Part 4

At all events, don't take this matter of the clubs too hard. For those youths, comparatively few, who by luck and circumstances find themselves eligible to them, they are an interesting form of discipline or indulgence, and I will not say that they are unimportant. Neither would I have you keep out of them because of their drawbacks. If you begin by keeping out of all things that have drawbacks, your progress in this world will involve constant hesitations. Alcohol has numerous drawbacks, but I don't advise you to be a teetotaller. Tobacco has drawbacks, but I believe you smoke it. Money has drawbacks, and so has advertisement. But, bless you, we have to take things as they come and deal with them as we can. The trick is to get the kernel and eliminate the shuck. A large proportion of people do the opposite. If you can manage that way with the clubs,--provided you ever get a chance,--you will be amused to observe in due time how large a proportion of your brethren value these organizations chiefly for their shuck, and grasp most eagerly at that. For the shuck, as I see it, is exclusiveness, which is not valuable except to persons justly doubtful of their own merits. Whereas the kernel is the fellowship of like minds which has always been treasured by the wise.

The clubs, my son, some more than others, are recruited considerably from what is known as the leisure class. To be sure, I don't see any very definite or important leisure class about in our land. Everybody who amounts to anything works, and always did and must, for you can't amount to anything otherwise; but the people who have money laid up ahead for them, are apt to work somewhat less strenuously than the rest of us, and not so much for money. Don't get it into your head that you want to tie up to the leisure class, or that the condition of not having to work is desirable. Have it in mind that you are to work just about as hard as the quality of your tires and cylinders will warrant. Plan to get into the game if you have to go on your hands and knees. Plan to earn your living somehow. Don't aim to go through life spoon-fed; don't aim to get a soft seat. If you do, you won't have your fair share of fun. There is no real fun in ease, except as you need it because you have worked hard.

I say, plan to earn your living! Whether you actually earn the money you live on, makes no great difference, though in your case I guess you'll have to if you are going to live at all well. But if you get money without earning it, it leaves you in debt to society. Somebody has to earn the money you spend. In mine, factory, railroad, or office, somebody works for the money that supports you. No matter where the money comes from, that is true: somebody has to earn it. If you get it without due labor of your own, you owe for it. Recognize that debt and qualify yourself to discharge it. Study to put back into the world somewhat more than you take out of it. Study to be somewhat more than merely worth your keep. Study to shoulder the biggest load your strength can carry. That is life. That is the great sport that brings the great compensations to the soul. Getting regular meals and nice clothes, and acceptable shelter and transportation, and agreeable acquaintances, is only a means to an end, and if you accept the means and shirk the end, the means will pall on you.

I said 'agreeable acquaintances.' A very large proportion of the acquaintances you can make will be agreeable if you can bring enough knowledge and a sufficiently hospitable spirit to your relations with them. I don't counsel you to cultivate the arts of popularity, for they are apt not to wash,--apt, that is, to conflict with inside qualities that are vastly more valuable than they are. But keep, in so far as you can, an open heart. There is no one to whom you are not related if only you can find the relation; there is no one but you owe him a benefit if you can see one you can do him.

Don't be too nice. It is such an impediment to usefulness as stuttering is to speech,--a sort of spiritual indigestion; a hesitation in your carbureter. By all means, be a gentleman, in manners and spirit, in so far as you know how, but be one from the inside out.

If you had come as far as you have in life without acquiring manners, you might well blush for your parents and teachers. I don't think you have, but I beg you hold on to all the good manners you have, and get more. Good manners seem to me a good deal to seek among present-day youth, but I suppose they have always been fairly scarce, and the more appreciated for their scarcity. Tobacco manners are uncommonly free and bad in this generation; more so, I think, than they were in mine. Since cigarettes came in, especially, youths seem to feel licensed to smoke them in all places and company. And the boys are prone to too much ease of attitude, and lounge and loll appallingly in company, and I see them in parlors with their legs crossed in such a fashion that their feet might almost as well be in the ladies' laps.

Have a care for these matters of deportment. Be strict with yourself and your postures. Keep your legs and feet where they belong; they were not meant for parlor ornaments. Show respect for people! Lord bless me! the things I see done by males with a claim to be gentlemen: tobacco-smoke puffed in women's faces; men who ought to know better, smoking as they drive out with ladies; men who put their feet on the table and expect you to talk over them! Show respect for people; for all kinds of people, including yourself, for self-respect is at the bottom of all good manners. They are the expression of discipline, of good-will, of respect for other people's rights and comfort and feelings. I suppose good manners are unselfish, but the most selfish people might well cultivate them, they are so remunerative. In the details of life, in the public vehicles, in crowds, and in all situations where the demand presses hard on supply, what you get by hogging is incomparably less than what you get by courtesy. The things you must scramble and elbow for are not worth having; not one of them. They are the swill of life, my son; leave them to swine.

You will have to think more or less about yourself, because that belongs to your time of life, provided you are the sort that thinks at all. But don't overdo it. You won't, because you will find it, as all healthy people do, a subject in which over-indulgence tends rapidly to nausea. To have one's self always on one's mind is to lodge a kill-joy; to act always from calculation is a sure path to blunders.

Most of these specific counsels I set down more for your entertainment than truly to guide you. You don't live by maxims any more than you speak by rules of grammar. You will speak by ear (improving, I hope, in your college environment), and you will live by whatever light there is in you, getting more, I hope, as you go along.

Grow in grace, my son! If your spirit is right, the details of life will take care of their own adjustment. Go to church; if not invariably, then variably. They don't require it any more in college, but you can't afford not to; for the churches reflect and recall--very imperfectly to be sure--the religion and the spirit of Christ; and on that the whole of our civilization rests. Get understanding of that. It is by far the most important knowledge in the whole book, the great fountain of sanity, tolerance, and political and social wisdom, a gateway to all kinds of truth, a rectifying and consoling current through all of life.

Intensive Living

By Cornelia A. P. Comer

Said Honoria casually,--

'When I was in town yesterday, I went to see Adelaide in her new house.'

The others looked up alertly, Martha from her darning, Grace from her Irish crochet.

'Oh, really? And how did you like the house?'

Honoria hesitated, looking to the wide view for clarification. The three sat on a cottage veranda in the foothills of Southern California, one February day. In front of them the landscape ran, laughing, down-hill to the sea. Spread beneath them like a map were thirty miles of town and country: orange orchards brave with fruit; eucalyptus groves appealing to the sky; friendly roofs inclosed in deep-sheltering trees; great open spaces where the wind moved free; round-topped hills, green near at hand (for the rains had come and gone thus early), changing to a dusky blue out yonder where the bright Pacific flashed at the end of the long, delightful view. For love of this prospect Martha had lately left steep, sturdy hills, brown brooks, elm-shaded streets and old friends, girding at herself as she did so. Honoria had lived here many years, while Grace was but a winter's guest in Honoria's home, whose hospitable brown gables, low and wide-spreading, were visible beyond the cypress hedge encircling Martha's cottage.

'It is a good-looking mansion. She had a capable architect. The building is Tudor,--consistent, graceful, well proportioned. For two people it is a very large house indeed, but it is a good house, and I see perfectly how Adelaide means it to express the idea of dignified, comfortable living. The decorator was not bad of his kind, either.'

'All this sounds like praise,' said Grace, 'yet I feel that you are keeping something back. What is the matter with Adelaide's house?'

Again Honoria hesitated.

'It seems ungracious to find fault with such a perfectly worthy performance, yet I came away chilled and uncomfortable, almost unhappy, indeed. Thinking about the matter on the way home, it became clear to me at last that the house is too large for Adelaide's personality. You know how perfectly she pervaded that old house of hers. Old-fashioned, in some respects inconvenient, with far less perfect fittings, it still was thoroughly delightful, for where the rugs failed or the draperies faltered, Adelaide's personality somehow stepped in and eked out all insufficiencies, corrected all errors. It was hers entirely. In this blameless achievement of architect and decorator, there are no insufficiencies to be eked out, and so Adelaide's personality seems to slip and slide helplessly upon a kind of glacial surface which it cannot penetrate and make its own. I may be expressing myself very poorly, but I know I have hold of something real. Adelaide's new house, good-looking as it is, is not interesting,--that is what I mean,--and even the dear woman herself seems less interesting, and less herself now that she is enfolded in it.'

'Did you know,' interposed Martha, 'that the first winter in a new house the heating actually requires more coal than is ever needed again?'

'No, I didn't know that--but I can well believe it. Why shouldn't it take more coal to warm it when it evidently takes more vitality to cheer it? It's a serious business, this breaking in of a large house to one's self late in life, as so many Americans do. The draughts upon their vital forces are more taxing than the coal bills.'

'We all ought to live in inherited homesteads,' suggested Grace,'where the humanizing of the bricks and mortar has been done for us by our own people.'

'Honoria,' Martha demanded, ignoring this unpractical suggestion, 'tell me the truth! If you were in Adelaide's place and had _carte blanche_ to incarnate your idea of a house for yourself and your family, wouldn't you over-build and over-decorate too? I should enjoy doing it! The furniture in my bungalow is altogether too sketchy at present, and I am tired of eking it out with personality. You would feel differently if you hadn't brought your old mahogany when you came West!'

Honoria set a few stitches, and looked at her friends with eyes in which conviction flamed.

'I don't over-dress, and I don't over-eat, though I have abundant opportunity,' she said, 'but it may be that I would over-build and over-decorate, or at least that I would have done so until yesterday. I don't think I would do it to-day--now that I know what ails Adelaide's house. As for your bungalow, Martha, it is comfortable and it is alive. There isn't a picture on the wall nor an ornament on the mantel that hasn't a reason for being exactly where it is. That is triumph, and you know it. I don't believe you would really exchange your house for Adelaide's.'

'Try me and see! I would like just for once to ignore beauty and suitability, and go in for size and sheer, luxurious comfort.'

'You would go distracted in two weeks in a place that was "sheer, luxurious comfort" and nothing else,' returned Honoria decidedly. 'You would hate it as you hate everything smug and fat and complacent. I have known you too long, Martha, not to know the ways of you with a house. To satisfy you, a domicile has to be livable. If you consider all the houses, little and big, of your friends, you will see that there are fixed limits to the amount of space in them that is truly and pleasantly habitable. You can't get the lovable "lived-in look" in rooms where you do not actually live, and you can't live all over a house that is bigger than your needs. Why! life isn't long enough, especially if you seldom stay at home! Think how dreary are most of the great houses we know. Consider Mrs. King's new marble palace with its commanding site and its ninety rooms. There isn't a single spot in it except her own bed-room and sitting-room that wouldn't give your spirit a congestive chill if you sat there for an hour. I know a woman in Colorado who so loathed her big new house as it left the hands of a New York decorator, that she would have moved back into the old one if she hadn't been afraid of her friends' laughter. And, Grace, even inherited homesteads are sometimes as difficult as uncongenial kin. Old houses have ways and wills of their own.'

'Houses _are_ curious things,' said Grace. 'We take a morsel of illimitable space and wall it in and roof it over. Suddenly it ceases to be part of God's out-of-doors and becomes an entity with an atmosphere of its own. We warm it with our fires, we animate it with our affections, we furnish it with such things as seem good in our eyes. We do this to get shelter for our bodies, but we acquire as well an instrument for our spirits that reacts on us in its turn.'

'In other words,' returned Honoria, warming to her subject, 'as we live our way into a house, adapting it to our need, the bricks and mortar, the paint and plaster, cease to be inert matter and become alive. Superficial sociologists have taunted woman with being "more anabolic or plant-like" than man, but I count it her second glory. The plant is an organism that "slowly turns lifeless into living matter," and this is the thing that woman has done from the beginning with her shelter! In our houses we achieve almost an organic extension of our very selves. That is part of what I was trying to say. But, obviously, there should exist some reasonable ratio between the self and its extensions. I take it, the modern multitude of overgrown mansions, like the Kings' or the Clays' or even Adelaide's smaller dwelling,--all these places whose owners never find out why they are not at home in them,--are symptoms of our modern disease of materialism. The essence of that disease is the desire to grasp more matter than the spirit can fully animate. That the infection can lay hold on Adelaide shows how all-pervading it is, gripping the just as well as the unjust. When I saw her tired and dissatisfied; when I felt the lack of charm and quality in the house, and remembered how full of both her old house and garden had been, I tried to think it out. It all works around to just this: you can't have quality, you can't have charm in your material environment unless you put them into it yourself. It is a plain question of your ability to choose, arrange and vitalize things. And the latter requisite is by far the most important of the three. For I have really seen, with these eyes, poor, mean rooms where absolutely nothing was beautiful or noteworthy, so charged with a gracious and comforting personality that you forgot their shabbiness and said, "What a home-like place!" Please note that that is the adjective we always use of places that draw us by their personality--as if personality and nothing else were the essence of home.

'Now Adelaide's old house had personality; it was completely vitalized. It was all under her hand, and as high as her heart. But Adelaide's big new house is as yet barren and chilly, for it is not vitalized at all. Of course I know that after she has lived in it longer, it is bound to improve, because it is her nature to humanize and modify all her surroundings. But the crucial question is--_how big a house can she humanize?_ Something bigger than a cottage probably--but certainly something much smaller than a hotel. The longer I looked at this question, the more it seemed to me that unconsciously I had put my finger on the vital query that, in the ideal state, should underlie all property, all education, all privilege.

'I have been talking about houses,--they are the most intimate, the most organic of a woman's possessions,--but the argument applies to all we own. It is the mark of our era to want more of everything than we can use, yet when we get the Too-Much we demand, we are crushed by it, as Tarpeia was crushed by the shields.'

'I have often thought' said Grace, 'that the sheer, brute mass of life--of people to know, of books to read, of plays to hear, of pictures to see, of things to do, buy, learn, enjoy--within reach of the well-to-do person in the modern world, far outruns the capacity of any human being to take it in and make of it the sane whole that a life should be.'

'Yes--yet we go crazily on, trying to expand to illimitable possibilities, thinking we shall be happier so soon as we have discarded all our present belongings and opportunities for bigger, newer, richer ones. How many people do you know who have not met a substantial increase of income with a corresponding enlargement of their whole scale of living, a senseless expansion sometimes out-running their increased ability to provide for it? There is no future but chaos for a society with such ambitions. They are centrifugal and can only lead to disintegration.

'The truth is, we have no notion of the value and necessity of a doctrine of limitations. Just as an illustration--not once in all the mass of matter printed in the last twenty years about the gyro-car, the aeroplane or other inventions capable of enormous swiftness, have I seen the faintest intimation that human beings could not intelligently direct a speed of two hundred miles an hour--yet the railroads are now tardily discovering that the capacity of engineers is seriously taxed by sixty miles!

'Don't mistake my meaning. I am not preaching the moral value of poverty. I am no convert to asceticism. That method of ridding one's self of the overweight of the material life is too extreme to the correct solution. I am simply calling attention with all my might to the æsthetic and vital value of Not-Too-Much. I am not afraid of Enough. I am greatly afraid of Too-Much. And the reason I am afraid is this:--

'Just as the capacity of the human stomach is limited to a certain quantity of food, so also is limited the capacity of the human spirit for appropriating and assimilating property in its different forms. Beyond a certain somewhat variable point, material possessions _do the holder no more good_. The common saying, "All you get in this world is your board and clothes," is the popular acknowledgment of this restricted capacity. The affirmation of bounds to our capacity holds good as regards the property of the mind--education, cultivation, æsthetic satisfactions--just as it does of material goods. There is a definite limit to what we can effectively make our own. Beyond that limit, possession is a detriment.'

'The direct result of helping ourselves to too much of anything is to coarsen and degrade. We can see this clearly as regards the primal necessity of food. Nature promptly writes it, in large letters, all over the man or woman of gross appetites.'

'It is as plainly printed, if in smaller type, on the faces of those who want too much of other things,--houses, notoriety, money, power,--what you will. The porcine brand is there, however disguised. Personally, I fear the Mark of the Pig as I fear nothing else on earth. Shaler says that certain lines of evolution terminate in such grotesque effects that one almost believes the guiding thought behind the process was humorous. I never see a stye with its squealing, shouldering inhabitants, without thinking how tremendously satiric it is--a master-caricature of human greed, not over-drawn! And I say, "Brother Pig, Heaven grant that I keep my voracities better concealed than thou."'

Her companions regarded Honoria, in type thin, nervous, ardent, with a keen and vivid face. The comparison was certainly not apparent--but the heart knoweth its own gluttonies.

'You are doing fairly well at it thus far,' said Martha dryly. 'What's the next step in your argument, Honoria?'

'Since our capacity is limited, and since to glut ourselves beyond it burdens and degrades, clearly the thing for each individual with intelligence to do is to find out where, for him, lies the golden point beyond which riches turns to the poverty of burden. When even the wise and earnest Adelaides get their houses too big and don't know what is the matter, it is time to formulate the principles of First Aid to the Prosperous. I believe the point from which the women of the comfortable classes should attack the problem of a saner living is this doctrine of limitation and selection, and that we should attack it first of all in our homes.

'Now, we human beings really do something to our immediate material surroundings which I can best describe as charging them with our personality. With the revolution of the days, personality accumulates in the things we handle and love and live with, much as electricity gathers upon the accumulator of a static machine with the revolution of the plates. This idea has always been popular with the poets and artists, but people who advance it in everyday life always do so apologetically, with the air of saying, "I know this is slightly fantastic, but doesn't it seem true?" Yet most housekeepers know its utter truth. I never doubted from the time I consciously began to care for old furniture, old rugs, old china--all the beautiful cast-offs of vanished lives--that a vast part of their charm was atmosphere, something imparted to them by the affection of those forgotten ones and now inhering, for the perceptive vision, in their very substance. The craftsman of those elder days is not the only creator of the beauty that has come down to us. Whoever has loved another's work has thereby added something to it. Is it not so? And I, in my turn, ought to be beautifying my belongings for those who come after me.'

Grace and Martha nodded readily enough, for this doctrine needs no long expounding to any woman who has lived her way into her material possessions, and distilled atmosphere from them for the comfort of her household. She knows what she has done, and knows, though she says little about it, that this business of turning lifeless into living things is one of her important natural functions.