Chapter 6
There, for instance, is the Alphabet. Because the teacher told us about it yesterday she is grieved that we do not remember what she said. But so many surprising things have happened since then that it takes a little time for us to make sure that it's the same old Alphabet this morning that we had the other day. She is the victim of preconceived ideas on the subject, but our minds are open to conviction. Most of the letters still look unfamiliar; but when we really do learn to recognize Big A and Round O, we are disposed to indulge our sacred ecstasy and to "triumph over mankind."
If the teacher be a sour person who has long ago completed her education, she will take this occasion to chide us for not paying attention to a new letter that is just swimming into our ken. If, however, she is fortunate enough to be one who keeps on learning, she will share the triumph of our achievement, for she knows how it feels.
There is coming to be a greater sympathy between teachers and learners, as there is a clearer knowledge of the way the mind grows. But even yet one may detect a certain note of condescension in the treatment of the characteristics of early childhood. The child, we say, has eager curiosity, a myth-making imagination, a sensitiveness to momentary impressions, a desire to make things and to destroy things, a tendency to imitate what he admires. His mind goes out not in one direction, but in many directions. Then we say, in our solemn, grown-up way: "Why, that is just like Primitive Man, and how unlike Us! It has taken a long time to transform Primitive Man into Us, but if we start soon enough we may eradicate the primitive things before they have done much harm."
What we persistently fail to understand is that in these primitive things are the potentialities of all the most lasting satisfactions of later life.
Browning tells us how the boy David felt when he watched his sheep:--
Then fancies grew rife Which had come long ago on the pasture, when round me the sheep Fed in silence--above, the one eagle wheeled slow as in sleep; And I lay in my hollow and mused on the world that might lie 'Neath his ken, though I saw but the strip 'twixt the hill and the sky: And I laughed,--"Since my days are ordained to be passed with my flocks, Let me people at least, with my fancies, the plains and the rocks, Dream the life I am never to mix with, and image the show Of mankind as they live in those fashions I hardly shall know."
All this is natural enough, we say, in a mere boy,--but he will outgrow it. But now and then some one does not outgrow it. He has become a man, and yet in his mind fancies are still rife. They throng upon him and crave expression. The things he sees, the people he meets, are all symbols to him, just as the one eagle which "wheeled slow as in sleep" was to the shepherd lad the symbol of a great unknown world. That which he sees of the actual world seems still to him only a strip "'twixt the hill and the sky,"--all the rest he imagines. He fills it with vivid color and absorbing life. He peoples it with his own thoughts.
We call such a person a poet; and if he is a very good poet, we call him a genius; and, in order to do him honor, we pretend that we cannot understand him, and we employ people to explain him to us. We treat his works as alcohol is treated in the arts. It is, as they say, "denaturized," that is, something is put into it that people don't like, so that they will not drink it "on the sly!"
Yet all the time the plain fact is that the poet is simply a person who is still in possession of all his early qualities. Wordsworth gave away the secret. He is a boy who keeps on growing. He is
One whose heart the holy forms Of young imagination have kept pure.
Where others see a finished world, he sees all things as manifestations of a free power.
Even in their fixed and steady lineaments He traced an ebbing and a flowing mind, Expression ever varying.
This ebbing and flowing mind with its ever-changing expression is the charm of early childhood. It is the charm of all genius as well. Turn to Shelley's "Skylark." The student of Child Psychology never found more images chasing one another through the mind. The fancies follow one another as rapidly as if Shelley had been only four years old. Frank's father would have been troubled at the lack of business-like grasp of the subject. What was the skylark like? It was
Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun.
Then again, it was
Like a star of heaven In the broad daylight.
It was
Like a poet hidden In the light of thought.
It was like a high-born maiden, like a rose, like a glow-worm, like vernal showers. The mind wanders off and sees visions of purple evenings and golden lightnings and white dawns and rain-awakened flowers. These were but hints of the reality of feeling, for
All that ever was Joyous, and clear, and fresh, thy music doth surpass.
We know of religion--or at least we have often been told--that it is found in the purest form in the heart of a child, and that it consists in nurture and development of this early grace through all the years that may be allotted. The same thing is true of all that concerns the ideal life. The artist, the reformer, the inventor, the poet, the man of pure science, the really fruitful and original man of affairs,--these are the incorrigibles. They refuse to accept the hard-and-fast rules that are laid down for them. They insist upon finding time and room for activities that are not conceived of as tasks, but as the glorious play of their own faculties. They are full of a great, joyous impulse, and their work is but the expression of this impulse. They somehow have time for the unexpected. They see that which
Gives to seas and sunset skies The unspent beauty of surprise.
The world is in their eyes ever fresh and sparkling. Life is full of possibilities. They see no reason to give up the habit of wonder. They never outgrow the need of asking questions, though the final answers do not come.
When to a person of this temper you repeat the hard maxims of workaday wisdom, he escapes from you with the smiling audacity of a truant boy. He is one who has awakened right early on a wonderful morning. There is a spectacle to be seen by those who have eyes for it. He is not willing out of respect for you to miss it. He hears the music, and he follows it. It is the music of the
Olympian bards who sung Divine ideas below, Which always find us young, And always keep us so.
V
Christmas and the Spirit of Democracy
"Times have changed," said old Scrooge, as he sat by my fireside on Christmas Eve. "The Christmas Carol" had been read, as our custom was, and the children had gone to bed, so that only Scrooge and I remained to watch the dying embers.
"Times have changed, and I am not appreciated as I was in the middle of the last century. People don't seem to be having so good a time. You remember the Christmas when I was converted? What larks! Up to that time I had been 'a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner.' Those were the very words that described me. Then the Christmas Spirit took possession of me and--presto! change! All at once I became a new creature. I began to hurry about, giving all sorts of things to all sorts of people. You remember how I scattered turkeys over the neighborhood, shouting, 'Here's the turkey! Hello! Whoop! How are you! Merry Christmas!' And then I sat down and chuckled over my generosity till I cried. I was having the time of my life. You see, I hadn't been used to that sort of thing, and it went to my head.
"And how grateful everybody was! They took everything in the spirit in which it was offered, and asked no questions. Everywhere there was an outstretched hand and a fervent God-bless-you for every gift. Nobody twitted me about the past. I was all at once elevated to the position of an earthly Providence.
"Talk of fun! Was there ever such a practical joke as to scare Bob Cratchit within an inch of his life and then raise his salary before he could say Jack Robinson! You should have seen him jump! How the little Cratchits shouted for joy! And when the thing was written up, all Anglo-Saxondom was smiling through its tears and saying: 'That's just like us. God bless us, every one.'
"But it's different now. Something has got into the Christmas Spirit. Doing good doesn't seem such a jolly thing as it once was, and you can't carry it off with a whoop and hello. People are getting critical. In these days a charitable shilling doesn't go so far as it used to, and doesn't buy nearly so many God-bless-you's. You complain of the rise in the price of the necessaries of life. It isn't a circumstance to the increase in the cost of luxuries like benevolence. Almost every one looks forward to the time when he can afford to be generous. And when he is generous he likes to feel generous, and to have other people sympathize with him. It's only human nature. A man can't be thinking about himself all the time; he gets that tired feeling that your scientific people in these days call altruism. It is an inability to concentrate his mind on his own concerns. In spite of himself his thoughts wander off to other people's affairs, and he has an impulse to do them good. Now in my day it was the easiest thing in the world to do good. The only thing necessary was to feel good-natured, and there you were! Nowadays, the way of the benefactor is hard. It's so difficult that I understand you actually have Schools of Philanthropy."
Scrooge shrugged his shoulders and seemed to shrivel at the thought of these horrible institutions.
"Just fancy," he continued, "how I should have felt on that blessed Christmas night, if, instead of starting off as an amateur angel, feeling my wings growing every moment, I had been compelled to prepare for an entrance examination. I suppose I should have been put with the backward pupils whose early education had been neglected, and should have had to learn the A B C's of charity. School of Philanthropy! Ugh! And in the holidays, too!
"I have been visiting some elderly gentlemen who have had something of my experience with the Spirit of Christmas. Like me, they were converted somewhat late in life. They never were in as bad a way as I was, for I did business, you may remember, in a narrow street with quite sordid surroundings, while they were financiers in a large way. Yet I suppose that they, too, were 'squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinners,' though nobody had the courage to tell them so. Then they got tired of clutching, and their hearts warmed and their hands relaxed and they began to give. Never was such giving known before. It was a perfect deluge of beneficence. A mere catalogue of the gifts would make a Christmas carol of itself.
"But would you believe it, they never have got the fun out of it that I got when I filled the cab full of turkeys and set out for Camden town. The old Christmas feeling seems to have been chilled. The public has grown critical. Instead of dancing for joy, it looks suspiciously at the gifts and asks: 'Where did they get them?' It has been so impressed by the germ theory of disease that it foolishly fears that even money may be tainted. It's a preposterous situation. Generosity is a drug on the market, and gratitude can't be had at any reasonable price."
"Yes," I said, "you are quite right, public sentiment has changed. Gratitude is not so easily won as it was in your day, and it takes longer to transform a clutching, covetous old sinner into a serviceable philanthropist. But I do not think, Scrooge, that the Christmas Spirit has really vanished. He is only a little chastened and subdued by the Spirit of Democracy."
"I don't see what Democracy has to do with it," said Scrooge. "I'm sure that nobody ever accused me of being an aristocrat. What I am troubled about is the decay of gratitude. If I give a poor fellow a shilling, I ought to be allowed the satisfaction of having him remove his hat and say, 'Thank'ee, sir,' and he ought to say it as if he meant it. The heartiness of his thanksgiving is half the fun. It makes one feel good all over."
"But," I answered, "if the fellow happens to have a good memory he may recall the fact that yesterday you took two shillings from him, and he may think that the proper response to your sudden act of generosity is, 'Where's that other shilling?' That's what the Spirit of Democracy puts him up to. It's not so polite, but you must admit that it goes right to the point."
"I don't like it," said Scrooge.
"I thought you wouldn't. There are a great many people who don't like it. It's a twitting on facts that takes away a good deal of the pleasure of being generous."
"I should say it did," grumbled Scrooge. "It makes you feel mean just when you are most sensitive. Just think how I should have felt if, when I gave Bob Cratchit a dig in the waistcoat and told him that I had raised his salary, he had taken the opportunity to ask for back pay. It would have been most inopportune."
"You owed it to him, didn't you?"
"Yes, I suppose I did, if you choose to put it that way. But Bob wouldn't have put it that way; he wouldn't take such liberties. He took what I gave him; and when I gave him more than he expected, he was all the happier, and so was I. That's what made it all seem so nice and Christmasy. We were not thinking about rights and duties; it was all free grace."
"Now, Scrooge, you are getting at the point. There is no concealing the fact that the Spirit of Democracy makes himself unpleasant sometimes. He breaks up the old pleasant relations existing not only between the Lords and the Commons, but between you and Bob Cratchit. Man is naturally a superstitious creature, and is prone to worship the first thing that comes in his way. When a poor fellow sees a person who is better off than himself, he jumps to the conclusion that he is a better man, and bows down before him, as before a wonder-working Providence. When this Providence smiles upon him, he is glad, and receives the bounty with devout thankfulness. It is what the old theologians used to call 'an uncovenanted mercy.'
"All this is very pleasant to one who can sign himself by the grace of God king, or president of a coal company, or some such thing as that. The gratification extends to all the minor grades of greatness as well. The great man is ordained to give as it pleases him and the little men to receive with due meekness. The great man is always the man who has something. I suppose, Scrooge, that in your busy life, first scraping money together and then dispensing it in your joyous Christmasy way, you have not had much time for general reading or even for listening to sermons?"
"I have always attended Divine Service since my conversion," answered Scrooge, piously; "as for listening--"
"What I was going to say was that if you had attended to such matters, you must have noticed how much of the literature of good-will is devoted to the praise of the Blessed Inequalities. How the changes are rung on the Strong and the Weak, the Wise and the Ignorant, the Rich and the Poor; especially the Poor, who form the hub of the philanthropic universe. Nobody seems to meet another on the level. Everybody is either looking up or looking down, and they are taught how to do it. I remember attending the annual meeting of the Society for the Relief of Indigent Children. The indigent children were first fed and then insulted by a plethoric gentleman, who addressed to them a long discourse on indigence and the various duties that it entailed. And no one of the children was allowed to throw things at the speaker. They had all been taught to look grateful.
"Now these inequalities do exist, and so long as they exist all sorts of helpful offices have place. The trouble is that good people are all the time doing their best to make the inequalities permanent. You have heard how divines have interpreted the text, 'The poor ye have always with you.' The good old doctrine has been that the relation between those who have not and those who have should be that of one-sided dependence. The Ignorant must depend upon the Wise, the Weak upon the Strong, the Poor upon the Rich. As for the black, yellow, and various parti-colored races, they must depend upon the White Man, who gayly walks off with their burdens without so much as saying 'By your leave.'
"Now it is against this whole theory, however beautifully or piously expressed, that the protest has come. The Spirit of Democracy is a bold iconoclast, and goes about smashing our idols. He laughs at the pretensions of the Strong and the Wise and the Rich to have created the things they possess. They are not the masters of the feast. They are only those of us who have got at the head of the line, sometimes by unmannerly pushing, and have secured a place at the first table. We are not here by their leave, and we may go directly to the source of supplies. They are not benefactors, but beneficiaries. The Spirit of Democracy insists that they shall know their place. He rebukes even the Captains of Industry, and when they answer insolently, he suggests that they be reduced to the ranks. Even toward bishops and other clergy his manner lacks that perfect reverence that belonged to an earlier time; yet he listens to them respectfully when they talk sense.
"It is this spirit that plays the mischief with many of the merry old ways of doing good. To scatter turkeys or colleges among a multitude of gratefully dependent folks is the very poetry of philanthropy. But to satisfy the curiosity of an independent citizen as to your title to these things is a different matter. The more independent people are, the harder it is to do good to them. They are apt to have their own ideas of what they want."
"It's a pity, then, to have them so independent," said Scrooge; "it spoils people to get above their proper station in life."
"Ah! there you are," I answered; "I feared it would come to that. With all your exuberant good-will you haven't altogether got beyond the theory that has come down from the time when the first cave-dweller bestowed on his neighbor the bone he himself didn't need, and established the pleasant relation of benefactor and beneficiary. It gave him such a warm feeling in his heart that he naturally wanted to make the relation permanent. First Cave-dweller felt a little disappointed next day when Second Cave-dweller, instead of coming to him for another bone, preferred to take his pointed stick and go hunting on his own account. It seemed a little ungrateful in him, and First Cave-dweller felt that it would be no more than right to arrange legislation in the cave so that this should not happen again.
"Christian Charity is a very beautiful thing, but sometimes it gets mixed up with these ideas of the cave-dwellers. Sometimes it perpetuates the very evils that it laments. Perhaps you won't mind my reading a bit from a homily of St. Augustine on this very subject. St. Augustine was a man who was a good many centuries ahead of his time. He begins his argument by saying: 'All love, dear brethren, consists in wishing well to those who are loved.' This seems like a harmless proposition. It is the sort of thing you might hear in a sermon and think no more about. But St. Augustine goes to the root of the matter, and asks what it means to wish well to the person you are trying to help. He comes to the conclusion that if you really wish him well, you must wish him to be at least as well off and as well able to take care of himself as you are. The first thing you know, you are wishing to have him reach a point where he will not look up to you at all. 'There is a certain friendliness by which we desire at one time or another to do good to those we love. But how if there be no good that we can do? We ought not to wish men to be wretched that we may be enabled to practice works of mercy. Thou givest bread to the hungry, but better were it that none hungered and thou hadst none to give to. Thou clothest the naked; oh, that all men were clothed and that this need existed not! Take away the wretched, and the works of mercy will be at an end, but shall the ardor of charity be quenched? With a truer touch of love thou lovest the happy man to whom there is no good office that thou canst do; purer will that love be and more unalloyed. For if thou hast done a kindness to the wretched, perhaps thou wishest him to be subject to thee. He was in need, thou didst bestow; thou seemest to thyself greater because thou didst bestow than he upon whom it was bestowed. Wish him to be thine equal.'
"There, Scrooge, is the text for the little Christmas sermon that I should like to preach to you and to your elderly wealthy friends who feel that they are not so warmly appreciated as they once were. 'Wish him to be thine equal'--that is the test of charity. It is all right to give a poor devil a turkey. But are you anxious that he shall have as good a chance as you have to buy a turkey for himself? Are you really enthusiastic about so equalizing opportunities that by and by you shall be surrounded by happy, self-reliant people who have no need of your benefactions?
"Do you know, Scrooge, I sometimes think that it is time for some one to write a new 'Christmas Carol,' a carol that will make the world know how people are feeling and some of the best things they are doing in these days. It should be founded on Justice and not on Mercy. We should feed up Bob Cratchit and put some courage into him, and he should come to you and ask a living wage not as a favor, but as a right. And you, Scrooge, would not be offended at him, but you would sit down like a sensible man and figure it out with him. And when the talk was over, you wouldn't feel particularly generous, and he wouldn't feel particularly grateful; it would be simple business. But you would like each other better, and the business would seem more worth while.
"And then, when you went out with the Spirit of Christmas, you would ask the Spirit of Democracy to go with you and show you the new things that are most worth seeing. He wouldn't wait for the night, for the cheeriest things would be those that go on during business hours. He would show you some sights to make your heart glad. He would show you vast numbers of persons who have got tired of the worship of the Blessed Inequalities, and who are going in for the Equalities. They have a suspicion that there is not so much difference between the Great and the Small as has been supposed, and that what difference there is does not prevent a frank comradeship and a perfect understanding. They think it is better to work with people than to work for them. They think that one of the inalienable rights of man is the right to make his own mistakes and to learn the lesson from them without too much prompting. So they are a little shy of many of the more intrusive forms of philanthropy. But you should see what they are up to.
"The Spirit of Democracy will take you to visit a school that is not at all like the school you used to go to, Scrooge. The teacher has forgotten his rod and his rules and his airs of superiority. He is not teaching at all, so far as you can see. He is the centre of a group of eager learners, who are using their own wits and not depending on his. They are so busy observing, comparing, reasoning, and finding out things for themselves that he can hardly get in a word edgewise. And he seems to like it, though it is clear that if they keep on at this rate they will soon get ahead of their teacher.