Part 3

I never miss a good chance for a river voyage. One has the element of adventure as one rounds the next bend. I have been on the rivers of southern Florida, I have been on the Savannah river in Georgia, and the last time I was at Vanderbilt university, in Nashville, friends gave me a memorable excursion on the Cumberland. One of the most interesting of all inland voyages in the United States is to take the steamer from Norfolk to Richmond on the James. From seven in the morning to eight at night it is a panorama of American history.

The word river occurs many times in the Bible, and think of the part played in the story of mankind by the Euphrates, the Nile, and the Jordan! The Bible begins and ends with a river. In the second chapter of Genesis, we read “And a river went out of Eden to water the garden,” a lovely spectacle, for Paradise would never have been complete without a river. In the last chapter of Revelation, we read, “And he showed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the Lamb.”

It is curious when the Bible speaks of the River of Life--“on either side of the river there was the tree of life”--that the idea should persist of the River of Death. This is a heathen and pagan idea and has no place in Jewish or Christian thought. Many people speak solemnly of crossing the river--they get the notion either from Greek mythology or from Bunyan’s _Pilgrim’s Progress_, or metaphorically, from the Promised Land lying on the other side of the Jordan.

In reality the Bible tells us that both the earthly and the heavenly Paradise had a river to refresh and gladden the people.

Without sermonising too grossly, we may say that a river is like a human life. The source is often obscure and humble, then a tiny stream, then growing bigger and more important (the widening of influence), then flowing tranquilly (prosperous, happy days), then getting into sand flats, hardly moving (serious illness), then roaring tempestuously in rapids (times of excitement and adventure), yet going on, somehow and somewhere.

Furthermore, they always arrive ultimately at the same destination--the mysterious open sea, leaving narrow circumstances for a deeper and greater existence.

And even those streams that seem to perish without fulfilling their destiny, are in their subsequent influence like the lives of obscurely good men. Some travellers in a desert came to a bit of green meadow where a river once had been.

IX

ONE DAY AT A TIME

On a certain morning in the year 1900 I called on President Eliot at his office in Harvard University. He was in a gracious mood and we talked of many things. As I rose to leave I said I hoped I might always have the privilege of calling on him whenever I came to Cambridge. He remarked gravely (in every sense of that word): “The next time you come I may not be here.”

“What’s the matter? Are you going to resign?” “Resign? Certainly not. But, remember, I am sixty-six years old.” The only answer to that was a laugh, which I provided spontaneously.

Now if the distinguished president of Harvard had known then that twenty-five years after this interview, he would be in the full possession of his physical and mental faculties, even though he had ceased to possess the Harvard one, he would have wasted not a single moment on the thought of his approaching death. And if gold rusts, what shall iron do?

In the eighteenth century, the poet Young was an intimate friend of the novelist Richardson and their correspondence has a certain mortuary interest. For Young’s letters are as gloomy as his verses; they are largely taken up with predicting his own speedy death, which, however, Richardson awaited in vain, as the aged poet survived him. In his own last moments Richardson may have felt something akin to resentment at having wasted his sympathy on one who would attend his funeral.

We look backward too much and we look forward too much. Thus we miss the passing moment. In our regrets and apprehensions, we miss the only eternity of which man can be absolutely sure, the eternal Present. For it is always NOW.

As Browning’s clever Bishop Blougram remarked:

Do you know, I have often had a dream (Work it up in your next month’s article) Of man’s poor spirit in its progress, still Losing true life forever and a day Through ever trying to be and ever being-- In the evolution of successive spheres-- Before its actual sphere and place of life, Halfway into the next, which having reached It shoots with corresponding foolery Halfway into the next still, on and off! As when a traveller, bound from North to South, Scouts fur in Russia; what’s its use in France? If France spurns flannel; what’s its need in Spain? If Spain drops cloth, too cumbrous for Algiers! Linen goes next, and last the skin itself, A superfluity in Timbuctoo. When, through his journey, was the fool at ease?

When Thoreau was questioned as to his beliefs in a life beyond the grave, he answered impatiently, “Oh, one world at a time.”

I was deeply impressed in reading Dr. Cushing’s admirable biography of Sir William Osler, to see that the physician and philosopher laid the greatest stress on living one day at a time. That was his summary of the art of living, for all those who wished to accomplish as much as possible, and retain their peace of mind: Live one day at a time.

I remember, when I was twenty years old, I wasted many good hours in speculating on what I should do after graduation from college, which event was two years ahead. An old man told me not to give it a moment’s thought: “You cannot decide what to do till the emergency comes.” Meanwhile there was the daily work. The best way to prepare for the future was to do that well, rather than waste one’s energies on idle worry.

“Give us this day our daily bread.”

There are always gloomy prophets who cannot enjoy the present moment, because they are so sure trouble is coming. The winter of 1917–1918 was the coldest in my recollection; and many said, “Well, the climate is changing and we must not expect any mild winters.” Then came the winter of 1918–1919, which was the mildest in my recollection. And how distinctly I recall conversations like the following. Along about Christmastide, I would say, “What a beautiful winter!” and in every instance, without a single exception, I got the reply, “Just wait. We’ll catch it later.” Then when the weather continued sweet all through January, I made the same remark to different individuals, and always got a warning for my pains. But the evil came not at all. My friends had determined to be miserable. They could not enjoy a lovely mild season, for in its loveliness they shook with the chill of apprehension.

The fear of life is the favourite disease of the twentieth century. Too many people are afraid of tomorrow--their happiness is poisoned by a phantom. Many are afraid of old age, forgetting that even if they should lose their bodily vigour, weakness itself may minister to the development of the mind and spirit. In the words of the aged poet Waller,

The soul’s dark cottage, battered and decayed, Lets in new light through chinks that time has made. Stronger by weakness, wiser men become, As they draw near to their eternal home.

Let the scientists worry about our origin--slime, monkeys, what not; let the prophets worry about our future--“the decline of western civilisations,” and what not. Some people are alarmed because in nine thousand billion years the sun’s fuel may give out. Instead of chagrin over our past, and alarm over our future, suppose we consider our opportunity.

Listen to Emerson: “Write it on your heart that every day is the best day in the year. No man has earned anything rightly until he knows that every day is doomsday. Today is a king in disguise. Today always looks mean to the thoughtless, in the face of a uniform experience that all good and great and happy actions are made up precisely of these blank todays. Let us not be deceived, let us unmask the king as he passes.”

Our Lord, in his daily conversations, was always drawing the attention of his listeners away from vague speculations, to the present moment and the present opportunity. To such absurd enquiries as, “Whose wife shall she be in heaven?” he said, “God is not the God of the dead, but of the living.” To the man who said that he must postpone action until he had attended a funeral, the Master replied crisply, “Let the dead bury the dead and come and follow me.” And after an enumeration of the various worries about the future with which men and women torment their minds, he said, “Take no thought for the morrow.” Do not worry about the future. He added, significantly, that if we are determined to look for trouble, we can find it today without waiting for tomorrow.

X

CITY AND COUNTRY

It is generally assumed that the country is more romantic, more poetical than the city; but it would not be so easy to prove this, if one were put to the test. “God made the country and man made the town,” said William Cowper, which meant simply that he preferred rural life. It is rather amusing to consider that in our age, which is so often called the age of machines, and when many people are afraid that simplicity and individuality will be lost, country places, mountain scenery, and the wilderness are more popular than ever before.

Now there are fashions in outdoor nature just as there are fashions in clothes. Today everyone must profess a love for mountains whether one really likes them or not; for mountains are very fashionable. Switzerland is the playground of the world; and the inhabitants make a larger income off their barren rocks than most communities make off fertile and productive plains.

But it is only within two hundred years that mountains have been generally admired. Before that time they were usually regarded as ugly excrescences, both disagreeable and dangerous; and at the best they were no more to be regarded as objects of beauty than pimples. English gentlemen who made the Grand Tour in the seventeenth century thought the Alps were disgusting; they were a monstrous and abominable barrier that must be crossed before the traveller could reach the smiling landscape of Italy.

When Addison wrote home from his travels in 1701, he said that he had had “a very troublesome journey over the Alps. My head is still giddy with mountains and precipices; and you can’t imagine how much I am pleased with the sight of a plain!” Such a remark would injure the reputation of a modern pilgrim; but Addison made it in perfect good faith, and with no apology.

Perhaps some of our contemporary love of wild scenery is owing to the comfortable circumstances in which we behold it; transportation, tunnels, fine hotels, luxuries of every description enable us to view mountains in security and serenity; but if we had to pass over them in acute discomfort and in constant danger, our attitude might be more like Addison’s. This by no means explains why the once “horrid” has become fashionable; but it helps to explain the modern love of wild scenery.

Had Addison been told that two centuries later people would build hotels on the edge of Alpine precipices, he would have dismissed the idea as a silly dream; no one would put a roadhouse there. “But, Mr. Addison, I am not talking of roadhouses. These hotels are not on the way to something else; they are not a means, they are an end. People will travel three thousand miles from California to New York, sail three thousand miles from New York to Europe just to spend the summer in a mountain hotel, where it costs twenty dollars a day--” he would have regarded the coming generation as idiotic.

It was Thomas Gray, author of the _Elegy_, who was one of the first English travellers to see the beauty of the Alps, and it was he therefore who is originally responsible for making them fashionable. He and Horace Walpole drove over the mountains in a chaise, and Gray wrote to his friend West, “Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry. There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief.” This was a new note in literature.

It is my belief that mountains and wild scenery are more appreciated today by citified folk who love them for the change and novelty than they are by those who are forced to live among them all the time. When I was young, I walked with three of my college mates from New Haven to the White Mountains; it was a fine expedition, and took us some three weeks. I remember toward twilight on a certain day we entered a gorge and passed through into a place surrounded by austere mountains.

A farmer addressed us: “Where do you boys come from?”

“Connecticut.”

He slowly and solemnly repeated the word CONN-ECT-ICUT--as though he were saying MESOPOTAMIA, and added, “My, I’d like to see Connecticut.”

We told him it was not so very remarkable.

“We have no such mountains as these in Connecticut.”

He replied, “Oh, damn these mountains! I’m sick of the sight of them.” And it appeared that he had never been out of that valley.

I spend a quarter of my life in the country, and love it, but if I had to choose between living all my life in the country or in a large city, I should choose the city immediately. And I believe this is true of most people.

A crowd of unemployed some years ago stood in line at the Detroit city hall. A man came up and offered every one in turn good wages, good food, a good place to sleep, and plenty of fresh air, if he would take for the summer a job on a farm. Every one of the men laughed at him. Some of us more fortunate folks are irritated by this, for in America everybody thinks that everybody else ought to be a farmer. But the truth is that man does not live by bread alone. People do not live in order to live--merely for healthy surroundings and good food. They want excitement, they want something interesting. Who can blame them? Don’t you feel that way yourself?

We should all contribute to the Fresh Air Funds, because little children of the slums ought to have a chance to see unimpaired nature. But very few of the children would be willing to stay there, and in some cases after a few days they are homesick for their native filth. The city is one continuous theatre, admission free; the street is the best playground in this world. There is a fire, a street fight, the appearance of policemen, an arrest, an automobile accident--all the day and all the night, “something doing.”

Thus it is not at all strange that the majority prefer the crowded conditions of the slums to the fresh air of the country; for other things being equal, isn’t that about the way we all feel?

XI

AGE BEFORE BEAUTY

This frequently-heard statement is a left-handed compliment; like many conventional tributes, it carries a smirk rather than a smile. Underneath the formal and hollow homage paid to the ancient the preference is of course elsewhere. It is somewhat like the so-called complimentary vote given to the “favourite son” at a political convention, which no one takes seriously, not even the son. Nothing would perhaps more shockingly disconcert the ballot-casters than to have their candidate receive other than local support.

In the expression Age Before Beauty, it is implied that the two are incompatible; you cannot have both. Yet upon a little reflexion it will appear that the vast majority of objects that receive human attention become more and more beautiful with the accumulation of years. I can think of only two classes of things that are more beautiful in their early than in their later existence.

I refer first to all varieties of animal life, including man; second to all objects whose main purpose is practical usefulness.

It ought to be obvious that kittens, puppies, baby lions, boys and girls are fairer to look upon than aged cats, rheumatic hounds, toothless lions, decrepit men, and time-worn harridans--such as guide you to your seat in the Paris theatres. It is true that the ecclesiastical poet, Dr. Donne, made a couplet comforting to some whose youth is only a memory.

Nor Spring nor Summer’s beauty hath such grace As I have seen in one autumnal face.

But you will observe he said “one” not many; and he had in mind not a number of charming old ladies, but just one. No doubt there are a sufficient number of exceptions to give added stability to the rule.

Browning said the reason why youth is so fair is that it would be intolerable without it; beauty is youth’s only asset. Nature makes boys and girls lovely to look upon so they can be tolerated until they acquire some sense. As soon as they are able to pull their weight in the work of the world and in the intellectual clearing-house of society, then grace and beauty depart. Thus mature people who have no brains and no sense are the last word in futility. They are as ridiculous as old apple-blossoms which for some reason never went into fruition.

The second class of objects which are beautiful only in youth are those which are built mainly for use. The purpose of an automobile is to go. A motor car one year old is better than when ten years old; it is also more attractive to the eye. I suppose Americans are the only people in the world who often buy new cars. If an Englishman has a car that carries him satisfactorily, he keeps it; the American “turns it in.” There is no more striking evidence of the “prosperity” of the American people than the twofold fact of the abundance of new cars, and also--amazing, when you think about it--that the tremendously efficient T-model Ford was not sufficiently lovely to pay for its continued manufacture.

When I was a boy, the number of my acquaintances whose fathers owned a horse and carriage could be counted on the fingers of one hand, like those who now own a steam yacht; the fact that the old Ford car is not “good enough” indicates how times have changed. For the proper epitaph for the T-model we should have to adapt the words of Shakespeare, which he put into a funeral oration:

But yesterday the Ford T-model might Have stood against the world; now lies it there, And none so poor to do it reverence.

Beauty and newness are inseparable in the case of bicycles, grocery-wagons, machinery, steamboats, factory buildings, flannel shirts, shoes, typewriters, trousers, socks; with all of these articles age means ugliness. In mechanical objects there is no charm in the accumulation of years.

But cathedrals, trees, mountains, castles, manor-houses, college lawns, violins, with the increase of age take on not only dignity but beauty. A thirteenth-century cathedral is more lovely than a glossy new church; an old tree is more beautiful than any sapling; the ancient turf in the quads of Oxford is fairer to behold than the graded front yard of a new house in Dakota.

Why do hundreds of thousands of Americans travel gladly in Europe every summer? Mainly for one thing. It is that their Yankee eyes may have the sensation of seeing objects which the wear of centuries has made beautiful. Many of us Americans have had the natural habit of associating beauty with newness; the new hat, the new clothes, the new motor car, the new stadium. It is worth while to discover that there are innumerable objects where age, instead of being a humiliation and a “depreciation,” is not only an asset, but a thing of beauty whose loveliness increases.

Boys and girls brought up in the slums naturally regard newness as essential to beauty and worth; the Fresh Air Fund should, if possible, take them not only to fresh woods and fields, but illuminate their minds with the sight of buildings whose age, instead of tarnishing, has made them surpassingly attractive. Henry James, in one of his novels, has a boy from the London slums entertained overnight in an English country house. This is what he saw as he looked out of his window in the early morning.

“He had never in his life been in the country--the real country, as he called it, the country which was not the mere ravelled fringe of London--and there entered through his open casement the breath of a world enchantingly new and after his feverish hours unspeakably refreshing; a sense of sweet sunny air and mingled odours, all strangely pure and agreeable, and of a musical silence that consisted for the greater part of the voices of many birds. There were tall quiet trees near by and afar off and everywhere.... There was something in the way the grey walls rose from the green lawn that brought tears to his eyes; the spectacle of long duration unassociated with some sordid infirmity or poverty was new to him; he had lived with people among whom old age meant for the most part a grudged and degraded survival. In the favored resistance of Medley was a serenity of success, an accumulation of dignity and honour.”

XII

CHURCH UNITY

I have in mind a tiny country village containing one large Catholic church and four small Protestant churches--Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal. The Catholic church holds services every Sunday, every holy day and on many other occasions; these services are well attended. Although the four Protestant churches are very small they are not small enough; some of them have long periods when they are not opened at all, and the others are never crowded.

It is not surprising that there should be many sects and denominations among Protestants, for the central principle of Protestantism is individual judgment, which makes uniformity neither possible nor desirable; and, indeed, in large cities it is a good thing that we have so many and such a variety of sectarian church services.

For the variety is not in religious faith; they are all following the same religion. The variety is in the form of worship, what I call religious etiquette.

There are many people who on account of their parentage and early associations love an elaborate ritual, with the clergy in uniform, the vested choir, etc. There are other persons, equally devout, who are repelled by ritualism; they like to see the minister in mufti and to have a service as informal and simple as possible. There are those who would be shocked by the language used by certain soap-box exhorters, but if they cannot endure these things they might remember that God has to listen to them, and take them as a compliment. Perhaps that is what is meant by the Divine Patience. These people feel religiously at home only in a dignified and elaborate service. But there are others who in a “high” church feel as if they were at an opera; their senses may be touched, but their hearts are cold. They are spectators, not worshippers.

How fortunate it is then that in every city of reasonable size every Protestant has the power of choice. If one church service or preacher “gets on his nerves” he can go elsewhere, where his precious nerves will be soothed rather than ruffled, and he can worship God with an etiquette to which he is accustomed.

When a young man and woman become engaged to be married it is extremely probable that during the courtship they will at one time or another discuss religion; the girl will probably ask the man for his views on the subject.