Part 2
The No-man progresses under his own steam. He is not led about and pushed around by officious tugboats.
The woman who can say No carries the very best insurance against the fires, tornadoes, earthquakes, and accidents that threaten womankind.
Be soft and gentle as you please outwardly, but let the centre of your soul be a No, as hard as steel.
TIME
Old Father Time knows more than anybody.
He solves more problems than all the brains in the world.
More hard knots are unloosed, more tangled questions are answered, more deadlocks are unfastened by Time than by any other agency.
In the theological disputes that once raged in Christendom neither side routed the other; Time routed them both by showing that the whole subject did not matter.
After the contemporaries had had their say, Time crowned Homer, Dante, Wagner, Shakespeare, Whitman, Emerson.
Almost any judgment can be appealed, but from the decision of Time there is no appeal.
Do not force issues with your children. Learn to wait. Be patient. Time will bring things to pass that no immediate power can accomplish.
Do not create a crisis with your husband, your wife. Wait. See what Time will do.
Time has a thousand resources, abounds in unexpected expedients.
Time brings a change in point of view, in temper, in state of mind which no contention can.
When you teach, make allowance for Time. What the child cannot possibly understand now, he can grasp easily a year from now.
When you have a difficult business affair to settle, give it Time, put it away and see how it will ferment, sleep on it, give it as many days as you can. It will often settle itself.
If you would produce a story, a play, a book, or an essay, write it out, then lay it aside and let it simmer, forget it a while, then take it out and write it over.
Time is the best critic, the shrewdest adviser, the frankest friend.
If you are positive you want to marry a certain person, let Time have his word. Nowhere is Time’s advice more needed. Today we may be sure, but listen to a few tomorrows.
You are born and you will die whenever fate decides; you have nothing to do with those fatal two things; but in marriage, the third fatality, you have Time. Take it.
Do not decide your beliefs and convictions suddenly. Hang up the reasons to cure. You come to permanent ideas not only by reasoning, but quite as much by growth.
Do not hobble your whole life by the immature certainties of youth. Give yourself room to change, for you must change, if you are to develop.
“Learn to labor and—to wait!”
SALESMANSHIP
Every young man should some time in his life have experience in salesmanship.
Selling goods is the best known cure for those elements in a man that tend to make him a failure.
The art of success consists in making people change their minds. It is this power that makes the efficient lawyer, grocer, politician, or preacher.
There are two classes of men. One seeks employment in a position where he merely obeys the rules and carries out the desires of his employer. There is little or no opportunity for advancement in this work. You get to a certain point and there you stick.
Such posts are a clerkship in a bank, a government job, such as letter-carrier, a place in the police force, or any other routine employment requiring no initiative. These kinds of work are entirely honorable and necessary. The difficulty is, they are cramping, limiting.
Some day you may have to take a position of this sort, but first try your hand at selling things.
Be a book-agent, peddle washing-machines, sell life-insurance, automobiles, agricultural implements, or peanuts.
You shrink from it because it is hard, it goes against the grain, as you are not a pushing sort of fellow. And that is the very reason you need it.
Salesmanship is strong medicine. You have to go out and wrestle with a cold and hostile world. You are confronted with indifference, often contempt. You are considered a nuisance. That is the time for you to buck up, take off your coat, and go in and win.
A young lawyer will gain more useful knowledge of men and affairs by selling real estate or fire-insurance than by law-school.
I have just read a letter from an office man fifty-seven years old. He has lodged at $1,600 a year for twenty years, while two of the salesmen who entered the business about the time he did own the concern.
Get out and sell goods. Hustle. Fight. Don’t get fastened in one hole. Take chances. Come up smiling. So the best and biggest prizes in America are open to you.
Selling things, commercialism, business, is not a low affair; it is a great, big, bully game. It is a thoroughly American game, and the most sterling qualities of Americanism are developed by it, when it is carried on fairly and humanely.
There is incitement in it for all your best self, for your honesty, perseverance, optimism, courage, loyalty, and religion. Nowhere does a MAN mean so much.
I mean to cast no slurs upon faithful occupants of posts of routine. They have their reward.
But, son, don’t look for a “safe” place. Don’t depend upon an organization to hold your job for you. Don’t scheme and wire-pull for influence and help and privilege.
Get out and peddle maps. Make people buy your chickens or your essays. Get in the game. It beats football.
THE INWARD SONG
The poet speaks of those
“Who carry music in their heart Through dusty lane and wrangling mart, Plying their daily task with busier feet, Because their secret souls a holier strain repeat.”
It would be interesting to have the statistics of what number, out of all the human stream that pours into the city every morning coming to their work, are singing inwardly.
How many are thinking tunefully? How many are moving rhythmically? And how many are going, as dead drays and carts, rumbling lifelessly to their tasks?
It is good that the greater part of the world is in love. For love is the Song of Songs. To the young lover Nature is transformed. Some Ithuriel has touched the deadly commonplace; all is miraculous. The moon, the dead companion to our earth, the pale and washed-out pilgrim of the sky, has been changed into a silver-fronted fairy whose beams thrill him with a heady enchantment. Every breeze has its secret. The woods, the houses, all men and women are notes of that sweet harmony that fills him.
“Orpheus with his lute made trees, And the mountain tops that freeze, Bow their heads when he did sing.”
Every man is an Orpheus, so he but carry about in him an inward melody. There is for him “a new heaven and a new earth.”
This world is an insolvable puzzle to human reason. It is full of the most absurd antinomies, the most distressing cruelties, the most amazing contradictions. No wonder men’s minds take refuge in stubborn stoicism, in agnosticism, in blank unfaith.
There is no intellectual faith, no rational creed, no logical belief. FAITH COMES ONLY THROUGH MUSIC. It is when the heart sings that the mind is cleared. Then the pieces of the infinite chaos of things drop into order, confusion ceases, they march, dance, coming into radiant concord.
Marcus Aurelius, that curious anomaly of the Roman world, perfect dreamer in an age of iron, was rich in inner music. The thought in him beamed like a ray of creative harmony over the disordered crowd of men and events.
“Welcome all that comes,” he wrote, “untoward though it may seem, for it leads you to the goal, the health of the world order. Nothing will happen to me that is not in accord with nature.”
None but so noble a mind can see a noble universe, a noble humanity, a noble God.
What a drop from such a level to the place of the mad sensualists and pleasure-mongers who only know
“To seize on life’s dull joys from a strange fear, Lest losing them all’s lost and none remains!”
What a whirl of cabaret music, what motion and forced laughter, what wild discord of hot viands, drugged drinks, and myriad-tricked lubricity it takes to galvanize us when our souls are dry and cracked and tuneless!
Have you ever had the feelings of Hazlitt? “Give me,” he said, “the clear blue sky over my head and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner—and then to thinking! I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy.”
Whoever does something that makes the souls of men and women sing within them does more to make this earth habitable and this life tolerable than all the army of them that widen our comforts and increase our luxuries.
IDLENESS THE MOTHER OF PROGRESS
Idleness is the mother of progress. So long as men were busy they had no time to think of bettering their condition.
Idleness is the mother of art. It was when men had leisure from the chase that they decorated the handles of their hunting-knives and the walls of their cave-dwellings.
Idleness is the mother of religion. It is in the relax and rebound from toil that men think of God.
We talk of all men’s right to work. There is a deeper right than that. It is the right to idleness.
The value of what we put upon the page of life depends upon the width of the margin.
The great, useful, redeeming, and lasting work of the world is that work which is a reaction from idleness. The continent of labor is barren. It is the little island of labor that is green and fruitful in the sea of leisure.
The curse of America is its deification of labor. Our little gods are the men who are ceaselessly forthputting.
Most of all we deify capital, which never rests, but goes on producing day and night.
We are so occupied in getting ready to live that we have lost the art of living.
With us a man is a fool if he sets about to enjoy himself before he has laid up a fortune. We count the woman happy when she has married money, and the child accursed when he has no inheritance.
Every morning we arise from our beds and charge bloodthirstily into the struggle. We all do it, millionaires and paupers. In his office the trust magnate sits at his scheming until his nerves are loosed, his arteries hardened, and his soul caked. The slaves of Rome never worked so hard as many of our laborers in mines and factories.
“After the Semitic fashion,” says Remy de Goncourt, “you make even the women work. Rich and poor, all alike, you know nothing of the joys of leisure.”
There ought to be two leisure classes, yea three: all children under twenty-one, all women, and all men over sixty.
The work of the world could be easily done by males between the ages of twenty-one and sixty. To accomplish this, all that is needed is to abolish militarism, that insane burden of men in idleness, abolish all piled-up wealth-units that keep husky males workless, and abolish our worship of activity.
Then there would be plenty of work for every man to keep him from want, and plenty of leisure for every man to preserve in him a living soul.
If I were czar of the world, no woman should work except as she might elect for her amusement; no child should do aught but play.
Among savages the women do all the work. In the coming civilization they shall do none. The progress of the race is the progress of the female from toil to leisure.
Every woman is a possible mother. She should have only to grow and to be strong. She should be the real aristocracy, the real Upper Class, to give culture and beauty to life. She should have time to attend to the duties of her eternal priesthood.
As for man, little by little, he also would lift himself from the killing grind of monotonous exertion. For he would make Steam and Electricity, and other giants not yet discovered, do the dirty work.
To bring all this to pass, you do not need to devise any cunning scheme of government, nor to join any party or specious ism. You need do only one thing.
And that is to establish Justice.
The end of fraud and wrong is fevered toil. The end of justice is the superior product of skill and genius, and their mother, leisure.
SELF-CURE
“How,” writes a lady to me, “can I remove the following difficulties from my path?
“How can I overcome the lazy habit of oversleeping in the morning—laziness in general, in fact?
“How can I overcome the fear and worry habit?
“How can I ‘let go’ of the thoughts of past disappointments, mistakes, etc? I have tried all manner of ways to divert my mind by work and study.
“Do you believe in confession, in the case of a non-Catholic, for the purpose of relieving the mind?
“How can I overcome prejudice? I find I am prejudiced against certain sects and races.”
Rather a stiff task, to answer all these questions. Of course, I cannot “answer” them fully. All I or any one can do is to give a few hints which may be useful.
Oversleeping is not necessarily laziness. Go to bed earlier, if you have to rise at a certain hour. It’s a safe rule to take all the sleep you can get. The rule in my own family is, “Let the sleepy sleep.”
Laziness is not a bad quality always. A lazy body often houses a most energetic mind. The real cure for physical laziness is fun; find some form of exercise that lures you. Mental laziness is a more difficult disease, and you can only cure it by taking yourself severely in hand. Usually, I should say, it is hopeless.
Fear can generally be mitigated, if not altogether removed, by intelligence. It is a by-product of ignorance, as a rule. We are afraid of what we don’t know. Science (knowledge) has done much to alleviate superstition (ignorance).
Worry can only be remedied by adopting some rational theory of life, some common-sense philosophy. Maeterlinck and Emerson have done me more good, as worry-antidotes, than any other masters.
How to “let go” of bedevilling thoughts is a hard problem. Thoughts that burn, stew, ferment, and torment—who has not suffered from them? About all I can do is to let them run their course. I say, “This too shall pass!” and try to bear up against the pestiferous imaginings and memories until they wear themselves out.
It is also a good idea to have some attractive, interesting, fascinating vision, of a pleasant nature, to which we can turn our minds when annoying suggestions persist. The author of “Alice in Wonderland” (who was a great mathematician) used to work out geometrical tasks, which he called “pillow problems” (and wrote a book of that name), to get himself to sleep. Can’t you find some alluring things to think of when wooing slumber? Call for them, and by and by they will come.
Do I believe in confession? Nothing can so purge the soul. Still, it must be exercised with the extremest care, judgment, and discretion, else you may harm others in pacifying yourself.
“How can I overcome prejudices against such and such sects or races?” Just repeat over and over to yourself that all prejudice is stupid and ignorant. By and by you will, by auto-suggestion, get it into your subconsciousness that prejudice shall have no place in you.
Prejudice means “judging before” you have the facts. Never judge till after you have the facts.
Nothing is so utterly devoid of reason as a passionate hatred of any race or class. All men are much the same when you come to know them. Class or race faults are superficial. The human qualities strike deep.
PERSONAL INFLUENCE
Of all the forces that drive human beings, the greatest is personal influence.
By personal influence I mean that force that goes out from you, simply by virtue of what you are. It has nothing to do with what you do or say or try, except as these things express what you are.
Every person sends out what we might call dynamic rays or invisible electric-like impulses which are of such nature as to affect other persons. These rays from me can make other individuals gay or sad, good or bad, and so forth.
This is the only power that pulls souls, the only wind that bends them, the only fire that warms them, the only stream that bears them along.
Emerson said that “what you are preaches so loudly that I cannot hear what you say”; which is a striking way of stating that one’s unconscious influence far outreaches in effect one’s conscious effort.
It would be well if we would keep this in mind; it would save us a lot of futile busying.
For instance, reformers bent on saving the world should not be so hot and impatient seeing that there is no real saving that ever has been or ever will be done that is not the result of the influence radiating from good people.
Laws are dead and wooden, but when a man incarnates a law it begins to work on other men. The “Word” is of no force until it is “made Flesh.”
It is the personal influence of a teacher that affects all the real educating of the pupil. The wise man understood this who said that the best university was “a log with Mark Hopkins on one end and me on the other.”
I sometimes doubt if any real good has ever been done by didactic teaching or preaching. All the moral maxims in the world are poor beside one strong, sweet, normal life. And a good woman is worth, as a guide, the most select list of “virtues and their opposite vices.”
To create such a character in fiction as “John Halifax” or “Jean Valjean” or “Little Nellie” or the man in the “Third Floor Back,” is to exert a lasting and potent uplift agency, better than a thousand sermons.
It is fascinating to many minds, the idea of “doing good” and “working for the Lord,” and devoting one’s time wholly to inducing people to become better; but it is not practical. The only way to improve mankind is to be something that inspires them; your argument and exhortation are of small avail. Just as the only way to dispel darkness is to shine, and the only way to electrify iron is to be a magnet.
Goodness is a contagion; we must “catch” it, we must have it and “give” it.
When you say in your creed that you believe in God, your declaration is of no help to you or to others unless what you mean is this: That you believe in the inherent potency of goodness, that it will live down, outwear, and destroy evil; that justice, cleanliness, honesty, and kindness will win in the long run against fraud, dirt, lying, and cruelty; and that persons who are upright and altruistic get more joy out of every minute of their lives than idle, sporty, and self-coddling folk; and that there is altogether a vast tidal or subterranean movement in the human race toward health, strength, and beauty.
Therefore why worry over what you will say or do, since it makes no matter? Simply BE right, and then say whatever comes to your mind, and do whatever comes to your hand, and you cannot fail to do the most possible toward helping along.
MONEY-MAKERS
Anybody can save; only a few can make money.
All you have to do, to save money, is to spend less than you get. And any human being that is healthy and “compos mentis” can live on, say, nine-tenths of what he is now living on and put by the other tenth. There may be exceptions to this rule; we must grant that for the severely accurate, but they are scarce as hen’s teeth. It is safe to say that those who say they need every cent of what they make, and that it is impossible to save anything at all, are victims of self-pity, weak will, and bad management.
And saving money is about all that most of us can do. And that makes few rich.
If I make ten dollars a week I can lay aside one dollar. If I make a thousand dollars a week I may bank nine hundred and ninety dollars of it (though I certainly would not). But in either case I wouldn’t get rich.
Rich people are not those who earn large salaries. They are those who handle money, who make money earn money.
Of course, in this argument we exclude two classes—those who have money given them, by inheritance or otherwise, and those who get money by chance. These two classes merely step into money some one else has made.
But very few people get rich, for the simple reason that money-making requires a certain order of genius. Money-makers are born. They have a natural gift.
They are like poets, mechanicians, orators, artists, in that they are endowed by their Creator with a peculiar capacity.
The money-makers are the real kings of modern life, because vulgarly we measure all things, including human worth, by dollars.
If you make ten thousand dollars a year at your job it is only because your employer is making more than that amount out of your services. He is the player; you are the chessman. He is the general; you are the private.
The best thing for us workers to do is to let money-making alone. Nine times out of ten when we go into that game we are stung.
Wall Street is strewn with the corpses of lambs who thought they could outwit the cunning old wolves that hunt there.
Many a shopkeeper has been ruined trying to get rich, not realizing that he is not a money-maker, but a money-earner.
And many and many a widow has lost all her insurance money by imagining that, being possessed of a tidy lump sum, she could increase it rapidly by shrewd investment. She does not understand that in speculating in real estate or buying stocks she is pitting her inexperience against genius and trained ability.
Let the natural-born money-makers make money. Let us, you and me, content ourselves with the only thing wherein we have a prospect of sure success—that is, saving money.
Sometimes the money-making faculty is a racial heritage, as among the Hebrews. Sometimes it runs in a family, and sometimes it appears sporadically, and a money-making genius crops out in the most unexpected place, just as a Lincoln, a Napoleon, or a Leonardo comes from a commonplace environment.
The thing for us to remember is that getting rich is but one small way in which human endeavor succeeds; that those who achieve riches are by no means certainly happy, and that their power to acquire luxuries is usually destructive to character.
And to remember also that the money-saver, if he be intelligent and if he have common sense and philosophy, is practically assured of contentment.
THE SUPREME MOMENT
“But Leonardo,” says one writing upon the genius of the incomparable da Vinci, “will never work till the happy moment comes—that moment of bien-etre (feeling just fit) which to imaginative men is a moment of invention. On this moment he waits; other moments are but a preparation or after-taste of it.”
There are two kinds of work to be done in the world, which may be called routine work and creative work.
By routine work we mean the tending of machines, the discharge of office duties, and the maintenance of the ordinary; which includes care of engines, ploughing, housework, answering letters and keeping accounts, tending the sick, digging mines, building bridges, and the like. All these—and the lives of all of us comprise such functions—are to be done whether we feel like it or not. The trombone-player in the band must go on, though his heart is lead. The servant must sweep the floors, no matter how the listless Spring has got into her blood. And the doctor must make his calls, the policeman walk his beat, and the elevator-boy run his car, for they are cogs in the social wheel.
By creative work we mean the writing of stories, the composition of music, the painting of pictures, the modelling of statues, the singing of songs, and doings of such quality.
These acts should await the supreme moment. Leonardo used to rush clear across Milan, when he was engaged in painting “The Last Supper” in the little out-of-the-way church of S. M. delle Grazie, just to make three or four strokes with his brush, to add a touch that had occurred to him. That is one reason why the picture, now faded, is yet epochal in art.
One trouble with story magazines is that they are issued regularly. The ideal publication would appear “every little while.” One does claim to, but it is a fraud, for it is a regular monthly.