Part 3

What a blessing if nobody wrote a story unless he had a story to write; if no parson preached unless the fire burned within him; if nobody made a political speech unless he were as white-hot as Patrick Henry when he gave his “Liberty or death” oration; if nobody played the piano or gave forth a song unless the compelling inspiration were there; if nobody built a house except to realize a beautiful dream, nor painted a picture except to grasp and fix an entrancing vision.

Creative work is the scarcest in the world. And the most underpaid. And the amount of hard work a man puts upon a thing is no gauge of its value—often quite the contrary—for it is the same shrewd Leonardo who observed, _Quante piu un’ arte porte seco fatica di corpo, tanto piu e vile_, or “The more bodily fatigue goes into a work of art, the viler it is.”

Men must work. In the forepart of the Scriptures it is laid down that “in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” and such labor perhaps will always be the most part of the world’s work.

But in the latter part of the Scriptures it is said that “man shall not live by bread alone,” and that sustenance other than bread, that diviner food that sustains souls, and the ghost-wine that cheers them, is not produced by sweating labor at all, should not be called work, but is a sort of glorious PLAY.

Art, craftsmanship, inspiration—no one can work at such things; they are essentially play, the joy (and not work, the pain) of self-forthputting.

And one supreme moment is worth a lifetime.

EFFICIENCY

Make good! Don’t explain! Do the thing you are expected to do! Don’t waste time in giving reasons why you didn’t, or couldn’t, or wouldn’t, or shouldn’t!

If I hire you to cook for me I expect my chops and baked potatoes on time, done to a turn and appetizing; I am not interested in the butcher’s mistake, nor the stove’s defect, nor in the misery in your left arm. I want food, not explanations. You can’t eat explanations.

If I hire you to take care of my automobile, or factory, or shirtwaist counter, I do not want to hear why things are half-done; I want results.

So also if you come to me and hire me to do a job of writing by the fifteenth of the month, you do not want me to show up on that day with a moving-picture story describing how I couldn’t do what I was paid for. You want the writing, and you want it first class, all wool and a yard wide.

This is cold, cruel, heartless talk. It is—to all second-raters and shirkers. But to real men it is a joy and gladness. They rejoice to make good themselves, they expect others to make good, and they like to hear preached the gospel of making good.

Mr. Yust, the Rochester librarian, in his report some time ago, spoke of the Parable of the Talents, in which we are told of the “three servants who had received talents, five, two and one, respectively. On the Master’s return they all rendered account of their stewardship. The first two had doubled their capital. Each of them said so in fourteen words, and their work was pronounced, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’ Servant number three had accomplished absolutely nothing, but he made a full report in forty-two words, three times as long as the other reports.”

There you have it. The less you do the more you explain.

EFFICIENCY!

Learn that word by heart. Get to saying it in your sleep.

Of all the joys on this terrestrial sphere, there is none quite so soul-satisfying and so one-hundred-per-centish as MAKING GOOD.

Do your work a little better than any one else could do it. That is the margin of success.

Making good needs no foot-notes.

Failure requires forty-two words.

A DULL DAY

The sun may be shining when you read this, but it was a dull day when it was written.

The sky is an ugly, drab smudge. There is no sun, no rain, no wind, nothing.

Across the street is a house. It is a stupid house, full of stupid people. I know them. I wish I didn’t. There are many people you are sorry to have met.

It’s too close to have a fire and too cold to do without one. Is anything hollower and drearier than a fireless fireplace?

A bird is on a tree outdoors. He is not singing. His head is all drawn down into his shoulders. He is just sitting there hating himself.

A number of people have passed by the window. They are the dullest, homeliest bunch of human creatures I ever saw. I hate them all.

A crash—the hired girl has just smashed one of our best plates, an extra fine Sunday plate with gold on it. The only reason I don’t go out and give her a dressing-down is because I hate to move.

Why move? Such a day as this you are no happier anywhere than where you are. If you must be miserable why spread it around?

Old Mrs. Grumpet has just called. She has told the missus for the n^th time about her troubles. She has all the diseases she ever heard of. As soon as she hears of a new one she goes and has it. She has more symptoms than a patent-medicine almanac. And it’s all along of that blue mass she took just before Austey was born. She’s a dreadful, vast, steamy creature.

She has left an aroma of added wretchedness in the house. We opened the window to admit some fresh air, and the flies came in. I loathe flies.

I chased them with a fly-swatter and broke an expensive vase. All vases must some day be shattered, as all men must die.

All women must die, too, and all children, also all dogs, cats, horses, cows, and grizzly bears. A hundred years from now everybody and everything will be dead. There will be a new crop. After awhile they, too, will die. What’s the use?

The gas-stove is out of fix this morning. So am I. So is the universe.

There is no news in the paper. Newspapers are all poor. Why read? Aren’t you miserable enough as you are?

I am trying to have a vacation and enjoy myself. This morning I played a game of tennis and was beaten by a poor boob that played worse than I. Then I played two games of solitaire. Lost both.

I went to the cupboard to see——. Nothing there but grape-juice.

The weather is thickening. It is going to rain. It is hours and hours till bedtime.

THE LITTLE GOD OF HAPPY ENDINGS

Some woman who knows how to tell a story sends me the following:

This is a fairy-story, but it is not about a princess; princesses are always wonderfully beautiful and wise and good, and the little girl in this story was a rather silly little girl.

She lived in a little house, on a great highway, and watched and waited for the coming of the prince for whom all girls, big and small, great princesses and poor silly little spinners, watch and wait.

Many people passed the little house by the roadside, as they travelled along the great highway. Once or twice the girl who watched thought she saw the prince in the distance, but always as he approached the likeness faded. Then came one traveller, who tarried for a while at the little house. He came quietly, unostentatiously, and the prince was to come riding on a white charger, clothed in the splendor of purple and gold. So she hid herself under a cloak until the traveller again set out on the great highway, alone.

But after he had gone she saw that he had left a shadow behind him, and for some contrary, woman-reason, she hid it, and guarded it carefully, in case he should return and claim it.

The days became weeks—the weeks months—the months years, and the prince did not appear. Gradually she gave up the hope of him ever appearing, and no longer watched for him, but occupied her days instead with wholesome labor. And now she was no longer a silly little girl, but a lonely woman.

One evening she stood in the doorway, watching the sunset. The highway was quite deserted, save for one lone traveller, off in the distance, who seemed vaguely familiar. As he approached, she recognized in him the one who had tarried at her dwelling almost five years before.

She went back into the house, to get the shadow from its secret hiding-place, to return it to him. But when she had opened the door of the little room where she kept it she suddenly realized that she did not want to give it up. She had kept it so long, and had grown so used to considering it hers, that she never realized how precious it had become until she had to part with it. She went to the door once more and looked out upon the highway. He was quite near now, and as she stared at him she saw with wonder what she had been blind to before—he was her prince!

She wanted to run out to meet him, with a great joy in her heart and a glad cry on her lips, but she was bound by convention. And she was filled with a great fear, lest he should pass by, merely thinking of her as a silly little girl who had hidden herself when he came the first time and let him go on alone. And she decided that, as she was not allowed to reveal herself to him, neither would she attempt to stop him and return the shadow which was rightly his, but would at least keep that, to help make the coming years less lonely.

And that is the end of this fairy-story. And after all, I am not sure that it is a REAL fairy-story, because most fairy-stories end—“And they lived happy ever after.”

Perhaps you, who are so much wiser than the silly little woman, can think of a better ending for it.

I thank you, dear unknown sender of this tale, for your pretty compliment. If in any way I might claim to be wiser than you, or than any one who feels destiny has cheated him, it is because I have ceased to seek the shrine of the Little Cheating God of Happy Endings, and visit rather the Great God of Day by Day.

THE ART OF HAPPY MEMORY

The most significant step a mind takes is that wherein it realizes that it can control its own operation; when it learns that it can command those things in itself commonly considered automatic.

And in nothing does this appear with such striking results to happiness as in the discovery of one’s power to manage his memory.

Most people think they remember what they remember, and that is all there is to it. But it is possible to make memory a servant, and restrain its mastery.

In Italy a rare motto was found by Hazlitt upon a sun-dial: _Horas non numero nisi serenas_—“I mark only the shining hours.”

The man whose increase of contentment is most assured, as he grows older, is the one who has discovered how to enjoy his past.

To many of us the past is always sad. We turn from it with impatience. “Man never is, but always to be, blest.” Naturally this habit of mind sees in the ever-shortening future nothing but tragedy. Accept, then, these hints on how to handle your past.

First, whatever it is, has been; it has brought you here. Your condition may not be all your impudent claims on the universe demand, but it might be worse. Better men than you are in jail, are stricken with unceasing pain. Better men than you have been hanged.

Out of the worst experiences you have had you may reap satisfaction. The dangers, sicknesses, accidents, and losses, one who understands the art of living finds in the recalling of even these a certain thankfulness. Is there not pleasure in recounting your narrow escape?

You have had your pangs and pains; but the wise man knows that out of these have come his richest crops of understanding. Life has its stripes; but they are its healing.

The past is largely made by the present. If you are now soured and disappointed you are quite hopeless, for your diseased memory will go over your past and pick out from it only miserable things. But if you have adjusted yourself, if with a courageous heart you are trying to make the best of conditions as they are, your memory will aid you, and bring you stores of happy incidents.

Your past is the strongest asset of your present judgment. It is your best teacher. Only from it do you learn whatever shrewdness you have in dealing with events.

Learn to forgive yourself, not in folly, but in a sane charity. The things you did wrong, the failures and mistakes, consider them as part of that tutelage of destiny that goes toward your present equipment.

What has happened to you has happened to all men. The question is, will you cull from it flowers or thorns?

“Everything considered,” says Renan, “there are few situations in the vast field of existence where the balance of debt and credit does not leave a little surplus of happiness.”

We have crossed the years. We are here. We have escaped what perils! We have landed with what residue of wisdom and of hope!

SUBCONSCIOUS FEARS

A young man writes me that he is afraid of thunderstorms, and asks if there is no way for him to overcome this weakness. “I am normal in every other respect,” he adds, “but notwithstanding my endeavors to fight off this nervousness I find it to be of no avail; it appears to be a sort of subconscious fear.”

This is not a matter of ridicule, but a sample of very real and acute suffering to which many persons are subject by fear-panics due to various causes.

Many women scream with terror at the sight of a mouse. There is no use telling them that mice will not hurt them. So doing, you are addressing their reason, while the trouble lies not in their intelligence—it is a nervous disease. They scare just as a horse shies at a newspaper flapping in the wind.

Cæsar Augustus was almost convulsed at the sound of thunder.

Tycho Brahe changed color and his legs shook under him on meeting a rabbit.

Dr. Samuel Johnson would never enter a room left foot first.

Talleyrand trembled at the mention of the word—death.

Marshal Saxe was mortally afraid of a cat.

Peter the Great could never be persuaded to cross a bridge, and, though he tried to master his terror, was unable to do so.

I myself have never been able to rid myself of a fear of horses, and the tamest old nag gives me the creeps.

And I know a senior in Wellesley College, a young lady of strong intelligence, who could be sent almost into convulsions by showing her a spider or a caterpillar.

To determine the cause of these fear-obsessions is a business for the psychologist. They seem to have nothing to do with the mind or the will, but to be, as my correspondent suggests, rooted somewhere in the subconsciousness.

That these weaknesses can be entirely eradicated in a grown person is doubtful. It is about as difficult to uproot an ingrained fear as to get rid of a distaste for mutton. Certain strong natures can perhaps cure themselves, but the average man has to accommodate himself to his weakness and resist it the best he can.

But the cruel part of this whole matter is that almost all of these fears are TAUGHT US WHEN WE ARE CHILDREN. Many a child’s mind is deliberately poisoned by fear-suggestions that are to plague him his life long.

Whoever threatens a child, or frightens a child by the fear of thunder or lightning or the dark or ghosts or the bad man or death or hell or a vindictive Deity, should be flogged.

Many a delicate child has been more horribly tormented by suggested fears than he could ever have been hurt by corporal punishment.

The most deeply moral lesson any mother can instil into her child is that he be UNAFRAID—of anything in life or death. And whoso teaches a child a fear has made an incurable wound in his soul.

LAYING UP

The thrifty man lays up money for his old age. The farmer lays up fodder for his winter feeding. The medical student lays up information for use in his future practise. The intelligent, by due exercise and diet, lay up health, and the wastrel lays up trouble and disease by his excesses.

All of us lay up something, willy-nilly.

It is a good idea to ask one’s self, in considering any act we are about to perform, not only what will be the immediate pleasure in it, but what sort of product we are laying up for ourselves by it.

We are always coming into our inheritance from our past deeds.

Maeterlinck says, “There is one thing that can never turn into suffering, and that is the good we have done.”

This day you may have to decide between doing a thing that will gain you a thousand dollars and a thing that will cost you ten. In making up your mind it is well to take into consideration what happiness dividend the transaction is going to bring you ten years from now.

The world you live in is formed on the laying-up principle. Nature gains her ends as a child learns to walk and talk, by infinite repetitions. She does the same thing over and over. She is eternally learning how.

Think how many centuries she practised in fish-flappers, bird-wings, and animal fore-legs until she could make a human arm.

Let the scientist tell you of the infinite trials that preceded the formation of an eye, an ear, a human brain.

The efficiency of every age depends upon what was laid up for it by the ages gone before. This age of coal and petroleum rests upon the long cycles of the carboniferous era, when summer after summer giant trees grew and fell, and in the crucible of earth were changed to coal and oil!

Nature never forgets. She never drops a stitch. What she does now is a part of what she has in mind for ten thousand years from now. The plan of the oak is in the acorn.

“The books were opened,” says the Apocalypse, describing the Day of Judgment, “and the dead were judged out of the things that were written in the books.” This parable is but a picture of the scientist’s declaration that our EVERY ACT LEAVES ITS RUT IN THE BRAIN, making us prone to repeat; what we feel today we more readily feel tomorrow; every functioning of body or mind, in fact, having memory-making as a by-product. The whole process looks toward a future man.

Creation is cumulative. That is the meaning of evolution.

The human race is cumulative. That we learn from reading history.

The individual life is cumulative. Every day is for future days. Every sensation and every act of will, everything I do, has a bearing upon the me that shall be ten years from this time—a thousand, a million years hence—who knows?

Hence, if any one chooses to believe that, after this long getting-ready, Nature is going to throw me, body and soul, back into the scrap-heap, let him believe it.

Nature ought to have as much sense as I have. And I certainly would not go to all the pains Nature takes in preparing a human spirit only to fling my product at last into the ditch.

HUMAN FLIES

Oh for a human fly-swatter! That is, for some sort of a swatter that would obliterate the human fly.

The most prominent trait of a fly is his ability and disposition to bother. He is essential, concentrated botheraciousness.

He is the arch intruder. He is the type of the unwelcome. His business is to make you quit what you are doing and attend to him.

He makes the busy cook cease her bread-making to shoo him away. He disturbs the sleeper to brush him off. He is president and chairman of the executive committee of the amalgamated association of all pesterers, irritators, and nuisances.

The human fly is the male or female of the genus homo who is like the housefly.

Some children are flies. They are so ill bred and undisciplined that they perpetually annoy their mother until her nerves are frazzled, and make life miserable for any guests that may be in the house. It may be well to be kind and thoughtful toward the little darlings, but the first lesson a child should be taught is to govern himself as not to be a bother.

There are respectful, considerate, and unobtrusive children alas—too few!

There are fly wives. Realizing their own pettiness they gain their revenge by systematically irritating the husband. They make a weapon of their weakness. They soon acquire the art of pestering, nipping, and buzzing, keep the man in a perpetual temper, and blame him for it. You can’t talk to them. Nothing can cure them but an eleven-foot swatter. And these are not for sale.

Some men are just as bad. Married to a superior woman such a man is inwardly galled by his own conscious inferiority. So he bedevils her in ways indirect. He enjoys seeing her in a state of suppressed indignation. He keeps her on edge. His persecution is all the more unbearable because it is the unconscious expression of his fly nature. Also for him there is no cure but to wait till he lights some time and swat him with some giant, Gargantuan swatter. And they’re all out of these, too, at the store.

There are office flies, likewise, who get into your room, occupy your extra chair, and buzz you for an hour upon some subject that you don’t care a whoop in Halifax about. Your inherent politeness prevents you from kicking them out, humanity will not let you poison them, and there is a law against shooting them. There ought to be an open season for office flies.

Where the human flies are proudest in their function of pestiferousness, however, is in a meeting. Wherever you have a conference, a committee meeting, or a convention, there they buzz, tickle, and deblatterate. They keep the majority waiting while they air their incoherence. They suggest, amend, and raise objections. They never do anything; it is their business to annoy people who do things.

I do not wish to seem unkind to my fellow-creatures, but it does seem as if to all legislatures, conventions, and other gatherings there should be an anteroom where the human flies could be gently but efficaciously swatted.

There are Senate flies, as well as House flies, politicians whose notion of their duty appears to be that they should vex, tantalize, and heckle the opposing party at every point.

There are fly newspapers, whose only policy seems to be petty, vicious annoyance.

There are fly preachers, with a cheap efficiency in diatribe and sarcasm, and no wholesome, constructive message.

There are fly school-teachers, who hector and scold; fly pupils, who find and fasten upon the teacher’s sensitive spot; fly beggars, who will not be put aside; fly reformers, who can only make trouble; fly neighbors, who cannot mind their own business; fly shopkeepers, who will not let you buy what you want.

And the name of the devil himself is Beelzebub; which being interpreted means “Lord of Flies.”

KEEP FIT

Ford, the automobile man, stated in his testimony before the Industrial Commission that he gets more and better work out of men at eight hours a day than at ten.

It is a law that holds good everywhere. The first duty of a worker is to keep himself fit. And an hour’s labor when he is up to the mark, bright, keen, and enthusiastic, is worth three hours’ effort when he is fagged.

“Keeping everlastingly at it brings success” is a lying motto; it rather brings poor results, slipshod products, and paresis.

Rest and recreation are the best parts of labor. They are the height to which the hammer is lifted; and the force of the blow depends on that height. To go ahead without let-up is to deliver only a succession of feeble, ineffective blows.

Get all the sleep you can. Stay abed all day occasionally. Learn to be lazy, to dawdle, to enjoy an empty mind; then, when you are called to effort, you can hit with ten times the power.

The higher the quality of your work, the more necessary it is that you approach it only when you are at your best.

This is especially true of intellectual effort. You can tell, when you read a story or an article, whether it is tainted with exhaustion; it is dull, lifeless putty.

Those who court the quality of brightness, but do not keep their bodies in trim, often resort to artificial stimulants. Stephen Crane said that the best literature could be divided into two classes: whisky and opium.

Intelligent people ought not need to be told that this is suicide. The best form of enthusiasm is the natural reaction of one’s system after a period of relaxation.

The pestiferous “work-while-you-rest” apostles are ever after us to “improve our spare time,” study French during lunch, geometry while going to sleep, and history during recess. But spare time ought to be wasted, not improved.