Part 7

Moreover, when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precocious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information? If we discuss the pathology of divorce with the first-comer, what is to prevent divorce from becoming, in the end, as natural as daily bread? And if nothing is to be _tabu_ in talk, how many things will remain _tabu_ in practice? The human race is, in the end, as relentlessly logical as that. Even the aborigines that we have occasionally mentioned turn scandals over to the medicine-man, and keep a few delicate silences themselves. Perhaps we are “returning to Nature,” as the Rousseauists wanted us to; with characteristic Anglo-Saxon thoroughness, going the savages one better. But it is a pity to forget how to blush; for though in the ideal society a blush would never be forced to a cheek, it would not be because nothing was considered (as our German friends might say) blushworthy. Each man’s private conscience ought to be a nice little self-registering thermometer: he ought to carry his moral code incorruptibly and explicitly within himself, and not care what the world thinks. The mass of human beings, however, are not made that way; and many people have been saved from crime or sin by the simple dislike of doing things they would not like to confess to people with a code. I do not contend that that is a high form of morality; but it has certainly saved society a good many practical unpleasantnesses. And we are clearly courting the danger of essentially undiscussable actions when we admit every action to discussion.

I saw it seriously contended in some journal or other, not long ago, that, whether any other women were enfranchised or not, prostitutes ought undoubtedly to have the vote, because only thus could the social evil be effectively dealt with. Incredible enough; but there it was. Not many people, perhaps, would agree with that particular reformer; but undoubtedly there is a mania at present, in the classes that used to be conventional, for getting one’s information from the other camp. It is valuable to know the prostitute’s opinion--facts never come amiss; but why assume that we have only to know it to hold it? Is it not conceivable that other generations than our own have known her opinions, and that lines of demarcation have been drawn because a lot of people, as intelligent as we, did not agree with her? The present tendency, however, is to consider everyone’s opinion important, in social and ethical matters, except that of respectable folk. My own pessimistic notion is, as I have hinted, that the philanthropic assault on the conventional code has come primarily from people who were too ignorant, or too lazy, or too undisciplined, to submit to the code; and that the success of the assault results from the sheer defenceless niceness--the mingled altruism and humility--of the people accused of conventionality. At all events, the fact is that our reticences have somehow become cases of cowardice, and our rejections forms of brutality. We are all a little pathetic in our credulity, and we are very like Moses Primrose at the fair. Well: let us buy green spectacles if we must; but let us, as long as we can, refuse to look through them!

It may seem a far cry from “temperament” to social service. I have known a great many people who went in for social service, and I do not think it is. The motives of the heterogeneous foes of convention may lie as far apart as the Poles (one Pole is very like the other, by the way, as far as we can make out from Peary and Amundsen) but the object is the same: to destroy the complicated fabric which the centuries have lovingly built up. (Even if you call it “restoration,” it is apt to amount to the same thing, as any good architect knows.) At the bar of Heaven, sober Roundheads and drunken rioters will probably be differently dealt with; but here on earth, both have been given to smashing stained-glass windows. Many of us do not believe in capital punishment, because thus society takes from a man what society cannot give. The iconoclasts do the same thing; for civilization, whether it be perfect or not, is a fruit of time. Conventions are easy to come by, if you are willing to take conventions like those of the Central Australians. The difference between a perfected and a barbaric convention is a difference of refinement, in the old alchemical sense. A lot of the _tabu_ business is too stupid and meaningless for words. Civilization has been a weeding-out process, controlled and directed by increasing knowledge. We have infinitely more conventions than the aborigines: we simply have not such silly ones. The foes of modern convention are not suggesting anything wiser, or better, or more subtle: they are only attacking all convention blindly, as if the very notion of _tabu_ were wrong. The very notion of _tabu_ is one of the rightest notions in the world. Better any old _tabu_ than none: for a man cannot be said to be “on the side of the stars” at all, unless he makes refusals. What the foes of convention want is to have all _tabu_ overthrown. It is very dull of them: for even if a cataclysm came and helped them out--even if we were all turned, over night, into potential beginnings of society would be founded on _tabu_. We shudder at the Central Australians: we should hate life on their terms. But I would rather live among the Warramunga than among the twentieth-century anarchists, for I cannot conceive a more odious society than one where nothing is considered indecent or impious. We may think that the mental agility of the Warramunga could be better applied. Well: in time, it will be. But they are lifted above the brute just in so far as they develop mental agility in the framing of a moral law, however absurd a one. I said that their conventions were almost too complicated for us to master. That, I fancy, is because any mind they have, they give to their conventions. It is the natural consequence of giving your mind to science and history and philology and art, that you simplify where you can; also, that your conventions become purified by knowledge. Even the iconoclasts of the present day do not want us to throw away such text-book learning as we have achieved. They do ask us, though, to throw away the racial inhibitions that we have been so long acquiring. Is it possible that they do not realize what a slow and difficult business it is to get any particular opinion into the instincts of a race? Only the “evolution” they are so fond of talking about, can do that. Perhaps we ought to take comfort from the reflection. But it is easier to destroy than to build up; and they are quite capable of wasting a few thousand years of our time.

No: they want to bring us, if possible, lower than the Warramunga. Some of them might be shocked at the allegation, for some of them, no doubt, are idealists--after the fashion of Jean-Jacques, be it understood. These are merely, one may say respectfully, mistaken: for they do not reckon with human nature any more than do the Socialists. But the majority, I incline to believe, are merely the natural foes of dignity, of spiritual hierarchy, of wisdom perceived and followed. They object to guarded speech and action, because they themselves find self-control a nuisance. So, often, it is; but if the moral experience of mankind has taught us anything, it has taught us that, without self-control, you get no decent society at all. When the mistress of Lowood School told Mr. Brocklehurst that the girl’s hair curled naturally, he retorted: “Yes, but we are not to conform to nature; I wish these girls to become children of grace.” We do not sympathize with Mr. Brocklehurst’s choice of what was to be objected to in nature; we do not, indeed, sympathize with him in any way, for he was a hypocrite. But none the less, it is better to be, in the right sense, a child of grace than a child of nature. Attila did not think so; and Attila sacked Rome. We may be sacked--the planet is used to these _débâcles_--but let us not, either as a matter of mistaken humility or by way of low strategy, pretend that the Huns were Crusaders!

ON HAVING THE BLUES

The letters of Charles Eliot Norton have lately been published, and the time is opportune for a lesson from that good man’s life. Though always physically frail, he lived to be over eighty, and got more out of his life, and gave more from it, than do most robust men, even when they have his rare degree of intellect. Some who knew him well, say that one great secret of his long life of helpfulness and happiness was that he never had the blues.

While men like Norton make cheerfulness a religion, many other people of very good intentions do not even recognize it as a duty, but grope, and drag others, through clouded lives, while the clouds are generally of their own permitting, and not seldom of their own making. They are often thoughtful people, but not thoughtful enough to realize how much happiness and usefulness are wasted by the habit of the blues, or how easily that habit can be overcome. They sometimes even indulge it from a notion that depression of spirit is synonymous with depth of spirit, not realizing how often black waters set up a very abysmal appearance in a chasm so shallow that if a man clinging to the edge would only let go, he could touch bottom without submerging his chin. But if he delights in what he assumes to be the gloomy depths of his soul, he does not want to let go: he wants to believe his own puddle deep, and hates nothing worse than the possibility that it may be shallow, just as nothing so enrages the insane as the suggestion that they are insane.

Really superior persons (without capitals or quotation marks) are sometimes superior because of superior sensibility, though oftener, I suspect, in spite of it; and sometimes because of superior morality. Upon such people the shortcomings of life--especially of human nature, weigh harder than upon common folks. It was by no means Carlyle’s dyspepsia alone that kept him grumbling all the while, and that, but for his sense of humor, would have killed him long before his time. Then, too, superior people often have superior imaginations, and often abuse them by imagining horrible things, and suffering more from them than the clod suffers from realities.

Moreover, people with sensibilities and imaginations are apt to be queer in their morals: they may have too few, because sensitiveness and imagination breed passions, and are inimical to the philosophy, as well as the plain common-sense, that regulate passions; or they may have too many morals, because sensitiveness makes them hate the ugly consequences of immorality worse than the rest of us can, and also because, where Hell is in fashion, if it still is anywhere, they imagine it so much more vividly, and shrink from it so much more vigorously than the rest of us can, that they get New England consciences. Worse still, that kind of superior person with too few morals to do business with, or too many, is subject to insufficient food and clothing, and to poor quarters and inefficient medical care--to being sick, in short; and deprivation and sickness very naturally bring on the blues; and last of all, sensitiveness and imagination and too many morals and too few comforts, and sickness do not develop a sense of humor. The poet or the tragedian in the black frock-coat buttoned up to hide the absence of the shirt, is not half so funny to himself as to us.

In giving so many of the reasons why people who make great and beautiful things are apt to have the blues, I have run along the edge of platitude, and occasionally, I fear, slipped over, because I want to emphasize the fact that there is no warrant for the fallacy nursed by so many would-be troubled souls, that having the blues will enable them to make great and beautiful things, and that because Carlyle and Poe had the blues, your or my having them is evidence that ours have the same causes as theirs or will be accompanied by the same results.

And there are several other things tending the same way which we had better put an end to. Depression of spirits is not as often the result of vanity, or over-sensibility or any other form of weak wits, as it is of weak nerves or weak liver. And yet all these weaknesses are generally inextricably mixed as cause and effect. If without any real cause of worry, you wake up two or three consecutive mornings feeling that the world is an unsatisfactory place, probably you had better go to the doctor. He won’t be apt to give you anything worse than rhubarb and soda. You might even try them before going; and if it is a sunny day, try to glory in it, out of doors if possible; and if it is a rainy day, try to think how cozy it will be by the fire, or if you have to go to an office, how good it will be to have a day for steady work, when clients and customers are not apt to come in.

I wish I felt sure that the doctor would make you realize that we need healthy emotional pickers and stealers just as much as we need healthy physical ones. Overstrain and undersleep will make the world appear an empty place, simply because the nerves won’t pick up the good things in it. Hence the listlessness apt to follow happiness, when happiness is great enough to fatigue. Hence people on honeymoons sometimes having entirely baseless suspicions that they don’t love as much as they supposed they did. Hence, too, no end of texts for temperance.

* * * * *

The bacteria of the blues of course always seize on a favorable culture medium. Probably the best of such media is a settled and exaggerated consciousness of the possibility of disaster, which soon becomes magnified into a probability. Some people feel as if they were always treading on a thin crust over a volcano. Your doctor can do a good deal for one cause of that. The other cause is what Bacon called defective enumeration--generalizing from the remarkable, instead of the usual--the most frequent of all fallacies. Hundreds of people can be killed in automobiling without your considering it more dangerous than other sports, but as soon as somebody very near to you is killed, you think the sport dangerous. Now as to danger in general, think of the facts. At any moment, perhaps one person in five hundred actually is in danger of disease or other misfortune. But the remaining four hundred and ninety-nine are not, except in the distorted imagination of far too large a proportion of them. There’s a big chance--perhaps one in three or four, that you who read these lines, being a person who lives not merely on the surface of things, are in the habit of letting your imagination play too much with what is under the surface. Now stop it! You _may_ of course be actually the victim of ill fortune; but even if you are, there’s a chance that, in compensation, you have been made a saint by it, and that you really get more out of life than do most people more happily situated: for that’s the way of saints, as you can tell by looking at their serene expression.

True, a few terrible disasters must be expected, but they are generally so much like surgical operations that, unless they are fatal, the character recovers with some of its evil elements removed. And most strange to say, outside of character, and merely in relations to the external world--to wealth, opportunity, friendship,--the very worst disasters are often blessings in disguise. It pays as well to seek for the bright side of our miseries, as it does to count our mercies. “Count yo’ mahcies, Honey, count yo’ mahcies!” recommended the old colored auntie. You will remember it in that shape.

I have heard one of my ink-diffusing friends confess that having had an infirmity that interfered with his sleep, he long grieved over it as lessening his production. But at last he realized that the sleeplessness had enforced economy of time, in which, before the infirmity, he had been sadly lacking, and that his waking hours, in the undisturbed night, had bred the best of the thoughts which have contributed to his share of fame and fortune, and to the philosophy which secures his happiness.

But the realization of hidden blessings in misfortunes to ourselves generally requires a long experience: so let us take a case concerning everybody. It is not long since the civilized world experienced from the earthquakes in Sicily and Calabria, a thrill of moral stimulus probably the most intense it ever knew.

At first, on reading of such widespread and merciless destruction--maiming, killing, starving, roasting of children to death before the eyes of pinioned mothers, mothers pinioned before strong sons also pinioned from helping; large communities destroyed, and the survivors driven mad; horror piled on horror until the mere reader suffers, the imagination shrinks back miserable and incapable, and the mind loses faith in a beneficent cause and control of the universe. But after the first intense revolt of feeling has spent itself, and the reason attempts calmly to estimate the evil and what there may be of resultant good, the preponderance of the good, even in such an extreme case, may not seem impossible. The disaster evoked a universal burst of charity that turned fleets of battleships into engines of mercy. The moral advantage to humanity was colossal--nothing less than a distinct injection of kindness into all the relations of men.

It involved the death of but one in hundreds of thousands of the inhabitants of the civilized world. Most of the survivors received distinct moral benefits, not to speak of the advantage to future generations from the effect on the moral quality of the race.

Moreover, the case cannot be justly put without noting that the sufferers were of a people notoriously lawless (the Northern Italians are reported to have said: “After all, they’re nothing but Calabrians and Sicilians”), and that the survivors received a powerful call to righteousness.

But reason on them as we may, and get from them what moral good we can, great tragedies tend to breed a terrible uncertainty regarding the stability and goodness of life--and indeed of the universe and the moral law. Yet though much uncertainty is very apt to start from great troubles, it is by no means sure to wait for them. This skepticism is the bottom horror. I have wondered if Sill was thinking of it when, in his poem “Truth at Last” about the Alpine guide hurled down by the snow slide, he asks:

Did he for just one heart-throb--did he indeed Know with certainty, as they swept onward, There was the end.... ’Tis something if at last, Though only for a flash, a man may see Clear-eyed the future as he sees the past, From doubt, or fear, or hope’s illusion free.

Did Sill mean that even death may be preferable to that haunting uncertainty which is the worst of the blues? Early in life he had more than his share of it, but he lived it down.

If any man can look on birds and flowers and most women and children and some men, and upon the manifold beauties of earth and sea and sky, from dawn on to dawn, if any man can realize that we might have been driven by pain more effectively than even attracted by pleasure, to feed ourselves and reproduce ourselves--if any man can see these things, and not be certain that behind the universe there is intention, and effective intention, to produce happiness, that man simply has, at least temporarily, an abnormal mind. But he is the very kind of man who gets the blues. All that can be done for him is to help him see the other side of the shield. As for mere argument, sometimes one might almost as well use it against paresis as against pessimism.

Neither can much be done for fools. But there are degrees and kinds of fools. The worst are probably those who, having committed a folly of lasting consequences, sulk over it instead of facing it cheerfully and trying to make the best of it. When we can’t get happiness, we can at least get discipline. But the hopeless thing about a fool is that he can never be convinced that he is one: his follies are always in the past tense.

Next to doubting too much, is expecting too much. Aside from the few great disasters of a lifetime, the worst things are proverbially those that never happen. This paper has not much to say about things that _do_ happen. They may involve feelings not to be remonstrated against, or even mentioned lightly. But still those feelings, often very sacred, should, like everything else, be limited to their proper range. The chief cause (and the chief consequence) of the blues are _borrowed_ troubles. One of the most effective ways of borrowing them is to take for granted that a bad situation will not right itself, and then, instead of merely taking care of the immediate issue, letting the imagination work at all possible issues, and devising means of taking care of them. This is often promoted by a mistaken notion that such constant thought over the matter is a duty--that if the worst comes, one will at least have done one’s best. Generally one’s best really is to drop the subject. But that is not so easy. Just as the tongue always seeks the uneasy tooth, so the mind always seeks the uneasy question. But the tooth is not always under control, and the question generally is, or ought to be. Rigid discipline will develop a habit of leaving it alone except as something can be done about it. The true method generally is to decide what the moment admits of, and then to await the next real occasion for decision, and meanwhile to keep the mind occupied with other things. Usually thought between times is worse than wasted. An occasion when it is not, is usually not between times, but one of the times. Of course one does not want to be taken unawares, but not a tithe of the imagined situations ever occur, and those actually to be met are often not foreseen at all: so most of the devising is wasted, attention is distracted from the immediate requirements of life, and time is spent in a continuous overshadowing of the blues. All this takes tissue, and when the next issue comes, the power to meet it is dulled. The strength of the great fighters--generals, lawyers, parliamentarians, depends largely on temperaments which preserve them from such waste of their powers. “The coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave man dies but one,” and exaggerated anticipation of evil is simply cowardice.

* * * * *

Akin to doing work that never is called for, is over-refinement in needed work. True, “perfection consists in trifles,” but don’t forget that “trifles can’t make perfection.” There comes a point beyond which the most conscientious workman can really do no more. Part of the equipment of a true artist is the capacity to recognize that point. After every essential thing is done, there remain non-essentials which may as well go one way as the other. They raise the hardest questions, if they are permitted to raise any, because they are as nearly balanced as the load of Burridon’s ass. Moiling over them is threshing straw: it leads to no result but fatigue and monomania. Monomania is generally the first step in insanity, and nearly every step in insanity is attended by the blues.