Part 8

But objections to superfluous work and over-refined work, are not objections to hard work, especially when one is in trouble. Carlyle says (I quote from memory): “To him who can earnestly and truly work, there is no need for despair.” But that advice is generally superfluous for an American. He is more apt to need advice to play hard--to mount his hobby or get hold of a new one, and ride it hard.

It is especially bad to let the mind run on worries at night; and to take them to bed with one is madness. This is a special reason for seeking society or the theatre: other people, in real life or on the stage (better in real life, of course, because there one has to talk back) can best pull one out of oneself when one’s own powers are utterly inadequate. When actual causes of anxiety seem overwhelming, if one can be made to forget them for a time, hope comes into the ascendant.

One most important point is that worries are apt to settle themselves during sleep. There may be a subconscious mental action, or one may wake up with the thinking powers invigorated; but whatever the reason may be, people go to bed in perplexity, and soon after waking, do certainly often find that all the considerations have slipped into their relative places, and that the perplexity has cleared.

The best of all remedies is perhaps the most difficult, though not impossible. It is to “rise superior” to your troubles--to convince yourself, lift yourself, force yourself into the feeling of directorship--of competent and confident directorship of all your affairs. Add “with God’s help” if you want to: for that may back up our worthy intentions more even than our ancestors began to realize--whatever they professed to believe. This feeling of calm adequacy does much to _secure_ adequacy, and what is of perhaps more importance, compels peace.

But adequacy is only adequacy to do the best that circumstances permit. To attempt more than circumstances permit is at once inadequacy--to put yourself on the weak side of a false equation. Attempt only what you can do, and you never need fail. Yet unless you attempt the best you can do, you do fail--fail just so far as the difference between the actual and the best possible. But if you are reasonably brave and wise, that difference will be slight; and the healthy conscience, like the law, takes no account of trifles.

Shoot your arrow at the sun, and hitch your wagon to a star, all you want to--as religious exercise; but in your daily work shoot only when game is within range, and hitch only to something which will hold tight, and is reasonably sure to draw.

And don’t be misled by shrewd Yankees who make divine phrases, but who regulate their actions in daily life as cannily as other Yankees who never make phrases at all.

Absence of work, and no less absence of play,--the mere opportunity to brood, is dangerous to those subject to the blues. When we are in the busy haunts of men, their activity inspires ours, and keeps our thoughts away from introspection and baleful notions; but if we are alone, even with Nature in her loveliest aspects, the mind is apt to seek the profundities, and to drag the spirits with it.

Interest in this subject has brought me some confidences. I knew a man beyond middle life, who had long longed for more opportunities of study and meditation. At last he obtained the cherished desire in the most desired way--in a lovely home amid the loveliest scenery. He took three solid months of it, and found himself low-spirited, ailing, and in need of tonics. But when he was called to the city, the first time he walked down Fifth Avenue, he felt that he didn’t need any other tonic. Yet the habit of years had put him, all unconsciously, in chronic need of that one. He took it at monthly intervals, and it did its work. But it cost time. As he approached old age, he realized in himself a tendency to melancholy, that, in spite of the city life that had been efficacious for himself, had given the declining years of one of his parents much unhappiness. He was frightened: he felt that external aid, like all tonics, must lose its effect in time; and so he worked hard to develop powers in himself that would put him above the need of it. After a few years, circumstances led again to three months away from the city, and so effectually had he enlightened and trained himself that it was a period of greater cheerfulness, health and fruitfulness than he had ever known.

His bottom principle was: “Kill the thing at the start. Watch! As soon as the serpent’s head shows itself through the egg, scotch it. If you don’t, your mind will become the abode of monsters.”

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Of course to those who believe in immortality, a faith in the ultimate goodness of the universe is almost unescapable. Beliefs cannot be made to order, but looked at in the most Philistine way, this one fills so many otherwise apparent gaps in the order of the universe, saves so many apparent wastes, changes so much chaos into kosmos, that, when relieved of some of its absurd accompaniments from the past, the belief seems, in the broadest view, almost a matter of course; and the narrowing of one’s view of existence by physical death appears absurd. The belief in immortality is such a simple and inexpensive machine for settling bad problems that, as in the case of any simple and inexpensive machine that throws out good results, there is a presumption in favor of investing in it. This, I suppose, is what they call Pragmatism. It has its dangers: for its principle is apt to be misconstrued, and Hope tells such flattering tales! But apparently Pragmatism has no direct business with hopes, but only with cold hypotheses; and if one must choose between hypotheses, the preferable one is that which strings the facts into the most orderly coherence; and certainly without immortality, the universe is much nearer chaos than with it.

Most of our upsets come from lack of health, or money or friends. Now if the universe holds for us ultimately an existence where we shan’t have to bother with such vile bodies, or such demands as they make for money, and where we may recover all the friends we have lost here, and if our troubles here aid in our development, as they certainly do, the universe appears much more orderly, and our worst problems are fairly settled. Perhaps a strong proud effective soul might not care much for a future existence that, in such brief outline, seems so easy; but I don’t know that our wide and exact knowledge of that existence contains anything to indicate that in it one will not have at least as good a chance as here to make his own way, or the way of those he cares for; and while doing this, to make his own additions to the gayety of nations, or their celestial equivalent. I don’t see, either, any indication warranting any shameless, weak and impotent soul--one like yours and mine when we have the blues--in refraining from doing its little best here, on the ground that everything will be made straight there, and that therefore it is just as well to wait. For there appear more and more weaknesses in the demonstration that even shining garments and harps and halos are to be passed around free, or indeed that anybody will start there with anything more than he takes with him. There does not seem, however, aught to negative the guess already hazarded regarding health and fortune and friends--that what capacity for winning them one does take, may have a better chance for activity there than it has here. And as capacity improves by practice, all this plain paragraph is an argument for doing one’s best here, and not sitting around indulging in the blues.

I freely admit, however--most freely--that such views, especially regarding the gayety, have not the sanction of very old or very wide acceptance; but with the decay of Puritanism, they seem on the way to more.

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Before we leave old-fashioned remedies, under however new-fashioned aspects, it may be well to consider another one that greatly helped our ancestors--the belief in an over-ruling Providence that really does help those who help themselves. In the form the belief was known to them, it is not known to many of us; but we may have it in a better form. For the narrow conception of an anthropomorphic god constantly tinkering at the universe, we can substitute the idea of an intelligence so great that it does not need to watch each act, and specifically adjust each result; but has established a law so comprehensive as to give each of our motives its legitimate consequences--a law that in some ways rewards each of our good intentions, even when it seems to fail, and punishes each of our evil ones, even when it seems to succeed. Faith in such a law makes us feel secure in spite of the haunting anxiety lest we break through the volcano’s crust. The sparrow’s flight may be free if compensation awaits its fall. And we may know a higher freedom and a fuller meaning, even a creative joy, in the feeling that when we shape our acts toward the best ends we know, we can leave the rest to a benign law that goes deeper into motive than human gropings can, gives rewards better than we can devise, and punishments that do not merely afflict but tend to cure.

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But all these faiths are another story. Faiths are good when they are not counter to reason, and the most matter-of-fact of us act on them every hour. But the big ones won’t come at mere bidding. What I have been principally trying to get you to do, in case you are subject to the blues, is to take hold and keep hold of the actual prosaic fact that in our year and place of grace, life has reached a fairly substantial foundation, and that throwing oneself open to every possible attack of the blues, through a chronic feeling that life is on a very ticklish basis, not only permits a great many needless attacks, but goes counter to the facts--is mathematically absurd. When you are scared, it is not because the universe is going to turn turtle, but because you are confusing its center of gravity with your own, and developing too much of a wrong sort of gravity above your own. Hopefulness is really the only reasonable attitude; at worst you lose nothing by it, unless it makes you careless.

Life is fairly reliable, and death at worst is simply nothing, while there are growing reasons to believe that it is better than life. And yet it is the one unfailing subject of abnormal brooding. It is possible at any moment, inevitable at some moment; and for that very reason it is, from most aspects, as a subject of worry, absurd at any moment. One of the sanest and sweetest men I ever knew, who lived to be nearly ninety, told me that he never thought of it.

Of all the humbugs of priestcraft, it is the greatest. The priests, who once owned a third of England, and probably more than a third of Italy, made more money out of death and its accessories than out of all the rest of the paraphernalia in their kit. Hell and purgatory and poor dear Dante’s scenery and properties were all part of the machinery. How shocked Dante would have been if he had realized how he was furnishing such ammunition! (A friend, on reading this, was surprised at my calling Dante “dear,” because he is generally regarded as so austere a man. To me he is not only dear, but like nearly all great geniuses, “as a little child.”) And some four centuries later, how shocked would have been another poet--not so poor or quite so dear, if he could have realized what a part he was playing in the same loathsome game! With them, one thinks of the geniuses who wrote the _Dies Irae_ and those other wonderful hymns, and questions what they too might have felt if they had realized all they were doing. Then come to mind some other contributors to the humbug, who as a rule were not poor, and were not dear at all, and who stole the sheet-iron thunder and resin lightning--John Calvin and Cotton Mather, and so on down to some poor dear men even so late as when the older of us were in college, who made us get up before daylight in winter, and go and hear them pray, because they feared that if they didn’t, and we didn’t, we should all go to Dante’s or Milton’s or some other man’s Hell.

Well, perhaps we who have a new century to play with, especially the younger of us, fancy among its fresh attractions a thorough emancipation from these old superstitions. But they are in the very blood our fathers transmitted to us. Many have had all the anti-toxic serum needed for immunity from serious attacks, but we are all liable to twinges--hours, perhaps days, of discomfort from that identical disease, when we don’t know what’s the matter with us.

Fear of pain is part of the equipment of self-defense evolved in the higher animals, but whether those below man fear death, is, I suppose, open to question. I believe horses and sheep, at least, show fear or aversion from the dead of their own kind. I have known it instantly shown by a child supposed too young to know anything of the subject. But be all that as it may, you can get far above the mere animal instinct, up into the tender human affections like those of my dear old friend, and find it probably true that normal creatures do not think about death, unless some external circumstance leads them to. Yet my old friend, with intelligence enough for the ordinary demands of life and the most delicate of its courtesies, would not have been called a thoughtful or imaginative man. But another dear old friend who was both (I don’t know why I shouldn’t say that I’m thinking of Stedman), I don’t believe ever thought much about death, except in the abstract, unless some distinct external circumstance led him to. And he was a very unusually normal man. On the whole, I don’t believe normal people do think about it, in the concrete, unless they have to. Well then, most of the thought about it in the concrete is abnormal, and in more senses than even the priests made it, death is a humbug.

Don’t let us get the blues about it then. If we want an excuse for them, let’s find it reasonably, in being obliged to survive when we prefer to follow. But there are few such cases, and Time takes care of them; and, as reasoning beings, let us realize that it is sweet and normal that he should, and let us no more resist Time in our perverse ways, than we would in the ways of the Egyptians.

And our ways are very perverse when they make us cling to some of the most absurd fashions from older civilizations, and neglect the wise ones. How long will it take us to put the Greek symbol of the lovely youth with the inverted torch, in place of the skull and cross-bones on the Puritan tombs? But we are coming on well when we bring forward the symbols of love to cover grief, and put flowers with the crape outside the door, and over the coffin. But we are not doing equally well when, after we let a woman have a veil, or a man slink down a side street, because they don’t want to recognize people, we, after they have got beyond that, still compel them to keep away from people, and even from music and the theatre, when they most need them. We can generally count on mourners suffering enough without any aid from such fashions.

But leaving out our relations to other people, in the deepest part of our very selves--the part that gets the blues, why have them over the certainty of death? When we were boys, wasn’t it a good way to avoid them before going back to school, to make the most of the last days? Today may be the last day.

If the best way out of worry is work, don’t sit around moping about that journey, but work. Pack up. You can’t take too much baggage--of the right kind. There are some reasons to suspect that in the new country you’ll find more use than you had here for all that you can get together of learning and wisdom and aspirations and affections: love is giving rather than receiving, you know--even to the point of giving unrecognized. Why not there as well as here? True, your constitution may not be up to that one-sided kind forever, but you may not have to wait so long as that.

And even if you’re lost, baggage and all, it will not have been wasted: for it will have done its service here, and it will not need to be renewed. And you can’t be sure now that you won’t want it. And how ineffably silly it is to worry over the possibility of oblivion! That surely can’t hurt. But if anybody believes that consciousness continues, shut up in a Pozzi-like darkness, deprived of an opportunity to enjoy this beautiful universe or any other, _that’s_ something to worry over. But did anybody ever invent such a Hell as that, or if anybody did, has anybody now any justification for having the blues over it? If you are worried by Scripture, probably you know that of the three uses of “outer darkness” in Matthew, two plainly refer to earthly conditions, and the third may fairly be taken in the same sense.

If you get tired packing, and need more work in view of departure, don’t go back to moping, but get right up and put things in shape for those you’re going to leave behind. But don’t bother them, or do foolish things. One of the best things about that journey is that nearly all the wise preparations for staying here are equally wise for going. So you would be foolish to make very many _specific_ preparations for going. In fact specific preparations for that journey have involved more of the waste and tomfoolery of the world than almost anything else--perhaps more than even war or fashion.

But be ready to go when you’re called.

Meantime circumstances may be so against you that you can’t have a happy life; but probably you can, if you so will, have at least a cheerful one, and those who have had the experience say that it’s pretty hard to tell the difference--that they amount to about the same thing, except that, on the whole, the cheerful life is the more effective; and that, at best, happiness is but a by-product.

All this simple advice may be easier to follow than you think, and if you do follow it, probably you won’t have the blues.

THE PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE OF KICKING

Now, at this present moment, and for the next two months, twenty million American youth,--turning from syndicalism, the new morality, forgotten virtues, capitalism, psychical research, sociology, trust-busting, fly-swatting, preventive medicine, the evils of alcohol and tobacco, and other of the million burning questions of the day,--are and will be chiefly occupied with the important historical problem as to whether Mr. Charles Brickley, captain of and kicker-in-extraordinary to the Harvard football team, is a mightier man than the ancient heroes of the kicking game,--Moffatt, Bull, Brooke, Trafford, O’Dea, Poe, Sharpe, Eckershall,--and with this discussion they will couple the practical ambition and personal hope of joining the great galaxy.

But why bother about such matters? We cannot all, dear brother sports, become members of the firm of Brickley and Company. There is no use in trying. Besides, satisfaction for disappointment is ready at hand. As is common in human affairs, when we cannot do a thing literally, we may always turn to a metaphor. The turn has this advantage: whereas actual kicking is the prerogative of a few favored mortals, its practice, under the metaphor, may become the pastime of any person, however humble. For this use of the word there is the highest possible authority: the heavenly vision that appeared to Saul of Tarsus on the road to Damascus, was accompanied by a voice which said, “It is hard for thee to kick against the pricks.” It is interesting to note, by the way, that these words were the only ones uttered in that famous conversation which bear any suggestion of rationality, and it is not unlikely that the great and able apostle, perceiving the hard-headed and common-sense quality of the advice, made haste to adopt a less futile pursuit than that of persecuting new movements.

Now this metaphor stands for an operation far more common than most of us are usually aware. Figuratively, we are all kickers, at least nearly all of us, in one way or another, at one time or another, for one cause or another. Illustrations are as common as football associations or earth worms. Thus that oracular Englishman, Mr. G. K. Chesterton, has all Victorian literature the outcome of various reactions against the “Victorian Compromise,” but, in less elegant phrase and from the point of view of the aforesaid “V. C.,” all Victorian literature might be said to have arisen from the _Stossenslust_, or desire to kick. And, whereas that desire, literally considered, is surging in the breast of every manly young American at this very moment,--the metaphorical function may be administered by young and old, male and female, alike. An extra strong cup of coffee, too many buckwheat cakes, too prolonged indulgence in prayer-meetings, will often do the trick, without those long years of patient practice which make certain of our football heroes distinguished above their kind.

Personally I like the easy way, and therefore I may, at the outset, and with all due modesty, lay a not-to-be-denied claim to some share in the function that I am describing. I admire the motives, and occasionally the works, of my colleagues in the noble art which we profess, the art of setting the world, the whole world, or the particular world, right,--perhaps of setting some parts of the world by the ears, who knows? I greatly admire such periodicals as are instruments and vehicles for the “registering of kicks” that will take the offender and the offence squarely and forcibly and leave the remains to be carted away by the scavengers of reform. I enjoy nothing more than a blithe, personally conducted “muck-rake”; I hope sometime to offer a Nobel kicking prize. Whatever makes against the crudeness, the carelessness, the complacency especially, and the contentment with mediocrity that so pervade some of the aspects of our modern civilization charms me. Doubtless we in America are eaten up with the heir-to-all-the-ages, we-can-do-as-we-like, America-for-the-Americans sort of feeling and sentiment. Though Mr. Wells is probably right in saying that “the United States of America remains the greatest country in the world, and the living hope of mankind,” yet anything that checks our bumptiousness is surely a good thing. But I do not halt here; far be it from me to delight solely in the advantages of my own land. I love to read about Ministerial and Opposition struggles, and the Austrian parliament and the French strikes are very merry spectacles. Kicking is really the most sacred tradition handed down to us from our puritan ancestors, themselves most accomplished in the art. Why should not one love it? But I dislike clumsy workers. As Matthew Arnold might have said, we want real kicking, real criticism, real objection. The vital question is as to the nature of good kicking and of bad kicking. What are the “pricks” to be shunned? for, as we have said, the advice of the heavenly voice would, in general, seem to be as sound as the Elizabethan semi-slang is lively. Into the answer enter considerations of motive, of object, of method, and of technic. In the interests of sound thinking, I am going to register my own demurrer against certain abuses of the noble pastime.

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