The Use of FoolsWhat a dull world it would be if everyone were modest, discreet and loyal to that conformity which is called good taste! if, in short, there were no fools to keep us amused. What would divert us from the deadly routine of seriousness? What toy scandal would we have to discuss at dinner? What would leaven this workaday world of common-places, if everyone were gifted with common sense? Is it not, when you stop to think of it, a bit inconsiderate to discountenance buffoonery and to resent innocently interesting impropriety? Should we not rather encourage eccentricity with what flattering hypocrisies we may, so that we shall never be at a loss for things to smile at and talk about?A fair sprinkling of fools in the world is as enlivening as a pinch of salt in a loaf of bread. They give a relish to life, and flavour with a brisk spicery of nonsense what would otherwise be oppressively flat. Civilized existence, if it were always cooked up and served to us by Mrs. Grundy herself, would be unpalatable enough; but luckily her infallible recipes are not always carried out, and a few plums and cloves get into her pudding.We may not care to play the part of public jesters ourselves, but the least we can do is to be grateful to those who are willing to become absurd for our benefit. Patronize them daintily, therefore, lest they backslide into propriety; remember that there is such a thing as enjoyment without ridicule. To make fun of a person to his face is a brutal way of amusing one's self; be delicate and cunning, and keep your laugh in your sleeve, lest you frighten away your game.But there will doubtless always be enough who are willing to play the guy, whether we encourage or condemn. The fool is a persistent factor in society, and yet the common misconception of his status and economic function is silly and unfair. With the prig and the crank, the fool has been reviled from time immemorial, and persecuted out of all reason. He is protected by no legislation; your fool is always in season, and is the target for universal contempt. Instead of this perpetual fusillade of wits, there should be a "close season" for fools to allow them to propagate and grow fearless, after which we could make game of them in safety of a full supply. Since he is, in a way, the lubricator of the wheels of life, a coiner of smiles, he should be carefully bred to give the greatest possible amount of diversion. He should be trained like an actor that his best points may be brought out; he should be paid a salary or kept in livery to amuse the public, with no need or excuse for sobriety.But, until the fool is properly appreciated and his place assured, we must put up with the amateurs that haunt the street and drawing-room. It is too much to hope for the sight of a zany every time we go out doors, but, when we do encounter one, what a ray of sunshine gleams athwart our strict fashions--poor sober dun slaves to style and custom! If we chance upon a woman who dares perpetrate her own radical theories of dress, who combines pink with red, or commits a gay indiscretion in millinery, how superbly she is distinguished, for the moment, from the ruck and swarm of victims to good taste! She is at once an event and a portent. The afternoon is quaintly illuminated with a phenomenon, and we scan with new interest and expectation the dull and sombre throng.How small a deviation from the mode, indeed, is necessary to provoke a revivifying smile! Every such unconscious laughing-stock is a true benefactor, ministering to our sense of superiority. Were we never to see the freaks, we would not know how glorious is our own uncompromising regularity. Truly, if we have sufficient conceit, every one in the world, in a way of thinking, may be considered foolish relatively to our own criterion. "All the world is queer except thee and me," said the Quaker, "and even thee is a little queer!"Such praise of fools may seem extravagant or illogical, but if it is so, it must be not because the fool is not helpful and stimulating in society, but because, after all, he is not so easily identified as one might suppose. Celestine tells me she never calls a man a fool, but instead asks him why he does so,--and in this way she often learns something. That is the most disagreeable trait of fools; often, upon investigation, what appears to be genuine nonsense is but the consistent carrying out of a clever and original idea, whose novelty alone excites amusement. The fool thus cheats us of our due enjoyment by being in the right. It seems dishonest of a fool to instruct; it is beside the mark, and outside his proper sphere, and yet even Confucius is said to have learned politeness from the impolite. To see one's own faults and weaknesses caricatured spoils the laugh that should testify to the folly.We cannot be sure, either, that the ass who amuses us by his eccentric absurdities may not eventually cheat us of the final victory by proving to be but the vanguard of a new custom to which we or our children must, perforce, in time succumb, and fall into line with him far behind, only then to count our present attitude foolish and old-fashioned. Let us therefore laugh while we may, for your fool is but a chameleon who refuses to change colour. What today is arrant silliness may tomorrow be good horse-sense, wherefore it is wise to watch fools carefully when you find them, lest the sport spoil overnight, and you yourself become ridiculous, while the fool takes your place as the amused philosopher.The word "fad," they say, was derived from the initial letters of the phrase "for a day." So we, the followers of the latest mode and mood, are, it would seem, the true ephemera, and the fools who defy the local custom are immortal. The fool is merely an anachronism. All inventors, most poets, and some statesmen have been honoured with the title, since we laugh chiefly at what we do not understand. There are more synonyms for "fool" than for any other word in the language!So we must take our chances and smile at all and sundry, at men of one idea, hobby riders, cranks,poseurs, managing mammas and antic youths, blushing brides and fond parents, bounders, pedants, bigots and hens with their heads cut off. Laugh at them, the character parts in the comedy of life, for the show is amusing, but be not resentful if you find the privilege of laughing is a common right, and you in your turn become a victim. For, strange as it may seem, many of these actors may be so foolish as to think you the fool yourself!Absolute AgeWhen I was a child, I invented a game so simple and so passive, that its enjoyment was permitted even on the rigorous Sundays of my youth. Upon a slate I ruled vertical columns, and at the head of these I wrote: "Men, women, boys, girls, babies, horses, dogs." Then, seated at a window commanding the street, I made note of the passers-by, and as fast as they appeared in sight I made a mark for each in the appropriate column. The compilation of this petty census was a pleasing pastime, and, moreover, it seemed to me that my categories were obviously complete. There were, in my world, but men and women, boys, girls and babies--what else, indeed?But this primary classification of sex and years did not satisfy me long, and I discovered that my system must be amended if I would segregate--mentally now--the various types I encountered. There were, for instance, good persons and bad ones, men educated and ignorant, rich and poor, and I superimposed upon my first list one after another of these modifying conditions. But with a larger view of life these crude distinctions overlapped and became confused, and I saw that the whole system was but a rude makeshift.Yet until I could pigeon-hole a new acquaintance in my own mind and put him with others of his kind I was never quite satisfied. Up to a certain stage in development, what we are most struck with is the difference between persons, but after the first intellectual climacteric we begin to see resemblances, invisible before, that knit men of different aspect together; and, that game of synthesis once begun, we must play it till we die. Every new acquaintance is an element of our experience--a new fact refuting or corroborating our theory of life, and, though we often may put the case into a separate compartment and label the specimen "unique," before long we shall probably have to reconsider the whole collection and devise a new system of arrangement for the complex characteristics of human nature.But what analysis can we adopt which shall prove universally satisfactory? If we rank men according to mental, moral or spiritual attributes, one quality is sure to contradict or affect the other, and it is hard to decide which trait is paramount. Friendship is dependent upon none of these things, and yet in our affections we recognize, almost unconsciously, grades and qualities of attraction and kinship. Of a bunch of letters at our breakfast plate, we are sure to open a special one first or last, as the expectation of pleasure may decide. We accept this nearness, this intimate relationship, without reasoning; it is manifested in the first flash of recognition of the handwriting, at sight of a photograph, at the sound of a voice or a name. Some are indubitably of our own clan, and others, however their charm, or a temporary passion, may blind us for a time, are foreigners, and speak another language of the emotions. There are invisible groups of souls, mysteriously related, and the tie is indissoluble.So I have come to adopt as the final classification what, for want of a better term, I must call Absolute Age--age or condition, that is, not relative, not dependent upon the year of one's birth. No one, surely, has failed to observe children who seem to be older than their parents in possibility of development. One knows that in a few years this child will have caught up to and passed his father or mother in soundness of judgment, in a sense of the relative importance of things, in the power to distinguish sham, convention and prejudice from things of vital import. This child is older in point of Absolute Age. When his soul has served its juvenile apprenticeship in the world of the senses he shall understand truths his parents never knew.This capacity for comprehending life does not seem to be dependent upon actual definite experience with the world. The villager may have this hidden wisdom as clearly as the man who has seen and done, who has fought, loved and travelled far and well. The mystics hold that we have all lived before, and that some have profited by their experiences in former lives and have attained a fairer conception of the very truth. But, though this illustrates what is meant by the term Absolute Age, it is by no means necessary to accept such an explanation of the effects we perceive. It is enough that we can definitely classify our friends by their emotions and desires, and by their point of view on life. In other words, some are philosophers and some are not. And even the philosophers are of varying sects. Some have a keen, childlike enthusiasm for the more obvious forms of excitement, for all that is new and strange and marvellous, while others are incapable of being shocked, surprised or embarrassed--they have poise, and prefer the part of observer to that of actor in the game of life.And yet, too, there is a simplicity which comes from a greater Absolute Age, a relish for real things that persists with enthusiasm. It is by this simplicity one may distinguish the cult from those that are merelyblaséor worldly wise. The joy in the taste of the fresh apple under the tongue, or in the abandon of the child at play, in the strength of youth and the grace of women,--this is a joy that does not fade; no, not even for those who would not trouble to go to the window if the king rode by! As a man can learn much by travel without losing his capacity for enjoying his native town, so one can enjoy life intellectually to the utmost without ever losing one's grasp on one's self, without being intoxicated by excitement or blinded by egoism, and yet feel still the clean, sane joys of youth to the last.We have come to our Absolute Age by different paths. If we are of the same status, you and I, you may have learned one lesson and I another, yet the sum of our experience is the same. We are akin spiritually, although we have not had the same process of development. You, perhaps, have fought down hate and I have conquered dishonesty, but we are calmer and wiser, we think, than those whom we smile at quietly when we view their eagerness for things that no longer concern us. We recognize, too, that there are others to whose attainments our own powers are infantile. But in either case the superiority is neither mental nor moral nor spiritual--it is that mysterious inherent quality we call "caste."The Manual BlessingSurely if there is one sharp, active sensation that, in this changeful life of ours, we never tire of, never outgrow, it is in the satisfaction of creative manual work. There is a conservation of pleasure as there is a conservation of energy, and our taste is being continually transmuted and evolved. One by one we outlive the joys of youth, the delights of physical exercise, the zest of travel, the beatitude of emotion, the singing raptures of love, passing from each to a more mature appeal, a more refined appetite, a subtler demand of the intellect or of the spirit. The familiar games lose their savour, the dance gives way to the drama, travel to the calmer investigation of homely miracles. We tire of seeing and begin to read, feasting peacefully at the banquet of the arts that other men have spread. This is, for many of us, what age means--a giving up of active for passive pleasures when the old games lose their charm.But the joy of creation does not fade, for in that lies our divinity and our claim to eternity. Each new product arouses the same thrill, the same spiritual excitement, the same pride of victory, and yet, strangely enough, though we think we work only for the final notch of accomplishment, it is not the completion but the construction that holds us entranced. Not the last stroke, but every stroke brings victory! It is like the climbing of a mountain. Do we endure the toil merely for the sake of the view at the summit? No, but for the primitive passion of conflict, the inch-by-inch fight against odds, the heaping of endeavour on endeavour, the continual measuring of what has been done with what remains to do. The finishing climax is but the exclamation point at the end of the sentence--most of the sensation has been used up before we come to the full stop, and that point serves but to sum up our emotion in a visible emblem of success.Many of us believe we are debarred from the exercise of this divine birthright, the joy of creation. We have neither talent nor genius--not even that variety which consists in the ability to take infinite pains. Are we not mistaken in this? I think we may each have our share of the immortal stimulus.To understand this, we must go back and back in the history of the race, and there we shall find that this satisfaction, this sane and virile delight in construction, was possible to the meanest member of the tribe. Its enjoyment came chiefly in the exercise of a laborious persistency in little things. The combination or addition of the simplest elements achieved a positive pleasurable result. The neolithic man chipped and chipped at his flint until the arrow-head was perfected, and his joy, had he been able to analyze it, was not so much in the last stroke as in every stroke. Not so much that he had himself with his own hands made something, as that he had been making something of use and beauty, and the possibility of that joy abiding with him as long as he lived. The makers of ancient pottery repeated the same shapes and designs, or, if their fancy soared, dared new inventions, but the satisfaction was in the doing. The carvers and joiners of the Middle Ages worked as amateurs in cottage and hovel, and in their work lay their content; no tyranny could wrest from them this well-spring of pleasure. Old age could but weaken the hand; I doubt if it could tame the immemorial joy of creation.We cannot all be professional mechanics, for the division of labour has cast our lot more and more with the workers in intellectual pursuits. But we might make handicraft an avocation, if not a vocation, and that regimen would help our digestion, perhaps, more than pepsin or a course of the German baths. Were I a physician I should often recommend the craft cure--a panacea for dyspepsia, ennui and nostalgia.Here is my modern health resort, my sanitorium for these most desperate of diseases; a little hamlet of shops and tents on the foothills of the Coast Range in California, where as you work you can look across a green valley to the blue Pacific. Here in this new land nature calls fondly to your soul, and you may turn to the primitive delights of living and taste the tang of the dawn of civilization, fresh and wholesome as a wild berry.Here, squatting on the bare sun-parched ground, with an Indian blanket over his shoulders, is a corpulent banker with a flint hammer battering a water-worn boulder. Thus, less than a hundred years ago, the Temecula Indians hollowed out their stone mortars on this very mesa. Thus they spent happy days, slept like bears, and were up with the birds, each morn a day younger than yesterday. In this lodge of deerskins, where the ground is spread with yellow poppies, sits an ex-secretary of legation, who has known everything, seen everything, done everything but this--to cut with a knife of shell strange patterns upon a circular horn gorget. Finished, his wife might wear it with pride at the Court of St. James, yet it is but the reproduction of a prehistoric ornament, its figures smeared with ochre, cobalt and vermilion, and inlaid with lumps of virgin copper by the mound-builders of the Mississippi Valley. In this open shelter of bamboo, a trysting-place for meadow-larks and song-sparrows, lies stretched upon the ground an East India warehouseman, all his gout and lumbago forgotten in the rapturous delight of printing a pattern of checquered stripes with a carved wooden block upon a sheet of tapa which he himself--unaided, mind you--has pounded from the fibrous bark of the paper mulberry. His strenuous daughter, once world-worn and frozen, has left Nietsche, Brahms, and the cult of the symbolists, to sit cross-legged and weave the woolly zigzags of a Navajo blanket. It is the first thing she has made with her ten fingers since she baked mud pies in the sun! Had she a scrap of mirror in her bungalow she could now face it without mortification. An open-air hand-loom is good for the complexion.But you need not journey to California. Rather make a pilgrimage to your own south attic. If you do but construct cardboard model houses with isinglass windows in your breakfast-room, you will perhaps find that more diverting than collecting cameos or first editions. If you can only compile a concordance toAlice in Wonderlandyou may achieve a hygienic and rejuvenative distraction. Can you cut, stamp, gild, paint, lacquer and emboss a leather belt? Can you hammer jewelry out of soft virgin silver? No? But you could, though, if you tried! Can you forget the impositions of convention in the rapt glow of pride in sawing and nailing together a wooden box? No matter how small it might be, how leaky of joint or loose of cover, it would hold all your worries!The Deserted IslandA friend of mine is curiously hampered by a limitation precluding him from association with any one conversant with the details of the manufacture of cold-drawn wire. To show that this self-imposed abstinence may indicate a most charming devotion to an ideal, rarely shown by the commonplace, is the object of this thesis, and that, too, despite the fact that an indiscriminating extension of the same principle would lead the radical to eschew the society of most of his acquaintances, as well as bar out the whole domain of didactic literature.When the day is done, and that entrancing hour is come for which some spend many of their waking hours in anticipation, to those blessed with fancy, the curtain of the dark arises, and within the theatre of the Night are played strange comedies. To a select performance I invite all uninitiated who have never enjoyed the drama of the Deserted Island--the perfect and satisfactory employment for the minutes that elapse after retiring and before the anchor is weighed and the voyage begun upon the Sea of Dreams.There are undoubtedly more than I am aware of who are happy enough to maintain deserted islands of their own--many more, perhaps, than would confess to the possession. To some the history may be well under way; they have long since discovered their island, and many improvements have already been successfully completed. Others, more adventurous, handicapped by stricter limitations and more meagre outfit, are still struggling with the primal demands of food and shelter. But to those whose imaginations have never put so far out to sea, and would welcome this modest diversion, I advise an expedition of discovery and exploration this very night. You have but to go to bed, close your eyes, and after a few preliminaries you are there!Authorities differ as to the allowable equipment for the occupancy of the sequestered territory. I myself hold that it is manifestly unfair to be provided with tools of any kind; to have a knife, now, I would call cheating. Surely the only legitimate beginning is to be vomited upon the beach stark naked from the sea, after some fearsome shipwreck in mid-ocean. Then, after years of occupancy, a man might taste the pride of his own resources, unfettered by any legacy inherited from civilization. Settle this point as you may, when the conditions of the game are once understood, the whole history of Science is to be re-enacted.I have a friend who arrived upon the scene in an open boat containing a keg of water, a crowbar, a pruning-knife, a red silk handkerchief and a woman's petticoat; and with these promiscuous accessories has, in the course of years, transformed the place, which now boasts a stone castle, entirely inhabitable. His island is about two miles long and a half-mile wide--much too narrow for comfort, I assert; the proportions should be about five miles by three, with one dominant hill from which the whole territory may be surveyed.But the owner of the other island--he of the cold-drawn wire--boldly asserts his right to a half-dozen labourers, presumably natives, and with this force at his disposal he has done wonders with his fief. Glass has been manufactured, fabrics woven, ore smelted and fine roads constructed, so that there now remains nothing to be desired but bicycles upon which he and his slaves may traverse the highways. But in vain his unskilled assistants look to him for advice; rack his wits as he may, he can devise no adequate system of making cold-drawn wire, and he is beginning to lose caste with his followers.Now at first sight one might think it necessary for him only to consult an encyclopedia, or to visit on iron mill, yet this course is strictly barred out by the rules of the game, which compels one to use only such information as comes naturally to hand--for one is likely to be cast ashore upon a desert island at any moment, and it is then too late for the research and education that has been before neglected. With any ingenious fellow who has his own amateur ideas on the subject, one may, of course, talk freely; for he may represent one of the more intelligent of the natives; but all they who really know whereof they speak are to be avoided. So the problem of the cold-drawn wire is still unsolved.I know of an artist, who, free on this enchanted spot, has turned his energies to those diverting pursuits for which his studio leaves no time, and he builds gigantic rock mosaics on the cliffs, selecting from the many coloured boulders on the beach. Luxuries are his only necessities even in his daily life, and the enormity of his trifling on this holiday playground is a thing to wonder at. His art, so used to a censorship of Nature, in his professional mimicries, here goes boldly forth and so mends, prunes and patches the aspect of his island, that the place is now, he says, absolutely perfect; a consummation not altogether discreditable to a nude, near-sighted man, whose eye-glasses were washed off before he arrived on the spot!But, taking the situation seriously, what will he be in the years to come? By what gradations shall the lonely artist sink to low and lower levels, abandoned by the stimulus of the outer world, the need for advance, and the struggle for recognition? How soon would he lose the desire to render, in the medium at hand, the lovely forms of nature about him, the subtle tones of the earth and air, lapsing by stages into ever cruder forms of expression, till the whole history of his development had been reversed, and he became content with rude squares, triangles and circles for his patterns, the barbarous effigies of the human form, and the primary colours that satisfy the savage?And the sense of humour, too--that universal solvent of all our miseries, the oil that lubricates the cumbrous machinery of life--how soon would that go? Is it not, in the last analysis, dependent upon the by-play of the social relationship of men? The inconsistencies of our fellows must be first noticed before we can get the reflected light of ridicule upon our own grotesque actions. It would soon be lost in such a sojourn, our impatience would have no foil, we would take ourselves more and more seriously until the end came upon that day when we had at last forgotten how to laugh.But, after all, as this text of the hypothetical deserted island is better fitted for a romance than for a sermon, we may leave such forebodings and trace out only the rising curve of improvement. And so, too, interesting as it might be to experience, we may leave aside the moral speculations incident to the discussion of the case where the place becomes occupied by a man and a woman. The possibilities of a shipwreck in company are not for such a brief memoir as this; they offer consideration too intimate for these discreet pages, and are best left to the exclusion of a private audience.But choose your company carefully, I entreat you, if you are not soberly minded to be shipwrecked alone. I know of persons with whom, were I cast ashore, there could be no end not tragic, albeit these are highly respectable and praiseworthy individuals, who never did any harm except in that trick of manner by which we recognize the bore. I am often inclined to test the merits of others by mentally permitting them a short visit to my island, but the hazard is too great, and the thought of the possibility of their footprints upon the sand unnerves me.Yet, to a distant islet of this fantastic archipelago I seriously consider consigning certain impossible acquaintances, absolutely intolerable personalities, whose probable fate, forced to endure each other's society, interests me beyond words. Upon one side of this far-away retreat rises a steep cliff overhanging the sea, and here I behold in imagination one after another of these marooned unfortunates pushed headlong over the slope, as, unable to support the society of his companions, each has in turn, by some stratagem, lured his hated accomplice in misery to the summit of the bluff.But of one island I have not yet spoken. I can get no description of it save that it lies sleeping in the summer sun, washed by the sapphire tides and fanned by the cool south winds, its olive slopes rising softly from the beach, marked by a grove of fruit trees at the crest. More the owner will not tell, for Celestine says there is no use for a deserted island after it is charted; but by these signs I shall know the place, and my trees are felled and my sails are plaited that shall yet bear me over towards the southwest!The Sense of HumourMuch as one may look through the small end of a telescope and find an unique and intrinsic charm in the spectacle there offered, so to certain eyes the whole visible universe is humorous. From the apparition of this dignified little ball, rolling soberly through the starry field of the firmament, to the unwarrantable gravity of a neighbour's straw hat, macrocosm and microcosm may minister to the merriment of man. There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in the philosophy of the Realist.It is one attribute of a man of parts that he shall have, in his mental vision, what corresponds to the "accommodation" of his eye, a flexibility of observation that enables him to adapt his mind to the focus of humour. Myopia and strabismus we know; the dullard can point their analogies in the mental optics, but for this other misunderstood function we have no name; and yet, failing that, we have dignified it as a sense apart--the sense of humour. But no form of lens has been discovered to correct its aberration and transfer the message in pleasurable terms to the lagging brain; and, unless we attempt hypnotism as a last resort, the prosiest must go purblind for life, missing all but the baldest jokes of existence.Is it not significant, that from the ancient terminology of leechcraft, this word "humour" has survived in modern medicine, to be applied only to the vitreous fluid of the eye? For humour is the medium through which all the phenomena of human intercourse may be witnessed, and for those normal minds that possess it, tints this world with a rare colour--like that of the mysterious ultra-violet rays of the spectrum. And indeed, to push further into modern science and speculation, perhaps this ray does not undulate, but shoots forth undeviating as Truth itself, like that from the Cathode Pole. Or, does it not strike our mental retina from some secret Fourth Direction?But this is mere verbiage; similes, flattering to the elect, but unconvincing to the uninitiate. Yet, as I am resolved that humour is essentially a point of view, I would have a try at proselytizing for the doctrine. For here is a religion ready made to my hand; I have but to raise my voice and become its prophet. The seeds are all sown, the Fraternity broods, hidden in hidden Chapters, guarding the Grand Hailing Sign; who knows but that a spark might not touch off this seasoned fuel, and the flame carry everything before it. O my readers, I give you the Philosophy of Mirth, the Cult of Laughter! Yet it is an esoteric faith, mind you, unattainable by the multitude. Not of the "Te-he! Papa's dead!" school, nor of the giggling punster's are its devotees. No comic weekly shall be its organ. It must be hymned not by the hoarse guffaw, but in the quiet inward smile--and for its ritual, I submit the invisible humour of the Commonplace. O Paradox!Brethren, from this flimsy pulpit, I assert with sincerity, that everything on two legs (and most on four) sleeping or awake, bow-legged or knock-kneed, has its humorous aspect. The curtain never falls on the diversion. You will tell me, no doubt, that here I ride too hard. Adam, you will say with reason, set aside in the beginning certain animals for our perpetual amusement--to wit: the goose, the monkey, the ostrich, the kangaroo, and, as a sublime afterthought--symbol of the Eternal Feminine--the hen. Civilization, you may admit, has added to these the goat--but, save in rare moods of insanity, as when the puppy pursues the mad orbit of his tail, the sight of only the aforesaid beasts makes for risibility. The cat, you will say, is never ridiculous. But here again we must hark back to the major premise, unrecognized though it be by the science of Æsthetic, that humour lies in the point of view. If I could prove it by mere iteration it would go without further saying that it is essentially subjective rather than objective. Surely there is no humour in insensate nature, as there is little enough in Art and Music. The bees, the trees, the fountains and the mountains take themselves seriously enough, and though, according to the minor poets, the fields and the brooks are at times moved to laughter, it is from a vegetable, pointless joy of life. Through the human wit alone, and that too rarely, the rays of thought are refracted in the angle of mirth, and split into whimsical rays of complementary sensations and contrasts.When we lay off the mantle of seriousness and relax the flexors and extensors, if we are well fed, healthy, and of a peaceful mood and capable of indolence, men and women, and even we ourselves, should become to our view players on the stage of life. And what then is comedy but tragedy seen backward or downside-up? It is the negative or corollary of what is vital in this great game of life. The custom has been, however, to give it a place apart and unrelated to the higher unities, as the newspapers assign their witticisms to isolated columns. Rather is it the subtle polarity induced by graver thought, the reading between the lines of the page. And as, to the vigorous intellect, rest does not come through inactivity so much as by a change of occupation, the happy humourist is refreshed by the solace of impersonality.For, to the initiate, his own inconsistencies and indiscretions are no less diverting than those of his associates, and should frequently give rise to emotions that impel him to hurry into a corner and scream aloud with mirth. It is ever the situation that is absurd, and never the victim; and in this lies the secret of his ability to appreciate a farce of which he himself is the hero. He must disincarnate himself as the whim blows, and hang in the air, a god for the time, gazing with amusement at the play of his own ridiculous failures. In some such way, perhaps, do the curious turn over the patterned fabric, to discover, on the reverse, the threads and stitches that explain the construction of the design.This faculty, then, gives one the stamp of caste by which one may know his brethren the world over, an Order of whose very existence many shall never be aware, till, in some after life, some grinning god conducts them to the verge of the heavens, and, leaning over a cloud, bids them behold the spectacle of this little planet swarming with its absurdly near-sighted denizens.Ohé la Renaissance!for this is to be the Age of Humour. We travail for the blithe rebirth of joy into the world. The Decadence, with its morbid personalities and accursed analysis of exotic emotion, is over, please God; yet we may adopt its methods and refine the simplicity of primary impulse, thus increasing the whole sum of pleasure with the delicate nuances that amplify the waves of feeling. Hark, O my reader! Do you not hear them, rising like overtones and turning the melody into a divine harmony?The Game of CorrespondenceThe receipt of a letter is no longer the event it was in the old stage-coach days; railways and the penny postage have robbed it of all excitement. One expects now one's little pile of white, blue and green envelopes beside one's plate at breakfast, along with one's toast and coffee, and one tastes its contents as one opens the matutinal egg. We have forgotten how to write interesting letters as we have forgotten how to fold and wafer a sheet of foolscap or sharpen a quill. Some of our missives are not even worth a cursory glance, many by no means deserve an answer, and most are speedily forgotten in the columns of the morning journal.Yet, at times, on red-letter days, we find one amongst the number which demands epicurean perusal; it is not to be ripped open and devoured in haste, it insists on privacy and attention. This has a flavour which the salt of silence alone can bring out; a dash of interruption destroys its exquisite delicacy. More than this, it must be answered while it is still fresh and sparkling, after which, if it be of the true vintage, it can afford still another sip to inspire your postscript.To your room then with this, and lock the door, or else save it for a more impregnable leisure. Open it daintily and entertain it with distinction and respect; efface any previous mood and hold yourself passive to its enchantment. It is no love message, and need depend upon no excited interest in the writer for its reception, for it has an intrinsic merit; it is the work of an artist; it is a fascinating move on the chess-board of the most alluring, most accessible game in the world.Though the fire of such a letter need have neither the artificiality of flirtation nor the intensity of love, yet it must both light and warm the reader. It is not valuable for the news it brings, for if it be a work of art the tidings it bears are not so important as the telling of them. It must be sincere and alive, revealing and confessing, a letter more from the writer than to the reader, as if it were written in face of a mirror rather than before the photograph of the receiver; and yet the communication must be spelled in the cypher of your friendship, to which only you have the key. We have our separate languages, each with the other, and there are emotions we cannot duplicate. This missive is for you, and for you only, or it ranks with a business communication. It is minted thought, invested, put out at loan for a time, bringing back interest to stimulate new speculations. There are no superfluous words, for the master strikes a clean sharp blow, forging his mood all of a single piece, welding your whim to his, and, fusing his sentences, there glows a spirit, a quality of style that bears no affectation; it must not, of all things, become literary, it must be direct, not showing signs of operose polish. It must be writ in the native dialect of the heart.If it be a risk to write frankly, it is one that gains interest in the same proportion; it makes the game the better sport. But after all, how many letters, so fearfully burned, so carefully hid away, but what, in after years, would seem innocuous? You are seduced by the moment, and your mood seems, and impulses seem, dangerous, incendiary. You grow perfervid in your indiscretion, not knowing that the whole world is stirred by the same recklessness, and that each one is profoundly bored by all save his own yearnings. Not many of our epistles will bear the test of print on their own merit, expurgate them as you will; you need only fear, rather, that the letter will grow dull even before it reaches its destination. The best of them, moreover, are written in sympathetic ink, and unless your correspondent has the proper reagent at hand, the sheets will be empty or incomprehensible even to him. Answer speedily as you may, too, it will be hard to overtake your correspondent's mood; he has overburdened his mind, precipitated the solution, and is off to another experiment by the time his stamp is affixed. But you must do your best in return; reflect enough of his ray to show him he has shot straight, and then flash your own colour back.There are virtues of omission and commission. It is not enough to answer questions; one must not add the active annoyance of apology to the passive offense of neglect. One must not hint at things untellable; one must give the crisp satisfaction of confidences wholly shared. Who has not received that dash of feminine inconsequence in the sentence, "I have just written you two long letters, and have torn them both up"? What letter could make up for such an exasperation? Your master letter-writer does not fear to stop when he is done, either, and a blank page at the end of the folio does not threaten his conscience.If one has not the commonplace view of things, and escapes the obvious, it matters little whether one uses the telescope or the microscope. One may deal with the abstract or concrete, discuss philosophy and systems, or gild homely little common things till they shine and twinkle with joy. Indeed, the perfect letter-writer must do both, and change from the intensely subjective to the intensely objective point of view. He must, as it were, look you in the eye and hold you by the hand. Two masters whose letters have recently been printed may illustrate these two different phases of expression, though each could do both as well. And this first, from Browning's love letters, describes what the perfect letter should be:"I persisted in not reading my letter in the presence of my friend.... I kept the letter in my hand, and only read it with those sapient ends of the fingers which the mesmerists make so much ado about, and which really did seem to touch a little of what was inside. Notall, however, happily for me! or my friend would have seen in my eyes whattheydid not see."To this, the twittering, delightful familiarities of Stevenson:"Two Sundays ago the sad word was brought that the sow was out again; this time she had brought another in her flight. Moors and I and Fanny were strolling up to the garden, and there by the waterside we saw the black sow looking guilty. It seemed to me beyond words; but Fanny'scri du coeurwas delicious. 'G-r-r!' she cried; 'nobody loves you!'"It was the same art in big and little, for each stripped off pretense and boldly revealed his moment's personality.And yet, and yet, a letter does not depend upon any artistic quality or glib facility with words, for its interest. The one test of a letter is that it must bring the writer close to your side. You must fasten your mood on me, so that I shall be you for hours afterward. It sounds easy enough, but it is the most difficult thing in the world, to be one's self. "I long for you, I long for you so much that I thank God upon my knees that you are not here!" There, now, is a letter that promises well, but I dare not quote more of it, for the subject must be seen from another side.The Caste of the ArticulateFair or unfair though it be, I have come to accept a letter as the final test of the personality of a new acquaintance. Not of his or her intellect or moral worth, perhaps, but the register of that rare power which dominates all attributes--that peculiar aroma, flavour,timbre, or colour which makes some of our friends eternally exceptional. "Who dares classify him and label him, sins against the Holy Ghost; I, for one, think I know him only inasmuch as I refuse to sum him up. I cannot find his name in the dictionary; I cannot make a map of him; I cannot write his epitaph." So writes Sonia of a friend with such a personality, and you will see by this that Sonia herself is of the caste of the Articulate.We are influenced first by sight, then by sound, and, lastly, by the written word. "She spoke, and lo! her loveliness methought she damaged with her tongue!" is the description of many a woman who appeals to the eye alone. And in something the same way many who fascinate us with their glamour while face to face, shock us by the dreary commonplaceness of their letters.It would seem that an interesting person must inevitably write an interesting letter,--indeed, that should be a part of the definition of the term interesting. But many decent folk are gagged with constraint and self-consciousness, and never seem to get free."I wonder," says Little Sister, "whether these wordless folk may not, after all, really feel much more deeply than we who write?" That is a troublesome question, and in its very nature unanswerable, since the witnesses are dumb. No doubt they feel more simply and unquestioningly, for as soon as a thing is once said its opposite and contradictory side, as true and as necessary, reacts upon us. But it seems to me that expression does not so much depend upon any spiritual insight, or even upon especial training, as it does upon the capacity for being one's self frankly and simply. That is the only thing necessary to make the humblest person interesting, and yet nothing is so difficult as to be one's self in this wild, whirling world.Expression is but another name for revelation. Unless one is willing to expose one's self like Lady Godiva, or protected only by such beauty and sincerity as hers, one can go but a little way in the direction of individuality. We must sacrifice ourselves at every turn, show good and bad alike, and laugh at ourselves too. "Would that mine enemy might write a book!" is no insignificant curse, and yet there are tepid, colourless authors who might hazard it with safety; no one would ever discover the element of personality."After our quarrel I felt as if I had a pebble in my shoe all day," Little Sister once wrote me. Let that be an example of the articulate manner, for by such vivid and homely metaphors she strews her pages. Did she reserve such phrases for her written words, I would feel bound to claim for letter-writing the distinction of being an art of itself, unrelated to any other faculty; but no, she talks in the same way--she is herself every moment. "My temper is violent and sudden, but it soon evaporates," she tells me; "it is like milk spilt on a hot stove."The inspiration which impels one so to illustrate an abstract statement with a concrete example, illuminating and convincing, is a spark of the divine fire of personality. This is thecruxof the articulate caste. An ounce of illustration is worth a pound of proof. Rob poetry of metaphor and it would be but prose; a simile, in verse, is usually merely ornament. The true purpose of tropes, however, is more virile and sustaining; they should reinforce logic, not decorate it. See how agilely Perilla can compress the whole history of a flirtation into six lines, defying the old saying that "there is nothing so difficult to relight as a dead love."I thought I saw a stiffened formA-lying in its shroud;I looked again and saw it wasThe love we once avowed."They told me you were dead!" I cried.The corpse sat up and bowed!When one has a few such acquaintances as these, books are superfluous. Who would read a dead romance when one can have it warm and living, vibrant, human, coming like instalments of a serial story, a perpetual revelation of character! Many pride themselves upon their proficiency in matter and many in manner,--there are those, even, who boast of mere quantity, but your professional writer is usually cool and calm, if not affected and pretentious. A letter, though, should be impregnate with living fire--it should boil. It is a treat of exceptional human nature. If the sentences be not spontaneous and unstudied the pleasure is lost. One may write fiery nonsense, but one must mean it at the time. One's mind must, as Sonia says, be hospitable, keep open house, and have the knack of making one's friends at home, to throb with one's own delights and despairs. One must give every mood open-handed, and mention nothing one may not say outright with gusto. But it is not everyone who can "bathe in rich, young feeling, and steep at day-dawning in green bedewed grasses" like my little Sonia. If I were dead she could still strike sparks out of me with her letters."Oh, if you could only see my new hat! I've been sitting in fetish worship half the evening, and I'll never dare tell how much I paid for it. You never need be good-looking under such a hat as that, for no one will ever see you!" Does not this quotation bring Little Sister very near to you, and make her very human and real? Ah, Little Sister is not afraid to be herself! She knows that she can do nothing better. "It's a terrible handy thing to have a smashing adjective in your pocket," she confesses. Little Sister has a good aim, too; she always hits my heart. And yet she acknowledges that "there are days when letters are blankly impossible."Such friends write the kind of letters that one keeps always, the kind that can be re-read without skipping. It is their own talk, their own lives, their own selves put up like fruit preserves of various flavours, moods and colours, warranted not to turn or spoil.And as for the gagged, wordless folk, it is my opinion that too much sensibility has been accredited to them. To any rich exotic nature expression must come as a demand not to be refused. It is feeling bubbling over into words. Other souls are compressed and silent; they have the possibilities of the bud--something warm and inspiring may at any time make them expand and free them from the constraint--but there is not much perfume until the flower blooms.
The Use of Fools
What a dull world it would be if everyone were modest, discreet and loyal to that conformity which is called good taste! if, in short, there were no fools to keep us amused. What would divert us from the deadly routine of seriousness? What toy scandal would we have to discuss at dinner? What would leaven this workaday world of common-places, if everyone were gifted with common sense? Is it not, when you stop to think of it, a bit inconsiderate to discountenance buffoonery and to resent innocently interesting impropriety? Should we not rather encourage eccentricity with what flattering hypocrisies we may, so that we shall never be at a loss for things to smile at and talk about?
A fair sprinkling of fools in the world is as enlivening as a pinch of salt in a loaf of bread. They give a relish to life, and flavour with a brisk spicery of nonsense what would otherwise be oppressively flat. Civilized existence, if it were always cooked up and served to us by Mrs. Grundy herself, would be unpalatable enough; but luckily her infallible recipes are not always carried out, and a few plums and cloves get into her pudding.
We may not care to play the part of public jesters ourselves, but the least we can do is to be grateful to those who are willing to become absurd for our benefit. Patronize them daintily, therefore, lest they backslide into propriety; remember that there is such a thing as enjoyment without ridicule. To make fun of a person to his face is a brutal way of amusing one's self; be delicate and cunning, and keep your laugh in your sleeve, lest you frighten away your game.
But there will doubtless always be enough who are willing to play the guy, whether we encourage or condemn. The fool is a persistent factor in society, and yet the common misconception of his status and economic function is silly and unfair. With the prig and the crank, the fool has been reviled from time immemorial, and persecuted out of all reason. He is protected by no legislation; your fool is always in season, and is the target for universal contempt. Instead of this perpetual fusillade of wits, there should be a "close season" for fools to allow them to propagate and grow fearless, after which we could make game of them in safety of a full supply. Since he is, in a way, the lubricator of the wheels of life, a coiner of smiles, he should be carefully bred to give the greatest possible amount of diversion. He should be trained like an actor that his best points may be brought out; he should be paid a salary or kept in livery to amuse the public, with no need or excuse for sobriety.
But, until the fool is properly appreciated and his place assured, we must put up with the amateurs that haunt the street and drawing-room. It is too much to hope for the sight of a zany every time we go out doors, but, when we do encounter one, what a ray of sunshine gleams athwart our strict fashions--poor sober dun slaves to style and custom! If we chance upon a woman who dares perpetrate her own radical theories of dress, who combines pink with red, or commits a gay indiscretion in millinery, how superbly she is distinguished, for the moment, from the ruck and swarm of victims to good taste! She is at once an event and a portent. The afternoon is quaintly illuminated with a phenomenon, and we scan with new interest and expectation the dull and sombre throng.
How small a deviation from the mode, indeed, is necessary to provoke a revivifying smile! Every such unconscious laughing-stock is a true benefactor, ministering to our sense of superiority. Were we never to see the freaks, we would not know how glorious is our own uncompromising regularity. Truly, if we have sufficient conceit, every one in the world, in a way of thinking, may be considered foolish relatively to our own criterion. "All the world is queer except thee and me," said the Quaker, "and even thee is a little queer!"
Such praise of fools may seem extravagant or illogical, but if it is so, it must be not because the fool is not helpful and stimulating in society, but because, after all, he is not so easily identified as one might suppose. Celestine tells me she never calls a man a fool, but instead asks him why he does so,--and in this way she often learns something. That is the most disagreeable trait of fools; often, upon investigation, what appears to be genuine nonsense is but the consistent carrying out of a clever and original idea, whose novelty alone excites amusement. The fool thus cheats us of our due enjoyment by being in the right. It seems dishonest of a fool to instruct; it is beside the mark, and outside his proper sphere, and yet even Confucius is said to have learned politeness from the impolite. To see one's own faults and weaknesses caricatured spoils the laugh that should testify to the folly.
We cannot be sure, either, that the ass who amuses us by his eccentric absurdities may not eventually cheat us of the final victory by proving to be but the vanguard of a new custom to which we or our children must, perforce, in time succumb, and fall into line with him far behind, only then to count our present attitude foolish and old-fashioned. Let us therefore laugh while we may, for your fool is but a chameleon who refuses to change colour. What today is arrant silliness may tomorrow be good horse-sense, wherefore it is wise to watch fools carefully when you find them, lest the sport spoil overnight, and you yourself become ridiculous, while the fool takes your place as the amused philosopher.
The word "fad," they say, was derived from the initial letters of the phrase "for a day." So we, the followers of the latest mode and mood, are, it would seem, the true ephemera, and the fools who defy the local custom are immortal. The fool is merely an anachronism. All inventors, most poets, and some statesmen have been honoured with the title, since we laugh chiefly at what we do not understand. There are more synonyms for "fool" than for any other word in the language!
So we must take our chances and smile at all and sundry, at men of one idea, hobby riders, cranks,poseurs, managing mammas and antic youths, blushing brides and fond parents, bounders, pedants, bigots and hens with their heads cut off. Laugh at them, the character parts in the comedy of life, for the show is amusing, but be not resentful if you find the privilege of laughing is a common right, and you in your turn become a victim. For, strange as it may seem, many of these actors may be so foolish as to think you the fool yourself!
Absolute Age
When I was a child, I invented a game so simple and so passive, that its enjoyment was permitted even on the rigorous Sundays of my youth. Upon a slate I ruled vertical columns, and at the head of these I wrote: "Men, women, boys, girls, babies, horses, dogs." Then, seated at a window commanding the street, I made note of the passers-by, and as fast as they appeared in sight I made a mark for each in the appropriate column. The compilation of this petty census was a pleasing pastime, and, moreover, it seemed to me that my categories were obviously complete. There were, in my world, but men and women, boys, girls and babies--what else, indeed?
But this primary classification of sex and years did not satisfy me long, and I discovered that my system must be amended if I would segregate--mentally now--the various types I encountered. There were, for instance, good persons and bad ones, men educated and ignorant, rich and poor, and I superimposed upon my first list one after another of these modifying conditions. But with a larger view of life these crude distinctions overlapped and became confused, and I saw that the whole system was but a rude makeshift.
Yet until I could pigeon-hole a new acquaintance in my own mind and put him with others of his kind I was never quite satisfied. Up to a certain stage in development, what we are most struck with is the difference between persons, but after the first intellectual climacteric we begin to see resemblances, invisible before, that knit men of different aspect together; and, that game of synthesis once begun, we must play it till we die. Every new acquaintance is an element of our experience--a new fact refuting or corroborating our theory of life, and, though we often may put the case into a separate compartment and label the specimen "unique," before long we shall probably have to reconsider the whole collection and devise a new system of arrangement for the complex characteristics of human nature.
But what analysis can we adopt which shall prove universally satisfactory? If we rank men according to mental, moral or spiritual attributes, one quality is sure to contradict or affect the other, and it is hard to decide which trait is paramount. Friendship is dependent upon none of these things, and yet in our affections we recognize, almost unconsciously, grades and qualities of attraction and kinship. Of a bunch of letters at our breakfast plate, we are sure to open a special one first or last, as the expectation of pleasure may decide. We accept this nearness, this intimate relationship, without reasoning; it is manifested in the first flash of recognition of the handwriting, at sight of a photograph, at the sound of a voice or a name. Some are indubitably of our own clan, and others, however their charm, or a temporary passion, may blind us for a time, are foreigners, and speak another language of the emotions. There are invisible groups of souls, mysteriously related, and the tie is indissoluble.
So I have come to adopt as the final classification what, for want of a better term, I must call Absolute Age--age or condition, that is, not relative, not dependent upon the year of one's birth. No one, surely, has failed to observe children who seem to be older than their parents in possibility of development. One knows that in a few years this child will have caught up to and passed his father or mother in soundness of judgment, in a sense of the relative importance of things, in the power to distinguish sham, convention and prejudice from things of vital import. This child is older in point of Absolute Age. When his soul has served its juvenile apprenticeship in the world of the senses he shall understand truths his parents never knew.
This capacity for comprehending life does not seem to be dependent upon actual definite experience with the world. The villager may have this hidden wisdom as clearly as the man who has seen and done, who has fought, loved and travelled far and well. The mystics hold that we have all lived before, and that some have profited by their experiences in former lives and have attained a fairer conception of the very truth. But, though this illustrates what is meant by the term Absolute Age, it is by no means necessary to accept such an explanation of the effects we perceive. It is enough that we can definitely classify our friends by their emotions and desires, and by their point of view on life. In other words, some are philosophers and some are not. And even the philosophers are of varying sects. Some have a keen, childlike enthusiasm for the more obvious forms of excitement, for all that is new and strange and marvellous, while others are incapable of being shocked, surprised or embarrassed--they have poise, and prefer the part of observer to that of actor in the game of life.
And yet, too, there is a simplicity which comes from a greater Absolute Age, a relish for real things that persists with enthusiasm. It is by this simplicity one may distinguish the cult from those that are merelyblaséor worldly wise. The joy in the taste of the fresh apple under the tongue, or in the abandon of the child at play, in the strength of youth and the grace of women,--this is a joy that does not fade; no, not even for those who would not trouble to go to the window if the king rode by! As a man can learn much by travel without losing his capacity for enjoying his native town, so one can enjoy life intellectually to the utmost without ever losing one's grasp on one's self, without being intoxicated by excitement or blinded by egoism, and yet feel still the clean, sane joys of youth to the last.
We have come to our Absolute Age by different paths. If we are of the same status, you and I, you may have learned one lesson and I another, yet the sum of our experience is the same. We are akin spiritually, although we have not had the same process of development. You, perhaps, have fought down hate and I have conquered dishonesty, but we are calmer and wiser, we think, than those whom we smile at quietly when we view their eagerness for things that no longer concern us. We recognize, too, that there are others to whose attainments our own powers are infantile. But in either case the superiority is neither mental nor moral nor spiritual--it is that mysterious inherent quality we call "caste."
The Manual Blessing
Surely if there is one sharp, active sensation that, in this changeful life of ours, we never tire of, never outgrow, it is in the satisfaction of creative manual work. There is a conservation of pleasure as there is a conservation of energy, and our taste is being continually transmuted and evolved. One by one we outlive the joys of youth, the delights of physical exercise, the zest of travel, the beatitude of emotion, the singing raptures of love, passing from each to a more mature appeal, a more refined appetite, a subtler demand of the intellect or of the spirit. The familiar games lose their savour, the dance gives way to the drama, travel to the calmer investigation of homely miracles. We tire of seeing and begin to read, feasting peacefully at the banquet of the arts that other men have spread. This is, for many of us, what age means--a giving up of active for passive pleasures when the old games lose their charm.
But the joy of creation does not fade, for in that lies our divinity and our claim to eternity. Each new product arouses the same thrill, the same spiritual excitement, the same pride of victory, and yet, strangely enough, though we think we work only for the final notch of accomplishment, it is not the completion but the construction that holds us entranced. Not the last stroke, but every stroke brings victory! It is like the climbing of a mountain. Do we endure the toil merely for the sake of the view at the summit? No, but for the primitive passion of conflict, the inch-by-inch fight against odds, the heaping of endeavour on endeavour, the continual measuring of what has been done with what remains to do. The finishing climax is but the exclamation point at the end of the sentence--most of the sensation has been used up before we come to the full stop, and that point serves but to sum up our emotion in a visible emblem of success.
Many of us believe we are debarred from the exercise of this divine birthright, the joy of creation. We have neither talent nor genius--not even that variety which consists in the ability to take infinite pains. Are we not mistaken in this? I think we may each have our share of the immortal stimulus.
To understand this, we must go back and back in the history of the race, and there we shall find that this satisfaction, this sane and virile delight in construction, was possible to the meanest member of the tribe. Its enjoyment came chiefly in the exercise of a laborious persistency in little things. The combination or addition of the simplest elements achieved a positive pleasurable result. The neolithic man chipped and chipped at his flint until the arrow-head was perfected, and his joy, had he been able to analyze it, was not so much in the last stroke as in every stroke. Not so much that he had himself with his own hands made something, as that he had been making something of use and beauty, and the possibility of that joy abiding with him as long as he lived. The makers of ancient pottery repeated the same shapes and designs, or, if their fancy soared, dared new inventions, but the satisfaction was in the doing. The carvers and joiners of the Middle Ages worked as amateurs in cottage and hovel, and in their work lay their content; no tyranny could wrest from them this well-spring of pleasure. Old age could but weaken the hand; I doubt if it could tame the immemorial joy of creation.
We cannot all be professional mechanics, for the division of labour has cast our lot more and more with the workers in intellectual pursuits. But we might make handicraft an avocation, if not a vocation, and that regimen would help our digestion, perhaps, more than pepsin or a course of the German baths. Were I a physician I should often recommend the craft cure--a panacea for dyspepsia, ennui and nostalgia.
Here is my modern health resort, my sanitorium for these most desperate of diseases; a little hamlet of shops and tents on the foothills of the Coast Range in California, where as you work you can look across a green valley to the blue Pacific. Here in this new land nature calls fondly to your soul, and you may turn to the primitive delights of living and taste the tang of the dawn of civilization, fresh and wholesome as a wild berry.
Here, squatting on the bare sun-parched ground, with an Indian blanket over his shoulders, is a corpulent banker with a flint hammer battering a water-worn boulder. Thus, less than a hundred years ago, the Temecula Indians hollowed out their stone mortars on this very mesa. Thus they spent happy days, slept like bears, and were up with the birds, each morn a day younger than yesterday. In this lodge of deerskins, where the ground is spread with yellow poppies, sits an ex-secretary of legation, who has known everything, seen everything, done everything but this--to cut with a knife of shell strange patterns upon a circular horn gorget. Finished, his wife might wear it with pride at the Court of St. James, yet it is but the reproduction of a prehistoric ornament, its figures smeared with ochre, cobalt and vermilion, and inlaid with lumps of virgin copper by the mound-builders of the Mississippi Valley. In this open shelter of bamboo, a trysting-place for meadow-larks and song-sparrows, lies stretched upon the ground an East India warehouseman, all his gout and lumbago forgotten in the rapturous delight of printing a pattern of checquered stripes with a carved wooden block upon a sheet of tapa which he himself--unaided, mind you--has pounded from the fibrous bark of the paper mulberry. His strenuous daughter, once world-worn and frozen, has left Nietsche, Brahms, and the cult of the symbolists, to sit cross-legged and weave the woolly zigzags of a Navajo blanket. It is the first thing she has made with her ten fingers since she baked mud pies in the sun! Had she a scrap of mirror in her bungalow she could now face it without mortification. An open-air hand-loom is good for the complexion.
But you need not journey to California. Rather make a pilgrimage to your own south attic. If you do but construct cardboard model houses with isinglass windows in your breakfast-room, you will perhaps find that more diverting than collecting cameos or first editions. If you can only compile a concordance toAlice in Wonderlandyou may achieve a hygienic and rejuvenative distraction. Can you cut, stamp, gild, paint, lacquer and emboss a leather belt? Can you hammer jewelry out of soft virgin silver? No? But you could, though, if you tried! Can you forget the impositions of convention in the rapt glow of pride in sawing and nailing together a wooden box? No matter how small it might be, how leaky of joint or loose of cover, it would hold all your worries!
The Deserted Island
A friend of mine is curiously hampered by a limitation precluding him from association with any one conversant with the details of the manufacture of cold-drawn wire. To show that this self-imposed abstinence may indicate a most charming devotion to an ideal, rarely shown by the commonplace, is the object of this thesis, and that, too, despite the fact that an indiscriminating extension of the same principle would lead the radical to eschew the society of most of his acquaintances, as well as bar out the whole domain of didactic literature.
When the day is done, and that entrancing hour is come for which some spend many of their waking hours in anticipation, to those blessed with fancy, the curtain of the dark arises, and within the theatre of the Night are played strange comedies. To a select performance I invite all uninitiated who have never enjoyed the drama of the Deserted Island--the perfect and satisfactory employment for the minutes that elapse after retiring and before the anchor is weighed and the voyage begun upon the Sea of Dreams.
There are undoubtedly more than I am aware of who are happy enough to maintain deserted islands of their own--many more, perhaps, than would confess to the possession. To some the history may be well under way; they have long since discovered their island, and many improvements have already been successfully completed. Others, more adventurous, handicapped by stricter limitations and more meagre outfit, are still struggling with the primal demands of food and shelter. But to those whose imaginations have never put so far out to sea, and would welcome this modest diversion, I advise an expedition of discovery and exploration this very night. You have but to go to bed, close your eyes, and after a few preliminaries you are there!
Authorities differ as to the allowable equipment for the occupancy of the sequestered territory. I myself hold that it is manifestly unfair to be provided with tools of any kind; to have a knife, now, I would call cheating. Surely the only legitimate beginning is to be vomited upon the beach stark naked from the sea, after some fearsome shipwreck in mid-ocean. Then, after years of occupancy, a man might taste the pride of his own resources, unfettered by any legacy inherited from civilization. Settle this point as you may, when the conditions of the game are once understood, the whole history of Science is to be re-enacted.
I have a friend who arrived upon the scene in an open boat containing a keg of water, a crowbar, a pruning-knife, a red silk handkerchief and a woman's petticoat; and with these promiscuous accessories has, in the course of years, transformed the place, which now boasts a stone castle, entirely inhabitable. His island is about two miles long and a half-mile wide--much too narrow for comfort, I assert; the proportions should be about five miles by three, with one dominant hill from which the whole territory may be surveyed.
But the owner of the other island--he of the cold-drawn wire--boldly asserts his right to a half-dozen labourers, presumably natives, and with this force at his disposal he has done wonders with his fief. Glass has been manufactured, fabrics woven, ore smelted and fine roads constructed, so that there now remains nothing to be desired but bicycles upon which he and his slaves may traverse the highways. But in vain his unskilled assistants look to him for advice; rack his wits as he may, he can devise no adequate system of making cold-drawn wire, and he is beginning to lose caste with his followers.
Now at first sight one might think it necessary for him only to consult an encyclopedia, or to visit on iron mill, yet this course is strictly barred out by the rules of the game, which compels one to use only such information as comes naturally to hand--for one is likely to be cast ashore upon a desert island at any moment, and it is then too late for the research and education that has been before neglected. With any ingenious fellow who has his own amateur ideas on the subject, one may, of course, talk freely; for he may represent one of the more intelligent of the natives; but all they who really know whereof they speak are to be avoided. So the problem of the cold-drawn wire is still unsolved.
I know of an artist, who, free on this enchanted spot, has turned his energies to those diverting pursuits for which his studio leaves no time, and he builds gigantic rock mosaics on the cliffs, selecting from the many coloured boulders on the beach. Luxuries are his only necessities even in his daily life, and the enormity of his trifling on this holiday playground is a thing to wonder at. His art, so used to a censorship of Nature, in his professional mimicries, here goes boldly forth and so mends, prunes and patches the aspect of his island, that the place is now, he says, absolutely perfect; a consummation not altogether discreditable to a nude, near-sighted man, whose eye-glasses were washed off before he arrived on the spot!
But, taking the situation seriously, what will he be in the years to come? By what gradations shall the lonely artist sink to low and lower levels, abandoned by the stimulus of the outer world, the need for advance, and the struggle for recognition? How soon would he lose the desire to render, in the medium at hand, the lovely forms of nature about him, the subtle tones of the earth and air, lapsing by stages into ever cruder forms of expression, till the whole history of his development had been reversed, and he became content with rude squares, triangles and circles for his patterns, the barbarous effigies of the human form, and the primary colours that satisfy the savage?
And the sense of humour, too--that universal solvent of all our miseries, the oil that lubricates the cumbrous machinery of life--how soon would that go? Is it not, in the last analysis, dependent upon the by-play of the social relationship of men? The inconsistencies of our fellows must be first noticed before we can get the reflected light of ridicule upon our own grotesque actions. It would soon be lost in such a sojourn, our impatience would have no foil, we would take ourselves more and more seriously until the end came upon that day when we had at last forgotten how to laugh.
But, after all, as this text of the hypothetical deserted island is better fitted for a romance than for a sermon, we may leave such forebodings and trace out only the rising curve of improvement. And so, too, interesting as it might be to experience, we may leave aside the moral speculations incident to the discussion of the case where the place becomes occupied by a man and a woman. The possibilities of a shipwreck in company are not for such a brief memoir as this; they offer consideration too intimate for these discreet pages, and are best left to the exclusion of a private audience.
But choose your company carefully, I entreat you, if you are not soberly minded to be shipwrecked alone. I know of persons with whom, were I cast ashore, there could be no end not tragic, albeit these are highly respectable and praiseworthy individuals, who never did any harm except in that trick of manner by which we recognize the bore. I am often inclined to test the merits of others by mentally permitting them a short visit to my island, but the hazard is too great, and the thought of the possibility of their footprints upon the sand unnerves me.
Yet, to a distant islet of this fantastic archipelago I seriously consider consigning certain impossible acquaintances, absolutely intolerable personalities, whose probable fate, forced to endure each other's society, interests me beyond words. Upon one side of this far-away retreat rises a steep cliff overhanging the sea, and here I behold in imagination one after another of these marooned unfortunates pushed headlong over the slope, as, unable to support the society of his companions, each has in turn, by some stratagem, lured his hated accomplice in misery to the summit of the bluff.
But of one island I have not yet spoken. I can get no description of it save that it lies sleeping in the summer sun, washed by the sapphire tides and fanned by the cool south winds, its olive slopes rising softly from the beach, marked by a grove of fruit trees at the crest. More the owner will not tell, for Celestine says there is no use for a deserted island after it is charted; but by these signs I shall know the place, and my trees are felled and my sails are plaited that shall yet bear me over towards the southwest!
The Sense of Humour
Much as one may look through the small end of a telescope and find an unique and intrinsic charm in the spectacle there offered, so to certain eyes the whole visible universe is humorous. From the apparition of this dignified little ball, rolling soberly through the starry field of the firmament, to the unwarrantable gravity of a neighbour's straw hat, macrocosm and microcosm may minister to the merriment of man. There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in the philosophy of the Realist.
It is one attribute of a man of parts that he shall have, in his mental vision, what corresponds to the "accommodation" of his eye, a flexibility of observation that enables him to adapt his mind to the focus of humour. Myopia and strabismus we know; the dullard can point their analogies in the mental optics, but for this other misunderstood function we have no name; and yet, failing that, we have dignified it as a sense apart--the sense of humour. But no form of lens has been discovered to correct its aberration and transfer the message in pleasurable terms to the lagging brain; and, unless we attempt hypnotism as a last resort, the prosiest must go purblind for life, missing all but the baldest jokes of existence.
Is it not significant, that from the ancient terminology of leechcraft, this word "humour" has survived in modern medicine, to be applied only to the vitreous fluid of the eye? For humour is the medium through which all the phenomena of human intercourse may be witnessed, and for those normal minds that possess it, tints this world with a rare colour--like that of the mysterious ultra-violet rays of the spectrum. And indeed, to push further into modern science and speculation, perhaps this ray does not undulate, but shoots forth undeviating as Truth itself, like that from the Cathode Pole. Or, does it not strike our mental retina from some secret Fourth Direction?
But this is mere verbiage; similes, flattering to the elect, but unconvincing to the uninitiate. Yet, as I am resolved that humour is essentially a point of view, I would have a try at proselytizing for the doctrine. For here is a religion ready made to my hand; I have but to raise my voice and become its prophet. The seeds are all sown, the Fraternity broods, hidden in hidden Chapters, guarding the Grand Hailing Sign; who knows but that a spark might not touch off this seasoned fuel, and the flame carry everything before it. O my readers, I give you the Philosophy of Mirth, the Cult of Laughter! Yet it is an esoteric faith, mind you, unattainable by the multitude. Not of the "Te-he! Papa's dead!" school, nor of the giggling punster's are its devotees. No comic weekly shall be its organ. It must be hymned not by the hoarse guffaw, but in the quiet inward smile--and for its ritual, I submit the invisible humour of the Commonplace. O Paradox!
Brethren, from this flimsy pulpit, I assert with sincerity, that everything on two legs (and most on four) sleeping or awake, bow-legged or knock-kneed, has its humorous aspect. The curtain never falls on the diversion. You will tell me, no doubt, that here I ride too hard. Adam, you will say with reason, set aside in the beginning certain animals for our perpetual amusement--to wit: the goose, the monkey, the ostrich, the kangaroo, and, as a sublime afterthought--symbol of the Eternal Feminine--the hen. Civilization, you may admit, has added to these the goat--but, save in rare moods of insanity, as when the puppy pursues the mad orbit of his tail, the sight of only the aforesaid beasts makes for risibility. The cat, you will say, is never ridiculous. But here again we must hark back to the major premise, unrecognized though it be by the science of Æsthetic, that humour lies in the point of view. If I could prove it by mere iteration it would go without further saying that it is essentially subjective rather than objective. Surely there is no humour in insensate nature, as there is little enough in Art and Music. The bees, the trees, the fountains and the mountains take themselves seriously enough, and though, according to the minor poets, the fields and the brooks are at times moved to laughter, it is from a vegetable, pointless joy of life. Through the human wit alone, and that too rarely, the rays of thought are refracted in the angle of mirth, and split into whimsical rays of complementary sensations and contrasts.
When we lay off the mantle of seriousness and relax the flexors and extensors, if we are well fed, healthy, and of a peaceful mood and capable of indolence, men and women, and even we ourselves, should become to our view players on the stage of life. And what then is comedy but tragedy seen backward or downside-up? It is the negative or corollary of what is vital in this great game of life. The custom has been, however, to give it a place apart and unrelated to the higher unities, as the newspapers assign their witticisms to isolated columns. Rather is it the subtle polarity induced by graver thought, the reading between the lines of the page. And as, to the vigorous intellect, rest does not come through inactivity so much as by a change of occupation, the happy humourist is refreshed by the solace of impersonality.
For, to the initiate, his own inconsistencies and indiscretions are no less diverting than those of his associates, and should frequently give rise to emotions that impel him to hurry into a corner and scream aloud with mirth. It is ever the situation that is absurd, and never the victim; and in this lies the secret of his ability to appreciate a farce of which he himself is the hero. He must disincarnate himself as the whim blows, and hang in the air, a god for the time, gazing with amusement at the play of his own ridiculous failures. In some such way, perhaps, do the curious turn over the patterned fabric, to discover, on the reverse, the threads and stitches that explain the construction of the design.
This faculty, then, gives one the stamp of caste by which one may know his brethren the world over, an Order of whose very existence many shall never be aware, till, in some after life, some grinning god conducts them to the verge of the heavens, and, leaning over a cloud, bids them behold the spectacle of this little planet swarming with its absurdly near-sighted denizens.
Ohé la Renaissance!for this is to be the Age of Humour. We travail for the blithe rebirth of joy into the world. The Decadence, with its morbid personalities and accursed analysis of exotic emotion, is over, please God; yet we may adopt its methods and refine the simplicity of primary impulse, thus increasing the whole sum of pleasure with the delicate nuances that amplify the waves of feeling. Hark, O my reader! Do you not hear them, rising like overtones and turning the melody into a divine harmony?
The Game of Correspondence
The receipt of a letter is no longer the event it was in the old stage-coach days; railways and the penny postage have robbed it of all excitement. One expects now one's little pile of white, blue and green envelopes beside one's plate at breakfast, along with one's toast and coffee, and one tastes its contents as one opens the matutinal egg. We have forgotten how to write interesting letters as we have forgotten how to fold and wafer a sheet of foolscap or sharpen a quill. Some of our missives are not even worth a cursory glance, many by no means deserve an answer, and most are speedily forgotten in the columns of the morning journal.
Yet, at times, on red-letter days, we find one amongst the number which demands epicurean perusal; it is not to be ripped open and devoured in haste, it insists on privacy and attention. This has a flavour which the salt of silence alone can bring out; a dash of interruption destroys its exquisite delicacy. More than this, it must be answered while it is still fresh and sparkling, after which, if it be of the true vintage, it can afford still another sip to inspire your postscript.
To your room then with this, and lock the door, or else save it for a more impregnable leisure. Open it daintily and entertain it with distinction and respect; efface any previous mood and hold yourself passive to its enchantment. It is no love message, and need depend upon no excited interest in the writer for its reception, for it has an intrinsic merit; it is the work of an artist; it is a fascinating move on the chess-board of the most alluring, most accessible game in the world.
Though the fire of such a letter need have neither the artificiality of flirtation nor the intensity of love, yet it must both light and warm the reader. It is not valuable for the news it brings, for if it be a work of art the tidings it bears are not so important as the telling of them. It must be sincere and alive, revealing and confessing, a letter more from the writer than to the reader, as if it were written in face of a mirror rather than before the photograph of the receiver; and yet the communication must be spelled in the cypher of your friendship, to which only you have the key. We have our separate languages, each with the other, and there are emotions we cannot duplicate. This missive is for you, and for you only, or it ranks with a business communication. It is minted thought, invested, put out at loan for a time, bringing back interest to stimulate new speculations. There are no superfluous words, for the master strikes a clean sharp blow, forging his mood all of a single piece, welding your whim to his, and, fusing his sentences, there glows a spirit, a quality of style that bears no affectation; it must not, of all things, become literary, it must be direct, not showing signs of operose polish. It must be writ in the native dialect of the heart.
If it be a risk to write frankly, it is one that gains interest in the same proportion; it makes the game the better sport. But after all, how many letters, so fearfully burned, so carefully hid away, but what, in after years, would seem innocuous? You are seduced by the moment, and your mood seems, and impulses seem, dangerous, incendiary. You grow perfervid in your indiscretion, not knowing that the whole world is stirred by the same recklessness, and that each one is profoundly bored by all save his own yearnings. Not many of our epistles will bear the test of print on their own merit, expurgate them as you will; you need only fear, rather, that the letter will grow dull even before it reaches its destination. The best of them, moreover, are written in sympathetic ink, and unless your correspondent has the proper reagent at hand, the sheets will be empty or incomprehensible even to him. Answer speedily as you may, too, it will be hard to overtake your correspondent's mood; he has overburdened his mind, precipitated the solution, and is off to another experiment by the time his stamp is affixed. But you must do your best in return; reflect enough of his ray to show him he has shot straight, and then flash your own colour back.
There are virtues of omission and commission. It is not enough to answer questions; one must not add the active annoyance of apology to the passive offense of neglect. One must not hint at things untellable; one must give the crisp satisfaction of confidences wholly shared. Who has not received that dash of feminine inconsequence in the sentence, "I have just written you two long letters, and have torn them both up"? What letter could make up for such an exasperation? Your master letter-writer does not fear to stop when he is done, either, and a blank page at the end of the folio does not threaten his conscience.
If one has not the commonplace view of things, and escapes the obvious, it matters little whether one uses the telescope or the microscope. One may deal with the abstract or concrete, discuss philosophy and systems, or gild homely little common things till they shine and twinkle with joy. Indeed, the perfect letter-writer must do both, and change from the intensely subjective to the intensely objective point of view. He must, as it were, look you in the eye and hold you by the hand. Two masters whose letters have recently been printed may illustrate these two different phases of expression, though each could do both as well. And this first, from Browning's love letters, describes what the perfect letter should be:
"I persisted in not reading my letter in the presence of my friend.... I kept the letter in my hand, and only read it with those sapient ends of the fingers which the mesmerists make so much ado about, and which really did seem to touch a little of what was inside. Notall, however, happily for me! or my friend would have seen in my eyes whattheydid not see."
"I persisted in not reading my letter in the presence of my friend.... I kept the letter in my hand, and only read it with those sapient ends of the fingers which the mesmerists make so much ado about, and which really did seem to touch a little of what was inside. Notall, however, happily for me! or my friend would have seen in my eyes whattheydid not see."
To this, the twittering, delightful familiarities of Stevenson:
"Two Sundays ago the sad word was brought that the sow was out again; this time she had brought another in her flight. Moors and I and Fanny were strolling up to the garden, and there by the waterside we saw the black sow looking guilty. It seemed to me beyond words; but Fanny'scri du coeurwas delicious. 'G-r-r!' she cried; 'nobody loves you!'"
"Two Sundays ago the sad word was brought that the sow was out again; this time she had brought another in her flight. Moors and I and Fanny were strolling up to the garden, and there by the waterside we saw the black sow looking guilty. It seemed to me beyond words; but Fanny'scri du coeurwas delicious. 'G-r-r!' she cried; 'nobody loves you!'"
It was the same art in big and little, for each stripped off pretense and boldly revealed his moment's personality.
And yet, and yet, a letter does not depend upon any artistic quality or glib facility with words, for its interest. The one test of a letter is that it must bring the writer close to your side. You must fasten your mood on me, so that I shall be you for hours afterward. It sounds easy enough, but it is the most difficult thing in the world, to be one's self. "I long for you, I long for you so much that I thank God upon my knees that you are not here!" There, now, is a letter that promises well, but I dare not quote more of it, for the subject must be seen from another side.
The Caste of the Articulate
Fair or unfair though it be, I have come to accept a letter as the final test of the personality of a new acquaintance. Not of his or her intellect or moral worth, perhaps, but the register of that rare power which dominates all attributes--that peculiar aroma, flavour,timbre, or colour which makes some of our friends eternally exceptional. "Who dares classify him and label him, sins against the Holy Ghost; I, for one, think I know him only inasmuch as I refuse to sum him up. I cannot find his name in the dictionary; I cannot make a map of him; I cannot write his epitaph." So writes Sonia of a friend with such a personality, and you will see by this that Sonia herself is of the caste of the Articulate.
We are influenced first by sight, then by sound, and, lastly, by the written word. "She spoke, and lo! her loveliness methought she damaged with her tongue!" is the description of many a woman who appeals to the eye alone. And in something the same way many who fascinate us with their glamour while face to face, shock us by the dreary commonplaceness of their letters.
It would seem that an interesting person must inevitably write an interesting letter,--indeed, that should be a part of the definition of the term interesting. But many decent folk are gagged with constraint and self-consciousness, and never seem to get free.
"I wonder," says Little Sister, "whether these wordless folk may not, after all, really feel much more deeply than we who write?" That is a troublesome question, and in its very nature unanswerable, since the witnesses are dumb. No doubt they feel more simply and unquestioningly, for as soon as a thing is once said its opposite and contradictory side, as true and as necessary, reacts upon us. But it seems to me that expression does not so much depend upon any spiritual insight, or even upon especial training, as it does upon the capacity for being one's self frankly and simply. That is the only thing necessary to make the humblest person interesting, and yet nothing is so difficult as to be one's self in this wild, whirling world.
Expression is but another name for revelation. Unless one is willing to expose one's self like Lady Godiva, or protected only by such beauty and sincerity as hers, one can go but a little way in the direction of individuality. We must sacrifice ourselves at every turn, show good and bad alike, and laugh at ourselves too. "Would that mine enemy might write a book!" is no insignificant curse, and yet there are tepid, colourless authors who might hazard it with safety; no one would ever discover the element of personality.
"After our quarrel I felt as if I had a pebble in my shoe all day," Little Sister once wrote me. Let that be an example of the articulate manner, for by such vivid and homely metaphors she strews her pages. Did she reserve such phrases for her written words, I would feel bound to claim for letter-writing the distinction of being an art of itself, unrelated to any other faculty; but no, she talks in the same way--she is herself every moment. "My temper is violent and sudden, but it soon evaporates," she tells me; "it is like milk spilt on a hot stove."
The inspiration which impels one so to illustrate an abstract statement with a concrete example, illuminating and convincing, is a spark of the divine fire of personality. This is thecruxof the articulate caste. An ounce of illustration is worth a pound of proof. Rob poetry of metaphor and it would be but prose; a simile, in verse, is usually merely ornament. The true purpose of tropes, however, is more virile and sustaining; they should reinforce logic, not decorate it. See how agilely Perilla can compress the whole history of a flirtation into six lines, defying the old saying that "there is nothing so difficult to relight as a dead love."
I thought I saw a stiffened formA-lying in its shroud;I looked again and saw it wasThe love we once avowed."They told me you were dead!" I cried.The corpse sat up and bowed!
I thought I saw a stiffened formA-lying in its shroud;I looked again and saw it wasThe love we once avowed."They told me you were dead!" I cried.The corpse sat up and bowed!
I thought I saw a stiffened form
A-lying in its shroud;
A-lying in its shroud;
I looked again and saw it was
The love we once avowed.
The love we once avowed.
"They told me you were dead!" I cried.
The corpse sat up and bowed!
The corpse sat up and bowed!
When one has a few such acquaintances as these, books are superfluous. Who would read a dead romance when one can have it warm and living, vibrant, human, coming like instalments of a serial story, a perpetual revelation of character! Many pride themselves upon their proficiency in matter and many in manner,--there are those, even, who boast of mere quantity, but your professional writer is usually cool and calm, if not affected and pretentious. A letter, though, should be impregnate with living fire--it should boil. It is a treat of exceptional human nature. If the sentences be not spontaneous and unstudied the pleasure is lost. One may write fiery nonsense, but one must mean it at the time. One's mind must, as Sonia says, be hospitable, keep open house, and have the knack of making one's friends at home, to throb with one's own delights and despairs. One must give every mood open-handed, and mention nothing one may not say outright with gusto. But it is not everyone who can "bathe in rich, young feeling, and steep at day-dawning in green bedewed grasses" like my little Sonia. If I were dead she could still strike sparks out of me with her letters.
"Oh, if you could only see my new hat! I've been sitting in fetish worship half the evening, and I'll never dare tell how much I paid for it. You never need be good-looking under such a hat as that, for no one will ever see you!" Does not this quotation bring Little Sister very near to you, and make her very human and real? Ah, Little Sister is not afraid to be herself! She knows that she can do nothing better. "It's a terrible handy thing to have a smashing adjective in your pocket," she confesses. Little Sister has a good aim, too; she always hits my heart. And yet she acknowledges that "there are days when letters are blankly impossible."
Such friends write the kind of letters that one keeps always, the kind that can be re-read without skipping. It is their own talk, their own lives, their own selves put up like fruit preserves of various flavours, moods and colours, warranted not to turn or spoil.
And as for the gagged, wordless folk, it is my opinion that too much sensibility has been accredited to them. To any rich exotic nature expression must come as a demand not to be refused. It is feeling bubbling over into words. Other souls are compressed and silent; they have the possibilities of the bud--something warm and inspiring may at any time make them expand and free them from the constraint--but there is not much perfume until the flower blooms.