Experience and the Calendar
Experience and the Calendar
“USELESS, quite useless, young man,” said the doctor, pursing his lips; and as he has a nice feeling for climax, he slapped the reins on Dobbin’s broad back and placidly drove away.
Beneath that flapping gray hat his wrinkled face was unusually severe. His eyes really seemed to flash resentment through his green spectacles. The doctor’s remark related to my manipulation of a new rose-sprayer which I had purchased this morning at the village hardware store, and was directing against the pests on my crimson ramblers when he paused to tell me that he had tried that identical device last year and found it worthless. As his shabby old phaeton rounded the corner, I turned the sprayer over to my young undergraduate friend Septimus, and hurried in to set down a few truths about the doctor.
He is, as you may already have guessed, the venerable Doctor Experience, of the well-known university that bears his name. He isa person of quality and distinction, and the most quoted of all the authorities on life and conduct. How empty the day would be in which we did not hear some one say, “Experience has taught me—” In the University of Experience the Doctor fills all the chairs; and all his utterances, one may say, areex cathedra.
He is as respectable for purposes of quotation as Thomas à Kempis or Benjamin Franklin. We really imagine—we who are alumni of the old doctor’s ivy-mantled knowledge-house, and who recall the austerity of his curriculum and the frugality of Sunday evening tea at his table—that his own courses were immensely profitable to us. We remember well how he warned us against yielding to the persuasions of the world, the flesh, and the devil, illustrating his points with anecdotes from his own long and honorable career. He used to weep over us, too, in a fashion somewhat dispiriting; but we loved him, and sometimes as we sit in the winter twilight thinking of the days that are no more, we recall him in a mood of affection and regret, and do not mind at all that cheerless motto in the seal of the university corporation, “Experientiadocet stultos,” to which he invariably calls attention after morning prayers.
“My young friends,” he says, “I hope and trust that my words may be the means of saving you from much of the heartache and sorrow of this world. When I was young—”
This phrase is the widely accepted signal for shuffling the feet and looking bored. We turn away from the benign doctor at his reading-desk, fumbling at that oft-repeated lecture which our fathers and grandfathers remember and quote,—we turn our gaze to the open windows and the sunlight. The philosophy of life is in process of making out there,—a new philosophy for every hour, with infinite spirit and color, and anon we hear bugles crying across the hills of our dreams. “When I was young!” If we were not the politest imaginable body of students,—we who take Doctor Experience’s course because it is (I blush at the confession) a “snap,”—we should all be out of the window and over the hills and far away.
The great weakness of Experience as a teacher lies in the fact that truth is so alterable. We have hardly realized how utterly the snowsand roses of yesteryear vanish before the amiable book agent points out to us the obsolete character of our most prized encyclopædia. All books should be purchased with a view to their utility in lifting the baby’s chin a proper distance above the breakfast table; for, quite likely, this will soon become their sole office in the household. Within a fifteen-minute walk of the window by which I write lives a man who rejects utterly the idea that the world is round, and he is by no means a fool. He is a far more interesting person, I dare say, than Copernicus or Galileo ever was; and his strawberries are the earliest and the best produced in our township. Truth, let us say, is a continuing matter, and hope springeth eternal. This is where I parted company with the revered doctor long ago. His inability to catch bass in the creek isn’t going to keep me at home to-morrow morning. For all I care, he may sit on his veranda and talk himself hoarse to his old friend, Professor Killjoy, whose gum shoes and ear-muffs are a feature of our village landscape.
When you and I, my brother, are called on to address the young, how blithely we congratulateour hearers upon being the inheritors of the wisdom of all the ages. This is one of the greatest of fallacies. The twentieth century dawned upon American States that were bored by the very thought of the Constitution, and willing to forget that venerable document at least long enough to experiment with the Initiative, the Referendum, and the Recall. What some Lord Chief Justice announced as sound law a hundred years ago means nothing to commonwealths that have risen since the motor-car began honking in the highway. On a starry night in the spring of 1912 a veteran sea-captain, with wireless warnings buttoned under his pea-jacket, sent the finest ship in the world smashing into an iceberg. All the safety devices known to railroading cannot prevent some engineer from occasionally trying the experiment of running two trains on a single track. With the full weight of the experience of a thousand years against him the teller begins to transfer the bank’s money to his own pocket, knowing well the hazard and the penalty.
We pretend to invoke dear old Experience as though he were a god, fondly imagining that anhonest impulse demands that we appeal to him as an arbiter. But when we have submitted our case and listened to his verdict, we express our thanks and go away and do exactly as we please. We all carry our troubles to the friends whose sympathy we know outweighs their wisdom. We want them to pat us on the back and tell us that we are doing exactly right. If by any chance they are bold enough to give us an honest judgment based on real convictions, we depart with a grievance, our confidence shaken. We lean upon our friends, to be sure; but we rely upon them to bail us out after the forts of folly have crashed about our ears and we pine in the donjon, rather than on their advice that might possibly have preserved us on the right side of the barricade. And I may note here, that of all the offices that man may undertake, that of the frank friend is the most thankless. The frank friend! It is he who told you yesterday that you were looking wretchedly ill. Doctor Experience had warnedhim; and he felt it to be his duty to stopyouin your headlong plunge. To-morrow he will drop in to tell you in gentle terms that your latest poem is—well,he hates to say it—but he fears it isn’t up to your old mark! The frank friend, you may remember, is Doctor Experience’s favorite pupil.
We are all trying to square wisdom with our own aims and errors. Professional men, whose business is the giving of advice, are fully aware of this. Death is the only arbiter who can enforce his own writs, and it is not for man to speak a final word on any matter.
I was brought up to have an immense respect—reverence, even—for law. It seemed to me in my youth to embody a tremendous philosophy. Here, I used to say, as I pondered opinion and precedent,—here is the very flower and fruit of the wisdom of the ages. I little dreamed that both sides of every case may be supported by authorities of equal dignity. Imagine my bewilderment when I found that a case which is likely to prove weak before one infallible judge may be shifted with little trouble to another, equally infallible, but with views known to be friendly to the cause in question. I sojourned for a time in a judicial circuit where there was considerable travelingto be done by the court and bar. The lawyer who was most enterprising in securing a sleeping-car stateroom wherein to play poker—discreetly and not too successfully—with the judge, was commonly supposed to have the best chance of winning his cases.
Our neighbors’ failures are really of no use to us. “No Admittance” and “Paint” are not accepted by the curious world as warnings, but as invitations.
“A sign once caught the casual eye,And it said, ‘Paint’;And every one who passed it by,Sinner or saint,Into the fresh green color mustMake it his bizA doubting finger-point to thrust,That he, accepting naught on trust,Might say, ‘It is, it is!’”
“A sign once caught the casual eye,And it said, ‘Paint’;And every one who passed it by,Sinner or saint,Into the fresh green color mustMake it his bizA doubting finger-point to thrust,That he, accepting naught on trust,Might say, ‘It is, it is!’”
“A sign once caught the casual eye,
And it said, ‘Paint’;
And every one who passed it by,
Sinner or saint,
Into the fresh green color must
Make it his biz
A doubting finger-point to thrust,
That he, accepting naught on trust,
Might say, ‘It is, it is!’”
Cynic, do I hear? The term is not one of opprobrium. A cynic is the alert and discerning man who declines to cut the cotton-filled pie or pick up the decoy purse on All Fools’ Day.
We are bound to test for ourselves the identical heating apparatus which the man next door cast away as rubbish last spring. We knowwhy its heat units were unsatisfactory to him,—it was because his chimneys were too small; and though our own are as like them as two peas we proceed to our own experiment with our eyes wide open. Mrs. B telephones to Mrs. A and asks touching the merits, habits, and previous condition of servitude of the cook Mrs. A discharged this morning. Mrs. A, who holds an honorary degree bestowed upon her by the good Doctor Experience, leans upon the telephone and explains with conscientious detail the deficiencies of Mary Ann. She does as she would be done by and does it thoroughly. But what is her astonishment to learn the next day that Mary Ann’s trunk has been transferred to Mrs. B’s third story; that Mary Ann’s impossible bread and deadly cake are upon Mrs. B’s table! Mrs. B, too, took a course of lectures under Doctor Experience, and she admires him greatly; but what do these facts avail her when guests are alighting at the door and Mary Ann is the only cook visible in the urban landscape? Moreover, Mrs. Aalways was(delectable colloquialism!) a hard mistress, and Mrs. B must, she feels, judge of these mattersfor herself. And so—so—say we all of us!
Men who have done post-graduate work in the good doctor’s school are no better fortified against error than the rest of us who may never have got beyond his kindergarten. The results might be different if it were not that Mistress Vanity by her arts and graces demoralizes the doctor’s students, whose eyes wander to the windows as she flits across the campus. Conservative bankers, sage lawyers, and wise legislators have been the frequent and easy prey of the gold-brick operator. The police announce a new crop of “suckers” every spring,—which seems to indicate that Mistress Vanity wields a greater influence than Doctor Experience. These words stare at me oddly in type; they are the symbols of a disagreeable truth,—and yet we may as well face it. The eternal ego will not bow to any dingy doctor whose lectures only illustrate his own inability to get on in the world.
The best skating is always on thin ice,—we like to feel it crack and yield under our feet; there is a deadly fascination in the thought ofthe twenty or forty feet of cold water beneath. Last year’s mortality list cuts (dare I do it?) no ice with us; we must make our own experiments, while the doctor screams himself hoarse from his bonfire on the bank. He has held many an inquest on this darkling shore of the river of time, and he will undoubtedly live to hold many another; but thus far we have not been the subjects; and when it comes to the mistakes of others we are all delighted to serve on the coroner’s jury.
It isn’t well for us to be saved from too many blunders; we need the discipline of failure. It is better to fail than never to try, and the man who can contemplate the graveyard of his own hopes without bitterness will not always be ignored by the gods of success.
Septimus had a narrow escape yesterday. He was reading “Tom Jones” in the college library, when the doctor stole close behind him and Septimus’s nervous system experienced a terrible shock. But it was the doctor’s opportunity. “Read biography, young man; biographies of the good and great are veritable textbooks in this school!” So you may observeSeptimus to-day sprawled under the noblest elm on the campus, with his eyes bulging out as he follows Napoleon on the retreat from Russia. He has firmly resolved to profit by the failure of “the darkly-gifted Corsican.” To-morrow evening, when he tries to hitch the doctor’s good old Dobbin to the chapel bell, and falls from the belfry into the arms of the village constable, he is far more tolerant of Napoleon’s mistakes. An interesting biography is no more valuable than a good novel. If life were an agreed state of facts and not a joyful experiment, then we might lean upon biography as final; but in this and in all matters, let us deal squarely with Youth. Boswell’s “Johnson” is only gossip raised to the highest power; the reading of it will make Septimus cheerfuler, but it will not keep him from wearing a dinner coat to a five o’clock tea or teach him how to earn more than four dollars a week.
We have brought existence to an ideal state when at every breakfast table we face a new world with no more use for yesterday than for the grounds of yesterday’s coffee. The wisdom behind us is a high wall which we cannot scale ifwe would. Its very height is tempting, but there is no rose-garden beyond it—only a bleak plain with the sea of time gnawing its dreary shores.
To be old and to know ten thousand things—there is something august and majestic in the thought; but to be young and ignorant, to see yesterday pass, a shining ripple on the flood of oblivion, and then to buckle down to the day’s business,—there’s a better thing than being old and wise! We are forever praising the unconscious ease of great literature; and that ease—typical of the life and time reflected—was a thing of the day, with no yesterdays’ dead weight dragging it down. Whitman’s charm for those of us who like him lies in the fact that he doesn’t invite us to a rummage sale of cast-off raiment, but offers fabrics that are fresh and in new patterns. We have all known that same impatience of the past that he voices so stridently. The world is as new to him as it was to Isaiah or Homer.
“When I heard the learned astronomer,When the proofs and figures were ranged in columns before me,When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;When I, sitting, heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room,How soon, unaccountably, I became tired and sick,Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to timeLook’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”
“When I heard the learned astronomer,When the proofs and figures were ranged in columns before me,When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;When I, sitting, heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room,How soon, unaccountably, I became tired and sick,Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to timeLook’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”
“When I heard the learned astronomer,
When the proofs and figures were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture room,
How soon, unaccountably, I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.”
The old doctor can name all the stars without a telescope, but he does not know that in joy they “perform their shining.” The real note in life is experiment and quest, and we are detached far more than we realize from what was and concerned with what is and may be.
There is a delightful comedy,—long popular in England and known in America, in which a Martian appears on earth to teach Dickens-like lessons of unselfishness to men. Since witnessing it, I have often indulged in speculations as to the sensations of a pilgrim who might wing his way from another star to this earth, losing in the transition all knowledge of his own past—and come freshly upon our world and its achievements, beholding man at his best and worst without any knowledge whatever of ourhistory or of the evolution through which we have become what we are. There you would have a critic who could view our world with fresh eyes. What we were yesterday would mean nothing to him, and what we are to-day he might judge honestly from a standpoint of utility or beauty. Not what was old or new, but what was good, would interest him—not whether our morals are better than those of our ancestors, but whether they are of any use at all. The croaking plaint of Not-What-It-Used-To-Be, the sanguine It-Will-Come-In-Time, would have no meaning for such a judge.
“And not only so, but we glory in tribulations also; knowing that tribulation worketh patience; and patience, experience; and experience, hope.”
The conjunction of these last words is happy. Verily in experience lies our hope. In learning what to do and what not to do, in stumbling, falling to rise again and faring ever upward and onward. Yes, in and through experience lies our hope, but not, O brother, a wisdom gained vicariously,—not yours for me nor mine foryou,—nor from enduring books, charm they never so wisely,—but every one of us, old and young, for himself.
Literature is rich in advice that is utterly worthless. Life’s “Book of Don’ts” is only read for the footnotes that explain why particular “don’ts” failed,—it has become in reality the “Book of Don’ts that Did.” It is pleasant to remember that the gentle Autocrat, a man of science as well as of letters, did not allow professional courtesy to stand in the way of a characteristic fling at Doctor Experience. He goes, in his contempt, to the stupid creatures of the barnyard, and points in high disdain to “that solemn fowl, Experience, who, according to my observation, cackles oftener than she drops real live eggs.”
If the old doctor were to be taken at his own valuation and we should be disposed to profit by his teachings, our lives would be a dreary round; and youth, particularly, would find the ginger savorless in the jar and the ale stale in the pot. I saw my venerable friend walking abroad the other day in the flowered dressing-gown which he so much affects, wearing hisfamiliar classroom smile. I heard him warning a boy, who was hammering a boat together out of wretchedly flimsy material, that his argosy would never float; but the next day I saw the young Columbus faring forth, with his coat for sail, and saw him turn the bend in the creek safely and steer beyond “the gray Azores” of his dreams.
The young admiral cannot escape the perils of the deep, and like St. Paul he will know shipwreck before his marine career is ended; but why discourage him? Not the doctor’s hapless adventures, but the lad’s own are going to make a man of him. I know a town where, thirty years ago, an afternoon newspaper failed about once every six months. There was, so the wiseacres affirmed, no manner of use in trying it again. But a tow-headed boy put his small patrimony into a venture, reinforced it with vigorous independence and integrity, and made it a source of profit to himself and a valued agent in the community. In twenty years the property sold for a million dollars. Greatness, I assure Septimus, consists in achieving the impossible.
“Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,And marching single in an endless file,Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.To each they offer gifts after his will,Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.I, in my pleachèd garden, watched the pomp,Forgot my morning wishes, hastilyTook a few herbs and apples, and the DayTurned and departed silent. I, too late,Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.”
“Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,And marching single in an endless file,Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.To each they offer gifts after his will,Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.I, in my pleachèd garden, watched the pomp,Forgot my morning wishes, hastilyTook a few herbs and apples, and the DayTurned and departed silent. I, too late,Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.”
“Daughters of Time, the hypocritic Days,
Muffled and dumb like barefoot dervishes,
And marching single in an endless file,
Bring diadems and fagots in their hands.
To each they offer gifts after his will,
Bread, kingdoms, stars, and sky that holds them all.
I, in my pleachèd garden, watched the pomp,
Forgot my morning wishes, hastily
Took a few herbs and apples, and the Day
Turned and departed silent. I, too late,
Under her solemn fillet saw the scorn.”
The season is at hand when Time throws his annual challenge in our teeth. The bell tinkles peremptorily and a calendar is thrust upon us. November is still young when we are dragged upon the threshold of another year. The leisurely dismissal of the old year is no longer possible; we may indulge in no lingering good-bye, but the old fellow hustles out in haste, with apologetic, shrinking step and we slam the door upon him. It is off with the old love and on with the new, whether we will or no. I solemnly protest against the invasion of the calendar. In an age that boasts of freedom, I rebel against a tyrant who comes merely to warn us of the fugitive character of Time; for that sharp elbowin the ribs has prodded many a noble soul to his death. These pretty devices that we are asked to hang upon our walls are the seductive advertisements of an insinuating and implacable foe. We are asked to beparticeps criminisin his hideous trade, for must I not tear off and cast as rubbish to the void a day, a week, a month, that I may not have done with at all? Why, may I ask, should I throw my yesterdays into the waste-basket? Yet if I fail, falling only a few leaves behind, is not my shameless inefficiency and heedlessness paraded before the world? How often have I delivered myself up to my enemies by suffering April to laugh her girlish laughter through torrid July? I know well the insinuating smile of the friend who, dropping in on a peaceful morning, when Time, as far as I am concerned, has paused in the hay-field to dream upon his scythe handle, walks coolly to the calendar and brings me up to date with a fine air of rebuke, as though he were conferring the greatest favor in the world. I am sure that I should have no standing with my neighbors if they knew that I rarely wind my watch and that the clocks in my house, saveone or two that are kept going merely to avoid explanations, are never wound.
There is a gentle irony in the fact that the most insolent dispensers of calendars are the life insurance companies. It is a legitimate part of their nefarious game: you and I are their natural prey, and if they can accent for us the mortality of the flesh by holding up before us, in compact form, the slight round of the year, they are doing much to impress upon us the appalling brevity of our most reasonable expectancy. How weak we are to suffer the intimidation of these soulless corporations, who thrust their wares upon us as much as to say, “Here’s a new year, and you’d better make the most of it, for there’s no saying when you will get another.” You, my friend, with your combined calendar and memorandum always before you, may pledge all your to-morrows if you will; but as for me the Hypocritic Days, the Barefoot Dervishes, may ring my bell until they exhaust the battery without gaining a single hour as my grudging alms.
We are all prone to be cowards, and to bend before the tyrant whose banner is spread victoriouslyon all our walls. Poets and philosophers aid and abet him; the preachers are forever telling us what a dreadful fellow he is, and warning us that if we don’t get on the good side of him we are lost forever,—mere wreckage on a grim, inhospitable shore. Hypocrisy and false oaths are born of such teaching. Januarius, let us remember, was two-faced, and it has come about naturally that New Year’s oaths carry a reserve. They are not, in fact, serious obligations. It is a poor soul that sets apart a certain number of days for rectitude, and I can’t for the life of me see anything noble in making a constable of the calendar. I find with joy that I am freeing myself of the tyrant’s thrall. I am never quite sure of the day of the week; I date my letters yesterday or to-morrow with equal indifference. June usually thrusts her roses into my windows before I change the year in dating my letters. The magazines seem leagued with the calendar for man’s undoing. I sometimes rush home from an inspection of a magazine counter in mad haste to get where Oblivion cannot stretch forth a long, lean arm and pluck me into the eternal shades; for Idecline with all the strength of my crude Western nature, to countenance the manufacture of yesterdays, no matter how cheerful they may be, out of my confident to-morrows. A March magazine flung into the teeth of a February blizzard does not fool the daffodils a particle. This stamping of months that have not arrived upon our current literature is nothing more or less than counterfeiting;—or rather, the issuing of false currency by the old Tyrant who stands behind the counter of the Bank of Time. And there is the railway time-table,—the unconscious comic utterance of theZeitgeist! If the 12.59 is one minute or one hour late, who cares, I wonder? Who am I, pray, that I should stuff my pocket with calendars and time-tables? Why not throw the charts to the fishes and let the winds have their will with us awhile! Let us, I beg, leave some little margin in our lives for the shock of surprise!
The Daughters of Time are charming young persons, and they may offer me all the bread, kingdoms, stars they like; but they must cheer up or keep out of my front yard! No shuffling around, like Barefoot Dervishes; but in goldensandals let them come, and I will kindle a fire of next year’s calendars in their honor. When the snows weigh heavily upon the hills, let us not mourn for yesterday or waste time in idle speculations at the fireside, but address ourselves manfully to the hour’s business. And as some of the phrases of Horace’s ode to Thaliarchus rap for attention in an old file box at the back of my head, I set down a pleasant rendering of them by Mr. Charles Edmund Merrill, Jr.
“To-morrow? Shall the fleeting yearsAbide our questioning? They goAll heedless of our hopes and fears.To-morrow? ’Tis not ours to knowThat we again shall see the flowers.To-morrow is the gods’, but oh,To-day is ours.”
“To-morrow? Shall the fleeting yearsAbide our questioning? They goAll heedless of our hopes and fears.To-morrow? ’Tis not ours to knowThat we again shall see the flowers.To-morrow is the gods’, but oh,To-day is ours.”
“To-morrow? Shall the fleeting years
Abide our questioning? They go
All heedless of our hopes and fears.
To-morrow? ’Tis not ours to know
That we again shall see the flowers.
To-morrow is the gods’, but oh,
To-day is ours.”
We all salute heartily and sincerely the “grandeur and exquisiteness” of old age. It is not because Doctor Experience is old that we distrust his judgment; it is not his judgment that we distrust half so much as his facts. They are good, as facts go, but we are all foreordained and predestined to reap our own crop. He need not take the trouble to nail his sign, “Nothoroughfare,” on the highways that have perplexed him, for we, too, must stray into the brambles and stumble at the ford. It is decreed that we sail without those old charts of his, and we drop our signal-books and barometer overboard without a qualm. The reefs change with every tide, adding zest to our adventure; and while the gulfs may wash us down, there’s always the chance that, in our own way and after much anxious and stupid sailing, we may ground our barnacled hulks on the golden sands of the Happy Isles. Our blood cries for the open sea or the long white road, and
“Rare the moment and exceeding fleetWhen the spring sunlight, tremulous and thin,Makes glad the pulses with tumultuous beatFor meadows never won nor wandered in.”
“Rare the moment and exceeding fleetWhen the spring sunlight, tremulous and thin,Makes glad the pulses with tumultuous beatFor meadows never won nor wandered in.”
“Rare the moment and exceeding fleet
When the spring sunlight, tremulous and thin,
Makes glad the pulses with tumultuous beat
For meadows never won nor wandered in.”