COMPOSITION AND
SELECTED ESSAYS
FOR NORMAL SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES
BY
JAMES CLOYD BOWMAN, M.A., D.Litt.
HEAD OF THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT, NORTHERN STATE NORMAL SCHOOL,
MARQUETTE, MICHIGAN
AND
J. LAWRENCE EASON, M.A.
HEAD OF THE ENGLISH DEPARTMENT, STATE NORMAL SCHOOL AND
TEACHERS COLLEGE, PERU, NEBRASKA
NEW YORK
harcourt, brace and company
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
HARCOURT, BRACE AND COMPANY, INC.
PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. BY
THE QU1NN & BODEN COMPANY
RAH WAY. N. J
PREFACE
This text is intended primarily for students in normal
schools and colleges. The freshmen who enter these insti-
tutions differ in many ways from the freshmen who enter
the larger universities. The text books used in smaller
institutions, however, are usually written by university pro-
fessors, and are intended for university students. The
authors of this book have taught Freshman Composition to
university students, to small-college students, and to normal
school students. The text, the result of a dozen years of
experience, has grown out of their desire for a book to fit
their present needs. They hope that other teachers, in
similar positions, may likewise find it useful.
This book is perhaps unusual in that it comprises both
rhetoric and selected essays. Sufficient details of rhetoric
are included for the first course in composition. The essays
make it possible for the instructor to enrich the subject by
the discussion of thoughts which relate to successful living,
and also to hold the interest of the student by putting at his
command illustrative material for every principle of success-
ful writing.
The authors have emphasized careful thinking. They
believe that careful thinking is the true beginning of success-
ful writing. They believe, further, that the surest way to
encourage careful thinking is persistently to urge the student
to write from actual first-hand experience and knowledge.
They have learned through years of hard effort that success-
ful writing is concrete writing; and that concrete writing
grows naturally from the intimate knowledge of things.
The authors are happy for the privilege of thanking those
who have generously granted permission to reprint copy-
right material. Mention of this kindness is made also in
foot-notes at various places throughout the text.
iii
CONTENTS
Preface
JPAGE
iii
PART ONE
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
The Writer and the Reader . . J. L. Eason .... 3
Getting Ready to Write . . . . /. L. Eason .... 25
Writing the Composition . . . J. L. Eason .... 46
The Paragraph J. C. Bowman ... 61
The Sentence J. C. Bowman . . . 74
Words J. C. Bowman . . . 90
PART TWO
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
Preface 107
The Influence of Books
I Entertain an Agent Unawares . David Grayson . . . 109
Reading the Bible William Lyon Phelps . 119
Right Reading James Russell Lowell . 146
Studies in Literature .... John Mor ley .... 150
Poetry for the Unpoetical . . Henry Seidel Canhy . 154
The Joy of Work
The Call of the Job .... Richard Clarke Cabot . 166
The Mowing David Grayson . . . 184
Labor; Reward Thomas Carlyle . . . 195
The Young Man's Future . . Frank A. Vanderlip . 209
The Ministry of Nature
My Winter Garden ..... Charles Kingsley . . 21?
A "Night Among the Pines . . Robert Louis Stevenson 234
"Natura in Minimis Existat . John Burroughs . . 230
The Battle of the Ants . . . Henry David Thoreau . 231
Walden Pond Henry David Thoreau . 25s
v
vi
CONTENTS
The Call of Society
The Sermon on the Mount
Citizenship in a Republic .
The New Freedom .
Progress
Coming into One's Own
When a Man Comes to Himself
A Crisis in My Mental History
A Message to Garcia .
Why Do So Many Men Never
Amount to Anything?
Mary White
274
Theodore Roosevelt . 281
Woodrow Wilson . . 292
John Dewey .... 302
Woodrow Wilson . .314
John Stuart Mill . . 327
Elbert Hubbard . . . 339
Thomas A. Edison . . 344
William Allen White . 351
PART ONE
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
CHAPTER I
THE WRITER AND THE READER
It seems to me that not one man in. a thousand appreciates what
can be accomplished by training the mind to think. . . . The brain is
exactly like any other part of the body: it can be strengthened by
proper exercise, by proper use. Put your arm in a sling and keep it
there for a considerable length of time, and when you take it out you
find that you can't use it. In the same way, the brain that isn't used
suffers atrophy.—Thomas A. Edison.
The successful writer is he who can completely transfer
an idea from his own mind to the mind of the reader, and do
so with such pleasantness and grace as to make the reader
his friend. In the past a vast deal of advice has been given
on how this may be done. However well this advice may
have been proffered, there is a growing feeling among prac-
tical men who are engaged in doing the work of the world,
as well as among teachers, that not enough stress has been
placed upon what Edison calls training the mind to think.
The study of the mother-tongue obviously should have an
important part in this training. Indeed, psychologists have
long since demonstrated that language is a tool even more
important for the individual's thinking than for the expres-
sion of his thought.
The purpose of this and the following chapters is to
present in simple language, and with concrete illustrations,
some necessary principles and methods of writing; principles
and methods which the student can easily understand and
readily make use of in learning to put on paper what he
wishes to say.
Keeping on the Highway
One of the common necessities of our modern life is the
highway. All sorts of people travel on a highway, and in
3
4
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
many kinds of vehicles. If the highway is well built, the
traveler is not likely to get lost or to fall by the way. More-
over, the better established highways have a name and a
color-sign by means of which the traveler may know that he
is on the right road. The arrow points the way and the
mile-post tells him of the steady progress he is making. All
these precautions are necessary to the good highway, because
all sorts of people travel—inexperienced drivers as well as
the experienced, careful drivers and careless drivers,
strangers and those that are not strangers.
Similarly, good structure in writing, which results from
clear and straight thinking, requires that the writer keep on
the "highway of his subject, so that his reader not only
does not get lost but that he may at every turn follow with
ease and sureness. The writer, like the tourist, has a definite
starting point; with the first sentence "he's off. His next
sentence leads the reader on from the idea of the first to
the idea of the second, prepares for the idea of the third,
and so continues through the first paragraph, which marks
the initial mile-post in the journey. No sentence is allowed
to stray from the highway. The second, third, and succeed-
ing paragraphs continue and complete the course. The
reader should feel that he is in competent hands, that clearly
and unmistakably he is going forward, and that the writer
knows both where he is going and when he gets there.
Transitional words, phrases, and sentences are his color-
signs and arrows. The successful writer knows that these
precautions are necessary because all sorts of readers travel
the printed road.
The Highway in Scientific Composition
All successful writers are careful that their readers follow
them. The better writers on scientific and mechanical sub-
jects reveal this quality preeminently. To the average
reader, they are likely to show more clearness, organization,
and logical method than the authors of purely literary
essays. They write more concisely, more directly, and make
THE WRITER AND THE READER
5
more apparent that underlying structural basis upon which
all good composition rests. For example, Professor J.
Arthur Thomson, who is a careful writer as well as a leading
scientist of our time, remembers his reader in such selec-
tions as the "Courtship of Birds. Notice with what clear-
ness he presents his subject and the methods he uses in
securing this clearness.
COURTSHIP OF BIRDS 1
J. Arthur Thomson
Let us select a few illustrations of different modes of court-
ship among birds. Perhaps the first place must be given to
song, but this raises so many questions that it must be dealt
with separately. It must suffice here to refer to its variety,
and one of Brehm's sentences will serve. "Dominated by love,
the jay sings, whistles, and murmurs, the magpie chatters, the
croaking raven transforms his rough sounds into gentle, soft
notes, the usually silent grebe lets its voice be heard, the diver
sings its wild yet tuneful ocean-song, the bittern dips its bill
under water that the only cry at its command may become a
dull, far-sounding booming. And what is one to say of the
nightingale, the mavis, the blackbird, the lark, the bullfinch,
and so through the long list of the Spring orchestra? In some
cases there is a certain degree of instrumental music, for it has
been shown that the drumming or bleating of the snipe is due
to the bird's rapid passage through the air with the outer tail-
feathers held very tensely.
Secondly, there is all the glamour of graceful movement.
Birds of prey ascend to giddy heights, let themselves go, almost
touch earth, and are up again—circling, soaring, hovering.
The flight of the eagle-like bateleur of the interior of Africa is
marvelous at all times, but at the pairing time it becomes "an
incomparable mountebank performance in the air, a bewildering
acrobatic display, which seems to unite in itself all the arts of
flight practised by the other birds of prey. So it is with hun-
dreds of birds: emotion finds expression in motion; swallow and
1 From The Biology of the Seasons, published by Henry Holt & Co.
6
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
lark, dove and pipit, bee-eater and bunting—all have their won-
derful aerial displays.
Some that have no display of flying powers show off on foot.
Cocks strut, turkeys dance, cranes pirouette to the verge of ex-
haustion, and even the solemn stork has its minuet. The caper-
caillie and the black grouse, the pheasant and the peacock, are
among the famous dancers. Even the phlegmatic albatross in-
dulges in antics, and the tragopan goes in for the most extraor-
dinary posturing and posing.
A third aspect of the courting is seen in the combats of rival
males. It is an unforgettable experience to get up before dawn
in the Spring, to creep quietly up the hillside and hide in a
sheep-fold, thence to spy on the "lek of the polygamous Black
Grouse. The cocks strut and fight on the level sward near by;
the hens stand looking on, like the dames at a tournament.
The cock utters a peculiar indescribable note, he spreads and
depresses his highly decorative tail, and indulges in extraordi-
nary antics, often ending with an excited charge on his rivals.
When the spectacle is at its height and the rising sun strikes
the combatants, it is difficult to believe that we are looking at
the familiar Black Grouse, so remarkable is the transfiguration.
In the end the most successful cock flies off with a following
of fascinated hens.
There are hundreds of other cases, though none more pic-
turesque, of combat and parade. Self-assertiveness runs riot.
Love flames out luridly into jealousy. Every one will be cock
of the walk, and hence the fray. "The means by which a male
bird declares his love and conducts his courtship are very vari-
ous, but naturally, they always accord with his most prominent
gifts. One woos with his song, another with his wings, this
one with his bill, and that with his foot; one displays all the
magnificence of his plumage, another some special decoration,
and a third some otherwise unused accomplishment. Serious
birds indulge in play and joke and dignified pranks, silent ones
chatter, quiet ones become restless, gentle ones combative, timid
ones bold, cautious ones careless; in short, all show themselves
in an unwonted light.
i. Notice how simply and directly Professor Thomson
announces his subject: "Let us select a few illustrations of
different modes of courtship among birds.
THE WRITER AND THE READER
7
2. Notice also (i) that the piece is divided into three
parts—song, graceful movement, and combats of rival
males; (2) that the first is treated in the first paragraph, the
next in the second and third paragraphs, and the last in the
fourth paragraph; and (3) that the last point is concluded
and the entire discussion informally restated in the final
paragraph.
3. Note finally (1) that the author in his analysis of his
subject is not only keeping on the highway so far as his own
private thinking is concerned, but that he also takes pains to
make the reader realize that he is passing from one point to
another. For instance, after he says in the first sentence,
"Let us select a few illustrations, he announces each with
these highway "signs": Perhaps the first place must be given
to song—Secondly, there is all the glamour of graceful
movement—A third aspect of the courting is seen in the
combats of rival males.
It is not enough that the writer makes use of these three
sentences, pointing arrows, to indicate the different steps and
the progress from one to another in the discussion as a
whole. He must also direct the way between each main
point by the use of transitional words and phrases, showing
the progress of his treatment of that point, thus in paragraph
one: It must suffice here—And what is one to say of the
nightingale—In some cases. In paragraphs two and three:
Birds of prey—So it is with hundreds of birds—Some that
have no display of flying powers—Even the phlegmatic alba-
tross. In paragraphs four and five: It is an unforgettable
experience . . . Black Grouse . . . strut and fight—When
the spectacle is at its height—In the end—There are hun-
dreds of other cases—Every one will be—One woos with his
song—another—and a third—Serious birds—in short, all.
The Highway in Artistic Composition
Writing may be scientific, clear as ice, a thing chiefly of
the head, as we have just seen illustrated in Thomson's
essay. But not all subjects are suited to analytical or scien-
8
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
tific treatment. And not all writers regard their mental
machinery as a cold logic-engine; some prefer to let their
imaginations play freely, developing and creating an effect
that is a unit of mood rather than a logical unit. The writing
of such authors is more truly artistic—a thing of the hearty
a product of thinking, no less, but a product that run^i
toward feeling rather than toward the intellect. The work
has completeness and finish, but the parts are not so much
in evidence as the effect of the whole. The piece has design,
but in executing his plan the writer has given first con-
sideration to creating a mood in his reader. In short, he is
appealing to the reader's artistic rather than to his logical
sense. The writer of artistic composition has said, "Struc-
ture I regard as so much scaffolding, necessary enough in
the process of building, but unsightly when left about the
finished edifice. I have thus concealed structure—covered
the 'tracks,' so to speak—so that the reader may behold
beauty alone and unobstructed.
Rupert Brooke gives an artistic rendering of his subject
in "Niagara Falls. This magnificent but simple piece of
prose is worthy of special examination with a view to dis-
tinguishing clearly between artistic and scientific composition.
NIAGARA FALLS 1
Rupert Brooke
Samuel Butler has a lot to answer for. But for him, a
modern traveler could spend his time peacefully admiring the
scenery instead of feeling himself bound to dog the simple and
grotesque of the world for the sake of their too-human com-
ments. It is his fault if a peasant's naivete has come to out-
weigh the beauty of rivers, and the remarks of clergymen are
more than mountains. It is very restful to give up all effort at
observing human nature and drawing social and political de-
ductions from trifles, and to let oneself relapse into wide-
mouthed worship of the wonders of nature. And this is very
1 From Letters from America, by the courtesy of the publishers,
Charles Scribner's Sons.
THE WRITER AND THE READER
easy at Niagara. Niagara means nothing. It is not leading;
anywhere. It does not result from anything. It throws no
light on the effects of Protection, nor on the Facility for Di-
vorce in America, nor on Corruption in Public Life, nor on
Canadian Character, nor even on the Navy Bill. It is merely
a great deal of water falling over some cliffs. But it is very
emarkably that. The human race, apt as a child to destroy
what it admires, has done its best to surround the Falls with
every distraction, incongruity, and vulgarity. Hotels, power-
houses, bridges, trams, picture post-cards, sham legends, stalls,
booths, rifle-galleries, and side-shows frame them about. And
there are Touts. Niagara is the central home and breeding-
place for all the touts of earth. There are touts insinuating,
and touts raucous, greasy touts, brazen touts, and upper-class,
refined, gentlemanly, take-you-by-the-arm touts; touts who in-
timidate and touts who wheedle; professionals, amateurs, and
dilettanti, male and female; touts who would photograph you
with your arm round a young lady against a faked background
of the sublimest cataract, touts who would bully you into cars,
char-a-bancs, elevators, or tunnels, or deceive you into a car-
riage and pair, touts who would sell you picture post-cards,
moccasins, sham Indian beadwork, blankets, tee-pees, and crock-
ery, and touts, finally, who have no apparent object in the
world, but just purely, simply, merely incessantly, indefatigably,
and ineffugibly to tout. And in the midst of all this, over-
whelming it all, are the Falls. He who sees them instantly
forgets humanity. They are not very high, but they are over-
powering. They are divided by an island into two parts, the
Canadian and the American.
Half a mile or so above the Falls, on either side, the water
of the great stream begins to run more swiftly and in confusion.
It descends with ever-growing speed. It begins chattering and
leaping, breaking into a thousand ripples, throwing up joyful
fingers of spray. Sometimes it is divided by islands and rocks,
sometimes the eye can see nothing but a waste of laughing,
springing, foamy waves, turning, crossing, even seeming to
stand for an instant erect, but always borne impetuously for-
ward like a crowd of triumphant feasters. Sit close down by it,
and you see a fragment of the torrent against the sky, mottled,
steely, and foaming, leaping onward in far-flung criss-cross
strands of water. Perpetually the eye is on the point of de-
10
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
scrying a pattern in this weaving, and perpetually it is cheated
by change. In one place part of the flood plunges over a ledge
a few feet high and a quarter of a mile or so long, in a uniform
and stable curve. It gives an impression of almost military con-
certed movement, grown suddenly out of confusion. But it is
swiftly lost again in the multitudinous tossing merriment.
Here and there a rock close to the surface is marked by a white
wave that faces backwards and seems to be rushing madly up-
stream, but is really stationary in the headlong charge. But
for these signs of reluctance, the waters seem to fling them-
selves on with some foreknowledge of their fate, in an ever
wilder frenzy. But it is no Maeterlinckian prescience. They
prove, rather, that Greek belief that the great crashes are pre-
ceded by a louder merriment and a wilder gaiety. Leaping in
the sunlight, careless, entwining, clamorously joyful, the waves
riot on towards the verge.
But there they change. As they turn to the sheer descent,
the white and blue and slate color, in the heart of the Canadian
Falls at least, blend and deepen to a rich, wonderful, luminous
green. On the edge of disaster the river seems to gather her-
self, to pause, to lift a head noble in ruin, and then, with a
slow grandeur, to plunge into the eternal thunder and white
chaos below. Where the stream runs shallower it is a kind
of violet color, but both violet and green fray and frill to
white as they fall. The mass of water, striking some ever-hid-
den base of rock, leaps up the whole two hundred feet again in
pinnacles and domes of spray. The spray falls back into the
lower river once more; all but a little that fines to foam and
white mist, which drifts in layers along the air, graining it, and
wanders out on the wind over the trees and gardens and houses,
and so vanishes.
The manager of one of the great power-stations on the banks
of the river above the Falls told me that the center of the
riverbed at the Canadian Falls is deep and of a saucer shape.
So it may be possible to fill this up to a uniform depth, and
divert a lot of water for the power-houses. And this, he said,
would supply the need for more power, which will certainly
soon arise, without taking away from the beauty of Niagara.
This is a handsome concession of the utilitarians to ordinary
sightseers. Yet, I doubt if we shall be satisfied. The real
secret of the beauty and terror of the Falls is not their height
THE WRITER AND THE READER n
or width, but the feeling of colossal power, and of unintelligible
disaster caused by the plunge of that vast body of water. If
that were taken away, there would be little visible change, but
the heart would be gone.
The American Falls do not inspire this feeling in the same
way as the Canadian. It is because they are less in volume,
and because the water does not fall so much into one place.
By comparison their beauty is almost delicate and fragile.
They are extraordinarily level, one long curtain of lacework
and woven foam. Seen from opposite, when the sun is on them,
they are blindingly white, and the clouds of spray show dark
against them. With both Falls the color of the water is the
ever-altering wonder. Greens and blues, purples and whites,
melt into one another, fade, and come again, and change with
the changing sun. Sometimes they are as richly diaphanous as
a precious stone, and glow from within with a deep, inexplicable
light. Sometimes the white intricacies of dropping foam be-
come opaque and creamy. And always there are the rainbows.
If you come suddenly upon the Falls from above, a great double
rainbow, very vivid, spanning the extent of spray from top to
bottom, is the first thing you see. If you wander along the
cliff opposite, a bow springs into being in the American Falls,
accompanies you courteously on your walk, dwindles and dies
as the mist ends, and awakens again as you reach the Canadian
tumult. And the bold traveler who attempts the trip under
the American Falls sees, when he dare open his eyes to any-
thing, tiny baby rainbows, some four or five yards in span,
leaping from rock to rock among the foam, and gamboling be-
side him, barely out of hand's reach, as he goes. One I saw in
that place was a complete circle, such as I have never seen be-
fore and so near that I could put my foot on it. It is a terrifying
journey, beneath and behind the Falls. The senses are battered
and bewildered by the thunder of the water and the assault of
wind and spray; or rather, the sound is not of falling water,
but merely of falling; a noise of unspecified ruin. So, if you
are close behind the endless clamor, the sight cannot recognize
liquid in the masses that hurl past. You are dimly and pitifully
aware that sheets of light and darkness are falling in great
curves in front of you. Dull omnipresent foam washes the
face. Farther away, in the roar and hissing, clouds of spray
seem literally to slide down some invisible plane of air.
12
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
Beyond the foot of the Falls the river is like a slipping floor
of marble, green with veins of dirty white, made by the scum
that was foam. It slides very quietly and slowly down for a
mile or two, sullenly exhausted. Then it turns to a dull sage
green, and hurries more swiftly, smooth and ominous. As
the walls of the ravine close in, trouble stirs, and the waters
boil and eddy. These are the lower rapids, a sight more ter-
rifying than the Falls, because less intelligible. Close in its
bands of rock the river surges tumultuously forward, writhing
and leaping as if inspired by a demon. It is pressed by the
straits into a visibly convex form. Great planes of water slide
past. Sometimes it is thrown up into a pinnacle of foam higher
than a house, or leaps with incredible speed from the crest of
one vast wave to another, along the shining curve between,
like the spring of a wild beast. Its motion continually sug-
gests muscular action. The power manifest in these rapids
moves one with a different sense of awe and terror from that
of the Falls. Here the inhuman life and strength are spon-
taneous, active, almost resolute; masculine vigor compared with
the passive gigantic power, female, helpless and overwhelming,
of the Falls. A place of fear.
One is drawn back, strangely, to a contemplation of the
Falls, at every hour, and especially by night, when the cloud
of spray becomes an immense visible ghost, straining and
wavering high above the river, white and pathetic and trans-
lucent. The Victorian lies very close below the surface in
every man. There one can sit and let great cloudy thoughts
of destiny and the passage of empires drift through the mind;
for such dreams are at home by Niagara. I could not get out
of my mind the thought of a friend, who said that the rain-
bows over the Falls were like the arts and beauty and good-
tiess, with regard to the stream of life—caused by it, thrown
upon its spray, but unable to stay or direct or affect it, and
ceasing when it ceased. In all comparisons that rise in the
heart, the river, with its multitudinous waves and its single cur-
rent, likens itself to a life, whether of an individual or of a
community. A man's life is of many flashing moments, and
yet one stream; a nation's flows through all its citizens, and
yet is more than they. In such places, one is aware, with an
almost insupportable and yet comforting certitude, that both
men and nations are hurried onwards to their ruin or ending
THE WRITER AND THE READER
13
as inevitably as this dark flood. Some go down to it unreluc-
tant, and meet it, like the river, not without nobility. And as
incessant, as inevitable, and as unavailing as the spray that
hangs over the Falls, is the white cloud of human crying. . . .
With some such thoughts does the platitudinous heart win from
the confusion and thunder of a Niagara peace that the quietest
plains or most stable hills can never give.
At the outset it must be evident that a writer of artistic
composition must move from one idea, image, or picture to
another, always with a feeling for the accumulative and final
effect. The reader, when he has reached the end of Rupert
Brooke's "Niagara Falls, has the sense of completeness and
finish. Let us examine the steps by which the effect was
produced.
1. The writer's first point of contact with his reader is
not the Falls themselves but Samuel Butler, whose works
habitually beguile the reader and force him to consider
human nature rather than physical nature. But on the pres-
ent occasion the author proposes to free himself from the
chains of Old Samuel and to "relapse into wide-mouthed
worship of the wonders of nature"—and he proposes that
the reader shall do the same. When he says, "And this
is very easy at Niagara, the reader knows at once what
it is in nature that is to be the object of the author's
"wide-mouthed worship and the subject of the present
essay.
In making his approach to the Falls—and the reader must
now regard the writer as his companion and guide—it is
appropriate for the writer to say to the reader: "The human
race, apt as a child to destroy what it admires, has done its
best to surround the Falls with every distraction, incon-
gruity, and vulgarity. Hotels, power-houses, bridges, trams,
picture post-cards, sham legends, stalls, booths, rifle-galleries,
and side-shows frame them about. These are obstructions
enough in the way of any one who wishes to relapse into
wide-mouthed worship of nature. But these are not all.
The author observes, "And there are touts. Every reader
who has attended a carnival or a circus or a fair knows
14
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
what touts are. Then the writer, whom the reader has
already taken for his guide, speaks these compensating
words: "And in the midst of all this, overwhelming it all,
are the Falls. He who sees them instantly forgets humanity
-—touts and all!
2. The "guide and his companion are now facing the
Falls; how shall the guide proceed with his description?
Above the Falls is the river, and below the Falls is the river.
The guide prefers to begin above first and come down, for
he says: "Half a mile or so above the Falls . . . the water
of the great stream begins to run more swiftly and in con-
fusion. But he wishes the other to have a "close-up of
the "great stream, for he says: "Sit close down by it.
What do you see? "In one part"—and he goes ahead with
that part. Then he says: "Here and there"—and proceeds
to another part, until we come near the Falls where the
"waves riot on toward the verge.
The reader can not help seeing that the writer is not only
presenting his subject in an orderly fashion, but that he is
taking pains to show that he is doing so—that he is keeping
on the highway by the use of such phrase-signs as, Half a
mile or so above the Falls—Sit close down by it—In one
place—Here and there. This he continues to do, the student
should note, throughout the essay.
3. But the description of the fall of the Falls is worth
a separate paragraph. The writer takes it. He has reached
his climax, so to speak, and is happy when he can say: "On
the edge of disaster the river seems to gather herself, to
pause, to lift a head noble in ruin, and then, with a slow
grandeur, to plunge into the eternal thunder and white chaos
below. Three sentences follow in which three separate
observations are made; explanations or solutions of the
plot — (1) "Where the stream runs shallower . . .
(2) "The mass of water . . . (3) "The spray . . .
4. The next paragraph—which, like the one above and
the one that follows, deals with the fall of the Falls and the
feeling it inspires in the spectator—begins with: "The man-
ager of one of the great power-stations . . . told me . . .
THE WRITER AND THE READER
The reader should note the importance of telling this from
the manager's point of view as a means of emphasizing "the
real secret of the beauty and terror of the Falls, which the
author says "is not their height or width, but the feeling of
colossal power and of unintelligible disaster caused by the
plunge of that vast body of water.
5. The moment is opportune now for a comparison of
the American and Canadian Falls in their power to "inspire
this feeling of beauty and terror, and for calling attention
to the superior power of the Canadian in this respect. Then
too he must mention the peculiar color of the American side,
which leads him to speak of the color of both Falls. "And
always there are the rainbows. The reader must see these
rainbows from various view-points, so the writer proceeds:
"If you come suddenly upon the Falls from above . . .";
or, "If you wander along the cliff opposite . . ."; "And the
bold traveler who attempts the trip under the American Falls
sees . . .
6. Having quit the fall of the Falls, the writer-guide is
ready to follow the water in its course as it passes on below.
Thus the new paragraph begins: "Beyond the foot of the
Falls the river is like a slipping floor of marble ... It
slides very quietly and slowly down for a mile or two . . .
then it . . . hurries more swiftly . . ., a sight more ter-
rifying than the Falls because less intelligible ... A place
of fear. The work of description has come to an end,
but a seventh and final paragraph remains.
7. In his last paragraph the author engages in what he
chooses to call "a contemplation of the Falls"—and of life,
symbolized in the river. This imaginative "contemplation
of what the Falls suggest to the spectator serves as an over-
tone or enveloping mood for the whole piece. Design and
detail are manifest in the several stages of description in
the f oregoing paragraphs; in this last, artistic finish and a
deeper meaning to the whole are given. It is the refrain, to
change the figure, of the harmony the author has sought in
his subject. No author of scientific or mechanical composi-
tions would ever write this last division; his plan might call
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
for a concluding or summarizing passage, but not for an
enveloping paragraph.
Exercises
Benjamin Franklin, in his autobiography, asserts that he
learned to write by making a close study of certain essays he
met with in an odd volume of the Spectator. Most of us,
like Franklin, learn to do new things by watching some one
else who has mastered the craft or art; and our safest guide
in learning to write, as was Franklin's, will no- doubt be in
our constant study of the writings of others. But the study
and imitation of others should not be slavish. An alert and
resourceful student can learn the essential principles from
another and yet remain himself throughout all he writes.
The following exercises, taken from several sources, offer
some variety of method among shorter pieces of successful
composition. The student should extend this close study to
include longer pieces which he will find in abundance in his
favorite books and magazines. To the extent that he sue-
ceeds in developing a genuine curiosity and a desire to imi-
tate, in so far as imitation enables him better to express his
own individuality, the larger purpose of this chapter will be
served.
I. I have before me a lobster. When I examine it, what
appears to be the most striking character it presents? Why, I
observe that this part which we call the tail of the lobster is
made up of six distinct hard rings and a seventh terminal piece.
If I separate one of the middle rings, say the third, I find it
carries upon its under surface a pair of limbs or appendages,
each of which consists of a stalk and two terminal pieces. So
that I can represent a traverse section of the ring and its ap-
pendages upon the diagram board in this way.
If I now take the fourth ring, I find it has the same structure,
and so have the fifth and the second; so that in each of these
divisions of the tail, I find parts which correspond with one
another, a ring and two appendages; and in each appendage a
stalk and two end pieces. These corresponding parts are called
THE WRITER AND THE READER
in the technical language of anatomy "homologous parts. The
ring of the third division is the "homologue of the ring of the
fifth, the appendage of the former is the homologue of the
appendage of the latter. And, as each division exhibits cor-
responding parts in corresponding places, we say that all the
divisions are constructed upon the same plan. But now let
us consider the sixth division. It is similar to, and yet different
from, the others. The ring is essentially the same as in the
other divisions, but the appendages look at first as if they were
very different; and yet when we regard them closely, what do we
find? A stalk and two terminal divisions, exactly as in the
others, but the stalk is very short and very thick, the terminal
divisions are very broad and flat, and one of them is divided
into two pieces.
I may say, therefore, that the sixth segment is like the others
in plan, but that it is modified in its details.
The first segment is like the others, so far as its ring is con-
cerned, and though its appendages differ from any of those yet
examined in the simplicity of their structure, parts correspond-
ing with the stem and one of the divisions of the appendages of
the other segments can be readily discerned in them.
Thus it appears that the lobster's tail is composed of a series
of segments which are fundamentally similar, though each
presents peculiar modifications of the plan common to all. But
when I turn to the fore part of the body, I see, at first, noth-
ing but a great shield-like shell, called technically the "cara-
pace, ending in front in a sharp spine, on either side of which
are the curious compound eyes, set upon the ends of stout
movable stalks. Behind these, on the under side of the body,
"are two pairs of long feelers, or antennae, followed by six pairs
of jaws, folded against one another over the mouth, and pinch-
ers, or claws, of the lobster.
It looks, at first, a little hopeless to attempt to find in this
complex mass a series of rings, each with its pair of appendages,
such as I have shown you in the abdomen, and yet it is not
difficult to demonstrate their existence. Strip off the legs, and
you will find that each pair is attached to a very definite seg-
ment of the under wall of the body; but these segments, in-
stead of being the lower parts of free rings, as in the tail, are
such parts of rings which are all solidly united and bound to-
gether; and the like is true of the jaws, the feelers, and the
18 SUCCESSFUL WRITING
eye-stalks, every pair of which is borne upon its own special
segment. Thus the conclusion is gradually forced upon us that
the body of the lobster is composed of as many rings as there
are pairs of appendages, namely, twenty in all, but that the
six hindmost rings remain free and movable, while the four-
teen front rings become firmly soldered together, their backs
forming one continuous shield—the carapace.
Unity of plan, diversity in execution, is the lesson taught by
the study of the rings of the body, and the same instruction is
given still more emphatically by the appendages. If I examine
the outermost jaw, I find it consists of three distinct portions,
an inner, a middle, and an outer, mounted upon a common
stem; and if I compare this jaw with the legs behind it, or the
jaws in front of it, I find it quite easy to see that in the legs
it is the part of the appendage which corresponds with the
inner division which becomes modified into what we know
familiarly as the "leg, while the middle division disappears,
and the outer division is hidden under the carapace. Nor is it
more difficult to discern that in the appendages of the tail the
middle division appears again and the outer vanishes; while,
on the other hand, in the foremost jaw, the so-called mandible,
the inner division only is left; and in the same way the parts
of the feelers and of the eye-stalks can be identified with those
of the legs and jaws.
But whither does all this tend? To the very remarkable con-
elusion that a unity of plan, of the same kind as that discover-
able in the tail or abdomen of the lobster, pervades the whole
organization of its skeleton, so that I can return to the diagram
representing any one of the rings of the tail, which I drew
upon the board, and by adding a third division to each ap-
pendage I can use it as a sort of scheme or plan of any ring of
the body. I can give names to all the parts of that figure, and
then if I take any segment of the body of the lobster, I can
point out to you exactly what modification the general plan
has undergone in that particular segment; what part has re-
mained movable, and what has become fixed to another; what
has been excessively developed and metamorphosed, and what
has been suppressed.—Huxley, On the Study of Zoology.
II. The question of the method of evolution continued to be
debated, with no satisfactory solution in sight, until 1859, when
THE WRITER AND THE READER 19
Charles Darwin published the greatest book of the nineteenth
century, and one of the greatest in the world's history, the
Origin of Species. This book was the result of over twenty
years of careful observation and thought. It consisted of the
elaboration of two principal theories: (1) that evolution is the
method of creation; (2) that natural selection is the method
of evolution. It is the second of these theories, that is, natural
selection, that constitutes the essence of Darwinism. The theory
is based upon five fundamental facts, which are matters of ob-
servation, and may be verified by any one, as follows:
1. Inheritance. Characteristics possessed by parents tend to
reappear in the next or in succeeding generations. We are all
familiar with the fact that children commonly resemble one or
both parents or a grandparent, or great-grandparent in some
characteristic. From this we infer that something has been
inherited from the ancestor which causes resemblance in one
or more characters—physical or mental.
2. Variations. But the expression of the inheritance is sel-
dom, if ever, perfect. Eyes are a little less or a little more
brown; stature is never just the same; one-half of the face
may resemble a given ancestor more than another; petals may
be more or less red or blue; no two oranges taste exactly alike;
no two maple leaves are of precisely the same shape. There
is inheritance, but inheritance is usually expressed with
modifications or variations of the ancestral type.
3. Fitness for Environment. It is common knowledge that
living things must be adjusted to their environment. Poor
adjustment means sickness or weakness; complete or nearly
complete lack of adjustment means death. Water-lilies, for
example, can not live in the desert, cacti can not live in salt
marshes; cocoanuts can not be grown except in subtropical or
tropical climates, edelweiss will not grow in the tropics. This
is because these various kinds of plants are so organized that
they can not adjust themselves to external conditions, beyond
certain more or less definite limits or extremes. A cactus is
fit to live in the desert because it is protected by its structure
against excessive loss of water, and has provision for storing
up water that may be used in time of drought. Deciduous trees
are fitted to live in temperate regions, partly because of their
deciduous habit, and their formation of scaly buds enables them
to withstand the drought of winter. Negroes live without dis-
20
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
comfort under the tropical sun because they are protected by
the black pigment in their skin. And so, in countless ways, we
might illustrate the fact that all living things, in order to flour-
ish, must be adjusted to their surroundings.
4. Struggle for Existence. The clue to the method of evolu-
tion first dawned upon Darwin in 1838, while reading Malthus
on Population. Malthus emphasized the fact that the number
of human beings in the world increased in geometrical ratio
(by multiplication), while the food supply increased much less
rapidly by arithmetical ratio (by addition). Therefore, argued
Malthus, the time will soon be reached when there will not be
food enough for all; men will then struggle for actual exist-
ence, and only the fittest (that is, the strongest, the fleetest, the
most clever or cunning) will survive. In pondering this hy-
pothesis Darwin at once saw its larger application. There are
always more progeny produced by a plant or an animal than
there is room and food for, should they all survive. Darwin
showed that the descendants of a single pair of elephants (one
of the slowest breeders of all animals) would, if all that were
born survived, reach the enormous number of 19,000,000 in
from 740 to 750 years. But the total number of elephants in
the world does not appreciably increase: evidently many must
perish for every one that lives. There must therefore be an
intense struggle for existence. . . .
5. Survival of the Fittest. In this struggle for existence only
those best suited to their environment will survive. The dande-
lion from the seed that germinates first secures the best light;
the one that sends down the longest and most vigorous root-
system, that produces the largest, most rapidly growing leaves
will survive, and will tend to transmit its vigorous qualities to
its progeny. Less vigorous or less "fit individuals perish.
To this phenomenon Herbert Spencer applied the phrase, "sur-
vival of the fittest. Darwin called it "natural selection, be-
cause it was analogous to the artificial selection of favored
types by breeders of plants and animals. It will be readily
seen, however, that the process in nature is not so much a se-
lection of the fittest, as a rejection of the unfit; the unfit are
eliminated, while the fit survive. It has been suggested that
"natural rejection would be a better name than "natural selec-
tion. "Variations neither useful nor injurious, said Darwin,
"would not be affected by natural selection.
THE WRITER AND THE READER
The publication of Darwin's Origin of Species aroused at
once a storm of opposition. Theologians opposed the theory be-
cause they thought it eliminated God. Especially bitter antago-
nism was aroused by Darwin's suggestion that, by means of his
theory "much light will be thrown on the origin of man and
his history. The unthinking and the careless thinkers ac-
cused Darwin of teaching that man is descended from monkeys.
Neither of these accusations, however, was true. Darwinism
neither eliminates God, nor does it teach that monkeys are the
ancestors of men.—Gager, Fundamentals of Botany.
III. Your own success here and your greatness as a college
student, if I may so phrase it, depends on your ability to train
yourself through your quiet days of study here in those qualities
that will be demanded of this representative man in the world
in which you are preparing to take your place.
May I briefly trace what these qualities seem to me necessarily
to be.
First: No student is truly trained unless he has learned to do
pleasantly, and promptly, and with clean-cut accuracy every
task he has obligated himself to do. A man may decline to
undertake a job, but to undertake it and shirk it is a crime in
the world of efficiency. An undergraduate has said that the
main purpose of colleges seems to be to give students incapacity
for work. This is because some students dodge every duty to
which the death penalty is not attached, and train themselves
into the fatal habit of doing as they like. I presume that it is
the prevalence in colleges of these amiable conspiracies for
making indolence respectable that has caused that master work-
man, Mr. Henry Ford, to employ no college men in his factory.
Decisive and purposeful performance of every duty is a funda-
mental rule of success in life that no man has the right to train
himself away from in college.
Second: No student is truly trained unless, in addition to
getting this mastery of the tools of life that comes through the
discipline of routine tasks, he puts into his work his own per-
sonal curiosities and opens his faculties to a live and original
interest in his work that leads him to test for himself what he
is told. Every subject lends itself to this spirit of inquiry, and
no subject has real fruitage until it has in some way, small or
22
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
great, had its conclusions retested, and its truths rediscovered
by the student himself.
Third: No student has been truly trained unless, in addition
to learning to do a workmanlike job, and cultivating a lively
spirit of insistent inquiry, he also gets from his contact with
the master spirits of the race those qualities of taste and be-
havior and standards of judgment that constitute a true gentle-
man. "To have spent one's youth at college, says William
James, "in contact with the choice and rare and precious, yet
be a blind prig or vulgarian, unable to scent out human excel-
lence, or divine it amid its accidents, to know it only when
labeled and forced on us by others, this indeed should be ac-
counted the very calamity and shipwreck of a higher education.
Fourth: In addition to these individual interests, no student
is truly trained unless he realizes that he does not live to him-
self alone, but is a part of an organic community life that is
the source of most of the privileges he enjoys. He is and will
ever be a member of a social group that implies responsibilities
and services to it quite as important as those he owes to him-
self. These he may learn with unusual force and intimacy in
the fine loyalties of a college community. What the total
power and spirit of the college will be is affected by every de-
tail of the conduct of each individual that composes it, the
tone of its atmosphere by every man that breathes it.—
E. K. Graham, Education and Citizenship.
IV. I preach the mountains, and everything that is taller
than a man.
Yet it is to be feared that many persons see too many moun-
tains and too many great landscapes, and that the "seeing of
nature becomes a business as redundant and wearisome as other
affairs. One who lives on the mountains does not know how
high they are. Let us have one inspiration that lifts us clear of
ourselves: this is better than to see so many mountains that
we remember only their names.
The best objects that you can see are those in your own
realm; but your own realm becomes larger and means more for
the sight of something beyond.
It is worth while to cherish the few objects and phenomena
that have impressed us greatly, and it is well to recount them
THE WRITER AND THE READER
23
often, until they become part of us. One such phenomenon is
idealized in my own memory. It was the sight of sunrise on
Mt. Shasta, seen from the southeastern side from a point that
was then untouched by travelers. From this point only the
main dome of the mountain is seen. I had left the railway
train at Upton's and had ridden on a flat-car over a lumber
railroad some eighteen miles to the southeast. From this des-
tination, I drove far into the great forest, over volcano dust
that floated through the woods like smoke as it was stirred up
by our horses and wagon wheels. I was a guest for the night
in one of those luxurious lodges which true nature lovers,
wishing wholly to escape the affairs of cities, build in remote
and inaccessible places. The lodge stood on a low promontory,
around three sides of which a deep swift mountain stream ran
in wild tumult. Giant shafts of trees, such shafts as one sees
only in the stupendous forests of the far West, shot straight
into the sky from the very cornices of the house. It is always
a marvel to the easterner how shafts of such extraordinary
height could have been nourished by the very thin and narrow
crowns that they bear. One always wonders, also, at the great
distance the sapwater must carry its freight of mineral from
root to leaf and its heavier freight from leaf to root.
We were up before the dawn. We made a pot of coffee, and
the horses were ready,—fine mounts, accustomed to woods,
trails, and hard slopes. It was hardly light enough to enable
us to pick our way. We were as two pygmies, so titanic was
the forest. The trails led us up and up, under pitchy boughs
becoming fragrant, over needle-strewn floors still heavy with
darkness, disclosing glimpses now and then of gray light show-
ing eastward between the boles. Suddenly the forest stopped,
and we found ourselves on the crest of a great ridge: and
sheer before us stood the great cone of Shasta, cold and gray
and silent, floating on a sea of darkness from which even the
highest tree crowns did not emerge. Scarcely had we spoken
in the course of our ascent, and now words would be sacrilege.
Almost automatically we dismounted, letting the reins fall over
the horses' necks, and removed our hats. The horses stood,
and dropped their heads. Uncovered, we sat ourselves on the
dry leaves and waited.
It was the morning of the creation. Out of the pure stuff
of nebulae the cone had just been shaped and flung adrift until
24
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
a world should be created on which it might rest. The gray
light grew into white. Wrinkle and features grew into the
mountain. Gradually a ruddy light appeared in the east. Then
a flash of red shot out of the horizon, struck on a point of the
summit, and caught from crag to crag and snow to snow until
the great mass was streaked and splashed with fire. Slowly
the darkness settled away from its base; a tree emerged; a
bird chirped; and the morning was born!
Now a great nether world began to rise up out of chaos.
Far hills rose first through rolling billows of mist. Then came
wide forests of conifer. As the panorama arose, the mountain
changed from red to gold. The stars had faded out and left
the great mass to itself on the bosom of the rising world,—
the mountain fully created now and stablished. Spriggy bushes
and little leaves—little green-brown leaves and tender tufts of
herbs—trembled out of the woods. The illimitable circle of the
world stretched away and away, its edges still hung in the stuff
from which it had just been fashioned. Then the forest awoke
with calls of birds and the penetrating light, and the creation
was complete.—L. H. Bailey, The Realm of the Commonplace.
SUGGESTED ASSIGNMENTS
1. Read pages 1-7. Analyze selections 1 and 2 of the above
exercises and note carefully how the writers planned and
wrote them for the reader.
2. Read pages 7-16. Make a careful study of two artistic com-
positions in the above exercises or elsewhere.
3. Read a longer article in the College paper and compare it
with one of the essays in this text from the view-point of the
discussion in Chapter I. In both the planning and the
writing did the writers remember the reader ?
4. The student may extend this study to include any article or
essay or chapter in his favorite magazine or book.
CHAPTER II
GETTING READY TO WRITE
He who would write clearly, ought first to think clearly.—Goethe.
It is one thing to examine carefully constructed pieces of
writing, such as we have in the foregoing chapter; it is a
more difficult thing to select an attractive subj ect and develop
it in a pleasing manner. Unfortunately most students face
their greatest difficulty at the outset: they do not know how
to start. They are not, if you please, "self-starters on the
unblazed highway. The following incident is typical of
many that take place in my office during the first and second
weeks of the fall semester.
I had met the class for the first time and had made the
usual assignment for the first composition. This preliminary
paper would serve to introduce the student to the instructor;
it would also indicate how well the student could write. On
the following day a member of the class came into my office.
He didn't have a subject to write on, he said. In fact, he
could not think of any experience he had had that was worth
writing about.
To start him in the direction of himself, I asked what
work he had done during the last four or five years. He
replied that he had been in the high school most of that time.
I soon learned that he had not played on any of the teams
and could not discuss any athletic game from first-hand
experience. There was a literary society and a debating
society in his high school, but he had belonged to neither.
The school maintained a manual training department, but he
had taken none of its courses and had learned to make with
his own hands none of the things in woodwork that manual
training students make. I then asked if he had ever sold
newspapers, or magazines, or had worked in a printing shop,
25
26
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
photographic gallery, garage, or store. No, he was innocent
of all these.
It began to seem that his first judgment of himself had
been correct—that he had nothing to write about. Finally,
I asked where and how he spent his summer vacations.
Then came the realization, quite as surprising to him as to
me, that he had not thought it important to mention that his
father owned oil land in Texas, and that he had spent much
time during summer vacations with his father in that section
of the country. He admitted that he had become greatly
interested in the technical processes involved in prospecting
and boring for oil, building piping lines to and from the
refineries, and in the special machinery and devices for
carrying on the work.
Here was a wealth of live material that no one else in his
class knew and could write of at first-hand. As soon as I
assured him that "that sort of thing would furnish desirable
subjects for an English class, he began to write. Before the
end of the semester he had done no less than a dozen papers
on all aspects of the oil industry, from preliminary prospect-
ing to the marketing of the refined product, and for good
measure he had discussed in entertaining fashion such
"human interest subjects as the follies of the over-night
millionaires, and their craze for newer, bigger automobiles,
aeroplanes, and diamonds! In short, he had become an
amateur writer on a special, fascinating subject.
This is a typical experience. • Every class has in it some
one who has been employed in an unusual business or in-
dustry, or some one who has made or invented a tool or
machine, such as a wireless set. Frequently the class con-
tains one who has lived in some distant section of the coun-
try—on a ranch or "claim in the west, in Florida, in Maine,
or on the Great Lakes. Occasionally the class is fortunate
in having one who has traveled abroad, or perhaps one who
was born abroad and who can write at first-hand on many
subjects of human interest. Every class has its modern Tom
Sawyers and Huck Finns, who have peddled aluminum ware
or owned second-hand Ford cars. Then too, miscellaneous
GETTING READY TO WRITE
experiences are represented in every class—such as selling
hay in a furniture store, or hardware in a drygoods store,
or having smallpox during the last three months of the senior
year in high school.
The members of any class will gladly cooperate with the
instructor in furnishing a list of the work they have done
and of their other first-hand experiences. There is no better
way to recall this information, and to make it available for
both instructor and student, than to have a painstaking
though not long-faced autobiography written at the begin-
ning of the semester.
This emphasis at the outset on self-examination and self-
discovery as an aid to the student in his writing is to be
cultivated and continued throughout all his composition
work. John Burroughs has an essay on "The Art of Seeing
Things, which is well worth reading in this connection. A
writer not only must write on subjects he knows personally
and intimately, but if he is to write with enthusiasm, he must
write about the things he has done with his own hands, seen
with his own eyes, or heard with his own ears. The best
subjects to choose, then, are those closest at hand—those the
writer knows best and in which he has the most interest.
Given the necessary motive, he should actually wish to say
something, and be uncomfortable until he has said it.
The successful planning of a composition requires five
practical steps—(i) discovering the subject, (2) tabulating
the student's present information on the subject, (3) accept-
ing and rejecting the materials tabulated, (4) organizing the
materials accepted, and (5) arranging the order of topics.
We are now ready to consider these in order.
Discovering the Subject
Where to begin and how to begin—these are questions to
be reckoned with at the outset. The choice of the general
topic, as already agreed, is limited by the writer's knowledge
and interests. For instance, no one would attempt to write
on mining gold in South Africa if he knew nothing of the
28
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
subject or had no interest in discussing it. But in discover-
ing the particular subject he must also decide what part or
phase of the general topic he wishes to discuss, which will
be determined largely by the ultimate purpose the writer
has in mind.
Let us suppose, for example, that the general topic for
discussion is "A Student Council. Assuming that the
student knows this topic and is interested in it, what special
phase of it shall he discuss? He might explain to a college
class that knew nothing about student councils the method of
organizing one, and he might label his paper "How to Orga-
nize a Student Council. On the other hand, the purpose of
the writer might not be to explain the method of organiza-
tion; his aim might be, rather, to give the qualifications of
the members of a student council. In this case he would use
some such title as, "Who Should Be Elected Members of a
Student Council, or, "Qualifications of Members of a Stu-
dent Council. Still again, the writer might wish to show
the value of a student council as a means of securing repre-
sentative self-government among students and training in
practical citizenship. In this event some such label as "The
Value of a Student Council might serve him as a convenient
title.
Thus, whatever the general topic, if the writer is familiar
with it, he finds his task relatively easy at the outset to divide
it and narrow it down to suit his specific purpose.
Suiting the particular subject to the particular audience is
important. The matter of adaptation for the average stu-
dent in the average college usually means that the writer
must select subjects that will interest the members of his
class—those who meet three or four times a week in the
same classroom at the same hour with him. If he learns to
meet this test during student days, he should be able to adapt
himself to different conditions and circumstances when he
has left the college campus. A student should not find it
difficult to adapt himself to his class. In addition to the list
of special activities and interests given in his autobiography,
every student on the campus is interested in athletics, the
GETTING READY TO WRITE
gymnasium, eating and sleeping places, stores in which to do'
his shopping, theaters, class organizations and student gov-
ernment, and in the vigorous and abundant life that is insep-
arably connected with these interests. In fact, any class if
"scratched deep enough contains far more material of
human, vital interest to the class than can be used for sub-
jects in any one composition course.
Tabulating the Student's Present Information on the
Subject
The writer has a definite goal in mind, then, and he has
selected a definite point of view from which to attain this
goal; he is now ready to bring together the materials that
will enable him to develop his purpose. That is to say, his
next step is to put down on scratch paper whatever informa-
tion or opinion he has on the subject. Many things will
occur to him. He sets these down hurriedly and regardless
of their merit or the order in which they appear. Soon he
has a score or so of phrases and statements representing
ideas more or less directly connected with the subject he pro-
poses to present. The work of tabulating should continue
until the writer has fairly drawn out his mind on the subject.
Too much time, however, should not be given to this pre-
liminary step in the planning, because other ideas can be
added later as the plan develops and forms itself in the mind
of the writer.
Returning again to our specimen subject, "The Value of
a Student Council, we may tabulate the ideas as they come
to us until we have some such result as the following:
1. A student council provides representative student self-gov-
ernment.
2. The members of a student council constitute the governing
board of the student body.
3. Students gain an idea of how to vote in the election of coun-
cil members.
4. Students learn the value of choosing good representatives.
30
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
5. By learning what to expect of others the student learns
what will be expected of him if he were elected.
6. Students learn the qualities of good leaders.
7. The student body learns the meaning of good citizenship.
8. A student council gives training in self-government.
9. Students in college days learn the meaning of democracy.
10. Under student self-government discipline is made easier for
the administration of the college.
11. Students develop qualities of patience and sympathy towards
the administration in its handling of college problems.
12. Through the student council the student body learns to co-
operate with the school authorities.
13. Student initiative is developed.
14. Student responsibility is developed.
15. Loyalty to the college is developed when students have a
share in campus government.
16. Practice in self-government has a high educational value.
17. In a democratic country it is no more than right that
students should govern themselves.
18. Council members, as officeholders, learn to respect trust and
confidence imposed in them.
19. A student council will aid in developing college spirit.
20. A student body can petition and secure from the faculty
advantages that individual members could not.
21. Through a student council students can ask for the repeal
of old regulations that are against their interests.
22. Students do their work better in colleges in which there is
a student council.
23. Not so much time is wasted on student follies.
24. Vicious college practices are rarely known where responsi-
ble student councils exist.
25. A student council lessens the burdens of the college by as-
suming duties, such as finding self-help work for needy
students, which are usually done by the faculty or adminis-
tration.
26. A student council secures fairer treatment to all the stu-
dents, and prevents special privileges to the few.
27. A student council simplifies student government, thus elimi-
nating much that is bad in campus politics.
28. A student council unifies college activities.
GETTING READY TO WRITE
Accepting and Rejecting
The process of tabulating one's present knowledge of a
subject reveals not only the many facts and ideas which the
writer wishes to use in his paper, but also a few which he
can not or does not wish to use. That is to say, he is now
aware that the first step in his planning—that of discovering
the particular subject according to his purpose—was not
complete. He could not at the outset determine exactly
every fact or idea he could or could not use. He must now
make further rejections, at the same time that he is deciding
what he shall retain and develop into his composition.
Even a hasty examination of the above tabulated list re-
veals that Nos. 2 and 17 are no part of the subject, since they
state no "value of a student council. No. 2 attempts a
definition of a council; No. 17 suggests student rights in a
democratic country. A few others—for example, Nos. 5,
6, 7, 8, and 9—either duplicate or seriously overlap one
another in their meaning and scope. Exactly what to do
with these, together with one or two other doubtful titles,
cannot be determined until later when the writer divides
the subject and organizes the points in their relation to one
another. How shall we now proceed, and what shall we do
with the material that remains ?
Organizing the Materials Retained
A careful examination of the remaining tabulated state-
ments reveals that each of them falls under one or another
of three general headings: (1) the advantages of a student
council to students during their stay on the campus; (2)
advantages to the college in carrying on its work of educa-
tion; and (3) the training that a student council offers to
students in practical citizenship. For convenience we may
now begin to organize the points and to cast them into the
form of an outline, which has both the advantage of aiding
the student in clarifying his thinking on the subject, and of
32
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
furnishing him with a guide to follow when he comes to
develop his points into the written composition.
The three main headings under which the subject seems
to group itself may be used as the three main divisions in
the outline, thus:
I. Advantages to Students.
II. Advantages to the College.
III. Training given Students in Practical Citizenship.
Now the tabulated list may be examined further for minor
points, which may be used as the principal subdivisions of
these main divisions. Beginning with main division I.,
putting down what seem to be the chief advantages, our first
trial result may contain the following:
I. Advantages to Students.
A. Representative student self-government.
B. United action in conducting student affairs.
C. Scientific choice of student leaders.
In like manner main divisions II. and III. may be com-
pleted by writing under each what seem on further examina-
tion to be their appropriate subdivisions, as follows:
II. Advantages to the College.
A. Discipline is made easier.
B. Higher standards in scholarship are maintained.
III. Training given Students in Practical Citizenship.
A. Practice in voting.
B. Experience in office-holding.
C. Develops responsibility for established regulations.
D. Students learn to cooperate with others.
Our outline in its present form is a bit general. For the
analysis of the subject thus far has given us only the main
divisions, indicated by the Roman numbers I., II., III., and
their principal subdivisions, lettered A, B, C, and so on.
GETTING READY TO WRITE
We need now to analyze each of these principal subdivisions
further to see if they contain other more detailed subdi-
visions. This process of dividing and subdividing may be
continued so long as the subject contains separate minor
points into which it may be divided, or at least so long as it
is feasible for the writer to do so in view of the use he is
to make of his outline. However, the beginner should be
warned against creating artificial subdivisions that, upon
careful analysis, the topic is not found to contain. For a
composition of two thousand words, or less, the third or
fourth rank of division in the outline is adequate for prac-
tical purposes to represent careful thought analysis.
The outline above in its present form is not only general
in content, but the brief topical statements into which the
subject matter of the points is cast are also lacking in defi-
nite, exact statement. One way to make an outline more
definite, and therefore more serviceable to the writer, is to
write each main division or subdivision in the form of a
complete sentence with a subject and a predicate. Thus,
assuming that the division of points into other points, as
represented by the outline, is clear-cut, the fuller statement
of these points in complete sentences will make each step in
the writer's thinking more exact and searching. The full
outline below illustrates in a measure the advantages both of
detailed analysis and of the statement of the results of de-
tailed analysis in the form of complete sentences.
THE VALUE OF A STUDENT COUNCIL
I. A student council secures many advantages to students
that they could not obtain otherwise, in that
A. A student council provides representative student
self-government, in that
1. Students govern themselves with the advice
and consent of the faculty.
2. \They secure equality of opportunity in campus
Affairs.
34
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
3. They are able to prevent unfair practices on
the part of small groups:
a. In the elections.
b. In the management of student activities.
B. A student council provides for united action in the
conducting of all student affairs, in that
1. Council members act for and represent the
whole student body.
2. A petition presented by the council to the
faculty in behalf of some student enterprise is
a petition of all the students.
3. A student council unifies all college activi-
ties.
C. The choice of student leadership is more scientific,
in that
1. The leaders are nominated and elected in the
general popular elections.
2. They are chosen because of their recognized
qualities of leadership rather than for some
unmerited or sudden popularity.
3. They represent the entire student body, not
individual clubs or cliques.
II. A student council promotes the work of the college, in
that
A. Discipline is made easier for the administration of
the college, in that
1. Students, through their council, cooperate with
the administration in matters of discipline.
2. They are more patient and sympathetic to-
wards the administration in its handling of
school problems when they share in the school
government.
3. Student responsibility for the behavior of the
GETTING READY TO WRITE
campus is developed through a student coun-
cil.
4. Students are more loyal to the college when
they have a share in campus government.
5. Vicious college practices are rarely known
among students where responsible student
councils exist.
B. A student council promotes scholarship, in that
1. A student council aids in developing genuine
college spirit.
2. Students show a more business-like attitude
towards their work in college communities
self-governed by a student council.
a. They take their studies more seriously.
b. Not so much time is wasted on student
follies.
c. More time is spent on worthy student
activities.
A student council offers valuable training to students in
practical citizenship, in that
A. Student elections furnish practise in voting for the
student officers of the entire college community, in
that
1. The best candidates are to be nominated.
2. The best candidates are to be elected.
3. Students learn the qualities of good leaders
from the experience gained in previous elec-
tions.
4. They learn the importance of choosing good
representatives from the conduct in office of
previous candidates.
B. Membership in the student council furnishes experi-
ence in the responsibility of office-holding, in that
I. Members of the council learn to respect trust
and confidence imposed in them:
36
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
a. By their fellow students.
b. By the faculty.
2. They learn to work for the interests of the
whole college community, instead of the in-
terests of particular groups.
3. They work to defeat corrupt campus politics.
C. Citizenship in a democratically-governed college
community requires responsibility for the accepted
regulations, in that
1. Each college citizen, whether he is an officer
or not, is expected to obey the regulations
which he has helped to set up for the good of
all.
2. He is expected to encourage others to respect
and obey these regulations.
D. All students, whether council members or not, learn
to cooperate with other citizen groups in the com-
munity, in that
1. The student council itself is a student organi-
zation the very life of which depends upon its
cooperation with the college.
2. The very principle of the council itself is to
work in harmony and jointly with the college
in the solution of campus problems.
3. Students learn to cooperate with the officers
and citizens of the town or city in which the
college is situated.
The Arranging of the Divisions in Order
So far nothing has been said concerning the order of
arrangement of the divisions in an outline. What order
shall a writer adopt for the main divisions, and subdivisions,
of his subject? Which shall be put first? Which next?
Which last? And why? The order in which points are
GETTING READY TO WRITE
taken up can never be left to chance, for often the effective-
ness of a discussion depends largely on what sort of approach
a writer makes to his subject, and what sort of farewell he
takes.
Some subjects require that they be treated in the order in
which the events happened—the time, or chronological order.
If a boy wished to tell how to go to work to make a rabbit-
trap, he would use the time order for the arrangement of
his points. He would first determine the kind and amount
of materials he would need. Next he would need to cut
enough boards of the proper length and size. Then these
parts would have to be brought together and fastened, after
which the special features such as the door and the "setter
would have to be made and adjusted to the trap. Each
later step in the process depends on some preceding step.
His explanation of how to make a rabbit-trap to a city boy
who had never seen one would not be understood unless he
followed clearly, step by step, the necessary time order.
In building a house a carpenter likewise makes use of the
chronological or time order, and he who would explain what
the carpenter does must arrange his points in the same
order. First the foundation is laid; then the framework is
raised, after which the boards and roof are put on, these in
turn being followed by the plastering and other steps in the
finishing of the interior. President Wilson, in his great war
speech in which he recommended that the United States
enter the war against Germany, made use of the time order.
Before he recommended to Congress and to the nation that
we enter the war, he traced in order the events which led up
to the time of his recommendation.
The second order of arrangement is from the simple to
the complex—from what is easily understood to what is not
so easily understood. Suppose the writer of an automobile
manual wishes to explain the gasoline engine of the particu-
lar car he is selling. Suppose further that the new purchaser
has never owned a car before, and that he is not a mechanic.
He has seen gasoline engines and has heard much of what
to him was vague talk about engines, but he has never under-
38
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
stood them. The writer of the manual must first give him a
general description of the engine as a whole and the principle
on which it works. Then he may proceed to explain the
essential parts of the engine and their function—what they
do—after which he is ready to explain these parts in their
relation to one another, showing just how each performs in
the process of converting gasoline into power.
A slightly different form of the simple-to-the-complex
order of arrangement is that of proceeding from the known
to the unknown. Suppose the new purchaser of a car had
owned previously, say a Ford, and is now purchasing a car
of another make. He knows perfectly how to run a Ford,
but he does not know how to run the new car. Of course,
there is much in common between the process of driving a
Ford car and that of driving any other car. But the gears
differ, and the uses of the gears differ, so that the speaker or
writer must make use of what his hearer or reader already
knows in order to point out what he does not know. From
the known to the unknown would be the order also if one
were explaining a game of cards, or an athletic contest to a
friend who knew other games but not that particular one.
The new game could be explained by pointing out, first, its
points of similarity, and then its points of difference.
A third method of arrangement of the divisions of a sub-
ject is that of enumeration. In the treatment of some sub-
jects the writer may not be able to make use of the "time
order, or the "simple to the complex or "known to the
unknown order. In such a case he may enumerate a num-
ber of points to be covered in his discussion and in an order
that seems suited to both subject and reader. In the outline
"The Value of a Student Council, the nature of the subject
as well as its three main divisions seem to determine the
order of topics. A student council concerns primarily
students and faculty in their relation to the college. But
the phrase "student council suggests, first, student affairs;
therefore that appears first in the outline. The relation of
the council to the faculty and the college comes next. These
two have to do with life here and now on the campus; but
GETTING READY TO WRITE
there are permanent advantages to the students, after college
days. Thus there is a third, a special topic, which comes
after the others have been considered. And, of course,
another analysis of the subject might give a fourth or a fifth
division, the arrangement of which, for effectiveness, would
have to be decided in relation to the others.
The analysis and the arrangement of subjects like the one
just considered are likely to differ with different writers.
Suppose the subject, for instance, was the advantages of
attending a particular college or university. Certain aspects
of the subject would appear important to one writer, others
to another writer. One may wish to introduce or to con-
elude his discussion with a point which another would not
consider fitting. One thing, however, is important—the
enumerative order, like any other order of arrangement, is
not a matter of chance. The writer must make his subject
attractive to the reader at the outset; he must continue in a
way to retain the reader's good will and the interest secured
in the beginning; he must leave the reader pleased and stimu-
lated at the close. The order—even if the enumerative
order—is no small part of this effectiveness.
Characteristics of a Good Outline
1. An outline should show a clear-cut analysis of the sub-
ject—the divisions should not seriously overlap one another.
2. In dividing the whole subject into its main divisions,
the writer should see that the sum total of the divisions equal
and cover the whole subject.
3. What is true of main divisions is likewise true of sub-
divisions: their sum should equal or cover the larger divi-
sion to which they are subordinate, and they should not
seriously overlap.
4. There is no single subdivision of a point; if a point
can be subdivided, two or more smaller points will result—
never one!
5. Each statement in the outline should be a complete
statement—should contain a subject and a predicate.
4°
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
6. The use of proper connectives will assist the writer in
determining the relation of ideas to other ideas in his
analysis and division of the subject. The most common ex-
pository connectives are in that and that is; the argumenta-
tive, for and because; and the conclusive, hence and there-
fore.
7. For convenience and accuracy, the writer of an outline
should make use of a series of symbols, such as I, A, 1,
a, to indicate rank and importance of ideas. The main divi-
sions are represented by the Roman numerals, the next
highest by the capital letters, and so on in the order of im-
portance. (See the outline, "The Value of a Student
Council.")
8. The rank of an idea is also indicated by the position
the symbol occupies on the margin, similar indentation being
used for similar rank. That is, ideas of coordinate rank are
represented by symbols of coordinate rank, the symbols
being written under one another in a perpendicular position.
And no sentence in the outline must be allowed to extend in
the open margin to the left of its symbol.
SUGGESTED TOPICS FROM WHICH SUBJECTS
MAY BE DERIVED
(The student should cultivate the "seeing eye"—the
faculty of finding composition subjects from his obser-
vation and reading.)
A. Mechanical and Scientific subjects:
1. A Fountain Pen.
2. An Electric Door-bell.
3. An Electric Light Bulb.
4. A Telephone Transmitter.
5. A Telephone Receiver.
6. A Lightning Rod.
7. How to Cut a Stencil.
8. A Speedometer.
9. A Vacuum Cleaner.
10. A Fireless Cooker.
GETTING READY TO WRITE 41
11. A Storage Battery.
12. How to Make a Kite.
13. A Coffee Percolator.
14. A Dishwasher.
15. A Tire Gage.
16. An Oil Gage.
17. The Care of a Motor Car.
18. The Principle of the Gasoline Engine.
19. The Principle of the Aeroplane.
20. How to Make a Miter-joint.
21. A Force Pump.
22. A Vacuum Gasoline Tank.
23. Steel Pressure Cooker and Cold-pack Canner.
24. Electric Heater.
25. Hydraulic Press.
26. A Periscope.
27. Double Action Air Pump.
28. How to Make a Fire by Rubbing Sticks.
29. City Filtration.
30. The Arc Light.
31. The Barometer.
32. The Donkey's Love for the Companionship of
Horses.
33. The Persistence of English Sparrows.
34. The Horse Sense of the Horse.
35. Social Instincts of Sheep.
36. The Belligerency of the Blue Jay.
37. Bird Wars over Favorite Nesting Places.
38. The Attachment of a Dog for his Beggar-master.
39. Why "Cats and Dogs"?
40. The Bird Bath.
41. Birds I Have Seen at a Summer Watering Place.
42. The Fussiness of Wrens.
43. The Chivalry of Cocks.
44. The Government of Bees.
45. The Farmer and the Crow.
B. Subjects of Fact and Opinion:
1. How to Read a Newspaper.
2. Honor in Student Life.
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
3. Clubs in College: Their Social Value; Educational
V alue.
4. The Novels I Like Best.
5. Coaching a Team.
6. How to Prepare a Debate.
7. Social Entertainment of our College.
8. Thinking for One's Self.
9. Athletics: What They Are and What They Should
Be.
10. Athletics for Girls.
11. The Use of a Library.
12. How to Earn One's Way in College.
13. Advantages of Earning One's Way in College.
14. The Financial Cost of Going to College.
15. The Y. M. C. A. as a Community Center for Young
Men.
16. The Y. W. C. A. as a Community Center for Young
Women
17. What I Think of Our College Paper.
18. College Loyalty.
19. The Value of a Daily Schedule.
20. Football as Recreation.
21. Recreation for Every Student in College.
22. How to Prepare a Lesson.
23. Advantages of Higher Education.
24. How to Organize a Student Council.
25. Qualifications of Student Council Members.
26. Why the Long Vacation?
27. The Proper Way to Observe Sunday.
28. How Students Spend Sunday—A Survey of the
Campus.
29. The College and the Church in the College Town.
30. The Type of Minister I Like.
31. What Is College Spirit?
32. How to Get the Most Out of College.
33. Advantages of Attending the Summer School.
34. Why It Pays to Complete a Four-year College
Course.
35. Advantages of Co-education.
36. Advantages of the Small College.
GETTING READY TO WRITE
37* The Budget Ticket as a Means of Supporting Col-
lege Activities.
38. On Limiting Extra-collegiate Activities.
39. The Advantages of Dormitories for College Students.
40. The Proper Relation of Student and Instructor.
41. Should Chapel Attendance Be Compulsory ?
42. How to Read.
43. My Favorite Authors.
44. The Value of Final Examinations.
45. Students as Citizens of the Community.
46. The Value of a Debating Society.
47. On Cooperation Between Students and Faculty.
48. The Advisability of a Theater Owned by the College
for Presenting Plays and Motion Pictures.
49. My Private Library.
50. The Value of Literary Societies.
C. Subjects for Imaginative and Artistic Treatment:
1. Spending One's "Pin Money.
2. Things Seen on the Campus.
3. "Clio As We Like Her.
4. Hair Dressing.
5. Writing Letters.
6. The Spirit of Truth.
7. A Defense of Whistling.
8. On Giving Advice.
9. The Art of Going to Church.
10. My Church Pew
11. Winter.
12. Autumn.
13. The Spirit of Christmas.
14. The Matter of Selecting Christmas Presents.
15. Match-making in a Co-educational College.
t6. The Powder Puff.
17. On Recovering from Love Affairs.
18. Lip-sticks.
19. Prayers and Preyers.
20. The Storm.
21. Sunrise.
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
22. Sunset.
23. On Giving Gifts.
24. Borrowing and Lending
25. My Garden.
26. My Star.
27. On Improving Our Campus.
28. The Passing Mark.
29. A Fool's Paradise.
30. Beading Aloud.
31. Writing a Composition.
32. On Making Up One's Mind.
33. On Seeing One's Name in Print.
34. Zero Hour in a Cemetery.
35. Cats and Dogs.
36. Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind.
37. Hearts Are Trumps.
38. Keeping Up With the Times.
39. On Being Fat.
40. On Attending to Other People's Business.
41. Being an Editor.
42. Fair Play.
43. My First Speech.
44. Friendship.
45. Making Excuses.
46. Asking for a Raise.
47. The Weekly Bath.
48. An Apology for Idlers.
49. The Excitement of Having a Bank Account.
SUGGESTED ASSIGNMENTS
Read pages 25-27. Write a sketch of your life, emphasizing
the period from the beginning of the first year in high school
to the present, including all vacations. In this sketch the
student should tabulate every kind of work he has done;
every unusual experience he has had, whether at home or
away from home. To remind himself of any subjects he
may have overlooked, he should run through the lists of sug-
gested titles for composition subjects at the end of Chapter
II. The student's tabulated list, revised from time to time
GETTING READY TO WRITE
and supplemented by the lists in the text, will constitute the
chief source of future composition assignments.
2. Read pages 27-30. Find a subject from one of the topics
recorded in the lists in the autobiographical sketch, and tabu-
late your present information on it.
3. Read pages 31-40. Complete the outline plan for your sub-
ject.
4. Write the composition, following the outline as a guide.
5. Review Chapter II. Select for your next subject something
you have made or a piece of work you have done, making
sure that you know the details of the subject. Tabulate your
entire information on the subject.
6. Re-read the outline "The Value of a Student Council and
the points under "The Characteristics of a Good Outline.
Complete in good form the outline for the above subject.
7. (Before writing this composit:on, see Chapter III.)
CHAPTER III
WRITING THE COMPOSITION
A writer ought always to remember that what he has to
say—his idea—is the most important thing in writing; and
second, that his idea exists solely for the reader. Methods
and devices of whatever sort in writing, then, may be tested
by what result they have in bringing the writer's complete
idea home to the reader. The reader is the writer's other
half-self, so to speak; whatever succeeds in writing, sue-
ceeds because it is successful with the reader.
What to Do on the First Page
In the preceding chapter we considered the several steps
in the planning of a composition, and agreed that the outline,
which represents the student's best practical thinking on his
subject, is worth its effort in time and work. But after all
an outline is only an outline, a sort of architect's blue-print;
or to change the figure, a tourist's guide-map. It is a good
promise of things to come, but, like the architect's blue-print
or the tourist's guide, it must be followed and executed with
diligence if it is to result in a worthy fulfilment of the
promise. Assuming that the subject has been well chosen,
and that the thinking has been straight and clear in the
planning, how shall the student begin? He has his outline,
a pencil, and a clean sheet of paper. What is his first-page
problem ?
I. The first thing a reader sees and reads is the title.
Many readers decide by the title alone whether they will
read further or turn the page for something else. Bad titles
are of several sorts—among them, titles that are too broad,
46
WRITING THE COMPOSITION
and titles that are too long. It is common practice for the
freshman to select such headings as Athletics, Recreation,
Entertainment, Motion Pictures, Honesty, Education, and
the like. Obviously he does not intend to discuss these
topics in their entirety; if he did, he would need space the
length of a book to treat them adequately. He has been told
to write five hundred words on some subject of interest to
him, and he has selected Athletics as his title. The truth of
the matter is that he intends to discuss some part or parts
of the subject of football, but does not know quite what or
how much when he begins—except the five hundred words
he has been told to write. Little labor is required to select
the broad title, Athletics, and less to have his discussion fall
somewhere under this caption. That is to say, broad titles
usually indicate slip-shod work. The writer has not ana-
lyzed his topic with sufficient care to find a definite subject,
to set himself a specific task.
Titles that are too long are less common. They are also
less vicious; for although they are awkward, they are more
definite. One student labeled his paper, The Literary
Society as an Up-building Factor in the Student's Life.
Another student selected as her title, Why a Freshman
Student Should Remain in College through Commencement
Week. Here is one quite as definite, and a bit shorter:
What the Chautauqua Is Doing for My Home Town. Here
is another shorter still: Qualification for Membership in the
Student Council. The following titles, taken from fresh-
men papers, may be compared as to length, definiteness, and
appropriateness for short discussions: The Patron's Duty in
the Country School, Debating as an Aid to Clear Thinking,
On Exterminating War, How to Read a Lesson, Education
for Service, Cooperative Buying and Selling, A Few Inter-
esting Things about the Coyote, Shakespeare's Court Fools,
Why Is the Country Woman's Life Hard?, Class Gifts, On
Improving Our Campus.
Titles for compositions may be classified also with respect
to the directness of their relationship to the subjects they
label. Mechanical, scientific, and matter of fact subjects
48
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
frequently have titles that are distinctive for their accuracy
and literalness. They are not only definite and appropriate
in length, but they fit exactly the discussions which they
attempt to name. Such titles are: How to Make a Camp,
How to Catch Trout, Teaching a Boy to Swim, Explanation
of an Electric Door-bell, Explanation of a Fireless Cooker,
and explanations of a similar nature.
Other titles have only an indirect relationship with their
subjects. Story-writers are fond of choosing suggestive or
symbolical titles that pique the curiosity of the reader. Such
titles are artistic, rather than mechanical or scientific, and
have the power to lead the reader on. Illustrations of artis-
tic or suggestive titles may be seen in Stevenson's "El
Dorado, Chesterton's "On Sandals and Simplicity, Utter's
"Winter Mist, Broun's "The Fifty-first Dragon, Lamb's
"The Two Races of Men, and "Dream-Children, and
Shakespeare's "Much Ado about Nothing.
All titles, regardless of the subject matter they label,
should approach this artistic ideal. Titles, even of scientific
and mechanical compositions, may be so appropriately allu-
sive as to coax their readers into a perusal of their subject
matter. Such titles have the effect and power of suggestion,
which is peculiarly the illusion of art. The name of the
humblest composition should be definite, of appropriate
length, and if possible one that will compel the reader to
read at least the first paragraph.
2. But the title merely catches the reader's attention.
The opening sentences and paragraphs of the first page must
hold his attention. The reader is always human, usually in
a hurry, and never to be trifled with. Woe to the writer
who opens his first page with a dry definition, explanation,
or aimless introduction that shows him to be a person devoid
of terminal facilities! If he is wise, he will jump in medias
res; he will engage in as little of the tuning-up process as
his soul will permit. Directness in the opening words is a
virtue. The first four sentences, save one, of the first chapter
of John Macy's volume, The Spirit of American Literature,
are these:
WRITING THE COMPOSITION
American literature is a branch of English literature as truly
as are English books written in Scotland or South Africa. . . .
In literature nationality is determined by language rather than
by blood or geography. M. Maeterlinck, born a subject of King
Leopold, belongs to French literature. Mr. Joseph Conrad, born
in Poland, is already an English classic.
Directness and vigor are sure to win respectful attention;
the reader, like the Ancient Mariner, "cannot choose but
hear. Robert Cortes Holliday starts his informal discus-
sion, under the title, "The Fish Reporter, of the pictur-
esque humors of trade j ournalism with this paragraph:
Men of genius, blown by the winds of chance, have been, now
and then, mariners, bar-keeps, schoolmasters, soldiers, politi-
cians, clergymen, and what not. And from these pursuits have
they sucked the essence of yarns and in the setting of these ac-
tivities found a flavor to stir and charm hearts untold. Now,
it is a thousand pities that no man of genius has ever been a
fish reporter. Thus has the world lost great literary treasure,
as it is highly probable that there is not under the sun any
prospect so filled with the scents and colors of story as that
presented by the commerce in fish.
Other writers are clever in introducing their subjects
with a simple but fitting incident or anecdote. But this is
only a beginning. The little "story must be selected with
care, for it must remind the reader of the subject. Hamil-
ton Wright Mabie skilfully does this for his essay on
"Meditation and Imagination":
There is a book in the British museum which would have,
for many people, a greater value than any other simple volume
in the world; it is a copy of Florio's translation of Montaigne,
and it bears Shakespeare's autograph on a flyleaf.
Robert Palfrey Utter introduces his informal essay on
"Winter Mist with this bit of diversion:
From a magazine with a rather cynical cover I learned very
recently that for pond skating the proper costume is brown
5Q
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
homespun with a fur collar on the jacket, whereas for private
rinks one wears a gray herringbone suit and a taupe-colored
alpine. Oh, barren years that I have been a skater, and no one
told me of this !
No one who has stopped to analyze what he reads and
why he reads, will deny that novelty and originality in
introducing the subject count for a great deal.
3. But there is a third thing that the first page—some-
times the second—does. The writer, early in his composi-
tion, comes to a more or less definite understanding with his
reader as to what subject he is to discuss. Not infrequently
he makes a promise to his reader, so to speak, of what he
proposes to do. The title at least has given the reader a hint.
Usually in expository writing it does more. But soon the
reader must be reassured of the subject he is pursuing—he
is willing to be led but not blindly. Thomas Nixon Carver
in his essay on "The Work of Rural Organization gives
his reader this rather abrupt warning in the first sentence:
The purpose of this paper is to point out the need that now
exists for a better organization of rural interests and the diffi-
culties that must be overcome before that need can be fully met.
Huxley discussed in an essay the difficult subject, "The
Physical Basis of Life. In the first four paragraphs he
gave a number of illustrations of the startling nature of his
subject before he came to state his purpose in the essay,
which he then did in these words:
I propose to demonstrate to you that, notwithstanding these
apparent difficulties, a threefold unity—namely, a unity of power
or faculty, a unity of form, a unity of substantial composition
—does pervade the whole world.
An informal announcement to the reader of the author's
purpose, combined with directness in approaching the sub-
ject, is well illustrated in the first paragraph of O. W.
Firkins' essay, "O. Henry.
WRITING THE COMPOSITION
There are two opinions concerning O. Henry. The middle
class views him as the impersonation of vigor and brilliance;
part of the higher criticism sees in him little but sensation and
persiflage. Between these views there is a natural relation; the
gods of the heathens are ipso facto the demons of Christianity.
Unmixed assertions, however, are commonly mixtures of truth
and falsehood; there is room to-day for an estimate which shall
respect both opinions and adopt neither.
After the First Page, What?
In Chapter II we considered the necessity for planning
the subject before beginning to write, and the importance of
the outline, which is to be the highway over which the reader
travels. In this chapter so far we have considered the selec-
tion of a suitable title for the subject, and the manner of
introducing the subject. Having announced his subject, the
writer is ready to proceed with the points of his discussion.
If the outline represents his best thinking so far as the selec-
tion and arrangement of the points of his subject are con-
cerned, he will do well now to follow it.
A subject may be logically planned, and everything repre-
sented in the outline may belong to the subject, but it may
be so badly written as not to make the reader realize that
everything belongs there. That is, much depends on whether
the straight and clear thinking represented in the outline is
made evident in the writing. If the student will return to
Chapter I, to the essay on the "Courtship of Birds, he will
recall that Professor Thomson:
1. Planned to illustrate three chief modes of courtship
among birds—song, graceful movement, and combats of
rival males.
2. That he treats the first of the three chief modes in
paragraph one, the next in paragraphs two and three, and
the last in paragraph four; and that he concludes the dis-
cussion of the last point and restates informally the discus-
sion of the entire piece in the final paragraph.
3. That in the analysis of his subject he is not only keep-
ing on the highway, but that he also takes pains to make the
52
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
reader realize that he is moving forward from the discussion
of one point to another. This he does in three transitional
sentences, one for each of the three points, thus: Perhaps
the first place must be given to song—Secondly, there is all
the glamour of graceful movement—A third aspect of the
courting is seen in the combats of rival males.
But the three transitional sentences are not enough. He
must also direct the reader between each point in the discus-
sion, within the paragraph, by the use of transitional words
and phrases, showing also the progress of the treatment of
that point, thus in paragraph one: It must suffice here—And
what is one to say of the nightingale—In some cases. Simi-
larly in paragraphs two and three, four and five, as was
pointed out in Chapter I, transitional words and phrases
direct the reader.
Thus the successful writer marks the highway of his com-
position with "color-signs, with "arrows, and other direc-
tions for keeping the reader from getting lost at any sudden
turn in the course of the discussion. And the "color-signs
for marking the highway in English composition, as we
learned from the illustrations in Chapter I, and as any one
may learn from any piece of good writing, are transition
sentences, words and phrases.
In longer compositions, say at least two thousand words
in length, short transition paragraphs also are often used to
mark the point at which one main subdivision of the essay
ends and another begins. Usually the first half of such a
transition paragraph contains a concluding or summarizing
statement of the point just discussed; the second half of the
transition paragraph states the new point to be taken up,
and looks forward to what is to come, just as the first half
looks backward to what has already been discussed. For
example Mr. Firkins in his essay, "O. Henry, referred to
above, writes this transition paragraph in the middle of his
essay:
Thus far in our inquiry extraordinary merits have been off-
set by extraordinary defects. To lift our author out of the
WRITING THE COMPOSITION
class of brilliant and skilful entertainers, more is needed. Is
more forthcoming? I should answer, yes. . . . On these his en-
durance may hinge.
In shorter essays, however, the transition paragraph is
unnecessary, and should not be used. At most the transi-
tion sentence, as we have seen in Professor Thomson's
essay, which frequently is also the topic sentence, is enough
to mark the passage from one point to another in a dis-
cussion.
What To Do on the Last Page
The writer's problem on the last page is similar to that
on the first page, except that on the first page his business
was to get the reader's attention, to welcome him with a
friendly greeting; on the last page, he must send the reader
away satisfied.
i. The least the writer may do on his last page is to com-
plete his subject as planned. Inexperienced writers fre-
quently become impatient with their task and stop before
the end is reached. The result is that their compositions
close abruptly and in a manner unsatisfactory to the reader.
In his announcement the writer has made a definite promise.
When he quits and runs away before he has fulfilled his
contract, he has failed to keep faith with the reader. If it
does no more, the last paragraph should conclude the dis-
cussion in a natural manner and leave the effect of comple-
tion in the mind of the friend who for five or ten minutes,
or half an hour, has cast his lot for better or worse with the
writer. Thomas Nixon Carver concluded his discussion of
"The Work of Rural Organization with this paragraph:
We are attempting a comprehensive organization of the rural
interests in one selected county in the South to see what can be
done there in order to gain experience. We shall carry the re-
suits of that experience to other counties whenever we feel
sure of our ground. These are very modest beginnings, it is
true, and may be disappointing to some people, but, as I said
54
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
before, we are of the opinion that it is better to go slow than
too fast, and in the second place, it is better to study the ex-
periments which other people are carrying on than to attempt to
carry on many independent experiments of our own.
2. Some writers feel that their compositions should not
only be finished and concluded, but that they should be sum-
marized in addition. Certainly the long written discussion,
like the long speech, has covered much material which the
reader has not carried with him. For the writer to clarify
the whole at the end by repeating, perhaps in different lan-
guage, the more important things he has tried to present, is
no doubt to render a service to the reader. But the sum-
mary, like the introduction, must be written with as much
variety and originality as the writer can muster, lest in his
last word he lose the attention and good will of the reader.
For this reason, the writer of a short, informal composition
or personal essay would do well to think twice before he
attempts a summary of what he has written. He ought to
let the nature of his subject and its length and the occasion
determine whether or not to summarize. George Herbert
Palmer, in his excellent essay on "Self-Cultivation in Eng-
lish, both concludes and summarizes in his final paragraph,
the last one-fifth of which only is pure summary.
3. Good essays are written for stimulation quite as much
as for information. The author's attitude towards his sub-
ject on the last page therefore, as on all preceding pages, is
perhaps more important than the exact manner in which he
terminates what he has to say. The writer ends his discus-
sion, not as a closed book, but as a challenge to the reader.
The good essay makes the good reader, just as the good
reader makes the good essay, since so much depends upon
the free play of mind between writer and reader. Many
last pages have the effect of soothing syrup—they put their
readers to sleep. The good ending is a tonic, rather; it is a
stimulus to intellectual battle with the author. The student
of English composition could do no better than to read Mr,
Palmer's discussion of "Self-Cultivation in English, not
WRITING THE COMPOSITION
only for its last page but for the challenge it presents
throughout the essay.
The Revision of the First Draft
Usually the writer can remember best the demands of his
subject and audience, can write with more freedom and
spontaneity, if he writes his first draft rapidly. The indi-
vidual's working habits, however, will determine for him at
what rate of speed he can do his best work. If he keeps
before him the purpose to be attained, he can "drive on
through the larger divisions of his subject, omitting, if he
must, for the present such minor parts and details as do not
take shape immediately in his mind. The work of the first
draft should be fairly complete, however, before it is put
aside and other interests allowed to crowd in. After a lapse
of time the writer is a slightly different person and his point
of view is a slightly different point of view. For this rea-
son, he may experience some difficulty in harmonizing his
later with his earlier work.
Many promising compositions have been left in the crude
state, just when success was in sight if only their writers
had had patience and industry enough to revise them. A
student later discovers that it is poor economy to labor with
a subject, plan the composition, and then present to the in-
structor a hastily-written first draft that does not in any
way represent his best work.
But the revision should not be made until several hours
after the original draft is completed; better still if it can be
postponed two or three days. The slightly different point of
view which the writer will have when he returns to his com-
position will be an advantage. He can then criticize him-
self: he can see many things that need to be added and
many that need to be eliminated. The first thing he should
do in revising is to read through his entire paper, noting
gaps in the discussion to be filled in later, and indicating as
well points and passages that are out of harmony with the
whole and which are to be cut out entirely or greatly
56
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
changed. In the light of these notations, he is ready to
begin the work of real revising.
Revision should be done religiously and with severity.
One of the most difficult things for an amateur writer to
do is to "kill parts of his own writing. He has written
what appears to him to be perfectly good paragraphs and
sentences, and though they may be wholly beside the main
point of the composition, he will think twice and hard be-
fore he can make up his mind to run his pencil through
them. But he may as well learn in the beginning as later,
that nothing in a piece of writing is good that does not
form a necessary part of the whole. He should remember
that the best writers, those experinced and skilled in the
craft, or art, revise their works carefully two and three and
four times before they present them for publication. Amy
Lowell, who has compared the first drafts of famous poems
with the same poems in their finished form, says: "The
greatest poets are everlasting tinkers!' Woodrow Wilson
said once: "I never get through doctoring a manuscript. If
professional writers find it necessary to revise their compo-
sitions with such care, how much more is it necessary for
the amateur to revise what he proposes to be read.
Although in his first revision the writer is concerned pri-
marily with improving the development of his main points,
seeing to it that these are stated fully and clearly and
with such easy and correct transition that the reader is not
lost, he has also discovered and corrected many errors in
matters of detail. He should next give his manuscript a
second revision, primarily to correct these details, if possible.
He has probably misspelled some words, abbreviated others
that should be spelled out, omitted or misused punctuation.
He will find sentences that are not clear, because incorrectly
written, or because the choice and order of words and
phrases made him say something he did not intend. These
he will revise or rewrite.
Reading their compositions aloud has aided many begin-
ning writers in detecting errors and unpleasant phrases that
would not otherwise be brought to their attention. In this
WRITING THE COMPOSITION
way the ear assists the eye in making a piece of writing
more nearly what the writer wishes it to be. Moreover,
students who read frequently from the works of good
writers have acquired a sense not only for correctness but
for the fitting and expressive phrase—the better way of say-
ing what they wish to say.
Concreteness in Style
There is no more important consideration in writing than
the subject of concreteness in one's style. William James
wrote, "Immobility diminishes conspicuity. If he had
spoken concretely instead of abstractly he might have said,
"If Willie Jones will sit still and keep his mouth shut,
when he is playing hide-and-go seek, his playmate who is
'it' will not be so likely to see him.
The other day a card came to my desk, on which were
two statements, one by an American-born boy and the other
by a foreign-born boy. Both spoke concretely.
The American-born boy wrote:
My father belongs to the Sons of the Revolution; my mother
to the Colonial Dames. My forefathers were Americans in the
making. Every drop of blood in me holds a heritage of patriot-
ism. I am proud of my past. I am an American.
The foreign-born boy wrote:
My father was an atom of the dust; my mother was a straw
in the wind, to his Serene Majesty. The history of my ances-
tors is a trail of blood to the palace gate of the Great White
Czar, but then the dream came—the dream of America. I am
proud of my future. I am an American.
At the time of the death of Mr. Roosevelt, many edito-
rials were written in praise of his life and work. The editor
of the San Jose News, California, might have written:
"Colonel Roosevelt was a typical American, a very great
man, whose words and deeds will be remembered by many
58 SUCCESSFUL WRITING
generations of Americans. What he did say was this for
he spoke concretely: "Your deeds had the taste of raw meat,
your words were like great bellowing winds that come in,
rough and keen, from the ocean. You drove words and
phrases into our language with the primal force of a cave-
man hammering the earth with a club snatched from a tree.
In his essay "Natura in Minimis Existat, John Bur-
roughs devotes a good three-fourths of the space to exam-
pies and illustrations, which for the reader are so many de-
lightful pictures and stories of the truth of the author's sub-
ject. In fact, the point of view of the naturalist is the point
of view of any one who wishes to learn to write: (I) the
naturalist is a trained observer of nature and human nature
—a trained watcher of face and field and sky; (2) his habit
is to take note of and to reflect a great deal upon what he
sees and hears, the relations that things have to one another,
the system and harmony they present, interest him; and (3)
when he goes to write of these—and this is the main point
—he thinks and writes in terms of concrete pictures and
incidents—examples and illustrations that are the very life
of his subject.
Huxley, who wrote and spoke much to popular audiences
on difficult subjects in science, discovered that the path of
least intellectual resistance to the mind of the reader or
hearer was in the concrete illustration. In his essay on "The
Method of Scientific Investigation, he first states his point
and then remarks: "You will understand this better, per-
haps, if I give you some familiar example. In the middle
of his essay, after he has illustrated his first point by means
of the extended example, he states a second point and pro-
ceeds, as above: "I want to put the case clearly before you,
and I will therefore show you what I mean, by another
familiar example. What is true of Huxley's writings in
this respect is true of effective writers of all time. There
is no more concrete book in our language than the English
Bible; no more concrete writer than Shakespeare. A most
interesting experiment for the student would be the reading
WRITING THE COMPOSITION
of an entire book of the Bible or his favorite play of Shake-
speare, with the subject of the concrete style in mind.
Of the many scores of magazines printed in the United
States, a few have reached a million circulation; two or
three have reached two million or more. It is no mere ac-
cident that those magazines whose editors have demanded
for their readers concrete, "human interest articles and
stories alone have reached this enormous circulation. On
the other hand, there are distinguished magazines printed
in this country with no more than ten to twenty-five thou-
sand circulation. The man in the street has dubbed these
"highbrow magazines, and the reason is that they are dif-
ficult for him to read. The late Walter Hines Page, the
distinguished editor of the World's Work, makes this in-
teresting explanation: "In the execution of the task of
making a magazine, the greatest practical difficulty is the
difficulty of finding men who can write with simple direct-
ness and still put the glow of conviction and of 'human
interest' in their writing. An amateur writer, even a fresh-
man, who wishes to succeed even moderately, should take
his cue from the experiences of magazine readers and maga-
zine publishers.
SUGGESTED ASSIGNMENTS
1. Read pages 46-55. Write the first draft of the composition
called for under suggested assignment No. 7, at the end of
Chapter II.
2. Read pages 55-59. Revise the first draft of the above com-
position carefully and copy for class.
3. Bring to class a list of fifteen titles taken from magazine
articles of recent date (specify magazines). The student
should give his opinion as to the relative merits of these
titles, and in particular of two or three, the articles of which
he should read entire to determine their special appropriate-
ness. Compare with the titles of any essays read in this
book or elsewhere recently.
4. Examine carefully several essays in this text, and elsewhere,
6o
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
to see how different writers begin the first sentences and
paragraphs of their compositions, noting the methods used
to attract the reader and to announce to him the subject the
writer is about to present.
5. Examine carefully one or more essays in this text to see
how well the writer has kept on his "highway, and how
well he has shown the reader that he has kept on it. Note
also how the writers of these essays close their discussion
on the last page. Compare in these respects one or more ar-
tides in the College paper.
6. Examine carefully one or more essays in this text that are
especially concrete in their style. Compare the effect on the
reader with that of essays not so concretely written. Exam-
ine articles in the college paper to see to what extent they
are concretely written.
7. After the student has had practice in selecting and in or-
ganizing material based on things he has made or work he
has done, he should try some subjects based on facts
and opinions; and for suggestions for these he should re-
read titles under group "B at the end of Chapter II. He
must not forget, however, that every subject of whatever
sort must be based on intimate knowledge and carefully
planned before it is written.
8. When the student has developed a sense of structure and
good form in writing on scientific and mechanical subjects,
and on subjects of fact and opinion, he should then be en-
couraged to select subjects suited to more artistic treatment.
(See group "C at end of Chapter II.) Originality should
be striven for—whether he writes on one type of subject or
another—as the student is encouraged to select the subjects
and manner of writing which are best suited to him and to
the development of his personality.
CHAPTER IV
THE PARAGRAPH
There is some topic or subject about which all the members of
the thought revolve. Half the time this topic is a problem; a gap
we cannot yet fill with a definite word, picture, or phrase, but which
influences us in an intensely active and determinate psychic way.
Whatever may be the images and phrases that pass before us, we
feel their relation to this aching gap. To fill it up is our thought's
destiny—William James.
There are two distinct types of paragraph: the journalistic
paragraph, and the thought paragraph. These will each be
explained in this chapter. It is the author's belief that stu-
dents who are learning to write should base their writing
on the thought paragraph. This, as will be seen later, is
because the thought paragraph stimulates logical thinking,
and logical thinking is, for the beginner, the larger problem
of writing.
The Journalistic Paragraph
If the student will examine almost any newspaper, he will
find many of the news articles paragraphed according to the
same principle as the story on the following page, which
happens to be taken from the Detroit Free Press:
If the student will study the paragraphs of this news story,
he will find that there are ten sentences and eight para-
graphs. Seven of these paragraphs contain a single sen-
tence each. The fifth paragraph contains three sentences.
The reason for so many paragraphs is two-fold. The
average newspaper reader feels that short paragraphs fur-
nish easy and therefore interesting reading. The writer
feels that he can emphasize a larger number of thoughts
by using a larger number of paragraphs. Interest and
61
TWO MILLION AUTO
THEFT RING BROKEN
Four of Ring Leaders Are Placed
Under Arrest
Los Angeles, Nov. 25.—A huge theft
ring, involving the theft and disposition
of approximately $2,000,000 worth of
stolen automobiles and operating in Cali-
fornia, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah and
Texas has been broken up by depart-
ment of justice agents, it was learned
to-day when F. M. Sturgis, special agent
for the department of justice here, re-
turned from Wyoming, where he arrested
four of the ringleaders.
The men arrested are charged with
violating the Dyer act, which forbids
the transportation of a stolen automo-
bile from one state to another.
The center of the ring, according to
Agent Sturgis, was Casper, Wyoming.
Those under arrest there are Robert
Evans, now held at Cheyenne, a man
named Torbey and another named "Red
Duncan.
Sturgis left here for Wyoming after
breaking up a huge ring operating in
California. This ring transported al-
most 100 stolen cars across the border
to Mexicali, altered the numbers and
identification marks and shipped them
back to California for re-sale. Members
of this gang, Sturgis stated, are now in
McNeil's islands.
Sixty-eight of these stolen cars were
recovered, identified and restored to their
owners.
Another branch of the big auto-theft
ring reaches into Texas, where autos
are transported across the border to
Juarez and are bought by wealthy Mexi-
cans there.
"The rate of secret exporting of stolen
automobiles of all kinds averages 100 a
month, Sturgis stated.
THE PARAGRAPH 63
emphasis are thus the two principles upon which the jour-
nalistic paragraph is based.
If the student will now study this news story carefully,
he will find that the thought is not organized in careful,
logical order. Paragraph three repeats the last part of para-
graph one. Paragraph seven logically follows paragraph
five. Paragraph six and paragraph eight naturally belong
together; they are, however, separated by paragraph six.
There are, after all, but two parts to the thought: the
description of the theft ring, and the description of the
number and disposition of the stolen automobiles. If this
story had been written from the point of view of the
thought paragraph, it would contain but two paragraphs
instead of eight.
The Thought Paragraph
The student is now invited to study carefully the organi-
zation of the thought and the paragraphing of the following
essay from Huxley.
METHOD OF SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION
T. H. Huxley
The method of scientific investigation is nothing but the ex-
pression of the necessary mode of working of the human mind.
It is simply the mode at which all phenomena are reasoned
about, rendered precise and exact. There is no more difference,
but there is just the same kind of difference, between the men-
tal operations of' a man of science and those of an ordinary
person, as there is between the operations and methods of a
baker or of a butcher weighing out his goods in common scales,
and the operations of a chemist in performing a difficult and
complex analysis by means of his balance and finely graduated
weights. It is not that the action of the scales in the one case,
and the balance in the other, differ in the principles of their
construction or manner of working; but the beam of one is set
on an infinitely finer axis than the other, and of course turns by
the addition of a much smaller weight.
64
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
You will understand this better, perhaps, if I give you some
familiar example. You have all heard it repeated, I dare say,
that men of science work by means of Induction and Deduction,
and that by the help of these operations, they, in a sort of sense,
wring from Nature certain other things, which are called Nat-
ural Laws and Causes, and that out of these, by some cunning
skill of their own, they build up Hypothesis and Theories. And
it is imagined by many, that the operations of the common
mind can be by no means compared with these processes, and
that they have to be acquired by a sort of special apprenticeship
to the craft. To hear all these large words, you would think
that the mind of a man of science must be constituted differently
from that of his fellowmen; but if you will not be frightened
by terms, you will discover that you are quite wrong, and that
all these terrible apparatus are being used by yourselves every
day and every hour of your lives.
There is a well-known incident in one of Moliere's plays,
where the author makes the hero express unbounded delight on
being told that he had been talking prose during the whole of
his life. In the same way, I trust that you will take comfort,
and be delighted with yourselves, on the discovery that you have
been acting on the principles of inductive and deductive philos-
ophy during the same period. Probably there is not one here
who has not in the course of the day had occasion to set in
motion a complex train of reasoning, of the very same kind,
though differing, of course, in degree, as that which a scientific
man goes through in tracing the causes of natural phenomena.
A very trivial circumstance will serve to exemplify this.
Suppose you go into a fruiterer's shop, wanting an apple,—
you take up one, and, on biting it, you find it is sour; you look
at it, and see that it is hard and green. You take up another
one, and that too is hard, green, and sour. The shopman offers
you a third; but, before biting it, you examine it, and find that
it is hard and green, and you immediately say that you will not
have it, as it must be sour, like those that you have already
tried.
Nothing can be more simple than that, you think; but if you
will take the trouble to analyze and trace out into its logical
elements what has been done by the mind, you will be greatly
surprised. In the first place, you have performed the operation
of Induction. You found that, in two experiences, hardness
THE PARAGRAPH
65
and greenness in apples went together with sourness. It was so
in the first case, and it was confirmed by the second. True, it is
a very small basis, but still it is enough to make an induction
from; you generalize the facts, and you expect to find sourness
in apples where you get hardness and greenness. You found
upon that a general law, that all hard and green apples are
sour; and that, so far as it goes, is a perfect induction. Well,
having got your natural law in this way, when you are offered
another apple which you find is hard and green, you say, "All
hard and green apples are sour; this apple is hard and green;
therefore this apple is sour. That train of reasoning is what
logicians call a syllogism, and has all its various parts and terms,
—its major premise, its minor premise, and its conclusion. And,
by the help of further reasoning, which, if drawn out, would
have to be exhibited in two or three other syllogisms, you ar-
rive at your final determination, "I will not have that apple.
So that, you see, you have, in the first place, established a law
by Induction, and upon that you have founded a Deduction,
and reasoned out the special conclusion of the particular case.
Well now, suppose, having got your law, that at some time
afterwards you are discussing the qualities of apples with a
friend: you will say to him, "It is a very curious thing,—but I
find that all hard and green apples are sour! Your friend
says to you, "But how do you know that? You at once reply,
"Oh, because I have tried them over and over again, and have
always found them to be so. Well, if we were talking science
instead of common sense, we should call that an Experimental
Verification. And, if still opposed, you go further, and say,
"I have heard from the people in Somersetshire and Devonshire,
where a large«number of apples are grown, that they have ob-
served the same thing. It is also found to be the case in Nor-
mandy, and in North America. In short, I find it to be the
universal experience of mankind wherever attention has been
directed to the subject. Whereupon, your friend, unless he is a
very unreasonable man, agrees with you, and is convinced that
you are quite right in the conclusion you have drawn. He
believes, although perhaps he does not know he believes
it, that the more extensive Verifications are,—that the more
frequently experiments have been made, and results of the
same kind arrived at,—that the more varied the conditions
under which the same results are attained, the more certain is
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SUCCESSFUL WRITING
the ultimate conclusion, and he disputes the question no further.
He sees that the experiment has been tried under all sorts of
conditions as to time, place, and people, with the same result;
and he says with you, therefore, that the law you have laid
down must be a good one, and he must believe it.
In science we do the same thing,—the philosopher exercises
precisely the same faculties, though in a much more delicate
manner. In scientific inquiry it becomes a matter of duty to
expose a supposed law to every possible kind of verification,
and to take care, moreover, that this is done intentionally, and
not left to a mere accident, as in the case of the apples. And in
science, as in common life, our confidence in a law is in exact
proportion to the absence of variation in the result of our ex-
perimental verifications. For instance, if you let go your grasp
of an article you may have in your hand, it will immediately
fall to the ground. That is a very common verification of one
of the best established laws of nature—that of gravitation. The
method by which men of science establish the existence of that
law is exactly the same as that by which we have established
the trivial position about the sourness of hard and green apples.
But we believe it in such an extensive, thorough, and unhesitating
manner because the universal experience of mankind verifies it,
and we can verify it ourselves at any time; and that is the
strongest possible foundation on which any natural law can
rest.
The thought of this essay is simply and logically arranged
in three main divisions: the statement of the thought; an
example to illustrate concretely the thought; and a con-
eluding restatement of the thought. The first division of
the thought extends through the first three paragraphs; the
second division, through the fourth and fifth paragraphs;
and the third division, through the sixth paragraph.
The thought is stated in the first sentence of the first
paragraph: "The method of scientific investigation is noth-
ing but the expression of the necessary mode of working of
the human mind. The example is cited in the fourth para-
graph: "Suppose you go into a fruiterer's shop wanting an
apple . . . immediately you say you will not have it, as it
must be sour, like those that you have already tried. The
THE PARAGRAPH
67
restatement of the thought is given in the last paragraph:
"In science we do the same thing,—the philosopher exer-
cises precisely the same faculties, though in a much more
delicate manner.
Now that the student has mastered the thought of the
essay, he should examine the relation of the paragraphing
to the divisions of the thought. Strictly speaking, there are
but three main divisions of the thought; there are, however,
six paragraphs. The first division of the thought is broken
up into three paragraphs; the second, into two paragraphs;
and the third contains a single paragraph. The question
arises as to whether Mr. Huxley should have written but
three paragraphs—one for each division of his thought.
The answer is that he did write but three paragraphs, or
blocks of thought, but because of the length of the treat-
ment, he preferred to set his first paragraph down on the
page as if it were three paragraphs, and his second para-
graph as if it were two paragraphs. Otherwise, his para-
graphs would have been too long. Rarely does a writer set
down paragraphs which average longer than two hundred
words. If Mr. Huxley had developed the present essay to
twice its present length, he would perhaps have set down
twice as many paragraphs, without changing the three main
divisions of his thought.
It should be understood, then, that the thought paragraph
does have a definite relation to the main divisions of the
thought of an essay. This does not mean that the para-
graph must always be forced into line. It is not necessary
that it be exactly consistent with the thought, except where
the essay is sufficiently brief to allow for a single para-
graph for each main division of the thought.
The student is now ready to examine the internal organi-
zation of the thought of each of these paragraphs from Mr.
Huxley's essay. The first thing to notice is that the first
sentence of each paragraph states the central thought:
|[ 1. The method of scientific investigation is nothing but
the expression of the necessary mode of the working of
the human mind.
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SUCCESSFUL WRITING
2. You will understand this better, perhaps, if I give
you some familiar example.
3. There is a well-known incident in one of Moliere's
plays, where the author makes the hero express unbounded
delight on being told that he had been talking prose during
the whole of his life.
4. A trivial circumstance will serve to exemplify this,
jf 5. Nothing can be more simple than that, you think;
but if you will take the trouble to analyze and trace out into
its logical elements what has been done by the mind, you
will be greatly surprised.
6. In science we do the same thing,—the philosopher
exercises precisely the same faculties, though in a much
more delicate manner.
The second thing to notice is that the body of each para-
graph develops or explains the thought which is stated in
the first sentence. In the first paragraph of Mr. Huxley's
essay, for example, the thought is clarified by repeating it
from three or four different points of view. In the second
paragraph, the thought is explained by giving a familiar
example. In the third paragraph, the thought is impressed
by comparing with an incident in Moliere's "Bourgeois
Gentilhomme. In the fourth paragraph, the thought is
exemplified by describing a trivial circumstance. In the
fifth paragraph, the thought is made clear by analyzing the
logical details. In the last paragraph, the author again ex-
plains the original thought by summary and repetition.
The student who carefully studies Mr. Huxley's essay will
thus find an example of each of the three methods which are
generally employed by authors in developing the thought of
paragraphs: the method of repetition; the method of logical
details; and the method of example.
The third thing to notice is that the paragraphs are log-
ically related to each other. Mr. Huxley calls this fact to
the reader's attention by the use of the word, this, in the
first sentence of the second paragraph; by the use of the
word, this, in the first sentence of the fourth paragraph; by
the use of the word, that, in the first sentence of the fifth
THE PARAGRAPH
69
paragraph; and by the use of the words, the same thing,
in the first sentence of the last paragraph. Thus without
wasting words, the writer skilfully leads the reader from
one paragraph to the next.
It is thus seen that the paragraph has a definite begin-
ning; that is, the first sentence states the central thought of
the paragraph. This central thought is also clearly ex-
plained or illustrated in the body of the paragraph. Then,
the relation between the paragraphs is shown by the use of
transitional words.
The following student's theme is also an example of the
thought paragraph. There are five main divisions of the
thought and five paragraphs. In learning to write, the stu-
dent will find this length of theme most valuable. The cen-
tral thought is expressed in the first paragraph, and a single
paragraph is given to each division of the central thought.
BIRTHDAYS
Ida Lobb
Birthdays in our childhood mean as much to us as Christmas;
in our youth they are used for an excuse to have a party; in
middle life we take them as a matter of fact; and often in our
old age we forget about them entirely, or often remember them
only after they have passed. These facts were forcibly im-
pressed on my mind because of four birthday celebrations which
I attended during the month of May.
My little cousin, Glenn, who is six years old, had his celebra-
tion first. For several weeks he had been reminding us that
his birthday was coming "next week. Each day seemed to
him an age in his expectancy. At last the great day came.
Glenn was dressed in his best clothes, and we treated him as
if he were some distinguished visiting gentleman. I am sure
that no one passed within a hundred yards of him that day with-
out learning that it was his birthday. His party was the talk
of the children of the entire neighborhood. It was really a
most important event in Glenn's young life.
The next week I attended Irene's birthday party. Irene is
eighteen. She is a close friend of mine. This was her coming-
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SUCCESSFUL WRITING
out party, and you can imagine how very important the event
seemed to her. In fact, we were all dressed in our very best,
and were conscious of a new epoch in our lives. We entered
into the spirit of the occasion with all the enthusiasm of grown-
up children.
Then came Uncle Jack's celebration. Uncle Jack is thirty-
five. His birthday was distinctly different. Just the close re-
lations of the family attended. It was a surprise party, and if
it hadn't been, it is likeiy that there never would have been an
observation of his birthday at all. It only meant for Uncle Jack
one more of the same sort—and why should he make a great
noise about it.
Then on another day Grandfather came over to our house
to visit for the day. When the cake—crowded with innumera-
ble lighted candles—was placed on the table, Grandfather inno-
cently asked whose birthday it was. He was so old he had
entirely lost track of time, it seemed. Sure enough, he hadn't
thought of his birthday at all, but before the day was at an end
we did our best to bring it back to his mind. Even then, he
couldn't be quite sure whether he was eighty-eight or ninety.
"Why make such a fuss about nothing, Grandpa smiled.
"Why, don't you know I've quit counting birthdays years and
years ago?
Thus far, the student has examined related paragraphs;
that is, paragraphs which are component parts of longer
essays. He will now study the individual, unrelated para-
graph.
The unrelated paragraph has three parts: the beginning,
the middle, and the end. These parts are based on the divi-
sions of the thought. The beginning states the thought, and
the middle develops this thought, the same as in the related'
paragraph. The end summarizes the thought. Study care-
fully the following paragraph:
Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or
market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for
idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of per-
sonal identity. There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people
about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exer-
THE PARAGRAPH
7i
cise of some conventional occupation. Bring these fellows into
the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how they
pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity; they
cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do
not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own
sake; and unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they
will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they
cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they
pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to
furious moiling in the gold mill. When they do not require to
go to the office, when they are not hungry and have no mind to
drink, the whole breathing world is a blank to them. If they
have to wait an hour or so for a train, they fall into a stupid
trance with their eyes open. To see them, you would suppose
there was nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you
would imagine they were paralyzed or alienated; and yet very
possibly they are hard workers in their own way, and have good
eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of the market. They
have been to school and college, but all the time they had their
eye on the medal; they have gone about in the world and mixed
with clever people; but all the time they were thinking of their
own affairs. As if a man's soul were not too small to begin
with, they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of
all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless
attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not
one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the
train. Before he was breeched, he might have clambered on the
boxes; when he was twenty, he would have stared at the girls;
but now the pipe is smoked out, the snuffbox empty, and my
gentleman sits bolt upright upon a bench, with lamentable eyes.
This does not appeal to me as being Success in Life.—Steven-
son.
The first sentence expresses the thought: "Extreme busy-
ness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symp-
torn of deficient vitality. This thought is developed by con-
crete details concerning extremely busy people. The last
two sentences summarize the thought. By taking the sub-
ject of the first sentence and the predicate of the last sen-
tence, one has the complete thought of the paragraph: "Ex-
treme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market,
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SUCCESSFUL WRITING
does not appeal to me as being Success in life. This para-
graph is typical of all expository paragraphs in that it has
a definite beginning, a distinct middle, and a clear end.
The student is now asked to study carefully the following
descriptive paragraph:
We were now standing at a great altitude between two bays;
the wilderness of waters before us. Of all the ten thousand
barks which annually plow those seas in sight of that old cape,
not one was to be descried. It was a blue shiny waste, broken
by no object save the black head of a spermaceti whale, which
would occasionally show itself on the top, casting up thin jets
of brine. The principal bay, that of Finisterra, as far as the
entrance, was beautifully variegated by an immense shoal of
sardinhas, on whose extreme skirts the monster was probably
feasting. From the northern side of the cape we looked down
upon a smaller bay, the shore of which was overhung by rocks
of various and grotesque shapes; this is called the outer bay, or,
in the language of the country, Prai do mar de fora: a fearful
place in seasons of wind and tempests, when the long swell of the
Atlantic pouring in, is broken into surf and foam by the sunken
rocks with which it abounds. Even in the calmest day there is a
rumbling and a hollow roar in that bay which fill the heart with
uneasy sensations.—Borrow.
The beginning is expressed in the first sentence: "We
were now standing at a great altitude between two bays;
the wilderness of waters before us. This gives the reader
a general view of the scene. The body of the paragraph
sketches in the concrete details of this scene. The last sen-
tence sums up the impression by expressing the feeling
which one experiences in the presence of this scene. This
paragraph is typical of the descriptive paragraph. The
divisions are perhaps less clearly marked than in the exposi-
tory paragraph, and yet they are quite distinct.
A final word is necessary to impress the fact that writing
—if it is to amount to anything—must be based on clear
thinking. And clear thinking naturally makes use of the
thought paragraph, since the paragraph directs the eye of
the reader to the natural divisions of the thought.
THE PARAGRAPH
73
SUGGESTED ASSIGNMENTS
1. Study your College paper or your local daily paper, and
bring to class two or three examples of journalistic para-
graphing. Show how each story could be rewritten from
the point of view of the thought paragraph.
2. Study carefully two or three essays from this text, and ex-
plain the paragraphing.
3. Write single paragraphs to illustrate the internal organiza-
tion of the individual, unrelated paragraph.
4. Write single paragraphs to illustrate the various methods of
developing the paragraph: the method of repetition; the
method of illustration; and the method of concrete details.
CHAPTER V
THE SENTENCE 1
Whoever would intelligently compose sentences must know, in
deciding what effect he would produce, both what he would denote
and what he would connote.—Barrett Wendell.
The thing for the student to remember first, last, and all
the time is that a sentence is simply an invention of lan-
guage to enable a person to express accurately a thought.
In other words, a sentence is simply a "thought box"; it
contains a single thought. It is true, also, that without a
sentence, one cannot express a thought. If the student is
to express a thought accurately, therefore, he must under-
stand the principles of sentence structure.
The Structure of the Sentence
The fundamental principle of sentence structure is that
a sentence must contain a clause; without a clause, there
can be no sentence. To understand what is meant by a
clause, the student needs to understand the following facts:
a clause must contain a subject and a predicate. The sub-
ject must always be a substantive,—that is, a noun or a pro-
noun, or some phrase or clause used as a noun. The predi-
cate must always contain one of the principal parts of a
verb. (If the student does not understand what is meant
by the term, substantive, or by the term, principal parts of
a verb, he should refer immediately to a text-book on
grammar.) Examples of clauses follow; these are, of
course, sentences:
1 This chapter is written not only to give the student a clear
understanding of the subject for his own use, but also as an illus-
tration for the prospective teacher of a method of presenting the
subject to pupils in the upper grades and in the high school.
74
THE SENTENCE
75
John runs.
He walked.
To run is pleasant.
Whatever is is right.
Sentences are classified upon the basis of the number of
clauses which they contain. A sentence may contain one
clause, or more than one clause. If it contains but one
clause, it is classified as a simple sentence; if more
than one clause, either as a complex or as a compound
sentence.
The Simple Sentence
The simple sentence contains a single independent clause.
This may be modified either by words or by phrases or by
both. The student should study carefully the following
simple sentences. The first three examples illustrate the
single independent clause and its modifiers. Sentences four
and five illustrate the fact that each element of the clause
as well as each modifier may be compounded without chang-
ing the classification of the sentence.
Mary ran.
Blue-eyed Mary ran to her mother.
Blue-eyed Mary, of happy disposition, ran to her mother cry-
ing for sympathy.
Mary and John ran and skipped.
Mary and John ran and skipped with laughter and singing to
school and to their, home again and again.
The Complex Sentence
The complex sentence contains a single independent
clause the same as the simple sentence. This clause, how-
ever, must be modified by one or more dependent clauses.
It may also be modified by words and phrases, the same as
the simple sentence.
To understand the complex sentence, it is necessary to
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SUCCESSFUL WRITING
understand the three distinct relationships which may exist
between the independent clause and the dependent clause or
clauses. The first relationship is that the dependent clause
merely limits or explains the thought of the independent
clause in the same way that the word and phrase modifiers
do in the simple sentence. This sort of dependent clause
may be either an adjective or an adverbial modifier. The
following examples will illustrate this use sufficiently:
Mary, who had blue eyes, ran.
Blue-eyed Mary, who had a happy disposition, ran.
Mary ran when she was frightened.
As far as the thought is concerned, this sort of complex
sentence is exactly the same as the simple sentence. The
only difference is that one or more of the modifiers must be
a dependent clause instead of a word or phrase.
The second relationship is that in which the subordinate
clause is used as a noun. In this relationship the subordi-
nate clause may be used either as the subject of the verb;
or as the object of the verb; or in apposition with another
noun; or as the object of a preposition. The following sen-
tences will illustrate these uses:
Whatever is is right.
Mary regrets that she was frightened.
The problem, why Mary was so frightened, is interesting.
Mary's happiness depends upon when she can go back to
school.
The third relationship is that in which the thought of
the independent and the dependent clauses are in the rela-
tionship of cause and effect. The following sentence is a
typical example:
I brought my umbrella because it was raining.
Students often express this sort of thought in a careless,
slipshod manner by a "so or an "and so construction.
THE SENTENCE
77
The following is a common example of this faulty construe-
tion. It is given in order that it may be avoided.
It was raining so I brought my umbrella.
The Compound Sentence
The compound sentence differs from the simple and com-
plex sentence in that it contains two or more coordinate
independent clauses. In the complex sentence, one clause is
always subordinate to the other; in the compound sentence,
the clauses are of equal importance. The student must not,
however, become confused, and as a result, think that the
compound sentence contains as many different thoughts as
there are independent clauses. The fact is that while the
clauses are of equal value, they express parts of the same
thought, and not individual thoughts. The student who mis-
takes the real meaning of the compound sentence is prone to
write as follows.
I got up and I put on my clothes and I washed my face and I
went to breakfast and I went to classes and I went to dinner
and I went to classes again and I went to basketball practice
and I went to supper and . . . and . . . and . . .
But this is not a sentence. This is rather a string of beads;
the only limit to the number of beads is the length of the
string. Remember then, above all things else, that the com-
pound sentence must express but a single thought—a
thought, if you will, which contains a number of distinct
parts, but, nevertheless, a single thought.
To understand the compound sentence, it is necessary to
understand the various relationships which may exist
between the coordinate clauses. The seven following rela-
tionships are common.
i. The sentence in which the various clauses contribute
the individual details which, taken together, create a single
impression. This kind of sentence is common in descriptive
writing.
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SUCCESSFUL WRITING
The winds go to every tree, fingering every leaf and branch
and furrowed bole; not one is forgotten; the Mountain Pine
towering with outstretched arms on the rugged buttresses of
the ice peaks, the lowliest and most retiring tenant of the dells;
they seek and find them all, caressing them tenderly, bending
them in lusty exercise, stimulating their growth, plucking off a
leaf or a limb as required, or removing an entire tree or grove,
now whispering and cooing through the branches like a sleepy
child, now roaring like the ocean; the winds blessing the forests,
the forests the winds, with ineffable beauty and harmony as the
sure result.—John Muir.
2. The sentence in which the thought in the first clause is
expressed in general terms, and that of the other gives a
concrete example of this thought. The Bible is the best
text-book when it comes to this sort of sentence, although
modern authors furnish many interesting examples of it.
In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the proc-
ess itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat
over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the
perusal, our minds filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of
images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought.—Steven-
son.
Consider the lilies of the field how they grow; they toil not,
neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon
in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.—The Bible.
3. The sentence in which the thought of the one clause
is in contrast to that of the other. This sort of sentence is
often called the "balanced sentence.
The Red-blood sees nothing; but the Mollycoddle sees
through everything. The Red-blood joins societies; the Molly-
coddle is a non-joiner. . . . The whole structure of civilization
rests on the foundations laid by Mollycoddles; but all the build-
ing is done by Red-bloods. ... In his lifetime the Mollycoddle
may be the slave of the Red-blood; but after his death, he is
the master, though the Red-blood know it not.—Lowes Dickin-
son.
THE SENTENCE
79
4. The sentence in which the thought of the one clause
repeats the thought of the other, though, of course, the
thought in each clause is presented from a different angle.
There never was a man of less pretension; the intoxicating
presence of an ink bottle, which was too much for the strong
head of Napoleon, left him sober and light-hearted; he had no
shade of literary vanity; he was never at trouble to be dull.—
Stevenson.
5. The sentence in which the thought in the one clause is
in alternation with the other.
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the
one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one and de-
spise the other.—The Bible.
6. The sentence in which the thought of one clause is a
consequence or an inference from the other.
Wisdom is the principal thing; therefore get wisdom.—The
Bible.
7. The sentence in which the first clause makes a general
statement, and the following clauses enumerate the details
of this statement.
The novel of character has this difference from all others:
that it requires no coherency of plot, and for this reason, as in
the case of Gil Bias, it is sometimes called the novel of adven-
ture.—Stevenson.
The Thought Expressed in the Sentence
As was explained at the beginning of this chapter, a sen-
tence is an invention of language to enable a person to
express accurately a thought. Throughout the discussion,
the fact has been emphasized that a sentence must contain a
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SUCCESSFUL WRITING
single thought. It now becomes necessary to explain more
fully the relation of the thought to the sentence.
In the simple sentence, the kernel of the thought must be
placed in the independent clause. The modifiers of this
clause must contribute to the accurate expression of this
kernel of thought. Let us examine again the third sentence
which was given earlier in this chapter as an example of the
simple sentence.
Blue-eyed Mary of happy disposition ran to her mother cry-
ing for sympathy.
The independent clause is
Mary ran.
The simplest expression of the thought is,
Mary ran to her mother crying for sympathy.
The question now arises whether Mary's blue eyes and her
happy disposition have anything to do with the thought of
the independent clause. If they do not, they should be
omitted from the sentence. It thus becomes clear that a
sentence may be grammatical and yet may be faulty from
the point of view of the thought which is expressed. One
can, for example, take the sentence which we have just
examined, and add any number of grammatical modifiers
until the kernel of the thought is lost in a bushel of chaff.
Blue-eyed, golden-haired, pretty, waxen-face Mary of six-
teen summers and of five feet three and of happy disposition
and with a freckled nose, though not without a spark of fire,
ran like a gazelle to her sleeping mother, a woman one hundred
and ten years old and a stern old lady into the bargain, for
sympathy.
This extravagant example should, then, show that each
modifier in the simple sentence must not alone be gram-
THE SENTENCE
81
matical, but that it must contribute definitely to the accurate
expression of the thought of the independent clause.
In expressing a thought in a complex sentence, the prob-
lem is essentially the same as that of the simple sentence.
All the modifiers, including the dependent clauses, must
contribute definitely to the accurate expression of the
thought of the independent clause. The student is especially
warned against using a loose compound sentence to express
a thought which rightfully belongs in a complex sentence.
The following are common examples:
(Wrong) I was in Chicago and I heard McCormick sing.
(Correct) While I was in Chicago I heard McCormick sing.
(Wrong) It was snowing so I wore my overcoat.
(Correct) As it was snowing I wore my overcoat.
In expressing a thought in a compound sentence, the
student needs to be warned constantly against stringing
loosely related thoughts together as if they were beads on a
string. The following sentences are examples of faulty
loose compound sentences:
The students are very happy in their work and the hardest
lessons are learned in a short time.
The lesson was hard and John was a dull student and it took
him five hours to get his lesson.
The streams abound in fish and I have actually seen some
brook trout which weigh five pounds and I caught one last
summer which weighs—on the scales, mind you—a pound and
fifteen ounces.
Parallel Construction
Parallel construction simply means that the various parts
of compound elements within the sentence are phrased simi-
larly, for the purpose of making the thought clear to the
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reader. In compound sentences, the coordinate independent
clauses are likewise phrased similarly.
Since this is true, it will be necessary for the student first
of all to understand what is meant by a compound element.
The following sentence will illustrate this:
Mary and John ran and skipped.
Mary and, John is a compound element (subject) ; ran and
skipped is a compound element (predicate). These elements
illustrate in its simplest form what is meant by parallel con-
struction. John and Mary are each proper nouns and each
is in the nominative case. Ran and skipped are each verbs
in the past tense. It is obviously wrong, because it is so
openly a violation of parallel construction, to write:
Mary's and John runs and skipped.
The following sentence will illustrate more fully the dif-
ferent problems which arise in writing sentences according
to the principle of parallel construction.
1. College football teaches a man obedience, to think in-
stantly, and how to cooperate with others.
In this sentence, the compound element is a compound
objective element. Obedience, to think, and how to cooperate
are the coordinate parts of this compound element. They
should, therefore, be phrased similarly.
College football teaches a man to be obedient, to think in-
stantly and to cooperate with others.
To be, to think, and to cooperate are phrased similarly.
2. The class met under the trees and a very pleasant hour
was had by all.
In this sentence, the compound element is composed of
the two independent clauses of the sentence. Class met and
THE SENTENCE
83
time was had are the coordinate parts of the clauses. These
are not phrased similarly; one verb is in the active voice and
the other is in the passive voice. Notice the improvement
when the structure is made parallel.
The class met under the trees and enjoyed a very pleasant
hour.
3. To study and tennis are my chief recreations.
In this sentence, the compound element is the subject.
To study and tennis are the coordinate parts. One is an
infinitive and the other a noun. Notice the improvement
when they are both phrased similarly:
Study and tennis are my chief recreations.
4. Having made everything ready and as the weather was
just to our liking, we decided to start deer hunting immediately.
In this sentence, the subordinate modifiers are coordinate.
Having made and as the weather was are not phrased simi-
larly. Notice the improvement with the change in phrasing:
As we had everything in readiness and as we were especially
pleased with the weather, we decided to start deer hunting im-
mediately.
But enough of faulty examples. It is perhaps more
profitable to study examples of parallel construction from
recognized prose writers. Turn back then and analyze care-
fully the parallel structure in the examples given under the
compound sentence, and then study carefully the following
paragraphs.
Religion apart, they are an unreverential people. I do not
mean irreverent,—far from it; nor do I mean that they have
not a great capacity for hero worship, as they have many a
time shown. I mean that they are little disposed, especially in
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public questions—political, economical, or social—to defer to
the opinions of those who are wiser or better instructed than
themselves. Everything tends to make the individual independ-
ent and self-reliant. He goes early into the world; he is left
to make his way alone; he tries one occupation after another if
the first or second venture does not prosper; he gets to think
that each man is his own best helper and adviser. Thus he is
led, I will not say, to form his own opinions, for even in America
few are those who do that, but to fancy that he has formed
them, and to feel little need of aid from others towards cor-
recting them. There is, therefore, less disposition than in Eu-
rope to expect light and leading on public affairs from speakers
or writers. Oratory is not directed towards instruction, but
towards stimulation. Special knowledge, which commands def-
erence in applied science or in finance, does not Command it in
politics, because that is not deemed a special subject, but one
within the comprehension of every practical man. Politics is,
to be sure, a profession, and so far might seem to need pro-
fessional aptitudes. But the professional politician is not the
man who has studied statesmanship, but the man who has prac-
ticed the art of running conventions and winning elections.—
Bryce.
What is a trust? It is a combination of capital, designed to
simplify and unify business, or a combination of labor, designed
to simplify and unify industry. It is easy to see, therefore, that
there can be good trusts and bad trusts, just as there can be
good men and bad men. A trust is a good trust when it per-
forms the work for which it is organized, and produces better
goods at cheaper prices, and delivers them to the consumer more
conveniently than a dozen different concerns could do. The
consumer is the sovereign factor. The well-being of the masses
is the result of every industrial development that endures.—
Beveridge.
Punctuation
Punctuation is an invention for the purpose of guiding
the eye in its effort to analyze the thought of the sentence.
Its use in the simple and in the complex sentence is to guide
the eye to the kernel of the thought as expressed in the inde-
THE SENTENCE
85
pendent clause, and to enable the eye easily to distinguish
between the independent clause and its modifiers.
Punctuation of the Simple and the Complex Sentence
In the simple and in the complex sentence there are two
different kinds of punctuation: end punctuation; and internal
punctuation. End punctuation consists either of a period, an
interrogation point, or an exclamation point. One or the
other of these is always placed at the end of the sentence.
Internal punctuation is made up almost entirely of the
comma, although the semicolon and the colon are not infre-
quently used.
The comma is used in two ways: singly and in pairs.
The comma is used singly either to separate modifiers which
come before the subject of the independent clause, or else
to separate modifiers which come after the predicate of the
independent clause. These uses of the comma are intended
to make it easy for the reader to find the independent clause,
and hence easy to analyze the thought of the sentence. The
following sentences from Stevenson will sufficiently illustrate
these uses:
Close upon the back of my discovery of Whitman, I came
under the influence of Herbert Spencer.
When you see no good, silence is best.
There are seasons when the imagination becomes somewhat
tranced and surfeited, as it is with me this morning.
I take pleasure in calling the dramatic novel by that name,
because it enables me to point out by the way a strange and
peculiarly English misconception.
The comma is also used singly to separate the parts of a
compound element which together form a series. The fol-
lowing examples from Stevenson will illustrate this use:
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One place suggests work, another idleness, a third early
rising and long rambles in the dew.
The effect of night, of any flowing water, of lighted cities,
of the peep of day, of ships, of the open ocean, calls up in the
mind an army of anonymous desires and pleasures.
Commas are used in pairs to separate modifiers which
come between the subject and the predicate of the independ- •
ent clause, from the independent clause. The parenthesis
and the dash may be used in the place of the pair of commas
for the same purpose, when the modifier is particularly
parenthetical. The following examples from Stevenson'
illustrate this use:
The gift of reading, as I have called it, is not very common.
A human truth, which is always very much a lie, hides as
much of life as it displays.
The desire for knowledge, I had almost added the desire for
meat, is not more deeply seated than this demand for fit and
striking incident.
The only hint that is given as to his physical man—I speak
for myself—is merely shocking.
This stroke of art (let me call it so) consists in casting the
Queen as an old woman.
Commas are also used in pairs to separate parenthetical
words or phrases, wherever they happen to come within the
sentence. The parenthesis and the dash are also used for
this same purpose when the parenthetical nature of the
modifier is especially marked. The following examples
from Stevenson will illustrate this usage:
We are not, above all, to look for faults.
Here, then, is work worth doing and worth trying to do well.
THE SENTENCE
87
I have made it my business to know (as far as my endurance
would support me) from a sincere interest in human nature and
the art of letters.
To make a character at all—so to select, so to describe a few
facts, a few speeches, perhaps (though this is quite superfluous)
a few details of physical appearance, so that these shall all co-
here and strike in the reader's mind a common note of person-
ality—there is no more delicate enterprise.
The Punctuation of the Compound Sentence
The compound sentence is punctuated in exactly the same
manner as the simple sentence and the complex sentence,
with one addition: the punctuation shows the dividing line
between the independent clauses. Each member of the com-
pound sentence is punctuated in itself in exactly the same
way as the simple and complex sentence, because each inde-
pendent clause, when analyzed by itself, is either a simple
or a complex sentence.
The punctuation that is used to separate the independent
clauses of the compound sentence is either the comma, the
semicolon, or the colon. The comma is used when the
sentence is short, and when the one clause follows the other
closely in thought, and when the codrdinate conjunction is
used between the independent clauses. When the sentence
is long, or when the conjunction is omitted, the semicolon is
nearly always used. The following examples from Steven-
son will illustrate these uses:
The stupid reader will only be offended, and the clever reader
lose the scent.
It is not merely bad English, or bad style; it is abominably
bad narrative besides.
Fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child; it is
here that he changes the atmosphere and tenor of his life; and
when the game so chimes with his fancy that he can join in it
with all his heart, when it pleases him with every turn, when
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he loves to recall it and dwells upon its recollection with entire
delight, fiction is called romance.
No art produces illusion; in the theatre we never forget that
we are in the theatre; and while we read a story, we sit waver-
ing between two minds, now merely clapping our hands at the
merit of the performance, now condescending to take an active
part in fancy with the characters.
The colon is used between the independent clauses when
the first independent clause expresses a general fact, and
when the succeeding clauses enumerate the details of the
general fact. The following examples, again from Steven-
son, will illustrate this use:
This last is the triumph of romantic story telling: when the
reader consciously plays at being the hero, the scene is a good
scene.
The novel of character has this difference from all others:
that it requires no coherency of plot, and for this reason, as in
the case of Gil Bias, it is sometimes called the novel of adven-
ture.
This discussion has described punctuation as an attempt
to clarify the thought of the sentence. In the study of the
sentence, the student should first master the clause, and the
relation of the independent clause to the other parts of the
sentence. He should then use punctuation for the purpose
of clearly showing the relationship of the parts of the
thought within the sentence. If he will base his knowledge
of the sentence upon reason, and not merely upon memory,
he will be on the highway to success in mastering the funda-
mental problems of writing.
SUGGESTED ASSIGNMENTS
l. Analyze a number of sentences from different essays in this
text. Explain whether each is a simple, a complex, or a
THE SENTENCE
89
compound sentence. Determine the independent clause, and
the relation of this clause to the other parts of the sentence.
2. From various essays in this text, explain the punctuation of
any number of assigned sentences.
3. Study the sentence structure from your College paper or
from your local daily paper. Make a list of the faulty loose
sentences that you find, and suggest how each sentence may
be improved. Also note carefully the faulty punctuation.
4. Make a list in your note-book of your own most common
errors in sentence structure and punctuation, and see how
quickly you can eliminate these from your writing.
CHAPTER VI
WORDS
For many a young person, his first discovery that words are living
powers, are the vesture, yea, even the body, which thoughts weave
for themselves, has been like the dropping of scales from his eyes,
like the acquiring of another sense, or the introduction into another
world—Trench.
The present discussion will have to do with the accurate
knowledge of words and with their effective use. Sugges-
tions will also be made to show the student how he may
improve his vocabulary.
The Origin of Words
Our English language is a derived language; we get our
words primarily from two sources: from the Old English
(Anglo-Saxon), and from the Latin. The words which we
get from the French are essentially derivatives from the
Latin. (Greek derivatives, though comparatively few in
number, are also important.) In order to understand our
language it is necessary to understand the root-meaning of
each word. The study of Old English and of Latin are thus
of great importance. The study of the dictionary is of
equal importance; and no student can hope to make progress
in English unless he constantly refers to it.
The following examples will, illustrate the various char-
acteristics of Old English and of Latin derivatives. The
student will study carefully the words of the following
description from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress:
Then Apollyon straddled quite over the whole breadth of the
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WORDS
91
way, and said, "I am void of fear in this matter: prepare thy-
self to die; for I swear by my infernal den, that thou shalt go
no further; here will I spill thy soul.
And with that he threw a flaming dart at his breast; but
Christian had a shield in his hand, with which he caught it,
and so prevented the danger of that.
Then did Christian draw; for he saw it was time to bestir
him: and Apollyon as fast made at him, throwing darts as
thick as hail; by the which, notwithstanding all that Christian
could do to avoid it, Apollyon wounded him in his head, his
hand, and foot. This made Christian give a little back; Apol-
lyon, therefore, followed his work amain, and Christian again
took courage and resisted as manfully as he could. This sore
combat lasted for above half a day, even till Christian was al-
most quite spent; for you must know, that Christian, by reason
of his wounds, must needs grow weaker and weaker.
Then Apollyon, espying his opportunity, began to gather up
close to Christian, and wrestling with him, gave him a dreadful,
fall; and with that, Christian's sword flew out of his hand.
Then said Apollyon, "I am sure of thee now. And with that he
had almost pressed him to death; so that Christian began to de-
spair of life: but as God would have it, while Apollyon was
fetching of his last blow, thereby to make a full end of this
good man, Christian nimbly reached out his hand for his
sword, and caught it, saying, "Rejoice not against me, O mine
enemy: when I fall, I shall ariseand with that gave him a
deadly thrust, which made him give back, as one that had re-
ceived his mortal wound. Christian perceiving that, made at
him again, saying, "Nay, in all these things we are more than
conquerors, through him that loved us. And with that Apollyon.
spread forth his dragon's wings, and sped him away, that Chris-
tian for a season saw him no more.
In this combat no man can imagine, unless he had seen and
heard as I did, what yelling and hideous roaring Apollyon made
all the time of the fight—he spake like a dragon; and, on the
other side, what sighs and groans burst from Christian's heart.
I never saw him all the while give so much as one pleasant
look, till he perceived he had wounded Apollyon with his two-
edged sword; then, indeed, he did smile and look upward; but it
was the dreadfulest sight that ever I saw.
So when the battle was over, Christian said, "I will here give
92 SUCCESSFUL WRITING
thanks to him that delivered me out of the mouth of the lion,
to him that did help me against Apollyon. And so he did.
The student will now look up in the dictionary the follow-
ing words from this description, and note carefully whether
each is derived from Old English or from Latin.
Straddled — spill — threw — breadth — caught — draw —
swear — den — wounded — further — breast — shield — fol-
lowed — throw — bestir — notwithstanding — thick as hail —
amain — spent — espying — give a little back — manfully —
wrestling — fetching — nimbly — began to gather up close —
thrust — yelling — hideous — roaring — sped him away —
burst — dreadfulest.
Now study the following words from Samuel Johnson's
Preface to the English Dictionary:
In hope of giving longevity to that which its own nature for-
bids to be immortal, I have devoted this book, the labour of
years, to the honour of my country, that we may no longer yield
the palm of philology, without a contest, to the nations of the
continent. The chief glory of every people arises from its au-
thors: whether I shall add anything by my own writings to the
reputation of English literature, must be left to time: much of
my life has been lost under the pressure of disease; much has
been trifled away; and much has always been spent in provision
for the day that was passing over me; but I shall not think my
employment useless or ignoble, if by my assistance foreign na-
tions and distant ages gain access to the propagators of knowl-
edge, and understand the teachers of truth; if my labours afford
light to the repositories of science, and add celebrity to Bacon,
to Hooker, to Milton, and to Boyle.
When I am animated by this wish, I look with pleasure on my
book, however defective, and deliver it to the world with the
spirit of a man that has endeavoured well. That it will imme-
diately become popular I have not promised to myself: a few
wild blunders and risible absurdities, from which no work of
such multiplicity was ever free, may for a time furnish folly
with laughter and harden ignorance into contempt; but useful
WORDS
93
diligence will at last prevail, and there never can be wanting
some who distiguish desert; who will consider that no diction-
ary of a living tongue ever can be perfect, since, while it is
hastening to publication, some words are budding, and some
falling away; that a whole life cannot be spent upon syntax
and etymology, and that even a whole life would not be suffi-
cient; that he, whose design includes whatever language can
express, must often speak of what he does not understand; that
a writer will sometimes be hurried by eagerness to the end, and
sometimes faint with weariness under a task which Scaliger
compares to the labours of the anvil and the mine; that what is
obvious is not always known, and what is known is not always
present; that sudden fits of inadvertency will surprise vigilance,
slight avocations will seduce attention, and casual eclipses of
the mind will darken learning; and that the writer shall often
in vain trace his memory, at the moment of need, for that which
yesterday he knew with intuitive readiness, and which will come
uncalled into his thoughts to-morrow.
In this work, when it shall be found that much is omitted, let
it not be forgotten that much likewise is performed; and though
no book was ever spared out of tenderness to the author, and
the world is little solicitous to know whence proceed the faults
of that which it condemns, yet it may gratify curiosity to in-
form it that the "English Dictionary was written with little as-
sistance of the learned, and without any patronage of the great;
not in the soft obscurities of retirement, or under the shelter of
academic bowers, but amidst inconvenience and distraction, in
sickness and in sorrow. It may repress the triumph of malig-
nant criticism to observe, that if our language is not here fully
displayed, I have only failed in an attempt which no human
powers have hitherto completed. If the lexicons of ancient
tongues, now immutably fixed, and comprised in a few volumes,
be yet, after the toil of successive ages, inadequate and delusive;
if the aggregated knowledge and co-operating diligence of the
Italian academicians did not secure them from the censure of
Beni; if the embodied critics of France, when fifty years had
been spent upon their work, were obliged to change its econ-
omy, and give their second edition another form, I may surely
be contented without the praise of perfection, which, if I could
obtain, in this gloom of solitude, what would it avail me? I
have protracted my work till most of those whom I wished to
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SUCCESSFUL WRITING
please have sunk into the grave, and success and miscarriage
are empty sounds: I therefore dismiss it with frigid tran-
quillity, having little to fear or hope from censure or from
praise.
Look up the following words from this preface, and note
whether each is derived from Old English or from Latin or
from Greek:
Longevity—immortal—philology—continent—provision — em-
ployment—ignoble—access—propagators— repositories — celeb-
rity — animated — endeavored—immediately—absurdities—mul-
tiplicity—ignorance—etymology—sufficient—inadvertency.
Now read carefully the following paragraphs from an
address by Theodore Roosevelt:
I want to see the boy enjoy himself. The boy at play some-
times exhibits the qualities which determine the kind of a man
he will make. If he dislikes his work, if he shirks his studies,
he will develop into a great failure in everything else. If he
has not character to study he won't have character to play.
Play hard while you play and work hard while you work.
Right here there is as great a lesson for the grown-ups as for
the younger ones. I want to see you brave and strong and
gentle and kind. Those are the qualities that make up good
citizenship. I want to see you so conduct yourselves that among
your fathers and mothers there will be a feeling of regret, but
not of relief, when you are away from home.
When you are out among your playmates, don't be afraid
of the little boy who happens to be rude to you. The boy who
is too nice to hold his own is not the boy who will grow up
to be the best citizen. When you boys grow to manhood I
want to see you put the wrongdoer out of the way, and make
the man who does wrong feel that you are his superior in
strength and character. If you cannot hold your own then you
will be a curse in any environment.
The bully, the boy who would maltreat the weaker boy or
an animal, is one of the meanest boys in the world. I want to
see you protecting those who are weak against those who would
WORDS
95
oppress the weak. Such a boy when he becomes a citizen will
be strong enough to abhor and despise the betrayal of a trust
and strong enough to stand for the right. You will find a
certain number of boys who have strength and who have mis-
used it by oppressing the boy or girl who is weak. That kind
of a boy has a weak streak in him, and has not in him the real
strength or the real courage that makes for character. I abhor
the boy who uses his strength against those who cannot help
themselves.—From an address before the Friends' Select School,
Washington, May 25, 1907.
Look up the following words from this address, and note
whether each is derived from the Old English or from
the Latin:
Want to see—enjoy—sometimes—exhibits—qualities—deter-
mines—dislikes—shirks—failure—everything—sturdy — play —
hard—grown-ups—brave—strong—guilty—kind—good citizen-
ship—conduct—regret—relief—playmates—rude—too nice to
hold his own—wrongdoer—out of the way—superior—
strength—character—curse—environment — bully — maltreat—
meanest — protecting — oppress — abhor—despise—betrayal—
strength—misused—a weak streak—real—help.
It becomes evident from this brief study that Old English
derivatives are usually short, homely, forceful words, and
that Latin derivatives are often long and smooth-flowing.
Latin derivatives give an academic or scholarly tone to
writing; but, since their root meaning is not always under-
stood, they are frequently vague. Writers of to-day use
derivatives from both sources. As in Roosevelt's address,
the connotation of homely forcefulness is oftenest found in
the Old English derivatives.
Good Use
The student needs to understand not only the derivation
of each word; he must also understand whether each word
is in good use; that is, whether it is being used by the best
speakers and writers at the present time. Good use means
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SUCCESSFUL WRITING
present use. Words, like men and women, have their life
histories. They are born, they grow into general favor, they
grow old and are obliged to give place to other words.
Good use also means national use. A word must have a
fixed meaning in all parts of the country. Some words, like
some people, are never known outside their local communi-
ties. They are favorite citizens of a certain county or
state, perhaps; they help make up the dialect of a certain
town; they are not, however, widely known; they are, for
this reason, excluded from the works of recognized writers.
Good use further implies reputable use. Words, like people,
have reputations. Some, because of their close association
with questionable ideas, are not found in the society of their
polite brothers and sisters. Others are vulgarisms; they go
about in dirty clothes, and give show of bad manners; they
are avoided because of their lack of good taste.
Words which are not in good use are commonly classified
as archaisms; as colloquial words; and as slang.
1. An archaism is the use of a word which is now obso-
lete. This means that the word was in good use at some
previous time, but that it is no longer used by the best
speakers and writers. The following are examples of
archaic words:
Eld—kine—mayhap—prithee—quoth—schoon — wight — wot
—yclept—yore.
2. Colloquial words are used in conversation to give an
informal, familiar, friendly tang to one's speech. In public
speech or in writing, they seem out of place, because they
lack dignity, and because they are often provincial. The
following are examples of colloquial expressions:
I'm sold to the proposition—I'll tell the world—All right,
you bet I'll be there without fail—Hold on, I'll be with you in
the twinkling of an eye.
3. Slang is an attempt at extreme cleverness in speech,
with the added spice of grotesque humor and superior so-
WORDS
97
phistication. The fault with slang is that the individual
words are without exact meaning. They usually have a
vagabondish origin, and have not yet found their place in
the dictionary. Many of them never will find a place in the
dictionary; they will thus be forgotten along with other
passing whims of the hour. Like local provincial words,
they are not national in their use. They cannot, therefore,
be used in careful writing. The following bit of "flapper
slang, taken from Dialect Notes will illustrate these facts:
Scene—A flapper's home at i a.m. Up-to-date member of the
younger generation returning from an evening out, having
left her "boy friend at or near the door. Meets mother.
Mother—"Well, Dear, did you have a good time?
Flapper—"Hot dog! It was the cat's pajamas. Started per-
fectly blaah, though. Joe brought a strike-breaker, some to-
mato he turned sub-chaser for, 'cause his regular jane had
given him the air. Jack had a flat-wheeler along who was a
cellar-smeller. He got jammed.
The following glossary is needed to make this slang
intelligible: Hot dog—a joyous expression of approval; the
cat's pajamas—anything that's very good; blaah—anything
that's no good; strike-breaker—a girl put in to take the
place of a regular girl when the latter is away; tomato—a
pretty girl who can dance like a streak, but who is otherwise
a "dumbdora"; jane—a girl; given the air—when a fellow
or girl is thrown down on a date; flat-wheeler—a young
man whose idea of entertaining a girl is to take her for a
walk; cellar-smeller—a young man who always turns up
where liquor is to be had without cost.
The Effective Use of Words
Thus far, the discussion has had to do with the accurate
meaning of words. The student is now asked to consider
the effective use of words.
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I. Words are used effectively when they are used con-
cretely. The most common fault in speaking and in writing
is the use of words abstractly and in generalized mean-
ings. This leads to loose thinking and sluggish mentality.
There are many lazy words for the use of lazy-minded
people. These are used glibly, but they lack the force of
vivid experience. How often we hear the following words;
but how seldom do we hear them used concretely:
That was just grand.
Wasn't that wonderful.
Oh, how awful.
It was simply terrible.
I was absolutely horrified.
Concretely used, these words should connote grandeur,
wonder, awe, terror, and horror. Look up the root mean-
ing of each of these words, and then ask yourself each time
that you hear one of them used, whether it is used effectively.
There is another sort of generalized use of words which
the student should understand, if he is to steer clear of
confused thinking. In much of the prevailing quackery,
there is the use of words to befog and excite the mind of
the reader. Find out, if you can, the concrete meaning of
the following phrases:
Vibration of atoms (within the mind)—cosmic unity—the
ego clothed in its astral body—psychic harmony—concept cen-
ters—thought ether—Freudean complex—supreme personality.
Read carefully the following description by Thoreau, and
pay special attention to the concrete use of words:
THE COLOR OF WALDEN POND
Henry David Thoreau
Walden is blue at one time and green at another, even from
the same point of view. Lying between the earth and the
heavens, it partakes of the color of both. Viewed from a hill-
WORDS
99
top is reflects the color of the sky; but near at hand it is of
a yellowish tint next the shore where you can see the sand,
then a light green, which gradually deepens to a uniform dark
green in the body of the pond. In some lights, viewed even
from a hilltop, it is of a vivid green next to the shore. Some have
referred this to the verdure; but it is equally green there against
the railroad sand-bank, and in the spring, before the leaves
are expanded, and it may be simply the result of the prevailing
blue mixed with the yellow of the sand. Such , is the color of
its iris. This is that portion, also, where in the spring the ice,
being warmed by the heat of the sun reflected from the bottom,
and also transmitted through the earth, melts first and forms
a narrow canal about the still frozen middle. Like the rest of
our waters, when much agitated, in clear weather, so that the
surface of the waves may reflect the sky at the right angle, or
because there is more light mixed with it, it appears at a little
distance of a darker blue than the sky itself; and at such a time,
being on its surface, and looking with divided vision, so as to
see the reflection, I have discerned a matchless and indescribable
light blue, such as watered or changeable silks and sword blades
suggest, more cerulean than the sky itself, alternating with the
original dark green on the opposite sides of the waves, which
last appeared but muddy in comparison. It is a vitreous green-
ish blue, as I remember it, like those patches of the winter sky
seen through cloud vistas in the west before sundown. Yet
a single glass of its water held up to the light is as colorless as
an equal quantity of air. It is well known that a large plate
of glass will have a green tint, owing, as the makers say, to
its "body, but a small piece of the same will be colorless. How
large a body of Walden water would be required to reflect a
green tint I have never proved. The water of our river is
black or a very dark brown to one looking directly down on it,
and, like that of most ponds, imparts to the body of one bathing
in it a yellowish tinge; but this water is of such crystalline
purity that the body of the bather appears of an alabaster white-
ness, still more unnatural, which, as the limbs are magnified
and distorted withal, produces a monstrous effect, making fit
studies for a Michael Angelo.—From Walden.
Thoreau used words concretely because he is writing out
of his own experience: "It is a vitreous greenish blue, as I
IOO
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
remember it, like those patches of the winter sky seen
through cloud vistas in the west before sundown. One is
always conscious, in reading from Thoreau, that the author
has spent tireless hours and days in making accurate obser-
vations before he has attempted to write his descriptions.
Students who find it difficult to write usually attempt to
write about something that they have not experienced.
They are anxious to describe Paris, especially if they have
never traveled abroad; or to explain the effects of socialism
in Russia, especially if they have read but a single magazine
article on the subject. The student should remember that
people who write effectively must write about subjects that
are related to their own intimate personal experience; this
enables them to use words concretely.
2. Words are used effectively when they are used simply
and without ostentation. If one writes honestly concerning
his own experience, he is likely to write vividly and inter-
estingly; his search is for the word which will most con-
cretely express his thought or feeling.
The most common error among young writers comes
about through the belief that a smart-sounding, clever
phrase, which has come into common use, is preferable to a
simple, natural phrase of their own manufacture. This
leads to the use of high-sounding or learned phrases when
writing about commonplace things, or else the use of trite
and hackneyed words and phrases. These words and
phrases, to be sure, had their place once. They were the
clever invention of clever writers; but they have been worn
threadbare by too frequent repetition. The student will do
well, therefore, to avoid them. Hazlitt was quite right
when he wrote: "I hate anything that occupies more space
than it is worth. I hate to see a load of bandboxes go along
the street, and I hate to see a parcel of big words without
anything in them. The following are common examples
of this sort of faulty diction:
The lacteal fluid—^fraught with disastrous consequences—
drastic measures—downy couch—misguided youth—double-
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IOI
dyed villain—wave of crime—dead as a door nail—along this
line—discoursed sweet music—round of applause—he gazed
upon a sea of upturned faces—he led the blushing bride to the
hymeneal altar—he imbibed too freely of the cup that cheers—
my paternal ancestor.
3. Words are used effectively when they are used, not
alone to denote their exact meaning, but also to connote
their suggestive meaning. In this suggestive sense, words
are like men; they have a reputation which is quite different
from their real character. The word Puritan to-day con-
notes something quite different from its exact denotation.
To call a man a Puritan is to infer that he is narrow-
minded, sour-faced, self-righteous, and egotistical. The
word is being used as a term of reproach by various sorts
of radical thinkers. The word, Rotarian is coming to be
used as a term of reproach by certain contemporary
writers to suggest the smug, conservative, blind, opti-
mistic, materialistic booster for the present order of
things. The word Bolshevist has, since the War,
been used as a general term of bitterest reproach
by conservative people to suggest all sorts of wild-eyed
destructive socialism. The words Naturalism and Expres-
sionism are at present being bandied about by various
schools of writers. Radical writers use these words to
suggest all that is highest and holiest in their ideals; con-
servative writers use the same words to suggest all that is
evil in the present war against civilization. The word Gen-
tleman has had a long and varied history. The Gentleman
during the days of Chivalry was suggestive of different
personal traits of character from the Gentleman of the days
of Queen Elizabeth. And both of these suggest different
qualities from the Gentleman of the age of Queen Victoria.
It is almost a contradiction of terms to say that it is possible
to develop the Gentleman in a Democracy. Were Sir
Walter Scott and Theodore Roosevelt both Gentlemen? If
so, the word would have a different connotation when
applied to one of these men from that when applied to the
SUCCESSFUL WRITING
other. Read carefully the following discussion of this word
by Barrett Wendell:
How true, how inevitable spontaneous disagreement as to
what words mean must be, how wholly inadequate the vocabu-
laries at our disposal to the infinite shades of thought and
feeling we must use them to express, nothing can show more
clearly than the disputes, in talk and even in volumes, which
are constantly going on about us. More of these than any one
would guess who has not carefully examined them turn upon
what seems like perverse misunderstanding of words. What
does a man mean, for example, who asserts another is or is not
a gentleman? To one the question turns on clothes; to another
on social position gauged by the subtile standards of fashion;
to another on birth; to another on manners; to another on
those still more subtile things, the feelings which go to make
up character; to another still on a combination of some or all
of these. Last winter a superannuated fisherman died in a little
Yankee village. He was rough enough in aspect to delight a
painter; if he could read and write it was all he could do.
But there was about the man a certain dignity of self-respect
which made him at ease with whoever spoke to him, which
made whoever spoke to him at ease with him. I have heard
few more fitting epitaphs than a phrase used by a college
friend of mine who knew the old fellow as well as I: "What
a gentleman he was! But one who heard this alone would
never have guessed that it applied to an uncouth old figure, not
over clean, that until a few months ago was visibly trudging
about the paths of our New England coast. Just such misun-
derstandings as any of us can see would arise here, underlie, by
far the greater part of what disputes come to my knowledge.—
From Barrett Wendell's English Composition.
Improvement of One's Vocabulary
Every student has four different vocabularies. These
include the words used in conversation with intimate
friends; the words used in conversation with superiors; the
words used in writing; and the words used in reading. The
first is usually a rather narrow, colloquial, not infrequently
WORDS
103
a slangy, vocabulary; the second is a more careful, accurate
—though painfully insecure—vocabulary; the third is a still
larger and more careful vocabulary because of the oppor-
tunity for deliberate choice; the last is the largest of all, and
includes all the others. The student should strive to improve
each of these vocabularies until the first three will include
all of the words contained in the reading vocabulary.
The way to improve one's vocabulary is to develop a keen
interest in words. This can be done easily if one will take
the pains to study the origin and the history of each word.
The word capricious, for example, • takes on an entirely new
life when one learns that it is derived from capra, meaning
a goat. There is a humorous metaphor at the root of the
word. Some quick-witted person, long years ago, observed
that certain persons were like goats in that they changed
their minds suddenly and without warning. To call a person
capricious is thus to say that he is goat-like. The word
squirrel has at its root the picture of an animal that sits
beneath its own tail. The word villain has an added
interest when one learns that it is a word that started out
with perfectly good intentions, but that it has gradually,
through the years, lost its reputation. The word bombast
means cotton batting. When Prince Hal called Falstaff a
creature of bombast, he scored a quick hit, because Falstaff
and those present too well knew that he was so fat that he
resembled a man whose clothes were stuffed and padded
with cotton. Bombast is to-day used most frequently with
reference to a certain kind of utterance. Every word, if one
seeks far enough, becomes pregnant with meaning; and the
student who begins actually to study words soon finds that
he is in the midst of a fascinating study.
If the student has never interested himself in the study of
words, he cannot do better than to read some such book as
Words and Their Ways in English Speech by Greenough
and Kittredge. Trench's Study of Words and English Past
and Present are also intensely interesting compilations of
word histories. Skeat's Etymological Dictionary is an au-
thoritative book of reference.
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The student needs, also, to observe the delicate distinction
between words and their subtle shades of meaning. Crabbe's
English Synonyms and Roget's Thesaurus of English Words
and Phrases are both interesting and authoritative.
Finally the student should follow the advice so well given
by Ruskin in his essay, "Of Kings' Treasuries, and by
George Herbert Palmer in his essay, "Self-Cultivation in
English.
SUGGESTED ASSIGNMENTS
1. Make a list, from any of the essays in this text, of twenty-
five words derived from Old English; twenty-five from
Latin; and fifteen from Greek.
2. Make a list of all the Old English, Latin, and Greek pre-
fixes and suffixes that you come across in your study and
reading for a single week.
3. Make a list of twenty-five synonyms and twenty-five anto-
nyms from any of the essays in this text.
4. Make a list of all the colloquial and dialectical words and
phrases that you hear during a single week.
5. Make a list of all the slang that you hear during a single
week.
6. Make a list of all the overworked words and phrases that
you hear during a single week.
7. Make a list of all the words that you hear used in gen-
eralized meanings during a single week.
8. Keep in your note-book a list of all the words that you
catch yourself misusing during the term.
9. Keep a list in your note-book of all the new words that
you learn to use during the term.
10. From the College paper or from the local daily paper fre-
quently study the faulty diction, and suggest improvements.
PART TWO
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
PREFACE
Every anthologist has the ambition to produce an entirely
new book by bringing together a number of congenial
writers—congenial not because they agree with one another,
but in that each states his point of view so sanely and surely
that it leaves a sort of intellectual aroma which permeates
the other opinions. While the others are having their say,
this aroma blends with all, sweetens and modifies each
appeal, until finally from the blending, a new point of view
is produced.
This is the same sort of creative spirit that arises out of a
sympathetic company of men who meet to whet their wits
one against the other. In the give and take, in the nimble-
witted sallies, in the brief but fiery arguments, in the quiet
reminiscences, in the humorous anecdotes, a new spirit is
born—the spirit of the crowd as distinguished from the
spirit of the individual.
In this collection of essays are found many views upon a
few of the far-reaching aspects of life. The reader will
find much food for ruminative thought, and after consider-
ing, will wish to express some conviction of his own.
Where the book is used in the class-room, the teacher's
part is to stimulate the student to discuss and to question
until he formulates an opinion, some warm certainty or
eager conjecture that belongs to him, himself. The teacher
will encourage him to set it down in writing. If the writing
is sincere, if it reflects experience—even though at times it
be awkward and clumsy in expression—it will be worth
while, in that it will fertilize the growing spirit, and will
lead to the companionship of books and of authors.
But enough. The art of a writer of prefaces is to suggest;
not to worry the prospective reader with details. In the
hands of a skilful teacher and receptive students, a book of
selected essays becomes a living spirit, and is transfused into
the glowing life of youth.
107
I ENTERTAIN AN AGENT UNAWARES1
David Grayson
Ray Stannard Baker, under the nom de plume, David Grayson,
attained popular fame overnight when he began his Adventures in
Contentment in the American Magazine a few years ago. The
essays stress the pleasures of one who, weary with the rush and
grind of the city, goes out into the country to find peace and quiet.
His is a kindly idyllic philosophy. The author was educated at the
Michigan Agricultural College and the University of Michigan. He
served on the staff of the Chicago Record, and was editor of Mc-
Clure's Syndicate. He did important journalistic work in war time.
Concerning his own reading, Mr. Baker says: "My reading has been
without rule or reason, and not even for instruction, but wilfully for
enjoyment, and I have written because, somehow, I could not
help it.
With the coming of winter I thought the life of a farmer
might lose something of its charm. So much interest lies in
the growth not only of crops but of trees, vines, flowers,
sentiments and emotions. In the summer the world is busy,
concerned with many things and full of gossip: in the winter
I anticipated a cessation of many active interests and en-
thusiasms. I looked forward to having time for my books
and for the quiet contemplation of the life around me.
Summer indeed is for activity, winter for reflection. But
when winter really came every day discovered some new
work to do or some new adventure to enjoy. It is surprising
how many things happen on a small farm. Examining the
book which accounts for that winter, I find the history of
part of a forenoon, which will illustrate one of the curious
adventures of a farmer's life. It is dated January 5.
I went out this morning with my ax and hammer to mend
1 From Adventures in Contentment, by permission of the pub-
lishers, Doubleday, Page & Co.
109
no
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the fence along the public road. A heavy frost fell last
night and the brown grass and the dry ruts of the roads
were powdered white. Even the air, which was perfectly
still, seemed full of frost crystals, so that when the sun
came up one seemed to walk in a magic world. I drew in a
long breath and looked out across the wonderful shining
country and I said to myself:
"Surely, there is nowhere I would rather be than here.
For I could have traveled nowhere to find greater beauty or
a better enjoyment of it than I had here at home.
As I worked with my ax and hammer, I heard a light
wagon come rattling up the road. Across the valley a man
had begun to chop a tree. I could see the ax steel flash
brilliantly in the sunshine before I heard the sound of the
blow.
The man in the wagon had a round face and a sharp blue
eye. I thought he seemed a businesslike young man.
"Say, there, he shouted, drawing up at my gate, "would
you mind holding my horse a minute? It's a cold morning
and he's restless.
"Certainly not, I said, and I put down my tools and held
his horse.
He walked up to my door with a brisk step and a certain
jaunty poise of the head.
"He is well contented with himself, I said. "It is a
great blessing for any man to be satisfied with what he
has got.
I heard Harriet open the door—how every sound rang
through the still morning air!
The young man asked some question and I distinctly
heard Harriet's answer:
"He's down there.
The young man came back: his hat was tipped up, his
quick eye darted over my grounds as though in a single
instant he had appraised everything and passed judgment
upon the cash value of the inhabitants. He whistled a lively
little tune.
"Say, he said, when he reached the gate, not at all dis-
I ENTERTAIN AN AGENT UNAWARES hi
concerted, "I thought you was the hired man. Your name's
Grayson, ain't it? Well, I want to talk with you.
After tying and blanketing his horse and taking a black
satchel from his buggy he led me up to my house. I had a
pleasurable sense of excitement and adventure. Here was a
new character come to my farm. Who knows, I thought,
what he may bring with him: who knows what I may send
away by him? Here in the country we must set our little
ships afloat on small streams, hoping that somehow, some
day, they will reach the sea.
It was interesting to see the busy young man sit down so
confidently in our best chair. He said his name was Dixon,
and he took out from his satchel a book with a fine showy
cover. He said it was called Living Selections from Poet,
Sage and Humourist.
"This, he told me, "is only the first of the series. We
publish six volumes full of literchoor. You see what a
heavy book this is ?
I tested it in my hand: it was a heavy book.
"The entire set, he said, "weighs over ten pounds. There
are 1,162 pages, enough paper if laid down flat, end to end,
to reach half a mile.
I cannot quote his exact language: there was too much of
it, but he made an impressive showing of the amount of lit-
erature that could be had at a very low price per pound.
Mr. Dixon was a hypnotist. He fixed me with his glittering
eye, and he talked so fast, and his ideas upon the subject
were so original that he held me spellbound. At first I was
inclined to be provoked: one does not like to be forcibly
hypnotized, but gradually the situation began to amuse me,
the more so when Harriet came in.
"Did you ever see a more beautiful binding? asked the
agent, holding his book admiringly at arm's length. "This
up here, he said, pointing to the illuminated cover, "is the
Muse of Poetry. She is scattering flowers—poems, you
know. Fine idea, ain't it? Coloring fine, too.
He jumped up quickly and laid the book on my table, to
the evident distress of Harriet.
112
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"Trims up the room, don't it? he exclaimed, turning his
head a little to one side and observing the effect with an
expression of affectionate admiration.
"How much, I asked, "will you sell the covers for with-
out the insides?
"Without the insides?
"Yes, I said, "the binding will trim up my table just as
well without the insides.
I thought he looked at me a little suspiciously, but he was
evidently satisfied by my expression of countenance, for he
answered promptly:
"Oh, but you want the insides. That's what the books
are for. The bindings are never sold alone.
He then went on to tell me the prices and terms of pay-
ment, until it really seemed that it would be cheaper to buy
the books than to let him carry them away again. Harriet
stood in the doorway behind him frowning and evidently
trying to catch my eye. But I kept my face turned aside so
that I could not see her signal of distress and my eyes fixed
on the young man Dixon. It was as good as a play. Harriet
there, serious-minded, thinking I was being befooled, and
the agent thinking he was befooling me, and I, thinking I
was befooling both of them—and all of us wrong. It was
very like life wherever you find it.
Finally, I took the book which he had been urging upon
me, at which Harriet coughed meaningly to attract my atten-
tion. She knew the danger when I really got my hands on
a book. But I made up as innocent as a child. I opened the
book almost at random—and it was as though, walking
down a strange road, I had come upon an old tried friend
not seen before in years. For there on the page before me
I read:
The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
I ENTERTAIN AN AGENT UNAWARES 113
The sea that bares her bosom to the moon;
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
But are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers;
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
And as I read it came back to me—a scene like a picture—
the place, the time, the very feel of the hour when I first saw
those lines. Who shall say that the past does not live! An
odor will sometimes set the blood coursing in an old emo-
tion, and a line of poetry is the resurrection and the life.
For a moment I forgot Harriet and the agent, I forgot
myself, I even forgot the book on my knee—everything but
that hour in the past—a view of shimmering hot housetops,
the heat and dust and noise of an August evening in the city,
the dumb weariness of it all, the loneliness, the longing for
green fields; and then these great lines of Wordsworth, read
for the first time, flooding in upon me:
"Great God! I'd rather be
A pagan suckled in a creed outworn:
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.
When I had finished I found myself standing in my own
room with one arm raised, and, I suspect, a trace of tears in
my eyes—there before the agent and Harriet. I saw Harriet
lift one hand and drop it hopelessly. She thought I was
captured at last. I was past saving. And as I looked at
the agent I saw "grim conquest glowing in his eye! So I
sat down not a little embarrassed by my exhibition—when I
had intended to be self-poised.
'You like it, don't you? said Mr. Dixon unctuously.
"I don't see, I said earnestly, "how you can afford to
sell such things as this so cheap.
"They are cheap, he admitted regretfully. I suppose he
wished he had tried me with the half-morocco.
ii4 SUCCESSFUL LIVING
"They are priceless, I said, "absolutely priceless. If you
were the only man in the world who had that poem, I think
I would deed you my farm for it.
Mr. Dixon proceeded, as though it were all settled, to get
out his black order book and open it briskly for business.
He drew his fountain pen, capped it, and looked up at me
expectantly. My feet actually seemed slipping into some
irresistible whirlpool. How well he understood practical
psychology! I struggled within myself, fearing engulfment:
I was all but lost.
"Shall I deliver the set at once, he said, "or can you wait
until the first of February?
At that critical moment a floating spar of an idea swept
my way and I seized upon it as the last hope of the lost.
"I don't understand, I said, as though I had not heard his
last question, "how you dare go about with all this treasure
upon you. Are you not afraid of being stopped in the road
and robbed? Why, I've seen the time when, if I had known
you carried such things as these, such cures for sick hearts,
I think I should have stopped you myself !
"Say, you are an odd one, said Mr. Dixon.
"Why do you sell such priceless things as these ? I asked,
looking at him sharply.
"Why do I sell them ? and he looked still more perplexed.
"To make money, of course; same reason you raise corn.
"But here is wealth, I said, pursuing my advantage.
"If you have these you have something more valuable than
money.
Mr. Dixon politely said nothing. Like a wise angler,
having failed to land me at the first rush, he let me have
line. Then I thought of Ruskin's words, "Nor can any
noble thing be wealth except to a noble person. And that
prompted me to say to Mr. Dixon:
"These things are not yours; they are mine. You never
owned them; but I will sell them to you.
He looked at me in amazement, and then glanced around
■—evidently to discover if there were a convenient way of
escape.
I ENTERTAIN AN AGENT UNAWARES 115
"You're all straight, are you? he asked, tapping his
forehead; "didn't anybody ever try to take you up?
"The covers are yours, I continued as though I had not
heard him, "the insides are mine and have been for a long
time: that is why I proposed buying the covers separately.
I opened his book again. I thought I would see what had
been chosen for its pages. And I found there many fine
and great things.
"Let me read you this, I said to Mr. Dixon; "it has been
mine for a long time. I will not sell it to you. I will give it
to you outright. The best things are always given.
Having some gift in imitating the Scotch dialect, I read:
November chill blaws loud wi' angry sugh;
The short'ning winter day is near a close;
The miry beasts retreating frae the pleugh;
The black'ning trains o' craws to their repose:
The toil-worn Cotter frae his labour goes,
This night his weekly moil is at an end,
Collects his spades, his mattocks and his hoes,
Hoping the morn in ease and rest to spend,
And weary, o'er the moor, his course does
Hameward bend.
So I read The Cotter's Saturday Night. I love the poem
very much myself, sometimes reading it aloud, not so much
for the tenderness of its message, though I prize that, too,
as for the wonder of its music.
Compar'd with these, Italian trills are tame;
The tickl'd ear no heart-felt raptures raise.
I suppose I showed my feeling in my voice. As I glanced
up from time to time I saw the agent's face change, and his
look deepen and the lips, usually so energetically tense,
loosen with emotion. Surely no poem in all the language
conveys so perfectly the simple love of the home, the quiet
joys, hopes, pathos of those who live close to the soil.
n6
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
When I had finished—I stopped with the stanza be-
ginning:
Then homeward all take off their sev'ral way;
the agent turned away his head trying to brave out his emo-
tion. Most of us, Anglo-Saxons, tremble before a tear when
we might fearlessly beard a tiger.
I moved up nearer to the agent and put my hand on his
knee; then I read two or three of the other things I found
in his wonderful book. And once I had him laughing and
once again I had the tears in his eyes. Oh, a simple young
man, a little crusty without, but soft inside—like the rest
of us.
Well, it was amazing, once we began talking not of books
but of life, how really eloquent and human he became.
From being a distant and uncomfortable person, he became
at once like a near neighbor and friend. It was strange to
me—as I have thought since—how he conveyed to us in few
words the essential emotional note of his life. It was no
violin tone, beautifully complex with harmonics, but the
clear simple voice of the flute. It spoke of his wife and his
baby girl and his home. The very incongruity of detail—he
told us how he grew onions in his back yard—added some-
how to the homely glamour of the vision which he gave Us.
The number of his house, the fact that he had a new cottage
organ, and that the baby ran away and lost herself in Seven-
teenth Street—were all, curiously, fabrics of his emotion.
It was beautiful to see commonplace facts grow phos-
phorescent in the heat of true feeling. How little we may
come to know Romance by the cloak she wears and how
humble must be he who would surprise the heart of her!
It was, indeed, with an indescribable thrill that I heard
him add the details, one by one—the mortgage on his place,
now rapidly being paid off, the brother who was a plumber,
the mother-in-law who was not a mother-in-law of the
comic papers. And finally he showed us the picture of the
I ENTERTAIN AN AGENT UNAWARES 117
wife and baby that he had in the cover of his watch; a fat
baby with its head resting on its mother's shoulder.
"Mister, he said, "p'r'aps you think it's fun to ride around
the country like I do, and be away from home most of the
time. But it ain't. When I think of Minnie and the kid—
He broke off sharply, as if he had suddenly remembered
the shame of such confidences.
"Say, he asked, "what page is that poem on?
I told him.
"One forty-six, he said. "When I get home I'm going to
read that to Minnie. She likes poetry and all such things.
And where's that other piece that tells how a man feels
when he's lonesome ? Say, that fellow knew !
We had a genuinely good time, the agent and I, and when
he finally rose to go, I said:
"Well, I've sold you a new book.
"I see now, mister, what you mean.
I went down the path with him and began to unhitch
his horse.
"Let me, let me, he said eagerly.
Then he shook hands, paused a moment awkwardly as if
about to say something, then sprang into his buggy without
saying it.
When he had taken up his reins he remarked:
"Say! but you'd make an agent! You'd hypnotize 'em.
I recognized it as the greatest compliment he could pay
me: the craft compliment.
Then he drove off, but pulled up before he had gone five
yards. He turned in his seat, one hand on the back of it,
his whip raised.
"Say! he shouted, and when I walked up he looked at me
with fine embarrassment.
"Mister, perhaps you'd accept one of these sets from
Dixon free gratis, for nothing.
"I understand, I said, "but you know I'm giving the
books to you—and I couldn't take them back again.
"Well, he said, "you're a good one, anyhow. Good-by
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
again, and then, suddenly, business naturally coming upper-
most, he remarked with great enthusiasm:
"You've given me a new idea. Say, I'll sell 'em.
"Carry them carefully, man, I called after him; "they are
precious.
So I went back to my work, thinking how many fine people
there are in this world—if you scratch 'em deep enough.
READING THE BIBLE1
William Lyon Phelps
This familiar essay is the first of three lectures, on the L. P. Stone
Foundation, delivered at Princeton University, February, 1919, and
published the same year under the title, Reading the Bible. The
piece is done in Professor Phelps's most characteristic and familiar
manner. All his life he has read and loved the King James Version
of the Bible. This volume, and the larger volume, Human Nature
in the Bible, both bear sincere testimony to his affection for what
he declares is the "most important and most influential book in Eng-
lish Literature. In mature learning, in wide experience, in kindly
wisdom, in wit and humor, as well as in delightful surprises, Pro-
fessor Phelps is one of the pleasantest writers of our time, and is
the author of numerous volumes. He was born at New Haven, Con-
necticut, in 1865; was educated at Yale and at Harvard, and since
1892 has been Professor of English at Yale.
When I was five years old, my mother offered me a dollar
if I would read the Bible through, from the first chapter of
Genesis to the last chapter of Revelation. I confess that my
price has risen since then; but in my boyhood I had more
leisure and less cash than I have now. My total income was
six cents a week; and as I was expected to deposit one cent
in the contribution box every Sunday, I always regarded
my income as five cents, unconsciously prophetic of the
modern income-tax law. I am glad that my mother bribed
me to read the Bible, and glad that she forced me to pay my
way in church. At first ,1 thought more of the dollar than
of the Holy Writ; but as I became interested, I found
keener joy in the race than in the prize.
The best books for children are those that never were in-
tended for children. The ordinary child's Christmas book
has an intolerable air of condescension like the ingratiating
smile of the professional speaker to boys, who deceives only
those in bad health. Even children deserve intellectual re-
spect and profit by it. No better books for children exist
than Pilgrim's Progress, Gulliver's Travels, Robinson
1 Reprinted from Reading the Bible, by permission of the pub-
lishers, Macmillan Co.
119
120
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
Crusoe, the anteburtonian Arabian Nights, and the Bible.
Apart from the mental discipline and emotional enrichment
obtained from these books, there exists to a higher degree
the same reason for the inclusion of classics in university
education—the pleasure arising when educated people have
the same background, a common storehouse of memory,
from which current coin may freely circulate.
In the Cornell Sun, March, 1915, the venerable Andrew
D. White, in response to a request that he should name the
books that had given him most real profit and abiding pleas-
ure, began his article with this paragraph: "First of all, like
most American boys and girls of my time, I was brought up
to read the Bible, and was nurtured in one of the religious
bodies which incorporates into its worship very many of the
noblest parts of our sacred books. Of these, the portions
which have always seemed to me to give the keynote to the
whole have been, for the Old Testament, the grander
Psalms, the nobler portions of Isaiah, and above all the sixth
chapter of Micah; and in the New Testament, the utterances
ascribed to Jesus himself, of which the Sermon on the
Mount is supreme, with St. James's definition of 'pure re-
ligion and undefiled,' and St. Paul's description of 'charity.'
In perfection of English diction, there is, in the whole range
of literature, nothing to surpass the story of Joseph and his
Brethren.
When I first read the Bible, I made up my own mind as to
the moral value of certain celebrated achievements, and was
encouraged to express my views in the family conversation.
It seemed to me that the murder of the sleeping Sisera was
treacherous and detestable; and I obtained no pleasure from
the exultant song of Deborah—
The mother of Sisera looked out at a window, and cried
through the lattice, Why is his chariot so long in coming?
Why tarry the wheels of his chariots?
Many years later, while at an Episcopal church one evening,
whither I had gone to hear one of my favorite preachers,
READING THE BIBLE
121
the Rev. Harry P. Nichols, I was both surprised and pleased,
to hear him say, at the conclusion of the reading for the
day, which was this same Song, "We should remember that
the glorification of this abominable deed came from Deborah,
and not from Almighty God.
Yet Sisera was a scoundrel, and the result of his deletion
was good; the land had rest forty years. Furthermore, if
he had won the battle, we learn from the words of his
mother—capable tigress for such a cub—that Captain Sisera
would have treated the captured men and women even as the
Germans treated the French and the Belgians.
Nor did I think highly of David's exploit in killing Go-
liath. All small boys like heavy-weight champions; and it
may be I had a fondness for the big fellow. Anyhow, it
seemed to me that David did not fight fairly. Goliath came
out with the legitimate weapons for a stand-up fight; David
stood at a safe distance and punctured his thick head with a
slingshot. If he had missed the first time, he had four more
stones to throw; and if he had failed to make a hit with any
of them, he would doubtless have run away, and Goliath,
encumbered with his heavy suit, would have found it quite
impossible to catch him. I felt that David was something
like a guttersnipe, who, afraid to fight with his fists, throws
stones from a coign of vantage; or like a man with a maga-
zine gun, taking the measure of a hippopotamus.
David's's affair with Goliath compares unfavorably with
the exploit of Benaiah, narrated in that wonderful eleventh
chapter of the first book of Chronicles, which celebrates the
mighty men.
Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, the son of a valiant man of
Kabzeel, who had done many acts; he slew two lionlike men
of Moab; also he went down and slew a lion in a pit in a snowy
day.
And he slew an Egyptian, a man of great stature, five cubits
high; and in the Egyptian's hand was a spear like a weaver's
beam; and he went down to him with a staff, and plucked the
spear out of the Egyptian's hand, and slew him with his own
spear.
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
These things did Benaiah, the son of Jehoiada, and had the
name among the three mighties.
I had to comfort myself with the reflection that on other
occasions, David exhibited plenty of courage.
It is of course possible to regard David's victory as the
triumph of brains over brawn: Goliath was conservative;
he was naturally beaten by the younger antagonist who
used more modern methods.
One day, by mere chance, I hit upon an expedient that
not only helped me to remember the Bible stories, but which
I heartily recommend to all parents and guardians who still
wish to have the youth entrusted to their care become fa-
miliar with the Scriptures. I was drawing pictures. My
prolonged and unusual silence in the room aroused the
interest of my mother—"What are you doing there?
"Drawing pictures. "But don't you know this is Sunday?
You must not draw pictures on Sunday.
Nobody ought to infer from this that my mother was
grim. She and I were intimate friends, understood each
other perfectly, and got along together beautifully.
Suddenly I remembered the Bible. "But, mother, it'll be
all right to draw Bible pictures? She turned this sugges-
tion up and down in her mind, and found it good. I there-
fore set to work, and after another period of silence, I
proudly exhibited to her a soldier, armed to the teeth, lit-
erally, for in addition to gun and pistol, he had a large knife
in his mouth.
"Didn't I tell you"—"But mother, this is Joab, captain
of the host of Israel. From this accidental Sabbatarian
exploit, 1 conceived the idea of drawing a picture to illus-
trate every chapter in the Bible. And this method I rec-
ommend to the young, for if one draws a picture for each
chapter, one must read the whole chapter through to find
the best available subject, and in this way, much will be re-
membered. It is not necessary to possess even rudimentary
skill with the pencil. I was obliged to label my pictures dis-
tinctly—a union of literature and art—in order that spec-
READING THE BIBLE
123
tators might know whether the picture were animal, vege-
table, or mineral—the invariable first inquiry in the game
Twenty Questions.
In the process of illustrating the sacred volume, I got
along excellently well in Genesis, Joshua, Judges, Kings;
there were frequent fights. But when I plunged into the
jungle of Paul's doctrinal epistles, my advance was slow.
It is not easy properly to illustrate some of the chapters in
Romans. I remember reading through the whole eighth
chapter and finishing in despair. Determined not to be
beaten, I began to read it again, and was brought up with a
turn at the twenty-second verse: "The whole creation groan-
eth. I set to work with an inspiration.
At that time I knew nothing of spiritual suffering; I sup-
posed that people groaned only when there was something
the matter with them. Like all small boys, I had eaten many
green apples, sometimes with disastrous results. My con-
ception of this passage was not altogether without a certain
vast grandeur. I literally supposed that once upon a time
every living person had indigestion at the same moment;
hence universal compulsory groaning. I therefore drew a
picture of a large number of people standing in a circle,
each in an attitude of anguish: and under it I wrote
THE WHOLE CREATION GROANETH
When I brought this picture to my mother, she looked at it
for some minutes, and was unable to speak; she paid it that
reverent silence which I suppose is the highest tribute to
art. Then she told me that I had made an original contribu-
tion to New Testament interpretation, for no commentator
in the world had ever thought of this explanation. I re-
tired proudly. After I grew up, I mistakenly regarded my
exegesis as absurd; and it was only a few years ago that
my respect for it was restored by my friend President Had-
ley. I had narrated the story, and he immediately said that
after all I was correct; for from the orthodox point of view
it was the unauthorized eating of apples that made the whole
creation groan.
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Even before the printed Bible was known in England,
manuscript copies were sometimes chained in churches.
There still exists at Hereford Cathedral a library of two
thousand books, about fifteen hundred of them chained;
some of these are in manuscript, and among them is a cata-
logue, also chained. Cromwell, as Vicar-general, by injunc-
tions in September, 1538, and King Henry VIII, by a proc-
lamation dated 6 May, 1541, provided that every parish
church should supply itself with a Bible; the book was of
course chained in some public place. There were some
copies of the Bible in Holland which excited the anger of the
Devil, as was proved by the marks of his claws upon them;
the result of which was a law requiring them to be chained.
Foxe's Book of Martyrs was frequently available in similar
fashion, "not to be taken from the room.
The so-called Authorized, or King James Version of the
Bible, published in 1611, is the most important and the most
influential book in English literature; and although copies
of it do not fetch an extraordinary price, it is a rarity. The
New York Public Library and the Morgan Library both
have one; university libraries certainly should obtain one
while it is possible to do so. I do not know how many were
issued in the original edition, but for the most part, whether
chained or not, they were read "hard, and many of them
fell to pieces or disappeared altogether. It is difficult to find
one in perfect condition, the great desideratum of book-col-
lectors.
In 1611 Robert Barker had the exclusive right to sell the
volume. The size was 16 inches by 10^2 ; the binding was
full calf, with covers half an inch thick, hence called
"boards. It weighed 17^2 pounds. It was printed in black-
letter, with three styles of type. The headlines, inserted
words, summaries at heads of chapters, references in margin
to parallel passages were roman, and the side-notes giving
alternative readings were italic.
The Dean and Chapter of Worchester Cathedral in 1611
bought a Bible of the new issue for two pounds, eighteen
shillings; it was probably in handsome binding.
READING THE BIBLE
125
Copies of the 1611 first edition vary, as was common with
other books in those days. The earlier copies are known
as the "he Bible and later ones as the "she Bible, because
of an error in Ruth, III, 15, "and she went into the city,
where in the earlier printing the word "he was erroneously
given. The "he Bible is, in general, a better piece of me-
chanical work than the "she. The copies of the latter vary
considerably, almost all showing combinations of sheets of
two and perhaps three printings. To-day the "he Bible is
much more costly than the "she, although, as has been
said, perfect copies of either are scarce. The Yale Uni-
versity Library is fortunate in having a perfect copy of the
"he Bible, and the same Library also has an imperfect
"she. The Princeton Theological Seminary has two good
copies of the "she issue, one of them presented by Henry
van Dyke.
The size of the vocabulary in the Authorized Version is a
matter of some interest, and Professor Albert S. Cook of
Yale undertook the task of counting all the words. He says,
"I compute the number of words in the Authorized Version
to be 6,568. If to these were added the inflected form of
nouns, pronouns, or verbs, . . . the total would be 9,884.
The Authorized Version is incomparably the best both
for the pulpit and for educated readers. I remember in the
year 1881 that the excitement over the Revised Version of
the New Testament was so intense that wheelbarrow loads
of copies were sold in the streets, and one of the New York
newspapers published the entire work in a Sunday issue.
Many believed that the Revised Version would supplant the
old; but after a few years, the people returned to the fa-
miliar book. There are some positive errors which were
corrected in the Revised Version; but the nineteenth cen-
tury scholars lost in beauty what they gained in accuracy.
There is no English in the world equal to that found in the
1611 Bible. The revisers knew more Greek, and less Eng-
lish. Whether the original text was inspired or not, I have
never felt any doubt as to the divine inspiration of the
version of 1611.
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
For the benefit of soldiers in military camps and on duty
overseas, an interesting and successful experiment in con-
densation has recently been made. With the assistance of
some colleagues, Professor Charles F. Kent of Yale has
prepared a new translation and rearrangement of the text,
called The Shorter Bible, of which the volume containing
the New Testament appeared in 1918. All repetitions in the
Gospel narrative are omitted; the subject-matter is logically
and topically presented; the original is translated into digni-
fied but strictly modern English, with the exclusion of
archaic and obsolete words. In this convenient form, the
greatest of all books seems born anew.
But except in special instances, and for special needs,
the Authorized Version is the one above all others for the
general reader. I was rather surprised to find in the Lit-
erary Supplement of the London Times, under date of the
fourth of July, 1918, a statement that British churches are
supplanting the Old with the Revised. This testimony is
cited here, not merely as a witness to a regrettable tendency,
but as a fine tribute to the version of 1611.
And they constantly regret the increasing tendency, noticeable
in our churches, to replace the Authorized Version, which gave
us all, the poetry and moving quality of the original, by the
Revised, which sacrifices these things to a grammatical pedantry
of intellectual precision. It is safe to prophesy that if the Bible
is ever to be restored to the place it occupied a hundred years
ago in the hearts and memories of the English people it will
not be through the medium of the Revised Version. It is
poetry, not logical or grammatical accuracy, that moves and
wins men, and that not only by its beauty, but by its higher and
more essential truth.
It is worth remembering, that shortly after the appearance
of the Revised Version, Matthew Arnold made a plea for
the retention of the Old.
For those who wish to read the whole Bible, and every
one at some time ought to read it all at least once, those of
systematic habits can read it through—omitting the Apocry-
READING THE BIBLE
127
pha—in exactly one year. There are 1,188 chapters, 928
in the Old Testament, 260 in the New. If one reads three
chapters every week day, and five every Sunday, one will
finish the undertaking just within the year. Or, if one reads
only on Sundays, and five chapters of the New Testament
each Sunday, one will complete this task on the fifty-second
day.
This is a chronological rather than a logical way of read-
ing the Bible, but it has its merits. It is naturally much bet-
ter to read a whole book, or a whole connected narrative in
one sitting. I remember, when caught in the rain one Sun-
day in a small town in England, that I pleasantly celebrated
being marooned by reading the Gospel according to Mark
without rising from my chair.
The Bible is not only the foundation of modern English
literature, it is the foundation of Anglo-Saxon civilization.
It seems a narrow and mistaken policy to drive it out of the
public schools. When I was a boy, every day in school be-
gan with a chapter in the Bible and the Lord's Prayer;
surely there is nothing sectarian about that. Merely in dig-
nity, the Hebrew and Christian religions compare favorably
with the Greek and Roman, with which we were compelled
to familiarize ourselves at school, and so far as I know,
without protest from any source. If the Greek and Roman
gods and goddesses were alive to-day, every one of them
would be in jail.
American boys and girls know more about the Bible than
was the case twenty years ago; at the dawn of the twentieth
century Biblical ignorance among our youth and particularly
among college undergraduates was by way of becoming a
public scandal. Well-bred boys in many instances were in-
nocent of even the penumbra of knowledge. Professor
Lounsbury discovered a young gentleman in his classes who
had never heard of Pontius Pilate. Twenty-five years ago I
requested a Freshman to elucidate the line in As You Like
It, "Here feel we not the penalty of Adam. He replied
confidently, "It was the mark imposed on him for slaying
his brother. To another I asked the meaning of the pas-
128
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
sage in Macbeth, "Or memorize another Golgotha. Seeing
the blank expression on his handsome face, I said, "It is a
New Testament reference. "Oh, yes, he exclaimed, "it
refers to Goliath. At about this time, a young clergyman,
obsessed with the importance of the "higher criticism, an-
nounced that if he accepted a call to a western church, he
must be allowed to preach to the younger people about the
second Isaiah. "That's all right, said the deacon cheer-
fully; "most of 'em don't know there is even one.
What with regular school and college courses in the Eng-
lish Bible, and the publication of many first aids to Biblical
ignorance, we have made much progress during the last
twenty-five years; but it is still true that the young genera-
tion to-day are not so familiar with the Bible as was cus-
tomary a century ago. Ignorant as the boy, the girl, and the
man in the street are, however, there is not the slightest in-
dication of any falling away from knowledge among the
poets, novelists, and dramatists. The .Bible has been a
greater influence on the course of English literature than all
other forces put together; it is impossible to read standard
authors intelligently without knowing something about the
Bible, for they all assume familiarity with it on the part of
their readers. But what particularly pleases me is that not
only standard, but contemporary authors, exhibit consciously
or unconsciously intimacy with the Scriptures. So uni-
versally true is this, that to any young man or woman eaten
with ambition to become a writer, I should advise first of
all—"Know the Bible. Ibsen said his chief reading was
always in the Bible: "It is so strong and mighty. Tolstoi
knew the Scriptures like Timothy; it is quite impossible to
read Dostoevski's novels—and every one wants to read
them just now—without knowing the Bible. For four years
in the Siberian prison, the New Testament was his most in-
timate friend. His greatest stories are really commentaries.
Andreev, giving a list of the books that had influenced him
most, put the Bible first. Kipling's finest poem, the Reces-
sional, is almost as close a paraphrase of Scripture as the
hymn Nearer, My God, to Thee, which is a verse-translation
READING THE BIBLE
129
of a passage in the twenty-eighth chapter of Genesis. Every
modern novel, every modern play I read is almost sure to
reveal an acquaintance with the great Book. And one of
the chief features of twentieth-century drama has been the
dramatization of Bible stories, presenting to metropolitan
audiences the revelation of human passion where it may be
found in its most powerful and convincing forms. In
Stuart Walker's theater version of the Book of Job, the
sublimity of the speeches is impressive.
Within the last three years, three tributes have been paid
to the Bible by three distinguished men of letters, who,
curiously enough, seem to be the last three on earth from
whom such a tribute would have been expected. The finest
English novel produced by the war is Mr. Britling Sees It
Through, by the apostle of scientific education, H. G. Wells;
he could not have written it without a profound knowledge
of the New Testament. The transcendent element in this
story is its spiritual force, which he obtained directly from
the Gospels. That arch pagan, George Moore, who boasts
that he has not even a grain of faith, and who, in an auto-
biographical sketch, put down as his chief recreation, Reli-
gion, wrote a long novel on the life of Christ; and although it
is filled with sacrilege, it exhibits the sway over his heart and
mind held by the greatest Personality in history. He found
he could not escape from the Son of Man, and wrote this
book to relieve his own mind, as old Burton wrote a treatise
on melancholy to cure himself of it. Finally, the wittiest
iconoclast of our day, Bernard Shaw, in the long preface to
Androcles and the Lion, has produced a carefully-written
commentary of one hundred and twenty-seven printed pages,
dealing with the Gospels in turn, with Acts, and the life and
letters of Paul. It is a marvelous and reverent exposition of
Christ's teaching as he understands it, and we have the spec-
tacle of Bernard Shaw bowing his hitherto unconquered
head in the presence of the King of Kings. He has been
reading and rereading the Bible with close attention; he
emerges from its study not only fascinated by the central
figure, but with a sincere belief that only through following
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
the teachings of Jesus can society attain salvation. He be-
lieves that Jesus knew more about human nature than any
other person who ever lived; that He knew not only our
diseases, but the remedy for them.
I am not concerned here with the truth or error of the
religious interpretations respectively put forth by Mr. Wells,
Mr. Moore, Mr. Shaw; but only with the plain fact that
these three creative artists have been recently studying the
Bible with extraordinary zeal.
The Bible contains every form of literature in the highest
degree, except humor. The seriousness of the main theme—
man's relation to God—and the serious cast of mind charac-
teristic of the various writers, forbade the introduction of
anything approaching hilarity. Yet there are adumbrations
of humor here and there. In Stuart Walker's stage produc-
tion, The Book of Job, there are half a dozen passages or
situations that arouse audible risibility. I wish that we were
able to interpret as humorous the famous passage (Job,
XXXI, 35) "behold, my desire is . . . that mine adversary
had written a book. No worse fate could be wished for
one's enemy, as every writer of books knows only too well;
but although the verse is often quoted lightly, I fear that in
the original there is no pleasantry. I have always thought
that the chronicler in Acts (XII, 18) intended the puzzle-
ment of the soldiers to be faintly humorous: "now as soon
as it was day, there was no small stir among the soldiers,
what was become of Peter.
It is difficult to read the following verse in Proverbs with-
out smiling: "He that blesseth his friend with a loud voice,
rising early in the morning, it shall be counted a curse to
him. And the world-old joke about shrewish women comes
on the heels of the inopportune friend: "A continual drop-
ping in a very rainy day and a contentious woman are
alike.
The pessimist who wrote Ecclesiastes admitted that there
was time to laugh, but he apparently found no time for it
himself. The Puritans had good authority for their dislike
of laughter, and were forever citing the thorns crackling
READING THE BIBLE
131
under the pot. Their view was well expressed in Proverbs—
"Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful.
I cannot recall any occasion when Our Lord laughed
aloud; but He must have been amused more than once. I
am sure that He wanted to laugh when the mother of Zebe-
dee's children fatuously requested that her two sons might
sit, one on His right hand, and one on His left, in the king-
dom. He settled that question and calmed the subsequent
indignation of the Ten with divine tact.
Yet if there is little humor in the Bible, there is an im-
mense amount of irony. The Psalms and the Prophetic
Books abound with illustrations.
The Bible is full of both passion and sentiment, but it has
no sentimentality. It is rather remarkable that there is, so
far as I can remember, not one touch of false sentiment. In
nearly all old books, the pathos that drew tears from con-
temporary readers often obtains either smiles or yawns
from later generations; but the scenes of sentiment in the
Bible are so deeply founded on human nature, that they im-
press the twentieth century with as much force as in the
time when they were written. Four supreme instances, out
of an uncountable number, may be given—illustrating the
love of man to woman, the love of brother to brother, the
love of man to man, and the grief of a father for a dead
son.
And Jacob served seven years for Rachel; and they seemed
unto him but a few days, for the love he had to her.
In the marvelous story of Joseph and his brethren, when
Joseph saw the lad Benjamin, his own brother, the situation
is enough to tax the power of the most consummate artist;
but the simplicity and dignity of the Bible narrative leaves
nothing to add, change, or omit.
And he asked them of their welfare, and said, Is your father
well, the old man of whom ye spake? Is he yet alive? And
they answered, Thy servant our father is in good health, he is
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
yet alive. And they bowed down their heads, and made obei-
sance.
And he lifted up his eyes, and saw his brother Benjamin, his
mother's son, and said, Is this your younger brother, of whom
ye spake unto me ? And he said, God be gracious unto thee,
my son.
And Joseph made haste; for his bowels did yearn upon his
brother; and he sought where to weep; and he entered into his
chamber, and wept there.
When David was informed of the death of Saul and Jona-
than, his lament for the latter is unsurpassed in literature
as a tribute to the strength of men's friendships.
Saul and Jonathan were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and
in their death they were not divided: they were swifter than
eagles, they were stronger than lions. . . . How are the mighty
fallen in the midst of the battle! O Jonathan, thou wast slain
in thine high places. I am distressed for thee, my brother
Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to
me was wonderful, passing the love of women.
When King David awaits the news of the decisive battle of
the civil war, he has only one question for both messengers,
Is the young man Absalom safe? Ahimaaz did not dare to
tell the truth, when he saw where his master's interest cen-
tered; Cushi replied with matchless diplomatic tact, but to
no avail. The king's passion of grief for his cruel son
seemed merely an enigma to the two messengers, whilst to
that seasoned fighting-hack, Joab, it seemed ridiculous and
disgusting. But to us it is not only impressive beyond
words, it reveals one of the qualities of the king that make
us love him.
And the king said unto Cushi, Is the young man Absalom
safe? And Cushi answered, The enemies of my lord the king,
and all that rise against thee to do thee hurt, be as that young
man is.
And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber
over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son
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Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for
thee, 0 Absalom, my son, my son!
There is no narrative style superior to that of the Old
Testament historians. They included everything, both good
and bad, never trying to make an idealized portrait. Now
the most important thing in a king's life, both for himself
and for the welfare of his subject, is his moral character.
Is it good or bad? This statement is given first, for it de-
serves primacy; his personal appearance, physical endow-
ments, accomplishments are all secondary.
In the three and twentieth year of Joash the son of Ahaziah,
king of Judah, Jehoahaz the son of Jehu began to reign over
Israel in Samaria, and reigned seventeen years.
And he did that which was evil in the sight of the Lord, and
followed the sins of Jeroboam the son of Nebat, which made
Israel to sin; he departed not therefrom.
Out of these impartially written historical pages, where
one fact soberly follows another, individuals leap to life
with astonishing vividity. Agag, going delicately, and say-
ing "Surely the bitterness of death is past"; the sprinter
Asahel, "light of foot as a wild roe, who turned not to the
right hand nor to the left from following Abner, and whom
Abner reluctantly slew pushing his spear back at him;
Amasa, treacherously slain by Joab, "Art thou in health,
my brother? Many characters like the above, to whom
only a few lines are given, are nevertheless unforgettable;
whilst the more important personages, Jehu, Ahab, Jezebel,
Joab, are as real to us as the leading figures in American
History.
Jonathan has been somewhat obscured by David, but he
was the opposite of a weak character. He was a first-class
fighting man. It took immense courage to defy a father
like Saul, and let it be remembered that when Saul, in un-
governable passion, threw a javelin at Jonathan across the
dinner-table, Jonathan showed no fear. The history says,
"So Jonathan then arose from the table in fierce anger.
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As for David himself, he had many sins to answer for,
including murder and adultery in their most malignant
form; yet every one loves David, for he had a great heart.
When Nathan stood up .to him, instead of killing the bold
prophet, he admitted his guilt; he was more interested in
the welfare of Absalom than in the outcome of the rebellion
against his throne; his attitude toward King Saul was a
model of loyalty and forbearance; his personal magnetism
was so powerful that mighty men loved to risk their lives
for him. Sometimes I think the finest episode in his career
was when he refused to drink the water brought to him by
the three champions.
And David longed, and said, Oh, that one would give me
drink of the water of the well of Bethlehem, that is at the gate!
And the three brake through the host of the Philistines, and
drew water out of the well of Bethlehem, that was by the gate,
and took it, and brought it to David; but David would not drink
of it but poured it out to the Lord, And said, My God, forbid it
me, that I should do this thing; shall I drink the blood of these
men that have put their lives in jeopardy? for with the jeopardy
of their lives they brought it. Therefore he would not drink it.
John Masefield, the English poet, in a memorable speech
made in America in June, 1918, cited this incident as a
parable. He said that after this great war is over, we shall
feel unworthy of using the freedom bought by victory; for
our liberty will come to us through the sacrifice of heroes.
And if the mature King David is splendid, the lyric David
is one of the most radiant figures in history. Was there
ever a finer description of a young athlete, than the follow-
ing sketch of David? And remember that the whole ac-
count of his appearance and accomplishments is compressed
into a part of one sentence, which is itself only a part of
one Bible verse:
Cunning in playing, and a mighty valiant man, and a man of
war, and prudent in speech, and a comely person, and the Lord
is with him.
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135
This recommendation was naturally enough for Saul, and
he sent for the young harp player.
Although paraphrases of the Bible are usually weak—I
once owned a book that contained the Gospels told in rime,
heaven knows why—many of the masterpieces of English
literature have been founded directly on the Bible text. We
need to think only of Milton's Samson Agonistes, and of
Browning's Saul. In Browning, David soothes the king by
playing the old tunes of the pasture. Saul was a cowboy;
he was rounding up his father's herd when the king-hunters
came after him; many times, amid the responsibilities of the
monarchy, he must have been homesick for the free life of
the hills. David knew what he was about when he played
pastoral tunes.
The great prophets of Israel exhibited not only a zeal
for righteousness, but plenty of common sense. I like the
quiet way in which they settled minor questions. When
Elisha was plowing, and Elijah cast his mantle on him, the
youth knew he was called to greater things than farm work,
but he asked the man of God, "Let me, I pray thee, kiss my
father and my mother, and then I will follow thee. And
Elijah replied, "Go back again: for what have I done to
thee?
And the matter of courtesy toward a religious service in
which we do not believe, was settled once for all by Elisha.
After Naaman had been cured of leprosy, he told Elisha
that of course the God of Israel was the only true God, and
he would worship Him for the rest of his life. But he was
troubled by a matter that might be called religious etiquette.
He is going back to serve his royal master, the king of
Syria, and how shall he behave in the house of Rimmon
where the king worships ?
In this thing the Lord pardon thy servant, that when my
master goeth into the house of Rimmon to worship there, and
he leaneth on my hand, and I bow myself in the house of Rim-
mon: when I bow down myself in the house of Rimmon, the
Lord pardon thy servant in this thing. And he said unto him.
Go in peace.
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Pastoral literature, which is a form by itself, has few
good illustrations in native English, for our pastorals from
Spenser and William Browne down to the nineteenth cen-
tury, are marred by artificiality and indeed by insipidity. I
suppose the best pastorals in secular literature are the first,
those by Theocritus. Yet even the Sicilian masterpieces are
inferior to a specimen found in the Bible, the book of Ruth.
This wonderful idyl of the farm, told in an impeccable style
by the old Hebrew writer, must forever remain supreme and
unapproachable. The economy of words is striking; in the
narrative of David's great-grandmother, there is not a su-
perfluous sentence. The suppressed passion in this tale has
been felt by all intelligent readers; and Keats, with his
genius for beauty of feeling and beauty of tone, has arrested
the lonely figure of Ruth in the grain-field, where she stands
in immortal loveliness like the images on the Greek urn.
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
Through the sad heart of Ruth, when sick for home,
She stood in tears amid the alien corn.
Epistolary literature in the New Testament reached its
climax. There are no letters in the history of the pen like
the letters of John, and James, and Peter, and Paul. It
would be difficult to improve on James's comment on pure
religion, or on his account of that untameable creature, the
tongue. Whilst the short letter by Jude is inferior to those
written by the great four, it contains a description of cer-
tain ungodly men mightily effective.
Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame;
wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of dark-
ness forever.
Although there are no books in the Bible cast in the form
of a play, there are not many dramatic elevations in litera-
ture loftier than the story of Esther, Haman, and Mordecai;
of Samson, the strongest man in the world, easy prey to
women; of Judith and Holofernes; of Ahab, Jezebel, and
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137
Naboth. These are pure drama. And in these dramas o£
terrific passion, there are natural, homely touches of sur-
prising realism, that seem as if the events might have hap-
pened yesterday. The night when King Ahasuerus was
wakeful, and after trying every expedient to induce sleep,
finally did what so many of us did some night last week—
he sat up in bed and read a book. He merely exercised the
royal prerogative, and had the book read to him.
The poetry of the Old Testament—especially in the books
Solomon's Song, Job, Psalms, Isaiah,—excels in every
variety of poetical expression, ranging from pure lyrical
singing to majestic epic harmonies. The most conventional
subject for a poem is Spring, and among the millions of
tributes to the mild air and the awakening earth, none is
more beautiful than the passage in the Song of Songs:
My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up, my love, my
fair one, and come away.
For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; the
flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds
is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vine with
the tender grape give a good smell. Arise, my love, my fair
one, and come away. ...
My beloved is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the
lilies.
Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, turn, my be~
loved, and be thou like a roe or a young hart upon the moun-
tains of Bether.
As Browning began what is perhaps his greatest work—
the Pope's speech in the Ring and the Book—with an allu-
sion to the story in Esther, so, in giving the Pope's tribute
to the soldier-saint Caponsacchi, he borrowed some poetry
from Job. It is worth while for a moment to compare the
original and Browning's language to see what good use
Browning made of his Biblical knowledge.
Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook? or his tongue
with a cord which thou lettest down ?
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Canst thou put an hook into his nose? or bore his jaw through
with a thorn? . . .
Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? or wilt thou bind
him for thy maidens? . . .
His heart is as firm as a stone; yea, as hard as a piece of
the nether millstone. . . .
He maketh a path to shine after him; one would think the
deep to be hoary. . . .
He beholdeth all high things; he is a king over all the chil-
dren of pride.
Browning, in the Pope's speech, gives some advice to the
teachers of young men. He bids them remember the
strength, passion, and glory of youth, and not expect to tame
adolescence with petty formalism, or with tiny devices. And
suddenly the thought of Leviathan must have entered his
mind, for the Pope speaks.
Irregular noble 'scapegrace—son the same!
Frailty—and peradventure ours the fault
Who still misteach, mislead, throw hook and line,
Thinking to land leviathan forsooth,
Tame the scaled neck, play with him as a bird,
And bind him for our maidens! Better bear
The King of Pride go wantoning awhile,
Unplagued by cord in nose and thorn in jaw,
Through deep to deep, followered by all that shine,
Churning the blackness hoary; He who made
The comely terror, He shall make the sword
To match that piece of netherstone his heart.
If one reads the book of Psalms straight through, no mat-
ter how familiar many passages may be, the glory and
splendor of the majestic poetry will come like a fresh reve-
lation; and if one will read the last three Psalms aloud, one
will feel how all the hymns of sorrow, delight, repentance
and adoration unite in one grand universal chorus of praise.
Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons, and all deeps:
Fire and hail; snow, and vapours; stormy wind fulfilling his
word:
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Mountains, and all hills; fruitful trees, and all cedars: Beasts,
and all cattle; creeping things, and flying fowl; Kings of the
earth, and all people; princes, and all judges of the earth;
Both young men, and maidens; old men, and children. . . .
Praise ye the Lord. Praise God in his sanctuary: praise him in
the firmament of his power.
Praise him for his mighty acts: praise him according to his
excellent greatness.
Praise him with the sound of the trumpet: praise him with
the psaltery and harp.
Praise him with the timbrel and dance: praise him with
stringed instruments and organs.
Piaise him upon the loud cymbals: praise him upon the high
sounding cymbals.
Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord. Praise ye
the Lord.
Handel's Messiah is the greatest of all oratorios; some-
times I think it is worth all other oratorios put together.
Handel was an inspired genius. When he wrote the Hallelu-
jah chorus, he said he saw the heavens opened and the Son
of God sitting in glory, and I have no doubt he really did.
He was fortunate in being able to match deathless words
with sublime music. Much of the grandeur of his work is
owing to the poetry, and especially to the parts taken from
the prophet Isaiah. Passages of stern authority alternate
with ineffable tenderness.
Every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill
shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and
the rough places plain:
And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall
see it together: . . .
He shall feed his flock like a shepherd: he shall gather the
lambs with his arm, and carry them in his bosom, and shall
gently lead those that are with young.
The poetry of the Bible is not only the highest poetry to
be found anywhere in literature, it contains the essence of
all religion, so far as religion consists in aspiration. In
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this way Job, the Psalms, and Isaiah contain an eternal ele-
ment of truth, that no advance in the world's thought can
make obsolete. Through such poetry rather than through
any formal creed, man is lifted into a communion with the
Divine Spirit. For in these immortal poems, which express
a fundamental and universal passion, the human soul rises
to that elevation which brings assurance and peace.
The Bible contains not only the finest historical prose,
and the finest lyric and epic poetry; in philosophy, practical
wisdom, and political economy it is also supreme. Modern
pessimism, even in the great artist Schopenhauer, finds no
more beautiful expression than in the book of Ecclesiastes;
and the ancient pessimist has a better key to the riddle of
life than asceticism. His conclusion of the whole matter is
to fear God and keep His commandments.
The political economy taught in the Gospels is not only
better for humanity to follow as a practical guide, it is
more deeply based on the fact than the treatises of John
Stuart Mill or any other classic authority. In the preface
to Androcles and the Lion, Bernard Shaw says that human-
ity can never solve the problems of society, can never ar-
range the social structure properly, until the teaching of
Jesus is followed. He believes that Jesus knew more about
such things than any modern student. It looks to-day as
though all progress was an attempt, naturally through much
failure and frequent relapse, to apply the doctrines of Jesus
Christ. And I think that in four or five centuries, say, in
the year of 2500, humanity will be nearer that goal than it
is to-day.
Even those who do not believe that the Bible is the revela-
tion. of God, will admit that it is the supreme revelation of
man. There is more revelation of man's weakness and
strength, man's capacity for evil and for good, in the Bible
than can be found in Shakespeare and all the dramatists of
the world. It is the most human of all books. And it is
true in its depiction of human nature as naturally sinful;
it does not flatter; men are instinctively bad, and therefore
need not palliatives, but regeneration. The basest deeds of
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141
which men and women are capable are faithfully recorded;
and the greatest Personality in history clearly set forth.
Religion, in its combination of reverence and conduct, the
attitude to God and the attitude to man, was understood by
the old prophets; they had a passion for spiritual worship
and a passion for right living. When President Eliot was
requested by the authorities at Washington to select a sen-
tence for a conspicuous place in the great Library, he said
there was nothing in the history of literature more worthy
than a pair of lines from the prophet Micah. Accordingly
there they stand, as true in the twentieth century as when
they were first uttered:
What doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to
love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God ?
The practical wisdom expressed in the book of Proverbs
has not been surpassed by any of our modern wise men.
Nor has it yet become stale. The wisest men to-day have
nothing to add in the way of a guide to life, to this collection
of ancient Jewish wisdom, compiled from long observation
and experience. Sensuality is still a guidepost to the grave,
and a soft answer still turns away wrath. In the midst of
the bewildering changes not only in women's garments, but
in women's activities, the two-verse sketch in the last chap-
ter of Proverbs still represents the ideal woman:
Strength and honour are her clothing; and she shall rejoice
in time to come.
She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the
law of kindness.
But of all the sagacity in this extraordinary book, the finest
both in thought and expression is to be found in the penulti-
mate chapter. After enumerating four inexplicable prob-
lems, ending charmingly with "the way of a man with a
maid, which has been the stock subject of the drama and
the novel for many centuries, the allusion to the adulterous
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woman seems at first to be an anti-climax. But a little re-
flection convinces us that her self-satisfaction is after all
the most inexplicable thing in the world. The things which
disquieted (excellent word) the earth then, disquiet it now:
the servant reigning, and the handmaid heir to her mistress
are ruining Russia, and disquieting the world; a fool with
a hearty dinner inside his carcass is insufferable, and an
odious woman when she is married becomes even more of-
fensive. Then follow the immortal four illustrations of
wisdom, unconscious examples of great ideas: the ants,
who can their food in the summer: the feeble conies, who
seek secure shelter; the locusts, who govern themselves con-
stitutionally; the ugly spider, who lives aloft in palatial sur-
roundings. Good things: Foresight: Security: Cooperation:
Aspiration.
For the last sixty years the chief intellectual passion of
educated men and women has been the passion for truth.
Never has truth been so loved, and followed with such de-
votion. It is worth remembering that in the first book of
Esdras in the Apocrypha, this passion for truth was ex-
pressed in final and impressive words, together with a pic-
ture of other forces as true to-day as then, and in one as-
pect amazingly applicable to the years from 1914 to 1918.
The three young men who competed for the prize of declar-
ing what was the strongest thing on earth, wrote their opin-
ions in secret, and defended them in public. The first
wrote, Wine is the strongest; the second, The king is the
strongest; the third, Women are strongest; but above all
things truth beareth away the victory. The man who de-
fended the second proposition might easily have been refer-
ring to Kaiser Wilhelm II, and to the organization of his
forces for war, some for fighting, some for the conservation
of food:
If he bid them make war the one against the other, they do
it; if he send them out against the enemies, they go, and break
down mountains, walls, and towers.
They slay and are slain, and transgress not the king's com-
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143
mandment; if they get the victory, they bring all to the king,
as well the spoil, as all things else.
Likewise for those that are no soldiers and have not to do
with wars, but use husbandry, when they have reaped again
that which they had sown, they bring it to the king, and com-
. pel one another to bring tribute to the king. And yet he is but
one man: if he command to kill, they kill; if he command to
spare, they spare;
If he command to smite, they smite; if he command to make
desolate, they make desolate; if he command to build, they build;
If he command to cut down, they cut down; if he command
to plant, they plant. So all his people and his armies obey him;
furthermore he lieth down, he eateth and drinketh, and taketh
his rest:
And these keep watch round about him, neither may any one
depart, and do his own business, neither disobey they him in
anything.
Then the third youth, after a witty and piquant tribute to
the power of women, began to speak of the truth.
Wine is wicked, the king is wicked, women are wicked, and
such are all their wicked works; and there is no truth in them;
in their unrighteousness also they shall perish.
As for the truth, it endureth, and is always strong; it liveth
and conquereth forevermore. . . .
With her there is no accepting of persons or rewards.
Neither in her judgment is any unrighteousness; and she is
the strength, kingdom, power, and majesty of all ages.
Blessed be the God of truth.
And with that he held his peace. And all the people then
shouted, and said, Great is truth, and mighty above all things.
I would give much if I knew the tone of Pilate's voice, or
the expression on his face, or his particular impelling
thought, when he asked our Lord the question, What is
truth f Jesus had just spoken of the permanent importance
of truth. "To this end was I born, and for this cause came
I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth.
Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice. Pilate
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saith unto him, What is truth? and immediately went out
and declared that he found no fault in the accused person.
Bacon begins his first essay with the words, "What is
Truth? said jesting Pilate; and would not stay for an an-
swer. But I am not at all sure that Pilate was jesting; in
the New Testament narrative, Pilate's bearing was serious
and dignified. The Pilate of the Mystery Plays was at
times jocose and it is more than possible that Bacon had the
stage Pilate in mind, as Shakespeare had the stage Herod,
though I have never heard this explanation suggested.
Martin Luther, if I understand him correctly, regarded
Pilate's question as coming from a practical politician.
What good is truth in an emergency like this? What you
want is not truth; what you need is some practical scheme
to get you out of this fix. It would be I suppose like the
complacency of the "regular candidate: you may have the
truth on your side, but I have the delegates. Possibly all
Pilate meant was to express his impatience tinctured with
dismay, that Jesus, in such a dangerous moment, should
begin talking about an abstraction like truth. Then the ques-
tion would simply mean, What is the use now of talking
about truth? Pilate regarded Jesus as a harmless dreamer,
and yet there was something puzzlingly impressive about
Him. The Romans, exactly the opposite of the Russians,
were eminently practical; pure theory had little interest for
them, and to discuss an abstract question was at best a waste
of time.
Some one has profanely remarked that even God Him-
self could not answer Pilate's question. At all events, it
remained unanswered, and the answer would have been
as incomprehensible to Pilate as the kingship of the
speaker.
The scene is one of the most dramatic in literature. The
powerful Roman official, with the whole force of the Empire
behind him, is confronted by a quiet figure, unaggressive
but unterrified, the only serene person in the hall. The
words of our Lord are a divine echo of the famous testimony
of the young man in the Book of Esdras.
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As for the truth, it endureth, and is always strong: it liveth
and conquereth forevermore.
With her there is no accepting of persons or rewards.
Neither in her judgment is any unrighteousness; and she is
the strength, kingdom, power and majesty of all ages.
The impotence of physical force to destroy truth has been
proved many times, but it is a fact always impressive in ret-
rospect. History is full of dramatic contrasts. After read-
ing the scurrilous attacks made by Aristophanes on Socrates,
one cannot help thinking to-day that the figure of the drama-
tist, piteously begging the Athenians for the prize, contrasts
harshly with the solitary grandeur of Socrates standing be-
fore his accusers, perfectly calm in the contemplation of
the grave. And the contrast between the friendless prisoner
and the mighty Roman, who imagined he had final power
over Him, imposes itself on every one who reads the Gospel
narrative. I came into the world to bear witness unto the
truth. This is God's world, not the Roman's nor the Jew's;
He rules it. I die on the cross; but truth, honor, morality
do not die; my death is a witness for all times to the su-
premacy of Truth.
RIGHT READING1
James Russell Lowell
When Lowell became editor of the Atlantic Monthly, he also be-
came a literary dictator. He revised Thoreau's manuscripts, until
Thoreau refused to send contributions; he reproved Holmes; he
advised and directed Whittier. Although he assumed dogmatic
authority, he did leave behind many essays which are still sugges-
tive. He had the insight which has made many of his estimates of
his contemporaries permanently valuable. Perhaps he did injustice
to Thoreau. His greatest contribution came through his freeing
American criticism from the domination of England.
Lowell came from a long line of Puritan ministers. He was dis-
tinctly a New England Brahmin. As a matter of course, he was
sent to Harvard College, where he finished a law course, but finding
the practice of law distasteful, he turned to a literary career. At
different times he edited The Pioneer, The North American Re-
view, and The Atlantic Monthly. For a number of years he was a
Professor of Modern Language in Harvard College. Later he
entered the Diplomatic Service. The present essay gives a brief
suggestion concerning reading.
Southey tells us that, in his walk one stormy day, he met
an old woman, to whom, by way of greeting, he made the
rather obvious remark that it was dreadful weather. She
answered, philosophically, that, in her opinion, "any weather
was better than none! I should be half inclined to say that
any reading was better than none, allaying the crudeness of
the statement by the Yankee proverb, which tells us that,
though "all deacons are good, there's odds in deacons.
Among books, certainly, there is much variety of company,
ranging from the best to the worst, from Plato to Zola, and
the first lesson in reading well is that which teaches us to
distinguish between literature and merely printed matter.
The choice lies wholly with ourselves. We have the key put
1 Reprinted from Democracy and Other Essays.
1A ft
RIGHT READING
147
into our hands; shall we unlock the pantry or the oratory ?
There is a Wallachian legend which, like most of the fig-
ments of popular fancy, has a moral in it. One Bakala, a
good-for-nothing kind of fellow in his way, having had the
luck to offer a sacrifice especially well pleasing to God, is
taken up into heaven. He finds the Almighty sitting in
something like the best room of a Wallachian peasant's
cottage—there is always a profound pathos in the homeli-
ness of the popular imagination, forced, like the princess in
the fairy tale, to weave its semblance of gold tissue out of
straw. On being asked what reward he desires for the good
service he has done, Bakala, who had always passionately
longed to be the owner of a bagpipe, seeing a half worn-out
one lying among some rubbish in a corner of the room, begs
eagerly that it may be bestowed on him. The Lord, with a
smile of pity at the meanness of his choice, grants him his
boon, and Bakala goes back to earth delighted with his prize.
With an infinite possibility within his reach, with the choice
of wisdom, of power, of beauty at his .tongue's end, he asked
according to his kind, and his sordid wish is answered with
a gift as sordid. Yes, there is a choice in books as in friends,
and the mind sinks or rises to the level of its habitual society,
is subdued, as Shakespeare says of the dyer's hand, to what
it works in. Cato's advice, cum bonis ambula, consort with
the good, is quite as true if we extend it to books, for they,
too, insensibly give away their own nature to the mind that
converses with them. They either beckon upwards or drag
down. Du gleichst dem Geist den du begreifst, says the
World Spirit to Faust, and this is true of the ascending no
less than of the descending scale. Every book we read may
be made a round in the ever-lengthening ladder by which we
climb to knowledge and to that temperance and serenity of
mind which, as it is the ripest fruit of Wisdom, is also the
sweetest. But this can only be if we read such books as
make us think, and read them in such a way as helps them to
do so, that is, by endeavoring to judge them, and thus to
make them an exercise rather than a relaxation of the mind.
Desultory reading, except as conscious pastime, hebetates
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
the brain and slackens the bow-string of Will. It communi-
cates as little intelligence as the messages that run along the
telegraph wire to the birds that perch on it. ... A man is
known, says the proverb, by the company he keeps, and not
only so, but made by it. Milton makes his fallen angels
grow small to enter the infernal council room, but the soul,
which God meant to be the spacious chamber where high
thoughts and generous aspirations might commune together,
shrinks and narrows itself to the measure of the meaner
company that is wont to gather there, hatching conspiracies
against our better selves. We are apt to wonder at the
scholarship of the men of three centuries ago and at a certain
dignity of phrase that characterizes them. They were
scholars because they did not read so many things as we.
They had fewer books, but these were of the best. Their
speech was noble, because they lunched with Plutarch and
supped with Plato. We spend as much time over print as
they did, but instead of communing with the choice thoughts
of choice spirits, and unconsciously acquiring the grand man-
ner of that supreme society, we diligently inform ourselves,
and cover the continent with a cobweb of telegraphs to in-
form us, of such inspiring facts as that a horse belonging to
Mr. Smith ran away on Wednesday, seriously damaging a
valuable carryall; that a son of Mr. Brown swallowed a
hickory nut on Thursday; and that a gravel bank caved in
and buried Mr. Robinson alive on Friday. . . . This is the
kind of news we compass the globe to catch, fresh from
Bungtown Centre, when we might have it fresh from heaven
by the electric lines of poet or prophet! ...
One is sometimes asked by young people to recommend a
course of reading. My advice would be that they should
confine themselves to the supreme books in whatever litera-
ture, or still better to choose some one great author, and
make themselves thoroughly familiar with him. For, as all
roads lead to Rome, so do they likewise lead away from it,
and you will find that, in order to understand perfectly and
weigh exactly any vital piece of literature, you will be
gradually and pleasantly persuaded to excursions and ex-
RIGHT READING
149
plorations of which you little dreamed when you began, and
will find yourselves scholars before you are aware. For
remember that there is nothing less profitable than scholar-
ship for the mere sake of scholarship, nor anything more
wearisome in the attainment. But the moment you have a
definite aim, attention is quickened, the mother of memory,
all that you acquire groups and arranges itself in an order
that is lucid, because everywhere and always it is in intelli-
gent relation to a central object of constant and growing
interest. This method also forces upon us the necessity of
thinking, which is, after all, the highest result of all educa-
tion. For what we want is not learning, but knowledge;
that is, the power to make learning answer its true end as a
quickener of intelligence and a widener of our intellectual
sympathies. I do not mean to say that every one is fitted
by nature or inclination for a definite course of study, or
indeed for serious study in any sense. I am quite willing
that these should "browse in a library, as Dr. Johnson
called it, to their hearts' content. It is, perhaps, the only way
in which time may be profitably wasted. But desultory read-
ing will not make a "full man, as Bacon understood it, of
one who has not Johnson's memory, his power of assimila-
tion, and, above all, his comprehensive view of the relations
of things.
STUDIES IN LITERATURE
John Morley
John Morley divided his time between politics and authorship.
When he was graduated from Lincoln College, Oxford, in 1859, he
went up to London to seek distinction by literature. At different
times he edited The Literary Gazette, The Fortnightly Review, and
Macmillan's Magazine. He was also the General Editor of the Eng-
lish Men of Letters series, and gained additional fame through his
Life of Edmund Burke and Iris Life of Gladstone. For a time he
held an important place in the House of Commons. Under Glad-
stone, he was appointed Secretary for Ireland. He was a staunch
advocate of the policy of Home Rule. The present essay is an illus-
tration of the literary finish of his style and the transparent honesty
of his reasoning.
No sensible person can suppose for a single moment that
everybody is born with the ability for using books, for read-
ing and studying literature. Certainly not everybody is born
with the capacity of being a great scholar. All people are no
more born great scholars like Gibbon and Bentley, than they
are all born great musicians like Handel and Beethoven.
What is much worse than that, many come into the world
with the incapacity of reading, just as they come into it with
the incapacity of distinguishing one tune from another. To
them I have nothing to say. Even the morning paper is too
much for them. They can only skim the surface even of
that. I go further, and frankly admit that the habit and
power of reading with reflection, comprehension, and mem-
ory all alert and awake, does not come at once to the natural
man any more than many other sovereign virtues come to
that interesting creature. What I do venture to press upon
you is, that it requires no preterhuman force of will in any
young man or woman—unless household circumstances are
more than usually vexatious and unfavorable—to get at least
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STUDIES IN LITERATURE
half an hour out of a solid busy day for good and disinter-
ested reading. Some will say that this is too much to expect,
and the first persons to say it, I venture to predict, will be
those who waste their time most. At any rate, if I cannot
get half an hour, I will be content with a quarter. Now, in
half an hour I fancy you can read fifteen or twenty pages
of Burke; or you can read one of Wordsworth's master-
pieces—say the lines on Tintern; or say, one-third—if a
scholar, in the original, and if not, in a translation—of a
book of the Iliad or the Tmeid. I do not think that I am
filling the half-hour too full. But try for yourselves what
you can read in half an hour. Then multiply the half-hour
by 365, and consider what treasures you might have laid by
at the end of the year; and what happiness, fortitude, and
wisdom they would have given you during all the days of
your life.
I will not take up your time by explaining the various
mechanical contrivances and aids to successful study. They
are not to be despised by those who would extract the most
from books. Many people think of knowledge as of money.
They would like knowledge but cannot face the perseverance
and self-denial that go to the acquisition of it. The wise
student will do most of his reading with a pen or a pencil in
his hand. He will not shrink from the useful toil of making
abstracts and summaries of what he is reading. Sir William
Hamilton was a strong advocate for underscoring books of
study. . . . Again, some great men—Gibbon was one, and
Daniel Webster was another, and the great Lord Strafford
was a third—always before reading a book made a short,
rough analysis of the questions which they expected to be
answered in it, the additions to be made to their knowledge,
and whither it would take them. I have sometimes tried
that way of steadying and guiding attention; and I commend
it to you. I need not tell you that you will find that most
books worth reading once are worth reading twice, and—
what is most important of all—the masterpieces of litera-
ture are worth reading a thousand times. It is a great mis-
take to think that because you have read a masterpiece once
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or twice, or ten times, therefore you have done with it.
Because it is a masterpiece, you ought to live with it, andc
make it part of your daily life. Another practice is that of
keeping a common-place book, and transcribing into it what
is striking and interesting and suggestive. And if you keep
it wisely, as Locke has taught us, you will put every entry
under the head, division, or subdivision. This is an excellent
practice for concentrating your thought on the passage and
making you alive to the real point and significance. . . .
Various correspondents have asked me to say something
about those lists of a hundred books that have been cir-
culating through the world within the last few months. I
have examined some of these lists with considerable care,
and whatever else may be said of them—and I speak of
them with deference and reserve, because men for whom one
must have a great regard have compiled them—they do not
seem to me to be calculated either to create or satisfy a wise
taste for literature in any very worthy sense. To fill a man
with a hundred parcels of heterogeneous scraps, from the
Mahabharata, and the Sheking, down to Pickwick and
White's SelboVne, may pass the time, but I cannot conceive
how it would strengthen or instruct or delight. For in-,
stance, it is a mistake to think that every book that has a
great name in the history of books or of thought is worth
reading. Some of the most famous books are least worth
reading. Their fame was due to their doing something that
needed in their day to be done. The work done, the virtue
of the book expires. Again, I agree with those who say
that the steady working down one of these lists would end in
the manufacture of that obnoxious product—the prig. A
prig has been defined as an animal that is overfed for its
size. I think that these bewildering miscellanies would lead
to an immense quantity of that kind of overfeeding. The
object of reading is not to dip into everything that even wise
men have ever written. In the words of one of the most
winning writers of English that ever existed—Cardinal
Newman—the object of literature in education is to open
the mind, to correct it, to refine it, to enable it to compre-
STUDIES IN LITERATURE
hend and digest its knowledge, to give it power over its own
faculties, application, flexibility, method, critical exactness,
sagacity, address, and expression. These are the objects of
that intellectual perfection which a literary education is des-
tined to give. . . .
Let me pass to another topic. We are often asked
whether it is best to study subjects, or authors, or books.
Well, I think that is like most of the stock questions with
which the perverse ingenuity of mankind torments itself.
There is no universal and exclusive answer. My own an-
swer is a very plain one. It is sometimes best to study
books, sometimes authors, and sometimes subjects; but at all
times it is best to study authors, subjects, and books in con-
nection with one another. Whether you make your first ap-
proach from interest in an author or in a book, the fruit will
be only half gathered if you leave off without new ideas and
clearer lights both on the man and the matter. . . .
This points to the right answer to another question that is
constantly asked. We are constantly asked whether desul-
tory reading is among things lawful and permitted. May
we browse at large in a library, as Johnson said, or is it for-
bidden to open a book without a definite aim and fixed ex-
pectations? I am for a compromise. If a man has once got
his general point of view, if he has striven with success to
place himself at the center, what follows is of less conse-
quence. If he has got in his head a good map of the coun-
try, he may ramble at large with impunity. If he has once
well and truly laid the foundations of a methodical, sys-
tematic habit of mind, what he reads will find its way to its
proper place. If his intellect is in good order, he will find
in every quarter something to assimilate and something that
will nourish.
POETRY FOR THE UNPOETICAL1
Henry Seidel Canby
Henry Seidel Canby has for some time been a member of the
English Department of Yale University. Recently he has added
to his usefulness by becoming the Editor of the Literary Review
of the New York Evening Post. For a number of years Mr.
Canby has been publishing critical essays which show a keen insight
into the tangled snarl of contemporary theories of art. He con-
stantly impresses the reader with his shrewd common-sense and
with his refusal to become excited over the shallow, noisy fads of
the present day. That he is a careful observer of life at first hand
as well as a wide reader is evident in all that he writes. The
present essay treats of a rather hackneyed subject with a sanity and
balance that is admirable.
I have looked through more essays upon poetry than I
care to remember without finding anywhere a discussion of
poetry for the unpoetical. A recent writer, it is true, has
done much to show that the general reader daily indulges in
poetry of a kind without knowing it. But the voluminous
literature of poetics is well-nigh all special. It is written
for students of rhythm, for instinctive lovers of poetry, for
writers of verse, for critics. It does not treat of the value of
poetry for the average, the unpoetical man—it says little of
his curious distaste for all that is not prose, or of the share
in all good poetry that belongs to him.
By the average man, let me hasten to say, I mean in this
instance the average intelligent reader, who has passed
through the usual formal education in literature, who reads
books as well as newspapers and magazines, who, without
calling himself a litterateur, would be willing to assert that
he was fairly well read and reasonably fond of good read-
ing. Your doctor, your lawyer, the president of your bank,
1 Reprinted from Definitions. Harcourt, Brace and Company.
154
POETRY FOR THE UNPOETICAL
and any educated business man who has not turned his brain
into a machine, will fit my case.
Among such excellent Americans, I find that there exists
a double standard as regards all literature, but especially
poetry. Just as the newspapers always write of clean politics
with reverence—whatever may be the private opinions and
practices of their editorial writers—so intelligent, though
unpoetic, readers are accustomed to speak of poetry with
very considerable respect. It is not proper to say, "I hate
poetry/' even if one thinks it. To admit ignorance of Ten-
nyson or Milton or Shakespeare is bad form, even if one
skimmed through them in college and has never disturbed
the dust upon their covers since. I have heard a whispered,
sneering remark after dinner, "I don't believe he ever heard
of Browning, by one who had penetrated about as far into
Browning's inner consciousness as a fly into the hickory-nut
it crawls over. I well remember seeing a lady of highly
respectable culture hold up her hands in horror before a col-
lege graduate who did not know who Beowulf was. Neither
did she, in any true sense of knowing. But her code taught
her that the "Beowulf, like other "good poetry, should
be upon one's list of acquaintances.
What these Americans really think is a very different
matter. The man in the trolley-car, the woman in the rock-
ing-chair, the clerk, the doctor, the manufacturer, most
lawyers, and some ministers would, if their hearts were
opened, give simply a categorical negative. They do not
like poetry, or they think they do not like it; in either case
with the same result. The rhythm annoys them (little
wonder, since they usually read it as prose), the rime seems
needless, the inversions, the compressions perplex their
minds to no valuable end. Speaking honestly, they do not
like poetry. And if their reason is the old one,
I do not like you, Dr. Fell;
The reason why I cannot tell,
it is none the less effective.
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But the positive answers are no more reassuring. Here
in America especially, when we like poetry, we like it none
too good. The "old favorites are almost all platitudinous
in thought and monotonous in rhythm. We prefer senti-
ment, and have a weakness for slush. Pathos seems to us
better than tragedy, anecdote than wit. Longfellow was
and is, except in metropolitan centers, our favorite "classi-
cal poet; the poetical corner and the daily poem of the
newspapers represent what most of us like when we do go
in for verse. The truth is that many of the intelligent in
our population skip poetry in their reading just because it is
poetry. They read no poetry, or they read bad poetry occa-
sionally, or they read good poetry badly.
This sorry state of affairs does not trouble the literary
critic. His usual comment is that either one loves poetry
or does not, and that is all there is to be said about it. If
the general reader neglects poetry, why then he belongs to
the lost Tribes and signifies nothing for Israel.
I am sure that he is wrong. His assertion is based on
the theory that every man worthy of literary salvation must
at all times love and desire the best literature, which is
poetry—and this is a fallacy. It is as absurd as if he should
ask most of us to dwell in religious exaltation incessantly,
or to live exclusively upon mountain peaks, or to cultivate
rapture during sixteen hours of the twenty-four. The
saints, the martyrs, the seers, the seekers, and enthusiasts
have profited nobly by such a regime, but not we of common
clay. To assume in advocating the reading of poetry that
one should substitute Pope for the daily paper, Francis
Thompson for the illustrated weekly, The Ring and the
Book for a magazine, and read The Golden Treasury
through instead of a novel, needs only to be stated to be
disproved. And yet this is the implication of much literary
crkicism.
But the sin of the general reader who refuses all poetry
is much more deadly, for it is due not to enthusiasm, but to
ignorance. It is true that the literary diet recommended
by an esthetic critic would choke a healthy business man;
POETRY FOR THE UNPOETICAL
but it is equally true that for all men whose emotions are
still alive within them, and whose intelligence permits the
reading of verse, poetry is quite as valuable as fresh air
and exercise. We do not need fresh air and exercise con-
stantly. We can get along very comfortably without them.
But if they are not essential commodities, they are impor-
tant ones, and so is poetry—a truth of which modern read-
ers seem to be as ignorant as was primitive man of fire until
he burned his hand in a blazing bush.
I do not mean for an instant to propose that every one
should read poetry. The man whose imagination has never
taken fire from literature of any kind, whose brain is literal
and dislikes any embroidery upon the surface of plain fact,
who is deaf to music, unresponsive to ideas, and limited in
his emotions—such a man in my opinion is unfortunate,
although he is often an excellent citizen, lives happily, makes
a good husband, and may save the state. But he should not
(no danger that he will) read poetry. And for another class
there is nothing in poetry. The emotionally dying or dead;
the men who have sunk themselves, their personalities,
their hopes, their happiness, in business or scholarship or
politics or sport—they, too, are often useful citizens, and
usually highly prosperous; but they would waste their time
upon literature of any variety, and especially upon poetry.
There are a dozen good arguments, however, to prove
that the reading of poetry is good for the right kind of
general reader, who is neither defective nor dead in his
emotions; and this means, after all, a very large percentage
of all readers. If I had space I should use them all, for I
realize that the convention we have adopted for poetry makes
us skip, in our magazines, as naturally from story to story
over the verse between as from stone to stone across the
brook. However, I choose only two, which seem to me as
convincing for the unpoetical reader (the dead and defective
excepted) as the ethical grandeur of poetry, let us say, for
the moralist, its beauty for the esthete, its packed knowledge
for the scholar.
The first has often been urged before and far more often
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overlooked. We everyday folk plod year after year through
routine, through fairly good or fairly bad, never quite real-
izing what we are experiencing, never seeing life as a whole,
or any part of it, perhaps, in complete unity. Words, acts,
sights, pass through our experience hazily, suggesting mean-
ings which we never fully grasp. Grief and love, the most
intense, perhaps, of sensations, we seldom understand ex-
cept by comparison with what has been said of the grief and
love of others. Happiness remains at best a diffused emo-
tion—felt, but not comprehended. Thought, if in some mo-
ment of intense clarity it grasps our relationship to the
stream of life, in the next shreds into trivialities. Is this
true? Test it by any experience that is still fresh in mem-
ory. See how dull, by comparison with the vivid colors of
the scene itself, are even now your ideas of what it meant
to you, how obscure its relations to your later life. The
moment you fell in love, the hour after your child had died,
the instant when you reached the peak, the quarrel that
began a misunderstanding not yet ended, the subtle house-
hold strain that pulls apart untiringly though it never sun-
ders two who love each other—all these I challenge you to
define, to explain, to lift into the light above the turbid sea
of complex currents which is life.
And this, of course, is what good poetry does. It seizes
the moment, the situation, the thought; drags it palpitating
from life and flings it, quivering with its own rhythmic
movement, into expression. The thing cannot be done in
mere prose, for there is more than explanation to the proc-
ess. The words themselves, in their color and suggestive-
ness, the rhythms that carry them, contribute to the sense,
even as overtones help to make the music.
All this may sound a little exalted to the comfortable
general reader, who does not often deal in such intense com-
modities as death and love. And yet I have mentioned
nothing that does not at one time or another, and frequently
rather than the opposite, come into his life, and need, not
constant, certainly, but at least occasional, interpretation.
Death and love, and also friendship, jealousy, courage, self-
POETRY FOR THE UNPOETICAL
sacrifice, hate—these cannot be avoided. We must experi-
ence them. So do the animals, who gain from their ex-
periences blind, instinctive repulsions or unreasoning likes
and distrusts. There are many ways of escaping from such
a bovine asquiescence, content to have felt, not desirous to
grasp and know and relate. Poetry, which clears and in-
tensifies like a glass held upon a distant snowpeak, is one
of the best.
But there is another service that poetry, among all writ-
ing, best renders to the general reader, when he needs it; a
service less obvious, but sometimes, I think, more important.
Poetry insures an extension of youth.
Men and women vary in their emotional susceptibility.
Some go through life always clouded, always dull, like a
piece of glass cut in semblance of a gem, that refracts no
colors and is empty of light. Others are vivid, impression-
able, reacting to every experience. Some of us are most
aroused by contact with one another. Interest awakens at
the sound of a voice; we are most alive when most with our
kind. Others, like Thoreau, respond best in solitude. The
very thrush singing dimly in the hemlocks at twilight moves
them more powerfully than a cheer. A deep meadow awave
with headed grass, a solemn hill shouldering the sky, a clear
blue air washing over the pasture slopes and down among
the tree-tops of the valley, thrills them more than all the
men in all the streets of the world. It makes no difference.
To every one, dull and vivid, social and solitary, age brings
its changes. We may understand better, but the vividness is
less, the emotions are tamer. They do not fully respond,
as the bell in the deserted house only half tinkles to our
pulling.
Si jeunesse savait,
Si vielliesse pouvait.
But to be able comes before to know. We must react to
experiences before it is worth while to comprehend them.
And after one is well enmeshed in the routine of plodding
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
life, after the freshness of the emotions (and this is a defini-
tion of youth) is gone, it is difficult to react. I can travel
now, if I wish, to the coral islands or the Spanish Main, but
it is too late.
Few willingly part with the fresh impressionability of
youth. Sometimes, as I have already suggested, the facul-
ties of sensation become atrophied, if indeed they ever ex-
isted. I know no more dismal spectacle than a man talking
shop on a moonlit hill in August, a woman gossiping by the
rail of a steamer plunging through the sapphire of the Gulf
Stream, or a couple perusing advertisements throughout a
Beethoven symphony. I will not advance as typical a drum-
mer I once saw read a cheap magazine from cover to cover
in the finest stretch of the Canadian Rockies. He was not
a man, but a sample-fed, word-emitting machine. These
people, emotionally speaking, are senile. They should not
try to read poetry.
But most of us—even those who are outwardly common-
place, practical, unenthusiastic, "solid, and not "sensitive
—lose our youthful keenness with regret. And that is why
poetry, except for the hopelessly sodden, is a tonic worthy
of a great price. For the right poetry at the right time has
the indubitable power to stir the emotions that experience
is no longer able to arouse. I cannot give satisfactory in-
stances, for the reaction is highly personal. What with me
stirs a brain cell long dormant to action will leave another
unmoved, and vice versa. However, to make clear my mean-
ing, let us take Romance, the kind that one capitalizes, that
belongs to Youth, also capitalized, and dwells in Granada or
Sicily or the Spanish Main. The middle-aged gentleman on
a winter cruise for his jaded nerves cannot expect a thrill
from sights alone. If it is not lost for him utterly, it is only
because Keats has kept it, in—
. . . Magic casements, opening on the foam
Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn,
and Nashe in—
POETRY FOR THE UNPOETICAL 161
Brightness falls from the air;
Queens have died young and fair.
Or consider the joy of travel renewed in Kipling's—
Then home, get her home, where the drunken rollers comb,
And the shouting seas drive by,
And the engines stamp and ring, and the wet bows reel and
swing,
And the Southern Cross rides high!
Yes, the old lost stars wheel back, dear lass,
That blaze in the velvet blue.
Or the multitudinous experiences of vivid life that crowd
the pages of men like Shakespeare, or Chaucer, who
thanked God that he had known his world as in his time.
Even in these shopworn quotations the power still remains.
Somewhere in poetry, and best in poetry because there
most concentrated and most penetrative, lies crystallized ex-
perience at hand for all who need it. It is not difficult to
find, although no one can find it for you. It is not neces-
sarily exalted, romantic, passionate; it may be comfortable,
homely, gentle or hearty, vigorous and cheerful; it may be
anything but commonplace, for no true emotion is ever
commonplace. I have known men of one poet; and yet that
poet gave them the satisfaction they required. I know
others whose occasional dip into poetry leads to no rapture
of beauty, no throbbing vision into eternity; and yet with-
out poetry they would be less alive, their minds would be
less young. As children, most of us would have flushed be-
fore the beauty of a sunrise on a tropic ocean, felt dimly if
profoundly—and forgotten. The poet—like the painter—
has caught, has interpreted, has preserved the experience,
so that, like music, it may be renewed. And he can perform
that miracle for greater things than sunrises. This, perhaps,
is the best of all reasons why every one except the emo-
tionally senile should sometimes read poetry. I know at
least one honest Philistine who, unlike many Philistines, has
traveled through the Promised Land—and does not like it.
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
When his emotional friends talk sentimentalism and call it
literature, or his esthetic acquaintances erect affectations and
call them art, he has the proper word of irony that brings
them back to food, money, and other verities. His voice
haunts me now, suggesting that, in spite of the reasons I
have advanced, the general reader can scarcely be expected
to read modern poetry, and that therefore his habit of skip-
ping must continue. He would say that most modern poetry
is unreadable, at least by the average man. He would say
that if the infinitely complex study of emotional mind-states
that lies behind the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson,
or the eerie otherworldliness of Yeats, or the harsh virility
of Sandburg is to be regarded as an intensification and clari-
fication of experience, he begs to be excused. He would
say that if the lyrics of subtle and passionate emotion and
the drab stories of sex experience that make up so many
pages of modern anthologies represent a renewal and ex-
tension of youth, it was not his youth. He prefers to be
sanely old rather than erotically young. He will stick to
the daily paper and flat prose.
Well, it is easy to answer him by ruling out modern
poetry from the argument. There was more good poetry,
neither complex, nor erotic, nor esoteric, written before our
generation than even a maker of anthologies is likely to
read. But I am not willing to dodge the issue so readily.
There is modern poetry for every reader who is competent
to read poetry at all. If there is none too much of it, that
is his own fault. If there is much that makes no appeal to
him, that is as it should be.
It is true that a very large proportion of contemporary
poetry is well-nigh unintelligible to the gentleman whose
reading, like his experience, does not often venture beyond
the primitive emotions. Why should it not be? The mod-
era lyric is untroubled by the social conscience. It is highly
individual, for it is written by men of intense individuality
for readers whose imaginations require an intimate appeal.
Such minds demand poetry prevailingly, just as the average
reader demands prose prevailingly. They profit by prose
POETRY FOR THE UNPOETICAL 163
now and then, just as, occasionally, he profits by poetry.
We talk so much of the enormous growth of the mass of
average readers in recent years that we forget the cor-
responding growth in the number of individualities that are
not average. Much modern poetry is written for such read-
ers, for men and women whose minds are sensitive to in-
tricate emotional experience, who can and do respond to
otherworldliness, to the subtly romantic, the finely esthetic,
and the intricately ideal. They deserve whatever poetry
they may desire.
The important point to note is that they do not get it. It
is they—far more than the Philistines—who complain that
modern poetry is insufficient for their needs. The highly
personal lyric is probably more perfected, more abundant,
and more poignant in its appeal to living minds now than
ever before in the history of our civilization. But it occu-
pies only one province of poetry. A lover of poetry desires,
far more keenly than the general reader, to have verse of his
own day that is more Shakespearian, more Miltonic, more
Sophoclean than this. He wants poetry that lifts spacious
times into spacious verse, poetry that "enlumynes, like
Petrarch's "rhetorike sweete, a race and a civilization. He
desires, in addition to what he is already getting, precisely
that poetry so universal in its subject-matter and its appeal,
which the general reader thinks he would read if he found it
instead of "lyrical subtleties in his pages.
Well, they do not get it very abundantly to-day, let us
admit the fact freely. But the fault is not altogether the
poets'. .The fault is in the intractable mediocrity of the
age, which resists transference into poetry as stiff clay re-
sists the hoe of the cultivator. The fault lies in the general
reader himself, whose very opposition to poetry because it is
poetry makes him a difficult person to write for. Commer-
cialized minds, given over to convention, denying their senti-
ment and idealism, or wasting them upon cheap and meretri-
cious literature, do not make a good audience. Our few
poets in English who have possessed some universality of
appeai have had to make concessions. Kipling has been the
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
most popular among good English poets in our time; but he
has had to put journalism into much of his poetry in order
to succeed. And Kipling is not read so much as a certain
American writer who discovered that by writing verse in
prose form he could make the public forget their prejudice
against poetry and indulge their natural pleasure in rhythm
and rime.
A striking proof of all that I have been writing is to be
found in so-called magazine verse. Sneers at magazine
poetry are unjust because they are unintelligent. It is quite
true that most of it consists of the highly individualistic
lyric of which I have spoken above. But in comparison with
the imaginative prose of the typical popular magazine, it
presents a most instructive contrast. The prose is too fre-
quently sensational or sentimental, vulgar or smart. The
verse, even though narrow in its appeal, and sometimes
slight, is at least excellent in art, admirable in execution,
and vigorous and unsentimental in tone. Regarded as lit-
erature, it is very much more satisfactory than the bulk of
magazine prose. Indeed, there is less difference between
the best and the worst of our magazines than between the
verse and the prose in any one of them.
And if this verse is too special in its subject-matter to be
altogether satisfactory, if so little of it appeals to the gen-
eral reader, is it not his fault? He neglects the poetry
from habit rather than from conviction based on experience.
Because he skips it, and has skipped it until habit has be-
come a convention, much of it has become by natural adap-
tation of supply to demand too literary, too narrow, too
subtle and complex for him now. The vicious circle is com-
plete.
This circle may soon be broken. A ferment, which in the
'nineties stirred in journalism, and a decade later trans-
formed our drama, is working now in verse. The poetical
revival now upon us may be richer so far in promise than
in great poetry, but it is very significant. For one thing, it
is advertising poetry, and since poetry is precisely what
Shakespeare called it, caviare to the general—a special com-
POETRY FOR THE UNPOETICAL 165
modity for occasional use—a little advertising will be good
for it. Again, the verse that has sprung from the movement
is much of it thoroughly interesting. Some of it is as bi-
zarre as the new art of the futurists and the vorticists;
some is merely vulgar, some merely affected, some hopelessly
obscure; but other poems, without convincing us of their
greatness, seem as original and creative as were Browning
and Whitman in their day. Probably, like the new paint-
ing, the movement is more significant than the movers.
Nevertheless, if one is willing to put aside prejudice, sus-
pend judgment, and look ahead, vers libre, even when more
libre than vers, is full of meaning—poetic realism, even
when more real than poetry, charged with possibility. For
with all its imperfections much of this new poetry is trying
to mean more than ever before to the general reader. I am
not sure that the democracy can be interpreted for him in
noble poetry and remain the democracy he knows. And yet
I think, and I believe, that, in his sub-consciousness at least,
he feels an intense longing to find the everyday life in
which we all live—so thrilling beneath the surface—inter-
preted, swung into that rhythmic significance that will make
it part of the vast and flowing stream of all life. I can
tolerate many short, rough words in poetry, and much that
we have been accustomed to regard as prose, on the way to
such a goal.
For I honestly believe that it is better to read fantastic
poetry, coarse poetry, prosaic poetry—anything but vulgar
and sentimental poetry—than no poetry at all. To be sus-
ceptible to no revival of the vivid emotions of youth, to be
touched by no thoughts more intense than our own, to be
accessible to no imaginative interpretation of the life we
lead—this seems to me to be a heavy misfortune. But to
possess, as most of us do, our share of all these qualities,
and then at no- time, in no fitting mood or proffered oppor-
tunity, to read poetry—this can only be regarded as deaf-
ness by habit and blindness from choice.
THE CALL OF THE JOB1
Richard Clarke Cabot
Roosevelt once said: "I have always had a horror of words that
are not translated into deeds. The very human essay here re-
printed was written by a man whose whole life has been an "efficient
devotion to good works, to the translation of his words into useful
deeds in the fields of medicine, and in educational and philanthropic
work. The essay first appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, and is now
incorporated in the volume, What Men Live By. Mr. Cabot was
born at Brookline, Massachusetts, in 1868. He was educated at Har-
vard, and has been, since 1903, a teacher in the Harvard Medical
School. He is the author of several books and treatises on profes-
sional subjects, and of others of a more popular character, such as
Social Service, the Art of Healing, and What Men Live By.
I
A camper starting into the woods on his annual vacation
undertakes with enthusiasm the familiar task of carrying a
Saranac boat upon a shoulder yoke. The pressure of the
yoke on his shoulders feels as good as the grasp of an old
friend's hand. The tautening of his muscles to the strain
of carrying seems to gird up his loins and true up his whole
frame. With the spring of the ground beneath him and the
elastic rebound of the boat on its springy yoke, he seems to
cJance over the ground between two enlivening rhythms. It
is pure fun.
In the course of half a mile or so, the carry begins to feel
like work. The pleasant, snug fit of the yoke has become a
very respectable burden, cheerfully borne for the sake of
the object in view, but not pleasant. The satisfaction of
the carry is now something anticipated, no longer grasped in
1 Reprinted from The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 112, by permis-
sion of the author and of the editors of the magazine.
166
THE CALL OF THE JOB
167
the present. The job is well worth while, but it is no joke.
It will feel good to reach the end and set the boat down.
Finally, if in about ten minutes more there is still no
sight of the end, no blue sparkling glimmer of distant water
low down among the trees, the work becomes drudgery.
Will it ever end? Are we on the right trail at all? Is it
worth while to go on ?
Perhaps not, but to stop means painfully lowering the
boat to the ground and later heaving it up again, which is
the worst task of all—worse than going on as we are. So
we hang to it, but now in scowling, stumbling, swearing mis-
ery, that edges always nearer revolt.
In varying proportions every one's life mingles the ex-
periences of that carry. At its best and for a few, work be-
comes play, at least for blessed jewel-like moments. By the
larger number it is seen not a joy but as a tolerable bur-
den, borne for the sake of the children's education, the
butter on the daily bread, the hope of promotion. Finally,
for the submerged fraction of humanity who are forced to
labor without choice and almost from childhood, life seems
drudgery, borne simply because they cannot stop without
still greater misery. They are committed to it, as to a
prison, and they cannot get out.
It is not often, I believe, that a whole life is possessed by
any one of these elements,—play, work, or drudgery. Work
usually makes up the larger part of life, with play and
drudgery sprinkled in. Some of us at most seasons, all of
us at some seasons, find work a galling yoke to which we
have to submit blindly or angrily for a time, but with revolt
in our hearts. Yet I have rarely seen drudgery so over-
whelming as to crush out altogether the play of humor and
good fellowship during the day's toil as well as after it.
In play you have what you want. In work you know
what you want and believe that you are serving or approach-
ing it. In drudgery no desired object is in sight; blind
forces push you on.
In all work and all education the worker should be in
touch with the distant sources of interest, else he is being
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
trained to slavery, not to self-government and self-respect.
Present good, future good, no good,—these possibilities
are mingled in the crude ore which we ordinarily call work.
Out of that we must smelt, if we can, the pure metal of a
vocation fit for the spirit of man. The crude mass of
"work as it exists to-day in mines, stores, railroads, school-
rooms, studies, and ships, contains elements that should be
abolished, elements that are hard, but no harder than we
need to call out the best of us, and here and there a nugget
of pure delight.
Defined in this way, work is always, I suppose, an ac-
quired taste. For its rewards are not immediate, but come
in foretastes and aftertastes. It involves postponement and
waiting. In the acquisition of wealth, economists rightly
distinguish labor and waiting; but in another sense labor is
always waiting. You work for your picture or your log-
house because you want it, and because it cannot be had
just for the asking. It awaits you in a future visible only
to imagination. Into the further realization of that future
you can penetrate only by work; meantime you-must wait
for your reward.
Further, this future is never perfectly certain. There is
many a slip between the cup and the lip, and even when
gross accidents are avoided, your goal,—your promotion,
your home, the degree for which you have worked, usually
do not turn out to be what you have pictured them. This
variation you learn to expect, to discount, perhaps to enjoy,
beforehand, if you are a trained worker, just because you
have been trained in faith. For work is always justified by
faith. Faith, holding the substance (not the details) of
things unseen, keeps us at our tasks. We have faith that
our efforts will some day reach their goal, and that this goal
will be something like what we expected. But no literalism
will serve us here. If we are willing to accept nothing but
the very pattern of our first desires, we are forever disap-
pointed in work and soon grow slack in it. In the more
fortunate of us, the love of work includes a love of the un-
expected, and finds a pleasant spice of adventure in the dif-
THE CALL OF THE JOB
169
ference between what we work for and what we actually
get-
Yet this working faith is not pure speculation. It includes
a foretaste of the satisfaction to come. We plunge into it
as we jump into a cold bath, not because the present sensa-
tions are altogether sweet, but because they are mingled
with a dawning awareness of the glow to follow. We do
our work happily because the future is alive in the present,
—not like a ghost but like a leader.
Where do we get this capacity to incarnate the future and
to feel it swelling within us as a present inspiration? The
power to go in pursuit of the future with seven-leagued
boots or magic carpets can hardly be acquired or even
longed for until we have had some actual experience of its
rewards. We seem, then, to be caught in one of those cir-
cles which may turn out to be either vicious or virtuous. In
the beginning something, or somebody, must magically en-
tice us into doing a bit of work. Having done that bit, we
can see the treasure of its results; these results will in turn
spur us to redoubled efforts, and so once more to increased
rewards. Given the initial miracle, we are soon established
in the habit and in the enjoyment of work.
But there is a self-maintaining circularity in disease, idle-
ness, and sloth, as well as in work, virtue, and health. Until
we get the result of our work, we cannot feel the motive
for exertion. Until we make the exertion (despite present
pain and a barren outlook) we cannot taste the delightful
result, or feel the spur to further effort. The wheel is at
the dead point! Why should it ever move ?
Probably some of us are moved at first by the leap of an
elemental instinct in our muscles, which act before and be-
yond our conscious reason. Other people are tempted into
labor by the irrational contagion of example. We want to
be "in it with the rest of our gang, or to win some one's
approval. So we get past the dead point,—often a most
alarming point to parents and teachers,—and once in mo-
tion, keep at it by the circular process just described.
Various auxiliary motives reinforce the ordinary energies
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
of work. Here I will allude only to one—a queer pleasure
in the mere stretch and strain of our muscles. If we are
physically fresh and not worried, there is a grim exhilara-
tion, a sort of frowning delight, in taking up a heavy load
and feeling that our strength is adequate to it. It seems
paradoxical to enjoy a discomfort, but the paradox is not
getting familiar. For modern psychologists have satisfac-
torily bridged the chasm between pleasure and pain, so that
we can now conceive what athletes and German poets have
long felt, the delight in a complex of agreeable and disagree-
able elements. In work we do not often get as far as the
"selige Schmerzen so familiar in German lyrics, but we
welcome difficulties, risks, and physical strains because (if
we can easily conquer them) they add a spice to life—a
spice of play in the midst of labor.
Work gets itself started, then, by the contagion of some-
body else's activity or by an explosion of animal energies
within us. After a few turns of the work-rest cycle we be-
gin to get a foretaste of rewards. A flavor of enjoyment
appears in the midst of strain. Habit then takes hold and
carries us along until the taste for work is definitely ac-
quired.
ii
In the crude job as we get it there is much rubbish. For
work is a very human product. It is no better than we have
made it, and even when it is redeemed from brutal drudg-
ery it is apt to be scarred and warped by our stupidities and
our ineptitudes. Out of the rough-hewn masses in which
work comes to us it is our business—it is civilization's busi-
ness—to shape a vocation fit for man. We shall have to re-
make it again and again; meantime, before we reject what
we now have, it is worth while to see what we want.
What (besides better hours, better wages, healthier con-
ditions) are the points of a good job? Imagine a sensibly
man looking for a satisfactory work, a vocational advise!;
guiding novices toward the best available occupation, and a
THE CALL OF THE JOB
171
statesman trying to mold the industrial world somewhat
nearer to the heart's desire,—what should they try for?
Physical and financial standards determine what we get out
of a job. But what shall we get in it? Much or little, I
think, according to its fitness or unfitness for our personal-
ity,—a factor much neglected nowadays.
Among the points of a good job I shall name seven:
1. Difficulty and crudeness enough to call out our latent
powers of mastery. 2. Variety and initiative balanced by
monotony and supervision. 3. A boss. 4. A chance to
achieve, to build something and to recognize what we have
done. 5. A title and a place which is ours. 6. Connection
with some institution, some firm, or some cause, which we
can loyally serve. 7. Honorable and pleasant relations with
our comrades in work.
Fulfil these conditions and work is one of the best things
in life. Let me describe them more fully.
We want a chance to subdue. We want to encounter the
raw and crude. Before the commercial age, war, hunting,
and agriculture gave us this foil. We want it still, and for
the lack of it often find our work too soft.
Of course, we can easily get an over-dose of crude re-
sistance. A good job should offer us a fair chance of our
winning. We have no desire to be crushed without a strug-
gle. But we are all the better pleased if the fish makes a
good fight before he yields.
Not only in the wilderness, but wherever we deal with raw
material, our hands meet adventures. Every bit of wood
and stone, every stream and every season has its own tan-
talizing but fascinating individuality, and as long as we have
health and courage, these novelties strike not as a frustra-
tion but as a challenge.
Even in half-tamed products, like leather or steel, there
are, experts tell me, incalculable variations which keep us
on the alert if we are still close enough to the elemental to
feel its fascinating materiality. When a clerk sells dry-
goods over the counter, I suppose he has to nourish his
frontiersman's spirit chiefly in foiling the wily bargain-
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
hunter or trapping the incautious countryman. But I doubt
if the work is as interesting as a carpenter's or a plumber's.
It reeks so strong of civilization and the "finished product
that it often sends us back to the woods to seek in a "vaca-
tion that touch with the elemental which should properly
form part of daily work.
We zvant both monotony and variety. The monotony of
work is perhaps the quality of which we complain most,
and often justifiably. Yet monotony is really demanded
by almost every one. Even children cry for it, though in
doses smaller than those which suit their elders. Your sec-
retary does not like her work, if you put more than her
regular portion of variety into it. She does not want to be
constantly undertaking new tasks, adapting herself to new
situations. She wants some regularity in her traveling,
some plain stretches in which she can get up speed and feel
quantity of accomplishment,—that is, she wants a reasonable
amount of monotony. Change and novelty in work are apt
to demand fresh thought, and reduce our speed.
Naturally, there is a limit to this. We want some variety,
some independence in our work. But we can easily get too
much. I have heard as many complaints and felt in myself
as many objections against variety as against monotony. I
have seen and felt as much discontent with "uncharted free-
dom as with irksome restraint. Bewilderment, a sense of
incompetence and of rudderless drifting, are never far off
from any one of us in our work. There is in all of us
something that likes to trot along in harness,—not too tight
or galling, to be sure,—but still in guidance and with sup-
port. That makes us show our best paces.
Nor is there anything slavish or humiliating in this. It is
simply the admission that we are not ready at every moment
to be original, inventive, creative. We have found out the
immense strain and cost of fresh thinking. We are certain
that we were not born to be at it perpetually. We want
some rest in our work, some relief from high tension.
Monotony supplies that relief. Moreover the rhythmic and
habitual elements in us (ancient labor-saving devices) de-
THE CALL OF THE JOB
173
mand their representation. To do something again and
again as the trees, the birds, and our own hearts do, is a
fundamental need which demands and receives satisfaction
in work as well as in play.
For the tragedies and abominations, the slaveries and deg-
radations of manual labor we cannot put all the blame on
the large element of monotony and repetition which such
labor often contains. We should revolt and destroy any
work that was not somewhat monotonous. But the point
is that work should offer to each worker as much variety
and independence as he has originality and genius, no more
and no less. Give us either more or less than our share
and we are miserable. We can be crushed and overdriven
by too much responsibility, as well as by too little. Our
initiative, as well as our docility, can be overworked.
We want a boss, especially in heavy or monotonous labor.
Most monotonous work is of the sort that is cut out and
supplied ready to hand. This implies that some one else plans
and directs it. In so far as we want monotony, therefore,
we want to be driven, though not overdriven, by a boss. If
we are to do the pulling some one else should hold the reins.
When f am digging my wife's garden beds I want her to
specify where they shall go. We all want a master of some
kind, and most of us want a master in human shape. The
more manual our work is, the more we want him. Boat-
men poling a scow through a creek need some one to steer
and tell them which should push harder as they turn the
bends of the stream. The steersman may not be chosen by
lot or each may steer in turn, but some boss we must have,
for when we are poling we cannot well steer and we don't
want the strain of trying fruitlessly to do both. This ex-
ample is typical of the world's work. It demands to be
bossed, and it is more efficient, even more original when it
is bossed,—just enough !
Monotony, then, and bossing we need, but in our own
quantity and also of our own kind. For there are different
kinds (as well as different doses) and some are better than
others. For example, to go to the same place of work every
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
day is a monotony that simplifies life advantageously for
most of us, but to teach the same subject over and over again
is for most teachers an evil, though it may be just now a
necessary evil.
We must try to distinguish. When we delight in think-
ing ourselves abused, or allow ourselves the luxury of
grumbling, we often single out monotony as the target of
our wrath. But we must not take all complaints (our own
or other people's) at their face value. A coat is a misfit if
it is too big or too small, or if it puckers in the wrong place.
A job can be a misfit in twenty different ways and can be
complained of in as many different tones. Let us be clear
about this. If our discontent is as divine as it feels, it is not
because all monotony is evil, but because our particular
share and kind of monotony has proved to be a degrading
waste of energy.
We want to see the product of our work. The bridge we
planned, the house we built, the shoes we cobbled, help us to
get before ourselves and so to realize more than a moment's
worth of life and effort. The impermanence of each in-
stant's thought, the transcience of every flush of effort tends
to make our lives seem shadowy even to ourselves. Our
memory is like a sieve through which most that we pick up
runs back like sand. But in work we find refuge and sta-
bility, because in the accumulated product of many days'
labor we can build up and present at last to our own sight
the durable structure of what we meant to do. Then we
can believe that our intentions, our hopes, our plans, our
daily food and drink, have not passed through us for noth-
ing, for we have funded their worth in some tangible
achievement which outlasts them.
Further, such external proofs of our efficiency win us not
only self-respect, but the recognition of others. We need
something to show for ourselves, something to prove that
our dreams are not impotent. Work gives us the means to
prove it.
I want to acknowledge here my agreement in the charge
often brought against modern factory labor,—namely that
THE CALL OF THE JOB
175
since no workman plans or finishes his product, no one can
recognize the product, take a pride in it or see its defects.
Even when factory labor is well paid, its impersonal and
wholesale merging of the man in the machine goes far to
make it unfit for men and women.
We want a handle to our name. Every one has a right to
the distinction which titles of nobility are meant to give,
but it is from our work that we should get them. The
grocer, the trapper, the night-watchman, the cook, is a per-
son fit to be recognized, both by his own timid self and by
the rest of the world. In time the title of our job comes to
stand for us, to enlarge our personality and to give us per-
manence. Thus it supplements the standing which is given
us by our product. To "hold down a job gives us a place
in the world, something approaching the home for which in
some form or other every one longs. "Have you any place
for me? we ask with eagerness, for until we find "a place
we are tramps,—men without a country.
A man with a job has, at least in embryo, the kind of
recognition which we all crave. He has won membership
in a club that he wants to belong to and especially hates to
be left out of. To be in it as a member in full standing
gives a taste of self-respect and self-confidence.
We want congeniality in our fellow workmen. One of the
few non-physical "points which people have already learned
to look for in selecting work, is the temper and character of
the "boss. Men, and especially women, care almost as
much about this as about the hours and wages of the jobs.
Young physicians will work in a laboratory at starvation
wages for the sake of being near a great teacher, even though
he rarely notices them. The congeniality of fellow work-
men is almost as important as the temper of the boss. Two
unfriendly stenographers in a single room will often give
up their work and take lower wages elsewhere in order to
escape each other.
All this is so obvious to those who look for jobs that I
wonder why so few employers have noticed it. The house-
wives who keep their servants, the manufacturers who avoid
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
strikes, are not always those who pay the best wages and
offer the best conditions of work. The human facts—the
personal relations of employer and employee—are often dis-
regarded, but always at the employer's peril. The personal
factor is as great as the economic in the industrial unrest of
to-day. Are not even the "captains of industry beginning
to wake up to this fact?
hi
Payment can be given a working man only for what some
other man might have done,—because his pay is fixed by
estimate of "what the work is worth, that is, what you can
get other people to do it for. Hence you never pay any one
for what he individually does, but for what "a man like
him, that fictitious being, that supposedly fair specimen of
his type and trade, can be expected to do.
The man himself you cannot pay. Yet any one who does
his work well or gets satisfaction out of it, puts himself
into it. Moreover he does things that he cannot be given
credit for, finishes parts that no one else will notice. Even
a mediocre amateur musician knows that the best parts of
his playing, his personal tributes to the genius of the com-
poser whom he plays, are heard by no one but himself and
"the God of things as they are. There might be bitterness
in the thought that in our work we get paid or praised only
for what is not particularly ours, while the work that we put
our hearts into is not recognized or rewarded. But in the
struggle for spiritual existence we adapt ourselves to the un-
appreciative features of our environment and learn to look
elsewhere for recognition. We do not expect people to pay ;
us for our best. We look to the approval of conscience, to ?
the light of our ideal seen more clearly when our work is ?
good, or to the judgment of God. Our terms differ more ^
than our tendencies. The essential point is that for appre:-
ciation of our best work we look to a Judge more just and
keensighted than our paymaster.
Nevertheless there is a spiritual value in being paid in
THE CALL OF THE JOB
177
hard cash. For though money is no measure of the indi-
vidual value in work, it gives precious assurance of some
value, some usefulness to people out of the worker's sight.
Workers who do not need a money wage for the sake of
anything that they can buy with it, still need it for its spirit-
ual value. Doctors find this out when they try to get in-
valids or neurasthenics to work for the good of their health.
Exercise done for exercise's sake, is of very little value, even
to the body, for half its purpose is to stimulate the will, and
most wills refuse to work at chestweights and treadmills,
however disguised. But our minds are still harder to fool
with hygienic exercises done for the sake of keeping busy.
To get any health or satisfaction out of work it must seem
to the worker to be of some use. If he knows that the mar-
ket for raffia baskets is nil, and that he is merely enticed
into using his hands for the good of his muscles or of his
soul, he soon gets a moral nausea at the whole attempt.
This is the flaw in ideals of studiousness and self-culture.
It is not enough that self-culture shall seem good to Presi-
dent. A. Lawrence Lowell or to some kind neurologist. The
college boy himself, the psychoneurotic herself must feel
some zest along with the labor if it is to do them any good.
And this zest comes because they believe that by this bit of
work they are "getting somewhere, winning some stand-
ing among those whose approval they desire, serving some-
thing or somebody besides the hired teacher or trainer.
I once set a neurasthenic patient, formerly a stenographer,
to helping me with the clerical work in my office. She be-
gan to improve at once, because the rapid return of her
former technical skill made her believe (after many months
of idleness and gnawing worry about money) that some day
she might get back to work. But what did her far more
good was the check which I sent her at the end of her first
week's work. She had not expected it, for she did not think
her work good enough. But she knew me well enough to
know that I had sworn off lying in all forms (even the most
philanthropic and hygienic) and would not deceive her by
pretending to value her work. The money was good for
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
what it would buy, but it was even better because it proved
to her the world's need for what she could do, and thus gave
her a right to space and time upon the earth.
This is the spiritual value of pay. So far no one has
thought of so convenient and convincing a way to wrap up
and deliver at each citizen's door a parcel of courage for
the future, and a morsel of self-respect which is food for the
soul. But money is not the only means of paying people.
The goods which money buys, the ends which it helps us to
achieve are part of our reward, perhaps the most genuine
part. But gratitude, service to others, and success to our
aims are often thought of as the proper ends or rewards of
work. Do we want them ? Can we achieve them ? Let us
see.
Gratitude given or received is one of the best things in
the world. We need far more of it and far better quality.
Yet I have never read any satisfactory account of what it
so gloriously means. Its value begins just where the value
of pay ends. Thanks are personal, and attempt to fit an
adequate response to the particular service performed. Pay
is an impersonal coin which has been handed out to many
before it reaches you, and will go to many others when it
leaves you. It is your right and you are not grateful for it.
But thanks are a free gift and enrich the giver. There is no
nobler art than the art of expressing one's gratitude in
fresh, unhackneyed, unexaggerated terms which answer de-
votion with fresh devotion, fancy with new fancy, clarity
with sincerity. Artists who get their reward only in money
and in the stale plaudits of clapping hands are restless for
something more individual. They want to be intimately
understood and beautifully answered. For such gratitude
they look to brother artists, to the few who really under-
stand. There they find their best reward;—but even this
leaves something wanting.
Why is it so notoriously difficult to accept thanks? Most
things that I am thanked for I am not conscious of having
done at all. Obviously the thanks are misdirected. Or, if
I am conscious of having done what the thanker is grateful
THE CALL OF THE JOB
for, I am likewise conscious that I only handed on to a third
person what had previously been given to me. I learned
from Smith and then enlightened Jones. Smith is the man
to thank. Or, again, one is thanked for simply carrying out
a contract; but one could not honorably do less. Thanks
for going along the usual and necessary road seem gratui-
tous and undeserved. Or, finally one receives gratitude for
what one did with joy; that seems as queer as being thanked
for eating one's dinner.
But suppose that the deed one is thanked for was not an
act of passing along what came originally from another as
you pass money in a street car. Suppose a man has really
originated something, an invention, a poem, a statue. He
hardly claims it as his, for he does not know where it came
from. He did not "make it up. It sprang into his mind,
given to him as much as if he had received it from a friend.
He does not feel that he is the one to receive thanks. The
thanks should pass through him, as the gift did, to some one
else,—to his parents who gave him and taught him so much,
to his race, his nation, his health, his friends, his opportuni-
ties. That is where it all came from; that is where thanks
are due. But each of the influences is itself the recipient
of countless other influences. Every fact in the universe
must be thanked.
He deals with firms and employers, but he looks behind
them, over their shoulders, and redirects their thanks else-
where, ultimately, if he but knew it, to the World-Spirit.
One may not remember that spirit. One often does not
bother about the world's work. Thinking exhausts some
people and fatally confuses others. But if one thinks at all
he runs pp hard against the world plan and finds it the
bulkiest object in sight.
The unsentimental male American is quick to reject the
idea that he cares about serving anybody or anything. He
may admit that he wants to "make good in a fair and
square way, according to the rules of the game. But "serv-
ice sounds too "stuck up and Pharisaical for him.
Nevertheless I firmly believe that his derision is only a
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
ruse to conceal his morbid bashfulness and oafish sensitive-
ness. For in point of fact service is one of the things that
pretty much everybody wants,—however much he may dis-
guise it and conceal it from himself. I have never seen any
more unsentimental and raw-boned being than the American
medical student; yet he is simply hankering for service.
Medical teachers spread before him banquets of tempting
"opportunities, rare "cases, "beautiful specimens, easy
chances to distinguish himself in research and to absorb his
medical food in predigested mouthfuls. He often remains
indifferent. But the moment you give him a place to work
in a clinic, to serve as Dr. Blank's fourteenth assistant in a
hospital where good work is done, he will jump at the
chance. The work is much harder and more monotonous
than his regular studies. Much of it is not teaching him
medicine. He has to go on doing Fehling's test for sugar
and trying knee jerks long after he has learned the trick.
He has to measure stomach contents, to weigh patients, to
bandage legs, and to write down names and addresses in
monotonous routine day after day. Yet he loves the job.
Despite all the drudgery, he learns far more medicine by
holding down an actual job of this kind, than by lectures
and classes. If you separate out the instructive portion of
his day's work and present it to him without assigning him
any regular position and duties, he does not like the work
as well or learn so much.
Extraordinarily sound those students' instincts! The men
are bored when we offer them more opportunities to do what
is easy and self-centered, but outside the current of reality.
It is only when we give them, dry work like an assistantship
in a clinic,—a place where they can accomplish something
that has a real value in the actual world,—that they fall to
with real appetite.
The sense of somebody's need is, I believe, the most
powerful motive in the world, one that appeals to the largest
number of people of every age, race, and kind. It wakes
up the whole nature, the powers that learn as well as those
that perform; it generates the vigor of interest that sub-
THE CALL OF THE JOB 181
merges selfishness and cowardice; it rouses the inventive-
ness and ingenuity that slumber so soundly in student's
classrooms. For many of us, every time the world takes a
step in the right direction, work which is service taps a
great reservoir of power, sets free our caked and leashed
energy.
I conclude then that pay, gratitude, and service as ends of
work, have each a value, though not exactly of the sort one
might expect. What about success as a reward of work?
Financial rewards are nowadays less advertised than the
general prosperity which they express. Civic ideals are kept
in the foreground, alike by "boosters, real-estate men, and
chambers of commerce. According to these authorities busi-
ness success means a flourishing city and a contented,
healthy community. To help build up a fine city is what
we are asked to do in case we take the investment offered
us. A fine city is an efficiently managed, well-lighted com-
munity, with plenty of schools, parks, and churches. But
stop a moment. What is the use of such a place ?
When we have built and finished this perfect city, with
its smooth-running government, its crime-freed, sanitary
streets will be swept and garnished, all ready to begin—
what? It is hard to hear any answer. Few are interested
enough even to attempt one. For the interest of civic re-
form is mainly in the process,—far less in the result. Boys
who built a boat or a play-house usually find that there is
far more fun in the process of building than in using the
finished product. So it is with the reform of a slum or a
municipal government. The best of it is in the reforming.
We shall hardly stop to notice it when it is perfect. We
shall take it for granted as we do the safe delivery of the
letters which we post, and be off on another campaign. Our
civic goals are like the scented rushes in "Wood and Water.
The most beautiful ones, Alice found, were always those
just beyond her reach. Perfect adaptation to environment,
which seems to be what the sanitary and civic reformers aim
at, would mean absolute stagnation,—attainment that buds
no more. For what should stir us further?
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
"Well, anyway, to reform our city is the best thing in
sight. It is certainly in the right direction. Ah, then we
know what the right direction is! That is something far
more significant than any single step in civic progress. If
we know the true direction we can point beyond the civic
models to something toward which they are on the road,
and get our satisfaction all along its course.
The worship of "the right direction is a fundamental
motive in art and play as well as in work. Every noble
game and work of art calls for others, incites to pilgrimages,
reforms, and nobler arts. Art is not meant to give us some-
thing final; everything in it is pointing ahead and gets justi-
fication because it is "in the right direction. Everything in
art, as in civics, gets the courage to exist and to push on be-
cause of its readiness to be corrected by experience to a
truer version of its own purpose. Sincere people want the
true, in their work as well as in their thinking. But the
truth is Infinite, and the will to approach it is an infinite
intention. The fruit of this infinite intention would be our
utter prostration of self before the vision, "Do with me as
thou wilt. "Thy will not mine be done.
I cannot see the end of all this. I see reform after re-
form of character and of civilization, progress in science
and art, rising like mountain ranges, one behind the other.
But there is no conceivable sense in all these upheavals if
they are mere changes, mere uneasy shifts in the position of
a dreaming world-spirit. To make sense they must be mov-
ing in a single direction.
It is obvious enough that all work is supposed to fulfil
some one's plan—the worker's plan or his master's. It is
good for something. But every one of the goods we buy
with our work is itself a means to something else, a coin
with which to purchase something more. The goods we
supply, the clothes, food, transportation, medicine, knowl-
edge, inspiration which we give, are themselves means to
something else, perhaps to comfort, health, education, cour-
age. These again are means to better work, to civic per-
fection, to family happiness. But these once more are in
THE CALL OF THE JOB
183
themselves as worthless as fiat money or dolls stuffed with
sawdust, unless there is absolute value behind them. Hap-
piness, civic perfection, love, are sometimes named as the
ultimate ends toward which the activities of busy men and
women are means, but anybody who experiences any of
these states, and is not a Buddhist wallowing in vague bliss,
finds that they incite us to new deeds. If they are not
soporific drugs they are spurs to fresh action.
Taken literally, the ideals of utility and civic reform are
like the old myth which explained the world's support as
the broad back of an elephant. Who supports the elephant ?
He rests on a gigantic tortoise; and who supports the tor-
toise? No answer is audible in the business sections of
cities, in the schoolrooms or in the colleges. The church's
answer is derided or ignored by a large fraction of us. But
it is the right one; and we shall learn to listen to it or pay
the penalty. Government does not rest ultimately on the
consent of the governed, but on their conformity to the will
of the World-Spirit who makes and unmakes civilizations.
Success in industry, in art, or in love is saved from bitter-
ness and disappointment because we regard our achieve-
ments far more symbolically than we know, and rest far
more than we are aware upon the backing of God.
Assuming that in every one there is an infinite and restless
desire to get into the life of the World,—to share any and
all life that is hot and urgent or cool and clear,—we can
tackle this infinite task in two ways:
By trying to understand the universe in the samples of it
which come into our ken and to draw from these bits a
knowledge which typifies and represents the whole. That is
science. By trying to serve. Service is one of the ways by
which a tiny insect like one of us can get a purchase on
the whole universe. If he finds the job where he can be of
use, he is hitched to the star of the world, and moves with
it.
THE MOWING1
David Grayson
The author, assuming the role of a farmer, remarks: "I have been
engaged in three different kinds of farming, the first being the
simple cultivation of the soil and the production of enough corn,
buckwheat and lesser crops to satisfy the small demands of my
household, the second being a more or less sedulous farming of
myself. As the good Dr. Donne says:
'We are but farmers of ourselves: yet may
If we can stock ourselves and thrive, uplay
Much, much good treasure for the great rent day.'
And finally, with some instruction and not a little amusement of a
quiet sort, I have farmed with the plow of perennial admiration,
and inquisitiveness, all that world, both of men and of nature, which
lies so pleasantly around me. By using my farm not as an end, but
as a tool, I have cultivated with diligence all the greater fields of
life which I have been able to reach.
"Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons,
It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
This is a well earned Sunday morning.
My chores were all done long ago, and I am sitting down
here after a late and leisurely breakfast with that luxurious
feeling of irresponsible restfulness and comfort which
comes only upon a clean, still Sunday morning like this—
after a week of hard work—a clean Sunday morning, with
clean clothes, and a clean chin, and clean thoughts, and the
June airs stirring the clean white curtains at my windows.
From across the hills I can hear very faintly the drowsy
sounds of early church bells, never indeed to be heard here
except on a morning of surpassing tranquillity. And in the
barnyard back of the house Harriet's hens are cackling
1 From Adventures in Friendship, by permission of the publishers,
Doubleday, Page & Co.
184
THE MOWING
185
triumphantly: they are impiously unobservant of the Sab-
bath day.
I turned out my mare for a run in the pasture. She has
rolled herself again and again in the warm earth and
shaken herself after each roll with an equine delight most
pleasant to see. Now, from time to time, I can hear her
gossipy whickerings as she calls across the fields to my
neighbor Horace's young bay colts.
When I first woke up this morning I said to myself:
"Well, nothing happened yesterday.
Then I lay quiet for some time—it being Sunday morning
—and I turned over in my mind all that I had heard or
seen or felt or thought about in that one day. And pres-
ently I said aloud to myself:
"Why, nearly everything happened yesterday.
And the more I thought of it the more interesting, the
more wonderful, the more explanatory of high things, ap-
peared the common doings of that June Saturday. I had
walked among unusual events—and had not known the
wonder of them! I had eyes, but I did not see—and ears,
but I heard not. It may be, it may be, that the Future Life
of which we have had such confusing but wistful prophecies
is only the reliving with a full understanding, of this mar-
velous Life that we now know. To a full understanding
this day, this moment even—here in this quiet room—would
contain enough to crowd an eternity. Oh, we are children
yet—playing with things much too large for us—much too
full of meaning.
Yesterday I cut my field of early clover. I should have
been at it a full week earlier if it had not been for the fre-
quent and sousing spring showers. Already half the bios-
soms of the clover had turned brown and were shriveling
away into inconspicuous seediness. The leaves underneath
on the lower parts of the stems were curling up and fading;
many of them had already dropped away. There is a tide
also in the affairs of clover and if a farmer would profit by
his crop, it must be taken at its flood.
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
I began to watch the skies with some anxiety, and on
Thursday I was delighted to see the weather become clearer,
and a warm dry wind spring up from the southwest. On
Friday there was not so much as a cloud of the size of a
man's hand to be seen anywhere in the sky, not one, and
the sun with lively diligence had begun to make up for the
listlessness of the past week. It was hot and dry enough
to suit the most exacting hay-maker.
Encouraged by these favorable symptoms I sent word to
Dick Sheridan (by one of Horace's men) to come over
bright and early on Saturday morning. My field is only a
small one and so rough and uneven that I had concluded
with Dick's help to cut it by hand. I thought that on a
pinch it could all be done in one day.
"Harriet, I said, "we'll cut the clover to-morrow.
"That's fortunate, said Harriet, "I'd already arranged
to have Ann Spencer in to help me.
Yesterday morning, then, I got out earlier than usual. It
was a perfect June morning, one of the brightest and clearest
I think I ever saw. The mists had not yet risen from the
hollows of my lower fields, and all the earth was fresh with
dew and sweet with the mingled odors of growing things.
No hour of the whole day is more perfect than this.
I walked out along the edge of the orchard and climbed
the fence of the field beyond. As I stooped over I could
smell the heavy sweet odor of the clover blossoms. I could
see the billowy green sweep of the glistening leaves. I lifted
up a mass of the tangled stems and laid the palm of my
hand on the earth underneath. It was neither too wet nor
too dry.
"We shall have good cutting to-day, I said to myself.
So I stood up and looked with a satisfaction impossible
to describe across the acres of my small domain, marking
where in the low spots the crop seemed heaviest, where it
was lodged and tangled by the wind and the rain, and where
in the higher spaces it grew scarce thick enough to cover
the sad baldness of the knolls. How much more we get
out of life than we deserve!
THE MOWING
187
So I walked along the edge of the field to the orchard
gate, which I opened wide.
"Here, I said, "is where we will begin.
So I turned back to the barn. I had not reached the
other side of the orchard when who should I see but Dick
Sheridan himself, coming in at the lane gate. He had an
old, coarse-woven straw hat stuck resplendently on the back
of his head. He was carrying his scythe jauntily over his
shoulder and whistling "Good-by, Susan at the top of his
capacity.
Dick Sheridan is a cheerful young fellow with a thin
brown face and (milky) blue eyes. He has an enormous
Adam's apple which has an odd way of moving up and
down when he talks—and one large tooth out in front. His
body is like a bundle of wires, as thin and muscular and
enduring as that of a broncho pony. He can work all day
long and then go down to the lodge-hall at the Crossing and
dance half the night. You should really see him when he
dances! He can jump straight up and click his heels twice
together before he comes down again! On such occasions
he is marvelously clad, as befits the gallant that he really
is, but this morning he wore a faded shirt and one of his
suspender cords behind was fastened with a nail instead of
a button. His socks are sometimes pale blue and sometimes
lavender and commonly, therefore, he turns up his trouser
legs so that these vanities may not be wholly lost upon a
dull world. His full name is Richard Tecumseh Sheridan,
but every one calls him Dick. A good, cheerful fellow,
Dick, and a hard worker. I like him.
"Hello, Dick, I shouted.
"Hello yourself, Mr. Grayson, he replied.
He hung his scythe in the branches of a pear tree and
we both turned into the barnyard to get the chores out of
the way. I wanted to delay the cutting as long as I could
—until the dew on the clover should begin—at least—to
disappear.
By half-past-seven we were ready for work. We rolled
back our sleeves, stood our scythes on end and gave them
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
a final lively stoning. You could hear the brisk sound of
the ringing metal pealing through the still morning air.
"It's a great day for haying, I said.
"A dang good one, responded the laconic Dick, wetting
his thumb to feel the edge of his scythe.
I cannot convey with any mere pen upon any mere paper
the feeling of jauntiness I had at that moment, as of con-
quest and fresh adventure, as of great things to be done
in a great world! You may say if you like that this ex-
hilaration was due to good health and the exuberance of
youth. But it was more than that—far more. I cannot
well express it, but it seemed as though at that moment Dick
and I were stepping out into some vast current of human
activity: as though we had the universe itself behind us,
and the warm regard and approval of all men.
I stuck my whetstone in my hip-pocket, bent forward and
cut the first short sharp swath in the clover. I swept the
mass of tangled green stems into the open space just out-
side the gate. Three or four more strokes and Dick stopped
whistling suddenly, spat on his hands and with a lively
"Here she goes! came swinging in behind me. The clover-
cutting had begun.
At first I thought the heat would be utterly unendurable,
and, then, with dripping face and wet shoulders, I forgot
all about it. Oh, there is something incomparable about
such work—the long steady pull of willing and healthy
muscles, the mind undisturbed by any disquieting thought,
the feeling of attainment through vigorous effort! It was
a steady swing and swish, swish and swing! When Dick
led I have a picture of him in my mind's eye—his wiry thin
legs, one heel lifted at each step and held rigid for a single
instant, a glimpse of pale blue socks above his rusty shoes
and three inches of whetstone sticking from his tight hip-
pocket. It was good to have him there whether he led or
followed.
At each return to the orchard end of the field we looked
for and found a gray stone jug in the grass. I had brought
it up with me filled with cool water from the pump. Dick
THE MOWING
had a way of swinging it up with one hand, resting it in his
shoulder, turning his head just so and letting the water
gurgle into his throat. I have never been able myself to
reach this refinement in the art of drinking from a jug.
And oh! the good feel of a straightened back after two
long swaths in the broiling sun! We would stand a mo-
ment in the shade, whetting our scythes, not saying much,
but glad to be there together. Then we would go at it again
with renewed energy. It is a great thing to have a working
companion. Many times that day Dick and I looked aside
at each other with a curious sense of friendliness—that
sense of friendliness which grows out of common rivalries,
common difficulties and a common weariness. We did not
talk much: and that little of trivial matters.
"Jim Brewster's mare had a colt on Wednesday.
"This'll go three tons to the acre, or I'll eat my shirt.
Dick was always about to eat his shirt if some particular
prophecy of his did not materialize.
"Dang it all, says Dick, "the moon's drawin' water.
"Something is undoubtedly drawing it, said I, wiping my
dripping face.
A meadow lark sprang up with a song in the adjoining
field, a few heavy old bumblebees droned in the clover as
we cut it, and once a frightened rabbit ran out, darting
swiftly under the orchard fence.
So the long forenoon slipped away. At times it seemed
endless, and yet we were surprised when we heard the bell
from the house (what a sound it was!) and we left our
cutting in the middle of the field, nor waited for another
stroke.
"Hungry, Dick? I asked.
"Hungry! exclaimed Dick with all the eloquence of a
lengthy oration crowded into one word.
So we drifted through the orchard, and it was good to
see the house with smoke in the kitchen chimney, and the
shade of the big maple where it rested upon the porch. And
not far from the maple we could see our friendly pump
with the moist boards of the well-cover in front of it. I
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
cannot tell you how good it looked as we came in from
the hot, dry fields.
"After you, says Dick.
I gave my sleeves another roll upward and unbuttoned
and turned in the moist collar of my shirt. Then I stooped
over and put my head under the pump spout.
"Pump, Dick, said I.
And Dick pumped.
"Harder, Dick, said I in a strangled voice.
And Dick pumped still harder, and presently I came up
gasping with my head and hair dripping with the cool
water. Then I pumped for Dick.
"Gee, but that's good, says Dick.
Harriet came out with clean towels, and we dried our-
selves, and talked together in low voices. And feeling a
delicious sense of coolness we sat down for a moment in
the shade of the maple and rested our arms on oui knees.
From the kitchen, as we sat there, we could hear the engag-
ing sounds of preparation, and busy voices, and the tinkling
of dishes, and agreeable odors! Ah, friend and brother,
there may not be better moments in life than this!
So we sat resting, thinking of nothing; and presently we
heard the screen door click and Ann Spencer's motherly
voice:
"Come in now, Mr. Grayson, and get your dinner.
Harriet had set the table on the east porch, where it was
cool and shady. Dick and I sat down opposite each other
and between us there was a great brown bowl of moist
brown beans with crispy strips of pork on top, and a good
steam rising from its depths; and a small mountain of baked
potatoes, each a little broken to show the snowy white in-
terior; and two towers of such new bread as no one on this
earth (or in any other planet so far as I know) but Harriet
can make. And before we had even begun our dinner in
came the ample Ann Spencer, quaking with hospitality, and
bearing a platter—let me here speak of it with the bated
breath of a proper respect, for I cannot even now think of
it without a sort of inner thrill—bearing a platter of her
THE MOWING
191
most famous fried chicken. Harriet had sacrificed the
promising careers of two young roosters upon the altar of
this important occasion. I may say in passing that Ann
Spencer is more celebrated in our neighborhood by virtue
of her genius at frying chicken, than Aristotle or Solomon
or Socrates, or indeed all the big-wigs of the past rolled
into one.
So we fell to with a silent but none the less fervid enthu-
siasm. Harriet hovered about us, in and out of the kitchen,
and poured the tea and the buttermilk, and Ann Spencer
upon every possible occasion passed the chicken.
"More chicken, Mr. Grayson? she would inquire in a
tone of voice that made your mouth water.
"More chicken, Dick? I'd ask.
"More chicken, Mr. Grayson, he would respond—and
thus we kept up a tenuous, but pleasant little joke be-
tween us.
Just outside the porch in a thicket of lilacs a catbird
sang to us while we ate, and my dog lay in the shade with
his nose on his paws and one eye open just enough to show
any stray flies that he was not to be trifled with—and far
away to the North and East one could catch glimpses—if
he had eyes for such things—of the wide-stretching pleas-
antness of our countryside.
I soon saw that something mysterious was going on in
the kitchen. Harriet would look significantly at Ann
Spencer and Ann Spencer, who could scarcely contain her
overflowing smiles, would look significantly at Harriet. As
for me, I sat there with perfect confidence in myself—in
my ultimate capacity, as it were. Whatever happened, I
was ready for it!
And the great surprise came at last: a Short-Cake:
a great, big, red, juicy, buttery, sugary short-cake, with
raspberries heaped up all over it. When It came in—and
I am speaking of it in that personal way because it radiated
such an effulgence that I cannot now remember whether it
was Harriet or Ann Spencer who brought it in—when It
came in, Dick, who pretends to be abashed upon such occa-
192
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
sions, gave one swift glance upward and then emitted a
long, low, expressive whistle. When Beethoven found him-
self throbbing with undescribable emotions he composed a
sonata; when Keats felt odd things stirring within him he
wrote an ode to an urn, but my friend Dick, quite as evi-
dently on fire with his emotions, merely whistled—and then
looked around evidently embarrassed lest he should have
infringed upon the proprieties of that occasion.
"Harriet, I said, "you and Ann Spencer are benefactors
of the human race.
"Go 'way now, said Ann Spencer, shaking all over with
pleasure, "and eat your short-cake.
And after dinner how pleasant it was to stretch at full
length for a few minutes on the grass in the shade of the
maple tree and look up through the dusky thick shadows
of the leaves. If ever a man feels the blissfulness of com-
plete content it is at such a moment—every muscle in the
body deliciously resting, and a peculiar exhilaration animat-
ing the mind to quiet thoughts. I have heard talk of the
hard work of the hayfields, but I never yet knew a healthy
man who did not recall many moments of exquisite pleasure
connected with the hardest and the hottest work.
I think sometimes that the nearer a man can place him-
self in the full current of natural things the happier he is.
If he can become a part of the Universal Process and know
that he is a part, that is happiness. All day yesterday I had
that deep quiet feeling that I was somehow not working for
myself, not because I was covetous for money, nor driven
by fear, not surely for fame, but somehow that I was a
necessary element in the processes of the earth. I was a
primal force! I was the indispensable Harvester. With-
out me the earth could not revolve!
Oh, friend, there are spiritual values here, too. For how
can a man know God without yielding himself fully to the
processes of God?
I lived yesterday. I played my part. I took my place.
And all hard things grew simple, and all crooked things
seemed straight, and all roads were open and clear before
THE MOWING
193
me. Many times that day I paused and looked up from my
work knowing that I had something to be happy for.
At one o'clock Dick and I lagged our way unwillingly out
to work again—rusty of muscles, with a feeling that the
heat would now surely be unendurable and the work im-
possibly hard. The scythes were oddly heavy and hot to
the touch, and the stones seemed hardly to make a sound
in the heavy noon air. The cows had sought the shady
pasture edges, the birds were still, all the air shook with
heat. Only man must toil!
"It's danged hot, said Dick conclusively.
How reluctantly we began the work and how difficult it
seemed compared with the task of the morning! In half
an hour, however, the reluctance passed away and we were
swinging as steadily as we did at any time in the forenoon.
But we said less—if that were possible—and made every
ounce of energy count. I shall not here attempt to chronicle
all the events of the afternoon, how we finished the mow-
ing of the field and how we went over it swiftly and raked
the long windrows into cocks, or how, as the evening began
to fall, we turned at last wearily toward the house. The
day's work was done.
Dick had stopped whistling long before the middle of the
afternoon, but now as he shouldered his scythe he struck
up "My Fairy Fay with some marks of his earlier enthu-
siasm.
"Well, Dick, said I, "we've had a good day's work
together.
"You bet, said Dick.
And I watched him as he went down the lane with a
pleasant friendly feeling of companionship. We had done
great things together.
I wonder if you ever felt the joy of utter physical weari-
ness: not exhaustion, but weariness. I wonder if you have
ever sat down, as I did last night, and felt as though you
would like to remain just there always—without stirring a
single muscle, without speaking, without thinking even!
Such a moment is not painful, but quite the reverse—it
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
is supremely pleasant. So I sat for a time last evening on
my porch. The cool, still night had fallen sweetly after the
burning heat of the day. I heard all the familiar sounds
of the night. A whippoorwill began to whistle in the dis-
tant thicket. Harriet came out quietly—1 could see the
white of her gown—and sat near me. I heard the occa-
sional sleepy tinkle of a cowbell, and the crickets were call-
ing. A star or two came out in the perfect dark blue of
the sky. The deep, Sweet, restful night was on. I don't
know that I said it aloud—such things need not be said
aloud—but as I turned almost numbly into the house, stum-
bling on my way to bed, my whole being seemed to cry
out: "Thank God, thank God.
LABOR; REWARD1
Thomas Carlyle
labor
: Carlyle was a dyspeptic old Scotchman with a love for paradox
and for growling. He was a philosopher as well, and an historian
who would not allow himself the dry-as-dust methods of histo-
rians. Rather, he wrote history as another man would have written
a novel, reconstructing the past age with a free creative imagina-
tion. His strong conviction is everywhere evident in the flashes of
wit and sarcasm.
Carlyle's life is an illustration of what an indomitable will can
lo. He came to London in 1835 with $1,000. He worked desper-
itely for five months writing his French Revolution. "Soul and
>ody very sick, he wrote in his diary when he had finished the
nanuscript. The story of his lending the manuscript to Mill and
>f its accidental destruction is known to all. Instead of giving up,
Carlyle was immediately back at his desk more determined than
ver, and soon the book was reconstructed. The present essay shows
Darlyle's knowledge of the ways of men, and is an illustration of
he effect of strong conviction on style.
There is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in
Vork. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high
ailing, there is always hope in a man that actually and
arnestly works : in Idleness alone is there perpetual despair.
Vork, never so Mammonish, mean, is in communication
rith Nature; the real desire to get Work done will itself
tad one more and more to truth, to Nature's appointments
ad regulations, which are truth.
The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and
D it. "Know thyself": long enough has that poor "self
f thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to "know it,
1 Chapters XI and XII, from the third book of Past and Present.
195
196
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thy-
self; thou art an unknowable individual: know what thou
canst work at; and work at it, like a Hercules! That will
be thy better plan.
It has been written, "an endless significance lies in Work";
a man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are
cleared away, fair seedfields rise instead, and stately cities;
and withal the man himself first ceases to be a jungle and
foul unwholesome desert thereby. Consider how, even in
the meanest sorts of Labor, the whole soul of a man is
composed into a kind of real harmony, the instant he sets
himself to work! Doubt, Desire, Sorrow, Remorse, Indig-
nation, Despair itself, all these like helldogs lie beleaguering
the soul of the poor dayworker, as of every man: but he
bends himself with free valor against his task, and all these
are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far off into their
caves. The man is now a man. The blessed glow of Labor
in him, is it not as purifying fire, wherein all poison is burnt
up, and of sour smoke itself there is made bright blessed
flame!
Destiny, on the whole, has no other way of cultivating
us. A formless Chaos, once set it revolving, grows round
and ever rounder; ranges itself, by mere force of gravity,
into strata, spherical courses; is no longer a Chaos, but a
round compacted World. What would become of the Earth,
did she cease to revolve ? In the poor old Earth, so long as
she revolves, all inequalities, irregularities disperse them-
selves; all irregularities are incessantly becoming regular.
Hast thou looked on the Potter's wheel,—one of the ven-
erablest objects; old as the Prophet Ezekiel and far older?
Rude lumps of clay, how they spin themselves up, by mere
quick whirling, into beautiful circular dishes. And fancy
the most assiduous Potter, but without his wheel; reduced
to make dishes or rather amorphous botches, by mere
kneading and baking! Even such a Potter were Destiny,
with a human soul that would rest and lie at ease, that
would not work and spin! Of an idle unrevolving man the
kindest Destiny, like the most assiduous Potter without
LABOR; REWARD
197
wheel, can bake and knead nothing other than a botch; let
her spend on him what expensive coloring, what gilding
and enameling she will, he is but a botch. Not a dish; no,
a bulging, kneaded, crooked, shambling, squint-cornered,
amorphous botch,—a mere enameled vessel of dishonor!
Let the idle think of this.
Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no
other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has
found it, and will follow it! How, as a free-flowing channel,
dug and torn by noble force through the sour mud-swamp
of one's existence, like an ever-deepening river there, it
runs and flows;—draining-off the sour festering water,
gradually from the root of the remotest grass-blade; mak-
ing, instead of pestilential swamp, a green fruitful meadow
with its clear-flowing stream. How blessed for the meadow
itself, let the stream and its value be great or small! Labor
is Life: from the inmost heart of the Worker rises his god-
given Force, the sacred celestial Life-essence breathed into
him by Almighty God; from his inmost heart awakens him
to all nobleness,—to all knowledge, "self-knowledge and
much else, so soon as Work fitly begins. Knowledge? The
knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to
that; for Nature herself accredits that, says Yea to that.
Properly thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast
got by working: the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowl-
edge; a thing to be argued of in schools, a thing floating
in the clouds, in endless logic-vortices, till we try it and
fix it. "Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by Action
alone.
And again, hast thou valued Patience, Courage, Perse-
verance, Openness to light; readiness to own thyself mis-
taken, to do better next time? All these, all virtues, in
wrestling with the dim brute Powers of Fact, in ordering
of thy fellows in such wrestle, there and elsewhere not at
all, thou wilt continually learn. Set down a brave Sir Chris-
topher in the middle of black ruined Stone-heaps, of foolish
unarchitectural Bishops, redtape Officials, idle Nell-Gwyn
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Defenders of the Faith; and see whether he will ever raise
a Paul's Cathedral out of all that, yea or no! Rough, rude,
contradictory are all things and persons, from the mutinous
masons and Irish hodmen, up to the idle Nell-Gwyn De-
fenders, to blustering redtape Officials, foolish unarchitec-
tural Bishops. All these things and persons are there not
for Christopher's sake and his Cathedral's; they are there
for their own sake mainly! Christopher will have to con-
quer and constrain all these,—if he be able. All these are
against him. Equitable Nature herself, who carries her
mathematics and architectonics not on the face of her, but
deep in the hidden heart of her,—Nature herself is but par-
tially for him; will be wholly against him, if he constrain
her not! His very money, where is it to come from? The
pious munificence of England lies far-scattered, distant,
unable to speak, and say, "I am here";—must be spoken to
before it can speak. Pious munificence, and all help, is so
silent, invisible like the gods; impediment, contradictions
manifold are so loud and near! O brave Sir Christopher,
trust thou in those notwithstanding, and front all these;
understand all these; by valiant patience, noble effort, in-
sight, by man's-strength, vanquish and compel all these,—
and, on the whole, strike down victoriously the last topstone
of that Paul's Edifice; thy monument for certain centuries,
the stamp "Great Man impressed very legibly on Portland-
stone there!—
Yes, all manner of help, and pious response from Men
or Nature, is always what we call silent; cannot speak or
come to light, till it be seen, till it be spoken to. Every
noble work is at first "impossible. In very truth, for every
noble work the possibilities will lie diffused through Immen-
sity; inarticulate, undiscoverable except to faith. Like
Gideon thou shalt spread out thy fleece at the door of thy
tent; see whether under the wide arch of Heaven there be
any bounteous moisture, or none. Thy heart and life-
purpose shall be as a miraculous Gideon's fleece, spread out
in silent appeal to Heaven: and from the kind Immensities,
what from the poor unkind Localities and town and country
LABOR; REWARD
199
Parishes there never could, blessed dew-moisture to suffice
thee shall have fallen!
Work is of a religious nature:—work is of a brave na-
ture; which it is the aim of all religion to be. All work of
man is as the swimmer's: a waste ocean threatens to devour
him; if he front it not bravely, it will keep its word. By
incessant wise defiance of it, lusty rebuke and buffet of it,
behold how it loyally supports him, bears him as its con-
queror along. "It is so, says Goethe, "with all things that
man undertakes in this world.
Brave Sea-captain, Norse Sea-king,—Columbus, my hero,
royalest Sea-king of all! it is no friendly environment this
of thine, in the waste deep waters; around thee mutinous
discouraged souls, behind thee disgrace and ruin, before
thee the unpenetrated veil of Night. Brother, these wild
water-mountains, bounding from their deep bases (ten miles
deep, I am told), are not entirely there on thy behalf!
Meseems they have other work than floating thee forward:
—and the huge Winds, that sweep from Ursa Major to the
Tropics and Equators, dancing their giant-waltz through the
kingdoms of Chaos and Immensity, they care little about
filling rightly or filling wrongly the small shoulder-of-mutton
sails in this cockle-skiff of thine! Thou art not among
articulate-speaking friends, my brother; thou art among im-
measurable dumb monsters, tumbling, howling wide as the
world here. Secret, far off, invisible to all hearts but thine,
there lies a help in them: see how thou wilt get at that.
Patiently thou wilt wait till the mad Southwester spend
itself, saving thyself by dextrous science of defense, the
while: valiantly, with swift decision, wilt thou strike in,
when the favoring East, the Possible, springs up. Mutiny
of men thou wilt sternly repress; weakness, despondency,
thou wilt cheerily encourage: thou wilt swallow down com-
plaint, unreason, weariness, weakness of others and thyself;
—how much wilt thou swallow down! There shall be a
depth of Silence in thee, deeper than this Sea, which is but
ten miles deep: a Silence unsoundable; known to God only.
Thou shalt be a Great Man. Yes, my World-Soldier, thou
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of the World Marine-service,—thou wilt have to be greater
than this tumultuous unmeasured World here round thee
is; thou, in thy strong soul, as with wrestler's arms, shalt
embrace it, harness it down; and make it bear thee on,—
to new Americas, or whither God wills!
REWARD
"Religion, I said; for, properly speaking, all true Work
is Religion: and whatsoever Religion is not Work may go
and dwell among the Brahmins, Antinomians, Spinning
Dervishes, or where it will; with me it shall have no harbor.
Admirable was that of the old Monks, "Laborare est Orare,
Work is Worship.
Older than all preached Gospels was this unpreached, in-
articulate, but ineradicable, forever-enduring Gospel: Work,
and therein have well-being. Man, Son of Earth and of
Heaven, lies there not, in the innermost heart of thee, a
Spirit of active Method, a Force for Work;—and burns like
a painfully-smoldering fire, giving thee no rest till thou
unfold it, till thou write it down in beneficent Facts around
thee! What is immethodic, waste, thou shalt make me-
thodic, regulated, arable; obedient and productive to thee.
Wheresoever thou findest Disorder, there is thy eternal
enemy; attack him swiftly, subdue him; make Order of him,
the subject not of Chaos, but of Intelligence, Divinity and
Thee! The thistle that grows in thy path, dig it out, that a
blade of useful grass, a drop of nourishing milk, may grow
there instead. The waste cotton-shrub, gather its waste
white down, spin it, weave it; that, in place of idle litter,
there may be folded webs, and the naked skin of man be
covered.
But above all, where thou findest Ignorance, Stupidity,
Brute-mindedness,—yes, there, with or without Church-
tithes and Shovel-hat, with or without Talfourd-Mahon
Copyrights, or were it with mere dungeons and gibbets and
crosses, attack it, I say; smite it wisely, unweariedly, and
rest not while thou livest and it lives; but smite, smite, in
LABOR; REWARD
2or
the name of God! The Highest God, as I understand it*
does audibly so command thee; still audibly, if thou have
ears to hear. He, even He, with his wnspoken voice, awfuler
than any Sinai thunders or syllabled speech of Whirlwinds;
for the Silence of deep Eternities, of Worlds from beyond
the morning-stars, does it not speak to thee? The unborn
Ages; the old Graves, with their long-moldering dust, the
very tears that wetted it now all dry,—do not these speak to
thee, what ear hath not heard? The deep Death-kingdoms,
the Stars in their never-resting courses, all Space and all
Time, proclaim it to thee in continual silent admonition.
Thou too, if ever man should, shalt work while it is called
To-day. For the Night cometh, wherein no man can
work.
All true Work is sacred; in all true Work, were it but
true hand-labor, there is something of divineness. Labor,
wide as the Earth, has its summit in Heaven. Sweat of the
brow; and up from that to sweat of the brain, sweat of the
heart; which includes all Kepler calculations, Newton medi-
tations, all Sciences, all spoken Epics, all acted Heroisms,
Martyrdoms,—up to that "Agony of bloody sweat, which
all men have called divine! O brother, if this is not "wor-
ship, then I say, the more pity for worship; for this is the
noblest thing yet discovered under God's sky. Who art
thou that complainest of thy life of toil? Complain not.
Look up, my wearied brother; see thy fellow Workmen
there, in God's Eternity; surviving there, they alone sur-
viving: sacred Band of the Immortals, celestial Bodyguard
of the Empire of Mankind. Even in the weak Human
Memory they survive so long, as saints, as heroes, as gods;
they alone surviving; peopling, they alone, the unmeasured
solitudes of Time! To thee Heaven, though severe, is not
unkind; Heaven is kind,—as a noble Mother; as that
Spartan Mother, saying while she gave her son his shield,
"With it, my son, or upon it! Thou too shalt return home
in honor; to thy far-distant home, in honor; doubt it not,—
if in the battle thou keep thy shield! Thou, in the Eter-
nities and deepest Death-kingdoms, art not an alien; thou
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■everywhere art a denizen! Complain not; the very Spartans
■did not complain.
And who art thou that braggest of thy life of Idleness;
complacently showest thy bright gilt equipages; sumptuous
cushions; appliances for folding of the hands to mere
sleep? Looking up, looking down, around, behind or be-
fore, discernest thou, if it be not in Mayfair alone, any idle
hero, saint, god, or even devil? Not a vestige of one. In
the Heavens, in the Earth, in the Waters under the Earth,
is none like unto thee. Thou art an original figure in this
Creation; a denizen in Mayfair alone, in this extraordinary
Century or Half-Century alone! One monster there is in
the world: the idle man. What is his "Religion"? That
Nature is a Phantasm, where cunning beggary or thievery
may sometimes find good victual. That God is a lie; and
that Man and his Life are a lie.—Alas, alas, who of us is
there that can say, I have worked? The faithfulest of us
are unprofitable servants; the faithfulest of us know that
best. The faithfulest of us may say, with sad and true old
Samuel, "Much of my life has been trifled away! But
he that has, and except "on public occasions professes to
have, no function but that of going idle in a graceful or
graceless manner; and of begetting sons to go idle; and to
address Chief Spinners and Diggers, who at least are spin-
ning and digging, "Ye scandalous persons who produce too
much"—My Corn-Law friends, on what imaginary still
richer Eldorados, and true iron-spikes with law of gravita-
tion, are ye rushing!
As to the Wages of Work there might innumerable things
be said; there will and must yet innumerable things be said
and spoken, in St. Stephen's and out of St. Stephen's; and
gradually not a few things be ascertained and written, on
Law-parchment, concerning this very matter:—"Fair days'-
wages for a fair day's-work is the most unrefusable de-
mand! Money-wages "to the extent of keeping your worker
alive that he may work more"; these, unless you mean to
dismiss him straightway out of this world, are indispensable
alike to the noblest Worker and to the least noble!
LABOR; REWARD
203
One thing only I will say here, in special reference to the
former class, the noble and noblest; but throwing light on
all the other classes and their arrangements of this difficult
matter: The "wages of every noble Work do yet lie in
Heaven or else Nowhere. Not in Bank-of-England bills, in
Owen's Labor-bank, or any of the most improved establish-
ment of banking and money-changing, needest thou, heroic
soul, present thy account of earnings. Human banks and
labor-banks know thee not; or know thee after generations
and centuries have passed away, and thou art clean gone
from "rewarding,"—all manner of bank-drafts, shop-tills,
and Downing-street Exchequers lying very invisible, so far
from thee! Nay, at bottom, dost thou need any reward?
Was it thy aim and life-purpose to be filled with good things
for thy heroism; to have a life of pomp and ease, and be
what men call "happy, in this world, or in any other world ?
I answer for thee deliberately. No. The whole spiritual
secret of the new epoch lies in this, that thou canst answer
for thyself, with thy whole clearness of head and heart,
deliberately, No!
My brother, the brave man has to give his Life away.
Give it, I advise thee;—thou dost not expect to sell thy Life
in an adequate manner? What price, for example, would
content thee? The just price of thy Life to thee,—why,
God's entire Creation to thyself, the whole Universe of
Space, the whole Eternity of Time, and what they hold:
that is the price which would content thee; that, and if thou
wilt be candid, nothing short of that! It is thy all; and for
it thou wouldst have all. Thou art an unreasonable mortal;
—or rather thou art a poor infinite mortal, who, in thy
narrow clay-prison here, seemest so unreasonable! Thou
wilt never sell thy Life, or any part of thy Life, in a satis-
factory manner. Give it, like a royal heart; let the price be
Nothing: thou hast then, in a certain sense, got All for it!
The heroic man,—and is not every man, God be thanked,
a potential hero?—has to do so, in all times and circum-
stances. In the most heroic age, as in the most unheroic,
he will have to say, as Burns said proudly and humbly of
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his little Scottish Songs, little dewdrops of Celestial Melody
in an age when so much was unmelodious : "By Heaven, they
shall either be invaluable or of no value; I do not need your
guineas for them. It is an element which should, and must,
enter deeply into all settlements of wages here below. They
never will be "satisfactory otherwise; they cannot, O Mam-
mon Gospel, they never can! Money for my little piece of
work "to the extent that will allow me to keep working";
yes, this,—unless you mean that I shall go my ways before
the work is all taken out of me: but as to "wages"—!—
On the whole, we do entirely agree with those old Monks,
Laborare est Orare. In a thousand senses, from one end of
it to the other, true Work is Worship. He that works, what-
soever be his work, he bodies forth the form of Things
Unseen; a small Poet every Worker is. The idea, were it
but of his poor Delf Platter, how much more of his Epic
Poem, is as yet "seen, half-seen, only by himself; to all
others it is a thing unseen, impossible; to Nature herself it
is a thing unseen, a thing which never hitherto was;—very
"impossible, for it is as yet a No-thing! The Unseen
Powers had need to watch over such a man; he works in
and for the Unseen. Alas, if he look to the Seen Powers
only, he may as well quit the business; his No-thing will
never rightly issue as a Thing, but as a Deceptivity, a Sham-
thing,—which it had better not do!
Thy No-thing of an Intended Poem, O Poet who hast
looked merely to reviewers, copyrights, booksellers, popu-
larities, behold it has not yet become a Thing; for the truth
is not in it! Though printed, hotpressed, reviewed, cele-
brated, sold to the twentieth edition: what is all that ? The
Thing, in philosophical uncommercial language, is still a
No-thing, mostly semblance and deception of the sight;—
benign Oblivion incessantly gnawing at it, impatient till
Chaos, to which it belongs, do reabsorb it!—
He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from
him will never come real visibility and speech. Thou must
descend to the Mothers, to the Manes, and Hercules-like
long suffer and labor there, wouldst thou emerge with victory
LABOR; REWARD
205
into the sunlight. As in battle and the shock of war,—for is
not this a battle ?—thou too shalt fear no pain or death, shalt
love no ease or life; the voice of festive Lubberlands, the
noise of greedy Acheron shall alike lie silent under thy vie-
torious feet. Thy work, like Dante's, shall "make thee lean
for many years. The world and its wages, its criticisms,
counsels, helps, impediments, shall be as a waste ocean-
flood; the chaos through which thou art to swim and sail.
Not the waste waves and their weedy gulf-streams, shalt
thou take for guidance: thy star alone,—"Se tu segui tua
stella! Thy star alone, now clear-beaming over Chaos,
nay now by fits gone out, disastrously eclipsed: this only
shalt thou strive to follow. Oh, it is a business, as I fancy,
that of weltering your way through Chaos and the murk of
Hell! Green-eyed dragons watching you, three-headed
Cerberuses,—not without sympathy of their sort! "Eccovi
I' uom ch' e stato all' Inferno. For in fine, as Poet Dryden
says, you do walk hand in hand with sheer Madness, all the
way,—who is by no means pleasant company! You look
fixedly into Madness, and her undiscovered, boundless, bot-
tomless Night-empire; that you may extort new Wisdom out
of it, as an Eurydice from Tartarus. The higher the Wis-
dom, the closer was its neighborhood and kindred with mere
Insanity; literally so ;—and thou wilt, with a speechless feel-
ing, observe how highest Wisdom, struggling up into this
world, has oftentimes carried such tinctures and adhesions
of Insanity still cleaving to it hither!
All Works, each in their degree, are a making of Madness
sane;—truly enough a religious operation; which cannot be
carried on without religion. You have not work otherwise;
you have eye-service, greedy grasping of wages, swift and
ever swifter manufacture of semblances to get hold of
wages. Instead of better felt-hats to cover your head, you
have bigger lath-and-plaster hats set traveling the streets
on wheels. Instead of heavenly and earthly Guidance for
the souls of men, you have "Black or White Surplice Con-
troversies, stuffed hair-and-leather Popes;—terrestrial Law-
wards, Lords and Law-bringers, "organizing Labor in these
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
years, by passing Corn-Laws. With all which, alas, this
distracted Earth is now full, nigh to bursting. Semblances
most smooth to the touch and eye; most accursed, neverthe-
less, to body and soul. Semblances, be they of Sham-woven
Cloth or of Dilettante Legislation, which are not real wool
or substance, but Devil's-dust, accursed of God and man!
No man has worked, or can work, except religiously; not
even the poor day-laborer, the weaver of your coat, the
sewer of your shoes. All men, if they work not as in a
Great Taskmaster's eye, will work wrong, work unhappily
for themselves and you.
Industrial work, still under bondage to Mammon, the ra-
tional soul of it not yet awakened, is a tragic spectacle. Men
in the rapidest motion and self-motion; restless, with con-
vulsive energy, as if driven by Galvanism, as if possessed by
a Devil; tearing asunder mountains,—to no purpose, for
Mammonism is always Midas-eared! This is sad, on the
face of it. Yet courage: the beneficent Destinies, kind in
their sternness, are apprising us that this cannot continue.
Labor is not a devil, even while encased in Mammonism;
Labor is ever an imprisoned god, writhing unconsciously or
consciously to escape out of Mammonism! Plugson of
Undershot, like Taillefer of Normandy, wants victory; how
much happier will even Plugson be to have a Chivalrous
victory than a Chactaw one! The unredeemed ugliness is
that of a slothful People. Show me a People energetically
busy; heaving, struggling, all shoulders at the wheel; their
heart pulsing, every muscle swelling, with man's energy and
will;—I show you a People of whom great good is already
predicable; to whom all manner of good is yet certain, if
their energy endure. By very working, they will learn;
they have, Antaeus-like, their foot on Mother Fact: how can
they but learn?
The vulgarest Plugson of a Master-Worker, who can
command Workers, and get work out of them, is already a
considerable man. Blessed and thrice-blessed symptoms I
discern of Master-Workers who are not vulgar men; who
are Nobles, and begin to feel that they must act as such: all
LABOR; REWARD
207
speed to these, they are England's hope at present! But in
this Plugson himself, conscious of almost no nobleness what-
ever, how much is there! Not without man's faculty, in-
sight, courage, hard energy, is this rugged figure. His words
none of the wisest; but his actings cannot be altogether
foolish. Think, how were it, stoodst thou suddenly in his
shoes! He has to command a thousand men. And not
imaginary commanding; no, it is real, incessantly practical.
The evil passions of so many men (with the Devil in them,
as in all of us) he has to vanquish; by manifold force of
speech and of silence, to repress or evade. What a force of
silence, to say nothing of the others, is in Plugson! For
these his thousand men he has to provide raw-material,
machinery, arrangement, houseroom; and ever at the week's
end, wages by due sale. No Civil-List, or Goulburn-Baring
Budget has he to fall back upon, for paying of his regiment;
he has to pick his supplies from the confused face of the
whole Earth and Contemporaneous History, by his dexterity
alone. There will be dry eyes if he fail to do it!—He ex-
claims, at present, "black in the face, near strangled with
Dilettante Legislation: "Let me have elbow-room, throat-
room, and I will not fail! No, I will spin yet, and conquer
like a giant: what 'sinews of war' lie in me, untold resources
towards the Conquest of this Planet, if instead of hanging
me, you husband them, and help me!"—My indomitable
friend, it is true; and thou shalt and must be helped.
This is not a man I would kill and strangle by Corn-Laws,
even if I could! No, I would fling my Corn-Laws and shot-
belts to the Devil; and try to help this man. I would teach
him, by noble precept and law-precept, by noble example
most of all, that Mammonism was not the essence of his or
of my station in God's Universe; but the adscititious excres-
cence of it; the gross, terrene, godless embodiment of it;
which would have to become, more or less, a godlike one.
By noble real legislation, by true noble's-work, by unwearied,
valiant, and were it wageless effort, in my Parliament and
in my Parish, I would aid, constrain, encourage him to effect
more or less this blessed change. I should know that it
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
would have to be effected; that unless it were in some
measure effected, he and I and all of us, I first and soonest
of all, were doomed to perdition!—Effected it will be; un-
less it were a Demon that made this Universe; which I, for
my own part, do at no moment, under no form, in the least
believe.
May it please your Serene Highnesses, your Majesties,
Lordships and Law-wardships, the proper Epic of this world
is not now "Arms and the Man"; how much less, "Shirt-frills
and the Man": no, it is now "Tools and the Man": that,
henceforth to all time, is now our Epic;—and you, first of
all others, I think were wise to take note of that!
THE YOUNG MAN'S FUTURE 1
Frank A. Vanderlip
Mr. Vanderlip was born in Aurora, Illinois, in 1864. He received
his education at the University of Illinois and at the University of
Chicago. Beginning as a reporter on the Chicago Tribune, he was
quickly advanced to the Financial Editorship. Later he edited the
Economist, Chicago. Subsequently, he became Private Secretary to
the Secretary of the Treasury, and from 1897 to 1901 was Assistant
Secretary to the Treasury. In 1901 he visited Europe to study
financial and industrial conditions, and as a result of this visit, wrote
various articles on Japanese-American relations. During the War he
was Chairman of the War Savings Committee, and was later ap-
pointed to conduct the sale of War Savings Certificates. For ten
years, beginning 1909, he was President of the National City Bank
of New York City. He has also held responsible positions on the
boards of management of various business organizations. The
present address, delivered at a banquet, is a simple, vigorous state-
ment of the Banker's estimate of the forces that contribute to the
success of any young man.
Bankers are more or less given to prediction, to the mak-
ing of forecasts and prophecies. They must form opinions
in regard to the future. It is a part of their business to
have definite ideas as to whether money is to be easy or
close, whether business will be active or dull, whether col-
lections will be good or otherwise.
Financial prophecy, however, is full of difficulties. There
are many currents and cross currents to be reckoned with.
The whole field of action is so much larger than any man's
vision that inadvertently he may leave out of consideration
matters of vital importance. The course of affairs may be
completely altered by psychological conditions which can
not be weighed in the most carefully prepared tables of sta-
tistics. At best the keenest and wisest observers must write
"E. & O. E. in large letters after their attempts to divine
1 Reprinted by permission from Business and Education. Copy-
right, 1907, by Duffield & Company.
209
2IO
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
the financial future. These distinguished bank officers who
have dined with you this evening are undoubtedly skilled in
such a correct grouping of facts as enables them to draw
accurate conclusions in regard to the financial future.
There is another line of prophecy, however, which is, I
believe, quite as interesting, and far easier. If I were forced
to turn seer and to undertake to forecast future events, and
could I have my choice of fields, I would keep quite clear
of any attempt at forecasting future financial affairs, and
would adopt the easier course of attempting to predict the
measure of success or of failure that is likely, with added
years, to come to a young man. Men ought to be as inter-
esting as markets. I am certain that a prediction can be
made regarding the future of a young man, if we have at
hand the necessary data, with as much accuracy as we can
predict the future of the market. There are many bank
officers here who could, I have no doubt, predict, with cor-
rectness, the future course of money rates, of bank reserves
or of gold imports, but with still greater chances of accu-
racy, I believe, they could predict the future careers of
some of the members of this chapter of the American Insti-
tute of Bank Clerks.
I believe it is possible to formulate certain rules and prin-
ciples which, applied to the data in regard to a young man's
capacity, character, and tendencies, will enable one to make
an accurate estimate of his chances of success or his dan-
gers of failure. If it is possible to lay down such rules, then
some knowledge of those rules ought to be of value to
young men. That is so because it is within the power of
each young man to change in a large measure the character
of the data in his case. Young men are not foreordained
to failure or success. Their future is, in the main, of their
own making. If they comprehend that certain character^
istics or tendencies which they are forming will have an
enormous influence upon their future, if they clearly sen
that their career is in but small measure a matter of chancy
and is in large measure the result of those early formed
habits, characteristics, and tendencies, they will be less likely
THE YOUNG MAN'S FUTURE
to feel that they must wait for some brilliant opportunity
to prove themselves; they will be more likely to understand
that success must be won by sincere effort applied to each
day's work.
Without doubt there is among the young men who are
members of this chapter of the American Institute of Bank
Clerks the future president of a great bank. I believe I can
pick out the man. I shall not name him; you can do that
better than I; but I am going to tell you exactly who he is.
y This young man has, of course, certain fundamental quali-
ties which are and must be common to every successful
man. \c.He started out with good physique, and he has not
abused that heritage, for no man can be permanently sue-
cessful without having an extraordinary capacity for work,
—and health and working capacity are one.K He has been
naturally endowed with a personality which will permit him
to work cooperatively with his fellow^a^pej~sonality which
will permit him to win their regard, as well as lead him
to recognize merit in others. ^Then, as a matter of course,
he has at least a fair education; he is diligent, capable, and
has already a character so well formed that there is every
reason to believe that he will have integrity, uprightness,
and honor so ingrained in him that men who know him will
come to recognize that he is worthy of a trust.
But all those characteristics, necessary as they are, by no
means serve to designate the man. Those characteristics
are general, and ought to be possessed by every young man.
There are additional characteristics possessed by the
young man I am picking out, and they are the ones which
will enable me more definitely to designate him.
Given first those sound fundamentals,—good health, good
character, at least a fair education, industry, and capacity,—
we have then only determined the general class from which
we will pick our man. This man I am indicating/ does his
regular work wellvbut he has recognized that he must, as
a matter of course, make his ordinary day's work a matter
of constant good records. He sees that he is not entitled
to special credit, and is not likely to receive extraordinary
212
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
rewards for merely a record of ordinary good work, and
so he has to come to recognize that those lines which mark
the limits of his daily task are not barriers to his further
effort. Those lines merely mark the work he has first to
do. He has learned that every occasion that is offered, every
opening that he could himself make, which would permit
him to break through those lines which mark his special
daily duty and give him a chance to do other work, is an
opportunity of the greatest importance. That statement is
no platitude; data bearing on that phase of a young man's
character form one of the most illuminating guides we have
in forecasting a career. It tells the measure of the man's
coming usefulness; it tells how quickly he will learn the
whole detail of his business; it tells whether he has that in-
valuable spirit of cooperation without which great success
cannot be built. The man we are picking out has learned
that lesson. He knows that of all things necessary for his
development opportunity is one of the most essential,—
opportunity to work, opportunity to learn. He has found
that doing some other man's work, in addition to his own,
when occasion offered, has made him master of some other
man's knowledge, and has added greatly to his own capa-
bilities and his value. He has found that his true salary is
made up of two parts; that the money he receives is but
one part of it, the opportunity to learn is the other. He
has not feared he would work too much for the salary he
was getting, because he has found that working is learning,
and that what he is learning is after all by far the more
valuable part of his salary.
When a young man has learned that, an added duty is a
new opportunity of great value, when he has learned that
an added task is something to be welcomed with enthusiasm,
he has marked himself for promotion,yhe has separated him-
self from those of his fellows who believe in making their
services just balance their salaries; he has opened the door
of opportunity and his progress is likely to be rapid toward
a complete mastery of the details of his business.
I wish I had the eloquence fully to emphasize the strength
THE YOUNG MAN'S FUTURE
213
of my belief in the practical, hard-headed sense of these
assertions—to emphasize my faith in the result of an
everyday application of them. If I understand correctly
any single principle on which success is based, I know that
a true one is this: Do more than you have to do that you
may learn more than you need to know for doing your own
simple daily task, and with this broader doing and wider
learning you will be laying the substantial foundation that
is required for any career of eminence.
There is another lesson of great value which has been
learned by this young man whom I am designating to you
as a future bank president. VHe has learned systematically
to use the timevwhich is available outside of his regular
work, y You will find that this young man whom I am
singling out has not been satisfied with the progress he has
made in the course of his regular work. He may have
started with a broad, sound education; but even so, he soon
found he would need a more specialized education if he
were thoroughly to master the principles of his business.
He attacked this problem of a specialized education with
the same energy and enthusiasm which he has brought to
his daily work at the bank. There has been nothing desul-
tory and intermittent about his method. The work has been
systematically planned and constantly carried on. The
work in itself has been a pleasure in the doing; in its result
it has given to. this young man a specialized knowledge and
a grasp of principles which in the future will be of a value
to him greater than he can now comprehend.
There is one more characteristic which the young man
possesses and to which I want to call your attention. It is
a characteristic which might lead some of you to doubt that
he was marked for large success. You may perhaps have
thought that he lacked a certain shrewdness, that his ambi-
tion for personal advancement was not keen enough, that
he was a little slow-going when it came to forcing recogni-
tion of his own abilities and hard work. Just there is where
you may be wrong. This man's interest in the work has
been greater than his interest in himself. To get the thing
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
rightly done has been his thought rather than merely to get
the credit for doing it. In traveling along the road leading
to success a man should not have his eyes solely on the
milestones; in straining to see the milestone, which is too
far ahead, one may fail to avoid the obstacle directly in the
path. That advice does not alone apply to the progress of
the young man. It is a truth that he may well heed, even
after he has reached a position of much influence and
power. /The great man in commerce to-day is the coopera-
tive man, the man who sees clearly the right thing to be
accomplished and is willing to sink his individuality to ac-
complish it; the man who is more interested in getting the
thing done than he is in getting credit for doing it./ We
must give great prominence to that quality of patience which
our future bank president possesses. Patience to wait for
personal reward, patience to work cooperatively with others,
a patience which rises to self-abnegation before a great
work to be done—a self-abnegation which sees only the one
thing, and that is the thing to be accomplished, and is will-
ing to sink for the time the gratification of ambition, per-
sonal pride, and personal reward.
Here then is the man: (He has health, character, ability,
industry. More than that, he has learned to welcome new
work as new opportunity, and he has learned systematically
to use his time outside of his regular work in gaining a
specialized knowledge which will give him a thorough grasp
of the principles of his business; and then above all that,
he has taken greater interest in his work than in himself.
He has cared more for getting the thing done right than he
has for getting the personal credit of doing it.
I have laid before you the data which will enable you,
with almost unerring accuracy, to name the man. Unless
there is some defect of personality or some accident of op-
portunity, the man who best fits this outline will in a decade
stand out from among his fellows a leader; he will be wear-
ing the honors of distinction and carrying the burdens of
responsibilitv.
MY WINTER GARDEN 1
Charles Kingsley
Kingsley, born in 1819, was a Devonshire clergyman, so far as his
literal vocation is concerned, but we are more likely to know him
as the author of Westward, Ho!, Hypatia, The Sands of Dee, and
—if we remember our own childhood—of Water Babies. He came
of stock which theoretically at least should justify his penchant for
poetry and romance. His mother had the blood of the West Indian
seigneurs, and his father belonged to a proud gentle family, which
had become impoverished through reckless extravagance. Kingsley
was educated at Kings College and Cambridge, took orders in the
Established Church, and obtained the curacy of Eversley. He was
alert to the political and social, as well as the religious, problems of
his day, and championed with endless zeal the cause of the English
working man. Besides the renown due him through his own writ-
ing and speaking, we may grant him a sort of back-handed credit
for calling forth, by his remarks on the veracity of the Roman
clergy, Newman's masterly Apologia pro Vita sua. Until his death
in 1875, Kingsley spent much of his time in the serene seclusion of
the country. My Winter Garden is one of the essays, largely auto-
biographical, which show that to him, at least, such a noiseless exist-
ence need not therefore be inert and pulseless as well.
So, my friend, you ask me to tell you how I contrive to
support this monotonous country life; how, fond as I am
of excitement, adventure, society, scenery, art, literature, I
go cheerfully through the daily routine of a commonplace
country profession, never requiring a six weeks' holiday;
not caring to see the Continent, hardly even to spend a day
in London; having never yet actually got to Paris.
You wonder why I do not grow dull as those round me,
whose talk is of bullocks—as indeed mine is, often enough;
why I am not by this time "all over blue mold"; why I have
not been tempted to bury myself in my study, and live a life
of dreams among old books.
1 From My Winter Garden.
21S
2l6
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
I will tell you. I am a minute philosopher; though one,
thank Heaven, of a different stamp from him whom the
great Bishop Berkeley silenced—alas! only for a while. I
am possibly, after all, a man of small mind, content with
small pleasures. So much the better for me. Meanwhile, I
can understand your surprise, though you cannot understand
my content. You have played a greater game than mine;
have lived a life perhaps more fit for an Englishman, cer-
tainly more in accordance with the taste of our common
fathers, the Vikings, and their patron Odin "the goer,
father of all them that go ahead. You have gone ahead,
and over many lands; and I reverence you for it, though I
envy you not. You have commanded a regiment—indeed
an army—and "drank delight of battle with your peers";
you have ruled provinces, and done justice and judgment,
like a noble Englishman as you are, old friend, among thou-
sands who never knew before what justice and judgment
were. You have tasted (and you have deserved to taste)
the joy of old David's psalm, when he has hunted down the
last of the robber lords of Palestine. You have seen "a
people whom you have not known serve you. As soon as
they heard of you, they obeyed you; but the strange chil-
dren dissembled with you; yet before you too, "the strange
children failed, and trembled in their hill-forts.
Noble work that was to do, and nobly you have done it,
and I do not wonder that to a man who has been set to such
a task, and given power to carry it through, all smaller
work must seem paltry; that such a man's very amusements,
in that grand Indian land, and that free, adventurous In-
dian life, exciting the imagination, calling out all the self-
help and daring of a man, should have been on a par with
your work; that when you go a-sporting, you ask for no
meaner preserve than the primeval forest, no lower park
wall than the snow-peaks of the Himalaya.
Yes; you have been a "burra Shikarree 2 as well as a
"burra Sahib. 3 You have played the great game in your
2 Great hunter.
3 Great gentleman.
MY WINTER GARDEN
217
work, and killed the great game in your play. How many
tons of mighty monsters have you done to death, since we
two were schoolboys together, five-and-twenty years ago?
How many starving villages have you fed with the flesh of
elephant, or buffalo? How many have you delivered from
man-eating tigers, or wary old alligators, their craws full
of poor girls' bangles? Have you not been charged by
rhinoceroses, all but ripped up by boars ? Have you not seen
face to face Ovis Ammon himself, the giant mountain sheep
—primeval ancestor, perhaps, of all the flocks of earth?
Your memories must be like those of Theseus and Hercules,
full of slain monsters. Your brains must be on fossiliferous
deposit, in which gaur and sambur, hog and tiger, rhinoceros
and elephant, lie heaped together, as the old ichthyosaurs
and plesiosaurus are heaped in the lias rocks at Lyme. And
therefore I like to think of you. I try to picture your feel-
ings to myself. I spell over with my boy Mayne Reid's
amusing books, or the Old Forest Ranger, or Williams's old
Tiger Book, with Howitt's plates; and try to realize the
glory of a burra Shikarree: and as I read and imagine, feel,
with Sir Hugh Evans, "a great disposition to cry.
For there were times, full many a year ago, when my
brains were full of bison and grizzly bear, mustang and big-
horn, Blackfoot and Pawnee, and hopes of wild adventure in
the far West, which I shall never see; for ere I was three-
and-twenty I discovered, plainly enough, that my lot was to
stay at home and earn my bread in a very quiet way; that
England was to be henceforth by prison or my palace as I
should choose to make it; and I have made it, by Heaven's
help, the latter.
I will confess to you, though, that in those first heats of
youth, this little England—or rather this little patch of moor
in which I have struck roots as firm as the wild fir-trees do
—looked at moments rather like a prison than a palace;
that my foolish young heart would sigh, "Oh! that I had
wings"—not as a dove, to fly home to its nest and croodle
there—but as an eagle, to swoop away over land and sea, in
a rampant and self-glorifying fashion, on which I now look
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
back as altogether unwholesome and undesirable. But the
thirst for adventure and excitement was strong in me, as
perhaps it ought to be in all at twenty-one. Others ram-
bled over Alps and Apennines, Italian picture-galleries and
palaces, filling their minds with fair memories—why should
not I? Others discovered new wonders in botany and
zoology—why should not I? Others too, like you, fulfilled
to the utmost that strange lust after the burra shikari, which
even now makes my pulse throb as often I see the stags'
heads in our friend A—'s hall—why should not I ? It is not
learned in a day, the golden lesson of the old Collect, to "love
the thing which is commanded, and desire that which is
promised. Not in a day, but in fifteen years, one can spell
out a little of its worth; and when one finds oneself on the
wrong side of forty, and the first gray hairs begin to show
on the temples, and one can no longer jump as high as one's
third button—scarcely, alas! to any button at all; and what;
with innumerable sprains, bruises, soakings, and chillings,
one's lower limbs feel in a cold thaw, much like an old
post-horse's, why, one makes a virtue of necessity; and if
one still lusts after sights, takes the nearest, and looks for
wonders, not in the Himalayas or Lake Ngami, but in the
turf on the lawn and the brook in the park; and with good
Alphonse Karr enjoys the macro-microcosm in one "Tow
autour de mon jardin. 4
For there it is, friend, the whole infinite miracle of nature
in every tuft of grass, if we have only eyes to see it, and can
disabuse our minds of that tyrannous phantom of size. Only
recollect that great and small are but relative terms; that, in
truth, nothing is great or small, save in proportion to the
quantity of creative thought which has been exercised in
making it; that the fly who basks upon one of the trilithons
of Stonehenge is in truth infinitely greater than all Stone-
henge together, though he may measure the tenth of an inch,
and the stone on which he sits five-and-twenty feet. You
differ from me? Be it so. Even if you prove me wrong I
will believe myself in the right: I cannot afford to do other-
4 Turn about my garden.
MY WINTER GARDEN
219
wise. If you rob me of my faith in "minute philosophy,
you rob me of a continual source of content, surprise, delight
So go your way and I mine, each working with all his
might, and playing with all his might, in his own place and
way. Remember only, that though I never can come round
to your sphere, you must some day come round to me, when
wounds, or weariness, or merely, as I hope, a healthy old
age, shall shut you out for once and for all from burra
shikari, whether human or quadruped. For you surely will
not take to politics in your old age? You will not surely
live to solicit (as many a fine fellow, alas ! did but last year)
the votes, not even of the people, but merely of the snoboc-
racy, on the ground of your having neither policy nor princi-
pies, nor even opinions, upon any matter in heaven or earth?
Then in that day will you be forced, my friend, to do what I
have done this many a year: to refrain your soul, and keep
it low. You will see more and more the depth of human
ignorance, the vanity of human endeavors. You will feel
more and more that the world is going God's way, and not
yours, or mine, or any man's; and that if you have been
allowed to do good work on earth, that work is probably as
different from what you fancy it as the tree is from the seed
whence it springs. You will grow content, therefore, not to
see the real fruit of your labors; because if you saw it you
would probably be frightened at it, and what is very good in
the eyes of God would not be very good in yours; content,
also, to receive your discharge, and work and fight no more,
sure that God is working and fighting, whether you are in
hospital or in the field. And with this growing sense of the
pettiness of human struggles will grow on you a respect for
simple labors, a thankfulness for simple pleasures, a sym-
pathy with simple people, and possibly, my trusty friend,
with me and my little tours about the moorland which I call
my winter garden, and which is to me as full of glory and
of instruction as the Himalayas or the Punjab are to you,
and in which I contrive to find as much health and amuse-
ment as I have time for—and who ought to have more ?
I call the said garden mine, not because I own it in any
220
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
legal sense (for only in a few acres have I a life interest),
but in that higher sense in which ten thousand people can
own the same thing, and yet no man's right interfere with
another's. To whom does the Apollo Belvedere belong, but
to all who have eyes to see its beauty? So does my winter
garden; and therefore to me among the rest.
Besides (which is a gain to a poor man), my pleasure in
it is a very cheap one. So are all those of a minute philoso-
pher, except his microscope. But my winter garden, which
is far larger, at all events, than that famous one at Chats-
worth, costs me not one penny in keeping up. Poor, did I
call myself ? Is it not true wealth to have all I want without
paying for it? Is it not true wealth, royal wealth, to have
some twenty gentlemen and noblemen, nay, even royal per-
sonages, planting and improving for me? Is it not more
than royal wealth to have sun and frost, Gulf Stream and
southwesters, laws of geology, phytology, physiology, and
other ologies—in a word, the whole universe and the powers
thereof, day and night, paving, planting, roofing, lighting,
coloring my winter garden for me, without my even having
the trouble to rub a magic ring and tell the genii to go
to work?
Yes. I am very rich, as every man may be who will. In
the doings of our little country neighborhood I find tragedy
and comedy, too fantastic, sometimes too sad, to be written
down. In the words of those whose talk is of bullocks I find
the materials of all possible metaphysic, and long weekly
that I had time to work them out. In fifteen miles of moor-
land I find the materials of all possible physical science, and
long that I had time to work out one smallest segment of
that great sphere. How can I be richer, if I have lying at
my feet all day a thousand times more wealth than I can use?
Some people—most people—in these runabout railway
days, would complain of such a life, in such a "narrow
sphere, so they call it, as monotonous. Very likely it is so.
But is it to be complained of on that account ? Is monotony
in itself an evil? Which is better, to know many places ill
or to know one place well? Certainly—if a scientific habit
MY WINTER GARDEN
221
of mind be a gain—it is only by exhausting as far as possible
the significance of an individual phenomenon (is not that
sentence a true scientific one in its magniloquence?) that you
can discover any glimpse of the significance of the universal.
Even men of boundless knowledge, like Humboldt, must
have once their specialty, their pet subject, or they- would
have, strictly speaking, no knowledge at all. The volcanoes
of Mexico, patiently and laboriously investigated in his
youth, were to Humboldt, possibly, the key of the whole
Cosmos. I learn more studying than I should by roaming all
Europe in search of new geologic wonders. Fifteen years
have I been puzzling at the same questions and have only
guessed at a few of the answers. What sawed out the edges
of the moors into long narrow banks of gravel ? What cut
them off all flat atop? What makes Erica tetralic grow in
one soil and the bracken in another ? How did three species
of club-moss—one of them quite an Alpine one—get down
here, all the way from Wales perhaps, upon this isolated
patch of gravel ? Why did that one patch of Carex arenaria
settle in the only square yard for miles and miles which
bore sufficient resemblance to its native sand-hill by the
seashore, to make it comfortable? Why did Myosurus
minimus, which I had hunted for in vain for fourteen years,
appear by dozens in the fifteenth, upon a new-made bank,
which had been for at least two hundred years a farm-yard
gateway? Why does it generally rain here from the south-
west, not when the barometer falls, but when it begins to
rise again? Why—why is everything which lies under my
feet all day long ? I don't know; and you can't tell me.
And till I have found out, I cannot complain of monotony,
with still undiscovered puzzles waiting to be explained, and
so to create novelty at every turn.
Besides monotony is pleasant in itself; morally pleasant
and morally useful. Marriage is monotonous; but there is
much, I trust, to be said in favor of holy wedlock. Living
in the same house is monotonous; but three removes, say the
wise, are as bad as a fire. Locomotion is regarded as an
evil by our Litany. The Litany, as usual, is right. "Those
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who travel by land or sea are too objects of our pity and
our prayers; and I do pity them. I delight in that same
monotony. It saves curiosity, anxiety, excitement, disap-
pointment, and a host of bad passions. It gives the man
the blessed, invigorating feeling that he is at home; that he
has roots, deep and wide, struck down into all he sees; and
that only The Being who will do nothing cruel or useless
can tear them up. It is pleasant to look down on the same
parish day after day, and say, I know all that lies beneath,
and all beneath know me. If I want a friend, I know where
to find him; if I want work done, I know who will do it.
It is pleasant and good to see the same trees year after year;
the same birds coming back in spring to the same shrubs;
the same banks covered with the same flowers, and broken
(if they be stiff ones) by the same gaps. Pleasant and
good it is to ride the same horse, to sit in the same chair, to
wear the same old coat. That man who offered twenty
pounds' reward for a lost carpet-bag full of old boots was a
sage, and I wish I knew him. Why should one change one's
place any more than one's wife or one's children? Is a
hermit-crab, slipping his tail out of one strange shell into
another, in the hopes of its fitting him a little better, either a
dignified, safe, or graceful animal? No; George Riddler
was a true philosopher:
Let vules go sarching vur and nigh,
We bides at Whum, my dog and I;
and become there, not only wiser, but more charitable; for
the oftener one sees, the better one knows; and the better
one knows, the more one loves.
It is an easy philosophy; especially in the case of the
horse, where a man cannot afford more than one, as I cannot.
To own a stud of horses, after all, is not to own horses at
all, but riding-machines. Your rich man who rides Crimea
in the morning, Sir Guy in the afternoon, and Sultan to-
morrow, and something else the next day, may be a very'
gallant rider; but it is a question whether he enjoys the
MY WINTER GARDEN
223
pleasure which one horse gives to the poor man who rides
him day after day; one horse, who is not a slave, but a
friend; who has learned all his tricks of voice, hand, heel,
and knows what his master wants, even without being told;
who will bear with his master's infirmities, and feels secure
that his master will bear with his in turn.
Possibly, after all, the grapes are sour; and were one
rich, one would do even as the rich are wont to do; but still,
I am a minute philosopher. And, therefore, this afternoon,
after I have done the same work, visited the same people,
and said the same words to them, which I have done for
years past, and shall, I trust, for many a year to come, I
shall go wandering out into the same winter garden on the
same old mare; and think the same thoughts, and see the
same fir-trees, and meet perhaps the same good fellows
hunting of their fox, as I have done with full content this
many a year; and rejoice, as I said before, in my own
boundless wealth, who have the whole universe to look at,
without being charged one penny for the show.
As I Have said, the grapes may be sour, and I enjoy the
want of luxuries only because I cannot get them; but if my
self-deception be useful to me, leave it alone.
No one is less inclined to depreciate that magnificent
winter garden at the Crystal Palace: yet let me, if I choose,
prefer my own; I argue that, in the first place, it is far
larger. You may drive, I hear, through the grand one at
Chatsworth for a quarter of a mile. You may ride through
mine for fifteen miles on end. I prefer, too, to any glass
roof which Sir Joseph Paxton ever planned, that dome above
my head some three miles high, of soft dappled gray and
yellow cloud, through the vast lattice-work whereof the blue
sky peeps, and sheds down tender gleams on yellow bogs,
and softly rounded heather knolls, and pale chalk ranges
gleaming far away. But, above all, I glory in my evergreens.
What winter garden can compare for them with mine?
True, I have but four kinds—Scotch fir, holly, furze, and
the heath; and by way of relief to them, only brows of
brown fern, sheets of yellow bog-grass, and here and there
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a leafless birch, whose purple tresses are even more lovely
to my eye than those fragrant green ones which she puts on
in spring. Well: in painting as in music, what effects are
more grand than those produced by the scientific combina-
tion, in endless new variety, of a few simple elements?
Enough for me is the one purple birch; the bright hollies
round its stem sparkling with scarlet beads; the furze-patch,
rich with its lacework of interwoven light and shade, tipped
here and there with a golden bud; the deep soft heather
carpet, which invites you to lie down and dream for hours;
and, behind all, the wall of red fir-stems, and the dark fir-
roof with its jagged edges a mile long, against the soft
gray sky.
An ugly, straight-edged, monotonous fir-plantation ? Well,
I like it, outside and inside. I need no saw-edge of moun-
tain peaks to stir up my imagination with the sense of the
sublime, while I can watch the saw-edge of those fir peaks
against the red sunset. They are my Alps; little ones it
may be: but after all, as I asked before, what is size? A
phantom of our brain; an optical delusion. Grandeur, if
you will consider wisely, consists in form, and not in size:
and to the eye of the philosopher, the curve drawn on a
paper two inches long is just as magnificent, just as sym-
bolic of divine mysteries and melodies, as when embodied in
the span of some cathedral roof. Have you eyes to see?
Then lie down on the grass, and look near enough to see
something more of what is to be seen; and you will find
tropic jungles in every square foot of turf, mountain cliffs
and debacles at the mouth of every rabbit burrow; dark
strids, tremendous cataracts, "deep glooms and sudden
glories, in every foot-broad rill which wanders through the;
turf. All is there for you to see, if you will but rid yourself;
of "that idol of space"; and Nature, as every one will tell'
you who has seen dissected an insect under the microscope,
is as grand and graceful in her smallest as in her hugest
forms. ;
The March breeze is chilly: but I can be always warm if
I like in my winter garden. I turn my horse's head to the'
MY WINTER GARDEN
225
red wall of fir-stems, and leap over the furze-grown bank
into my cathedral, wherein if there be no saints, there are
likewise no priestcraft and no idols; but endless vistas of
smooth, red, green-veined shafts holding up the warm dark
roof, lessening away into endless gloom, paved with rich
brown fir-needle—a carpet at which Nature has been at
work for forty years. Red shafts, green roof, and here
and there a pane of blue sky—neither Owen Jones nor
Willement can improve upon that ecclesiastical ornamenta-
tion—while for incense I have the fresh healthy turpentine
fragrance, far sweeter to my nostrils than the stifling nar-
cotic odor which fills a Roman Catholic cathedral. There is
not a breath of air within: but the breeze sighs over the roof
above in a soft whisper. I shut my eyes and listen. Surely
that is the murmur of the summer sea upon the summer
sands in Devon far away. I hear the innumerable wavelets
spend themselves gently upon the shore, and die away to
rise again. And with the innumerable wave-sighs come in-
numerable memories, and faces which I shall never see again
upon this earth. I will not tell even you of that, old friend.
It has two notes, two keys rather, that Aiolian harp of
fir-needles above my head; according as the wind is east or
west, the needles dry or wet. This easterly key of to-day is
shriller, more cheerful, warmer in sound, though the day
itself be colder: but grander still, as well as softer, is the
sad soughing key in which the southwest wind roars on,
rain-laden, over the forest, and calls me forth—being a
minute philosopher—to catch trout in the nearest chalk-
stream.
The breeze is gone awhile, and I am in perfect silence—a
silence which may be heard. Not a sound and not a moving
object—absolutely none. The absence of animal life is sol-
emn, startling. That ring-dove who was cooing half a mile
away has hushed his moan; that flock of long-tailed titmice,
which were twinging and pecking about the fir-cones a few
minutes since, are gone; and now there is not even a gnat to
quiver in the slant sun-rays. Did a spider run over these
dead leaves, I almost fancy I could hear his footfall. The
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creaking of the saddle, the soft step of the mare upon the
fir-needles, jar my ears. I seem alone in a dead world. A
dead world: and yet so full of life, if I had eyes to see!
Above my head every fir-needle is breathing—breathing for-
ever; currents unnumbered circulate in every bough, quick-
ened by some undiscovered miracle; around me every fir-
stem is distilling strange juices, which no laboratory of man
can make; and where my dull eye sees only death, the eye of
God sees boundless life and motion, health and use.
Slowly I wander on beneath the warm roof of the winter
garden, and meditate upon that one word—Life; and spe-
dally on all that Mr. Lewes has written so well thereon—
for instance:
"We may consider Life itself as an ever-increasing
identification with Nature. The simple cell, from which the
plant or animal arises, must draw light and heat from the
sun, nutriment from the surrounding world, or else it will
remain quiescent, not alive, though latent with life; as the
grains in the Egyptian tombs, which after lying thousands
of years in those sepulchers, are placed in the earth, and
smile forth as golden wheat. What we call growth, is it
not a perpetual absorption of Nature, the identification of
the individual with the universal? And may we not, in
speculative moods, consider Death as the grand impatience
of the soul to free itself from the circle of individual ac-
tivity—the yearning of the creature to be united with the
Creator ?
"As with Life, so with knowledge, which is intellectual
life. In the early days of man's history, Nature and her
marvelous ongoings were regarded with but a casual and
careless eye, or else with the merest wonder. It was late
before profound and reverent study of her laws could wean
man from impatient speculations; and now, what is our
intellectual activity based on, except on the more thorough
mental absorption of Nature? When that absorption is
completed the mystic drama will be sunny clear, and all
Nature's processes be visible to man, as a Divine Effluence
and Life.
MY WINTER GARDEN
227
True: yet not all the truth. But who knows all the
truth ?
Not I. "We see through a glass darkly, said St. Paul
of old; and what is more, dazzle and weary our eyes, like
clumsy microscopists, by looking too long and earnestly
through the imperfect and by no means achromatic lens.
Enough. I will think of something else. I will think of
nothing at all—
Stay. There was a sound at last; a light footfall.
A hare races towards us through the ferns, her great
bright eyes full of terror, her ears aloft to catch some sound
behind. She sees us, turns short, and vanishes into the
gloom. The mare pricks up her ears too, listens, and looks;
but not the way the hare has gone. There is something com-
ing; I can trust the finer sense of the horse, to which (and
no wonder) the Middle Age attributed the power of seeing
ghosts and fairies impalpable to man's gross eyes. Besides,
that hare was not traveling in search of food. She was not
loping along, looking around to her right and left; but
galloping steadily. She has been frightened; she has been
put up; but what has put her up? And there, far away
among the fir-stems, rings the shriek of a startled blackbird.
What has put him up?
That, old mare, at sight whereof your wise eyes widen
till they are ready to burst, and your ears are first shot
forward towards your nose, and then laid back with vicious
intent. Stand still, old woman! Do you think still, after
fifteen winters, that you can catch a fox?
A fox it is indeed; a great dog-fox, as red as the fir-stems
between which he glides. And yet his legs are black with
fresh peat-stains.
He is a hunted fox; but he has not been up long.
The mare stands like a statue; but I can feel her trem-
bling between my knees. Positively he does not see us. He
sits down in the middle of a ride, turns his great ears right
and left, to make them hear the better. Now he is up again
and on.
Beneath yon firs, some hundred yards away, standeth, or
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rather lieth, for it is on dead flat ground, the famous castle
of Malepartus, which beheld the base murder of Lampe the
hare, and many a seely soul besides. I knew it well; a patch
of sand-heaps mingles with great holes, amid the twining
fir-roots; ancient home of the last of the wild beasts. And
thither, unto Malepartus safe and strong, trots Reinecke,
where he hopes to be snug among the labyrinthine windings
and innumerable starting-holes, as the old apologue has it,
of his ballium, covert-way, and donjon keep. Full blown in
self-satisfaction he trots, lifting his toes delicately, and car-
rying his brush aloft, as full of cunning and conceit as that
world-famous ancestor of his, whose deeds of unchivalry
were the delight, if not the model, of knight and kaiser, lady
and burgher, in the Middle Age.
Suddenly he halts at the great gate of Malepartus;
examines it with his nose; goes on to a postern; examines
that also, and then another and another; while I perceive
afar, projecting from every cave's mouth, the red and green
end of a new fir-faggot. Ah, Reinecke! fallen is thy conceit,
and fallen thy tail therewith. Thou hast worse foes to deal
with than Bruin the bear, or Isegrim the wolf, or any foolish
brute whom thy great ancestor outwitted. Man, the many-
counseled, has been beforehand with thee; and the earths are
stopped.
One moment he sits down to meditate, and scratches those
trusty counselors, his ears, as if he would tear them off,
"revolving swift thoughts in a crafty mind.
He has settled it now. He is up and off—and at what a
pace! Out of the way, Fauns and Hamadryads, if any be
left in the forest! What a pace! And with what a grace
besides!
0 Reinecke, beautiful thou art, of a surety, in spite of thy
great naughtiness! Art thou some fallen spirit, doomed to
be hunted for thy sins in this life, and in some future life
rewarded for thy swiftness, and grace, and cunning, by
being made a very messenger of the immortals? Who
knows? Not I.
1 am rising fast to Pistol's vein. Shall I ejaculate? Shall
MY WINTER GARDEN
229
I notify? Shall I waken the echoes? Shall I break the
grand silence by that scream which the vulgar view-halloo
call?
It is needless; for louder and louder every moment swells
up a sound which makes my heart leap into my mouth and
my mare into the air.
Music? Well-beloved soul of Hullah, would that thou
wert here this day, and not in St. Martin's Hall, to hear
that chorus, as it pours round the fir-stems, rings against
the roof above, shatters up into a hundred echoes, till the air
is alive with sound! You love madrigals, and whatever
Weekes, or Wilbye, or Orlando Gibbons sang of old. So
do I. Theirs is music fit for men: worthy of the age of
heroes, of Drake and Raleigh, Spenser and Shakespeare:
but oh, that you could hear this madrigal! If you must
have "four parts, then there they are: deep-mouthed bass,
rolling along the ground; rich, joyful tenor; wild, wistful
alto; and leaping up here and there above the throng of
sounds, delicate treble shrieks and trills of trembling joy.
I know not whether you can fit it into your laws of music,
any more than you can the song of the Ariel sprite who
dwells in the .ZEolian harp, or the roar of the waves on the
rock, or
"Myriads of rivulets hurrying through the lawn,
And murmuring of innumerable bees.
But music it is. A madrigal? Rather a whole opera of
Der Freischutz 5—demoniac element and all—to judge by
those red lips, fierce eyes, wild, hungry voices; and such as
should make Reinecke, had he strong esthetic sympathies,
well content to be hunted from his cradle to his grave, that
such sweet sounds might by him enrich the air. Heroes of
old were glad to die, if but some vates-sacer would sing
their fame in worthy strains: and shall not thou too be
61821. Music by Weber, libretto by Kind. Freischiitz—from
folklore—is a marksman who by compact with the devil has obtained
a certain number of bullets destined to hit without fail whatever
object he wishes.
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glad, Reinecke? Content thyself with thy fate. Music
soothes care; let it soothe thine, as thou runnest for thy
life; thou shalt have enough of it in the next hour. For as
the Etruscans (says Athenseus) were so luxurious that they
used to flog their slaves to the sound of the flute, so shall
luxurious Chanter and Challenger, Sweetlips and Melody,
eat thee to the sound of rich organ-pipes, that so thou mayest
"Like that old baffled swan, in music die.
And now appear, dim at first and distant, but brightening
and nearing fast, many a right good fellow and many a
right good horse. I know three out of four of them, their
private histories, and the private histories of their horses;
and could tell you many a good story of them; but shall not,
being an English gentleman, and not an American litterateur.
They may not all be very clever, or very learned, or very
anything except gallant men; but they are all good enough
company for me, or any one; and each has his own speciality
for which I like him. That huntsman I have known for
fifteen years, and sat many an hour beside his father's
death-bed. I am godfather to that whip's child. I have seen
the servants of the hunt, as I have the hounds, grow up
round me for two generations, and I feel for them as old
friends; and like to look into their brave, honest, weather-
beaten faces. That red coat there, I knew him when he
was a schoolboy; and now he a captain of the Guards, and
won his Victoria Cross at Inkermann; that bright green
coat is the best farmer, as well as the hardest rider, for
many a mile round; one who plays, as he works, with all his
might, and might have been a beau sabreur and colonel of
dragoons. So might that black coat, who now brews good
beer, and stands up for the poor at the Board of Guardians,
and rides, like the county banker; but he knows more of the
fox than the fox knows of himself, and where the hounds
are, there will he be this day. That red coat has hunted
kangaroo in Australia: that one, as clever and good as he is
brave and simple, has stood by Napier's side in many an
MY WINTER GARDEN
231
Indian fight; that one won his Victoria at Delhi, and was
cut up at Lucknow, with more than twenty wounds; that
one has—but what matter to you who each man is ? Enough
that each can tell one a good story, welcome one cheerfully,
and give one out here, in the wild forest, the wholesome
feeling of being at home among friends.
There is music, again, if you will listen, in the soft tread
of hundred horse-hoofs upon the spongy vegetable soil.
They are trotting now in "common time. You may hear
the whole Croats' March (the finest trotting march in the
world) played by those iron heels; the time, as it does in
the Croats' March, breaking now and then, plunging, jing-
ling, struggling through heavy ground, bursting for a mo-
ment into a jubilant canter as it reaches a sound spot.
The hounds feather a moment round Malepartus, puzzled
by the windings of Reinecke's footsteps. You can hear the
flap and snort of the dogs' nostrils as they canter round;
and one likes it. It is exciting; but why—who can tell ?
What beautiful creatures they are too! Next to a Greek
statue (I mean a real old Greek one: for I am a thoroughly
anti-pre-Raphaelite benighted pagan heathen in taste, and
intend some day to get up a Clinque-Cento Club, for the
total abolition of Gothic art)—next to a Greek statue, I say,
I know few such combinations of grace and strength as in a
fine fox-hound. It is the beauty of the Theseus—light and
yet massive; and light not in spite of its masses, but on
account of the perfect disposition of them. I do not care
for grace in man, woman, or animal, which is obtained (as
in the old painters) at the expense of honest flesh and
blood. It may be all very pure, and unearthly, and saintly,
and what not; but it is not itself such as much as it likes.
The highest art must be that in which the outward is the
most perfect symbol of the inward; and, therefore, a healthy
soul can only be expressed by a healthy body; and starved
limbs and a hydrocephalus forehead must be taken either
as incorrect symbols of spiritual excellence, or as—what
they were really meant for—symbols of certain spiritual dis-
eases which were in the Middle Age considered as ecclesi-
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astical graces and virtues. Wherefore I like pagan and
naturalist art; consider Titian and Correggio as unappre-
ciated geniuses, whose excellence the world will in some
saner mood rediscover; hold, in direct opposition to Rio,
that Raphael improved steadily all his life through, and that
his noblest works are not his somewhat simpering Madonnas
and somewhat impish Bambinos (very lovely though they
are), but his great, coarse, naturalist, Protestant cartoons,
which (with Andrea Mantegna's "Heathen Triumph")
Cromwell saved for the British nation. Probably no one
will agree with all this for the next quarter of a century;
but after that I have hopes. The world will grow tired of
pretending to admire Manichaean pictures in an age of
natural science; and Art will let the dead bury their dead,
and beginning again where Michael Angelo and Raphael
left off, work forward into nobler, truer, freer, and more
divine school than the world had yet seen—at least, so I
hope.
And all this has grown out of those fox-hounds. Why
not? Theirs is the sort of form which expresses to me
what I want art to express—nature not limited, but de-
veloped, by high civilization. The old savage ideal of
beauty was the lion, type of mere massive force. That was
succeeded by an over-civilized ideal, say from fawn, type of
delicate grace. By cunning breeding and choosing, through
long centuries, man has combined both, and has created the
fox-hound-lion and fawn in one; just as he might create
noble human beings, did he take half as much trouble about
politics (in the true old sense of the word) as he does about
fowls. Look at that old hound, who stands doubtful, look-
ing up at his master for advice. Look at the severity, deli-
cacy, lightness of every curve. His head is finer than a
deer's; his hind legs tense as steel springs; the sweep of
loin, the breadth of paw, the mass of arm and thigh; and
if you have an eye for form, look at the absolute majesty
of his attitude at this moment. Majesty is the only word
for it. If he were six feet high, instead of twenty-three
inches, with what animal on earth could you compare him?
MY WINTER GARDEN
233
Is it not a joy to see such a thing alive ? It is to me, at least.
I should like to have one in my study all day long, as I
would have a statue or a picture; and when Mr. Morrell
gave (as they say) two hundred guineas for Hercules alone,
I believe the dog was well worth the money, only to look
at. But I am a minute philosopher.
I cap them on to the spot at which Reinecke disappeared.
Old Virginal's stern flourishes; instantly her pace quickens.
One whimper, and she is away full-mouthed through the
wood, and the pack after her; but not I.
I am not going with them. My hunting days are over.
Let it suffice that I have, in the days of my vanity, "drunk
delight of battle with my peers, far on the ringing plains
of many a county, grass and forest, down and vale. No,
my gallant friends. You know that I could ride, if I chose;
and I am vain enough to be glad that you know it. But use-
less are your coaxings, solicitations, wavings of honest right
hands. "Life, as my friend Tom Brown says, "is not all
beer and skittles"; it is past two now and I have four old
women to read to at three, and an old man to bury at four;
and I think on the whole, that you will respect me more for
going home and doing my duty. That I should like to see
this fox fairly killed, or even fairly lost, I deny not. That
I should like it as much as I can like any earthy and outward
thing, I deny not. But sugar to one's bread and butter is
not good; and if my winter garden represent the bread and
butter, then will fox-hunting stand to it in the relation of
superfluous and unwholesome sugar; so farewell; and long
may your noble sport prosper—"the image of war with only
half its danger, to train you and your sons after, into gallant
soldiers—full of
"The reason firm, the temperate will,
Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill.
A NIGHT AMONG THE PINES1
Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson leads all authors in the charm of his style and person-
ality. A vagrant and a companion, he travels through life letting
every one into all his secrets and all his ambitions. He makes his
readers believe that he is a special friend of each.
Stevenson was the son of a family of famous light-house engi-
neers. He disappointed his father by showing not the least interest
in engineering. To please his father he allowed himself to take
a course in law so that he might have something to fall back upon
should he fail as an author—although he had not the least intention
of failing. His life is inspirational. Doomed by tuberculosis, he
worked with unflagging energy to his very last day. Cut off as he
was in mid-course, he had already attracted a wide company of
readers and admirers. Since his death, this company has been con-
stantly increasing. The present description from his Travels with
a Donkey shows how a commonplace experience may be treated
with fresh interest and charm.
Night is a dead, monotonous period under a roof; but in
the open world it passes lightly, with its stars and dews and
perfumes, and the hours are marked by changes in the face
of Nature. What seems a kind of temporal death to people
choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living
slumber to the man who sleeps afield. All night long he can
hear Nature breathing deeply and freely; even as she takes
her rest she turns and smiles; and there is one stirring hour
unknown to those who dwell in houses, when a wakeful
influence goes abroad over the sleeping hemisphere, and all
the out-door world are on their feet. It is then that the
cock first crows, not this time to announce the dawn, but
like a cheerful watchman speeding the course of the night.
Cattle awake on the meadows; sheep break their fast on
dewy hill-sides, and change to a new lair among the ferns;
1 From Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes.
234
A NIGHT AMONG THE PINES
235.
and houseless men who have lain down with the fowls opea
their dim eyes and behold the beauty of the night.
At what inaudible summons, at what gentle touch of
Nature, are all these sleepers thus recalled in the same hour
to life? Do the stars rain down an influence, or do we
share some thrill of mother earth below our resting bodies?
Even shepherds and old country-folk, who are the deepest
read in these arcana, have not a guess as to the means or
purpose of this nightly resurrection. Towards two in the
morning they declare the thing takes place; and neither know
nor inquire further. And at least it is a pleasant incident.
We are disturbed in our slumber only, like the luxurious
Montaigne, "that we may the better and more sensibly
relish it. We have a moment to look upon the stars, and
there is a special pleasure for some minds in the reflection
that we share the impulse with all out-of-door creatures in
our neighborhood, that we have escaped out of the Bastille
of civilization, and are become, for the time being, a mere
kindly animal and a sheep of Nature's flock.
When that hour came to me among the pines, I awakened
thirsty. My tin was standing by me half full of water.
I emptied it at a draught; and feeling broad awake after
this internal cold aspersion, sat upright to make a cigarette.
The stars were clear, colored, and jewel-like, but not frosty.
A faint silvery vapor stood for the Milky Way. All around
me the black fir-points stood upright and stock-still. By
the whiteness of the pack-saddle, I could see Modestine
walking round and round at the length of her tether; I could
hear her steadily munching at the sward; but there was not
another sound, save the indescribable quiet talk of the runnel
over the stones. I lay lazily smoking and studying the color
of the sky, as we call the void of space, from where it
showed a reddish gray behind the pines to where it showed
a glossy blue-black between the stars. As if to be more
like a peddler, I wear a silver ring. This I could see faintly
shining as I raised or lowered the cigarette; and at each
whiff the inside of my hand was illuminated, and became
for a second the highest light in the landscape.
236
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
A faint wind, more like a moving coolness than a stream
of air, passed down the glade from time to time; so that even
in my great chamber the air was being renewed all night
long. I thought with horror of the inn at Chasserades and
the congregated nightcaps; with horror of the nocturnal
prowesses of clerks and students, of hot theaters and pass-
keys and close rooms. I have not often enjoyed a more
serene possession of myself, nor felt more independent of
material aids. The outer world, from which we cower into
our houses, seemed after all a gentle habitable place; and
night after night a man's bed, it seemed, was laid and wait-
ing for him in the fields, where God keeps an open house.
I thought I had rediscovered one of those truths which are
revealed to savages and hid from political economists: at
the least, I had discovered a new pleasure for myself. And
yet even while I was exulting in my solitude I became
aware of a strange lack. I wished a companion to lie near
me in the starlight, silent and not moving, but ever within
touch. For there is a fellowship more quiet even than soli-
tude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made per-
feet. And to live out of doors with the woman a man loves
is of all lives the most complete and free.
As I thus lay, between content and longing, a faint noise
stole towards me through the pines. I thought, at first, it
was the crowing of cocks or the barking of dogs at some
very distant farm; but steadily and gradually it took articu-
late shape in my ears, until I became aware that a pas-
senger was going by upon the high-road in the valley, and
singing loudly as he went. There was more of good-will
than grace in his performance; but he trolled with ample
lungs; and the sound of his voice took hold upon the hill-
side and set the air shaking in the leafy glens. I have
heard people passing by night in sleeping cities; some of
them sang; one, I remember, played loudly on the bagpipes.
I have heard the rattle of a cart or carriage spring up sud-
denly after hours of stillness, and pass, for some minutes,
within the range of my hearing as I lay abed. There is a
romance about all who are abroad in the black hours, and
A NIGHT AMONG THE PINES
237
with something of a thrill we try to guess their business.
But here the romance was double: first, this glad passenger,
lit internally with wine, who sent up his voice in music
through the night; and then I, on the other hand, buckled
into my sack, and smoking alone in the pine-woods between
four and five thousand feet towards the stars.
When I awoke again (Sunday, 29th September), many
of the stars had disappeared; only the stronger companions
of the night still burned visibly overhead; and away towards
the east I saw a faint haze of light upon the horizon, such
as had been the Milky Way when I was last awake. Day
was at hand. I lit my lantern, and by its glowworm light
put on my boots and gaiters; then I broke up some bread
for Modestine, filled my can at the water-tap, and lit my
spirit-lamp to boil myself some chocolate. The blue dark-
ness lay long in the glade where I had so sweetly slumbered;
but soon there was a broad streak of orange melting into
gold along the mountain-tops of Vivarais. A solemn glee
possessed my mind at this gradual and lovely coming in of
day. I heard the runnel with delight; I looked round me
for something beautiful and unexpected; but the still black
pine-trees, the hollow glade, the munching ass, remained
unchanged in figure. Nothing had altered but the light,
and that, indeed, shed over all a spirit of life and of breath-
ing peace, and moved me to a strange exhilaration.
I drank my water chocolate, which was hot if it was not
rich, and strolled here and there, and up and down about
the glade. While I was thus delaying, a gush of steady
wind, as long as a heavy sigh, poured direct out of the
quarter of the morning. It was cold, and set me sneezing.
The trees near at hand tossed their black plumes in its pas-
sage; and I could see the thin distant spires of pine along
the edge of the hill rock slightly to and fro against the golden
east. Ten minutes after, the sunlight spread at a gallop
along the hillside, scattering shadows and sparkles, and the
day had come completely.
I hastened to prepare my pack, and tackle the steep ascent
that lay before me; but I had something on my mind. It
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
was only a fancy; yet a fancy will sometimes be impor-
tunate. I had been most hospitably received and punctually
served in my green caravanserai. The room was airy, the
water excellent, and the dawn had called me to a moment.
I say nothing of the tapestries or the inimitable ceiling, nor
yet of the view which I commanded from the windows; but
I felt I was in some one's debt for all this liberal entertain-
ment. And so it pleased me, in a half-laughing way, to
leave pieces of money on the turf as I went along, until I
had left enough for my night's lodging. I trust they did
not fall to some rich and churlish drover.
"NATURA IN MINIMIS EXISTAT"1
John Burroughs
Naturalist, literary critic, and philosopher, Burroughs is most
widely loved because of his intimate knowledge of the out-of-doors.
In his studies of nature he combines scientific accuracy with human
interpretation and with perfect naturalness. "If I relate the bird,
says he, "in some way to human life, to my own life,—show what
it is to me and what it is in the landscape and the season,—then
do I give my reader a live bird and not a labeled specimen. It
was this perfect blending, observes one writer, of human instincts
with accurate observations of fact that made Burroughs easily the
leading naturalist of his generation. He was born at Roxbury, New
York, in 1837. He received an academy education; taught school
for a number of years; served as Clerk in the Treasury, and as
National Bank Examiner. Beginning with 1874 he lived at his
farm on the Hudson, and devoted himself to horticulture and to
literature. He died in 1921.
I
This saying of Aristotle's is usually translated from the
Greek as if it meant that Nature is seen only, or more fully,
in "leasts, whereas it is more probable that Aristotle meant
to say that Nature is as complete in the small as the great,
that she is whole in all her parts—as much in evidence in the
minute as in the gigantic, in the plant as in the oak, in the
gnat as in the elephant, in the pond as in the sea. In the
clay bank washed by rains, by the roadside, you may per-
ceive the same sculpturing and modeling that you see in
vast mountain chains. In California I have seen in a small
mound of clay by the roadside, that had been exposed to the
1 Copyright. Reprinted from The Art World, by permission of
the publishers.
239
24-0
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
weather for a few years, a reproduction in miniature of the
range of mountains that towered above it—the Sierra Madre.
A rivulet winding through a plain loops the same loops
and oxbows that the Mississippi makes traversing the
prairie states. The physical laws at work are the same in
both cases. Has not some poet said that the same law that
shapes a tear-drop shapes a planet? The little whirlwind
that dances before you along the road in summer, and maybe
snatches your hat from your head, is a miniature cyclone,
and in our hemisphere it rotates in the same direction—in
opposition to the hands of a clock.
Mere size does not count for much with Nature; she is all
there, in the least as in the greatest. A drop of dew reveals
the rainbow tints as well as the myriad drops of the summer
shower, and the bow hovers in the spray of a small waterfall
as surely as in that of Niagara. The thunderbolt leaps with
no more speed across the black chasm of the clouded heavens
than does the electric spark in your laboratory leap across
the tiny space from one pole to the other.
But the big-lettered and startling headlines in Nature's
book occupy the real nature lover less than does the smaller
print. The big and exceptional things all can see, but only
the loving observers take note of the minor facts and inci-
dents.
Emerson in his journal thinks it worth while to notice the
jokes of Nature. He cites the Punch faces in the English
violets, the parrots, the monkeys, the lapwing's limping, and
the like petty stratagems of other birds. He might have
cited the little green tody of Jamaica, which is pretty sure
to make one smile, or the murres of the Northern seas with
their Jew-like profiles and short legs. But of course Nature
does not joke; it is man that jokes and experiences a sense
of humor in certain of her forms, but all these forms have
serious purposes. Inanimate things often behave in a way
to excite one's risibles, but that end can be no part of the
plan of Nature. When inanimate things act like human
beings we laugh, and when human beings act like inanimate
things we laugh; why we laugh it would not be easy to say.
"NATURA IN MINIMIS EXISTAT
Most animals certainly have a keen sense of play, but it is
very doubtful if even so humanized an animal as the dog has
any sense of humor. The grotesque is pretty sure to frighten
him instead of amusing him. The sense of humor implies
powers of ideation, which the lower animals do not possess.
The waltzing and saluting and other courtship antics of
certain birds are very amusing to the human spectator, but
it is all very serious business with the birds. I always have
to smile when I see a chipmunk come up out of his hole into
which he has been hurrying his winter food supply, stand
up straight on his hind legs, and quickly wash his face. How
rapidly he passes his paws over that delicate nose and face,
looking around the while to see if any danger is near! He
does this at every trip. When we say on witnessing any act
of an animal, "How cunning! we feel, I suppose, a sense
of its humanness; it suggests our own behavior under like
conditions.
Last spring the vanishing of the deep snows from my lawn
gave me a glimpse of the life and works of the meadow-
mice in their winter freedom under the snow. At one place
standing out very clearly was a long mouse highway, sunken
into the turf and leading to a large dome-shaped nest of dry
grass, which it entered by a round hole on one side and
became two highways leading off over the turf. It suggested
a tiny railroad station with its converging lines. "How
cunning! exclaimed some school children and their teacher
to whom I pointed it out. The mice had evidently enjoyed
privacy, freedom, and safety there under the two feet of
snow, as the record they left clearly showed.
I smiled one day last April when, walking near the edge
of a small pond, I saw a muskrat on shore very busy
stuffing his mouth with dry leaves, then take to the water,
holding his bedding well up till he came opposite to his hole
in the bank, when he dived and swam to its under-water
entrance. My smile was provoked, I suppose, by the dis-
crepancy between the care the animal took to secure dry
leaves, and the necessity that compelled it to plunge under
the wave in order to reach its chamber. I do not suppose
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
the muskrat could have interpreted my smile had he seen it
and tried.
I was interested and amused by the behavior of the big
garter snake I met in my field walk one October day. The
day was chilly and I could not stir the snake into any con-
siderable degree of activity. He was sluggish and made no
effort to escape, though I teased him with my cane for a
quarter of an hour. He presently woke up enough to scent
danger in my cane. Probably he had a dim sense that it
was another snake. He flattened himself out and became a
half round, opened his mouth threateningly, but would not
seize or strike my stick. He coiled beautifully, and when I
turned him on his back he righted his body. After a while
I noticed that his body began to contract at a point about
one third the distance from the end of the tail; then, as I
continued my teasing, he folded the lower part of his body
back upon himself and twined it around the upper, like a
vine doubling upon itself. If he was taking precautions
against my stick as another snake trying to swallow him, it
was good tactics; it would have made the problem of swal-
lowing him much more difficult. I do not think it at all
probable that the snake had ever experienced such uncivil
treatment before, and the emergency was met by the best
resources the poor half benumbed creature had. "Swallow
me, if you will, but I will stick in your throat if I can. I
left him unharmed, doubled and twisted in self-defense.
Jokes in nature, no! but there are curious and amusing
forms and incidents—grotesque shapes, preposterous color
schemes and appendages, from our point of view, but all a
serious part of the complex web of animal life.
The transparent trick of the ground-building birds to
decoy you from their nests or young is very amusing, but
the heart of the poor mother-bird is in her mouth.
The cock or mock nests of the house wren and marsh;
wren look like jokes; in fact the wrens themselves seem like
jokes, they are so pert and fussy and attitudinizing, but:
whether these extra nests are sham nests—or whether they;
are the result of the overflowing measure of the breeding
"NATURA IN MINIMIS EXISTAT
instinct, or decoy nests, serving a real purpose in concealing
or protecting the real nest, is a question.
There are more tragedies in wild life than comedies, and
fear is a much more active agent in development than joy
or peace. The only two of our more common wild animals
that I recall, in which the instinct or impulse of fear is low,
are the porcupine and the skunk. Both are pretty effectively
armed against their natural enemies and both are very slow,
stupid animals.
When I stop to contemplate the ways of wild creatures
around me and the part they play in the all-the-year-round
drama, my thoughts are pretty sure to rest for a while on
the crow. From the wide distribution of the crow over the
earth in some form, it would appear that Nature has him
very much at heart. She has equipped him to make his way
in widely diversified lands and climates. He thrives upon
the shore and he thrives upon the mountains. He is not
strictly a bird of prey, neither is he preyed upon. What is
it in nature that he expresses? True, he expresses cunning,
hardiness, sociability; but he is not alone in these things.
Yet the crow is unique; he is a character, and at times one
is almost persuaded that he has a vein of humor in him.
Probably no country boy who has had a tame crow has any
doubt about it. His mischief-making propensities are cer-
tainly evident enough. His soliloquies, his deliberate cat-
calls and gutturak sounds, his petty stealings, his teasing of
other animals, his impudent curiosity, all stamp him as a
bird full of the original Adam.
Country people are now much more friendly to the crow
than they were in my boyhood. He is not so black as he
was painted. The farmers have learned that he is their
friend, for all his occasional corn-pulling and chicken-steal-
ing. His is the one voice you are pretty sure to hear wher-
ever your walk leads you. He is at home and about his own
business. It is not his grace as a flyer that pleases us; he is
heavy and commonplace on the wing—no airiness, no easy
mastery as with the hawks; only when he walks is he grace-
ful. The pedestrian crow! how much at home he looks upon
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
the ground—an ebony clod-hopper, but in his bearing the
lord of the soil. He always looks prosperous; he always
looks contented; his voice is always reassuring. The farmer
may be disgruntled and discouraged, his crows are not. The
country is good enough for them; they can meet their en-
gagements; they do not borrow trouble; they have not lived
on the credit of the future; their acres are not mortgaged.
The crow is a type of the cheerful, successful countryman.
He is not a bird of leisure; he is always busy, going some-
where, or policing the woods, or saluting his friends, or
calling together the clans, or mobbing a hawk, or spying out
new feeding-grounds, or taking stock of the old, or just
cawing to keep in touch with his fellows. He is very
sociable; he has many engagements, now to the woods, now
to the fields, now to this valley, now to the next—a round of
pleasure or duty all the day long. Not given to solitude and
contemplation like the proud hawks, not pugnacious, never
or rarely quarreling with his fellows, cheerfully sharing his
last morsel with them, playing sentinel while they feed, sus-
picious, inquisitive, cunning, but never hiding; as open as
the day in his manners, proclaiming his whereabouts at all
hours of the day, looking upon you as the»intruder and him-
self as the rightful occupant. The stiller the day the more
noise he makes. He is never a sneaker, never has the air of
a prowler. He is always in the public eye or ear. His
color gives him away, his voice gives him away; on the
earth or in the sky he is seen and heard afar. No
creature wants his flesh, no lady wants his plume, though
a more perfect and brilliant ebony cannot be found in
nature. He is a bit of the night with the sheen of the
stars in it, yet the open day is his province, publicity his
passion. A spy, a policeman, a thief, a good fellow, a
loyal friend, an alarmist, a socialist, all in one. Winter
makes him gregarious, as it does many men; at night he
seeks the populous rookery in the woods, by day he wanders
in bands seeking food. In spring he establishes a crow net-
work all over the country and is rarely out of ear-shot of
some of his fellows. How we should miss him from the
"NATURA IN MINIMIS EXISTAT
day! Among our community of birds he is the conspicuous,
all-the-year-round feature. We do not love him, there is
no poetry in his soul; but he challenges our attention, he is
at home in the landscape, he is never disgruntled. Come
rain, come shine, come heat, come snow, he is on his job
and is always reassuring.
ii
The book of nature is always open winter and summer
and is always within reach, and the print is legible if we
have eyes to read it. But most persons are too preoccupied
to have their attention arrested by it. Think of the amazing
number of natural things and incidents that must come under
the observations of the farmer, the miner, the hunter, that
do not interest him, because they are aside from his main
purpose. I see a farmer getting his cows every morning in
the early dawn while the dew is on the grass and all nature
is just waking up, and think that during the twenty or more
years that he has been doing this, what interesting and sig-
nificant incidents he must have witnessed in the lives of the
wild creatures, if his mind had been alert to such happen-
ings! But it was not. He noticed only his cows, or when
his fences needed mending, or where a spring needed clear-
ing out. What a harvest Thoreau would have gathered
during>that score or more of years! From ant to bumble-
bee, and from bumble-bee to hawks and eagles, he would
have caught the significant things. Rarely can the farmer
tell the poet or the naturalist anything he wants to know,
because he has not the seeing eye, or the hearing ear. The
fox hunter can tell you of the foxes he has killed or pursued,
and just what it was that turned those that escaped him
from their runway, but he can tell you little about the lesser
game—what the mice and squirrels are doing, or the chicka-
dees or woodpeckers are saying; his interests lie elsewhere.
A downy might be excavating his winter retreat in a dry
stub or branch over his head and he not know it. A chip-
munk might be digging his hole in the field the farmer is
246 SUCCESSFUL LIVING
plowing in September, and he none the wiser. The poet
can say to the farmer:
One harvest from the field
Homeward brought the oxen strong;
A second crop thine acres yield
Which I gather in a song.
And an Audubon or a Fabre would bring home an equal
and a different harvest.
Our interest in nature is a reflection of our interest in
ourselves—Nature is ourselves extended and seen externally.
We experience a thrill of interest when we learn that the
plants breathe and sleep as we do—that they have ingenious
devices for disseminating their seed and for securing cross-
fertilization; that there is competition among them and
among the trees for the light and air and moisture and fer-
tility of the soil; that they protect themselves against the
sun and the cold, and against the wet. They all have their
struggles and their enemies as we do—their youth, their
maturity, their ripe old age.
How curious it is that the air plants should be able to get
their mineral elements from the air as if this all but im-
palpable fluid were a soil full of lime and magnesia and
silica, and the plant pushed invisible roots into it! In Florida
how often I used to pause and regard them when I saw them
growing upon gate-posts or dead tree-trunks and flourishing
so luxuriantly! I burned some of them up to see if they
left any ashes and was surprised at the amount. Is this
semi-tropical air, then, so loaded with all these mineral ele-
ments ? How much I wished to see the mechanical or chemi-
cal devices by which the plants seized it or strained it out of
the air! A Russian chemist says that "if a linen surface
moistened with an acid be placed in perfectly pure air, then
the washings are found to contain sodium, calcium, iron,*
potassium. Linen moistened with an alkali absorbs car-
bonic, sulphuric, phosphoric, and hydrochloric acids. The
presence of organic substances in the air can be proved bf
"NATURA IN MINIMIS EXISTAT
similar experiments. The cosmic dust in the air from the
wear and tear of the vast sidereal machinery, not detectable
by any of our human senses, may also be a source of some
of the mineral elements in the air plants. It is evidently by
the aid of the acids in the leaf that these plants trap and
appropriate the iron, the potassium, etc. The atmosphere,
then, seems like another and finer earth possessing nearly
all the mineral and gaseous and living organisms—a finer
world superimposed upon the world in which we live. It
is the watery vapor in the air, as it is the liquid water in
the earth, that holds in infinite division the various earth
salts upon which the plants feed. An air plant, and an earth
plant, then, do not differ so fundamentally as would at first
seem—the former has its roots in the air and draws about
the same elements thence that the latter does through its
roots in the earth.
Is not distilled and evaporated water supposed to be abso-
lutely free from mineral elements? How then do all these
minerals get into the air, if not through the vapors that rise
from the sea and the land? It is curious, if true, as is
alleged, that stagnant water anywhere near air plants seems
to be injurious to them. They need the purest air.
Wait long enough and Nature will always have a fresh
surprise for you. I have seen in my life only one big maple
tree utterly destroyed and reduced to kindling wood by a
thunderbolt. I have never yet known lightning to strike a
beech tree, but probably if I wait long enough I shall see it
or hear of it. I have only once in my life found a plant
called the Devil's bit, but in time I hope to find another
of each. I have only once seen a wild bird turning over her
eggs in her nest as does a hen. I have never but once seen
the Golden Eagle soaring above my native hills and that
was seventy years ago. No wild animal of the cat tribe
other than the ordinary wild cat had been seen or heard in
my native town in the Catskills in my time, till a few years
ago, when a new cry was heard. Let me tell about it:
One still moonlight October night, as I was sleeping on
the porch, a bit of natural history on four legs, which I had
248
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
never heard before, let out such a cry and wail under the
hill within a stone's throw below me, that I was startled
and puzzled beyond measure. I thought I knew the natural
history of the Catskills pretty well, but here was a cry abso-
lutely new to me. There was first a loud, strident, mur-
derous scream, such as a boy might utter when utterly be-
side himself with fear or pain, followed by a long tapering
moan and wail, like the plaint of a lost soul. It was almost
blood-curdling. Five times, with less than half a minute
interval, the creature, or lost spirit, rent the midnight silence
with this cry, followed by the wail of utterly hopeless
despair. I raised myself up on my elbow and listened.
Each scream echoed off in the woods a few hundred yards
away, but the moan faded away in the moonlight and be-
came a mere wraith of sound. I could not help visualizing
it, and see it mount up toward the moon and become fairly
blue and transparent in its beams. I was partially disabled
from the kick of a horse around whom I had become too
coltish in the field the day before, and could not get up and
run to the brink of the hill, below which the creature seemed
to be. What could it be?
The next night it came again at about the same hour, but
I was sleeping too soundly to be awakened. A young couple
from Kansas were sleeping in separate beds in the chamber
above me; they heard it and the wife was so scared that she
got up and crept in the bed beside her husband, when her
fear was communicated to him and neither of them slept
any more till morning. The next night we all lay awake
listening till after midnight, but the performance was not
repeated. Not long after I visited the Zoological Park at
the Bronx and described the sound I had heard to the Di-
rector. "A puma, he said, "probably one escaped from
captivity and calling for her mate. The Director had heard
them cry hundreds of times and he repeated the cry. "Was
it like that? "Not a bit, 1 said. "No human voice could
give the scream I heard, or imitate the hopelessness of that
wail. The only sound that I had ever heard that was at all
like the cry, was uttered by a young man whom I caught
"NATURA IN MINIMIS EXISTAT
one night stealing my grapes. I suddenly rose up amid the
vines, draped in black, and seized him by the leg as he was
trying, half paralyzed with fear, to get over the wall. He
gave forth a wild, desperate-animal scream, as if he had
found himself in the clutches of a veritable black fiend.
Only the wild animal which slumbers in each of us, and
which fear can at times so suddenly awaken, was vocal in
that cry. As for the utterly forlorn and heart-breaking
crescendo of the midnight wail I heard from my sleeping-
porch, I have never heard anything approaching it from
man or beast.
There were traditions in the neighborhood of some such
mysterious cry having been heard here and there for the
past seven or eight years, frightening horses at night, caus-
ing them to tremble and snort and stop in the road, and
almost paralyzing with fear a young fellow and his girl
crossing from one valley to another on their way home
from a country dance.
Six years ago, on a warm July night, a woman friend of
mine and her son, of sixteen or eighteen, were passing the
night in hammocks in my orchard, when near midnight they
came hurrying to the house in a great state of agitation;
they had heard a terrible blood-curdling cry. I laughed at
them as city tenderfeet, told them they had probably heard
the squall of a fox, or the cry of an owl, or a coon. They
did not care what it was, but they would not return to their
hammocks, or even try to pass another night there. They
have since told me that the fearful cry they heard was like
the one I described.
An old woodsman and hunter has told me that I heard the
cry of the Canada lynx. And he is probably correct, though
I can find no record in the books that the lynx has such a
cry. In the winter of 1915 a similar cry was heard late at
night on the hills above the village. It set all the dogs in
town barking and people thrust their heads out of their doors
and windows to see or hear what had caused the sudden
rumpus. The following September, while a young man
whom I know was plowing in a hill field near the woods, a
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large, yellow, cat-like animal came down and lingered near
him. His description of it, and the fact that it had a short
tail, convinced me that he had seen a lynx, and that this
was our mysterious night-screamer. The young farmer ran
to the house to get his gun, but when he returned he saw
the big cat disappearing in the woods. Yet no one has seen
its track upon the snow, and no poultry or lambs or pigs
or calves in the neighborhood have been killed by it.
One need never expect to exhaust the natural history of
even his own farm. Every year sees a new and enlarged
edition of the book of nature, and we may never hope to
turn the final leaf.
THE BATTLE OF THE ANTS 1
Henry David Thoreau
Thoreau is one of the few really original geniuses of America.
Eccentric, and misunderstood and underestimated by his townsmen,
he went quietly on, following the bent of his personality. He made
Nature his companion and Philosophy his friend. He introduced
Nature into literature, and thus opened a new field for writers.
Thoreau's father was an unsuccessful business man. Failing in
Boston, he moved to Concord and began the manufacture of lead
pencils. Thoreau, himself, managed to work his way through Har-
vard College. Later he taught school for a brief period. He lived
for a time as a servant and helper in Emerson's home. He worked
in the lead pencil shop with his father, and acquired wonderful
skill. He did odd jobs as a common workman and as a surveyor.
Finally he attracted wide attention by proving a sociological dream,
which was partly the outgrowth of Transcendentalism, by his strange
method of life at Walden Pond. His life was cut short by inherited
tuberculosis. After his death, his fame grew by leaps and bounds.
The present essays show his sensitive insight into wild life as well
as his deep love for Nature.
One day when I went out to my wood-pile, or rather my
pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the
dther much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black,
fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold
they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on
the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to
find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that
it was not a duellum, but a be Hum, a war between two races
of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and fre-
quently two red ones to one black. The legions of these
Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard,
and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying,
both red and black. It was the only battle which I have
1 From Chapter XII of Walden, 1854-
251
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ever witnessed, the only battlefield I ever trod while the
battle was raging; internecine war; the red republicans on
the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other. On
every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without
any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought
so resolutely. I watched a couple that were fast locked in
each other's embraces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips,
now at noon-day prepared to fight till the sun went down,
or life went out. The smaller red champion had fastened
himself like a vice to his adversary's front, and through all
the tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to
gnaw at one of his feelers near the root, having already
caused the other to go by the board; while the stronger black
one dashed him from side to side, and, as I saw on looking
nearer, had already divested him of several of his members.
They fought with more pertinacity than bull-dogs. Neither
manifested the least disposition to retreat. It was evident
that their battle-cry was Conquer or Die. In the meanwhile
there came along a single red ant on the hill-side of this val-
ley, evidently full of excitement, who either had despatched
his foe, or had not yet taken part in the battle; probably
the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs; whose mother
had charged him to return with his shield or upon it. Or
perchance he was some Achilles, who had nourished his
wrath apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his
Patroclus.2 He saw this unequal combat from afar,—for
the blacks were nearly twice the size of the reds; he drew
near with rapid pace till he stood on his guard within half
an inch of the combatants; then, watching his opportunity,
he sprang upon the black warrior, and commenced his opera-
tions near the root of his right foreleg, leaving the foe to
select among his own members; and so there were three
united for life, as if a new kind of attraction had been in-
vented which put all other locks and cements to shame. I
should not have wondered by this time to find that they had
their respective musical bands stationed on some eminent
2 Patroclus, in Homer's Iliad, was the friend whose death at the
hands of the Trojans roused Achilles to action.
THE BATTLE OF THE ANTS
253
chip, and playing their national airs the while, to excite the
slow and cheer the dying combatants. I was myself excited
somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you
think of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is
not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the
history of America, that will bear a moment's comparison
with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for
the patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers and for
carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight!
Two killed on the patriots' side, and Luther Blanchard
wounded! Why here every ant was a Buttrick,—"Fire!
for God's sake, fire!"—and thousands shared the fate of
Davis and Hosmer. There was not one hireling there. I
have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as
much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a three-penny tax
on their tea; and the results of this battle will be as impor-
tant and memorable to those whom it concerns as those of
the battle of Bunker Hill, at least.
I took up the chip on which the three I have particularly
described were struggling, carried it into my house, and
placed it under a tumbler on my window-sill, in order to see
the issue. Holding a microscope to the first-mentioned red
ant, I saw that, though he was assiduously gnawing at the
near foreleg of his enemy, having severed his remaining
feeler, his own breast was all torn away, exposing what
vitals he had there to the jaws of the black warrior, whose
breast-plate was apparently too thick for him to pierce; and
the dark carbuncles of the sufferer's eyes shone with ferocity
such as war only could excite. They struggled half an hour
longer under the tumbler, and when I looked again the black
soldier had severed the heads of his foes from their bodies,
and the still living heads were hanging on either side of him
like ghastly trophies at his saddle-bow, still apparently as
firmly fastened as ever, and he was endeavoring with feeble
struggles, being without feelers and with only the remnant
of a leg, and I know not how many other wounds, to divest
himself of them; which at length, after half an hour more,
he accomplished. I raised the glass, and he went off over
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the window-sill in that crippled state. Whether he finally
survived that combat, and spent the remainder of his days
in some Hotel des Invalides, I do not know; but I thought
that his industry would not be worth much thereafter. I
never learned which party was victorious, nor the cause of
the war; but I felt for the rest of that day as if I had
had my feelings excited and harrowed by witnessing the
struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human battle before
my door.
Kirby and Spence tell us that the battles of ants have
long been celebrated and the date of them recorded, though
they say that Huber is the only modern author who appears
to have witnessed them, "tineas Sylvius, say they, "after
giving a very circumstantial account of one contested with
great obstinacy by a great and small species on the trunk
of a pear tree, adds that  'This action was fought in the
pontificate of Eugenius the Fourth, in the presence of
Nicholas Pistoriensis, an eminent lawyer, who related the
whole history of the battle with the greatest fidelity.' A
similar engagement between great and small ants is recorded
by Olaus Magnus, in which the small ones being victorious,
are said to have buried the bodies of their own soldiers, but
left those of their giant enemies a prey to the birds. This
event happened previous to the expulsion of the tyrant
Christiern the Second from Sweden. The battle which I
witnessed took place in the Presidency of Polk, five years
before the passage of Webster's Fugitive-Slave Bill.
WALDEN POND1
Henry David Thoreau
Occasionally, after my hoeing was done for the day, I
joined some impatient companion who had been fishing on
the pond since morning, as silent and motionless as a duck
or a floating leaf, and, after practising various kinds of phi-
losophy, had concluded commonly, by the time I arrived,
that he belonged to the ancient sect of Coenobites. There
was one older man, an excellent fisher and skilled in all
kinds of woodcraft, who was pleased to look upon my house
as a building erected for the convenience of fishermen; and
I was equally pleased when he sat in my doorway to arrange
his lines. Once in a while we sat together on the pond, he
at one end of the boat, and I at the other; but not many
words passed between us, for he had grown deaf in his
later years, but he occasionally hummed a psalm, which har-
monized well enough with my philosophy. Our intercourse
was thus altogether one of unbroken harmony, far more
pleasing to remember than if it had been carried on by
speech. When, as was commonly the case, I had none to
commune with, I used to raise the echoes by striking with
a paddle on the side of my boat, filling the surrounding
woods with circling and dilating sound, stirring them up
as the keeper of a menagerie his wild beasts, until I elicited
a growl from every wooded vale and hillside.
In warm evenings I frequently sat in the boat playing
the flute, and saw the perch, which I seemed to have
charmed, hovering around me, and the moon traveling over
the ribbed bottom, which was strewed with the wrecks of
the forest. Formerly I had come to this pond adventur-
1 From Chapter IX of Waid en, 1854*
255
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ously, from time to time, in dark summer nights, with a
companion, and making a fire close to the water's edge,
which we thought attracted the fishes, we caught pouts with
a bunch of worms strung on a thread; and when we had
done, far in the night, threw the burning brands high into
the air like sky-rockets, which, coming down into the pond,
were quenched with a loud hissing, and we were suddenly
groping in total darkness. Through this, whistling a tune,
we took our way to the haunts of men again. But now I
had made my home by the shore.
Sometimes, after staying in a village parlor till the family
had all retired, I have returned to the woods, and, partly
with a view to the next day's dinner, spent the hours of
midnight fishing from a boat by moonlight, serenaded by
owls and foxes, and hearing, from time to time, the creaking
note of some unknown bird close at hand. These experi-
ences were very memorable and valuable to me,—anchored
in forty feet of water, and twenty or thirty rods from the
shore, surrounded sometimes by thousands of small perch
and shiners, dimpling the surface with their tails in the
moonlight, and communicating by a long flaxen line with
mysterious nocturnal fishes which had their dwelling forty
feet below, or sometimes dragging sixty feet of line about
the pond as I drifted in the gentle night breeze, now and
then feeling a slight vibration along it, indicative of some
life prowling about its extremity, of dull uncertain blunder-
ing purpose there, and slow to make up its mind. At length
you slowly raise, pulling hand over hand, some horned pout
squeaking and squirming to the upper air. It was very
queer, especially in dark nights, when your thoughts had
wandered to vast and cosmogonal themes in other spheres,
to feel this faint jerk, which came to interrupt your dreams
and link you to Nature again. It seemed as if I might next
cast my line upward into the air, as well as downward into
this element which was scarcely more dense. ■ Thus I caught
two fishes as it were with one hook.
The scenery of Walden is on a humble scale, and, though
very beautiful, does not approach to grandeur, nor can it
WALDEN POND
257
much concern one who has not long frequented it, or lived
by its shore; yet this pond is so remarkable for its depth
and purity as to merit a particular description. It is a clear
and deep green well, half a mile long and a mile and three
quarters in circumference, and contains about sixty-one and
a half acres; a perennial spring in the midst of pine and
oak woods, without any visible inlet or outlet except by the
clouds and evaporation. The surrounding hills rise abruptly
from the water to the height of forty to eighty feet, though
on the southeast and east they attain to about one hundred
and one hundred and fifty feet respectively, within a quarter
and a third of a mile. They are exclusively woodland. All
our Concord waters have two colors at least, one when
viewed at a distance, and another, more proper, close at
hand. The first depends more on the light, and follows
the sky. In clear weather, in summer, they appear blue at
a little distance, especially if agitated, and at a great distance
all appear alike. In stormy weather they are sometimes of
a dark slate color. The sea, however, is said to be blue one
day and green another without any perceptible change in
the atmosphere. I have seen our river, when, the landscape
being covered with snow, both water and ice were almost
as green as grass. Some consider blue "to be the color of
pure water, whether liquid or solid. But looking directly
down into our waters from a boat, they are seen to be of
very different colors. Walden is blue at one time and green
at another, even from the same point of view. Lying be-
tween the earth and the heavens, it partakes of the color
of both. Viewed from a hilltop it reflects the color of the
sky, but near at hand it is of a yellowish tint next the shore
where you can see the sand, then a light green, which gradu-
ally deepens to a uniform dark green in the body of the
pond. In some lights, viewed even from a hilltop, it is of
a vivid green next the shore. Some have referred this to
the reflection of the verdure; but it is equally green there
against the railroad sand-bank, and in the spring, before
the leaves are expanded, and it may be simply the result of
the prevailing blue mixed with the yellow of the sand. Such
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is the color of its iris. This is that portion, also, where in
the spring, the ice being warmed by the heat of the sun
reflected from the bottom, and also transmitted through the
earth, melts first and forms a narrow canal about the still
frozen middle. Like the rest of our waters, when much
agitated, in clear weather, so that the surface of the waves
may reflect the sky at the right angle, or because there is
more light mixed with it, it appears at a little distance of
a darker blue than the sky itself; and at such a time, being
on its surface, and looking with divided vision, so as to see
the reflection, I have discerned a matchless and indescribable
light blue, such as watered or changeable silks and sword
blades suggest, more cerulean than the sky itself, alternat-
ing with the original dark green on the opposite sides of
the waves, which last appeared but muddy in comparison.
It is a vitreous greenish blue, as I remember it, like those
patches of the winter sky seen through cloud vistas in the
west before sundown. Yet a single glass of its water held
up to the light is as colorless as an equal quantity of air.
It is well-known that a.large plate of glass will have a
green tint, owing, as the makers say, to its "body, but a
small piece of the same will be colorless. How large a body
of Walden water would be required to reflect a green tint
I have never proved. The water of our river is black or a
very dark brown to one looking directly down on it, and
like that of most ponds, imparts to the body of one bathing
in it a yellowish tinge; but this water is of such crystalline
purity that the body of the bather appears of an alabaster
whiteness, still more unnatural, which, as the limbs are
magnified and distorted withal, produces a monstrous effect,
making fit studies for a Michael Angelo.
The water is so transparent that the bottom can easily
be discerned at the depth of twenty-five or thirty feet.
Paddling over it, you may see many feet beneath the sur-
face the schools of perch and shiners, perhaps only an inch
long, yet the former easily distinguished by their transverse
bars, and you think that they must be ascetic fish that find
a subsistence there. Once, in the winter, many years ago,
WALDEN POND
259
when I had been cutting holes through the ice in order to
catch pickerel, as I stepped ashore I tossed my ax back
on to the ice, but, as if some evil genius had directed it, it
slid four or five rods directly into one of the holes, where
the water was twenty-five feet deep. Out of curiosity, I
lay down on the ice and looked through the hole, until I
saw the ax a little on one side, standing on its head, with
its helve erect and gently swaying to and fro with the pulse
of the pond; and there it might have stood erect and sway-
ing till in the course of time the handle rotted off, if I had
not disturbed it. Making another hole directly over it with
an ice chisel which I had, and cutting down the longest birch
which I could find in the neighborhood with my knife, I
made a slip-noose, which I attached to its end, and, letting
it down carefully, passed it over the knob of the handle,
and drew it by a line along the birch, and so pulled the ax
out again.
The shore is composed of a belt of smooth rounded white
stones like paving stones, excepting one or two short sand
beaches, and is so steep that in many places a single leap
will carry you into water over your head; and were it not
for its remarkable transparency, that would be the last to
be seen of its bottom till it rose on the opposite side. Some
think it is bottomless. It is nowhere muddy, and a casual
observer would say that there were no weeds at all in it;
and of noticeable plants, except in the little meadows re-
cently overflowed, which do not properly belong to it, a
closer scrutiny does not detect a flag nor a bulrush, nor
even a lily, yellow or white, but only a few small heart-
leaves and potamogetons, and perhaps a water-target or
two; all which however a bather might not perceive; and
these plants are clean and bright like the element they grow
in. The stones extend a rod or two into the water, and then
the bottom is pure sand, except in the deepest parts, where
there is usually a little sediment, probably from the decay
of the leaves, which have been wafted on to it so many sue-
cessive falls, and a bright green weed is brought up on
anchors even in midwinter.
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We have one other pond just like this, White Pond in
Nine Acre Corner, about two and a half miles westerly;
but, though I am acquainted with most of the ponds within
a dozen miles of this center, I do not know a third of this
pure and well-like character. Successive nations perchance
have drunk at, admired, and fathomed it, and passed away,
and still its water is green and pellucid as ever. Not an
intermitting spring! Perhaps on that spring morning when
Adam and Eve were driven out of Eden, Walden Pond was
already in existence, and even then breaking up in a gentle
spring rain accompanied with mist and a southerly wind, and
covered with myriads of ducks and geese, which had not
heard of the fall, when still such pure lakes sufficed them.
Even then it had commenced to rise and fall, and had clari-
fied its waters and colored them of the hue they now wear,
and obtained a patent of heaven to be the only Walden
Pond in the world and distiller of celestial dews. Who
knows in how many unremembered nations' literatures this
has been the Castalian Fountain?2 or what nymphs presided
over it in the Golden Age? It is a gem of the first water
which Concord wears in her coronet.
Yet perchance the first who came to this well have left
some trace of their footsteps. I have been surprised to
detect encircling the pond, even where a thick wood has
just been cut down on the shore, a narrow shelf-like path in
the steep hillside, alternately rising and falling, approaching
and receding from the water's edge, as old probably as the
race of man here, worn by the feet of aboriginal hunters,
and still from time to time unwittingly trodden by the
present occupants of the land. This is particularly distinct
to one standing on the middle of the pond in winter, just
after a light snow has fallen, appearing as a clear undulat-
ing white line, unobscured by weeds and twigs, and very
obvious a quarter of a mile off in many places where in
summer it is hardly distinguishable close at hand. The
snow reprints it, as it were, in clear white type alto-relievo.
2 The Castalian Fountain on Mount Parnassus was sacred to
Apollo and the Muses.
WALDEN POND
The ornamented grounds of villas which will one day be
built here may still preserve some trace of this.
The pond rises and falls, but whether regularly or not,
and within what period, nobody knows, though, as usual,
many pretend to know. It is commonly higher in the winter
and lower in the summer, though not corresponding to the
general wet and dryness. I can remember when it was a
foot or two lower, and also when it was at least five feet
higher, than when I lived by it. There is a narrow sand-
bar running into it, very deep water on one side, on which
I helped boil a kettle of chowder, some six rods from the
main shore, about the year 1824, which it has not been
possible to do for twenty-five years; and on the other hand,
my friends used to listen with incredulity when I told them
that a few years later I was accustomed to fish from a boat
in a secluded cove in the woods, fifteen rods from the only
shore they knew, which place was long .since converted into
a meadow. But the pond has risen steadily for two years,
and now, in the summer of '52, is just five feet higher than
when I lived there, or as high as it was thirty years ago,
and fishing goes on again in the meadow. This makes a
difference of level, at the outside, of six or seven feet; and
yet the water shed by the surrounding hills is insignificant
in amount, and this overflow must be referred to causes
which affect the deep springs. This same summer the pond
has begun to fall again. It is remarkable that this fluctua-
tion, whether periodical or not, appears thus to require
many years for its accomplishment. I have observed one
rise and a part of two falls, and I expect that a dozen or
fifteen years hence the water will again be as low as I have
ever known it. Flint's Pond, a mile eastward, allowing for
the disturbance occasioned by its inlets and outlets, and the
smaller intermediate ponds also, sympathize with Walden,
and recently attained their greatest height at the same time
with the latter. The same is true, as far as my observation
goes, of White Pond.
This rise and fall of Walden at long intervals serves this
use at least: the water standing at this great height for a
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year or more, though it makes it difficult to walk round it,
kills the shrubs and trees which have sprung up about its
edge since the last rise, pitch-pines, birches, alders, aspens,
and others, and, falling again, leaves an unobstructed shore;
for, unlike many ponds, and all waters which are subject to
a daily tide, its shore is cleanest when the water is lowest.
On the side of the pond next my house, a row of pitch-
pines fifteen feet high has been killed and tipped over as if
by a lever, and thus a stop put to their encroachments; and
their size indicates how many years have elapsed since the
last rise to this height. By this fluctuation the pond asserts
its title to a shore, and thus the shore is shorn, and the trees
cannot hold it by right of possession. These are the lips
of the lake on which no beard grows. It licks its chops
from time to time. When the water is at its height, the
alders, willows, and maples send forth a mass of fibrous
red roots several feet long from all sides of their stems in
the water, and to the height of three or four feet from the
ground, in the effort to maintain themselves; and I have
known the high blueberry bushes about the shore, which
commonly produce no fruit, bear an abundant crop under
these circumstances.
Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so
regularly paved. My townsmen have all heard the tradi-
tion—the oldest people tell me that they heard it in their
youth—that anciently the Indians were holding a pow-wow
upon a hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as the
pond now sinks deep into the earth, and they used much pro-
fanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one of which
the Indians were never guilty, and while they were thus
engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old
squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her the pond was
named. It has been conjectured that when the hill shook,
these stones rolled down its side and became the present
shore. It is very certain, at any rate, that once there was
no pond here, and now there is one; and this Indian fable
does not in any respect conflict with the account of that
ancient settler whom I have mentioned, who remembers so
WALDEN POND
263
well when he first came here with his divining-rod, saw a
thin vapor rising from the sward, and the hazel pointed
steadily downward, and he concluded to dig a well here.
As for the stones, many still think that they are hardly to
be accounted for by the action of the waves on these hills;
but I observe that the surrounding hills are remarkably full
of the same kind of stones, so that they have been obliged
to pile them up in walls on both sides of the railroad cut
nearest the pond; and, moreover, there are most stones
where the shore is most abrupt; so that, unfortunately, it is
no longer a mystery to me. I detect the paver. If the name
was not derived from that of some English locality—Saf-
fron Walden, for instance—one might suppose that is was
called, originally, Walled-in Pond.
The pond was my well ready dug. For four months in
the year its water is as cold as it is pure at all times; and
I think that it is then as good as any, if not the best, in the
town. In the winter, all water which is exposed to the air
is colder than springs and wells which are protected from
it. The temperature of the pond water which had stood
in the room where I sat from five o'clock in the afternoon
till noon the next day, the sixth of March, 1846, the ther-
mometer having been up to 65° or 70° some of the time,
owing partly to the sun on the roof, was 42°, or one degree
colder than the water of one of the coldest wells in the vil-
lage just drawn. The temperature of the Boiling Spring
the same day was 45°, or the warmest of any water tried,
though it is the coldest that I know of in summer, when,
besides, shallow and stagnant surface water is not mingled
with it. Moreover, in summer, Walden never becomes so
warm as most water which is exposed to the sun, on account
of its depth. In the warmest weather I usually placed a
pailful in my cellar, where it became cool in the night, and
remained so during the day; though I also resorted to a
spring in the neighborhood. It was as good when a week
old as the day it was dipped, and had no taste of the pump.
Whoever camps for a week in summer by the shore of a
pond, needs only bury a pail of water a few feet deep in
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
the shade of his camp to be independent of the luxury of
ice.
There have been caught in Walden, pickerel, one weigh-
ing seven pounds, to say nothing of another which carried
off a reel with great velocity, which the fisherman safely
set down at eight pounds because he did not see him, perch
and pouts, some of each weighing over two pounds, shiners,
chivins or roach (Leucisus pulchellus), a very few breams,
and a couple of eels, one weighing four pounds—I am thus
particular because the weight of a fish is commonly its only
title to fame, and these are the only eels I have heard of
here; also, I have a faint recollection of a little fish some
five inches long, with silvery sides and a greenish back,
somewhat dace-like in its character, which I mention here
chiefly to link my facts to fable. Nevertheless, this pond
is not very fertile in fish. Its pickerel, though not abundant,
are its chief boast. I have seen at one time lying on the
ice pickerel of at least three different kinds: a long and
shallow one, steel-colored, most like those caught in the
river; a bright golden kind, with greenish reflections and
remarkably deep, which is the most common here; and
another, golden-colored, and shaped like the last, but pep-
pered on the sides with small dark brown or black spots,
intermixed with a few faint blood-red ones very much like
a trout. The specific name reticulatus3 would not apply to
this; it should be guttatus 4 rather. These are all very firm
fish, and weigh more than their size promises. The shiners,
pouts, and perch, also, and indeed all the fishes which in-
habit this pond, are much cleaner, handsomer, and firmer
fleshed than those in the river and most other ponds, as the
water is purer, and they can easily be distinguished from
them. Probably many ichthyologists would make new
varieties of some of them. There are also clean races of
frogs and tortoises, and a few mussels in it; muskrats and
minks leave their traces about it, and occasionally a travel-
ing mud-turtle visits it. Sometimes, when I pushed off my
3 With net-like markings
4 Speckled.
WALDEN POND
265
boat in the morning, I disturbed a great mud-turtle which
had secreted himself under the boat in the night. Ducks
and geese frequent it in the spring and fall, the white-bellied
swallows {Hirundo bicolor) skim over it, and the peetweets
(Totanus macularius) "teter along its stony shores all
summer. I have sometimes disturbed a fishhawk sitting on
a white-pine over the water; but I doubt if it is ever pro-
faned by the wing of a gull, like Fair-Haven. At most, it
tolerates one annual loon. These are all the animals of
consequence which frequent it now.
You may see from a boat, in calm weather, near the sandy
eastern shore, where the water is eight or ten feet deep,
and also in some other parts of the pond, some circular
heaps half a dozen feet in diameter by a foot in height,
consisting of small stones less than a hen's egg in size, where
all around is bare sand. At first you wonder if the Indians
could have formed them on the ice for any purpose, and so,
when the ice melted, they sank to the bottom; but they are
too regular and some of them plainly too fresh for that.
They are similar to those found in rivers; but as there are
no suckers or lampreys here, I know not by what fish they
could be made. Perhaps they are the nests of the chivin.
These lend a pleasing mystery to the bottom.
The shore is irregular enough not to be monotonous. I
have in my mind's eye the western indented with deep bays,
the bolder northern, and the beautifully scalloped southern
shore, where successive capes overlap each other and sug-
gest unexplored coves between. The forest has never so
good a setting, nor is so distinctly beautiful, as when seen
from the middle of a small lake amid hills which rise from
the water's edge; for the water in which it is reflected not
only makes the best foreground in such a case, but, with its
winding shore, the most natural and agreeable boundary to
it. There is no rawness nor imperfection in its edge there,
as where the ax has cleared a part, or a cultivated field
abuts on it. The trees have ample room to expand on the
water side, and each sends forth its most vigorous branch
in that direction. There Nature has woven a natural sel-
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
vage, and the eye rises by just gradations from the low
shrubs of the shore to the highest trees. There are few
traces of man's hand to be seen. The water laves the shore
as it did a thousand years ago.
A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive
feature. It is earth's eye; looking into which the beholder
measures the depth of his own nature. The fluviatile trees
next the shore are the slender eyelashes which Fringe it,
and the wooded hills and cliffs around are its overhanging
brows.
Standing on the smooth sandy beach at the east end of
the pond, in a calm September afternoon, when a slight
haze makes the opposite shore line indistinct, I have seen
whence came the expression, "the glassy surface of a lake.
When you invert your head, it looks like a thread of finest
gossamer stretched across the valley, and gleaming against
the distant pine woods, separating one stratum of the atmos-
phere from another. You would think that you could walk
dry under it to the opposite hills, and that the swallows
which skim over might perch on it. Indeed, they sometimes
dive below the line, as it were by mistake, and are unde-
ceived. As you look over the pond westward you are
obliged to employ both your hands to defend your eyes
against the reflected as well as the true sun, for they are
equally bright; and if, between the two, you survey its sur-
face critically, it is literally as smooth as glass, except where
the skater insects, at equal intervals scattered over its
whole extent, by their motions in the sun produce the finest
imaginable sparkle on it, or, perchance, a duck plumes itself,
or, as I have said, a swallow skims so low as to touch it.
It may be that in the distance a fish describes an arc of three
or four feet in the air, and there is one bright flash where
it emerges, and another where it strikes the water; some-
times the whole silvery arc is revealed; or here and there,
perhaps, is a thistle-down floating on its surface, which the
fishes dart at and so dimple it again. It is like molten glass
cooled but not congealed, and the few motes in it are pure
and beautiful like the imperfections in glass. You may
WALDEN POND
267
'often detect a yet smoother and darker water, separated
from the rest as if by an invisible cobweb, boom of the
water nymphs, resting on it. From a hilltop you can see
a fish leap in almost any part; for not a pickerel or shiner
picks an insect from this smooth surface but it manifestly
disturbs the equilibrium of the whole lake. It is wonderful
with what elaborateness this simple fact is advertised—this
piscine murder will out—and from my distant perch I dis-
tinguish the circling undulations when they are half a
dozen rods in diameter. You can even detect a water-bug
(Gyrinus) ceaselessly progressing over the smooth surface
a quarter of a mile off; for they furrow the water slightly,
making a conspicuous ripple bounded by two diverging
lines, but the skaters glide over it without rippling it per-
ceptibly. When the surface is considerably agitated there
are no skaters nor water-bugs on it, but apparently, in calm
days, they leave their havens and adventurously glide forth
from the shore by short impulses till they completely cover
it. It is a soothing employment, on one of those fine days
in the fall when all the warmth of the sun is fully appre-
ciated, to sit on a stump on such a height as this, over-
looking the pond, and study the dimpling circles which are
incessantly inscribed on its otherwise invisible surface amid
the reflected skies and trees. Over this great expanse there
is no disturbance but it is thus at once gently smoothed
away and assuaged, as, when a vase of water is jarred, the
trembling circles seek the shore and all is smooth again.
Not a fish can leap or an insect fall on the pond but it is
thus reported in circling dimples, in lines of beauty, as it
were the constant welling up of its fountain, the gentle
pulsing of its life, the heaving of its breast. The thrills of
joy and thrills of pain are undistinguishable. How peaceful
the phenomena of the lake! Again the works of man shine
as in the spring. Ay, every leaf and twig and stone and
cobweb sparkles now at mid-afternoon as when covered
with dew in a spring morning. Every motion of an oar
or an insect produces a flash of light; and if an oar falls,
how sweet the echo!
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In such a day in September or October, Walden is a per-
feet forest mirror, set round with stones as precious to my
eye as if fewer or rarer. Nothing so fair, so pure, and at
the same time so large, as a lake, perchance, lies on the sur-
face of the earth. Sky water. It needs no fence. Nations
come and go without defiling it. It is a mirror which no
stone can crack, whose quicksilver will never wear off,
whose gilding Nature continually repairs; no storms, no
dust, can dim its surface ever fresh—a mirror in which all
impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the
sun's hazy brush—this the light dust-cloth—which retains
no breath that is breathed on it, but sends its own to float
as clouds high above its surface, and be reflected in its
bosom still.
A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is
continually receiving new life and motion from above. It
is intermediate in its nature between land and sky. On
land only the grass and trees wave, but the water itself is
rippled by the wind. I see where the breeze dashes across
it by the streaks or flakes of light. It is remarkable that
we can look down on its surface. We shall, perhaps, look
down thus on the surface of air at .length, and mark where
a still subtler spirit sweeps over it.
The skaters and water-bugs finally disappear in the latter
part of October, when the severe frosts have come; and
then and in November, usually, on a calm day, there is
absolutely nothing to ripple the surface. One November
afternoon, in the calm at the end of a rain storm of several
days' duration, when the sky was still completely overcast
and the air was full of mist, I observed that the pond was
remarkably smooth, so that it was difficult to distinguish
its surface; though it no longer reflected the bright tints
of October, but the somber November colors of the sur-
rounding hills. Though I passed over it as gently as pos-
sible, the slight undulations produced by my boat extended
almost as far as I could see, and gave a ribbed appearance
to the reflections. But, as I was looking over the surface,
I saw here and there at a distance a faint glimmer, as if
WALDEN POND
269
some skater insects which had escaped the frosts might be
collected there, or, perchance, the surface, being so smooth,
betrayed where a spring welled up from the bottom. Pad-
dling gently to one of these places, I was surprised to find
myself surrounded by myriads of small perch, about five
inches long, of a rich bronze color in the green water, sport-
ing there and constantly rising to the surface and dimpling
it, sometimes leaving bubbles on it. In such transparent
and seemingly bottomless water, reflecting the clouds, I
seemed to be floating through the air as in a balloon, and
their swimming impressed me as a kind of flight or hover-
ing, as if they were a compact flock of birds passing just
beneath my level on the right or left, their fins, like sails,
set all around them. There were many such schools in the
pond, apparently improving the short season before winter
would draw an icy shutter over their broad skylight, some-
times giving to the surface an appearance as if a slight
breeze struck it, or a few rain-drops fell there. When I
approached carelessly and alarmed them, they made a sud-
den plash and rippling with their tails, as if one had struck
the water with a brushy bough, and instantly took refuge
in the depths. At length the wind rose, the mist increased,
and the waves began to run, and the perch leaped much
higher than before, half out of water, a hundred black
points, three inches long, at once above the surface. Even
as late as the fifth of December, one year, I saw some dim-
pies on the surface, and thinking it was going to rain hard
immediately, the air being full of mist, I made haste to take
my place at the oars and row homeward; already the rain
seemed rapidly increasing, though I felt none on my cheek,
and I anticipated a thorough soaking. But suddenly the
dimples ceased, for they were produced by the perch, which
the noise of my oars had scared into the depths, and I saw
their schools dimly disappearing; so I spent a dry after-
noon after all.
An old man who used to frequent this pond nearly sixty
years ago, when it was dark with surrounding forests, tells
me that in those days he sometimes saw it all alive with
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ducks and other water fowl, and that there were many
eagles about it. He came here a-fishing, and used an old
log canoe which he found on the shore. It was made of
two white-pine logs dug out and pinned together, and was
cut off square at the ends. It was very clumsy, but lasted
a great many years before it became water-logged and per-
haps sank to the bottom. He did not know whose it was;
it belonged to the pond. He used to make a cable for his
anchor of strips of hickory bark tied together. An old
man, a potter, who lived by the pond before the Revolution,
told him once that there was an iron chest at the bottom,
and that he had seen it. Sometimes it would come floating
up to the shore; but when you went toward it, it would go
back into deep water and disappear. I was pleased to hear
of the old log canoe, which took the place of an Indian
one of the same material but more graceful construction,
which perchance had first been a tree on the bank, and then,
as it were, fell into the water, to float there for a genera*
tion, the most proper vessel for the lake. I remember that
when I first looked into these depths there were many large
trunks to be seen indistinctly lying on the bottom, which
had either been blown over formerly, or left on the ice at
the last cutting, when wood was cheaper; but now they
have mostly disappeared.
When I first paddled a boat on Walden, it was completely
surrounded by thick and lofty pine and oak woods, and
in some of its coves grape vines had run over the trees next
the water and formed bowers under which a boat could
pass. The hills which form its shores are so steep, and the
woods on them were then so high, that, as you looked down
from the west end, it had the appearance of an amphitheater
for some kind of sylvan spectacle. I have spent many an
hour, when I was younger, floating over its surface, as the
zephyr willed, having paddled my boat to the middle, and
lying on my back across the seats, in a summer forenoon,
dreaming awake, until I was aroused by the boat touching
the sand, and I arose to see what shore my fates had im-
pelled me to; days when idleness was the most attractive
WALDEN POND
271
and productive industry. Many a forenoon have I stolen
away, preferring to spend thus the most valued part of the
day; for I was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and
summer days, and spent them lavishly; nor do I regret that
I did not waste more of them in the workshop or at the
teacher's desk. But since I left those shores the wood-
choppers have still further laid them waste, and now for
many a year there will be no more rambling through the
aisles of the wood, with occasional vistas through which
you see the water. My Muse may be excused if she is
silent henceforth. How can you expect the birds to sing
when their groves are cut down?
Now the trunks of trees on the bottom, and the old log
canoe, and the dark surrounding woods, are gone, and the
villagers, who scarcely know where it lies, instead of going
to the pond to bathe or drink, are thinking to bring its
water, which should be as sacred as the Ganges at least, to
the village in a pipe, to wash their dishes with!—to earn
their Walden by the turning of a cock or drawing of a plug!
That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard
throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring with
his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on
Walden shore; that Trojan horse, with a thousand men in
his belly, introduced by mercenary Greeks! Where is the
country's champion, the Moore of Moore Hall,5 to meet
him at the Deep Cut and thrust an avenging lance between
the ribs of the bloated pest?
Nevertheless, of all the characters I have known, perhaps
Walden wears best, and best preserves its purity. Many
men have been likened to it, but few deserve that honor.
Though the wood-choppers have laid bare first this shore
and then that, and the Irish have built their sties by it, and
the railroad has infringed on its border, and the ice-men have
skimmed it once, it is itself unchanged, the same water
which my youthful eyes fell on; all the change is in me. It
has not acquired one permanent wrinkle after all its ripples.
s The hero of an old ballad.
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It is perennially young, and I may stand and see a swallow
dip apparently to pick an insect from its surface as of yore.
It struck me again to-night, as if I had not seen it almost
daily for more than twenty years—Why, here is Walden,
the same woodland lake that I discovered so many years
ago; where a forest was cut down last winter another is
springing up by its shore as lustily as ever; the same
thought is welling up to its surface that was then; it is the
same liquid joy and happiness to itself and its Maker, ay,
and it may be to me. It is the work of a brave man, surely,
in whom there was no guile! He rounded this water with
his hand, deepened and clarified it in his thought, and in his
will bequeathed it to Concord. I see by its face that it is
visited by the same reflection; and I can almost say, Wal-
den, is it you?
It is no dream of mine,
To ornament a line;
I cannot come nearer to God and Heaven
Than I live to Walden even.
I am its stony shore,
And the breeze that passes o'er;
In the hollow of my hand
Are its water and its sand,
And its deepest resort
Lies high in my thought.
The cars never pause to look at it; yet I fancy that the
engineers and firemen and brakemen, and those passengers
who have a season ticket and see it often, are better men
for the sight. The engineer does not forget at night, or his
nature does not, that he has beheld this vision of serenity
and purity once at least during the day. Though seen but
once, it helps to wash out State-street and the engine's soot.
One proposes that it be called "God's Drop.
I have said that Walden has no visible inlet or outlet,
but it is on the one hand distantly and indirectly related to
Flint's Pond, which is more elevated, by a chain of small
ponds coming from that quarter, and on the other directly
WALDEN POND
273
and manifestly to Concord River, which is lower, by a
similar chain of ponds through which in some other geo-
logical period it may have flowed; and by a little digging,
which God forbid, it can be made to flow thither again. If
by living thus reserved and austere, like a hermit in the
woods, so long, it has acquired such wonderful purity, who
would not regret that the comparatively impure waters of
Flint's Pond should be mingled with it, or itself should ever
go to waste its sweetness in the ocean wave?
THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT
The Sermon, as reported by Matthew in his Gospel, is the longest
and most widely quoted utterance of Jesus. It is at the heart of
the New Testament teaching. Its universal appeal is due not alone
to its truth, but also to the wonderfully clear ind fluent expression
of this truth. The text is from the King James Version, and the
paragraphing is that indorsed by the Cambridge University Press.
Many an author has owed the best part of his taste in literature to
the language of the King James Version of the Bible.
Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom
of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be
comforted. Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the
earth. Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after
righteousness: for they shall be filled. Blessed are the
merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the pure
in heart: for they shall see God. Blessed are the peace-
makers: for they shall be called the children of God.
Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness'
sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye,
when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say
all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice,
and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven:
for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.
Ye are the salt of the earth: but if the salt have lost his
savour, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good
for nothing, but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot
of men. Ye are the light of the world. A city that is set
on a hill cannot be hid. Neither do men light a candle, and
put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick; and it giveth
light unto all that are in the house. Let your light so shine
before men, that they may see your good works, and glorify
your Father which is in heaven.
Think not that I come to destroy the law, or the prophets:
I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say
274
THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT
unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle
shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. Who-
soever therefore shall break one of these least command-
ments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least
in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and
teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom
of heaven. For I say unto you, That except your righteous-
ness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and
Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of
heaven.
Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou
shalt not kill: and whosoever shall kill shall be in danger of
the judgment: But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry
with his brother. without a cause shall be in danger of the
judgment: and whosoever shall say to his brother, Raca,
shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say,
Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire. Therefore if thou
bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy
brother hath ought against thee; Leave there thy gift before
the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy
brother, and then come and offer thy gift. Agree with
thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with
him; least at any time the adversary deliver thee to the
judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be
cast into prison. Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no
means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost
farthing.
Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou
shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That who-
soever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed
adultery with her already in his heart. And if thy right
eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it
is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish,
and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell. And
if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from
thee; for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members
should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast
into hell. It hath been said, Whosoever shall put away his
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wife, let him give her a writing of divorcement: But I say
unto you, That whosoever shall put away his wife, saving
for the cause of fornication, causeth her to commit adul-
tery: and whosoever shall marry her that is divorced com-
mitteth adultery.
Again, ye have heard that it hath been said by them of
old time, Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform
unto the Lord thine oaths: But I say unto you, Swear not
at all; neither by heaven; for it is God's throne: Nor by
the earth; for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem; for
it is the city of the great King. Neither shalt thou swear
by thy head, because thou canst not make one hair white
or black. But let your communication be, Yea, yea; Nay,
nay: for whatsoever is more than these cometh of evil.
Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye,
and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist
not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek
turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee
at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke
also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go
with him twain. Give to him that asketh thee, and from
him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.
Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy
neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love
your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them
that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use
you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of
your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to
rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the
just and on the unjust. For if ye love them which love
you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the
same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye
more than others? do not even the publicans so? Be ye
therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven
is perfect.
Take heed that ye do not your alms before men, to be
seen of them: otherwise ye have no reward of your Father
which is in heaven. Therefore when thou doest thine alms,
THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT
do not sound a trumpet before thee, as the hypocrites do in
the synagogues and in the streets, that they may have glory
of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what
thy right hand doeth: That thine alms may be in secret:
and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward
thee openly.
And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites
are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and
in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.
Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou,
when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast
shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and
thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.
But when ye pray, use not vain repetitions, as the heathen
do: for they think that they shall be heard for their much
speaking. Be not ye therefore like unto them: for your Fa-
ther knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask
him. After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father
which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy Kingdom
come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us
this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we
forgive our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but
deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the
power, and the glory, for ever, Amen. For if ye forgive
men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive
you: But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will
your Father forgive your trespasses.
Moreover when ye fast, be not, as the hypocrites, of a
sad countenance: for they disfigure their faces, that they
may appear unto men to fast. Verily I say unto you, They
have their reward. But thou, when thou fastest, anoint
thine head, and wash thy face; That thou appear not unto
men to fast, but unto thy Father which is in secret: and thy
Father which seeth in secret, shall reward thee openly.
Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where
moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break
through and steal: But lay up for yourselves treasures in
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heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and
where thieves do not break through and steal: For where
your treasure is, there will your heart be also. The light
of the body is the eye: if therefore thine eye be single, thy
whole body shall be full of light. But if thine eye be evil,
thy whole body shall be full of darkness. If therefore the
light that is in thee be darkness, how great is that darkness!
No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the
one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and
despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon.
Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life,
what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your
body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than meat,
and the body than raiment? Behold the fowls of the air:
for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into
barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not
much better than they? Which of you by taking thought
can add one cubit unto his stature? And why take ye
thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how
they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say
unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not ar-
rayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the
grass of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast
into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of
little faith? Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall
we eat ? or, What shall we drink ? or, Wherewithal shall we
be clothed? (For after all these things do the Gentiles
seek) : for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need
of all these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God,
and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added
unto you. Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for
the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Suf-
ficient unto the. day is the evil thereof.
Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judg-;
ment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure'
ye mete, it shall be measured to you again. And why be-)
holdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but con-'
siderest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how?
THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT
wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out
of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?
Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own
eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote
out of thy brother's eye.
Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye
your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their
feet, and turn again and rend you.
Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find;
knock, and it shall be opened unto you: For every one that
asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him
that knocketh it shall be opened. Or what man is there of
you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?
Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? If ye then,
being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children,
how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give
good things to them that ask him? Therefore all things
whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even
so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.
Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and
broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many
there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and
narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there
be that find it.
Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep's
clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall
know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of
thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bring-
eth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil
fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither
can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that
bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into
the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.
Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter
into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of
my Father which is in heaven. Many will say to me in
that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name ?
and in thy name have cast out devils ? and in thy name done
28o
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
many wonderful works? And then will I profess unto
them, I never knew you; depart from me, ye that work
iniquity.
Therefore whosoever heareth these sayings of mine, and
doeth them, I will liken him unto a wise man, which built
his house upon a rock: And the rain descended and the
floods came, and the winds blew, and beat upon that house;
and it fell not: for it was founded upon a rock. And every
one that heareth these sayings of mine, and doeth them not,
shall be likened unto a foolish man, which built his house
upon the sand: And the rain descended, and the floods came,
and the winds blew, and beat upon that house: and it fell:
and great was the fall of it.
CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 1
Theodore Roosevelt
A few weeks after Mr. Taft was inaugurated as President, Mr.
Roosevelt started on his famous hunting trip to East Africa. On
his return he visited and delivered speeches at many European capi-
tals, including Paris, Berlin, Budapest, Copenhagen, and at such dis-
tinguished Universities as Oxford, the Sorbonne at Paris, and the
University of Christiania. This essay is part of the address deliv-
ered at the Sorbonne. "In Paris, explains Mr. Roosevelt in his
Foreword to the volume, "after consultation with the French Am-
bassador, M. Jusserand, through whom the invitation was tendered,
I decided to speak more generally as the citizen of one republic
addressing the citizens of another republic. Mr. Roosevelt is so
well known as author, naturalist, explorer, statesman, and soldier,
that any further comment is superfluous. Everywhere he was rec-
ognized as the most virile man of his generation.
To-day I shall speak to you on the subject of individual
citizenship, the one subject of vital importance to you, my
hearers, and to me and my countrymen, because you and we
are citizens of great democratic republics. A democratic
republic such as each of ours—an effort to realize in its full
sense government by, of, and for the people—represents the
most gigantic of all possible social experiments, the one
fraught with greatest possibilities alike for good and for
evil. The success of republics like yours and like ours
means the glory, and our failure the despair, of mankind;
and for you and for us the question of the quality of the
individual citizen is supreme. Under other forms of gov-
ernment, under the rule of one man or of a very few men,
the quality of the rulers is all-important. If, under such
1 Reprinted from Citizenship in a Republic, by courtesy of G. P.
Putnam's Sons, Publishers, New York and London.
281
282
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
governments, the quality of the rulers is high enough, then
the nation may for generations lead a brilliant career, and
add substantially to the sum of world achievement, no
matter how low the quality of the average citizen; because
the average citizen is an almost negligible quantity in work-
ing out the final results of that type of national greatness.
But with you and with us the case is different. With you
here, and with us in my own home, in the long run, success
or failure will be conditioned upon the way in which the
average man, the average woman, does his or her duty, first
in the ordinary, every-day affairs of life, and next in those
great occasional crises which call for the heroic virtues.
The average citizen must be a good citizen if our republics
are to succeed. The stream will not permanently rise higher
than the main source; and the main source of national
power and national greatness is found in the average citi-
zenship of the nation. Therefore it behooves us to do our
best to see that the standard of the average citizen is kept
high; and the average cannot be kept high unless the
standard of the leaders is very much higher.
It is well if a large proportion of the leaders in any re-
public, in any democracy, are, as a matter of course, drawn
from the classes represented in this audience to-day; but
only provided that those classes possess the gifts of sym-
pathy with plain people and of devotion to great ideals.
You and those like you have received special advantages;
you have all of you had the opportunity for mental train-
ing; many of you have had leisure; most of you have had
a chance for the enjoyment of life far greater than comes
to the majority of your fellows. To you and your kind
much has been given, and from you much should be ex-
pected. Yet there are certain failings against which it is
especially incumbent that both men of trained and cultivated
intellect, and men of inherited wealth and position, should
especially guard themselves, because to these failings they
are especially liable; and if yielded to, their—your—chances
of useful service are at an end.
Let the man of learning, the man of lettered leisure, be-
CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 283
ware of that queer and cheap temptation to pose to himself
and to others as the cynic, as the man who has outgrown
emotions and beliefs, the man to whom good and evil are
as one. The poorest way to face life is to face it with a
sneer. There are many men who feel a kind of twisted
pride in cynicism; there are many who confine themselves
to criticism of the way others do what they themselves dare
not even attempt. There is no more unhealthy being, no
man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds,
or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief towards
all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in
that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes second to
achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a
readiness to criticize work which the critic himself never
tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not
accept contact with life's realities—all these are marks, not,
as the possessor would fain think, of superiority, but of
weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part man-
fully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affecta-
tion of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide
from others and from themselves their own weakness. The
role is easy; there is none easier, save only the role of the
man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points
out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of
deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to
the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred
by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who
errs, and comes short again and again, because there is no
effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually
strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms,
the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause;
who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high
achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails
while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with
those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor
defeat. Shame on the man of cultivated taste who permits
refinement to develop into ci fastidiousness thcit unfits liim
284
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for doing the rough work of a workaday world. Among
the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small
field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who
shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less room is
there for those who deride or slight what is done by those
who actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those
others who always profess that they would like to take
action, if only the conditions of life were not what they
actually are. The man who does nothing cuts the same
sordid figure in the pages of history, whether he be cynic,
or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being
whose tepid soul knows nothing of the great and generous
emotion, of the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthu-
siasm, of the men who quell the storm and ride the thunder.
Well for these men if they succeed; well also, though not
so well, if they fail, given only that they have nobly ven-
tured, and have put forth all their heart and strength. It
is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the
many errors and the valiant end, over whose memory we
love to linger, not over the memory of the young lord who
"but for the vile guns would have been a soldier.
France has taught many lessons to other nations; surely
one of the most important is the lesson her whole history
teaches, that a high artistic and literary development is com-
patible with notable leadership in arms and statecraft. The
brilliant gallantry of the French soldier has for many cen-
turies been proverbial; and during these same centuries at
every court in Europe the "freemasons of fashion have
treated the French tongue as their common speech; while
every artist and man of letters, and every man of science
able to appreciate that marvelous instrument of precision,
French prose, has turned towards France for aid and in-
spiration. How long the leadership in arms and letters has
lasted is curiously illustrated by the fact that the earliest
masterpiece in modern tongue is the splendid French epic
which tells of Roland's doom and the vengeance of Charle-
magne when the lords of the Frankish host were stricken
at Roncesvalles.
CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 285
Let those who have, keep, let those who have not, strive
to attain, a high standard of cultivation and scholarship.
Yet let us remember that these stand second to certain other
things. There is need of a sound body, and even more need
of a sound mind. But above mind and above body stands
character—the sum of those qualities which we mean when
we speak of a man's force and courage, of his good faith
and sense of honor. I believe in exercise for the body, al-
ways provided that we keep in mind that physical develop-
ment is a means and not an end. I believe, of course, in
giving to all the people a good education. But the education
must contain much besides book-learning in order to be
really good. We must ever remember that no keenness and
subtleness of intellect, no polish, no cleverness, in any way
make up for the lack of the great solid qualities. Self-
restraint, self-mastery, commonsense, the power of accept-
ing individual responsibility and yet of acting in conjunc-
tion with others, courage and resolution—these are the
qualities which mark a masterful people. Without them no
people can control itself, or save itself from being controlled
from the outside. I speak to a brilliant assemblage; I'speak
in a great university which represents the flower of the
highest intellectual development; I pay all homage to intel-
lect, and to elaborate and specialized training of the intel-
lect; and yet I know I shall have the assent of all of you
present when I add that more important still are the com-
monplace, everyday qualities and virtues.
Such ordinary, everyday qualities include the will and the
power to work, to fight at need, and to have plenty of
healthy children. The need that the average man shall work
is so obvious as hardly to warrant insistence. There are a
few people in every country so born that they can lead
lives of leisure. These fill a useful function if they make
it evident that leisure does not mean idleness; for some of
the most valuable work needed by civilization is essentially
non-remunerative in its character, and of course the people
who do this work should in large part be drawn from those
to whom remuneration is an object of indifference. But the
286
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
average man must earn his own livelihood. He should be
trained to do so, and he should be trained to feel that he
occupies a contemptible position if he does not do so; that
he is not an object of envy if he is idle, at whichever end
of the social scale he stands, but an object of contempt, an
object of derision.
In the next place, the good man should be both a strong
and a brave man; that is, he should be able to fight, he
should be able to serve his country as a soldier, if the need
arises. There are well-meaning philosophers who declaim
against the unrighteousness of war. They are right only if
they lay all their emphasis upon the unrighteousness. War
is against humanity. But it is such a crime because it is
unjust, not because it is war. The choice must ever be in
favor of righteousness, and this whether the alternative be
peace or whether the alternative be war. The question must
not be merely, Is there to be peace or war? The question
must be, Is the right to prevail? Are the great laws of
righteousness once more to be fulfilled? And the answer
from a strong and virile people must be, "Yes, whatever
the cost. Every honorable effort should always be made
to avoid war, just as every honorable effort should always
be made by the individual in private life to keep out of a
brawl, to keep out of trouble; but no self-respecting indi-
vidual, no self-respecting nation, can or ought to submit to
wrong.
Finally, even more important than ability to work, even
more important than ability to fight at need, is it to re-
member that the chief of blessings for any nation is that it
shall leave its seed to inherit the land. It was the crown
of blessings in Biblical times; and it is the crown of bless-
ings now. The greatest of all curses is the curse of sterility,
and the severest of all condemnations should be that visited
upon wilful sterility. The first essential to any civilization
is that the man and the woman shall be father and mother
of healthy children, so that the race shall increase and not
decrease. If this is not so, if through no fault of the society
there is failure to increase, it is a great misfortune. If the
CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 287
failure is due to deliberate and wilful fault, then it is not
merely a misfortune, it is one of those crimes of ease and
self-indulgence, of shrinking from pain and effort and risk,
which in the long run Nature punishes more heavily than
any other. If we of the great republics, if we, the free
people who claim to have emancipated ourselves from the
thraldom of wrong and error, bring down on our heads the
curse that comes upon the wilfully barren, then it will be an
idle waste of breath to prattle of our achievements, to boast
of all that we have done. No refinement of life, no delicacy
of taste, no material progress, no sordid heaping up of
riches, no sensuous development of art and literature, can
in any way compensate for the loss of the great funda-
mental virtues; and of these great fundamental virtues, the
greatest is the race's power to perpetuate the race.
Character must show itself in the man's performance both
of the duty he owes himself and of the duty he owes the
State. The man's foremost duty is owed to himself and his
family; and he can do this duty only by earning money, by
providing what is essential to material well-being; it is only
after this has been done that he can hope to build a higher
superstructure on the solid material foundation; it is only
after this has been done that he can help in movements for
the general well-being. He must pull his own weight first,
and only after this can his surplus strength be of use to the
general public. It is no good to excite that bitter laughter
which expresses contempt; and contempt is what we feel
for the being whose enthusiasm to benefit mankind is such
that he is a burden to those nearest him; who wishes to do
great things for humanity in the abstract, but who cannot
keep his wife in comfort or educate his children.
Nevertheless, while laying stress on this point, while not
merely acknowledging but insisting upon the fact that there
must be a basis of material well-being for the individual as
for the nation, let us with equal emphasis insist that his
material well-being represents nothing but the foundation,
and that the foundation, though indispensable, is worthless
unless upon it is raised the superstructure of a higher life.
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That is why I decline to recognize the mere multi-million-
aire, the man of mere wealth, as an asset of value to any
country; and especially as not an asset to my own country.
If he has earned or uses his wealth in a way that makes
him a real benefit, of real use,—and such is often the
case,—why then he does become an asset of worth. But it
is the way in which it has been earned or used, and not
the mere fact of wealth, that entitles him to the credit.
There is need in business, as in most other forms of human
activity, of the great guiding intelligences. Their places
cannot be supplied by any numbr of lesser intelligences. It
is a good thing that they should have ample recognition,
ample reward. But we must not transfer our admiration
to the reward instead of to the deed rewarded; and if what
should be the reward exists without the service having been
rendered, then admiration will come only from those who
are mean of soul. The truth is that, after a certain measure
of tangible material success or reward has been achieved,
the question of increasing it becomes of constantly less im-
portance compared to other things that can be done in life.
It is a bad thing for a nation to raise and to admire a false
standard of success; and there can be no falser standard
than that set by the deification of material well-being in and
for itself. The man who, for any cause for which he is
himself accountable, has failed to support himself and those
for whom he is responsible, ought to feel that he has fallen
lamentably short in his prime duty. But the man who, hav-
ing far surpassed the limit of providing for the wants, both
of body and mind, of himself and those depending upon him,
then piles up a great fortune, for the acquisition or retention
of which he returns no corresponding benefit to the nation
as a whole, should himself be made to feel that, so far from
being a desirable, he is an unworthy, citizen of the com-
munity; that he is to be neither admired nor envied; that his
right-thinking fellow-countrymen put him low in the scale
of citizenship, and leave him to be consoled by the admira-
tion of those whose level of purpose is even lower than
his own.
CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC 289
My position as regards the moneyed interests can be put
in a few words. In every civilized society property rights
must be carefully safeguarded; ordinarily, and in the great
majority of cases, human rights and property rights are
fundamentally and in the long run identical; but when it
clearly appears that there is a real conflict between them,
human rights must have the upper hand, for property
belongs to man and not man to property.
In fact, it is essential to good citizenship clearly to under-
stand that there are certain qualities which we in a democ-
racy are prone to admire in and of themselves, which ought
by rights to be judged admirable or the reverse solely from
the standpoint of the use made of them. Foremost among
these I should include two very distinct gifts—the gift of
money-making and the gift of oratory. Money-making, the
money touch, I have spoken of above. It is a quality which
in a moderate degree is essential. It may be useful when
developed to a very great degree, but only if accompanied
and controlled by other qualities; and without such control
the possessor tends to develop into one of the least attractive
types produced by a modern industrial democracy. So it is
with the orator. It is highly desirable that a leader of opin-
ion in a democracy should be able to state his views clearly
and convincingly. But all that the oratory can do of value
to the community is to enable the man thus to explain him-
self; if it enables the orator to persuade his hearers to put
false values on things, it merely makes him a power for
mischief. Some excellent public servants have not the gift
at all, and must rely upon their deeds to speak for them;
and unless the oratory does represent genuine conviction,
based on good common-sense and able to be translated into
efficient performance, then the better the oratory the greater
the damage to the public it deceives. Indeed, it is a sign of
marked political weakness in any commonwealth if the
people tend to be carried away by mere oratory, if they tend
to value words in and for themselves, as divorced from the
deeds for which they are supposed to stand. The phrase-
290 SUCCESSFUL LIVING
maker, the phrase-monger, the ready talker, however great
his power, whose speech does not make for courage, sobriety,
and right understanding, is simply a noxious element in the
body politic, and it speaks ill for the public if he has influ-
ence over them. To admire the gift of oratory without
regard to the moral quality behind the gift is to do wrong
to the republic.
Of course all that I say of the orator applies with even
greater force to the orator's latter-day and more influential
brother, the journalist. The power of the journalist is
great, but he is entitled neither to respect nor admiration
because of that power unless it is used aright. He can do,
and he often does, great good. He can do, and he often
does, infinite mischief. All journalists, all writers, for the
very reason that they appreciate the vast possibilities of
their profession, should bear testimony against those who
deeply discredit it. Offenses against taste and morals, which
are bad enough in a private citizen, are infinitely worse if
made into instruments for debauching the community
through a newspaper. Mendacity, slander, sensationalism,
inanity, vapid triviality, all are potent factors for the de-
bauchery of the public mind and conscience. The excuse
advanced for vicious writing, that the public demands it and
that the demand must be supplied, can no more be admitted
than if it were advanced by the purveyors of food who sell
poisonous adulterations.
In short, the good citizen in a republic must realize that
he ought to possess two sets of qualities, and that neither
avails without the other. He must have those qualities
which make for efficiency; and he must also have those
qualities which direct the efficiency into channels for the
public good. He is useless if he is inefficient. There is
nothing to be done with that type of citizen of whom all that
can be said is that he is harmless. Virtue which is depen-
dent upon sluggish circulation is not impressive. There is
little place in active life for the timid good man. The man
who is saved by weakness from robust wickedness is likewise
CITIZENSHIP IN A REPUBLIC
rendered immune from the robuster virtues. The good citi-
zen in a republic must first of all be able to hold his own.
He is no good citizen unless he has the ability which will
make him work hard and which at need will make him fight
hard. The good citizen is not a good citizen unless he is an
efficient citizen.
THE NEW FREEDOM1
Woodrow Wilson
This easy-going essay is from The New Freedom, which, in the
words of Mr. Wilson himself, "is a discussion of a number of very
vital subjects in the free form of extemporaneously spoken words.
. . . These speeches contained in The New Freedom are an attempt
to express the new spirit of our politics and to set forth, in large
terms which may stick in the imagination, what it is that must be
done if we are to restore our politics to their full spiritual vigor
again, and our national life, whether in trade, in industry, or in
what concerns us only as families and individuals, to its purity, its
self respect, and its pristine strength and freedom. "Where the
President excels, says Colonel House, "is in his union of the capa-
bilities of the dreamer, the seer, and the man of action. The union
of these powers accounts for his brilliant leadership as the foremost
champion of liberalism and progress of his generation.
No matter how often we think of it, the discovery of
America must each time make a fresh appeal to our imagi-
nations. For centuries, indeed from the beginning, the face
of Europe had been turned toward the east. All the routes
of trade, every impulse and energy, ran from west to east.
The Atlantic lay at the world's back-door. Then, suddenly,
the conquest of Constantinople by the Turk closed the route
to the Orient. Europe had either to face about or lack any
outlet for her energies; the unknown sea at the west at last
was ventured upon, and the- earth learned that it was twice
as big as it had thought. Columbus did not find, as he had
expected, the civilization of Cathay; he found an empty
continent. In that part of the world, upon that new-found
half of the globe, mankind, late in its history, was thus
afforded an opportunity to set up a new civilization; here it
was strangely privileged to make a new human experiment.
1 From The New Freedom, by permission of the publishers, Dou-
bleday, Page & Co.
292
THE NEW FREEDOM
293
Never can that moment of unique opportunity fail to ex-
cite the emotion of all who consider its strangeness and
richness; a thousand fanciful histories of the earth might
be contrived without the imagination daring to conceive
such a romance as the hiding away of half the globe until
the fullness of time had come for a new start in civilization.
A mere sea captain's ambition to trace a new trade route
gave way to a moral adventure for humanity. The race was
to found a new order here on this delectable land, which
no man approached without receiving, as the old voyagers
relate, you remember, sweet airs out of woods aflame with
flowers and murmurous with the sounds of pellucid waters.
The hemisphere lay waiting to be touched with life,—life
from the old centers of living, surely, but cleansed of defile-
ment, and cured of weariness, so as to be fit for the virgin
purity of a new bride. The whole thing springs into the
imagination like a wonderful vision, an exquisite marvel
which once only in all history could be vouchsafed.
One other thing only compares with it; only one other
thing touches the springs of emotion as does the picture of
the ships of Columbus drawing near the bright shores,—
and that is the thought of the choke in the throat of the
immigrant of to-day as he gazes from the steerage deck at
the land where, he has been taught to believe he in his turn
shall find an earthly paradise, where, a free man, he shall
forget the heartaches of the old life, and enter into the ful-
filment of the hope of the world. For has not every ship
that has pointed her prow westward borne hither the hopes
of generation after generation of the oppressed of other
lands? How always have men's hearts beat as they saw
the coast of America rise to their view! How it has always
seemed to them that the dweller there would at last be rid
of kings, of privileged classes, and of all those bonds which
had kept men depressed and helpless, and would there
realize the full fruition of his sense of honest manhood,
would there be one of a great body of brothers, not seeking
to defraud and deceive one another, but seeking to ac-
complish the general good!
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
What was in the writings of the men who founded
America,—to serve the selfish interests of America? Do
you find that in their writings? No; to serve the cause of
humanity, to bring liberty to mankind. They set up their
standards here in America in the tenet of hope, as a beacon
of encouragement to all the nations of the world; and men
came thronging to these shores with an expectancy that
never existed before, with a confidence they never dared
feel before, and found here for generations together a haven
of peace, of opportunity, of equality.
God send that in the complicated state of modern affairs
we may recover the standards and repeat the achievements
of that heroic age!
For life is no longer the comparatively simple thing it
was. Our relations one with another have been profoundly
modified by the new agencies of rapid communication and
transportation, tending swiftly to concentrate life, widen
communities, fuse interests, and complicate all the processes
of living. The individual is dizzily swept about in a thou-
sand new whirlpools of activities. Tyranny has become
more subtle, and has learned to wear the guise of mere in-
dustry, and even of benevolence. Freedom has become a
somewhat different matter. It cannot,—eternal principle that
it is,—it cannot have altered, yet it shows itself in new
aspects. Perhaps it is only revealing its deeper meaning.
What is liberty?
I have long had an image in my mind of what constitutes
liberty. Suppose that I were building a great piece of
powerful machinery, and suppose that I should so awk-
wardly and unskilfully assemble the parts of it that every
time one part tried to move it would be interfered with by
the others, and the whole thing would buckle up and be
checked. Liberty for the several parts would consist in the
best possible assembling and adjustment of them all, would
it not? If you want the great piston of the engine to run
with absolute freedom, give it absolutely perfect alignment
and adjustment with the other parts of the machine, so that
it is free, not because it is let alone or isolated, but because
THE NEW FREEDOM
295
it has been associated most skilfully and carefully with the
other parts of the great structure.
What is liberty? You say of the locomotive that it runs
free. What do you mean? You mean that its parts are so
assembled and adjusted that friction is reduced to a mini-
mum, and that it has perfect adjustment. We say of a boat
skimming the water with light foot, "How free she runs,
when we mean, how perfectly she is adjusted to the force
of the wind, how perfectly she obeys the great breath out of
the heavens that fills her sails. Throw her head up into the
wind and see how she will halt and stagger, how every sheet
will shiver and her whole frame be shaken, how instantly she
is "in irons, in the expressive phrase of the sea. She is
free only when you have let her fall off again and have re-
covered once more her nice adjustment to the forces she
must obey and cannot defy.
Human freedom consists in perfect adjustments of human
interests and human activities and human energies.
Now, the adjustments necessary between individuals, be-
tween individuals and the complex institutions amidst which
they live, and between those institutions and the govern-
ment, are infinitely more intricate to-day than ever before.
No doubt this is a tiresome and roundabout way of saying
the thing, yet perhaps it is worth while to get somewhat
clearly in our mind what makes all the trouble to-day. Life
has become complex; there are many more elements, more
parts, to it than ever before. And, therefore, it is harder
to find out where the trouble lies when the machine gets
out of order.
You know that one of the interesting things that Mr.
Jefferson said in those early days of simplicity which marked
the beginnings of our government was that the best govern-
ment consisted in as little governing as possible. And there
is still a sense in which that is true. It is still intolerable
for a government to interfere with our individual activities
except where it is necessary to interfere with them in order
to free them. But I feel confident that if Jefferson were
living in our day he would see what we see; that the in-
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
dividual is caught in a great confused nexus of all sorts of
complicated circumstances, and that to let him alone is to
leave him helpless as against the obstacles with which he
has to contend; and that, therefore, law in our day must
come to the assistance of the individual. It must come to
his assistance to see that he gets fair play; that is all, but
that is much. Without the watchful interference, the reso-
lute interference, of the government, there can be no fair
play between individuals and such powerful institutions as
the trusts. Freedom to-day is something more than being
let alone. The program of a government of freedom must in
these days be positive, not negative merely.
Well, then, in this new sense and meaning of it, are we
preserving freedom in this land of ours, the hope of all the
earth ?
Have we, inheritors of this continent and of the ideals to
which the fathers consecrated it,—have we maintained
them, realizing them, as each generation must, anew? Are
we, in the consciousness that the life of man is pledged to
higher levels here than elsewhere, striving still to bear aloft
the standards of liberty and hope, or, disillusioned and de-
feated, are we feeling the disgrace of having had a free
field in which to do new things and of not having done them?
The answer must be, I am sure, that we have been in a
fair way of failure,—tragic failure. And we stand in
danger of utter failure yet except we fulfil speedily the de-
termination we have reached, to deal with the new and
subtle tyrannies according to their deserts. Don't deceive
yourselves for a moment as to the power of the great in-
terests which now dominate our development. They are so
great that it is almost an open question whether the govern-
ment of the United States can dominate them or no. Go one
step further, make their organized power permanent, and it
may be too late to turn back. The roads diverge at the point
where we stand. They stretch their vistas out to regions
where they are very far separated from one another; at the
end is the old tiresome scene of government tied up with
special interests; and at the other shines the liberating light
THE NEW FREEDOM 297
of individual initiative, of individual liberty, of individual
freedom, the light of untrammeled enterprise. I believe
that that light shines out of the heavens itself that God has
created. I believe in human liberty as I believe in the wine
of life. There is no salvation for men in the pitiful con-
descensions of industrial masters. Guardians have no place
in a land of freemen. Prosperity guaranteed by trustees
has no prospect of endurance. If monopoly persists, mo-
nopoly will always sit at the helm of the government. I do
not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are
men in this country big enough to own the government of
the United States, they are going to own it; what we have
to determine now is whether we are big enough, whether
we are men enough, whether we are free enough, to take
possession again of the government which is our own. We
haven't had free access to it, our minds have not touched it
by way of guidance, in half a generation, and now we are
engaged in nothing less than the recovery of what was
made with our own hands, and acts only by our delegated
authority.
I tell you, when you discuss the question of the tariffs
and of the trusts, you are discussing the very lives of your-
selves and your children. I believe that I am preaching the
Very cause of some of the gentlemen whom I am opposing
when I preach the cause of free industry in the United
States, for I think they are slowly girding the tree that
bears the inestimable fruits of our life, and that if they are
permitted to gird it entirely nature will take her revenge
and the tree will die.
I do not believe that America is securely great because
she has great men in her now. America is great in propor-
tion as she can make sure of having great men in the next
generation. She is rich in her unborn children; rich, that is
to say, if those unborn children see the sun in a day of op-
portunity, see the sun when they are free to exercise their
energies as they will. If they open their eyes in a land
where there is no special privilege, then we shall come into
a new era of American greatness and American liberty; but
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
if they open their eyes in a country where they must be em-
ployees or nothing, if they open their eyes in a land of
merely regulated monopoly, where all the conditions of in-
dustry are determined by small groups of men, then they
will see an America such as the founders of this Republic
would have wept to think of. The only hope is in the re-
lease of the forces which philanthropic trust presidents want
to monopolize. Only the emancipation, the freeing and
heartening of the vital energies of all the people will re-
deem us. In all that I may have to do in public affairs in
the United States I am going to think of towns such as I
have seen in Indiana, towns of the old American pattern,
that own and operate their own industries, hopefully and
happily. My thought is going to be bent upon the multipli-
cation of towns of that kind and the prevention of the con-
centration of industry in this country in such a fashion and
upon such a scale that towns that own themselves will be
impossible. You know what the vitality of America con-
sists of. Its vitality does not lie in New York, nor in Chi-
cago; it will not be sapped by anything that happens in St.
Louis. The vitality of America lies in the brains, the ener-
gies, the enterprise of the people throughout the land; in the
efficiency of their factories and in the richness of the fields
that stretch beyond the borders of the town; in the wealth
which they extract from nature and originate for themselves
through the inventive genius characteristic of all free
American communities.
That is the wealth of America, and if America discourages
the locality, the community, the self-contained town, she will
kill the nation. A nation is as rich as her free communities;
she is not as rich as her capital city or her metropolis. The
amount of money in Wall Street is no indication of the
wealth of the American people. That indication can be
found only in the fertility of the American mind and the
productivity of American industry everywhere throughout
the United States. If America were not rich and fertile,
there would be no money in Wall Street. If Americans
were not vital and able to take care of themselves, the great
THE NEW FREEDOM
299
money exchanges would break down. The welfare, the very
existence of the nation, rests at last upon the great mass of
the people; its prosperity depends at last upon the spirit in
which they go about their work in their several communities
throughout the broad land. In proportion as her towns and
her countrysides are happy and hopeful will America realize
the high ambitions which have marked her in the eyes of all
the world.
The welfare, the happiness, the energy and spirit of the
men and women who do the daily work in our mines and
factories, on our railroads, in our offices and ports of trade,
on our farms and on the sea, is the underlying necessity of all
prosperity. There can be nothing wholesome unless their
life is wholesome; there can be no contentment unless they
are contented. Their physical welfare affects the soundness
of the whole nation. How would it suit the prosperity of
the United States, how would it suit business, to have a
people that went every day sadly or sullenly to their work?
How would the future look to you if you felt that the as-
piration had gone out of most men, the confidence of sue-
cess, the hope that they might improve their condition ? Do
you not see that just so soon as the old self-confidence of
America, just so soon as her old boasted advantage of in-
dividual liberty and opportunity, is taken away, all the
energy of her people begins to subside, to slacken, to grow
loose and pulpy, without fiber, and men simply cast about
to see that the day does not end disastrously with them ?
So we must put heart into the people by taking the heart-
lessness out of politics, business, and industry. We have
got to make politics a thing in which an honest man can
take his part with satisfaction because he knows that his
opinion will count as much as the next man's, and that the
boss and the interests have been dethroned. Business we
have got to untrammel, abolishing tariff favors, and rail-
road discrimination, and credit denials, and all forms of un-
just handicaps against the little man. Industry we have got
to humanize,—not through the trusts,—but through the di-
rect action of law guaranteeing protection against dangers
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
and compensation for injuries, guaranteeing sanitary condi-
tions, proper hours, the right to organize, and all the other
things which the conscience of the country demands as the
workingman's right. We have got to cheer and inspirit our
people with the sure prospects of social justice and due re-
ward, with the vision of the open gates of opportunity for all.
We have got to set the energy and the initiative of this great
people absolutely free, so that the future of America will be
greater than the past, so that the pride of America will
grow with achievement, so that America will know as she
advances from generation to generation that each brood of
her sons is greater and more enlightened than that which
preceded it, know that she is fulfilling the promise that she
has made to mankind.
Such is the vision of some of us who now come to assist
in its realization. For we Democrats would not have en-
dured this long burden of exile if we had not seen a vision.
We could have traded; we could have got into the game;
we could have surrendered and made terms; we could have
played the role of patrons to the men who wanted to domi-
nate the interests of the country,—and here and there gen-
tlemen who pretended to be of us did make those arrange-
ments. They couldn't stand privation. You never can stand
it unless you have within you some imperishable food upon
which to sustain life and courage, the food of those visions
of the spirit where a table is set before us laden with
palatable fruits, the fruits of hope, the fruits of imagination,
those invisible things of the spirit which are the only things
upon which we can sustain ourselves through this weary
world without fainting. We have carried in our minds,
after you had thought you had obscured and blurred them,
the ideals of those men who first set their foot upon Amer-
ica those little bands who came to make a foothold in the
wilderness, because the great teeming nations that they had
left behind them had forgotten what human liberty was,
liberty of thought, liberty of residence, liberty of action.
Since their day the meaning of liberty has deepened. But
it has not ceased to be a fundamental demand of the human
THE NEW FREEDOM
301
spirit, a fundamental necessity for the life of the soul. And
the day is at hand when it shall be realized on this conse-
crated soil,—a New Freedom,—a Liberty widened and
deepened to match the broadened life of man in modern
America, restoring to him in very truth the control of his
government, throwing wide all gates of lawful enterprise,
unfettering his energies, and warming the generous im-
pulses of his heart,—a process of release, emancipation, and
inspiration, full of a breath of life as sweet and wholesome
as the airs that filled the sails of the caravels of Columbus,
and gave the promise and boast of magnificent Opportunity
in which America dare not fail.
PROGRESS1
John Dewey
This clear and thoughtful essay appeared first in the International
Journal of Ethics. It is one of many essays in which the writer, by
sheer strength of imagination and intellect, grasps in a "single firm
vision, so to speak, the long course of history and distinguishes
clearly between what is essential and what is ephemeral—between
what is progress and what is merely change. Mr. Dewey was born
at Burlington, Vermont, in 1859. He received his education at the
University of Vermont and at Johns Hopkins University. Later he
was connected with the Department of Philosophy at the University
of Michigan, at the University of Minnesota, and at the University
of Chicago. «Since 1904 he has been Professor of Philosophy at
Columbia University. Since the death of William James in 1910,
he has been one of the leaders of the pragmatic movement in phi-
losophy in America.
Some persons will see only irony in a discussion of prog-
ress at the present time. Never was pessimism easier.
Others will recognize in it a fine exhibition of courage and
faith, and find the manifestation heartening. There is in-
deed every cause for discouragement. But discouragement
affords just the occasion for a more intelligent courage. If
our optimism was too complacent, it is because it was too
thoughtless, too sentimental. Never was there a time when
it was more necessary to search for the conditions upon
which progress depends, until we can reaffirm our faith in
its possibility upon grounds better than those upon which
we have too blindly relied.
If we have been living in a fool's paradise, in a dream of
automatic uninterrupted progress, it is well to be awakened.
If we have been putting our trust in false gods, it is a good
1 Copyright. Reprinted from The International Journal of Ethics,
by permission of the publishers and of the author.
302
PROGRESS
303
thing to have our confidence shaken, even rudely. We may
be moved to find truer gods. If the reeds upon which we
relied have broken, it is well for us to have discovered their
frailty. If we have been looking in the wrong direction, we
now have a sufficiently strong stimulus to direct our atten-
tion elsewhere. We can hardly welcome the war merely be-
cause it has made us think, and has made us realize how
many of the things we called thoughts were asylums for
laziness. But since the war has come, we may welcome
whatever revelations of our stupidity and carelessness it
brings with it; and set about the institution of a more manly
and more responsible faith in progress than that in which
we have indulged in the past.
For there can be no blinking the fact that much of that
faith was childish and irresponsible. We confused rapidity
of change with advance, and we took certain gains in our
own comfort and ease as signs that cosmic forces were
working inevitably to improve the whole state of human af-
fairs. Having reaped where we had not sown, our undisci-
plined imaginations installed in the heart of history forces
which were to carry on progress whether or no, and whose
advantages we were progressively to enjoy. It is easy to
understand why our minds were taken captive by the spec-
tacle of change, and why we should have confused progress
with change. It is not necessary to rehearse an account of
the barriers which for thousands of years kept human so-
ciety static. Nor is it necessary to do more than allude to
the various inventions which, by facilitating migration and
travel, communication and circulation of ideas and reciprocal
criticism, and the production and distribution of goods in a
world-wide market, have broken down those barriers. The
release of energies has gone on for a century and a half to
a degree which we are still impotent to realize. Persons and
things have been endlessly redistributed and mingled. The
fixed has given way to the mobile; the settled to the free,
It was doubtless inevitable that, in its contrast with static
conditions and ideals, this mobility and freedom should be
taken for progress. Such it doubtless is in some respects.
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
But the present crisis is in vain, so far as our intelligence is
concerned, if it does not make us see that in the main this
rapid change of conditions affords an opportunity for prog-
ress, but is not itself progress.
We have confused, I repeat, rapidity of change with
progress. We have confused the breaking down of barriers
by which advance is made possible with advance itself. Ex-
cept with respect to the conservatives who have continuously
bemoaned all change as destructive these statements seem
to me to sum up fairly well the intellectual history of the
epoch that is closing. The economic situation, the problem
of poverty by the side of great wealth, of ignorance and
absence of a fair chance in life by the side of culture and
unlimited opportunity, have, indeed, always served to re-
mind us that after all we were dealing with an opportunity
for progress rather than with an accomplished fact. It re-
minded us that the forces which were revolutionizing society
might be turned in two ways: that they actually were em-
ployed for two diverse and opposed ends. But the display
was not dramatic enough, not sensational enough, to force
the lesson home. The war stages the lesson in a sufficiently
striking way.
We had been told that the development of industry and
commerce had brought about such an interdependence of
peoples that war was henceforth out of the question—at
least upon a vast scale. There are men now fighting who
had written and lectured to that effect. But it is now clear
that commerce also creates jealousies and rivalries and sus-
picions which are potent for war. We were told that na-
tions could not long finance a war under modern conditions:
economists had demonstrated that to the satisfaction of
themselves and others. We see now that they had under-
rated both the production of wealth and the extent to which
it could be mobilized for destructive purposes. We were
told that the advance of science had made war practically
impossible. We now know that science has not only ren-
dered the enginery of war more deadly, but has also in-
creased the powers of resistance and endurance when war
PROGRESS
305
comes. If all this does not demonstrate that the forces
which have brought about complicated and extensive changes
in the fabric of society do not of themselves generate prog-
ress, I do not know what a demonstration would be. Has
man subjugated physical nature only to release forces be-
yond his control ?
Two things are apparent. First, progress depends not on
the existence of social change but on the direction which
human beings deliberately give that change. Secondly, ease
of social change is a condition of progress. Side by side
with the fact that the mere substitution of a dynamic or
readily changing social structure for a static society does
not accomplish progress, stands the fact that this substitu-
tion furnishes the opportunity for progress. We cannot too
much insist upon the fact that until men got control of
natural forces civilization was a local accident. It depended
upon the ability of a small number of men to command,
with assurance, the labor and services of other men. Any
civilization based mainly upon ability to exploit the energies
of men is precarious; it is at the mercy of internal revolt and
external overflow. By exploring the heaps of rubbish scat-
tered over the face of the earth, we are just beginning to
learn how many civilizations have arisen in the past only to
sink into rubbish heaps. The dominion of man over the
labor of other men is a shaky basis for civilization. And
civilization never attained stability upon such a basis. The
scientific conquest of nature has at least given us another
basis. We have now a sure method. Wholesale permanent
decays of civilization are impossible. As long as there exists
a group of men who understand the methods of physical
science and are expert in their use, recovery, under the
worst of circumstances, of the material basis of culture is
sure and relatively speedy. While the modern man was
deceived about the amount of progress he had made, and
especially deceived about the automatic certainty of prog-
ress, he was right in thinking that for the first time in his-
tory mankind is in command of the possibility of progress.
The rest is for us to say.
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
I might almost as well stop here. For it seems to me that
about all that I can say about the future of progress at
the present time is that it depends upon man to say whether
he wants it or not. If we want it, we can have it—if we are
willing to pay the price in effort, especially in effort of
intelligence. The conditions are at hand. We do not of
course wholly control the energies of nature; we shall never
wholly do so. But we are in possession of a method which
enables us to forecast desirable physical changes and to set
about securing them. So much is the secure result of the
scientific revolution of the last three hundred years. We
also know that it is not possible to bring about these physical
changes without effecting at the same time vast social
changes. The men who invented the stationary and locomo-
tive steam engine, and the men who have since then har-
nessed both steam and electricity to all sorts of ends, have
produced social changes by the side of which those pro-
duced by Alexander, Caesar, and Napoleon are insignificant.
And the same process is going on as long as applied science
goes on, whatever we may think about its worth. But, I
repeat, while social change, thus brought about, represents
an indispensable condition of progress, it does not present a
guarantee for progress. The latter depends upon deliberate
human foresight and socially constructive work. Hence we
have, first of all, to change our attitude. Instead of con-
gratulating ourselves upon its presence and certainty as a
gift of the gods, as we have been wont to do, we have to
recognize that it is a human and intentional product—as
much so in principle as a telephone or irrigation or a self-
binding reaper, and as much more so in fact as the factors
upon which it depends are more complex and more elusive.
The doctrine of evolution has been popularly used to give
a kind of cosmic sanction to the notion of an automatic and
wholesale progress in human affairs. Our part, the human
part, was simply to enjoy the usufruct. Evolution inherited
all the goods of Divine Providence and had the advantage
of being in fashion. Even a great and devastating war is
not too great a price to pay for an awakening from such an
PROGRESS
307
infantile and selfish dream. Progress is not automatic; it
depends upon human intent and aim and upon acceptance
of responsibility for its production. It is not a wholesale
matter, but a retail job, to be contracted for and executed
in sections. I doubt if the whole history of mankind shows
any more vicious and demoralizing ethic than the recent
widespread belief that each of us, as individuals and as
classes, might safely and complacently devote ourselves to
increasing our own possessions, material, intellectual, and
artistic, because progress was inevitable anyhow.
In dwelling upon the need of conceiving progress as a
responsibility and not as an endowment, I put primary em-
phasis upon responsibility for intelligence, for the power
which foresees, plans, and constructs in advance. We are
so overweighted by nature with impulse, sentiment, and
emotion, that we are always tempted to rely unduly upon
the efficacy of these things. Especially do we like to intrust
our destiny to them when they go by eulogistic names—like
altruism, kindliness, peaceful feelings. But spite of the
dogma which measures progress by increase in these senti-
ments, there is no reason that I know of to suppose that the
basic fund of these emotions has increased appreciably in
thousands and thousands of years. Man is equipped with
these feelings at birth as well as with emotions of fear,
anger, emulation, and resentment. What appears to be an
increase in one set and a decrease in the other set is, in
reality, a change in their social occasions and social chan-
nels. Civilized man has not a better endowment of ear and
eye than savage man; but his social surroundings give him
more important things to see and hear than the savage has,
and he has the wit to devise instruments to reinforce his eye
and ear—the telegraph and telephone, the microscope and
telescope. But there is no reason for thinking that he has
less natural aggressiveness or more natural altruism—or
will ever have—than the barbarian. But he may live in
social conditions that create a relatively greater demand for
the display of kindliness and which turn this aggressive
instinct into less destructive channels. There is at any time
3O8
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
a sufficient amount of kindly impulses possessed by man to
enable him to live in amicable peace with all his fellows;
and there is at any time a sufficient equipment of bellicose
impulses to keep him in trouble with his fellows. An in-
tensification of the exhibition of one may accompany an
intensification of the display of the other, the only difference
being that social arrangements cause the kindly feelings to
be displayed toward one set of fellows and the hostile im-
pulses toward another set. Thus, as everybody knows, the
hatred toward the foreigner characterizing peoples now at
war is attended by an unusual manifestation of a mutual
affection and love within each warring group. So charac-
teristic is this fact that that man was a good psychologist
who said that he wished that this planet might get into war
with another planet, as that was the only effective way he
saw of developing a world-wide community of interest in
this globe's population.
I am not saying this to intimate that all impulses are
equally good or that no effective control of any of them is
possible. My purpose is, in lesser part, to suggest the fu-
tility of trying to secure progress by immediate or direct
appeal to even the best feelings in our makeup. In the main
there is an adequate fund of such feelings. What is lacking
is adequate social stimulation for their exercise as compared
with the social occasions which evoke less desirable emotions.
In greater part, my purpose is to indicate that since the
variable factor, the factor which may be altered indefinitely,
is the social conditions which call out and direct the impulses
and sentiments, the positive means of progress lie in the
application of intelligence to the construction of proper
social devices. Theoretically, it is possible to have social
arrangements which will favor the friendly tendencies of
human nature at the expense of the bellicose and predatory
ones, and which will direct the latter into channels where
they will do the least harm or even become means of good.'
Practically this is a matter of the persistent use of reflection
in the study of social conditions and the devising of social
contrivances.
PROGRESS
309
I have already said that the indispensable preliminary con-
dition of progress has been supplied by the conversion of
scientific discoveries into inventions which turn physical
energy, the energy of sun, coal, and iron, to account.
Neither the discoveries nor the inventions were the product
of unconscious physical nature. They were the product of
human devotion and application, of human desire, patience,
ingenuity, and mother wit. The problem which now con-
fronts us, the problem of progress, is the same in kind, dif-
fering in subject-matter. It is a problem of discovering the
needs and capacities of collective human nature as we find it
aggregated in racial or national groups on the surface of
the globe, and of inventing the social machinery which will
set available powers operating for the satisfaction of those
needs.
This is a large order. But it is not, with reasonable limits,
one hopeless to undertake. It is much more within the bounds
of legitimate imagination than would have been, five cen-
turies ago, the subjugation of physical nature which has
since been achieved. The chief difficulty lies in the primary
step; it consists in getting a sufficiently large number of
persons to believe in its desirability and practicability. In
spite of its discipline by the achievements of physical science
our imagination is cowardly and irresponsible. We do not
believe that study, foresight, and planning will do for the
human relations of human beings what they have done for
our relationship to physical nature.
We are living still under the dominion of a laissez-faire
philosophy. I do not mean by this an individualistic as
against a socialistic philosophy. I mean by it a philosophy
which trusts the direction of human affairs to nature, or
Providence, or evolution, or manifest destiny—that is to say,
to accident—rather than to a contriving and constructive
intelligence. To put our faith in the collective state instead
of in individual activity is quite as laissez-faire a proceeding
as to put it in the results of voluntary private enterprise.
The only genuine opposite to a go-as-you-please let-alone
philosophy is a philosophy which studies specific social
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
needs and evils with a view to constructing the special
machinery for which they call.
So far I have avoided any contrast of the so-called pro-
gressive attitude with the so-called conservative attitude. I
cannot maintain that reserve any longer. While, in general,
the opposite of the progressive attitude is not so much con-
servatism as it is disbelief in the possibility of constructive
social engineering, the conservative mind is a large factor
in propagating this disbelief. The hard and fast conserva-
tive is the man who cannot conceive that existing constitu-
tions, institutions, and social arrangements are mechanisms
for achieving social results. To him, they are the results;
they are final. If he could once cure himself of this illu-
sion, he would be willing to admit that they grew up at
haphazard and cross-purposes, and mainly at periods quite
unlike the present. Admitting this, he would be ready to
conceive the possibility that they are as poor mechanisms
for accomplishing needed social results as were the physical
tools which preceded the mastery of nature by mind. He
would then be free: not free just to get emotionally excited
about something called progress in general, but to consider
what improved social mechanisms or contrivances are de-
manded at the present day.
All this, you will say (and quite justly), is very general,
very vague. Permit me, in concluding, to give a few illustra-
tions suggested by the present international situation, which
may make my conception a little less vague. A friend was
in Japan at the time when the war broke out. He remarked
to an acquaintance, who happened to be the United States
consul in the town where he was, that he supposed he would
have no difficulty in getting an American draft cashed.
His friend replied: On the contrary; he himself had had to
spend almost two days in getting even a government draft
cashed. My friend proceeded to generalize from this inci-
dent. He said in effect that in commerce we are proceeding
upon an international basis; commerce depends upon a sys-
tern of international credit. But politically we are doing
business upon the basis of ideas that were formed before
PROGRESS 311
the rise of modern commerce—upon the basis of isolated
national sovereignty. The deadlock due to this conflict could
not continue, he surmised; either we must internationalize
our antiquated political machinery or we must make our
commercial ideas and practices conform to our political.
Personally I agree with his account of the needed remedy;
it makes little difference, however, for purposes of my
illustration whether any one else agrees or not. The situa-
tion is one which is real; and it calls for some kind of con-
structive social planning. Our existing human intercourse
requires some kind of a mechanism which it has not got.
We may drift along till the evil gets intolerable, and then
take some accidental way out, or we may plan in advance.
Another similar illustration is the condition in which
neutral countries find themselves at the present time. They
are in the position of the public when there is a strike on the
part of street-railway employees. The corporation and the
employees fight it out between themselves and the public
suffers and has nothing to say. Now it ought to be clear
that, as against contending nations, the nations not at war
have the superior right in every case—not by any merit of
theirs, usually only by accident. But nevertheless in the
existing situation they are the representatives of the normal
interests of mankind, and so are in the right against even
the contending party that with respect to other contenders
is most nearly in the right. But if the present situation
makes anything clear, it is that there is almost a total lack
of any machinery by which the factors which continue to
represent civilization may make their claims effective. We
are quite right in prizing such beggarly elements of inter-
national law as exist; but it is evidence of the conservative
or laissez-faire mind that we cling so desperately to the
established tradition and wait for new laws to be struck out
by the accident of clash and victory, instead of setting our-
selves in deliberate consultation to institute the needed laws
of the intercourse of nations.
The illustration may be made more specific. It was com-
paratively easy to unify the sentiment of the nation when
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
previous international custom was violated by the sinking
of the Lusitania. It would not be very difficult to inflame
that sentiment, in the name of a combination of defense of
national honor and defense of international custom, to the
point of war. But it is always defense, mind you; every
war is ipso facto defensive on the part of everybody nowa-
days. And defense is always retrospective and conserva-
tive, even when most offensive. A proposition to call for a
conference of nations which would formulate what their
rights are henceforth to be, whatever they may have been
in the past, would be a constructive use of intelligence. But
it would hardly call forth at present the enthusiastic acclaim
of the public and consequently makes no great appeal to the
political authorities who are dependent upon the support of
the populace.
One more illustration from the international situation.
The relative failure of international socialism in the present
crisis has been sufficiently noted, with grief by some, with
ill-disguised glee by others. But the simple fact of the case
is that at present workingmen have more to gam from their
own national state in the way of legislative and administra-
tive concessions than they have from some other state, or
from any international organization. That they should
make use of war to strengthen their claims for concessions
from the only power which can make these concessions is
but to be human. When the day dawns when the working-
men have more to gain in the way of justice from an inter-
national organization than from a purely national one, that
day war will become an impossibility. But it is easier to try
to do away with war by appeal to personal sentiment than it
is to strive to institute even the first steps of any such
organization—futile in comparison as the former method
must prove.
I hope these remarks at least illustrate what is meant by
the dependence of progress upon a foreseeing and contriving
intelligence as well as what is meant by saying that it is a
retail job. I can only point out the need, so far as they
coincide in the further interests of peace with the interest
PROGRESS
3i3
of progress, of an international commerce commission; of
an international tariff board; of an international board for
colonies and one for the supervision of relations with those
backward races which have not as yet been benevolently, or
otherwise, assimilated by the econonomically advanced
peoples. Such things are not counsels of perfection. They
are practical possibilities as soon as it is genuinely recog-
nized that the guarantee of progress lies in the perfecting of
social mechanisms corresponding to specific needs.
WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF1
Woodrow Wilson
This is one of the brilliant essays produced by Ex-President Wilson
during his career as educator and public speaker and writer for the
quarter-century preceding his entering politics. The essay first ap-
peared in the Century Magazine for June, 1901.
It is a very wholesome and regenerating change which a
man undergoes when he "comes to himself. It is not only
after periods of recklessness or infatuation, when he has
played the spendthrift or the fool, that a man comes to
himself. He comes to himself after experiences of which
he alone may be aware: when he has left off being wholly
preoccupied with his own powers and interests and with
every petty plan that centers in himself; when he has cleared
his eyes to see the world as it is, and his own true place
and function in it.
It is a process of disillusionment. The scales have fallen
away. He sees himself soberly, and knows under what con-
ditions his powers must act, as well as what his powers are.
He has got rid of earlier prepossessions about the world of
men and affairs, both those which were too favorable and
those which were too unfavorable—both those of the nursery
and those of a young man's reading. He has learned his
own paces, or, at any rate, is in a fair way to learn them;
has found his footing and the true nature of the "going he
must look for in the world; over what sorts of roads he
must expect to make his running, and at what expenditure
of effort; whither his goal lies, and what cheer he may
expect by the way. It is a process of disillusionment, but it
disheartens no soundly made man. It brings him into a light
1 Reprinted from The Century, Volume XI, by permission of the
author and of the publishers of the magazine.
314
WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF 315
which guides instead of deceiving him; a light which does
not make the way look cold to any man whose eyes are fit
for use in the open, but which shines wholesomely, rather,
upon the obvious path, like the honest rays of the frank sun,
and makes traveling both safe and cheerful.
There is no fixed time in a man's life at which he comes
to himself, and some men never come to themselves at all.
It is a change reserved for the thoroughly sane and healthy,
and for those who can detach themselves from tasks and
drudgery long and often enough to get, at any rate once and
again, view of the proportions of life and of the state and
plot of its action. We speak often with amusement, some-
times with distaste and uneasiness, of men who "have no
sense of humor, who take themselves too seriously, who
are intense, self-absorbed, over-confident in matters of
opinion, or else go plumed with conceit, proud of we cannot
tell what, enjoying, appreciating, thinking of nothing so
much as themselves. These are men who have not suffered
that wholesome change. They have not come to themselves.
If they be serious men, and real forces in the world, we may
conclude that they have been too much and too long ab-
sorbed; that their tasks and responsibilities long ago rose
about them like a flood, and have kept them swimming with
sturdy stroke the years through, their eyes level with the
troubled surface—no horizon in sight, no passing fleets, no
comrades but those who struggled in the flood like them-
selves. If they be frivolous, light-headed, men without pur-
pose or achievement, we may conjecture, if we do not know,
that they were born so, or spoiled by fortune, or befuddled
by self-indulgence. It is no great matter what we think
of them.
It is enough to know that there are some laws which
govern a man's awakening to know himself and the right
part to play. A man is the part he plays among his fellows.
He is not isolated; he cannot be. His life is made up of the
relations he bears to others—is made or marred by those
relations, guided by them, judged by them, expressed in
them. There is nothing else upon which he can spend his
3i6 SUCCESSFUL LIVING
spirit—nothing else that we can see. It is by these he gets
his spiritual growth; it is by these we see his character re-
vealed, his purpose, and his gifts. Some play with a certain
natural passion, an unstudied directness, without grace,
without modulation, with no study of the masters or con-
sciousness of the pervading spirit of the plot; others give
all their thought to their costume and think only of the
audiences; a few act as those who have mastered the secrets
of a serious art, with deliberate subordination of themselves
to the great end and motive of the play, spending themselves
like good servants, indulging no wilfulness, obtruding no
eccentricity, lending heart and tone and gesture to the perfect
progress of the action. These have "found themselves, and
have all the ease of a perfect adjustment.
Adjustment is exactly what a man gains when he comes
to himself. Some men gain it late, some early; some get it
all at once, as if by one distinct act of deliberate accommo-
dation; others get it by degrees and quite imperceptibly. No
doubt to most men it comes by the slow processes of ex-
perience—at each stage of life a little. A college man feels
the first shock of it at graduation, when the boy's life has
been lived out and the man's life suddenly begins. He has
measured himself with boys; he knows their code and feels
the spur of their ideals of achievement. But what the world
expects of him he has yet to find out, and it works, when he
has discovered it, a veritable revolution in his ways both of
thought and of action. He finds a new sort of fitness de-
manded of him, executive, thoroughgoing, careful of details,
full of drudgery and obedience to orders. Everybody is
ahead of him. Just now he was a senior, at the top of a
world he knew and reigned in, a finished product and pattern
of good form. Of a sudden he is a novice again, as green as
in his first school year, studying a thing that seems to have
no rules—at sea amid cross-winds, and a bit seasick withal.
Presently, if he be made of stuff that will shake into shape
and fitness, he settles to his tasks and is comfortable. He
has come to himself: understands what capacity is, and what
it is meant for; sees that his training was not for ornament;
WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF 317
or personal gratification, but to teach him how to use him-
self and develop faculties worth using. Henceforth there
is a zest in action, and he loves to see his strokes tell.
The same thing happens to the lad come from the farm
into the city, a big and novel field, where crowds rush and
jostle, and a rustic boy must stand puzzled for a little how
to use his placid and unjaded strength. It happens, too,
though in a deeper and more subtle way, to the man who
marries for love, if the love be true and fit for foul weather.
Mr. Bagehot used to say that a bachelor was "an amateur
in life, and wit and wisdom are married in the jest. A
man who lives only for himself has not begun to live—has
yet to learn his use, and his real pleasure too, in the world.
.It is not necessary he should marry to find himself out, but
it is necessary he should love. Men have come to them-
selves serving their mothers with an unselfish devotion, or
their sisters, or a cause for whose sake they forsook ease
and left off thinking of themselves. It is unselfish action,
growing slowly into the high habit of devotion, and at last,
it may be, into a sort of consecration, that teaches a man the
wide meaning of his life, and makes of him a steady profes-
sional in living, if the motive be not necessity, but love.
Necessity may make a mere drudge of a man, but no mere
drudge ever made a professional of himself; that demands
a higher spirit and a finer incentive than his.
Surely a man has come to himself only when he has found
the best that is in him, and has satisfied his heart with the
highest achievement he is fit for. It is only then that he
knows of what he is capable and what his heart demands.
And, assuredly, no thoughtful man ever came to the end of
his life, and had time and a little space of calm from which
to look back upon it, who did not know and acknowledge
that it was what he had done unselfishly and for others, and
nothing else, that satisfied him in the retrospect, and made
him feel that he had played the man. That alone seems to
him the real measure of himself, the real standard of his
manhood. And so men grow by having responsibility laid
upon them, the burden of other people's business. Their
318
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
powers are put out at interest, and they get usury in kind.
They are like men multiplied. Each counts manifold. Men
who live with an eye only upon what is their own are
dwarfed beside them—seem fractions while they are integers.
The trustworthiness of men trusted seems often to grow
with the trust.
It is for this reason that men are in love with power and
greatness: it affords them so pleasurable an expansion of
faculty, so large a run for their minds, an exercise of spirit
so various and refreshing; they have the freedom of so wide
a tract of the world of affairs. But if they use power only
for their own ends, if there be no unselfish service in it, if
its object be only their personal aggrandizement, their love
to see other men tools in their hands, they go out of the
world small, disquieted, beggared, no enlargement of soul
vouchsafed them, no usury of satisfaction. They have
added nothing to themselves. Mental and physical powers
alike grow by use, as every one knows; but labor for one's
self alone is like exercise in a gymnasium. No healthy man
can remain satisfied with it, or regard it as anything but a
preparation for tasks in the open, amid the affairs of the
world—not sport, but business—where there is no orderly
apparatus, and every man must devise the means by which
he is to make the most of himself. To make the most of
himself means the multiplication of his activities, and he
must turn away from himself for that. He looks about him,
studies the face of business or of affairs, catches some
intimation of their larger objects, is guided by the intima-
tion, and presently finds himself part of the motive force of
communities or of nations. It makes no difference how
small a part, how insignificant, how unnoticed. When his
powers begin to play outward, and he loves the task at hand
not because it gains him a livelihood but because it makes
him a life, he has come to himself.
Necessity is no mother to enthusiasm. Necessity carries a
whip. Its method is compulsion, not love. It has no thought
to make itself attractive; it is content to drive. Enthusiasm
comes with the revelation of true and satisfying objects of
WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF 319
devotion; and it is enthusiasm that sets the powers free. It
is a sort of enlightenment. It shines straight upon ideals,
and for those who see it the race and struggle are henceforth
toward these. An instance will point the meaning. One of
the most distinguished and most justly honored of our great
philanthropists spent the major part of his life absolutely
absorbed in the making of money—so it seemed to those who
did not know him. In fact, he had very early passed the
stage at which he looked upon his business as a means of
support or of material comfort. Business had become for
him an intellectual pursuit, a study in enterprise and incre-
ment. The field of commerce lay before him like a chess-
board; the moves interested him like the manceuvers of a
game. More money was more power, a greater advantage
in the game, the means of shaping men and events and
markets to his own ends and uses. It was his will that set
fleets afloat and determined the havens they were bound for;
it was his foresight that brought goods to market at the
right time; it was his suggestion that made the industry of
unthinking men efficacious; his sagacity saw itself justified
at home not only, but at the ends of the earth. And as the
money poured in, his government and mastery increased,
and his mind was the more satisfied. It is so that men make
little kingdoms for themselves, and an international power
undarkened by diplomacy, undirected by parliaments.
It is a mistake to suppose that the great captains of in-
dustry, the great organizers and directors of manufacture
and commerce and monetary exchange, are engrossed in a
vulgar pursuit of wealth. Too often they suffer the vul-
garity of wealth to display itself in the idleness and ostenta-
tion of their wives and children, who "devote themselves,
it may be, "to expense regardless of pleasure"; but we ought
not to misunderstand even that, or condemn it unjustly.
The masters of industry are often too busy with their own
sober and momentous calling to have time or spare thought
enough to govern their own households. A king may be
too faithful a statesman to be a watchful father. These
men are not fascinated by the glitter of gold: the appetite
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
for power has got hold upon them. They are in love with
the exercise of their faculties upon a great scalo; they are
organizing and overseeing a great part of the life of the
world. No wonder they are captivated. Business is more
interesting than pleasure, as Mr. Bagehot said, and when
once the mind has caught its zest, there's no disengaging it.
The world has reason to be grateful for the fact.
It was this fascination that had got hold upon the faculties
of the man whom the world was afterward to know, not as a
prince among merchants—for the world forgets merchant
prices—but as a prince among benefactors; for beneficence
breeds gratitude, gratitude admiration, admiration fame, and
the world remembers its benefactors. Business, and business
alone, interested him, or seemed to him worth while. The
first time he was asked to subscribe money for a benevolent
object he declined. Why should he subscribe ? What affair
would be set forward, what increase of efficiency would the
money buy, what return would it bring in? Was good
money to be simply given away, like water poured on a
barren soil, to be sucked up and yield nothing? It was not
until men who understood benevolence on its sensible, syste-
matic, practical, and really helpful side explained it to him
as an investment that his mind took hold of it and turned to
it for satisfaction. He began to see that education was a
thing of infinite usury; that money devoted to it would
yield a singular increase, to which there was no calculable
end, an increase in perpetuity—increase of knowledge, and
therefore of intelligence and efficiency, touching generation
after generation with new impulses, adding to the sum total
of the world's fitness for affairs—an invisible but intensely
real spiritual usury beyond reckoning, because compounded
in an unknown ratio from age to age. Henceforward benefi-
cence was as interesting to him as business—was, indeed,
a sort of sublimated business in which money moved new
forces in a commerce which no man could bind or limit.
He had come to himself—to the full realization of his
powers, the true and clear perception of what it was his
mind demanded for its satisfaction. His faculties were
WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF 321
consciously stretched to their right measure, were at last
exercised at their best. He felt the keen zest, not of success
merely, but also of honor, and was raised to a sort of
majesty among his fellow-men, who attended him in death
like a dead sovereign. He had died dwarfed had he not
broken the bonds of mere money-getting; would never have
known himself had he not learned how to spend it; and
ambition itself could not have shown him a straighter road
to fame.
This is the positive side of a man's discovery of the way
in which his faculties are to be made to fit into the world's
affairs and released for effort in a way that will bring real
satisfaction. There is a negative side also. Men come to
themselves by discovering their limitations no less than by
discovering their deeper endowments and the mastery that
will make them happy. It is the discovery of what they can
not do, and ought not to attempt, that transforms reformers
into statesmen; and great should be the joy of the world
over every reformer who comes to himself. The spectacle
is not rare; the method is not hidden. The practicability
of every reform is determined absolutely and always by
"the circumstances of the case, and only those who put
themselves into the midst of affairs, either by action or by
observation, can know what those circumstances are or per-
ceive what they signify. No statesman dreams of doing
whatever he pleases; he knows that it does not follow that
because a point of morals or of policy is obvious to him it
will be obvious to the nation, or even to his own friends; and
it is the strength of a democratic polity that there are so
many minds to be consulted and brought to agreement, and
that nothing can be wisely done for which the thought, and
a good deal more than the thought, of the country, its senti-
ment and its purpose, have not been prepared. Social reform
is a matter of cooperation, and, if it be of a novel kind,
requires an infinite deal of converting to bring the efficient
majority to believe in it and support it. Without their
agreement and support it is impossible.
It is this that the more imaginative and impatient re-
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
formers find out when they come to themselves, if that
calming change ever comes to them. Oftentimes the most
immediate and drastic means of bringing them to themselves
is to elect them to legislative or executive office. That will
reduce oversanguine persons to their simplest terms. Not
because they find their fellow legislators or officials incapable
of high purpose or indifferent to the betterment of the com-
munities which they represent. Only cynics hold that to be
the chief reason why we approach the millennium so slowly,
and cynics are usually very ill-informed persons. Nor is it
because under our modern democratic arrangements we so
subdivide power and balance parts in government that no one
man can tell for much or turn affairs to his will. One of
the most instructive studies a politician could undertake
would be a study of the infinite limitations laid upon the
power of the Russian Czar, notwithstanding the despotic
theory of the Russian constitution—limitations of social
habit, of official prejudice, of race jealousies, of religious
predilections, of administrative machinery even, and the in-
convenience of being himself only one man, and that a very
young one, oversensitive and touched with melancholy. He
can do only what can be done with the Russian people. He
can no more make them quick, enlightened, and of the
modern world of the West than he can change their tastes
in eating. He is simply the leader of Russians.
An English or American statesman is better off. He leads
a thinking nation, not a race of peasants topped by a class
of revolutionists and a caste of nobles and officials. He can
explain new things to men able to understand, persuade men
willing and accustomed to make independent and intelligent
choices of their own. An English statesman has an even
better opportunity to lead than an American statesman, be-
cause in England executive power and legislative initiative
are both intrusted to the same grand committee, the min-
istry of the day. The ministers both propose what shall be
made law and determine how it shall be enforced when
enacted. And yet English reformers, like American, have
found office a veritable cold-water bath for their ardor for
WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF 323
change. Many a man who has made his place in affairs as
the spokesman of those who see abuses and demand their
reformation has passed from denunciation to calm and mod-
erate advice when he got into Parliament, and has turned
veritable conservative when made a minister of the crown.
Mr. Bright was a notable example. Slow and careful men
had looked upon him as little better than a revolutionist so
long as his voice rang free and imperious from the platforms
of public meetings. They greatly feared the influence he
should exercise in Parliament, and would have deemed the
constitution itself unsafe could they have foreseen that he
would some day be invited to take office and a hand of
direction in affairs. But it turned out that there was nothing
to fear. Mr. Bright lived to see almost every reform he had
urged accepted and embodied in legislation; but he assisted
at the process of their realization with greater and greater
temperateness and wise deliberation as his part in affairs
became more and more prominent and responsible, and was
at the last as little like an agitator as any man that served
the Queen.
It is not that such men lose courage when they find them-
selves charged with the actual direction of the affairs con-
cerning which they have held and uttered such strong, un-
hesitating, drastic opinions. They have only learned discre-
tion. For the first time they see in its entirety what it was
that they were attempting. They are at last at close quarters
with the world. Men of every interest and variety crowd
about them; new impressions throng them; in the midst of
affairs the former special objects of their zeal fall into new
environments, a better and newer perspective; seem no
longer susceptible to separate and radical change. The real
nature of the complex stuff of hie they were seeking to work
in is revealed to them—its intricate and delicate fiber, and
the subtle, secret interrelationship of its parts—and they
work circumspectly, lest they should mar more than they
mend. Moral enthusiasm is not, uninstructed and of itself,
a suitable guide to practicable and lasting reformation; and if
the reform sought be the reformation of others as well as of
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
himself the reformer should look to it that he knows the
true relation of his will to the wills of those he would change
and guide. When he has discovered that relation he has
come to himself: has discovered his real use and planning
part in the general world of men; has come to the full com-
mand and satisfying employment of his faculties. Other-
wise he is doomed to live forever in a fools' paradise, and
can be said to have come to himself only on the supposition
that he is a fool.
Every man—if I may adopt and paraphrase a passage
from Dr. South—every man hath both an absolute and a
relative capacity: an absolute in that he hath been endued
with such a nature and such parts and faculties; and a rela-
tive in that he is part of the universal community of men,
and so stands in such a relation to the whole. When we say
that a man has come to himself, it is not of his absolute ca-
pacity that we are thinking, but of his relative. He has
begun to realize that he is part of a whole, and to know what
part, suitable for what service and achievement.
It was once fashionable—and that not a very long time
ago—to speak of political society with a certain distaste, as
a necessary evil, an irritating but inevitable restriction upon
the "natural sovereignty and entire self-government of the
individual. That was the dream of the egotist. It was a
theory in which men were seen to strut in the proud con-
sciousness of their several and "absolute capacities. It
would be as instructive as it would be difficult to count the
errors it has bred in political thinking. As a matter of fact,
men have never dreamed of wishing to do without the
"trammels of organized society, for the very good reason
that those trammels are in reality no trammels at all, but
indispensable aids and spurs to the attainment of the high-
est and most enjoyable things man is capable of. Political
society, the life of men in states, is an abiding natural
relationship. It is neither a mere convenience nor a mere
necessity. It is not a mere voluntary association, not a mere
corporation. It is nothing deliberate or artificial, devised
for a special purpose. It is in real truth the eternal and
WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF 325
natural expression and embodiment of a form of life higher
than that of the individual—that common life of mutual
helpfulness, stimulation, and contest which gives leave and
opportunity to the individual life, makes it possible, makes it
full and complete.
It is in such a scene that man looks about to discover his
own place and force. In the midst of men organized, infi-
nitely cross-related, bound by ties of interest, hope, affec-
tion, subject to authorities, to opinion, to passion, to visions
and desires which no man can reckon, he casts eagerly about
to find where he may enter in with the rest and be a man
among his fellows. In making his place he finds, if he seek
intelligently and with eyes that see, more than ease of spirit
and scope for his mind. He finds himself—as if mists had
cleared away about him and he knew at last his neighbor-
hood among men and tasks.
What every man seeks is satisfaction. He deceives him-
self so long as he imagines it to lie in self-indulgence, so
long as he deems himself the center and object of effort.
His mind is spent in vain upon itself. Not in action itself,
not in "pleasure, shall it find its desires satisfied, but in
consciousness of right, of powers greatly and nobly spent.
It comes to know itself in the motives which satisfy it, in
the zest and power of rectitude. Christianity has liberated
the world, not as a system of ethics, not as a philosophy of
altruism, but by its revelations of the power of pure and
unselfish love. Its vital principle is not its code, but its
motive. Love, clear-sighted, loyal, personal, is its breath
and immortality. Christ came, not to save himself, assur-
edly, but to save the world. His motive, his example, are
every man's key to his own gifts and happiness. The ethical
code he taught may no doubt be matched, here a piece and
there a piece, out of other religions, other teachings and
philosophies. Every thoughtful man born with a conscience
must know a code of right and of pity to which he ought to
conform; but without the motive of Christianity, without
love, he may be the purest altruist and yet be as sad and as
unsatisfied as Marcus Aurelius.
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Christianity gave us, in the fullness of time, the perfect
image of right living, the secret of social and of individual
well-being; for the two are not separable, and the man who
receives and verifies that secret in his own living has dis-
covered not only the best and only way to serve the world,
but also the one happy way to satisfy himself. Then, in-
deed, has he come to himself. Henceforth he knows what
his powers mean, what spiritual air they breathe, what
ardors of service clear them of lethargy, relieve them of all
sense of effort, put them at their best. After this fretfulness
passes away, experience mellows and strengthens and makes
more fit, and old age brings, not senility, not satiety, not
regret, but higher hope and serene maturity.
A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY1
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill was among the most precocious of precocious
boys. His early education was directed personally by his father.
At the age of three he was taught the Greek alphabet and long lists
of Greek words together with their English equivalents. By his
eighth year he had read Aisop, Xenophon, Herodotus, Lucian,
Diogenes, Isocrates, Plato, Hume, Gibbon, Watson, Hooke, Plu-
tarch, and various other authors. More important, however, than
this prodigious acquaintance with books, was the boy's intimate con-
tact with the vigorous intellect of his strenuous father. From the
Autobiography we learn how his enthusiasm was checked by a mis-
giving as to the value of the ends he had set before him. This feel-
ing was doubtless the result of his forced training and his lack of
healthy, childish friendships. His activities in connection with the
India House, and his teachings as a philosopher and an economist
are well known. We are interested, however, in this essay, with the
author's childhood.
From the winter of 1821, when I first read Bentham, and
especially from the commencement of the Westminster
Review, I had what might truly be called an object in life;
to be a reformer of the world. My conception of my Own
happiness was entirely identified with this object. The per-
sonal sympathies I wished for were those of fellow laborers
in this enterprise. I endeavored to pick up as many flowers
as I could by the way; but as a serious and permanent per-
sonal satisfaction to rest upon, my whole reliance was placed
on this; and I was accustomed to felicitate myself on the
certainty of a happy life which I enjoyed, through placing
my happiness in something durable and distant, in which
some progress might be always making, while it could never
be exhausted by complete attainment. This did very well
1 From Chapter V of the Autobiography, 1874.
327
328
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
for several years, during which the general improvement
going on in the world and the idea of myself as engaged
with others in struggling to promote it, seemed enough to
fill up an interesting and animated existence. But the time
came when I awakened from this as from a dream. It was
in the autumn of 1826. I was in a dull state of nerves, such
as everybody is occasionally liable to; unsusceptible to en-
joyment or pleasurable excitement; one of those moods when
what is pleasure at other times, becomes insipid or indif-
ferent; the state, I should think, in which converts to Meth-
odism usually are, when smitten by their first "conviction of
sin. In this frame of mind it occurred to me to put the
question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects
in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and
opinions which you are looking forward to, could be com-
pletely effected at this very instant: would this be a great
joy and happiness to you? And an irrepressible self-con-
sciousness distinctly answered, "No! At this my heart sank
within me: the whole foundation on which my life was con-
structed fell down. All my happiness was to have been
found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had
ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any
interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to
live for.
At first I hoped that the cloud would pass away of itself;
but it did not. A night's sleep, the sovereign remedy for the
smaller vexations of life, had no effect on it. I awoke to a
renewed consciousness of the woeful fact. I carried it with
me into all companies, into all occupations. Hardly any-
thing had power to cause me even a few minutes' oblivion
of it. For some months the cloud seemed to grow thicker
and thicker. The lines in Coleridge's Dejection—I was not
then acquainted with them—exactly describe my case:
A grief without a pang, void, dark and drear,
A drowsy, stifled, unimpassioned grief,
Which finds no natural outlet or relief
In word, or sigh, or tear.
A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY 329
In vain I sought relief from my favorite books; those
memorials of past nobleness and greatness from which I
had always hitherto drawn strength and animation. I read
them now without feeling, or with the accustomed feeling
minus all its charm; and I became persuaded, that my love
of mankind, and of excellence for its own sake, had worn
itself out. I sought no comfort by speaking to others of
what I felt. If I had loved any one sufficiently to make
confiding my griefs a necessity, I should not have been in
the condition I was. I felt, too, that mine was not an
interesting, or in any way respectable distress. There was
nothing in it to attract sympathy. Advice, if I had known
where to seek it, would have been most precious. The words
of Macbeth to the physician often occurred to my thoughts.
But there was no one on whom I could build the faintest
hope of such assistance. My father, to whom it would
have been natural to me to have recourse in any practical
difficulties, was the last person to whom, in such a case as
this, I looked for help. Everything convinced me that he
had no knowledge of any such mental state as I was suffer-
ing from, and that even if he could be made to understand
it, he was not the physician who could heal it. My educa-
tion, which was wholly his work, had been conducted with-
out any regard to the possibility of its ending in this result;
and I saw no use in giving him the pain of thinking that his
plans had failed, when the failure was probably irremediable,
and, at all events, beyond the power of his remedies. Of
other friends, I had at that time none to whom I had any
hope of making my condition intelligible. It was, however,
abundantly intelligible to myself; and the more I dwelt upon
it, the more hopeless it appeared.
My course of study had led me to believe that all mental
and moral feelings and qualities, whether of a good or of a
bad kind, were the results of association; that we love one
thing, and hate another, take pleasure in one sort of action
or contemplation, and pain in another sort, through the
clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those things, from
the effect of education or of experience. As a corollary
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
from this, I had always heard it maintained by my father,
and was myself convinced, that the object of education
should be to form the strongest possible associations of the
salutary class; associations of pleasure with all things bene-
ficial to the great whole, and of pain with all things hurtful
to it. This doctrine appeared inexpugnable; but it now
seemed to me, on retrospect, that my teachers had occupied
themselves but superficially with the means of forming and
keeping up these salutary associations. They seemed to
have trusted altogether to the old familiar instruments, praise
and blame, reward and punishment. Now, I did not doubt
that by these means, begun early, and applied unremittingly,
intense associations of pain and pleasure, especially of pain,
might be created, and might produce desires and aversions
capable of lasting undiminished to the end of life. But
there must always be something artificial and casual in
associations thus produced. The pains and pleasures thus
forcibly associated with things, are not connected with them
by any natural tie; and it is therefore, I thought, essential
to the durability of these associations, that they should have
become so intense and inveterate as to be practically indis-
soluble, before the habitual exercise of the power of analysis
had commenced. For I now saw, or thought I saw, what I
had always before received with incredulity—that the habit
of analysis has a tendency to wear away the feelings: as
indeed it has, when no other mental habit is cultivated, and
the analyzing spirit remains without its natural complements
and correctives. The very excellence of analysis (I argued)
is that it tends to weaken and undermine whatever is the
result of prejudice; that it enables us mentally to separate
ideas which have only casually clung together: and no asso-
ciations whatever could ultimately resist this dissolving
force, were it not that we owe to analysis our clearest knowl-
edge of the permanent sequences in nature; the real connec-
tions between Things, not dependent on our will and feel-
ings; natural laws, by virtue of which, in many cases, one
thing is inseparable from, another in fact; which laws, in
proportion as they are clearly perceived and imaginatively
A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY 331
realized, caused our ideas of things which are always joined
together in Nature, to cohere more and more closely in our
thoughts. Analytic habits may thus even strengthen the
associations between causes and effects, means and ends,
but tend altogether to weaken those which are, to speak
familiarly, a mere matter of feeling. They are therefore
(I thought) favorable to prudence and clear-sightedness,
but a perpetual worm at the root both of the passions and
of the virtues; and, above all, fearfully undermine all de-
sires, and all pleasures, which are the effects of association,
that is, according to the theory I held, all except the purely
physical and organic; of the entire insufficiency of which to
make life desirable, no one had a stronger conviction than
I had. These were the laws of human nature, by which, as
it seemed to me, I had been brought to my present state.
All those to whom I looked up were of opinion that the
pleasure of sympathy with human beings, and the feelings
which made the good of others, and especially of mankind
on a large scale, the object of existence, were the greatest
and surest sources of happiness. Of the truth of this I was
convinced, but to know that a feeling would make me happy
if I had it, did not give me the feeling. My education, I
thought, had failed to create these feelings in sufficient
strength to resist the dissolving influence of analysis, while
the whole course of my intellectual cultivation had made
precocious and premature analysis the inveterate habit of
my mind. I was thus, as I said to myself, left stranded
at the commencement of my voyage, with a well-equipped
ship and a rudder, but no sail; without any real desire for
the ends which I had been so carefully fitted out to work
for: no delight in virtue, or the general good, but also just
as little in anything else. The fountains of vanity and
ambition seemed to have dried up within me, as completely
as those of benevolence. I had had (as I reflected) some
gratification of vanity at too early an age: I had obtained
some distinction, and felt myself of some importance, before
the desire of distinction and of importance had grown into
a passion: and little as it was which I had attained, yet
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
having been attained too early, like all pleasures enjoyed too
soon, it had made me blase and indifferent to the pursuit.
Thus neither selfish nor unselfish pleasures were pleasures
to me. And there seemed no power in nature sufficient to
begin the formation of my character anew, and create in a
mind now irretrievably analytic, fresh associations of
pleasure with any of the objects of human desire.
These were the thoughts which mingled with the dry heavy
dejection of the melancholy winter of 1826-1827. During
this time I was not incapable of my usual occupations. I
went on with them mechanically, by the mere force of habit.
I had been so drilled in a certain sort of mental exercise,
that I could still carry it on when all the spirit had gone out
of it. I even composed and spoke several speeches at the
debating society, how, or with what degree of success, I
know not. Of four years' continual speaking at that society,
this is the only year of which I remember next to nothing.
Two lines of Coleridge, in whom alone of all writers'I have
found a true description of what I felt, were often in my
thoughts, not at this time (for I had never read them),
but in a later period of the same mental malady:
Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,
And hope without an object cannot live.
In all probability my case was by no means so peculiar as I
fancied it, and I doubt not that many others have passed
through a similar state; but the idiosyncrasies of my educa-
tion had given to the general phenomenon a special charac-
ter, which made it seem the natural effect of causes that it
was hardly possible for time to remove. I frequently asked
myself, if I could, or if I was bound to go on living, when
life must be passed in this manner. I generally answered
to myself, that I did not think I could possibly bear it beyond
a year. When, however, not more than half that duration
of time had elapsed, a small ray of light broke in upon my
gloom. I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel's Memoires,
and came to the passage which relates his father's death, the
A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY 333
distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration
by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that
he would be everything to them—would supply the place
of all that they had lost. A vivid conception of the scene
and its feelings came over me, and I was moved to tears.
From this moment my burden grew lighter. The oppression
of the thought that all feeling was dead within me, was
gone. I was no longer hopeless: I was not a stock or a
stone. I had still, it seemed, some of the material out of
which all worth of character, and all capacity for happiness,
are made. Relieved from my ever present sense of irreme-
diable wretchedness, I gradually found that the ordinary
incidents of life could again give me some pleasure; that I
could again find enjoyment, riot intense, but sufficient for
cheerfulness, in sunshine and sky, in books, in conversation,
in public affairs; and that there was, once more, excitement,
though of a moderate kind, in exerting myself for my opin-
ions, and for the public good. Thus the cloud gradually
drew off, and I again enjoyed life: and though I had several
relapses, some of which lasted many months, I never again
was as miserable as I had been.
The experiences of this period had two very marked
effects on my opinions and character. In the first place,
they led me to adopt a theory of life, very unlike that on
which I had before acted, and having much in common
with what at that time I certainly had never heard of, the
anti-self-consciousness theory of Carlyle. I never, indeed,
wavered in the conviction that happiness is the test of all
rules of conduct, and the end of life. But I now thought
that this end was only to be attained by not making it the
direct end. Those only are happy (I thought) who have
their minds fixed on some object other than their own happi-
ness; on the happiness of others, on the improvement of
mankind, even on some art or pursuit, followed not as a
means, but as itself an ideal end. Aiming thus at something
else, they find happiness by the way. The enjoyments of
life (such was now my theory) are sufficient to make it a
pleasant thing, when they are taken en passant, without
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
being made a principal object. Once make them so, and
they are immediately felt to be insufficient. They will not
bear a scrutinizing examination. Ask yourself whether you
are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to
treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the
purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny,
your self-interrogation, exhaust themselves on that; and if
otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happi-
ness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or
thinking about it, without either forestalling it in imagina-
tion, or putting it to flight by fatal questioning. This theory
now became the basis of my philosophy of life. And I still
hold to it as the best theory for all those who have but a
moderate degree of sensibility and of capacity for enjoyment,
that is, for the great majority of mankind.
The other important change which my opinions at this
time underwent, was that I, for the first time, gave its proper
place, among the prime necessities of human well-being, to
the internal culture of the individual. I ceased to attach
almost exclusive importance to the ordering of outward cir-
cumstances, and the training of the human being for specu-
lation and for action.
I had now learnt by experience that the passive suscepti-
bilities needed to be cultivated as well as the active capacities,
and required to be nourished and enriched as well as guided.
I did not, for an instant, lose sight of, or undervalue, that
part of the truth which I had seen before; I never turned
recreant to intellectual culture, or ceased to consider the
power and practice of analysis as an essential condition both
of individual and of social improvement. But I thought that
it had consequences which required to be corrected, by join-
ing other kinds of cultivation with it. The maintenance of
a due balance among the faculties, now seemed to me of
primary importance. The cultivation of the feelings became
one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical
creed. And my thoughts and inclinations turned in an in-
creasing degree towards whatever seemed capable of being
instrumental to that object.
A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY 335
I now began to find meaning in the things which I had
read or heard about the importance of poetry and art as
instruments of human culture. But it was some time longer
before I began to know this by personal experience. The
only one of the imaginative arts in which I had from child-
hood taken great pleasure, was music; the best effect of
which (and in this it surpasses perhaps every other art)
consists in exciting enthusiasm; in winding up to a high
pitch those feelings of an elevated kind which are already
in the character, but to which this excitement gives a glow
and a fervor, which, though transitory at its utmost height,
is precious for sustaining them at other times. This effect
of music I had often experienced; but like all my pleasurable
susceptibilities it was suspended during the gloomy period.
I had sought relief again and again from this quarter, but
found none. After the tide had turned, and I was in process
of recovery, I had been helped forward by music, but in a
much less elevated manner. I at this time first became
acquainted with Weber's Oberon, and the extreme pleasure
which I drew from its delicious melodies did me good, by
showing me a source of pleasure to which I was as suscep-
tible as ever. The good, however, was much impaired by
the thought, that the pleasure of music (as is quite true of
such pleasure as this was, that of mere tune) fades with
familiarity, and requires either to be revived by intermit-
tence, or fed by continual novelty. And it is very character-
istic both of my then state, and of the general tone of my
mind at this period of my life, that I was seriously tormented
by the thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations.
The octave consists only of five tones and two semi-tones,
which can be put together in only a limited number of ways,
of which but a small proportion are beautiful: most of
these, it seemed to me, must have been already discovered,
and there could not be room for a long succession of Mozarts
and Webers, to strike out, as these had done, entirely new
and surpassingly rich veins of musical beauty. This source
of anxiety may, perhaps, be thought to resemble that of the
philosophers of Laputa, who feared lest the sun should be
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
burnt out. It was, however, connected with the best feature
in my character, and the only good point to be found in my
very unromantic and in no way honorable distress. For
though my dejection, honestly looked at, could not be called
other than egotistical, produced by the ruin, as I thought,
of my fabric of happiness, yet the destiny of mankind in
general was ever in my thoughts, and could not be separated
from my own. I felt that the flaw in my life must be a flaw
in life itself ; that the question was, whether, if the reformers
of society and government could succeed in their objects,
and every person in the community were free and in a state
of physical comfort, the pleasures of life, being no longer
kept up by struggle and privation, would cease to be pleas-
ures. And I felt that unless I could see my way to some
better hope than this for human happiness in general my
dejection must continue; but that if I could see such an
outlook, I should then look on the world with pleasure;
content as far as I was myself concerned, with any fair
share of the general lot.
This state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of
my reading Wordsworth for the first time (in the autumn
of 1828), an important event in my life. I took up the col-
lection of his poems from curiosity, with no expectation of
mental relief from it, though I had before resorted to poetry
with that hope. In the worst period of my depression, I
had read through the whole of Byron (then new to me), to
try whether a poet, whose peculiar department was supposed
to be that of the intenser feelings, could rouse any feeling in
me. As might be expected, I got no good from this reading,
but the reverse. The poet's state of mind was too like my
own. His was the lament of a man who had worn out all
pleasures, and who seemed to think that life, to all who
possess the good things of it, must necessarily be the vapid,
uninteresting thing which I found it. His Harold and Man-
fred had the same burden on them which I had; and I was
not in a frame of mind to desire any comfort from the vehe-
ment sensual passion of his Giaours, or the sullenness of his
Laras. But while Byron was exactly what did not suit my
A CRISIS IN MY MENTAL HISTORY 337
condition, Wordsworth was exactly what did. I had looked
into the Excursion two or three years before, and found
little in it; and I should probably have found as little, had I
read it at this time. But the miscellaneous poems, in the
two-volume edition of 1815 (to which little of value was
added in the latter part of the author's life), proved to be
the precise thing for my mental wants at that particular
juncture.
In the first place, these poems addressed themselves power-
fully to one of the strongest of my pleasurable suscepti-
bilities, the love of rural objects and natural scenery; to
which I had been indebted not only for much of the pleasure
of my life, but quite recently for relief from one of my
longest relapses into depression. In this power of rural
beauty over me, there was a foundation laid for taking
pleasure in Wordsworth's poetry; the more so, as his scenery
lies mostly among mountains, which, owing to my early
Pyrenean excursion, were my ideal of natural beauty. But
Wordsworth would never have had any great effect on me,
if he had merely placed before me beautiful pictures of
natural scenery. Scott does this still better than Words-
worth, and a very second-rate landscape does it more effec-
tually than any poet. What made Wordsworth's poems a
medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed,
not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of
thought colored by feeling, under the excitement of beauty.
They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings which
I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source
of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasures,
which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no
connection with struggle or imperfection, but would be
made richer by every improvement in the physical or social
condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn what
would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the
greater evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt
myself at once better and happier as I came under their
influence. There have certainly been, even in our own age,
greater poets than Wordsworth; but poetry of deeper and
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
loftier feeling could not have done for me at that time what
his did. I needed to be made to feel that there was real,
permanent happiness in tranquil contemplation. Words-
worth taught me this, not only without turning away from,
but with a greatly increased interest in the common feelings
and common destiny of human beings. And the delight
which these poems gave me, proved that with culture of this
sort, there was nothing to dread from the most confirmed
habit of analysis. At the conclusion of the poems came the
famous ode, falsely called Platonic, Intimations of Immor-
tality: in which, along with more than his usual sweetness
of melody and rhythm, and along with the two passages of
grand imagery but bad philosophy so often quoted, I found
that he too had had similar experience to mine; that he also
had felt that the first freshness of youthful enjoyment of
life was not lasting; but that he had sought for compensa-
tion, and found it, in the way in which he was now teaching
me to find it. The result was that I gradually, but com-
pletely, emerged from my habitual depression, and was never
again subject to it. I long continued to value Wordsworth
less according to his intrinsic merits, than by the measure
of what he had done for me. Compared with the greatest
poets, he may be said to be the poet of unpoetical natures,
possessed of quiet and contemplative tastes. But unpoetical
natures are precisely those which require poetic cultivation.
This cultivation Wordsworth is much more fitted to give,
than poets who are intrinsically far more poets than he.
A MESSAGE TO GARCIA1
Elbert Hubbard
Elbert Hubbard had the journalist's sense of the importance of
advertising. In fact, he seldom hesitated even to advertise himself.
Some people thought this in bad taste; but Mr. Hubbard allowed
them to think what they wished, and went on his merry way. To
many, he has redeemed himself through two acts: his writing of
The Message to Garcia, and his meeting his death like a courageous
gentleman when the great liner Lusitania went down. Tempera-
mental, self-possessed, kindly, showy, yet with real solidity of char-
acter, he attracted many and varied followers. He was born in
Bloomington, Illinois, in 1859, and was educated, according to his
own statement, in the "University of Hard Knocks. The Philis-
tine, the Little Journeys and "The Roycrofters still stand as monu-
ments to his memory.
In all this Cuban business there is one man stands out on
the horizon of my memory like Mars at perihelion. When
war broke out between Spain and the United States, it was
very necessary to communicate quickly with the leader of
the Insurgents. Garcia was somewhere in the mountain
fastnesses of Cuba—no one knew where. No mail nor
telegraph message could reach him. The President must
secure his cooperation, and quickly. What to do!
Some one said to the President, "There is a fellow by the
name of Rowan will find Garcia for you, if anybody can.
Rowan was sent for and given a letter to be delivered to
Garcia. How the "fellow by the name of Rowan took the
letter, sealed it up in an oilskin pouch, strapped it over his
heart, in four days landed by night off the coast of Cuba
from an open boat, disappeared into the jungle, and in three
weeks came out on the other side of the island, having
traversed a hostile country on foot, and delivered his letter
to Garcia—are things I have no special desire now to tell
1 Reprinted by special permission of "The Roycrofters.
339
340
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
in detail. The point that I wish to make is this: McKinley
gave Rowan a letter to be delivered to Garcia; Rowan took
the letter and did not ask, "Where is he at?
By the Eternal! there is a man whose form should be cast
in deathless bronze and the statue placed in every college of
the land. It is not book-learning young men need, nor in-
struction about this and that, but a stiffening of the vertebra
which will cause them to be loyal to a trust, to act promptly,
concentrate their energies: do the thing—"Carry a message
to Garcia.
General Garcia is dead now, but there are other Garcias.
No man who has endeavored to carry out an enterprise
where many hands were needed, but has been well-nigh
appalled at times by the imbecility of the average man—the
inability or unwillingness to concentrate on a thing and do it.
Slipshod assistance, foolish inattention, dowdy indifference,
and half-hearted work seem the rule; and no man succeeds,
unless by hook or crook or threat he forces or bribes other
men to assist him; or mayhap, God in His goodness per-
forms a miracle, and sends him an Angel of Light for
an assistant.
You, reader, put this matter to a test: You are sitting now
in your office—six clerks are within call. Summon any one
and make this request: "Please look in the encyclopedia and
make a brief memorandum for me concerning the life of
Correggio.
Will the clerk quietly say, "Yes, sir, and go do the task?
On your life he will not. He will look at you out of a fishy
eye and ask one or more of the following questions: Who
was he? Which encyclopedia? Where is the encyclopedia?
Was I hired for that? Don't you mean Bismarck? What's
the matter with Charlie doing it ? Is he dead ? Is there any
hurry ? Sha'n't I bring you the book and let you look it up
yourself? What do you want to know for? And I will lay
you ten to one that after you have answered the questions,
and explained how to find the information, and why you want
it, the clerk will go off and get one of the other clerks to help
him try to find Correggio—and then come back and tell you
A MESSAGE TO GARCIA
there is no such man. Of course I may lose my bet, but
according to the Law of Average I will not.
No, if you are wise, you will not bother to explain to your
"assistant that Correggio is indexed under the C's, not in
the K's, but you will smile sweetly and say, "Never mind,
and go look it up yourself.
And this incapacity for independent action, this moral
stupidity, this infirmity of the will, this unwillingness to
cheerfully catch hold and lift—these are the things that put
pure Socialism so far into the future. If men will not act
for themselves, what will they do when the benefit of their
effort is for all? A first mate with knotted club seems
necessary; and the dread of getting "the bounce Saturday
night holds many a worker to his place. Advertise for a
stenographer, and nine out of ten who apply can neither
spell nor punctuate—and do not think it necessary to. Can
such a one write a letter to Garcia ?
"You see that bookkeeper, said the foreman to me in a
large factory.
"Yes; what about him?
"Well, he's a fine accountant, but if I'd send him up-town
on an errand, he might accomplish the errand all right, and
on the other hand, might stop at four saloons on the way,
and when he got to Main Street would forget what he had
been sent for. Can such a man be entrusted to carry a
message to Garcia?
We have recently been hearing much maudlin sympathy
expressed for the "down-trodden denizens of the sweat-
shop and the "homeless wanderer searching for honest em-
ployment, and with it all often go many hard words for
the man in power. Nothing is said about the employer who
grows old before his time in a vain attempt to get frowsy
ne'er-do-wells to do intelligent work; and his long, patient
striving after "help that does nothing but loaf when his
back is turned. In every store and factory there is a con-
stant weeding-out process going on. The employer is con-
stantly sending away "help that have shown their incapacity
to further the interests of the business, and others are
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
being taken on. No matter how good times are, this sorting
continues: only if times are hard and work is scarce, this
sorting is done finer—but out and forever out the incompe-
tent and unworthy go. It is the survival of the fittest.
Self-interest prompts every employer to keep the best—
those who can carry a message to Garcia.
I know one man of really brilliant parts who has not the
ability to manage a business of his own, and yet who is ab-
solutely worthless to any one else, because he carries with
him constantly the insane suspicion that his employer is op-
pressing, or intending to oppress him. He can not give
orders, and he will not receive them. Should a message be
given him to take to Garcia, his answer would probably be,
"Take it yourself! To-night this man walks the streets
looking for work, the wind whistling through his threadbare
coat. No one who knows him dare employ him, for he is a
regular firebrand of discontent. He is impervious to reason,
and the only thing that can impress him is the toe of a thick-
soled No. 9 boot.
Of course I know that one so morally deformed is no less
to be pitied than a physical cripple; but in our pitying let
us drop a tear, too, for the men who are striving to carry on
a great enterprise, whose working hours are not limited by
the whistle, and whose hair is fast turning white through
the struggle to hold in line dowdy indifference, slipshod im-
becility, and the heartless ingratitude which, but for their
enterprise, would be both hungry and homeless.
Have I put the matter too strongly ? Possibly I have; but
when all the world has gone a-slumming I wish to speak
a word of sympathy for the man who succeeds—the man
who, against great odds, has directed the efforts of others,
and having succeeded, finds there's nothing in it: nothing
but bare board and clothes. I have carried a dinner-pail and
worked for day's wages, and I have also been an employer
of labor, and I know there is something to be said on both
sides. There is no excellence, per se, in poverty; rags are no
recommendation; and all employers are not rapacious and
high-handed, any more than all poor men are virtuous. My
A MESSAGE TO GARCIA 343
heart goes out to the man who does his work when the
"boss is away, as well as when he is at home. And the man
who, when given a letter for Garcia, quietly takes the mis-
sive, without asking any idiotic questions, and with no lurk-
ing intention of chucking it into the nearest sewer, or of
doing aught else but deliver it, never gets "laid off, nor has
to go on a strike for higher wages. Civilization is one long
anxious search for just such individuals. Anything such a
man asks shall be granted. He is wanted is every city, town,
and village—in every office, shop, store, and factory. The
world cries out for such: he is needed badly—the man who
can Carry a Message to Garcia.
WHY DO SO MANY MEN NEVER AMOUNT
TO ANYTHING?1
Thomas A. Edison
Mr. Edison, known by his generation as a veritable wizard in his
work with electricity, has been one of the best illustrations of his
own definition of genius: "ninety-nine per cent perspiration and one
per cent inspiration. At the same time he has been much impressed
with Sir Joshua Reynolds' remark: "There is no expedient to which
man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking. Mr. Edison
is possessed of a practical, inventive mind, which is revealed in
everything that he does and says. Born at Milan, Ohio, in 1847, he
tersely describes his education thus: "Received some instruction
from my mother. At twelve he was a railway news-boy; later, a
telegraph operator; subsequently the greatest inventive genius of his
age. He is credited with more than a thousand patented inventions.
Every man has some forte, something he can do better
than he can do anything else. Many men, however, never
find the job they are best suited for. And often this is be-
cause they do not think enough. Too many men drift lazily
into any job, suited or unsuited for them; and when they
do not get along well, they blame everybody and everything
except themselves. Grouches are nearly always "pinheads,
small men who have never made any effort to improve their
mental capacity.
Why do so many men never amount to anything? It is
because they do not think!
There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to
avoid the real labor of thinking. There is hardly a day that
I do not discover how painfully true these words of Sir
Joshua Reynolds are. What progress individuals could
make, and what progress the world would make, if thinking
1 Reprinted from The American Magazine, by permission of the
publishers. Volume XCI.
344
WHY MEN NEVER AMOUNT TO ANYTHING 345
were given proper consideration! It seems to me that not
one man in a thousand appreciates what can be accomplished
by training the mind to think.
It is because they do not use their thinking powers that so
many people have never developed a creditable mentality.
The brain can be developed just the same as the muscles
can be developed, if one will only take .the pains to train
the mind to think. The brain that is not used rusts. The
brain that is used responds. The brain is exactly like any
other part of the body: it can be strengthened by proper
exercise, by proper use. Put your arm in a sling and keep
it there for a considerable length of time, and when you
take it out, you find that you can not use it. In the same
way, the brain that is not used suffers atrophy.
I said that there is something every man can do, if he
can only find out what that something is. Henry Ford has
proved this. He has installed in his vast organization a
system for taking hold of a man who fails in one depart-
ment, and giving him a chance in some other department.
Where necessary every effort is made to discover just what
job the man is capable of filling. The result has been that
very few men have had to be discharged, for it has been
found that there was some kind of work each man could do
at least moderately well. This wonderful system adopted
by my friend Ford has helped many a man to find himself.
It has put many a fellow on his feet. It has taken round
pegs out of square holes, and found a round hole for them.
I understand that last year only 120 workers out of his
force of 50,000 were discharged.
Let me cite an illustration from our own organization of
how a man can be taught to think; and how, by doing
enough hard thinking, he has accomplished something far
beyond what would have seemed possible. When I was a
youth, I saved the life of a little boy by snatching him off a
railway track just as a train was about to run over him.
The boy's father was a telegraph operator, and to show his
gratitude he taught me telegraphy. Years after, things did
not go well with him and he came to see me. He told me
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
that he was down and out, that apparently he was a "lunk-
head. I said to him, "Mack, I have an order from a con-
cern which wants to have a machine invented to do a cer-
tain thing. See if you can not work it out.
He told me he never had invented anything, and he was
quite sure he never could. I told him to go ahead and do
his best, and that meanwhile I would give him enough sal-
ary to keep him and his family alive. By and by he came
to me with an idea. We tried it out; but it did not work.
He was discouraged; but I insisted that he keep right at it,
and see if he could not find what was the matter, and then
try and get around it. He did, and finally conceived a work-
able machine. The concern gladly paid five thousand dol-
lars for it. This so encouraged him that he tried his hand
at inventing other things, and became the inventor of quite
a number of small things.
Now, how did this man manage to accomplish the things
he did? Simply because he used his thinking powers. He
did not succeed at first; but because of my urging he kept
at it until he developed his mind sufficiently to do the job.
By developing your thinking powers you expand the ca-
pacity of your brain and attain new abilities. For example,
the average person's brain does not observe a thousandth
part of what the eye observes. The average brain simply
fails to register the things which come before the eye. It
is almost incredible how poor our powers of observation—
genuine observation—are.
Let me give you an illustration. When we first started
the incandescent lighting system we had a lamp factory at
the bottom of a hill, at Menlo Park. It was a very busy time
for all of us. Seventy-five of us worked twenty hours every
day and slept only four hours—and thrived on it. I fed
them all, and I had a man play an organ all the time we
were at work. One midnight, while at lunch, a matter came
up which caused me to refer to a cherry tree beside the. hill
leading from the main works to the lamp factory. Nobody
seemed to know anything about the location of the cherry
tree. This made me conduct a little investigation, and I
WHY MEN NEVER AMOUNT TO ANYTHING 347
found that although twenty-seven of these had used this
path every day for six months not one of them had ever
noticed the tree.
The eye sees a great many things, but the average brain
records very few of them. Indeed, nobody has the slightest
conception of how little the brain "sees unless it has been
highly trained. I remember dropping in to see a man whose
duty was to watch the working of a hundred machines on
a table. I asked him if everything was all right. "Yes,
everything was all right, he said. But I had already no-
ticed that two of the machines had stopped. I drew his at-
tention to them, and he was mortified. He confessed that,
although his sole duty was to watch and see that every ma-
chine was working, he had not noticed that these two had
stopped.
I do not know whether the woeful failure of most people
to think is due to faulty methods of teaching in our schools
or not, but I am inclined to think it is. It seems to me that
either the teachers are not practical, or else the authorities
do not furnish the right kind of practical books. The more
experience I have with young men, the more I am inclined
to think that something serious is wrong with both our com-
mon school and our college systems of education. The boys
and young men are taught a lot of theories which they seem
to learn by rote. At any rate, very few of them are taught
to do any thinking of their own. I can very rarely find
even a college graduate who can think to any purpose.
I had a recent experience which proves how true—and
tragic—this is. I advertised for industrial chemists. The
advertisement explained clearly what I wanted: industrial
chemists with experience in managing small chemical works
making a diversity of chemicals. Thirty-six applicants came.
I had personally written out a questionnaire containing for-
ty-eight questions. These questions were all exceedingly
simple. If these applicants had had the experience which
the advertisement called for they could have answered every
one of the questions readily. But would you believe that
out of thirty-six at least thirty could not answer even ten
348
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
of the questions? Yet these young men had good recom-
mendations, and many of them had worked for big con-
cerns.
The trouble was that they had never done any thinking.
Eighty-five per cent of them gave a formula for one thing
which does not exist! I got only one man out of the lot who
was worth engaging.
It is the same way with many mechanical engineers. They
are not mechanical engineers at all. They are utterly in-
competent. Yet every large concern is employing many of
these incompetents, causing loss to the companies—and,
therefore, to the public—of untold millions. If concerns
would only get up a little questionnaire and have candidates
for positions take this test, at least the worst of the incom-
petents could be prevented from being put into positions
where their gross inability results in incalculable loss. How
badly this country needs competent industrial chemists, en-
gineers, electricians, and other men of scientific training! It
needs these men more to-day than ever before, because the
opportunities to raise America's place among the industrial
nations of the world are greater now than ever before.
The world-wide dislocation caused by the war has opened
innumerable new doors for Americans. We have a chance
to do a lot of things which were formerly done by Ger-
many. Almost any salary would be gladly paid by chemical
companies, electric companies, steel companies, automobile
companies, rubber companies, and concerns like Eastman
Kodak and the DuPonts for brainy, thoroughly-trained
men capable of thinking up improved processes.
And how easy it would really be for men to qualify for
such places. It would take only a little study, only a little
earnest, sustained, concentrated thinking. It would not be
hard.
Many men holding executive positions have this same
aversion to thinking. They have fifteen or twenty letters to
write of a morning, and they will reply to all the easy ones,
but balk at one requiring real thought and decision. They
paw over it and put it off and off. They can not bring them-
WHY MEN NEVER AMOUNT TO ANYTHING 349
selves to do the amount of thinking necessary to give an in-
telligent decision. Needless to say, these procrastinators are
not the type who become really big executives.
The man who is of the stuff that makes a big executive
usually tackles the hardest things first. He does not neces-
sarily decide an important matter right away. He either
takes the papers home with him or carries the substance of
the matter in his mind, thinks it all over from every angle,,
and then is in a position to dictate his decision the following
morning. Such men may appear to decide things quickly;
and, in a sense, they do decide quickly; but the decision does
not come until they have thought the thing out.
Thinking, after a while, becomes the most pleasurable
thing in the world. Give me a satchel and a fishing rod,
and I could hie myself off and keep busy at thinking forever.
I do not need anybody to amuse me. It is the same way
with my friends John Burroughs, the naturalist, and Henry
Ford, who is a natural-born mechanic. We can derive the
most satisfying kind of joy from thinking and thinking and
thinking.
 The man who does not make up his mind to cultivate the
habit of thinking misses the greatest pleasure in life. He
not only misses the greatest pleasure, but he can not make
the most of himself. "All progress, all success, springs from
thinking/ Of course, even the most concentrated thinking
can not solve every new problem that the brain can con-
ceive. It usually takes me from five to seven years to per-
feet a thing. Some things I have been working on for twen-
ty-five years—and some of them are still unsolved. My
average would be about seven years. The incandescent light
was the hardest one of all; it took many years not only of
concentrated thought but also of world-wide research. The
storage battery took eight years. It took even longer to per-
feet the phonograph.
One great trouble with the world to-day is that people
wander from place to place, and are never satisfied with
anything. They are shiftless and thoughtless. They re-
volt at buckling down and doing hard work and hard think-
350
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
ing. They refuse to take the time and the trouble to lay
solid foundations. They are too superficial, too flighty, too
easily bored. They fail to adopt the right spirit toward
their life work, and consequently fail to enjoy the satisfac-
tion and the happiness which come from doing a job, no
matter what it is, absolutely in the best way within their
power. Failing to find the joy which they should find in
accomplishing something, they turn to every imaginable
variety of amusement. Instead of learning to drink in joy
through their minds, they try to find it, without effort,
through their eyes and their ears—and sometimes their
stomachs.
It is all because they will not think!
In trying to perfect a thing I sometimes run straight up
against a granite wall a hundred feet high. If, after trying
and trying and trying again, I can not get over it, I turn to
something else. Then some day, it may be months or it
may be years later, something is discovered either by my-
self or some one else, or something happens in some part of
the world, which I recognize may help me to scale at least
part of that wall.
I never allow myself to become discouraged under any
circumstances. I recall that after we had conducted thou-
sands of experiments on a certain project without solving
the problem, one of my associates, after we had conducted
the crowning experiment and it had proved a failure, ex-
pressed discouragement and disgust over our having failed
"to find out anything. I cheerfully assured him that we
had learned something. For we had learned for a certainty
that the thing could not be done that way, and that we would
have to try some other way. We sometimes learn a lot from
our failures if we have put into the effort the best thought
and work we are capable of.
MARY WHITE1
William Allen White
William Allen White has gained distinction as the Editor of the
Emporia Gazette, as a writer of short stories, magazine articles and
novels. Through each of these channels he has constantly pre-
sented popular expositions of his sound political and social princi-
pies. He is characterized by the eminent sanity of his thinking.
The present essay is revealing, both of the author's manhood and
of his literary mastery. Written the day of his daughter's burial,
the words are intense with restrained grief, and beautiful in their
simplicity.
The Associated Press reports carrying the news of Mary
White's death declared that it came as the result of a fall
from a horse. How she would have hooted at that! She
never fell from a horse in her life. Horses have fallen on
her and with her—"I'm always trying to hold 'em in my
lap, she used to say. But she was proud of few things,
and one was that she could ride anything that had four legs
and hair. Her death resulted not from a fall, but from a
blow on the head which fractured her skull, and the blow
came from the limb of an overhanging tree on the parking.
The last hour of her life was typical of its happiness.
She came home from a day's work at school, topped off by a
hard grind with the copy on the High School Annual, and
felt that a ride would refresh her. She climbed into her
khakis, chattering to her mother about the work she was
doing, and hurried to get her horse and be out on the dirt
roads for the country air and the radiant green fields of the
spring. As she rode through the town on an easy gallop she
kept waving at passers-by. She knew every one in town.
For a decade the little figure with the long pig-tail and the
i Written for the Emporia Gazette, Emporia, Kansas, which Mr.
White has edited since 1895.
351
352
SUCCESSFUL LIVING
red hair ribbon has been familiar on the streets of Emporia,
and she got in the way of speaking to those who nodded at
her. She passed the Kerrs, walking the horse, in front of
the Normal Library, and waved at them; passed another
friend a few hundred feet further on, and waved at her.
The horse was walking and, as she turned into North Mer-
chant Street she took off her cowboy hat, and the horse
swung into a lope. She passed the Tripletts and waved her
cowboy hat at them, still moving gaily north on Merchant
Street. A Gazette carrier passed—a High School boy friend
—and she waved at him, but with her bridle hand; the horse
veered quickly, plunged into the parking where the low-
hanging limb faced her, and, while she still looked back
waving, the blow came. But she did not fall from the horse,
she slipped off, dazed a bit, staggered, and fell in a faint.
She never quite recovered consciousness.
But she did not fall from the horse, neither was she riding
fast. A year or so ago she used to go like the wind. But
that habit was broken, and she used the horse to get into
the open to get fresh, hard exercise, and to work off a cer-
tain surplus energy that welled up in her and needed a physi-
cal outlet. That need has been in her heart for years. It
was back of the impulse that kept the dauntless, little brown-
clad figure on the streets and country roads of this com-
munity and built into a strong, muscular body what had been
a frail and sickly frame during the first years of her life.
But the riding gave her more than a body. It released a
gay and hardy soul. She was the happiest thing in the
world. And she was happy because she was enlarging her
horizon. She came to know all sorts and conditions of men;
Charley O'Brien, the traffic cop, was one of her best friends.
W. L. Holtz, the Latin teacher, was another. Tom O'Con-
nor, farmer-politician, and Rev. J. H. J. Rice, preacher and
police judge, and Frank Beach, music master, were her spe-
cial friends, and all the girls, black and white, above the
track and below the track, in Pepville and Stringtown, were
among her acquaintances. And she brought home riotous
stories of her adventures. She loved to rollick; persiflage
MARY WHITE 353
was her natural expression at home. Her humor was a
continual bubble of joy. She seemed to think in hyperbole
and metaphor. She was mischievous without malice, as full
of faults as an old shoe. No angel was Mary White, but
an easy girl to live with, for she never nursed a grouch five
minutes in her life.
With all her eagerness for the out-of-doors, she loved
books. On her table when she left her room were a book
by Conrad, one by Galsworthy, Creative Chemistry, by E. E.
Slosson, and a Kipling book. She read Mark Twain, Dick-
ens, and Kipling before she was ten—all of their writings.
Wells and Arnold Bennett particularly amused and diverted
her. She was entered as a student in Wellesley in 1922; was
assistant editor of the High School Annual this year, and in
line for election to the editorship of the Annual next year.
She was a member of the executive committee of the High
School Y. W. C. A.
Within the last two years she had begun to be moved by
an ambition to draw. She began as most children do by
scribbling in her school books, funny pictures. She bought
cartoon magazines and took a course—rather casually, nat-
urally, for she was, after all, a child with no strong pur-
poses—and this year she tasted the first fruits of success
by having her pictures accepted by the High School Annual.
But the thrill of delight she got when Mr. Ecord, of the
Normal Annual, asked her to do the cartooning for that
book this spring, was too beautiful for words. She fell to
her work with all her enthusiastic heart. Her drawings
were accepted, and her pride—always repressed by a lively
sense of the ridiculousness of the figure she was cutting—
was a really gorgeous thing to see. No successful artist
ever drank a deeper draught of satisfaction than she took
from the little fame her work was getting among her school-
fellows. In her glory, she almost forgot her horse—but
never her car.
For she used the car as a jitney bus. It was her social
life. She never had a "party in all her nearly seventeen
years—wouldn't have one; but she never drove a block in
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
the car in her life that she didn't begin to fill the car with
pick-ups! Everybody rode with Mary White—white and
black, old and young, rich and poor, men and women. She
liked nothing better than to fill the car full of long-legged
High School boys and an occasional girl, and parade the
town. She never had a "date, nor went to a dance, except
once with her brother, Bill, and the "boy proposition didn't
interest her—yet. But young people—great spring-breaking,
varnish-cracking, fender-bending, door-sagging carloads of
"kids gave her great pleasure. Her zests were keen. But
the most fun she ever had in her life was acting as chair-
man of the committee that got up the big turkey dinner for
the poor folks at the county home; scores of pies, gallons
of slaw; jam, cakes, preserves, oranges, and a wilderness
of turkey were loaded in the car and taken to the county
home. And, being of a practical turn of mind, she risked
her own Christmas dinner by staying to see that the poor
folks actually got it all. Not that she was a cynic; she just
disliked to tempt folks. While there she found a blind
colored uncle, very old, who could do nothing but make rag
rugs, and she rustled up from her school friends rags enough
to keep him busy for a season. The last engagement she
tried to make was to take the guests at the county home out
for a car ride. And the last endeavor of her life was to try
to get a rest room for colored girls in the High School.
She found one girl reading in the toilet, because there was
no better place for a colored girl to loaf, and it inflamed her
sense of injustice, and she became a nagging harpie to those
who, she thought, could remedy the evil. The poor she had
always with her, and was glad of it. She hungered and
thirsted for righteousness; and was the most impious crea-
ture in the world. She joined the Congregational Church
without consulting her parents; not particularly for her
soul's good. She never had a thrill of piety in her life, and
would have hooted at a "testimony. But even as a little
child she felt the church was an agency for helping people
to more of life's abundance, and she wanted to help. She
never wanted help for herself. Clothes meant little to her.
MARY WHITE 355
It was a fight to get a new rig on her; but eventually a
harder fight to get it off. She never wore a jewel and had
no ring but her High School class ring, and never asked for
anything but a wrist watch. She refused to have her hair
up; though she was nearly seventeen. "Mother, she pro-
tested, you don't know how much I get by with, in my
braided pigtails, that I could not with my hair up. Above
every other passion of her life was her passion not to grow
up, to be a child. The tom-boy in her, which was big,
seemed to loathe to be put away forever in skirts. She was
a Peter Pan, who refused to grow up.
Her funeral yesterday at the Congregational Church was
as she would have wished it; no singing, no flowers save the
big bunch of red roses from her Brother Bill's Harvard
classmen—Heavens, how proud that would have made her!
and the red roses from the Gazette force—in vases at her
head and feet. A short prayer, Paul's beautiful essay on
"Love from the Thirteenth Chapter of First Corinthians,
some remarks about her democratic spirit by her friend,
John H. J. Rice, pastor and police judge, which she would
have deprecated if she could, a prayer sent down for her by
her friend, Carl Nau, and opening the service the slow poig-
nant movement from Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, which
she loved, and closing the service a cutting from the joy-
ously melancholy first movement of Tschaikowski's Pathetic
Symphony, which she liked to hear in certain moods on the
phonograph; then the Lord's Prayer by her friends in the
High School.
That was all.
For her pall-bearers only her friends were chosen; her
Latin teacher—W. L. Holtz; her High School principal,
Rice Brown; her doctor, Frank Foncannon; her friend,
W. W. Finney; her pal at the Gazette office, Walter Hughes;
and her brother Bill. It would have made her smile to
know that her friend, Charley O'Brien, the traffic cop, had
been transferred from Sixth and Commercial to the corner
near the church to direct her friends who came to bid her
good-by.
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SUCCESSFUL LIVING
A rift in the clouds in a gray day threw a shaft of sun-
light upon her coffin as her nervous, energetic little body
sank to its last sleep. But the soul of her, the glowing,
gorgeous, fervent soul of her, surely was flaming in eager
joy upon some other dawn.