Chapter I Walled In
The brave man carves out his fortune, and every man is the son of his own works.—CERVANTES
An author is of necessity a rather egotistical sort of a fellow, or else he would not trumpet abroad his name upon the title-page of a book. If we should measure this egotism by the size of the audience to which he hopes to appeal, we fear that the sponsor of this little book should make humble apologies in behalf of his phrenological egocentric bump. He who writes upon how to grow fat, modestly limits his audience to those who, from pride of appearance, or upon doctor’s orders, desire to add to their avoirdupois. There is a similar modesty upon the part of those who limit their audiences by writing cook-books for the cooks, temperance appeals for the drunkards, novels for the seminary ladies, war books for the valiant, peace books for the pacificists. We (notwithstanding the fact that he fears to call himself “I” in the first chapter) acknowledge no such modesty. Every one wants to get the best of life. This general statement is as true as the more specific ones that every one wants to enjoy his dinner, his work, his family, and his friends. The desire to obtain satisfaction through the passing of the years is the prime motive in the actions of the male and the female, the fat and the thin, the long and the short, the stupid and the wise, the railroad president and the ditch digger. It is for this cosmopolitan, democratic crowd of you and myself and every one else that there is, or is not, a message in the following pages.
One of the most stimulating thoughts to which mankind is heir is the realization of the handicaps under which we are all laboring. This is a great thought in that it is so universal, so levelling, so powerful in making us truly appreciate that we are all brothers one unto another. The millionaire is a slave to his money; another man is embittered by poverty, a third carries the burden of an unsound body, a fourth of a selfish nature, a fifth of an unhappy family life, a sixth is overwhelmed by his own stupidity, a seventh by his sense of duty towards others, an eighth by a sense of duty towards himself, and so it goes through the rank and file, the humble and the mighty. How many of us take the bit in our teeth, and have a glorious revel in enjoying every furlong of life’s race-course? To run such a race is a hard task, as there is always some handicap hanging on our shoulders. We are afraid to knock it off. Oftentimes the burden is terrifically hard for the man who carries it to define, and yet, when you look into your inmost self you realize that the precious hours of life are slipping by without your cramming into them all the good things that you feel should be offered by a world in which there is the romance of other people’s lives, the blue of the sky, the play of the sunlight, the success of your rivals. There seems too often a wall between ourselves and that romance, that sky, that sunlight and that success. There is indeed this wall between us and our ideal. If we break through it, there is another one that dares our courage to the assault and capture of our greater, enlarged ideal. This is stimulating and comforting, as each man and woman has to make his own assault; there is no one so lucky as to get the prizes of life without a fight, and no one so unlucky as to be without the desire, no matter how deeply it may be buried in his nature, to make that fight.
In what direction are you going, and what are you going to do when you get there? Are you plugging against an impassable barrier, or is there a way through for the man who does his best? Some lie down in the traces and quit. They have three satisfactory meals a day, work that is not too arduous, a warm bed at night, and, taking it all in all, that is sufficient; at any rate, they think it better than the attempt to break down any more walls. Perhaps they bruised their knuckles at the first: “George Washington, Thomas Edison, and the other heroes were not afraid of the blows at the first or at the score that followed, but we all cannot be great, and I am willing to subside with what is already my portion.” Yes, that is the attitude of the slackers. They are in every walk of life—the stupidly content.
There are many others who say that if they could only lift the mortgage off their house, or buy an automobile, or get into society, or get promoted, they could pass untouched through the barrier that crushes them, and be ready to tackle the second with unheard-of power. They are sadly suffering under an illusion. When you take the spur from a laggard steed, you do not make him a thoroughbred.
Two thousand years ago Christ told us that unless we become as little children we cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven. That was a tremendous statement, and one of infinite truth. To find the reasons for our struggles and the means of carrying our burdens we must go to the boy of ten.
He is having a splendid time! Are you? From the moment he leaves his bed with a whoop and a hurrah, until the evening when he sinks to sleep exhausted but happy, he has lived in a turmoil of adventure, wild dreams, and imaginings. The world has been a magic pleasure dome from which there were countless doors to be opened and beckoning passages to be explored. We have our troubles and sulk under their weight, he longs for them and so invents the game of Cowboys and Indians and glories in the battle; we become bored with a routine existence, he scorns such an attitude and fears that he will miss a great excitement if he but close an eye. If rainy weather or a particular mother prevents him from organizing a military campaign, fraught with danger and hardship, against the enemies in the next block, he stays at home and reads of battling with dragons. The world is forever a thing of wonder, a tremendous feast from which he is forever called before he has had sufficient courses. Hungry for life, he cannot find within the twenty-four half enough hours to fulfil his demands. A fishing-rod in his eyes is a magic thing with an incarnate life and power of its own; the dark pool contains a possible catfish, and what, by all the stars, could be more wonderful, more inexplicable, more mysterious and awe inspiring than a bearded catfish! Every new friend, old or young, is a peculiar individual of which he must ask a thousand questions to find out whether he be an engineer, a policeman, or a fireman, or whether he can spin a top or owns a collection of postage stamps.
What a lesson in the way of life is a lad of ten! He sees in life an opportunity, a vast opportunity for everything. No specialist is he—within the month he decides that his career shall lie in any one of a dozen, from that of the man upon the back of the ice wagon, to that of the President of the United States.
Why are the young so superior to their elders? Why, indeed, do we have to cast off our years to enter the Kingdom of Heaven? Ponce de Leon, in search of the Fountain of Youth, journeyed from Spain to the New World, and, weary of the quest, left his body to rot in the American wilderness. He need not have gone so far upon his travels, as in the point of view of the last boy whom he met before embarking from the shores of Spain there was this very Fountain which he sought. To break down all the barriers which hedge us in, to open a thousand doors entering upon undiscovered countries of ambition and delight, to forget time, to forget everything but the joy of living, to experience the thrill of carrying heavy burdens and the overcoming of obstacles, all we have to do is to see the world through the eyes of the boy of ten. It is the youth’s relation to the world as he finds it that makes him superior to, and a more worthy inheritor of the Kingdom than is his father. The former’s outlook is that of perpetual wonderment, of endless romance, of intensive interest, and wide horizons; the latter’s too often is that of a blind man in a picture gallery. A lad lives acutely, never lets an hour “slip by,” is ever willing for an assault against any battlement, and in that lies the secret of life.
Most things, to be sure, are “easier said than done,” but after having found that the proper door to open is that which leads to the world of fervid expectancies, experienced by the boy, we may at least attempt to find the key that fits the lock. Perhaps you have already found it! This is a good personal test—do you feel that your mind is a-tingle with the music that is played by the world in which you live?
It has been said that you can tell a man by the company he keeps—but there are far better methods! Find out his experiences when he walks along a city street, rubbing elbows with the crowd, dodging motors at the crossings, with every step he takes passing faces, human faces, passing windows behind which are woven the webs of human happiness and grief. What are his innermost sensations? Does he feel the throbbing pulse of men and women, or is his heart and soul dead and forbidding? Or else go with him upon a walk into the country—Spring or Fall—Winter or Summer—his talk and expression will show the stuff that is in him. Is he alive to the multifarious beauties of color, life, and movement that are about him, or is he the same gnarled, twisted parody of man who, when in the office, always thinks himself imposed upon, or in his home appears a misfit, uncomfortable piece of furniture?
Yes, there is a sublime religion in the joy of jostling your fellows in the workaday streets, there is a sublime possibility of growth in the soul of him who, when upon a journey in the country, breathes a deep and lasting draught of the joyousness of life. And yet, why does this religion slip from us, why at times do we refuse to grow? Why do we lose the tingle of living which is the very essence of the boy’s sense of life?
One man will tell you that he is in a rut. He has worked until his youth is passed, and there is no further chance of promotion. A second has lost his money, and he is bitter against the world that took it from him. A third misses the companions whom he used to know, and with them went the color and the value of the world. A fourth has gambled with life’s good things: has wasted his body and mind in his lust for women, wine, or food, or in his greed for gold. Perhaps, although not admitted, with the satisfaction of his desires women have lost their beauty, wine and food their taste, and gold has proved tarnished metal.
What is, at bottom, the matter with them all? And what is the matter with the men and women who have had worldly success, who have had all the exterior things that life could give them, and yet feel that this Earth is an unsatisfactory sort of pasture in which to graze? Why should there be sighs of discontent when above us the sky is blue, and in the world about us children are born of women, heroic deeds are accomplished, and tragedies met and defeated by the courage and love of our human kind?
The answer is in the fact that many of us lose the blessed heritage that was part of our youth: our sense of wonderment, our breadth of sympathy. To the youth, every moment of every day meant an awakening to new things, an introduction to strange, exciting mysteries, whereas there are no such awakenings for the man who finds not the wonder in the windows bordering and the faces passing on the crowded city streets, or feels not, in the country, the subtle magic of Nature’s workings.
You say the world grows stale; it is not the world grown stale that takes the lustre from life, it is your own sleepiness, the profound drunkenness of the lazy and the cold heart. It is the loss of a personal sympathy with God and man.
A loss of sympathy is a horrible thing. The loss of that sympathy which holds your heart engripped, and makes you feel part and parcel of this great, moving, turbulent, sorrowing thing we call the World, is as grievous a loss as can befall any man. It is worse than a separation from money, friends or family—it is the loss of an individual’s personal stake in the world. And yet, we see men who have lost and are losing it. In them we see die that spark of life which has made them an integral part of all that lives. We see smothered the divine fire of humanity and godliness. If we consider Nature, including man, as one great spirit, we feel that those who have lost an embracing sympathy are apart from that great spirit, are drifting off into the barren deserts of bewilderment and decay. If we consider men as individual souls plotting their own destinies, we must see in those who have lost their intimate touch with the surge of their fellows’ labors, and their sympathy to the power of beauty, pariahs, true outcasts, apart and alone.
How great is your appetite for life? How great is your willingness to break the shell of your prison and liquidate your heart? What prevents you from throwing open your arms to the universe, accepting and welcoming the embrace? The embrace of humanity is a glorious thing! It is the nectar of the gods. Be one with the world, be not a pariah; be part of the great wave, be not a stagnant pool.
But one hears answers, “I can’t,” “I don’t want to,” “I’m apart and will not mingle.” Why can’t you? Why won’t you? Why are you apart? Is it because you are old and mummified? Have you lost your vision, have you lost your heart, has the world beaten you back, and does life roll too fast a pace? Has your understanding become blunted? Are you a snob upon a pedestal of derision? Are your eyes blind to the colors, your ears deaf to the music, your voice bitter in your companions’ hearing?
Ah, let there be a way out of the prison—there is a door that will lead you to your youth. Within a man there is always the spark that can be made to brighten and to break into living flame. There is no understanding so dense, no spirit so sordid that it cannot be stirred to awaken to that sympathy for man and nature that is the pass word to the Kingdom of Life.
“The Kingdom of Life.” Those are perhaps hackneyed words, and yet how many of us seem to be the inheritors of the Kingdom of Death. Live bodies find no value in dead souls, so let us make our souls aflame and attain to a realization of life. Where is the match to strike the light, the key to open the door?
Through all the ages there has been a medium through which the hearts of men have been revealed. There has been one cauldron into which the riches of our richest and most godlike minds have been poured. It is the melting pot that has purified the sorrows and joys of men, since man had wit enough to know his pangs and jubilations. There is a vehicle which will bring us to a universal sympathy, if not an understanding, of our human kindred. There is a powerful tool, welded by man, with which we can awaken ourselves to an appreciation of our universe, from which we can obtain consolation in our difficulties, stimulus for our ambitions, tonic for our depressions. The medium, the cauldron, the vehicle, the tool is Literature.
Some men are afraid of books, and some are afraid of life; some do not understand books, and some do not sympathize with, nor care to understand life. Literature is the key to the door of life for those who wish to open! There is no wall cramping the ambitions, blinding the eyes, deafening the ears of those who seek their nutriment in the spiritual messages and solemn understandings of the greatest minds of the ages. The symbol of a man walking down the street with no heart to feel, nor mind to understand the happenings about him, is the relationship between two stones. To our knowledge there is no known communication between one and the other. Literature is the great communicator, the powerful disseminator of sympathies, the magnificent doorway through which we can pass to other men’s hearts, and obtain warmth for our own in case ours are cold and comfortless.
God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. Perhaps there is not enough, for we all walk in partial darkness, but the tremendous sunburst that is here to lighten and revive is the lasting, printed word, handed on from generation to generation.