Imaginary Interviews Part 13

"airy tongues that syllable men's names On sands and sh.o.r.es and desert wildernesses."

Simplicity, at the furthest possible remove from all complexity, will be the next word--the word that follows the last, the woman's word.

XVI

QUALITIES WITHOUT DEFECTS

They had got to that point in their walk and talk where the talk might be best carried forward by arresting the walk; and they sat down on a bench of the Ramble in Central Park, and provisionally watched a man feeding a squirrel with peanuts. The squirrel had climbed up the leg of the man's trousers and over the promontory above, and the man was holding very still, flattered by the squirrel's confidence, and anxious not to frighten it away by any untoward movement; if the squirrel had been a child bestowing its first intelligent favors upon him the man could not have been prouder. He was an old fellow, one of many who pamper the corrupt rodents of the Park, and reduce them from their native independence to something like the condition of those pauper wards of the nation on our Indian Reservations, to whom a blurred image of the chase offers itself at stated intervals in the slaughter of the Government's dole of beef-cattle.

The friend to whom this imperfect parallel occurred recalled his thoughts from it and said, with single reference to the man and the squirrel: "I suppose that's an expression of the sort of thing we've been talking about. Kindness to animals is an impulse, isn't it, of the 'natural piety' embracing the fatherhood of G.o.d and the brotherhood of man?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE MALL, CENTRAL PARK]

"I don't think it's quite so modern as that formulation," the other friend questioned. "I was thinking it was very eighteenth-century; part of the universal humanitarian movement of the time when the master began to ask himself whether the slave was not also a man and a brother, and the philanthropist visited the frightful prisons of the day and remembered those in bonds as bound with them."

"Yes, you may say that," the first allowed. "But benevolence toward dumb creatures originated very much further back than the eighteenth century.

There was St. Francis of a.s.sisi, you know, who preached to the birds, didn't he? and Walter von der Vogelweide, who pensioned them. And several animals--cats, crocodiles, cows, and the like--enjoyed a good deal of consideration among the Egyptians. The serpent used to have a pretty good time as a popular religion. And what about the Stoics? They were rather kind to animals, weren't they? Why should Pliny's Doves have come down to us in mosaic if he cultivated them solely for the sake of broiled squabs? It's true that the modern Roman, before the extension of the S.P.C.A. to his city, used his horse cruelly upon the perfectly unquestionable ground that the poor beast was not a Christian."

"I don't remember about the Stoics exactly," the second friend mused aloud; and the first let this go, though they both understood that very likely he not only did not remember, but had never known. "They had so many virtues that they must have been kind to brutes, but I taste something more Cowperian, more Wordsworthian, than Marcus-Aurelian in our own kindness. These poets taught me, so far as I could learn, not to

'enter on my list of friends the man Who needlessly sets foot upon a worm,'

and

'Never to mix my pleasure or my pride With sorrow of the meanest thing that breathes.'"

"Yes, but I don't like giving up the Stoics; we may have to come back to their ground if things keep on going the way they have gone for the last generation. The Stoics had a high ideal of duty; it's hard to see that the Christian ideal is higher, though they taught themselves to be proudly good, and we (if we may still say we when we say Christians) are always trying to teach ourselves to be humbly good."

"What do you mean," the second of the friends demanded, "by coming back to their ground?"

"Why," the first responded, picking up a twig that opportunely dropped at his feet, and getting out his knife to whittle it, "I suppose they were the first agnostics, and we who don't so much deny the Deity as ignore Him----"

"I see," the second answered, sadly. "But aren't you throwing up the sponge for faith rather prematurely? The power of believing has a tremendous vitality. I heard a Catholic once say to a Protestant friend, 'You know the Church has outlived schisms much older than yours.' And inside of Protestantism as well as Catholicism there is a tremendous power of revival. We have seen it often. After an age of unbelief an age of belief is rather certain to follow."

"Well, well, I'm willing. I'm no more agnostic than you are. I should be glad of an age of faith for the rest to my soul, if for no other reason. I was harking back to the Stoics not only because they were good to animals, if they were good, but because they seemed to have the same barren devotion to duty which has survived my faith as well as my creed.

But why, if I neither expect happiness nor dread misery, should I still care to do my duty? And I certainly always do."

"What, always?"

"Well, nearly always."

The friends laughed together, and the first said, "What a pity the Gilbertian humor has gone out so; you can't adapt it to a daily need any longer without the risk of not being followed."

The other sighed. "Nearly everything goes out, except duty. If that went out, I don't think I should have much pleasure in life."

"No, you would be dead, without the hope of resurrection. If there is anything comes direct from the Creative Force, from

'La somma sapienza e il primo amore,'

it is the sense of duty, 'the moral law within us,' which Kant divined as unmistakably delivered from G.o.d to man. I use the old terminology."

"Don't apologize. It still serves our turn; I don't know that anything else serves it yet. And you make me think of what dear old M.D.

C----told me shortly after his wife died. He had wished, when they both owned that the end was near, to suggest some comfort in the hope of another life, to clutch at that straw to save his drowning soul; but she stopped him. She said, 'There is nothing but duty, the duty we have wished to do and tried to do.'"

The friends were silent in the pathos of the fact, and then the first said, "I suppose we all wish to do our duty, even when we don't try or don't try hard enough."

The other conjectured, "Perhaps, after all, it's a question of strength; wickedness is weakness."

"That formula won't always serve; still, it will serve in a good many cases; possibly most. It won't do to preach it, though."

"No, we must cultivate strength of character. I wonder how?"

"Well, your Stoics--"

"_My_ Stoics?"

"_Anybody's_ Stoics--did it by self-denial. When they saw a pleasure coming their way they sidestepped it; they went round the corner, and let it go by while they recruited their energies. Then when they saw a duty coming they stepped out and did it."

"It seems very simple. But aren't you rather cynical?"

"That's what people call one when one puts ethics picturesquely. But perhaps I've rather overdone it about the Stoics. Perhaps they wouldn't have refused to enjoy a pleasure at their own expense, at their cost in some sort of suffering to themselves. They really seem to have invented the Christian ideal of duty."

"And a very good thing. It may be all that will be left of Christianity in the end, if the Christian hope of reward goes as the Christian fear of punishment has gone. It seems to have been all there was of it in the beginning."

The second of the friends said at this, "I don't know that I should go so far as that."

The first returned, "Well, I don't know that I should ask you. I don't know that I go that far myself," he said, and then they laughed together again.

The man who was feeding the squirrel seemed to have exhausted his stock of peanuts, and he went away. After some hesitation the squirrel came toward the two friends and examined their countenances with a beady, greedy eye. He was really glutted with peanuts, and had buried the last where he would forget it, after having packed it down in the ground with his paws.

"No, no," the first of the friends said to the squirrel; "we are on the way back to being Stoics and practising the more self-denying virtues.

You won't get any peanuts out of us. For one thing, we haven't got any."

"There's a boy," the second friend dreamily suggested, "down by the boat-house with a basketful."

"But I am teaching this animal self-denial. He will be a n.o.bler squirrel all the rest of his life for not having the peanuts he couldn't get.

That's like what I always try to feel in my own case. It's what I call character-building. Get along!"

The squirrel, to which the last words were addressed, considered a moment. Then it got along, after having inspected the whittlings at the feet of the friends to decide whether they were edible.

"I thought," the second of the friends said, "that your humanity included kindness to animals."

"I am acting for this animal's best good. I don't say but that, if the peanut-boy had come by with his basket, I shouldn't have yielded to my natural weakness and given the little brute a paper of them to bury. He seems to have been rather a saving squirrel--when he was gorged."

The mellow sunlight of the November day came down through the tattered foliage, and threw the shadows of the friends on the path where they sat, with their soft hats pulled over their foreheads. They were silent so long that when the second of them resumed their conversation he had to ask, "Where were we?"