Revisiting the Earth Part 12

Is it the brain or the soul that does the thinking? Is our body the agent or is it a living spirit that uses the organisms? Is it the imagination whose wings uplift or am I at the center of the circle of my faculties making use of them?

Is there any causal relation between justice and victory in arms?

_Some Social Features_

This student life establishes certain relationships both with the inst.i.tution, also with individuals which are felt to be the choicest holding of a man's whole later life. The topaz of Ethiopia shall not equal it, neither shall it be valued with pure gold. Here is a strong ill.u.s.tration of how deep and enduring are the attachments of an eager hearted boy. They are more ardent perhaps than they should have been, but there they are, and the college gains thus a token of attachment and tender recollection of unreturnable youth. The most exquisite, the most unforeseen, the most compensative feature of my life has been, my personal friendship with the professors. Some of them I admired extravagantly. Silhouetted upon my memory for all time is my first sight of Professor Leonard F. Parker. I remember a particular day when we gathered somewhat early for a Sabbath service. Some of us who were to be his pupils had no acquaintance with him even by sight. a.s.suming that the leading scholar of the place would attend the meeting it was for us a question of identification. Soon there came a man in the succession not a farmer, possibly a resident clergyman, and some of us thought it might be he. But something within me said "Query." I tried to make it into the professor.

A good man doubtless, but I wanted to see something in this worshiper that was not in him. He did not fill the picture. He did not make me say, It is enough. Soon there came a man who needed no badge, no signature, no guarantee. His face was an index of him. All of us joined in a common feeling of relief. We felt his presence. We knew that this was the man. The bearing of a professional man in those days was more sedate than now, occasioned by what he thought to be due to his professorship. He looked upon his office as a high and sacred calling, and it met all the ends of his ambition if he could be, not teaching students, but educating men and women. It is said of the Roman conquerors that they were so used to victory that they carried on their faces the secret of an imperial people who knew not defeat.

"_Fixing Up_"

There was an obvious neatness about him and a perfection of dress, which usually requires an absence of anything which draws attention to itself.

He excelled all men whom I have ever known in the teaching profession for enkindling among his pupils an ardent zeal in their literary pursuits. A great personal force was needed in those days to teach disciplinary studies only, in an effective manner, and to dominate the industrial spirit and the trade spirit by those cla.s.sical enthusiasms which were the joy and ornament of his youth. Mercantilism was unbridled in the general community, yet it is an acknowledged fact, that at the beginning the responsibility of the teacher has much to do with the success of the school. No teaching is worth much without enthusiasm, and enthusiasm is generated by concentrating interest at a focal point. One cannot teach for more than he is.

A little history is worth a great deal of opinion. By his unusual gifts, by his out-reaching personal sympathies, by the individual impress of a great teacher, many of his pupils became interested through him in the cla.s.sics. Let him be judged by his product. I never hear President Main in one of those vigorous, fine-phrased, official statements, in language impressive, copious and beautiful, the outward sign of an inward grace, making a sort of an Iliad out of a routine college president's report, without saying to myself and to others,--That power of statement, discipline of mind, felicity of speech, the administration itself, if you please, are the fruitage of patient discipline acquired in his early and long study of Greek. Alexander of Macedon used to say that he owed his life to his father, but to his teacher, Aristotle, a greater debt, for it was that philosopher who taught him how to make the most of life.

While the ability to teach is a treasure committed to earthly vessels, some are of finer clay than others.

_He Had no Pet Virtue_

The Professor was a natural leader, full of vision and initiative, whose heart was in his work, and the old college impulse never left him, and he represents a part of what has given a worthy name and character to the college. A man gets to do what he is fitted to do. I do not believe he will be allowed to come back from the other world to this but he will hardly know what to do with himself when separated from those interesting a.s.sociations on which so much of his happiness depended. A father or mother or both would come to town, wander about the place, invariably in company with the object of their affection. These parents are not first of all astronomical, or philosophical, or mathematical, they are human, and they are not there to hear about the new water-works or the freshly paved streets, or the perfect miracle of an artificial lake. They are there because their treasure is, and a kind word spoken to them about their young hopeful is like a spark of fire upon tinder.

These folks used to wait about the doors and walk the streets and hope to throw themselves in the Professor's way, with the idea that he would talk with them a little about their scion. I was once driving the distance between two railroads and a dark night and a continuous downpour of rain settled drearily upon me, and I was forced to stop at random at a farm house, and beg for entertainment. Disposing of my case in a few words, the family resumed its talk relative to a letter they had received from the Professor about their descendant in whom were centered great expectations. And when they had said everything that could be said, someone, as if by accident, would pull a string and let loose again the flood of talk about that letter. Someone, coming in, for a moment, out of the storm, would divert the attention, and then they would apply the flail again to that letter and thrash out some further kernels of wheat that they had not at first noticed. The family, of course, found out that I knew the Professor, and so, although I was to start in the morning while it was still dark, the mother was unexpectedly up, and had the table so spread, that she could at once sit down, when I did, and talk over her happiness and the rewards of her self-sacrifice in having a boy at college. She had hoped and believed all that had been written, and yet it was a great comfort to have the professor say it.

_A Disposition to Build Tabernacles_

He lived close to the people. When Christian, in the Pilgrim's Progress, found himself in the City of Destruction, he departed speedily out of it, whereas our professor would consider if the situation was remediless. I was present when he, having given the best of his life to the college, under the weight of his years, resigned. It was touching, as a great American author has pointed out, to see the new att.i.tude that the community had taken toward him, putting him into a new relationship and into a new atmosphere, in which it was recognized that he was undeniably and irresistibly older than he had been. People had hardly thought that he was not a permanent feature. The evidences of Christianity stand very much in facts. I point to the fact of his consistent fruitful life and to the fact of his triumphant peaceful death. They make a fresh volume on the evidences of Christianity. I have heard of a man who had one foot in the grave, but here was a man who had one foot in heaven. Dear friend, and my father's friend, friend of my youth, and all my later years, teacher, counselor, encourager, model of my student life, to whom my heart was knit in all the ardor of the first enthusiasm over the idea of going to college, to whom my obligations are beyond computation, Thou hast thyself gone to sit at the feet of the Great Teacher.

CHAPTER XV

WHERE I MET MYSELF

I can thankfully say that I have been on earth twice, once walking on air, when I graduated from college, and again when I, walking across the College campus, with heart lifted up, tenderly recalling the past, saw the jejune young hopeful that I used to be and sat down with him under a birch, the queen of trees,--many savage nations worship trees,--and debated for an hour with this young blonde, that I met, that I used to be, this question, Which is better for the person graduating, the opportunities which were lined up, reaching out their hands to us, that we had, or the greater academic advantages which the students now enjoy.

I could not seem to make him see that the present advantages develop opportunities which are quite as acceptable and fruitful as those that in early days came to us ready-made.

_The Old and New_

Discussion over, this rather immature youngster, that I met, that I used to be, rising up, I getting up, went down town, or perhaps more properly, he went down town and I went with him. He found a man, I did not so easily recognize, that was Soph.o.m.oric at about the same period that he was and I experienced a bad quarter of an hour. The situation had in it an uncomfortable pinch. I became self-conscious. I found myself stammering and protesting the past. We had come upon a tall, spa.r.s.ely-haired, gray-bearded bent figure, with a smooth shiny head, with furrows in his cheeks and forehead, having evidently, as Webster so well said, come down to us from another generation. I knew that he was of my age but I never dreamed that I was of his. This callow stripling then started to show us around, and unlike Elihu, in the days of Job, who apologized for showing his opinion, seeing he was so young, a.s.serted that once we were led by the clergy, then by lawyers, then by business men, but that now everything pointed to a great revival of the college and its influence in affairs. Then he stood right out apart and began to plaster praise on his own inst.i.tution. I thought that the young man gestured too much, and I told him so, but he dramatically with open mouthed vehemence of adoration told of her spirit, her fellowship. I tried to use the soft pedal, suggesting that perhaps he had too many exciting topics to discuss thus in public, and that we might later adjourn to a restaurant where we could make an afternoon of it. But he was in high spirits and made his talk like a young man who had the world at an advantage. It was June in his personal history and the top tide of his youthful happiness. That part of his existence was so satisfactory to him that he liked to dwell upon it.

_Words Pale and Inadequate_

I kept noticing that I was much more interesting to this unripe young sprig, who, I thought, had much to learn, and whose mind seemed like an unweeded garden, than he was even to me, for I had seen him before, while I had for him all the interest that is excited by a relic, something designed by Providence to arrest attention, like those that after a great convulsion of nature came out of their graves and went into the city and appeared unto many.

Then this sappy, beardless representative of the rising generation that I met, that I used to be, with the Aurora-spirit, had the effrontery to ask me how it happened that a man had but one youth and then came age and infirmity, while a college, like a nation, seems under favorable administration to have a re-birth and a renewal of the vitality of youth twice or even thrice. I thought that the excess of his knowledge was too much for him and that he was cross examining me, and so side-stepping the main issue, I stammered out something about the excessive beauty of the cla.s.sic town with embowered streets and sunny gardens, a sort of a metropolis of education, the very capital of a little republic of letters.

There seemed to be equality in all the compet.i.tions for the prizes of student life, with no favors and yet no privilege denied. There was fair play and all good feeling, with no caste of wealth, and no apology for the laggard. Even when whipping up a little I flagged miserably in all the conversation. This lad, in his leading strings, was an incomparable gossip. I felt that he had a kind of genius for picking up news. Anyway he used great liberality in the diffusion of it. He was I thought a charitable reporter. While he had breathed the cla.s.sic atmosphere of the place, yet all the books he had to read had been dumped there, like a sort of terminal moraine. For scholars today the whole stock would be not only a curiosity, but a relic, being little else than folios on serious subjects. They were books that must be reverenced, as members of the eldest liturgical church would reverence the bones of the blessed martyrs. I inquired, Do you partic.i.p.ate in athletics? Yes, by dividing cord wood into stove lengths, toying with the spade, coquetting with big bundles of grain. Golf and basket ball were not in his day introduced into the college curriculum. I thought he was flippant. I felt that comparisons were odious, as some one must suffer when a comparison is inst.i.tuted. So I said with a good deal of voice, My Friend, hear me, I am older than thou. Your question shows what your diploma cannot cover nor absolve. n.o.body thinks that you lack courage. I wish now that you would try and be polite.

"_Far Away and Long Ago_"

So far from gratifying this wish, in another connection he put it right up to me, that I was looking around with complaisance, as though it was a college of this present size and appearance that I graduated from, but that such was not the historic fact. It did not seem nice in the stripling to move right out in the direction of ocular demonstration, and make particular inquiry of me about the library and chapel and training field and gymnasium that I used in that college that I graduated from. His very impudence made him interesting to me. But I wished he would cultivate more repose and serenity. He had sense enough to know better but his resources in that direction were not immediately available.

As we were looking around I observed that this young tyro was all the time tipping his hat and bowing and sc.r.a.ping as often as a pretty face came within the horizon, and so I knew that there was a way I could divert his remarks from poor me, and that was to ask him outright about the girls. I was astonished that I had not named them to the fledgling before. I was amazed that I was capable of pa.s.sing them by so long. He said that there was nothing like them, that the air was favorable to their elegance and charm, that there was no place of its size in that state or in any other that could show fairer specimens of the various kinds of feminine attractiveness. But in his talk on the comeliness of the young ladies I noticed that he quoted from an actress who seems to have said that three things are necessary for success on the stage, vivacity, ability and beauty, and I told him that I could not be too thankful that the stage of practical life did not insist on these rigid requirements.

_Stepping Stones in Recent History_

It was a holiday within a holiday to traverse the town with this lambkin. I came to the right place to squarely meet him. Here they introduce people to themselves. This stripling that I used to be seemed bent on hiring a horse and carriage to show me about. That was his only idea of hospitality. On the best streets in town, he did not have far to go, the livery stables were as convenient to the homes of the people as the school-houses and churches. A very convenient location was near the public library. His fear was that all the horses would be already taken as there were a good many visitors in town. If the high steppers were out we would find their keepers in more or less rickety arm chairs tilted back against the side of a wall awaiting their return.

There are two panels placed side by side in the old palace at Potsdam.

The left contains Napoleon refusing the queenly Louise favorable terms of peace at Tilsit, the right contains the nephew of that Napoleon receiving notoriously hard terms from the son of the beautiful Louise at Sedan. Entire shifts in history are vividly seen in companion pictures.

On the left is a picture of the horse with the caption, The Greatest Pleasure-giver to Man. On the right is the picture of a Ford. All that a man hath will he give in exchange for an automobile. The left exhibits what G.o.d made, the right, what man made. No one living in the city will look at a horse. He now shows that he feels that he is something left over. Survey the specimens that remain, low-headed, tail-switching, creatures, with an indolent air, shuffling gait, abject, pitiable objects with mis-shapen, stumbling legs in front. No one doubts but that it takes all day to go anywhere and return with these antique, stunted, gaunt-ribbed, swollen-jointed, knock-kneed, piteous-eyed creatures that now survive. Knowing the pleasure that young people once had in horses and ponies, it seems odd to find that the rising generation has almost forgotten their existence.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE GREATEST PLEASURE GIVEN TO MAN]

_Worthy of Unstinted Praise_

But they had a fine history. Stonewall Jackson, the hero of the flank movement, gained his great victories and his great reputation by the celerity of his movements, made possible by the familiarity of Southerners with horses. When pressed in battle the Russians could fall back sullenly and the j.a.panese unfamiliar with horses could not strike their flank nor cut off their retreat. The mastery of nations has sometimes come from the possession of horses. The amazing spread of Mohammedanism came from the same sort of ownership. The horse gave to Paul Revere and to Phil Sheridan their place in history. He was in their day the greatest factor in strategy and surprise. He is docile, affectionate, and capable of a deep and lasting attachment. He has a real craving for human notice. He dislikes to be left in a solitary position. Essentially by his very nature he must love something. It touches the heart to have a horse reach out his fore foot and begin to paw until his master a.s.sures him that he recognizes him. This is what the horse likes. I confess to a feeling of pride when, leaving him untied at the door, I have gone into a house and have heard him whinny for me to return when he might have gone off and left me. Although there were other persons all about he would neigh at my approach and turn his well-shaped head, full of character, with clear intelligent eyes of the speaking kind, toward me. Such a warm-blooded sensitive horse will always exhibit in ways of his own the friendly relations that exist between us.

_Time Tries All Things_

On revisiting the earth it is found that the owner of a high-stepper, threatened with speed, can now only lead a shame-faced kind of existence. If out in the daylight he feels like apologizing to every one he meets. This man used to electrify the street with his tallyho coach crowded with gaily dressed guests accompanied by a footman and a trumpeter, with a hitch of four n.o.ble grays showing by their arched necks and high knee action that they felt pride in belonging to a rich man. As in the case of the bicycle, the fashion changed abruptly. He had to load a lot of portable property into the carriage to get some poor relation to take the outfit for a gift. I find that a person can now buy a discarded silver-mounted harness for the cost of a halter and that the people today like an upholstered life. Gasoline spelled the doom of the horse and it must be said now that Dobbin's future never looked so uninviting.

There are four new experiences for which no description ever adequately prepares us, the view of a volcano in violent eruption, a visit to the home of cliff dwellers (prehistoric peoples who left their homes just as they used them), a walk on a moving glacier, and the first survey of the Grand Canyon. I was lifted off my feet by discovering, when talking with that college youngster and comparing things closely, that the five senses--sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch--have had another added to them. Each of those we named over uses a distinctive organ. The surface of the whole body contributes to the sense of touch. These are pointed out as the receiving agents of the mind which keeps her hidden seat and receives communication from the distant provinces of her empire. They put us in possession of just the information needed concerning external things. On revisiting the earth it is awakening to engage in controversy with the young scion of the college that I used to be, touching learning's last word. He believed that we had all the possible senses defined and numbered like the fingers on the hand and now comes the new sense of balance having the exact function we have been naming. I remember the moment and the place where I was made conscious of this sixth sense. I did not learn it. I had it. I had bought a bicycle. I had no teacher. I was sitting on it in the hall giving the animal a little gentle exercise. "Keep your balance. Employ what sense you have; you do not need to acquire it, use it." It is so with aviators. We call them bird men. They were born, like birds, with a certain innate sense of equilibrium. Birds find out when to go north and to go south and how to build and line their own nests and where to find their food and how to maintain themselves in the air. All this is in them. Nature takes care of that. A small child, learning to walk, shows that he has an instinctive faculty of adjustment and equipoise and tries early to get his little legs to support his position. An untutored lad when mounted thinks he is riding a horse, whereas the quadruped, knowing at once that the boy does not know anything about his business, allows him to simply balance himself while he gives him a ride. The boy voyages like an unballasted ship. He does not acquire a new sense; he follows his intuitions and all is well. A seed of grain would not differ from a dust speck or tiny pebble except for what it is, but it is yet to manifest by its inherent vitality. You would not know, looking at a boy, that he has this instinct of balance, but he has and he will find it and use it. As the pilgrim with his staff wends his way to Mecca, so I went to that place to meet that particular stripling. He was the youngster that was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found. I wanted to stay beside him much longer. His heart was young. He was fresh for his work.

_The World a Wheel_

The skeleton of a horse is given in an automobile catalogue. He is depicted as a fossil and the statement is made, These animals were used until about the year 1900. Every man, woman, and child in the state of South Dakota could be seated at one time in the automobiles owned by the people of that one state. Eighty per cent of those cars have been bought in the last two years. It seems like flying or ballooning after jolting for years in a heavy farm wagon, and what miles they were! The Dutch are economical of money, but have been very profuse of time. Their conveyances by sea or land have been slow and "Dutch speed" has grown into a proverb for tardiness, but now, with scarfs over their heads, Dutch women loll in the back seats of a Pierce-Arrow with, not the father, but a son, in the family to drive. While in my earlier life I had never dodged an automobile and I have never been injured by one except in my disposition, we are all unspeakably indebted to them for getting people out-of-doors and for contributing more to the temperance reformation than all the lectures in Christendom. The automobile enforces the same abstinence upon the people that the railroads require of engineers. Automobiles plainly show that the only place for saloons is that place Rev. William A. Sunday so graphically describes, and while our streets do not yet come up to the requirements of the boulevards of the New Jerusalem as described by St. John, yet we are done with those crossings at the street corners made up of granite stringers. Carriages had worn down the softer material just before and just after the granite crossings, so that if a person rode rapidly length-wise of the street he would jolt and bite his tongue at every intersection. These depressions in the road were called "Thank you, marms," because persons in pa.s.sing each corner would forcibly be made to bow their heads, as if in expression of grat.i.tude, to some imagined object. Another transformation has overtaken the community, changing its general appearance in some cases for the better, almost beyond recognition.

_Pigs is Pigs_

All barns in the towns are upon the market and dealers in lumber have opened a second-hand department where they dispose of what is left of the barns to farmers for the construction of granaries. Back to the farm applies now even to lumber. The horse, the cow, and the pig once formed a part of the family circle and how kindly and carefully were they provided for. The execrable back alley was conducted on the pig-sty basis. How slatternly the old back alley fence would look now that the parking system is adopted by neighbors. In earlier days the sumptuous houses were fenced or hedged always. After the old English idea the grounds were private. It remains now to have fences removed among denominations. They stand for the old time privacy and exclusiveness that once prevailed in business. Down south they forced business out into the open, requiring by ordinance that all employees shall be paid in the public square. The parking system proceeds upon the principle that a resident owes something to the town. The present ideal is to induce people not to shut the blinds or draw the shades when the house is lighted but to see in the evening how far each little candle can throw its beams.

CHAPTER XVI