The Crow's Nest Part 11

Well, the last I heard of Tilly he was planning not to think, And he'd tied a piece of string around his tongue, And he never went within a mile of either pen or ink, And he always stood when _any_ song was sung.

And maybe you are thinking that his fate was rather tough, But what I say is, not a bit, they didn't do enough.

When anybody differs with you, dammit, treat 'em rough, Why, they ought to be bub-boiled alive and hung!

Humpty-Dumpty and Adam

It is not only every country that has its own language. It is each generation. The books and family letters of our grandfathers are not quite in our dialect. And so of the books of their grandfathers, and the letters they wrote. These dialects are not so different from ours that we can't make them out: they sound a little queer, that is all. Just as our own way of talking and writing (and thinking) will seem so quaint to our descendants that they'll put us away on the shelves.

A few books are written in a tongue that all times understand.

A few of us are linguists and have learned to enjoy the books of all ages.

For the rest, aged books need translation into the speech of the day.

The poets of each generation seldom sing a new song. They turn to themes men always have loved, and sing them in the mode of their times. Each new tribe of artists perpetually repaints the same pictures. The story-men tell the same stories. They remain fresh and young.

The disguise is new sometimes, but never the story behind it. A few generations ago, when some one wrote Humpty-Dumpty, he was merely retelling an old story for the men of his era, one of the oldest of stories, the first part of Genesis.

It is a condensed account--it leaves out the serpent and Eve and the apple. Some editor blue-penciled these parts, perhaps, as fanciful little digressions. "Stick to the main theme," said the editor, "don't go wandering off into frills. Your story is about the fall of Adam. Get on. Make him fall."

"I had intended to introduce a love-interest," the author of Humpty-Dumpty explained.

"A love interest!" sneered the editor. "You should have waited to be born in the twentieth century. These are manlier times. Give us men and adventure and fate."

"And what about the garden," the author sighed. "Must that be cut too?"

"By all means. Change the garden. It's a pretty enough idea in romance.

But a realist who has worked in one, knows that a garden's no paradise.

Genesis got it just wrong. Adam should have been exiled from town as a punishment, and put to slave in a garden."

"But town isn't paradise either. We've got to start him in paradise."

"Dear me," said the editor. "There's only one place left to put the fellow, and that's on the wall. 'Adam sat on a wall.' Begin that way."

[Ill.u.s.tration: Cinderella]

"I'm calling him Humpty-Dumpty," the author said. "It makes it less tragic. It suggests that the fall didn't hurt Man so much after all."

"Which is true," said the editor.

I wish I had known that author. He had a kind heart. He has changed even the unforgiving cherubim in the Genesis story to those King's men who try in such a friendly way to restore Humpty-Dumpty. But the story can't let them. That would leave the hero back on his wall again--like some Greek philosopher. This other way, we think of him as starting out to conquer the world.

Humpty-Dumpty is a story for boys. Cinderella for girls. In Cinderella five able females, two old and three young, contend most resourcefully to capture one stupid young man. It is a terrible story. The beautiful surface barely masks the hungry wiles underneath. But it's true. It depicts the exact situation a marrying girl has to face; and, even while she's a tot in the nursery, it reminds her to plan.

But these are examples of stories that live, and last for more than one age. The mortality is heavier in other fields. For instance, philosophy.

Great philosophical works of past eras are still alive in a sense, but they dwell among us as foreigners do, while Mother Goose has been naturalized.

Modern philosophies are so different. Not many centuries ago, in those eras when few changes took place, men thought of the world as something to study, instead of to mold. It was something to appropriate and possess, to be sure, but not to transform.

Humpty-Dumpty sat on the wall, then. He hadn't begun his new life.

There were few inventors in those old times, and few of those few were honored. Edison among the Greeks would have been as lonely as Plato with us.

Civilization was Thought. It was measured by what men knew and felt of eternal things. It was wisdom.

Civilization to-day is invention: it is measured by our control over nature. If you remind a modern that nature is not wholly ductile, he is profoundly discouraged! "We _expect_ to make over and control our world." We not only a.s.sume it is possible, we a.s.sume it is best.

What is democracy but a form of this impulse, says Professor George Plimpton Adams, "bidding man not to content himself with any political order thrust upon him, but actively to construct that order so that it does respond to his own nature"?

"Not contemplation ... but creative activity," that is our modern att.i.tude.

Well, it's all very interesting.

Will and Wisdom are both mighty leaders. Our times wors.h.i.+p Will.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Will and Wisdom]

How It Looks to a Fish

The most ordinary steams.h.i.+p agent, talking to peasants in Europe, can describe America in such a way that those peasants will start there at once. But the most gifted preacher can't get men to hurry to heaven.

All sorts of prophets have dreamed of a heaven, and they have imagined all kinds; they have put houris in the Mahometan's paradise, and swords in Valhalla. But in spite of having carte blanche they have never invented a good one.

A man sits in his pew, hearing about harps and halos and hymns, and when it's all over he goes home and puts on his old wrapper. "I suppose I can stand it," he thinks. "I've stood corns and neuritis. But I just hate the idea of floating around any such region."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "I've stood corns and neuritis--"]

Some persons may want to go to heaven so as to keep out of h.e.l.l, or to get away from misery here--if they are in great enough misery. Others think of it as a place to meet friends in, or as a suitable destination for relatives. But the general idea is it's like being cast away in the tropics: the surroundings are gorgeous, and it's pleasant and warm--but not home.

It seems too bad that heaven should always be somehow repugnant, and unfit as it were for human habitation. Isn't there something we can do about it?

I fear there is not.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "But I just hate the idea of floating"]

a.s.suming that we are immortal, what happens to a man when he dies? It is said by some that at first the surroundings in his new life seem shadowy, but after a bit they grow solid; and then it is the world left behind that seems vague. You lose touch with it and with those whom you knew there--except when they think of you. When they think of you, although you can see them, and feel what they're thinking, it isn't like hearing the words that they say, or their voices; it's not like looking over their shoulders to see what they write; it's more like sensing what is in their thoughts.

But at first you are too bewildered to do this. You are in a new world, and you find yourself surrounded by spirits, telling you that you're dead. The spiritualists say that many new arrivals refuse to believe they are dead, and look around skeptically at heaven, and think they are dreaming. It often takes a long time to convince them. This must be rather awkward. It's as though no one who arrived in Chicago would believe he was there, but went stumbling around, treating citizens as though they weren't real, and saying that he doubted whether there was any such place as Chicago.

But if there is any truth in this picture, it explains a great deal. If the spirits themselves cannot clearly take in their new life at first, how can we on this side of the barrier ever understand what it's like?

And, not understanding, what wonder we don't find it attractive?