“They were once real, and now are stuffed,” I said.
Her eager mind leaped at this. Here was a happy little formula. And at every succeeding specimen, whether a wolf or a puma or a walrus or a whale, with monotonous insistence she asked, “Is it real and stuffed?” To which I replied, each time, with patient repetition, “Yes, real and stuffed.” It satisfied her perfectly until we came to the figures of Indians and Eskimos. Here a new formula had to be devised, that they were “Not real, but made to look like it.” These trifling statements made the museum, for her, a rational and not too terrifying place.
Once in a while, if you are fond of self-scrutiny, you will catch yourself in the very act of creating or parroting some useful formula. Formulæ swarm in the mind just as birds do in an orchard. And though they destroy some fruit, they also help to exterminate lesser vermin which might do much harm. For the most part we are all mercifully unaware of our dependence on them.
Secondly, then, once formulæ are made, another subtle trick of the mind enters into function. Man’s sovereign faculty of pretense works upon them. He persuades himself that these little rites and short-cuts are not really made by himself, but that they are sacred. Man’s capacity for pretense, I dare say, has been the only thing that has kept him going in a rough, bruising world. He has found, throughout history, that the percolation of certain fictions into affairs made order and government more easy. Indeed the number of generally accepted fictions in currency is not such a bad test of civilization: the more such harmless pretenses, the pleasanter life is. The divine right of kings was one great fiction that had a long serial career and gradually tapered off. Oliver Cromwell “Garred kings ken they had a lith in their necks”; the Prince of Wales’s horses seem to have suggested the same thing. That adorable old shrew, Thomas Hobbes, whose wise and racy survey of human foibles might almost have made any subsequent palaver unnecessary, had people patience to read “Leviathan” nowadays, is copious in instance of men’s love of standing “in awe of their own imaginations.” We are all quick to believe anything, he remarks, from teachers who can “with gentleness and dexterity take hold of our fear and ignorance.” Whereas any truth, no matter how rationally arrived at, that counters our passion and interest, we naturally reject. “I doubt not but,” says the darling old cynic, “if it had been a thing contrary to any man’s right of dominion that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry, suppressed.”
Master Hobbes is very jolly, too, on a matter that has interested every thoughtful observer since civilization began—that religion is always heartily favoured by prosperous people. Obviously; for it is a stabilizing force. I was greatly struck, approaching Pittsburgh on the train, passing through a black, cindered region where life must lack many of its most harmless pleasures, to notice the astounding number of churches. These, surely, are not there without some sound social reason. There are three prime consolations known to man in the difficulty of his life, God, love, and money. Of any two of these you may deprive him without hearing much grumble, provided he has plenty of the third. But if he lacks all three, there is sure to be trouble.
I have often noticed, in burning a pile of dead leaves, that the mass that seems burned through will, if turned over with the rake, burst into fresh flame. Down under the mound, smothered by weight and closeness, were many fragments that needed only air and freedom to burst into golden blaze. Perhaps it is so with any industrial society. To turn it top to bottom now and then would liberate brilliant human combustions that now lie choked. It is a dangerous doctrine, but so are all doctrines that are any fun. It is a thoroughly Christian doctrine, too.
Before we leave the topic of human relish in pretense, let’s mention one very innocent and amusing example. One of the gay hilarities of existence is the way the current social pretenses shift and vary and move in recurring orbits. The négligé of one period becomes the haut ton of the next. A few years ago, during a very severe winter, it became the mode for young women to go trapesing about in galoshes which were left floppingly unbuckled. What, then, do we see? A year or so later galoshes are put on the market, very cunningly devised with drooping webbed tops to look as though they were carelessly left undone. These at once became, particularly in rustic high schools, excellently de rigueur. It was a daintily accurate exposition of our human taste for illusion.
And the third fundamental characteristic that I am thinking of is our universal liability to habit. This is too familiar for comment. Take merely one instance which has pleasing analogies. Suppose you go to a small haberdasher to buy a pair of socks. In payment, you give him a five-dollar gold piece. As he makes change, he is obscurely troubled. He will ask if you haven’t a bill instead. He doesn’t relish that coin, because he isn’t used to it. Yet, if I understand correctly, gold is the only genuine money there is; all the other stuff is merely money by convention. And how beautifully valid in regard to truth as well. Half-truths to which men are accustomed are so much easier to pass than the golden mintage they rarely encounter! What was it Mr. Don Marquis has remarked: “If you make people think they think, they’ll love you. If you really make them think, they’ll hate you.”
§4
Certainly these three coercive factors, and many others, too, bear strangely upon all our attempts to think. The beauty and the happiness of religion, perhaps, lie in the fact that it has little to do with thinking. As far as any man knows, up to now, the universe is insoluble; and the mind, ardent particle, rather resents insolubility. It resents the solemn circling of the Dipper, seen from the front porch every clear night. Filling itself with slow darkness, gently tilting and draining again, it too cruelly reminds us of the orderly immensities of space. And religion may very well be considered a form of art and of anesthetic to soften the onset of that insolvency. It is reason’s petition in bankruptcy, “to drown the memory of that insolence.” If it makes us happy, we need inquire no further; for happiness is what all pursue. Perhaps, indeed, we are but memoranda in the note-book of the cosmic Author, jottings of some story that flashed into His mind one day, but which He did not trouble to write. So we are hunting, hunting endlessly for the rest of the plot. Or we are surf-bathers in an ocean where one step carries us beyond our depth. Accept any figure of speech that appeals to you. No work of art or literature yet, so far as I know, has given an adequate presentment of the glory and agony and mirth and excitement of being alive. Suppose some visitor from another planet dropped in for an evening and could communicate his inquisition. We wanted to give him just one book that would offer a picture, trustworthy, frank, recognizable, of the life we have known—man’s long campaign with nature, with other men, with woman, with himself. Some suggest “Candide,” but I find that great book too pitiless. Some, Browne’s “Religio Medici,” but is it not too witty? We might, in a hasty ransack of the shelves, linger momently upon Boswell or Walt Whitman or Shakespere’s Sonnets or “Moby Dick”; or upon the Book of Common Prayer or a photograph of Gozzoli’s “Viaggio dei Re Magi.” But not even these would duly serve. It would have to be an anthology, I fear; perhaps Robert Bridges’s “Spirit of Man,” though it should really have a stouter infusion of the seventeenth century, when God-intoxicated and Eros-maddened poets like John Donne and Andrew Marvell uttered their ecstatic and magnanimous despair.