TRULY, as Sadie said, nothing is so rare as the Educated Heart. And if you wonder why, just show a kodak group picture—a banquet photograph—a photograph of a class. What does every one of us first look at, talk about? Ourself. And that’s the reason why most hearts are so unlearned in kindness. Yet none of us likes himself to be forgotten or neglected. Almost any wife, I verily believe, would prefer actual rudeness to having a husband pass over her wedding anniversary unnoticed. Even a blow would prove that she was of some importance in his life.
So it isn’t always the big, climactic misfortune that we suffer from most. We can rally, after we’re stunned, and go on, somehow. But it’s the little stings that we can’t forget. It’s because of the Uneducated Heart that love-mad women kill.
“Why don’t you get a smart hat like Carrie’s, dear? She’s always so well-dressed!”
Yes, and because of the Uneducated Hearts of their wives, husbands grow seedy, silly and old.
Why, one can tell, almost, by the looks of a man—his posture, his very clothes—whether or not his wife truly loves him. For many a wife, dubbed by his undiscerning friends a shrew, a harridan, has proved her real interest in him by so ballyragging him for his faults that he has, despite himself, improved to meet her criticism, become ambitious, become persevering and successful—while as many others have been slowly kissed and praised into an intellectual apathy; most affectionately murdered by the Uneducated Heart. Ah, ’tis not only cats and lap dogs that are killed with kindness!
There is another side to the Mary and Martha story. I know them well, those two sisters. Mary loves Martha well, she will tell you, and be shocked at your question. But dear Martha is, before her time, an old woman, round-shouldered, bowed down by caring for others. In the years, has Mary ever said, “Straighten up, dear! You are growing crooked.”
Not once. Her own head high, she walks beside a sister almost deformed—whom, with an Educated Heart, she could have saved from ugliness.
AND by this time you’ll understand of course that the Educated Heart isn’t really educated at all, in the sense that it has had to learn how to be kind. It merely is wise. Its gesture is instinctive, its knowledge innate. But, you ask, can’t the uneducated heart be instructed? Don’t the churches and Sunday-schools teach How to be Good? How about the books of Ethics? Ah, the trouble with them all is that they teach what to do, but not how to do it.
And the trouble with this little study will be, perhaps, if you and I don’t look out, that it will educate us as to others’ faults but lead us to forget our own. It’s so easy to be petulant and critical; it’s so easy to deny that we ourselves are morally round-shouldered. If you have even the rudiments of a heart culture, long before this you will be saying to yourself:
Have I an Educated Heart?