The Romance of the Commonplace

by Gelett Burgess

But this primary classification of sex and years did not satisfy me long, and I discovered that my system must be amended if I would segregate--mentally now--the various types I encountered. There were, for instance, good persons and bad ones, men educated and ignorant, rich and poor, and I superimposed upon my first list one after another of these modifying conditions. But with a larger view of life these crude distinctions overlapped and became confused, and I saw that the whole system was but a rude makeshift.

Yet until I could pigeon-hole a new acquaintance in my own mind and put him with others of his kind I was never quite satisfied. Up to a certain stage in development, what we are most struck with is the difference between persons, but after the first intellectual climacteric we begin to see resemblances, invisible before, that knit men of different aspect together; and, that game of synthesis once begun, we must play it till we die. Every new acquaintance is an element of our experience--a new fact refuting or corroborating our theory of life, and, though we often may put the case into a separate compartment and label the specimen "unique," before long we shall probably have to reconsider the whole collection and devise a new system of arrangement for the complex characteristics of human nature.

But what analysis can we adopt which shall prove universally satisfactory? If we rank men according to mental, moral or spiritual attributes, one quality is sure to contradict or affect the other, and it is hard to decide which trait is paramount. Friendship is dependent upon none of these things, and yet in our affections we recognize, almost unconsciously, grades and qualities of attraction and kinship. Of a bunch of letters at our breakfast plate, we are sure to open a special one first or last, as the expectation of pleasure may decide. We accept this nearness, this intimate relationship, without reasoning; it is manifested in the first flash of recognition of the handwriting, at sight of a photograph, at the sound of a voice or a name. Some are indubitably of our own clan, and others, however their charm, or a temporary passion, may blind us for a time, are foreigners, and speak another language of the emotions. There are invisible groups of souls, mysteriously related, and the tie is indissoluble.

So I have come to adopt as the final classification what, for want of a better term, I must call Absolute Age--age or condition, that is, not relative, not dependent upon the year of one's birth. No one, surely, has failed to observe children who seem to be older than their parents in possibility of development. One knows that in a few years this child will have caught up to and passed his father or mother in soundness of judgment, in a sense of the relative importance of things, in the power to distinguish sham, convention and prejudice from things of vital import. This child is older in point of Absolute Age. When his soul has served its juvenile apprenticeship in the world of the senses he shall understand truths his parents never knew.

This capacity for comprehending life does not seem to be dependent upon actual definite experience with the world. The villager may have this hidden wisdom as clearly as the man who has seen and done, who has fought, loved and travelled far and well. The mystics hold that we have all lived before, and that some have profited by their experiences in former lives and have attained a fairer conception of the very truth. But, though this illustrates what is meant by the term Absolute Age, it is by no means necessary to accept such an explanation of the effects we perceive. It is enough that we can definitely classify our friends by their emotions and desires, and by their point of view on life. In other words, some are philosophers and some are not. And even the philosophers are of varying sects. Some have a keen, childlike enthusiasm for the more obvious forms of excitement, for all that is new and strange and marvellous, while others are incapable of being shocked, surprised or embarrassed--they have poise, and prefer the part of observer to that of actor in the game of life.

And yet, too, there is a simplicity which comes from a greater Absolute Age, a relish for real things that persists with enthusiasm. It is by this simplicity one may distinguish the cult from those that are merely blasé or worldly wise. The joy in the taste of the fresh apple under the tongue, or in the abandon of the child at play, in the strength of youth and the grace of women,--this is a joy that does not fade; no, not even for those who would not trouble to go to the window if the king rode by! As a man can learn much by travel without losing his capacity for enjoying his native town, so one can enjoy life intellectually to the utmost without ever losing one's grasp on one's self, without being intoxicated by excitement or blinded by egoism, and yet feel still the clean, sane joys of youth to the last.

We have come to our Absolute Age by different paths. If we are of the same status, you and I, you may have learned one lesson and I another, yet the sum of our experience is the same. We are akin spiritually, although we have not had the same process of development. You, perhaps, have fought down hate and I have conquered dishonesty, but we are calmer and wiser, we think, than those whom we smile at quietly when we view their eagerness for things that no longer concern us. We recognize, too, that there are others to whose attainments our own powers are infantile. But in either case the superiority is neither mental nor moral nor spiritual--it is that mysterious inherent quality we call "caste."

The Manual Blessing

Surely if there is one sharp, active sensation that, in this changeful life of ours, we never tire of, never outgrow, it is in the satisfaction of creative manual work. There is a conservation of pleasure as there is a conservation of energy, and our taste is being continually transmuted and evolved. One by one we outlive the joys of youth, the delights of physical exercise, the zest of travel, the beatitude of emotion, the singing raptures of love, passing from each to a more mature appeal, a more refined appetite, a subtler demand of the intellect or of the spirit. The familiar games lose their savour, the dance gives way to the drama, travel to the calmer investigation of homely miracles. We tire of seeing and begin to read, feasting peacefully at the banquet of the arts that other men have spread. This is, for many of us, what age means--a giving up of active for passive pleasures when the old games lose their charm.

But the joy of creation does not fade, for in that lies our divinity and our claim to eternity. Each new product arouses the same thrill, the same spiritual excitement, the same pride of victory, and yet, strangely enough, though we think we work only for the final notch of accomplishment, it is not the completion but the construction that holds us entranced. Not the last stroke, but every stroke brings victory! It is like the climbing of a mountain. Do we endure the toil merely for the sake of the view at the summit? No, but for the primitive passion of conflict, the inch-by-inch fight against odds, the heaping of endeavour on endeavour, the continual measuring of what has been done with what remains to do. The finishing climax is but the exclamation point at the end of the sentence--most of the sensation has been used up before we come to the full stop, and that point serves but to sum up our emotion in a visible emblem of success.