Experience and the Calendar
“USELESS, quite useless, young man,” said the doctor, pursing his lips; and as he has a nice feeling for climax, he slapped the reins on Dobbin’s broad back and placidly drove away.
Beneath that flapping gray hat his wrinkled face was unusually severe. His eyes really seemed to flash resentment through his green spectacles. The doctor’s remark related to my manipulation of a new rose-sprayer which I had purchased this morning at the village hardware store, and was directing against the pests on my crimson ramblers when he paused to tell me that he had tried that identical device last year and found it worthless. As his shabby old phaeton rounded the corner, I turned the sprayer over to my young undergraduate friend Septimus, and hurried in to set down a few truths about the doctor.
He is, as you may already have guessed, the venerable Doctor Experience, of the well-known university that bears his name. He is a person of quality and distinction, and the most quoted of all the authorities on life and conduct. How empty the day would be in which we did not hear some one say, “Experience has taught me—” In the University of Experience the Doctor fills all the chairs; and all his utterances, one may say, are ex cathedra.
He is as respectable for purposes of quotation as Thomas à Kempis or Benjamin Franklin. We really imagine—we who are alumni of the old doctor’s ivy-mantled knowledge-house, and who recall the austerity of his curriculum and the frugality of Sunday evening tea at his table—that his own courses were immensely profitable to us. We remember well how he warned us against yielding to the persuasions of the world, the flesh, and the devil, illustrating his points with anecdotes from his own long and honorable career. He used to weep over us, too, in a fashion somewhat dispiriting; but we loved him, and sometimes as we sit in the winter twilight thinking of the days that are no more, we recall him in a mood of affection and regret, and do not mind at all that cheerless motto in the seal of the university corporation, “Experientia docet stultos,” to which he invariably calls attention after morning prayers.
“My young friends,” he says, “I hope and trust that my words may be the means of saving you from much of the heartache and sorrow of this world. When I was young—”
This phrase is the widely accepted signal for shuffling the feet and looking bored. We turn away from the benign doctor at his reading-desk, fumbling at that oft-repeated lecture which our fathers and grandfathers remember and quote,—we turn our gaze to the open windows and the sunlight. The philosophy of life is in process of making out there,—a new philosophy for every hour, with infinite spirit and color, and anon we hear bugles crying across the hills of our dreams. “When I was young!” If we were not the politest imaginable body of students,—we who take Doctor Experience’s course because it is (I blush at the confession) a “snap,”—we should all be out of the window and over the hills and far away.
The great weakness of Experience as a teacher lies in the fact that truth is so alterable. We have hardly realized how utterly the snows and roses of yesteryear vanish before the amiable book agent points out to us the obsolete character of our most prized encyclopædia. All books should be purchased with a view to their utility in lifting the baby’s chin a proper distance above the breakfast table; for, quite likely, this will soon become their sole office in the household. Within a fifteen-minute walk of the window by which I write lives a man who rejects utterly the idea that the world is round, and he is by no means a fool. He is a far more interesting person, I dare say, than Copernicus or Galileo ever was; and his strawberries are the earliest and the best produced in our township. Truth, let us say, is a continuing matter, and hope springeth eternal. This is where I parted company with the revered doctor long ago. His inability to catch bass in the creek isn’t going to keep me at home to-morrow morning. For all I care, he may sit on his veranda and talk himself hoarse to his old friend, Professor Killjoy, whose gum shoes and ear-muffs are a feature of our village landscape.
When you and I, my brother, are called on to address the young, how blithely we congratulate our hearers upon being the inheritors of the wisdom of all the ages. This is one of the greatest of fallacies. The twentieth century dawned upon American States that were bored by the very thought of the Constitution, and willing to forget that venerable document at least long enough to experiment with the Initiative, the Referendum, and the Recall. What some Lord Chief Justice announced as sound law a hundred years ago means nothing to commonwealths that have risen since the motor-car began honking in the highway. On a starry night in the spring of 1912 a veteran sea-captain, with wireless warnings buttoned under his pea-jacket, sent the finest ship in the world smashing into an iceberg. All the safety devices known to railroading cannot prevent some engineer from occasionally trying the experiment of running two trains on a single track. With the full weight of the experience of a thousand years against him the teller begins to transfer the bank’s money to his own pocket, knowing well the hazard and the penalty.
We pretend to invoke dear old Experience as though he were a god, fondly imagining that an honest impulse demands that we appeal to him as an arbiter. But when we have submitted our case and listened to his verdict, we express our thanks and go away and do exactly as we please. We all carry our troubles to the friends whose sympathy we know outweighs their wisdom. We want them to pat us on the back and tell us that we are doing exactly right. If by any chance they are bold enough to give us an honest judgment based on real convictions, we depart with a grievance, our confidence shaken. We lean upon our friends, to be sure; but we rely upon them to bail us out after the forts of folly have crashed about our ears and we pine in the donjon, rather than on their advice that might possibly have preserved us on the right side of the barricade. And I may note here, that of all the offices that man may undertake, that of the frank friend is the most thankless. The frank friend! It is he who told you yesterday that you were looking wretchedly ill. Doctor Experience had warned him; and he felt it to be his duty to stop you in your headlong plunge. To-morrow he will drop in to tell you in gentle terms that your latest poem is—well, he hates to say it—but he fears it isn’t up to your old mark! The frank friend, you may remember, is Doctor Experience’s favorite pupil.