But my narrower world, so to speak, was all feet. An unconventional boy, as I think the most erudite student of boy-life and boy-psychology will admit, is much more rare than an unconventional man; and even then his unconventionality is likely to be imposed upon him “for his own good” by well-meaning but tyrannical parents. “I have known boys,” wrote Uncle Jones, observing but not comprehending this characteristic fact, “when playing at ‘Hare and hounds’ and ‘Follow my leader,’ to scramble over hedges, leap over brooks, and mount up precipices, in a manner which they would not have dared to attempt, had it not been for the examples set them by their school-fellows; but,” he adds, “I do not remember any instance of a boy imitating another on account of his good temper, patience, forbearance, principle, or piety.”
Naturally not. You and I, Uncle Jones, might be expected to imitate each other’s good temper, patience, forbearance, principle, or piety,—though I do not say that we would,—but from the point of view of a boy these virtues are unconventional. Their practice shocks and disconcerts the observer. The behavior of Sir Isaac Newton, when kicked in the stomach, was perfectly scandalous.
And what is there, after all, in the life of a boy, that a man would find interesting? Or that he may not do, if such is sufficiently his desire to “make” the time for it, as he makes time for his adult pleasures, and if he is not too old or too fat? He can spend his vacation at the old swimming-hole—but he never does it. He can go barefooted whenever he wishes: his mother can no longer prevent him. He can fish with a bent pin in the porcelain bathtub,—adding a goldfish to make the pursuit more exciting,—every morning before he takes his bath. He can chase butterflies; here and there, indeed, a man makes a profession of it, and institutions of learning call him an entomologist, and pay him much honor and a small salary. Nobody forbids him to enlarge his mental horizon by reading the lives of criminals and detectives; and I can myself direct him to many an entertaining book, which is at once far worse and far better, morally and artistically, than the sober narratives that Old Sleuth used to write by the yard for boys to read by stealth. He can roll a hoop; in many cases it would do him a world of good to roll it down to the office in the morning and back home at night. If he can persuade other ageing men, wishful of renewed boyhood, to join with him, he can play at marbles, tick, puss-in-the-corner, hop-scotch, ring-taw, and “Hot beans ready buttered.” (Uncle Jones mentions these games. I do not remember all of them myself, but “Hot beans ready buttered” sounds especially interesting.) And where better than in some green, quiet corner at the Country Club? And why, if you will raise the question of conventionality, why more foolish than golf, or folk-dancing?
But what he cannot do is to assume the boy’s unconsciousness of his own mortality. What he cannot unload is his own consciousness of responsibility to and for others. Life, in short, has provided the man with a worrying company of creditors of whom the boy knows nothing—Creditor Cost-of-Living, Creditor Ambition, Creditor Conscience, and Creditor Death. And the boy is unmarried! It is even claimed by one philosopher of my acquaintance that this is why men wish they were once more boys. I grant the plausibility of this opinion; for the more a man is is devoted to his wife and family, the more he is beset and worried by these troublesome creditors, the more, one may reasonably argue, he feels the need of time to meet his obligations, and is likely now and then to envy the boy his narrow, conventional, but immortal-feeling life.
Uncle Jones misses, I think, this fundamental fact. He is always trying to destroy the boy’s sense of immortality in this world by trying to persuade him to read the Bible and prepare for immortality in the next. “When a boy first begins his A B C,” says Uncle Jones, “it is terrible work for him for a short time; yet how soon he gets over it, and begins to read! And, then, what a pleasure to be able to read a good and pleasant book! Oh, it is worthwhile to go through the trouble of learning to read fifty times over, to obtain the advantage of reading the Bible.”
III
ON MEETING THE BELOVED
Now it is a quainte Oddity of thys State and Mysterie of Loue that youre trew Louer combines the opposyte qualities of a deepe Humilitie and a loftie Conceit of Hymselfe. For with respect to this, hys Mistresse, he believes himself a most inferior Person, and as it were a mere Worme; yet if he doth suspect her to regard any Man els as his Equal, he is consumed with great Astonishment and raging Indignation, for this same Loue is a great Destroyer of Common Sense in its Victimes. For he thinketh Hymselfe inferior to her because he is her Louer, and superior to all Men els for the same silly Reason.—Anatomie of Loue.
TO any sensitive man, not yet armored by the indifference that comes of being married himself, there is cause for apprehension in the prospect of meeting for the first time that person, male or female, whom somebody he knows and loves has recently agreed to marry. The event, when it comes, is unavoidable, nor is there any period in adult life when it may not happen, or anybody we know so old that he or she may not occasion it. Fact is more romantic, or at any rate remains romantic much later in life, than fiction. Only the other day I read in the newspaper of a man of one hundred and thirty-five years who had just subjected his little circle to this formality. Very likely the newspaper exaggerated, but the case undermines the security that one ordinarily feels in his relationship with the ageing.
Now it needs no argument that to be happy in the happiness of others is an inexpensive pleasure and well worth cultivating. Other things being equal, one should go dancing and singing to his first meeting with another’s beloved. Bright-colored flowers, be she sixteen or sixty, should blossom, to his imagination, from the granite curb along his way; and, though a foolish convention may repress the song and dance, yet should he walk as if shod with the most levitating heels ever made from the liveliest of live rubber, and sing merrily in his heart.
But, thus to enter into the happiness of another, one must see and feel, as if for himself, some good and sufficient reason for that happiness; and the deep, insoluble mystery essential to all proper betrothals is that this good and sufficient reason is not necessarily visible: these two are happy-mad, and how shall anybody who is sane enter into their lunacy?