There are many kinds of fallow as I have already intimated. The more modern is not the "bare fallow" which lets the land so ploughed and harrowed lie unsown even for a season, but the fallow, of varied name, where the land is sown to crops whose purpose is to gather the free nitrogen back into the ground for its enrichment. So is our fallowing by the classics not only to prepare the ground, clear it of weeds, aerate it, break up the clods, but also to enrich it by bringing back into the mind of the youth of to-day that which has escaped into the air of the ages past through the great human minds that have lived and loved upon this earth and laid themselves down into its dust to die.
In New York City, a young man, born out upon the prairies, was lying, as it was thought, near to death, in a hospital. He turned to the nurse and asked what month it was. She answered that it was early May. He thought of the prairies, glorified to him by Horace's Odes. He heard the frogs in the swales amid the virgin prairie flowers as Aristophanes had heard them in the ponds of Greece. He saw the springing oats in a neighboring field that should furnish the pipes for the winds of Pan. He saw, as the dying poet Ibycus, the cranes go honking overhead. And he said, "I can't die now. It's ploughing time."
It is "ploughing time" for the world again, and ploughing time not only because we turn from instruments of war to those of peace, symbolized since the days of Isaiah by the "ploughshares" beaten from swords, but because we must turn to the cultivation with thoroughness and patience not only of our acres but of the minds that are alike to have world horizons in this new season of the earth.
Amos prophesied that in the day of restoration "the ploughman would overtake the reaper." War's grim reaper is quitting the field to-day. The ploughman has overtaken him. May he remember the law of the "fallow" and not be in too great a hurry.
[WRITING AND READING][14]
John Matthews Manly and Edith Rickert
Do you like to write? Probably not. What have you tried to write? Probably "themes."
The "theme" is a literary form invented by teachers of rhetoric for the education of students in the art of writing. It does not exist outside the world of school and college. No editor ever accepted a "theme." No "theme" was ever delivered from a rostrum, or spoken at a dinner, or bound between the covers of a book in the hope that it might live for centuries. In a word, a "theme" is first and last a product of "composition"--a laborious putting together of ideas, without audience and without purpose, hated alike by student and by instructor. Its sole use is to exemplify the principles of rhetoric. But rhetoric belongs to the past as much as the toga and the snuffbox; it is an extinct art, the art of cultivating style according to the mannerisms of a vanished age.
Forget that you ever wrote a "theme," and ask yourself now: "Should I like to write?" Of course you would--if you could. And you can. You have had, and you will have, some experiences that will not be repeated exactly in any other life--that no one else can express exactly as you would express them. And the art of expressing what you have experienced, what you think, what you feel, and what you believe, can be learned.