You are entitled to a point of view, but not to announce it as the centre of the universe. Prejudice, more than anything else, robs life of its educational value. I knew a man who maintained that the chief obstacle to the triumph of Christianity was the practice of infant baptism. I heard a woman say that no one who ate with his knife could be a gentleman. Hopeless scholars, these!
What we call society is very narrow. But life is very broad. It includes "the whole world of God's cheerful, fallible men and women." It is not only the famous people and the well-dressed people who are worth meeting. It is every one who has something to communicate. The scholar has something to say to me, if he be alive. But I would hear also the traveller, the manufacturer, the soldier, the good workman, the forester, the village school-teacher, the nurse, the quiet observer, the unspoiled child, the skilful housewife. I knew an old German woman, living in a tenement, who said, "My heart is a little garden, and God is planting flowers there."
"Il faut cultiver son jardin,"—yes, but not only that. One should learn also to enjoy the neighbor's garden, however small; the roses straggling over the fence, the scent of lilacs drifting across the road.
There is a great complaint nowadays about the complication of life, especially in its social and material aspects. It is bewildering, confusing, overstraining. It destroys the temper of tranquillity necessary to education. The simple life is recommended (and rightly) as a refuge from this trouble. But perhaps we need to understand a little more clearly what simplicity is. It does not consist merely in low ceilings, loose garments, and the absence of bric-à-brac.
Life may be complicated in a log cabin. There is a conventionalism of the Philistines as well as of the Athenians. A country town, with its set formulas of propriety, its minute etiquette, its subtle rivalries, its undercurrents of gossip, and its inveterate convolutions of prejudice, may be as complicated as the Labyrinth itself.
The real simplicity is not outward, but inward. It consists in singleness of aim, clearness of vision, directness of purpose, openness of mind, cheerfulness of spirit, sincerity of taste and affection, gentle candor of speech, and loyalty to the best that we know. I have seen it in a hut. I have seen it in a palace. It is the bright ornament and badge of the best scholars in the School of Life.
Song
THE dark is dying, dying,
Weary, faint, forlorn,
I fling my casement open
To clasp the virgin Morn.
And now the Day is dying—
She that I love, I swear,
But see,—th' Evening woman,
With star-dust in her hair.
