Philosophy of Trimmings

Iamque tenebat Nox — Night already held the mid spaces of the sky, and the Professor was in his roof-garden. The town was asleep. It was calm and quiet and restful up there, and invited meditation. There were numbers of people sitting about, it is true; but they were not talking — or at least, if they were, it was in the still, small voice. They shared Hawthorne’s theory of communication: speech was intended for the use of those who could converse in no other way.

Of course it was not a really truly roof-garden: it was only the Professor’s quiet and secluded little study. And as for the people I mentioned, they were the friendly books among which he sat, and had sat for years. They were not books by specialists in learning, but works by the great general practitioners of Life.

The Professor and his wife had returned, shortly before, from a social function. It had taken them hours to prepare for it, hours to go and come, and it would take them hours to recover from it. It was not different in the essential from most of the social functions they attended: they had enjoyed, at a very liberal estimate, about twenty minutes of real sociability; and now they were at home again, exhausted physically, nervously, spiritually, and financially, and filled with skepticism as to the sociability of society.

It was to regain his calm that the Professor had gone up into his roofgarden. He had sat for some time pondering on the trimmings of society, and was now gravitating into a meditation on the trimmings of life. For the trimmings of polite society, though they might be more conspicuous and more inane, were nevertheless but one province of the great world of trimmings universal. Men were everywhere, and at all times, in greater or less degree a prey to either the deception or the tyranny of that which was only incidental or accidental to the main business of life.

There was education, for example. The Professor thought of the administration of his college — of all the regents, registrars, clerks, secretaries, committees, and advisers, of all the printing and writing and classifying and pigeon-holing, of all the roll-calling and quizzing and examination. What was all the marvelous system for? Why, simply this: in order that young men and women who came to college to get an education might be prevented from avoiding the thing they came for.

And as for instruction itself (this was a college of liberal arts), what expense for illustrative and experimental apparatus, for professors and assistants, and for scores of thousands of books, nine-tenths of which were repetition or obscuration of the remaining tenth! The shelves of a monstrous library would soon be insufficient to contain them. Many of them would never be read, and most of those that would be read were far from indispensable. The Professor could n’t help feeling some sympathy with the western legislature which refused its university faculty an appropriation for books on the ground that they had not yet read through those that they already had in their library.

And all this was to teach young people a few ordinary facts, to develop in them the faculty of thought, and to communicate an attitude toward life, — something which could be got, he had often heard, within four bare walls, if you had five feet of books, a few rough benches, and one or two good teachers. There was such a thing as having so many aids to liberal culture that you never got to the real business of liberal culture, which was to think. Plato and Aristotle and the great men of their time — and of all time — had been fortunate in the absence of trimmings. Yes, the Professor had even been told that all you needed to do to get a liberal education was to sit at one end of a log, provided at the other end you had a MAN.

And there was business, too. Once upon a time in the Professor’s institution an auditing system had been installed. He could n’t remember clearly, but he thought it was at the persuasion of certain professors of history and literature who were convinced that the scientific method as employed by them might be carried with profit even into the realm of business administration. The scheme involved the creation of a number of highly-paid clerks, necessitated endless printing, and cost thousands and thousands of dollars a year; and when it was put into operation nobody could fill in the blanks properly without the aid of the professor who invented the scheme; and the educational interests of the institution began to suffer so much from the nervousness of the faculty at large, especially of the mathematicians, who found little time for anything but the study and signing of blanks, that the system was abandoned — particularly as there was general apprehension that its inventor might die or resign, and leave his fellow professors defenseless. The original reason for its installation had been that the professor of philosophy had once been unable to explain a shortage of two dollars and forty cents.

And there was government — from the household to the nation. What duplication, triplication, and multiplication of men and measures and things, what quantities of red tape, and what circumlocution offices! And war — what a magnificent trimming it was, and what magnificent trimmings it had: uniforms, battleships, parades, big guns, manifestoes! And all this to settle questions of right and wrong after the manner of wild beasts; questions, too, raised only by men’s ignorance of the real, or their unwillingness to see it. Why not campaign as in antiquity — fight in fair seasons only, and when you did fight get at it directly, in an intimate and familiar way, like Athenian and Spartan? Modern warfare a contest of wit, not of brute strength? Very well, then, let the Horatii and the Curiatii get together and have an adding match, or let them spell down, or try the paradigm of the Greek verb. Let whole nations do it! There would be slaughter for you, and the greatest impulse of all toward the beating of swords into ploughshares, and the inauguration of an era of good spelling.

In philanthropy, too — it cost almost as much to organize charities as to relieve the object of charities. It cost almost as much to invest a dollar in foreign missions as the dollar was worth. Balls for the benefit of the poor cost thousands of dollars, and netted tens.

Nothing escaped trimmings — not even the most sacred things. Even religion had its trimmings. Pure religion and undefiled before God the Father, the Professor had often been told, was this: to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep yourself unspotted from the world. The chief end of man was to glorify God and serve Him forever. It was true, of course, that men’s ideas might differ as to methods, but it was also true, if the Professor understood the past and the present, that the trimmings of religion were especially numerous and mischievous. He thought of the expense of maintaining church worship—paid choirs and organists, paid florists, salaried janitors, printing, hymn-books, pastors, and assistant pastors. He thought of the dozens of organizations in the modern church — the brotherhoods, sisterhoods, motherhoods, clubs, societies, leagues of every description, social,financial,educational, missionary, industrial,athletic, musical, political, dramatic. He thought of petitions buried in verbiage, of the intellectual gymnastics which many times passed for sermons, and which in an hour obscured beyond recognition a truth which the text in the beginning made utterly clear, and which had needed only a few words and a little ceremonial to give it lodgment in the emotion. He thought of theological speculation, of wars and rumors of wars, of all the ills religion had been guiltlessly guilty of by reason of trimmings —

And yet men had always maintained that the conversion of souls was the end toward which religious effort was to be directed; if there was any single detail on which there was unanimous consent as to the method of glorifying God, this was it: men were to go out into the highways and byways, to go into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. And this was the last and least directly striven for of all.

Whether men did not really after all believe in this, or whether they were exhausted before they came to it, it was notorious that they stopped short of its accomplishment. The average man would spend his time, his money, and his strength in maintaining church services and promoting benevolences, but it was all but impossible for him to bring himself to do personal work among his neighbors, or in his own fam ily. It was as if the chief end of man were indeed to glorify God, but that he could not or would not get further than the glorification of trimmings.

Yes, trimmings were universal. Wherever he looked, the Professor sawr abundance of the inessential. Many a time, when he had tried to divide the truth, his sword, arm and all, had buried themselves in an unresisting mass of ribbons and fluff, and had been withdrawn without a drop of blood to tell of life.

Why was there so much in the world that was indirect, inessential, and merely time-consuming and fruitless? Why were religion, charities, social communion, education, and even recreation, so beset behind and before by trimmings that men could live long tmd die without intimate acquaintance with the real? The Professor was philosopher enough to know that whatever was, however useless or vile, had some reason for existence. He was impelled to look into the Philosophy of Trimmings.

With the instinct of the scientific mind, he reached for pencil and paper, and put down ten or twelve numerical heads at the left margin of the page. There was nothing like mathematical demonstration. For a great many college professors, you know, the lines of Spenser —

mean something of this sort.

Opposite number one he set down Ignorance as a full-flowing source of trimmings. Whether from the accident of natal environment, or from subsequent decree of fortune, or from general incapacity and dullness, a great many men dwelt so continually in the realm of trimmings that they were ignorant of the attractiveness of the kingdom of the genuine, or were unaware even of its existence. The Professor recalled an old story: Hieron had it thrown up to him, by a certain one of his enemies, that his breath was foul. Going home, therefore, to his wife: “What do you say? ” he cried. “You never told me of this!” But she being a properly discreet and guileless girl, “I thought,” she said, “ that this was the way all the men smelled! ”

So there were many who knew nothing of the charm of simplicity and truth, and who made life into coarse and gaudy kaleidoscopic change. Among them were the rich and the powerful, who had always had their desires, and who had always been fawned on, and flattered, and separated from the wholesome truth; and among them, too, were the newly-rich, and the silly poor who envied and imitated them; people who judged plays by the scenery, novels by the description, and men by their clothes; and all others whose vision was so blunt or whose natures were so careless that their eyes never penetrated beyond the exterior.

For short, the Professor called this class fools — not meaning to reproach them, you understand. He knew that fools were born, not made. A wiser man than he had said that, though you should bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet would not his foolishness depart from him. He would follow Thackeray’s instruction and example: whenever he could, he would smash the idols with good courage; but he would not be too fierce with the idolaters — they worshiped the best thing they knew.

Opposite the second head the Professor placed Vanity. Many men, and women, were filled with inordinate love of praise— not so bad when they themselves were genuine, and when what they strove for was legitimate fame, the fame

but productive of endless cheap trimmings when they were of common clay, and were resolved on distinction whether for worthy causes, or unworthy. For the emptier of merit your seeker after distinction, the greater the number and brilliance of the trimmings he must perforce employ to attract attention. Here were to be catalogued men and women in the whirl of society, ministers and professors who diverted their congregations and classes with refined vaudeville, “ original ” poets and short-story writers, and the remainder of the long line of life’s players who for the most part were capable of nothing but inexplicable dumbshows and noise.

Thirdly in the Professor’s list came people of Disordered Taste, who could be amused only by constant novelty. He did not stop long here — just long enough to make a note of neurotic society queens (and kings), jaded epicures, and the blasé and burned-out in general. God made them, and therefore let them pass for men.

For the fourth head he wrote down the Unwilling — those who had unpleasant or impossible duties to perform, and who avoided the labor of execution, or the shame of confession, by prolonging their attention to the trimmings. He recalled once being sent into the garden, in his now far-away childhood, to get a currant switch — for purposes which his mother knew perfectly, and regarding which he himself had what he later learned to call a good working hypothesis. A half-hour afterward, she came out and found him patiently pulling weeds along the whole row of bushes. He would come soon, when he had finished.

He called to mind an incident of his later youth, too, when he had taken a young lady to a picnic ten miles away, driven a circuit of fifteen to get home, gone a mile or two beyond the gate and back, played a game of croquet, sat an hour in the parlor, invited her to another picnic, and gone away without having asked her the question, as a preliminary to which he had planned the whole day’s events. This was not unlike the religious association of his college experience, which conducted an extensive and expensive epistolary campaign during the summer vacation, met five hundred students at the station at the beginning of the year, helped them find rooms, saw them through the line on registration day, gathered and compiled their religious statistics, delivered repeated invitations to its meetings, entertained them at socials and sacred concerts, all to pave the way for personal work with them — and by this time noticed with relief that it was time to prepare for the June examinations.

The fifth class was not so innocent. There were many who employed trimmings deliberately, to deceive. There were monarchs, for example, who wanted money for the wars, and blinded their peoples with splendid words and ways. There were framers of tariff legislation, pseudo-artists, orators, and musicians, professors who did n’t want to resign, magicians, and clairvoyants. It was to the interest of all of these for the audience to see, not the real thing, but the trimmings.

Against number six the Professor placed a less reprehensible cause of trimmings. This was man’s natural Impatience of Inactivity. He thought of certain of his students who always groaned unutterably when they hesitated for a word in translation. He called to mind, too, a classmate in philosophy, who, at the moment he was called on, promptly began to recite, and talked on until he came to something. Mankind, especially in his own country, liked to see “ something doing.” There was something reposeful in activity, even if you were not sure it was going to accomplish your end. The Professor had been in many committee meetings, sacred and profane, when a plan of action was adopted and everybody was set to work, without any one’s knowing very well what it was all about. By the time he had found out, he was in the case of the Knickerbocker historian, and had to pause and take breath, and recover from the excessive fatigue he had undergone in preparing to begin his undertaking ; “in this but imitating the example of a renowned Dutch tumbler of antiquity, who took a start of three miles for the purpose of jumping over a hill, but having run himself out of breath by the time he reached the foot, sat himself quietly down for a few moments to blow, and then walked over it at his leisure.”

Only — most people had neither the courage nor the sense of the Dutchman, but turned back, or kept on sitting, or took a run for another hill, with the same result. The world was full of people who were either running toward hills, or blowing from effort; by the look of them you would think them mighty leapers. But when hills were climbed, it was usually by sober people who made no great fuss either before or during the ascent.

When the Professor came to the seventh head, he pondered for some time. He knew there were more causes for trimmings than a mere half-dozen, and yet at the moment he could think of nothing more to set down. He leaned back and thought. Perhaps if he let his mind wander a while in the general realm of trimmings, he would receive a suggestion.

He had n’t gone further than the trimmings on his wife’s last hat (hats were good that year) when the suggestion came. It was Art; and the trimmings that resulted from it were legitimate and desirable. The reason why he had not thought of it before was, of course, that he had not been looking for virtue in trimmings. But you must not get the idea that the Professor was set against all trimmings — one of the kind who think clothes are only for covering and warmth, churchspires only for the support of lightningrods, and language and pictures only for the convenience of advertisers. Not at all. Quite the contrary: one of the few principles of art which he thought he understood was that architecture — and all the other arts — stood in need of certain devices to emphasize dimensions and outlines, to aid the eye and the soul to comprehend the essential meaning of what was before them. The human body in painting and sculpture needed skillfully arranged drapery — and so it did in life — to set off its exquisite lines. A temple needed color and ornament to give it clearness of outline and grace, a vase was the better for decoration to give its graceful proportions more distinctness.

In the same way religious devotion stood in need of music and speech and form; the poem must have rhyme or rhythm; and the general business of life had to be clarified and expedited by the trimmings of organization and the amenities. Without this kind of trimmings life could not be lived abundantly, and civilization would degenerate into the barbarism of anarchy.

But the Professor’s principle of art went on, further, to specify that ornament existed not for its own sake, but for the sake of what it ornamented. Here was the trouble with that great work of art, human life: it had not in all cases been left to artists to furnish the trimmings. Pseudo-artists, well-meaning bunglers, and even artisans, had all too frequently been commissioned on great works. Ignorance and conceit and commerce had filled the world with base imitations, which contained but a negligible part of the excellence of the models, and were possible only because the undiscriminating multitude lived by trimmings alone. Just as there were pseudo-Plautuses and pseudo-Peruginos, so were there pseudo-culture, pseudo-religion, pseudo-education, pseudo-sociability, and pseudo-amusement.

And that human kind was wasting itself over trimmings was not the worst thing about it. That was indeed bad; but far worse was the fact that trimmings were responsible for the great breaches between men and men. The hierarchy of human society was in the last analysis due to the inessential. All men were by nature desirous of distinction — among them the undeserving no less than those who possessed merit. To such, since reality could bring no distinction, the way to it lay open only through paths that were available. They could not excel; therefore they would differ. Trimmings, loud and expensive imitations of the real, would insure them their desire. These could be purchased. Enter money. Enter strife and struggle, selfishness, injustice, violence, oppression, crime, splendor, misery. The history of civilization was filled with it. The history of mankind, the Professor had read, was the history of the struggle for liberty, liberty from what, if not from the oppression of those who were in blind and passionate pursuit of trimmings?

The Professor left eight, nine, and ten blank, for future convenience; he might think of something further before sleep overtook him — or he overtook sleep. He would take the sheet and pencil to his room, so that he could get up and use them in case he had an idea — like the great men he had read about.

Meanwhile, he jotted down a remedy. Of course you expect one; and, being a professor, of course he had one to propose.

It did n’t. require much space. It was just the single word, Philosophy.

When I tell you that it was philosophy, of course your first thought is that the Professor was a doctrinaire. But he was n’t, except in the innocent matter of thinking that the subject he taught was indispensable to any rational education —which you know very well is common to all professors. For your real doctrinaire you must go to modern subjects, not to professors of ancient literature, who have met so much twentieth-century civilization in Athens and Rome as to recognize that what is called progress is after all more or less a matter of trimmings; that

and who look twice before organizing an international faculty base-ball game on the strength of possessing an untested soap-bubble.

The Professor was under no delusions. He knew that philosophy was no cure-all. If it had been, trimmings would have gone out of style long before Socrates.

Not that it had no potency. The Professor could testify to its efficacy. The trouble was, you could n’t get people to take it. Some made faces at the first dose, and declared that the remedy was worse than the disease. Others would not look at it: they had taken medicine before, and it was bitter. Still others had already tried it, and it had done them no good. The fact was, there were so many worthless imitations that many never got the genuine, soon became discouraged, and lost faith. For trimmings obscure philosophy as well as other goods of life.

But real philosophy, the Professor knew, was a good thing for rich and poor alike, and neglect of it was harmful to both young and old. And an older and wiser than either he or Horace had said that wisdom was the principal thing, and called happy the man who found it. Length of days was in her right hand; and in her left hand riches and honor.

You see that the Professor’s philosophy was the kind without trimmings, or at least that it was very lightly trimmed, and by his own hand. I ought to have told you in the first place that it was neither Stoic, nor Epicurean, nor anything else with a name.

But if it was without fixed form, and variable according to the taste of the individual artist, it was nevertheless not void. It had one immutable tenet: Plato’s earnest desire for the vision of the truth. Its essence was the just perception of values — to know a good thing or a good man when you saw one; to realize in thought and action that the eternal verities were few, but real; that the simple and the untrimmed goods of life were in the main the nearest at hand and the most abundant, and also the most valuable; and that trimmings for trimmings’ sake did not pay.

And it was not a philosophy of the head only. It was also a philosophy of the heart. If it were not so easy to be misunderstood, perhaps it would be as well to call it religion; for if you strip religion of its trimmings, you find at its heart a philosophy of life, or you find nothing at all. And it was like religion, too, in this: that it did n’t depend upon learning, though learning (of the untrimmed sort) made it more intelligent and efficacious.

And if the Professor was no doctrinaire, and no conventionalist, neither was he that other unpleasant but indispensable character, the uncompromising idealist. He would not rail at trimmings, like a Juvenal; he would laugh at them, like a Flaccus. After all, the world was bound to have trimmings, and part of the world liked trimmings better than anything else. Definitions might vary. It was the fitting thing for each to measure himself by his own yard-stick.

But for his single self, he had as lief not be, as live to be in awe of such a thing as trimmings. He would not be enslaved. Every philosopher was a king, and every fool a serf. He would be answerable to his own conscience. He would submit to trimmings when they were necessary, enjoy them when they were innocent, encourage them when they were real art, laugh at them when they were silly, and despise them only when they were vile. He would follow the sage’s advice to be, not seem. He would teach his students, first of all, the messages of the great souls of literature; he would let his charity begin at home, in just and generous dealing with those whose lot was less fortunate than his own; he would let his religion be the giving of the cup of cold water in His Name, and to owe no man aught but to love one another; he would meet his friends on the basis of congeniality of spirit, without regard to their rank or the amount of their possessions; his diversions, too, he would seek also in the realm of the unconventional. He would cling to the eternal verities, according to the teaching of his friends of the roof-garden, and with as little indirection as possible in the midst of a society whose members were so intent on the trimmings of life as to lose the reasons for living:

So concluding, the Professor descended from the roof-garden, and slept the sleep of the man who has formulated a restful theory of conduct — and has not yet been called upon to put it into practice.