The Crooked Stick

IN nearly every young orchard is at least one tree whose main stalk, instead of directly seeking the zenith like its neighbors’, is disfigured by an inclination at a certain point, making a hip or a knuckle. Sometimes Nature seems to realize that, having permitted this tree to acquire a surface blemish, she owes it due compensation; and, whether it be fact or imagination, I have heard more than one farmer boast that he could depend on the ‘ crooked stick ’ in his orchard for surer bearing and better fruit than the average of his straight, symmetrical trees. Yet if you were looking for a sapling to buy, you would take a straight one in preference to this.

We seldom find a large family without its human crooked stick. I do not mean a monstrosity, incapable of bearingnormal blossoms or fruit; orascamp, who is like a tree rotten at the core; or a ne’er-do-weel, who has the chronic weakness of a tree from which every wind whips off a branch or two. The human crooked stick may be as sound inside as the best member of his group, but simply different from the rest. Their ambitions are not his, or their points of view, or their methods, or their tastes. If you ask him why, he cannot tell you. All he will say is t hat he and they are not interested in t he same things, and there your hope of persuading him into conformity runs up against a dead wall.

The most salient characteristic of the crooked stick may be, in one case, a calm contempt for the conventions; in another, a secretive tendency; in a third, an amiable irresponsibility; in a fourth, lack of the social quality, or absorption in some subject which does not attract others of the same age; in a fifth, an ascetic disposition to selfpunishment for trifling misdeeds, or morbid self-pity. A different mode of handling may be needed for each of these types; but before we attempt any, it is well to inquire into some of the anteceden t conditions.

If you have watched the crooked stick in your orchard from the seedleaf period, you can pretty surely tell at what stage of its growth the stalk was diverted from the perpendicular, and by what circumstance. Perchance, when you marked the spot where you had planted your seed, you did not drive your marking-stake far enough to one side, and the tender young shoot, crowded out of its course, took a bend in order to escape an obstacle it was not equal to wrestling with. Or a stone may have rolled out of the fence, and settled right in the treelet’s pathway toward the upper air. Or the first winter’s blizzard may have dropped a branch from an adult tree where its infant neighbor, after t he snows were melted, had this weight to lift with every inch of its own growth, though still too puny for such a burden. In short, since t he law of its being requires it to press straight upward, no sapling ever left, the perpendicular save through some external influence; and it behooves the parent who discovers a crooked stick in his family to reflect that this young replica of himself may be only paying vicariously the penalty of his mistakes or neglect.

Take Alice as an example. She is the only one of a houseful of girls who revolts against the conventions which hedge about her sex; and I sympathize with her, not because I disbelieve in the conventions, but because I know that Alice was forced in childhood to obey a lot of rigid rules for which she could see no reason, and for which, to tell the truth, there wasn’t very much. What she needs now is a stimulant for her intelligence. Release her from peremptory obligations as far as practicable, and encourage her to look into the origins of the generally accepted social canons, and to figure out what would happen if they were expunged to-morrow. It is no answer to her protests to say, ‘These rules were adopted a hundred years before you were born’; for she will probably retort that by the same token we ought still to be depending on the tallow-dip and the stage-coach. The subject is hard to debate, because you are bound to confess that institutions like chaperonage, for instance, though starting as measures of protection against real perils, have mostly shrunken to mere forms. Still, a form may serve good purpose as a danger-signal. We lock the door at night under no illusion that it can keep out a skilled burglar; but the turning of the key gives notice that we wish to be left in peace, and that any intruder will take his fate in his hand. So, when we throw even the most flimsy safeguard around girlish ignorance, we warn the minions of scandal to keep their distance.

Often an explanation like this will appeal to the common sense of a girl on whom bludgeon-logic or acrid sarcasm would be wasted. On her st rictly feminine side she might be approached with a reminder that she bows every day to unwritten laws of custom no deeperrooted than the law of chaperonage. Why does she not wear a tailor-made costume when she dines out, or a dinner-gown on the street promenade? Because her modesty revolts at the idea of making herself conspicuous by an act of bad taste. What she needs to learn is the relation between ‘must not’ and ‘better not’ —that public opinion is only the raw material of which the statute is the finished product. With Alice, moreover, it might not come amiss to counterpoise your defense of harmless conventions by condemning mere idolatry of forms, emphasizing the fact that the girl who would not, in a genuine emergency, face perils to body or reputation without flinching, deserves as little admiration as one who would wantonly flaunt her contempt for such things when there is no need. Finally, make her see that all of us have to submit, in the cause of the common weal, to restraints which we do not require, because we are only individual units in a great aggregation of which the majority are the better for a little curbing, and the laws have to be made to control all, not to fit the few.

The peculiarity of John, the crooked stick in another family, is non-communicativeness. From all I can learn of his habits, he has nothing unworthy to conceal; but whereas Will and Helen and Amy lack even prudent reserve in their self-expression, no one is sure what John thinks about anything. To the stranger, his inscrutability would appear temperamental; but we who remember him as a little fellow know that his volubility then was often so embarrassing as to call forth sharp rebukes from his elders. At first this wrought no outward change; as he passed, however, from the elasticity of babyhood and became an uncommonly sensitive boy, he felt such treatment not the less keenly because of his belated consciousness that he had brought it upon himself. Here was his mother’s mistake. With her diplomatic gift, she might have diverted, instead of strangling, his ill-timed deliverances, and, by later seeking occasion to give him a full hearing in private, have encouraged him to come to her alone when he had personal problems to settle or judgments to pronounce. The irritation caused by repeated public admonitions to ‘talk less and think more,’ simply crystallized into a chronic indisposition to speak his mind about anything.

To his parents he is respectful in demeanor, and of his obligations toward his brothers and sisters politely observant; but he enters little into their counsels, and has formed his own circle of friends apart from t heirs. Somebody proposes an expedition, and all the family except John are enthusiastic over the plans: he finds that he has ‘ an engagement ’ — nature unspecified — which will prevent his taking part. A bit of news about a neighbor is announced at breakfast; and, while all the rest are bristling with eager comment, John excuses his lack of an opinion by saying that he ‘does not know all the facts.’ There is no tartness in his tone, no covert reflection on the others for founding conclusions on premises insufficient for him, yet his colorless response throws a damper upon the vivacity of every one else.

Albeit, his uniform negativity offers no clear ground for reproach, his mother is painfully conscious that John’s position in the household is more that of a guest than a member. She wonders what she can do to overcome this. It would be fruitless, madam, to try argument, for he would deny that he cherished any but the kindest feeling toward all, and you have no tangible proof to the contrary. A change in your manner toward him, if in the direction of coolness, would only intensify the situation you now deplore; whereas any additional warmth would so plainly be forced that you would risk arousing his distrust. Your best course for the present is to ignore the difference between John and t he others and go on as you have been going. When opportunity offers to become acquainted with any of his special friends, cultivate them, to the end of attracting them to the house, where they can get a little of the society of Will and Helen and Amy. Make it, in brief, as easy as possible for John to have the companions he likes without going too far afield to find them, and thus cut away one of the excuses which he is probably making to himself for his subtle estrangement from the inner life of the home.

Meanwhile, keep up your spirits. Conditions which separate a healthy, clean-hearted boy from his own are not natural, and therefore not everlasting. The day will come when not everything will go so smoothly with John: he may fall ill; he may form an unprofitable business connection; he may lose the girl he had hoped to marry. Whatever its source, his trouble doubtless will make a breach in his defenses of reserve, opening a way for you to put in your claim to his confidence and a closer personal bond. Don’t brood over by-gones, whether the mistakes were his, or yours, or evenly divided between you: remorse is the poorest investment ever made by one who has anything to live for. You know that the past is past; so does John; therefore drop it. Prove to him, by your mode of approach rather than by any form of speech, that you never were really away from his side for an hour, even when the invisible barrier seemed to thrust itself most persistently between you.

Warm him with your unobtrusive sympathy. Grant, his mishaps and disappointments all the weight that he gives them, even though they may seem less momentous to one of your wider experience. Remember that his is only a boy’s soul in a man’s body, and that, till age has hardened us, our griefs are liquid, and flow at a light touch; let him pour out his without check. Damming a stream does not dry up the springs that feed it. When the flood is spent, your soothing words can avail much. Admitting the seriousness of what he has suffered, show him how many worse things might have happened, and how much it helps to turn a brave face toward fate. Remind him that the general who converts defeat into victory does not waste time counting his dead between fights. When inward quiet is restored in John, you will observe that, no matter how stiff may be his self-reliance, he will still like to keep his hand where it touches yours. And, having found something in you whose presence he had not before recognized, the new love he gives you will be all the more intense because mixed with the joy of discovery.

Negative faults in the young, though sometimes hard to deal with, do more than positive faults toward curing themselves, because contact with the world makes up many of the deficits left by nature. The little child, toddling cautionless about the highway, will learn, after being knocked down once or twice, to keep out of the way of moving objects larger than itself; so the youth who at the outset ignores the obligations resting on him, comes to a lively sense of them after enough of his ethical oversights have brought their punishments.

Edward, a boy who inherited a really bright mind, was at the age of nine still wholly irresponsible. He was not trusted to dress himself, because he was liable to leave off any of his most important garments. At school he regularly forgot what lessons had been assigned him, and in a reading exercise he was the only pupil in his class who invariably lost his place. Advised to wean him of his habitual untidiness by giving him some dainty decorations for his room, his mother embroidered a cover for his bureau-top; but he used to light his matches where their live embers fell upon it and dotted it with holes, and one day, experimenting with his button-hook to see whether it would heat white in the gas-flame, he laid the incandescent metal down on the cloth and finished the work of destruction.

When sent with a bank-note to make a trifling purchase, he would come home without his change, and quite unable to remember whether the shopman gave him any. To impress upon him the value of money, his parents made him a small weekly allowance to spend as he chose, at the same time establishing a system of petty fines for acts of carelessness; but the fines soon ran up so much faster than the allowance that the account had to be closed in consequence of the hopeless insolvency of the debtor. With no malicious intent, he amused himself one idle Sunday afternoon bedaubing with mudballs the windows of a neighbor who had gone out to walk; but, when told that this was a real offense, of his own accord he hastened to call upon his victim and apologize.

The uniformly good behavior of his brothers and sisters made Edward’s derelictions seem heinous by contrast, and the friends of the family generally set him dow n as an incorrigible. They erred. Put early upon his own resources, some concepts of accountability were driven into him by blows so hard that they hurt; and the orderly evolution of the sense followed, till, while he was still a very young man, I found him filling an important position in a big manufacturing plant., won in competition with colleagues who had begun life under auspices far more promising than his.

The trouble in his case undoubtedly was neglect at an age when no one thought of him as yet trainable. His parents were so occupied with the education of their older children that they did not notice how Edward was shooting up. Since no one guided or guarded his expansion, his precociously active mind was bent according to whatever happened to get in its way; and it did not resume a continuously straight growth till the pressure of certain practical needs forced it into normality and kept it there.

In one case I knew, the warp of unsociability was given to a young mind through excessive benevolence. Wallace, a little boy with a preternatural memory, an unadjusted imagination, and a very languid reasoning faculty, was thrown by circumstances into constant contact with a household of adult relatives who were satisfied, by his ability to rattle off rhymes and assimilate long words, that he was an intellectual prodigy. What he needed at that stage of his career was a tonic for one part of his mind, a vigorous kneading for another part, and rest for a third. He received none of these.

A childless aunt took his education in hand. She was a good woman, but a sentimentalist; and her dominating impulse was to make the gifts of her nephews a force for the moral advancement of the race. She began by playing on his emotional nature. Most of the books she read aloud to him had pathetic endings. The few glints of humor that filtered through her mind into his were of ihe evasive sort used to lighten up ‘addresses to youth’ on sober topics. In their talks she would personify the objects of nature, to make them contribute toward his apprenticeship in philanthropy. He ought not to break the branches of the trees, she told him, because it made the trees weep; it was cruel to knock off the heads of the field flowers with his stick, because the Baby Daisies would feel so badly when they saw Father and Mother Daisy lying dead on the ground; it would be a pity to kill the mosquito that haunted his bedchamber, because all it was doing was to sing a little song, the only one it knew; and so forth. As a consequence, this boy was seen, at the age when most boys are semi-barbarians, to halt in his walk through the streets and shed tears over a defunct beetle he found on its back with its claws lifted tragically skyward.

Did Wallace grow into a leader of humane movements, or a poet of nature? On the contrary, his respectability to-day is due to his inheritance of a moral constitution robust enough to resist the pernicious influences of his infant environment. In t he common boy-world he presented a queer little figure, pitiful indeed in its isolation of thought and motive. He looked at everything through the medium his aunt had artificially tinted for him. Other boys, accustomed to view life in its own crude colors, had scant patience with his oddities. A few, who were fond of his brothers and who recognized his good native traits, held open for him a share in their intimacies and pleasures, but, finding him unresponsive, let him alone.

Being human, he could not help realizing the cause of all this remoteness; and, as his reason slowly ripened and he began to see things as others did, he became soured at the thought of the false start given him. This is an unfortunate state of mind for a boy: it makes a pessimist of him at a time when his outlook ought to be only bright and hopeful. The emotions which nature gave him as resources to be drawn on when some real joy or sorrow came his way having been exhausted by premature and unwholesome excitation, he sees nothing left of life except a juiceless routine. So he lives mainly to himself, like one who has lost the sense of sight or hearing; and it is well for him if a subject offer itself in which he can bury and busy himself to the exclusion of the introspective habit.

Introspection, viewed in the large, is a valuable thing, but much of its virtue lies in its discreet use. Let it become a fixed habit, and heaven help its victim! He is almost sure to grow into a crooked stick of the ascetic or morbid class. Our internal analysis ought to be carried only so far as to convince us that our ethical judgments and our self-esteem are not all solid, but partly gaseous. When it proceeds to the separation of these constituents, have a care; for as soon as the fluid elements are forced out, the residuum will weigh down our spirits in proportion to its loss of leaven. That is what is the matter with us when our complaint is popularly diagnosed as New England conscience.

Laura, before she turned seventeen, had the int rospective habit so fastened on her that sometimes she would abstain half a day from legitimate pleasures with her young friends because she felt constrained to punish herself for a passing mistake, and spend the remaining half in pitying herself because nobody interfered to prevent her martyrdom. Here were vanity, selfishness, and hypocrisy, masquerading as conscientiousness: vanity, because she ascribed importance to a misdemeanor of her own which she would not have condescended to notice in any one else; selfishness, because she reveled in ostentatious suffering, even at the cost of discomforting all her family; hypocrisy, because in her innermost heart she knew that the whole performance was a sham.

Laura’s parents were long undecided whether she ought to go to college. Whenever they seemed averse to the notion, she became most anxious to go, and this gave her self-pity plenty of exhilarating exercise. When they finally concluded to send her, she lapsed into sluggish indifference, as who should say, ’Pray don’t consider me in the matter. I am nothing but a sacrificial offering on the altar of discipline.’ Her shifting attitude doubtless gave her a keen morbid enjoyment, since it Held for her the centre of the stage.

Her mother’s chief misgiving had been lest Laura, being thrown among a number of girls with no ties of kindred or old association to stir their charity for her, might be humiliated by their treatment of her tantrums. And so it proved. As soon as the novelty of her unfamiliar environment had worn off, she began the self-punishing and selfpitying business. On the first occasion a few soft-hearted fellow students, older than she, were touched by her dispirited condition, which they attributed to homesickness. By the second time, only one had failed to see through her; and at the next recurrence she had not a single sympathizer, but was obliged to nurse her morbidity in seclusion. This aroused her resentment; but, as there was no home audience to play to, and the college audience had no taste for such comedy, she found herself disregarded almost as if the earth had opened and swallowed her. A fourth fit of the same sort was so mortifying in its sequel that a fifth never got fully under way. The needed remedy had been found; but she might have lived to a ripe old age in the bosom of her family without obtaining what was best for her soul.

The way out is not always so plainly marked. The unsociable and the selfabsorbed may find some rational occupation for their solitude, and get along; the morbid may drop their morbidity when compelled to seek sympathy from strangers or nobody, and develop into genial companions. But there is grave danger to be faced in the case of a Wallace, or of a boy with Laura’s bent, if he has passed his most plastic years away from his brothers and sisters and in the company of adults. A career without a childhood is as unnatural as a day without a dawn; and when a lad who has been thus bereft takes his place among others who have not, they find him like an alien, unable to share their thoughts or speak their language. Too many a young man, thus waking to the discovery that he has been cheated into leading an unreal life, resolves to make up for it by plunging into a real one, consisting chiefly of excesses. Though he may not be vicious by nature, he has been bent so far in one direction that, the backward swing carries him equally far over in the other; and before the equilibrium is restored he has been irreparably hurt. Pride forbids his seeking the society of his equals as long as they show no especial desire for his; so he takes up with inferiors, distilling from their adulation a salve for his wounded sensibilities. Of all the paths into which a young man’s feet may stray, none leads so directly downward as this.

In such a situation, the easiest course for the parent is to sit still and say, ’Ah, boys must have their fling! When these wild oats have been sown, he will come to himself!' A harder one, but. more common, is to read the transgressor a lecture on the outrageousness of conduct which is killing his father and mother by inches. An extreme course, when the culprit continues to misbehave after due warning, is to banish him from home and cut him off with a shilling. There are serious objections to any of these methods. The first has the sound of worldly wisdom without its substance. The father who reasons that, because so many other sons survive the dissipation of their powers, his is safe to do so, might as well say that, because pneumonia is not invariably fatal, he will not call in the doctor when it attacks a member of his household. He may shirk his responsibility with a verbal formula satisfactory to his ears, but it will not satisfy his soul or deceive anyone into believing him sincere.

The second alternative is both tactless and selfish. If your boy is acting outrageously, he knows it; the more you declaim, the less temperate you will grow, unless you have a superhuman control over your temper and your manners; and the effect of anything like an outburst will be to irritate him further, and give fresh poignancy to the very feeling which led him into trouble, the sense of detachment from those with whom nature meant him to affiliate. Your protest, moreover, would be in behalf of yourself, your own rights, your own pride, your own comfort, instead of his manhood, his potential worth, his self-respect. Even worse, if possible, would be the third plan, which contemplates severing the last tie that had bound him to his place in the scheme of things.

No. Two ideas should underlie whatever you do: first, that your boy’s case needs tonic and not drastic remedies; next, that you are only trying to help him help himself. Convince him that every leverage within reach will be used to keep his moral system up to its work while it is undergoing treatment, but take for granted that he is a reasoning being and a free agent. Deplore frankly and sympathetically the causes which led to his morbid condition of mind, but appeal to his common sense in as sanguine a spirit as if you were trying to restrain him from throwing good money after bad in an impolitic business investment. Your hopefulness will insensibly infect him. Demonstrate your faith in his inherent manliness so that he cannot harbor a suspicion that he has sacrificed your love because you dislike the disorder from which he is suffering. Hold fast to him at any cost to your own self-complacency.

I am not advising you to play the weakling; do not mince phrases when the situation calls for strong ones, or skim lightly over critical conditions. But remember always that you are attacking the disease and not the patient. Beware of choosing inopportune times for your discourses, or misplacing your emphasis when you speak: there is always a psychological moment when your lightest word will find its mark, and nothing so impoverishes an argument as magnifying its negligible factors. To straighten a bent sapling, you would not tie it to a stake with a cross crack in the middle; you would not use gauze for your thongs when you could get stout leather; you would not watch for results in the autumn or winter, but in the growing season. Study the case of your crooked stick of a boy with at least the sagacity you would use in your tree-plantation.

The straightest trees, of course, are those which stand close enough together to form a grove. Here is a fine exemplification of the competitive principle in inanimate nature. Every young tree is reaching up after a larger share of the sunlight than its neighbors enjoy. Its top may prosper while its lower members are smothering to death; but its perpendicular attitude is perfectly preserved throughout its growth, because there is no lateral expansion to distract the forces which make for height. Go into a close-growing forest and you will note, too, that as a rule one trunk differs from another of the same variety only in size, the uniformity being most pronounced in the case of those trees which furnish the standard lumber of commerce.

Leave the forest for the open. Here stands an oak or a walnut tree with a body big enough to shelter yours from the wind and rain, and generous arms outstretched to protect your head from the sun. You can hide in the forest as you could in the crowd of a city street; but the lone tree, by the special friendliness of its proffered refuge, and the sense of trust with which its unbolstered stability inspires you, attracts you more fondly than the cluster. Though it may be far from straight, its shape is its own, whose very gnarls and twists impress your memory and spur your imagination. Its scars record the storms through which it has passed. Its slight leaning indicates the direction whence the worst gales came during its youth. You could use its variegated bark as a compass. In a word, your isolated tree has a distinctive character not possessed by the trees which interlace their boughs; which help support each other, yet persist in competing for the largest measure of light and warmth; which through close and constant contact acquire a regularity of habit that gives joy to the lumberman, but lacks inspiration for the philosopher or the poet.

Does this contrast appeal to you as fairly symbolic of the difference between the human being who stands by himself, and his contemporary whose identity is partly merged in the mass? Look among your own friends, and contrast the characteristics of those who are rooted in the social forest, and those who stand out in the sun-burned and storm-swept field. So far as life can be reckoned in terms of quantity and units of subsistence, the forest products will make the better showing. In their length, breadth, and thickness, you can read their density and weight, and the uses to which t he timber in them can be put. On the other hand, you may not be so sure of what the isolated tree had in it till its fall enables you to apply your scaling instruments at leisure; and for the present the business eye will see chiefly its non-conformity. Yet who will deny that an unsymmetrical tree here and there holds a more grateful place in the associations of his past than any of the smooth growths he has been taught to respect as the merchantable standard ?

So, if all your efforts to straighten out your crooked stick of a child prove unavailing, console yourself with the reflection that humanity owes a heavy debt to its eccentrics. Every outward swing of the pendulum of progress takes its impulse from the hand of some one who is not afraid of being adjudged a lunatic. When he succeeds, we cannot speak too well of him; but, long before that, he will probably have been marked as peculiar, and with an unflattering characterization. Linnæus wore out his father’s patience by his contempt for the conventional studies of his day. At Audubon, as a lad, friends wagged their heads to think what a fool he was. Young Darwin was so absent-minded that on one of his lonely tramps he walked off an embankment and narrowly escaped being crippled. Watt was scolded for his indifference to the books and sports which interested other boys, and the fascination he found in his aunt’s steaming kettle. Trollope, who gave to literature its best portraits of English social life in his era, was at school so destitute of the social gift that he was everybody’s butt and nobody’s companion. Moses and Demosthenes were stammerers, Cæsar and Napoleon epileptics, Goldsmith was a sloven, Thoreau a crank, Emerson a mystic dreamer. These men overcame their handicaps of physique or temperament as Lincoln, Burritt, Dickens, and Carnegie surmounted the barriers with which poverty had threatened to hem them in.

Underneath the unusual exterior of your child may lie equally unusual qualities of mind and heart, which the world will one day wake to find itself admiring. Heroism, genius, prophetic insight, are as far from conformity to the ways of the multitude as those modes of speech and action at which we sneer as eccentricities. The power to command men is rarely combined with a faculty for mingling with them; the best writers are seldom glib talkers; the profound thinker often must seek a quiet place in which to do his thinking. The hero does not make a calling of his courage: it is revealed by some accident which exposes the deficient mettle of other men. Your crooked stick may never astonish the world by the brilliancy of his intellect or by his moral grandeur; you may never be able to eliminate the one early kink in him which has stiffened with the passage of time. Still, you can keep him from growing zig-zag, or becoming weak and punky. And if, thanks to your patience, your tact, and the everlasting faith in him which is born of your broad optimism, you bring him through his most perilous period with a sound heart and a generally upward purpose, your work will need no apologist.