Meditations of a Bachelor

IT IS printed on some page of a now forgotten volume: —

‘The cry of “The Christian to the Lions!” resounded everywhere through the dark streets.'

The page was probably describing the reign of the Emperor Nero, and was possibly written by Sienkiewicz, though that is no matter here.

The little boy who read it, and went to bed immediat ely afterward, lay alone for a long time—or at least what seemed a long time — in a perfectly dark bedroom, hearing that terrible cry. It came to him in a dozen forms, but each distinctly articulate. There was a large clock below, at the stairs’ foot, which ticked it; somewhere in the fields outside a cow bellowed it defiantly into the dark universe; a lonely whip-poorwill down by the river somewhere lamented it with equal intervals.

It was the very worst night of that little boy’s life. Never afterward was he quite so frightened. He believed, a trifle arrogantly, may be, that he was a Christian, and, of course, he was sure of lions. To these facts, add that unnamable quality which the dark possesses, even for an animal, and you have by the simplest reasoning a truly terrifying situation. For it is a terrifying situation to be alone in the dark, a very small Christian, and hear a horde of barbarians shrieking for your life. It is terrifying, and it is childish, and it is as impeccably reasonable as arithmetic.

Of course, to the adult mind that last quality, the rationality, is not self-evident; but that is because the adult mind cannot recapture firm faith in its own orthodoxy or shed its acquired knowledge of the scarcity of lions. But taking these two feats as accomplished, certainly the perfect reasonableness of that terror is undeniable. Anyone is afraid of being thrown to the lions, who knows that he is defenselessly liable to such a fate and that there is a plentiful and immediate supply of lions. That small boy was not, as his elders would have assured him, groundlessly alarmed. He was ignorant, very, and of many things — of zoology, of the improved customs of theological dispute; but he was not. in the least irrational. His fright was childish, but it was not in any correct sense unreasonable.

That so simple a conclusion requires any demonstration shows the extent of the evil — this confounding of the unreasonable with the childish. The two terms have become positively almost synonymous. The two adjectives pop out in any casual talk like the two barrels of a shot-gun. It would be more accurate, however, to say that they are in antithesis. For example, the fair question is rather whether there are any reasonable fears, except childish fears. It is this that gives them their unequaled poignancy. They assail not the imagination, but the very seat of reason itself. They cannot be argued away, because they have all the arguments on their side. Not Socrates himself that night could have reasoned that little boy into serenity. He remained alarmed at the horrible possibilities of his merciless logic, until experience shifted the weight of probability to his side of the balance — a faultlessly logical method. True, the result was absurd; but then, that was the defect of his education. He was helpless in that regard, for he could acquire only what was permitted to him. Beyond that he was the victim of his method — a fate that overtakes only children and philosophers.

The likeness between these two classes of human beings, between children and philosophers, which has become the most obvious of observations, is, indeed, never a matter of chance. It is as sequential as it is obvious. Each confronted by an unintelligible universe, which he is compelled to explain, attempts to reduce it to order by the method of his reason. The central effort of the life of either is precisely the same. Each fails. The child becomes a man or woman, acquires experience, prejudices, sympathy, superstitions, memories, and so accomplishes his few purposes. The philosopher commits suicide, or dies of old age, according to the intensity of his convictions. As surely as a man is a child who has grown up, a philosopher is a child who has not grown up. The Pauline admonition that he put away childish things he has not heeded — not, at least, in regard to the most childish of all things. All of which is the most obvious of observations. The type of philosopher who forgets his hat and carries about into the world the heart of a child has worn out its welcome in the most popular fiction. It is strange that the equally broad generalization, the philosophy of infancy, has escaped an equally general recognition. Perhaps the explanation is that children have so recently begun to write books.

Certainly no one who has ever encountered the merciless rationalism of the human young has failed to mark it. The matured descendant of that small boy with the lions, then grown to thirty years and more, had such an experience. It was terrifying; but how absurd, how beyond all reasonable explanation appears this adult terror — occurring, too, not in the darkness of a lonely bedroom, but in the mild afternoon light of a nursery — by comparison with that earlier one.

It was exactly mid-afternoon in May that he, a grown-up Christian now, was thrown into the arena of his grownup fear, a nursery, to three little lions seated about a sort of Gulliver’s Travels table before a window. The mother of t hese lions stood in the doorway. The poor Christian stood in the middle of the floor being looked at, not at all angrily, only thoroughly. The mother of the lions looked anxiously at the group about the table. Then she turned a tranquil glance for an instant to the Christian. So, exactly, might some Imperial Roman, lolling on velvetcovered marble, have glanced down at the terrible sands. And just as that one might, for a brief instant of bored indecision, have looked at his thumb before deciding ‘up’ or ‘down,’ so she glanced at her wrist with its tiny watch.

‘I shall be back,’ she said evenly, ‘about six.’

It was then about five. So it was distinctly, ‘Thumbs down.'

Then she went out, closing the door behind her — chaining it possibly. And the lions sat implacable.

When, at a little before six, — she was not so heartless as she appeared, — the door was unbarred, it was a truly exhausted man who was released. He was exhausted because no adult car live in the rarefied air of pure truth, purged of every uncertainty that interrogation can detect, for that length of time without exhaustion. He, like an air-pilot at altitude, must get down for a few lungfulls of earth-contaminated atmosphere, or die. Only children and philosophers can do otherwise.

Yet this man’s ordeal had been a light one. He had been set three tasks. First, he had been asked to sing. He could n’t sing; but then, neither could the children. He had been taught the fact by experience. Innocent of experience, their ecstasy during ten repetitions of ' My Country, ’t is of Thee’ was exquisite. His mortification was unnecessary, unreasonable, and painful.

Failing completely to explain his lack of voice, he was asked to tell a story. Now it happened, that whatever selfrespect he had he had won for himself by the belief that he could tell stories and by the stories he had told. In fact, he was a story-teller by trade. It might be well to explain that the situation as it stood then was caused by the mother of the lions, who was his hostess for that week-end and rather at a loss to dispose of him, suggesting, —

‘I have to meet Elizabeth on the 5.35. Why don’t you go up and tell the children stories. I am sure you would tell such wonderful ones.’

He remembered later that he had thought he would — would, that is, tell wonderful ones. He even had a remnant of such confidence after the failure of ‘My Country, ’t is of Thee.’

So he started off gallantly at t he command, ‘ Tell us a story,’ with ‘ Well, once upon a time—’

In three sentences he had lost his audience. In ten he had disgusted them. They were, on the whole, polite about it, though not obscurely circuitous. They merely said, —

‘We’re going to play Alps.’

Fortunately they let him be the mountain. He possessed superior qualifications for that rôle.

So he lay for the better part of an hour covered by a white table-cloth, and was an Alp, while disregarding feet trampled on his diminished head. In that way, at the last, he achieved a success of a sort. But to be only a mountain in a nursery is not a gratifying experience.

When at last he lifted a corner of the table-cloth and peered out at his returned hostess, all vanity had fled from that man. There was an annoying symbolism about his attitude on the carpet. He had been brought low by the pitiless logic that seemed to stamp ‘Mene, mene’ upon his forehead. He had been tested, soul and body, and found only body. He had been subjected to that dreadful and merciless analysis, — so many of whose celebrated practitioners have justly suffered death at the hands of outraged humanity, — that pitiless judgment which, taking no account of the nobler, though abortive impulses of mankind, their capacity for love, their dauntless aspiration, their tender fancy and sympathy, the mysteries of their imagination, will accept only the hard cash of Reason.

‘Well, how did you like it?' asked his hostess as they went downstairs.

If he had answered frankly, the violence of his feeling, of his just resentment, would possibly have hurled her the length of the flight of stairs. That is the way her children would have answered her.

He managed to preserve some degree of truth, however, by replying that it was one of the most instructive afternoons of his life.

It was a just answer. Later reflection has confirmed it. After all, his assailants were unconscious of their acts. Like himself thirty years earlier, they were the victims of their method. And that method was the only one they knew. Strip any human soul of its experience, of the sympathy that comes by suffering, of the aspiration that springs only from watching the sufferings of others, of the humility that only failure can teach — what is left to it, except Reason? True, the infants were terrible, but how terribly they were armed, with minds free from the prejudices of experience, unsoftened by strain, functioning with mechanical accuracy. These are the qualifications of a machine-gun, not of a human soul. Alas, it cannot be denied that, the more one feels, the more especially one has felt, the less accurately one reasons. It is not the ineptitude of the child’s question that upsets his ciders, it is its directness. The enfant terrible is terrible only because of his accuracy, of his simplicity, of his perfect unconcern with anything but truth. Surely, to say of an afternoon spent in such company that it is instructive, is not to exceed the bounds of even their rigid veracity.

But his questioner was not daunted. She ventured further.

‘Yes,’ she agreed as her feet touched the bottom step. ‘Are n’t they fascinating?’

That was the fatal step too far, the famous little bit of the too-much. There is the story of the man who developed feliphobia fainting at the sound of a purr, or the touch of fur, and explained his aversion on the grounds that ‘cats can only reason.’ There is a difference between an association that is instructive and one that fascinates.

‘I love to watch their little minds grow,’ she finished happily.

The remark, somehow, instantly called up a picture of this most delightful gentle human being, spending her life gloating over the gradual and inevitable deterioration of her offspring — like some distraught marksman enthusiastically calculating the increasing error of his rifle.