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Discovering Diverse Content Through
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were scattered through Europe, were covered with paint and
clothes, and were nearly as hideous as the monks that placed them
there. When the condition of Europe and its religious thought are
clearly understood, it is not difficult to imagine the reception that
greeted the first dawn of modern realistic art. Sculpture and painting
deified the material. They told of beauty in the human form which
hundreds of years of religious fanaticism had taught was bad and
vile. If the flesh was beautiful, what of the monks and priests, who
had hidden it from sight, who had kept it covered night and day
through all their foolish lives, who maimed and bruised, cut and
lacerated, for the glory of the spirit, which they thought was chained
within. The church had taught that the death of the flesh was the
birth of the soul, and they therefore believed that the artist’s
resurrection of the flesh was the death of the soul.
This old religious prejudice, born of a misty, superstitious past, has
slowly faded from the minds of men, but we find its traces even yet.
The origin of the feeling against realistic art has well nigh been
forgot, but much of the feeling still remains. No one would now
pretend to say that all the body was unholy or unfit for sight, and
yet years of custom and inherited belief have made us think that a
part is good and the rest is bad: that nature, in her work of building
up the human form, has made one part sacred and another vile. It is
easy to mistake custom for nature, and inherited prejudice for
morality. There is scarcely a single portion of the human body but
that some people have thought it holy, and scarcely a single portion
but that some have believed it vile. It was not shame that made
clothing, but clothing that made shame. If we would eradicate from
our beliefs all that inheritance and environment have given, it would
be hard for us to guess how much should still remain. Custom has
made most things good and most things bad, according to the whim
of time and place. To find solid ground we must turn to nature and
ask her what it is that conduces to the highest happiness and the
longest life.
The realistic artist cannot accept the popular belief, whatever that
may be, as to just where the dead line on the human body should
be drawn that separates the sacred and profane. There are realists
that look at all the beauty and loveliness of the world, and all its
maladjustments too, and do not seek to answer the old, old question
whether back of this is any all-controlling and designing power; they
do not answer, for they cannot know; but they strive to touch the
subtle chord that makes their individual lives vibrate in harmony with
the great heart of that nature, which they love; and they cannot
think but that all parts of life are good, and that while men may
differ, nature must know best.
Other realists there are that believe they see in nature the work of a
divine maker, who created man in his own image as the last and
highest triumph of his skill; that the minutest portion of the universe
exists because he wished it thus. To the realist that accepts this all-
controlling power, any imputation against a portion of his master’s
work must reach back to the author that designed it all.
We need not say that the human body might not be better than it is;
we need only know that it is the best that man can have, and that
its wondrous mechanism has been constructed with infinitely more
than human skill; that every portion is adapted for its work, and
through the harmony of every part the highest good is reached; and
that all is beautiful, for it makes the being best adapted to the earth.
Those who denounce realistic art deny that knowledge is power and
that wisdom only can make harmony, and they insist instead that
there are some things vital to life and happiness that we should not
know, but that if we must know these things, we should at all events
pretend that we do not. One day the world will learn that all things
are good or bad according to the service they perform. One day it
ought to learn that the power to create immortality, through infinite
succeeding links of human life, is the finest and most terrible that
nature ever gave to man, and that to ignore this power or call it bad,
or fail to realize the great responsibility of this tremendous fact, is to
cry out against the power that gave us life, and commit the greatest
human sin, for it may be one that never dies.
The true artist does not find all beauty in the human face or form.
He looks upon the sunset, painting all the clouds with rosy hue, and
his highest wish is to create another scene like this. He never
dreams that he could paint a sunset fairer than the one which lights
the fading world. A fairer sunset would be something else. He sees
beauty in the quiet lake, the grassy field, and running brook; he sees
majesty in the cataract and mountain peak. He knows that he can
paint no streams and mountain peaks more perfect than the ones
that nature made.
The growth of letters has been like the growth of art from the
marvelous and mythical to the natural and true. The tales and
legends of the ancient past were not of common men and common
scenes. These could not impress the undeveloped intellect of long
ago. A man of letters could not deify a serf, or tell the simple story
of the poor. He must write to maintain the status of the world, and
please the prince that gave him food; so he told of kings and
queens, of knights and ladies, of strife and conquest; and the
coloring he used was human blood.
The world has grown accustomed to those ancient tales, to scenes
of blood and war, and novels that would thrill the soul and cause the
hair to stand on end. It has read these tales so long that the true
seems commonplace, and unfit to fill the pages of a book. But all the
time we forget the fact that the story could not charm unless we half
believed it true. The men and women in the tale we learn to love
and hate; we take an interest in their lives; we hope they may
succeed or fail; we must not be told at every page that the people of
the book are men of straw, that no such beings ever lived upon the
earth. We could take no interest in men and women that are myths
conjured up to play their parts, and remind us in every word they
speak that, regardless of the happiness or anguish the author makes
them feel, they are but myths and can know neither joy nor pain.
It may be that the realistic tale is commonplace, but so is life, and
the realistic tale is true. Among the countless millions of the earth it
is only here and there, and now and then, that some soul is born
from out the mighty deep that does not soon return to the great sea
and leave no ripple on the waves.
In the play of life each actor seems important to himself; the world
he knows revolves around him as the central figure of the scene; his
friends rejoice in all the fortune he attains and weep with him in all
his grief. To him the world is bounded by the faces that he knows,
and the scenes in which he lives. He forgets the great surging world
outside, and cannot think how small a space he fills in that infinity
which bounds his life. He dies, and a few sorrowing friends mourn
him for a day, and the world does not know he ever lived or ever
died. In the ordinary life nearly all events are commonplace; but a
few important days are thinly sprinkled in amongst all of those that
intervene between the cradle and the grave. We eat and drink, we
work and sleep, and here and there a great joy or sorrow creeps in
upon our lives, and leaves a day that stands out against the
monotony of all the rest, like the pyramids upon the level plains; but
these events are very few and are important only to ourselves, and
for the rest we walk with steady pace and slow along the short and
narrow path of life, and rely upon the common things alone to
occupy our minds and hide from view the marble stone that here
and there gleams through the over-hanging trees just where the
road leaves off.
The old novel which we used to read and to which the world so
fondly clings, had no idea of relation or perspective. It had a hero
and a heroine, and sometimes more than one. The revolutions of the
planets were less important than their love. War, shipwreck, and
conflagration, all conspired to produce the climax of the scene, and
the whole world stood still until the lovers’ hearts and hands were
joined. Wide oceans, burning deserts, arctic seas, impassable
jungles, irate fathers, and even designing mothers, were helpless
against the decree that fate had made, and when all the barriers
were passed and love had triumphed over impossibilities, the tale
was done; through the rest of life nothing of interest could occur.
Sometimes in the progress of the story, if the complications were too
great, a thunderbolt or an earthquake was introduced to destroy the
villain and help on the match. Earthquakes sometimes happen, and
the realistic novelist might write a tale of a scene like this, but then
the love affair would be an incident of the earthquake, and not the
earthquake an incident of the love affair.
In real life the affections have played an important part and
sometimes great things have been done and suffered in the name of
love, but most of the affairs of the human heart have been as
natural as the other events of life.
The true love story is generally a simple thing. “Beside a country
road, on a sloping hill, lives a farmer, in the house his father owned
before. He has a daughter, who skims the milk, and makes the beds,
and goes to singing school at night. There are other members of the
household, but our tale is no concern of theirs. In the meadow back
of the house a woodchuck has dug its hole, and reared a family in its
humble home. Across the valley only a mile away, another farmer
lives. He has a son, who plows the fields and does the chores and
goes to singing school at night. He cannot sing, but attends the
school as regularly as if he could. Of course he does not let the girl
go home alone, and in the spring, when singing school is out, he
visits her on Sunday eve without excuse. If the girl had not lived so
near, the boy would have fancied another girl about the same age,
who also went to singing school. Back of the second farmer’s house
is another woodchuck hole and woodchuck home. After a year or
two of courtship the boy and girl are married as their parents were
before, and they choose a pretty spot beside the road, and build
another house near by, and settle down to common life: and so the
world moves on. And a woodchuck on one farm meets a woodchuck
on the other, and they choose a quiet place beside a stump, in no
one’s way, where they think they have a right to be, and dig another
hole and make another home.” For after all, men and animals are
much alike, and nature loves them both and loves them all, and
sends them forth to drive the loneliness from off the earth, and then
takes them back into her loving breast to sleep.
It may be that there are few great incidents in the realistic take, but
each event appeals to life and cannot fail to wake our memories and
make us live the past again. The great authors of the natural school
—Tolstoi, Hardy, Howells, Daudet, Ibsen, Flaubert, Zola and their
kind, have made us think and live. Their words have burnished up
our minds and revealed a thousand pictures that hang upon the
walls of memory, covered with the dust of years, and hidden from
our sight. Sometimes of course we cry with pain at the picture that
is thrown before our view, but life consists of emotions, and we
cannot truly live unless the depths are stirred. These great masters,
it is true, may sometimes shock the over-sensitive with the tales
they tell of life, but if the tale is true, why hide it from our sight?
There is nothing more common than the protest against the wicked
stories of the realistic school, filled with tales of passion and of sin;
but he that denies passion denies all the life that exists upon the
earth, and cries out against the mother that gave him birth. And he
that ignores this truth passes with contempt the greatest fact that
nature has impressed upon the world. Those who condemn as
sensual the tales of Tolstoi and Daudet still defend the love stories of
which our literature is full. Those weak and silly tales that make
women fit only to be the playthings of the world, and deny to them
a single thought or right except to serve their master, man. These
objectors do not contend that tales dealing with the feelings and
affections shall not be told, they approve these tales; they simply
insist that they shall be false instead of true. The old novel filled the
mind of the school girl with a thousand thoughts that had no place
in life—with ten thousand pictures she could never see. It taught
that some time she should meet a prince in disguise to whom she
would freely give her hand and heart. So she went out upon the
road to find this prince, and the more disguised he was, the more
certain did she feel that he was the prince for whom she sought.
The realist paints the passions and affections as they are. Both man
and woman can see their beauty and their terror, their true position,
and the relation that they bear to all the rest of life. He would not
beguile the girl into the belief that her identity should be destroyed
and merged for the sake of this feeling, which not once in ten
thousand times could realize the promises the novel made; but he
would leave her as an individual to make the most she can, and all
she can, of life, with all the hope and chance of conquest, which
men have taken for themselves. Neither would the realist cry out
blindly against these deep passions, which have moved men and
women in the past, and which must continue fierce and strong as
long as life exists. He is taught by the scientist that the fiercest heat
may be transformed to light, and is taught by life that from the
strongest passions are sometimes born the sweetest and the purest
souls.
In these days of creeds and theories, of preachers in the pulpit and
of preachers out, we are told that all novels should have a moral and
be written to serve some end. So we have novels on religion, war,
marriage, divorce, socialism, theosophy, woman’s rights, and other
topics without end. It is not enough that the preachers and lecturers
shall tell us how to think and act; the novelist must try his hand at
preaching too. He starts out with a theory, and every scene and
incident must be bent to make it plain that the author believes
certain things. The doings of the men and women in the book are
secondary to the views the author holds. The theories may be true,
but the poor characters that must adjust their lives to these ideal
states are sadly warped and twisted out of shape. The realist would
teach a lesson, too, but he would not violate a single fact for all the
theories in the world—for a theory could not be true if it did violence
to life. He paints his picture so true and perfect that all men who
look upon it know it is a likeness of the world that they have seen;
they know that these are men and women and little children that
they meet upon the streets; they see the conditions of their lives,
and the moral of the picture sinks deep into their minds.
There are so-called scientists that make a theory and then gather
facts to prove their theory true; the real scientist patiently and
impartially gathers facts, and then forms a theory to explain and
harmonize these facts. All life bears a moral, and the true artist must
teach a lesson with his every fact. Some contend that the moral
teacher must not tell the truth; the realist holds that there can be no
moral teaching like the truth. The world has grown tired of
preachers and sermons; to-day it asks for facts. It has grown tired of
fairies and angels, and asks for flesh and blood. It looks on life as it
exists, both its beauty and its horror, its joy and its sorrow; it wishes
to see it all; not the prince and the millionaire alone, but the laborer
and the beggar, the master and the slave. We see the beautiful and
the ugly, and with it know what the world is and what it ought to be;
and the true picture, which the author saw and painted, stirs the
heart to holier feelings and to grander thoughts.
It is from the realities of life that the highest idealities are born. The
philosopher may reason with unerring logic, and show us where the
world is wrong. The economist may tell us of the progress and
poverty that go hand in hand; but these are theories, and the
abstract cannot suffer pain. Dickens went out into the streets of the
great city and found poor little Jo sweeping the crossing with his
broom. All around was the luxury and the elegance, which the rich
have ever appropriated to themselves; great mansions, fine
carriages, beautiful dresses, but in all the great city of houses and
homes, poor little Jo could find no place to lay his head. His home
was in the street, and every time he halted for a moment in the
throng, the policeman touched him with his club and bade him
“move on.” At last, ragged, wretched, almost dead with “moving on,”
he sank down upon the cold stone steps of a magnificent building
erected for “The Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts.” As we
think of wretched, ragged Jo in the midst of all this luxury and
wealth, we see the tens of thousands of other waifs in the great
cities of the world, and we condemn the so-called civilization of the
earth that builds the mansions of the rich and great upon the rags
and miseries of the poor.
The true realist cannot worship at the shrine of power, nor prostitute
his gifts for gold. With an artist’s eye he sees the world exactly as it
is, and tells the story faithful unto life. He feels for every heart that
beats, else he could not paint them as he does. It takes the soul to
warm a statue into life and make living flesh and coursing blood, and
each true picture that he paints or draws makes the world a better
place in which to live.
The artists of the realistic school have a sense so fine that they
cannot help but catch the inspiration that is filling all the world’s best
minds with the hope of greater justice and more equal social life.
With the vision of the seer they feel the coming dawn when true
equality shall reign upon the earth; the time when democracy shall
no more be confined to constitutions and to laws, but will be a part
of human life. The greatest artists of the world to-day are telling
facts and painting scenes that cause humanity to stop, and think,
and ask why one should be a master and another be a serf; why a
portion of the world should toil and spin, should wear away its
strength and life, that the rest should live in idleness and ease.
The old-time artists thought they served humanity by painting saints
and madonnas and angels from the myths they conjured in their
brains. They painted war with long lines of soldiers dressed in
uniforms, and looking plump and gay; and a battle scene was always
drawn from the side of the victorious camp, with the ensign proudly
planting his bright colors on the rampart of the foe. One or two were
dying, but always in their comrades’ arms, and listening to shouts of
victory that filled the air, and thinking of the righteous cause for
which they fought and died. In the last moments they dreamed of
pleasant burial yards at home, and of graves kept green by loving,
grateful friends; and a smile of joy shone on their wasted faces that
was so sweet, that it seemed a hardship not to die in war. They
painted peace as a white winged dove settling down upon a cold and
fading earth. Between the two it was plain which choice a boy would
make, and thus art served the state and king.
But Verestchagin painted war; he painted war so true to life that as
we look upon the scene, we long for peace. He painted war as war
has ever been, and as war will ever be—a horrible and ghastly
scene, where men, drunk with blind frenzy which rulers say is
patriotic pride, and made mad by drums and fifes and smoke and
shot and shell and flowing blood, seek to maim and wound and kill,
because a ruler gives the word. He paints a battle field, a field of life
and death; a field of carnage and of blood; and who are these that
fight like fiends and devils driven to despair? What cause is this that
makes these men forget that they are men, and vie with beasts to
show their cruel thirst for blood? They shout of home and native
land, but they have no homes, and the owners of their native land
exist upon their toil and blood. The nobles and princes, for whom
this fight is waged, are far away upon a hill, beyond the reach of
shot and shell, and from this spot they watch their slaves pour out
their blood to satisfy their rulers’ pride and lust of power. What is the
enemy they fight? Men like themselves; who blindly go to death at
another king’s command, slaves, who have no land, who freely give
their toil or blood, whichever one their rulers may demand. These
fighting soldiers have no cause for strife, but their rulers live by
kindling in their hearts a love of native land, a love that makes them
hate their brother laborers of other lands, and dumbly march to
death to satisfy a king’s caprice. But let us look once more after the
battle has been fought. Here we see the wreck and ruin of the strife;
the field is silent now, given to the dead, the beast of prey and
night. A young soldier lies upon the ground; the snow is falling fast
around his form; the lonely mountain peaks rise up on every side;
the wreck of war is all about. His uniform is soiled and stained, a
spot of red is seen upon his breast. It is not the color that his
country wove upon his coat to catch his eye and bait him to his
death; it is hard and jagged and cold. It is his life’s blood, which
leaked out through a hole that followed the point of a sabre to his
heart. His form is stiff and cold, for he is dead. The cruel wound and
icy air have done their work. The government that took his life
taught this poor boy to love his native land; as a child he dreamed of
scenes of glory and of power, and the great wide world just waiting
to fall captive to his magic strength. He dreamed of war and strife,
of victory and fame; if he should die, kind hands would smooth his
brow, and loving friends would keep his grave and memory green,
because he died in war. But no human eye is there at last, as the
mist of night and mist of death shut out the lonely mountains from
his sight. The snow is all around, and the air above is grey with
falling flakes, which soon will hide him from the world; and when the
summer time shall come again, no one can tell his bleaching bones
from all the rest. The only life upon the scene is the buzzard slowly
circling in the air above his head, waiting to make sure that death
has come. The bird looks down upon the boy, into the eyes through
which he first looked out upon the great, wide world, and which his
mother fondly kissed; upon these eyes the buzzard will commence
his meal.
Not all the world is beautiful, and not all of life is good. The true
artist has no right to choose the lovely spots alone and make us
think that this is life. He must bring the world before our eyes and
make us read and learn. As he loves the true and noble, he must
show the false and bad. As he yearns for true equality, he must paint
the master and the slave. He must tell the truth, and tell it all, must
tell it o’er and o’er again, till the deafest ear will listen and the
dullest mind will think. He must not swerve to please the world by
painting only pleasant sights and telling only lovely tales. He must
think, and paint, and write, and work, until the world shall learn so
much and grow so good, that the true will all be beautiful and all the
real be ideal.

THE · SKELETON
IN · THE · CLOSET
 THE SKELETON IN THE CLOSET

he closet has so long been allotted to the skeleton that

we have come to regard this room as its fit and natural
home; it has been given over to this guest because it is
the darkest, the closest and least conspicuous in the
house. The door can be securely fastened and only now
and then can the grating bones be heard by the world outside. Still,
however secluded and unused this guest chamber seems to be, and
however carefully we bolt the door and darken every chink and
crevice in the walls, we are ever conscious that the occupant is
there, and will remain until the house is closed, and the last tenant
has departed, never to return. The very fact that we try so hard to
keep the skeleton in its proper room, makes it the more impossible
to forget that it is there. Now and then we awake with a start at the
thought of what might happen should it break the door and wander
through the house, and then stray out into the wide world, and tell
all the peaceful, trusting neighbors from what house it stole away;
and yet we are somehow conscious that the rumor of its dread
presence has already traveled as far as we are known. Man is a
wonderfully adaptable animal; he fits himself easily into the
environment where he is placed. He passes from infancy to
childhood and from childhood to boyhood as smoothly as the placid
river flows to the waiting sea. Every circumstance and surrounding
of his life seems to have been made for him. Suddenly a new desire
takes possession of his soul; he turns his back on the home of his
childhood days and goes out alone. In a little time a new family is
reared about him, and he forgets the group that clustered round his
father’s hearth. He may lose a leg or a fortune, and he soon
conforms to his changed condition and life goes on as naturally and
as easily as before. A child is born beneath his roof; it takes a place
within his heart and home, and in a little while he can scarcely think
of the day it was not there. Death comes, and a member of his little
band is carried out, but time drops its healing balm upon the
wounds and life goes on almost unconscious that the dead has ever
lived. But while we adjust ourselves naturally to all things living and
to ever varying scenes, the skeleton in the closet is always an
intruder, no matter how long it may have dwelt beneath the roof.
Even though we may forget its actual presence for a little time, still
no scene is so perfect and no enjoyment so great but we feel a
cloud casting its shadow across our happiness or the weight of some
burden on our soul; and when we stop to ask the cause, the
grinning skeleton reminds us that it is with us even here.
This specter stands quite apart from the other sorrows of our life;
age seems powerless to forget, and time will not bring its ever-fresh,
recurring scenes to erase the memory of the past. This is not
because the skeleton is really such a dreadful guest. The kind and
loving ivy creeps tenderly around each yawning scar and crumbling
stone, until the whole ruin is covered with a lovely green. The
decaying pile stands free and open to the sun and rain and air. It
does not hide its head or apologize for the blemishes and seams that
mark its face, and a kind, forgiving nature takes the ruin, scars and
all, and blends these with her softening years and lovely face into a
beautiful harmonious whole; but unlike the ruin, the skeleton in the
closet is a neglected, outcast child. With every breath we insist that
there is nothing in the room. We refuse to take it to our hearts and
homes and acknowledge it as our own. We seek to strangle it to
death, and each fresh attempt not only shows our murderous
design, but proves that the skeleton is not a pulseless thing but is
endowed with immortal life. The brighter the fire-light that glows
around our hearth, the more desolate and drear sounds the wail of
the wind outside, for through its cold blasts wanders the outcast,
whose rightful place is in the brightest corner of the room.
Our constant annoyance and sorrow at this dread presence is not
caused by the way the skeleton behaves to us, but from the way we
treat our guest. If we looked it squarely in its grinning skull, it might
not seem so very loathsome to the sight. It has the right to grin. It
may be but a grim smile over the consciousness that it has sounded
the last sorrow and that henceforth no greater evils are in store; it
may be a mocking, sardonic grin at the thought of our discomfiture
over its unwelcome presence and the knowledge that we cannot
drive it out.
There is no truer index to real character than the way we treat the
skeletons with which we live. Some run to the closet door, and try to
lock it fast when a neighbor comes their way. If perchance any fear
of discovery is felt, they stand guard outside and solemnly protest
that there is nothing in the room. Their anxiety and haste plainly
show fear lest their hated guest shall reveal its face; and of course
there rises in the neighbor’s mind a vision of a skeleton more
horrible by far than the one inside the door or than anyone can be.
If the luckless jailer really fears that the rattle of the prisoner’s bones
has been heard outside, he feels it his duty to carefully explain or
tediously cover up every detail and circumstance that caused the
presence of the specter in the house. All this can only show that the
guest is terrible to behold or that the jailer is so poor and weak that
he himself is a helpless prisoner to his foolish pride and unmanly
fear. It can only serve to emphasize the presence he tries so vainly
to deny. There are also those who know that their skeleton has been
seen, or who having lost all else but this persistent, grinning guest,
drag it out and parade it in the world to gain the sympathy or the
money of their neighbors and their friends, like the crippled beggar
standing on the corner holding out his hat to every passer-by. The
true man neither guiltily conceals nor anxiously explains nor vulgarly
parades. He lives his life the best he can, and lets it stand for what it
is. A thousand idle tales may be true or false. One may have seen
but certain things, and placed him with the saints. Another little soul,
who never felt the breadth and depth of human life, may have seen
his scars alone, and cast him out. But standing by his side, or
clasping his strong, sympathetic hand, no one thinks of halos or
scars or asks an explanation of this or that, for in his whole being is
felt the divine presence of a great soul, who has lived and loved,
sinned and suffered, and been strengthened and purified by all.
The skeleton is really kind that it only grins as we look it in the face.
Of all our household it has received the hardest treatment at our
hands. It has helped us more than any of the rest, and been locked
in the closet for its pains. It may perchance have come at our own
invitation, bringing us the keenest, wildest joy our life had ever
known. We gladly drained the pleasure to the dregs, and then coolly
locked the memory close in the darkest hole that we could find. The
day it came, has well nigh faded from our minds, and the mad, wild
joy we knew can never more be wakened from the burned-out
passions of the past, but the skeleton, which rose up grim and
ghastly from the dying flame, remains to mock and jeer and make
us sad. And now when the day is spent and the cup is drained, we
charge the poor specter with our lasting pain, and forget the joy it
brought. We look with dread at these mocking, grinning bones,
which we cannot drive away, and we forget the time, long, long ago,
when those dry sticks were covered up with beautiful and tempting
flesh.
It may be that we shall always shudder as we hear the rattle of the
bones when we pass the closet door, but in justice to the inmate, we
should give him credit for the joys of long ago. And this brings us
back to the old question of the balancing of pain and pleasure, good
and evil, right and wrong. It may be that in the mysterious
adjustment of nature’s balances, a moment of supreme bliss will
outweigh an eternity of pain. In the infinite economy, which life
counted for the more,—that of Napoleon, or the poor French
peasant that passed through an obscure existence to an unknown
grave? The brief glory of Austerlitz was followed by the bitterness of
Waterloo, and the long silence of an exile’s life, while the peasant
trod his short path without ambition, and filled a nameless grave
without regret. Which is the greater and finer, the blameless life of
the patient brute, or the winding, devious path of a human soul? It
is only the dull level that brings no sorrow or regret. It is a sterile
soil where no weeds will grow, and a bare closet where no skeleton
will dwell.
Neither should we remember the skeleton only for the joy it
brought; from the day it came, it has been the greatest benefactor
that our life has known. When the mad delirium had passed away,
and the last lingering fragrance was almost spent, this despised
skeleton remained as the sole companion, whose presence should
forever bind us back to those feelings that were fresh and true and
straight from nature’s heart, and that world which once was green
and young and filled with pulsing life. As the shadows gather round
our head, and our once-straying feet fall mechanically into the
narrow path so straight and even at the farther end, we may
shudder now and then at the thought of the grim skeleton whose life
is so far removed from our sober later selves; but with the shudder
comes a spark, a flash of that great, natural light and heat that once
possessed this tottering frame, and gave a glow of feeling and a
strength of purpose so deep and all-controlling that the artificial life
of an artificial world seems no more than a dim candle shining by
the glorious sun.
It is the exhausted emotions of age, which men call prudence, that
are ever warning youth of the follies of its sins. It is the grinning
skeleton, speaking truly from the memory of other days, that insists
that life’s morning held the halcyon hours. Does old age outlive the
follies of childhood or does the man outgrow the wisdom of youth?
The most vociferous preachers are often those whose natural spirits
have led them to drink the deepest of life. They are so foolish as to
think that others can be taught by their experiences, and mumbling
grey-beards endorse the excellence and wisdom of the sermons that
they preach. They are not wise enough to know that their prattle is
more vain and foolish than the babblings of their childhood days. It
was the growing, vital sap of life that made them children years ago;
it is the icy, palsying touch of age that makes them babbling,
preaching children once again. As well might the calm and placid
lake teach the beauty of repose to the boiling, seething cataract,
that thunders down Niagara’s gulf. When the troubled waters shall
have reached the lake they shall be placid too. Nature is wiser far
than man. She makes the first childhood precede the second. If the
age of prudence came with youth, it would be a dull and prosy world
for a little time; then life would be extinct upon the earth and death
triumphant over all.
But these are the smallest reasons why we should venerate the
neglected skeleton, which we have ruthlessly cast into the closet as
if it were a hideous thing. This uncanny skeleton, ever thrusting its
unwelcome bones into our presence and our lives, has been the
most patient, persistent, constant teacher that all our years have
known. We look backward through the long dim vista of the past,
back to the little trusting child that once nestled on its mother’s
breast and from whose loving lips and gentle soul it first was told of
life, its temptations and its sins; backward to her, whose whole
thought was a benediction to the life that was once a portion of
herself. We remember still this mother’s words teaching us the way
to live and telling us the way to die. We always knew that no selfish
thought inspired a single word she said and yet time and time again
we strayed and wandered from the path she pointed out. We could
not keep the road and after while we did not try. Again our teacher
told us of the path. He, too, was good and kind and knew the way
we ought to go, and showed us all the bad results of sin, and still we
stumbled on. The preacher came and told us of the beauteous
heaven, straight at the other end of the narrow path, and the
yawning gulf of hell to which our shifting footsteps led; but we
heeded not his solemn tones, though they seemed to come with the
authority of God himself. As the years went on, our mother’s voice
was stilled, the teacher’s words were hushed, the preacher’s threats
became an empty, hollow sound; and in their place came the
grinning skeleton, born of our own desires and deeds; less loving
than the gentle mother, more real and life-like than the teacher,
saner and truer than the preacher’s idle words. It was ever present
and persistent; it was a portion of our very selves.
We detested and feared the hated thing; we locked it in the closet,
and denied that it was there; but through the brightness of the day
and the long and silent watches of the night, we heard its rattling
bones, and felt its presence at our side. No teacher of our youth was
like that grim and ghastly skeleton, which we tried to hide away. The
schoolmaster of our early life took our fresh, young, plastic minds
and sought to crowd them full of useless, unrelated facts that served
no purpose through the years that were to come. These lessons that
our teacher made us learn by rote filled so small a portion of our
daily lives that most of them were forgotten when the school-house
door was closed. When now and then we found some use for a
trifling thing that we had learned through years at school, we were
surprised to know that the pedagogue had taught us even this. In
those early days it seemed to us that life would consist of one long
examination in which we should be asked the names of states, the
rule of three, and the words the Romans used for this and that. All
that we were taught of the great world outside and the problem that
would one day try our souls, was learned from the copy books
where we wrote the same old maxim until all the paper was used
up. In after years, we learned that, while the copy book might have
taught us how to write in a stilted, unused hand, still all its maxims
were untrue.
We left the school as ignorant of life as we commenced, nay, we
might more easily have learned its lesson without the false,
misleading theories we were taught were true. When the doors were
opened and the wide world met us face to face, we tested what we
learned, and found it false, and then we blundered on alone. We
were taught by life that the fire and vigor of our younger years could
not be governed by the platitudes of age. Nature was ever present
with her strong and earthly grasp, her keen desires, her white hot
flame. We learned the precepts of the books, but we lived the life
that nature taught.
Our pathetic blunders and mistakes, and the skeleton that followed
in their wake, remained to teach us what was false and point to
what was true. This grim, persistent teacher made but little of the
unimportant facts that the schoolmaster sought to make us learn,
and it laughed to scorn the preacher’s doctrine, that in some way we
could avoid the results of our mistakes and sins. It did not preach, it
took its place beside us as another self and by its presence sought
to make us know that we could not be at peace until we clasped it to
our breast and freely accepted the unwelcome thing as a portion of
our lives.
Only the smallest fraction that we learned in youth was assimilated
and made a portion of ourselves; the rest faded so completely that it
seemed never to have been. The teacher soon became a dim,
uncertain memory of the past, whose voice had long since died
away; but the skeleton in the closet never wearied nor grew old. It
ever made us learn again the lesson we would fain forget; opened at
each succeeding period of our lives the pages we would gladly put
away, until, at last, the ripening touch of time and the specter’s
constant presence made us know. From the day it came beneath our
roof, it remained the liveliest, wisest, most persistent member of the
family group, the tireless, watchful teacher, who would neither sleep
nor allow its pupil to forget.
It may be that there are lives so barren and uneventful that this
guest passes ever by their door, but unfortunate indeed is that
abode where it will not dwell. The wide vistas can be seen only from
the mountain top, and the infinite depths of life can be sounded only
by the soul that has been softened and hallowed by the sanctifying
touch of misery and sin.
Life is a never-ending school, and the really important lessons all
tend to teach man his proper relation to the environment where he
must live. With wild ambitions and desires untamed, we are
spawned out into a shoreless sea of moving molecules of life, each
separate atom journeying on an unknown course, regardless of the
countless other lives it meets as it blindly rushes on; no lights nor
headlands stand to point the proper way the voyager should take, he
is left to sail an untried bark across an angry sea. If no disaster
should befall, it does not show that the traveler is wise or good, but
that his ambitions and desires are few or he has kept close inside
the harbor line. At first we seek to swim the flood, to scale the rocky
heights, to clutch the twinkling stars. Of course we fail and fall, and
the scars our passions and ambitions leave, remain, though all our
particles are made anew year after year. We learn at last to leave the
stars to shine where they belong, to take all things as they are and
adjust our lives to what must be.
The philosophy of life can come only from those experiences that
leave lasting scars and results that will not die. Rather than seek to
cover up these gaping wounds, we should accept with grace the
tales they tell, and show them as trophies of the strife we have
passed through. Those scars are honorable that have brought our
lives into greater harmony with the universal power. For resist it as
we will, this infinite, loving presence will ever claim us as a portion
of its self until our smallest fragments return once more to earth,
and are united with the elements from which we came.
No life can be rounded and complete without the education that the
skeleton alone can give. Until it came we never knew the capacities
of the human soul. We had learned by rote to be forgiving, kind and
true. But the anguish of the human soul cannot be told—it must be
felt or never known. That charity born of true comradeship, which is
the highest and holiest sentiment of life, can be taught by the
skeleton alone. The self-righteous, who prate of forgiveness to their
fellow men and who look down upon their sinning brothers from
above, are hypocrites or fools. They either have not lived or else
desire to pass for something they are not. No one can understand
the devious, miry paths trodden by another soul unless he himself
has wandered through the night.
Those placid, human lives that have moved along a narrow, even
path; that learned by rote the lessons that the churches and the
schools have ever taught; whose perfection consists in refraining
from doing certain things in certain ways; who never had a noble
thought or felt a great desire to help their fellow men—those
blameless, aimless, worthless souls, are neither good nor bad. They
neither feel nor think; no skeleton would deem it worth its while to
come inside their door.
The world judges the conduct of youth by the standards of age.
Even when due allowance is made for the inexperience and haste of
the young, it is assumed that youth and age are measured by the
calendar alone. Few have ever been wise enough to know that every
passion and circumstance must be fully weighed, before an honest
verdict can be written down; and that therefore only the infinite can
judge a human soul.
Though accursed, doubted, and despised, Nature ever persists in her
relentless plan. She would make us learn the lessons that youth so
easily forgets. She finds us headstrong, unreasoning, and moved by
the same feelings that sway the brute. She decrees that every act,
however blind or wilful, must leave its consequences on our lives,
and these immortal consequences we treat as skeletons and lock
them up. But these uncanny specters wrap us closely in their bony
arms; they ever peer with sightless eyes into our soul; they are with
us if we sleep or wake, and their persistent presence will not let us
sleep. It is the hated, imprisoned skeleton that we vainly sought to
hide away, that takes an untamed, fiery soul within its cruel, loving
clasp, and holds it closely in its unforgiving grasp until the vain
longings and wild desires of youth are subdued, and cooled, and the
deeper harmonies of life are learned. It is the hated skeleton that
finds within our breast a heart of flint and takes this hard and
pulseless thing and scars and twists and melts it in a thousand
tortuous ways until the stony mass is purged and softened and is
sensitive to every touch.
It is this same despised skeleton that finds us vain and boastful and
critical of others’ sins, that watches every word we speak and even
each unuttered thought; it is with us when we tightly draw our robes
and pass our fellow on the other side; it hears us when we seek to
show how good we are by boasting of our neighbor’s sins; for every
spot of black or red that we see upon another’s robes, it points its
bony fingers to a scar upon our heart, to remind us that we are like
the rest; and the same finger ever points us to our wounds until we
feel and understand that the clay the Master used for us was as
weak and poor as that from which he made the rest.
However blind and stubborn we may be, however long we deny the
lesson that the skeleton would teach, still it will not let us go until
with perfect peace and harmony we look at all the present and the
past, at all that was, and all that is, and feel no regrets for what is
gone, and no fears for what must come. It may be that our
stubborn, stiffnecked soul will still persist until the hair is white and
the heavy shadows hang about our heads, but the skeleton with his
soothing, softening ally, time, sits with the last watchers at our
suffering bed, and goes if need be, to the silent grave, where alike
the darkest crimson spot and the softest, purest clay are reunited
once again with the loving, universal mother who has forgiven all
and conquered all. It matters not how high we seem to climb, or
what the careless world may think for good or ill. It matters not how
many small ambitions we may seem to have achieved. Even the
unworthy cannot be forever soothed by the hollow voice of fame. All
triumphs are futile without the victory over self; and when the
triumph over self is won, there are no more battles to be fought, for
all the world is then at peace. It is the skeleton in the closet pointing
ever to the mistakes and maladjustments of our past, the skeleton
standing there before our gaze that makes us still remember where
our lives fell short; that teaches us so slowly but so surely to turn
from the unworthy victories and the dire defeats of life to the
mastery of ourselves. It is the skeleton from whom we learn that we
can live without the world, but not without ourselves.
Without the skeleton we could never feel another’s sorrow, or know
another’s pain. Philosophy and theology cannot tell us how another’s
life became a hopeless wreck. It is ourselves alone that reveals the
precipice along which every footpath leads. It is from life we learn
that it is but an accident when we fall, and equally an accident when
we keep the path. The pupil of the schools may look down with
pitying glance upon the unfortunate victim of what seems to be his
sin. He may point to a love that will forgive and kindly plead with
him to take another path, but the wayfarer that the skeleton has
taught will clasp this fellow mortal to his heart, for in his face he
sees but the reflection of himself. The wise and good may forgive
the evil and the wrong, but only the sinner knows that there is no
sin.
The charity that is born of life and sin is not fine because of its effect
on some one else, but for what it does for us. True charity is only
the sense of the kinship of all living things. This is the charity that
neither humiliates nor offends. It is the sense that brings a new
meaning to life and a new purpose to the soul.
Let us do simple justice to this neglected, outcast guest, the useful,
faithful teacher of our lives. Let us open the closet door, and let the
skeleton come out, and lock the schoolmaster in its place. Let us
leave this faithful friend to roam freely at its will. Let us look it
squarely in the face with neither fear or shame, but with gratitude
for the lessons it has taught. It may be that the jeering crowd will
point in scorn as they see us with the grewsome figure at our side,
but when we fully learn the lesson that it came to teach, we shall
need to look no more without for the approval or disapproval of our
acts, but seek to satisfy ourselves alone. Let us place a new chair
beside the hearth, in the cosiest nook, and bid the skeleton take its
place as the worthiest guest. Let us neither parade nor hide our
new-found friend, but treat it as a fact of life—a fact that is, a fact
that had the right to be, and a fact that taught us how to find
ourselves. Let us not forget the parents, who watch us in our youth,
and the friends that were ever good and true. But above all, let us
remember this grim and silent teacher, who never neglected or
forgot, who showed us life as only it could show, who opened up
new vistas to our soul, who touched our human hearts, who made
us know and love our fellowman, who softened and mellowed and
purified our souls until we felt the kinship that we bore to all living
things. Until it came we knew only the surface of the world. Before it
came, we had tasted of the shallow cup of joy and the bitter cup of
pain, but we needed this to teach us from the anguish of the soul
that there is a depth profound and great, where pain and pleasure
both are one. That there is a life so deep and true that earth’s
rewards and penalties alike are but a hollow show; that there is a
conquest of ourselves, which brings perfect peace and perfect rest.

PRINTED FOR C. L.
RICKETTS BY R. R.
DONNELLEY & SONS
COMPANY, AT THE
LAKESIDE PRESS,
CHICAGO, ILL. MCMII
 TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
1. Silently corrected typographical errors.
2. Retained anachronistic and non-standard
spellings as printed.
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