The Philosopher of the Gate

I KNOW a story of another Scotch laddie who was asked what he wanted? what would make him happy? and promptly he answered, “ Cream parritch and cream to them, and to swing on a yett (gate) a’ day.”

This story was told by a man who was once a boy in a beautiful Scotch village himself, and who used to stir up the cows when they were chewing their cud, and drive them off, and warm his bare toes in the grass heated by their bodies; he used to kneel on the edge of a stream, and feel with his hands under the bank, and find a big fish, and pass his fingers gently all over it, feeling its whole smooth form, while it lay quite still. And sometimes of course he would close his hands and lift out a salmon for dinner. He used to crouch in the track of a running hare, and the scared creature, with its eyes turned back, looking for trouble behind, would run right into his arms — ” and we often had hare soup.”

A man who was so close to nature as that would be truthful — at least so we are taught, and I suppose cows and fish are more clearly nature than men and women. So the truth of the story is demonstrated, if that is any addition to it.

Whether it is true or not, it is a very important story, for surely we may all have cream parritch — ay, and cream to them, and swing on gates till our heads swim, if we are sure we want to. Happily we do not all want to, or there would not be half enough gates to go round. There is no accounting, the proverb says, for tastes. I have heard of certain people who went a great distance to church. The service was long. The sermon lasted more than an hour, and there was another service in the afternoon, with another sermon. There was not time for these worshipers to go home and return for the afternoon service, so they took their lunch and ate it in church, and spent the entire day there. Need I say this also was in Scotland?

Our Puritan ancestors — not so long ago — used to sing a hymn beginning thus: —

The tune is as dreadful as the words. Surely no higher critic would have the heart — if he had the power — to rob these believers of a hell at once so awful and so amusing? They lavished all their gifts of imagination on it, and made it as perfect as they could; it needed only their own presence there to be an ideal hell. They would have repudiated with horror the idea that they enjoyed it, but doubtless all the good it ever did was in the uncomprehended thrill it gave them. Stand aside and let them swing their gates to their hearts’ content; for if you try to stop them or slow them down, who knows but they may show you the utter and quite demonstrable silliness of your continuing to practice on your ’cello, or crossing the ocean every year to look for an hour at the Nattier which has enslaved you so that you know no peace?

“ On n’apprend pas en s’amusant,” says a schoolmaster severely to dear Monsieur Sylvestre Bonnard. “ On n’apprend qu’en s’amusant ” retorts that philosopher. When I was a child I was so fortunate as to go to a school where we were allowed to enjoy our lessons. When Washington or any of his generals won a battle, we sprang to our feet and cheered — indeed I think I remember Eugene leaping on to his desk, but this was at a crisis of great emotional fervor — a sudden wrenching of victory from defeat — a triumph artfully led up to by a great teacher. We were allowed to choose our own punishments, and were not punished at all if we did not think we had been bad. I wish I could tell with modesty how well we all came out. Some of us are famous, — or about to be, — and we are all of course highly developed individualities. One of that class, a boy, has painted and drawn animals all his life, so lovingly that now the world loves his animals too. A lady heard him mention Oxford, and with a stern ambition to learn from one who knew, she asked him what he had admired most in that ancient seat of learning (and had her tablets ready). The artist’s eyes grew dim with the memory of beauty. “ I saw a goldenhaired sheep in Oxford,”he said softly. He was swinging on his own gate as he has done all day, and let us hope the cream parritch are coming to him — with cream to them.

“ I care not who knows it,” says the greatest story-teller of them all, “ I write for the general amusement.” And it is because he amused all the world, beginning with himself, so well, that his fellow men have loved him so much (and after the perverse unhumorous way of mankind, have made a classic of him, and force their children to read him — with notes). But funnily enough, a little boy I know of happened to get the most education out of his books in quite another way. He used to pass a bookseller’s shop in Edinburgh, and stopped to gaze at the first page of a book exposed to view in the window; he became absorbed, and stood with his eager little face pressed against the glass till he had devoured every word on the two pages, and then walked reluctantly on to school. But the bookseller, who happened to be a very human being, had seen the greedy little eyes, and he turned the leaf, so that on the way home the boy read two pages more of the story; and every day four more until he had read the whole book.

It was Waverley, and of course it was “ part of his education,” though he did not think so. Who would not be educated by loving those gentle females with “ ringlets betwixt brown and flaxen,” and those brave simple knights and very royal kings? Many admirable things are told in the life of the great romancer, but best of all is the fact that when he came into the room his children and their friends (notwithstanding that the young of the human race are the shyest and most suspicious of all the wild animals) never stopped playing leap-frog, or flirting, or any other game they were engaged in; he was permitted to join if he felt like it, or to look on, but the game never stopped — and this when he was honored by the world as something between a god and a great prince; when he had invented the art of romantic fiction and almost created a country. No wonder so many ladies proposed to him, though he was old and lame and in broken financial circumstances. Here was the ideal man, who had the world at his feet, and who could come into the room and join in the fooling of the young people without (I can think of no better expression than my brother’s, though they may have had a different word for it at Abbotsford) — without “gumming” the party. The ladies did right to marry him if they possibly could.

I do not know what became of my lad of definite desires. Certainly he got what he wanted. He may be a great philosopher or a good gardener; he may be only a millionaire if his aim continued to be as narrowly material; but is there not in the unprofitable longing to swing everlastingly on a gate, the germ of a hope that he may have become a poet?