H IL L INO I S UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANA-CHAMPAIGN PRODUCTION NOTE University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Library Brittle Books Project, 2010. COPYRIGHT NOTIFICATION In Public Domain. Published prior to 1923. This digital copy was made from the printed version held by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It was made in compliance with copyright law. Prepared for the Brittle Books Project, Main Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign by Northern Micrographics Brookhaven Bindery La Crosse, Wisconsin 2010 79 6 B12I a >g THE UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS LIBRARY THE TECHNIQUE . OF REST BY ANNA C. BRACKETT As for Leisure "The fashion of it men forgot About the age of chivalry" NEW YORK HARPER AND BROTHERS MDCCCXCII Copyright, 1892, by HARPER & BROTHERS. All rights reserved. "My roof is hardly picturesqueIt lacks the pleasant reddish brown Of the tiled house-tops out of town, And cannot even hope to match The modest beauty of the thatch; Nor 'is it Gothic or grotesqueNo gable breaks, with quaint design, Its hard monotony of line, And not a gargoyle on the spout Brings any 'latent beauty out ; Its only charm-I hoki it highIs just. its nearness to the sky." - d. 4967iO- CONTENTS. PAGE CHAP. I. REST........... I1. NECESSITY. ......... 34 88 111. FREEDOM ......... IV. RESTLESSNESS........"9 V. BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY ' 54 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST I REST HE occasion of this book is an article of mine in HARPER'S NEW MONTHLY MAGAZINE for June, 1891, called "The Technique of Rest," which was an attempt to help, out of my own rather wide experience, some of the women who were tired. From different parts of the country, and from women whom I had never heard of, came letters of thanks for the help given to I 2 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST them-letters written evidently out of very full and very weary lives. Then it was suggested to me that more might be said on the same subject, for which there seemed to be a decided demand. Thanks and appreciation were universal from the women who spoke of the article; it seemed to have touched the right chord, and for that I was very thankful, since the world of women is not destitute of effort, nor is its effort purposeless, but the purpose is too often methodless, and so, much brave effort is worse than wasted. This is particularly the case in home life, the demands of which must of necessity be multifarious and never-ending. Where woman has taken her place in business she has found her method ready-shaped for her, and following that, she does her work, if with a certain amount of monotony, yet without undue fatigue. Her hours are fixed, and as a rule she REST gets needful change of scene as she goes to her business and returns to her home or the place where she lives. But the "home- maker" has not, nor can she have, any such change, and her hours are always from the rising of the sun beyond the going down of the same. She cannot get away from the demands made upon her, and as the years go on, these tighten more and more. She may try to escape them, but they are more in number than the sands of the sea, and disappear for a moment only to return in other and more complicated forms. The more humble and the more in earnest she grows, the more weary she gets, till she lives in a perpetual sense of not being able to draw one full breath. Many a woman will recognize the truth of these words, though it will seem to most men that they are exaggerated. I said above that from women I had received only 4 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST warm thanks and appreciation for my words in the " Technique of Rest." I should add that I sent it to a man-a psychologist--who said in return: "I have read your article; it is good, but too grim." That was not what the women thought; they knew it was not too grim for the truth. It is sometimes asked why things in the home cannot be regulated in the same way as they are in business. It can be done to a certain but very limited extent, for to do more would destroy the very idea of a home. Times for meals can be maintained if the man of the family does not make that impossible. Beyond this regularity there must be a large degree of flexibility Peace and rest are the characteristics of the home. But it should not be a peace which is only a stifled war, and the Rest must come from the constant balance of the complicated conditions, REST yielding at every side with a certain compensating movement, so that it shall yet be firm and supporting. That this is impossible is no reason why it should not be accomplished. One is reminded of Montaigne's saying that only when a thing becomes incredible is there any room for faith. A woman has power to accomplish the impossible, and she should never fear to undertake it. Just that she may do this is she made so quick and so facile, so able to turn from one thing to another, and so sensitive to outside impressions. Give her the width of information which she lacks because of the narrowness of her education, and she will free herself from the coils which render her breathing difficult, and find herself able to create a home without, in doing it, sacrificing herself. But in order to do this, she must work from within, outward i she must create within her- 6 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST self the strength which shall be equal to that pressing upon her from without. For it is only in a balance of forces that Rest consists. It is not anything in and for itself; it is only the harmony of demand and supply, the supply varying as the demand varies, no matter how often or how greatly, with the beautiful sureness of some of the sewing machines. What we want is an automatic tension attachment to every woman. Then the work will run easily, and the stitches will be of even length, even though the pull be now strong and now weak. Rest is not rust. It may at some times mean the absolute do-nothingness longed for by the old woman whose pathetic last words I have never been able to divest my memory of since I first read them, centuries ago. I am quite sure these lines must have been written by a woman, though their authorship has never REST yet been claimed to my knowledge. What makes them pathetic is their unmistakable truth. I give the epitaph: " Here lies a poor woman who always was tired, For she lived in a house where help was not hired, Her very last words were, 'My friends, I am going To a place where there's nothing of washing or sewing! Oh, everything there will be just to my wishes, For where they don't eat, there's no washing of dishes. The courts with sweet anthems are constantly ringing, But having no voice, I shall get clear of singing!" She folded her hands with her latest endeavor, And whispered,' Oh, nothing, sweet nothing forever !" In the whole range of literature, I do not think there is anything which can match the eighth line for completeness and finish of thought. It is evident that the question of the music had for a time troubled her, but that the moment had come in which that anxiety ?Iso had been dispelled, and she was reatuy to fold her hands-another stroke of genius-in perfect confidence that at last there was no more doubt as to the complete rest awaiting her. It is 8 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST doubtless true that Nirvana offers great attractions to many women, and that the preacher who would strive to lead them by picturing heaven as a place of continual activity is misdirecting his efforts. In the same strain was the recent account of the suicide of a woman found dead at eighty years old, in the house of her grandson, where she was living. Under her pillow there was a half-emptied bottle of laudanum and a piece of paper on which she had written, "This will be the last time of my going to bed." One can easily imagine the feeling of rest at last with which the poor old woman wrote these words-a protest against the deadly monotony of daily existence, against the continual drudgery of dressing and undressing, which necessarily forms so large a part of the duties of every day, and which, whenever we become conscious of it, is REST so wearily tiresome. Sometimes there is no other rest but absolute do-nothing, and therefore has a pitiful God made death a component part of every life, a something without which life would be incomplete. But this does not invalidate the statement made above, that Rest is in any case only harmony between the inside and the outside conditions of life. If these conditions be not harmonious, then one of them must be tuned up or down to the other. And this tuning cannot be done once for all, but must be a continual care. Every day brings its own conditions and new complications. The orchestra cannot tune its instruments to last through even one concert. Always there must be new adjustments after every piece of music, and so it is with human life. That human nature is always wanting to embody its experience, whether religious or political, in IO THE TECHNIQUE OF REST creeds and in laws is only a proof of how it longs for rest; and the fact of revision of creeds and laws shows also that this effort is of no use except as leading to a new activity. As Professor James has so well said, the mere naming of anything gives us a certain sense of rest and repose. It is as if we fastened the new idea with a label, and now might reasonably hope that it would cease tormenting us with its persistent presence, and leave us free to attend to other things. When Adam had named all the animals, he must have gone to sleep for the first time with a quiet hope of undisturbed repose. It is very simple to name a thing. To formulate a creed-that is, to name a conviction on the profoundest subject of thought-is a more difficult task, but really in the very same line. To the questions which have concerned us, we give a formal answer: REST II We say, "I am tired of being continually haunted by you. I believe exactly so and so and once for all. Now let me rest." And the Church does rest, but only for a while. Or the State says, "Let us decide forever, and in a way that no one can misunderstand, the question of what shall be considered crimes, and what punishments shall be allotted to the doers of these offences. We will settle all the problems of property so that any questions which can possibly arise shall be easily adjusted." And so it does, or tries to do. But a live world, whether of thought or of action, cannot be kept in such swaddling-clothes, so that the history of the world is only a story of perpetual revision in one region or another. When nations have fought till they are tired, they call for rest in the form of a treaty, and they hope that now, at last, there will be a final settlement of the 12 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST vexed questions. We are always hearing about "final settlements," and it takes us a considerable part of our lives to comprehend that there is no such thing as a final settlement of anything, and that we need not look for it. Whether in large or in small affairs, there must be perpetual readjustment. All the monotony there really is, is a monotony of change, and this is no more so in household affairs than in all others. Therefore, women ought not to complain of monotony in their lives, as if it were something especially belonging to them. It is the law of any live universe. Neither ought they to expect that they can escape the need of constant tuning. Where the harmony between the inner desire and the outside circumstances does not exist-in other words, where there is no rest-the question to be settled is, first of all, which of the two is to REST 13 be changed. Five from ten does not leave eight, but we can get eight by changing five to two just as easily as by substituting thirteen for ten. There are always at least two ways of doing a thing, and there are generally more than two. The thoughtless person goes blindly to work, changing the first condition that presents itself to his view, though the fact that it does so present itself may be a mere accident. But what we need is the breadth of mind which brings all the conditions before it, the clearness of sight which discriminates, weighs, and measures, and this with always present thought of the end to be attained or to be approached; and last, but not least, the cool self-control which poises untroubled with balanced wing over all the conditions, suspending action till a rational decision has been reached. Even the hawk does not descend over the lake where the ducks 14 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST are swimming without doing all these things. To those who see what they imply, it will be clear why the manner of the education of the little girl who is to be confronted by all the complicated and ever-changing problems of homecreation is of far more consequence than what she is learning. Rest you cannot compass till you have secured harmony of the internal and external conditions of your own life, whatever that life may be. The question is always which of these conditions you can change. It may be possible, of course, that both are capable of modification. If so, the problem becomes more complicated. If, however, you decide, after a careful review of all the outside circumstances, that they cannot be altered, then your task is to mould your own mind into harmony with those conditions. Every effort to do this will be an approximation tow- REST 15 ards Rest. But bear always in mind that this must be a perpetually active process, and keep your mind ever open to the appreciation of the changes of the outward world. Harmony is not a simple thing. If the bass changes, perhaps the soprano must also change, and perhaps, also, the contralto and the tenor. You are not dealing with dead matter, if there be indeed any such thing as dead matter in the universe of God. You are dealing with His live world on the one hand, and on the other with your own live soul, and the possibilities of combination are practically infinite. Therein lies the interest of the problem. And if you can bring yourself to look at it as a problem, a game which you have to play out and to be triumphant in, so much the better. There will then enter into it a certain keen intellectual zest which will be of great service. The less personal feeling and the more cool 16 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST intellect you can throw into the game the better. If you could stand far enough off from the question which you have to solve, it would all become perfectly clear to you. If you could stand far enough off either in space or in time, it would be comparatively easy. You do not suppose that God has any difficulty in seeing clear through all the problems of His Providence, or that to Him any one event, no matter how small and insignificant in your eyes, can be troubled or interfered with by any other, no matter how great. It is true you have not His infinite sight, but you can get farther away than you are from the pressing problems of to-day and here, if you will make a determined effort. And the farther away you can get, the more they will fall into harmony. It is because the conditions lie so close before your eyes that you cannot see to disentangle them. Try in the freedom of your mind to REST 17 withdraw from them by never so little a space, and the crossing and tangled lines will begin to weave into some kind of order. Necessity-that is, God and His world, the whole of it-stands outside of you. Within you, you have the freedom which God has given. It is your business to reconcile that necessity and that freedom, since it is only in such reconciliation that Rest can be found. Find it ! It can be found thus, no maeLr how seemingly mean or how so alled monotonous is the round of yc daily life. It is for every woman in hey vn life to lay out her own course to the desired haven, and, as a rule, she will find it easier to steer her own ship than to try to steer the heavenly bodies or change the currents of the ocean. If your weariness is simply bodily exhaustion, then you need, for restoration, only bodily repose. But this is almost never the case with a grown - up wom- I8 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST an. Generally with her, the exhaustion comes from the mind. With children it is different. A child who is properly looked after, goes to sleep when it is tired, and wakes up refreshed and as good as new, for sleep is an unfailing restorative for mere bodily weariness, and in that case is sure to come to the rescue. Indeed, so long as you sleep well and eat well, you have no great reason to complain; but in the weariness arising from the mind, sleep is not so ready to come. The child may reach this trouble in the same way. The sensitive, conscientious child may be driven to it by being forced into introspection -a state which is not natural to the immature mind-or it may come to the child intellectually through bad teaching in school. Anything which produces want of harmony in the mind will bring nervous exhaustion in a greater or a less degree. When the conscience has been REST 19 freed, or when the difficulty has been solved, the face will brighten and the look of care disappear. Over and over again, Rest consists simply in producing harmony between the individual and her surroundings or the conditions under which she has to live. This harmony must be created by herself, for when God created us in His own image He could not do otherwise than to make us active agents, and to ordain that if we wanted anything, we must get it for ourselves. You cannot teach the child by forcing facts upon him; so long as you do this, they remain foreign to him. It is only the knowledge that he himself actively takes in and assimilates till it becomes a part of his being that goes towards his education. He himself must reach out actively for it or it can never become his. It is so with Rest. It cannot be pasted on to us nor forced down into our minds or 20 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST hearts. We must reach out and take it. In the case of affliction or trouble, where rest will not come till real resignation comes, we might at first think that it could be passively obtained, but this is so far from being the case that no greater effort could be required of us than to put our minds into the passive state requisite for being worked upon. Did you ever try to hear the sound of the crickets in the summer twilight and find yourself unable to do so, simply because your ear was tuned to the rustle of the poplar leaves or to the twitter of the birds ? In such case a strong and vigorous effort is required to tune down the ear to the chirping, and only then is it borne in upon you, though you were surrounded by it all the time. Just so there is always plenty of Rest lying all round you, eager to press in and take possession of you, but you must take and control the other things with a REST 21 steady and sometimes with a forceful hand before it can reach you. This is true. Believe it, if you do not know it, for the belief that it is so will be one great step towards the knowledge of it. "'Oh, where is the sea?' the fishes cried, As they swam the crystal clearness through; 'We've heard from of old of the ocean's tide, And we long to look at the waters blue. The wise ones speak of the infinite sea; Oh, whu can tell us if such there be ?' The lark flew up in the morning bright, And sung and balanced on sunny wings; And this was its song: 'I see the light, I look o'er a world of beautiful things; But flying and singing everywhere, In vain I have searched to find the air.' " This is too often the case. Before "Thy will be done," came the sorrow and the heaviness, and so they come still in America as well as in Palestine. Resignation is not merely a passive state. It is an intensely active one in 22 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST which the soul is standing on tiptoe "with arms out-stretched and eager face ablaze." If conditions cannot be changed, then they must be submitted to, but not after the manner of the Mahometan sailor who drops upon the deck when the wind rises, refusing to try to handle the ship because Allah will save him in any case if it be His will, and he will be destroyed in spite of all his efforts if Allah has so ordained it. We are not Orientals, and Allah is not the name of our God. The freedom the Orient has never known and can never know is ours, but only for a great price, and that price, our own effort. Our place is not with the sailors who, when the ship took fire, "leaped and left her," but with those who "stood by her, firing steady," as Helen Gray Cone says, and it was only for them that the old sailor in the tale invoked rest. You must have trust in Someone else than REST 23 yourself, and in a wiser Sight than your own. If you have not this trust, you must fight for it till you win it. Sometimes the people who claim to love God most, trust Him least. They seem unwilling to leave anything to Him, as if He were incompetent. They insist upon trying to do the work of His worldcurrents as if these were of no avail, and when great events happen they assume to stand as His interpreters, or they talk of "mysteries" as if they expected to fathom His counsels! They make the mistake of trying to comprehend the Infinite. Although presumably they have read the book of Job, they talk as if in the kingdom of God we were in a market-place, where articles were laid out openly for sale, and where we could buy anything, if only we were willing to pay what we consider its fair price in any coin which might happen to be most convenient for us, unmind- 24 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST ful of the coinage of the kingdom. We must not expect to buy with Casar's coins any other than the goods of Casar. In the first place, we must hold to Montaigne's teaching-that it is only when we meet an incredible thing that there is any occasion at all for faith. In the second place, we must know that it is with the heart and never with the intellect "that man believeth unto righteousness," and that it is the pure in heart, and not the keen in intellect, who shall see God. " Mere intellectual reasoning will never lead to the knowledge of divine things;" and we must try to see that "demonstrative evidence which left no room for doubt would be absolutely fatal to any morality, because it would leave no place for faith or deliberate choice." It is from a critique in the London Spectator on the poems of Robert Browning that I am quoting, where the writer says that Browning REST 25 knew, and insisted upon it, that "purity of heart and loyal love were the only sure avenues to the knowledge of God and His ways." " Eternal failure is the only condition of spiritual progress." We must, first of all, understand the principle of the spiritual harvest, and cease to expect to reap money or fine clothes from good deeds. This, to begin with, will free us from much unrest. Those who by daily living have in some degree attained this insight have no reason to be troubled over any failure in mmory which advancing age may bring. Emily Dickinson wisely asks, "Is it oblivion or absor5tionwhen things pass from our minds ?" We take out our watch to look at the time in order to decide whether we will follow some course of action. We decide, and put the watch back again, and are perhaps troubled afterwards to find that we cannot remember what the time was. But 26 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST that was not what we wanted to know; what we did want to know was whether we should or should not do a certain thing. The knowledge of the exact hour was only a means to an end; we ought to be glad that we do not remember it. Of what avail would it be to be able to recite, never so perfectly, the bills of fare of the meals which have nourished us? We don't want to remember such things; we want to have forgotten them. This is the case with much of our knowledge also; we do not want to hold it in our minds. We want to have read a certain book, but we do not need to remember the contents of the book. It is the results which we have garnered that are of consequence to us, not the steps by which we attained them. It is what we are, not what we have done, or what any one else has done, that concerns us. If our lives have been worth anything, REST 27 they have given us some degree of insight, which is only a sort of mental instinct telling us at once what to do under certain conditions, just as we involuntarily close our eyes if a blow be aimed at our faces, or throw out our arms if we slip on the ice. There is a theory, not at all improbable, that what is known as instinct in the race is only the gathered and assimilated wisdom of all our ancestors. In the same way, the insight which comes with advancing age, and which makes the advice of its possessors valuable, is only the gradually assimilated wisdom gained from long years in which we have been forced to reason out many problems, and to contemplate with more or less satisfaction the results of innumerable deeds, whether our own or those of others. The remembrance of those deeds, these courses of action and their results, have been generalized in the mind, till now, 28 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST when we are asked a question on any subject with which we are familiar, we see at once without conscious reasoning the way of action which it would be probably best to adopt. People say sometimes after asking for advice, "But you do not think about the thing at all! I wanted to talk it over with you," not realizing that we have been doing nothing else but thinking about that very thing and a host of others of the same nature all our lives, till we have only to propose the question to the mind thus trained, and the answer starts out like the answer to a puzzle, or the result of an arithmetical example in a calculating machine. It seems possible that the gathered and assorted experiences of our lives here are to become the instincts of our life hereafter-the instincts with which we shall start on that new life. It may well be that we shall no longer remember any of the events or re- REST 29 flections which led to the formation of those instincts, or shall only at times dimly recall them as half-remembered visions of some uncertain life beyond our ken, retaining as material for our new experiences only their results in consciousness. Towards such a purpose the weakening, as it is called, of mere memory as years go on seems to point or dimly to hint. It certainly is a method of action not inconsistent with what we see and know of that God before whom not one sparrow falls to the ground unnoticed, and who in Nature is always teaching us the lesson of how material worn out in one sort of service is the fittest to employ in carrying out a different and a higher purpose. If there be one lesson more than another taught by all study of natural phenomena, it is that of this sort of economy. There is no niggardliness in the means employed to gain a cer- 30 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST tain end, or to carry out a previously determined plan; but after that plan has been carried out, there is never any waste of the smallest bit of material. Always every fragment is taken up and put to some new use "that nothing be lost;" there was no more characteristically divine saying than the direction given by Christ after the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Let your memory transmute itself into insight, passing into a higher and a better thing. Waste no vain regrets over it, and as to the flight of time, the hurry and bustle of the swiftly recurring, the swiftly vanishing days in which you would do so much, and in which, it seems to you, you can do so little, remember "Yesterday, to-day, to-morrow come; They hustle one another and they pass ; But all our hustling morrows only make One smooth to-day of God." REST 31 After all, every day which seems so long and so hard to us is only a part of the whole, and not a whole in itself; and many a trouble and vexation, many a thing hard to bear and difficult to manage, will lose much of its importance in our eyes if we can stop to remember that it is only a part of a whole which we cannot see, and a component part of a smaller whole-the life given to us. If we say, " It is only a part" when it comes, and try to manage it as such, we shall find that it is not totally discouraging, and so can take hold of it with more confidence and trust. We are living not in a finished abode where we might have reason to expect regularity and completeness, nay, not even in a half-finished house, but really only IN THE QUARRY. Impatient, stung with pain and long delay, I chid the roughhewn stone that round me lay; I said-" What shelter art thou from the heat ? What rest art thou for tired and wayworn feet ? 32 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST What beauty hast thou for the longing eye ? Thou nothing hast my need to satisfy !" And then the patient stone fit answer made" Most true, I am no roof with welcome shade; I am no house for rest, or full delight Of sculptured beauty for the weary sight ; Yet am I still material for all; Use me as such-I answer to thy call; Nay, tread me only under climbing feet, So serve I thee, my destiny complete; Mount by me into freer, purer air, And find the roof that archeth everywhere; So what but failure seems, shall build success, For all, as possible, thou dost possess." Who by the Universal squares his life, Sees but success in all its finite strife. In all that is, his truth-enlightened eyes Detect the May-be through its thin disguise; And in the Absolute's unclouded sun, To him the two already are the one. We are too apt to forget that all we have now is only material. Of one thing we may be sure: away from rest, if that is what we are seeking, or after which we are longing, lead all small and petty thoughts, all mean- REST 33 ness and all narrow things, "pride, vainglory and hypocrisy, envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness." The roads to it are by all great and everlasting things, by humility, sincerity, truth, magnanimity, forgiveness, and -- in the noble and characteristic words of ex-Senator Edmunds-that "inextinguishable joy which comes from having been faithful to truth and self-respect." When we have once found out that ''Tis -ot the grapes of Canaan that repay, But t'ne high faith that failed not by the way," we shall have found the place where Rest dwells 3 34 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST II NECESSITY , ' OME of us at least can remember the house-keeping in old days, the extremest demands of which, in spite of the lapse of time, are still to be found in our New England towns. If we look at the work expected as a matter of course from many a farmer's wife of to-day, we can only exclaim, "Who is sufficient for these things ?" She is up at four or five, and, finding perhaps her fire made for her, prepares the breakfast, washes and dresses the children, clears away the dishes, washes clothes, puts the house to rights, takes care of the milk, often of twenty cows, cleans and dries the pans and makes the but- NECESSITY 35 ter. Meanwhile she is cooking the dinner for three or four hungry men and serving it. Afterwards the dishes and what a little friend of mine used to call th," pot-pans " are to be washed and cleared off, though she has learned to put away nothing which is to be used for the next meal, but to lay those dishes and plates back on the table in preparation for supper when the "men-folks" will be in from field work. The children are mostly taking care of themselves in some of the many places so dear to the childish heart which a barn and all sorts of sheds offer, though they need intermittent attention and an everwatchful ear; then she mixes and bakes hot biscuit for tea, and has everything ready when the men-folks come, for often they can't afford to waste a minute, having to return to the fields. Then more dishes are to be washed and the table must be set in readiness 36 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST for breakfast, the room cleaned, the lamp lighted, the children put to bed and the mending done, and so to sleep, provided a summons do not come from a neighboring farm-house that "My woman is too sick to be left alone, and I thought mebbe you would come in and help us for to-night." And so it goes on day after day in which all the water that is used must be drawn, or at the best, pumped outside the house, brought into the kitchen, carried wherever it is needed, and then when used, fetched out again, for in many a New England house to-day the luxury of a sink into which water can be poured is unknown. It should not be forgotten, either, that all this must be done without any helping hand. There is no servant to take up the ends of the work, such as to mop the floor after the main work is done, or to blacken the stove and "tidy up." No loose ends NECESSITY 37 can be left, for they would only make more work for the next day, and that is not to be thought of. It is no wonder that the woman often looks forward with a real sense of rest to the very first weeks of the life of a new baby, because she knows that for that time at least, she can lie still and have somebody else do the manual labor, if not the thinking. I do not mean that the husband has been idle or neglectful. He, too, is busy; but it is nevertheless true that if there be an errand which necessitates a "hitching up" of the horse and a drive to the village, he is generally the one to go, and thus at least he gets a little change, and the sight of other people with different interests from those on his own farm, while to the woman there is no such respite except once in a while the sewing- circle, which brings with it more dishes to wash and more 38 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST cooking to do. Or if she takes the eggs-which in New England generally are, by an old traditional law, her perquisite-to the village to sell, or rather to barter, she often finds herself confronted with the hard problem of painfully trying to contrive how she can manage to make a dress out of a very small pattern of calico-all that she can get in exchange, after spending the necessary amount for her husband's tobacco. This is no exaggerated picture, as whoever will spend a summer in one of the back towns will learn, if he will take pains to become acquainted with the facts. This story may sound strange and far away; but even in our cities fifty years ago, and with well-to-do families, all the water used had to be carried over the house; for the running water, even where it was found, would not run above the first floor, and scarcely there NECESSITY 39 on washing-days. All the dishes used at meals had to be brought to the dining-room from the kitchen on trays, generally up a flight of stairs, and taken back again in the same way afterwards. Any woman who has done this work or has seen it done, knows what an amount of labor it involves, if not to the housekeeper, then to the servants. Now we have running water and waste-pipes all over our houses; dumb-waiters for all sorts of purposes, and more servants than in those old days, and yet the work of the house is never done, and everybody is complaining of being tired. The ways of living have been rendered vastly easier by a multitude of inventions, by the increasing wealth of the country, by better and more intelligent service; and yet life is by no means easier, but indeed harder. The demands on time, whether real or imagined, have increased in a greater ratio 40 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST than the supply of facilities for answering them, and as the earth provokingly continues to revolve on its axis just as rapidly as of old, the days are never long enough for all the duties which they bring. It is as if everybody had had dealings with Andersen's Moor Woman, "a venomous old creature and never idle," who, among other industries, " sewed running leather to put into the shoes of human beings, so that they should never be at rest." The very existence of the conveniences increases the number of possible accidents, and of calls on our attention. The more complicated the structure of an animal, the more in number are the possible derangements of the parts of that structure -the more diseases it is liable to, and the more care must be spent to preserve health, or the more trained skill to restore it, if lost. Physicians multiply, and in the household the plumber's NECESSITY 41 bill may become one of the regular expenses, as much as those of the grocer and the butcher. The woman who has seen water pouring out of her kitchen range because the "water-back" has burst during the night, and has considered the resemblance in complication of the modern house to the human body, has ceased to wonder at the curious and almost incredible diseases which may befall either. If she be not too tired, she will look on, after that experience, with a sort of amused wonder at what will happen next in a world where all things seem possible, and most of them probable. The care necessary in a modern house always reminds one of the poor man who could never be perfectly dressed, because as soon as he got a new hat his shoes began to wear out, and he hastily provided himself with new shoes only to find that his necktie was fraying, and so on 42 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST forever. If there be not something the matter with the roof, you may be sure that there is with the cellar, and if the warm-water faucet in the kitchen does not drip, the gas-burners need attention. When we were little girls we could never succeed in "playing paper dolls." We were always cutting new dresses or hats for them in anticipation of entertainments which had no time to come off, because when they were all ready or almost ready for these great events, it grew dark, and it was time to put away our playthings and get ready for supper. It is very much the same with us now that we are only older children. We are always getting ready to live, and never having time enough to live. And by-and-by it begins to grow dark, and we must put up our playthings and go to bed. It is a pity, and there must be some way out of the mistake. Perhaps if we had not been so anxious to have NECESSITY 43 our dolls so variously arrayed, they might have gone to more parties, and been happier dolls. But it is now too late to restore to them anything of the life which they lost, for they and their dresses and hats have long ago vanished with the rest of our childish treasures. What we might have done for them and did not do, however, perhaps their memory may do for us, and then their paper lives will not have been in vain. We go on multiplying our conveniences only to multiply our cares. We increase our possessions only to the enlargement of our anxieties. There is, I presume, no careful house-keeper who has not, in some desperate moment of going to the country or of returning therefrom, wished that civilization had never existed, and envied the freedom of the Indian woman who could peacefully leave her wigwam to the prairie- 44 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST dogs and carry her wardrobe on her back. But such wishes as these are unavailing; we are living in modern cities, and we must find some way out of our own problems, not falling into "blue-rose melancholy," which is of all things the narrowest and the most hopeless. We are not alone in the trouble forced upon us by the innumerable inventions, products of the intense mental activity of the time into whichrwewere born. All the comfort to be derived from the knowledge that we are only a part of a large company, we have. The old farmer, ruefully contemplating his potato patch, says, "It does somehow seem as if every time a man invented a new machine to save us work, the Lord invented a new bug !" But as we can fight fire most successfully with fire, so we must fight the army of inventions with our own. Buildings are not fire-proof unless they are NECESSITY 45 built of material that has had the fire itself for godmother. To our own power of invention, therefore, we must turn if we would not be overcome. The spirit of the age, which has stimulated the mental activity of other people, has not left us untouched; and though it seems sometimes as if it were an unequal fight with the whole world against one woman, we may avail ourselves of o-r q1>ickened power of thinking to ci .tt- nd utilize many little devices which, though small in themselves, will help not a little to smooth our way. First among these may, perhaps, be counted, increasing the elasticity of our income. In our day, needs and desires grow faster than the bank account. But what we have is, after all, only the ratio between the two, and not either by itself. If we can't increase the latter, we have the ability to lessen the former, and the result in peace of mind, and 46 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST consequently in power to battle coolly and successfully with what we have to do, will be just so much increased. The suggesting of this might belong as properly to the chapter on Freedom. As an English writer says, "The great thing in these circumstances is to avoid, as much as possible, breaking into the precious coins, and testing the resources of what that clever woman, Ann Taylor (Mrs. Gilbert), called the eminent firm, Messrs. Hook, Crook & Co. There was once an upper servant, valuable in many ways, who, when her new mistress gave her an undergarment to patch and the wherewithal to accomplish it, observed, 'I will do my best, madam, but I have never worn anything patched myself.' That young person never found her income elastic, though she lived to desire that it had been so, but she did not go the right way to work. It is mainly by judicious patching, mend- NECESSITY 47 ing, turning about, and the preservation of unconsidered trifles, that middleclass incomes can be made elastic, and the kind of life that consists of an endless succession of calls, afternoon teas, and tennis tournaments does not conduce to it at all. The possessors of narrow incomes should purchase wisely and at fixed times, if they mean to make the best of everything; and if only they have a little stock of ready cash to start with, they can buy when and where they see what suits them. By fixed times we mean at the after - season summer and winter sales, instead of starting out to buy summer frocks in May and winter ones in October, when thin or thick materials, as the case may be, are in season. It is really very difficult to increase the purchasing power of money, but time is money in the one sense that time may be made to serve instead of money; and there are thousands of 48 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST families where breakfast is early, in order that the masculine portion may go to business, and the women have long, clear days before them in which to make the best of things, and yet can have the hour's reading or rest, or the occasional outing that redeems life from dulness, while the pleasure of proving that a given income can be made elastic will add zest to every effort." It is probably the case that far more pleasure comes from the contriving of means to make a thing " do," and succeeding, than would have resulted from the purchasing of a new one. For the woman who is "dead tired" with planning and contriving, it is doubtless a great relief to buy at once the new thing, but just now, in our country at least, many women are tired for the lack of the pleasure which comes from planning. For planning comes next to creating, and to create is essentially the part of woman. NECESSITY 49 There would not have been so much pleasure in the Creation if it had not been preceded by chaos. To overcome difficulty is pleasure, because it gives always a sense of power, than which there is nothing more agreeable. To have power, and to use it, is a great joy; just as the possession of power shut out from its exercise is the hardest thing to bear. As to income, then, let us overcome the necessity which confronts us, with our own freedom in invention. Whenever we conquer necessity with freedom, we discover that they are the same, and do not need the dialectic of the metaphysician to convince us of the fact. If we would know of the doctrine, we must do the work; otherwise we shall only humbly trust that it is so. To secure time for all we have to do, we must offset the rapidity of its flight by reducing as many of our actions as possible to automatism. Doing this, 50 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST we shall not only perform them more quickly at the time, acting, as we shall, like a machine, but we shall set free a large proportion of the thinking power we have, to be applied to work which may refresh us instead of wearying. I quote from a recent article in the Andover Review . "The extension of automatic action in the lower range of faculties is the enlargement of freedom and power in realizing the higher objects of personal life, for it is growing facility in the application of means to ends. The more things a man can do without conscious effort, in the use of his bodily powers, in the use of reasoning faculties, of memory, of languages, of music, the wider range he has in the great pursuits of literature, science, philosophy, art, and religion. He has more power and he has wider area. Animals have more automatic action at the start, but make little appreciable gain upon NECESSITY 51 it, and get no release for higher uses. Man, by increasing his unconscious and subconscious action, of which he has but little at the start, widens his range continually, and increases the effectiveness of his personality, which guides native and acquired powers to the ends he may choose. And there is no ascertained limit to enlargement of power through the extension of habitual action into the various facilities of which man is capable." Leaving aside the bearing of this fact upon the question of immortality, of which the writer in the Review goes on to speak, we cannot read these words without seeing that to have our thinking power set free from the common, every-day affairs of daily life, is exactly the thing we are most earnestly striving towards. The more we reduce ourselves to machines in the lower things, the more force we shall set free to use in the higher. 52 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST When we first began to walk, we had to give our attention to every step, or indeed, to the working of every muscle engaged in taking those steps. We have only to notice the anxious expression on the face of the child during his first lesson in the difficult accomplishment to appreciate this. Now we walk without thinking of what we are doing. We can carry on a train of thought while walking, so deep that we may not know we are moving at all. This is because that activity has become automatic. In psychological language, the lines of discharge of the cells in our brain, necessary to produce in proper order the compound action of walking, have been set in activity so many times and kept in activity so long at a time, that now all we have to do is, as it were, to touch off the explosion of the first cell of the series, and the discharge of the others follows in regular order. It is like the NECESSITY 53 fall of a row of card houses. We knock down the first of the line, and that is all that is necessary. But if, in our walk, we come upon an uneven place, we then at once become conscious of the level of the ground, and set our foot down with care; or if it be in a dangerous spot, with some degree of anxiety. The course of our thought is checked for the time, for the thinking power has had to give its attention to minor matters. When the ground is level again, the brain hands back the work to its servants and resumes its own more congenial occupation. It is very much the same with house- keeping. As long as the house is well organized, and the daily work running in its habitual grooves, it runs itself, so to speak. But if a new emergency arise or a change of servants occur, the mind of the mistress can no longer be given to her favorite occupations. She finds herself 54 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST dragged down from any thinking on restful themes to the pulverizing cares of daily life until she can reorganize and again deliver over the work to the hands of her executive officers. The multitude of things which we have learned by repeated effort to do automatically is already greater than we should suppose unless we reflect on it, from the very reason that we no longer think about them. Watch the motion of your hands and fingers when buttoning your boot, and you will see how complicated is the seemingly simple act, and how they move with the regularity of the levers in a machine back and forth, back and forth, while you go on talking and have no recollection of having done anything; or, while you are taking a new needleful of thread from the spool as you are sewing, look to see where you are holding your needle. I venture to assert that you do NECESSITY 55 not know where it has been tucked away for the moment in order to allow you the use of your forefinger, and yet you will find it carefully disposed of, and by nine hundred and ninety-nine women out of a thousand in precisely the same place. These are good examples of automatic action. Did you ever try to teach any one how to make tatting? If you have, you will have found out that although you can do it yourself without any trouble, you do not really know how you do it. The woodsman will tell in the depth of winter by a glance of the eye what is the name of the tree, but he cannot tell you how he knows. He has so many times observed and combined in his mind all the characteristics of the tree that he knows it as soon as he sees it. To become conscious of processes is the part of a specialist : it is, for example, to be fit for a teacher. In ordinary life, driven as we 56 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST modern women are, by so many and differing demands, we must banish all minor matters possible to the region of automatism. And we need not feel that in so doing we are giving up any portion of our prerogative as thinking beings. Just that we might think to some purpose were we gifted with this faculty of performing our work like automata, and in its use lies absolutely our only hope for the present as against the ever-increasing demands of daily life. We should endeavor to put all things which are of no value in themselves, but are only means to ends, under the control of automatic or mechanical action. There are a hundred things which must be looked after, a hundred orders that must be given, a hundred errands to be done in order that the family may have a comfortable and a restful home. But though they are of importance in NECESSITY 57 that light-for the comfort of other people-they are of no further use. It is important for that day and for that trip that the conductor should have a memory of the faces of the passengers onthe train. He goes through the cars many times, and seldom makes a mistake in recognizing a new passenger, or in failing to recognize an old one. This has become automatic with him. But, the trip once over, and the passengers safely disposed of, he clears his memory of them as easily as one washes figures from a slate, and has a fresh memory for the next set as he passes through the train on his next trip, his brain mechanically taking a picture of each car in the train as he goes through for the first time. The girl is going to college. Among the professors under the fire of whose examination she is to come is one who is known to be a great stickler for dates, even to the unit figure, and 58 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST a warm partisan of a certain authority on ancient dates as opposed to another theory. What is she to do if she is to pass that examination and gain the privileges of the college ? She must commit to memory long lists of dates as important in any culture as the date of the birth of Rameses II. As she has an end to gain she does this, all the time with the consciousness lying back of her mental activity that the list is of no real use to her, further than to reach the Freshman Class. She passes the examination satisfactorily, winning warm commendation from the Professor of History, and in a week's time has forgotten all the dates. This is the story of many an examination and of the knowledge which has been sought in order to pass it. It seems to make a difference in the retaining power of the memory if we know that the facts we are acquiring are to be used NECESSITY 59 for a special purpose only. What we learn for the sake of knowing, we hold; what we learn for the sake of accomplishing some ulterior end, we forget so soon as that end has been gained. This, too, is automatic action in the constitution of the mind itself, and it is fortunate and merciful that it is so, for otherwise our minds would be soon only rubbish-rooms. A very simple and useful device is to have a memorandum-book, so small that it can be easily carried in the pocket, to be used instead of your mind to keep note of any errand or any appointment that you may have. The Standard Diary, less than four inches long and less than two and a half inches wide, is one of the best for this purpose. Besides a page for every day in the year, it has pages for memoranda, where you can keep notes of such facts as the amount of goods needed for any 60 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST garment, or trimming for any article which you are in the habit of using, so that you will not have to calculate over and over again the quantity to be bought. You will not have to stop, as you are going out, to say, " Let me see! I forget how much we need of that for Mary's dress." With true perception of the value of time, this diary has added lately a special page for putting down many of these things, such as number of gloves, sizes of collar, stockings, cuffs, shoes, number of bank-book, number of bicycle, etc. It contains, also, all the postage rates, directions for help in case of accidents, antidotes for the most common poisons, the list of divisions for standard time, church festivals, and all astronomical information needed, unless by the master of a ship. At the end is a condensed cash account for every month of the year, and several pages devoted to addresses such as NECESSITY those you are most commonly asked for and want always at hand: the name and exact address, for instance, of that pale-faced young girl who wants sewing to do at home, and whom you want to recommend to your friends; that of the teacher who gave you French lessons last year, and whom you found so excellent. There are four pages each given to calls and to letters, with columns for checking them off as returned or answered. The number of pages allotted to the former would seem to indicate that, in the opinion of the editor of this diary, it is not likely that a busy woman will have much time to spend in making calls which are merely a matter of form, where neither of the parties engaged can think of anything to say to the other except at the cost of much diligent ransacking of the tired brain and much invention. In fact, such diaries as these, in their wide range of 62 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST information, would seem to be all that one needs in practical life, the only other book that at all approaches them in this respect being unquestionably Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. And all this information is contained within a tiny well-bound book only half an inch thick, and with excellent paper and type. I speak of the binding because I have repeatedly proved that it will last through the whole year, and be in good order at the end, after having been carried in all sorts of pockets every day and having been opened thousands of times. As I am speaking of small things, I may be allowed to add that if a rubber ring be put round the first part of the book, shutting up all the past days, it will open always at the place you want, that is, at to-day, so that you will not have to waste any time in hunting for the duties you are in search of. I say NECESSITY 63 round the first part of the book, because the pages belonging to the coming days want to be left always open for any engagement you may make for them. If you have an errand for a certain day, put down the address on the page where it belongs when you make the engagement. Then you can dismiss it from your mind, and when the day comes you will find it there as you look over your book for what you have to do on that day. When you have done the errand, mark it off then and there by drawing a line through the memorandum. If at the close of the day you find, on looking over your artificial memory, that some of the things have not been lined off, showing that they have not been done, transfer these items to the next page, marking them off with a cross instead of a straight line. You will thus be sure that nothing has been left unthought of, and your work for 64 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST each day will, as far as possible, be shaped out for you in advance. Besides the mental rest which you will gain by being sure thus that none of all the little things are forgotten, you will begin to find an additional amount of rest, from the feeling which you will have that your work is laid out for you -as if you were under the direction of some one else, and that person one who is not confused by the multifarious demands of the present, but who plans for you in quiet and in advance. It is largely the constant making of decisions that tires us. To the list of duties for the day which you find thus prescribed for you, you will add others as you look it over in the morning before starting out on your walk. And when you have the list complete, arrange your different errands, if they be many, in the most convenient order for taking them up, bearing in mind the street-car routes NECESSITY 65 and other arrangements of the city where you live, and jot them down in order on a card which you can slip under the elastic on the outside of the book as you drop it into your pocket. Then follow your list of work laid out automatically, and you will do your errands with very much less fatigue, being relieved of a hundred little anxieties which, though small, do have a great cumulative power, and really tire one more than we should suppose. If you are a very busy woman, and must be so, rule the pages of your little book into columns for morning, afternoon, and evening; or, if it be more convenient, for in-the-house and outof-the-house business respectively, and you will be still more helped in your duties for the day by this classification. I know that some will interpose the objection here that I am suggesting more trouble than I shall succeed in avoid- 66 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST ing. I know well enough that there is a mania for order in the minds of some people that really makes more trouble than the disorder which it seeks to prevent; but I can only say that I am giving the results of the experience of a very hard-worked woman who has carried on for many years both woman's and man's work, and that without any respite, and who yet finds herself now far stronger and abler for work than most of the women who have had, compared with her, almost nothing to do. It can never be often enough repeated that it is the constant succession of little things and small anxieties that wear upon us, and not the great things. The only wise way for us is to hand over as many little things as possible to the care of automatism, and to conquer monotony by bringing larger and more fruitful interests into our minds in the space thus left free. It is always a NECESSITY 67 positive gain of time to make our plans beforehand and in quiet, when we can see clearly. It is like taking directions from Philip sober instead of from Philip drunk, and that saves time and useless work. As to the smoothness of the housework, it is an undoubted fact that the reason why so many women have continual trouble with their servants is that they do not give clear directions, and then find fault because the directions are not followed, or they make such uncertain and varying demands that the best and most anxious to please become discouraged. Servants, as well as any one else, like to have something certain to depend upon, and will serve more willingly often, though they have more to do, where they have their work clearly laid out for them, and where they feel perfectly sure that if they follow orders they are not going to be found fault with. I 68 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST know that all the fault does not lie directly at the door of the employer, but I think we do not perhaps realize how much of it lies there indirectly. It is a strong desire of the human race to fall back into a state of mechanism. There is nothing which the average mind so strongly and so constantly craves as rules and definite statements. Teachers know this, and their one effort during all the school-hours may be said to be to shake the pupils' minds out of the tendency to mechanism, and to force them into a state of self - activity. But with the house-keeper, the question is not how to train immature minds, but how to get the work done decently and in order. The object for her is the quietness, order, and comfort of the house, and the servants are only means to this end; so she may conscientiously allow them to fall into habits of mechanism as to the greater part of their work. Their NECESSITY 69 daily routine should be laid out for them for each day of the week, and trouble and dispute will be saved by putting it down in writing, and having the programme fastened up where they can refer to it. It is a question of saving time and the annoyance which prevents clear action of the mind, and it makes not much difference how little the gain may be, if it be only a gain. Whatever can be saved in this way will bear fruit a hundred-fold in the comfort of those who are dearer to us than ourselves, for there is no Calumet or Hecla mine that pays so large dividends as Home. Let there be constant watchfulness over the stores always kept in the house, so that no one of them shall ever be suffered to run out. Always order more before the supply comes quite to an end, and then you will never be driven to hurry by an unexpected demand coming 70 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST at the most inopportune time, for more of this or that. It is best always to have a written list of all these regular stores, and to be sure in this way that they are always on hand, not trusting to your memory; always save your memory by paper memories, as to all small details. The greatest order should be insisted on, not only in the general household, but in all personal belongings. There can hardly be too much carehul arrangement here. The old New England saying of "a place for everything and everything in its place" is in need of revival by those of us who want time saved for relief. If we are not the possessors of an instinct for order, we must create and diligently cultivate it. As to the many small articles of a woman's wardrobe -which should always be so arranged that she can get any of them in the dark as well as in the light-a little of the invention, always necessary NECESSITY 71 if we are to find our way out of the difficulty that we are living in, will be sufficient to instruct a carpenter so that there may be in the top drawer a place for everything, out of which it cannot slip because of partitions which shut it in. I have a friend who has her shoedrawer also arranged in divisions, so that she never has to stop to hunt for the mate to a shoe, the pairs lying always together. Some may think this a useless thing, but I happen to know that this woman does an almost incredible amount of work in different lines, and that she never keeps anybody who has an engagement with her waiting for one moment. These results may seem worthy of attainment, as they certainly enable her to meet the many calls upon her attention in a quiet frame of mind. It is the little foxes that spoil the vines, and the little things that tell upon nervous strength. At the desk, whenever 72 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST anything is done with, it should be at once restored to its place, and not left lying round to be looked up when wanted again. Pencils, rulers, and blotters should come under this stern rule, the carrying out of which will soon form a habit, and save in the total a great amount of time. These are only the simplest rules of business. As it is undoubtedly an advantage to American homes that so many of the wives and mothers have served as teachers before becoming house-directors, so it will be an advantage that so many young women are getting now some degree of training through their employment in offices and at cash-desks. They will carry with them into their future homes the business habits there acquired, which are only the gradually summed-up experience of many generations of business men interested in doing things in the shortest possible time, and the homes NECESSITY 73 will be benefited thereby. Before you begin to work, see that every one of the small tools you are to use is in the most convenient place for reaching it, so that you may not have to make one unnecessary movement, and you will be sur\prised to find with how little expenditure of force you will do the work. Few women probably reflect, as they sit in their comfortable chairs at a theatre and enjoy the smooth performance without a hitch or break, upon the amount of order and preparation indispensable to produce the result which charms them. A visit to the property-room and a little talk with the man or woman in charge might be a good lesson upon the effect of thorough order and previous arrangement in preventing friction. You see the actor reach for the pen or for some little thing required by the play, and you do not think that it was the business of some one to see that all these 74 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST little unnumbered trifles should be in the particular place where they were wanted at precisely the time when they were wanted; and the next day at dinner you find fault sharply with the servant because necessary articles are not on the table. Perhaps it was not the fault of the servant so much as that of some one else. It is little things like these that destroy the whole comfort of a dinner-table, and vex and annoy others besides yourself. It is so much easier to prevent trouble than to cure it! A little more order in the household arrangements, a little more carefully planned directions to the servants, and, above all, a little more of the oversight of the trained eye beforehand, would save so much friction and spare yourself so much fatigue; for most of the women who will read these words are not tired with bodily labor directly, but only with the exhaustion coming from the men- NECESSITY 75 tal friction which follows them every day, and with the constant effort to keep things smooth and to do all their duty. So closely are the mind and body related that the very effort at keeping things in order will tend to spread order in the thought, so that clear thinking and clear directions, which are its result, will day by day become easier. Go on, patiently putting and keeping outside things in order, and you will find that after a while you are beginning to gain a mental grip of the problems which beset you. They will fall into order, and take their places according to their proper relations. It is useless trying to have any real order in a school of children where the maps on the walls are awry, chairs and tables crooked, and the interiors of the desks a scene of wild confusion, as if the books had been tipped in like coal from 76 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST a cart. So you are not able to think in order clearly and logically in a room where everything is in confusion. In the same way, if you want to rest with your mind, you must learn first of all to keep all parts of the body quiet-that is, to have them under control. If you try to stop a street-car, and the driver takes no notice of you, diligently regarding the fine proportions of a steeple in the distance, though you may not yet be able to see him go by with profound quietness of mind, you can at least refrain from expressing your feelings. After you have done this a sufficient number of times, holding yourself in perfect serenity so far as the outward woman is concerned, you will be agreeably surprised to find that you begin not to be so provoked as was your wont. Try it. Learn not to play with your watch-chain, not to swing your shopping-bag slowly back and forth, not per- NECESSITY 77 petually to caress the handle of your umbrella as you ride. Learn to keep still, and you will feel the quieting influence all through your life. If the train stops, don't ask a hundred questions, which don't concern you, as to the cause of the delay. Do not seek for information of which you can make no use. When the steamer goes slowly because of fog, do not attack the captain every time he appears on deck with your inquiries as to whether he thinks he will run into an iceberg or another vessel, or whether there is always fog in that part of the ocean, and a hundred others, so various as to leave no doubt in the mind of any one who listens to them of the great power of invention of their propounder. The captain will perhaps answer, gruffly, as I heard one do, that he has never lived there and can't tell. The woman who received this answer felt doubtless that 78 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST she had been hardly treated, but she had only herself to blame. Learn to keep still outwardly, even as to hands and the tips of your fingers, as to feet and head, and you will find rest and quiet coming to the mind as a result. If you are ill, lie quiet if it be possible, and it will generally be found so. Lie still, and don't allow yourself to toss about. Sit still when you sit, and stand still when you must stand. Try this constantly and persistently and you will not fail of help. Allow yourself to make no motion that has not a purpose and an aim; if you find yourself moving unnecessarily, call yourself back to quietness. No one can tell how much of the beautiful serenity of the Quakers comes from the outward stillness and quiet of their worship. Watch other people to be convinced how much muscular and nervous force is actually thrown away for nothing. NECESSITY 79 Do not allow yourself to move nervously fast, and the more nervous you are, the more deliberate all motions should be. Force yourself to move slowly even if you are in a hurry. In walking, the tread of the city policeman is an excellent model for one to imitate, though there is no danger that you will succeed in copying it exactly. When at your desk and with not much time to spare, the pencil falls on the floor, and the ruler won't be picked up, your eye-glass string catches on a button, you can't find the blotter, and the paper on which were the memoranda you were copying just gets up from the desk and plunges, without any obvious motive-power but its own will, into the waste-basket; or when, another day, scissors slip to the floor, the knot which you are sure you had made at the end of your basting-thread is not there, the button-hole-twist kinks, knots, and, tak- 80 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST ing on a life of its own, becomes a self flinging lasso in pursuit of any game, and the needle, going through perilously hard, finally snaps into three pieces; in short when-to use Gail Hamilton's felicitous phrase-the "total depravity of inanimate things" is manifestly in the ascendant, that is the time for delay and dallying. When you are waiting for a train, don't keep perpetually looking to see if it is coming. The time of its arrival is the business of the conductor, not yours. It will not come any sooner for all your nervous glances and your impatient pacing, and you will save strength if you will keep quiet. After we discover that the people who sit still on a long railroad journey reach that journey's end at precisely the same time as those who "fuss" continually, we have a valuable piece of information which we should not fail to put to practical use. NECESSITY 81 If you were asked to raise one hundred and twenty pounds twelve or thirteen feet you would probably answer that you were not strong enough to do it and yet that is what you do every time that you go up a flight of stairs. You do not think of that, but it is worth while for you to do so, and to make wise choice of the muscles with which you will do the work. It is not the best way to place only the ball of your foot on the stair, throw yourself forward, and then do the lifting with the muscles of the back. If, instead of this, you will plant the whole foot on the step, and then simply straighten the knee, keeping yourself perfectly erect, you will find that much fatigue is saved; and in city houses there are many stairs to be climbed in the course of a day. Take care of yourself in such little ways as these. Try in every way to acquire a habit of quietness. God has 82 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST mercifully built us so that habits are easily formed. Help yourself out of the stores of aid which He has provided for you from the foundation of the world. And if you must have tonics, take those also from Him, in sunshine, pure air, exercise, regular hours, healthful food, and, above all perhaps, in sleep. Religiously avoid all others. It is vain hoping to restore nerve-power by recourse to medicine. All such attempts are but patches, which only take from the garment, making the rent worse. An English physician has recently said of the maladies which imply or consist in loss of nerve-power, such as suppressed gout, hysteria, neuralgia, insomnia, chorea, epilepsy, melancholia, and general loss of mental control, that " all this class of ills are, as a rule, whether they be hereditary in their origin or notand very often they are hereditary-ex- NECESSITY 83 tremely gradual and slow in their onset, arising, as they do, from deep-rooted, constitutional causes." He maintains, therefore, that they can be successfully combated "only by very cautious and gradual remedies -remedies which do not cause any reaction but which slowly steal into the system, and restore its strength by gradually accumulating, without stimulating, the resources from which nerve-power is derived. Strong nerve-tonics are in such cases mischievous, and sedatives positively injurious. A healthy plan of life, with air, exercise, and nutritive food are of the first importance." This point can hardly be enough insisted upon. What you have done by a long series of drafts upon your nerve strength, whether necessary or not, can be made up only by a long series of efforts at patience and of willpower to keep yourself still and in the way of recovery. You cannot hurry 84 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST the processes of the Creator, however much you may desire to do so" Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small." If you have learned by experience of the exceeding smallness of the grinding, you must also learn practically of the exceeding slowness of the machinery. There is no other way. We should hardly go to Earle's lisA Prose to find advice about bodily health, and yet at the foot of page 2 1 is this sentence: "Ailing people fancy that some specific might in a minute put them all to rights if only they could chance upon it; not considering that health is the result of a harmonious condition of a highly complex organization, and that the main secret lies in the conduct and regulation of that life which is its animating centre." Professor Earle is speaking of diction, and of the idea Eng- NECESSITY 85 which many writers have, that "it is a sovereign specific of diction to use short words." If the practice of medicine consisted in the giving of specifics, physicians would be of very little use. All that we should need would be a book with the remedy for every trouble set down in a column opposite to the name of the disease. Teachers are very often confronted by the same misconception on the part of parents, who seem to think that instruction, instead of being a live process, consists in a sort of knack, a certain method which has only to be applied to the children like a plaster, to insure success in the school. They seem to think that teachers have in some way been inducted into a secret method, and that anybody could teach if he were a participator of the This is the idea of secret "method." all quackery, in whatever profession, and the fact that so many who have 86 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST over-used their nerve-force expect to recover at once, if only they could find the tonic suited to their case is a proof how wide-spread is the belief in quackery and quacks. If you are nerve-tired, do not be induced to trust to tonics of any kind, and never to sedatives if you hope to make any real gain. Tea, coffee, and alcohol will not help you now. You have used them before as your allies in evading obedience to the plainest rules of health; do not hope that they will act as such in the effort to regain it. And remember always that you must give some thought, and a considerable amount of it, too, to the care of your health if you expect to be of any use in the world, or comfort to anybody. It is only in such ways as have been here indicated that you can meet the demands of modern life, and conquer necessity. What you are to try to acquire above all is what the Satur- NECESSIT- 87 day Revieze characterizes as "repose, and the calm power frequently associated with it which is greatly lacking in the sons and daughters of the latter part of the nineteenth century." Look carefully through all the claims pressing upon you in your complicated life, and decide once and for all what it is that is the one really important and overmastering duty in it, and should be the one dominating aim. Then remember that if you succeed in that, the others, so multifarious, are really no more than the fringe of the garment, and that you need not spend so much anxiety over them, provided that the one most important is faithfully attended to. What that is for each woman, no other person can decide for her. 88 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST III FREEDOM LL real freedom springs from necessity, for it can be gained only through the exercise of the individual will, and that will can be roused to energetic action only by the force of necessity acting upon it from the outside to spur it to effort. The necessity, as we call it, under which we labor, comes mostly from the outside and from the physical world, while the freedom to which it leads or rather pushes us is of the spirit. There is no real contradiction between the two. Our "must" is determined by the direction in which we voluntarily set our faces, and so is superimposed upon us F FREEDOM 89 by our own wills. We set up a certain aim, and put ourselves of our own will into the power of a certain current. Once having done that, we find ourselves committed to usages and customs which we had not before fully known, but from which we cannot depart without giving up the end which we have chosen. But we have no right, therefore, to claim that we ire under the yoke of necessity. We might as well say that the man whom we see struggling vainly in the current of Niagara could not have helped jumping in. He deliberately chose the leap and preferred to trust himself to the water rather than to the land, and he was allowed his choice. The woman who marries because she desires diamonds and foreign travel, and gets both, has no right to complain afterwards that she has no love or companionship, and no home. She made her bargain, and was paid in 9go THE TECHNIQUE OF REST the coin that she asked, and fully. She chose her own lot, and should accept it in silence and not talk about "hard fate." The woman who makes her entrance into a set of society must not complain if she finds that society is satisfied with no half-hearted devotion. She has lost the right to say that she has no time for such or such a duty. She has all the time that there is, all that any one can have; she has chosen to spend it in a special direction; it is not that she has not had it to apply as she chose. The feverish emulation of Americans to excel each other in the ways of "society" is responsible for a large amount of the weariness and the nervous prostration which are charged - up against necessary demands upon our time, though they do not belong there. Maria Mitchell used to say to women who, pleading for help, urged that they "must FREEDOM 91 live,' that there was not the slightest necessity for living, and, moreover, that if there were, the almshouse was always open, a fact which she declared to be of great comfort to herself. It was only her brusque way of saying that many things which people generally put in the domain of the necessary really do lie in that of the unnecessary, or of freedom. Those women who read A/arcus Aurelius, and who know that "the life is more than meat and the body than raiment," do not need to be told where Freedom lies. The others who cry piteously for more freedom may have come across the statement, "Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow," but have perchance never thought that it referred to any one but the Swiss mountaineers or the struggling patriots of Greece. To be free in any sense, a certain amount of independence is necessary, nor can Freedom be pur- 9 2 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST chased at any other price. It would seem imperative that society, so called, should exist, for otherwise how would the horses have their manes pulled and their tails docked, each one blunter than the other; and what would become of the manufacturers of bearing-reins ? There must be a gilded image to set up if we are going to build a temple. These facts seem irrefragable. But there is one thing sure : the carpenter who does not believe in Unions, and who keeps out of them as long as possible, only to join at last, and never afterwards dares to express his honest opinion, or his sense of justice, is no more an absolute slave than is the woman who surrenders her own action, in whatever direction, to the dictates of society. Both she and the carpenter are under a slavery as absolute as if they were living in Russia or Turkey, and they will not come out until they have paid the uttermost farthing. FREEDOM 93 Many women seem to be under the impression that nothing can be accomplished in the direction of freedom unless a Society be formed with president, vice-president, secretary, treasurer, and a large board of directors, and public meetings held. But independence does not lie that way. There are many things that perhaps you would like to do or like to have; first bear in mind the undoubted truth that there are perhaps only one or two things in the world which are not far more charming in desire than they are in possession. Montaigne relates how ardently from his earliest youth he had desired to have the order of St. Michael conferred upon him. But when he had in his hand the coveted decoration, it had ceased to attract him, partly because through his growth he no longer held it in so high esteem, partly also, probably, because it was his. The great actor who at last 94 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST realized the dream of his life in owning a theatre is said to have had no pleasure in it when he had built it and could fill it night after night with a delighted public. For pleasure lies in pursuit, not in the attainment. It is because of this, that society is never satisfied, and, however wearied, is always on the race-track, straining every nerve to reach the goal. But where we cannot acquire all things, we must have some measure of values in order to select. That measure will be the one great aim of our lives, whatever it may be. If we have no aim, then of course we have no measure; and in that case it does not matter to ourselves or to any one else that we have none, so we may be left out of the account. The Rev. Edward E. Hale, in one of his fictitious - real stories, describes the experiment of shooting a train of cars across the abyss FREEDOM 95 round which the Horseshoe Bend runs on the Pennsylvania Railroad, in order to save time, and he details with Swiftlike minuteness the abstruse mathematical calculations as to rate of speed and precise point of projection. He then goes on to describe the actual trying of the experiment and its gratifying success. The train, he tells us, landed safely on the other side at the very poinit calculated, with the exception of the drawing-room car, which, being last and becoming detached, had fallen into the gulf. But he says this in no wise detracted from the complete success, because passengers who travel in drawing-room cars would never be missed by any one, and that therefore they and their fate may with propriety be dropped altogether from the results, like infinitesimal quantities in a mathematical calculation. The humor is delicious, and may serve to hint at a truth. 96 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST At least those who have no particular aim in life really are of no account; their various actions are as likely as not to cancel each other, and whatsoever happens to them can never furnish material for a tragedy. But a fixed aim furnishes us with a fixed measure, by which we can decide whether such or such an action proposed is worth trying for or not, and as aims must vary with the individual, the decisions of any two people as to the desirableness of an action may not be the same. But a certain proud independence you must possess if you would have peace of mind. Commenting on the suicide of a prominent banker, the Boston Transcript says: "Let us get rich as fast as we can. Let us speculate. Let us make fortunes and lose them, maybe; no matter about that-but make them, anyway. Let us cut ourselves off from the sweet and wholesome influences of life, FREEDOM 97 and give ourselves up to fever and madness. Never mind about the consequences to our own peace of mind of such a course. Our own peace of mind is never worth considering. Can you put up peace of mind with a bank as collateral for a loan ? Will the Street reckon your peace of mind among your assets ? Why, no ; and what the Street does not value, is worthless, of course. And yet many a man dies for want of this very thing." The words are too sadly true. Yet peace of mind is an undoubted security at a high rate of interest. It is unavailable as collateral only because it is non-negotiable-nobody can transfer title to peace of mind; but its value is not thereby affected, since nobody ever desires to pledge or exchange it for anything. It is your business to find the bank that deals in it. Advice has been defined to be "that 7 98 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST which everybody wants, everybody asks for, everybody gives, and nobody takes." But certainly there is a lack of truth in the last assertion. The rider buys a horse which is perfect in every way and suits him exactly. But a friend suggests that it is not quite up to his weight, another remarks that it is a little nervous, and a third finds some fault with the shape of a spot on the nigh fore-leg. All these criticisms work silently in his mind after the way of unconscious cerebration, and three weeks after we meet him riding another animal. He has simply taken advice; that is all. How many of the books that you have read during the last year have you read simply and only because some one said, "You really ought to read it!" How many changes in your dress have you made on account of the half-meant criticism of a friend. How much trouble might you not have saved FREEDOM 99 if, instead of consulting with another as to some annoyance, you had only sat down in your own room-if your closet seemed to you too small -applied to the difficulty the measure of your life, and quietly decided your course of action for yourself. The truth is that too much, not too little, is taken of the unthinking advice tossed at us every day, often forgotten by the giver. We need to preach the gospel of independence in America, not that of dependence. We are always going, as we think, with the majority. But we forget that the greater majority is an invisible one, and that it may be safer to side with that. It is not alone individuals that take too much advice. Our Legislatures and even Congress - it may be a result of the peculiar manner of electing their members-often yield, as in utter helplessness, on the most important issues, to advice, no matter whence corn- I00 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST ing. A society of women, well-meaning, but with thought totally possessed by one evil, that of drunkenness, asks permission to offer advice to the Legislature. The legislators thereupon frame a law, requiring all text-books in physiology which are to be used in the publicschools to be profusely illustrated with violent wood-cuts, depicting the liver or the stomach of an habitual drinker, and a chapter to be attached to every division of the book, pointing out the effect of alcohol on the different tissues of the body. They think to produce in the child's mind a terror of the distantly possible which will enable the man to turn away from the saloon. If they were teachers, they would place a more just estimate on the residuum left in the minds of children from such talk in school. Or Congress obediently follows the advice of the manufacturers of some article and lays a high duty upon FREEDOM IoI it, only to wake to the knowledge, a few months later, that in protecting that infant industry they have throttled in a distant territory half a dozen others, of whose indirect connection with the first, they had never had even the shade of the shadow of an idea. Mr. Powderly would not probably materially improve the Constitution were it to be subjected to his revision, as was seriously proposed only a few years ago. Everybody takes advice, because it seems to be a way of getting, at least temporarily, out of a difficulty, and, at any rate, of shifting the responsibility for failure if it come. But the fact is that there is only one person who can decide a problem, because he is the only one knowing all the conditions, external and internal, and that is the person whose problem it is. You have to grapple with it first or last, and it is as easy to do it first. Free yourself at 102 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST once from the slavery of always doing this or that just because some friend says to you, "You really ought to do it!" and you will take the first step towards an independence which will rest you, if it be only on account of its novelty. In a recent article in the Fortnightly Review, entitled "Under the Yoke of the Butterflies," Mr. Auberon Herbert says: "The world persistently presents us with the paradox that a very large percentage of its people live habitually doing what they don't want to do: giving subscriptions they don't want to give; visiting and receiving people they don't want to visit and receive; saying things they don't mean and don't want to say; spending time and money which they don't want to spend; supporting measures and proceedings they don't want to support; putting into this or that kind of office people whom they would rather not see FREEDOM lo3 there; in fact, generally contradicting themselves, because they have attached themselves to some system or other which they find it is, on the whole, easier to obey than to disobey." In the matter of dress it seems as if the majority of women have no independence at all. If, as has been said, every woman creates in her own likeness the gifts which are given her, it is surely true that every woman should in a measure create after her own nature the dress which she habitually wears. To see two grown women dressed exactly alike is, with almost every one, to pass the mental judgment that at least one of them must have very little character of her own. In a somewhat restricted sense we pass the same judgment when each season we see almost every woman in a city following some one decree of fashion, no matter how unreasonable, Fash inconvenient, or unbecoming. 104 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST ion says, " Fasten your arms down to your hips so that you will look like a trussed turkey," and they do it. "Have your sleeves set up so that it will be impossible to lift your hands to your heads, so that you will have to put on your hat before you put on your dress," and the obedient slaves answer, " Aye." " Sweep the streets with your skirts," and they are swept. " Wear them so tightly drawn that the outline of your form is distinctly seen by every one who may meet you," and a life school for the sculptor is at once set up in every street-car. These illustrations are perhaps enough, though the list might be almost indefinitely enlarged. It is by no means to be maintained that fashion has not a certain right to authority. As Walter Pater acutely says, " The power of fashion is but one minor form, slight though it may be, yet distinctly symptomatic of that deeper yearning FREEDOM IO 5 of human nature towards an ideal perfection which is a continuous force in it." To ignore fashion entirely, or to fight against it continually, is not to secure freedom. It is said that one of the sweetest and strongest of Boston women, now dead, but while here always anxious to serve others, made herself more trouble and care by insisting upon the really uncouth dress which she habitually wore than if she had conformed to the prevailing style, simply because her attire was so out of date that it was hard and almost impossible to have it made after her plans. It is not necessary to go to such extremes as this. It is perfectly easy for any woman so to dress that, while she is not noticeable on the street, she shall be entirely comfortable, and able to do what she has to do without fatigue from carrying undue weight, and without having any motion consciously ham- Io6 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST pered. I heard one woman say to another some years ago: Oh, do get a Jersey waist. You have no idea how comfortable they are! Why, I can lift both arms up straight over my head." And she did so, stretching up her shapely arms with a sigh of relief and a smile of triumph, only to hear the answer, "Why, I have not a dress in the world And the that I cannot do that in. speaker, too, lifted her arms, straight as an arrow high above her head, while all the weight of her skirts was lifted smoothly and easily, as the shoulders rose. And yet you would not have remarked the dress of the second woman if you had met her, as at all peculiar. It is not necessary, in order to reform your dress, if it need reforming, to belong to any association or any league for the purpose. As the most natural and effective way after the war to resume specie payments was just simply FREEDOM 1O7 to resume, so the most sensible way to reform your dress is to reform it. Any woman whose dress is worth considering at all, surely has enough commonsense and invention to order her own under-clothing so that it shall be healthful and perfectly comfortable. If she have not, she had better not try to reform the world in any larger way. There is one thing sure: if you will not trouble yourself much about the passing fashion, taking care only not to dress so that you will attract attention from excessive singularity, but keeping all the parts of your clothing simple and comfortable, you will be sure to see the fashion come round to you once in about seven years, and find yourself, to your great amusement, wearing clothes in the mode. The original Free Soilers were a small party at first, but it took only time for all the Whigs to fall into line after them. 108 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST At any rate, if you are to do your work without getting tired, you have got to save all unnecessary weight in what you have to carry, and what weight cannot be avoided should be hung where it will do the least harm. The amount of strength which can be saved by conforming to the simplest rules of common-sense in the matter of dress is very great, as those of us who have tried it know. Of course the object of the dress - maker and the tailor is to avoid wrinkles, and they are right, so far as their profession goes; but I fancy you would hardly care to assert that your object in life was the same. It is only the old story; first make up your mind what you want to do with your life, and then decide the question of dress, as every other question, by that test. It is not so hard as you suppose to be independent about these things. Those who are single -hearted in any FREEDOM lOg great aim never find it so. In fact, they don't think about it at all. They go on and do what they have to do, saving every smallest bit of strength as they go, and that is all there is about it. The same necessity of independence exists as to what you shall read. Most people read every year what happens to come in their way, or what some person happens to say that they ought to read. Just look back over your reading for the last year and say if this has not been so with you. If you read stories for rest and relaxation, take only those that are by authors of some real repute. Eschew the crowd of novels that every week brings forth, only to be relegated in a few weeks to deserved oblivion. Better wait a while, and see whether a book has any but an ephemeral life before you spend your time on it; it is not necessary that you should read a story at the same time IIO THE TECHNIQUE OF REST with everybody else. Do not destroy all the fibre of your mind and lower your whole mental tone by reading wishy-washy stuff, even though it be not bad. And even with the magazines, which give you a series of disconnected articles, inviting you monthly or weekly to an exhibition of noses, arms, hands, and chippings from many studios, but not one really whole work of art, have some line in your reading. As it does not become your duty to visit a woman simply because she invites you to do so, so it is by no means your duty to read an article merely because the editor of a certain magazine serves it up to you. You do not feel obliged to eat of every dish on the bill of fare at a hotel, or to buy all the jewelry in a store because you go into it. The editor makes up his magazine to suit all tastes "if by any means he may please some." If he be worthy of his title, FREEDOM III whether he be magazine or newspaper editor, he tries to place himself behind the public and to see through their eyes. He endeavors to make each number of his production a whole in itself, ministering to each of his world of readers in some way. In this effort at wholeness in each number lies the pleasure of his labor, and in the success of this effort consists his right to his title. But that is no reason why you should read all he offers. Read no article in a magazine which does not bear on your own subjects of thought and does not fall into line with your other reading, and you will be doing wisely. The trouble with magazines is the same as with concerts: they consist of only fragments. If one of these is such as you need to fill in a gap in your thought, then you want it. Pick it out and fit it into your mosaic. But if you are desirous of understanding Wagner in the degree possible to 112 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST you, it would seem hardly worth while to listen to a dozen " Prize Waltzes " before the music of Tannhiiuser is played. At the concert you may be obliged to hear many such waltzes in order to reach your aim, but with the magazine the same trouble does not exist. Have always some reason for reading a magazine article or let it alone. The same rule should apply to the daily newspaper. History in the making is a very uncertain thing. It might be better to wait till the South American republic has got through with its twenty - fifth revolution before reading much about it. When it is over, some one whose business it is, will be sure to give you in a digested form all that it concerns you to know, and save you trouble, confusion, and time. If you will follow this plan, you will be surprised to find how new and fresh your interest in what you read will become. The difference be- FREEDOM I3 tween reading to find out something you really want to know, and reading whatever happens to fall into your hands is very great. It is like the difference between eating because you are hungry, and eating because you are summoned to the table. And one word more on the subject of reading: If you read only the best, you will have no need of reading the other books, because the latter are nothing but a rehash of the best and the oldest. To read Shakespeare, Plato, Dante, Milton, Spenser, Chaucer, and their compeers in prose, is to read in condensed form what all others have diluted. If you have little time for eating, you will find it desirable to take only the most nutritious food-that is, only the most condensed. Do the same thing as to books, and you will be surprised to find how much time you will have for reading. 8 114 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST Then how much strength and time do you waste every day in worrying about possible happenings, half of which never come to pass? With a little reasoning and a little determined effort of will, there is a chance for great economy in this line. When your friend is ill, you suffer a hundred deaths for one which perhaps will not come, because you give rein to your excited imagination, and arrange in your mind for all sorts of future contingencies. If instead of doing this you will give your whole attention to the actual present, doing faithfully all that can be done, and then just leave something to God, you will save so much wear and tear. Many people are not willing to leave anything entirely in His hands, and practically treat Him as if He were far from as competent as themselves. It is precisely "in all time of our tribulation " that we should trust the most. One is often FREEDOM 115 reminded of the little boy who was quite willing to say his prayers at night, but absolutely refused to say them in the morning, maintaining that "any fellow could take care of himself in the daytime." And yet those who will not practise trusting in the sunshine are sure to find difficulty in the darkness. We cannot expect to reap where we have not sown, though we often for that reason "all alone beweep our outcast state, And trouble deaf Heaven with our bootless cries." There was much wisdom in the story in the old reading-books of the farmer's clock, which stopped one night because the pendulum had been calculating how many times it would have to beat in a century, and felt itself entirely discouraged at what was to be required of it. But the centuries are not dealt out to us in wholes. We persist in winding up II6 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST our eight-day clocks every evening, and then wonder that we are so tired. We laugh at Don Quixote as he tilts with windmills, and then close the book to do the same thing. It is not impossible to control imagination. It may be hard; but fighting, even if it bring temporary defeat, is better than not fighting, and what seems defeat is often victory, even if we do not count the increased strength which comes from effort of the will. The farmers had to retreat from Bunker Hill, but they won a victory all the same. It was for us that those ten thousand kinsmen of ours stood against the hosts of the Persians at Marathon, and won the fight because of the invisible forces within them. They are fighting for us still, and we with them, if we fight at all. And then The sun will shine and the clouds will lift; The snow will melt, though high it drift; Across the ocean there is a shore; Must we learn the lesson o'er and o'er ? FREEDOM I7 To know there is sun when the clouds droop low, To believe in the violets under the snow, To watch on the bows for the land that shall riseThat is victory in disguise. There can be no work, whatever it may be, that is so exhausting as painful emotion; while on the other hand, mercifully, there is no tonic so upbuilding and renewing as joy, which sets into active exercise every constructive power of the body, and whose rush is like the leap of the brooks in spring from the strong mountain-tops to the lowlands. There is nothing more sure to undermine health than constant gnawing dissatisfaction with one's lot. And that is in your own power to destroy, though you may not be able to alter the circumstances. Emily Dickinson said a wise thing when she wrote, "Do not try to be saved, but let redemption find you, as it certainly will." She might have added, as she surely meant, if you 11 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST keep in the roads by which it travels. In most cases of nervous exhaustion it is the diseased mind which requires treatment, or has required treatment long before. "Useless muscular tension is merely a reflex of cerebral conditions." The body is only the tool of the mind, and its restlessness betrays the condition of that mind. Do not waste much time by treating symptoms; if you want to be cured, go straight to the cause of the disease. Medical science will tell you that more and more it relies for a cure on the great healing forces of Nature. If the physician can succeed in giving strength to the tone of the whole body, he knows that he may leave the disease to take care of itself. Only a temporary peace is gained by a treaty which does not touch the underlying principles that caused the war. And there will always be restlessness and fatigue till peace is born of inner freedom. RESTLESSNESS 119 IV RESTLESSNESS HE migration of whole races from their original homes, in the history of the world generally westward to new locations, has been a phenomenon always especially interesting to the student of history, considering not only the great changes which it has involved in the lives of the nations upon which they have poured down, but also the causes that have induced the movement. It seems as if a whole people becomes possessed by a kind of fury for a change. They leave all that is familiar to them and go in a mass to strange places, driving out before them the inhabitants of those lands 120 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST and taking the country for their own. Why they should do so at that time more than at any other is to us inscrutable, except that, in the Scripture phrase, "the fulness of time" is come for them. History is full of such stories, from the great irruption of the Mongol Tartars into China to the risings and departures of the peoples in the north of Europe, whose far-off rush southward made itself at last very distinctly felt in the fall of the Roman Empire, and that also when the "fulness of time" was come. When Christianity turned the main forces of the world inward, it did not leave untouched this impulse for movement. The area to be sought and taken possession of was, in a measure, transferred to the spirit, and the restlessness which had long before driven those old tribes to wide wandering now appears in the mind instead of on the surface of the earth. The wandering goes on still, RESTLESSNESS 121 and in mighty hordes of men, over wide and unknown spaces. The old landmarks are forsaken, and a strong impulse, not confined to any one country or continent, calls thought forth to new and untried conquests. The old impulse is not dead; only its field has been changed. The migration is now into the fields of natural science, now into those of divine truth, and it presses always further. Old standards are cast aside, old conceptions put to the test; the demand is for change, always change, and for new resting- places for thought and belief. The human spirit is always asking after a place where it may stop and build abodes. But so long as it is human-which is the same thing as divine- it must be driven, in spite of its own will, by the impulse to move on to new homes. The fever of migration is contained within its very nature, and it can hope to escape it only for a time. 122 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST To us, who live so close to the twentieth century, the on-rushing movement which sweeps the world away seems to have been accelerated with frightful velocity within the present generation. It seems as if our parents, or at least our grandparents, dwelt quietly among their own folk, and were allowed quietly to die in the old beliefs which they had learned at the knees of their mothers. But for us there is no such repose of soul. "' For you,' they said, 'no barriers be, For you no sluggard rest. Each street leads downward to the sea, Or landward to the West.'" It is possible that we mistake, and that what at this distance appears to us a halcyon rest was to them a time of heartsearching; to them also it may have seemed as if all moorings were loosening, and they drifting with their generation to unknown seas. But, however this may be, we know that for us RESTLESSNESS 123 the world of invention and discovery has moved faster than our power to adapt ourselves to it has increased, and we, desirous as we are at tired moments of something that we can rest in, are forced to consider problems which in our ignorance we had fancied long ago settled, so differently do they present themselves to modern thought. Always there is something new, and life heaves with a perpetual restlessness, from the influence of which no one can hold himself entirely free. It seems to some of us as if what was known as the old home-life were fast disappearing; young people no longer seek their pleasures in the home, but outside of it, and the pleasures are no longer quiet. This is not their fault. We may consider it their misfortune; but, after all, it is a fact that has to be faced and cannot be overlooked. It is an unmistakable truth that the family 124 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST tie is not so strong as it was a hundred years ago, and that the individuality of the members of a household has to be taken more into account than was formerly the case. Some of the far-reaching effects of the tendency we may deplore, but we cannot avoid; we have to take the world as we find it, and do the best with it as it is. It is true that this doctrine, carried to the uttermost, would have kept Columbus on the other side of the Atlantic, and left electricity to dash about uncontrolled in the atmosphere instead of obeying our command. In some places we might feel it a duty to inculcate the need of change and of faster progress, but the modern American city is certainly not one of these, and there would seem little danger within its walls of laying too much emphasis on the beauty of repose. And, at any rate, even a clergyman cannot be expected to preach both RESTLESSNESS 125 faith and works on the same Sunday; if his text be faith, he must teach faith to the best of his ability, leaving for that Sunday at least, the great value of works out of consideration. In like manner here and now our text is not motion but Rest. Whatever other people in other times have needed, we in America are not likely to suffer from stagnation, and a lack of effort to do a hundred things at a time; what we need are lessons in rest and repose, and not more of the restlessness which already runs riot in every drop of our blood. We cannot keep still, though we long to do so, and though increasing weariness warns us that we are going on towards a breakdown. The restlessness of the sea is as nothing compared with the restlessness of the American people. At any rate, in the sea every drop is trying to get below every other, and thus to 126 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST come nearer to one fixed and stable point; but here every drop in the social ocean is, on the other hand, endeavoring to get above every other in some particular, and there is no fixed point at all. The restless drive of the impulse is creating a new variety of men and women, to be recognized wherever met -- and where, over all the surface of the earth, are they not sure to be met ? The mental unrest is passing into the physique. How many women do you know who can sit perfectly still or stand perfectly motionless ? With how many do you talk who will allow you to finish a sentence without interrupting? How many have the grace of only walking quietly, or of speaking slowly and placidly so that it is a delight to listen ? How many whose eyes are not constantly roving? How many who are not always in a hurry, and complaining that everything RESTLESSNESS 127 always comes at the same time with everything else? To how many houses-so-called homes-can you go as into a haven of rest, where everything breathes quietness and repose? How many men can even cross the ferry from New York to Brooklyn without reading vigorously every one of the few minutes of the transit, and then crowding to jump off the boat before she is made fast, with one eye still on the open newspaper? How many can quietly let one streetcar go past without running to catch it, though there are six others behind within a quarter of a mile? How many can wait for a train without reading a few lines in every one of the newspapers laid out on the news-stand or carefully examining all the colored cartoons tacked up on the wall ? When you have answered these questions you will begin to appreciate what a continual hurry most people live in, 128 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST and perhaps you may begin to notice how many unnecessary and perfectly objectless motions you yourself are helping to wear yourself out with. There used to be a simple game played with children, in the old times, which it might be worth while to revive: After our elders had answered what seemed to them a sufficient number of ridiculous questions and were tired of our childish fun, they used to set us in a line and propose that we and they should fold our arms, shut our eyes, and see how long we could keep still, and the one who could keep perfectly still the longest was to be called "the best fellow." Perhaps it may have been so, for "composure is often the hiohest result of power." If only we were restive instead of restless, it would be well for us. It is undoubtedly true that our climate has much to do with the state of the case. It is impossible for English- RESTLESSNESS 129 men to believe many facts which have always been familiar to us; as, for instance, that one can light the gas on a cold winter day by touching the burner with a knuckle, or that sparks may fly from the hair when brushed under the same circumstances. The editor of the London Yournal of Education professed entire incredulity as to these things when they were told to him a few years ago. To live in such an electrical climate is to be a very different person from those who do not. It is doubtless true that we do live in a "nervous tension produced by climate and habit of hurried life-a tension visible in the astonishing frequency of sudden deaths from overwork and emotion, and an intense fear of opinion, which, so to speak, causes self-love, the sense of personal dignity, to remain permanently raw." So comments the Spectator, reviewing an article entitled " The Brand of Cain," 130 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST in the Fortnightly, charging the people of the United States with readiness to commit and to condone murder. I am inclined to think that the "habit of hurried life" and the sensitiveness to opinion spoken of as morbid states are not co-ordinate causes with, but results of, the climate, the effect of which goes very deep in all the life of this people. But, as I have said, we have to take the world as we find it, and our climate is one of the factors which must not be left out of the problem we have to solve for ourselves and for our children. Much of the Restlessness we see and feel comes from over-exertion. It is as ifthe machine had got to working at such a strain that even if we wished we could not stop it. We seem to have become slaves to the blind force of inertia, and our will is no longer of any avail. There is no bichloride of gold treatment for this state, nor is any RESTLESSNESS 131 necessary, for as it is a result not of deficiency of will, but of its abounding strength - a strength born of constant exercise - we have in our own hands the means for our cure. We have strength of will sufficient to force ourselves not to be outwardly restless when we are awake, if only we will use it. It is the people of most will who are in most danger of wearing out, because they have all their lives forced up the unwilling and protesting bodily powers to tasks which were too great for them, as the horse is forced up to the leap which his reason tells him is dangerously high, by the whip and spur of his rider. When we are awake, I said-and, unhappily, if we have habitually overworked our nervous force, we are awake too often when we know that we ought to be asleep. We hear the clock strike, and calculate the number of hours left to us before the time at which the work 132 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST of another day must begin, with a sort of despair, and with an anathema on the city congregation so heathenishly thoughtless of the comfort of people forced to live within sound of their much-loved clock that they allow the perfectly useless time-announcer to disturb and trouble them. They themselves live far away from the steeple, so that they are not disturbed. Only six hours left, and then presently only five and then only four ! If that clock would only stop reiterating its dreadful tale of truth! You remember the Sibylline leaves and all the stories of Edgar Poe that you have ever read, and try to think of something else, or to be charitable to the worshippers who own the clock, but it is all of no use, and the next day draws pitilessly nearer and nearer. You can almost hear the sure, smooth turning of the earth around its axis, and you wish that Edison would RESTLESSNESS 133 turn his attention to the problem of adding to the force of friction in that region. And then you remember that the axis is imaginary only, and that even Edison would be of no use, and the Christian clock strikes again! The fact is only that the vapor will not go back into the casket, the flying horse on which you have insisted on making your journeys will not descend because the wooden peg in his neck has become fast, the mill which was so useful to grind your corn will not stop grinding even in the night-season. These things are your masters now, not your slaves, and the demon of sleeplessness, more horrible and more fatal than the Old Man of the Sea, is upon you, insisting upon your working without, nay, against your will, just as the screw of a vessel whirls round as the wave lifts it out of the water, and shakes her from stem to stern, uselessly and harmfully, as if driven 134 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST by some demonic power. The demonic power in you, however, is not demonic, but only a heavenly power perverted, just as all the faults of a child are only unregulated virtues. It is nothing but your own will which has become so strong that you are afraid of it. Do not complain, then, nor hesitate to use your will to keep yourself perfectly quiet at any rate. You can if you only think you can. Be greatly thankful that you have the will, and if the clock be heard again, eat something, which by this time you should have learned to have always within reach, it matters not much what. The physiological trouble is that you have too much blood in your brain, and if you can divert a little of this to the stomach to do work there, you may succeed in sleep suddenly. If you are accustomed to lie awake for hours, you had better make a practice of eating before going to bed, preferably some- RESTLESSNESS 135 thing warm. While you are waiting for sleep to come to you, you will certainly be thinking, probably of the very things which you are most tired of considering; here too, you must use your will to determine the course of your thought, and if it persistently goes back to the avoided topic, you must just as persistently call it away and set it on another track. What that track shall be matters not much, but it must be of your own choosing. As it is by the will that you have sinned, so it is only by the road of the will that you can obtain remission of the penalties you have brought upon yourself. To repeat poetry which you know perfectly, or to count, is not sufficient. It must be something which involves some effort of the memory, a list of incidents which you recall with a little difficulty, either in your own life or in the life of some one else, which have a 136 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST certain order in regard to time or an arbitrary succession which you have given to them; there must always be some call upon the memory in order to produce the best result. If you make a mistake in the order of your events, start at the beginning and go through them again, and if you do this over and over, you will soon find that you begin to do it sleepily, and then the battle is won. Or start at one corner of a room with which you are perfectly familiar, and travel round it, recalling as you go every piece of furniture in its place, with all the small articles which may lie on it, or beneath it, and if you make a mistake, go back to the same corner, and do not be satisfied till you have gone quite round the room. This is a very good plan. Or if you know the position of the letters on the Hammond type - writer, imagine that you have a Remington instead, and try to RESTLESSNESS 137 write on that and spell your words. This device will present a most decided blank before your mental sight, and that is exactly what you want. It is precisely because your mind is not blank that you can't go to sleep. It is said that Kant used to tell his students to " think the wall," and then when they had succeeded in doing that, to "think their thought of the wall." That is also a very good exercise sleepward. The plans which I have suggested above may seem to conflict with the directions of the philosopher, inasmuch as they lead towards the concrete and his towards the abstract; but that makes no difference. They both lead towards a state of muddiness in the mind, and when thought ceases to be clear you may hope it will stop altogether. It may do to rehearse an imaginary sermon to be preached in Trinity church in case you should ever be summoned to officiate 138 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST there. You can arrange the heads, and the more you have, the better. If would be well to begin as an old preacher in Boston is said to have been fond of doing, " Dear brethren, I shall divide my thoughts on this text into four heads, and each of these I shall subdivide into twenty-five minor divisions." That would be an excellent way of starting in. Sermons of this sort have such soporific power that they have actually been known to affect the members of the congregation who only listened to them. One thing you must not do, and that is to become deeply interested in the welfare of the imaginary audience, for if you do, you will step into the domain of the emotions, and there is no sleep there; keep in the line of pure reason and argument. Never allow yourself to plan what you are to do; don't get into the realm of real action unless it RESTLESSNESS 139 be past action, and, again and again, be sure that you make demand on abstract memory. Then help the process by lying in such a way as to leave every In muscle in a state of relaxation. other words, lie as if you were dead. Let go of your muscles! You will find it possible to withdraw your will from even the tips of the fingers if you make the effort to do so. Gradually take it away from every muscle, beginning with those of the fingers. When they lie perfectly limp, call in the will from the arm muscles, one arm at a time, and so on. You must give close attention to this withdrawal of the will, and that is also good, for then you will cease thinking about yourself or any business. Put yourself as much as possible into the state of a man who is dead drunk. You know how expressionless his hands look? Don't put yours into any definite position; lift them slowly, and then 40o THE TECHNIQUE OF REST let them drop where and how they will, and lie as they fall. It may be added that the slow swinging of a hammock is certainly provocative of sleep. There seems to be a direct drozsying influence on the brain, produced by the rhythmical swing which gradually grows slower, and finally dies out by imperceptible gradations; and I think that whoever has had a hammock slung in his room will have come to the conclusion that the instinct of the human race was right when it fashioned rockers for the baby's cradle. It is as much your duty to go to sleep as it is to eat your food. It is your fault that you do not, if you will not use every means in your power towards that end. As God meant that you should die, because only in that way could your life come to perfection, so he meant you to sleep while you lived, and to sleep enough to keep you fresh for work, RESTLESSNESS 141 which also He mercifully ordained as a means of health. Just as you withdraw from the company of friends and undress yourself, so you should take your mind to itself, free it from the garments necessary to labor, and put it into His hands for refreshment and rest. But you do not do this when you lie down only to go over and over the actions of the finished day, or painfully to lay plans for the cares of the morrow. It is especially futile to try to do this last; what you will do when the day comes must depend very much upon what sort of a day it is, and what shall be the conditions of the real work-a-day world. Your action is only a part of a great whole of working men, women, and things, of which you and your resolutions are the smallest fraction. What you will do depends upon what they will do and say. This you cannot by any possibility know, and even if you 142 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST could, you are not now in condition to appreciate the bearings of things upon each other and upon you, your power of judgment being in some degree impaired by your isolation. As in the night-obscurity of your chamber you fancy all sorts of threatening and monstrous shapes in articles of furniture or clothing which are very small and harmless, so in the separateness of your excited thought you are really unable to measure and assign their due proportions to arguments and probabilities. The conclusions formulated with so much pains in the night are seen with the first rays of the sun to be of no value in the day-world, and so gradually you learn to save yourself the labor of working them out. As plants are supposed to breathe out a different substance in the dark from that which they exhale by day, so does the human mind by night exhale only impossible fancies. RESTLESSNESS 143 Learn not to be restless in planning for the future; learn to wait till you come to the bridge before you cross it, and you will be saved many footsteps. Alone in your room, with the uncertainty of the unseen universe around you, and with the fatigue of the day upon you, deprived of any visible or audible standards of measure by which to test the importance of things, you are no more capable of drawing correct conclusions about what you had best do in difficult circumstances than is the hermit in the desert of making out a running schedule for the New York Central Railroad. Charles V. found it difficult to direct the affairs of his kingdom from the monastery of Yuste, and the effort of his restless brain brought him only vexation when, finding weariness in his seclusion, he tried again to take part in the turmoil from which he had fancied he should be glad to escape. 144 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST Of course, the more active is the mind, the more difficulty exists in putting it into a state of passivity; teachers, for instance, whose calling compels them to be active in a high degree on the minds of others, find it at last almost impossible to attain this state; they can teach, but they cannot listen. The incapacity is one of the losses which the profession entails. But, after all, if you are to gain any great amount of good from the world, you must attain a passive condition of mind. He who receives a great many letters demanding answer, sees himself as if engaged in a hopeless struggle of one man against the rest of the world. However, it is never to be forgotten that it is the rest of the world and not you that holds the great share of the world's wealth, and that you must allow yourself to be acted upon by the world, if you would become a sharer in the RESTLESSNESS 145 gain of all the ages to your own infinite advantage. Many lose all the possible benefit to be won by travel because they have not the necessary passivity. You should go to picture-galleries and museums of sculpture to be acted upon, and not to express or try to form your own perfectly futile opinion. It makes no difference to you or to the world what you may think of any work of art. That is not the question; the point is how it affects you. The picture is the judge of your capacity, not you of its excellence; the world has long ago passed its judgment upon it, and now it is for the work to estimate you. If without knowing that a certain picture is from the hand of a great master, you find yourself wonderfully affected by it and drawn to it over and over again, you may be glad that its verdict upon you is favorable and that you are acquitted from the possible charge of foolishness, IO 146 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST but you ought to be very humble in your gladness. When you go to Cologne Cathedral, sit down and make your mind perfectly passive and empty, and wait for what measure of grace may be vouchsafed to you. In religion the influence which comes to the passive mindmade and held so by the active willis called Grace, and it is that which will descend upon you in other domains if only you will let it come. The main trouble generally is that by your continual Restlessness you keep your soul in such a state that no influence can come to you from without. And yet from without it is, that all sorts of good things are pressing to reach and to bless you. As a writer in the Christian Union says, "No one knows so well as he who does great things how partial and limited is his work, and how divine a refuge from the fragmentariness of his life is absorption in the vastness of RESTLESSNESS 147 God's work, and obliviousness in the vastness of God's life." But you cannot be absorbed unless you will let yourself be so. One path out of restlessness is by the road of doing great things, which always leads through the valley of humility as it goes, with the kingdom of Heaven at its end. There is a Restlessness springing from the consciousness of power not fully utilized, which must be present wherever there is unused power of whatever kind. This is the restlessness of the germ within the seed, struggling upward and downward towards its proper life. It is a valuable testimony that there is life within, but where the surroundings are unfavorable, it is a striving full of pain, the cutting of tender flesh by the fetters of the captive as he struggles against their pitilessness. The wild birds that fall dead at the foot of the light-house, dashed back from the 148 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST hard glass of the lantern whose light called them from safe flying in the soft air, know this. But they fall dead, and their rest is sudden and swift, while to the human pain, can be applied only the palliative of a long patience and fortitude. But the shadow merely of Peter healed the sick folk as he passed by; he did not need even to touch them with his hand. And so to those who may have the power for greater achievement than that for which opportunity is granted them, is given the power to heal by their shadows as they pass. For the patient self-control, which goes on bravely in the work possible to it, while knowing of boundless possibilities unattainable, yields in large measure a harvest of strength felt like the passing of a strong shadow wherever it may go. And in knowledge of this we may find a surcease of the Restlessness with which we seem to ourselves RESTLESSNESS 149 to be devoured till there is no strength left. To see power wasted is very hard. But really no power is ever wasted in the spiritual kingdom any more than in the material. It is only transmuted and correlated, so that there need never be mourning over a loss which does not exist, and the Restlessness of mourning will thus pass over into Rest. It has been said of an Englishman recently dead : " As we looked on him and lived by his side, we knew well that his peculiar grace was worth more, far more, to the world at large than it could ever gauge; more, far more, than all the minor average excellencies that were strewn thickly around us . . . No accu- mulation of lower attainments in the many could have done for mankind what this one spiritual achievement effected by its solitary supremacy. Yet who could look at it and doubt how slow had been the process by which it I50 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST had been won; how slowly and how patiently the tree had grown by the water-side before, in its due season, it had brought forth its fruit; the rare gracein all the senses of the word 'grace,' from the highest to the lowest-which resulted in the fine and subtile courage, the wise and ingrained humility, of that vigorous and single mind." When we bitterly regret our powerlessness, it may be that we do not trust enough to our UNCONSCIOUS INFLUENCE. Drifting dreamily with the tide, Slowly away from the sunset's gold, Leaning over our vessel's side, We watched the sail with its drooping fold. Southward, the slope of a summer hill, Strewn with the fragrant, new-made hay; The horse and hay-wagon waiting still For the finished fruit of the sunny day. The rapid rake, and the gleaming fork Tossing its load on the growing pile, Farmer and wife and children at work Sharing the labor, and all the while RESTLESSNESS 151 One little maiden down on the shore, Just where the land and the water meet, Wandering free till the work was o'er, Chasing the waves with gleaming feet, Singing clearly across the bay, All unconscious of listening ear, Simple ballads, so light and gay, We hushed our words as we leaned to hear. Songs of our school-days long agone, Ringing out over the sunset sea; Then sweet in the silvery childish tone The battle-cry for the Land of the Free. Dreamily drifting by Deer Isle, We lay and listened with strange surprise, Feeling a blessing of peace the while Dropping down from the quiet skies; Feeling our deeper life touched at the core By the simple song of the glad child-heart; And peace in the boat and peace on the shore Were so near and yet so far apart! Living our lives out day by day, All unconscious of listening ear, Singing our song as we go our way, Do we know who may be leaning to hear? Anything is restless which has not a purpose, and hence it is that listlessness 152 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST breeds Restlessness. For listlessness is really "lustlessness," or pleasurelessness - absence of any controlling interest in anything. To be in deadearnest about one thing is to be set free from all sorts of slaveries, and it is well that the word "lust," or pleasure, comes from a root meaning to be set free, or to be released. When Mrs. Watts Hughes, singing through her eidophone against the disk which vibrated to the sound, and expecting to see the lycopodium dust on it take the form that it had taken before under the influence of the same tone, found the particles flying hither and thither, seemingly baffled in their attempts towards regularity, she did not understand why this should be so; but she suspected that she had been singing with too much force, and upon getting rid of the over-tones, the obedient dust at once settled into the beautiful figure she was RESTLESSNESS 153 looking for. Then she sang against it, pure and true, the octave of the note she had given before, and immediately the dust took another figure, the one, as she could now see, between which and the one she had been trying to create, it had before been uncertain, and hence unable to settle upon either. The restlessness of the lycopodium dust was due only to the over-tones. How many of us are singing with overtones, and wondering why the life-dust is flying hither and thither, and why there is no rest in it? Suppose we were to sing only one pure tone, and see how quickly it would fall into order and symmetry. Or suppose we try an octave higher! The magnetic needle is restless so long as it does not point to the north; but when it does, there is no more Restlessness. 154 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST V BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY HERE is a country, not far Soff from many of us, where YProfessor Earle and all G those who, like him, are justly anxious as to the fate of the Subjunctive Mood, might lay down all fear, for the speech there has no other mood, except it be the long discredited Potential, or the Conditional of the French and German. This land is full of all perfect things, and has no bad weather, except, now and then, gentle rain on the farms. No plans "gang agley," and to each dweller in it, all the other human beings there have no wills of their own. Railroad trains never miss connection, tele- BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 155 grams are never misspelled or wrongly punctuated, and gas meters are to be perfectly trusted, as also the companies that put them in. Good people who fall into the water always succeed in reaching land in safety, while all the bad ones are drowned. The men who control the government have no other thought but to direct it properly, and the citizen may take his ease, free from any anxiety, even after the Legislature of his State has resumed its regular sessions. Riders and drivers always keep on the right side of the road, and all the nurses with perambulators are continually on the watch to see that no carriage or swiftly galloping horse is coming upon them. The inhabitants generally live in beautiful castles after the Moorish style of architecture, which are full of all sorts of conveniences, and never dusty or out of order in any of their appointments. Abundance of 156 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST pure water rises to the top floors in all of them, and the kerosene used never smokes. If any repairs are to be made, the mechanics who have the work in charge always come in such succession that no one ever has to take out the work of another in order to put in his own; but as a rule there are no repairs, properly so called, because all the material used, as also all the workmanship, is of the first class. The Irish servants have no cousins, and the relatives they do have are never dangerously ill. Children never forget what is told them to do, and are of such a nature that they perfectly and at once understand all the reasons which influence their elders in giving directions or issuing prohibitions; this saves any necessity for explanations, and prevents disobedience. All schoolteachers, bishops, and fashionable doctors speak the exact truth, and indeed BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 157 have no temptation at any time to do otherwise. Trade is absolutely free, and since there is no interference with its regular action, takes care of itself in a perfectly easy way. All the inhabitants, as might have been expected, are wealthy, and possess perfect health till they die, so that the physicians have very little to do, except to examine, each one, the special organ of the body which he particularly likes, and to write books about it. The authors and publishers live always together in mutual admiration clubs, as do also the actors and the dramatic critics. This land is not out of sight, though it seems to have been somewhat difficult of access from the earth except to a few who have visited it, and given to it each the name he thought most fitting. It is the land of the Blue Rose. When we speak of it, we generally begin our sentences with an "If," and we 158 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST speak confidently in the future time. The sentences run somewhat after this model: "If this or that were so, I would do thus or so;" or, "If I had not so much to do, I could be or do so or so." Or generally, " If the here and the now were utterly different from what they are, then I could be quite content; then I could rest, but as things are, it is quite impossible." The blue rose belongs probably to the same family as the blue flower told of by Novalis, of which Spielhagen says, "That is the flower which mortal eye has never yet seen, and the fragrance of which fills the whole world. Not every creature is delicately enough made to be able to perceive the perfume; but the nightingale is intoxicated with it when it sings and sobs and sighs in the moonlight or at early daybreak, and all foolish men have been and are drunk with it when they cry in prose or in poetry BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 159 to heaven, pouring out their sorrow and their grief. ... He who has once breath- ed the perfume of the blue flower has no more peace and quiet in this life, but is driven on and on, though his sore feet pain him, and he yearns to lay down his weary head to rest. He asks for a drink at this or that cottage door, but he returns the emptied cup without thanks, for there was a fly in the water, or the cup was not quite clean, or-well, he was not refreshed by the drink." We come across the blue rose again where Sir Thomas Browne tells us of "a maid of Germany that lived without meat on the smell of a rose," but he makes haste to warn us that she only pretended to be cared for by God and good angels, and adds that she was obliged to recant. There is a gentle melancholy which marks those who would be quite willing to live if only they could live in the country where I60 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST the blue rose thrives, and which is of so well-pronounced a type that it is known by the name that I have ventured to put at the head of this chapter. It is met in all classes and ranks of society, and is especially to be seen in America, probably because the facilities for travelling are here so many and so great that every one may hope with more or less degree of confidence to reach the land at some time, and to spend the rest of her life in inhaling the perfume of the blue rose. How many of us bear about the melancholy of which I speak! How many a woman is not quite sure that if she were in altogether different circumstances, she should find no difficulty in doing all things required of her with great cheerfulness, if not with positive joy! She wants to remain a fully grown bird, but at the same time she blames fate that she cannot get into the nest BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY and lie down as she once could. That the nest is not large enough for the old birds, in fact that it was never intended that they should get into it, strikes her as unreasonable. She is always complaining gently that she cannot make her circles squares or her squares circles. She claims all the privileges of a man, and, at the same time, feels hurt if she fail to receive any consideration generally accorded to a woman. She is not at all desirous of a fair field and no favor, but she asks for all the field and all the favor too. She constructs an ideal world out of her own consciousness, and then feels injured because the world around her does not harmonize with it. And thus she falls a victim to blue-rose melancholy. Sometimes this is because she has too little real work to do; sometimes because she is ignorant of what the world really is. She shuts herself up 162 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST too much in the narrow circle of her own home and her own folk, and shuns, rather than seeks, contact with other scenes and other classes of people. When she travels she goes in first-class carriages, and at hotels she lives in suites of apartments, with those she knew at home; she changes neither her sky nor her mind. She spends all her winters visiting the same persons and receiving visits from them, and in summer she does the same things and meets the very same people. No wonder that she knows so little of the real world, and thinks it all wrong, and herself a much-abused person because it does not go to suit her; she has a touch of the blue-rose melancholy, and other evils follow in its train. What she wants is the tonic of regular work and enough of it, and the wholesome nervous shock which comes from contact with people entirely different from BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 163 herself. Those who are tired from the strain of long and constant work-even they could tell her of the tonic effect of regular and much-demanding labor; it may be monotonous, and it may hecome wearying after many years, but it leaves no time for illness, none for melancholy or for dawdling on lounges, and none for mind-weariness, which saps the life and cuts the wrinkles sooner than labor. It is moth and rust that corrupt. Only the flowing water is pure and sweet. Only the spinning top and the moving bicycle do not fall over. Rest is not found in irregular and purposeless motion, nor is it stagnation; all real and firm rest is to be sought in harmonious action. It is only by constant hewing at the block of marble that you can find the statue hidden within it, and it is only by your own mental activity and decision that you 164 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST can determine which of all the possible statues contained in it you will chisel out. What difference does it make if, in shaping your beautiful drinking-fountain, you cut away a hundred tons of granite from the stone of the quarry, if so be that at last you shall have a shapely and well-proportioned work of art? The best use that could be made of those tons of granite was to cut them away and reveal the fountain, and the work and the weariness, and all the long years of incompleteness, are not lost to the life that shapes itself into beauty and fulfilment at the end thereof. Go on and make errors, and fall and get up again. Only go on! You will never learn to speak a foreign language if you are afraid of mistakes; so you will never do anything with your own life if you are discouraged by failure. You were made to fail over and over again, or you would never gain BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 165 any strength. The harder time you have, the gladder you ought to be; for you are getting exercise and experience, and, then, God would never spend so much trouble in training you if you were not worth the effort. You really must be of considerable value if you are turned, twisted, and tried in all sorts of ways. There was much wisdom in the fable of Antaeus; as he grew stronger by falling, so may you. Mr. George Nevile, in his Horses and Riding, says, "A man bought a horse, and after some time was asked by a friend whether the horse was a safe horse to ride, on which he replied that he could not tell, as the horse had never stumbled with him up to that time. This was repeated as a good joke, but is strict sense." It is only one out of a hundred wise truths which may be learned from experience with a horse, for our increase in righteousness. 166 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST I saw a squirrel to-day, busy collecting dry leaves. He did not take indiscriminately, but selected evidently with much care. He held them by the stems in his mouth till he had so many that he looked as if his head were nothing but a bunch of leaves. Then he made for his nest, which was near the top of a lofty tree a long distance away; but he went by circuitous routes, and at last, when he found a group of children directly in his path, he took to the trunk of a tree at a considerable distance from his home; on this he climbed wisely and warily out to the end of a long branch, then leaped from that to the end of another on a second tree, and from that in the same way to his own, losing, as he did so, one of his treasures, but not for that reason flinging away the others; then he made his way, still circuitously, to the nest, and disappeared in it. Your tasks are BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 167 no harder than was his, and you will have no greater obstacles. Have you not his invention and perseverance? There was no blue - rose melancholy about him. And yet his world is a pretty hard one, considering the existence of human beings in it, and it is full of all sorts of difficulties. Can you not " Be as the bird that chancing to alight Upon a bough too slight, Feels it give way beneath her, and yet sings, Knowing that she hath wings?" Your wings must be made of the same stuff as that from which you have constructed your melancholy-your own imagination. But so long as you think of nothing but the frailness and the good-for-nothingness of the bough on which you have been standing, you will have no power to use it, even to spring from. Take to yourself wings and flee away. You think perhaps that the gods 168 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST do not care. But if you had read AEschylus you would have learned that "the gods, for what they care for, care enough." And if they do not seem to care for your unequalled trouble, it may be--I say it may be-that it is not in their clear eyes worth caring about. It is in reading such writers as Eschylus and not in modern literature that you may often find the antidote for the melancholy which is sapping your strength. A taste for the best literature is a blessed gift; if you have it not yet, strive towards it till you acquire it. Be content to be passive and let yourself be worked upon by it, and finally you may begin to take in its influence actively, and then you will know where to go to find wings, and will flee as a bird to your mountain. Many people seem to overlook the fact that even Christ and the three disciples did not remain forever on the BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 169 Mount of Transfiguration, but came down again into the low-lying valleys. Even the hardest days are a component part of the whole life, and should be looked at and held as such, not wished away; there is great force in the conviction that everything that may be in your life is really a necessary part of it and cannot be spared, any more than death can, if it is to be rounded and full. When you meet trouble and annoyance in this way, they cease to be enemies and are changed to friends. There is good doctrine in " Aubrey de Vere :" " Count each affliction, whether light or grave, God's messenger sent down to thee; do thou With courtesy receive him; rise and bow; And, ere his shadow pass thy threshold, crave Permission first his heavenly feet to lave; Then lay before him all thou hast ; allow No cloud of passion to usurp thy brow, Or mar thy hospitality; no wave Of mortal tumult to obliterate The soul's marmoreal calmness; Grief should be 170 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST Like joy, majestic, equable, sedate, Confirming, cleansing, raising, making free, Strong to consume small troubles; to commend Great thoughts, grave thoughts, thoughts lasting to the end." The problem before you is unchangeably and always, not what you "would do if "-for that is the way the thought of blue-rose melancholy runs-but what you will do on this particular gloomy day, in this particular room, with the particular people and things that are in it. You have got to play the game with the cards that have been dealt to you, and it is of no use for you to bewail your fate because you don't hold different ones. Look them over, arrange them, and play. You certainly must play them before you will get any others, and you need never expect to have other people's cards. You would probably not know how to manage them if you had them, but that is not the point. BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 171 In the land of the blue-rose you would probably have held thirteen trumps, but you are not there, and what is more, you never will get there if you don't play, and play according to the full measure of your ability, the cards you do hold. " When the armies are set in array, and the battle beginning, Is it well that the soldier whose to the leftward Say, 'I will go to the right, it shall do best service ?' There is a great Field - Marshal, who arrays our battalions; Let us to Providence trust, and work in our stations." post is far is there I my friend, abide and Did you ever read the old proverb which says that it is the same to him whose feet are incased in a shoe as if the whole surface of the earth were covered with leather?- Perhaps, after all, you have only to take off your own shoes to find that the ground is not 172 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST hard and unyielding, but soft and " resulting" under your tread. At any rate, the experiment is a simple one; the hard surface of which you complain may be only one symptom that you are falling into blue-rose melancholy. Your business on this earth is the same as was that of the Creator at the first: " the singing of shapeless matter into symmetry and beauty." Do you want any higher? But notice that it is only the singing and not the speaking voice that sends the light lycopodium dust flying into regular forms in Mrs. Watts Hughes's voice-form experiments. And she warns us that "Success demands considerable practice in singing, and untiring perseverance in its employment." Otherwise your chaos will remain chaos, and your little dustheap will be only a little dust- heap at the end. Who hinders your practice in singing but yourself ? BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 173 Blue-rose melancholy, like other sorts of melancholia, is a sympton of insanity, that is, of a want of Reason. It must not be humored, it must be fought. Are there dragons in the road? Attack them ! If there is a wall of flame across the path, read the story of Spenser's "Britomart," and then strike spurs into your will and ride at it! That is the only way. But - and this is a great " But "-make yourself sure before you do either, that the dragon and the flames are actually in your road, and not in one of the openings of the impenetrable thicket surrounding the land of the blue rose. If so, the way of discretion as well as the way of valor is to turn back into your actual road again, and not to waste strength by trying to push in thither. You have no right to complain of the roughness of the path if you have voluntarily turned aside from the one assigned you, to climb the wall 174 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST of a precipice which seemed to lead more directly towards the goal of your wishes; if you have done so, at least have the grace to accept bravely and without murmur what you have yourself chosen. Don't waste time on symptoms when nothing but radical measures will do. Go straight to the root of the matter, to the source of the symptoms. Don't be afraid to recognize that your real trouble is the genuine bluerose melancholy, and half the battle will have been won. If you have one continuous thread of some strong purpose in your life, you can disregard things that do not touch it and afford to give them the go-by. Do not waste strength in fighting annoyances which concern not that; then, finally, it may be said of you, as was said of CanonLiddon, that "everything about him was natural and spontaneous, because it was governed by a purpose BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 175 so habitual that it was no longer noticed." If you have only a small natural stock of trust, enlist under the banner of Savonarola and be content to "live upon the faith of yesterday, waiting for the faith of to -morrow." At least you can do that, even if you have no faith to-day, and there are many people who have to live thus, so that you need not fear to suffer from solitude. There is the possibility of great virtue in simply standing still, as well in your soul as with your body, and there are many who learn this truth only when it is too late - if, indeed, there be any such words as "too late" in the language of God, or any thought which corresponds to them in His heart. Walter Pater, in MariustheEicurean, calls attention to four characteristics of the Cyrenaic philosophy in which, he says, " it approached the nobler form of 176 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST Cynicism as also the more nobly developed phases of the old or traditional ethics." These are - and they may well give us pause-"The gravity of its conception of life. " Its pursuit after nothing less than a perfection. " Its apprehension of the value of time. " The passion and the seriousness which are like a consecration." We live in the light which broke upon the world after the time of these philosophies, but we may well read and reread these words, and ask ourselves how many of the four we have in personal possession. They have been, perhaps, sufficiently illustrated in the preceding chapters of this book, to which they correspond in a somewhat deeper sense than that of mere number. The demands of modern life consti- BLUE-ROSE MELANCHOLY 177 tute the Sphinx of to-day. She has still all the strength and size of the lion, and she has still a woman's face. As of old, to the answer of the question which she propounds, there is no alternative but death, and from answering there is no escape. Not only to the Thebans came The fiery question, winged with flame; We hear the same, yet not the same. Uplifted from her dread domain, The Sphinx may bring us deathless painBeyond, her threatening is in vain. I solve no riddle, Sphinx, for thee, But hold thee fast and rigidly; Hope thou for no escape from me. Not less well-won we count the field By waiting than by fighting sealed; Thou, thou thyself shalt answer yield! O Life, I hold thee face to face; Nor move I back one single pace For accident of time or space; Z2 178 THE TECHNIQUE OF REST For time and space to me belong, Nor know they how to work me wrong; I wait, for I, not thou, am strong. Day after day may slow go by. After the worst that thou canst try, At last, at last, thou shalt reply! No haste-Eternity is now; No rest-I will not let thee go; What thou hast asked, that answer thou! THE END. By CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER. AS WE WERE SAYING. With Portrait, and Illustrated by H. W. McVICKAR and others. 16mo, Cloth, oo. Ornamental, $i OUR ITALY. An Exposition of the Climate and Resources of Southern California. Illustrated. Square 8vo, Cloth, Ornamental, $2 00. A LITTLE JOURNEY IN THE A Novel. Post 8vo, Half Leather, Uncut Edges and Gilt Top, WORLD. $I 50. STUDIES IN THE SOUTH AND WEST, with Comments on Canada. 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