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Page 19
This leads to a fourth maxim. _Don't preach too much to your pupils or
abound in good talk in the abstract_. Lie in wait rather for the
practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus
at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do. The
strokes of _behavior_ are what give the new set to the character, and
work the good habits into its organic tissue. Preaching and talking too
soon become an ineffectual bore.
* * * * *
There is a passage in Darwin's short autobiography which has been often
quoted, and which, for the sake of its bearing on our subject of habit,
I must now quote again. Darwin says: "Up to the age of thirty or beyond
it, poetry of many kinds gave me great pleasure; and even as a schoolboy
I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical
plays. I have also said that pictures formerly gave me considerable, and
music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read
a line of poetry. I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it
so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my
taste for pictures or music.... My mind seems to have become a kind of
machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts; but
why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone,
on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive.... If I had to
live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and
listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of
my brain now atrophied would thus have been kept alive through use. The
loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be
injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by
enfeebling the emotional part of our nature."
We all intend when young to be all that may become a man, before the
destroyer cuts us down. We wish and expect to enjoy poetry always, to
grow more and more intelligent about pictures and music, to keep in
touch with spiritual and religious ideas, and even not to let the
greater philosophic thoughts of our time develop quite beyond our view.
We mean all this in youth, I say; and yet in how many middle-aged men
and women is such an honest and sanguine expectation fulfilled? Surely,
in comparatively few; and the laws of habit show us why. Some interest
in each of these things arises in everybody at the proper age; but, if
not persistently fed with the appropriate matter, instead of growing
into a powerful and necessary habit, it atrophies and dies, choked by
the rival interests to which the daily food is given. We make ourselves
into Darwins in this negative respect by persistently ignoring the
essential practical conditions of our case. We say abstractly: "I mean
to enjoy poetry, and to absorb a lot of it, of course. I fully intend to
keep up my love of music, to read the books that shall give new turns to
the thought of my time, to keep my higher spiritual side alive, etc."
But we do not attack these things concretely, and we do not begin
_to-day. _We forget that every good that is worth possessing must be
paid for in strokes of daily effort. We postpone and postpone, until
those smiling possibilities are dead. Whereas ten minutes a day of
poetry, of spiritual reading or meditation, and an hour or two a week at
music, pictures, or philosophy, provided we began _now_ and suffered no
remission, would infallibly give us in due time the fulness of all we
desire. By neglecting the necessary concrete labor, by sparing
ourselves the little daily tax, we are positively digging the graves of
our higher possibilities. This is a point concerning which you teachers
might well give a little timely information to your older and more
aspiring pupils.
According as a function receives daily exercise or not, the man becomes
a different kind of being in later life. We have lately had a number of
accomplished Hindoo visitors at Cambridge, who talked freely of life and
philosophy. More than one of them has confided to me that the sight of
our faces, all contracted as they are with the habitual American
over-intensity and anxiety of expression, and our ungraceful and
distorted attitudes when sitting, made on him a very painful impression.
"I do not see," said one, "how it is possible for you to live as you do,
without a single minute in your day deliberately given to tranquillity
and meditation. It is an invariable part of our Hindoo life to retire
for at least half an hour daily into silence, to relax our muscles,
govern our breathing, and meditate on eternal things. Every Hindoo child
is trained to this from a very early age." The good fruits of such a
discipline were obvious in the physical repose and lack of tension, and
the wonderful smoothness and calmness of facial expression, and
imperturbability of manner of these Orientals. I felt that my countrymen
were depriving themselves of an essential grace of character. How many
American children ever hear it said by parent or teacher, that they
should moderate their piercing voices, that they should relax their
unused muscles, and as far as possible, when sitting, sit quite still?
Not one in a thousand, not one in five thousand! Yet, from its reflex
influence on the inner mental states, this ceaseless over-tension,
over-motion, and over-expression are working on us grievous national
harm.
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