of ignorance more than knowledge will this grasping after surface culture to hide the defects of all ignorance be done away with. And, meantime, why not be happy in our ignorance and choose the line of ignorance that means most bliss? "Let's be frivolous and gay and superficial," says the heroine of a modern novel, and no doubt she, or her creator, had learned the folly of trying to get Spinoza's philosophy in a nutshell. If Michael O'Hennesy, sitting in his brougham, is a genuinely happy object, as Mr. Lee admits, why should he become wretched by trying to run an automobile into the heart of science, civilization and all dark mysteries. "All I ask of you," said a society girl to a gay Lothario she was about to marry, "is that if you do any fool things after the wedding curtain drops you will keep them to yourself." And village story saith they lived like turtledoves ever after. It is the eternal prying into knowledge inconvenient to us that makes havoc of homes and all human institutions everywhere. "The unknown God, him declare I unto you," said the wisest of the apostles, and to see eye to eye, and know as we are known, is a consummation wisely reserved for a better world than this. Wherefore the fool's prayer, as one of our own poets has written it, touches the core of all wisdom. "God be merciful to me, a fool," is no doubt the most fitting petition that our stammering tongues and groping minds can put up. But the pity of it is that no one short of a God has any ear for such a prayer. And that is largely what is the matter with our poor pretentious and pedantic little earth. TANGLES OF LIFE ORE and more life in the hands of our teachers is becoming like the picture puzzles. "The Arab is looking for his camel; where is it?" Scrawling lines and barren plain, and never a gleam of anything that looks more like a camel than a sage bush; yet all the brilliant ones take much delight in drawing the humpbacked creature out of his retirement and displaying to us his goodly proportions. The ambition of the scientific and unscientific alike seems to be to present life as a bewildering puzzle and yet show us how to draw the object of our desire out of it. Graciously, too, when revealed, they show us that it was a part of the landscape, and expect us to admire the skill of the artist who put it there. Those who find it appear to. Those who miss it challenge the sense of the craftsman at once, and for any other purpose than hiding a camel or some other ungainly beast in a wilderness his effort is a poor That is why the whole game seems beneath the dignity of the Great Artist of the universe. one. Out of a little suburban window one of his spring pictures opens this moment to the view. A woodland park, carpeted in a soft, fresh velvet green that no loom of the Orient can match; trees just showing a faint glimmer of coming leaf or bud against the airy tracing of thin, bare boughs; a sky of ethereal blue melting in a kind of misty tenderness into the calm bosom of the great lake that sweeps on and on, in delicate waves of purple and azure, to the far horizon. Where is the camel? What lumbering, slow-footed beast of human desire has any occult maniac to project into that scene? And can any rational creature believe that the divine artist meant the being for whom he painted it to do aught but sit down in rapt content and drink it in to his soul's refreshing? Last night a round, yellow moon hung low in the soft sky, and out of the brooding forest the cry of the whip-poor-will rang full and clear. What tortured shape of desire would you paint there? Nothing short of two young lovers newly wed would fit the scene, and no doubt it was made for them and all other happy spirits who have no problems to hunt in it. To project man's dark and tangled images of desire into the fair and open face of nature and set him hunting for them there is to pervert the finest ministry of creation to his soul's unrest. This searching for some hidden meaning everywhere, some puzzle in the picture, some shape that shall spring forth to satisfy the haunting demon of desire, is the thing that steals from us the very glory of the universe, and the old Brahmins were no doubt right in teaching that only in the death of desire was the birth of any true life or fullness of being possible to man. So long as he is searching for his own little dromedary or caravan to wait upon him all the eternal forces of creation sweep round him in vain. Even Sylvia's absence should not take the music out of the Nightingale. Yet it does, and that is one of the sorriest features of the case, since from time immemorial all nature and life have been trying to teach man that she, too, could drop out of the landscape-nay, only by some rare chance could be found in it. The most capricious wizard that ever tried to hide steeds in a wilderness is that little God of love. Yet all creation turns life into a picture puz zle to find them at his behest, and commonly resolves it to a desert, or something worse in the operation: To be with Wilhelm, that's my heaven; So runs the delirious lesson. And shortly Wilhelm takes to the woods, or that mysterious realm of "You can never know why," and there you are in hell, just where you ought to be for trying to make heaven out of any creature but the highest. That is the secret of life's picture puzzle if you want to know it; and of every leaf and flower and growing thing that freshens and blooms in the springtime and fades and blooms again, in life's eternal round. They all speak of a light that fails not, a love that knows no satiety; a being that floats high and higher toward that great white center of life, unhampered by the need of any Ariadne clews of philosopher or mystic to show it the way. That grand old Hebrew palmist knew it, when he said "The heaven declares the glory of the Lord and the firmament showeth his handiwork," and there is nothing obscure in that matchless picture that he rolls out. That poet, "beautiful as an angel," knew it when he sent his skylark careening through the golden light, "like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun." There are no tears and puzzles in "the sweet face that nature wears," save as man, with his fears and groanings, and selfish individual desires and ambitions, puts them there, for himself, or his brother. And, oh! the pity that some strong hand can not wipe them out and give us the rapture of the open picture before it is folded up like a scroll from our failing sight. Once to gaze upon it, without that haunting sense of some hidden want, some puzzling problem to be wrought out of it, might reveal to us the end of all wants in its harmonious whole. For what we want of life may be, after all, of less moment than what it wants of us, and if we could fit into the picture perhaps the tangle of the whole business would be resolved for us. For many decades the very gentlest of the philosophers have been telling us that what God has made his creatures to need that he invariably provides. "I do not believe that God ever made a want without providing for its supply," says one of the latest of them, and that seems the only true principle for any fair creator to go upon. Considering, then, that we spend the better part of our days chasing after wants that are never supplied, the natural conclusion is that we are on the track of wants not made by the Creator. And this, indeed, it may be, that turns the fair face of things into mysteries and tangles, when the bounties of heaven are ever open as the day and common to every creature that breathes. To draw the object of his own desire out of the human canvas there is no limit to the liberty which man will take with the picture, and in the main all the psychic teachers of the day are abetting him in it. Meantime, life teaches him, as one great preacher has it, to "satisfy his wants by lopping off his desires," and not till he has mastered that lesson can he know, indeed, how glorious is the provision which the Creator offers for every want that he has made. |