By the Christmas Fire | Page 7

may not live to see any dramatic entrance of the world upon "the
thousand years of peace," but we are living in a time when men are
rapidly learning the art of doing peacefully many things which once
were done with infinite strife and confusion. We live in a time when
intelligence is applied to the work of love. The children of light are less
content than they once were to be outranked in sagacity by the children
of this world. The result is that many things which once were the
dreams of saints and sages have come within the field of practical
business and practical politics. They are a part of the day's work. A

person of active temperament may prefer to live in this stirring period,
rather than to have his birth postponed to the millennium.
It is only the incorrigible doctrinaire who refuses to sympathize with
the illogical processes by which the world is gradually being made
better. With him it is the millennium or nothing. He will tolerate no
indirect approach. He will give no credit for partial approximations. He
insists on holding every one strictly to his first fault. There shall be no
wriggling out of a false position, no gradual change in function, no
adaptations of old tools to new uses.
In the next essay I shall have something to say about this way of
looking at things. It would do no harm to stir up the doctrinaire
assumptions with the bayonet-poker.

II
On Being a Doctrinaire
[Illustration]
The question is sometimes asked by those who devise tests of literary
taste, "If you were cast upon a desert island and were allowed but one
book, what book would you choose?"
If I were in such a predicament I should say to the pirate chief who was
about to maroon me, "My dear sir, as this island seems, for the time
being, to have been overlooked by Mr. Andrew Carnegie, I must ask
the loan of a volume from your private library. And if it is convenient
for you to allow me but one volume at a time, I pray that it may be the
Unabridged Dictionary."
I should choose the Unabridged Dictionary, not only because it is big,
but because it is mentally filling. One has the sense of rude plenty such
as one gets from looking at the huge wheat elevators in Minneapolis.
Here are the harvests of innumerable fields stored up in little space.
There are not only vast multitudes of words, but each word means

something, and each has a history of its own, and a family relation
which it is interesting to trace.
But that which I should value most on my desert island would be the
opportunity of acquainting myself with the fine distinctions which are
made between different human qualities. It would seem that the
Aggregate Mind which made the language is much cleverer than we
usually suppose. The most minute differences are infallibly registered
in tell-tale words. There are not only words denoting the obvious
differences between the good and the bad, the false and the true, the
beautiful and the ugly, but there are words which indicate the delicate
shades of goodness and truth and beauty as they are curiously blended
with variable quantities of badness and falseness and ugliness. There
are not only words which tell what you are, but words which tell what
you think you are, and what other people think you are, and what you
think they are when you discover that they are thinking that you are
something which you think you are not.
In the bright lexicon of youth there is no such word as "fail," but the
dictionary makes up for this deficiency. It is particularly rich in words
descriptive of our failures. As the procession of the virtues passes by,
there are pseudo-virtues that tag on like the small boys who follow the
circus. After Goodness come Goodiness and Goody-goodiness; we see
Sanctity and Sanctimoniousness, Piety and Pietism, Grandeur and
Grandiosity, Sentiment and Sentimentality. When we try to show off
we invariably deceive ourselves, but usually we deceive nobody else.
Everybody knows that we are showing off, and if we do it well they
give us credit for that.
A scholar has a considerable amount of sound learning, and he is afraid
that his fellow citizens may not fully appreciate it. So in his
conversation he allows his erudition to leak out, with the intent that the
stranger should say, "What a modest, learned man he is, and what a
pleasure it is to meet him." Only the stranger does not express himself
in that way, but says, "What an admirable pedant he is, to be sure."
Pedantry is a well-recognized compound, two thirds sound learning and
one third