By the Christmas Fire | Page 7

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
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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 harmless vanity.
Sometimes on the street you see a man whom you take for an old acquaintance. You approach with outstretched hand and expectant countenance, but his stony glare of non-recognition gives you pause. The fact that he does not know you gives you time to perceive that you do not know him and have never seen him before. A superficial resemblance has deceived you. In the dictionary you may find many instances of such mistakes in the moral realm.
One of the most common of these