What Is Man? and Other Essays
except that the man is conscious and the watch isn’t, and the man TRIES
to plan things and the watch doesn’t. The watch doesn’t wind itself and
doesn’t regulate itself—these things are done exteriorly. Outside
influences, outside circumstances, wind the MAN and regulate him. Left
to himself, he wouldn’t get regulated at all, and the sort of time he
would keep would not be valuable. Some rare men are wonderful watches,
with gold case, compensation balance, and all those things, and some
men are only simple and sweet and humble Waterburys. I am a Waterbury.
A Waterbury of that kind, some say.
A nation is only an individual multiplied. It makes plans and
Circumstance comes and upsets them—or enlarges them. Some patriots
throw the tea overboard; some other patriots destroy a Bastille. The
PLANS stop there; then Circumstance comes in, quite unexpectedly, and
turns these modest riots into a revolution.
And there was poor Columbus. He elaborated a deep plan to find a new
route to an old country. Circumstance revised his plan for him, and he
found a new _world_. And _he _gets the credit of it to this day. He
hadn’t anything to do with it.
Necessarily the scene of the real turning-point of my life (and of
yours) was the Garden of Eden. It was there that the first link was
forged of the chain that was ultimately to lead to the emptying of me
into the literary guild. Adam’s TEMPERAMENT was the first command the
Deity ever issued to a human being on this planet. And it was the only
command Adam would NEVER be able to disobey. It said, “Be weak, be
water, be characterless, be cheaply persuadable.” The latter command,
to let the fruit alone, was certain to be disobeyed. Not by Adam
himself, but by his _temperament_—which he did not create and had no
authority over. For the _temperament _is the man; the thing tricked out
with clothes and named Man is merely its Shadow, nothing more. The law
of the tiger’s temperament is, Thou shalt kill; the law of the sheep’s
temperament is Thou shalt not kill. To issue later commands requiring
the tiger to let the fat stranger alone, and requiring the sheep to
imbue its hands in the blood of the lion is not worth while, for those
commands _can’T_ be obeyed. They would invite to violations of the law
of _temperament_, which is supreme, and takes precedence of all other
authorities. I cannot help feeling disappointed in Adam and Eve. That
is, in their temperaments. Not in _them_, poor helpless young
creatures—afflicted with temperaments made out of butter; which butter
was commanded to get into contact with fire and _be melted_. What I
cannot help wishing is, that Adam and EVE had been postponed, and
Martin Luther and Joan of Arc put in their place—that splendid pair
equipped with temperaments not made of butter, but of asbestos. By
neither sugary persuasions nor by hell fire could Satan have beguiled
_them _to eat the apple. There would have been results! Indeed, yes.
The apple would be intact today; there would be no human race; there
would be no YOU; there would be no _me_. And the old, old creation-dawn
scheme of ultimately launching me into the literary guild would have
been defeated.
HOW TO MAKE HISTORY DATES STICK
These chapters are for children, and I shall try to make the words
large enough to command respect. In the hope that you are listening,
and that you have confidence in me, I will proceed. Dates are difficult
things to acquire; and after they are acquired it is difficult to keep
them in the head. But they are very valuable. They are like the
cattle-pens of a ranch—they shut in the several brands of historical
cattle, each within its own fence, and keep them from getting mixed
together. Dates are hard to remember because they consist of figures;
figures are monotonously unstriking in appearance, and they don’t take
hold, they form no pictures, and so they give the eye no chance to
help. Pictures are the thing. Pictures can make dates stick. They can
make nearly anything stick—particularly _if you make the pictures
yourself_. Indeed, that is the great point—make the pictures
_yourself_. I know about this from experience. Thirty years ago I was
delivering a memorized lecture every night, and every night I had to
help myself with a page of notes to keep from getting myself mixed. The
notes consisted of beginnings of sentences, and were eleven in number,
and they ran something like this:
“_In that region the weather_—”
“_at that time it was a custom_—”
“_but in california one never heard_—”
Eleven of them. They initialed the brief divisions of the lecture and
protected me against skipping. But they all looked about alike on the
page; they formed no picture; I had them by heart, but I could never
with certainty remember the order of their succession; therefore I
always had to keep those notes by me and look at them every little
while. Once I mislaid them; you will not be able to imagine the terrors
of that evening. I now saw that I must invent some other protection. So
I got ten of the initial letters by heart in their proper order—I, A,
B, and so on—and I went on the platform the next night with these
marked in ink on my ten finger-nails. But it didn’t answer. I kept
track of the fingers for a while; then I lost it, and after that I was
never quite sure which finger I had used last. I couldn’t lick off a
letter after using it, for while they could have made success certain
it would also have provoked too much curiosity. There was curiosity
enough without that. To the audience I seemed more interested in my
fingernails than I was in my subject; one or two persons asked me
afterward what was the matter with my hands.
It was now that the idea of pictures occurred to me; then my troubles
passed away. In two minutes I made six pictures with a pen, and they
did the work of the eleven catch-sentences, and did it perfectly. I
threw the pictures away as soon as they were made, for I was sure I
could shut my eyes and see them any time. That was a quarter of a
century ago; the lecture vanished out of my head more than twenty years
ago, but I could rewrite it from the pictures—for they remain. Here are
three of them: (Fig. 1).
The first one is a haystack—below it a rattlesnake—and it told me where
to begin to talk ranch-life in Carson Valley. The second one told me
where to begin to talk about a strange and violent wind that used to
burst upon Carson City from the Sierra Nevadas every afternoon at two
o’clock and try to blow the town away. The third picture, as you easily
perceive, is lightning; its duty was to remind me when it was time to
begin to talk about San Francisco weather, where there IS no
lightning—nor thunder, either—and it never failed me.
I will give you a valuable hint. When a man is making a speech and you
are to follow him don’t jot down notes to speak from, jot down
PICTURES. It is awkward and embarrassing to have to keep referring to
notes; and besides it breaks up your speech and makes it ragged and
non-coherent; but you can tear up your pictures as soon as you have
made them—they will stay fresh and strong in your memory in the order
and sequence in which you scratched them down. And many will admire to
see what a good memory you are furnished with, when perhaps your memory
is not any better than mine.
Sixteen years ago when my children were little creatures the governess
was trying to hammer some primer histories into their heads. Part of
this fun--if you like to call it that--consisted in the memorizing of
the accession dates of the thirty-seven personages who had ruled over
England from the Conqueror down. These little people found it a bitter,
hard contract. It was all dates, they all looked alike, and they
wouldn’t stick. Day after day of the summer vacation dribbled by, and
still the kings held the fort; the children couldn’t conquer any six of
them.
With my lecture experience in mind I was aware that I could invent some
way out of the trouble with pictures, but I hoped a way could be found
which would let them romp in the open air while they learned the kings.
I found it, and then they mastered all the monarchs in a day or two.
The idea was to make them _see _the reigns with their eyes; that would
be a large help. We were at the farm then. From the house-porch the
grounds sloped gradually down to the lower fence and rose on the right
to the high ground where my small work-den stood. A carriage-road wound
through the grounds and up the hill. I staked it out with the English
monarchs, beginning with the Conqueror, and you could stand on the
porch and clearly see every reign and its length, from the Conquest
down to Victoria, then in the forty-sixth year of her reign—_eight
hundred and seventeen years of_ English history under your eye at once!
English history was an unusually live topic in America just then. The
world had suddenly realized that while it was not noticing the Queen
had passed Henry VIII., passed Henry VI. and Elizabeth, and gaining in
length every day. Her reign had entered the list of the long ones;
everybody was interested now—it was watching a race. Would she pass the
long Edward? There was a possibility of it. Would she pass the long
Henry? Doubtful, most people said. The long George? Impossible!
Everybody said it. But we have lived to see her leave him two years
behind.
I measured off 817 feet of the roadway, a foot representing a year, and
at the beginning and end of each reign I drove a three-foot white-pine
stake in the turf by the roadside and wrote the name and dates on it.
Abreast the middle of the porch-front stood a great granite flower-vase
overflowing with a cataract of bright-yellow flowers—I can’t think of
their name. The vase was William the Conqueror. We put his name on it
and his accession date, 1066. We started from that and measured off
twenty-one feet of the road, and drove William Rufus’s stake; then
thirteen feet and drove the first Henry’s stake; then thirty-five feet
and drove Stephen’s; then nineteen feet, which brought us just past the
summer-house on the left; then we staked out thirty-five, ten, and
seventeen for the second Henry and Richard and John; turned the curve
and entered upon just what was needed for Henry III.—a level, straight
stretch of fifty-six feet of road without a crinkle in it. And it lay
exactly in front of the house, in the middle of the grounds. There
couldn’t have been a better place for that long reign; you could stand
on the porch and see those two wide-apart stakes almost with your eyes
shut. (Fig. 2.)
That isn’t the shape of the road—I have bunched it up like that to save
room. The road had some great curves in it, but their gradual sweep was
such that they were no mar to history. No, in our road one could tell
at a glance who was who by the size of the vacancy between stakes—with
_locality _to help, of course.
Although I am away off here in a Swedish village[3] and those stakes
did not stand till the snow came, I can see them today as plainly as
ever; and whenever I think of an English monarch his stakes rise before
me of their own accord and I notice the large or small space which he
takes up on our road. Are your kings spaced off in your mind? When you
think of Richard III. and of James II. do the durations of their reigns
seem about alike to you? It isn’t so to me; I always notice that
there’s a foot’s difference. When you think of Henry III. do you see a
great long stretch of straight road? I do; and just at the end where it
joins on to Edward I. I always see a small pear-bush with its green
fruit hanging down. When I think of the Commonwealth I see a shady
little group of these small saplings which we called the oak parlor;
when I think of George III. I see him stretching up the hill, part of