XX. FOOLISH PROVERBS.

There are a great many things which have been said so often and so positively that they have at last taken a sort of brevet rank as facts, but which are nevertheless absurdly false and often very stupid. It is one of the funny fashions of this very funny world to enunciate these maxims with the air of having just originated some especially smart new maxim, the brilliant result of our own superior wisdom. I do not know anything more comically provoking than this air unless it is the earsplitting cackle of a hen over a new-laid egg. The egg is no better and no different from that which Eve’s favorite pullet laid in paradise and that pullet’s daughters have been laying ever since. But to hear the cackle one would imagine that special hen had invented eggs and wished to call the attention of the world to the fact.

For instance, if a young man shows a tendency to go away from home and see something of the world, become “a globe trotter” to a greater or less extent, he is warned that “a rolling stone gathers no moss”—that is to say, the moving man will not acquire money and position. Now, we all know that this is a prodigious falsehood. It is the moving man, the pusher, the hustler, the rustler, or whatever else he may be called, who succeeds and makes for himself position, money and influence. The human bowlder gathers moss indeed, but it is the moss of decay and the rust of inaction.

But opposed to this is another proverb equally false, “Homely youth have ever homely wits,” a statement perhaps true in Shakespeare’s time, but not at all true now, for it is in quiet and seclusion, at home, or college, or in some sort of retirement, that “wits,” if wits mean intellect and mental processes, go on the best, and the scientist, the chemist, the philosopher, the lecturer or the preacher, would come to great grief if he had not some sort of “home” to shut himself into.

But the popular saying which just now annoys me the most is one that your friends always present to you in times of trouble and perplexity, generally offering it with a sort of benevolent and perfunctory air, as if it were a piece of religious consolation or a well-proved recipe for happiness, a sort of panacea for every ill of spirit mind or body. It is sometimes expressed in one form, sometimes another; but the idea is, “All things come round to him who will but wait.”

Now I appeal to you, my dear reader, to say if that promise has fulfilled itself in your life. It certainly has not in mine. We, all of us, I suppose, start in life with some far-off ideal of happiness or at least pleasure glittering like a star in our future, either remote or close at hand. It is like the golden cup which we were told in our childhood is to be found hanging on the end of the rainbow. Probably most of us have once or twice set off full of hope to find that cup, but I have yet to hear of any one who has achieved it. And do we generally gain these early ideals? Have you? Think a bit of what you wanted most at fifteen, at twenty, at twenty-five, and so on. Have you ever really and fully obtained it? Probably you have changed that ideal many times, you have set the goal where you were to rest, satisfied farther and farther away, but have you ever reached it? In one word, have you found in your own experience that “all things come round to him who will wait?”

Doubtless we have often derived comfort from the phrase, for most people are very ready to take words for things. Some older person has said it to us with that assured and benevolent manner of which I spoke but now—some parent or friend or clergyman to whom we have applied for counsel and comfort—and we have received it as a sort of prophetic promise, and gone away with the feeling that all is now going to be set right, and we have only to wait a bit to have our heart’s desire fulfilled in the completest manner.

And does it?

It is about as rational a belief as that we attach to the words of a fortune teller to whom we have furtively applied in some terrible muddle of our affairs. She has “prophesied smooth things” in a very impressive manner, and even while jeering at our own credulity we go away with a sort of shamefaced faith that perhaps, after all, she is right, and at any rate we feel a little encouraged.

And how common sense insists upon reminding us of the failure of various other similar ventures!

The young girl fixes her affections or perhaps only her fancy upon some man, who in turn has fixed his upon some other woman, or, as is more likely, upon himself and his own interests. “All things come round to him who will but wait,” whispers the poor child to herself, and she modestly and silently waits until the man either marries the other girl or drifts out of her horizon altogether.

Perhaps the “waiting” lover is the man—one of those men who pride themselves upon their tenacity of purpose and power of controlling fate. He pays court to the woman of his choice, and she, having like a bee just lighted upon the proffered blossom and sipped the quality of its honey, declines to take any more of it, be she wooed never so importunately. So he, too, fixes his faith upon Time and waits for that official to bring round his heart’s desire. And does he?

Well, I am bound to confess that here and there is a case where the woman, tired out with her lover’s persistency, marries him to get rid of him—but does she do it? And does he find that Time has brought him the spirit of what he desired, or only tantalized him with the empty letter? More often, however, the girl only encourages him enough to keep him along and uses him as a butt and foil for her other flirtations, a bête de souffrance to be finally dropped with a scornful laugh or a pettish disclaimer when the man she loves finally makes his definite offer.

But outside of sentiment or love-making there are plenty of people who, trusting to this delusive promise, prove for themselves its falsity—the young man, for instance, who intends to be rich. He is told of the millionaires who have begun life with two or three pence in their pockets, and the traditional “bundle under their arms,” and somebody with that exasperating air of giving an invaluable formula of success adds, “All things come round to him who will but wait.”

So he goes to work at five dollars per month, and after awhile is raised to ten dollars and twenty dollars, and so on, and keeps “waiting,” with the most generous reliance upon that charming promise—waiting through boyhood and youth and young manhood, until some fine day he suddenly perceives that he is a gray haired, middle-aged man, with a few most painfully saved thousands in the bank, and a salary which just enables him to live comfortably and to put by a little every year. And those are all the things that have come round to reward his waiting.

Perhaps he has no ambition to be a Vanderbilt; perhaps he only desires to have a house of his own, a horse and trap, a comfortable home for the girl he means to marry; perhaps he is a good young fellow, and wants to take care of his widowed mother and little sisters as well as the wife. He goes bravely about his task, knowing that he cannot nearly reach the mark just yet, but then, you know, “All things come round,” etc.

He finds hundreds—yes, thousands—of other Richards in the field; he finds the labor market glutted; he finds trained skill demanded where he has only willing service to render. He is not one of the exceptional few who hit upon the royal road to success through some invention or some system as yet unheard of. He is only capable of routine work performed in a plodding sort of fashion, and although he is never out of employment, he never makes any great success or receives any great emolument until, at last, when the mother is dead, and the sisters married, or earning their own living as school-teachers or typists, and the wife worn and fretted with hope too long deferred, he sees that he might have a horse and trap, perhaps, but after all, he doesn’t care for driving, and the boys will need the money, or the girls must have it, and so it goes.

Yet another class of patient waiters upon this ignis fatuus of a promise are the brethren of my own craft—the writers.

A man, or, for that matter, it is in these days more often a woman, who feels within herself the cacœthes scribendi, immediately stakes out her homestead on Parnassus and selects her niche in the temple of fame. Shakespeare, Milton, Bulwer, George Eliot, Dickens and the rest are her brothers and sisters. They had to make a beginning, and so will she. They have made glorious endings, and so will she. Their names are known all over the world, and hers is not known at all, but then “all things come round to him who will but wait,” and she doesn’t mind waiting for a year or perhaps, two.

So the poor thing begins, and if my tone is playfully scoffing, my heart is full of the tenderest sympathy and pity, for I have seen and known it all so often, tried to warn some of these gallant adventurers of the perils of their voyage, and to point out the fact that amid such crowded fleets as daily put to sea upon the inky ocean comparatively few of the brave little crafts reach the harbor of success, while the rest are stranded on Charybdis, or swallowed up in Scylla, or swamped by collision with their rivals, or lost and wrecked from any one of a hundred causes impossible to foresee.

“But I am brave and patient,” the aspirant will answer, with a smile. “I can wait for months, or even a year or two, and ‘all things come round to him who will but wait.’”

So the victim starts out, writes her poem or her essay or her serial story, for these hopeful people never think of doing less than the heroic, and never descend to the level of the short, pithy story, which is the only salable kind of manuscript, and she or he sends it first to the leading magazines, with perhaps, a line suggesting that the author knows that Longfellow received five hundred dollars for a similar work, but she is content to begin with one hundred dollars. The editor smiles compassionately, and sends back the MS. Then it sifts down through the lower channels of literature, until it finally reaches home for the last time, and sleeps in the grave of “rejected addresses.”

Now, not wishing to be misanthropic or discouraging to any brave endeavor, I appeal to all literary experts to decide out of their own experience and observation the truth to such a one as this author of the proverb which has buoyed him or her up. Does anything of consequence “come round” after long waiting? Is it not rather the rule that the author who fails to gain some measure of success and recognition in the first two or three years of mature effort, never will succeed? If relying upon his false maxim he persists in offering his wares here, there and everywhere, and accepting the lowest prices and poorest places, he will doubtless earn some money and have the pleasure of seeing himself in print, but alas for the dreams that promised to become golden realities!

But Nemesis, or Fate, or whatever we call the “destiny that shapes men’s ends,” is fond of her little joke, and is constantly amusing herself by fulfilling the letter of her agreement while breaking the spirit of it all to pieces.

Often enough she does bring round “all things to him who will but wait,” but at such a time and in such fashion as to make success even more bitter than defeat. The lover wins his lass, or the lass her lover, only to find that the apple of Sodom, fair and rosy without, was all bitterness and dryness within, mere dust and ashes which, perforce, the winner must swallow and put as good a face as possible upon the unsavory morsel.

The young man wins his fortune when he is too old, too decrepit, too world-worn to enjoy it. I knew one such man whom nature had intended for an artist, and whose early dream was to earn money enough to go to Italy and study. At fifty odd he told me of this youthful vision, and added, “I have plenty of money now, and last year I went to Italy only to find that pictures bored me, and looking at galleries tried me more than Wall Street or the Corn Exchange.”

The literary hack, after years of thankless labor, hits upon a vein which some critic recognizes as true metal, and kindly prophesies will bring success at last, but the hand is palsied, the pen is worn out, the brain after that one last flicker sinks into slumber. “Twenty years ago,” the poor pale lips whisper, “I could have made a name and a fortune out of this, but now—too late!”

Saddest of all, perhaps, is the love that comes too late—the pang with which a weary heart recognizes that it has spent itself for naught, has given its pure gold for the basest dross, and that now, when it is bankrupt and discouraged and hopeless, here is the object to which it should have turned; here is the diamond of purest water which it should have purchased with all its wealth; here is the one opportunity life has held for the happiness of that poor sorrowful heart, and it has come too late, too late!

And such are the ironies of fate, and such is the true and most frequent translation of that glittering generality, “All things come round to him who will but wait!”