Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/335



HOUGH many have got ready and gone, by far the most of the privileged city-dwellers who go into the country for the summer, or a part of it, are now getting ready to go, and we will take it for granted that in the moments of exhaustion, when he, and more specifically she, sinks breathless amidst the incompleted preparations, powerless to lift another hand, or stir another foot, they will be willing to share with us a few reflections on the gross and ridiculous disproportion that getting ready to do things bears, all through life, to the act of doing them, or the sense of having done them.

We do not mind saying, in the confidence which we have never known one of our million readers to betray, that the fact was brought poignantly home to us, the other day, by the simple experience of sailing for Europe. In the prospect, this trivial undertaking loomed up in a vastness which seemed to require all our latent energies to accomplish it. The work of getting ready began with the earliest thought of going, and instantly presented itself in the form of a resolution not to go, not to be hired for money to go, not to be entreated for love to go. In the soul's juggle with itself we were perfectly aware that we were going; and that the entire renunciation of our purpose was the main condition precedent of its fulfilment. Without the moral effect of the renunciation we could not have got off.

There is a parity of misery in preparations of all kinds which intimates the identity and equality of experience. Spiritually the preparation for going into battle must be much of the measure of getting ready to have a tooth drawn, with the chances of hope on the side of the battle. You may come out of the fight alive and unhurt, but you are not likely to come away from the dentist's office with your raging tooth still in your head, unless it has opportunely stopped aching just before you have rung his bell, or entered upon the perusal of the ripe periodical parlor table. In either event the same disproportion between the preparation and the event which we have noted in the simpler case of going to Europe will suggest itself: the battle, or your part of it, is over in a few hours; the tooth is out in a few seconds; but the preliminaries have covered weeks or days of agonized expectation, in which the soul has counselled with itself concerning all imaginable ways and means of shirking. Few will own the wish to shirk, but to the strictly private circle we are addressing, we do not scruple to affirm that the man who would not rather not fight, or not have a tooth drawn, does not now live, whatever may have been true of man in the prehistoric ages. In the process of fortifying his spirit he dies many deaths before not dying at all, and loses every tooth in his head before getting the aching one soothed with iodine, and finally restored to health and usefulness.

Through life the disproportion of the cause to the consequence insists upon itself. The accepted superstition is that the most momentous consequences flow from the least momentous causes; but probably if the matter were carefully looked into the reverse might be found true. In the moral world some apparently trivial act of folly entails effects tragical and sorrowful, far beyond the measure of the cause. Yet if the fact could be thoroughly analyzed, it would probably be found the complex impulse of untold ages of error. The cataclysmal sin and folly of long generations of fools and sinners could be seen to have overflowed in it; while the far-spreading consequence would soon sink into the ground, or be inhaled into the healing heaven. It used to be gloomily imagined that consequences were cumulative, especially evil consequences, and many reprobates have been shaken from their impenitence in times past by the picture of the growing effects of their misdeeds. But it seems now more probable that the first effect is the greatest, and that all the later effects diminish until they cease. Even the first effect is of a moral magnitude much less than the cause, and the