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Abjurers of the Hackneyed
Harper’s Weekly (January 22, 1910) : 29
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      To refuse to do the things stamped with the marks of long usage is, after a fashion, to refuse to exist, and there is in consequence a certain mad absurdity attached to those who perversely take this stand. So that, when the recoil from hearing tea described as “the cup that cheers but does not inebriate” produces a certain hesitancy about living and dying, loving and breathing — they all in their more trite forms seem worn so threadbare — great disapproval is shown by those people who with ease and enjoyment say, “It’s muddy underfoot, but pleasant overhead.”
      Very rightly they protest that if one insists upon finding new things to do and say, one will of necessity remain silent and inactive. Very rightly they protest that if one insists upon finding new things to do and say, one will of necessity remain silent and inactive. And they take advantage of the silence they have forced abjurers of the hackneyed into, to declare hurriedly that being educated and getting married, and having children and gray hairs, are all hopelessly bromidic and can be nothing else. They think because you have not said a word that you are convinced. That your futile efforts to escape from the too usual will cease, and you will at once be interested to hear how many minutes longer or shorter each day is than the one preceding it, and may even discuss with avidity whether the English have or have not a sense of humor. As you have been overwhelmed with most respectable reasons, it is taken for granted that you are won to their side, and in the silence that follows, your supposed conversion — up to now the upheaval of your protests has closed your throat — you tiptoe outside the boundaries of their influence and whisper to the world at large, “I’m not, I say, I am not convinced.”
      There is no use in explaining your position to people who think they have changed it, so you take the world into your confidence and beckon it closer. If it comes and sits down attentively, prepared, as you suppose, to understand your obsession, your shying and bolting at the faintest approach of the hackneyed (that is to say, the hackneyed as you see it), it will, ten to one, petrify your opening speech by asking with gentle reasonableness, “But why do you think you must be different from other people when you end by doing the same average sort of thing you rail at in them?” For a moment you fear you are to be reduced to silence again. People in the wrong always have such unanswerable arguments. They will not see what the point is; but, taking a long breath and hoping that the gods will permit you to make yourself clear, you begin slowly, looking at the world with a compelling intensity. “I do and say the hackneyed things because I could not express the feelings they stand for in any other way. I have the mould from which the cast was made, and I use the empty thing with perfect contentment. I cannot breathe unless I feel sure that the spirit is inside the symbol, and every time I use the stereotyped form of expression I am smothered because I feel I am smothering the spirit, perhaps extinguishing the flame. So I have to be what you call ‘being unconventional for the sake of being unconventional’ because that is the only way I can feel spontaneous and genuine.”
      This explanation has sounded involved, rambling, and weak to your own ears. You are not surprised when the believers in the banal smile for the millionth time their satisfied smile, and reply, But since you confess that you only feel what we do, isn’t it beneath you, isn’t it faddy and a shade strained, to do the unconventional thing just because it is unconventional?”
      There is no use; certain prominent facts vanish when caught in the net of an explanation.
 
Why is it not perfectly obvious that frenzied abhorrers of the too customary are but insistent upon having expression come after feeling, instead of feeling being the windy centre of the dry husks of hackneyed expression? There is no use; certain prominent facts vanish when caught in the net of an explanation. Your hands saw the air desperately, you walk dramatically up and down the room only to sit weakly, your mouth parched with inarticulacy. Why is it not perfectly obvious that frenzied abhorrers of the too customary are but insistent upon having expression come after feeling, instead of feeling being the windy centre of the dry husks of hackneyed expression? It is not that one is afraid of death, one is only sent on a panicky flight from the mention of it when some one intones “passed away,” and “departed dear one.” The exposed nerves of our hearing cannot stand having these dusty matted grasses used to decorate a thing so eternally new as a grave. Because marriage and pain and success and health never do lose their power of astonishing us, of overwhelming and fairly knocking us silly by the novel reality of them, we recoil with a violent bound from having them reduced to meaningless terms and draped in tawdry conventionalities. To express sorrow through crépe, and religion by church-going, and reverence by the forcible shutting off of one’s humor where the dogma is concerned, to prepare for one’s marriage by a frolicking dinner to bridesmaids — it is too much. The forms of expression provided by custom are no longer in a state fit for use,
      One must express the amount he feels in the mode most natural to him and not have the degree of the sentiment and the very wording of it prescribed for him. To expose oneself to old ladies utterly indifferent to one’s fate and saying, “I hope you will be successful in your undertaking, my dear,” and to have to reply chirpingly, “Thank you, I hope so too,” when what you really do is to lie awake nights in terror for fear you are going to muss things — ah, one can’t, one really can’t. Fancy an explorer eating a farewell dinner on the night of his departure, with teeth chattering, and all because a society has been formed for the express purpose of giving dinners to departing explorers, and must live up to its charter! The explorer is willing to wrestle every man present. He would be charmed if each would pummel him for being such a fool as to undertake so difficult a trip, but to stand up and in set phrases say what he hopes to do when he hopes to do everything — no, that is a little more than he is equal to.
      Picture a young mother being asked to issue tiny cards announcing the birth of her first son. She may want to do just this. Then all is well. But if she wants to fire a cannon from every window in the house, declare a national holiday, and see the world as one man mop its brow and ejaculate, “By Jove, she’s done it!” — how in that case can she confine herself to tiny white cards? If the announcement cannot be made adequately, she prefers saying nothing, and letting the state of affairs be found out by degrees.
      When people say dull, hackneyed things, slap them on the back. You would do as much if they were choking on a crumb. Do not let the conversation die ignominiously in their mouths. Shout! Cry out! Let them know that the best part of you flew to an irrevocable distance the moment they said that few people loved nature as they did. They should have the consequences of their acts pointed out to them, and not be encouraged in their sterile dearth of spontaneity.
      You make a scene when your family insist that you go to a reception. You are sorry, it is not pleasant for you to have to be disagreeable, but some one said a reception was not serious. Now that, that is where you see you must take a stand. A reception is a serious thing, and if one goes to it in that spirit very well. One’s eyes are open, and the consequences, when they come, are not unexpected. You see people sinking to depths of inanity because they have not sufficient spontaneity to be interesting. They come from inertia, they talk the way they do because they know no one is listening, and you lose your faith in mankind for a cup of unforgivable tea. Then people say a reception is not serious. You do not believe in receptions, you have scruples against looking at humankind when it is so exposing itself, and you do not go to receptions. You are quite right. Some one else feels it to be wrong to impute a sense of humor to the Lord, and they carefully segregate their sense of humor from anything that might ignite it. They are quite right. We are so individual about these things if we are honest. Only you will not, you will not, and in your intensity you shake your fingers as though they had been snapped at, and raise one foot, then the other, like one sinking in a bog. You will not of your own free will go to a place with the proclaimed intention, and for the sole purpose of being dull. That is against your deepest principles. If the horror of the too habitual is keen within you, it is only because you feel such great delight in naturalness, in springs — above all in springs. It is not because dulness is hackneyed, but because hackneyed words are a stupor into which the speaker has sunk, and it may already be too late to save them. You, at least, will not lull them into eternal unconsciousness by giving a the encouragement of your intention.
      You are avoiding the hackneyed from a sense of duty. You may be objectionable, but you are also earnest-minded. If the horror of the too habitual is keen within you, it is only because you feel such great delight in naturalness, in springs — above all in springs. It is the jolting that racks your nerves. The measure put on buoyancy. You wish to spring, or not sping, as your spirit moves vou. It is the regulated rise and fall that sets your teeth on edge. It is — the abjurer of the hackneyed pauses, looks back at what has been written, and makes a last effort to further the cause hy ceasing abruptly.
 

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