Florida Pier : writings and about / jmcvey.net
The Ploughers
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (December 24, 1910) : 26
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We do not in the least object to the stodgy condition of our mind or the equally deplorable state of the minds of other people. We protect its glutinous consistency by concealing its entire existence from ourselves and others, making unceasing efforts the while to discourage minds of disturbing activity by dubbing them queer, unbalanced, and if the mind persists in its intense workings we reflect unfavorably on its possessor’s parenthood. A dull man we grant respectability without inquiry. A brilliant one we penalize for his wits by suspecting an irregularity somewhere.
If the mind capable of taking daily exercise were content to do it alone without bothering about the type of mind owned by the average man, the average man would perhaps think well of the spontaneously alert mind. He would at least refrain from his hysterical denunciation of the slightest mental movement. But the quality most common among minds that work freshly and sharply is a sensitiveness to the dulness of the average man. His fallacious reasoning, his futile labors, his stolid stupidities, and spineless accustomed fears, are the very things that matter so painfully to a keen mind. The mind cares so much about the insensibility of his fellow men that he almost ceases to care about anything else, and he plunges into the unproductive ground of the average mind determined to plough up some of the stones, to furrow ruthlessly until he reaches some virgin soil where the man behind him, if he lacks the time himself, may plant a fresh idea. This being the work of the man of mind, it is hardly to be wondered at if the average man is resentful and attempts to dismiss the incident by accusing his assailant of exaggeration.
There is always a small body of ploughers. They are called various things, and they use divers mediums for their work. A great many of them write — some novels, some plays — and there are a few who talk, while a scattered minority live. But though they seem to be doing many things, they are always feverishly, devotedly ploughing. It is interesting that they, being developed so much above the mean, should be so invariably social. The clarified peak on which they come into being apparently serves but as a vantage-point from where they get an overwhelmingly comprehensive view of human stodginess, and, leaping down into it, they work with a fervor that makes even their grotesquer methods appear hallowed. They ask us to believe all manner of things, from woman being a spider in her sex campaign, to raucous music being above harmonious music, and blue trees behind hideous street prowlers being the only true beauty. They ask us to believe all manner of things, from woman being a spider in her sex campaign, to raucous music being above harmonious music, and blue trees behind hideous street prowlers being the only true beauty. Of course no one does believe that these excrescences of effort are recently discovered, though fundamental laws of nature, but if we were asked to believe anything less startling it would not so much as attract our notice. We would not cry out indignantly, and our belief in porcelain-finished paintings telling a pleasingly moral tale, Traviata’s saccharine waltz to which death and adultery are liltingly sung, and an outraged denial that sex exists at all in woman or can be mentioned as existing in the world at large, would not be shaken as it is.
The people who shock us are the real missionaries. They work so hard and watch so anxiously for the slightest signs in us of uncertainty of anything except that somnolent surety that what is not is, and cannot be changed. If the ploughers see that we are shocked, if we visibly quiver, they sit back and draw a breath of gratitude. Our suicidal smugness has been leavened a little, and who knows, before a live man — that is to say, a great and rare man — dies, he may have removed one entire boulder of dangerous denial or loathsome self-satisfaction from the minds of hundreds of people. To die and leave a handful of the earth’s population in honest doubt or sincere speсulation, to go, having robbed them by force of a false premise, it would be a gallant life’s work.
As we do not observe ourselves we cannot draw straight conclusions, and having no conclusions of our own, we borrow half thoughts from unaccounted-for sources, misapply them to things we learn of by hearsay, and with such a receipt for living, we breathe for seventy years or so... As we do not observe ourselves we cannot draw straight conclusions, and having no conclusions of our own, we borrow half thoughts from unaccounted-for sources, misapply them to things we learn of by hearsay, and with such a receipt for living, we breathe for seventy years or so, mere monuments of insensibility, with faith in our own infallibility and ignorant scorn of all else. It is not surprising that the ploughers weep at the spectacle we present, and smash our idols because they were so glaringly unworthy of us, while all the time real gods were non-existent only for lack of our worship.
We must be driven with whips to the sources (those fountain-heads visited by the few) in order to bring back ourselves, the only possession a man needs, and the one he is longest in finding. We persist in believing the travellers’ tales of people who never wanted to get to the source of things, and who, in all probability, would have failed to recognize it if chance had caused them to stumble at its brink. We believe that all is for the best because such a state of affairs needs no changing. We do not want to live; it is difficult and exposing, and with a little care can be nicely avoided. We contrive a comfortable evasion for ourselves, and we start our children off with a perversion of facts so that they too can be comatose all the days of their existence if they so wish; after which we are surprised, not to say grieved and displeased, at the lack of self-control on the part of the ploughers. What the ploughers say cannot be even half true, for if it were it would apply to us, and it being out of the question that we are anything but upright and enlightened people, the ploughers are of course ridiculous, eccentric characters, and, above all, wits. If a man says something disturbing, call him a wit at once. Laugh or you are lost. If the truth of his remark made you jump, keep at it, and there is just a chance that you may be thought to be shaking with laughter.
The ploughers do not always know that they are ploughers. It is sometimes necessary to the success of their work that they believe all they say; consequently it is an insult to confront them with the epithet. There are only a few of them to a generation, but there springs up under their influence a goodly body of willing helpers. People who see that if one felt so inclined, if one deliberately preferred it, it would be quite possible to believe in even the madnesses of the ploughers; people who find it a stimulating exercise to go their lengths with the result that they are more supple in their normality afterward. If these small, quiet folk, whom one knows to be leading perfectly humdrum lives — if they think such strange things, there may be the smallest, the most minute possible grain of truth in them. They write book reviews praising the ploughers inordinately, and imitate their styles and ideals in short essays. They are average folk themselves, and their championship of the extremists has tremendous results. If these small, quiet folk, whom one knows to be leading perfectly humdrum lives — if they think such strange things, there may be the smallest, the most minute possible grain of truth in them.Then all the stuffy little people, unhappily, but driven on by the awful doubt that has entered their souls, begin to wonder if the things they have always thought wholly right may be only partially so, and they pause, they actually pause before laying down immutable laws for all mankind. They do not go so far as to say they catch glimmers of two sides of a subject, but the cocksure look goes out from their eyes, and the ploughers’ most fantastic efforts are justified when the average man refrains from knowing absolutely and substitutes an encouraging, puzzled smile.
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