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Op. 29, Etc.
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly vol. 56, no. 2911 (October 5, 1912) : 24
Purdue copy/scan (via hathitrust) : link
archive.org : link
 

      We would be so glad to have writers number their works as composers do, and add a satisfying “Op. 29” to the title. We so frequently want to know in what sequence an author arrived at an attitude, and whether felicity of expression is the bubble of his youth or the surety of his maturity. We want to know how he developed whether he lapsed to thoughtful grayness, sank to mechanical repetition of his first freshness, or worked through impressionable variety to a true, firmly held note of his own. We are so often put to it to know.
      A biography gives the sequence occasionally, but we cannot wait for lives to be written of our almost contemporaries. So often one book is the postscript of the other, when it seems a contradiction. In the first is expressed a theory, and by the time the second comes to be written the author has felt the fear of the interpreter who will wield his truth so that it will have all the vices of an untruth; and the author protests and prods the reader of his first book in his second. We want to know of this repartee between the men who make life and the public who paralyze it. We want to know which of the books is a mood brought about by the pressing circumstances of the moment and which is a position taken largely, and after a long and tested tendency in that direction. The sequence of their work would not give us all this, but it would give us at least a basis for surmises. We would not feel as uncomfortably at sea as we do now. The fragment published after a man’s death could not be taken for his interrupted last work, but would then be known as the early discarded start it sometimes is.

      The practical older generation is enraged by the theorizing of the younger generation. The slightest fragment of theory straying into a conversation, and the older generation is roused on the instant. They take it as a personal reflection on them. They have not an instant’s patience for it. A method applied to a simple thing like a baby irritates them unspeakably. Have not babies grown up since the beginning of time?? — so that to begin now weighing them weekly is mere affectation and nonsense. It shows how silly modern mothers are, and how ill adapted to bring up babies. If the mother keeps a chart of his health, it is an added taunt. It makes grandmothers sputter. They do not object to science when applied to modern things, for that is merely to put queer things with queerer thingsThey do not object to science when applied to modern things, for that is merely to put queer things with queerer things, and concerns no one but the incomprehensible people responsible for them, but babies — simple, homely, cozy, obvious things like babies — to begin being elaborate and portentous about them at this late day, is to criticize harshly all the perfectly good people who have gone before you.
      Ordinary common sense is what the older generation advocates. Just the thing that everybody has or ought to have. The younger generation alone being oddly lacking in it. It stands to reason that certain things are good for one and that others are not; why be so irritating and pretentious as to talk about proteids? If a baby is petulant, he is teething; it is absurd to say that he is hoodwinking you into playing with him or that he has had too much farinacious food. The thing to do is to make strange and loud noises for him and to give him clocks or pocketbooks or lamp shades to play with. The position of the younger generation is trying, for the baby invariably approves of the ideas of the older generation and he even goes so far as to thrive on them. It lights a gleam of triumph in the eye of the older generation and makes the eyes of the younger generation furtive, not to say evasive.
      Gardeners, who are amazingly like grandmothers in a certain dogmatic prejudice for practice as against theory, go a step further and declare that all gardening books and the ideas contained therein are a deep-laid plan to prevent one learning how to garden. They say that they have looked into the matter for themselves, and they know for a fact that these people with theories about gardening tell you things “as could na’ be.” they have looked into the matter for themselves, and they know for a fact that these people with theories about gardening tell you things “as could na’ be.” What is more, they deliberately withhold facts just to trap the innocent person and make him spend his money. The iniquity of people who write about gardens is past belief. They do not know anything about it themselves, and they try to conceal the dreadful fact by writing things that no one else can understand.
      There is no use in having ideas about a thing that has always been and, what is more, has always been precisely as it is now, except that now it is not quite as good as it used to be. The way to learn about it is to begin when the mind is young, and get the hang of the thing sensibly for yourself. There has been many a good garden spoiled by these new-fangled notions. Plants do not take to them, and as a final argument the gardener points to yews indefinitely aged and says: “I'd like fine to ken how much theory there was in the growin’ o’ that !”
      Without an exception they spurn theory, these people who have been successful with practice. It attacks the very place where they feel safe and sure. It grafts something they cannot get the hang of on to the precise thing that gave them a sense of pleasant capacity, even of superiority over the young things who had not yet learned by long repetition. They are so often right, and when they are not the reason is wrapped in mystery and blamed on the god of chance. When they triumph they experience a relish greater than any to be got out of a well-working system. Theories are inhuman, impersonal, barren, and uninviting; above all, theories are not of them. They stand a good deal, the older generation, but they beg that you will wait to be theoretical until they are no more.
 

3 August 2026