Delphi Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Illustrated)

by Bierce, Ambrose

  If the ghosts care to prove their existence as objective phenomena they are unfortunate in always discovering themselves to inaccurate observers, to say nothing of the bad luck of frightening them into fits. That the seers of ghosts are inaccurate observers, and therefore incredible witnesses, is clear from their own stories. Who ever heard of a naked ghost? The apparition is always said to present himself (as he certainly should) properly clothed, either “in his habit as he lived” or in the apparel of the grave. Herein the witness must be at fault: whatever power of apparition after dissolution may inhere in mortal flesh and blood, we can hardly be expected to believe that cotton, silk, wool and linen have the same mysterious gift If textile fabrics had that property they would sometimes manifest it independently, one would think — would “materialize” visibly without a ghost inside, a greatly simpler apparition than “the grin without the cat.”

  Ask any proponent of ghosts if he think that the products of the loom can “revisit the glimpses of the moon” after they have duly decayed, or, while still with us, can show themselves in a place where they are not. If he have no suspicion, poor man, of the trap set for him, he will pronounce the thing impossible and absurd, thereby condemning himself out of his own mouth; for assuredly such powers in these material things are necessary to the garmenting of spooks.

  Now, by the law falsus in uno falsus in omnibus we are compelled to reject all the ghost stories that have ever been seriously told. If the observer (let him be credited with the best intentions) has observed so badly as to think he saw what he did not see, and could not have seen, in one particular, to what credence is he entitled with regard to another? His error in the matter of the “long white robe” or other garment where no long white robe or other garment could be puts him out of court altogether. Resurrection of woolen, linen, silk, fur, lace, feathers, hooks and eyes, buttons, hatpins and the like > — well, really, that is going far.

  No, we draw the line at clothing. The materialized spook appealing to our senses for recognition of his ghostly character must authenticate himself otherwise than by familiar and remembered habiliments. He must be credentialed by nudity — and that regardless of temperature or who may happen to be present. Nay, it is to be feared that he must eschew his hair, as well as his habiliments, and “swim into our ken” utterly bald; for the scientists tell us with becoming solemnity that hair is a purely vegetable growth and no essential part of us. If he deem these to be hard conditions he is at liberty to remain on his reservation and try to endow us with a terrifying sense of himself by other means.

  In brief, the conditions under which the ghost must appear in order to command the faith of an enlightened world are so onerous that he may prefer to remain away — to the unspeakable impoverishment of letters and art.

  1902.

  SOME ASPECTS OF EDUCATION

  WHEN Richard Olney was Secretary of State, “Ouida” (who had nothing to do with the matter) addressed to him a remonstrance against exclusion of illiterate immigrants, explaining that the analphabets in her employ were better servants than those who could read. “I have had for twenty years,” she said, “an old man (what is called ‘the odd man’ in England), and he can be sent with fifty commissions to purchase objects. Detail him orally and he will execute these commissions with no single error.” Illiteracy may be a valuable quality in a servant, but we are not taking in immigrants with a view to the betterment of our domestic service; it may qualify a man to do errands, but as a help to him in reading a ballot it does not amount to much. As a claim to high political preferment it is distinctly less valid than a bald head and a knack at gabble.

  Nevertheless, “Ouida” was not altogether wrong. A man is not made intelligent by mere ability to read and write: his little learning is a dangerous thing to himself and to his country. The only reading that such men do is of the most degrading kind: it debases them, mind and heart, gives them a false estimate of their worth, magnifies their woes, and fills them with a sense of their numbers and their power. Eventually they a rise” and have to be shot. Or they succeed, and having first put to death the gifted rascals who incited and led them, they set up a Government of Unreason which they lack the sense to maintain, and their last state is no better than their first. That is the dull, dreary old sequence of events, so familiar to the student of history, That is the beaten path leading back to its beginning, which must be traveled again and again without a break in the monotony of the march. That is Progress — the brute revolt of the ignorant mass, their resubjection by the intelligent few; nowhere justice, nowhere righteousness, everywhere and always force, greed, selfishness and sin. That is the universal struggle — sometimes sluggish, sometimes turbulent, always without an outcome and with no hope of one. Along that hideous path our American free feet are merrily keeping time to the beating of hearts which, swelling to-day with the pride of progress, will shrink to-morrow with the dread of doom.

  What then? — is popular education mischievous? Popular education is good for many things; it is not good for the stability of states. Whatever its advantages, it has this disadvantage: it produces “industrial discontent”; and industrial discontent is the first visible symptom of national wreck. Prate as we will of the “dignity of labor,” we convince no one that labor is anything other than a hard, imperious necessity, to be avoided if possible.. Education promises avoidance — a promise which to the mass of workers is not, and can not be, kept. It brings to Labor a bitter disappointment which in time is transmuted into political mischief. The only man that labors with a song in his heart is he that knows nothing but to labor. Give him education — enlarge by ever so little the scope of his thought — make him permeable to a sense of the pleasures of life and his own privations, and you set up a quarrel between him and his condition. He may remain in his lowly station, but that will be because he cannot get out of it. He may continue to perform his hard and hateful work, but he will no longer perform it cheerfully and well.

  What is the remedy? — educate him still more? Then he will no longer perform it at all — he will die first! Those of us who have tried both may assure him that head-work is harder than hand-work, that it takes more out of one, that its rewards give no greater happiness; he observes that none of us renounces it for the other kind. He does not believe us, and it would not affect him if he did.

  What, as a matter of fact, is the public advantage of even that higher education which we tax ourselves more and more to make general? Look at our overcrowded professions, whose “ethics” and practices grow worse and worse from increasing competition. Not one of them is any longer a really “honorable” profession. Look at the monstrous overgrowth of our cities, those congested brains of the nation. They draw to themselves all the output of the colleges and the universities, and as much of that of the country schools as can get a precarious foothold and live — God knows how — in hope to “better its condition.” A pretty picture, truly: a population roughly divisible into a conscienceless crowd of brain-workers who have so “bettered their condition” as to live by prey; a sullen multitude of manual laborers blowing the coals of discontent and plotting a universal overthrow. Above the one perch the primping monkeys of “society,” chattering in meaningless glee; below the other the brute tramp welters in his grime. And with it all a national wealth that amazes the world and profits nobody — the country’s wonder, pride and curse. Still we go on with a maniacal hope, adding school to school, college to college, university to university, and — unconscious provision for their product — almshouses, asylums and prisons in prodigal abundance.

  I am far from affirming that the industrial discontent which for more than a half century has been an augmenting menace to our national life, has its sole origin in popular education conjoined with the higher education of too many. For any social phenomenon there is no lack of causes. For this there are, among others, two of special importance. First, the duplication of the labor force by that female competition which, beginning its displacements pret
ty well up in the scale, drives the unlucky male to lower and lower levels, until forced out of the lowest by invasion by his own sex from higher ones, he finds no rest for the sole of his foot and takes to the road, an irreclaimable tramp. Second, the amazing multiplication of “labor-saving” machinery, whose disadvantages are swift, and advantages slow — which throws men out of work, who starve while awaiting restitution in the lower price of its products, many of which, even when cheap, are imperfectly edible. So I do not say that the schoolmaster is the only pestilence that walketh at noonday. But I do say — and one with half an eye can observe it for himself and in his own person — that learning in any degree indisposes to manual toil in some degree; that the scholar will not labor musclewise if he can help it, nor with a contented spirit when he can not help it.

  In his Founders’ Day address at Stanford University, the President of another university said:

  Usually an education will pay, but even when the professions are crowded and he [the college man] can find no place he is still the better for it if he will but accept some lower occupation in life.

  But “usually” he will not; he will wedge himself into some “profession,” whether he can make an honest living in it or not. And failing to make an honest living, he will make a living that is not honest. In the service of his belly and his back, he will resort to all manner of shady and unprofessional conduct. His competition forces other weak members of his profession into the same crooked courses, to which the public becomes accustomed and indifferent. What was once unprofessional becomes professional and respectable; with every accession of new men, the standard of allowable conduct falls lower, and to-day the learned professions are little more than organized conspiracies to plunder.

  The distinguished author of the address is not without dreams of educational expansion. He says:

  Let the common people flock by hundreds of thousands to the higher institutions of learning; then the whole community will be lifted to a happier level.

  As in Germany, where men of university education are as thick as flies and the fields are tilled by women. Then educate the women and the field must be tilled by monkeys. Treading that “happier level” of German civilization are hundreds of thousands of scholars, becomingly stoop-shouldered and fitly be-spectacled, whom a day’s wage of an American farm hand would support in unaccustomed luxury for a week. But not a mother’s son of them will perform manual labor if he can help it. Nor will any of the corresponding class here or elsewhere. To educate “the man with a hoe” is to divorce him from his hoe — a prompt and irrevocable separation. A good deal of hoeing is needful in this world, and not so much lawing and physicking and preaching and writing and painting and the rest of it.

  If I were dictator I would abolish every “institution of learning” above the grammar schools, excepting one or two universities. I would make a university in fact, as well as in name. It should not only turn out the finest scholars in the world, but it should be a place of original research in a sense that none of our universities now is. From the grammar school to its portal the student should make his upward way unaided — enough would accomplish the feat and thereby prove their fitness; and those who failed would not be greatly harmed by the effort. I am not quite sure if I should limit the number of students by law; probably that could best be done by the rigor of examinations. Under my dictatorship we would not be a community of “college graduates,” mostly men of prey, but neither should we be so top-heavy that in some social convulsion the country would “turn turtle” and stand on its head.

  THE REIGN OF THE RING

  THE statement is made on what seems as good authority as in such a matter can be cited that in Europe the custom of wearing finger-rings is “going out” — to “come in” again, doubtless, with renewed vitality. It is hardly to be expected that it will suffer a permanent extinction while human character remains what it is; and the acutest observer can discern no symptoms of change in that. The original impulse moving the gentlemen and ladies of the Stone Age to circumclude their untidy digits with annular sections of the shinbones of their vanquished foemen while awaiting a knowledge of the metals is apparently not nearly exhausted, and we are far less likely to see the end of it than it is to see the end of us. It is more probable, indeed, that the nosering will return to bless us than that the finger-ring will add itself to the melancholy list of good things gone before.

  Amongst the several tribes of our species the habit of encircling the human finger with something not contemplated in the original design of that variously useful member is almost universal, and it so far antedates history and tradition that by another sort of lying than either it has been outfitted with a divine origin. In ancient Egypt it was ascribed to Osiris, whose priests were distinguished from meaner mortals by finger-rings of a peculiar and mystical design, having a profound significance all the more impressive by reason of its impenetrability to conjecture. Perchol, however, has an ingenious theory that it was intended to puzzle the Egyptologist of the time-to-be; an instance of foresight which one can commend while deploring the unworthy motive at the back of it.

  Amongst the ancient Jews rings were symbols of authority, as we see in the case of Joseph, to whom the Pharaoh gave one when he made him Governor; and this was a common use of rings in all antiquity. They were credentials of ambassadors and messengers, and served in place of written commissions, which, frequently it was impossible to give, for the commissioning power could not write, and which would have been ineffective, for most other persons could not read. In matters of business the ring was a power-of-attorney. Its usefulness in this way was suggested, doubtless, by the difficulty of imposture: written authorization may easily be forged, but a ring can not well be obtained from the finger of its owner without his consent.

  The attribution of magical and medicinal virtues to rings pervades all ancient and mediaeval story. Gyges, King of Lydia, had a ring by which the wearer could become invisible — a result accomplishable, though sometimes too tardily, by our modern plan of going away. One of the Kings of Lombardy had a ring which told him in what direction to travel. It may have contained a compass, though to that theory is opposed the objection that he antedated the invention of that instrument. But (I make the suggestion with humility) may not his have been the compass afterward invented? Medicated rings were in popular use in ancient Rome. An efficacious design for these, according to Trallian, a physician of the fourth century, was Hercules strangling the Nemæan lion. This, he assures us, is, if well engraved, a specific for stomach-ache. Throughout mediaeval Europe belief in the healing power of certain rings was widely diffused; but then, as now, persons free from gross superstitions preferred to treat their disorders by touching the relics of saints.

  Rings engraved with the names of the Magi were once in great medical repute, but in 1674 a learned prelate threw discredit upon them by showing that the true names were not known, being variously given as Melchior, Balthasar and Jasper; Apellius, Amerus and Damascus; Ator, Sator and Petratoras. As the author of Ben-Hur has given the weight of his authority to the first three names, the healing-ring may with some confidence be engraved with them and pushed back into its old place in public esteem. But before risking any money in the manufacture it would be prudent to test upon a few patients the accuracy of General Wallace’s historical knowledge by administering the names of his choice internally.

  A ring presented to Edward the Confessor cured epilepsy, and after the death of the royal owner by another and hardier disease it was preserved as a relic in Westminster Abbey. Rings which had been blessed, or even touched, by the sovereign were for some centuries considered worthy of a place in the British materia medica; and such would doubtless command a high price to-day in the American market — not to keep the purchaser in good health, but to make his neighbors sick with envy.

  Of all rings possessing magical or medicinal virtues the toadstone ring of our fathers was the most interesting. It was well known to those ingenious natural
ists that

  the toad, ugly and venomous,

  Wears yet a precious jewel in his head,

  as Shakspeare was at the trouble to point out. It was customary to set this in a ring and wear it, for it had the useful property of changing color and sweating when poison was about. As poison was one of the commonest means by which our easy-going ancestors accomplished the end of one another’s sojourn in this vale of tears a monitor of that kind was extremely useful to have literally “on hand at meal-time.”

  Certain stones were once regarded as having maleficent properties and were never set in rings. A chronicler relates that a certain knight in one of the crusades possessed himself of a costly scimitar belonging to a Saracen whom he had slain, and became so expert in its use that he discarded his own weapon and used the other. But from that time forth he met with nothing but disaster and shame. It was discovered that in fitting the scimitar with a cross-hilt, as Christian piety demanded, the malicious armorer had substituted for one of the gems an emerald, which by some secret process he had disguised. The malign stone and the armorer’s head having been removed the prowess of the knight was again effective and he rose to great distinction and honor. In the folk-lore of some of the riparian peoples along the Danube the topaz was listed as a peculiar possession of the Adversary of Souls. It was held that if one could by force or fraud get a topaz ring upon an enemy’s finger it would be impossible to remove it, and the victim would go, body and soul, to the devil. Advancing enlightenment has effaced these silly superstitions; we now know that the opal only is really malign.