ADVENTURES IN INDIGENCE AND OTHER ESSAYS

"It is doubtful whether the present volume should be looked on as a collection of essays, or might not more aptly be called a book of personal experience. The true essayist offers you fewer doubts and peradventures. He comes with clear philosophies, to which he means to convert you. He is well armed for controversy. He will cite you Scripture, the Decalogue, and the statutes. You will find it difficult to pick a flaw in his argument. Never hope to prove him wrong! He leaves no man reasonable choice but to agree with him. He is a sworn advocate. His essay is his brief. If he be a man of force, his cause is won before the jurymen take their places. Be sure he will prove his point before any just judge. The case, it seems when you come to think upon it later, might almost have gone by default, so little is there any argument left you.
The papers in the present volume are not so forethought, nor are they designed to be so convincing. There is more memory than doctrine in them; more experience than authority, theology, or faith. In them will be found little that is taught by the schools, upheld by the courts, or propounded by the Fathers. Perhaps they contain not so much what I believe, as what, because of persistent personal observation and testing and proving, of my own, I have been at last unable to disbelieve. These papers, in short, deal with none of the usual and traditional theories of life, but rather with life as I have intimately found it and lived it.
It is one thing to uphold loyally an ancient faith which has from the beginning been taught one, or to which one has, on the respected authority of others, been converted; it is a wholly other thing to uphold sincerely, and for what it may be worth, a belief which one has but evolved and tested and proven for one's self. God forbid it should be upheld arrogantly! For, as the first method is calculated to produce devout believers, zealous to convert those whose beliefs differ from their own, so does the other tend, rather, to make devout observers; and as the passionate believer is to the last unable to understand how others could believe differently than he does; the devout observer is eager to mark where and how the[Pg ix] observations of others differ from his own, or, it may be, happily coincide with them. He has a persistent desire to know whether, given the same experience and facts, others will approve of his findings.
It is for this reason, no doubt, that I find myself wondering whether the reader of this volume has discovered, as I have,—all tradition, teaching, theory, and articles of faith to the contrary,—indisputable evidence of the mysterious and imponderable powers of the poor. Has Life the Educator revealed herself to another in such a fashion as to me? Have you who read—you also—a secret belief in certain unmistakable superiorities hidden away in the unwritten records and the unadministered laws of lesser creatures than ourselves? Have you, like myself, lost birthdays irretrievably, and found in their place that larger nativity writ in a more universal horoscope?
Though these papers do not claim to be more than personal records of experience and adventure and consequent belief, yet there may be those who will decry the persistent personality, who will condemn the seeming[Pg x] egotism. To these there is recommended—perhaps a little wistfully—the paper, toward the last, which attempts to deal with this rather widespread failing.FROM THE BOOK"