My friends, I am not arguing that you and I must drink the dregs of
defeat, or that our lives must fill up with poverty or sorrow, or
become wrecks. But I am insisting upon what I see written all around me
in the affairs of everyday life, that none of us will ever know real
success in any line of human endeavor until that success flows from the
fullness of our experience just as the songs came from the life of
Carrie Jacobs-Bond.
The world is full of theorists, dreamers, uplifters, reformers, who
have worthy visions but are not able to translate them into practical
realities. They go around with their heads in the clouds, looking
upward, and half the time their feet are in the flower-beds or
trampling upon their fellow men they dream of helping. Their ideas must
be forged into usefulness available for this day upon the anvil of
experience.
Many of the most brilliant theorists have been the greatest failures in
practice.
There are a thousand who can tell you what is the matter with things to
one person who can give you a practical way to fix them.
I used to have respect amounting to reverence for great readers and
book men. I used to know a man who could tell in what book almost
anything you could think of was discussed, and perhaps the page. He was
a walking library index. I thought him a most wonderful man. Indeed, in
my childhood I thought he was the greatest man in the world.
He was a remarkable man—a great reader and with a memory that retained
it all. That man could recite chapters and volumes. He could give you
almost any date. He could finish almost any quotation. His conversation
was largely made up of classical quotations.
But he was one of the most helpless men I have ever seen in practical
life. He seemed to be unable to think and reason for himself. He could
quote a page of John Locke, but somehow the page didn't supply the one
sentence needed for the occasion. The man was a misfit on earth. He was
liable to put the gravy in his coffee and the gasoline in the fire. He
seemed never to have digested any of the things in his memory. Since I
have grown up I always think of that man as an intellectual cold
storage plant.
The greatest book is the textbook of the University of Hard Knocks, the
Book of Human Experience the "sermons in stones" and the "books in
running brooks." Most fortunate is he who has learned to read
understandingly from it.
Note the sweeping, positive statements of the young person.
Note the cautious, specific statements of the person who has lived long
in this world.
Our education is our progress from the sweeping, positive, wholesale
statements we have not proved, to the cautious, specific statements we
have proved.
