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WOES OF THE MISUNDERSTOOD

FTER all, neither wisdom nor destiny amount to much

unless human beings can manage somehow to understand each other. Considering the poverty of our means of communication with each other, the plain Scripture rule of thinking no evil is the only one to save us.

Our language not only conceals thought, but it manages to conceal about every decent principle and aspiration that lurks within us. It tangles up the best of friends and has parted lovers that not all the blast of time or adverse fate could sever. Half the crimes and wars of the Christian centuries rage about the words and teachings of the Christ, and, although nineteen centuries of scholars have been trying to make out what they mean, nobody is sure of it yet. Hamlet is a mooning maniac to one sage critic, and a deep and subtle scholar and philosopher to another. At the universities one professor presents Macbeth as an essentially good, brave and heroic soldier, ruined by his thoroughly fiendish wife, and another as a poor coward in both deed and purpose, hung like a millstone around the neck of a woman who would have been one of the greatest characters in history without him.

Nearly every writer who puts pen to paper is damned for what he never knew he was saying, and keys, commentators and women's clubs give themselves to reading into the remnant of the saved something that they never dreamed of saying. The "June baby" who cried "such a much" over her apronful of flowers or kittens is about as neat an expositor

of the tangle as recent examples furnish. And yet when people open their mouths and speak it is fair to believe that they mean something, and unless their actions belie it, something decent. There really ought to be such a thing as character that could stand despite all the confusion of tongues that could be brought to bear upon it.

A lover and man of the quill, gone on a journey recently, sent his love a letter that seemed to write him one of the "gay deceivers," against whom all her Byronic favorites had warned her. Being of an explosive nature, she was about to create an earthquake that would engulf both love and the lover, when she bethought herself that this wandering Ulysses had been rather a stanch devotee at her shrine for some eight or ten years and it was curious that he should undergo so tremendous a sea change in the space of a few weeks. Hence she gave him the benefit of the doubt and a chance to explain himself. And, lo! it turned out that he meant just the opposite of what he said and was overwhelmed at the misunderstanding. Since which time these two intellectual and long familiar creatures are using a kind of letter writer's manual to preserve themselves. Before using, however, they might have been a light to the world if from their neat experience they could have taught human beings to believe in each other in spite of our idiotic tongue.

Really, "to understand is to forgive" in nearly all our blundering offenses against each other, and if our words and theories could be sifted down to some clear and accurate expression of what we verily do think and mean, half our disagreements in creed, code and principle would disappear at a breath.

Some day, perhaps, there will arise, as Whitman suspected, "the true son of God singing his songs," speaking his language, and then they who are not already lost in a

babel of tongues will be able to unveil themselves to each other without fear of a policeman, a heresy trial or a ban from the insapient. But, meantime, it remains true, as Macaulay observed, that the "flashes of silence" are the most "delightful" part of any conversation, and certainly the safest. The picture of Carlyle dismissing Tennyson after an afternoon visit with the eager invitation, "Come again, Alfred, we have had such a fine chat," when neither of them had uttered a syllable during the entire interview, is one of the most refreshing, as well as significant ones, in all literature. That it requires two well-attuned souls to accomplish it is no reason why even lesser creatures might not taste such bliss, for who knows what kindred spirits in any circle might not be beating in unison with our own if we could keep still long enough to find it out?

It was noted recently that in their ideas of diplomacy in conducting a campaign the man said "don't talk" and the woman "talk ceaselessly." The end in view is the measure of the wisdom in either course, for if it is to befuddle an adversary what better can one do than to pelt him with words, words, words, and the discomfiture to which poor tongue-tied man has been driven by such a policy ought to teach him the value of it in the ruder warfare of life. But when it comes to the heights, the spirit altitudes and communication, words are too gross. It is about as that poetseer tells us, "When the finer feelings are touched one can only have music or silence." Writers like Maeterlinck in all the grace of poetry and art have tried to put us in communication with life and relations beyond the bounds of sense, elemental, universal, and yet through the necessity of speaking in terms of sense the grossest meanings and ideas have been attributed to them. How then, shall the ungifted

be expected to save themselves in their dull grapple with

the indiscretions of speech? It is a tender legend which tells us that the tears of the recording angel wash out all the evil or the unfortunate words of the good man, and if some kind lord of life would teach the recording angels of earth to do likewise this world would be a better place to live in. As it is, the very goodness of the saints is held on the tip of the tongue and goes down with a misinterpreted phrase or symbol.

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OTHER PEOPLE'S ILLS

PROMINENT business man recently sprained his

back by some rash stroke in athletics and came home to his wife more or less disabled for life. When her sympathy grew tearful he assured her that there was scarcely a man of his acquaintance not largely the worse for some such physical injury. This seemed to comfort them both, and the disaster to the spinal column became a secondary consideration.

The philosophy is as old as humanity, and about as curious. Why it should comfort a man with a broken back to know that another man's back is broken it is not easy to say. But apparently it does, though heaven is not the legitimate outcome of such a philosophy. Indeed, Swedenborg seems to be its true interpreter when he tells us that the good Lord, out of his tender mercy, provided "the hells” where, as it were, people of broken backs and lame limbs in morals could get together and enjoy what Plutarch calls the comfort of society in shipwreck. Meantime to educate us up to it is the part of much of the instruction offered from the very nursery in the line of comforting reflections upon the sins and miseries of other people.

That we are all poor sinners is a relief that theology itself offers to the strain of that deeper cry, be merciful to me a sinner, though nothing in all the history of ethics can show that one human soul has been helped by it. Poets and philosophers of course of all ages have tried to make suffering as the common lot the bases of individual endurance,