Who Was Jeremy?

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Title:     Who Was Jeremy?
Author: Charles S. Brooks [More Titles by Brooks]

Who was Jeremy Bentham? I have run on his name recently two or three times. I could, of course, find out. The Encyclopedia--volume Aus to Bis--would enlighten me. Right now, downstairs in the bookcase--up near the top where the shabby books are kept--among the old Baedekers--there is a life of him by Leslie Stephen. No! That is a life of Hobbes. I don't know anything about Hobbes either. It seems to me that he wrote the "Leviathan," whatever that was. But there is a Bentham somewhere around the house. But I have not read it.

In a rough way I know who Bentham was. He lived perhaps a hundred years ago and he had a theory of utility. Utility was to clean the infected world. Even the worst of us were to rise out of the tub white and perfect. It was Bentham who wished to revisit the world in a hundred years to see how sweet and clean we had become. He was to utility what Malthus was to population. Malthus! There is another hard one. It is the kind of name that is cut round the top of a new City Hall to shame citizens by their ignorance.

I can go downstairs this minute and look up Bentham. Is it worth while? But then I might be called to dinner in the middle of the article, or I might be wanted to move the refrigerator. There is a musty smell, it seems, in the drain pipe, and the stubborn casters are turned sidewise. It hardly seems worth the chance and effort.

There are a great many things that really do stir my curiosity, and even those things I don't look up. Or tardily, after my ignorance has been exposed. The other day the moon arose--as a topic--at the round table of the club where I eat lunch. It had really never occurred to me that we had never seen its other side, that we never could--except by a catastrophe--unless it smashed into a planet and was thrown heels up. How does it keep itself so balanced that one face is forever hid? Try to roll an apple around a pumpkin and meanwhile spin the pumpkin. Try this on your carpet. I take my hat off to the moon.

I have been very ignorant of the moon. All of these years I have regarded it as a kindly creature that showed itself now and then merely on a whim. It was just jogging around of an evening, so I supposed, and looked us up. It was an old neighbor who dropped in after dinner, as it were, for a bit of gossip and an apple. But even the itinerant knife-grinder--whose whirling wheel I can hear this minute below me in the street--even the knife-grinder has a route. He knows at what season we grow dull. What necessity, then, of ours beckons to the moon? Perhaps it comes with a silver brush to paint the earth when it grows shabby with the traffic of the day. Perhaps it shows itself to stir a lover who halts coldly in his suit. The pink god, they say, shoots a dangerous arrow when the moon is full.

The extent of my general ignorance is amazing. And yet, I suppose, by persistence and energy I could mend it. Old Doctor Dwight used to advise those of us who sat in his classroom to read a hard book for half an hour each day. How those half hours would mount up through the years! What a prodigious background of history, of science, of literature, one would gain as the years revolved! If I had followed his advice I would today be bursting with knowledge of Jeremy Bentham; I would never have been tripped upon the moon.

How ignorant most of us are of the times in which we live! We see the smoke and fires of revolution in Europe. We hear the cries of famine and disease, but our perception is lost in the general smudge. How are the Balkans parceled? How is the nest of nationalities along the Danube disposed? This morning there is revolt in Londonderry. What parties are opposite in the quarrel? Trouble brews in Chile. Is Tacni-Arica a district or a mountain range? The Åland Islands breed war in the north. Today there is a casualty list from Bagdad. The Bolsheviki advance on Warsaw. Those of us who are cobblers tap our shoes unruffled, tailors stitch, we bargain in the market--all of us go about on little errands without excitement when the news is brought.

And then there is mechanics. This is now so preeminently a mechanical world that no one ought to be entirely ignorant of cylinders and cogs and carburetors. And yet my own motor is as dark as Africa. I am as ignorant of a carburetor as of the black stomach of a zebra. Once a carpenter's bench was given me at Christmas, fitted up with all manner of tricky tools. The bookshelves I built in my first high enthusiasm have now gone down to the basement to hold the canned fruit, where they lean with rickets against the wall. Even the box I made to hold the milk bottles on the back steps has gone the way of flesh. Any chicken-coop of mine would topple in the wind. Well-instructed hens would sit around on fence-posts and cackle at my efforts with a saw. Certainly, if a company of us were thrown on a desert island, it would not be I who proved the Admirable Crichton. Not by my shrewdness could we build a hut. Robinson Crusoe contrived a boat. If I tied a raft together it would be sure to sink.

Where are the Virgin Islands? What makes a teapot bubble? What forces bring the rain and tempest?

In cooking I go no farther than an egg. Birds, to me, are either sparrows or robins. I know an elm and a maple, but hemlocks and pines and firs mix me up. I am not to be trusted to pull the weeds. Up would come the hollyhocks. Japanese prints and Chinese vases sit in a world above me.

I can thump myself in front without knowing whether I jar my stomach or my liver. I have no notion where my food goes when it disappears. When once I have tilted my pudding off its spoon my knowledge ceases. It is as a child of Israel on journey in the wilderness. Does it pass through my thorax? And where do my lungs branch off?

I know nothing of etchings, and I sit in gloomy silence when friends toss Whistler and Rembrandt across the table. I know who our mayor is, but I scratch my head to name our senator. And why does the world crumple up in hills and mountains?

I could look up Jeremy Bentham and hereafter I would know all about him. And I could look up the moon. And Hobbes. And Leslie Stephen, who wrote a book about him. And a man named Maitland who wrote a life of Stephen. Somebody must have written about Maitland. I could look him up, too. And I could read about the Balkans and tell my neighbors whether they are tertiary or triassic. I could pursue the thorax to its lair. Saws and chicken-coops, no doubt, are an engaging study. I might take a tree-book to the country, or seek an instructive job in a garage.

But what is the use? Right in front of Jeremy Bentham, in Aus to Bis, is George Bentham, an English botanist. To be thorough I would have to read about him also. Then following along is Bentivoglio, and Benzene--a long article on benzene. And Beowulf! No educated person should be quite ignorant of him. Albrecht Bitzius was a Swiss novelist. Somehow he has escaped me entirely. And Susanna Blamire, "the muse of Cumberland"! She sounds engaging. Who is there so incurious that he would not give an evening to Borneo? And the Bryophyta?--which I am glad to learn include "the mosses and the liverworts." Dear me! it is quite discouraging.

And then, when I am gaining information on Hobbes, the Hittites, right in front, take my eye. Hilarius wrote "light verses of the goliardic type"--whatever that means. And the hippopotamus! "the largest representative of the non-ruminating artiodactyle ungulate mammals." I must sit with the hippopotamus and worm his secret.

And after I have learned to use the saw, I would have to take up the plane. And then the auger. And Whistler. And Japanese prints. And a bird book.

It is very discouraging.

I stand with Pope. Certainly, unless one is very thirsty and has a great deal of vacant time, it is best to avoid the Pierian spring.

Jeremy can go and hang himself. I am learning to play golf.

[The end]
Charles S. Brooks's essay: Who Was Jeremy?

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