Little Candles

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Title:     Little Candles
Author: Charles S. Brooks [More Titles by Brooks]

High conceit of one's self and a sureness of one's opinion are based so insecurely in experience that one is perplexed how their slight structure stands. One marvels why these emphatic builders trust again their glittering towers. Surely anyone who looks into himself and sees its void or malformation ought by rights to shrink from adulation of self, and his own opinion should appear to him merely as one candle among a thousand.

And yet this conceit of self outlasts innumerable failures, and any new pinnacle that is set up, neglecting the broken rubble on the ground and all the wreckage at the base, boasts again of its sure communion with the stars. A man, let us say, has gone headlong from one formula of belief into another. In each, for a time, he burns with a hot conviction. Then his faith cools. His god no longer nods. But just when you think that failure must have brought him modesty, again he amazes you with the golden prospect of a new adventure. He has climbed in his life a hundred hillocks, thinking each to be a mountain. He has journeyed on many paths, but always has fallen in a bog. Conceit is a thin bubble in the wind, it is an empty froth and breath, yet, hammered into ship-plates, it defies the U-boat.

On every sidewalk, also, we see some fine fellow, dressed and curled to his satisfaction, parading in the sun. An accident of wealth or birth has marked him from the crowd. He has decked his outer walls in gaudy color, but is bare within. He is a cypher, but golden circumstance, like a figure in the million column, gives him substance. Yet the void cries out on all matters in dispute with firm conviction.

But this cypher need not dress in purple. He is shabby, let us say, and pinched with poverty. Whose fault? Who knows? But does misfortune in itself give wisdom? He is poor. Therefore he decides that the world is sick with pestilence, and accordingly he proclaims himself a doctor. Or perhaps he sits at ease in middle circumstance. He judges that his is an open mind because he lets a harsh opinion blow upon his ignorance until it flames with hatred. He sets up to be a thinker, and he is resolved to shatter the foundations of a thousand years.

The outer darkness stretches to such a giddy distance! And these thousand candles of belief, flickering in the night, are so insufficient even in their aggregate! Shall a candle wink at flaming Jupiter as an equal? By what persuasion is one's own tiny wick, shielded in the fingers from misadventure, the greatest light?

Who is there who has read more than a single chapter in the book of life? Most of us have faltered through scarcely a dozen paragraphs, yet we scribble our sure opinion in the margin. We hear a trifling pebble fall in a muddy pool, and we think that we have listened to the pounding of the sea. We hold up our little candle and we consider that its light dispels the general night.

But it has happened once in a while that someone really strikes a larger light and offers it to many travelers for their safety. He holds his candle above his head for the general comfort. And to it there rush the multitude of those whose candles have been gutted. They relight their wicks, and go their way with a song and cry, to announce their brotherhood. If they see a stranger off the path, they call to him to join their band. And they draw him from the mire.

And sometimes this company respects the other candles that survive the wind. They confess with good temper that their glare, also, is sufficient; that there is, indeed, more than one path across the night. But sometimes in their intensity--in their sureness of exclusive salvation--they fall to bickering. One band of converts elbows another. There is a mutual lifting of the nose in scorn, an amused contempt, or they come to blows and all candles are extinguished. And sometimes, with candles out, they travel onward, still telling one another of their band how the darkness flees before them.

We live in a world of storm, of hatred, of blind conceit, of shrill and intolerant opinion. The past is worshiped. The past is scorned. Some wish only to kiss the great toe of old convention. Others shout that we must run bandaged in the dark, if we would prove our faith in God and man. It is the best of times, and the worst of times. It is the dawn. We grope toward midnight. Our fathers were saints in judgment. Our fathers were fools and rogues. Let's hold minutely to the past! Any change is sacrilege. Let's rip it up! Let's destroy it altogether!

We'll kill him and stamp on him: He's a Montague. We'll draw and quarter him: He's a Capulet. He's a radical: He must be hanged. A conservative: His head shall decorate our pike.

A plague on both your houses!

Panaceas are hawked among us, each with a magic to cure our ills. Universal suffrage is a leap to perfection. Tax reform will bring the golden age. With capital and interest smashed, we shall live in heaven. The soviet, the recall from office, the six-hour day, the demands of labor, mark the better path. The greater clamor of the crowd is the guide to wisdom. Men with black beards and ladies with cigarettes say that machine-guns and fire and death are pills that are potent for our good. We live in a welter of quarrel and disagreement. One pictures a mighty shelf with bottles, and doctors running to and fro. The poor world is on its back, opening its mouth to every spoon. By the hubbub in the pantry--the yells and scuffling at the sink--we know that drastic and contrary cures are striving for the mastery.

There was a time when beacons burned on the hills to be our guidance. The flames were fed and moulded by the experience of the centuries. Men might differ on the path--might even scramble up a dozen different slopes--but the hill-top was beyond dispute.

But now the great fires smoulder. The Constitution, it is said,--pecked at since the first,--must now be carted off and sold as junk. Art has torn down its older standards. The colors of Titian are in the dust. Poets no longer bend the knee to Shakespeare.

Conceit is a pilot who scorns the harbor lights--

Modesty was once a virtue. Patience, diligence, thrift, humility, charity--who pays now a tribute to them? Charity is only a sop, it seems, that is thrown in fright to the swift wolves of revolution. Humility is now a weakness. Diligence is despised. Thrift is the advice of cowards. Who now cares for the lessons that experience and tested fact once taught? Ignorance sits now in the highest seat and gives its orders, and the clamor of the crowd is its high authority.

And what has become of modesty? A maid once was prodigal if she unmasked her beauty to the moon. Morality? Let's all laugh together. It's a quaint old word.

Tolerance is the last study in the school of wisdom. Lord! Lord! Tonight let my prayer be that I may know that my own opinion is but a candle in the wind!

[The end]
Charles S. Brooks's essay: Little Candles

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