BOGIES.
91HE catastrophes which have attended our conquest of
the air and the rattle of war which still echoes in our ears have brought the word " crash " into great prominence and led to a large expansion of its meaning. Everything may
crash " now, from an aeroplane to a scheme or even a repu- tation. The placards inform us of " crashes," warn us of them, and threaten us with them again and again. Our more pessi- mistic friends are always expecting some indefinite misfortune to which they give this resounding name. Indeed the " crash " bids fair to become a bogy—a fearsome thing whose features, especially its financial features, no one agrees about or is able to describe. We have not yet heard of any child crying in the night for fear of the " crash," but very likely such nursery pessimists exist. " Does it mean that such and such will happen ? " we ask of the drawing-room Jeremiahs in awestruck tones, always to receive a non-committal reply. Now and then a warning delivered by a specially loud-voiced prophet elicits a prayer for advice. " In my place now," says the alarmed but eager listener, " would you be inclined to —," the sentence is never finished. Such small-minded inquiries are worthy of nothing but a snub. The questioner feels like a child who has upset the discourse of a theologian with a too particular question as to the reality and appearance of the devil.
The danger of employing bogies to point a warning is not the danger of creating panic, but of creating laughter. No sooner do we realize that the scarecrow is a fake and decide that the danger is imaginary than we go back like the winged robbers of the orchard to our cherry trees. Many a bird sceptic gets himself shot or netted by making too bold. If he had but taken warning he might have eaten anything that the tyrant man did not want till he died of old age.
Often the bogy we despise is simply an advertisement, some- times the advertisement of a cure. Such a "crash" was perhaps invented to cure us of extravagance, and however much we ridicule the overdrawn picture it may serve to keep simpler people out of misery while wo sink in the quicksands of debt. The simpler people, however, might have given heed to a less terrific picture, and sharper ones would not have been tempted to overreach themselves—and so the warning had been more efficacious. Secretly, we all entertain some bogy or other. To say that all men have superstition in them is as true and as commonplace as to say that all men have good In them. But definite little bogies-such as reside in the number 13 and the house-painter's ladder, in hawthorn blossoms and in opal rings, do remarkably little harm. They are more than counteracted by the lucky fairies who inhabit white heather and four-leaved clovers and green jade and the " something blue " concealed about a wedding- dress. All these little superstitions have antidotes. A child is brought into the dining-room to make a fourteenth. The man who goes under a ladder can cross himself. The nefarious effect of an opal may be dependent upon the month in which the owner was born, etc. The little - curse is in most in- stances removable. Obviously, the whole business is non- sensical. All these bogies are man-made.. Either they are scarecrows, and as such not to be despised, or they are fairy tales invented to produce a shudder or a thrill, and so relieve the monotony of existence.
But we are all acquainted with some very much more for- midable bogies than those we have alluded to, bogies who might be described as devil-made. The superstitions which really destroy men's peace of mind have no antidote and do not depend upon any silly little doings. The fear of happiness, for instance, has overshadowed many a sunny day since time immemorial. A percentage of people cannot even thoroughly enjoy their good fortune. The rancour of the gods remains at the back of their minds. "It is too good to last," they sigh, and they deliberately forestall the agony of fortune's frowns. You cannot argue with these people and say that these fears derogate from the character of a good God and constitute indeed a form of blasphemy. The best and most religious people are as subject as the most secular to this shadowy form of melancholy. After all, the argument is absurd. One might as well say that it is irreligious to expect any form of injustice or expect anything in life but what we deserve for good or evil. Some people do get themselves into a state of mind when they believe this tempting theory, but not surely by an exercise of reason. We suppose the truth to be that when the perceptions are heightened by any form of emotion, the perception of the uncertainty of life is—for the few—increased among them. If we apply pure reason to the whole question we shall surely find that the only marvel consists in the fact that this per- ception is so dull among most of us. Many quite healthy men and women suffer all their lives from fear of illness. We are not talking of fussy hypochondriacs; but of people who suffer in secret. The present writer was acquainted with a short- sighted man whose eyesight remained almost unchanged till his death at eighty. He confessed that from his boyhood the fear of blindness had been a sort of bogy never quite out of mind. A speck of dust, the slightest form of irritation in either eye, was sufficient to produce an inward gloom whits he could hardly conceal.
There are nervous people among whom almost every form of self-satisfaction is rebuked by a kind of terror. This sense of fear succeeding to self-congratulation is not the same thing as humility. The humble man who congratulates himself on an accomplished duty is rebuked by his own unreached idea'. The bogy who ridicules the self-satisfaction of many men with a turn for vanity has no more resemblance to an ideal than a Swiftian satirist has to an angbl of light. The latter urges to further effort : the former holds up to his victim a caricature of himself and asks him how he can admire the antics of such a being. Again, some people have an unfortunate fear of fore- thought. They can hardly be persuaded to make a will. They cannot look ahead without intense pain in their mental eyes. " Why do you plan ? You will be dead," says a familiar bogy in their ears ; and nothing but the knowledge that their families will suffer if they give in to their superstition enables them to speak calmly of what they will do three years hence. How would it be if we all spoke openly of the devils of fear which possess us, dared them to do their worst, cursed them and defied them ? Suppose we all met together on a given occasion and swore thus summarily to attempt an exorcism ? We doubt if any man on earth has courage for it, and, to be absolutely truthful, we should hesitate very much to urge another man to do it. Life is so mysterious, and the laws by which it is governed are so imperfectly known, that it does not do to pit reason always against intuition. Do not encourage these fancies, we all say to each other. To cast them aside, break with them altogether, defy them, is the truly courageous course, but it is what few dare do—or advise.
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