Thinking on this, we presently discover that margin means a species of freedom. No wonder the word, and the thing it represents, wherever we find them, delight us.
We use the word constantly in senses which, speaking carelessly, we should have called secondary and borrowed. Now we see that its application to pages, or pictures, or decorations, and so forth, was the borrowed and secondary use; and that primarily its meaning is spiritual.
We must have margin, or be uncomfortable in every thing in life. Our plan for a day, for a week, for our lifetime, must have it,--margin for change of purpose, margin for interruption, margin for accident. Making no allowance for these, we are fettered, we are disturbed, we are thwarted.
Is there a greater misery than to be hurried? If we leave ourselves proper margin, we never need to be hurried. We always shall be, if we crowd our plan. People pant, groan, and complain as if hurry were a thing outside of themselves,--an enemy, a monster, a disease which overtook them, and against which they had no shelter. It is hard to be patient with such nonsense. Hurry is almost the only known misery which it is impossible to have brought upon one by other people's fault.
If our plan of action for an hour or a day be so fatally spoiled by lack of margin, what shall we say of the mistake of the man who leaves himself no margin in matters of belief? No room for a wholesome, healthy doubt? No provision for an added enlightenment? No calculation for the inevitable progress of human knowledge? This is, in our eyes, the crying sin and danger of elaborate creeds, rigid formulas of exact statement on difficult and hidden mysteries.
The man who is ready to give pledge that the opinion he will hold to-morrow will be precisely the opinion he holds to-day has either thought very little, or to little purpose, or has resolved to quit thinking altogether.
Some theatrical experiments are being made at this time to show that all possible emotions and all shades and gradations of emotion can be expressed by facial action, and that the method of so expressing them can be reduced to a system, and taught in a given number of lessons. It seems a matter of question whether one would be likely to make love or evince sorrow any more successfully by keeping in mind all the while the detailed catalogue of his flexors and extensors, and contracting and relaxing No. 1, 2, or 3, according to rule. The human memory is a treacherous thing, and what an enormous disaster would result from a very slight forgetfulness in such a nicely adjusted system! The fatal effect of dropping the superior maxillary when one intended to drop the inferior, or of applying nervous stimuli to the up track, instead of the down, can easily be conceived. Art is art, after all, be it ever so skilful and triumphant, and science is only a slow reading of hieroglyphs. Nature sits high and serene above both, and smiles compassionately on their efforts to imitate and understand. And this brings us to what we have to say about smiling. Do many people feel what a wonderful thing it is that each human being is born into the world with his own smile? Eyes, nose, mouth, may be merely average commonplace features; may look, taken singly, very much like anybody's else eyes, nose, or mouth. Let whoever doubts this try the simple but endlessly amusing experiment of setting half a dozen people behind a perforated curtain, and making them put their eyes at the holes. Not one eye in a hundred can be recognized, even by most familiar and loving friends. But study smiles; observe, even in the most casual way, the variety one sees in a day, and it will soon be felt what subtle revelation they make, what infinite individuality they possess.