self-respectful, open face, into any presence, such people as
these seem unworthy of the race to which they belong. It is not
the bold, brassy, self-asserting man who is their superior, because
his sort of offensive forwardness originates in even a worse state
of mind and heart than the habit of shying. When a man shies, he
only suspects that he is inferior to his surroundings. When a man
offensively puts himself forward, and talks loudly among his
betters, he knows he is mean, and knows that he is not where he
belongs. You will find a professional gambler to be a loudmouthed
man, who not only does not shy at his betters, but who seeks all
convenient opportunities for associating with them, and claiming
an equality with them. The shying man is one who has not much
respect for himself, who is envious and jealous of others, and
who, however strongly he may protest against the charge, has the
most abject respect for social position and arbitrary social
distinctions. If he see a man who either assumes or seems to be
above him, it is a reason in his mind why that man should not
notice him. The result is that decent men soon take him at his own
valuation, and notice him no more than they would a dog; and they
serve him right.
I know of no more thankless task than the attempt to assure shying
people that we love them, respect them, and are glad to continue
their acquaintance. The instances in which old school-mates meet
in the journey of life with a sickening coolness, in consequence
of changed circumstances and relations, are of every-day
occurrence. Two persons who separated at the school-house door in
dawning manhood, with equal prospects, come together later in
life. One has risen in the world, has won hosts of friends, has
been put forward by them into public office, perhaps, and has
acquired a competence. The other has remained upon the old
homestead, has had a hard life, and has won neither distinction
nor wealth. The fortunate man grasps the hand of the other with
all the cordiality of his nature and of his honest friendship; but
he meets a reserve which may be almost sullen. He strives to call
up the scenes gone by--the old school-sports--the school
companions, boys and girls--the old neighborhood friendships--but
they will not come. All attempts to touch the heart of his former
schoolmate, and bring him into sympathy through the power of
association, fail. The poor fool suspects his friend of
patronizing him, and he will not be patronized. Feeling that his
friend has got along in the world better than himself, he cannot
understand why he should not be regarded as an inferior, and
treated as such. Thenceforward, the fortunate man must seek the
society of the unfortunate man, or he will never have it. The
former may give practical recognition of entire equality, to the
best of his ability, but it will avail nothing, for the latter
will not "toady" to his friend, nor be "patronized" by him. At
last the fortunate man becomes tired of the effort to make his
unfortunate friend understand him, and he kicks him and his memory
aside, and calls it a friendship closed forever, without fault
upon his part.
I have often wished that it could be understood by these people
who are so uncertain in regard to their position, and so
suspicious that everybody has the disposition to slight them, and
so much afraid of being patronized, and so averse to the thought
of "toadying" that they stand stiffly aloof from the society which
they envy, and so much offended with people for feeling above
them, that their sentiments and feelings are sufficient reasons
for society to hold them in contempt. There is a lack of
self-respect--a meanness--in their position, that is really a
sufficient apology for treating them with entire social neglect.
They habitually misconstrue those among whom they move; they are
exacting of attention to the last degree; they are always
uncomfortable, and they are ready to take offense at the smallest
fancied provocation. I have now in my mind an artisan whom I had
occasion to get acquainted with a dozen years ago; and I have
compelled him to speak to me every time I have met him since. I
really do not know what he had done to make him regard himself so
contemptuously, but I think he has never to this day fully
believed that I have the slightest respect for him. He has tried
to dodge me. He has shied repeatedly, but I have compelled him to
make me a good-natured bow, till he begins to like it, I think--
till he expects it, at least.
Many children are bred to the idea that certain families are
socially above them. They are taught from their cradles to
consider themselves in a certain sense inferior. How few American
children are taught that there is no degradation in poverty, and
that a humble employment and an obscure position are entirely
consistent with self-respect, under all circumstances, in whatever
society. I do not mean to say that they have not heard their
parents remark that they were "as good as anybody." There is
enough of this talk; and it is precisely this which teaches
children that they are born to what their parents consider
dishonor,--inferiority to their neighbors. It is impossible for
children who have been bred in this way ever to outgrow, entirely,
their feeling of inferiority. The people who are entirely
self-respectful never have any thing to say about their position in
the presence of their children; and it is a cruel thing to teach a
child, not that there is a grade of society which is actually
above him, but that the persons who occupy that grade look down
upon him--and, in the constitution of society, have the right to
look down upon him--with contempt. To see an honest lad in humble
clothing actually awed by finding himself in the presence of a
well-dressed child of affluence, is very pitiful; and there are
thousands of these poor boys who, having won wealth and
distinction, never in their consciousness lose their early estate
sufficiently to feel at home with those among whom the advance of
fortune has brought them.
A thoroughly self-respectful person will command respect anywhere.
A man who carries into the world an unsuspecting, unassuming face,
who is polite to everybody, minds his own business, and does not
show by his demeanor that he bears about with him a sense of
degradation and inferiority, and who gives evidence that he
considers himself a man, and expects the treatment due to a man,
will secure politeness and respect from every true gentleman and
gentlewoman in the world. The man who shies, and suspects, and
envies, and is full of petty jealousies, and is always afraid that
he shall not get all that is due to him in the way of polite
attention, and manifests a feeling of great uncertainty and
anxiety concerning his own social position, is sure to be shunned
at last, and he will well deserve his fate. No real gentleman, and
no true gentlewoman, ever has feelings like these. It is only
those who are neither, and who do not deserve the position of
either, that are troubled in this way. I give it as a deliberate
judgment that there is far less of contempt for the poor and
obscure among what are denominated the higher classes of society
than there is of envy and hatred of the rich and renowned among
the poor and humble; and that the principal bar to a more cordial
and gentle intercourse between the two classes, is the lack of
self-respect which pervades the latter, and the mean, degrading
humility which they manifest in all their relations with those
whom they consider above their level.
American society is mixed--heterogeneous--more so, probably, than
that of any other country. There is no such thing as well-defined
classification. There is no nobility, no gentry, no aristocracy,
no peasantry. The owners of palaces were bred in log cabins; men
of learning are the children of boors; and one can never tell by a
man's position and relations in society into what style of life he
was born. The boy goes into the city from his father's farm,
carrying only a hardy frame, a good heart, and a suit of homespun,
and twenty years frequently suffice to establish him as a man of
fortune, and marry him to a woman of fashion. There is no bar to
progress in any direction for the ambitious man, except lack of
brains and tact. Society erects no barriers of caste which define
the bounds of his liberty. Notwithstanding this, there is always,
in every place, a body of people who assume to be "the best
society." The claim to the title is rarely well substantiated, and
is based on different ideas in different places. We shall find in
some places, that society crystallizes around the idea of wealth;
in others, around the idea of literary culture; in others, around
certain religious views, so that, as it may happen, the "best
society" is constituted of the Presbyterian, or Episcopalian, or
Unitarian, or other sectarian element. In other places, an old
family name is the central power, and, in others still, a certain
style of family life attracts sympathetic materials which assume
the position of "the best society."
Whatever may be the central idea of the self-constituted elite,
they are always the objects of the envy of a large number of
minds. Silly people "lie awake nights" to get into the best
society. Those who are securely in, of course sleep soundly in
their safety and their self-complacency; and those who are too low
to think of rising to it, and those who do not care for it, go
through the six to ten hours of their slumber "without landing,"
as the North River boatmen say. But a middle class, who range
along the ragged edges of society, know no rest. They sail along
in an uncertain way, like the moon on the border of a cloud--
sometimes in and sometimes out--feeling naked and very much
exposed among the stars, and rather foggy and confused in the
cloud, as if, after all, they did not belong there. It is in this
class that we meet with shying men and shying women. It is in this
class that we find heart-burnings, and jealousies, and envyings,
and sensitive misunderstandings. It is a sort of purgatory through
which the rising man and woman pass to reach the paradise of their
hope, and from which an unhappy soul is never lifted. These people
do not stop to inquire whether they have any sympathy, or any
thing in common with the society which they seek--whether they
would be lost, or whether they would be at home in it. They do not
even seem to suspect that much of that which is called the best
society, is the last society that a sensible, good man should
seek.
Let us suppose that wealth is the central idea of the best
society, and then let the aspirant to this society ask himself
whether he has wealth. Has he a fine house and an elegant turnout?
Does he dress expensively, and is he able to give costly
entertainments? Is he prepared to unite, on a plane of perfect
equality, with those who give the law to this society? If so, it
will not be necessary for him to seek it, for the society will
seek him,--that is, if he be an agreeable man. If he be very rich
indeed, why, it is not necessary that he be agreeable at all. But
suppose literary culture be the central force of this society--has
the aspirant any fitness for, or sympathy with it? Can he meet
those who form this society as an equal, or mingle in it as a
thoroughly sympathetic element? Would he feel happy and at home in
a literary atmosphere? Those questions indicate a legitimate
direction of inquiry, touching every case of this kind. Multitudes
of those who are dissatisfied with their position have nothing in
common with the society to which they aspire, and would be so much
out of place there that they would be very unhappy. My idea, then,
is, that so far as society is concerned, men and women naturally
find their own place. A true gentleman and a genuine gentlewoman,
wherever they may appear, and whoever they may be, are as readily
known as any objects; and really good society recognizes its
affinities for them at once. They do not have to seek for a place,
for they fall into their place as naturally as a soldier falls
into, and joins step with, his company.
Now what can be meaner than the jealousy which sits in the circle
where it is really most at home, and regards with its green and
greedy eyes, a circle for which it has no affinities, except the
affinities which envy has for that which it considers above
itself? It is a meanness, too, which has two sides to it. It is
notorious that the black overseer upon the plantation is severer
with his companions in slavery than a white man would be, and it
is just as notorious that the man who has abjectly bowed before
the distinction of wealth and social standing, always becomes
insufferably pretentious when fortune or favor lifts him to the
place of his desire. The man who shies those he esteems his
betters is always a proud man at heart, or if the adjective be
allowable, an aristocratic man; and he is very careful to preserve
his position of comparative respectability with relation to those
below him. He will always be found to be pretentious in his own
circle, and supercilious with relation to those in lower life. Is
it not true that half of the neighborhood quarrels that take
place, and three-quarters of the slander, and all the gossip that
are indulged in, result from these petty jealousies between
circles, and the sensitiveness that is felt regarding social
standing on the part of those who are not quite so high in the
world as they would like to be?
I can only notice briefly the shying that is done by the other
side of society. In effect, I have done this already, perhaps, but
it is proper to say directly that there are many moving in what is
called the best society, who, with a suspicion that they do not
belong there, or a feeling that their position is not secure
there, shy a humble man when they meet him, and dodge all vulgar
associations. I suppose that no true gentleman is ever afraid of
being mistaken for any thing else. A gentleman knows that there is
nothing which is more unlike the character of a gentleman than the
supercilious treatment of the humble, and the fear of losing caste
by treating every class with kindness and politeness. I recognize
no difference between the two shying classes--the men who shy
their fellow-men because they are high, and the men who shy their
fellow-men because they are low. Both are mean, both are unmanly,
and both are deficient in the self-respect necessary to the
constitution of a gentleman. There are no better friends in the
world--no men who understand each other better--none who meet and
converse more freely at their ease--none who have more respect for
each other--than a genuine gentleman and a self-respectful humble
man, who knows his place in the social scale, and is abundantly
satisfied with it. There is no need of any intercourse between
men, of whatever difference of social standing, less dignified and
gentle than this.
LESSON XVII.
FAITH IN HUMANITY.
"Say, what is honor? 'Tis the finest sense
Of justice which the human mind can frame,
Intent each lurking frailty to disclaim,
And guard the way of life from all offense,
Suffered or done." WORDSWORTH.
"A child of God had rather ten thousand times suffer for Christ,
than that Christ should suffer by Him."--JOHN MASON.
"For mankind are one in spirit, and an instinct bears along
Round the earth's electric circle the swift flash of right or
wrong;
Whether conscious or unconscious, yet humanity's vast frame
Through its ocean-sounded fibres feels the gush of joy or
shame;--
In the gain or loss of one race, all the rest have equal claim."
LOWELL.
One of the most reliable supports of that which is best in man is
faith in other men. In truth, I believe that no man can lose his
faith in men and women, and remain as good a man as he was before
the loss. Better evidence that a man is rotten in some portion of
his character, or rotten clean through his character, cannot be
found than real, or pretended, loss of faith in his fellows. When
a young man tells me that he has no doubt that certain persons,
publicly reputed to be good, take sly drinks in their own closets,
and descend into grosser indulgences when in strange places; that
the best men are hypocrites; that there is no such thing as
womanly virtue; and that appetite and selfishness outweigh
everywhere principle and manly honor, I know that, ninety-nine
times in one hundred, he finds a reason in his own heart and life
for his declarations. I know that he simply wishes to maintain a
certain degree of self-respect, and that he finds no way to do
this save by bringing everybody around him down to his own level.
A man who has lost his virtue, and is still suffering under the
blows of conscience, is very both to believe that there is any
virtue in the world.
Yet there are circumstances in which faith in humanity is lost
without fault, though never without damage, on the part of the
loser; and very sad cases they are. I remember an abused,
broken-hearted, and forsaken wife, who declared to me her belief
that her husband was no worse than other men (pleasant for me,
wasn't it?)--that there was not a man in the world who could
withstand temptation, or who would have done differently from her
husband under the same circumstances. Why was this? She had loved
this man with all the devotion of which her warm woman's heart was
capable; she had respected him as an embodiment of all manly
qualities; he had impersonated her _beau ideal_. If he--the
peerless, the prince--could fall, and forsake, and forget, who
would not? He who had once been to her the noblest and best man in
the world, could never become worse than the rest of the world.
Now one of the foulest wrongs and one of the deepest injuries
which this man had inflicted upon his wife was the destruction of
her faith in men. He had not only blotted out her faith in him,
but he had blotted out her faith in humanity, and, of course, her
faith in herself. What safeguards of her own virtue fell when her
faith in man was destroyed, she did not know; but, in her
innermost consciousness, she must have grown careless of herself--
possibly desperate.
Hardly a month passes by in which we do not hear of some
defalcation, some lapse from integrity, by a man who, through many
years of business life, had maintained an untarnished reputation.
I have half a dozen such cases in my memory now, and I do not know
what to make of them. When I see a character standing to-day above
all reproach, compacted through many years of manly, honest,
Christian living, overthrown to-morrow, and trodden in the mire, I
am shocked. If such men fall, where are we to look for those who
will not? If such men, with worthy natures, and long practice of
virtue, and myriad motives for the maintenance of an unspotted
character, yield to temptation, and are suddenly overthrown, what
reason have I to suppose that my partner, my brother, myself,
shall escape? I am scared, and grow cautious, and suspicious.
Did you ever think that there is one individual, at least, in the
world--that possibly there are ten individuals, possibly one
hundred, possibly more--who believe that you are, as a man or a
woman, just as nearly right as you can be? Did you ever think that
there are people who pin their faith to you, who believe in you,
who trust you, and that among those people your own reputation is
identified with the reputation of the race? I care not how humble
a man may be, there are always those who trust in him. Think of
the trust which a family of children repose in their parents, and
of the faith which the parents have in their children. Very humble
the parents may be--very untrustworthy as moral guides, and
judges, and authorities; but if they were angels, with the light
of heaven in their eyes, they would not be more confided in and
relied upon by the little ones who cling to their knees. So, at
all ages, we garner our faith in individuals; and so, all men and
women, however humble and unworthy they may be, become the objects
and recipients of this faith.
Now, if there be ten men and women who have garnered their faith
in me--who believe in me, through and through--and whose faith in
all humanity would be sadly shocked, if I should fall, and prove
to them that their confidence had been entirely misplaced, then I
hold for those ten persons the reputation of the human race in my
hands. If you, my reader, have attracted to yourself the honest
faith of a thousand hearts, then you hold in your hands, for those
hearts, the good name of humanity. Upon the shoulders of each man
in the community, there rests a great responsibility. He has not
only his own reputation to take care of, but he has the reputation
of his race. If all mankind are to be thought more meanly of by
mankind, to be less trusted, and less loved, because I have been
untrue, though my untruth touch but one person directly, I commit
a great crime against my race. Yet this crime is nothing by the
side of that which I commit against those who have trusted in me.
It injures them to think meanly of mankind--to have their
confidence shaken in humanity--much more than it injures humanity
to be thought meanly of. A man may as well stab me as to destroy
my faith in my kind, for the comfort and happiness of my life
depend upon the maintenance of this faith.
There are not a few men and women in this world who are thoroughly
conscious that not only their immediate personal friends think
better of them than they deserve, but that the community--all who
know them--accord to them a higher excellence of heart and life
than they really possess. There are some who seem fitted by nature
to attract the affection, and secure the respect of all those with
whom they come into contact, in a very remarkable degree; and,
yet, these persons may be painfully conscious, all the while, that
they are not so good as they are thought to be. They are not
hypocrites; they have never intended to deceive anybody; they have
never pretended to be what they are not; but people believe in
them without limit. A person who has this power of attracting the
confidence of men has forced upon him an immense responsibility.
To say nothing of his duty to himself and his God, he owes it to
his race to be, or to become, as good as he seems. It is
essentially a crime against humanity for one who draws the hearts
of men to him easily, to do any thing which will tend to
depreciate their estimate of his character. A man should carry a
life thus extravagantly over-estimated, as he would carry a cup of
wine--careful that none be spilled, and careful that no impurity
fall into it. It is a great blessing to be loved and respected--
nay to be admired for admirable qualities--and when men are
generous enough to pay in advance for excellence, they should
never be cheated in the amount and quality of the article.
There is such a thing as honor among men; there are such things
as modesty, truth, and integrity. They are qualities that belong
to humanity, irrespective of religion and of Christian culture.
There are men so true to their higher natures that I would trust
them with my name, my gold, my children, my all, without a doubt.
I am proud to claim kinship with such men. They confer dignity
upon the race of which I am a member. I am glad to take their
hands in mine. Suppose one of these--or such things have been--
should deceive me, and I should discover that my name had been
abused, my gold wasted or stolen, and my children ruined by this
man: could I ever trust again? Should I not be humiliated? Should
I not feel disgraced? Should I ever be willing to let another man
into my heart? Should I not doubt whether there are, indeed, such
things as honor, and modesty, and truth, and integrity, in the
world; and thus doubting, would not the strongest defences of my
own virtue be thrown down? The truth is, that no man can do an
unmanly thing without inflicting an injury on the whole human
race. No man can say "I will do as I choose, and it will be
nobody's business." Every man's sin is everybody's business,
literally. Every sin shakes men's confidence in men, and becomes,
whatever its origin, the enemy of mankind; and all mankind have a
right to make common cause in its extermination.