Our judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on
the _feelings_ the things arouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be
precious in consequence of the _idea_ we frame of it, this is only
because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. If we were
radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only things our mind could
entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes at a stroke, and be
unable to point to any one situation or experience in life more valuable
or significant than any other.
Now the blindness in human beings, of which this discourse will treat,
is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the
feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.
We are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties to
perform. Each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own
duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth.
But this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with
which we vainly look to others. The others are too much absorbed in
their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. Hence the stupidity
and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance
of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judgments, so far as they
presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons'
conditions or ideals.
Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate
than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly
fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life significant
for the other!--we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of
trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and art. As you
sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a
judge is your fox-terrier of your behavior? With all his good will
toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his
comprehension. To sit there like a senseless statue, when you might be
taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! What queer
disease is this that comes over you every day, of holding things and
staring at them like that for hours together, paralyzed of motion and
vacant of all conscious life? The African savages came nearer the truth;
but they, too, missed it, when they gathered wonderingly round one of
our American travellers who, in the interior, had just come into
possession of a stray copy of the New York _Commercial Advertiser_, and
was devouring it column by column. When he got through, they offered him
a high price for the mysterious object; and, being asked for what they
wanted it, they said: "For an eye medicine,"--that being the only reason
they could conceive of for the protracted bath which he had given his
eyes upon its surface.
The spectator's judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter, and to
possess no truth. The subject judged knows a part of the world of
reality which the judging spectator fails to see, knows more while the
spectator knows less; and, wherever there is conflict of opinion and
difference of vision, we are bound to believe that the truer side is the
side that feels the more, and not the side that feels the less.
Let me take a personal example of the kind that befalls each one of us
daily:--
Some years ago, while journeying in the mountains of North Carolina, I
passed by a large number of 'coves,' as they call them there, or heads
of small valleys between the hills, which had been newly cleared and
planted. The impression on my mind was one of unmitigated squalor. The
settler had in every case cut down the more manageable trees, and left
their charred stumps standing. The larger trees he had girdled and
killed, in order that their foliage should not cast a shade. He had then
built a log cabin, plastering its chinks with clay, and had set up a
tall zigzag rail fence around the scene of his havoc, to keep the pigs
and cattle out. Finally, he had irregularly planted the intervals
between the stumps and trees with Indian corn, which grew among the
chips; and there he dwelt with his wife and babes--an axe, a gun, a few
utensils, and some pigs and chickens feeding in the woods, being the sum
total of his possessions.
The forest had been destroyed; and what had 'improved' it out of
existence was hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of
artificial grace to make up for the loss of Nature's beauty. Ugly,
indeed, seemed the life of the squatter, scudding, as the sailors say,
under bare poles, beginning again away back where our first ancestors
started, and by hardly a single item the better off for all the
achievements of the intervening generations.
Talk about going back to nature! I said to myself, oppressed by the
dreariness, as I drove by. Talk of a country life for one's old age and
for one's children! Never thus, with nothing but the bare ground and
one's bare hands to fight the battle! Never, without the best spoils of
culture woven in! The beauties and commodities gained by the centuries
are sacred. They are our heritage and birthright. No modern person ought
to be willing to live a day in such a state of rudimentariness and
denudation.
Then I said to the mountaineer who was driving me, "What sort of people
are they who have to make these new clearings?" "All of us," he replied.
"Why, we ain't happy here, unless we are getting one of these coves
under cultivation." I instantly felt that I had been losing the whole
inward significance of the situation. Because to me the clearings spoke
of naught but denudation, I thought that to those whose sturdy arms and
obedient axes had made them they could tell no other story. But, when
_they_ looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal
victory. The chips, the girdled trees, and the vile split rails spoke
of honest sweat, persistent toil and final reward. The cabin was a
warrant of safety for self and wife and babes. In short, the clearing,
which to me was a mere ugly picture on the retina, was to them a symbol
redolent with moral memories and sang a very pæan of duty, struggle, and
success.
I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions as they
certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a
peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at Cambridge.
* * * * *
Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives
it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the
eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with the
perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective
thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the
excitement of reality; and there _is_ 'importance' in the only real and
positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be.
Robert Louis Stevenson has illustrated this by a case, drawn from the
sphere of the imagination, in an essay which I really think deserves to
become immortal, both for the truth of its matter and the excellence of
its form.
"Toward the end of September," Stevenson writes, "when school-time was
drawing near, and the nights were already black, we would begin to sally
from our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern.
The thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of
Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish
their windows with our particular brand of luminary. We wore them
buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the
rigor of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled noisomely of
blistered tin. They never burned aright, though they would always burn
our fingers. Their use was naught, the pleasure of them merely fanciful,
and yet a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing
more. The fishermen used lanterns about their boats, and it was from
them, I suppose, that we had got the hint; but theirs were not
bull's-eyes, nor did we ever play at being fishermen. The police carried
them at their belts, and we had plainly copied them in that; yet we did
not pretend to be policemen. Burglars, indeed, we may have had some
haunting thought of; and we had certainly an eye to past ages when
lanterns were more common, and to certain story-books in which we had
found them to figure very largely. But take it for all in all, the
pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a bull's-eye
under his top-coat was good enough for us.
"When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious 'Have you got
your lantern?' and a gratified 'Yes!' That was the shibboleth, and very
needful, too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none
could recognize a lantern-bearer unless (like the polecat) by the smell.
Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a ten-man lugger,
with nothing but the thwarts above them,--for the cabin was usually
locked,--or chose out some hollow of the links where the wind might
whistle overhead. Then the coats would be unbuttoned, and the
bull's-eyes discovered; and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge,
windy hall of the night, and cheered by a rich steam of toasting
tinware, these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the
cold sand of the links, or on the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and
delight them with inappropriate talk. Woe is me that I cannot give some
specimens!... But the talk was but a condiment, and these gatherings
themselves only accidents in the career of the lantern-bearer. The
essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night, the
slide shut, the top-coat buttoned, not a ray escaping, whether to
conduct your footsteps or to make your glory public,--a mere pillar of
darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of
your fool's heart, to know you had a bull's-eye at your belt, and to
exult and sing over the knowledge.
"It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid.
It may be contended rather that a (somewhat minor) bard in almost every
case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor. Justice is not
done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man's
imagination. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud:
there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells
delighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will
have some kind of bull's-eye at his belt."
... "There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life,--the
fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into
song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself at his return a
stranger at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years, and
of all his comrades there survived but one to recognize him. It is not
only in the woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is
native there. He sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him
and chuckles, and his days are moments. With no more apparatus than an
evil-smelling lantern, I have evoked him on the naked links. All life
that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands,--seeking for
that bird and hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard
to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. And it is just a
knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which
the bird _has_ sung to _us_, that fills us with such wonder when we turn
to the pages of the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of
life in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and
cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are
careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-devouring
nightingale we hear no news."
... "Say that we came [in such a realistic romance] on some such business
as that of my lantern-bearers on the links, and described the boys as
very cold, spat upon by flurries of rain, and drearily surrounded, all
of which they were; and their talk as silly and indecent, which it
certainly was. To the eye of the observer they _are_ wet and cold and
drearily surrounded; but ask themselves, and they are in the heaven of a
recondite pleasure, the ground of which is an ill-smelling lantern."
"For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit. It may
hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside in
the mysterious inwards of psychology.... It has so little bond with
externals ... that it may even touch them not, and the man's true life,
for which he consents to live, lie together in the field of fancy.... In
such a case the poetry runs underground. The observer (poor soul, with
his documents!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court
deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment;
but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed
through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism
were that of the poets, to climb after him like a squirrel, and catch
some glimpse of the heaven in which he lives. And the true realism,
always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy
resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing."
"For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the
sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one
who has not the secret of the lanterns the scene upon the links is
meaningless. And hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of
realistic books.... In each we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted
atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and
seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough,
instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colors of the sunset;
each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth
among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his
brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall."[D]
[D] 'The Lantern-bearers,' in the volume entitled 'Across the
Plains.' Abridged in the quotation.
These paragraphs are the best thing I know in all Stevenson. "To miss
the joy is to miss all." Indeed, it is. Yet we are but finite, and each
one of us has some single specialized vocation of his own. And it seems
as if energy in the service of its particular duties might be got only
by hardening the heart toward everything unlike them. Our deadness
toward all but one particular kind of joy would thus be the price we
inevitably have to pay for being practical creatures. Only in some
pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or romancer, or when the common
practical man becomes a lover, does the hard externality give way, and a
gleam of insight into the ejective world, as Clifford called it, the
vast world of inner life beyond us, so different from that of outer
seeming, illuminate our mind. Then the whole scheme of our customary
values gets confounded, then our self is riven and its narrow interests
fly to pieces, then a new centre and a new perspective must be found.