"What, then, is our neighbor? Thou hast regarded his thought, his
feeling, as somehow different from thine. Thou hast said, 'A pain in him
is not like a pain in me, but something far easier to bear.' He seems to
thee a little less living than thou; his life is dim, it is cold, it is
a pale fire beside thy own burning desires.... So, dimly and by instinct
hast thou lived with thy neighbor, and hast known him not, being blind.
Thou hast made [of him] a thing, no Self at all. Have done with this
illusion, and simply try to learn the truth. Pain is pain, joy is joy,
everywhere, even as in thee. In all the songs of the forest birds; in
all the cries of the wounded and dying, struggling in the captor's
power; in the boundless sea where the myriads of water-creatures strive
and die; amid all the countless hordes of savage men; in all sickness
and sorrow; in all exultation and hope, everywhere, from the lowest to
the noblest, the same conscious, burning, wilful life is found,
endlessly manifold as the forms of the living creatures, unquenchable as
the fires of the sun, real as these impulses that even now throb in
thine own little selfish heart. Lift up thy eyes, behold that life, and
then turn away, and forget it as thou canst; but, if thou hast _known_
that, thou hast begun to know thy duty."[E]
[E] The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 157-162
(abridged).
* * * * *
This higher vision of an inner significance in what, until then, we had
realized only in the dead external way, often comes over a person
suddenly; and, when it does so, it makes an epoch in his history. As
Emerson says, there is a depth in those moments that constrains us to
ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. The passion
of love will shake one like an explosion, or some act will awaken a
remorseful compunction that hangs like a cloud over all one's later day.
This mystic sense of hidden meaning starts upon us often from non-human
natural things. I take this passage from 'Obermann,' a French novel that
had some vogue in its day: "Paris, March 7.--It was dark and rather
cold. I was gloomy, and walked because I had nothing to do. I passed by
some flowers placed breast-high upon a wall. A jonquil in bloom was
there. It is the strongest expression of desire: it was the first
perfume of the year. I felt all the happiness destined for man. This
unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in
me complete. I never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. I know
not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was that made
me see in this flower a limitless beauty.... I shall never enclose in a
conception this power, this immensity that nothing will express; this
form that nothing will contain; this ideal of a better world which one
feels, but which it would seem that nature has not made."[F]
[F] De Sénancour: Obermann, Lettre XXX.
Wordsworth and Shelley are similarly full of this sense of a limitless
significance in natural things. In Wordsworth it was a somewhat austere
and moral significance,--a 'lonely cheer.'
"To every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower,
Even the loose stones that cover the highway,
I gave a moral life: I saw them feel
Or linked them to some feeling: the great mass
Lay bedded in some quickening soul, and all
That I beheld respired with inward meaning."[G]
[G] The Prelude, Book III.
"Authentic tidings of invisible things!" Just what this hidden presence
in nature was, which Wordsworth so rapturously felt, and in the light of
which he lived, tramping the hills for days together, the poet never
could explain logically or in articulate conceptions. Yet to the reader
who may himself have had gleaming moments of a similar sort the verses
in which Wordsworth simply proclaims the fact of them come with a
heart-satisfying authority:--
"Magnificent
The morning rose, in memorable pomp,
Glorious as ere I had beheld. In front
The sea lay laughing at a distance; near
The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds,
Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light;
And in the meadows and the lower grounds
Was all the sweetness of a common dawn,--
Dews, vapors, and the melody of birds,
And laborers going forth to till the fields."
"Ah! need I say, dear Friend, that to the brim
My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows
Were then made for me; bond unknown to me
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly,
A dedicated Spirit. On I walked,
In thankful blessedness, which yet survives."[H]
[H] The Prelude, Book IV.
As Wordsworth walked, filled with his strange inner joy, responsive thus
to the secret life of nature round about him, his rural neighbors,
tightly and narrowly intent upon their own affairs, their crops and
lambs and fences, must have thought him a very insignificant and foolish
personage. It surely never occurred to any one of them to wonder what
was going on inside of _him_ or what it might be worth. And yet that
inner life of his carried the burden of a significance that has fed the
souls of others, and fills them to this day with inner joy.
Richard Jefferies has written a remarkable autobiographic document
entitled The Story of my Heart. It tells, in many pages, of the rapture
with which in youth the sense of the life of nature filled him. On a
certain hill-top he says:--
"I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the
grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the
distant sea, far beyond sight.... With all the intensity of feeling
which exalted me, all the intense communion I held with the earth, the
sun and sky, the stars hidden by the light, with the ocean,--in no
manner can the thrilling depth of these feelings be written,--with these
I prayed as if they were the keys of an instrument.... The great sun,
burning with light, the strong earth,--dear earth,--the warm sky, the
pure air, the thought of ocean, the inexpressible beauty of all filled
me with a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. With this inflatus, too, I
prayed.... The prayer, this soul-emotion, was in itself, not for an
object: it was a passion. I hid my face in the grass. I was wholly
prostrated, I lost myself in the wrestle, I was rapt and carried
away.... Had any shepherd accidentally seen me lying on the turf, he
would only have thought I was resting a few minutes. I made no outward
show. Who could have imagined the whirlwind of passion that was going
on in me as I reclined there!"[I]
[I] _Op. cit._, Boston, Roberts, 1883, pp. 5, 6.
Surely, a worthless hour of life, when measured by the usual standards
of commercial value. Yet in what other _kind_ of value can the
preciousness of any hour, made precious by any standard, consist, if it
consist not in feelings of excited significance like these, engendered
in some one, by what the hour contains?
Yet so blind and dead does the clamor of our own practical interests
make us to all other things, that it seems almost as if it were
necessary to become worthless as a practical being, if one is to hope to
attain to any breadth of insight into the impersonal world of worths as
such, to have any perception of life's meaning on a large objective
scale. Only your mystic, your dreamer, or your insolvent tramp or
loafer, can afford so sympathetic an occupation, an occupation which
will change the usual standards of human value in the twinkling of an
eye, giving to foolishness a place ahead of power, and laying low in a
minute the distinctions which it takes a hard-working conventional man a
lifetime to build up. You may be a prophet, at this rate; but you cannot
be a worldly success.
Walt Whitman, for instance, is accounted by many of us a contemporary
prophet. He abolishes the usual human distinctions, brings all
conventionalisms into solution, and loves and celebrates hardly any
human attributes save those elementary ones common to all members of the
race. For this he becomes a sort of ideal tramp, a rider on omnibus-tops
and ferry-boats, and, considered either practically or academically, a
worthless, unproductive being. His verses are but ejaculations--things
mostly without subject or verb, a succession of interjections on an
immense scale. He felt the human crowd as rapturously as Wordsworth felt
the mountains, felt it as an overpoweringly significant presence, simply
to absorb one's mind in which should be business sufficient and worthy
to fill the days of a serious man. As he crosses Brooklyn ferry, this is
what he feels:--
Flood-tide below me! I watch you, face to face;
Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see
you also face to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes!
how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross,
returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose;
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence,
are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you
might suppose.
Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from
shore to shore;
Others will watch the run of the flood-tide;
Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west,
and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east;
Others will see the islands large and small;
Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the
sun half an hour high.
A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years
hence, others will see them,
Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the
falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide.
It avails not, neither time or place--distance avails not.
Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I
felt;
Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a
crowd;
Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and
the bright flow, I was refresh'd;
Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the
swift current, I stood, yet was hurried;
Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the
thick-stemmed pipes of steamboats, I looked.
I too many and many a time cross'd the river, the sun half
an hour high;
I watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls--I saw them high in
the air, with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,
I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies,
and left the rest in strong shadow,
I saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the gradual edging
toward the south.
Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships
at anchor,
The sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars;
The scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups,
the frolicsome crests and glistening;
The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray
walls of the granite store-houses by the docks;
On the neighboring shores, the fires from the foundry chimneys
burning high ... into the night,
Casting their flicker of black ... into the clefts of streets.
These, and all else, were to me the same as they are to you.[J]
[J] 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry' (abridged).
And so on, through the rest of a divinely beautiful poem. And, if you
wish to see what this hoary loafer considered the most worthy way of
profiting by life's heaven-sent opportunities, read the delicious volume
of his letters to a young car-conductor who had become his friend:--
"NEW YORK, Oct. 9, 1868.
"_Dear Pete_,--It is splendid here this forenoon--bright and
cool. I was out early taking a short walk by the river only
two squares from where I live.... Shall I tell you about [my
life] just to fill up? I generally spend the forenoon in my
room writing, etc., then take a bath fix up and go out about
twelve and loafe somewhere or call on someone down town or on
business, or perhaps if it is very pleasant and I feel like
it ride a trip with some driver friend on Broadway from 23rd
Street to Bowling Green, three miles each way. (Every day I
find I have plenty to do, every hour is occupied with
something.) You know it is a never ending amusement and study
and recreation for me to ride a couple of hours on a pleasant
afternoon on a Broadway stage in this way. You see everything
as you pass, a sort of living, endless panorama--shops and
splendid buildings and great windows: on the broad sidewalks
crowds of women richly dressed continually passing,
altogether different, superior in style and looks from any to
be seen anywhere else--in fact a perfect stream of
people--men too dressed in high style, and plenty of
foreigners--and then in the streets the thick crowd of
carriages, stages, carts, hotel and private coaches, and in
fact all sorts of vehicles and many first class teams, mile
after mile, and the splendor of such a great street and so
many tall, ornamental, noble buildings many of them of white
marble, and the gayety and motion on every side: you will not
wonder how much attraction all this is on a fine day, to a
great loafer like me, who enjoys so much seeing the busy
world move by him, and exhibiting itself for his amusement,
while he takes it easy and just looks on and observes."[K]
[K] Calamus, Boston, 1897, pp. 41, 42.
Truly a futile way of passing the time, some of you may say, and not
altogether creditable to a grown-up man. And yet, from the deepest point
of view, who knows the more of truth, and who knows the less,--Whitman
on his omnibus-top, full of the inner joy with which the spectacle
inspires him, or you, full of the disdain which the futility of his
occupation excites?
When your ordinary Brooklynite or New Yorker, leading a life replete
with too much luxury, or tired and careworn about his personal affairs,
crosses the ferry or goes up Broadway, _his_ fancy does not thus 'soar
away into the colors of the sunset' as did Whitman's, nor does he
inwardly realize at all the indisputable fact that this world never did
anywhere or at any time contain more of essential divinity, or of
eternal meaning, than is embodied in the fields of vision over which
his eyes so carelessly pass. There is life; and there, a step away, is
death. There is the only kind of beauty there ever was. There is the old
human struggle and its fruits together. There is the text and the
sermon, the real and the ideal in one. But to the jaded and unquickened
eye it is all dead and common, pure vulgarism, flatness, and disgust.
"Hech! it is a sad sight!" says Carlyle, walking at night with some one
who appeals to him to note the splendor of the stars. And that very
repetition of the scene to new generations of men in _secula seculorum_,
that eternal recurrence of the common order, which so fills a Whitman
with mystic satisfaction, is to a Schopenhauer, with the emotional
anæsthesia, the feeling of 'awful inner emptiness' from out of which he
views it all, the chief ingredient of the tedium it instils. What is
life on the largest scale, he asks, but the same recurrent inanities,
the same dog barking, the same fly buzzing, forevermore? Yet of the kind
of fibre of which such inanities consist is the material woven of all
the excitements, joys, and meanings that ever were, or ever shall be, in
this world.
To be rapt with satisfied attention, like Whitman, to the mere
spectacle of the world's presence, is one way, and the most fundamental
way, of confessing one's sense of its unfathomable significance and
importance. But how can one attain to the feeling of the vital
significance of an experience, if one have it not to begin with? There
is no receipt which one can follow. Being a secret and a mystery, it
often comes in mysteriously unexpected ways. It blossoms sometimes from
out of the very grave wherein we imagined that our happiness was buried.
Benvenuto Cellini, after a life all in the outer sunshine, made of
adventures and artistic excitements, suddenly finds himself cast into a
dungeon in the Castle of San Angelo. The place is horrible. Rats and wet
and mould possess it. His leg is broken and his teeth fall out,
apparently with scurvy. But his thoughts turn to God as they have never
turned before. He gets a Bible, which he reads during the one hour in
the twenty-four in which a wandering ray of daylight penetrates his
cavern. He has religious visions. He sings psalms to himself, and
composes hymns. And thinking, on the last day of July, of the
festivities customary on the morrow in Rome, he says to himself: "All
these past years I celebrated this holiday with the vanities of the
world: from this year henceforward I will do it with the divinity of
God. And then I said to myself, 'Oh, how much more happy I am for this
present life of mine than for all those things remembered!'"[L]
[L] Vita, lib. 2, chap. iv.
But the great understander of these mysterious ebbs and flows is
Tolstoï. They throb all through his novels. In his 'War and Peace,' the
hero, Peter, is supposed to be the richest man in the Russian empire.
During the French invasion he is taken prisoner, and dragged through
much of the retreat. Cold, vermin, hunger, and every form of misery
assail him, the result being a revelation to him of the real scale of
life's values. "Here only, and for the first time, he appreciated,
because he was deprived of it, the happiness of eating when he was
hungry, of drinking when he was thirsty, of sleeping when he was sleepy,
and of talking when he felt the desire to exchange some words.... Later
in life he always recurred with joy to this month of captivity, and
never failed to speak with enthusiasm of the powerful and ineffaceable
sensations, and especially of the moral calm which he had experienced at
this epoch. When at daybreak, on the morrow of his imprisonment, he saw
[I abridge here Tolstoï's description] the mountains with their wooded
slopes disappearing in the grayish mist; when he felt the cool breeze
caress him; when he saw the light drive away the vapors, and the sun
rise majestically behind the clouds and cupolas, and the crosses, the
dew, the distance, the river, sparkle in the splendid, cheerful
rays,--his heart overflowed with emotion. This emotion kept continually
with him, and increased a hundred-fold as the difficulties of his
situation grew graver.... He learnt that man is meant for happiness, and
that this happiness is in him, in the satisfaction of the daily needs of
existence, and that unhappiness is the fatal result, not of our need,
but of our abundance.... When calm reigned in the camp, and the embers
paled, and little by little went out, the full moon had reached the
zenith. The woods and the fields roundabout lay clearly visible; and,
beyond the inundation of light which filled them, the view plunged into
the limitless horizon. Then Peter cast his eyes upon the firmament,
filled at that hour with myriads of stars. 'All that is mine,' he
thought. 'All that is in me, is me! And that is what they think they
have taken prisoner! That is what they have shut up in a cabin!' So he
smiled, and turned in to sleep among his comrades."[M]
[M] La Guerre et la Paix, Paris, 1884, vol. iii. pp. 268, 275, 316.
The occasion and the experience, then, are nothing. It all depends on
the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents
absorbed by what is given. "Crossing a bare common," says Emerson, "in
snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my
thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a
perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear."
Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive sensibilities.
But we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got
far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare,
the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed
with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities;
and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy
connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow
stone-blind and insensible to life's more elementary and general goods
and joys.
The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound and
primitive level. To be imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the
army would permanently show the good of life to many an over-educated
pessimist. Living in the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided
beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line; and the
over-sensibilities and insensibilities even themselves out. The good
of all the artificial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of
seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and doing with one's
body, grows and grows. The savages and children of nature, to whom we
deem ourselves so much superior, certainly are alive where we are often
dead, along these lines; and, could they write as glibly as we do, they
would read us impressive lectures on our impatience for improvement and
on our blindness to the fundamental static goods of life. "Ah! my
brother," said a chieftain to his white guest, "thou wilt never know the
happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing. This, next to
sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we were before our
birth, and thus we shall be after death. Thy people,... when they have
finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the
day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonlight. What is their
life to ours,--the life that is as naught to them? Blind that they are,
they lose it all! But we live in the present."[N]
[N] Quoted by Lotze, Microcosmus, English translation, vol. ii.
p. 240.
The intense interest that life can assume when brought down to the
non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception, has been
beautifully described by a man who _can_ write,--Mr. W.H. Hudson, in his
volume, "Idle Days in Patagonia."
"I spent the greater part of one winter," says this admirable author,
"at a point on the Rio Negro, seventy or eighty miles from the sea."
... "It was my custom to go out every morning on horseback with my gun,
and, followed by one dog, to ride away from the valley; and no sooner
would I climb the terrace, and plunge into the gray, universal thicket,
than I would find myself as completely alone as if five hundred instead
of only five miles separated me from the valley and river. So wild and
solitary and remote seemed that gray waste, stretching away into
infinitude, a waste untrodden by man, and where the wild animals are so
few that they have made no discoverable path in the wilderness of
thorns.... Not once nor twice nor thrice, but day after day I returned
to this solitude, going to it in the morning as if to attend a festival,
and leaving it only when hunger and thirst and the westering sun
compelled me. And yet I had no object in going,--no motive which could
be put into words; for, although I carried a gun, there was nothing to
shoot,--the shooting was all left behind in the valley.... Sometimes I
would pass a whole day without seeing one mammal, and perhaps not more
than a dozen birds of any size. The weather at that time was cheerless,
generally with a gray film of cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak
wind, often cold enough to make my bridle-hand quite numb.... At a slow
pace, which would have seemed intolerable under other circumstances, I
would ride about for hours together at a stretch. On arriving at a hill,
I would slowly ride to its summit, and stand there to survey the
prospect. On every side it stretched away in great undulations, wild and
irregular. How gray it all was! Hardly less so near at hand than on the
haze-wrapped horizon where the hills were dim and the outline obscured
by distance. Descending from my outlook, I would take up my aimless
wanderings again, and visit other elevations to gaze on the same
landscape from another point; and so on for hours. And at noon I would
dismount, and sit or lie on my folded poncho for an hour or longer. One
day in these rambles I discovered a small grove composed of twenty or
thirty trees, growing at a convenient distance apart, that had evidently
been resorted to by a herd of deer or other wild animals. This grove was
on a hill differing in shape from other hills in its neighborhood; and,
after a time, I made a point of finding and using it as a resting-place
every day at noon. I did not ask myself why I made choice of that one
spot, sometimes going out of my way to sit there, instead of sitting
down under any one of the millions of trees and bushes on any other
hillside. I thought nothing about it, but acted unconsciously. Only
afterward it seemed to me that, after having rested there once, each
time I wished to rest again, the wish came associated with the image of
that particular clump of trees, with polished stems and clean bed of
sand beneath; and in a short time I formed a habit of returning, animal
like, to repose at that same spot."
"It was, perhaps, a mistake to say that I would sit down and rest,
since I was never tired; and yet, without being tired, that noon-day
pause, during which I sat for an hour without moving, was strangely
grateful. All day there would be no sound, not even the rustling of a
leaf. One day, while _listening_ to the silence, it occurred to my mind
to wonder what the effect would be if I were to shout aloud. This seemed
at the time a horrible suggestion, which almost made me shudder. But
during those solitary days it was a rare thing for any thought to cross
my mind. In the state of mind I was in, thought had become impossible.
My state was one of _suspense_ and _watchfulness_; yet I had no
expectation of meeting an adventure, and felt as free from apprehension
as I feel now while sitting in a room in London. The state seemed
familiar rather than strange, and accompanied by a strong feeling of
elation; and I did not know that something had come between me and my
intellect until I returned to my former self,--to thinking, and the old
insipid existence [again]."
"I had undoubtedly _gone back_; and that state of intense watchfulness
or alertness, rather, with suspension of the higher intellectual
faculties, represented the mental state of the pure savage. He thinks
little, reasons little, having a surer guide in his [mere sensory
perceptions]. He is in perfect harmony with nature, and is nearly on a
level, mentally, with the wild animals he preys on, and which in their
turn sometimes prey on him."[O]
[O] _Op. cit._, pp. 210-222 (abridged).
For the spectator, such hours as Mr. Hudson writes of form a mere tale
of emptiness, in which nothing happens, nothing is gained, and there is
nothing to describe. They are meaningless and vacant tracts of time. To
him who feels their inner secret, they tingle with an importance that
unutterably vouches for itself. I am sorry for the boy or girl, or man
or woman, who has never been touched by the spell of this mysterious
sensorial life, with its irrationality, if so you like to call it, but
its vigilance and its supreme felicity. The holidays of life are its
most vitally significant portions, because they are, or at least should
be, covered with just this kind of magically irresponsible spell.
* * * * *
And now what is the result of all these considerations and quotations?
It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely
forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms
of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate,
respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy
in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off:
neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any
single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of
insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and
sick-rooms have their special revelations. It is enough to ask of each
of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the
most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the
vast field.