In my previous talk, 'On a Certain Blindness,' I tried to make you feel
how soaked and shot-through life is with values and meanings which we
fail to realize because of our external and insensible point of view.
The meanings are there for the others, but they are not there for us.
There lies more than a mere interest of curious speculation in
understanding this. It has the most tremendous practical importance. I
wish that I could convince you of it as I feel it myself. It is the
basis of all our tolerance, social, religious, and political. The
forgetting of it lies at the root of every stupid and sanguinary mistake
that rulers over subject-peoples make. The first thing to learn in
intercourse with others is non-interference with their own peculiar ways
of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by
violence with ours. No one has insight into all the ideals. No one
should presume to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dogmatize about
them in each other is the root of most human injustices and cruelties,
and the trait in human character most likely to make the angels weep.
Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections to the
enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold. And which has
the superior view of the absolute truth, he or we? Which has the more
vital insight into the nature of Jill's existence, as a fact? Is he in
excess, being in this matter a maniac? or are we in defect, being
victims of a pathological anæsthesia as regards Jill's magical
importance? Surely the latter; surely to Jack are the profounder truths
revealed; surely poor Jill's palpitating little life-throbs _are_ among
the wonders of creation, _are_ worthy of this sympathetic interest; and
it is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel like Jack. For Jack
realizes Jill concretely, and we do not. He struggles toward a union
with her inner life, divining her feelings, anticipating her desires,
understanding her limits as manfully as he can, and yet inadequately,
too; for he is also afflicted with some blindness, even here. Whilst
we, dead clods that we are, do not even seek after these things, but are
contented that that portion of eternal fact named Jill should be for us
as if it were not. Jill, who knows her inner life, knows that Jack's way
of taking it--so importantly--is the true and serious way; and she
responds to the truth in him by taking him truly and seriously, too. May
the ancient blindness never wrap its clouds about either of them again!
Where would any of _us_ be, were there no one willing to know us as we
really are or ready to repay us for _our_ insight by making recognizant
return? We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense,
pathetic, and important way.
If you say that this is absurd, and that we cannot be in love with
everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact,
certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and
for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such persons know
more of truth than if their hearts were not so big. The vice of ordinary
Jack and Jill affection is not its intensity, but its exclusions and its
jealousies. Leave those out, and you see that the ideal I am holding up
before you, however impracticable to-day, yet contains nothing
intrinsically absurd.
We have unquestionably a great cloud-bank of ancestral blindness
weighing down upon us, only transiently riven here and there by fitful
revelations of the truth. It is vain to hope for this state of things to
alter much. Our inner secrets must remain for the most part impenetrable
by others, for beings as essentially practical as we are are necessarily
short of sight. But, if we cannot gain much positive insight into one
another, cannot we at least use our sense of our own blindness to make
us more cautious in going over the dark places? Cannot we escape some of
those hideous ancestral intolerances and cruelties, and positive
reversals of the truth?
For the remainder of this hour I invite you to seek with me some
principle to make our tolerance less chaotic. And, as I began my
previous lecture by a personal reminiscence, I am going to ask your
indulgence for a similar bit of egotism now.
A few summers ago I spent a happy week at the famous Assembly Grounds on
the borders of Chautauqua Lake. The moment one treads that sacred
enclosure, one feels one's self in an atmosphere of success. Sobriety
and industry, intelligence and goodness, orderliness and ideality,
prosperity and cheerfulness, pervade the air. It is a serious and
studious picnic on a gigantic scale. Here you have a town of many
thousands of inhabitants, beautifully laid out in the forest and
drained, and equipped with means for satisfying all the necessary lower
and most of the superfluous higher wants of man. You have a first-class
college in full blast. You have magnificent music--a chorus of seven
hundred voices, with possibly the most perfect open-air auditorium in
the world. You have every sort of athletic exercise from sailing,
rowing, swimming, bicycling, to the ball-field and the more artificial
doings which the gymnasium affords. You have kindergartens and model
secondary schools. You have general religious services and special
club-houses for the several sects. You have perpetually running
soda-water fountains, and daily popular lectures by distinguished men.
You have the best of company, and yet no effort. You have no zymotic
diseases, no poverty, no drunkenness, no crime, no police. You have
culture, you have kindness, you have cheapness, you have equality, you
have the best fruits of what mankind has fought and bled and striven
for tinder the name of civilization for centuries. You have, in short, a
foretaste of what human society might be, were it all in the light, with
no suffering and no dark corners.
I went in curiosity for a day. I stayed for a week, held spell-bound by
the charm and ease of everything, by the middle-class paradise, without
a sin, without a victim, without a blot, without a tear.
And yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and
wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily
saying: "Ouf! what a relief! Now for something primordial and savage,
even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the balance
straight again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate,
this goodness too uninspiring. This human drama without a villain or a
pang; this community so refined that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost
offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in
the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things,--I
cannot abide with them. Let me take my chances again in the big outside
worldly wilderness with all its sins and sufferings. There are the
heights and depths, the precipices and the steep ideals, the gleams of
the awful and the infinite; and there is more hope and help a thousand
times than in this dead level and quintessence of every mediocrity."
Such was the sudden right-about-face performed for me by my lawless
fancy! There had been spread before me the realization--on a small,
sample scale of course--of all the ideals for which our civilization has
been striving: security, intelligence, humanity, and order; and here was
the instinctive hostile reaction, not of the natural man, but of a
so-called cultivated man upon such a Utopia. There seemed thus to be a
self-contradiction and paradox somewhere, which I, as a professor
drawing a full salary, was in duty bound to unravel and explain, if I
could.
So I meditated. And, first of all, I asked myself what the thing was
that was so lacking in this Sabbatical city, and the lack of which kept
one forever falling short of the higher sort of contentment. And I soon
recognized that it was the element that gives to the wicked outer world
all its moral style, expressiveness and picturesqueness,--the element of
precipitousness, so to call it, of strength and strenuousness, intensity
and danger.
What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and
the statues celebrate and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the
everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with
heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory
from the jaws of death. But in this unspeakable Chautauqua there was no
potentiality of death in sight anywhere, and no point of the compass
visible from which danger might possibly appear. The ideal was so
completely victorious already that no sign of any previous battle
remained, the place just resting on its oars. But what our human
emotions seem to require is the sight of the struggle going on. The
moment the fruits are being merely eaten, things become ignoble. Sweat
and effort, human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet
getting through alive, and then turning its back on its success to
pursue another more rare and arduous still--this is the sort of thing
the presence of which inspires us, and the reality of which it seems to
be the function of all the higher forms of literature and fine art to
bring home to us and suggest. At Chautauqua there were no racks, even in
the place's historical museum; and no sweat, except possibly the gentle
moisture on the brow of some lecturer, or on the sides of some player in
the ball-field.
Such absence of human nature _in extremis_ anywhere seemed, then, a
sufficient explanation for Chautauqua's flatness and lack of zest.
But was not this a paradox well calculated to fill one with dismay? It
looks indeed, thought I, as if the romantic idealists with their
pessimism about our civilization were, after all, quite right. An
irremediable flatness is coming over the world. Bourgeoisie and
mediocrity, church sociables and teachers' conventions, are taking the
place of the old heights and depths and romantic chiaroscuro. And, to
get human life in its wild intensity, we must in future turn more and
more away from the actual, and forget it, if we can, in the romancer's
or the poet's pages. The whole world, delightful and sinful as it may
still appear for a moment to one just escaped from the Chautauquan
enclosure, is nevertheless obeying more and more just those ideals that
are sure to make of it in the end a mere Chautauqua Assembly on an
enormous scale. _Was im Gesang soll leben muss im Leben untergehn_. Even
now, in our own country, correctness, fairness, and compromise for every
small advantage are crowding out all other qualities. The higher
heroisms and the old rare flavors are passing out of life.[P]
[P] This address was composed before the Cuban and Philippine
wars. Such outbursts of the passion of mastery are, however,
only episodes in a social process which in the long run seems
everywhere tending toward the Chautauquan ideals.
With these thoughts in my mind, I was speeding with the train toward
Buffalo, when, near that city, the sight of a workman doing something on
the dizzy edge of a sky-scaling iron construction brought me to my
senses very suddenly. And now I perceived, by a flash of insight, that I
had been steeping myself in pure ancestral blindness, and looking at
life with the eyes of a remote spectator. Wishing for heroism and the
spectacle of human nature on the rack, I had never noticed the great
fields of heroism lying round about me, I had failed to see it present
and alive. I could only think of it as dead and embalmed, labelled and
costumed, as it is in the pages of romance. And yet there it was before
me in the daily lives of the laboring classes. Not in clanging fights
and desperate marches only is heroism to be looked for, but on every
railway bridge and fire-proof building that is going up to-day. On
freight-trains, on the decks of vessels, in cattle-yards and mines, on
lumber-rafts, among the firemen and the policemen, the demand for
courage is incessant; and the supply never fails. There, every day of
the year somewhere, is human nature _in extremis_ for you. And wherever
a scythe, an axe, a pick, or a shovel is wielded, you have it sweating
and aching and with its powers of patient endurance racked to the utmost
under the length of hours of the strain.
As I awoke to all this unidealized heroic life around me, the scales
seemed to fall from my eyes; and a wave of sympathy greater than
anything I had ever before felt with the common life of common men began
to fill my soul. It began to seem as if virtue with horny hands and
dirty skin were the only virtue genuine and vital enough to take account
of. Every other virtue poses; none is absolutely unconscious and simple,
and unexpectant of decoration or recognition, like this. These are our
soldiers, thought I, these our sustainers, these the very parents of our
life.
Many years ago, when in Vienna, I had had a similar feeling of awe and
reverence in looking at the peasant-women, in from the country on their
business at the market for the day. Old hags many of them were, dried
and brown and wrinkled, kerchiefed and short-petticoated, with thick
wool stockings on their bony shanks, stumping through the glittering
thoroughfares, looking neither to the right nor the left, bent on duty,
envying nothing, humble-hearted, remote;--and yet at bottom, when you
came to think of it, bearing the whole fabric of the splendors and
corruptions of that city on their laborious backs. For where would any
of it have been without their unremitting, unrewarded labor in the
fields? And so with us: not to our generals and poets, I thought, but to
the Italian and Hungarian laborers in the Subway, rather, ought the
monuments of gratitude and reverence of a city like Boston to be reared.
* * * * *
If any of you have been readers of Tolstoï, you will see that I passed
into a vein of feeling similar to his, with its abhorrence of all that
conventionally passes for distinguished, and its exclusive deification
of the bravery, patience, kindliness, and dumbness of the unconscious
natural man.
Where now is _our_ Tolstoï, I said, to bring the truth of all this home
to our American bosoms, fill us with a better insight, and wean us away
from that spurious literary romanticism on which our wretched
culture--as it calls itself--is fed? Divinity lies all about us, and
culture is too hidebound to even suspect the fact. Could a Howells or a
Kipling be enlisted in this mission? or are they still too deep in the
ancestral blindness, and not humane enough for the inner joy and meaning
of the laborer's existence to be really revealed? Must we wait for some
one born and bred and living as a laborer himself, but who, by grace of
Heaven, shall also find a literary voice?
And there I rested on that day, with a sense of widening of vision, and
with what it is surely fair to call an increase of religious insight
into life. In God's eyes the differences of social position, of
intellect, of culture, of cleanliness, of dress, which different men
exhibit, and all the other rarities and exceptions on which they so
fantastically pin their pride, must be so small as practically quite to
vanish; and all that should remain is the common fact that here we are,
a countless multitude of vessels of life, each of us pent in to peculiar
difficulties, with which we must severally struggle by using whatever of
fortitude and goodness we can summon up. The exercise of the courage,
patience, and kindness, must be the significant portion of the whole
business; and the distinctions of position can only be a manner of
diversifying the phenomenal surface upon which these underground virtues
may manifest their effects. At this rate, the deepest human life is
everywhere, is eternal. And, if any human attributes exist only in
particular individuals, they must belong to the mere trapping and
decoration of the surface-show.
Thus are men's lives levelled up as well as levelled down,--levelled up
in their common inner meaning, levelled down in their outer gloriousness
and show. Yet always, we must confess, this levelling insight tends to
be obscured again; and always the ancestral blindness returns and wraps
us up, so that we end once more by thinking that creation can be for no
other purpose than to develop remarkable situations and conventional
distinctions and merits. And then always some new leveller in the shape
of a religious prophet has to arise--the Buddha, the Christ, or some
Saint Francis, some Rousseau or Tolstoï--to redispel our blindness. Yet,
little by little, there comes some stable gain; for the world does get
more humane, and the religion of democracy tends toward permanent
increase.
This, as I said, became for a time my conviction, and gave me great
content. I have put the matter into the form of a personal reminiscence,
so that I might lead you into it more directly and completely, and so
save time. But now I am going to discuss the rest of it with you in a
more impersonal way.
Tolstoï's levelling philosophy began long before he had the crisis of
melancholy commemorated in that wonderful document of his entitled 'My
Confession,' which led the way to his more specifically religious works.
In his masterpiece 'War and Peace,'--assuredly the greatest of human
novels,--the rôle of the spiritual hero is given to a poor little
soldier named Karataïeff, so helpful, so cheerful, and so devout that,
in spite of his ignorance and filthiness, the sight of him opens the
heavens, which have been closed, to the mind of the principal character
of the book; and his example evidently is meant by Tolstoï to let God
into the world again for the reader. Poor little Karataïeff is taken
prisoner by the French; and, when too exhausted by hardship and fever to
march, is shot as other prisoners were in the famous retreat from
Moscow. The last view one gets of him is his little figure leaning
against a white birch-tree, and uncomplainingly awaiting the end.
"The more," writes Tolstoï in the work 'My Confession,' "the more I
examined the life of these laboring folks, the more persuaded I became
that they veritably have faith, and get from it alone the sense and the
possibility of life.... Contrariwise to those of our own class, who
protest against destiny and grow indignant at its rigor, these people
receive maladies and misfortunes without revolt, without opposition, and
with a firm and tranquil confidence that all had to be like that, could
not be otherwise, and that it is all right so.... The more we live by
our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life. We see only a
cruel jest in suffering and death, whereas these people live, suffer,
and draw near to death with tranquillity, and oftener than not with
joy.... There are enormous multitudes of them happy with the most
perfect happiness, although deprived of what for us is the sole good of
life. Those who understand life's meaning, and know how to live and die
thus, are to be counted not by twos, threes, tens, but by hundreds,
thousands, millions. They labor quietly, endure privations and pains,
live and die, and throughout everything see the good without seeing the
vanity. I had to love these people. The more I entered into their life,
the more I loved them; and the more it became possible for me to live,
too. It came about not only that the life of our society, of the learned
and of the rich, disgusted me--more than that, it lost all semblance of
meaning in my eyes. All our actions, our deliberations, our sciences,
our arts, all appeared to me with a new significance. I understood that
these things might be charming pastimes, but that one need seek in them
no depth, whereas the life of the hard-working populace, of that
multitude of human beings who really contribute to existence, appeared
to me in its true light. I understood that there veritably is life, that
the meaning which life there receives is the truth; and I accepted
it."[Q]
[Q] My Confession, X. (condensed).
In a similar way does Stevenson appeal to our piety toward the elemental
virtue of mankind.
"What a wonderful thing," he writes,[R] "is this Man! How surprising are
his attributes! Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many
hardships, savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably
condemned to prey upon his fellow-lives,--who should have blamed him,
had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous?
... [Yet] it matters not where we look, under what climate we observe
him, in what stage of society, in what depth of ignorance, burdened with
what erroneous morality; in ships at sea, a man inured to hardship and
vile pleasures, his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern, and a bedizened
trull who sells herself to rob him, and he, for all that, simple,
innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave to
drown, for others;... in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent
millions to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the
future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his
virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbors, tempted perhaps
in vain by the bright gin-palace,... often repaying the world's scorn
with service, often standing firm upon a scruple;... everywhere some
virtue cherished or affected, everywhere some decency of thought and
courage, everywhere the ensign of man's ineffectual goodness,--ah! if I
could show you this! If I could show you these men and women all the
world over, in every stage of history, under every abuse of error, under
every circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without
thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still
clinging to some rag of honor, the poor jewel of their souls."
[R] Across the Plains: "Pulvis et Umbra" (abridged).
All this is as true as it is splendid, and terribly do we need our
Tolstoïs and Stevensons to keep our sense for it alive. Yet you remember
the Irishman who, when asked, "Is not one man as good as another?"
replied, "Yes; and a great deal better, too!" Similarly (it seems to me)
does Tolstoï overcorrect our social prejudices, when he makes his love
of the peasant so exclusive, and hardens his heart toward the educated
man as absolutely as he does. Grant that at Chautauqua there was little
moral effort, little sweat or muscular strain in view. Still, deep down
in the souls of the participants we may be sure that something of the
sort was hid, some inner stress, some vital virtue not found wanting
when required. And, after all, the question recurs, and forces itself
upon us, Is it so certain that the surroundings and circumstances of the
virtue do make so little difference in the importance of the result? Is
the functional utility, the worth to the universe of a certain definite
amount of courage, kindliness, and patience, no greater if the
possessor of these virtues is in an educated situation, working out
far-reaching tasks, than if he be an illiterate nobody, hewing wood and
drawing water, just to keep himself alive? Tolstoï's philosophy, deeply
enlightening though it certainly is, remains a false abstraction. It
savors too much of that Oriental pessimism and nihilism of his, which
declares the whole phenomenal world and its facts and their distinctions
to be a cunning fraud.
* * * * *
A mere bare fraud is just what our Western common sense will never
believe the phenomenal world to be. It admits fully that the inner joys
and virtues are the _essential_ part of life's business, but it is sure
that _some_ positive part is also played by the adjuncts of the show. If
it is idiotic in romanticism to recognize the heroic only when it sees
it labelled and dressed-up in books, it is really just as idiotic to see
it only in the dirty boots and sweaty shirt of some one in the fields.
It is with us really under every disguise: at Chautauqua; here in your
college; in the stock-yards and on the freight-trains; and in the czar
of Russia's court. But, instinctively, we make a combination of two
things in judging the total significance of a human being. We feel it
to be some sort of a product (if such a product only could be
calculated) of his inner virtue _and_ his outer place,--neither singly
taken, but both conjoined. If the outer differences had no meaning for
life, why indeed should all this immense variety of them exist? They
_must_ be significant elements of the world as well.
Just test Tolstoï's deification of the mere manual laborer by the facts.
This is what Mr. Walter Wyckoff, after working as an unskilled laborer
in the demolition of some buildings at West Point, writes of the
spiritual condition of the class of men to which he temporarily chose to
belong:--
"The salient features of our condition are plain enough. We are grown
men, and are without a trade. In the labor-market we stand ready to sell
to the highest bidder our mere muscular strength for so many hours each
day. We are thus in the lowest grade of labor. And, selling our muscular
strength in the open market for what it will bring, we sell it under
peculiar conditions. It is all the capital that we have. We have no
reserve means of subsistence, and cannot, therefore, stand off for a
'reserve price.' We sell under the necessity of satisfying imminent
hunger. Broadly speaking, we must sell our labor or starve; and, as
hunger is a matter of a few hours, and we have no other way of meeting
this need, we must sell at once for what the market offers for our
labor.
"Our employer is buying labor in a dear market, and he will certainly
get from us as much work as he can at the price. The gang-boss is
secured for this purpose, and thoroughly does he know his business. He
has sole command of us. He never saw us before, and he will discharge us
all when the débris is cleared away. In the mean time he must get from
us, if he can, the utmost of physical labor which we, individually and
collectively, are capable of. If he should drive some of us to
exhaustion, and we should not be able to continue at work, he would not
be the loser; for the market would soon supply him with others to take
our places.
"We are ignorant men, but so much we clearly see,--that we have sold our
labor where we could sell it dearest, and our employer has bought it
where he could buy it cheapest. He has paid high, and he must get all
the labor that he can; and, by a strong instinct which possesses us, we
shall part with as little as we can. From work like ours there seems to
us to have been eliminated every element which constitutes the nobility
of labor. We feel no personal pride in its progress, and no community of
interest with our employer. There is none of the joy of responsibility,
none of the sense of achievement, only the dull monotony of grinding
toil, with the longing for the signal to quit work, and for our wages at
the end.
"And being what we are, the dregs of the labor-market, and having no
certainty of permanent employment, and no organization among ourselves,
we must expect to work under the watchful eye of a gang-boss, and be
driven, like the wage-slaves that we are, through our tasks.
"All this is to tell us, in effect, that our lives are hard, barren,
hopeless lives."
And such hard, barren, hopeless lives, surely, are not lives in which
one ought to be willing permanently to remain. And why is this so? Is it
because they are so dirty? Well, Nansen grew a great deal dirtier on his
polar expedition; and we think none the worse of his life for that. Is
it the insensibility? Our soldiers have to grow vastly more insensible,
and we extol them to the skies. Is it the poverty? Poverty has been
reckoned the crowning beauty of many a heroic career. Is it the slavery
to a task, the loss of finer pleasures?
Such slavery and loss are of the very essence of the higher fortitude,
and are always counted to its credit,--read the records of missionary
devotion all over the world. It is not any one of these things, then,
taken by itself,--no, nor all of them together,--that make such a life
undesirable. A man might in truth live like an unskilled laborer, and do
the work of one, and yet count as one of the noblest of God's creatures.
Quite possibly there were some such persons in the gang that our author
describes; but the current of their souls ran underground; and he was
too steeped in the ancestral blindness to discern it.
If there _were_ any such morally exceptional individuals, however, what
made them different from the rest? It can only have been this,--that
their souls worked and endured in obedience to some inner _ideal_, while
their comrades were not actuated by anything worthy of that name. These
ideals of other lives are among those secrets that we can almost never
penetrate, although something about the man may often tell us when they
are there. In Mr. Wyckoff's own case we know exactly what the
self-imposed ideal was. Partly he had stumped himself, as the boys say,
to carry through a strenuous achievement; but mainly he wished to
enlarge his sympathetic insight into fellow-lives. For this his sweat
and toil acquire a certain heroic significance, and make us accord to
him exceptional esteem. But it is easy to imagine his fellows with
various other ideals. To say nothing of wives and babies, one may have
been a convert of the Salvation Army, and had a nightingale singing of
expiation and forgiveness in his heart all the while he labored. Or
there might have been an apostle like Tolstoï himself, or his compatriot
Bondareff, in the gang, voluntarily embracing labor as their religious
mission. Class-loyalty was undoubtedly an ideal with many. And who knows
how much of that higher manliness of poverty, of which Phillips Brooks
has spoken so penetratingly, was or was not present in that gang?
"A rugged, barren land," says Phillips Brooks, "is poverty to live
in,--a land where I am thankful very often if I can get a berry or a
root to eat. But living in it really, letting it bear witness to me of
itself, not dishonoring it all the time by judging it after the standard
of the other lands, gradually there come out its qualities. Behold! no
land like this barren and naked land of poverty could show the moral
geology of the world. See how the hard ribs ... stand out strong and
solid. No life like poverty could so get one to the heart of things and
make men know their meaning, could so let us feel life and the world
with all the soft cushions stripped off and thrown away.... Poverty
makes men come very near each other, and recognize each other's human
hearts; and poverty, highest and best of all, demands and cries out for
faith in God.... I know how superficial and unfeeling, how like mere
mockery, words in praise of poverty may seem.... But I am sure that the
poor man's dignity and freedom, his self-respect and energy, depend upon
his cordial knowledge that his poverty is a true region and kind of
life, with its own chances of character, its own springs of happiness
and revelations of God. Let him resist the characterlessness which often
goes with being poor. Let him insist on respecting the condition where
he lives. Let him learn to love it, so that by and by, [if] he grows
rich, he shall go out of the low door of the old familiar poverty with a
true pang of regret, and with a true honor for the narrow home in which
he has lived so long."[S]
[S] Sermons. 5th Series, New York, 1893, pp. 166, 167.
The barrenness and ignobleness of the more usual laborer's life consist
in the fact that it is moved by no such ideal inner springs. The
backache, the long hours, the danger, are patiently endured--for what?
To gain a quid of tobacco, a glass of beer, a cup of coffee, a meal, and
a bed, and to begin again the next day and shirk as much as one can.
This really is why we raise no monument to the laborers in the Subway,
even though they be our conscripts, and even though after a fashion our
city is indeed based upon their patient hearts and enduring backs and
shoulders. And this is why we do raise monuments to our soldiers, whose
outward conditions were even brutaller still. The soldiers are supposed
to have followed an ideal, and the laborers are supposed to have
followed none.
You see, my friends, how the plot now thickens; and how strangely the
complexities of this wonderful human nature of ours begin to develop
under our hands. We have seen the blindness and deadness to each other
which are our natural inheritance; and, in spite of them, we have been
led to acknowledge an inner meaning which passeth show, and which may be
present in the lives of others where we least descry it. And now we are
led to say that such inner meaning can be _complete_ and _valid for us
also_, only when the inner joy, courage, and endurance are joined with
an ideal.
* * * * *
But what, exactly, do we mean by an ideal? Can we give no definite
account of such a word?
To a certain extent we can. An ideal, for instance, must be something
intellectually conceived, something of which we are not unconscious, if
we have it; and it must carry with it that sort of outlook, uplift, and
brightness that go with all intellectual facts. Secondly, there must be
_novelty_ in an ideal,--novelty at least for him whom the ideal grasps.
Sodden routine is incompatible with ideality, although what is sodden
routine for one person may be ideal novelty for another. This shows that
there is nothing absolutely ideal: ideals are relative to the lives that
entertain them. To keep out of the gutter is for us here no part of
consciousness at all, yet for many of our brethren it is the most
legitimately engrossing of ideals.
Now, taken nakedly, abstractly, and immediately, you see that mere
ideals are the cheapest things in life. Everybody has them in some shape
or other, personal or general, sound or mistaken, low or high; and the
most worthless sentimentalists and dreamers, drunkards, shirks and
verse-makers, who never show a grain of effort, courage, or endurance,
possibly have them on the most copious scale. Education, enlarging as it
does our horizon and perspective, is a means of multiplying our ideals,
of bringing new ones into view. And your college professor, with a
starched shirt and spectacles, would, if a stock of ideals were all
alone by itself enough to render a life significant, be the most
absolutely and deeply significant of men. Tolstoï would be completely
blind in despising him for a prig, a pedant and a parody; and all our
new insight into the divinity of muscular labor would be altogether off
the track of truth.
But such consequences as this, you instinctively feel, are erroneous.
The more ideals a man has, the more contemptible, on the whole, do you
continue to deem him, if the matter ends there for him, and if none of
the laboring man's virtues are called into action on his part,--no
courage shown, no privations undergone, no dirt or scars contracted in
the attempt to get them realized. It is quite obvious that something
more than the mere possession of ideals is required to make a life
significant in any sense that claims the spectator's admiration. Inner
joy, to be sure, it may _have_, with its ideals; but that is its own
private sentimental matter. To extort from us, outsiders as we are, with
our own ideals to look after, the tribute of our grudging recognition,
it must back its ideal visions with what the laborers have, the sterner
stuff of manly virtue; it must multiply their sentimental surface by the
dimension of the active will, if we are to have _depth_, if we are to
have anything cubical and solid in the way of character.
The significance of a human life for communicable and publicly
recognizable purposes is thus the offspring of a marriage of two
different parents, either of whom alone is barren. The ideals taken by
themselves give no reality, the virtues by themselves no novelty. And
let the orientalists and pessimists say what they will, the thing of
deepest--or, at any rate, of comparatively deepest--significance in life
does seem to be its character of _progress_, or that strange union of
reality with ideal novelty which it continues from one moment to another
to present. To recognize ideal novelty is the task of what we call
intelligence. Not every one's intelligence can tell which novelties are
ideal. For many the ideal thing will always seem to cling still to the
older more familiar good. In this case character, though not
significant totally, may be still significant pathetically. So, if we
are to choose which is the more essential factor of human character, the
fighting virtue or the intellectual breadth, we must side with Tolstoï,
and choose that simple faithfulness to his light or darkness which any
common unintellectual man can show.
* * * * *
But, with all this beating and tacking on my part, I fear you take me to
be reaching a confused result. I seem to be just taking things up and
dropping them again. First I took up Chautauqua, and dropped that; then
Tolstoï and the heroism of common toil, and dropped them; finally, I
took up ideals, and seem now almost dropping those. But please observe
in what sense it is that I drop them. It is when they pretend _singly_
to redeem life from insignificance. Culture and refinement all alone are
not enough to do so. Ideal aspirations are not enough, when uncombined
with pluck and will. But neither are pluck and will, dogged endurance
and insensibility to danger enough, when taken all alone. There must be
some sort of fusion, some chemical combination among these principles,
for a life objectively and thoroughly significant to result.
Of course, this is a somewhat vague conclusion. But in a question of
significance, of worth, like this, conclusions can never be precise. The
answer of appreciation, of sentiment, is always a more or a less, a
balance struck by sympathy, insight, and good will. But it is an answer,
all the same, a real conclusion. And, in the course of getting it, it
seems to me that our eyes have been opened to many important things.
Some of you are, perhaps, more livingly aware than you were an hour ago
of the depths of worth that lie around you, hid in alien lives. And,
when you ask how much sympathy you ought to bestow, although the amount
is, truly enough, a matter of ideal on your own part, yet in this notion
of the combination of ideals with active virtues you have a rough
standard for shaping your decision. In any case, your imagination is
extended. You divine in the world about you matter for a little more
humility on your own part, and tolerance, reverence, and love for
others; and you gain a certain inner joyfulness at the increased
importance of our common life. Such joyfulness is a religious
inspiration and an element of spiritual health, and worth more than
large amounts of that sort of technical and accurate information which
we professors are supposed to be able to impart.
To show the sort of thing I mean by these words, I will just make one
brief practical illustration and then close.
We are suffering to-day in America from what is called the
labor-question; and, when you go out into the world, you will each and
all of you be caught up in its perplexities. I use the brief term
labor-question to cover all sorts of anarchistic discontents and
socialistic projects, and the conservative resistances which they
provoke. So far as this conflict is unhealthy and regrettable,--and I
think it is so only to a limited extent,--the unhealthiness consists
solely in the fact that one-half of our fellow-countrymen remain
entirely blind to the internal significance of the lives of the other
half. They miss the joys and sorrows, they fail to feel the moral
virtue, and they do not guess the presence of the intellectual ideals.
They are at cross-purposes all along the line, regarding each other as
they might regard a set of dangerously gesticulating automata, or, if
they seek to get at the inner motivation, making the most horrible
mistakes. Often all that the poor man can think of in the rich man is a
cowardly greediness for safety, luxury, and effeminacy, and a boundless
affectation. What he is, is not a human being, but a pocket-book, a
bank-account. And a similar greediness, turned by disappointment into
envy, is all that many rich men can see in the state of mind of the
dissatisfied poor. And, if the rich man begins to do the sentimental act
over the poor man, what senseless blunders does he make, pitying him for
just those very duties and those very immunities which, rightly taken,
are the condition of his most abiding and characteristic joys! Each, in
short, ignores the fact that happiness and unhappiness and significance
are a vital mystery; each pins them absolutely on some ridiculous
feature of the external situation; and everybody remains outside of
everybody else's sight.
Society has, with all this, undoubtedly got to pass toward some newer
and better equilibrium, and the distribution of wealth has doubtless
slowly got to change: such changes have always happened, and will happen
to the end of time. But if, after all that I have said, any of you
expect that they will make any _genuine vital difference_ on a large
scale, to the lives of our descendants, you will have missed the
significance of my entire lecture. The solid meaning of life is always
the same eternal thing,--the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal,
however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some
man's or woman's pains.--And, whatever or wherever life may be, there
will always be the chance for that marriage to take place.
Fitz-James Stephen wrote many years ago words to this effect more
eloquent than any I can speak: "The 'Great Eastern,' or some of her
successors," he said, "will perhaps defy the roll of the Atlantic, and
cross the seas without allowing their passengers to feel that they have
left the firm land. The voyage from the cradle to the grave may come to
be performed with similar facility. Progress and science may perhaps
enable untold millions to live and die without a care, without a pang,
without an anxiety. They will have a pleasant passage and plenty of
brilliant conversation. They will wonder that men ever believed at all
in clanging fights and blazing towns and sinking ships and praying
hands; and, when they come to the end of their course, they will go
their way, and the place thereof will know them no more. But it seems
unlikely that they will have such a knowledge of the great ocean on
which they sail, with its storms and wrecks, its currents and icebergs,
its huge waves and mighty winds, as those who battled with it for years
together in the little craft, which, if they had few other merits,
brought those who navigated them full into the presence of time and
eternity, their maker and themselves, and forced them to have some
definite view of their relations to them and to each other."[T]
[T] Essays by a Barrister, London, 1862, p. 318.
In this solid and tridimensional sense, so to call it, those
philosophers are right who contend that the world is a standing thing,
with no progress, no real history. The changing conditions of history
touch only the surface of the show. The altered equilibriums and
redistributions only diversify our opportunities and open chances to us
for new ideals. But, with each new ideal that comes into life, the
chance for a life based on some old ideal will vanish; and he would
needs be a presumptuous calculator who should with confidence say that
the total sum of significances is positively and absolutely greater at
any one epoch than at any other of the world.
I am speaking broadly, I know, and omitting to consider certain
qualifications in which I myself believe. But one can only make one
point in one lecture, and I shall be well content if I have brought my
point home to you this evening in even a slight degree. _There are
compensations_: and no outward changes of condition in life can keep the
nightingale of its eternal meaning from singing in all sorts of
different men's hearts. That is the main fact to remember. If we could
not only admit it with our lips, but really and truly believe it, how
our convulsive insistencies, how our antipathies and dreads of each
other, would soften down! If the poor and the rich could look at each
other in this way, _sub specie æternatis_, how gentle would grow their
disputes! what tolerance and good humor, what willingness to live and
let live, would come into the world!