Humor is half pathos and more. This sword has two edges. On the one,
shining like burnished silver, you may see smiles reflected as from a
mirror; on the other, tears stand thick, like dews on flowers at early
morning of the later spring. Humor is a dual faculty, as much
misconceived by those who listen as by those who speak. We do not
always have wit to know the scope of what we do. Thoughts of
childhood, says the poet, are long, long thoughts; but who supposes
childhood knows they are? Nor is this altogether a fault. To feel the
sublime sequence of all we did would burden us as Atlas was burdened by
holding up the sky. Life might easily come to be sober to somberness,
which is a thing unwholesome and undesirable. Sunlight must have its
way. Darkness must not trespass too far; and every morning says to
every night, "Thus far, but no farther."
To many readers, Don Quixote seems fantastic, and Cervantes a
laughter-monger. Cervantes had suffered much. His life reads like a
novelist's tale. He belonged to the era of Spenser and Shakespeare; of
Philip II and William the Silent; of Leicester and Don John of Austria;
of The Great Armada and the Spanish Inquisition; of Lope de Vega and
Cervantes--for he was, in the Hispanian peninsula, his own greatest
contemporary--and to this hour this battle-scarred soldier of fortune
stands the tallest figure of Spanish literature. His was a lettered
rearing, and a young manhood spent as a common soldier. At Lepanto he
lost hand and arm. In five long, weary, and bitter years of slavery
among Algerine pirates, he held up his head, being a man; plotted
escape in dreams and waking; fought for freedom as a pinioned eagle
might; was at last rescued by the Society for the Redemption of Slaves;
sailed home from slavery to penury; came perilously near the age of
threescore, poverty-stricken and unknown, when, like a sun which leaps
from sunrise to noon at a single bound, this maimed soldier sprang
mid-sky, impossible to be ignored or forgotten, and disclosed himself,
the marked Spaniard of his era; and on the same day of 1616, Cervantes
and Shakespeare stopped their life in an unfinished line, and not a man
since then has been able to fill out the broken meaning. This man had
not wine, but tears to drink. Yet he jests, and the world laughs with
him; though we feel sure that while his age and after ages laugh and
applaud, Miguel Cervantes sits with laughter all faded from his face,
and the white look of pain settled about his lips, while tears "rise in
the heart and gather to the eyes." Tears sometimes make laughter and
jest the wilder. Men and women laugh to keep their hearts from
breaking.
Cervantes has ostensibly drawn a picture of a madman, and in fact has
painted a gentleman. What his intent was, who can be so bold as to
say? What part of his purpose was, we know. He would excoriate a
false and flippant chivalry. Contemporaneous chivalry he knew well;
for he had been a common soldier, wounded and distressed. He had seen
what a poor triviality that once noble thing had grown to be.
Institutions become effete. Age is apt to sap the strength of
movements as of men. Feudalism and the Crusades had commissioned the
knight-errant; and now, when law began to hold sword for itself, the
self-constituted legal force--knight-errantry--was no longer needed.
But to know when an institution has served its purpose is little less
than genius. Some things can be laughed down which can not be argued
down. A jest is not infrequently more potent than any syllogism. Some
things must be laughed away, other things must be wept away; so that
humor and pathos are to be ranked among the mighty agents for reform.
And one purpose Cervantes had was to laugh a tawdry knight-errantry off
the stage. In long years of soldiery, I doubt not he had grown to hate
this empty boast, and his nursed wrath now breaks out like a volcano.
This was his apparent purpose--but who can say this was all his
purpose? "King Lear" has a double action. Mayhap, Don Quixote has a
double meaning. We are always attaching meanings to works of genius.
But you can not tie any writer's utterance down to some poor altitude.
Great utterances have at least a half-infinite application. Tennyson
felt this, saying--as we read in his son's biography of him--regarding
explanations of his "Idyls of the King:" "I hate to be tied down to
'this means that,' because the thought within the image is much more
than any one interpretation;" and, "Poetry is like shot-silk, with many
glancing colors. Every reader will find his own interpretation
according to his ability, and according to his sympathy, with the
poet." What is true of poetry is true of all imaginative literature.
An author may not have analyzed his own motive in its entirety. In any
case, we may hold to this, Don Quixote was a gentleman, and is the
first gentleman whose portrait is given us in literature. We have
laughed at Don Quixote, but we have learned to love him. The "knight
of the rueful countenance," as we see him now, is not himself a jest,
but one of literature's most noble figures; and we love him because we
must. Was it mere chance that in drawing this don, Cervantes clothed
him with all nobilities, and shows him--living and dying--good,
courageous, pure; in short, a man? This scarcely seems a happening.
Seas have subtle undercurrents. I venture, Don Quixote has the same,
and marks the appearance of a gentleman in literature, since which day
that person has been a recurring, ennobling presence on the pages of
fiction and poetry.
A gentleman is a comparatively recent creation in life, as in letters.
Christ was the foremost and first gentleman. After him all gentility
patterns. With the law of the imagination we are familiar, which is
this: Imagination deals only with materials supplied by the senses.
Imagination, in other words, is not strictly originative, but, rather,
appropriative, giving a varied placing to images on hand, just as the
kaleidoscope makes all its multiform combinations with a given number
of pieces. Imagination does not make materials, is no magician, but is
an architect. Admitting this law, we can readily see how the creation
of a gentleman does not lie in the province of imagination. Homer's
heroes are the men Homer knew, with a poetic emphasis on strength,
stature, prowess. His era grew warriors and nothing else, and so Homer
paints nothing else. Human genius has limits. Man is originative in
character; and poets--"of imagination all compact"--catch this new form
of life, and we call the picture poetry. All civilization, to the days
of Jesus, produced but one character, so far as we may read, worthy to
be thought entire gentleman, and this was Joseph, the Jew, premier of
Egypt. He is the most manly man of pre-Christian civilizations. Or
probably Moses must be listed here. Classic scholarship can show no
gentleman Greece produced. Greek soil grew no such flowers beneath its
radiant sky. Plato was a philosopher--not gentleman. Socrates was an
iconoclast, but not a manly man and helpful spirit. Greek heroes were
guilty of atrocious and unthinkable sins. Test them by this canon of
Alfred Tennyson: "I would pluck my hand from a man, even if he were my
greatest hero or dearest friend, if he wronged a woman or told her a
lie;" and, so tested, where must Greek heroes be classified? Greece
and Rome produced heroes, but not gentlemen. Julius Caesar was the
flower of the Latin race. Nothing approximates him. Great qualities
cluster in him like stars in the deep sky. But his ambition was like
to that of Milton's Satan, and his lust was a bottomless pit. As a
national heroic figure, Julius Caesar is dazzling as a sun at summer
noon; but as a gentleman he cuts poorer figure than Lancelot or Sir
Tristram. The gentleman is not an evolution, but a creation. Christ
created the gentleman as certainly as he created the world.
Now, literature is what Emerson says genius is, a superlative borrower.
The state of a civilization at a given time will gauge the poet's
concept. He can not pass beyond the world's noblest notions to his
hour. If Greece and Rome produced no man, settle to it that Greek and
Roman literatures will produce no man. Sculptor, as Phidias;
statesman, as Pericles; dramatist, as Aeschylus; general, as
Themistocles; stern justice, as Aristides,--Greece can show; and such
characters the historians, dramatists, and epic poets will delineate
and celebrate. Horace is a looking-glass, and holds his genius so as
to catch the shadows of men passing by. This poets do, and can do no
more. They are not strictly creative. We mistake their mission. God
has somehow kept the creative power in his own possession. Men can
appropriate; God can create. So what we find is, that ancient
literature never attempted depicting a gentleman. Those days had no
such persons. But Christ came and set men a-dreaming. He filled men's
souls to the brim with expectation and wonder akin to fear and
anticipation of impossibilities; and what he was, men fondly and
greatly dreamed they might aspire to be. And thus the gentleman became
a prospective fact in life and after life, in literature; for we think
it has been fairly shown how literature produces no type till life has
produced it first. Literature is not properly productive, but
reproductive; not creative, but appropriative. As men climb a mountain
on a dark, still night, to watch a sunrise, so the race began to climb
toward manhood. The night was long, and this mountain taller than
Himalayas; and man slept not, but climbed. His groping toward this
sunrise of soul is the epic of history. Dante knew not a gentleman,
and could not dream him therefore. Mediaevalism learned to paint the
Madonna's face, but not manhood's look. Character is the last test of
genius. Man saw gray streaks of dawn, rimming far, ragged peaks, and
still he climbed; and, on a morning, beheld the sunrise! And if you
will note, 't is Don Quixote standing on the mountain's crest.
Some things can be adequately represented in marble. For "the Laocoon"
marble is probably the best method of expression. Fear, superhuman
effort, anguish, brute strength mastering human strength,--these are
the thoughts to be expressed, and are brought out in marble with
singular clearness and fidelity. For some things color is a necessity;
and marble would be totally inadequate. "The Greek Slave" may be put
in stone; the bewildering face of a world's Christ can never be
seriously attempted in marble, the futility of such attempt being so
apparent. Color, lights and shadows are essential to give hints of
deep things of deep soul. Hoffman must have canvas and colors. You
must paint the Christ. And some facts can not be painted. They are
abstract, and can not be intimated by anything short of words. You can
paint a man--Saul of Tarsus, or Charlemagne--but can not paint a
gentleman; for he represents no single majesty, but an essential and
intricate balance of all useful, great, and noble qualities. He can be
painted only by words; so that literature is the solitary means of
making apparent the shadow of that divine thing, a gentleman.
Don Quixote becomes intensely interesting, then, as a new attempt in
creative genius. But dare we think a gentleman could be ludicrous and
fantastic? for this the don was. We revolt against the notion that so
gracious a thing could be grotesque. Yet is this our mature thought?
Do not the facts certify that from this world's unregenerate standpoint
manliness is grotesque? Was not Christ looked upon as mad? Did not
his ideas of manliness appear as nothing other than fantastic, when he
would substitute love for might, meekness for braggadocio, and purity
of heart for an omnipresent sensuality? What were his ideals of
manhood but battling with windmills or being enamored of a myth?
Tested by standards of this world's make, his notions and conduct were
sheerly fantastic. As recorded on one occasion, "They laughed him to
scorn;" and this they did many another time, covertly or openly.
Indeed, grasping the state of civilization as then existing, and
comprehending Christ's non-earthly idea of what a gentleman was, we can
not be slow to perceive how ludicrous this conception would be to the
Roman world. Tall dreams seem madness. Hamlet's feigned madness
puzzles us even yet. Many an auditor heard Columbus with a smile
ill-concealed behind his beard. All high ideality sounds a madman's
babble. To see a true life live truly will strike many as a jest, and
others as pathos too deep for sobs.
Don Quixote conceived a man ought to live for virtue. To be
self-dedicated to the help of others; to be courageous as an army which
had never met defeat; to be self-forgetful, so that hunger, pain,
thirst, fatigue, become trifles; to have love become absorbing; to fill
the mind's unfathomed sky with dreams outshining dawns; to count honor
to be so much more than life, as that honor is all and life is naught;
to interpret all men and women at their best, and so to expect good and
not suspicion evil; to meet all men on the high level of manhood; and
to love God with such persistency and eagerness as that the soul's
solitudes are peopled with him as by a host,--if this be not a
gentleman, we have misconceived the species. Read this history of his
early and later battles for right, and you will not find an impurity of
word, suggestion, thought. God's lilies are not cleaner. I confess
that the knight's love for Dulcinea del Tobosa moves me to tears. I
never can smile or jest at him when his heart and lips hold with fealty
to an ideal love. His love created her. He found her a clod, but
flung her into the sky and made her a star. Is not this love's uniform
history? Blinded, not of lust or ambition, but of ideality. Saul met
Christ at noon, and was blinded by his vision; and would not all brave
men covet blindness thus incurred? And better to be blinded, as Don
Quixote, by a ravishing ideal, than to see, besotted in soul and shut
out from God. That humorous figure astride lean Rosinante, esquired by
pudgy, sensible Sancho; eager for chances to be of use; faithful to his
love as dawn to sun; strong in his desire of being all eyes to see
distress, all ears to hear a call for succor; sitting a dark night
through in vigil, tireless, courageous, waiting for day to charge on
what proved to be fulling hammers, making tumult with their own
stamping; or, again, asleep in the inn bed, fighting with wine-skins
and dreaming himself battling with giants,--this does not touch me as
being humorous so much as it does as being pathetic, unspeakably
pathetic, and manfully courageous. I see, but do not feel, the humor.
I have followed Don Quixote as faithfully as Sancho Panza on his
"Dapple;" have seen him fight, conquer, suffer defeat, ride through his
land of dreams; have seen his pasteboard helmet; have noted melancholy
settle round him as shadows on the landscape of an autumn day; have
seen him grow sick, weaken, die; but have known in him only high
dreams, attempted high achievings; have found him honor's soul, and
holding high regard for women; have been spectator of goodness as
unimpeachable as heaven, and purity deep, like that which whitens round
the throne--a human soul given over to goodness, and named, for cause,
"Quixada the Good." And his goodness seems a contagion.
For two and a half centuries since Cervantes painted this picture of a
gentleman, literature has given less or more of heed to similar
attempts; though as result, as I suppose, there are but two life-size
pictures which unhesitatingly we name gentlemen as soon as our eyes
light on them. Profile or silhouette of him there has been, but of the
full-length, full-face figure, only two. Shakespeare did not attempt
this task. Aside from Hamlet--who was not meant to sit for this
picture, though he had been no ill character for such sitting--there is
not among Shakespeare's men an intimation of such undertaking. Would
this princely genius had put his hand to this attempt, though, as seems
clear to me, Shakespeare did not conceive a gentleman. His ideas were
not quite whitened with Christ's morning light enough to have perceived
other than the natural man. Shakespeare's men are always "a little
lower than the angels;" whereas a gentleman might fittingly stand among
angels as a brother. This one star never swung across the optic-glass
of our great Shakespeare. That spiritual-mindedness which is life he
scarcely possessed. This was his limitation. Spenser stood higher on
this mount of vision. He conceived and executed a picture of pure
womanhood, and, had he attempted, might have sketched a wondrous face
and figure of a gentleman. Even as it was, he gave intimations of this
coming king. He seems one who gathers fuel for a fire, but never sets
the flame. His figures shift, and present no central character of
manhood who grows and furnishes standard of comparison. Milton's
genius was cast in a cyclopean mold, and needed distances remote as
heaven and hell to give right perspective to his figures, and his
supreme art concerns itself with Satan, and archangels, and God.
Of this ideal gentleman we have had growing hints. Literature, more
and more, concerns itself with spiritual quantities. The air of our
century is aromatic with these beautiful conceptions, as witness Jean
Valjean, Dr. MacLure, Deacon Phoebe, Sidney Carton, Daniel Deronda,
Donal Grant, Bayard, Red Jason, Pete, Captain Moray, John Halifax, and
Caponsacchi. Some of these pictures seem more than side views. But a
gentleman should be, must be, nobly normal. He is a balance of virtue.
Symmetry impresses us in him, as when we look at the Parthenon. All
his powers are in such delicate balance as that they seem capable of
easy perturbation, yet are, in fact, imperturbable as stars. The
gentleman in life is becoming a common figure. We have known such--so
strong, quiet, heroic, calm, sure of the future, knit to God, big with
fidelity and faith, that they translated into literal speech the holy
precepts of the Book of God. So tested, this world grows surely
better. Man has lost in romantic glitter of costume and bearing, but
has gained immeasurably in manhood. The gospel is peopling the world
with men. To suppose God meant to change men to saints was a
misconception. St. Simeon Stylites was that old misconception
realized. We can but honor him, so vast his hunger, so noble his
strife, so courageous his attitude, when he shouts, "I smote them with
the cross;" but St. Simeon did not realize God's notion. Goodness is
fraternal, accessible, genial. John Storm, in Hall Caine's "The
Christian," is susceptible to the same criticism. He is not balanced.
He means well, but is erratic, fitful, lacking center. He is like a
bird lost in storms, flying in circles. He thought to be a saint,
whereas Christ did not come to make saints, but to make men; and the
sooner we realize that a "saint" or a "Christian" is not the end of the
gospel, the better will it be for Christianity. Christianity is God's
method of making men; and Christianity is not an end, but a means.
When God gets his way, he wants to have this world populated with men
and women. Whether Caine meant John Storm for an ideal Christian we
can not say. There is strength here, as in all he has written; but
Storm's lacks are many and great. He is enthusiast, but flighty. He
means well, but is spasmodic in its display. Storm might have grown
into a hero had he lived longer, and, as a flame, leaped high at some
point in his career. Both as man and Christian, he disappoints us.
Red Jason, in "The Bondman," is a worthier contribution to the natural
history of the gentleman. View him how you will, he is great. His
moral stature lifts itself like the mass of a mountain. His nature
seems a fertile field seeded down to heroisms, and every seed
germinating and growing to maturity. Jason has virtues vast of girth
as huge forest-trees, but he is scarcely companionable. Glooms gather
round him as night about a hamlet in a valley. He is moral, imposing,
heroic, yet is there something lacking--is it voice, self-poise,
what?--lacking of being quite a gentleman. Nor was he shaped for such
a role by his creator, but was meant to sit for the portrait of a hero.
And such he is to the point of moving the spirit, as by the lightning's
touch, Goethe was not capable of conceiving a gentleman. His "Wilhelm
Meister" and himself fall so low in the scale of worth as to preclude
his seeing so serene a face. Goethe's sky was clouded, and fine lines
of finest character are only brought out under unhindered sunlight.
Manhood is a serene thing. Though storm-bolts rain about it thick as
hail, the quiet of deep seas reigns in it. And Dumas's men are each a
_bon vivant_, save the son of Porthos. These dusty and bloody
guardsmen had not enough moral fiber to fill a thimble. They think the
world of men and women a field for forage. This physical dash and
courage, this galloping of steeds, and sabers pummeling steeds' sides,
stands instead of character. In "Marius the Epicurean," Walter Pater
has given, as I think, a true picture of one who in the Roman era
aspired to be a man. He is cold, and in consequence barren; but such
is an accurate reading of Roman attempts at manhood; for ordinary
Epicureanism was fervid to sensuality, and the Stoic was frigid. To
heathen conception there was no middle ground. The warm color on
cheek, the morning in the eyes, the geniality in the hand, the fervor
at the heart, the alert thought, the winged imagination, the sturdy
will, the virile moral sense, the responsive conscience, the courage
which laughed to die for duty,--these could not be amalgamated. Heroic
qualities have always been native to the soul as warmth to the south
wind. All history is rich with tapestries of tragic and colossal
heroisms, so as to make us proud that we are men. Heroisms are harsh,
but manliness is tender. And in this seeming irreconcilability lies
the difficulty of constructing a gentleman.
But attempts thicken. In our century they group together like violets
on a stream's bank fronting the sun in spring. Literary artists,
knowing how difficulties hedge this attempt, hesitate. There are many
hints of the gentleman. Let us be glad for that, seeing we are
enriched thereby. "Rab and His Friends" gives so strong a picture of
stolid strength in love's fidelity, which knows to serve and suffer and
die without a moan or being well aware of aught save love. And Dr.
MacLure is a dear addition to our company of manhood, shouldering his
way through Scotland's winter's storm and cold because need calls him;
serving as his Master had taught him so long ago; forgetting himself in
absorbing thought for others; lonely as a fireless hearth; longing for
friendship which would not fail; reaching for Drumsheugh's hand, and
holding it when death was claiming the good physician's hand. We could
easily conceive we had been seated at the deathbed of a gentleman.
Deacon Phoebe stands as a character in Annie Trumbull Slosson's "Seven
Dreamers," a book which, outside Cable's "Old Creole Days," is to me
the most perfect series of brief character-sketches drawn by an
American author, and entirely worthy to stand by "A Window in Thrums,"
and "Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush," and "In Ole Virginia." Deacon
Phoebe has forgotten himself. Unselfishness does not often rise to
such heights. This "dreamer" of "Francony Way" is full brother to
Sidney Carton, born across the seas. Self-forgetfulness, so beautiful
as that even name and sex become a memory dim as a distant sail upon an
evening sea,--this must be a sight fitted to bring laughter to the
heart of God. Deacon Phoebe is one trait in a gentleman. Sidney
Carton is of the same sort, save that the hero element stands more
apparent. His is a larger field, a more attractive background, thus
throwing his figure into clearer relief. Deacon Phoebe was the
self-abasement of humility, Sidney Carton is the supreme surrender of
love; but the end of both is service. There ought to be a gallery in
our earth from which men and women might lean and look on nobilities
like Sidney Carton. That beatified face; that hand holding a woman's
trembling hand, what time he whispered for her comfort, "I am the
resurrection and the life," as the crowded tumbrel rattled on to the
guillotine, and he faced death with smile as sweet as love upon his
face, and love making a man thus divine,--this is Sidney Carton, who
stirs our soul as storms stir the seas. Bonaventure, as drawn by
Cable, is of similar design. He is unconscious as a flower; but had
learned, as his schoolmaster-priest had taught him, to write "self"
with a small "s;" so an untutored soul, lacerated with grief, pierced
by suffering, gave himself over to goodness and help, becoming absorbed
therein. Such is Bonaventure. He was what Tennyson has said of "the
gardener's daughter," "A sight to make an old man young."
Love has learned to work miracles in character. Rains do not wash air
so clean as love washes character, whiting "as no fuller on earth can
white" it. And how constantly manhood neighbors with love is a
beautiful and noteworthy circumstance. Here place Pete, in "The
Manxman." You can not over-praise him. Some esteem him a fabulous
character; but knowing his island and people well, I feel sure he is
flesh and blood, though flesh and blood so uncommon and superior
stagger our faith for a moment. It is the glory of our race that at
rare springtime it bursts into such bloom that painter and poet are
both bankrupt in attempting to copy this loveliness. Pete is such an
effort of nature. His letters to himself, written as from his wife, to
cover her shame and desertion, present a spectacle so magnanimous and
pathetic as to upbraid us that we had never learned nobilities so
sublime. Love made him great. And Macdonald, in Donal Grant, has
shown us a strong, pure soul of moral strength, religious appetencies,
determined goodness, of elevation of character, of strength and wisdom,
so that in his accustomed walk he might have met Sir Percivale or Sir
Launfal. Good, and given over to God, he was found out by love; and
love did with him as with us all--love glorified him. In his clean
life is something sturdy you might lean on, as on a staff, and have no
fear. So is Enoch Arden made hero by love. In love, remembrance, and
absence of self, he is manhood. We have all wept with Arden, finding
our faces wet with tears, though not knowing we wept. His story never
grows trite. Each time we read, new light breaks from this character
as if it were a sun. The sight of him when he, like a poor thief,
looking in at the window,
"Because things seen are mightier than things heard,
Stagger'd and shook, holding the branch, and feared
To send abroad a shrill and terrible cry
Which in one moment, like the blast of doom,
Would shatter all the happiness of the hearth.
And feeling all along the garden wall,
Lest he should swoon and tumble and be found,
Crept to the gate, and open'd it and closed
As lightly as a sick man's chamber door
Behind him, and came out upon the waste;"
and when,
"Falling prone, he dug
His fingers into the wet earth, and pray'd,--"
the sight of him is as unforgettable as a man's first look upon the
woman he loves. The poet was right. Arden was a "strong, heroic
soul," and when he woke, arose, and cried, "A sail! a sail!" it was
God's nobleman who sighted it.
"Daniel Deronda" and "John Halifax, Gentleman," may wisely be classed
together as attempts of competent artists to sketch a gentleman.
Whether they have failed in the attempt I would not make bold to say,
but for some reason the characters impress me as being scarcely
adequate. Both faces are open, and lit as by a lamp of truth; their
lives are sweet as meadows scented with new-mown hay; we become sworn
friends to both without our willing it; they have nothing to take back,
because words and deeds are faithful to their best manhood; they are
strong, and women lean on them, which, aside from God's confidence, is
the highest compliment ever paid a man. Deronda is a man among
aristocrats, Halifax a man among plebeians and commercial relations;
but manhood is the same quality wherever found; for God has made all
soils salubrious for such growth. But these do not compel, though they
do charm us. Bayard, in "A Singular Life," may fall in with Deronda
and Halifax. Tragedy darkens at "the far end of the avenue." Bayard
is a social reformer in attempt, though of the safe and right type,
meaning to change men, that there may be wrought a change in
institutions. He runs a tilt with Calvinian orthodoxy as Methodism
does, and loves God and his fellow-men and a good woman, and finds no
toil burdensome if he may be of spiritual help and healing. "A
singular life" he lives; but singular because it is the gospel life,
and he merits the name the slums gave him, "The Christ-man." He is
helpful, few more so, and knows power to stir us, which in the event is
the superb quality in character. Captain Moray, in "The Seats of the
Mighty," and Henry Esmond, in "Henry Esmond," are gentlemen of military
mold, and we love them both because they make for lordly inspiration in
the soul. Esmond must always keep his hold on men as a hero. These
two soldiers need no one to remind us they know how to die; and know
that other, larger thing--how to live. Esmond, over a long stretch of
life lying in our sight, walked ever as a prince. Any national
literature might be glad for one such as he. Our imagination takes
wings when we think of him. Such cleanness, such lack of self, such
self-poise and firmness, such singleness of love and devotion, such
inaptitude for anything not noble, such tense heroic purposes, such
stalwart intention to make himself a man! He is greatness, and his
story to be read as a tonic. He recruits heroisms in the heart, and
rests us when we grow weary. Thackeray is reported by Anthony Trollope
to have called his creation, Esmond, "a prig." He might better have
called him a gentleman; for such he is, or narrowly lacks of being.
Indeed, did not Thackeray present another who is altogether gentleman,
Esmond would be catalogued as this ideal character; for he misses it so
little, if at all, and is by odds most magnetic of Thackeray's
creations. And Browning's "Caponsacchi" and Hugo's "Valjean" have the
true instincts of gentlemen. Valjean redeemed himself from worse than
galley slavery--from debauched manhood to spiritual nobility,
bewildering in holy audacity and achievement. Were there a pantheon
for souls who have struggled up from the verge of hell to stand in the
clear light of heaven, be sure Valjean would be there. Volumes are
requisite for his portrait, and we have only room for words! Of
Caponsacchi, take the pope's estimate as accurate, "Thou sprang'st
forth hero." And Pompilia conceived him rightly, for he minded her of
God. What farther need be said? Is not that panegyric enough for any
man? Because he was so strong, so fearless, so pure, so gifted with
great might to love, so keen to see Pompilia was pure as a babe's
dreams, and the light on his forehead falls from the lattices
overhead--the lattices of heaven--we love him. Had his figure been
fully drawn we should have had a gentleman. Nor are we sure he ought
not to be so catalogued; as he is, we find no fault in him. He minds
us of the morning star.
Two characters in literature since Don Quixote are life-size gentlemen,
and these are Colonel Newcome and King Arthur, as drawn by Thackeray
and Tennyson, men of one era and pure souls. In these characters is
evident deliberation of intent to create gentlemen. This article has
given no heed to biography or history, because these concern themselves
with truth as observed, and are therefore not imaginative. What we are
considering is an ideal person, fashioned after the pattern discovered
in good lives, which happily grow more and more plentiful as years
multiply. Besides, biography can never get at the real man; for
biography is a story of doing, while what we need is a story of soul.
In Boswell's "Johnson" or in Anthony Trollope's "Autobiography" there
is approach to what we care to know; but in the life of Jowett or
Tennyson, though both are admirable specimens of biography, what man
among us but closed those books with a sense of, not dissatisfaction,
but unsatisfaction? What we were really hungry for was not there.
What Jowett was, which made him a part of the life-blood of English
thought and Englishmen--who found that out? Some things never can be
told, unless the poets or prose dramatists tell them. Poetry and
fiction do what history and biography fail to do--make us interior to a
soul's true life.
Colonel Newcome is all gentleman. He hangs a curtain of silence over
one room in his life. To his wife, mother of his beloved Clive, he
will make no reference. Not bad, but frivolous and weak and querulous,
she was; but Colonel Newcome never whispers it. What had made many
misanthropes, made him a better man. No bitterness tainted his spirit.
Pure women put him in a mood of worship, as they ought to put us all.
He could, in conduct, if not in memory, forget hurts and wrongs, which
is one mark of a large spirit. His was, his biographer affirms, "a
tender and a faithful heart." In him paternity and maternity met,
which is a conjunction we have not given heed to as we ought in
thinking on the heart. Motherhood is in the best fatherhood. Not long
since I met a minister who, on my mentioning a black and scrawny
village, said, with lovelit face and ringing, jubilant voice, "O yes,
that is where my boy was born!" How true hearts do remember! And
Colonel Newcome loved his son with such sweet and wide fidelity as
makes the heart covet him for father. All those days of separation
from his son, he thought of him "with such a constant longing
affection." And his joy on seeing his son once more is the joy of one
getting home to heaven. "To ask a blessing on his boy was as natural
to him as to wake with the sunrise, or to go to rest when the day is
over. His first and last thought was always the child." He expects
good of people, will say no ill of any, can not understand Sir Brian
Newcome's frigid reception, and is hurt by it as by a poisoned arrow
shot by the hill tribes in far India; he can not tolerate foul thought
or speech, burns hot with righteous wrath against Captain Costigan when
he sings a vile song, thundering, "Silence!" "'We ought to be ashamed
of doing wrong. We must forgive other people's trespasses if we hope
forgiveness of our own.' His voice sunk low as he spoke, and he bowed
his honest head reverently." How unostentatious his bravery, and
riches puffed him up not a trifle! How alert to love, how open to
enjoyment, how young his heart and how pure! What simplicity and what
grave courtesy, particularly to women! How wide those windows of his
soul open toward heaven! How magnanimous, how sad his face and heart,
how sensitive his nature, to any lack of love on dear Clive's part!
Though to his own heart he will not admit such lack exists, sitting
above in his cheerless room, listening to his son's merry-making, that
son glad to be left free of his father's presence,--how bravely he bore
poverty when financial ruin came, not missing wealth for himself, but
for him he loved, and how he grieved for those who had lost through
him! He was not faultless. Men are not often that; but his anger rose
from his heart. His indignation was for those he loved. We can see
him now, as if he lived among us yet. His honest, melancholy face; his
loose clothes hanging on his loose limbs; sitting silent, with his sad
eyes; a bankrupt, giving over his pension for reimbursing those who had
lost by him; and his eagerness for wealth for love's sake, always
thinking of somebody else,--such is this gentleman who trusts in God.
And thus simple, noble, unhumiliated:
"I chanced to look up from my book toward the swarm of blackcoated
pensioners, and among them--among them--sat Thomas Newcome. His dear
old head was bent down over his prayer-book; there was no mistaking
him. He wore the black gown of the pensioners of the Hospital of Grey
Friars. His Order of the Bath was on his breast. He stood among the
poor brethren, uttering the responses to the psalm. . . . His own wan
face flushed up when he saw me, and his hand shook in mine. 'I have
found a home, Arthur,' said he; for save this he was homeless. As
death came toward him his mind wandered, driven as a leaf is driven by
wandering winds. He headed columns in Hindustan; he called the name of
the one woman he had loved. In death, as in life, his thought was for
others, for Clive, dear, dear Clive. He said, 'Take care of him when I
'm in India;' and then, with a heartrending voice, he called out,
'Leonore, Leonore!' She was kneeling by his side now. The patient
voice sank into faint murmurs; only a moan now and then announced that
he was not asleep. At the usual hour the chapel bell began to toll,
and Thomas Newcome's hands, outside the bed, feebly beat time. And
just as the last bell struck, a peculiar sweet smile shone over his
face, and he lifted up his head a little, and quickly said, 'Adsum!'
and fell back. It was the word we used at school when names were
called; and lo! he, whose heart was as that of a little child, had
answered to his name, and stood in the presence of his Master."