RULES FOR TELLING A HERO--WHEN ONE SEES ONE
I have sometimes hoped that the modern world was about to produce at
last some man somewhere with a big-hearted, easy powerful mind, who
could protect the French Revolution. What we need most of all just now
in our present crisis is some man who could take up the French
Revolution without half trying, all the world looking on and wondering
softly how he dares to do it, and put it gently but firmly, and once for
all, up high somewhere where no one except geniuses, or at least the
very tallest-minded people, could ever again get at it.
As it is, hardly a day passes but one sees new little nobodies
everywhere all about one reaching up without half thinking to it--to the
French Revolution--grabbing it calmly, and then using it deliberately
before our eyes as a general free-for-all analogy for anything that
comes into their heads. The Syndicalists and Industrial Workers of the
World have had the use of it last. The fact that the French Revolution
was French and that it worked fairly well a hundred years ago and with a
Louis Sixteenth sort of person, and as a kind of first rough sketch, or
draft of just what a revolution might be for once, and what it would
have to get over being afterward, as soon as possible, never seems to
have occurred to many people. One sees them rushing about the world
trying to get up exact duplicates, little fussy replicas of a
revolution, and of a kind of revolution that the real world put quietly
away in the attic seventy years ago. The real world, and all the men in
it who are facing real facts to-day, are getting what they want in
precisely the opposite of the violent, theatrical French-Revolution
way. The fact that people are quite different now, and that it is more
effective and practical to get new ideas into their heads by keeping
their heads on than it is by taking their heads off--some of us seem to
have passed over. Living as we do in a world to-day with our new
explosives, our new antiseptics, our new biology, bacteriology, our new
storage batteries, our habit of getting everything we get and changing
everything we change by quietly and coolly looking at facts, the old
lumbering fashion of having a beautiful, showy, emotional revolution now
on one side, and then waiting to have another beautiful, showy,
emotional revolution on the other, each oscillating back and forth year
by year until people finally settle down, look at facts together, become
scientific, and see things as they are--has gone by. We have not time
for revolutions nowadays. They may be amusing, but they are not
practical, and evolution or revolution-without-knowing-it, or evolution
all together, suit us better. We are in a world in which we are seeing
men almost being made over before our eyes by the scientific habit of
thought--by the new, slow, imperious way we have come to have of making
ourselves look at things at which we would rather not look, until we see
them as they are. The man of scientific spirit, the quiet-minded,
implacable man who gets what he wants for himself and for others by
merely turning on the light, who makes a new world for us by just
showing us more plainly the one we really have, possesses the earth.
There is no reason why revolutionists should feel that they are
particularly courageous, that they are the particularly high-minded,
romantic, adventurous, uncompromising and superior people. The real
adventure, the abiding emotion and wonder of living in the twentieth
century, lies in the high, patient, slow, quiet, silent enterprise of
seeing facts as they are, and without any fuss, and inexorably and with
good cheer, acting on them. The human race has a new temperament. The
way to fight now is to look, to look first, to look longest, and to
look for the most people. The way we win a revolution or bring the
enemy to terms to-day is by battering the enemy with coöperation, with
understanding him and being understood by him, by being impregnably,
obstinately his brother, by piling up huge happy citadels of good-will,
of services rendered, services deserved, and services returned. We had
an idea once that the way to conquer a man was by hitting the outside of
him. We conquer men now by getting inside of them, and by getting inside
first and then dealing with outside things together.
We see the inside. It is the modern note to see the inside, to attack
the essence, the spirit, and to work everything out from that.
The modern method of being courageous and of defending what we want is a
kind of chemistry.
Hercules is a bust now.
We prefer still little women like Madame Curie, or a man like Sir Joseph
Lister, or like Wilbur Wright--the courage that faces material facts,
that deals with the elements of things, whether in a bottle, or in the
heaven above us, or in the earth, or in a man, or in an enemy.
When the subject-matter is human nature and the courage we have to have
is the courage that can deal with people, we ask ourselves: "What are
the most difficult facts to face in people?"
They are:
The facts about how they are different from us. The facts
about their being like us. The facts as to what we can do
about it.
So it has come to seem to me to be the greatest, the most typical and
difficult courage of modern life and of a crowd civilization, the
courage to look at actual facts in people and to see how the people can
be made to go together.
A man's courage is his sense of identity.
A man's courage toward nature, heat, cold, mountains, seas, deserts,
chemistry, geology, is his sense of identity with God and of his right
to share with God in the creating of His world.
His courage toward people is his sense of identity with men who seem
different from him, of all races, all classes, and all nations. He sees
the differences in their big relations alongside the resemblances. Then
he fits the differences into the resemblances and knows what to do.
There is a statue of Sir George Livesey, one of the early presidents of
the South Metropolitan Gas Company, placed at the entrance of the works
where thousands of workmen day and night pass in and pass out.
Sir George Livesey was the man who, in the early days of the South
Metropolitan Gas Company, stood out against all his workmen, for six
long weeks, to get the workmen to believe that they were as good as he
was. He believed that they were capable, or should be capable, of being
identified with him and working with him as partners, of sharing in the
direction of the business, of sharing in the profits, and coöperating
all day, every day, with him and the other partners, to make the
business a success.
He did not propose to be locked up in a business, if he could help it,
with men who did not feel identified with him, who were not his
partners, or who did not want to be.
He thought it was not good business to engage five thousand men and pay
them deliberately so much a day to fight his business on the inside of
the works. Being obliged to do his business as a fight against people
who helped him all the time, watching and outwitting them as if he were
dealing with five thousand intelligent gorillas instead of with fellow
human beings, did not interest him.
He did not believe that the men themselves, in spite of the way they
talked, when they came to think of it, really enjoyed being intelligent
gorillas, any more than he did.
The Trades Unions passed a resolution that it was safer for the men in
dealing with Sir George Livesey to keep on being gorillas.
Sir George Livesey proposed that they should all try being fellow human
beings and being in partnership for a little while and see how it
worked.
The Trades Unions were afraid to let them try. Even if it worked very
well, and if it turned out that being men was safer, in this one
particular case, than being gorillas, it would set a bad example, the
Trades Unions thought. They took the ground that it was safer to have
all men treated alike, whether they were gorillas or not.
They instructed the men to strike. The South Metropolitan Gas Company
was almost closed up, but it did not yield.
Sir George Livesey took the ground that if the Trades Unions believed
that his men were not good enough for him, and that he was not good
enough for his men, he would wait until they did.
The bronze statue of Sir George Livesey that the men have raised, and
that thousands of men go by every day, day after day, and look up to at
their work, was raised to a man who had stood out against his workmen
for weeks to prove that they were as good as he was, and could be
trusted to be loyal to him, and that he was as good as they were, and
that he could be trusted to be loyal to them.
He had the courage to insist on being, whether anybody wanted it for the
moment or not, a new kind and new size of man. He preferred being
allowed to be a new kind and new size himself, and he preferred allowing
his men to be new kinds and new sizes of men, and he made a shrewd,
dogged guess that when they tried it they would like it. They were
merely afraid to be new sizes, as we all are at first.
* * * * *
There are possibly three ways in which, in the confusion of our modern
world, one can tell a hero when one sees one.
One knows a hero first by his originality. He invents a new kind and new
size of man. He finishes off one sample. There he is.
The next thing one notices about this man (when he is invented) is his
humility. He never seems to feel--having invented himself--how original
he is. The more original people think he is, and the more they try to
set him one side as an exception, the more he resents it.
And then, of course, the final way one knows a man is a hero is always
by his courage, by his masterful way of driving through, when he meets a
man, to his sense of identity with him.
One always sees a hero going about quietly everywhere, treating every
other man as if he were a hero too.
He gets so in the habit, from day to day (living with himself), of
believing in human nature, that when he finds himself suddenly up
against other people he cannot stop.
It is not that he is deceived about the other people, though it might
seem so sometimes. He merely sees further into them and further for
them.
Has he not invented himself? Is he not at this very moment a better kind
of man than he thought he could be once? Is he not going to be a better
kind to-morrow than he is now?
So, quietly, he keeps on year by year and day by day, treating other
people as if they were, or were meant to be, the same kind of man that
he is, until they are.