[Footnote 11: From _The Century Magazine_, June, 1901. Copyright 1901, by
Harper and Brothers, and published by them in 1915 in a volume entitled
_When a Man Comes to Himself_. By permission of the author and of the
publishers.]
It is a very wholesome and regenerating change which a man undergoes when
he "comes to himself." It is not only after periods of recklessness or
infatuation, when he has played the spendthrift or the fool, that a man
comes to himself. He comes to himself after experiences of which he alone
may be aware: when he has left off being wholly preoccupied with his own
powers and interests and with every petty plan that centers in himself;
when he has cleared his eyes to see the world as it is, and his own true
place and function in it.
It is a process of disillusionment. The scales have fallen away. He sees
himself soberly, and knows under what conditions his powers must act, as
well as what his powers are. He has got rid of earlier prepossessions about
the world of men and affairs, both those which were too favorable and those
which were too unfavorable--both those of the nursery and those of a young
man's reading. He has learned his own paces, or, at any rate, is in a fair
way to learn them; has found his footing and the true nature of the "going"
he must look for in the world; over what sorts of roads he must expect to
make his running, and at what expenditure of effort; whither his goal lies,
and what cheer he may expect by the way. It is a process of
disillusionment, but it disheartens no soundly made man. It brings him into
a light which guides instead of deceiving him; a light which does not make
the way look cold to any man whose eyes are fit for use in the open, but
which shines wholesomely, rather, upon the obvious path, like the honest
rays of the frank sun, and makes traveling both safe and cheerful.
There is no fixed time in a man's life at which he comes to himself, and
some men never come to themselves at all. It is a change reserved for the
thoroughly sane and healthy, and for those who can detach themselves from
tasks and drudgery long and often enough to get, at any rate once and
again, view of the proportions of life and of the stage and plot of its
action. We speak often with amusement, sometimes with distaste and
uneasiness, of men who "have no sense of humor," who take themselves too
seriously, who are intense, self-absorbed, over-confident in matters of
opinion, or else go plumed with conceit, proud of we cannot tell what,
enjoying, appreciating, thinking of nothing so much as themselves. These
are men who have not suffered that wholesome change. They have not come to
themselves. If they be serious men, and real forces in the world, we may
conclude that they have been too much and too long absorbed; that their
tasks and responsibilities long ago rose about them like a flood, and have
kept them swimming with sturdy stroke the years through, their eyes level
with the troubled surface--no horizon in sight, no passing fleets, no
comrades but those who struggle in the flood like themselves. If they be
frivolous, lightheaded, men without purpose or achievement, we may
conjecture, if we do not know, that they were born so, or spoiled by
fortune, or befuddled by self-indulgence. It is no great matter what we
think of them.
It is enough to know that there are some laws which govern a man's
awakening to know himself and the right part to play. A man _is_ the part
he plays among his fellows. He is not isolated; he cannot be. His life is
made up of the relations he bears to others--is made or marred by those
relations, guided by them, judged by them, expressed in them. There is
nothing else upon which he can spend his spirit--nothing else that we can
see. It is by these he gets his spiritual growth; it is by these we see his
character revealed, his purpose, and his gifts. Some play with a certain
natural passion, an unstudied directness, without grace, without
modulation, with no study of the masters or consciousness of the pervading
spirit of the plot; others give all their thought to their costume and
think only of the audience; a few act as those who have mastered the
secrets of a serious art, with deliberate subordination of themselves to
the great end and motive of the play, spending themselves like good
servants, indulging no wilfulness, obtruding no eccentricity, lending heart
and tone and gesture to the perfect progress of the action. These have
"found themselves," and have all the ease of a perfect adjustment.
Adjustment is exactly what a man gains when he comes to himself. Some men
gain it late, some early; some get it all at once, as if by one distinct
act of deliberate accommodation; others get it by degrees and quite
imperceptibly. No doubt to most men it comes by the slow processes of
experience--at each stage of life a little. A college man feels the first
shock of it at graduation, when the boy's life has been lived out and the
man's life suddenly begins. He has measured himself with boys, he knows
their code and feels the spur of their ideals of achievement. But what the
world expects of him he has yet to find out, and it works, when he has
discovered it, a veritable revolution in his ways both of thought and of
action. He finds a new sort of fitness demanded of him, executive,
thoroughgoing, careful of details, full of drudgery and obedience to
orders. Everybody is ahead of him. Just now he was a senior, at the top of
a world he knew and reigned in, a finished product and pattern of good
form. Of a sudden he is a novice again, as green as in his first school
year, studying a thing that seems to have no rules--at sea amid
cross-winds, and a bit seasick withal. Presently, if he be made of stuff
that will shake into shape and fitness, he settles to his tasks and is
comfortable. He has come to himself: understands what capacity is, and what
it is meant for; sees that his training was not for ornament, or personal
gratification, but to teach him how to use himself and develop faculties
worth using. Henceforth there is a zest in action, and he loves to see his
strokes tell.
The same thing happens to the lad come from the farm into the city, a big
and novel field, where crowds rush and jostle, and a rustic boy must stand
puzzled for a little how to use his placid and unjaded strength. It
happens, too, though in a deeper and more subtle way, to the man who
marries for love, if the love be true and fit for foul weather. Mr. Bagehot
used to say that a bachelor was "an amateur in life," and wit and wisdom
are married in the jest. A man who lives only for himself has not begun to
live--has yet to learn his use, and his real pleasure too, in the world. It
is not necessary he should marry to find himself out, but it is necessary
he should love. Men have come to themselves serving their mothers with an
unselfish devotion, or their sisters, or a cause for whose sake they
forsook ease and left off thinking of themselves. It is unselfish action,
growing slowly into the high habit of devotion, and at last, it may be,
into a sort of consecration, that teaches a man the wide meaning of his
life, and makes of him a steady professional in living, if the motive be
not necessity, but love. Necessity may make a mere drudge of a man, and no
mere drudge ever made a professional of himself; that demands a higher
spirit and a finer incentive than his.
Surely a man has come to himself only when he has found the best that is in
him, and has satisfied his heart with the highest achievement he is fit
for. It is only then that he knows of what he is capable and what his heart
demands. And, assuredly, no thoughtful man ever came to the end of his
life, and had time and a little space of calm from which to look back upon
it, who did not know and acknowledge that it was what he had done
unselfishly and for others, and nothing else, that satisfied him in the
retrospect, and made him feel that he had played the man. That alone seems
to him the real measure of himself, the real standard of his manhood. And
so men grow by having responsibility laid upon them, the burden of other
people's business. Their powers are put out at interest, and they get usury
in kind. They are like men multiplied. Each counts manifold. Men who live
with an eye only upon what is their own are dwarfed beside them--seem
fractions while they are integers. The trustworthiness of men trusted seems
often to grow with the trust.
It is for this reason that men are in love with power and greatness: it
affords them so pleasurable an expansion of faculty, so large a run for
their minds, an exercise of spirit so various and refreshing; they have the
freedom of so wide a tract of the world of affairs. But if they use power
only for their own ends, if there be no unselfish service in it, if its
object be only their personal aggrandizement, their love to see other men
tools in their hands, they go out of the world small, disquieted, beggared,
no enlargement of soul vouchsafed them, no usury of satisfaction. They have
added nothing to themselves. Mental and physical powers alike grow by use,
as every one knows; but labor for one's self alone is like exercise in a
gymnasium. No healthy man can remain satisfied with it, or regard it as
anything but a preparation for tasks in the open, amid the affairs of the
world--not sport, but business--where there is no orderly apparatus, and
every man must devise the means by which he is to make the most of himself.
To make the most of himself means the multiplication of his activities, and
he must turn away from himself for that. He looks about him, studies the
face of business or of affairs, catches some intimation of their larger
objects, is guided by the intimation, and presently finds himself part of
the motive force of communities or of nations. It makes no difference how
small a part, how insignificant, how unnoticed. When his powers begin to
play outward, and he loves the task at hand not because it gains him a
livelihood but because it makes him a life, he has come to himself.
Necessity is no mother to enthusiasm. Necessity carries a whip. Its method
is compulsion, not love. It has no thought to make itself attractive; it is
content to drive. Enthusiasm comes with the revelation of true and
satisfying objects of devotion; and it is enthusiasm that sets the powers
free. It is a sort of enlightenment. It shines straight upon ideals, and
for those who see it the race and struggle are henceforth toward these. An
instance will point the meaning. One of the most distinguished and most
justly honored of our great philanthropists spent the major part of his
life absolutely absorbed in the making of money--so it seemed to those who
did not know him. In fact, he had very early passed the stage at which he
looked upon his business as a means of support or of material comfort.
Business had become for him an intellectual pursuit, a study in enterprise
and increment. The field of commerce lay before him like a chess-board; the
moves interested him like the manoeuvres of a game. More money was more
power, a greater advantage in the game, the means of shaping men and events
and markets to his own ends and uses. It was his will that set fleets
afloat and determined the havens they were bound for; it was his foresight
that brought goods to market at the right time; it was his suggestion that
made the industry of unthinking men efficacious; his sagacity saw itself
justified at home not only, but at the ends of the earth. And as the money
poured in, his government and mastery increased, and his mind was the more
satisfied. It is so that men make little kingdoms for themselves, and an
international power undarkened by diplomacy, undirected by parliaments.
It is a mistake to suppose that the great captains of industry, the great
organizers and directors of manufacture and commerce and monetary exchange,
are engrossed in a vulgar pursuit of wealth. Too often they suffer the
vulgarity of wealth to display itself in the idleness and ostentation of
their wives and children, who "devote themselves," it may be, "to expense
regardless of pleasure"; but we ought not to misunderstand even that, or
condemn it unjustly. The masters of industry are often too busy with their
own sober and momentous calling to have time or spare thought enough to
govern their own households. A king may be too faithful a statesman to be a
watchful father. These men are not fascinated by the glitter of gold: the
appetite for power has got hold upon them. They are in love with the
exercise of their faculties upon a great scale; they are organizing and
overseeing a great part of the life of the world. No wonder they are
captivated. Business is more interesting than pleasure, as Mr. Bagehot
said, and when once the mind has caught its zest, there's no disengaging
it. The world has reason to be grateful for the fact.
It was this fascination that had got hold upon the faculties of the man
whom the world was afterward to know, not as a prince among merchants--for
the world forgets merchant princes--but as a prince among benefactors; for
beneficence breeds gratitude, gratitude admiration, admiration fame, and
the world remembers its benefactors. Business, and business alone,
interested him, or seemed to him worth while. The first time he was asked
to subscribe money for a benevolent object he declined. Why _should_ he
subscribe? What affair would be set forward, what increase of efficiency
would the money buy, what return would it bring in? Was good money to be
simply given away, like water poured on a barren soil, to be sucked up and
yield nothing? It was not until men who understood benevolence on its
sensible, systematic, practical, and really helpful side explained it to
him as an investment that his mind took hold of it and turned to it for
satisfaction. He began to see that education was a thing of infinite usury;
that money devoted to it would yield a singular increase, to which there
was no calculable end, an increase in perpetuity--increase of knowledge,
and therefore of intelligence and efficiency, touching generation after
generation with new impulses, adding to the sum total of the world's
fitness for affairs--an invisible but intensely real spiritual usury beyond
reckoning, because compounded in an unknown ratio from age to age.
Henceforward beneficence was as interesting to him as business--was,
indeed, a sort of sublimated business in which money moved new forces in a
commerce which no man could bind or limit.
He had come to himself--to the full realization of his powers, the true and
clear perception of what it was his mind demanded for its satisfaction. His
faculties were consciously stretched to their right measure, were at last
exercised at their best. He felt the keen zest, not of success merely, but
also of honor, and was raised to a sort of majesty among his fellow-men,
who attended him in death like a dead sovereign. He had died dwarfed had he
not broken the bonds of mere money-getting; would never have known himself
had he not learned how to spend it; and ambition itself could not have
shown him a straighter road to fame.
This is the positive side of a man's discovery of the way in which his
faculties are to be made to fit into the world's affairs and released for
effort in a way that will bring real satisfaction. There is a negative side
also. Men come to themselves by discovering their limitations no less than
by discovering their deeper endowments and the mastery that will make them
happy. It is the discovery of what they can _not_ do, and ought not to
attempt, that transforms reformers into statesmen; and great should be the
joy of the world over every reformer who comes to himself. The spectacle is
not rare; the method is not hidden. The practicability of every reform is
determined absolutely and always by "the circumstances of the case," and
only those who put themselves into the midst of affairs, either by action
or by observation, can know what those circumstances are or perceive what
they signify. No statesman dreams of doing whatever he pleases; he knows
that it does not follow that because a point of morals or of policy is
obvious to him it will be obvious to the nation, or even to his own
friends; and it is the strength of a democratic polity that there are so
many minds to be consulted and brought to agreement, and that nothing can
be wisely done for which the thought, and a good deal more than the
thought, of the country, its sentiment and its purpose, have not been
prepared. Social reform is a matter of coöperation, and, if it be of a
novel kind, requires an infinite deal of converting to bring the efficient
majority to believe in it and support it. Without their agreement and
support it is impossible.
It is this that the more imaginative and impatient reformers find out when
they come to themselves, if that calming change ever comes to them.
Oftentimes the most immediate and drastic means of bringing them to
themselves is to elect them to legislative or executive office. That will
reduce over-sanguine persons to their simplest terms. Not because they find
their fellow legislators or officials incapable of high purpose or
indifferent to the betterment of the communities which they represent. Only
cynics hold that to be the chief reason why we approach the millennium so
slowly, and cynics are usually very ill-informed persons. Nor is it because
under our modern democratic arrangements we so subdivide power and balance
parts in government that no one man can tell for much or turn affairs to
his will. One of the most instructive studies a politician could undertake
would be a study of the infinite limitations laid upon the power of the
Russian Czar, notwithstanding the despotic theory of the Russian
constitution--limitations of social habit, of official prejudice, of race
jealousies, of religious predilections, of administrative machinery even,
and the inconvenience of being himself only one man, and that a very young
one, over-sensitive and touched with melancholy. He can do only what can be
done with the Russian people. He can no more make them quick, enlightened,
and of the modern world of the West than he can change their tastes in
eating. He is simply the leader of Russians.
An English or American statesman is better off. He leads a thinking nation,
not a race of peasants topped by a class of revolutionists and a caste of
nobles and officials. He can explain new things to men able to understand,
persuade men willing and accustomed to make independent and intelligent
choices of their own. An English statesman has an even better opportunity
to lead than an American statesman, because in England executive power and
legislative initiative are both intrusted to the same grand committee, the
ministry of the day. The ministers both propose what shall be made law and
determine how it shall be enforced when enacted. And yet English reformers,
like American, have found office a veritable cold-water bath for their
ardor for change. Many a man who has made his place in affairs as the
spokesman of those who see abuses and demand their reformation has passed
from denunciation to calm and moderate advice when he got into Parliament,
and has turned veritable conservative when made a minister of the crown.
Mr. Bright was a notable example. Slow and careful men had looked upon him
as little better than a revolutionist so long as his voice rang free and
imperious from the platforms of public meetings. They greatly feared the
influence he should exercise in Parliament, and would have deemed the
constitution itself unsafe could they have foreseen that he would some day
be invited to take office and a hand of direction in affairs. But it turned
out that there was nothing to fear. Mr. Bright lived to see almost every
reform he had urged accepted and embodied in legislation; but he assisted
at the process of their realization with greater and greater temperateness
and wise deliberation as his part in affairs became more and more prominent
and responsible, and was at the last as little like an agitator as any man
that served the Queen.
It is not that such men lose courage when they find themselves charged with
the actual direction of the affairs concerning which they have held and
uttered such strong, unhesitating, drastic opinions. They have only learned
discretion. For the first time they see in its entirety what it was that
they were attempting. They are at last at close quarters with the world.
Men of every interest and variety crowd about them; new impressions throng
them; in the midst of affairs the former special objects of their zeal fall
into new environments, a better and truer perspective; seem no longer
susceptible to separate and radical change. The real nature of the complex
stuff of life they were seeking to work in is revealed to them--its
intricate and delicate fiber, and the subtle, secret interrelationship of
its parts--and they work circumspectly, lest they should mar more than they
mend. Moral enthusiasm is not, uninstructed and of itself, a suitable guide
to practicable and lasting reformation; and if the reform sought be the
reformation of others as well as of himself the reformer should look to it
that he knows the true relation of his will to the wills of those he would
change and guide. When he has discovered that relation he has come to
himself: has discovered his real use and planning part in the general world
of men; has come to the full command and satisfying employment of his
faculties. Otherwise he is doomed to live forever in a fools' paradise, and
can be said to have come to himself only on the supposition that he is a
fool.
Every man--if I may adopt and paraphrase a passage from Dr. South--every
man hath both an absolute and a relative capacity; an absolute in that he
hath been endued with such a nature and such parts and faculties; and a
relative in that he is part of the universal community of men, and so
stands in such a relation to the whole. When we say that a man has come to
himself, it is not of his absolute capacity that we are thinking, but of
his relative. He has begun to realize that he is part of a whole, and to
know _what_ part, suitable for what service and achievement.
It was once fashionable--and that not a very long time ago--to speak of
political society with a certain distaste, as a necessary evil, an
irritating but inevitable restriction upon the "natural" sovereignty and
entire self-government of the individual. That was the dream of the
egotist. It was a theory in which men were seen to strut in the proud
consciousness of their several and "absolute" capacities. It would be as
instructive as it would be difficult to count the errors it has bred in
political thinking. As a matter of fact, men have never dreamed of wishing
to do without the "trammels" of organized society, for the very good reason
that those trammels are in reality no trammels at all, but indispensable
aids and spurs to the attainment of the highest and most enjoyable things
man is capable of. Political society, the life of men in states, is an
abiding natural relationship. It is neither a mere convenience nor a mere
necessity. It is not a mere voluntary association, not a mere corporation.
It is nothing deliberate or artificial, devised for a special purpose. It
is in real truth the eternal and natural expression and embodiment of a
form of life higher than that of the individual--that common life of mutual
helpfulness, stimulation, and contest which gives leave and opportunity to
the individual life, makes it possible, makes it full and complete.
It is in such a scene that man looks about to discover his own place and
force. In the midst of men organized, infinitely cross-related, bound by
ties of interest, hope, affection, subject to authorities, to opinion, to
passion, to visions and desires which no man can reckon, he casts eagerly
about to find where he may enter in with the rest and be a man among his
fellows. In making his place he finds, if he seek intelligently and with
eyes that see, more than ease of spirit and scope for his mind. He finds
himself--as if mists had cleared away about him and he knew at last his
neighborhood among men and tasks.
What every man seeks is satisfaction. He deceives himself so long as he
imagines it to lie in self-indulgence, so long as he deems himself the
center and object of effort. His mind is spent in vain upon itself. Not in
action itself, not in "pleasure," shall it find its desires satisfied, but
in consciousness of right, of powers greatly and nobly spent. It comes to
know itself in the motives which satisfy it, in the zest and power of
rectitude. Christianity has liberated the world, not as a system of ethics,
not as a philosophy of altruism, but by its revelation of the power of pure
and unselfish love. Its vital principle is not its code, but its motive.
Love, clear-sighted, loyal, personal, is its breath and immortality. Christ
came, not to save himself, assuredly, but to save the world. His motive,
his example, are every man's key to his own gifts and happiness. The
ethical code he taught may no doubt be matched, here a piece and there a
piece, out of other religions, other teachings and philosophies. Every
thoughtful man born with a conscience must know a code of right and of pity
to which he ought to conform; but without the motive of Christianity,
without love, he may be the purest altruist and yet be as sad and as
unsatisfied as Marcus Aurelius.
Christianity gave us, in the fullness of time, the perfect image of right
living, the secret of social and of individual well-being; for the two are
not separable, and the man who receives and verifies that secret in his own
living has discovered not only the best and only way to serve the world,
but also the one happy way to satisfy himself. Then, indeed, has he come to
himself. Henceforth he knows what his powers mean, what spiritual air they
breathe, what ardors of service clear them of lethargy, relieve them all
sense of effort, put them at their best. After this fretfulness passes
away, experience mellows and strengthens and makes more fit, and old age
brings, not senility, not satiety, not regret, but higher hope and serene
maturity.