II

What a monstrous spectre is this man, the disease of the agglutinated

dust, lifting alternate feet or lying drugged with slumber; killing,

feeding, growing, bringing forth small copies of himself; grown upon

with hair like grass, fitted with eyes that move and glitter in his

face; a thing to set children screaming;--and yet looked at nearlier,

known as his fellows know him, how surprising are his attributes! Poor

soul, here for so little, cast among so many hardships, filled with

desires so incommensurate and so inconsistent, 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? And we look and behold him

instead filled with imperfect virtues: infinitely childish, often

admirably valiant, often touchingly kind; sitting down, amidst his

momentary life, to debate of right and wrong and the attributes of the

deity; rising up to do battle for an egg or die for an idea; singling

out his friends and his mate with cordial affection; bringing forth in

pain, rearing with long-suffering solicitude, his young. To touch the

heart of his mystery,[5] we find in him one thought, strange to the

point of lunacy: the thought of duty;[6] the thought of something

owing to himself, to his neighbour, to his God: an ideal of decency,

to which he would rise if it were possible; a limit of shame, below

which, if it be possible, he will not stoop. The design in most men is

one of conformity; here and there, in picked natures, it transcends

itself and soars on the other side, arming martyrs with independence;

but in all, in their degrees, it is a bosom thought:--Not in man

alone, for we trace it in dogs and cats whom we know fairly well, and

doubtless some similar point of honour sways the elephant, the oyster,

and the louse, of whom we know so little:--But in man, at least, it

sways with so complete an empire that merely selfish things come

second, even with the selfish: that appetites are starved, fears are

conquered, pains supported; that almost the dullest shrinks from the

reproof of a glance, although it were a child's; and all but the most

cowardly stand amid the risks of war; and the more noble, having

strongly conceived an act as due to their ideal, affront and embrace

death. Strange enough if, with their singular origin and perverted

practice, they think they are to be rewarded in some future life:

stranger still, if they are persuaded of the contrary, and think this

blow, which they solicit, will strike them senseless for eternity. I

shall be reminded what a tragedy of misconception and misconduct man

at large presents: of organised injustice, cowardly violence and

treacherous crime; and of the damning imperfections of the best. They

cannot be too darkly drawn. Man is indeed marked for failure in his

efforts to do right. But where the best consistently miscarry, how

tenfold more remarkable that all should continue to strive; and surely

we should find it both touching and inspiriting, that in a field from

which success is banished, our race should not cease to labour.

If the first view of this creature, stalking in his rotatory isle, be

a thing to shake the courage of the stoutest, on this nearer sight, he

startles us with an admiring wonder. It matters not where we look,

under what climate we observe him, in what stage of society, in what

depth of ignorance, burthened with what erroneous morality; by

camp-fires in Assiniboia,[7] the snow powdering his shoulders, the

wind plucking his blanket, as he sits, passing the ceremonial calumet

and uttering his grave opinions like a Roman senator; 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

neighbours, tempted perhaps in vain by the bright gin-palace, perhaps

long-suffering with the drunken wife that ruins him; in India (a woman

this time) kneeling with broken cries and streaming tears, as she

drowns her child in the sacred river;[8] in the brothel, the discard

of society, living mainly on strong drink, fed with affronts, a fool,

a thief, the comrade of thieves, and even here keeping the point of

honour and the touch of pity,[9] often repaying the world's scorn with

service, often standing firm upon a scruple, and at a certain cost,

rejecting riches:--everywhere some virtue cherished or affected,

everywhere some decency of thought and carriage, 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, in the brothel or

on the scaffold, to some rag of honour, the poor jewel of their souls!

They may seek to escape, and yet they cannot; it is not alone their

privilege and glory, but their doom; they are condemned to some

nobility; all their lives long, the desire of good is at their heels,

the implacable hunter.

Of all earth's meteors, here at least is the most strange and

consoling: that this ennobled lemur, this hair-crowned bubble of the

dust, this inheritor of a few years and sorrows, should yet deny

himself his rare delights, and add to his frequent pains, and live for

an ideal, however misconceived. Nor can we stop with man. A new

doctrine,[10] received with screams a little while ago by canting

moralists, and still not properly worked into the body of our

thoughts, lights us a step farther into the heart of this rough but

noble universe. For nowadays the pride of man denies in vain his

kinship with the original dust. He stands no longer like a thing

apart. Close at his heels we see the dog, prince of another genius:

and in him too, we see dumbly testified the same cultus[11] of an

unattainable ideal, the same constancy in failure. Does it stop with

the dog? We look at our feet where the ground is blackened with the

swarming ant: a creature so small, so far from us in the hierarchy of

brutes, that we can scarce trace and scarce comprehend his doings; and

here also, in his ordered polities and rigorous justice, we see

confessed the law of duty and the fact of individual sin. Does it

stop, then, with the ant? Rather this desire of well-doing and this

doom of frailty run through all the grades of life: rather is this

earth, from the frosty top of Everest[12] to the next margin of the

internal fire, one stage of ineffectual virtues and one temple of

pious tears and perseverance. The whole creation groaneth[13] and

travaileth together. It is the common and the god-like law of life.

The browsers, the biters, the barkers, the hairy coats of field and

forest, the squirrel in the oak, the thousand-footed creeper in the

dust, as they share with us the gift of life, share with us the love

of an ideal: strive like us--like us are tempted to grow weary of the

struggle--to do well; like us receive at times unmerited refreshment,

visitings of support, returns of courage; and are condemned like us to

be crucified between that double law[14] of the members and the will.

Are they like us, I wonder in the timid hope of some reward, some

sugar with the drug? do they, too, stand aghast at unrewarded virtues,

at the sufferings of those whom, in our partiality, we take to be

just, and the prosperity of such as, in our blindness, we call wicked?

It may be, and yet God knows what they should look for. Even while

they look, even while they repent, the foot of man treads them by

thousands in the dust, the yelping hounds burst upon their trail, the

bullet speeds, the knives are heating in the den of the

vivisectionist;[15] or the dew falls, and the generation of a day is

blotted out. For these are creatures, compared with whom our weakness

is strength, our ignorance wisdom, our brief span eternity.

And as we dwell, we living things, in our isle of terror[16] and under

the imminent hand of death, God forbid it should be man the erected,

the reasoner, the wise in his own eyes--God forbid it should be man

that wearies in well-doing,[17] that despairs of unrewarded effort, or

utters the language of complaint. Let it be enough for faith, that the

whole creation groans in mortal frailty, strives with unconquerable

constancy: Surely not all in vain.[18]