20. Never be satisfied until you have understood the meaning of the
world, and the purpose of our own life, and have reduced your world to
a rational cosmos.
One of the "placards" Davidson tried hardest to keep his Society from
wearing was that of "Socialism." Yet no one felt more deeply than he
the evils of rapacious individual competition. Spontaneously and
flexibly organized social settlements or communities, with individual
leaders as their centres, seem to have been his ideal, each with its
own religious or ethical elements of discipline. The present isolation
of the family is too inhuman. The ideal type of future life, he
thought, will be something like the monastery, with the family instead
of the individual, for its unit.
Leveller upwards of men as Davidson was, upon the intellectual and
moral level, he seemed wholly without that sort of religion which makes
so many of our contemporary anarchists think that they ought to dip, at
least, into some manual occupation, in order to share the common burden
of humanity I never saw T. D. work with his hands in any way. He
accepted material services of all kinds without apology, as if he were
a patrician, evidently feeling that if he played his own more
intellectual part rightly, society could make no further claim upon him.
This confidence that the life of the spirit is the absolutely highest,
made Davidson serene about his outward fortunes. Pecuniary worry would
not tally with his program. He had a very small provision against a
rainy day, but he did little to increase it. He used to write as many
articles and give as many "lectures," "talks," or "readings" every
winter as would suffice to pay the year's expenses, and thereafter he
refused additional invitations, and repaired to Glenmore as early in
the spring as possible. I could but admire the temper he showed when
the principal building there was one night burned to ashes. There was
no insurance on it, and it would cost a couple of thousand dollars to
replace it. Excitable as Davidson was about small contrarieties, he
watched this fire without a syllable of impatience. _Plaie d'argent
n'est pas mortelle_, he seemed to say, and if he felt sharp regrets, he
disdained to express them.
No more did care about his literary reputation trouble him. In the
ordinary greedy sense, he seemed quite free from ambition. During his
last years he had prepared a large amount of material for that history
of the interaction of Greek, Christian, Hebrew, and Arabic thought upon
one another before the revival of learning, which was to be his _magnum
opus_. It was a territory to which, in its totality, few living minds
had access, and in which a certain proprietary feeling was natural.
Knowing how short his life might be, I once asked him whether he felt
no concern lest the work already done by him should be frustrate, from
the lack of its necessary complement, in case he were suddenly cut off.
His answer surprised me by its indifference. He would work as long as
he lived, he said, but not allow himself to worry, and look serenely at
whatever might be the outcome. This seemed to me uncommonly
high-minded. I think that Davidson's conviction of immortality had
much to do with such a superiority to accidents. On the surface, and
towards small things, he was irritable enough, but the undertone of his
character was remarkable for equanimity. He showed it in his final
illness, of which the misery was really atrocious. There were no
general complaints or lamentations about the personal situation or the
arrest to his career. It was the human lot and he must even bear it;
so he kept his mind upon objective matters.
But, as I said at the outset, the paramount thing in Davidson in my
eyes was his capacity for friendship. His friends were
innumerable--boys and girls and old boys and old girls, Papists and
Protestants, Jews and Gentiles, married and single; and he cared deeply
for each one of them, admiring them often too extravagantly. What term
can name those recurrent waves of delighted laughter that expressed his
greeting, beginning from the moment he saw you and accompanying his
words continuously, as if his pleasure in you were interminable? His
hand too, stretched out when yards away, so that a country neighbor
said it reached farther than any hand he ever met with. The odd thing
was that friendship in Davidson seemed so little to interfere with
criticism. Persons with whom intercourse was one long contradiction on
his part, and who appeared to annoy him to extermination, he none the
less loved tenderly, and enjoyed living with them. "He's the most
utterly selfish, illiberal and narrow-hearted human being I ever knew,"
I heard him once say of someone, "and yet he's the dearest, nicest
fellow living." His enthusiastic belief in any young person who gave a
promise of genius was touching. Naturally a man who is willing, as he
was, to be a prophet, always finds some women who are willing to be
disciples. I never heard of any sentimental weakness in Davidson in
this relation, save possibly in one case. They harmed themselves at
the fire of his soul, and he told them truths without accommodation.
"You 're farther off from God than any woman I ever heard of." "Nay,
if you believe in a protective tariff, you 're in hell already, though
you may not know it." "You had a fine hysterical time last night,
didn't you, when Miss B was brought up from the ravine with her
dislocated shoulder." To Miss B he said: "I don't pity you. It served
you right for being so ignorant as to go there at that hour." Seldom,
strange to say, did the recipients of these deliverances seem to resent
them.
What with Davidson's warmth of heart and sociability, I used to wonder
at his never marrying. Two years before his death he told me the
reason--an unhappy youthful love-affair in Scotland. Twice in later
life, he said, temptation had come to him, and he had had to make his
decision. When he had come to the point, he had felt each time that
the tie with the dead girl was prohibitive. "When two persons have
known each other as we did," he said, "neither can ever fully belong to
a stranger. So it would n't do." "It would n't do, it would n't do!"
he repeated, as we lay on the hillside, in a tone so musically tender
that it chimes in my ear now as I write down his confession. It can
surely be no breach of confidence to publish it--it is too creditable
to the profundity of Davidson's affections. As I knew him, he was one
of the purest of human beings.
If one asks, now, what the _value_ of Thomas Davidson was, what was the
general significance of his life, apart from his particular books and
articles, I have to say that it lay in the example he set to us all of
how, even in the midst of this intensely worldly social system of ours,
in which each human interest is organized so collectively and so
commercially, a single man may still be a knight-errant of the
intellectual life, and preserve full freedom in the midst of
sociability. Extreme as was his need of friends, and faithful as he
was to them, he yet lived mainly in reliance on his private
inspiration. Asking no man's permission, bowing the knee to no tribal
idol, renouncing the conventional channels of recognition, he showed us
how a life devoted to purely intellectual ends could be beautifully
wholesome outwardly, and overflow with inner contentment. Fortunately
this type of man is recurrent, and from generation to generation,
literary history preserves examples. But it is infrequent enough for
few of us to have known more than one example--I count myself happy in
knowing two and a half! The memory of Davidson will always strengthen
my faith in personal freedom and its spontaneities, and make me less
unqualifiedly respectful than ever of "Civilization," with its herding
and branding, licensing and degree-giving, authorizing and appointing,
and in general regulating and administering by system the lives human
beings. Surely the individual, the person in the singular number, is
the more fundamental phenomenon, and the social institution, of
whatever grade, is but secondary and ministerial. Many as are the
interests which social systems satisfy, always unsatisfied interests
remain over, and among them are interests to which system, as such,
does violence whenever it lays its hand upon us. The best Commonwealth
will always be the one that most cherishes the men who represent the
residual interests, the one that leaves the largest scope to their
peculiarities.
[1] First published in _McClure's Magazine_ for May, 1905.
[2] "The Education of the Wage-Earners." Boston, Ginn & Company, 1904.