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, a 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 struggled in the flood like themselves. If they be frivolous,
light-headed 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 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, a veritable revolution in his ways both of
thought and of action. He finds a new sort of fitness demanded of him,
executive, thorough-going, 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 the world he knows 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 crosswinds, 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 at
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.