And then genuineness will bring serenity—which I take to be another
mark of the right development of the true human being, certainly in an
age passionate and confused as this in which we live. Of course
serenity does not always go with genuineness. We must say of Dr.
Johnson that he was genuine, and yet we know that the stormy tyrant of
the Turk’s Head Tavern was not serene. Carlyle was genuine (though that
is not quite the first adjective we should choose to describe him), but
of serenity he allowed cooks and cocks and every modern and every
ancient sham to deprive him. Serenity is a product, no doubt, of two
very different things, namely, vision and digestion. Not the eye only,
but the courses of the blood must be clear, if we would find serenity.
Our word “serene” contains a picture. Its image is of the calm evening
when the stars are out and the still night comes on; when the dew is on
the grass and the wind does not stir; when the day’s work is over, and
the evening meal, and thought falls clear in the quiet hour. It is the
hour of reflection—and it is human to reflect. Who shall contrive to be
human without this evening hour, which drives turmoil out, and gives
the soul its seasons of self-recollection? Serenity is not a thing to
beget inaction. It only checks excitement and uncalculating haste. It
does not exclude ardor or the heat of battle: it keeps ardor from
extravagance, prevents the battle from becoming a mere aimless mêlée.
The great captains of the world have been men who were calm in the
moment of crisis; who were calm, too, in the long planning which
preceded crisis; who went into battle with a serenity infinitely
ominous for those whom they attack. We instinctively associate serenity
with the highest types of power among men, seeing in it the poise of
knowledge and calm vision, the supreme heat and mastery which is
without splutter or noise of any kind. The art of power in this sort is
no doubt learned in hours of reflection, by those who are not born with
it. What rebuke of aimless excitement there is to be got out of a
little reflection, when we have been inveighing against the corruption
and decadence of our own days, if only we have provided ourselves with
a little knowledge of the past wherewith to balance our thought! As bad
times as these, or any we shall see, have been reformed, but not by
protests. They have been made glorious instead of shameful by the men
who kept their heads and struck with sure self-possession in the fight.
The world is very human, not a bit given to adopting virtues for the
sakes of those who merely bemoan its vices, and we are most effective
when we are most calmly in possession of our senses.
So far is serenity from being a thing of slackness or inaction that it
seems bred, rather, by an equable energy, a satisfying activity. It may
be found in the midst of that alert interest in affairs which is, it
may be, the distinguishing trait of developed manhood. You distinguish
man from the brute by his intelligent curiosity, his play of mind
beyond the narrow field of instinct, his perception of cause and effect
in matters to him indifferent, his appreciation of motive and
calculation of results. He is interested in the world about him, and
even in the great universe of which it forms a part, not merely as a
thing he would use, satisfy his wants and grow great by, but as a field
to stretch his mind in, for love of journeyings and excursions in the
large realm of thought. Your full-bred human being loves a run afield
with his understanding. With what images does he not surround himself
and store his mind! With what fondness does he con travelers’ tales and
credit poets’ fancies! With what patience does he follow science and
pore upon old records, and with what eagerness does he ask the news of
the day! No great part of what he learns immediately touches his own
life or the course of his own affairs: he is not pursuing a business,
but satisfying as he can an insatiable mind. No doubt the highest form
of this noble curiosity is that which leads us, without self-interest,
to look abroad upon all the field of man’s life at home and in society,
seeking more excellent forms of government, more righteous ways of
labor, more elevating forms of art, and which makes the greater among
us statesmen, reformers, philanthropists, artists, critics, men of
letters. It is certainly human to mind your neighbor’s business as well
as your own. Gossips are only sociologists upon a mean and petty scale.
The art of being human lifts to be a better level than that of gossip;
it leaves mere chatter behind, as too reminiscent of a lower stage of
existence, and is compassed by those whose outlook is wide enough to
serve for guidance and a choosing of ways.
V
Luckily we are not the first human beings. We have come into a great
heritage of interesting things, collected and piled all about us by the
curiosity of past generations. And so our interest is selective. Our
education consists in learning intelligent choice. Our energies do not
clash or compete: each is free to take his own path to knowledge. Each
has that choice, which is man’s alone, of the life he shall live, and
finds out first or last that the art in living is not only to be
genuine and one’s own master, but also to learn mastery in perception
and preference. Your true woodsman needs not to follow the dusty
highway through the forest nor search for any path, but goes straight
from glade to glade as if upon an open way, having some privy
understanding with the taller trees, some compass in his senses. So
there is the subtle craft in finding ways for the mind, too. Keep but
your eyes alert and your ears quick, as you move among men and among
books, and you shall find yourself possessed at last of a new sense,
the sense of the pathfinder. Have you never marked the eyes of a man
who has seen the world he has lived in: the eyes of the sea-captain,
who has watched his life through the changes of the heavens; the eyes
of the huntsman, nature’s gossip and familiar; the eyes of the man of
affairs, accustomed to command in moments of exigency? You are at once
aware that they are eyes which can see. There is something in them that
you do not find in other eyes, and you have read the life of the man
when you have divined what it is. Let the thing serve as a figure. So
ought alert interest in the world of men and thought to serve each one
of us that we shall have the quick perceiving vision, taking meanings
at a glance, reading suggestions as if they were expositions. You shall
not otherwise get full value of your humanity. What good shall it do
you else that the long generations of men which have gone before have
filled the world with great store of everything that may make you wise
and your life various? Will you not take the usury of the past, if it
may be had for the taking? Here is the world humanity has made: will
you take full citizenship in it, or will you live in it as dull, as
slow to receive, as unenfranchised, as the idlers for whom civilization
has no uses, or the deadened toilers, men or beasts, whose labor shuts
the door on choice?
That man seems to me a little less than human who lives as if our life
in the world were but just begun, thinking only of the things of sense,
reckoning nothing of the infinite thronging and assemblage of affairs
the great stage over, or of the old wisdom that has ruled the world.
That is, if he have the choice. Great masses of our fellow-men are shut
out from choosing, by reason of absorbing toil, and it is part of the
enlightenment of our age that our understandings are being opened to
the workingman’s need of a little leisure wherein to look about him and
clear his vision of the dust of the workshop. We know that there is a
drudgery which is inhuman, let it but encompass the whole life, with
only heavy sleep between task and task. We know that those who are so
bound can have no freedom to be men, that their very spirits are in
bondage. It is part of our philanthropy—it should be part of our
statesmanship—to ease the burden as we can, and enfranchise those who
spend and are spent for the sustenance of the race. But what shall we
say of those who are free and yet choose littleness and bondage, or of
those who, though they might see the whole face of society,
nevertheless choose to spend all a life’s space poring upon some single
vice or blemish? I would not for the world discredit any sort of
philanthropy except the small and churlish sort which seeks to reform
by nagging—the sort which exaggerates petty vices into great ones, and
runs atilt against windmills, while everywhere colossal shams and
abuses go unexposed, unrebuked. Is it because we are better at being
common scolds than at being wise advisers that we prefer little reforms
to big ones? Are we to allow the poor personal habits of other people
to absorb and quite use up all our fine indignation? It will be a bad
day for society when sentimentalists are encouraged to suggest all the
measures that shall be taken for the betterment of the race. I, for
one, sometimes sigh for the generation of “leading people” and of good
people who shall see things steadily and see them whole; who shall show
a handsome justness and a large sanity of view, an opportune tolerance
for details, that happen to be awry, in order that they may spend their
energy, not without self-possession, in some generous mission which
shall make right principles shine upon the people’s life. They would
bring with them an age of large moralities, a spacious time, a day of
vision.
Knowledge has come into the world in vain if it is not to emancipate
those who may have it from narrowness, censoriousness, fussiness, an
intemperate zeal for petty things. It would be a most pleasant, a truly
humane world, would we but open our ears with a more generous welcome
to the clear voices that ring in those writings upon life and affairs
which mankind has chosen to keep. Not many splenetic books, not many
intemperate, not many bigoted, have kept men’s confidence; and the mind
that is impatient, or intolerant, or hoodwinked, or shut in to a petty
view shall have no part in carrying men forward to a true humanity,
shall never stand as examples of the true humankind. What is truly
human has always upon it the broad light of what is genial, fit to
support life, cordial, and of a catholic spirit of helpfulness. Your
true human being has eyes and keeps his balance in the world; deems
nothing uninteresting that comes from life; clarifies his vision and
gives health to his eyes by using them upon things near and things far.
The brute beast has but a single neighborhood, a single, narrow round
of existence; the gain of being human accrues in the choice of change
and variety and of experience far and wide, with all the world for
stage—a stage set and appointed by this very art of choice—all future
generations for witnesses and audience. When you talk with a man who
has in his nature and acquirements that freedom from constraint which
goes with the full franchise of humanity, he turns easily with topic to
topic; does not fall silent or dull when you leave some single field of
thought such as unwise men make a prison of. The men who will not be
broken from a little set of subjects, who talk earnestly, hotly, with a
sort of fierceness, of certain special schemes of conduct, and look
coldly upon everything else, render you infinitely uneasy, as if there
were in them a force abnormal and which rocked toward an upset of the
mind; but from the man whose interest swings from thought to thought
with the zest and poise and pleasure of the old traveler, eager for
what is new, glad to look again upon what is old, you come away with
faculties warmed and heartened—with the feeling of having been comrade
for a little with a genuine human being. It is a large world and a
round world, and men grow human by seeing all its play of force and
folly.