VI

Let no one suppose that efficiency is lost by such breadth and

catholicity of view. We deceive ourselves with instances, look at sharp

crises in the world’s affairs, and imagine that intense and narrow men

have made history for us. Poise, balance, a nice and equable exercise

of force, are not, it is true, the things the world ordinarily seeks

for or most applauds in its heroes. It is apt to esteem that man most

human who has his qualities in a certain exaggeration, whose courage is

passionate, whose generosity is without deliberation, whose just action

is without premeditation, whose spirit runs toward its favorite objects

with an infectious and reckless ardor, whose wisdom is no child of slow

prudence. We love Achilles more than Diomedes, and Ulysses not at all.

But these are standards left over from a ruder state of society: we

should have passed by this time the Homeric stage of mind—should have

heroes suited to our age. Nay, we have erected different standards, and

do make a different choice, when we see in any man fulfillment of our

real ideals. Let a modern instance serve as test. Could any man

hesitate to say that Abraham Lincoln was more human than William Lloyd

Garrison? Does not every one know that it was the practical

Free-Soilers who made emancipation possible, and not the hot,

impracticable Abolitionists; that the country was infinitely more moved

by Lincoln’s temperate sagacity than by any man’s enthusiasm,

instinctively trusted the man who saw the whole situation and kept his

balance, instinctively held off from those who refused to see more than

one thing? We know how serviceable the intense and headlong agitator

was in bringing to their feet men fit for action; but we feel uneasy

while he lives, and vouchsafe him our full sympathy only when he is

dead. We know that the genial forces of nature which work daily,

equably, and without violence are infinitely more serviceable,

infinitely more admirable, than the rude violence of the storm, however

necessary or excellent the purification it may have wrought. Should we

seek to name the most human man among those who led the nation to its

struggle with slavery, and yet was no statesmen, we should, of course,

name Lowell. We know that his humor went further than any man’s passion

toward setting tolerant men atingle with the new impulses of the day.

We naturally hold back from those who are intemperate and can never

stop to smile, and are deeply reassured to see a twinkle in a

reformer’s eye. We are glad to see earnest men laugh. It breaks the

strain. If it be wholesome laughter, it dispels all suspicion of spite,

and is like the gleam of light upon running water, lifting sullen

shadows, suggesting clear depths.

Surely it is this soundness of nature, this broad and genial quality,

this full-blooded, full-orbed sanity of spirit, which gives the men we

love that wide-eyed sympathy which gives hope and power to humanity,

which gives range to every good quality and is so excellent a

credential of genuine manhood. Let your life and your thought be

narrow, and your sympathy will shrink to a like scale. It is a quality

which follows the seeing mind afield, which waits on experience. It is

not a mere sentiment. It goes not with pity so much as with a

penetrative understanding of other men’s lives and hopes and

temptations. Ignorance of these things makes it worthless. Its best

tutors are observations and experience, and these serve only those who

keep clear eyes and a wide field of vision. It is exercise and

discipline upon such a scale, too, which strengthen, which for ordinary

men come near to creating, that capacity to reason upon affairs and to

plan for action which we always reckon upon finding in every man who

has studied to perfect his native force. This new day in which we live

cries a challenge to us. Steam and electricity have reduced nations to

neighborhoods; have made travel pastime, and news a thing for

everybody. Cheap printing has made knowledge a vulgar commodity. Our

eyes look, almost without choice, upon the very world itself, and the

word “human” is filled with new meaning. Our ideals broaden to suit the

wide day in which we live. We crave, not cloistered virtue—it is

impossible any longer to keep the cloister—but a robust spirit that

shall take the air in the great world, know men in all their kinds,

choose its way amid the bustle with all self-possession, with wise

genuineness, in calmness, and yet with the quick eye of interest and

the quick pulse of power. It is again a day for Shakespeare’s spirit—a

day more various, more ardent, more provoking to valor and every large

design, even than “the spacious times of great Elizabeth,” when all the

world seemed new; and if we cannot find another bard, come out of a new

Warwickshire, to hold once more the mirror up to nature, it will not be

because the stage is not set for him. The time is such an one as he

might rejoice to look upon; and if we would serve it as it should be

served, we should seek to be human after his wide-eyed sort. The

serenity of power; the naturalness that is nature’s poise and mark of

genuineness; the unsleeping interest in all affairs, all fancies, all

things believed or done; the catholic understanding, tolerance,

enjoyment, of all classes and conditions of men; the conceiving

imagination, the planning purpose, the creating thought, the wholesome,

laughing humor, the quiet insight, the universal coinage of the

brain—are not these the marvelous gifts and qualities we mark in

Shakespeare when we call him the greatest among men? And shall not

these rounded and perfect powers serve us as our ideal of what it is to

be a finished human being?

We live for our own age—an age like Shakespeare’s, when an old world is

passing away, a new world coming in—an age of new speculation and every

new adventure of the mind; a full stage, an intricate plot, a universal

play of passion, an outcome no man can foresee. It is to this world,

this sweep of action, that our understandings must be stretched and

fitted; it is in this age we must show our human quality. We must

measure ourselves by the task, accept the pace set for us, make shift

to know what we are about. How free and liberal should be the scale of

our sympathy, how catholic our understanding of the world in which we

live, how poised and masterful our action in the midst of so great

affairs! We should school our ears to know the voices that are genuine,

our thought to take the truth when it is spoken, our spirits to feel

the zest of the day. It is within our choice to be with mean company or

with great, to consort with the wise or with the foolish, now that the

great world has spoken to us in the literature of all tongues and

voices. The best selected human nature will tell in the making of the

future, and the art of being human is the art of freedom and of force.

1 From “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” by William

Wordsworth.—J.M.

2 From “The Future,” by Matthew Arnold.—J.M.