Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals
But the great understander of these mysterious ebbs and flows is
Tolstoi. They throb all through his novels. In his 'War and Peace,' the
hero, Peter, is supposed to be the richest man in the Russian empire.
During the French invasion he is taken prisoner, and dragged through
much of the retreat. Cold, vermin, hunger, and every form of misery
assail him, the result being a revelation to him of the real scale of
life's values. "Here only, and for the first time, he appreciated,
because he was deprived of it, the happiness of eating when he was
hungry, of drinking when he was thirsty, of sleeping when he was sleepy,
and of talking when he felt the desire to exchange some words.... Later
in life he always recurred with joy to this month of captivity, and
never failed to speak with enthusiasm of the powerful and ineffaceable
sensations, and especially of the moral calm which he had experienced at
this epoch. When at daybreak, on the morrow of his imprisonment, he saw
[I abridge here Tolstoi's description] the mountains with their wooded
slopes disappearing in the grayish mist; when he felt the cool breeze
caress him; when he saw the light drive away the vapors, and the sun
rise majestically behind the clouds and cupolas, and the crosses, the
dew, the distance, the river, sparkle in the splendid, cheerful
rays,--his heart overflowed with emotion. This emotion kept continually
with him, and increased a hundred-fold as the difficulties of his
situation grew graver.... He learnt that man is meant for happiness, and
that this happiness is in him, in the satisfaction of the daily needs of
existence, and that unhappiness is the fatal result, not of our need,
but of our abundance.... When calm reigned in the camp, and the embers
paled, and little by little went out, the full moon had reached the
zenith. The woods and the fields roundabout lay clearly visible; and,
beyond the inundation of light which filled them, the view plunged into
the limitless horizon. Then Peter cast his eyes upon the firmament,
filled at that hour with myriads of stars. 'All that is mine,' he
thought. 'All that is in me, is me! And that is what they think they
have taken prisoner! That is what they have shut up in a cabin!' So he
smiled, and turned in to sleep among his comrades."[M]
[M] La Guerre et la Paix, Paris, 1884, vol. iii. pp. 268, 275, 316.
The occasion and the experience, then, are nothing. It all depends on
the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents
absorbed by what is given. "Crossing a bare common," says Emerson, "in
snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my
thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a
perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear."
Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive sensibilities.
But we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got
far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare,
the exquisite exclusively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed
with abstract conceptions, and glib with verbalities and verbosities;
and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy
connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow
stone-blind and insensible to life's more elementary and general goods
and joys.
The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound and
primitive level. To be imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the
army would permanently show the good of life to many an over-educated
pessimist. Living in the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided
beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line; and the
over-sensibilities and insensibilities even themselves out. The good
of all the artificial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of
seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and doing with one's
body, grows and grows. The savages and children of nature, to whom we
deem ourselves so much superior, certainly are alive where we are often
dead, along these lines; and, could they write as glibly as we do, they
would read us impressive lectures on our impatience for improvement and
on our blindness to the fundamental static goods of life. "Ah! my
brother," said a chieftain to his white guest, "thou wilt never know the
happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing. This, next to
sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we were before our
birth, and thus we shall be after death. Thy people,... when they have
finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the
day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonlight. What is their
life to ours,--the life that is as naught to them? Blind that they are,
they lose it all! But we live in the present."[N]
[N] Quoted by Lotze, Microcosmus, English translation, vol. ii.
p. 240.
The intense interest that life can assume when brought down to the
non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception, has been
beautifully described by a man who _can_ write,--Mr. W.H. Hudson, in his
volume, "Idle Days in Patagonia."
"I spent the greater part of one winter," says this admirable author,
"at a point on the Rio Negro, seventy or eighty miles from the sea."
... "It was my custom to go out every morning on horseback with my gun,
and, followed by one dog, to ride away from the valley; and no sooner
would I climb the terrace, and plunge into the gray, universal thicket,
than I would find myself as completely alone as if five hundred instead
of only five miles separated me from the valley and river. So wild and
solitary and remote seemed that gray waste, stretching away into
infinitude, a waste untrodden by man, and where the wild animals are so
few that they have made no discoverable path in the wilderness of
thorns.... Not once nor twice nor thrice, but day after day I returned
to this solitude, going to it in the morning as if to attend a festival,
and leaving it only when hunger and thirst and the westering sun
compelled me. And yet I had no object in going,--no motive which could
be put into words; for, although I carried a gun, there was nothing to
shoot,--the shooting was all left behind in the valley.... Sometimes I
would pass a whole day without seeing one mammal, and perhaps not more
than a dozen birds of any size. The weather at that time was cheerless,
generally with a gray film of cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak
wind, often cold enough to make my bridle-hand quite numb.... At a slow
pace, which would have seemed intolerable under other circumstances, I
would ride about for hours together at a stretch. On arriving at a hill,
I would slowly ride to its summit, and stand there to survey the
prospect. On every side it stretched away in great undulations, wild and
irregular. How gray it all was! Hardly less so near at hand than on the
haze-wrapped horizon where the hills were dim and the outline obscured
by distance. Descending from my outlook, I would take up my aimless
wanderings again, and visit other elevations to gaze on the same
landscape from another point; and so on for hours. And at noon I would
dismount, and sit or lie on my folded poncho for an hour or longer. One
day in these rambles I discovered a small grove composed of twenty or
thirty trees, growing at a convenient distance apart, that had evidently
been resorted to by a herd of deer or other wild animals. This grove was
on a hill differing in shape from other hills in its neighborhood; and,
after a time, I made a point of finding and using it as a resting-place
every day at noon. I did not ask myself why I made choice of that one
spot, sometimes going out of my way to sit there, instead of sitting
down under any one of the millions of trees and bushes on any other
hillside. I thought nothing about it, but acted unconsciously. Only
afterward it seemed to me that, after having rested there once, each
time I wished to rest again, the wish came associated with the image of
that particular clump of trees, with polished stems and clean bed of
sand beneath; and in a short time I formed a habit of returning, animal
like, to repose at that same spot."
"It was, perhaps, a mistake to say that I would sit down and rest,
since I was never tired; and yet, without being tired, that noon-day
pause, during which I sat for an hour without moving, was strangely
grateful. All day there would be no sound, not even the rustling of a
leaf. One day, while _listening_ to the silence, it occurred to my mind
to wonder what the effect would be if I were to shout aloud. This seemed
at the time a horrible suggestion, which almost made me shudder. But
during those solitary days it was a rare thing for any thought to cross
my mind. In the state of mind I was in, thought had become impossible.
My state was one of _suspense_ and _watchfulness_; yet I had no
expectation of meeting an adventure, and felt as free from apprehension
as I feel now while sitting in a room in London. The state seemed
familiar rather than strange, and accompanied by a strong feeling of
elation; and I did not know that something had come between me and my
intellect until I returned to my former self,--to thinking, and the old
insipid existence [again]."
"I had undoubtedly _gone back_; and that state of intense watchfulness
or alertness, rather, with suspension of the higher intellectual
faculties, represented the mental state of the pure savage. He thinks
little, reasons little, having a surer guide in his [mere sensory
perceptions]. He is in perfect harmony with nature, and is nearly on a
level, mentally, with the wild animals he preys on, and which in their
turn sometimes prey on him."[O]
[O] _Op. cit._, pp. 210-222 (abridged).
For the spectator, such hours as Mr. Hudson writes of form a mere tale
of emptiness, in which nothing happens, nothing is gained, and there is
nothing to describe. They are meaningless and vacant tracts of time. To
him who feels their inner secret, they tingle with an importance that
unutterably vouches for itself. I am sorry for the boy or girl, or man
or woman, who has never been touched by the spell of this mysterious
sensorial life, with its irrationality, if so you like to call it, but
its vigilance and its supreme felicity. The holidays of life are its
most vitally significant portions, because they are, or at least should
be, covered with just this kind of magically irresponsible spell.
* * * * *
And now what is the result of all these considerations and quotations?
It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely
forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms
of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate,
respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy
in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off:
neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any
single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of
insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and
sick-rooms have their special revelations. It is enough to ask of each
of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the
most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate the rest of the
vast field.
III. WHAT MAKES A LIFE SIGNIFICANT
In my previous talk, 'On a Certain Blindness,' I tried to make you feel
how soaked and shot-through life is with values and meanings which we
fail to realize because of our external and insensible point of view.
The meanings are there for the others, but they are not there for us.
There lies more than a mere interest of curious speculation in
understanding this. It has the most tremendous practical importance. I