Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals
and aching and with its powers of patient endurance racked to the utmost
under the length of hours of the strain.
As I awoke to all this unidealized heroic life around me, the scales
seemed to fall from my eyes; and a wave of sympathy greater than
anything I had ever before felt with the common life of common men began
to fill my soul. It began to seem as if virtue with horny hands and
dirty skin were the only virtue genuine and vital enough to take account
of. Every other virtue poses; none is absolutely unconscious and simple,
and unexpectant of decoration or recognition, like this. These are our
soldiers, thought I, these our sustainers, these the very parents of our
life.
Many years ago, when in Vienna, I had had a similar feeling of awe and
reverence in looking at the peasant-women, in from the country on their
business at the market for the day. Old hags many of them were, dried
and brown and wrinkled, kerchiefed and short-petticoated, with thick
wool stockings on their bony shanks, stumping through the glittering
thoroughfares, looking neither to the right nor the left, bent on duty,
envying nothing, humble-hearted, remote;--and yet at bottom, when you
came to think of it, bearing the whole fabric of the splendors and
corruptions of that city on their laborious backs. For where would any
of it have been without their unremitting, unrewarded labor in the
fields? And so with us: not to our generals and poets, I thought, but to
the Italian and Hungarian laborers in the Subway, rather, ought the
monuments of gratitude and reverence of a city like Boston to be reared.
* * * * *
If any of you have been readers of Tolstoi, you will see that I passed
into a vein of feeling similar to his, with its abhorrence of all that
conventionally passes for distinguished, and its exclusive deification
of the bravery, patience, kindliness, and dumbness of the unconscious
natural man.
Where now is _our_ Tolstoi, I said, to bring the truth of all this home
to our American bosoms, fill us with a better insight, and wean us away
from that spurious literary romanticism on which our wretched
culture--as it calls itself--is fed? Divinity lies all about us, and
culture is too hidebound to even suspect the fact. Could a Howells or a
Kipling be enlisted in this mission? or are they still too deep in the
ancestral blindness, and not humane enough for the inner joy and meaning
of the laborer's existence to be really revealed? Must we wait for some
one born and bred and living as a laborer himself, but who, by grace of
Heaven, shall also find a literary voice?
And there I rested on that day, with a sense of widening of vision, and
with what it is surely fair to call an increase of religious insight
into life. In God's eyes the differences of social position, of
intellect, of culture, of cleanliness, of dress, which different men
exhibit, and all the other rarities and exceptions on which they so
fantastically pin their pride, must be so small as practically quite to
vanish; and all that should remain is the common fact that here we are,
a countless multitude of vessels of life, each of us pent in to peculiar
difficulties, with which we must severally struggle by using whatever of
fortitude and goodness we can summon up. The exercise of the courage,
patience, and kindness, must be the significant portion of the whole
business; and the distinctions of position can only be a manner of
diversifying the phenomenal surface upon which these underground virtues
may manifest their effects. At this rate, the deepest human life is
everywhere, is eternal. And, if any human attributes exist only in
particular individuals, they must belong to the mere trapping and
decoration of the surface-show.
Thus are men's lives levelled up as well as levelled down,--levelled up
in their common inner meaning, levelled down in their outer gloriousness
and show. Yet always, we must confess, this levelling insight tends to
be obscured again; and always the ancestral blindness returns and wraps
us up, so that we end once more by thinking that creation can be for no
other purpose than to develop remarkable situations and conventional
distinctions and merits. And then always some new leveller in the shape
of a religious prophet has to arise--the Buddha, the Christ, or some
Saint Francis, some Rousseau or Tolstoi--to redispel our blindness. Yet,
little by little, there comes some stable gain; for the world does get
more humane, and the religion of democracy tends toward permanent
increase.
This, as I said, became for a time my conviction, and gave me great
content. I have put the matter into the form of a personal reminiscence,
so that I might lead you into it more directly and completely, and so
save time. But now I am going to discuss the rest of it with you in a
more impersonal way.
Tolstoi's levelling philosophy began long before he had the crisis of
melancholy commemorated in that wonderful document of his entitled 'My
Confession,' which led the way to his more specifically religious works.
In his masterpiece 'War and Peace,'--assuredly the greatest of human
novels,--the role of the spiritual hero is given to a poor little
soldier named Karataieff, so helpful, so cheerful, and so devout that,
in spite of his ignorance and filthiness, the sight of him opens the
heavens, which have been closed, to the mind of the principal character
of the book; and his example evidently is meant by Tolstoi to let God
into the world again for the reader. Poor little Karataieff is taken
prisoner by the French; and, when too exhausted by hardship and fever to
march, is shot as other prisoners were in the famous retreat from
Moscow. The last view one gets of him is his little figure leaning
against a white birch-tree, and uncomplainingly awaiting the end.
"The more," writes Tolstoi in the work 'My Confession,' "the more I
examined the life of these laboring folks, the more persuaded I became
that they veritably have faith, and get from it alone the sense and the
possibility of life.... Contrariwise to those of our own class, who
protest against destiny and grow indignant at its rigor, these people
receive maladies and misfortunes without revolt, without opposition, and
with a firm and tranquil confidence that all had to be like that, could
not be otherwise, and that it is all right so.... The more we live by
our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life. We see only a
cruel jest in suffering and death, whereas these people live, suffer,
and draw near to death with tranquillity, and oftener than not with
joy.... There are enormous multitudes of them happy with the most
perfect happiness, although deprived of what for us is the sole good of
life. Those who understand life's meaning, and know how to live and die
thus, are to be counted not by twos, threes, tens, but by hundreds,
thousands, millions. They labor quietly, endure privations and pains,
live and die, and throughout everything see the good without seeing the
vanity. I had to love these people. The more I entered into their life,
the more I loved them; and the more it became possible for me to live,
too. It came about not only that the life of our society, of the learned
and of the rich, disgusted me--more than that, it lost all semblance of
meaning in my eyes. All our actions, our deliberations, our sciences,
our arts, all appeared to me with a new significance. I understood that
these things might be charming pastimes, but that one need seek in them
no depth, whereas the life of the hard-working populace, of that
multitude of human beings who really contribute to existence, appeared
to me in its true light. I understood that there veritably is life, that
the meaning which life there receives is the truth; and I accepted
it."[Q]
[Q] My Confession, X. (condensed).
In a similar way does Stevenson appeal to our piety toward the elemental
virtue of mankind.
"What a wonderful thing," he writes,[R] "is this Man! How surprising are
his attributes! Poor soul, here for so little, cast among so many
hardships, savagely surrounded, savagely descended, irremediably
condemned to prey upon his fellow-lives,--who should have blamed him,
had he been of a piece with his destiny and a being merely barbarous?
... [Yet] it matters not where we look, under what climate we observe
him, in what stage of society, in what depth of ignorance, burdened with
what erroneous morality; in ships at sea, a man inured to hardship and
vile pleasures, his brightest hope a fiddle in a tavern, and a bedizened
trull who sells herself to rob him, and he, for all that, simple,
innocent, cheerful, kindly like a child, constant to toil, brave to
drown, for others;... in the slums of cities, moving among indifferent
millions to mechanical employments, without hope of change in the
future, with scarce a pleasure in the present, and yet true to his
virtues, honest up to his lights, kind to his neighbors, tempted perhaps
in vain by the bright gin-palace,... often repaying the world's scorn
with service, often standing firm upon a scruple;... everywhere some
virtue cherished or affected, everywhere some decency of thought and
courage, everywhere the ensign of man's ineffectual goodness,--ah! if I
could show you this! If I could show you these men and women all the
world over, in every stage of history, under every abuse of error, under
every circumstance of failure, without hope, without help, without
thanks, still obscurely fighting the lost fight of virtue, still
clinging to some rag of honor, the poor jewel of their souls."
[R] Across the Plains: "Pulvis et Umbra" (abridged).
All this is as true as it is splendid, and terribly do we need our
Tolstois and Stevensons to keep our sense for it alive. Yet you remember
the Irishman who, when asked, "Is not one man as good as another?"
replied, "Yes; and a great deal better, too!" Similarly (it seems to me)
does Tolstoi overcorrect our social prejudices, when he makes his love
of the peasant so exclusive, and hardens his heart toward the educated
man as absolutely as he does. Grant that at Chautauqua there was little
moral effort, little sweat or muscular strain in view. Still, deep down
in the souls of the participants we may be sure that something of the
sort was hid, some inner stress, some vital virtue not found wanting
when required. And, after all, the question recurs, and forces itself
upon us, Is it so certain that the surroundings and circumstances of the
virtue do make so little difference in the importance of the result? Is
the functional utility, the worth to the universe of a certain definite
amount of courage, kindliness, and patience, no greater if the
possessor of these virtues is in an educated situation, working out
far-reaching tasks, than if he be an illiterate nobody, hewing wood and
drawing water, just to keep himself alive? Tolstoi's philosophy, deeply
enlightening though it certainly is, remains a false abstraction. It
savors too much of that Oriental pessimism and nihilism of his, which
declares the whole phenomenal world and its facts and their distinctions
to be a cunning fraud.
* * * * *
A mere bare fraud is just what our Western common sense will never
believe the phenomenal world to be. It admits fully that the inner joys
and virtues are the _essential_ part of life's business, but it is sure
that _some_ positive part is also played by the adjuncts of the show. If
it is idiotic in romanticism to recognize the heroic only when it sees
it labelled and dressed-up in books, it is really just as idiotic to see
it only in the dirty boots and sweaty shirt of some one in the fields.
It is with us really under every disguise: at Chautauqua; here in your