Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals
college; in the stock-yards and on the freight-trains; and in the czar
of Russia's court. But, instinctively, we make a combination of two
things in judging the total significance of a human being. We feel it
to be some sort of a product (if such a product only could be
calculated) of his inner virtue _and_ his outer place,--neither singly
taken, but both conjoined. If the outer differences had no meaning for
life, why indeed should all this immense variety of them exist? They
_must_ be significant elements of the world as well.
Just test Tolstoi's deification of the mere manual laborer by the facts.
This is what Mr. Walter Wyckoff, after working as an unskilled laborer
in the demolition of some buildings at West Point, writes of the
spiritual condition of the class of men to which he temporarily chose to
belong:--
"The salient features of our condition are plain enough. We are grown
men, and are without a trade. In the labor-market we stand ready to sell
to the highest bidder our mere muscular strength for so many hours each
day. We are thus in the lowest grade of labor. And, selling our muscular
strength in the open market for what it will bring, we sell it under
peculiar conditions. It is all the capital that we have. We have no
reserve means of subsistence, and cannot, therefore, stand off for a
'reserve price.' We sell under the necessity of satisfying imminent
hunger. Broadly speaking, we must sell our labor or starve; and, as
hunger is a matter of a few hours, and we have no other way of meeting
this need, we must sell at once for what the market offers for our
labor.
"Our employer is buying labor in a dear market, and he will certainly
get from us as much work as he can at the price. The gang-boss is
secured for this purpose, and thoroughly does he know his business. He
has sole command of us. He never saw us before, and he will discharge us
all when the debris is cleared away. In the mean time he must get from
us, if he can, the utmost of physical labor which we, individually and
collectively, are capable of. If he should drive some of us to
exhaustion, and we should not be able to continue at work, he would not
be the loser; for the market would soon supply him with others to take
our places.
"We are ignorant men, but so much we clearly see,--that we have sold our
labor where we could sell it dearest, and our employer has bought it
where he could buy it cheapest. He has paid high, and he must get all
the labor that he can; and, by a strong instinct which possesses us, we
shall part with as little as we can. From work like ours there seems to
us to have been eliminated every element which constitutes the nobility
of labor. We feel no personal pride in its progress, and no community of
interest with our employer. There is none of the joy of responsibility,
none of the sense of achievement, only the dull monotony of grinding
toil, with the longing for the signal to quit work, and for our wages at
the end.
"And being what we are, the dregs of the labor-market, and having no
certainty of permanent employment, and no organization among ourselves,
we must expect to work under the watchful eye of a gang-boss, and be
driven, like the wage-slaves that we are, through our tasks.
"All this is to tell us, in effect, that our lives are hard, barren,
hopeless lives."
And such hard, barren, hopeless lives, surely, are not lives in which
one ought to be willing permanently to remain. And why is this so? Is it
because they are so dirty? Well, Nansen grew a great deal dirtier on his
polar expedition; and we think none the worse of his life for that. Is
it the insensibility? Our soldiers have to grow vastly more insensible,
and we extol them to the skies. Is it the poverty? Poverty has been
reckoned the crowning beauty of many a heroic career. Is it the slavery
to a task, the loss of finer pleasures?
Such slavery and loss are of the very essence of the higher fortitude,
and are always counted to its credit,--read the records of missionary
devotion all over the world. It is not any one of these things, then,
taken by itself,--no, nor all of them together,--that make such a life
undesirable. A man might in truth live like an unskilled laborer, and do
the work of one, and yet count as one of the noblest of God's creatures.
Quite possibly there were some such persons in the gang that our author
describes; but the current of their souls ran underground; and he was
too steeped in the ancestral blindness to discern it.
If there _were_ any such morally exceptional individuals, however, what
made them different from the rest? It can only have been this,--that
their souls worked and endured in obedience to some inner _ideal_, while
their comrades were not actuated by anything worthy of that name. These
ideals of other lives are among those secrets that we can almost never
penetrate, although something about the man may often tell us when they
are there. In Mr. Wyckoff's own case we know exactly what the
self-imposed ideal was. Partly he had stumped himself, as the boys say,
to carry through a strenuous achievement; but mainly he wished to
enlarge his sympathetic insight into fellow-lives. For this his sweat
and toil acquire a certain heroic significance, and make us accord to
him exceptional esteem. But it is easy to imagine his fellows with
various other ideals. To say nothing of wives and babies, one may have
been a convert of the Salvation Army, and had a nightingale singing of
expiation and forgiveness in his heart all the while he labored. Or
there might have been an apostle like Tolstoi himself, or his compatriot
Bondareff, in the gang, voluntarily embracing labor as their religious
mission. Class-loyalty was undoubtedly an ideal with many. And who knows
how much of that higher manliness of poverty, of which Phillips Brooks
has spoken so penetratingly, was or was not present in that gang?
"A rugged, barren land," says Phillips Brooks, "is poverty to live
in,--a land where I am thankful very often if I can get a berry or a
root to eat. But living in it really, letting it bear witness to me of
itself, not dishonoring it all the time by judging it after the standard
of the other lands, gradually there come out its qualities. Behold! no
land like this barren and naked land of poverty could show the moral
geology of the world. See how the hard ribs ... stand out strong and
solid. No life like poverty could so get one to the heart of things and
make men know their meaning, could so let us feel life and the world
with all the soft cushions stripped off and thrown away.... Poverty
makes men come very near each other, and recognize each other's human
hearts; and poverty, highest and best of all, demands and cries out for
faith in God.... I know how superficial and unfeeling, how like mere
mockery, words in praise of poverty may seem.... But I am sure that the
poor man's dignity and freedom, his self-respect and energy, depend upon
his cordial knowledge that his poverty is a true region and kind of
life, with its own chances of character, its own springs of happiness
and revelations of God. Let him resist the characterlessness which often
goes with being poor. Let him insist on respecting the condition where
he lives. Let him learn to love it, so that by and by, [if] he grows
rich, he shall go out of the low door of the old familiar poverty with a
true pang of regret, and with a true honor for the narrow home in which
he has lived so long."[S]
[S] Sermons. 5th Series, New York, 1893, pp. 166, 167.
The barrenness and ignobleness of the more usual laborer's life consist
in the fact that it is moved by no such ideal inner springs. The
backache, the long hours, the danger, are patiently endured--for what?
To gain a quid of tobacco, a glass of beer, a cup of coffee, a meal, and
a bed, and to begin again the next day and shirk as much as one can.
This really is why we raise no monument to the laborers in the Subway,
even though they be our conscripts, and even though after a fashion our
city is indeed based upon their patient hearts and enduring backs and
shoulders. And this is why we do raise monuments to our soldiers, whose
outward conditions were even brutaller still. The soldiers are supposed
to have followed an ideal, and the laborers are supposed to have
followed none.
You see, my friends, how the plot now thickens; and how strangely the
complexities of this wonderful human nature of ours begin to develop
under our hands. We have seen the blindness and deadness to each other
which are our natural inheritance; and, in spite of them, we have been
led to acknowledge an inner meaning which passeth show, and which may be
present in the lives of others where we least descry it. And now we are
led to say that such inner meaning can be _complete_ and _valid for us
also_, only when the inner joy, courage, and endurance are joined with
an ideal.
* * * * *
But what, exactly, do we mean by an ideal? Can we give no definite
account of such a word?
To a certain extent we can. An ideal, for instance, must be something
intellectually conceived, something of which we are not unconscious, if
we have it; and it must carry with it that sort of outlook, uplift, and
brightness that go with all intellectual facts. Secondly, there must be
_novelty_ in an ideal,--novelty at least for him whom the ideal grasps.
Sodden routine is incompatible with ideality, although what is sodden
routine for one person may be ideal novelty for another. This shows that
there is nothing absolutely ideal: ideals are relative to the lives that
entertain them. To keep out of the gutter is for us here no part of
consciousness at all, yet for many of our brethren it is the most
legitimately engrossing of ideals.
Now, taken nakedly, abstractly, and immediately, you see that mere
ideals are the cheapest things in life. Everybody has them in some shape
or other, personal or general, sound or mistaken, low or high; and the
most worthless sentimentalists and dreamers, drunkards, shirks and
verse-makers, who never show a grain of effort, courage, or endurance,
possibly have them on the most copious scale. Education, enlarging as it
does our horizon and perspective, is a means of multiplying our ideals,
of bringing new ones into view. And your college professor, with a
starched shirt and spectacles, would, if a stock of ideals were all
alone by itself enough to render a life significant, be the most
absolutely and deeply significant of men. Tolstoi would be completely
blind in despising him for a prig, a pedant and a parody; and all our
new insight into the divinity of muscular labor would be altogether off
the track of truth.
But such consequences as this, you instinctively feel, are erroneous.
The more ideals a man has, the more contemptible, on the whole, do you
continue to deem him, if the matter ends there for him, and if none of
the laboring man's virtues are called into action on his part,--no
courage shown, no privations undergone, no dirt or scars contracted in
the attempt to get them realized. It is quite obvious that something
more than the mere possession of ideals is required to make a life
significant in any sense that claims the spectator's admiration. Inner
joy, to be sure, it may _have_, with its ideals; but that is its own
private sentimental matter. To extort from us, outsiders as we are, with
our own ideals to look after, the tribute of our grudging recognition,
it must back its ideal visions with what the laborers have, the sterner
stuff of manly virtue; it must multiply their sentimental surface by the
dimension of the active will, if we are to have _depth_, if we are to
have anything cubical and solid in the way of character.