our judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on the feelings the things arouse in us. where we judge a thing to be precious in consequence of the idea we frame of it, this is only because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. if we were radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only things our mind could entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes at a stroke, and be unable to point to any one situation or experience in life more valuable or significant than any other.
now the blindness in human beings, of which this discourse will treat, is the blindness with which we all are afflicted in regard to the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves.
we are practical beings, each of us with limited functions and duties to perform. each is bound to feel intensely the importance of his own duties and the significance of the situations that call these forth. but this feeling is in each of us a vital secret, for sympathy with which we vainly look to others. the others are too much absorbed in their own vital secrets to take an interest in ours. hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance of alien lives. hence the falsity of our judgments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the value of other persons’ conditions or ideals.
take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate than most ties in this world; and yet, outside of that tie of friendly fondness, how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life significant for the other! — we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and art. as you sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a judge is your fox-terrier of your behavior? with all his good will toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his comprehension. to sit there like a senseless statue, when you might be taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! what queer disease is this that comes over you every day, of holding things and staring at them like that for hours together, paralyzed of motion and vacant of all conscious life? the african savages came nearer the truth; but they, too, missed it, when they gathered wonderingly round one of our american travellers who, in the interior, had just come into possession of a stray copy of the new york commercial advertiser, and was devouring it column by column. when he got through, they offered him a high price for the mysterious object; and, being asked for what they wanted it, they said: “for an eye medicine,”— that being the only reason they could conceive of for the protracted bath which he had given his eyes upon its surface.
the spectator’s judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter, and to possess no truth. the subject judged knows a part of the world of reality which the judging spectator fails to see, knows more while the spectator knows less; and, wherever there is conflict of opinion and difference of vision, we are bound to believe that the truer side is the side that feels the more, and not the side that feels the less.
let me take a personal example of the kind that befalls each one of us daily:—
some years ago, while journeying in the mountains of north carolina, i passed by a large number of ‘coves,’ as they call them there, or heads of small valleys between the hills, which had been newly cleared and planted. the impression on my mind was one of unmitigated squalor. the settler had in every case cut down the more manageable trees, and left their charred stumps standing. the larger trees he had girdled and killed, in order that their foliage should not cast a shade. he had then built a log cabin, plastering its chinks with clay, and had set up a tall zigzag rail fence around the scene of his havoc, to keep the pigs and cattle out. finally, he had irregularly planted the intervals between the stumps and trees with indian corn, which grew among the chips; and there he dwelt with his wife and babes — an axe, a gun, a few utensils, and some pigs and chickens feeding in the woods, being the sum total of his possessions.
the forest had been destroyed; and what had ‘improved’ it out of existence was hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of artificial grace to make up for the loss of nature’s beauty. ugly, indeed, seemed the life of the squatter, scudding, as the sailors say, under bare poles, beginning again away back where our first ancestors started, and by hardly a single item the better off for all the achievements of the intervening generations.
talk about going back to nature! i said to myself, oppressed by the dreariness, as i drove by. talk of a country life for one’s old age and for one’s children! never thus, with nothing but the bare ground and one’s bare hands to fight the battle! never, without the best spoils of culture woven in! the beauties and commodities gained by the centuries are sacred. they are our heritage and birthright. no modern person ought to be willing to live a day in such a state of rudimentariness and denudation.
then i said to the mountaineer who was driving me, “what sort of people are they who have to make these new clearings?” “all of us,” he replied. “why, we ain’t happy here, unless we are getting one of these coves under cultivation.” i instantly felt that i had been losing the whole inward significance of the situation. because to me the clearings spoke of naught but denudation, i thought that to those whose sturdy arms and obedient axes had made them they could tell no other story. but, when they looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal victory. the chips, the girdled trees, and the vile split rails spoke of honest sweat, persistent toil and final reward. the cabin was a warrant of safety for self and wife and babes. in short, the clearing, which to me was a mere ugly picture on the retina, was to them a symbol redolent with moral memories and sang a very p?an of duty, struggle, and success.
i had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions as they certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at cambridge.
* * * * *
wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. sometimes the eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective thought. but, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is ‘importance’ in the only real and positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be.
robert louis stevenson has illustrated this by a case, drawn from the sphere of the imagination, in an essay which i really think deserves to become immortal, both for the truth of its matter and the excellence of its form.
“toward the end of september,” stevenson writes, “when school-time was drawing near, and the nights were already black, we would begin to sally from our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull’s-eye lantern. the thing was so well known that it had worn a rut in the commerce of great britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish their windows with our particular brand of luminary. we wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigor of the game, a buttoned top-coat. they smelled noisomely of blistered tin. they never burned aright, though they would always burn our fingers. their use was naught, the pleasure of them merely fanciful, and yet a boy with a bull’s-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing more. the fishermen used lanterns about their boats, and it was from them, i suppose, that we had got the hint; but theirs were not bull’s-eyes, nor did we ever play at being fishermen. the police carried them at their belts, and we had plainly copied them in that; yet we did not pretend to be policemen. burglars, indeed, we may have had some haunting thought of; and we had certainly an eye to past ages when lanterns were more common, and to certain story-books in which we had found them to figure very largely. but take it for all in all, the pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a bull’s-eye under his top-coat was good enough for us.
“when two of these asses met, there would be an anxious ‘have you got your lantern?’ and a gratified ‘yes!’ that was the shibboleth, and very needful, too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none could recognize a lantern-bearer unless (like the polecat) by the smell. four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts above them — for the cabin was usually locked — or chose out some hollow of the links where the wind might whistle overhead. then the coats would be unbuttoned, and the bull’s-eyes discovered; and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge, windy hall of the night, and cheered by a rich steam of toasting tinware, these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the cold sand of the links, or on the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and delight them with inappropriate talk. woe is me that i cannot give some specimens! . . . but the talk was but a condiment, and these gatherings themselves only accidents in the career of the lantern-bearer. the essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night, the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned, not a ray escaping, whether to conduct your footsteps or to make your glory public — a mere pillar of darkness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your fool’s heart, to know you had a bull’s-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the knowledge.
“it is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid. it may be contended rather that a (somewhat minor) bard in almost every case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor. justice is not done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man’s imagination. his life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud: there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells delighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will have some kind of bull’s-eye at his belt.”
. . . “there is one fable that touches very near the quick of life — the fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found himself at his return a stranger at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years, and of all his comrades there survived but one to recognize him. it is not only in the woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. he sings in the most doleful places. the miser hears him and chuckles, and his days are moments. with no more apparatus than an evil-smelling lantern, i have evoked him on the naked links. all life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands — seeking for that bird and hearing him. and it is just this that makes life so hard to value, and the delight of each so incommunicable. and it is just a knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn to the pages of the realist. there, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap desires and cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time-devouring nightingale we hear no news.”
. . . “say that we came [in such a realistic romance] on some such business as that of my lantern-bearers on the links, and described the boys as very cold, spat upon by flurries of rain, and drearily surrounded, all of which they were; and their talk as silly and indecent, which it certainly was. to the eye of the observer they are wet and cold and drearily surrounded; but ask themselves, and they are in the heaven of a recondite pleasure, the ground of which is an ill-smelling lantern.”
“for, to repeat, the ground of a man’s joy is often hard to hit. it may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside in the mysterious inwards of psychology. . . . it has so little bond with externals . . . that it may even touch them not, and the man’s true life, for which he consents to live, lie together in the field of fancy. . . . in such a case the poetry runs underground. the observer (poor soul, with his documents!) is all abroad. for to look at the man is but to court deception. we shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. and the true realism were that of the poets, to climb after him like a squirrel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven in which he lives. and the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing.”
“for to miss the joy is to miss all. in the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. that is the explanation, that the excuse. to one who has not the secret of the lanterns the scene upon the links is meaningless. and hence the haunting and truly spectral unreality of realistic books. . . . in each we miss the personal poetry, the enchanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, life falls dead like dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colors of the sunset; each is true, each inconceivable; for no man lives in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall.”4
4 ‘the lantern-bearers,’ in the volume entitled ‘across the plains.’ abridged in the quotation.
these paragraphs are the best thing i know in all stevenson. “to miss the joy is to miss all.” indeed, it is. yet we are but finite, and each one of us has some single specialized vocation of his own. and it seems as if energy in the service of its particular duties might be got only by hardening the heart toward everything unlike them. our deadness toward all but one particular kind of joy would thus be the price we inevitably have to pay for being practical creatures. only in some pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or romancer, or when the common practical man becomes a lover, does the hard externality give way, and a gleam of insight into the ejective world, as clifford called it, the vast world of inner life beyond us, so different from that of outer seeming, illuminate our mind. then the whole scheme of our customary values gets confounded, then our self is riven and its narrow interests fly to pieces, then a new centre and a new perspective must be found.
the change is well described by my colleague, josiah royce:—
“what, then, is our neighbor? thou hast regarded his thought, his feeling, as somehow different from thine. thou hast said, ‘a pain in him is not like a pain in me, but something far easier to bear.’ he seems to thee a little less living than thou; his life is dim, it is cold, it is a pale fire beside thy own burning desires. . . . so, dimly and by instinct hast thou lived with thy neighbor, and hast known him not, being blind. thou hast made [of him] a thing, no self at all. have done with this illusion, and simply try to learn the truth. pain is pain, joy is joy, everywhere, even as in thee. in all the songs of the forest birds; in all the cries of the wounded and dying, struggling in the captor’s power; in the boundless sea where the myriads of water-creatures strive and die; amid all the countless hordes of savage men; in all sickness and sorrow; in all exultation and hope, everywhere, from the lowest to the noblest, the same conscious, burning, wilful life is found, endlessly manifold as the forms of the living creatures, unquenchable as the fires of the sun, real as these impulses that even now throb in thine own little selfish heart. lift up thy eyes, behold that life, and then turn away, and forget it as thou canst; but, if thou hast known that, thou hast begun to know thy duty.”5
5 the religious aspect of philosophy, pp. 157–162 (abridged).
* * * * *
this higher vision of an inner significance in what, until then, we had realized only in the dead external way, often comes over a person suddenly; and, when it does so, it makes an epoch in his history. as emerson says, there is a depth in those moments that constrains us to ascribe more reality to them than to all other experiences. the passion of love will shake one like an explosion, or some act will awaken a remorseful compunction that hangs like a cloud over all one’s later day.
this mystic sense of hidden meaning starts upon us often from non-human natural things. i take this passage from ‘obermann,’ a french novel that had some vogue in its day: “paris, march 7. — it was dark and rather cold. i was gloomy, and walked because i had nothing to do. i passed by some flowers placed breast-high upon a wall. a jonquil in bloom was there. it is the strongest expression of desire: it was the first perfume of the year. i felt all the happiness destined for man. this unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in me complete. i never felt anything so great or so instantaneous. i know not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was that made me see in this flower a limitless beauty. . . . i shall never enclose in a conception this power, this immensity that nothing will express; this form that nothing will contain; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which it would seem that nature has not made.”6
6 de sénancour: obermann, lettre xxx.
wordsworth and shelley are similarly full of this sense of a limitless significance in natural things. in wordsworth it was a somewhat austere and moral significance — a ‘lonely cheer.’
“to every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower,
even the loose stones that cover the highway,
i gave a moral life: i saw them feel
or linked them to some feeling: the great mass
lay bedded in some quickening soul, and all
that i beheld respired with inward meaning.”7
7 the prelude, book iii.
“authentic tidings of invisible things!” just what this hidden presence in nature was, which wordsworth so rapturously felt, and in the light of which he lived, tramping the hills for days together, the poet never could explain logically or in articulate conceptions. yet to the reader who may himself have had gleaming moments of a similar sort the verses in which wordsworth simply proclaims the fact of them come with a heart-satisfying authority:—
“magnificent
the morning rose, in memorable pomp,
glorious as ere i had beheld. in front
the sea lay laughing at a distance; near
the solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds,
grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light;
and in the meadows and the lower grounds
was all the sweetness of a common dawn —
dews, vapors, and the melody of birds,
and laborers going forth to till the fields.”
“ah! need i say, dear friend, that to the brim
my heart was full; i made no vows, but vows
were then made for me; bond unknown to me
was given, that i should be, else sinning greatly,
a dedicated spirit. on i walked,
in thankful blessedness, which yet survives.”8
8 the prelude, book iv.
as wordsworth walked, filled with his strange inner joy, responsive thus to the secret life of nature round about him, his rural neighbors, tightly and narrowly intent upon their own affairs, their crops and lambs and fences, must have thought him a very insignificant and foolish personage. it surely never occurred to any one of them to wonder what was going on inside of him or what it might be worth. and yet that inner life of his carried the burden of a significance that has fed the souls of others, and fills them to this day with inner joy.
richard jefferies has written a remarkable autobiographic document entitled the story of my heart. it tells, in many pages, of the rapture with which in youth the sense of the life of nature filled him. on a certain hill-top he says:—
“i was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. lying down on the grass, i spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea, far beyond sight. . . . with all the intensity of feeling which exalted me, all the intense communion i held with the earth, the sun and sky, the stars hidden by the light, with the ocean — in no manner can the thrilling depth of these feelings be written — with these i prayed as if they were the keys of an instrument. . . . the great sun, burning with light, the strong earth — dear earth — the warm sky, the pure air, the thought of ocean, the inexpressible beauty of all filled me with a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. with this inflatus, too, i prayed. . . . the prayer, this soul-emotion, was in itself, not for an object: it was a passion. i hid my face in the grass. i was wholly prostrated, i lost myself in the wrestle, i was rapt and carried away. . . . had any shepherd accidentally seen me lying on the turf, he would only have thought i was resting a few minutes. i made no outward show. who could have imagined the whirlwind of passion that was going on in me as i reclined there!”9
9 op. cit., boston, roberts, 1883, pp. 5, 6.
surely, a worthless hour of life, when measured by the usual standards of commercial value. yet in what other kind of value can the preciousness of any hour, made precious by any standard, consist, if it consist not in feelings of excited significance like these, engendered in some one, by what the hour contains?
yet so blind and dead does the clamor of our own practical interests make us to all other things, that it seems almost as if it were necessary to become worthless as a practical being, if one is to hope to attain to any breadth of insight into the impersonal world of worths as such, to have any perception of life’s meaning on a large objective scale. only your mystic, your dreamer, or your insolvent tramp or loafer, can afford so sympathetic an occupation, an occupation which will change the usual standards of human value in the twinkling of an eye, giving to foolishness a place ahead of power, and laying low in a minute the distinctions which it takes a hard-working conventional man a lifetime to build up. you may be a prophet, at this rate; but you cannot be a worldly success.
walt whitman, for instance, is accounted by many of us a contemporary prophet. he abolishes the usual human distinctions, brings all conventionalisms into solution, and loves and celebrates hardly any human attributes save those elementary ones common to all members of the race. for this he becomes a sort of ideal tramp, a rider on omnibus-tops and ferry-boats, and, considered either practically or academically, a worthless, unproductive being. his verses are but ejaculations — things mostly without subject or verb, a succession of interjections on an immense scale. he felt the human crowd as rapturously as wordsworth felt the mountains, felt it as an overpoweringly significant presence, simply to absorb one’s mind in which should be business sufficient and worthy to fill the days of a serious man. as he crosses brooklyn ferry, this is what he feels:—
flood-tide below me! i watch you, face to face;
clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! i see
you also face to face.
crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes!
how curious you are to me!
on the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross,
returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose;
and you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence,
are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you
might suppose.
others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from
shore to shore;
others will watch the run of the flood-tide;
others will see the shipping of manhattan north and west,
and the heights of brooklyn to the south and east;
others will see the islands large and small;
fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the
sun half an hour high.
a hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years
hence, others will see them,
will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the
falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide.
it avails not, neither time or place — distance avails not.
just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so i
felt;
just as any of you is one of a living crowd, i was one of a
crowd;
just as you are refresh’d by the gladness of the river and
the bright flow, i was refresh’d;
just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the
swift current, i stood, yet was hurried;
just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the
thick-stemmed pipes of steamboats, i looked.
i too many and many a time cross’d the river, the sun half
an hour high;
i watched the twelfth-month sea-gulls — i saw them high in
the air, with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies,
i saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies,
and left the rest in strong shadow,
i saw the slow-wheeling circles, and the gradual edging
toward the south.
saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships
at anchor,
the sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars;
the scallop-edged waves in the twilight, the ladled cups,
the frolicsome crests and glistening;
the stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray
walls of the granite store-houses by the docks;
on the neighboring shores, the fires from the foundry chimneys
burning high . . . into the night,
casting their flicker of black . . . into the clefts of streets.
these, and all else, were to me the same as they are to you.10
10 ‘crossing brooklyn ferry’ (abridged).
and so on, through the rest of a divinely beautiful poem. and, if you wish to see what this hoary loafer considered the most worthy way of profiting by life’s heaven-sent opportunities, read the delicious volume of his letters to a young car-conductor who had become his friend:—
“new york, oct. 9, 1868.
“dear pete — it is splendid here this forenoon — bright and
cool. i was out early taking a short walk by the river only
two squares from where i live. . . . shall i tell you about [my
life] just to fill up? i generally spend the forenoon in my
room writing, etc., then take a bath fix up and go out about
twelve and loafe somewhere or call on someone down town or on
business, or perhaps if it is very pleasant and i feel like
it ride a trip with some driver friend on broadway from 23rd
street to bowling green, three miles each way. (every day i
find i have plenty to do, every hour is occupied with
something.) you know it is a never ending amusement and study
and recreation for me to ride a couple of hours on a pleasant
afternoon on a broadway stage in this way. you see everything
as you pass, a sort of living, endless panorama — shops and
splendid buildings and great windows: on the broad sidewalks
crowds of women richly dressed continually passing,
altogether different, superior in style and looks from any to
be seen anywhere else — in fact a perfect stream of
people — men too dressed in high style, and plenty of
foreigners — and then in the streets the thick crowd of
carriages, stages, carts, hotel and private coaches, and in
fact all sorts of vehicles and many first class teams, mile
after mile, and the splendor of such a great street and so
many tall, ornamental, noble buildings many of them of white
marble, and the gayety and motion on every side: you will not
wonder how much attraction all this is on a fine day, to a
great loafer like me, who enjoys so much seeing the busy
world move by him, and exhibiting itself for his amusement,
while he takes it easy and just looks on and observes.”11
11 calamus, boston, 1897, pp. 41, 42.
truly a futile way of passing the time, some of you may say, and not altogether creditable to a grown-up man. and yet, from the deepest point of view, who knows the more of truth, and who knows the less — whitman on his omnibus-top, full of the inner joy with which the spectacle inspires him, or you, full of the disdain which the futility of his occupation excites?
when your ordinary brooklynite or new yorker, leading a life replete with too much luxury, or tired and careworn about his personal affairs, crosses the ferry or goes up broadway, his fancy does not thus ‘soar away into the colors of the sunset’ as did whitman’s, nor does he inwardly realize at all the indisputable fact that this world never did anywhere or at any time contain more of essential divinity, or of eternal meaning, than is embodied in the fields of vision over which his eyes so carelessly pass. there is life; and there, a step away, is death. there is the only kind of beauty there ever was. there is the old human struggle and its fruits together. there is the text and the sermon, the real and the ideal in one. but to the jaded and unquickened eye it is all dead and common, pure vulgarism, flatness, and disgust. “hech! it is a sad sight!” says carlyle, walking at night with some one who appeals to him to note the splendor of the stars. and that very repetition of the scene to new generations of men in secula seculorum, that eternal recurrence of the common order, which so fills a whitman with mystic satisfaction, is to a schopenhauer, with the emotional an?sthesia, the feeling of ‘awful inner emptiness’ from out of which he views it all, the chief ingredient of the tedium it instils. what is life on the largest scale, he asks, but the same recurrent inanities, the same dog barking, the same fly buzzing, forevermore? yet of the kind of fibre of which such inanities consist is the material woven of all the excitements, joys, and meanings that ever were, or ever shall be, in this world.
to be rapt with satisfied attention, like whitman, to the mere spectacle of the world’s presence, is one way, and the most fundamental way, of confessing one’s sense of its unfathomable significance and importance. but how can one attain to the feeling of the vital significance of an experience, if one have it not to begin with? there is no receipt which one can follow. being a secret and a mystery, it often comes in mysteriously unexpected ways. it blossoms sometimes from out of the very grave wherein we imagined that our happiness was buried. benvenuto cellini, after a life all in the outer sunshine, made of adventures and artistic excitements, suddenly finds himself cast into a dungeon in the castle of san angelo. the place is horrible. rats and wet and mould possess it. his leg is broken and his teeth fall out, apparently with scurvy. but his thoughts turn to god as they have never turned before. he gets a bible, which he reads during the one hour in the twenty-four in which a wandering ray of daylight penetrates his cavern. he has religious visions. he sings psalms to himself, and composes hymns. and thinking, on the last day of july, of the festivities customary on the morrow in rome, he says to himself: “all these past years i celebrated this holiday with the vanities of the world: from this year henceforward i will do it with the divinity of god. and then i said to myself, ‘oh, how much more happy i am for this present life of mine than for all those things remembered!’"12
12 vita, lib. 2, chap. iv.
but the great understander of these mysterious ebbs and flows is tolsto?. 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 tolsto?‘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.”13
13 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.”14
14 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.”15
15 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.