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Page 56
[D] '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."[E]
[E] 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."[F]
[F] De S�nancour: 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."[G]
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