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Page 59
[K] 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!'"[L]
[L] 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."[M]
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