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Page 63
So I meditated. And, first of all, I asked myself what the thing was
that was so lacking in this Sabbatical city, and the lack of which kept
one forever falling short of the higher sort of contentment. And I soon
recognized that it was the element that gives to the wicked outer world
all its moral style, expressiveness and picturesqueness,--the element of
precipitousness, so to call it, of strength and strenuousness, intensity
and danger.
What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and
the statues celebrate and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the
everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with
heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory
from the jaws of death. But in this unspeakable Chautauqua there was no
potentiality of death in sight anywhere, and no point of the compass
visible from which danger might possibly appear. The ideal was so
completely victorious already that no sign of any previous battle
remained, the place just resting on its oars. But what our human
emotions seem to require is the sight of the struggle going on. The
moment the fruits are being merely eaten, things become ignoble. Sweat
and effort, human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet
getting through alive, and then turning its back on its success to
pursue another more rare and arduous still--this is the sort of thing
the presence of which inspires us, and the reality of which it seems to
be the function of all the higher forms of literature and fine art to
bring home to us and suggest. At Chautauqua there were no racks, even in
the place's historical museum; and no sweat, except possibly the gentle
moisture on the brow of some lecturer, or on the sides of some player in
the ball-field.
Such absence of human nature _in extremis_ anywhere seemed, then, a
sufficient explanation for Chautauqua's flatness and lack of zest.
But was not this a paradox well calculated to fill one with dismay? It
looks indeed, thought I, as if the romantic idealists with their
pessimism about our civilization were, after all, quite right. An
irremediable flatness is coming over the world. Bourgeoisie and
mediocrity, church sociables and teachers' conventions, are taking the
place of the old heights and depths and romantic chiaroscuro. And, to
get human life in its wild intensity, we must in future turn more and
more away from the actual, and forget it, if we can, in the romancer's
or the poet's pages. The whole world, delightful and sinful as it may
still appear for a moment to one just escaped from the Chautauquan
enclosure, is nevertheless obeying more and more just those ideals that
are sure to make of it in the end a mere Chautauqua Assembly on an
enormous scale. _Was im Gesang soll leben muss im Leben untergehn_. Even
now, in our own country, correctness, fairness, and compromise for every
small advantage are crowding out all other qualities. The higher
heroisms and the old rare flavors are passing out of life.[P]
[P] This address was composed before the Cuban and Philippine
wars. Such outbursts of the passion of mastery are, however,
only episodes in a social process which in the long run seems
everywhere tending toward the Chautauquan ideals.
With these thoughts in my mind, I was speeding with the train toward
Buffalo, when, near that city, the sight of a workman doing something on
the dizzy edge of a sky-scaling iron construction brought me to my
senses very suddenly. And now I perceived, by a flash of insight, that I
had been steeping myself in pure ancestral blindness, and looking at
life with the eyes of a remote spectator. Wishing for heroism and the
spectacle of human nature on the rack, I had never noticed the great
fields of heroism lying round about me, I had failed to see it present
and alive. I could only think of it as dead and embalmed, labelled and
costumed, as it is in the pages of romance. And yet there it was before
me in the daily lives of the laboring classes. Not in clanging fights
and desperate marches only is heroism to be looked for, but on every
railway bridge and fire-proof building that is going up to-day. On
freight-trains, on the decks of vessels, in cattle-yards and mines, on
lumber-rafts, among the firemen and the policemen, the demand for
courage is incessant; and the supply never fails. There, every day of
the year somewhere, is human nature _in extremis_ for you. And wherever
a scythe, an axe, a pick, or a shovel is wielded, you have it sweating
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.
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