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Page 64
Many years ago, when in Vienna, I had had a similar feeling of awe and
reverence in looking at the peasant-women, in from the country on their
business at the market for the day. Old hags many of them were, dried
and brown and wrinkled, kerchiefed and short-petticoated, with thick
wool stockings on their bony shanks, stumping through the glittering
thoroughfares, looking neither to the right nor the left, bent on duty,
envying nothing, humble-hearted, remote;--and yet at bottom, when you
came to think of it, bearing the whole fabric of the splendors and
corruptions of that city on their laborious backs. For where would any
of it have been without their unremitting, unrewarded labor in the
fields? And so with us: not to our generals and poets, I thought, but to
the Italian and Hungarian laborers in the Subway, rather, ought the
monuments of gratitude and reverence of a city like Boston to be reared.
* * * * *
If any of you have been readers of Tolsto�, you will see that I passed
into a vein of feeling similar to his, with its abhorrence of all that
conventionally passes for distinguished, and its exclusive deification
of the bravery, patience, kindliness, and dumbness of the unconscious
natural man.
Where now is _our_ Tolsto�, I said, to bring the truth of all this home
to our American bosoms, fill us with a better insight, and wean us away
from that spurious literary romanticism on which our wretched
culture--as it calls itself--is fed? Divinity lies all about us, and
culture is too hidebound to even suspect the fact. Could a Howells or a
Kipling be enlisted in this mission? or are they still too deep in the
ancestral blindness, and not humane enough for the inner joy and meaning
of the laborer's existence to be really revealed? Must we wait for some
one born and bred and living as a laborer himself, but who, by grace of
Heaven, shall also find a literary voice?
And there I rested on that day, with a sense of widening of vision, and
with what it is surely fair to call an increase of religious insight
into life. In God's eyes the differences of social position, of
intellect, of culture, of cleanliness, of dress, which different men
exhibit, and all the other rarities and exceptions on which they so
fantastically pin their pride, must be so small as practically quite to
vanish; and all that should remain is the common fact that here we are,
a countless multitude of vessels of life, each of us pent in to peculiar
difficulties, with which we must severally struggle by using whatever of
fortitude and goodness we can summon up. The exercise of the courage,
patience, and kindness, must be the significant portion of the whole
business; and the distinctions of position can only be a manner of
diversifying the phenomenal surface upon which these underground virtues
may manifest their effects. At this rate, the deepest human life is
everywhere, is eternal. And, if any human attributes exist only in
particular individuals, they must belong to the mere trapping and
decoration of the surface-show.
Thus are men's lives levelled up as well as levelled down,--levelled up
in their common inner meaning, levelled down in their outer gloriousness
and show. Yet always, we must confess, this levelling insight tends to
be obscured again; and always the ancestral blindness returns and wraps
us up, so that we end once more by thinking that creation can be for no
other purpose than to develop remarkable situations and conventional
distinctions and merits. And then always some new leveller in the shape
of a religious prophet has to arise--the Buddha, the Christ, or some
Saint Francis, some Rousseau or Tolsto�--to redispel our blindness. Yet,
little by little, there comes some stable gain; for the world does get
more humane, and the religion of democracy tends toward permanent
increase.
This, as I said, became for a time my conviction, and gave me great
content. I have put the matter into the form of a personal reminiscence,
so that I might lead you into it more directly and completely, and so
save time. But now I am going to discuss the rest of it with you in a
more impersonal way.
Tolsto�'s levelling philosophy began long before he had the crisis of
melancholy commemorated in that wonderful document of his entitled 'My
Confession,' which led the way to his more specifically religious works.
In his masterpiece 'War and Peace,'--assuredly the greatest of human
novels,--the r�le of the spiritual hero is given to a poor little
soldier named Karata�eff, so helpful, so cheerful, and so devout that,
in spite of his ignorance and filthiness, the sight of him opens the
heavens, which have been closed, to the mind of the principal character
of the book; and his example evidently is meant by Tolsto� to let God
into the world again for the reader. Poor little Karata�eff is taken
prisoner by the French; and, when too exhausted by hardship and fever to
march, is shot as other prisoners were in the famous retreat from
Moscow. The last view one gets of him is his little figure leaning
against a white birch-tree, and uncomplainingly awaiting the end.
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