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Page 67
If there _were_ any such morally exceptional individuals, however, what
made them different from the rest? It can only have been this,--that
their souls worked and endured in obedience to some inner _ideal_, while
their comrades were not actuated by anything worthy of that name. These
ideals of other lives are among those secrets that we can almost never
penetrate, although something about the man may often tell us when they
are there. In Mr. Wyckoff's own case we know exactly what the
self-imposed ideal was. Partly he had stumped himself, as the boys say,
to carry through a strenuous achievement; but mainly he wished to
enlarge his sympathetic insight into fellow-lives. For this his sweat
and toil acquire a certain heroic significance, and make us accord to
him exceptional esteem. But it is easy to imagine his fellows with
various other ideals. To say nothing of wives and babies, one may have
been a convert of the Salvation Army, and had a nightingale singing of
expiation and forgiveness in his heart all the while he labored. Or
there might have been an apostle like Tolsto� himself, or his compatriot
Bondareff, in the gang, voluntarily embracing labor as their religious
mission. Class-loyalty was undoubtedly an ideal with many. And who knows
how much of that higher manliness of poverty, of which Phillips Brooks
has spoken so penetratingly, was or was not present in that gang?
"A rugged, barren land," says Phillips Brooks, "is poverty to live
in,--a land where I am thankful very often if I can get a berry or a
root to eat. But living in it really, letting it bear witness to me of
itself, not dishonoring it all the time by judging it after the standard
of the other lands, gradually there come out its qualities. Behold! no
land like this barren and naked land of poverty could show the moral
geology of the world. See how the hard ribs ... stand out strong and
solid. No life like poverty could so get one to the heart of things and
make men know their meaning, could so let us feel life and the world
with all the soft cushions stripped off and thrown away.... Poverty
makes men come very near each other, and recognize each other's human
hearts; and poverty, highest and best of all, demands and cries out for
faith in God.... I know how superficial and unfeeling, how like mere
mockery, words in praise of poverty may seem.... But I am sure that the
poor man's dignity and freedom, his self-respect and energy, depend upon
his cordial knowledge that his poverty is a true region and kind of
life, with its own chances of character, its own springs of happiness
and revelations of God. Let him resist the characterlessness which often
goes with being poor. Let him insist on respecting the condition where
he lives. Let him learn to love it, so that by and by, [if] he grows
rich, he shall go out of the low door of the old familiar poverty with a
true pang of regret, and with a true honor for the narrow home in which
he has lived so long."[S]
[S] Sermons. 5th Series, New York, 1893, pp. 166, 167.
The barrenness and ignobleness of the more usual laborer's life consist
in the fact that it is moved by no such ideal inner springs. The
backache, the long hours, the danger, are patiently endured--for what?
To gain a quid of tobacco, a glass of beer, a cup of coffee, a meal, and
a bed, and to begin again the next day and shirk as much as one can.
This really is why we raise no monument to the laborers in the Subway,
even though they be our conscripts, and even though after a fashion our
city is indeed based upon their patient hearts and enduring backs and
shoulders. And this is why we do raise monuments to our soldiers, whose
outward conditions were even brutaller still. The soldiers are supposed
to have followed an ideal, and the laborers are supposed to have
followed none.
You see, my friends, how the plot now thickens; and how strangely the
complexities of this wonderful human nature of ours begin to develop
under our hands. We have seen the blindness and deadness to each other
which are our natural inheritance; and, in spite of them, we have been
led to acknowledge an inner meaning which passeth show, and which may be
present in the lives of others where we least descry it. And now we are
led to say that such inner meaning can be _complete_ and _valid for us
also_, only when the inner joy, courage, and endurance are joined with
an ideal.
* * * * *
But what, exactly, do we mean by an ideal? Can we give no definite
account of such a word?
To a certain extent we can. An ideal, for instance, must be something
intellectually conceived, something of which we are not unconscious, if
we have it; and it must carry with it that sort of outlook, uplift, and
brightness that go with all intellectual facts. Secondly, there must be
_novelty_ in an ideal,--novelty at least for him whom the ideal grasps.
Sodden routine is incompatible with ideality, although what is sodden
routine for one person may be ideal novelty for another. This shows that
there is nothing absolutely ideal: ideals are relative to the lives that
entertain them. To keep out of the gutter is for us here no part of
consciousness at all, yet for many of our brethren it is the most
legitimately engrossing of ideals.
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