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Page 69
To show the sort of thing I mean by these words, I will just make one
brief practical illustration and then close.
We are suffering to-day in America from what is called the
labor-question; and, when you go out into the world, you will each and
all of you be caught up in its perplexities. I use the brief term
labor-question to cover all sorts of anarchistic discontents and
socialistic projects, and the conservative resistances which they
provoke. So far as this conflict is unhealthy and regrettable,--and I
think it is so only to a limited extent,--the unhealthiness consists
solely in the fact that one-half of our fellow-countrymen remain
entirely blind to the internal significance of the lives of the other
half. They miss the joys and sorrows, they fail to feel the moral
virtue, and they do not guess the presence of the intellectual ideals.
They are at cross-purposes all along the line, regarding each other as
they might regard a set of dangerously gesticulating automata, or, if
they seek to get at the inner motivation, making the most horrible
mistakes. Often all that the poor man can think of in the rich man is a
cowardly greediness for safety, luxury, and effeminacy, and a boundless
affectation. What he is, is not a human being, but a pocket-book, a
bank-account. And a similar greediness, turned by disappointment into
envy, is all that many rich men can see in the state of mind of the
dissatisfied poor. And, if the rich man begins to do the sentimental act
over the poor man, what senseless blunders does he make, pitying him for
just those very duties and those very immunities which, rightly taken,
are the condition of his most abiding and characteristic joys! Each, in
short, ignores the fact that happiness and unhappiness and significance
are a vital mystery; each pins them absolutely on some ridiculous
feature of the external situation; and everybody remains outside of
everybody else's sight.
Society has, with all this, undoubtedly got to pass toward some newer
and better equilibrium, and the distribution of wealth has doubtless
slowly got to change: such changes have always happened, and will happen
to the end of time. But if, after all that I have said, any of you
expect that they will make any _genuine vital difference_ on a large
scale, to the lives of our descendants, you will have missed the
significance of my entire lecture. The solid meaning of life is always
the same eternal thing,--the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal,
however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some
man's or woman's pains.--And, whatever or wherever life may be, there
will always be the chance for that marriage to take place.
Fitz-James Stephen wrote many years ago words to this effect more
eloquent than any I can speak: "The 'Great Eastern,' or some of her
successors," he said, "will perhaps defy the roll of the Atlantic, and
cross the seas without allowing their passengers to feel that they have
left the firm land. The voyage from the cradle to the grave may come to
be performed with similar facility. Progress and science may perhaps
enable untold millions to live and die without a care, without a pang,
without an anxiety. They will have a pleasant passage and plenty of
brilliant conversation. They will wonder that men ever believed at all
in clanging fights and blazing towns and sinking ships and praying
hands; and, when they come to the end of their course, they will go
their way, and the place thereof will know them no more. But it seems
unlikely that they will have such a knowledge of the great ocean on
which they sail, with its storms and wrecks, its currents and icebergs,
its huge waves and mighty winds, as those who battled with it for years
together in the little craft, which, if they had few other merits,
brought those who navigated them full into the presence of time and
eternity, their maker and themselves, and forced them to have some
definite view of their relations to them and to each other."[T]
[T] Essays by a Barrister, London, 1862, p. 318.
In this solid and tridimensional sense, so to call it, those
philosophers are right who contend that the world is a standing thing,
with no progress, no real history. The changing conditions of history
touch only the surface of the show. The altered equilibriums and
redistributions only diversify our opportunities and open chances to us
for new ideals. But, with each new ideal that comes into life, the
chance for a life based on some old ideal will vanish; and he would
needs be a presumptuous calculator who should with confidence say that
the total sum of significances is positively and absolutely greater at
any one epoch than at any other of the world.
I am speaking broadly, I know, and omitting to consider certain
qualifications in which I myself believe. But one can only make one
point in one lecture, and I shall be well content if I have brought my
point home to you this evening in even a slight degree. _There are
compensations_: and no outward changes of condition in life can keep the
nightingale of its eternal meaning from singing in all sorts of
different men's hearts. That is the main fact to remember. If we could
not only admit it with our lips, but really and truly believe it, how
our convulsive insistencies, how our antipathies and dreads of each
other, would soften down! If the poor and the rich could look at each
other in this way, _sub specie �ternatis_, how gentle would grow their
disputes! what tolerance and good humor, what willingness to live and
let live, would come into the world!
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