If it were proper to treat a poetical utterance of this kind like a deliberate philosophical theory, I might wish to argue the point a little with the rabbi. But, at any rate, he points to considerations which show how little any one can judge of merit by any tangible and generally accessible test. I am content to say that this sentiment gives one--and a very impressive--answer to a problem which presses upon us the more as we grow older. It is natural for a man who feels that he has done most of his work, that the night is coming, and, as it seems, coming with accelerated speed; who feels, too, that whatever he has done or may do, he can no longer have the approval of those whose approval was dear to him as his breath;--it is natural for such a man to look back, to take stock more or less of his own performances perhaps, and at any rate to endeavour to estimate at their true worth the services which he has received from others. What, he may ask, has he done with his talents? what little fragment has he achieved of what might once have been in his power? The answer is pretty sure to have a very melancholy side to it; and it will lead to the question, what part of that fragment was really worth doing? What were the few really solid services which he may set off as some satisfaction to his self-esteem, against his countless errors and his wanderings in wrong directions, and his attempts to achieve the impossible, and the waste of energy upon the trifling and the worthless in which he is pretty sure to have spent a very large proportion of his time? When we try to return a verdict upon such issues, we feel painfully to how many illusions we are subject.
When we are young we naturally accept the commonplaces, and do not question the ideals amid which we happen to have grown up; we are not conscious of the movement which we share. As long as we are floating with the current, we are not even aware that any current exists. We take our own little world to be the fixed base, quite unconscious that it is all the time whirling and spinning along a most complex course. And so it is difficult, even if the thought of making the attempt ever occurs to us, to try to occupy the position of a bystander looking on at life from outside, and endeavouring to p.r.o.nounce some general opinion as to its merits or defects--its happiness or misery as a whole. "What a queer place this is!" I remember a man once saying to me abruptly; and I thought that he was referring to the steamboat on which we were fellow-pa.s.sengers. I found that he had been suddenly struck by the oddity of the universe in general; and it seemed to me that there was a great deal to be said for a remark which seldom occurs to those people who take things for granted. We are roused sometimes by a philosopher who professes pessimism or optimism, to ask and to try to answer such questions. The answers, we know, are apt to be painfully discordant. Is the world on the whole a scene of misery, of restless desires, proving that we are miserable now, and doomed never to obtain satisfaction? is it our only wisdom to give up the will to live; to hope that all this visible and tangible scenery is so much illusion, and to aspire to sink into Nirvana? Shall we try to conquer all earthly appet.i.tes by a thorough-going asceticism, and cultivate those spiritual emotions which can only find full satisfaction in another and a better world? Or shall we agree that, after all, the love of the true and the beautiful, or, it may be, the physically pleasurable, gives a real solid comfort for the time, which it would be idle to drop for a shadow? Is the world a scene of probation, in which we are to be fitted for higher spheres beyond human ken by the hearty and strenuous exertion of every faculty that we possess? or shall we say that such action is a good in itself, which requires to be supplemented by no vision of any ulterior end? Shall we say that this is the best of all possible worlds because the fittest always tends to prevail, or that it is the worst because even the greatest wretchedness which is compatible with bare existence can still survive?
Philosophers, no doubt, contradict each other, because even philosophers are not exempt from the universal weakness. The explanation that pessimism means a disordered liver, and the counter remark that optimism means a cold heart and a good digestion, are too familiar to need exposition. Each man"s macrocosm is apt to be related to his microcosm, as the convex to the concave of a curve. To say the world is disagreeable, means that I find it disagreeable; and that may be either my own fault or the world"s. Nor is it easy to correct the personal error by observation, for the observer carries himself and his illusions with him. Has such-and-such a life been a happy one? How are we to decide? We are often subject to what may be called the dramatic illusion. We judge by the catastrophe, by the success or failure of the a.s.sumed end. We see a n.o.ble young man struck down by some accident, and we think of his career sadly, because the promise has not been fulfilled. Is it not equally reasonable to say that the promise was itself a blessing? that the man we regret had his twenty or thirty years of hopefulness, confidence, and happiness, and that that was a clear gain even if we lose the result which we might have antic.i.p.ated? Or we are impressed by the more exciting incidents of a life, the blows which crushed a man at intervals; and we forget all the monotonous years of tranquil happiness which, if we apply an arithmetical test, may have occupied by far the greater part of his existence. Southey, for example, argues that although we remember Cowper chiefly for his terrible mental suffering, we shall find, if we add up the moments of happiness and misery, that he probably had, on the balance, a life of much more enjoyment than torture. So, when we speak of the misery of a nation at the time of some great trouble--the French Revolution, for example--it is difficult to remember how small was the proportion of actual sufferers; how many thousands or millions of children were enjoying their little sports, utterly ignorant of the distant storm; how many mothers were absorbed in watching their children; and how many quiet commonplace people were going about their daily peaceful labour, pretty much as usual, and with only a vague--and possibly pleasurable--excitement at the news, which occasionally drifted to them, of the catastrophes in a different sphere. Carlyle, in one of his most vivid and famous pa.s.sages, has incidentally drawn the contrast. Or, if we try to form an estimate of the balance of happiness and misery through any portion of the race, and appeal to experience for an answer, we must certainly remember how limited is the field of observation, even of the best informed, and the most impartial; how rigidly they are confined for their direct knowledge to one little section of one part of the race; and how the vast majority--the thousand millions or so who are altogether beyond their ken--are known to them only by statistical tables or the casual reports of superficial observers.
As there are so many difficulties in forming an estimate, as we are not agreed as to the true ends of human life, nor as to the degrees in which those ends are actually attained, nor as to the efficacy of the various causes which determine the success or failure of the means employed, it becomes any one to put forward his own opinion upon the topics to which such considerations apply, with all modesty. And, yet, I think that I may dwell upon some truths which may be admitted by those who differ upon these difficult problems, and, as I fancy, deserve more weight than they generally receive, even though they have become commonplaces. The main condition of human happiness, say some people, is physical health.
A man whose organs are all working satisfactorily cannot fail to be happy under any but very abnormal conditions; as, conversely, a grain of sand in the wrong place will make any life a burden. No one will dispute the truth contained in such _dicta_; and, perhaps, as we realise more distinctly the importance of sound health to our neighbours and to our descendants, as well as to ourselves, we shall lay greater stress upon the conduct which is conducive to its preservation. We shall see that what is, apparently, a mere dictate of personal prudence, has, also, its ethical aspect. But, without dwelling upon this view, we may apply the a.n.a.logy to society. Whatever morality precisely means, and whatever happiness means, it clearly indicates what we call--and I think that it is no mere metaphor--a healthy state of society. This, again, implies, first of all, the health of those domestic relations which are as the ultimate molecular forces which bind together the social tissue. The society, we may say without hesitation, in which the reciprocal duties of husbands and wives, parents and children, are instinctively recognised and habitually observed, has, so far, secured the most deeply-seated and essential condition of happiness and virtue; the society in which the union of married people normally produces harmony, and the absolute ident.i.ty of interests and affections, in which children are brought up in a pure home atmosphere, with an embodiment of the beauty of domestic love always before their eyes, imbibing unconsciously the tradition of a high moral standard, and so prepared to repay, in due time, to others the services lavishly and ungrudgingly bestowed upon them by their elders,--so far represents perfectly sound health. The degree in which any ethical theory recognises and reveals the essential importance of the family relation is, I think, the best test of its approximation to the truth. An unworthy view of domestic happiness may lead to the ascetic view which sets up a sham and Quixotic ideal; or to the cynical view which regards it as a mere case of selfish indulgence.
I do not deny that the relation, like all other human relations, may require modification as circ.u.mstances change. Difficulties arise, as when we notice the great social changes which have broken up ancient ties, and have tended to weaken the family bond by facilitating desertion, and increasing the floating population. And many socialist schemes appear at first sight to be, and sometimes are, consciously designed to weaken the sense of responsibility of parents. I, of course, cannot now discuss a point which is, undoubtedly, of the highest importance; but I am certainly convinced that the merits of any change must be tested by its tendency to preserve, and, if possible, intensify the strength of this underlying bond upon which the welfare of society depends far more intimately than upon any other human relation.
If this be true, it follows also that to those activities which knit families together, which help to enlarge the highest ideal of domestic life, we owe a greater debt than to any other kind of conduct. And to this I add that, as I believe, the highest services of this kind are rendered by persons condemned, or perhaps I should say privileged, to live in obscurity; whose very names will soon be forgotten, and who are entirely eclipsed by people whose services, though not equally valuable, are by their nature more public. To prove such an a.s.sertion is, of course, impossible. I give it only as my personal impression--for what it is worth, after any deductions you may please to make upon the score of the great fallibility of such impressions; and only because, correct or otherwise, it may serve to bring out aspects of the truth which we are apt to neglect. I have lived long enough to have had opportunities of seeing many eminent men and women. I have insensibly formed some kind of estimate of the services which they have rendered to me and my like; and I record, as far as I can, the result upon my own convictions. I will put aside for the moment the half-dozen men of really first-rate eminence,--the men whose names are written upon all the great intellectual and social movements of the century. I will think for the present only of those who may be placed in the second rank; of those who do not profess to have originated, but only to have diffused, important thoughts; who have acted as lieutenants to the great leaders, and become known to their contemporaries, with little prospect of filling any important place in the memory of their successors. Yet even such men bulk far more largely in our eyes than mult.i.tudes of men and women whose names will never be known outside their own little parish, or even their family circles. And then I ask myself, how far the estimate thus formed corresponds to the real value of the services performed. I think that I can speak most easily by deserting the line of abstract argument, and endeavouring to draw a portrait or two, which you need not a.s.sume to correspond too closely to particular facts. I mean to suggest reflections which will really apply in many representative cases, and to refer to typical instances of general truths. I will first mention one such case which happened to strike me forcibly at the time, and which no one here, I am quite certain, will be able to identify. Long years ago I knew a young man at college; he was so far from being intellectually eminent that he had great difficulty in pa.s.sing his examinations; he died from the effects of an accident within a very short time after leaving the university, and hardly any one would now remember his name.
He had not the smallest impression that there was anything remarkable about himself, and looked up to his teachers and his more brilliant companions with a loyal admiration which would have made him wonder that they should ever take notice of him. And yet I often thought then, and I believe, in looking back, that I thought rightly, that he was of more real use to his contemporaries than any one of the persons to whose influence they would most naturally refer as having affected their development. The secret was a very simple one. Without any special intellectual capacity, he somehow represented with singular completeness a beautiful moral type. He possessed the "simple faith miscalled simplicity," and was so absolutely unselfish, so conspicuously pure in his whole life and conduct, so unsuspicious of evil in others, so sweet and loyal in his nature, that to know him was to have before one"s eyes an embodiment of some of the most lovable and really admirable qualities that a human being can possess. He was a living exemplification of the truth which some great humorists have embodied in their writings, the truth that simplicity at which fools laugh may be venerable to wise observers. Young men were not always immaculate in those days: I don"t know that they are now; some of them probably were vicious in conduct, and might be cynical in the views which they openly expressed. But whatever might be their failings, they were at the age when all but the depraved--that is, I hope and fully believe, all but a very small minority--were capable of being deeply impressed by this concrete example. They might affect to ridicule, but it was impossible that even the ridicule should not be of the kindly sort; blended and tempered with something that was more like awe--profound respect, at least, for the beauty of soul that underlay the humble exterior. The direct moral addresses which took the form of eloquent sermons or of good advice naturally gained an incomparably higher reputation for those who uttered them. But, considering the facility with which the impressions so made evaporate from the minds of the hearers, I often thought that this obscure influence, the more impressive when one felt it because of its entire unconsciousness, probably did far more to stimulate good feelings and higher aspirations among his companions than all the official exhortations to which they ever listened. He would have been unfeignedly surprised to hear, what I most sincerely believe to be the truth, that his tutor owed incomparably more to his living exemplification of what is meant by a character of unblemished purity and simplicity, than he owed to the tutor whose respectable plat.i.tudes he received with unaffected humility.
The case--for various reasons--impressed me deeply; and I have often thought of it and of the principle which it ill.u.s.trates in later years.
I once knew, for example, a woman whose whole life was devoted to domestic duties, and who confessed to me that she had sometimes felt a touch of humiliation when she thought how narrow was her own sphere of action, while her husband was daily deciding upon great questions of high political importance. Some women would have drawn the conclusion, that the exclusion of women from political activity was a grievance to be abated; and such people might receive with scorn the suggestion that the discharge of the domestic duty might possibly be as important as the discharge of the more conspicuous function. The argument about the proper sphere of women is now generally treated with contempt; and I am perfectly ready to admit that it begs the question, and is often a mere utterance of blind prejudice. No one, I hope, could a.s.sert more willingly than I, that the faculties of women should be cultivated as fully as possible, and that every sphere in which their faculties can be effectively applied should be thrown open to them. But the doctrine sometimes tacitly confounded with this, that the sphere generally a.s.signed to women is necessarily lower or less important than others, is not to be admitted, because the contradictory may be misapplied. The domestic influence is, no doubt, confined within narrower limits; but then, within those limits it is incomparably stronger and more certain of effect. The man or woman can really mould the character of a little circle, and determine the whole life of one little section of the next generation; when it may be very difficult to say whether the influence which they can bring to bear upon a cla.s.s or a nation is really perceptible at all, or does not even operate in the direction opposite to that intended. And I could not help thinking that a woman who was bringing up sons and daughters ready to quit themselves like brave men and women in the great struggle of life, might be doing something more really important than her conspicuous husband, who was, after all, only part of a vast and complicated machinery, nominally directed by him, but, in reality, controlling all his energy, and, not impossibly, working out the very results which he most disapproved.
It is, therefore, with no reference to any of the political theories of women"s rights, and so forth, that I venture to insist upon this topic.
I think that we habitually under-estimate the enormous value of the services, whether of man or woman, done in the shade, and confined within a very limited area. Let me attempt, again, to draw a portrait, not all imaginary, which may explain, at least, what I often feel--the contrast between the real worth of such lives and the recognition which they can ever receive. Wordsworth, in one of those poems which show best how true and tender were his moral instincts, has described one who was--
A perfect woman, n.o.bly planned To warn, to comfort, and command; And yet a spirit too, and bright With something of an angel light.
The words have often come to me of late, till I fancy that I could supply a commentary. The woman of whom Wordsworth speaks was, when he first saw her, a "phantom of delight," an embodiment of feminine beauty, and, as such, possessing a characteristic perhaps superfluous from a moral point of view. I have known and know women, not exactly beautiful, before whom I would gladly bow as deeply as I would if they were beautiful as Helen of Troy. But a poet must be allowed to take pleasure in beauty, and we may grant to it a certain place that it deserves among higher qualities. For it does so when the possessor is absolutely--not unaware of the fact, for that is hardly possible, nor, perhaps, desirable--but absolutely untouched by any vanity or self-consciousness.
The beauty, one may say, gives, at least, an opportunity for displaying a quality which otherwise would not have so good an occasion of manifestation. And, moreover, there is a beauty of the rarest and most exquisite, which, if not the product, is, or at least seems to be, the spontaneous accompaniment of n.o.bility of mind and character. Some persons, by a singular felicity, possess beauty as one of their essential attributes; it seems to be not an accident or an addition, but a part of their essence, which must mould every detail, which shines through body as well as soul, and is but the outward and visible sign of all that is sweet and elevated. Wordsworth"s ideal woman is--
Not too bright or good For human nature"s daily food, For transient sorrows, simple wiles, Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears and smiles:
and yet displays equally--
The reason firm, the temperate will, Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill.
We cannot, even in our thoughts, separate the artistic homage which we pay to the external appearance, and that which we pay to the inner qualities, of which they are apparently the inevitable and predestined symbol. We have before us the ideal--the type which reconciles all the conditions of human life, physical and moral--the "perfect woman," who is also the fitting vehicle of the angel light.
But it is, of course, upon the qualities symbolised and not upon the outward symbols that we must insist. I will, therefore, say, that the inward beauty, whether fully represented or not by the outward form, implies, in the first place, the absence of all those qualities which tend to lower and vulgarise life. What we call the worldly view, for example, of love and marriage, is simply unintelligible to such a nature. Love means, to it, an absolute self-surrender, and the complete fusion of its own life with the life of the beloved object. It can only be granted in return for a reciprocal surrender; and becomes the mutual pa.s.sion by which fear and distrust are utterly cast out; and the intensity proves not liability to weak illusions, but the sure insight of the lofty instincts which cannot fail to recognise corresponding instincts in others. To the lower mind, such a character appears to be too highly strung, too impa.s.sioned, romantic, and careless of the solid advantages which secure at least comfort. To those of more or less congenial sentiment, it will rather appear to imply a spirit which, because it breathes a higher element than that at which men habitually live, perceives also more distinctly what are the truest and deepest sources of all that deserves to be called real happiness. To live in an atmosphere of the strongest and most unqualified affection, to have the very substance of life woven out of the unreserved love of a worthy object, is its ideal; and that ideal represents, I am convinced, the highest and purest happiness that can be enjoyed in this world.
Suppose, now, that one so endowed is struck by one of those terrible blows which shiver the very foundations of life; which make the outside world a mere discordant nightmare, and seem to leave for the only reality a perpetual and gnawing pain, which lulls for an instant only to be revived by every contact with facts. Sorrow becomes the element in which one lives and moves. Consolation, according to the familiar phrase, is idle; for the vulgar notion of consoling is that which Sir Walter Scott attributes to one of his characters: it is to try to prove that the very thing for which we offer consolation has not happened--in other words, to undertake an enterprise which is obviously hopeless and illusory. Yet the greatest test of true n.o.bility of character is its power of turning even the bitterest grief to account. The lofty and simple nature sorrows; it does not attempt to shut its eyes to the full extent of the calamity, nor seek to distract itself by a forgetfulness which might obscure its most sacred visions of the past; nor, on the other hand, to make a parade of its sensibility, or try to foster or stimulate enervating emotions. It knows instinctively that grief, terrible as it is, is yet, in another sense, an invaluable possession.
The sufferer who has eaten his bread with herbs learns, as the poet puts it, to know the heavenly powers. For he or she acquires a deeper and keener sympathy with all who are desolate and afflicted; and the natural affections become blended, if with a certain melancholy, yet with that quick and delicate perception of the suffering of others which gives the only consolation worthy of the name--the sense of something soothing and softening and inspiring in the midst of the bitterest agony. Grief, so taken, may be stunning and deadening for the time; it may make life a heavy burden, from which hope and eager interest have disappeared: "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable"; but by slow degrees it undergoes a trans.m.u.tation into more steady and profound love of whatsoever may still be left. The broken and mangled fibres imperceptibly find new attachments; and the only solution of the terrible dilemma is reached when time, which heals the actual laceration, enables the sufferer to feel that the new ties do not imply infidelity to the objects still beloved, but are a continuous development of the indelible emotions, and that the later activities are but a carrying on of the old duties, made more sacred and solemn by the old grief and its a.s.sociations.
A lofty nature which has profited by pa.s.sing through the furnace acquires claims not only upon our love but upon our reverence. It becomes perhaps within the little circle with which it is familiar the obvious and immediate resort whenever some blow of sorrow or sickness has fallen upon one of its fellows. The figure which I attempt truly to describe is happily not unfamiliar. We have all, I hope, known some one who is instinctively called to mind whenever there is need of the loving kindness which seems so obvious and spontaneous that it does not even occur to the bestower to connect the conduct with self-sacrifice. Such persons appear to be formed by nature for ministering angels, and move among us unconscious of their claims to our devotion, and bringing light into darkness by their simple presence with as little thought that they deserve our grat.i.tude as that they ought to emerge from obscurity.
Happiness, peaceful and contented at least, if not the old bright and confident happiness, may come in time; and new spheres be bound together by the attractive force of a character which, if it is not more intrinsically lovable, has gained a more pathetic charm from its experience. The desire to relieve suffering has become a settled instinct; and, even when there is no special appeal to it, is incessantly overflowing in those "little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love" which, according to Wordsworth again, are the "best portion of a good man"s life". Whether that be quite true I know not; but in so far as such acts seem to testify most unequivocally to the constant flow of a current of sympathetic tenderness, always ready to seize upon every occasion of giving happiness, on a child"s birthday as on the parent"s deathbed, they perhaps speak to us most convincingly of an all-pervading sweetness of character. An a.s.siduous and watchful desire to show kindness, which makes a perpetual succession of such little attentions a part of the practical religion of the doer, may generate a corresponding love even more forcibly than the sacrifices made in obedience to a more conspicuous appeal for help.
The value of such a life as I have tried imperfectly to indicate is not to be estimated by the number of good actions performed, or by any definite list of the particular consequences achieved. It may be hard to say how many pangs have been soothed, how much happiness has been added in special cases, by one who goes through life absorbed in such activities. But above and beyond all the separate instances, such a person,--the object only to a few, perhaps, of love and reverence, but to those few the object of those feelings in the most unreserved and unequivocal form,--is something far more than a source of any number of particular benefits. To reckon up and estimate the value of such benefits is a conceivable undertaking; but we cannot attempt to calculate the value of a spiritual force which has moulded our lives, which has helped by a simple consciousness of its existence to make us gentler, n.o.bler, and purer in our thoughts of the world; which has constantly set before us a loftier ideal than we could frame for ourselves; which has bestowed upon us an ever-present criterion of the goodness or badness of our own motives by our perception of the light in which they appear to a simple and elevated character; which has made every cowardly and worldly thought shrink away abashed in the presence of n.o.ble instincts; which has given us a sympathy so close and constant that, as with the light of the sun, we are apt to be unconscious of its essential importance to us until some accident makes us realise the effect of its eclipse; and which, therefore, has in some sense become a part of ourselves, a restraining and elevating and softening impulse, to which we cling as to the worthiest and most indispensable of our possessions.
I am not speaking from imagination. I am trying to utter convictions springing from my personal experience, and which I feel--most painfully--that I cannot adequately express. I could not say more, even if by saying more I could express myself adequately, without a sense of a kind of profanity for uttering what should be kept for a few. But though I speak for myself, I hope and I entirely believe that I am therefore speaking for many others also. There are few who have the eyes to see who have not recognised some such light shining upon their lives, and as one main source of what they have done or said if least unworthy. I fancy that the thought which naturally occurs to us when we reflect upon such an influence will be: was I, could I, be worthy of it?
what am I that such goodness should have come to me? or, what, if anything, have I done to transmit to others the blessings conferred upon me? Such questions have various aspects, and I do not quite see how they could be reduced to a form admitting of a bare logical answer. It now seems to me almost unbecoming to dwell upon the comparison which I contemplated at starting. I imagined a man who has made some such impression upon the world as is recognised by public reputation, to compare his own achievement with such achievements as these, which are absolutely private, and neither seek nor desire any public reward. In truth, the two things are, perhaps, strictly incommensurable. They must be measured by different standards, and are of importance in different spheres. And yet I must try to say this much. The achievements to which I have referred as in their nature public and recognisable, should certainly be considered with grat.i.tude. Yet, when we attempt to estimate their worth we are sensible of terrible drawbacks. I have pa.s.sed, let us say, a measure admirably useful, or written a book which has made a mark. Certainly I have done a good action. But what if I had not done it? Were there not hundreds of people who would have been only too glad to take my place? I have been successful because I happen to have been in the front rank, which was impelled by thousands of eager supporters.
I have said just a little better than my rivals what they were all striving to say; and my highest reward will be that my name will be attached in my own generation, and possibly even in the next, to some particular opinion which yet would have come to the birth without me. I have made a certain commotion on the surface for a moment or two, but the ripple will die away in a few years; and, important as I may seem to myself, I have only to look back for a generation to recognise the plain fact that there have not been at any period more than one or two conspicuous workers the products of whose activity can be distinctly recognised at the present day. Even in regard to them, it is often doubtful whether they did more harm or good; whether they did not direct human energy along the wrong paths, and do as much in giving currency to fallacies as in extending permanent truths.
Now, after making such deductions, which to me, at least, seem to be essentially necessary, we can, I think, do justice to the truth which is contained in Browning"s poem. You are not, he seems to say, to measure the worth of life by the amount of work done in it, by the tangible and obvious results which can be tested by the world"s coa.r.s.e finger and thumb. Rather, he suggests, the value depends upon the excellence of the soul which is fashioned into "heaven"s consummate cup"
by the stress of the potter"s wheel; by the joys and sorrows, the trials and triumphs, which have affected it in its pa.s.sage through life. I should prefer to say that the kind of dilemma so suggested is not really to the purpose. The rabbi may seem to speak, as I said, with a little too much complacency, if he be interpreted as sharing the feeling which is often, however unjustly, attributed to Goethe--that his supreme end was the cultivation of his own nature, and that he regarded himself as a work of art, to be elaborated for its own sake, and enriched by experience even at the cost of others. But in a better interpretation this does not apply: for the very process by which the n.o.ble nature is developed and cultivated, implies the closest and most active sympathy with suffering, and an invariable reference to the highest aims of life.
It becomes perfect, that is, by constantly rendering invaluable services to others; and there is, therefore, no meaning in drawing a distinction between the services and the influence upon the soul itself. They are parts of the same indivisible process. What is true and n.o.ble, as I think, in the rabbi"s doctrine, is that which I have already tried to indicate: namely, that the worth of such a life is not exhausted by a catalogue of the good deeds done, but that, beyond and above all them, remains the inestimable value within its own circle of the very existence of a natural symbol of the good and holy--by the "holy" I understand that which is not only moral, but beautiful by reason of its morality--and the incalculable benefits to it of the pure fountain of all good influences which descend upon all within its reach. The stimulus which is given to the beholders of such a life--by the clear perception that morality does not mean a string of judicious commonplaces, but can be embodied as the spring of a harmonious life, and reveal itself as a concrete flesh-and-blood human being--is something which transcends in value all the particular results which we can tabulate and reckon up. We must think of it, not as the cause of so many external benefits, but as the manifestation of a spiritual force which modifies and raises the characters of all its surroundings. If the sphere within which it distinctly operates is far narrower than that of political or literary achievement, it is also incomparably purer, and works without a single drawback. Every religion has its saints, and honours them in various ways, not always altogether edifying. But that man is unfortunate who has not a saint of his own--some one in whose presence, or in the very thought of whom, he does not recognise a superior, before whom it becomes him to bow with reverence and grat.i.tude, and who has purified the atmosphere and strengthened the affections in a little circle from which the influence may be transmitted to others. The saint will be forgotten all too soon--long before less valuable, but accidentally more conspicuous, services have pa.s.sed out of mind--but the moral elevation, even of a small circle, is a benefit which may be propagated indefinitely.
If we cannot hope to preserve the name, we can try to carry on the good work; to maintain the ties which have been formed and propagate the goodwill through widening circles. That, I think, is what every one feels under the stress of the most terrible trials of life. We are shocked by the sense of the inevitable oblivion that will hide all that we loved so well. There is, according to my experience, only one thought which is inspiring, and--if not in the vulgar sense consoling, for it admits the existence of an unspeakable calamity--points, at least, to the direction in which we may gradually achieve something like peace and hopefulness without the slightest disloyalty to the objects of our love. It is the thought which I can only express by saying that we may learn to feel as if those who had left us had yet become part of ourselves; that we have become so permeated by their influence, that we can still think of their approval and sympathy as a stimulating and elevating power, and be conscious that we are more or less carrying on their work, in their spirit. We find, as Lowell says in his n.o.ble ode--
We find in our dull road their shining track; In every n.o.bler mood We feel the orient of their spirit glow, Part of our life"s unalterable good, Of all our saintlier aspiration; They come transfigured back, Secure from change in their high-hearted ways, Beautiful evermore, and with the rays Of morn on their white shields of expectation.
Alas, he adds, even the best deeds will be hidden before long by "the thoughtless drift of the deciduous years". Yes; they will be forgotten before long, as we too shall be forgotten--the incalculable majority within a generation or two. The thought may be painful, but the reasonable conclusion is, I think, not that we should fret over the inevitable; rather that we should purify our minds from this as from other illusions, and feel ashamed of the selfish desire that our own names should be preserved when we know that so many who were far better and n.o.bler than ourselves will inevitably be forgotten, and were better and n.o.bler without the stimulus of any such paltry desire. Grat.i.tude to the obscure is, in this sense, I take it, a duty, which we cannot practise without a proportional moral benefit. It enables us to rise above the constant temptation to seek for notoriety at any price, and to make our ultimate aim the achievement of good work, not the chorus of popular applause which may be aroused. Thoroughly to conquer that temptation is, I take it, one of the objects which every man should set before himself. And nothing, I think, helps one more than a vivid and enduring consciousness of the enormous debt which we owe to men and women who lived in obscurity, who never had a thought of emerging out of obscurity, and whose enn.o.bling influence has yet become a part of every higher principle of action in ourselves. I may or I may not have formed too low an estimate of the services of the few heroes who stand conspicuously above the ordinary level; but I am certain that nothing that I can say would exaggerate the importance of many who have no claims to such a position. To cherish and preserve that influence by every faculty we possess seems to me to be our plainest duty; and we may comfort ourselves, if comfort be needed, by the reflection that, though the memory may be transitory, the good done by a n.o.ble life and character may last far beyond any horizon which can be realised by our imaginations.
THE END.