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Title: On Being Human

Author: Woodrow Wilson

Release date: February 1, 2004 [eBook #5068]
                Most recently updated: September 10, 2021

Language: English

Credits: Jennifer Godwin and Jose Menendez


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ON BEING HUMAN ***

[Illustration]




On Being Human

by Woodrow Wilson


Ph.D., Litt.D., LL.D.
President of the United States

1897
From the _Atlantic Monthly_


Contents

 I
 II
 III
 IV
 V
 VI




I


“The rarest sort of a book,” says Mr. Bagehot, slyly, is “a book to
read”; and “the knack in style is to write like a human being.” It is
painfully evident, upon experiment, that not many of the books which
come teeming from our presses every year are meant to be read. They are
meant, it may be, to be pondered; it is hoped, no doubt, they may
instruct, or inform, or startle, or arouse, or reform, or provoke, or
amuse us; but we read, if we have the true reader’s zest and plate, not
to grow more knowing, but to be less pent up and bound within a little
circle,—as those who take their pleasure, and not as those who
laboriously seek instruction,—as a means of seeing and enjoying the
world of men and affairs. We wish companionship and renewal of spirit,
enrichment of thought and the full adventure of the mind; and we desire
fair company, and a larger world in which to find them.

No one who loves the masters who may be communed with and read but must
see, therefore, and resent the error of making the text of any one of
them a source to draw grammar from, forcing the parts of speech to
stand out stark and cold from the warm text; or a store of samples
whence to draw rhetorical instances, setting up figures of speech
singly and without support of any neighbor phrase, to be stared at
curiously and with intent to copy or dissect! Here is grammar done
without deliberation: the phrases carry their meaning simply and by a
sort of limpid reflection; the thought is a living thing, not an image
ingeniously contrived and wrought. Pray leave the text whole: it has no
meaning piecemeal; at any rate, not that best, wholesome meaning, as of
a frank and genial friend who talks, not for himself or for his phrase,
but for you. It is questionable morals to dismember a living frame to
seek for its obscure fountains of life!

When you say that a book was meant to be read, you mean, for one thing,
of course, that it was not meant to be studied. You do not study a good
story, or a haunting poem, or a battle song, or a love ballad, or any
moving narrative, whether it be out of history or out of fiction—nor
any argument, even, that moves vital in the field of action. You do not
have to study these things; they reveal themselves, you do not stay to
see how. They remain with you, and will not be forgotten or laid by.
They cling like a personal experience, and become the mind’s intimates.
You devour a book meant to be read, not because you would fill yourself
or have an anxious care to be nourished, but because it contains such
stuff as it makes the mind hungry to look upon. Neither do you read it
to kill time, but to lengthen time, rather, adding to its natural usury
by living the more abundantly while it lasts, joining another’s life
and thought to your own.

There are a few children in every generation, as Mr. Bagehot reminds
us, who think the natural thing to do with any book is to read it.
“There is an argument from design in the subject,” as he says; “if the
book was not meant to be read for that purpose, for what purpose was it
meant?” These are the young eyes to which books yield up great
treasure, almost in spite of themselves, as if they had been penetrated
by some swift, enlarging power of vision which only the young know. It
is these youngsters to whom books give up the long ages of history,
“the wonderful series going back to the times of old patriarchs with
their flocks and herds”—I am quoting Mr. Bagehot again—“the keen-eyed
Greek, the stately Roman, the watching Jew, the uncouth Goth, the
horrid Hun, the settled picture of the unchanging East, the restless
shifting of the rapid West, the rise of the cold and classical
civilization, its fall, the rough impetuous Middle Ages, the vague warm
picture of ourselves and home. When did we learn these? Not yesterday
nor today, but long ago, in the first dawn of reason, in the original
flow of fancy.” Books will not yield to us so richly when we are older.
The argument from design fails. We return to the staid authors we read
long ago, and do not find in them the vital, speaking images that used
to lie there upon the page. Our own fancy is gone, and the author never
had any. We are driven in upon the books meant to be read.

These are books written by human beings, indeed, but with no general
quality belonging to the kind—with a special tone and temper, rather, a
spirit out of the common, touched with a light that shines clear out of
some great source of light which not every man can uncover. We call
this spirit human because it moves us, quickens a like life in
ourselves, makes us glow with a sort of ardor of self-discovery. It
touches the springs of fancy or of action within us, and makes our own
life seem more quick and vital. We do not call every book that moves us
human. Some seem written with knowledge of the black art, set our base
passions aflame, disclose motives at which we shudder—the more because
we feel their reality and power; and we know that this is of the devil,
and not the fruitage of any quality that distinguishes us as men. We
are distinguished as men by the qualities that mark us different from
the beasts. When we call a thing human we have a spiritual ideal in
mind. It may not be an ideal of that which is perfect, but it moves at
least upon an upland level where the air is sweet; it holds an image of
man erect and constant, going abroad with undaunted steps, looking with
frank and open gaze upon all the fortunes of his day, feeling even and
again—

“. . . the joy 1
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused.
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things.”


Say what we may of the errors and the degrading sins of our kind, we do
not willingly make what is worst in us the distinguishing trait of what
is human. When we declare, with Bagehot, that the author whom we love
writes like a human being, we are not sneering at him; we do not say it
with a leer. It is in token of admiration, rather. He makes us like our
humankind. There is a noble passion in what he says, a wholesome humor
that echoes genial comradeships; a certain reasonableness and
moderation in what is thought and said; an air of the open day, in
which things are seen whole and in their right colors, rather than of
the close study or the academic class-room. We do not want our poetry
from grammarians, nor our tales from philologists, nor our history from
theorists. Their human nature is subtly transmuted into something less
broad and catholic and of the general world. Neither do we want our
political economy from tradesmen nor our statesmanship from mere
politicians, but from those who see more and care for more than these
men see or care for.




II


Once—it is a thought which troubles us—once it was a simple enough
matter to be a human being, but now it is deeply difficult; because
life was once simple, but is now complex, confused, multifarious.
Haste, anxiety, preoccupation, the need to specialize and make machines
of ourselves, have transformed the once simple world, and we are
apprised that it will not be without effort that we shall keep the
broad human traits which have so far made the earth habitable. We have
seen our modern life accumulate, hot and restless, in great cities—and
we cannot say that the change is not natural: we see in it, on the
contrary, the fulfillment of an inevitable law of change, which is no
doubt a law of growth, and not of decay. And yet we look upon the
portentous thing with a great distaste, and doubt with what altered
passions we shall come out of it. The huge, rushing, aggregate life of
a great city—the crushing crowds in the streets, where friends seldom
meet and there are few greetings; the thunderous noise of trade and
industry that speaks of nothing but gain and competition, and a
consuming fever that checks the natural courses of the kindly blood; no
leisure anywhere, no quiet, no restful ease, no wise repose—all this
shocks us. It is inhumane. It does not seem human. How much more likely
does it appear that we shall find men sane and human about a country
fireside, upon the streets of quiet villages, where all are neighbors,
where groups of friends gather easily, and a constant sympathy makes
the very air seem native! Why should not the city seem infinitely more
human than the hamlet? Why should not human traits the more abound
where human beings teem millions strong?

Because the city curtails man of his wholeness, specializes him,
quickens some powers, stunts others, gives him a sharp edge, and a
temper like that of steel, makes him unfit for nothing so much as to
sit still. Men have indeed written like human beings in the midst of
great cities, but not often when they have shared the city’s
characteristic life, its struggle for place and for gain. There are not
many places that belong to a city’s life to which you can “invite your
soul.” Its haste, its preoccupations, its anxieties, its rushing noise
as of men driven, its ringing cries, distract you. It offers no quiet
for reflection; it permits no retirement to any who share its life. It
is a place of little tasks, of narrowed functions, of aggregate and not
of individual strength. The great machine dominates its little parts,
and its Society is as much of a machine as its business.

“This tract which the river of Time 2
Now flows through with us, is the plain.
Gone is the calm of its earlier shore.
Border’d by cities, and hoarse
With a thousand cries is its stream.
And we on its breast, our minds
Are confused as the cries which we hear,
Changing and shot as the sights which we see.

“And we say that repose has fled
Forever the course of the river of Time
That cities will crowd to its edge
In a blacker, incessanter line;
That the din will be more on its banks,
Denser the trade on its stream,
Flatter the plain where it flows,
Fiercer the sun overhead,
That never will those on its breast
See an enobling sight,
Drink of the feeling of quiet again.

“But what was before us we know not,
And we know not what shall succeed.

“Haply, the river of Time—
As it grows, as the towns on its marge
Fling their wavering lights
On a wider, statelier stream—
May acquire, if not the calm
Of its early mountainous shore,
Yet a solemn peace of its own.

“And the width of the waters, the hush
Of the gray expanse where he floats,
Freshening its current and spotted with foam
As it draws to the Ocean, may strike
Peace to the soul of the man on its breast—
As the pale waste widens around him,
As the banks fade dimmer away,
As the stars come out, and the night-wind
Brings up the stream
Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea.”


We cannot easily see the large measure and abiding purpose of the novel
age in which we stand young and confused. The view that shall clear our
minds and quicken us to act as those who know their task and its
distant consummation will come with better knowledge and completer
self-possession. It shall not be a night-wind, but an air that shall
blow out of the widening east and with the coming of the light, and
shall bring us, with the morning, “murmurs and scents of the infinite
sea.” Who can doubt that man has grown more and more human with each
step of that slow process which has brought him knowledge,
self-restraint, the arts of intercourse, and the revelations of real
joy? Man has more and more lived with his fellow-men, and it is society
that has humanized him—the development of society into an infinitely
various school of discipline and ordered skill. He has been made more
human by schooling, by growing more self-possessed—less violent, less
tumultuous; holding himself in hand, and moving always with a certain
poise of spirit; not forever clapping his hand to the hilt of his
sword, but preferring, rather, to play with a subtler skill upon the
springs of action. This is our conception of the truly human man: a man
in whom there is a just balance of faculties, a catholic sympathy—no
brawler, no fanatic, no pharisee; not too credulous in hope, not too
desperate in purpose; warm, but not hasty; ardent, and full of definite
power, but not running about to be pleased and deceived by every new
thing.

It is a genial image of men we love—an image of men warm and true of
heart, direct and unhesitating in courage, generous, magnanimous,
faithful, steadfast, capable of a deep devotion and self-forgetfulness.
But the age changes, and with it must change our ideals of human
quality. Not that we would give up what we have loved: we would add
what a new life demands. In a new age men must acquire a new capacity,
must be men upon a new scale, and with added qualities. We shall need a
new Renaissance, ushered in by a new “humanistic” movement, in which we
shall add our present minute, introspective study of ourselves, our
jails, our slums, our nerve centers, our shifts to live, almost as
morbid as medieval religion, a rediscovery of the round world, and of
man’s place in it, now that its face has changed. We study the world,
but not yet with intent to school our hearts and tastes, broaden our
natures, and know our fellow-men as comrades rather than as phenomena;
with purpose, rather, to build up bodies of critical doctrine and
provide ourselves with theses. That, surely, is not the truly
humanizing way in which to take the air of the world. Man is much more
than a “rational being,” and lives more by sympathies and impressions
than by conclusions. It darkens his eyes and dries up the wells of his
humanity to be forever in search of doctrine. We need wholesome,
experiencing natures, I dare affirm, much more than we need sound
reasoning.




III


Take life in the large view, and we are most reasonable when we seek
that which is most wholesome and tonic for our natures as a whole; and
we know, when we put aside pedantry, that the great middle object in
life—the object that lies between religion on one hand, and food and
clothing on the other, establishing our average levels of
achievement—the excellent golden mean, is, not to be learned, but to be
human beings in all the wide and genial meaning of the term. Does the
age hinder? Do its many interests distract us when we would plan our
discipline, determine our duty, clarify our ideals? It is the more
necessary that we should ask ourselves what it is that is demanded of
us, if we would fit our qualities to meet the new tests. Let us remind
ourselves that to be human is, for one thing, to speak and act with a
certain note of genuineness, a quality mixed of spontaneity and
intelligence. This is necessary for wholesome life in any age, but
particularly amidst confused affairs and shifting standards.
Genuineness is not mere simplicity, for that may lack vitality, and
genuineness does not. We expect what we call genuine to have pith and
strength of fiber. Genuineness is a quality which we sometimes mean to
include when we speak of individuality. Individuality is lost the
moment you submit to passing modes or fashions, the creations of an
artificial society; and so is genuineness. No man is genuine who is
forever trying to pattern his life after the lives of other
people—unless, indeed, he be a genuine dolt. But individuality is by no
means the same as genuineness; for individuality may be associated with
the most extreme and even ridiculous eccentricity, while genuineness we
conceive to be always wholesome, balanced, and touched with dignity. It
is a quality that goes with good sense and self-respect. It is a sort
of robust moral sanity, mixed of elements both moral and intellectual.
It is found in natures too strong to be mere trimmers and conformers,
too well poised and thoughtful to fling off into intemperate protest
and revolt. Laughter is genuine which has in it neither the shrill,
hysterical note of mere excitement nor the hard, metallic twang of the
cynic’s sneer—which rings in the honest voice of gracious good humor,
which is innocent and unsatirical. Speech is genuine which is without
silliness, affectation, or pretense. That character is genuine which
seems built by nature rather than by convention, which is stuff of
independence and of good courage. Nothing spurious, bastard, begotten
out of true wedlock of the mind; nothing adulterated and seeming to be
what it is not; nothing unreal, can ever get place among the nobility
of things genuine, natural, of pure stock and unmistakable lineage. It
is a prerogative of every truly human being to come out from the low
estate of those who are merely gregarious and of the herd, and show his
innate powers cultivated and yet unspoiled—sound, unmixed, free from
imitation; showing that individualization without extravagance which is
genuineness.

But how? By what means is this self-liberation to be effected—this
emancipation from affectation and the bondage of being like other
people? Is it open to us to choose to be genuine? I see nothing
insuperable in the way, except for those who are hopelessly lacking in
a sense of humor. It depends upon the range and scale of your
observation whether you can strike the balance of genuineness or not.
If you live in a small and petty world, you will be subject to its
standards; but if you live in a large world, you will see that
standards are innumerable—some old, some new, some made by the
noble-minded and made to last, some made by the weak-minded and
destined to perish, some lasting from age to age, some only from day to
day—and that a choice must be made among them. It is then that your
sense of humor will assist you. You are, you will perceive, upon a long
journey, and it will seem to you ridiculous to change your life and
discipline your instincts to conform with the usages of a single inn by
the way. You will distinguish the essentials from the accidents, and
deem the accidents something meant for your amusement. The strongest
natures do not need to wait for these slow lessons of observation, to
be got by conning life: their sheer vigor makes it impossible for them
to conform to fashion or care for times and seasons. But the rest of us
must cultivate knowledge of the world in the large, get our offing,
reaching a comparative point of view, before we can become with steady
confidence our own masters and pilots. The art of being human begins
with the practice of being genuine, and following standards of conduct
which the world has tested. If your life is not various and you cannot
know the best people, who set the standards of sincerity, your reading
at least can be various, and you may look at your little circle through
the best books, under the guidance of writers who have known life and
loved the truth.




IV


And then genuineness will bring serenity—which I take to be another
mark of the right development of the true human being, certainly in an
age passionate and confused as this in which we live. Of course
serenity does not always go with genuineness. We must say of Dr.
Johnson that he was genuine, and yet we know that the stormy tyrant of
the Turk’s Head Tavern was not serene. Carlyle was genuine (though that
is not quite the first adjective we should choose to describe him), but
of serenity he allowed cooks and cocks and every modern and every
ancient sham to deprive him. Serenity is a product, no doubt, of two
very different things, namely, vision and digestion. Not the eye only,
but the courses of the blood must be clear, if we would find serenity.
Our word “serene” contains a picture. Its image is of the calm evening
when the stars are out and the still night comes on; when the dew is on
the grass and the wind does not stir; when the day’s work is over, and
the evening meal, and thought falls clear in the quiet hour. It is the
hour of reflection—and it is human to reflect. Who shall contrive to be
human without this evening hour, which drives turmoil out, and gives
the soul its seasons of self-recollection? Serenity is not a thing to
beget inaction. It only checks excitement and uncalculating haste. It
does not exclude ardor or the heat of battle: it keeps ardor from
extravagance, prevents the battle from becoming a mere aimless mêlée.
The great captains of the world have been men who were calm in the
moment of crisis; who were calm, too, in the long planning which
preceded crisis; who went into battle with a serenity infinitely
ominous for those whom they attack. We instinctively associate serenity
with the highest types of power among men, seeing in it the poise of
knowledge and calm vision, the supreme heat and mastery which is
without splutter or noise of any kind. The art of power in this sort is
no doubt learned in hours of reflection, by those who are not born with
it. What rebuke of aimless excitement there is to be got out of a
little reflection, when we have been inveighing against the corruption
and decadence of our own days, if only we have provided ourselves with
a little knowledge of the past wherewith to balance our thought! As bad
times as these, or any we shall see, have been reformed, but not by
protests. They have been made glorious instead of shameful by the men
who kept their heads and struck with sure self-possession in the fight.
The world is very human, not a bit given to adopting virtues for the
sakes of those who merely bemoan its vices, and we are most effective
when we are most calmly in possession of our senses.

So far is serenity from being a thing of slackness or inaction that it
seems bred, rather, by an equable energy, a satisfying activity. It may
be found in the midst of that alert interest in affairs which is, it
may be, the distinguishing trait of developed manhood. You distinguish
man from the brute by his intelligent curiosity, his play of mind
beyond the narrow field of instinct, his perception of cause and effect
in matters to him indifferent, his appreciation of motive and
calculation of results. He is interested in the world about him, and
even in the great universe of which it forms a part, not merely as a
thing he would use, satisfy his wants and grow great by, but as a field
to stretch his mind in, for love of journeyings and excursions in the
large realm of thought. Your full-bred human being loves a run afield
with his understanding. With what images does he not surround himself
and store his mind! With what fondness does he con travelers’ tales and
credit poets’ fancies! With what patience does he follow science and
pore upon old records, and with what eagerness does he ask the news of
the day! No great part of what he learns immediately touches his own
life or the course of his own affairs: he is not pursuing a business,
but satisfying as he can an insatiable mind. No doubt the highest form
of this noble curiosity is that which leads us, without self-interest,
to look abroad upon all the field of man’s life at home and in society,
seeking more excellent forms of government, more righteous ways of
labor, more elevating forms of art, and which makes the greater among
us statesmen, reformers, philanthropists, artists, critics, men of
letters. It is certainly human to mind your neighbor’s business as well
as your own. Gossips are only sociologists upon a mean and petty scale.
The art of being human lifts to be a better level than that of gossip;
it leaves mere chatter behind, as too reminiscent of a lower stage of
existence, and is compassed by those whose outlook is wide enough to
serve for guidance and a choosing of ways.




V


Luckily we are not the first human beings. We have come into a great
heritage of interesting things, collected and piled all about us by the
curiosity of past generations. And so our interest is selective. Our
education consists in learning intelligent choice. Our energies do not
clash or compete: each is free to take his own path to knowledge. Each
has that choice, which is man’s alone, of the life he shall live, and
finds out first or last that the art in living is not only to be
genuine and one’s own master, but also to learn mastery in perception
and preference. Your true woodsman needs not to follow the dusty
highway through the forest nor search for any path, but goes straight
from glade to glade as if upon an open way, having some privy
understanding with the taller trees, some compass in his senses. So
there is the subtle craft in finding ways for the mind, too. Keep but
your eyes alert and your ears quick, as you move among men and among
books, and you shall find yourself possessed at last of a new sense,
the sense of the pathfinder. Have you never marked the eyes of a man
who has seen the world he has lived in: the eyes of the sea-captain,
who has watched his life through the changes of the heavens; the eyes
of the huntsman, nature’s gossip and familiar; the eyes of the man of
affairs, accustomed to command in moments of exigency? You are at once
aware that they are eyes which can see. There is something in them that
you do not find in other eyes, and you have read the life of the man
when you have divined what it is. Let the thing serve as a figure. So
ought alert interest in the world of men and thought to serve each one
of us that we shall have the quick perceiving vision, taking meanings
at a glance, reading suggestions as if they were expositions. You shall
not otherwise get full value of your humanity. What good shall it do
you else that the long generations of men which have gone before have
filled the world with great store of everything that may make you wise
and your life various? Will you not take the usury of the past, if it
may be had for the taking? Here is the world humanity has made: will
you take full citizenship in it, or will you live in it as dull, as
slow to receive, as unenfranchised, as the idlers for whom civilization
has no uses, or the deadened toilers, men or beasts, whose labor shuts
the door on choice?

That man seems to me a little less than human who lives as if our life
in the world were but just begun, thinking only of the things of sense,
reckoning nothing of the infinite thronging and assemblage of affairs
the great stage over, or of the old wisdom that has ruled the world.
That is, if he have the choice. Great masses of our fellow-men are shut
out from choosing, by reason of absorbing toil, and it is part of the
enlightenment of our age that our understandings are being opened to
the workingman’s need of a little leisure wherein to look about him and
clear his vision of the dust of the workshop. We know that there is a
drudgery which is inhuman, let it but encompass the whole life, with
only heavy sleep between task and task. We know that those who are so
bound can have no freedom to be men, that their very spirits are in
bondage. It is part of our philanthropy—it should be part of our
statesmanship—to ease the burden as we can, and enfranchise those who
spend and are spent for the sustenance of the race. But what shall we
say of those who are free and yet choose littleness and bondage, or of
those who, though they might see the whole face of society,
nevertheless choose to spend all a life’s space poring upon some single
vice or blemish? I would not for the world discredit any sort of
philanthropy except the small and churlish sort which seeks to reform
by nagging—the sort which exaggerates petty vices into great ones, and
runs atilt against windmills, while everywhere colossal shams and
abuses go unexposed, unrebuked. Is it because we are better at being
common scolds than at being wise advisers that we prefer little reforms
to big ones? Are we to allow the poor personal habits of other people
to absorb and quite use up all our fine indignation? It will be a bad
day for society when sentimentalists are encouraged to suggest all the
measures that shall be taken for the betterment of the race. I, for
one, sometimes sigh for the generation of “leading people” and of good
people who shall see things steadily and see them whole; who shall show
a handsome justness and a large sanity of view, an opportune tolerance
for details, that happen to be awry, in order that they may spend their
energy, not without self-possession, in some generous mission which
shall make right principles shine upon the people’s life. They would
bring with them an age of large moralities, a spacious time, a day of
vision.

Knowledge has come into the world in vain if it is not to emancipate
those who may have it from narrowness, censoriousness, fussiness, an
intemperate zeal for petty things. It would be a most pleasant, a truly
humane world, would we but open our ears with a more generous welcome
to the clear voices that ring in those writings upon life and affairs
which mankind has chosen to keep. Not many splenetic books, not many
intemperate, not many bigoted, have kept men’s confidence; and the mind
that is impatient, or intolerant, or hoodwinked, or shut in to a petty
view shall have no part in carrying men forward to a true humanity,
shall never stand as examples of the true humankind. What is truly
human has always upon it the broad light of what is genial, fit to
support life, cordial, and of a catholic spirit of helpfulness. Your
true human being has eyes and keeps his balance in the world; deems
nothing uninteresting that comes from life; clarifies his vision and
gives health to his eyes by using them upon things near and things far.
The brute beast has but a single neighborhood, a single, narrow round
of existence; the gain of being human accrues in the choice of change
and variety and of experience far and wide, with all the world for
stage—a stage set and appointed by this very art of choice—all future
generations for witnesses and audience. When you talk with a man who
has in his nature and acquirements that freedom from constraint which
goes with the full franchise of humanity, he turns easily with topic to
topic; does not fall silent or dull when you leave some single field of
thought such as unwise men make a prison of. The men who will not be
broken from a little set of subjects, who talk earnestly, hotly, with a
sort of fierceness, of certain special schemes of conduct, and look
coldly upon everything else, render you infinitely uneasy, as if there
were in them a force abnormal and which rocked toward an upset of the
mind; but from the man whose interest swings from thought to thought
with the zest and poise and pleasure of the old traveler, eager for
what is new, glad to look again upon what is old, you come away with
faculties warmed and heartened—with the feeling of having been comrade
for a little with a genuine human being. It is a large world and a
round world, and men grow human by seeing all its play of force and
folly.




VI


Let no one suppose that efficiency is lost by such breadth and
catholicity of view. We deceive ourselves with instances, look at sharp
crises in the world’s affairs, and imagine that intense and narrow men
have made history for us. Poise, balance, a nice and equable exercise
of force, are not, it is true, the things the world ordinarily seeks
for or most applauds in its heroes. It is apt to esteem that man most
human who has his qualities in a certain exaggeration, whose courage is
passionate, whose generosity is without deliberation, whose just action
is without premeditation, whose spirit runs toward its favorite objects
with an infectious and reckless ardor, whose wisdom is no child of slow
prudence. We love Achilles more than Diomedes, and Ulysses not at all.
But these are standards left over from a ruder state of society: we
should have passed by this time the Homeric stage of mind—should have
heroes suited to our age. Nay, we have erected different standards, and
do make a different choice, when we see in any man fulfillment of our
real ideals. Let a modern instance serve as test. Could any man
hesitate to say that Abraham Lincoln was more human than William Lloyd
Garrison? Does not every one know that it was the practical
Free-Soilers who made emancipation possible, and not the hot,
impracticable Abolitionists; that the country was infinitely more moved
by Lincoln’s temperate sagacity than by any man’s enthusiasm,
instinctively trusted the man who saw the whole situation and kept his
balance, instinctively held off from those who refused to see more than
one thing? We know how serviceable the intense and headlong agitator
was in bringing to their feet men fit for action; but we feel uneasy
while he lives, and vouchsafe him our full sympathy only when he is
dead. We know that the genial forces of nature which work daily,
equably, and without violence are infinitely more serviceable,
infinitely more admirable, than the rude violence of the storm, however
necessary or excellent the purification it may have wrought. Should we
seek to name the most human man among those who led the nation to its
struggle with slavery, and yet was no statesmen, we should, of course,
name Lowell. We know that his humor went further than any man’s passion
toward setting tolerant men atingle with the new impulses of the day.
We naturally hold back from those who are intemperate and can never
stop to smile, and are deeply reassured to see a twinkle in a
reformer’s eye. We are glad to see earnest men laugh. It breaks the
strain. If it be wholesome laughter, it dispels all suspicion of spite,
and is like the gleam of light upon running water, lifting sullen
shadows, suggesting clear depths.

Surely it is this soundness of nature, this broad and genial quality,
this full-blooded, full-orbed sanity of spirit, which gives the men we
love that wide-eyed sympathy which gives hope and power to humanity,
which gives range to every good quality and is so excellent a
credential of genuine manhood. Let your life and your thought be
narrow, and your sympathy will shrink to a like scale. It is a quality
which follows the seeing mind afield, which waits on experience. It is
not a mere sentiment. It goes not with pity so much as with a
penetrative understanding of other men’s lives and hopes and
temptations. Ignorance of these things makes it worthless. Its best
tutors are observations and experience, and these serve only those who
keep clear eyes and a wide field of vision. It is exercise and
discipline upon such a scale, too, which strengthen, which for ordinary
men come near to creating, that capacity to reason upon affairs and to
plan for action which we always reckon upon finding in every man who
has studied to perfect his native force. This new day in which we live
cries a challenge to us. Steam and electricity have reduced nations to
neighborhoods; have made travel pastime, and news a thing for
everybody. Cheap printing has made knowledge a vulgar commodity. Our
eyes look, almost without choice, upon the very world itself, and the
word “human” is filled with new meaning. Our ideals broaden to suit the
wide day in which we live. We crave, not cloistered virtue—it is
impossible any longer to keep the cloister—but a robust spirit that
shall take the air in the great world, know men in all their kinds,
choose its way amid the bustle with all self-possession, with wise
genuineness, in calmness, and yet with the quick eye of interest and
the quick pulse of power. It is again a day for Shakespeare’s spirit—a
day more various, more ardent, more provoking to valor and every large
design, even than “the spacious times of great Elizabeth,” when all the
world seemed new; and if we cannot find another bard, come out of a new
Warwickshire, to hold once more the mirror up to nature, it will not be
because the stage is not set for him. The time is such an one as he
might rejoice to look upon; and if we would serve it as it should be
served, we should seek to be human after his wide-eyed sort. The
serenity of power; the naturalness that is nature’s poise and mark of
genuineness; the unsleeping interest in all affairs, all fancies, all
things believed or done; the catholic understanding, tolerance,
enjoyment, of all classes and conditions of men; the conceiving
imagination, the planning purpose, the creating thought, the wholesome,
laughing humor, the quiet insight, the universal coinage of the
brain—are not these the marvelous gifts and qualities we mark in
Shakespeare when we call him the greatest among men? And shall not
these rounded and perfect powers serve us as our ideal of what it is to
be a finished human being?

We live for our own age—an age like Shakespeare’s, when an old world is
passing away, a new world coming in—an age of new speculation and every
new adventure of the mind; a full stage, an intricate plot, a universal
play of passion, an outcome no man can foresee. It is to this world,
this sweep of action, that our understandings must be stretched and
fitted; it is in this age we must show our human quality. We must
measure ourselves by the task, accept the pace set for us, make shift
to know what we are about. How free and liberal should be the scale of
our sympathy, how catholic our understanding of the world in which we
live, how poised and masterful our action in the midst of so great
affairs! We should school our ears to know the voices that are genuine,
our thought to take the truth when it is spoken, our spirits to feel
the zest of the day. It is within our choice to be with mean company or
with great, to consort with the wise or with the foolish, now that the
great world has spoken to us in the literature of all tongues and
voices. The best selected human nature will tell in the making of the
future, and the art of being human is the art of freedom and of force.


1 From “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” by William
Wordsworth.—J.M.
2 From “The Future,” by Matthew Arnold.—J.M.


THE END






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