Everyman's world

Table Of Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I An Intimate Word 1

II Democracy of the Higher Riches . . 10

Chapter I

My sun has passed the meridian and is moving, with rhythmic and deliberate stride, toward the western horizon, beyond which lies the alluring world of mystery and wonder.

As I look back over the years, I feel that I should say a liturgy of thanksgiving to Fortune for the lavishness of her bounty toward me. She has not always consulted my desires, nor humored my moods. I have found her to be more a Stoic than a Sybarite in her manners and methods. She has made me pay with a sufficient liberality for the many felicities I have enjoyed through the grace of her favor. In the things of lesser importance, the mysterious providence that rules over the affairs of men has been rather frugal with me ; but I have been blessed beyond measure in the one treasure of priceless significance, the treasure of life. I have lived! With a great passion of gratitude flooding my heart, I can say, without extravagance, that through all the years life, despite its seriousness and its shadow, has been a sweet triumph. If I maintain, until the curtain falls upon the final act of the marvelous drama, the serene vision of the day of entire sanity and perfect health, the Nunc Dimittis will be said with a smile upon my lips. To use the quaint phrase of our more spiritual fathers of the long ago, my adieu shall be "an ejaculatory prayer" — "O God, I thank Thee for the wondrous glory of the world and the unspeakable beatitude of life !"

In the largest sense, life has lacked, for me, somewhat in the completeness and the smoothness of its adjustments. I have lived in medias res, between two worlds — the one dead, the other powerless to be born. I came in my early youth to this great and wonderful country. I am proud of my American citizenship. It is a citizenship politically without the least taint of hyphenation. I believe with all my heart in the toast of Stephen Decatur, "Our country . . . may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong!"

I exult in America, in its noble spaces, its superb historic accomplishment, its regal hospitality; and in the alertness, the intelligence, the interestingness and the efficiency of its people. And yet the color of place, the physical genius, the national habit of thought and action and speech, the tradition of ideals and of manners, that I imbibed as a sensitive lad in the north of England have lingered with me, an unforgettable legacy of impressions that have deepened with the years. I am in the matter of political temperament and national fealty altogether American, but some part of me, the folk-consciousness, the inheritance of Albion, refused to voyage with me to these hospitable shores. My spirit still hovers, with a tenderness and a longing that almost touch the edge of pain, over the old scenes, over the Cheviot Hills, the moors, the braes, the burns and the meadows, beautiful with the glamour that fills the uncritical eyes and saturated with the joy that dwells in the carefree heart of youth.

While living in the Middle West it was my privilege to enjoy the noble friendship of a man who was a Jew with a strain of the Gentile in his veins. A tender, almost feminine, sorrow rested upon his soul, the unmistakable sorrow that is so often consequent upon racial miscegenation. He was deficient in the unity of racial type. The Gentile was an alien in the heart of the Jew. and the Jew was an unwelcome guest in the heart of the Gentile. The elements of race in him were incommiscible. They were too well-bred to clash, and too intensely individual and characteristic to harmonize. He was an inhabitant, by necessity, of two hemispheres; and the ceaseless, silent controversy of race in his blood wrought a deep sorrow in his heart. My life has been burdened, very slightly, but still quite perceptibly, by the abiding shadow of a miscegenation of a somewhat different kind, the miscegenation of nationalities. I am American, but not wholly, incontrovertibly American. The tree of my soul has grown in the generous air of this glorious country, but the roots are way over there, far across the sea, in England — in the England of the north country, the England of the border feuds and border minstrelsy.

I have been denied, by reason of the infelicity of my individual tastes and reticences, the somewhat questionable delight of popularity — a delight that, despite its questionableness, gives a vivid zest to life, and that atones for a multitude of privations and delinquencies. Popularity is an opiate. It is the most potent anodyne of the spirit. With one movement of its magic fingers, it magnifies our vanity and draws a curtain before the eye of the soul, veiling from its sight the barrenness of its actual possessions.

I am not sure whether I should rejoice in my obscurity as a token of good fortune or bow my head in an act of contrition because the Goddess of Fame has swept by me with an austere disdain. There was an hour in the mid-morning of life when this lady of illusions sought converse with me. She approached me, a winsome presence, gently undulating like the waves of the ocean in its tranquil mood, robed in garments of light and tremulous with the loveliness of an April day which conceals in the hard brilliance of the sunshine the destructive storm, the violence of hail and lightning and wind that lurks in its treacherous heart. She encircled me with her charms, and I was almost on the verge of capitulating to her seductions when it occurred to me to ask the terms of the compact.

"The superlative talent,'' she answered. "But, alas !" I said, "the superlative talent is not mine. I do not belong, by profusion of temperament or affluence of faculty, with the lords of light, the creators of beauty, or the rulers of men. I have neither the afflatus nor the power of endurance to reach the towering heights where the masters dwell and reign with the ease of rulership that is the distinction of the mighty ones of earth. The gift extraordinary has been withheld from me. I cannot speak in the great way. I cannot think in the great way. I cannot write in the great way. I cannot act in the great way. I belong to the world of ordinary men, the men of the single talent ; and the man of the single talent can no more achieve the honors of the man of the two or the five talents than the finite can achieve the infinite."

"Ah ! but there is yet another way," replied my lady, "to the paradise of popular esteem. It is not so pleasant, so high, so royal a way as the way of the superlative gift, but it will bring you with certain step to the goal you seek. Since you cannot soar, you must learn to stoop — stoop to conquer. Shut your eyes to the vision of the ideal! Meet the multitude on its own plane of life — think with its mind, love with its heart, hate with its passions, pray with its prejudices, worship with its animosities, humor its moods, flatter its vanities as a sycophant, follow in its footsteps as a slave, while posing as its counselor and leader — and the world will crown you with its honors and gladden your heart with its applause!"

"But, dear lady of renown," I pleaded, "these very mundane terms offend my sense of honor. They would involve the spirit in a ceaseless finesse that would be blighting and ignominious. Fame is important: it enhances the talent and enlarges the sphere of opportunity and of service ; but it is surely not worth the cost of the soul. I would rather be a minnow in the running brook whose waters are fresh and clear than the largest fish in a foul and stagnant pool. There is a goal of felicity, and there is a way to that goal; and in any well-ordered life the way is as important as the goal, and as vital to one's well-being, to one's honor, to one's supreme and ultimate achievement."

Thereupon the goddess, flashing upon me eyes of beauteous witchery, but burning with an unmistakable contempt, swept out of my sight, leaving me in a long, unbroken obscurity that has safeguarded my peace of mind from the fretting touch of envy and afforded me many hours for happy communion with the haunting and elusive mysteries of life, the mystery of the Infinite Spirit, the mystery of nature, the mystery of humanity, and the lesser — though, to me, the more intimate — mystery of my own soul.

Yet, despite the mild anxieties born of modest circumstances, the slender measure of my importance and the secret sorrows that I carry in the inmost privacy of my heart, wherever I go and whatever I do, I have found life to be a success — not a high success measured in the terms of the spectacular and imposing, but an infinite success construed in the terms of life and love and beauty. The years, bringing in their viewless hands a countless wealth of treasure, have wound their way through my heart with a cumulative sweetness and a lyric charm. A discovery has been vouchsafed to me which is more essentially interwoven with the melodious flow of life than the most vital discoveries of science. To rejoice in the bliss, the bounty and the beauty of the sun, we happily need no familiarity with the physics of light and of heat. To enjoy the grace of contour and the fragrance of the flower world — of the primrose, the carnation, the violet, the daisy — we need not go from garden to garden, from meadow to meadow, with a botany in hand. But to live our life with an abounding consciousness of its magnitude, its freedom, its joyousness, its beguiling beauty — this is an art. It is the supreme art, for it is the art in which all other arts — music, painting, sculpture, literature — find their raison d'etre and their completion. Unlike the lesser arts, however, the art of life is a democracy, and its secrets unfold themselves with a noble impartiality to all who ask in the power of a great passion and seek in the devotion of a tireless patience.

Chapter II Democracy Of The Higher Riches

A great and beautiful life is quite easily within the grasp of every one. It is permitted to the few only to be highly prosperous in material things, for physical wealth is by its very nature oligarchic and exclusive. What one man owns, his neighbor cannot own. The possession of the few necessarily involves the dispossession of the multitudes, for material riches are limited and not universal. The world of property is inexorably a world of inequality, of division, of caste, of mastery and of servitude.

Nor can the more ethereal rewards of the intellectual life be the portion of the multitudes, since to attain the distinction that belongs to the highly cultured mind there must be leisure, an inspirational environment, academic opportunity, and, above all, a virility and prowess of intellect that by reason of its excess of endowment be-

HIGHER RICHES 11

comes a force of separation and preeminence. The Alps would lose their significance as objects of wonder and admiration, were all mountains of alpine dignity and elevation. Shakespeare is Shakespeare by virtue of his magical talents and his supernal faculties. He reigns alone because of the majesty and lavishness of his endowments. There must be a rare conspiracy of gift, sphere and opportunity before one can grave in song "The Grecian Urn" of Keats, or achieve the richness, the luxuriousness and the delicacy of the prose of Edmund Burke.

Celebrity, whether it be in the domain of letters, of painting, or of sculpture, means exclusiveness. Were the victorious life and intellectual distinction synonymous, the most of us would be condemned by the paucity of our gifts and the feebleness of our light to utter failure. Stars of the first magnitude constitute a very limited aristocracy in the sidereal world, and intellects of planetary mass and compass likewise constitute a very imposing and select aristocracy in the kingdom of the fine arts. The majority of us are committed to certain disappointment if we seek to find our well-being in the glamour of social prestige, of publicity, of fame. The few are illustrious and important purely by the law of contrast. A man in a great measure creates his own personality, but fame, prestige, reputation — these factitious and external honors are conferred and not seldom thrust upon him by the multitudes, who, in the act of crowning their king, admit their own inferiority. It is axiomatic that the distinction of the gods involves the indistinction of their satellites and subjects. Were all wild animals lions, the lion would cease to be the monarch of the jungle. The lion is the monarch because the lesser tribes fear him and acclaim the magistracy of his strength. Our pursuit, then, of the great life is foredoomed to sheer failure if we seek for it in the world of acrid competition, with its sequential victory and preeminency for the few and its certain defeat and obscurity for the many. It is demonstrably clear that the most of us can be neither imposingly rich nor commanding of intellect, nor outstanding in our social importance. Concentrated strength implies a diffused weakness, just as the brilliancy of the stars implies the vast interstellar darkness we call night.

I said the great, the beautiful, the triumphant

HIGHER RICHES 13

life is a democracy. Its prerogatives are the prerogatives of all. Its honors are the honors of all. Its blessings are the blessings of all. By virtue of its divine catholicity, it rises above all distinctions of power, of talent, of environment, of fortune. Granted an adequate passion of desire and a sufficient instinct of pursuit, the essential treasures of life are equally within the reach and realization of the rich and the poor, the high and the low, the scholar and the peasant, the master and the servant. The empyrean of vision, beauty, love, freedom — the supersensual over-world where the great spirits of this earth have their abode — is insusceptible of division and circumscription. The kingdom of heaven is catholic and universal. Its citizenship is a divine proletariat. The earth is, and perhaps ought to be, the sphere of an aggressive and insistent individualism, but the sky is splendidly communistic. However vast and dominant my talent of appropriation may be, I cannot delimit the stars. I cannot write in lines of shadow the word "mine" athwart the light of Jupiter, or of Venus. David, the gifted son of Jesse, was richer as a shepherd lad than he was as the crowned king of Israel. As king, he reigned i 4 EVERYMAN'S WORLD

over only a small fragment of the earth's surface : as shepherd-poet, he was the owner of the heavens and of the great Jehovah's glory. As king, he was possessed of a kingdom narrowly bounded by space, by time and by the caprices of his subjects: as poet and prophet, he was dowered with the uncircumfered wealth of the whole world.

The unkempt gamin of the streets and gutters, if he be blessed with the seeing eye and the sensitive imagination of the poet, is more successful so far as the actual wealth of life is concerned than the plethoric landowner who has so submerged his soul in the economic values of his narrow acres that he has lost the larger vision of the firmament, its immensity and its splendor. Villon, though a wastrel and a vagabond, lived a more victorious life than the most resplendent courtier of his day, for the real knight is more than a creature of ribands and garters; he is a man of spacious thoughts, of subtle imaginations, of high and fine emotions. Who would not rather be Villon, a vagrant and an outcast, rich in the talents and the beatitudes of the kingdom of beauty, than the most illustrious prince of his generation, clothed with an ephemeral prestige and adorned with daz-

HIGHER RICHES 15

zling honors, who lived his brief day of empty and paltry glory to sink at last into an oblivion that no resurrection shall disturb !

Where are the rich ; where are the noble ; where are the priests and the high priests ; where are the potentates; where are the scribes and the masters learned in the law of the day of Jesus of Galilee? Who thinks of them; who knows them; who honors them? But the sweet and gracious Galilean — "the best of men that e'er wore earth about him, . . . the first true gentleman that ever breathed" — we remember Him; we know Him; we honor Him; we crown Him with our praise and magnify Him with our worship, our adoration and our love! Why this homage? He was poor. He was of obscure origin. He had a limited and meager education. He was wholly without social luster and without the distinction that belongs to academic culture. He was a king without a kingdom — a prophet whose mottled discipleship was constituted chiefly of tanners, publicans, fishermen, nondescripts, disreputables and prodigals. His gospel does not amicably consort with the actualities of common life. His morality is of an inconvenient fineness. There is no community of nature between His celestial idealism and our very terrestrial instincts and propensions. His empire was Golgotha, and His throne a cross. Yet, despite His poverty, His local insignificance, the isolation wrought by His wondrous ideality, the immediate failure of His dreams, the collapse of His ambitions and the tragical consummation of His august Messianic enterprise, He lives to-day the supreme figure of history — His gospel a transcendent power, His church the most magisterial and formative institution in the world, and His life a life of superlative authority and beauty and triumph. The Jesus of Israel reigns the most kingly presence in historic time, and rules the over-lord of every heart responsive to the appeal and the charm of the ideal and the alluring beauty of holiness, because He lived His swift and eager days, with a solitary grandeur of vision, of passion and of devotion, in a blessed coalescence with the Eternal; and to live in blessed coalescence with the Eternal is to live and to love and to serve and to accomplish in the grand manner, in the great and magnificent way.

HIGHER RICHES 17

This fair, white world of the spirit; this high, far-sweeping world of flame and light and grace and freedom and love, where Socrates, Vergil, Raphael, Thomas a Kempis, Shakespeare, Dante, Fenelon, Lincoln, St. John, Buddha, Jesus have found inspiration, mastery, serenity of mind, the peace of the celestial vision and the life triumphant, the life whose beauty faileth not, and "whose glory fadeth not away" — this world is your inheritance and mine. It is a divine patrimony, of whose treasures and felicities we can be deprived only by our own obtuseness and perversity. No man need suffer defeat; no man need crucify his spirit with the dark consciousness of failure; no man need miss the way to the Land of Promise, the City of God, if he have but the fortitude to break once and forever from the most false and the most cruel of all servitudes, the servitude of the spirit to the despotism of things and matter and externalities, and possess himself of his inalienable heritage, the heritage of a will in sweet conformity with the will of the Eternal; a mind aglow with the infinity, the wonder and the mystery of Truth; a heart abounding with a wealth of love so divine that it grows while it consumes its own substance; a body tremulously sensitive to the melody and the music of the world; and a spirit transfigured with the light and centered in the inerrant wisdom of God.

Chapter III Greatness Of Our Inheritance

I remember saying to a mountaineer who was in the prime of life, finely intelligent and endowed with mechanical gifts of a high order, that he should leave his cabin in a southern state and go to the city in which I lived, where he would find a sphere and an opportunity worthy of his talents. His answer to my invitation took on the dignity of a revelation. It revealed a largeness of nature and a sweep of imagination that brought, as with a lightning's flash, the poverty and the prose of my own ideals of well-being into painful visibility.

"Why should I go to a city"? What would I find there to interest me*? I should earn a little more money, and, perhaps, work would be more regular. But what would become of me, of my life, my soul, my freedom, in the city, with its narrow streets, its smoke, its noises, its confusions, its cramped quarters, its unrest and its suffocating air*? I should perish in the city. I should be homesick — homesick for the sky, for the cliffs, for the forests, for the birds, for the largeness and the freedom of the mountain life." As he spoke, he opened wide his arms as if to include the planet in his embrace. "What a world it is," said this woodsman-poet of the Cumberland plateau — "what a world it is, so wonderful, so interesting, so changing; such a great, kind, loving, companionable world ! Wherever you look, or wherever you go, there you find life and beauty. And then, there is so much room ! It is all so big. The sky is big. The storms are big. The forests are big. The mountains are big. The sunrise and the sunset are big. The days are big with the sheer joy of living. The nights are big with splendor and silence and repose."

Then came the affirmation of an egoism that was divine in its audacity and its finality: "All this is mine — all this freedom, this beauty, this sky, this mountain world is mine! No man can take it from me. It is all mine. It is my kingdom. It is my inheritance. It is all I have. It is all I want — all I ever want. It has a satisfaction for

OUR INHERITANCE 21

every need, a message for every mood, a strength for every emergency. The boisterous winds of March, the caressing breeze of a June day, the trees and the bushes — the oaks, the white oak, the red oak, the black oak, the hickory, the poplar, the ash, the walnut, the black gum, the sumac — the birds, the red bird, the mocking bird, the turtledove, the goldfinch, the thrush — all the music and the color of this mountain world fill my spirit with a great and sweet contentment. I am satisfied, perfectly satisfied with my riches, my possessions, my kingdom. I am happy. Can you say as much for yourself*? No, you take the city and its gold. My wealth is here, in the free air, in all the varied loveliness and the glorious spaces of the hills, the plains and the sky."

This woodsman of the mountains, by virtue of the inheritance of a kingly spirit, had discovered a great secret. He had learned to confront life and measure its transcendent opportunities with a splendid world-consciousness. He was poor, with the undistressing poverty of the mountaineer — with a poverty that had in it no touch of meanness or squalor, no hint of shame or degradation. He was clad in khaki, somewhat shabby from the fraying touch of time and circumstance. His larder contained no greater abundance than provisions for himself and his family for the space of a week. And yet he was rich with all the boundless wealth of the world that he had made his own through the poetic sensitiveness of his imagination and the imperial sweep of his soul.

What a world it is that ranges away in a large and defiant freedom beyond the petty constrictions of our property laws, our deeds, our mortgages, our stocks, our bonds, our investments and our bank account! It is a world of illimitable vastness, of exhaustless variety, secreting in its fathomless deeps an infinite mystery, ever inviting our scrutiny and our solution. We soar in thought into its spaces, and we revel for forty, fifty, seventy years in its abysses; and yet we are playing, like children on the beach of the ocean, on the edge of its boundless wonders. Our minds are attuned to the elementary magnitudes of mathematics. We think in units — in hundreds, thousands, tens and hundreds of thousands — but when we endeavor to survey and run the north and south lines, the east and west lines of our world-estate, we have to deal with magnitudes that leave us

OUR INHERITANCE 23

dazed — with billions, trillions, quintillions, nonillions — nonillions of miles in space and nonillions of worlds, countless suns and moons and planets, innumerable constellations and galaxies. It is a wonderful world, wonderful in its hugeness, wonderful in its eloquence, wonderful in its reticence, wonderful in its sublimity, wonderful in its allurement and wonderful in its elusiveness, growing with our growth and unfolding in an everaugmenting majesty and mystery with every enlargement of our vision and every advancement of our understanding.

This world, so enormous in its dimensions, with horizons receding at every point of approach into the Infinite, is, in every atom of it, in every detail and lineament of it, the habitation of fathomless, yet most entrancing, mysteries — the mysteries of origin and process and destiny ; the mysteries of affinity and repulsion, of cohesion and dispersion, of love and hate, of harmony and discord, of good and evil, of life and death. The least atom contains a philosophy of being that has baffled the metaphysic of all the ages. The most modest flower — the buttercup of the meadows; the primrose, resting softly in its bed of moss at the foot of the oak tree ; the daisy that you will find in your walks through the fields on a summer's day — concentrates within the deep, still heart of it an encyclopaedia of culture, a university of the sciences and the arts — the science of being, the science of creation, the science of morphology, the science of life; and the arts of form and of color; and that which is the consummation of all the sciences and all the arts, the science and the art of divinity.

"Flower in the crannied wall, I pluck you out of the crannies, Hold you here, root and all, in my hand, Little flower, but if I could understand What you are, root and all and all in all, I should know what God and man is."

That is true! The flower in the crannied wall holds in the inmost recess of its being a philosophy of the cosmos.

The world is a progressive series of interrogations. Every problem solved is an open door leading toward a mansion of more intricate problems. The problem of the atom touches the problem of a planet, and the problem of a planet opens the way into the problem of the universe. There is no resting place for the mind in all the vast scheme

OUR INHERITANCE 25

and enterprise of the world — no elevation, however high, where the spirit can stand erect and affirm its mastery of being and of life. However rich may be the treasures of wisdom we acquire as we journey along the highways of culture, we are, mercifully, never bereft of the essence of all pleasure, the passion of pursuit. "Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge." Every extension of vision reveals a finer glory in the world. "Lift up your heads, O ye gates; and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors; and the King of Glory shall come in." This is the cry of the Eternal Psalmist to your soul. He bids you lift up the gates of your intellect, of your imagination, of your emotions, of your passions, that He, the King of Glory — the glory of sun and moon and star; the glory of heaven and earth; the glory of sky and sea and meadow; the glory of the trees and the flowers, the hills and the glens; the glory of sight and of sound, of sunshine and of symphony— may enter into your spirit and make you great with His greatness, glad with His gladness and beautiful with His beauty.

What an offense it is against the dignity and the prerogative of the soul to incarcerate ourselves in an illusion of poverty when we are affluent with a cosmic plenitude of wealth ! And how malignant is that perversity which causes us, habitually, to murmur over the continuance of the night when all we have to do is to open our eyes to live in the full and radiant bounty of the zenith sun! All poverty is an illusion, except the poverty of the sealed vision and the immured talent. The great essential wealth — the wealth of health, the wealth of life, the wealth of high spirits, the wealth of beauty, the wealth of sweet and exquisite sensations, the wealth of love — is nobly impartial. The primitive and indispensable blessings constitute a divine democracy.

The first lesson we all must learn in the mystical art of happiness is to enter into this inheritance of world-possession that no man can take from us. The whole world is ours for the seeking, the willing, the seeing and the taking. The beatitude of health is subject to the poor man's will more certainly than it is at the command of the rich man's check book. The priceless treasures of Nature — the fresh, green fields of the springtime; the trees, robed in their delicate finery of snow on a winter's