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Life's Enthusiasms

And with this you may take many other bits of verse which were hammered out on the anvil of the terrible Civil War. Perhaps these bits of verse chosen almost at random will not appeal to your taste. Then find some other verse that does. The range of literature is as wide as humanity. It touches every feeling, every hope, every craving of the human heart. Select what you can understand—best, what you can rise on tiptoe to understand. "It was my duty to have loved the highest." It is your duty toward poetry to take the highest you can reach. Then learn it by heart. Learn it when you are young. It will give you a fresh well of thoughts. It will form your style as a writer. That is poetry in which truth is expressed in the fewest possible words, in words which are inevitable, in words which could not be changed without weakening the meaning or throwing discord into the melody. To choose the right word and to discard all others, this is the chief factor in good writing. To learn good poetry by heart is to acquire help toward doing this instinctively, automatically, as other habits are acquired. In the affairs of life there is no form of good manners, no habit of usage more valuable than the habit of good English. And to this end the masters of English, from Chaucer to Tennyson, and in spite of perversities, we may add Emerson, Browning, and Kipling, have written English verse. It is not in verse alone that poetry is written. Sweetness and light and truth can be crystallized into prose, and prose well worthy to be borne in memory. Take this from Emerson: "The poet is the true landlord, sea lord, air lord! Wherever snow falls or water flows or birds fly, wherever day and night meet in twilight, wherever the blue heaven is hung by clouds or sown with stars, wherever are forms with transparent boundaries, wherever are outlets into celestial spaces, wherever is danger and awe and love—there's Beauty, plenteous as rain shed for thee and though thou shouldst walk the world over thou shalt not be able to find a condition inopportune or ignoble." "I took a walk the other day," so Thoreau tells us, "on Spaulding's farm. I saw the setting sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable family had settled there in that part of Concord, unknown to me—to whom the sun was servant. I saw their path, their pleasuring ground through the woods in Spaulding's cranberry meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew. Their house was not obvious to vision, the trees grew through it. They have sons and daughters. They are quite well. The farmer's cart path which leads directly through their hall does not in the least put them out, as the muddy bottom of the pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies. They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their neighbor, notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team through their house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their coat of arms is simply a lichen. It is painted on the pines and the oaks. They are of no politics. There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum as of a distant hive in May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle thoughts and no one without could say their work, for their industry was not in knots and excrescences embayed. Yet I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably even while I speak. It is only after a long and serious effort to recollect that I became again aware of their cohabitance. If it were not for such families as this I think I should move out of Concord." In the arts of music and painting and sculpture, one may find not only professional satisfaction, but the strength that comes from higher living and more lofty feeling. In the study of history as biography, the acquaintance with the men and women of other times, those who have felt and thought and acted and suffered to make a freer world for you and me, like inspiration may be found. History is more than its incidents. It is the movement of man. It is the movement of individual men, and it is in giving illumination to personal and racial characters that the succession of incidents has its value. The picturesque individual, the man who could not be counted with the mass, the David, the Christ, the Brutus, the Caesar, the Plato, the Alfred, the Charlemagne, the Cromwell, the Mirabeau, the Luther, the Darwin, the Helmholtz, the Goethe, the Franklin, the Hampden, the Lincoln, all these give inspiration to history. It is well that we should know them, should know them all, should know them well—an education is incomplete that is not built about a Pantheon, dedicated to the worship of great men. With all this comes that feeling of dedication to the highest purposes which is the essential feature of religion. Religion should be known by its tolerance, its broadmindedness, its faith in God and humanity, its recognition of the duty of action. And action should be understood in a large way, the taking of one's part in affairs worth doing, not mere activity, nor fussiness, nor movement for movement's sake, like that of "ants on whom pepper is sprinkled." As the lesser enthusiasms fade and fail, one should take a stronger hold on the higher ones. "Grizzling hair the brain doth clear" and one sees in better perspective the things that need doing. It is thus possible to grow old as a "grand old man," a phrase invented for Gladstone, but which fits just as well our own Mark Twain. Grand old men are those who have been grand young men, and carry still a young heart beneath old shoulders. There are plenty of such in our country to-day, though the average man begins to give up the struggle for the higher life at forty. President White, President Eliot, President Angell,—few men have left so deep an impression on the Twentieth Century. Edward Everett Hale, the teacher who has shown us what it is to have a country. Senator Hoar, Professor Agassiz, Professor Le Conte, Professor Shaler,—all these, whatever the weight of years, remained young men to the last. When Agassiz died, the Harvard students "laid a wreath of laurel on his bier and their manly voices sang a requiem, for he had been a student all his life long, and when he died he was younger than any of them." Jefferson was in the seventies when he turned back to his early ambition, the foundation of the University of Virginia. The mother of Stanford University was older than Jefferson before she laid down the great work of her life as completed. When the heart is full, it shows itself in action as well as in speech. When the heart is empty, then life is no longer worth while. The days pass and there is no pleasure in them. Let us then fill our souls with noble ideals of knowledge, of art, of action. "Let us lay up a stock of enthusiasms in our youth, lest we reach the end of our journey with an empty heart, for we lose many of them by the way." We hear much in these days of the wickedness of power, of the evil behavior of men in high places, of men in low places, and men whom the people have been perforce obliged to trust. This is no new thing, though the struggle against it, the combination of the forces of reform and blackmail, of dreamers and highwaymen, is offering some new phases. There is a kind of music popular with uncritical audiences and with people who know no better, which answers to the name of "ragtime." It is the music of those who do not know good music or who have not the moral force to demand it. The spirit of ragtime is not confined to music: graft is the ragtime of business, the spoils system the ragtime of politics, adulteration the ragtime of manufacture. There is ragtime science, ragtime literature, ragtime religion. You will know each of these by its quick returns. The spirit of ragtime determines the six best sellers, the most popular policeman, the favorite congressman, the wealthiest corporation, the church which soonest rents its pews. But it does not, control the man who thinks for himself. It has no lien on the movements of history, its decrees avail nothing in the fixing of truth. The movements of the stars pay it no tribute, neither do the movements of humanity. The power of graft is a transient deception. Emerson's parable of the illusions gives the clue to our time, to all time, in its contrast of the things which appear with the things that abide. "There is no chance and no anarchy in the Universe," says Emerson, "all is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament; there he is alone with them alone, they pronouncing on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant and incessantly fall snow storms of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that and whose movements and doings he must obey. He fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their will and think and act for himself? Every moment new changes and new showers of deceptions to baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, for an instant the air clears and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones—they alone with him alone." — The last paragraphs of this little essay were written within a huge hotel of steel and stone in the heart of a bustling city, in the most gracious of lands and under the bluest of skies. A great commercial city it was, a wondrous city, full of all manner of men—eager, impulsive, loving, enthusiastic men; men cunning and grasping, given over to all "high, hard lust and wilful deed;" carefree, joyous men living in the present and taking their chances for the future; men who have whistled all the airs that fluttering birds and frolicking children have learned to sing; workmen of all grades, quiet, courageous and self-respecting, and weak, disgruntled and incapable; bright-eyed, clear-headed, sagacious men, such men as build a state; hopeless, broken, disappointed men, who have made this city of hope their last resort; gamblers, parasites, bartenders, agitators, self-seekers, haters of men and haters of organization, impossibles, men uncontrolled and uncontrollable, of every nation and with every dialect of the civilized world—and of uncivilized worlds also;—the most cosmopolitan of all American towns, the one fullest of the joy of living, the one least fearful of future disaster, "serene, indifferent to fate," thus her own poets have styled her, and on no other city since the world began has fate, unmalicious, mechanical and elemental, wrought such a terrible havoc. In a day this city has vanished; the shock of a mighty earthquake forgotten in an hour in the hopeless horror of fire; homes, hotels, hospitals, hovels, libraries, museums, skyscrapers, factories, shops, banks and gambling dens, all blotted out of existence almost in the twinkling of an eye; millionaires, beggars, dancers and workers, men great and small, foolish and courageous, with their women and children of like natures with them, fleeing together by the thousands and hundreds of thousands to the hills and the sand-dunes, where on the grass and the shifting sands they all slept together or were awake together in the old primal equality of life. Never since man began to plan and to create has there been such a destruction of the results of human effort. Never has a great calamity been met with so little repining. Never before has the common man shown himself so hopeful, so courageous, so sure of himself and his future. For it is the man, after all, that survives and it is the will of man that shapes the fates. It is the lesson of earthquake and fire that man cannot be shaken and cannot be burned. The houses he builds are houses of cards, but he stands outside of them and can build again. It is a wonderful thing to build a great city. Men can do this in a quarter century, working together each at his own part. More wonderful still is it to be a city, for a city is composed of men, and now, ever and forever the man must rise above his own creations. That which is in the man is greater than all that he can do. "Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud Under the bludgeonings of chance, My head is bloody but not bowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years Finds and shall find me unafraid. It matters not how straight the gate, How charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul!" <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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