A Man's Value to Society (12 page)

Nor has the case been different with men in the humbler walks of life. Multitudes are doomed to delve and dig. Three-fourths of the race live on the verge of poverty. The energies of most men are consumed in supporting the wants of the body. It is given to multitudes to descend into the coal mine ere the day is risen, to emerge only when night has fallen. Other multitudes toil in the smithy or tend the loom. The division of labor has closed many avenues for happiness and culture. The time was when the village cobbler was primarily a citizen, and only incidentally a shoemaker. In the old New England days the cobbler owned his garden and knew the orchard; owned his horse and knew the care of animals; had his special duties in relation to school and church, and, therefore, was a student of all public questions. But tending a machine that clinches tacks, cabins and confines the soul. The man who begins as a citizen ends an appendage to a wheel. The life of many becomes a treadmill existence. Year in and year out they tend some spindle. Now this drudgery of modern life threatens happiness and manhood. Therefore it was ordained that while the hand digs the mind may soar.

While Henry Clay's hands were hoeing corn in that field in Kentucky, through his imagination the young orator was standing in the halls of Congress. What orations he wrote! What arguments he fashioned! Each time his hoe cut down a weed, his mind with an argument hewed down an opponent. Never was there a tool for hoeing corn like unto the imagination! Christine Nilsson tells that once she toiled as a flower girl at the country fairs in Sweden. But all the time she delved she was dreaming, and by her very dreams making herself strong against the day when she would charm vast audiences with celestial music. What battles the plowboys have fought in dreams! What orations they have pronounced! What reforms they have achieved! What tools invented! What books written! What business reared! Thus the imagination shortens the hours of labor and sweetens toil. While the body tires, the soul soars and sings.

This young foreigner newly arrived in our city digs downward with his spade, but his imagination works upward into the realm of the invisible. He endures the ditch and the spade through foresight of the day when his playmate will come over the sea; when together they will own a little house, and have a garden with vines and flowers, with a little path leading down to "the spring where the water bubbles out day and night like a little poem from the heart of the earth;" when they will have a little competence, so that the sweet babe shall not want for knowledge. By that dream the youth sustains his loneliness and poverty; by that dream he conquers his vices and passions; at last through that dream he is lifted up to the rank of a patriot and worthy citizen. Nor shall you find one hard-worked man caught to-morrow in life's swirl who does not endure the strife, the rivalry and the selfishness of the street with this gift divine. It is the noblest instrument of the soul. Thereby are the heavens opened. Imagination is the poor man's friend and saviour. Imagination is God whispering to the soul what shall be when time and the divine resources have accomplished their work upon man.

And when imagination has achieved for man, his progress, happiness, and culture, it goes on to help him to gain personal worth and character. Above every noble soul hangs a vision of things higher, better and sweeter. It causes the best men even in their best moods to feel that better things still are possible. By sweet visions it tempts men upward, just as of old the bees were lured onward by the honey dropped through the hunter's hands. The vision of a higher manhood discontents men with to-day's achievement and takes the flavor out of yesterday's victory. In such hours it is not enough that men have bread and raiment, or are better than their fellows. The soul is filled with nameless yearnings and longings. The deeper convictions, long hidden, begin to stir and strain, even as in June the seed aches with its hidden harvest.

Though the youth still pursues, he never overtakes his ideal. In the process of transmutation into life the ideal is injured and dwarfed. Just as the poet's vision is transcendently more beautiful than the song he writes upon the page; as the artist's dream is a glorious-creation, but his picture is only a photograph thereof; as the musician's song or symphony is but an echo of the ethereal music he heard in his soul, so every purpose and ideal is marred in the effort to give it expression and embodiment.

These children of aspiration hold the secret of all progress for society. Just as of old artists drew the outline of glowing and glorious pictures, and then with bits of colored glass and precious stones filled up the mosaic, causing angels and seraphs to stand forth in lustrous beauty, so imagination lifts up before the youth its glowing plans and purposes, and asks him to give himself to the details of life in filling it up and perfecting a glorious character. The patterns of life are only given upon that holy mount where, midst clouds and darkness, dwell God and the higher imagination.

But if the imagination has its use, it has its abuse also. If visions of truth and beauty can exalt, visions of vice can debase and degrade. In that picture where Faust and Satan battle together for the scholar's soul, the angels share in the conflict. Plucking the roses of Paradise, they fling them over the battlements down upon the heads of the combatants. When the roses fall on Faust they heal his wounds; when they fall on Satan they turn into coals of fire. Thus the imagination casts inspirations down upon the pure, but smites the evil into the abyss. The miseries of men of genius like Burns are perpetual warnings to youth against the riotings of imagination. There are poems, also novels and lurid scenes in the city, hanging pictures before the imagination and scorching the soul like flames of fire. For as of old so now, what a man imagineth in his heart that he is. For not what a man does outwardly, but what he dreams inwardly, determines his character.

Most men are better than we think, but some men are worse. As steam in the boiler makes itself known by hisses, so the evil imaginings heave and strain, seeking escape. Many forbear vice and crime through fear; their conscience is cowardice; if they dared they would riot through life like the beasts of the field; if all their inner imaginings were to take an outward expression in deeds, they would be scourges, plagues and pests. In the silence of the soul they commit every vice. But they who sow the wind shall reap the whirlwind; the revealing day will come when the films of life shall be withdrawn, and the character shall appear faithful as a portrait, and then all the meanness and sliminess shall be seen to have given something to the soul's picture. Oh, be warned against these dreams, all ye young hearts! The indulgence of the imagination is like the sultriness of a summer's day; what began so fair ends with sharp lightnings and thunder. How terrible is this word to evil-doers! "As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he."

It is also given to this vision faculty to redeem men out of oppression and misfortune, and through its intimations of royalty to lend victory and peace. Oft the days are full of storms and turbulence; oft events grow bad as heart can wish; full oft the next step promises the precipice. There are periods in every career when troubles are so strangely increased that the world seems like an orb let loose to wander widely through space. In these dark hours some endure their pain and trouble through dogged, stoical toughness. Then men imitate the turtle as it draws in its head and neck, saying to misfortune: "Behold the shell, and beat on that." But, God be thanked! victory over trouble has been ordained. In the blackest hour of the storm it is given to the vision faculty to lift man into the realm of tranquillity. As travelers in the jungle climb the trees at night and draw the ladder up after them, and dwell above the reach of wild beasts and serpents, so the soul in its higher moods ascends into the realms of peace and rest. In that dark hour just before Jesus Christ entered into the cloud and darkness, and fronted His grievous suffering, He called His disciples about Him and uttered that discourse beginning: "Let not your hearts be troubled." Strange wonder words; words of matchless genius and beauty.

Moreover, the vision faculty furnishes man his idea and picture of God. Many suppose that all that is necessary to understand the divine nature is that it should be stated distinctly in language. Greater error there could not be. There can be no language for causing a little child to understand the larger truths of heroism, art or government. The unripe cannot understand the mature. Each mind must paint its own picture of God. Nature itself is but a palette upon which God draws her portrait. Reason furnishes the materials and truths about God, and the imagination unites them in some noble conception of His all-helpful nature. Everything in nature that has power or beauty or benefit has received it from God. Moving along the Alpine valleys the traveler sees huge bowlders lying in the stream, and, looking to the mountain side, his eye rests upon the very cliff from which the bowlder fell. Thus discerning the noble qualities in mother or patriot, in hero or friend, we trace their beautiful qualities back to God, from whom all noble souls borrow their excellence. In the largest sense all the elements of power in sea and sky and sun, all the beauty of the fields and forests, of summers and winters, are letters in nature's alphabet for spelling out the name of God. As a diamond has many facets, and every one reflects the sun, so the universe itself is a gem whose every facet reflects the mind and genius of God.

When reason has culled out of life and nature everything that excites awe or admiration, everything that represents bounty and beauty, then imagination lifts up all these ideals and sweeps them together and melts them into one glowing and glorious conception of the God of power, wisdom and love. But even then the heart whispers: "He is that, and infinitely more than that, even as the sun is more than the little taper man has made." But if the reason and memory, through misuse, furnish but few of the truths about God, and if the imagination has been weakened in its power, then how poor the picture the soul paints!

What scant, feeble portraits of God some men have! What can an Eskimo, whose highest conception of summer is a stunted bush, know of tropical orchards, of luscious peach, pear and plum? If the student has seen only the broken fragments of Phidias, what can he know of the Parthenon as it once stood in the zenith of its perfection, in the splendor of its beauty? But if man's reason can cull out all the lustrous facts of nature and history, and if his imagination has strength and skill to bring them all together, then how beautiful will be the face and name of God! That name will fill his soul with music. That thought will set his heart vibrating with tumultuous joy. If all the air were filled with invisible bells, and angels were the ringers, and music fell in waves as sweet as melted amethyst and pearl, we should have that which would answer to the sweetness that by day and night rains down upon the hearts of those who approach God--not through the eye nor ear, not through argument nor judgment, but through the heart, through the imagination, as they endure, beholding Him who is invisible.

THE ENTHUSIASM OF FRIENDSHIP

"He that walketh with wise men shall be wise."--
Solomon.

"The only way to have a friend is to be one."--
Emerson.

"A talent is perfected in solitude; a character in the stream of the world."--
Göethe.

"It is certain that either wise bearing or ignorant carriage is caught as men take diseases, one of another; therefore let men take heed of their company."--
Shakespeare.

"Beyond all wealth, honor or even health, is the attachment we form to noble souls, because to become one with the good, generous and true, is to become, in a measure, good, generous and true ourselves."--
Thomas Arnold.

"Cicero said: 'Friendship can make riches splendid.' Friendship can plan many things for its wealth to execute. It can plan a good winter evening for a group, and it can plan an afternoon for a hundred children. It can roll in a Christmas log for a large hearth. It can spread happiness to the right and left. It can spend money most beautifully and make gold to shine. Civilization itself is of the heart."--
Swing.

VIII

THE ENTHUSIASM OF FRIENDSHIP

Destiny is determined by friendship. Fortune is made or marred when the youth selects his companions. Friendship has ever been the master-passion ruling the forum, the court, the camp. The power of love is God-breathed, and life has nothing like love for majesty and beauty. Civilization itself is more of the heart than of the mind. As an eagle cannot rise with one wing, so the soul ascends borne up equally by reason and affection. Plato found the measure of greatness in a man's capacity for exalted friendship. All the great ones of history stand forth as unique in some master passion as in their intellectual supremacy. Witness David and Jonathan, with love surpassing the love of women. Witness Socrates and his group of immortal friends. Witness Dante and his deathless love for Beatrice. Witness Tennyson and his refrain for Arthur Hallam. Witness the disciples and Christ, with "love as strong as death."

Sweetness is not more truly the essence of music than is love the very soul of a deep, strong, harmonious manhood. Friendship cheers like a sunbeam; charms like a good story; inspires like a brave leader; binds like a golden chain; guides like a heavenly vision. To love alone is it given to wrestle victoriously with death.

Lord Bacon said: "He who loves solitude is either a wild beast or a god." The normal man is gregarious. He wants companionship. The very cattle go in herds. The fishes go in shoals. The bees go in swarms. And men come together in families and cities. As men go up toward greatness their need of friendship increases. No mind of the first order was ever a hermit. Modern literature enshrines the friendships of the great and makes them memorable. While letters last, society will never forget Charles Lamb and his companions; Dr. Johnson and his immortal group; Petrarch and his helpless dependence upon Laura; while the letters of Abélard and Héloise enshrine them in everlasting remembrance.