Books: On Being Human
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Woodrow Wilson >> On Being Human
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, recking 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 let 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 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.
The End.