ber of 'coves,' as they call them there, or heads of small valleys between the hills, which had been newly cleared and planted. The impression on my mind was one of unmitigated squalor. The settler had in every case cut down the more manage- able trees, and left their charred stumps standing. The larger trees he had girdled and killed, in order that their foliage should not cast a shade. He had then built a log cabin, plastering its chinks with clay, and had set up a tall zigzag rail fence around the scene of his havoc, to keep the pigs and cattle out. Finally, he had irregularly planted the intervals between the stumps and trees with Indian corn, which grew among the chips; and there he dwelt with his wife and babes — an axe, a gun, a few utensils, and some pigs and chickens feeding in the woods, being the sum total of his possessions.
The forest had been destroyed; and what had 'improved' it out of existence was hideous, a sort of ulcer, without a single element of artificial grace to make up for the loss of Nature's beauty. Ugly, indeed, seemed the life of the squatter, scudding, as the sailors say, under bare poles, be- ginning again away back where our first ancestors started, and by hardly a single item the better off THE 'coves' in the SMOKY MOUNTAINS 233 for all the achievements of the intervening genera- tions.
Talk about going back to nature! I said to myself, oppressed by the dreariness, as I drove by. Talk of a country life for one's old age and for one's children! Never thus, with nothing but the bare ground and one's bare hands to fight the battle! Never, without the best spoils of culture woven in! The beauties and commodities gained by the centuries are sacred. They are our heri- tage and birthright. No modem person ought to be willing to live a day in such a state of rudi- mentariness and denudation.
Then I said to the mountaineer who was driv- ing me, "WTiat sort of people are they who have to make these new clearings?" "All of us," he replied. "Why, we ain't happy here, unless we are getting one of these coves under cultivation." I instantly felt that I had been losing the whole in- ward significance of the situation. Because to me the clearings spoke of naught but denudation, I thought that to those whose sturdy arms and obedient axes had made them they could tell no other story. But, when ihcy looked on the hideous stumps, what they thought of was personal victory. The chips, the girdled trees, and the vile 234 TALKS TO STUDENTS split rails spoke of honest sweat, persistent toil and final reward. The cabin was a warrant of safety for self and wife and babes. In short, the clear- ing, which to me was a mere ugly picture on the retina, was to them a symbol redolent with moral memories and sang a very psean of duty, struggle, and success.
I had been as blind to the peculiar ideality of their conditions as they certainly would also have been to the ideality of mine, had they had a peep at my strange indoor academic ways of life at Cambridge.
Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the eagerness is more knit up with the motor activi- ties, sometimes with the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is 'importance' in the only real and posi- tive sense in which importance ever anyAvhere can be.
Robert Louis Stevenson has illustrated this by a case, drawn from the sphere of the imagination, THE LANTERN BEARERS 235 in an essay which I really think deserves to be- come immortal, both for the truth of its matter and the excellence of its form.
"Toward the end of September," Stevenson writes, "when school-time was drawing near, and the nights were already black, we would begin to sally from our respective villas, each equipped with a tin bull's-eye lantern. The thing was so well knowTQ that it had worn a rut in the com- merce of Great Britain; and the grocers, about the due time, began to garnish their windows with our particular brand of luminary. We wore them buckled to the waist upon a cricket belt, and over them, such was the rigor of the game, a buttoned top-coat. They smelled noisomely of blistered tin. They never burned aright, though they would always burn our fingers. Their use was naught, the pleasure of them merely fanciful, and yet a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat asked for nothing more. The fishermen used lanterns about their boats, and it was from them, I suppose, that we had got the hint; but theirs were not bull's- eyes, nor did we ever play at being fishermen. The police carried them at their belts, and we had plainly copied them in that; yet we did not pre- tend to be policemen. Burglars, indeed, we may 236 TALKS TO STUDENTS have had some haunting thought of; and we had certainly an eye to past ages when lanterns were more common, and to certain story-books in which we had found them to figure very largely. But take it for all in all, the pleasure of the thing was substantive; and to be a boy with a bull's-eye under his top-coat was good enough for us.
"When two of these asses met, there would be an anxious 'Have you got your lantern?' and a gratified 'Yes!' That was the shibboleth, and very needful, too; for, as it was the rule to keep our glory contained, none could recognize a lan- tern-bearer unless (like the polecat) by the smell. Four or five would sometimes climb into the belly of a ten-man lugger, with nothing but the thwarts above them, — for the cabin was usually locked, — or chose out some hollow of the links where the wind might whistle overhead. Then the coats would be unbuttoned, and the bull's-eyes dis- covered; and in the chequering glimmer, under the huge, windy hall of the night, and cheered by a rich steam of toasting tinware, these fortunate young gentlemen would crouch together in the cold sand of the links, or on the scaly bilges of the fishing-boat, and delight them with inappropriate talk. Woe is me that I cannot give some speci- STEVENSON QUOTED 237 mens!...But the talk was but a condiment, and these gatherings themselves only accidents in the career of the lantern-bearer. The essence of this bliss was to walk by yourself in the black night, the slide shut, the top-coat buttoned, not a ray es- caping, whether to conduct your footsteps or to make your glory public, — a mere pillar of dark- ness in the dark; and all the while, deep down in the privacy of your fool's heart, to Imow you had a bull's-eye at your belt, and to exult and sing over the knowledge.
"It is said that a poet has died young in the breast of the most stolid. It may be contended rather that a (somewhat minor) bard in almost every case survives, and is the spice of life to his possessor. Justice is not done to the versatility and the unplumbed childishness of man's imagi- nation. His life from without may seem but a rude mound of mud: there will be some golden chamber at the heart of it, in which he dwells de- lighted; and for as dark as his pathway seems to the observer, he will have some kind of bull's- eye at his belt..."There is one fable that touches very near the quick of life,— the fable of the monk who passed into the woods, heard a bird break into 238 TALKS TO STUDENTS song, hearkened for a trill or two, and found him- self at his return a stranger at his convent gates; for he had been absent fifty years, and of all his comrades there survived but one to recognize him. It is not only in the woods that this enchanter carols, though perhaps he is native there. He sings in the most doleful places. The miser hears him and chuckles, and his days are moments. With no more apparatus than an evil-smelling lantern, I have evoked him on the naked links. All life that is not merely mechanical is spun out of two strands,— seeking for that bird and hearing him. And it is just this that makes life so hard to value, and the delight of each so incommu- nicable. And it is just a knowledge of this, and a remembrance of those fortunate hours in which the bird has sung to us, that fills us with such wonder when we turn to the pages of the realist. There, to be sure, we find a picture of life in so far as it consists of mud and of old iron, cheap de- sires and cheap fears, that which we are ashamed to remember and that which we are careless whether we forget; but of the note of that time- devouring nightingale we hear no news.
..."Say that we came [in such a realistic ro- mance] on some such business as that of my Ian- STEVENSON QUOTED 239 tern-bearers on the links, and described the boys as very cold, spat upon by flurries of rain, and drearily surrounded, all of which they were; and their talk as silly and indecent, which it certainly was. To the eye of the observer they are wet and cold and drearily surrounded; but ask them- selves, and they are in the heaven of a recondite pleasure, the ground of which is an ill-smelling lantern.
"For, to repeat, the ground of a man's joy is often hard to hit. It may hinge at times upon a mere accessory, like the lantern; it may reside in the mysterious inwards of psychology...It has so Uttle bond with externals...that it may even touch them not, and the man's true life, for which he consents to live, lie together in the field of fancy...In such a case the poetry runs under- ground. The observer (poor soul, with his docu- ments!) is all abroad. For to look at the man is but to court deception. We shall see the trunk from which he draws his nourishment; but he himself is above and abroad in the green dome of foliage, hummed through by winds and nested in by nightingales. And the true realism were that of the poets, to climb after him like a squir- rel, and catch some glimpse of the heaven in 240 TALKS TO STUDENTS which he lives. And the true realism, always and everywhere, is that of the poets: to find out where joy resides, and give it a voice far beyond singing.
"For to miss the joy is to miss all. In the joy of the actors lies the sense of any action. That is the explanation, that the excuse. To one who has not the secret of the lanterns the scene upon the hnks is meaningless. And hence the haunt- ing and truly spectral unreality of realistic books...In each we miss the personal poetry, the en- chanted atmosphere, that rainbow work of fancy that clothes what is naked and seems to ennoble what is base; in each, hfe falls dead Uke dough, instead of soaring away like a balloon into the colors of the sunset; each is true, each incon- ceivable; for no man Hves in the external truth among salts and acids, but in the warm, phantas- magoric chamber of his brain, with the painted windows and the storied wall."* These paragraphs are the best thing I know in all Stevenson. "To miss the joy is to miss all." Indeed, it is. Yet we are but finite, and each one of us has some single specialized vocation of his own. And it seems as if energy in the service of its particular duties might be got only by harden- * 'The Lantern-bearers,' in the volume entitled 'Across the Plains.' Abridged in the quotation.
ROYCE QUOTED 241 ing the heart toward ever}i:hing unlike them. Our deadness toward all but one particular kind of joy would thus be the price we inevitably have to pay for being practical creatures. Only in some pitiful dreamer, some philosopher, poet, or romancer, or when the common practical man becomes a lover, does the hard externality give way, and a gleam of insight into the ejective world, as CUfford called it, the vast world of inner life beyond us, so different from that of outer seeming, illuminate our mind. Then the whole scheme of our customary values gets confounded, then our self is riven and its narrow interests fly to pieces, then a new centre and a new perspective must be found.
The change is well described by my colleague, Josiah Royce: — "What, then, is our neighbor? Thou hast re- garded his thought, his feeling, as somehow differ- ent from thine. Thou hast said, 'A pain in him is not like a pain in me, but something far easier to bear.' He seems to thee a little less living than thou; his life is dim, it is cold, it is a pale fire beside thy own burning desires...So, dimly and by instinct hast thou Uved with thy neighbor, and hast known him not, being blind. Thou hast made 242 TALKS TO STUDENTS [of him] a thing, no Self at all. Have done with this illusion, and simply try to learn the truth. Pain is pain, joy is joy, everjrwhere, even as in thee. In all the songs of the forest birds; in all the cries of the wounded and dying, struggling in the cap- tor's power; in the boundless sea where the myr- iads of water-creatures strive and die; amid all the countless hordes of savage men; in all sick- ness and sorrow; in all exultation and hope, everywhere, from the lowest to the noblest, the same conscious, burning, wilful life is found, end- lessly manifold as the forms of the living creatures, unquenchable as the fires of the sun, real as these impulses that even now throb in thine own httle selfish heart. Lift up thy eyes, behold that life, and then turn away, and forget it as thou canst; but, if thou hast known that, thou hast begun to know thy duty."* This higher vision of an inner significance in what, until then, we had realized only in the dead external way, often comes over a person suddenly; and, when it does so, it makes an epoch in his his- tory. As Emerson says, there is a depth in those moments that constrains us to ascribe more reality • The Religious Aspect of Philosophy, pp. 157-162 (abridged).
OBERMANN QUOTED 243 to them than to all other experiences. The pas- sion of love will shake one like an explosion, or some act will awaken a remorseful compunction that hangs Uke a cloud over all one's later day.
This mystic sense of hidden meaning starts upon us often from non-human natural things. I take this passage from 'Obermann/ a French novel that had some vogue in its day: "Paris, March 7. — It was dark and rather cold. I was gloomy, and walked because I had nothing to do. I passed by some flowers placed breast-high upon a wall. A jonquil in bloom was there. It is the strongest expression of desire: it was the first per- fume of the year. I felt all the happiness destined for man. This unutterable harmony of souls, the phantom of the ideal world, arose in me complete. I never felt anji^hing so great or so instantaneous. I know not what shape, what analogy, what secret of relation it was that made me see in this flower a limitless beauty...I shall never enclose in a conception this power, this immensity that noth- ing will express; this form that nothing will con- tain; this ideal of a better world which one feels, but which it would seem that nature has not made."* * De SfSnancour: Obermann, Lettre XXX.
244 TALKS TO STUDENTS Wordsworth and Shelley are similarly full of this sense of a limitless significance in natural things. In Wordsworth it was a somewhat aus- tere and moral significance, — a 'lonely cheer.'
"To every natural form, rock, fruit, or flower, Even the loose stones that cover the highway, I gave a moral life: I saw them feel Or hnked them to some feeUng: the great mass Lay bedded in some quickening soul, and all That I beheld respired with inward meaning."* "Authentic tidings of invisible things!" Just what this hidden presence in nature was, which Wordsworth so rapturously felt, and in the fight of which he lived, tramping the hills for days together, the poet never could explain logically or in articulate conceptions. Yet to the reader who may himself have had gleaming moments of a similar sort the verses in which Wordsworth simply proclaims the fact of them come with a heart-satisfying authority: — "Magnificent The morning rose, in memorable pomp. Glorious as ere I had beheld. In front The sea lay laughing at a distance; near * The Prelude, Book III.
Wordsworth's inner life 245 The solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds, Grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light; And in the meadows and the lower grounds Was all the sweetness of a common dawn, — Dews, vapors, and the melody of birds. And laborers going forth to till the fields."
"Ah! need I say, dear Friend, that to the brim My heart was fuU; I made no vows, but vows Were then made for me; bond unknown to me Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, A dedicated Spirit. On I walked, In thankful blessedness, which yet survives."* As Wordsworth walked, filled with his strange inner joy, responsive thus to the secret life of nature round about him, his rural neighbors, tightly and narrowly intent upon their own affairs, their crops and lambs and fences, must have thought him a very insignificant and foolish per- sonage. It surely never occurred to any one of them to wonder what was going on inside of him or what it might be worth. And yet that inner life of his carried the burden of a significance that has fed the souls of others, and fills them to this day with inner joy.
Richard Jefferies has written a remarkable auto- ♦ The Prelude, Book IV.
246 TALKS TO STUDENTS biographic document entitled The Story of my Heart. It tells, in many pages, of the rapture with which in youth the sense of the life of nature filled him. On a certain hill-top he says: — "I was utterly alone with the sun and the earth. Lying down on the grass, I spoke in my soul to the earth, the sun, the air, and the distant sea, far beyond sight...With all the intensity of feel- ing which exalted me, all the intense communion I held with the earth, the sun and sky, the stars hidden by the light, with the ocean, — in no man- ner can the thrilling depth of these feelings be written, — ^with these I prayed as if they were the keys of an instruments...The great sun, burn- ing with hght, the strong earth, — dear earth, — the warm sky, the pure air, the thought of ocean, the inexpressible beauty of all filled me with a rapture, an ecstasy, an inflatus. With this in- flatus, too, I prayed...The prayer, this soul- emotion, was in itself, not for an object: it was a passion. I hid my face in the grass. I was wholly prostrated, I lost myself in the wrestle, I was rapt and carried away...Had any shep- herd accidentally seen me lying on the turf, he would only have thought I was resting a few minutes. I made no outward show. Who could RICHARD JEFFERIES QUOTED 247 have imagined the whirlwind of passion that was going on in me as I recUned there!"* Sm^el}^, a worthless hour of life, when measured by the usual standards of commercial value. Yet in what other kind of value can the preciousness of any hour, made precious by any standard, consist, if it consist not in feeUngs of excited sig- nificance like these, engendered in some one, by what the hour contains?
Yet so bUnd and dead does the clamor of our own practical interests make us to all other things, that it seems almost as if it were necessary to be- come worthless as a practical being, if one is to hope to attain to any breadth of insight into the impersonal world of worths as such, to have any perception of life's meaning on a large objective scale. Only your mystic, your dreamer, or your insolvent tramp or loafer, can afford so sympa- thetic an occupation, an occupation which will change the usual standards of human value in the twinkHng of an eye, giving to foolishness a place ahead of power, and laying low in a minute the distinctions which it takes a hard-working con- ventional man a lifetime to build up. You may be a prophet, at this rate; but you cannot be a worldly success.
♦ Op. cil., Boston, Roberta, 1883, pp. ij, 6.
248 TALKS TO STUDENTS Walt Whitman, for instance, is accounted by many of us a contemporary prophet. He abolishes the usual human distinctions, brings all con- ventionalisms into solution, and loves and cele- brates hardly any human attributes save those elementary ones common to all members of the race. For this he becomes a sort of ideal tramp, a rider on omnibus-tops and ferry-boats, and, considered either practically or academically, a worthless, unproductive being. His verses are but ejaculations — things mostly without subject or verb, a succession of interjections on an im- mense scale. He felt the human crowd as raptur- ously as Wordsworth felt the mountains, felt it as an overpoweringly significant presence, simply to absorb one's mind in which should be business sufl&cient and worthy to fill the days of a serious man. As he crosses Brooklyn ferry, this is what he feels: — Flood-tide below me! I watch you, face to face; Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you sup- pose; WALT WHITIVIAN QUOTED 249 And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose. Others will enter the gates of the ferry, and cross from shore to shore; Others will watch the rim of the flood- tide; Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east; Others will see the islands large and small; Fifty years hence, others wiU see them as they cross, the sun half an hour high. A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence, others will see them, Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring in of the flood-tide, the falling back to the sea of the ebb-tide. It avails not, neither time or place — distance avails not. Just as you feel when you look on the river and sky, so I felt; Just as any of you is one of a living crowd, I was one of a crowd; Just as you are refresh'd by the gladness of the river and the bright flow, I was refresh'd; Just as you stand and lean on the rail, yet hurry with the swift current, I stood, yet was hurried; Just as you look on the numberless masts of ships, and the thick-stemmed pipes of steamboats, I looked. I too many and many a time cross' d the river, the sun half an hour high; I watched the Twelfth-month sea-gulls— I saw them high in the air, with motionless wings, oscillating their bodies, 250 TALKS TO STUDENTS I saw how the glistening yellow lit up parts of their bodies, and left the rest in strong shadow, I saw the slow-wheeHng circles, and the gradual edging toward the south.
Saw the white sails of schooners and sloops, saw the ships at anchor, The sailors at work in the rigging, or out astride the spars; The scaUop-edged waves in the twihght, the ladled cups, the frohcsome crests and ghstening; The stretch afar growing dimmer and dimmer, the gray walls of the granite store-houses by the docks; On the neighboring shores, the fires from the foundry chim- neys burning high...into the night, Casting their flicker of black...into the clefts of streets.
These, and all else, were to me the same as they are to you.* And so on, through the rest of a divinely beau- tiful poem. And, if you wish to see what this hoary loafer considered the most worthy way of profiting by life's heaven-sent opportunities, read the delicious volume of his letters to a young car- conductor who had become his friend: — "New York, Oct. 9, 1868.
''Dear Pete, — It is splendid here this forenoon — bright and cool. I was out early taking a short * 'Crossing Brooklyn Ferry' (abridged).
WALT WHITINIAN QUOTED 251 walk by the river only two squares from where I live...Shall I tell you about [my life] just to fill up? I generally spend the forenoon in my room writing, etc., then take a bath fix up and go out about twelve and loafe somewhere or call on someone down town or on business, or per- haps if it is very pleasant and I feel like it ride a trip with some driver friend on Broadway from 23rd Street to Bowling Green, three miles each way. (Every day I find I have plenty to do, every hour is occupied with something.) You know it is a never ending amusement and study and recreation for me to ride a couple of hours on a pleasant afternoon on a Broadway stage in this way. You see everything as you pass, a sort of living, endless panorama — shops and splendid buildings and great windows: on the broad side- walks crowds of women richly dressed continually passing, altogether different, superior in style and looks from any to be seen anywhere else — ^in fact a perfect stream of people — men too dressed in high style, and plenty of foreigners — and then in the streets the thick crowd of carriages, stages, carts, hotel and private coaches, and in fact all sorts of vehicles and many first class teams, mile after mile, and the splendor of such a great street 252 TALKS TO STUDENTS and so many tall, ornamental, noble buildings many of them of white marble, and the gayety and motion on every side: you will not wonder how much attraction all this is on a fine day, to a great loafer like me, who enjoys so much seeing the busy world move by him, and exhibiting itself for his amusement, while he takes it easy and just looks on and observes."* Truly a futile way of passing the time, some of you may say, and not altogether creditable to a gro^Ti-up man. And yet, from the deepest point of view, who knows the more of truth, and who knows the less, — Whitman on his omnibus-top, full of the inner joy with which the spectacle in- spires him, or you, full of the disdain which the futility of his occupation excites?
When your ordinary Brooklynite or New Yorker, leading a life replete with too much luxury, or tired and careworn about his personal affairs, crosses the ferry or goes up Broadway, his fancy does not thus 'soar away into the colors of the sunset' as did Whitman's, nor does he inwardly realize at all the indisputable fact that this world never did anywhere or at any time contain more of essential divinity, or of eternal meaning, than is embodied CARLYLE AND SCHOPENHAUER 253 in the fields of vision over which his eyes so care- lessly pass. There is life; and there, a step away, is death. There is the only kind of beauty there ever was. There is the old human struggle and its fruits together. There is the text and the sermon, the real and the ideal in one. But to the jaded and unquickened eye it is all dead and common, pure vulgarism, flatness, and disgust. "Hech! it is a sad sight!" says Carlyle, walking at night with some one who appeals to him to note the splendor of the stars. And that very repetition of the scene to new generations of men in secula seculorum, that eternal recurrence of the common order, which so fills a Whitman with mystic satisfaction, is to a Schopenhauer, with the emotional anaesthesia, the feeling of 'awful inner emptiness' from out of which he views it all, the chief ingredient of the tedium it instils. What is life on the largest scale, he asks, but the same recurrent inanities, the same dog barking, the same fly buzzing, forevcrmore? Yet of the kind of fibre of which such inanities consist is the material woven of all the excitements, joys, and meanings that ever were, or ever shall be, in this world.
To be rapt with satisfied attention, like Whit- 254 TALKS TO STUDENTS man, to the mere spectacle of the world's presence, is one way, and the most fundamental way, of confessing one's sense of its unfathomable signifi- cance and importance. But how can one attain to the feeling of the vital significance of an expe- rience, if one have it not to begin with? There is no receipt which one can follow. Being a secret and a mystery, it often comes in myste- riously unexpected ways. It blossoms sometimes from out of the very grave wherein we imagined that our happiness was buried. Benvenuto Cel- lini, after a life all in the outer sunshine, made of adventures and artistic excitements, suddenly finds himself cast into a dungeon in the Castle of San Angelo. The place is horrible. Rats and wet and mould possess it. His leg is broken and his teeth fall out, apparently with scurvy. But his thoughts turn to God as they have never turned before. He gets a Bible, which he reads during the one hour in the twenty-four in which a wandering ray of daylight penetrates his cavern. He has religious visions. He sings psalms to him- self, and composes hymns. And thinking, on the last day of July, of the festivities customary on the morrow in Rome, he says to himself: "All these past years I celebrated this hohday with the