BENVENUTO CELLINI AND TOLSTOI 255 vanities of the world: from this year hencefor- ward I will do it with the divinity of God. And then I said to myself, 'Oh, how much more happy I am for this present life of mine than for all those things remembered! ' " * But the great understander of these mysterious ebbs and flows is Tolstoi. They throb all through his novels. In his 'War and Peace,' the hero, Peter, is supposed to be the richest man in the Russian empire. During the French invasion he is taken prisoner, and dragged through much of the retreat. Cold, vermin, hunger, and every form of misery assail him, the result being a reve- lation to him of the real scale of life's values. "Here only, and for the first time, he appreciated, because he was deprived of it, the happiness of eating when he was hungry, of drinking when he was thirsty, of sleeping when he was sleepy, and of talking when he felt the desire to exchange some words...Later in life he always recurred with joy to this month of captivity, and never failed to speak with enthusiasm of the powerful and inefi'aceable sensations, and especially of the moral calm which he had experienced at this epoch. When at daybreak, on the morrow of his *Vita, lib. 2, chap, iv.
256 TALKS TO STUDENTS imprisonment, he saw [I abridge here Tolstoi's description] the mountains with their wooded slopes disappearing in the grayish mist; when he felt the cool breeze caress him; when he saw the light drive away the vapors, and the sun rise majestically behind the clouds and cu- polas, and the crosses, the dew, the distance, the river, sparkle in the splendid, cheerful rays, — his heart overflowed with emotion. This emotion kept continually with him, and increased a hun- dred-fold as the difliculties of his situation grew graver...He learnt that man is meant for happiness, and that this happiness is in him, in the satisfaction of the daily needs of existence, and that unhappiness is the fatal result, not of our need, but of our abundance...When calm reigned in the camp, and the embers paled, and little by little went out, the full moon had reached the zenith. The woods and the fields roundabout lay clearly visible; and, beyond the inundation of light which filled them, the view plunged into the limitless horizon. Then Peter cast his eyes upon the firmament, filled at that hour with myriads of stars. 'All that is mine,' he thought. 'All that is in me, is me! And that is what they think they have taken prisoner! That is what they have EMERSON AND NATURE 257 shut up in a cabin!' So he smiled, and turned in to sleep among his comrades."* The occasion and the experience, then, are nothing. It all depends on the capacity of the soul to be grasped, to have its life-currents ab- sorbed by what is given. "Crossing a bare com- mon," says Emerson, "in snow puddles, at twi- light, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration. I am glad to the brink of fear."
Life is always worth living, if one have such responsive sensibiUties. But we of the highly educated classes (so called) have most of us got far, far away from Nature. We are trained to seek the choice, the rare, the exquisite exclu- sively, and to overlook the common. We are stuffed with abstract conceptions, and gUb with verbalities and verbosities; and in the culture of these higher functions the peculiar sources of joy connected with our simpler functions often dry up, and we grow stone-blind and insensible to life's more elementary and general goods and joys.
The remedy under such conditions is to descend to a more profound and primitive level. To be • La Guerre et la Paix, Paris, 1881, vol. iii. pp. 203, 275, 316.
258 TALKS TO STUDENTS imprisoned or shipwrecked or forced into the army would permanently show the good of life to many an over-educated pessimist. Living in the open air and on the ground, the lop-sided beam of the balance slowly rises to the level line; and the over-sensibilities and insensibilities even themselves out. The good of all the artificial schemes and fevers fades and pales; and that of seeing, smelling, tasting, sleeping, and daring and doing with one's body, grows and grows. The savages and children of nature, to whom we deem ourselves so much superior, certainly are alive where we are often dead, along these lines; and, could they write as glibly as we do, they would read us impressive lectures on our impatience for improvement and on our blindness to the funda- mental static goods of life. "Ah! my brother," said a chieftain to his white guest, "thou wilt never Imow the happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing. This, next to sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we were before our birth, and thus we shall be after death. Thy people,...when they have finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonUght. What is their life to THE NON-THINKING LEVEL 259 ours, — the life that is as naught to them? Bhnd that they are, they lose it all! But we live in the present."* The intense interest that life can assume when brought do'mi to the non-thinking level, the level of pure sensorial perception, has been beau- tifully described by a man who ca7i write, — ]Mr. W. H. Hudson, in his volume, "Idle Days in Patagonia."
"I spent the greater part of one winter," says this admirable author, "at a point on the Rio Negro, seventy or eighty miles from the sea..."It was my custom to go out every morn- ing on horseback with my gun, and, followed by one dog, to ride away from the valley; and no sooner would I climb the terrace, and plunge into the gray, universal thicket, than I would find myself as completely alone as if five hundred in- stead of only five miles separated me from the valley and river. So wild and solitary and re- mote seemed that gray waste, stretching away into infinitude, a waste untrodden by man, and where the wdld animals are so few that they have made no discoverable path in the wilder- ness of thorns...Not once nor twice nor * Quoted by Lotze, Microcosmus, Engliuh traiialutiuii, vul. ii. p. 24U.
260 TALKS TO STUDENTS thrice, but day after day I returned to this soli- tude, going to it in the morning as if to attend a festival, and leaving it only when hunger and thirst and the westering sun compelled me. And yet I had no object in going, — no motive which could be put into words; for, although I carried a gun, there was nothing to shoot, — the shooting was all left behind in the valley...Sometimes I would pass a whole day without seeing one mammal, and perhaps not more than a dozen birds of any size. The weather at that time was cheerless, generally with a gray film of cloud spread over the sky, and a bleak wind, often cold enough to make my bridle-hand quite numb...At a slow pace, which would have seemed intolerable under other circumstances, I would ride about for hours together at a stretch. On arriving at a hill, I would slowly ride to its summit, and stand there to survey the prospect. On every side it stretched away in great undu- lations, wild and irregular. How gray it all was! Hardly less so near at hand than on the haze-wrapped horizon where the hills were dim and the outline obscured by distance. Descend- ing from my outlook, I would take up my aim- less wanderings again, and visit other elevations TIIE PATAGONIAN WILDERNESS 261 to gaze on the same landscape from another point; and so on for hours. And at noon I would dismount, and sit or lie on my folded poncho for an hour or longer. One day in these rambles I discovered a small grove composed of twenty or thirty trees, growing at a convenient distance apart, that had evidently been resorted to by a herd of deer or other wild animals. This grove was on a hill differing in shape from other hills in its neighborhood; and, after a time, I made a point of finding and using it as a rest- ing-place every day at noon. I did not ask myself why I made choice of that one spot, sometimes going out of my way to sit there, instead of sitting down under any one of the mill- ions of trees and bushes on any other hillside. I thought nothing about it, but acted uncon- sciously. Only afterward it seemed to me that, after having rested there once, each time I wished to rest again, the wish came associated with the image of that particular clump of trees, with polished stems and clean bed of sand be- neath; and in a short time I formed a habit of returning, animal like, to repose at that same spot.
"It was, perhaps, a mistake to say that I would 262 TALKS TO STUDENTS sit down and rest, since I was never tired; and yet, without being tired, that noon-day pause, dur- ing which I sat for an hour without moving, was strangely grateful. All day there would be no sound, not even the rustling of a leaf. One day, while listening to the silence, it occurred to my mind to wonder what the effect would be if I were to shout aloud. This seemed at the time a horrible suggestion, which almost made me shud- der. But during those solitary days it was a rare thing for any thought to cross my mind. In the state of mind I was in, thought had become im- possible. My state was one of suspense and watch- fulness; yet I had no expectation of meeting an adventure, and felt as free from apprehension as I feel now while sitting in a room in London. The state seemed familiar rather than strange, and accompanied by a strong feeling of elation; and I did not know that something had come be- tween me and my intellect until I returned to my former self, — to thinking, and the old insipid ex- istence [again].
"I had undoubtedly gone hack; and that state of intense watchfulness or alertness, rather, with suspension of the higher intellectual faculties, re- presented the mental state of the pure savage. He FELICITY OF THE SENSORIAL LIFE 263 thinks little, reasons little, having a surer guide in his [mere sensory perceptions]. He is in per- fect harmony with nature, and is nearly on a level, mentally, with the wild animals he preys on, and which in their turn sometunes prey on him."* For the spectator, such hours as Mr. Hudson writes of form a mere tale of emptiness, in which nothing happens, nothing is gained, and there is nothing to describe. The}'- are meaningless and vacant tracts of time. To him who feels their inner secret, they tingle with an importance that unutterably vouches for itself. I am sorry for the boy or girl, or man or woman, who has never been touched by the spell of this mysterious sensorial hfe, with its irrationality, if so you like to call it, but its vigilance and its supreme felicity. The holidays of life are its most vitally significant portions, because they are, or at least should be, covered with just this kind of magically irrespon- sible spell.
And now what is the result of all these consid- erations and quotations? It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely for- bids us to be forward in pronouncing on the ♦ Op. cit., pp. 210-222 (abridged).
264 TALKS TO STUDENTS meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly inter- ested and happy in their own ways, however unin- telligible these may be to us. Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is re- vealed to any single observer, although each ob- server gains a partial superiority of insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons and sick-rooms have their special revela- tions. It is enough to ask of each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and make the most of his own blessings, without pre- suming to regulate the rest of the vast field.
ni.
WHAT MAKES A LIFE SIGNIFICANT In my previous talk, 'On a Certain Blindness,' I tried to make you feel how soaked and shot- through life is with values and meanings which we fail to realize because of our external and in- sensible point of view. The meanings are there for the others, but they are not there for us. There lies more than a mere interest of curious speculation in understanding this. It has the most tremendous practical importance. I wish that I could convince you of it as I feel it myself. It is the basis of all our tolerance, social, rehg- ious, and political. The forgetting of it lies at the root of every stupid and sanguinary mistake that rulers over subject-peoples make. The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non- interference with their own peculiar ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violoncf! with ours. No one has in- 266 TALKS TO STUDENTS sight into all the ideals. No one should presume to judge them off-hand. The pretension to dog- matize about them in each other is the root of most human injustices and cruelties, and the trait in human character most likely to make the angels weep.
Every Jack sees in his own particular Jill charms and perfections to the enchantment of which we stolid onlookers are stone-cold. And which has the superior view of the absolute truth, he or we? Which has the more vital insight into the nature of Jill's existence, as a fact? Is he in excess, being in this matter a maniac? or are we in defect, being victims of a pathologi- cal anaesthesia as regards Jill's magical impor- tance? Surely the latter; surely to Jack are the profounder truths revealed; surely poor Jill's palpitating little life-throbs are among the won- ders of creation, are worthy of this sympathetic interest; and it is to our shame that the rest of us cannot feel like Jack. For Jack real- izes Jill concretely, and we do not. He strug- gles toward a union with her inner life, divining her feelings, anticipatmg her desires, understand- ing her limits as manfully as he can, and yet inadequately, too; for he is also afflicted with LOVE DISPELS BLINDNESS 267 some blindness, even here. TMiilst we, dead clods that we are, do not even seek after these things, but are contented that that portion of eternal fact named Jill should be for us as if it were not. Jill, who knows her inner life, knows that Jack's way of taking it — so im- portantly— is the true and serious way; and she responds to the truth in him by taking him truly and seriously, too. May the ancient blindness never wTap its clouds about either of them again! "VMicre would any of us be, were there no one wilHng to know us as we really are or ready to repay us for our insight by making recognizant return? We ought, all of us, to realize each other in this intense, pathetic, and important way.
If you say that this is absurd, and that we can- not be in love with everyone at once, I merely point out to you that, as a matter of fact, certain persons do exist with an enormous capacity for friendship and for taking delight in other people's lives; and that such persons know more of truth than if their hearts were not so big. The vice of ordinary Jack and Jill affection is not its inten- sity, but its exclusions and its jealousies. Leave those out, and you see that the ideal I am holding 268 TALKS TO STUDENTS up before you, however impracticable to-day, yet contains nothing intrinsically absurd.
We have unquestionably a great cloud-bank of ancestral blindness weighing down upon us, only transiently riven here and there by fitful revela- tions of the truth. It is vain to hope for this state of things to alter much. Our inner secrets must remain for the most part impenetrable by others, for beings as essentially practical as we are are necessarily short of sight. But, if we cannot gain much positive insight into one another, can- not we at least use our sense of our own blindness to make us more cautious in going over the dark places? Cannot we escape some of those hideous ancestral intolerances and cruelties, and positive reversals of the truth?
For the remainder of this hour I invite you to seek with me some principle to make our toler- ance less chaotic. And, as I began my previous lecture by a personal reminiscence, I am going to ask your indulgence for a similar bit of egotism now.
A few summers ago I spent a happy week at the famous Assembly Grounds on the borders of Chautauqua Lake. The moment one treads that sacred enclosure, one feels one's self in an atmos- CHAUTAUQUA 269 CHAUTAUQUA 269 phere of success. Sobriety and industrj-, intelli- gence and goodness, orderliness and ideality, pros- perity and cheerfulness, pervade the air. It is a serious and studious picnic on a gigantic scale. Here you have a town of many thousands of in- habitants, beautifully laid out in the forest and drained, and equipped with means for satisfying all the necessary lower and most of the super- fluous higher Avants of man. You have a first- class college in full blast. You have magnificent music — a chorus of seven hundred voices, with possibly the most perfect cpen-air auditorium in the world. You have every sort of athletic exer- cise from sailing, rowing, swimming, bicycling, to the ball-field and the more artificial doings which the gymnasium affords. You have kindergartens and model secondar}^ schools. You have general religious services and special club-houses for the several sects. You have perpetually running soda- water fountains, and daily popular lectures by distinguished men. You have the best of com- pany, and yet no effort. You have no zymotic diseases, no poverty, no drunkenness, no crime, no police. You have culture, you have kindness, you have cheapness, you have equality, you have the best fruits of what mankind has fought and 270 TALKS TO STUDENTS bled and striven for under the name of civiliza- tion for centuries. You have, in short, a fore- taste of what human society might be, were it all in the light, with no suffering and no dark corners.
I went in curiosity for a day. I stayed for a week, held spell-bound by the charm and ease of everything, by the middle-class paradise, without a sin, without a victim, without a blot, without a tear.
And yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involunta- rily saying: "Ouf! what a relief! Now for some- thing primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the bal- ance straight again. This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate, this goodness too unin- spiring. This human drama without a villain or a pang; this community so refined that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things, — I cannot abide with them. Let me take my chances again in the big outside worldly wilderness with all its sins and sufferings. There CHAUTAUQUA 271 CHAUTAUQUA 271 are the heights and depths, the precipices and the steep ideals, the gleams of the awful and the in- finite; and there is more hope and help a thousand times than in this dead level and quintessence of every mediocrity."
Such was the sudden right-about-face performed for me by my lawless fancy! There had been spread before me the realization — on a small, sample scale of course — of all the ideals for which our civilization has been striving: security, in- telligence, humanity, and order; and here was the instinctive hostile reaction, not of the natural man, but of a so-called cultivated man upon such a Utopia. There seemed thus to be a self-contra- diction and paradox somewhere, which I, as a pro- fessor drawing a full salary, was in duty bound to unravel and explain, if I could.
So I meditated. And, first of all, I asked myself what the thing was that was so lacking in this Sabbatical city, and the lack of which kept one forever falling short of the higher sort of content- ment. And I soon recognized that it was the ele- ment that gives to the wicked outer world all its moral style, expressiveness and picturesqueness, — the element of precipitousness, so to call it, of strength and strenuousness, intensity and danger.
272 TALKS TO STUDENTS What excites and interests the looker-on at life, what the romances and the statues celebrate and the grim civic monuments remind us of, is the everlasting battle of the powers of light with those of darkness; with heroism, reduced to its bare chance, yet ever and anon snatching victory from the jaws of death. But in this unspeakable Chautauqua there was no potentiality of death in sight anywhere, and no point of the compass visible from which danger might possibly appear. The ideal was so completely victorious already that no sign of any previous battle remained, the place just resting on its oars. But what our human emotions seem to require is the sight of the struggle going on. The moment the fruits are being merely eaten, things become ignoble. Sweat and effort, human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet getting through alive, and then turning its back on its success to pursue another more rare and arduous still — this is the sort of thing the presence of which inspires us, and the reality of which it seems to be the func- tion of all the higher forms of literature and fine art to bring home to us and suggest. At Chau- tauqua there were no racks, even in the place's historical museum; and no sweat, except possibly GROWING TAMENESS OF THE WORLD 273 the gentle moisture on the brow of some lectm-er, or on the sides of some player in the ball-field.
Such absence of human nature in extremis any- where seemed, then, a sufficient explanation for Chautauqua's flatness and lack of zest.
But was not this a paradox well calculated to fill one with dismay? It looks indeed, thought I, as if the romantic idealists with their pessimism about our civilization were, after all, quite right. An irremediable flatness is coming over the world. Bourgeoisie and mediocrity, church sociables and teachers' conventions, are talcing the place of the old heights and depths and romantic chiaroscuro. And, to get human life in its wild intensity, we must in future turn more and more away from the actual, and forget it, if we can, in the romancer's or the poet's pages. The whole world, delightful and sinful as it may still appear for a moment to one just escaped from the Chautauquan enclosure, is nevertheless obeying more and more just those ideals that are sure to make of it in the end a mere Chautauqua Assembly on an enormous scale. Was im Gesang soil leben muss im Leben untergehn. Even now, in our own country, correctness, fair- ness, and compromise for every small advantage are crowding out all other qualities. The higher 274 TALKS TO STUDENTS heroisms and the old rare flavors are passmg out of life.* With these thoughts in my mind, I was speed- ing with the train toward Buffalo, when, near that city, the sight of a workman doing some- thing on the dizzy edge of a sky-scaling iron con- struction brought me to my senses very suddenly. And now I perceived, by a flash of insight, that I had been steeping myself in pure ancestral bhndness, and looldng at life with the eyes of a remote spectator. Wishing for heroism and the spectacle of human nature on the rack, I had never noticed the great fields of heroism lying round about me, I had failed to see it present and alive. I could only think of it as dead and embalmed, labelled and costumed, as it is in the pages of romance. And yet there it was before me in the daily lives of the laboring classes. Not in clang- ing fights and desperate marches only is heroism to be looked for, but on every railway bridge and fire-proof building that is going up to-day. On freight-trains, on the decks of vessels, in cattle- yards and mines, on lumber-rafts, among the fire- * Thia address was composed before the Cuban and Philippine wars. Such outbursts of the passion of mastery are, however, only episodes in a social process which in the long run seems everywhere tending toward the Chautauquan ideals.
THE HEROIC ASPECT OF COMMON LABOR 275 men and the policemen, the demand for courage is incessant; and the supply never fails. There, every day of the year somewhere, is human nat- ure in extremis for you. And wherever a scythe, an axe, a pick, or a shovel is wielded, you have it sweating and aching and with its powers of patient endurance racked to the utmost under the length of hours of the strain.
As I awoke to all this unidealized heroic life around me, the scales seemed to fall from my eyes; and a wave of sympathy greater than anything I had ever before felt with the common life of common men began to fill my soul. It began to seem as if virtue with horny hands and dirty skin were the only virtue genuine and vital enough to take account of. Every other virtue poses; none is absolutely unconscious and simple, and unexpectant of decoration or recognition, like this. These are our soldiers, thought I, these our sustainers, these the very parents of our Ufe.
Many years ago, when in Vienna, I had had a similar feeling of awe and reverence in looking at the peasant-women, in from the coun- try on their business at the market for the day. Old hags many of them were, dried and brown 276 TALKS TO STUDENTS and wrinkled, kerchiefed and short-petticoated, with thick wool stockings on their bony shanks, stumping through the glittering thoroughfares, looking neither to the right nor the left, bent on duty, envying nothing, humble-hearted, re- mote;— and yet at bottom, when you came to think of it, bearing the whole fabric of the splen- dors and corruptions of that city on their labori- ous backs. For where would any of it have been without their unremitting, unrewarded labor in the j5elds? And so with us: not to our gen- erals and poets, I thought, but to the Italian and Hungarian laborers in the Subway, rather, ought the monuments of gratitude and reverence of a city like Boston to be reared.
If any of you have been readers of Tolstoi, you will see that I passed into a vein of feeling simi- lar to his, with its abhorrence of all that conven- tionally passes for distinguished, and its exclusive deification of the bravery, patience, kindliness, and dumbness of the unconscious natural man.
Where now is our Tolstoi", I said, to bring the truth of all this home to our American bosoms, fill us with a better insight, and wean us away from that spurious literary romanticism on which THE DIVINE IS THE COMMON 277 our wretched culture — as it calls itself — is fed? Divinity lies all about us, and culture is too hide- bound to even suspect the fact. Could a Howells or a Kipling be enlisted in this mission? or are they still too deep in the ancestral blindness, and not humane enough for the inner joy and meaning of the laborer's existence to be really revealed? Must we wait for some one born and bred and living as a laborer himself, but who, by grace of Heaven, shall also find a literary voice?
And there I rested on that day, with a sense of widening of vision, and with what it is surely fair to call an increase of religious insight into life. In God's eyes the differences of social position, of intellect, of culture, of cleanliness, of dress, which different men exhibit, and all the other rarities and exceptions on which they so fantasti- cally pin their pride, must be so small as practi- cally quite to vanish; and all that should remain is the common fact that here we are, a countless multitude of vessels of life, each of us pent in to peculiar difficulties, with which we must sev- erally struggle ])y using whatever of fortitude and goodness we can summon up. The exercise of the courage, patience, and kindness, must be the significant portion of the whole business; 278 TALKS TO STUDENTS and the distinctions of position can only be a manner of diversifying the phenomenal surface upon which these underground virtues may mani- fest their effects. At this rate, the deepest human life is everywhere, is eternal. And, if any human attributes exist only in particular individuals, they must belong to the mere trapping and dec- oration of the surface-show.
Thus are men's lives levelled up as well as levelled down, — levelled up in their common inner meaning, levelled down in their outer gloriousness and show. Yet always, we must confess, this levelling insight tends to be obscured again; and always the ancestral blindness returns and wraps us up, so that we end once more by thinking that creation can be for no other purpose than to develop remarkable situations and conventional distinctions and merits. And then always some new leveller in the shape of a religious prophet has to arise — the Buddha, the Christ, or some Saint Francis, some Rousseau or Tolstoi — to redispel our blindness. Yet, little by little, there comes some stable gain; for the world does get more humane, and the religion of democracy tends toward permanent increase.
TOLSTOI ON COMMON PEOPLE 279 This, as I said, became for a time my convic- tion, and gave me great content. I have put the matter into the form of a personal reminiscence, so that I might lead you into it more directly and completely, and so save time. But now I am going to discuss the rest of it with you in a more impersonal way.
Tolstoi's levelhng philosophy began long before he had the crisis of melancholy commemorated in that wonderful document of his entitled 'My Con- fession,' which led the way to his more specifically religious works. In his masterpiece 'War and Peace,' — assuredly the greatest of human novels, — the role of the spiritual hero is given to a poor little soldier named Karataieff, so helpful, so cheerful, and so devout that, in spite of his ignorance and filthiness, the sight of him opens the heavens, which have been closed, to the mind of the prin- cipal character of the book; and his example evi- dently is meant by Tolstoi to let God into the world again for the reader. Poor little Karataieff is taken prisoner by the French; and, when too ex- hausted by hardship and fever to march, is shot as other prisoners were in the famous retreat from Moscow. The last view one gets of him is his little figure leaning against a white birch-tree, and uncomplainingly awaiting the end.
280 TALKS TO STUDENTS "The more," writes Tolstoi in the work 'My Confession,' "the more I examined the life of these laboring folks, the more persuaded I be- came that they veritably have faith, and get from it alone the sense and the possibility of life...Contrariwise to those of our own class, who protest against destiny and grow indignant at its rigor, these people receive maladies and misfortunes without revolt, without opposition, and with a firm and tranquil confidence that all had to be like that, could not be otherwise, and that it is all right so...The more we live by our intellect, the less we understand the meaning of life. We see only a cruel jest in suf- fering and death, whereas these people live, suffer, and draw near to death with tranquillity, and of- tener than not with joy...There are enormous multitudes of them happy with the most perfect happiness, although deprived of what for us is the sole good of life. Those who understand life's meaning, and know how to live and die thus, are to be counted not by twos, threes, tens, but by hun- dreds, thousands, millions. They labor quietly, endure privations and pains, live and die, and throughout everything see the good without see- ing the vanity. I had to love these people. The