Part 14 (2/2)
Self-surrender, however, takes other forms than religious absorption or devotion. ”Saintliness” is not unknown in secular forms of life, in the devotion of men to any ideal, despite pain and privation of worldly goods and successes.
The doctor sacrificing his life in a leper colony is an extreme example. But something of the same humility and submissiveness is exhibited every time a man makes a choice which places the welfare of other people before his own immediate success. It is shown by the thousands of physicians and settlement workers and teachers who spend their lives in patient devotion to labors that bring little remuneration and as little glory. Men of affairs and a large proportion of other men generally measure worth by worldly success. But even from the worldly, such signs of self-surrender elicit admiration.
ECCENTRICS. There is one type of self so various and miscellaneous that it can only be subsumed under the general epithet, ”eccentric.” These are the unexpectedly large number of individuals in our civilization who do not come under any of the usual categories, who display some small or great abnormality which sets them off from the general run of men.
That some of these are accounted eccentric is to be explained in the light of man's tendency, as a gregarious animal, to think ”queer” and ”freakish” anything off the beaten track.
Some are clearly and unmistakably abnormal in some physiological or psychological respect. From these are recruited the inmates of our penitentiaries and insane asylums and the candidates for them. But there are eccentricities of social behavior, types of personality which though they cannot be cla.s.sed as either insane or criminal, yet definitely set an individual apart.
These include what Trotter has called the ”mentally unstable,”
as set over against ”the great cla.s.s of normal, sensible, reliable middle age, with its definite views, its resiliency to the depressing influence of facts, and its gift for forming the backbone of the State.” There are the large group of slightly neurasthenic, made so, in part, by the high nervous tension under which modern, especially modern urban, life is lived. These include what are commonly called the hysterical or over-emotional, or ”temperamental” types. In a civilization where most professions demand regularity, restraint, punctuality, and directness, unstability and excess emotionalism are necessarily at a discount. There are the vagabond types who, like young Georges, Jean-qhristophe's protege, regard a profession as a prison house, in which most of one's capacities are cruelly confined. There are again those who, possessing singular and exclusive sensitivity to aesthetic values, to music, art, and poetry, find the world outside their own lyric enthusiasms flat, stale, and unprofitable.
If, as so frequently happens, these combine, along with their peculiar temperaments, little genius and slender means, social and economic life becomes for them a blind alley. Every year at our great universities we see small groups of young men, who, having spent three or four years on philosophy, literature, and the liberal arts, and having no interest in academic life, are put to it to find a profession in which they can find a genuine interest or possible success.
Among these ”eccentrics” a few have been reckoned geniuses by their contemporaries or by posterity. In such cases society hesitates to apply its usual formulae. One cannot condemn out of hand a Sh.e.l.ley. He is not of the run of men.
Sh.e.l.ley was one of those spokesmen of the _a priori_, one of those nurslings of the womb, like a bee or a b.u.t.terfly, a dogmatic, inspired, perfect, and incorrigible creature.... Being a finished child of nature, not a joint product, like most of us, of nature, history, and society, he abounded miraculously in his own clear sense, but was obtuse to the droll miscellaneous lessons of fortune. The cannonade of hard inexplicable facts that knocks into most of us what little wisdom we have, left Sh.e.l.ley dazed and sore, perhaps, but uninstructed.[1]
[Footnote 1: Santayana: _Winds of Doctrine_; Sh.e.l.ley, p. 159.]
It is difficult to draw the line in some cases between genius and insanity.[1] There have been time and again in society Ca.s.sandras who have spoken true prophecies and have been thought mad. There have been, on the other hand, those who, having some of the external eccentricities of genius, have given an illusive impression of greatness. The professional Bohemian likes to make himself great by wearing his hair long and living in a garret. But it is unquestionably true that a highly sensitive and creative mind is often ill at ease in the world of action, and remains a vagabond, an _enfant terrible_ or an eccentric all through life. It remains a fact that in contemporary society there are a small number of people, some of them of considerable talents, who simply cannot be made to fit into the social routine. For such Bertrand Russell suggests a ”vagabond's wage.” This he conceives as being just large enough to enable them to get along, to give them a chance to wander and experiment, but sufficiently small to penalize them for not settling down to the accustomed social routines.[2]
[Footnote 1: Thus Plato: ”But he who, not being inspired and having no touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks that he will get into the temple by the help of art--he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman.”
_Phoedrus_ (Jowett translation), p. 550.]
[Footnote 2: Russell: _Proposed Roads to Freedom_, p. 177.
There was recently introduced to the writer a boy, aged nineteen, for whom this would be an admirable solution. Brought up in a tenement and working as a clerk, this youngster wrote what competent judges p.r.o.nounced to be really extraordinary lyrics.
He was at the same time utterly helpless in the world of affairs.
Even at college his casual habits and absorption would have prevented him from getting through his freshman year.]
Mill has generalized the situation of the genius:
Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an _atmosphere_ of freedom. Persons of genius are, _ex vi termini_, more individual than any other people--less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their own character.... If they are of a strong character, and break their fetters, they become a mark for the society which has not succeeded in reducing them to commonplace, to point at with solemn warning as ”wild,” ”erratic,” and the like; much as if one should complain of the Niagara River for not flowing smoothly between its banks, like a Dutch ca.n.a.l.[1]
[Footnote 1: Mill: _Essay on Liberty_, chap. III.]
THE ACTIVE AND THE CONTEMPLATIVE. One final distinction must be made, one that cuts across all the types of self hitherto discussed, namely, the distinction between the man of action and the man of thought. One need not go far in literature or in life to find the contrast made. In the Scriptures Mary is set over against Martha, Rachel against Leah.
Hamlet and Ulysses are permanent representations of the melancholy thinker and the exuberant adventurer. The business man and the executive may be put over against the poet and the scholar; the strenuous organizer and administrator over against the quiet philosopher. Both have their outstanding uses, and, in their extreme forms, their outstanding defects. The active type, as we say, ”gets things done.” He builds bridges and industries; he manages markets and men. His eye is on the practical; he is dependable, rapid, and efficient. In an industrial civilization he is the great heroic type. The statesman and the railroad builder, the newspaper editors and the political leaders captivate the imaginations as they control the destinies of mankind.
On the other hand, there are those who stand aside (either from incapacity or disinclination or both) from the management of affairs and the life of action, and spend their lives in observation and contemplation. Plato and Aristotle regarded this as the highest type of life; it may have been because they were themselves both philosophers. In its extreme form it is exhibited in such men as Spinoza or Kant, spending their lives in practical obscurity, speculating on time and s.p.a.ce and eternity. But it is apparent in less extreme types. The ”patient observer,” the genial spectator of other men's actions is not infrequent. When he has literary gifts he is a philosopher or a poet. Lucretius in a famous pa.s.sage stated the contemplative ideal, contrasting it with its opposite:
Sweet it is when on the great seas the winds are buffeting, to gaze from the land on another's great struggles; not because it is pleasure or joy that any one should be distressed, but because it is sweet to perceive from what misfortunes you yourself are free. Sweet is it, too, to behold great contests of war in full array over the plains, when you have no part in the danger. But nothing is more gladdening than to dwell in the calm high places, firmly embattled on the heights by the teaching of the wise, whence you can look down on others, and see them wandering hither and thither and going astray, as they seek the way of life, in strife matching their wits or rival claims of birth, struggling night and day by surpa.s.sing effort to rise up to the height of power and gain possession of the world.[1]
[Footnote 1: Lucretius: _De Rerum Natura_ (Bailey translation), book II, lines 1-12.]
But in the two types it is not the fruit of action or contemplation, but action and contemplation themselves that the two types find respectively interesting. The man of action finds an immediate satisfaction in movement, change, the clamor of affairs, the contacts with other people, the making of changes in the practical world. The man of thought finds as immediate enjoyment in noting the ways of men, and reflecting upon them.
That contemplation, disinterested thinking, also has its use goes without saying. The thinker and the dreamer may be something at least of what the Irish poet boasts:
<script>