RULES FOR TELLING A HERO—WHEN ONE SEES ONE
I have sometimes hoped that the modern world was about to produce at last some man somewhere with a big-hearted, easy powerful mind, who could protect the French Revolution. What we need most of all just now in our present crisis is some man who could take up the French Revolution without half trying, all the world looking on and wondering softly how he dares to do it, and put it gently but firmly, and once for all, up high somewhere where no one except geniuses, or at least the very tallest-minded people, could ever again get at it.
As it is, hardly a day passes but one sees new little nobodies everywhere all about one reaching up without half thinking to it—to the French Revolution—grabbing it calmly, and then using it deliberately before our eyes as a general free-for-all analogy for anything that comes into their heads. The Syndicalists and Industrial Workers of the World have had the use of it last. The fact that the French Revolution was French and that it worked fairly well a hundred years ago and with a Louis Sixteenth sort of person, and as a kind of first rough sketch, or draft of just what a revolution might be for once, and what it would have to get over being afterward, as soon as possible, never seems to have occurred to many people. One sees them rushing about the world trying to get up exact duplicates, little fussy replicas of a revolution, and of a kind of revolution that the real world put quietly away in the attic seventy years ago. The real world, and all the men in it who are facing real facts to-day, are getting what they want in precisely the opposite of the violent, theatrical French-Revolution way. The fact that people are quite different now, and that it is more effective and practical to get new ideas into their heads by keeping their heads on than it is by taking their heads off—some of us seem to have passed over. Living as we do in a world to-day with our new explosives, our new antiseptics, our new biology, bacteriology, our new storage batteries, our habit of getting everything we get and changing everything we change by quietly and coolly looking at facts, the old lumbering fashion of having a beautiful, showy, emotional revolution now on one side, and then waiting to have another beautiful, showy, emotional revolution on the other, each oscillating back and forth year by year until people finally settle down, look at facts together, become scientific, and see things as they are—has gone by. We have not time for revolutions nowadays. They may be amusing, but they are not practical, and evolution or revolution-without-knowing-it, or evolution all together, suit us better. We are in a world in which we are seeing men almost being made over before our eyes by the scientific habit of thought—by the new, slow, imperious way we have come to have of making ourselves look at things at which we would rather not look, until we see them as they are. The man of scientific spirit, the quiet-minded, implacable man who gets what he wants for himself and for others by merely turning on the light, who makes a new world for us by just showing us more plainly the one we really have, possesses the earth.
There is no reason why revolutionists should feel that they are particularly courageous, that they are the particularly high-minded, romantic, adventurous, uncompromising and superior people. The real adventure, the abiding emotion and wonder of living in the twentieth century, lies in the high, patient, slow, quiet, silent enterprise of seeing facts as they are, and without any fuss, and inexorably and with good cheer, acting on them. The human race has a new temperament. The way to fight now is to look, to look first, to look longest, and to look for the most people. The way we win a revolution or bring the enemy to terms to-day is by battering the enemy with coöperation, with understanding him and being understood by him, by being impregnably, obstinately his brother, by piling up huge happy citadels of good-will, of services rendered, services deserved, and services returned. We had an idea once that the way to conquer a man was by hitting the outside of him. We conquer men now by getting inside of them, and by getting inside first and then dealing with outside things together.
We see the inside. It is the modern note to see the inside, to attack the essence, the spirit, and to work everything out from that.
The modern method of being courageous and of defending what we want is a kind of chemistry.
Hercules is a bust now.
We prefer still little women like Madame Curie, or a man like Sir Joseph Lister, or like Wilbur Wright—the courage that faces material facts, that deals with the elements of things, whether in a bottle, or in the heaven above us, or in the earth, or in a man, or in an enemy.
When the subject-matter is human nature and the courage we have to have is the courage that can deal with people, we ask ourselves: "What are the most difficult facts to face in people?"
They are:
The facts about how they are different from us. The facts about their being like us. The facts as to what we can do about it.
So it has come to seem to me to be the greatest, the most typical and difficult courage of modern life and of a crowd civilization, the courage to look at actual facts in people and to see how the people can be made to go together.
A man's courage is his sense of identity.
A man's courage toward nature, heat, cold, mountains, seas, deserts, chemistry, geology, is his sense of identity with God and of his right to share with God in the creating of His world.
His courage toward people is his sense of identity with men who seem different from him, of all races, all classes, and all nations. He sees the differences in their big relations alongside the resemblances. Then he fits the differences into the resemblances and knows what to do.
There is a statue of Sir George Livesey, one of the early presidents of the South Metropolitan Gas Company, placed at the entrance of the works where thousands of workmen day and night pass in and pass out.
Sir George Livesey was the man who, in the early days of the South Metropolitan Gas Company, stood out against all his workmen, for six long weeks, to get the workmen to believe that they were as good as he was. He believed that they were capable, or should be capable, of being identified with him and working with him as partners, of sharing in the direction of the business, of sharing in the profits, and coöperating all day, every day, with him and the other partners, to make the business a success.
He did not propose to be locked up in a business, if he could help it, with men who did not feel identified with him, who were not his partners, or who did not want to be.
He thought it was not good business to engage five thousand men and pay them deliberately so much a day to fight his business on the inside of the works. Being obliged to do his business as a fight against people who helped him all the time, watching and outwitting them as if he were dealing with five thousand intelligent gorillas instead of with fellow human beings, did not interest him.
He did not believe that the men themselves, in spite of the way they talked, when they came to think of it, really enjoyed being intelligent gorillas, any more than he did.
The Trades Unions passed a resolution that it was safer for the men in dealing with Sir George Livesey to keep on being gorillas.
Sir George Livesey proposed that they should all try being fellow human beings and being in partnership for a little while and see how it worked.
The Trades Unions were afraid to let them try. Even if it worked very well, and if it turned out that being men was safer, in this one particular case, than being gorillas, it would set a bad example, the Trades Unions thought. They took the ground that it was safer to have all men treated alike, whether they were gorillas or not.
They instructed the men to strike. The South Metropolitan Gas Company was almost closed up, but it did not yield.
Sir George Livesey took the ground that if the Trades Unions believed that his men were not good enough for him, and that he was not good enough for his men, he would wait until they did.
The bronze statue of Sir George Livesey that the men have raised, and that thousands of men go by every day, day after day, and look up to at their work, was raised to a man who had stood out against his workmen for weeks to prove that they were as good as he was, and could be trusted to be loyal to him, and that he was as good as they were, and that he could be trusted to be loyal to them.
He had the courage to insist on being, whether anybody wanted it for the moment or not, a new kind and new size of man. He preferred being allowed to be a new kind and new size himself, and he preferred allowing his men to be new kinds and new sizes of men, and he made a shrewd, dogged guess that when they tried it they would like it. They were merely afraid to be new sizes, as we all are at first.
There are possibly three ways in which, in the confusion of our modern world, one can tell a hero when one sees one.
One knows a hero first by his originality. He invents a new kind and new size of man. He finishes off one sample. There he is.
The next thing one notices about this man (when he is invented) is his humility. He never seems to feel—having invented himself—how original he is. The more original people think he is, and the more they try to set him one side as an exception, the more he resents it.
And then, of course, the final way one knows a man is a hero is always by his courage, by his masterful way of driving through, when he meets a man, to his sense of identity with him.
One always sees a hero going about quietly everywhere, treating every other man as if he were a hero too.
He gets so in the habit, from day to day (living with himself), of believing in human nature, that when he finds himself suddenly up against other people he cannot stop.
It is not that he is deceived about the other people, though it might seem so sometimes. He merely sees further into them and further for them.
Has he not invented himself? Is he not at this very moment a better kind of man than he thought he could be once? Is he not going to be a better kind to-morrow than he is now?
So, quietly, he keeps on year by year and day by day, treating other people as if they were, or were meant to be, the same kind of man that he is, until they are.