IV
With this we have also solved the last question you will put: “What shall we get out of it? What real gain has a man from true culture?” To this is to be answered that every great inward advancement a man makes rests first upon a faith. He must forsake something he knows, and seek something toward which only a presentiment is leading him, something he can not understand yet fully, because the capacity is for the present lacking.
But if he possesses the courage to will it, he attains it; and of those who have attained this goal, not one has yet found the cost too high, or the toil too hard.
The reward of virtue in this world is just this, that virtue is, and that it can be overcome by no power of the world, but itself is the only real power and force that will completely fill life full and satisfy.
Tennyson has expressed this very beautifully in his poem “Wages”:
“Glory of warrior, glory of orator, glory of song,
Paid with a voice flying by to be lost on an endless sea—
Glory of Virtue, to fight, to struggle, to right the wrong—
Nay, but she aim’d not at glory, no lover of glory she:
Give her the glory of going on, and still to be.
“The wages of sin is death: if the wages of Virtue be dust,
Would she have heart to endure for the life of the worm and the fly?
She desires no isles of the blest, no quiet seats of the just,
To rest in a golden grove, or to bask in a summer sky:
Give her the wages of going on, and not to die.”
It is therefore, in the judgment of the best even of our own day, fully worth the trouble to strive for true culture, and all attain who really desire—rich or poor, learned or unlearned. Indeed, what Christ first said for his own generation is also very appropriate for ours, that simple souls and modest lives stand much more intimately near to true culture, and on the way to it do not meet so many and so great hindrances as do the wise and the prudent, and especially the rich, who must first strip off infinitely many prejudices and attachments to outward things, all of which are irreconcilable with true culture.
It is therefore harder for some and easier for others to attain to culture, but for none impossible, save those whose mind is wholly bound up with material things, and are satisfied besides with a merely external culture that is rather form and show than reality, however much it may claim to be real.
An ancient Chinese philosopher has already expressed this very well in the following verses, somewhat naïvely translated:
“Men who win the highest prize
Are quick to learn and quickly wise;
Men in the second rank belong
Who’re wise, but in the learning long;
Those people must be classed as thirds
Who stupid stay, and learn—but words.”
It scarcely lies within the will of every one of us whether his lot shall assign him to the first of these classes, and happily it is not a matter of very much concern. They are the great exceptions, the moral geniuses of humanity. But to the second rank every one of us is called, yes, emphatically challenged, when once the way has been shown. And the saddest thing that can happen to him in life is, if he nevertheless remains among the third sort of men, whose existence, at the end, has had no real worth, either for themselves, or for others.
“Happy is the man that findeth wisdom, and the man that getteth understanding; for the merchandise of it is better than the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold.
“Wisdom is more precious than rubies: and none of the things thou canst desire are to be compared unto her.
“Length of days is in her right hand; in her left hand are riches and honor.
“Her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace.”
V. NOBLE SOULS