Social Rights And Duties: Addresses to Ethical Societies. Vol 2 [of 2]

by Leslie Stephen

FORGOTTEN BENEFACTORS.

I was reading not long ago some remarks[A] which impressed me at the time, and upon which, as it came to pass, I have had reason to reflect more seriously. The writer dwelt upon the vast services which have been rendered to the race by men of whom all memory has long since faded away. Compare, he said, the England of Alfred with the England of Victoria; think of the enormous differences which have been brought about in thirty generations; and then try to estimate how large a share of all that has been done in the interval should be put to the credit of thousands who have long sunk into oblivion, and whose achievements, by the very necessity of the case, can never be properly estimated. A few great names mark every period; the great statesmen, the great churchmen and warriors, are commemorated in our official histories; they are placed upon exalted pedestals; and to them is attributed everything that was done in their time, though, but for the co-operation of innumerable nameless fellow-labourers, they would not have been provided even with the foundations upon which their work was necessarily based.

This remark recalls the familiar discussion about the importance of the individual. Is the hero whom we are invited to worship everything, or is he next to nothing? Is it true, as some writers put it, that had Cleopatra broken her nose, or had a cannon ball gone a hair's breadth further to the right or left when Napoleon was directing the siege of Toulon, "the whole course of history would have been changed"? Or is it rather true that, as some philosophers would say, no man is indispensable, nor even any man very important: that, if any even of the greatest of men had died of the measles in his infancy, we should have carved a different set of letters upon the pedestals of our statues, but the course of affairs would have run in much the same channel? I will not seek to discuss that old theme, to which it is evident that no very precise answer can be given. It is clearly a question of degree. Nobody can deny that a great man has an influence in the spheres of action and of thought; but to attempt to say how great an influence he has, how far he depends upon others or could be replaced by others, involves considerations lying in the unprofitable region of vague conjecture. This only I wish to note. It seems often to be suggested that there is something degrading or ungenerous in taking a side against the importance of the hero. It raises a suspicion that you are a valet, capable of supposing that men are distinguished by the quantity of lace on their coats, and not by the intensity of the fire in their souls. And, moreover, the view is fatalistic: it supposes that the destinies of the race are determined by what are denounced as blind "laws," and not by the passions and aspirations which guide their energies. To me it seems that it would be easy enough to retort these imputations. I cannot feel that a man of generous sympathies should be therefore inclined to a doctrine which would tend to make the future of the race a matter of chance. The more you believe in the importance of the great men, the more you have to admit that our progress depends upon the innumerable accidents which may stifle the greatest as easily as the smallest career. If some great social change was so absolutely dependent upon the leader who first put into words the demand upon which it is based, or who led the first forlorn hope which made victory possible, that his loss would have been the loss of his cause, it follows that the cause might have been lost if a crust of bread had gone the wrong way. It ought surely to be pleasanter if we are entitled to hold that we have a stronger ground of confidence; that the great victories of thought and action prove the diffusion of enthusiasm and courage through a wide circle; and that the fall of the chief is sure to make room for a worthy successor. The wider and deeper the causes of progress, the more confidently we can derive hope from the past, and accept with comparative equanimity even the most painful catastrophes.

Nor can I agree that such a view implies any want of susceptibility to the claims of the hero. I do not think that we can pay homage too cheerfully to the great men who form landmarks in history. I admit, most gladly, that the admiration which we feel for such men; the thrill which stirs us in reading of the great patriots and martyrs of the past; the reverence which we are now and then able to pay to a contemporary—to a Lincoln, proving that political action may represent real faiths, not party formulæ; to a Gordon, impersonating the sense of duty; or a Father Damien, sacrificing his life for the lepers—is one of the invaluable elements of moral cultivation. But I do not see the connection between this and the desire to exalt the glory of the great man by ignoring the unknown who followed in his steps, and often made them possible. I have not so far attained to the cosmopolitan point of view that my blood is not stirred by the very name of Nelson. Nay, however cosmopolitan I might become, I hope that my sympathies would never blind me to the greatness of the qualities implied in his patriotic devotion. My cosmopolitanism would rather, I hope, lead me to appreciate more generously the similar qualities in his antagonists, and, also, the similar qualities in the "band of brothers" whom he was proud to lead. I should be sorry so to admire Nelson as to forget the sturdy old race of sea dogs who did their duty, and helped him to do his in a memorable way, some ninety years ago. I would rather believe than not that, had Nelson been killed at the Nile, there were many among his followers who, had the chance come to them, would have led the Victory at Trafalgar, and have made England impregnable. "I trust we have within this realm five hundred good as he" is surely the more heroic tone. But, to drop the old-fashioned appeal to patriotic spirit, is it not true that, in every department of life, it is more congenial to our generous feelings to remember the existence and the importance of those who have never won a general reputation? This has come to be a commonplace in the sphere of scientific discovery. We find, over and over again, that the great discoverer has been all but anticipated by his rivals; that his fame, if not his real greatness, depends upon the circumstance that he has just anticipated by a year, or, perhaps, in extreme cases, by a generation, results to which a comparatively second-rate thinker would have been competent a few years later. The winner of the race is apt to monopolise the glory, though he wins only by a hair's breadth. The familiar instance of Darwin and Mr. Wallace is remarkable, not because the relation of the two thinkers was unique, but because, unfortunately, the generosity with which each acknowledged the merit of the other was exceptional. A great discovery is made when the fertile thought is already going through the process of incubation in a whole circle of intelligent minds; and that in which it first comes to the birth, claims, or, at least, receives, the whole merit, by a right of intellectual primogeniture not much more justifiable than the legal right. Admitting, again, in the fullest sense, the value and the difficulty of that last step which has to be made in order to reach the crowning triumph, it would surely be ungenerous to forget the long series of previous explorations by which alone it was made possible. There must have been countless forgotten Newtons and Descartes', who, in their day, had to exert equal powers in order to discover what are now the most familiar truths; to invent the simplest systems of arithmetical notation, or solve the earliest geometrical problems, without which neither a Newton nor a Descartes would have been possible. And what is true in science is, surely, equally true of activities which touch most of us more nearly. Of all undeniable claims to greatness I suppose the most undeniable to be the claim of the founders of religions. Their disciples are so much impressed by their greatness that they regard them as supernatural beings, or, in other words, as beings who are the sole and indispensable causes of all the consequences attributed to the prevalence of their doctrines. We are told, constantly, and often as though it were too obvious to need proof, that every moral improvement which has taken place in the world since the origin of Christianity, is due to Christianity, and that Christianity itself is entirely due to its founder. Human nature was utterly corrupt until the Deity became incarnate in the form of a Jewish peasant; and every social or moral step which has since been made in advance—and not one of the unfortunate backslidings by which the advance has since been trammelled—is a direct consequence of that stupendous event. This is the theory of the importance of the individual, raised, so to speak, to its very highest potence. We not only attribute the most important and far-reaching of all changes to a single agent, but declare that that agent cannot have been human, and indeed cannot have been less than the first cause of all changes. I shall not, of course, discuss the plausibility of a doctrine which, if accepted, breaks the whole chain of cause and effect, and makes the later history of the world not an evolution of previously operative process, but the result of an abrupt, mysterious interference from without, incommensurable with any other set of spiritual forces. I am content to say that to my mind the doctrine becomes daily more impossible to any one who thinks seriously and tries to picture to himself distinctly the true nature of the great world processes. What is to my purpose is, that it seems to me to be not only infinitely more credible, but also more satisfactory and more generous—if there be properly a question of generosity—to do justice to the disciples as well as to the master—to believe that the creed was fermenting in the hearts and minds of millions of human beings; and that, although the imperfect and superstitious elements by which it was alloyed were due to the medium in which it was propagated, yet, on the other hand, it succeeded so far as it corresponded to the better instincts of great masses of men, struggling blindly and through many errors to discover rules of conduct and modes of conceiving the universe more congenial than the old to their better nature, and prepared to form a society by crystallising round the nucleus which best corresponded to their aspirations. When so regarded, it seems to me, and only when so regarded, we can see in the phenomenon something which may give us solid ground for hopes of humanity, and enable us to do justice to countless obscure benefactors. The corruption of human nature, as theologians sometimes tell us, expresses a simple fact. Undoubtedly, it expresses a fact which nobody, so far as I know, ever thought of denying—the fact that there are bad instincts in human nature; that many men are cruel, sensual, and false; and that every man is more or less liable to succumb to temptation. But the essential meaning of the old theological dogma was, I take it, something different. It meant that man was so corrupt that he could only be made good by a miracle; that even his apparent virtues are splendid sins unless they come from divine grace; and, in short, that men cannot be really elevated without supernatural interference. If all that is good in men comes from their religions, and if religions are only explicable as inspirations from without, that, no doubt, logically follows. I prefer, myself, to believe that, though all men are weak, and a good many utter scoundrels; yet human nature does contain good principles; that those principles tend, however slow and imperfect may be the process, gradually to obtain the mastery; and that the great religions of the races, while indicating the intellectual and moral shortcomings of mankind, indicate also the gradual advance of ethical ideals, worked out by the natural and essential tendencies of the race. And thus, as it seems to me, this conception of the mode of growth of religions and of morality, which gathers strength as we come to take a more reasonable view of the world's history, is closely connected with the doctrine that, instead of ascribing all good achievement to the hero who drops from heaven, or springs spontaneously from the earth, we should steadily remember that he is only possible, and his work can only be successfully secured, by the tacit co-operation of the innumerable unknown persons in whose hearts his words find an echo because they are already feeling after the same ideal which is in him more completely embodied.

In our judgment of such cases there is, then, an injustice so far as we make a false estimate of the right distribution of praise and gratitude. It would be an injustice, in a stricter sense, to the persons ignored, if we regarded such gratitude as the appropriate and main reward of a noble life. I need not repeat the commonplaces of moralists as to the real value of posthumous fame, nor inquire whether it implies an illusion, nor how far the desire for such fame is, in point of fact, a strong motive with many people. This only I will note—that obscurity is a condition, and by no means an altogether unpleasant condition, of much of the very best work that is done. The general or the statesman is conspicuous in connection with successful enterprise in which his subordinates necessarily do a great part of the labour. It is impossible for the outside world to form a correct judgment in such cases; and, therefore, there is no hardship to the particular persons concerned, if they are simply ignored where they would, certainly, be misjudged; and if they, therefore, work in obscurity, content with the approval of the very few who can estimate their merits. There is a compensation, as we see, when we reflect upon the moral disadvantages of conspicuous station. Literary people, for example, must be very unobservant if they do not notice how demoralising is the influence of public applause, and the constant inducement to court notoriety. It is unwholesome to live in an atmosphere which constantly stimulates and incites the weaknesses to which we are most liable. And many of our first writers must, I should fancy, feel pangs of self-humiliation when they contrast the credit which they have got for popular work with the very scanty recognition which comes to many who have applied equal talents to the discharge of duties often far more beneficial to mankind, but, from their nature, performed in the shade. "I," such a man, I fancy, must sometimes say to himself, "am quoted in every newspaper; I am puffed, and praised, and denounced; not to know me is to write yourself down a dunce; and, yet, have I done as much for the good of my kind as this or that humble friend, who would be astonished were his name ever to be uttered in public?" Some such thought, for example, is inspired by Johnson's most pathetic verses, when the great lexicographer, the acknowledged dictator of English literature, thought of the poor dependant, the little humble quack doctor, Levett, who was content, literally, to be fed with the crumbs from his tables. But the obscure dependant, as the patron felt, had done all that he could to alleviate the sum of human misery.

His virtues walked their narrow round,

Nor made a pause, nor left a void;

And, sure, the Eternal Master found

The single talent well employed.

Have I not, Johnson seems to have felt, really done less to soothe misery by my Dictionary and my Ramblers than this obscure labourer in the back lanes of London, of whom, but for my verses, no one would have heard even the name?

A full answer to questions suggested by these thoughts would, perhaps, require an estimate of the relative value of different aims and different functions in life; and, for such an estimate, there are no adequate grounds. In one of Browning's noblest poems, Rabbi Ben Ezra—of whom I must say that he strikes me as being a little too self-complacent—puts a relevant question. "Who," he asks, "shall arbitrate?"

Ten men love what I hate;

Shun what I follow, slight what I receive;

Ten who, in ears and eyes,

Match me; we all surmise,

They this thing and I that: whom shall my soul believe?

And he answers or suggests one condition of a satisfactory answer, by saying that we are not to take the coarse judgment of the world, which goes by the work achieved. We must remember—

All instincts immature,

All purposes unsure,

That, weighed not as his work, yet swelled the man's account;

Thoughts hardly to be packed

Into a narrow act;

Fancies that broke through language and escaped;

All I would never be,

All men ignored in me,

That I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped.

If it were proper to treat a poetical utterance of this kind like a deliberate philosophical theory, I might wish to argue the point a little with the rabbi. But, at any rate, he points to considerations which show how little any one can judge of merit by any tangible and generally accessible test. I am content to say that this sentiment gives one—and a very impressive—answer to a problem which presses upon us the more as we grow older. It is natural for a man who feels that he has done most of his work, that the night is coming, and, as it seems, coming with accelerated speed; who feels, too, that whatever he has done or may do, he can no longer have the approval of those whose approval was dear to him as his breath;—it is natural for such a man to look back, to take stock more or less of his own performances perhaps, and at any rate to endeavour to estimate at their true worth the services which he has received from others. What, he may ask, has he done with his talents? what little fragment has he achieved of what might once have been in his power? The answer is pretty sure to have a very melancholy side to it; and it will lead to the question, what part of that fragment was really worth doing? What were the few really solid services which he may set off as some satisfaction to his self-esteem, against his countless errors and his wanderings in wrong directions, and his attempts to achieve the impossible, and the waste of energy upon the trifling and the worthless in which he is pretty sure to have spent a very large proportion of his time? When we try to return a verdict upon such issues, we feel painfully to how many illusions we are subject. When we are young we naturally accept the commonplaces, and do not question the ideals amid which we happen to have grown up; we are not conscious of the movement which we share. As long as we are floating with the current, we are not even aware that any current exists. We take our own little world to be the fixed base, quite unconscious that it is all the time whirling and spinning along a most complex course. And so it is difficult, even if the thought of making the attempt ever occurs to us, to try to occupy the position of a bystander looking on at life from outside, and endeavouring to pronounce some general opinion as to its merits or defects—its happiness or misery as a whole. "What a queer place this is!" I remember a man once saying to me abruptly; and I thought that he was referring to the steamboat on which we were fellow-passengers. I found that he had been suddenly struck by the oddity of the universe in general; and it seemed to me that there was a great deal to be said for a remark which seldom occurs to those people who take things for granted. We are roused sometimes by a philosopher who professes pessimism or optimism, to ask and to try to answer such questions. The answers, we know, are apt to be painfully discordant. Is the world on the whole a scene of misery, of restless desires, proving that we are miserable now, and doomed never to obtain satisfaction? is it our only wisdom to give up the will to live; to hope that all this visible and tangible scenery is so much illusion, and to aspire to sink into Nirvana? Shall we try to conquer all earthly appetites by a thorough-going asceticism, and cultivate those spiritual emotions which can only find full satisfaction in another and a better world? Or shall we agree that, after all, the love of the true and the beautiful, or, it may be, the physically pleasurable, gives a real solid comfort for the time, which it would be idle to drop for a shadow? Is the world a scene of probation, in which we are to be fitted for higher spheres beyond human ken by the hearty and strenuous exertion of every faculty that we possess? or shall we say that such action is a good in itself, which requires to be supplemented by no vision of any ulterior end? Shall we say that this is the best of all possible worlds because the fittest always tends to prevail, or that it is the worst because even the greatest wretchedness which is compatible with bare existence can still survive?

Philosophers, no doubt, contradict each other, because even philosophers are not exempt from the universal weakness. The explanation that pessimism means a disordered liver, and the counter remark that optimism means a cold heart and a good digestion, are too familiar to need exposition. Each man's macrocosm is apt to be related to his microcosm, as the convex to the concave of a curve. To say the world is disagreeable, means that I find it disagreeable; and that may be either my own fault or the world's. Nor is it easy to correct the personal error by observation, for the observer carries himself and his illusions with him. Has such-and-such a life been a happy one? How are we to decide? We are often subject to what may be called the dramatic illusion. We judge by the catastrophe, by the success or failure of the assumed end. We see a noble young man struck down by some accident, and we think of his career sadly, because the promise has not been fulfilled. Is it not equally reasonable to say that the promise was itself a blessing? that the man we regret had his twenty or thirty years of hopefulness, confidence, and happiness, and that that was a clear gain even if we lose the result which we might have anticipated? Or we are impressed by the more exciting incidents of a life, the blows which crushed a man at intervals; and we forget all the monotonous years of tranquil happiness which, if we apply an arithmetical test, may have occupied by far the greater part of his existence. Southey, for example, argues that although we remember Cowper chiefly for his terrible mental suffering, we shall find, if we add up the moments of happiness and misery, that he probably had, on the balance, a life of much more enjoyment than torture. So, when we speak of the misery of a nation at the time of some great trouble—the French Revolution, for example—it is difficult to remember how small was the proportion of actual sufferers; how many thousands or millions of children were enjoying their little sports, utterly ignorant of the distant storm; how many mothers were absorbed in watching their children; and how many quiet commonplace people were going about their daily peaceful labour, pretty much as usual, and with only a vague—and possibly pleasurable—excitement at the news, which occasionally drifted to them, of the catastrophes in a different sphere. Carlyle, in one of his most vivid and famous passages, has incidentally drawn the contrast. Or, if we try to form an estimate of the balance of happiness and misery through any portion of the race, and appeal to experience for an answer, we must certainly remember how limited is the field of observation, even of the best informed, and the most impartial; how rigidly they are confined for their direct knowledge to one little section of one part of the race; and how the vast majority—the thousand millions or so who are altogether beyond their ken—are known to them only by statistical tables or the casual reports of superficial observers.

As there are so many difficulties in forming an estimate, as we are not agreed as to the true ends of human life, nor as to the degrees in which those ends are actually attained, nor as to the efficacy of the various causes which determine the success or failure of the means employed, it becomes any one to put forward his own opinion upon the topics to which such considerations apply, with all modesty. And, yet, I think that I may dwell upon some truths which may be admitted by those who differ upon these difficult problems, and, as I fancy, deserve more weight than they generally receive, even though they have become commonplaces. The main condition of human happiness, say some people, is physical health. A man whose organs are all working satisfactorily cannot fail to be happy under any but very abnormal conditions; as, conversely, a grain of sand in the wrong place will make any life a burden. No one will dispute the truth contained in such dicta; and, perhaps, as we realise more distinctly the importance of sound health to our neighbours and to our descendants, as well as to ourselves, we shall lay greater stress upon the conduct which is conducive to its preservation. We shall see that what is, apparently, a mere dictate of personal prudence, has, also, its ethical aspect. But, without dwelling upon this view, we may apply the analogy to society. Whatever morality precisely means, and whatever happiness means, it clearly indicates what we call—and I think that it is no mere metaphor—a healthy state of society. This, again, implies, first of all, the health of those domestic relations which are as the ultimate molecular forces which bind together the social tissue. The society, we may say without hesitation, in which the reciprocal duties of husbands and wives, parents and children, are instinctively recognised and habitually observed, has, so far, secured the most deeply-seated and essential condition of happiness and virtue; the society in which the union of married people normally produces harmony, and the absolute identity of interests and affections, in which children are brought up in a pure home atmosphere, with an embodiment of the beauty of domestic love always before their eyes, imbibing unconsciously the tradition of a high moral standard, and so prepared to repay, in due time, to others the services lavishly and ungrudgingly bestowed upon them by their elders,—so far represents perfectly sound health. The degree in which any ethical theory recognises and reveals the essential importance of the family relation is, I think, the best test of its approximation to the truth. An unworthy view of domestic happiness may lead to the ascetic view which sets up a sham and Quixotic ideal; or to the cynical view which regards it as a mere case of selfish indulgence. I do not deny that the relation, like all other human relations, may require modification as circumstances change. Difficulties arise, as when we notice the great social changes which have broken up ancient ties, and have tended to weaken the family bond by facilitating desertion, and increasing the floating population. And many socialist schemes appear at first sight to be, and sometimes are, consciously designed to weaken the sense of responsibility of parents. I, of course, cannot now discuss a point which is, undoubtedly, of the highest importance; but I am certainly convinced that the merits of any change must be tested by its tendency to preserve, and, if possible, intensify the strength of this underlying bond upon which the welfare of society depends far more intimately than upon any other human relation.

If this be true, it follows also that to those activities which knit families together, which help to enlarge the highest ideal of domestic life, we owe a greater debt than to any other kind of conduct. And to this I add that, as I believe, the highest services of this kind are rendered by persons condemned, or perhaps I should say privileged, to live in obscurity; whose very names will soon be forgotten, and who are entirely eclipsed by people whose services, though not equally valuable, are by their nature more public. To prove such an assertion is, of course, impossible. I give it only as my personal impression—for what it is worth, after any deductions you may please to make upon the score of the great fallibility of such impressions; and only because, correct or otherwise, it may serve to bring out aspects of the truth which we are apt to neglect. I have lived long enough to have had opportunities of seeing many eminent men and women. I have insensibly formed some kind of estimate of the services which they have rendered to me and my like; and I record, as far as I can, the result upon my own convictions. I will put aside for the moment the half-dozen men of really first-rate eminence,—the men whose names are written upon all the great intellectual and social movements of the century. I will think for the present only of those who may be placed in the second rank; of those who do not profess to have originated, but only to have diffused, important thoughts; who have acted as lieutenants to the great leaders, and become known to their contemporaries, with little prospect of filling any important place in the memory of their successors. Yet even such men bulk far more largely in our eyes than multitudes of men and women whose names will never be known outside their own little parish, or even their family circles. And then I ask myself, how far the estimate thus formed corresponds to the real value of the services performed. I think that I can speak most easily by deserting the line of abstract argument, and endeavouring to draw a portrait or two, which you need not assume to correspond too closely to particular facts. I mean to suggest reflections which will really apply in many representative cases, and to refer to typical instances of general truths. I will first mention one such case which happened to strike me forcibly at the time, and which no one here, I am quite certain, will be able to identify. Long years ago I knew a young man at college; he was so far from being intellectually eminent that he had great difficulty in passing his examinations; he died from the effects of an accident within a very short time after leaving the university, and hardly any one would now remember his name. He had not the smallest impression that there was anything remarkable about himself, and looked up to his teachers and his more brilliant companions with a loyal admiration which would have made him wonder that they should ever take notice of him. And yet I often thought then, and I believe, in looking back, that I thought rightly, that he was of more real use to his contemporaries than any one of the persons to whose influence they would most naturally refer as having affected their development. The secret was a very simple one. Without any special intellectual capacity, he somehow represented with singular completeness a beautiful moral type. He possessed the "simple faith miscalled simplicity," and was so absolutely unselfish, so conspicuously pure in his whole life and conduct, so unsuspicious of evil in others, so sweet and loyal in his nature, that to know him was to have before one's eyes an embodiment of some of the most lovable and really admirable qualities that a human being can possess. He was a living exemplification of the truth which some great humorists have embodied in their writings, the truth that simplicity at which fools laugh may be venerable to wise observers. Young men were not always immaculate in those days: I don't know that they are now; some of them probably were vicious in conduct, and might be cynical in the views which they openly expressed. But whatever might be their failings, they were at the age when all but the depraved—that is, I hope and fully believe, all but a very small minority—were capable of being deeply impressed by this concrete example. They might affect to ridicule, but it was impossible that even the ridicule should not be of the kindly sort; blended and tempered with something that was more like awe—profound respect, at least, for the beauty of soul that underlay the humble exterior. The direct moral addresses which took the form of eloquent sermons or of good advice naturally gained an incomparably higher reputation for those who uttered them. But, considering the facility with which the impressions so made evaporate from the minds of the hearers, I often thought that this obscure influence, the more impressive when one felt it because of its entire unconsciousness, probably did far more to stimulate good feelings and higher aspirations among his companions than all the official exhortations to which they ever listened. He would have been unfeignedly surprised to hear, what I most sincerely believe to be the truth, that his tutor owed incomparably more to his living exemplification of what is meant by a character of unblemished purity and simplicity, than he owed to the tutor whose respectable platitudes he received with unaffected humility.

The case—for various reasons—impressed me deeply; and I have often thought of it and of the principle which it illustrates in later years. I once knew, for example, a woman whose whole life was devoted to domestic duties, and who confessed to me that she had sometimes felt a touch of humiliation when she thought how narrow was her own sphere of action, while her husband was daily deciding upon great questions of high political importance. Some women would have drawn the conclusion, that the exclusion of women from political activity was a grievance to be abated; and such people might receive with scorn the suggestion that the discharge of the domestic duty might possibly be as important as the discharge of the more conspicuous function. The argument about the proper sphere of women is now generally treated with contempt; and I am perfectly ready to admit that it begs the question, and is often a mere utterance of blind prejudice. No one, I hope, could assert more willingly than I, that the faculties of women should be cultivated as fully as possible, and that every sphere in which their faculties can be effectively applied should be thrown open to them. But the doctrine sometimes tacitly confounded with this, that the sphere generally assigned to women is necessarily lower or less important than others, is not to be admitted, because the contradictory may be misapplied. The domestic influence is, no doubt, confined within narrower limits; but then, within those limits it is incomparably stronger and more certain of effect. The man or woman can really mould the character of a little circle, and determine the whole life of one little section of the next generation; when it may be very difficult to say whether the influence which they can bring to bear upon a class or a nation is really perceptible at all, or does not even operate in the direction opposite to that intended. And I could not help thinking that a woman who was bringing up sons and daughters ready to quit themselves like brave men and women in the great struggle of life, might be doing something more really important than her conspicuous husband, who was, after all, only part of a vast and complicated machinery, nominally directed by him, but, in reality, controlling all his energy, and, not impossibly, working out the very results which he most disapproved.

It is, therefore, with no reference to any of the political theories of women's rights, and so forth, that I venture to insist upon this topic. I think that we habitually under-estimate the enormous value of the services, whether of man or woman, done in the shade, and confined within a very limited area. Let me attempt, again, to draw a portrait, not all imaginary, which may explain, at least, what I often feel—the contrast between the real worth of such lives and the recognition which they can ever receive. Wordsworth, in one of those poems which show best how true and tender were his moral instincts, has described one who was—

A perfect woman, nobly planned

To warn, to comfort, and command;

And yet a spirit too, and bright

With something of an angel light.

The words have often come to me of late, till I fancy that I could supply a commentary. The woman of whom Wordsworth speaks was, when he first saw her, a "phantom of delight," an embodiment of feminine beauty, and, as such, possessing a characteristic perhaps superfluous from a moral point of view. I have known and know women, not exactly beautiful, before whom I would gladly bow as deeply as I would if they were beautiful as Helen of Troy. But a poet must be allowed to take pleasure in beauty, and we may grant to it a certain place that it deserves among higher qualities. For it does so when the possessor is absolutely—not unaware of the fact, for that is hardly possible, nor, perhaps, desirable—but absolutely untouched by any vanity or self-consciousness. The beauty, one may say, gives, at least, an opportunity for displaying a quality which otherwise would not have so good an occasion of manifestation. And, moreover, there is a beauty of the rarest and most exquisite, which, if not the product, is, or at least seems to be, the spontaneous accompaniment of nobility of mind and character. Some persons, by a singular felicity, possess beauty as one of their essential attributes; it seems to be not an accident or an addition, but a part of their essence, which must mould every detail, which shines through body as well as soul, and is but the outward and visible sign of all that is sweet and elevated. Wordsworth's ideal woman is—

Not too bright or good

For human nature's daily food,

For transient sorrows, simple wiles,

Praise, blame, love, kisses, tears and smiles:

and yet displays equally—

The reason firm, the temperate will,

Endurance, foresight, strength, and skill.

We cannot, even in our thoughts, separate the artistic homage which we pay to the external appearance, and that which we pay to the inner qualities, of which they are apparently the inevitable and predestined symbol. We have before us the ideal—the type which reconciles all the conditions of human life, physical and moral—the "perfect woman," who is also the fitting vehicle of the angel light.

But it is, of course, upon the qualities symbolised and not upon the outward symbols that we must insist. I will, therefore, say, that the inward beauty, whether fully represented or not by the outward form, implies, in the first place, the absence of all those qualities which tend to lower and vulgarise life. What we call the worldly view, for example, of love and marriage, is simply unintelligible to such a nature. Love means, to it, an absolute self-surrender, and the complete fusion of its own life with the life of the beloved object. It can only be granted in return for a reciprocal surrender; and becomes the mutual passion by which fear and distrust are utterly cast out; and the intensity proves not liability to weak illusions, but the sure insight of the lofty instincts which cannot fail to recognise corresponding instincts in others. To the lower mind, such a character appears to be too highly strung, too impassioned, romantic, and careless of the solid advantages which secure at least comfort. To those of more or less congenial sentiment, it will rather appear to imply a spirit which, because it breathes a higher element than that at which men habitually live, perceives also more distinctly what are the truest and deepest sources of all that deserves to be called real happiness. To live in an atmosphere of the strongest and most unqualified affection, to have the very substance of life woven out of the unreserved love of a worthy object, is its ideal; and that ideal represents, I am convinced, the highest and purest happiness that can be enjoyed in this world.

Suppose, now, that one so endowed is struck by one of those terrible blows which shiver the very foundations of life; which make the outside world a mere discordant nightmare, and seem to leave for the only reality a perpetual and gnawing pain, which lulls for an instant only to be revived by every contact with facts. Sorrow becomes the element in which one lives and moves. Consolation, according to the familiar phrase, is idle; for the vulgar notion of consoling is that which Sir Walter Scott attributes to one of his characters: it is to try to prove that the very thing for which we offer consolation has not happened—in other words, to undertake an enterprise which is obviously hopeless and illusory. Yet the greatest test of true nobility of character is its power of turning even the bitterest grief to account. The lofty and simple nature sorrows; it does not attempt to shut its eyes to the full extent of the calamity, nor seek to distract itself by a forgetfulness which might obscure its most sacred visions of the past; nor, on the other hand, to make a parade of its sensibility, or try to foster or stimulate enervating emotions. It knows instinctively that grief, terrible as it is, is yet, in another sense, an invaluable possession. The sufferer who has eaten his bread with herbs learns, as the poet puts it, to know the heavenly powers. For he or she acquires a deeper and keener sympathy with all who are desolate and afflicted; and the natural affections become blended, if with a certain melancholy, yet with that quick and delicate perception of the suffering of others which gives the only consolation worthy of the name—the sense of something soothing and softening and inspiring in the midst of the bitterest agony. Grief, so taken, may be stunning and deadening for the time; it may make life a heavy burden, from which hope and eager interest have disappeared: "weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable"; but by slow degrees it undergoes a transmutation into more steady and profound love of whatsoever may still be left. The broken and mangled fibres imperceptibly find new attachments; and the only solution of the terrible dilemma is reached when time, which heals the actual laceration, enables the sufferer to feel that the new ties do not imply infidelity to the objects still beloved, but are a continuous development of the indelible emotions, and that the later activities are but a carrying on of the old duties, made more sacred and solemn by the old grief and its associations.

A lofty nature which has profited by passing through the furnace acquires claims not only upon our love but upon our reverence. It becomes perhaps within the little circle with which it is familiar the obvious and immediate resort whenever some blow of sorrow or sickness has fallen upon one of its fellows. The figure which I attempt truly to describe is happily not unfamiliar. We have all, I hope, known some one who is instinctively called to mind whenever there is need of the loving kindness which seems so obvious and spontaneous that it does not even occur to the bestower to connect the conduct with self-sacrifice. Such persons appear to be formed by nature for ministering angels, and move among us unconscious of their claims to our devotion, and bringing light into darkness by their simple presence with as little thought that they deserve our gratitude as that they ought to emerge from obscurity. Happiness, peaceful and contented at least, if not the old bright and confident happiness, may come in time; and new spheres be bound together by the attractive force of a character which, if it is not more intrinsically lovable, has gained a more pathetic charm from its experience. The desire to relieve suffering has become a settled instinct; and, even when there is no special appeal to it, is incessantly overflowing in those "little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love" which, according to Wordsworth again, are the "best portion of a good man's life". Whether that be quite true I know not; but in so far as such acts seem to testify most unequivocally to the constant flow of a current of sympathetic tenderness, always ready to seize upon every occasion of giving happiness, on a child's birthday as on the parent's deathbed, they perhaps speak to us most convincingly of an all-pervading sweetness of character. An assiduous and watchful desire to show kindness, which makes a perpetual succession of such little attentions a part of the practical religion of the doer, may generate a corresponding love even more forcibly than the sacrifices made in obedience to a more conspicuous appeal for help.

The value of such a life as I have tried imperfectly to indicate is not to be estimated by the number of good actions performed, or by any definite list of the particular consequences achieved. It may be hard to say how many pangs have been soothed, how much happiness has been added in special cases, by one who goes through life absorbed in such activities. But above and beyond all the separate instances, such a person,—the object only to a few, perhaps, of love and reverence, but to those few the object of those feelings in the most unreserved and unequivocal form,—is something far more than a source of any number of particular benefits. To reckon up and estimate the value of such benefits is a conceivable undertaking; but we cannot attempt to calculate the value of a spiritual force which has moulded our lives, which has helped by a simple consciousness of its existence to make us gentler, nobler, and purer in our thoughts of the world; which has constantly set before us a loftier ideal than we could frame for ourselves; which has bestowed upon us an ever-present criterion of the goodness or badness of our own motives by our perception of the light in which they appear to a simple and elevated character; which has made every cowardly and worldly thought shrink away abashed in the presence of noble instincts; which has given us a sympathy so close and constant that, as with the light of the sun, we are apt to be unconscious of its essential importance to us until some accident makes us realise the effect of its eclipse; and which, therefore, has in some sense become a part of ourselves, a restraining and elevating and softening impulse, to which we cling as to the worthiest and most indispensable of our possessions.

I am not speaking from imagination. I am trying to utter convictions springing from my personal experience, and which I feel—most painfully—that I cannot adequately express. I could not say more, even if by saying more I could express myself adequately, without a sense of a kind of profanity for uttering what should be kept for a few. But though I speak for myself, I hope and I entirely believe that I am therefore speaking for many others also. There are few who have the eyes to see who have not recognised some such light shining upon their lives, and as one main source of what they have done or said if least unworthy. I fancy that the thought which naturally occurs to us when we reflect upon such an influence will be: was I, could I, be worthy of it? what am I that such goodness should have come to me? or, what, if anything, have I done to transmit to others the blessings conferred upon me? Such questions have various aspects, and I do not quite see how they could be reduced to a form admitting of a bare logical answer. It now seems to me almost unbecoming to dwell upon the comparison which I contemplated at starting. I imagined a man who has made some such impression upon the world as is recognised by public reputation, to compare his own achievement with such achievements as these, which are absolutely private, and neither seek nor desire any public reward. In truth, the two things are, perhaps, strictly incommensurable. They must be measured by different standards, and are of importance in different spheres. And yet I must try to say this much. The achievements to which I have referred as in their nature public and recognisable, should certainly be considered with gratitude. Yet, when we attempt to estimate their worth we are sensible of terrible drawbacks. I have passed, let us say, a measure admirably useful, or written a book which has made a mark. Certainly I have done a good action. But what if I had not done it? Were there not hundreds of people who would have been only too glad to take my place? I have been successful because I happen to have been in the front rank, which was impelled by thousands of eager supporters. I have said just a little better than my rivals what they were all striving to say; and my highest reward will be that my name will be attached in my own generation, and possibly even in the next, to some particular opinion which yet would have come to the birth without me. I have made a certain commotion on the surface for a moment or two, but the ripple will die away in a few years; and, important as I may seem to myself, I have only to look back for a generation to recognise the plain fact that there have not been at any period more than one or two conspicuous workers the products of whose activity can be distinctly recognised at the present day. Even in regard to them, it is often doubtful whether they did more harm or good; whether they did not direct human energy along the wrong paths, and do as much in giving currency to fallacies as in extending permanent truths.

Now, after making such deductions, which to me, at least, seem to be essentially necessary, we can, I think, do justice to the truth which is contained in Browning's poem. You are not, he seems to say, to measure the worth of life by the amount of work done in it, by the tangible and obvious results which can be tested by the world's coarse finger and thumb. Rather, he suggests, the value depends upon the excellence of the soul which is fashioned into "heaven's consummate cup" by the stress of the potter's wheel; by the joys and sorrows, the trials and triumphs, which have affected it in its passage through life. I should prefer to say that the kind of dilemma so suggested is not really to the purpose. The rabbi may seem to speak, as I said, with a little too much complacency, if he be interpreted as sharing the feeling which is often, however unjustly, attributed to Goethe—that his supreme end was the cultivation of his own nature, and that he regarded himself as a work of art, to be elaborated for its own sake, and enriched by experience even at the cost of others. But in a better interpretation this does not apply: for the very process by which the noble nature is developed and cultivated, implies the closest and most active sympathy with suffering, and an invariable reference to the highest aims of life. It becomes perfect, that is, by constantly rendering invaluable services to others; and there is, therefore, no meaning in drawing a distinction between the services and the influence upon the soul itself. They are parts of the same indivisible process. What is true and noble, as I think, in the rabbi's doctrine, is that which I have already tried to indicate: namely, that the worth of such a life is not exhausted by a catalogue of the good deeds done, but that, beyond and above all them, remains the inestimable value within its own circle of the very existence of a natural symbol of the good and holy—by the "holy" I understand that which is not only moral, but beautiful by reason of its morality—and the incalculable benefits to it of the pure fountain of all good influences which descend upon all within its reach. The stimulus which is given to the beholders of such a life—by the clear perception that morality does not mean a string of judicious commonplaces, but can be embodied as the spring of a harmonious life, and reveal itself as a concrete flesh-and-blood human being—is something which transcends in value all the particular results which we can tabulate and reckon up. We must think of it, not as the cause of so many external benefits, but as the manifestation of a spiritual force which modifies and raises the characters of all its surroundings. If the sphere within which it distinctly operates is far narrower than that of political or literary achievement, it is also incomparably purer, and works without a single drawback. Every religion has its saints, and honours them in various ways, not always altogether edifying. But that man is unfortunate who has not a saint of his own—some one in whose presence, or in the very thought of whom, he does not recognise a superior, before whom it becomes him to bow with reverence and gratitude, and who has purified the atmosphere and strengthened the affections in a little circle from which the influence may be transmitted to others. The saint will be forgotten all too soon—long before less valuable, but accidentally more conspicuous, services have passed out of mind—but the moral elevation, even of a small circle, is a benefit which may be propagated indefinitely.

If we cannot hope to preserve the name, we can try to carry on the good work; to maintain the ties which have been formed and propagate the goodwill through widening circles. That, I think, is what every one feels under the stress of the most terrible trials of life. We are shocked by the sense of the inevitable oblivion that will hide all that we loved so well. There is, according to my experience, only one thought which is inspiring, and—if not in the vulgar sense consoling, for it admits the existence of an unspeakable calamity—points, at least, to the direction in which we may gradually achieve something like peace and hopefulness without the slightest disloyalty to the objects of our love. It is the thought which I can only express by saying that we may learn to feel as if those who had left us had yet become part of ourselves; that we have become so permeated by their influence, that we can still think of their approval and sympathy as a stimulating and elevating power, and be conscious that we are more or less carrying on their work, in their spirit. We find, as Lowell says in his noble ode—

We find in our dull road their shining track;

In every nobler mood

We feel the orient of their spirit glow,

Part of our life's unalterable good,

Of all our saintlier aspiration;

They come transfigured back,

Secure from change in their high-hearted ways,

Beautiful evermore, and with the rays

Of morn on their white shields of expectation.

Alas, he adds, even the best deeds will be hidden before long by "the thoughtless drift of the deciduous years". Yes; they will be forgotten before long, as we too shall be forgotten—the incalculable majority within a generation or two. The thought may be painful, but the reasonable conclusion is, I think, not that we should fret over the inevitable; rather that we should purify our minds from this as from other illusions, and feel ashamed of the selfish desire that our own names should be preserved when we know that so many who were far better and nobler than ourselves will inevitably be forgotten, and were better and nobler without the stimulus of any such paltry desire. Gratitude to the obscure is, in this sense, I take it, a duty, which we cannot practise without a proportional moral benefit. It enables us to rise above the constant temptation to seek for notoriety at any price, and to make our ultimate aim the achievement of good work, not the chorus of popular applause which may be aroused. Thoroughly to conquer that temptation is, I take it, one of the objects which every man should set before himself. And nothing, I think, helps one more than a vivid and enduring consciousness of the enormous debt which we owe to men and women who lived in obscurity, who never had a thought of emerging out of obscurity, and whose ennobling influence has yet become a part of every higher principle of action in ourselves. I may or I may not have formed too low an estimate of the services of the few heroes who stand conspicuously above the ordinary level; but I am certain that nothing that I can say would exaggerate the importance of many who have no claims to such a position. To cherish and preserve that influence by every faculty we possess seems to me to be our plainest duty; and we may comfort ourselves, if comfort be needed, by the reflection that, though the memory may be transitory, the good done by a noble life and character may last far beyond any horizon which can be realised by our imaginations.

THE END.