Life's Enthusiasms

by David Starr Jordan

And action should be understood in a large way, the taking of one's part in affairs worth doing, not mere activity, nor fussiness, nor movement for movement's sake, like that of "ants on whom pepper is sprinkled." As the lesser enthusiasms fade and fail, one should take a stronger hold on the higher ones. "Grizzling hair the brain doth clear" and one sees in better perspective the things that need doing. It is thus possible to grow old as a "grand old man," a phrase invented for Gladstone, but which fits just as well our own Mark Twain. Grand old men are those who have been grand young men, and carry still a young heart beneath old shoulders. There are plenty of such in our country to-day, though the average man begins to give up the struggle for the higher life at forty. President White, President Eliot, President Angell,—few men have left so deep an impression on the Twentieth Century. Edward Everett Hale, the teacher who has shown us what it is to have a country. Senator Hoar, Professor Agassiz, Professor Le Conte, Professor Shaler,—all these, whatever the weight of years, remained young men to the last. When Agassiz died, the Harvard students "laid a wreath of laurel on his bier and their manly voices sang a requiem, for he had been a student all his life long, and when he died he was younger than any of them." Jefferson was in the seventies when he turned back to his early ambition, the foundation of the University of Virginia. The mother of Stanford University was older than Jefferson before she laid down the great work of her life as completed. When the heart is full, it shows itself in action as well as in speech. When the heart is empty, then life is no longer worth while. The days pass and there is no pleasure in them. Let us then fill our souls with noble ideals of knowledge, of art, of action. "Let us lay up a stock of enthusiasms in our youth, lest we reach the end of our journey with an empty heart, for we lose many of them by the way."

We hear much in these days of the wickedness of power, of the evil behavior of men in high places, of men in low places, and men whom the people have been perforce obliged to trust. This is no new thing, though the struggle against it, the combination of the forces of reform and blackmail, of dreamers and highwaymen, is offering some new phases.

There is a kind of music popular with uncritical audiences and with people who know no better, which answers to the name of "ragtime." It is the music of those who do not know good music or who have not the moral force to demand it. The spirit of ragtime is not confined to music: graft is the ragtime of business, the spoils system the ragtime of politics, adulteration the ragtime of manufacture. There is ragtime science, ragtime literature, ragtime religion. You will know each of these by its quick returns. The spirit of ragtime determines the six best sellers, the most popular policeman, the favorite congressman, the wealthiest corporation, the church which soonest rents its pews.

But it does not, control the man who thinks for himself. It has no lien on the movements of history, its decrees avail nothing in the fixing of truth. The movements of the stars pay it no tribute, neither do the movements of humanity. The power of graft is a transient deception. Emerson's parable of the illusions gives the clue to our time, to all time, in its contrast of the things which appear with the things that abide.

"There is no chance and no anarchy in the Universe," says Emerson, "all is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere. The young mortal enters the hall of the firmament; there he is alone with them alone, they pronouncing on him benedictions and gifts, and beckoning him up to their thrones. On the instant and incessantly fall snow storms of illusions. He fancies himself in a vast crowd which sways this way and that and whose movements and doings he must obey. He fancies himself poor, orphaned, insignificant. The mad crowd drives hither and thither, now furiously commanding this thing to be done, now that. What is he that he should resist their will and think and act for himself? Every moment new changes and new showers of deceptions to baffle and distract him. And when, by and by, for an instant the air clears and the cloud lifts a little, there are the gods still sitting around him on their thrones—they alone with him alone."

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The last paragraphs of this little essay were written within a huge hotel of steel and stone in the heart of a bustling city, in the most gracious of lands and under the bluest of skies. A great commercial city it was, a wondrous city, full of all manner of men—eager, impulsive, loving, enthusiastic men; men cunning and grasping, given over to all "high, hard lust and wilful deed;" carefree, joyous men living in the present and taking their chances for the future; men who have whistled all the airs that fluttering birds and frolicking children have learned to sing; workmen of all grades, quiet, courageous and self-respecting, and weak, disgruntled and incapable; bright-eyed, clear-headed, sagacious men, such men as build a state; hopeless, broken, disappointed men, who have made this city of hope their last resort; gamblers, parasites, bartenders, agitators, self-seekers, haters of men and haters of organization, impossibles, men uncontrolled and uncontrollable, of every nation and with every dialect of the civilized world—and of uncivilized worlds also;—the most cosmopolitan of all American towns, the one fullest of the joy of living, the one least fearful of future disaster, "serene, indifferent to fate," thus her own poets have styled her, and on no other city since the world began has fate, unmalicious, mechanical and elemental, wrought such a terrible havoc. In a day this city has vanished; the shock of a mighty earthquake forgotten in an hour in the hopeless horror of fire; homes, hotels, hospitals, hovels, libraries, museums, skyscrapers, factories, shops, banks and gambling dens, all blotted out of existence almost in the twinkling of an eye; millionaires, beggars, dancers and workers, men great and small, foolish and courageous, with their women and children of like natures with them, fleeing together by the thousands and hundreds of thousands to the hills and the sand-dunes, where on the grass and the shifting sands they all slept together or were awake together in the old primal equality of life. Never since man began to plan and to create has there been such a destruction of the results of human effort. Never has a great calamity been met with so little repining. Never before has the common man shown himself so hopeful, so courageous, so sure of himself and his future. For it is the man, after all, that survives and it is the will of man that shapes the fates.

It is the lesson of earthquake and fire that man cannot be shaken and cannot be burned. The houses he builds are houses of cards, but he stands outside of them and can build again. It is a wonderful thing to build a great city. Men can do this in a quarter century, working together each at his own part. More wonderful still is it to be a city, for a city is composed of men, and now, ever and forever the man must rise above his own creations. That which is in the man is greater than all that he can do.

"Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud
Under the bludgeonings of chance,
My head is bloody but not bowed.