CHAPTER IV
DEFECTS OF GIVING
A colleague of mine, an excellent classical scholar, received by bequest an admirable collection of Latin authors. In the writers themselves, in the choice editions, and the appropriate bindings he took extreme pleasure. When talking with him about them one day I asked what he intended to do with the books at his death. Would he have them given to another Latinist as fine as himself? Or would he have them go to some college library where any one might use them? He said the question had often puzzled him, but he had finally decided to send them to the auction-room. They were books he had so much loved that he could not bear to have them fall into unappreciative hands. If he gave them away, what warrant had he that they would be prized? If they were sold, nobody would obtain one unless he were willing to get it by some sacrifice. This was not a case where generosity could be trusted. Probably the matter could be more wisely settled by self-interest.
This instance makes evident the uncertain character of giving. However superior in altruistic fulness gifts are to manners, they are unfit, unless supplemented by some other principle, to form a practical rule of life. Let us examine them in detail and see wherein they fail to embody complete altruism. In their very nature I find them to be exceptional, irrational, and condescending; and I will briefly explain each of these points.
Giving is occasional and fragmentary. It cannot occupy a life. The great body of our time and attention must be directed upon individual interests. I rise in the morning after eight hours of sleep, go downstairs to breakfast, take my walk for the needed morning exercise, on returning look over my mail and the morning paper, turn to my studies, to my meals, to calling on a friend. It is all egoistic. No doubt during the day I am repeatedly summoned to attend to other people’s affairs. Begging letters, interruptions, engagements of a public and business nature are not absent. They intervene and stand out isolated in my egoistic day. No doubt, too, most of my occupation with myself—in sleep, food, exercise, study—is a necessary preparation for social service. All I am urging is that social service cannot stand alone. It requires a large individualistic background. The care one gives to others is occasional, one might even say exceptional. In order to be able to meet it, our primary and preponderant care must be given to ourselves. Such a thing as interest in altruistic giving, separate from personal gain and established as an independent guiding principle, is altogether impossible. Only at intervals comes the generous act; in general, we are busied with our own affairs.
On this inseparability of egoism and altruism I received excellent instruction many years ago out of the mouth of babes and sucklings. A couple of little children, a girl of four and a boy of five years old, had just been tucked into their beds. Their mother in the next room heard them talking. Listening to learn if they needed anything, she found them discussing one of the vast problems for which the infant mind seems to have a natural affinity. They were inquiring why we were ever put into the world. The little girl suggested we might have been sent here to help others. “Why no, indeed, Mabel,” was her big brother’s reply. “Of course not; for then what would others be here for?” Pertinent reflection, putting the answer to one-sided altruism into a nutshell! If our own affairs are worthless, why suppose they can be of worth to others? It is no kindness to bestow on another what has never been found good for ourselves. A gift should cost something. Something properly valued by us we part with for another’s sake. A strong egoistic sense, then, is a condition of altruistic action. The latter cannot cover the whole of a life. No man is benevolent all the time, but exceptionally, at intervals, when regard for himself may safely be withdrawn.
A graver defect of giving is its arbitrary character. Our reformers have been attempting to rationalize charity and certainly have devised methods by which some of its worst evils may be lessened. But until they stop it altogether they will not rid it of irrational wilfulness. One would say that in kind and degree my gift should answer another’s reasonable claim. But it never does. A just claim renders a gift impossible. Gifts come from a region outside claims, outside rational justification. They are the expression of arbitrary will. I give because I want to, and the other knows he has no right beyond my inclination to what he is receiving. Were there legitimate grounds for my pretended gift it would be merely the payment of a debt and would afford no such pleasure as does the over-and-above of a gift. A clerk may have satisfaction in his salary, but his feeling on receiving his employer’s gift is something altogether different. The gift dropped from the sky. He had no idea it was coming. He really had done nothing to deserve it. Others might have had it equally well, but by some fancy he had been picked out for enrichment. It is this unexpectedness, this incalculability, which makes a gift so good. Gifts at Christmas, which have been systematized, are of a paler order. Even in these there is usually uncertainty enough left to keep them agreeable. Our regular giver may decide to give elsewhere this year, he may forget; what he will select we cannot guess. The important part of the gift is not its intrinsic worth but its expression of the giver’s will. Gladness over the former springs from greed, over the latter from gratitude. This arbitrary will on the giver’s part and the absence of claim in the receiver make a reasonable gift hard to conceive. To be a gift at all it must be capricious, undeserved, and only occasional.
But there is a feature of giving more obnoxious than either of these two, yet no less deeply rooted in giving than exceptionality and caprice. A gift has always something disparaging about it. It professes to honor, but deep in the heart of it there is disparagement, condescension at least. I declare another to be better than myself, preferring that he shall be the owner of something prized by me. Yet in reality I retain the superior position myself and make the one whom I honor my dependent. Rightly did Jesus say: “It is more blessed to give than to receive.” How could it be otherwise? The giver is the wealthy man, the man of power and preference; the receiver confessedly the man of need, passive to another’s will. The very attempt, then, that I make to raise him up and provide him with something acceptable from my store sets him beneath me. He lacks, I abound. At the very moment when turning to him I say: “I prefer you to myself and desire that you rather than I should possess this,” I am really also saying: “But by all right it belongs to me and I part with it as its and your superior.” However glad, therefore, we may be to get our wants supplied, a disagreeable taste is apt to lurk about the acceptance of a gift. A good share of humility is required of one who will be an altogether happy receiver, a contented inferior. Our age has discovered this and has grown restive over charity. It would seem that in past ages those who lacked the things that make life worth living stood with outstretched hands to receive them from their rightful owners, and that those who owned counted it a prerogative of their station thus to assist their inferiors. But this humble attitude of the needy is disappearing, together with many other traditions of aristocratic days. Our poorer classes now have too much self-respect to be at ease in such relations. Certainly the poor to-day are vastly better off than at any other period of the world’s history, yet never more discontented. The new self-respect which has come with easier conditions makes them resent charity and dependence. “Give us what belongs to us,” they seem to say. “We want no benevolence. If a better living should be ours, we will take it as of right but not by favor. We stand on our own feet, acknowledging inferiority to no man.” This rejection of charity on grounds of self-respect is not uncommon to-day. I have met it in administering the little trust for the benefit of students of which I spoke. And though I do not altogether sympathize with it, I see in it much to honor.
Such are the possible humiliations of the receiver. But the giver is exposed to dangers hardly less. His gifts may be selfish rather than generous. Few pleasures are greater than giving. In it we feel our power and catch a sense of the creative efficiency of our will. One often gives for the sake of indulging this self-assertion, with small regard for the receiver. Then too, while a true gift costs the giver something, he who gives out of his abundance may hardly feel the loss, though feeling full well the glow of raising the helpless to prosperity. That glow is by no means reprehensible. It is one of our purest pleasures.
“All earthly joys go less
To the one joy of doing kindnesses.”