Is Polite Society Polite? and Other Essays

by Julia Ward Howe

But Nature does not afford the church. Art does this, laboring long and finishing never,—coming to a platform of rest, but coming at the same time to a higher view, inciting to higher effort. Temple after temple is raised. Juggernaut, Jove, Jesus! India does not get beyond Juggernaut. Rome could not get beyond Jove. Christendom is far behind Jesus. In all religions, Art founds on Nature, and aspires to super-nature. In all, Art asserts the superiority of thought over unthought, of measure over excess, of conscience over confidence. The latest evangel alone supplies a method of popularizing thought, of beautifying measure, of harmonizing conscience, and is, therefore, the religion that uses most largely from the race, and returns most largely to it.

Time permits me only a partial review of this great system of gifts and deficiencies. The secret of progress seems an infinitesimal seed, dropped in some bosoms to bear harvest for all. Seed and soil together give the product which is called genius. But genius is only half of the great man. No one works so hard as he does to obtain the result corresponding to his natural dimensions and obligations. The gift and the capacity to employ it are simply boons of Nature. The resolution to do so, the patience and perseverance, the long tasks bravely undertaken and painfully carried through—these come of the individual action of the moral man, and constitute his moral life. The wonderfully clever people we all know, who fill the society toy-shop with what is needed in the society workshop, are people who have not consummated this resolution, who have not had this bravery, this perseverance. Death does not waste more of immature life than Indolence wastes of immature genius. The law of labor in ethics and æsthetics corresponds to the energetic necessities of hygiene, and is the most precious and indispensable gift of one generation to its successors.

In ethics, Nature supplies the first half, but Religion, or the law of duty, supplies the other. Nature gives the enthusiasm of love, but not the tender and persevering culture of friendship, which carries the light of that tropical summer into the winter of age, the icy recesses of death.

Art has no need to intervene in order to bring together those whom passion inspires, whom inclination couples. But in crude Nature, passion itself remains selfish, brutal, and short-lived.

The tender and grateful recollection of transient raptures, the culture and growth of generous sympathies, resulting in noble co-operation—Art brings these out of Nature by the second birth, of which Christ knew, and at which Nicodemus marvelled.

Nature gives the love of offspring. Human parents share the passionate attachment of other animals for their young. With the regulation of this attachment Art has much to do. You love the child when it delights you by day; you must also love it when it torments you at night. This latter love is not against Nature, but Conscience has to apply the whip and spur a little, or the mother will take such amusement as the child can afford, and depute to others the fatigues which are its price.

A graver omission yet Nature makes. She does not teach children to reverence and cherish their parents when the relation between them reverses itself in the progress of time, and those who once had all to give have all to ask. Moses was not obliged to say: "Parents, love your children." But he was obliged to say: "Honor thy father and thy mother," in all the thunder of the Decalogue. The gentler and finer spirits value the old for their useful council and inestimable experience.

You know to-day; but your father can show you yesterday, bright with living traditions which history neglects and which posterity loses. We do not profit as we might by this source of knowledge. Elders question the young for their instruction. Young people, in turn, should question elders on their own account, not allowing the personal values of experience to go down to the grave unrealized. But Youth is cruel and remorseless. The young, in their fulness of energy, in their desire for scope and freedom, are often in unseemly haste to see the old depart.

Here Religion comes in with strong hands to moderate the tyrannous impulse, the controversy of the green with the ripe fruit. All religions agree in this intervention. The worship of ancestors in the Confucian ethics shows this consciousness and intention. The aristocratic traditions of rank and race are an invention to the same end. Vanity, too, will often lead a man to glorify himself in the past and future, as well as in the present.

Still, the instinct to get rid of elders is a feature in unreclaimed nature. It shows the point at which the imperative suggestions of personal feeling stop,—the spot where Nature leaves a desert in order that Art may plant a garden. "Why don't you give me a carriage, now?" said an elderly wife to an elderly husband. "When we married, you would scarcely let me touch the ground with my feet. I need a conveyance now far more than I did then." "That was the period of my young enthusiasm," replied the husband. The statement is one of unusual candor, but the fact is one of not unusual occurrence.