Is Polite Society Polite? and Other Essays

by Julia Ward Howe

I think that in the present study I have come upon the true and simple sense of the parable of the talents. Of every human good, the initial half is bestowed by Nature. But the value of this half is not realized until Labor shall have acquired the other half. Talents are one thing: the use of them is another. The first depend on natural conditions; the second, on moral processes. The greatest native facilities are useless to mankind without the discipline of Art. So in an undisciplined life, the good that is born with a man dwindles and decays. The sketch of childhood, never filled out, fades in the objectless vacancy of manhood; and from the man is "taken away even that which he seemeth to have." Not judicial vengeance this, but inevitable consequence.

Education should clearly formulate this problem: Given half of a man or woman, to make a whole one. This, I need not say, is to be done by development, not by addition. Kant says that knowledge grows per intus susceptionem, and not per appositionem. The knowledges that you adjoin to memory do not fill out the man unless you reach, in his own mind, the faculty that generates thought. A single reason perceived by him either in numbers or in speech will outweigh in importance all the rules which memory can be taught to supply. With little skill and much perseverance, Education hammers upon the man until somewhere she strikes a nerve, and the awakened interest leads him to think out something for himself. Otherwise, she leaves the man a polite muddle, who makes his best haste to forget facts in forms, and who cancels the enforced production of his years of pedagogy by a lifelong non-production.

What Nature is able to give, she does give with a wealth and persistence almost pathetic. The good gifts afloat in the world which never take form under the appropriate influence, the good material which does not build itself into the structures of society,—you and I grieve over these sometimes. And here I come upon a doctrine which Fourier, I think, does not state correctly. He maintains that inclinations which appear vicious and destructive in society as at present constituted would become highly useful in his ideal society. I should prefer to state the matter thus: The given talent, not receiving its appropriate education, becomes a negative instead of a positive, an evil instead of a good. Here we might paraphrase the Scripture saying, and affirm that the stone which is not built into the corner becomes a stumbling-block for the wayfarer to fall over. So great mischief lies in those uneducated, unconsecrated talents! This cordial companion becomes a sot. This could-be knight remains a prize-fighter. This incipient mathematician does not get beyond cards or billiards. This clever mechanic picks locks and robs a bank, instead of endowing one.

Modern theories of education do certainly point toward the study, by the party educating, of the party appointed to undergo education. But this education of others is a very complex matter, not to be accomplished unless the educator educates himself in the light afforded him by his pupils. The boys or girls committed to you may study what you will: be sure, first of all, that you study them to your best ability. Education in this respect is forced to a continual rectification of her processes. The greatest power and resource are needed to awaken and direct the energies of the young. No speech in Congress is so important as are the lessons in the primary school; no pulpit has so great a field of labor as the Sunday school. The Turkish government showed a cruel wisdom of instinct when it levied upon Greece the tribute of Christian children to form its corps of Janissaries. It recognized alike the Greek superiority of race, and the invaluable opportunity of training afforded by childhood.

The work, then, of education demands an investigation of the elements which Nature has granted to the individual, with the view of matching that in which he is wanting with that which he has. I have heard of lovers who, in plighting their faith, broke a coin in halves, whose matching could only take place with their meeting. In true education as in the love, these halves should correspond.

"What hast thou?" is, then, the first question of the educator. His second is, "What hast thou not?" The third is, "How can I help thee to this last?"

To my view, the man remains incomplete his whole life long. Most incomplete is he, however, in the isolations of selfishness and of solitude. Study is not necessarily solitude, but ideal society in the highest grade in which human beings can enjoy it. It is, nevertheless, dangerous to suffer the ideal to distance the real too largely. Desk-dreamers end by being mental cripples. Divorce of this sort is not wholesome, nor holy. Life is a perpetual marriage of real and ideal, of endeavor and result. The solitary departure of physical death is hateful, as putting asunder what God has joined together.

Must I go hence as lonely as I was born? My mother brought me into the infinite society: I go into the absolute dissociation. I go many steps further back than I came,—to the ur mother, the common matrix which bears plants, animals, and human creatures. Where, oh where, shall I find that infinite companionship which my life should have earned for me? My friendship has been hundred-handed. My love has consumed the cities of the plain, and built the heavenly Jerusalem. And I go, without lover or friend, in a box, into an earth vault, from which I cannot even turn into violets and primroses in any recognizable and conscious way.

The completeness of our severance or deficiency may be, after all, the determining circumstance of our achievement. What I would have is cut so clean off from what I have as to leave no sense of wholeness in my continuing as I am. Something of mine is mislaid or lost. It is more mine than anything that I have, but where to find it? Who has it? I reach for it under this bundle and under that. After my life's trial, I find that I have pursued, but not possessed it. What I have gained of it in the pursuit, others must realize. I bequeath, and cannot take it with me. Did Dante regard the parchments of his "Divina Commedia" with a sigh, foreseeing the long future of commentators and booksellers, he himself absolving them beforehand by the quitclaim of death? You and I may also grieve to part from certain unsold volumes, from certain manuscripts of doubtful fate and eventuality. Oh! out of this pang of death has come the scheme and achievement of immortality. "Non omnis moriar." "I am the resurrection and the life." "It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body."

This tremendous leap and feat of the human soul across the bridge of dark negativity would never have been made without the sharp spur and bitter pang of death. "My life food for worms? No; never. I will build and bestow it in arts and charities, spin it in roads and replicate it in systems; but to be lopped from the great body of humanity, and decay like a black, amputated limb? My manhood refuses. The infinite hope within me generates another life, realizable in every moment of my natural existence, whose moments are not in time, whose perfect joys are not measured by variable duration. Thus every day can be to me full of immortality, and the matter of my corporeal decease full of indifference, as sure to be unconscious."