A Man's Value to Society: Studies in Self Culture and Character

by Newell Dwight Hillis

It is deeply interesting to see how each living thing bears about in its body the story of its degradation, or the history of its rise and exaltation. Even in things that creep and crawl, the whole life-history is swept together in the animal body. The ship barnacle began its career with two splendid eyes. But it used its vision to find an easy place upon the side of pier or ship. Giving up locomotion, it grew sleek and fat, and finally its big eyes grew dull through misuse, and now they are dead. When the squirrels left the forests in the west and journeyed out upon the open prairies, they began to burrow in the ground. Finally, for want of use, they lost all power of climbing. Among the birds the lazy cuckoo began by stealing the nest another bird had built. But it paid a grievous price for its theft, for now when the cuckoo is confined by man and wants a nest of its own it toils aimlessly, and has lost all power to make for itself a soft, warm nesting-place.

In northern climes the mistletoe has a healthy normal taproot. But in our rich soil it became too dainty for dirt, and chose the life of a parasite. So the little seed struck its outer roots into the bark of the oak, and lazily sucked away the tree's rich sap. Soon luxury and living upon another's life ruined the mistletoe, just as the generation of young Romans was ruined by the father's wealth; just as an active and healthy boy is wrecked when he begins to be a sluggard and goes to the aunt—some rich aunt—and waits for her to die. And since all the lower creatures bear about in the body the marks of the full life-history, it seems natural to expect that man's body, through its health and beauty, or weakness and decay, should tell the story of how the soul within has lived and wrought. A short journey through our streets will prove to us that iniquity sets its mark in the face. Dickens describes Fagin as a man who was solid bestiality and villainy done up in bone and tissue. Each feature was as eloquent of rascality as an ape's of idiocy. Contrariwise, in the kingdom of morals there are men who seem solid goodness, kindness, and virtue, bound together with fleshly bands. Even distant ancestors leave their marks in man's body.

It has recently been discovered that the handwriting of one of our presidents was almost exactly that in his grandfather's will. The Bourbon family has always been distinguished by the aquiline nose. One of the oldest New England families is known for its singular length and strength of arm. Beauty is a mark in one family, and size is a mark in the other. Because man is made in the image of God we naturally look for those divine trademarks in man's body called comeliness and complexion, just as we look for the artist's name on the corner of his picture, or the sculptor's name on the pedestal of his statue. By so much as a babe's cheek is higher than the blushing peach, it ought to be more beautiful. And because the trees of the forest go forward toward October and death arrayed in their brightest robes, we have a right to expect that man in his old age also will reach the highest beauty and perfection.

But not so. Man's history has been a history of selfishness and sin, and his body bears the marks thereof. His features are "seamed by sickness, dimmed by sensuality, convulsed by passion, pinched by poverty, shadowed by sorrow, branded by remorse." Men's bodies are consumed by sloth, broken down by labor, tortured by disease, dishonored by foul uses, until beholding the "marks" of character in the natural face in a glass multitudes would fain forget what manner of men they are. For the human face is a canvas, and nature's writing goes ever on. But as the wrong act or foul deed sets its seal of distortion on the features, so the right act or true thought sets its stamp of beauty. There is no cosmetic for homely folks like character. Even the plainest face becomes beautiful in noble and radiant moods. He who ever beholds the vision of Christ's face will at last so take on the likeness of his Master as to bear about in his body also "the marks of the Lord Jesus."

Consider the habits and the unconscious desires as marks of character. When Arnold of Rugby took his boys for a holiday to London he found the revelators of personality in the objects which they first visited. The youth who had spent each spare moment in sketching made his way immediately to the gallery. Young Stanley, even then brooding upon moral themes, turned his face toward the abbey, whose fame he was to augment. The eager aspirant for political honors rushed toward the houses of Parliament. Thus also the students of physiognomy try to catch the subject off his guard, when the unconscious and habitual lines appear in the face. The kind of books one loves to read, the amusements one seeks, the friends he chooses, are all revelators. Recently an English traveler published a volume of impressions concerning America. Finding little to praise, the traveler finds much to criticise and blame. During his two or three weeks' sojourn in our cities, he tells us that he found sights and scenes that would shame Sodom and Gomorrah, and bemoans the fact that in this young, fresh land things should be as bad as in London and Paris, whither the scum and wrecks of society have drifted.

What a revelation! not of the city, but of the critic himself. But because he was interested in other things, the editor of an English Review found here material for a fruitful discussion of "The Higher Life of American Cities." Multitudes have sojourned here during a score of years and have not so much as heard of orgies and excesses. Yet if the bee is blind to all save flowers; if the worm cares only for rotten wood; if the mole bores downward, so there are natures that cannot rest until they have ferreted out that which they lovingly seek and eagerly desire to find. Habits also reveal personality. First the river digs the channel, then the channel controls the river, and when the faculties, by repetition, have formed habits, those habits become grooves and channels for controlling the faculties. What grievous marks were in poor Coleridge! Once this scholar spent a fortnight upon an annual address. But while the audience was assembling Coleridge left his friends and stepped out the rear door of the hall to go in search of his favorite drug, leaving his audience to master its disappointment as best it could.

And here is Robert Burns, bearing about in his body also the marks of his ownership. For this matchless genius was wrecked and ruined not by the wiles of him of the cloven foot, but by temptations that have been called "godlike." This glorious youth was not beguiled from the path by a desire to be a cold and calculating villain in his treatment of Jean, or to die of drink in his prime, or to leave his widow and orphans in poverty. Burns loved upward, loved noble things and beautiful; and his very love of beauty and grace, his love of good company, of wit, laughter and song, and all the stormy splendors of youth at springtide—these are the snares and wiles that caught his beautiful genius and led it away captive.

To-day, for him who hath eyes to see, the marks of a like immoderation are upon our generation also. What a revelation of the taste of our age is found in the new love of highly spiced literature! All history holds no nobler literature than that in the English tongue. Our poetry furnishes nectar for angels! Our philosophies bread for giants! The essayists furnish food for the gods! Nevertheless, a multitude have turned from this glorious feast to the highly spiced literature of fiction.

A traveler tells of watching bees linger so long beside the vats of the distillery that they became maudlin. And the love of high stimulants in literature is one of the character marks of our generation. Excess threatens our people. Men are anxious to be scholars and hurry along a pathway that leads straight to the grave. Men are anxious to find pleasure, but they find the flowers were grown in the church-yard. Men are feverishly anxious for wealth, and, coining all time and strength into gold, they find they have no health with which to enjoy the gathered sweetness. Haste in cooking the dinner has destroyed the appetite. We are told that "moderation and poise are the secrets of all successful art," as they are of all successful life. Give the rein to appetite and passion, and satiety, disenchantment, and the grave quickly come. Health, happiness, and character are through restraint. Thus truly, habit and trait in the individual or the generation become a mark in the body that is the revelator of character.

What men call character to-day is really another one of the marks of the Lord Jesus. Now and then a man appears in society from whose very presence there emanates an atmosphere and a sense of power—power that seizes upon the imagination of the beholder and holds him breathless, even as one stands breathless when overtaken by some sense in nature of overmastering sublimity. These strangely gifted men have appeared only at intervals of centuries. If an ordinary man is attacked in a lonely spot by armed footpads, he finds himself helpless. But history tells of a man who carried such reserves that, bound and unaided, he could deliver himself from an entire band of robbers. Surprised one day by a company of bandits, he was knocked down, robbed, and bound. But when he recovered consciousness, he argued the ropes off his wrists, talked his purse and rings out of the robbers' pockets back into his, bound his enemies—not with cords, but with linked words—led them back to the city instead of away from it, and landed the waylayers in jail.