CHAPTER V
THE WAY OF PERSONALITY
I
ANOTHER KIND OF HERO
A generation ago almost everybody read, at least once, Carlyle’s great book on heroes. He gave us the hero as prophet, as priest, as poet, as king, and he made us realize that these heroes have been the real makers of human society. I should like to add a chapter on another kind of hero, who has, perhaps, not done much to build cities and states and church systems, but who has, almost more than anybody else, shown us the spiritual value of endurance—I mean the hero as invalid.
It is the hardest kind of heroism there is to achieve. Most of us know some man—too often it is oneself—who is a very fair Christian when he is in normal health and absorbed in interesting work, who carries a smooth forehead and easily drops into a good-natured smile, but who becomes “blue” and irritable and a storm center in the family weather as soon as the bodily apparatus is thrown out of gear. Most of us have had a taste of humiliation as we have witnessed our own defeat in the presence of some thorn in the flesh, which stubbornly pricked us, even though we prayed to have it removed and urged the doctor to hurry up and remove it.
What a hero, then, must he be, who, with a weak and broken body, a prey to pain and doomed to die daily, learns how to live in calm faith that God is good and makes his life a center of cheer and sunshine! The heroism of the battlefield and the man-of-war looks cheap and thin compared with this. We could all rally to meet some glorious moment when a trusted leader shouted to us, “Your country expects you to do your duty!” But to drag on through days and nights, through weeks and months, through recurring birthdays, with vital energy low, with sluggish appetite, with none of that ground-swell of superfluous vigor which makes healthy life so good, and still to prove that life is good and to radiate joy and triumph—that is the very flower and perfume of heroism. If we are making up a bead-roll of heroes, let us put at the top the names of those quiet friends of ours who have played the man or revealed the woman through hard periods of invalidism and have exhibited to us the fine glory of a courageous spirit.
One of the hardest and most difficult features to bear is the inability to work at one’s former pace and with the old-time constructive power. The prayer of the Psalmist that his work, the contribution of his life, might be preserved is very touching: “Establish thou the work of our hands upon us, yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.” What can be more tragic than the cry of Othello: “My occupation is gone!” So long as the hand keeps its cunning and the mind remains clear and creative, one can stand physical handicap and pain, but when the working power of mind or body is threatened, then the test of faith and heroism indeed arrives.
A man whose life meant much to me and whose intimacy was very precious to me made me see many years ago how wonderfully this test could be met. He was a great teacher, the head of a distinguished boys’ school. He was experiencing the full measure of success, and his influence over his boys was extraordinary. He realized, as his work went on, that his hearing was becoming dull and was steadily failing. He went to New York and consulted a famous specialist. After making a careful examination the specialist said, with perfect frankness: “Your case is hopeless. Nothing can be done to check the disaster. You are hard of hearing already, but in a very short time you will have no hearing at all.” Without a quaver the teacher said: “Don’t you think, doctor, that I shall hear Gabriel’s trumpet when it blows!” He went back to his school, learned to read lips, reorganized his life, accepted without a murmur his loss of a major sense, and finished his splendid career of work in an undefeated spirit and with a grace and joy which were envied by many persons in possession of all their powers.
All my readers will think of some “star player” in this hard game of patience and endurance, and will have watched with awe and reverence the glorious fight of some of those unrecorded heroes who won but got no valor medal. The only person who ranks higher in the scale of heroism than the hero as invalid is possibly the person who patiently, lovingly nurses and cares for some invalid through years of decline and suffering. Generally, though not always, it is a woman. Not seldom she is called upon to consecrate her life to the task, and often she gives what is much more precious than life itself. We build no monuments to daughters who unmurmuringly forego the joy of married life, who refuse the suit of love in order to be free to ease the closing years of father or mother, grown helpless; but where is there higher consecration or finer heroism? Men sometimes complain that the days of chivalry and heroism are past. On the contrary, they are more truly dawning. As Christianity ripens love grows richer and deeper, and where love appears heroism is always close at hand. Our best heroes are mothers and wives and daughters, fathers and husbands and sons.