But the characteristic of moral grit is equality with the occasions which exact its exercise. It is morality with thews and sinews and blood and passions,—morality made man, and eager to put its phrases to the test of action. It gives and takes hard blows,—aims not only to be upright in deed, but downright in word,—silences with a "Thus saith the Lord" all palliations of convenient sins,—scowls ominously at every attempt to reconcile the old feud between the right and the expedient and make them socially shake hands,—and when cant taints the air, clears it with good wholesome rage and execration. On the virtues of this stubborn conscientiousness it is needless to dilate; its limitations spring from its tendency to disconnect morality from mercy, and law from love,—its too frequent substitution of moral antipathies for moral insight,—and its habit of describing individual men, not as they are in themselves, but as they appear to its offended conscience. Understanding sin better than it understands sinners, it sometimes sketches phantoms rather than paints portraits,—identifies the weakly wicked with the extreme of Satanic wickedness,—and in its assaults, pitches at its adversaries rather than really pitches into them. But, in a large moral view, the light of intellectual perception should shine far in advance of the heat of ethical invective, and an ounce of characterization is worth a ton of imprecations. Indeed, moral grit, relatively admirable as it is, partakes of the inherent defect of other and lower kinds of grit, inasmuch as its force is apt to be as unsympathetic as it is uncompromising, as ungracious as it is invincible. It drives rather than draws, cuffs rather than coaxes. Intolerant of human infirmity, it is likewise often intolerant of all forms of human excellence which do not square with its own conceptions of right; and its philanthropy in the abstract is apt to secrete a subtile misanthropy in the concrete. Brave, unselfish, self-sacrificing, and flinching from no consequences which its principles may bring upon itself, it flinches from no consequences which they may bring upon others; and its attitude towards the laws and customs of instituted imperfection is almost as sourly belligerent as towards those of instituted iniquity.
Men of this austere and somewhat crabbed rectitude may be found in every department of life, but they are most prominent and most efficient when they engage in the reform of abuses, whether those abuses be in manners, institutions, or religion; and here they never shrink from the rough, rude work of the cause they espouse. They are commonly adored by their followers, commonly execrated by their opponents; but they receive the execration as the most convincing proof that they have performed their duties, as the shrieks of the wounded testify to the certainty of the shots. Indeed, they take a kind of grim delight in so pointing their invective that the adversaries of their principles are turned into enemies of their persons, and scout at all fame which does not spring from obloquy. As they thus exist in a state of war, the gentler elements of their being fall into the background; the bitterness of the strife works into their souls, and gives to their conscientious wrath a certain Puritan pitilessness of temper and tone. In the thick of the fight, their battle-cry is, "No quarter to the enemies of God and man!"—and as, unfortunately, there are few men who, tried by their standards, are friends of man, population very palpably thins as the lava-tide of their invective sweeps over it, and to the mental eye men, disappear as man emerges.
The gulf which yawns between uncompromising moral obligation and compromising human conduct is so immense that these fierce servants of the Lord seem to be fanatics and visionaries. But history demonstrates that they are among the most practical of all the forces which work in human affairs; for, without taking into account the response which their inflexible morality finds in the breasts of inflexibly moral men, their morality, in its application to common life, often becomes materialized, and shows an intimate connection with the most ordinary human appetites and passions. They commune with the mass of men through the subtile freemasonry of discontent. Compelled to hurl the thunderbolts of the moral law against injustice in possession, they unwittingly set fire to injustice smouldering in unrealized passions; and their speech is translated and transformed, in its passage into the public mind, into some such shape as this:—"These few persons who are dominant in Church and State, and who, while you physically and spiritually starve, are fed fat by the products of your labor and the illusions of your superstition, are powerful and prosperous, not from any virtue in themselves, but from the violation of those laws which God has ordained for the beneficent government of the universe. Their property and their power are the signs, not of their merits, but of their sins." The instinctive love of property and power are thus addressed to overturn the present possessors of property and power; and the vices of men are unconsciously enlisted in the service of the regeneration of man. The motives which impel whole masses of the community are commonly different from the motives of those reformers who urge the community to revolt; and their fervent denunciations of injustice bring to their side thousands of men who, perhaps unconsciously to themselves, only desire a chance to be unjust. The annals of all emancipations, revolutions, and reformations are disfigured by this fact. Better than what they supplant, their good is still relative, not absolute.
In the history of religious reforms, few men better illustrate this hard moral manliness, as distinguished from the highest moral heroism, than the sturdy Scotch reformer, John Knox. Tenacious, pugnacious, thoroughly honest and thoroughly earnest, superior to all physical and moral fear, destitute equally of fine sentiments and weak emotions, blurting out unwelcome opinions to queens as readily as to peasants, and in words which hit and hurt like knocks with the fist, he is one of those large, but somewhat coarse-grained natures, that influence rude populations by having so much in common with them, and in which the piety of the Christian, the thought of the Protestant, and the zeal of the martyr are curiously blended with the ferocity of the demagogue. Jenny Geddes, at the time when Archbishop Laud attempted to force Episcopacy upon Scotland, is a fair specimen of the kind of character which the teachings and the practice of such a man would tend to produce in a nation. This rustic heroine was present when the new bishop, hateful to Presbyterian eyes, began the service, with the smooth saying, "Let us read the Collect of the Day." Jenny rose in wrath, and cried out to the surpliced official of the Lord,—"Thou foul thief, wilt thou say mass at my lug?" and hurled her stool at his head. Then rose cries of "A Pope! a Pope! Stone him!" And "the worship of the Lord in Episcopal decency and order" was ignominiously stopped. And in the next reign, when the same thing was attempted, the Covenanters, the true spiritual descendants of Knox, opposed to the most brutal persecution a fierce, morose heroism, strangely compounded of barbaric passion and Christian fortitude. They were the most perfect specimens of pure moral grit the world has ever seen. In the great theological humorist of the nineteenth century, the Reverend Sydney Smith, the legitimate intellectual successor of the Reverend Rabelais and the Reverend Swift and the Reverend Sterne, their sullen intrepidity excites a mingled feeling, in which fun strives with admiration. In arguing against all intolerance, the intolerance of the church to which he belonged as well as the intolerance of the churches to which he was opposed, he said that persecution and bloodshed had no effect in preventing the Scotch, "that metaphysical people, from going to heaven in their true way instead of our true way"; and then comes the humorous sally,—"With a little oatmeal for food and a little sulphur for friction, allaying cutaneous irritation with one hand and grasping his Calvinistical creed with the other, Sawney ran away to the flinty hills, sung his psalm out of tune his own way, and listened to his sermon of two hours long, amid the rough and imposing melancholy of the tallest thistles." But from the graver historian, developing the historic significance of their determined resistance to the insolent claims of ecclesiastical authority, their desperate hardihood elicits a more fitting tribute. "Hunted down," he says, "like wild beasts, tortured till their bones were beaten flat, imprisoned by hundreds, hanged by scores, exposed at one time to the license of soldiers from England, abandoned at another time to the mercy of bands of marauders from the Highlands, they still stood at bay in a mood so savage that the boldest and mightiest oppressor could not but dread the audacity of their despair."
But the man who, in modern times, stands out most prominently as the representative of this tough physical and moral fibre is Oliver Cromwell, the greatest of that class of Puritans who combined the intensest religious passions with the powers of the soldier and the statesman, and who, in some wild way, reconciled their austere piety with remorseless efficiency in the world of facts. After all the materials for an accurate judgment of Cromwell which have been collected by the malice of his libellers and the veneration of his partisans, he is still a puzzle to psychologists; for no one, so far, has bridged the space which separates the seeming anarchy of his mind from the executive decision of his conduct. A coarse, strong, massive English nature, thoroughly impregnated with Hebrew thought and Hebrew passion,—democratic in his sympathy with the rudest political and religious feelings of his party, autocratic in the consciousness of superior abilities and tyrannic will,—emancipated from the illusions of vanity, but not from those of ambition and pride,—shrinking from no duty and no policy from the fear of obloquy or the fear of death,—a fanatic and a politician,—a demagogue and a dictator,—seeking the kingdom of heaven, but determined to take the kingdom of England by the way,—believing in God, believing in himself, and believing in his Ironsides,—clothing spiritual faith in physical force, and backing dogmas and prayers with pikes and cannon,—anxious at once that his troops should trust in God and keep their powder dry,—with a mind deep indeed, but distracted by internal conflicts, and prolific only in enormous, half-shaped ideas, which stammer into expression at once obscure and ominous, the language a strange compound of the slang of the camp and the mystic phrases of inspired prophets and apostles,—we still feel throughout, that, whatever may be the contradictions of his character, they are not such as to impair the ruthless energy of his will. Whatever he dared to think he dared to do. No practical emergency ever found him deficient either in sagacity or resolution, however it might have found him deficient in mercy. He overrode the moral judgments of ordinary men as fiercely as he overrode their physical resistance, crushing prejudices as well as Parliaments, ideas as well as armies; and whether his task was to cut off the head of an unmanageable king, or disperse an unmanageable legislative assembly, or massacre an unmanageable Irish garrison, or boldly establish himself as the uncontrolled supreme authority of the land, he ever did it thoroughly and unrelentingly, and could always throw the responsibility of the deed on the God of battles and the God of Cromwell. In all this we observe the operation of a colossal practical force rather than an ideal power, of grit rather than heroism. However much he may command that portion of our sympathies which thrill at the touch of vigorous action, there are other sentiments of our being which detect something partial, vulgar, and repulsive even in his undisputed greatness.
In truth, grit, in its highest forms, is not a form of courage deserving of unmixed respect and admiration. Admitting its immense practical influence in public and private life, conceding its value in the rough, direct struggle of person with person and opinions with institutions, it is still by no means the top and crown of heroic character; for it lacks the element of beauty and the element of sympathy; it is individual, unsocial, bigoted, relatively to occasions; and its force has no necessary connection with grandeur, generosity, and enlargement of soul. Even in great men, like Cromwell, there is something in its aspect which is harsh, ugly, haggard, and ungenial; even in them it is strong by the stifling of many a generous thought and tolerant feeling; and when it descends to animate sterile and stunted natures, endowed with sufficient will to make their meanness or malignity efficient, its unfruitful force is absolutely hateful. It has done good work for the cause of truth and right; but it has also done bad work for the cause of falsehood and wrong: for evil has its grit as well as virtue. As it lacks, suppresses, or subordinates imagination, it is shorn of an important portion of a complete manhood; for it not only loses the perception of beauty, but the power of passing into other minds. It never takes the point of view of the persons it opposes; its object is victory, not insight; and it thus fails in that modified mercy to men which springs from an interior knowledge of their characters. Even when it is the undaunted force through which moral wrath expresses its hatred of injustice and wrong, its want of imaginative perception makes it somewhat caricature the sinners it inveighs against. It converts imperfect or immoral men into perfect demons, which humanity as well as reason refuses to accept; and it is therefore not surprising that the prayer of its indignant morality sometimes is, "Almighty God, condemn them, for they know what they do!" But we cannot forget that there sounds down the ages, from the saddest and most triumphant of all martyrdoms, a different and a diviner prayer,—"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!"
Indeed, however much we may be struck with the startling immediateness of effect which follows the exercise of practical force, we must not forget the immense agency in human affairs of the ideal powers of the soul. These work creatively from within to mould character, not only inflaming great passions, but touching the springs of pity, tenderness, gentleness, and love,—above all, infusing that wide-reaching sympathy which sends the individual out of the grit-guarded fortress of his personality into the wide plain of the race. The culmination of these ideal powers is in genius and heroism, which draw their inspiration from ideal and spiritual sources, and radiate it in thoughts beautifully large and deeds beautifully brave. They do not merely exert power, they communicate it. If you are overcome by a man of grit, he insolently makes you conscious of your own weakness. If you are overcome by genius and heroism, you are made participants in their strength; for they overcome only to invigorate and uplift. They sweep on their gathering disciples to the object they have in view, by making it an object of affection as well as duty. Their power to allure and to attract is not lost even when their goal is the stake or the cross. They never, in transient ignominy and pain, lose sight and feeling of the beauty and bliss inseparably associated with goodness and virtue; and the happiest death-beds have often been on the rack or in the flame of the hero-martyr. And they are also, in their results, great practical influences; for they break down the walls which separate man from man,—by magnanimous thought or magnanimous act shame us out of our bitter personal contentions, and flash the sentiment of a common nature into our individual hatreds and oppositions. As grit decomposes society into an aggregate of strong and weak persons, genius and heroism unite them in one humanity. Thus, not many years ago, we were all battling about the higher law and the law to return fugitive slaves. It was argument against argument, passion against passion, person against person, grit against grit. The notions advanced regarding virtue and vice, justice and injustice, humanity and inhumanity, were as different as if the controversy had not been between men and men, but between men and cattle. There were no signs among the combatants that they had the common reason and the common instincts of a common nature. Then came a woman of genius, who refused to credit the horrible conceit that the diversity was essential, who resolutely believed that the human heart was a unit, and whose glance, piercing the mist of opinions and interests, saw in the deep and universal sources of humane and human action the exact point where her blow would tell; and in a novel unexampled in the annals of literature for popular effect, shook the whole public reason and public conscience of the country, by the most searching of all appeals to its heart and imagination.
THE PETTIBONE LINEAGE.
My name is Esek Pettibone, and I wish to affirm in the outset that it is a good thing to be well-born. In thus connecting the mention of my name with a positive statement, I am not unaware that a catastrophe lies coiled up in the juxtaposition. But I cannot help writing plainly that I am still in favor of a distinguished family-tree. Esto perpetua! To have had somebody for a great-grandfather that was somebody is exciting. To be able to look back on long lines of ancestry that were rich, but respectable, seems decorous and all right. The present Earl of Warwick, I think, must have an idea that strict justice has been done him in the way of being launched properly into the world. I saw the Duke of Newcastle once, and as the farmer in Conway described Mount Washington, I thought the Duke felt a propensity to "hunch up some." Somehow it is pleasant to look down on the crowd and have a conscious right to do so.