As a result of our shabby thinking on the subject of self-dependence we have lowered our standards of the exceptional to an alarming degree. We call that person exceptional who does what almost any one might do—but doesn’t. For instance:
The average girl of twenty in a conventional home hates to be told that she must not read Havelock Ellis or make friends with those dreadful persons known vaguely as “socialists,” or that she must not work when she happens to believe that work is a beautiful thing. She is submerged in the ghastly sentimentalities of a tradition-soaked atmosphere—and heaven knows that sentimentalities of that type are difficult to break away from. It takes not only brains, but what William James called the fundamental human virtue—bravery—to do it. And so the girl gives up the fight and moans that circumstances were too much for her. The next stage of her development shows her passing around gentle advice to all her friends on the noble theme of not being “hard” and living only for oneself; how one must sacrifice to the general good—never having had the courage or the insight to find out what the general good might really be. Thus are our incapacities extended. The girl who did break away she regards secretly as remarkable—which is not necessarily true. It is not that the second girl is remarkable, but that the first one is inadequate.
The average man of thirty-five slaves all day in an office and comes home at night to wheel the baby around the block and fall asleep over the newspaper. He has lost any feeling of rebellion, simply because he feels that he must. His permanent attitude is that all men are more or less in the same condition (or should be, if they’re well-behaved), and that to part with a vision after college is what any man of sense must do. His neighbor with an eye on something beyond an office desk and a go-cart is a dreamer or a fool; if the neighbor makes good with his dream, then he is a remarkable man of extraordinary capabilities. Which is not necessarily true, either; the dreamer has simply scorned that attitude which has been so aptly epitomized as “the second choice.”
There are as many phlegmatic radicals as there are conservatives; and there is no type among them more exasperating than the one that is content to sit around and be radical—and be nothing else. The lazy evasiveness of the “revolutionary” with his the-world-owes-me-a-living air positively sicken me. Why should the world owe anybody anything except a protection against that lack of struggle which cramps one’s intellectual muscles so hideously?
And then there is that most unpleasant type of all—the man who boasts of how he will use his chance when he gets it. He always gets it, of course; but he doesn’t know it. And when it comes out boldly and takes him by the ear he becomes terrified and slips back under the cover of things as they are. His is the most unattractive kind of intellectual cowardice, because it involves so many lies; it is simply a rapid sequence of boasting and fright and refusing to meet the truth.
Here they all are—the uncourageous company of the second choice: the half-people, the makeshifts, the compromisers, the near-adventurers. How pale and ambling they look; how they crawl through the world with their calculating side looks, ready to take any second-rate thing when the first-rate one costs too much. Oh, it is a sad sight!
We must be more brave! We must be more fine! We must be more demanding! The saddest aspect of the whole thing is that choice is such a tiny element in the process of becoming. It is after one has chosen highly that his real struggle—and his real joy—begins. And only on such a basis is built up that intensity of inner life which is the sole compensation one can wrest from a world of mysterious terrors ... and of ecstasies too dazzling to be shared.
Souls are weighed in silence, as gold and silver are weighed in pure water, and the words which we pronounce have no meaning except through the silence in which they are bathed.—Maeterlinck.
A Letter from London
Amy Lowell