Why we cannot rest in Stoicism as our final guide to life, the mere statement of their doctrine must have made clear to every one; and in calling attention to its limitations I shall only be saying for the reader what he has been saying to himself all through the chapter. It may be well enough to treat things as indifferent, and work them over into such mental combinations as best serve our rational interests. To treat persons in that way, however, to make them mere pawns in the game which reason plays, is heartless, monstrous. The affections are as essential to man as his reason. It is a poor substitute for the warm, sweet, tender ties that bind together husband and wife, parent and child, friend and friend,—this freezing of people together through their common relation to the universal law. I suppose that is why, in all the history of Stoicism, though college girls usually have a period of flirting with the Stoic melancholy of Matthew Arnold, no woman was ever known to be a consistent and steadfast Stoic. Indeed a Stoic woman is a contradiction in terms. One might as well talk of a warm iceberg, or soft granite, or sweet vinegar. Stoicism is something of which men, unmarried or badly married men at that, have an absolute monopoly.
Again if its disregard of particulars and individuals is cold and hard, its attempted substitute of abstract, vague universality is a bit absurd. Sometimes the lighter mood of caricature best brings out the weaknesses that are concealed in grave systems when taken too seriously. Mr. W. S. Gilbert has put the dash of absurdity there is in the Stoic doctrines so convincingly that his lines may serve the purpose of illustrating the inherent weakness of the Stoic position better than more formal criticism. They are addressed
TO THE TERRESTRIAL GLOBE
"Roll on, thou ball, roll on;
Through pathless realms of space
Roll on.
What though I'm in a sorry case?
What though I cannot pay my bills?
What though I suffer toothache's ills?
What though I swallow countless pills?
Never you mind!
Roll on.
"Roll on, thou ball, roll on;
Through seas of inky air
Roll on.
It's true I've got no shirts to wear;
It's true my butcher's bills are due;
It's true my prospects all look blue—
But don't let that unsettle you—
Never you mind!
Roll on.
(It rolls on.)"
The incompleteness of the Stoic position is precisely this tendency to slight and ignore the external conditions out of which life is made. Its God is fate. Instead of a living, loving will, manifest in the struggle with present conditions, Stoicism sees only an impersonal law, rigid, fixed, fatal, unalterable, unimprovable, uncompanionable. Man's only freedom lies in unconditional surrender to what was long ago decreed. Of glad and original coöperation with its beneficent designs, thus helping to make the world happier and better than it could have been had not the universal will found and chosen just this individual me, to work freely for its improvement, Stoicism knows nothing. Its satisfaction is staked on a dead law to be obeyed, not a live will to be loved. Its ideal is a monotonous identity of law-abiding agents who differ from each other chiefly in the names by which they chance to be designated. It has no place for the development of rich and varied individuality in each through intense, passionate devotion to other individuals as widely different as age, sex, training, and temperament can make them. Before we find the perfect guidance of life we must look beyond the Stoic as well as the Epicurean, to Plato, to Aristotle, and, above all, to Jesus.