Human Traits and their Social Significance Part 14

For to-day have the petty people become master; they all preach submission, and humility, and policy, and diligence, and consideration, and the long _et cetera_ of petty virtues.

These masters of to-day--surpa.s.s them, O my brethren--these petty people: they are the Superman's greatest danger![2]

[Footnote 2: _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ (Macmillan edition), pp. 351-52.]

It need scarcely be noted that even if the genius or Superman were justified, as this philosophy insists, on ruthlessly a.s.serting his priority, it is a dangerous procedure to identify one's ambitions with one's desserts. As already noted, a flamboyant a.s.surance of one's own importance is sometimes a ludicrous symptom of the reverse.

The more legitimate manifestation of strong individualism in action or opinion is in the case of deeply conscientious natures, who will not compromise by a hair's breadth from what they conceive to be the right. The fanatic is seldom an appealing character, but he is a type that enforces admiration.

Of such unflinching insistence are martyrs and great leaders made. There are in every community men who will regard it as treachery to their highest ideals to compromise at all from the inviolable principles to which they feel themselves committed.

Such men are difficult to deal with in human situations involving cooperation and compromise, and they exhibit frequently a rigid austerity, bitterness, and hate that do not readily win sympathy. But it is to such men as these that many religious and social reforms owe their initiation. Bertrand Russell, who, whether one agrees with him or not, exhibits a puritanical devotion to his social beliefs, has finely described the type:

The impatient idealist--and without some impatience a man will hardly prove effective--is almost sure to be led into hatred by the oppositions and disappointments which he encounters in his endeavors to bring happiness to the world. The more certain he is of the purity of his motives and the truth of his gospel, the more indignant will he become when his teaching is rejected.... The intense faith which enables him to withstand persecution for the sake of his beliefs makes him consider these beliefs so luminously obvious that any thinking man who rejects them must be dishonest and must be actuated by some sinister motive of treachery to the cause.[1]

[Footnote 1: Russell: _Proposed Roads to Freedom_, pp. xiii-xiv.]

ENTHUSIASM. The enthusiast is another type of self that plays an important part in social life and makes not the least attractive of its figures. The exuberant exponent of ideas, causes, persons, or inst.i.tutions is an effective preacher, teacher, or leader of men, and may be, apart from his utility, intrinsically of the utmost charm. Emotions vividly displayed are, as already pointed out in connection with sympathy, readily duplicated in others, and the ardors of the enthusiast are, when they have the earmarks of sincerity, contagious. A genuinely enthusiastic personality kindles his own fire in the hearts of others, and makes them appreciate as no mere formal a.n.a.lysis could, the vital and moving aspects of things. Good teaching has been defined as communication by contagion, and the teachers whom students usually testify to have influenced them most are not those who doled out flat prescribed wisdom, but those whose own informed ardor for their subject-matter communicated to the student a warm sense of its significance. Leaders of great movements who have been successful in controlling the energies and loyalties of millions of men have been frequently men of this high and contagious voltage. It certainly const.i.tuted part of Theodore Roosevelt's political strength, and, in more or less genuine form, is the a.s.set of every successful political speaker and leader.

Both for the one controlled by enthusiasm and for the others to whom it spreads, experience becomes richer in significance. Poets and the poetically-minded have to a singular degree the power of clothing with imaginative enthusiasm all the items of their experience.

Enthusiasm does not necessarily connote hysteria or sentimentalism.

The unstable enthusiast is a familiar type, the man who has another object of eagerness and loyalty each week. Mark Twain describes the type in the person of his brother, who had a dozen different ambitions a year. But enthusiasm may be a long-sustained devotion to a single ideal.

A curious instance of it was seen in the case of an Armenian scholar who, so it is reported to the writer by a student of Armenian culture, spent forty years in mastering cuneiform script in order to prove that the Phrygians were descended from the Armenians, and not _vice versa_.

Sh.e.l.ley could kindle the spirit of revolution in thousands who would have been bored to death with the same fiery doctrines in the abstract and cold pages of G.o.dwin, from whom Sh.e.l.ley derived his ideas of "political justice." The enthusiast, since he instinctively likes to share his emotions, not infrequently displays an intense desire for leadership, not so much that he may be a leader as that he may win converts to his own cause or creed. Such a personality finds its satisfaction in some form of proselyting zeal, be it for a religion, for a favorite charity, for good books, poetry, or social justice.

A well-known literary scholar who died recently was thus described by one of his former students:

Dr. Gummere was not a teacher; he was a vital atmosphere and his lectures, as one considered them from an intellectual or emotional angle, were revelations or adventures. There never were such cla.s.ses as his, we believed. Who could equal him in readiness of wit? Where was there such a raconteur? Who else could put the feel of a poem into one's heart? ... His voice was very deep, and exceedingly free and flexible. It always seemed to brim up as from a spirit overflowing. Everything about him was individual and spontaneous. He was perhaps most like a powerful river that braced one's energies, and carried one along without the slightest desire to resist.[1]

[Footnote 1: Charles Wharton Stork: "A Great Teacher," _The Nation_, July 26, 1919.]

THE NEGATIVE SELF. All the types of personality or self that have thus far been discussed are in some way positive or a.s.sertive. But the self may be exhibited negatively, in a shrinking, not only from observation, but from any positive or p.r.o.nounced action. This has already been noted in connection with submissiveness. Most people in the presence of their intellectual and social or even their physical superior, experience a sense of, to use McDougall's term, "negative self-feeling." In some people this negation or effacement of the self is a predominant characteristic.

It may be mere social timidity, which, in the case of those continually placed in servile positions, as in the case of the proverbial "poor relation," may become chronic. In its most disagreeable form it is exhibited as an obsequious flattering and a pretentious humility. Of this the cla.s.sic instance is Uriah Heep in _David Copperfield_:

"I suppose you are quite a great lawyer," I [David Copperfield]

said, after looking at him for some time.

"Me, Master Copperfield?" said Uriah. "Oh, no! I'm a very umble person."

It was no fancy of mine about his hands, I observed; for he frequently ground the palms against each other, as if to squeeze them dry and warm, besides often wiping them, in a stealthy way, on his pocket-handkerchief.

"I am well aware that I am the umblest person going," said Uriah Heep modestly, "let the other be where he may. My mother is likewise a very umble person. We live in a numble abode, Master Copperfield, but have much to be thankful for. My father's former calling was umble. He was a s.e.xton."

"What is he now?" I asked.

"He is a partaker of glory, at present, Master Copperfield, but we have much to be thankful for. How much have I to be thankful for, in living with Mr. Wickfield."

Negative self-feeling may be provoked by a genuine sense of unworthiness or modesty, and when this takes place among religious people, it may become a complete and rapturous submissiveness to G.o.d. The records of many mediaeval and of some modern mystics emphasize this complete yielding to the will of G.o.d, and in His will finding peace. James quotes in this connection Pascal's _Priere pour bien user les maladies_:

I ask you, neither for health nor for sickness, for life nor for death; but that you may dispose of my health and my sickness, my life and my death, for your glory.... You alone know what is expedient for me; you are the sovereign master; do with me according to your will. Give to me, or take away from me, only conform my will to yours. I know but one thing, Lord, that it is good to follow you, and bad to offend you. Apart from that, I know not what is good or bad in anything. I know not which is most profitable to me, health or sickness, wealth or poverty, nor anything else in the world. That discernment is beyond the power of men or angels, and is hidden among the secrets of your Providence, which I adore, but do not seek to fathom.[1]

[Footnote 1: Quoted in James: _Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 286.]

Self-surrender, however, takes other forms than religious absorption or devotion. "Saintliness" is not unknown in secular forms of life, in the devotion of men to any ideal, despite pain and privation of worldly goods and successes.

The doctor sacrificing his life in a leper colony is an extreme example. But something of the same humility and submissiveness is exhibited every time a man makes a choice which places the welfare of other people before his own immediate success. It is shown by the thousands of physicians and settlement workers and teachers who spend their lives in patient devotion to labors that bring little remuneration and as little glory. Men of affairs and a large proportion of other men generally measure worth by worldly success. But even from the worldly, such signs of self-surrender elicit admiration.

ECCENTRICS. There is one type of self so various and miscellaneous that it can only be subsumed under the general epithet, "eccentric." These are the unexpectedly large number of individuals in our civilization who do not come under any of the usual categories, who display some small or great abnormality which sets them off from the general run of men.

That some of these are accounted eccentric is to be explained in the light of man's tendency, as a gregarious animal, to think "queer" and "freakish" anything off the beaten track.

Some are clearly and unmistakably abnormal in some physiological or psychological respect. From these are recruited the inmates of our penitentiaries and insane asylums and the candidates for them. But there are eccentricities of social behavior, types of personality which though they cannot be cla.s.sed as either insane or criminal, yet definitely set an individual apart.

These include what Trotter has called the "mentally unstable,"

as set over against "the great cla.s.s of normal, sensible, reliable middle age, with its definite views, its resiliency to the depressing influence of facts, and its gift for forming the backbone of the State." There are the large group of slightly neurasthenic, made so, in part, by the high nervous tension under which modern, especially modern urban, life is lived. These include what are commonly called the hysterical or over-emotional, or "temperamental" types. In a civilization where most professions demand regularity, restraint, punctuality, and directness, unstability and excess emotionalism are necessarily at a discount. There are the vagabond types who, like young Georges, Jean-qhristophe's protege, regard a profession as a prison house, in which most of one's capacities are cruelly confined. There are again those who, possessing singular and exclusive sensitivity to aesthetic values, to music, art, and poetry, find the world outside their own lyric enthusiasms flat, stale, and unprofitable.

If, as so frequently happens, these combine, along with their peculiar temperaments, little genius and slender means, social and economic life becomes for them a blind alley. Every year at our great universities we see small groups of young men, who, having spent three or four years on philosophy, literature, and the liberal arts, and having no interest in academic life, are put to it to find a profession in which they can find a genuine interest or possible success.

Among these "eccentrics" a few have been reckoned geniuses by their contemporaries or by posterity. In such cases society hesitates to apply its usual formulae. One cannot condemn out of hand a Sh.e.l.ley. He is not of the run of men.

Sh.e.l.ley was one of those spokesmen of the _a priori_, one of those nurslings of the womb, like a bee or a b.u.t.terfly, a dogmatic, inspired, perfect, and incorrigible creature.... Being a finished child of nature, not a joint product, like most of us, of nature, history, and society, he abounded miraculously in his own clear sense, but was obtuse to the droll miscellaneous lessons of fortune. The cannonade of hard inexplicable facts that knocks into most of us what little wisdom we have, left Sh.e.l.ley dazed and sore, perhaps, but uninstructed.[1]

[Footnote 1: Santayana: _Winds of Doctrine_; Sh.e.l.ley, p. 159.]

It is difficult to draw the line in some cases between genius and insanity.[1] There have been time and again in society Ca.s.sandras who have spoken true prophecies and have been thought mad. There have been, on the other hand, those who, having some of the external eccentricities of genius, have given an illusive impression of greatness. The professional Bohemian likes to make himself great by wearing his hair long and living in a garret. But it is unquestionably true that a highly sensitive and creative mind is often ill at ease in the world of action, and remains a vagabond, an _enfant terrible_ or an eccentric all through life. It remains a fact that in contemporary society there are a small number of people, some of them of considerable talents, who simply cannot be made to fit into the social routine. For such Bertrand Russell suggests a "vagabond's wage." This he conceives as being just large enough to enable them to get along, to give them a chance to wander and experiment, but sufficiently small to penalize them for not settling down to the accustomed social routines.[2]

[Footnote 1: Thus Plato: "But he who, not being inspired and having no touch of madness in his soul, comes to the door and thinks that he will get into the temple by the help of art--he, I say, and his poetry are not admitted; the sane man is nowhere at all when he enters into rivalry with the madman."

_Phoedrus_ (Jowett translation), p. 550.]

[Footnote 2: Russell: _Proposed Roads to Freedom_, p. 177.

There was recently introduced to the writer a boy, aged nineteen, for whom this would be an admirable solution. Brought up in a tenement and working as a clerk, this youngster wrote what competent judges p.r.o.nounced to be really extraordinary lyrics.

He was at the same time utterly helpless in the world of affairs.

Even at college his casual habits and absorption would have prevented him from getting through his freshman year.]

Mill has generalized the situation of the genius:

Persons of genius, it is true, are, and are always likely to be, a small minority; but in order to have them, it is necessary to preserve the soil in which they grow. Genius can only breathe freely in an _atmosphere_ of freedom. Persons of genius are, _ex vi termini_, more individual than any other people--less capable, consequently, of fitting themselves, without hurtful compression, into any of the small number of moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their own character.... If they are of a strong character, and break their fetters, they become a mark for the society which has not succeeded in reducing them to commonplace, to point at with solemn warning as "wild," "erratic," and the like; much as if one should complain of the Niagara River for not flowing smoothly between its banks, like a Dutch ca.n.a.l.[1]

[Footnote 1: Mill: _Essay on Liberty_, chap. III.]

THE ACTIVE AND THE CONTEMPLATIVE. One final distinction must be made, one that cuts across all the types of self hitherto discussed, namely, the distinction between the man of action and the man of thought. One need not go far in literature or in life to find the contrast made. In the Scriptures Mary is set over against Martha, Rachel against Leah.

Hamlet and Ulysses are permanent representations of the melancholy thinker and the exuberant adventurer. The business man and the executive may be put over against the poet and the scholar; the strenuous organizer and administrator over against the quiet philosopher. Both have their outstanding uses, and, in their extreme forms, their outstanding defects. The active type, as we say, "gets things done." He builds bridges and industries; he manages markets and men. His eye is on the practical; he is dependable, rapid, and efficient. In an industrial civilization he is the great heroic type. The statesman and the railroad builder, the newspaper editors and the political leaders captivate the imaginations as they control the destinies of mankind.

On the other hand, there are those who stand aside (either from incapacity or disinclination or both) from the management of affairs and the life of action, and spend their lives in observation and contemplation. Plato and Aristotle regarded this as the highest type of life; it may have been because they were themselves both philosophers. In its extreme form it is exhibited in such men as Spinoza or Kant, spending their lives in practical obscurity, speculating on time and s.p.a.ce and eternity. But it is apparent in less extreme types. The "patient observer," the genial spectator of other men's actions is not infrequent. When he has literary gifts he is a philosopher or a poet. Lucretius in a famous pa.s.sage stated the contemplative ideal, contrasting it with its opposite:

Sweet it is when on the great seas the winds are buffeting, to gaze from the land on another's great struggles; not because it is pleasure or joy that any one should be distressed, but because it is sweet to perceive from what misfortunes you yourself are free. Sweet is it, too, to behold great contests of war in full array over the plains, when you have no part in the danger. But nothing is more gladdening than to dwell in the calm high places, firmly embattled on the heights by the teaching of the wise, whence you can look down on others, and see them wandering hither and thither and going astray, as they seek the way of life, in strife matching their wits or rival claims of birth, struggling night and day by surpa.s.sing effort to rise up to the height of power and gain possession of the world.[1]

[Footnote 1: Lucretius: _De Rerum Natura_ (Bailey translation), book II, lines 1-12.]

But in the two types it is not the fruit of action or contemplation, but action and contemplation themselves that the two types find respectively interesting. The man of action finds an immediate satisfaction in movement, change, the clamor of affairs, the contacts with other people, the making of changes in the practical world. The man of thought finds as immediate enjoyment in noting the ways of men, and reflecting upon them.

That contemplation, disinterested thinking, also has its use goes without saying. The thinker and the dreamer may be something at least of what the Irish poet boasts: