Chapter 18

And the artist lover, under the first picture, in quaint letters, such as monks in remote ages used, wrote this legend, "To-morrow;" and the woman, taking the pencil, wrote in her sweet girlish hand, "Youth is Very Beautiful." The artist took back his pencil, and under the second picture scrolled, "These Loved Themselves Better Than They Loved Others;" and the woman wrote, "Their To-morrow was Failure." Under the third picture the artist wrote, "These Loved God Best and Their Neighbors as Themselves;" and the woman took the pencil from his hand and wrote, "Old Age is Very Beautiful--More Beautiful Than Youth," and a tear fell and blotted some of the words, as a drop of rain makes a blurred spot on a dusty pane. And the lover said, "Serving others is better than serving ourselves;" and the girl's sweet voice answering, like an echo, "Serving others is better than serving ourselves."

And the sun had set. The glow from the sky was fading, as embers on a hearth, pale to gray ashes; and an owl called from an elm-tree on the hillside, while these two arose, with faces like the morning, and, taking the pictures, walked slowly as lovers will; and so, fading into the deepening twilight, I heard her saying, "Serving others is life at its best," and him replying, "Jesus said, 'The poor ye have always with you;'" and their footsteps and voices died away together in the gloaming; and a whip-poor-will called often and plaintively from the woodland across the field.

XI

The Gentleman in Literature

Humor is half pathos and more. This sword has two edges. On the one, shining like burnished silver, you may see smiles reflected as from a mirror; on the other, tears stand thick, like dews on flowers at early morning of the later spring. Humor is a dual faculty, as much misconceived by those who listen as by those who speak. We do not always have wit to know the scope of what we do. Thoughts of childhood, says the poet, are long, long thoughts; but who supposes childhood knows they are? Nor is this altogether a fault. To feel the sublime sequence of all we did would burden us as Atlas was burdened by holding up the sky. Life might easily come to be sober to somberness, which is a thing unwholesome and undesirable. Sunlight must have its way. Darkness must not trespass too far; and every morning says to every night, "Thus far, but no farther."

To many readers, Don Quixote seems fantastic, and Cervantes a laughter-monger. Cervantes had suffered much. His life reads like a novelist's tale. He belonged to the era of Spenser and Shakespeare; of Philip II and William the Silent; of Leicester and Don John of Austria; of The Great Armada and the Spanish Inquisition; of Lope de Vega and Cervantes--for he was, in the Hispanian peninsula, his own greatest contemporary--and to this hour this battle-scarred soldier of fortune stands the tallest figure of Spanish literature. His was a lettered rearing, and a young manhood spent as a common soldier. At Lepanto he lost hand and arm. In five long, weary, and bitter years of slavery among Algerine pirates, he held up his head, being a man; plotted escape in dreams and waking; fought for freedom as a pinioned eagle might; was at last rescued by the Society for the Redemption of Slaves; sailed home from slavery to penury; came perilously near the age of threescore, poverty-stricken and unknown, when, like a sun which leaps from sunrise to noon at a single bound, this maimed soldier sprang mid-sky, impossible to be ignored or forgotten, and disclosed himself, the marked Spaniard of his era; and on the same day of 1616, Cervantes and Shakespeare stopped their life in an unfinished line, and not a man since then has been able to fill out the broken meaning. This man had not wine, but tears to drink. Yet he jests, and the world laughs with him; though we feel sure that while his age and after ages laugh and applaud, Miguel Cervantes sits with laughter all faded from his face, and the white look of pain settled about his lips, while tears "rise in the heart and gather to the eyes." Tears sometimes make laughter and jest the wilder. Men and women laugh to keep their hearts from breaking.

Cervantes has ostensibly drawn a picture of a madman, and in fact has painted a gentleman. What his intent was, who can be so bold as to say? What part of his purpose was, we know. He would excoriate a false and flippant chivalry. Contemporaneous chivalry he knew well; for he had been a common soldier, wounded and distressed. He had seen what a poor triviality that once noble thing had grown to be. Institutions become effete. Age is apt to sap the strength of movements as of men. Feudalism and the Crusades had commissioned the knight-errant; and now, when law began to hold sword for itself, the self-constituted legal force--knight-errantry--was no longer needed. But to know when an institution has served its purpose is little less than genius. Some things can be laughed down which can not be argued down. A jest is not infrequently more potent than any syllogism. Some things must be laughed away, other things must be wept away; so that humor and pathos are to be ranked among the mighty agents for reform. And one purpose Cervantes had was to laugh a tawdry knight-errantry off the stage. In long years of soldiery, I doubt not he had grown to hate this empty boast, and his nursed wrath now breaks out like a volcano. This was his apparent purpose--but who can say this was all his purpose? "King Lear" has a double action. Mayhap, Don Quixote has a double meaning. We are always attaching meanings to works of genius. But you can not tie any writer's utterance down to some poor altitude. Great utterances have at least a half-infinite application. Tennyson felt this, saying--as we read in his son's biography of him--regarding explanations of his "Idyls of the King:" "I hate to be tied down to 'this means that,' because the thought within the image is much more than any one interpretation;" and, "Poetry is like shot-silk, with many glancing colors. Every reader will find his own interpretation according to his ability, and according to his sympathy, with the poet." What is true of poetry is true of all imaginative literature. An author may not have analyzed his own motive in its entirety. In any case, we may hold to this, Don Quixote was a gentleman, and is the first gentleman whose portrait is given us in literature. We have laughed at Don Quixote, but we have learned to love him. The "knight of the rueful countenance," as we see him now, is not himself a jest, but one of literature's most noble figures; and we love him because we must. Was it mere chance that in drawing this don, Cervantes clothed him with all nobilities, and shows him--living and dying--good, courageous, pure; in short, a man? This scarcely seems a happening. Seas have subtle undercurrents. I venture, Don Quixote has the same, and marks the appearance of a gentleman in literature, since which day that person has been a recurring, ennobling presence on the pages of fiction and poetry.

A gentleman is a comparatively recent creation in life, as in letters. Christ was the foremost and first gentleman. After him all gentility patterns. With the law of the imagination we are familiar, which is this: Imagination deals only with materials supplied by the senses. Imagination, in other words, is not strictly originative, but, rather, appropriative, giving a varied placing to images on hand, just as the kaleidoscope makes all its multiform combinations with a given number of pieces. Imagination does not make materials, is no magician, but is an architect. Admitting this law, we can readily see how the creation of a gentleman does not lie in the province of imagination. Homer's heroes are the men Homer knew, with a poetic emphasis on strength, stature, prowess. His era grew warriors and nothing else, and so Homer paints nothing else. Human genius has limits. Man is originative in character; and poets--"of imagination all compact"--catch this new form of life, and we call the picture poetry. All civilization, to the days of Jesus, produced but one character, so far as we may read, worthy to be thought entire gentleman, and this was Joseph, the Jew, premier of Egypt. He is the most manly man of pre-Christian civilizations. Or probably Moses must be listed here. Classic scholarship can show no gentleman Greece produced. Greek soil grew no such flowers beneath its radiant sky. Plato was a philosopher--not gentleman. Socrates was an iconoclast, but not a manly man and helpful spirit. Greek heroes were guilty of atrocious and unthinkable sins. Test them by this canon of Alfred Tennyson: "I would pluck my hand from a man, even if he were my greatest hero or dearest friend, if he wronged a woman or told her a lie;" and, so tested, where must Greek heroes be classified? Greece and Rome produced heroes, but not gentlemen. Julius Caesar was the flower of the Latin race. Nothing approximates him. Great qualities cluster in him like stars in the deep sky. But his ambition was like to that of Milton's Satan, and his lust was a bottomless pit. As a national heroic figure, Julius Caesar is dazzling as a sun at summer noon; but as a gentleman he cuts poorer figure than Lancelot or Sir Tristram. The gentleman is not an evolution, but a creation. Christ created the gentleman as certainly as he created the world.

Now, literature is what Emerson says genius is, a superlative borrower. The state of a civilization at a given time will gauge the poet's concept. He can not pass beyond the world's noblest notions to his hour. If Greece and Rome produced no man, settle to it that Greek and Roman literatures will produce no man. Sculptor, as Phidias; statesman, as Pericles; dramatist, as Aeschylus; general, as Themistocles; stern justice, as Aristides,--Greece can show; and such characters the historians, dramatists, and epic poets will delineate and celebrate. Horace is a looking-glass, and holds his genius so as to catch the shadows of men passing by. This poets do, and can do no more. They are not strictly creative. We mistake their mission. God has somehow kept the creative power in his own possession. Men can appropriate; God can create. So what we find is, that ancient literature never attempted depicting a gentleman. Those days had no such persons. But Christ came and set men a-dreaming. He filled men's souls to the brim with expectation and wonder akin to fear and anticipation of impossibilities; and what he was, men fondly and greatly dreamed they might aspire to be. And thus the gentleman became a prospective fact in life and after life, in literature; for we think it has been fairly shown how literature produces no type till life has produced it first. Literature is not properly productive, but reproductive; not creative, but appropriative. As men climb a mountain on a dark, still night, to watch a sunrise, so the race began to climb toward manhood. The night was long, and this mountain taller than Himalayas; and man slept not, but climbed. His groping toward this sunrise of soul is the epic of history. Dante knew not a gentleman, and could not dream him therefore. Mediaevalism learned to paint the Madonna's face, but not manhood's look. Character is the last test of genius. Man saw gray streaks of dawn, rimming far, ragged peaks, and still he climbed; and, on a morning, beheld the sunrise! And if you will note, 't is Don Quixote standing on the mountain's crest.

Some things can be adequately represented in marble. For "the Laocoon" marble is probably the best method of expression. Fear, superhuman effort, anguish, brute strength mastering human strength,--these are the thoughts to be expressed, and are brought out in marble with singular clearness and fidelity. For some things color is a necessity; and marble would be totally inadequate. "The Greek Slave" may be put in stone; the bewildering face of a world's Christ can never be seriously attempted in marble, the futility of such attempt being so apparent. Color, lights and shadows are essential to give hints of deep things of deep soul. Hoffman must have canvas and colors. You must paint the Christ. And some facts can not be painted. They are abstract, and can not be intimated by anything short of words. You can paint a man--Saul of Tarsus, or Charlemagne--but can not paint a gentleman; for he represents no single majesty, but an essential and intricate balance of all useful, great, and noble qualities. He can be painted only by words; so that literature is the solitary means of making apparent the shadow of that divine thing, a gentleman.

Don Quixote becomes intensely interesting, then, as a new attempt in creative genius. But dare we think a gentleman could be ludicrous and fantastic? for this the don was. We revolt against the notion that so gracious a thing could be grotesque. Yet is this our mature thought? Do not the facts certify that from this world's unregenerate standpoint manliness is grotesque? Was not Christ looked upon as mad? Did not his ideas of manliness appear as nothing other than fantastic, when he would substitute love for might, meekness for braggadocio, and purity of heart for an omnipresent sensuality? What were his ideals of manhood but battling with windmills or being enamored of a myth? Tested by standards of this world's make, his notions and conduct were sheerly fantastic. As recorded on one occasion, "They laughed him to scorn;" and this they did many another time, covertly or openly. Indeed, grasping the state of civilization as then existing, and comprehending Christ's non-earthly idea of what a gentleman was, we can not be slow to perceive how ludicrous this conception would be to the Roman world. Tall dreams seem madness. Hamlet's feigned madness puzzles us even yet. Many an auditor heard Columbus with a smile ill-concealed behind his beard. All high ideality sounds a madman's babble. To see a true life live truly will strike many as a jest, and others as pathos too deep for sobs.

Don Quixote conceived a man ought to live for virtue. To be self-dedicated to the help of others; to be courageous as an army which had never met defeat; to be self-forgetful, so that hunger, pain, thirst, fatigue, become trifles; to have love become absorbing; to fill the mind's unfathomed sky with dreams outshining dawns; to count honor to be so much more than life, as that honor is all and life is naught; to interpret all men and women at their best, and so to expect good and not suspicion evil; to meet all men on the high level of manhood; and to love God with such persistency and eagerness as that the soul's solitudes are peopled with him as by a host,--if this be not a gentleman, we have misconceived the species. Read this history of his early and later battles for right, and you will not find an impurity of word, suggestion, thought. God's lilies are not cleaner. I confess that the knight's love for Dulcinea del Tobosa moves me to tears. I never can smile or jest at him when his heart and lips hold with fealty to an ideal love. His love created her. He found her a clod, but flung her into the sky and made her a star. Is not this love's uniform history? Blinded, not of lust or ambition, but of ideality. Saul met Christ at noon, and was blinded by his vision; and would not all brave men covet blindness thus incurred? And better to be blinded, as Don Quixote, by a ravishing ideal, than to see, besotted in soul and shut out from God. That humorous figure astride lean Rosinante, esquired by pudgy, sensible Sancho; eager for chances to be of use; faithful to his love as dawn to sun; strong in his desire of being all eyes to see distress, all ears to hear a call for succor; sitting a dark night through in vigil, tireless, courageous, waiting for day to charge on what proved to be fulling hammers, making tumult with their own stamping; or, again, asleep in the inn bed, fighting with wine-skins and dreaming himself battling with giants,--this does not touch me as being humorous so much as it does as being pathetic, unspeakably pathetic, and manfully courageous. I see, but do not feel, the humor. I have followed Don Quixote as faithfully as Sancho Panza on his "Dapple;" have seen him fight, conquer, suffer defeat, ride through his land of dreams; have seen his pasteboard helmet; have noted melancholy settle round him as shadows on the landscape of an autumn day; have seen him grow sick, weaken, die; but have known in him only high dreams, attempted high achievings; have found him honor's soul, and holding high regard for women; have been spectator of goodness as unimpeachable as heaven, and purity deep, like that which whitens round the throne--a human soul given over to goodness, and named, for cause, "Quixada the Good." And his goodness seems a contagion.

For two and a half centuries since Cervantes painted this picture of a gentleman, literature has given less or more of heed to similar attempts; though as result, as I suppose, there are but two life-size pictures which unhesitatingly we name gentlemen as soon as our eyes light on them. Profile or silhouette of him there has been, but of the full-length, full-face figure, only two. Shakespeare did not attempt this task. Aside from Hamlet--who was not meant to sit for this picture, though he had been no ill character for such sitting--there is not among Shakespeare's men an intimation of such undertaking. Would this princely genius had put his hand to this attempt, though, as seems clear to me, Shakespeare did not conceive a gentleman. His ideas were not quite whitened with Christ's morning light enough to have perceived other than the natural man. Shakespeare's men are always "a little lower than the angels;" whereas a gentleman might fittingly stand among angels as a brother. This one star never swung across the optic-glass of our great Shakespeare. That spiritual-mindedness which is life he scarcely possessed. This was his limitation. Spenser stood higher on this mount of vision. He conceived and executed a picture of pure womanhood, and, had he attempted, might have sketched a wondrous face and figure of a gentleman. Even as it was, he gave intimations of this coming king. He seems one who gathers fuel for a fire, but never sets the flame. His figures shift, and present no central character of manhood who grows and furnishes standard of comparison. Milton's genius was cast in a cyclopean mold, and needed distances remote as heaven and hell to give right perspective to his figures, and his supreme art concerns itself with Satan, and archangels, and God.

Of this ideal gentleman we have had growing hints. Literature, more and more, concerns itself with spiritual quantities. The air of our century is aromatic with these beautiful conceptions, as witness Jean Valjean, Dr. MacLure, Deacon Phoebe, Sidney Carton, Daniel Deronda, Donal Grant, Bayard, Red Jason, Pete, Captain Moray, John Halifax, and Caponsacchi. Some of these pictures seem more than side views. But a gentleman should be, must be, nobly normal. He is a balance of virtue. Symmetry impresses us in him, as when we look at the Parthenon. All his powers are in such delicate balance as that they seem capable of easy perturbation, yet are, in fact, imperturbable as stars. The gentleman in life is becoming a common figure. We have known such--so strong, quiet, heroic, calm, sure of the future, knit to God, big with fidelity and faith, that they translated into literal speech the holy precepts of the Book of God. So tested, this world grows surely better. Man has lost in romantic glitter of costume and bearing, but has gained immeasurably in manhood. The gospel is peopling the world with men. To suppose God meant to change men to saints was a misconception. St. Simeon Stylites was that old misconception realized. We can but honor him, so vast his hunger, so noble his strife, so courageous his attitude, when he shouts, "I smote them with the cross;" but St. Simeon did not realize God's notion. Goodness is fraternal, accessible, genial. John Storm, in Hall Caine's "The Christian," is susceptible to the same criticism. He is not balanced. He means well, but is erratic, fitful, lacking center. He is like a bird lost in storms, flying in circles. He thought to be a saint, whereas Christ did not come to make saints, but to make men; and the sooner we realize that a "saint" or a "Christian" is not the end of the gospel, the better will it be for Christianity. Christianity is God's method of making men; and Christianity is not an end, but a means. When God gets his way, he wants to have this world populated with men and women. Whether Caine meant John Storm for an ideal Christian we can not say. There is strength here, as in all he has written; but Storm's lacks are many and great. He is enthusiast, but flighty. He means well, but is spasmodic in its display. Storm might have grown into a hero had he lived longer, and, as a flame, leaped high at some point in his career. Both as man and Christian, he disappoints us. Red Jason, in "The Bondman," is a worthier contribution to the natural history of the gentleman. View him how you will, he is great. His moral stature lifts itself like the mass of a mountain. His nature seems a fertile field seeded down to heroisms, and every seed germinating and growing to maturity. Jason has virtues vast of girth as huge forest-trees, but he is scarcely companionable. Glooms gather round him as night about a hamlet in a valley. He is moral, imposing, heroic, yet is there something lacking--is it voice, self-poise, what?--lacking of being quite a gentleman. Nor was he shaped for such a role by his creator, but was meant to sit for the portrait of a hero. And such he is to the point of moving the spirit, as by the lightning's touch, Goethe was not capable of conceiving a gentleman. His "Wilhelm Meister" and himself fall so low in the scale of worth as to preclude his seeing so serene a face. Goethe's sky was clouded, and fine lines of finest character are only brought out under unhindered sunlight. Manhood is a serene thing. Though storm-bolts rain about it thick as hail, the quiet of deep seas reigns in it. And Dumas's men are each a _bon vivant_, save the son of Porthos. These dusty and bloody guardsmen had not enough moral fiber to fill a thimble. They think the world of men and women a field for forage. This physical dash and courage, this galloping of steeds, and sabers pummeling steeds' sides, stands instead of character. In "Marius the Epicurean," Walter Pater has given, as I think, a true picture of one who in the Roman era aspired to be a man. He is cold, and in consequence barren; but such is an accurate reading of Roman attempts at manhood; for ordinary Epicureanism was fervid to sensuality, and the Stoic was frigid. To heathen conception there was no middle ground. The warm color on cheek, the morning in the eyes, the geniality in the hand, the fervor at the heart, the alert thought, the winged imagination, the sturdy will, the virile moral sense, the responsive conscience, the courage which laughed to die for duty,--these could not be amalgamated. Heroic qualities have always been native to the soul as warmth to the south wind. All history is rich with tapestries of tragic and colossal heroisms, so as to make us proud that we are men. Heroisms are harsh, but manliness is tender. And in this seeming irreconcilability lies the difficulty of constructing a gentleman.