Chapter 14

It will be plain to those who have read what has elsewhere been said of the ideal life, that democracy is for the nation a true embodiment of that life, and wears its characteristics upon its sleeve. In it the individual mingles with the mass, and becomes one with mankind, and mankind itself sums the totality of individual good in a well-nigh perfect way. In it there is the slow embodiment of a future nobly conceived and brought into existence on an ideal basis of the best that is, from age to age, in man's power. It includes the universal wisdom, the reach of thought and aspiration, by virtue of which men climb, and here manhood climbs. It knows no limit; it rejects no man who wears the form Christ wore; it receives all into its benediction. Through democracy, more readily and more plainly than through any other system of government or conception of man's nature and destiny, the best of men may blend with his race, and store in their common life the energies of his own soul, looking for as much aid as he may give. Democracy, as elsewhere has been said, is the earthly hope of men; and they who stand apart, in fancied superiority to mankind, which is by creation equal in destiny, and in fact equal in the larger part of human nature, however obstructed by time and circumstance, are foolish withdrawers from the ways of life. On the battle-field or in the senate, or in the humblest cabin of the West, to lead an American life is to join heart and soul in this cause.

THE RIDE

Mystery is the natural habitat of the soul. It is the child's element, though he sees it not; for, year by year, acquiring the solid and palpable, the visible and audible, the things of mortal life, he lives in horizons of the senses, and though grown a youth he still looks intellectually for things definite and clear. Education in general through its whole period induces the contempt of all else, impressing almost universally the positive element in life, whose realm in early years at least is sensual. So it was with me: the mind's eye saw all that was or might be in an atmosphere of scepticism, as my bodily eye beheld the world washed in colour. Yet the habitual sense of mystery in man's life is a measure of wisdom in the man; and, at last, if the mind be open and turn upon the poles of truth, whether in the sage's knowledge or the poet's emotion or such common experience of the world as all have, mystery visibly envelops us, equally in the globed sky or the unlighted spirit,

I well remember the very moment when a poetical experience precipitated this conviction out of moods long familiar, but obscurely felt and deeply distrusted. I was born and bred by the sea; its mystery had passed into my being unawares, and was there unconscious, or, at least, not to be separated from the moods of my own spirit. But on my first Italian voyage, day by day we rolled upon the tremendous billows of a stormy sea, and all was strange and solemn--the illimitable tossing of a wave-world, darkening night after night through weird sunsets of a spectral and unknown beauty, enchantments that were doorways of a new earth and new heavens; and, on the tenth day, when I came on deck in this water-world, we had sighted Santa Maria, the southernmost of the Azores, and gradually we drew near to it. I shall never forget the strangeness of that sight--that solitary island under the sunlit showers of early morning; it lay in a beautiful atmosphere of belted mists and wreaths of rain, and tracts of soft sky, frequent with many near and distant rainbows that shone and faded and came again as we steamed through them, and the white wings of the birds, struck by the sun, were the whitest objects I have ever seen; slowly we passed by, and I could not have told what it was in that island scene which had so arrested me. But when, some days afterward, at the harbor of Gibraltar I looked upon the magnificent rock, and saw opposite the purple hills of Africa, again I felt through me that unknown thrill. It was the mystery of the land. It was altogether a discovery, a direct perception, a new sense of the natural world. Under the wild heights of Sangue di Christo I had dreamed that on the further side I should find the "far west" that had fled before me beyond the river, the prairies, and the plains; but there was no such mystery in the thought, or in the prospect, as this that saluted me coming landward for the first time from the ocean-world. Since that morning in the Straits, every horizon has been a mystery to me, to the spirit no less than to the eye; and truths have come to me like that lone island embosomed in eternal waters, like the capes and mountain barriers of Africa thrusting up new continents unknown, untravelled, of a land men yet might tread as common ground.

"A poet's mood"--I know what once I should have said. But mystery I then accepted as the only complement, the encompassment, of what we know of our life. In many ways I had drawn near to this belief before, and I have since many times confirmed it. One occasion, however, stands out in my memory even more intensely than those I have made bold to mention,--one experience that brought me near to my mother earth, as that out of which I was formed and to which I shall return, and made these things seem as natural as to draw my breath from the sister element of air. I had returned to the West; and while there, wandering in various places, I went to a small town, hardly more than a hamlet, some few hundred miles beyond the Missouri, where the mighty railroad, putting out a long feeler for the future, had halted its great steel branch--sinking like a thunderbolt into the ground for no imaginable reason, and affecting me vaguely with a sense of utmost limits. There a younger friend, five years my junior, in his lonely struggle with life bore to live, in such a camp of pioneer civilization as made my heart fail at first sight, though not unused to the meagreness, crudity, and hardness of such a place; but there I had come to take the warm welcome of his hands and look once more into his face before time should part us. He flung his arms about me, with a look of the South in his eyes, full of happy dancing lights, and the barren scene was like Italy made real for one instant of golden time.

But if we had wandered momentarily, as if out of some quiet sunlit gallery of Monte Beni, I soon found it was into the frontier of our western border. A herd of Texas ponies were to be immediately on sale, and I went to see them--wild animals, beautiful in their wildness, who had never known bit or spur; they were lariated and thrown down, as the buyers picked them out, and then led and pulled away to man's life. It was a typical scene: the pen, the hundred ponies bunched together and startled with the new surroundings, the cowboys whose resolute habit sat on them like cotillion grace--athletes in the grain--with the gray, close garb for use, the cigarette like a slow spark under the broad sombrero, the belted revolver, the lasso hung loose-coiled in the hand, quiet, careless, confident, with the ease of the master in his craft, now pulling down a pony without a struggle, and now showing strength and dexterity against frightened resistance; but the hour sped on, and our spoil was two of these creatures, so attractive to me at least that every moment my friend's eye was on me, and he kept saying, "They're wild, mind!" The next morning in the dark dawn we had them in harness, and drove out, when the stars were scarce gone from the sky, due north to the Bad Lands, to give me a new experience of the vast American land that bore us both, and made us, despite the thousands of miles that stretched between ocean and prairie, brothers in blood and brain,--brothers and friends.

Yet how to tell that ride, now grown a shining leaf of my book of memory! for my eyes were fascinated with the land, in the high blowing August wind, full of coolness and upland strength, like new breath in my nostrils; and forward over the broken country, fenceless, illimitable, ran the brown road, like a ploughed ribbon of soil, into the distance, where pioneer and explorer and prospector had gone before, and now the farmer was thinly settling,--the new America growing up before my eyes! and him only by me to make me not a stranger there, with talk of absent friends and old times, though scarce the long age of a college course had gone by,--talk lapsing as of old on such rides into serious strains, problems such as the young talk of together and keep their secret, learning life,--the troubles of the heart of youth. And if now I recur to some of the themes we touched on, and set down these memoranda, fragments of life, thinking they may be of use to other youths as they were then to us, I trust they will lose no privacy; for, as I write, I see them in that place, with that noble prospect, that high sky, and him beside me whose young listening yet seems to woo them from my breast.

We mounted the five-mile ridge,--and, "Poor Robin," he said, "what of him?" "Poor Robin sleeps in the Muses' graveyard," I laughed, "in the soft gray ashes of my blazing hearth. One must live the life before he tells the tale." "I loved his 'awakening,'" he replied, "and I have often thought of it by myself. And will nothing come of him now?" "Who can tell?" I said, looking hard off over the prairie. "The Muses must care for their own. That 'awakening,'" I went on, after a moment of wondering why the distant stream of the valley was called "the Looking-glass," and learning only that such was its name, "was when after the bookish torpor of his mind--you remember he called books his opiates--he felt the beauty of the spring and the marvel of human service come back on him like a flood. It was the growing consciousness of how little of life is our own. Youth takes life for granted; the hand that smoothed his pillow the long happy years, the springs that brought new blossoms to his cheeks, the common words that martyr and patriot have died to form on childish lips, and make them native there with life's first breath, are natural to him as Christmas gifts, and bring no obligation. Our life from babyhood is only one long lesson in indebtedness; and we best learn what we have received by what we give. This was dawning on my hero then. I recall how he ran the new passion. That outburst you used to like, amid the green bloom of the prairies, like the misted birches at home, under the heaven-wide warmth of April breathing with universal mildness through the softened air--why, you can remember the very day," I said. "It was one--" "Yes, I can remember more than that," he interrupted; "I know the words, or some of them; what you just said was the old voice--tang and colour--Poor Robin's voice;" and he began, and I listened to the words, which had once been mine, and now were his.

"By heaven, I never believed it. 'Clotho spins, Lachesis weaves, and Atropos cuts,' I said, 'and the poor illusion vanishes; the loud laughter, the fierce wailing, die on pale lips; the foolish and the wise, the merciful and the pitiless, the workers in the vineyard and the idlers in the market-place, are huddled into one grave, and the heart of Mary Mother and of Mary Magdalen are one dust.' Duly in those years the sun rose to cheer me; the breath of the free winds was in my nostrils; the grass made my pathways soft to my feet. Spring with its blossomed fruit trees, and the ungarnered summer, gladdened me; the flame of autumn was my torch of memory, and winter lighted my lamp of solitude. Men tilled the fields to feed me, and worked the loom to clothe me, and so far as in them was power and in me was need, brought to my doors sustenance for the body and whatsoever of divine truth was theirs for my soul. Women ministered to me in blessed charities; and some among my fellows gave me their souls in keeping. How true is that which my friend said to the poor boy-murderer condemned to die,--'I tell you, you cannot escape the mercy of God;' and tears coursed down the imbruted face, and once more the human soul, that the ministers of God could not reach, shone in its tabernacle. Now the butterfly has flown in at the tavern-window, and rebuked me. I go out, and on the broad earth the warm sun shines; the spring moves throughout our northern globe as when first man looked upon it; the seasons keep their word; the birds know their pathways through the air; the animals feed and multiply; the succession of day and night has no shadow of turning; the stars keep their order in the blue depths of infinite space; Sirius has not swerved from his course, nor Aldebaran flamed beyond his sphere; nature puts forth her strength in all the vast compass of her domain, and is manifest in life that continues and is increased in fuller measures of joy, heightened to fairer beauty, instinct with love in the heart of man. Wiser were the ascetics whom I used to scorn; they made themselves ascetics of the body, but I have been an ascetic of the soul."

* * * * *

"_Eccola!_" I said, "was it like that? But a heady rhetoric is not inconsistent with sobriety of thought, as many a Victorian page we have read together testifies. The style tames with the spirit; and wild blood is not the worst of faults in poets or boys. But I will change old coin for the new mintage with you, if you like, and it is not so very different. There is a good stretch ahead, and the ponies never seem to misbehave both at once." In fact, these ponies, who seemed to enjoy the broad, open world with us, had yet to learn the first lesson of civilization, and unite their private wills in rebellion; for, while one or the other of them would from time to time fling back his heels and prepare to resist, the other dragged him into the course with the steady pace, and, under hand and voice, they kept going in a much less adventurous way than I had anticipated. And so I read a page or two from the small blank-book in which I used to write, saying only, by way of preface, that the April morning my friend so well remembered marked the time when I began that direct appeal to life of which these notes were the first-fruits.

The waters of the Looking-glass had been lost behind its bluffs to the west as we turned inland, though we still rose with the slope of the valley; and now on higher land we saw the open country in a broad sweep, but with bolder configuration than was familiar to me in prairie regions, the rolling of the country being in great swells; and this slight touch of strangeness, this accentuation of the motionless lines of height and hollow, and the general lift of the land, perhaps, was what first gave that life to the soil, that sense of a presence in the earth itself, which was felt at a later time. Then I saw only the outspread region, with here and there a gleam of grain on side-hills and far-curved embrasures of the folded slopes, or great strands of Indian corn, acres within acres, and hardly a human dwelling anywhere; the loneliness, the majesty, the untouched primitiveness of it, were the elements I remember; and the wind, and the unclouded great expanse of the blue upper sky, like a separate element lifted in deep color over the gold of harvest, the green of earth, and the touches of brown road and soil. So, with pauses for common sights and things, and some word of comment and fuller statement and personal touches that do not matter now, I read my brief notes of life in its most sacred part.

"The gift of life at birth is only a little breath on a baby's lips; the air asks no consent to fill the lungs, the heart beats, the senses awaken, the mind begins, and the first handwriting of life is a child's smile; but as boyhood gathers fuller strength, and youth hives a more intimate sweetness, and manhood expands in richer values, life is not less entirely a gift. As well say a self-born as a self-made man. Nature does not intrust to us her bodily processes and functions, and the fountains of feeling within well up, and the forms of thought define, without obligation to man's wisdom; body and soul alike are above his will--our garment of sense comes from no human loom, nor were the bones of the spirit fashioned by any mortal hands; in our progress and growth, too, bloom of health and charm of soul owe their loveliness to that law of grace that went forth with the creative word. Slow as men are to realize the fact and the magnitude of this great grant, and the supreme value of it as life itself in all its abundance of blessings, there comes a time to every generous and open heart when the youth is made aware of the stream of beneficence flowing in upon him from the forms and forces of nature with benedictions of beauty and vigour; he knows, too, the cherishing of human service all about him in familiar love and the large brothering of man's general toil; he begins to see, shaping itself in him, the vast tradition of the past,--its mighty sheltering of mankind in institution and doctrine and accepted hopes, its fostering agencies, its driving energies. What a breaking out there is then in him of the emotions that are fountain-heads of permanent life,--filial love, patriotic duty, man's passion for humanity! It is then that he becomes a man. Strange would it be, if, at such tidal moments, the youth should not, in pure thankfulness, find out the Giver of all good!

"As soon as man thus knows himself a creature, he has established a direct relation with the Creator, did he but realize it,--not in mere thought of some temporal creation, some antecedent fact of a beginning, but in immediate experience of that continuing act which keeps the universe in being,

'Which wields the world with never wearied love, Sustains it from beneath and kindles it above,'--

felt and known now in the life which, moment to moment, is his own. The extreme sense of this may take on the expression of the pantheistic mood, as here in Shelley's words, without any logical irreverence: for pantheism is that great mood of the human spirit which it is, permanent, recurring in every age and race, as natural to Wordsworth as to Shelley, because of the fundamental character of these facts and the inevitability of the knowledge of them. The most arrogant thought of man, since it identifies him with deity, it springs from that same sense of insignificance which makes humility the characteristic of religious life in all its forms. A mind deeply penetrated with the feeling that all we take and all we are, our joys and the might and grace of life in us, are the mere lendings of mortality like Lear's rags, may come to think man the passive receptacle of power, and the instrument scarce distinguishable from the hand that uses it; the thought is as nigh to St. Paul as to Plato. This intimate and infinite sense of obligation finds its highest expression, on the secular side, and takes on the touch of mystery, in those great men of action who have believed themselves in a special manner servants of God, and in great poets who found some consecration in their calling. They, more than other men, know how small is any personal part in our labours and our wages alike. But in all men life comes to be felt to be, in itself and its instruments, this gift, this debt; to continue to live is to contract a greater debt in proportion to the greatness of the life; it is greatest in the greatest.

"This spontaneous gratitude is a vital thing. He who is most sensitive to beauty and prizes it, who is most quick to love, who is most ardent in the world's service, feels most constantly this power which enfolds him in its hidden infinity; he is overwhelmed by it: and how should gratitude for such varied and constant and exhaustless good fail to become a part of the daily life of his spirit, deepening with every hour in which the value, the power and sweetness of life, is made more plain? Yet at the same instant another and almost contrary mood is twin-born with this thankfulness,--the feeling of helplessness. Though the secret and inscrutable power, sustaining and feeding life, be truly felt,--

'Closer is He than breathing and nearer than hands and feet,'--

though in moments of life's triumphs it evokes this natural burst of happy gratitude, yet who can free himself from mortal fear, or dispense with human hope, however firm and irremovable may be his confidence in the beneficent order of God? And especially in the more strenuous trials of later ages for Christian perfection in a world not Christian, and under the mysterious dispensation of nature, even the youth has lived little, and that shallowly, who does not crave companionship, guidance, protection. Dependent as he feels himself to be for all he is and all he may become, the means of help--self-help even--and the law of it must be from that same power, whose efficient working he has recognized with a thankful heart. Where else shall he look except to that experience of exaltation during whose continuance he plucked a natural trust for the future, a reasonable belief in Providence, and a humble readiness to accept the partial ills of life? In life's valleys, then, as on its summits, in the darkness as in the light, he may retain that once confided trust; not that he looks for miracle, or any specific and particularizing care, it may be, but that in the normal course of things he believes in the natural alliance of that arm of infinite power with himself. In depression, in trouble, in struggle, such as all life exhibits, he will be no more solitary than in his hours of blessing. Thus, through helplessness also, he establishes a direct relation with God, which is also a reality of experience, as vital in the cry for aid as in the offering of thanks. The gratitude of the soul may be likened to that morning prayer of the race which was little more than praise with uplifted hands; the helplessness of man is rather the evening prayer of the Christian age, which with bowed head implores the grace of God to shield him through the night. These two, in all times, among all races, under ten thousand divinities, have been the voices of the heart.