Chapter VI: Front Matter (6)

“That is right,” I answered. “If you include the animals as selves, he could still be good or bad in his relation with them. But you see that goodness is of relation. It is having our relations right, good and sympathetic, as far as they reach.

“That, then, is the law, the only law. All moralities and systems were made to uphold and fulfil that law, and they all change with the needs of man and his circumstances, but that one law is always the same, is always true, is the spirit which makes all actions either good or bad. For I believe there is no action in itself either good or bad, but all must be tested by this law. ‘Is it good?’ means: Does it make for true and understanding relations between men? Do you agree with me?”

“Yes,” they said.

“Take the laws of Moses, or any system of laws,” I went on, “and you will see that they were made by men, who realized in themselves the one supreme law, the law of progress toward the human whole. These systems of laws, if followed by people incapable of seeing the broad way for themselves, would lead toward that end. But the lesser laws change with circumstance, as a path changes with the landscape. Take the Mosaic laws. The first laws, ‘Thou shalt have no other God,’ ‘Thou shalt not take his name in vain,’ and ‘Thou shalt keep the Sabbath,’ seem to us now much less important than some later laws, such as ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ and so on. But if you stop to think, you will see that these first were most necessary; for the people’s idea of God, so much more limited than ours, was still, like ours, the reason for their morality, the law of laws, the ‘I Am’ that gave meaning to goodness. In their condition, if they had not reverenced and feared God, they would not have kept the laws of Moses. The actions or ways of life we often hear called good, but which arouse in us a feeling of contempt, as if it were goody-goodiness, or self-righteousness, are actions according to petty laws of goodness, by people who do not know the spirit, the great law above all laws. Sometimes they are actions no longer good at all, acted according to petty laws that we have passed. Do you see what I mean?”

“Give me an example of what you mean,” Marian said.

“Many conventions are an example,” said Henry.

“Yes, they may be,” I answered.

“Conventions,” said Virginia, “are neither right nor wrong.”

“No,” I answered, “they are usually a matter of convenience. But some people do make the mistake of calling them right or wrong. Then again you will hear people argue whether or not it is right to tell the truth, under all circumstances.”

“You mean,” Henry said, “that they argue whether or not it is good to tell the truth as truth, not whether the truth will help us toward better relation.”

“Exactly.”

“I think,” said Virginia, “to tell the truth to hurt people’s feelings is wicked.”

Now they were just going to have an argument as to truth-telling, when I reminded them that this was what we did not want to do.

Marian spoke of school laws, and said that these were often without force or reason, and that she saw no great harm in breaking them. When I remembered the folly of laws in many schools, I could not disagree with her. “Of course,” she said, “one gets out of sympathy with that class of mortals called teachers.”

“Hardly,” said I, “if one is honest at all times. And perhaps the meanest, most cowardly lie is the lie of evasion and shirking of punishment in such a case.”

Henry said: “Teachers ought not to ask boys and girls, ‘did you do this or that?’”

“You are right,” I answered; “but, again, no boy or girl of spirit, courage and character would hesitate to answer truthfully.

“Self-sacrifice,” I said, “is a good example of the sort of action that is called good in itself, when it is not at all so, but has only a definite and limited purpose in the scheme. I wish to explain it to you. But first I want to be sure that you understand this idea of good. Is it new to you?”

“Yes,” said Marian, “I never thought of it in that way before.”

“You all have said so little,” I went on, “I am afraid you may not fully understand.”

“There is nothing to say,” answered Marian, “for it grows so naturally out of everything we have done.”

“Our whole thought is like a chain,” said Virginia, “link within link.”

“Alfred,” I said, “you are so silent, you don’t give us a chance to see how bright you are. Now, tell me, what is the good? What do I mean? I want to be sure you understand.”

He hesitated. “The good is completeness, harmony.”

“Yes,” I said, “but I want it more definitely. The good is a sign of that completeness. To the truly good man, as much as he knows of the world, or dreams of it, is his whole self. And he wants that whole self to be right. The good man cannot be wholly good until every one else is so. The world must be perfect to satisfy his desire for good.”

Ruth said: “It is what you told us before, that we cannot be perfect unless the universe is perfect. But it seems to me that a man may be just as good, though others are bad.”

“Yes,” I said, “he can do his best to fill out the gaps and make his relations right, but his goodness will not wholly satisfy him. On the other hand, the self-righteous man, who lives according to precepts and rules, is easily satisfied with himself. Goodness is beauty. The good is always the beautiful action. But goodness, according to laws and precepts which are outworn, which we have left behind us, is no longer beautiful for us.”

Virginia pointed out that in this, then, goodness differed from art, for the objects of art remained beautiful through hundreds of years.

“Six hundred years ago,” she said, “men painted pictures which probably cannot be equalled to-day.”

“But,” I answered, “a man trying to paint like Raphael now, would not paint beautifully.”

“No,” said she; “but if he tried to paint like Franz Hals or Rembrandt he might.”

“Not at all,” I answered.

“Of course,” she admitted, “he would have to paint like himself, to be himself.”

“Surely,” said I, “and so with goodness. Each man has his own particular goodness, according to his circumstances and nature. But, just as a beautiful picture is eternally beautiful, so goodness in the past, though it no longer seems good to us for practice, is always delightful to think of, though it would be horrible to imitate. For instance, the self-imposed poverty of St. Francis of Assisi.”

We spoke of asceticism and the ideals of self-sacrifice, and then of self-sacrifice itself, as preached in our own lives.

“In the first place,” I said, “we must get clear in our minds the meaning of happiness. People will say to you again and again that the aim of life is happiness. But if each one of us were to speak of happiness, and use the same word, we would each mean something different. Now, what is happiness?”

“It is having fun,” said Virginia.

“Yes,” I said, “that is all right. But that’s only repeating the same thing. What is it that makes us happy?”

Florence answered: “Having what you like.”

“Yes,” I said, “but more than that. It is having what you want most. If you liked pie, but you liked ice cream better, then pie wouldn’t satisfy you, would it?”

“No.”

“What would?”

“Ice cream and pie both,” said Florence.

We decided, however, after some thought, that we would give up pie for ice cream. “And this,” I said, “is the meaning of self-sacrifice. It is giving up what we want for something we want still more. And as the thing we want most of all, and for which we would give up everything else, is complete harmony, sympathy and understanding, you see that in all our self-sacrifices we are giving up what we want for what we want still more. We are giving up our smaller for our larger self.”

“That is just what Booker T. Washington said at the lecture this morning,” Virginia went on. “He said he had never made a single sacrifice, but he had always done the thing he loved to do most. It is fun to do good. It makes us feel so virtuous. And we do it because we like most to see other people happy.”

“That is what I mean, Virginia.”

“I don’t think it is so, always,” said Ruth. “I think often people are just forced to give up things and sacrifice themselves, when they don’t like it at all.”

“That’s different,” I said, “if it is enforced. I meant voluntary self-sacrifice.”

“Even so,” she went on, “suppose you are going out somewhere, and you have to stay at home with some person who is ill, just because you are asked to do it. You don’t like it, but you do it, anyway.”

“Probably,” I answered, “you love that person and that person’s pleasure far more than you do, say, the theatre.”

“No,” said Ruth, “perhaps you don’t love the person at all.”

“But you love to feel virtuous,” Virginia said, “and all the time you stay at home you are saying bad things, mentally, about that person.”

“But you stay from choice, you please your bigger self and its demands for beauty,” I went on; “you give up what you want for what you want more.”

“Yes,” Virginia said, “for you would be uncomfortable and unhappy if you went.”

“You see how silly and childish it is,” I continued, “to give up anything for nothing, to deny yourself pleasures, to make sacrifices for their own sake. That is one of the false virtues which make people self-righteous, ‘goody-goody’ and ridiculous. I know a girl who gave up eating butter during Lent because she liked butter, and she thought it noble to deny herself.”

“Yes,” said Virginia, “and I know girls who won’t take sundaes during Lent, but drink sodas instead, because they like sundaes better.”

I read aloud to them a Ruskin quotation that Ruth had brought some time ago:

“Recollect that ‘mors’ means death, and delaying; and ‘vita’ means life, and growing; and try always, not to mortify yourself, but to vivify yourself.”

“You see,” I said, “I believe in being selfish, in the very largest sense. I believe the whole world, all that I know and love, to be my whole self, and I want to make that as good, as true, as harmonious as I can. What people usually call selfishness is only self-limitation, cutting yourself off.”

“Yes; it is making yourself little.”

“Exactly. Take selfish people, and you will find that they are not only making others unhappy, but making their own lives very small and narrow.”

“They are unhappy themselves,” said Florence.

I told them a story of three apple seedlings. The first said: “I will not grow; there is so little room; I will not help crowd out the others.” He died, a weakling. The second said: “I will not bear apples, because the effort might spoil the glossy appearance and fulness of my foliage.” He was good to look at, but—useless. The third one said: “Apple-trees were made to bear apples. I like to do it, I want to do it, and I will.” And he did, and so served himself and many beside.

“I never could understand the morality,” I said, “that tells us to live only for others.”

“It would be impossible,” said Henry; “one has to live first for one’s self.”

“And last for one’s self,” I went on, “for that biggest self which is our own life in relation with all that we know. If we lived only for others, others would still live for others, and so on, with no end and no sense. It is like that idea of living for future generations.”

“What of it?” asked Marian. “I am particularly interested.”

“That we shall live for future generations, and the future generations shall live also for future generations, and so on forever and ever!”

“Unless it were all for the last generation,” said Henry.

“But that will never come,” I answered, “or, if it does, it will surely not be worth while. I believe that whoever lives the best life for himself, and does the thing he is most impelled to do, for his whole big self, is also best for all others. He must be, since they are a part of him.”

“It seems to me,” said Marian, who had been dreaming, “that there is no absolute truth. When people claim that they have found the whole truth, and try to explain it to me, I never feel convinced.”

“Does our idea strike you so, Marian?” I asked.

“Oh, no,” she said, “not at all. You never make positive statements.”

“No,” I answered, “I am willing to grant that what seems true to me now may one day be included in a larger truth.”

We spoke a few words, here, of envy. They agreed at once that artistic envy, the envying of capabilities and talents, was impossible to one who felt that others were doing things for him, that what he lacked in himself he would find in others, for his satisfaction.

“But,” said Florence, “there are so many other kinds of envy, where other people having the thing does you no good.”

“That’s true,” I said; “a beggar, for instance, envying the rich people in a restaurant for their food, will not lose his hunger through seeing them eat.”

I told them of the danger and difficulty of our philosophy of right and wrong, how I hesitated to tell it to them for fear they might misuse it, and how much harder it was to guide one’s self by so big a standard than by an unbeautiful, ready-made morality of little laws and precepts. He must take the straight and narrow path, who cannot guide himself across the prairies by the path of stars and planets.

Virginia insisted on my repeating some facts I had told her lately. A young French girl of good education, made desperate by poverty and lack of work, slashed a picture in the Louvre, in order to be arrested, get shelter and food, and attract attention to the injustice of her lot. We discussed such cases, and decided that where society did so great a wrong, the lesser wrong might be part of the cure.

“I cannot judge people,” I said, “when circumstances drive them to do wrong in self-defence.”

We came near forgiving every one, when I reminded them of the sternness of our standard. It made us lenient with others, who did not—and perhaps could not—know that they might master circumstance, and that the whole world was their whole self. But with ourselves it made us terribly exacting.

“Some people are like animals,” said Virginia. “I can’t understand them, and cannot sympathize with them.”

“That,” I said, “is your loss, you superior animal. Ruskin says somewhere, and quite truly, that who cannot sympathize with the lower cannot sympathize with the higher.”

Now Virginia plunged off into a stream of delightful nonsense, told us how she sometimes loved and sometimes hated herself, how, if she was very happy, she had to pay the penalty of reaction, and how interesting she was, altogether. As a punishment we made her keep still for five minutes by the watch. I hoped Alfred would talk instead. Suppose we punished him by making him talk for five minutes!

Florence said: “What I like most of all is to be liked. I often envy people their lovableness.”

“Naturally,” said I, “that is what we all like most, isn’t it?

“And the truly good person, in our sense of good, is also the lovable, beloved person.”

Marian and Virginia exchanged glances. They were thinking again of that girl in Sunday-school, who, they said, was thoroughly good, but not at all lovable.

“The good person,” I said, “is also the intelligent, sympathetic person. Sympathy, understanding love, is the great virtue. I have made a list of seven virtues. Would you like to hear them? First, Love.”

That, they said, included all the others.

Yes, I answered, it was the chief. Second, Courage. Courage, they said, to do as we believed. Third, Trustworthiness. They all agreed. Fourth, love of knowledge. Fifth, love of beauty. Sixth, insight. Seventh, a sense of humor!

During this time Virginia and Marian were fitting each virtue to that girl, and found her lacking only in the latter ones, but no more lovable or interesting than before.

“Ruth,” I said.

“Yes.”

“Are you sure they are not speaking of you or me?”

“I don’t know,” she answered; “perhaps.”

They protested.

“Do you know the girl, Ruth?” I asked.

“Yes, I do.”

“Well,” I said, “please bring her to the next meeting. She interests me.”

Ruth promised, despite the protestations and explanations of Marian and Virginia. “You would know, then, of whom we had been talking,” they said.

“Very well,” I answered, “she shall stay away on one condition.”

“What is that?”

“That you don’t mention her again. I always feel,” I went on, “that when any one is badly spoken of, I am being criticized behind my back. Just as when a race, such as the negroes, for instance, is unjustly spoken of, I feel like fighting for my rights; for I take it as a mere matter of chance that I didn’t happen to be one of them.

“Florence,” I continued, “is quite right in wanting to be loved. It is the best thing in the world.”

“Except loving,” said Virginia.

“Of course,” I answered; “but to want to be loved by those we love for what we really are, and truly to wish to be what they can truly love, that is the whole of goodness, I believe. The only difference between vanity and true worth is that the vain person wishes to appear to be what is lovable—which is very unsafe—and the truly good person wishes to be it.”

“You mean,” said Henry, “that vanity is company manners?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know,” Florence said. “I have liked people who used ‘company manners’ for some company, and not for others.”

“I have known people,” said Marian, “who were always agreeable and sweet, and appeared to want every one to like them, and yet were not a bit lovable.”

“Naturally,” I said, “the person who wishes to be loved for what he is, is also willing to be hated for it, if he must, by those who think otherwise.” I said there was a man of whom we had heard much during the last days (because of his centenary) who seemed to be exactly what we meant by good. This was Abraham Lincoln. We spent some time speaking of him, the man who, it seems to me, might have inspired a new American religion.

“We always sympathize most with those,” said Henry, “who sympathize with us.”

“We love them most,” I said, “but the man of large heart will often sympathize with people who understand him no better than they understand the sunshine: with the bad man, for instance.”

“That is true.”

“In the drama of life,” I said, “he who loves beauty and his whole self will live so as to make that whole beautiful, and for this joy and beauty will gladly give up his petty satisfactions. For remember that the good life is the beautiful life, and the influential life. Indeed, every life in this drama has immense influence.”

“For good or bad,” said Henry.

“Yes, surely.”

“I thought not,” answered Florence; “each one has a very, very small influence.”

“In the universe, perhaps, but we know nothing, and can know nothing, of that. We cannot make comparisons with infinity. But with those we love, who know us, in our own family, our own circle of friends, the influence of each one is immense. Think of any family you know, of your own family, and see how much difference each one makes in the whole, how each one changes the whole. Each one influences all the others, and makes the tone and color of life, whether he will or not.”

“I suppose,” said Henry, “that even those who have no influence, who do nothing, could have an influence.”

“They can’t help having it, for good or bad. And people can know they have this influence, and use it consciously, to make life about them as they wish it to be. As a woman who comes into a house, if she loves beauty and order, will set it in order at once and make it beautiful, so that it will be all changed because of her, and for her pleasure, so in life we can set all things in order and change them to our wish, by our presence and character.”

“I don’t think,” Ruth said, “that the good is always beautiful. Often the thing we have to do is disagreeable.”

“For instance, what?” I asked.

“In school work, for example. We have to study subjects that are hard and disagreeable, simply to pass.”

“You mean that you have to do disagreeable things to get what you want. Naturally. That is self-sacrifice. And you cannot always do things as you would like to do them. The woman in the house might find ugly wallpaper, and not be able to change that. But she would find other means of making things look better. People can have conscious influence; and the difference between those who make life good and beautiful, and those who attract attention to themselves, is the difference between the play in which all the actors are good, and combine to make a beautiful play, and the one where there is a star who wants a poor cast to set off her charms, and produces an inartistic and uneven play.”

“I don’t see how one could have conscious influence,” said Marian; “it seems to me one lives unconsciously all the time. I like to dream. I am not fond of acting. I don’t believe I would ever have any conscious influence.”

“To dream and dream and keep on dreaming, and not act, is impossible,” I said.

“But,” asked Florence, “isn’t it just the dreamers who do all the great things?”

“Surely,” I answered, “one cannot help influencing people, even by one’s dreams. But you, Florence, you must realize how much difference each member of a family makes.”

“Yes, I do.”

“And Virginia, I believe, has often made conscious effort toward cheerful influence, and knows what I mean. You, too, Ruth; I am certain you know exactly what I mean, and I hope you and Marian will talk it over; for it is an interesting subject.”

“Yes, I know well what you mean.”

As we left I asked Alfred to write a paper for me. “For,” I said, “they will begin to think you stupid if you show no sign of intelligence. And even I would like a tangible proof of what I really know, that you do grasp exactly the spirit of what we say.”

THIRTEENTH MEETING

Marian was absent. I read aloud Henry’s paper:

“Last Sunday we met for the first time in almost two months. We had finished talking about art, and we started on a new course in which we shall apply our standard of beauty.

“Our topic last Sunday was Goodness. Good is a much-abused word. We often speak disdainfully of a person, as being a goody-goody, but usually this person, though not necessarily bad, is not good according to the standard of to-day. In the last generation, and even in some places to-day, the good child is the one which does its work conscientiously, and spends all its spare time at sewing or doing odd jobs around the house. The ‘good man’ does his work faithfully, never swears or lies under any circumstances, and follows his religion, as it is set down for him by others, absolutely to the letter.

“In speaking of bad, one kind we mentioned was that which was once good, but which we have left behind us in our progress. This is true of that old standard. We have said that what we want is complete sympathy. That which is beautiful is the symbol of completeness, and the good is beautiful; and therefore the man with a warm, sympathetic heart is the good man. A splendid type of this sort of man is Abraham Lincoln, a man who suffered with the sufferer, and rejoiced with the happy; a man with charity for all and enmity toward none.

“We condemn the selfish man, but the man who does so much for others that he does nothing for himself, is to be criticized just as much. Hillel says: ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me?’

“There is really no such thing as self-sacrifice, for if you voluntarily give up one thing for another, it is because you like it better.”

I said that this paper proved to me, what I had already suspected, that in the last meeting I had dwelt too much on one side of our subject, and not enough on the other.

“Perhaps,” said Henry, “I spent too much time describing the man who isn’t truly good?”

“No,” I answered, “I don’t mind that. But you say ‘the man with a warm and sympathetic heart is the good man.’ To be the truly good and great man, one must have more than a warm and sympathetic heart, more, even, than a feeling of kindliness and sympathy for one’s fellows.

“You speak of Lincoln as a man ‘with charity for all and enmity toward none.’ But Lincoln was much more than that. This alone would not have made him great and splendid. What did?”

Henry said: “He was a man of determination,” and, before I could answer, Alfred went on: “He was a man of large sympathies.”

“Yes,” I said, “it is the combination of the two; it is more than both. I mean that the great and good man is the man whose final far-off aim is the unity and completeness of man, who shapes his life and his work toward that aim, who works for it, lives for it, sacrifices himself and all things to it; and such a man was Lincoln. He made mistakes—he used them for his cause. His morality, his law, was the union—that symbol of the larger union—and for this immense self-fulfilment he worked with his might, and died for it.”

“Yes,” said Henry, “and the great man must make mistakes, and go beyond them. Roosevelt, for instance, is always making mistakes, and then acknowledging them, and going forward once more.”

“Surely. And so Lincoln worked for the union, in sympathy with all men.”

“In one speech,” said Henry, “he asked Davis, his opponent in the House, to ‘help him save the union.’”

“Now, Henry,” I said, “there is another thing in your paper—if you don’t mind my saying it?”

“Not at all.”

“I mean that when you quoted Hillel you should have finished the quotation: ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me?’ and ‘but if I am for myself alone, what am I then?’ You did not bring out the idea of the large and small self, of sacrificing the small self to the large, because you love the large self above all else, not because you like it better. This morning I heard a lecture by Professor Royce, of Harvard, and it is curious that he used exactly the same words we used in speaking of self-sacrifice. He said we sacrifice the small to the large self.”

At this point Ruth came in, and brought Marian’s paper. I read it at once:

“Our meeting of the Seekers of February 14th was very interesting. We talked about goodness. First we tried to define _good_, and finally reached the conclusion that _goodness_ means being in a harmonious relation with all our fellow-beings. We should try to make our life like some beautiful picture or other work of art, making it a complete and harmonious whole. All our friends and acquaintances, everything we see, hear, do or know, help to make this picture; and if we try, we can consciously make it what we want. We are masters of our lives, and if we remember this, it will influence all our thoughts and deeds. We also spoke of happiness, and decided that each one has a different kind of happiness, depending on what he wants most. We also spoke of self-sacrifice. There is really no such thing as self-sacrifice, because when we give up one thing it is always because we think another finer, and because we want the other more. We cannot have every detail in our picture as clear as the main idea, and we must give up something to bring out this idea.”

We all thought this paper excellent. I told Ruth briefly what we had said before she came; and then we spoke at length of the importance of living our belief, of working for the cause, of giving ourselves to the large self.

I said: “Every great man has always done just that, whether he was writer, philosopher, artist, statesman or scientist; he has always devoted himself to a work which aimed toward the great union.”

Florence said: “You mean not like the philosophers, simply to dream of the good, but like the artist, to work it out? Didn’t you say that, when we spoke of choosing the artistic life?”

“No,” I answered, “not quite. The philosopher and dreamer also work for the supreme good, by showing what it is like, and pointing the way which men afterward go.”

“That is what I always thought,” said Florence.

“Yes,” I answered, “the philosopher is the teacher of teachers. But I chose the artistic way of viewing life, because it combines the philosophic and the scientific way, the vision and the work.”

Virginia now said: “But sometimes men who work for completeness, and whose motives are all good, do harm, anyway.”

“What do you mean?”

“Jesus, for instance,” she said. “He has done so much harm throughout the ages, which he never meant to do.”

“It was not he who did the harm,” I answered; “it was the people who misunderstood him and misused his words. No great man ever does all that he sets out to do. He cannot, since his aim is no less than perfection.”

“I hate perfect people,” said Virginia, “or to think of any great man as perfect, because it is so inhuman. I read a book for children, lately, about Jesus, which made him out a perfect child. It was full of contradictions, for it said first that he was a wonder, who walked, talked and thought earlier than other children, and then it said that he was human, and understood all human weaknesses. I think that to know men a man must have human weaknesses and imperfections.”

“Yes,” I said; “and I never thought of Jesus as unhumanly perfect. He, too, had his temptation and weakness to fight and overcome. Indeed, only the petty man could be perfect.”

“But he would not be perfect,” said Henry.

“No,” I answered; “but according to his standard, he might think himself so. The great man, the Jesus, the Lincoln, could never be perfect, for his perfection could only come with the completeness and beauty and goodness of the whole world. You said of Jesus that he did harm, because the doctrine made from his words did harm. But you must see that until all men are great men, every man must suffer so. Take Lincoln, for instance. If he had lived, and kept control of the Government, surely the evils of the reconstruction period would have been avoided. You might say, then, that Lincoln did harm, because his work led to all that wrong and unhappiness.”

“But it has all come right now,” said Henry.

“Hardly,” I answered; “it is not nearly right, even to-day.”

“And I suppose,” Virginia said, “that finally the work of Jesus and of every great man will come right.”

“And Lincoln’s work,” said Florence, “will come right sooner, because it is not so large as the work of Jesus.”

Now I said I wanted to go on to a subject which seemed to me especially interesting, the question of the making of laws and regulations. Was it not a curious thing that men’s minds, outrunning their other powers, should see clearly the great good for which they strove, and should make regulations for themselves, which they were even unable to keep?

Henry and Ruth did not think it at all curious that people should make regulations for themselves, but it did seem strange that they were unable to keep them.

“To me,” I said, “it seems a wonderful thing that the sense of beauty and fitness should be so strong in the mind of man, should so far outrun his impulses and his body, that he creates for himself laws and regulations which he then tries to follow, as one sets up a ladder which he afterward tries to climb. Of course, we no longer believe in revelation, in the old Biblical sense, but to us it means revelation from within. We do not believe that God dictated his laws to Moses, but that Moses created his laws from his own sense of love and beauty. Man made his own laws. And his laws outrun him.”

“Some people,” said Ruth, “make laws for the other people, who are not up to them.”

“No,” Henry said; “isn’t it really all the people making laws for themselves?”

“Yes,” I answered, “for finally it is the few making laws for all, for themselves, too. It is humanity making laws for humanity. Every time a man does wrong and knows he is doing wrong, he is breaking one of his self-made or self-chosen laws. His mind outruns his powers. When Coleridge wanted to break himself of the opium-eating habit, he used to hire men to stand in front of the drug-stores and prevent his going in. He tried to overcome himself with himself.”

“I like Coleridge,” said Virginia. “I like people with weaknesses, who try to overcome them.”

I said I liked them, too, that there was no sight so stimulating as that of fights and conquests, as seeing the very thing we longed for, the opposition beaten, the difficulties overcome.

“But even the weak people who fail to win,” said Virginia; “I like them, too.”

“So do I,” I answered; “the fight itself, even the failure, the human longing, is worth while.

“But I want you to see clearly one thing about all laws and regulations, and that is that they are substitutes. They are substitutes for understanding love, or, rather, they are the forerunners of understanding love, the path of beauty and fitness which the mind makes for itself before all our desires are strong and harmonious enough to fulfil the supreme desire. Laws are the framework on which the house of love shall be built. But when the house is finished, the framework shall no more be seen; nor is it of value in itself, but only as that which upholds the house. I would like to talk with you of certain special laws of this kind. And the first is justice.”

“I was just going to say that,” said Ruth; “it was on my lips.”

“I was thinking of it, too,” said Henry.

“I am sorry,” I answered, “that I did not give you the chance.”

We talked of this subject, and agreed that although justice, the sense of equity, was a great and necessary virtue and a serviceable tool, it was but the tool of love, and less than love, and that if our understanding, our sympathy and possession of life were complete, we would no longer think of justice, nor praise it; that the rigid laws of justice, which must oftentimes change, were forever at the service of love, which made changes and overcame laws.

“Some people are not so far advanced as others,” said Virginia, “and the others lift them up with laws. Some people are undeveloped, like animals.”

We could not help laughing at Virginia, with her eternal animals.

“You remember,” I said, “I spoke to you of past virtues that were good in their time, because the time was ripe only for them, and that in their own setting interest and delight us, and remain forever beautiful, like old pictures, but which would now be ugly, bad and out-of-place. Revenge is an example. How the old stories of revenge stir and even uplift us, and yet how hateful is the idea of revenge in modern life! You remember being thrilled and stirred by the heroism of some old duel, whereas you could find no beauty or heroism in any duel at the present time.”

“I think,” said Ruth, “it is often the language in which the thing is put that stirs us.”

“It is the spirit of the time and place,” I said. “No language could make a duel in New York, among educated people, inspiring or heroic. With war it is the same. Old wars and wars among savages may inspire us, because of the heroism and comradeship of the fighters. But among modern nations even the justified war must be somewhat disgusting, because now far more heroism is required in other works, and comradeship can mean no less than all mankind.

“Now,” said I, “can any of you think of another virtue, like justice, which is a substitute for understanding love?”

“Yes,” said Florence; “I think that pity is.”

“Pity?” I said. “Yes—perhaps. Still, that is somewhat different. Pity was good once, because it was feeling, and feeling is the root of all understanding and sympathy. But self-torturing pity seems to me a weakness. Sympathy is quite a different, a stronger, a braver thing. Who agrees with me?”

First, they said, would I explain exactly what I meant?

“Sympathy seems to me understanding and love, such as you have for yourself. You are willing to suffer, since it is a part of life and a part of the way. You want to suffer for the cause, if necessary; not otherwise. But you don’t pity yourself. You would be ashamed to make so much of your pain. So you do not pity others. You love them, you feel with them, you help them bravely. You can bear their pain without making a fuss over them, as you would bear your own. You consider them as strong and brave as yourself.”

They all agreed with me, save Virginia. She said: “If I step by accident on the foot of a little dog, and he cries out, then that hurts me. And I think it is good, because then I know how I would feel if I were a little dog, and I try not to do it again. Isn’t that pity?”

“Perhaps,” I said; “we are apt to pity lower creatures. But there is no good in the mere feeling of physical pain that goes with such things, of the pain and thrill up and down your spine when you hurt any creature accidentally, and hear it cry out.”

“Don’t you think,” asked Alfred, “it is only because they cry out that we feel it?”

“Maybe,” I said, “for the cry makes us know of the pain. At one time, however, a virtue was made of the mere suffering _with_ others; and I suppose in its good time this was necessary, because it developed the feeling which makes sympathy possible.”

“I think it is good,” said Virginia, “for when my sister was ill, I did not know how she felt, or understood her, and so I couldn’t sympathize with her; but later I understood, and then I wished I had felt with her as she did. It would have been better.”

“Perhaps,” I said, “for it would have taught you to feel. To know how others feel is the best thing in the world. But to let that feeling overcome and crush you, to pity them, is weakness. I think it is a weakness we have all felt, and longed to overcome, when we suffered so much with others that we were unable to act.”

“Yes, indeed,” said Ruth.

“To be strong to help and strong to do, not overcome with world-sorrow,” I said, “to face suffering in ourselves and others as something to be overcome and used!”

Virginia spoke of a curious calmness in herself that made her not act excitedly when anything happened, but always wait first to see the outcome. “If a child falls in the street,” she said, “I don’t go rushing toward it as some people do, but wait to see if it will pick itself up.”

“But if it fell out of a window,” said Ruth, “I suppose you would rush forward.”

“No,” she answered, “not unless it were necessary. I would wait to see what happened. When my hat blows off, I never go rushing after it till I see where it is going to stop.”

The juxtaposition of a falling child and a falling hat was disconcerting.

“I know how Virginia feels,” I said; “it is the artist in her always looking on at all that happens. It is a good way, too. Now what other virtues are there, like justice, that are really substitutes for right feeling?”

They could not think of the others. So I mentioned honesty, which is much like justice—even a form of it; steered clear of a reef of arguments on truth-telling, showed them how honesty would not even be mentioned where there was perfect love, and went on to the next and most important, namely, duty. They had not thought of it in this way before. They all disliked the word duty.

I spoke again of the girl who stays home from the theatre with some one she does not love, because she feels it to be her duty. Why does she do it?

“Because she chooses,” said Alfred; “she wants to do it most.”

“But why?” I asked.

“She may think,” said Ruth, “that the other person would do the same for her.”

“But she may not think so,” I said, “and still she would stay.”

“Because,” said Virginia, “she would feel good afterward.”

“Yes,” I said, “in a sense it is that. It would give her satisfaction.”

“I would do it,” said Ruth, “but I don’t think I would feel any particular satisfaction afterward.”

“But,” I said, “if you didn’t do it, you would feel dissatisfied with yourself. And therein lies the explanation of duty. Duty is a substitute for love. It is the substitute the mind imposes on us when our feelings will not fulfil the scheme of beauty and order which is our strongest desire. To do your duty is to fulfil your strongest desire—lacking the great love. Love shall overcome duty. Duty means only debt. It is limited, small. It is the ugly framework that love must make before it can build its beautiful dwelling-place. The strong man always does his duty, because he flinches at nothing that is on the path, but more and more he loses duty in love.”

Virginia said: “I think it is fun sometimes to hate things, such as hating to go to school.”

“Why?”

“Because to do a thing you hate to do makes you feel good sometimes. I like it.”

“We have come to love the hard thing,” I said, “because it is the growing thing. We get to fancy that when we do something hard we must be getting ahead, because generally it is true.”

Virginia said: “I like the poem by Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm:

‘When joy and duty clash,
Let duty go to smash.’”

“I wish joy and duty were the same,” I said, “and that is just what they are when love conquers. You have to do your duty when love fails, and so it often seems an unpleasant job.”

I spoke now of promises, and of how unnecessary they would be were it not for our failures in love. Then we went on to speak of obedience. We said that where love was perfect one would not think of obedience or disobedience. Obedience is a substitute for understanding. He who understands does not obey. He acts. We spoke of necessary obedience, the substitute, and then of the family where parents and children were so much at one that obedience was never mentioned.

“A person out of such a home,” said Virginia, “would not have enough to struggle against. I don’t like people who are just perfect, and have nothing to overcome.”

“We will never reach perfection,” they said; and they all, save Henry, agreed with me that the greatest joy in life was working for, rather than achieving our desires.

“But when we reach perfection,” he said, “we won’t wish for it any more.”

I refused to argue that problematic point.

I said: “Be sure the strong and good man will always find something still to fight and overcome.”

We spoke now of how disobedience might be a virtue, of the rebels in wars for freedom, and the child who would refuse to obey his parents, if they ordered him to do what he thought bad; the thief’s child, for example.

I said: “The framework is for the house—not for itself—and if it doesn’t suit the house, it must be pulled down.”

Now we had an amusing talk on conventions, in which Henry objected to full-dress suits, bouillon cups and polite lies. But I showed them how good and necessary were conventions properly used, since they saved us weighty discussions on trivial matters. I said it was a good thing we didn’t have to waste time and energy deciding what we would eat for breakfast each day.

“But,” said Henry, “if some day I don’t care to eat oatmeal for breakfast, I don’t want to feel obliged.”

“No,” I said; “don’t be a slave to convention.”

I went on: “If all things were right, then conformity would be good—though uninteresting—but in this growing world we need reformers who smash and reform things, whenever conformity becomes deformity.”

You notice that Alfred spoke more at this meeting. I had told him that if he did not help us along, and show what he meant and thought, he was not living up to our idea of completeness and work in unison.

FOURTEENTH MEETING

I read Henry’s paper:

“A good man will bring those with whom he comes in contact into harmonious relations with himself. It is not enough to have a good heart. Many people are always meaning to do good, but never do it. It is the actions that count; for we said: ‘Art (good) is self-expression and self-fulfilment.’

“Many things which we call virtues are only substitutes for love and sympathy, which we are outgrowing. The principal ones are justice, honesty, conformity, obedience and pity.

“Men have not perfect sympathy, but often do things at the expense of others. Therefore man, realizing his weakness, has made for himself a set of laws.”

I objected to his use of the word “pity” along with the other substitutes. We had another short talk on the subject.

Virginia said: “I would rather commit suicide than be pitied.”

“Then,” I answered, “since we do not wish to be pitied, we could not, with perfect sympathy, do so unto others.”

Virginia went on: “When a person who has some trouble or loss makes a great fuss over it, I must say I don’t think very well of him.”

“We expect people to bear life bravely,” I said, “and to help them do it, to do it altogether. A man who is prevented from helping by his own pity is like a man who, when he saw another blind, put out his own eyes in sorrow, instead of leading the blind.”

I said I wanted to speak of a subject that seemed especially to interest Virginia. I meant patriotism, but patriotism in a large and unusual sense. What were their ideas on this subject? Virginia implied that patriotism was not good, “because whenever you are patriotic for your own country, you have to be patriotic against other countries. You seem to be praising and helping your own at the expense of others.”

“That,” I said, “is just the trouble with the false view of patriotism, and that view has grown out of wars and conquests. For, naturally, whenever people fought for their country, they had to fight against another. But I see patriotism—and any loyalty or faithfulness—in a larger relation. Think for a moment what the word patriotism really means, in its verbal root, and you will see how it grows, how it begins at home, and ends by including the world. What does it mean?”

Henry remembered that it came from a word meaning “Father.”

“Yes,” I said, “it meant, originally, loyalty to our fathers, to our family; and so you must see what it would finally mean.”

“Because,” asked Ruth, “we are related to the whole world?”

“Yes,” I answered, “we are related to the whole world, we are children of all the nations; but most of all, of course, children of our fathers; so that, beginning at the centre, we shall spread to all sides, yet not lose the centre. The definite thing, the love for this land, this home, will come first, and include all the others. We will be patriotic for our Father, the world.”

“Do you suppose,” asked Marian, “that an Englishman could be patriotic for the United States?”

“Yes,” I said, “and I am glad you asked that, for it gives me a chance to tell you what forms patriotism is beginning to take. An Englishman, or American, may be patriotic for Anglo-Saxonism all the world over; for the English language and literature everywhere; he may dream of it as the world-language; and then, surely, he is patriotic for these States, as well as for England. I am not going to preach patriotism to you. I know you are all patriotic for this country, for Americanism, for the idea of democracy which America upholds. Surely the schools, from first to last, dwell so much upon it that an American child can hardly help being patriotic.”

I was surprised at the burst of answers.

Marian said, on the contrary, the school with its continual, boring insistence on patriotism, almost made one hate it; that no children liked to sing the patriotic songs. Ruth objected that singing patriotic songs was not patriotism. Alfred, Marian and Ruth spoke of the boredom of patriotic holiday celebrations in school, how the well-known men got up and, as Alfred put it, “said the same thing each time.” Marian said they had patriotism “thrown at them in chunks.” Florence added, she thought we felt unpatriotic, because we didn’t want to be like those who expressed that kind of patriotism.

We concluded, however, that after all we were patriotic in spite of the schools, and that America stood for something big, definite, wonderful. I told them that if only they had been away from it more, they would understand it better. And they all admitted that America, insulted with false criticism, would arouse them like a personal insult.

The picture, with its central, definite object, still suggests universal things. So one must begin with loyalty to first things, to family and State, before one can be loyal to the universe. I spoke of those French Socialists whose patriotism for the whole world had carried them to the point of unpatriotism to France, so that in a war they would wish to see their own country destroyed. Their loyalty to working-men the world over made them careless of the state at home.

“Only to working-men!” cried Virginia. “But I think one need be just as loyal to the rich, and that they are quite as much in need of reform and help.”

“I agree with you,” I answered.

Ruth said she could understand those French Socialists very well, and to her it seemed that from their own point of view they might be right.

I answered: “From their own point of view, of course. And they do want final, universal good; but they don’t see that to gain the large one must preserve the small, that the universal must begin with the particular.”

“Like some philosophers,” said Henry.

We discussed the subject of war—all disbelieving in it—without coming to any definite conclusion as to what we would do under any particular circumstance.

Virginia asked whether it would be wrong of a man, if his country went to war, to refuse to fight because he disbelieved in war. Henry said he thought it would be better to do as the fighting Quakers did, to fight, so that the war might soon be ended.