Lessons in Life Part 12

So, if a man would live a full and generous life, he must supply it with a full and generous diet. So far as his ability will go, he should make his home the embodiment of his best taste. There should be abundant meaning in its architecture. There should be pictures upon its walls, and books upon its shelves and tables. All the domestic and social affections should be abundantly fed there. His table should be a gathering place for friends. Music should minister to him. He should bring himself into contact with the great and wise and good, who have embalmed their lives in the varied forms of art.

The facts that live in the earth under his feet, the beauty that spreads itself around him, and all those truths which appeal to his religious nature, are food which should minister to his life. An irreligious man--no matter what his genius may be--is always a starveling. An unsocial man can by no possibility lead a true life.

A man's nature should be thrown wide open at every point, to drink in the nourishment that comes from the healthy sources of supply; and thus only may his life become abundantly rich and beautiful. I repeat the proposition that I started with: we cannot get more out of human life than we put into it.

There is another aspect of this subject that I have barely s.p.a.ce to allude to. The ill.u.s.tration with which this article opens, touching the effects of hay and grain respectively upon the life of the horse, suggests that the food with which our bodies are nourished may have an important bearing upon our mental and moral life. Of this I have no doubt. Coa.r.s.e food, made of material but feebly vitalized, makes coa.r.s.e men and women. Muscular tissues not formed from choice material, brains built of poor stuff, nervous fibres to which the finest and most delicate food has not ministered, are not the instruments of the highest grade of mental life. The dispensation of sawdust is pa.s.sed away. It is pretty well understood that the most complicated, the n.o.blest, and the finest creature in the world requires the best food the world can produce; and that he requires it in great variety. If a man leads simply an animal life-- eating, working, and sleeping--let him feed as animals do; but if he lives a life above animals, as a social and religious being, then let him take food that gives pleasure to his palate, and pluck and power to all the instruments of his mind. Hay may answer very well for a mind that moves at the rate of only three miles an hour; but a mile was never yet made "inside of 2:40" without grain.

LESSON XXIV.

HALF-FINISHED WORK.

"Ah G.o.d! well, art is long!

And life is short and fleeting.

What headaches have I felt and what heart-beating, When critical desire was strong.

How hard it is the ways and means to master By which one gains each fountain head!

And ere one yet has half the journey sped The poor fool dies--O sad disaster!"

BROOKS' TRANSLATION OF FAUST.

Mankind are "nothing, if not critical;" and nothing would seem to be criticism with them but fault-finding. It is astonis.h.i.+ng to see what a number of architects there are in the world--how many people there are who feel competent to give an opinion upon buildings in course of erection on the public streets. If a dwelling is going up, there is not a day of its progress in which its builder or architect is not convicted of being a fool, by any number of wise people who judge him on the evidence of a half-finished structure. When the dwelling is completed, it usually "looks better than they ever supposed it could;" but they learn nothing from this, though the proverb that "only fools criticize half-finished work" is a good deal older than they are. Every man who builds is obliged to take this running fire of fault-finding. Pa.s.sing a new church recently, in the company of an architect, I asked him what he thought of the building. "I can tell better when the staging is down," was his reply. He knew enough not to criticize half-finished work, while probably a hundred men, knowing nothing of architecture whatever, had, during that very day, freely given their opinion of the building in the most unqualified way.

Did it ever occur to the reader of this essay that nearly all the judgments that are made up and expressed in this world relate to half-finished work? We hear a great deal of criticism indulged in with regard to American society. I have no doubt that this criticism is just, in a certain sense, but American society is only a half-finished structure. If it had arrived at the end of improvement and growth; if the elements which enter into it had already organized themselves in their highest form; if the creation of a high, refined, and beautiful society were not a thing of time; if such a society did not depend upon the operation of forces that require a great range of influences and circ.u.mstances, then the criticism might be entirely just; but it is as unreasonable to expect a high grade of social life in America, at this point of American history, as it is to expect perfection in a church before the carpenters get out of it, and the staging is down.

Wealth, learning, culture, leisure--these cannot be so combined in this country yet as to give us the highest grade and style of social life. We are all at work upon the structure, and unless American ideas are incurably bad, and we are faithless to our duties, American society will be good when the work upon it is completed. No society is to be condemned so long as it is progressive toward a goodly completeness.

Men and women are always judging one another before they are finished. A raw boy, with only the undeveloped elements of manhood in him, is denounced as a dunce. A light-hearted, sportive girl, with an incontinent overflow of spirits, is condemned as a hoiden.

Neither boy nor girl is half made. There is only the frame-work of the man and woman up, and it does not appear what they are to become. A young man is wild, and judged accordingly. It is not remembered that there are various modifying influences to be brought to bear upon him, before he will be a man. We see the bold outline of a new house, and we say that it is not beautiful.

Soon, however, a piazza is built here, and a dormer is pushed out there, and gracefully modelled chimneys pierce the roof, and cornice and verandah and tower are added, until the structure stands before us complete in beauty, convenience, and strength.

When we condemn a young man we do not stop to think that he is not done,--that there is a wife to place upon one side of him, and children to be grouped upon the other, and sundry relations to be adjusted before we can tell any thing about him at all.

There is nothing more common in experience and observation than the partiality felt by young and unmarried men for the society of married women, and the love of unmarried young women for the society of married men. I suppose that nearly every young man and young woman has a time of feeling that all the desirable matches in the world are disposed of, and that the marriageable young persons left are really very insipid companions. This is entirely natural, but exceedingly unreasonable. To expect a man to be as much of a man without a wife as with one, is just as reasonable as to expect a half-finished house to be as beautiful as a finished one. It is impossible for an unmarried man, other things being equal, to be as agreeable a companion as a married man; and lest I be suspected of a jest in this statement, I wish to a.s.sure my reader that I am entirely in earnest. Intimate contact with the nature of a good woman, in the relation of marriage, is just as necessary to the completeness of manhood, as the details of an architectural design are to the homely conveniences around which they are made to cl.u.s.ter. Every man is a better man for having children, and the more he extends those relations which grow out of the family life, the more does he open up to culture and carry to completeness the very choicest portions of his manly nature. It is natural, therefore, that the unmarried woman should become possessed of the notion that all the desirable men are married, and that the unmarried man should be the subject of a similar mistake with relation to the other s.e.x. It must be remembered that men and women are made desirable by matrimony, and that half-finished work should not be subjected to any sweeping judgments.

Men and women are always turning out differently from what we expected and predicted they would. Men who have been laughed at and slighted during all their early life, become, quite to our surprise, very important and notable persons, and we are mortified to ascertain that we have been criticizing half-finished men. The college faculty give a diploma to some very slow young man, with great reluctance, but in the course of twenty years he completes himself, and when he comes back to honor them with a visit they make very low bows to him. All young people are pieces of unfinished work, to be judged very carefully, and always to be regarded as incomplete. We can say that we do not like their general style, as we would say that we do not like the style of an unfinished house. Grecian may not be to our liking, and we may prefer Gothic.

It seems to me that the Christian Church suffers more from the judgments of those who criticize unfinished work than any organized body of men and women. Here is an organization whose members do not pretend to perfection; whose whole theory forbids any such idea. They are disciples--learners of the Divine Master.

They are members of a school in which none ever arrives at fulness of knowledge. Their prayer is that they may grow; and they know that if they have the true life in them they will grow while they live. If there is one thing in the world of which they are painfully conscious, it is that they are pieces of unfinished work. Some of the members are very much lower in the scale of completeness than others. In some there is only a confused pile of timber and bricks. In others only a part of the frame is up, or the walls are hardly more than begun. In others, perhaps, the roof is on. In comparatively few do we see the outlines all defined and the rooms in a good degree of completeness. In none of them is there a perfected structure, and none see and acknowledge their incompleteness more than those whose characters are farthest advanced toward perfection.

Now I put it to the world outside of the Christian Church to say if it has been entirely fair, and just in its judgments of the Church. Has it not judged Christianity by these imperfect disciples, and has it not condemned these imperfect disciples because they are not what they never pretended to be? Has it not criticized half-finished work, and condemned, not only the work, but Christianity itself, because this work was not up to the sample? It is very common to hear men say that such and such a Christian is no better than the average of people outside of the Christian Church, thus condemning the genuineness of his character because he is not a perfect Christian. A house is a house, even if it be only half-finished. At least, it is not any thing else; and as Christians cannot by any possibility be perfected on the instant, it follows that the large majority of Christians must be in various stages of progress--nay, that most of this large majority are not even half-finished. The Christian Church itself is a piece of unfinished work, and every individual member is the same. It is not pretended that either is any thing else. I never knew a Christian to set himself up as a pattern. So far as I know, they are very shy of pretension, and deprecate nothing more than the thought that anybody should take them for finished specimens of the work of Christianity in human life and character.

A sermon upon any important subject is always a piece of unfinished work. I once heard a famous preacher say that he could preach throughout his whole life on the text, "the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked," and even then have something left to say. The statement ill.u.s.trates the many-sidedness of truth, and the mult.i.tude of its relations to the life of the individual and the world. Any sensible preacher knows that, within the compa.s.s of a single sermon, he can only present a single aspect of a great and important truth, yet he is criticized as if it had been expected that the work of a dozen volumes could be crowded into the utterances of half an hour. What is called an "exhaustive" sermon would exhaust an audience long before it would its subject. A sermon is only the dab of a brush upon a great picture, and if it gives a single striking view of a single great truth, it accomplishes its object.

It must necessarily be an unfinished piece as regards its exposition of truth; and the same may be said of any essay on any subject.

Every writer begins in the middle of things, and leaves off in the middle of things; and every thing he writes relates at some point to every thing that everybody has written. No man cleans up the field over which he walks, and leaves nothing to be said; and the best we do is unfinished work.

There are those who, in view of the sin and suffering which appear on every hand, are moved to impugn the goodness and love of Him who created the world by His power, and sustains and orders it by His providence. Millions are whelmed in the darkness of heathenism; other millions are bound by the chains of slavery; the oppressor is clothed in purple and fine linen; the beautiful and innocent are the victims of treacherous l.u.s.t; children cry for bread beneath the windows of luxury; justice is denied to the poor by men who take bribes of wealth; and deceit circ.u.mvents and baffles honor. Such a world as this the critics condemn as a failure, which reflects alike upon the benevolence and power of its Maker; but these men have an eminent place among the fools who criticize half-finished work. If they could have witnessed the creation of the earth, and watched it through all the processes by which it was prepared for the reception of the human race, they would doubtless have been quite as critical as they are now, and quite as unreasonable. Suppose a man should visit his pear-trees in midsummer, and on tasting the fruit upon them, should condemn them and order them to be cut down and removed--how should we characterize his folly? He has criticized half-finished fruit, and made a fatal mistake. It is just as unreasonable to condemn a half-finished world as a half-finished pear. Human society must be brought to perfection by regularly inst.i.tuted and slowly operating processes. It may take as long to perfect society as it did to create the world that it lives on; and G.o.d is not to be found fault with for the flavor of a fruit slowly ripening beneath the light of His smile and the warmth of His love, but not yet fully ripe.

Mr. Buckle has undertaken to write a history of civilization, or, rather, he has commenced to write an introduction to a history of civilization. His progress has not been great, and he doubtless realizes that he has undertaken a task which he can never finish.

He will probably labor upon it while he lives, and then some other daring man will take up the thread where he will drop it, and go on until he in turn will be obliged to relinquish his unfinished task to a successor. When the work shall be finished, after its original design, it will doubtless be found to be antiquated. It undertook to organize a half-finished life--to reason upon forces that had only half revealed their nature and their power--to develop principles whose relations were imperfectly known. In short, it must necessarily prove to be a half-finished history of a half-finished civilization, whose every newly-opened event will throw a modifying light on all that shall have preceded it.

We have, therefore, but little finished work in this world. Not a finished character lives among mankind. No nation of the world ill.u.s.trates a consummate civilization. All presentations of truth, of whatever nature and relation, are necessarily incomplete. Life is too short, comprehension too limited in its grasp, and expression too feeble or too clumsy, to allow the mind fully to organize, vitalize, and fill out to roundness and just proportion, a single creature of legitimate art. It is, therefore, literally true that the criticisms of the world are the judgments of the world's half-finished men on the world's half-finished affairs.

Imperfection sits in judgment on incompleteness, and the natural consequence is that criticism, in whatever field of demonstration, is little more than a record of notions which a.s.sume to array themselves against other notions, which may be better or worse than those that oppose them.

It is with a depressing sense of the incompleteness of these lessons in life, that I now indite their closing paragraph. I cannot but be aware that the criticisms I have indulged in relate very largely to half-finished work, and I painfully feel that they are the product of a most imperfect judgment. If the reader has found them kind, charitable, hopeful--tending toward that which is good--and lenient toward human frailty, loyal to common sense, and faithful to virtue; if he has found in them that which leaves him a larger and a more liberal man--advanced in some degree toward that perfection which we are ever striving for, but which we never reach, then my aim has been accomplished, bid him G.o.d speed!

THE END.