True Manliness

XXXVII

Our race on both sides of the Atlantic has, for generations, got and spent money faster than any other, and this spendthrift habit has had a baleful effect on English life. It has made it more and more feverish and unsatisfying. The standard of expenditure has been increasing by leaps and bounds, and demoralizing trade, society, every industry, and every profession until a false ideal has established itself, and the aim of life is too commonly to get, not to be, while men are valued more and more for what they have, not for what they are.

The reaction has, I trust, set in. But the reign of Mammon will be hard to put down, and all wholesome influences which can be brought to bear upon that evil stronghold will be sorely needed.

I say, deliberately, that no man can gauge the value, at this present critical time, of a steady stream of young men, flowing into all professions and all industries, who have learnt resolutely to speak in a society such as ours, “I can’t afford;” who have been trained to have few wants and to serve these themselves, so that they may have always something to spare of power and of means to help others; who are “careless of the comfits and cushions of life,” and content to leave them to the valets of all ranks.

And take my word for it, while such young men will be doing a great work for their country, and restoring an ideal which has all but faded out, they will be taking the surest road to all such success as becomes honest men to achieve, in whatever walk of life they may choose for themselves.

XXXVIII

The first aim for your time and your generation should be, to foster, each in yourselves, a simple and self-denying life – your ideal to be a true and useful one, must have these two characteristics before all others. Of course purity, courage, truthfulness are as absolutely necessary as ever, without them there can be no ideal at all. But as each age and each country has its own special needs and weaknesses, so the best mind of its youth should be bent on serving where the need is sorest, and bringing strength to the weak places. There will be always crowds ready to fall in with the dapper, pliant ways which lead most readily to success in every community. Society has been said to be “always and everywhere in conspiracy against the true manhood of every one of its members,” and the saying, though bitter, contains a sad truth. So the faithful idealist will have to learn, without arrogance and with perfect good temper, to treat society as a child, and never to allow it to dictate. So treated, society will surely come round to those who have a high ideal before them, and therefore firm ground under their feet.

Let me say a word or two more on this business of success. Is it not, after all, the test of true and faithful work? Must it not be the touchstone of the humble and magnanimous, as well as of the self-asserting and ambitious? Undoubtedly; but here again we have to note that what passes with society for success, and is so labeled by public opinion, may well be, as often as not actually is, a bad kind of failure.

Public opinion in our day has, for instance, been jubilant over the success of those who have started in life penniless and have made large fortunes. Indeed, this particular class of self-made men is the one which we have been of late invited to honor. Before doing so, however, we shall have to ask with some care, and bearing in mind Emerson’s warnings, by what method the fortune has been made. The rapid accumulation of national wealth in England can scarcely be called a success by any one who studies the methods by which it has been made, and its effects on the national character. It may be otherwise with this or that millionaire, but each case must be judged on its own merits.

XXXIX

I remember hearing, years ago, of an old merchant who, on his death-bed, divided the results of long years of labor, some few hundreds in all, amongst his sons. “It is little enough, my boys,” were almost his last words, “but there isn’t a dirty shilling in the whole of it.” He had been a successful man too, though not in the “self-made” sense. For his ideal had been, not to make money, but to keep clean hands. And he had been faithful to it.

XL

In reading the stories of many persons whom the English nation is invited to honor, I am generally struck with the predominance of the personal element. The key-note seems generally some resolve taken in early youth connected with their own temporal advancement. This one will be Lord Mayor; this other Prime Minister; a third determines to own a fine estate near the place of his birth, a fourth to become head of the business in which he started as an errand-boy. They did indeed achieve their ends, were faithful to the idea they had set before themselves as boys; but I doubt if we can put them anywhere but in the lower school of idealists. For the predominant motive being self-assertion, their idealism seems never to have got past the personal stage, which at best is but a poor business as compared with the true thing.

XLI

Christ is the great idealist. “Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,” is the ideal he sets before us – the only one which is permanent and all-sufficing. His own spirit communing with ours is the call which comes to every human being.

XLII

Blessed is the man who has the gift of making friends; for it is one of God’s best gifts. It involves many things, but above all, the power of going out of one’s self, and seeing and appreciating whatever is noble and living in another man.

But, even to him who has the gift, it is often a great puzzle to find out whether a man is really a friend or not. The following is recommended as a test in the case of any man about whom you are not quite sure; especially if he should happen to have more of this world’s goods, either in the shape of talents, rank, money, or what not, than you:

Fancy the man stripped stark naked of every thing in the world, except an old pair of trousers and a shirt, for decency’s sake, without even a name to him, and dropped down in the middle of Holborn or Piccadilly. Would you go up to him then and there, and lead him out from among the cabs and omnibuses, and take him to your own home, and feed him, and clothe him, and stand by him against all the world, to your last sovereign and your last leg-of-mutton? If you wouldn’t do this, you have no right to call him by the sacred name of friend. If you would, the odds are that he would do the same by you, and you may count yourself a rich man; for, probably, were friendship expressible by, or convertible into current coin of the realm, one such friend would be worth to a man at least £100,000. How many millionaires are there in England? I can’t even guess; but more by a good many, I fear, than there are men who have ten real friends. But friendship is not so expressible or convertible. It is more precious than wisdom, and wisdom “can not be gotten for gold, nor shall rubies be mentioned in comparison thereof.” Not all the riches that ever came out of earth and sea are worth the assurance of one such real abiding friendship in your heart of hearts.

But for the worth of a friendship commonly so called – meaning thereby a sentiment founded on the good dinners, good stories, opera stalls, and days’ shooting, you have gotten or hope to get out of a man, the snug things in his gift, and his powers of procuring enjoyment of one kind or another to your miserable body or intellect – why, such a friendship as that is to be appraised easily enough, if you find it worth your while; but you will have to pay your pound of flesh for it one way or another – you may take your oath of that. If you follow my advice, you will take a £10 note down, and retire to your crust of bread and liberty.

XLIII

The idea of entertaining, of being hospitable, is a pleasant and fascinating one to most young men; but the act soon gets to be a bore to all but a few curiously constituted individuals. With these hospitality becomes first a passion and then a faith – a faith the practice of which, in the cases of some of its professors, reminds one strongly of the hints on such subjects scattered about the New Testament. Most of us feel, when our friends leave us, a certain sort of satisfaction, not unlike that of paying a bill; they have been done for, and can’t expect anything more for a long time. Such thoughts never occur to your really hospitable man. Long years of narrow means can not hinder him from keeping open house for whoever wants to come to him, and setting the best of everything before all comers. He has no notion of giving you anything but the best he can command. He asks himself not, “Ought I to invite A or B? do I owe him anything?” but, “Would A or B like to come here?” Give me these men’s houses for real enjoyment, though you never get anything very choice there – (how can a man produce old wine who gives his oldest every day?) – seldom much elbow-room or orderly arrangement. The high arts of gastronomy and scientific drinking, so much valued in our highly-civilized community, are wholly unheeded by him, are altogether above him, are cultivated, in fact, by quite another set, who have very little of the genuine spirit of hospitality in them; from whose tables, should one by chance happen upon them, one rises, certainly with a feeling of satisfaction and expansion, chiefly physical, but entirely without that expansion of heart which one gets at the scramble of the hospitable man. So that we are driven to remark, even in such every-day matters as these, that it is the invisible, the spiritual, which, after all, gives value and reality even to dinners; and, with Solomon, to prefer to the most touching diner Russe the dinner of herbs where love is, though I trust that neither we nor Solomon should object to well-dressed cutlets with our salad, if they happen to be going.

XLIV

There are few of us who do not like to see a man living a brave and righteous life, so long as he keeps clear of us; and still fewer who do like to be in constant contact with one who, not content with so living himself, is always coming across them, and laying bare to them their own faint-heartedness, and sloth, and meanness. The latter, no doubt, inspires the deeper feeling, and lays hold with a firmer grip of the men he does lay hold of, but they are few. For men can’t keep always up to high pressure till they have found firm ground to build upon, altogether outside of themselves; and it is hard to be thankful and fair to those who are showing us, time after time, that our foothold is nothing but shifting sand.

XLV

Reader! had you not ever a friend a few years older than yourself, whose good opinion you were anxious to keep? A fellow teres atque rotundus; who could do everything better than you, from Plato and tennis down to singing a comic song and playing quoits? If you have had, wasn’t he always in your rooms or company whenever anything happened to show your little weak points?

XLVI

To come back home after every stage of life’s journeying with a wider horizon – more in sympathy with men and nature, knowing ever more of the righteous and eternal laws which govern them, and of the righteous and loving will which is above all, and around all, and beneath all, this must be the end and aim of all of us, or we shall be wandering about blind-fold, and spending time and labor and journey-money on that which profiteth nothing.

XLVII

What man among us all, if he will think the matter over calmly and fairly, can honestly say that there is any spot on the earth’s surface in which he has enjoyed so much real, wholesome, happy life as in a hay field? He may have won on horseback or on foot at the sports and pastimes in which Englishmen glory; he may have shaken off all rivals, time after time, across the vales of Aylesbury, or of Berks, or any other of our famous hunting counties; he may have stalked the oldest and shyest buck in Scotch forests, and killed the biggest salmon of the year in the Tweed, and trout in the Thames; he may have made topping averages in first-rate matches of cricket; or have made long and perilous marches, dear to memory, over boggy moor, or mountain, or glacier; he may have successfully attended many breakfast-parties within drive of Mayfair, on velvet lawns, surrounded by all the fairy-land of pomp, and beauty, and luxury, which London can pour out; his voice may have sounded over hushed audiences at St. Stephens or in the law-courts; or he may have had good times in any other scenes of pleasure or triumph open to Englishmen; but I much doubt whether, on putting his recollections fairly and quietly together he would not say at last that the fresh-mown hay-field is the place where he has spent the most hours which he would like to live over again, the fewest which he would wish to forget.

As children, we stumble about the new-mown hay, revelling in the many colors of the prostrate grass and wild flowers, and in the power of tumbling where we please without hurting ourselves; as small boys, we pelt one another, and the village school-girls, and our nurse-maids, and young lady cousins with the hay, till, hot and weary, we retire to tea or syllabub beneath the shade of some great oak or elm standing up like a monarch out of the fair pasture; or, following the mowers, we rush with eagerness on the treasures disclosed by the scythe stroke – the nest of the unhappy late-laying titlark, or careless field-mouse; as big boys, we toil ambitiously with the spare forks and rakes, or climb into the wagons and receive with open arms the delicious load as it is pitched up from below, and rises higher and higher as we pass along the long lines of haycocks: a year or two later we are strolling there with our first sweethearts, our souls and tongues loaded with sweet thoughts, and soft speeches; we take a turn with the scythe as the bronzed mosses lie in the shade for their short rest, and willingly pay our footing for the feat. Again, we come back with book in pocket, and our own children tumbling about us as we did before them; now romping with them, and smothering them with the sweet-smelling load – now musing and reading and dozing away the delicious summer evenings. And so shall we not come back to the end, enjoying as grandfathers the love-making and the rompings of younger generations yet?

Were any of us ever really disappointed or melancholy in a hay-field? Did we ever lie fairly back on a hay-cock and look up into the blue sky, and listen to the merry sounds, the whetting of scythes, and the laughing prattle of women and children, and think evil thoughts of the world or our brethren? Not we! or, if we have so done, we ought to be ashamed of ourselves, and deserve never to be out of town again during hay-harvest.

There is something in the sights and sounds of a hay-field which seems to touch the same chord in one as Lowell’s lines in the “Lay of Sir Launfal,” which end:

But the philosophy of the hay-field remains to be written. Let us hope that whoever takes the subject in hand will not dissipate all its sweetness in the process of the inquiry wherein the charm lies.

XLVIII

Who among you, dear readers, can appreciate the intense delight of grassing your first big fish after a nine-months’ fast? All first sensations have their special pleasure; but none can be named, in a small way, to beat this of the first fish of the season. The first clean leg-hit for four in your first match at Lord’s – the grating of the bows of your racing-boat against the stern of the boat ahead in your first race – the first half-mile of a burst from the cover-side in November, when the hounds in the field ahead may be covered in a tablecloth, and no one but the huntsman and a top sawyer or two lies between you and them – the first brief after your call to the bar, if it comes within the year – the sensations produced by these are the same in kind; but cricket, boating, getting briefs, even hunting, lose their edge as time goes on. But the first fish comes back as fresh as ever, or ought to come, if all men had their rights, once in a season. So, good luck to the gentle craft and its professors, and may the Fates send us much into their company! The trout-fisher, like the landscape-painter, haunts the loveliest places of the earth, and haunts them alone. Solitude, nature, and his own thoughts – he must be on the best terms with all these; and he who can take kindly the largest allowance of these is likely to be the kindliest and truest with his fellow-men.

XLIX

How many spots in life are there which will bear comparison with the beginning of a college boy’s second term at Oxford? So far as external circumstances are concerned, it seems hard to know what a man could find to ask for at that period of his life, if a fairy godmother were to alight in his rooms and offer him the usual three wishes. In our second term we are no longer freshmen, and begin to feel ourselves at home, while both “smalls” and “greats” are sufficiently distant to be altogether ignored if we are that way inclined, or to be looked forward to with confidence that the game is in our own hands if we are reading men. Our financial position – unless we have exercised rare ingenuity in involving ourselves – is all that heart can desire; we have ample allowances paid in quarterly to the university bankers without thought or trouble of ours, and our credit is at its zenith. It is a part of our recognized duty to repay the hospitality we have received as freshmen; and all men will be sure to come to our first parties, to see how we do the thing; it will be our own fault if we do not keep them in future. We have not had time to injure our characters to any material extent with the authorities of our own college, or of the university. Our spirits are never likely to be higher, or our digestions better. These, and many other comforts and advantages, environ the fortunate youth returning to Oxford after his first vacation; thrice fortunate, however, if it is Easter term to which he is returning; for that Easter term, with the four days’ vacation, and little Trinity term at the head of it, is surely the cream of the Oxford year. Then, even in this our stern Northern climate, the sun is beginning to have power, the days have lengthened out, great-coats are unnecessary at morning chapel, and the miseries of numbed hands and shivering skins no longer accompany every pull on the river and canter on Bullingdon. In Christ-church meadows and the college gardens the birds are making sweet music in the tall elms. You may almost hear the thick grass growing, and the buds on tree and shrub are changing from brown, red, or purple, to emerald green under your eyes; the glorious old city is putting on her best looks and bursting out into laughter and song. In a few weeks the races begin, and Cowley marsh will be alive with white tents and joyous cricketers. A quick ear, on the towing-path by the Gut, may feast at one time on those three sweet sounds, the thud, thud of the eight-oar, the crack of the rifles at the Weirs, and the click of the bat on the Magdalen ground. And then Commemoration rises in the background, with its clouds of fair visitors, and visions of excursions to Woodstock and Nuneham in the summer days – of windows open on to the old quadrangles in the long still evenings, through which silver laughter and strains of sweet music, not made by man, steal out and puzzle the old celibate jackdaws, peering down from the battlements with heads on one side. To crown all, long vacation, beginning with the run to Henley regatta, or up to town to see the match with Cambridge at Lord’s, and taste some of the sweets of the season before starting on some pleasure tour or reading-party, or dropping back into the quiet pleasures of English country life! Surely the lot of young Englishmen who frequent our universities is cast in pleasant places. The country has a right to expect something from those for whom she finds such a life as this in the years when enjoyment is keenest.

L

In all the wide range of accepted British maxims there is none, take it for all in all, more thoroughly abominable than the one as to the sowing of wild oats. Look at it on what side you will, and you can make nothing but a devil’s maxim of it. What a man – be he young, old, or middle-aged – sows, that, and nothing else shall he reap. The one only thing to do with wild oats is to put them carefully into the hottest part of the fire, and get them burnt to dust, every seed of them. If you sow them, no matter in what ground, up they will come, with long, tough roots like couch-grass, and luxuriant stalks and leaves as sure as there is a sun in heaven – a crop which it makes one’s heart cold to think of. The devil, too, whose special crop they are, will see that they thrive, and you, and nobody else will have to reap them; and no common reaping will get them out of the soil, which must be dug down deep again and again. Well for you if, with all your care, you can make the ground sweet again by your dying day. “Boys will be boys,” is not much better, but that has a true side to it; but this encouragement to the sowing of wild oats is simply devilish, for it means that a young man is to give way to the temptations and follow the lusts of his age. What are we to do with the wild oats of manhood and old age – with ambition, over-reaching, the false weights, hardness, suspicion, avarice – if the wild oats of youth are to be sown and not burnt? What possible distinction can we draw between them? If we may sow the one, why not the other?

LI

Man of all ages is a selfish animal, and unreasonable in his selfishness. It takes every one of us in turn many a shrewd fall, in our wrestlings with the world to convince us that we are not to have everything our own way. We are conscious in our inmost souls that man is the rightful lord of creation; and, starting from this eternal principle, and ignoring, each man-child of us in turn, the qualifying truth that it is to man in general, including women, and not to one man in particular, that the earth has been given, we set about asserting our kingships each in his own way, and proclaiming ourselves kings from our own little ant-hills of thrones. And then come the struggles and the down-fallings, and some of us learn our lesson, and some learn it not. But what lesson? That we have been dreaming in the golden hours when the vision of a kingdom rose before us? That there is in short, no kingdom at all, or that, if there be, we are no heirs of it?