Conserving the Great
CONSERVING THE GREAT IT seems to have been just a natural result of Longfellow's much talked-of simplicity that the lives of great men reminded him of things altogether different from what...
...And we may take our best example from what is incomparably the most sublime Figure in the annals of the race...
...We may say then, that historically speaking, heroes have never been angels or mothers' darlings, but men who slipped in the mud and, at least occasionally, spat in their hands...
...CONSERVING THE GREAT IT seems to have been just a natural result of Longfellow's much talked-of simplicity that the lives of great men reminded him of things altogether different from what our generation is likely to recall...
...with men of supposed integrity and large purses, who generally got 8 percent on their greatness ; and with poets so minor that their collected works are barely visible to the eye...
...In contrast to a certain milk-and-water allegory now so dear to many otherwise excellent people, the gaunt dragon was not overwhelmed with a toothpick or a safetypin...
...There was a hard fight, but the hero won and thereby encouraged the plain citizen to continue his battle against the forces of the flesh...
...and after men had witnessed His miracles and His death, they knew that He is forever the great conqueror and exemplar...
...The professional manufacturer of glory has glutted the market with shoddy goods— with fake statesmen who were merely rather canny politicians...
...Once again, in a stumbling and groping modern decade, we are taking a moral inventory...
...But in every generation there were some who, because they were tired, or cynical, or troubled by the chaos of their historical learning, undertook to reduce the awefulness of the figure of Christ...
...And generally the significance of legend has lain in the triumph of the good prince over the dragon—that is, of the right instinct over the libidinous desire...
...Voltaire raised the point to a classic maxim when he declared that if God did not exist, it would have been necessary to invent Him...
...During moments of security and quiet ease, the sceptical—who are also the inactive—may amuse themselves by projecting their own static selves into the roles of glory...
...and they left us merely the emaciated landscape, like a desert battlefield over which the sun has long hovered in peace...
...and secondly, that the really illustrious men in our ancestral history were those who, like Francis or the Maid of Domremy, made their lives copies of His...
...It is the office of satirical realism to laugh all these supers off the stage...
...What matters always is the memory of sterling human achievement, in whatever field and by no matter whom...
...So abiding has this truth been in the course of history that common people who were left without heroes invariably invented them...
...We assume that all congressmen—past and present—are talkative dunces, that openly or covertly every literary man could go Shelley one better, and that 99 percent of the pioneers were laid to rest in Spoon River...
...The modern repudiation is due, at least in part, to the circumstance that the decorum which has so generously regulated literature during the past several generations very nearly succeeded in turning the hero into something like a house cat...
...But the young creature asked wearily: "Can't you give me something entertaining...
...He was almost— fortunately not quite—a nice imbecile who grew into long trousers and, finally, into a coffin without ever having moved out of a moral temperature of seventy degrees...
...But the task was left to those who succeeded only too well in failing to see that sainthood is victory over the deadliest of dragons...
...The ironical are, as Maurice Barres would have said, entitled only to a restricted area in any properly organized society...
...His udeparting footprints" have been pretty well covered over by higher criticism or something of the sort...
...nor should those who covet the luxury of ironical minds be denied their banquet of fumbles and flaws...
...Would American civic pedagogy have profited by the statement that although Sam Houston held the Alamo, he was badly afflicted with catarrh...
...The centre of the story was the victory...
...It guaranteed the possibility that in this world good can triumph over evil, no matter how ghastly the odds may be...
...And we learn in doing so that the safe rule of conduct for the individual is to make himself, as far as possible, objective—that is, similar to something which is worth while resembling...
...The four corners of the earth were moulded, clumsily but none the less patently, to resemble Him...
...Alexander Hamilton held an aristocratic view of government problems, but the naughty stories people tell about him are really very interesting...
...The other day a handsomely gowned young creature inquired hesitatingly about a French novel which she had selected from a heap on the counter...
...Sooner or later the majority of western men guage the current of their common living and remember two things: first, as Taine said, that wherever the wings of the spirit of Christ are broken, "public and private morals are degraded...
...They did this because they could not grasp or concede the dimensions of Divinity...
...All this has been said because it is highly important to get the right definition of the word "heroism...
...But on the other hand, the inheritance of heroism is of such general civic importance that it cannot safely be turned wholesale into a theme for laughter...
...We conquer our baser instincts by nurturing them into affections for nobler purposes...
...And one may concede to this realism that it is the product of a refined civilization and a disillusioned experience...
...They have no right to fix the moral and intellectual directions which most of us shall have to follow, because the very essence of their attitude is a repudiation of directions...
...In its place it is a very useful thing...
...and sometimes when their names were brilliant, the crowd followed them...
...Admittedly, we have been duped into investing in much bogus heroism...
...But one may observe further the curious fact that the older and better stories about the prince and the beast made the contest very grim and dangerous...
...That," said the saleslady in virtuous triumph—she was really a very old-fashioned saleslady—"is the story of a hero...
...but the most of mankind invariably continues to see the truth of heroism sanely, because it is a struggling multitude that must win and live— live by a pattern which transfigures the prosaic and steels the heart for shocks to be met...
...It is sadly true that the most fitting illustrations of this can be drawn from the mass of literature devoted to the very highest form of human nobility—the saints...
...From the valleys of Galilee there came One who had eternally been willing to assume the hopeless task of saving the world...
...If all holy men had possessed the rhetorical gifts of Saint Augustine and had written accounts of their own lives, the world would read them avidly, as it does the Confessions...
...But not for very long...
...We are usually ready to raise our hands and say that of course George Washington wasn't of great importance, but he danced all night...
...But where shall either the individual or the society of which he is a part look for guidance, for the counsel of sweetly human example, if not to the great men of the race and nation...
...In the long battle which our world has fought against the myriad forms of barbarism, moments of triumph have been precious and the conquering captains were rescuers for whom the crowd had earnestly prayed...
...They cannot presume to tell us how to get anywhere because their whole point is the joke about the man who went down the wrong street...
...Does it profit now when a contemporary critic terms a collection of narratives about the Jesuit missionaries in North America "fanaticism" which is "magnificent" ? The answer to these questions may, perhaps, be found in what the modern psychologist aptly calls sublimation...
...A problem like that of heroism can be estimated 45O THE COMMONWEAL March 3, 1926 fairly only when we see what it has meant in the history of the race...
...Yet, in spite of all mistakes in method, the ancient virtue of heroism remains permanent and necessary...
...Everybody is quite sure that the poet Shakespeare was a ticket-broker, that Milton earned shrewd sums in real-estate, and that Balzac was an insufferable dandy...
...It follows, also, that society will be tolerable and civilized according as it is able to make certain objective standards impressive—that is, to get away from anarchy by guaranteeing the existence of illuminated law...
...And we may say that, apart from all other considerations that might be urged, the idea of heroism is the central civic preoccupation of the present time for the simple reason that the future of human society depends upon a new realization of the Divinity of the Master...
Vol. 3 • March 1926 • No. 17
