William Rounseville Alger, The Solitudes of Nature and of Man; or, The Loneliness of Human Life (Boston, Roberts Brothers, 1867), 122-24, 126: (emphasis mine):
The man who separates himself from mankind to nourish dislike or contempt for them, has in him a morbid element which must make woe. True content, a life of divine delight, cannot be attained through a sense of superiority secured by thrusting others down; but only through one secured by lifting ourselves up, by communing with the great principles of morality, contemplating the conditions of universal good, laying hold of the will of God. Whoso would climb over a staircase of subjected men into a lonely happiness, will find it misery when he arrives. To be really happy one must love and wish to elevate men, not despise and wish to rule them. There is nothing in which the blindness and deceit of self-love is more deeply revealed than in the supposition with which misanthropic recluses frequently flatter themselves, of their complete detachment from other men, their lofty freedom. Spatial separation is not spiritual independence. Of all men the man-hater is the one who is fastened to his fellow-men by the closest and the most degrading bond. Misanthropy, as a dominant characteristic, if thoroughly tracked and analyzed, will be found almost always to be the revenge we take on mankind for fancied wrongs it has inflicted on us, especially for its failure to appreciate us and admire us according to our fancied deserts. The powerful and savagely alienated Arthur Schopenhauer, who said that, in order to despise men as they deserved, it was necessary not to hate them, was embittered, almost infuriated, by disappointment in not obtaining the notice he thought he merited. He came daily from his sullen retreat to dine at a great public table where he could display his extraordinary conversational powers. He eagerly gathered every scrap of praise that fell from the press, and fed on it with desperate hunger. He sat in his hotel at Frankfort, in this age of newspapers and telegraphs, a sublimer Diogenes, the whole earth his tub. An apathetic carelessness for men shows that we really despise them, but an angry and restless resentment towards them betrays how great a place they occupy in our hearts. Diogenes and Alcibiades were equally dependent on public attention; the one to feel the enjoyment of his pride and scorn intensified by the reaction of hate and admiration he called forth; the other to feel the similar fruition of his vanity and sympathy. . . . The greatest egotists are the most fond both of retirement and publicity. There they lave their wounds with the anodyne of self-love; here they display their claims to admiration. The truly great and healthy man is not dependent on either, but draws blessings out of both,—resolve, inspiration, consecration, sanity. In both he pleases himself by improving every possibility of indulging in sentiments of respect and affection towards his race.
The great danger of the courters of solitude is the vice of pampering a conviction and feeling of their own worth by dwelling on the ignobleness of other men. They are tempted to make the meanness and wretchedness of the world foils to set off their own exceptional magnanimity. They need especially to guard themselves against this fallacy by laying bare to their own eyes the occult operations of pride and vanity. An efficacious antidote for their disease is a clear perception of the humbling truth of the case, of the ignoble cause of the disease. For it is unquestionably true that the man who despises the world, and loathes mankind, is usually one who cannot enjoy the boons of the world, or has been disappointed of obtaining from his fellows the love and honor he coveted. He then strives to console himself for the prizes he cannot pluck, by industriously cultivating the idea of their contemptibleness. Rousseau demanded more from men than they could give him. His brain and heart were pitched too high; with the fine intensity of their tones the cold and coarse souls of common men made painful discords. Instead of wisely seeing the truth, and nobly renouncing his excessive exactions, he turned against the world and labored with misanthropic materials to build up his overweening self-love. Of course he was not conscious of this himself. It was a disease, and, fleeing from all antidotes, it fed in solitude; whence he looked abroad and fancied that he saw his contemporaries leagued in a great plot against him.
. . . Thousands have been impelled to solitude by resentment,—as the hermit confessed to Imlac he was,—where one has been led to it by devotion. The true improvement of our lonely hours is not to cherish feelings of superiority to our neighbors, but to make us really superior by a greater advancement in the knowledge of truth, the practice of virtue, communion with the grandeurs of nature, and absorption in the mysteries of God. He who is continually exercising scorn towards the pleasures of society and the prizes of the world, is one who has failed in the experiment of life and been soured by his failure. The truly successful man appreciates these goods at their genuine value,—sees that in their place they have sweetness and worth, but knows that there are other prizes of infinitely higher rank, and is so content with his possession and pursuit of these latter as to have no inclination to complain of the deceitfulness and vileness of the former. To dwell alone is an evil when we use our solitude to cherish an odious idea of our race, and a disgust for the natural attractions of life. It should be improved, not negatively for dislike and alienation, but positively to cultivate a more earnest love for higher mental pursuits, choicer spiritual fruitions, than the average community about us are wonted to. Scorn for man, disgust for the world, is no sign of strength, loftiness, or victory, but rather a sign of weakness, defeat, and misery. “The great error of Napoleon was a continued obtrusion on mankind of his want of all community of feeling for or with them.” He deceived himself in fancying his ruling feelings unlike in kind to those of the bulk of men; they were the same in sort, only superior in scale and tenacity, and in the greater stage on which they were displayed.
No comments:
Post a Comment