He only who keeps himself aloof from all feeling can remain the
spectator of the hour. All that humanity which is held within the
beating, coiling, surging tides of passion, has no individuality; it
sinks its personality to become a vein in the limb of this giant, a
pulse in the heart of that Titan. Only when out of the spirit of the
times the event is born, only when the act is complete, the curtain rung
down, only then does the intellectuality of the vein, the pulse, rise to
the level of the dispassionate. Only then can it survey a tragedy and
say, "This was necessary"--a reaction, and say, "This was inevitable."
Yet as a drop of blood is a quivering, living, flashing ruby beside the
dead, pale pearl of a stagnant pool, so is one drop of feeling a shining
thing, a living thing, beside the deadness of the intellect which judges
while the heart is stone; beside those quiet bayous of brain which
reflect back the images before them very purely, very stilly, giving no
heed to the great rushing river of heart that rolls on, hurries on so
close beside them. Bye and bye, bye and bye, the river reaches the
grand, great sea, and the waters spread out calm and deep, so deep that
the stars of the upper sea, the lights of the higher life, shine far up
from them as a babe smiles up into its mother's eyes, and up still to
the distant source of the light within the eyes.
It is to men and women of feeling that I speak, men and women of the
millions, men and women in the hurrying current! Not to the shallow
egotist who holds himself apart and with the phariseeism of
intellectuality exclaims, "I am more just than thou"; but to those whose
every fiber of being is vibrating with emotion as aspen leaves quiver in
the breath of Storm! To those whose hearts swell with a great pity at
the pitiful toil of women, the weariness of young children, the
handcuffed helplessness of strong men! To those whose blood runs quick
along the veins like wild-fire on the dry grass of prairies when the
wind whirls aside the smokings of the holocaust, and, courting the teeth
of the flame, the black priestess, Injustice, beckons it on while her
feet stamp on the cinders of the sacrifice! To those whose heart-strings
thrill at the touch of Love like the sweet, low, musical laugh of
childhood, or thrum with hate like the singing vibration of the
bowstring speeding the arrow of Death! I speak to those whose eyes
behold all things through a haze of gray, or rose, or gold, born of
their surroundings, and which mist slips away only when the gaze is
leveled on that dead Past whose passions and whose deeds are ended: to
whom the present is always a morning with the dimness of morning around
it--the past clear and still--no veil on its face, for the veil has been
shredded asunder.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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