On Being Human | Page 9

a wide field of vision. It is exercise and discipline upon such a
scale, too, which strengthen, which for ordinary men come near to
creating, that capacity to reason upon affairs and to plan for action
which we always reckon upon finding in every man who has studied to
perfect his native force. This new day in which we live cries a
challenge to us. Steam and electricity have reduced nations to
neighborhoods; have made travel pastime, and news a thing for
everybody. Cheap printing has made knowledge a vulgar commodity.
Our eyes look, almost without choice, upon the very world itself, and
the word "human" is filled with new meaning. Our ideals broaden to
suit the wide day in which we live. We crave, not cloistered virtue--it is
impossible any longer to keep the cloister--but a robust spirit that shall
take the air in the great world, know men in all their kinds, choose its
way amid the bustle with all self-possession, with wise genuineness, in
calmness, and yet with the quick eye of interest and the quick pulse of
power. It is again a day for Shakespeare's spirit--a day more various,
more ardent, more provoking to valor and every large design, even than
"the spacious times of great Elizabeth," when all the world seemed new;
and if we cannot find another bard, come out of a new Warwickshire, to
hold once more the mirror up to nature, it will not be because the stage
is not set for him. The time is such an one as he might rejoice to look
upon; and if we would serve it as it should be served, we should seek to
be human after his wide-eyed sort. The serenity of power; the
naturalness that is nature's poise and mark of genuineness; the
unsleeping interest in all affairs, all fancies, all things believed or done;
the catholic understanding, tolerance, enjoyment, of all classes and
conditions of men; the conceiving imagination, the planning purpose,
the creating thought, the wholesome, laughing humor, the quiet insight,
the universal coinage of the brain--are not these the marvelous gifts and
qualities we mark in Shakespeare when we call him the greatest among

men? And shall not these rounded and perfect powers serve us as our
ideal of what it is to be a finished human being?
We live for our own age--an age like Shakespeare's, when an old world
is passing away, a new world coming in--an age of new speculation and
every new adventure of the mind; a full stage, an intricate plot, a
universal play of passion, an outcome no man can foresee. It is to this
world, this sweep of action, that our understandings must be stretched
and fitted; it is in this age we must show our human quality. We must
measure ourselves by the task, accept the pace set for us, make shift to
know what we are about. How free and liberal should be the scale of
our sympathy, how catholic our understanding of the world in which
we live, how poised and masterful our action in the midst of so great
affairs! We should school our ears to know the voices that are genuine,
our thought to take the truth when it is spoken, our spirits to feel the
zest of the day. It is within our choice to be mean company or with
great, to consort with the wise or with the foolish, now that the great
world has spoken to us in the literature of all tongues and voices. The
best selected human nature will tell in the making of the future, and the
art of being human is the art of freedom and of force.
The End.

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