The Crown of Individuality. V: The Sculptured Figures of Society

The Crown of Individuality. BY WILLIAM GEORGE JORDAN.

V.— The Sculptured Figures of Society. Over the great doorway of one of New York's sky-scraping office buildings three colossal sculptured figures are posed in

crouching attitudes. With their great bowed heads, grimly tense features, and muscles strained like whip-cords they seem to hold on their broad shoulders the terrific weight of twenty or more stories of solid masonry. They are really only — pompous shams. Theirs is only a Herculean pose. Theirs is only the pretense of the strenuous — not its reality. They were put in after the build- ing was completed; they could be removed without endangering the safety of the edifice in the slightest. They have no more real responsibility than a wandering fly, tarrying for a moment on the flag-pole on the roof. There are thousand of such sculptured figures in the world of society today. They are men whose powers are evidenced in ounces, whose pretense is proclaimed in tons. They are those whose promises out-soar the eagles, whose performance is lower than the flight of the mud-lark. They are constantly posing phy- sically, mentally, morally, socially,or spiritually. By juggling with excuses of their vanity and selfishness they may mislead them- selves and others for a time, but usually — they deceive only them- selves. They are most often like the village fool who thought he played the organ when he only— pumped the bellows.

• From The Crown of Individuality . Copyright, 1909, by Fleming

H. Re veil Company.

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Certain fairly harmless sculptured figures have the pose of being "extremely busy." They constantly seek to raise themselves to a conspicuous ledge by the derrick of their own conceit. They seem to have so much to accomplish that you might infer that were each day two weeks long and three weeks wide, it would be absurdly inadequate for their diurnal duties. Their tasks are so "terrifically many" that, if you were optimistic enough to accept their statements as net, without asking for discount, you would realize that these tasks could never be accomplished by any indi- vidual — would surely require a syndicate. it

They belong to a class, who if they receive three letters a day, tell you that they are "just deluged with correspondence."

Their social engagements are "positively tiresome" and as you listen to the list of their society friends your commercial instinct makes you picture what a splendid elite directory it would be were itonly put into print. Their troubles with their servants seem so great that you wonder why they do not discharge nine or so of them and worry along with the remainder. They use a seventy horse-power vocabulary for a bicycle set of thoughts. They go around polishing their own halos. Another of these sculptured figures poses as an intellectual Atlas holding up the whole firmament of thought — merely one world is too easy. His ignorance and his impudence ever collab- orate with his iconoclasm. He demolishes literary reputation with the ease of a sharp-shooter hitting glass balls. He confides to you that Shakespeare is greatly overrated, Thackeray was only a cynic, Scott a garrulous old novelist, George Elliot a sawdust doll, Dickens a tedious reporter. All the world's greatest drama- tists, novelists, poets, philosophers and thinkers, are one by one, inevitably bowled into — nothingness. There is a sculptured figure who speaks as though pronounc- ing the last word of finality on science and higher thought. The problems that- have baffled the sages for ages seem to him as lu- minant as an electric sign on a dark street. Though he has read, perhaps, partially through one volume of Spencer, Tyndall, Hux- ley, or Darwin, he erupts, like a pretensive Vesuvius of knowledge on — evolution. There are thick clouds of the smoke of mere words, and sputtering of confused light. Every weak spot in

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theology is known to him and where he cannot find a puncture he makes one. He seems to believe he could handle all cannon-ball problems as lightly as though they were rubber-balls. Ignorance of many of these great questions is justifiable and natural to us who are not omniscient. It needs no apology, because one may

be thinking honestly on other subjects nearer and dearer to one's life. The wrong and folly lie only in — the pose and the pretense. There are other sculptured figures more sad to think of, more serious to contemplate, more blighting on the lives of others. They are those who peril the crown of their individuality by a moral or a religious pose— a combination of pharisaism, pride, policy and pretense. They may occupy high places but, like statues in cathedrals, despite the religious atmosphere and the environment in which they exist, they remain — only stone. Religion to be worth aught must transform and sweeten and better lives or — it is only a self-deceiving formula. It must be a living impetus making them bear bravely their own burdens; it must broaden their shoulders to stand the strain of others' needs; itmust make them active, verile, aggressive, inspiring powers in the world. Religion, to be really worth while, should, by their living, fill men's hearts with love, truth, right, justice, sweetness, honesty, faith, charity, trust and peace. These virtues can no more be kept hid from the world around them than can the blaz- ing sun, riding royally in the zenith at noonday. There are religious sculptured figures from sheer hypocrisy, consciously treading on their church rating— these may deceive the world without blindfolding their own eyes for a moment. There is a more subtle form where the individual himself does not realize that he is only an eye-servant or an ear-servant, that his is lip He has no realization that he is not trans- service only. forming what he believes is true into a dynamic moral force affect- ing his own life and the lives of others. There are sculptured figures of friendship that may deceive us for a time. Discovery may take from us, for a long period, all that is best in us, shrivel our faith in humanity, and leave us lonely — until we bury the dead body of the friendship and learn to forget. There are friendships upon the certainty of which we have

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staked our life.We have felt that though the winds of adversity might blow bleakly about us, the ships of our highest hopes wreck at the moment we believed they were almost in their haven of return; the night of our great misfortune settle down on us without a star; the cup of sorrow, shame and suffering be close- pressed to our lips, yet despite all that might possibly come to us, there would ever be— this true friend by our side. We may have shared his crust of trial and disappointment, heart-gladdened, in a way, and we were privileged thus to be of service to him. We may have listened untiringly to his endless repetition of the litany of some sorrow of his— soothing him, sweetly consoling, silently and sympathetically comforting — with no thought of self. We may have secretly left the deathbed of some great hope of our own, stifled our sobs bravely that he might not know, and sat down with serene patience to watch and nurse with him at the sick-bed of some grief of his or to help him towards the resurrection of some hope of his from the grave of his sorrow or his failure. All that was ours, all the resources of our whole life were more truly his than ours because his need would stimulate us to higher effort in his behalf than we would make in our own. He may have protested undying gratitude, told us freely, over and over again, that no demand or need of ours would seem even a drop to the ever-flowing spring of his gratitude. Then when the finger of time had moved from days to weeks, and to months, the angel of a great grief may have knocked at the door of our heart, and perforce we have to open and let the angel of sorrow come in. In the awful desolation and loneliness that numb our very soul we may turn around confident of meeting responsive eyes looking inspiration into ours; we involuntarily bend the ear to hear words of courage from the lips of the only one in all the world that could comfort or console. We reach out, by some subtle instinct, the hand of our pain, expecting it to be warmly covered, but instead we touch only — the cold, hard, chiseled out. lines of a sculptured figure. Then we realize the fulness of one of the most pathetic cries in all the world's history, when Christ in the garden of Gethsemane, in sublime hunger of heart, in divine protest of soul, broke in on the