doctor, the teacher-every class but the labor class. Can the Church be Christ's which wins every class that believes in soul, but cannot win the one class that believes in body? Must not the Church change its creed to become the Church of the workingman? So be it. Creed be changed, at least so far as creed is certified by conduct! We must make terms. We must join labor leagues. We must leave off linen cuffs and wear blouses, and smoke strong tobacco. We must preach against capital, property, interest. We must berate the sins of the rich, and canonize the infirmities of the poor, and go mooning for signs of a co-operative commonwealth, and preach as the last, best gospel, salvation by swill. Can God be God if Lucifer leaves heaven? Was Jesus the Christ when Judas sold Him for a bag of silver? Meanwhile Millet tells us that when there is a soul in the "hoe" man's hand, his hoe sings Ave Marias and Pater Nosters among haloed dandelions, and under a high-priest sun whose beams are benedictions. Millet is Millet whether at hoe or easelpainting sign-boards for taverns, or medal-pictures for the salon. His genius is but the conscience of his hand; and the approval of that conscience forespeaks fame. The true man does all things truly. He rises above his work by rising in it. Because little occasions seem large to him, large ones become little in his ready grasp. A Newton sees planets in apples; a Cuvier, the mastodon in a tooth, a Lyell, the genesis of the earth in a pebble; and every great heart works in the humblest task with the same motive that gladdens the highest, even as in his armor at the bottom of the sea the diver breathes the fresh, strong gale that blows across its upper billows. The great heart, by which I mean the good heart, never chafes at its lot, nor fidgets for place, nor mistakes chance for merit, as though man could be made or unmade by chance, and were but a chance himself. Occasions do not create, but reveal greatness, and no less surely reveal the littleness of men who expect to be made great by them. So have I seen a dwarf-palmetto, whose seed some bird had borne thither from the swamp below, grow out of the gray moss that lay in the topmost fork of a dead cypress, and look pertly down on live-oak and magnolia, as if in it the dead cypress had come to life again; when, of a truth, the height only exposed its upstart scrubbiness. Folly alike in swamp or Society, in individual or class, to seek eminence by accidental elevation, and not by eminent growth of character. And this, I think, is the meaning of Millet's art, and of all the so-called realism of modern art. It is the realism of life, most romantic when most real. Its heroes are the great little-ones of the world, the Oliver Twists, Nicholas Nicklebys, Silas Marners, cotters at their Saturday night prayers, and blithevoiced Pippas 66 who wind silk The whole year round to earn just bread and milk.” The common every-day conflict, victory, battlejoy, is theirs, to turn from which to phantoms of reverie is to renounce summer sunshine for boreal lights-summer sunshine most glorious because so common that men forget its glory. Bethink you of your clothes woven of the whole world's flax, cotton, woollen, silk; your food gathered from the whole world's tilth; your shilling-edition books making you bosom friends of the wisest spirits of the race; your civic freedom, a Round Table whose knights have shed their blood in many a fray that you might sit down without a scar at their banquet of peerage-bethink you of these boons, and be proud with all the pride of a peer that you can stand in your lot, and do your work, and in your work unfold your life, and, by unfolding, heighten and expand it. Wait not on fulfilment; your act fulfils itself. As the work goes now, it will go for ever, increasing with increase of power which alone may convert it into athletic play. Haste not. "Hurry is akin to flurry." What darkens this spot will gloom that; your shadow runs with you. light that falls yonder shines here; turn about and face it. Know you not that the front rank of the universe is the rank next to God, and every man stands there who does his work as in God's sight? Wade your troubles as a trout fisher wades the stream that twists and shoots and eddies and plunges, with many a snag in the midst, and fallen tree across. When no upward flash meets your cast, cast again while the reel hums merry expectation, until at last every disappointment is fulfilled at once by the jerk, the swirl, the jump that tingle wrist and brain. Broken leaders, snarled lines, torn garments, bruised limbs, cannot spoil the hilarity which feels the whole day's sport in every minute, the whole brook's beauty at every step. The The sport is just as grand when the day lasts through years; the brook still more beautiful when you know it as the River of Life. The luck that fills your creel with love and wisdom, though it catch little else, is luck enough for time and eternity; nay, it is eternal sport in time. "Live thou thy life-no less; 66 Live thou thy life—no more; Quit not thy heart; than that What deadlier ill can be? How shall he find who leaves behind "For in thine ample breast Are heaven, and earth, and air; IX "THE WAGES OF GOING ON” "How will you ever straighten up this shape : Touch it again with immortality." MARKHAM. "The wages of sin is death: if the wages of virtue be dust, MMORTALITY is a vague word. IMM TENNYSON. It takes any meaning the dreamer's mood would give it. There is entirely too much "music and dream" and too little thought in its employment. It can be made to speak the very contrary of its intent, and belie its promise, as when it becomes an immortality of "touches," a mortal immortality. And science no less than sentiment indicates a disposition to retain the music and dream without the thought, the thought being one that outsoars its category of things which, because they are things, must necessarily change and pass. Science cannot think personality, and personality alone is immortal. Immortality has no other reason, no other evidence. God is God because He is the I of the universe, and man is God's namesake in sharing His eternal I-hood. But this I, whether God's or man's, is the one 9 |