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WHAT HE WAS LIKE.

Old acquaintance is the heart of friendship. We think of some friendships that began before memory began. Other friends we remember makinghow and where we met them first, and the impression they made on us. Sometimes the contrast between first impression and the knowledge of years is ludicrous. The mind was on the alert when we met the stranger; it was quick and eager to master his outlook and his ways of thought, to see what he was, and to get his right size; we wanted to know where we were, in short. So it is always with new faces. But, as time goes on, we notice less and less; we see more of the man, we study him less, it would seem. Yet it is this careless intercourse that counts. The mind is off guard, and, so far as it is conscious of it, it is doing nothing. In reality, it is receiving a host of unnoticed impressions, which in the long run may have extraordinary influence.

Cannot many a man point to some long and pleasant, easy-going friendship, a continuous source of interest and ease of mind, which went on without much reflection, till one day he woke up and found himself another man-re-made by another's personality, in the ordinary round of life, in work and play and talk, in talk of books and business, of neighbors and old memories? Slowly one has reached the other's point of view; his life has been learned piece-meal as he tells of its crises, and how he felt at this great moment and that; how he was disappointed at first, but soon came to another mind; how after that he found a great joy, and lived on it for years; and then how it was taken away, but nothing could keep him from living on it still. Stage by stage, by unconscious and freely given sympathy, one has lived the other man's life; one has seen

things and felt them as he saw and felt them; one has slipped unawares into his language, and by degrees into his thoughts. Then comes a great separation, perhaps the friend dies, or duty sends us different ways; the ocean lies between us; one comes back to the old home, and there, alone among one's original friends, among familiar scenes, one finds oneself the strange figure; for the real intimate is across the sea, or beyond the grave. And then with surprise one realizes how close had been the identification with the friend now far away.

The task comes of telling others what has happened to us, and we begin to make trials at biography.

Here's my case; of old I used to love him.

But what was he? What was he not? What are we to say? Most of us break down when it comes to the systematic evolution of a character. If our friends to-day want to know what the great man was of whom they hear so much, they have really to repeat our experience, and gather him up piecemeal. And it is really a wonderful thing how much the mind can absorb in this way, quite unconsciously, how much it can keep, and how well, without effort, it can co-ordinate what it keeps into a general idea.

The next stage is the written biography. But what are we to put into that? Some people have recourse to adjectives, and the result is idle and flavorless. Some confine themselves to the great thoughts and the great labors, till the man is lost in the hero, and not easily distinguishable, perhaps, from an abstract idea. And then a man comes, who is such a fool as not to be able to tell the significant from the insignificant, and he babbles away

in volume after volume about odd and irrelevant things-gestures, orangepeel, paving stones, wigs, lodgings, quips, nonsense, all mixed hopelessly together with things of real momenttill we are not quite sure whether the writer is a total fool or only a partial one, but somehow we read on and reread, and Boswell's Dr. Johnson becomes an intimate of our own.

Now to pass to another region. The greatest change the world has seen was brought about by an intimacy and a biography. "He goeth up into a mountain, and calleth unto him whom he would: and they came unto him. And he ordained twelve, that they should be with him." So runs the oldest account of it in Mark's Gospel. Under the necessity of compression for the sake of working in more material, Matthew and Luke abridge this, and the needless phrase "that they should be with him" is cut away. A quite needless phrase, like many more in Mark, which are also omitted, and yet how essential! The thing is implied by the other writers, but are not the quiet and unobtrusive words worth remembering? Do they not contain the gist of the whole matter? In epitome what else would the history of Christianity be of Christianity, that is, so far as it is a real thing, a force and a factor, and not a logomachy or a label?

One thing is worth noting at once. The writers of the first three gospelsprobably all three, certainly two of them-had little or no first-hand intercourse with Jesus. They are using other men's reminiscences. This makes it more remarkable how little of the adjective there is in their work-no compliment, no eulogy, no great passages of enconium or commendation. "Why callest thou me good?" So it is recorded that Jesus asked a man once; and it looks as if the mood had passed over into his intimates. They did not "call him good"; they had no

adjectives for him, any more than a man has adjectives for his father or his wife or his child when they mean most to him. The lips may tighten, and say more so than any adjective could achieve. The men who were with Jesus were too full of him for the facile relief of praise. How had it come about?

These men consorted with him in a life of wandering and often of weariness. One vivid incident survives of a day's travel. Once, after the day's march-and that no ordinary one, for it was full of a marked tension, his face was "set"-he and his friends came to a village where they expected to rest. But the messengers whom they had sent on ahead met them with no pleasant news-they would not be received. No one who has not known what it is to be refused bread when hungry and weary will quite guess what it meant. Now it is such moments that show the man, for then he is off his guard. There was nothing to be done but to tramp on; so on they tramped. There were angry looks and hot words-all futile; old stories came back-if one had Elijah's power now, and could call fire from Heaven-"But he turned and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of Man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save them." After this, the evangelist says simply: "And they went to another village"-a quiet ending, but full of significance. So they lived. "The Son of Man had not where to lay his head." It is such a life, stripped of all padding, that shows the real man.

But many another day's ending is lost to us. What was the talk, as they sat at the night's meal? Was it always intense? Did he never (in our rather foolish phrase) "unbend"? Was he gay or bright-if men can be so without ceasing to be earnest, which some seem to doubt? As they broke bread among

themselves, when there were no crowds, on what did their talk run? Had he what we call "little ways"? "I know you by the waggling of your head," says some one in Shakespeare. "You could never do him so ill-well, unless you were the very man. Here's his dry hand up and down: you are he, you are he!" One thing of this kind survives in the narratives-the fixed gaze and the pause which came when he was going to speak with effect. There are also one or two special words which are quoted as his. There must have been much else as familiar. They must have known him through and through-the inflexions of his voice, his characteristic movements, his step in the darkness, the hang of his clothes, and all such things. Did he speak quickly or slowly? Parables, aphorisms-how dull the set terms sound, when they are labels tied to his words! What proportion have we of all he spoke? And how and when and where did he speak this or that? Was it in a long talk, or suddenly, flashed out with gaze and pause as prelude?

What subjects occupied their leisure? Herods, Roman governors, zealots, Custom House memories, tales of the fishermen's life on the lake, stories of neighbors and of home, what not? What failed to interest him? One cannot picture him as other than deeply read in human experience.

But it is when we reach the heart of the story that imagination fails. The problem is hard. Here are these men, a commonplace, uneducated, and miscellaneous group, dull, as he found and, as he said, at taking in his deepest thoughts, a quite impossible and impracticable regiment for a crusade. And then, a few years later, what do we find? Something has happened to them; they are magnetic with a new power, and draw strong men and wise about them, and foolish men, too, and depraved, it may be, and hopeless

any creature that is human and capable of conceiving that there may be something he does not know. Set down in black and white, what they had to say looked odd and doubtful; some saw at a glance that it was folly. But the spoken word was another thing; the man behind the message gave it a life that went beyond anything that could have been guessed. Elders and scribes and high priests, we read-and it is true of a great many more "took knowledge of them that they had been with Jesus."

The problem is to find what made the transformation, and the two passages with the same phrase give the answer clearly enough. They had "been with him"-and the answer grows stranger the more we realize it. It was not what he said, nor exactly how he said it, nor what he did, but the whole effect of Himself. No one will readily understand this who has not had a great intimacy with some one else, with someone of clear mind and kindly heart, richly gifted with the aptitudes that go to make experience and character.

Criticism is the easiest and sorriest trade a beginner can learn in a twinkling. Disraeli spoke of critics as those who have failed; the more drastic sort have never begun. But criticism that is to count must rest on experience; and if the gospels and the movement connected with them are to be criticised, as of course they must be by every intelligent person who is confronted with them, they, too, must be criticised on the basis of knowledge. But here the knowledge, to be of much use, cannot be got from book or books, but it must be gathered, slowly and half-unconsciously, in the original way from an intimacy. Even a political opponent is beyond criticism till one can understand how a human mind can have reached his conclusions and been content with them-till we have iden

tified ourselves with him. What are we to say of a personality which represents no mere movement of a day, but the gradual and progressive transformation of the world, of the individual and society? Some deeper identifica

The Nation.

tion of critic and criticised seems needful in such a case. It was from an intimacy that it began; in an intimacy it has gone on, and goes on; and only in an intimacy can it be judged aright..

SOCIAL FEARLESSNESS.

In the handicap of life social fearlessness is an immense advantage. It is almost the equivalent of birth. The strange thing is that it should be so uncommon. A small amount of reflection should encourage even the most arrant social coward. Society is the only place in which courage is actually a protection. Roughly speaking, no harm can happen to us if only we are not afraid. Intrepidity implies almost no risk. Yet how few of us can say to ourselves that our hearts have never sunk in a new social atmosphere, or that we have never lost our heads in the presence of those persons who cultivate the repute of social greatness and dread. But there are a few men and women to whom social fear is unknown. We can all call to mind some such. They belong to many types and to all ranks of life.

Some of the socially fearless are among the most lovable characters in the world. There are a few childlike natures who retain for ever an instinctive trust in humanity. They seem always to be in sympathy with their company. They know how to disarm the world. As a rule, there is something in their attitude towards strangers which we can only describe as deference; but their deference, like that of children, lies very close to dignity. They pay it instinctively to every one, to rich and poor alike, as the best-mannered children pay it. They never, as we say, let themselves down; yet they seem always to be look

ing up. There is something in them of the very spirit of youth, and they have always the supreme charm of happiness. Men say that they are lucky; it would be truer to say that they are gifted.

But it is not only the good who are fearless, though the world, with its instinctive desire to give admiration, would like to think so. Even socially the notion is a fallacy. There are plenty of bullies who love to strike terror and plenty of thick-skinned persons into whom one only wishes that terror could be struck; plenty also of men and women to whom social life, though fate obliges them to take part in it, is a matter of such small importance as to be impotent to rouse any emotion whatever. Of course there are a great variety of thick skins. Some insensitive people are attractive and very restful. They do not need to be considered; they take things as they come. They do not notice this person's airs, or that person's ungraciousness. Differences of atmosphere are not recognized by them. Their notion of social intercourse is to answer when you are spoken to, speak when you have something to say, and ask what you want to know. On this principle they get through their social lives very comfortably, and on the whole they find society very pleasant and interesting. Any snub they may get they innocently put down to the ill manners of the snubber, and, for themselves, they never hurt any

one except by accident. Other thickskinned persons are, however, nothing but a nuisance. No one can abate them. They always come where they are not wanted. They push into every enclosure, no matter the reason of its reservation. They pay to all above them the sometimes unpalatable and always unwholesome compliment of constantly seeking them. There is a form of social brute-courage which generally belongs to the most complete snobs and the most expert brain-pickers. They try to share in joys with which the stranger should not intermeddle, and offer sympathy for sorrows of which the afflicted persons were hoping that they did not know. They are a ceaseless source of annoyance to strangers, and of shame to their intimates. "The worst of her is that you can't offend her," said a poor woman not long ago to the present writer, as she described a socially fearless neighbor who left her neither peace nor privacy.

Neither of these types means any harm. Among the socially fearless, however, there are some really illnatured and cruel people. For them, as a rule, social life is the whole of life. Not to know its minutest rules, or to ignore them by reason of other cares, is a crime, and the punishment of such crime is sport. Nearly always they get on in the world, or one might say they have got on. Their arrogance is usually the outcome of suc

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in the world so ephemeral and despicable. Yet to how many social strugglers is it the crown and seal of their triumph. No doubt there are a few people who, born where social knowledge seems to come by instinct, overrate their birthright, and enjoy it most when it is made conspicuous by contrast; but they are rare. There are some socially fearless people, who, because they startle the timid, are occasionally confused with the unkind, who simply go on the principle of saying and doing as they like. If they are men and women of goodwill, they are among the most wholesome of social elements. They accord the liberty they demand. The higher up in the world they are, the more good they do. They destroy the game of the student of fashion, make straight the path of the able ignorant, and keep the social waters sweet with movement.

Inevitably the greater number of the socially fearless are to be found among the highly placed. There is, of course, a purely physical terror of a crowd to which we believe certain people in every rank of life are equally subject. To them a sense of hostility comes with numbers, and if chance places the crowd-shy person in a conspicuous position among a number of eyes, he has a sense of almost unbearable discomfort. A man or woman may be socially fearless-that is, may be able to face any social dilemma or any change of social circumstance with absolute calm -and yet be quite unnerved by a sudden sense of conspicuousness among a concourse of people. Social courage is susceptible of no such test, any more than physical courage can be judged of by tolerance or intolerance of heights. Putting aside this constitutional form of shyness, it is difficult to see why the very highly placed should ever feel any social fear. Can one imagine a shy King? Is it possible that Royalty may sometimes feel shy

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