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The Rueful Group
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (August 3, 1912): 26
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A price so high is paid for fineness that the grave wonder of its being paid has troubled us from the beginning. There have always been the few who preferred the finer discriminations, though they saw clearly that, in the world’s exchanges, to discriminate too austerely is to forego, and a little to give the effect of having futilely failed. though they saw clearly that, in the world’s exchanges, to discriminate too austerely is to forego, and a little to give the effect of having futilely failed. The gods love the hearty, crass souls. The things the lusty, blunt minds enjoy are scattered freely about, and they gain them, noticeably. The things they can do are necessary, and they do them sententiously, with weightily moral reflexions, and succulent reception of the public rewards received. They are largely lenient to the person who squirms under their pudgy touch, for they see with magnified view how much that person misses. The person also sees. He sees how unreal a figure he cuts in the world. He sees his ruddy associates walk through his subdivisions, emphasis, and exclusions, like a bear waddling busily through a wraith, comfortable because unaware. He knows that the things which mean happiness for him come rarely, and he knows that to stand back so often with a denying handshake is almost to negate oneself into oblivion. That is the oblivion of being ignored by life’s warm, varied, hurly-burly. He lives, happily but of necessity, in a world thinly populated, believed in but by its inmates, who have a primary trouble in finding one another, who communicate through books and rare vibrating encounters. He rails his world about with the rigor of cheerful isolation. He sometimes fails seriously in his effort to live in the world on its own terms, and it may be that he fails where his failure will hurt others. That is the part of the mind and heart that is preserving the divine hair-splittings.
He sees two sides where he should see one, he has an enthusiasm where he should have a convention. He separates himself from the crowd after each attempt at becoming part of it, flattened and depressed. It had looked so enjoyably promiscuous, but he lacked its password; he could cull so little there, and lose so much. He returns to his task of shredding life into delicate wisps, all the veins exquisitely displayed, each drop of water in the rainbow separated and regarded as a single jewel.
It may be that his possession of some of these jewels is what incapacitates him for his work. He sees two sides where he should see one, he has an enthusiasm where he should have a convention. Perhaps he tries to apply an abstract principle and it sounds like incitement to riot, which is his own fault for having such a thing as an abstract principle in his possession. When a coarser person would give ready sympathy, he may see the selfish, petty, rudimentary quality of the sorrow, and while he stops to grieve at the human make-up he perhaps sits unresponsively silent and blank. He gets few of the things he tries for, for one only arrives by having no doubts of any kind. He doubts his right to acquire, his motive, his relish on receiving, and perhaps by the prism of his view-point, which breaks an act into seven questions, he is made vacillating and invertebrate. and perhaps by the prism of his view-point, which breaks an act into seven questions, he is made vacillating and invertebrate.
Had he had strength added to his other qualities — ah, but then he would have been a genius and made the world grasp his sparkling subdivisions whether it would or no! Geniuses come rarely. There are always existing somewhere the people whose weakness is an integral part of their destiny of keeping the fineness, the unnecessary fineness, going. If they had a jot more vitality the call of contest and success would be too strong for them and they would fling aside the delicacies.
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