From: Cheerful Yesterdays (1898)
Author: Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Published: Houghton Mifflin and Company 1898 Boston
IN reading reminiscences like those contained in this volume, the public may often justly complain that too much has been told. The writer, on the other hand, when he comes to review what he has written, may be more justly amazed to see how large a portion of what is to him most important has remained unmentioned. Unless he has by nature the oppressive communicativeness of a French or Italian autobiographer, he will probably have left unchronicled the most intimate and essential parts of his own existence,—love, friendship, home, society, health,—while only that which is more overt and tangible remains in view. The frankest writer doubtless leaves untold more of the story of his life than he tells. For the rest, his career, be it larger or smaller, belongs to his own time; and its record is chiefly valuable for the light it throws on the period and the place.
It must be borne in mind that one who has habitually occupied the attitude of a reformer must inevitably have some satisfactions, at the latter end of life, which those who are conservative by temperament can hardly share. To the latter, things commonly seem to be changing for the worse, and this habit of mind must be a dreary companion as the years advance. The reformer, on the other hand, sees so much already accomplished, in the direction of his desires, that he can await in some security the fulfillment of the rest. Personally I should like to live to see international arbitration secured, civil service reform completed, free trade established; to find the legal and educational rights of the two sexes equalized; to know that all cities are as honestly governed as that in which I dwell; to see natural monopolies owned by the public, not in private hands; to see drunkenness extirpated; to live under absolute as well as nominal religious freedom; to perceive American literature to be thoroughly emancipated from that habit of colonial deference which still hampers it. Yet it is something to believe it possible that, after the progress already made on the whole in these several directions, some future generation may see the fulfillment of what remains.
To those who were living when the American nation lifted and threw off from its shoulders the vast incubus of human slavery, what other task can seem too great to be accomplished? In the presence of such a step in human progress as this, how trivial and unimportant are all personal ambitions! The high-water mark of earthly endeavor is not to be found in the pure love of science or art or literature, since these do not, at their utmost, include all the interests of man; nor in the wish to establish the glory of God, which needs no establishing; but it lies in aims so far-reaching that they exclude all petty personalities—in aims such as are expressed in George Eliot’s “choir invisible,” or in the sublime prayer of the French iconoclast, Proudhon, “Let my memory perish, if only humanity may be free.”
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