“Somebody said that when Thoreau died there was no one left to appreciate the vast silence of the American forest. And when Grant died we felt that there was no one left to appreciate the little triumphs of little men. The talent that none else observed, the success that none else remarked, found warm commendation from him. Those shrewd observing eyes kindled to praise and to encourage, and there is no one left so kindly and so deft now that he is gone. I remember hearing him say: ‘The gifts of fragrance that the wise men brought to Jesus would make sweet the road they came. Deliciously the myrrh would smell even through its wrappings; there would be a trail of perfume from east to west.’ That was just Grant’s life—a trail of perfume from east to west—a life of kindnesses.”
That is said of a Scottish minister whose influence (which was very notable) was greatly due to the gift of appreciation—Alexander Duncan Grant of Greenock. It is one of the most precious gifts that God gives to His ministers. And it is bestowed sometimes on others besides priests and prophets. There is an entry in Amiel’s Journal for 22nd April 1878 which, in spite of a touch of condescension, goes far to redeem that book from the sin of self-regard. This is the entry: “Letter from my cousin Julia. These kind old relations find it very difficult to understand a man’s life, especially a student’s life. The hermits of reverie are scared by the busy world, and feel themselves out of place in action. But after all, we do not change at seventy, and a good, pious old lady, half-blind and living in a village, can no longer extend her point of view, nor form any idea of existences which have no relation with her own.
“What is the link by which these souls, shut in and encompassed as they are by the details of daily life, lay hold on the ideal? The link of religious aspiration. Faith is the plank which saves them. They know the meaning of the higher life; their soul is athirst for Heaven. Their opinions are defective, but their moral experience is great; their intellect is full of darkness, but their soul is full of light. We scarcely know how to talk to them about the things of earth, but they are ripe and mature in the things of the heart. If they cannot understand us, it is for us to make advances to them, to speak their language, to enter into their range of ideas, their modes of feeling. We must approach them on their noble side, and, that we may show them the more respect, induce them to open to us the casket of their most treasured thoughts. There is always some grain of gold at the bottom of every honourable old age. Let it be our business to give it an opportunity of showing itself to affectionate eyes.” [Note: Amiel’s Journal (tr. Mrs. Humphry Ward), 249.]
Look at man in himself; look at him as he makes himself by yielding to and aiding the fraud and malice of the devil, and hardly any language is too bitter to describe his baseness and degradation; but look at him in the light of revelation, look at him under the triple overarching rainbow of faith and hope and love, look at him ransomed and ennobled into a filial relationship with God, and you will see at once where men have learned their high faith in themselves, and who has taught them to speak of man in such noble accents. They learned them from St. Paul (1Co_6:11): “And such were some of you: but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, that ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.” They learned them from St. Peter (1Pe_2:9): “But ye are a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people; that ye should show forth the praises of him who hath called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.” They learned them from St. John (1Jn_3:2): “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is.” They learned them most of all from Christ Himself (Joh_16:26-28): “I say not unto you, that I will pray the Father for you; for the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God.”
Oh for the gift of vision, that we might behold the teeming marvels and delights of this fair earth, whose most modest shapes are rich in bloom and beauty! Oh for the gift of faith and love, that we might interpret truly the events of life, and find in each a theme for delectable song! Oh for the heavenly charity which can recognize in our brethren patience, kindness, and heroism, where a niggling intellect can see nothing but imperfection and failure! Oh that we might behold with open face the goodness of God in Jesus Christ, and live in the spirit of adoring wonder and loving consecration! If we do not grow in grace, let us turn over a new leaf; let us try the focus of appreciation instead of that of criticism; let us be freer to see the beautiful, to appreciate the good, to praise the high; and if only we are humble, sympathetic, and pure, the glory and joy of life will stand freshly revealed in everything, the law of praise will be on our lips, and in the genial glow we shall grow as flowers and palms in the sun.
Love greatens and glorifies all things,
Till God is aglow to the loving heart,
In what was mere earth before. [Note: Browning.]
1. There can hardly be a happier or more fruitful and wonder-working life than his in whose company men are always stirred to brightness and unselfishness just because he always believes that they are purer and better than they are: by whose trustful expectation they are reminded of what they once desired and hoped to be, so that the long-forgotten ideal seems again to come within their reach, and they live, if only for a while, by a light which they never thought to see again. For thus this quickening and enlightening power of faith in our fellow-men changes the whole air and aspect of a life; and he who is thus trustful and hopeful draws out in one man the timid and hidden germ of good, and engenders in another the grace and warmth which his faith presumes—and the dullest heart is startled into sympathy with the charity which believeth all things, and hopeth all things: so that everywhere this faith is greeted by the brightness which itself calls out, as the sun is welcomed by the glad colours which sleep until he comes.
There is a scene in the life of St. Paul which is not without eminent meaning. Near the close of his ministry he writes a letter, which has been preserved, to his pupil and companion, the youthful Timothy. What a ring it has, from its first word to its last, of brotherly confidence and trust He is soon to be put to death and he knows it; he has been deserted by all but one of his fellow-labourers, and he knows that; he has made as yet but the smallest impression upon that huge mass of imperial heathenism which has bound him a prisoner in Rome; but none of these things has shaken his faith in the Master whom he serves or in that son in the ministry to whom he writes. When he called to mind, as he says, the unfeigned faith which dwelt in those who had borne and nurtured Timothy—and he adds with exquisite tenderness (2Ti_1:5), “I am persuaded is in thee also” — he had no doubt, no, not for an instant, concerning this absent fellow-labourer. He was old, he was deserted, he was a prisoner, and yet what is the tone of his letter? Does he write a stinging satire upon the faithlessness of men? Does he caution Timothy against sacrificing himself to impetuous hopes, and tell him that after all zeal is well enough, but that it may better be tempered by an habitual distrust and suspicion, especially of one’s fellow-men? On the contrary, were there ever words of such hopeful import, of such serene confidence, of such tender and undiminished trustfulness as he speaks to this untried young man? Now, St. Paul was not a novice or an innocent. He was in the largest and worthiest sense a man of the times. He knew society in the forum and in the market-place quite as intimately as he knew it in the temple or the synagogue. He knew the sins of his age and his race, and the shames and falsehoods that had stained even believing communities and Christian churches, like those of Corinth or of Ephesus. But these sad experiences had not made of him a cynic in society or a pessimist in religion. He knew enough to know how, underneath its falsehoods and unrealities, the nature that is not true loathes its falseness and longs and aches to be free from it. He knew that if men were to be won to love truth and goodness, it must be by appealing to that instinct, or impulse, or aspiration in them which could own and respond to such an appeal, and not by denying its existence. And what he knew he taught and preached and lived, until that mass of corrupt and perishing heathenism to which he went, wakened at last out of its hopeless lethargy, owned the message of hope, and the image of redeeming love and life which he held up before its eyes.
My dear friend and teacher, Lowell, right as he is in almost everything, is for once wrong in these lines, though with a noble wrongness:—
Disappointment’s dry and bitter root,
Envy’s harsh berries, and the choking pool
Of the world’s scorn, are the right mother-milk
To the tough hearts that pioneer their kind.
They are not so; love and trust are the only mother-milk of any man’s soul. So far as he is hated and mistrusted, his powers are destroyed. Do not think that with impunity you can follow the eyeless fool, and shout with the shouting charlatan; and that the men you thrust aside with gibe and blow are thus sneered and crushed into the best service they can do you. I have told you they will not serve you for pay. They cannot serve you for scorn. Even from Balaam, money-lover though he be, no useful prophecy is to be had for silver or gold. From Elisha, saviour of life though he be, no saving of life—even of children’s, who “know no better”—is to be got by the cry, Go up, thou bald-head. No man can serve you either for purse or curse; neither kind of pay will answer. No pay is, indeed, receivable by any true man; but power is receivable by man, in the love and faith you give him. So far only as you give him these can he serve you; that is the meaning of the question which his Master asks always, “Believest thou that I am able?” And from every one of his servants—to the end of time—if you give them the Capernaum measure of faith, you shall have from them Capernaum measure of works, and no more.
Do you think that I am irreverently comparing great and small things? The system of the world is entirely one; small things and great are alike part of one mighty whole. As the flower is gnawed by frost, so every human heart is gnawed by faithlessness. And as surely—as irrevocably—as the fruit-bud falls before the east wind, so fails the power of the kindest human heart, if you meet it with poison. [Note: Ruskin, Modern Painters, v., pt. ix., ch. xii.]
I wish that I might tell you what you are
To me—you seem so fine and strong and true,
So bold, and yet so gentle, so apart
From petty strivings that confuse men’s minds.
I wish that I might make you understand
How your clean, brave young life has made me brave,
How I am cheered and strengthened, and upheld
When I consider that the world holds you
A hero; in a world of false ideals
Your truth, your worth, has blazed its own brave way.
Yes, I would have you know this, know how dear
My heart holds what you stand for, for I fear
You might do something that you might not do,
My dream’s embodiment, if you but knew.
2. How rarely do we recognize the value of appreciation—except when we receive it ourselves. We are startled sometimes into incredulity when we hear of a great man accepting appreciation thankfully. Mr. A. C. Benson represents Father Payne as saying: “There’s that odd story of Robert Browning, that; when he received an ovation at Oxford, and someone said to him, ‘I suppose you don’t care about all this,’ he said, ‘It is what I have waited for all my life!’ I wonder if he did say it! I think he must have done, because it is exactly the sort of thing that one is supposed not to say.” Yet in the same book Mr. Benson approves of the well-known incident in Johnson’s life which is very similar: “I remember his telling me a story of Dr. Johnson, how in the course of his last illness, when he could not open his letters, he asked Boswell to read them for him. Boswell opened a letter from some person in the North of England, of a complimentarykind, and thinking it would fatigue Dr. Johnson to have it read aloud, merely observed that it was highly in his praise. Dr. Johnson at once desired it to be read to him, and said with great earnestness ‘The applause of a single human being is of great consequence.’ Father Payne added that it was one of Johnson’s finest sayings, and had no touch of vanity or self-satisfaction in it, but the vital stuff of humanity. That I believe to be profoundly true: and that is the spirit in which I have set all this down.” [Note: A. C. Benson, Father? Payne]
To the friends, and to the friends of the friends, whose work Ruskin had occasion to praise, the lectures in Oxford on The Art of England gave the liveliest pleasure. Mr. Holman Hunt wrote to Ruskin expressing in the most generous terms the help which he had derived from the praises of his friend. The lecture on Mr. Hunt’s “Triumph of the Innocents” gave fresh confidence to the artist’s patrons, and encouraged the artist himself to persevere with the completion both of the original design and of the second version painted from it. Upon the work of Burne-Jones Ruskin did not say within the necessary limits of time all that he had hoped; but the appreciation, as it stood, even in a compressed report in the Pall Mall Gazette, greatly pleased the artist’s friends.
“A spirit moves me,” wrote Mr. Swinburne to his friend in the “palace of painting,” “to write a line to you, not of congratulation (which would be indeed an absurd impertinence), on the admirable words which I have just read in this evening’s paper’s report of Ruskin’s second Oxford lecture; but to tell you how glad I was to read them. If I may venture to say as much without presumption, I never did till now read anything in praise of your work, that seemed to me really and perfectly apt and adequate. I do envy Ruskin the authority and the eloquence which give such weight and effect to his praise. It is just what I see in a glass darkly’ that he brings out and lights up with the very best words possible; while we others (who cannot draw), like Shakespeare, have eyes for wonder but lack tongues to praise?’ [Note: E. T. Cook, The Life of Ruskin, ii. 469.]
Itis said of Edward Irving that he went about making men noble by thinking them so. Mrs. Oliphant says: “He had so much celestial light in his eyes that he unconsciously assigned to every one whom he addressed a standing ground in some degree equal to his own. He addressed ordinary individuals as if they were heroes and princes; charged a candidate for the ministry to be at once an apostle, a gentleman, and a scholar; made poor astonished women in tiny London apartments feel themselves ladies in the light of his courtesy; and unconsciously elevated every man he talked with into the ideal man he ought to have been.” [Note: J. Lewis, The Mystic Secret, 79.]
Believe in me, at once you bid
Myself believe that, since one soul has disengaged
Mine from the shows of things, so much is fact: I waged
No foolish warfare, then, with shades, myself a shade,
Here in the world—may hope my pains will be repaid! [Note: Browning, “Fifine at the Fair.”]
3. If we can show a man that we have faith in him we do more for him than incite him to do his best, and we do more than rouse in him feelings of gratitude. Such faith is often the very means of his recovery. Read the parable of the prodigal son, of the lost piece of money, of one sheep that went astray. Read Christ’s encounter with Matthew, with the rich young man, with the woman that was a sinner; do you find falling from those pure and perfect lips anything of the distrust, the scorn, the faithlessness in human nature that falls too often from our most imperfect lips? Christ’s was not that charity which thinks lightly of evil, but rather that charity which is slow to believe in it; and when He deals with men in sin—with those whose guilt was indisputably clear—this was the supreme thought that animated Him: that such an one had fallen from his real nature and could not be at peace with himself; that there must be a better soul behind, where God’s long-suffering love would find a hearing yet; and that, anyhow, through whatever suffering and discipline, there was possibility that the vilest and guiltiest of those to whom He came might be won back to truth and purity and God.
Those who trust us educate us. [Note: George Eliot, Daniel Deronda.]
Scott had hardly been a week in possession of his new domains, before he made acquaintance with a character much better suited to his purpose than James Hogg ever could have been. I mean honest Thomas Purdie, his faithful servant—his affectionately devoted humble friend from this time until death parted them. Tom was first brought before him, in his capacity of Sheriff, on a charge of poaching, when the poor fellow gave such a touching account of his circumstances—a wife, and I know not how many children depending on his exertions—work scarce and grouse abundant—and all this with a mixture of odd Sly humour—that the Sheriff’s heart was moved. Tom escaped the penalty of the law—was taken into employment as shepherd, and showed such zeal, activity, and shrewdness in that capacity, that Scott never had any occasion to repent of the step he soon afterwards took, in promoting him to the position which had been originally offered to James Hogg. [Note: J. G. Lockhart, Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., ii. 192.]
There is a hero in every man, a Christ in every man. See one there. Choose your meeting-ground with your fellow-man. Do not meet him on his plain side but on his least plain most beautiful side. Worship the Christ in him. Give your vote and your allegiance and your faith to the man who has a tender heart and a hand of power, one who from the fount of love can produce the miracle of life. But what is the miracle of life? It is the interpretation of dull fact into bright sense, the transformation of barren metal into gold, the ray of sunshine through the poor window, the picking up of the despised piece of creation whether human being, animal, flower, or thing, and putting it where it gives glory to God. [Note: Stephen Graham, Priest of the Ideal, 340.]
4. No doubt there is praise and praise. And the test which will enable us to distinguish between a flatterer and an encourager, between just appreciation and excessive and hurtful praise, is not one that can easily be expressed in words. It lies partly in the character of the speaker. An honest, sincere, and hearty friend, who is simply speaking the truth in love, may generally be trusted, even though we know well enough that our friends often think too highly of us. On the other hand, there is an untoward race of people who are afflicted with a positive disease of smooth-speaking, people who seem to be always bidding for intimacy and affection—a craving which is a token of self-indulgence rather than of love. The test, however, lies partly in the hearer. There are some who can not only stand praise, but who are better for it. It braces them for fresh endeavour, and inspires them to be worthy of the good opinion with which their friends have honoured them. Others are so vain, so silly, so unused to self-examination, that praise intoxicates them. For want of independent self-examination many a pleasant character has been disfigured and destroyed in this way, through its very virtues.
J. M. Barrie has said, “The praise that comes of love does not make us vain, but humble rather.” In a magazine recently I saw a distinction drawn between what were called “plus” and “minus” people. Did you ever think that there are people whose most fitting symbol is a “minus” sign? They never add to your happiness or your hopes or your faith either in your self or anybody else. Rather they take away from these. When they leave your company, you feel that you are somehow poorer than you were in your own esteem, and in your belief in others. These are the “minus” people. But there are others, thank God, of a different sort. They never come to us but they add to our store of all the best things far beyond their thought or intention. They believe in us, and so help us to do better. They draw out the best side of us, and sometimes that side surprises even ourselves. They radiate courage and hope and faith. Their praise humbles us, yet leaves us tingling with desire to be more worthy of it. I ask you, Is it not better to be “plus” than “minus”? [Note: A. Alexander, The Glory in the Grey, 76]
Letters constantly came to him, telling him—it almost seems in exaggerated strain—how much he had done. These letters were to him like the staying up of Moses’s arms when he engaged in prayer. A friend recalls his words: “Do not be chary of appreciation. Hearts are unconsciously hungry for it. There is little danger, especially with us in this cold New England region, that appreciation shall be given too abundantly.” [Note: A. V. G. Allen, Phillips Brooks, 578.]
