| The Every Day of Life |
Chapter 1 |
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These are beautiful things. They shine like lofty peaks above life’s plains. But the ordinary attainment of the common days is a truer index of the life, a truer measure of its character and value, than are the most striking and brilliant things of its exalted moments. It requires more strength to be faithful in the ninety and nine commonplace duties, when no one is looking on, when there is no special motive to stir the soul to its best effort, than it does in the one duty, which by its unusual importance, or by its conspicuousness, arouses enthusiasm for its own doing. It is a great deal easier to be brave in one stern conflict which calls for heroism, in which large interests are involved, than to be brave in the thousand little struggles of the common days, for which it seems scarcely worth while to put on the armor. It is very much less a task to be good-natured under one great provocation, in the presence of others, than it is to keep sweet temper month after month of ordinary days, amid the frictions, strife’s, and petty annoyances and cares of home-life, or of business life.
Thus it is that one’s every-day life is a surer revealer of character than one’s public acts. There are men who are magnificent when they appear on great occasions, – wise, eloquent, masterly, – but who are almost utterly unendurable in their fretfulness, unreasonableness, irascibility, and all manner of selfish disagreeableness in the privacy of their own homes, to those whom they ought to show all of love’s gentleness and sweetness. There are women, too, who shine with wondrous brilliancy in society, sparkling in conversation, winning in manner, the center ever of admiring groups, restless in their charms, but who, in their every-day life, in the presence of only their own households, are the dullest and wearisomest of mortals. No doubt in these cases the common every-day, unflattering as it is, is a truer expression of the inner life than the hour or two of greatness or graciousness in the blaze of publicity.
On the other hand, there are men who are never heard of on the street, whose names never appear in the newspapers, who do no conspicuous things, whose lives have no glittering peaks towering high, and yet the level plain of their years is rich in its beauty and its fruitfulness of love. There are women who are the idols of no drawing-rooms, who attract no throngs of admirers about them by resistless charms, but who, in their own quiet sheltered world, do their daily tasks with faithfulness, move in ways of lowly duty and quiet cheerfulness, and pour out their heart’s pure love, like fragrance, on all about them. Who will say that the uneventful and un-praised every-day of these lowly ones is not radiant in heaven’s sight, though they
“Leave no memorial but a world made
A little better by their lives”?
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