The Measure Of A Man

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Title:     The Measure Of A Man
Author: Richard Le Gallienne [More Titles by Le Gallienne]

I sometimes grow melancholy with the thought that, though I wear trousers and shave once a day, I am not, properly speaking, a Man. Surely it is from no failure of goodwill, no lack of prayerful striving towards that noble estate: for if there is one spectacle in this moving phantasmagoria of life that I love to carry within my eye, it is the figure of a true man. The mere idea of a true man stirs one's heart like a trumpet. Therefore, this doubt I am confiding is all the more dreary. Naturally, I feel it most keenly in the company of my fellows, each one of whom seems to carry the victorious badge of manhood, as though to cry shame upon me. They make me shrink into myself, make me feel that I am but an impostor in their midst. Indeed, in that sensitiveness of mine you have the starting-point of my unmanliness. Look at that noble fellow there. He is six-foot odd in his stockings, straight, stalwart, and confident. His face is broad and strong, his close-cropped head is firm and proud on his shoulders--firm and proud as a young bull's. It is a head made, indeed, rather to butt than to think with; it is visited with no effeminacy of thought or dream. It has another striking quality: it is hardly distinguishable from any other head in the room--for I am in an assemblage of true men all, a glorious herd of young John Bulls. All have the same strong jaws, the same powerful low foreheads. Noble fellows! Any one of them could send me to eternity with the wind of his fist.

And, most of all, is their manhood brought home to me, with a sickening sense of inferiority, in their voices. What a leonine authority in the roar of their opinions! Their words strike the air firm as the tread of lions. They are not teased with fine distinctions, possibilities of misconception, or the perils of afterthought. Their talk is of the absolute, their opinions wear the primary colours, and dream not of 'art shades.' Never have they been wrong in their lives, never shall they be wrong in the time to come. Never have they been known to conjecture that another may, after all, be wiser than they, handsomer, stronger, or more fortunate. They would kill a man rather than admit a mistake. Noble fellows! And I? Do you wonder that I blush in my corner as I gaze upon them, strive to smooth my hair into the appearance of a manly flatness, strive to set my face hard and feign it knowing, strive to elevate my voice to the dogmatic note, strive to cast out from my mind all those evil spirits of proportion?

Can it be possible that any one of my readers has ever been in a like case? Is there hope for us, my brother? You have, I perceive, a fine, expressive, sensitive countenance. That is, indeed, against you in this race for manhood. It is true that Apollo passed for a man--but that was long ago, and not in Britain. You have a pleasant, sympathetic voice. An excellent thing in _woman_. But you, my friend,--break it, I beseech you. Coarsen it with raw spirits and rawer opinions; and set that face of thine with hog's bristles, plant a shoe-brush on thy upper lip, and send thy head to the turner of billiard balls. Else come not nigh me, for, 'fore Heaven, I love a man!

Sometimes, however, I am inclined to a more comfortable consideration of this great question--for it is one of my weaknesses to be positive on few matters. But to-day I taunted my soul with its unmanliness till it rose in rebellion against me. 'Poor-spirited creature,' I said, 'where is thy valour? When a fool has struck thee I have seen thee pass on without a word, not so much as a momentary knitting of thy fist When ignorance has waxed proud, and put thee to the mock, thou hast sat meek, and uttered never a word. It must needs be thou art pigeon-livered and lack gall! There is not in thee the swagger, the rustle, the braggadocio of a true swashbuckler manhood. Out on thee!'

And my soul took the blows in patience.

'Hast thou any courage hid in any crevice of thee?' I continued my taunt. And suddenly my soul answered with a firm quiet voice: 'Try me!'

Then said I, 'Coward as thou art, fearful of thy precious skin, darest thou strike a blow for the weak against his oppressor, darest thou meet the strong tyrant in the way?'

And thereon I was startled, for my soul suddenly sprang up within me, and, lo! it neighed like a war-horse for the battle.

'Ah!' I continued, 'but couldst thou fight against the enemy of thy land? Surely thy valour would melt at the clash of swords and the voice of the drum?'

And the answer of my soul was like the march of armed men.

Then said I softly, for I was touched by this unwonted valour of my soul, 'Soul! wouldst thou die for thy friend?'

And the voice of my soul came sweet as the sound of bells at evening. It seemed, indeed, as though it could dream of naught sweeter than to die for one's friend.

This colloquy of inner and outer set me further reflecting. Can it be that this manhood is, after all, rather a quality of the spirit than of the body; that it is to be sought rather in the stout heart than in the strong arm; that big words and ready blows may, like a display of bunting, betoken no true loyalty, and be but the gaudy sign to a sorry inn? Dr. Watts, it may be remembered, declared the mind to be the standard of the man. As he was the author of a book on 'The Human Mind,' envious persons may meanly conceive that his statement was but a subtly-disguised advertisement of his literary wares.

'Were I so tall to reach the Pole,
Or grasp the ocean in my span,
I must be measured by my soul:
The mind's the standard of the man.'

The fact of Dr. Watts being also a man of low stature does not affect the truth or untruth of this fine verse, which may serve to comfort many. One may assume that it was Jack, and not the giant, whom we would need to describe as the true man of the two; and one seems to have heard of some 'fine,' 'manly' fellows, darlings of the football field and the American bar, whose actions somehow have not altogether justified those epithets, or, at any rate, certain readings of them. Theirs is a manhood, one fancies, that is given to shine more at race-meetings and in hotel parlours than at home--revealed to the barmaid, and strangely hidden from the wife, who, indeed, has less opportunities for perceiving it.

This kind of manhood is, perhaps, rather a fashion than a personal quality: a way of carrying the stick, of wearing, or not wearing, the hair; it resides in the twirl of the moustache, or the cut of the trouser; you must seek it in the quality of the boot and the shape of the hat rather than in the actions of the wearer.

Take that matter of the hair. When next the street-boy sorrowfully exclaims on your passing that 'it's no wonder the barbers all 'list for soldiers,' or some puny idiot at your club--a lilliputian model of popular 'manhood'--sniggers to his friend behind his coffee as you come in: call to mind pictures of certain brave 'tailed men' of old, at the winking of whose eyelid your tiny club 'man' would have expired on the instant. Threaten him with a Viking. Show him in a vision a band of blue-eyed pirates, with their wild hair flying in the breeze, as they sternly hasten across the Northern Sea. Summon Godiva's lord, 'his beard a yard before him, and his hair a yard behind.' Call up the brave picture of Rupert's love-locked Cavaliers, as their glittering column hurls like a bolt of heaven to the charge, or Nelson's pig-tailed sailors in Trafalgar's Bay. But, before you have gone half-way through your panorama, that club-mannikin will have hastily departed, leaving his coffee half-drunk, and you shall find him airing his manhood in the security of the billiard-room.

Yes, for us who are denied the admiration of the billiard-marker; denied the devotion of the barmaid (with charming paradox so-called); for us who make poor braggarts, and often prefer to surrender rather than to elbow for our rights; for us who deliver our opinions with mean-spirited diffidence, and are men of quiet voices and ways: for us there is hope. It may be that to love one's neighbour is also a part of manhood, to suffer quietly for another as true a piece of bravery as to fell him for a careless word; it may be that purity, constancy, and reverence are as sure criteria of manhood as their opposites. It may be, I say; but be certain that a strong beard, a harsh voice, and a bull-dog physiognomy are surer still.

[The end]
Richard Le Gallienne's essay: Measure Of A Man

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