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He never wrote of himself or his own exploits. As some one well said, he had "the impersonality of genius." But in a few remarkable passages in his private letters, we can see how the meaning of life and of that great time unrolled itself before his inner eyes. In June, 1861, he wrote: I cannot say I take any great pleasure in the contemplation of the future.
When he had reached that point in his consideration of the question, his mind, or rather perhaps, his essential self, had not unnaturally risen up and said: Which is absurd! Impersonality was in fashion, and as a rule he believed in thinking impersonally. There was a point, however, where the possibility of doing so ceased, without treachery to oneself, one's order, and the country.
Was it a bit of phosphorus, that brain whose creations are so real, that, mixing with them, we feel as if we ourselves were but fleeting magic-lantern shadows? But higher even than the genius we rate the character of this unique man, and the grand impersonality of what he wrote. What has he told us of himself?
True, he was a scientist, a clear-sighted man; he did not believe in any idyllic humanity living in a world of perpetual peace; he saw, on the contrary, its woes and its vices; he had laid them bare; he had examined them; he had catalogued them for thirty years past, but his passion for life, his admiration for the forces of life, sufficed to produce in him a perpetual gaiety, whence seemed to flow naturally his love for others, a fraternal compassion, a sympathy, which were felt under the roughness of the anatomist and under the affected impersonality of his studies.
But the moment I turned away from the imitations of human beings to look at the imitations of nature, the whole impression was changed. I was pleased with the artistic taste displayed in the perfectly imitated, delicately colored flowers. They were beautiful indeed. Why has Japanese art made so little of man as man? Is it due to the "impersonality" of the Orient, as urged by some?
He took Merton aside, in private talk.... Ally looked me over with a keen, swift glance that appraised me from head to foot instantly ... sharply but not hostilely ... as one who takes in a situation in a comprehensive instant. "Yes, Mr. Mackworth, I can do it easily ... if they'll fit him." There was an impersonality, however, about Merton's cryptic words that annoyed me.
Summing up, as it were, in propria persona the impersonality of Japanese speech, the word for "man," "hito," is identical with, and probably originally the same word as "hito," the numeral "one;" a noun and a numeral, from which Aryan languages have coined the only impersonal pronoun they possess.
Indeed she was both good-natured and kind-hearted as soon as she could allow her better impulses to have their own way; but she was a little apt, as are most people to whom life resolves itself into a narrow ministering to their personal pains and pleasures, to look upon untoward occurrences as evidence of the causeless animosity of some vague impersonality, continually on the watch to adjust the largest events of life so as to occasion her particular inconvenience.
He read listlessly on, going over the belated news from his old-time home with the melancholy indifference of the alien, with the poignant impersonality of the exile. He read of fires and crimes and calamities, of investigations and elections. He read of a rumored Police Department shake up, and he could afford to smile at the vitality of that hellbender-like report.
Realize once the true soul behind it, devoid of attributes, therefore without this capacity for suffering, an indivisible part of the great impersonal soul of nature: then, and then only, will you have found happiness in the blissful quiescence of Nirvana. With a certain poetic fitness, misery and impersonality were both present in the occasion that gave the belief birth.
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