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"Ah, Margaret!" said her rustic companion with a sigh, which amply testified to the humility of his own self-estimate, and of the decline of his hope which came with it "ah, Margaret, if that be the rule, where are you going to find friends and intimates in Charlemont?"
"He makes friends, learns certain things, it gives him finish. We are very provincial here." Provincial! I did not stop to reflect how recently she must have acquired the word; it summed up precisely the self-estimate at which I had arrived. The sting went deep. Before I could think of an effective reply Nancy was being carried off by the young man from the East, who was clearly infatuated.
And after all, few will dare assert that "The Vanity of Human Wishes" is greater as a poem than Shelley's "Ode to the West Wind," or Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale," because no line in either of these poems is half so often quoted as "To point a moral or adorn a tale." We cannot do better than begin our consideration of Emerson's poetry with Emerson's own self-estimate.
That was just what Ray Ingraham did see; only he hardly set it down in his self-estimate at its full value. Do you perceive, story-reader, story-raveller, that Frank Sunderline was not quite in love with either of these girls? Do you see that it is not a matter of course that he should be?
Others cling to the need of their own self-approval; they are aristocrats, firm and secure in their self-estimate. Let their self-esteem crumble, and these proud and haughty ones are humble, weak, inefficient. We fiercely resent criticism because in it is a threat to our source of energy, our very feeling of being alive.
To compare him, therefore, with the modern giants of research, would be quite absurd; and the more absurd since Schiller the historian, unlike Goethe the scientist, was extremely modest in his self-estimate and fully aware of his limitations on the side of scholarship. Of the qualities that go to the making of a great historian he had two, the philosophic mind and the vivid imagination.
It was not a theory with him, but a fact that shaped his life and colored his poems. "Whoever degrades another degrades me," and the thought fired his imagination. The student of Whitman's life and works will be early struck by three things, his sudden burst into song, the maturity of his work from the first, and his self-knowledge and self-estimate.
On the other hand, feminine pride, outside of its adherence to what is chaste and womanly, consists of pride in self, a kind of self-estimate, based frequently upon social position, sometimes on a consciousness of self-importance which comes through the admiration of men. In either case the pride is likely to show itself in a jealous exaction of consideration for the individual.
The Roman Empire would still exist if it had been entirely fit. The causes of its unfitness form a long and intricate problem. Germany of to-day evidently looks upon herself as the dominant nation, the one fittest to survive, and she has committed herself to the desperate struggle of justifying her self-estimate. She tramples down weaker nations as we do the stubble of the fields.
Posterity will be puzzled what to do with busts like these, the concretions and petrifactions of a vain self-estimate; but will find, no doubt, that they serve to build into stone walls, or burn into quicklime, as well as if the marble had never been blocked into the guise of human heads. But it is an awful thing, indeed, this endless endurance, this almost indestructibility, of a marble bust!
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