Superior People | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 3, 1874

Superior People.

One word more to the teachers waiting for scholars before they and their multitudinous swarms disappear from view for another six months—don't inflict too many great men on the next generation. There is not a Bob or Joe who shoulders his school-bag this week who has not been adjured from his cradle to become a President, a missionary, or a millionaire, “a great and good man” of some sort or other. As soon as he could walk, mother and father were on the watch to discover peculiar talent in him. From the day he enters school until he leaves it, the prizes and honors are the objects at which they aim for him. That he should jog on with the hard-working rank and file of boys, who master just enough knowledge to enable them to jog on afterward with the rank and file outside, honest mechanics, tradesmen, professional men, agreeable fellows and good workers who earn their bread and butter and make no mark in the world—what father or mother imagines such a fate possible for their prodigy? Yet in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out of the thousand he does so jog on, in school and in the world, and bears the gall and bitterness of disappointments that he could not reach the unattainable mark they set before him.

It is not only the school-boy who shares in this gasping race for greatness; the American of any age scorns mediocrity, the level middle place to which he rightfully belongs. If he is in trade he must be a Fisk, if he is in politics, a Butler (for these are our gods, O Israel!). He is in reality a ward politician or a dry goods clerk; but why shall he not have immortal longings in him and be overworked and neuralgic and disagreeable in consequence, as the rest of the aspiring Smiths and Joneses who are his neighbors? His wife and children strain and work breathlessly for the cordon bleu of whatever sort it may be which bewilders their fancy; they dress and talk and actually live after the fashion of some village aristocrat who is their demigod, but whose habits fit them as badly as their old clothes would do. But worse woe befalls them if greatness has really overtaken them! Whether it be money or position or the possession of a little more culture than their neighbors, how exaggerated is the glory in their own eyes! How the sprig of broom in their caps turns into a royal crown! Or if they cannot claim pre-eminence on their own account with any hope of success, they manage to know somebody else in whose reflected light they may shine. Dutton's grandmother was a friend of Mrs. Dolly Madison's and aided that lady in her stately receptions, and little Van Nott was taken into Dickens's set in London, and has dined and wined with Thackeray. Shall they not look down affably on all ignoble humanity thereafter?

Another phase of this morbid hankering for superiority shows itself noticeable among lonely unmarried women in inland villages and country places, of finer tastes and instincts than their kinsfolk; women who invariably read The Tribune, and best magazines, and usually essay to write for them once a year. The class is larger in this than in any other country; they drag through their routine of sewing, housework, etc., with lifeless exactitude, and spend their strength and energy in studying and forming themselves. Missionary circles they regard as a snare, and canning fruits is to them but foolishness. They mold themselves on some lofty model—Eugenie de Guerin, if religion is their hobby; or if they are literary, pour over the brilliant successes of this poetess or that lecturer with bitter bewailing over their own balked chances. Now, if these and all other aspirants for eminence would but consider the hordes of commonplace people about them, what a wholesome change society would experience. The vestal virgin who sighs over the “lack of intellectuality in Smithville” will never find a Mrs. Browning or John Stuart Mill there, but the carpenter who is building her hen-roost could give her ideas about the qualities of woods, and the belts of timber through the States, that would be new to her, and the ostler in the stable belonged to a menagerie once, and knows queer traits and stories about the brute beasts more suggestive than any idea in Casa Guidi windows. With our everlasting straining after high ideas we shut our eyes to the mass of ordinary weighty facts about us, which would give breadth and foundation to our minds, just as in our groping for refinement we see nothing of the sound sense, the good feeling, the honesty of our grocer or our milkman.—N. Y. Tribune.