[1] The peasant type, greatly admired by the agricultural folk of Central Europe, is stout and ruddy. This is a better ideal of beauty than the lily-white, slender and dainty maid of the cultured, who very often can neither work nor bear and nurse children.
When we leave the physical qualities and pass to the mental we again find a lack of agreement as to the admirable. All agree that intelligence is to be admired, but how shall that intelligence be manifested? In practice, the major part of the world admires the intelligence that is financially and socially successful, and the rich and powerful have the greatest share of the world's praise. Power, strength, and superiority command admiration, even from the unwilling, and the philosopher who stands aloof from the world and is without real strength finds himself admiring a crude, bustling fellow ordering men about.
True, we admire such acknowledged great intelligences as Plato, Galileo, Newton, Pascal, Darwin, etc., but in reality only a fragment of the men and women of any country know anything at all about these men, and the admiration of most is an acceptance of the authority of others as to what it is proper to admire.
Genuine admiration is in proportion to the intelligence and idealism of the admirer. And there are in this country a thousand intense admirers of Babe Ruth and his mighty baseball club to one who pours out his soul before the image of Pasteur. You may know a man (or woman) not by his lip-homage, but by what he genuinely admires, by that which evokes his real enthusiasm and praise.
Judge by that and then note that the most constant admiration of the women of our country goes out to actresses, actors, professional beauties, with popular authors and lecturers a bad second, and that of the men is evoked by prize fighters, ball players and the rich. No wonder the problems of the world find no solution, for it is only by fits and starts that men and women admire real intelligence and real ability. The orator has more admirers than the thinker, and this is the curse of politics; the executive has more admirers than the research worker, and this is the bane of industry; the entertainer is more admired than the educator, and that is why Charlie Chaplin makes a million a year and President Eliot received only a few thousand. The race and the nation has its generous enthusiasms and its bursts of admiration for the noble, but its real admiration it gives to those whom it best understands. Fortunately the leaders of the race have more of generosity and fine admiration than have the mass they lead. Left to itself, the mass of the race limits its hero-worship to the lesser, unworthy race of heroes.
The school histories, which should emphasize the admirable as well as point out the reverse, have played a poor role in education. The hero they depict is the warrior, and they fire the hearts of the child with admiration and desire for emulation.
They say almost nothing of the great inventors, scientists and philanthropists. The teaching of history should, above all, set up heroes for the child to study, admire and emulate. "When the half-gods go the gods arrive." The stage of history as taught is cluttered with the tin-plate shedders of blood to the exclusion of the greater men.[1]
[1] Plutarch's Lives are an example of the praise and place given to the soldier and orator; and many a child, reading them, has burned to be an Alexander or a Caesar. Wells' History, with all its defects, pushes the "conquerors" to their real place as enemies of the race.
When the object that confronts us is so superior, so vast, that we sink into insignificance, then admiration takes on a tinge of fear in the state or feeling of awe. All men feel awe in the presence of strength and mystery, so that the concept of God is that most wrapped up with this emotion, and the ceremonies with which kings and institutions have been surrounded strike awe by their magnificence and mystery into the hearts of the governed.
We contemplate natural objects, such as mountains, mighty rivers and the oceans, with awe because we feel so little and puny in comparison, and we do not "enjoy" contemplating them because we hate to feel little. Or else we grow familiar with them, and the awe disappears. The popular and the familiar are never awe-full, and even death loses in dignity when one has dissected a few bodies. So objects viewed by night or in gloom inspire awe, though seen by day they are stripped of mystery and interest. To the adolescent boy, woman is a creature to be regarded with awe,--beautiful, strangely powerful and mysterious. To the grown-up man, enriched and disillusioned by a few experiences, woman, though still loved, is no longer worshiped.
Though the reverent spirit is admirable and poetic, it is not by itself socially valuable. It has been played upon by every false prophet, every enslaving institution. It prevents free inquiry; it says to science, "Do not inquire here. They who believe do not investigate. This is too holy a place for you." We who believe in science deny that anything can be so holy that it can be cheapened by light, and we believe that face to face with the essential mysteries of life itself even the most assiduous and matter-of-fact must feel awe. Man, the little, has probed into the secrets of the universe of which he is a part. What he has learned, what he can learn, make him bow his head with a reverence no worshiper of dogmatic mysteries can ever feel.
