Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, no. 24 October 1859 | Page 3

rather that
what is beautiful is good.--Do you think that Peter and Paul were
well-dressed? I don't believe that you would have listened to them, if
they were not.
Grey. I'm not sure about St. Peter,--or whether it was necessary or
proper that he should have been well-dressed, in the general acceptation
of the term. You forget that there is a beauty of fitness. Beside, I have
listened, deferentially and with pleasure, to a fisherman in a red shirt, a

woollen hat, and with his trousers tucked into cow-hide boots; and why
should I not have listened to the great fisherman of Galilee, had it been
my happy fortune to live within sound of his voice?
Tomes. Ay, if it had been a fine voice, perhaps you might.
Grey. But as to Saint Paul I have less doubt, or none. I believe that he
appeared the gentleman of taste and culture that he was.
Tomes. When he made tents? and when he lived at the house of one
Simon, a tanner?
Grey. Why not? What had those accidents of Paul's life to do with Paul,
except as occasions which elicited the flexibility of his nature and the
extent of his capacity and culture?
Tomes. In making tents? Tent-making is an honest and a useful
handicraft; but I am puzzled to discover how it would afford
opportunity for the exhibition of the talents of such a man as Paul.
Grey. Not his peculiar talents, perhaps; though, on that point, those
who sat under the shadow of his canvas were better able to judge than
we are. For a man will make tents none the worse for being a
gentleman, a scholar, and a man of taste,--but, other things being equal,
the better. Your general intelligence and culture enter into your ability
to perform the humblest office of daily life. An educated man, who can
use his hands, will make an anthracite coal-fire better and quicker after
half a dozen trials than a raw Irish servant after a year's experience; and
many a lady charges her housemaid with stupidity and obstinacy,
because she fails again and again in the performance of some
oft-explained task which to the mistress seems "so simple," when there
is no obstinacy in the case, and only the stupidity of a poor neglected
creature who had been taught nothing till she came to this country, not
even to eat with decency, and, since she came, only to do the meanest
chores. As to living with a tanner, I am no Brahmin, and believe that a
man may not only live with a tanner, but be a tanner, and have all the
culture, if not all the learning and the talent, of Simon's guest. Thomas
Dowse pointed the way for many who will go much farther upon it than

he did.
_Tomes._ The tanners are obliged to you. But of what real use is that
process of intellectual refinement upon which you set so high a value?
How much better is discipline than culture! Of how much greater worth,
to himself and to the world, is the man who by physical and mental
training, the use of his muscles, the exercise of his faculties, the
restraint of his appetites,--even those mental appetites which you call
tastes,--has acquired vigor, endurance, self-reliance, self-control! Let a
man be pure and honorable, do to others as he would have them do to
him, and, in the words of the old Church of England Catechism, "learn
and labor truly to get his own living in that state of life to which it has
pleased God to call him," and what remains for him to do, and of time
in which to do it, is of very small importance.
_Grey._ You talk like what you are.
_Tomes._ And that is----?
_Grey._ Pardon me,--a cross between a Stoic and a Puritan:--morally, I
mean.
_Tomes._ Don't apologize. You might say many worse things of me,
and few better. But telling me what I am does not disprove what I say.
_Grey._ Do you not see? you cannot fail to see, that, after the labor of
your human animal has supplied his mere animal needs, provided him
with shelter, food, and clothes, he must set himself about something
else. Having made life endurable, he will strive to make it comfortable,
according to his notions of comfort. Comfort secured, he will seek
pleasure; and among the earliest objects of his endeavors in this
direction will be that form of pleasure which results from the
embellishment of his external life; the craving that he then supplies
being just as natural, that is, just as much an inevitable result of his
organization, as that which first claimed his thought and labor.
_Tomes._ A statement of your case entirely inconsistent with the facts
that