Library Notes Part 1

Library Notes.

by A. P. Russell.

I.

INSUFFICIENCY.

It was well said by some one that "in every object there is an inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing." "Each one sees what he carries in his heart," said Goethe. "You will find poetry nowhere," said Joubert, "unless you bring some with you." "Those who would see or feel the truth of the anatomy in the marble must bring their knowledge with them." "Don't you think that statue indecent?" said Boswell to Johnson. "No, sir," was the reply, "but your remark is." Once, we are told by Hazlitt, when a pedantic c.o.xcomb was crying up Raphael to the skies, Northcote could not help saying, "If there was nothing in Raphael but what you can see in him, we should not now have been talking of him." Douglas Jerrold, it is said, disliked the theatre behind the scenes, and seldom went there save to witness a rehearsal. He would generally attend on the first night of the performance of his piece, but he seldom saw the same piece twice. His idea, as realized, generally disgusted him. He saw it with all the delicate touches rubbed away,--a shadow, or a vulgar caricature. His quarrels with actors were incessant, because they would take their idea and not his idea of a part. La Rochefoucauld, in his Maxims, gives us a picture, not of human nature, but of its selfishness. "He works," said Sterling, "like a painter who paints the profile, and chooses the side of the face in which the eye is blind and deformed, instead of the other, which is unblemished. Yet the picture may be a most accurate copy." So do we all. Those of us that see at all see but a small part of anything at a time. Only a line upon the column is distinctly visible; all the rest is hidden, or obscured in the glaring light or eclipsing shadow. A man, especially, must be looked at all around, within, by a fair light, and with a good eye, to be seen truly or judged justly. We put a narrow and fine sight upon him naturally, and can hardly avoid estimating him meanly. We have too much the habit of Fuseli, who preferred beginning his sketch of the human figure at the lowest point, and working from the foot upward. "The wisest amongst us," said the artist and critic, Richardson, "is a fool in some things, as the lowest amongst men has some just notions, and therein is as wise as Socrates; so that every man resembles a statue made to stand against a wall or in a niche; on one side it is a Plato, an Apollo, a Demosthenes; on the other, it is a rough, unformed piece of stone." "Both," said Dr. Johnson of the remarks of Lord Orrery and Delany on Swift, "were right,--only Delany had seen most of the good side, Lord Orrery most of the bad."

There is a curious life of Tiberius, with two t.i.tle-pages, both taken from historical authorities; two characters--one detestable, the other admirable--of one and the same person; made up, both, of recorded facts.

"We ought not," said La Bruyere, "to judge of men as of a picture or statue, at the first sight; there is a mind and heart to be searched; the veil of modesty covers merit, and the mask of hypocrisy disguises malignity. There are but few judges that have knowledge to discern aright to pa.s.s sentence; 'tis but by little and little, and perhaps even by time and occasion, that complete virtue or perfect vice come at last to show themselves." "A man," said Emerson, "is like a bit of Labrador spar, which has no l.u.s.tre as you turn it in your hand, until you come to a particular angle; then it shows deep and beautiful colors." What you think of him depends so much on how you look at him. As a creature of small ways and little achievements, he seems fit only for "stopping a bung-hole;" as an embodiment of every manly trait and of every Christian virtue, he appears indeed "a n.o.ble animal, splendid in ashes, and pompous in the grave." The petty tyrant of a family, he satirizes Caesar; the canting bigot of the church, he brings reproach upon religion. Now a gentleman, he makes you think of Sidney; now a beast, of Swift's revolting Yahoo. When truly humble and consciously ignorant, he hath the aspect of a child of G.o.d; when conceited, dogmatic, aggressive, all the forgotten orthodox teachings of the fate of the hopeless come back to you with the force of apostolic thunder. As the splendid immortal he is destined to be, you hasten to apotheosize him; as the monster he sometimes appears, you wonder that he exists. Burns, who was a master in human nature, characterized woman as "great for good, or great for evil; when not an angel, she's a devil." "There is something still more to be dreaded than a Jesuit," said Eugene Sue, "and that is a Jesuitess." It seems to be nearly impossible to be moderate. If we are calm or deliberate enough to be just, we are almost sure to be indifferent. Our ignorance, our education, our interests, our prejudices, blind our eyes, darken our minds, or drive us to violence. There is nothing half and half about us. The little that we see, we see so differently and so partially, and ignorance finds its complement in feeling. Dryden said of some of the judges of his day, that, right or wrong, they always decided for the poor against the rich; and he quoted a saying of Charles II., that the crown was uniformly worsted in every case which was heard before Sir Matthew Hale. "The eyes of critics," said Landor, "whether in commending or carping, are both on one side, like a turbot's."

"Truth, as Humanity knows it," said Bulwer, "is not what the schoolmen call it, one and indivisible; it is like light, and splits not only into elementary colors, but into innumerable tints. Truth with Raphael is not the same as truth with t.i.tian; truth with Shakespeare is not the same as truth with Milton; truth with St. Xavier is not the same as truth with Luther; truth with Pitt is not the same as truth with Fox. Each man takes from life his favorite truth, as each man takes from light his favorite color."

Perhaps that which astonishes us most, when we fairly open our eyes upon the world, is the diversity in everything. Out in the forest, under the spreading tree, looking up at the luxuriant foliage, you may not think of the difference between the leaves; but pull down a limb, and spend an hour comparing them; you find, much as they resemble, that no two are precisely alike. Examine the plumage of the owl that you cruelly brought down with your rifle; every feather of his beautiful dress differs from every other; and, what is more remarkable, every fibre of every feather is another feather, still more delicate, differing from every other, all of which together yield to the pressure of your hand like floss silk. No wonder he fell upon the mischievous mole or mouse as noiselessly as the shadow of a cloud. Go down to the sea-sh.o.r.e; the tide is out; there is an apparent waste of white sand, a dull extent of uniformity; but stretch yourself on the beach, which the innumerable differing waves have beaten to incomparable smoothness, and examine leisurely, with a good gla.s.s, a few hundred of the infinite grains which you thought to be the same, and you discover that they differ, that each is differently shaped, each holds the light differently, and, what is more wonderful than all, each appears to be a sh.e.l.l, or part of a sh.e.l.l, which was once the abode of a creature, and a different creature from every other inhabiting or that ever inhabited any other sh.e.l.l of the ocean. Look into the crowded street; the men are all men; they all walk upright; they might wear each other's clothes without serious inconvenience; but could they exchange souls? "Clothe me as you will," said Sancho, "I shall still be Sancho Panza." "The soul is not twin-born, but the only begotten." "And there never was in the world," said Montaigne, "two opinions alike, no more than two hairs or two grains. The most universal quality is diversity."

"The nerve-tissue," said an acute physiologist, "is never precisely the same in two men; the blood of no two men is precisely alike; the milk of no two women is identical in composition--they all vary (within certain limits), and sometimes the variation is considerable. It is in this that depends what we call the difference of 'temperament,' which makes one twin so unlike his brother, and makes the great variety of the human race." "Give Professor Owen part of an old bone or a tooth, and he will on the instant draw you the whole animal, and tell you its habits and propensities. What professor has ever yet been able to cla.s.sify the wondrous variety of human character? How very limited as yet the nomenclature! We know there are in our moral dictionary the religious, the irreligious, the virtuous, the vicious, the prudent, the profligate, the liberal, the avaricious, and so on to a few names, but the comprehended varieties under these terms--their mixtures, which, like colors, have no names--their strange complexities and intertwining of virtues and vices, graces and deformities, diversified and mingled, and making individualities--yet of all the myriads of mankind that ever were, not one the same, and scarcely alike; how little way has science gone to their discovery, and to mark their delineation! A few sounds, designated by a few letters, speak all thought, all literature, that ever was or will be. The variety is infinite, and ever creating a new infinite; and there is some such mystery in the endless variety of human character."

Cicero gives an account of a man who could distinguish marks of difference amongst eggs so well, that he never mistook one for another; and, having many hens, could tell which laid a particular egg.

Socrates asked Menon what virtue was? "There is," said Menon, "the virtue of a man and of a woman, of a magistrate and of a private person, of an old man and of a child." "Very well," said Socrates, "we were in quest of virtue, and thou hast brought us a whole swarm."

"What," asks the great French essayist, "have our legislators got by culling out a hundred thousand particular cases, and annexing to these a hundred thousand laws? The number holds no manner of proportion with the infinite diversity of human actions; the multiplication of our inventions will never arrive at the variety of examples; add to them a hundred times as many more; it will not, nevertheless, ever happen, that, of events to come, there shall any one fall out that, in this great number of thousands of events so chosen and recorded, shall find any one to which it can be so exactly coupled and compared, that there will not remain some circ.u.mstance and diversity which will require a variety of judgment."

"Some ask," says La Bruyere, "why mankind in general don't compose but one nation, and are not contented to speak one language, to live under the same laws, to agree amongst themselves in the same customs and wors.h.i.+p: for my part, seeing the contrariety of their inclinations, tastes, and sentiments, I wonder to see seven or eight persons live under the same roof, within the same walls, and make a single family."

Molecular philosophy shows inters.p.a.ces betwixt atom and atom, differing atoms, which can hardly be said to touch; so bodies are formed, and so society and public opinion are compounded. "The single individual is to collective humanity," says Alger, "as the little column of mercury in the barometer is to the whole atmosphere. They balance each other, although infinitely incommensurate. A quicksilver sea, two and a half feet deep, covering the globe, would weigh five thousand million tons.

That is the heft of the air,--that transparent robe of blue gauze which outsags the Andes and the Alps. Its pressure is unfelt, yet if that pressure were annulled all the water on the earth would immediately fly into vapor. Public opinion is the atmosphere of society, without which the forces of the individual would collapse and all the inst.i.tutions of society fly into atoms." Common sense has been defined to be the "average intellect and conscience of the civilized world,--that portion of intelligence, morality, and Christianity, which has been practically embodied in life and active power. It destroys pretense and quackery, and tests genius and heroism. It changes with the progress of society; persecutes in one age what it adopts in the next; its martyrs of the sixteenth century are its precedents and exponents of the nineteenth; and a good part of the common sense of an elder day is the common nonsense of our own."

"The history of human opinions," said Voltaire, "is scarcely anything more than the history of human errors."

John Foster, in one of his thoughtful essays, has this suggestive pa.s.sage: "If a reflective, aged man were to find at the bottom of an old chest--where it had lain forgotten fifty years--a record which he had written of himself when he was young, simply and vividly describing his whole heart and pursuits, and reciting verbatim many pa.s.sages of the language which he sincerely uttered, would he not read it with more wonder than almost every other writing could at his age inspire? He would half lose the a.s.surance of his ident.i.ty, under the impression of this immense dissimilarity. It would seem as if it must be the tale of the juvenile days of some ancestor, with whom he had no connection but that of name." Said Swift, "If a man would register all his opinions upon love, politics, religion, learning, etc., beginning from his youth, and so go on to old age, what a bundle of inconsistencies and contradictions would appear at last." Says Montaigne, "Never did two men make the same judgment of the same thing; and 'tis impossible to find two opinions exactly alike, not only in several men, but in the same men, at different times." Says Pope, "What is every year of a wise man's life but a censure or critique on the past? Those whose date is the shortest live long enough to laugh at one half of it; the boy despises the infant; the man, the boy; the philosopher, both; and the Christian, all." Diet, health, the weather, affairs,--a thousand things,--determine our views. "I knew a witty physician," says Emerson, "who found the creed in the biliary duct, and used to affirm that if there was disease in the liver, the man became a Calvinist, and if that organ was sound, he became a Unitarian." Voltaire declared that the fate of a nation had often depended on the good or bad digestion of a prime minister; and Motley holds that the gout of Charles V. changed the destinies of the world. Our views change so often that the writer who would be consistent would never write at all. The sentence that would express his thought at one time would fail at another. Alteration would only confuse. An attempt to find words to express his thoughts upon any one thing at all times would be given up in despair. Voltaire once praised another writer very heartily to a third person. "It is very strange," was the reply, "that you speak so well of him, for he says you are a charlatan." "Oh,"

replied Voltaire, "I think it very likely that both of us are mistaken."

A day or two after the production of one of Sheridan's comedies, a friend met the author, and told him he had seen c.u.mberland at the theatre on its representation. "Ah, well," replied Sheridan, "What did he say to it?" "He wasn't seen to smile from the beginning to the end of the comedy," said the friend. "Come, now, that's very ungrateful of him," retorted Sheridan, "for I went to see his tragedy the other evening, and laughed through the whole of it." Smith gives an account of a lady in weeds for her husband who came drooping like a willow to Nollekens, the sculptor, desiring a monument, and declaring that she did not care what money was expended on the memory of one she loved so. "Do what you please, but, oh, do it quickly!" were her parting orders.

Nollekens went to work, made the design, finished the model, and began to look for a block of marble to carve it from, when in dropped the lady; she had been absent some three months. "Poor soul," said the sculptor, when she was announced, "I thought she would come soon, but I am ready." The lady came light of foot, and lighter of look. "Ah, how do you do, Mr. Nollekens? Well, you have not commenced the model?" "Ay, but I have, though," returned the sculptor, "and there it stands, finished!"

"There it is, indeed," sighed the lady, throwing herself into a chair; they looked at each other for a minute's s.p.a.ce or so--she spoke first; "These, my good friend, are, I know, early days for this little change,"--she looked at her dress, from which the early profusion of c.r.a.pe had disappeared,--"but since I saw you, I have met with an old Roman acquaintance of yours who has made me an offer, and I don't know how he would like to see in our church a monument of such expense to my late husband. Indeed, on second thought, it would be considered quite enough if I got our mason to put up a mural tablet, and that, you know, he can cut very prettily." "My charge, madam, for the model," said the sculptor, "is one hundred guineas." "Enormous! enormous!" said the lady, but drew out her purse, and paid it. The mutability of human nature! Change, change is the rule. Flaxman, when he was in Rome, lived at a sort of chocolate house kept by three girls who were so elegant as to be called "the Graces." They lived to be so old that they were called "the Furies." A distinguished painter has said, that often while you are looking at a face, and though you perceive no difference in the features, yet you find they have undergone a total alteration of expression. "I have seen several pictures of Garrick," said Macaulay, "none resembling another, and I have heard Hannah More speak of the extraordinary variety of countenance by which he was distinguished." "I wish the world, James," said Christopher North to the Ettrick Shepherd, "would stand still for some dozen years--till I am at rest. It seems as if the very earth itself were undergoing a vital change. Nothing is unalterable, except the heaven above my head, and even it, James, is hardly, methinks, at times, the same as in former days or nights. There is not much difference in the clouds, James, but the blue sky, I must confess, is not quite so very blue as it was sixty years since; and the sun, although still a glorious luminary, has lost a leetle--of his l.u.s.tre." Gilbert White, in his Natural History of Selborne, says he saw a c.o.c.k-bullfinch in a cage, which had been caught in the fields after it was come to its full colors. In about a year it began to look dingy; and blackening each succeeding year, it became coal-black at the end of four. Its chief food was hemp seed. Such influence has food on the color of animals! Darwin, in his Voyage, says that the wild cattle in East Falkland Island, originally the same stock, differ much in color; and that in different parts of that one small island, different colors predominate. He remarked that the difference in the prevailing colors was so obvious, that in looking at the herds from a point near Point Pleasant, they appeared from a long distance like black spots, whilst south of Choiseul Sound they appeared like white spots on the hill-sides. Round Mount Usborne, at a height of one thousand to fifteen hundred feet above the sea, about half of some of the herds are mouse or lead colored. "From the westward till you get to the river Adur,"

observed White, "all the flocks have horns and smooth white faces, and white legs, and a hornless sheep is rarely to be seen; but as soon as you pa.s.s that river eastward, and mount Beeding Hill, all the flocks at once become hornless, or, as they call them, poll-sheep; and have, moreover, black faces, with a white tuft of wool on their foreheads, and speckled and spotted legs, so that you would think that the flocks of Laban were pasturing on one side of the stream, and the variegated breed of his son-in-law, Jacob, were cantoned along on the other." Youatt speaks of two flocks of Leicester sheep which have been purely bred from the original stock of Mr. Bakewell for more than fifty years. There is not a suspicion existing in the mind of any one at all acquainted with the subject, that the owner of either of them has deviated in any one instance from the pure blood of Mr. Bakewell's flock, and yet the difference between the sheep possessed by these two gentlemen is so great that they have the appearance of being quite different varieties.

"We may, in truth," said Voltaire, "be naturally and aptly resembled to a river, all whose waters pa.s.s away in perpetual change and flow. It is the same river as to its bed, its banks, its source, its mouth, everything, in short, that is not itself; but changing every moment its water, which const.i.tutes its very being, it has no ident.i.ty; there is no sameness belonging to the river." Said Sir Kenelm Digby, long before Voltaire, "There is not one drop of the same water in the Thames that ran down by Whitehall yesternight; yet no man will deny but that it is the same river that was in Queen Elizabeth's time, as long as it is supplied from the same common stock, the sea."

Lowell, in one of his critical essays, says that "all men are interested in Montaigne in proportion as all men find more of themselves in him; and all men see but one image in the gla.s.s which the greatest of poets holds up to nature,--an image which at once startles and charms with its familiarity." Montaigne himself says, "Nature, that we may not be dejected with the sight of our deformities, has wisely thrust the action of seeing outward." "Know thyself," that Apollo caused to be written on the front of his temple at Delphi, appeared to him contradictory. We are vain of our knowledge, vain of our virtue, vain of everything that pertains to us. Reading La Rochefoucauld's Maxims at twenty, one is a little surprised that the first and longest should be upon self-love; at forty, one is not astonished at the rank and importance it has in the philosopher's system. "In vain," says Xavier de Maistre, "are looking-gla.s.ses multiplied around us which reflect light and truth with geometrical exactness. As soon as the rays reach our vision and paint us as we are, self-love slips its deceitful prism between us and our image, and presents a divinity to us. And of all the prisms that have existed since the first that came from the hands of the immortal Newton, none has possessed so powerful a refractive force, or produced such pleasing and lively colors, as the prism of self-love. Now, seeing that ordinary looking-gla.s.ses record the truth in vain, and that they cannot make men see their own imperfections, every one being satisfied with his face, what would a moral mirror avail? Few people would look at it, and no one would recognize himself." "Oh, the incomparable contrivance of Nature,"

exclaims Erasmus, "who has ordered all things in so even a method that wherever she has been less bountiful in her gifts, there she makes it up with a larger dose of self-love, which supplies the former defects, and makes all even." "Could all mankind," says John Norris, "lay claim to that estimate which they pa.s.s upon themselves, there would be little or no difference betwixt laps'd and perfect humanity, and G.o.d might again review his image with paternal complacency, and still p.r.o.nounce it good." "Blinded as they are as to their true character by self-love, every man," says Plutarch, "is his own first and chiefest flatterer, prepared therefore to welcome the flatterer from the outside, who only comes confirming the verdict of the flatterer within." It was the habit of Sir G.o.dfrey Kneller to say to his sitter, "Praise me, sir, praise me: how can I throw any animation into your face if you don't choose to animate me?" "I have heard," says Bulwer, in one of his essays, "that when the late Mr. Kean was performing in some city of the United States, he came to the manager at the end of the third act and said, 'I can't go on the stage again, sir, if the pit keeps its hands in its pockets. Such an audience would extinguish aetna.' The audience being notified by the manager of the determination of the actor, proved hearty enough in its applause. As the favor of the audience rose, so rose the genius of the actor, and the contagion of their own applause redoubled their enjoyment of the excellence it contributed to create." "Vanity," says Pascal, "has taken so firm a hold on the heart of man, that a porter, a hodman, a turnspit, can talk greatly of himself, and is for having his admirers.

Philosophers who write of the contempt of glory do yet desire the glory of writing well; and those who read their compositions would not lose the glory of having read them. We are so presumptuous as that we desire to be known to all the world; and even to those who are not to come into the world till we have left it. And, at the same time, we are so little and vain as that the esteem of five or six persons about us is enough to content and amuse us." "We censure others," says Sir Thomas Browne, "but as they disagree from that humor which we fancy laudable in ourselves, and commend others but for that wherein they seem to quadrate and consent with us. So that in conclusion, all is but that we all condemn, self-love." We think ourselves of great importance in the eyes of others, when we are only so in our own. Calmly considering it, what can be more astonis.h.i.+ng than vanity in a middle-aged person? Know as much as it is possible for a human being to know in this world, he cannot know enough to justify him in being vain of his knowledge. Good as it is possible for a human being to be, he cannot be good enough to excuse a conceit of his goodness. Yet how common it is for full-grown ignorance to have conceit of wisdom, and for ordinary virtue to a.s.sume the airs of saints.h.i.+p. How we shall one day wonder, looking back at the world we have left, at the nearly invisible mites, like ourselves, tossing their heads in pride, and gathering their skirts in self-righteousness, that we were ever as vain and shameless as they, and that the little things of life ever so engrossed us. Alas, to learn and unlearn is our fate; to gather as we climb the hill of life, to scatter as we descend it: empty-handed alike at the end and at the beginning.

"Youth's heritage is hope, but man's Is retrospect of shattered plans, And doubtful glances cast before."

"All the world, all that we are, and all that we have, our bodies and our souls, our actions and our sufferings, our conditions at home, our accidents abroad, our many sins, and our seldom virtues," says Jeremy Taylor, "are as so many arguments to make our souls dwell low in the valleys of humility." We are not what we think ourselves, nor are other people what we think them, else this were a different world. We know not ourselves, nor others, nor anything, so well as to avoid misapprehending everything. Our condition is ignorance and humility, and better it were if we kept modestly in our paths. Whatever we do or are, we are of chief importance to ourselves. Northcote said that he often blamed himself for uttering what might be thought harsh things; and that on mentioning this once to Kemble, and saying it sometimes kept him from sleep, after he had been out in company, Kemble replied, "Oh, you need not trouble yourself so much about them; others never think of them afterward." "I see you will not believe it," said Sydney Smith, "but I was once very shy." "Were you, indeed, Mr. Smith? how did you cure yourself?" "Why, it was not very long before I made two very useful discoveries: First, that all mankind were not solely employed in observing me (a belief that all young people have); and next, that shamming was of no use; that the world was very clear-sighted, and soon estimated a man at his just value. This cured me, and I determined to be natural, and let the world find me out." "The world," says Thackeray, "can pry out everything about us which it has a mind to know. But there is this consolation, which men will never accept in their own cases, that the world doesn't care. Consider the amount of scandal it has been forced to hear in its time, and how weary it must be of that kind of intelligence. You are taken to prison and fancy yourself indelibly disgraced? You are bankrupt under odd circ.u.mstances? You drive a queer bargain with your friend and are found out, and imagine the world will punish you? Pshaw! Your shame is only vanity. Go and talk to the world as if nothing had happened, and nothing has happened. Tumble down; brush the mud off your clothes; appear with a smiling countenance, and n.o.body cares. Do you suppose society is going to take out its pocket-handkerchief and be inconsolable when you die? Why should it care, very much, then, whether your wors.h.i.+p graces yourself or disgraces yourself? Whatever happens, it talks, meets, jokes, yawns, has its dinner, pretty much as before." Depend upon it, the world will not hunt you, nor concern itself much about you. If you want its favors you must keep yourself in its eye. Cicero left Sicily extremely pleased with the success of his administration, and flattered himself that all Rome was celebrating his praises, and that the people would readily grant him everything that he desired; in which imagination he landed at Puteoli, a considerable port adjoining to Baiae, the chief seat of pleasure in Italy, where there was a perpetual resort of all the rich and the great, as well for the delights of its situation as for the use of its baths and hot waters. But here, as he himself pleasantly tells the story, he was not a little mortified by the first friend whom he met, who asked him how long he had left Rome, and what news there, when he answered that he came from the provinces. "From Africk, I suppose," says another; and upon his replying, with some indignation, "No; I come from Sicily,"

a third, who stood by, and had a mind to be thought wiser, said presently, "How? did you not know that Cicero was quaestor of Syracuse?"

Upon which, perceiving it in vain to be angry, he fell into the humor of the place, and made himself one of the company who came to the waters.

This mortification gave some little check to his ambition, or taught him rather how to apply it more successfully; and did him more good, he says, than if he had received all the compliments that he expected; for it made him reflect that the people of Rome had dull ears, but quick eyes; and that it was his business to keep himself always in their sight; nor to be so solicitous how to make them hear of him, as to make them see him: so that, from this moment, he resolved to stick close to the forum, and to live perpetually in the view of the city; nor to suffer either his porter or his sleep to hinder any man's access to him.

As capital in trade must be constantly turning to acc.u.mulate, so intelligence must be constantly in use to be useful. Its value and utility and accuracy can only be known by constantly testing it. A false light leads straight into the bog, and misinformation is worse than no information at all. Curiosity has need to be on tip-toe,--but cautious, nevertheless. Southey tells a story in his Doctor which the Jesuit Manuel de Vergara used to tell of himself. When he was a little boy he asked a Dominican friar what was the meaning of the seventh commandment, for he said he could not tell what committing adultery was. The friar, not knowing how to answer, cast a perplexed look around the room, and thinking he had found a safe reply, pointed to a kettle on the fire, and said the commandment meant that he must never put his hand in the pot while it was boiling. The very next day, a loud scream alarmed the family, and behold there was little Manuel running about the room, holding up his scalded finger, and exclaiming, "Oh dear! oh dear! I've committed adultery! I've committed adultery! I've committed adultery!"

Men are most apt to believe what they least understand. What they are most ready to talk upon, if they knew just a little more about, they would be dumb; or would at least betray in some degree what John Buncle calls "the decencies of ignorance." We are told that shortly after the shock of the famous earthquake at Talcahuano, a great wave was seen from the distance of three or four miles, approaching in the middle of the bay with a smooth outline; but along the sh.o.r.e it tore up cottages and trees, as it swept onward with irresistible force. At the head of the bay it broke in a fearful line of white breakers, which rushed up to a height of twenty-three vertical feet above the highest spring-tides. The lower orders in Talcahuano thought that the earthquake was caused by some old Indian women, witches, who, two years before, being offended, stopped the volcano of Antuco!

Bishop Latimer says that "Master More was once sent in commission into Kent, to help to try out, if it might be, what was the cause of Goodwin Sands, and the shelf that stopped up Sandwich Haven. Among others, came in before him an old man with a white head, and one that was thought to be little less than one hundred years old. Quoth Master More, How say you in this matter? What think you to be the cause of these shelves and flats that stop up Sandwich Haven? Forsooth, quoth he, I am an old man.

I think that Tenterden-steeple is the cause of Goodwin Sands; for I am an old man, sir, quoth he, and I may remember the building of Tenterden-steeple, and I may remember when there was no steeple at all there. And before that Tenterden-steeple was in building, there was no manner of speaking of any flats or sands that stopped the haven, and therefore I think that Tenterden-steeple is the cause of the destroying and decay of Sandwich Haven!" (The centenarian's reply crystallized at once into a proverb and synonym for popular ignorance; but what if the old man had in his mind the half of the story omitted by Latimer--that the obnoxious steeple had been built by a bishop with fifty thousand pounds appropriated to build a breakwater!)

The fox that Darwin tells us about in his Voyage was literally lost in the presence of wonders. "In the evening," says the naturalist, "we reached the island of San Pedro. In doubling the point, two of the officers landed, to take a round of angles with the theodolite. A fox of a kind said to be peculiar on the island, and very rare in it, was sitting on the rocks. He was so intently absorbed in watching the work of the officers, that I was able, by quietly walking up behind, to knock him on the head with my geological hammer!"

"We on this globe," said Voltaire, speaking of the slender acquaintance of Europe with the Chinese Empire, "we on this globe are like insects in a garden--those who live on an oak seldom meet those who pa.s.s their short lives on an ash." "We are poor, silly animals," says Horace Walpole; "we live for an instant upon a particle of a boundless universe, and are much like a b.u.t.terfly that should argue about the nature of the seasons, and what creates their vicissitudes, and does not exist itself to see an annual revolution of them." When Dr. Livingstone returned from Africa, after a stay of sixteen years as a missionary, he was induced to bring with him an intelligent and affectionate native, Sekwebu, who had been of great service to him. When they parted from their friends at Kilemane, the sea on the bar was frightful, even to the seamen. This was the first time Sekwebu had seen the sea. As the terrible breakers broke over them, he asked, wonderingly, "Is this the way you go? Is this the way you go?" exclaiming, "What a strange country is this--all water together!"

At sea, a person's eye being six feet above the surface of the water, his horizon is only two miles and four fifths distant; yet his tongue will as freely wag of the world as if it were all spinning under his eye. We freely discuss the ignorance of those we believe to be less intelligent than ourselves, never thinking that we are the cause of like amus.e.m.e.nt to those who are more intelligent than we are. Fewer laugh with us than at us. The grades are so many that contrast is more natural than comparison. Unfortunately, too, it is only in the descent that we can see, and that but a little way. We know it is up, up, that we would go, but the rounds of the ladder are but vaguely visible. But a small part, indeed, we perceive of the prodigious sweep from the lowest ignorance to possible intelligence. Happily, credulity fills the empty s.p.a.ces, and, setting itself up for original wisdom, satisfies us with ourselves and ours. Thackeray, in one of his best novels, thus satirically screams out one of its uses: "Oh, Mr. Pendennis! if Nature had not made that provision for each s.e.x in the credulity of the other, which sees good qualities where none exist, good looks in donkeys' ears, wit in their numskulls, and music in their bray, there would not have been near so much marrying and giving in marriage as now obtains, and as is necessary for the due propagation and continuance of the n.o.ble race to which we belong!" "I desire to die," said Horace Walpole, "when I have n.o.body left to laugh with me. I have never yet seen, or heard, anything serious that was not ridiculous.... Oh! we are ridiculous animals; and if angels have any fun in them, how we must divert them."

"I had taken, when a child," says Crabb Robinson, "a great fancy to the Book of Revelation; and I have heard that I asked our minister to preach from that book, because it was my favorite. 'And why is it your favorite, Henry?' 'Because it is so pretty and easy to understand!'"

Robert Robinson, a witty and distinguished clergyman in the last century, was addressed by a grave brother, "Friend, I never heard you preach on the Trinity." "Oh, I intend to do so," was the reply, "as soon as ever I understand it!"

This recalls the rebuke of a clergyman to a young man, who said he would believe nothing which he could not understand. "Then, young man, your creed will be the shortest of any man's I know."

John Foster's observations upon an atheist you remember,--"one of the most daring beings in the creation, a contemner of G.o.d, who explodes his laws by denying his existence. If you were so unacquainted with mankind that this character might be announced to you as a rare or singular phenomenon, your conjectures, till you saw and heard the man, at the nature and the extent of the discipline through which he must have advanced, would be led toward something extraordinary. And you might think that the term of that discipline must have been very long; since a quick train of impressions, a short series of mental gradations, within the little s.p.a.ce of a few months and years, would not seem enough to have matured such an awful heroism. Surely the creature that thus lifts his voice, and defies all invisible power within the possibilities of infinity, challenging whatever unknown being may hear him, was not as yesterday a little child, that would tremble and cry at the approach of a diminutive reptile. But indeed it is heroism no longer, if he knows there is no G.o.d. The wonder then turns on the great process by which a man could grow to the immense intelligence that can know that there is no G.o.d. What ages and what lights are requisite for this attainment!

This intelligence involves the very attributes of the Divinity, while a G.o.d is denied. For unless this man is omnipresent, unless he is at this moment in every place in the universe, he cannot know but there may be in some place manifestations of a Deity by which even he would be overpowered. If he does not know absolutely every agent in the universe, the one that he does not know may be G.o.d. If he is not in absolute possession of all the propositions that const.i.tute universal truth, the one which he wants may be, that there is a G.o.d. If he does not know everything that has been done in the immeasurable ages that are past, some things may have been done by a G.o.d. Thus, unless he knows all things, that is, precludes another Deity by being one himself, he cannot know that the Being whose existence he rejects does not exist. And yet a man of ordinary age and intelligence may present himself to you with the avowal of being thus distinguished from the crowd!"

"I had one just flogging," says Coleridge. "When I was about thirteen I went to a shoemaker and begged him to take me as his apprentice. He, being an honest man, immediately brought me to Bowyer, [the head-master at the charity-school] who got into a great rage, knocked me down, and even pushed Crispin rudely out of the room. Bowyer asked me why I had made myself such a fool? to which I answered that I had a great desire to be a shoemaker, and that I hated the thought of being a clergyman.

'Why so?' said he. 'Because, to tell you the truth, sir,' said I, 'I am an infidel!' For this, without more ado, Bowyer flogged me,--wisely, as I think,--soundly, as I know. Any whining or sermonizing would have gratified my vanity, and confirmed me in my absurdity; as it was, I was laughed at and got heartily ashamed of my folly." At a supper-table, when Cottle was present, Coleridge spoke of the unutterable horror he felt, when a son of Holcroft, (the atheist,) a boy eight years of age, came up to him and said, "There is no G.o.d."

"It is one thing to see that a line is crooked, and another thing to be able to draw a straight one," said Conversation Sharp. "It is not quite so easy to do good as those may imagine who never try." Says Montaigne, "Could my soul once take footing, I would not essay, but resolve; but it is always leaving and making trial." "'Tis an exact and exquisite life that contains itself in due order in private. Every one may take a part in the farce, and a.s.sume the part of an honest man upon the stage; but within, and in his own bosom, where all things are lawful to us, all things concealed,--to be regular, that is the point. The next degree is to be so in one's house, in one's ordinary actions, for which one is accountable to none, and where there is no study or artifice." "We chiefly, who live private lives, not exposed to any other view than our own, ought to have settled a pattern within ourselves, by which to try our actions." "Conscience," cries Sterne, "is not a law; no, G.o.d and reason made the law, and have placed conscience within you to determine."

How often our virtues and benefactions are but the effects of our vices and our crimes; and as often do our vices disguise themselves under the name of virtues. "We ought not," says Montaigne, "to honor with the name of duty that peevishness and inward discontent which spring from private interest and pa.s.sion; nor call treacherous and malicious conduct courage. People give the name of zeal to their propensity to mischief and violence, though it is not the cause, but their interest, that inflames them. Miserable kind of remedy, to owe a man's health to his disease. The virtue of the soul does not consist in flying high, but walking orderly; its grandeur does not exercise itself in grandeur, but in mediocrity." The greatest man is great in matters of self-conduct; the wisest is wise in little matters of life; the one is never little, the other never foolish.

"The superior man," says Confucius, "does not wait till he sees things, to be cautious, nor till he hears things, to be apprehensive. There is nothing more visible than what is secret, and nothing more manifest than what is minute. Therefore, the superior man will watch over himself when he is alone. He examines his heart that there may be nothing wrong there, and that he may have no cause for dissatisfaction with himself.

That wherein he excels is simply his work which other men cannot see.

Are you free from shame in your apartment, when you are exposed only to the light of heaven?"

"Most men," says Alger, "live blindly to repeat a routine of drudgery and indulgence, without any deliberately chosen and maintained aims.

Many live to outstrip their rivals, pursue their enemies, gratify their l.u.s.ts, and make a display. Few live distinctly to develop the value of their being, know the truth, love their fellows, enjoy the beauty of the world, and aspire to G.o.d."

"Life is a series of surprises," says Emerson, "and would not be worth taking or keeping if it were not. G.o.d delights to isolate us every day, and hide from us the past and the future. We would look about us, but with grand politeness He draws down before us an impenetrable screen of purest sky. 'You will not remember,' He seems to say, 'and you will not expect.'"

Goldsmith, in one of his delightful Chinese Letters, gives this ill.u.s.tration of the vanity and uncertainty of human judgment: "A painter of eminence was once resolved to finish a piece which should please the whole world. When, therefore, he had drawn a picture, in which his utmost skill was exhausted, it was exposed in the public market-place, with directions at the bottom for every spectator to mark with a brush, which lay by, every limb and feature which seemed erroneous. The spectators came, and in general applauded; but each, willing to show his talent at criticism, marked whatever he thought proper. At evening, when the painter came, he was mortified to find the whole picture one universal blot; not a single stroke that was not stigmatized with marks of disapprobation. Not satisfied with this trial, the next day he was resolved to try them in a different manner, and, exposing his picture as before, desired that every spectator would mark those beauties he approved or admired. The people complied; and the artist, returning, found his picture replete with the marks of beauty; every stroke that had been yesterday condemned now received the character of approbation."

"Experience tells us," says La Bruyere, "if there are ten persons who would blot a thought or an expression out of a book, there are a like number who would oppose it." "The most accomplished piece," he thought, "which the age has produced would fail under the hands of the critics and censurers, if the author would hearken to all their objections, and allow every one to throw out the pa.s.sage that pleased him the least."

"To hear praise and dispraise on a sermon, a piece of music, or a picture, and upon the very same subject to be entertained with quite opposite sentiments, is what makes one freely conclude we may safely publish anything, good or bad; for the good pleases some, the bad others, and the worst has its admirers."

At a club meeting in London, a nephew of Macaulay refused to rise when the national anthem was sung; but when he said that he did so from principle, he was respected in it. Others when questioned as to why they rose said, one because it was a hymn; another because of loyalty to England; another because he loved the queen; another because it was the custom; and they finally justified the refusal to rise because no two of them could agree as to why they rose.

Irving, in his Knickerbocker's New York, thus refers to the habit of criticising and complaining in the time of William the Testy: "Cobblers abandoned their stalls to give lessons on political economy; blacksmiths suffered their fires to go out while they stirred up the fires of faction; and even tailors, though said to be the ninth parts of humanity, neglected their own measures to criticise the measures of government. Strange! that the science of government, which seems to be so generally understood, should invariably be denied to the only ones called upon to exercise it. Not one of the politicians in question but, take his word for it, could have administered affairs ten times better than William the Testy."

Socrates used to say that although no man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest, yet every one thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades, that of government.