(_Translation_.)—Fortune is for the most part but a galaxy or milky
way, as it were, of certain obscure virtues without a name.
“DOES Fortune favour fools? Or how do you explain the origin of the
proverb, which, differently worded, is to be found in all the languages
of Europe?”
This proverb admits of various explanations, according to the mood of
mind in which it is used. It may arise from pity, and the soothing
persuasion that Providence is eminently watchful over the helpless, and
extends an especial care to those who are not capable of caring for
themselves. So used, it breathes the same feeling as “God tempers the
wind to the shorn lamb”—or the more sportive adage, that “the fairies
take care of children and tipsy folk.” The persuasion itself, in
addition to the general religious feeling of mankind, and the scarcely
less general love of the marvellous, may be accounted for from our
tendency to exaggerate all effects that seem disproportionate to their
visible cause, and all circumstances that are in any way strongly
contrasted with our notions of the persons under them. Secondly, it
arises from the safety and success which an ignorance of danger and
difficulty sometimes actually assists in procuring; inasmuch as it
precludes the despondence, which might have kept the more foresighted
from undertaking the enterprise, the depression which would retard its
progress, and those overwhelming influences of terror in cases where the
vivid perception of the danger constitutes the greater part of the danger
itself. Thus men are said to have swooned and even died at the sight of
a narrow bridge, over which they had ridden, the night before, in perfect
safety; or at tracing the footmarks along the edge of a precipice which
the darkness had concealed from them. A more obscure cause, yet not
wholly to be omitted, is afforded by the undoubted fact that the exertion
of the reasoning faculties tends to extinguish or bedim those mysterious
instincts of skill, which, though for the most part latent, we
nevertheless possess in common with other animals.
Or the proverb may be used invidiously; and folly in the vocabulary of
envy or baseness may signify courage and magnanimity. Hardihood and
fool-hardiness are indeed as different as green and yellow, yet will
appear the same to the jaundiced eye. Courage multiplies the chances of
success by sometimes making opportunities, and always availing itself of
them: and in this sense Fortune may be said to favour fools by those who,
however prudent in their own opinion, are deficient in valour and
enterprise. Again: an emiently good and wise man, for whom the praises
of the judicious have procured a high reputation even with the world at
large, proposes to himself certain objects, and adapting the right means
to the right end attains them; but his objects not being what the world
calls fortune, neither money nor artificial rank, his admitted inferiors
in moral and intellectual worth, but more prosperous in their worldly
concerns, are said to have been favoured by Fortune and be slighted;
although the fools did the same in their line as the wise man in his;
they adapted the appropriate means to the desired end, and so succeeded.
In this sense the proverb is current by a misuse, or a catachresis at
least, of both the words, fortune and fools.
How seldom, friend, a good great man inherits
Honour or wealth with all his worth and pains!
It sounds like stories from the land of spirits,
If any man obtain that which he merits,
Or any merit that which he obtains.