“Spectators only on this bustling stage,
We see what vain designs mankind engage:
Vice after vice with ardour they pursue,
And one old folly brings forth twenty new....
Squirrels for nuts contend, and, wrong or right,
For the world’s empire, kings, ambitious, fight.
What odds?—to us ’tis all the selfsame thing,
A nut, a world, a squirrel, and a king.”
In other verses, and another measure, the same poet justifies his use of
the expression “whatever shadows we pursue,” by the interpolated comment,
“For our pursuits, be what they will,
Are little more than shadows still;
Too swift they fly, too swift and strong,
For man to catch or hold them long.”
Of world-wide application is what Bernardin de Saint-Pierre said of
himself, by way of private interpretation: “Toutes mes idées ne sont que
des ombres de la nature, recueillies par une autre ombre.” Goldsmith was
not altogether in sport when he made Croaker in the comedy pronounce
life to be, at the greatest and best, but a froward child, that must be
humoured and coaxed a little till it falls asleep, and then all the care
is over; while Honeywood assents—Good-natured Man that he is—with a ready
“Very true, sir; nothing can exceed the vanity of our existence, but the
folly of our pursuits.” For Goldsmith was in sad earnest when he wrote of
himself as one
“Impelled with steps unceasing to pursue
Some fleeting good that mocks me with the view
That like the circle bounding earth and skies,
Allures from far, yet, as I follow, flies.”
Shadow-hunted shadows is the very text for Mr. Carlyle. World’s memory
is very whimsical now and then, he says, in recording the forgotten
exploits of Johann, King of Bohemia, “all which have proved voiceless in
the World’s memory; while the casual Shadow of a Feather he once more has
proved vocal there.” And a whole chapter is devoted to, and entitled,
a Kaiser hunting Shadows,—Kaiser Karl with his Pragmatic Sanction to
wit, and similar projects, aims, or hobbies, more or less shadowy
and unsubstantial, all. “There was another vast Shadow, or confused
high-piled continent of shadows, to which our poor Kaiser held with his
customary tenacity. To procure adherences and assurances to this dear
Pragmatic Sanction, was even more than the shadow of the Spanish crown,”
the one grand business of his life henceforth. “Shadow of Pragmatic
Sanction, shadow of the Spanish crown,—it was such shadow-huntings of the
Kaiser in Vienna” that thwarted the Prussian Double-marriage. Another
object which Kaiser Karl pursued with some diligence, and which “likewise
proved a shadow,” was his Ostend East India Company, which gave much
disturbance to mankind. “This was the third grand shadow which the Kaiser
chased, shaking all the world, poor crank world, as he strode after it.”
Foiled in this, as in another and another chase, no wonder he grew more
and more saturnine, and “addicted to solid taciturn field-sports. His
Political ‘Perforce Hunt (_Parforce Jagd_),’ with so many two-footed
terriers, and legationary beagles, distressing all the world by their
baying and their burrowing, had proved to be of Shadows; and melted into
thin air, to a very singular degree!” Many chapters later Mr. Carlyle
recurs to his picture of the “Kaiser in his Shadow-hunt, coursing the
Pragmatic Sanction chiefly, as he has done these twenty years past”—and
so begins a chapter entitled, by a mixed metaphor, “Kaiser’s Shadow-hunt
has caught Fire”—by contact, namely, with inflammable Poland. And a
subsequent chapter details the damages the poor Kaiser had to pay for
meddling in Polish elections,—“for galloping thither in chase of
Shadows.... This may be considered as the consummation of the Kaiser’s
Shadow-hunt; or at least its igniting and exploding point.... Shadow-hunt
is now all gone to Pragmatic Sanction, as it were: that is now the one
thing left in Nature for a Kaiser; and that he will love, and chase,
as the summary of all things.” From this point we see him go steadily
down, and at a rapid rate,—getting into disastrous Turkish wars, “with
as little preparation for War or Fact as a life-long Hunt of _Shadows_
presupposes.”
Or let us take our stand, with the same philosopher, in that
_Œil-de-Bœuf_, in the Versailles Palace Gallery—through which what
figures have passed, and vanished! “Figures? Men? They are fast-fleeting
Shadows; fast chasing each other: it is not a Palace, but a Caravansera.”
Macaulay has his Sermon in a Churchyard. To that spot the homilist
invites all and sundry, and he takes his standpoint for his text. Come
to this school of his, he bids us, with the promise that there we shall
learn, “in one short hour of placid thought, a stoicism more deep, more
stern, than ever Zeno’s porch hath taught:”
“The plots and feats of those that press
To seize on titles, wealth, or power,
Shall seem to thee a game of chess,
Devised to pass a tedious hour.
What matters it to him who fights
For shows of unsubstantial good,
Whether his kings, and queens, and knights,
Be things of flesh, or things of wood?
“We check and take, exult, and fret;
Our plans extend, our passions rise,
Till in our ardour we forget
How worthless is the victor’s prize.
Soon fades the spell, soon comes the night:
Say will it not be then the same,
Whether we play the black or white,
Whether we lost or won the game?”
This may remind us of Mrs. Battle’s apology for whist, or of the
concluding sentence in a characteristic confession by Benjamin
Constant—who, by the way, had said of himself in a previous letter, _Je
passerai comme une OMBRE sur la terre entre le malheur et l’ennui_—he
records his _sentiment profond et_ (like his name) _constant_ of the
shortness of life—a sentiment, he says, so deep and so constant that
it makes the pen or the book drop from his hand whenever he takes to
study: “Nous n’avons pas plus de motifs pour acquérir de la gloire, pour
conquérir un empire ou pour faire un bon livre, que n’en avons pour
faire une promenade ou une partie de whist.” Even so utterly different
a man in creed and character as Joseph de Maistre could exclaim, “Ah!
le vilain monde! j’ai toujours dit qu’il ne pourrait aller si nous
avions le sens commun.... C’est nôtre folie qui fait tout aller.” Else
when we see—especially when death brings home to us, strikes home to
us—what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue, “en vérité chacun se
coucherait et daignerait à peine s’habiller.” _N’importe! tout marche et
c’est assez._ And readers of M. de Tocqueville’s letters will remember
how often that philosophic writer confides to his correspondents his
conviction that there is no one thing in the world capable of fixing and
satisfying him. He had attained a success unhoped for at the beginning of
his career, but was far from happy. Often, in imagination, he would fancy
himself at the summit of human greatness; and when there, the conviction
would force itself irrepressibly upon him, that the same painful
sensations would follow him to that sublime altitude.
Succeeding? What is the great use of succeeding? muses the master
showman of Vanity Fair. Failing? Where is the great harm? “Psha! These
things appear as nought, when Time passes—Time the consoler—Time the
anodyne—Time the grey calm satirist, whose sad smile seems to say, Look,
O man, at the vanity of the objects you pursue, and of yourself who
pursue them!”
“Dust are our frames; and, gilded dust, our pride
Looks only for a moment whole and sound;
Like that long-buried body of the king,
Found lying with his urns and ornaments,
Which at a touch of light, an air of heaven,
Slipt into ashes and was found no more.”
The professed cynic, remarks an essayist on the theme of Occasional
Cynicism, has reached the delightful conclusion that “the whole thing,”
by which he means life and all its interests, is a sheer mistake and
piece of confusion. And as it presents itself to the grander and loftier
type of mind, this difficulty is held by the same writer to be the
“starting-point of all systems of religion and philosophy, of which it
is the object to show either that aims exist before men’s eyes that are
solid realities worth pursuing, and not mere shadows, or else that even
shadows are better worth pursuing in some one way than in all others.”
Jeffrey’s earlier letters abound in almost cynical reflections on the
folly of ambition and the “ridiculous self-importance” implied in “heroic
toils.” The whole game of life seemed to him a little childish, “and the
puppets that strut and look lofty very nearly as ridiculous as those that
value themselves on their airs and graces—poor little bits of rattling
timber—to be jostled in a bag as soon as the curtain drops.” “God help
us! it is a foolish little thing this human life at the best; and it is
half ridiculous and half pitiful to see what importance we ascribe to it,
and to its little ornaments and distinctions,” etc. We are, as a modern
poet of name and promise puts it, for ever at hide-and-seek with our
souls:
... “Not in Hades alone
Doth Sisyphus roll, ever frustrate, the stone,
Do the Danaïds ply, ever vainly, the sieve.
Tasks as futile does earth to its denizens give.”
When we reflect on the shortness and uncertainty of life, how despicable,
exclaims David Hume, seem all our pursuits of happiness! And even if we
would extend our concern beyond our own life, he goes on to say, how
frivolous appear our most enlarged and most generous projects, when we
consider the incessant changes and revolutions of human affairs, by
which laws and learning, books and governments, are hurried away by
time, as by a rapid stream, and are lost in the immense ocean of matter.
If such a reflection certainly tends to mortify all our passions, does
it not, asks the essayist, thereby counterwork the artifice of nature,
by which we are “happily deceived into an opinion that human life is
of some importance? And may not such a reflection be employed with
success by voluptuous reasoners, in order to lead us from the paths of
action and virtue into the flowery fields of indolence and pleasure?”
The Chinese have been pointed to, by a moral philosopher, to point his
moral, which is, the desolating tendency of secularism—they having learnt
practically, as well as theoretically, to think of themselves as mere
transitory beings, who have no future life to expect, and no present
Providence to reverence or fear; and the result he takes to be, that
they are the meanest, the most deceitful, and one of the most vicious
nations in the world—a people who literally sit in darkness, and whose
lives are passed in the shadow of death. “In all the world there is no
more terrible or instructive example of the practical results of looking
upon men as mere passing shadows, who have no superior and no hereafter.”
Once succeed, this writer argues, in persuading men that they are mere
passing phenomena, possessing no more distinctive qualities than the
successive waves of the sea, and the consequence is inevitable. “They
will cease—gradually, imperceptibly, and with all sorts of moral, and
perhaps religious, reflections on their lips—to care for what is great,
permanent, and noble, and they will become, in the fullest sense of the
words, beasts that perish.”
Many men, says Archdeacon Hare, spend their lives in gazing at their
own shadows, and so dwindle away into shadows thereof. And one of his
companion guessers at truth remarks, that instead of watching the bird
as it flies above our heads, we chase his shadow along the ground; and,
finding we cannot grasp it, we conclude it to be nothing.
If a man be a reality, says John Sterling, no empty vision in the
dreaming soul of nature, but inwardly substantial and personal, that
which he most earnestly desires, which best satisfies his whole being,
must be real too. And here is a parallel passage from a later writer:
“Yes, this life is the war of the False and the True,
Yet this life is a truth, though so complex to view
That its latent veracity few of us find....
Ay, the world but a frivolous phantasm seems,
And mankind in the mass but as motes in sunbeams;
But when Fate, from the midst of this frivolous nature,
Selects for her purpose some frail human creature,
And the Angel of Sorrow, outstretching a wan
Forefinger to mark him, strikes down from the man
The false life that hid him, the man’s self appears
A solemn reality: Him the dread spheres
Of heaven and hell with their forces dispute,
And dare we be indifferent? Hence, and be mute,
Light scoffer, vain trifler! Through all thou discernest
A Greater than thou is at work, and in earnest;
And he who dares trifle with man, trifles too
With man’s awful Maker.”...
_HARAN TAKEN: TERAH LEFT._
GENESIS xi. 28.
There is a pathetic significance in what to the unobserving reader might
seem a dry record of decease, commonplace among other commonplaces,
in the fact mentioned concerning the house of Terah, the father of
Abraham,—that “Haran died before his father Terah in the land of his
nativity, in Ur of the Chaldees.”
It is, as Canon Melvill says, like an inversion of the natural order,
when we see parents performing the last office to their children: we feel
it natural that children should close the eyes, and shroud the limbs
of fathers and mothers, but unnatural that fathers and mothers should
perform these sad duties for children. “Haran should have followed Terah,
and not Terah Haran.”
A great French moralist, in his exposition of the sublime intensity of
a father’s love, goes on to say of the tie, the _lien_, which unites
devoted parent to endeared child, “Et la nature brise ce lien. Elle jette
au tombeau cette vie qui commence, et condamne le père à rester vivant.”
A tender poet of our day was writing from such an experience—not in his
case an isolated one—when bewailing the gem of his hearth, his household
pride, who, could love have saved from death, would have found a father’s
love, and a mother’s, stronger than death:
“Humbly we bow to Fate’s decree;
Yet had we hoped that Time should see
Thee mourn for us, not us for thee.”
_Les funérailles des fils_, says another French author, _sont toujours
contre la nature quand les parents y assistant_. How often Edmund
Burke harps on that tremulously vibrating string, in reference to the
master-grief which overshadowed his closing period of life! In a letter
to Dr. Lawrence, he expresses his thankfulness to God for dismissing him
“so gently from life,” and being sent, he adds, “to follow those who in
course ought to have followed me.” In his famous letter to the Duke of
Bedford, the bereaved old man utters the lament: “I live in an inverted
order. They who ought to have succeeded me have gone before me. They who
should have been to me as posterity, are in the place of ancestors.”
Shakspeare had anticipated the thought, and the expression of the
thought, when he made old Lucretius exclaim:
“If in the child the father’s image lies,
Where shall I live, now Lucrece is unlived?
Thou wast not to this end from me derived.
If children predecease progenitors,
We are their offspring, and they none of ours.”
So again he makes Capulet cry out, at the loss of his daughter Juliet, “O
thou untaught! what manners is in this, to press before thy father to a
grave!” Writing to a kinsman on the birth of a son, Burke gives utterance
to the wish, “May he live to be the staff of your age, and to close your
eyes in peace; instead of, like me, reversing the order of nature, and
having the melancholy office to close _his_.” And to his “dear little
niece,” Mary, he thus writes after the birth of her son (Thomas Haviland
Burke): “May you see your son a support to your old age; ... and at a
very long day may _he_ close _your_ eyes, not as I have done those of
your admirable cousin.” His progeny may never be his posterity, muses Sir
Thomas Browne, in his meditations on man: “he may go out of the world
less related than he came into it; and considering the frequent mortality
in friends and relations, in such a term of time, he may pass away divers
years in sorrow and black habits, and leave none to mourn for himself;
orbity may be his inheritance.”
Bitterly Mohammed bewailed the death of his four sons by Kadijah, who
died in their infancy; and especially that of one by Maria the Egyptian;
for not only was this fatal to his hopes of founding an hereditary
religious dynasty, but it affected his claims to pre-eminent favour with
God. “Al-as Ebn Wayel, who was so cruel and so daring as to insult him on
the loss of his favourite boy, ... was accursed of heaven, and a special
Sura (the 108th) was revealed to console the Prophet.” Bitterly Saint
Stephen, the first king of Hungary, bewailed the loss of his promising
son Emeric—the first of a series of shocks that hastened his own end.
Like the desolate sire in Scott’s poem who
... “beheld aghast,
With Wilfrid all his projects pass,
All turn’d and centred on his son,
On Wilfrid all—and he was gone.
‘And I am childless now,’ he said.”
Réné of Anjou, in surviving his male offspring, was the last
representative of his race. Southey observes that _Pauli in domo præter
se nemo superest_, is a reflection passing melancholy in the speech of
Paulus Æmilius; and applying it to his own emphatically good physician,
he says, that the speedy extinction of his family in his own person was
often in the Doctor’s mind, and that he would sometimes touch upon it, to
dear friends, in moods of autumnal feeling.
Michelet’s record of the death of Charles le Bel, who leaving only a
daughter, was succeeded by a cousin, closes with the reminder, “All that
fine family of princes who had sat near their father at the council of
Vienne, was extinct. In the popular belief, the curse of Boniface had
taken effect.” So with Alexander III. of Scotland, whose eldest son died
soon after his marriage, leaving no issue, and whose second son died
while a boy; other bereavements followed, and the king came to feel in
fact as the patriarch felt by anticipation, that to be bereaved of one’s
children, was bereavement indeed. King James V., in like manner the
survivor of both his sons, died a broken-hearted man.
Laelio Torelli, the Florentine statesman and man of letters, survived all
his children. Shakspeare lost his only son some twenty years before his
own decease. Vincentio Scamozzi, the architect, who died the same year as
Shakspeare, caused no little talk at the time, by the very singular will
he left, betokening a most extraordinary solicitude for the perpetuation
of his name, as he had the grief of outliving his offspring. Sir Francis
Vere’s three sons and two daughters all died before him. It was accounted
a signal calamity in the career of that true nobleman, the Duke of
Ormond, that he outlived “the noble-minded Ossory,” worthy son of such a
sire.
“The feeble wrap the athletic in his shroud; and weeping fathers build
their children’s tomb.” Young’s is that truism; and Pope’s is the cognate
query, “Say, was it virtue, more though Heaven ne’er gave, lamented
Digby, sunk thee to the grave?
“Tell me, if virtue made the son expire,
Why, full of days and honours, lives the sire?”
Passing in his Meditations from single persons to families, Marcus
Antoninus refers to that of the Pompeys, for one instance, as wholly
extinct. “This man was the last of his house,” he says, is not an
uncommon inscription upon a monument. As with Homer’s Phænops, in feeble
age, who lost his joy and hope in young Xanthus and Thoön:
“Vast was his wealth, and these the only heirs
Of all his labours, and a life of cares.
Cold death o’ertakes them in their blooming years,
And leaves the father unavailing tears.
To strangers now descends his heapy store,
The race forgotten, and the name no more.”
Who on his staff is this? we ask with Ossian; who is this whose head is
white with age, whose eyes are red with tears, who quakes at every step?
“It is thy father, O Morar!” dead and gone Morar: “the father of no
son but thee.... Weep, thou father of Morar; weep, but thy son heareth
thee not. Deep is the sleep of the dead—low their pillow of dust.” This
flies sure to the old man’s heart, says Schiller’s Illo of the elder
Piccolomini,
... “He has his whole life long
Fretted and toil’d to raise his ancient house
From a count’s title to the name of prince;
And now must seek a grave for his only son.”
Peter the Great, whether guilty or not of putting to death his elder son,
Alexis, was inconsolable for the loss of the only remaining one. It was
the fate of Queen Anne to lose, at twelve years of age, the hopeful young
prince who alone survived of all her very many children.
Samuel Richardson was the saddened survivor of all his five sons
and a daughter. The celebrated Dutch philosopher and mathematician,
’Sgravesande, who, by the way, was born within the same year with
Richardson, lost his two sons within eight days of each other, and is
honoured for the Christian resignation with which he bore the sharp
trial. Sir John Vanbrugh lost his only son at the battle of Tournay.
Bishop Warburton died not long after his only son, who was carried off
by a decline in the springtide of life. It is of a distinguished Swiss
littérateur, who died in his prime, that Sainte-Beuve somewhere says _que
sa destinée tranchée avant l’heure a pourtant été complète, si un père
octogénaire ne lui survivait_.
“I ought to have gone before him: I wonder he went so young,”
wails the aged mother in Mr. Tennyson’s poem, all whose children have
gone before her, she is so old.
The gathering sorrows which clouded the latter years of Bishop Percy,
“after a life in the main prosperous and happy,” commenced with the loss
of an only son.
Lord Kenyon died in 1802, “sorrow-stricken by the loss of his eldest son,
after having accumulated a fortune of £300,000.” Lord Stowell lost his
son, aged forty-two, about two months only before he too fell on death.
Sprengel, the very learned German physician, never recovered the stroke
of his son’s loss. Cuvier’s four children all died before him. “Write ye
this man childless:” many a man of genius has felt his heart sink and his
strength fail under that blighting sentence. In his sixty-seventh year
we find Moore writing, “The last of our five children is now gone, and
we are left desolate and alone. Not a single relative have I now left in
the world.” How Mr. Hallam was successively bereaved of sons so rich in
promise, if not in performance, is too well known.
There is a seeming affectation of literary paternity in what
Chateaubriand writes of the death of Byron,—as though it were Terah and
Haran, with a difference. “I preceded him in life; he preceded me in
death. He was summoned before his time. My number came before his, and
yet his was drawn first from the urn. It was Childe Harold who ought to
have remained.”
_THE MOTE AND THE BEAM._
ST. MATTHEW vii. 5.
As easy is it to discern the mote in a brother’s eye as to discern the
face of the sky. Hypocrite is the term by which the facile discerner in
either case is divinely stigmatised; in the one instance, because with
all his discernment he cannot read the signs of the times; in the other,
because with all his insight and microscopic nicety of perception, and
exceptionally developed faculty of vision, he yet considers not the beam
that is in his own eye.
With our Lord’s words concerning the mote and the beam, Archbishop
Trench bids us compare the Chinese proverb, “Sweep away the snow from
thine own door, and heed not the frost upon thy neighbour’s tiles.” The
Greek and Latin classics are not wanting in various readings of the same
theme. Demosthenes meant much the same thing when he said that we must
beware of austerely scrutinizing the actions of others, unless first we
are conscious of having acquitted ourselves aright: “οὐ γὰρ ἐστι πικρῶς
ἐξετάσαι τι πέπρακται τοῖς ἀλλοῖς, ἀν μὴ παῤ ὑμῶν ἀυτῶν πρῶτον ὑπάρξη τὰ
δέοντα.” “Man is blind to his own faults, but keen-sighted to perceive
those of others,” is a Latin adage: “Vitiis suis pervidendis cæcus est
homo, in alienis perspicax.” “Is it never your way to look at yourself
when you are abusing another?” is a question in Plautus: “Non soles
respicere te, cum dicas injuste alteri?” Cicero pronounces it to be of
the nature of folly to see the faults of others, and to forget one’s own:
“Proprium est stultitiæ aliorum vitia cernere, oblivisci suorum.” Horace
shrewdly submits that the man who is desirous that his friends should not
take offence at his own protuberances, will “ignore” that friend’s warts:
“Qui, ne tuberibus propriis offendat amicum,
Postulat, ignoscat verrucis illius.”
And at least as pointed and piquant is the passage beginning,
“Quum tua pervideas oculis male lippus inunctis,
Cur in amicorum vitiis tam cernis acutum,” etc.
The query Plautus puts, “How is it that no man tries to search into
himself, but each fixes his eyes on the wallet of the one who goes before
him?” is in allusion to the fable of Jupiter having loaded men with a
couple of wallets; the one, filled with our own vices, being slung at our
backs,
“Propriis repletam vitiis post tergum dedit;”
the other, heavy with our neighbour’s faults, hung in front,
“Alienis ante pectus suspendit gravem.”
To pardon those absurdities in ourselves which we cannot suffer in
others, is neither better nor worse, says Dean Swift, than to be more
willing to be fools ourselves than to have others so. The proverbs
of all nations show all nations to be alive to the ridiculous in this
respect. The kiln calls the oven, burnt house, says one. In Italy,
the pan says to the pot, Keep off, or you’ll smutch me. In Spain, the
raven bawls hoarsely to the crow, Get out, blackamoor! (_Quítate allá,
negro!_) In Germany, one ass nicknames another, Long-ears. And Dr. Trench
is rather taken with a certain originality in the Catalan version of
the proverb: “Death said to the man with his throat cut, ‘How ugly you
look!’” They should be fair, hints Juvenal, who venture to deride the
disproportioned leg or sooty hide, _Loripedem rectus derideat, Æthiopem
albus_. Yet, as the Ettrick shepherd once sang in his native Doric:—
“There’s some wi’ big scars on their face,
Point out a prin scart on a frien’;
And some, black as sweeps wi’ disgrace,
Cry out, the whole warld’s unclean.”
Molière’s Chrysale twits her sister Bélise, who is a _femme savante_,
with snapping up everybody short who makes a slip with the tongue, while
herself liable to graver censure for slips of conduct:—
“Le moindre solécisme en parlant vous irrite;
Mais vous en faites, vous, d’étranges en conduite.”
Sappho, again, in Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s portentous romance—once
the rage of readers in France, despite its plurality of volumes, as
“Clarissa” was in England, a century later—ridicules the _bizarre_
orthography of the fine-ladyism of the day, while amused at the fact
that the fine ladies in question, who perpetrated such gross errors in
writing, and who lost every particle of wit the moment they took up a
pen, would yet make game for days together of some poor foreigner who
happened to use one term for another. As if it were less a matter of
mirth or marvel for a _grande dame_, claiming to be a woman of wit, too,
and a power in society, to commit a thousand blunders in writing her
native language, than for a raw foreigner to make a few slips in speaking
it.
We every day and every hour, observes Montaigne, say things of another
that we might more properly say of ourselves, could we but revert our
observation to our own concerns as well as extend it to others. And the
old essayist has his fling at not a few authors of the day who, in this
manner, prejudiced their own cause by running headlong upon those they
attacked, and darting those shafts against their enemies that might, with
much greater propriety and effect, be hurled back at themselves.
A stanza in the most elaborate of Shakspeare’s poems that are not
plays—for are not all his plays poems?—runs into this eloquence of
remonstrant appeal:—
“Think but how vile a spectacle it were
To view thy present trespass in another.
Men’s faults do seldom to themselves appear;
Their own transgressions partially they smother:
This guilt would seem death-worthy in thy brother.
O, how are they wrapped in with infamies,
That from their own misdeeds askance their eyes!”
It is of their common friend Breuning that Beethoven writes to Ferdinand
Ries,—“He certainly possesses many admirable qualities, but he thinks
himself quite faultless, whereas the very defects that he discovers in
others are those which he possesses himself to the highest degree.” One
of the most natural and truthfully, as well as forcibly, drawn characters
in Mrs. Inchbald’s “Simple Story,”—Sandford,—a man of understanding, of
learning, and a complete casuist, yet all whose faults were committed for
the want of knowing better, is described as constantly reproving faults
in others, and most assuredly too good a man not to have corrected and
amended his own, had they been known to him; but known to him they were
not. He had been, we are told, for so long a time the spiritual superior
or preceptor of all with whom he lived, and so busied with instructing
others, that he had not once recollected that he needed instruction
himself; and in such awe did his habitual severity keep all about him,
that although he had numerous friends, not one of them told him of his
failing. “Was there not then some reason for him to suppose he _had_ no
faults? His enemies, indeed, hinted that he had; but enemies he never
hearkened to; and thus, with all his good sense, he wanted the sense to
follow the rule, ‘Believe what your enemies say of you rather than what
is said by your friends.’” He had yet to learn, and to learn by heart,
the wide and practical import of the prayer—
“Teach me to love and to forgive,
Exact my own defects to scan,
What others are to feel, and know myself a Man.”
Well may the demoniac guide of Don Cleofas, in Le Sage’s symbolical
fiction, say, and well does he say, “J’admire messieurs les hommes; leurs
propres défauts leur paraissent des minuties, au lieu qu’ils regardent
ceux d’autrui avec un microscope.” To their own faults more than a little
blind, to those of others they are not a little unkind.
Gay begins his fable of the Turkey and the Ant with the smoothly-turned
truism, that
“In other men we faults can spy,
And blame the mote that dims their eye;
Each little speck and error find;
To our own stronger errors blind.”
One of the most classical masters of modern English, whether in verse
or prose, was employing the same metre—of fatal facility, as it is
called—when he closed his address to a brother bard in a strain that must
also close this chapter of instances:
“We, who surround a common table,
And imitate the fashionable,
Wear each two eye-glasses: _this_ lens
Shows us our faults, _that_ other men’s.
We do not care how dim may be
_This_ by whose aid our own we see;
But, ever anxiously alert
That all may have their whole desert,
We would melt down the stars and sun
In our heart’s furnace, to make one
Through which th’ enlightened world might spy
A mote upon a brother’s eye.”
_STRANGERS AND PILGRIMS._