“And how then shall we judge each other,
Who are all earth?”
Mr. Lockhart, in the closing chapter of his admirable Life of Scott,
quoting Keble’s lines,—
“Not even the tenderest heart, and next our own,
Knows half the reasons why we smile or sigh,”
declares considerations of this kind to have always induced him to regard
with small respect any attempt to delineate fully and exactly any human
being’s character. He avows his distrust of our capacity for, even in
very humble cases, judging our neighbour fairly; and cannot but pity
the presumption that must swell in the heart and brain of any ordinary
brother of the race, when daring to pronounce, _ex cathedrâ_, on the
whole structure and complexion of a great mind, from the comparatively
narrow and scanty materials which can by possibility have been placed
before him.
Men who see _into_ their neighbours, observes Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes,
are very apt to be contemptuous; but men who see _through_ them find
something lying behind every human soul which it is not for them to sit
in judgment on, or to attempt to sneer out of the order of God’s manifold
universe.
The same wise-hearted writer—wise of heart as well as head—has a dialogue
between doctor and minister concerning a quasi-reprobate, to whom the
former has been kind, and about whose destiny the other is hardly more
severe than certain. “Bad enough, no doubt,” Doctor Kittredge owns
this scampish half-breed to be; “but might be worse. Has some humanity
left in him yet. Let him go. God can judge him—I can’t.” “You are too
charitable, doctor,” objects the minister. “He has saved his neck—but
his soul is a lost one, I am afraid, beyond question.” “I can’t judge
men’s souls,” the doctor replies. “I can judge their acts, and hold them
responsible for those; but I don’t know much about their souls. If you
or I had found our soul in a half-breed body, and then been turned loose
to run among the Indians, we might have been playing just such tricks
as this fellow has been trying.” What said a greater doctor when Boswell
asked him whether, in the case of an aggressor forcing on a duel by
ill usage, and getting killed in it, there is not almost no “ground to
hope that he is gone to a state of happiness”? “Sir,” said Johnson, “we
are not to judge determinately of the state in which a man leaves this
life. He may in a moment have repented effectually.” And then Johnson
quoted, apparently with approval, at any rate with hopeful interest,
an epitaph, from Camden’s Remains, upon a very wicked man, who was
killed by a fall from his horse, in which epitaph he is supposed to say,
“Between the stirrup and the ground, I mercy asked, I mercy found.” On
another occasion Johnson appealed to Richard Baxter’s avowed belief that
a suicide—if hurried by sudden passion to self-slaughter—may be saved.
And “if,” says Baxter, “it should be objected that what I maintain may
encourage suicide, I answer, I am not to tell a lie to prevent it.” Who,
as Campbell asks, after surmising that the hand which smote its kindred
heart, might yet be prone to deeds of mercy,—
... “Who may understand
Thy many woes, poor suicide, unknown?
He who thy being gave shall judge of thee alone.”
_Qualis vita, finis ita_, is a rhyming proverb not quite worthy of all
acceptation. That Country Parson whose Recreations made him a name (such
name, at least, as four initials may comprise) declares himself to have
no look but one of sorrow and pity to cast on the poor suicide’s grave,
and thinks the common English verdict is right as well as charitable,
which supposes that in every such case reason has become unhinged, and
responsibility is gone. “No doubt it is the saddest of all sad ends; but
I do not forget that a certain Authority, the highest of all authorities,
said to all human beings, ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’ The writer
has, in the course of his duty, looked upon more than one suicide’s dead
face; and the lines of Hood appeared to sketch the fit feeling with which
to do so:—
“‘Owning her weakness,
Her evil behaviour;
And leaving, with meekness,
Her soul to her Saviour.’”
A different spirit informs the Kirk from the day when Wishart complained
that, in their arrogance, her ministers, “as if they had been privy to
the councils of God, or the dispensers of His vengeance to the world,”
presumed to pronounce upon the future state of their adversaries, and
“doomed them, both body and soul, to eternal torments.” Pity but the
poet had been better man and Christian who wrote these strong lines on
damnatory sentences _de mortuis_, even when there remains nought to show—
... “save a life misspent,—
And soul—but who shall answer where it went?
’Tis ours to bear, not judge the dead; and they
Who doom to hell, themselves are on the way,
Unless those bullies of eternal pains
Are pardoned their bad hearts for their worse brains.”
More in a reverent spirit, and in a farther-seeing one, is the mystic
finale of the Laureate’s memorable Vision of Sin, and its open verdict on
the obscure crime of a great criminal:—
“At last I heard a voice upon the slope
Cry to the summit, ‘Is there any hope?’
To which an answer pealed from that high land,
_But in a tongue no man could understand_;
And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn,
God made Himself an awful rose of dawn.”
Never let it be forgotten, insists a Quarterly Reviewer, that there is
scarcely a single moral action of a single human being of which other men
have such a knowledge—its ultimate grounds, its surrounding incidents,
and the real determining causes of its merits,—as to warrant their
pronouncing a conclusive judgment.
The writings of Mr. Arthur Helps are honourably distinguished by an
oft-recurring plea for mutual tolerance, on the ground of the little we
really know one of another. In “Companions of my Solitude,” for instance,
the author remarks that were it only considered how utterly incompetent
men are to talk of the conduct of others as they do, the talkers would
often be silenced at once, and the sufferers as readily consoled. Take
the one question merely of difference of temperament—which, amongst men,
is probably as great as that amongst the different species of animals—as
between that, for example, of the lively squirrel and the solemn crane.
“Now, if only from this difference between them, the squirrel would be a
bad judge of the felicity, or generosity, or the domestic conduct, of the
crane.
“Probably when we are thinking or talking of a person, we recall some
visual image of that person. I have thought what an instructive thing it
would be, if under some magic influence—like that, for example, which
would construct a ‘palace of truth’—it were arranged that as we gave out
our comments on the character or conduct of any person, this image on the
retina of memory should change according to the truth, or rather the want
of it, in our remarks. Gradually, feature after feature would steal away
till we gazed at nonentity, or we should find another image glide into
the field of view,—somebody we had never seen, perhaps, but to whom the
comments we were uttering really did apply.”
Accordingly, our author would have the sufferers from injurious and
unjust comment treat the whole thing as one which lacked reality.
No thoughtful man, he urges, ought to be long vexed at such stuff,
immaterial in every sense: such stuff as dreams are made of.
In one of his Dialogues, again, he makes Dunsford declare the most
curious thing, as regards people living together, to be the intense
ignorance they sometimes are in of each other. And Milverton follows up
the remark by adding, that people fulfil a relation towards each other,
and only know each other in that relation: they perform orbits round each
other, each gyrating, too, upon his own axis, so that there are parts of
the character of each which are never brought into view of the other. In
another Dialogue, Milverton refers to the habit divines have of reminding
us, that, in forming our ideas of the government of Providence, we should
recollect that we see only a fragment. The same observation, in its
degree, he holds to be true as regards human conduct. “We see a little
bit here and there, and assume the nature of the whole. Even a very silly
man’s actions are often more to the purpose than his friends’ comments on
them.”
In yet another of his works, this popular essay-writer devotes an entire
essay to the subject of our judgments of other men. Who does not feel, he
asks, that to describe with fidelity the least portion of the entangled
nature that is within him would be no easy matter? And yet the same man
who feels this, and who, perhaps, would be ashamed of talking at hazard
about the properties of a flower, of a weed, of some figure in geometry,
will put forth his guesses about the character of his brother-man, as if
he had the fullest authority for all that he was saying. It is shown in
detail how an opinion of some man’s character and conduct gets abroad
which is formed after a wrong method, by prejudiced persons, upon a
false statement of facts, respecting a matter which they cannot possibly
understand; and how this is then left to be inflated by Folly, and blown
about by Idleness.
There is among Wordsworth’s Poems on the Naming of Places, one which is
memorable if only as containing one of the most admired lines he ever
wrote, descriptive of Lady of the Mere—
“Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance,”
—but which is also pertinent to the present occasion, as pointing a
moral, after the poet’s wont to moralise his song. A man had been seen in
the distance by the poet and his friends, angling. No great harm in that,
my masters? Nay; but the angler was in peasant’s garb, and the season was
mid-harvest, and therefore, and on the spot, they voted him improvident
and reckless. But when they came up to him, these over-hasty judges
found in the man they had summarily condemned, a poor mortal wasted by
sickness, and all too weak to labour in the harvest-field, but using his
best skill to gain a pittance from the dead unfeeling lake that knew not
of his wants:—
“I will not say
What thoughts immediately were ours, nor how
The happy idleness of that sweet morn
With all its lovely images, was changed
To serious musing and to self-reproach.
Nor did we fail to see within ourselves
What need there is to be reserved in speech,
And temper all our thoughts with charity.
—Therefore, unwilling to forget that day,
My friend, myself, and she who then received
The same admonishment, have called the place
By a memorial name, uncouth indeed
As e’er by mariner was given to bay
Or foreland on a new-discovered coast;
And POINT RASH-JUDGMENT is the name it bears.”[21]
Forbear to judge: for how pitifully little is the all we really know one
of another! Mr. Froude has forcibly remarked—even admitting the remark
to be a truism—that whoever has attended but slightly to the phenomena
of human nature has discovered how inadequate is the clearest insight
which he can hope to attain into character and disposition. “Every one is
a perplexity to himself and a perplexity to his neighbours; and men who
are born in the same generation, who are exposed to the same influences,
trained by the same teachers, and live from childhood to age in constant
and familiar intercourse, are often little more than shadows to each
other, intelligible in superficial form and outline, but divided inwardly
by impalpable and mysterious barriers.” And yet how ready each “weak
unknowing hand” to hurl the bolts of Heaven against whomsoever it deems
to be Heaven’s foe.
Sir James Stephen bids all hail to Rhadamanthus on his posthumous
judgment-seat in the nether regions. But when Rhadamanthus comes
above ground, holds in his hand the historical pen, and resolves all
the enigmas of hearts which ceased to beat long centuries ago, more
confidently than most of us would dare to interpret the mysteries of
own, Sir James for one wishes him back again at the confluence of Styx,
Phlegethon, and Cocytus. For, “it is, after all, nothing more than
the surface of human character which the retrospective scrutiny of the
keenest human eye is able to detect.” It is in a subsequent portion of
the same instructive treatise, that the writer pronounces human justice
to be severe, not merely because man is censorious, but because he
reasonably distrusts himself, and fears lest his weakness should confound
the distinctions of good and evil; and Divine justice to be lenient,
because there alone love can flow in all its unfathomable depths and
boundless expansion, impeded by no dread of error, and diverted by no
misplaced sympathies.[22]
In the course of some remarks on the harshness with which man is disposed
to regard the fellow-man whose doctrine, in matters of religious faith,
differs from his own, the author of the “Caxton Essays” is impressive
on the fact that He who hath reserved to Himself the right of judging,
has imperatively said to man, whose faculty of judging must be, like
man himself, erring and human, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” Now,
argues the essayist, of all our offences, it is clear that that offence
of which man can be the least competent judge is an offence of defective
faith. “For faith belongs to our innermost hearts, and not to our overt
actions. And religious faith is therefore that express tribute to the
only Reader of all hearts, on the value of which man can never, without
arrogant presumption, set himself up as judge.”
If even-handed justice, says Mr. Anthony Trollope, were done throughout
the world, some apology would be found for most offences. Not that
the offences would thus be wiped away, and black become white; but
much that is now very black would, he submits, be reduced to that
sombre, uninviting shade of ordinary brown which is so customary to
humanity.“[23] It is much the same humane thought which underlies
Pelayo’s apology for Roderick, when we read how closely that generous
prince would and did
... “cherish in his heart the constant thought
Something was yet untold, which, being known,
Would palliate his offence, and make the fall
Of one till then so excellently good,
Less monstrous, less revolting to belief,
More to be pitied, more to be forgiven.”
As one of George Eliot’s good parsons has it, God sees us as we are
altogether, not in separate feelings or actions, as our fellow-men see
us. We are always doing each other injustice, and thinking better or
worse of each other than we deserve, he says, because we only hear and
see separate words and actions—not each other’s whole nature. Do not
philosophic doctors tell us, again, the reflective author in person
elsewhere muses, that we are unable to discern so much as a tree,
except by an unconscious cunning which combines many past and separate
sensations; that no one sense is independent of another, so that in the
dark we can hardly taste a fricassee, or tell whether our pipe is alight
or not, and the most intelligent boy, if accommodated with claws or hoofs
instead of fingers, would be likely to remain on the lowest form? If
so, it is easy to understand that our discernment of men’s motives must
depend on the completeness of the elements we can bring from our own
susceptibility and our own experience. “See to it, friend, before you
pronounce a too hasty judgment, that your own moral sensibilities are
not of a hoofed or clawed character.” For, as this penetrating writer
insists, in continuation of the metaphor, the keenest eye will not serve,
unless you have the delicate fingers, with their subtile nerve filaments,
which elude scientific lenses, and lose themselves in the invisible
world of human sensations.
Deeds which, to quote another popular though less powerful penwoman,
our acquaintance designate our follies, may at another tribunal be our
virtues—our single redeeming points; who judges rightly, who can rightly
judge, where so many of our efforts are bent to seem other than we are,
and the universal conjuring trick of this world is to throw dust expertly
in our neighbours’ eyes?
Centuries ago, well-nigh two score, it was written by the most
philosophic, and perhaps the best, of Roman emperors, that men’s actions
look worse than they are; and, says he, “one must be thoroughly informed
of a great many things before one can be rightly qualified to give
judgment in the case.” The sceptic Bayle was a better Christian than
Scaliger, when he protested against the assertion of that peremptory
scholar that Bellarmin did not believe a word of what he wrote, and
was at heart an atheist: besides the testimony of Bellarmin’s life and
deathbed to the contrary, such judgments are, said Bayle (and no friend
to the Jesuits he), a usurpation of the rights of One who alone is the
Judge of hearts, and before whom there is no dissembling.
An apostle’s reason given for the counsel, Speak not evil one of another,
brethren,—is this: that whoso speaketh evil of his brother, and judgeth
his brother, speaketh evil of the law, and judgeth the law. Now, there
is one Lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy; who art thou that
judgest another?
“Oh what are we,
Frail creatures as we are, that we should sit
In judgment man on man! and what were we,
If the All-merciful should mete to us
With the same rigorous measure wherewithal
Sinner to sinner metes!”
No observant reader of Mr. Carlyle but will have noticed, if not (which
were better) laid to heart, his habitual abstention from that dogmatism
of the judgment-seat in which smaller spirits delight. For instance, in
his moral estimate of so erring a genius as Hoffmann, if, in judging
him, Mr. Carlyle is forced to condemn him, it is with mildness, with a
desire to do justice. Let us not forget, urges the critic, that for a
mind like Hoffmann’s, the path of propriety was difficult to find—still
more difficult to keep. “Moody, sensitive, and fantastic, he wandered
through the world like a foreign presence, subject to influences of which
common natures have happily no glimpse.” A good or a wise man we must
not call him; but among the ordinary population of this world, “to note
him with the mark of reprobation were ungrateful and unjust.” So, again,
in the same author’s review of the life and writings of Werner—who,
always in some degree an enigma to himself, may well be obscure to us.
For “there are mysteries and unsounded abysses in every human heart; and
that is but a questionable philosophy which undertakes so readily to
explain them.” Religious belief especially, Mr. Carlyle urges, at least
when it seems heartfelt and well-intentioned, is no subject for harsh
or even irreverent investigation. “He is a wise man that, having such a
belief, knows and sees clearly the grounds of it in himself; and those,
we imagine, who have explored with strictest scrutiny the secret of their
own bosoms, will be least apt to rush with intolerant violence into that
of other men’s.” Still more elaborate and emphatic is the exposition
of this doctrine as applied to the case of Robert Burns. The world, it
is alleged, is habitually unjust in its judgments of such men, since
it decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes, and not positively
but negatively,—less on what is done right, than on what is or is not
done wrong. Whereas, by Mr. Carlyle’s doctrine, not the few inches of
deflection from the mathematical orbit, which are so easily measured,
but the _ratio_ of these to the whole diameter, constitutes the real
aberration. “This orbit may be a planet’s, its diameter the breadth of
the solar system; or it may be a city hippodrome; nay, the circle of
a ginhorse, its diameter a score of feet or paces. But the inches of
deflection only are measured; and it is assumed that the diameter of the
ginhorse, and that of the planet, will yield the same ratio when compared
to them!” Here, according to our author, lies the root of many a blind,
cruel condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, Rousseaus, which one never listens
to with approval. “Granted, the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and
tackle damaged; the pilot is blameworthy; he has not been all-wise and
all-powerful: but to know _how_ blameworthy, tell us first whether his
voyage has been round the globe, or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of
Dogs.”
To a very different style of sinners the same judgment—rather the same
refusal to judge—is accorded, when the doom of Chaumette, Gobel, and
other reddest of red-republican reprobates, is rehearsed, in the history
of France’s reign of terror, while the revolution was devouring so
greedily her own children. “For Anaxagoras Chaumette, the sleek head now
[April 1794] stript of its _bonnet rouge_ [and a traveller by tumbril to
Sainte Guillotine], what hope is there? Unless Death _were_ ‘an eternal
sleep’? Wretched Anaxagoras! God shall judge thee, not I.”
Once more: “Unhappy soul! who shall judge him?” is the historian’s
deprecating query in the instance of August of Poland, the physically
strong,—who dies, confessedly a _very_ great sinner, early in 1733. Who
shall judge him?
“Hereafter?—And do you think to look
On the terrible pages of that Book
To find his failings, faults, and errors?
Ah, you will then have other cares,
In your own shortcomings and despairs,
In your own secret sins and terrors!”
Corporal Trim was once moved to avow his belief—rather hotly, for his
_esprit de corps_ was piqued—that when a soldier “gets time to pray, he
prays as heartily as a parson—though not with all his fuss and hypocrisy.
Thou shouldst not have said that, Trim, said my uncle Toby—for God only
knows who is a hypocrite, and who is not. At the great and general review
of us all, Corporal, at the day of judgment (and not till then)—it will
be seen who have done their duties in this world, and who have not.”
In a like spirit, another clerical novelist, of a more recent type,
and whose distinctive evangel is Muscular Christianity, introduces a
“double-first” candidate for orders who reminds him of Mr. Bye-Ends in
Bunyan: “And yet,” comes the charitable clause conditional, “I believe
the man was really in earnest. He was really desirous to do what was
right, as far as he knew it; and all the more desirous, because he saw,
in the present state of society, what was right would pay him. God shall
judge him, not I. Who can unravel the confusion of mingled selfishness
and devotion that exist even in his own heart, much less in that of
another?”
In Mr. Thackeray’s instance, exception has been taken, on ethical
grounds, by no vulgar critic, to his habit of shrinking from moral
estimate as well as moral judgment, in dealing with his characters.
Into that distinction not without a difference, this is not the place
(nor this the pen) to enter. But the critic in question—for some years
a main support of the _National Review_—recognises this avoidance of
moral judgment as springing from kindly feeling, from the just and humble
sense we all should have that our own demerits make it unseemly for us to
ascend the judgment-chair, and from a wide appreciation of the variety
and obscurity of men’s real motives of action.[24]
_PART-KNOWLEDGE._