distinguished family and large property, who died at his house, not far
from Haworth, not many years ago. His great amusement and occupation had
been cock-fighting. When he was confined to his chamber with what he
knew would be his last illness, he had his cocks brought up there, and
watched the bloody battle from his bed. As his mortal disease increased
and it became impossible for him to turn so as to follow the combat, he
had looking-glasses arranged in such a manner around and above him, as
he lay, that he could still see the cocks fighting. And in this manner
he died.
"Qualities," says Helps, "are often inserted in a character in the most
curious and inharmonious way; and the end is that you have a man who is
the strangest mixture of generosity and meanness, of kindness and
severity, even of dishonesty and nobleness. Then the passions enter.
Sometimes these just fit in, unfortunately, with good points of
character,--so that one man may be ruined by a passion which another and
a worse man would have escaped unhurt from. Then there are the
circumstances to which a character is exposed, and which vary so much
that it hardly seems that people are living in the same world, so
different are to them the outward things they have to contend with.
Altogether, the human being becomes such a complicated creature, that
though at last you may know something about some one specimen,--what it
will say and what it will do on a given occasion,--you never know enough
about the creature to condemn it." "Neither the vices nor the virtues of
man," says Taine, "are his nature; to praise or to blame him is not to
know him; approbation or disapprobation does not define him; the names
of good or bad tell us nothing of what he is. Put the robber Cartouche
in an Italian court of the fifteenth century; he would be a great
statesman. Transport this nobleman, stingy and narrow-minded, into a
shop; he will be an exemplary tradesman. This public man, of inflexible
probity, is in his drawing-room an intolerable coxcomb. This father of a
family, so humane, is an idiotic politician. Change a virtue in its
circumstances, and it becomes a vice; change a vice in its
circumstances, and it becomes a virtue. Regard the same quality from
two sides; on one it is a fault, on the other a merit. The essential of
a man is found concealed far below these moral badges. A character is a
force, like gravity, weight, or steam, capable, as it may happen, of
pernicious or profitable effects, and which must be defined otherwise
than by the amount of weight it can lift or the havoc it can cause. It
is therefore to ignore man, to reduce him to an aggregate of virtues and
vices; it is to lose sight in him of all but the exterior and social
side; it is to neglect the inner and natural element."
"The character of the French nation," says De Tocqueville, "is so
peculiar that the study of human nature in general does not embrace it;
those even who have most studied it are continually taken by surprise;
for our nation is gifted beyond any other with capacity to appreciate
great things, and even to do them; it is equal to any single effort,
however extraordinary, but unable to remain strung up to a high pitch
for any length of time; because we act upon impulse, not on principle,
and our instincts are better than our moral qualities; we are the most
civilized people in the world, and yet, in certain respects, we have
retained more of the savage than any other nation; for the great
characteristic of the savage is, to be influenced by the sudden
impressions of the present, without recollection of the past or thought
of the future."
"Recollect that village of the Limousin," said a member of the National
Convention during the Reign of Terror, "from the top of whose steeple
the tri-color flag suddenly disappeared. A violent disturbance was
instantly raised; search was made for the daring offender, who could not
be found, and in consequence a dozen persons were instantly arrested on
suspicion. At length the fragments of the flag were discovered suspended
from the branches of a tree, and it was found that a magpie had made its
nest with the remains of the national color. Oh! the tyrannical bird!
they seized it, cut off its head, and transmitted the evidence of the
act to the Convention. We received it without bursting into laughter;
had any one ventured to indulge himself in that way, he would have run
the risk of perishing on the public scaffold."
"In all the courts of ancient philosophy this is to be found," says
Montaigne, "that the same lecturer there publishes the rules of
temperance, and at the same time discourses of love and wantonness." "I
know not," said the courtesan Lais, "what they talk of books, wisdom,
and philosophy; but these men knock as often at my door as any others."
Says Bayle, in his Critical Dictionary, "It was reported that Pericles
turned out his wife, and lodged with the famous Aspasia, and plunged
himself into lewdness, and spent a great part of his estate upon her.
She was a woman of so great parts that Socrates went to see her, and
carried his friends with him; and, to speak more clearly, she taught him
rhetoric and politics. That which is most strange is, that those who
frequented her carried their wives to her house, that they might hear
her discourses and lectures, though she kept several courtesans at home.
Pericles went to see Aspasia twice a day, and kissed her when he went in
and when he came out; which was before he married her. She was accused
of two crimes by the comedian Hermippus. He made himself a party against
her in due form, and accused her before the judges of impiety, and of
drawing women into her house to satisfy the lust of Pericles. During the
trial of Aspasia, Pericles used so many entreaties with the judges, and
shed so many tears, according to AEschines, that he obtained her
absolution. The Athenians said that Phidias, the most excellent sculptor
in the world, and surveyor-general of all the works which Pericles
ordered to be made for the ornament of the city, drew in the ladies
under pretense of showing them the works of the greatest masters; but in
truth to debauch and deliver them to Pericles." The golden statue of
Minerva, it should be remembered, was the workmanship of Phidias, and
his name was inscribed upon the pedestal. Through the friendship of
Pericles he had the direction of everything, and all the artists
received his orders. For this, said Plutarch, the one was envied, and
the other slandered.
"Good and bad men are each less so than they seem."
"When man's first incense rose above the plain,
Of earth's two altars, one was built by Cain."
"As there is," said Coleridge, "much beast and some devil in man, so is
there some angel and some God in man. The beast and the devil may be
conquered, but in this life never destroyed." "I have ever delighted,"
said Boswell, "in that intellectual chemistry which can separate good
qualities from evil in the same person."
"The first lesson of history," says Emerson, "is the good of evil. Good
is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better. 'Tis the oppressions of
William the Norman, savage forest-laws, and crushing despotism, that
made possible the inspirations of Magna Charta under John. Edward I.
wanted money, armies, castles, and as much as he could get. It was
necessary to call the people together by shorter, swifter ways,--and the
House of Commons arose. To obtain subsidies, he paid in privileges. In
the twenty-fourth year of his reign he decreed, 'that no tax should be
levied without consent of Lords and Commons;' which is the basis of the
English Constitution. Plutarch affirms that the cruel wars which
followed the march of Alexander, introduced the civility, language, and
arts of Greece into the savage East; introduced marriage; built seventy
cities; and united hostile nations under one government. The barbarians
who broke up the Roman empire did not arrive a day too soon. Schiller
says, the Thirty Years' War made Germany a nation. Rough, selfish
despots serve man immensely, as Henry VIII. in the contest with the
pope; as the infatuations no less than the wisdom of Cromwell; as the
ferocity of the Russian czars; as the fanaticism of the French regicides
of 1789. The frost which kills the harvest of a year, saves the harvests
of a century, by destroying the weevil or the locust. Wars, fires,
plagues, break up immovable routine, clear the ground of rotten races,
and dens of distemper, and open a fair field to new men. There is a
tendency in things to right themselves, and the war or revolution or
bankruptcy that shatters a rotten system, allows things to take a new
and natural order." "Steam was, till the other day, the devil which we
dreaded. Every pot made by any human potter or brazier had a hole in its
cover, to let off the enemy, lest he should lift pot and roof, and carry
the house away. But the Marquis of Worcester, Watt, and Fulton bethought
themselves, that, where was power, was not devil, but was God; that it
must be availed of, and not by any means let off and wasted. Could he
lift pots and roofs so handily? he was the workman they were in search
of."
It is related of Hart, a Baptist minister, that he was so good a
preacher and so bad a liver that it was said to him once, "Mr. Hart,
when I hear you in the pulpit, I wish you were never out of it; when I
see you out of it, I wish you were never in it." One Mr. Nicholls, a
Yorkshire clergyman in the days immediately succeeding the Reformation,
who was "much addicted to drinking and company-keeping," used to say to
his companions, "You must not heed me but when I am got three feet above
the earth," that was, into the pulpit. "I have heard of a witty parson,"
says Dr. Beattie, "who having been dismissed for irregularities, used
afterward, in conversation, to say, that he thanked God he was not
cashiered for ignorance and insufficiency, but only for vice and
immorality." Foster, in a note to one of his Essays, refers to a Spanish
story of a village where the devil, having made the people excessively
wicked, was punished by being compelled to assume the appearance and
habit of a friar, and to preach so eloquently, in spite of his internal
repugnance and rage, that the inhabitants were completely reformed.
Cotton Mather has preserved a choice specimen of invective against Dr.
Owen, by one of the primitive Quakers, whose name was Fisher. It was,
says Southey, a species of rhetoric in which they indulged freely, and
exceeded all other sectarians. Fisher addressed him thus: "Thou fiery
fighter and green-headed trumpeter; thou hedgehog and grinning dog; thou
bastard, that tumbled out of the mouth of the Babylonish bawd; thou
mole; thou tinker; thou lizard; thou bell of no metal, but the tone of a
kettle; thou wheelbarrow; thou whirlpool; thou whirligig; oh, thou
firebrand; thou adder and scorpion; thou louse; thou cow-dung; thou
moon-calf; thou ragged tatterdemalion; thou Judas: thou livest in
philosophy and logic, which are of the devil." Mather in turn was alike
severe upon the Quakers. He applied to them such language as "upstart
sect;" "sink of all heresies;" "the grossest collection of blasphemies
and confusions that ever was heard of;" "dangerous villains;"
"choke-weed of Christianity;" "the quaking which distinguished these
poor creatures was a symptom of diabolical possession;" "devil-driven
creatures;" "for pride, and hypocrisy, and hellish reviling against the
painful ministers of Christ, I know no people can match them." "He was a
wise and a good counsellor in Plymouth-colony, who propounded 'that a
law might be made for the Quakers to have their heads shaved.' I
confess," he said, "the punishment was in some sort capital; but it
would have been the best remedy for them; it would have both sham'd and
cur'd them." He quotes some choice language of Penn--"Thou gormandizing
Priest, one of the abominable tribe; thou bane of reason; thou pest, to
be spared of mankind; thou mountebank Priest"--and says, "these are the
very words (I wrong them not!) which they vomit out against the best men
in the English nation, that have been so hardy as to touch their 'light
within:' but let the quills of these porcupines fly as fast as they
will, I shall not feel them." The good Luther was a violent saint
sometimes. Hear him express himself on the Catholic divines: "The
papists are all asses, and will always remain asses. Put them in
whatever sauce you choose, boiled, roasted, baked, fried, skinned, beat,
hashed, they are always the same asses." Hear him salute the pope: "The
pope was born out of the devil's posteriors. He is full of devils, lies,
blasphemies, and idolatries; he is Antichrist; the robber of churches;
the ravisher of virgins; the greatest of pimps; the governor of Sodom,
etc. If the Turks lay hold of us, then we shall be in the hands of the
devil; but if we remain with the pope, we shall be in hell. What a
pleasing sight would it be to see the pope and the cardinals hanging on
one gallows, in exact order, like the seals which dangle from the bulls
of the pope! What an excellent council would they hold under the
gallows!" And hear him upon Henry VIII.: "It is hard to say if folly can
be more foolish, or stupidity more stupid, than is the head of Henry. He
has not attacked me with the heart of a king, but with the impudence of
a knave. This rotten worm of the earth, having blasphemed the majesty of
my King, I have a just right to bespatter his English majesty with his
own dirt and ordure. This Henry has lied." The good Calvin was alike
violent. He hated Catholic and Lutheran. "His adversaries are never
others than knaves, lunatics, drunkards, and assassins. Sometimes they
are characterized by the familiar appellatives of bulls, asses, cats,
and hogs." Beza, the disciple of Calvin, imitated his master. Upon a
Lutheran minister, Tilleman, he bestowed these titles of honor:
"Polyphemus; an ape; a great ass who is distinguished from other asses
by wearing a hat; an ass on two feet; a monster composed of part of an
ape and wild ass; a villain who merits hanging on the first tree we
find." As to the Catholics, there is no end to the anathemas and curses
of the Fathers.
One of the old bishops called anger "the sinews of the soul." It helped
to fortify the rugged reformer in his conflicts, and illuminated the
perilous way he trod. "We oft by lightning read in darkest nights." It
is said the finest wine is pressed from vintages which grow on fields
once inundated with lava. "I never work better," said Luther, "than when
I am inspired by anger; when I am angry I can write, pray, and preach
well; for then my whole temperament is quickened, my understanding
sharpened, and all mundane vexations and temptations depart." "No one
can suppose," said Bulwer, "that Calvin did not deem that the angels
smiled approbation when he burned Servetus. No one can suppose that when
Torquemada devised the Inquisition, he did not conscientiously believe
that the greatest happiness of the greatest number could be best secured
by selecting a few for a roast." Burke said, "a vigorous mind is as
necessarily accompanied with violent passions as a great fire with great
heat." "It is the strong passions," said Helvetius, "which, rescuing us
from sloth, can alone impart to us that continuous and earnest attention
necessary to great intellectual efforts." "No revolution (in public
sentiment), civil or religious," said Sir Gilbert Elliot, "can be
accomplished without that degree of ardor and passion which, in a later
age, will be matter of ridicule to men who do not feel the occasion, and
enter into the spirit of the times." "The man who succeeds," said a
British reviewer, "is generally the narrow man, the man of one idea, who
works at nothing but that; sees everything only through the light of
that; sacrifices everything to that; the fanatic, in short. By fanatics,
whether military, commercial, or religious, and not by 'liberal-minded
men' at all, has the world's work been done in all ages." "Our
passions," said John Norris, "were given us to perfect and accomplish
our natures, though by accidental misapplications to unworthy objects
they may turn to our degradation and dishonor. We may, indeed, be
debased as well as ennobled by them; but then the fault is not in the
large sails, but in the ill conduct of the pilot, if our vessel miss the
haven." When one commended a certain king of Sparta for a gentle, a
good, and a meek prince, his colleague said, "How can he be good who is
not an enemy even to vicious persons?" Erasmus said of Luther that there
were two natures in him: sometimes he wrote like an apostle, sometimes
like a raving ribald. "When he was angry, invectives rushed from him
like bowlder rocks down a mountain torrent in flood." "The same man,"
said Heine, of Luther, "who could scold like a fish-wife could be as
gentle as a tender maiden. At times he was as fierce as the storm that
uproots oaks; and then again he was as mild as the zephyr caressing the
violets.... The refinement of Erasmus, the mildness of Melancthon, could
never have brought us so far as the godlike brutality of Brother
Martin." But there was no trace of vanity about him. "Do not call
yourselves Lutherans," he said; "call yourselves Christians. Who and
what is Luther? Has Luther been crucified for the world?"
"The Latin tongue," says Montaigne, "is, as it were, natural to me; I
understand it better than French, but I have not used to speak it, nor
hardly to write it, these forty years; and yet, upon an extreme and
sudden emotion, which I have fallen into twice or thrice in my life, and
once on seeing my father in perfect health, fall upon me in a swoon, I
have always uttered my first outcries and ejaculations in Latin; nature
starting up and forcibly expressing itself, in spite of so long a
discontinuation." "Nature," says Bacon, "will be buried a great time,
and yet revive upon the occasion or temptation; like as it was with
AEsop's damsel, turned from a cat to a woman, who sat very demurely at
the board's end till a mouse ran before her." "A frog," said Publius
Syrus, "would leap from a throne of gold into a puddle." In Froissart's
Chronicles there is an account of a reverend monk who had been a robber
in the early part of his life, and who, when he grew old, used feelingly
to lament that he had ever changed his profession. He said "it was a
goodly sight to sally out from his castle, and to see a troop of jolly
friars coming riding that way, with their mules well laden with viands
and rich stores, to advance toward them, to attack and overthrow them,
returning to the castle with a noble booty." Layard relates an incident
of the party of Arabs which for some time had been employed to assist
him in excavating amongst the ruins of Nineveh. One evening, after their
day's work, he observed them following a flock of sheep belonging to the
people of the village, shouting their war-cry, flourishing their swords,
and indulging in the most extravagant gesticulations. He asked one of
the most active of the party to explain to him the cause of such violent
proceedings. "O Bey!" they exclaimed almost together, "God be praised,
we have eaten butter and wheaten bread under your shadow, and are
content; but an Arab is an Arab. It is not for a man to carry about dirt
in baskets, and to use a spade all his life; he should be with his sword
and his mare in the desert. We are sad as we think of the days when we
plundered the Anayza, and we must have excitement or our hearts must
break. Let us then believe that these are the sheep we have taken from
the enemy, and that we are driving them to our tents." And off they ran,
raising their wild cry, and flourishing their swords, to the no small
alarm of the shepherd, who saw his sheep scampering in all directions.
Hazlitt related an Indian legend of a Brahman, who was so devoted to
abstract meditation, that in the pursuit of philosophy he quite forgot
his moral duties, and neglected ablution. For this he was degraded from
the rank of humanity, and transformed into a monkey. But even when a
monkey he retained his original propensities, for he kept apart from
other monkeys, and had no other delight than that of eating cocoanuts
and studying metaphysics. "Perhaps few narratives in history or
mythology," says Carlyle, "are more significant than that Moslem one of
Moses and the Dwellers by the Dead Sea. A tribe of men dwelt on the
shores of that same asphaltic lake; and having forgotten, as we are all
too prone to do, the inner facts of Nature, and taken up with the
falsities and other semblances of it, were fallen into sad
conditions,--verging, indeed, toward a certain far deeper lake.
Whereupon it pleased kind Heaven to send them the prophet Moses, with an
instructive word of warning out of which might have sprung 'remedial
measures' not a few. But no: the men of the Dead Sea discovered, as the
valet species always does in heroes or prophets, no comeliness in Moses;
listened with real tedium to Moses, with light grinning, or splenetic
sniffs and sneers, affecting even to yawn; and signified, in short, that
they found him a humbug, and even a bore. Such was the candid theory
these men of the asphalt lake formed to themselves of Moses, that
probably he was a humbug, that certainly he was a bore. Moses withdrew;
but Nature and her rigorous veracities did not withdraw. The men of the
Dead Sea, when we next went to visit them, were all changed into apes,
sitting on the trees there, grinning now in the most unaffected manner;
gibbering and chattering very genuine nonsense; finding the whole
universe now a most indisputable humbug! The universe has become a
humbug to those apes who thought it one. There they sit and chatter, to
this hour: only, I believe, every Sabbath, there returns to them a
bewildered half-consciousness, half-reminiscence; and they sit with
their wizened, smoke-dried visages, and such an air of supreme
tragicality as apes may, looking out through those blinking,
smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, into the wonderfulest universal smoky
twilight and undecipherable disordered dusk of things; wholly an
uncertainty, unintelligibility, they and it, and for commentary thereon,
here and there an unmusical chatter or mew,--truest, tragicalest humbug
conceivable by the mind of man or ape! They made no use of their souls;
and so have lost them. Their worship on the Sabbath now is to roost
there, with unmusical screeches, and half-remember that they had souls."
The shark is said to have been the god the Sandwich Islanders, in their
savage state, chiefly worshiped, or sought to propitiate. In their
present semi-civilized, semi-Christianized condition, it is stated, they
pray, and sing, and moralize, in fair weather; but when they get into
trouble they are apt to call upon the shark-god of their fathers for
help or deliverance.