were possible to view him through powerful glasses, what humiliating
resemblances and infirmities would be discovered. He would be found to
have innumerable tentacula and appendages, for protection and warning,
and especially to possess unconceived of apparatus for making his way in
the dark,--necessities to him, it would appear, when further inspection
of the creature had shown him to be--blind. At last, he finds himself
obliged to rely upon such qualities and faculties as take the place of
powers and eyes. Cowardly, he is gregarious, and will not live alone;
weak, he consorts with weakness, to acquire strength; ignorant, he
contributes the least bit to the common stock of intelligence, and
escapes responsibility. One of many, he has the protection of the mob;
embodying others' weaknesses, he is strong in the bundle of sticks;
joining his voice with the million, it is lost in the confusion of
tongues. Attacked, he is fortified by his society; down, he will rise
again with his fellows; stupid with the rest, his shame is unfelt by
being diffused. In any extremity, there is safety in counsel; in the
ranks, he cannot run; in the crowd, it were vain to think. Weary of
stagnation or tired by the eddies, he goes with the current; unable to
stand an individual, he joins with a party; a poor creature of God, he
is afraid to trust Him on his Word, and flies to a sect with a creed for
protection. In the wake of thought, he may be thoughtless; voting the
ticket, he is a patriot; a stiff bigot, there can be no doubt about his
religion. He submits to be thought for as a child; to be cared for as an
invalid; to be subordinated as an idiot. Unequal to a scheme of his own,
he falls into one already devised for him; without independent views, he
relies upon his newspaper; without implicit trust in God, he leans upon
a broken reed in preference. Thus his business, his politics, his
religion, are defined for him, and are of easy reference; indeed it may
be said he knows them by heart, so little there is of them. Of the laws
of trade, political economy, essential Christianity, he may be as
ignorant as a barbarian, at the same time be complacent and respectable
in his ignorance. Acting for himself, he would be set down as eccentric
by his banker; thinking for himself, he would be thought to be too
uncertain to be trustworthy; living virtuously, walking humbly, and
trusting his Creator to take care of his creature, he would be an object
of suspicion, even if he escaped being called an infidel. His tailor
determines the cut of his coat; the street defines his manners and
morals; custom becomes his law, and compliance his gospel.
Addison, in The Spectator, gives an account of a gentleman who
determined to live and dress according to the rules of common sense, and
was shut up in a lunatic asylum in consequence. "Custom," says Carlyle,
"doth make dotards of us all. Philosophy complains that custom has
hoodwinked us from the first; that we do everything by custom, even
believe by it; that our very axioms, let us boast of free-thinking as we
may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we have never heard
questioned." "In this great society wide lying around us," says Emerson,
"a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is
almost all custom and gross sense." We play our parts so faithfully, not
to say conscientiously, that often we have difficulty in placing
ourselves, whether with the assumed or the natural. The little arts and
artifices we thrive by, become essentially a part of us; and in the
jostle and conflict--the greater to devour the lesser and the lesser the
least--we seem impelled to pursue the objects and ends which long habit
has somehow convinced us nature particularly suited us to pursue. When
an event occurs to attract attention to our follies or baseness, it has
not the effect to prompt repentance, but to excite our cunning, and set
us to work to find excuses, or to imagine some other course of conduct
which would have been more foolish or mischievous. "We keep on deceiving
ourselves in regard to our faults, until we, at last, come to look upon
them as virtues." Like Selwyn, the accomplished courtier and wit in the
time of George III., we get to think even our vices necessities. After a
night of elegant rioting and debauch, he tumbled out of his bed at noon
the next day, and reeling with both hands upon his head to a mirror in
his apartment, gazed at himself and soliloquized: "I look and feel most
villainously mean; but it's life--hang it, it's life!"
Lord Bacon, discoursing upon the "politic knowledge of ourselves," and
the "wisdom of business," in the Second Book of the Proficience and
Advancement of Learning, says: "The covering of defects is of no less
importance than the valuing of good parts; which may be done in three
manners, by caution, by color, and by confidence. Caution is when men do
ingeniously and discreetly avoid to be put into those things for which
they are not proper: whereas, contrariwise, bold and unquiet spirits
will thrust themselves into matters without difference, and so publish
and proclaim all their wants. Color is, when men make a way for
themselves, to have a construction made of their faults and wants, as
proceeding from a better cause, or intended for some other purpose: for
of the one it is well said, 'Vice often lurks in the likeness of
virtue,' and therefore whatsoever want a man hath, he must see that he
pretend the virtue that shadoweth it; as if he be dull, he must affect
gravity; if a coward, mildness; and so the rest: for the second, a man
must frame some probable cause why he should not do his best, and why he
should dissemble his abilities; and for that purpose must use to
dissemble those abilities which are notorious in him, to give color that
his true wants are but industries and dissimulations. For confidence, it
is the last but surest remedy; namely, to depress and seem to despise
whatsoever a man cannot attain; observing the good principle of the
merchants, who endeavor to raise the price of their own commodities, and
to beat down the price of others. But there is a confidence that passeth
this other; which is to face out a man's own defects, in seeming to
conceive that he is best in those things wherein he is failing; and, to
help that again, to seem on the other side that he hath least opinion of
himself in those things wherein he is best; like as we shall see it
commonly in poets; that if they show their verses, and you except to
any, they will say, that that line cost them more labor than any of the
rest; and presently will seem to disable and suspect rather some other
line, which they know well enough to be the best in the number."
"Few persons who talk of any virtue or quality," says Pascal, "are
inwardly acquainted or affected with it. We are all full of duplicity,
deceit, and contradiction. We love to wear a disguise, even within, and
are afraid of being detected by ourselves."
Infirmities and calamities have been made to serve important uses in the
designs of men. "It was necessary," says a writer upon Mahomet, "that
the religion he proposed to establish should have a divine sanction; and
for this purpose he turned a calamity with which he was afflicted to his
advantage. He was often subject to fits of epilepsy, a disease which
those whom it afflicts are desirous to conceal. Mahomet gave out,
therefore, that these fits were trances, into which he was miraculously
thrown by God Almighty, during which he was instructed in his will,
which he was commanded to publish to the world. By this strange story,
and by leading a retired, abstemious, and austere life, he easily
acquired a character for superior sanctity among his acquaintances and
neighbors. When he thought himself sufficiently fortified by the numbers
and enthusiasm of his followers, he boldly declared himself a prophet,
sent by God into the world, not only to teach his will, but to compel
mankind to obey it."
The world not only seems to be easily deceived, but seems to delight in
deception. "If you wish to be powerful," said Horne Tooke, "pretend to
be powerful." If you wish to be considered wise, systematically pretend
to be, and you will generally be acknowledged to be. We all know, for
instance, the influence of manner, as sometimes displayed by persons of
great assumed personal dignity. Every neighborhood is afflicted with
such pretenders. "Among those terms," says Whipple, indignantly, "which
have long ceased to have any vital meaning, the word dignity deserves a
disgraceful prominence. No word has fallen so readily into the designs
of cant, imposture, and pretense; none has played so well the part of
verbal scarecrow, to frighten children of all ages and both sexes. It is
at once the thinnest and most effective of all the coverings under which
duncedom sneaks and skulks. Most of the men of dignity, who awe or bore
their more genial brethren, are simply men who possess the art of
passing off their insensibility for wisdom, their dullness for depth,
and of concealing imbecility of intellect under haughtiness of manner.
Their success in this small game is one of the stereotyped satires upon
mankind. Once strip from these pretenders their stolen garments--once
disconnect their show of dignity from their real meanness--and they
would stand shivering and defenseless,--objects of the tears of pity,
or targets for the arrows of scorn.... Manner triumphs over matter; and
throughout society, politics, letters, and science, we are doomed to
meet a swarm of dunces and wind-bags, disguised as gentlemen, statesmen,
and scholars." When they open their mouths, it is to expand themselves
with a new inhalation of emptiness, or to depreciate or belittle what
they pretend is insignificant, when it only exceeds their capacity. They
put up their heads and expectorate with a smirky haughtiness, as if
everything worth knowing were known to them, when a single sensation of
modesty would envelop their moony faces with blushes. Every one has seen
such a character,--"an embodied tediousness, which society is apt not
only to tolerate, but to worship; a person who announces the stale
commonplaces of conversation with the awful precision of one bringing
down to the valleys of thought bright truths plucked on its summits; who
is so profoundly deep and painfully solid, on the weather, or some
nothing of the day; who is inexpressibly shocked if your eternal
gratitude does not repay him for the trite information he consumed your
hour in imparting; and who, if you insinuate that this calm, contented,
imperturbable stupidity is preying upon your patience, instantly stands
upon his dignity, and puts on a face." "A certain nobleman, some years
ago," says Bulwer, in one of his essays, "was conspicuous for his
success in the world. He had been employed in the highest situations, at
home and abroad, without one discoverable reason for his selection, and
without justifying the selection by one proof of administrative ability.
Yet at each appointment the public said, 'A great gain to the
government! Superior man!' And when from each office he passed away, or
rather passed imperceptibly onward toward offices still more exalted,
the public said, 'A great loss to the government! Superior man!' He was
the most silent person I ever met. But when the first reasoners of the
age would argue some knotty point in his presence, he would, from time
to time, slightly elevate his eyebrows, gently shake his head, or, by a
dexterous smile of significant complacency, impress on you the notion
how easily he could set those babblers right if he would but condescend
to give voice to the wisdom within him. I was very young when I first
met this superior man; and chancing on the next day to call on the late
Lord Durham, I said, in the presumption of early years, 'I passed six
mortal hours last evening in company with Lord ----. I don't think there
is much in him,' 'Good heavens!' cried Lord Durham, 'how did you find
that out? Is it possible that he could have--talked?'" Coleridge speaks
of a dignified man he once saw at a dinner-table. "He listened to me,"
says the poet, "and said nothing for a long time; but he nodded his
head, and I thought him intelligent. At length, toward the end of the
dinner, some apple dumplings were placed on the table, and my man had no
sooner seen them, than he burst forth with,--'Them's the jockies for
me!' I wish Spurzheim could have examined the fellow's head." The Duke
of Somerset is described as one of these dignified gentlemen. His second
wife was one of the most beautiful women in England. She once suddenly
threw her arms around his neck, and gave him a kiss which might have
gladdened the heart of an emperor. The duke, lifting his shoulders with
an aristocratic square, slowly said, "Madam, my first wife was a Howard,
and she never would have taken such a liberty!" If it were practicable
to expose the artifice and emptiness of such characters, the exhibition
would be as amusing as the scene once presented on the stage of a
theatre. The comedian was enveloped in a great India-rubber suit,
expanded by air to give it the proper proportions to represent Falstaff:
when just in the middle of one of the inimitable speeches of that
inimitable character, some wag of the stock insinuated a sharp-pointed
instrument into the immense windful garment: immediately the great
proportions of Falstaff began to diminish, attended by an audible
hissing noise; and before the discomposed actor, overwhelmed with the
laughter of the uproarious audience, could retire from the stage, he had
shrunk to an insignificant one hundred and fifty pounds avoirdupois,
with his deceptive covering hanging about his gaunt limbs in voluminous
folds! Such persons will generally be found in possession of good moral
habits--props they instinctively set up to sustain their pretenses. They
know by intuition that an affectation of wisdom and greatness would be
intolerable if attended by vicious propensities and practices; so they
cultivate with systematic carefulness all the forms of morality and
virtue. They know that their good habits will always insure the respect
of even those who detect and despise their emptiness. But they are never
heard to claim anything on the score of superior virtue; they demand to
be known as Solons--as abridgments of all that is profound and wonderful
known among men. Like the owl--that wise bird, sacred of old to
Minerva--they make their pretensions respected by the most commendable
propriety.
"Yorick had an invincible dislike and opposition in his nature to
gravity;--not to gravity as such;--for where gravity was wanted, he
would be the most grave or serious of mortal men for days and weeks
together; but he was an enemy to the affectation of it, and declared
open war against it, only as it appeared a cloak for ignorance, or
folly: and then, whenever it fell in his way, however sheltered and
protected, he seldom gave it any quarter. Sometimes, in his wild way of
talking, he would say, that gravity was an errant scoundrel, and, he
would add,--of the most dangerous kind too,--because a sly one; and that
he verily believed, more honest, well-meaning people were bubbled out of
their goods and money by it in one twelvemonth, than by pocket-picking,
and shoplifting in seven. In the naked temper which a merry heart
discovered, he would say there was no danger,--but to itself:--whereas
the very essence of gravity was design, and consequently deceit;--'twas
a taught trick, to gain credit of the world for more sense and knowledge
than a man was worth; and that, with all his pretensions,--it was no
better, but often worse, than what a French wit had long ago defined it,
viz.: A mysterious carriage of the body, to cover the defects of the
mind:--which definition of gravity, Yorick, with great imprudence, would
say, deserved to be wrote in letters of gold."
"Men in general," says Machiavelli, in his Prince, "judge more from
appearances than from reality. All men have eyes, but few have the gift
of penetration. Every one sees your exterior, but few can discern what
you have in your heart; and those few dare not oppose the voice of the
multitude."
A pretension to devoutness and asceticism was one of the fashions in
Moliere's time. In his play of Le Festin de Pierre, he makes Don Juan to
say: "The profession of hypocrite has marvelous advantages. It is an act
of which the imposture is always respected; and though it may be
discovered, no one dares do anything against it. All the other vices of
man are liable to censure, and every one has the liberty of boldly
attacking them; but hypocrisy is a privileged vice, which with its hand
closes everybody's mouth, and enjoys its repose with sovereign
impunity."
The absorbing desire for wealth--"that bad thing, gold," that "buys all
things good"--like ambition, "often puts men upon doing the meanest
offices: so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping."
Almost every act may be a lie against the thought or motive which
prompted it. The great aim of the mere money-getter--to get and get
forever--involves him in false pretense and practical falsehood. He
advises to inveigle; he condoles and sympathizes to ruin. He talks of
liberalty, and never gives. He depreciates money and the love of it, at
the same time glows and dimples with the consciousness of his
possessions. He calls life a humbug or muck, and proves it by a
hypocritical exhibit of his gains. He puts a penny in the urn of
poverty, and sees clearly how he will get a shilling out. He whines for
wretchedness, forgetting the number he has made wretched. He gives to
religion, and plunders her devotees. He hires an expensive pew near the
pulpit, and cheats his woodsawyer and washerwoman. He builds costly
churches with tall steeples, and, writing the Almighty in his list of
debtors, formally bargains admission to heaven. "He falls down and
worships the god of this world, but will have neither its pomps, its
vanities, nor its pleasures, for his trouble. He begins to accumulate
treasure as a mean to happiness, and by a common but morbid association
he continues to accumulate it as an end. He lives poor to die rich, and
is the mere jailer of his house, and the turnkey of his wealth.
Impoverished by his gold, he slaves harder to imprison it in his chest
than his brother-slave to liberate it from the mine." "Some men," says
Chrysippus, in Athenaeus, "apply themselves with such eagerness to the
pursuit of money, that it is even related, that a man once, when near
his end, swallowed a number of pieces of gold, and so died. Another
person sewed a quantity of money into a tunic, and put it on, and then
ordered his servants to bury him in that dress, neither burning his
body, nor stripping it and laying it out." Foote, in endeavoring to
express the microscopic niggardliness of a miser of his acquaintance,
expressed a belief that he would be willing to take the beam out of his
own eye if he knew he could sell the timber. Doubtless, one source of
the miser's insane covetousness and parsimony is the tormenting fear of
dying a beggar--that "fine horror of poverty," according to Lamb, "by
which he is not content to keep want from the door, or at arm's-length,
but he places it, by heaping wealth upon wealth, at a sublime distance."
("All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil,"
impatiently exclaimed Dr. Johnson, "show it to be evidently a great
evil. You never find people laboring to convince you that you may live
very happily upon a plentiful fortune. So you hear people talking how
miserable a king must be; and yet they all wish to be in his place."
"One asks," says La Bruyere, "if, in comparing the different conditions
of men together, their sufferings and advantages, we cannot observe an
equal mixture, and a like assortment of good and evil, which settles
them on an equality, or at least makes one as desirable as the other:
the rich and powerful man, who wants nothing, may put the question, but
a poor man must answer it.") The hoarding habits of the miser remind one
of a device of American boatmen, at an early day, before the steamboat
was invented, and when the forest was infested with savages and robbers.
Receiving specie at New Orleans for their produce, they deposited it in
a wet buckskin belt, of sufficient length to surround the body, which,
as it dried, contracted and shrunk round the coin, till no amount of
shaking would cause it to jingle. So may the heart and soul of the
avaricious man shrink round his little heap of gold, until all healthy
circulation ceases, and his heart never jingles with a genuine,
generous, manly impulse.
Disraeli, in his Curiosities, gives an interesting philosophical sketch
of Audley,--the great Audley, as he was called in his time,--who
concentrated all the powers of a vigorous intellect in the accumulation
of wealth. He lived in England in the beginning of the seventeenth
century, through the reigns of James I. and Charles I., and, beginning
life with almost nothing, died worth four hundred thousand pounds
sterling. He "lived to view his mortgages, his statutes, and his
judgments so numerous, that it was observed, his papers would have made
a good map of England. This philosophical usurer never pressed hard for
his debts; like the fowler, he never shook his nets lest he might
startle, satisfied to have them, without appearing to hold them. With
great fondness he compared his 'bonds to infants, which battle best by
sleeping.' To battle is to be nourished, a term still retained at the
University of Oxford. His familiar companions were all subordinate
actors in the great piece he was performing; he too had his part in the
scene. When not taken by surprise, on his table usually laid open a
great Bible, with Bishop Andrews' folio Sermons, which often gave him an
opportunity of railing at the covetousness of the clergy! declaring
their religion was a 'mere preach,' and that 'the time would never be
well till we had Queen Elizabeth's Protestants again in fashion.' He was
aware of all the evils arising out of a population beyond the means of
subsistence, and dreaded an inundation of man, spreading like the spawn
of a cod. Hence he considered marriage, with a modern political
economist, as very dangerous; bitterly censuring the clergy, whose
children, he said, never thrived, and whose widows were left destitute.
An apostolic life, according to Audley, required only books, meat, and
drink, to be had for fifty pounds a year! Celibacy, voluntary poverty,
and all the mortifications of a primitive Christian, were the virtues
practiced by this Puritan among his money bags. Audley's was that
worldly wisdom which derives all its strength from the weaknesses of
mankind. Everything was to be obtained by stratagem, and it was his
maxim, that to grasp our object the faster, we must go a little round
about it. His life is said to have been one of intricacies and
mysteries, using indirect means in all things; but if he walked in a
labyrinth, it was to bewilder others; for the clew was still in his own
hand; all he sought was that his designs should not be discovered in
his actions. His word, we are told, was his bond; his hour was punctual;
and his opinions were compressed and weighty; but if he was true to his
bond-word, it was only a part of the system to give facility to the
carrying on of his trade, for he was not strict to his honor; the pride
of victory, as well as the passion for acquisition, combined in the
character of Audley, as in more tremendous conquerors. In the course of
time he purchased a position in the 'court of wards,' which enabled him
to plunder the estates of deceased persons and minors. When asked the
value of this new office, he replied that 'it might be worth some
thousands of pounds to him who after his death would go instantly to
heaven; twice as much to him who would go to purgatory, and nobody knows
what to him who would adventure to go to hell.'" What he thought of a
venture to the latter place, his four hundred thousand pounds must
speak.
Many and interesting as are the disguises of avarice, it is only in rank
and ancestry that you find perfect complacency and assurance. "We have
all heard," says Thackeray, "of the dying French duchess who viewed her
coming dissolution and subsequent fate so easily, because she said she
was sure that Heaven must deal politely with a person of her quality."
You recollect that other duchess, in Saint-Simon, who, on the death of a
sinner of illustrious race, said, "They may say what they like, but no
one shall persuade me that God does not think of it twice before he
damns a man of his birth." An old lady once said to De Tocqueville, "I
have been reading with great satisfaction the genealogies which prove
that Jesus Christ descended from David. It shows that our Lord was a
gentleman." "We are somewhat ashamed in general," said Senior to De
Tocqueville, "of Jewish blood; yet the Levis boast of their descent from
the Hebrew Levi." "They are proud of it," answered De Tocqueville;
"because they make themselves out to be cousins of the blessed Virgin.
They have a picture in which a Duke de Levi stands bareheaded before the
Virgin. 'Pray put your hat on, cousin,' she says. 'I had rather keep it
off,' he answered."
"Do we not every day meet with people," says Xavier de Maistre, "who
fancy they are ill because they are unshaven, or because some one has
thought they have looked poorly, and told them so? Dress has such
influence upon men's minds that there are valetudinarians who think
themselves in better health than usual when they have on a new coat and
well powdered wig. They deceive the public and themselves by their
nicety about dress, until one finds some fine morning they have died in
full fig, and their death startles everybody."