of commerce with the frivolous amusement of high life. One of them, who
plays every night (Sundays are not excepted here), will tell you how
closely he attends to profit. 'I never pay a porter for bringing a
burden till the next day,' says he, 'for while the fellow feels his back
ache with the weight, he charges high; but when he comes the next day
the feeling is gone, and he asks only half the money.' And the author of
this philosophical scheme is worth two hundred thousand dollars!"
"The late grand duke," said Goethe to Eckermann, "was very partial to
Merck, so much so that he once became his security for a debt of four
thousand dollars. Very soon Merck, to our surprise, gave him back his
bond. As Merck's circumstances were not improved, we could not divine
how he had been able to do this. When I saw him again, he explained the
enigma thus: 'The duke,' said he, 'is an excellent, generous man, who
trusts and helps men whenever he can. So I thought to myself, Now if you
cozen him out of his money, that will prejudice a thousand others; for
he will lose his precious trustfulness, and many unfortunate but worthy
men will suffer, because one was worthless. So I made a speculation, and
borrowed the money from a scoundrel, whom it will be no matter if I do
cheat; but if I had not paid our good lord, the duke, it would have been
a pity.'"
"The greatest pleasure I know," said Lamb, "is to do a good action by
stealth, and to have it found out by accident."
IV.
STANDARDS.
At a glance, it would appear that, as a rule, all men think all men
imperfect but themselves. It follows, therefore, that all would reform
all but themselves. But if every man's standard of excellence could be
accounted for, what a melancholy history of human frailties and follies
might be had. What sad curiosities, perhaps, would be our pet
virtues--offspring, alas, too often, of sated appetites, spent passions,
hair-breadth escapes, and disappointed hopes. Knowing all, with what
wondrous pity must God hear our poor prayers. To seek perfect virtue or
contentment "is as hopeless as to try to recover a lost limb. Those only
have it who never have thought about it. The moment we feel that we wish
for it, we may be certain that it is gone forever." "To know how
cherries and strawberries taste, you must ask the children and the
birds."
"All things," says Emerson, "work exactly according to their quality,
and according to their quantity; attempt nothing they cannot do, except
man." He ventures "to say that what is bad is bad," and finds himself
"at war with all the world." "Do not be so vain of your one objection.
Do you think there is only one? Alas, my good friend, there is no part
of society or of life better than any other part. All our things are
right and wrong together. The wave of evil washes all alike." "Probably
there never was," says De Quincey, "one thought, from the foundation of
the earth, that has passed through the mind of man, which did not offer
some blemish, some sorrowful shadow of pollution, when it came up for
review before a heavenly tribunal; that is, supposing it a thought
entangled at all with human interests or human passions." "All the
progress which we have really made," says a writer in Blackwood, "and
all the additional and fictitious progress which exists in our
imagination, prompts us to the false idea that there is a remedy for
everything, and that no pain is inevitable. But there are pains which
are inevitable in spite of philosophy, and conflicting claims to which
Solomon himself could do no justice. We are not complete syllogisms, to
be kept in balance by intellectual regulations, we human creatures. We
are of all things and creatures in the world the most incomplete; and
there are conditions of our warfare, for the redress of which, in spite
of all the expedients of social economy, every man and woman, thrown by
whatever accident out of the course of nature, must be content to wait
perhaps for years, perhaps for a life long, perhaps till the
consummation of all things." "All the speculations and schemes of the
sanguine projectors of all ages," says John Foster, "have left the world
still a prey to infinite legions of vices and miseries, an immortal
band, which has trampled in scorn on the monuments and the dust of the
self-idolizing men who dreamed, each in his day, that they were born to
chase these evils out of the earth. If these vain demi-gods of an hour,
who trusted to change the world, and who perhaps wished to change it
only to make it a temple to their fame, could be awaked from the
unmarked graves into which they sunk, to look a little while round on
the world for some traces of the success of their projects, would they
not be eager to retire again into the chambers of death, to hide the
shame of their remembered presumption?" "It is not given to reason,"
said Vauvenargues, "to cure all the vices of nature." "For a reasonable,
voluntary being," says Sterling, "learning as he only can learn by
experience, there will always be errors behind to mourn over, and a
vista of unattainable good before, which inevitably lengthens as we
advance." If we only could "grieve without affectation or imbecility,
and journey on without turning aside or stopping."
Leslie says, in his Recollections: "I remember seeing at Howard Payne's
lodgings, at a breakfast which he gave to a large party, the then
celebrated Robert Owen, who was at that time filling the papers with his
scheme for remodeling society on a plan that was to transcend Utopia. I
remember Payne telling me that when Wilberforce, on being urged to bring
this plan before Parliament, replied that it was too late in the season,
Owen exclaimed, "What, sir! put off the happiness of mankind till
another session of Parliament!""
"I overheard Jove one day," said Silenus, "talking of destroying the
earth; he said it had failed; they were all rogues and vixens, who went
from bad to worse, as fast as the days succeeded each other. Minerva
said she hoped not; they were only ridiculous little creatures, with
this odd circumstance, that they had a blur, or indeterminate aspect,
seen far or near; if you called them bad, they would appear so; and
there was no one person or action among them which would not puzzle her
owl, much more all Olympus, to know whether it was fundamentally bad or
good."
"It is the conviction of the purest men, that the net amount of man and
man does not much vary. Each is incomparably superior to his companion
in some faculty. Each seems to have some compensation yielded to him by
his infirmity, and every hinderance operates as a concentration of his
force." "Everything we do has its results. But the right and prudent
does not always lead to good, or contrary measures to bad; frequently
the reverse takes place. Some time since," said Goethe, "I made a
mistake in one of these transactions with booksellers, and was disturbed
that I had done so. But, as circumstances turned out, it would have
been very unfortunate if I had not made that very mistake. Such
instances occur frequently in life, and it is the observation of them
which enables men of the world to go to work with such freedom and
boldness."
"When we see a special reformer, we feel like asking him," says Emerson,
"What right have you, sir, to your one virtue? Is virtue piecemeal?"
"Your mode of happiness," said Coleridge, talking to such an one, "would
make me miserable. To go about doing as much good as possible, to as
many men as possible, is, indeed, an excellent object for a man to
propose to himself; but then, in order that you may not sacrifice the
real good and happiness of others to your particular views, which may be
quite different from your neighbors', you must do that good to others
which the reason, common to all, pronounces to be good for all." "What I
object," said Sydney Smith, "to Scotch philosophers in general is, that
they reason upon man as they would upon a divinity; they pursue truth
without caring if it be useful truth." Michel Angelo's great picture of
the Last Judgment, in the Sistine Chapel, narrowly escaped from
destruction by the monastic views of Paul IV. In the commencement of his
reign, we are told, he conceived a notion of reforming that picture, in
which so many academical figures offended his sense of propriety. This
was communicated to Michel Angelo, who desired that the pope might be
told "that what he wished was very little, and might be easily effected;
for if his holiness would only reform the opinions of mankind, the
picture would be reformed of itself." "You must have a genius for
charity as well as for anything else. As for doing good," says Thoreau,
"that is one of the professions which are full. What good I do, in the
common sense of that word, must be aside from my main path, and for the
most part wholly unintended. Men say, practically, Begin where you are
and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and
with kindness aforethought go about doing good. If I were to preach at
all in this strain, I should say, rather, Set about being good. As if
the sun should stop when he had kindled his fires up to the splendor of
a moon, or a star of the sixth magnitude, and go about like a Robin
Goodfellow, peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and
tainting meats, and making darkness visible, instead of steadily
increasing his genial heat and beneficence till he is of such brightness
that no mortal can look him in the face, and then, and in the meanwhile
too, going about the world in his own orbit, doing it good, or rather,
as a truer philosophy has discovered, the world going about him, getting
good. When Phaeton, wishing to prove his heavenly birth by his
beneficence, had the sun's chariot but one day, and drove out of the
beaten track, he burned several blocks of houses in the lower streets of
heaven, and scorched the surface of the earth, and dried up every
spring, and made the great Desert of Sahara, till at length Jupiter
hurled him headlong to the earth with a thunderbolt, and the sun,
through grief at his death, did not shine for a year."
"There is no odor so bad," continues the same defiant radical, "as that
which arises from goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion.
If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the
conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life, as from
that dry and parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom,
which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are
suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done to
me,--some of its virus mingled with my blood. No; in this case I would
rather suffer evil the natural way."
An officer of the government called one day at the White House, and
introduced a clerical friend to Lincoln. "Mr. President," said he,
"allow me to present to you my friend, the Rev. Mr. F., of ----. Mr. F.
has expressed a desire to see you and have some conversation with you,
and I am happy to be the means of introducing him." The president shook
hands with Mr. F., and, desiring him to be seated, took a seat himself.
Then, his countenance having assumed an air of patient waiting, he said,
"I am now ready to hear what you have to say." "Oh, bless you, sir,"
said Mr. F., "I have nothing special to say; I merely called to pay my
respects to you, and, as one of the million, to assure you of my hearty
sympathy and support." "My dear sir," said the president, rising
promptly, his face showing instant relief, and with both hands grasping
that of his visitor, "I am very glad to see you, indeed. I thought you
had come to preach to me!"
"My father," said the Attic Philosopher, "feared everything that had the
appearance of a lesson. He used to say that virtue could make herself
devoted friends, but she did not take pupils; therefore he was not
anxious to teach goodness; he contented himself with sowing the seeds of
it, certain that experience would make them grow." "The disease of men,"
said Mencius, "is this: that they neglect their own fields, and go to
weed the fields of others, and that what they require from others is
great, while what they lay upon themselves is light."
"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil," says Thoreau,
again, "to one who is striking at the root; and it may be that he who
bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the
most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain
to relieve. It is the pious slave-breeder devoting the proceeds of every
tenth slave to buy a Sunday's liberty for the rest.... The
philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his
own cast-off griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. We should
impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not
our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion.... If
anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he
have a pain in his bowels even, for that is the seat of sympathy, he
forthwith sets about reforming--the world. Being a microcosm himself, he
discovers--and it is a true discovery, and he is the man to make
it--that the world has been eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact,
the globe itself is a great green apple, which there is danger awful to
think of that the children of men will nibble before it is ripe; and
straightway his drastic philanthropy seeks out the Esquimaux and the
Patagonian, and embraces the populous Indian and Chinese villages; and
thus, by a few years of philanthropic activity, the powers in the
meanwhile using him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of
his dyspepsia, the globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its
cheeks, as if it were beginning to be ripe, and life loses its crudity
and is once more sweet and wholesome to live. I never dreamed of any
enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall
know, a worse man than myself.... My excuse for not lecturing against
the use of tobacco is that I never chewed it; that is a penalty which
reformed tobacco-chewers have to pay; though there are things enough I
have chewed, which I could lecture against. If you should ever be
betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand
know what your right hand does, for it is not worth knowing. Rescue the
drowning, and tie your shoe-strings. Take your time, and set about some
free labor."
It has been observed that persons who are themselves very pure are
sometimes on that account blunt in their moral feelings. "Right, too
rigid, hardens into wrong"--even into cruelty sometimes. A friend of one
of these malicious philanthropists dined with him one day, and
afterward related an anecdote illustrative of his character. While at
the table, the children of the refining humanitarian, playing about the
open door, were noisy and intractable, which caused him to speak to them
impatiently. The disturbance, however, did not cease, and hearing one of
the children cry out, he jumped spasmodically from the table, and
demanded to know what was the matter. Upon being informed that one of
them had accidentally pinched the finger of another, he immediately
seized the hand of the innocent offender, and placing the forefinger at
the hinge of the door, deliberately closed it--crushing the poor child's
finger as a punishment. There is another equally authentic story of a
reformer who hired his children to go to bed without their supper as a
means of preserving their health, and then stole their money back again
to pay them for the next abstinence.
"I have never known a trader in philanthropy," says Coleridge, "who was
not wrong in head or heart somewhere or other. Individuals so
distinguished are usually unhappy in their family relations: men not
benevolent or beneficent to individuals, but almost hostile to them; yet
lavishing money and labor and time on the race, the abstract notion."
"This is always true of those men," says Hawthorne, in his analysis of
Hollingsworth, "who have surrendered themselves to an overruling power.
It does not so much impel them from without, nor even operate as a
motive power from within, but grows incorporate in all they think and
feel, and finally converts them into little else save that one
principle. When such begins to be the predicament, it is not cowardice,
but wisdom, to avoid these victims. They have no heart, no sympathy, no
reason, no conscience. They will keep no friend, unless he make himself
the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and slay you, and trample
your dead corpse under foot, all the more readily, if you take the first
step with them, and cannot take the second, and the third, and every
other step of their terribly straight path. They have an idol, to which
they consecrate themselves high-priest, and deem it holy work to offer
sacrifices of whatever is most precious; and never once seem to
suspect--so cunning has the devil been with them--that this false deity,
in whose iron features, immitigable to all the rest of mankind, they see
only benignity and love, is but a spectrum of the very priest himself,
projected upon the surrounding darkness. And the higher and purer the
original object, and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the
slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the
process by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring
egotism."
The same writer, in one of his minor productions, says, "When a good man
has long devoted himself to a particular kind of beneficence, to one
species of reform, he is apt to become narrowed into the limits of the
path wherein he treads, and to fancy that there is no other good to be
done on earth but that self-same good to which he has put his hand, and
in the very mode that best suits his own conceptions. All else is
worthless. His scheme must be wrought out by the united strength of the
whole world's stock of love, or the world is no longer worthy of a
position in the universe. Moreover, powerful Truth, being the rich
grape-juice expressed from the vineyard of the ages, has an intoxicating
quality when imbibed by any save a powerful intellect, and often, as it
were, impels the quaffer to quarrel in his cups."
At a dinner-party one day, Madame de Stael said to Lady Mackintosh,
after Godwin was gone, "I am glad to have seen this man,--it is curious
to see how naturally Jacobins become the advocates of tyrants."
"I have often blamed myself," said Boswell, "for not feeling for others
as sensibly as many say they do." "Sir," replied Johnson, "don't be
duped by them any more. You will find these very feeling people are not
very ready to do you good. They pay you by feeling."
A very large proportion of the men who during the French Revolution
proved themselves most absolutely indifferent to human suffering, were
deeply attached to animals. Fournier was devoted to a squirrel, Couthon
to a spaniel, Panis to two gold pheasants, Chaumette to an aviary, Marat
kept doves. Bacon has noticed that the Turks, who are a most cruel
people, are nevertheless conspicuous for their kindness to animals, and
he mentions the instance of a Christian boy who was nearly stoned to
death for gagging a long-billed fowl. Abbas, the viceroy, when a boy,
had his pastry-cook bastinadoed to death. Mehemet Ali mildly reproved
him for it, as a European would correct a child for killing a butterfly.
He explained to his little grandson that such things ought not to be
done without a motive. Abbe Migne tells how one old Roman fed his
oysters on his slaves; how another put a slave to death that a curious
friend might see what dying was like; how Galen's mother tore and bit
her waiting-women when she was in a passion with them. Caligula
conferred the honor of priesthood upon his horse. "The day before the
Circensian games," says Suetonius, "he used to send his soldiers to
enjoin silence in the neighborhood, that the repose of the animal might
not be disturbed. For this favorite, besides a marble stable, an ivory
manger, purple housings, and a jeweled frontlet, he appointed a house,
with a retinue of slaves, and fine furniture, for the reception of such
as were invited in the horse's name to sup with him. It is even said
that he intended to make him consul." In Egypt there are hospitals for
superannuated cats, and the most loathsome insects are regarded with
tenderness; but human life is treated as if it were of no account, and
human suffering scarcely elicits a care.
Sydney Smith advised the bishop of New Zealand, previous to his
departure, to have regard to the minor as well as to the more grave
duties of his station--to be given to hospitality, and, in order to
meet the tastes of his native guests, never to be without a smoked
little boy in the bacon-rack, and a cold clergyman on the sideboard.
"And as for myself, my lord," he concluded, "all I can say is, that when
your new parishioners do eat you, I sincerely hope you will disagree
with them."
Lamb once told a droll story of an India-house clerk accused of eating
man's flesh, and remarked that "among cannibals those who rejected the
favorite dish would be called misanthropists."
The eternal barbarisms must not be forgotten by the reformer while he is
reforming the barbarians. The pagan Frisians, that illustrious northern
German tribe, afterward known as the "free Frisians," "whose name is
synonymous with liberty,--nearest blood-relations of the Anglo-Saxon
race,"--struggled for centuries against the dominion of the Franks, and
were only eventually subjugated by Charlemagne, who left them their name
of free Frisians. "The Frisians," says their statute-book, "shall be
free as long as the wind blows out of the clouds and the world stands."
Radbod, their chief, was first overcome by Pepin the younger, and
Pepin's bastard, Charles the Hammer, with his "tremendous blows,
completed his father's work;" he "drove the Frisian chief into
submission, and even into Christianity. A bishop's indiscretion,
however, neutralized the apostolic blows" of the Christian conqueror.
"The pagan Radbod had already immersed one of his royal legs in the
baptismal font, when a thought struck him. 'Where are my dead
forefathers at present?' he said, turning suddenly upon Bishop Wolfran.
'In hell, with all other unbelievers,' was the imprudent answer. 'Mighty
well,' replied Radbod, removing his leg, 'then will I rather feast with
my ancestors in the halls of Woden, than dwell with your little
starveling band of Christians in heaven.' Entreaties and threats were
unavailing. The Frisian declined positively a rite which was to cause
an eternal separation from his buried kindred, and he died as he had
lived, a heathen."