idea seems to them a convincing reason that it must be, if not solely,
yet especially theirs. It fits in so beautifully with their general
wisdom, it lies implicitly in so many of their manifested opinions, that
if they have not yet expressed it (because of preoccupation) it is
clearly a part of their indigenous produce, and is proved by their
immediate eloquent promulgation of it to belong more naturally and
appropriately to them than to the person who seemed first to have
alighted on it, and who sinks in their all-originating consciousness to
that low kind of entity, a second cause. This is not lunacy, nor
pretence, but a genuine state of mind very effective in practice, and
often carrying the public with it, so that the poor Columbus is found to
be a very faulty adventurer, and the continent is named after Amerigo.
Lighter examples of this instinctive appropriation are constantly met
with among brilliant talkers. Aquila is too agreeable and amusing for
any one who is not himself bent on display to be angry at his
conversational rapine--his habit of darting down on every morsel of
booty that other birds may hold in their beaks, with an innocent air, as
if it were all intended for his use, and honestly counted on by him as a
tribute in kind. Hardly any man, I imagine, can have had less trouble in
gathering a showy stock of information than Aquila. On close inquiry you
would probably find that he had not read one epoch-making book of modern
times, for he has a career which obliges him to much correspondence and
other official work, and he is too fond of being in company to spend his
leisure moments in study; but to his quick eye, ear, and tongue, a few
predatory excursions in conversation where there are instructed persons,
gradually furnish surprisingly clever modes of statement and allusion on
the dominant topic. When he first adopts a subject he necessarily falls
into mistakes, and it is interesting to watch his gradual progress into
fuller information and better nourished irony, without his ever needing
to admit that he has made a blunder or to appear conscious of
correction. Suppose, for example, he had incautiously founded some
ingenious remarks on a hasty reckoning that nine thirteens made a
hundred and two, and the insignificant Bantam, hitherto silent, seemed
to spoil the flow of ideas by stating that the product could not be
taken as less than a hundred and seventeen, Aquila would glide on in the
most graceful manner from a repetition of his previous remark to the
continuation--"All this is on the supposition that a hundred and two
were all that could be got out of nine thirteens; but as all the world
knows that nine thirteens will yield," &c.--proceeding straightway into
a new train of ingenious consequences, and causing Bantam to be regarded
by all present as one of those slow persons who take irony for
ignorance, and who would warn the weasel to keep awake. How should a
small-eyed, feebly crowing mortal like him be quicker in arithmetic than
the keen-faced forcible Aquila, in whom universal knowledge is easily
credible? Looked into closely, the conclusion from a man's profile,
voice, and fluency to his certainty in multiplication beyond the
twelves, seems to show a confused notion of the way in which very common
things are connected; but it is on such false correlations that men
found half their inferences about each other, and high places of trust
may sometimes be held on no better foundation.
It is a commonplace that words, writings, measures, and performances in
general, have qualities assigned them not by a direct judgment on the
performances themselves, but by a presumption of what they are likely to
be, considering who is the performer. We all notice in our neighbours
this reference to names as guides in criticism, and all furnish
illustrations of it in our own practice; for, check ourselves as we
will, the first impression from any sort of work must depend on a
previous attitude of mind, and this will constantly be determined by the
influences of a name. But that our prior confidence or want of
confidence in given names is made up of judgments just as hollow as the
consequent praise or blame they are taken to warrant, is less commonly
perceived, though there is a conspicuous indication of it in the
surprise or disappointment often manifested in the disclosure of an
authorship about which everybody has been making wrong guesses. No doubt
if it had been discovered who wrote the 'Vestiges,' many an ingenious
structure of probabilities would have been spoiled, and some disgust
might have been felt for a real author who made comparatively so shabby
an appearance of likelihood. It is this foolish trust in prepossessions,
founded on spurious evidence, which makes a medium of encouragement for
those who, happening to have the ear of the public, give other people's
ideas the advantage of appearing under their own well-received name,
while any remonstrance from the real producer becomes an unwelcome
disturbance of complacency with each person who has paid complimentary
tributes in the wrong place.
Hardly any kind of false reasoning is more ludicrous than this on the
probabilities of origination. It would be amusing to catechise the
guessers as to their exact reasons for thinking their guess "likely:"
why Hoopoe of John's has fixed on Toucan of Magdalen; why Shrike
attributes its peculiar style to Buzzard, who has not hitherto been
known as a writer; why the fair Columba thinks it must belong to the
reverend Merula; and why they are all alike disturbed in their previous
judgment of its value by finding that it really came from Skunk, whom
they had either not thought of at all, or thought of as belonging to a
species excluded by the nature of the case. Clearly they were all wrong
in their notion of the specific conditions, which lay unexpectedly in
the small Skunk, and in him alone--in spite of his education nobody
knows where, in spite of somebody's knowing his uncles and cousins, and
in spite of nobody's knowing that he was cleverer than they thought him.
Such guesses remind one of a fabulist's imaginary council of animals
assembled to consider what sort of creature had constructed a honeycomb
found and much tasted by Bruin and other epicures. The speakers all
started from the probability that the maker was a bird, because this was
the quarter from which a wondrous nest might be expected; for the
animals at that time, knowing little of their own history, would have
rejected as inconceivable the notion that a nest could be made by a
fish; and as to the insects, they were not willingly received in society
and their ways were little known. Several complimentary presumptions
were expressed that the honeycomb was due to one or the other admired
and popular bird, and there was much fluttering on the part of the
Nightingale and Swallow, neither of whom gave a positive denial, their
confusion perhaps extending to their sense of identity; but the Owl
hissed at this folly, arguing from his particular knowledge that the
animal which produced honey must be the Musk-rat, the wondrous nature of
whose secretions required no proof; and, in the powerful logical
procedure of the Owl, from musk to honey was but a step. Some
disturbance arose hereupon, for the Musk-rat began to make himself
obtrusive, believing in the Owl's opinion of his powers, and feeling
that he could have produced the honey if he had thought of it; until an
experimental Butcher-bird proposed to anatomise him as a help to
decision. The hubbub increased, the opponents of the Musk-rat inquiring
who his ancestors were; until a diversion was created by an able
discourse of the Macaw on structures generally, which he classified so
as to include the honeycomb, entering into so much admirable exposition
that there was a prevalent sense of the honeycomb having probably been
produced by one who understood it so well. But Bruin, who had probably
eaten too much to listen with edification, grumbled in his low kind of
language, that "Fine words butter no parsnips," by which he meant to say
that there was no new honey forthcoming.
Perhaps the audience generally was beginning to tire, when the Fox
entered with his snout dreadfully swollen, and reported that the
beneficent originator in question was the Wasp, which he had found much
smeared with undoubted honey, having applied his nose to it--whence
indeed the able insect, perhaps justifiably irritated at what might seem
a sign of scepticism, had stung him with some severity, an infliction
Reynard could hardly regret, since the swelling of a snout normally so
delicate would corroborate his statement and satisfy the assembly that
he had really found the honey-creating genius.
The Fox's admitted acuteness, combined with the visible swelling, were
taken as undeniable evidence, and the revelation undoubtedly met a
general desire for information on a point of interest. Nevertheless,
there was a murmur the reverse of delighted, and the feelings of some
eminent animals were too strong for them: the Orang-outang's jaw dropped
so as seriously to impair the vigour of his expression, the edifying
Pelican screamed and flapped her wings, the Owl hissed again, the Macaw
became loudly incoherent, and the Gibbon gave his hysterical laugh;
while the Hyaena, after indulging in a more splenetic guffaw, agitated
the question whether it would not be better to hush up the whole affair,
instead of giving public recognition to an insect whose produce, it was
now plain, had been much overestimated. But this narrow-spirited motion
was negatived by the sweet-toothed majority. A complimentary deputation
to the Wasp was resolved on, and there was a confident hope that this
diplomatic measure would tell on the production of honey.
XII.
"SO YOUNG!"
Ganymede was once a girlishly handsome precocious youth. That one cannot
for any considerable number of years go on being youthful, girlishly
handsome, and precocious, seems on consideration to be a statement as
worthy of credit as the famous syllogistic conclusion, "Socrates was
mortal." But many circumstances have conspired to keep up in Ganymede
the illusion that he is surprisingly young. He was the last born of his
family, and from his earliest memory was accustomed to be commended as
such to the care of his elder brothers and sisters: he heard his mother
speak of him as her youngest darling with a loving pathos in her tone,
which naturally suffused his own view of himself, and gave him the
habitual consciousness of being at once very young and very interesting.
Then, the disclosure of his tender years was a constant matter of
astonishment to strangers who had had proof of his precocious talents,
and the astonishment extended to what is called the world at large when
he produced 'A Comparative Estimate of European Nations' before he was
well out of his teens. All comers, on a first interview, told him that
he was marvellously young, and some repeated the statement each time
they saw him; all critics who wrote about him called attention to the
same ground for wonder: his deficiencies and excesses were alike to be
accounted for by the flattering fact of his youth, and his youth was the
golden background which set off his many-hued endowments. Here was
already enough to establish a strong association between his sense of
identity and his sense of being unusually young. But after this he
devised and founded an ingenious organisation for consolidating the
literary interests of all the four continents (subsequently including
Australasia and Polynesia), he himself presiding in the central office,
which thus became a new theatre for the constantly repeated situation of
an astonished stranger in the presence of a boldly scheming
administrator found to be remarkably young. If we imagine with due
charity the effect on Ganymede, we shall think it greatly to his credit
that he continued to feel the necessity of being something more than
young, and did not sink by rapid degrees into a parallel of that
melancholy object, a superannuated youthful phenomenon. Happily he had
enough of valid, active faculty to save him from that tragic fate. He
had not exhausted his fountain of eloquent opinion in his 'Comparative
Estimate,' so as to feel himself, like some other juvenile celebrities,
the sad survivor of his own manifest destiny, or like one who has risen
too early in the morning, and finds all the solid day turned into a
fatigued afternoon. He has continued to be productive both of schemes
and writings, being perhaps helped by the fact that his 'Comparative
Estimate' did not greatly affect the currents of European thought, and
left him with the stimulating hope that he had not done his best, but
might yet produce what would make his youth more surprising than ever.
I saw something of him through his Antinoüs period, the time of rich
chesnut locks, parted not by a visible white line, but by a shadowed
furrow from which they fell in massive ripples to right and left. In
these slim days he looked the younger for being rather below the middle
size, and though at last one perceived him contracting an indefinable
air of self-consciousness, a slight exaggeration of the facial
movements, the attitudes, the little tricks, and the romance in
shirt-collars, which must be expected from one who, in spite of his
knowledge, was so exceedingly young, it was impossible to say that he
was making any great mistake about himself. He was only undergoing one
form of a common moral disease: being strongly mirrored for himself in
the remark of others, he was getting to see his real characteristics as
a dramatic part, a type to which his doings were always in
correspondence. Owing to my absence on travel and to other causes I had
lost sight of him for several years, but such a separation between two
who have not missed each other seems in this busy century only a
pleasant reason, when they happen to meet again in some old accustomed
haunt, for the one who has stayed at home to be more communicative about
himself than he can well be to those who have all along been in his
neighbourhood. He had married in the interval, and as if to keep up his
surprising youthfulness in all relations, he had taken a wife
considerably older than himself. It would probably have seemed to him a
disturbing inversion of the natural order that any one very near to him
should have been younger than he, except his own children who, however
young, would not necessarily hinder the normal surprise at the
youthfulness of their father. And if my glance had revealed my
impression on first seeing him again, he might have received a rather
disagreeable shock, which was far from my intention. My mind, having
retained a very exact image of his former appearance, took note of
unmistakeable changes such as a painter would certainly not have made by
way of flattering his subject. He had lost his slimness, and that curved
solidity which might have adorned a taller man was a rather sarcastic
threat to his short figure. The English branch of the Teutonic race does
not produce many fat youths, and I have even heard an American lady say
that she was much "disappointed" at the moderate number and size of our
fat men, considering their reputation in the United States; hence a
stranger would now have been apt to remark that Ganymede was unusually
plump for a distinguished writer, rather than unusually young. But how
was he to know this? Many long-standing prepossessions are as hard to be
corrected as a long-standing mispronunciation, against which the direct
experience of eye and ear is often powerless. And I could perceive that
Ganymede's inwrought sense of his surprising youthfulness had been
stronger than the superficial reckoning of his years and the merely
optical phenomena of the looking-glass. He now held a post under
Government, and not only saw, like most subordinate functionaries, how
ill everything was managed, but also what were the changes that a high
constructive ability would dictate; and in mentioning to me his own
speeches and other efforts towards propagating reformatory views in his
department, he concluded by changing his tone to a sentimental head
voice and saying--
"But I am so young; people object to any prominence on my part; I can
only get myself heard anonymously, and when some attention has been
drawn the name is sure to creep out. The writer is known to be young,
and things are none the forwarder."
"Well," said I, "youth seems the only drawback that is sure to diminish.
You and I have seven years less of it than when we last met."
"Ah?" returned Ganymede, as lightly as possible, at the same time
casting an observant glance over me, as if he were marking the effect of
seven years on a person who had probably begun life with an old look,
and even as an infant had given his countenance to that significant
doctrine, the transmigration of ancient souls into modern bodies.
I left him on that occasion without any melancholy forecast that his
illusion would be suddenly or painfully broken up. I saw that he was
well victualled and defended against a ten years' siege from ruthless
facts; and in the course of time observation convinced me that his
resistance received considerable aid from without. Each of his written
productions, as it came out, was still commented on as the work of a
very young man. One critic, finding that he wanted solidity, charitably
referred to his youth as an excuse. Another, dazzled by his brilliancy,
seemed to regard his youth as so wondrous that all other authors
appeared decrepit by comparison, and their style such as might be looked
for from gentlemen of the old school. Able pens (according to a familiar
metaphor) appeared to shake their heads good-humouredly, implying that
Ganymede's crudities were pardonable in one so exceedingly young. Such
unanimity amid diversity, which a distant posterity might take for
evidence that on the point of age at least there could have been no
mistake, was not really more difficult to account for than the
prevalence of cotton in our fabrics. Ganymede had been first introduced
into the writing world as remarkably young, and it was no exceptional
consequence that the first deposit of information about him held its
ground against facts which, however open to observation, were not
necessarily thought of. It is not so easy, with our rates and taxes and
need for economy in all directions, to cast away an epithet or remark
that turns up cheaply, and to go in expensive search after more genuine
substitutes. There is high Homeric precedent for keeping fast hold of an
epithet under all changes of circumstance, and so the precocious author
of the 'Comparative Estimate' heard the echoes repeating "Young
Ganymede" when an illiterate beholder at a railway station would have
given him forty years at least. Besides, important elders, sachems of
the clubs and public meetings, had a genuine opinion of him as young
enough to be checked for speech on subjects which they had spoken
mistakenly about when he was in his cradle; and then, the midway parting
of his crisp hair, not common among English committee-men, formed a
presumption against the ripeness of his judgment which nothing but a
speedy baldness could have removed.
It is but fair to mention all these outward confirmations of Ganymede's
illusion, which shows no signs of leaving him. It is true that he no
longer hears expressions of surprise at his youthfulness, on a first
introduction to an admiring reader; but this sort of external evidence
has become an unnecessary crutch to his habitual inward persuasion. His
manners, his costume, his suppositions of the impression he makes on
others, have all their former correspondence with the dramatic part of
the young genius. As to the incongruity of his contour and other little
accidents of physique, he is probably no more aware that they will
affect others as incongruities than Armida is conscious how much her
rouge provokes our notice of her wrinkles, and causes us to mention
sarcastically that motherly age which we should otherwise regard with
affectionate reverence.
But let us be just enough to admit that there may be old-young coxcombs
as well as old-young coquettes.
XIII.
HOW WE COME TO GIVE OURSELVES FALSE TESTIMONIALS, AND BELIEVE IN THEM.
It is my way when I observe any instance of folly, any queer habit, any
absurd illusion, straightway to look for something of the same type in
myself, feeling sure that amid all differences there will be a certain
correspondence; just as there is more or less correspondence in the
natural history even of continents widely apart, and of islands in
opposite zones. No doubt men's minds differ in what we may call their
climate or share of solar energy, and a feeling or tendency which is
comparable to a panther in one may have no more imposing aspect than
that of a weasel in another: some are like a tropical habitat in which
the very ferns cast a mighty shadow, and the grasses are a dry ocean in
which a hunter may be submerged; others like the chilly latitudes in
which your forest-tree, fit elsewhere to prop a mine, is a pretty
miniature suitable for fancy potting. The eccentric man might be
typified by the Australian fauna, refuting half our judicious
assumptions of what nature allows. Still, whether fate commanded us to
thatch our persons among the Eskimos or to choose the latest thing in
tattooing among the Polynesian isles, our precious guide Comparison
would teach us in the first place by likeness, and our clue to further
knowledge would be resemblance to what we already know. Hence, having a
keen interest in the natural history of my inward self, I pursue this
plan I have mentioned of using my observation as a clue or lantern by
which I detect small herbage or lurking life; or I take my neighbour in
his least becoming tricks or efforts as an opportunity for luminous
deduction concerning the figure the human genus makes in the specimen
which I myself furnish.
Introspection which starts with the purpose of finding out one's own
absurdities is not likely to be very mischievous, yet of course it is
not free from dangers any more than breathing is, or the other functions
that keep us alive and active. To judge of others by oneself is in its
most innocent meaning the briefest expression for our only method of
knowing mankind; yet, we perceive, it has come to mean in many cases
either the vulgar mistake which reduces every man's value to the very
low figure at which the valuer himself happens to stand; or else, the
amiable illusion of the higher nature misled by a too generous
construction of the lower. One cannot give a recipe for wise judgment:
it resembles appropriate muscular action, which is attained by the
myriad lessons in nicety of balance and of aim that only practice can
give. The danger of the inverse procedure, judging of self by what one
observes in others, if it is carried on with much impartiality and
keenness of discernment, is that it has a laming effect, enfeebling the
energies of indignation and scorn, which are the proper scourges of
wrong-doing and meanness, and which should continually feed the
wholesome restraining power of public opinion. I respect the horsewhip
when applied to the back of Cruelty, and think that he who applies it is
a more perfect human being because his outleap of indignation is not
checked by a too curious reflection on the nature of guilt--a more
perfect human being because he more completely incorporates the best
social life of the race, which can never be constituted by ideas that
nullify action. This is the essence of Dante's sentiment (it is painful
to think that he applies it very cruelly)--
"E cortesia fù, lui esser villano"[1]--
and it is undeniable that a too intense consciousness of one's kinship
with all frailties and vices undermines the active heroism which battles
against wrong.
But certainly nature has taken care that this danger should not at
present be very threatening. One could not fairly describe the
generality of one's neighbours as too lucidly aware of manifesting in
their own persons the weaknesses which they observe in the rest of her
Majesty's subjects; on the contrary, a hasty conclusion as to schemes of
Providence might lead to the supposition that one man was intended to
correct another by being most intolerant of the ugly quality or trick
which he himself possesses. Doubtless philosophers will be able to
explain how it must necessarily be so, but pending the full extension of
the _à priori_ method, which will show that only blockheads could expect
anything to be otherwise, it does seem surprising that Heloisa should be
disgusted at Laura's attempts to disguise her age, attempts which she
recognises so thoroughly because they enter into her own practice; that
Semper, who often responds at public dinners and proposes resolutions on
platforms, though he has a trying gestation of every speech and a bad
time for himself and others at every delivery, should yet remark
pitilessly on the folly of precisely the same course of action in
Ubique; that Aliquis, who lets no attack on himself pass unnoticed, and
for every handful of gravel against his windows sends a stone in reply,
should deplore the ill-advised retorts of Quispiam, who does not
perceive that to show oneself angry with an adversary is to gratify him.
To be unaware of our own little tricks of manner or our own mental
blemishes and excesses is a comprehensible unconsciousness; the puzzling
fact is that people should apparently take no account of their
deliberate actions, and should expect them to be equally ignored by
others. It is an inversion of the accepted order: _there_ it is the
phrases that are official and the conduct or privately manifested
sentiment that is taken to be real; _here_ it seems that the practice is
taken to be official and entirely nullified by the verbal representation
which contradicts it. The thief making a vow to heaven of full
restitution and whispering some reservations, expecting to cheat
Omniscience by an "aside," is hardly more ludicrous than the many ladies
and gentlemen who have more belief, and expect others to have it, in
their own statement about their habitual doings than in the
contradictory fact which is patent in the daylight. One reason of the
absurdity is that we are led by a tradition about ourselves, so that
long after a man has practically departed from a rule or principle, he
continues innocently to state it as a true description of his
practice--just as he has a long tradition that he is not an old
gentleman, and is startled when he is seventy at overhearing himself
called by an epithet which he has only applied to others.
[Footnote 1: Inferno, xxxii. 150.]
"A person with your tendency of constitution should take as little sugar
as possible," said Pilulus to Bovis somewhere in the darker decades of
this century. "It has made a great difference to Avis since he took my
advice in that matter: he used to consume half a pound a-day."
"God bless me!" cries Bovis. "I take very little sugar myself."
"Twenty-six large lumps every day of your life, Mr Bovis," says his
wife.
"No such thing!" exclaims Bovis.
"You drop them into your tea, coffee, and whisky yourself, my dear, and
I count them."
"Nonsense!" laughs Bovis, turning to Pilulus, that they may exchange a
glance of mutual amusement at a woman's inaccuracy.