The man who, in his progress through life, has listened with attention
to the conversation of human beings, who has carefully read the writings
of the best English authors, who has made himself well acquainted with
the history and usages of his native land, and who has meditated much on
all he has seen and read, must have been led to the firm conviction that
by VEAL those who speak the English language intend to denote the flesh
of calves, and that by a calf is intended an immature ox or cow. A calf
is a creature in a temporary and progressive stage of its being. It will
not always be a calf; if it live long enough, it will assuredly cease to
be a calf. And if impatient man, arresting the creature at that stage,
should consign it to the hands of him whose business it is to convert
the sentient animal into the impassive and unconscious meat, the
nutriment which the creature will afford will be nothing more than
immature beef. There may be many qualities of Veal; the calf which
yields it may die at very different stages in its physical and moral
development; but provided only it die as a calf,--provided only that its
meat can fitly be styled Veal,--_this_ will be characteristic of
it, that the meat shall be immature meat. It may be very good, very
nutritious and palatable; some people may like it better than Beef, and
may feed upon it with the liveliest satisfaction; but when it is fairly
and deliberately put to us, it must be admitted, even by such as like
Veal the best, that Veal is but an immature production of Nature. I take
Veal, therefore, as the emblem of IMMATURITY,--of that which is now in
a stage out of which it must grow,--of that which, as time goes on,
will grow older, will probably grow better, will certainly grow very
different. _That_ is what I mean by Veal.
And now, my reader and friend, you will discern the subject about which
I trust we are to have some pleasant and not unprofitable thought
together. You will readily believe that my subject is not that material
Veal which may be beheld and purchased in the butchers' shops. I am not
now to treat of its varied qualities, of the sustenance which it yields,
of the price at which it may be procured, or of the laws according to
which that price rises and falls. I am not going to take you to the
green fields in which the creature which yielded the Veal was fed, or to
discourse of the blossoming hawthorn hedges from whose midst it was reft
away. Neither shall I speak of the rustic life, the toils, cares, and
fancies of the farm-house near which it spent its brief lifetime. The
Veal of which I intend to speak is Moral Veal, or (to speak with
entire accuracy) Veal Intellectual, Moral, and Aesthetical. By Veal
I understand the immature productions of the human mind,--immature
compositions, immature opinions, feelings, and tastes. I wish to think
of the work, the views, the fancies, the emotions, which are yielded by
the human soul in its immature stages,--while the calf (so to speak)
is only growing into the ox,--while the clever boy, with his absurd
opinions and feverish feelings and fancies, is developing into the
mature and sober-minded man. And if I could but rightly set out the
thoughts which have at many different times occurred to me on this
matter, if one could catch and fix the vague glimpses and passing
intuitions of solid unchanging truth, if the subject on which one has
thought long and felt deeply were always that on which one could write
best, and could bring out to the sympathy of others what a man himself
has felt, what an excellent essay this would be! But it will not be so;
for, as I try to grasp the thoughts I would set out, they melt away and
elude me. It is like trying to catch and keep the rainbow hues you have
seen the sunshine cast upon the spray of a waterfall, when you try to
catch the tone, the thoughts, the feelings, the atmosphere of early
youth.
There can be no question at all as to the fact, that clever young men
and women, when their minds begin to open, when they begin to think for
themselves, do pass through a stage of mental development which they
by-and-by quite outgrow, and entertain opinions and beliefs, and
feel emotions, on which afterwards they look back with no sympathy or
approval. This is a fact as certain as that a calf grows into an ox, or
that veal, if spared to grow, will become beef. But no analogy between
the material and the moral must be pushed too far. There are points of
difference between material and moral Veal. A calf knows it is a calf.
It may think itself bigger and wiser than an ox, but it knows it is not
an ox. And if it be a reasonable calf, modest, and free from prejudice,
it is well aware that the joints it will yield after its demise will be
very different from those of the stately and well-consolidated ox which
ruminates in the rich pasture near it. But the human boy often thinks he
is a man, and even more than a man. He fancies that his mental stature
is as big and as solid as it will ever become. He fancies that his
mental productions--the poems and essays he writes, the political
and social views he forms, the moods of feeling with which he regards
things--are just what they may always be, just what they ought always to
be. If spared in this world, and if he be one of those whom years make
wiser, the day comes when he looks back with amazement and shame on
those early mental productions. He discerns now how immature, absurd,
and extravagant they were,--in brief, how Vealy. But at the time, he
had not the least idea that they were so. He had entire confidence in
himself,--not a misgiving as to his own ability and wisdom. You, clever
young student of eighteen years old, when you wrote your prize essay,
fancied that in thought and style it was very like Macaulay,--and not
Macaulay in that stage of Vealy brilliancy in which he wrote his essay
on Milton, not Macaulay the fairest and most promising of calves, but
Macaulay the stateliest and most beautiful of oxen. Well, read over your
essay now at thirty, and tell us what you think of it. And you, clever,
warm-hearted, enthusiastic young preacher of twenty-four, wrote your
sermon; it was very ingenious, very brilliant in style, and you never
thought but that it would be felt by mature-minded Christian people as
suiting their case, as true to their inmost experience. You could not
see why you might not preach as well as a man of forty. And if people in
middle age had complained, that, eloquent as your preaching was, they
found it suited them better and profited them more to listen to the
plainer instructions of some good man with gray hair, you would not have
understood their feeling, and you might perhaps have attributed it to
many motives rather than the true one. But now at five-and-thirty,
find out the yellow manuscript, and read it carefully over; and I will
venture to say, that, if you were a really clever and eloquent young
man, writing in an ambitious and rhetorical style, and prompted to do
so by the spontaneous fervor of your heart and readiness of your
imagination, you will feel now little sympathy even with the literary
style of that early composition,--you will see extravagance and
bombast, where once you saw only eloquence and graphic power. And as for
the graver and more important matter of the thought of the discourse,
I think you will be aware of a certain undefinable shallowness and
crudity. Your growing experience has borne you beyond it. Somehow you
feel it does not come home to you, and suit you as you would wish it
should. It will not do. That old sermon you cannot preach now, till you
have entirely recast and rewritten it. But you had no such notion when
you wrote the sermon. You were satisfied with it. You thought it even
better than the discourses of men as clever as yourself, and ten or
fifteen years older. Your case was as though the youthful calf should
walk beside the sturdy ox, and think itself rather bigger.
Let no clever young reader fancy, from what has been said, that I
am about to make an onslaught upon clever young men. I remember too
distinctly how bitter, and indeed ferocious, I used to feel, about
eleven or twelve years ago, when I heard men of more than middle age and
less than middling ability speak with contemptuous depreciation of the
productions and doings of men considerably their juniors, and vastly
their superiors,--describing them as _boys_, and as _clever lads_, with
looks of dark malignity. There are few more disgusting sights than
the envy and jealousy of their juniors, which may be seen in various
malicious, commonplace old men; as there is hardly a more beautiful and
pleasing sight than the old man hailing and counselling and encouraging
the youthful genius which he knows far surpasses his own. And I, my
young friend of two-and-twenty, who, relatively to you, may be regarded
as old, am going to assume no preposterous airs of superiority. I do not
claim to be a bit wiser than you; all I claim is to be older. I have
outgrown your stage; but I was once such as you, and all my sympathies
are with you yet. But it is a difficulty in the way of the essayist,
and, indeed, of all who set out opinions which they wish to be received
and acted on by their fellow-creatures, that they seem, by the very act
of offering advice to others, to claim to be wiser and better than those
whom they advise. But in reality it is not so. The opinions of the
essayist or of the preacher, if deserving of notice at all, are so
because of their inherent truth, and not because he expresses them.
Estimate them for yourself, and give them the weight which you think
their due. And be sure of this, that the writer, if earnest and sincere,
addressed all he said to himself as much as to any one else. This is the
thing which redeems all didactic writing or speaking from the charge of
offensive assumption and self-assertion. It is not for the preacher,
whether of moral or religious truth, to address his fellows as outside
sinners, worse than himself, and needing to be reminded of that of which
he does not need to be reminded. No, the earnest preacher preaches to
himself as much as to any in the congregation; it is from the picture
ever before him in his own weak and wayward heart that he learns to
reach and describe the hearts of others, if, indeed, he do so at all.
And it is the same with lesser things.
It is curious and it is instructive to remark how heartily men, as they
grow towards middle age, despise themselves as they were a few years
since. It is a bitter thing for a man to confess that he is a fool; but
it costs little effort to declare that he was a fool, a good while ago.
Indeed, a tacit compliment to his present self is involved in the latter
confession: it suggests the reflection, what progress he has made, and
how vastly he has improved, since then. When a man informs us that he
was a very silly fellow in the year 1851, it is assumed that he is not a
very silly fellow in the year 1861. It is as when the merchant with ten
thousand a year, sitting at his sumptuous table, and sipping his '41
claret, tells you how, when he came as a raw lad from the country, he
used often to have to go without his dinner. He knows that the plate,
the wine, the massively elegant apartment, the silent servants, so
alert, yet so impassive, will appear to join in chorus with the obvious
suggestion, "You see he has not to go without his dinner now!" Did you
ever, when twenty years old, look back at the diary you kept when
you were sixteen,--or when twenty-five, at the diary you kept when
twenty,--or at thirty, at the diary you kept when twenty-five? Was not
your feeling a singular mixture of humiliation and self-complacency?
What extravagant, silly stuff it seemed that you had thus written five
years before! What Veal! and, oh, what a calf he must have been who
wrote it! It is a difficult question, to which the answer cannot be
elicited, Who is the greatest fool in this world? But every candid and
sensible man of middle age knows thoroughly well the answer to the
question, Who was the greatest fool that he himself ever knew? And after
all, it is your diary, especially if you were wont to introduce into it
poetical remarks and moral reflections, that will mainly help you to
the humiliating conclusion. Other things, some of which I have already
named, will point in the same direction. Look at the prize essays you
wrote when you were a boy at school; look even at your earlier prize
essays written at college (though of these last I have something to say
hereafter); look at the letters you wrote home when away at school or
even at college, especially if you were a clever boy, trying to write
in a graphic and witty fashion; and if you have reached sense at last,
(which some, it may be remarked, never do,) I think you will blush even
through the unblushing front of manhood, and think what a terrific,
unutterable, conceited, intolerable blockhead you were. It is not till
people attain somewhat mature years that they can rightly understand
the wonderful forbearance their parents must have shown in listening
patiently to the frightful nonsense they talked and wrote. I have
already spoken of sermons. If you go early into the Church, say at
twenty-three or twenty-four, and write sermons regularly and diligently,
you know what landmarks they will be of your mental progress. The first
runnings of the stream are turbid, but it clears itself into sense and
taste month by month and year by year. You wrote many sermons in your
first year or two; you preached them with entire confidence in them,
and they did really keep up the attention of the congregation in a
remarkable way. You accumulate in a box a store of that valuable
literature and theology, and when by-and-by you go to another parish,
you have a comfortable feeling that you have a capital stock to go on
with. You think that any Monday morning, when you have the prospect of
a very busy week, or when you feel very weary, you may resolve that you
shall write no sermon that week, but just go and draw forth one from the
box. I have already said what you will probably find, even if you draw
forth a discourse which cost much labor. You cannot use it as it stands.
Possibly it may be structural and essential Veal: the whole framework of
thought may be immature. Possibly it may be Veal only in style; and by
cutting out a turgid sentence here and there, and, above all, by cutting
out all the passages which you thought particularly eloquent, the
discourse may do yet. But even then you cannot give it with much
confidence. Your mind can yield something better than that now. I
imagine how a fine old orange-tree, that bears oranges with the thinnest
possible skin and with no pips, juicy and rich, might feel that it has
outgrown the fruit of its first years, when the skin was half an inch
thick, the pips innumerable, and the eatable portion small and poor. It
is with a feeling such as _that_ that you read over your early
sermon. Still, mingling with the sense of shame, there is a certain
satisfaction. You have not been standing still; you have been getting
on. And we always like to think _that_.
What is it that makes intellectual Veal? What are the things about a
composition which stamp it as such? Well, it is a certain character in
thought and style hard to define, but strongly felt by such as discern
its presence at all. It is strongly felt by professors reading the
compositions of their students, especially the compositions of the
cleverest students. It is strongly felt by educated folk of middle age,
in listening to the sermons of young pulpit orators, especially of
such as think for themselves, of such as aim at a high standard of
excellence, of such as have in them the makings of striking and eloquent
preachers. Dull and stupid fellows never deviate into the extravagance
and absurdity which I specially understand by Veal. They plod along in
a humdrum manner; there is no poetry in their soul,--none of those
ambitious stirrings which lead the man who has in him the true spark of
genius to try for grand things and incur severe and ignominious tumbles.
A heavy dray-horse, walking along the road, may possibly advance at a
very lagging pace, or may even stand still; but whatever he may do, he
is not likely to jump violently over the hedge, or to gallop off at
twenty-five miles an hour. It must be a thoroughbred who will go wrong
in that grand fashion. And there are intellectual absurdities and
extravagances which hold out hopeful promise of noble doings yet: the
eagle, which will breast the hurricane yet, may meet various awkward
tumbles before he learns the fashion in which to use those iron wings.
But the substantial goose, which probably escapes those tumbles in
trying to fly, will never do anything very magnificent in the way of
flying. The man who in his early days writes in a very inflated and
bombastic style will gradually sober down into good sense and accurate
taste, still retaining something of liveliness and eloquence. But expect
little of the man who as a boy was always sensible, and never bombastic.
He will grow awfully dry. He is sure to fall into the unpardonable sin
of tiresomeness. The rule has exceptions; but the earliest productions
of a man of real genius are almost always crude, flippant, and
affectedly smart, or else turgid and extravagant in a high degree.
Witness Mr. Disraeli; witness Sir E.B. Lytton; witness even Macaulay.
The man who as mere boy writes something very sound and sensible will
probably never become more than a dull, sensible, commonplace man.
Many people can say, as they bethink themselves of their old college
companions, that those who wrote with good sense and good taste at
twenty have mostly settled down into the dullest and baldest of prosers;
while such as dealt in bombastic flourishes and absurd ambitiousness of
style have learned, as time went on, to prune their early luxuriances,
while still retaining something of raciness, interest, and ornament.
I have been speaking very generally of the characteristics of Veal in
composition. It is difficult to give any accurate description of it that
shall go into minuter details. Of course it is easy to think of little
external marks of the beast,--that is, the calf. It is Veal in style,
when people, writing prose, think it a fine thing to write _o'er_
instead of _over_, _ne'er_ instead of _never_, _poesie_ instead of
_poetry_, and _methinks_ under any circumstances whatsoever. References
to the heart are generally of the nature of Veal; also allusions to the
mysterious throbbings and yearnings of our nature. The word _grand_ has
of late come to excite a strong suspicion of Veal; and when I read the
other day in a certain poem something about a _great grand man_, I
concluded that the writer of that poem was meanwhile a great grand calf.
The only case in which the words may properly be used together is in
speaking of your great-grandfather. To talk about _mine_ affections,
meaning _my_ affections, is Veal; and _mine bonnie love_ was decided
Veal, though it was written by Charlotte Bronté. _Wife mine_ is Veal,
though it stands in "The Caxtons." I should rather like to see the man
who in actual life is accustomed to address his spouse in that fashion.
To say _Not, oh, never_ shall we do so and so is outrageous Veal.
_Sylvan grove_ or _sylvan vale_ in ordinary conversation is Veal. The
word _glorious_ should be used with caution; when applied to trees,
mountains, or the like, there is a strong suspicion of Veal about it.
But one feels that in saying these things we are not getting at the
essence of Veal. Veal in thought is essential Veal, and it is very hard
to define. Beyond extravagant language, beyond absurd fine things, it
lies in a certain lack of reality and sobriety of sense and view,--in a
certain indefinable jejuneness in the mental fare provided, which makes
mature men feel that somehow it does not satisfy their cravings. You
know what I mean better than I can express it. You have seen and heard
a young preacher, with a rosy face and an unlined brow, preaching about
the cares and trials of life. Well, you just feel at once he knows
nothing about them. You feel that all this is at second-hand. He is
saying all this because he supposes it is the right thing to say. Give
me the pilot to direct me who has sailed through the difficult channel
many a time himself. Give me the friend to sympathize with me in sorrow
who has felt the like. There is a hollowness, a certain want, in the
talk about much tribulation of the very cleverest man who has never felt
any great sorrow at all. The great force and value of all teaching lie
in the amount of personal experience which is embodied in it. You feel
the difference between the production of a wonderfully clever boy and of
a mature man, when you read the first canto of "Childe Harold," and then
read "Philip van Artevelde." I do not say but that the boy's production
may have a liveliness and interest beyond the man's. Veal is in certain
respects superior to Beef, though Beef is best on the whole. I have
heard Vealy preachers whose sermons kept up breathless attention. From
the first word to the last of a sermon which was unquestionable Veal, I
have witnessed an entire congregation listen with that audible hush you
know. It was very different, indeed, from the state of matters when a
humdrum old gentleman was preaching, every word spoken by whom was the
maturest sense, expressed in words to which the most fastidious taste
could have taken no exception; but then the whole thing was sleepy: it
was a terrible effort to attend. In the case of the Veal there was no
effort at all. I defy you to help attending. But then you sat in pain.
Every second sentence there was some outrageous offence against good
taste; every third statement was absurd, or overdrawn, or almost
profane. You felt occasional thrills of pure disgust and horror, and you
were in terror what might come next. One thing which tended to carry all
this off was the manifest confidence and earnestness of the speaker.
_He_ did not think it Veal that he was saying. And though great
consternation was depicted on the faces of some of the better-educated
people in church, you could see that a very considerable part of the
congregation did not think it Veal either. There can be no doubt, my
middle-aged friend, if you could but give your early sermons now with
the confidence and fire of the time when you wrote them, they would make
a deep impression on many people yet. But it is simply impossible for
you to give them; and if you should force yourself some rainy Sunday to
preach one of them, you would give it with such a sense of its errors,
and with such an absence of corresponding feeling, that it would fall
very flat and dead. Your views are maturing; your taste is growing
fastidious; the strong things you once said you could not bring yourself
to say now. If you _could_ preach those old sermons, there is no doubt
they would go down with the mass of uncultivated folk,--go down better
than your mature and reasonable ones. We have all known such cases as
that of a young preacher who, at twenty-five, in his days of Veal, drew
great crowds to the church at which he preached, and who at thirty-five,
being a good deal tamed and sobered, and in the judgment of competent
judges vastly improved, attracted no more than a respectable
congregation. A very great and eloquent preacher lately lamented to me
the uselessness of his store of early discourses. If he could but get
rid of his present standard of what is right and good in thought and
language, and preach them with the enchaining fire with which he
preached them once! For many hearers remain immature, though the
preacher has matured. Young people are growing up, and there are people
whose taste never ripens beyond the enjoyment of Veal. There is a period
in the mental development of those who will be ablest and maturest, at
which Vealy thought and language are accepted as the best. Veal will be
highly appreciated by sympathetic calves; and the greatest men, with
rare exceptions, are calves in youth, while many human beings are calves
forever. And here I may remark, as something which has afforded me
consolation on various occasions within the last year, that it seems
unquestionable that sermons which are utterly revolting to people of
taste and sense have done much good to large masses of those people in
whom common sense is most imperfectly developed, and in whom taste is
not developed at all; and accordingly, wherever one is convinced of the
sincerity of the individuals, however foolish and uneducated, who go
about pouring forth those violent, exaggerated, and all but blasphemous
discourses of which I have read accounts in the newspapers, one would
humbly hope that a Power which works by many means would bring about
good even through an instrumentality which it is hard to contemplate
without some measure of horror. The impression produced by most things
in this world is relative to the minds on which the impression is
produced. A coarse ballad, deficient in rhyme and rhythm, and only half
decent, will keep up the attention of a rustic group to whom you might
read from "In Memoriam" in vain. A waistcoat of glaring scarlet will be
esteemed by a country bumpkin a garment every way preferable to one of
aspect more subdued. A nigger melody will charm many a one who would
yawn at Beethoven. You must have rough means to move rough people.
The outrageous revival-orator may do good to people to whom Bishop
Wilberforce or Dr. Caird might preach to no purpose; and if real good be
done, by whatever means, all right-minded people should rejoice to hear
of it.
* * * * *
And this leads to an important practical question, on which men at
different periods of life will never agree. _When_ shall thought be
regarded as mature? Is there a standard by which we may ascertain beyond
question whether a composition be Veal or Beef? I sigh for fixity and
assurance in matters aesthetical. It is vexatious that what I think very
good my friend Smith thinks very bad. It is vexatious that what strikes
me as supreme and unapproachable excellence strikes another person, at
least as competent to form an opinion, as poor. And I am angry with
myself when I feel that I honestly regard as inflated commonplace and
mystical jargon what a man as old and (let us say) nearly as wise
as myself thinks the utterance of a prophet. You know how, when
you contemplate the purchase of a horse, you lead him up to the
measuring-bar, and there ascertain the precise number of hands and
inches which he stands. How have I longed for the means of subjecting
the mental stature of human beings to an analogous process of
measurement! Oh for some recognized and unerring gauge of mental
calibre! It would be a grand thing, if somewhere in a very conspicuous
position--say on the site of the National Gallery at Charing
Cross--there were a pillar erected, graduated by some new Fahrenheit,
on which we could measure the height of a man's mind. How delightful it
would be to drag up some pompous pretender who passes off at once upon
himself and others as a profound and able man, and make him measure his
height upon that pillar, and understand beyond all cavil what a pigmy
he is! And how pleasant, too, it would be to bring up some man of
unacknowledged genius, and make the world see the reach of _his_
intellectual stature! The mass of educated people, even, are so
incapable of forming any estimate of a man's ability, that it would be
a blessing, if men could be sent out into the world with the stamp upon
them, telling what are their weight and value, plain for every one to
see. But of course there are many ways in which a book, sermon, or essay
may be bad without being Vealy. It may be dull, stupid, illogical,
and the like, and yet have nothing of boyishness about it. It may be
insufferably bad, yet quite mature. Beef may be bad, and yet undoubtedly
Beef. And the question now is, not so much whether there be a standard
of what is in a literary sense good or bad, as whether there be a
standard of what is Veal and what is Beef. And there is a great
difficulty here. Is a thing to be regarded as mature, when it suits your
present taste, when it is approved by your present deliberate judgment?
For your taste is always changing: your standard is not the same for
three successive years of your early youth. The Veal you now despise you
thought Beef when you wrote it. And so, too, with the productions of
other men. You cannot read now without amazement the books which used
to enchant you as a child. I remember when I used to read Hervey's
"Meditations" with great delight. That was when I was about five years
old. A year or two later I greatly affected Macpherson's translation of
Ossian. It is not so very long since I felt the liveliest interest in
Tupper's "Proverbial Philosophy." Let me confess that I retain a kindly
feeling towards it yet; and that I am glad to see that some hundreds
of thousands of readers appear to be still in the stage out of which I
passed some years since. Yes, as you grow older, your taste changes: it
becomes more fastidious; and especially you come to have always less
toleration for sentimental feeling and for flights of fancy. And besides
this gradual and constant progression, which holds on uniformly year
after year, there are changes in mood and taste sometimes from day to
day and from hour to hour. The man who did a very silly thing thought
it was a wise thing when he did it. He sees the matter differently in a
little while. On the evening after the Battle of Waterloo, the Duke of
Wellington wrote a certain letter. History does not record its matter or
style. But history does record, that some years afterwards the Duke paid
a hundred guineas to get it back again,--and that, on getting it, he
instantly burned it, exclaiming, that, when he wrote it, he must have
been the greatest idiot on the face of the earth. Doubtless, if we had
seen that letter, we should have heartily coincided in the sentiment of
the hero. He _was_ an idiot when he wrote it, but he did not think that
he was one. I think, however, that there is a standard of sense and
folly, and that there is a point at which Veal is Veal no more. But I do
not believe that thought can justly be called mature only when it has
become such as to suit the taste of some desperately dry old gentleman,
with as much feeling as a log of wood, and as much imagination as an
oyster. I know how intolerant some dull old fogies are of youthful
fire and fancy. I shall not be convinced that any discourse is puerile
because it is pronounced such by the venerable Dr. Dryasdust. I remember
that the venerable man has written many pages, possibly abundant in
sound sense, but which no mortal could read, and to which no mortal
could listen. I remember, that, though that not very amiable individual
has outlived such wits as he once had, he has not outlived the
unbecoming emotions of envy and jealousy; and he retains a strong
tendency to evil-speaking and slandering. You told me, unamiable
individual, how disgusted you were at hearing a friend of mine, who is
one of the best preachers in Britain, preach one of his finest sermons.
Perhaps you really were disgusted: there is such a thing as casting
pearls before swine, who will not appreciate them highly. But you went
on to give an account of what the great preacher said; and though I
know you are extremely stupid, you are not quite so stupid as to have
actually fancied that the great preacher said what you reported that he
said: you were well aware that you were grossly misrepresenting him. And
when I find malice and insincerity in one respect, I am ready to suspect
them in another: and I venture to doubt whether you were disgusted.
Possibly you were only ferocious at finding yourself so unspeakably
excelled. But even if you had been really disgusted, and even if you
were a clever man, and even if you were above the suspicion of jealousy,
I should not think that my friend's noble discourse was puerile because
you thought it so. It is not when the warm feelings of earlier days are
dried up into a cold, time-worn cynicism, that I think a man has become
the best judge of the products of the human brain and heart. It is
a noble thing when a man grows old retaining something of youthful
freshness and fervor. It is a fine thing to ripen without shrivelling,--
to reach the calmness of age, yet keep the warm heart and ready sympathy
of youth. Show me such a man as _that_, and I shall be content to bow to
_his_ decision whether a thing be Veal or not. But as such men are not
found very frequently, I should suggest it as an approximation to a
safe criterion, that a thing may be regarded as mature when it is
deliberately and dispassionately approved by an educated man of good
ability and above thirty years of age. No doubt a man of fifty may
hold that fifty is the age of sound taste and sense; and a youth of
twenty-three may maintain that he is as good a judge of human doings
now as he will ever be. I do not claim to have proposed an infallible
standard. I give you my present belief, being well aware that it is very
likely to alter.
It is not desirable that one's taste should become too fastidious, or
that natural feeling should be refined away. And a cynical young man is
bad, but a cynical old one is a great deal worse. The cynical young
man is probably shamming; he is a humbug, not a cynic. But the old man
probably _is_ a cynic, as heartless as he seems. And without thinking
of cynicism, real or affected, let us remember, that, though the taste
ought to be refined, and daily refining, it ought not to be refined
beyond being practically serviceable. Let things be good, but not too
good to be workable. It is expedient that a cart for conveying coals
should be of neat and decent appearance. Let the shafts be symmetrical,
the boards well-planed, the whole strong, yet not clumsy; and over the
whole let the painter's skill induce a hue rosy as beauty's cheek, or
dark-blue as her eye. All _that_ is well; and while the cart will carry
its coals satisfactorily, it will stand a good deal of rough usage, and
it will please the eye of the rustic who sits in it on an empty sack and
whistles as it moves along. But it would be highly inexpedient to make
that cart of walnut of the finest grain and marking, and to have it
French-polished. It would be too fine to be of use; and its possessor
would fear to scratch it, and would preserve it as a show, seeking some
plainer vehicle to carry his coals. In like manner, do not refine too
much either the products of the mind, or the sensibilities of the taste
which is to appreciate them. I know an amiable professor very different
from Dr. Dryasdust. He was a country clergyman,--a very interesting
plain preacher. But when he got his chair, he had to preach a good deal
in the college chapel; and by way of accommodating his discourses to an
academic audience, he rewrote them carefully, rubbed off all the salient
points, cooled down whatever warmth was in them to frigid accuracy,
toned down everything striking. The result was that his sermons became
eminently classical and elegant; only they became impossible to attend
to, and impossible to remember; and when you heard the good man preach,
you sighed for the rough and striking heartiness of former days. And
we have all heard of such a thing as taste refined to that painful
sensitiveness, that it became a source of torment,--that is, unfitted
for common enjoyments and even for common duties. There was once a great
man, let us say at Melipotamus, who never went to church. A clergyman
once, in speaking to a friend of the great man, lamented that the great
man set so bad an example before his humbler neighbors. "How _can_ that
man go to church?" was the reply; "his taste, and his entire critical
faculty, are sharpened, to that degree, that, in listening to any
ordinary preacher, he feels outraged and shocked at every fourth
sentence he hears, by its inelegance or its want of logic; and the
entire sermon torments him by its unsymmetrical structure, its want of
perspective in the presentment of details, and its general literary
badness." I quite believe that there was a moderate proportion of truth
in the excuse thus urged; and you will probably judge that it would have
been better, had the great man's mind not been brought to so painful a
polish.
The mention of dried-up old gentlemen reminds one of a question which
has sometimes perplexed me. Is it Vealy to feel or to show keen emotion?
Is it a precious result and indication of the maturity of the human mind
to look as if you felt nothing at all? I have often looked with wonder,
and with a moderate amount of veneration, at a few old gentlemen whom I
know well, who are leading members of a certain legislative and judicial
council held in great respect in a country of which no more need be
said. I have beheld these old gentlemen sitting apparently quite
unmoved, when discussions were going on in which I knew they felt a very
deep interest, and when the tide of debate was setting strongly against
their peculiar views. There they sat, impassive as a Red Indian at the
stake. I think of a certain man who, while a smart speech on the other
side is being made, retains a countenance expressing actually nothing;
he looks as if he heard nothing, felt nothing, cared for nothing. But
when the other man sits down, he rises to reply. He speaks slowly at
first, but every weighty word goes home and tells: he gathers warmth and
rapidity as he goes on, and in a little you become aware that for a few
hundred pounds a year you may sometimes get a man who would have made
an Attorney-General or a Lord-Chancellor; you discern, that, under
the appearance of almost stolidity, there was the sharpest attention
watching every word of the argument of the other speaker, and ready to
come down on every weak point in it; and the other speaker is (in a
logical sense) pounded to jelly by a succession of straight-handed hits.
Yes, it is a wonderful thing to find a combination of coolness and
earnestness. But I am inclined to believe that the reason why some old
gentlemen look as if they did not care is that in fact they don't care.
And there is no particular merit in looking cool while a question is
being discussed, if you really do not mind a rush which way it may be
decided. A keen, unvarying, engrossing regard for one's self is a great
safeguard against over-excitement in regard to all the questions of the
day, political, social, and religious.
* * * * *
It is a curious, but certain fact, that clever young men, at that period
of their life when their own likings tend towards Veal, know quite
well the difference between Veal and Beef, and are quite able, when
necessary, to produce the latter. The tendency to boyishness of thought
and style may be repressed, when you know you are writing for the
perusal of readers with whom _that_ will not go down. A student of
twenty, who has in him great talent, no matter how undue a supremacy his
imagination may meanwhile have, if he be set to producing an essay in
Metaphysics to be read by professors of philosophy, will produce a
composition singularly free from any trace of immaturity. For such a
clever youth, though he may have a strong bent towards Veal, has in him
an instinctive perception that it _is_ Veal, and a keen sense of what
will and will not do for the particular readers he has to please. Go,
you essayist who carried off a host of university honors, and read over
now the prize essays you wrote at twenty-one or twenty-two. I think
the thing that will mainly strike you will be, how very mature these
compositions are,--how ingenious, how judicious, how free from
extravagance, how quietly and accurately and even felicitously
expressed. _They_ are not Veal. And yet you know that several years
after you wrote them you were still writing a great deal which was Veal
beyond all question. But then a clever youth can produce material to any
given standard; and you wrote the essays not to suit your own taste, but
to suit what you intuitively knew was the taste of the grave and even
smoke-dried professors who were to read them and sit in judgment on
them.
And though it is very fit and right that the academic standard should be
an understood one, and quite different from the popular standard, still
it is not enough that a young man should be able to write to a standard
against which he in his heart rebels and protests. It is yet more
important that you should get him to approve and adopt a standard which
is accurate, if not severe. It is quite extraordinary what bombastic
and immature sermons are preached in their first years in the Church by
young clergymen who wrote many academic compositions in a style the
most classical. It seems to be essential that a man of feeling and
imagination should be allowed fairly to run himself out. The course
apparently is, that the tree should send out its rank shoots, and then
that you should prune them, rather than that by some repressive means
you should prevent the rank shoots coming forth at all. The way to get a
high-spirited horse to be content to stay peaceably in its stall is to
allow it to have a tearing gallop, and thus get out its superfluous
nervous excitement and vital spirit. Let the boiler blow off its steam.
All repression is dangerous. And some injudicious folk, instead of
encouraging the highly-charged mind and heart to relieve themselves
by blowing off in excited verse and extravagant bombast, would (so to
speak) sit on the safety-valve. Let the bursting spring flow! It will
run turbid at first; but it will clear itself day by day. Let a young
man write a vast deal: the more he writes, the sooner will the Veal be
done with. But if a man write very little, the bombast is not blown off;
and it may remain till advanced years. It seems as if a certain quantity
of fustian must be blown off before you reach the good material. I have
heard a mercantile man of fifty read a paper he had written on a social
subject. He had written very little save business letters all his life.
And I assure you that his paper was bombastic to a degree that you would
have said was barely tolerable in a youth of twenty. I have seldom
listened to Veal so outrageous. You see he had not worked through it in
his youth; and so here it was now. I have witnessed the like phenomenon
in a man who went into the Church at five-and-forty. I heard him preach
one of his earliest sermons, and I have hardly ever heard such boyish
rhodomontade. The imaginations of some men last out in liveliness longer
than those of others; and the taste of some men never becomes perfect;
and it is no doubt owing to these things that you find some men
producing Veal so much later in life than others. You will find men who
are very turgid and magniloquent at five-and-thirty, at forty, at fifty.
But I attribute the phenomenon in no small measure to the fact that such
men had not the opportunity of blowing off their steam in youth. Give
a man at four-and-twenty two sermons to write a week, and he will
very soon work through his Veal. It is probably because ladies write
comparatively so little, that you find them writing at fifty poetry and
prose of the most awfully romantic and sentimental strain.
* * * * *
We have been thinking, my friend, as you have doubtless observed, almost
exclusively of intellectual and aesthetical immaturity, and of its
products in composition, spoken or written. But combining with that
immaturity, and going very much to affect the character of that Veal,
there is moral immaturity, resulting in views, feelings, and conduct
which may be described as Moral Veal. But, indeed, it is very difficult
to distinguish between the different kinds of immaturity, and to say
exactly what in the moods and doings of youth proceeds from each. It is
safest to rest in the general proposition, that, even as the calf yields
Veal, so does the immature human mind yield immature productions. It
is a stage which you outgrow, and therefore a stage of comparative
immaturity, in which you read a vast deal of poetry, and repeat much
poetry to yourself when alone, working yourself up thereby to an
enthusiastic excitement. And very like a calf you look, when some one
suddenly enters the room in which you are wildly gesticulating or
moodily laughing, and thinking yourself poetical, and, indeed, sublime.
The person probably takes you for a fool; and the best, you can say for
yourself is that you are not so great a fool as you seem to be. Vealy is
the period of life in which you filled a great volume with the verses
you loved, and in which you stored your memory, by frequent reading,
with many thousands of lines. All that you outgrow. Fancy a man of fifty
having his commonplace book of poetry! And it will be instructive to
turn over the ancient volume, and to see how year by year the verses
copied grew fewer, and finally ceased entirely. I do not say that all
growth is progress: sometimes it is like that of the muscle, which once
advanced into manly vigor and usefulness, but is now ossifying into
rigidity. It is well to have fancy and feeling under command: it is not
well to have feeling and fancy dead. That season of life is Vealy in
which you are charmed by the melody of verse, quite apart from its
meaning. And there is a season in which that is so. And it is curious
to remark what verses they are that have charmed many men; for they are
often verses in which no one else could have discerned that singular
fascination. You may remember how Robert Burns has recorded that in
youth he was enchanted by the melody of two lines of Addison's,--
"For though in dreadful whirls we hung,
High on the broken wave."
Sir Walter Scott felt the like fascination in youth (and he tells us it
was not entirely gone even in age) in Mickle's stanza,--
"The dews of summer night did fall;
The moon, sweet regent of the sky,
Silvered the walls of Cumnor Hall,
And many an oak that grew thereby."
Not a remarkable verse, I think. However, it at least presents a
pleasant picture. But I remember well the enchantment which, when
twelve years old, I felt in a verse by Mrs. Hemans, which I can now see
presents an excessively disagreeable picture. I saw it not then; and
when I used to repeat that verse, I know it was without the slightest
perception of its meaning. You know the beautiful poem called the
"Battle of Morgarten." At least I remember it as beautiful; and I am not
going to spoil my recollection by reading it now. Here is the verse:--
"Oh! the sun in heaven fierce havoc viewed,
When the Austrian turned to fly:
And the brave, in the trampling multitude,
Had a fearful death to die!"
As I write that verse, (at which the critical reader will smile,) I am
aware that Veal has its hold of me yet. I see nothing of the miserable
scene the poet describes; but I hear the waves murmuring on a distant
beach, and I see the hills across the sea, the first sea I ever beheld;
I see the school to which I went daily; I see the class-room, and the
place where I used to sit; I see the faces and hear the voices of my old
companions, some dead, one sleeping in the middle of the great Atlantic,
many scattered over distant parts of the world, almost all far away.
Yes, I feel that I have not quite cast off the witchery of the "Battle
of Morgarten." Early associations can give to verse a charm and a hold
upon one's heart which no literary excellence, however high, ever could.
Look at the first hymns you learned to repeat, and which you used to say
at your mother's knee; look at the psalms and hymns you remember hearing
sung at church when you were a child: you know how impossible it is for
you to estimate these upon their literary merits. They may be almost
doggerel; but not Mr. Tennyson can touch you like them! The most
effective eloquence is that which is mainly done by the mind to which
it is addressed: it is _that_ which touches chords which of themselves
yield matchless music; it is _that_ which wakens up trains of old
remembrance, and which wafts around you the fragrance of the hawthorn
that blossomed and withered many long years since. An English stranger
would not think much of the hymns we sing in our Scotch churches: he
could not know what many of them are to us. There is a magic about
the words. I can discern, indeed, that some of them are mawkish in
sentiment, faulty in rhyme, and, on the whole, what you would call
extremely unfitted to be sung in public worship, if you were judging of
them as new things: but a crowd of associations which are beautiful and
touching gathers round the lines which have no great beauty or pathos in
themselves.
You were in an extremely Vealy condition, when, having attained the age
of fourteen, you sent some verses to the county newspaper, and with
simple-hearted elation read them in the corner devoted to what was
termed "Original Poetry." It is a pity you did not preserve the
newspapers in which you first saw yourself in print, and experienced the
peculiar sensation which accompanies that sight. No doubt your
verses expressed the gloomiest views of life, and told of the bitter
disappointments you had met in your long intercourse with mankind, and
especially with womankind. And though you were in a flutter of anxiety
and excitement to see whether or not your verses would be printed, your
verses probably declared that you had used up life and seen through
it,--that your heart was no longer to be stirred by aught on earth,--and
that, in short, you cared nothing for anything. You could see nothing
fine then in being good, cheerful, and happy; but you thought it a grand
thing to be a gloomy man, of a very dark complexion, with blood on your
conscience, upwards of six feet high, and accustomed to wander from land
to land, like Childe Harold. You were extremely Vealy when you used to
fancy that you were sure to be a very great man, and to think how proud
your relations would some day be of you, and how you would come back and
excite a great commotion at the place where you used to be a school-boy.
And it is because the world has still left some impressionable spot in
your hearts, my readers, that you still have so many fond associations
with "the school-boy spot we ne'er forget, though we are there
forgot." They were Vealy days, though pleasant to remember, my old
school-companions, in which you used to go to the dancing-school, (it
was in a gloomy theatre, seldom entered by actors,) in which you fell
in love with several young ladies about eleven years old, and (being
permitted occasionally to select your own partners) made frantic rushes
to obtain the hand of one of the beauties of that small society. Those
were the days in which you thought, that, when you grew up, it would
be a very fine thing to be a pirate, bandit, or corsair, rather than a
clergyman, barrister, or the like; even a cheerful outlaw like Robin
Hood did not come up to your views; you would rather have been a man
like Captain Kyd, stained with various crimes of extreme atrocity, which
would entirely preclude the possibility of returning to respectable
society, and given to moody laughter in solitary moments. Oh, what truly
asinine developments the human being must go through, before arriving at
the stage of common sense! You were very Vealy, too, when you used
to think it a fine thing to astonish people by expressing awful
sentiments,--such as that you thought Mahometans better than Christians,
that you would like to be dissected after death, that you did not care
what you got for dinner, that you liked learning your lessons better
than going out to play, that you would rather read Euclid than
"Ivanhoe," and the like. It may be remarked, that this peculiar
Vealiness is not confined to youth; I have seen it appearing very
strongly in men with gray hair. Another manifestation of Vealiness,
which appears both in age and youth, is the entertaining a strong belief
that kings, noblemen, and baronets are always in a condition of ecstatic
happiness. I have known people pretty far advanced in life, who not only
believed that monarchs must be perfectly happy, but that all who were
permitted to continue in their presence would catch a considerable
degree of the mysterious bliss which was their portion. I have heard a
sane man, rather acute and clever in many things, seriously say, "If a
man cannot be happy in the presence of his Sovereign, where can he be
happy?"
And yet, absurd and foolish as is Moral Vealiness, there is something
fine about it. Many of the old and dear associations most cherished in
human hearts are of the nature of Veal. It is sad to think that most
of the romance of life is unquestionably so. All spooniness, all the
preposterous idolization of some one who is just like anybody else,
all love, (in the narrow sense in which the word is understood by
novel-readers,) you feel, when you look back, are Veal. The young lad
and the young girl, whom at a picnic party you have discerned stealing
off under frivolous pretexts from the main body of guests, and sitting
on the grass by the river-side, enraptured in the prosecution of a
conversation which is intellectually of the emptiest, and fancying that
they two make all the world, and investing that spot with remembrances
which will continue till they are gray, are (it must in sober sadness be
admitted) of the nature of calves. For it is beyond doubt that they are
at a stage which they will outgrow, and on which they may possibly look
back with something of shame. All these things, beautiful as they are,
are no more than Veal. Yet they are fitting and excellent in their time.
No, let us not call them Veal; they are rather like Lamb, which is
excellent, though immature. No doubt, youth is immaturity; and as you
outgrow it, you are growing better and wiser: still youth is a fine
thing; and most people would be young again, if they could. How cheerful
and light-hearted is immaturity! How cheerful and lively are the little
children even of silent and gloomy men! It is sad, and it is unnatural,
when they are not so. I remember yet, when I was at school, with what
interest and wonder I used to look at two or three boys, about twelve or
thirteen years old, who were always dull, sullen, and unhappy-looking.
In those days, as a general rule, you are never sorrowful without
knowing the reason why. You are never conscious of the dull atmosphere,
of the gloomy spirits, of after-time. The youthful machine, bodily and
mental, plays smoothly; the young being is cheery. Even a kitten is very
different from a grave old cat, and a young colt from a horse sobered by
the cares and toils of years. And you picture fine things to yourself in
your youthful dreams. I remember a beautiful dwelling I used often to
see, as if from the brow of a great hill. I see the rich valley below,
with magnificent woods and glades, and a broad river reflecting the
sunset; and in the midst of the valley, the vast Saracenic pile, with
gilded minarets blazing in the golden light. I have since then seen many
splendid habitations, but none in the least equal to that. I cannot even
yet discard the idea that somewhere in this world there stands that
noble palace, and that some day I shall find it out. You remember also
the intense delight with which you read the books that charmed you then:
how you carried off the poem or the tale to some solitary place,--how
you sat up far into the night to read it,--how heartily you believed
in all the story, and sympathized with the people it told of. I wish I
could feel now the veneration for the man who has written a book which I
used once to feel. Oh that one could read the old volumes with the
old feeling! Perhaps you have some of them yet, and you remember the
peculiar expression of the type in which they were printed: the pages
look at you with the face of an old friend. If you were then of an
observant nature, you will understand how much of the effect of any
composition upon the human mind depends upon the printing, upon the
placing of the points, even upon the position of the sentences on the
page. A grand, high-flown, and sentimental climax ought always to
conclude at the bottom of a page. It will look ridiculous, if it ends
four or five lines down from the top of the next page. Somehow there is
a feeling as of the difference between the night before and the next
morning. It is as though the crushed ball-dress and the dishevelled
locks of the close of the evening reappeared, the same, before
breakfast. Let us have homely sense at the top of the page, pathos
at the foot of it. What a force in the bad type of the shabby little
"Childe Harold" you used to read so often! You turn it over in a grand
illustrated edition, and it seems like another poem. Let it here be
said, that occasionally you look with something like indignation on the
volume which enchained you in your boyish days. For now you have burst
the chain. And you have somewhat of the feeling of the prisoner towards
the jailer who held him in unjust bondage. What right had that bombastic
rubbish to touch and thrill you as it used to do? Well, remember that
it suits successive generations at their enthusiastic stage. There are
poets whose great admirers are for the most part under twenty years
old; but probably almost every clever young person regards them at some
period in his life as among the noblest of mortals. And it is no ignoble
ambition to win the ardent appreciation of even immature tastes and
hearts. Its brief endurance is compensated by its intensity. You sit by
the fireside and read your leisurely "Times," and you feel a tranquil
enjoyment. You like it better than the "Sorrows of Werter," but you do
not like it a twentieth part as much as you once liked the "Sorrows
of Werter." You would be interested in meeting the man who wrote that
brilliant and slashing leader; but you would not regard him with
speechless awe, as something more than human. Yet, remembering all the
weaknesses out of which men grow, and on which they look back with a
smile or sigh, who does not feel that there is a charm which will not
depart about early youth? Longfellow knew that he would reach the hearts
of most men, when he wrote such a verse as this:--
"The green trees whispered low and mild;
It was a sound of joy!
They were my playmates when a child,
And rocked me in their arms so wild;
Still they looked at me and smiled,
As if I were a boy!"
Such, readers as are young men will understand what has already been
said as to the bitter indignation with which the writer, some years ago,
listened to self-conceited elderly persons who put aside the arguments
and the doings of younger men with the remark that these younger men
were _boys_. There are few terms of reproach which I have heard uttered
with looks of such deadly ferocity. And there are not many which excite
feelings of greater wrath in the souls of clever young men. I remember
how in those days I determined to write an essay which should scorch up
and finally destroy all these carping and malicious critics. It was to
be called "A Chapter on Boys." After an introduction of a sarcastic and
magnificent character, setting out views substantially the same as those
contained in the speech of Lord Chatham in reply to Walpole, which boys
are taught to recite at school, that essay was to go on to show that
a great part of English literature was written by very young men.
Unfortunately, on proceeding to investigate the matter carefully, it
appeared that the best part of English literature, even in the range of
poetry, was in fact written by men of even more than middle age. So the
essay was never finished, though a good deal of it was sketched out.
Yesterday I took out the old manuscript; and after reading a bit of it,
it appeared so remarkably Vealy, that I put it with indignation into the
fire. Still I observed various facts of interest as to great things done
by young men, and some by young men who never lived to be old. Beaumont
the dramatist died at twenty-nine. Christopher Marlowe wrote "Faustus"
at twenty-five, and died at thirty. Sir Philip Sidney wrote his
"Arcadia" at twenty-six. Otway wrote "The Orphan" at twenty-eight,
and "Venice Preserved" at thirty. Thomson wrote the "Seasons" at
twenty-seven. Bishop Berkeley had devised his Ideal System at
twenty-nine; and Clarke at the same age published his great work on "The
Being and Attributes of God." Then there is Pitt, of course. But these
cases are exceptional; and besides, men at twenty-eight and thirty are
not in any way to be regarded as boys. What I wanted was proof of the
great things that had been done by young fellows about two-and-twenty;
and such proof was not to be found. A man is simply a boy grown up to
his best; and of course what is done by men must be better than what is
done by boys. Unless in very peculiar cases, a man at thirty will be
every way superior to what he was at twenty; and at forty to what he was
at thirty. Not, indeed, physically,--let _that_ be granted; not always
morally; but surely intellectually and aesthetically.
* * * * *
Yes, my readers, we have all been Calves. A great part of all our doings
has been, what the writer, in figurative language, has described as
Veal. We have not said, written, or done very much on which we can now
look back with entire approval; and we have said, written, and done a
very great deal on which we cannot look back but with burning shame
and confusion. Very many things, which, when we did them, we thought
remarkably good, and much better than the doings of ordinary men, we now
discern, on calmly looking back, to have been extremely bad. That time,
you know, my friend, when you talked in a very fluent and animated
manner after dinner at a certain house, and thought you were making a
great impression on the assembled guests, most of them entire strangers,
you are now fully aware that you were only making a fool of yourself.
And let this hint of one public manifestation of Vealiness suffice to
suggest to each of us scores of similar cases. But though we feel, in
our secret souls, what Calves we have been, and though it is well for us
that we should feel it deeply, and thus learn humility and caution, we
do not like to be reminded of it by anybody else. Some people have a
wonderful memory for the Vealy sayings and doings of their friends.
They may be very bad hands at remembering anything else; but they never
forget the silly speeches and actions on which one would like to shut
down the leaf. You may find people a great part of whose conversation
consists of repeating and exaggerating their neighbors' Veal; and though
that Veal may be immature enough and silly enough, it will go hard but
your friend Mr. Snarling will represent it as a good deal worse than the
fact. You will find men, who while at college were students of large
ambition, but slender abilities, revenging themselves in this fashion
upon the clever men who beat them. It is easy, very easy, to remember
foolish things that were said and done even by the senior wrangler or
the man who took a double first-class; and candid folk will think
that such foolish things were not fair samples of the men,--and will
remember, too, that the men have grown out of these, have grown mature
and wise, and for many a year past would not have said or done such
things. But if you were to judge from the conversation of Mr. Limejuice,
(who wrote many prize essays, but, through the malice and stupidity of
the judges, never got any prizes,) you would conclude that every word
uttered by his successful rivals was one that stamped them as essential
fools, and calves which would never grow into oxen. I do not think it
is a pleasing or magnanimous feature in any man's character, that he is
ever eager to rake up these early follies. I would not be ready to throw
in the teeth of a pretty butterfly that it was an ugly caterpillar once,
unless I understood that the butterfly liked to remember the fact. I
would not suggest to this fair sheet of paper on which I am writing,
that not long ago it was dusty rags and afterwards dirty pulp. You
cannot be an ox without previously having been a calf; you acquire taste
and sense gradually, and in acquiring them you pass through stages
in which you have very little of either. It is a poor burden for the
memory, to collect and shovel into it the silly sayings and doings in
youth of people who have become great and eminent. I read with much
disgust a biography of Mr. Disraeli which recorded, no doubt accurately,
all the sore points in that statesman's history. I remember with great
approval what Lord John Manners said in Parliament in reply to Mr.
Bright, who had quoted a well-known and very silly passage from Lord
John's early poetry. "I would rather," said Lord John, "have been the
man who in his youth wrote those silly verses than the man who in mature
years would rake them up." And with even greater indignation I regard
the individual who, when a man is doing creditably and Christianly
the work of life, is ever ready to relate and aggravate the moral
delinquencies of his school-boy and student days, long since repented of
and corrected. "Remember not," said a man who knew human nature well,
"the sins of my youth." But there are men whose nature has a peculiar
affinity for anything petty, mean, and bad. They fly upon it as a
vulture on carrion. Their memory is of that cast, that you have only
to make inquiry of them concerning any of their friends, to hear of
something not at all to the friends' advantage. There are individuals,
after listening to whom you think it would be a refreshing novelty,
almost startling from its strangeness, to hear them say a word in favor
of any human being whatsoever.
It is not a thing peculiar to immaturity; yet it may be remarked, that,
though it is an unpleasant thing to look back and see that you have said
or done something very foolish, it is a still more unpleasant thing to
be well aware at the time that you are saying or doing something very
foolish. If a man be a fool at all, it is much to be desired that he
should be a very great fool; for then he will not know when he is making
a fool of himself. But it is painful not to have sense enough to know
what you should do in order to be right, but to have sense enough to
know that you are doing wrong. To know that you are talking like an ass,
yet to feel that you cannot help it,--that you must say something, and
can think of nothing better to say,--this is a suffering that comes with
advanced civilization. This is a phenomenon frequently to be seen
at public dinners in country towns, also at the entertainment which
succeeds a wedding. Men at other times rational seem to be stricken into
idiocy when they rise to their feet on such occasions; and the painful
fact is, that it is conscious idiocy. The man's words are asinine, and
he knows they are asinine. His wits have entirely abandoned him: he is
an idiot for the time. Have you sat next a man unused to speaking at a
public dinner? have you seen him nervously rise and utter an incoherent,
ungrammatical, and unintelligible sentence or two, and then sit down
with a ghastly smile? Have you heard him say to his friend on the other
side, in bitterness, "I have made a fool of myself"? And have you seen
him sit moodily through the remainder of the feast, evidently ruminating
on what he said, seeing now what he ought to have said, and trying to
persuade himself that what he said was not so bad after all? Would you
do a kindness to that miserable man? You have just heard his friend
on the other side cordially agreeing with what he had said as to the
badness of the appearance made by him. Enter into conversation with
him; talk of his speech; congratulate him upon it; tell him you were
extremely struck by the freshness and naturalness of what he said,--that
there is something delightful in hearing an unhackneyed speaker,--that
to speak with entire fluency looks professional,--it is like a barrister
or a clergyman. Thus you may lighten the mortification of a disappointed
man; and what you say will receive considerable credence. It is
wonderful how readily people believe anything they would like to be
true.
* * * * *
I was walking this afternoon along a certain street, coming home from
visiting certain sick persons, and wondering how I should conclude this
essay, when, standing on the pavement on one side of the street, I saw a
little boy four years old crying in great distress. Various individuals,
who appeared to be Priests and Levites, looked, as they passed, at the
child's distress, and passed on without doing anything to relieve it. I
spoke to the little man, who was in great fear at being spoken to, but
told me he had come away from his home and lost himself, and could not
find his way back. I told him I would take him home, if he could tell me
where he lived; but he was frightened into utter helplessness, and could
only tell that his name was Tom, and that he lived at the top of a
stair. It was a poor neighborhood, in which many people live at the
top of stairs, and the description was vague. I spoke to two humble
decent-looking women who were passing, thinking they might gain the
little thing's confidence better than I; but the poor little man's great
wish was just to get away from us,--though, when he got two yards off,
he could but stand and cry. You may be sure he was not left in his
trouble, but that he was put safely into his father's hands. And as I
was coming home, I thought that here was an illustration of something I
have been thinking of all this afternoon. I thought I saw in the poor
little child's desire to get away from those who wanted to help him,
though not knowing where to go when left to himself, something analogous
to what the immature human being is always disposed to. The whole
teaching of our life is leading us away from our early delusions and
follies, from all those things about us which have been spoken of under
the similitude which need not be again repeated. Yet we push away the
hand that would conduct us to soberer and better things, though, when
left alone, we can but stand and vaguely gaze about us; and we speak
hardly of the growing experience which makes us wiser, and which ought
to make us happier too. Let us not forget that the teaching which takes
something of the gloss from life is an instrument in the kindest Hand of
all; and let us be humbly content, if that kindest Hand shall lead us,
even by rough means, to calm and enduring wisdom,--wisdom by no means
inconsistent with youthful freshness of feeling, and not necessarily
fatal even to youthful gayety of mood,--and at last to that Happy Place
where worn men regain the little child's heart, and old and young are
blest together.