CHAPTER XIV. CONCLUSION

CHAPTER I.

CONCERNING THE PARSON'S CHOICE BETWEEN TOWN AND COUNTRY.

One very happy circumstance in a clergyman's lot, is that he is

saved from painful perplexity as regards his choice of the scene

in which he is to spend his days and years. I am sorry for the

man who returns from Australia with a large fortune; and with no

further end in life than to settle down somewhere and enjoy it.

For in most cases he has no special tie to any particular place;

and he must feel very much perplexed where to go. Should any person

who may read this page cherish the purpose of leaving me a hundred

thousand pounds to invest in a pretty little estate, I beg that

he will at once abandon such a design. He would be doing me no

kindness. I should be entirely bewildered in trying to make up my

mind where I should purchase the property. I should be rent asunder

by conflicting visions of rich English landscape, and heathery Scottish

hills: of seaside breezes, and inland meadows: of horse-chestnut

avenues, and dark stern pine-woods. And after the estate had been

bought, I should always be looking back and thinking I might have

done better. So, on the whole, I would prefer that my reader should

himself buy the estate, and bequeath it to me: and then I could

soon persuade myself that it was the prettiest estate and the

pleasantest neighbourhood in Britain.

Now, as a general rule, the Great Disposer says to the parson, Here

is your home, here lies your work through life: go and reconcile

your mind to it, and do your best in it. No doubt there are men in

the Church whose genius, popularity, influence, or luck is such,

that they have a bewildering variety of livings pressed upon them:

but it is not so with ordinary folk; and certainly it was not so

with me. I went where Providence bade me go, which was not where

I had wished to go, and not where I had thought to go. Many who

know me through the pages which make this and a preceding volume,

have said, written, and printed, that I was specially cut out for

a country parson, and specially adapted to relish a quiet country

life. Not more, believe me, reader, than yourself. It is in every

man who sets himself to it to attain the self-same characteristics.

It is quite true I have these now: but, a few years since, never

was mortal less like them. No cockney set down near Sydney Smith

at Foston-le-Clay: no fish, suddenly withdrawn from its native

stream: could feel more strange and cheerless than did I when I

went to my beautiful country parish, where I have spent such happy

days, and which I have come to love so much.

I have said that the parson is for the most part saved the labour

of determining where he shall pitch his tent: his place and his

path in life are marked out for him. But he has his own special

perplexity and labour: quite different from those of the man to

whom the hundred thousand pounds to invest in land are bequeathed:

still, as some perhaps would think, no less hard. His work is to

reconcile his mind to the place where God has set him. Every mortal

must, in many respects, face one of these two trials. There is all

the world before you, where to choose; and then the struggle to

make a decided choice with which you shall on reflection remain

entirely satisfied. Or there is no choice at all: the Hand above

gives you your place and your work; and then there is the struggle

heartily and cheerfully to acquiesce in the decree as to which you

were not consulted.

And this is not always an easy thing; though I am sure that the

man who honestly and Christianly tries to do it, will never fail to

succeed at last. How curiously people are set down in the Church;

and indeed in all other callings whatsoever! You find men in the

last places they would have chosen; in the last places for which

you would say they are suited. You pass a pretty country church,

with its parsonage hard-by embosomed in trees and bright with

roses. Perhaps the parson of that church had set his heart on an

entirely different kind of charge: perhaps he is a disappointed

man, eager to get away, and (the very worst possible policy) trying

for every vacancy of which he can hear. You think, as you pass by,

and sit down on the churchyard wall, how happy you could be in so

quiet and sweet a spot: well, if you are willing to do a thing,

it is pleasant: but if you are struggling with a chain you cannot

break, it is miserable. The pleasantest thing becomes painful,

if it is felt as a restraint. What can be cosier than the warm

environment of sheet and blanket which encircles you in your snug

bed? Yet if you awake during the night at some alarm of peril, and

by a sudden effort try at once to shake yourself clear of these

trammels, you will, for the half-minute before you succeed, feel

that soft restraint as irksome as iron fetters. 'Let your will lead

whither necessity would drive,' said Locke, 'and you will always

preserve your liberty.' No doubt, it is wise advice; but how to do

all that?

Well, it can be done: but it costs an effort. Great part of the

work of the civilized and educated man consists of that which the

savage, and even the uneducated man, would not regard as work at

all. The things which cost the greatest effort may be done, perhaps,

as you sit in an easy chair with your eyes shut. And such an effort

is that of making up our mind to many things, both in our own lot,

and in the lot of others. I mean not merely the intellectual effort

to look at the success of other men and our own failure in such a

way as that we shall be intellectually convinced that, we have no

right to complain of either: I do not mean merely the labour to

put things in the right point of view: but the moral effort to look

fairly at the facts not in any way disguised,--not tricked out by

some skilful art of putting things;--and yet to repress all wrong

feeling;--all fretfulness, envy, jealousy, dislike, hatred. I do

not mean, to persuade ourselves that the grapes are sour; but (far

nobler surely) to be well aware that they are sweet, and yet be

content that another should have them and not we. I mean the labour,

when you have run in a race and been beaten, to resign your mind

to the fact that you have been beaten, and to bear a kind feeling

towards the man who beat you. And this is labour, and hard labour;

though very different from that physical exertion which the uncivilized

man would understand by the word. Every one can understand that to

carry a heavy portmanteau a mile is work. Not every one remembers

that the owner of the portmanteau, as he walks on carrying nothing

weightier than an umbrella, may be going through exertion much

harder than that of the porter. Probably St. Paul never spent

days of harder work in all his life, than the days he spent lying

blind at Damascus, struggling to get free from the prejudices and

convictions of all his past years, and resolving--on the course he

would pursue in the years to come.

I know that in all professions and occupations to which men

can devote themselves, there is such a thing as com petition: and

wherever there is competition, there will be the temptation to envy,

jealousy, and detraction, as regards a man's competitors: and so

there will be the need of that labour and exertion which lie in

resolutely trampling that temptation down. You are quite certain,

rny friend, as you go on through life, to have to make up your

mind to failure and disappointment on your own part, and to seeing

other men preferred before you. When these tilings come, there

are two ways of meeting them. One is, to hate and vilify those who

surpass you, either in merit or in success: to detract from their

merit and under-rate their success: or, if you must admit some

merit, to bestow upon it very faint praise. Now, all this is natural

enough; but assuredly it is neither a right nor a happy course to

follow. The other and better way is, to fight these tendencies to

the death: to struggle against them, to pray against them: to resign

yourself to God's good will: to admire and love the man who beats

you. This course is the right one, and the happy one. I believe the

greatest blessing God can send a man, is disappointment, rightly

met and used. There is no more ennobling discipline: there is no

discipline that results in a happier or kindlier temper of mind.

And in honestly fighting against the evil impulses which have been

mentioned, you will assuredly get help and strength to vanquish

them. I have seen the plain features look beautiful, when man or

woman was faithfully by God's grace resisting wrong feelings and

tendencies, such as these. It is a noble end to attain, and it

is well worth all the labour it costs, to resolutely be resigned,

cheerful, and kind, when you feel a strong inclination to be

discontented, moody, and bitter of heart. Well said a very wise

mortal, 'Better is he that ruleth his spirit, than he that taketh

a city.' And that ruling of the spirit which is needful to rightly

meet disappointment, brings out the best and noblest qualities that

can be found in man.

Sometimes, indeed, even in the parson's quiet life, he may know

something of the first perplexity of which we have been thinking:

the perplexity of the man who is struggling to make up his mind

where he is to settle down for the remainder of life. And it is

not long since such a perplexity came my way. For I had reached a

spot in my onward path at which I must make a decided choice. I must

go either to the right or the left: for, as Goldsmith has remarked

with great force, when the road you are pursuing parts into several

roads, you must be careful to follow only one. And I had to decide

between country and town. I had to resolve whether I was to remain

in that quiet cure of souls about which I formerly told you; or go

into the hard work and hurry of a large parish in a certain great

city.

I had been for more than five years in that sweet country place: it

seemed a very long time as the days passed over. Even slow-growing

ivy grew feet longer in that time, and climbing roses covered yards

and yards of wall. And for very many months I thought that here I

was to live and die, and never dreamt of change. Not indeed that

my tastes were always such. At the beginning of that term of years,

when I went down each Sunday morning to preach in the plain little

church to a handful of quiet rustic people, I used to think of

a grand edifice where once upon a time, at my first start in my

profession, I had preached each afternoon for many months to a very

large congregation of educated folk; and I used to wonder whether

my old friends remembered and missed me. Once there was to me

a fascination about that grand church, and all connected with it:

now it is to me no more than it is to every one else, and I pass

near it almost every day and hardly look at it. Other men have

taken my old place in it, and had the like feelings, and got over

them. Several of these men I never saw: how much I should like to

shake each man's hand! But all these fancies were long, long ago:

I was pleased to be a country parson, and to make the best of it.

Friends, who have held like stations in life, have you not felt,

now and then, a little waking up of old ideas and aspirations? All

this, you thought, was not what you once had wished, and pictured

to yourself. You vainly fancied, in your student days, that you

might reach a more eminent place and greater usefulness. I know,

indeed, that even such as have gone very unwillingly to a little

remote country parish, have come most heartily to enjoy its peaceful

life: have grown fond of that, as they never thought to do. I do

not mean that you need affectedly talk, after a few months there,

as if you had lived in the country all your life, and as if your

thoughts had from childhood run upon horses, turnips, and corn. But

in sober earnest, as weeks pass over, you gain a great interest in

little country cares; and you discover that you may be abundantly

useful, and abundantly laborious, amid a small and simple population.

Yet sometimes, my clever friend, I know you sit down on a green

bank, under the trees, and look at your little church. You think,

of your companions and competitors in College days, filling

distinguished places in life: and, more particularly, of this and

that friend in your own calling, who preaches to as many people on

one Sunday as you do in half a year. Fine fellows they were: and

though you seldom meet now, you are sure they are faithful, laborious,

able, and devoted ministers: God bless them all! You wonder how

they can do so much work; and especially how they have confidence

to preach to so large and intelligent congregations. For a certain

timidity, and distrust of his own powers, grows upon the country

parson. He is reaching the juster estimate of himself, indeed: yet

there is something not desirable in the nervous dislike to preach

in large churches and to cultivated people which is sure to come.

And little things worry him, which would not worry a mind kept more

upon the stretch. It is possible enough that among the Cumberland

hills, or in curacies like Sydney Smith's on Salisbury Plain, or

wandering sadly by the shore of Shetland fiords, there may be men

who had in them the makings of eminent preachers; but whose powers

have never been called out, and are rusting sadly away: and in whom

many petty cares are developing a pettiness of nature.

I have observed that in those advertisements which occasionally appear

in certain newspapers, offering for sale the next presentation to

some living in the Church, the advertiser, after pointing out the

various advantages of the situation, frequently sums up by stating

that the population of the parish is very small, and so the

clergyman's duty very light. I always read such a statement with

great displeasure. For it seems to imply, that a clergyman's great

object is, to enjoy his benefice and do as little duty as possible

in return for it. I suppose it need not be proved, that if such

were truly the great object of any parson, he has no business to

be in the Church at all. Failing health, or powers overdriven, may

sometimes make even the parson whose heart is in his work desire a

charge whose duty and responsibility are comparatively small: but

I firmly believe that in the case of the great majority of clergymen,

it is the interest and delight they feel in their work, and not

its worldly emolument, that mainly attach them to their sacred

profession: and thus that the more work they have to do (provided

their strength be equal to it), the more desirable and interesting

they hold their charge to be. And I believe that the earnest pastor,

settled in some light and pleasant country charge, will oftentimes,

even amid his simple enjoyment of that pleasant life, think that

perhaps he would be more in the path of duty, if, while the best

years of his life are passing on, he were placed where he might

serve his Master in a larger sphere.

And thinking now and then in this fashion, I was all of a sudden

asked to undertake a charge such as would once have been my very

ideal: and in that noble city where my work began, and so which

has always been very dear. But I felt that everything was changed.

Before these years of growing experience, I dare say I should not

have feared to set myself even to work as hard; but now I doubted

greatly whether I should prove equal to it. That time in the country

had made me sadly lose confidence. And I thought it would be very

painful and discouraging to go to preach to a large congregation,

and to see it Sunday by Sunday growing less, as people got discontented

and dropped away.

But happily, those on whom I leant for guidance and advice, were

more hopeful than myself; and so I came away from my beautiful

country parish. You know, my friends, who have passed through the

like, the sorrow to look for the last time at each kind homely

face: the sorrow to turn away from the little church where you have

often preached to very small congregations: the sorrow to leave

each tree you have planted, and the evergreens whose growth you

have watched, year by year. Soon, you are in all the worry of what

in Scotland we call a flitting: the house and all its belongings

are turned upside down. The kindness of the people comes out with

tenfold strength when they know how soon you are to part. And some,

to whom you had tried to do little favours, and who had somewhat

disappointed you by the slight sense of them they had shown, now

testify by their tears a hearty regard which you never can forget.

The Sunday comes when you enter your old pulpit for the last time.

You had prepared your sermon in a room from which the carpet had

been removed, and amid a general confusion and noise of packing.

The church is crowded in a fashion never seen before. You go through

the service, I think, with a sense of being somewhat stunned and

bewildered. And in the closing sentences of your sermon, you say

little of yourself; but in a few words, very hard to speak, you

thank your old friends for their kindness to you through the years

you have passed together; and you give them your parting advice, in

some sentence which seems to contain the essence of all you meant

to teach in all these Sundays; and you say farewell, farewell.

You are happy, indeed, if after all, though quitting your country

parsonage, and turning over a new leaf in life, you have not to make

a change so entire as that from country to town generally is: if,

like me, you live in the most beautiful city in Britain: a city

where country and town are blended together: where there are green

gardens, fields, and trees: shady places into which you may turn

from the glaring streets, into verdure as cool and quiet as ever,

and where your little children can roll upon the grass, and string

daisies as of old; streets, from every opening in which you look

out upon blue hills and blue sea. No doubt, the work is very hard,

and very constant; and each Sunday is a very exciting and exhausting

day. You will understand, my friend, when you go to such a charge,

what honour is due to those venerable men who have faithfully and

efficiently done the duty of the like for thirty or forty years.

You will look at them with much interest: you will receive their

kindly counsel with great respect. You will feel it somewhat trying

and nervous work to ascend your pulpit; and to address men and women

who in mental cultivation, and in things much more important, are

more than equal to yourself. And as you walk down; always alone,

to church each Sunday morning, you will very earnestly apply for

strength and wisdom beyond your own, in a certain Quarter where

they will never be sought in vain. Yet you will delight in all your

duty: and you will thank God you feel that were your work in life

to choose again, you would give yourself to the noblest task that

can be undertaken by mortal, with a resolute purpose firmer a

thousand times than even the enthusiastic preference of your early

youth. The attention and sympathy with which your congregation

will listen to your sermons, will be a constant encouragement and

stimulus; and you will find friends so dear and true, that yon.

will hope never to part from them while life remains. In such a

life, indeed, these Essays, which never would have been begun had

my duty been always such, must be written in little snatches of

time: and perhaps a sharp critic could tell, from internal evidence,

which of them have been written in the country and which in the

town. I look up from the table at which I write: and the roses,

honeysuckle, and the fuchsias, of a year since, are far away:

through the window I discover lofty walls, whose colour inclines

to black. Yet I have not regretted the day, and I do not believe

I ever will regret the day, when I ceased to be a Country Parson.

CHAPTER II.

CONCERNING DISAPPOINTMENT AND SUCCESS.

Russet woods of Autumn, here you are once more! I saw you, golden

and brown, in the afternoon sunshine to-day. Crisp leaves were

falling, as I went along the foot-path through the woods: crisp

leaves lie upon the green graves in the churchyard, fallen from the

ashes: and on the shrubbery walks, crisp leaves from the beeches,

accumulated where the grass bounds the gravel, make a warm edging,

irregular, but pleasant to see. It is not that one is 'tired of

summer:' but there is something soothing and pleasing about the

autumn days. There is a great clearness of the atmosphere sometimes;

sometimes a subdued, gray light is diffused everywhere. In the

country, there is often, on these afternoons, a remarkable stillness

in the air, amid which you can hear a withering leaf rustling down.

I will not think that the time of bare branches and brown grass

is so very near as yet; Nature is indeed decaying, but now we have

decay only in its beautiful stage, wherein it is pensive, but not

sad. It is but early in October; and we, who live in the country all

through the winter, please ourselves with the belief that October

is one of the finest months of the year, and that we have many

warm, bright, still days yet before us. Of course we know we are

practising upon ourselves a cheerful, transparent delusion; even

as the man of forty-eight often declares that about forty-eight

or fifty is the prime of life. I like to remember that Mrs. Hemans

was describing October, when she began her beautiful poem on The

Battle of Morgarlen, by saying that, 'The wine-month shone in its

golden prime:' and I think that in these words the picture presented

to the mind of an untravelled Briton, is not the red grapes hanging in

blushing profusion, but rather the brown, and crimson, and golden

woods, in the warm October sunshine. So, you russet woods of autumn,

you are welcome once more; welcome with all your peculiar beauty,

so gently enjoyable by all men and women who have not used up life;

and with all your lessons, so unobtrusive, so touching, that have

come home to the heart of human generations for many thousands

of years. Yesterday was Sunday; and I was preaching to my simple

rustics an autumn sermon from the text We all do fade as a leaf.

As I read out the text, through a half-opened window near me, two

large withered oak-leaves silently floated into the little church

in the view of all the congregation. I could not but pause for a

minute till they should preach their sermon before I began mine.

How simply, how unaffectedly, with what natural pathos they seemed

to tell their story! It seemed as if they said, Ah you human beings,

something besides us is fading; here we are, the things like which

you fade!

And now, upon this evening, a little sobered by the thought that

this is the fourth October which has seen this hand writing that

which shall attain the authority of print, I sit down to begin an

essay which is to be written leisurely as recreation and not as

work. I need not finish this essay, unless I choose, for six weeks

to come: so I have plenty of time, and I shall never have to write

under pressure. That is pleasant. And I write under another feeling,

more pleasing and encouraging still. I think that in these lines

I am addressing many unknown friends, who, though knowing nothing

more of me than they can learn from pages which I have written,

have come gradually not to think of me as a stranger. I wish here

to offer my thanks to many whose letters, though they were writing

only to a shadow, have spoken in so kindly a fashion of the writer's

slight productions, that they have given me much enjoyment in the

reading, and much encouragement to go on. To all my correspondents,

whether named or nameless, I now, in a moral sense, extend a friendly

hand. As to the question sometimes put, who the writer is, that

is of no consequence. But as to what he is, I think, intelligent

readers of his essays, you will gradually and easily see that.

It is a great thing to write leisurely, and with a general feeling

of kindliness and satisfaction with everybody; but there is a

further reason why one should set to work at once. I feel I must

write now, before my subject loses its interest; and before the

multitude of thoughts, such as they are, which have been clustering

round it since it presented itself this afternoon in that walk

through the woods, have faded away. It is an unhappy thing, but it

is the fact with many men, that if you do not seize your fancies

when they come to you, and preserve them upon the written page, you

lose them altogether. They go away, and never come back. A little

while ago I pulled out a drawer in this table whereon I write; and

I took out of it a sheet of paper, on which there are written down

various subjects for essays. Several are marked with a large cross;

these are the essays which are beyond the reach of fate: they are

written and printed. Several others have no cross; these are the

subjects of essays which are yet to be written. But upon four of

those subjects I look at once with interest and sorrow. I remember

when I wrote down their names, what a vast amount, as I fancied,

I had to say about them: and all experience failed to make me feel

that unless those thoughts were seized and chronicled at once,

they would go away and never come back again. How rich the subjects

appeared to me, I well remember! Now they are lifeless, stupid

things, of which it is impossible to make anything. Before, they

were like a hive, buzzing with millions of bees. Now they are like

the empty hive, when the life and stir and bustle of the bees are

gone. O friendly reader, what a loss it was to you, that the writer

did not at once sit down and sketch out his essays, Concerning Things

Slowly Learnt; and Concerning Growing Old! And two other subjects

of even greater value were, Concerning the Practical Effect of

Illogical Reasons, and An Estimate of the Practical Influence of

False Assertions. How the hive was buzzing when these titles were

written down: but now I really hardly remember anything of what

I meant to say, and what I remember appears wretched stuff. The

effervescence has gone from the champagne; it is flat and dead.

Still, it is possible that these subjects may recover their interest;

and the author hereby gives notice that he reserves the right of

producing an essay upon each of them. Let no one else infringe his

vested claims.

There is one respect in which I have often thought that there is

a curious absence of analogy between the moral and the material

worlds. You are in a great excitement about something or other; you

are immensely interested in reaching some aim; you are extremely

angry and ferocious at some piece of conduct; let us suppose. Well,

the result is that you cannot take a sound, clear, temperate view

of the circumstances; you cannot see the case rightly; you actually

do see it very wrongly. You wait till a week or a month passes;

till some distance, in short, intervenes between you and the matter;

and then your excitement, your fever, your wrath, have gone down,

as the matter has lost its freshness; and now you see the case

calmly, you see it very differently indeed from the fashion in

which you saw it first; you conclude that now you see it rightly.

One can think temperately now of the atrocities of the mutineers

in India, It does riot now quicken your pulse to think of them.

You have not now the burning desire you once felt, to take a Sepoy

by the throat and cut him to pieces with a cat-of-nine-tails. The

common consent of mankind has decided that you have now attained

the right view. I ask, is it certain that in all cases the second

thought is the best;--is the right thought, as well as the calmest

thought? Would it be just to say (which would be the material

analogy) that you have the best view of some great rocky island when

you have sailed away from it till it has turned to a blue cloud on

the horizon; rather than when its granite and heather are full in

view, close at hand? I am not sure that in every case the calmer

thought is the right thought, the distant view the right view. You

have come to think indifferently of the personal injury, of the

act of foul cruelty and falsehood, which once roused you to flaming

indignation. Are you thinking rightly too? Or has not just such

an illusion been practised upon your mental view, as is played upon

your bodily eye when looking over ten miles of sea upon Staffa?

You do not see the basaltic columns now; but that is because you

see wrongly. You do not burn at the remembrance of the wicked lie,

the crafty misrepresentation, the cruel blow; but perhaps you ought

to do so. And now (to speak of less grave matters) when all I had

to say about Growing Old seems very poor, do I see it rightly? Do

I see it as my reader would always have seen it? Or has it faded

into falsehood, as well as into distance and dimness? When I look

back, and see my thoughts as trash, is it because they are trash

and no better? When I look back, and see Ailsa as a cloud, is it

because it is a cloud and nothing more? Or is it, as I have already

suggested, that in one respect the analogy between the moral and

the material fails.

I am going to write Concerning Disappointment and Success. In the

days when I studied metaphysics, I should have objected to that

title, inasmuch as the antithesis is imperfect between the two

things named in it. Disappointment and Success are not properly

antithetic; Failure and Success are. Disappointment is the feeling

caused by failure, and caused also by other things besides failure.

Failure is the thing; disappointment is the feeling caused by the

thing; while success is the thing, and not the feeling. But such

minute points apart, the title I have chosen brings out best the

subject about which I wish to write. And a very wide subject it

is; and one of universal interest.

I suppose that no one will dispute the fact that in this world

there are such things as disappoititment and success. I do not

mean merely that each man's lot has its share of both; I mean that

there are some men whose life on the whole is a failure, and that

there are others whose life on the whole is a success. You and I,

my reader, know better than to think that life is a lottery; but

those who think it a lottery, must see that there are human beings

who draw the prizes, and others who draw the blanks. I believe in

Luck, and Ill Luck, as facts; of course I do not believe the theory

which common consent builds upon these facts. There is, of course,

no such thing as chance; this world is driven with far too tight a

rein to permit of anything whatsoever falling out in a way properly

fortuitous. But it cannot be denied that there are persona with

whom everything goes well, and other persons with whom everything

goes ill. There are people who invariably win at what are called

games of chance. There are people who invariably lose. You remember

when Sydney Smith lay on his deathbed, how he suddenly startled

the watchers by it, by breaking a long silence with a sentence from

one of his sermons, repeated in a deep, solemn voice, strange from

the dying man: His life had been successful at last; but success

had come late; and how much of disappointment he had known! And

though he had tried to bear up cheerily under his early cares, they

had sunk in deep. 'We speak of life as a journey,' he said, 'but

how differently is that journey performed! Some are borne along

their path in luxury and ease; while some must walk it with naked

feet, mangled and bleeding.'

Who is there that does not sometimes, on a quiet evening, even

before he has attained to middle age, sit down and look back upon

his college days, and his college friends; and think sadly of the

failures, the disappointments, the broken hearts, which have been

among those who all started fair and promised well? How very much

has after life changed the estimates which we, formed in those

days, of the intellectual mark and probable fate of one's friends

and acquaintances! You remember the dense, stolid dunces of that

time: you remember the men who sat next you in the lecture-room,

and never answered rightly a question that was put to them: you

remember how you used to wonder if they would always be the dunces

they were then. Well, I never knew a man who was a dunce at twenty,

to prove what might be called a brilliant or even a clever man in

after life; but we have all known such do wonderfully decently.

You did not expect much of them, you see. You did not try them by

an exacting standard. If a monkey were to write his name, you would

be so much surprised at seeing him do it at all, that you would

never think of being surprised that he did not do it very well. So,

if a man you knew as a remarkably stupid fellow preaches a decent

sermon, you hardly think of remarking that it is very common-place

and dull, you are so much pleased and surprised' to find that the

man can preach at all. And then, the dunces of college days are

often sensible, though slow and in this world, plain plodding common

sense is very likely in the long run to beat erratic brilliancy.

The tortoise passes the hare. I owe an apology to Lord Campbell

for even naming him on the same page on which stands the name of

dunce: for assuredly in shrewd, massive sense, as well as in kindness

of manner, the natural outflow of a kind and good heart, no judge

ever surpassed him. But I may fairly point to his career of unexampled

success as an instance which proves my principle. See how that

man of parts which are sound and solid, rather than brilliant or

showy, has won the Derby and the St. Ledger of the law: has filled

with high credit the places of Chief Justice of England and Lord

Chancellor. And contrast his eminently successful and useful course

with that of the fitful meteor, Lord Brougham. What a great, dazzling

genius Brougham unquestionably is; yet his greatest admirer must

admit that his life has been a brilliant failure. But while you,

thoughtful reader, in such a retrospect as I have been supposing,

sometimes wonder at the decent and reasonable success of the dunce,

do you not often lament over the fashion in which those who promised

well, and even brilliantly, have disappointed the hopes entertained

of them? What miserable failures such have not unfrequently made!

And not always through bad conduct either: not always, though

sometimes, by taking to vicious courses; but rather by a certain want

of tact and sense, or even by just somehow missing the favourable

tide. You have got a fair living and a fair standing in the Church;

you have held them for eight or ten years; when some evening as you

are sitting in your study or playing with your children, a servant

tells you, doubtfully, that a man is waiting to see you. A poor,

thin, shabbily-dressed fellow comes in, and in faltering tones begs

for the lean of five shillings. Ah, with what a start you recognise

him! It is the clever fellow whom you hardly beat at college, who

was always so lively and merry, who sang so nicely, and was so

much asked out into society. You had lost sight of him for several

years; and now here he is, shabby, dirty, smelling of whisky, with

bloated face and trembling hand: alas, alas, ruined! Oh, do not

give him up. Perhaps you can do something for him. Little kindness

he has known for very long. Give him the five shillings by all

means; but next morning see you go out, and try what may be done

to lift him out of the slough of despond, and to give him a chance

for better days! I know that it may be all in vain; and that

after years gradually darkening down you may some day, as you pass

the police-office, find a crowd at the door, and learn that they

have got the corpse of the poor suicide within. And even when the

failure is not so utter as this, you find, now and then, as life

goes onward, that this and that old acquaintance has, you cannot

say how, stepped out of the track, and is stranded. He went into the

Church: he is no worse preacher or scholar than many that succeed;

but somehow he never gets a living. You sometimes meet him in

the street, threadbare and soured: he probably passes you without

recognising you. O reader, to whom God has sent moderate success,

always be chivalrously kind and considerate to such a disappointed

man!

I have heard of an eminent man who, when well advanced in years,

was able to say that through all his life he had never set his

mind on anything which he did not succeed in attaining. Great and

little aims alike, he never had known what it was to fail. What a

curious state of feeling it would be to most men to know themselves

able to assert so much! Think of a mind in which disappointment

is a thing unknown! I think that one would be oppressed by a vague

sense of fear in regarding one's self as treated by Providence in

a fashion so different from the vast majority of the race. It cannot

be denied that there are men in this world in whose lot failure

seems to be the rule. Everything to which they put their hand breaks

down or goes amiss. But most human beings can testify that their

lot, like their abilities, their stature, is a sort of middling

thing. There is about it an equable sobriety, a sort of average

endurableness. Some things go well: some things go ill. There is

a modicum of disappointment: there is a modicum of success. But so

much of disappointment comes to the lot of almost all, that there

is no object in nature at which we all look with so much interest

as the invariably lucky man--the man whom all this system of things

appears to favour. You knew such a one at school: you knew him at

college: you knew him at the bar, in the Church, in medicine, in

politics, in society. Somehow he pushes his way: things turn up

just at the right time for him: great people take a fancy to him:

the newspapers cry him up. Let us hope that you do not look at him

with any feeling of envy or bitterness; but you cannot help looking

at him with great interest, he is so like yourself, and at the same

time so very unlike you. Philosophers tell us that real happiness

is very equally distributed; but there is no doubt that there is a

tremendous external difference between the man who lives in a grand

house, with every appliance of elegance and luxury, with plump

servants, fine horses, many carriages, and the poor struggling

gentleman, perhaps a married curate, whose dwelling is bare, whose

dress is poor, whose fare is scanty, whose wife is careworn, whose

children are ill-fed, shabbily dressed, and scantily educated.

It is conceivable that fanciful wants, slights, and failures, may

cause the rich man as much and as real suffering as substantial

wants and failures cause the poor; but the world at large will

recognise the rich man's lot as one of success, and the poor man's

as one of failure.

This is a world of competition. It is a world full of things that

many people wish to get, and that all cannot get at once; and

to say this is much as to say that this is a world of failure and

disappointments. All things desirable, by their very existence imply

the disappointment of some. When you, my reader, being no longer

young, look with a philosophic eye at some pretty girl entering a

drawing-room, you cannot but reflect, as you survey the pleasing

picture, and more especially when you think of the twenty thousand

pounds--Ah! my gentle young friend, you will some day make one heart

very jolly, but a great many more extremely envious, wrathful, and

disappointed. So with all other desirable things; so with a large

living in the Church; so with aliy place of dignity; so with a seat

on the bench; so with the bishopric; so with the woolsack; so with

the towers of Lambeth. So with smaller matters; so with a good

business in the greengrocery line; so with a well-paying milk-walk;

so with a clerk's situation of eighty pounds a year; so with an

errand boy's place at three shillings a week, which thirty candidates

want, and only one can get. Alas for our fallen race! Is it not

part, at least, of some men's pleasure in gaining some object which

has been generally sought for, to think of the mortification of

the poor fellows that failed?

Disappointment, in short, may come and must come wherever man can

set his wishes and his hopes. The only way not to be disappointed

when a thing turns out against you, is not to have really cared how

the thing went. It is not a truism to remark that this is impossible

if you did care. Of course you are not disappointed at failing of

attaining an end which you did not care whether you attained or

not; but men seek very few such ends. If a man has worked day and

night for six weeks in canvassing his county, and then, having been

ignominiously beaten, on the following day tells you he is not in

the least degree disappointed, he might just as trulv assure you,

if you met him walking up streaming with water from a river into

which he had just fallen, that he is not the least wet. No doubt

there is an elasticity in the healthy mind which very soon tides

it over even a severe disappointment; and no doubt the grapes which

are unattainable do sometimes in actual fact turn sour. But let no

man tell us that he has not known the bitterness of disappointment

for at least a brief space, if he have ever from his birth tried

to get anything, great or small, and yet not got it. Failure is

indeed a thing of all degrees, from the most fanciful to the most

weighty: disappointment is a thing of all degrees, from the transient

feeling that worries for a minute, to the great crushing blow that

breaks the mind's spring for ever. Failure is a fact which reaches

from the poor tramp who lies down by the wayside to die, up to the

man who is only made Chief Justice when he wanted the Chancellorship,

or who dies Bishop of London when he had set his heart upon being

Archbishop of Canterbury; or to the Prime Minister, unrivalled in

eloquence, in influence, in genius, with his fair domains and his

proud descent, but whose horse is beaten after being first favourite

for the Derby. Who shall say that either disappointed man felt less

bitterness and weariness of heart than the other? Each was no more

than disappointed; and the keenness of disappointment bears no

proportion to the reality of the value of the object whose loss

caused it. And what endless crowds of human beings, children and

old men, nobles and snobs, rich men and poor, know the bitterness

of disappointment from day to day. It begins from the child shedding

many tears when the toy bought with the long-hoarded pence is broken

the first day it comes home; it goes on to the Duke expecting the

Garter, who sees in the newspaper. at breakfast that the yards of

blue ribbon have been given to another. What a hard time his servants

have that day. How loudly he roars at them, how willingly would he

kick them! Little recks he that forenoon of his magnificent castle

and his ancestral woods. It may here be mentioned that a very

pleasing opportunity is afforded to malignant people for mortifying

a clever, ambitious man, when any office is vacant to which it is

known he aspires. A judge of the Queen's Bench has died: you, Mr.

Verjuice, know how Mr. Swetter, Q. C., has been rising at the bar;

you know how well he deserves the ermine. Well, walk down to his

chambers; go in and sit down; never mind how busy he is--your time

is of no value--and talk of many different men as extremely suitable

for the vacant seat on the bench, but never in the remotest manner

hint at the claims of Swetter himself. I have often seen the like

done. And you, Mr. Verjuice, may conclude almost with certainty that

in doing all this you are vexing and mortifying a deserving man.

And such a consideration will no doubt be compensation sufficient

to your amiable nature for the fact that every generous muscular

Christian would like to take you by the neck, and swing your sneaking

carcase out of the window.

Even a slight disappointment, speedily to be repaired, has in it

something that jars painfully the mechanism of the mind. You go to

the train, expecting a friend, certainly. He does not come. Now this

worries you, even though you receive at the station a telegraphic

message that he will be by the train which follows in two hours.

Your magazine fails to come by post on the last day of the month;

you have a dull, vague sense of something wanting for an hour or

two, even though you are sure that you will have it next morning.

And indeed a very krge share of the disappointments of civilized

life are associated with the post-office. I do not suppose the

extreme case of the poor fellow who calls at the office expecting

a letter containing the money without which he cannot see how he

is to get through the day; nor of the man who finds no letter on

the day when he expects to hear how it fares with a dear relative

who is desperately sick. I am thinking merely of the lesser

disappointments which commonly attend post-time: the Times not

coming when you were counting with more than ordinary certainty

on its appearing; the letter of no great consequence, which yet

you would have liked to have had. A certain blankness--a feeling

difficult to define--attends even the slightest disappointment; and

the effect of a great one is very stunning and embittering indeed.

You remember how the nobleman in Ten Thousand a Year, who had been

refused a seat in the Cabinet, sympathized with poor Titmouse's

exclamation when, looking at the manifestations of gay life

in Hyde-park, and feeling his own absolute exclusion from it, he

consigned everything to perdition. All the ballads of Professor

Aytoun and Mr. Theodore Martin are admirable, but there is none

which strikes me as more so than the brilliant imitation of Locksley

Hall, And how true to nature the state of mind ascribed to the

vulgar snob who is the hero of the ballad, who, bethinking himself

of his great disappointment when his cousin married somebody else,

bestowed his extremest objurgations upon all who had abetted the

hateful result, and then summed up thus comprehensively:--

Cursed be the foul apprentice, who his loathsome fees did earn;

Cursed be the clerk and parson; CURSED BE THE WHOLE CONCERN!

It may be mentioned here as a fact to which experience will testify,

that such disappointments as that at the railway station and the

post-office are most likely to come when you are counting with

absolute certainty upon things happening as you wish; when not

a misgiving has entered your mind as to your friend's arriving or

your letter coining. A little latent fear in your soul that you

may possibly be disappointed, seems to have a certain power to fend

off disappointment, on the same principle on which taking out an

umbrella is found to prevent rain. What you are prepared for rarely

happens. The precise thing you expected comes not once in a thousand

times. A confused state of mind results from long experience of

such cases. Your real feeling often is: Such a thing seems quite

sure to happen; I may say I expect it to happen; and yet I don't

expect it, because I do: for experience has taught me that the

precise thing which I expect, which I think most likely, hardly

ever comes. I am not prepared to side with a thoughtless world,

which is ready to laugh at the confused statement of the Irishman

who had killed his pig. It is not a bull; it is a great psychological

fact that is involved in his seemingly contradictory declaration--'It

did not weigh as much as I expected, and I never thought it would!'

When young ladies tell us that such and such a person 'has met with

a disappointment,' we all understand what is meant. The phrase,

though it is conventionally intelligible enough, involves a fallacy:

it seems to teach that the disappointment of the youthful heart in

the matter of that which in its day is no doubt the most powerful

of all the affections, is by emphasis the greatest disappointment

which a human being can ever know. Of course that is an entire

mistake. People get over that disappointment not but what it may

leave its trace, and possibly colour the whole of remaining life;

sometimes resulting in an unlovely bitterness and hardness of

nature; sometimes prolonging even into age a lingering thread of

old romance, and keeping a kindly corner in a heart which worldly

cares have in great measure deadened. But the disappointment

which has its seat in the affections is outgrown as the affections

themselves are outgrown, as the season of their predominance passes

away; and the disappointment which sinks the deepest and lasts the

longest of all the disappointments which are fanciful rather than

material, is that which reaches a man through his ambition and his

self-love,--principles in his nature which outlast the heyday of

the heart's supremacy, and which endure to man's latest years. The

bitter and the enduring disappointment to most human beings is that

which makes them feel, in one way or other, that they are less

wise, clever, popular, graceful, accomplished, tall, active, and in

short fine, than they had fancied themselves to be. But it is only

to a limited portion of human kind that such words as disappointment

and success are mainly suggestive of gratified or disappointed

ambition, of happy or blighted affection; to the great majority

they are suggestive rather of success or non-success in earning

bread and cheese, in finding money to pay the rent, in generally

making the ends meet. You are very young, my reader, and little

versed in the practical affairs of ordinary life, if you do not

know that such prosaic matters make to most men the great aim of

their being here, so far as that aim is bounded by this world's

horizon. The poor cabman is successful or is disappointed, according

as he sees, while the hours of the day are passing over, that he

is making up or not making up the shillings he must hand over to

his master at night, before he has a penny to get food for his wife

and children. The little tradesman is successful or the reverse,

according as he sees or does not see from week to week such a small

accumulation of petty profits as may pay his landlord, and leave a

little margin by help of which he and his family may struggle on.

And many an educated man knows the analogous feelings. The poor

barrister, as he waits for the briefs which come in so slowly--the

young doctor, hoping for patients--understand them all. Oh what

slight, fanciful things, to such men, appear such disappointments

as that of the wealthy proprietor who fails to carry his county,

or the rich mayor or provost who fails of being knighted!

There is an extraordinary arbitrariness about the way in which great

success is allotted in this world. Who shall say that in one case

out of every two, relative success is in proportion to relative

merit? Nor need this be said in anything of a grumbling or captious

spirit. It is but repeating what a very wise man said long ago,

that 'the race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the

strong.' I suppose no one will say that the bishops are the greatest

men in the Church of England, or that every Chief Justice is a

greater man than every puisne judge. Success is especially arbitrary

in cases where it goes by pure patronage: in many such cases the

patron would smile at your weakness if you fancied that the desire

to find the best man ever entered his head. In the matter of the

bench and bar, where tangible duties are to be performed, a patron

is compelled to a certain amount of decency; for, though he may

not pretend to seek for the fittest man, he must at least profess

to have sought a fit man. No prime minister dare appoint a blockhead

a judge, without at least denying loudly that he is a blockhead.

But the arbitrariness of success is frequently the result of causes

quite apart from any arbitrariness in the intention of the human

disposer of success; a Higher Hand seems to come in here. The

tide of events settles the matter: the arbitrariness is in the way

in which the tide of events sets. Think of that great lawyer and

great man, Sir Samuel Romilly. Through years of his practice at

the bar, he himself, and all who knew him, looked to the woolsack

as his certain destination. You remember the many entries in his

diary bearing upon the matter; arid I suppose the opinion of the

most competent was clear as to his unrivalled fitness for the post.

Yet all ended in nothing. The race was not to the swift. The first

favourite was beaten, and more than one outsider has carried ofil

the prize for which he strove in vain. Did any mortal ever dream,

during his days of mediocrity at the bar, or his time of respectability

as a Baron of the Exchequer, that Sir R. M. Rolfe was the future

Chancellor? Probably there is no sphere in which there is more of

disappointment and heartburning than the army. It must be supremely

mortifying to a grey-headed veteran, who has served his country for

forty years, to find a beardless Guardsman put over his head into

the command of his regiment, and to see honours and emoluments

showered upon that fair-weather colonel. And I should judge that

the despatch written by a General after an important battle must

be a source of sad disappointment to many who fancied that their

names might well be mentioned there. But after all, I do not know

but that it tends to lessen disappointment, that success should

be regarded as going less by merit than by influence or good luck.

The disappointed man can always soothe himself with the fancy that

he deserved to succeed. It would be a desperately mortifying thing

to the majority of mankind, if it were distinctly ascertained

that each man gets just what he deserves. The admitted fact that

the square man, is sometimes put in the round hole, is a cause

of considerable consolation to all disappointed men, and to their

parents, sisters, aunts, and grandmothers.

No stronger proof can be adduced of the little correspondence that

often exists between success and merit, than the fact that the

self-same man, by the exercise of the self-same powers, may at one

time starve and at another drive his carriage and four. When poor

Edmund Kean was acting in barns to country bumpkins, and barely

rinding bread for his wife and child, he was just as great a genius

as when he was crowding Drury Lane. When Brougham presided in the

House of Lords, he was not a bit better or greater than when he

had hung about in the Parliament House at Edinburgh, a briefless

and suspected junior barrister. When all London crowded to see the

hippopotamus, he was just the animal that he was a couple of years

later, when no one took the trouble of looking at him. And when

George Stephenson died, amid the applause and gratitude of all the

intelligent men in Britain, he was the same man, maintaining the

same principle, as when men of science and of law regarded as a

mischievous lunatic the individual who declared that some day the

railroad would be the king's highway, and mail-coaches would be

drawn by steam.

As to the very highest prizes of human affairs, it is, I believe,

admitted on all hands, that these generally fall to second-rate

men. Civilized nations have found it convenient entirely to give

up the hallucination that the monarch is the greatest, wisest, and

best man in his dominions. Nobody supposes that. And in the case

of hereditary dynasties, such an end is not even aimed at. But it

is curious to find how with elective sovereignties it is just the

same way. The great statesmen of America have very rarely attained

to the dignity of President of the United States. Not Clays and

Webstcrs have had their four years at the White House. And even

Cardinal Wiseman candidly tells us that the post which is regarded

by millions as the highest which can be held by mortal, is all but

systematically given to judicious mediocrity. A great genius will

never be Pope. The coach must not be trusted to too dashing a

charioteer. Give us the safe and steady man. Everybody knows that

the same usage applies to the Primacy in England. Bishops must be

sensible; but archbishops are by some regarded with suspicion if

they have ever committed themselves to sentiments more startling

than that two and two make four. Let me suppose, my reader, that you

have met with great success: I mean success which is very great in

your own especial field. The lists are just put out, and you are

senior wrangler; or you have got the gold medal in some country

grammar-school. The feeling in both cases is the same. In each case

there combines with the exultant emotion, an intellectual conception

that you are one of the greatest of the human race. Well, was

not the feeling a strange one? Did you not feel somewhat afraid?

It seemed too much. Something was sure to come, you thought, that

would take you down. Few are burdened with such a feeling; but surely

there is something alarming in great success. You were a barber's

boy: you are made a peer. Surely you must go through life with an

ever-recurring emotion of surprise at finding yourself where you

are. It must be curious to occupy a place whence you look down upon

the heads of most of your kind. A duke gets accustomed to it; but

surely even he must sometimes wonder how he comes to be placed so

many degrees above multitudes who deserve as well. Or do such come

to fancy that their merit is equal to their success; and that by

as much as they are better off than other men, they are better than

other men? Very likety they do. It is all in human nature. And I

suppose the times have been in which it would have been treasonable

to hint that a man with a hundred thousand pounds a year was not

at least two thousand times as good as one with fifty.

The writer always feels a peculiar sympathy with failure, and with

people who are suffering from disappointment, great or small. It is

not that he himself is a disappointed man. No; he has to confess,

with deep thankfulness, that his success has far, very far,

transcended his deserts. And, like many other men, he has found

that one or two events in his life, which seemed disappointments

at the time, were in truth great and signal blessings. Still, every

one has known enough of the blank, desolate feeling of disappointment,

to sympathize keenly with the disappointments of others. I feel

deeply for the poor Punch and Judy man, simulating great excitement

in the presence of a small, uninterested group, from which people

keep dropping away. I feel for the poor barn-actor, who discovers,

on his first entrance upon his rude stage, that the magnates of

the district, who promised to be present at the performance, have

not come. You have gone to see a panorama, or to hear a lecture on

phrenology. Did you not feel for the poor fellow, the lecturer or

exhibitor, when ne came in ten minutes past the hour, and found

little but empty benches? Did you not see what a chill fell upon

him: how stupified he seemed: in short, how much disappointed he

was? And if the money he had hoped to earn that evening was to pay

the lodgings in which he and his wife were staying, you may be sure

there was a heart sickness about his disappointment far beyond the

mortification of mere self-love. When a rainy day stops a pic-nic,

or mars the enjoyment of it, although the disappointment is hardly

a serious one, still it is sure to cause so much real suffering,

that only rancorous old ladies will rejoice in the fact. It is

curious how men who have known disappointment themselves, and who

describe it well, seem to like to paint lives which in the meantime are

all hope and success. There is Mr. Thackeray. With what sympathy,

with what enjoyment, he shows us the healthy, wealthy, hopeful

youths, like Clive Newcome, or young Pendennis, when it was all

sunshine around the young prince! And yet how sad a picture of

life he gives us in The Newcomes. It would not have done to make

it otherwise: it is true, though sad: that history of the good and

gallant gentleman, whose life was a long disappointment, a long

failure in all on which he had set his heart; in his early love,

in his ambitious plans for his son, even in his hopes for his son's

happiness, in his own schemes of fortune, till that life of honour

ended in the almshouse at last. How the reader wishes that the

author would make brighter days dawn upon his hero! But the author

cannot: he must hold on unflinchingly as fate. In such a story as

his, truth can no more be sacrificed to our wishes than in real

life we know it to be. Well, all disappointment is discipline; and

received in a right spirit, it may prepare us for better things

elsewhere. It has been said that heaven is a place for those who

failed on earth. The greatest hero is perhaps the man who does his

very best, and signally fails, and still is not embittered by the

failure. And looking at the fashion in which an unseen Power permits

wealth and rank and influence to go sometimes in this world, we are

possibly justified in concluding that in His judgment the prizes

of this Vanity Fair are held as of no great account. A life here,

in which you fail of every end you seek, yet which disciplines you

for a better, is assuredly not a failure.

What a blessing it would be, if men's ambition were in every case

made to keep pace with their ability. Very much disappointment

arises from a man's having an absurd over-estimate of his own

powers, which leads him, to use an expressive Scotticism, to even

himself to some position for which he is utterly unfit, and which

he has no chance at all of reaching. A lad comes to the university

who has been regarded in his own family as a great genius, and

who has even distinguished himself at some little country school.

What a rude shock to the poor fellow's estimate of himself; what

a smashing of the hopes of those at home, is sure to come when he

measures his length with his superiors; and is compelled, as is

frequently the case, to take a third or fourth-rate position. If

you ever read the lives of actors (and every one ought, for they

show you a new and curious phase of life), you must have smiled

to see the ill-spelled, ungrarnmatical letters in which some poor

fellow writes to a London manager for an engagement, and declares

that he feels within him the makings of a greater actor than Garrick

or Kean. How many young men who go into the Church fancy that they

are to surpass Melvill or Chalmers! No doubt, reader, you have

sometimes come out of a church, where you had heard a preacher

aiming at the most ambitious eloquence, who evidently had not the

slightest vocation that way; and you have thought it would be well

if no man ever wished to be eloquent who had it not in him to be

so. Would that the principle were universally true! Who has not

sometimes been amused iff passing along the fashionable street of

a great city, to see a little vulgar snob dressed out within an

inch of his life, walking along, evidently fancying that he looks

like a gentleman, and that he is the admired of all admirers?

Sometimes, in a certain street which I might name, I have witnessed

such a spectacle, sometimes with amusement, oftener with sorrow and

pity, as I thought of the fearful, dark surmises which must often

cross the poor snob's mind, that he is failing in his anxious

endeavours. Occasionally, too, I have beheld a man bestriding a

horse in that peculiar fashion which may be described as his being

on the outside of the animal, slipping away over the hot stones,

possibly at a trot, and fancying ivthough with many suspicions to

the contrary; that he is witching the world with noble horsemanship.

What a pity that such poor fellows will persist in aiming at what

they cannot achieve! What mortification and disappointment they must

often know! The horse backs on to the pavement, into a plate-glass

window, just as Maria, for whose sake the poor screw was hired, is

passing by. The boys halloo in derision; and some ostler, helpful,

but not complimentary, extricates the rider, and says, 'I see you

have never been on 'ossback before; you should not have pulled the

curb-bit that way!' And when the vulgar dandy, strutting along,

with his Brummagem jewellery, his choking collar, and his awfully

tight boots which cause him agony, meets the true gentleman; how

it rushes upon him that he himself is only a humbug! How the poor

fellow's heart sinks!

Turning from such inferior fields of ambition as these, I think

how often it happens that men come to some sphere in life with

a flourish of trumpets, as destined to do great things, and then

fail. There is a modest, quiet self-confidence, without which

you will hardly get on in this world; but I believe, as a general

rule, that the men who have attained to very great success have

started with very moderate expectations. Their first aim was lowly;

and the way gradually opened before them. Their ambition, like

their success, went on step by step; they did not go at the top of

the tree at once. It would be easy to mention instances in which

those who started with high pretensions have been taught by stern

fact to moderate them; in which the man who came over from the

Irish bar intending to lead the Queen's Bench, and become a Chief

Justice, was glad, after thirty years of disappointment, to get

made a County Court judge. Not that this is always so; sometimes

pretension, if big enough, secures success. A man setting up as a

silk-mercer in a strange town, is much likelier to succeed if he

opens a huge shop, painted in flaring colours and puffed by enormous

bills and vast advertising vans, than if he set up in a modest

way, in something like proportion to his means. And if he succeeds,

well; if he fails, his creditors bear the loss. A great field

has been opened for the disappointment of men who start with the

flourish of trumpets already mentioned, by the growing system of

competitive examinations. By these, your own opinion of yourself,

and the home opinion of you, are brought to a severe test. I think

with sympathy of the disappointment of poor lads who hang on week

after week, hoping to hear that they have succeeded in gaining the

coveted appointment, and then learn that they have failed. I think

with sympathy of their poor parents. Even when the prize lost is

not substantial pudding, but only airy praise, it is a bitter thing

to lose it, after running the winner close. It must be a supremely

irritating and mortifying thing to be second wrangler. Look at the

rows of young fellows, sitting with their papers before them at a

Civil Service Examination, and think what interest and what hopes

are centred on every one of them. Think how many count on great

success, kept up to do so by the estimation in which they are held

at home. Their sisters and their mothers think them equal to anything.

Sometimes justly; sometimes the fact justifies the anticipation.

When Baron Alderson went to Cambridge, he tells us that he would

have spurned the offer of being second man of his year; and sure

enough, he was out of sight the first. But for one man of whom the

home estimation is no more than just, there are ten thousand in

whose case, to strangers, it appears simply preposterous.

There is one sense in which all after-life may be said to be a

disappointment. It is far different from that which it was pictured

by early anticipations and hopes. The very greatest material success

still leaves the case thus. And no doubt it seems strange to many

to look back on the fancies of youth, which experience has sobered

down. When you go back, my reader, to the village where you were

brought up, don't you remember how you used to fancy that when you

were a man you would come to it in your carriage and four? This, it

is unnecessary to add, you have not yet done. You thought likewise

that when you came back you would be arrayed in a scarlet coat,

possibly in a cuirass of steel; whereas in fact you have come to

the little inn where nobody knows you to spend the night, and you

are wandering along the bank of the river (how little changed!) in

a shooting-jacket of shepherd's plaid. You intended to marry the

village grocer's pretty daughter; and for that intention probably

you were somewhat hastily dismissed to a school a hundred miles

off; but this evening as you passed the shop you discovered her,

a plump matron, calling to her children in a voice rather shrill

than sweet; and you discovered from the altered sign above the

door that her father is dead, and that she has married the shopman,

your hated rival of former years. And yet how happily the wind is

tempered to the shorn lamb! You are not the least mortified. You

are much amused that your youthful fancies have been blighted. It

would have been fearful to have married that excellent individual;

the shooting-jacket is greatly more comfortable than the coat

of mail; and as for the carriage and four, why, even if you could

afford them, you would seldom choose to drive four horses. And it

is so with the more substantial anticipations of maturer years.

The man who, as already mentioned, intended to be a Chief Justice,

is quite happy when he is made a County Court judge. The man who

intended to eclipse Mr. Dickens in the arts of popular authorship

is content and proud to be the great writer of the London Journal.

The clergyman who would have liked a grand cathedral like York Minster

is perfectly pleased with his little country church, ivy-green and

grey. We come, if we are sensible folk, to be content with what we

can get, though we have not what we could wish.

Still, there are certain cases in which this can hardly be so. A

man of sense can bear cheerfully the frustration of the romantic

fancies of childhood and youth; but not many are so philosophical

in regard to the comparatively reasonable anticipations of more

reasonable years. When you got married at five-and-forty, your

hopes were not extravagant. You knew quite well you were not winning

the loveliest of her sex, and indeed you felt you had no right to

expect to do so. You were well aware that in wisdom, knowledge,

accomplishment, amiability, you could not reasonably look for more

than the average of the race. But you thought you might reasonably

look for that: and now, alas, alas! you find you have not got it.

How have I pitied a worthy and sensible man, listening to his wife

making a fool of herself before a large company of people! How

have I pitied such a one, when I heard his wife talking the most

idiotical nonsense; or when I saw her flirting scandalously with

a notorious scapegrace; or learned of the large parties which she

gave in his absence, to the discredit of her own character and the

squandering of his hard-earned gains! No habit, no philosophy, will

ever reconcile a human being of right feeling to such a disappointment

as that. And even a sadder thing than this--one of the saddest

things in life--is when a man begins to feel that his whole life is

a failure; not merely a failure as compared with the vain fancies

of youth, but a failure as compared with his sobered convictions of

what he ought to have been and what he might have been. Probably,

in a desponding mood, we have all known the feeling; and even when

we half knew it was morbid and transient, it was a very painful

one. But painful it must be beyond all names of pain, where it is

the abiding, calm, sorrowful conviction of the man's whole being.

Sore must be the heart of the man of middle age, who often thinks

that he is thankful his father is in his grave, and so beyond mourning

over his son's sad loss in life. And even when the stinging sense

of guilt is absent, it is a mournful thing for one to feel that he

has, so to speak, missed stays in his earthly voyage, and run upon

a mud-bank which he can never get off: to feel one's self ingloriously

and uselessly stranded, while those who started with us pass by

with gay flag and swelling sail. And all this may be while it is

hard to know where to attach blame; it may be when there was nothing

worse to complain of than a want of promptitude, resolution, and

tact, at the one testing time. Every one knows the passage in point

in Shakspeare.

Disappointment, I have said, is almost sure to be experienced in

a greater or less degree, so long as anything remains to be wished

or sought. And a provision is made for the indefinite continuance

of disappointment in the lot of even the most successful of men,

by the fact in rerum naturu that whenever the wants felt on a lower

level are supplied, you advance to a higher platform, where a new

crop of wants is felt. Till the lower wants are supplied you never

feel the higher; and accordingly people who pass through life

barely succeeding in gaining the supply of the lower wants, will

hardly be got to believe that the higher wants are ever really felt

at all. A man who is labouring anxiously to earn food and shelter

for his children--who has no farther worldly end, and who thinks he

would be perfectly happy if he could only be assured on New Year's

day that he would never fail in earning these until the thirty-first

of December, will hardly believe you when you tell him that the

Marquis at the castle is now utterly miserable because the King would

not give him a couple of yards of blue or green ribbon. And it is

curious in how many cases worldly-successful men mount, step after

step, into a new series of wants, implying a new set of mortifications

and disappointments. A person begins as a small tradesman; all he

aims at is a maintenance for him and his. That is his first aim.

Say he succeeds in reaching it. A little ago he thought he would

have been quite content could he only do that. But from his new

level he sees afar a new peak to climb; now he aims at a fortune.

That is his next aim. Say he reaches it. Now he buys an estate;

now he aims at being received and admitted as a country gentleman;

and the remainder of his life is given to striving for social

recognition in the county. How he schemes to get the baronet to dine

with him, and the baronet's lady to call upon his homely spouse!

And every one has remarked with amusement the hive of petty

mortifications, failures, and disappointments, through which he

fights his way, till, as it may chance, he actually gains a dubious

footing in the society he seeks, or gives up the endeavour as a

final failure. Who shall say that any one of the successive wants

the man has felt is more fanciful, less real, than any other? To

Mr. Oddbody, living in his fine house, it is just as serious an

aim to get asked to the Duke's ball, as in former days it was to

Jack Oddbody to carry home on Saturday night the shillings which

were to buy his bread and cheese.

And another shade of disappointment which keeps pace with all material

success is that which arises, not from failing to get a thing, but

from getting it and then discovering that it is not what we had

fancied--that it will not make us happy. Is not this disappointment

ft It everywhere? When the writer was a little boy, he was promised

that on a certain birthday a donkey should be bought for his future

riding. Did not he frequently allude to it in conversation with

his companions? Did not he plague the servants for information as

to the natural history and moral idiosyncrasy of donkeys? Did not

the long-eared visage appear sometimes through his dreams? Ah,

the donkey came! Then followed the days of being pitched over his

head; the occasions on which the brute of impervious hide rushed

through hedges and left me sticking in them: happiness was no

nearer, though the donkey was there. Have you not, my philosophic

friend, had your donkey? I mean your moral donkey. Yes, and scores

of such. When you were a schoolboy, longing for the holidays,

have you not chalked upon doors the legend--OH FOR AUGUST! Vague,

delightful visions of perfect happiness were wrapped up in the

words. But the holidays came, as all holidays have done and will

do; and in a few days you were heartily wearied of them. When you

were spoony about Marjory Anne, you thought that once your donkey

came, once you were fairly married and settled, what a fine thing

it would be! I do not say a syllable against that youthful matron;

but I presume you have discovered that she falls short of perfection,

and that wedded life has its many cares. You thought you would

enjoy so much the setting-up of your carriage; your wife and you

often enjoyed it by anticipation on dusty summer days: but though

all very well, wood and iron and leather never made the vehicle

that shall realize your anticipations. The horses were often lame;

the springs would sometimes break; the paint was always getting

scratched and the lining cut. Oh, what a nuisance is a carriage!

You fancied you would be perfectly happy when you retired from

business and settled in the country. What a comment upon such

fancies is the fashion in which retired men of business haunt the

places of their former toils like unquiet ghosts! How sick they

get of the country! I do not think of grand disappointments of

the sort; of the satiety of Vathek, turning sickly away from his

earthly paradise at Cintra; nor of the graceful towers I have seen

rising from a woody cliff above a summer sea, and of the story

told me of their builder, who, after rearing them, lost interest

in them, and in sad disappointment left them to others, and went

back to the busy town wherein he had made his wealth. I think of

men, more than one or two, who rented their acre of land by the

sea-side, and built their pretty cottage, made their grassplots and

trained their roses, and then in unaccustomed idleness grew weary

of the whole and sold their place to some keen bargain-maker for

a tithe of what it cost them.

Why is it that failure in attaining ambitious ends is so painful?

When one has honestly done one's best, and is beaten after all,

conscience must be satisfied: the wound is solely to self-love;

and is it not to the discredit of our nature that that should imply

such a weary, blank, bitter feeling as it often does? Is it that

every man has within his heart a lurking belief that, notwithstanding

the world's ignorance of the fact, there never was in the world

anybody so remarkable as himself? I think that many mortals need

daily to be putting down a vague feeling which really comes to that.

You who have had experience of many men, know that you can hardly

over-estimate the extent and depth of human vanity. Never be afraid

but that nine men out of ten will swallow with avidity flattery,

however gross; especially if it ascribe to them those qualities of

which they are most manifestly deficient.

A disappointed man looks with great interest at the man who has

obtained what he himself wanted. Your mother, reader, says that

her ambition for you would be entirely gratified if you could but

reach a certain place which some one you know has held for twenty

years. You look at him with much curiosity; he appears very much

like yourself; and, curiously, he does not appear particularly happy.

Oh, reader, whatever you do--though last week he gained without an

effort what you have been wishing for all your life--do not hate

him. Resolve that you will love and wish well to the man who fairly

succeeded where you fairly failed. Go to him and get acquainted

with him: if you and he are both true men, you will not find it a

difficult task to like him. It is perhaps asking too much of human

nature to ask you to do all this in the case of the man who has

carried off the woman you loved; but as regards anything else, do

it all. Go to your successful rival, heartily congratulate him.

Don't be Jesuitical; don't merely felicitate the man; put down the

rising feeling of envy: that is always out-and-out wrong. Don't

give it a moment's quarter. You clerks in an office, ready to be

angry with a fellow-clerk who gets the chance of a trip to Scotland

on business, don't give in to the feeling. Shake hands with him

all round, and go in a body with him to Euston Square, and give

him three cheers as he departs by the night mail. And you, greater

mortals--you, rector of a beautiful parish, who think you would have

done for a bishop as well as the clergyman next you who has got the

mitre; you, clever barrister, sure some day to be solicitor-general,

though sore to-day because a man next door has got that coveted

post before you; go and see the successful man--go forthwith,

congratulate him heartily, say frankly you wish it had been you:

it will do oreat good both to him and to yourself. Let it not be

that envy--that bitter and fast-growing fiend--shall be suffered

in your heart for one minute. When I was at college I sat on the

same bench with a certain man. We were about the same age. Now, I

am a country parson, and he is a cabinet minister. Oh, how he has

distanced poor me in the race of life! Well, he had a tremendous

start, no doubt. Now, shall I hate him? Shall I pitch into him, rake

up all his errors of youth, tell how stupid he was (though indeed

he was not stupid), and bitterly gloat over the occasion on which

he fell on the ice and tore his inexpressibles in the presence of

a grinning throng? No, my old fellow-student, who hast now doubtless

forgotten my name, though I so well remember yours, though you got

your honours possibly in some measure from the accident of your

birth, you have nobly justified their being given you so early; and

so I look on with interest to your loftier advancement yet, and I

say--God bless you!

I think, if I were an examiner at one of the Universities, that I

should be an extremely popular one. No man should ever be plucked.

Of course it would be very wrong, and, happily, the work is in the

hands of those who are much fitter for it; but, instead of thinking

solely and severely of a man's fitness to pass, I could not help

thinking a great deal of the heartbreak it would be to the poor

fellow and his family if he were turned. It would be ruin to any

magazine to have me for its editor. I should always be printing

all sorts of rubbishing articles, which are at present consigned

to the Balaam-box. I could not bear to grieve and disappoint the

young lady who sends her gushing verses. I should be picturing to

myself the long hours of toil that resulted in the clever lad's

absurd attempt at a review, and all his fluttering hopes and fears

as to whether it was to be accepted or not. No doubt it is by this

mistaken kindness that institutions are damaged and ruined. The

weakness of a sympathetic bishop burdens the Church with a clergy-man

who for many years will be an injury to her; and it would have been

far better even for the poor fellow himself to have been decidedly

and early kept out of a vocation for which he is wholly unfit. I am

far from saying that the resolute examiner who plucks freely, and

the resolute editor who rejects firmly, are deficient in kindness

of heart, or even in vividness of imagination to picture what they

are doing: though much of the suffering and disappointment of this

world is caused by men who are almost unaware of what they do. Like

the brothers of Isabella, in Keats' beautiful poem,

Half ignorant, they turn an easy wheel,

That sets sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel.

Yet though principle and moral decision may be in you sufficient

to prevent your weakly yielding to the feeling, be sure you always

sympathize with failure;--honest, laborious failure. And I think

all but very malicious persons generally do sympathize with it. It

is easier to sympathize with failure than with success. No trace of

envy comes in to mar your sympathy, and you have a pleasant sense

that you are looking down from a loftier elevation. The average man

likes to have some one to look down upon--even to look down upon

kindly. I remember being greatly touched by hearing of a young man

of much promise, who went to preach his first sermon in a little

church by the sea-shore in a lonely highland glen. He preached his

sermon, and got on pretty fairly; but after service he went down

to the shore of the far-sounding sea, and wept to think how sadly

he had fallen short of his ideal, how poor was his appearance

compared to what he had intended and hoped. Perhaps a foolish vanity

and self-conceit was at the foundation of his disappointment; but

though I did not know him at all, I could not but have a very kindly

sympathy for him. I heard, years afterwards, with great pleasure,

that he had attained to no small eminence and success as a pulpit

orator; and I should not have alluded to him here but for the fact

that in early youth, and amid greater expectations of him, he

passed away from this life of high aims and poor fulfilments. I

think how poor Keats, no doubt morbidly ambitious as well as morbidly

sensitive, declared in his preface to Endymion that 'there is no

fiercer hell than failure in a great attempt.'

Most thoughtful men must feel it a curious and interesting study,

to trace the history of the closing days of those persons who have

calmly and deliberately, in no sudden heat of passion, taken away

their own life. In such cases, of course, we see the sense of

failure, absolute and complete. They have quietly resolved lo give

up life as a losing game. You remember the poor man who, having

spent his last shilling, retired to a wood far from human dwellings,

and there died voluntarily by starvation. He kept a diary of those

days of gradual death, setting out his feelings both of body and

mind. No nourishment passed his lips after he had chosen his last

resting-place, save a little water, which he dragged himself to

a pond to drink. He was not discovered till he was dead; but his

melancholy chronicle appeared to have been carried down to very

near the time when he became unconscious. I remember its great

characteristic appeared to be a sense of utter failure. There

seemed to be no passion, none of the bitter desperate resolution

which prompts the energetic 'Anywhere, anywhere, out of the world;'

but merely a weary, lonely wish to creep quietly away. I have no

look but one of sorrow and pity to cast on the poor suicide's grave.

I think the common English verdict is right as well as charitable,

which supposes that in every such case reason has become unhinged,

and responsibility is gone. And what desperate misery, what a

black horrible anguish of heart, whether expressing itself calmly

or feverishly, must have laid its gripe upon a human being before

it can overcome in him the natural clinging to life, and make him

deliberately turn his back upon 'the warm precincts of the cheerful

day.' No doubt it is the saddest of all sad ends; but I do not

forget that a certain Authority, the highest of all authorities,

said to all human beings, 'Judge not, that ye be not judged.' The

writer has, in the course of his duty, looked upon more than one

suicide's dead face; and the lines of Hood appeared to sketch the

fit feeling with which to do so:--

Owning her weakness,

Her evil behaviour;

And leaving, with meekness,

Her soul to her Saviour.

What I have just written recalls to me, by some link of association,

the words I once heard a simple old Scotch-woman utter by her son's

deathbed. He was a young man of twenty-two, a pious and good young

man, and I had seen him very often throughout his gradual decline.

Calling one morning, I found he was gone, and his mother begged me

to come and see his face once more; and standing for the last time

by him, I said (and I could say them honestly) some words of Christian

comfort to the poor old woman. I told her, in words far better than

any of my own, how the Best Friend of mankind had said, 'I am the

Resurrection and the Life: he that believeth in Me, though he were

dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me,

shall never die.' I remember well her answer. 'Aye,' said she, 'he

gaed away trusting in that; and he'll be sorely disappointed if he

doesna' find it so.' Let me venture to express my hope, that when

my readers and I pass within the veil, we may run the risk of

no other disappointment than that these words should prove false;

and then it will be well with us. There will be no disappointment

there, in the sense of things failing to come up to our expectations.

Let it be added, that there are disappointments with which even

the kindest hearts will have no sympathy, and failures over which

we may without malignity rejoice. You do not feel very deeply for

the disappointed burglar, who retires from your dwelling at 3 A. M.,

leaving a piece of the calf of his leg in the jaws of your trusty

watch-dog; nor for the Irish bog-trotter who (poor fellow),

from behind the hedge, misses his aim at the landlord who fed him

and his family through the season of famine. You do not feel very

deeply for the disappointment of the friend, possibly the slight

acquaintance, who with elongated face retires from your study,

having failed to persuade you to attach your signature to a bill

for some hundreds of pounds 'just as a matter of form.' Very likely

he wants the money; so did the burglar: but is that any reason why

you should give it to him? Refer him to the wealthy and influential

relatives of whom he has frequently talked to you; tell him they

are the very people to assist him in such a case with their valuable

autograph. As for yourself, tell him you know what you owe to your

children and yourself; and say that the slightest recurrence to

such a subject must be the conclusion of all intercourse between

you. Ah, poor disappointed fellow! How heartless it is in you to

refuse to pay, out of your hard earnings, the money which he so

jauntily and freely spent!

How should disappointment be met? Well, that is far too large

a question to be taken up at this stage of my essay, though there

are various suggestions which I should like to make. Some disappointed

men take to gardening and farming; and capital things they are.

But when disappointment is extreme, it will paralyse you so that

you will suffer the weeds to grow up all about you, without your

having the heart to set your mind to the work of having the place

made neat. The state of a man's garden is a very delicate and

sensitive test as to whether he is keeping hopeful and well-to-do.

It is to me a very sad sight to see a parsonage getting a dilapidated

look, and the gravel walks in its garden growing weedy. The parson

must be growing old and poor. The parishioners tell you how trim

and orderly everything was when he came first to the parish. But

his affairs have become embarrassed, or his wife and children are

dead; and though still doing his duty well, and faithfully, he has

lost heart and interest in these little matters; and so things are

as you see.

I have been amused by the way in which some people meet disappointment.

They think it a great piece of worldly wisdom to deny that they

have ever been disappointed at all. Perhaps it might be so, if the

pretext were less transparent than it is. An old lady's son is

plucked at an examination for a civil appointment. She takes up

the ground that it is rather a credit to be plucked; that nearly

everybody is plucked; that all the cleverest fellows are plucked;

and that only stupid fellows are allowed to pass. When the

examiners find a clever man, they take a pleasure in plucking him.

A number of the cleverest men in England can easily put out a lad

of one-and-twenty. Then, shifting her ground, she declares the

examination was ridiculously easy: her son was rejected because he

could not tell what two and two amount to: because he did not know

the name of the river on which London is built: because he did not

(in his confusion) know his own name. She shows you the indignant

letter which the young man wrote to her, announcing the scandalous

injustice with which he was treated. You remark three words misspelt

in the first five lines; and you fancy you have fathomed the secret

of the plucking.

I have sometimes tried, but in vain, to discover the law which

regulates the attainment of extreme popularity. Extreme popularity,

in this country and age, appears a very arbitrary thing. I defy any

person to predict a priori what book, or song, or play, or picture,

is to become the rage,--to utterly transcend all competition. I

believe, indeed, that there cannot be popularity for even a short

time, without some kind or degree of merit to deserve it; and in

any case there is no other standard to which one can appeal than

the deliberate judgment of the mass of educated persons. If you

are quite convinced that a thing is bad which all such think good,

why, of course you are wrong. If you honestly think Shakspeare

a fool, you are aware you must be mistaken. And so, if a book,

or a picture, or a play, or a song, be really good, and if it be

properly brought before the public notice, you may, as a general

rule, predict that it will attain a certain measure of success.

But the inexplicable thing--the thing of which I am quite unable to

trace the law--is extreme success. How is it that one thing shoots

ahead of everything else of the same class; and without being

materially better, or even materially different, leaves everything

else out of sight behind? Why is it that Eclipse is first and the

rest nowhere, while the legs and wind of Eclipse are no whit better

than the legs and wind of all the rest? If twenty novels of nearly

equal merit are published, it is not impossible that one shall dart

ahead of the remaining nineteen; that it shall be found in every

library; that Mr. Mudie may announce that he has 3250 copies of

it; that it shall be the talk of every circle; its incidents set to

music, its plot dramatized; that it shall count readers by thousands

while others count readers by scores; while yet one cannot really

see why any of the others might not have taken its place. Or of a

score of coarse comic songs, nineteen shall never get beyond the

walls of the Cyder Cellars (I understand there is a place of the

name), while the twentieth, no wise superior in any respect, comes to

be sung about the streets, known by everybody, turned into polkas

and quadrilles and in fact to become for the time one of the

institutions of this great and intelligent country. I remember

how, a year or two since, that contemptible Rat-catcher's Daughter,

without a thing to recommend it, with no music, no wit, no sentiment,

nothing but vulgar brutality, might be heard in every separate town

of England and Scotland, sung about the streets by every ragged

urchin; while the other songs of the vivacious Cowell fell dead

from his lips. The will of the sovereign people has decided that

so it shall be. And as likings and dislikings in most cases are

things strongly felt, but impossible to account for even by the

person who feels them, so is it ffith the enormous admiration,

regard, and success which fall to the lot of many to whom popularity

is success. Actors, statesmen, authors, preachers, have often in

England their day of quite undeserved popular ovation; and by and

bye their day of entire neglect. It is the rocket and the stick.

We are told that Bishop Butler, about the period of the great

excesses of the French Revolution, was walking in his garden with

his chaplain. After a long fit of musing, the Bishop turned to the

chaplain, and asked the question whether nations might not go mad,

as well as individuals? Classes of society, I think, may certainly

have attacks of temporary insanity on some one point. The Jenny

Lind fever was such an attack. Such was the popularity of the

boy-actor Betty. Such the popularity of the Small Coal Man some time

in the last century; such that of the hippopotamus at the Regent's

Park; such that of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

But this essay must have an end. It is far too long already. I am

tired of it, and a fortiori my reader must be so. Let me try the

effect of an abrupt conclusion.

CHAPTER III.

CONCERNING SCYLLA AND CHARYBDIS;

SOME THOUGHTS UPON THE SWING OF THE PENDULUM.

[Footnote: For the suggestion of the subject of this essay, and

for many valuable hints as to its treatment, I am indebted to the

kindness of the Archbishop of Dublin. Indeed, in all that part of

the essay which treats of Secondary Vulgar Errwi, I have done little

more than expand and illustrate the skeleton of thought supplied

to me by Archbishop Whately.]

I have eaten up all the grounds of my tea, said, many years since,

in my hearing, in modest yet triumphant tones, a little girl of

seven years old. I have but to close my eyes, and I see all that

scene again, almost as plainly as ever. Six or seven children (I

am one of them) are sitting round a tea-table; their father and

mother are there too; and an old gentleman, who is (in his own

judgment) one of the wisest of men. I see the dining-room, large and

low-ceilinged; the cheerful glow of the autumnal fire; the little

faces in the soft candle-light, for glaring gas was there unknown.

There had been much talk about the sinfulness of waste--of the

waste of even very little things. The old gentleman, so wise (in

his own judgment, and indeed in my judgment at that period), was

instilling into the children's minds some of those lessons which

are often impressed upon children by people (I am now aware) of

no great wisdom or cleverness. He had dwelt at considerable length

upon the sinfulness of wasting anything; likewise on the sinfulness

of children being saucy or particular as to what they should eat.

He enforced, with no small solemnity, the duty of children's eating

what was set before them without minding whether it was good or not,

or at least without minding whether they liked it or not. The poor

little girl listened to all that was said, and of course received

it all as indubitably true. Waste and sauciness, she saw, were

wrong, so she judged that the very opposite of waste and sauciness

must be right. Accordingly, she thought she would turn to use

something that was very small, but still something that ought not

to be wasted. Accordingly, she thought she would show the docility

of her taste by eating up something that was very disagreeable.

Here was an opportunity at once of acting out the great principles

to which she had been listening. And while a boy, evidently destined

to be a metaphysician, and evidently possessed of the spirit

of resistance to constituted authority whether in government or

doctrine, boldly argued that it could not be wicked in him to hate

onions, because God had made him so that he did hate onions, and

(going still deeper into things) insisted that to eat a thing when

you did not want it was wasting it much more truly than it would

be wasting it to leave it; the little girl ate up all the grounds

left in her teacup, and then announced the fact with considerable

complacency.

Very, very natural. The little girl's act was a slight straw

showing how a great current sets. It was a fair exemplification

of a tendency which is woven into the make of our being. Tell the

average mortal that it is wrong to walk on the left side of the road,

and in nine cases out of ten he will conclude that the proper thing

must be to walk on the right side of the road; whereas in actual

life, and in almost all opinions, moral, political, and religious,

the proper thing is to walk neither on the left nor the right side,

but somewhere about the middle. Say to the ship-master, You are to

sail through a perilous strait; you will have the raging Scylla on

one hand as you go. His natural reply will be, Well, I will keep as

far away from it as possible; I will keep close by the other side.

But the rejoinder must be, No, you will be quite as ill off there;

you will be in equal peril on the other side: there is Charybdis.

What you have to do is to keep at a safe distance from each. In

avoiding the one, do not run into the other.

It seems to be a great law of the universe, that Wrong lies upon

either side of the way, and that Right is the narrow path between.

There are the two ways of doing wrong--Too Much and Too Little.

Go to the extreme right hand, and you are wrong; go to the extreme

left hand, and you are wrong too. That you may be right, you have

to keep somewhere between these two extremes: but not necessarily

in the exact middle. All this, of course, is part of the great fact

that in this world Evil has the advantage of Good. It is easier to

go wrong than right.

It is very natural to think that if one thing or course be wrong,

its reverse must be right. If it be wrong to walk towards the east,

surely it must be right to walk towards the west. If it be wrong to

dress in black, it must be right to dress in white. It is somewhat

hard to say, Dum vitant stulti vitia, in contraria currunt--to

declare, as if that were a statement of the whole truth, that

fools mistake reverse of wrong for right. Fools do so indeed, but

not fools only. The average Jiuman being, with the most honest

intentions, is prone to mistake reverse of wrong for right. We

are fond, by our natural constitution, of broad distinctions--of

classifications that put the whole interests and objects of this

world to iho Tight-hand and to the left. We long for Aye or No--for

Heads or Tails. We are impatient of limitations, qualifications,

restrictions. You remember how Mr. Micawber explained the philosophy

of income and expenditure, and urged people never to run in debt.

Income, said he, a hundred pounds a year; expenditure ninety-nine

pounds nineteen shillings: Happiness. Income, a hundred pounds a

year; expenditure a hundred pounds and one shilling: Misery. You

see the principle involved is, that if you are not happy, you must

be miserable--that if you are not miserable, you must be happy.

If you are not any particular thing, then you are its opposite. If

you are not For, then you are Against. If you are not black, many

men will jump to the conclusion that you are white: the fact probably

being that you are gray. If not a Whig, you must be a Tory: in

truth, you are a Liberal-Conservative. We desiderate in all things

the sharp decidedness of the verdict of a jury--Guilty or Not

Guilty. We like to conclude that if a man be not very good, then

he is very bad; if not very clever, then very stupid; if not very

wise, then a fool: whereas in fact, the man probably is a curious

mixture of good and evil, strength and weakness, wisdom and folly,

knowledge and ignorance, cleverness and stupidity.

Let it be here remarked, that in speaking of it as an error to

take reverse of wrong for right, I use the words in their ordinary

sense, as generally understood. In common language the reverse

of a thing is taken to mean the thing at the opposite end of

the scale from it. Thus, black is the reverse of white, bigotry

of latitudinarianism, malevolence of benevolence, parsimony of

extravagance, and the like. Of course, in strictness, these things

are not the reverse of one another. In strictness, the reverse of

wrong always is right; for, to speak with severe precision, the

reverse of steering upon Scylla is simply not steering upon Scylla;

the reverse of being extravagant is not being parsimonious--it is

simply not being extravagant; the reverse of walking eastward is

not walking westward--it is simply not walking eastward. And that

may include standing still, or walking to any point of the compass

except the east. But I understand the reverse of a thing as meaning

the opposite extreme from it. And you see, the Latin words quoted

above are more precise than the English. It is severely true, that

while fools think to shun error on one side, they run into the

contrary error--i. e., the error that lies equi-distant, or nearly

equi-distant, on the other side of the line of right.

One class of the errors into which men are prone to run under this

natural impulse are those which have been termed Secondary Vulgar

Errors. A vulgar error, you will understand, my reader, does not

by any means signify an error into which only the vulgar are likely

to fall. It does not by any means signify a mistaken belief which

will be taken up only by inferior and uneducated minds. A vulgar

error means an error either in conduct or belief into which man,

by the make of his being, is likely to fall. Now, people a degree

wiser and more thoughtful than the mass, discover that these vulgar

errors are errors. They conclude that their opposites (i. e., the

things at the other extremity of the scale) must be right; and by

running into the opposite extreme they run just as far wrong upon

the other side. There is too great a reaction. The twig was bent

to the right--they bend it to the left, forgetting that the right

thing was that the twig should be straight. If convinced that waste

and sauciness are wrong, they proceed to eat the grounds of their

tea; if convinced that self-indulgence is wrong, they conclude that

hair-shirts and midnight floggings are right; if convinced that

the Church of Rome has too many ceremonies, they resolve that they

will have no ceremonies at all; if convinced that it is unworthy to

grovel in the presence of a duke, they conclude that it will be a

fine thing to refuse the duke ordinary civility; if convinced that

monarehs are not much wiser or better than other human beings, they

run off into the belief that all kings have been little more than

incarnate demons; if convinced that representative government

often works very imperfectly, they raise a cry for imperialism;

if convinced that monarchy has its abuses, they call out for

republicanism; if convinced that Britain has many things which are

not so good as they ought to be, they keep constantly extolling

the perfection of the United States.

Now, inasmuch as a rise of even one step in the scale of thought

elevates the man who has taken it above the vast host of men who

have never taken even that one step, the number of people who (at

least in matters of any moment) arrive at the Secondary Vulgar

Error is much less than the number of the people who stop at the

Primary Vulgar Error. Very great multitudes of human beings think

it a very fine thing, the very finest of all human things, to

be very rich. A much smaller number, either from the exercise of

their own reflective powers, or from the indoctrination of romantic

novels and overdrawn religious books, run to the opposite extreme:

undervalue wealth, deny that it adds anything to human comfort and

enjoyment, declare that it is an unmixed evil, profess to despise

it. I dare say that many readers of the Idylls of the King will

so misunderstand that exquisite song of 'Fortune and her Wheel,'

as to see in it only the charming and sublime embodiment of a

secondary vulgar error,--the error, to wit, that wealth and outward

circumstances are of no consequence at all. To me that song appears

rather to take the further step, and to reach the conclusion

in which is embodied the deliberate wisdom of humankind upon this

matter: the conclusion which shakes from itself on either hand

either vulgar error: the idolization of wealth on the one side,

the contempt of it on the other: and to convey the sobered judgment

that while the advantages and refinements of fortune are so great

that no thoughtful man can long despise it, the responsibilities

and temptations of it are so great that no thoughtful man will

much repine if he fail to reach it; and thus that we may genially

acquiesce in that which it pleases God to send. Midway between two

vulgar errors: steering a sure track between Scylla and Charybdis:

the grovelling multitude to the left, the romantic few to the

right; stand the words of inspired wisdom. The pendulum had probably

oscillated many times between the two errors, before it settled at

the central truth; 'Give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me

with food convenient for me: Lest I be full and deny Thee, and say,

Who is the Lord? Or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name

of my God in vain.'