Part 3

Goldsmith, in one of his delightful Chinese Letters, gives this illustration of the vanity and uncertainty of human judgment: "A painter of eminence was once resolved to finish a piece which should please the whole world. When, therefore, he had drawn a picture, in which his utmost skill was exhausted, it was exposed in the public market-place, with directions at the bottom for every spectator to mark with a brush, which lay by, every limb and feature which seemed erroneous. The spectators came, and in general applauded; but each, willing to show his talent at criticism, marked whatever he thought proper. At evening, when the painter came, he was mortified to find the whole picture one universal blot; not a single stroke that was not stigmatized with marks of disapprobation. Not satisfied with this trial, the next day he was resolved to try them in a different manner, and, exposing his picture as before, desired that every spectator would mark those beauties he approved or admired. The people complied; and the artist, returning, found his picture replete with the marks of beauty; every stroke that had been yesterday condemned now received the character of approbation."

"Experience tells us," says La Bruyere, "if there are ten persons who would blot a thought or an expression out of a book, there are a like number who would oppose it." "The most accomplished piece," he thought, "which the age has produced would fail under the hands of the critics and censurers, if the author would hearken to all their objections, and allow every one to throw out the passage that pleased him the least." "To hear praise and dispraise on a sermon, a piece of music, or a picture, and upon the very same subject to be entertained with quite opposite sentiments, is what makes one freely conclude we may safely publish anything, good or bad; for the good pleases some, the bad others, and the worst has its admirers."

At a club meeting in London, a nephew of Macaulay refused to rise when the national anthem was sung; but when he said that he did so from principle, he was respected in it. Others when questioned as to why they rose said, one because it was a hymn; another because of loyalty to England; another because he loved the queen; another because it was the custom; and they finally justified the refusal to rise because no two of them could agree as to why they rose.

Irving, in his Knickerbocker's New York, thus refers to the habit of criticising and complaining in the time of William the Testy: "Cobblers abandoned their stalls to give lessons on political economy; blacksmiths suffered their fires to go out while they stirred up the fires of faction; and even tailors, though said to be the ninth parts of humanity, neglected their own measures to criticise the measures of government. Strange! that the science of government, which seems to be so generally understood, should invariably be denied to the only ones called upon to exercise it. Not one of the politicians in question but, take his word for it, could have administered affairs ten times better than William the Testy."

Socrates used to say that although no man undertakes a trade he has not learned, even the meanest, yet every one thinks himself sufficiently qualified for the hardest of all trades, that of government.

"Whoever would aim directly at a cure of a public evil," says Montaigne, "and would consider of it before he began, would be very willing to withdraw his hands from meddling in it. Pacuvius Calavius, according to Livy, corrected the vice of this proceeding by a notable example. His fellow-citizens were in mutiny against their magistrates; he, being a man of great authority in the city of Capua, found means one day to shut up the senators in the palace, and calling the people together in the market-place, he told them that the day was now come wherein, at full liberty, they might revenge themselves on the tyrants by whom they had been so long oppressed, and whom he had now, all alone and unarmed, at his mercy; and advised that they should call them out one by one by lot, and should particularly determine of every one, causing whatever should be decreed to be immediately executed; with this caution, that they should at the same time depute some honest man in the place of him that was condemned, to the end that there might be no vacancy in the senate. They had no sooner heard the name of one senator, but a great cry of universal dislike was raised up against him. 'I see,' said Pacuvius, 'we must get rid of him; he is a wicked fellow; let us look out a good one in his room.' Immediately there was a profound silence, every one being at a stand who to choose. But one, more impudent than the rest, having named his man, there arose yet a greater consent of voices against him, a hundred imperfections being laid to his charge, and as many just reasons being presently given why he should not stand. These contradictory humors growing hot, it fared worse with the second senator and the third, there being as much disagreement in the election of the new, as consent in the putting out of the old. In the end, growing weary of this bustle to no purpose, they began, some one way and some another, to steal out of the assembly; every one carrying back this resolution in his mind, that the oldest and best known evil was ever more supportable than one that was new and untried."

"Among all animals man is the only one who tries to pass for more than he is, and so involves himself in the condemnation of seeming less." "The negro king desired to be portrayed as white. But do not laugh at the poor African," pleads Heine, "for every man is but another negro king, and would like to appear in a color different from that with which Fate has bedaubed him."

It is even harder, when he is most barbarous and besotted in his ignorance, to disturb his complacency and self-conceit. "It was most ludicrous," says Darwin, "to watch through a glass the Indians, as often as the shot struck the water, take up stones, and, as a bold defiance, throw them toward the ship, though about a mile and a half distant! A boat was then sent with orders to fire a few musket-shots wide of them. The Fuegians hid themselves behind the trees, and for every discharge of the muskets they fired their arrows; all, however, fell short of the boat, and the officer as he pointed at them laughed. This made the Fuegians frantic with passion, and they shook their mantles in vain rage. At last, seeing the balls cut and strike the trees, they ran away, and we were left in peace and quietness."

Mungo Park, while traveling in Africa, once entered a region until that time unexplored by civilized man. His escort of Guinea negroes carried him to witness a gala-day jollification. The sable chief was sitting on a stump in the centre of a cleared half-acre, his face tattooed, trinkets dangling from his nose, ears, chin, etc., and his subjects were dancing around him. Having sold negroes, captured in war, to the slave-traders on the coast, the chief had learned to speak a little outlandish English. When the visitor approached His Majesty,--the dance suspended,--he exclaimed: "English?" "Yes," said Park, "I am an Englishman." "Way over yonder?" said the chief, pointing westward. "Yes," answered Park; "three thousand miles off." "What folks say 'bout me dar?" was the eager inquiry of his African Majesty.

The half-naked barbarians of Abyssinia claim descent from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, and boast that all other kings are but upstarts and pretenders compared to theirs. Reminding the reader of the "most mighty emperor of Lilliput" (six inches in height), described in the famous state paper as the "delight and terror of the universe, whose dominions extend (about twelve miles in circumference) to the extremities of the globe; monarch of all monarchs, taller than the sons of men; whose feet press down to the centre, and whose head strikes against the sun; at whose nod the princes of the earth shake their knees; pleasant as the spring, comfortable as the summer, fruitful as autumn, dreadful as winter."

You remember the famous contest of an eminent wit, in Billingsgate. He was passing through the market, as the story goes, when he was rudely jostled and profanely addressed by a monstrous fish-woman. "See how I will bring her down without degrading myself," whispered he to his companion. Looking straight at the creature, he said to her, deliberately and emphatically, "You are a triangle!" which made her swear louder than ever. He then called her "a rectangle! a parallelogram!" That made her eloquent; but the great man with a big voice again broke through her volubility, screaming fiercely, "You are a miserable, wicked hypothenuse!" That dumfounded the brute. She had never heard swearing like that.

Curran used to tell of a like ludicrous encounter between himself and a fish-woman on the quay at Cork. This lady, whose tongue would have put Billingsgate to the blush, was urged one day to assail him, which she did with very little reluctance. "I thought myself a match for her," said he, "and valorously took up the gauntlet. But such a virago never skinned an eel. My whole vocabulary made not the least impression. On the contrary, she was manifestly becoming more vigorous every moment, and I had nothing for it but to beat a retreat. This, however, was to be done with dignity; so, drawing myself up disdainfully, I said, 'Madam, I scorn all further discourse with such an individual!' She did not understand the word, and thought it, no doubt, the very hyperbole of opprobrium. 'Individual, you wagabone!' she screamed, 'what do you mean by that? I'm no more an individual than your mother was?' Never was victory more complete. The whole sisterhood did homage to me, and I left the quay of Cork covered with glory."

The discomfiture of Miss Pinkerton, who attempted once to scold Becky Sharp in public, is familiar to every reader of Thackeray. Rebecca hit upon the plan of answering her in French, which quite routed the old woman.

A wise man, who lived a long life of virtue, study, travel, society, and reflection; who read the best books and conversed with the greatest and best men; the companion of philosophers and scientists; familiar with all important discoveries and experiments; after he was three-score and ten, wrote, "It is remarkable that the more there is known, the more it is perceived there is to be known. And the infinity of knowledge to be acquired runs parallel with the infinite faculty of knowing, and its development. Sometimes I feel reconciled to my extreme ignorance, by thinking, If I know nothing, the most learned know next to nothing." "Had I earlier known," said Goethe, "how many excellent things have been in existence, for hundreds and thousands of years, I should have written no line; I should have had enough else to do." Cardinal Farnese one day found Michel Angelo, when an old man, walking alone in the Coliseum, and expressed his surprise at finding him solitary amidst the ruins; to which he replied, "I go yet to school, that I may continue to learn." In his last days, he made a design of himself as a child in a go-cart, with this motto under it, "I am yet learning." Rubens complained, that just as he was beginning to understand his profession he was forced to quit it. Mozart declared on his death-bed, that he began to see what may be done in music. Buffon told a friend that, after passing fifty years at his desk, he was every day learning to write. Macaulay, the year before his death, after spending some hours over his own writings, wrote in his diary: "Alas! how short life and how long art! I feel as if I had just begun to understand how to write; and the probability is that I have very nearly done writing." Theophrastus, one hundred and seven years old, St. Jerome assures us, lamented that he was obliged to quit life at a time when he just began to be wise. Mrs. Jameson once asked Mrs. Siddons which of her great characters she preferred to play? She replied, after a moment's consideration, "Lady Macbeth is the character I have most studied." She afterward said that she had played the character during thirty years, and scarcely acted it once without carefully reading over the part, and generally the whole play, in the morning; and that she never read over the play without finding something new in it; "something," she said, "which had not struck me so much as it ought to have struck me." Dugald Stewart said of Bacon's Essays that in reading them for the twentieth time he observed something which had escaped his attention in the nineteenth. "I do not know," said Newton, "what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me." Said Bossuet, "The term of my existence will be eighty years at most, but let us allow it an hundred. What ages have rolled before I had my being! How many will flow after I am gone! And what a small space do I occupy in this grand succession of years! I am as a blank; this diminutive interval is not sufficient to distinguish me from that nothing to which I must inevitably return. I seem only to have made my appearance for the purpose of increasing the number; and I am even useless--for the play would have been just as well performed, had I remained behind the scenes." Wrote Voltaire, "I am ignorant how I was formed, and how I was born. I was perfectly ignorant, for a quarter of my life, of the reasons of all that I saw, heard, and felt, and was a mere parrot, talking by rote in imitation of other parrots. When I looked about me and within me, I conceived that something existed from all eternity. Since there are beings actually existing, I concluded that there is some being necessary and necessarily eternal. Thus the first step which I took to extricate myself from my ignorance overpassed the limits of all ages--the boundaries of time. But when I was desirous of proceeding in this infinite career, I could neither perceive a single path, nor clearly distinguish a single object; and from the flight which I took to contemplate eternity, I have fallen back into the abyss of my original ignorance." "Heads of capacity, and such as are not full with a handful, or easy measure of knowledge, think they know nothing till they know all; which being impossible, they fall," said Sir Thomas Browne, "upon the opinion of Socrates, and only know they know not anything." Hiero, tyrant of Sicily, asked old Simonides to tell him what God is. The poet answered him that it was not a question that could be immediately answered, and that he wanted a whole day to think upon it. When that term was over, Hiero asked the answer; but Simonides desired two days more to consider of it. This was not the last delay he asked; he was often called on to give an answer, and every time he desired double the time he had last demanded. The tyrant, wondering at it, desired to know the reason of it. I do so, answered Simonides, because the more I examine the matter, the more obscure it appears to me. "After reading all that has been written," says the poet Poe, "and all that can be thought, on the topics of God and the soul, the man who has a right to say that he thinks at all, will find himself face to face with the conclusion that, on these topics, the most profound thought is that which can be the least easily distinguished from the most superficial sentiment." "I am a fragment, and this is a fragment of me," says Emerson.... "I am very content with knowing, if only I could know.... To know a little, would be worth the expense of this world." "You read of but one wise man," says Congreve, "and all that he knew was--that he knew nothing." "The curiosity of knowing things has been given to man for a scourge." "If God," said Lessing, "held all truth shut in his right hand, and in his left nothing but the restless instinct for truth, though with the condition of forever and ever erring, and should say to me, Choose! I would bow reverently to his left hand, and say, Father, give! Pure truth is for Thee alone!"

II.

EXTREMES.

In man, it has been said, there will be a layer of fierce hyena, or of timid deer, running through the nature in the most uncertain and tortuous manner. Nero is sensitive to poetry and music, but not to human suffering: Marcus Aurelius is tolerant and good to all men but Christians. The Tlascalans of Mexico loved, and even worshiped, flowers; but they were cruel to excess, and sacrificed human victims with savage delight. The body of the sacrificed captive, we are told by Prescott, was delivered to the warrior who had taken him in battle, and by him, after being dressed, was served up in an entertainment to his friends. This was not the coarse repast of famished cannibals, but a banquet teeming with delicious beverages and delicate viands, prepared with art, and attended by both sexes, who conducted themselves with all the decorum of civilized life. The Aztec priests were more wild and ferocious than the soldiery, their hair was long and matted, and their garments were stained with human blood. The good and the evil lie close together; the virtues and the vices alternate; so is human power accumulated; alternately the metals and the rags; a terrible Voltaic pile. In the well-bred animal the claw is nicely cushioned; the old Adam is presentable. Overhear a beautiful young woman swear, and meet her an hour afterward, all smiles and loveliness, in the drawing-room. Speak with unreserved kindness of one lady to another,--both of them very lovely creatures, so far as you know,--and receive in reply, "Don't! She, of all persons I know, is the only one I hate to hear praised." Lady Mary Wortley Montagu said of the Duchess of Marlborough, "We continue to see one another like two persons who are resolved to hate with civility." "It goes far to reconcile me to being a woman," she said on another occasion, "when I reflect that I am thus in no danger of ever marrying one." Madame de Maintenon and Madame de Montespan met in public, talked with vivacity, and, to those who judged only by appearances, seemed excellent friends. Once when they had to make a journey in the same carriage, Madame de Montespan said, "Let us talk as if there were no difference between us, but on condition that we resume our disputes when we return." Pietro Della Valle says that when the Ecce Homo was exposed during the sermon in the Jesuit church at Goa, the women used to beat their servants, if they did not cry enough to please them. Saint-Simon relates of the Marechale de la Ferte and her sister, both beautiful women, but very dissolute, that upon one occasion they heard a sermon on penitence which terrified them. "My sister," one said on their return, "it was all true; we must do penance or we are lost. But, my sister, what shall we do?" After having well turned it over, "My sister," replied the other, "This is what we must do--we must make our servants fast." When Moore's Life of Byron first appeared, it was in two large, quarto volumes, and the first came out alone. Murray told Leslie that a lady said to him, "I hear it is dull;" and he told her the scandal was all to be in the second volume. "And is the second volume to be had separately?" asked the lady. I was once, says a writer, passing through Moorfields, with a young girl, aged about nine or ten years, born and educated in Portugal, but in the Protestant faith; and, observing a large concourse of people assembled around a pile of fagots on fire, I expressed a curiosity to know the cause. She very composedly answered, "I suppose that it is nothing more than that they are going to burn a Jew." Isabella the Catholic was wont to rejoice and give thanks at the sight of a gallows with a man hanging therefrom. Charlotte Cushman related an incident that occurred at a theatre. A man in the gallery made such a disturbance that the play could not proceed. Cries of "Throw him over," arose from all parts of the house, and the noise became furious. All was tumultuous chaos until a sweet and gentle female voice was heard in the pit, exclaiming, "No! I pray you don't throw him over! I beg of you, dear friends, don't throw him over, but--kill him where he is." It is recorded that after the massacre of St. Bartholomew the ladies of the court of Paris went out to examine the long row of the bodies of the Huguenot cavaliers who had been slain during the tumult, and curiously turning them over, when half-stripped of their garments, said to each other, "This must have been a charming lover; that was not worth looking at;" and when a fanatic assassin was brought out in the square of the Louvre to undergo during four hours the most frightful tortures which human ingenuity or malignity could devise, or the human frame endure, all the ladies of the court assembled to witness the spectacle, and paid high prices for seats nearest the scene of agony. In the Conciergerie, during the Reign of Terror, a corridor was common in the day-time to both sexes, and here, it is stated, there was as much dressing, talking, flirting, and love-making as in the salons of Paris. Most of the women contrived to change their dress three times a day, though in the interval they had often to wash or mend the garment they were about to put on. The tone of conversation was gay and animated, and the people seemed bent on proving that though the Reign of Terror might imprison and kill them, it could not make them dull or disagreeable.

It is related that Della Valle, the distinguished Italian traveler, had such an absorbing fondness for his wife that, when she died, on the shore of the Persian Gulf, he embalmed her body, and spent one whole year conveying it back through India to Rome, where he celebrated her obsequies by pronouncing a funeral oration, during the delivery of which his emotions became so violent as to choke his utterance. Not long after, in a fit of anger, he killed his coachman, in the area before St. Peter's, while the pope was pronouncing a benediction. "I remember," says Patmore, in his personal recollections of Hazlitt, "having occasionally played at whist with a person who, on any occurrence of extraordinary ill-luck, used to lay his cards down deliberately, and bite a piece out of the back of his hand! This person was, under ordinary circumstances, the very ideal of a 'gentleman'--bland, polished, courteous, forbearing, kind, and self-possessed to an extraordinary degree; and his personal appearance in every respect corresponded with his manners and bearing. Hazlitt's passions sometimes produced similar results. I have seen him more than once, at the Fives Court in St. Martin Street, on making a bad stroke or missing his ball at some critical point of the game, fling his racket to the other end of the court, walk deliberately to the centre, with uplifted hands imprecate the most fearful curses on his head, for his stupidity, and then rush to the side wall and literally dash his head against it!" Shortly before the Chinese Emperor's death, a gigantic image, the goddess of small-pox, was paraded round the city of Pekin in solemn procession, and then taken into the bedroom of the dying youth, where it was worshiped and honored with many propitiatory offerings. As, however, the goddess continued obdurate, she was subjected to a severe flogging, and finally burned.