Part 6

"In the first year of this persecution, Cotton Mather wrote a history of the earliest of the trials. This history was introduced to the English public by Richard Baxter, who declared in his preface that 'that man must be a very obdurate Sadducee who would not believe it.' Not content with having thus given the weight of his great name to the superstition, Baxter in the following year published his treatise on The Certainty of the World of Spirits; in which he collected, with great industry, an immense number of witch cases; reverted in extremely laudatory terms to Cotton Mather and his crusade; and denounced, in unmeasured language, all who were skeptical upon the subject. This work appeared in 1691, when the panic in America had not yet reached its height; and being widely circulated there, is said to have contributed much to stimulate the persecutions. The Pilgrim Fathers had brought to America the seeds of the persecution; and at the same time when it was rapidly fading in England, it flourished with fearful vigor in Massachusetts. Cotton Mather and Parris proclaimed the frequency of the crime; and, being warmly supported by their brother divines, they succeeded in creating a panic through the whole country. A commission was issued. A judge named Stoughton, who appears to have been a perfect creature of the clergy, conducted the trials. Scourgings and tortures were added to the terrorism of the pulpit, and many confessions were obtained. The few who ventured to oppose the prosecutions were denounced as Sadducees and infidels. Multitudes were thrown into prison, others fled from the country, abandoning their property, and twenty-seven persons were executed. An old man of eighty was pressed to death--a horrible sentence, which was never afterward executed in America. [Giles Corey was the name of the poor victim. He refused to plead, to save his property from confiscation. He urged the executioners, it is stated by Upham, in his History of Witchcraft, to increase the weight which was crushing him; he told them that it was no use to expect him to yield; that there could be but one way of ending the matter, and that they might as well pile on the stones. Calef says, that as his body yielded to the pressure, his tongue protruded from his mouth, and an official forced it back with his cane.] The ministers of Boston and Charlestown drew up an address, warmly thanking the commissioners for their zeal, and expressing their hope that it would never be relaxed."

There is no more painful reading than this except the trials of the witches themselves. "These," says Lowell, "awaken, by turns, pity, indignation, disgust, and dread,--dread, at the thought of what the human mind may be brought to believe not only probable, but proven. But it is well to be put upon our guard by lessons of this kind, for the wisest man is in some respects little better than a madman in a straight-waistcoat of habit, public opinion, prudence, or the like. Skepticism began at length to make itself felt, but it spread slowly, and was shy of proclaiming itself. The orthodox party was not backward to charge with sorcery whoever doubted their facts or pitied their victims. The mob, as it always is, was orthodox. It was dangerous to doubt, it might be fatal to deny."

"The spirit of party," quaintly says Bayle, in his Critical Dictionary, discoursing of Margaret, Queen of Navarre, "the attachment to a sect, and even zeal for orthodoxy, produce a kind of ferment in the humors of our body; and hence the medium through which reason ought to behold these primitive ideas is clouded and obscured. These are infirmities which will attend our reason, as long as it shall depend upon the ministry of organs. It is the same thing to it, as the low and middle region of the air, the seat of vapors and meteors. There are but very few persons who can elevate themselves above these clouds, and place themselves in a true serenity. If any one could do it, we must say of him what Virgil did of Daphnis:--

'Daphnis, the guest of Heaven, with wondering eyes, Views in the milky-way the starry skies; And far beneath him, from the shining sphere, Beholds the moving clouds and rolling year.'

And he would not have so much the appearance of a man, as of an immortal Being, placed upon a mountain above the region of wind and clouds. There is almost as much necessity for being above the passions to come to a knowledge of some kind of truths, as to act virtuously." "How limited is human reason," exclaims Disraeli, the younger, "the profoundest inquirers are most conscious. We are not indebted to the reason of man for any of the great achievements which are the landmarks of human action and human progress. It was not reason that besieged Troy; it was not reason that sent forth the Saracen from the desert to conquer the world; that inspired the crusades; that instituted the monastic orders; it was not reason that produced the Jesuits; above all, it was not reason that enacted the French Revolution. Man is only truly great when he acts from the passions; never irresistible but when he appeals to the imagination. Even Mormon counts more votaries than Bentham." "Let us not dream," said Goethe, "that reason can ever be popular. Passions, emotions, may be made popular; but reason remains ever the property of an elect few." "It is not from reason and prudence that people marry," said Dr. Johnson, "but from inclination. A man is poor; he thinks it cannot be worse, and so I'll e'en marry Peggy." "If people," said Thackeray, "only made prudent marriages, what a stop to population there would be!"

III.

DISGUISES.

Man, poor fellow, would be a curious object for microscopic study. If it were possible to view him through powerful glasses, what humiliating resemblances and infirmities would be discovered. He would be found to have innumerable tentacula and appendages, for protection and warning, and especially to possess unconceived of apparatus for making his way in the dark,--necessities to him, it would appear, when further inspection of the creature had shown him to be--blind. At last, he finds himself obliged to rely upon such qualities and faculties as take the place of powers and eyes. Cowardly, he is gregarious, and will not live alone; weak, he consorts with weakness, to acquire strength; ignorant, he contributes the least bit to the common stock of intelligence, and escapes responsibility. One of many, he has the protection of the mob; embodying others' weaknesses, he is strong in the bundle of sticks; joining his voice with the million, it is lost in the confusion of tongues. Attacked, he is fortified by his society; down, he will rise again with his fellows; stupid with the rest, his shame is unfelt by being diffused. In any extremity, there is safety in counsel; in the ranks, he cannot run; in the crowd, it were vain to think. Weary of stagnation or tired by the eddies, he goes with the current; unable to stand an individual, he joins with a party; a poor creature of God, he is afraid to trust Him on his Word, and flies to a sect with a creed for protection. In the wake of thought, he may be thoughtless; voting the ticket, he is a patriot; a stiff bigot, there can be no doubt about his religion. He submits to be thought for as a child; to be cared for as an invalid; to be subordinated as an idiot. Unequal to a scheme of his own, he falls into one already devised for him; without independent views, he relies upon his newspaper; without implicit trust in God, he leans upon a broken reed in preference. Thus his business, his politics, his religion, are defined for him, and are of easy reference; indeed it may be said he knows them by heart, so little there is of them. Of the laws of trade, political economy, essential Christianity, he may be as ignorant as a barbarian, at the same time be complacent and respectable in his ignorance. Acting for himself, he would be set down as eccentric by his banker; thinking for himself, he would be thought to be too uncertain to be trustworthy; living virtuously, walking humbly, and trusting his Creator to take care of his creature, he would be an object of suspicion, even if he escaped being called an infidel. His tailor determines the cut of his coat; the street defines his manners and morals; custom becomes his law, and compliance his gospel.

Addison, in The Spectator, gives an account of a gentleman who determined to live and dress according to the rules of common sense, and was shut up in a lunatic asylum in consequence. "Custom," says Carlyle, "doth make dotards of us all. Philosophy complains that custom has hoodwinked us from the first; that we do everything by custom, even believe by it; that our very axioms, let us boast of free-thinking as we may, are oftenest simply such beliefs as we have never heard questioned." "In this great society wide lying around us," says Emerson, "a critical analysis would find very few spontaneous actions. It is almost all custom and gross sense." We play our parts so faithfully, not to say conscientiously, that often we have difficulty in placing ourselves, whether with the assumed or the natural. The little arts and artifices we thrive by, become essentially a part of us; and in the jostle and conflict--the greater to devour the lesser and the lesser the least--we seem impelled to pursue the objects and ends which long habit has somehow convinced us nature particularly suited us to pursue. When an event occurs to attract attention to our follies or baseness, it has not the effect to prompt repentance, but to excite our cunning, and set us to work to find excuses, or to imagine some other course of conduct which would have been more foolish or mischievous. "We keep on deceiving ourselves in regard to our faults, until we, at last, come to look upon them as virtues." Like Selwyn, the accomplished courtier and wit in the time of George III., we get to think even our vices necessities. After a night of elegant rioting and debauch, he tumbled out of his bed at noon the next day, and reeling with both hands upon his head to a mirror in his apartment, gazed at himself and soliloquized: "I look and feel most villainously mean; but it's life--hang it, it's life!"

Lord Bacon, discoursing upon the "politic knowledge of ourselves," and the "wisdom of business," in the Second Book of the Proficience and Advancement of Learning, says: "The covering of defects is of no less importance than the valuing of good parts; which may be done in three manners, by caution, by color, and by confidence. Caution is when men do ingeniously and discreetly avoid to be put into those things for which they are not proper: whereas, contrariwise, bold and unquiet spirits will thrust themselves into matters without difference, and so publish and proclaim all their wants. Color is, when men make a way for themselves, to have a construction made of their faults and wants, as proceeding from a better cause, or intended for some other purpose: for of the one it is well said, 'Vice often lurks in the likeness of virtue,' and therefore whatsoever want a man hath, he must see that he pretend the virtue that shadoweth it; as if he be dull, he must affect gravity; if a coward, mildness; and so the rest: for the second, a man must frame some probable cause why he should not do his best, and why he should dissemble his abilities; and for that purpose must use to dissemble those abilities which are notorious in him, to give color that his true wants are but industries and dissimulations. For confidence, it is the last but surest remedy; namely, to depress and seem to despise whatsoever a man cannot attain; observing the good principle of the merchants, who endeavor to raise the price of their own commodities, and to beat down the price of others. But there is a confidence that passeth this other; which is to face out a man's own defects, in seeming to conceive that he is best in those things wherein he is failing; and, to help that again, to seem on the other side that he hath least opinion of himself in those things wherein he is best; like as we shall see it commonly in poets; that if they show their verses, and you except to any, they will say, that that line cost them more labor than any of the rest; and presently will seem to disable and suspect rather some other line, which they know well enough to be the best in the number."

"Few persons who talk of any virtue or quality," says Pascal, "are inwardly acquainted or affected with it. We are all full of duplicity, deceit, and contradiction. We love to wear a disguise, even within, and are afraid of being detected by ourselves."

Infirmities and calamities have been made to serve important uses in the designs of men. "It was necessary," says a writer upon Mahomet, "that the religion he proposed to establish should have a divine sanction; and for this purpose he turned a calamity with which he was afflicted to his advantage. He was often subject to fits of epilepsy, a disease which those whom it afflicts are desirous to conceal. Mahomet gave out, therefore, that these fits were trances, into which he was miraculously thrown by God Almighty, during which he was instructed in his will, which he was commanded to publish to the world. By this strange story, and by leading a retired, abstemious, and austere life, he easily acquired a character for superior sanctity among his acquaintances and neighbors. When he thought himself sufficiently fortified by the numbers and enthusiasm of his followers, he boldly declared himself a prophet, sent by God into the world, not only to teach his will, but to compel mankind to obey it."

The world not only seems to be easily deceived, but seems to delight in deception. "If you wish to be powerful," said Horne Tooke, "pretend to be powerful." If you wish to be considered wise, systematically pretend to be, and you will generally be acknowledged to be. We all know, for instance, the influence of manner, as sometimes displayed by persons of great assumed personal dignity. Every neighborhood is afflicted with such pretenders. "Among those terms," says Whipple, indignantly, "which have long ceased to have any vital meaning, the word dignity deserves a disgraceful prominence. No word has fallen so readily into the designs of cant, imposture, and pretense; none has played so well the part of verbal scarecrow, to frighten children of all ages and both sexes. It is at once the thinnest and most effective of all the coverings under which duncedom sneaks and skulks. Most of the men of dignity, who awe or bore their more genial brethren, are simply men who possess the art of passing off their insensibility for wisdom, their dullness for depth, and of concealing imbecility of intellect under haughtiness of manner. Their success in this small game is one of the stereotyped satires upon mankind. Once strip from these pretenders their stolen garments--once disconnect their show of dignity from their real meanness--and they would stand shivering and defenseless,--objects of the tears of pity, or targets for the arrows of scorn.... Manner triumphs over matter; and throughout society, politics, letters, and science, we are doomed to meet a swarm of dunces and wind-bags, disguised as gentlemen, statesmen, and scholars." When they open their mouths, it is to expand themselves with a new inhalation of emptiness, or to depreciate or belittle what they pretend is insignificant, when it only exceeds their capacity. They put up their heads and expectorate with a smirky haughtiness, as if everything worth knowing were known to them, when a single sensation of modesty would envelop their moony faces with blushes. Every one has seen such a character,--"an embodied tediousness, which society is apt not only to tolerate, but to worship; a person who announces the stale commonplaces of conversation with the awful precision of one bringing down to the valleys of thought bright truths plucked on its summits; who is so profoundly deep and painfully solid, on the weather, or some nothing of the day; who is inexpressibly shocked if your eternal gratitude does not repay him for the trite information he consumed your hour in imparting; and who, if you insinuate that this calm, contented, imperturbable stupidity is preying upon your patience, instantly stands upon his dignity, and puts on a face." "A certain nobleman, some years ago," says Bulwer, in one of his essays, "was conspicuous for his success in the world. He had been employed in the highest situations, at home and abroad, without one discoverable reason for his selection, and without justifying the selection by one proof of administrative ability. Yet at each appointment the public said, 'A great gain to the government! Superior man!' And when from each office he passed away, or rather passed imperceptibly onward toward offices still more exalted, the public said, 'A great loss to the government! Superior man!' He was the most silent person I ever met. But when the first reasoners of the age would argue some knotty point in his presence, he would, from time to time, slightly elevate his eyebrows, gently shake his head, or, by a dexterous smile of significant complacency, impress on you the notion how easily he could set those babblers right if he would but condescend to give voice to the wisdom within him. I was very young when I first met this superior man; and chancing on the next day to call on the late Lord Durham, I said, in the presumption of early years, 'I passed six mortal hours last evening in company with Lord ----. I don't think there is much in him,' 'Good heavens!' cried Lord Durham, 'how did you find that out? Is it possible that he could have--talked?'" Coleridge speaks of a dignified man he once saw at a dinner-table. "He listened to me," says the poet, "and said nothing for a long time; but he nodded his head, and I thought him intelligent. At length, toward the end of the dinner, some apple dumplings were placed on the table, and my man had no sooner seen them, than he burst forth with,--'Them's the jockies for me!' I wish Spurzheim could have examined the fellow's head." The Duke of Somerset is described as one of these dignified gentlemen. His second wife was one of the most beautiful women in England. She once suddenly threw her arms around his neck, and gave him a kiss which might have gladdened the heart of an emperor. The duke, lifting his shoulders with an aristocratic square, slowly said, "Madam, my first wife was a Howard, and she never would have taken such a liberty!" If it were practicable to expose the artifice and emptiness of such characters, the exhibition would be as amusing as the scene once presented on the stage of a theatre. The comedian was enveloped in a great India-rubber suit, expanded by air to give it the proper proportions to represent Falstaff: when just in the middle of one of the inimitable speeches of that inimitable character, some wag of the stock insinuated a sharp-pointed instrument into the immense windful garment: immediately the great proportions of Falstaff began to diminish, attended by an audible hissing noise; and before the discomposed actor, overwhelmed with the laughter of the uproarious audience, could retire from the stage, he had shrunk to an insignificant one hundred and fifty pounds avoirdupois, with his deceptive covering hanging about his gaunt limbs in voluminous folds! Such persons will generally be found in possession of good moral habits--props they instinctively set up to sustain their pretenses. They know by intuition that an affectation of wisdom and greatness would be intolerable if attended by vicious propensities and practices; so they cultivate with systematic carefulness all the forms of morality and virtue. They know that their good habits will always insure the respect of even those who detect and despise their emptiness. But they are never heard to claim anything on the score of superior virtue; they demand to be known as Solons--as abridgments of all that is profound and wonderful known among men. Like the owl--that wise bird, sacred of old to Minerva--they make their pretensions respected by the most commendable propriety.

"Yorick had an invincible dislike and opposition in his nature to gravity;--not to gravity as such;--for where gravity was wanted, he would be the most grave or serious of mortal men for days and weeks together; but he was an enemy to the affectation of it, and declared open war against it, only as it appeared a cloak for ignorance, or folly: and then, whenever it fell in his way, however sheltered and protected, he seldom gave it any quarter. Sometimes, in his wild way of talking, he would say, that gravity was an errant scoundrel, and, he would add,--of the most dangerous kind too,--because a sly one; and that he verily believed, more honest, well-meaning people were bubbled out of their goods and money by it in one twelvemonth, than by pocket-picking, and shoplifting in seven. In the naked temper which a merry heart discovered, he would say there was no danger,--but to itself:--whereas the very essence of gravity was design, and consequently deceit;--'twas a taught trick, to gain credit of the world for more sense and knowledge than a man was worth; and that, with all his pretensions,--it was no better, but often worse, than what a French wit had long ago defined it, viz.: A mysterious carriage of the body, to cover the defects of the mind:--which definition of gravity, Yorick, with great imprudence, would say, deserved to be wrote in letters of gold."

"Men in general," says Machiavelli, in his Prince, "judge more from appearances than from reality. All men have eyes, but few have the gift of penetration. Every one sees your exterior, but few can discern what you have in your heart; and those few dare not oppose the voice of the multitude."

A pretension to devoutness and asceticism was one of the fashions in Moliere's time. In his play of Le Festin de Pierre, he makes Don Juan to say: "The profession of hypocrite has marvelous advantages. It is an act of which the imposture is always respected; and though it may be discovered, no one dares do anything against it. All the other vices of man are liable to censure, and every one has the liberty of boldly attacking them; but hypocrisy is a privileged vice, which with its hand closes everybody's mouth, and enjoys its repose with sovereign impunity."