Part 9

"When we see a special reformer, we feel like asking him," says Emerson, "What right have you, sir, to your one virtue? Is virtue piecemeal?" "Your mode of happiness," said Coleridge, talking to such an one, "would make me miserable. To go about doing as much good as possible, to as many men as possible, is, indeed, an excellent object for a man to propose to himself; but then, in order that you may not sacrifice the real good and happiness of others to your particular views, which may be quite different from your neighbors', you must do that good to others which the reason, common to all, pronounces to be good for all." "What I object," said Sydney Smith, "to Scotch philosophers in general is, that they reason upon man as they would upon a divinity; they pursue truth without caring if it be useful truth." Michel Angelo's great picture of the Last Judgment, in the Sistine Chapel, narrowly escaped from destruction by the monastic views of Paul IV. In the commencement of his reign, we are told, he conceived a notion of reforming that picture, in which so many academical figures offended his sense of propriety. This was communicated to Michel Angelo, who desired that the pope might be told "that what he wished was very little, and might be easily effected; for if his holiness would only reform the opinions of mankind, the picture would be reformed of itself." "You must have a genius for charity as well as for anything else. As for doing good," says Thoreau, "that is one of the professions which are full. What good I do, in the common sense of that word, must be aside from my main path, and for the most part wholly unintended. Men say, practically, Begin where you are and such as you are, without aiming mainly to become of more worth, and with kindness aforethought go about doing good. If I were to preach at all in this strain, I should say, rather, Set about being good. As if the sun should stop when he had kindled his fires up to the splendor of a moon, or a star of the sixth magnitude, and go about like a Robin Goodfellow, peeping in at every cottage window, inspiring lunatics, and tainting meats, and making darkness visible, instead of steadily increasing his genial heat and beneficence till he is of such brightness that no mortal can look him in the face, and then, and in the meanwhile too, going about the world in his own orbit, doing it good, or rather, as a truer philosophy has discovered, the world going about him, getting good. When Phaeton, wishing to prove his heavenly birth by his beneficence, had the sun's chariot but one day, and drove out of the beaten track, he burned several blocks of houses in the lower streets of heaven, and scorched the surface of the earth, and dried up every spring, and made the great Desert of Sahara, till at length Jupiter hurled him headlong to the earth with a thunderbolt, and the sun, through grief at his death, did not shine for a year."

"There is no odor so bad," continues the same defiant radical, "as that which arises from goodness tainted. It is human, it is divine, carrion. If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life, as from that dry and parching wind of the African deserts called the simoom, which fills the mouth and nose and ears and eyes with dust till you are suffocated, for fear that I should get some of his good done to me,--some of its virus mingled with my blood. No; in this case I would rather suffer evil the natural way."

An officer of the government called one day at the White House, and introduced a clerical friend to Lincoln. "Mr. President," said he, "allow me to present to you my friend, the Rev. Mr. F., of ----. Mr. F. has expressed a desire to see you and have some conversation with you, and I am happy to be the means of introducing him." The president shook hands with Mr. F., and, desiring him to be seated, took a seat himself. Then, his countenance having assumed an air of patient waiting, he said, "I am now ready to hear what you have to say." "Oh, bless you, sir," said Mr. F., "I have nothing special to say; I merely called to pay my respects to you, and, as one of the million, to assure you of my hearty sympathy and support." "My dear sir," said the president, rising promptly, his face showing instant relief, and with both hands grasping that of his visitor, "I am very glad to see you, indeed. I thought you had come to preach to me!"

"My father," said the Attic Philosopher, "feared everything that had the appearance of a lesson. He used to say that virtue could make herself devoted friends, but she did not take pupils; therefore he was not anxious to teach goodness; he contented himself with sowing the seeds of it, certain that experience would make them grow." "The disease of men," said Mencius, "is this: that they neglect their own fields, and go to weed the fields of others, and that what they require from others is great, while what they lay upon themselves is light."

"There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil," says Thoreau, again, "to one who is striking at the root; and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve. It is the pious slave-breeder devoting the proceeds of every tenth slave to buy a Sunday's liberty for the rest.... The philanthropist too often surrounds mankind with the remembrance of his own cast-off griefs as an atmosphere, and calls it sympathy. We should impart our courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion.... If anything ail a man, so that he does not perform his functions, if he have a pain in his bowels even, for that is the seat of sympathy, he forthwith sets about reforming--the world. Being a microcosm himself, he discovers--and it is a true discovery, and he is the man to make it--that the world has been eating green apples; to his eyes, in fact, the globe itself is a great green apple, which there is danger awful to think of that the children of men will nibble before it is ripe; and straightway his drastic philanthropy seeks out the Esquimaux and the Patagonian, and embraces the populous Indian and Chinese villages; and thus, by a few years of philanthropic activity, the powers in the meanwhile using him for their own ends, no doubt, he cures himself of his dyspepsia, the globe acquires a faint blush on one or both of its cheeks, as if it were beginning to be ripe, and life loses its crudity and is once more sweet and wholesome to live. I never dreamed of any enormity greater than I have committed. I never knew, and never shall know, a worse man than myself.... My excuse for not lecturing against the use of tobacco is that I never chewed it; that is a penalty which reformed tobacco-chewers have to pay; though there are things enough I have chewed, which I could lecture against. If you should ever be betrayed into any of these philanthropies, do not let your left hand know what your right hand does, for it is not worth knowing. Rescue the drowning, and tie your shoe-strings. Take your time, and set about some free labor."

It has been observed that persons who are themselves very pure are sometimes on that account blunt in their moral feelings. "Right, too rigid, hardens into wrong"--even into cruelty sometimes. A friend of one of these malicious philanthropists dined with him one day, and afterward related an anecdote illustrative of his character. While at the table, the children of the refining humanitarian, playing about the open door, were noisy and intractable, which caused him to speak to them impatiently. The disturbance, however, did not cease, and hearing one of the children cry out, he jumped spasmodically from the table, and demanded to know what was the matter. Upon being informed that one of them had accidentally pinched the finger of another, he immediately seized the hand of the innocent offender, and placing the forefinger at the hinge of the door, deliberately closed it--crushing the poor child's finger as a punishment. There is another equally authentic story of a reformer who hired his children to go to bed without their supper as a means of preserving their health, and then stole their money back again to pay them for the next abstinence.

"I have never known a trader in philanthropy," says Coleridge, "who was not wrong in head or heart somewhere or other. Individuals so distinguished are usually unhappy in their family relations: men not benevolent or beneficent to individuals, but almost hostile to them; yet lavishing money and labor and time on the race, the abstract notion." "This is always true of those men," says Hawthorne, in his analysis of Hollingsworth, "who have surrendered themselves to an overruling power. It does not so much impel them from without, nor even operate as a motive power from within, but grows incorporate in all they think and feel, and finally converts them into little else save that one principle. When such begins to be the predicament, it is not cowardice, but wisdom, to avoid these victims. They have no heart, no sympathy, no reason, no conscience. They will keep no friend, unless he make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and slay you, and trample your dead corpse under foot, all the more readily, if you take the first step with them, and cannot take the second, and the third, and every other step of their terribly straight path. They have an idol, to which they consecrate themselves high-priest, and deem it holy work to offer sacrifices of whatever is most precious; and never once seem to suspect--so cunning has the devil been with them--that this false deity, in whose iron features, immitigable to all the rest of mankind, they see only benignity and love, is but a spectrum of the very priest himself, projected upon the surrounding darkness. And the higher and purer the original object, and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the process by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism."

The same writer, in one of his minor productions, says, "When a good man has long devoted himself to a particular kind of beneficence, to one species of reform, he is apt to become narrowed into the limits of the path wherein he treads, and to fancy that there is no other good to be done on earth but that self-same good to which he has put his hand, and in the very mode that best suits his own conceptions. All else is worthless. His scheme must be wrought out by the united strength of the whole world's stock of love, or the world is no longer worthy of a position in the universe. Moreover, powerful Truth, being the rich grape-juice expressed from the vineyard of the ages, has an intoxicating quality when imbibed by any save a powerful intellect, and often, as it were, impels the quaffer to quarrel in his cups."

At a dinner-party one day, Madame de Stael said to Lady Mackintosh, after Godwin was gone, "I am glad to have seen this man,--it is curious to see how naturally Jacobins become the advocates of tyrants."

"I have often blamed myself," said Boswell, "for not feeling for others as sensibly as many say they do." "Sir," replied Johnson, "don't be duped by them any more. You will find these very feeling people are not very ready to do you good. They pay you by feeling."

A very large proportion of the men who during the French Revolution proved themselves most absolutely indifferent to human suffering, were deeply attached to animals. Fournier was devoted to a squirrel, Couthon to a spaniel, Panis to two gold pheasants, Chaumette to an aviary, Marat kept doves. Bacon has noticed that the Turks, who are a most cruel people, are nevertheless conspicuous for their kindness to animals, and he mentions the instance of a Christian boy who was nearly stoned to death for gagging a long-billed fowl. Abbas, the viceroy, when a boy, had his pastry-cook bastinadoed to death. Mehemet Ali mildly reproved him for it, as a European would correct a child for killing a butterfly. He explained to his little grandson that such things ought not to be done without a motive. Abbe Migne tells how one old Roman fed his oysters on his slaves; how another put a slave to death that a curious friend might see what dying was like; how Galen's mother tore and bit her waiting-women when she was in a passion with them. Caligula conferred the honor of priesthood upon his horse. "The day before the Circensian games," says Suetonius, "he used to send his soldiers to enjoin silence in the neighborhood, that the repose of the animal might not be disturbed. For this favorite, besides a marble stable, an ivory manger, purple housings, and a jeweled frontlet, he appointed a house, with a retinue of slaves, and fine furniture, for the reception of such as were invited in the horse's name to sup with him. It is even said that he intended to make him consul." In Egypt there are hospitals for superannuated cats, and the most loathsome insects are regarded with tenderness; but human life is treated as if it were of no account, and human suffering scarcely elicits a care.

Sydney Smith advised the bishop of New Zealand, previous to his departure, to have regard to the minor as well as to the more grave duties of his station--to be given to hospitality, and, in order to meet the tastes of his native guests, never to be without a smoked little boy in the bacon-rack, and a cold clergyman on the sideboard. "And as for myself, my lord," he concluded, "all I can say is, that when your new parishioners do eat you, I sincerely hope you will disagree with them."

Lamb once told a droll story of an India-house clerk accused of eating man's flesh, and remarked that "among cannibals those who rejected the favorite dish would be called misanthropists."

The eternal barbarisms must not be forgotten by the reformer while he is reforming the barbarians. The pagan Frisians, that illustrious northern German tribe, afterward known as the "free Frisians," "whose name is synonymous with liberty,--nearest blood-relations of the Anglo-Saxon race,"--struggled for centuries against the dominion of the Franks, and were only eventually subjugated by Charlemagne, who left them their name of free Frisians. "The Frisians," says their statute-book, "shall be free as long as the wind blows out of the clouds and the world stands." Radbod, their chief, was first overcome by Pepin the younger, and Pepin's bastard, Charles the Hammer, with his "tremendous blows, completed his father's work;" he "drove the Frisian chief into submission, and even into Christianity. A bishop's indiscretion, however, neutralized the apostolic blows" of the Christian conqueror. "The pagan Radbod had already immersed one of his royal legs in the baptismal font, when a thought struck him. 'Where are my dead forefathers at present?' he said, turning suddenly upon Bishop Wolfran. 'In hell, with all other unbelievers,' was the imprudent answer. 'Mighty well,' replied Radbod, removing his leg, 'then will I rather feast with my ancestors in the halls of Woden, than dwell with your little starveling band of Christians in heaven.' Entreaties and threats were unavailing. The Frisian declined positively a rite which was to cause an eternal separation from his buried kindred, and he died as he had lived, a heathen."

Tomochichi, chief of the Chickasaws, said to Wesley, "I will go up and speak to the wise men of the nation, and I hope they will hear. But we would not be made Christians as the Spaniards make Christians; we would be taught before we are baptised." He felt the want unconsciously acknowledged by the King of Siam, spoken of by John Locke in his chapter on Probability. A Dutch ambassador, when entertaining the king with the peculiarities of Holland, amongst other things told the sovereign that the water in Holland would sometimes in cold weather be so hard that men walked upon it, and that it would bear an elephant if he were there. To which the king replied, "Hitherto I have believed the strange things you have told me, because I looked upon you as a sober, fair man, but now I am sure you lie." But Tomochichi had an eye that saw the faults of the colonists, if he did not understand their religion. When urged to listen to the doctrines of Christianity he keenly replied, "Why, these are Christians at Savannah! these are Christians at Frederica! Christian much drunk! Christian beat men! Christian tell lies! Devil Christian! Me no Christian!" This recalls the pathetic story of the West Indian cazique, who, at the stake, refused life, temporal or eternal, at the price of conversion, asking where he should go to live so happily. He was told--in heaven; and then he at once refused, on the ground that the whites would be there; and he had rather live anywhere, or nowhere, than dwell with such people as he had found the white Christians to be. Almost the first word, says Dr. Medhurst, uttered by a Chinese, when anything is said concerning the excellence of Christianity, is, "Why do Christians bring us opium, and bring it directly in defiance of our laws? The vile drug has destroyed my son, has ruined my brother, and well-nigh led me to beggar my wife and children. Surely those who import such a deleterious substance, and injure me for the sake of gain, cannot wish me well, or be in possession of a religion better than my own. Go first and persuade your own countrymen to relinquish their nefarious traffic; and give me a prescription to correct this vile habit, and then I will listen to your exhortations on the subject of Christianity!" Dr. Livingstone says he found a tribe of men in the interior of Africa so pure and simple that they seemed to have no idea of untruthfulness and dishonesty until they were brought into contact with Asiatics and Europeans. Some of Dr. Kane's men, "while resting at Kalutunah's tent, had appropriated certain fox-skins, boots, and sledges, which their condition seemed to require. The Esquimaux complained of the theft, and Dr. Kane, after a careful inquiry into the case, decided in their favor. He gave each five needles, a file, and a stick of wood, and knives and other extras to Kalutunah and Shanghu, and after regaling them with a hearty supper, he returned the stolen goods, and tried to make them believe that his people did not steal, but only took the articles to save their lives! In imitation of this Arctic morality the natives, on their departure, carried off a few knives and forks, which they deemed as essential to their happiness as the fox-dresses were to the white men."

Among the airy visions which had been generated in the teeming brain of Coleridge, says a writer in The London Quarterly, was the project of pantisocracy--a republic to be founded in the wilds of America, of which the fundamental principles were an equality of rank and property, and where all who composed it were to be under the perpetual dominion of reason, virtue, and love. Southey was inflamed by it and converted. Through it he saw a way out of all his troubles. There he would enjoy the felicity of living in a pure democracy, where he could sit unelbowed by kings and aristocrats. "You," he wrote to his brother Tom, "are unpleasantly situated, so is my mother, so were we all till this grand scheme of pantisocracy flashed upon our minds, and now all is perfectly delightful." Coleridge, contented to have delivered a glowing description of Utopia, did nothing further, and departed on a pedestrian tour through Wales, where, as the ridiculous will sometimes mingle itself with the sublime, he feared he had caught the itch from an admiring democratical auditor at an inn, who insisted upon shaking hands with him. Some time after, Southey, having tried his panacea upon a few select pantisocratic friends, wrote, "There was a time when I believed in the persuadability of man, and had the mania of man-mending. Experience has taught me better. The ablest physician can do little in the great lazar-house of society. He acts the wisest part who retires from the contagion."

"Nature goes her own way," said Goethe, "and all that to us seems an exception is really according to order." He quoted the saying of Rousseau, that you cannot hinder an earthquake by building a city near a burning mountain. Peter the Great, he said, repeated Amsterdam so dear to his youth, in locating St. Petersburg at the mouth of the Neva. The ground rises in the neighborhood, and the emperor could have had a city quite free from all the trouble arising from overflow if he had but gone a little higher up. An old shipmaster represented this to him, and prophesied that the people would be drowned every seventy years. There stood also an old tree, with various marks from times when the waters had risen to a great height. But all was in vain; the emperor stood to his whim, and had the tree cut down, that it might not be witness against him! Sydney Smith said of a certain fanatical member of Parliament, that "he was losing his head. When he brings forward his Suckling Act, he will be considered as quite mad. No woman to be allowed to suckle her own child without medical certificates. Three classes, viz., free-sucklers, half-sucklers, and spoon-meat mothers. Mothers, whose supply is uncertain, to suckle upon affidavit! How is it possible that an act of Parliament can supply the place of nature and natural affection?"

"There is in nature," said Goethe to Soret, "an accessible and an inaccessible. Be careful to discriminate between the two, be circumspect, and proceed with reverence." "The sight of a primitive phenomenon," he said to Eckermann, "is generally not enough for people; they think they must go still further; and are thus like children who, after peeping into a mirror, turn it round directly to see what is on the other side." "When one," said he on another occasion, "has looked about him in the world long enough to see how the most judicious enterprises frequently fail, and the most absurd have the good fortune to succeed, he becomes disinclined to give any one advice. At bottom, he who asks advice shows himself limited; he who gives it gives also proof that he is presumptuous. If any one asks me for good advice, I say, I will give it, but only on condition that you will promise not to take it.... Much is said of aristocracy and democracy; but the whole affair is simply this: in youth, when we either possess nothing, or know not how to value the tranquil possession of anything, we are democrats; but when we, in a long life, have come to possess something of our own, we wish not only ourselves to be secure of it, but that our children and grandchildren should be secure of inheriting it. Therefore, we always lean to aristocracy in our old age, whatever were our opinions in youth."

Lord Eldon said in his old age, "that, if he were to begin life again, he would be damned but he would begin as agitator." "I am no more ashamed of having been a republican," said Southey, "than I am of having been a child." Barere, who said that "the tree of liberty cannot flourish unless it is watered by the blood of kings and aristocrats"--who proposed the famous decree for the annihilation of Lyons--devoted a great part of his later life to declaiming on the necessity of entirely abolishing capital punishments.

Elliott, the Corn-Law Rhymer, being asked, "What is a communist?" answered, "One who has yearnings for equal division of unequal earnings. Idler or bungler, he is willing to fork out his penny and pocket your shilling."

"Sir," said Johnson, "your levelers wish to level down as far as themselves; but they cannot bear leveling up to themselves. They would all have some people under them; why not then have some people above them?"