Part 19

Dunsford the essayist’s objection to all hasty judgment of our fellow-creatures is based on the ground of its being “such an unscientific proceeding.” You comment, he says, upon another man’s conduct, and attribute motives to him. Now an ingenious and imaginative person—a lawyer making a speech for him—might show many different motives of equal probability. You fix upon one, perhaps because it is consonant to your own mind and nature, or because it is the uppermost or easiest one to conjecture; but really you often ignore the doctrine of chances, and perhaps you will find upon strict calculation that the chances are fairly four to one against your having named the right motive. As the winning horse is often “a dark one,” at any rate not the favourite, so after all some obscure and improbable motive is often the true cause of a man’s actions. In short, Dunsford maintains that our condemnation of others is often as unscientific as it is unchristian.

When the Doge of Venice, Foscari, in Byron’s tragedy, agitated by the summons to judge his son, speculates somewhat wildly on the burden of the mystery of all this unintelligible world, Marina submissively suggests that

“These are things we cannot judge On earth.”

And how then, demands the old man,—

“And how then shall we judge each other, Who are all earth?”

Mr. Lockhart, in the closing chapter of his admirable Life of Scott, quoting Keble’s lines,—

“Not even the tenderest heart, and next our own, Knows half the reasons why we smile or sigh,”

declares considerations of this kind to have always induced him to regard with small respect any attempt to delineate fully and exactly any human being’s character. He avows his distrust of our capacity for, even in very humble cases, judging our neighbour fairly; and cannot but pity the presumption that must swell in the heart and brain of any ordinary brother of the race, when daring to pronounce, _ex cathedrâ_, on the whole structure and complexion of a great mind, from the comparatively narrow and scanty materials which can by possibility have been placed before him.

Men who see _into_ their neighbours, observes Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, are very apt to be contemptuous; but men who see _through_ them find something lying behind every human soul which it is not for them to sit in judgment on, or to attempt to sneer out of the order of God’s manifold universe.

The same wise-hearted writer—wise of heart as well as head—has a dialogue between doctor and minister concerning a quasi-reprobate, to whom the former has been kind, and about whose destiny the other is hardly more severe than certain. “Bad enough, no doubt,” Doctor Kittredge owns this scampish half-breed to be; “but might be worse. Has some humanity left in him yet. Let him go. God can judge him—I can’t.” “You are too charitable, doctor,” objects the minister. “He has saved his neck—but his soul is a lost one, I am afraid, beyond question.” “I can’t judge men’s souls,” the doctor replies. “I can judge their acts, and hold them responsible for those; but I don’t know much about their souls. If you or I had found our soul in a half-breed body, and then been turned loose to run among the Indians, we might have been playing just such tricks as this fellow has been trying.” What said a greater doctor when Boswell asked him whether, in the case of an aggressor forcing on a duel by ill usage, and getting killed in it, there is not almost no “ground to hope that he is gone to a state of happiness”? “Sir,” said Johnson, “we are not to judge determinately of the state in which a man leaves this life. He may in a moment have repented effectually.” And then Johnson quoted, apparently with approval, at any rate with hopeful interest, an epitaph, from Camden’s Remains, upon a very wicked man, who was killed by a fall from his horse, in which epitaph he is supposed to say, “Between the stirrup and the ground, I mercy asked, I mercy found.” On another occasion Johnson appealed to Richard Baxter’s avowed belief that a suicide—if hurried by sudden passion to self-slaughter—may be saved. And “if,” says Baxter, “it should be objected that what I maintain may encourage suicide, I answer, I am not to tell a lie to prevent it.” Who, as Campbell asks, after surmising that the hand which smote its kindred heart, might yet be prone to deeds of mercy,—

... “Who may understand Thy many woes, poor suicide, unknown? He who thy being gave shall judge of thee alone.”

_Qualis vita, finis ita_, is a rhyming proverb not quite worthy of all acceptation. That Country Parson whose Recreations made him a name (such name, at least, as four initials may comprise) declares himself to have no look but one of sorrow and pity to cast on the poor suicide’s grave, and thinks 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. “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.’”

A different spirit informs the Kirk from the day when Wishart complained that, in their arrogance, her ministers, “as if they had been privy to the councils of God, or the dispensers of His vengeance to the world,” presumed to pronounce upon the future state of their adversaries, and “doomed them, both body and soul, to eternal torments.” Pity but the poet had been better man and Christian who wrote these strong lines on damnatory sentences _de mortuis_, even when there remains nought to show—

... “save a life misspent,— And soul—but who shall answer where it went? ’Tis ours to bear, not judge the dead; and they Who doom to hell, themselves are on the way, Unless those bullies of eternal pains Are pardoned their bad hearts for their worse brains.”

More in a reverent spirit, and in a farther-seeing one, is the mystic finale of the Laureate’s memorable Vision of Sin, and its open verdict on the obscure crime of a great criminal:—

“At last I heard a voice upon the slope Cry to the summit, ‘Is there any hope?’ To which an answer pealed from that high land, _But in a tongue no man could understand_; And on the glimmering limit far withdrawn, God made Himself an awful rose of dawn.”

Never let it be forgotten, insists a Quarterly Reviewer, that there is scarcely a single moral action of a single human being of which other men have such a knowledge—its ultimate grounds, its surrounding incidents, and the real determining causes of its merits,—as to warrant their pronouncing a conclusive judgment.

The writings of Mr. Arthur Helps are honourably distinguished by an oft-recurring plea for mutual tolerance, on the ground of the little we really know one of another. In “Companions of my Solitude,” for instance, the author remarks that were it only considered how utterly incompetent men are to talk of the conduct of others as they do, the talkers would often be silenced at once, and the sufferers as readily consoled. Take the one question merely of difference of temperament—which, amongst men, is probably as great as that amongst the different species of animals—as between that, for example, of the lively squirrel and the solemn crane. “Now, if only from this difference between them, the squirrel would be a bad judge of the felicity, or generosity, or the domestic conduct, of the crane.

“Probably when we are thinking or talking of a person, we recall some visual image of that person. I have thought what an instructive thing it would be, if under some magic influence—like that, for example, which would construct a ‘palace of truth’—it were arranged that as we gave out our comments on the character or conduct of any person, this image on the retina of memory should change according to the truth, or rather the want of it, in our remarks. Gradually, feature after feature would steal away till we gazed at nonentity, or we should find another image glide into the field of view,—somebody we had never seen, perhaps, but to whom the comments we were uttering really did apply.”

Accordingly, our author would have the sufferers from injurious and unjust comment treat the whole thing as one which lacked reality. No thoughtful man, he urges, ought to be long vexed at such stuff, immaterial in every sense: such stuff as dreams are made of.

In one of his Dialogues, again, he makes Dunsford declare the most curious thing, as regards people living together, to be the intense ignorance they sometimes are in of each other. And Milverton follows up the remark by adding, that people fulfil a relation towards each other, and only know each other in that relation: they perform orbits round each other, each gyrating, too, upon his own axis, so that there are parts of the character of each which are never brought into view of the other. In another Dialogue, Milverton refers to the habit divines have of reminding us, that, in forming our ideas of the government of Providence, we should recollect that we see only a fragment. The same observation, in its degree, he holds to be true as regards human conduct. “We see a little bit here and there, and assume the nature of the whole. Even a very silly man’s actions are often more to the purpose than his friends’ comments on them.”

In yet another of his works, this popular essay-writer devotes an entire essay to the subject of our judgments of other men. Who does not feel, he asks, that to describe with fidelity the least portion of the entangled nature that is within him would be no easy matter? And yet the same man who feels this, and who, perhaps, would be ashamed of talking at hazard about the properties of a flower, of a weed, of some figure in geometry, will put forth his guesses about the character of his brother-man, as if he had the fullest authority for all that he was saying. It is shown in detail how an opinion of some man’s character and conduct gets abroad which is formed after a wrong method, by prejudiced persons, upon a false statement of facts, respecting a matter which they cannot possibly understand; and how this is then left to be inflated by Folly, and blown about by Idleness.

There is among Wordsworth’s Poems on the Naming of Places, one which is memorable if only as containing one of the most admired lines he ever wrote, descriptive of Lady of the Mere—

“Sole-sitting by the shores of old romance,”

—but which is also pertinent to the present occasion, as pointing a moral, after the poet’s wont to moralise his song. A man had been seen in the distance by the poet and his friends, angling. No great harm in that, my masters? Nay; but the angler was in peasant’s garb, and the season was mid-harvest, and therefore, and on the spot, they voted him improvident and reckless. But when they came up to him, these over-hasty judges found in the man they had summarily condemned, a poor mortal wasted by sickness, and all too weak to labour in the harvest-field, but using his best skill to gain a pittance from the dead unfeeling lake that knew not of his wants:—

“I will not say What thoughts immediately were ours, nor how The happy idleness of that sweet morn With all its lovely images, was changed To serious musing and to self-reproach. Nor did we fail to see within ourselves What need there is to be reserved in speech, And temper all our thoughts with charity. —Therefore, unwilling to forget that day, My friend, myself, and she who then received The same admonishment, have called the place By a memorial name, uncouth indeed As e’er by mariner was given to bay Or foreland on a new-discovered coast; And POINT RASH-JUDGMENT is the name it bears.”[21]

Forbear to judge: for how pitifully little is the all we really know one of another! Mr. Froude has forcibly remarked—even admitting the remark to be a truism—that whoever has attended but slightly to the phenomena of human nature has discovered how inadequate is the clearest insight which he can hope to attain into character and disposition. “Every one is a perplexity to himself and a perplexity to his neighbours; and men who are born in the same generation, who are exposed to the same influences, trained by the same teachers, and live from childhood to age in constant and familiar intercourse, are often little more than shadows to each other, intelligible in superficial form and outline, but divided inwardly by impalpable and mysterious barriers.” And yet how ready each “weak unknowing hand” to hurl the bolts of Heaven against whomsoever it deems to be Heaven’s foe.

Sir James Stephen bids all hail to Rhadamanthus on his posthumous judgment-seat in the nether regions. But when Rhadamanthus comes above ground, holds in his hand the historical pen, and resolves all the enigmas of hearts which ceased to beat long centuries ago, more confidently than most of us would dare to interpret the mysteries of own, Sir James for one wishes him back again at the confluence of Styx, Phlegethon, and Cocytus. For, “it is, after all, nothing more than the surface of human character which the retrospective scrutiny of the keenest human eye is able to detect.” It is in a subsequent portion of the same instructive treatise, that the writer pronounces human justice to be severe, not merely because man is censorious, but because he reasonably distrusts himself, and fears lest his weakness should confound the distinctions of good and evil; and Divine justice to be lenient, because there alone love can flow in all its unfathomable depths and boundless expansion, impeded by no dread of error, and diverted by no misplaced sympathies.[22]

In the course of some remarks on the harshness with which man is disposed to regard the fellow-man whose doctrine, in matters of religious faith, differs from his own, the author of the “Caxton Essays” is impressive on the fact that He who hath reserved to Himself the right of judging, has imperatively said to man, whose faculty of judging must be, like man himself, erring and human, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” Now, argues the essayist, of all our offences, it is clear that that offence of which man can be the least competent judge is an offence of defective faith. “For faith belongs to our innermost hearts, and not to our overt actions. And religious faith is therefore that express tribute to the only Reader of all hearts, on the value of which man can never, without arrogant presumption, set himself up as judge.”

If even-handed justice, says Mr. Anthony Trollope, were done throughout the world, some apology would be found for most offences. Not that the offences would thus be wiped away, and black become white; but much that is now very black would, he submits, be reduced to that sombre, uninviting shade of ordinary brown which is so customary to humanity.“[23] It is much the same humane thought which underlies Pelayo’s apology for Roderick, when we read how closely that generous prince would and did

... “cherish in his heart the constant thought Something was yet untold, which, being known, Would palliate his offence, and make the fall Of one till then so excellently good, Less monstrous, less revolting to belief, More to be pitied, more to be forgiven.”

As one of George Eliot’s good parsons has it, God sees us as we are altogether, not in separate feelings or actions, as our fellow-men see us. We are always doing each other injustice, and thinking better or worse of each other than we deserve, he says, because we only hear and see separate words and actions—not each other’s whole nature. Do not philosophic doctors tell us, again, the reflective author in person elsewhere muses, that we are unable to discern so much as a tree, except by an unconscious cunning which combines many past and separate sensations; that no one sense is independent of another, so that in the dark we can hardly taste a fricassee, or tell whether our pipe is alight or not, and the most intelligent boy, if accommodated with claws or hoofs instead of fingers, would be likely to remain on the lowest form? If so, it is easy to understand that our discernment of men’s motives must depend on the completeness of the elements we can bring from our own susceptibility and our own experience. “See to it, friend, before you pronounce a too hasty judgment, that your own moral sensibilities are not of a hoofed or clawed character.” For, as this penetrating writer insists, in continuation of the metaphor, the keenest eye will not serve, unless you have the delicate fingers, with their subtile nerve filaments, which elude scientific lenses, and lose themselves in the invisible world of human sensations.

Deeds which, to quote another popular though less powerful penwoman, our acquaintance designate our follies, may at another tribunal be our virtues—our single redeeming points; who judges rightly, who can rightly judge, where so many of our efforts are bent to seem other than we are, and the universal conjuring trick of this world is to throw dust expertly in our neighbours’ eyes?

Centuries ago, well-nigh two score, it was written by the most philosophic, and perhaps the best, of Roman emperors, that men’s actions look worse than they are; and, says he, “one must be thoroughly informed of a great many things before one can be rightly qualified to give judgment in the case.” The sceptic Bayle was a better Christian than Scaliger, when he protested against the assertion of that peremptory scholar that Bellarmin did not believe a word of what he wrote, and was at heart an atheist: besides the testimony of Bellarmin’s life and deathbed to the contrary, such judgments are, said Bayle (and no friend to the Jesuits he), a usurpation of the rights of One who alone is the Judge of hearts, and before whom there is no dissembling.

An apostle’s reason given for the counsel, Speak not evil one of another, brethren,—is this: that whoso speaketh evil of his brother, and judgeth his brother, speaketh evil of the law, and judgeth the law. Now, there is one Lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy; who art thou that judgest another?

“Oh what are we, Frail creatures as we are, that we should sit In judgment man on man! and what were we, If the All-merciful should mete to us With the same rigorous measure wherewithal Sinner to sinner metes!”

No observant reader of Mr. Carlyle but will have noticed, if not (which were better) laid to heart, his habitual abstention from that dogmatism of the judgment-seat in which smaller spirits delight. For instance, in his moral estimate of so erring a genius as Hoffmann, if, in judging him, Mr. Carlyle is forced to condemn him, it is with mildness, with a desire to do justice. Let us not forget, urges the critic, that for a mind like Hoffmann’s, the path of propriety was difficult to find—still more difficult to keep. “Moody, sensitive, and fantastic, he wandered through the world like a foreign presence, subject to influences of which common natures have happily no glimpse.” A good or a wise man we must not call him; but among the ordinary population of this world, “to note him with the mark of reprobation were ungrateful and unjust.” So, again, in the same author’s review of the life and writings of Werner—who, always in some degree an enigma to himself, may well be obscure to us. For “there are mysteries and unsounded abysses in every human heart; and that is but a questionable philosophy which undertakes so readily to explain them.” Religious belief especially, Mr. Carlyle urges, at least when it seems heartfelt and well-intentioned, is no subject for harsh or even irreverent investigation. “He is a wise man that, having such a belief, knows and sees clearly the grounds of it in himself; and those, we imagine, who have explored with strictest scrutiny the secret of their own bosoms, will be least apt to rush with intolerant violence into that of other men’s.” Still more elaborate and emphatic is the exposition of this doctrine as applied to the case of Robert Burns. The world, it is alleged, is habitually unjust in its judgments of such men, since it decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes, and not positively but negatively,—less on what is done right, than on what is or is not done wrong. Whereas, by Mr. Carlyle’s doctrine, not the few inches of deflection from the mathematical orbit, which are so easily measured, but the _ratio_ of these to the whole diameter, constitutes the real aberration. “This orbit may be a planet’s, its diameter the breadth of the solar system; or it may be a city hippodrome; nay, the circle of a ginhorse, its diameter a score of feet or paces. But the inches of deflection only are measured; and it is assumed that the diameter of the ginhorse, and that of the planet, will yield the same ratio when compared to them!” Here, according to our author, lies the root of many a blind, cruel condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, Rousseaus, which one never listens to with approval. “Granted, the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and tackle damaged; the pilot is blameworthy; he has not been all-wise and all-powerful: but to know _how_ blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the globe, or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs.”

To a very different style of sinners the same judgment—rather the same refusal to judge—is accorded, when the doom of Chaumette, Gobel, and other reddest of red-republican reprobates, is rehearsed, in the history of France’s reign of terror, while the revolution was devouring so greedily her own children. “For Anaxagoras Chaumette, the sleek head now [April 1794] stript of its _bonnet rouge_ [and a traveller by tumbril to Sainte Guillotine], what hope is there? Unless Death _were_ ‘an eternal sleep’? Wretched Anaxagoras! God shall judge thee, not I.”

Once more: “Unhappy soul! who shall judge him?” is the historian’s deprecating query in the instance of August of Poland, the physically strong,—who dies, confessedly a _very_ great sinner, early in 1733. Who shall judge him?

“Hereafter?—And do you think to look On the terrible pages of that Book To find his failings, faults, and errors? Ah, you will then have other cares, In your own shortcomings and despairs, In your own secret sins and terrors!”

Corporal Trim was once moved to avow his belief—rather hotly, for his _esprit de corps_ was piqued—that when a soldier “gets time to pray, he prays as heartily as a parson—though not with all his fuss and hypocrisy. Thou shouldst not have said that, Trim, said my uncle Toby—for God only knows who is a hypocrite, and who is not. At the great and general review of us all, Corporal, at the day of judgment (and not till then)—it will be seen who have done their duties in this world, and who have not.”

In a like spirit, another clerical novelist, of a more recent type, and whose distinctive evangel is Muscular Christianity, introduces a “double-first” candidate for orders who reminds him of Mr. Bye-Ends in Bunyan: “And yet,” comes the charitable clause conditional, “I believe the man was really in earnest. He was really desirous to do what was right, as far as he knew it; and all the more desirous, because he saw, in the present state of society, what was right would pay him. God shall judge him, not I. Who can unravel the confusion of mingled selfishness and devotion that exist even in his own heart, much less in that of another?”