In Judging Others.
Stop before gauging a person’s capacity solely by his physiognomy. Lafayette’s forehead suggested idiocy, Keats, the poet, had the jaws of a prize-fighter, and warriors of the Salvation Army have been mistaken (before opening their mouths) for men of intelligence.
Stop, however, before judging people altogether on antithetic grounds. To invariably accept a monkey-jawed, rat-eyed, ear-shadowed countenance as a criterion for mental profundity, for instance, or crime-sodden, sin-exhaling bulldog traits as suggestive of ethical culture or religious zeal, is hardly to be recommended.
Stop before judging others, especially men, wholly by their dress and manners. A millionaire may be “shabby-genteel” and retiring to excess, whereas professional scoundrels are often notorious for a fashionable exterior and distinction of bearing “as to the manner born.”
Stop on the verge of taking dress and ornament as a sure indication of a woman’s character or station. You might regret mistaking a quietly-attired unadorned heiress for a shirt-maker in distress; or a fourth-class pawnbroker’s wife, beringed and bediamonded from bang to belt, for a sorceress of fashion.
Stop before judging people disparagingly by their eccentricities. A poet, for instance, may indulge in long hair, without necessarily being an æsthete or a cowboy; the habit of talking to one’s-self is no proof of a guilty conscience; and absent-mindedness in many forms has accompanied the possession of exceptional capacity.
Stop, however, before accepting such betrayals as positive indications of either genius, talent or brains. To do this would be to libel the ordinarily well-behaved people who have some respect for the amenities of existence.
Stop, for instance, ere ascribing pure benevolence to the absent-mindedness that mistakes your silk umbrella for a mislaid gingham one, shaky in the ribs, feruled with long service, and filtery at the seams.
Stop and draw a line likewise, at the abstraction that finds its hand in your pocket, or creeps in at your bedroom window, or is blandly oblivious as to whether it owes you money, or vice versa.
Stop, and turn the question over in your mind: True enough, there is a chance of such eccentricities being the concomitants of a certain sort of talent, but is it exactly the sort that ought to be encouraged?
Stop, if naturally dishonest or vicious yourself, and inquire if you can fairly judge others according to your own corrupt standard. This may prevent your giving yourself away, besides leavening your collective baseness with a grain or two of charity.
Stop, however, if honest and well-meaning—and, indeed, it is mainly for such that this symposium of golden precepts is prepared—and remember, as a stimulant to careful discrimination in these things, that your own superficialities may be constantly and cruelly misjudged.
Stop short of supposing that you have no superficialities, or but few, to be judged by. The visibility of existence is largely made up of them; it is, perhaps even well that the heart is not often worn upon the sleeve; and equally well that our externals are but deceptive indices of the springs of action, the blots and foibles they disguise, else were the wisest of us each other’s sport.
Stop before taking mildness and retirement of manner for a want of resolution or courage. True greatness in anything is seldom self-celebrating, and it is as true as proverbial that “still waters run deep.”
Stop, on the other hand, before setting down a strutting self-importance as invariably betokening a wind-bag or a nincompoop. Modesty is, unfortunately, not always the hand-maid of merit.
Stop before mistaking ostentation for generosity, or calm acceptance for ingratitude. “As the mean have a calculating avarice that sometimes inclines them to give, so the magnanimous have a condescending generosity that sometimes inclines them to receive.”
Stop before despising in another the demonstrativeness that you would despise in yourself. The babble of the brook is as natural as the stillness of the pool and temperamental differences are always to be considered.
Stop before regarding extreme particularity in dress as an invariable evidence of intellectual insignificance. It often is so, but nine-tenths of the shabbily-attired men of brains would dress better if they could afford to.
Stop on the dizzy verge of mistaking an excessive and painstaking courtesy for a genuine and heartfelt interest. It should rather put you on your guard.
Stop short of the old-time cynicism of regarding every man as a rascal until he shall have afforded proofs to the contrary. Such a wholesale distrust of human nature is creditable to neither the head nor the heart.
Stop before sweepingly condemning a discreditable action the temptations to which are outside your own experience. Even to “put yourself in his place” is not always available for the formation of intelligent criticism in such cases.
Stop before lightly assigning reasons for another’s domestic troubles. The closet-skeleton is a strictly local spectre that is not the less terrible by reason of the narrowness of its haunting powers.
Stop short of disparaging the charity that methodizes and calculates its smallest alms. There is an enlightened self-interest that relieves more real distress than all the off-handed gratuities that are bestowed.
Stop before impugning self-seeking motives to a good deed that redounds to the doer’s advantage. Even if partly premeditated to this end, the result, if humanitarian in its general influence, is not the less useful and noble.
Stop before judging a man solely by his errors or misfortunes. The former may have been circumstantially unavoidable, as the latter may have been undeserved.
Stop before adopting the stereotyped, canting “I-might-have-told-you-so” criticism in the case of a friend who has fallen. The helping hand is then in order, if ever at all; and he is doubtless aware of the cause of his disgrace, without your telling him.
