Library Notes

by A. P. Russell

"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!"

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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."