"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 Molière'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."
The absorbing desire for wealth—"that bad thing, gold," that "buys all things good"—like ambition, "often puts men upon doing the meanest offices: so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping." Almost every act may be a lie against the thought or motive which prompted it. The great aim of the mere money-getter—to get and get forever—involves him in false pretense and practical falsehood. He advises to inveigle; he condoles and sympathizes to ruin. He talks of liberalty, and never gives. He depreciates money and the love of it, at the same time glows and dimples with the consciousness of his possessions. He calls life a humbug or muck, and proves it by a hypocritical exhibit of his gains. He puts a penny in the urn of poverty, and sees clearly how he will get a shilling out. He whines for wretchedness, forgetting the number he has made wretched. He gives to religion, and plunders her devotees. He hires an expensive pew near the pulpit, and cheats his woodsawyer and washerwoman. He builds costly churches with tall steeples, and, writing the Almighty in his list of debtors, formally bargains admission to heaven. "He falls down and worships the god of this world, but will have neither its pomps, its vanities, nor its pleasures, for his trouble. He begins to accumulate treasure as a mean to happiness, and by a common but morbid association he continues to accumulate it as an end. He lives poor to die rich, and is the mere jailer of his house, and the turnkey of his wealth. Impoverished by his gold, he slaves harder to imprison it in his chest than his brother-slave to liberate it from the mine." "Some men," says Chrysippus, in Athenæus, "apply themselves with such eagerness to the pursuit of money, that it is even related, that a man once, when near his end, swallowed a number of pieces of gold, and so died. Another person sewed a quantity of money into a tunic, and put it on, and then ordered his servants to bury him in that dress, neither burning his body, nor stripping it and laying it out." Foote, in endeavoring to express the microscopic niggardliness of a miser of his acquaintance, expressed a belief that he would be willing to take the beam out of his own eye if he knew he could sell the timber. Doubtless, one source of the miser's insane covetousness and parsimony is the tormenting fear of dying a beggar—that "fine horror of poverty," according to Lamb, "by which he is not content to keep want from the door, or at arm's-length, but he places it, by heaping wealth upon wealth, at a sublime distance." ("All the arguments which are brought to represent poverty as no evil," impatiently exclaimed Dr. Johnson, "show it to be evidently a great evil. You never find people laboring to convince you that you may live very happily upon a plentiful fortune. So you hear people talking how miserable a king must be; and yet they all wish to be in his place." "One asks," says La Bruyère, "if, in comparing the different conditions of men together, their sufferings and advantages, we cannot observe an equal mixture, and a like assortment of good and evil, which settles them on an equality, or at least makes one as desirable as the other: the rich and powerful man, who wants nothing, may put the question, but a poor man must answer it.") The hoarding habits of the miser remind one of a device of American boatmen, at an early day, before the steamboat was invented, and when the forest was infested with savages and robbers. Receiving specie at New Orleans for their produce, they deposited it in a wet buckskin belt, of sufficient length to surround the body, which, as it dried, contracted and shrunk round the coin, till no amount of shaking would cause it to jingle. So may the heart and soul of the avaricious man shrink round his little heap of gold, until all healthy circulation ceases, and his heart never jingles with a genuine, generous, manly impulse.
Disraeli, in his Curiosities, gives an interesting philosophical sketch of Audley,—the great Audley, as he was called in his time,—who concentrated all the powers of a vigorous intellect in the accumulation of wealth. He lived in England in the beginning of the seventeenth century, through the reigns of James I. and Charles I., and, beginning life with almost nothing, died worth four hundred thousand pounds sterling. He "lived to view his mortgages, his statutes, and his judgments so numerous, that it was observed, his papers would have made a good map of England. This philosophical usurer never pressed hard for his debts; like the fowler, he never shook his nets lest he might startle, satisfied to have them, without appearing to hold them. With great fondness he compared his 'bonds to infants, which battle best by sleeping.' To battle is to be nourished, a term still retained at the University of Oxford. His familiar companions were all subordinate actors in the great piece he was performing; he too had his part in the scene. When not taken by surprise, on his table usually laid open a great Bible, with Bishop Andrews' folio Sermons, which often gave him an opportunity of railing at the covetousness of the clergy! declaring their religion was a 'mere preach,' and that 'the time would never be well till we had Queen Elizabeth's Protestants again in fashion.' He was aware of all the evils arising out of a population beyond the means of subsistence, and dreaded an inundation of man, spreading like the spawn of a cod. Hence he considered marriage, with a modern political economist, as very dangerous; bitterly censuring the clergy, whose children, he said, never thrived, and whose widows were left destitute. An apostolic life, according to Audley, required only books, meat, and drink, to be had for fifty pounds a year! Celibacy, voluntary poverty, and all the mortifications of a primitive Christian, were the virtues practiced by this Puritan among his money bags. Audley's was that worldly wisdom which derives all its strength from the weaknesses of mankind. Everything was to be obtained by stratagem, and it was his maxim, that to grasp our object the faster, we must go a little round about it. His life is said to have been one of intricacies and mysteries, using indirect means in all things; but if he walked in a labyrinth, it was to bewilder others; for the clew was still in his own hand; all he sought was that his designs should not be discovered in his actions. His word, we are told, was his bond; his hour was punctual; and his opinions were compressed and weighty; but if he was true to his bond-word, it was only a part of the system to give facility to the carrying on of his trade, for he was not strict to his honor; the pride of victory, as well as the passion for acquisition, combined in the character of Audley, as in more tremendous conquerors. In the course of time he purchased a position in the 'court of wards,' which enabled him to plunder the estates of deceased persons and minors. When asked the value of this new office, he replied that 'it might be worth some thousands of pounds to him who after his death would go instantly to heaven; twice as much to him who would go to purgatory, and nobody knows what to him who would adventure to go to hell.'" What he thought of a venture to the latter place, his four hundred thousand pounds must speak.
Many and interesting as are the disguises of avarice, it is only in rank and ancestry that you find perfect complacency and assurance. "We have all heard," says Thackeray, "of the dying French duchess who viewed her coming dissolution and subsequent fate so easily, because she said she was sure that Heaven must deal politely with a person of her quality." You recollect that other duchess, in Saint-Simon, who, on the death of a sinner of illustrious race, said, "They may say what they like, but no one shall persuade me that God does not think of it twice before he damns a man of his birth." An old lady once said to De Tocqueville, "I have been reading with great satisfaction the genealogies which prove that Jesus Christ descended from David. It shows that our Lord was a gentleman." "We are somewhat ashamed in general," said Senior to De Tocqueville, "of Jewish blood; yet the Levis boast of their descent from the Hebrew Levi." "They are proud of it," answered De Tocqueville; "because they make themselves out to be cousins of the blessed Virgin. They have a picture in which a Duke de Levi stands bareheaded before the Virgin. 'Pray put your hat on, cousin,' she says. 'I had rather keep it off,' he answered."
"Do we not every day meet with people," says Xavier de Maistre, "who fancy they are ill because they are unshaven, or because some one has thought they have looked poorly, and told them so? Dress has such influence upon men's minds that there are valetudinarians who think themselves in better health than usual when they have on a new coat and well powdered wig. They deceive the public and themselves by their nicety about dress, until one finds some fine morning they have died in full fig, and their death startles everybody."