Library Notes

by A. P. Russell

"It is the conviction of the purest men, that the net amount of man and man does not much vary. Each is incomparably superior to his companion in some faculty. Each seems to have some compensation yielded to him by his infirmity, and every hinderance operates as a concentration of his force." "Everything we do has its results. But the right and prudent does not always lead to good, or contrary measures to bad; frequently the reverse takes place. Some time since," said Goethe, "I made a mistake in one of these transactions with booksellers, and was disturbed that I had done so. But, as circumstances turned out, it would have been very unfortunate if I had not made that very mistake. Such instances occur frequently in life, and it is the observation of them which enables men of the world to go to work with such freedom and boldness."

"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 Phaëton, 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 Staël 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."