"I have the capacity in me for every crime," wrote that gentlest of gentle men, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Of course he hadn't, and in making this assertion Emerson pulled toward him a little more credit than was his due. That is, he overstated a great classic truth.
"If Rembrandt painted the 'Christ at Emmaus' and the 'Sortie of the
Civic Guard,' then Rembrandt had two souls," exclaims Professor
Lautner.
And the simple answer of Emerson would have been, "He had."
That is just the difference between Rembrandt and Professor Lautner. Lautner has one flat, dead-level, unprofitable soul that neither soars high nor dives deep; and his mind reasons unobjectionable things out syllogistically, in a manner perfectly inconsequential. He is icily regular, splendidly null.
Every man measures others by himself—he has only one standard. When a man ridicules certain traits in other men, he ridicules himself. How would he know that other men were contemptible, did he not look into his own heart and there see the hateful things? Thackeray wrote his book on Snobs, because he was a Snob—which is not to say that he was a Snob all the time. When you recognize a thing, good or bad, in the outside world, it is because it was yours already.
"I carry the world in my heart," said the Prophet of old. All the universe you have is the universe you have within.
Old Walt Whitman, when he saw the wounded soldier, exclaimed, "I am that man!" And two thousand years before this, Terence said, "I am a man, and nothing that is human is alien to me."
I know just why Professor Lautner believes that Rembrandt never could have painted a picture with a deep, tender, subtle and spiritual significance. Professor Lautner averages fairly well, he labors hard to be consistent, but his thought gamut runs just from Bottom the weaver to Dogberry the judge. He is a cauliflower—that is to say, a cabbage with a college education.
Yes, I understand him, because for most of the time I myself am supremely dull, childishly dogmatic, beautifully self-complacent.
I am Lautner.