THE OPEN RIGHT HAND’S SECRET FROM THE LEFT.
St. Matthew vi. 3.
To some of us, to very many, it may seem that the Sermon might well be on a Mount, that set forth such a text as this: “But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth.” The atmosphere is of other altitudes than here below. We may not sound a trumpet before us, as the hypocrites did in the synagogue and in the streets, to have glory of men; and verily, every man his own trumpeter, they had their reward. But as to keeping our open-handed doles and donations a secret, as it were, from our other self; as to concealing from the left hand the furtive bounties and stealthy almsgiving of the right, that is a practical transcendentalism mostly undreamt of in our philosophy.
Yet are there, and ever will be, those—else had this earth of ours lost the salt of the earth, and wherewith then should it be salted?—who—
“Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.”
The larger number of benefactors, who, as the caustic French wit, Chamfort, puts it, pretend to conceal themselves after effecting a deed of kindness, betake themselves to flight and a hiding-place only as Virgil’s Galatea did, with a decided wish to be seen first: Et se cupit ante videri. Another of Chamfort’s cynical maximes et pensées runs thus: “Il y a peu de bienfaiteurs qui ne disent comme Satan, Si cadens adoraveris me.” Whom the vulgar succour, they oppress, says Crabbe. They have as little sympathy with, or interest in, the rule of keeping the right hand’s largesse a secret from the left, as with Peter of Aragon’s famous refusal to let Pope Martin IV know what were his designs against the infidel. Peter implored the blessing of the Holy Father on his scheme of action; “but if he thought his right hand knew his secret, he would cut it off, lest it should betray it to his left.” And the vulgar mean the commonalty, the many, the polloi. The doer of good, therefore, who does it by stealth, is the exception to a rule; and as an exception he is treated in literature and life as what is called a “character.” Goldsmith makes a highly pronounced character of his man in black, whose hand is open as day to melting charity, while he professes to keep it closed tight as wax and hard as steel. He bullies in words a petitioner for aid, while he is but studying what method he shall take to relieve him unobserved. “He had, however,” writes the Chinese citizen of the world, “no easy part to act, as he was obliged to preserve the appearance of ill-nature before me, and yet relieve himself by relieving the sailor.” And by contrivance he gains his end. The mandarin’s curiosity to know “what could be his motives for thus concealing virtues which others take such pains to display,” is natural, and finds natural expression; and thereby hangs the tale of the “reluctantly good” Man in Black. Smollett, again, makes one of his heroes, though young and pleasure-loving, retrench his expenses in order to help the needy: “Numberless were the objects to which he extended his charity in private. Indeed, he exerted this virtue in secret, not only on account of avoiding the charge of ostentation, but also because he was ashamed of being detected in such an awkward, unfashionable practice by the censorious observers of this humane generation. In this particular he seemed to confound the ideas of virtue and vice; for he did good as other people do evil, by stealth; and was [like the man in black] so capricious in point of behaviour, that frequently, in public, he wagged his tongue in satirical animadversions upon that poverty which his hand had, in private, relieved.” It cannot be affirmed of him that he exemplified, in detail, all the attributes of a portrait from life, but after death, by Cowper; but some of them he did:
“Yet was thy liberality discreet,
Nice in its choice, and of a tempered heat;
And though in act unwearied, secret still,