“I think,” said Flamin, “that one does sometimes feel the deadliest hatred of one’s self, for over-haste.”
“And then,” said Jean Paul, “your argument would apply just as well to love—at least it would half apply. Come, let’s hear what you’ve got to say to that?”
“We never hate ourselves,” I said. “We despise and pity ourselves, when we have done wrong. Although—I must add this—we hate all men, our ownselves excepted, for vices. Can this be right?” “Self-hatred,” went on the Professor, “is not possible, for hatred is nothing but the wishing of evil to the object of it—i. e., a desire to punish, not for bettering’s sake, but for punishing’s. But the most repentant of sinners never can wish himself made the subject of a chastening of this kind; and even if he could, such a wish would be merely a disguised desire for bettering—i. e., for greater happiness. But to a transgressor other than ourselves we hardly can concede rapidity of conversion, not, at all events, until he has gone through a proper expiation. What distinguishes our feeling concerning other people’s errors from our feeling concerning our own is a sham self-love. The very minutest particle of hatred desires the unhappiness of its object; that is what I have got to prove now.”
His own wife here interrupted him with the words, “My heart tells me, as plainly as possible, that I could never wish any serious misfortune to happen to my bitterest enemy—such as money troubles, or anything about her children. I could not bear even the idea of a tear being brought to her eyes on my account.”
“No, I suppose not,” he went on. “The better nature within us never wishes its antipode a broken leg, would not leave him without a strip of lint, or a wish for his recovery. But I know that that same ‘better nature’ does take a delight in his minor skin-wounds—his being put to confusion, his sleigh slipping down hill backwards, his losing his hair. The gentlest of souls hides, at the back of its tender sympathy with great troubles, its untender satisfaction with small ones, such as call for condolence (a smaller thing than sympathy). The tenderest of people, people incapable of indicting the smallest wound imaginable on their enemy’s skin, are delighted to make a thousand deep ones in his heart.” “Ah!” said Luna, “how can that be possible?” “I don’t think it would be possible,” Clotilda answered her, “if the pain of the soul had as definite a physiognomy, and as real tears, as that of the body.”
“Exactly,” said the Professor; “that is just where it is. To make ourselves feel more gently towards the wicked we have only to think of them as delivered wholly over into our hands. For what harm would one do them then? The moment they acknowledged their fault we would stay the rack, and bid the torture cease. What redoubles our indignation, and renders it everlasting, is the very impossibility of inflicting any punishment.”
“Yes, that is quite true,” said Melchior. “The oftener I read of these two live guillotines of their age, Alba and Philip (whose lips were shears of the Parcæ), or of those two other mowers of mankind, Marat and Robespierre, the deeper does the aquafortis of anger etch their condemnation into my heart, although death has drawn up their Acts of Amnesty.”
“And yet, after all,” I put in (leaving the Piqueur in the rear for the present), “if anybody would deliver over the King and the Duke to you and me here this afternoon, and a couple of caldrons of boiling oil into the bargain, I feel quite certain I couldn’t throw one of them in—at any rate till the oil had stood a long time in the cold. I should let them off with a good flogging—say 100 lashes, or so. Ah! what a cast-iron sort of fellow were he who should not soothe, and comfort with cooling, healing touch (had he the power) a heart breaking with anguish, a face whereon the worm of suffering was ploughing its tortuous track! At the same time (I continued, rapidly; for I was determined to bring in my Piqueur somehow or other), where emotion is concerned, the memory of past errors is not the smallest safeguard against new ones.”
“You see, you won’t allow me to speak,” the Professor broke in. “I still owe you a tremendous number of proofs, and I am most anxious to acquit the debt. Our hatred, being an emotion, always turns every action into a whole life; every attribute into a personality (or, to speak more accurately, because our only mode of seeing any personality is by its reflection in the mirror of its attributes) converts one attribute into the sum of them. It is only in the case of liking—of friendship—that we find it easy to separate the attribute from the personality. Hatred can not do it. Nay, in the case of liking, the converse transformation takes place—that of the personality into the attribute. We hate as if the object of our hatred had never possessed any virtues, or inclination to them—neither pity nor truthfulness, love of the young, one single good hour, anything whatever. In brief, since it is with the individuality of the person whose punishment we are decreeing that we are angry (not with its characteristic of the moment), we make him out to be a wholly wicked being. Yet such a being is not conceivable. The voice of conscience speaking in that being would be of itself one goodness in him, even though it spoke in vain; the pain of that conscience would be another; each joy and each impulse of his life another.”
“Ah! how delightful,” said Luna, “that there is nobody so utterly bad; nobody whom one would have to hate altogether.”