“Whether this author means to make his Doctor more fool or philosopher, is more than I can discover,” says a grave reader, who lays down the open book, and knits his brow while he considers the question.
Make him, good Reader! I, make him!—make “the noblest work of”——But as the Spaniards say, el creer es cortesia, and it is at your pleasure either to believe the veracity of these biographical sketches, or to regard them as altogether fictitious. It is at your pleasure, I say; not at your peril: but take heed how you exercise that pleasure in cases which are perilous! The worst that can happen to you for disbelief in this matter is, that I shall give you little credit for courtesy, and less for discrimination; and in Doncaster you will be laughed to scorn. You might as well proclaim at Coventry your disbelief in the history of Lady Godiva and Peeping Tom; or tell the Swiss that their tale of shooting the apple on the child's head was an old story before William Tell was born.
But perhaps you did not mean to express any such groundless incredulity, your doubt may be whether I represent or consider my friend as having in his character a larger portion of folly or of philosophy?
This you might determine, Reader, for yourself, if I could succeed in delineating him to the life,—the inner I mean, not the outward man,
Et en peu de papier, comme sur un tableau,
Vous pourtraire au naïf tout son bon, et son beau.1
He was the soul of goodness,
And all our praises of him are like streams
Drawn from a spring, that still rise full, and leave
The part remaining greatest.
But the Duchess of Newcastle hath decided in her philosophy that it is not possible for any one person thoroughly to understand the character of another. In her own words, “if the Mind was not joined and mixed with the sensitive and inanimate parts, and had not interior as well as exterior parts, the whole Mind of one man might perceive the whole Mind of another man; but that being not possible—one whole Mind cannot perceive another whole Mind.” By which observation we may perceive there are no Platonic Lovers in Nature. An odd conclusion of her Grace's, and from odd premises. But she was an odd personage.
1 PASQUIER.
So far however the beautiful and fanciful as well as fantastic Duchess is right, that the more congenial the disposition of two persons who stand upon the same intellectual level, the better they understand each other. The lower any one is sunk in animal life the less is he capable of apprehending the motives and views of those who have cultivated the better part of their nature.
If I am so unfortunate as to fail in producing the moral likeness which I am endeavouring to pourtray, it will not be owing to any want of sympathy with the subject in some of the most marked features of his character.
It is a maxim of Bayle's qu'il n'y a point de grand esprit dans le caractère du quel il n'entre un peu de folie. And he named Diogenes as one proof of this. Think indeed somewhat more than a little upon the words folly and philosophy, and if you can see any way into a mist, or a stone wall, you will perceive that the same radicals are found in both.