"I was present at my friend's trial. The facts had become known beforehand. He stood there with his gray hair, and his mutilated limbs, and the deep scar on his visage, and the cross of the legion of honour on his breast; and when he had told his tale, he ended with these words—'I have saved the son whom I reared for France, from a doom that spared the life to brand it with disgrace. Is this a crime? I give you my life in exchange for my son's disgrace. Does, my country need a victim? I have lived for my country's glory, and I can die contented to satisfy its laws; sure that if you blame me, you will not despise; sure that the hands that give me to the headsman will scatter flowers over my grave. Thus I confess all. I, a soldier, look round amongst a nation of soldiers; and in the name of the star which glitters on my breast, I dare the fathers of France to condemn me!'
"They acquitted the soldier, at least they gave a verdict answering to what in our courts is called 'justifiable homicide.' A shout rose in the court, which no ceremonial voice could still; the crowd would have borne him in triumph to his house, but his look repelled such vanities. To his house he returned indeed, and the day afterwards they found him dead, beside the cradle in which his first prayer had been breathed over his sinless child. Now, father and son, I ask you, do you condemn that man?"
CHAPTER VIII.
My father took three strides up and down the room, and then, halting on his hearth, and facing his brother, he thus spoke—"I condemn his deed, Roland! At best he was but a haughty egotist. I understand why Brutus should slay his sons. By that sacrifice he saved his country! What did this poor dupe of an exaggeration save? nothing but his own name. He could not lift the crime from his son's soul, nor the dishonour from his son's memory. He could but gratify his own vain pride, and, insensibly to himself, his act was whispered to him by the fiend that ever whispers to the heart of man, 'Dread men's opinions more than God's law!' Oh, my dear brother, what minds like yours should guard against the most is not the meanness of evil—it is the evil that takes false nobility, by garbing itself in the royal magnificence of good." My uncle walked to the window, opened it, looked out a moment, as if to draw in fresh air, closed it gently, and came back again to his seat; but during the short time the window had been left open, a moth flew in.
"Tales like these," renewed my father, pityingly—"whether told by some great tragedian or in thy simple style, my brother,—tales like these have their uses: they penetrate the heart to make it wiser; but all wisdom is meek, my Roland. They invite us to put the question to ourselves that thou hast asked—'Can we condemn this man?' and reason answers, as I have answered—'We pity the man, we condemn the deed.' We—take care, my love! that moth will be in the candle. We—whish!— whish!"— and my father stopped to drive away the moth. My uncle turned, and taking his handkerchief from the lower part of his face, on which he had wished to conceal the workings, he flapped away the moth from the flame. My mother moved the candles from the moth. I tried to catch the moth in my father's straw-hat. The deuce was in the moth, it baffled us all; now circling against the ceiling, now swooping down at the fatal lights. As if by a simultaneous impulse, my father approached one candle, my uncle approached the other; and just as the moth was wheeling round and round, irresolute which to choose for its funeral pyre, both were put out. The fire had burned down low in the grate, and in the sudden dimness my father's soft sweet voice came forth as if from an invisible being:—"We leave ourselves in the dark to save a moth from the flame, brother! shall we do less for our fellow-men? Extinguish, oh! humanely extinguish the light of our reason, when the darkness more favours our mercy." Before the lights were relit, my uncle had left the room. His brother followed him; my mother and I drew near to each other and talked in whispers.
GUESSES AT TRUTH.
We remember perusing this book soon after its first appearance. The shortness of the several sections into which it is divided, and the frequent change of topics, keeping the mind in a constant state of expectation, prevented us, we suppose, from feeling at that time a sense of weariness. In the perpetual anticipation of finding something new in the next paragraph or section, we forgot the disappointment which the last had so often occasioned. It is only thus we can explain the difference of feeling with which we have re-perused this third and late edition of the same work. The brevity of chapters, and interchange of topics, could not practise their kindly deception on us twice. Like those intertwisted walks in a confined shrubbery, which are designed to cheat the pedestrian into the idea of vast extent of space, the imposition succeeds but once. At the second perambulation we discover within what narrow boundaries we have been led up and down, and made our profitless circuit. We are compelled to say that an exceeding weariness came over us on the second perusal of these Guesses at Truth. Notwithstanding the modesty of the title, there are few books which wear so perpetually the air of superiority, of profound and subtle thought, with so very little to justify the pretension. There is a constant smile of self-complacency—but it plays over a very barren landscape. The soil is sterile on which this sunshine is resting. It is not uninstructive to notice how far an assumption of superiority, coupled with a form of composition indulgent to the reader's attention, and stimulating to his curiosity, may succeed in giving popularity and very respectable reputation to a work which, when examined closely, proves to be made up of materials of the slightest possible value.
We are the more disposed to look a little into these Guesses at Truth, because they afford a fair specimen of the manner and lucubrations of a small class, or coterie, whom we have had amongst us, and who may be best described as the Coleridgean school of philosophers. It is a class distinguished by the thorough contempt it manifests for all whom the world has been accustomed to consider as clear and painstaking thinkers—by an overweening, quiet arrogance—by a general indolence of mind interrupted by fitful efforts of thought, and much laborious trifling. They are not genuine conscientious thinkers after any order of philosophy; they are as little followers of Kant as they are of Locke; but they take advantage of the name and reputation of the one to speak with something approximating to disdain of the superficiality of the other. That they alone are right—would be fair enough. To one who strenuously labours to bring out and establish his principles, we readily permit a great confidence in his own opinion; if he did not think others wrong and himself alone right, why should he be labouring at our conviction? But these gentlemen do not labour; they have earned nothing with the sweat of their brow; they hover over all things with a consummate self-complacency; they investigate nothing; they condescend to understand no one. Men of indolent ability, they would be supposed calmly to overlook the whole field of philosophic controversy, and by dint of some learning, by the perpetual proclamation of the shallowness of their contemporaries, and a mysterious intimation of profundities of thought of their own, which they are sufficiently cautious not to attempt too fully to reveal,—they certainly contrive to make a marvellous impression upon the good-natured reader.