It is curious to mark a variation of this intellectual hardihood and personal force when the premises are not in the solidities, but in the oddities of thought and character, and whim stands stiffly up to the remotest inferences which may be deduced from its insanest freaks of individual opinion. Thus it is said that in one of our country towns there is an old gentleman who is an eccentric hater of women; and this crotchet of his character he carries to its extreme logical consequences. Not content with general declamation against the sex, he turns eagerly, the moment he receives the daily newspaper, to the list of deaths; and if he sees the death of a woman recorded, he gleefully exclaims,—"Good! good! there's another of 'em gone!"
We have heard of a man who had conceived a violent eccentric prejudice against negroes; and he was not content with chiming in with the usual cant of the prejudice that they ought not to be allowed in our churches and in our rail-road-cars, but vociferated, that, if he had his way, they should not be allowed in Africa! The advantage of grit in this respect is in its annihilating a prejudice by presenting a vivid vision of its theoretical consequences. Carlyle has an eccentric hatred of the eighteenth century, its manners, morals, politics, religion, and men. He has expressed this in various ways for thirty years; but in his last work, the "Life of Frederick the Great," his prejudice reached its logical climax in the assertion, that the only sensible thing the eighteenth century ever did was blowing out its own brains in the French Revolution.
Again, in discussion, some men have felicity in replying to a question, others a felicity in replying to the motive which prompted the question. In one case you get an answer addressed to your understanding; in the other, an answer which smites like a slap in the face. Thus, when a pert skeptic asked Martin Luther where God was before He created heaven, Martin stunned his querist with the retort,—"He was building hell for such idle, presumptuous, fluttering, and inquisitive spirits as you." And everybody will recollect the story of the self-complacent cardinal who went to confess to a holy monk, and thought by self-accusation to get the reputation of a saint.
"I have been guilty of every kind of sin," snivelled the cardinal.
"It is a solemn fact," replied the impassive monk.
"I have indulged in pride, ambition, malice, and revenge," groaned the cardinal.
"It is too true," answered the monk.
"Why, you fool," exclaimed the enraged dignitary, "you don't imagine that I mean all this to the letter!"
"Ho! ho!" said the monk, "so you have been a liar, too, have you?"
This relentless rebuker of shams furnishes us with a good transition to another department of the subject, namely, moral hardihood, or grit organized in conscience, and applying the most rigorous laws of ethics to the practical affairs of life. Now there is a wide difference between moral men, so called, and men moralized,—between men who lazily adopt and lazily practise the conventional moral proprieties of the time, and men transformed into the image of inexorable, unmerciful moral ideas, men in whom moral maxims appear organized as moral might. There are thousands who are prodigal of moral and benevolent opinions, and honestly eloquent in loud professions of what they would do in case circumstances called upon them to act; but when the occasion is suddenly thrust upon them, when temptation, leering into every corner and crevice of their weak and selfish natures, connects the notion of virtue with the reality of sacrifice, then, in that sharp pinch, they become suddenly apprised of the difference between rhetoric and rectitude, and find that their speeches have been far ahead of their powers of performance. Thus, in one of Gerald Griffin's novels, there is a scene in which a young Irish student, fresh from his scholastic ethics, amazes the company at his father's table, who are all devout believers in the virtues of the hair-trigger, by an eloquent declamation against the folly and the sin of duelling. At last one of the set gets sufficient breath to call him a coward. The hot Irish blood is up in an instant, a tumbler is thrown at the head of the doubter of his courage, and in ten seconds the young moralist is crossing swords with his antagonist in a duel.