Nescio. “You underrate their intellect, that you may relieve their heart from the imputation of baseness. True, he who is always searching for faults, without paying any attention to beauties, affords strong grounds for the conclusion, that he has no perception of the latter, and in his own experience is conversant only with the former: and he who is ever detecting plagiarisms, and starting resemblances, gives reason for the suspicion, that his acquaintance with the fountains of these stolen waters, is not so purely accidental, or so honorably gotten, as he would have us imagine. But deficiency of taste and weakness of mind are not the sole causes of such conduct. The prompter of the whole is envy,—envy, the meanest passion of the human heart—the only one in which there is not some shade of honor, some trace of nobility. Ambition may be laudable—hate become a virtue from the loathsomeness of its object—covetousness acquire dignity from the excellence of the thing coveted—but the baseness of envy is enhanced by the purity and splendor against which it is directed.”
Tristo. “Not only is envy so mean a passion in itself, but it exerts a most debasing influence upon the intellect and whole character. Indeed, if we may believe Coleridge, the cherishing of it is incompatible with the existence of genius. His language is solemn; would that all the fosterers, or rather the victims, of this worst vice, to which we are by our situation exposed, might listen to his warning. ‘Genius may co-exist with wildness, idleness, folly, even with crime; but not long, believe me, with the indulgence of an envious disposition. Envy is both the worst and justest divinity, as I once saw it expressed somewhere in a page of Stobæus; it dwarfs and withers its worshippers.’”
Apple. “To recall your attention, Tristo, to the subject from which we passed so suddenly to a more serious one, what think you of those who ‘wit-wanton it’ with things sacred, who at every breath break over the bounds of modesty, and outrage our sympathies with the true and the beautiful, for the sake of a momentary, and not unfrequently a shame-faced laugh?”
Tristo. “Such persons do themselves and others more injury than they think. Their incessant insults to all refinement and delicacy of feeling, if unresented and unguarded against, at length deaden and efface these sentiments. Bulwer says well of such, ‘Their humor debauches the whole moral system—they are like the Sardinian herb—they make you laugh, it is true, but they poison you in the act.’”
Nescio. “It is disgraceful that impurity should be an unequivocal characteristic of college wit. But it will be so, until some one shall demonstrate by his own example that there is no necessary connection, but rather an essential hostility between real humor and obscenity. But so long as it is easier to swim with the current than to buffet its dashings—so long as it is pleasanter to excite a hearty laugh, than encounter a cold sneer—so long as indolence and vacillation continue to be descriptive marks of a student’s character—we need not hope for a change.”
Pulito. “Whoever would attempt to effect one, should remember the aphorism, ‘He ought to be well mounted who is for leaping over the hedges of custom.’”
Tristo. “If this license on the part of some deserves severe reprobation, the chilling churlishness of those, who can feel no sympathy with pleasure, be it ever so innocent—whose minds can admit but the single idea of the useful, and reject as trifling the elegant and refining—who, swallowed up in their admiration of moral beauty, lose sight of or depreciate intellectual symmetry, (forgetting that moral excellence, though it resemble in its value the priceless diamond, is not like it advantaged by a dull and roughened setting)—such, I say, must not pass without their share of censure, for they are in no slight degree the occasion, I will not say the cause, of the opposite vice in others.”
Pulito. “Such illiberality frustrates the praise-worthy exertions of all who indulge in it. It places them out of the circle of influence—their efforts can no more reach those whom they desire to affect, than (to use a magniloquent simile) the perturbations of the moons of Uranus can sway the Earth’s satellite in its orbit. But beside the unfortunate reaction of such principles, is not this cutting off, ‘at one fell swoop,’ all amusements, this tying down to one staid rule of formal observance, youth of every variety of taste, talent and temperament, and brought up under every complexion of circumstances—this curbing of all tastes and inclinations, not within the lawgiver’s capabilities—is it not based upon error of judgment, and directed by something of inquisitorial arrogance?”
Apple. “I never listen to a specimen of such frosty philosophy, without recalling an anecdote, much to the point. It is found, originally, I believe, in one of Pope’s letters to Swift, though I read it somewhere else. ‘A courtier saw a sage picking out the best dishes at table. ‘How,’ said he, ‘are sages epicures?’ ‘Do you think, Sir,’ said the wise man, reaching over the table to help himself, ‘do you think, Sir, that God Almighty made all the good things of this world for fools?’”
Tristo. “The sage must have belonged to the sect Deipnosophoi, or ‘Supper-wise,’ whom D’Israeli mentions. His principles, however, will apply in their full extent, I think, to the purer pleasures of taste and wit and literature.”