In Praise of Folly
rather have their company, than that of their gravest counsellors, whom
they maintain more for fashion-sake than good-will; nor is it so strange
that these fools should be preferred before graver politicians, since
these last, by their harsh, sour advice, and ill-timing the truth, are
fit only to put a prince out of the humour, while the others laugh, and
talk, and joke, without any danger of disobliging.
It is one farther very commendable property of fools, that they always
speak the truth, than which there is nothing more noble and heroical.
For so, though Plato relate it as a sentence of Alcibiades, that in the
sea of drunkenness truth swims uppermost, and so wine is the only teller
of truth, yet this character may more justly be assumed by me, as I
can make good from the authority of Euripides, who lays down this as
an axiom _uwpa uwpos heyei_. Children and fools always speak the truth.
Whatever the fool has in his heart he betrays it in his face; or what
is more notifying, discovers it by his words: while the wise man, as
Euripides observes, carries a double tongue; the one to speak what may
be said, the other what ought to be; the one what truth, the other what
the time requires: whereby he can in a trice so alter his judgment,
as to prove that to be now white, which he had just before swore to be
black; like the satyr at his porridge, blowing hot and cold at the same
breath; in his lips professing one thing, when in his heart he means
another.
Furthermore, princes in their greatest splendour seem upon this account
unhappy, in that they miss the advantage of being told the truth,
and are shammed off by a parcel of insinuating courtiers, that acquit
themselves as flatterers more than as friends. But some will perchance
object, that princes do not love to hear the truth, and therefore wise
men must be very cautious how they behave themselves before them, lest
they should take too great a liberty in speaking what is true, rather
than what is acceptable. This must be confessed, truth indeed is seldom
palatable to the ears of kings; yet fools have so great a privilege as
to have free leave, not only to speak bare truths, but the most bitter
ones too; so as the same reproof, which had it come from the mouth of a
wise man would have cost him his head, being blurted out by a fool, is
not only pardoned, but well taken, and rewarded. For truth has naturally
a mixture of pleasure, if it carry with it nothing of offence to the
person whom it is applied to; and the happy knack of ordering it so is
bestowed only on fools. 'Tis for the same reason that this sort of men
are more fondly beloved by women, who like their tumbling them about,
and playing with them, though never so boisterously; pretending to take
that only in jest, which they would have to be meant in earnest, as that
sex is very ingenious in palliating, and dissembling the bent of their
wanton inclinations.
But to return. An additional happiness of these fools appears farther
in this, that when they have run merrily on to their last stage of
life, they neither find any fear nor feel any pain to die, but march
contentedly to the other world, where their company sure must be as
acceptable as it was here upon earth.
Let us draw now a comparison between the condition of a fool and that of
a wise man, and see how infinitely the one outweighs the other.
Give me any instance then of a man as wise as you can fancy him possible
to be, that has spent all his younger years in poring upon books, and
trudging after learning, in the pursuit whereof he squanders away the
pleasantest time of his life in watching, sweat, and fasting; and in
his latter days he never tastes one mouthful of delight, but is
always stingy, poor, dejected, melancholy, burthensome to himself, and
unwelcome to others, pale, lean, thin-jawed, sickly, contracting by his
sedentariness such hurtful distempers as bring him to an untimely death,
like roses plucked before they shatter. Thus have you, the draught of a
wise man's happiness, more the object of a commiserating pity, than of
an ambitioning envy.
But now again come the croaking Stoics, and tell me in mood and figure,
that nothing is more miserable than the being mad: but the being a fool
is the being mad, therefore there is nothing more miserable than the
being a fool. Alas, this is but a fallacy, the discovery whereof solves
the force of the whole syllogism. Well then, they argue subtlety, 'tis
true; but as Socrates in Plato makes two Venuses and two Cupids, and
shews how their actions and properties ought not to be confounded;
so these disputants, if they had not been mad themselves, should have
distinguished between a double madness in others: and there is certainly
a great difference in the nature as well as in the degrees of them, and
they are not both equally scandalous: for Horace seems to take delight
in one sort, when he says:--
_Does welcome frenzy make me thus mistake?_
And Plato in his Phaedon ranks the madness of poets, of prophets, and of
lovers among those properties which conduce to a happy life. And Virgil,
in the sixth AEneid, gives this epithet to his industrious AEneas:--
_If you will proceed to these your mad attempts._
And indeed there is a two-fold sort of madness; the one that which the
furies bring from hell; those that are herewith possessed are hurried on
to wars and contentions, by an inexhaustible thirst of power and
riches, inflamed to some infamous and unlawful lust, enraged to act the
parricide, seduced to become guilty of incest, sacrilege, or some
other of those crimson-dyed crimes; or, finally, to be so pricked in
conscience as to be lashed and stung with the whips and snakes of grief
and remorse. But there is another sort of madness that proceeds from
Folly, so far from being any way injurious or distasteful that it is
thoroughly good and desirable; and this happens when by a harmless
mistake in the judgment of things the mind is freed from those cares
which would otherwise gratingly afflict it, and smoothed over with
a content and satisfaction it could not under other circumstances so
happily enjoy. And this is that comfortable apathy or insensibleness
which Cicero, in an epistle to his friend Atticus, wishes himself master
of, that he might the less take to heart those insufferable outrages
committed by the tyrannizing triumvirate, Lepidus, Antonius, and
Augustus. That Grecian likewise had a happy time of it, who was so
frantic as to sit a whole day in the empty theatre laughing, shouting,
and clapping his hands, as if he had really seen some pathetic tragedy
acted to the life, when indeed all was no more than the strength of
imagination, and the efforts of delusion, while in all other respects
the same person behaved himself very discreetly was,
Sweet to his friends, to his wife, obliging, kind,
And so averse from a revengeful mind,
That had his men unsealed his bottled wine,
He would not fret, nor doggedly repine.
And when by a course of physic he was recovered from this frenzy, he
looked upon his cure so far from a kindness, that he thus reasons the
case with his friends:
This remedy, my friends, is worse i' th' main
Than the disease, the cure augments the pain;
My only hope is a relapse again,
And certainly they were the more mad of the two who endeavoured to
bereave him of so pleasing a delirium, and recall all the aches of his
head by dispelling the mists of his brain.
I have not yet determined whether it be proper to include all the
defects of sense and understanding under the common genius of madness.
For if anyone be so short-sighted as to take a mule for an ass, or so
shallowpated as to admire a paltry ballad for an elegant poem, he is not
thereupon immediately censured as mad. But if anyone let not only his
senses but his judgment be imposed upon in the most ordinary common
concerns, he shall come under the scandal of being thought next door to
a madman. As suppose any one should hear an ass bray, and should take it
for ravishing music; or if any one, born a beggar, should fancy himself
as great as a prince, or the like. But this sort of madness, if (as is
most usual) it be accompanied with pleasure, brings a great satisfaction
both to those who are possessed with it themselves, and those who deride
it in others, though they are not both equally frantic. And this species
of madness is of larger extent than the world commonly imagines. Thus
the whole tribe of madmen make sport among themselves, while one laughs
at another; he that is more mad many times jeering him that is less
so. But indeed the greater each man's madness is, the greater is his
happiness, if it be but such a sort as proceeds from an excess of folly,
which is so epidemical a distemper that it is hard to find any one man
so uninfected as not to have sometimes a fit or two of some sort of
frenzy. There is only this difference between the several patients, he
that shall take a broom-stick for a strait-bodied woman is without more
ado sentenced for a madman, because this is so strange a blunder as very
seldom happens; whereas he whose wife is a common jilt, that keeps a
warehouse free for all customers, and yet swears she is as chaste as an
untouched virgin, and hugs himself in his contented mistake, is scarce
taken notice of, because he fares no worse than a great many more of his
good-natured neighbours. Among these are to be ranked such as take an
immoderate delight in hunting, and think no music comparable to the
sounding of horns and the yelping of beagles; and were they to take
physic, would not question to think the most sovereign virtues to be
in the _album Graecum_ of a dog's, turd. When they have run down their
game, what strange pleasure they take in cutting of it up! Cows and
sheep may be slaughtered by common butchers, but what is killed in
hunting must be broke up by none under a gentleman, who shall throw down
his hat, fall devoutly on his knees, and drawing out a slashing hanger
(for a common knife is not good enough), after several ceremonies shall
dissect all the parts as artificially as the best skilled anatomist,
while all that stand round shall look very intently, and seem to be
mightily surprised with the novelty, though they have seen the same an
hundred times before; and he that can but dip his finger, and taste of
the blood, shall think his own bettered by it: and though the constant
feeding on such diet does but assimilate them to the nature of those
beasts they eat of, yet they will swear that venison is meat for
princes, and that their living upon it makes them as great as emperors.
Near a kin to these are such as take a great fancy for building: they
raise up, pull down, begin anew, alter the model, and never rest till
they run themselves out of their whole estate, taking up such a compass
for buildings, till they leave themselves not one foot of land to live
upon, nor one poor cottage to shelter themselves from cold and hunger:
and yet all the while are mighty proud of their contrivances, and sing a
sweet _requiem_ to their own happiness.
To these are to be added those plodding virtuosos, that plunder the most
inward recesses of nature for the pillage of a new invention, and rake
over sea and land for the turning up some hitherto latent mystery; and
are so continually tickled with the hopes of success, that they spare
for no cost nor pains, but trudge on, and upon a defeat in one attempt,
courageously tack about to another, and fall upon new experiments, never
giving over till they have calcined their whole estate to ashes, and
have not money enough left unmelted to purchase one crucible or limbeck.