The Book-Hunter
defined their own science as the knowledge of things human and divine.]
Few wiser things have ever been said than that remark of Byron's, that
"man is an unfortunate fellow, and ever will be." Perhaps the
originality of the fundamental idea it expresses may be questioned, on
the ground that the same warning has been enounced in far more solemn
language, and from a far more august authority. But there is originality
in the vulgar everyday-world way of putting the idea, and this makes it
suit the present purpose, in which, a human frailty having to be dealt
with, there is no intention to be either devout or philosophical about
it, but to treat it in a thoroughly worldly and practical tone, and in
this temper to judge of its place among the defects and ills to which
flesh is heir. It were better, perhaps, if we human creatures sometimes
did this, and discussed our common frailties as each himself partaking
of them, than that we should mount, as we are so apt to do, into the
clouds of theology or of ethics, according as our temperament and
training are of the serious or of the intellectual order. True, there
are many of our brethren violently ready to proclaim themselves frail
mortals, miserable sinners, and no better, in theological phraseology,
than the greatest of criminals. But such has been my own unfortunate
experience in life, that whenever I find a man coming forward with these
self-denunciations on his lips, I am prepared for an exhibition of
intolerance, spiritual pride, and envy, hatred, malice, and all
uncharitableness, towards any poor fellow-creature who has floundered a
little out of the straight path, and being all too conscious of his
errors, is not prepared to proclaim them in those broad emphatic terms
which come so readily to the lips of the censors, who at heart believe
themselves spotless,--just as complaints about poverty, and inability to
buy this and that, come from the fat lips of the millionaire, when he
shows you his gallery of pictures, his stud, and his forcing-frames.
No; it is hard to choose between the two. The man who has no defect or
crack in his character--no tinge of even the minor immoralities--no
fantastic humour carrying him sometimes off his feet--no preposterous
hobby--such a man, walking straight along the surface of this world in
the arc of a circle, is a very dangerous character, no doubt; of such
all children, dogs, simpletons, and other creatures that have the
instinct of the odious in their nature, feel an innate loathing. And
yet it is questionable if your perfectionised Sir Charles Grandison is
quite so dangerous a character as your "miserable sinner," vociferously
conscious that he is the frailest of the frail, and that he can do no
good thing of himself. And indeed, in practice, the external symptoms of
these two characteristics have been known so to alternate in one
disposition as to render it evident that each is but the same moral
nature under a different external aspect,--the mask, cowl, varnish,
crust, or whatever you like to call it, having been adapted to the
external conditions of the man--that is, to the society he mixes in, the
set he belongs to, the habits of the age, and the way in which he
proposes to get on in life. It is when the occasion arises for the mask
being thrown aside, or when the internal passions burst like a volcano
through the crust, that terrible events take place, and the world throbs
with the excitement of some wonderful criminal trial.[24]
[Footnote 24: It has often been observed that it is among the Society of
Friends, who keep so tight a rein on the passions and propensities, that
these make the most terrible work when they break loose. De Quincey, in
one of his essays on his contemporaries, giving a sketch of a man of
great genius and high scholarship, whose life was early clouded by
insanity, gives some curious statements about the effects of the system
of rigid restraint exercised by the Society of Friends, which I am not
prepared either to support or contradict. After describing the system of
restraint itself, he says: "This is known, but it is not equally known
that this unnatural restraint, falling into collision with two forces at
once--the force of passion and of youth--not unfrequently records its
own injurious tendencies, and publishes the rebellious movements of
nature by distinct and anomalous diseases. And, further, I have been
assured, upon most excellent authority, that these diseases--strange and
elaborate affections of the nervous system--are found _exclusively_
among the young men and women of the Quaker Society; that they are known
and understood exclusively amongst physicians who have practised in
great towns having a large Quaker population, such as Birmingham; that
they assume a new type and a more inveterate character in the second or
third generation, to whom this fatal inheritance is often transmitted;
and, finally, that if this class of nervous derangements does not
increase so much as to attract public attention, it is simply because
the community itself--the Quaker body--does not increase, but, on the
contrary, is rather on the wane."
There exist many good stories which have for their point the passions of
the natural man breaking forth, in members of this persuasion, in a
shape more droll than distressing. One of the best of these is a
north-country anecdote preserved by Francis Douglas in his Description
of the East Coast of Scotland. The hero was the first Quaker of that
Barclay family which produced the apologist and the pugilist. He was a
colonel in the great civil wars, and had seen wild work in his day; but
in his old age a change came over him, and, becoming a follower of
George Fox, he retired to spend his latter days on his ancestral estate
in Kincardineshire. Here it came to pass that a brother laird thought
the old Quaker could be easily done, and began to encroach upon his
marches. Barclay, a strong man, with the iron sinews of his race, and
their fierce spirit still burning in his eyes, strode up to the
encroacher, and, with a grim smile, spoke thus: "Friend, thou knowest
that I have become a man of peace and have relinquished strife, and
therefore thou art endeavouring to take what is not thine own, but mine,
because thou believest that, having abjured the arm of the flesh, I
cannot hinder thee. And yet, as thy friend, I advise thee to desist; for
shouldst thou succeed in rousing the old Adam within me, perchance he
may prove too strong, not only for me, but for _thee_." There was no use
of attempting to answer such an argument.]
The present, however, is not an inquiry into the first principles either
of ethics or of physiology. The object of this rambling preamble is to
win from the reader a morsel of genial fellow-feeling towards the human
frailty which I propose to examine and lay bare before him, trusting
that he will treat it neither with the haughty disdain of the
immaculate, nor the grim charity of the "miserable sinner:" that he may
even, when sighing over it as a failing, yet kindly remember that, in
comparison with many others, it is a failing that leans to virtue's
side. It will not demand that breadth of charity which even rather rigid
fathers are permitted to exercise by the licence of the existing school
of French fiction.[25] Neither will it exact such extensive toleration
as that of the old Aberdeen laird's wife, who, when her sister
lairdesses were enriching the tea-table conversation with broad
descriptions of the abominable vices of their several spouses, said her
own "was just a gueed, weel-tempered, couthy, queat, innocent, daedlin,
drucken body--wi' nae ill practices aboot him ava!" But all things in
their own time and place. To understand the due weight and bearing of
this feeling of optimism, it is necessary to remember that its happy
owner had probably spent her youth in that golden age when it was deemed
churlish to bottle the claret, and each guest filled his stoup at the
fountain of the flowing hogshead; and if the darker days of dear claret
came upon her times, there was still to fall back upon the silver age of
smuggled usquebaugh, when the types of a really hospitable country-house
were an anker of whisky always on the spigot, a caldron ever on the
bubble with boiling water, and a cask of sugar with a spade in it,--all
for the manufacture of toddy.
[Footnote 25: In the renowned Dame aux Camelias, the respectable, rigid,
and rather indignant father, addresses his erring son thus: "Que vous
ayez une maitresse, c'est fort bien; que vous la payiez comme un galant
homme doit payer l'amour d'une fille entretenue, c'est on ne peut mieux;
mais que vous oubliez les choses les plus saintes pour elle, que vous
permettiez que la bruit de votre vie scandaleuse arrive jusqu'au fond de
ma province, et jette l'ombre d'une tache sur le nom honorable que je
vous ai donne--voila ce qui ne peut etre, voila ce qui ne sera pas."
So even the French novelists draw the line "somewhere," and in other
departments of morals they may be found drawing it closer than many good
uncharitable Christians among us would wish. In one very popular novel
the victim spends his wife's fortune at the gaming-table, leaves her to
starve, lives with another woman, and, having committed forgery, plots
with the Mephistopheles of the story to buy his own safety at the price
of his wife's honour. This might seem bad enough, but worse remains. It
is told in a smothered whisper, by the faithful domestic, to the
horrified family, that he has reason to suspect his master of having
indulged, once at least, if not oftener, in brandy-and-water!]
The habits of that age have passed away, and with them the drunken laird
and the widely tolerant wife. The advancing civilisation which has
nearly extinguished this class of frailties among those who have the
amplest means of indulgence in them, is, no doubt, doing for other
frailties, and will come at last to the one in hand, leaving it an
object of admiring and compassionate retrospect to an enlightened
posterity. There are people, however, too impatient to wait for such
results from the mellowing influence of progressive civilisation. Such a
consideration suggests to me that I may be treading on dangerous
ground--dangerous, I mean, to the frail but amiable class to whom my
exposition is devoted. Natural misgivings arise in one who professes to
call attention to a special type of human frailty, since the world is
full of people who will be prepared to deal with and cure it, provided
only that they are to have their own way with the disease and the
patient, and that they shall enjoy the simple privilege of locking him
up, dieting him, and taking possession of his worldly goods and
interests, as one who, by his irrational habits, or his outrages on the
laws of physiology, or the fitness of things, or some other neology, has
satisfactorily established his utter incapacity to take charge of his
own affairs. No! This is not a cruel age; the rack, the wheel, the boot,
the thumbikins, even the pillory and the stocks, have disappeared;
death-punishment is dwindling away; and if convicts have not their full
rations of cooked meat, or get damaged coffee or sour milk, or are
inadequately supplied with flannels and clean linen, there will be an
outcry and an inquiry, and a Secretary of State will lose a percentage
of his influence, and learn to look better after the administration of
patronage. But, at the same time, the area of punishment--or of
"treatment," as it is mildly termed--becomes alarmingly widened, and
people require to look sharply into themselves lest they should be
tainted with any little frailty or peculiarity which may transfer them
from the class of free self-regulators to that of persons under