Paul Clifford — Complete

BRACHYLOGIA; OR, ESSAYS, CRITICAL, SENTIMENTAL, MORAL, AND ORIGINAL

The irony in the preceding essays is often lost sight of in the present.  The illness of this great man, which happened while composing these little gems, made him perhaps more in earnest than when in robust health.—Editor’s Note.

As soon as the urchin pauper can totter out of doors, it is taught to pull off its hat, and pull its hair to the quality. “A good little boy,” says the squire; “there’s a ha’penny for you.” The good little boy glows with pride. That ha’penny instils deep the lesson of humility. Now goes our urchin to school. Then comes the Sunday teaching,—before church, which enjoins the poor to be lowly, and to honour every man better off than themselves. A pound of honour to the squire, and an ounce to the beadle. Then the boy grows up; and the Lord of the Manor instructs him thus: “Be a good boy, Tom, and I’ll befriend you. Tread in the steps of your father; he was an excellent man, and a great loss to the parish; he was a very civil, hard-working, well-behaved creature; knew his station;—mind, and do like him!” So perpetual hard labour and plenty of cringing make the ancestral virtues to be perpetuated to peasants till the day of judgment! Another insidious distillation of morality is conveyed through a general praise of the poor. You hear false friends of the people, who call themselves Liberals and Tories, who have an idea of morals half chivalric, half pastoral, agree in lauding the unfortunate creatures whom they keep at work for them. But mark the virtues the poor are always to be praised for,—industry, honesty, and content. The first virtue is extolled to the skies, because industry gives the rich everything they have; the second, because honesty prevents an iota of the said everything being taken away again; and the third, because content is to hinder these poor devils from ever objecting to a lot so comfortable to the persons who profit by it. This, my pupils, is the morality taught by the rich to the poor!

The great error of emulation is this: we emulate effects without inquiring into causes. When we read of the great actions of a man, we are on fire to perform the same exploits, without endeavouring to ascertain the precise qualities which enabled the man we imitate to commit the actions we admire. Could we discover these, how often might we discover that their origin was a certain temper of body, a certain peculiarity of constitution, and that, wish we for the same success, we should be examining the nature of our bodies rather than sharpening the faculties of our minds,—should use dumbbells, perhaps, instead of books; nay, on the other hand, contract some grievous complaint rather than perfect our moral salubrity. Who should say whether Alexander would have been a hero had his neck been straight; or Boileau a satirist, had he never been pecked by a turkey? It would be pleasant to see you, my beloved pupils, after reading “Quintus Curtius,” twisting each other’s throat; or, fresh from Boileau, hurrying to the poultry-yard in the hope of being mutilated into the performance of a second “Lutrin.”

My beloved pupils, there is a set of persons in the world, daily increasing, against whom you must be greatly on your guard; there is a fascination about them. They are people who declare themselves vehemently opposed to humbug,—fine, liberal fellows, clear-sighted, yet frank. When these sentiments arise from reflection, well and good,—they are the best sentiments in the world; but many take them up second hand. They are very inviting to the indolence of the mob of gentlemen who see the romance of a noble principle, not its utility. When a man looks at everything through this dwarfing philosophy, everything has a great modicum of humbug. You laugh with him when he derides the humbug in religion, the humbug in politics, the humbug in love, the humbug in the plausibilities of the world; but you may cry, my dear pupils, when he derides what is often the safest of all practically to deride,—the humbug in common honesty! Men are honest from religion, wisdom, prejudice, habit, fear, and stupidity; but the few only are wise; and the persons we speak of deride religion, are beyond prejudice, unawed by habit, too indifferent for fear, and too experienced for stupidity.

You must know, my dear young friends, that while the appearance of magnanimity is very becoming to you, and so forth, it will get you a great deal of ill-will if you attempt to practise it to your own detriment. Your neighbours are so invariably, though perhaps insensibly, actuated by self-interest—self-interest—[Mr. Tomlinson is wrong here; but his ethics were too much narrowed to Utilitarian principles.—EDITOR.]—is so entirely, though every twaddler denies it, the axis of the moral world—that they fly into a rage with him who seems to disregard it. When a man ruins himself, just hear the abuse he receives; his neighbours take it as a personal affront!

One main reason why men who have been great are disappointed, when they retire to private life, is this: Memory makes a chief source of enjoyment to those who cease eagerly to hope; but the memory of the great recalls only that public life which has disgusted them. Their private life hath slipped insensibly away, leaving faint traces of the sorrow or the joy which found them too busy to heed the simple and quiet impressions of mere domestic vicissitude.

Providence seems to have done to a certain set of persons—who always view their own things through a magnifying medium, deem their house the best in the world, their gun the truest, their very pointer a miracle—as Colonel Hanger suggested to economists to do; namely, provide their servants each with a pair of large spectacles, so that a lark might appear as big as a fowl, and a twopenny loaf as large as a quartern.

It is often the easiest move that completes the game. Fortune is like the lady whom a lover carried off from all his rivals by putting an additional lace upon his liveries.

People may talk about fiction being the source of fancy, and wit being at variance with truth. Now, some of the wittiest things in the world are witty solely from their truth. Truth is the soul of a good saying. “You assert,” observes the Socrates of modern times, “that we have a virtual representation; very well, let us have a virtual taxation too!” Here the wit is in the fidelity of the sequitur. When Columbus broke the egg, where was the wit? In the completeness of conviction in the broken egg.

Not only every sect but every individual modifies the general attributes of the Deity towards assimilation with his own character: the just man dwells on the justice, the stern upon the wrath; the attributes that do not please the worshipper he insensibly forgets. Wherefore, O my pupils, you will not smile when you read in Barnes that the pygmies declared Jove himself was a pygmy. The pious vanity of man makes him adore his own qualities under the pretence of worshipping those of his God.

A sentence is sometimes as good as a volume. If a man ask you to give him some idea of the laws of England, the answer is short and easy: In the laws of England there are somewhere about one hundred and fifty laws by which a poor man may be hanged, but not one by which he can obtain justice for nothing!

As in the world we must look to actions, not motives, so a knave is the man who injures you; and you do not inquire whether the injury be the fruit of malice or necessity. Place, then, a fool in power, and he becomes unconsciously the knave. Mr. Addington stumbled on the two very worst and most villanous taxes human malice could have invented,—one on medicines, the other on justice. What tyrant’s fearful ingenuity could afflict us more than by impeding at once redress for our wrongs, and cure for our diseases? Mr. Addington was the fool in se, and therefore the knave in office; but, bless you! he never meant it!

Common-sense,—common-sense,—of all phrases, all catchwords, this is often the most deceitful and the most dangerous. Look, in especial, suspiciously upon common-sense whenever it is opposed to discovery. Common-sense is the experience of every day. Discovery is something against the experience of every day. No wonder, then, that when Galileo proclaimed a great truth, the universal cry was, “Pshaw! common-sense will tell you the reverse.” Talk to a sensible man for the first time on the theory of vision, and hear what his common-sense will say to it. In a letter in the time of Bacon, the writer, of no mean intellect himself, says: “It is a pity the chancellor should set his opinion against the experience of so many centuries and the dictates of common-sense.” Common-sense, then, so useful in household matters, is less useful in the legislative and in the scientific world than it has been generally deemed. Naturally, the advocate for what has been tried, and averse to what is speculative, it opposes the new philosophy that appeals to reason, and clings to the old which is propped by sanction.

My warm, hot-headed, ardent young friends, ye are in the flower of your life, and writing verses about love,—let us say a word on the subject. There are two species of love common to all men and to most animals,—[Most animals; for some appear insensible to the love of custom]—one springs from the senses, the other grows out of custom. Now, neither of these, my dear young friends, is the love that you pretend to feel,—the love of lovers. Your passion, having only its foundation (and that unacknowledged) in the senses, owes everything else to the imagination. Now, the imagination of the majority is different in complexion and degree in every country and in every age; so also, and consequently, is the love of the imagination. As a proof, observe that you sympathize with the romantic love of other times or nations only in proportion as you sympathize with their poetry and imaginative literature. The love which stalks through the “Arcadia” or “Amadis of Gaul” is to the great bulk of readers coldly insipid or solemnly ridiculous. Alas! when those works excited enthusiasm, so did the love which they describe. The long speeches, the icy compliments, expressed the feeling of the day. The love madrigals of the time of Shenstone, or the brocade gallantries of the French poets in the last century, any woman now would consider hollow or childish, imbecile or artificial. Once the songs were natural, and the love seductive. And now, my young friends, in the year 1822, in which I write, and shall probably die, the love which glitters through Moore, and walks so ambitiously ambiguous through the verse of Byron; the love which you consider now so deep and so true; the love which tingles through the hearts of your young ladies, and sets you young gentlemen gazing on the evening star,—all that love too will become unfamiliar or ridiculous to an after age; and the young aspirings and the moonlight dreams and the vague fiddle-de-dees which ye now think so touching and so sublime will go, my dear boys, where Cowley’s Mistress and Waller’s Sacharissa have gone before,—go with the Sapphos and the Chloes, the elegant “charming fairs,” and the chivalric “most beauteous princesses!” The only love-poetry that stands through all time and appeals to all hearts is that which is founded on either or both the species of love natural to all men,—the love of the senses, and the love of custom. In the latter is included what middle-aged men call the rational attachment, the charm of congenial minds, as well as the homely and warmer accumulation of little memories of simple kindness, or the mere brute habitude of seeing a face as one would see a chair. These, sometimes singly, sometimes skilfully blended, make the theme of those who have perhaps loved the most honestly and the most humanly; these yet render Tibullus pathetic, and Ovid a master over tender affections; and these, above all, make that irresistible and all-touching inspiration which subdues the romantic, the calculating, the old, the young, the courtier, the peasant, the poet, the man of business, in the glorious love-poetry of Robert Burns.

The great inheritance of man is a commonwealth of blunders. One race spend their lives in botching the errors transmitted to them by another; and the main cause of all political, that is, all the worst and most general, blunders is this,—the same rule we apply to individual cases we will not apply to public. All men consent that swindling for a horse is swindling,—they punish the culprit and condemn the fault. But in a State there is no such unanimity. Swindling, Lord help you! is called by some fine name; and cheating grows grandiloquent, and styles itself “Policy.” In consequence of this there is always a battle between those who call things by their right names and those who pertinaciously give them the wrong ones. Hence all sorts of confusion. This confusion extends very soon to the laws made for individual cases; and thus in old States, though the world is still agreed that private swindling is private swindling, there is the Devil’s own difficulty in punishing the swindling of the public. The art of swindling now is a different thing to the art of swindling a hundred years ago; but the laws remain the same. Adaptation in private cases is innovation in public; so, without repealing old laws, they make new. Sometimes these are effectual, but more often not. Now, my beloved pupils, a law is a gun which if it misses a pigeon always kills a crow; if it does not strike the guilty, it hits some one else. As every crime creates a law, so in turn every law creates a crime; and hence we go on multiplying sins and evils, and faults and blunders, till society becomes the organized disorder for picking pockets.

A man who begins the world by being a fool often ends it by becoming a knave; but he who begins as a knave, if he be a rich man (and so not hanged), may end, my beloved pupils, in being a pious creature. And this is the wherefore: “a knave early” soon gets knowledge of the world. One vice worn out makes us wiser than fifty tutors. But wisdom causes us to love quiet, and in quiet we do not sin. He who is wise and sins not can scarcely fail of doing good; for let him but utter a new truth, and even his imagination cannot conceive the limit of the good he may have done to man!

Do you well understand what a wonderful thing style is? I think not; for in the exercises you sent me, your styles betrayed that no very earnest consideration had been lavished upon them. Know, then, that you must pause well before you take up any model of style. On your style often depends your own character,—almost always the character given you by the world. If you adopt the lofty style,—if you string together noble phrases and swelling Sonora,—you have expressed, avowed, a frame of mind which you will insensibly desire to act up to; the desire gradually begets the capacity. The life of Dr. Parr is Dr. Parr’s style put in action; and Lord Byron makes himself through existence unhappy for having accidentally slipped into a melancholy current of words. But suppose you escape this calamity by a peculiar hardihood of temperament, you escape not the stamp of popular opinion. Addison must ever be held by the vulgar the most amiable of men, because of the social amenity of his diction; and the admirers of language will always consider Burke a nobler spirit than Fox, because of the grandeur of his sentences. How many wise sayings have been called jests because they were wittily uttered! How many nothings swelled their author into a sage, ay, a saint, because they were strung together by the old hypocrite nun,—Gravity!