Volume 93 / Part 15 — CAXTONIANA: A SERIES OF ESSAYS ON LIFE, LITERATURE, AND MANNERS. By the Author of ‘The Caxton Family.’ PART XV.

NO. XX.—ON SELF-CONTROL.

“He who desires to influence others must learn to command himself,” is an old aphorism, on which, perhaps, something new may be said. In the ordinary ethics of the nursery, self-control means little more than a check upon temper. A wise restraint, no doubt; but as useful to the dissimulator as to the honest man. I do not necessarily conquer my anger because I do not show that I am angry. Anger vented often hurries towards forgiveness; anger concealed often hardens into revenge.

A hasty temper is not the only horse that runs away with the charioteer on the Road of Life. Nor is it the most dangerous, for it seldom runs away far. It gives a jerk and a shake; but it does not take the bit between its teeth, and gallop blindly on, mile after mile, in one obstinate direction towards a precipice. A hasty temper is an infirmity disagreeable to others, undignified in ourselves—a fault so well known to every man who has it, that he will at once acknowledge it to be a fault which he ought to correct. He requires, therefore, no moralising essayist to prove to him his failing, or teach him his duty. But still a hasty temper is a frank offender, and has seldom that injurious effect either on the welfare of others, or on our own natures, mental and moral, which results from the steady purpose of one of those vices which are never seen in a passion.

In social intercourse, if his character be generous and his heart sound, a man does not often lose a true friend from a quick word. And even in the practical business of life, wherein an imperturbable temper is certainly a priceless advantage, a man of honesty and talent may still make his way without it. Nay, he may inspire a greater trust in his probity and candour, from the heat he displays against trickiness and falsehood. Indeed there have been consummate masters in the wisdom of business who had as little command of temper as if Seneca and Epictetus had never proved the command of temper to be the first business of wisdom. Richelieu strode towards his public objects with a footstep unswervingly firm, though his servants found it the easiest thing in the world to put him into a passion. Sometimes they did so on purpose, pleased to be scolded unjustly, because sure of some handsome amends. And in treating of self-control, I am contented to take that same Richelieu, the Cardinal, as an illustration of the various and expansive meaning which I give to the phrase. Richelieu did not command his temper in the sphere of his private household: he commanded it to perfection in his administration of a kingdom. He was cruel, but from policy, not from rage. Among all the victims of that policy, there was not one whose doom could be ascribed to his personal resentments. The life of no subject, and the success of no scheme, depended on the chance whether the irritable minister was in good or bad humour. If he permitted his temper free vent in his household, it was because there he was only a private individual. There, he could indulge in the luxury of ire without disturbing the mechanism of the state. There, generous as a noble and placable as a priest, he could own himself in the wrong, and beg his servants’ forgiveness, without lowering the dignity of the minister, who, when he passed his threshold, could ask no pardon from others, and acknowledge no fault in himself. It was there where his emotions were most held in restraint,—there where, before the world’s audience, his mind swept by concealed in the folds of its craft, as, in Victor Hugo’s great drama, L’Homme Rouge passes across the stage, curtained round in his litter, a veiled symbol of obscure, inexorable, majestic fate,—it was there where the dread human being seemed to have so mastered his thoughts and his feelings, that they served but as pulleys and wheels to the bloodless machine of his will,—it was there that self-control was in truth the most feeble. And this apparent paradox brings me at once to the purpose for which my essay is written.

What is Self? What is that many-sided Unity which is centred in the single Ego of a man’s being? I do not put the question metaphysically. Heaven forbid! The problem it involves provokes the conjectures of all schools, precisely because it has received no solution from any. The reader is welcome to whatever theory he may prefer to select from metaphysical definitions, provided that he will acknowledge in the word Self the representation of an integral individual human being—the organisation of a certain fabric of flesh and blood, biassed, perhaps, originally by the attributes and peculiarities of the fabric itself—by hereditary predispositions, by nervous idiosyncrasies, by cerebral developments, by slow or quick action of the pulse, by all in which mind takes a shape from the mould of the body;—but still a Self which, in every sane constitution, can be changed or modified from the original bias, by circumstance, by culture, by reflection, by will, by conscience, through means of the unseen inhabitant of the fabric. Not a man has ever achieved a something good or great, but will own that, before he achieved it, his mind succeeded in conquering or changing some predisposition of body.

True self-control, therefore, is the control of that entire and complex unity, the individual Self. It necessitates an accurate perception of all that is suggested by the original bias, and a power to adapt and to regulate, or to oppose and divert, every course to which that bias inclines the thought and impels the action.

For Self, left to itself, only crystallises atoms homogeneous to its original monad. A nature constitutionally proud and pitiless, intuitively seeks, in all the culture it derives from intellectual labour, to find reasons to continue proud and pitiless—to extract from the lessons of knowledge arguments by which to justify its impulse, and rules by which the impulse can be drilled into method and refined into policy.

Among the marvels of psychology, certainly not the least astounding is that facility with which the conscience, being really sincere in its desire of right, accommodates itself to the impulse which urges it to go wrong. It is thus that fanatics, whether in religion or in politics, hug as the virtue of saints and heroes the barbarity of the bigot, the baseness of the assassin. No one can suppose that Calvin did not deem that the angels smiled approbation when he burned Servetus. No one can suppose that when Torquemada devised the Inquisition, he did not conscientiously believe that the greatest happiness of the greatest number could be best secured by selecting a few for a roast. Torquemada could have no personal interest in roasting a heretic; Torquemada did not eat him when roasted; Torquemada was not a cannibal.

Again: no one can suppose that when the German student, Sand, after long forethought, and with cool determination, murdered a writer whose lucubrations shocked his political opinions, he did not walk to the scaffold with a conscience as calm as that of the mildest young lady who ever slaughtered a wasp from her fear of its sting.

So when Armand Richelieu marched inflexibly to his public ends, the spy on his left side, the executioner on his right, Bayard could not have felt himself more free from stain and reproach. His conscience would have found in his intellect not an accusing monitor but a flattering parasite. It would have whispered in his ear—“Great Man—Hero, nay, rather Demigod^[5]—to destroy is thy duty, because to reconstruct is thy mission. The evils which harass the land—for which Heaven, that gave thee so dauntless a heart and so scheming a brain, has made thee responsible—result from the turbulent ambition of nobles who menace the throne thou art deputed to guard, and the licence of pestilent schisms at war with the Church of which thou art the grace and the bulwark. Pure and indefatigable patriot, undeterred by the faults of the sovereign who hates thee, by the sins of the people who would dip their hands in thy blood, thou toilest on in thy grand work serenely, compelling the elements vainly conflicting against thee into the unity of thine own firm design—unity secular, unity spiritual—one throne safe from rebels, one church free from schisms; in the peace of that unity, the land of thy birth will collect and mature and concentrate its forces, now wasted and waning, till it rise to the rank of the one state of Europe—the brain and the heart of the civilised world! No mythical Hercules thou! Complete thy magnificent labours. Purge the land of the Lion and Hydra—of the throne-shaking Baron—the church-splitting Huguenot!”

Armand Richelieu, by nature not vindictive nor mean, thus motions without remorse to the headsman, listens without shame to the spy, and, when asked on his deathbed if he forgave his enemies, replies, conscientiously ignorant of his many offences against the brotherhood between man and man, “I owe no forgiveness to enemies; I never had any except those of the State.”

For human governments, the best statesman is he who carries a keen perception of the common interests of humanity into all his projects, howsoever intellectually subtle. But that policy is not for the interests of humanity which cannot be achieved without the spy and the headsman. And those projects cannot serve humanity which sanction persecution as the instrument of truth, and subject the fate of a community to the accident of a benevolent despot.

In Richelieu there was no genuine self-control, because he had made his whole self the puppet of certain fixed and tyrannical ideas. Now, in this the humblest and obscurest individual amongst us is too often but a Richelieu in miniature. Every man has in his own temperament peculiar propellers to the movement of his thoughts and the choice of his actions. Every man has his own favourite ideas rising out of his constitutional bias. At the onset of life this bias is clearly revealed to each. No youth ever leaves college but what he is perfectly aware of the leading motive-properties of his own mind. He knows whether he is disposed by temperament to be timid or rash, proud or meek, covetous of approbation or indifferent to opinion, thrifty or extravagant, stern in his justice or weak in his indulgence. It is while his step is yet on the threshold of life that man can best commence the grand task of self-control; for then he best adjusts that equilibrium of character by which he is saved from the despotism of one ruling passion or the monomania of one cherished train of ideas. Later in life our introvision is sure to be obscured—the intellect has familiarised itself to its own errors, the conscience is deafened to its own first alarms; and the more we cultivate the intellect in its favourite tracks, the more we question the conscience in its own prejudiced creed, so much the more will the intellect find skilful excuses to justify its errors, so much the more will the conscience devise ingenious replies to every doubt we submit to the casuistry of which we have made it the adept.

Nor is it our favourite vices alone that lead us into danger—noble natures are as liable to be led astray by their favourite virtues; for it is the proverbial tendency of a virtue to fuse itself insensibly into its neighbouring vice; and, on the other hand, in noble natures, a constitutional vice is often drilled into a virtue.

But few men can attain that complete subjugation of self to the harmony of moral law, which was the aim of the Stoics. A mind so admirably balanced that each attribute of character has its just weight and no more, is rather a type of ideal perfection, than an example placed before our eyes in the actual commerce of life. I must narrow the scope of my homily, and suggest to the practical a few practical hints for the ready control of their faculties.

It seems to me that a man will best gain command over those intellectual faculties which he knows are his strongest, by cultivating the faculties that somewhat tend to counterbalance them. He in whom imagination is opulent and fervid will regulate and discipline its exercise by forcing himself to occupations or studies that require plain common sense. He who feels that the bias of his judgment or the tendency of his avocations is over-much towards the positive and anti-poetic forms of life, will best guard against the narrowness of scope and feebleness of grasp which characterise the intellect that seeks common sense only in commonplace, by warming his faculties in the glow of imaginative genius; he should not forget that where heat enters it expands. And, indeed, the rule I thus lay down, eminent men have discovered for themselves. Men of really great imagination will be found to have generally cultivated some branch of knowledge that requires critical or severe reasoning. Men of really great capacities for practical business will generally be found to indulge in a predilection for works of fancy. The favourite reading of poets or fictionists of high order will seldom be poetry or fiction. Poetry or fiction is to them a study, not a relaxation. Their favourite reading will be generally in works called abstruse or dry—antiquities, metaphysics, subtle problems of criticism, or delicate niceties of scholarship. On the other hand, the favourite reading of celebrated lawyers is generally novels. Thus in every mind of large powers there is an unconscious struggle perpetually going on to preserve its equilibrium. The eye soon loses its justness of vision if always directed towards one object at the same distance—the soil soon exhausts its produce if you draw from it but one crop.

But it is not enough to secure counteraction for the mind in all which directs its prevailing faculties towards partial and special results; it is necessary also to acquire the power to keep differing faculties and acquirements apart and distinct on all occasions in which it would be improper to blend them. When the poet enters on the stage of real life as a practical man of business, he must be able to leave his poetry behind him; when the practical man of business enters into the domain of poetry, he must not remind us that he is an authority on the Stock Exchange. In a word, he who has real self-control has all his powers at his command, now to unite and now to separate them.

In public life this is especially requisite. A statesman is seldom profound unless he be somewhat of a scholar; an orator is seldom eloquent unless he have familiarised himself with the world of the poets. But he will never be a statesman of commanding influence, and never an orator of lasting renown, if, in action or advice on the practical affairs of nations, he be more scholar or poet than orator or statesman. Pitt and Fox are memorable instances of the discriminating self-abnegation with which minds of masculine power can abstain from the display of riches unsuited to place and occasion.

In the Mr Fox of St Stephen’s, the nervous reasoner from premises the broadest and most popular, there is no trace of the Mr Fox of St Anne’s, the refining verbal critic, with an almost feminine delight in the filigree and trinkets of literature. At rural leisure, under his apple-blossoms, his predilection in scholarship is for its daintiest subtleties; his happiest remarks are on writers very little read. But place the great Tribune on the floor of the House of Commons, and not a vestige of the fine verbal critic is visible. His classical allusions are then taken from passages the most popularly known. And, indeed, it was a saying of Fox’s, “That no young member should hazard in Parliament a Latin quotation not found in the Eton Grammar.”

Pitt was yet more sparing than Fox in the exhibition of his scholarship, which, if less various than his rival’s, was probably quite as deep. And one of the friends who knew him best said, that Pitt rigidly subdued his native faculty of wit, not because he did not appreciate and admire its sparkles in orators unrestrained by the responsibilities of office, but because he considered that a man in the position of First Minister impaired influence and authority by the cheers that transferred his reputation from his rank of Minister to his renown as Wit. He was right. Grave situations are not only dignified but strengthened by that gravity of demeanour which is not the hypocrisy of the would-be wise, but the genuine token of the earnest sense of responsibility.

Self-control thus necessitates, first, Self-Knowledge—the consciousness and the calculation of our own resources and our own defects. Every man has his strong point—every man has his weak ones. To know both the strong point and the weak ones is the first object of the man who means to extract from himself the highest degree of usefulness with the least alloy of mischief. His next task is yet more to strengthen his strong points by counterbalancing them with weights thrown into the scale of the weak ones; for force is increased by resistance. Remedy your deficiencies, and your merits will take care of themselves. Every man has in him good and evil. His good is his valiant army, his evil is his corrupt commissariat; reform the commissariat, and the army will do its duty.

The third point in Self-control is Generalship—is Method—is that calm science in the midst of movement and passion which decides where to advance, where to retreat—what regiments shall lead the charge, what regiments shall be held back in reserve. This is the last and the grandest secret: the other two all of us may master.

The man who, but with a mind somewhat above the average (raised above the average whether by constitutional talent or laborious acquirement), has his own intellect, with all its stores, under his absolute control,—that man can pass from one state of idea to another—from action to letters, from letters to action—without taking from one the establishment that would burden the other. It is comparatively a poor proprietor who cannot move from town to country but what he must carry with him all his servants and half his furniture. He who keeps the treasures he has inherited or saved in such compartments that he may know where to look for each at the moment it is wanted, will rarely find himself misplaced in any change of situation. It is not that his genius is versatile, but that it has the opulent attributes which are essential to successful intellect of every kind. The attributes themselves may vary in property and in degree, but the power of the Self—of the unity which controls all at its disposal—should be in the facility with which it can separate or combine all its attributes at its will.

It is thus, in the natural world, that an ordinary chemist may accomplish marvels beyond the art of magicians of old. Each man of good understanding, who would be as a chemist to the world within himself, will be startled to discover what new agencies spring into action merely by separating the elements dormant when joined, or combining those that were wasted in air when apart. In one completed Man there are the forces of many men. Self-control is self-completion.

NO. XXI.—THE MODERN MISANTHROPE.

“All the passions,” saith an old writer, “are such near neighbours, that if one of them is on fire the others should send for the buckets.” Thus love and hate being both passions, the one is never safe from the spark that sets the other ablaze. But contempt is passionless; it does not catch, it quenches fire. The misanthrope who professes to hate mankind has generally passed to that hate from too extravagant a love. And love for mankind is still, though unconsciously to himself, feeding hate by its own unextinguished embers. “The more a man loves his mistress,” says Rochefoucauld, “the nearer he is to hate her.” Possibly so, if he is jealous; but in return, the more he declares he hates her, the nearer he is to loving her again. Vehement affections do not move in parallels but in circles. As applied to them the proverb is true, “Les extrêmes se touchent.” A man of ardent temperament who is shocked into misanthropy by instances of ingratitude and perfidy, is liable any day to be carried back into philanthropy, should unlooked-for instances of gratitude and truth start up and take him by surprise. But if an egotist, who, inheriting but a small pittance of human affection, concentres it rigidly on himself, should deliberately school his reason into calm contempt for his species, he will retain that contempt to the last. He looks on the world of man, with its virtues and vices, much as you, O my reader, look on an ant-hill! What to you are the virtues or vices of ants? It is this kind of masked misanthropy which we encounter in our day—the misanthropy without a vizard belongs to a ruder age.

The misanthrope of Shakespeare and Molière is a passionate savage; the misanthrope who has just kissed his hand to you is a polished gentleman. No disgust of humanity will ever make him fly the world. From his club-window in St James’s his smile falls on all passers-by with equal suavity and equal scorn. It may be said by verbal critics that I employ the word misanthrope incorrectly—that, according to strict interpretation, a misanthrope means not a despiser but a hater of men, and that this elegant gentleman is not, by my own showing, warmblooded enough for hate. True, but contempt so serene and immovable is the philosophy of hate—the intellectual consummation of misanthropy. My hero would have listened with approving nod to all that Timon or Alceste could have thundered forth in detestation of his kind, and blandly rejoined, “Your truisms, mon cher, are as evident as that two and two make four. But you can calculate on the principle that two and two make four without shouting forth, as if you proclaimed a notable discovery, what every one you meet knows as well as yourself. Men are scoundrels—two and two make four—reckon accordingly, and don’t lose your temper in keeping your accounts.” My misanthrope à la mode never rails at vice; he takes it for granted as the elementary principle in the commerce of life. As for virtue, he regards it as a professor of science regards witchcraft. No doubt there are many plausible stories, very creditably attested, that vouch for its existence, but the thing is not in nature. Easier to believe in a cunning imposture than an impossible fact. It is the depth and completeness of his contempt for the world that makes him take the world so pleasantly. He is deemed the man of the world par excellence, and the World caresses and admires its Man.

The finest gentleman of my young day, who never said to you an unkind thing nor of you a kind one—whose slightest smile was a seductive fascination—whose loudest tone was a flute-like melody—had the sweetest way possible of insinuating his scorn of the human race. The urbanity of his manners made him a pleasant acquaintance—the extent of his reading an accomplished companion. No one was more versed in those classes of literature in which Mephistopheles might have sought polite authorities in favour of his demoniacal views of philosophy. He was at home in the correspondence between cardinals and debauchees in the time of Leo X. He might have taken high honours in an examination on the memoirs illustrating the life of French salons in the ancien régime. He knew the age of Louis Quinze so well that to hear him you might suppose he was just fresh from a petit souper in the Parc aux Cerfs.

Too universally agreeable not to amuse those present at the expense of those absent, still, even in sarcasm, he never seemed to be ill-natured. As one of his associates had a louder reputation for wit than his own, so it was his modest habit to father upon that professed diseur de bons mots any more pointed epigram that occurred spontaneously to himself. “I wonder,” said a dandy of another dandy who was no Adonis, “why on earth —— has suddenly taken to cultivate those monstrous red whiskers.” “Ah,” quoth my pleasant fine gentleman, “I think for my part they become his style of face very much; A—— says ‘that they plant out his ugliness.’” For the rest, in all graver matters, if the man he last dined with committed some act which all honest men blamed, my misanthrope evinced his gentle surprise, not at the act, but the blame—“What did you expect?” he would say, with an adorable indulgence, “he was a man—like yourselves!”

Sprung from one of the noblest lineages in Christendom—possessed of a fortune which he would smilingly say “was not large enough to allow him to give a shilling to any one else,” but which, prudently spent on himself, amply sufficed for all the elegant wants of a man so emphatically single—this darling of fashion had every motive conceivable to an ordinary understanding not to be himself that utter rogue which he assumed every other fellow-creature to be. Nevertheless, he was too nobly consistent to his creed to suffer his example to be at variance with his doctrine; and here he had an indisputable advantage over Timon and Alceste, who had no right, when calling all men rogues, to belie their assertion by declining to be rogues themselves. His favourite amusement was whist, and in that game his skill was so consummate that he had only to play fairly in order to add to his income a sum which, already spending on himself all that he himself required, he would not have known what to do with. But, as he held all men to be cheats, he cheated on principle. It was due to the honour of his philosophy to show his utter disdain of the honour which impostors preached, but which only dupes had the folly to practise. If others did not mark the aces and shuffle up the kings as he did, it was either because they were too stupid to learn how, or too cowardly to risk the chance of exposure. He was not as stupid, he was not as cowardly, as the generality of men. It became him to show his knowledge of their stupidity and his disdain of their cowardice. Bref—he cheated!—long with impunity: but, as Charron says, L’homme se pique—man cogs the dice for his own ruin. At last he was suspected, he was watched, he was detected. But the first thought of his fascinated victims was not to denounce, but to warn him—kindly letters conveying delicate hints were confidentially sent to him: he was not asked to disgorge, not exhorted to repent; let bygones be bygones, only for the future, would he, in playing with his intimate associates, good-naturedly refrain from marking the aces and shuffling up the kings?

I can well imagine the lofty smile with which the scorner of men must have read such frivolous recommendations to depart from the philosophical system adorned in vain by his genius if not enforced by his example. He who despised the opinions of sages and saints—he to be frightened into respecting the opinions of idlers at a club!—send to him an admonition from the world of honour, to respect the superstitions of card-players! as well send to Mr Faraday an admonition from the world of spirits to respect the superstitions of table-rappers! To either philosopher there would be the same reply—“I go by the laws of nature.” In short, strong in the conscience of his opinion, this consistent reasoner sublimely persevered in justifying his theories of misanthropy by his own resolute practice of knavery, inexcusable and unredeemed.

“What Timon thought, this god-like Cato was!”

But man, whatever his inferiority to the angels, is still not altogether a sheep. And even a sheep only submits to be sheared once a year; to be sheared every day would irritate the mildest of lambs. Some of the fellow-mortals whom my hero smiled on and plundered, took heart, and openly accused him of marking the aces and shuffling up the kings. At first his native genius suggested to him the wisdom of maintaining, in smiling silence, the contempt of opinion he had hitherto so superbly evinced. Unhappily for himself, he was induced by those who, persuaded that a man of so high a birth could never have stooped to so low a peccadillo, flattered him with the assurance of an easy triumph over his aspersers—unhappily, I say, he was induced into a departure from that system of action which he had hitherto maintained with so supreme a success. He condescended, for the first time in his life, to take other men into respect—to regard what might be thought of him by a world he despised. He brought an action for libel against his accusers. His counsel, doubtless by instruction, sought to redeem that solitary inconsistency in his client, by insinuating that my lord’s chosen associates were themselves the cheats, malignant conspirators against the affable hawk of quality in whom they had expected to find a facile pigeon.

The cuttle-fish blackens the water to escape from his enemies, but he does not always escape; nay, in blackening the water he betrays himself to the watchful spectators. My hero failed in his action, and quitted the court leaving behind him the bubble reputation. If I am rightly informed, Adversity, that touchstone of lofty minds, found this grand philosopher as serene as if he had spent his life in studying Epictetus. He wrapt himself, if not in virtue, at least in his scorn of it,—

“Et udo

Spernit humi defugiente penno.”

He retired to the classic Tusculum of his villa in St John’s Wood. There, cheered by the faithful adherence of some elegant companions, who, if they did not believe him innocent, found him unalterably agreeable, he sipped his claret and moralised on his creed. Doubtless he believed that “the talk would soon subside,” “the thing blow over.” The world would miss him too much not to rally again round the sage who so justly despised it. Perhaps his belief might have been realised, but,

“Vita summa brevis spem nos vetat inchoare longam”—

Death, the only player that no man can cheat, cut into his table, and trumped the last card of his long suit.

In the more brilliant period of this amiable man-scorner’s social career, once, and once only, he is said to have given way to anger. One of his associates (I say designedly associates, not friends, out of respect for his memory, since friendship is a virtue, and he therefore denied its existence)—one of his associates, warmed perhaps into literature by his own polite acquaintance with all that is laide in belles lettres, wrote a comedy. The comedy was acted. My hero honoured the performance by appearing in the author’s box. Leaning forward so as to be seen of all men, he joined his hands in well-bred applause of every abortive joke and grammatical solecism, till, in a critical part of the play, there occurred a popular claptrap—a something said in praise of virtue and condemnation of vice. The gallery of course responded to the claptrap, expressing noisy satisfaction at the only sentiment familiar to their comprehension which they had hitherto heard. But my archetype of modern misanthropy paused aghast, suspended

“The soft collision of applauding gloves,”

and, looking at his associate as reproachfully as Cæsar might have looked at Brutus when he sighed forth “Et tu, Brute!” let fall these withering words, “Why, Billy, this is betraying the Good Old Cause.” So saying, he left the box, resentful. Now, this man I call the genuine, positive, realistic Misanthrope, compared to whom Timon and Alceste are poetical make-believes!

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