"You know my mother now and then argues very notably;always very warmly at least.I happen often to differ from her; and we both think so well of our own arguments, that we very seldom are so happy as to convince one another.A pretty common case, I believe, in all VEHEMENT debatings.She says, I am TOO WITTY; Anglice, TOO PERT; I, that she is TOO WISE;that is to say, being likewise put into English, NOT SO YOUNGAS SHE HAS BEEN." - Miss Howe to Miss Harlowe, CLARISSA, vol.
ii.Letter xiii.
THERE is a strong feeling in favour of cowardly and prudential proverbs.The sentiments of a man while he is full of ardour and hope are to be received, it is supposed, with some qualification.But when the same person has ignominiously failed and begins to eat up his words, he should be listened to like an oracle.Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity.And since mediocre people constitute the bulk of humanity, this is no doubt very properly so.But it does not follow that the one sort of proposition is any less true than the other, or that Icarus is not to be more praised, and perhaps more envied, than Mr.Samuel Budgett the Successful Merchant.The one is dead, to be sure, while the other is still in his counting-house counting out his money; and doubtless this is a consideration.But we have, on the other hand, some bold and magnanimous sayings common to high races and natures, which set forth the advantage of the losing side, and proclaim it better to be a dead lion than a living dog.
It is difficult to fancy how the mediocrities reconcile such sayings with their proverbs.According to the latter, every lad who goes to sea is an egregious ass; never to forget your umbrella through a long life would seem a higher and wiser flight of achievement than to go smiling to the stake; and so long as you are a bit of a coward and inflexible in money matters, you fulfil the whole duty of man.
It is a still more difficult consideration for our average men, that while all their teachers, from Solomon down to Benjamin Franklin and the ungodly Binney, have inculcated the same ideal of manners, caution, and respectability, those characters in history who have most notoriously flown in the face of such precepts are spoken of in hyperbolical terms of praise, and honoured with public monuments in the streets of our commercial centres.This is very bewildering to the moral sense.You have Joan of Arc, who left a humble but honest and reputable livelihood under the eyes of her parents, to go a-colonelling, in the company of rowdy soldiers, against the enemies of France; surely a melancholy example for one's daughters! And then you have Columbus, who may have pioneered America, but, when all is said, was a most imprudent navigator.His life is not the kind of thing one would like to put into the hands of young people; rather, one would do one's utmost to keep it from their knowledge, as a red flag of adventure and disintegrating influence in life.The time would fail me if I were to recite all the big names in history whose exploits are perfectly irrational and even shocking to the business mind.The incongruity is speaking; and I imagine it must engender among the mediocrities a very peculiar attitude, towards the nobler and showier sides of national life.They will read of the Charge of Balaclava in much the same spirit as they assist at a performance of the LYONS MAIL.
Persons of substance take in the TIMES and sit composedly in pit or boxes according to the degree of their prosperity in business.As for the generals who go galloping up and down among bomb-shells in absurd cocked hats - as for the actors who raddle their faces and demean themselves for hire upon the stage - they must belong, thank God! to a different order of beings, whom we watch as we watch the clouds careering in the windy, bottomless inane, or read about like characters in ancient and rather fabulous annals.Our offspring would no more think of copying their behaviour, let us hope, than of doffing their clothes and painting themselves blue in consequence of certain admissions in the first chapter of their school history of England.
Discredited as they are in practice, the cowardly proverbs hold their own in theory; and it is another instance of the same spirit, that the opinions of old men about life have been accepted as final.All sorts of allowances are made for the illusions of youth; and none, or almost none, for the disenchantments of age.It is held to be a good taunt, and somehow or other to clinch the question logically, when an old gentleman waggles his head and says: "Ah, so I thought when Iwas your age." It is not thought an answer at all, if the young man retorts: "My venerable sir, so I shall most probably think when I am yours." And yet the one is as good as the other: pass for pass, tit for tat, a Roland for an Oliver.