Looking Forward

It is my habit to give an account to myself of the characters I meet

with: can I give any true account of my own? I am a bachelor, without

domestic distractions of any sort, and have all my life been an

attentive companion to myself, flattering my nature agreeably on

plausible occasions, reviling it rather bitterly when it mortified me,

and in general remembering its doings and sufferings with a tenacity

which is too apt to raise surprise if not disgust at the careless

inaccuracy of my acquaintances, who impute to me opinions I never held,

express their desire to convert me to my favourite ideas, forget whether

I have ever been to the East, and are capable of being three several

times astonished at my never having told them before of my accident in

the Alps, causing me the nervous shock which has ever since notably

diminished my digestive powers. Surely I ought to know myself better

than these indifferent outsiders can know me; nay, better even than my

intimate friends, to whom I have never breathed those items of my inward

experience which have chiefly shaped my life.

Yet I have often been forced into the reflection that even the

acquaintances who are as forgetful of my biography and tenets as they

would be if I were a dead philosopher, are probably aware of certain

points in me which may not be included in my most active suspicion. We

sing an exquisite passage out of tune and innocently repeat it for the

greater pleasure of our hearers. Who can be aware of what his foreign

accent is in the ears of a native? And how can a man be conscious of

that dull perception which causes him to mistake altogether what will

make him agreeable to a particular woman, and to persevere eagerly in a

behaviour which she is privately recording against him? I have had some

confidences from my female friends as to their opinion of other men whom

I have observed trying to make themselves amiable, and it has occurred

to me that though I can hardly be so blundering as Lippus and the rest

of those mistaken candidates for favour whom I have seen ruining their

chance by a too elaborate personal canvass, I must still come under the

common fatality of mankind and share the liability to be absurd without

knowing that I am absurd. It is in the nature of foolish reasoning to

seem good to the foolish reasoner. Hence with all possible study of

myself, with all possible effort to escape from the pitiable illusion

which makes men laugh, shriek, or curl the lip at Folly's likeness, in

total unconsciousness that it resembles themselves, I am obliged to

recognise that while there are secrets in me unguessed by others, these

others have certain items of knowledge about the extent of my powers and

the figure I make with them, which in turn are secrets unguessed by me.

When I was a lad I danced a hornpipe with arduous scrupulosity, and

while suffering pangs of pallid shyness was yet proud of my superiority

as a dancing pupil, imagining for myself a high place in the estimation

of beholders; but I can now picture the amusement they had in the

incongruity of my solemn face and ridiculous legs. What sort of hornpipe

am I dancing now?

Thus if I laugh at you, O fellow-men! if I trace with curious interest

your labyrinthine self-delusions, note the inconsistencies in your

zealous adhesions, and smile at your helpless endeavours in a rashly

chosen part, it is not that I feel myself aloof from you: the more

intimately I seem to discern your weaknesses, the stronger to me is the

proof that I share them. How otherwise could I get the discernment?--for

even what we are averse to, what we vow not to entertain, must have

shaped or shadowed itself within us as a possibility before we can think

of exorcising it. No man can know his brother simply as a spectator.

Dear blunderers, I am one of you. I wince at the fact, but I am not

ignorant of it, that I too am laughable on unsuspected occasions; nay,

in the very tempest and whirlwind of my anger, I include myself under my

own indignation. If the human race has a bad reputation, I perceive that

I cannot escape being compromised. And thus while I carry in myself the

key to other men's experience, it is only by observing others that I can

so far correct my self-ignorance as to arrive at the certainty that I am

liable to commit myself unawares and to manifest some incompetency which

I know no more of than the blind man knows of his image in the glass.

Is it then possible to describe oneself at once faithfully and fully? In

all autobiography there is, nay, ought to be, an incompleteness which

may have the effect of falsity. We are each of us bound to reticence by

the piety we owe to those who have been nearest to us and have had a

mingled influence over our lives; by the fellow-feeling which should

restrain us from turning our volunteered and picked confessions into an

act of accusation against others, who have no chance of vindicating

themselves; and most of all by that reverence for the higher efforts of

our common nature, which commands us to bury its lowest fatalities, its

invincible remnants of the brute, its most agonising struggles with

temptation, in unbroken silence. But the incompleteness which comes of

self-ignorance may be compensated by self-betrayal. A man who is

affected to tears in dwelling on the generosity of his own sentiments

makes me aware of several things not included under those terms. Who has

sinned more against those three duteous reticences than Jean Jacques?

Yet half our impressions of his character come not from what he means to

convey, but from what he unconsciously enables us to discern.

This _na***_ veracity of self-presentation is attainable by the

slenderest talent on the most trivial occasions. The least lucid and

impressive of orators may be perfectly successful in showing us the weak

points of his grammar. Hence I too may be so far like Jean Jacques as to

communicate more than I am aware of. I am not indeed writing an

autobiography, or pretending to give an unreserved description of

myself, but only offering some slight confessions in an apologetic

light, to indicate that if in my absence you dealt as freely with my

unconscious weaknesses as I have dealt with the unconscious weaknesses

of others, I should not feel myself warranted by common-sense in

regarding your freedom of observation as an exceptional case of

evil-speaking; or as malignant interpretation of a character which

really offers no handle to just objection; or even as an unfair use for

your amusement of disadvantages which, since they are mine, should be

regarded with more than ordinary tenderness. Let me at least try to feel

myself in the ranks with my fellow-men. It is true, that I would rather

not hear either your well-founded ridicule or your judicious strictures.

Though not averse to finding fault with myself, and conscious of

deserving lashes, I like to keep the scourge in my own discriminating

hand. I never felt myself sufficiently meritorious to like being hated

as a proof of my superiority, or so thirsty for improvement as to desire

that all my acquaintances should give me their candid opinion of me. I

really do not want to learn from my enemies: I prefer having none to

learn from. Instead of being glad when men use me despitefully, I wish

they would behave better and find a more amiable occupation for their

intervals of business. In brief, after a close intimacy with myself for

a longer period than I choose to mention, I find within me a permanent

longing for approbation, sympathy, and love.

Yet I am a bachelor, and the person I love best has never loved me, or

known that I loved her. Though continually in society, and caring about

the joys and sorrows of my neighbours, I feel myself, so far as my

personal lot is concerned, uncared for and alone. "Your own fault, my

dear fellow!" said Minutius Felix, one day that I had incautiously

mentioned this uninteresting fact. And he was right--in senses other

than he intended. Why should I expect to be admired, and have my company

doated on? I have done no services to my country beyond those of every

peaceable orderly citizen; and as to intellectual contribution, my only

published work was a failure, so that I am spoken of to inquiring

beholders as "the author of a book you have probably not seen." (The

work was a humorous romance, unique in its kind, and I am told is much

tasted in a Cherokee translation, where the jokes are rendered with all

the serious eloquence characteristic of the Red races.) This sort of

distinction, as a writer nobody is likely to have read, can hardly

counteract an indistinctness in my articulation, which the

best-intentioned loudness will not remedy. Then, in some quarters my

awkward feet are against me, the length of my upper lip, and an

inveterate way I have of walking with my head foremost and my chin

projecting. One can become only too well aware of such things by looking

in the glass, or in that other mirror held up to nature in the frank

opinions of street-boys, or of our Free People travelling by excursion

train; and no doubt they account for the half-suppressed smile which I

have observed on some fair faces when I have first been presented before

them. This direct perceptive judgment is not to be argued against. But I

am tempted to remonstrate when the physical points I have mentioned are

apparently taken to warrant unfavourable inferences concerning my mental

quickness. With all the increasing uncertainty which modern progress has

thrown over the relations of mind and body, it seems tolerably clear

that wit cannot be seated in the upper lip, and that the balance of the

haunches in walking has nothing to do with the subtle discrimination of

ideas. Yet strangers evidently do not expect me to make a clever

observation, and my good things are as unnoticed as if they were

anonymous pictures. I have indeed had the mixed satisfaction of finding

that when they were appropriated by some one else they were found

remarkable and even brilliant. It is to be borne in mind that I am not

rich, have neither stud nor cellar, and no very high connections such as

give to a look of imbecility a certain prestige of inheritance through a

titled line; just as "the Austrian lip" confers a grandeur of historical

associations on a kind of feature which might make us reject an

advertising footman. I have now and then done harm to a good cause by

speaking for it in public, and have discovered too late that my attitude

on the occasion would more suitably have been that of negative

beneficence. Is it really to the advantage of an opinion that I should

be known to hold it? And as to the force of my arguments, that is a

secondary consideration with audiences who have given a new scope to the

_ex pede Herculem_ principle, and from awkward feet infer awkward

fallacies. Once, when zeal lifted me on my legs, I distinctly heard an

enlightened artisan remark, "Here's a rum cut!"--and doubtless he

reasoned in the same way as the elegant Glycera when she politely puts

on an air of listening to me, but elevates her eyebrows and chills her

glance in sign of predetermined neutrality: both have their reasons for

judging the quality of my speech beforehand.

This sort of reception to a man of affectionate disposition, who has

also the innocent vanity of desiring to be agreeable, has naturally a

depressing if not embittering tendency; and in early life I began to

seek for some consoling point of view, some warrantable method of

softening the hard peas I had to walk on, some comfortable fanaticism

which might supply the needed self-satisfaction. At one time I dwelt

much on the idea of compensation; trying to believe that I was all the

wiser for my bruised vanity, that I had the higher place in the true

spiritual scale, and even that a day might come when some visible

triumph would place me in the French heaven of having the laughers on my

side. But I presently perceived that this was a very odious sort of

self-cajolery. Was it in the least true that I was wiser than several of

my friends who made an excellent figure, and were perhaps praised a

little beyond their merit? Is the ugly unready man in the corner,

outside the current of conversation, really likely to have a fairer

view of things than the agreeable talker, whose success strikes the

unsuccessful as a repulsive example of forwardness and conceit? And as

to compensation in future years, would the fact that I myself got it

reconcile me to an order of things in which I could see a multitude with

as bad a share as mine, who, instead of getting their corresponding

compensation, were getting beyond the reach of it in old age? What could

be more contemptible than the mood of mind which makes a man measure the

justice of divine or human law by the agreeableness of his own shadow

and the ample satisfaction of his own desires?

I dropped a form of consolation which seemed to be encouraging me in the

persuasion that my discontent was the chief evil in the world, and my

benefit the soul of good in that evil. May there not be at least a

partial release from the imprisoning verdict that a man's philosophy is

the formula of his personality? In certain branches of science we can

ascertain our personal equation, the measure of difference between our

own judgments and an average standard: may there not be some

corresponding correction of our personal partialities in moral

theorising? If a squint or other ocular defect disturbs my vision, I can

get instructed in the fact, be made aware that my condition is abnormal,

and either through spectacles or diligent imagination I can learn the

average appearance of things: is there no remedy or corrective for that

inward squint which consists in a dissatisfied egoism or other want of

mental balance? In my conscience I saw that the bias of personal

discontent was just as misleading and odious as the bias of

self-satisfaction. Whether we look through the rose-coloured glass or

the indigo, we are equally far from the hues which the healthy human eye

beholds in heaven above and earth below. I began to dread ways of

consoling which were really a flattering of native illusions, a

feeding-up into monstrosity of an inward growth already

disproportionate; to get an especial scorn for that scorn of mankind

which is a transmuted disappointment of preposterous claims; to watch

with peculiar alarm lest what I called my philosophic estimate of the

human lot in general, should be a mere prose lyric expressing my own

pain and consequent bad temper. The standing-ground worth striving after

seemed to be some Delectable Mountain, whence I could see things in

proportions as little as possible determined by that self-partiality

which certainly plays a necessary part in our bodily sustenance, but has

a starving effect on the mind.

Thus I finally gave up any attempt to make out that I preferred cutting

a bad figure, and that I liked to be despised, because in this way I was

getting more virtuous than my successful rivals; and I have long looked

with suspicion on all views which are recommended as peculiarly

consolatory to wounded vanity or other personal disappointment. The

consolations of egoism are simply a change of attitude or a resort to a

new kind of diet which soothes and fattens it. Fed in this way it is apt

to become a monstrous spiritual pride, or a chuckling satisfaction that

the final balance will not be against us but against those who now

eclipse us. Examining the world in order to find consolation is very

much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to

find our own name, if not in the text, at least in a laudatory note:

whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us

from a true knowledge of the contents. But an attention fixed on the

main theme or various matter of the book would deliver us from that

slavish subjection to our own self-importance. And I had the mighty

volume of the world before me. Nay, I had the struggling action of a

myriad lives around me, each single life as dear to itself as mine to

me. Was there no escape here from this stupidity of a murmuring

self-occupation? Clearly enough, if anything hindered my thought from

rising to the force of passionately interested contemplation, or my poor

pent-up pond of sensitiveness from widening into a beneficent river of

sympathy, it was my own dulness; and though I could not make myself the

reverse of shallow all at once, I had at least learned where I had

better turn my attention.

Something came of this alteration in my point of view, though I admit

that the result is of no striking kind. It is unnecessary for me to

utter modest denials, since none have assured me that I have a vast

intellectual scope, or--what is more surprising, considering I have

done so little--that I might, if I chose, surpass any distinguished man

whom they wish to depreciate. I have not attained any lofty peak of

magnanimity, nor would I trust beforehand in my capability of meeting a

severe demand for moral heroism. But that I have at least succeeded in

establishing a habit of mind which keeps watch against my

self-partiality and promotes a fair consideration of what touches the

feelings or the fortunes of my neighbours, seems to be proved by the

ready confidence with which men and women appeal to my interest in their

experience. It is gratifying to one who would above all things avoid the

insanity of fancying himself a more momentous or touching object than he

really is, to find that nobody expects from him the least sign of such

mental aberration, and that he is evidently held capable of listening to

all kinds of personal outpouring without the least disposition to become

communicative in the same way. This confirmation of the hope that my

bearing is not that of the self-flattering lunatic is given me in ample

measure. My acquaintances tell me unreservedly of their triumphs and

their piques; explain their purposes at length, and reassure me with

cheerfulness as to their chances of success; insist on their theories

and accept me as a dummy with whom they rehearse their side of future

discussions; unwind their coiled-up griefs in relation to their

husbands, or recite to me examples of feminine incomprehensibleness as

typified in their wives; mention frequently the fair applause which

their merits have wrung from some persons, and the attacks to which

certain oblique motives have stimulated others. At the time when I was

less free from superstition about my own power of charming, I

occasionally, in the glow of sympathy which embraced me and my confiding

friend on the subject of his satisfaction or resentment, was urged to

hint at a corresponding experience in my own case; but the signs of a

rapidly lowering pulse and spreading nervous depression in my previously

vivacious interlocutor, warned me that I was acting on that dangerous

misreading, "Do as you are done by." Recalling the true version of the

golden rule, I could not wish that others should lower my spirits as I

was lowering my friend's. After several times obtaining the same result

from a like experiment in which all the circumstances were varied except

my own personality, I took it as an established inference that these

fitful signs of a lingering belief in my own importance were generally

felt to be abnormal, and were something short of that sanity which I

aimed to secure. Clearness on this point is not without its

gratifications, as I have said. While my desire to explain myself in

private ears has been quelled, the habit of getting interested in the

experience of others has been continually gathering strength, and I am

really at the point of finding that this world would be worth living in

without any lot of one's own. Is it not possible for me to enjoy the

scenery of the earth without saying to myself, I have a cabbage-garden

in it? But this sounds like the lunacy of fancying oneself everybody

else and being unable to play one's own part decently--another form of

the disloyal attempt to be independent of the common lot, and to live

without a sharing of pain.

Perhaps I have made self-betrayals enough already to show that I have

not arrived at that non-human independence. My conversational

reticences about myself turn into garrulousness on paper--as the

sea-lion plunges and swims the more energetically because his limbs are

of a sort to make him shambling on land. The act of writing, in spite of

past experience, brings with it the vague, delightful illusion of an

audience nearer to my idiom than the Cherokees, and more numerous than

the visionary One for whom many authors have declared themselves willing

to go through the pleasing punishment of publication. My illusion is of

a more liberal kind, and I imagine a far-off, hazy, multitudinous

assemblage, as in a picture of Paradise, making an approving chorus to

the sentences and paragraphs of which I myself particularly enjoy the

writing. The haze is a necessary condition. If any physiognomy becomes

distinct in the foreground, it is fatal. The countenance is sure to be

one bent on discountenancing my innocent intentions: it is pale-eyed,

incapable of being amused when I am amused or indignant at what makes me

indignant; it stares at my presumption, pities my ignorance, or is

manifestly preparing to expose the various instances in which I

unconsciously disgrace myself. I shudder at this too corporeal auditor,

and turn towards another point of the compass where the haze is

unbroken. Why should I not indulge this remaining illusion, since I do

not take my approving choral paradise as a warrant for setting the press

to work again and making some thousand sheets of superior paper

unsaleable? I leave my manuscripts to a judgment outside my imagination,

but I will not ask to hear it, or request my friend to pronounce, before

I have been buried decently, what he really thinks of my parts, and to

state candidly whether my papers would be most usefully applied in

lighting the cheerful domestic fire. It is too probable that he will be

exasperated at the trouble I have given him of reading them; but the

consequent clearness and vivacity with which he could demonstrate to me

that the fault of my manuscripts, as of my one published work, is simply

flatness, and not that surpassing subtilty which is the preferable

ground of popular neglect--this verdict, however instructively

expressed, is a portion of earthly discipline of which I will not

beseech my friend to be the instrument. Other persons, I am aware, have

not the same cowardly shrinking from a candid opinion of their

performances, and are even importunately eager for it; but I have

convinced myself in numerous cases that such exposers of their own back

to the smiter were of too hopeful a disposition to believe in the

scourge, and really trusted in a pleasant anointing, an outpouring of

balm without any previous wounds. I am of a less trusting disposition,

and will only ask my friend to use his judgment in insuring me against

posthumous mistake.

Thus I make myself a charter to write, and keep the pleasing, inspiring

illusion of being listened to, though I may sometimes write about

myself. What I have already said on this too familiar theme has been

meant only as a preface, to show that in noting the weaknesses of my

acquaintances I am conscious of my fellowship with them. That a

gratified sense of superiority is at the root of barbarous laughter may

be at least half the truth. But there is a loving laughter in which the

only recognised superiority is that of the ideal self, the God within,

holding the mirror and the scourge for our own pettiness as well as our

neighbours'.