Impressions of Theophrastus Such

False Testimonials

HOW WE COME TO GIVE OURSELVES FALSE TESTIMONIALS, AND BELIEVE IN THEM.

It is my way when I observe any instance of folly, any queer habit, any

absurd illusion, straightway to look for something of the same type in

myself, feeling sure that amid all differences there will be a certain

correspondence; just as there is more or less correspondence in the

natural history even of continents widely apart, and of islands in

opposite zones. No doubt men's minds differ in what we may call their

climate or share of solar energy, and a feeling or tendency which is

comparable to a panther in one may have no more imposing aspect than

that of a weasel in another: some are like a tropical habitat in which

the very ferns cast a mighty shadow, and the grasses are a dry ocean in

which a hunter may be submerged; others like the chilly latitudes in

which your forest-tree, fit elsewhere to prop a mine, is a pretty

miniature suitable for fancy potting. The eccentric man might be

typified by the Australian fauna, refuting half our judicious

assumptions of what nature allows. Still, whether fate commanded us to

thatch our persons among the Eskimos or to choose the latest thing in

tattooing among the Polynesian isles, our precious guide Comparison

would teach us in the first place by likeness, and our clue to further

knowledge would be resemblance to what we already know. Hence, having a

keen interest in the natural history of my inward self, I pursue this

plan I have mentioned of using my observation as a clue or lantern by

which I detect small herbage or lurking life; or I take my neighbour in

his least becoming tricks or efforts as an opportunity for luminous

deduction concerning the figure the human genus makes in the specimen

which I myself furnish.

Introspection which starts with the purpose of finding out one's own

absurdities is not likely to be very mischievous, yet of course it is

not free from dangers any more than breathing is, or the other functions

that keep us alive and active. To judge of others by oneself is in its

most innocent meaning the briefest expression for our only method of

knowing mankind; yet, we perceive, it has come to mean in many cases

either the vulgar mistake which reduces every man's value to the very

low figure at which the valuer himself happens to stand; or else, the

amiable illusion of the higher nature misled by a too generous

construction of the lower. One cannot give a recipe for wise judgment:

it resembles appropriate muscular action, which is attained by the

myriad lessons in nicety of balance and of aim that only practice can

give. The danger of the inverse procedure, judging of self by what one

observes in others, if it is carried on with much impartiality and

keenness of discernment, is that it has a laming effect, enfeebling the

energies of indignation and scorn, which are the proper scourges of

wrong-doing and meanness, and which should continually feed the

wholesome restraining power of public opinion. I respect the horsewhip

when applied to the back of Cruelty, and think that he who applies it is

a more perfect human being because his outleap of indignation is not

checked by a too curious reflection on the nature of guilt--a more

perfect human being because he more completely incorporates the best

social life of the race, which can never be constituted by ideas that

nullify action. This is the essence of Dante's sentiment (it is painful

to think that he applies it very cruelly)--

and it is undeniable that a too intense consciousness of one's kinship

with all frailties and vices undermines the active heroism which battles

against wrong.

But certainly nature has taken care that this danger should not at

present be very threatening. One could not fairly describe the

generality of one's neighbours as too lucidly aware of manifesting in

their own persons the weaknesses which they observe in the rest of her

Majesty's subjects; on the contrary, a hasty conclusion as to schemes of

Providence might lead to the supposition that one man was intended to

correct another by being most intolerant of the ugly quality or trick

which he himself possesses. Doubtless philosophers will be able to

explain how it must necessarily be so, but pending the full extension of

the _* priori_ method, which will show that only blockheads could expect

anything to be otherwise, it does seem surprising that Heloisa should be

disgusted at Laura's attempts to disguise her age, attempts which she

recognises so thoroughly because they enter into her own practice; that

Semper, who often responds at public dinners and proposes resolutions on

platforms, though he has a trying gestation of every speech and a bad

time for himself and others at every delivery, should yet remark

pitilessly on the folly of precisely the same course of action in

Ubique; that Aliquis, who lets no attack on himself pass unnoticed, and

for every handful of gravel against his windows sends a stone in reply,

should deplore the ill-advised retorts of Quispiam, who does not

perceive that to show oneself angry with an adversary is to gratify him.

To be unaware of our own little tricks of manner or our own mental

blemishes and excesses is a comprehensible unconsciousness; the puzzling

fact is that people should apparently take no account of their

deliberate actions, and should expect them to be equally ignored by

others. It is an inversion of the accepted order: _there_ it is the

phrases that are official and the conduct or privately manifested

sentiment that is taken to be real; _here_ it seems that the practice is

taken to be official and entirely nullified by the verbal representation

which contradicts it. The thief making a vow to heaven of full

restitution and whispering some reservations, expecting to cheat

Omniscience by an "aside," is hardly more ludicrous than the many ladies

and gentlemen who have more belief, and expect others to have it, in

their own statement about their habitual doings than in the

contradictory fact which is patent in the daylight. One reason of the

absurdity is that we are led by a tradition about ourselves, so that

long after a man has practically departed from a rule or principle, he

continues innocently to state it as a true description of his

practice--just as he has a long tradition that he is not an old

gentleman, and is startled when he is seventy at overhearing himself

called by an epithet which he has only applied to others.

[Footnote 1: Inferno, xxxii. 150.]

"A person with your tendency of constitution should take as little sugar

as possible," said Pilulus to Bovis somewhere in the darker decades of

this century. "It has made a great difference to Avis since he took my

advice in that matter: he used to consume half a pound a-day."

"God bless me!" cries Bovis. "I take very little sugar myself."

"Twenty-six large lumps every day of your life, Mr Bovis," says his

wife.

"No such thing!" exclaims Bovis.

"You drop them into your tea, coffee, and whisky yourself, my dear, and

I count them."

"Nonsense!" laughs Bovis, turning to Pilulus, that they may exchange a

glance of mutual amusement at a woman's inaccuracy.

But she happened to be right. Bovis had never said inwardly that he

would take a large allowance of sugar, and he had the tradition about

himself that he was a man of the most moderate habits; hence, with this

conviction, he was naturally disgusted at the saccharine excesses of

Avis.

I have sometimes thought that this facility of men in believing that

they are still what they once meant to be--this undisturbed

appropriation of a traditional character which is often but a melancholy

relic of early resolutions, like the worn and soiled testimonial to

soberness and honesty carried in the pocket of a tippler whom the need

of a dram has driven into peculation--may sometimes diminish the

turpitude of what seems a flat, barefaced falsehood. It is notorious

that a man may go on uttering false assertions about his own acts till

he at last believes in them: is it not possible that sometimes in the

very first utterance there may be a shade of creed-reciting belief, a

reproduction of a traditional self which is clung to against all

evidence? There is no knowing all the disguises of the lying serpent.

When we come to examine in detail what is the sane mind in the sane

body, the final test of completeness seems to be a security of

distinction between what we have professed and what we have done; what

we have aimed at and what we have achieved; what we have invented and

what we have witnessed or had evidenced to us; what we think and feel in

the present and what we thought and felt in the past.

I know that there is a common prejudice which regards the habitual

confusion of _now_ and _then_, of _it was_ and _it is_, of _it seemed

so_ and _I should like it to be so_, as a mark of high imaginative

endowment, while the power of precise statement and description is rated

lower, as the attitude of an everyday prosaic mind. High imagination is

often assigned or claimed as if it were a ready activity in fabricating

extravagances such as are presented by fevered dreams, or as if its

possessors were in that state of inability to give credible testimony

which would warrant their exclusion from the class of acceptable

witnesses in a court of justice; so that a creative genius might fairly

be subjected to the disability which some laws have stamped on dicers,

slaves, and other classes whose position was held perverting to their

sense of social responsibility.

This endowment of mental confusion is often boasted of by persons whose

imaginativeness would not otherwise be known, unless it were by the slow

process of detecting that their descriptions and narratives were not to

be trusted. Callista is always ready to testify of herself that she is

an imaginative person, and sometimes adds in illustration, that if she

had taken a walk and seen an old heap of stones on her way, the account

she would give on returning would include many pleasing particulars of

her own invention, transforming the simple heap into an interesting

castellated ruin. This creative freedom is all very well in the right

place, but before I can grant it to be a sign of unusual mental power, I

must inquire whether, on being requested to give a precise description

of what she saw, she would be able to cast aside her arbitrary

combinations and recover the objects she really perceived so as to make

them recognisable by another person who passed the same way. Otherwise

her glorifying imagination is not an addition to the fundamental power

of strong, discerning perception, but a cheaper substitute. And, in

fact, I find on listening to Callista's conversation, that she has a

very lax conception even of common objects, and an equally lax memory of

events. It seems of no consequence to her whether she shall say that a

stone is overgrown with moss or with lichen, that a building is of

sandstone or of granite, that Meliboeus once forgot to put on his cravat

or that he always appears without it; that everybody says so, or that

one stock-broker's wife said so yesterday; that Philemon praised

Euphemia up to the skies, or that he denied knowing any particular evil

of her. She is one of those respectable witnesses who would testify to

the exact moment of an apparition, because any desirable moment will be

as exact as another to her remembrance; or who would be the most worthy

to witness the action of spirits on slates and tables because the action

of limbs would not probably arrest her attention. She would describe the

surprising phenomena exhibited by the powerful Medium with the same

freedom that she vaunted in relation to the old heap of stones. Her

supposed imaginativeness is simply a very usual lack of discriminating

perception, accompanied with a less usual activity of misrepresentation,

which, if it had been a little more intense, or had been stimulated by

circumstance, might have made her a profuse writer unchecked by the

troublesome need of veracity.

These characteristics are the very opposite of such as yield a fine

imagination, which is always based on a keen vision, a keen

consciousness of what _is_, and carries the store of definite knowledge

as material for the construction of its inward visions. Witness Dante,

who is at once the most precise and homely in his reproduction of actual

objects, and the most soaringly at large in his imaginative

combinations. On a much lower level we distinguish the hyperbole and

rapid development in descriptions of persons and events which are lit up

by humorous intention in the speaker--we distinguish this charming play

of intelligence which resembles musical improvisation on a given motive,

where the farthest sweep of curve is looped into relevancy by an

instinctive method, from the florid inaccuracy or helpless exaggeration

which is really something commoner than the correct simplicity often

depreciated as prosaic.

Even if high imagination were to be identified with illusion, there

would be the same sort of difference between the imperial wealth of

illusion which is informed by industrious submissive observation and the

trumpery stage-property illusion which depends on the ill-defined

impressions gathered by capricious inclination, as there is between a

good and a bad picture of the Last Judgment. In both these the subject

is a combination never actually witnessed, and in the good picture the

general combination may be of surpassing boldness; but on examination it

is seen that the separate elements have been closely studied from real

objects. And even where we find the charm of ideal elevation with wrong

drawing and fantastic colour, the charm is dependent on the selective

sensibility of the painter to certain real delicacies of form which

confer the expression he longed to render; for apart from this basis of

an effect perceived in common, there could be no conveyance of aesthetic

meaning by the painter to the beholder. In this sense it is as true to

say of Fra Angelico's Coronation of the Virgin, that it has a strain of

reality, as to say so of a portrait by Rembrandt, which also has its

strain of ideal elevation due to Rembrandt's virile selective

sensibility. To correct such self-flatterers as Callista, it is worth

repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but

intense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed by

susceptibility to the veriest minutiae of experience, which it

reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes; not the habitual

confusion of provable fact with the fictions of fancy and transient

inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs every

material object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories and

stored residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious

relations of human existence. The illusion to which it is liable is not

that of habitually taking duck-ponds for lilied pools, but of being more

or less transiently and in varying degrees so absorbed in ideal vision

as to lose the consciousness of surrounding objects or occurrences; and

when that rapt condition is past, the sane genius discriminates clearly

between what has been given in this parenthetic state of excitement, and

what he has known, and may count on, in the ordinary world of

experience. Dante seems to have expressed these conditions perfectly in

that passage of the _Purgatorio_ where, after a triple vision which has

made him forget his surroundings, he says--

Certainly the seer, whether prophet, philosopher, scientific discoverer,

or poet, may happen to be rather mad: his powers may have been used up,

like Don Quixote's, in their visionary or theoretic constructions, so

that the reports of common-sense fail to affect him, or the continuous

strain of excitement may have robbed his mind of its elasticity. It is

hard for our frail mortality to carry the burthen of greatness with

steady gait and full alacrity of perception. But he is the strongest

seer who can support the stress of creative energy and yet keep that

sanity of expectation which consists in distinguishing, as Dante does,

between the _cose che son vere_ outside the individual mind, and the

_non falsi errori_ which are the revelations of true imaginative power.