The Complete Essays (172 page)

Some start hating a barrister: by next morning they are saying that he is a poor speaker! (I have touched elsewhere on how zeal has driven decent
men to similar errors. For my part I can easily say, ‘He does this wickedly, that virtuously.’) Similarly, when the outlook or the outcome of an event is unfavourable, they want each man to be blind and insensible towards his own party, and that our judgement and conviction should serve not the truth but to project our desires. I would rather err to the other extreme, for I fear that my desires may seduce me. Added to which I have a rather delicate mistrust of anything I desire. I have seen in my time amazing examples of the indiscriminate and prodigious facility which peoples have for letting their beliefs be led and their hopes be manipulated towards what has pleased and served their leaders, despite dozens of mistakes piled one upon another and despite illusions and deceptions. I am no longer struck with wonder at those who were led by the nose by the apish miracles of Apollonius and Mahomet:
³²
their thoughts and their minds had been stifled by their emotions. Their power of discernment could no longer admit anything save that which smiled upon them and favoured their cause.

I thought this had attained its highest degree in the first of our feverish factions: that other one, born subsequently, imitated it and surpasses it.
³³
From which I conclude that it is a quality inseparable from mass aberrations: all opinions tumble out after the first one, whipped along like waves in the wind. You do not belong if you can change your mind, if you do not bob along with all the rest. Yet we certainly do wrong to just parties when we would support them by trickery. I have always opposed that. It only works for sick minds: for sane ones there are surer ways (not merely more honourable ones) of sustaining courage and explaining setbacks.

[B] The heavens have never seen strife as grievous as that between Caesar and Pompey, and never will again. Yet I believe I can detect in both their fair, noble souls a great moderation towards each other. Their rivalry over honour and command did not sweep them into frenzied and indiscriminate hatred. Even in their harshest deeds I can discover some remnants of respect and good-will, which leads me to conclude that, had it been possible, each of them would have wished to achieve his ends without the downfall of his fellow rather than with it.

Between Marius and Sylla how different things were! Take warning.
³⁴
We should not dash so madly after our emotions and selfish interests. When I was young I resisted the advances of love as soon as I realized that it was getting too much hold over me; I took care that it was not so delightful to me that it finally took me by storm and held me captive entirely at its mercy: on all the other occasions upon which my will seizes too avidly I do the same: I lean in the opposite direction when I see it leaping in and wallowing in its own wine; I avoid so far fuelling the advance of its pleasure that I cannot retake it without loss and bloodshed.

There are souls which, through insensitivity, see only half of anything; they enjoy the good fortune of being less bruised by harmful events. That is a leprosy of the mind which has some appearance of sanity – and of such a sanity as philosophy does not entirely despise; for all that, it is not reasonable to call it wisdom, as we often do. There was a man in antiquity who for just such an affectation mocked Diogenes who, to assay his powers of endurance, went out stark naked and threw his arms round a snowman. He came across him in that attitude. ‘Feeling very cold just now?’ he asked. ‘Absolutely not,’ replied Diogenes. ‘In that case,’ continued the other, ‘what is there hard and exemplary, do you think, about hanging on out there?’
³⁵

To measure steadfastness we must know what is suffered. But let those souls which have to experience the adversities and injuries of Fortune in all their depth and harshness and which have to weigh them at their natural weight and taste them according to their natural bitterness employ their arts to avoid being involved in what causes them and to deflect their approaches. What was it that King Cotys did? He paid handsomely when some beautiful and ornate tableware was offered to him, but since it was unusually fragile he immediately smashed the lot, ridding himself in time of an easy occasion for anger against his servants.
³⁶

[C] I have likewise deliberately avoided confusion of interests; I have not sought properties adjoining those of close relatives or belonging to folk to whom I should be linked by close affection; from thence arise estrangements and dissension.

[B] I used to like games of chance with cards and dice. I rid myself of them long ago – for one reason only: whenever I lost, no matter what a good face I put on, I still felt a stab of pain. A man of honour, who must take it deeply to heart if he is insulted or given the lie [C] and not be one to accept some nonsense to pay and console him for his loss, [B] should avoid letting controversies grow as well as stubborn quarrels. I avoid like the plague morose men of gloomy complexions, and I do not engage in any discussions which I cannot treat without self-interest or emotion, unless compelled to do so by duty: [C]
‘Melius non incipient, quam desinent.’
[Better that they should never begin than to leave off.]
³⁷
[B] The safest way is to be prepared before the event. I am well aware that there have been sages who have adopted a different course: they were not afraid to sink their hooks deep, engaging themselves in several objectives. Those fellows are sure of their fortitude, beneath which they can shelter against all kinds of hostile events, wrestling against evils by the power of their endurance:

velut rupes vastum quœ prodit in œquor,
Obvia ventorum furiis, expostaque ponto,
Vim cunctam atque minas perfert cœlique marisque,
Ipsa immota manens
.

[as a cliff, jutting out into the vast expanse of ocean, exposed to furious winds and confronting the waves, braves the menaces of sea and sky and itself remains unmoved.]
³⁸

Let us not attempt to follow such examples: we shall never manage it. Such men have made up their minds to watch resolutely and unmoved the destruction of their country, which once held and governed all their affection.
³⁹
For common souls like ours there is too much strain, too much savagery in that. Cato gave up for his country the most noble life there ever was; little men like us should flee farther from the storm; we should see that there are no pains to feel, no pains to endure, dodging blows not parrying them. [C] When Zeno saw Chremonides, a young man whom he loved, coming to sit beside him, he jumped up. Cleanthes asked why. ‘I understand,’ he replied, ‘that when any part of the body starts to swell the
doctors chiefly prescribe rest and forbid emotion.’
⁴⁰
[B] Socrates never says, ‘Do not surrender to the attraction of beauty; resist it; struggle against it.’ He says, ‘Flee it; run from its sight and from any encounter with it, as from a potent poison which can dart and strike you from afar.’ [C] And that good disciple of his, describing either fictionally or historically (though in my opinion more historically than fictionally) the rare perfections of Cyrus the Great, shows him distrusting his ability to resist the attractions of the heavenly beauty of his captive the illustrious Panthea: it was to a man who was less at liberty than he was that he gave the tasks of visiting her and guarding her.
⁴¹
[B] And the Holy Ghost likewise says,
‘Ne nos inducas in tentationem.’
[Lead us not into temptation.]
⁴²
We pray, not that our reason may not be assailed and overcome by worldly desires, but that it may not even be assayed by them, that we be not led into a position where we have even merely to withstand the approaches, blandishments and temptations of sin, and we beseech our Lord to keep our consciences quiet, wholly and completely delivered from commerce with evil.
⁴³

[C] Those who say that they have got the better of their vindictive feelings or of some other species of blameworthy passion often speak truly of things as they are but not as they were. They are talking to us now that the causes behind their error have been advanced and promoted by themselves. But push farther back; summon those causes back to their first principles: there you will catch them napping. Do they expect their faults to be trivial just because they are older, and that the outcome of an unjust beginning should be just?

[B] Whoever would wish his country well (as I do) without getting ulcers about it or wasting away will, when he sees it threatening either to collapse in ruin or to continue in a no-less-ruinous state, be unhappy about it but not knocked senseless. O wretched ship of State, ‘hauled in different direction by the waves, the winds and the man at the wheel’:

in tarn diversa magister,
Ventus et unda trahunt.
⁴⁴

Whoever does not gape after the favours of princes as something he cannot live without is not greatly stung by the coldness of their reception nor the fickleness of their wills. A man who does not brood over his children or his honours with. [C] slavish [B] propensity
⁴⁵
does not cease to live comfortably after he has lost them. Whoever acts well mainly for his own satisfaction is not much put out when he sees men judging his deeds contrary to his merit. A quarter of an ounce of endurance can provide for such discomforts. I find that the remedy which works for me is, from the outset, to purchase my freedom at the cheapest price I can get; I know that I have by this means escaped much travail and hardship. With very little effort I stop the first movement of my emotions, giving up whatever begins to weigh on me before it bears me off. [C] If you do not stop the start, you will never stop the race. If you cannot slam the door against your emotions you will never chase them out once they have got in. If you cannot struggle through the beginning, you will never get through the end; nor will you withstand the building’s fall, if you cannot stand its being shaken.
‘Etenim ipsœ se impellunt ubi semel a ratione discessum est; ipsaque sibi imbecillitas indulget, in altutnque provehitur imprudens, nec repent locum consistendi.’
[Once they have departed from reason the emotions drive themselves on; their very weakness indulges itself, venturing imprudently on to the deep and finding no place in which it can heave to.]
⁴⁶

[B] I can feel in time the tiny breezes which come fondling me and rustling within me, as forerunners of gales: [C]
‘Animus, multo antequam opprimatur, quatitur.’
[The mind is lashed well before it is engulfed.]

[B]
Ceu flamina prima
Cum deprensa fremunt sylvis, et cœca volutant
Murmura, venturos nautis prodentia ventos
.

[Thus when the light breeze is pent up in the woodlands, it swirls about and makes a sullen roar, warning seamen that a storm is nigh.]
⁴⁷

How frequently have I done myself an evident injustice so as to avoid the risk of receiving a worse one from the judges after years of agony and of vile and base machinations which are more hostile to my nature than the rack or pyre. [C]
‘convenit a litibus quantum licet, et nescio an paulo plus etiam quam licet, abhorrentem esse. Est enim non modo liberale, paululum nonnunquam de suo jure decedere, sed interdum etiam fructuosum.’
[It is seemly to avoid lawsuits as far as you should, and even a little bit further. It is not only gentlemanly to waive one’s rights a little it is sometimes also profitable.]
⁴⁸
If we were truly wise we should delight in it and boast about it, like the innocent son of a great house whom I heard happily welcoming each guest with, ‘Mother has just lost her case!’ as though her case were a cough or a fever or some other thing which it is grievous to have. Even such advantages as Fortune has favoured me with – namely kinships and ties with men who have supreme authority over matters of that kind – I have consciously striven hard to avoid exploiting to the detriment of anyone else or to inflate my rights beyond their rightful worth. In short [B] I am happy to say that I have spent all my days virgin of lawsuits (even though they have not failed frequently to offer themselves to my service on many a just pretext if only I would listen) and virgin of actions against me. So I shall soon have spent a long life without serious harm given or received, and without being called anything worse than my name: a rare gift of Heaven.

Our greatest commotions arise from laughable principles and causes. What ruin befell our last Duke of Burgundy because of an action against him for a cartload of sheep-skins. And was not the engraving on a seal the original and main cause of the most horrifying disaster that the fabric of this world has ever suffered?
⁴⁹
(For Pompey and Caesar are only side-shoots, consequent upon the first two rivals.) And in my own day I have seen the wisest heads in this Kingdom assembled with great ceremony and at great public expense to make treaties and agreements, while the details of them depended on sovereign chatter in the ladies’ drawing-room and on the inclination of some slip of a woman. [C] The poets understood that
rightly enough when they put all Greece and Asia to fire and bloody strife for the sake of an apple.
⁵⁰

[B] Think why that man over there takes his sword and dagger and risks his life and honour; let him tell you the source of the quarrel: the occasion was so trivial that he cannot tell you of it without blushing. When it is starting to ferment, all you need is a little wisdom. Once you have embarked, all the hawsers pull tight: then, great precautions are needed, much more difficult and important ones.