Part 3 (2/2)
But if you discerned the bitter personality, the incurable prejudice, the cutting retort, the suspicious implication, the recriminating sneer, the cherished animosity; if you beheld the interests of an empire standing still, the business of the civilized globe suspended, while two intellectual gladiators are thrusting each to give the other a fall, and to show his own strength; would you not lament the littleness of the great, the infirmities of the good, and the weaknesses of the wise?
Would you not, soaring a flight far above Hamlet or Pascal, apostrophize with the royal Psalmist, ”Lord, what is man that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou regardest him?”
But to descend to my individual concerns. Among my acquaintance, I visited two separate families, where the daughters were remarkably attractive; and more than usually endowed with beauty, sense, and elegance; but I was deterred from following up the acquaintance, by observing, in each family, practices which, though very different, almost equally revolted me.
In one, where the young ladies had large fortunes, they insinuated themselves into the admiration, and invited the familiarity, of young men, by attentions the most flattering, and civilities the most alluring. When they had made sure of their aim, and the admirers were encouraged to make proposals, the ladies burst out into a loud laugh, wondered what the man could mean; they never dreamt of any thing more than common politeness; then petrified them with distant looks, and turned about to practice the same arts on others.
The other family in which I thought I had secured an agreeable intimacy, I instantly deserted on observing the gracious and engaging reception given by the ladies to more than one libertine of the most notorious profligacy. The men were handsome, and elegant, and fas.h.i.+onable, and had figured in newspapers and courts of justice. This degrading popularity rather attracted than repelled attention; and while the guilty a.s.sociates in their crimes were shunned with abhorrence by these very ladies, the specious undoers were not only received with complaisance, but there was a sort of compet.i.tion who should be most strenuous in their endeavors to attract them. Surely women of fas.h.i.+on can hardly make a more corrupt use of influence, a talent for which they will be peculiarly accountable. Surely, mere personal purity can hardly deserve the name of virtue in those who can sanction notoriously vicious characters, which their reprobation, if it could not reform, would at least degrade.
On a further acquaintance, I found Sir John and Lady Belfield to be persons of much worth. They were candid, generous, and sincere. They saw the errors of the world in which they lived, but had not resolution to emanc.i.p.ate themselves from its shackles. They partook, indeed, very sparingly of its diversions, not so much because they suspected their evil tendency, as because they were weary of them, and because they had better resources in themselves.
Indeed, it is wonderful that more people from mere good sense and just taste, without the operation of any religious consideration, do not, when the first ardor is cooled, perceive the futility of what is called pleasure, and decline it as the man declines the amus.e.m.e.nts of the child. But fas.h.i.+onable society produces few persons, who, like the ex-courtier of King David, a.s.sign their fourscore years as a reason for no longer ”delighting in the voice of singing men and singing women.”
Sir John and Lady Belfield, however, kept a large general acquaintance; and it is not easy to continue to a.s.sociate with the world, without retaining something of its spirit. Their standard of morals was high, compared with that of those with whom they lived; but when the standard of the gospel was suggested, they drew in a little, and thought _things might be carried too far_. There was nothing in their practice which made it their interest to hope that Christianity might not be true. They both a.s.sented to its doctrines, and lived in a kind of general hope of its final promises. But their views were neither correct, nor elevated.
They were contented to generalize the doctrines of Scripture, and though they venerated its awful truths in the aggregate, they rather took them upon trust than labored to understand them, or to imbue their minds with the spirit of them. Many a high professor, however, might have blushed to see how carefully they exercised not a few Christian dispositions; how kind and patient they were! how favorable in their construction of the actions of others! how charitable to the necessitous! how exact in veracity! and how tender of the reputation of their neighbor!
Sir John had been early hurt by living so much with men of the world, with wits, politicians, and philosophers. This, though he had escaped the contagion of false principles, had kept back the growth of such as were true. Men versed in the world, and abstracted from all religious society, begin, in time, a little to suspect whether their own religious opinions may not possibly be wrong, or at least rigid, when they see them so opposite to those of persons to whose judgment they are accustomed to look up in other points. He found too, that, in the society in which he lived, the reputation of religion detracted much from that of talents; and a man does not care to have his understanding questioned by those in whose opinion he wishes to stand well. This apprehension did not, indeed, drive him to renounce his principles, but it led him to conceal them; and that piety which is forcibly kept out of sight, which has nothing to fortify, and every thing to repel it, is too apt to decline.
His marriage with an amiable woman, whose virtues and graces attached him to his own home, drew him off from the most dangerous of his prior connections. This union had at once improved his character, and augmented his happiness. If Lady Belfield erred, it was through excess of kindness and candor. Her kindness led to the too great indulgence of her children; and her candor to the too favorable construction of the errors of her acquaintance. She was the very reverse of my Hampstead friend. Whereas Mrs. Ranby thought hardly any body would be saved, Lady Belfield comforted herself that hardly any body was in danger. This opinion was not taken up as a palliative to quiet her conscience, on account of the sins of her own conduct, for her conduct was remarkably correct; but it sprang from a natural sweetness of temper, joined to a mind not sufficiently informed and guided by scriptural truth. She was candid and teachable, but as she could not help seeing that she had more religion than most of her acquaintance; she felt a secret complacency in observing how far her principles rose above theirs, instead of an humbling conviction of how far her own fell below the requisitions of the gospel.
The fundamental error was, that she had no distinct view of the corruptions of human nature. She often lamented the weaknesses and vices of individuals, but thought all vice an incidental, not a radical mischief, the effect of thoughtlessness and casual temptation. She talked with discrimination of the faults of some of her children; but while she rejoiced in the happier dispositions of the others, she never suspected that they had all brought into the world with them any natural tendency to evil; and thought it cruel to suppose that such, innocent little things had any such wrong propensities as education would not effectually cure. In every thing the complete contrast of Mrs. Ranby--as the latter thought education could do nothing, Lady Belfield thought it would do every thing; that there was no good tendency which it would not bring to perfection, and no corruption which it could not completely eradicate. On the operation of a higher influence she placed too little dependence; while Mrs. Ranby rested in an unreasonable trust on an interference not warranted by Scripture.
In regard to her children, Lady Belfield was led by the strength of her affection to extreme indulgence. She encouraged no vice in them, but she did not sufficiently check those indications which are the seeds of vice. She reproved the actual fault, but never thought of implanting a principle which might extirpate the evil from whence the fault sprung; so that the individual error and the individual correction were continually recurring.
As Mrs. Ranby, I had observed, seldom quoted any sacred writer but St.
Paul, I remarked that Lady Belfield admired almost exclusively Ecclesiastes, Proverbs, and the historical books of the Bible. Of the Epistles, that of St. James was her favorite; the others she thought chiefly, if not entirely, applicable to the circ.u.mstances of the Jews and Pagans, to the converts from among whom they were addressed. If she entertained rather an awful reverence for the doctrinal parts, than an earnest wish to study them, it arose from the common mistake of believing that they were purely speculative, without being aware of their deep practical importance. But if these two ladies were diametrically opposite to each other in certain points, both were frequently right in what they a.s.sumed, and both wrong only in what they rejected. Each contended for one half of that which will not save when disjointed from the other, but which when united to it, makes up the complete Christian character.
Lady Belfield, who was, if I may so speak, const.i.tutionally charitable, almost thought that heaven might be purchased by charity. She inverted the valuable superstructure of good works, and laid them as her foundation; and while Mrs. Ranby would not, perhaps, much have blamed Moses for breaking the tables of the law, had he only demolished the second, Lady Belfield would have saved the second, as the more important of the two.
Lady Belfield had less vanity than any woman I ever knew who was not governed by a very strict religious principle. Her modesty never courted the admiration of the world, but her timidity too much dreaded its censure. She would not do a wrong thing to obtain any applause, but she omitted some right ones from the dread of blame.
CHAPTER VIII.
The house of Sir John Belfield was become a pleasant kind of home to me.
He and his lady seldom went out in an evening. Happy in each other and in their children, though they lived much with the rational, they a.s.sociated as little as they thought possible with the racketing world.
Yet being known to be generally at home, they were exposed to the inroads of certain invaders, called fine ladies, who, always afraid of being too early for their parties, are constantly on the watch how to disburden themselves for the intermediate hour, of the heavy commodity _time_; a raw material, which as they seldom work up at home, they are always willing to truck against the time of their more domestic acquaintance. Now as these last _have_ always something to do, it is an unfair traffic; ”all the reciprocity is on one side,” to borrow the expression of an ill.u.s.trious statesman; and the barter is as disadvantageous to the sober home-trader, as that of the honest negroes, who exchange their gold-dust and ivory for the beads and bits of gla.s.s of the wily English.
These nightly irruptions, though sometimes inconvenient to my friends, were of use to me, as they enabled me to see and judge more of the gay world than I could have done without going in search of it; a risk which I thought bore no proportion to the gain. It was like learning the language of the enemy's country at home.
One evening, when we were sitting happily alone in the library, Lady Belfield, working at her embroidery, cheerfully joining in our little discussions, and comparing our peaceful pleasures with those pursued by the occupiers of the countless carriages which were tearing up the ”wheel-worn streets,” or jostling each other at the door of the next house, where a grand a.s.sembly was collecting its myriads--Sir John asked what should be the evening book. Then rising, he took down from the shelf Akenside's Pleasures of Imagination.
”Is it,” said he, as soon as he sat down, ”the rage for novelty, or a real degeneracy of taste, that we now so seldom hear of a poet, who, when I was a boy, was the admiration of every man who had a relish for true genius? I can not defend his principles, since in a work, of which _Man_ is professedly the object, he has overlooked his _immortality_: a subject which one wonders did not force itself upon him, as so congenial to the sublimity of his genius, whatever his religious views might have been. But to speak of him only as a poet; a work which abounds in a richer profusion of images, and a more variegated luxuriance of expression than the Pleasures of Imagination, can not easily be found.
<script>