Looking Forward - Page 2

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