The Watch-dog of Knowledge - Page 2

some humorous vigour. It is not true that a man's intellectual power is
like the strength of a timber beam, to be measured by its weakest point.

Why should we any more apply that fallacious standard of what is called
consistency to a man's moral nature, and argue against the existence of
fine impulses or habits of feeling in relation to his actions
generally, because those better movements are absent in a class of cases
which act peculiarly on an irritable form of his egoism? The mistake
might be corrected by our taking notice that the ungenerous words or
acts which seem to us the most utterly incompatible with good
dispositions in the offender, are those which offend ourselves. All
other persons are able to draw a milder conclusion. Laniger, who has a
temper but no talent for repartee, having been run down in a fierce way
by Mordax, is inwardly persuaded that the highly-lauded man is a wolf at
heart: he is much tried by perceiving that his own friends seem to think
no worse of the reckless assailant than they did before; and Corvus, who
has lately been flattered by some kindness from Mordax, is unmindful
enough of Laniger's feeling to dwell on this instance of good-nature
with admiring gratitude. There is a fable that when the badger had been
stung all over by bees, a bear consoled him by a rhapsodic account of
how he himself had just breakfasted on their honey. The badger replied,
peevishly, "The stings are in my flesh, and the sweetness is on your
muzzle." The bear, it is said, was surprised at the badger's want of
altruism.

But this difference of sensibility between Laniger and his friends only
mirrors in a faint way the difference between his own point of view and
that of the man who has injured him. If those neutral, perhaps even
affectionate persons, form no lively conception of what Laniger suffers,
how should Mordax have any such sympathetic imagination to check him in
what he persuades himself is a scourging administered by the qualified
man to the unqualified? Depend upon it, his conscience, though active
enough in some relations, has never given him a twinge because of his
polemical rudeness and even brutality. He would go from the room where
he has been tiring himself through the watches of the night in lifting
and turning a sick friend, and straightway write a reply or rejoinder in
which he mercilessly pilloried a Laniger who had supposed that he could
tell the world something else or more than had been sanctioned by the
eminent Mordax--and what was worse, had sometimes really done so. Does
this nullify the genuineness of motive which made him tender to his
suffering friend? Not at all. It only proves that his arrogant egoism,
set on fire, sends up smoke and flame where just