Sidebilder
PDF
ePub

stancy of nature to maintain it without flaw or damage under the rude trial of large obligations; and a weighty favour conferred without counting the cost is usually fatal to it. We would gladly think that our friend values us as one of his possessions, and is careful of us on the same grounds; and if, for our sake, he should ever endanger money, or credit, or popularity, that he will do it not rashly or thoughtlessly, but knowing it to be a sacrifice. People not exactly miserly, but mean and narrow in their notions about money, often surprise us by a certain exceptional fidelity towards old friends. In this case, their constancy is probably not of a very noble order. The general restriction of their ideas preserves them from the temptations which ambition or imagination opens to larger minds; but if it modifies the value of their regard on the one hand, it redeems their love of money for its own sake from some of its baseness. It is not rapacity, but a perverted sense of ownership-that ownership which makes the steady mind value its possessions, and exaggerate the worth of all that is its own. Perhaps, indeed, it is only the larger and higher constancy that can afford to be critical. A just perception of faults and blemishes hidden from their possessors is the cause of a good deal of the inconstancy that gets called the hardest names. True constancy can see and yet be faithful, but often at an unknown expense. The good people who more commonly represent the quality are full of favourable prejudices, and see the merits of their cause or their friend with quite different eyes

from their defects. We should augur ill for Touchstone's constancy, even if he himself had betrayed no suspicions, because he saw Audrey exactly as she was -"A poor thing, but mine own." He had the sense of possession, but he regarded her with too critical an eye, or rather, which is more fatal still, with the eye of the critic to whom he introduced her. It is a great step towards security when our friend is proud of us.

If constancy is what we believe it to be, a moral virtue, it may be acquired in spite of every natural tendency to fickleness and change. A due training of the temper and disposition may bring a mind, which at first only resembles the mirror in reflecting every image that flits across it, into a surface capable of receiving lasting impressions. Yet there must be no conscious effort in constancy; it must not be confounded with duty, which often, with much labour and pains, has to do its work. A man may indeed be worthily constant in an unworthy cause; but if the sentiment deserves the name, he has lived, and still lives, under a delusion. If he once sees the worthlessness of an object, constancy is not the proper epithet for his loyalty to it; it is then either duty or infatuation. The tie between the first choice and the present estimate is severed, and it is regarded from a wholly different point of view. If he has promised love and service to the end, and thinks constancy a virtue, he will act it out in deed if not in thought; and habit even here will assert itself a second nature,

and help and cheer him through the hardest task. If, on the contrary, he takes the transcendental view that he has passed out of the sphere of the old love, he may, whether the object of past regard be deserving or not, content himself with curiously noting the transitions of feeling; apostrophising it in the words of a distinguished and popular authoress, who has lately been so obliging as to tell us how inconstancy feels in its first workings-" Oh! dead root of love, who shall tell the mystery of your nipping? How, with startled eyes, suddenly we miss the coloured blossoms and fresh green leaves that should be there!" Inconstancy, no doubt, comes of false and unreasonable expectations, an intolerance of the levels and barren spaces, the checks and inequalities of the pleasantest intercourse, a demand for change and variety which one mind or one state of things will not furnish. "Even tempers and uniform dispositions" are prepared for this, and those who have the doubtful praise of "being always the same" recognise no difficulty; but wherever there is the charm of quick, eager sensibilities, a lively imagination, and a fastidiously delicate perception, there we must be indulgent to a tendency to caprice and disgust, there we must be prepared, on our part, for what seems to us an undue share of endurance-there we must put our own constancy on the stretch, if we would not indulge the world with the scandal of a broken friendship or a deserted cause. Our duties to others ought to be continually looked at from their point of view. Appear

ances are sometimes the heart of things, and, in critical tests of constancy, must often be so. There is a rule which we think would make all men constant, whatever their natural bias; and this is, in trifling services, as in great things, never willingly to disappoint a just and reasonable expectation.

RESERVE.

RESERVE, as denoting a characteristic, is, comparatively speaking, a new word. Old writers now and then call a man reserved, coupling the idea with policy or constitutional melancholy; but the word reserve, as meaning an innate quality of a healthy mind, we do not meet with. In fact, there was not, in other days, the occasion for it which we find among ourselves. Reserve was not a national quality, as it is supposed to be now; and if people wanted to attribute something of the kind to their acquaintance, they commonly expressed their meaning by some harsher term-sour perhaps, morose, sullen, proud, lofty, taciturn, or dissembling. Or the objectionable trait was summarily set down to "humours," and a thickness of the blood. That a man should lead a shut-up life-should deliberately conceal the best part of himself, his more intimate and individual sentiments, from the society of which he forms a part-and that this habit of his should affect others with admiration, and with a raised and excited expec

« ForrigeFortsett »