Miscellaneous Essays | Page 5

by its moral handle, (as it generally is in the pulpit, and at the Old
Bailey;) and that, I confess, is its weak side; or it may also be treated
_æsthetically_, as the Germans call it, that is, in relation to good taste.
[Footnote 1: Kant--who carried his demands of unconditional veracity
to so extravagant a length as to affirm, that, if a man were to see an
innocent person escape from a murderer, it would be his duty, on being
questioned by the murderer, to tell the truth, and to point out the retreat
of the innocent person, under any certainty of causing murder. Lest this
doctrine should be supposed to have escaped him in any heat of dispute,
on being taxed with it by a celebrated French writer, he solemnly
reaffirmed it, with his reasons.]
To illustrate this, I will urge the authority of three eminent persons, viz.,
S.T. Coleridge, Aristotle, and Mr. Howship the surgeon. To begin with
S.T.C. One night, many years ago, I was drinking tea with him in
Berners' Street, (which, by the way, for a short street, has been
uncommonly fruitful in men of genius.) Others were there besides
myself; and amidst some carnal considerations of tea and toast, we
were all imbibing a dissertation on Plotinus from the attic lips of S.T.C.
Suddenly a cry arose of "_Fire--fire_!" upon which all of us, master and
disciples, Plato and [Greek: hoi peri ton Platona], rushed out, eager for
the spectacle. The fire was in Oxford Street, at a piano-forte maker's;
and, as it promised to be a conflagration of merit, I was sorry that my
engagements forced me away from Mr. Coleridge's party before
matters were come to a crisis. Some days after, meeting with my
Platonic host, I reminded him of the case, and begged to know how that
very promising exhibition had terminated. "Oh, sir," said he, "it turned

out so ill, that we damned it unanimously." Now, does any man
suppose that Mr. Coleridge,--who, for all he is too fat to be a person of
active virtue, is undoubtedly a worthy Christian,--that this good S. T. C.,
I say, was an incendiary, or capable of wishing any ill to the poor man
and his piano-fortes (many of them, doubtless, with the additional keys)?
On the contrary, I know him to be that sort of man, that I durst stake
my life upon it he would have worked an engine in a case of necessity,
although rather of the fattest for such fiery trials of his virtue. But how
stood the case? Virtue was in no request. On the arrival of the
fire-engines, morality had devolved wholly on the insurance office.
This being the case, he had a right to gratify his taste. He had left his
tea. Was he to have nothing in return?
I contend that the most virtuous man, under the premises stated, was
entitled to make a luxury of the fire, and to hiss it, as he would any
other performance that raised expectations in the public mind, which
afterwards it disappointed. Again, to cite another great authority, what
says the Stagyrite? He (in the Fifth Book, I think it is, of his
Metaphysics) describes what he calls [Greek: kleptaen teleion], i.e., _a
perfect thief_; and, as to Mr. Howship, in a work of his on Indigestion,
he makes no scruple to talk with admiration of a certain ulcer which he
had seen, and which he styles "a beautiful ulcer." Now will any man
pretend, that, abstractedly considered, a thief could appear to Aristotle a
perfect character, or that Mr. Howship could be enamored of an ulcer?
Aristotle, it is well known, was himself so very moral a character, that,
not content with writing his Nichomachean Ethics, in one volume
octavo, he also wrote another system, called Magna Moralia, or Big
Ethics. Now, it is impossible that a man who composes any ethics at all,
big or little, should admire a thief per se, and, as to Mr. Howship, it is
well known that he makes war upon all ulcers; and, without suffering
himself to be seduced by their charms, endeavors to banish them from
the county of Middlesex. But the truth is, that, however objectionable
per se, yet, relatively to others of their class, both a thief and an ulcer
may have infinite degrees of merit. They are both imperfections, it is
true; but to be imperfect being their essence, the very greatness of their
imperfection becomes their perfection. _Spartam nactus es, hunc
exorna_. A thief like Autolycus or Mr. Barrington, and a grim
phagedænic ulcer, superbly defined, and running regularly through all

its natural stages, may no less justly be regarded as ideals after their
kind, than the most faultless moss-rose amongst flowers, in its progress
from