Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 348

Paulett saw nothing but his suffering wife, heard nothing except her painful breath. At that moment the door opened, and Charles stood there, paler than ever, with glittering eyes. He held the cup towards his father. “Father,” he said, “there is water coming down from heaven!”

Paulett looked up and cried, “O God, it rains!”

A TENDER CONSCIENCE

I have a story to tell you, my dear Eusebius, of a tender conscience. It will please you; for you delight to extract good out of evil, and find something ever to say in favour of the “poor wretches of this world’s coinage,” as you call them; thus gently throwing half their errors, and scattering them among a pretty large society to be responsible for them; provided only they be wretches by confession, that dare not hide themselves in hypocrisy. In all such cases you show that you were born with the genius of a beadle, and (strange conjunction) the tenderest of hearts. I believe that you would stand an hour at a pillory, and see full justice done to a delinquent of that caste; and would as willingly, in your own person, receive the missiles that you would attempt to ward off from the contrite wretch, whose sins might not have been woefully against human kindness. Could you choose your seat in the eternal mansions, it would be among the angels that rejoice over one sinner that repenteth. You can distinguish in another the feeblest light of conscience that ever dimly burned, and see in it the germ of a beautiful light, that may one day, by a little fanning and fostering, shine as a star, and shed a vital heat that may set the machinery of the heart in motion to throw off glorious actions. But let not the man that shams a conscience come in your way. I have seen you play off such an one till he has burst forth—up, up, up, aiming at the skies, nothing less, in his self-glorification; and how have you despised him, and exhibited him to all bystanders as nothing but a poor stick in his descent! These human rockets are at their best but falling stars—cinders incapable of being rekindled. Commend me to the modest glow-worms, that shine only when they think the gazing world is asleep, and dwell in green hedges, and fancy themselves invisible to all eyes but those of love.

There are persons, and of grave judgments too, who verily believe that the quantity of conscience amongst mankind is not worth speaking of, and treat of human actions as entirely independent of it. And this fault honest Montaigne finds with Guicciardini:—“I have also,” says he, “observed this in him, that of so many persons and so many effects, so many motives and so many counsels as he judges of, he never attributes any one of them to virtue, religion, or conscience, as if all those were utterly extinct in the world; and of all the actions, however brave an outward show they make, he always throws the cause and motive upon some vicious occasion, or some prospect of profit. It is impossible to imagine but that, amongst such an infinite number of actions as he makes mention of, there must be some one produced by the way of reason. No corruption could so universally have affected men, that some of them would not have escaped the contagion, which makes me suspect that his own taste was vicious; from whence it might happen that he judged other men by himself.” You, Eusebius, will be perfectly of Montaigne’s opinion. We would rather trust that there are few in whom this moral principle has no vitality whatever. The wayside beggar, when he divides his meal—which, perhaps, he has stolen—with his dog, acts from its kind impulse; and see how uncharitable I am at my first impulse, to suppose, to suggest that the meal is stolen—so ready are we to steal away virtues, one after the other, and in our judgments to be thieves upon a large scale. And so a better feeling pricks me to charity. I doubt if we ought even to say that the parliamentary reprobate, who openly confessed “that he could not afford to keep a conscience,” had none—he was but dead to some of its motions. If it were not that it must be something annexed to an immortal condition, would you not, Eusebius, say that the beggar’s dog conscientiously makes his return of service and gratitude for the scraps thrown to him? See him by the gipsies’ tent: how safely can the infant children be left to his sole care by the roadside! It is a beautiful sight to see the sagacious, the faithful creature, watching   while they sleep, and lying upon the outer fold of the blanket that enwraps them. Has he not a sense of duty—a sort of bastard conscience? And what is truly wonderful, is, that animals have often a sense of duty against their instincts. If it be said that they act through fear of punishment, it is a punishment their instincts would teach them to avoid; and, after all, this fear of punishment may be a mighty ingredient in most men’s consciences. We learn that immense numbers of ducks are reared by that part of the Chinese population who spend their lives in boats upon the rivers; and these birds, salted and dried, form one of the chief articles of diet in the celestial land. They are kept in large cages or crates, from which, in the morning, they are sent forth to seek their food upon the river banks. A whistle from their keeper brings them back in the evening; and as, according to Tradescent Lay, the last to return receives a flogging for his tardiness, their hurry to get back to the boats, when they hear the accustomed call, is in no small degree amusing. I cannot but think that there must be something like a sense of duty in these poor creatures, that they thus of themselves, and of good-will return to the certainty of being salted and dried. This may sound very ridiculous, Eusebius, but there is matter in it to muse upon; and if we want to know man, we must speculate a little beyond him, and learn him by similities and differences. He has best knowledge of his own home and country who has wandered into a terra incognita, and studied the differences of soil and climate. And besides that every man is a world to himself, and may find a terra incognita in his own breast, it is not amiss to look abroad into other wildernesses, where he will find instincts that are not so much any creature’s but that they have something divine in them, and so, in their origin at least, akin to his own. He will find conscience of some sort growing in the soil of every heart. It is not amiss to discover where it grows most healthily, and by what deadly nightshade its virtue may be suffocated, and its nicer sense not thrive.

Surprising is the diversity;—were not nature corrupted, there would be no diversity. Now, truth and right is one; and yet we judge not one thing, we think not aright. Yet is the original impulse true to its purpose, but, in its passage through the many channels of the mind, is strangely perverted. It is eloquently said by a modern writer, a deep thinker, “Thus does the conscience of man project itself athwart whatsoever of knowledge, or surmise, or imagination, understanding, faculty, acquirement, or natural disposition he has in him; and, like light through coloured glass, paint strange pictures on the rim of the horizon and elsewhere. Truly this same sense of the infinite nature of duty, is the central part of all within us; a ray as of eternity and immortality immured in dusky many-coloured Time, and its deaths and births. Your coloured glass varies so much from century to century—and in certain money-making, game-preserving centuries, it gets terribly opaque. Not a heaven with cherubim surrounds you then, but a kind of vacant, leaden, cold hell. One day it will again cease to be opaque, this coloured glass; now, may it not become at once translucent and uncoloured? Painting no pictures more for us, but only the everlasting azure itself. That will be a right glorious consummation.” If it were only the painting pictures! but we act the painted scenes. And strange they are, and of diversity enough. It was the confession of an apostle, that he “thought with himself that he ought to do many things contrary” to his master. There are national consciences how unlike each other; there are consciences of tribes and guilds, which, strange to say, though they be composed of individuals, bear not the stamp of any one individual conscience among them. They apologise to themselves for iniquity by a division and subdivision of the responsibility; and thus, by each owning to but a little share collectively, they commit a great enormity. It is the whole and sole responsibility of the individual, responsibility to that inner arbiter sitting foro conscientiæ, and the sight of those frowning attendants of the court, Nemesis and Adraste, ready with the scourge to follow crime,   that keep the man honest. Put not confidence, Eusebius, in bodies, in guilds, and committees. Trust not to them property or person; they may be all individually good Samaritans, but collectively they will rather change places with the thieves than bind up your wounds. In this matter, “Experto crede Roberto.”

But of this diversity.—The Turk will split his sides with laughter, against the very nature, too, of his Turkish gravity, should he witness the remorse of the subdued polygamist. We read of nations who, from a sense of duty, eat their parents, and would shudder at the crime of burying them in the earth, or burning them. So is there a cannibalism of love as well as of hatred. Sinbad’s terror at the duty of being buried alive with his deceased wife, the king’s daughter, was no invention beyond the probability of custom. The Scythians, as Herodotus tells us, thought it an honourable act and no murders committed, when they slaughtered the king’s councillors and officers of state, and guards and their horses, on which they stuck them upright by skewers, to be in death the king’s attendants. The suttee is still thought no wrong. There is habit of thought that justifies habit of deed. Southey, in his History of the Brazils, tells a sad tale of a dying converted Indian. In her dying moments, cannibalism prevailed over Christian conscience; and was the Pagan conscience silent? She was asked by those standing about her, if they could do any thing for her. She replied, that she thought she could pick the bones of a little child’s hand, but that she had no one now who would go and kill her one. I dare to say, Eusebius, she died in peace. The greater part of the world die in peace. Their conscience may be the first part of then that departs—it is dead before the man—most say, I have done no harm. I have known a man die in the very effort of triumphant chuckling over his unfortunate neighbours, by his successful fraud and over-reaching; yet, perhaps, this man’s conscience was only dead as to any sense of right and wrong in this particular line; very possibly he had “compunctious visitings” about “mint and cumine”—and oh! human inconsistency, some such have been known to found hospitals—some spark of conscience working its way into the very rottenness of their hearts, that, like tinder, have let out all their kindred and latent fire, till that moment invisible, all but in posse non-existent. But for any thing like a public conscience so kindling since the repentance of the Ninevites, it is not to be thought of. The pretence of such a thing is a sign of the last state of national hypocrisy. It was not that sense which emancipated the Negroes and forbade the slave trade. Take, for example, the Portuguese, and their “board of conscience” at Lisbon, which they set up to quiet the remorse, if any should exist, of those who had bought the miserable natives of Reoxcave, when they sold themselves and their children for food. This very convenient scruple was started in “the court, to sanction the purchase, that if these so purchased slaves were set free, they might apostatize!” Now, who were the judges in such a court? Oh! the villany of the whole conclave!—yet was each individual, perhaps, of demure and sanctimonious manners, to whom the moral eye of a people looked—villains all in the guise of goodness:—

“Vir bonus, omne forum quem spectat et omne tribunal,Quandocuncque Deos vel porco vel bove placat,Jane Pater, clare, clare, cum dixit, Apollo,Labra movet metuens audiri—Pulchra Laverna,Da mihi fallere, da justum sanctumque videri,Noctem peccatis et fraudibus objice nubem.”

We are told that there is such a disease as a cannibal madness, and that it was common among the North American savages; that those seized with it have a raving desire for human flesh, and rush like wolves upon all they meet. Now, in what was this court of conscience better than these cannibals? Better! a thousand times worse—for wolves are honest. Now   I well know, Eusebius, how I have put a coal under the very fountain of your blood—and it is boiling at a fine rate. Let me allay it, and follow the stage directions of “soft music;” only on this occasion we omit the music, and take the rhyme. So here do I exhibit conscience in its playful vein. Our friend S., the other day, repeated me off the following lines; he cannot remember where he had them—he says it was when a boy that he met with them somewhere. Call it the Conscientious Toper; yet that is too common—it is the characteristic of all topers—never was one that could not find an excuse. Drink wonderfully elicits moral words, to compound for immoral deeds. Call it then—

The Controversy

No plate had John and Joan to hoard—Plain folks in humble plight—One only tankard graced their board,But that was fill’d each night;Upon whose inner bottom, sketch’dIn pride of chubby grace,Some rude engraver’s hand had etch’dA baby angel’s face.John took at first a moderate sup—But Joan was not like John—For when her lips once touch’d the cup,She swill’d till all was gone.John often urged her to drink fair,But she cared not a jot—She loved to see that angel there,And therefore drain’d the pot.When John found all remonstrance vain,Another card he play’d,And where the angel stood so plainHe had a devil portray’d.Joan saw the horns, Joan saw the tail,Yet still she stoutly quaff’d,And when her lips once touch’d the ale,She clear’d it at a draught.John stood with wonder petrified,His hair stood on his pate,“And why dost guzzle now,” he cried,“At that enormous rate?”“Oh, John!” she said, “I’m not to blame—I can’t in conscience stop—For sure ’twould be a burning shameTo leave the devil a drop.”

Changeable, versatile, inconstant Eusebius, where is now your burst of philanthropy—where is all your rage? Pretty havoc you would but now have made, had you been armed with thunder—thunder, I say, for yours would have been no silent devastation among the villains. No Warnerian silent blazeless destruction would suit your indignation—in open day, and with a shout, would you do it, and in such wise would you suffer, if needs must,   with Ajax’s prayer in your mouth—“Εν δε Φαει και ολεσσον.” But for a grand picture of a sweeping indignation, there is nothing so grand as that fine passage in the Psalms—“Let them be as the dust before the wind, and the angel of the Lord scattering them.” Men and all their iniquities, once so mighty, so vast, but as grains less than grains of dust—all the clouds of hypocrisy dispersed in atoms before the fury of the storm of vengeance. You were, as you read, Eusebius, in honest rage. I could see you as in a picture, like the figure with the scourge in hand flying off the very ground, in Raffaelle’s noble fresco, the Heliodorus; and now are you far more like a merryandrew in your mirth, and the quaint sly humour of the tale in verse has made you blind to the delinquencies of the quaffing Joan. Blind to their delinquencies! Stay your mirth a moment, Eusebius—are you not blind to your own? Now I remember me, you are a thief, Eusebius, however you may have settled that matter with your conscience. Have you read the proposed “Dog-bill?” Here’s a pretty to do!—Eusebius convicted of dog-stealing—subject to the penalty of misdemeanour! “I!” you will say. Yes, you. You put it down, doubtless, in the catalogue of your virtues, as you did when you boasted to me that you had, by a lucky detection in probably the criminal’s first offence, saved a fellow-creature from a course of crime. Do you remember your dog Chance? yes, your dog, for so you called him—and, pray, how came you by him? This was your version. A regiment was marching by your neighbourhood, at the fag-end of which a soldier led a very fine spaniel by a piece of cord. You always loved dogs—did you not, you cunning Eusebius? You can put two and two together as well as most people. The dog had no collar. Oh, oh! thought you—the master of so fine a dog would have collar and chain, too, for him. This fellow must have stolen him—it is my duty (your virtuous duty, indeed) to rescue this fine creature, and perchance save this wretched man from such wicked courses. So thus you proceed—you look indignant, and accost the soldier, “Holloa, you fellow—whose dog’s that?” Soldier—“What’s that to you?” Eusebius—“What’s the name of your captain, that I may instantly appeal to him on the subject?” Soldier alarmed—“I beg your honour’s pardon, but the dog followed me. I don’t know to whom he belongs.” What made you, then, so particularly enquire where he came from, and whereabouts he met with him? Your virtue whispered to you, “Ask these questions, that you may be able to find out the owner.” Another imp whispered, “It might be useful.” So you seize the rope, lecture the man upon the enormity of his intentions, quietly take the dog to your stable, and walk away with, as you flatter yourself, the heartfelt satisfaction of having saved a fellow-creature from the commission of a theft. To do you justice, you did, I verily believe, for two whole days make decent enquiries, and endeavour, if that be not too strong a word—endeavour to find out the owner. But at the close of every day you thought proper to question Rover himself; and questioning Rover led you to look into each other’s faces—and so you liked Rover’s looks, and Rover liked your looks—and when you said to Rover, I should like to know who your master is? Rover looked with all his eyes, as much as to say, “Well now, if ever I heard the like of that! If my name is Rover, yours must be Bouncer”—then you patted him for a true and truth-telling dog; and he wagged his tail, and looked again at you, till you perfectly mesmerized each other, and understood each other, and he acknowledged that you, and no other, could be his master—and so you mastered him, and he mastered your conscience—and then you and your conscience began to have a parley. I fear you had sent her to a bad boarding-school, and had just brought her home for the holidays, with a pretty many more niceties and distinctions than she took with her—and had come back “more nice than wise.” “Have you found the owner?” quoth she. “It is time he were found,” replied you. “Why?” quoth she. “Because,” you rejoin, “the shooting season is fast approaching.” “That is true.” “The dog will be spoiled for want of practice.” “That will be a pity.” “Thank you, conscience—won ’t   it be a sin?” Conscience is silent, so you take that for granted. “Hadn’t I better take out a license this year?” “Oh! it wouldn’t be right you should go without one.” “Certainly not, (somewhat boldly;) I will get my license directly. Poor Rover!—well—how very fond that dog is of me—it would be highly ungrateful not to make a return even to a dog. I ought to be fond of him. I—am—very fond of him.” Then you confess, Eusebius, that you should be very sorry to part with him. Conscience says, “Do you mean to say you should be sorry to find out the real owner?” “Really, conscience,” you reply, “there can be no harm in being sorry; but you are becoming very impertinent, and asking too many questions.” Here conscience nods—is asleep—is in a coma, Eusebius—fairly mesmerized by you, and follows you at your beck wherever you choose to lead her. And so you take her to your stable to look at Rover: and you want a suggestion how you can stop Rover’s wandering propensities; and conscience, being in a state of clairvoyance, bids you tie him up. You ask how—“by the teeth;” so you order him a good plate of meat inside, your stable-door locked, and you replenish that plate for a week or more, and have a few conferences with Rover in your parlour—and the dog is tied. Then you didn’t like the name of Rover—but liked Chance. Conscience suggested the name as a palliative, as something between true proprietorship and theft—it gave you a protective right, and took away the sting of the possession. You fortified yourself in this position, as cunningly as the French at Tahiti. But how happened it, Eusebius, that when any friend asked you if you had found the owner, you turned off the subject always so ingeniously, or denied that you had a Rover, but one Chance, certainly a fine dog?—and how came it that you never took him in the direction of the country from whence the regiment had come? And yet, if the truth could be known, would it not turn out, Eusebius, that fears did often come across your pleasures, and your affection for Chance? and had a child but asked you, as you might have been crossing a stile, in quest, with Chance before you, as you did the soldier, “whose dog’s that?” you would have stammered a little—and almost, in your affection, have gone down upon your knees to have begged him as a gift; and it is fearful to think what a sum any knave as cunning as yourself had been, would have got out of you. Now, my dear Eusebius, I entreat you, when you shall read or hear read—“Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this thing,” that you think of Chance, and not of his doing, but yours. I dare to say, you have never quite looked at the affair in this light; we all are apt to wash our hands of a troublesome affair, and think we come with them clean into court.

Take care you don’t resemble the monkey with the meal-tub. His master thrashed him when he caught him at the theft, and showed him his hands covered with meal, that he might understand the reason of his punishment. Monkey, after the next theft, took care to wash his hands, and when his master came to punish him, extended them to show how clean they were. His master smiled, and immediately brought him a looking-glass—his face and whiskers were powdered with meal: and there you have the origin of the adage, “You have washed your hands but not your face.” There will still be a monitor, Eusebius, to hold the looking-glass to you, and the like of you: and look to your face; and whenever you find that you have put a good face upon any doubtful matter, take the trouble then to look at your hands; and if they be clean, look again and see if your face and hands are clean together. And that will be the best tableau-vivant you or any one else can study.

Now, however, that conscience seems so thoroughly gone to the dogs, without any personal allusion to your case, Eusebius, I cannot resist telling you an anecdote by which you will see how Neighbour Grace of M–n ingeniously touched the conscience of Attorney B., who was supposed to have none—upon the matter of a dog-theft, and how Attorney B. was a match for Neighbour Grace.

“I am come to thee, Friend B.,” said Grace, “to ask thee a question. Suppose my dog should go into thy kitchen, and run off with a neck of   mutton, dost thee think I ought to pay thee for the neck of mutton?”

“Without doubt,” said Lawyer B.

“Then I’d thank thee to pay me three and fourpence; for it was thy dog stole my neck of mutton, and that’s the cost of it.”

“Perfectly right,” said Attorney B., coolly drawing out a bill and receipt. “So, Neighbour Grace, you must pay me three and fourpence, and that settles the matter.”

“How so?”

“Why, as you asked my opinion, my charge for that is six and eightpence—deduct value of neck of mutton, three and fourpence, and just so much remains.” And Lawyer B. got the best of it, and made him pay too. Now this it was to probe another’s conscience, without knowing the nature of the beast you stir up; not considering that when conscience thus comes down, as it were, with “a power of attorney,” it is powerful indeed—“recalcitrat undique tutus.” There are many such big swelling consciences, that grow up and cover the whole man—like the gourd of Jonah, up in a night and down in a night—a fine shelter for a time from the too-searching sun; but there is a worm in it, Eusebius, and it won’t last.

It is a very odd thing that people commonly think they can have their consciences at command, and can set them as they do their watches, and it is generally behind time: yet will they go irregularly, and sometimes all of a run; and when they come to set them again, they will bear no sort of regulation. Some set them as they would an alarum, to awaken them at a given time; and when this answers at all, they are awakened in such an amazement that they know not what they are about. Such was the case with the notorious Parisian pawnbroker, who all in a hurry sent for the priest; but when the crucifix was presented to him, stammered out that he could lend but a very small matter upon it. So consciences go by latitudes and longitudes—slow here and fast there. They have, too, their antipodes—it is night here and sunshine there. And so of ages and eras: and thus the same things make men laugh and tremble by turns. What unextinguishable laughter would arise should Dr Howley, Archbishop of Canterbury, go in procession with his clergy to Windsor, each armed with scissors, to clip the moustaches of the prince and his court! Yet a like absurdity has in other days pricked the consciences of king and courtiers to a sudden and bitter remorse. I read the other day in that very amusing volume, the Literary Conglomerate, in an “Essay on Hair,” how Anselm, archbishop of Canterbury, went so far as to pronounce an anathema of excommunication on all who wore long hair, for which pious zeal he was much commended; and how “Serlo, a Norman bishop, acquired great honour by a sermon which he preached before Henry I. in 1104, against long curled hair, with which the king and his courtiers were so much affected, that they consented to resign their flowing ringlets of which they had been so vain. The prudent prelate gave them no time to change their minds, but immediately pulled a pair of shears out of his sleeve, and performed the operation with his own hand.” A canon is still extant, of the date of 1096, importing that such as wore long hair should be excluded from the church whilst living, or being prayed for when dead. Now, the very curates rejoice in ringlets and macassar. It would be curious to trace the heresy to its complete triumph in full-bottomed wigs, in which, it was ignorantly supposed, wisdom finally settled, when it was not discovered elsewhere. Thus it is, Eusebius, that folly, the vile insect, flies about—just drops a few eggs in the very nest of conscience, and is off, and a corruption of the flesh followeth. Those, therefore, who take out license to shoot folly as it flies, should be made to look after the eggs likewise.