第44章

In this high summertide, I remember with a strange feeling that there are people who, of their free choice, spend day and night in cities, who throng to the gabble of drawing-rooms, make festival in public eating-houses, sweat in the glare of the theatre.They call it life; they call it enjoyment.Why, so it is, for them; they are so made.The folly is mine, to wonder that they fulfil their destiny.

But with what deep and quiet thanksgiving do I remind myself that never shall I mingle with that well-millinered and tailored herd!

Happily, I never saw much of them.Certain occasions I recall when a supposed necessity took me into their dismal precincts; a sick buzzing in the brain, a languor as of exhausted limbs, comes upon me with the memory.The relief with which I stepped out into the street again, when all was over! Dear to me then was poverty, which for the moment seemed to make me a free man.Dear to me was the labour at my desk, which, by comparison, enabled me to respect myself.

Never again shall I shake hands with man or woman who is not in truth my friend.Never again shall I go to see acquaintances with whom I have no acquaintance.All men my brothers? Nay, thank Heaven, that they are not! I will do harm, if I can help it, to no one; I will wish good to all; but I will make no pretence of personal kindliness where, in the nature of things, it cannot be felt.I have grimaced a smile and pattered unmeaning words to many a person whom I despised or from whom in heart I shrank; I did so because I had not courage to do otherwise.For a man conscious of such weakness, the best is to live apart from the world.Brave Samuel Johnson! One such truth-teller is worth all the moralists and preachers who ever laboured to humanise mankind.Had HEwithdrawn into solitude, it would have been a national loss.Every one of his blunt, fearless words had more value than a whole evangel on the lips of a timidly good man.It is thus that the commonalty, however well clad, should be treated.So seldom does the fool or the ruffian in broadcloth hear his just designation; so seldom is the man found who has a right to address him by it.By the bandying of insults we profit nothing; there can be no useful rebuke which is exposed to a tu quoque.But, as the world is, an honest and wise man should have a rough tongue.Let him speak and spare not!