By a memorial name, uncouth indeed Or foreland, on a new-discovered coast; And POINT RASH-JUDGMENT is the name it bears.* Forbear to judge; for how pitifully little is the all we really know one of another! Mr. Froude has forcibly remarked-even admitting the remark to be a truism-that whoever has attended but slightly to the phenomena of human nature has discovered how inadequate is the clearest insight which he can hope to attain into character and disposition. "Every one is a perplexity to himself and a perplexity to his neighbours; and men who are born in the same generation, who are exposed to the same influences, trained by the same teachers, and live from childhood to age in constant and familiar intercourse, are often little more than shadows to each other, intelligible in superficial form and outline, but divided inwardly by impalpable and mysterious barriers."+ And yet how ready each "weak unknowing hand" to hurl the bolts of Heaven against whomsoever it deems to be Heaven's foe.. Sir James Stephen bids all hail to Rhadamanthus on his posthumous judgment-seat in the nether regions. But when Rhadamanthus comes above ground, holds in his hand the historical pen, and resolves all the enigmas of hearts which ceased to beat long centuries ago, more confidently than most of us would dare to interpret the mysteries of our own, Sir James for one wishes him back again at the confluence of Styx, Phlegethon, and Cocytus. For, "it is, after all, nothing more than the surface of human character which the retrospective scrutiny of the keenest human eye is able to detect." It is in a subsequent portion of the same instructive treatise, that the writer pronounces human justice to be severe, not merely because man is censorious, but because he reasonably distrusts himself, and fears lest his weakness should confound the distinctions of good and evil; and divine justice to be lenient, because there alone love can flow in all its unfathomable depths and boundless expansion-impeded by no dread of error, and diverted by no misplaced sympathies.§ In the course of some remarks on the harshness with which man is disposed to regard the fellow-man whose doctrine, in matters of religious faith, differs from his own, the author of the Caxton Essays is impressive on the fact that He who hath reserved to Himself the right of judging, has imperatively said to man, whose faculty of judging must be, like man The friends spoken of, were Coleridge and Miss Wordsworth. The scene was the eastern shore of Grasmere. The date of the poem is 1800. Froude, History of England, &c., vol. iv. p. 1. Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography, vol. i.; The Founders of Jesuitism. On the "false humility" which shrinks from all censure or reprobation of what is evil, under cover of the text "judge not, that ye be not judged"-as if it were the intent of that text, not to warn us against rash, presumptuous, and uncharitable judgments, but absolutely to forbid our taking account of the distinction between right and wrong,-see Mr. Henry Taylor's essay on Humility and Independence, in his valuable "Notes on Life." The man of true humility, we are there taught, will come to the task of judgment, on serious occasions, not lightly or unawed, but praying to have "a right judgment in all things;" and whilst exercising that judgment in no spirit of compromise or evasion, he will feel that to judge his brother is a duty and not a privilege; and he will judge him in sorrow, humbled by the contemplation of that fallen nature of which he is himself part and parcel.-See "Notes from Life" (1847), pp. 46 sqq. himself, erring and human, "Judge not, that ye be not judged." Now, argues the Essayist, of all our offences, it is clear that that offence of which man can be the least competent judge is an offence of defective faith. "For faith belongs to our innermost hearts, and not to our overt actions. And religious faith is therefore that express tribute to the only Reader of all hearts, on the value of which man can never, without arrogant presumption, set himself up as judge." If even-handed justice, says Mr. Anthony Trollope, were done throughout the world, some apology would be found for most offences. Not that the offences would thus be wiped away, and black become white; but much that is now very black would, he submits, be reduced to that sombre, uninviting shade of ordinary brown which is so customary to humanity. It is much the same humane thought which underlies Pelayo's apology for Roderick, when we read how closely that generous prince would and did -cherish in his heart the constant thought Less monstrous, less revolting to belief, As one of George Eliot's good parsons has it, God sees us as we are altogether, not in separate feelings or actions, as our fellow-men see us. We are always doing each other injustice, and thinking better or worse of each other than we deserve, he says, because we only hear and see separate words and actions-not each other's whole nature.§-Do not philosophic doctors tell us, again, the reflective author in person elsewhere muses, that we are unable to discern so much as a tree, except by an unconscious cunning which combines many past and separate sensations; that no one sense is independent of another, so that in the dark we can hardly taste a fricassee, or tell whether our pipe is alight or not, and the most intelligent boy, if accommodated with claws or hoofs instead of fingers, would be likely to remain on the lowest form? If so, it is easy to understand that our discernment of men's motives must depend on the completeness of the elements we can bring from our own susceptibility and our own experience. "See to it, friend, before you pronounce a too hasty judgment, that your own moral sensibilities are not of a hoofed or clawed character." For, as this penetrating writer insists, in continuation of the metaphor, the keenest eye will not serve, unless you have the delicate finger, with their subtle nerve filaments, which elude scientific lenses, and lose themselves in the invisible world of human sensations.|| Deeds which, to quote another popular though less powerful penwoman, our acquaintance designate our follies, may at another tribunal * Caxtoniana: Faith and Charity. † Were we all turned inside out, however, Mr. Trollope elsewhere surmises, some of us might find "our shade of brown to be very dark."-The Bertrams, chap. xix. Southey: Roderick, the Last of the Goths, § xvii. Scenes of Clerical Life, Mr. Gilfil's Love-Story, chap. xix. Holme Lee, "Kathie Brande," chap. xix. be our virtues our single redeeming points; who judges rightly, who can rightly judge where so many of our efforts are bent to seem other than we are, and the universal conjuring trick of this world is to throw dust expertly in our neighbours' eyes? 66 Centuries ago, well-nigh twoscore, it was written by the most philosophic, and perhaps the best, of Roman emperors, that men's actions look worse than they are; and, says he, one must be thoroughly informed of a great many things before one can be rightly qualified to give judgment in the case. ."* The sceptic Bayle was better Christian than Scaliger, when he protested against the assertion of that peremptory scholar that Bellarmin did not believe a word of what he wrote, and was at heart an atheist besides the testimony of Bellarmin's life and death-bed to the contrary, such judgments are, said Bayle (and no friend to the Jesuits he), a usurpation of the rights of One who alone is the Judge of hearts, and before whom there is no dissembling. An apostle's reason given for the counsel, Speak not evil one of another, brethren,t-is this: that whoso speaketh evil of his brother, and judgeth his brother, speaketh evil of the law, and judgeth the law. Now, there is one lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy; who art thou that judgest another? No observant reader of Mr. Carlyle but will have noticed, if not (which were better) laid to heart, his habitual abstention from that dogmatism of the judgment-seat in which smaller spirits delight. For instance, in his moral estimate of so erring a genius as Hoffmann, if, in judging him, Mr. Carlyle is forced to condemn him, it is with mildness, with a desire to do justice. Let us not forget, urges the critic, that for a mind like Hoffmann's, the path of propriety was difficult to find, still more difficult to keep. Moody, sensitive and fantastic, he wandered through the world like a foreign presence, subject to influences of which common natures have happily no glimpse." A good or a wise man we must not call him; but among the ordinary population of this world, "to note him with the mark of reprobation were ungrateful and unjust."§ So, again, in the same author's review of the life and writings of Werner— who, always, in some degree, an enigma to himself, may well be obscure For "there are mysteries and unsounded abysses in every human heart; and that is but a questionable philosophy which undertakes so readily to explain them." Religious belief especially, Mr. Carlyle urges, at least when it seems heartfelt and well intentioned, is no subject for harsh or even irreverent investigation. "He is a wise man that, having such a belief, knows and sees clearly the grounds of it in himself; and those, we imagine, who have explored with strictest scrutiny the secret of to us. * Marcus Antoninus, Meditations, 1. xi. chap. xviii. † St. James, iv. 11 sq. Southey's Roderick, the Last of the Goths, c. x. their own bosoms, will be least apt to rush with intolerant violence into that of other men's."* Still more elaborate and emphatic is the exposition of this doctrine as applied to the case of Robert Burns. The world, it is alleged, is habitually unjust in its judgments of such men, since it decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes; and not positively but negatively, less on what is done right, than on what is or is not done wrong. Whereas, by Mr. Carlyle's doctrine, not the few inches of deflection from the mathematical orbit, which are so easily measured, but the ratio of these to the whole diameter, constitutes the real aberration." This orbit may be a planet's, its diameter the breadth of the solar system; or it may be a city hippodrome; nay, the circle of a ginhorse, its diameter a score of feet or paces. But the inches of deflection only are measured: and it is assumed that the diameter of the ginhorse, and that of the planet, will yield the same ratio when compared to them!" Here, according to our author, lies the root of many a blind, cruel condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, Rousseaus, which one never listens to with approval. "Granted, the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and tackle damaged; the pilot is blameworthy; he has not been all-wise and all-powerful: but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the Globe, or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs."+ To a very different style of sinners the same judgment-rather the same refusal to judge—is accorded, when the doom of Chaumette, Gobel, and other reddest of red-republican reprobates, is rehearsed, in the history of France's reign of terror, while the Revolution was devouring, so greedily, her own children. "For Anaxagoras Chaumette, the sleek head now [April, 1794] stript of its bonnet rouge, [and a traveller by tumbril to Saint Guillotine,] what hope is there? Unless Death were sleep'? Wretched Anaxagoras, God shall judge thee, not I." Once more: "Unhappy soul; who shall judge him?" is the historian's deprecating query, in the instance of August of Poland, the Physically Strong,-who dies, confessedly a very great sinner, early in 1733. shall judge him? an eternal Who Corporal Trim was once moved to avow his belief-rather hotly, for his esprit de corps was piqued—that when a soldier "gets time to pray, he prays as heartily as a parson-though not with all his fuss and hypocrisy. Thou shouldst not have said that, Trim, said my uncle Toby -for God only knows who is a hypocrite, and who is not. At the great and general review of us all, Corporal, at the day of judgment (and not till then)-it will be seen who have done their duties in this world, and who have not."¶ * Life and Writings of Werner: Foreign Review, No. 1 (1828). The French Revolution: a History; part iii. book vi. ch. iii. Longfellow, In the Churchyard at Cambridge. Tristram Shandy, vol. vi. ch. vi. In a like spirit, another clerical novelist, of a more recent type, and whose distinctive evangel is Muscular Christianity, introduces a "doublefirst" candidate for orders who reminds him of Mr. Bye-Ends in Bunyan: "And yet," comes the charitable clause conditional, "I believe the man was really in earnest. He was really desirous to do what was right, as far as he knew it; and all the more desirous, because he saw, in the present state of society, what was right would pay him. God shall judge him, not I. Who can unravel the confusion of mingled selfishness and devotion that exist even in his own heart, much less in that of another?"* In Mr. Thackeray's instance, exception has been taken, on ethical grounds, by no vulgar critic, to his habit of shrinking from moral estimate as well as moral judgment, in dealing with his characters. Into that distinction not without a difference, this is not the place (nor this the pen) to enter. But the critic in question-for some years a main support of the National Review-recognises this avoidance of moral judgment as springing from kindly feeling, from the just and humble sense we all should have that our own demerits make it unseemly for us to ascend the judgment-chair, and from a wide appreciation of the variety and obscurity of men's real motives of action.† BERTRA M. A TALE. "VAIN is the hope, by man's mere will, to stay It was of one we all had known, while free Happy his youth had been; each grove and glen * Alton Locke, ch. xxiv. †The avoidance of moral estimate, on the other hand, is imputed to an insufficient sense on the duty incumbent on all of us to form determinate estimates of men and actions, if only as bearing on our own conduct in life.-See W. C. Roscoe's Essays, II. 308. |