Friends in Council | Page 6

best can paint them who has felt them most."
And so, though we should not exactly declare that writers who have had much moral influence have been wicked men, yet we may admit that they have been amongst the most struggling, which implies anything but serene self-possession and perfect spotlessness. If you take the great ones, Luther, Shakespeare, Goethe, you see this at once.
Dunsford. David, St. Paul.
Milverton. Such men are like great rocks on the seashore. By their resistance, terraces of level land are formed; but the rocks themselves bear many scars and ugly indents, while the sea of human difficulty presents the same unwrinkled appearance in all ages. Yet it has been driven back.
Ellesmere. But has it lost any of its bulk, or only gone elsewhere? One part of the resemblance certainly is that these same rocks, which were bulwarks, become, in their turn, dangers.
Milverton. Yes, there is always loss in that way. It is seldom given to man to do unmixed good. But it was not this aspect of the simile that I was thinking of: it was the scarred appearance.
Dunsford. Scars not always of defeat or flight; scars in the front.
Milverton. Ah, it hardly does for us to talk of victory or defeat, in these cases; but we may look at the contest itself as something not bad, terminate how it may. We lament over a man's sorrows, struggles, disasters, and shortcomings; yet they were possessions too. We talk of the origin of evil and the permission of evil. But what is evil? We mostly speak of sufferings and trials as good, perhaps, in their result; but we hardly admit that they may be good in themselves. Yet they are knowledge--how else to be acquired, unless by making men as gods, enabling them to understand without experience. All that men go through may be absolutely the best for them--no such thing as evil, at least in our customary meaning of the word. But, you will say, they might have been created different and higher. See where this leads to. Any sentient being may set up the same claim: a fly that it had not been made a man; and so the end would be that each would complain of not being all.
Ellesmere. Say it all over again, my dear Milverton: it is rather hard. [Milverton did so, in nearly the same words.] I think I have heard it all before. But you may have it as you please. I do not say this irreverently, but the truth is, I am too old and too earthly to enter upon these subjects. I think, however, that the view is a stout-hearted one. It is somewhat in the same vein of thought that you see in Carlyle's works about the contempt of happiness. But in all these cases, one is apt to think of the sage in "Rasselas," who is very wise about human misery till he loses his daughter. Your fly illustration has something in it. Certainly when men talk big about what might have been done for man, they omit to think what might be said, on similar grounds, for each sentient creature in the universe. But here have we been meandering off into origin of evil, and uses of great men, and wickedness of writers, etc., whereas I meant to have said something about the essay. How would you answer what Bacon maintains? "A mixture of a lie doth ever add pleasure."
Milverton. He is not speaking of the lies of social life, but of self-deception. He goes on to class under that head "vain opinions, flattering hopes, false valuations, imaginations as one would." These things are the sweetness of "the lie that sinketh in." Many a man has a kind of mental kaleidoscope, where the bits of broken glass are his own merits and fortunes, and they fall into harmonious arrangements and delight him--often most mischievously and to his ultimate detriment, but they are a present pleasure.
Ellesmere. Well, I am going to be true in my pleasures: to take a long walk alone. I have got a difficult case for an opinion, which I must go and think over.
Dunsford. Shall we have another reading tomorrow?
Milverton. Yes, if you are both in the humour for it.

CHAPTER II.

As the next day was fine, we agreed to have our reading in the same spot that I have described before. There was scarcely any conversation worth noting, until after Milverton had read us the following essay on Conformity.
CONFORMITY.
The conformity of men is often a far poorer thing than that which resembles it amongst the lower animals. The monkey imitates from imitative skill and gamesomeness: the sheep is gregarious, having no sufficient will to form an independent project of its own. But man often loathes what he imitates, and conforms to what he