Friends in Council | Page 8

wearing one of these hats in order to please
the rest. As in the fine arts, and in architecture, especially, so in dress,
something is often retained that was useful when something else was
beside it. To go to architecture for an instance, a pinnacle is retained,
not that it is of any use where it is, but in another kind of building it
would have been. That style of building, as a whole, has gone out of
fashion, but the pinnacle has somehow or other kept its ground and
must be there, no one insolently going back to first principles and
asking what is the use and object of building pinnacles. Similar
instances in dress will occur to my readers. Some of us are not skilled
in such affairs; but looking at old pictures we may sometimes see how

modern clothes have attained their present pitch of frightfulness and
inconvenience. This matter of dress is one in which, perhaps, you might
expect the wise to conform to the foolish; and they have.
When we have once come to a right estimate of the strength of
conformity, we shall, I think, be more kindly disposed to eccentricity
than we usually are. Even a wilful or an absurd eccentricity is some
support against the weighty common-place conformity of the world. If
it were not for some singular people who persist in thinking for
themselves, in seeing for themselves, and in being comfortable, we
should all collapse into a hideous uniformity.
It is worth while to analyse that influence of the world which is the
right arm of conformity. Some persons bend to the world in all things,
from an innocent belief that what so many people think must be right.
Others have a vague fear of the world as of some wild beast which may
spring out upon them at any time. Tell them they are safe in their
houses from this myriad-eyed creature: they still are sure that they shall
meet with it some day, and would propitiate its favour at any sacrifice.
Many men contract their idea of the world to their own circle, and what
they imagine to be said in that circle of friends and acquaintances is
their idea of public opinion- -"as if," to use a saying of Southey's, "a
number of worldlings made a world." With some unfortunate people,
the much dreaded "world" shrinks into one person of more mental
power than their own, or perhaps merely of coarser nature; and the
fancy as to what this person will say about anything they do, sits upon
them like a nightmare. Happy the man who can embark his small
adventure of deeds and thoughts upon the shallow waters round his
home, or send them afloat on the wide sea of humanity, with no great
anxiety in either case as to what reception they may meet with! He
would have them steer by the stars, and take what wind may come to
them.
A reasonable watchfulness against conformity will not lead a man to
spurn the aid of other men, still less to reject the accumulated mental
capital of ages. It does not compel us to dote upon the advantages of
savage life. We would not forego the hard-earned gains of civil society
because there is something in most of them which tends to contract the
natural powers, although it vastly aids them. We would not, for
instance, return to the monosyllabic utterance of barbarous men,

because in any formed language there are a thousand snares for the
understanding. Yet we must be most watchful of them. And in all
things, a man must beware of so conforming himself as to crush his
nature and forego the purpose of his being. We must look to other
standards than what men may say or think. We must not abjectly bow
down before rules and usages; but must refer to principles and purposes.
In few words, we must think, not whom we are following, but what we
are doing. If not, why are we gifted with individual life at all?
Uniformity does not consist with the higher forms of vitality. Even the
leaves of the same tree are said to differ, each one from all the rest. And
can it be good for the soul of a man "with a biography of his own like
to no one else's," to subject itself without thought to the opinions and
ways of others: not to grow into symmetry, but to be moulded down
into conformity?
----
Ellesmere. Well, I rather like that essay. I was afraid, at first, it was
going to have more of the fault into which you essay writers generally
fall, of being a comment on the abuse of a thing, and not on the thing
itself. There always seems