UNSTABLE AS WATER. I want to be forgotten even by God! 83 UNSTABLE AS WATER. GENESIS xlix. 4. NSTABLE as water, how could Reuben excel? Excel UN lence involves elements of constancy, conditions of stability. But what stability is there in water? The house built on the shifting sea-sands—we know what came of it. But the sands are more stable than the sea-than the waves of the sea, at least; and he that wavereth is like the waves of the Unstable as that troubled water, he shall not excel. sea. In the great affairs of the world, especially in the revolutions which change its condition, the one thing needful, says Lord Brougham, is a sustained determination of character; a mind firm, persevering, inflexible, incapable of bending to the will of another, and ever controlling circumstances, not yielding to them. Cicero, for instance, could never have risen to eminence in the Revolution of France, any more than he could have mingled in the scenes which disgracefully distinguished it from the troubles of Rome. Decision of character is a topic of oft recurrence in the Historical Sketches; the want of it is illustrated in Lord Thurlow, for example, who in all questions of political conduct is characterized by the later Chancellor as "exceedingly irresolute;" so that Pitt found him a colleague wholly unfruitful in council, though always apt to raise diffi culties, and very slow and undecided. "The Whigs, when he joined them, soon discovered how infirm a frame of mind there lay concealed behind the outward form of vigour and decision." Eldon's far more pronounced repute for indecision, on the bench at least, is excused by his admirers as a frequent accompaniment of the most acute and penetrating intellect, which often seems undecided, not because it sees little, but because it sees so much, that instant decision is impossible. "Decision of character, the quality of all others the most important for success in life, often arises from the will being more powerful than the judgment; and the opposite side disregarded." Men and soldiers, as Mr. Carlyle says, love swift inflexible decision, even when they suffer by it. "As indee is not this fundamentally the quality of qualities for a man?” A quality which, he admits, taken by itself is next to nothing, since inferior animals, asses, dogs, even mules have it; yet, in due combination, the indispensable basis of all. Balzac ascribes to one of his heroes cette vivacité méridionale which forbids a Frenchman of the South to abide in any uncertainty whatever; a quality which they of the North call a defect: if, say they, it was the occasion of the brilliant fortune of Murat, it was also the cause of his death. Suvórov has been blamed for want of deliberation ;* nevertheless he is one of the few generals on record who never lost a battle. Pope Zephyrinus (A.D. 202-219), unstable as water, how could he excel in the pontificate? In Latin Christianity he is characterized as "of unsettled principles; embracing adverse tenets with all the zeal of which a mind so irresolute was capable." He was now a disciple of the Noetians (who held the extreme Monarchian doctrine, if not Patripassianism itself), now of Sabellius; and was constantly being driven back by his fears, or confusion of mind, to opposite tenets, and involved in the most glaring contradictions. So through his long episcopate there was endless conflict and uncertainty. The time was out *His quickness of decision was incidentally observable in the short and laconic style of his orders; and a studied conciseness is said to have marked his conversation. He used to say that the whole of his tactics consisted in the magic words, Stupai i bey! "Advance and strike!"an instance of the rhyming laconics he affected both in table-talk and letterwriting. PAINS OF IRRESOLUTION. 85 of joint, and that Holy Father was scarcely the Coming Man to set it right, nor was the hour at hand for the promulgation of the latter-day dogma of infallibility. The instability of Zephyrinus would have surrounded the dogma with difficulties not a few. ; La Bruyère thinks it hard to decide whether irresolution makes a man most unhappy or contemptible; and a graphic sketch he draws of such a man,—not really a single character, but several, multiplying himself as often as his tastes and purposes change. At each moment he is what he was not the moment before, and will not be the moment after: he succeeds himself. And therefore, in another phase of the verb, he never succeeds at all. A late philosophic writer contrasts the career of those who preserve a steadiness of taste and purpose, not to be suddenly altered by any of the vicissitudes of life, with that of others who bend to every impulse, and fluctuate with every variation; who seem to possess a constant susceptibility of being influenced with ardour towards any object which happens to strike the imagination: for a short time the chase is kept up with a vigour and enthusiasm which amaze the ordinary class of mortals, and leave competition at a distance but their preternatural energy soon relaxes, and ultimately dies away, till it is revived by some other caprice, and starts off in a new direction. Well says Samuel Bailey, that happiness must be held on a precarious tenure by a man who is thus subject to the opposite influence of inconsistent attractions, and who is continually liable to have his tranquillity ruffled and his purposes disturbed by some novel event or contact with some new character. "With a mind full of associations which can be acted upon by impulses the most contrary, he is the slave of circumstances, which seem to snatch the guidance of his conduct out of his own hands, and impel him forward till other events overpower their influence, and, having usurped the same ascendency, exercise the same despotism." The friends made by such a man are many, and hardly one of them kept. Friendship is with him an intermittent fever, and after the hot fits come the cold. Virtue only is stable, observes Dr. Thomas Brown, because virtue only is consistent; and the caprice which, under a momentary impulse, begins an eager intimacy with one, as it began it from an impulse as momentary with another, will soon find a third, with whom it may again begin it, with the same exclusion, for the moment, of every previous attachment (so true is Rousseau's remark on these hasty starts of kindness, that he who treats us at first sight like a friend of twenty years' standing, will very probably, before anything like twenty years are past, treat us as a stranger, if we have any important service to ask of him). "Some fickle creatures boast a soul True as the needle to the pole, Their humour yet so various They manifest their whole life through The needle's variations too, Their love is so precarious." Towards the middle of the eighteenth century, the Opposition nominally had for its chief Frederick Prince of Wales; but the influence was nominal only; for, says Earl Stanhope, "so weak and fickle had been his conduct to all parties, that even the near approach of a throne could not make him an object of respect." The same historian refers to the parliamentary wit and rising statesman of that day, Charles Townshend,* as * Whom Walpole in one letter stigmatizes as a "poor toad," to be pitied for the distracting effects upon himself of his own complex manoeuverings, "all tearing him or impelling him a thousand ways, with the addition of his own vanity and irresolution" (Walpole to Lord Hertford, Jan. 27, 1765). In another he thus remonstrates with his friend Conway (and if ever Horace had a friend he cared for, it was Harry Conway): "Pray stay where you are, and do some good to your country. You have engaged and must go through. I have no patience with your thinking so idly. It would be a reflection on your understanding and character, and a want of resolution unworthy of you " (Nov. 29, 1765). It was going to Italy from which Walpole would dissuade the Marshal. As editor of Moore's Diary, Earl Russell may have felt a passing inclination, if not to suppress, at least to take exception to, some passages in which the writer seems to impute as characteristic a tendency to vexatious irresolution on the part of his noble friend. Thus, Sept. 13. 1821: "Lord John came to take leave of Bessy. Told him that, as I knew he liked to change his mind, he must not be particular with me, as to his promise of going with me [to England, from Paris]; he seemed, however, POLITICAL INDECISION. 87 kept back by fickleness and unsteadiness of purpose. Of an entirely different complexion is the uncertainty complained of by Lord Brougham in Mr. Windham, as not only impairing the effect of his oratory, but diminishing his usefulness and injuring his reputation as a statesman. "For he was too often the dupe of his own ingenuity; which made him doubt and balance, and gave an oscitancy fatal to vigour in council, as well as most prejudicial to the effects of eloquence, by breaking the force of his blows as they fell." So his "hesitating disposition" indisposed him to be a leader, and tended to make him a follower, rather than an original thinker or actor; as if, says his critic, he felt some relief under the doubts which harassed him, in thus taking shelter under a master's wing, and devolving upon a less scrupulous balancer of conflicting reasons the task of trimming the scales and forming his opinions for him. "Our doubts are traitors, And make us lose the good we oft might win, The Duke of Newcastle,-Smollett's duke, Walpole's, Macaulay's, is a signal type of the forcibly-feeble irresolute man. He is pictured in 1757, at a ministerial crisis, in the agonies of irresolution; sometimes his ambition and sometimes his fears predominated; and whatever he said one day he was sure to unsay the next. Again, that Earl of Loudoun whom he sent to Canada as Commander-in-Chief, against Montcalm, for whom he was no match, shared all too largely in the duke's defect. Indecision, says Earl Stanhope, was the ruling fault of his, as of most weak characters. "He is like St. George upon the signposts," said a Philadelphian to Dr. Franklin, “always on horseback, but never advances." Gibbon depicts the dis decided upon it."-15th. "Had a note from Lord John to say he has changed his mind about going. This uncertainty rather a fault. Called upon Lord John, who seemed, after a little conversation, to be half inclined to change again. Bid me, at parting, not give him up."-17th. "Saw Lord John, who says he is now determined to go, if I will wait for him till Saturday." On the 23rd, go he did. |