THE INCONSEQUENT CREATURE, MAN. OETRY, as well as science, has, by poetical licence, its POET definitions to offer of Man. And one of these is, "The inconsequent creature, man,-for that's his speciality.' Whether St. Paul was discussing man christianized or not, in that problematical seventh chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, he would probably have accepted the definition by way of illustrating his text. "For that which I do I allow not; for what I would, that do I not: but what I hate, that do I. The good that I would, I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me,”—the_result being, that he, the man in question, the representative man, with his mind served the law of God, but with the flesh the law of sin. 66 Men define a man, The creature who stands frontward to the stars, Loves things proved bad, and leaves a thing proved good?" So various and inconsistent is human nature, says Chesterfield in more than one of his letters, so strong and so changeable are our passions, so fluctuating are our wills, and so much are our minds influenced by the accidents of our bodies, that every man is more the man of the day, than a regular and consequential character." Hence, his lordship professes to look with some contempt upon those refining and sagacious historians who ascribe all, even the most common events, to some deep political cause; "whereas mankind is made up of inconsistencies, and no man acts invariably up to his predominant character." Our jarring passions, our variable* * There are some remarks almost identically the same in David Hume's chapter on Liberty and Necessity. ALTER ET IDEM. 409 humours, and the like, "produce such contradictions in our conduct, that I believe those are the oftenest mistaken who ascribe our actions to the most seemingly obvious motives." Again and again he warns his readers against supposing that, because man is a rational animal, he will therefore always act rationally; or, because he has such or such a predominant passion, that he will act invariably and "consequentially" in the pursuit of it. No, we are, on my lord's showing, complicated machines; and though we have one main-spring that gives motion to the whole, we have an infinity of little wheels, which, in their turns, retard, precipitate, and sometimes stop that motion. The characters men draw in books have been well said by a real student of character to hang together in too wonderful a harmony of parts: if we had to deal with them, we should know what we were about, so amazingly consistent are they. We may and do exclaim, "How natural! what a wonderful knowledge of human nature has Scott, or Richardson, or Dickens, or Charlotte Brontè!" But the difficulty in real life, objects a dissertator on the study of character, is, that people are not natural-that they are inconsistent, inconsequent —that their deviations from their proper selves would disgrace a novel and spoil any author's reputation. Take, as he says, some men and compare them one year with another, one day with another, and there is absolutely scarce a trace of the former man. "Hamlet puzzles the commentators because he is not always reconcilable with himself; but, surely, all of us can point out some one or more compared with whom Hamlet is plain sailing." We may always, it is alleged, detect a real character amongst shadows in a novel by his want of harmony. La Bruyère was alive to this when he penned Les Caractères. "Je me contredis, il est vrai; accusez-en les hommes, dont je ne fais que rapporter les jugemens, je ne dis pas des différens hommes, je dis les mêmes qui jugent si différemment." And still more pointedly, and to the point, he says in another chapter : "Les hommes n'ont point de caractères, ou s'ils en ont, c'est celui de n'en avoir aucun qui soit suivi, qui ne se démente point, et où ils soient reconnoissables." "Ils ont des passions contraires, et des foibles qui se contredisent. Il leur coûte moins de joindre les extrémités, que d'avoir une conduite dont une partie naisse de l'autre." Pope twits his guide, philosopher, and friend with being keenly captious in criticism on any little vagary in his dress, and not in the least to any extravagant inconsequence or incoherence in his character: "But when no prelate's lawn with horse-hair lined Is half so incoherent as my mind, When (each opinion with the next at strife, I plant, root up; I build, and then confound; Turn round to square, and square again to round ;* Kind to my dress, my figure, not to Me." The heart has often been compared to the needle for its constancy has it ever, asks Archdeacon Hare, been so for its variations? Yet, were any man to keep minutes of his feelings from youth to age, what a table of variations would they present! how numerous, diverse, and strange.+ Macaulay taxed almost all the modern historians of Greece, but this was before Mr. Grote had entered an appearance,—with showing the grossest ignorance of the most obvious phenomena of human nature, the generals and statesmen of antiquity being by their representations absolutely divested of all individuality; mere personifications; passions, talents, opinions, virtues, vices, but not men. "Inconsistency is a thing of which these writers have no notion." This practice of painting in nothing * As in Mrs. Browning's forcible line, "Conceives the circle, and then walks the square." "This is just what we find in the writings of Horace. If we consider his occasional effusions,-and such they nearly all are,-as merely expressing the piety or the passion, the seriousness or the levity of the moment, we shall have no difficulty in accounting for those discrepancies in their features which have so much puzzled professional_commentators. very contradictions prove their truth."-Guesses at Truth, i. 2. Their CONTRADICTIONS IN CHARACTER. 4II but black and white, the young Edinburgh Reviewer declared to be "unpardonable even in the drama," and he cited it as the great fault of Alfieri. A contemporary French critic hailed in the dramas of Schiller and Goethe this one advantage at least of a transgression of the unity of time, that "la vie morale a retrouvé sa place au théâtre. Les hommes ici ne sont plus d'une seule pièce, décidément bons ou mauvais, selon les exigences d'une action de vingt-quatre heures. Ils sont inconséquents sur la scène comme dans la vie : ils doutent, ils hésitent, ils se démentent." But twenty-four hours will often supply ample room and verge enough for the display of inconsequences the most emphatic : "Such inconsistent moods have we, E'en when our passions strike the key." Byron jots down in his journal his sense of relief due to that journal. When he is tired-as he generally is-out it comes, and down goes everything. But he can't read it over; and he can only guess at what flagrant contradictions it may contain. For, "If I am sincere with myself (but I fear one lies more to one's self than to any one else), every page should confute, refute, and utterly abjure its predecessor." His biographer somewhere observes of him, that still more singular than the contradiction between Byron in public and in private,—a contradiction not unfrequent, and, in some cases, more apparent than real, as depending upon the relative position of the observer, were those startling contrarieties and changes which his character so often exhibited, as compared with itself; now intrenched in the most absolute self-will, and next moment all that was docile and tractable. In him the simple mode of tracing character to its sources was often wholly at fault; and Moore pleads, that if, in trying to solve the strange variances of his friend's mind, he should himself be found to have fallen into contradictions and inconsistencies, such an unexampled complication of qualities may suggest his excuse. It is in his capacity of critical biographer of a very different man, that Mr. Carlyle proffers him as typically an ill-assorted, glaring mixture of the highest and the lowest; and what, indeed, the question then occurs, is man's life generally, but a kind of beast godhood? Did not the ancients figure Nature itself, their sacred ALL, or PAN, as a portentous commingling of these two discords —musical, humane, oracular, in its upper part, yet ending below in the cloven hairy feet of a goat? "And is not man a microcosm, or epitomized mirror of that same universe? No wonder that man, that each man, that James Boswell like the others, should resemble it. The peculiarity in his case was the unusual defect of amalgamation and subordination." One thinks of the Laureate's characterization of that piebald miscellany, man, Bursts of great heart and slips in sensual mire.” Nor unremembered be the spirit of Wordsworth's query, supposing the heart to be inspected to its inmost folds by sight undazzled with the glare of praise, "Who shall be named-in the resplendent line Of sages, martyrs, confessors-the man Whom the best might of faith, wherever fixed, From painful and discreditable shocks Of contradiction?" Balzac calls man a Toujours en opposition avec lui-même, l'homme imprime à tous ses actes le caractère de l'inconséquence et de la faiblesse. Ici-bas rien n'est complet que le malheur." Scott's Aunt Margaret, of mirror memorabilia, claims, in her old age, a right to be as inconsistent in her political sentiments as mankind in general show themselves in all the various courses of life; since you cannot point out one of them, she asserts, in which the passions and prejudices of those who pursue it are not perpetually carrying them away from the path which their reason approves. It has been said, that of all prophecies, none are, perhaps, so frequently erroneous as those on which we are most apt to venture, in endeavouring to foretell the effect of outward events on the characters of men; that in no form of our anticipations are we more frequently baffled than in such attempts |