When those redoubtable disputants, Tom Touchy and Will Wimble, appealed to Sir Roger de Coverley to settle a dispute between them, the good knight listened with patience, "and, having paused some time, told them, with the air of a man who would not give his judgment rashly, that much might be said on both sides." The Reviewer confesses that this temper of mind is one which he finds very congenial. It is pleasant to dally with both sides of a question,—to keep your mental eyes open to the magnificent vista of arguments that Alp-like rise one above the other on either side, until on either side they melt away into the immeasurable distance, far, far beyond the range of human vision. "To speak," says Goethe, "is to begin to err." For we can hardly speak, we can hardly even think, without limiting ourselves, without becoming partisans, without ranging ourselves on one side or the other of a mooted question, without closing our ears to the music which to our opponent's sense gives harmony to his arguments. And, dear God! it is so easy for us to go wrong. Even in the cases where we are right, we probably reach the right by wrong reasoning. The watch that has stopped is right twice in the twenty-four hours. Only very young people are infallible. To be sure, there is the Pope; but even he claims to be infallible within the narrowest limitations, and only a small fraction of the world is willing to yield him credence. For the rest, what test of right thinking is there? Our reason? The chief use of our reason is to teach us on the morrow how false were our conclusions of the day before. The consensus of mankind? On no one subject has mankind reached a consensus. The judgment of the best minds, of Matthew Arnold's remnant? How shall we know which are the best minds, or, having found them, shall we find them in agreement? The wisest man errs almost as often and as grievously as the fool. We have authority for calling Solomon a wise man, yet he made at least six hundred and ninety-nine mistakes. If we wish to refrain from error, we must cease from thinking and cease from speaking, or at least we must cease from coming to any decision on any question that has the normal number of sides.
Still, if the Reviewer were pressed for a yea or a nay, he would side against his correspondent. He would acknowledge the force of that gentleman's arguments, he would be humbly alive to his own fallibility, but he would suggest, not insist, that the truth is usually better than a lie. If the idols which "the youthful and the enthusiastic" have set up are clay, it is best to point out the truth, though it might then be in order to prove that the clay was at least of a superior character. "Paint me with all my wrinkles," said Cromwell to the artist who was inclined to flatter him, knowing well that the harshness of that countenance, amid all its imperfections, was nobler than the sleek beauty of the curled darling. Illusion may be helpful to the youthful and the enthusiastic; but disillusion is fatal, and there is no disillusion so terrible as that which springs from the recognition that much of history and biography and fiction is a lie,—as unfortunately it is. To quote again from the ever-quotable Goethe, the difference between men and women is that women deceive each other but do not deceive men, while men do not deceive each other but do deceive women. And women are glad to be deceived wherever truth would be painful to them. Tell any woman exactly what you believe and what you know about her husband, excellent but imperfect man as he may be, she would turn you out of her house in angry scorn. The whole atmosphere of modern literature, and especially of modern fiction, is womanly; the conventions are womanly,—they are part of the
