The Clergyman's Wife and Other Sketches/Fault-Seekers

by Anna Cora Mowatt

FAULT-SEEKERS.

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t is easier to cavil than to applaud—easier to carp than to appreciate. The voice of praise is low and feeble, for it issues from the generous and discriminating few; its tone is readily drowned by the loud cries of condemnation roared from the lips of the captious million. No talent, no taste, no information are requisite to qualify the self-constituted censor for his office.

"A man must serve his time to every trade
Save censure—critics all are ready made,"

says the poet. These surgeons of literature pass through no college, and earn no diplomas, to establish their right to cut and slash, dismember and decapitate the fair offsprings of mightier minds. Walter Scott aptly designates them as "tinkers who, unable to make pots and pans themselves, set up for menders of them."

In art, as in literature, their eyes search out defects alone, and are as blind to beauties as bats to sunshine. In the wonders of Science they behold not the marvels she has achieved but the desirable ends she has failed to compass.

Their indulgence of this fault-finding passion gradually renders them skeptical of the existence of all genius and greatness, all truth and triumph. They believe in nothing but the earth's imperfections and man's short-comings.

But it is in the every-day contact with humanity that this condemning, hypercritical spirit proves most tormenting and most disastrous. The constitutional fault-seeker never makes a new acquaintance without tearing the unlucky individual's character to pieces, to search out all its crooked turns, sharp angles, and weak points. If the nature he is dissecting chance to be one enriched with many virtues,—virtues which the ready censor never himself possessed,—he tries to drag it down to his own level, by pronouncing its graces assumed and its goodness spurious. If, on the other hand, it be a temperament full of faults, he glories over their discovery, and points them out with compassionless zeal. He never admits, as excuse, the plea of inherited evil, the lack of early discipline, the contagion of forced association; and he never dreams that he is prone to the same failings himself, but lifts up his eyes and hands and thanks Heaven that he is "not such a man." Not a foible escapes his keen scrutiny; he drags the merest weaknesses into broad light; magnifies them into vices, unsparingly judges and condemns the culprit, and wholly forgets that he is making a merciless law by which he will be judged in turn.

Is it thus that the angels with their pure eyes, look down upon mortals? Those eyes pierce the coarse veil of flesh, and gaze into the depths of the spirit; therefore all our imperfections they must surely see; but upon these their holy contemplation never dwells. They seek out the hidden gems of the mind, and toilingly remove the surrounding ore of evil, and gently polish the least valuable jewel, with the attrition of circumstance, until all its sparkle is developed. They search out and foster every little, weak, struggling germ of goodness, give it the sunshine of their celestial smiles, and when it droops, as though about to die, pour upon it the refreshing rain of their pitying tears. They look upon a man's virtues as the Heaven-ordered flowers in the garden of his heart, on his faults, as the weeds, sown by an enemy, that must be rooted out with tenderest hands, for fear that some delicate violet of promise may be plucked up with the nightshade beside which it grew.

Should it not be the perpetual aspiration of that man who hopes to associate with angels hereafter, to make this, his preparatory life, approach as nearly as possible to the lives of the wished-for companions of his future? If he would cultivate the angelic within himself (which alone can bring him in communion with angelic existences), he must cast out the spirit of fault-seeking, and substitute in its place that loving gaze which beholds the least precious gem of worth, though buried deep beneath beneath the mire of impurity—that holy vision which discovers the feeblest shoot of virtue, though overshadowed by the flaunting weeds of folly.