<h2 id="id00957" style="margin-top: 4em">POPULAR FALLACIES</h2>
<h4 id="id00958" style="margin-top: 2em">I.—THAT A BULLY IS ALWAYS A COWARD</h4>
<p id="id00959">This axiom contains a principle of compensation, which disposes us to
admit the truth of it. But there is no safe trusting to dictionaries
and definitions. We should more willingly fall in with this popular
language, if we did not find <i>brutality</i> sometimes awkwardly coupled
with <i>valour</i> in the same vocabulary. The comic writers, with their
poetical justice, have contributed not a little to mislead us upon
this point. To see a hectoring fellow exposed and beaten upon the
stage, has something in it wonderfully diverting. Some people's
share of animal spirits is notoriously low and defective. It has not
strength to raise a vapour, or furnish out the wind of a tolerable
bluster. These love to be told that huffing is no part of valour.
The truest courage with them is that which is the least noisy and
obtrusive. But confront one of these silent heroes with the swaggerer
of real life, and his confidence in the theory quickly vanishes.
Pretensions do not uniformly bespeak non-performance. A modest
inoffensive deportment does not necessarily imply valour; neither does
the absence of it justify us in denying that quality. Hickman wanted
modesty—we do not mean <i>him</i> of Clarissa—but who ever doubted his
courage? Even the poets—upon whom this equitable distribution of
qualities should be most binding—have thought it agreeable to nature
to depart from the rule upon occasion. Harapha, in the "Agonistes," is
indeed a bully upon the received notions. Milton has made him at once
a blusterer, a giant, and a dastard. But Almanzor, in Dryden, talks
of driving armies singly before him—and does it. Tom Brown had a
shrewder insight into this kind of character than either of his
predecessors. He divides the palm more equably, and allows his hero
a sort of dimidiate pre-eminence:—"Bully Dawson kicked by half
the town, and half the town kicked by Bully Dawson." This was true
distributive justice.</p>
<h4 id="id00960" style="margin-top: 2em">II.—THAT ILL-GOTTEN GAIN NEVER PROSPERS</h4>
<p id="id00961">The weakest part of mankind have this saying commonest in their mouth.
It is the trite consolation administered to the easy dupe, when he has
been tricked out of his money or estate, that the acquisition of
it will do the owner <i>no good</i>. But the rogues of this world—the
prudenter part of them, at least—know better; and, if the observation
had been as true as it is old, would not have failed by this time
to have discovered it. They have pretty sharp distinctions of the
fluctuating and the permanent. "Lightly come, lightly go," is a
proverb, which they can very well afford to leave, when they leave
little else, to the losers. They do not always find manors, got by
rapine or chicanery, insensibly to melt away, as the poets will have
it; or that all gold glides, like thawing snow, from the thief's hand
that grasps it. Church land, alienated to lay uses, was formerly
denounced to have this slippery quality. But some portions of it
somehow always stuck so fast, that the denunciators have been vain to
postpone the prophecy of refundment to a late posterity.</p>
<h4 id="id00962" style="margin-top: 2em">III.—THAT A MAN MUST NOT LAUGH AT HIS OWN JEST</h4>
<p id="id00963">The severest exaction surely ever invented upon the self-denial of
poor human nature! This is to expect a gentleman to give a treat
without partaking of it; to sit esurient at his own table, and commend
the flavour of his venison upon the absurd strength of his never
touching it himself. On the contrary, we love to see a wag <i>taste</i>
his own joke to his party; to watch a quirk, or a merry conceit,
flickering upon the lips some seconds before the tongue is delivered
of it. If it be good, fresh, and racy—begotten of the occasion; if he
that utters it never thought it before, he is naturally the first to
be tickled with it; and any suppression of such complacence we hold to
be churlish and insulting. What does it seem to imply, but that your
company is weak or foolish enough to be moved by an image or a fancy,
that shall stir you not at all, or but faintly? This is exactly the
humour of the fine gentleman in Mandeville, who, while he dazzles his
guests with the display of some costly toy, affects himself to "see
nothing considerable in it."</p>
<h4 id="id00964" style="margin-top: 2em">IV.—THAT SUCH A ONE SHOWS HIS BREEDING.—THAT IT IS EASY TO PERCEIVE
HE IS NO GENTLEMAN</h4>
<p id="id00965">A speech from the poorer sort of people, which always indicates that
the party vituperated is a gentleman. The very fact which they deny,
is that which galls and exasperates them to use this language. The
forbearance with which it is usually received, is a proof what
interpretation the bystander sets upon it. Of a kin to this, and still
less politic, are the phrases with which, in their street rhetoric,
they ply one another more grossly:—<i>He is a poor creature.</i>—<i>He has
not a rag to cover</i>—<i>&c.</i>; though this last, we confess, is more
frequently applied by females to females. They do not perceive that
the satire glances upon themselves. A poor man, of all things in
the world, should not upbraid an antagonist with poverty. Are there
no other topics—as, to tell him his father was hanged—his sister,
&c.—, without exposing a secret, which should be kept snug between
them; and doing an affront to the order to which they have the honour
equally to belong? All this while they do not see how the wealthier
man stands by and laughs in his sleeve at both.</p>
<h4 id="id00966" style="margin-top: 2em">V.—THAT THE POOR COPY THE VICES OF THE RICH</h4>
<p id="id00967">A smooth text to the latter; and, preached from the pulpit, is sure of
a docile audience from the pews lined with satin. It is twice sitting
upon velvet to a foolish squire to be told, that <i>he</i>—and not
<i>perverse nature</i>, as the homilies would make us imagine, is the true
cause of all the irregularities in his parish. This is striking at the
root of free-will indeed, and denying the originality of sin in any
sense. But men are not such implicit sheep as this comes to. If the
abstinence from evil on the part of the upper classes is to derive
itself from no higher principle, than the apprehension of setting
ill patterns to the lower, we beg leave to discharge them from
all squeamishness on that score: they may even take their fill of
pleasures, where they can find them. The Genius of Poverty, hampered
and straitened as it is, is not so barren of invention but it can
trade upon the staple of its own vice, without drawing upon their
capital. The poor are not quite such servile imitators as they take
them for. Some of them are very clever artists in their way. Here and
there we find an original. Who taught the poor to steal, to pilfer?
They did not go to the great for schoolmasters in these faculties
surely. It is well if in some vices they allow us to be—no copyists.
In no other sense is it true that the poor copy them, than as servants
may be said to <i>take after</i> their masters and mistresses, when
they succeed to their reversionary cold meats. If the master, from
indisposition or some other cause, neglect his food, the servant dines
notwithstanding.</p>
<p id="id00968">"O, but (some will say) the force of example is great." We knew a lady
who was so scrupulous on this head, that she would put up with the
calls of the most impertinent visitor, rather than let her servant say
she was not at home, for fear of teaching her maid to tell an untruth;
and this in the very face of the fact, which she knew well enough,
that the wench was one of the greatest liars upon the earth without
teaching; so much so, that her mistress possibly never heard two words
of consecutive truth from her in her life. But nature must go for
nothing: example must be every thing. This liar in grain, who never
opened her mouth without a lie, must be guarded against a remote
inference, which she (pretty casuist!) might possibly draw from a form
of words—literally false, but essentially deceiving no one—that
under some circumstances a fib might not be so exceedingly sinful—a
fiction, too, not at all in her own way, or one that she could be
suspected of adopting, for few servant-wenches care to be denied to
visitors.</p>
<p id="id00969">This word <i>example</i> reminds us of another fine word which is in use
upon these occasions—<i>encouragement</i>. "People in our sphere must
not be thought to give encouragement to such proceedings." To such
a frantic height is this principle capable of being carried, that
we have known individuals who have thought it within the scope of
their influence to sanction despair, and give <i>éclat</i> to—suicide. A
domestic in the family of a county member lately deceased, for love,
or some unknown cause, cut his throat, but not successfully. The poor
fellow was otherwise much loved and respected; and great interest was
used in his behalf, upon his recovery, that he might be permitted
to retain his place; his word being first pledged, not without some
substantial sponsors to promise for him, than the like should never
happen again. His master was inclinable to keep him, but his mistress
thought otherwise; and John in the end was dismissed, her ladyship
declaring that she "could not think of encouraging any such doings in
the county."</p>
<h4 id="id00970" style="margin-top: 2em">VI.—THAT ENOUGH IS AS GOOD AS A FEAST</h4>
<p id="id00971">Not a man, woman, or child in ten miles round Guildhall, who really
believes this saying. The inventor of it did not believe it himself.
It was made in revenge by somebody, who was disappointed of a regale.
It is a vile cold-scrag-of-mutton sophism; a lie palmed upon the
palate, which knows better things. If nothing else could be said for
a feast, this is sufficient, that from the superflux there is usually
something left for the next day. Morally interpreted, it belongs to
a class of proverbs, which have a tendency to make us undervalue
<i>money</i>. Of this cast are those notable observations, that money is
not health; riches cannot purchase every thing: the metaphor which
makes gold to be mere muck, with the morality which traces fine
clothing to the sheep's back, and denounces pearl as the unhandsome
excretion of an oyster. Hence, too, the phrase which imputes dirt to
acres—a sophistry so barefaced, that even the literal sense of it is
true only in a wet season. This, and abundance of similar sage saws
assuming to inculcate <i>content</i>, we verily believe to have been the
invention of some cunning borrower, who had designs upon the purse of
his wealthier neighbour, which he could only hope to carry by force of
these verbal jugglings. Translate any one of these sayings out of the
artful metonyme which envelops it, and the trick is apparent. Goodly
legs and shoulders of mutton, exhilarating cordials, books, pictures,
the opportunities of seeing foreign countries, independence, heart's
ease, a man's own time to himself, are not <i>muck</i>—however we may be
pleased to scandalise with that appellation the faithful metal that
provides them for us.</p>
<h4 id="id00972" style="margin-top: 2em">VII.—OF TWO DISPUTANTS, THE WARMEST IS GENERALLY IN THE WRONG</h4>
<p id="id00973">Our experience would lead us to quite an opposite conclusion. Temper,
indeed, is no test of truth; but warmth and earnestness are a proof
at least of a man's own conviction of the rectitude of that which
he maintains. Coolness is as often the result of an unprincipled
indifference to truth or falsehood, as of a sober confidence in a
man's own side in a dispute. Nothing is more insulting sometimes than
the appearance of this philosophic temper. There is little Titubus,
the stammering law-stationer in Lincoln's Inn—we have seldom known
this shrewd little fellow engaged in an argument where we were not
convinced he had the best of it, if his tongue would but fairly have
seconded him. When he has been spluttering excellent broken sense
for an hour together, writhing and labouring to be delivered of the
point of dispute—the very gist of the controversy knocking at his
teeth, which like some obstinate iron-grating still obstructed its
deliverance—his puny frame convulsed, and face reddening all over at
an unfairness in the logic which he wanted articulation to expose, it
has moved our gall to see a smooth portly fellow of an adversary, that
cared not a button for the merits of the question, by merely laying
his hand upon the head of the stationer, and desiring him to be <i>calm</i>
(your tall disputants have always the advantage), with a provoking
sneer carry the argument clean from him in the opinion of all the
bystanders, who have gone away clearly convinced that Titubus must
have been in the wrong, because he was in a passion; and that Mr.——,
meaning his opponent, is one of the fairest, and at the same time one
of the most dispassionate arguers breathing.</p>
<h4 id="id00974" style="margin-top: 2em">VIII.—THAT VERBAL ALLUSIONS ARE NOT WIT, BECAUSE THEY WILL NOT BEAR A
TRANSLATION</h4>
<p id="id00975">The same might be said of the wittiest local allusions. A custom is
sometimes as difficult to explain to a foreigner as a pun. What would
become of a great part of the wit of the last age, if it were tried by
this test? How would certain topics, as aldermanity, cuckoldry, have
sounded to a Terentian auditory, though Terence himself had been alive
to translate them? <i>Senator urbanus</i>, with <i>Curruca</i> to boot for a
synonime, would but faintly have done the business. Words, involving
notions, are hard enough to render; it is too much to expect us to
translate a sound, and give an elegant version to a jingle. The
Virgilian harmony is not translatable, but by substituting harmonious
sounds in another language for it. To Latinise a pun, we must seek
a pun in Latin, that will answer to it; as, to give an idea of the
double endings in Hudibras, we must have recourse to a similar
practice in the old monkish doggrel. Dennis, the fiercest oppugner of
puns in ancient or modern times, professes himself highly tickled
with the "a stick" chiming to "ecclesiastic." Yet what is this but a
species of pun, a verbal consonance?</p>
<h4 id="id00976" style="margin-top: 2em">IX.—THAT THE WORST PUNS ARE THE BEST</h4>
<p id="id00977">If by worst be only meant the most far-fetched and startling, we agree
to it. A pun is not bound by the laws which limit nicer wit. It is a
pistol let off at the ear; not a feather to tickle the intellect. It
is an antic which does not stand upon manners, but comes bounding into
the presence, and does not show the less comic for being dragged in
sometimes by the head and shoulders. What though it limp a little, or
prove defective in one leg—all the better. A pun may easily be too
curious and artificial. Who has not at one time or other been at a
party of professors (himself perhaps an old offender in that line),
where, after ringing a round of the most ingenious conceits, every man
contributing his shot, and some there the most expert shooters of the
day; after making a poor <i>word</i> run the gauntlet till it is ready to
drop; after hunting and winding it through all the possible ambages of
similar sounds; after squeezing, and hauling, and tugging at it, till
the very milk of it will not yield a drop further,—suddenly some
obscure, unthought-of fellow in a corner, who was never 'prentice
to the trade, whom the company for very pity passed over, as we
do by a known poor man when a money-subscription is going round,
no one calling upon him for his quota—has all at once come out
with something so whimsical, yet so pertinent; so brazen in its
pretensions, yet so impossible to be denied; so exquisitely good,
and so deplorably bad, at the same time,—that it has proved a Robin
Hood's shot; any thing ulterior to that is despaired of; and the party
breaks up, unanimously voting it to be the very worst (that is, best)
pun of the evening. This species of wit is the better for not being
perfect in all its parts. What it gains in completeness, it loses in
naturalness. The more exactly it satisfies the critical, the less hold
it has upon some other faculties. The puns which are most entertaining
are those which will least bear an analysis. Of this kind is the
following, recorded, with a sort of stigma, in one of Swift's
Miscellanies.</p>
<p id="id00978">An Oxford scholar, meeting a porter who was carrying a hare through
the streets, accosts him with this extraordinary question: "Prithee,
friend, is that thy own hare, or a wig?"</p>
<p id="id00979">There is no excusing this, and no resisting it. A man might blur ten
sides of paper in attempting a defence of it against a critic who
should be laughter-proof. The quibble in itself is not considerable.
It is only a new turn given, by a little false pronunciation, to a
very common, though not very courteous inquiry. Put by one gentleman
to another at a dinner-party, it would have been vapid; to the
mistress of the house, it would have shown much less wit than
rudeness. We must take in the totality of time, place, and person;
the pert look of the inquiring scholar, the desponding looks of the
puzzled porter; the one stopping at leisure, the other hurrying on
with his burthen; the innocent though rather abrupt tendency of
the first member of the question, with the utter and inextricable
irrelevancy of the second; the place—a public street, not favourable
to frivolous investigations; the affrontive quality of the primitive
inquiry (the common question) invidiously transferred to the
derivative (the new turn given to it) in the implied satire; namely,
that few of that tribe are expected to eat of the good things which
they carry, they being in most countries considered rather as the
temporary trustees than owners of such dainties,—which the fellow was
beginning to understand; but then the <i>wig</i> again comes in, and he can
make nothing of it: all put together constitute a picture: Hogarth
could have made it intelligible on canvass.</p>
<p id="id00980">Yet nine out of ten critics will pronounce this a very bad pun,
because of the defectiveness in the concluding member, which is its
very beauty, and constitutes the surprise. The same persons shall
cry up for admirable the cold quibble from Virgil about the broken
Cremona;[1] because it is made out in all its parts, and leaves
nothing to the imagination. We venture to call it cold; because of
thousands who have admired it, it would be difficult to find one who
has heartily chuckled at it. As appealing to the judgment merely
(setting the risible faculty aside,) we must pronounce it a monument
of curious felicity. But as some stories are said to be too good to be
true, it may with equal truth be asserted of this bi-verbal allusion,
that it is too good to be natural. One cannot help suspecting that the
incident was invented to fit the line. It would have been better had
it been less perfect. Like some Virgilian hemistichs, it has suffered
by filling up. The <i>nimium Vicina</i> was enough in conscience; the
<i>Cremonæ</i> afterwards loads it. It is in fact a double pun; and we
have always observed that a superfoetation in this sort of wit is
dangerous. When a man has said a good thing, it is seldom politic to
follow it up. We do not care to be cheated a second time; or, perhaps,
the mind of man (with reverence be it spoken) is not capacious enough
to lodge two puns at a time. The impression, to be forcible, must be
simultaneous and undivided.</p>
<p id="id00981">[Footnote 1: Swift.]</p>
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