It is my habit to give an account to myself of the characters I meet
with: can I give any true account of my own? I am a bachelor, without
domestic distractions of any sort, and have all my life been an
attentive companion to myself, flattering my nature agreeably on
plausible occasions, reviling it rather bitterly when it mortified me, and in general remembering its doings and sufferings with a tenacity which is too apt to raise surprise if not disgust at the careless inaccuracy of my acquaintances, who impute to me opinions I never held, express their desire to convert me to my favourite ideas, forget whether I have ever been to the East, and are capable of being three several times astonished at my never having told them before of my accident in the Alps, causing me the nervous shock which has ever since notably diminished my digestive powers. Surely I ought to know myself better than these indifferent outsiders can know me; nay, better even than my intimate friends, to whom I have never breathed those items of my inward experience which have chiefly shaped my life.
Yet I have often been forced into the reflection that even the
acquaintances who are as forgetful of my biography and tenets as they
would be if I were a dead philosopher, are probably aware of certain
points in me which may not be included in my most active suspicion. We
sing an exquisite passage out of tune and innocently repeat it for the
greater pleasure of our hearers. Who can be aware of what his foreign
accent is in the ears of a native? And how can a man be conscious of
that dull perception which causes him to mistake altogether what will
make him agreeable to a particular woman, and to persevere eagerly in a
behaviour which she is privately recording against him? I have had some
confidences from my female friends as to their opinion of other men whom
I have observed trying to make themselves amiable, and it has occurred
to me that though I can hardly be so blundering as Lippus and the rest
of those mistaken candidates for favour whom I have seen ruining their
chance by a too elaborate personal canvass, I must still come under the
common fatality of mankind and share the liability to be absurd without
knowing that I am absurd. It is in the nature of foolish reasoning to
seem good to the foolish reasoner. Hence with all possible study of
myself, with all possible effort to escape from the pitiable illusion
which makes men laugh, shriek, or curl the lip at Folly's likeness, in
total unconsciousness that it resembles themselves, I am obliged to
recognise that while there are secrets in me unguessed by others, these
others have certain items of knowledge about the extent of my powers and
the figure I make with them, which in turn are secrets unguessed by me. When I was a lad I danced a hornpipe with arduous scrupulosity, and while suffering pangs of pallid shyness was yet proud of my superiority as a dancing pupil, imagining for myself a high place in the estimation of beholders; but I can now picture the amusement they had in the incongruity of my solemn face and ridiculous legs. What sort of hornpipe am I dancing now?
Thus if I laugh at you, O fellow-men! if I trace with curious interest
your labyrinthine self-delusions, note the inconsistencies in your
zealous adhesions, and smile at your helpless endeavours in a rashly
chosen part, it is not that I feel myself aloof from you: the more
intimately I seem to discern your weaknesses, the stronger to me is the
proof that I share them. How otherwise could I get the discernment?—for
even what we are averse to, what we vow not to entertain, must have
shaped or shadowed itself within us as a possibility before we can think
of exorcising it. No man can know his brother simply as a spectator. Dear blunderers, I am one of you. I wince at the fact, but I am not ignorant of it, that I too am laughable on unsuspected occasions; nay, in the very tempest and whirlwind of my anger, I include myself under my own indignation. If the human race has a bad reputation, I perceive that I cannot escape being compromised. And thus while I carry in myself the key to other men's experience, it is only by observing others that I can so far correct my self-ignorance as to arrive at the certainty that I am liable to commit myself unawares and to manifest some incompetency which I know no more of than the blind man knows of his image in the glass.