[Footnote 1: _Translator's Note_.--Moritz was a miscellaneous writer of the last century (1757-93). His _Anton Reiser_, composed in the form of a novel, is practically an autobiography.]
In our early days we fancy that the leading events in our life, and the persons who are going to play an important part in it, will make their entrance to the sound of drums and trumpets; but when, in old age, we look back, we find that they all came in quite quietly, slipped in, as it were, by the side-door, almost unnoticed.
From the point of view we have been taking up until now, life may be compared to a piece of embroidery, of which, during the first half of his time, a man gets a sight of the right side, and during the second half, of the wrong. The wrong side is not so pretty as the right, but it is more instructive; it shows the way in which the threads have been worked together.
Intellectual superiority, even if it is of the highest kind, will not secure for a man a preponderating place in conversation until after he is forty years of age. For age and experience, though they can never be a substitute for intellectual talent, may far outweigh it; and even in a person of the meanest capacity, they give a certain counterpoise to the power of an extremely intellectual man, so long as the latter is young. Of course I allude here to personal superiority, not to the place a man may gain by his works.
And on passing his fortieth year, any man of the slightest power of mind--any man, that is, who has more than the sorry share of intellect with which Nature has endowed five-sixths of mankind--will hardly fail to show some trace of misanthropy. For, as is natural, he has by that time inferred other people's character from an examination of his own; with the result that he has been gradually disappointed to find that in the qualities of the head or in those of the heart--and usually in both--he reaches a level to which they do not attain; so he gladly avoids having anything more to do with them. For it may be said, in general, that every man will love or hate solitude--in other Words, his own society--just in proportion as he is worth anything in himself. Kant has some remarks upon this kind of misanthropy in his _Critique of the Faculty of Judgment_.[1]