by Andrew Lynn
287. Never act in a Passion.
If you do, all is lost. You cannot act for yourself if you are not yourself, and passion always drives out reason. In such cases interpose a prudent go-between who can only be prudent if he keeps cool. That is why lookers-on see most of the game, because they keep cool. As soon as you notice that you are losing your temper beat a wise retreat. For no sooner is the blood up than it is spilt, and in a few moments occasion may be given for many days’ repentance for oneself and complaints of the other party.
288. Live for the Moment.
Our acts and thoughts and all must be determined by circumstances. Will when you may, for time and tide wait for no man. Do not live by certain fixed rules, except those that relate to the cardinal virtues. Nor let your will subscribe fixed conditions, for you may have to drink the water tomorrow which you cast away today. There be some so absurdly paradoxical that they expect all the circumstances of an action should bend to their eccentric whims and not vice versa. The wise man knows that the very polestar of prudence lies in steering by the wind.
297. Always act as if your Acts were seen.
He must see all around who sees that men see him or will see him. He knows that walls have ears and that ill deeds rebound back. Even when alone he acts as if the eyes of the whole world were upon him. For as he knows that sooner or later all will be known, so he considers those to be present as witnesses who must afterwards hear of the deed. He that wished the whole world might always see him did not mind that his neighbours could see him over their walls.
* * *
Charles V. ↵
Archaic: resistance or reaction roused by opposition or by the action of an opposite principle or quality. ↵
Without a dissenting vote. ↵
8
William Hazlitt, On Success
Introduction
‘Success’ literature typically displays a tendency that is at best idealistic, and at worst borderline dishonest.
It tells us to plan our time more effectively.
It tells us to develop our emotional intelligence.
It tells us to work harder, smarter, and more purposefully.
What the many rogues, chancers, and ne’er-do-wells who have progressed so handsomely in the world know is that this advice is, and has always been, a distraction from what really matters. Life has never been fair, predictable, or rational. The rules governing our advancement in the world follow quite another logic.
It is, however, rare for this logic to be spelt out – which is what makes William Hazlitt’s ‘On the Qualifications Necessary for Success’ such an exceptional contribution to the underappreciated art of telling unsettling truths.
Hazlitt’s first major insight is that people succeed in life as much through the qualifications they lack as through those they in fact possess. The way to secure success, he suggests, is to focus on obtaining it – rather than on deserving it. Pursuit of perfection only gets in the way; it is an obstacle to completing works, and beyond a certain point it only yields diminishing returns that cannot be appreciated by ordinary men. Breadth of talent doesn’t help much either – to do anything well there should be ‘an exclusiveness, a concentration, a bigotry, a blindness of attachment to that one object’. If you wish for success, strive to be the ‘dull plodding man’; by being content with narrow mediocrity you are more likely to advance beyond it.
The second ingredient of success is what Hazlitt calls ‘constitutional talent’ – the vigour given to a man’s ideas and pursuits by his bodily stamina and physical condition. It is better by far to have a weak mind in a sound body, says Hazlitt, than a sound mind and weak body. The man in robust physical condition ‘shall strut and swagger and vapour and jostle his way through life, and have the upper-hand of those who are his betters in everything but health and strength’. The physically weak man, on the other hand, can never cast away his uneasy sense of personal insignificance and weakness. It avails little that there may be internal qualities since all that the observer sees is the exterior man. It is a man’s strong body and vigorous constitution that is the best guarantor – and also the best criterion – of his progress through life.
The third ingredient is what Hazlitt calls ‘animal spirits and showy accomplishment’. The world pays dividends to those who thrust themselves forward with aplomb: what wins out is not merely confidence but actual active impudence – the assumption of merit that is taken by observers to indicate its actual possession. Others take on trust the opinion we have of ourselves. The important thing is not to doubt your own pretensions, because providing you don’t doubt yourself, no one else is likely to doubt you either. ‘If you keep your own secret,’ says Hazlitt, ‘be assured the world will keep it for you.’
What’s valuable about Hazlitt’s perspective is its intense familiarity with the realities of life. The posture he adopts is not that of the lofty thinker peering down from his philosophical perch on a remote and inferior world. Instead, he throws us into the scrum of humanity: its arbitrariness, its hypocrisy, its cruelty, and its stupidity. And yet the tone of his essay is ultimately one of acknowledgement rather than of total rejection. The world of men is very far from perfect, the author seems to say. But it is our world. And it is a world that has its own comprehensible – if troubled – logic.
* * *
On Success
It is curious to consider the diversity of men’s talents, and the causes of their failure or success, which are not less numerous and contradictory than their pursuits in life. Fortune does not always smile on merit – ‘the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong’; and even where the candidate for wealth or honours succeeds, it is as often, perhaps, from the qualifications which he wants as from those which he possesses; or the eminence which he is lucky enough to attain is owing to some faculty or acquirement, which neither he nor any body else suspected. There is a balance of power in the human mind, by which defects frequently assist in furthering our views, as superfluous excellences are converted into the nature of impediments; and again, there is a continual substitution of one talent for another, through which we mistake the appearance for the reality, and judge (by implication) of the means from the end. So a Minister of State wields the House of Commons by his manner alone; while his friends and his foes are equally at a loss to account for his influence, looking for it in vain in the matter or style of his speeches. So the air with which a celebrated barrister waved a white cambric handkerchief passed for eloquence. So the buffoon is taken for a wit. To be thought wise, it is for the most part only necessary to seem so; and the noisy demagogue is easily translated, by the popular voice, into the orator and patriot. Qualities take their colour from those that are next them, as the chameleon borrows its hue from the nearest object; and unable otherwise to grasp the phantom of our choice or our ambition, we do well to lay violent hands on something else within our reach, which bears a general resemblance to it; and the impression of which, in proportion as the thing itself is cheap and worthless, is likely to be gross, obvious, striking, and effectual. The way to secure success is to be more anxious about obtaining than about deserving it; the surest hindrance to it is to have too high a standard of refinement in our own minds, or too high an opinion of the discernment of the public. He who is determined not to be satisfied with any thing short of perfection will never do any thing at all, either to please himself or others. The question is not what we ought to do, but what we can do for the best. An excess of modesty is, in fact, an excess of pride, and more hurtful to the individual, and less advantageous to society, than the grossest and most unblushing vanity –
Aspiring to be Gods, if angels fell,
Aspiring to be angels, men rebel.
If a celebrated artist in our own day had stayed to do justice to his principal figure in a generally admired painting before he had exhibited it, it would never have seen the light. He has passed on to other things more within his power to accomplish, and more within the competence of the spectators
to understand. They see what he has done, which is a great deal – they could not have judged of, or given him credit for the ineffable idea in his own mind, which he might vainly have devoted his whole life in endeavouring to embody. The picture, as it is, is good enough for the age and for the public. If it had been ten times better, its merits would have been thrown away: if it had been ten times better in the more refined and lofty conception of character and sentiment, and had failed in the more palpable appeal to the senses and prejudices of the vulgar, in the usual ‘appliances and means to boot’, it would never have done. The work might have been praised by a few, a very few, and the artist himself have pined in penury and neglect. Mr Wordsworth has given us the essence of poetry in his works, without the machinery, the apparatus of poetical diction, the theatrical pomp, the conventional ornaments; and we see what he has made of it. The way to fame through merit alone is the narrowest, the steepest, the longest, the hardest of all others – that it is the most certain and lasting, is even a doubt – the most sterling reputation is, after all, but a species of imposture. As for ordinary cases of success and failure, they depend on the slightest shades of character or turn of accident – ‘some trick not worth an egg’ –
There’s but the twinkling of a star
Betwixt a man of peace and war;
A thief and justice, fool and knave,
A huffing officer and a slave;
A crafty lawyer and pickpocket,
A great philosopher and a blockhead;
A formal preacher and a player,
A learn’d physician and manslayer.
Men are in numberless instances qualified for certain things for no other reason than because they are qualified for nothing else. Negative merit is the passport to negative success. In common life, the narrowness of our ideas and appetites is more favourable to the accomplishment of our designs, by confining our attention and ambition to one single object, than a greater enlargement of comprehension or susceptibility of taste, which (as far as the trammels of custom and routine of business are concerned) only operate as diversions to our ensuring the main chance; and, even in the pursuit of arts and science, a dull plodding fellow will often do better than one of a more mercurial and fiery cast – the mere unconsciousness of his own deficiencies, or of any thing beyond what he himself can do, reconciles him to his mechanical progress, and enables him to perform all that lies in his power with labour and patience. By being content with mediocrity, he advances beyond it; whereas the man of greater taste or genius may be supposed to fling down his pen or pencil in despair, haunted with the idea of unattainable excellence, and ends in being nothing, because he cannot be every thing at once. Those even who have done the greatest things were not always perhaps the greatest men. To do any given work, a man should not be greater in himself than the work he has to do; the faculties which he has beyond this will be faculties to let, either not used, or used idly and unprofitably, to hinder, not to help. To do any one thing best, there should be an exclusiveness, a concentration, a bigotry, a blindness of attachment to that one object; so that the widest range of knowledge and most diffusive subtlety of intellect will not uniformly produce the most beneficial results; and the performance is very frequently in the inverse ratio, not only of the pretensions, as we might superficially conclude, but of the real capacity. A part is greater than the whole: and this old saying seems to hold true in moral and intellectual questions also – in nearly all that relates to the mind of man, which cannot embrace the whole, but only a part.
I do not think (to give an instance or two of what I mean) that Milton’s mind was (so to speak) greater than the Paradise Lost; it was just big enough to fill that mighty mould, the shrine contained the Godhead. Shakespeare’s genius was, I should say, greater than any thing he has done, because it still soared free and unconfined beyond whatever he undertook – ran over, and could not be ‘constrained by mastery’ of his subject. Goldsmith, in his Retaliation, celebrates Burke as one who was kept back in his dazzling, wayward career, by the supererogation of his talents –
Though equal to all things, for all things unfit,
Too nice for a statesman, too proud for a wit.
Dr. Johnson, in Boswell’s Life, tells us that the only person whose conversation he ever sought for improvement was George Psalmanazar: yet who knows any thing of this extraordinary man now, but that he wrote about twenty volumes of the Universal History – invented a Formosan alphabet and vocabulary – being a really learned man, contrived to pass for an impostor, and died no one knows how or where! The well-known author of the Enquiry Concerning Political Justice[1] in conversation has not a word to throw at a dog; all the stores of his understanding or genius he reserves for his books, and he has need of them, otherwise there would be hiatus in manuscripts. He says little, and that little were better left alone, being both dull and nonsensical; his talk is as flat as a pancake, there is no leaven in it, he has not dough enough to make a loaf and a cake; he has no idea of any thing till he is wound up, like a clock, not to speak, but to write, and then he seems like a person risen from sleep or from the dead. The author of the Diversions of Purley,[2] on the other hand, besides being the inventor of the theory of grammar, was a politician, a wit, a master of conversation, and overflowing with an interminable babble – that fellow had cut and come again in him, and
Tongue with a garnish of brains;
but it only served as an excuse to cheat posterity of the definition of a verb, by one of those conversational ruses de guerre by which he put off his guests at Wimbledon with some teasing equivoque[3] which he would explain the next time they met – and made him die at last with a nostrum in his mouth! The late Professor Porson was said to be a match for the Member for Old Sarum[4] in argument and raillery – he was a profound scholar, and had wit at will – yet what did it come to? His jests have evaporated with the marks of the wine on the tavern table; the page of Thucydides or Aeschylus, which was stamped on his brain, and which he could read there with equal facility backwards or forwards, is contained, after his death, as it was while he lived, just as well in the volume on the library shelf. The man[5] of perhaps the greatest ability now living is the one who has not only done the least, but who is actually incapable of ever doing any thing worthy of him – unless he had a hundred hands to write with, and a hundred mouths to utter all that it hath entered into his heart to conceive, and centuries before him to embody the endless volume of his waking dreams. Cloud rolls over cloud; one train of thought suggests and is driven away by another; theory after theory is spun out of the bowels of his brain, not like the spider’s web, compact and round, a citadel and a snare, built for mischief and for use; but, like the gossamer, stretched out and entangled without end, clinging to every casual object, flitting in the idle air, and glittering only in the ray of fancy. No subject can come amiss to him, and he is alike attracted and alike indifferent to all – he is not tied down to any one in particular – but floats from one to another, his mind every where finding its level, and feeling no limit but that of thought – now soaring with its head above the stars, now treading with fairy feet among flowers, now winnowing the air with winged words – passing from Duns Scotus to Jacob Behmen, from the Kantean philosophy to a conundrum, and from the Apocalypse to an acrostic – taking in the whole range of poetry, painting, wit, history, politics, metaphysics, criticism, and private scandal – every question giving birth to some new thought, and every thought ‘discoursed in eloquent music’, that lives only in the ear of fools, or in the report of absent friends. Set him to write a book, and he belies all that has been ever said about him –
Ten thousand great ideas filled his mind,
But with the clouds they fled, and left no trace behind.
Now there is _________, who never had an idea in his life, and who therefore has never been prevented by the fastidious refinements of self-knowledge, or the dangerous seductions of the Muse, from succeeding in a number of things which he has attempted, to the
utmost extent of his dullness, and contrary to the advice and opinion of all his friends. He has written a book without being able to spell, by dint of asking questions – has painted draperies with great exactness, which have passed for finished portraits – daubs in an unaccountable figure or two, with a back-ground, and on due deliberation calls it history – he is dubbed an Associate after being twenty times black-balled, wins his way to the highest honours of the Academy, through all the gradations of discomfiture and disgrace, and may end in being made a foreign Count! And yet (such is the principle of distributive justice in matters of taste) he is just where he was. Non ex quovis lingo fit Mercurius.[6] Having once got an idea of _________, it is impossible that any thing he can do should ever alter it – though he were to paint like Raphael and Michelangelo, no one in the secret would give him credit for it, and ‘though he had all knowledge, and could speak with the tongues of angels’, yet without genius he would be nothing. The original sin of being what he is renders his good works and most meritorious efforts null and void. ‘You cannot gather grapes of thorns, nor figs of thistles.’ Nature still prevails over art. You look at _________, as you do at a curious machine, which performs certain puzzling operations, and as your surprise ceases, gradually unfolds other powers which you would little expect – but do what it will, it is but a machine still; the thing is without a soul!
Respice finem,[7] is the great rule in all practical pursuits: to attain our journey’s end, we should look little to the right or to the left; the knowledge of excellence as often deters and distracts, as it stimulates the mind to exertion; and hence we may see some reason why the general diffusion of taste and liberal arts is not always accompanied with an increase of individual genius.