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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



verse, that coming generations would be pro- 

 foundly interested in the analysis of her character 

 and the genesis of her works, and also that the 

 merits of her contemporaries might be accurately 

 gauged by the extent to which they did or did 

 not sympathize with Harriet Martineau. Is not 

 egotism of this kind mere vanity disguised by a 

 superficial air of impartiality ? Take the vanity, 

 again, which is revealed so curiously in the re- 

 cently-published letters of Balzac. Here it be- 

 comes a force which leads a man to reckon him- 

 self among the four greatest heroes of his age, 

 and goes far to make him what he supposes him- 

 self to be. It develops a kind of monomania 

 leading to utter absorption in his own affairs, in 

 his literary ambition, and, above all, in calcula- 

 tions as to the number of francs into which his 

 genius can be coined. Was it a strength or a 

 weakness ? Contrast it with the vanity — for 

 many people will call it vanity — of his contem- 

 porary Doudan. Doudan's letters reveal to us a 

 man of that admirable fineness of intellect so 

 conspicuous in the best French writers, which 

 may be defined as the sublimated essence of com- 

 mon-sense. But his exquisite sensibility was 

 pushed to such a point as to destroy his fertility, 

 and but for his letters his name would have been 

 known to his fellows only through a passing allu- 

 sion of Sainte-Beuve. Shall we say that Balzac's 

 vanity led him to produce the " Comedie Hu- 

 maine," and Doudan's humility made him pro- 

 duce — nothing ? Then vanity is so far a good 

 and humility a bad thing. Or shall we say that 

 this excessive sensibility is but vanity disguised ? 

 — that a man who trembles before criticism 

 thinks too much of his own importance ? The 

 theory is a common one, and enables us verbally 

 to condemn vanity in all forms ; but it implicitly 

 admits, too, that vanity may produce diametri- 

 cally opposite results, and at times cooperate 

 hand-in-hand with humility. 



Infuse vanity into such a man as Goldsmith, 

 and it adds a childlike charm to his character ; 

 it gives a tinge of delightful humor to his writ- 

 ing, and enables his friends to love him the more 

 heartily because they have a right also to pay 

 themselves by a little kindly contempt. Make a 

 Byron vain, and half his magnificent force of 

 mind will be wasted by silly efforts to attract the 

 notice of his contemporaries by attacking their 

 best feelings and affecting (a superfluous task !) 

 vices which he docs not possess. The vanity of 

 a Wordsworth enables him to treat with profound 

 disdain the sneers of Edinburgh reviewers, and 

 the dull indifference of the mass of readers ; but 



it encourages him also to become a literary sloven, 

 to spoil noble thought by groveling language, and 

 to subside into supine obstructiveness. Converse- 

 ly, the vanity of a Fope makes him suffer un- 

 speakable tortures from the stings of critics com- 

 pared to whom Jeffrey was a giant, condescend 

 to the meanest artifices to catch the applause of 

 his contemporaries, and hunger and thirst for the 

 food which Wordsworth rejected with contempt. 

 But it also enables him to become within his own 

 limits the most exquisite of artists in words ; to 

 increase in skill as he increased in years ; and to 

 coin phrases for a distant posterity even out of 

 the most trifling ebullition of passing spite. The 

 vanity of a Milton excites something approaching 

 to awe. The vanity of a Congreve excites our 

 rightful contempt. Vanity seems to be at once 

 the source of the greatest weaknesses and of the 

 greatest achievements. To write a history of 

 vanity would be to write the history of the great- 

 est men of our race ; for soldiers and statesmen 

 have been as vain as poets and artists. Chatham 

 was vain ; Wolfe was vain ; Nelson was childish- 

 ly vain ; and the great Napoleon was as vain as 

 the vainest. Must not our condemnation of the 

 quality undergo some modification before we can 

 lay it down as an absolute principle ? 



If, to set aside some ambiguities, we declare 

 that man to be vain who, for whatever reason, 

 over-estimates his own merit or importance in the 

 world, we shall naturally infer that vanity is so 

 far bad as it implies an error. A man is the bet- 

 ter for knowing the truth, in this as in all other 

 cases. But we may still ask whether the error is 

 of such a nature as to deserve moral disapproval. 

 We do not blame a man because he gives the 

 wrong answer to one of those problems which 

 have tasked the ingenuity of countless thinkers 

 of the highest ability. The difficulty of discover- 

 ing the truth about one individual, especially about 

 our own individuality, is as great as the difficulty 

 of discovering the truth about a general problem 

 of philosophy and theology. The moralist who, 

 in this latter case, admits that sincerity is no 

 guarantee against error, orders men to be candid, 

 but cannot order them to arrive at right conclu- 

 sions. A mistake in judgment is not wicked, pre- 

 cisely because mistakes are the necessary conse- 

 quence of candid examination by our imperfect 

 reason. Sincerity, not infallibility, is our moral 

 duty. Similarly, it is right to judge of ourselves 

 as fairly as we can ; but the difficulties which be- 

 set the task of at once seating ourselves on the 

 bench and taking our place at the bar are so 

 great, that the least prejudiced of self-critics will 



