POPULAR FALLACIES

I.—­THAT A BULLY IS ALWAYS A COWARD

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 brutality sometimes awkwardly coupled with valour 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 him 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.

II.—­THAT ILL-GOTTEN GAIN NEVER PROSPERS

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 no good.  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.