Certainly if a bad-tempered man can be admirably virtuous, he must be so under extreme difficulties.  I doubt the possibility that a high order of character can coexist with a temper like Touchwood’s.  For it is of the nature of such temper to interrupt the formation of healthy mental habits, which depend on a growing harmony between perception, conviction, and impulse.  There may be good feelings, good deeds—­for a human nature may pack endless varieties and blessed inconsistencies in its windings—­but it is essential to what is worthy to be called high character, that it may be safely calculated on, and that its qualities shall have taken the form of principles or laws habitually, if not perfectly, obeyed.

If a man frequently passes unjust judgments, takes up false attitudes, intermits his acts of kindness with rude behaviour or cruel words, and falls into the consequent vulgar error of supposing that he can make amends by laboured agreeableness, I cannot consider such courses any the less ugly because they are ascribed to “temper.”  Especially I object to the assumption that his having a fundamentally good disposition is either an apology or a compensation for his bad behaviour.  If his temper yesterday made him lash the horses, upset the curricle and cause a breakage in my rib, I feel it no compensation that to-day he vows he will drive me anywhere in the gentlest manner any day as long as he lives.  Yesterday was what it was, my rib is paining me, it is not a main object of my life to be driven by Touchwood—­and I have no confidence in his lifelong gentleness.  The utmost form of placability I am capable of is to try and remember his better deeds already performed, and, mindful of my own offences, to bear him no malice.  But I cannot accept his amends.

If the bad-tempered man wants to apologise he had need to do it on a large public scale, make some beneficent discovery, produce some stimulating work of genius, invent some powerful process—­prove himself such a good to contemporary multitudes and future generations, as to make the discomfort he causes his friends and acquaintances a vanishing quality, a trifle even in their own estimate.

VII.

A POLITICAL MOLECULE.

The most arrant denier must admit that a man often furthers larger ends than he is conscious of, and that while he is transacting his particular affairs with the narrow pertinacity of a respectable ant, he subserves an economy larger than any purpose of his own.  Society is happily not dependent for the growth of fellowship on the small minority already endowed with comprehensive sympathy:  any molecule of the body politic working towards his own interest in an orderly way gets his understanding more or less penetrated with the fact that his interest is included in that of a large number.  I have watched several political molecules being educated in this way by the nature of things into a faint feeling of fraternity.