TRUTH-HUNTING

Is truth-hunting one of those active mental habits which, as Bishop Butler tells us, intensify their effects by constant use; and are weak convictions, paralyzed intellects, and laxity of opinions amongst the effects of Truth-hunting on the majority of minds?  These are not unimportant questions.

Let us consider briefly the probable effects of speculative habits on conduct.

The discussion of a question of conduct has the great charm of justifying, if indeed not requiring, personal illustration; and this particular question is well illustrated by instituting a comparison between the life and character of Charles Lamb and those of some of his distinguished friends.

Personal illustration, especially when it proceeds by way of comparison, is always dangerous, and the dangers are doubled when the subjects illustrated and compared are favorite authors.  It behoves us to proceed warily in this matter.  A dispute as to the respective merits of Gray and Collins has been known to result in a visit to an attorney and the revocation of a will.  An avowed inability to see anything in Miss Austen’s novels is reported to have proved destructive of an otherwise good chance of an Indian judgeship.  I believe, however, I run no great risk in asserting that, of all English authors, Charles Lamb is the one loved most warmly and emotionally by his admirers, amongst whom I reckon only those who are as familiar with the four volumes of his ’Life and Letters’ as with ‘Elia.’

But how does he illustrate the particular question now engaging our attention?

Speaking of his sister Mary, who, as every one knows, throughout ‘Elia’ is called his cousin Bridget, he says:—­

“It has been the lot of my cousin, oftener perhaps than I could have wished, to have had for her associates and mine free-thinkers, leaders and disciples of novel philosophies and systems; but she neither wrangles with nor accepts their opinions.”

Nor did her brother.  He lived his life cracking his little jokes and reading his great folios, neither wrangling with nor accepting the opinions of the friends he loved to see around him.  To a contemporary stranger it might well have appeared as if his life were a frivolous and useless one as compared with those of these philosophers and thinkers. They discussed their great schemes and affected to prove deep mysteries, and were constantly asking, “What is truth?” He sipped his glass, shuffled his cards, and was content with the humbler inquiry, “What are trumps?” But to us, looking back upon that little group, and knowing what we now do about each member of it, no such mistake is possible.  To us it is plain beyond all question that, judged by whatever standard of excellence it is possible for any reasonable human being to take, Lamb stands head and shoulders a better man than any of them.  No need to stop to compare him with Godwin, or Hazlitt, or Lloyd; let us boldly put him in the scales with one whose fame is in all the churches—­with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “logician, metaphysician, bard.”