PRIDE AND MERIT.
IT is curious to observe how proud Mr. Stanley is of his own swift insight and resolution. In the speech at Cairo briefly reported by telegraph on Tuesday, he once more dealt, with apparently very unnecessary emphasis, and surely a cer- tain want of taste, on Emin Pasha's vacillations and the alternatives he had so peremptorily pressed upon him. Con- sidering the very critical state of Emin Pasha's health, this reversion to the subject of the hesitatingness of the one European, and the decisiveness of the other, could hardly have taken place had not Mr. Stanley's mind been very full of it,—had he not, we may say, been a little too much inclined to thank God that he was not as other men are, nor even as this Emin. Nor can there be any doubt that this clearness and peremptoriness of resolve are qualities for which Mr. Stanley has the greatest reason to be thankful. Doubtless they distinguish him amongst men as nothing else distinguishes him, though he has no occasion to be so very anxious to contrast his promptness of resolve with the German's reluctance to take his final decision, and with his sub- sequent tendency to question whether or not he had decided wrongly. In enterprises such as those of Mr. Stanley, the power to discern quickly what is, on the whole, the best course, and to adhere to a decision when taken without the smallest disposition to waver or hark back upon former doubts, are endowments worth almost all other endowments put
together. We do not blame him in the least for attaching the highest value to this promptness of discernment, and this per- fect confidence in the justness of his own decision. Without these qualities Mr. Stanley could no more have accomplished what he has accomplished, than Newton could have discovered the law of gravitation without unrivalled powers of mathemati- cal reflection, or Milton have written "Paradise Lost" without an imaginative ardour and a sense of the rhythmic felicities of speech which hardly any human being has surpassed. Mr. Stanley's pride is a fitting and reasonable pride, though it may have tempted him to indulge it in this instance at the cost of good taste, and perhaps even good manners. But we take note of it not so much in order to show that Mr.
Stanley understands how to appreciate accurately his own strong points, as to illustrate the fact that what men aec almost always, and, as we think, quite rightly, proudest of, is, not that which they can justly ascribe to their own efforts and volitions, but that which they have inherited without the smallest merit on their own part. What, for instance, men are perhaps on the whole most proud of, is their blood when they are well descended, and yet no one can say that they are in the smallest degree responsible for that ; or again of their genius or talents or physical strength if they are not well descended, and all these things are endowments, and never in any great degree due to self-culture. What women are certainly proudest of, is their beauty or grace, and neither beauty nor grace can be acquired without a considerable original gift, beauty not in any degree, and even grace in very small degree, for a grace
which is in any way artificial is not grace but a soft mannerism. As a rule, men show very distinctly how much they prefer gifts for which they can claim absolutely no merit, to gifts for the possession of which they have at least some small share of merit, by being positively indignant if they find that anybody happens to ascribe mere wealth that they have inherited from their fathers, to their own hard work. Seldom indeed is a family proud of being supposed to be " new " when it is really old ; but a family that is really " new " is generally delighted to be mistaken for an old family. That only means that a family is proud, not of having earned its own wealth, but of having had its wealth transmitted to it. And yet wealth, if it be self-made, is just one of the possessions which is in great measure due to mere effort, steady diligence, minute care, and punctual habits,—all of which are usually more or less acquired or cultivated qualities, and hardly ever the mere results of transmitted talent. That shows that men are prouder of possessions which they can prove to be inherited, and not due in any degree to their own efforts, than they are of those which they have acquired by hard service. And it is the same with women. If you admire a woman's jewels, for instance, she is twice as proud of them if she can p sove that they are heirlooms, as she is if she should have bought them herself out of her own earnings. And so, too, a great musician is a thousand times as proud of gifts of ear and touch which he can prove that he possessed as an infant, when it was simply impossible that he could have acquired them by any pains of his own, as he is of what he has made his own by hard industrious drill. The truth is, no doubt, that men regard the fruits of plodding as open to all the world, while they regard any remarkable heirloom, physical or spiritual, as distinguishing them from the rest of mankind, and as conferring upon them a distinction that is adventitious no doubt, but exactly because it is adven- titious, is also rare and significant. If Mr. Stanley had only that amount of prompt insight and alert resolve which he might have gained for himself by sedulous self-discipline, he would not be so proud of it; but thoroughly aware as he is, that it amounts in him to genius of a high order, which dis- tinguishes him far above the ordinary traveller who has to run a multitude of risks and to escape from them by presence of mind and strength of purpose, he is excessively proud of it, and loves to contrast it with the inferior endowment of another great traveller who has also distinguished himself in the same field, but distinguished himself in a very much lower degree. All the most honourable pride is pride that, if properly analysed, is strictly unselfish, that centres in what has been given us by others, not won by ourselves, like pride in our country, in our nation's achievements, in our race, in our friends, in our parents, and, of course, for the most part, even in our children, who, though they may owe much to our care in bringing out all their higher qualities and restraining all their lower qualities, owe very much more to gifts which we had the power neither to bestow nor to withhold. All the more generous pride entertained by human beings, is pride in the possession of either privileges or endowments which those who enjoy them could never have earned for themselves, and which they would not have valued a tenth-part as much as they do if it had not been quite out of their power to choose whether they would have or would reject them.
But the unquestionable truth that this is so, is, as a matter of fact, forgotten by the greater number of those who feel this pride even in its more generous forms. They do allow their pride to increase their sense of self-importance, instead of, as it should do, tending rather to diminish it. The man who is proud of being an Englishman, for instance, is very apt to regard it as a sort of personal credit to himself that he is an Englishman, in spite of the perfectly obvious truth that he has no more credit in the matter than he has for possessing two hands and two legs. The beauty, again, can very seldom contrive not to think it a credit to herself that she should be a beauty, or the man of genius to doubt that he deserves all the better of the world for having a genius. Yet these gifts ought to be really regarded with that sort of modest pride in the possession of treasures to which we had no sort of natural right or moral claim, that a man feels, for instance, in living in fine scenery, or in a refined and thought- ful society. In fact the very same feeling should dominate all the nobler kinds of pride which filled the hearts of the greater saints who said that but for the grace of God,—that is, but for something which they could not in any way corn. mand or control,—they should have been the most despicable and sinful of beings. Thus the better kind of pride should add, not to the sense of merit, but (rather of the two) to the sense of demerit, because it should deepen and intensify the conscious- ness of the lavish gifts, the inherited advantages, the high level of opportunity from which we started, and from which it might have been fairly hoped that we should have been able to achieve far more than we actually have achieved. The higher pride ought to deepen modesty. How can a man be proud of his ancestry without feeling the extreme danger that he will not be able to justify his descent P How can a man be proud of his possessions without fearing that he will be found to have been unworthy of the trust which those possessions impose ? Most of all, how can a man be proud of his genius without dreading that he may prove a spendthrift of that genius instead of its skilful almoner ? A man who takes a genuine pride in the public love and esteem in which (suppose) his father is held, can hardly help feeling all the more modest the deeper that pride is; and yet that is, as we hold, precisely the attitude in which he should look upon his rank or his wealth, or even his personal strength and dexterity, though, of course, these latter gifts are not subjects for anything like an equal amount of pride. Even Mr. Stanley's legitimate pride in his own swiftness of insight and promptitude of resolve, would have been all the wiser and more legitimate if he could have shown that be took no credit to himself for what had been the free gift of Providence, and did not think of comparing his own decision with Emin Pasha's vacillation, while he was studying how best to make his resolute- ness serve the purpose of extricating the great German from the embarrassments of a difficult and ambiguous crisis. If, indeed, pride were limited to the qualities for which we could honestly take credit as of our own fostering, there would hardly be enough of pride amongst us to make it signify anything important in human life. It is not only not so limited, but a vast deal more of it, and that, too, of a vastly better kind, is felt in relation to privileges and possessions for which we are eager to assert that we can claim no credit at all, than in relation to either wealth or moral qualities which we have painfully acquired. In other words, the best pride must go hand-in-hand with the deepest modesty in things secular as well as in things religious.
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