COLD-BLOODED GOODNESS.
GOODNESS has its temptations; for instance, righteous indignation, the better forms of pride, a vain quixotry, love of approbation, sentimentality, inordinate loyalty, and many more. There are high-minded persons who fall into none of these temptations, but they are few, and for the most part rather cold-blooded. We have all known some sold. blooded characters. Some are wicked, but the majority are not bad at all; indeed, they are quite good. Their frigidity is by no means always betrayed in their manners. We cannot differentiate them from the warm-blooded by momentary con- tact, as we can differentiates frog from a squirrel. Incapacity for righteous indignation should always lead one to suspect that the good man who is without it belongs to a low type of good man, for all that our suspicions may be quite incorrect. There are some warm-hearted men and women whom nothing moves to anger. The greatest cruelty taking place beneath their eyes might cast them into dejection or fear, but not rouse them to passionate remonstrance or instant retribution. The sense of justice is perhaps not very strong in them; and there they differ from the cold-blooded good, in whom it is marked almost always. There are some exceptional people who without any cynicism rise above the plain virtues. They are generous before they are just. They are too generous ever to do an injustice, but they notice it very little unless it causes them distress or rouses their pity. Abstraet justice hardly exists for them. In such people absence of indignation has no reptile suggestion. All the same, they lack something, and not infrequently are so unfortunate as to be condemned with the cold-blooded.
There is a pride which makes men overlook petty offences, which in its determination to see only what is praiseworthy will deliberately take a false view of life, will deliberately declare that what is is not lest it soil its immaculacy by any recognition of eviL This is the temptation of the very good, the fervent lover of the fair, the true, and the beautifuL Some people, however, who are quite capable of fervour never fall into it. They take delight in being realists, in having lost all illusions, in accepting the world as it is. It is a
suspicious peculiarity, but it establishes no absolute ease against a warm heart. To do a good action solely because it is pretty, to sacrifice to the beauty of holiness, and occa- sionally to sacrifice self-consciously and with a view to praise, is a terrible temptation to most good people—even to those who never fall. Rare men and women know nothing about it They are utterly tm-self-conscions in their virtue. They would no more make a sacrifice for the look of the thing than they would practise asceticism for no purpose. That need not, however, mean that they are incapable of enthusiasm ; but it renders them a little inhuman, it relates them—or shall we say connects them, for the relation is not one of blood ?—with the cold souls.
It is a great delight to some people to say that they have never left a friend in the lurch. They stick to those they have once loved through thick and thin. It is a point of honour with them, and the worse their friend turns out to be the more hotly will they defend him. He has not done wrong, they say. Their faith in him is unshaken. Like the ancient Father of the Church, they believe in his innocence because it is impossible. One must admire their loyalty, bat it always lands them in a certain amount of injustice. It is at our peril that we any of us refuse deliberately to see a fact. This inordinate loyalty is a temptation to almost all the best and warmest hearts. Now and then, here and there, we may come across a kind man or woman who has never felt it. They cannot disregard evidence. They will hold out a hand to their friend who is down, but it is the right hand of pity, not of fellowship. Like the cold-blooded, they are clear-sighted; but they are not cold-blooded, nevertheless.
A young person of either sex who is wholly without senti- mentality has not as a rule much heart. On the other hand, where practicality so overruns the character as to destroy all the finest feelings, it may still leave the capacity for sympathy not uninjured, but certainly undestroyed. No good child ever lived who did not wish for approbation, but certain good people do grow out of it. Indifference to it is a cold, unlovable virtue; but some quite kind and lovable people are indifferent to the opinion even of those they really like. It goes, we think, with an overweening desire for independence, a quality always unsocial and rather inhuman. All these temptations may quite well be no temptations to warm-hearted people; but, speaking generally, those who have never felt them 'belong to the cold-blooded good. "Have cold-blooded people a right to be called good at all ?" we bear some one ask. We think they have. They cannot help being cold-blooded, and, though they may be hateful, they are not nefarious. We have a notion that they exist more among the rich than among the poor, more among the educated than the uneducated, more among women than men. Those we have known have looked down, and have had from a worldly point of view a right to look down, on their fellow-creatures. There is often a sort of exquisiteness about cold blood. It is a dis- tinction. They have been as incapable of dishonesty as of kindness, as impervious to pity as to passion. With serene indulgence coloured by contempt they have watched the follies of the fervent good. "How their indignation checks their usefulness!" they say to themselves. "When will they learn to control it? How their desperate over-anxiety impairs their health I How strange that they have themselves so little in hand! Why do men permit themselves all these doubts, which weaken their political position and disturb their religions placidity P Why do women work themselves to death when a little thought would show them that their individual effort is of no account against the great exile and distresses of the world ? When will they see their own true and tiny proportions P Why are they so infatuate, so high- falutin'?" All this they wonder as they look on in their cool wisdom. Half the troubles of the world, in the eyes of the cold-blooded good, come of want of something which they call courage, but which has as little resemblance to that high- mettled quality as a fish has to a man. They regard it as the glittering gift of the natural patrician, of the man or woman whom Godor "Burke" has lifted a head and shoulders above the people. These are the characters whose watchword is "No fuss" and whose secret is no feeling. Nevertheless, they are high-minded people.
Why do we all dislike them more than we dislike so many unprincipled people ? We think one reason is that they do not belong properly to the modern world. There is some. thing antediluvian about them. They have snrvived the great flood of Christianity which drowned the "former things.' Certainly they were commoner in the old world than they are now, and we think far better specimens existed. Most antediluvian survivals are, as it were, degenerate. There were cold-blooded giants on the earth once. We can hardly conceive them now. They had knowledge and faith and a stoical power of self-sacrifice. We think we owe them a great debt We still deeply revere the moral philosophy of their Imperial mouthpiece. But even then they were not all giants. Perhaps it was the thought of the lees admirable amongst them which inspired a Christian tentmaker to write in a moment of righteous fervour a hymn to charity in which, as a sort of afterthought, be pronounced their everlasting condemnation.
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