290 WHICH TO SACRIFICE, FRIEND OR JEST ? provokes even her devoted Catherine Seyton to exclaim to herself, "Now, Our Lady forgive me! How deep must the love of sarcasm be implanted in us women, since the Queen, with all her sense, will risk ruin rather than rein in her wit." When Ethel Newcome bids her brother Barnes be kind, for that is better than all the wit in the world, she points to desolate old Lady Kew as a warning example: "Look at grandmamma, how witty she was and is; what a reputation she had, how people were afraid of her; and see her now-quite alone." Very different is the smug complacency of the Rev. Charles Honeyman's warning: "Satire! satire! Mr. Pendennis," said that divine, holding up a reproving finger of lavender kid, "beware of a wicked wit!—But when a man has that tendency, I know how difficult it is to restrain." Boileau's - jeune fou qui se croit tout permis, Et qui pour un bon mot va perdre vingt amis," may pair off with Sir Perfidious Oldcraft's exemplar, in Beaumont and Fletcher, 66 a Duke Humphrey spark, Had rather lose his dinner than his jest. I say I love a wit the best of all things." To which category may be consigned the whole race of what Jonson's Knowell characterizes and condemns as petulant jeering gamesters, that can spare No argument or subject from their jest." Of which, in another play, rare Ben offers us a salient example in the person of Carlo Buffone, who will sooner lose his soul than a jest, and profane even the most holy things, to excite laughter. XXVIII. SELF-BESTOWED PRAISE. PROVERBS Xxvii. 2.* VERY man his own trumpeter, is, ironically or otherwise, an accepted adage; but it is not among the Proverbs of Solomon. His counsel on the subject takes another direction altogether: "Let another man praise thee, and not thine own mouth; a stranger, and not thine own lips." James Howel, the great old letter-writer, quoting the Latin proverb, propria laus sordet in ore, thus pungently paraphrases it: "Be a man's breath ever so sweet, yet it makes one's praise stink, if he makes his own mouth the conduitpipe of it." But some people think they can do their own praise best. Who else is so competent to appreciate and appraise them? The Milverton of Friends in Council somewhere observes that praise is always a dull thing; that people seldom spend much time in praising; and that when a man looks back upon his misspent hours, he will not find that he has to reproach himself for many of them having been spent in commendation. La Rochefoucauld once avowed, ironically or not, his repentance of the law he had prescribed to himself of never uttering his own praises: what a many more followers and partisans he might have had, but for that self-denying ordinance! Look, for instance, said he, at M. de Roquelaure and M. de Miossens, who discourse for a couple of hours together before a score of persons, bepraising themselves the whole time; there are only *For another set of illustrations of this text, see the chapter headed "Self-Praise," in the First Series of Secular Annotations on Scripture Texts, pp. 96-100. 292 SINGING ONE'S OWN PRAISES. two or three out of the twenty who find them insufferable, and the remaining seventeen applaud and regard them as peerless-comme des gens qui n'ont point leurs semblables. Sainte-Beuve suggests that if Roquelaure and Miossens had judiciously intermingled with their self-commendations a little praise of their listeners, they would have been better listened to still. That is to say, one may infer, that all the twenty would have been good listeners; as to the seventeen, they surely were as good as could be already. Ehleypoolie, the Cingalese grandee, in Joanna Baillie's Indian drama, candidly demands, "If I commend myself, who, like myself, Can know so well my actual claims to praise ?" to which demand an acquiescent companion maliciously responds, "Most true; for surely no one else doth know it." When the red Indian of another hemisphere calls upon the moribund old trapper in Cooper's Prairie to tell his auditory how many Mingoes he has struck, and what acts of valour and justice he has done, that they may know how to admire, and so come to imitate him, he replies, with simple earnestness of manner and speech, "A boastful tongue is not heard in the heaven of a white man. No, my son, a pale-face may not sing his own praises, and hope to have them acceptable before his God." So thinks not the vaunting Pharamond, Prince of Spain, in Beaumont and Fletcher's Philaster, whose opening speech is "nothing but a large inventory of his own commendations," moving Dion to the speculation, "I wonder what's his price? For certainly He'll sell himself, he has so praised his shape." Arbaces in the King and No King of the same jointstock authorship, is a yet more accomplished master in BLOWING ONE'S OWN TRUMPET. 293 the art of brag, while invoking heaven and earth to say if he have need to brag. His self-asserting speeches run over with such recurring phrases as, "Should I then boast?" "Far then from me be ostentation." "I could tell the world" this, that, and the other, "If I would brag. Should I, that have the power Mix with vainglory? Did I but take delight But he shall wrong his and my modesty, A little glory in a soldier's mouth Is well becoming; be it far from vain.” Don Quixote, perceiving that he had attracted the attention of the traveller in green, and being the pink of courtesy and always desirous of pleasing, anticipated his questions by an announcement of name, style, and achievements; ending his speech with the apologetic assurance, "Though self-praise depreciates, I am compelled sometimes to pronounce my own commendations, but it is only when no friend is present to perform that office for me." The once widely popular as well as highly patronized author of Wild Oats, vindicates the right, nay duty, of blowing one's own trumpet; as author, he speaks in a metrical preface: "Ere Roman triumph was decreed, The victor for himself must plead, And tell the when, the where, and how He won the laurel for his brow: Though for ourselves the trump we blow, George Wither's kindliest critic, the most genial and most congenial of them all, defines what that poet calls his Motto to be a continued self-eulogy of two thousand 294 BLOWING ONE'S OWN TRUMPET. lines, which, however, we read to the end without any feeling of distaste, almost without a consciousness that we have been listening all the while to a man praising himself-there being in it none of the "cold particles, the hardness and self-ends, which render vanity and egotism hateful." He seems, says Elia, to be praising another person, under the mask of self; or rather, we feel that it was indifferent to him where he found the virtue which he celebrates; whether another's bosom or his own were its chosen receptacle. This is self-praise with a difference; the Non-Ego commingled and confounded with the Ego, after approved Teutonic fashion. Self-depreciation was not the foible of the Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth's Earl; witness the "most ingenuous reference to himself," as Mr. Motley calls it, in the Leicester correspondence in 1586, relating to Zutphen: "In my former letters I forgot one, who not only on that day but at every day's service, hath been a principal actor himself. A tall, wise, rare servant he is, as I know, and of marvellous good government and judgment. That gentleman may take a great charge upon him, I warrant you." John Foster's apology would never seem to come amiss to such as need it, if put upon their defence he writes to the Rev. Joseph Hughes, "If you are beginning to say, 'Let another praise thee, and not thyself,' I may ask whether it should not be an excepted case where that 'other' has not sense to see anything in me to praise." An excepted case: every man is willing enough to make his own case an exception, and to let the exception prove the rule. The rule is a proved and approved one, by all the world. The exception, by the individual claimant in particular. His personal and perhaps peremptory claim abates not in the least his adhesion to the proverb of King Solomon and to the counsel of Sir Matthew Hale |