Attempt > Volume 1 and Select writings

THE ATTEMPT
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she -would willingly forget. A woman can be gracious to her acquaintances, and over-
indulgent to her children, by making her husband the butt of her ill humour,
installing herself the self-constituted check on his pleasures at home and abroad, while
some people are agreeable to the whole world, except just those with whom they
are connected by ties of blood, to whom they display a totally different phase of
character.
Sensitiveness to disagreeable things implies self-mistrust. Only absolutely self-
reliant people are impervious to them. We are dependant on others more than we
think, for even our own good opinion—we think best of ourselves wdien others share
our favourable impressions, and no strength of constancy can prevent our estimate of
our friends suffering some faint fluctuation according to the view which others take of
them. All people have an idea of their own position towards the world, though “ idea ”
is perhaps too definite a term. At any rate, they have a dim assumption of a certain stand¬
ing of which they are scarcely aware until it is infringed, and which it is the part of the
sayer of disagreeable things to infringe. We are each the centre of our own world, and thus
have a place in our own eyes which no one can give us. Something of this half-delusion is
indispensable to carry us through our parts creditably, and the laws of politeness, on
principle, support this degree of pretension. The disagreeable thing jars on this nice
adjustment. The speaker has the unjustifiable aim of lowering this fancied elevation,
whether moral or social; and he dispels illusions, not as he supposes in the interest
of truth on any social or moral view, but really for selfish ends. He obeys an un-
amiable impulse to prove that he is knowing where we are ignorant, wise where we are
foolish, strong where we are weak, that he sees into us and through us, and that it is be¬
fore all things important, that this should he declared and made evident. It is cold com¬
fort to those smarting under disagreeable things, to tell them that such sayings generally
recoil on their authors in the end, but such is the indubitable fact. We must bear
and forbear much in this world. These remarks are to all of us one of the minor ills of
life, for which, alas, there is no cure; only the more we suffer from them in others,
let us the more earnestly strive to check ourselves in any indulgence of the sort. Such
a habit once formed is very hard to check—it becomes indeed second nature. Let a
fellow- feeling in this case make us wondrous kind.
Anon.