“JUDGE NOT.”
St. Matthew vii. 1.
A stringent motive is adduced to enforce the strenuous monition, “Judge not,”—and it is, “that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged; and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.” There is one Lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy; even He who hath committed all judgment unto the Son: who art thou that judgest another?
Appalled were all who gazed on the last struggles of Cardinal Beaufort, rendered hideous by the tortures of agonizing remorse. Hope had he none. Despair was impersonated in the frenzied contortions of that dying man. King and peers stood beside the death-bed, awe-stricken and shocked. The king prayed for the cardinal, that the Eternal mover of the heavens might “look with a gentle eye upon this wretch:
See, says a less gentle observer, Warwick, how the pangs of death do make him grin. Royal Henry, on devouter thoughts intent, bids “peace to his soul,” in parting, “if God’s pleasure be.” And then the monarch solemnly, urgently, importunes the moribund cardinal to give some token, ere he quite depart, that Despair has not made him all her own: “Lord cardinal, if thou think’st on heaven’s bliss, hold up thy hand, make signal of thy hope.” But the cardinal—dies, and makes no sign. The appeal is fruitless: no hand is held up; no signal of hope displayed. The baffled prince, cut to the heart, can but exclaim, “He dies, and makes no sign: O God, forgive him!” Warwick again interposes a harsher voice, “So bad a death argues a monstrous life,” he is sure. But his sovereign hushes his damning criticism with a right royal veto:—
Forbear to judge. And the Shakspearean Henry practises in person the monition thus enforced. It is his rule to check in himself every tendency to uncharitable judgment. As when proof all but positive distresses him of his uncle Gloster’s death being due to violence, he yet restrains the bent of his convictions by the prayer,—
It is by the deathbed of the man self-convicted of Duke Humphrey’s death, that Henry can yet say, even of him, when from so bad a death is argued a monstrous life, Forbear to judge, for we are sinners all.
Are we to infer that Shakspeare was himself for backing to the full this royal veto? That, perhaps, were going too far. The veto is dramatically true to character, and designedly characteristic of the royal speaker. But if Shakspeare himself (we are assuming him to be the author of this disputed play) would or could scarcely in this particular instance have enforced such a lesson of charity, we may at least be assured, from the large tolerance and subtle apprehension so patent in his own kingly nature, that he would in spirit have echoed the king’s forbear. Perhaps his own feeling might be as nearly as possible expressed in other words of his, put into the mouth of quite another character, and referring to quite another occasion:—
Forbear to judge, is, nevertheless, the moral of this strain, as of the other. Human ignorance in the one case, human frailty in the other, ousts human nature from the judgment-seat.
No man, avers Sir Thomas Browne, can justly censure or condemn another; because, in fact, no man truly knows another. “This I perceive in myself; for I am in the dark to all the world, and my nearest friends behold me but in a cloud.... Further, no man can judge another, because no man knows himself.” In a former section of this his profession of faith, this good physician warns those who, upon a rigid application of the law, sentence Solomon unto damnation,[19] that they condemn not only him, but themselves, and the whole world; “for, by the letter and written word of God, we are without exception in the state of death: but there is a prerogative of God, and an arbitrary pleasure above the letter of His own law, by which alone we can pretend unto salvation, and through which Solomon might be as easily saved as those who condemn him.”
The Vicar of Gravenhurst, in his position of parish priest, owns himself compelled to confess that the best people are not the best in every relation of life, and the worst not bad in every relation of life; so that, with experience, he finds himself growing lenient in his blame, if also reticent in his praise. “Again and again I say to myself that only the Omniscient can be the equitable judge of human beings—so complicated are our virtues with our failings, and so many are the hidden virtues, as well as hidden vices, of our fellow-men.” If judge at all we dare, and do, be it in the spirit and to the letter of Wordsworth’s counsel:—
Well and wisely said La Bruyère, that “La règle de Descartes, qui ne veut pas que l’on décide sur les moindres vérités avant qu’elles soient connues clairement et distinctement, est assez belle et assez juste pour devoir s’étendu au jugement que l’on fait des personnes.” Real character, as William Hazlitt says, is not one thing, but a thousand things: actual qualities do not conform to any factitious standard in the mind, but rest upon their own truth and nature. “The dull stupor under which we labour in respect of those whom we have the greatest opportunities of inspecting nearly, we should do well to imitate, before we give extreme and uncharitable verdicts against those whom we only see in passing, or at a distance.”
Who can say, asks Samuel Rogers, “In such circumstances I should have done otherwise?” Who, did he but reflect by what slow gradations, often by how many strange occurrences, we are led astray; with how much reluctance, how much agony, how many efforts to escape, how many sighs, how many tears—who, did he but reflect for a moment, would have the heart to cast a stone?[20]
The autobiographer of one of Mr. Wilkie Collins’s earlier fictions proposes in an opening chapter to give a sketch of his character. But he sensibly refrains from the execution of a too ambitious plan. For, “what man can say: I will sound the depth of my own vices and measure the height of my own virtues; and be as good as his word? We can neither know nor judge ourselves—others may judge, but cannot know us—God alone judges and knows too.”
Dunsford the essayist’s objection to all hasty judgment of our fellow-creatures is based on the ground of its being “such an unscientific proceeding.” You comment, he says, upon another man’s conduct, and attribute motives to him. Now an ingenious and imaginative person—a lawyer making a speech for him—might show many different motives of equal probability. You fix upon one, perhaps because it is consonant to your own mind and nature, or because it is the uppermost or easiest one to conjecture; but really you often ignore the doctrine of chances, and perhaps you will find upon strict calculation that the chances are fairly four to one against your having named the right motive. As the winning horse is often “a dark one,” at any rate not the favourite, so after all some obscure and improbable motive is often the true cause of a man’s actions. In short, Dunsford maintains that our condemnation of others is often as unscientific as it is unchristian.
When the Doge of Venice, Foscari, in Byron’s tragedy, agitated by the summons to judge his son, speculates somewhat wildly on the burden of the mystery of all this unintelligible world, Marina submissively suggests that
And how then, demands the old man,—
Mr. Lockhart, in the closing chapter of his admirable Life of Scott, quoting Keble’s lines,—
declares considerations of this kind to have always induced him to regard with small respect any attempt to delineate fully and exactly any human being’s character. He avows his distrust of our capacity for, even in very humble cases, judging our neighbour fairly; and cannot but pity the presumption that must swell in the heart and brain of any ordinary brother of the race, when daring to pronounce, ex cathedrâ, on the whole structure and complexion of a great mind, from the comparatively narrow and scanty materials which can by possibility have been placed before him.
Men who see into their neighbours, observes Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, are very apt to be contemptuous; but men who see through them find something lying behind every human soul which it is not for them to sit in judgment on, or to attempt to sneer out of the order of God’s manifold universe.
The same wise-hearted writer—wise of heart as well as head—has a dialogue between doctor and minister concerning a quasi-reprobate, to whom the former has been kind, and about whose destiny the other is hardly more severe than certain. “Bad enough, no doubt,” Doctor Kittredge owns this scampish half-breed to be; “but might be worse. Has some humanity left in him yet. Let him go. God can judge him—I can’t.” “You are too charitable, doctor,” objects the minister. “He has saved his neck—but his soul is a lost one, I am afraid, beyond question.” “I can’t judge men’s souls,” the doctor replies. “I can judge their acts, and hold them responsible for those; but I don’t know much about their souls. If you or I had found our soul in a half-breed body, and then been turned loose to run among the Indians, we might have been playing just such tricks as this fellow has been trying.” What said a greater doctor when Boswell asked him whether, in the case of an aggressor forcing on a duel by ill usage, and getting killed in it, there is not almost no “ground to hope that he is gone to a state of happiness”? “Sir,” said Johnson, “we are not to judge determinately of the state in which a man leaves this life. He may in a moment have repented effectually.” And then Johnson quoted, apparently with approval, at any rate with hopeful interest, an epitaph, from Camden’s Remains, upon a very wicked man, who was killed by a fall from his horse, in which epitaph he is supposed to say, “Between the stirrup and the ground, I mercy asked, I mercy found.” On another occasion Johnson appealed to Richard Baxter’s avowed belief that a suicide—if hurried by sudden passion to self-slaughter—may be saved. And “if,” says Baxter, “it should be objected that what I maintain may encourage suicide, I answer, I am not to tell a lie to prevent it.” Who, as Campbell asks, after surmising that the hand which smote its kindred heart, might yet be prone to deeds of mercy,—
Qualis vita, finis ita, is a rhyming proverb not quite worthy of all acceptation. That Country Parson whose Recreations made him a name (such name, at least, as four initials may comprise) declares himself to have no look but one of sorrow and pity to cast on the poor suicide’s grave, and thinks the common English verdict is right as well as charitable, which supposes that in every such case reason has become unhinged, and responsibility is gone. “No doubt it is the saddest of all sad ends; but I do not forget that a certain Authority, the highest of all authorities, said to all human beings, ‘Judge not, that ye be not judged.’ The writer has, in the course of his duty, looked upon more than one suicide’s dead face; and the lines of Hood appeared to sketch the fit feeling with which to do so:—
A different spirit informs the Kirk from the day when Wishart complained that, in their arrogance, her ministers, “as if they had been privy to the councils of God, or the dispensers of His vengeance to the world,” presumed to pronounce upon the future state of their adversaries, and “doomed them, both body and soul, to eternal torments.” Pity but the poet had been better man and Christian who wrote these strong lines on damnatory sentences de mortuis, even when there remains nought to show—
More in a reverent spirit, and in a farther-seeing one, is the mystic finale of the Laureate’s memorable Vision of Sin, and its open verdict on the obscure crime of a great criminal:—
Never let it be forgotten, insists a Quarterly Reviewer, that there is scarcely a single moral action of a single human being of which other men have such a knowledge—its ultimate grounds, its surrounding incidents, and the real determining causes of its merits,—as to warrant their pronouncing a conclusive judgment.
The writings of Mr. Arthur Helps are honourably distinguished by an oft-recurring plea for mutual tolerance, on the ground of the little we really know one of another. In “Companions of my Solitude,” for instance, the author remarks that were it only considered how utterly incompetent men are to talk of the conduct of others as they do, the talkers would often be silenced at once, and the sufferers as readily consoled. Take the one question merely of difference of temperament—which, amongst men, is probably as great as that amongst the different species of animals—as between that, for example, of the lively squirrel and the solemn crane. “Now, if only from this difference between them, the squirrel would be a bad judge of the felicity, or generosity, or the domestic conduct, of the crane.
“Probably when we are thinking or talking of a person, we recall some visual image of that person. I have thought what an instructive thing it would be, if under some magic influence—like that, for example, which would construct a ‘palace of truth’—it were arranged that as we gave out our comments on the character or conduct of any person, this image on the retina of memory should change according to the truth, or rather the want of it, in our remarks. Gradually, feature after feature would steal away till we gazed at nonentity, or we should find another image glide into the field of view,—somebody we had never seen, perhaps, but to whom the comments we were uttering really did apply.”
Accordingly, our author would have the sufferers from injurious and unjust comment treat the whole thing as one which lacked reality. No thoughtful man, he urges, ought to be long vexed at such stuff, immaterial in every sense: such stuff as dreams are made of.
In one of his Dialogues, again, he makes Dunsford declare the most curious thing, as regards people living together, to be the intense ignorance they sometimes are in of each other. And Milverton follows up the remark by adding, that people fulfil a relation towards each other, and only know each other in that relation: they perform orbits round each other, each gyrating, too, upon his own axis, so that there are parts of the character of each which are never brought into view of the other. In another Dialogue, Milverton refers to the habit divines have of reminding us, that, in forming our ideas of the government of Providence, we should recollect that we see only a fragment. The same observation, in its degree, he holds to be true as regards human conduct. “We see a little bit here and there, and assume the nature of the whole. Even a very silly man’s actions are often more to the purpose than his friends’ comments on them.”
In yet another of his works, this popular essay-writer devotes an entire essay to the subject of our judgments of other men. Who does not feel, he asks, that to describe with fidelity the least portion of the entangled nature that is within him would be no easy matter? And yet the same man who feels this, and who, perhaps, would be ashamed of talking at hazard about the properties of a flower, of a weed, of some figure in geometry, will put forth his guesses about the character of his brother-man, as if he had the fullest authority for all that he was saying. It is shown in detail how an opinion of some man’s character and conduct gets abroad which is formed after a wrong method, by prejudiced persons, upon a false statement of facts, respecting a matter which they cannot possibly understand; and how this is then left to be inflated by Folly, and blown about by Idleness.
There is among Wordsworth’s Poems on the Naming of Places, one which is memorable if only as containing one of the most admired lines he ever wrote, descriptive of Lady of the Mere—
—but which is also pertinent to the present occasion, as pointing a moral, after the poet’s wont to moralise his song. A man had been seen in the distance by the poet and his friends, angling. No great harm in that, my masters? Nay; but the angler was in peasant’s garb, and the season was mid-harvest, and therefore, and on the spot, they voted him improvident and reckless. But when they came up to him, these over-hasty judges found in the man they had summarily condemned, a poor mortal wasted by sickness, and all too weak to labour in the harvest-field, but using his best skill to gain a pittance from the dead unfeeling lake that knew not of his wants:—
Forbear to judge: for how pitifully little is the all we really know one of another! Mr. Froude has forcibly remarked—even admitting the remark to be a truism—that whoever has attended but slightly to the phenomena of human nature has discovered how inadequate is the clearest insight which he can hope to attain into character and disposition. “Every one is a perplexity to himself and a perplexity to his neighbours; and men who are born in the same generation, who are exposed to the same influences, trained by the same teachers, and live from childhood to age in constant and familiar intercourse, are often little more than shadows to each other, intelligible in superficial form and outline, but divided inwardly by impalpable and mysterious barriers.” And yet how ready each “weak unknowing hand” to hurl the bolts of Heaven against whomsoever it deems to be Heaven’s foe.
Sir James Stephen bids all hail to Rhadamanthus on his posthumous judgment-seat in the nether regions. But when Rhadamanthus comes above ground, holds in his hand the historical pen, and resolves all the enigmas of hearts which ceased to beat long centuries ago, more confidently than most of us would dare to interpret the mysteries of own, Sir James for one wishes him back again at the confluence of Styx, Phlegethon, and Cocytus. For, “it is, after all, nothing more than the surface of human character which the retrospective scrutiny of the keenest human eye is able to detect.” It is in a subsequent portion of the same instructive treatise, that the writer pronounces human justice to be severe, not merely because man is censorious, but because he reasonably distrusts himself, and fears lest his weakness should confound the distinctions of good and evil; and Divine justice to be lenient, because there alone love can flow in all its unfathomable depths and boundless expansion, impeded by no dread of error, and diverted by no misplaced sympathies.[22]
In the course of some remarks on the harshness with which man is disposed to regard the fellow-man whose doctrine, in matters of religious faith, differs from his own, the author of the “Caxton Essays” is impressive on the fact that He who hath reserved to Himself the right of judging, has imperatively said to man, whose faculty of judging must be, like man himself, erring and human, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.” Now, argues the essayist, of all our offences, it is clear that that offence of which man can be the least competent judge is an offence of defective faith. “For faith belongs to our innermost hearts, and not to our overt actions. And religious faith is therefore that express tribute to the only Reader of all hearts, on the value of which man can never, without arrogant presumption, set himself up as judge.”
If even-handed justice, says Mr. Anthony Trollope, were done throughout the world, some apology would be found for most offences. Not that the offences would thus be wiped away, and black become white; but much that is now very black would, he submits, be reduced to that sombre, uninviting shade of ordinary brown which is so customary to humanity.“[23] It is much the same humane thought which underlies Pelayo’s apology for Roderick, when we read how closely that generous prince would and did
As one of George Eliot’s good parsons has it, God sees us as we are altogether, not in separate feelings or actions, as our fellow-men see us. We are always doing each other injustice, and thinking better or worse of each other than we deserve, he says, because we only hear and see separate words and actions—not each other’s whole nature. Do not philosophic doctors tell us, again, the reflective author in person elsewhere muses, that we are unable to discern so much as a tree, except by an unconscious cunning which combines many past and separate sensations; that no one sense is independent of another, so that in the dark we can hardly taste a fricassee, or tell whether our pipe is alight or not, and the most intelligent boy, if accommodated with claws or hoofs instead of fingers, would be likely to remain on the lowest form? If so, it is easy to understand that our discernment of men’s motives must depend on the completeness of the elements we can bring from our own susceptibility and our own experience. “See to it, friend, before you pronounce a too hasty judgment, that your own moral sensibilities are not of a hoofed or clawed character.” For, as this penetrating writer insists, in continuation of the metaphor, the keenest eye will not serve, unless you have the delicate fingers, with their subtile nerve filaments, which elude scientific lenses, and lose themselves in the invisible world of human sensations.
Deeds which, to quote another popular though less powerful penwoman, our acquaintance designate our follies, may at another tribunal be our virtues—our single redeeming points; who judges rightly, who can rightly judge, where so many of our efforts are bent to seem other than we are, and the universal conjuring trick of this world is to throw dust expertly in our neighbours’ eyes?
Centuries ago, well-nigh two score, it was written by the most philosophic, and perhaps the best, of Roman emperors, that men’s actions look worse than they are; and, says he, “one must be thoroughly informed of a great many things before one can be rightly qualified to give judgment in the case.” The sceptic Bayle was a better Christian than Scaliger, when he protested against the assertion of that peremptory scholar that Bellarmin did not believe a word of what he wrote, and was at heart an atheist: besides the testimony of Bellarmin’s life and deathbed to the contrary, such judgments are, said Bayle (and no friend to the Jesuits he), a usurpation of the rights of One who alone is the Judge of hearts, and before whom there is no dissembling.
An apostle’s reason given for the counsel, Speak not evil one of another, brethren,—is this: that whoso speaketh evil of his brother, and judgeth his brother, speaketh evil of the law, and judgeth the law. Now, there is one Lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy; who art thou that judgest another?
No observant reader of Mr. Carlyle but will have noticed, if not (which were better) laid to heart, his habitual abstention from that dogmatism of the judgment-seat in which smaller spirits delight. For instance, in his moral estimate of so erring a genius as Hoffmann, if, in judging him, Mr. Carlyle is forced to condemn him, it is with mildness, with a desire to do justice. Let us not forget, urges the critic, that for a mind like Hoffmann’s, the path of propriety was difficult to find—still more difficult to keep. “Moody, sensitive, and fantastic, he wandered through the world like a foreign presence, subject to influences of which common natures have happily no glimpse.” A good or a wise man we must not call him; but among the ordinary population of this world, “to note him with the mark of reprobation were ungrateful and unjust.” So, again, in the same author’s review of the life and writings of Werner—who, always in some degree an enigma to himself, may well be obscure to us. For “there are mysteries and unsounded abysses in every human heart; and that is but a questionable philosophy which undertakes so readily to explain them.” Religious belief especially, Mr. Carlyle urges, at least when it seems heartfelt and well-intentioned, is no subject for harsh or even irreverent investigation. “He is a wise man that, having such a belief, knows and sees clearly the grounds of it in himself; and those, we imagine, who have explored with strictest scrutiny the secret of their own bosoms, will be least apt to rush with intolerant violence into that of other men’s.” Still more elaborate and emphatic is the exposition of this doctrine as applied to the case of Robert Burns. The world, it is alleged, is habitually unjust in its judgments of such men, since it decides, like a court of law, by dead statutes, and not positively but negatively,—less on what is done right, than on what is or is not done wrong. Whereas, by Mr. Carlyle’s doctrine, not the few inches of deflection from the mathematical orbit, which are so easily measured, but the ratio of these to the whole diameter, constitutes the real aberration. “This orbit may be a planet’s, its diameter the breadth of the solar system; or it may be a city hippodrome; nay, the circle of a ginhorse, its diameter a score of feet or paces. But the inches of deflection only are measured; and it is assumed that the diameter of the ginhorse, and that of the planet, will yield the same ratio when compared to them!” Here, according to our author, lies the root of many a blind, cruel condemnation of Burnses, Swifts, Rousseaus, which one never listens to with approval. “Granted, the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and tackle damaged; the pilot is blameworthy; he has not been all-wise and all-powerful: but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the globe, or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs.”
To a very different style of sinners the same judgment—rather the same refusal to judge—is accorded, when the doom of Chaumette, Gobel, and other reddest of red-republican reprobates, is rehearsed, in the history of France’s reign of terror, while the revolution was devouring so greedily her own children. “For Anaxagoras Chaumette, the sleek head now [April 1794] stript of its bonnet rouge [and a traveller by tumbril to Sainte Guillotine], what hope is there? Unless Death were ‘an eternal sleep’? Wretched Anaxagoras! God shall judge thee, not I.”
Once more: “Unhappy soul! who shall judge him?” is the historian’s deprecating query in the instance of August of Poland, the physically strong,—who dies, confessedly a very great sinner, early in 1733. Who shall judge him?
Corporal Trim was once moved to avow his belief—rather hotly, for his esprit de corps was piqued—that when a soldier “gets time to pray, he prays as heartily as a parson—though not with all his fuss and hypocrisy. Thou shouldst not have said that, Trim, said my uncle Toby—for God only knows who is a hypocrite, and who is not. At the great and general review of us all, Corporal, at the day of judgment (and not till then)—it will be seen who have done their duties in this world, and who have not.”
In a like spirit, another clerical novelist, of a more recent type, and whose distinctive evangel is Muscular Christianity, introduces a “double-first” candidate for orders who reminds him of Mr. Bye-Ends in Bunyan: “And yet,” comes the charitable clause conditional, “I believe the man was really in earnest. He was really desirous to do what was right, as far as he knew it; and all the more desirous, because he saw, in the present state of society, what was right would pay him. God shall judge him, not I. Who can unravel the confusion of mingled selfishness and devotion that exist even in his own heart, much less in that of another?”
In Mr. Thackeray’s instance, exception has been taken, on ethical grounds, by no vulgar critic, to his habit of shrinking from moral estimate as well as moral judgment, in dealing with his characters. Into that distinction not without a difference, this is not the place (nor this the pen) to enter. But the critic in question—for some years a main support of the National Review—recognises this avoidance of moral judgment as springing from kindly feeling, from the just and humble sense we all should have that our own demerits make it unseemly for us to ascend the judgment-chair, and from a wide appreciation of the variety and obscurity of men’s real motives of action.[24]