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Schleiermacher professes to have always concluded there was something wrong in the character of Hippel, because that master of German humour, such as it is, was known to have said, that where entire sincerity prevailed even the best friends could not help despising each other. "I have often," observes Schleiermacher, "speculated upon what the evil in him might be." Such speculations would soon find no end, in wandering mazes lost. If the spelling be obsolete, not so is the truism, in Butler's lines, alluding to Momus and his strictures on the structure of man:

"Nature has made man's breast no windores,

To publish what he does within doors." 1

Absolutely transparent characters are justly said to be as pure an invention as that other fiction, of infallible readers of character: there is something in every man of which we have no consciousness, hid from himself, and hid from us, and which nothing but the event will lay bare. "Nobody, whatever his penetration, can be sure what his best friend, or the man he knows best, will do under untried or startling circumstances"; and knowledge of character, to be real-to show true, thorough insight-ought to be able to prophesy.2 No man, says a student of human nature, can know himself who is not conscious of little subtleties of temper, strange perversities of mood, that he perceives but cannot analyse, and queer creatures of the mind that at critical moments rise out of the dark places of sentiment and turn him to the right hand or

1 When Mahomet was a-dying, he addressed the congregation at the mosque for the last time, and bade any one, who had aught on his conscience, to speak out, that he might ask God's pardon for him. Upon this a man, who had passed for a devout Moslem, stood forth, and confessed himself a hypocrite, a liar, and a weak disciple. "Out upon thee!" cried Omar ; "why dost thou make known what God had suffered to remain

concealed?"

2 But who can do this? asks an anonymous essayist on the Study of Character. "Which of us knows himself so well as to guess what he would be, and do, and think, when put out of his present course of life?-much less what others would do: for whatever may be said of self deception, it is certain that every man knows secrets about himself which no one else has surmised, and which are indispensable to the foresight" in question.

"The

the left, away from the control of his ordinary reason. rest of us who are watching him, and who think that we have long since found out all the springs of his conduct, are amazed to find him taking the wrong turning with an invincible assurance." And is he not often amazed himself? Almost like Katerfelto, with his hair on end at his own wonders-his own inconsistencies, follies, capacities for evil thinking, evil speaking, evil doing. Few human creatures in their teens, observes the author of Steven Lawrence, Yeoman, know so much of themselves as not to be shocked when circumstances chance abruptly to reveal to them their own capabilities : "it is later in life, that no revelation of our own hearts can ever, by possibility, surprise us.”

Marcus Antoninus makes a "meditation" of this,-that if any god, or eminent instructor in philosophy, should stand at a man's elbow, and order him to "turn his inside outwards," and publish every thought and fancy, as fast as they came into his head, he would think it a hard chapter, and not submit to so much as a day's discipline. The Minister's Black Veil is the title of one of Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales, always suggestive in their symbolism; and if Father Hooper hide his face for sorrow, there is cause enough, he pleads, to those who question him thereupon; "and if I cover it for secret sin, what mortal might not do the same?" He dies as he has lived, the veiled minister; and his words at the last are: "When the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend; the lover to his best beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of his sin; then deem me a monster, for the symbol beneath which I have lived, and die! I look around me, and lo! on every visage a black veil."

"In this masque of the passions called life, there's no human
Emotion, though masked, or in man or in woman,

But, when faced and unmasked, it will leave us at last
Struck by some supernatural aspect aghast.

*

*

*

A whole world lies cryptic in each human breast;
And that drama of passions as old as the hills,
Which the moral of all men in each man fulfils,

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Is only revealed now and then to our eyes

In the newspaper files and the courts of assize."

If the dissection of any man's soul could be completely effected, what eye, asks Sir James Stephen, but must turn away from the spectacle! Wisely, to his thinking, has the church proclaimed the sanctity of the confessional, "Who would wish or dare to study this morbid anatomy?" Who, he further asks, would not loathe the knowledge with which the memory of the priesthood, who study it professionally, is soiled and burdened? Who has courage enough to tell how far our mutual affection and esteem may depend on our imperfect knowledge of each other? "The same creative wisdom, which shelters from every human eye the processes of our animal frame, has shrouded from observation the workings of our spiritual structure." There are indeed morbid anatomists who revel in their conscious skill in the art; like Alexander Farnese, delighting to "lay bare to his master the real heart of Mayenne"-or, say, like Dwining, the physician, in Scott's historical tale, who, in reply to the wicked knight's complaint that his heart beats as if it would burst his bosom, utters aloud a "Heaven forbid !" and then mutters sotto voce, "It would be a strange sight if it should. I should like to dissect it, save that its stony case would spoil my best instruments." One of

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1 "No one could surpass Alexander in this skilful vivisection of political characters," etc.-Motley, Hist. United Netherlands, vol. iii., chap. xxviii. 2 Compare, and contrast, the lines in Dryden's Roman tragedy— "I find your breast fenced round from human reach,

Transparent as a rock of solid crystal;
Seen through, but never pierced."

Massinger's Marrall exults in that he "can now anatomise" Sir Giles Overreach. Vanbrugh's Heartfree claims to see a perplexing character "turned inside out. Her heart well examined, I find there pride, vanity, covetousness, malice," etc. Of Paul Marchmont's scrutiny of his sister, we read, in a modern fiction: "He took his dissecting knife and went to work at an intellectual autopsy. He anatomised the wretched woman's soul. He made her tell her secret, and bare her tortured breast before him." "Lay her on the table by all means, and bring out your dissecting tools," says another personage in another work from the same pen. "I saw down into his inmost heart: it was black as night,"-that comes from an anonymous

Colani's discourses broaches the query, what "subject" more interesting for the dissecter than a vicious man? But it is a subject he quickly dismisses; one reason being that alleged in another place, that he sees small prospect of profit in a pulpit study of the carnal mind, in all its impurity and distortion, and en ètalant tout ce que le cœur d'un tel homme peut renfermer de corruption; another reason consisting in the depraving effect of such scrutinies on the scrutineer himself: "Il vous arrivera ce qui arrive à tous les disséqueurs et à tous les analyseurs, depuis les chimistes et les anatomistes jusqu'aux moralistes: l'objet de leurs études ne leur inspire plus ni répulsion ni dégoût." Not unconditionally or invariably the proper study of mankind is man. If you must look, guarda e passa is a better precept at times. But a passing glance may take in a world of iniquity.

Often appalling in their suggestiveness are the rambling, raving sentences of crazed King Lear; and such is this one, touching Regan, his favourite daughter, and the one whose unnatural cruelty caused him the keenest pang of all: "Let them anatomise Regan, see what breeds about her heart: is there any cause in nature, that makes these hard hearts ?" Young was not thinking of Regans or Gonerils, but of average human nature, when he penned his stern line on that hideous sight,

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a naked human heart." Landor however somewhere incidentally observes, in a comparison of Young with Crabbe, that Young moralised at a distance on some external appearances of

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letter writer in Mr. Wilkie Collins' masterpiece. In a story which is not Mr. Dickens' masterpiece, we have a glimpse of a keen and cold female observer standing with her hand upon her own bosom, looking at a passionate girl, 'as one afflicted with a diseased part might curiously watch the dissection and exposition of an analogous case.' No such scrutineer is Mrs. Gaskell's country doctor, shrewd yet simple: "Mr. Gibson, however, surgeon though he was, had never learnt to anatomise a woman's heart." Caroline Ryder, in Mr. Reade's tale of jealousy, is a proficient in her way, and in that way; as where she "went to scrutinise and anatomise her mistress's heart with plenty of cunning, but no mercy." Far less apt to the study is her master, whom we watch, "watching her, grim, silent, and sombre, to detect her inmost heart." Explicitly the author professes, in the same chapter, not to "imitate those writers who undertake to dissect and analyse the heart at such moments, and put the exact result on paper." Yet perhaps none living could do it better; very few indeed could do it anything like so well.

the human heart; whereas Crabbe entered it "on all fours," and told the people what an ugly thing it is inside. Mr. Browning's Paracelsus vehemently deprecates those obstinate questionings, by dint of which his friend Festus would, as he suspects, know him more searchingly:

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My heart, hideous and beating, or tear up

My vitals for your gaze, ere you will deem
Enough made known?"

The autobiographer of one of Mr. Wilkie Collins' earlier books opens his narrative with the averment, that as there have been men who, on their death beds, have left directions that their bodies should be anatomised, as an offering to science, so, in these pages, written on the death bed of enjoyment and hope, he gives his heart, already anatomised, as an offering to human nature. Morbid anatomy it is, very; but an autobiographic anatomist is never likely to cut very deep. Sometimes the most unsparing of professed, or professional, anatomists has nothing deep to cut at, in the heart that is supposed to lie palpitating before him, so shallow are its depths, so petty its circumference, so crude and almost inorganic its structure. "Que je vous plains," said Madame de Tencin to Fontenelle; "ce n'est pas un cœur que vous avez là dans la poitrine: c'est de la cervelle, comme dans la tête." But it is something to have brains somewhere in the system, even if the possession be in excess, and misplaced. Addison devotes a whole Spectator to the anatomy of a coquette's heart; and the operator, before engaging in this visionary dissection, gives the lookers on to understand that there is nothing in his art more difficult than to lay open the heart of a coquette, by reason of the many labyrinths and recesses to be found in it, such as do not appear in the heart of any other animal. The fibres are shown to be turned and twisted in a most intricate and perplexing way; insomuch that the entire organ is wound up together like a Gordian knot, and must have very irregular and unequal motions, while employed in its vital functions. "One thing we thought rery observable, namely, that upon examining all the vessels

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