gain, although I have given a full description of
our hero's exterior (such as it is), I may yet be asked for an inclusive
definition also of his moral personality. That he is no hero compounded
of virtues and perfections must be already clear. Then WHAT is he? A
villain? Why should we call him a villain? Why should we be so hard upon
a fellow man? In these days our villains have ceased to exist. Rather
it would be fairer to call him an ACQUIRER. The love of acquisition, the
love of gain, is a fault common to many, and gives rise to many and many
a transaction of the kind generally known as "not strictly honourable."
True, such a character contains an element of ugliness, and the same
reader who, on his journey through life, would sit at the board of a
character of this kind, and spend a most agreeable time with him, would
be the first to look at him askance if he should appear in the guise of
the hero of a novel or a play. But wise is the reader who, on meeting
such a character, scans him carefully, and, instead of shrinking from
him with distaste, probes him to the springs of his being. The human
personality contains nothing which may not, in the twinkling of an eye,
become altogether changed--nothing in which, before you can look round,
there may not spring to birth some cankerous worm which is destined to
suck thence the essential juice. Yes, it is a common thing to see not
only an overmastering passion, but also a passion of the most petty
order, arise in a man who was born to better things, and lead him both
to forget his greatest and most sacred obligations, and to see only in
the veriest trifles the Great and the Holy. For human passions are as
numberless as is the sand of the seashore, and go on to become his most
insistent of masters. Happy, therefore, the man who may choose from
among the gamut of human passions one which is noble! Hour by hour will
that instinct grow and multiply in its measureless beneficence; hour by
hour will it sink deeper and deeper into the infinite paradise of his
soul. But there are passions of which a man cannot rid himself, seeing
that they are born with him at his birth, and he has no power to abjure
them. Higher powers govern those passions, and in them is something
which will call to him, and refuse to be silenced, to the end of his
life. Yes, whether in a guise of darkness, or whether in a guise which
will become converted into a light to lighten the world, they will and
must att