Complete. From “Good Words.”
“For ye suffer fools gladly.”
YES, because we recognize them as fools, and there is in our human nature a certain Pharisaical element which hugs itself in the thought that we are not “as other men are.” Therefore we regard them and their folly with a self-contented and not unkindly pity. We understand them and put up with them, and it soothes our vanity to feel how very much we are above them.
But these other, the “odd” people, are somewhat different. We do not understand them; they keep us always in an uneasy uncertainty as to whether we ought to respect or despise them; whether they are inferior or superior to ourselves. Consequently we are often to them unjust, and always untender. They puzzle us, these people whom we designate as “unlike other people” (that is, unlike ourselves and our charming and highly respectable neighbors); whose motives we do not comprehend and whose actions we can never quite calculate upon; who are apparently a law unto themselves, quite independent of us; who do not look up to us,—nay, we rather suspect look down upon us, or are at least calmly indifferent to us, and consequently more irritating a thousand times than the obvious and confessed fools.
An “odd” person! How often one hears the word, and generally in a tone of depreciation, as if it implied a misfortune or a disgrace, or both. Which it does, when the oddity or eccentricity is not natural but artificially assumed, as is frequently the case. Of all forms of egotism, that of being intentionally peculiar is the most pitiful. The man who is always putting himself in an attitude, physical or moral, in order that the world may stare at him; striving to make himself different from other folks under the delusion that difference constitutes superiority—such a man merits, and generally gets, only contempt. He who, not from conscientiousness but conceit, sets himself against the tide of public opinion deserves to be swept away by it, as most commonly he is, in a whirl of just derision. Quite different is the case of one who is neither a fool nor an egotist, but merely “odd,” born such, or made such by inevitable, and often rather sad, circumstances and habits of life.
It is for these, worthy sometimes of much sympathy, respect, and tenderness, never certainly of contempt, that I wish to say a word.
I once knew a family who, having possessed a tolerable amount of brains in itself for more than one generation, had an overweening admiration for the same, and got into the habit of calling all commonplace, ordinary people “chuckie-stanes”—every Scotch schoolboy knows the word. It describes exactly those people exactly like everybody else whom one is constantly meeting in society, and without whom society could not get on at all, for they make a sort of background to the other people, who are not like everybody else.
But in all surface judgments and unkindly criticisms there is some injustice. No one is really a “chuckie-stane.” Every human being has his own individuality, small or large, his salient and interesting points, quite distinct from his neighbors, if only his neighbors will take the trouble to find them out. One often hears the remark, especially from the young, that such a person is “a bore,” and such a house is “the dullest house possible.” For myself, I can only say that I wonder where the “dull houses” are and where the “bores” go to, for I never succeed in finding either. Only once I remember a feeling of despair in having the companionship for two mortal hours of a not brilliant young farmer; but I plunged him at once into sheep and turnips, when he became so enthusiastic and intelligent that I gained from him information which will last me to the end of my days on agricultural subjects.
Very few people are absolutely uninteresting except those that are unreal. A fool is bearable, a humbug never.
Now “odd” people, whatever they are, are certainly not humbugs. Nor are they necessarily bad people—quite the contrary. Society, much as it dislikes them, is forced to allow this. Many men and women whom others stigmatize as “so very peculiar,” are, the latter often confess, not worse, but much better, than themselves; capable of acts of heroism which they know they would shrink from, and of endurances which they would much rather admire than imitate. But then they are such odd people!
How? In what does their oddity consist?
Generally their detractors cannot exactly say. It mostly resolves itself into small things, certain peculiarities of manner or quaintnesses of dress, or an original way of looking at things, and a fearless fashion of judging them; independence of or indifference to the innumerable small nothings which make the sum of what the world considers everything worth living, worth dying for, but which these odd people do not consider of so much importance after all. Therefore the world is offended with them, and condemns them with a severity scarcely commensurate with their deserts.
Especially in things most apparent outside—their manners and their clothing.
Now, far be it from me to aver that either of these is of no consequence. Dress especially, as the “outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,” is of the utmost consequence. They who, by neglecting it, make themselves singular in the eyes of strangers, or unpleasant in those of friends, are strongly to blame.
But not less so are the people who wear out their own lives, and those of others, by fidgeting over trifles—bemoaning a misfitting coat or an unbecoming bonnet, and behaving as if the world had come to an end on account of a speck on a boot or a small rent in a gown. There is a proportion in things. Those who worry themselves to death, and others too, over minute wrongs and errors, commit a still greater wrong and overlook a much more serious error. How many of us would prefer to dine upon potatoes and salt, and dress in a sack with sleeve holes, rather than be ceaselessly tormented, with the best of intentions, about what we eat, drink, and put on! “Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?”
Yes; but society must have its meat and also its raiment, and that in the most decorous form which the general consensus of its members considers is decorous. To set oneself rampantly against this is, when not wrong, simply foolish. The obnoxious plebeian who insisted in vindicating that “a man’s a man for a’ that,” by presenting himself at a patrician dinner in rough morning garb, the conceited young artist who appeared so picturesque and snobbish at a full-dress assembly in his velvet painting-coat, were certainly odd people; but their oddity was pure silliness—neither grand nor heroic in the least. Nor, I must say, can I consider much wiser the ladies, young and old, whom I see yearly at private views, dressed not like the ordinary gentlewomen of the day, but just as if they had “stepped out of a picture,” only the pictures they choose to step out of are not always the most beautiful—often the most bizarre of their kind.
As a general rule, any style of dress, whether an exaggeration of the fashion of the time or a divergence from it, which is so different from other people as to make them turn round and look at it, is a mistake. This sort of eccentricity I do not defend. But I do defend the right of every man and woman to dress himself and herself in their own way; that is, the way which they find most comfortable, suitable, and tasteful, provided it is not glaringly obnoxious to the community at large….
A gentleman who, hating the much-abused but still-endured chimney-pot hat, persists in going through life with his noble brows shaded by a wide-awake; a lady who has manfully resisted deformity in the shape of tight stays and high-heeled boots, has held out successfully against hoop petticoats and dresses tied up like umbrellas, who declined equally to smother her fresh young face under a coal-scuttle bonnet, or to bare her poor old cheeks to sun and wind and critical observation by a small stringless hat, good neither for use nor ornament—such people may be set down as “odd”; but they are neither culpable nor contemptible. They do what they consider right and best for themselves; and what possible harm do they do to other people?
Besides—though this is no excuse for all oddities, but it is for some—the chances are that they are people no longer young, who have learnt the true value of life and the true proportions of things much better than their accusers or criticisers. Possibly, too, they are busy people, who have many other things to think of than themselves and their clothes. It is the young, the idle, the small-minded, who are most prone to vex themselves about small things and outside things. As years advance and interests widen we see with larger eyes, and refuse to let minute evils destroy in us, and in those dear to us, that equal mind which—accepting life as a whole, in all its earnestness and reality, its beauty and sadness combined—weighs calmly and strikes bravely the balance of good and ill.
Perfection even in the humblest and commonest details is to be striven after, but not to the sacrifice of higher and better things. I have known a young lady sulk through half a ball because her dress was not quite as tight fitting as the mode exacted; and an elderly gentleman make a happy family-party miserable for a whole dinner-time because there chanced to be too much salt in the soup. Such exactingly “even” folk as these drive one to appreciate those that are “odd.”
The world still contains many who persist in tithing “mint, anise, and cummin,” and neglecting “wisdom, justice, and the weightier matters of the law.” It is they who are hardest upon the odd people. Their minds, absorbed in the mint, anise, and cummin of existence, cannot take in the condition, intellectual and moral, of a person upon whom those “weightier matters” weigh so heavily that he is prone to overlook lesser matters, and object to be tired and bound by certain narrow social laws, which, indeed, being of no real importance, he refuses to consider laws at all. Therefore he is set down as a law-breaker, laughed at as eccentric, or abused as conceited, when probably there is in him not an atom of either conceit or egotism, and his only eccentricity consists in the fact that his own large nature cannot comprehend the exceeding smallness of other people’s. He gives Tom, Dick, and Harry credit for the same quick sympathies, high aims, and earnest purposes that he has himself, and is altogether puzzled to find in them nothing of the kind. They can no more understand him than if he spoke to them in Chinese. They only think him “a rather odd sort of person”—smile at him and turn away. So he “shuts up”—to use a phrase out of that elegant slang which they are far more adepts at than he—and Tom, Dick, and Harry hate him for evermore with the relentless animosity of small souls towards another soul, into whose depths they cannot in the least penetrate, but sometimes suspect it to be a little deeper and larger than their own.
And occasionally, rather to their annoyance, the fact is discovered, even by the purblind world.
Take, for instance, that very “odd” person Don Quixote, whom successive generations have laughed at as a mere fool; but this generation begins to see in the poor old knight a pathetic type of that ideal Christian chivalry which spends itself in succoring the weak and oppressed, which believes the best of every human being, and is only led astray by its expectation of finding in others the purity, truthfulness, honor, and unselfishness which are to itself as natural as the air it breathes. But they are not the natural atmosphere of half the world, which accordingly sets down those who practice these virtues—who have a high ideal of life, and strive through endless difficulties and deficiences to carry it out—as “Quixotic,” or, at best, rather “odd” people. Yet these are the people who mostly influence the world. It is they who do daring acts of generosity or heroism, while others are only thinking about it; and perpetrate philanthropic follies with such success, that society, which would utterly have scouted them had they failed, now praises them as possessing the utmost wisdom and most admirable common sense.
Again, many are odd simply because they are independent. That weak gregariousness which is content to “follow the multitude to do evil” (or good, as it happens, and often the chances are pretty equal both ways) is not possible to them. They must think, speak, and act for themselves. And there is something in their natures which makes them a law unto themselves, without breaking any other rational laws. The bondage of conventionality—a stronghold and safeguard to feebler folk—is to them unnecessary and irksome. They mean to do the right, and do it, but they cannot submit to the trammels of mere convenience or expediency. Being quite clear of their own minds, and quite strong enough to carry out their own purposes, they prefer to do so, without troubling themselves very much about what others think of them. Having a much larger bump of self-esteem, or self-respect, than of love of approbation, outside opinion does not weigh with them as it does with weaker people, and they go calmly upon their way without knowing or asking what are their neighbors’ feelings towards them.
Therefore their neighbors, seeing actions but not motives, and being as ignorant of results as they are of causes, often pronounce upon them the rashest judgments, denouncing the quiet indifference of true greatness as petty vanity, and the simplicity of a pure heart and single mind as mere affectation. For to the worldly unworldliness is so incredible, to the bad goodness is so impossible, that they will believe anything sooner than believe in either. Any one whose ideal of life is above the ordinary standard, and who persists in carrying it out after a fashion incomprehensible to society in general, is sure to be denounced by society as “singular,” or worse.
It always was so, and always will be. That excellent Italian gentleman—I forget his name—who felt it necessary to apologize for Michael Angelo’s manners, doubtlessly considered the old sculptor as an exceedingly “odd” person. Odder still he must have been thought by many an elegant Florentine, when, for some mere crotchet about the abolition of the republic, he abruptly quitted Florence and all his advantages there; nor ever returned, even though leaving unfinished those works which still remain unfinished in the Mausoleum of the Medici,—monuments of the obstinacy, or conscientiousness, or whatever you like to call it, of a poor artist, who set his individual opinion and will in opposition to the highest power in the land.
Poor old fellow, with his grim, saturnine face and broken nose! How very “peculiar” he must have appeared to his contemporaries! One wonders if any one, even Vittoria Colonna, had the sense to see into the deep heart of him, with all its greatness, sadness, and tenderness. There is a Pietà of his at Genoa, and another in St. Peter’s, in which the Virgin Mother’s gaze upon her dead Son lying across her lap seems to express all the motherhood and all the grief for the dead since the foundation of the world. And yet the sculptor might have been rough enough, and eccentric enough, outside, and his friend might have been quite excusable in craving pardon for his “manners.”
There are cases in which eccentricity requires more than an apology,—a rebuke. Those peculiarities which cause people to become a nuisance or an injury to other people, such as unpunctuality as to time, neglect or inaccuracy in business matters, and all those minor necessities or courtesies of life which make it smooth and sweet,—these failings, from whatever cause they spring, ought, even if forgiven, not to be pardoned without protest. They are wrong in themselves, and no argument or apology will make them right. The man who breaks his appointments, forgets his social engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, and his promises unfulfilled, is not merely an “odd,” but a very erring, individual; and if he shelters himself for this breach of every-day duties and courtesies by the notion that he is superior to them, deserves instead of excuses sharp condemnation.
But the peculiarities which harm nobody, and are not culpable in themselves, though they may seem so to the “chuckie-stanes” of society who are afraid of anything which differs from their own smooth roundness,—these are often more worthy of respectful tenderness than of blame or contempt. For who can tell the causes from which they sprang? What human being knows so entirely his fellow-creature’s inner and outer life that he dare pronounce upon many things, crotchety habits, peculiar manners or dress, eccentric ways of life or mode of thought, which may have resulted from the unrecorded, but never obliterated, history of years? For it is mostly the old who are “odd,” and when the young laugh at them, how do they know that they are not laughing at what may be their own fate one day? Many an oddity may have sprung from warped nobility of nature, many an eccentricity may have originated in the silent tragedy of a lifetime.
Of necessity these “odd” people are rather solitary people. They may dwell in a crowd, and do their duty in a large family, but neither the crowd nor the family entirely understands, or has much sympathy with them; and they know it. They do not always feel it, that is, to the extent of keen suffering, for their very “oddity” makes them sufficient to themselves, and they have ceased to expect what they know they cannot get. Still, at one time probably they did expect it. That “pernickity” old maid whom her nieces devoutly hope they may never resemble, may have been the “odd” one—but the thoughtful and earnest one—in a tribe of light-minded sisters, who danced and dressed, flirted and married, while she—who herself might possibly have wished to marry once upon a time—never did, but has lived her solitary, self-contained life from then till now, and will live it to the end. That man, who was once a gay young bachelor, and is now a grim old bachelor,—not positively disagreeable, but very peculiar, with all sorts of queer notions of his own, may have been, though the world little guesses it, a thoroughly disappointed man; beginning life with a grand ideal of ambition or philanthropy, striving hard to make himself, or to mend the world, or both, and finding that the task is something
| “Like one who strives in little boat | |
| To tug to him the ship afloat.” |
For the tide of life is almost sure to be at its ebb with those whom we call “odd” people. Therefore, we ask for them, not exactly compassion—they seldom need it, and would scorn to ask it for themselves—but that tenderness which is allied to reverence, and shows itself as such. Young people have, in a sense, no right to be odd. They have plenty of years before them, and will meet plenty of attrition in the world, so as to rub down their angles and make them polished and pleasant to all beholders. Early singularities are generally mere affectations. But when time has brought to most of us the sad “too late,” which in many things more or less we all must find, the case is a little different. Then it becomes the generation still advancing to show to that which is just passing away tenderness, consideration, and respect, even in spite of many harmless weaknesses.
For they know themselves as none other can ever know them except God. Others see their failures; but he saw how they struggled, and conquered sometimes. Others count their gains and triumphs; they have to sit night and day face to face with their perpetual losses. The world distinguishes shrewdly enough all they have done or not done; they themselves only know what they meant to do and how far they have succeeded. If they are “odd,” that is, if having strong individualities, they are not afraid or ashamed to show them, to speak fearlessly, to act independently, or possibly, plunging into the other extreme, to sink into morbid silence and neither look nor speak at all—what marvel? Better that, perhaps, than be exactly like everybody else, and go through life as evenly and as uselessly as a chuckie-stane.
For undoubtedly odd people have their consolations.
In the first place they are quite sure not to be weak people. Every one with a marked individuality has always this one great blessing—he can stand alone. In his pleasures and his pains he is sufficient to himself, and if he does not get sympathy he can generally do without it. Also, “peculiar” people, though not attractive to the many, by the few who do love them are sure to be loved very deeply, as we are apt to love those who have strongly salient points, and in whom there is a good deal to get over. And even if unloved, they have generally great capacity of loving; a higher and, it may be, a safer thing. For affection that rests on another’s love often leans on a broken reed; love which rests on itself is founded on a rock and cannot move. The waves may lash, the winds may rave around it; but there it is, and there it will abide.
The loneliness of which I have spoken is also something like that of a rock in the great sea; which flows about it, around it, and over it, but cannot affect it, save in the merest outward way. This solitude, the possible lot of many, is to these few a lot absolutely inevitable. No use to murmur at it, or grieve over it, or shrink from it. It is in the very nature of things; and it must be borne.
They whose standard of right is not movable, but fixed, not dictated to them from the outside, but drawn from something within; whose ideal is nothing in themselves or what they have around them, but something above and beyond both; whose motives are often totally misapprehended because they belong not to the seen, but the unseen; and whose actions are alike misjudged from their fearlessness of and indifference to either praise or blame—such people will always seem “odd” in the eyes of the world—which knows its own and loves them so far as it can.
But these it never does love, though it is sometimes a little afraid of them. Now and then it runs after them for awhile, and then, being disappointed, runs back and leaves them stranded in that solitude which sooner or later they are sure to find. Yet this solitude, increasing more and more as years advance, has in it glimpses of divine beauty, an atmosphere of satisfied peace which outsiders can seldom comprehend. Therefore they had better leave it and the “odd” people who dwell in it with deep reverence, but without needless pity, in the hands of the Great Consoler.
