CONCEIT.

Temuka Leader, Issue 207, 6 December 1879, Page 2

CONCEIT.

It would be difficult to name a vice go innocent towards others as conceit. Your impatience, your apathy, your fretfulness, your carelessness, your garrulity, your extravagence, all these, almost all faults and foibles in the catalogue of human imperfection, have it inevitable to them to inflict harms and vexations on people you hav’e to do with ; your conceit leaves them never a whit the worse. And yet there is nothing man resents so much as conceit in his fellow man. The display of it arouses an aggressive desire for the reformation of the offender, which can only be satiated by his miserable abashV ment, and to that end many will take' over a mere causal acquaintance an amount of trouble, which few would think worth while for the cure of downright depravity in any person in whom they had not the immediate interest of near kinship or responsible connection. While there is a watchful delicacy about even alluding to any other mental or moral defect ir the presence of a person " known to be one of those possessing it, or rather possessed by it, not only politeness but resonable kindness is constantly set aside without compunction forthe sake of giving the conceited the glftie of seeing themselves as ithers see them—with their least softening spectacles on. One would think it need not matter much to anyone of us ff our friend has more admiration for himself than we have for him ; yet his error is one which it is scarcely in human nature to tolerate, and for him charity bears the pedagogues whip. It is every man’s mission to inflict wholesomediscipline for his good on the conceited man.

Real conceit seems to be partly the over-estimation of what one is, and, therefore, of what one does, and partly the living, as it were, before a lookingglass, taking notice of one s self. Sometimes the ovei-estimation may be only apparent; tin* capacity one supposes in one’s self may have really existed, may still exist, but the time which should have gone in cultivating it have beenspent in admiring it ; it has been frittered away in little exhibitions, and has dwindled for want of pains to make it more. Bystanders, seeing no signs of it, believe it never was but as an hallucination of demented butit'did once have its place as a rational prompting to the exercise of a faculty,, and it is possible that the faculty may have been worth exercising. Thechattering sciolist, the half-skilled superfluous dilettante, may have had in them so much instinctive ability as,, with the plodding zeal of humilitv, goes to make sound philosophers ami competent artists. They were right, perhaps in thinking they could get over the racecourse, hut they kept stopping on the way to pat their heads and give themselves sugar plums, and so they never got near the goal. Unhappily such runners are apt to believe in theircapabilities for the extremes! prowess, just because they have never at any time tested their strength to the fall. What they have done with such case that, surely a littleeffect would make themAa match for the best. Something in thorn, they know not what—a genius that cannot bear harness, a nobility ot naWre which forbids descent into the arena of competition, a divine indolence, an ethereal carelessness —something, in fact, whatever it he, which is-unpractical but exceedingly superior, has hindered them of craftsman’s excellence.

These superlunary beings descend not to the menial steadiness of a Wheweb, a Tennyson, a Huxley, a Millais, they are comets, air-plants, nil sorts of erratic wild flowers, vinca lalogimd stars, anything that cannot lie calculated upon and jr 'cs its own wuV' uselessly. jvmody »..uS so possess*-'! of a lyr«v a soul, st genius,.

a star, as the occasional poet incapably ferocious against grammar and petulant at metre. A plain-sailing Shakespeare, or Milton, cr so, has litt’e < n muh of such extra-human inspiration to hoast ; ■ but the amount of lespectable genth men and ladies who are guided and gifted by such consumate influences, is past the multiplication. (Something gets in their way to even penny-a-liner publicity; and they are scarcely likely to perceive that the something is conceit. Y t, do we know what is conceit ? Can wc tell who of the youthful is under its blight ? No little boy could be more liable to be accused ot it by rational creatures than the little boy who saw a picture which, of course, he could no more have painted then than he could have jumped over the moon and cheerfully remarked, “ Ancii’ io son pittore.” By-and-bye it turned out that he was right. But if circumstances had been adverse—df he had never get a chance of learning to mix the colons and the vehicles the right way—would he have been conceited because be never became a successful ? Would the prompting have been less genuine because opportunity failed ? The doggerel that is written 1 the daubs that are. pain ted ! and all under the youthful inspiration that feels a power none looking at the execution can discern.. Are we to see in such immature confidences only conceit? Or if it be conceit that nerves young boneless creatures of a Hercules, in which they fail, and leaves them after failure ready to begin again, and try, try, try, till they fail past their strength to rise again as the million do, or with final gasps rise again and triumph, as the dozen do —then, if this he conceit, as doubtless it is let us thank God for conceit, and be a little lenient even to the simpletons in whom conceit is but an enervating mistake. Conceit in the young means the possibility of immortal success of ludicrous failure. If there were no conceit among 1 lie young, what would there he for the wurld but decent, se 1 f seeking, so much per cent respectability ? For the gain of the future, for kindly pity’s sake to-dav, let us be a litt'e more lenient to conceit than we arc, rerrmmbei ing that, if without it there need he no halhos of presumption in the dust, there could be no ascension of low-born greatness to the heigts.