THE MAN OF VIGOUR.

Waikato Times, Volume XV, Issue 1278, 7 September 1880, Page 3

THE MAN OF VIGOUR.

To an observer of the humours of his time, there are both pathos and entertainment in the study of that contemporary type, the Man of Vigour. Vigour, as we shall all acknowledge, is a salutary and essential gift. Let a man's judgment be never so sound, let his aims be never so praiseworthy, he will fail if he lack vigour to enforce the one and prosecute the other. But the personage of whom we speak is one who mistakes the nature of this excellent gift. He forgets that the value of vigour depends altogether upon that of the ends for which it is put forth. He pays a touching but misguided homage to the qualiiy of vigour in the abstract, and makes it his mission to exemplify the virtu* s of the quality in his own person. Being of an excitable tern, perament, he has begun by conceiving an exaggerated idea of the amount of sentiment and philanthrophy current among his fellow-creatures. His first care is to prove himself exempt from these weaknesses of a maudlin generation. He then sets up as a censor of politics, conduct, literature and art j and nis task is easy, because his canons are simple. In politics, if one course is recommended as being more consistant with morality than another, that is enough to decide the person who aspires to be distinguished as a man of vigour. It is only women and priests, he declares to himself, who reason of policy so. 'Expediency,' he clamours, 'is the rule of politics ;' ignor- j ing the fact that morality is only another name for the expediency of the greatest number. ' Emotion ' is his peculiar abhorrence, and ' emotional' the most damaging word in his vocabulary. But again, he forgets that there are emotions and emotions. There are emotions of pity and justice, and there are emotions of anger and aversion; and both are liable to perversion and excess. Against the excesses of the former class of emotions the profession of vigour puts its votary on his guard ; but in those of the latter class it allows him full liberty to indulge. Accordingly we find the man of vigour contending against the humanitarian and the sentimentalist in a manner which is not emotional merely, but hysterical. He will not, if he knows it, pule or gnah ; but he is perpetually hectoring and scolding. To be indignant, he thinks, is vigorous ; so he proceeds to be indignant at random. He conceives and encourages in himself spontaneous antipathies, and calls names gratuitously until he believes them. His sense of superior vigour carries along with it a sense of superior patriotism, honesty, foresight, insight. And all the while he has lost the habit of cool examination, and with it the power of measuring forces and appiehending events as they are. He wakes up one fine morning to find all his railings disregarded and all his forecasts belied. Disappointment exasperates instead of instructing him, and he only takes up the cudgels again to lay about him more blindly than ever. In the domain of literature and art, the snares which beset the man of vigour are of the same natare. He plays the part of a kind of forcible feeble, or emotional censor of what he takes to be the signs of emotion in others. His alarm lest he should be found countenancing affections is so great that hedoesnot retain the selfpossession necessary for judging 1 what is affected and what is not. His fear of being betrayed into raptures betrays him into strictures than which no raptures could be more foolish or irrelevant. Here is a motto of Blake's which the man of vigour — but that he has probably been accustomed to regard Blake as the crackbrained idol of a coterie whom he detests — might adopt with satisfaction as his own : c "Damn." says Blake, among a string of other and less-pointed apothegms, * "damn" braces, "bless" relaxes.' To brace and not to relax is the function of criticism, according to the man of vigour ; and at any rate, for a critic with a nervous dread of the softer emotions to damn is to be on the safe side." The words fantastic, morbid, insincere, as applied to the works of literature and art, like the words sentimental, emotional, fanatical, as applied in the sphere of politics, afford him, as often as he utters them, a comfortable proof of his own success in the pursuit of his ideal. But the misfortune is that in both orders of phenomena the man of vigour is in the habit of applying his bracing epithets at haphazard. In his blind dislike of morbidness and fanaticism he becomes himself one of the most morbid of fanatics. He foments his aversions until he can no longer discern the objects of them in anything resembling their proper lineaments. He lives in a state of chronic fury and alaim against bugbears of his own oreation. The chances are that his favourite bugbears are two in number : the • Radical ' and the • .Esthetic' The former is the representative of everything in politics, and the latter of everything in art and literature, that the man of vigour holds himself bound by his vocation to denounce. The Radical of his dreams bears in truth little likeness to any real politician of the work-a-day world ; nevertheless, with this imaginary being he insists in his heat on identifying- the whole world, not only of Radical but of Liberal politicians collectively. The stands originally for those who cannot express their admiration without posturing ; but in these offenoes the n»an of vigour is prone to regard as participating all persons who allow themselves any hearty admiration whatsoever. So against these and other chimeras he tilts without. Occasionally he lays aside his swashing blow, and betakes himself to the weapons of ridicule. It is then that his case is the worst ; for the man of vigour is nothing if not angry, and ridicule attempted by an angry man is a thing indead depressing to the spirits of its victims. If this scourge of the sentimentalist had only started with the saving gift of humour, or if he had been half as anxious to be right as to be vigourous, his adventures would long ago nave taken a different turn. As it is, vigour has been his idol and. bis bane. The man, of vigour

may be accepted for a time as the oracle of an excited clique ; but he ends by being discredited on all hands as the man of random denunciations, of blundering criticisms, of arrogant misjudgments, of sarcasms that miss the point, and prophecies that are scattered to the winds by the event.