His toleration of it in men--at least his
faculty of merging some kinds and degrees of it in concomitant good, or
even beholding certain errors rather as objects of interest, or of a
meditative pity and tenderness, than of pure aversion and condemnation,
Mr. Talfourd has feelingly described in his "Memoir" (vol. ii, p.
326-9), "Not only to opposite opinions," he says, "and devious habits of
thought was Lamb indulgent; he discovered the soul of goodness in things
evil so vividly, that the surrounding evil disappeared from his mental
vision." This characteristic of his mind is not to be identified with
the idolizing propensity common to many ardent and imaginative spirits.
He "not only loved his friends in spite of their errors," as Mr.
Talfourd observes, "but loved them, "errors and all";" which implies
that he was not unconscious of their existence. He saw the failings as
plainly as any one else, nay, fixed his gentle but discerning eye upon
them; whereas the idolizers behold certain objects in a bedarkening
blaze of light, or rather of light-confounding brightness, the
multiplied and heightened reflection of whatever is best in them, to the
obscurity or transmutation of all their defects. Whence it necessarily
follows that the world presents itself to their eyes divided, like a
chess-board, into black and white compartments--a moral and intellectual
chequer-work; not that they love to make darkness, but that they
luxuriate too eagerly in light: and their "over-muchness" toward some
men involves an over-littleness towards others, whom they involuntarily
contrast, in all their poor and peccant reality, with gorgeous
idealisms.
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