balancing of this against that—to hear a man suddenly propose some naked
principle with which everybody is acquainted, and decide by it solely. I
came to know him through M’Kay, who had known him for years; but M’Kay at
last broke out against him, and called him a stupid fool when he threw up
a handsome salary and refused to serve any longer under a house which had
always treated him well, because they, moving with the times, had
determined to offer their customers a cheaper description of goods, which
Cardinal thought was dishonest. M’Kay said, and said truly, that many
poor persons would buy these goods who could buy nothing else, and that
Cardinal, before yielding to such scruples, ought to satisfy himself
that, by yielding, he would not become a burden upon others less
fanciful. This was just what happened. Cardinal could get no work again
for a long time, and had to borrow money. I was sorry; but for my part,
this and other eccentricities did not disturb my confidence in him. He
was an honest, affectionate soul, and his peculiarities were a necessary
result of the total chaos of a time without any moral guidance. With no
church, no philosophy, no religion, the wonder is that anybody on whom
use and wont relax their hold should ever do anything more than blindly
rove hither and thither, arriving at nothing. Cardinal was adrift, like
thousands and hundreds of thousands of others, and amidst the storm and
pitchy darkness of the night, thousands and hundreds of thousands of
voices offer us pilotage. It spoke well for him that he did nothing
worse than take a few useless phantoms on board which did him no harm,
and that he held fast to his own instinct for truth and goodness. I
never let myself be annoyed by what he produced to me from his books.
All that I discarded. Underneath all that was a solid worth which I
loved, and which was mostly not vocal. What was vocal in him was, I am
bound to say, not of much value.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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