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A SPASM OF SENSE.

The conjunction of amiability and sense in the same individual renders that individual’s position in a world like this very disagreeable.  Amiability without sense, or sense without amiability, runs along smoothly enough.  The former takes things as they are.  It receives all glitter as pure gold, and does not see that it is custom alone which varnishes wrong with a shiny coat of respectability, and glorifies selfishness with the aureole of sacrifice.  It sets down all collisions as foreordained, and never observes that they occur because people will not smooth off their angles, but sharpen them, and not only sharpen them, but run them into you.  It forgets that the Lord made man upright, but he hath sought out many inventions.  It attributes all the confusion and inaptitude which it finds to the nature of things, and never suspects that the Devil goes around in the night, thrusting the square men into the round places, and the round men into the square places.  It never notices that the reason why the rope does not unwind easily is because one strand is a world too large and another a world too small, and so it sticks where it ought to roll, and rolls where it ought to stick.  It makes sweet, faint efforts with tender fingers and palpitating heart to oil the wheels and polish up the machine, and does not for a moment imagine that the hitch is owing to original incompatibility of parts and purposes, that the whole machine must be pulled to pieces and made over, and that nothing will be done by standing patiently by, trying to soothe away the creaking and wheezing and groaning of the laboring, lumbering thing, by laying on a little drop of sweet-oil with a pin-feather.  As it does not see any of these things that are happening before its eyes, of course it is shallowly happy.  And on the other hand, he who does see them and is not amiable is grimly and Grendally happy.  He likes to say disagreeable things, and all this dismay and disaster scatter disagreeable things broadcast along his path, so that all he has to do is to pick them up and say them.  Therefore this world is his paradise.  He would not know what to do with himself in a world where matters were sorted and folded and laid away ready for you when you wanted them.  He likes to see human affairs mixing themselves up in irretrievable confusion.  If he detects a symptom of straightening, it shall go hard but he will thrust in his own fingers and snarl a thread or two.  He is delighted to find dogged duty and eager desire butting each other.  All the irresistible forces crashing against all the immovable bodies give him no shock, only a pleasant titillation.  He is never so happy as when men are taking hold of things by the blade, and cutting their hands, and losing blood.  He tells them of it, but not in order to relieve so much as to “aggravate” them; and he does aggravate them, and is satisfied.  Oh, but he is an aggravating person!