the strongest. My father used to say to me: ‘What you’re doing is
both a good thing and a bad thing. It’s good because you are earning
yourself a reputation for generosity of character, because you’re so
ready to get involved in disagreements for which you are the one who
pays the price rather than the boy who was originally involved. At the
moment it is of little consequence, being beaten by one of your
playmates who stole the apples which you didn’t eat, or whom the
master of the house caught in the act of breaking windows, and
whom he would have hit hard if you had not been there to receive the
blows yourself. But as you grow older, things become more serious.
If you wade in to defend a man every time you see there are two men
against him, you will suffer for it, I warn you.’
(J.-J.Coulmann, Notice sur Benjamin Constant..., Paris:
Crapelet, 1831, pp. 5–6)
27.
Constant, Correspondance I (1774–1792), letter 21.
- On this fascinating subject, see Patrice Thompson’s article ‘Pratique de la “double
ironie” chez Constant’ in Benjamin Constant, Madame de Staël et le Groupe de
Coppet, ed. Etienne Hofmann, Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation; Lausanne: Institut
Benjamin Constant, 1982, pp. 287–304. According to Sainte-Beuve, Constant once
told a surprised interlocutor: ‘Ce que vous dites là est si juste que le contraire est
parfaitement vrai’, ‘What you’ve just said is so right that the opposite is perfectly
true’ (see Dennis Wood, Benjamin Constant: ‘Adolphe’, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press [Landmarks of World Literature], 1987, p. 33). Constant wrote
from Weimar to his aunt Anne de Nassau on 23 January 1804:
Why, might I ask, do you accuse me of having a weak character? It’s
an accusation all enlightened people are exposed to because they see
both—or rather the thousand—sides of everything they look at, so
that they find it impossible to make up their minds, and appear to be
leaning now to this side, now to that. But that is good sense, it’s not
weakness, and you know perfectly well, my dear Aunt, that you are
as indecisive as me.
(Melegari [1895], p. 329)
It is not impossible that his known tendency to laugh uproariously—or
hysterically—at moments of great and serious emotion was related to this ability to
stand outside himself and his situation. Apropos of the pianist Glenn Gould and his
capacity for laughter and irreverence, Nicholas Spice has written:
The presence of the fool...not far below the surface of Gould’s
playing gives it an exhilarating ambiguity, in which total
commitment and peals of laughter, extraordinary beauty and hilarity,
seem to alternate. [He] understood that humour is not about
responding to self-consciously funny things, but about laughing at
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