Character and Conduct
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Character and Conduct’
Advice that is not based on honesty, humility and deep reflection is mere craft.
Ben Jonson’s Timber: or, Discoveries was not published until 1641, four years after his death. It took the form of a series of reflections on subjects from personal morality to literary criticism, written by a keen and principled observer of life in the theatre and also at Court. In this extract, he discusses the giving of advice.
A loving parent doesn’t want her son to be a success; she wants him to be a fine human being.
In February 1878, Fyodor Dostoevsky received a letter from an anxious mother asking him how to bring up a child. Dostoevsky was taken aback, and told her plainly that she was requiring more wisdom than he was fit to give. In particular, her question “What is good, and what is not good?” left him almost speechless; fortunately for us, that left just enough speech to impart this touching counsel.
A road accident made parish priest George Herbert late for his musical evening, but he was not a bit sorry.
Welshman and poet George Herbert was a country clergyman in Bemerton near Salisbury. Quiet, sensitive, and not much enamoured of the cold new Protestantism, his ministered gently to his parish until his death in 1633 at the age of just 39. Izaak Walton told this story as an illustration of the kind of man he was.
We all want our politicians to be clever men, but being cunning isn’t the same as being wise.
Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, declared himself one of the Country Party, a loose and cross-bench federation of MPs speaking up (so they said) for the country as a whole, and not only for the elite only. In 1738, he wrote The Idea of a Patriot King for the benefit of Frederick, Prince of Wales, in which Bolingbroke distinguished between two kinds of politician.
Sir Philip Sidney reminded comedians that when the audience is laughing they aren’t necessarily the better for it.
In 1579, Stephen Gosson wrote School of Abuse, accusing Elizabethan theatre of being a frivolous and bawdy distraction from England’s serious social problems. Some three years later, Sir Philip Sidney replied with An Apologie for Poetrie, a gentle defence of the drama; but even he could find little to say for comedians who thought that anything that raised a laugh was entertainment.
Persian scholar Al-Ghazali feared for any country where morals were lagging behind brains.
Al-Ghazali, known in Medieval Europe as Algazel, was a Persian scholar roughly contemporary with Anselm of Canterbury. In 1095, feeling compromised by political and academic expectations, Ghazali abruptly left his prestigious teaching post and embarked on a ten-year pilgrimage to Damascus, Jerusalem and Mecca. The Revival of the Religious Sciences was the fruit of his soul-searching, and one of the most important Islamic works after the Quran itself.