Of the Inconsistency of Our Actions

Those who make a practice of comparing human actions are never so perplexed as when they try to piece them together and place them in the same light, for they commonly contradict each other so strangely that it seems impossible they should have come from the same shop. Marius the younger was sometimes a son of Mars, sometimes a son of Venus. Pope Boniface VIII, they say, entered his office like a fox, bore himself in it like a lion, and died like a dog. And who would believe that Nero, that living image of cruelty, should have been moved, when sentence of death was brought to him to sign, to cry out: “Would to God I had never learned to write!”

We are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves as there is between us and others. Consider it a great thing to play the part of one single man. Ambition can teach men valor, and temperance, and liberality, and even justice. Greed can inspire courage, and fear can inspire boldness. These inclinations do not arise from a settled and fixed resolve — they arrive, they pass, they are strangers to the house.

A man who is everywhere is nowhere. He who is a friend to all is a friend to none.

I cannot keep my subject still. It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness. I take it in this condition, just as it is at the moment I give my attention to it. I do not paint its being; I paint its passage. Not a passage from age to age, or, as the people reckon, from one seven-year period to the next, but from day to day, from minute to minute. My history needs to be adapted to the moment. I may presently change — not only by chance but also by intention. This is a record of various and mutable occurrences, and of irresolute and inconsistent imaginations.

If the soul were settled, if it spoke with one voice, we might draw from it a sure pattern and rule. But the soul shows us always a new face. There are those who have gone to their deaths with perfect composure, and the same men have trembled at the sound of breaking glass. We praise consistency but we do not live it. Let us at least be honest about this before we begin building statues to our own virtue.