Forster.
Inconsistency of conduct, of professed opinion, whether of things or
men, we can understand; but an inconsistent character is something
without example, and which nature abhors as she does false logic.
Opportunity may develop, hindrance may dwarf, the prevailing set of
temptation may give a bent to character, but the germ planted at birth
can never be wholly disnatured by circumstance any more than soil or
exposure can change an oak into a pine. Character is continuous, it is
cumulative, whether for good or ill; the general tenor of the life is a
logical sequence from it, and a man can always explain himself to
himself, if not to others, as a coherent whole, because he always knows,
or thinks he knows, the value of _x_ in the personal equation. Were it
otherwise, that sense of conscious identity which alone makes life a
serious thing and immortality a rational hope, would be impossible. It
is with the means of finding out this unknown quantity--in other words,
of penetrating to the man's motives or his understanding of them--that
the biographer undertakes to supply us, and unless he succeed in this,
his rummaging of old papers but raises a new cloud of dust to darken our
insight.
[Footnote 1: Lowell was mistaken. Heine never lost his love for the
Jews. He regretted his apostasy and always regarded himself as a Jew,
and not a Christian.
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