We are all familiar with the fleeting and fickle nature of gratitude. When our services are found to be expedient, or agreeable, we are flattered and fêted; but when the immediate crisis has passed, and there is longer a looming emergency, we are forgotten as quickly as last Sunday’s supper. We are likely to forget that it has always been so. An interesting anecdote, found in Alexander Garden’s 1822 volume Anecdotes of the Revolutionary War in America, will serve to confirm this fact.
The year 1745 saw the commencement in Scotland of what historians call the Jacobite Rising. In simplest terms, the goal of the insurrection was to overthrow the Hanoverian king of England, George II, and install the exiled House of Stuart. There were, as always, deeper economic and social forces at work, but these details need not detain us from our story. In 1745, we are told, an English officer passing through the county of York, and headed to fight the rebellion, was met with gushing hospitality by a local Quaker. With great enthusiasm, he said to the officer, “Go forward, friend, smite thy opponents, crush rebellion; and on thy return, remember to tarry with him,who regards thee as one of the Pillars of the Nation!” The officer took the old Quaker at his word.
After the uprising sputtered out at the Battle of Culloden in 1746, the officer again passed through York on his way home. He had not forgotten the warm reception offered to him by his Quaker friend, and sought to pay the old man visit, in accordance with his earlier invitation. However, when the officer knocked on the man’s door, the startled Quaker greeted him with a look of dismay and irritation. “Retire, friend, I know thee not!” were his words to the shocked officer. “Know not me?” cried the officer. “Why, sir, when we last parted, you not only pressed me to return to you when the rebellion should be extinguished, but assured me, moreover, that you regarded me as one of the pillars of the nation!” Without the slightest pause, the wily Quaker retorted, “Did I so? Then, trust me, friend, I must have meant one of the caterpillars.”
Obligations birthed in the sentiment of gratitude are ill-remembered; only a virtuous soul can elevate principle above the emotions of the moment. One such example is found in the same volume cited in our introductory paragraph. A soldier named Levingstone, who served under General Francis Marion (the so-called “Swamp Fox”) in South Carolina during the American Revolution, was once returning from a mission alone at night. Unfortunately for him, he encountered an armed party whose allegiance in the conflict was not clear. One of the men, a fearsome individual, drew a pistol and pointed it directly at Levingstone. “Declare, instantly, to what party you belong, or you are a dead man.” The hapless Levingstone had a despairing suspicion that he had met with a British patrol.
At first he tried to talk his way out of the predicament. “I think, Sir, it would be a little more in the way of civility if you were to drop a hint, just to let me know which side of the question you are pleased to favor.” The man with the pistol was not amused. “No jesting,” he stated, cocking the pistol. “Declare your principles, or die.” At this point Levingstone abandoned all hope of subterfuge, and decided to throw caution to the wind. “Then by Jesus,” he exploded, “I will not die with a lie in my mouth. I am an American, to extremity, you spalpeen, so do your worst, and be damned to you!” The man with the pistol grinned, and his party chuckled in amusement. “You are an honest fellow,” he said warmly. “We are friends, and I rejoice to meet a man faithful as you are to the cause of our country.” (Readers may be interested to know that the word spalpeen is an archaic Irish term meant to denote an itinerant laborer. It had a secondary, pejorative meaning as a knave or a troublemaker).
How to deal with the fickleness of human gratitude? We cannot be perturbed by the want of something we never expected. So our first task should be to expect nothing in the way of gratitude. We do what what is good and just for its own sake, knowing that goodness and justice are their own rewards. I admire the position taken by Atticus, as he is described in Cornelius Nepos’s Lives of the Great Commanders:
He retained a permanent memory of generosity that had been extended to him by others; but with regard to a charitable act he himself performed, he remembered it only as long as the beneficiary was grateful. Thus he acted in accordance with the saying,
Each man’s personal habits shape his own fortune.
Nevertheless, before Atticus shaped his fortune, he shaped himself with enough protective traits to avoid ever being justly harmed.
And this is without doubt a wise policy. What is important is that we expect nothing: for he who expects nothing can never be disappointed. And I think you will find that, the less you chase the approbation of others, the more benefits Fortune will confer on you. The wise man fortifies himself, and armors his exterior, with the cumulative effects of his right actions. A righteous patina deflects all spears. It is as Petrarch said, in a letter written to his brother Gherardo in 1349:
Dum matutino tempore excitaris, ad divinum te colloquium evocari credito.
And this means, “When you rise in the morning hour, believe yourself to be called to a divine conference.” And this divine conference we call life, to which we are all daily summoned, does not hinge on the evanescent, emotionally-driven opinions of others. It is truly its own reward.
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Be sure to take a look at the new, annotated translation of Cornelius Nepos’s Lives of the Great Commanders.
