Phew!"
continued he, waxing warm, "if old Pontifex had had Cromwell's chances he
would have done all that Cromwell did, and have done it better; if he had
had Giotto's chances he would have done all that Giotto did, and done it
no worse; as it was, he was a village carpenter, and I will undertake to
say he never scamped a job in the whole course of his life."
"But," said I, "we cannot judge people with so many 'ifs.' If old
Pontifex had lived in Giotto's time he might have been another Giotto,
but he did not live in Giotto's time."
"I tell you, Edward," said my father with some severity, "we must judge
men not so much by what they do, as by what they make us feel that they
have it in them to do. If a man has done enough either in painting,
music or the affairs of life, to make me feel that I might trust him in
an emergency he has done enough. It is not by what a man has actually
put upon his canvas, nor yet by the acts which he has set down, so to
speak, upon the canvas of his life that I will judge him, but by what he
makes me feel that he felt and aimed at. If he has made me feel that he
felt those things to be loveable which I hold loveable myself I ask no
more; his grammar may have been imperfect, but still I have understood
him; he and I are _en rapport_; and I say again, Edward, that old
Pontifex was not only an able man, but one of the very ablest men I ever
knew.
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