The Proud Fool

Stultus and stuck-up grow on the same stalk.¹ You will hardly find greater fools than the stuck-up and the proud. St. Paul himself, that preacher from Tarsus, testifies that those who think a great deal of themselves are nothing but fools: “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.”² Fellows of that kind are past counting in this world. In Rome there is a whole hospital for them, called Alli Pazzarelli,³ where you will find nothing but crazed heads, brains turned inside out, strange fantastics, worm-eaten skulls, and fools stuffed with fancies. There you will meet one who fancies he has a whole nest of sparrows in his head, which give him no peace day or night. He would gladly let them out, but he is afraid the peasants would beat him to death for hatching such grain-thieves on them. Another says he is St. Christopher, and has carried our Lord through the Adriatic Sea more than once; but the oak he used for a staff has snapped in two, and so he begs for another tree, so that he can wade across again when the occasion arises.⁴ A third will tell you he is the King of Calicut, and any day now he will send out a fleet against the Dutch, because they cut off the heads of innocent stockfish and banish them, headless, to foreign lands.⁵ You will find yet another who fancies his nose is made of wax. If he so much as sees a fire far off, he trembles in every limb; offer him a whole province, and he would not put up with a flick on the nose. And there was one who firmly believed he was the Devil’s own barber, and complained that his razor never got more nicks in it than when he had to shave the Devil, who appeared to him in the shape of a hog, and so on. A thousand such fanciful fellows are to be found there, and foreigners and travellers often take a particular pleasure in them. None of these poor wretches sins by it; they are far more to be pitied. God keep every one of us from falling into such fantasies! But those whom pride drives to fancy themselves more than they are, these are the greatest fools of all, and an abomination in the eyes of God besides: “Every proud man is an abomination to the Lord.”⁶

Very finely did the crowned Prophet say: “Man when he was in honour did not understand.”⁷ That is, says St. Bernard, “Honour swallowed up his understanding”:⁸ the honour took his wits away. That happens again and again.

“Brother Fidel,⁹ do you see that man riding in the carriage over there?”

“Yes, I see him.”

“Take my word for it, he won’t shift his hat for you, for the honour he has risen to has shifted his wits. He doesn’t know me any more; or, to put it better, he doesn’t want to know me. I know well enough who his father was.

His father went bumble-de-bum,
Round and round the cask with his mallet he’d come.

His father was a cooper, a hooper of barrels; his name was Joseph Schneitzer. Now his son is called the Lord of Rotzberg, and so forth.”¹⁰

“Look, Brother Fidel, there’s a woman kneeling in the front pew, with a red velvet book-bag in front of her. She’ll be praying the Gradual Psalms, no doubt, for she has climbed a good long way.¹¹ Not one in a thousand would believe she is the daughter of a woman who roasted chestnuts. She came into money from a rich cousin, and so into so grand a marriage that she is now addressed as Her Ladyship.”

All this might pass. God often enough grants people the grace to rise from the needle to nobility,¹² and everyone would gladly grant her as much, if only she would remember what she used to be and not look down on others so. But she will not so much as condescend to speak to a common person: “Man when he was in honour did not understand.”

A certain man was raised to high rank, partly through the favour of great lords, partly for his own good qualities. Among the rest, his oldest and best-known comrade came to wish him joy of it.

“I congratulate Your Lordship from my heart,” he said, “on this high dignity, and wish you nothing else than many long years in the best of health in your office; and I beg you to count me among your humblest servants.”

“I,” said the newly hatched Blasius,¹³ “do not know you.”

To which the other replied, “My name is So-and-so. The two of us were together for years, and were always the best of brothers.”

And he again: “I do not know you.”

That so vexed the other that he at once turned his congratulations into condolences. “I am heartily sorry,” he said, “that Your Lordship has met so unexpectedly with such a misfortune: that you have lost your understanding all at once and been robbed of your reason entirely, so that you no longer know me at all. I only wish I were so potent, and had the power to drive so harmful a swelling out of your brain. Adieu.”

If I were rich, I would make such a proud fool a present of a Mainz ducat with a wheel on it. For Willigis, Archbishop of Mainz, had a wheel painted all over his palace, and it was afterwards stamped on the coinage too, to remind himself that he came of humble stock, and was in fact a wheelwright’s son.¹⁴

Achitophel was a proud fool.¹⁵ He carried almost every point with the royal princes and stood in great esteem; but when once the counsel and advice he had given Absalom was rejected, the fool was so ashamed, believing his reputation had caught a consumption from it, that he hurried home at once, made his will and set his affairs in order, and then hanged himself. O fool! Honour tickled this one more than the rope did.

People say that fools must be deloused with a club;¹⁶ but for the proud fools, God Himself mostly brings them to shame. Lucifer found that out at the very beginning. Because in his sheer arrogance he wished to be equal to the Most High, his Gloria in excelsis was followed straight away by the De profundis:¹⁷ from a cherub he became a scrub; from a sky-dweller, a sty-dweller; from a lily, a silly; from a lambkin, a bumpkin; from a steerer, a smearer; from a torch, a scorch-mark; from a wonder, a blunder; from a “My!”, a “Fie!”, and that is why people say “Fie, devil!”¹⁸ In the end God has no more usual custom than to damp down the vapours of pride and put them to shame. Out of countless examples, here is the following story.

At Genoa a peasant was carrying a sizeable load of wood on his back, to sell it in the town, and in the street, as the custom is, he kept shouting, “Make way! Make way!” A young Strut-at-Court,¹⁹ swaggering along in his à-la-mode suit as though a peacock had hatched him, would not step aside, thinking it beneath his weighty dignity. But the peasant kept straight on his way and knocked this dressed-up street-angel into a deep patch of mud, so that he himself had to laugh at this hare in its pepper-sauce.²⁰

My High-and-Well-Born Lordship, as he fancied himself, took this for a most punishable insult, and reported it to the court without delay, and the peasant was summoned at once. When he was asked why he had committed this outrage, the peasant said not a word, but made as if he were dumb and speechless; his whole answer was signs. The bench, weighing the circumstances, objected that in this case they could give the plaintiff no satisfaction, since the poor man was dumb and could not answer for himself.

“Dumb, is he?” says this feather-Jack. “Dumb, my foot! The peasant is an arrant rogue. Why, at the time it happened he could talk well enough, and even shout at the top of his voice.”

“And what did he say at the time?” asks the judge.

“He shouted,” says this Pompolus,²¹ “‘Make way! Make way!’”

“Well then,” says the judge, “the poor man is hereby excused, and free and quit. Why did the gentleman not make way for the poor laden wretch?”

So he had to pay for his pride with a blush of shame and take his leave, not without laughter; and most people said the proud fool had got what he deserved.²²