440
PARTISAN REVIEW
ferent hold on us in a comparable situation. The proverb which comes to
hand here has wide familiarity. Yet it appears in only one standard collec–
tion. Its generic form appears to be French:
Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner.
We translate it into English tersely, dropping the
tout:
To understand is to forgive .
Some modem variants add local color and alliteration. "Never criticize
anyone till you've walked a mile in his moccasins." The poet Henri
Michaux includes this cautionary pastoral version in one of his collec–
tions, "If the wolf understands the sheep, he'll die of hunger." However
phrased, these distillations of folk wisdom deal with the power of empa–
thy to sway our judgment.
So arresting a formula as "Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner"
could not long exist without generating its polar opposite. La Rochefou–
cauld provides a subtle version, "If the world were aware of the motives
behind them, we would often be ashamed of our finest actions." In other
words: To understand is to condemn. G. B. Shaw says so without flinch–
ing, "If a great man could make us understand him, we should hang
him." We could recast it in neutral terms: Full understanding compels full
judgment. But when do we ever reach full understanding?
I single out "Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner" in part because
the proverb links our tendency to heroicize Meursault to the spell of
Ca–
mus's seemingly transparent narrative style. That style makes us believe
we understand Meursault. But the proverb also encapsulates a variant of
moral relativism. Travellers have always noticed that customs and laws
can be very different on the other side of a frontier. Montaigne condoned
cannibalism among South American Indians, not in his native Bordeaux.
Not until modem times has relativism been widely applied
within
a cul–
ture. In the opening pages of
Diary
of
a
Writer
Dostoevsky editorializes
about the "acquittal mania" affecting juries across Russia in the 1870s.
Juries see criminals as victims of circumstance. "Who is guilty? The en–
vironment is guilty ... there are no crimes at all." Though Nietzsche
found ways to justifY crime and immorality among the strong, he could
not tolerate sympathy for misconduct among the weak:
