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Title: Impressions of Theophrastus Such

Author: George Eliot

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IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH


GEORGE ELIOT


Second Edition

William Blackwood and Sons
Edinburgh and London
MDCCCLXXIX



  "Suspicione si quis errabit sua,
  Et rapiet ad se, quod erit commune omnium,
  Stulte nudabit animi conscientiam
  Huic excusatum me velim nihilominus
  Neque enim notare singulos mens est mihi,
  Verum ipsam vitam et mores hominum ostendere"

  --Phaedrus


CONTENTS


    I. LOOKING INWARD

   II. LOOKING BACKWARD

  III. HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH

   IV. A MAN SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY

    V. A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN

   VI. ONLY TEMPER

  VII. A POLITICAL MOLECULE

 VIII. THE WATCH-DOG OF KNOWLEDGE

   IX. A HALF-BREED

    X. DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY

   XI. THE WASP CREDITED WITH THE HONEYCOMB

  XII. "SO YOUNG!"

 XIII. HOW WE COME TO GIVE OURSELVES FALSE
       TESTIMONIALS, AND BELIEVE IN THEM

  XIV. THE TOO READY WRITER

   XV. DISEASES OF SMALL AUTHORSHIP

  XVI. MORAL SWINDLERS

 XVII. SHADOWS OF THE COMING RACE

XVIII. THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP!



I.


LOOKING INWARD.

It is my habit to give an account to myself of the characters I meet
with: can I give any true account of my own? I am a bachelor, without
domestic distractions of any sort, and have all my life been an
attentive companion to myself, flattering my nature agreeably on
plausible occasions, reviling it rather bitterly when it mortified me,
and in general remembering its doings and sufferings with a tenacity
which is too apt to raise surprise if not disgust at the careless
inaccuracy of my acquaintances, who impute to me opinions I never held,
express their desire to convert me to my favourite ideas, forget whether
I have ever been to the East, and are capable of being three several
times astonished at my never having told them before of my accident in
the Alps, causing me the nervous shock which has ever since notably
diminished my digestive powers. Surely I ought to know myself better
than these indifferent outsiders can know me; nay, better even than my
intimate friends, to whom I have never breathed those items of my inward
experience which have chiefly shaped my life.

Yet I have often been forced into the reflection that even the
acquaintances who are as forgetful of my biography and tenets as they
would be if I were a dead philosopher, are probably aware of certain
points in me which may not be included in my most active suspicion. We
sing an exquisite passage out of tune and innocently repeat it for the
greater pleasure of our hearers. Who can be aware of what his foreign
accent is in the ears of a native? And how can a man be conscious of
that dull perception which causes him to mistake altogether what will
make him agreeable to a particular woman, and to persevere eagerly in a
behaviour which she is privately recording against him? I have had some
confidences from my female friends as to their opinion of other men whom
I have observed trying to make themselves amiable, and it has occurred
to me that though I can hardly be so blundering as Lippus and the rest
of those mistaken candidates for favour whom I have seen ruining their
chance by a too elaborate personal canvass, I must still come under the
common fatality of mankind and share the liability to be absurd without
knowing that I am absurd. It is in the nature of foolish reasoning to
seem good to the foolish reasoner. Hence with all possible study of
myself, with all possible effort to escape from the pitiable illusion
which makes men laugh, shriek, or curl the lip at Folly's likeness, in
total unconsciousness that it resembles themselves, I am obliged to
recognise that while there are secrets in me unguessed by others, these
others have certain items of knowledge about the extent of my powers and
the figure I make with them, which in turn are secrets unguessed by me.
When I was a lad I danced a hornpipe with arduous scrupulosity, and
while suffering pangs of pallid shyness was yet proud of my superiority
as a dancing pupil, imagining for myself a high place in the estimation
of beholders; but I can now picture the amusement they had in the
incongruity of my solemn face and ridiculous legs. What sort of hornpipe
am I dancing now?

Thus if I laugh at you, O fellow-men! if I trace with curious interest
your labyrinthine self-delusions, note the inconsistencies in your
zealous adhesions, and smile at your helpless endeavours in a rashly
chosen part, it is not that I feel myself aloof from you: the more
intimately I seem to discern your weaknesses, the stronger to me is the
proof that I share them. How otherwise could I get the discernment?--for
even what we are averse to, what we vow not to entertain, must have
shaped or shadowed itself within us as a possibility before we can think
of exorcising it. No man can know his brother simply as a spectator.
Dear blunderers, I am one of you. I wince at the fact, but I am not
ignorant of it, that I too am laughable on unsuspected occasions; nay,
in the very tempest and whirlwind of my anger, I include myself under my
own indignation. If the human race has a bad reputation, I perceive that
I cannot escape being compromised. And thus while I carry in myself the
key to other men's experience, it is only by observing others that I can
so far correct my self-ignorance as to arrive at the certainty that I am
liable to commit myself unawares and to manifest some incompetency which
I know no more of than the blind man knows of his image in the glass.

Is it then possible to describe oneself at once faithfully and fully? In
all autobiography there is, nay, ought to be, an incompleteness which
may have the effect of falsity. We are each of us bound to reticence by
the piety we owe to those who have been nearest to us and have had a
mingled influence over our lives; by the fellow-feeling which should
restrain us from turning our volunteered and picked confessions into an
act of accusation against others, who have no chance of vindicating
themselves; and most of all by that reverence for the higher efforts of
our common nature, which commands us to bury its lowest fatalities, its
invincible remnants of the brute, its most agonising struggles with
temptation, in unbroken silence. But the incompleteness which comes of
self-ignorance may be compensated by self-betrayal. A man who is
affected to tears in dwelling on the generosity of his own sentiments
makes me aware of several things not included under those terms. Who has
sinned more against those three duteous reticences than Jean Jacques?
Yet half our impressions of his character come not from what he means to
convey, but from what he unconsciously enables us to discern.

This _naive_ veracity of self-presentation is attainable by the
slenderest talent on the most trivial occasions. The least lucid and
impressive of orators may be perfectly successful in showing us the weak
points of his grammar. Hence I too may be so far like Jean Jacques as to
communicate more than I am aware of. I am not indeed writing an
autobiography, or pretending to give an unreserved description of
myself, but only offering some slight confessions in an apologetic
light, to indicate that if in my absence you dealt as freely with my
unconscious weaknesses as I have dealt with the unconscious weaknesses
of others, I should not feel myself warranted by common-sense in
regarding your freedom of observation as an exceptional case of
evil-speaking; or as malignant interpretation of a character which
really offers no handle to just objection; or even as an unfair use for
your amusement of disadvantages which, since they are mine, should be
regarded with more than ordinary tenderness. Let me at least try to feel
myself in the ranks with my fellow-men. It is true, that I would rather
not hear either your well-founded ridicule or your judicious strictures.
Though not averse to finding fault with myself, and conscious of
deserving lashes, I like to keep the scourge in my own discriminating
hand. I never felt myself sufficiently meritorious to like being hated
as a proof of my superiority, or so thirsty for improvement as to desire
that all my acquaintances should give me their candid opinion of me. I
really do not want to learn from my enemies: I prefer having none to
learn from. Instead of being glad when men use me despitefully, I wish
they would behave better and find a more amiable occupation for their
intervals of business. In brief, after a close intimacy with myself for
a longer period than I choose to mention, I find within me a permanent
longing for approbation, sympathy, and love.

Yet I am a bachelor, and the person I love best has never loved me, or
known that I loved her. Though continually in society, and caring about
the joys and sorrows of my neighbours, I feel myself, so far as my
personal lot is concerned, uncared for and alone. "Your own fault, my
dear fellow!" said Minutius Felix, one day that I had incautiously
mentioned this uninteresting fact. And he was right--in senses other
than he intended. Why should I expect to be admired, and have my company
doated on? I have done no services to my country beyond those of every
peaceable orderly citizen; and as to intellectual contribution, my only
published work was a failure, so that I am spoken of to inquiring
beholders as "the author of a book you have probably not seen." (The
work was a humorous romance, unique in its kind, and I am told is much
tasted in a Cherokee translation, where the jokes are rendered with all
the serious eloquence characteristic of the Red races.) This sort of
distinction, as a writer nobody is likely to have read, can hardly
counteract an indistinctness in my articulation, which the
best-intentioned loudness will not remedy. Then, in some quarters my
awkward feet are against me, the length of my upper lip, and an
inveterate way I have of walking with my head foremost and my chin
projecting. One can become only too well aware of such things by looking
in the glass, or in that other mirror held up to nature in the frank
opinions of street-boys, or of our Free People travelling by excursion
train; and no doubt they account for the half-suppressed smile which I
have observed on some fair faces when I have first been presented before
them. This direct perceptive judgment is not to be argued against. But I
am tempted to remonstrate when the physical points I have mentioned are
apparently taken to warrant unfavourable inferences concerning my mental
quickness. With all the increasing uncertainty which modern progress has
thrown over the relations of mind and body, it seems tolerably clear
that wit cannot be seated in the upper lip, and that the balance of the
haunches in walking has nothing to do with the subtle discrimination of
ideas. Yet strangers evidently do not expect me to make a clever
observation, and my good things are as unnoticed as if they were
anonymous pictures. I have indeed had the mixed satisfaction of finding
that when they were appropriated by some one else they were found
remarkable and even brilliant. It is to be borne in mind that I am not
rich, have neither stud nor cellar, and no very high connections such as
give to a look of imbecility a certain prestige of inheritance through a
titled line; just as "the Austrian lip" confers a grandeur of historical
associations on a kind of feature which might make us reject an
advertising footman. I have now and then done harm to a good cause by
speaking for it in public, and have discovered too late that my attitude
on the occasion would more suitably have been that of negative
beneficence. Is it really to the advantage of an opinion that I should
be known to hold it? And as to the force of my arguments, that is a
secondary consideration with audiences who have given a new scope to the
_ex pede Herculem_ principle, and from awkward feet infer awkward
fallacies. Once, when zeal lifted me on my legs, I distinctly heard an
enlightened artisan remark, "Here's a rum cut!"--and doubtless he
reasoned in the same way as the elegant Glycera when she politely puts
on an air of listening to me, but elevates her eyebrows and chills her
glance in sign of predetermined neutrality: both have their reasons for
judging the quality of my speech beforehand.

This sort of reception to a man of affectionate disposition, who has
also the innocent vanity of desiring to be agreeable, has naturally a
depressing if not embittering tendency; and in early life I began to
seek for some consoling point of view, some warrantable method of
softening the hard peas I had to walk on, some comfortable fanaticism
which might supply the needed self-satisfaction. At one time I dwelt
much on the idea of compensation; trying to believe that I was all the
wiser for my bruised vanity, that I had the higher place in the true
spiritual scale, and even that a day might come when some visible
triumph would place me in the French heaven of having the laughers on my
side. But I presently perceived that this was a very odious sort of
self-cajolery. Was it in the least true that I was wiser than several of
my friends who made an excellent figure, and were perhaps praised a
little beyond their merit? Is the ugly unready man in the corner,
outside the current of conversation, really likely to have a fairer
view of things than the agreeable talker, whose success strikes the
unsuccessful as a repulsive example of forwardness and conceit? And as
to compensation in future years, would the fact that I myself got it
reconcile me to an order of things in which I could see a multitude with
as bad a share as mine, who, instead of getting their corresponding
compensation, were getting beyond the reach of it in old age? What could
be more contemptible than the mood of mind which makes a man measure the
justice of divine or human law by the agreeableness of his own shadow
and the ample satisfaction of his own desires?

I dropped a form of consolation which seemed to be encouraging me in the
persuasion that my discontent was the chief evil in the world, and my
benefit the soul of good in that evil. May there not be at least a
partial release from the imprisoning verdict that a man's philosophy is
the formula of his personality? In certain branches of science we can
ascertain our personal equation, the measure of difference between our
own judgments and an average standard: may there not be some
corresponding correction of our personal partialities in moral
theorising? If a squint or other ocular defect disturbs my vision, I can
get instructed in the fact, be made aware that my condition is abnormal,
and either through spectacles or diligent imagination I can learn the
average appearance of things: is there no remedy or corrective for that
inward squint which consists in a dissatisfied egoism or other want of
mental balance? In my conscience I saw that the bias of personal
discontent was just as misleading and odious as the bias of
self-satisfaction. Whether we look through the rose-coloured glass or
the indigo, we are equally far from the hues which the healthy human eye
beholds in heaven above and earth below. I began to dread ways of
consoling which were really a flattering of native illusions, a
feeding-up into monstrosity of an inward growth already
disproportionate; to get an especial scorn for that scorn of mankind
which is a transmuted disappointment of preposterous claims; to watch
with peculiar alarm lest what I called my philosophic estimate of the
human lot in general, should be a mere prose lyric expressing my own
pain and consequent bad temper. The standing-ground worth striving after
seemed to be some Delectable Mountain, whence I could see things in
proportions as little as possible determined by that self-partiality
which certainly plays a necessary part in our bodily sustenance, but has
a starving effect on the mind.

Thus I finally gave up any attempt to make out that I preferred cutting
a bad figure, and that I liked to be despised, because in this way I was
getting more virtuous than my successful rivals; and I have long looked
with suspicion on all views which are recommended as peculiarly
consolatory to wounded vanity or other personal disappointment. The
consolations of egoism are simply a change of attitude or a resort to a
new kind of diet which soothes and fattens it. Fed in this way it is apt
to become a monstrous spiritual pride, or a chuckling satisfaction that
the final balance will not be against us but against those who now
eclipse us. Examining the world in order to find consolation is very
much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to
find our own name, if not in the text, at least in a laudatory note:
whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us
from a true knowledge of the contents. But an attention fixed on the
main theme or various matter of the book would deliver us from that
slavish subjection to our own self-importance. And I had the mighty
volume of the world before me. Nay, I had the struggling action of a
myriad lives around me, each single life as dear to itself as mine to
me. Was there no escape here from this stupidity of a murmuring
self-occupation? Clearly enough, if anything hindered my thought from
rising to the force of passionately interested contemplation, or my poor
pent-up pond of sensitiveness from widening into a beneficent river of
sympathy, it was my own dulness; and though I could not make myself the
reverse of shallow all at once, I had at least learned where I had
better turn my attention.

Something came of this alteration in my point of view, though I admit
that the result is of no striking kind. It is unnecessary for me to
utter modest denials, since none have assured me that I have a vast
intellectual scope, or--what is more surprising, considering I have
done so little--that I might, if I chose, surpass any distinguished man
whom they wish to depreciate. I have not attained any lofty peak of
magnanimity, nor would I trust beforehand in my capability of meeting a
severe demand for moral heroism. But that I have at least succeeded in
establishing a habit of mind which keeps watch against my
self-partiality and promotes a fair consideration of what touches the
feelings or the fortunes of my neighbours, seems to be proved by the
ready confidence with which men and women appeal to my interest in their
experience. It is gratifying to one who would above all things avoid the
insanity of fancying himself a more momentous or touching object than he
really is, to find that nobody expects from him the least sign of such
mental aberration, and that he is evidently held capable of listening to
all kinds of personal outpouring without the least disposition to become
communicative in the same way. This confirmation of the hope that my
bearing is not that of the self-flattering lunatic is given me in ample
measure. My acquaintances tell me unreservedly of their triumphs and
their piques; explain their purposes at length, and reassure me with
cheerfulness as to their chances of success; insist on their theories
and accept me as a dummy with whom they rehearse their side of future
discussions; unwind their coiled-up griefs in relation to their
husbands, or recite to me examples of feminine incomprehensibleness as
typified in their wives; mention frequently the fair applause which
their merits have wrung from some persons, and the attacks to which
certain oblique motives have stimulated others. At the time when I was
less free from superstition about my own power of charming, I
occasionally, in the glow of sympathy which embraced me and my confiding
friend on the subject of his satisfaction or resentment, was urged to
hint at a corresponding experience in my own case; but the signs of a
rapidly lowering pulse and spreading nervous depression in my previously
vivacious interlocutor, warned me that I was acting on that dangerous
misreading, "Do as you are done by." Recalling the true version of the
golden rule, I could not wish that others should lower my spirits as I
was lowering my friend's. After several times obtaining the same result
from a like experiment in which all the circumstances were varied except
my own personality, I took it as an established inference that these
fitful signs of a lingering belief in my own importance were generally
felt to be abnormal, and were something short of that sanity which I
aimed to secure. Clearness on this point is not without its
gratifications, as I have said. While my desire to explain myself in
private ears has been quelled, the habit of getting interested in the
experience of others has been continually gathering strength, and I am
really at the point of finding that this world would be worth living in
without any lot of one's own. Is it not possible for me to enjoy the
scenery of the earth without saying to myself, I have a cabbage-garden
in it? But this sounds like the lunacy of fancying oneself everybody
else and being unable to play one's own part decently--another form of
the disloyal attempt to be independent of the common lot, and to live
without a sharing of pain.

Perhaps I have made self-betrayals enough already to show that I have
not arrived at that non-human independence. My conversational
reticences about myself turn into garrulousness on paper--as the
sea-lion plunges and swims the more energetically because his limbs are
of a sort to make him shambling on land. The act of writing, in spite of
past experience, brings with it the vague, delightful illusion of an
audience nearer to my idiom than the Cherokees, and more numerous than
the visionary One for whom many authors have declared themselves willing
to go through the pleasing punishment of publication. My illusion is of
a more liberal kind, and I imagine a far-off, hazy, multitudinous
assemblage, as in a picture of Paradise, making an approving chorus to
the sentences and paragraphs of which I myself particularly enjoy the
writing. The haze is a necessary condition. If any physiognomy becomes
distinct in the foreground, it is fatal. The countenance is sure to be
one bent on discountenancing my innocent intentions: it is pale-eyed,
incapable of being amused when I am amused or indignant at what makes me
indignant; it stares at my presumption, pities my ignorance, or is
manifestly preparing to expose the various instances in which I
unconsciously disgrace myself. I shudder at this too corporeal auditor,
and turn towards another point of the compass where the haze is
unbroken. Why should I not indulge this remaining illusion, since I do
not take my approving choral paradise as a warrant for setting the press
to work again and making some thousand sheets of superior paper
unsaleable? I leave my manuscripts to a judgment outside my imagination,
but I will not ask to hear it, or request my friend to pronounce, before
I have been buried decently, what he really thinks of my parts, and to
state candidly whether my papers would be most usefully applied in
lighting the cheerful domestic fire. It is too probable that he will be
exasperated at the trouble I have given him of reading them; but the
consequent clearness and vivacity with which he could demonstrate to me
that the fault of my manuscripts, as of my one published work, is simply
flatness, and not that surpassing subtilty which is the preferable
ground of popular neglect--this verdict, however instructively
expressed, is a portion of earthly discipline of which I will not
beseech my friend to be the instrument. Other persons, I am aware, have
not the same cowardly shrinking from a candid opinion of their
performances, and are even importunately eager for it; but I have
convinced myself in numerous cases that such exposers of their own back
to the smiter were of too hopeful a disposition to believe in the
scourge, and really trusted in a pleasant anointing, an outpouring of
balm without any previous wounds. I am of a less trusting disposition,
and will only ask my friend to use his judgment in insuring me against
posthumous mistake.

Thus I make myself a charter to write, and keep the pleasing, inspiring
illusion of being listened to, though I may sometimes write about
myself. What I have already said on this too familiar theme has been
meant only as a preface, to show that in noting the weaknesses of my
acquaintances I am conscious of my fellowship with them. That a
gratified sense of superiority is at the root of barbarous laughter may
be at least half the truth. But there is a loving laughter in which the
only recognised superiority is that of the ideal self, the God within,
holding the mirror and the scourge for our own pettiness as well as our
neighbours'.




II.


LOOKING BACKWARD.

Most of us who have had decent parents would shrink from wishing that
our father and mother had been somebody else whom we never knew; yet it
is held no impiety, rather, a graceful mark of instruction, for a man to
wail that he was not the son of another age and another nation, of which
also he knows nothing except through the easy process of an imperfect
imagination and a flattering fancy.

But the period thus looked back on with a purely admiring regret, as
perfect enough to suit a superior mind, is always a long way off; the
desirable contemporaries are hardly nearer than Leonardo da Vinci, most
likely they are the fellow-citizens of Pericles, or, best of all, of the
Aeolic lyrists whose sparse remains suggest a comfortable contrast with
our redundance. No impassioned personage wishes he had been born in the
age of Pitt, that his ardent youth might have eaten the dearest bread,
dressed itself with the longest coat-tails and the shortest waist, or
heard the loudest grumbling at the heaviest war-taxes; and it would be
really something original in polished verse if one of our young writers
declared he would gladly be turned eighty-five that he might have known
the joy and pride of being an Englishman when there were fewer reforms
and plenty of highwaymen, fewer discoveries and more faces pitted with
the small-pox, when laws were made to keep up the price of corn, and the
troublesome Irish were more miserable. Three-quarters of a century ago
is not a distance that lends much enchantment to the view. We are
familiar with the average men of that period, and are still consciously
encumbered with its bad contrivances and mistaken acts. The lords and
gentlemen painted by young Lawrence talked and wrote their nonsense in a
tongue we thoroughly understand; hence their times are not much
flattered, not much glorified by the yearnings of that modern sect of
Flagellants who make a ritual of lashing--not themselves but--all their
neighbours. To me, however, that paternal time, the time of my father's
youth, never seemed prosaic, for it came to my imagination first through
his memories, which made a wondrous perspective to my little daily world
of discovery. And for my part I can call no age absolutely unpoetic: how
should it be so, since there are always children to whom the acorns and
the swallow's eggs are a wonder, always those human passions and
fatalities through which Garrick as Hamlet in bob-wig and knee-breeches
moved his audience more than some have since done in velvet tunic and
plume? But every age since the golden may be made more or less prosaic
by minds that attend only to its vulgar and sordid elements, of which
there was always an abundance even in Greece and Italy, the favourite
realms of the retrospective optimists. To be quite fair towards the
ages, a little ugliness as well as beauty must be allowed to each of
them, a little implicit poetry even to those which echoed loudest with
servile, pompous, and trivial prose.

Such impartiality is not in vogue at present. If we acknowledge our
obligation to the ancients, it is hardly to be done without some
flouting of our contemporaries, who with all their faults must be
allowed the merit of keeping the world habitable for the refined
eulogists of the blameless past. One wonders whether the remarkable
originators who first had the notion of digging wells, or of churning
for butter, and who were certainly very useful to their own time as well
as ours, were left quite free from invidious comparison with
predecessors who let the water and the milk alone, or whether some
rhetorical nomad, as he stretched himself on the grass with a good
appetite for contemporary butter, became loud on the virtue of ancestors
who were uncorrupted by the produce of the cow; nay, whether in a high
flight of imaginative self-sacrifice (after swallowing the butter) he
even wished himself earlier born and already eaten for the sustenance of
a generation more _naive_ than his own.

I have often had the fool's hectic of wishing about the unalterable, but
with me that useless exercise has turned chiefly on the conception of a
different self, and not, as it usually does in literature, on the
advantage of having been born in a different age, and more especially in
one where life is imagined to have been altogether majestic and
graceful. With my present abilities, external proportions, and generally
small provision for ecstatic enjoyment, where is the ground for
confidence that I should have had a preferable career in such an epoch
of society? An age in which every department has its awkward-squad seems
in my mind's eye to suit me better. I might have wandered by the Strymon
under Philip and Alexander without throwing any new light on method or
organising the sum of human knowledge; on the other hand, I might have
objected to Aristotle as too much of a systematiser, and have preferred
the freedom of a little self-contradiction as offering more chances of
truth. I gather, too, from the undeniable testimony of his disciple
Theophrastus that there were bores, ill-bred persons, and detractors
even in Athens, of species remarkably corresponding to the English, and
not yet made endurable by being classic; and altogether, with my present
fastidious nostril, I feel that I am the better off for possessing
Athenian life solely as an inodorous fragment of antiquity. As to
Sappho's Mitylene, while I am convinced that the Lesbian capital held
some plain men of middle stature and slow conversational powers, the
addition of myself to their number, though clad in the majestic folds of
the himation and without cravat, would hardly have made a sensation
among the accomplished fair ones who were so precise in adjusting their
own drapery about their delicate ankles. Whereas by being another sort
of person in the present age I might have given it some needful
theoretic clue; or I might have poured forth poetic strains which would
have anticipated theory and seemed a voice from "the prophetic soul of
the wide world dreaming of things to come;" or I might have been one of
those benignant lovely souls who, without astonishing the public and
posterity, make a happy difference in the lives close around them, and
in this way lift the average of earthly joy: in some form or other I
might have been so filled from the store of universal existence that I
should have been freed from that empty wishing which is like a child's
cry to be inside a golden cloud, its imagination being too ignorant to
figure the lining of dimness and damp.

On the whole, though there is some rash boasting about enlightenment,
and an occasional insistance on an originality which is that of the
present year's corn-crop, we seem too much disposed to indulge, and to
call by complimentary names, a greater charity for other portions of the
human race than for our contemporaries. All reverence and gratitude for
the worthy Dead on whose labours we have entered, all care for the
future generations whose lot we are preparing; but some affection and
fairness for those who are doing the actual work of the world, some
attempt to regard them with the same freedom from ill-temper, whether on
private or public grounds, as we may hope will be felt by those who will
call us ancient! Otherwise, the looking before and after, which is our
grand human privilege, is in danger of turning to a sort of
other-worldliness, breeding a more illogical indifference or bitterness
than was ever bred by the ascetic's contemplation of heaven. Except on
the ground of a primitive golden age and continuous degeneracy, I see no
rational footing for scorning the whole present population of the globe,
unless I scorn every previous generation from whom they have inherited
their diseases of mind and body, and by consequence scorn my own scorn,
which is equally an inheritance of mixed ideas and feelings concocted
for me in the boiling caldron of this universally contemptible life, and
so on--scorning to infinity. This may represent some actual states of
mind, for it is a narrow prejudice of mathematicians to suppose that
ways of thinking are to be driven out of the field by being reduced to
an absurdity. The Absurd is taken as an excellent juicy thistle by many
constitutions.

Reflections of this sort have gradually determined me not to grumble at
the age in which I happen to have been born--a natural tendency
certainly older than Hesiod. Many ancient beautiful things are lost,
many ugly modern things have arisen; but invert the proposition and it
is equally true. I at least am a modern with some interest in advocating
tolerance, and notwithstanding an inborn beguilement which carries my
affection and regret continually into an imagined past, I am aware that
I must lose all sense of moral proportion unless I keep alive a stronger
attachment to what is near, and a power of admiring what I best know and
understand. Hence this question of wishing to be rid of one's
contemporaries associates itself with my filial feeling, and calls up
the thought that I might as justifiably wish that I had had other
parents than those whose loving tones are my earliest memory, and whose
last parting first taught me the meaning of death. I feel bound to quell
such a wish as blasphemy.

Besides, there are other reasons why I am contented that my father was a
country parson, born much about the same time as Scott and Wordsworth;
notwithstanding certain qualms I have felt at the fact that the property
on which I am living was saved out of tithe before the period of
commutation, and without the provisional transfiguration into a modus.
It has sometimes occurred to me when I have been taking a slice of
excellent ham that, from a too tenable point of view, I was breakfasting
on a small squealing black pig which, more than half a century ago, was
the unwilling representative of spiritual advantages not otherwise
acknowledged by the grudging farmer or dairyman who parted with him. One
enters on a fearful labyrinth in tracing compound interest backward, and
such complications of thought have reduced the flavour of the ham; but
since I have nevertheless eaten it, the chief effect has been to
moderate the severity of my radicalism (which was not part of my
paternal inheritance) and to raise the assuaging reflection, that if the
pig and the parishioner had been intelligent enough to anticipate my
historical point of view, they would have seen themselves and the rector
in a light that would have made tithe voluntary. Notwithstanding such
drawbacks I am rather fond of the mental furniture I got by having a
father who was well acquainted with all ranks of his neighbours, and am
thankful that he was not one of those aristocratic clergymen who could
not have sat down to a meal with any family in the parish except my
lord's--still more that he was not an earl or a marquis. A chief
misfortune of high birth is that it usually shuts a man out from the
large sympathetic knowledge of human experience which comes from contact
with various classes on their own level, and in my father's time that
entail of social ignorance had not been disturbed as we see it now. To
look always from overhead at the crowd of one's fellow-men must be in
many ways incapacitating, even with the best will and intelligence. The
serious blunders it must lead to in the effort to manage them for their
good, one may see clearly by the mistaken ways people take of flattering
and enticing those whose associations are unlike their own. Hence I have
always thought that the most fortunate Britons are those whose
experience has given them a practical share in many aspects of the
national lot, who have lived long among the mixed commonalty, roughing
it with them under difficulties, knowing how their food tastes to them,
and getting acquainted with their notions and motives not by inference
from traditional types in literature or from philosophical theories, but
from daily fellowship and observation. Of course such experience is apt
to get antiquated, and my father might find himself much at a loss
amongst a mixed rural population of the present day; but he knew very
well what could be wisely expected from the miners, the weavers, the
field-labourers, and farmers of his own time--yes, and from the
aristocracy, for he had been brought up in close contact with them and
had been companion to a young nobleman who was deaf and dumb. "A
clergyman, lad," he used to say to me, "should feel in himself a bit of
every class;" and this theory had a felicitous agreement with his
inclination and practice, which certainly answered in making him beloved
by his parishioners. They grumbled at their obligations towards him; but
what then? It was natural to grumble at any demand for payment, tithe
included, but also natural for a rector to desire his tithe and look
well after the levying. A Christian pastor who did not mind about his
money was not an ideal prevalent among the rural minds of fat central
England, and might have seemed to introduce a dangerous laxity of
supposition about Christian laymen who happened to be creditors. My
father was none the less beloved because he was understood to be of a
saving disposition, and how could he save without getting his tithe? The
sight of him was not unwelcome at any door, and he was remarkable among
the clergy of his district for having no lasting feud with rich or poor
in his parish. I profited by his popularity, and for months after my
mother's death, when I was a little fellow of nine, I was taken care of
first at one homestead and then at another; a variety which I enjoyed
much more than my stay at the Hall, where there was a tutor. Afterwards
for several years I was my father's constant companion in his outdoor
business, riding by his side on my little pony and listening to the
lengthy dialogues he held with Darby or Joan, the one on the road or in
the fields, the other outside or inside her door. In my earliest
remembrance of him his hair was already grey, for I was his youngest as
well as his only surviving child; and it seemed to me that advanced age
was appropriate to a father, as indeed in all respects I considered him
a parent so much to my honour, that the mention of my relationship to
him was likely to secure me regard among those to whom I was otherwise a
stranger--my father's stories from his life including so many names of
distant persons that my imagination placed no limit to his
acquaintanceship. He was a pithy talker, and his sermons bore marks of
his own composition. It is true, they must have been already old when I
began to listen to them, and they were no more than a year's supply, so
that they recurred as regularly as the Collects. But though this system
has been much ridiculed, I am prepared to defend it as equally sound
with that of a liturgy; and even if my researches had shown me that some
of my father's yearly sermons had been copied out from the works of
elder divines, this would only have been another proof of his good
judgment. One may prefer fresh eggs though laid by a fowl of the meanest
understanding, but why fresh sermons?

Nor can I be sorry, though myself given to meditative if not active
innovation, that my father was a Tory who had not exactly a dislike to
innovators and dissenters, but a slight opinion of them as persons of
ill-founded self-confidence; whence my young ears gathered many details
concerning those who might perhaps have called themselves the more
advanced thinkers in our nearest market-town, tending to convince me
that their characters were quite as mixed as those of the thinkers
behind them. This circumstance of my rearing has at least delivered me
from certain mistakes of classification which I observe in many of my
superiors, who have apparently no affectionate memories of a goodness
mingled with what they now regard as outworn prejudices. Indeed, my
philosophical notions, such as they are, continually carry me back to
the time when the fitful gleams of a spring day used to show me my own
shadow as that of a small boy on a small pony, riding by the side of a
larger cob-mounted shadow over the breezy uplands which we used to
dignify with the name of hills, or along by-roads with broad grassy
borders and hedgerows reckless of utility, on our way to outlying
hamlets, whose groups of inhabitants were as distinctive to my
imagination as if they had belonged to different regions of the globe.
From these we sometimes rode onward to the adjoining parish, where also
my father officiated, for he was a pluralist, but--I hasten to add--on
the smallest scale; for his one extra living was a poor vicarage, with
hardly fifty parishioners, and its church would have made a very shabby
barn, the grey worm-eaten wood of its pews and pulpit, with their doors
only half hanging on the hinges, being exactly the colour of a lean
mouse which I once observed as an interesting member of the scant
congregation, and conjectured to be the identical church mouse I had
heard referred to as an example of extreme poverty; for I was a
precocious boy, and often reasoned after the fashion of my elders,
arguing that "Jack and Jill" were real personages in our parish, and
that if I could identify "Jack" I should find on him the marks of a
broken crown.

Sometimes when I am in a crowded London drawing-room (for I am a
town-bird now, acquainted with smoky eaves, and tasting Nature in the
parks) quick flights of memory take me back among my father's
parishioners while I am still conscious of elbowing men who wear the
same evening uniform as myself; and I presently begin to wonder what
varieties of history lie hidden under this monotony of aspect. Some of
them, perhaps, belong to families with many quarterings; but how many
"quarterings" of diverse contact with their fellow-countrymen enter into
their qualifications to be parliamentary leaders, professors of social
science, or journalistic guides of the popular mind? Not that I feel
myself a person made competent by experience; on the contrary, I argue
that since an observation of different ranks has still left me
practically a poor creature, what must be the condition of those who
object even to read about the life of other British classes than their
own? But of my elbowing neighbours with their crush hats, I usually
imagine that the most distinguished among them have probably had a far
more instructive journey into manhood than mine. Here, perhaps, is a
thought-worn physiognomy, seeming at the present moment to be classed as
a mere species of white cravat and swallow-tail, which may once, like
Faraday's, have shown itself in curiously dubious embryonic form leaning
against a cottage lintel in small corduroys, and hungrily eating a bit
of brown bread and bacon; _there_ is a pair of eyes, now too much
wearied by the gas-light of public assemblies, that once perhaps learned
to read their native England through the same alphabet as mine--not
within the boundaries of an ancestral park, never even being driven
through the county town five miles off, but--among the midland villages
and markets, along by the tree-studded hedgerows, and where the heavy
barges seem in the distance to float mysteriously among the rushes and
the feathered grass. Our vision, both real and ideal, has since then
been filled with far other scenes: among eternal snows and stupendous
sun-scorched monuments of departed empires; within the scent of the long
orange-groves; and where the temple of Neptune looks out over the
siren-haunted sea. But my eyes at least have kept their early
affectionate joy in our native landscape, which is one deep root of our
national life and language.

And I often smile at my consciousness that certain conservative
prepossessions have mingled themselves for me with the influences of our
midland scenery, from the tops of the elms down to the buttercups and
the little wayside vetches. Naturally enough. That part of my father's
prime to which he oftenest referred had fallen on the days when the
great wave of political enthusiasm and belief in a speedy regeneration
of all things had ebbed, and the supposed millennial initiative of
France was turning into a Napoleonic empire, the sway of an Attila with
a mouth speaking proud things in a jargon half revolutionary, half
Roman. Men were beginning to shrink timidly from the memory of their
own words and from the recognition of the fellowships they had formed
ten years before; and even reforming Englishmen for the most part were
willing to wait for the perfection of society, if only they could keep
their throats perfect and help to drive away the chief enemy of mankind
from our coasts. To my father's mind the noisy teachers of revolutionary
doctrine were, to speak mildly, a variable mixture of the fool and the
scoundrel; the welfare of the nation lay in a strong Government which
could maintain order; and I was accustomed to hear him utter the word
"Government" in a tone that charged it with awe, and made it part of my
effective religion, in contrast with the word "rebel," which seemed to
carry the stamp of evil in its syllables, and, lit by the fact that
Satan was the first rebel, made an argument dispensing with more
detailed inquiry. I gathered that our national troubles in the first two
decades of this century were not at all due to the mistakes of our
administrators; and that England, with its fine Church and Constitution,
would have been exceedingly well off if every British subject had been
thankful for what was provided, and had minded his own business--if,
for example, numerous Catholics of that period had been aware how very
modest they ought to be considering they were Irish. The times, I heard,
had often been bad; but I was constantly hearing of "bad times" as a
name for actual evenings and mornings when the godfathers who gave them
that name appeared to me remarkably comfortable. Altogether, my father's
England seemed to me lovable, laudable, full of good men, and having
good rulers, from Mr Pitt on to the Duke of Wellington, until he was for
emancipating the Catholics; and it was so far from prosaic to me that I
looked into it for a more exciting romance than such as I could find in
my own adventures, which consisted mainly in fancied crises calling for
the resolute wielding of domestic swords and firearms against unapparent
robbers, rioters, and invaders who, it seemed, in my father's prime had
more chance of being real. The morris-dancers had not then dwindled to a
ragged and almost vanished rout (owing the traditional name probably to
the historic fancy of our superannuated groom); also, the good old king
was alive and well, which made all the more difference because I had no
notion what he was and did--only understanding in general that if he had
been still on the throne he would have hindered everything that wise
persons thought undesirable.

Certainly that elder England with its frankly saleable boroughs, so
cheap compared with the seats obtained under the reformed method, and
its boroughs kindly presented by noblemen desirous to encourage
gratitude; its prisons with a miscellaneous company of felons and
maniacs and without any supply of water; its bloated, idle charities;
its non-resident, jovial clergy; its militia-balloting; and above all,
its blank ignorance of what we, its posterity, should be thinking of
it,--has great differences from the England of to-day. Yet we discern a
strong family likeness. Is there any country which shows at once as much
stability and as much susceptibility to change as ours? Our national
life is like that scenery which I early learned to love, not subject to
great convulsions, but easily showing more or less delicate (sometimes
melancholy) effects from minor changes. Hence our midland plains have
never lost their familiar expression and conservative spirit for me;
yet at every other mile, since I first looked on them, some sign of
world-wide change, some new direction of human labour has wrought itself
into what one may call the speech of the landscape--in contrast with
those grander and vaster regions of the earth which keep an indifferent
aspect in the presence of men's toil and devices. What does it signify
that a lilliputian train passes over a viaduct amidst the abysses of the
Apennines, or that a caravan laden with a nation's offerings creeps
across the unresting sameness of the desert, or that a petty cloud of
steam sweeps for an instant over the face of an Egyptian colossus
immovably submitting to its slow burial beneath the sand? But our
woodlands and pastures, our hedge-parted corn-fields and meadows, our
bits of high common where we used to plant the windmills, our quiet
little rivers here and there fit to turn a mill-wheel, our villages
along the old coach-roads, are all easily alterable lineaments that seem
to make the face of our Motherland sympathetic with the laborious lives
of her children. She does not take their ploughs and waggons
contemptuously, but rather makes every hovel and every sheepfold, every
railed bridge or fallen tree-trunk an agreeably noticeable incident; not
a mere speck in the midst of unmeasured vastness, but a piece of our
social history in pictorial writing.

Our rural tracts--where no Babel-chimney scales the heavens--are without
mighty objects to fill the soul with the sense of an outer world
unconquerably aloof from our efforts. The wastes are playgrounds (and
let us try to keep them such for the children's children who will
inherit no other sort of demesne); the grasses and reeds nod to each
other over the river, but we have cut a canal close by; the very heights
laugh with corn in August or lift the plough-team against the sky in
September. Then comes a crowd of burly navvies with pickaxes and
barrows, and while hardly a wrinkle is made in the fading mother's face
or a new curve of health in the blooming girl's, the hills are cut
through or the breaches between them spanned, we choose our level and
the white steam-pennon flies along it.

But because our land shows this readiness to be changed, all signs of
permanence upon it raise a tender attachment instead of awe: some of us,
at least, love the scanty relics of our forests, and are thankful if a
bush is left of the old hedgerow. A crumbling bit of wall where the
delicate ivy-leaved toad-flax hangs its light branches, or a bit of grey
thatch with patches of dark moss on its shoulder and a troop of
grass-stems on its ridge, is a thing to visit. And then the tiled roof
of cottage and homestead, of the long cow-shed where generations of the
milky mothers have stood patiently, of the broad-shouldered barns where
the old-fashioned flail once made resonant music, while the watch-dog
barked at the timidly venturesome fowls making pecking raids on the
outflying grain--the roofs that have looked out from among the elms and
walnut-trees, or beside the yearly group of hay and corn stacks, or
below the square stone steeple, gathering their grey or ochre-tinted
lichens and their olive-green mosses under all ministries,--let us
praise the sober harmonies they give to our landscape, helping to unite
us pleasantly with the elder generations who tilled the soil for us
before we were born, and paid heavier and heavier taxes, with much
grumbling, but without that deepest root of corruption--the
self-indulgent despair which cuts down and consumes and never plants.

But I check myself. Perhaps this England of my affections is half
visionary--a dream in which things are connected according to my
well-fed, lazy mood, and not at all by the multitudinous links of
graver, sadder fact, such as belong everywhere to the story of human
labour. Well, well, the illusions that began for us when we were less
acquainted with evil have not lost their value when we discern them to
be illusions. They feed the ideal Better, and in loving them still, we
strengthen the precious habit of loving something not visibly, tangibly
existent, but a spiritual product of our visible tangible selves.

I cherish my childish loves--the memory of that warm little nest where
my affections were fledged. Since then I have learned to care for
foreign countries, for literatures foreign and ancient, for the life of
Continental towns dozing round old cathedrals, for the life of London,
half sleepless with eager thought and strife, with indigestion or with
hunger; and now my consciousness is chiefly of the busy, anxious
metropolitan sort. My system responds sensitively to the London
weather-signs, political, social, literary; and my bachelor's hearth is
imbedded where by much craning of head and neck I can catch sight of a
sycamore in the Square garden: I belong to the "Nation of London." Why?
There have been many voluntary exiles in the world, and probably in the
very first exodus of the patriarchal Aryans--for I am determined not to
fetch my examples from races whose talk is of uncles and no
fathers--some of those who sallied forth went for the sake of a loved
companionship, when they would willingly have kept sight of the familiar
plains, and of the hills to which they had first lifted up their eyes.




III.


HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH.

The serene and beneficent goddess Truth, like other deities whose
disposition has been too hastily inferred from that of the men who have
invoked them, can hardly be well pleased with much of the worship paid
to her even in this milder age, when the stake and the rack have ceased
to form part of her ritual. Some cruelties still pass for service done
in her honour: no thumb-screw is used, no iron boot, no scorching of
flesh; but plenty of controversial bruising, laceration, and even
lifelong maiming. Less than formerly; but so long as this sort of
truth-worship has the sanction of a public that can often understand
nothing in a controversy except personal sarcasm or slanderous ridicule,
it is likely to continue. The sufferings of its victims are often as
little regarded as those of the sacrificial pig offered in old time,
with what we now regard as a sad miscalculation of effects.

One such victim is my old acquaintance Merman.

Twenty years ago Merman was a young man of promise, a conveyancer with a
practice which had certainly budded, but, like Aaron's rod, seemed not
destined to proceed further in that marvellous activity. Meanwhile he
occupied himself in miscellaneous periodical writing and in a
multifarious study of moral and physical science. What chiefly attracted
him in all subjects were the vexed questions which have the advantage of
not admitting the decisive proof or disproof that renders many ingenious
arguments superannuated. Not that Merman had a wrangling disposition: he
put all his doubts, queries, and paradoxes deferentially, contended
without unpleasant heat and only with a sonorous eagerness against the
personality of Homer, expressed himself civilly though firmly on the
origin of language, and had tact enough to drop at the right moment such
subjects as the ultimate reduction of all the so-called elementary
substances, his own total scepticism concerning Manetho's chronology, or
even the relation between the magnetic condition of the earth and the
outbreak of revolutionary tendencies. Such flexibility was naturally
much helped by his amiable feeling towards woman, whose nervous system,
he was convinced, would not bear the continuous strain of difficult
topics; and also by his willingness to contribute a song whenever the
same desultory charmer proposed music. Indeed his tastes were domestic
enough to beguile him into marriage when his resources were still very
moderate and partly uncertain. His friends wished that so ingenious and
agreeable a fellow might have more prosperity than they ventured to hope
for him, their chief regret on his account being that he did not
concentrate his talent and leave off forming opinions on at least
half-a-dozen of the subjects over which he scattered his attention,
especially now that he had married a "nice little woman" (the generic
name for acquaintances' wives when they are not markedly disagreeable).
He could not, they observed, want all his various knowledge and Laputan
ideas for his periodical writing which brought him most of his bread,
and he would do well to use his talents in getting a speciality that
would fit him for a post. Perhaps these well-disposed persons were a
little rash in presuming that fitness for a post would be the surest
ground for getting it; and on the whole, in now looking back on their
wishes for Merman, their chief satisfaction must be that those wishes
did not contribute to the actual result.

For in an evil hour Merman did concentrate himself. He had for many
years taken into his interest the comparative history of the ancient
civilisations, but it had not preoccupied him so as to narrow his
generous attention to everything else. One sleepless night, however (his
wife has more than once narrated to me the details of an event memorable
to her as the beginning of sorrows), after spending some hours over the
epoch-making work of Grampus, a new idea seized him with regard to the
possible connection of certain symbolic monuments common to widely
scattered races. Merman started up in bed. The night was cold, and the
sudden withdrawal of warmth made his wife first dream of a snowball,
and then cry--

"What is the matter, Proteus?"

"A great matter, Julia. That fellow Grampus, whose book is cried up as a
revelation, is all wrong about the Magicodumbras and the Zuzumotzis, and
I have got hold of the right clue."

"Good gracious! does it matter so much? Don't drag the clothes, dear."

"It signifies this, Julia, that if I am right I shall set the world
right; I shall regenerate history; I shall win the mind of Europe to a
new view of social origins; I shall bruise the head of many
superstitions."

"Oh no, dear, don't go too far into things. Lie down again. You have
been dreaming. What are the Madicojumbras and Zuzitotzums? I never heard
you talk of them before. What use can it be troubling yourself about
such things?"

"That is the way, Julia--that is the way wives alienate their husbands,
and make any hearth pleasanter to him than his own!"

"What _do_ you mean, Proteus?"

"Why, if a woman will not try to understand her husband's ideas, or at
least to believe that they are of more value than she can understand--if
she is to join anybody who happens to be against him, and suppose he is
a fool because others contradict him--there is an end of our happiness.
That is all I have to say."

"Oh no, Proteus, dear. I do believe what you say is right That is my
only guide. I am sure I never have any opinions in any other way: I mean
about subjects. Of course there are many little things that would tease
you, that you like me to judge of for myself. I know I said once that I
did not want you to sing 'Oh ruddier than the cherry,' because it was
not in your voice. But I cannot remember ever differing from you about
_subjects_. I never in my life thought any one cleverer than you."

Julia Merman was really a "nice little woman," not one of the stately
Dians sometimes spoken of in those terms. Her black _silhouette_ had a
very infantine aspect, but she had discernment and wisdom enough to act
on the strong hint of that memorable conversation, never again giving
her husband the slightest ground for suspecting that she thought
treasonably of his ideas in relation to the Magicodumbras and
Zuzumotzis, or in the least relaxed her faith in his infallibility
because Europe was not also convinced of it. It was well for her that
she did not increase her troubles in this way; but to do her justice,
what she was chiefly anxious about was to avoid increasing her husband's
troubles.

Not that these were great in the beginning. In the first development and
writing out of his scheme, Merman had a more intense kind of
intellectual pleasure than he had ever known before. His face became
more radiant, his general view of human prospects more cheerful.
Foreseeing that truth as presented by himself would win the recognition
of his contemporaries, he excused with much liberality their rather
rough treatment of other theorists whose basis was less perfect. His own
periodical criticisms had never before been so amiable: he was sorry for
that unlucky majority whom the spirit of the age, or some other
prompting more definite and local, compelled to write without any
particular ideas. The possession of an original theory which has not yet
been assailed must certainly sweeten the temper of a man who is not
beforehand ill-natured. And Merman was the reverse of ill-natured.

But the hour of publication came; and to half-a-dozen persons, described
as the learned world of two hemispheres, it became known that Grampus
was attacked. This might have been a small matter; for who or what on
earth that is good for anything is not assailed by ignorance, stupidity,
or malice--and sometimes even by just objection? But on examination it
appeared that the attack might possibly be held damaging, unless the
ignorance of the author were well exposed and his pretended facts shown
to be chimeras of that remarkably hideous kind begotten by imperfect
learning on the more feminine element of original incapacity. Grampus
himself did not immediately cut open the volume which Merman had been
careful to send him, not without a very lively and shifting conception
of the possible effects which the explosive gift might produce on the
too eminent scholar--effects that must certainly have set in on the
third day from the despatch of the parcel. But in point of fact Grampus
knew nothing of the book until his friend Lord Narwhal sent him an
American newspaper containing a spirited article by the well-known
Professor Sperm N. Whale which was rather equivocal in its bearing, the
passages quoted from Merman being of rather a telling sort, and the
paragraphs which seemed to blow defiance being unaccountably feeble,
coming from so distinguished a Cetacean. Then, by another post, arrived
letters from Butzkopf and Dugong, both men whose signatures were
familiar to the Teutonic world in the _Selten-erscheinende
Monat-schrift_ or Hayrick for the insertion of Split Hairs, asking their
Master whether he meant to take up the combat, because, in the contrary
case, both were ready.

Thus America and Germany were roused, though England was still drowsy,
and it seemed time now for Grampus to find Merman's book under the heap
and cut it open. For his own part he was perfectly at ease about his
system; but this is a world in which the truth requires defence, and
specious falsehood must be met with exposure. Grampus having once looked
through the book, no longer wanted any urging to write the most crushing
of replies. This, and nothing less than this, was due from him to the
cause of sound inquiry; and the punishment would cost him little pains.
In three weeks from that time the palpitating Merman saw his book
announced in the programme of the leading Review. No need for Grampus to
put his signature. Who else had his vast yet microscopic knowledge, who
else his power of epithet? This article in which Merman was pilloried
and as good as mutilated--for he was shown to have neither ear nor nose
for the subtleties of philological and archaeological study--was much
read and more talked of, not because of any interest in the system of
Grampus, or any precise conception of the danger attending lax views of
the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis, but because the sharp epigrams with
which the victim was lacerated, and the soaring fountains of acrid mud
which were shot upward and poured over the fresh wounds, were found
amusing in recital. A favourite passage was one in which a certain kind
of sciolist was described as a creature of the Walrus kind, having a
phantasmal resemblance to higher animals when seen by ignorant minds in
the twilight, dabbling or hobbling in first one element and then the
other, without parts or organs suited to either, in fact one of Nature's
impostors who could not be said to have any artful pretences, since a
congenital incompetence to all precision of aim and movement made their
every action a pretence--just as a being born in doeskin gloves would
necessarily pass a judgment on surfaces, but we all know what his
judgment would be worth. In drawing-room circles, and for the immediate
hour, this ingenious comparison was as damaging as the showing up of
Merman's mistakes and the mere smattering of linguistic and historical
knowledge which he had presumed to be a sufficient basis for theorising;
but the more learned cited his blunders aside to each other and laughed
the laugh of the initiated. In fact, Merman's was a remarkable case of
sudden notoriety. In London drums and clubs he was spoken of abundantly
as one who had written ridiculously about the Magicodumbras and
Zuzumotzis: the leaders of conversation, whether Christians, Jews,
infidels, or of any other confession except the confession of ignorance,
pronouncing him shallow and indiscreet if not presumptuous and absurd.
He was heard of at Warsaw, and even Paris took knowledge of him. M.
Cachalot had not read either Grampus or Merman, but he heard of their
dispute in time to insert a paragraph upon it in his brilliant work,
_L'orient au point de vue actuel_, in which he was dispassionate enough
to speak of Grampus as possessing a _coup d'oeil presque francais_ in
matters of historical interpretation, and of Merman as nevertheless an
objector _qui merite d'etre connu_. M. Porpesse, also, availing himself
of M. Cachalot's knowledge, reproduced it in an article with certain
additions, which it is only fair to distinguish as his own, implying
that the vigorous English of Grampus was not always as correct as a
Frenchman could desire, while Merman's objections were more sophistical
than solid. Presently, indeed, there appeared an able _extrait_ of
Grampus's article in the valuable _Rapporteur scientifique et
historique_, and Merman's mistakes were thus brought under the notice of
certain Frenchmen who are among the masters of those who know on
oriental subjects. In a word, Merman, though not extensively read, was
extensively read about.

Meanwhile, how did he like it? Perhaps nobody, except his wife, for a
moment reflected on that. An amused society considered that he was
severely punished, but did not take the trouble to imagine his
sensations; indeed this would have been a difficulty for persons less
sensitive and excitable than Merman himself. Perhaps that popular
comparison of the Walrus had truth enough to bite and blister on
thorough application, even if exultant ignorance had not applauded it.
But it is well known that the walrus, though not in the least a
malignant animal, if allowed to display its remarkably plain person and
blundering performances at ease in any element it chooses, becomes
desperately savage and musters alarming auxiliaries when attacked or
hurt. In this characteristic, at least, Merman resembled the walrus. And
now he concentrated himself with a vengeance. That his counter-theory
was fundamentally the right one he had a genuine conviction, whatever
collateral mistakes he might have committed; and his bread would not
cease to be bitter to him until he had convinced his contemporaries that
Grampus had used his minute learning as a dust-cloud to hide
sophistical evasions--that, in fact, minute learning was an obstacle to
clear-sighted judgment, more especially with regard to the Magicodumbras
and Zuzumotzis, and that the best preparation in this matter was a wide
survey of history and a diversified observation of men. Still, Merman
was resolved to muster all the learning within his reach, and he
wandered day and night through many wildernesses of German print, he
tried compendious methods of learning oriental tongues, and, so to
speak, getting at the marrow of languages independently of the bones,
for the chance of finding details to corroborate his own views, or
possibly even to detect Grampus in some oversight or textual tampering.
All other work was neglected: rare clients were sent away and amazed
editors found this maniac indifferent to his chance of getting
book-parcels from them. It was many months before Merman had satisfied
himself that he was strong enough to face round upon his adversary. But
at last he had prepared sixty condensed pages of eager argument which
seemed to him worthy to rank with the best models of controversial
writing. He had acknowledged his mistakes, but had restated his theory
so as to show that it was left intact in spite of them; and he had even
found cases in which Ziphius, Microps, Scrag Whale the explorer, and
other Cetaceans of unanswerable authority, were decidedly at issue with
Grampus. Especially a passage cited by this last from that greatest of
fossils Megalosaurus was demonstrated by Merman to be capable of three
different interpretations, all preferable to that chosen by Grampus, who
took the words in their most literal sense; for, 1 deg., the incomparable
Saurian, alike unequalled in close observation and far-glancing
comprehensiveness, might have meant those words ironically; 2 deg., _motzis_
was probably a false reading for _potzis_, in which case its bearing was
reversed; and 3 deg., it is known that in the age of the Saurians there
were conceptions about the _motzis_ which entirely remove it from the
category of things comprehensible in an age when Saurians run
ridiculously small: all which views were godfathered by names quite fit
to be ranked with that of Grampus. In fine, Merman wound up his
rejoinder by sincerely thanking the eminent adversary without whose
fierce assault he might not have undertaken a revision in the course of
which he had met with unexpected and striking confirmations of his own
fundamental views. Evidently Merman's anger was at white heat.

The rejoinder being complete, all that remained was to find a suitable
medium for its publication. This was not so easy. Distinguished mediums
would not lend themselves to contradictions of Grampus, or if they
would, Merman's article was too long and too abstruse, while he would
not consent to leave anything out of an article which had no
superfluities; for all this happened years ago when the world was at a
different stage. At last, however, he got his rejoinder printed, and not
on hard terms, since the medium, in every sense modest, did not ask him
to pay for its insertion.

But if Merman expected to call out Grampus again, he was mistaken.
Everybody felt it too absurd that Merman should undertake to correct
Grampus in matters of erudition, and an eminent man has something else
to do than to refute a petty objector twice over. What was essential had
been done: the public had been enabled to form a true judgment of
Merman's incapacity, the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis were but
subsidiary elements in Grampus's system, and Merman might now be dealt
with by younger members of the master's school. But he had at least the
satisfaction of finding that he had raised a discussion which would not
be let die. The followers of Grampus took it up with an ardour and
industry of research worthy of their exemplar. Butzkopf made it the
subject of an elaborate _Einleitung_ to his important work, _Die
Bedeutung des Aegyptischen Labyrinthes_; and Dugong, in a remarkable
address which he delivered to a learned society in Central Europe,
introduced Merman's theory with so much power of sarcasm that it became
a theme of more or less derisive allusion to men of many tongues. Merman
with his Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis was on the way to become a
proverb, being used illustratively by many able journalists who took
those names of questionable things to be Merman's own invention, "than
which," said one of the graver guides, "we can recall few more
melancholy examples of speculative aberration." Naturally the subject
passed into popular literature, and figured very commonly in advertised
programmes. The fluent Loligo, the formidable Shark, and a younger
member of his remarkable family known as S. Catulus, made a special
reputation by their numerous articles, eloquent, lively, or abusive, all
on the same theme, under titles ingeniously varied, alliterative,
sonorous, or boldly fanciful; such as, "Moments with Mr Merman," "Mr
Merman and the Magicodumbras," "Greenland Grampus and Proteus Merman,"
"Grampian Heights and their Climbers, or the New Excelsior." They tossed
him on short sentences; they swathed him in paragraphs of winding
imagery; they found him at once a mere plagiarist and a theoriser of
unexampled perversity, ridiculously wrong about _potzis_ and ignorant of
Pali; they hinted, indeed, at certain things which to their knowledge he
had silently brooded over in his boyhood, and seemed tolerably well
assured that this preposterous attempt to gainsay an incomparable
Cetacean of world-wide fame had its origin in a peculiar mixture of
bitterness and eccentricity which, rightly estimated and seen in its
definite proportions, would furnish the best key to his argumentation.
All alike were sorry for Merman's lack of sound learning, but how could
their readers be sorry? Sound learning would not have been amusing; and
as it was, Merman was made to furnish these readers with amusement at no
expense of trouble on their part. Even burlesque writers looked into his
book to see where it could be made use of, and those who did not know
him were desirous of meeting him at dinner as one likely to feed their
comic vein.

On the other hand, he made a serious figure in sermons under the name of
"Some" or "Others" who had attempted presumptuously to scale eminences
too high and arduous for human ability, and had given an example of
ignominious failure edifying to the humble Christian.

All this might be very advantageous for able persons whose superfluous
fund of expression needed a paying investment, but the effect on Merman
himself was unhappily not so transient as the busy writing and speaking
of which he had become the occasion. His certainty that he was right
naturally got stronger in proportion as the spirit of resistance was
stimulated. The scorn and unfairness with which he felt himself to have
been treated by those really competent to appreciate his ideas had
galled him and made a chronic sore; and the exultant chorus of the
incompetent seemed a pouring of vinegar on his wound. His brain became a
registry of the foolish and ignorant objections made against him, and of
continually amplified answers to these objections. Unable to get his
answers printed, he had recourse to that more primitive mode of
publication, oral transmission or button-holding, now generally regarded
as a troublesome survival, and the once pleasant, flexible Merman was on
the way to be shunned as a bore. His interest in new acquaintances
turned chiefly on the possibility that they would care about the
Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis; that they would listen to his complaints
and exposures of unfairness, and not only accept copies of what he had
written on the subject, but send him appreciative letters in
acknowledgment. Repeated disappointment of such hopes tended to embitter
him, and not the less because after a while the fashion of mentioning
him died out, allusions to his theory were less understood, and people
could only pretend to remember it. And all the while Merman was
perfectly sure that his very opponents who had knowledge enough to be
capable judges were aware that his book, whatever errors of statement
they might detect in it, had served as a sort of divining rod, pointing
out hidden sources of historical interpretation; nay, his jealous
examination discerned in a new work by Grampus himself a certain
shifting of ground which--so poor Merman declared--was the sign of an
intention gradually to appropriate the views of the man he had attempted
to brand as an ignorant impostor.

And Julia? And the housekeeping?--the rent, food, and clothing, which
controversy can hardly supply unless it be of the kind that serves as a
recommendation to certain posts. Controversial pamphlets have been known
to earn large plums; but nothing of the sort could be expected from
unpractical heresies about the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis. Painfully
the contrary. Merman's reputation as a sober thinker, a safe writer, a
sound lawyer, was irretrievably injured: the distractions of controversy
had caused him to neglect useful editorial connections, and indeed his
dwindling care for miscellaneous subjects made his contributions too
dull to be desirable. Even if he could now have given a new turn to his
concentration, and applied his talents so as to be ready to show himself
an exceptionally qualified lawyer, he would only have been like an
architect in competition, too late with his superior plans; he would not
have had an opportunity of showing his qualification. He was thrown out
of the course. The small capital which had filled up deficiencies of
income was almost exhausted, and Julia, in the effort to make supplies
equal to wants, had to use much ingenuity in diminishing the wants. The
brave and affectionate woman whose small outline, so unimpressive
against an illuminated background, held within it a good share of
feminine heroism, did her best to keep up the charm of home and soothe
her husband's excitement; parting with the best jewel among her wedding
presents in order to pay rent, without ever hinting to her husband that
this sad result had come of his undertaking to convince people who only
laughed at him. She was a resigned little creature, and reflected that
some husbands took to drinking and others to forgery: hers had only
taken to the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis, and was not unkind--only a
little more indifferent to her and the two children than she had ever
expected he would be, his mind being eaten up with "subjects," and
constantly a little angry, not with her, but with everybody else,
especially those who were celebrated.

This was the sad truth. Merman felt himself ill-used by the world, and
thought very much worse of the world in consequence. The gall of his
adversaries' ink had been sucked into his system and ran in his blood.
He was still in the prime of life, but his mind was aged by that eager
monotonous construction which comes of feverish excitement on a single
topic and uses up the intellectual strength.

Merman had never been a rich man, but he was now conspicuously poor, and
in need of the friends who had power or interest which he believed they
could exert on his behalf. Their omitting or declining to give this help
could not seem to him so clearly as to them an inevitable consequence of
his having become impracticable, or at least of his passing for a man
whose views were not likely to be safe and sober. Each friend in turn
offended him, though unwillingly, and was suspected of wishing to shake
him off. It was not altogether so; but poor Merman's society had
undeniably ceased to be attractive, and it was difficult to help him. At
last the pressure of want urged him to try for a post far beneath his
earlier prospects, and he gained it. He holds it still, for he has no
vices, and his domestic life has kept up a sweetening current of motive
around and within him. Nevertheless, the bitter flavour mingling itself
with all topics, the premature weariness and withering, are irrevocably
there. It is as if he had gone through a disease which alters what we
call the constitution. He has long ceased to talk eagerly of the ideas
which possess him, or to attempt making proselytes. The dial has moved
onward, and he himself sees many of his former guesses in a new light.
On the other hand, he has seen what he foreboded, that the main idea
which was at the root of his too rash theorising has been adopted by
Grampus and received with general respect, no reference being heard to
the ridiculous figure this important conception made when ushered in by
the incompetent "Others."

Now and then, on rare occasions, when a sympathetic _tete-a-tete_ has
restored some of his old expansiveness, he will tell a companion in a
railway carriage, or other place of meeting favourable to
autobiographical confidences, what has been the course of things in his
particular case, as an example of the justice to be expected of the
world. The companion usually allows for the bitterness of a disappointed
man, and is secretly disinclined to believe that Grampus was to blame.




IV.


A MAN SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY.

Among the many acute sayings of La Rochefoucauld, there is hardly one
more acute than this: "La plus grande ambition n'en a pas la moindre
apparence lorsqu'elle se rencontre dans une impossibilite absolue
d'arriver ou elle aspire." Some of us might do well to use this hint in
our treatment of acquaintances and friends from whom we are expecting
gratitude because we are so very kind in thinking of them, inviting
them, and even listening to what they say--considering how insignificant
they must feel themselves to be. We are often fallaciously confident in
supposing that our friend's state of mind is appropriate to our moderate
estimate of his importance: almost as if we imagined the humble mollusc
(so useful as an illustration) to have a sense of his own exceeding
softness and low place in the scale of being. Your mollusc, on the
contrary, is inwardly objecting to every other grade of solid rather
than to himself. Accustomed to observe what we think an unwarrantable
conceit exhibiting itself in ridiculous pretensions and forwardness to
play the lion's part, in obvious self-complacency and loud
peremptoriness, we are not on the alert to detect the egoistic claims of
a more exorbitant kind often hidden under an apparent neutrality or an
acquiescence in being put out of the question.

Thoughts of this kind occurred to me yesterday when I saw the name of
Lentulus in the obituary. The majority of his acquaintances, I imagine,
have always thought of him as a man justly unpretending and as nobody's
rival; but some of them have perhaps been struck with surprise at his
reserve in praising the works of his contemporaries, and have now and
then felt themselves in need of a key to his remarks on men of celebrity
in various departments. He was a man of fair position, deriving his
income from a business in which he did nothing, at leisure to frequent
clubs and at ease in giving dinners; well-looking, polite, and generally
acceptable in society as a part of what we may call its bread-crumb--the
neutral basis needful for the plums and spice. Why, then, did he speak
of the modern Maro or the modern Flaccus with a peculiarity in his tone
of assent to other people's praise which might almost have led you to
suppose that the eminent poet had borrowed money of him and showed an
indisposition to repay? He had no criticism to offer, no sign of
objection more specific than a slight cough, a scarcely perceptible
pause before assenting, and an air of self-control in his utterance--as
if certain considerations had determined him not to inform against the
so-called poet, who to his knowledge was a mere versifier. If you had
questioned him closely, he would perhaps have confessed that he did
think something better might be done in the way of Eclogues and
Georgics, or of Odes and Epodes, and that to his mind poetry was
something very different from what had hitherto been known under that
name.

For my own part, being of a superstitious nature, given readily to
imagine alarming causes, I immediately, on first getting these mystic
hints from Lentulus, concluded that he held a number of entirely
original poems, or at the very least a revolutionary treatise on
poetics, in that melancholy manuscript state to which works excelling
all that is ever printed are necessarily condemned; and I was long timid
in speaking of the poets when he was present. For what might not
Lentulus have done, or be profoundly aware of, that would make my
ignorant impressions ridiculous? One cannot well be sure of the negative
in such a case, except through certain positives that bear witness to
it; and those witnesses are not always to be got hold of. But time
wearing on, I perceived that the attitude of Lentulus towards the
philosophers was essentially the same as his attitude towards the poets;
nay, there was something so much more decided in his mode of closing his
mouth after brief speech on the former, there was such an air of rapt
consciousness in his private hints as to his conviction that all
thinking hitherto had been an elaborate mistake, and as to his own
power of conceiving a sound basis for a lasting superstructure, that I
began to believe less in the poetical stores, and to infer that the line
of Lentulus lay rather in the rational criticism of our beliefs and in
systematic construction. In this case I did not figure to myself the
existence of formidable manuscripts ready for the press; for great
thinkers are known to carry their theories growing within their minds
long before committing them to paper, and the ideas which made a new
passion for them when their locks were jet or auburn, remain perilously
unwritten, an inwardly developing condition of their successive selves,
until the locks are grey or scanty. I only meditated improvingly on the
way in which a man of exceptional faculties, and even carrying within
him some of that fierce refiner's fire which is to purge away the dross
of human error, may move about in society totally unrecognised, regarded
as a person whose opinion is superfluous, and only rising into a power
in emergencies of threatened black-balling. Imagine a Descartes or a
Locke being recognised for nothing more than a good fellow and a
perfect gentleman--what a painful view does such a picture suggest of
impenetrable dulness in the society around them!

I would at all times rather be reduced to a cheaper estimate of a
particular person, if by that means I can get a more cheerful view of my
fellow-men generally; and I confess that in a certain curiosity which
led me to cultivate Lentulus's acquaintance, my hope leaned to the
discovery that he was a less remarkable man than he had seemed to imply.
It would have been a grief to discover that he was bitter or malicious,
but by finding him to be neither a mighty poet, nor a revolutionary
poetical critic, nor an epoch-making philosopher, my admiration for the
poets and thinkers whom he rated so low would recover all its buoyancy,
and I should not be left to trust to that very suspicious sort of merit
which constitutes an exception in the history of mankind, and recommends
itself as the total abolitionist of all previous claims on our
confidence. You are not greatly surprised at the infirm logic of the
coachman who would persuade you to engage him by insisting that any
other would be sure to rob you in the matter of hay and corn, thus
demanding a difficult belief in him as the sole exception from the
frailties of his calling; but it is rather astonishing that the
wholesale decriers of mankind and its performances should be even more
unwary in their reasoning than the coachman, since each of them not
merely confides in your regarding himself as an exception, but overlooks
the almost certain fact that you are wondering whether he inwardly
excepts _you_. Now, conscious of entertaining some common opinions which
seemed to fall under the mildly intimated but sweeping ban of Lentulus,
my self-complacency was a little concerned.

Hence I deliberately attempted to draw out Lentulus in private dialogue,
for it is the reverse of injury to a man to offer him that hearing which
he seems to have found nowhere else. And for whatever purposes silence
may be equal to gold, it cannot be safely taken as an indication of
specific ideas. I sought to know why Lentulus was more than indifferent
to the poets, and what was that new poetry which he had either written
or, as to its principles, distinctly conceived. But I presently found
that he knew very little of any particular poet, and had a general
notion of poetry as the use of artificial language to express unreal
sentiments: he instanced "The Giaour," "Lalla Rookh," "The Pleasures of
Hope," and "Ruin seize thee, ruthless King;" adding, "and plenty more."
On my observing that he probably preferred a larger, simpler style, he
emphatically assented. "Have you not," said I, "written something of
that order?" "No; but I often compose as I go along. I see how things
might be written as fine as Ossian, only with true ideas. The world has
no notion what poetry will be."

It was impossible to disprove this, and I am always glad to believe that
the poverty of our imagination is no measure of the world's resources.
Our posterity will no doubt get fuel in ways that we are unable to
devise for them. But what this conversation persuaded me of was, that
the birth with which the mind of Lentulus was pregnant could not be
poetry, though I did not question that he composed as he went along, and
that the exercise was accompanied with a great sense of power. This is a
frequent experience in dreams, and much of our waking experience is but
a dream in the daylight. Nay, for what I saw, the compositions might be
fairly classed as Ossianic. But I was satisfied that Lentulus could not
disturb my grateful admiration for the poets of all ages by eclipsing
them, or by putting them under a new electric light of criticism.

Still, he had himself thrown the chief emphasis of his protest and his
consciousness of corrective illumination on the philosophic thinking of
our race; and his tone in assuring me that everything which had been
done in that way was wrong--that Plato, Robert Owen, and Dr Tuffle who
wrote in the 'Regulator,' were all equally mistaken--gave my
superstitious nature a thrill of anxiety. After what had passed about
the poets, it did not seem likely that Lentulus had all systems by
heart; but who could say he had not seized that thread which may
somewhere hang out loosely from the web of things and be the clue of
unravelment? We need not go far to learn that a prophet is not made by
erudition. Lentulus at least had not the bias of a school; and if it
turned out that he was in agreement with any celebrated thinker,
ancient or modern, the agreement would have the value of an undesigned
coincidence not due to forgotten reading. It was therefore with renewed
curiosity that I engaged him on this large subject--the universal
erroneousness of thinking up to the period when Lentulus began that
process. And here I found him more copious than on the theme of poetry.
He admitted that he did contemplate writing down his thoughts, but his
difficulty was their abundance. Apparently he was like the woodcutter
entering the thick forest and saying, "Where shall I begin?" The same
obstacle appeared in a minor degree to cling about his verbal
exposition, and accounted perhaps for his rather helter-skelter choice
of remarks bearing on the number of unaddressed letters sent to the
post-office; on what logic really is, as tending to support the buoyancy
of human mediums and mahogany tables; on the probability of all miracles
under all religions when explained by hidden laws, and my
unreasonableness in supposing that their profuse occurrence at half a
guinea an hour in recent times was anything more than a coincidence; on
the haphazard way in which marriages are determined--showing the
baselessness of social and moral schemes; and on his expectation that he
should offend the scientific world when he told them what he thought of
electricity as an agent.

No man's appearance could be graver or more gentleman-like than that of
Lentulus as we walked along the Mall while he delivered these
observations, understood by himself to have a regenerative bearing on
human society. His wristbands and black gloves, his hat and nicely
clipped hair, his laudable moderation in beard, and his evident
discrimination in choosing his tailor, all seemed to excuse the
prevalent estimate of him as a man untainted with heterodoxy, and likely
to be so unencumbered with opinions that he would always be useful as an
assenting and admiring listener. Men of science seeing him at their
lectures doubtless flattered themselves that he came to learn from them;
the philosophic ornaments of our time, expounding some of their luminous
ideas in the social circle, took the meditative gaze of Lentulus for one
of surprise not unmixed with a just reverence at such close reasoning
towards so novel a conclusion; and those who are called men of the
world considered him a good fellow who might be asked to vote for a
friend of their own and would have no troublesome notions to make him
unaccommodating. You perceive how very much they were all mistaken,
except in qualifying him as a good fellow.

This Lentulus certainly was, in the sense of being free from envy,
hatred, and malice; and such freedom was all the more remarkable an
indication of native benignity, because of his gaseous, illimitably
expansive conceit. Yes, conceit; for that his enormous and contentedly
ignorant confidence in his own rambling thoughts was usually clad in a
decent silence, is no reason why it should be less strictly called by
the name directly implying a complacent self-estimate unwarranted by
performance. Nay, the total privacy in which he enjoyed his
consciousness of inspiration was the very condition of its undisturbed
placid nourishment and gigantic growth. Your audibly arrogant man
exposes himself to tests: in attempting to make an impression on others
he may possibly (not always) be made to feel his own lack of
definiteness; and the demand for definiteness is to all of us a needful
check on vague depreciation of what others do, and vague ecstatic trust
in our own superior ability. But Lentulus was at once so unreceptive,
and so little gifted with the power of displaying his miscellaneous
deficiency of information, that there was really nothing to hinder his
astonishment at the spontaneous crop of ideas which his mind secretly
yielded. If it occurred to him that there were more meanings than one
for the word "motive," since it sometimes meant the end aimed at and
sometimes the feeling that prompted the aiming, and that the word
"cause" was also of changeable import, he was naturally struck with the
truth of his own perception, and was convinced that if this vein were
well followed out much might be made of it. Men were evidently in the
wrong about cause and effect, else why was society in the confused state
we behold? And as to motive, Lentulus felt that when he came to write
down his views he should look deeply into this kind of subject and show
up thereby the anomalies of our social institutions; meanwhile the
various aspects of "motive" and "cause" flitted about among the motley
crowd of ideas which he regarded as original, and pregnant with
reformative efficacy. For his unaffected goodwill made him regard all
his insight as only valuable because it tended towards reform.

The respectable man had got into his illusory maze of discoveries by
letting go that clue of conformity in his thinking which he had kept
fast hold of in his tailoring and manners. He regarded heterodoxy as a
power in itself, and took his inacquaintance with doctrines for a
creative dissidence. But his epitaph needs not to be a melancholy one.
His benevolent disposition was more effective for good than his silent
presumption for harm. He might have been mischievous but for the lack of
words: instead of being astonished at his inspirations in private, he
might have clad his addled originalities, disjointed commonplaces, blind
denials, and balloon-like conclusions, in that mighty sort of language
which would have made a new Koran for a knot of followers. I mean no
disrespect to the ancient Koran, but one would not desire the roc to lay
more eggs and give us a whole wing-flapping brood to soar and make
twilight.

Peace be with Lentulus, for he has left us in peace. Blessed is the man
who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of
the fact--from calling on us to look through a heap of millet-seed in
order to be sure that there is no pearl in it.




V.


A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN.

A little unpremeditated insincerity must be indulged under the stress of
social intercourse. The talk even of an honest man must often represent
merely his wish to be inoffensive or agreeable rather than his genuine
opinion or feeling on the matter in hand. His thought, if uttered, might
be wounding; or he has not the ability to utter it with exactness and
snatches at a loose paraphrase; or he has really no genuine thought on
the question and is driven to fill up the vacancy by borrowing the
remarks in vogue. These are the winds and currents we have all to steer
amongst, and they are often too strong for our truthfulness or our wit.
Let us not bear too hardly on each other for this common incidental
frailty, or think that we rise superior to it by dropping all
considerateness and deference.

But there are studious, deliberate forms of insincerity which it is fair
to be impatient with: Hinze's, for example. From his name you might
suppose him to be German: in fact, his family is Alsatian, but has been
settled in England for more than one generation. He is the superlatively
deferential man, and walks about with murmured wonder at the wisdom and
discernment of everybody who talks to him. He cultivates the low-toned
_tete-a-tete,_ keeping his hat carefully in his hand and often stroking
it, while he smiles with downcast eyes, as if to relieve his feelings
under the pressure of the remarkable conversation which it is his honour
to enjoy at the present moment. I confess to some rage on hearing him
yesterday talking to Felicia, who is certainly a clever woman, and,
without any unusual desire to show her cleverness, occasionally says
something of her own or makes an allusion which is not quite common.
Still, it must happen to her as to every one else to speak of many
subjects on which the best things were said long ago, and in
conversation with a person who has been newly introduced those
well-worn themes naturally recur as a further development of salutations
and preliminary media of understanding, such as pipes, chocolate, or
mastic-chewing, which serve to confirm the impression that our new
acquaintance is on a civilised footing and has enough regard for
formulas to save us from shocking outbursts of individualism, to which
we are always exposed with the tamest bear or baboon. Considered purely
as a matter of information, it cannot any longer be important for us to
learn that a British subject included in the last census holds Shakspere
to be supreme in the presentation of character; still, it is as
admissible for any one to make this statement about himself as to rub
his hands and tell you that the air is brisk, if only he will let it
fall as a matter of course, with a parenthetic lightness, and not
announce his adhesion to a commonplace with an emphatic insistance, as
if it were a proof of singular insight. We mortals should chiefly like
to talk to each other out of goodwill and fellowship, not for the sake
of hearing revelations or being stimulated by witticisms; and I have
usually found that it is the rather dull person who appears to be
disgusted with his contemporaries because they are not always strikingly
original, and to satisfy whom the party at a country house should have
included the prophet Isaiah, Plato, Francis Bacon, and Voltaire. It is
always your heaviest bore who is astonished at the tameness of modern
celebrities: naturally; for a little of his company has reduced them to
a state of flaccid fatigue. It is right and meet that there should be an
abundant utterance of good sound commonplaces. Part of an agreeable
talker's charm is that he lets them fall continually with no more than
their due emphasis. Giving a pleasant voice to what we are all well
assured of, makes a sort of wholesome air for more special and dubious
remark to move in.

Hence it seemed to me far from unbecoming in Felicia that in her first
dialogue with Hinze, previously quite a stranger to her, her
observations were those of an ordinarily refined and well-educated woman
on standard subjects, and might have been printed in a manual of polite
topics and creditable opinions. She had no desire to astonish a man of
whom she had heard nothing particular. It was all the more exasperating
to see and hear Hinze's reception of her well-bred conformities.
Felicia's acquaintances know her as the suitable wife of a distinguished
man, a sensible, vivacious, kindly-disposed woman, helping her husband
with graceful apologies written and spoken, and making her receptions
agreeable to all comers. But you would have imagined that Hinze had been
prepared by general report to regard this introduction to her as an
opportunity comparable to an audience of the Delphic Sibyl. When she had
delivered herself on the changes in Italian travel, on the difficulty of
reading Ariosto in these busy times, on the want of equilibrium in
French political affairs, and on the pre-eminence of German music, he
would know what to think. Felicia was evidently embarrassed by his
reverent wonder, and, in dread lest she should seem to be playing the
oracle, became somewhat confused, stumbling on her answers rather than
choosing them. But this made no difference to Hinze's rapt attention and
subdued eagerness of inquiry. He continued to put large questions,
bending his head slightly that his eyes might be a little lifted in
awaiting her reply.

"What, may I ask, is your opinion as to the state of Art in England?"

"Oh," said Felicia, with a light deprecatory laugh, "I think it suffers
from two diseases--bad taste in the patrons and want of inspiration in
the artists."

"That is true indeed," said Hinze, in an undertone of deep conviction.
"You have put your finger with strict accuracy on the causes of decline.
To a cultivated taste like yours this must be particularly painful."

"I did not say there was actual decline," said Felicia, with a touch of
_brusquerie_. "I don't set myself up as the great personage whom nothing
can please."

"That would be too severe a misfortune for others," says my
complimentary ape. "You approve, perhaps, of Rosemary's 'Babes in the
Wood,' as something fresh and _naive_ in sculpture?"

"I think it enchanting."

"Does he know that? Or _will_ you permit me to tell him?"

"Heaven forbid! It would be an impertinence in me to praise a work of
his--to pronounce on its quality; and that I happen to like it can be of
no consequence to him."

Here was an occasion for Hinze to smile down on his hat and stroke
it--Felicia's ignorance that her praise was inestimable being peculiarly
noteworthy to an observer of mankind. Presently he was quite sure that
her favourite author was Shakspere, and wished to know what she thought
of Hamlet's madness. When she had quoted Wilhelm Meister on this point,
and had afterwards testified that "Lear" was beyond adequate
presentation, that "Julius Caesar" was an effective acting play, and
that a poet may know a good deal about human nature while knowing little
of geography, Hinze appeared so impressed with the plenitude of these
revelations that he recapitulated them, weaving them together with
threads of compliment--"As you very justly observed;" and--"It is most
true, as you say;" and--"It were well if others noted what you have
remarked."

Some listeners incautious in their epithets would have called Hinze an
"ass." For my part I would never insult that intelligent and
unpretending animal who no doubt brays with perfect simplicity and
substantial meaning to those acquainted with his idiom, and if he feigns
more submission than he feels, has weighty reasons for doing so--I would
never, I say, insult that historic and ill-appreciated animal, the ass,
by giving his name to a man whose continuous pretence is so shallow in
its motive, so unexcused by any sharp appetite as this of Hinze's.

But perhaps you would say that his adulatory manner was originally
adopted under strong promptings of self-interest, and that his absurdly
over-acted deference to persons from whom he expects no patronage is the
unreflecting persistence of habit--just as those who live with the deaf
will shout to everybody else.

And you might indeed imagine that in talking to Tulpian, who has
considerable interest at his disposal, Hinze had a desired appointment
in his mind. Tulpian is appealed to on innumerable subjects, and if he
is unwilling to express himself on any one of them, says so with
instructive copiousness: he is much listened to, and his utterances are
registered and reported with more or less exactitude. But I think he
has no other listener who comports himself as Hinze does--who,
figuratively speaking, carries about a small spoon ready to pick up any
dusty crumb of opinion that the eloquent man may have let drop. Tulpian,
with reverence be it said, has some rather absurd notions, such as a
mind of large discourse often finds room for: they slip about among his
higher conceptions and multitudinous acquirements like disreputable
characters at a national celebration in some vast cathedral, where to
the ardent soul all is glorified by rainbow light and grand
associations: any vulgar detective knows them for what they are. But
Hinze is especially fervid in his desire to hear Tulpian dilate on his
crotchets, and is rather troublesome to bystanders in asking them
whether they have read the various fugitive writings in which these
crotchets have been published. If an expert is explaining some matter on
which you desire to know the evidence, Hinze teases you with Tulpian's
guesses, and asks the expert what he thinks of them.

In general, Hinze delights in the citation of opinions, and would
hardly remark that the sun shone without an air of respectful appeal or
fervid adhesion. The 'Iliad,' one sees, would impress him little if it
were not for what Mr Fugleman has lately said about it; and if you
mention an image or sentiment in Chaucer he seems not to heed the
bearing of your reference, but immediately tells you that Mr Hautboy,
too, regards Chaucer as a poet of the first order, and he is delighted
to find that two such judges as you and Hautboy are at one.

What is the reason of all this subdued ecstasy, moving about, hat in
hand, with well-dressed hair and attitudes of unimpeachable correctness?
Some persons conscious of sagacity decide at once that Hinze knows what
he is about in flattering Tulpian, and has a carefully appraised end to
serve though they may not see it They are misled by the common mistake
of supposing that men's behaviour, whether habitual or occasional, is
chiefly determined by a distinctly conceived motive, a definite object
to be gained or a definite evil to be avoided. The truth is, that, the
primitive wants of nature once tolerably satisfied, the majority of
mankind, even in a civilised life full of solicitations, are with
difficulty aroused to the distinct conception of an object towards which
they will direct their actions with careful adaptation, and it is yet
rarer to find one who can persist in the systematic pursuit of such an
end. Few lives are shaped, few characters formed, by the contemplation
of definite consequences seen from a distance and made the goal of
continuous effort or the beacon of a constantly avoided danger: such
control by foresight, such vivid picturing and practical logic are the
distinction of exceptionally strong natures; but society is chiefly made
up of human beings whose daily acts are all performed either in
unreflecting obedience to custom and routine or from immediate
promptings of thought or feeling to execute an immediate purpose. They
pay their poor-rates, give their vote in affairs political or parochial,
wear a certain amount of starch, hinder boys from tormenting the
helpless, and spend money on tedious observances called pleasures,
without mentally adjusting these practices to their own well-understood
interest or to the general, ultimate welfare of the human race; and when
they fall into ungraceful compliment, excessive smiling or other
luckless efforts of complaisant behaviour, these are but the tricks or
habits gradually formed under the successive promptings of a wish to be
agreeable, stimulated day by day without any widening resources for
gratifying the wish. It does not in the least follow that they are
seeking by studied hypocrisy to get something for themselves. And so
with Hinze's deferential bearing, complimentary parentheses, and
worshipful tones, which seem to some like the over-acting of a part in a
comedy. He expects no appointment or other appreciable gain through
Tulpian's favour; he has no doubleness towards Felicia; there is no
sneering or backbiting obverse to his ecstatic admiration. He is very
well off in the world, and cherishes no unsatisfied ambition that could
feed design and direct flattery. As you perceive, he has had the
education and other advantages of a gentleman without being conscious of
marked result, such as a decided preference for any particular ideas or
functions: his mind is furnished as hotels are, with everything for
occasional and transient use. But one cannot be an Englishman and
gentleman in general: it is in the nature of things that one must have
an individuality, though it may be of an often-repeated type. As Hinze
in growing to maturity had grown into a particular form and expression
of person, so he necessarily gathered a manner and frame of speech which
made him additionally recognisable. His nature is not tuned to the pitch
of a genuine direct admiration, only to an attitudinising deference
which does not fatigue itself with the formation of real judgments. All
human achievement must be wrought down to this spoon-meat--this mixture
of other persons' washy opinions and his own flux of reverence for what
is third-hand, before Hinze can find a relish for it.

He has no more leading characteristic than the desire to stand well with
those who are justly distinguished; he has no base admirations, and you
may know by his entire presentation of himself, from the management of
his hat to the angle at which he keeps his right foot, that he aspires
to correctness. Desiring to behave becomingly and also to make a figure
in dialogue, he is only like the bad artist whose picture is a failure.
We may pity these ill-gifted strivers, but not pretend that their works
are pleasant to behold. A man is bound to know something of his own
weight and muscular dexterity, and the puny athlete is called foolish
before he is seen to be thrown. Hinze has not the stuff in him to be at
once agreeably conversational and sincere, and he has got himself up to
be at all events agreeably conversational. Notwithstanding this
deliberateness of intention in his talk he is unconscious of falsity,
for he has not enough of deep and lasting impression to find a contrast
or diversity between his words and his thoughts. He is not fairly to be
called a hypocrite, but I have already confessed to the more
exasperation at his make-believe reverence, because it has no deep
hunger to excuse it.




VI.


ONLY TEMPER.

What is temper? Its primary meaning, the proportion and mode in which
qualities are mingled, is much neglected in popular speech, yet even
here the word often carries a reference to an habitual state or general
tendency of the organism in distinction from what are held to be
specific virtues and vices. As people confess to bad memory without
expecting to sink in mental reputation, so we hear a man declared to
have a bad temper and yet glorified as the possessor of every high
quality. When he errs or in any way commits himself, his temper is
accused, not his character, and it is understood that but for a brutal
bearish mood he is kindness itself. If he kicks small animals, swears
violently at a servant who mistakes orders, or is grossly rude to his
wife, it is remarked apologetically that these things mean nothing--they
are all temper.

Certainly there is a limit to this form of apology, and the forgery of a
bill, or the ordering of goods without any prospect of paying for them,
has never been set down to an unfortunate habit of sulkiness or of
irascibility. But on the whole there is a peculiar exercise of
indulgence towards the manifestations of bad temper which tends to
encourage them, so that we are in danger of having among us a number of
virtuous persons who conduct themselves detestably, just as we have
hysterical patients who, with sound organs, are apparently labouring
under many sorts of organic disease. Let it be admitted, however, that a
man may be "a good fellow" and yet have a bad temper, so bad that we
recognise his merits with reluctance, and are inclined to resent his
occasionally amiable behaviour as an unfair demand on our admiration.

Touchwood is that kind of good fellow. He is by turns insolent,
quarrelsome, repulsively haughty to innocent people who approach him
with respect, neglectful of his friends, angry in face of legitimate
demands, procrastinating in the fulfilment of such demands, prompted to
rude words and harsh looks by a moody disgust with his fellow-men in
general--and yet, as everybody will assure you, the soul of honour, a
steadfast friend, a defender of the oppressed, an affectionate-hearted
creature. Pity that, after a certain experience of his moods, his
intimacy becomes insupportable! A man who uses his balmorals to tread on
your toes with much frequency and an unmistakeable emphasis may prove a
fast friend in adversity, but meanwhile your adversity has not arrived
and your toes are tender. The daily sneer or growl at your remarks is
not to be made amends for by a possible eulogy or defence of your
understanding against depredators who may not present themselves, and on
an occasion which may never arise. I cannot submit to a chronic state of
blue and green bruise as a form of insurance against an accident.

Touchwood's bad temper is of the contradicting pugnacious sort. He is
the honourable gentleman in opposition, whatever proposal or proposition
may be broached, and when others join him he secretly damns their
superfluous agreement, quickly discovering that his way of stating the
case is not exactly theirs. An invitation or any sign of expectation
throws him into an attitude of refusal. Ask his concurrence in a
benevolent measure: he will not decline to give it, because he has a
real sympathy with good aims; but he complies resentfully, though where
he is let alone he will do much more than any one would have thought of
asking for. No man would shrink with greater sensitiveness from the
imputation of not paying his debts, yet when a bill is sent in with any
promptitude he is inclined to make the tradesman wait for the money he
is in such a hurry to get. One sees that this antagonistic temper must
be much relieved by finding a particular object, and that its worst
moments must be those where the mood is that of vague resistance, there
being nothing specific to oppose. Touchwood is never so little engaging
as when he comes down to breakfast with a cloud on his brow, after
parting from you the night before with an affectionate effusiveness at
the end of a confidential conversation which has assured you of mutual
understanding. Impossible that you can have committed any offence. If
mice have disturbed him, that is not your fault; but, nevertheless, your
cheerful greeting had better not convey any reference to the weather,
else it will be met by a sneer which, taking you unawares, may give you
a crushing sense that you make a poor figure with your cheerfulness,
which was not asked for. Some daring person perhaps introduces another
topic, and uses the delicate flattery of appealing to Touchwood for his
opinion, the topic being included in his favourite studies. An
indistinct muttering, with a look at the carving-knife in reply, teaches
that daring person how ill he has chosen a market for his deference. If
Touchwood's behaviour affects you very closely you had better break your
leg in the course of the day: his bad temper will then vanish at once;
he will take a painful journey on your behalf; he will sit up with you
night after night; he will do all the work of your department so as to
save you from any loss in consequence of your accident; he will be even
uniformly tender to you till you are well on your legs again, when he
will some fine morning insult you without provocation, and make you wish
that his generous goodness to you had not closed your lips against
retort.

It is not always necessary that a friend should break his leg for
Touchwood to feel compunction and endeavour to make amends for his
bearishness or insolence. He becomes spontaneously conscious that he has
misbehaved, and he is not only ashamed of himself, but has the better
prompting to try and heal any wound he has inflicted. Unhappily the
habit of being offensive "without meaning it" leads usually to a way of
making amends which the injured person cannot but regard as a being
amiable without meaning it. The kindnesses, the complimentary
indications or assurances, are apt to appear in the light of a penance
adjusted to the foregoing lapses, and by the very contrast they offer
call up a keener memory of the wrong they atone for. They are not a
spontaneous prompting of goodwill, but an elaborate compensation. And,
in fact, Dion's atoning friendliness has a ring of artificiality.
Because he formerly disguised his good feeling towards you he now
expresses more than he quite feels. It is in vain. Having made you
extremely uncomfortable last week he has absolutely diminished his
power of making you happy to-day: he struggles against this result by
excessive effort, but he has taught you to observe his fitfulness rather
than to be warmed by his episodic show of regard.

I suspect that many persons who have an uncertain, incalculable temper
flatter themselves that it enhances their fascination; but perhaps they
are under the prior mistake of exaggerating the charm which they suppose
to be thus strengthened; in any case they will do well not to trust in
the attractions of caprice and moodiness for a long continuance or for
close intercourse. A pretty woman may fan the flame of distant adorers
by harassing them, but if she lets one of them make her his wife, the
point of view from which he will look at her poutings and tossings and
mysterious inability to be pleased will be seriously altered. And if
slavery to a pretty woman, which seems among the least conditional forms
of abject service, will not bear too great a strain from her bad temper
even though her beauty remain the same, it is clear that a man whose
claims lie in his high character or high performances had need impress
us very constantly with his peculiar value and indispensableness, if he
is to test our patience by an uncertainty of temper which leaves us
absolutely without grounds for guessing how he will receive our persons
or humbly advanced opinions, or what line he will take on any but the
most momentous occasions.

For it is among the repulsive effects of this bad temper, which is
supposed to be compatible with shining virtues, that it is apt to
determine a man's sudden adhesion to an opinion, whether on a personal
or impersonal matter, without leaving him time to consider his grounds.
The adhesion is sudden and momentary, but it either forms a precedent
for his line of thought and action, or it is presently seen to have been
inconsistent with his true mind. This determination of partisanship by
temper has its worst effects in the career of the public man, who is
always in danger of getting so enthralled by his own words that he looks
into facts and questions not to get rectifying knowledge, but to get
evidence that will justify his actual attitude which was assumed under
an impulse dependent on something else than knowledge. There has been
plenty of insistance on the evil of swearing by the words of a master,
and having the judgment uniformly controlled by a "He said it;" but a
much worse woe to befall a man is to have every judgment controlled by
an "I said it"--to make a divinity of his own short-sightedness or
passion-led aberration and explain the world in its honour. There is
hardly a more pitiable degradation than this for a man of high gifts.
Hence I cannot join with those who wish that Touchwood, being young
enough to enter on public life, should get elected for Parliament and
use his excellent abilities to serve his country in that conspicuous
manner. For hitherto, in the less momentous incidents of private life,
his capricious temper has only produced the minor evil of inconsistency,
and he is even greatly at ease in contradicting himself, provided he can
contradict you, and disappoint any smiling expectation you may have
shown that the impressions you are uttering are likely to meet with his
sympathy, considering that the day before he himself gave you the
example which your mind is following. He is at least free from those
fetters of self-justification which are the curse of parliamentary
speaking, and what I rather desire for him is that he should produce the
great book which he is generally pronounced capable of writing, and put
his best self imperturbably on record for the advantage of society;
because I should then have steady ground for bearing with his diurnal
incalculableness, and could fix my gratitude as by a strong staple to
that unvarying monumental service. Unhappily, Touchwood's great powers
have been only so far manifested as to be believed in, not demonstrated.
Everybody rates them highly, and thinks that whatever he chose to do
would be done in a first-rate manner. Is it his love of disappointing
complacent expectancy which has gone so far as to keep up this
lamentable negation, and made him resolve not to write the comprehensive
work which he would have written if nobody had expected it of him?

One can see that if Touchwood were to become a public man and take to
frequent speaking on platforms or from his seat in the House, it would
hardly be possible for him to maintain much integrity of opinion, or to
avoid courses of partisanship which a healthy public sentiment would
stamp with discredit. Say that he were endowed with the purest honesty,
it would inevitably be dragged captive by this mysterious, Protean bad
temper. There would be the fatal public necessity of justifying
oratorical Temper which had got on its legs in its bitter mood and made
insulting imputations, or of keeping up some decent show of consistency
with opinions vented out of Temper's contradictoriness. And words would
have to be followed up by acts of adhesion.

Certainly if a bad-tempered man can be admirably virtuous, he must be so
under extreme difficulties. I doubt the possibility that a high order of
character can coexist with a temper like Touchwood's. For it is of the
nature of such temper to interrupt the formation of healthy mental
habits, which depend on a growing harmony between perception,
conviction, and impulse. There may be good feelings, good deeds--for a
human nature may pack endless varieties and blessed inconsistencies in
its windings--but it is essential to what is worthy to be called high
character, that it may be safely calculated on, and that its qualities
shall have taken the form of principles or laws habitually, if not
perfectly, obeyed.

If a man frequently passes unjust judgments, takes up false attitudes,
intermits his acts of kindness with rude behaviour or cruel words, and
falls into the consequent vulgar error of supposing that he can make
amends by laboured agreeableness, I cannot consider such courses any the
less ugly because they are ascribed to "temper." Especially I object to
the assumption that his having a fundamentally good disposition is
either an apology or a compensation for his bad behaviour. If his temper
yesterday made him lash the horses, upset the curricle and cause a
breakage in my rib, I feel it no compensation that to-day he vows he
will drive me anywhere in the gentlest manner any day as long as he
lives. Yesterday was what it was, my rib is paining me, it is not a main
object of my life to be driven by Touchwood--and I have no confidence in
his lifelong gentleness. The utmost form of placability I am capable of
is to try and remember his better deeds already performed, and, mindful
of my own offences, to bear him no malice. But I cannot accept his
amends.

If the bad-tempered man wants to apologise he had need to do it on a
large public scale, make some beneficent discovery, produce some
stimulating work of genius, invent some powerful process--prove himself
such a good to contemporary multitudes and future generations, as to
make the discomfort he causes his friends and acquaintances a vanishing
quality, a trifle even in their own estimate.




VII.


A POLITICAL MOLECULE.

The most arrant denier must admit that a man often furthers larger ends
than he is conscious of, and that while he is transacting his particular
affairs with the narrow pertinacity of a respectable ant, he subserves
an economy larger than any purpose of his own. Society is happily not
dependent for the growth of fellowship on the small minority already
endowed with comprehensive sympathy: any molecule of the body politic
working towards his own interest in an orderly way gets his
understanding more or less penetrated with the fact that his interest is
included in that of a large number. I have watched several political
molecules being educated in this way by the nature of things into a
faint feeling of fraternity. But at this moment I am thinking of Spike,
an elector who voted on the side of Progress though he was not inwardly
attached to it under that name. For abstractions are deities having many
specific names, local habitations, and forms of activity, and so get a
multitude of devout servants who care no more for them under their
highest titles than the celebrated person who, putting with forcible
brevity a view of human motives now much insisted on, asked what
Posterity had done for him that he should care for Posterity? To many
minds even among the ancients (thought by some to have been invariably
poetical) the goddess of wisdom was doubtless worshipped simply as the
patroness of spinning and weaving. Now spinning and weaving from a
manufacturing, wholesale point of view, was the chief form under which
Spike from early years had unconsciously been a devotee of Progress.

He was a political molecule of the most gentleman-like appearance, not
less than six feet high, and showing the utmost nicety in the care of
his person and equipment. His umbrella was especially remarkable for its
neatness, though perhaps he swung it unduly in walking. His complexion
was fresh, his eyes small, bright, and twinkling. He was seen to great
advantage in a hat and greatcoat--garments frequently fatal to the
impressiveness of shorter figures; but when he was uncovered in the
drawing-room, it was impossible not to observe that his head shelved off
too rapidly from the eyebrows towards the crown, and that his length of
l