Impressions of Theophrastus Such

137 7

PUBLISHERS1 NOTE.

The Manuscript of this Work was put into our
hands towards the close of last year, but the
publication has been delayed owing to the domestic
affliction of the Author.

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."

— Phcedrus.

IMPRESSIONS

OF

THEOPHRASTUS SUCH

BY

GEORGE ELIOT

WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS

EDINBURGH AND LONDON

MDCCCLXXIX

All Rights reserz'ed

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,
XL THE WASP CREDITED WITH THE HONEY

COMB,

XII. " SO YOUNG ! "

XIII. HOW WE COME TO GIVE OURSELVES FALSE
TESTIMONIALS, AND BELIEVE IN THEM,
THE TOO READY WRITER, .
DISEASES OF SMALL. AUTHORSHIP,

XIV,
XV,

XVI. 1
XVII.
XVIII

SHADOWS OF THE COMING RACE,
THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! .

I

53
81

99
115
131
141

157
173

187
211

223
241

259
279
297
3ii

I.

LOOKING INWARD

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 remem-
bering 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, ex-
press their desire to convert me to my favour-
ite 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

4 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 re-
flection 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 sus-
picion. 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 con-
scious of that dull perception which causes him
to mistake altogether what will make him
agreeable to a particular woman, and to per-
severe eagerly in a behaviour which she is
privately recording against him ? I have had
some confidences from my female friends as to

LOOKING INWARD. 5

their opinion of other men whom I have ob-
served 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 know-
ing 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 them-
selves, 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

6 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

the estimation of beholders ; but I can now
picture the amusement they had in the incon-
gruity 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 dis-
cernment ? — for even what we are averse to,
what we vow not to entertain, must have
shaped or shadowed itself within us as a pos-
sibility 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 oc-
casions ; nay, in the very tempest and whirl-
wind 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

LOOKING INWARD. 7

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 confes-
sions into an act of accusation against others,
who have no chance of vindicating them-
selves ; 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 un-
broken silence. But the incompleteness which
comes of self-ignorance may be compensated
by self-betrayal. A man who is affected to

8 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 impres-
sive 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 confes-
sions 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 malig-
nant interpretation of a character which really

LOOKING INWARD. 9

offers no handle to just objection ; or even as
an unfair use for your amusement of disadvan-
tages 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 ridi-
cule or your judicious strictures. Though not
averse to finding fault with myself, and con-
scious 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 occupa-
tion 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, sym-
pathy, and love.

Yet I am a bachelor, and the person I love

10 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 con-
cerned, 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 contribu-
tion, 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 elo-
quence characteristic of the Red races.) This
sort of distinction, as a writer nobody is likely
to have read, can hardly counteract an indis-
tinctness in my articulation, which the best-
intentioned loudness will not remedy. Then,
in some quarters my awkward feet are against

LOOKING INWARD. II

me, the length of my upper lip, and an invet-
erate 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 pre-
sented 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 stran-
gers 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

12 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 histor-
ical associations on a kind of feature which
might make us reject an advertising footman.
I have now and then done harm to a good

o

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

LOOKING INWARD. 1 3

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 affec-
tionate 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 consol-
ing 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 compensa-
tion ; 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 hav-
ing 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 un-
ready man in the corner, outside the current of

14 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

conversation, really likely to have a fairer view
of things than the agreeable talker, whose suc-
cess 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 multi-
tude 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 meas-
ure 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 persua-
sion 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 judg-
ments and an average standard : may there

LOOKING INWARD. 15

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 im-
agination I can learn the average appearance
of things : is there no remedy or corrective for
that inward squint which consists in a dissatis-
fied egoism or other want of mental balance ?
In my conscience I saw that the bias of per-
sonal 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 flat-
tering of native illusions, a feeding -up into
monstrosity of an inward growth already dis-
proportionate ; 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 express-

16 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

ing my own pain and consequent bad tem-
per. 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-par-
tiality 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 :

LOOKING INWARD. 17

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, consider-

B

18 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

ing 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 considera-
tion of what touches the feelings or the for-
tunes of my neighbours, seems to be proved
by the ready confidence with which men and
women appeal to my interest in their expe-
rience. 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 aberra-
tion, and that he is evidently held capable of
listening to all kinds of personal outpouring
without the least disposition to become com-
municative in the same way. This confirma-
tion of the hope that my bearing is not that of
the self-flattering lunatic is given me in ample
measure. My acquaintances tell me unre-
servedly of their triumphs and their piques ;

LOOKING INWARD. 19

explain their purposes at length, and reassure
me with cheerfulness as to their chances of suc-
cess ; 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 incomprehensible-
ness as typified in their wives ; mention fre-
quently the fair applause which their merits
have wrung from some persons, and the at-
tacks 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 con-
fiding friend on the subject of his satisfaction
or resentment, was urged to hint at a corre-
sponding experience in my own case ; but the
signs of a rapidly lowering pulse and spread-
ing 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

2Q THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 linger-
ing belief in my own importance were gener-
ally 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 de-
cently— 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

LOOKING INWARD. 21

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 vision-
ary 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 be-
comes 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 un-
consciously disgrace myself. I shudder at

22 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 un-
saleable ? I leave my manuscripts to a judg-
ment outside my imagination, but I will not
ask to hear it, or request my friend to pro-
nounce, 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 do-
mestic 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 pre-
ferable ground of popular neglect — this ver-
dict, 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

LOOKING INWARD. 23

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 weak-
nesses 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

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 an-
other age and another nation, of which also he
knows nothing except through the easy pro-
cess of an imperfect imagination and a flatter-
ing 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

28 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

the ^Eolic lyrists whose sparse remains sug-
gest a comfortable contrast with our redund-
ance. No impassioned personage wishes he
had been born in the age of Pitt, that his ar-
dent youth might have eaten the dearest bread,
dressed itself with the longest coat-tails and
the shortest waist, or heard the loudest grum-
bling 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 miser-
able. 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 encum-
bered with its bad contrivances and mistaken
acts. The lords and gentlemen painted by
young Lawrence talked and wrote their non-
sense in a tongue we thoroughly understand ;
hence their times are not much flattered, not

LOOKING BACKWARD. 29

much glorified by the yearnings of that modern
sect of Flagellants who make a ritual of lash-
ing— 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 pas-
sions 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 vul-
gar and sordid elements, of which there was
always an abundance even in Greece and
Italy, the favourite realms of the retrospec-
tive 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 ser-
vile, pompous, and trivial prose.

30 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

Such impartiality is not in vogue at present.
If we acknowledge our obligation to the an-
cients, it is hardly to be done without some
flouting of our contemporaries, who with all
their faults must be allowed the merit of keep-
ing 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 prede-
cessors 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 un-
corrupted 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

LOOKING BACKWARD. 3 1

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 alto-
gether majestic and graceful. With my pres-
ent 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 depart-
ment 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 know-
ledge; on the other hand, I might have ob-
jected to Aristotle as too much of a systema-
tiser, and have preferred the freedom of a little
self-contradiction as offering more chances of
truth. I gather, too, from the undeniable tes-
timony of his disciple Theophrastus that there
were bores, ill-bred persons, and detractors
even in Athens, of species remarkably corre-
sponding to the English, and not yet made
endurable by being classic ; and altogether,
with my present fastidious nostril, I feel that I

32 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 hima-
tion 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 antici-
pated theory and seemed a voice from " the
prophetic soul of the wTide 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 wish-
ing which is like a child's cry to be inside a

LOOKING BACKWARD. 33

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 occa-
sional 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 com-
plimentary names, a greater charity for other
portions of the human race than for our con-
temporaries. 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 bitter-
ness than was ever bred by the ascetic's con-
templation of heaven. Except on the ground
of a primitive golden age and continuous de-
generacy, I see no rational footing for scorning

C

34 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 con-
temptible 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 excel-
lent juicy thistle by many constitutions.

Reflections of this sort have gradually deter-
mined 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 contin-
ually into an imagined past, I am aware that I
must lose all sense of moral proportion unless

LOOKING BACKWARD. 35

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 mean-
ing 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 pro-
visional 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 acknow-
ledged by the grudging farmer or dairyman

36 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

who parted with him. One enters on a fear-
ful labyrinth in tracing compound interest back-
ward, 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 draw-
backs I am rather fond of the mental furniture
I got by having a father who was well ac-
quainted 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 ignor-

LOOKING BACKWARD. IJ

ance 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 in-
capacitating, even with the best will and intel-
ligence. 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 fellow-
ship and observation. Of course such experi-
ence 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 —

38 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 be-
loved 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 danger-
ous laxity' of supposition about Christian lay-
men 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

LOOKING BACKWARD. 39

popularity, and for months after my mothers
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 dia-
logues 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 remem-
brance 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 rela-
tionship to him was likely to secure me re-
gard 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 composi-
tion. It is true, they must have been already

40 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 dis-
like 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 per-
haps 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 classi-

LOOKING BACKWARD. 41

fication which I observe in many of my su-
periors, 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 offi-
ciated, 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

42 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

as an interesting member of the scant congre-
gation, and conjectured to be the identical
church mouse I had heard referred to as an
example of extreme poverty ; for I was a pre-
cocious boy, and often reasoned after the fash-
ion 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 Lon-
don 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 qualifica-
tions to be parliamentary leaders, professors
of social science, or journalistic guides of the
popular mind ? Not that I feel myself a per-
son made competent by experience ; on the

LOOKING BACKWARD. 43

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 alpha-
bet 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 mysteri-

44 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

ously 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 min-
gled 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

LOOKING BACKWARD. 45

memory of their own words and from the re-
cognition of the fellowships they had formed
ten years before ; and even reforming English-
men 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 teach-
ers 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

46 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 con-
sidering they were Irish. The times, I heard,
had often been bad ; but I was constantly hear-
ing of " bad times " as a name for actual even-
ings and mornings when the godfathers who
gave them that name appeared to me remark-
ably comfortable. Altogether, my father's Eng-
land 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 fire-
arms 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 tradi-
tional name probably to the historic fancy of
our superannuated groom); also, the good old

LOOKING BACKWARD. 47

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 convul-
sions, but easily showing more or less delicate
(sometimes melancholy) effects from minor
changes. Hence our midland plains have

48 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

never lost their familiar expression and con-
servative 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 con-
trast 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 wind-
mills, 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

LOOKING BACKWARD. 49

waggons contemptuously, but rather makes
every hovel and every sheepfold, every railed
bridge or fallen tree-trunk an agreeably notice-
able 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
D

50 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 gen-
erations of the milky mothers have stood
patiently, of the broad - shouldered barns
where the old-fashioned flail once made res-
onant 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 har-
monies they give to our landscape, helping
to unite us pleasantly with the elder gener-
ations who tilled the soil for us before we

LOOKING BACKWARD. 5 I

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

52 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

strife, with indigestion or with hunger; and
now my consciousness is chiefly of the busy,
anxious metropolitan sort. My system re-
sponds sensitively to the London weather-
signs, political, social, literary ; and my bach-
elor'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

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 contro-
versial 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.

56 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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

HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 57

reduction of all the so-called elementary sub-
stances, 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 scat-
tered 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

58 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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. Per-
haps 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 concen-
trate 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, how-
ever (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

HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 59

made his wife first dream of a snowball, and
then cry —

" What is the matter, Proteus ? "

11 A great matter, Julia. That fellow Gram-
pus, 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 Zuzitot-
zums ? 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 under-

60 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

stand her husband's ideas, or at least to believe
that they are of more value than she can under-
stand— if she is to join anybody who happens
to be against him, and suppose he is a fool be-
cause 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 remem-
ber ever differing from you about subjects. I
never in my life thought any one cleverer
than you."

Julia Merman was really a "nice little wo-
man," not one of the stately Dians sometimes
spoken of in those terms. Her black silhouette
had a very infantine aspect, but she had discern-
ment 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

HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 6l

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 cheer-
ful. Foreseeing that truth as presented by
himself would win the recognition of his con-
temporaries, he excused with much liberality
their rather rough treatment of other theorists
whose basis was less perfect. His own periodi-
cal 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

62 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 some-
times even by just objection ? But on ex-
amination it appeared that the attack might
possibly be held damaging, unless the ignorance
of the author were well exposed and his pre-
tended facts shown to be chimeras of that
remarkably hideous kind begotten by imper-
fect 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

HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 63

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 para-
graphs which seemed to blow defiance being
unaccountably feeble, coming from so distin-
guished a Cetacean. Then, by another post,
arrived letters from Butzkopf and Dugong,
both men whose signatures were familiar to
the Teutonic world in the Selteft-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

64 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

to the cause of sound inquiry ; and the pun-
ishment 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 Magico-
dumbras 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 re-
cital. A favourite passage was one in which
a certain kind of sciolist was described as a
creature of the Walrus kind, having a phan-
tasmal resemblance to higher animals when
seen by ignorant minds in the twilight, dab-
bling or hobbling in first one element and then

HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 65

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 com-
parison was as damaging as the showing up
of Merman's mistakes and the mere smatter-
ing 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 Chris-
tians, Jews, infidels, or of any other confes-
sion except the confession of ignorance, pro-
nouncing him shallow and indiscreet if not
presumptuous and absurd. He was heard of

E

66 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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, U orient au point de vue
actuel, in which he was dispassionate enough
to speak of Grampus as possessing a coup
oToeil presque francais in matters of historical
interpretation, and of Merman as nevertheless
an objector qui nitrite d'etre connu. M. Por-
pesse, also, availing himself of M. Cachalot's
knowledge, reproduced it in an article with cer-
tain additions, which it is only fair to distin-
guish 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 kistoriqzie, and Mer-
man'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

HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 6j

nobody, except his wife, for a moment re-
flected on that. An amused society con-
sidered that he was severely punished, but
did not take the trouble to imagine his sen-
sations ; indeed this would have been a diffi-
culty 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 desper-
ately 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

68 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

to hide sophistical evasions — that, in fact, min-
ute 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 com-
pendious 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

HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 69

had acknowledged his mistakes, but had re-
stated 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,
i°, the incomparable Saurian, alike unequalled
in close observation and far-glancing compre-
hensiveness, might have meant those words
ironically ; 20, motzis was probably a false read-
ing for potziS) in which case its bearing was
reversed ; and 30, 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 sin-
cerely thanking the eminent adversary with-

yo THEOPRHASTUS SUCH.

out whose fierce assault he might not have
undertaken a revision in the course of which
he had met with unexpected and striking con-
firmations of his own fundamental views.
Evidently Merman's anger was at white heat.

The rejoinder being complete, all that re-
mained was to find a suitable medium for its
publication. This was not so easy. Distin-
guished 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 mod-
est, 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

HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 71

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 satis-
faction of finding that he had raised a discus-
sion which would not be let die. The fol-
lowers of Grampus took it up with an ardour
and industry of research worthy of their ex-
emplar. Butzkopf made it the subject of an
elaborate Einleitung to his important work,
Die Bedeittung des Algyptischen 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 Magicodum-
bras and Zuzumotzis was on the way to become
a proverb, being used illustratively by many
able journalists who took those names of ques-
tionable 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 sub-
ject passed into popular literature, and figured

72 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 reputa-
tion 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 Magicodum-
bras," " Greenland Grampus and Proteus Mer-
man," " Grampian Heights and their Climbers,
or the New Excelsior." They tossed him on
short sentences; they swathed him in para-
graphs 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 know-
ledge he had silently brooded over in his boy-
hood, and seemed tolerably well assured that
this preposterous attempt to gainsay an incom-
parable 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

HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 73

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 ex-
pression 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 cer-
tainty that he was right naturally got stronger
in proportion as the spirit of resistance was
stimulated. The scorn and unfairness with

74 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 objec-
tions. 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 sur-
vival, 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 under-
stood, and people could only pretend to re-

HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 75

member 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. Pain-
fully 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

76 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

care for miscellaneous subjects made his con-
tributions 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 laywer, 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 cap-
ital 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 illu-
minated 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 under-
taking to convince people who only laughed at
him. She was a resigned little creature, and
reflected that some husbands took to drinking

HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. >]>]

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 him-
self 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

78 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

and sober. Each friend in turn offended him,
though unwillingly, and was suspected of wish-
ing 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

HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 79

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 meet-
ing 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 disap-
pointed man, and is secretly disinclined to
believe that Grampus was to blame.

IV.

A MAN SURPRISED AT HIS
ORIGINALITY

IV.

A MAN SURPRISED AT HIS
ORIGINALITY.

Among the many acute sayings of La Roche-
foucauld, 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 oil 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 :

84 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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. Accus-
tomed to observe what we think an unwarrant-
able conceit exhibiting itself in ridiculous pre-
tensions 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 yester-
day 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 posi-

ONE SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY. 85

tion, 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 some-
thing very different from what had hitherto
been known under that name.

86 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 posi-
tives 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 phil-
osophers 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

ONE SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY. 87

an elaborate mistake, and as to his own power
of conceiving a sound basis for a lasting super-
structure, 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 de-
veloping 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 carry-
ing 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 unre-
cognised, regarded as a person whose opin-
ion is superfluous, and only rising into a power
in emergencies of threatened black-balling.
Imagine a Descartes or a Locke being recog-
nised for nothing more than a good fellow and

88 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 phil-
osopher, my admiration for the poets and
thinkers whom he rated so low would re-
cover 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 sur-
prised at the infirm logic of the coachman
who would persuade you to engage him by
insisting that any other would be sure to rob

ONE SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY. 89

you in the matter of hay and corn, thus de-
manding a difficult belief in him as the sole
exception from the frailties of his calling ;
but it is rather astonishing that the whole-
sale decriers of mankind and its performances
should be even more unwary in their reason-
ing than the coachman, since each of them
not merely confides in your regarding him-
self as an exception, but overlooks the al-
most certain fact that you are wondering
whether he inwardly excepts you. Now,
conscious of entertaining some common opin-
ions 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

90 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 re-
sources. 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

ONE SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY. 91

much of our waking experience is but a dream
in the daylight. Nay, for what I saw, the
compositions might be fairly classed as Ossi-
anic. 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 em-
phasis of his protest and his consciousness of
corrective illumination on the philosophic think-
ing 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 supersti-
tious 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

92 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 curi-
osity that I engaged him on this large sub-
ject— the universal erroneousness of think-
ing 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 say-
ing, " 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 re-
ligions 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

ONE SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY. 93

coincidence ; on the haphazard way in which
marriages are determined — showing the base-
lessness 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 choos-
ing his tailor, all seemed to excuse the preva-
lent 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 doubt-
less 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

94 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 content-
edly 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 com-
placent self-estimate unwarranted by perform-
ance. 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

ONE SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY. 95

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 oc-
curred to him that there were more meanings
than one for the word " motive," since it
sometimes meant the end aimed at and some-
times the feeling that prompted the aiming,
and that the word " cause " was also of change-
able 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 institu-
tions ; meanwhile the various aspects of
" motive " and " cause " flitted about among

96 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 fol-
lowers. 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.

ONE SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY. 97

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

V.
A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN.

A little unpremediated 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,

102 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

or think that we rise superior to it by drop-
ping 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 set-
tled 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 conver-
sation 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, occa-
sionally 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

A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN. 103

with a person who has been newly introduced
those well-worn themes naturally recur as a
further development of salutations and pre-
liminary 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 in-
sight. 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

104 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

usually found that it is the rather dull person
who appears to be disgusted with his contem-
poraries because they are not always strikingly
original, and to satisfy whom the party at a
country house should have included the pro-
phet Isaiah, Plato, Francis Bacon, and Voltaire.
It is always your heaviest bore who is aston-
ished at the tameness of modern celebrities :
naturally ; for a little of his company has re-
duced them to a state of flaccid fatigue. It is
right and meet that there should be an abun-
dant 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 unbecom-
ing in Felicia that in her first dialogue with
Hinze, previously quite a stranger to her, her
observations were those of an ordinarily re-
fined 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

A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN. 105

she had heard nothing particular. It was
all the more exasperating to see and hear
Hinze's reception of her well-bred confor-
mities. 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 recep-
tions 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 embar-
rassed 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 con-
tinued to put large questions, bending his head

106 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 inspira-
tion 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 imperti-

A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN. 107

nence in me to praise a work of his — to pro-
nounce 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 igno-
rance that her praise was inestimable being
peculiarly noteworthy to an observer of man-
kind. Presently he was quite sure that her
favourite author was Shakspere, and wished
to know what she thought of Hamlet's mad-
ness. 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 geo-
graphy, Hinze appeared so impressed with the
plenitude of these revelations that he recap-
itulated 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

108 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 adu-
latory 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 unre-
flecting persistence of habit — just as those
who live with the deaf will shout to every-
body else.

And you might indeed imagine that in talk-
ing to Tulpian, who has considerable interest
at his disposal, Hinze had a desired appoint-
ment 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 lis-
tened to, and his utterances are registered and

A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN. 109

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 dis-
course often finds room for : they slip about
among his higher conceptions and multitudin-
ous acquirements like disreputable characters
at a national celebration in some vast cathe-
dral, 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 vari-
ous fugitive writings in which these crotchets
have been published. If an expert is explain-
ing 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

1 10 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 saga-
city decide at once that Hinze knows what he
is about in flattering Tulpian, and has a care-
fully 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 deter-
mined by a distinctly conceived motive, a def-
inite object to be gained or a definite evil to
be avoided. The truth is, that, the primitive
wants of nature once tolerably satisfied, the

A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN. Ill

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 care-
ful 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 exception-
ally 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 prompt-
ings of thought or feeling to execute an im-
mediate 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, with-
out mentally adjusting these practices to their
own well-understood interest or to the general,
ultimate welfare of the human race ; and when

112 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 prompt-
ings 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, com-
plimentary parentheses, and worshipful tones,
which seem to some like the over-acting of a
part in a comedy. He expects no appoint-
ment or other appreciable gain through Tul~
pian'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

A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN. 113

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 ma-
turity 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 defer-
ence 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 admira-
tions, and you may know by his entire pre-
sentation 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

H

114 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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

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 refer-
ence 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 expect-
ing 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 mis-

Il8 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

takes 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 order-
ing 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 them-
selves detestably, just as we have hysterical
patients who, with sound organs, are appa-
rently 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 re-
sent 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

ONLY TEMPER. 1 19

face of legitimate demands, procrastinating in
the fulfilment of such demands, prompted to
rude words and harsh looks by a moody dis-
gust with his fellow-men in general — and yet,
as everybody will assure you, the soul of hon-
our, a steadfast friend, a defender of the op-
pressed, an affectionate-hearted creature. Pity
that, after a certain experience of his moods,
his intimacy becomes insupportable 1 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 depreciators who
may not present themselves, and on an occa-
sion 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 contra-
dicting 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

120 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 con-
currence in a benevolent measure : he will not
decline to give it, because he has a real sym-
pathy with good aims ; but he complies resent-
fully, 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 antagon-
istic 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 op-
pose. 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

ONLY TEMPER. 121

offence. If mice have disturbed him, that is
not your fault ; but, nevertheless, your cheer-
ful greeting had better not convey any refer-
ence 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 intro-
duces another topic, and uses the delicate
flattery of appealing to Touchwood for his
opinion, the topic being included in his favour-
ite 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 good-

122 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

ness 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 misbe-
haved, 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. Hav-
ing made you extremely uncomfortable last

ONLY TEMPER. 123

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 them-
selves 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 per-

124 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

formances 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 moment-
ous occasions.

For it is among the repulsive effects of this
bad temper, which is supposed to be com-
patible 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 recti-
fying knowledge, but to get evidence that will
justify his actual attitude which was assumed
under an impulse dependent on something

ONLY TEMPER. 125

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-sighted-
ness 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 conspic-
uous manner. For hitherto, in the less
momentous incidents of private life, his capri-
cious 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 smil-
ing 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

126 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 unvary-
ing monumental service. Unhappily, Touch-
wood's great powers have been only so far
manifested as to be believed in, not demon-
strated. 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

ONLY TEMPER. 127

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 cap-
tive 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 ex-
treme 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 forma-
tion 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 inconsist-
encies in its windings — but it is essential to
what is worthy to be called high character,

128 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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 judg-
ments, 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 funda-
mentally 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 con-
fidence in his lifelong gentleness. The ut-
most form of placability I am capable of is to
try and remember his better deeds already

ONLY TEMPER. 129

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 genera-
tions, 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

VII.
A POLITICAL MOLECULE.

The most arrant denier must admit that a
man often furthers larger ends than he is con-
scious 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 en-
dowed 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

134 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

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
gentlemanlike 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

A POLITICAL MOLECULE. 135

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 great-
coat — garments frequently fatal to the im-
pressiveness 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 limb seemed to
have used up his mind so as to cause an air
of abstraction from conversational topics. He
appeared, indeed, to be preoccupied with a
sense of his exquisite cleanliness, clapped his
hands together and rubbed them frequently,
straightened his back, and even opened his
mouth and closed it again with a slight snap,
apparently for no other purpose than the con-
firmation to himself of his own powers in that
line. These are innocent exercises, but they are
not such as give weight to a man's personality.
Sometimes Spike's mind, emerging from its
preoccupation, burst forth in a remark delivered
with smiling zest ; as, that he did like to see
gravel walks well rolled, or that a lady should
always wear the best jewellery, or that a bride

136 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

was a most interesting object ; but finding
these ideas received rather coldly, he would
relapse into abstraction, draw up his back,
wrinkle his brows longitudinally, and seem
to regard society, even including gravel walks,
jewellery, and brides, as essentially a poor
affair. Indeed his habit of mind was de-
sponding, and he took melancholy views as to
the possible" extent of human pleasure and the
value of existence. Especially after he had
made his fortune in the cotton manufacture,
and had thus attained the chief object of his
ambition — the object which had engaged his
talent for order and persevering application.
For his easy leisure caused him much ennui.
He was abstemious, and had none of those
temptations to sensual excess which fill up a
man's time first with indulgence and then with
the process of getting well from its effects.
He had not, indeed, exhausted the sources of
knowledge, but here again his notions of human
pleasure were narrowed by his want of appe-
tite ; for though he seemed rather surprised at
the consideration that Alfred the Great was
a Catholic, or that apart from the Ten Com-
mandments any conception of moral conduct

A POLITICAL MOLECULE. 137

had occurred to mankind, he was not stim-
ulated to further inquiries on these remote
matters. Yet he aspired to what he regarded
as intellectual society, willingly entertained
beneficed clergymen, and bought the books
he heard spoken of, arranging them carefully
on the shelves of what he called his library,
and occasionally sitting alone in the same
room with them. But some minds' seem well
glazed by nature against the admission of
knowledge, and Spike's was one of them. It
was not, however, entirely so with regard to
politics. He had had a strong opinion about
the Reform Bill, and saw clearly that the large
trading towns ought to send members. Por-
traits of the Reform heroes hung framed and
glazed in his library : he prided himself on
being a Liberal. In this last particular, as
well as in not giving benefactions and not
making loans without interest, he showed un-
questionable firmness. On the Repeal of the
Corn Laws, again, he was thoroughly convinced.
His mind was expansive towards foreign mar-
kets, and his imagination could see that the
people from whom we took corn might be
able to take the cotton goods which they had

138 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

hitherto dispensed with. On his conduct in
these political concerns, his wife, otherwise in-
fluential as a woman who belonged to a family
with a title in it, and who had condescended
in marrying him, could gain no hold : she had
to blush a little at what was called her hus-
band's " radicalism " — an epithet which was a
very unfair impeachment of Spike, who never
went to the root of anything. But he under-
stood his own trading affairs, and in this way
became a genuine, constant political element.
If he had been born a little later he could
have been accepted as an eligible member of
Parliament, and if he had belonged to a high
family he might have done for a member of
the Government. Perhaps his indifference to
" views " would have passed for administrative
judiciousness, and he would have been so gene-
rally silent that he must often have been silent
in the right place. But this is empty specu-
lation : there is no warrant for saying what
Spike would have been and known so as to
have made a calculable political element, if he
had not been educated by having to manage
his trade. A small mind trained to useful
occupation for the satisfying of private need

A POLITICAL MOLECULE. 139

becomes a representative of genuine class-
needs. Spike objected to certain items of
legislation because they hampered his own
trade, but his neighbours' trade was hampered
by the same causes ; and though he would have
been simply selfish in a question of light or
water between himself and a fellow-towns-
man, his need for a change in legislation, being-
shared by all his neighbours in trade, ceased
to be simply selfish, and raised him to a sense
of common injury and common benefit. True,
if the law could have been changed for the
benefit of his particular business, leaving the
cotton trade in general in a sorry condition
while he prospered, Spike might not have
thought that result intolerably unjust ; but the
nature of things did not allow of such a result
being contemplated as possible ; it allowed of
an enlarged market for Spike only through the
enlargement of his neighbours' market, and
the Possible is always the ultimate master of
our efforts and desires. Spike was obliged to
contemplate a general benefit, and thus became
public-spirited in spite of himself. Or rather,
the nature of things transmuted his active
egoism into a demand for a public benefit.

140 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

Certainly if Spike had been born a marquis
he could not have had the same chance of
being useful as a political element. But he
might have had the same appearance, have
been equally null in conversation, sceptical as
to the reality of pleasure, and destitute of
historical knowledge ; perhaps even dimly
disliking Jesuitism as a quality in Catholic
minds, or regarding Bacon as the inventor
of physical science. The depths of middle-
aged gentlemen's ignorance will never be
known, for want of public examinations in
this branch.

VIII.
THE WATCH-DOG OF KNOWLEDGE

VIII.
THE WATCH-DOG OF KNOWLEDGE.

Mordax is an admirable man, ardent in intel-
lectual work, public-spirited, affectionate, and
able to find the right words in conveying in-
genious ideas or elevated feeling. Pity that
to all these graces he cannot add what would
give them the utmost finish — the occasional
admission that he has been in the wrong, the
occasional frank welcome of a new idea as
something not before present to his mind !
But no : Mordax's self-respect seems to be
of that fiery quality which demands that
none but the monarchs of thought shall have
an advantage over him, and in the presence
of contradiction or the threat of having his
notions corrected, he becomes astonishingly
unscrupulous and cruel for so kindly and
conscientious a man.

144 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

" You are fond of attributing those fine
qualities to Mordax," said Acer, the other day,
" but I have not much belief in virtues that
are always requiring to be asserted in spite of
appearances against them. True fairness and
goodwill show themselves precisely where his
are conspicuously absent. I mean, in recog-
nising claims which the rest of the world are
not likely to stand up for. It does not need
much love of truth and justice in me to say
that Aldebaran is a bright star, or Isaac New-
ton the greatest of discoverers ; nor much
kindliness in me to want my notes to be heard
above the rest in a chorus of hallelujahs to
one already crowned. It is my way to apply
tests. Does the man who has the ear of the
public use his advantage tenderly towards
poor fellows who may be hindered of their due
if he treats their pretensions with scorn? That
is my test of his justice and benevolence."

My answer was, that his system of moral
tests might be as delusive as what ignorant
people take to be tests of intellect and learn-
ing. If the scholar or savant cannot answer
their haphazard questions on the shortest
notice, their belief in his capacity is shaken.

THE WATCH-DOG OF KNOWLEDGE. 145

But the better-informed have given up the
Johnsonian theory of mind as a pair of legs
able to walk east or west according to choice.
Intellect is no longer taken to be a ready-
made dose of ability to attain eminence (or
mediocrity) in all departments ; it is even ad-
mitted that application in one line of study
or practice has often a laming effect in other
directions, and that an intellectual quality or
special facility which is a furtherance in one
medium of effort is a drag in another. We
have convinced ourselves by this time that a
man may be a sage in celestial physics and a
poor creature in the purchase of seed-corn, or
even in theorising about the affections; that he
may be a mere fumbler in physiology and yet
show a keen insight into human motives ; that
he may seem the "poor Poll" of the company in
conversation and yet write with some humor-
ous vigour. It is not true that a man's intel-
lectual power is like the strength of a timber
beam, to be measured by its weakest point.

Why should we any more apply that falla-
cious standard of what is called consistency to
a man's moral nature, and argue against the
existence of fine impulses or habits of feeling

K

146 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

in relation to his actions generally, because
those better movements are absent in a class
of cases which act peculiarly on an irritable
form of his egoism ? The mistake might be
corrected by our taking notice that the un-
generous words or acts which seem to us the
most utterly incompatible with good disposi-
tions in the offender, are those which offend
ourselves. All other persons are able to draw
a milder conclusion. Laniger, who has a tem-
per but no talent for repartee, having been run
down in a fierce way by Mordax, is inwardly
persuaded that the highly-lauded man is a
wolf at heart : he is much tried by perceiving
that his own friends seem to think no worse of
the reckless assailant than they did before; and
Corvus, who has lately been flattered by some
kindness from Mordax, is unmindful enough
of Laniger's feeling to dwell on this instance
of good-nature with admiring gratitude. There
is a fable that when the badger had been stung
all over by bees, a bear consoled him by a
rhapsodic account of how he himself had just
breakfasted on their honey. The badger re-
plied, peevishly, " The stings are in my flesh,
and the sweetness is on your muzzle." The

THE WATCH-DOG OF KNOWLEDGE. 147

bear, it is said, was surprised at the badger's
want of altruism.

But this difference of sensibility between
Laniger and his friends only mirrors in a faint
way the difference between his own point of
view and that of the man who h'as injured him.
If those neutral, perhaps even affectionate per-
sons, form no lively conception of what Laniger
suffers, how should Mordax have any such sym-
pathetic imagination to check him in what he
persuades himself is a scourging administered
by the qualified man to the unqualified ? De-
pend upon it, his conscience, though active
enough in some relations, has never given

Ihim a twinge because of his polemical rude-
ness and even brutality. He would go from
the room where' he has been tiring himself
through the watches of the night in lifting and
turning a sick friend, and straightway write
a reply or rejoinder in which he mercilessly
pilloried a Laniger who had supposed that he
could tell the world something else or more
than had been sanctioned by the eminent
Mordax — and what was worse, had sometimes
really done so. Does this nullify the genuine-
ness of motive which made him tender to his

148 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

suffering friend ? Not at all. It only proves
that his arrogant egoism, set on fire, sends up
smoke and flame where just before there had
been the dews of fellowship and pity. He is
angry and equips himself accordingly — with a
penknife to give the offender a comprachico
countenance, a mirror to show him the effect,
and a pair of nailed boots to give him his
dismissal. All this to teach him who the
Romans really were, and to purge Inquiry of
incompetent intrusion, so rendering an import-
ant service to mankind.

When a man is in a rage and wants to hurt
another in consequence, he can always regard
himself as the civil arm of a spiritual power,
and all the more easily because there is real
need to assert the righteous efficacy of indigna-
tion. I for my part feel with the Lanigers, and
should object all the more to their or my being
lacerated and dressed with salt, if the adminis-
trator of such torture alleged as a motive his
care for Truth and posterity, and got himself
pictured with a halo in consequence. In trans-
actions between fellow-men it is well to con-
sider a little, in the first place, what is fair and
kind towards the person immediately concerned,

THE WATCH-DOG OF KNOWLEDGE. 149

before we spit and roast him on behalf of the
next century but one. Wide-reaching motives,
blessed and glorious as they are, and of the
highest sacramental virtue, have their dangers,
like all else that touches the mixed life of the
earth. They are archangels with awful brow
and flaming sword, summoning and encourag-
ing us to do the right and the divinely heroic,
and we feel a beneficent tremor in their pres-
ence ; but to learn what it is they thus summon
us to do, we have to consider the mortals we
are elbowing, who are of our own stature and
our own appetites. I cannot feel sure how my
voting will affect the condition of Central Asia
in the coming ages, but I have good reason to
believe that the future populations there will be
none the worse off because I abstain from con-
jectural vilification of my opponents during the
present parliamentary session, and I am very
sure that I shall be less injurious to my con-
temporaries. On the whole, and in the vast
majority of instances, the action by which we
can do the best for future ages is of the sort
which has a certain beneficence and grace for
contemporaries. A sour father may reform
prisons, but considered in his sourness he does

ISO THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

harm. The deed of Judas has been attributed
to far-reaching views, and the wish to hasten
his Master s declaration of himself as the Mes-
siah. Perhaps — I will not maintain the con-
trary— Judas represented his motive in this
way, and felt justified in his traitorous kiss ;
but my belief that he deserved, metaphorically
speaking, to be where Dante saw him, at the
bottom of the Malebolge, would not be the
less strong because he was not convinced that
his action was detestable. I refuse to accept
a man who has the stomach for such treach-
ery, as a hero impatient for the redemption
of mankind and for the beginning of a reign
when the kisses shall be those of peace and
righteousness.

All this is by the way, to show that my
apology for Mordax was not founded on his
persuasion of superiority in his own motives,
but on the compatibility of unfair, equivocal,
and even cruel actions with a nature which,
apart from special temptations, is kindly and
generous ; and also to enforce the need of
checks from a fellow-feeling with those whom
our acts immediately (not distantly) concern.
Will any one be so hardy as to maintain that

THE WATCH-DOG OF KNOWLEDGE. 15 1

an otherwise worthy man cannot be vain and
arrogant ? I think most of us have some in-
terest in arguing the contrary. And it is of the
nature of vanity and arrogance, if unchecked,
to become cruel and self-justifying. There
are fierce beasts within : chain them, chain
them, and let them learn to cower before the
creature with wider reason. This is what
one wishes for Mordax — that his heart and
brain should restrain the outleap of roar and
talons.

As to his unwillingness to admit that an
idea which he has not discovered is novel to
him, one is surprised that quick intellect and
shrewd observation do not early gather reasons
for being ashamed of a mental trick which
makes one among the comic parts of that vari-
ous actor Conceited Ignorance.

I have a sort of valet and factotum, an ex-
cellent, respectable servant, whose spelling is
so unvitiated by non-phonetic superfluities that
he writes night as nit. One day, looking over
his accounts, I said to him jocosely, " You
are in the latest fashion with your spelling,
Pummel : most people spell " night " with a
gh between the i and the t, but the greatest

152 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

scholars now spell it as you do." " So I sup-
pose, sir," says Pummel ; " I've see it with a
ghx but I've noways give into that myself."
You would never catch Pummel in an inter-
jection of surprise. I have sometimes laid
traps for his astonishment, but he has escaped
them all, either by a respectful neutrality, as of
one who would not appear to notice that his
master had been taking too much wine, or else
by that strong persuasion of his all-knowing-
ness which makes it simply impossible for him
to feel himself newly informed. If I tell him
that the world is spinning round and along
like a top, and that he is spinning with it,
he says, " Yes, I've heard a deal of that in
my time, sir," and lifts the horizontal lines of
his brow a little higher, balancing his head
from side to side as if it were too painfully
full. Whether I tell him that they cook pup-
pies in China, that there are ducks with fur
coats in Australia, or that in some parts of
the world it is the pink of politeness to put
your tongue out on introduction to a respect-
able stranger, Pummel replies, " So I suppose,
sir," with an air of resignation to hearing my
poor version of well-known things, such as

THE WATCH-DOG OF KNOWLEDGE. 1 53

elders use in listening to lively boys lately pre-
sented with an anecdote book. His utmost
concession is, that what you state is what he
would have supplied if you had given him
carte blanche instead of your needless instruc-
tion, and in this sense his favourite answer is,
" I should say."

" Pummel," I observed, a little irritated at
not getting my coffee, " if you were to carry
your kettle and spirits of wine up a mountain
of a morning, your water would boil there
sooner." " I should say, sir." " Or, there are
boiling springs in Iceland. Better go to Ice-
land." " That's what I've been thinking, sir."

I have taken to asking him hard questions,
and as I expected, he never admits his own
inability to answer them without representing
it as common to the human race. " What is
the cause of the tides, Pummel ? " " Well, sir,
nobody rightly knows. Many gives their
opinion, but if I was to give mine, it 'ud be
different."

But while he is never surprised himself, he
is constantly imagining situations of surprise
for others. His own consciousness is that of
one so thoroughly soaked in knowledge that

154 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

further absorption is impossible, but his neigh-
bours appear to him to be in the state of
thirsty sponges which it is a charity to be-
sprinkle. His great interest in thinking of
foreigners is that they must be surprised at
what they see in England, and especially at
the beef. He is often occupied with the
surprise Adam must have felt at the sight
of the assembled animals — " for he was not
like us, sir, used from a b'y to Wombwell's
shows." He is fond of discoursing to the lad
who acts as shoe-black and general subaltern,
and I have overheard him saying to that
small upstart, with some severity, " Now don't
you pretend to know, because the more you
pretend the more I see your ignirance " — a
lucidity on his part which has confirmed my
impression that the thoroughly self-satisfied
person is the only one fully to appreciate
the charm of humility in others.

Your diffident self-suspecting mortal is not
very angry that others should feel more com-
fortable about themselves, provided they are
not otherwise offensive : he is rather like the
chilly person, glad to sit next a warmer neigh-
bour ; or the timid, glad to have a courageous

THE WATCH-DOG OF KNOWLEDGE. 155

fellow-traveller. It cheers him to observe the
store of small comforts that his fellow-creatures
may find in their self-complacency, just as one
is pleased to see poor old souls soothed by
the tobacco and snuff for which one has neither
nose nor stomach oneself.

But your arrogant man will not tolerate a
presumption which he sees to be ill-founded.
The service he regards society as most in need
of is to put down the conceit which is so par-
ticularly rife around him that he is inclined
to believe it the growing characteristic of the
present age. In the schools of Magna Graecia,
or in the sixth century of our era, or even
under Kublai Khan, he finds a comparative
freedom from that presumption by which his
contemporaries are stirring his able gall. The
way people will now flaunt notions which are
not his without appearing to mind that they
are not his, strikes him as especially disgusting.
It might seem surprising to us that one
strongly convinced of his own value should
prefer to exalt an age in which he did not
flourish, if it were not for the reflection that
the present age is the only one in which
anybody has appeared to undervalue him.

IX.

A HALF-BREED

IX.
A HALF-BREED.

An early deep-seated love to which we become
faithless has its unfailing Nemesis, if only in
that division of soul which narrows all newer
joys by the intrusion of regret and the estab-
lished presentiment of change. I refer not
merely to the love of a person, but to the
love of ideas, practical beliefs, and social habits.
And faithlessness here means not a gradual
conversion dependent on enlarged knowledge,
but a yielding to seductive circumstance ; not
a conviction that the original choice was a
mistake, but a subjection to incidents that
flatter a growing desire. In this sort of love
it is the forsaker who has the melancholy lot ;
for an abandoned belief may be more effec-
tively vengeful than Dido. The child of a

160 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

wandering tribe caught young and trained to
polite life, if he feels an hereditary yearning
can run away to the old wilds and get his
nature into tune. But there is no such re-
covery possible to the man who remembers
what he once believed without being convinced
that he was in error, who feels within him un-
satisfied stirrings towards old beloved habits
and intimacies from which he has far receded
without conscious justification or unwavering
sense of superior attractiveness in the new.
This involuntary renegade has his character
hopelessly jangled and out of tune. He is
like an organ with its stops in the lawless
condition of obtruding themselves without
method, so that hearers are amazed by the
most unexpected transitions — the trumpet
breaking in on the flute, and the oboe con-
founding both.

Hence the lot of Mixtus affects me patheti-
cally, notwithstanding that he spends his grow-
ing wealth with liberality and manifest enjoy-
ment. To most observers he appears to be
simply one of the fortunate and also sharp com-
mercial men who began with meaning to be
rich and have become what they meant to be :

A HALF-BREED. l6l

a man never taken to be well-born, but sur-
prisingly better informed than the well-born
usually are, and distinguished among ordinary
commercial magnates by a personal kindness
which prompts him not only to help the
suffering in a material way through his wealth,
but also by direct ministration of his own ;
yet with all this, diffusing, as it were, the odour
of a man delightedly conscious of his wealth
as an equivalent for the other social distinctions
of rank and intellect which he can thus admire
without envying. Hardly one among those
superficial observers can suspect that he aims
or has ever aimed at being a writer ; still less
can they imagine that his mind is often moved
by strong currents of regret and of the most
unworldly sympathies from the memories of
a youthful time when his chosen associates
were men and women whose only distinction
was a religious, a philanthropic, or an intellec-
tual enthusiasm, when the lady on whose
words his attention most hung was a writer
of minor religious literature, when he was a
visitor and exhorter of the poor in the alleys
of a great provincial town, and when he at-
tended the lectures given specially to young

L

162 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

men by Mr Apollos, the eloquent congrega-
tional preacher, who had studied in Germany
and had liberal advanced views then far
beyond the ordinary teaching of his sect.
At that time Mixtus thought himself a young
man of socially reforming ideas, of religious
principles and religious yearnings. It was
within his prospects also to be rich, but he
looked forward to a use of his riches chiefly
for reforming and religious purposes. His
opinions were of a strongly democratic stamp,
except that even then, belonging to the class
of employers, he was opposed to all demands
in the employed that would restrict the ex-
pansiveness of trade. He was the most
democratic in relation to the unreasonable
privileges of the aristocracy and landed
interest ; and he had also a religious sense
of brotherhood with the poor. Altogether,
he was a sincerely benevolent young man,
interested in ideas, and renouncing personal
ease for the sake of study, religious com-
munion, and good works. If you had known
him then you would have expected him to
marry a highly serious and perhaps literary
woman, sharing his benevolent and religious

A HALF-BREED. 163

habits, and likely to encourage his studies —
a woman who along with himself would play
a distinguished part in one of the most en-
lightened religious circles of a great provincial
capital.

How is it that Mixtus finds himself in a
London mansion, and in society totally unlike
that which made the ideal of his younger
years ? And whom did he marry ?

Why, he married Scintilla, who fascinated
him as she had fascinated others, by her
prettiness, her liveliness, and her music. It
is a common enough case, that of a man being
suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the
opposite of his ideal ; or if not wholly capti-
vated, at least effectively captured by a com-
bination of circumstances along with an un-
warily manifested inclination which might
otherwise have been transient. Mixtus was
captivated and then captured on the worldly
side of his disposition, which had been always
growing and flourishing side by side with his
philanthropic and religious tastes. He had
ability in business, and he had early meant
to be rich ; also, he was getting rich, and the
taste for such success was naturally growing

I 64 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

with the pleasure of rewarded exertion. It
was during a business sojourn in London that
he met Scintilla, who, though without fortune,
associated with families of Greek merchants
living in a style of splendour, and with
artists patronised by such wealthy enter-
tainers. Mixtus on this occasion became
familiar with a world in which wealth
seemed the key to a more brilliant sort of
dominance than that of a religious patron in
the provincial circles of X. Would it not
be possible to unite the two kinds of sway ?
A man bent on the most useful ends might,
with a fortune large enough, make morality
magnificent, and recommend religious prin-
ciple by showing it in combination with the
best kind of house and the most liberal of
tables ; also with a wife whose graces, wit,
and accomplishments gave a finish some-
times lacking even to establishments got up
with that unhesitating worldliness to which
high cost is a sufficient reason. Enough.

Mixtus married Scintilla. Now this lively
lady knew nothing of Nonconformists, except
that they were unfashionable : she did not
distinguish one conventicle from another, and

A HALF-BREED. 165

Mr Apollos with his enlightened interpreta-
tions seemed to her as heavy a bore, if not
quite so ridiculous, as Mr Johns could have
been with his solemn twang at the Baptist
chapel in the lowest suburbs, or as a local
preacher among the Methodists. In general,
people who appeared seriously to believe in
any sort of doctrine, whether religious, social,
or philosophical, seemed rather absurd to
Scintilla. Ten to one these theoretic people
pronounced oddly, had some reason or other
for saying that the most agreeable things
were wrong, wore objectionable clothes, and
wanted you to subscribe to something.
They were probably ignorant of art and
music, did not understand badinage, and,
in fact, could talk of nothing amusing. In
Scintilla's eyes the majority of persons were
ridiculous and deplorably wanting in that
keen perception of what was good taste, with
which she herself was blest by ' nature and
education ; but the people understood to be
religious or otherwise theoretic, were the
most ridiculous of all, without being pro-
portionately amusing and invitable.

Did Mixtus not discover this view of

1 66 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

Scintilla's before their marriage ? Or did
he allow her to remain in ignorance of
habits and opinions which had made half
the occupation of his youth ?

When a man is inclined to marry a par-
ticular woman, and has made any committal
of himself, this woman's opinions, however
different from his own, are readily regarded
as part of her pretty ways, especially if
they are merely negative ; as, for example,
that she does not insist on the Trinity or
on the rightfulness or expediency of church
rates, but simply regards her lover's troub-
ling himself in disputation on these heads
as stuff and nonsense. The man feels his
own superior strength, and is sure that mar-
riage will make no difference to him on the
subjects about which he is in earnest. And
to laugh at men's affairs is a woman's privi-
lege, tending to enliven the domestic hearth.
If Scintilla had no liking for the best sort of
nonconformity, she was without any trouble-
some bias towards Episcopacy, Anglicanism,
and early sacraments, and was quite con-
tented not to go to church.

As to Scintilla's acquaintance with her

A HALF-BREED. 167

lover's tastes on these subjects, she was
equally convinced on her side that a hus-
band's queer ways while he was a bachelor
would be easily laughed out of him when he
had married an adroit woman. Mixtus, she
felt, was an excellent creature, quite likable,
who was getting rich ; and Scintilla meant
to have all the advantages of a rich man's
wife. She was not in the least a wicked
woman ; she was simply a pretty animal of
the ape kind, with an aptitude for certain
accomplishments which education had made
the most of.

But we have seen what has been the result
to poor Mixtus. He has become richer even
than he dreamed of being, has a little palace
in London, and entertains with splendour the
half-aristocratic, professional, and artistic so-
ciety which he is proud to think select. This
society regards him as a clever fellow in his
particular branch, seeing that he has become a
considerable capitalist, and as a man desirable
to have on the list of one's acquaintance. But
from every other point of view Mixtus finds
himself personally submerged : what he hap-
pens to think is not felt by his esteemed guests

1 68 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

to be of any consequence, and what he used to
think with the ardour of conviction he now
hardly ever expresses. He is transplanted,
and the sap within him has long been di-
verted into other than the old lines of vigor-
ous growth. How could he speak to the
artist Crespi or to Sir Hong Kong Bantam
about the enlarged doctrine of Mr Apollos ?
How could he mention to them his former
efforts towards evangelising the inhabitants of
the X. alleys ? And his references to his
historical and geographical studies towards a
survey of possible markets for English pro-
ducts are received with an air of ironical sus-
picion by many of his political friends, who
take his pretension to give advice concerning
the Amazon, the Euphrates, and the Niger
as equivalent to the currier's wide views on
the applicability of leather. He can only
make a figure through his genial hospitality.
It is in vain that he buys the best pictures
and statues of the best artists. Nobody will
call him a judge in art. If his pictures and
statues are well chosen it is generally thought
that Scintilla told him what to buy ; and yet
Scintilla in other connections is spoken of as

A HALF-BREED. 169

having only a superficial and often question-
able taste. Mixtus, it is decided, is a good
fellow, not ignorant — no, really having a good
deal of knowledge as well as sense, but not
easy to classify otherwise than as a rich man.
He has consequently become a little uncertain
as to his own point of view, and in his most
unreserved moments of friendly intercourse,
even when speaking to listeners whom he
thinks likely to sympathise with the earlier
part of his career, he presents himself in all
his various aspects and feels himself in turn
what he has been, what he is, and what others
take him to be (for this last status is what we
must all more or less accept). He will re-
cover with some glow of enthusiasm the
vision of his old associates, the particular limit
he was once accustomed to trace of freedom
in religious speculation, and his old ideal of
a worthy life ; but he will presently pass to
the argument that money is the only means
by which you can get what is best worth
having in the world, and will arrive at the
exclamation " Give me money ! " with the
tone and gesture of a man who both feels
and knows. Then if one of his audience, not

170 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

having money, remarks that a man may have
made up his mind to do without money be-
cause he prefers something else, Mixtus is
with him immediately, cordially concurring in
the supreme value of mind and genius, which
indeed make his own chief delight, in that he
is able to entertain the admirable possessors
of these attributes at his own table, though
not himself reckoned among them. Yet, he
will proceed to observe, there was a time
when he sacrificed his sleep to study, and even
now amid the press of business he from time
to time thinks of taking up the manuscripts
which he hopes some day to complete, and is
always increasing his collection of valuable
works bearing on his favourite topics. And
it is true that he has read much in certain
directions, and can remember what he has
read ; he knows the history and theories of
colonisation and the social condition of coun-
tries that do not at present consume a suffi-
ciently large share of our products and manu-
factures. He continues his early habit of
regarding the spread of Christianity as a great
result of our commercial intercourse with
black, brown, and yellow populations ; but

A HALF-BREED. 171

this is an idea not spoken of in the sort of
fashionable society that Scintilla collects round
her husband's table, and Mixtus now philoso-
phically reflects that the cause must come
before the effect, and that the thing to be
directly striven for is the commercial inter-
course, not excluding a little war if that
also should prove needful as a pioneer of
Christianity. He has long been wont to feel
bashful about his former religion ; as if it
were an old attachment having consequences
which he did not abandon but kept in decent
privacy, his avowed objects and actual posi-
tion being incompatible with their public
acknowledgment.

There is the same kind of fluctuation in his
aspect towards social questions and duties.
He has not lost the kindness that used to
make him a benefactor and succourer of the
needy, and he is still liberal in helping for-
ward the clever and industrious ; but in his
active superintendence of commercial under-
takings he has contracted more and more of
the bitterness which capitalists and employers
often feel to be a reasonable mood towards
obstructive proletaries. Hence many who

172 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

have occasionally met him when trade ques-
tions were being discussed, conclude him to
be indistinguishable from the ordinary run of
moneyed and money-getting men. Indeed,
hardly any of his acquaintances know what
Mixtus really is, considered as a whole — nor
does Mixtus himself know it.

X.

DEBASING THE MORAL
CURRENCY

X.

DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY

" II ne faut pas mettre un ridicule ou il n'y en
a point : c'est se gater le gout, c'est corrompre
son jugement et celui des autres. Mais le
ridicule qui est quelque part, il faut l'y voir,
Ten tirer avec grace et d'une maniere qui
plaise et qui instruise."

I am fond of quoting this passage from La
Bruyere, because the subject is one where I
like to show a Frenchman on my side, to save
my sentiments from being set down to my
peculiar dulness and deficient sense of the
ludicrous, and also that they may profit by
that enhancement of ideas when presented in
a foreign tongue, that glamour of unfamiliarity
conferring a dignity on the foreign names of
very common things, of which even a philos-

176 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

opher like Dugald Stewart confesses the in-
fluence. I remember hearing a fervid woman
attempt to recite in English the narrative of a
begging Frenchman who described the violent
death of his father in the July days. The
narrative had impressed her, through the mists
of her flushed anxiety to understand it, as
something quite grandly pathetic ; but finding
the facts turn out meagre, and her audience
cold, she broke off, saying, " It sounded so
much finer in French— -fai vu le sang de mon
pere, and so on — I wish I could repeat it in
French." This was a pardonable illusion in
an old-fashoned lady who had not received the
polyglot education of the present day; but I
observe that even now much nonsense and
bad taste win admiring acceptance solely by
virtue of the French language, and one may
fairly desire that what seems a just discrimina-
tion should profit by the fashionable prejudice
in favour of La Bruyere's idiom. But I wish
he had added that the habit of dragging the
ludicrous into topics where the chief interest is
of a different or even opposite kind is a sign
not of endowment, but of deficiency. The
art of spoiling is within reach of the dullest

DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY. 177

faculty : the coarsest clown with a hammer in
his hand might chip the nose off every statue
and bust in the Vatican, and stand grinning at
the effect of his work. Because wit is an ex-
quisite product of high powers, we are not
therefore forced to admit the sadly confused
inference of the monotonous jester that he is
establishing his superiority over every less
facetious person, and over every topic on which
he is ignorant or insensible, by being uneasy
until he has distorted it in the small cracked
mirror which he carries about with him as a
joking apparatus. Some high authority is need-
ed to give many worthy and timid persons the
freedom of muscular repose under the grow-
ing demand on them to laugh when they have
no other reason than the peril of being taken
for dullards ; still more to inspire them with the
courage to say that they object to the theatrical
spoiling for themselves and their children of all
affecting themes, all the grander deeds and aims
of men, by burlesque associations adapted to the
taste of rich fishmongers in the stalls and their
assistants in the gallery. The English people
in the present generation are falsely reputed
to know Shakspere (as, by some innocent per-

M

178 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

sons, the Florentine mule-drivers are believed
to have known the Divina Commedia, not, per-
haps, excluding all the subtle discourses in the
Purgatorio and Paradisd) ; but there seems a
clear prospect that in the coming generation
he will be known to them through burlesques,
and that his plays will find a new life as panto-
mimes. A bottle- nosed Lear will come on
with a monstrous corpulence from which he
will frantically dance himself free during the
midnight storm ; Rosalind and Celia will join
in a grotesque ballet with shepherds and
shepherdesses ; Ophelia in fleshings and a
voluminous brevity of grenadine will dance
through the mad scene, finishing with the
famous " attitude of the scissors " in the arms
of Laertes ; and all the speeches in " Ham-
let" will be so ingeniously parodied that the
originals will be reduced to a mere memoria
technica of the improver's puns — premonitory
signs of a hideous millennium, in which the
lion will have to lie down with the lascivious
monkeys whom (if we may trust Pliny) his
soul naturally abhors.

I have been amazed to find that some artists
whose own works have the ideal stamp, are

DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY. 179

quite insensible to the damaging tendency of
the burlesquing spirit which ranges to and
fro and up and down on the earth, seeing no
reason (except a precarious censorship) why it
should not appropriate every sacred, heroic,
and pathetic theme which serves to make up
the treasure of human admiration, hope, and
love. One would have thought that their own
half-despairing efforts to invest in worthy out-
ward shape the vague inward impressions of
sublimity, and the consciousness of an implicit
ideal in the commonest scenes, might have
made them susceptible of some disgust or
alarm at a species of burlesque which is likely
to render their compositions no better than a
dissolving view, where every noble form is
seen melting into its preposterous caricature.
It used to be imagined of the unhappy me-
dieval Jews that they parodied Calvary by
crucifying dogs ; if they had been guilty they
would at least have had the excuse of the
hatred and rage begotten by persecution. Are
we on the way to a parody which shall have
no other excuse than the reckless search after
fodder for degraded appetites — after the pay to
be earned by pasturing Circe's herd where they

l8o THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

may defile every monument of that grow-
ing life which should have kept them hu-
man ?

The world seems to me well supplied with
what is genuinely ridiculous : wit and humour
may play as harmlessly or beneficently round
the changing facets of egoism, absurdity, and
vice, as the sunshine over the rippling sea or
the dewy meadows. Why should we make
our delicious sense of the ludicrous, with its
invigorating shocks of laughter and its irre-
pressible smiles which are the outglow of an
inward radiation as gentle and cheering as the
warmth of morning, flourish like a brigand on
the robbery of our mental wealth ? — or let it
take its exercise as a madman might, if allowed
a free nightly promenade, by drawing the popu-
lace with bonfires which leave some venerable
structure a blackened ruin or send a scorching
smoke across the portraits of the past, at which
we once looked with a loving recognition of
fellowship, and disfigure them into butts of
mockery ? — nay, worse — use it to degrade the
healthy appetites and affections of our nature
as they are seen to be degraded in insane
patients whose system, all out of joint, finds

DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY. 181

matter for screaming laughter in mere topsy-
turvy, makes every passion preposterous or
obscene, and turns the hard-won order of life
into a second chaos hideous enough to make
one wail that the first was ever thrilled with
light ?

This is what I call debasing the moral cur-
rency : lowering the value of every inspiring
fact and tradition so that it will command less
and less of the spiritual products, the generous
motives which sustain the charm and elevation
of our social existence — the something besides
bread by which man saves his soul alive.
The bread-winner of the family may demand
more and more coppery shillings, or assignats,
or greenbacks for his day's work, and so get
the needful quantum of food ; but let that
moral currency be emptied of its value — let a
greedy buffoonery debase all historic beauty,
majesty, and pathos, and the more you heap
up the desecrated symbols the greater will be
the lack of the ennobling emotions which sub-
due the tyranny of suffering, and make ambi-
tion one with social virtue.

And yet, it seems, parents will put into the
hands of their children ridiculous parodies

182 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

(perhaps with more ridiculous " illustrations ")
of the poems which stirred their own tender-
ness or filial piety, and carry them to make
their first acquaintance with great men, great
works, or solemn crises through the medium of
some miscellaneous burlesque which, with its
idiotic puns and farcical attitudes, will remain
among their primary associations, and reduce
them throughout their time of studious pre-
paration for life to the moral imbecility of an
inward giggle at what might have stimulated
their high emulation or fed the fountains of
compassion, trust, and constancy. One won-
ders where these parents have deposited that
stock of morally educating stimuli which is to
be independent of poetic tradition, and to
subsist in spite of the finest images being de-
graded and the finest words of genius being
poisoned as with some befooling drug.

Will fine wit, will exquisite humour prosper
the more through this turning of all things
indiscriminately into food for a gluttonous
laughter, an idle craving without sense of
flavours ? On the contrary. That delightful
power which La Bruyere points to — " le ridi-
cule qui est quelque part, il faut l'y voir, Ten

DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY. 183

tirer avec grace et d'une maniere qui plaise et
qui instruise" — depends on a discrimination
only compatible with the varied sensibilities
which give sympathetic insight, and with the
justice of perception which is another name for
grave knowledge. Such a result is no more
to be expected from faculties on the strain to
find some small hook by which they may
attach the lowest incongruity to the most
momentous subject, than it is to be expected
of a sharper, watching for gulls in a great
political assemblage, that he will notice the
blundering logic of partisan speakers, or
season his observation with the salt of his-
torical parallels. But after all our psycho-
logical teaching, and in the midst of our zeal
for education, we are still, most of us, at the
stage of believing that mental powers and
habits have somehow, not perhaps in the
general statement, but in any particular case,
a kind of spiritual glaze against conditions
which we are continually applying to them.
We soak our children in habits of contempt
and exultant gibing, and yet are confident that
— as Clarissa one day said to me — " We can
always teach them to be reverent in the right

1 84 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

place, you know." And doubtless if she were
to take her boys to see a burlesque Socrates,
with swollen legs, dying in the utterance of
cockney puns, and were to hang up a sketch
of this comic scene among their bedroom
prints, she would think this preparation not
at all to the prejudice of their" emotions on
hearing their tutor read that narrative of the
Apology which has been consecrated by the
reverent gratitude of ages. This is the im-
poverishment that threatens our posterity : —
a new Famine, a meagre fiend with lewd grin
and clumsy hoof, is breathing a moral mildew
over the harvest of our human sentiments.
These are the most delicate elements of our
too easily perishable civilisation. And here
again I like to quote a French testimony.
Sainte Beuve, referring to a time of insurrec-
tionary disturbance, says : " Rien de plus
prompt a baisser que la civilisation dans des
crises comme celle-ci ; on perd en trois se-
maines le resultat de plusieurs siecles. La
civilisation, la vie est une chose apprise et in-
ventee, qu'on le sache bien : * Inventas aut
qui vitam excoluere per artes.' Les hommes
apres quelques annees de paix oublient trop

DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY. 185

cette verite : ils arrivent a. croire que la culture
est chose innee, quelle est la meme chose que
la nature. La sauvagerie est toujours la a
deux pas, et, des qu'on lache pied, elle re-
commence." We have been severely enough
taught (if we were willing to learn) that our
civilisation, considered as a splendid material
fabric, is helplessly in peril without the spiritual
police of sentiments or ideal feelings. And it
is this invisible police which we had need, as a
community, strive to maintain in efficient force.
How if a dangerous " Swing" were sometimes
disguised in a versatile entertainer devoted to
the amusement of mixed audiences ? And I
confess that sometimes when I see a certain
style of young lady, who checks our tender
admiration with rouge and henna and all the
blazonry of an extravagant expenditure, with
slang and bold brusquerie intended to signify
her emancipated view of things, and with cyn-
ical mockery which she mistakes for penetra-
tion, I am sorely tempted to hiss out " Pdtro-
leuse!" It is a small matter to have our
palaces set aflame compared with the misery
of having our sense of a noble womanhood,
which is the inspiration of a purifying shame,

186 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

the promise of life - penetrating affection,
stained and blotted out by images of repul-
siveness. These things come — not of higher
education, but — of dull ignorance fostered into
pertness by the greedy vulgarity which re-
verses Peter's visionary lesson and learns to
call all things common and unclean. It comes
of debasing the moral currency.

The Tirynthians, according to an ancient
story reported by Athenseus, becoming con-
scious that their trick of laughter at every-
thing and nothing was making them unfit for
the conduct of serious affairs, appealed to the
Delphic oracle for some means of cure. The
god prescribed a peculiar form of sacrifice,
which would be effective if they could carry
it through without laughing. They did their
best ; but the flimsy joke of a boy upset their
unaccustomed gravity, and in this way the
oracle taught them that even the gods could
not prescribe a quick cure for a long vitiation,
or give power and dignity to a people who in
a crisis of the public wellbeing were at the
mercy of a poor jest.

XI.

THE WASP CREDITED WITH
THE HONEYCOMB

XI.

THE WASP CREDITED WITH
THE HONEYCOMB.

No man, I imagine, would object more
strongly than Euphorion to communistic prin-
ciples in relation to material property, but
with regard to property in ideas he entertains
such principles willingly, and is disposed to
treat the distinction between Mine and Thine
in original authorship as egoistic, narrowing,
and low. I have known him, indeed, insist
at some expense of erudition on the prior right
of an ancient, a medieval, or an eighteenth
century writer to be credited wTith a view or
statement lately advanced with some show of
originality ; and this championship seems to
imply a nicety of conscience towards the dead.
He is evidently unwilling that his neighbours

190 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

should get more credit than is due to them,
and in this way he appears to recognise a
certain proprietorship even in spiritual pro-
duction. But perhaps it is no real inconsis-
tency that, with regard to many instances of
modern origination, it is his habit to talk with
a Gallic largeness and refer to the universe :
he expatiates on the diffusive nature of intel-
lectual products, free and all-embracing as the
liberal air ; on the infinitesimal smallness of
individual origination compared with the mas-
sive inheritance of thought on which every
new generation enters ; on that growing pre-
paration for every epoch through which cer-
tain ideas or modes of view are said to be in
the air, and, still more metaphorically speak-
ing, to be inevitably absorbed, so that every
one may be excused for not knowing how he
got them. Above all, he insists on the proper
subordination of the irritable self, the mere
vehicle of an idea or combination which, being
produced by the sum total of the human race,
must belong to that multiple entity, from the
accomplished lecturer or populariser who trans-
mits it, to the remotest generation of Fue-
gians or Hottentots, however indifferent these

THE WASP CREDITED WITH HONEY. 191

may be to the superiority of their right above
that of the eminently perishable dyspeptic
author.

One may admit that such considerations
carry a profound truth to be even religiously
contemplated, and yet object all the more to
the mode in which Euphorion seems to apply
them. I protest against the use of these
majestic conceptions to do the dirty work of
unscrupulosity and justify the non-payment of
conscious debts which cannot be defined or
enforced by the law. Especially since it is
observable that the large views as to intel-
lectual property which can apparently recon-
cile an able person to the use of lately bor-
rowed ideas as if they were his own, when this
spoliation is favoured by the public darkness,
never hinder him from joining in the zealous
tribute of recognition and applause to those
warriors of Truth whose triumphal arches
are seen in the public ways, those conquerors
whose battles and " annexations " even the
carpenters and bricklayers know by name.
Surely the acknowledgment of a mental debt
which will not be immediately detected, and
may never be asserted, is a case to which the

192 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

traditional susceptibility to " debts of honour "
would be suitably transferred. There is no
massive public opinion that can be expected to
tell on these relations of thinkers and investi-
gators— relations to be thoroughly understood
and felt only by those who are interested in
the life of ideas and acquainted with their
history. To lay false claim to an invention
or discovery which has an immediate market
value ; to vamp up a professedly new book of
reference by stealing from the pages of one
already produced at the cost of much labour
and material ; to copy somebody else's poem
and send the manuscript to a magazine, or
hand it about among friends as an original
" effusion ;" to deliver an elegant extract from
a known writer as a piece of improvised elo-
quence : — these are the limits within which
the dishonest pretence of originality is likely
to get hissed or hooted and bring more or less
shame on the culprit. It is not necessary to
understand the merit of a performance, or even
to spell with any comfortable confidence, in
order to perceive at once that such pretences
are not respectable. But the difference be-
tween these vulvar frauds, these devices of

THE WASP CREDITED WITH HONEY. 193

ridiculous jays whose ill -secured plumes are
seen falling off them as they run, and the
quiet appropriation of other people's philo-
sophic or scientific ideas, can hardly be held
to lie in their moral quality unless we take
impunity as our criterion. The pitiable jays
had no presumption in their favour and
foolishly fronted an alert incredulity ; but
Euphorion, the accomplished theorist, has an
audience who expect much of him, and take it
as the most natural thing in the world that
every unusual view which he presents anony-
mously should be due solely to his ingenuity.
His borrowings are no incongruous feathers
awkwardly stuck on ; they have an appro-
priateness which makes them seem an answer
to anticipation, like the return phrases of a
melody. Certainly one cannot help the
ignorant conclusions of polite society, and
there are perhaps fashionable persons who, if
a speaker has occasion to explain what the
occiput is, will consider that he has lately
discovered that curiously named portion of the
animal frame : one cannot give a genealogical
introduction to every long-stored item of fact
or conjecture that may happen to be a re vela-

194 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH,

tion for the large class of persons who are
understood to judge soundly on a small basis
of knowledge. But Euphorion would be very
sorry to have it supposed that he is un-
acquainted with the history of ideas, and some-
times carries even into minutiae the evidence
of his exact registration of names in connec-
tion with quotable phrases or suggestions : I
can therefore only explain the apparent in-
firmity of his memory in cases of larger " con-
veyance " by supposing that he is accustomed
by the very association of largeness to range
them at once under those grand laws of the
universe in the light of which Mine and Thine
disappear and are resolved into Everybody's
or Nobody's, and one man's particular obli-
gations to another melt untraceably into the
obligations of the earth to the solar system
in general.

Euphorion himself, if a particular omission
of acknowledgment were brought home to
him, would probably take a narrower ground
of explanation. It was a lapse of memory ; or
it did not occur to him as necessary in this
case to mention a name, the source being well
known — or (since this seems usually to act as

THE WASP CREDITED WITH HONEY. 195

a strong reason for mention) he rather ab-
stained from adducing the name because it
might injure the excellent matter advanced,
just as an obscure trade-mark casts discredit
on a good commodity, and even on the retailer
who has furnished himself from a quarter not
likely to be esteemed first-rate. No doubt this
last is a genuine and frequent reason for the
non-acknowledgment of indebtedness to what
one may call impersonal as well as personal
sources : even an American editor of school
classics whose own English could not pass for
more than a syntactical shoddy of the cheap-
est sort, felt it unfavourable to his reputation
for sound learning that he should be obliged
to the Penny Cyclopaedia, and disguised his
references to it under contractions in which
Us. Knowl. took the place of the low word
Penny. Works of this convenient stamp, easily
obtained and well nourished with matter, are felt
to be like rich but unfashionable relations who
are visited and received in privacy, and whose
capital is used or inherited without any osten-
tatious insistance on their names and places of
abode. As to memory, it is known that this
frail faculty naturally lets drop the facts which

196 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

are less flattering to our self-love — when it
does not retain them carefully as subjects not
to be approached, marshy spots with a warning
flag over them. But it is always interesting
to bring forward eminent names, such as Patri-
cius or Scaliger, Euler or Lagrange, Bopp or
Humboldt. To know exactly what has been
drawn from them is erudition and heightens
our own influence, which seems advantageous
to mankind ; whereas to cite an author whose
ideas may pass as higher currency under our
own signature can have no object except the
contradictory one of throwing the illumination
over his figure when it is important to be seen
oneself. All these reasons must weigh con-
siderably with those speculative persons who
have to ask themselves whether or not Uni-
versal Utilitarianism requires that in the par-
ticular instance before them they should injure
a man who has been of service to them, and
rob a fellow-workman of the credit which is
due to him.

After all, however, it must be admitted
that hardly any accusation is more difficult
to prove, and more liable to be false, than
that of a plagiarism which is the conscious

THE WASP CREDITED WITH HONEY. 197

theft of ideas and deliberate reproduction
of them as original. The arguments on the
side of acquittal are obvious and strong: —
the inevitable coincidences of contemporary
thinking ; and our continual experience of find-
ing notions turning up in our minds without
any label on them to tell us whence they
came ; so that if we are in the habit of ex-
pecting much from our own capacity we
accept them at once as a new inspiration.
Then, in relation to the elder authors, there
is the difficulty first of learning and then of
remembering exactly what has been wrought
into the backward tapestry of the world's
history, together with the fact that ideas
acquired long ago reappear as the sequence
of an awakened interest or a line of inquiry
which is really new in us, whence it is con-
ceivable that if we were ancients some of
us might be offering grateful hecatombs by
mistake, and proving our honesty in a ruin-
ously expensive manner. On the other hand,
the evidence on which plagiarism is concluded
is often of a kind which, though much trusted
in questions of erudition and historical criti-
cism, is apt to lead us injuriously astray in our

198 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

daily judgments, especially of the resentful,
condemnatory sort. How Pythagoras came
by his ideas, whether St Paul was acquainted
with all the Greek poets, what Tacitus must
have known by hearsay and systematically
ignored, are points on which a false persua-
sion of knowledge is less damaging to justice
and charity than an erroneous confidence, sup-
ported by reasoning fundamentally similar, of
my neighbour's blameworthy behaviour in a
case where I am personally concerned. No
premisses require closer scrutiny than those
which lead to the constantly echoed con-
clusion, "He must have known," or " He
must have read." I marvel that this facility
of belief on the side of knowledge can sub-
sist under the daily demonstration that the
easiest of all things to the human mind is
not to know and not to read. To praise,
to blame, to shout, grin, or hiss, where others
shout, grin, or hiss — these are native ten-
dencies ; but to know and to read are arti-
ficial, hard accomplishments, concerning which
the only safe supposition is, that as little of
them has been done as the case admits.
An author, keenly conscious of having writ-

THE WASP CREDITED WITH HONEY. 199

ten, can hardly help imagining his condition
of lively interest to be shared by others,
just as we are all apt to suppose that the
chill or heat we are conscious of must be
general, or even to think that our sons and
daughters, our pet schemes, and our quarrel-
ling correspondence, are themes to which
intelligent persons will listen long without
weariness. But if the ardent author happen
to be alive to practical teaching he will soon
learn to divide the larger part of the enlight-
ened public into those who have not read
him and think it necessary to tell him so
when they meet him in polite society, and
those who have equally abstained from read-
ing him, but wish to conceal this negation
and speak of his "incomparable works" with
that trust in testimony which always has its
cheering side.

Hence it is worse than foolish to entertain
silent suspicions of plagiarism, still more to
give them voice, when they are founded on
a construction of probabilities which a little
more attention to everyday occurrences as a
guide in reasoning would show us to be really
worthless, considered as proof. The length to

200 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

which one man's memory can go in letting
drop associations that are vital to another can
hardly find a limit. It is not to be supposed
that a person desirous to make an agreeable
impression on you would deliberately choose
to insist to you, with some rhetorical sharp-
ness, on an argument which you were the first
to elaborate in public ; yet any one who listens
may overhear such instances of obliviousness.
You naturally remember your peculiar connec-
tion with your acquaintance's judicious views ;
but why should he f Your fatherhood, which
is an intense feeling to you, is only an addi-
tional fact of meagre interest for him to re-
member ; and a sense of obligation to the
particular living fellow - struggler who has
helped us in our thinking, is not yet a form
of memory the want of which is felt to be
disgraceful or derogatory, unless it is taken
to be a want of polite instruction, or causes
the missing of a cockade on a day of cele-
bration. In our suspicions of plagiarism we
must recognise as the first weighty probability,
that what we who feel injured remember best
is precisely what is least likely to enter last-
ingly into the memory of our neighbours.

THE WASP CREDITED WITH HONEY. 201

But it is fair to maintain that the neighbour
who borrows your property, loses it for a
while, and when it turns up again forgets
your connection with it and counts it his
own, shows himself so much the feebler in
grasp and rectitude of mind. Some absent
persons cannot remember the state of wear
in their own hats and umbrellas, and have
no mental check to tell them that they have
carried home a fellow-visitor's more recent
purchase : they may be excellent house-
holders, far removed from the suspicion of
low devices, but one wishes them a more
correct perception, and a more wary sense
that a neighbour's umbrella may be newer
than their own.

True, some persons are so constituted that
the very excellence of an idea seems to them a
convincing reason that it must be, if not solely,
yet especially theirs. It fits in so beautifully
with their general wisdom, it lies implicitly in
so many of their manifested opinions, that if
they have not yet expressed it (because of pre-
occupation) it is clearly a part of their indigen-
ous produce, and is proved by their immediate
eloquent promulgation of it to belong more

202 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

naturally and appropriately to them than to
the person who seemed first to have alighted
on it, and who sinks in their all-originating
consciousness to that low kind of entity, a
second cause. This is not lunacy, nor pre-
tence, but a genuine state , of mind very effec-
tive in practice, and often carrying the public
with it, so that the poor Columbus is found to
be a very faulty adventurer, and the continent
is named after Amerigo. Lighter examples
of this instinctive appropriation are constantly
met with among brilliant talkers. Aquila is
too agreeable and amusing for any one who
is not himself bent on display to be angry at
his conversational rapine — his habit of darting
down on every morsel of booty that other birds
may hold in their beaks, with an innocent air,
as if it were all intended for his use, and hon-
estly counted on by him as a tribute in kind.
Hardly any man, I imagine, can have had less
trouble in gathering a showy stock of infor-
mation than Aquila. On close inquiry you
would probably find that he had not read one
epoch-making book of modern times, for he
has a career which obliges him to much cor-
respondence and other official work, and he

THE WASP CREDITED WITH HONEY. 203

is too fond of being in company to spend his
leisure moments in study ; but to his quick
eye, ear, and tongue, a few predatory excur-
sions in conversation where there are instructed
persons, gradually furnish surprisingly clever
modes of statement and allusion on the domi-
nant topic. When he first adopts a subject he
necessarily falls into mistakes, and it is inter-
esting to watch his gradual progress into fuller
information and better nourished irony, without
his ever needing to admit that he has made a
blunder or to appear conscious of correction.
Suppose, for example, he had incautiously
founded some ingenious remarks on a hasty
reckoning that nine thirteens made a hundred
and two, and the insignificant Bantam, hitherto
silent, seemed to spoil the flow of ideas by
stating that the product could not be taken
as less than a hundred and seventeen, Aquila
would glide on in the most graceful manner
from a repetition of his previous remark to the
continuation — " All this is on the supposition
that a hundred and two were all that could be
got out of nine thirteens ; but as all the world
knows that nine thirteens will yield," &c. —
proceeding straightway into a new train of

204 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

ingenious consequences, and causing Bantam
to be regarded by all present as one of those
slow persons who take irony for ignorance,
and who would warn the weasel to keep awake.
How should a small - eyed, feebly crowing
mortal like him be quicker in arithmetic than
the keen -faced forcible Aquila, in whom uni-
versal knowledge is easily credible ? Looked
into closely, the conclusion from a man's pro-
file, voice, and fluency to his certainty in mul-
tiplication beyond the twelves, seems to show
a confused notion of the way in which very
common things are connected ; but it is on
such false correlations that men found half
their inferences about each other, and high
places of trust may sometimes be held on
no better foundation.

It is a commonplace that words, writings,
measures, and performances in general, have
qualities assigned them not by a direct judg-
ment on the performances themselves, but by
a presumption of what they are likely to be,
considering who is the performer. We all
notice in our neighbours this reference to
names as guides in criticism, and all furnish
illustrations of it in our own practice; for, check

THE WASP CREDITED WITH HONEY. 205

ourselves as we will, the first impression from
any sort of work must depend on a previous
attitude of mind, and this will constantly be
determined by the influences of a name. But
that our prior confidence or want of confidence
in given names is made up of judgments just
as hollow as the consequent praise or blame
they are taken to warrant, is less commonly
perceived, though there is a conspicuous indi-
cation of it in the surprise or disappointment
often manifested in the disclosure of an author-
ship about which everybody has been making
wrong guesses. No doubt if it had been dis-
covered who wrote the ' Vestiges,' many an
ingenious structure of probabilities would have
been spoiled, and some disgust might have been
felt for a real author who made comparatively
so shabby an appearance of likelihood. It is
this foolish trust in prepossessions, founded on
spurious evidence, which makes a medium of
encouragement for those who, happening to
have the ear of the public, give other people's
ideas the advantage of appearing under their
own well - received name, while any remon-
strance from the real producer becomes an
unwelcome disturbance of complacency with

206 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

each person who has paid complimentary tri-
butes in the wrong place.

Hardly any kind of false reasoning is more
ludicrous than this on the probabilities of
origination. It would be amusing to catechise
the guessers as to their exact reasons for
thinking their guess " likely : " why Hoopoe
of John's has fixed on Toucan of Magdalen ;
why Shrike attributes its peculiar style to
Buzzard, who has not hitherto been known as
a writer ; why the fair Columba thinks it must
belong to the reverend Merula ; and why they
are all alike disturbed in their previous judg-
ment of its value by finding that it really came
from Skunk, whom they had either not thought
of at all, or thought of as belonging to a species
excluded by the nature of the case. Clearly
they were all wrong in their notion of the
specific conditions, which lay unexpectedly in
the small Skunk, and in him alone — in spite
of his education nobody knows where, in spite
of somebody's knowing his uncles and cousins,
and in spite of nobody's knowing that he was
cleverer than they thought him.

Such guesses remind one of a fabulist's
imaginary council of animals assembled to

THE WASP CREDITED WITH HONEY. 207

consider what sort of creature had constructed
a honeycomb found and much tasted by Bruin
and other epicures. The speakers all started
from the probability that the maker was a bird,
because this was the quarter from which a
wondrous nest might be expected ; for the
animals at that time, knowing little of their
own history, would have rejected as incon-
ceivable the notion that a nest could be made
by a fish ; and as to the insects, they were not
willingly received in society and their ways
were little known. Several complimentary
presumptions were expressed that the honey-
comb was due to one or the other admired and
popular bird, and there was much fluttering
on the part of the Nightingale and Swallow,
neither of whom gave a positive denial, their
confusion perhaps extending to their sense of
identity ; but the Owl hissed at this folly, ar-
guing from his particular knowledge that the
animal which produced honey must be the
Musk-rat, the wondrous nature of whose se-
cretions required no proof; and, in the power-
ful logical procedure of the Owl, from musk
to honey was but a step. Some disturbance
arose hereupon, for the Musk-rat began to

208 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

make himself obtrusive, believing in the Owl's
opinion of his powers, and feeling that he could
have produced the honey if he had thought
of it ; until an experimental Butcher-bird pro-
posed to anatomise him as a help to decision.
The hubbub increased, the opponents of the
Musk-rat inquiring who his ancestors were;
until a diversion was created by an able dis-
course of the Macaw on structures generally,
which he classified so as to include the honey-
comb, entering into so much admirable expo-
sition that there was a prevalent sense of the
honeycomb having probably been produced by
one who understood it so well. But Bruin,
who had probably eaten too much to listen
with edification, grumbled in his low kind of
language, that " Fine words butter no pars-
nips," by which he meant to say that there
was no new honey forthcoming.

Perhaps the audience generally was begin-
ning to tire, when the Fox entered with his
snout dreadfully swollen, and reported that
the beneficent originator in question was the
Wasp, which he had found much smeared with
undoubted honey, having applied his nose to
it — whence indeed the able insect, perhaps

THE WASP CREDITED WITH HONEY. 209

justifiably irritated at what might seem a sign
of scepticism, had stung him with some
severity, an infliction Reynard could hardly
regret, since the swelling of a snout normally
so delicate would corroborate his statement
and satisfy the assembly that he had really
found the honey-creating genius.

The Fox's admitted acuteness, combined
with the visible swelling, were taken as un-
deniable evidence, and the revelation undoubt-
edly met a general desire for information on
a point of interest. Nevertheless, there was
a murmur the reverse of delighted, and the
feelings of some eminent animals were too
strong for them : the Orang-outang's jaw
dropped so as seriously to impair the vigour
of his expression, the edifying Pelican screamed
and flapped her wings, the Owl hissed again,
the Macaw became loudly incoherent, and the
Gibbon gave his hysterical laugh ; while the
Hyaena, after indulging in a more splenetic
guffaw, agitated the question whether it would
not be better to hush up the whole affair, in-
stead of giving public recognition to an insect
whose produce, it was now plain, had been

O

210 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

much overestimated. But this narrow-spirited
motion was negatived by the sweet -toothed
majority. A complimentary deputation to the
Wasp was resolved on, and there was a con-
fident hope that this diplomatic measure would
tell on the production of honey.

XII.

SO YOUNG!

XII.
"SO YOUNG!"

Ganymede was once a girlishly handsome
precocious youth. That one cannot for any
considerable number of years go on being
youthful, girlishly handsome, and precocious,
seems on consideration to be a statement as
worthy of credit as the famous syllogistic con-
clusion, " Socrates was mortal." But many
circumstances have conspired to keep up in
Ganymede the illusion that he is surprisingly
young. He was the last born of his family,
and from his earliest memory was accustomed
to be commended as such to the care of his
elder brothers and sisters : he heard his mother
speak of him as her youngest darling with a
loving pathos in her tone, which naturally
suffused his own view of himself, and gave

214 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

him the habitual consciousness of being at
once very young and very interesting. Then,
the disclosure of his tender years was a con-
stant matter of astonishment to strangers who
had had proof of his precocious talents, and
the astonishment extended to what is called
the world at large when he produced ' A Com-
parative Estimate of European Nations ' before
he was well out of his teens. All comers, on
a first interview, told him that he was marvel-
lously young, and some repeated the statement
each time they saw him ; all critics who wrote
about him called attention to the same ground
for wonder : his deficiencies and excesses were
alike to be accounted for by the flattering fact
of his youth, and his youth was the golden
background which set off his many-hued en-
dowments. Here was already enough to
establish a strong association between his
sense of identity and his sense of being un-
usually young. But after this he devised and
founded an ingenious organisation for consoli-
dating the literary interests of all the four con-
tinents (subsequently including Australasia and
Polynesia), he himself presiding in the central
office, which thus became a new theatre for

"SO YOUNG !" 215

the constantly repeated situation of an as-
tonished stranger in the presence of a boldly
scheming administrator found to be remarkably
young. If we imagine with due charity the
effect on Ganymede, we shall think it greatly
to his credit that he continued to feel the
necessity of being something more than young,
and did not sink by rapid degrees into a paral-
lel of that melancholy object, a superannuated
youthful phenomenon. Happily he had enough
of valid, active faculty to save him from that
tragic fate. He had not exhausted his foun-
tain of eloquent opinion in his ' Comparative
Estimate/ so as to feel himself, like some other
juvenile celebrities, the sad survivor of his own
manifest destiny, or like one who has risen too
early in the morning, and finds all the solid
day turned into a fatigued afternoon. He has
continued to be productive both of schemes
and writings, being perhaps helped by the fact
that his ' Comparative Estimate ' did not greatly
affect the currents of European thought, and
left him with the stimulating hope that he had
not done his best, but might yet produce what
would make his youth more surprising than
ever.

2l6 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

I saw something of him through his Anti-
nolis period, the time of rich chesnut locks,
parted not by a visible white line, but by a
shadowed furrow from which they fell in mas-
sive ripples to right and left. In these slim
days he looked the younger for being rather
below the middle size, and though at last one
perceived him contracting an indefinable air
of self-consciousness, a slight exaggeration of
the facial movements, the attitudes, the little
tricks, and the romance in shirt-collars, which
must be expected from one who, in spite of
his knowledge, was so exceedingly young, it
was impossible to say that he was making any
great mistake about himself. He was only
undergoing one form of a common moral
disease : being strongly mirrored for himself
in the remark of others, he was getting to see
his real characteristics as a dramatic part, a
type to which his doings were always in cor-
respondence. Owing to my absence on travel
and to other causes I had lost sight of him for
several years, but such a separation between
two who have not missed each other seems in
this busy century only a pleasant reason, when
they happen to meet again in some old accus-

" SO YOUNG! 217

tomed haunt, for the one who has stayed at
home to be more communicative about him-
self than he can well be to those who have all
along been in his neighbourhood. He had
married in the interval, and as if to keep up
his surprising youthfulness in all relations, he
had taken a wife considerably older than him-
self. It would probably have seemed to him
a disturbing inversion of the natural order that
any one very near to him should have been
younger than he, except his own children who,
however young, would not necessarily hinder
the normal surprise at the youthfulness of
their father. And if my glance had revealed
my impression on first seeing him again, he
might have received a rather disagreeable
shock, which was far from my intention. My
mind, having retained a very exact image of
his former appearance, took note of unmistake-
able changes such as a painter would certainly
not have made by way of flattering his sub-
ject. He had lost his slimness, and that
curved solidity which might have adorned a
taller man was a rather sarcastic threat to his
short figure. The English branch of the
Teutonic race does not produce many fat

2l8 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

youths, and I have even heard an American
lady say that she was much " disappointed "
at the moderate number and size of our
fat men, considering their reputation in the
United States ; hence a stranger would now
have been apt to remark that Ganymede was
unusually plump for a distinguished writer,
rather than unusually young. But how was
he to know this ? Many long-standing pre-
possessions are as hard to be corrected as a
long-standing mispronunciation, against which
the direct experience of eye and ear is often
powerless. And I could perceive that Gany-
mede's inwrought sense of his surprising
youthfulness had been stronger than the su-
perficial reckoning of his years and the merely
optical phenomena of the looking-glass. He
now held a post under Government, and not
only saw, like most subordinate functionaries,
how ill everything was managed, but also
what were the changes that a high construc-
tive ability would dictate ; and in mentioning
to me his own speeches and other efforts to-
wards propagating reformatory views in his
department, he concluded by changing his
tone to a sentimental head voice and saying —

"so young!" 219

" But I am so young ; people object to any
prominence on my part ; I can only get my-
self heard anonymously, and when some at-
tention has been drawn the name is sure to
creep out. The writer is known to be young,
and things are none the forwarder."

"Well," said I, "youth seems the only
drawback that is sure to diminish. You and
I have seven years less of it than when we
last met."

"Ah?" returned Ganymede, as lightly as
possible, at the same time casting an obser-
vant glance over me, as if he were marking
the effect of seven years on a person who
had probably begun life with an old look, and
even as an infant had given his countenance to
that significant doctrine, the transmigration of
ancient souls into modern bodies.

I left him on that occasion without any
melancholy forecast that his illusion would be
suddenly or painfully broken up. I saw that
he was well victualled and defended against
a ten years' siege from ruthless facts ; and in
the course of time observation convinced me
that his resistance received considerable aid
from without. Each of his written productions,

220 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

as it came out, was still commented on as the
work of a very young man. One critic, find-
ing that he wanted solidity, charitably referred
to his youth as an excuse. Another, dazzled
by his brilliancy, seemed to regard his youth
as so wondrous that all other authors ap-
peared decrepit by comparison, and their style
such as might be looked for from gentlemen
of the old school. Able pens (according to a
familiar metaphor) appeared to shake their
heads good-humouredly, implying that Gany-
mede's crudities were pardonable in one so
exceedingly young. Such unanimity amid
diversity, which a distant posterity might take
for evidence that on the point of age at least
there could have been no mistake, was not
really more difficult to account for than the
prevalence of cotton in our fabrics. Gany-
mede had been first introduced into the writing
world as remarkably young, and it was no
exceptional consequence that the first deposit
of information about him held its ground
against facts which, however open to obser-
vation, were not necessarily thought of. It
is not so easy, with our rates and taxes and
need for economy in all directions, to cast away

"so young!" 221

an epithet or remark that turns up cheaply,
and to go in expensive search after more
genuine substitutes. There is high Homeric
precedent for keeping fast hold of an epithet
under all changes of circumstance, and so the
precocious author of the ' Comparative Esti-
mate ' heard the echoes repeating " Young
Ganymede" when an illiterate beholder at a
railway station would have given him forty
years at least. Besides, important elders,
sachems of the clubs and public meetings,
had a genuine opinion of him as young
enough to be checked for speech on subjects
which they had spoken mistakenly about
when he was in his cradle ; and then, the
midway parting of his crisp hair, not common
among English committee-men, formed a pre-
sumption against the ripeness of his judgment
which nothing but a speedy baldness could
have removed.

It is but fair to mention all these outward
confirmations of Ganymede's illusion, which
shows no signs of leaving him. It is true
that he no longer hears expressions of sur-
prise at his youthfulness, on a first introduc-
tion to an admiring reader ; but this sort of

222 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

external evidence has become an unnecessary
crutch to his habitual inward persuasion. His
manners, his costume, his suppositions of the
impression he makes on others, have all their
former correspondence with the dramatic part
of the young genius. As to the incongruity
of his contour and other little accidents of
physique, he is probably no more aware that
they will affect others as incongruities than
Armida is conscious how much her rouge
provokes our notice of her wrinkles, and
causes us to mention sarcastically that moth-
erly age which we should otherwise regard
with affectionate reverence.

But let us be just enough to admit that
there may be old-young coxcombs as well
as old-young coquettes.

XIII.

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

XIII.

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

It is my way when I observe any instance
of folly, any queer habit, any absurd illusion,
straightway to look for something of the same
type in myself, feeling sure that amid all
differences there will be a certain correspond-
ence ; just as there is more or less correspond-
ence in the natural history even of continents
widely apart, and of islands in opposite zones.
No doubt men's minds differ in what we may
call their climate or share of solar energy,
and a feeling or tendency which is comparable
to a panther in one may have no more im-
posing aspect than that of a weasel in another:
some are like a tropical habitat in which the

P

226 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

very ferns cast a mighty shadow, and the
grasses are a dry ocean in which a hunter
may be submerged ; others like the chilly
latitudes in which your forest -tree, fit else-
where to prop a mine, is a pretty miniature
suitable for fancy potting. The eccentric
man might be typified by the Australian
fauna, refuting half our judicious assumptions
of what nature allows. Still, whether fate
commanded us to thatch our persons among
the Eskimos or to choose the latest thing
in tattooing among the Polynesian isles, our
precious guide Comparison would teach us in
the first place by likeness, and our clue to
further knowledge would be resemblance to
what we already know. Hence, having a
keen interest in the natural history of my
inward self, I pursue this plan I have men-
tioned of using my observation as a clue or
lantern by which I detect small herbage or
lurking life ; or I take my neighbour in his
least becoming tricks or efforts as an oppor-
tunity for luminous deduction concerning the
figure the human genus makes in the specimen
which I myself furnish.

Introspection which starts with the purpose

FALSE TESTIMONIALS. 227

of finding out one's own absurdities is not
likely to be very mischievous, yet of course
it is not free from dangers any more than
breathing is, or the other functions that keep
us alive and active. To judge of others by
oneself is in its most innocent meaning the
briefest expression for our only method of
knowing mankind ; yet, we perceive, it has
come to mean in many cases either the vulgar
mistake which reduces every man's value to
the very low figure at which the valuer him-
self happens to stand ; or else, the amiable
illusion of the higher nature misled by a too
generous construction of the lower. One
cannot give a recipe for wise judgment : it
resembles appropriate muscular action, which
is attained by the myriad lessons in nicety
of balance and of aim that only practice can
give. The danger of the inverse procedure,
judging of self by what one observes in others,
if it is carried on with much impartiality and
keenness of discernment, is that it has a
laming effect, enfeebling the energies of in-
dignation and scorn, which are the proper
scourges of wrong-doing and meanness, "and
which should continually feed the wholesome

228 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

restraining power of public opinion. I respect
the horsewhip when applied to the back of
Cruelty, and think that he who applies it is
a more perfect human being because his out-
leap of indignation is not checked by a too
curious reflection on the nature of guilt — a
more perfect human being because he more
completely incorporates the best social life of
the race, which can never be constituted by
ideas that nullify action. This is the essence
of Dante's sentiment (it is painful to think
that he applies it very cruelly) —

" E cortesia fu, lui esser villano M1 —

and it is undeniable that a too intense con-
sciousness of one's kinship with all frailties
and vices undermines the active heroism
which battles against wrong.

But certainly nature has taken care that this
danger should not at present be very threaten-
ing. One could not fairly describe the gener-
ality of one's neighbours as too lucidly aware
of manifesting in their own persons the weak-
nesses which they observe in the rest of her
Majesty's subjects ; on the contrary, a hasty

1 Inferno, xxxii. 150.

FALSE TESTIMONIALS. 229

conclusion as to schemes of Providence might
lead to the supposition that one man was in-
tended to correct another by being most intol-
erant of the ugly quality or trick which he
himself possesses. Doubtless philosophers
will be able to explain how it must necessarily
be so, but pending the full extension of the a
priori method, which will show that only block-
heads could expect anything to be otherwise,
it does seem surprising that Heloisa should
be disgusted at Laura's attempts to disguise
her age, attempts which she recognises so
thoroughly because they enter into her own
practice; that Semper, who often responds
at public dinners and proposes resolutions on
platforms, though he has a trying gestation of
every speech and a bad time for himself and
others at every delivery, should yet remark
pitilessly on the folly of precisely the same
course of action in Ubique ; that Aliquis, who
lets no attack on himself pass unnoticed, and
for every handful of gravel against his windows
sends a stone in reply, should deplore the
ill-advised retorts of Quispiam, who does not
perceive that to show oneself angry with an
adversary is to gratify him. To be unaware

230 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

of our own little tricks of manner or our own
mental blemishes and excesses is a compre-
hensible unconsciousness ; the puzzling fact is
that people should apparently take no account
of their deliberate actions, and should expect
them to be equally ignored by others. It is
an inversion of the accepted order : there it is
the phrases that are official and the conduct or
privately manifested sentiment that is taken
to be real ; here it seems that the practice is
taken to be official and entirely nullified by
the verbal representation which contradicts it.
The thief making a vow to heaven of full
restitution and whispering some reservations,
expecting to cheat Omniscience by an " aside,"
is hardly more ludicrous than the many ladies
and gentlemen who have more belief, and ex-
pect others to have it, in their own statement
about their habitual doings than in the contra-
dictory fact which is patent in the daylight.
One reason of the absurdity is that we are led
by a tradition about ourselves, so that long
after a man has practically departed from a
rule or principle, he continues innocently to
state it as a true description of his practice —
just as he has a long tradition that he is not

FALSE TESTIMONIALS. 23 1

an old gentleman, and is startled when he
is seventy at overhearing himself called by
an epithet which he has only applied to
others.

" A person with your tendency of constitu-
tion should take as little sugar as possible,"
said Pilulus to Bovis somewhere in the darker
decades of this century. " It has made a great
difference to Avis since he took my advice in
that matter : he used to consume half a pound
a-day."

" God bless me ! " cries Bovis. " I take very
little sugar myself."

" Twenty-six large lumps every day of your
life, Mr Bovis," says his wife.

" No such thing ! " exclaims Bovis.

" You drop them into your tea, coffee, and
whisky yourself, my dear, and I count them."

" Nonsense ! " laughs Bovis, turning to Pil-
ulus, that they may exchange a glance of mu-
tual amusement at a woman's inaccuracy.

But she happened to be right. Bovis had
never said inwardly that he would take a large
allowance of sugar, and he had the tradition
about himself that he was a man of the most
moderate habits ; hence, with this conviction,

232 THEOPHRASTUS SUGH.

he was naturally disgusted at the saccharine
excesses of Avis.

I have sometimes thought that this facility
of men in believing that they are still what
they once meant to be — this undisturbed ap-
propriation of a traditional character which
is often but a melancholy relic of early res-
olutions, like the worn and soiled testimo-
nial to soberness and honesty carried in the
pocket of a tippler whom the need of a dram
has driven into peculation — may sometimes
diminish the turpitude of what seems a flat,
barefaced falsehood. It is notorious that a
man may go on uttering false assertions about
his own acts till he at last believes in them : is
it not possible that sometimes in the very first
utterance there may be a shade of creed-recit-
ing belief, a reproduction of a traditional self
which is clung to against all evidence ? There
is no knowing all the disguises of the lying
serpent.

When we come to examine in detail what is
the sane mind in the sane body, the final test
of completeness seems to be a security of dis-
tinction between what we have professed and
what we have done ; what we have aimed at

FALSE TESTIMONIALS. 233

and what we have achieved; what we have in-
vented and what we have witnessed or had
evidenced to us; what we think and feel in the
present and what we thought and felt in the
past.

I know that there is a common prejudice
which regards the habitual confusion of now
and then, of it was and it is, of it seemed so and
/ should like it to be so, as a mark of high im-
aginative endowment, while the power of pre-
cise statement and description is rated lower,
as the attitude of an everyday prosaic mind.
High imagination is often assigned or claimed
as if it were a ready activity in fabricating ex-
travagances such as are presented by fevered
dreams, or as if its possessors were in that
state of inability to give credible testimony
which would warrant their exclusion from the
class of acceptable witnesses in a court of
justice ; so that a creative genius might fairly
be subjected to the disability which some laws
have stamped on dicers, slaves, and other
classes whose position was held perverting to
their sense of social responsibility.

This endowment of mental confusion is
often boasted of by persons whose imagina-

234 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

tiveness would not otherwise be known, unless
it were by the slow process of detecting that
their descriptions and narratives were not to
be trusted. Callista is always ready to testify
of herself that she is an imaginative person,
and sometimes adds in illustration, that if she
had taken a walk and seen an old heap of
stones on her way, the account she would give
on returning would include many pleasing par-
ticulars of her own invention, transforming the
simple heap into an interesting castellated ruin.
This creative freedom is all very well in the
right place, but before I can grant it to be a
sign of unusual mental power, I must inquire
whether, on being requested to give a precise
description of what she saw, she would be
able to cast aside her arbitrary combinations
and recover the objects she really perceived
so as to make them recognisable by another
person who passed the same way. Otherwise
her glorifying imagination is not an addition to
the fundamental power of strong, discerning
perception, but a cheaper substitute. And, in
fact, I find on listening to Callista's conver-
sation, that she has a very lax conception
even of common objects, and an equally lax

FALSE TESTIMONIALS. 235

memory of events. It seems of no conse-
quence to her whether she shall say that a
stone is overgrown with moss or with lichen,
that a building is of sandstone or of granite,
that Melibceus once forgot to put on his cravat
or that he always appears without it ; that
everybody says so, or that one stock-broker's
wife said so yesterday ; that Philemon praised
Euphemia up to the skies, or that he denied
knowing any particular evil of her. She is
one of those respectable witnesses who would
testify to the exact moment of an apparition,
because any desirable moment will be as exact
as another to her remembrance ; or who would
be the most worthy to witness the action of
spirits on slates and tables because the action
of limbs would not probably arrest her atten-
tion. She would describe the surprising phen-
omena exhibited by the powerful Medium with
the same freedom that she vaunted in relation
to the old heap of stones. Her supposed
imaginativeness is simply a very usual lack of
discriminating perception, accompanied with a
less usual activity of misrepresentation, which,
if it had been a little more intense, or had
been stimulated by circumstance, might have

236 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

made her a profuse writer unchecked by the
troublesome need of veracity.

These characteristics are the very opposite
of such as yield a fine imagination, which is
always based on a keen vision, a keen con-
sciousness of what is, and carries the store of
definite knowledge as material for the construc-
tion of its inward visions. Witness Dante,
who is at once the most precise and homely
in his reproduction of actual objects, and the
most soaringly at large in his imaginative
combinations. On a much lower level we
distinguish the hyperbole and rapid develop-
ment in descriptions of persons and events
which are lit up by humorous intention in the
speaker — we distinguish this charming play
of intelligence which resembles musical impro-
visation on a given motive, where the farthest
sweep of curve is looped into relevancy by an
instinctive method, from the florid inaccuracy
or helpless exaggeration which is really some-
thing commoner than the correct simplicity
often depreciated as prosaic.

Even if high imagination were to be iden-
tified with illusion, there would be the same
sort of difference between the imperial wealth

FALSE TESTIMONIALS. 237

of illusion which is informed by industrious
submissive observation and the trumpery
stage-property illusion which depends on the
ill-denned impressions gathered by capricious
inclination, as there is between a good and a bad
picture of the Last Judgment. In both these
the subject is a combination never actually
witnessed, and in the good picture the general
combination may be of surpassing boldness ;
but on examination it is seen that the separate
elements have been closely studied from real
objects. And even where we find the charm
of ideal elevation with wrong drawing and
fantastic colour, the charm is dependent on the
selective sensibility of the painter to certain
real delicacies of form which confer the expres-
sion he longed to render ; for apart from this
basis of an effect perceived in common, there
could be no conveyance of aesthetic meaning
by the painter to the beholder. In this sense
it is as true to say of Fra Angelico's Corona-
tion of the Virgin, that it has a strain of real-
ity, as to say so of a portrait by Rembrandt,
which also has its strain of ideal elevation due
to Rembrandt's virile selective sensibility.
To correct such self-flatterers as Callista, it

238 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

is worth repeating that powerful imagination
is not false outward vision, but intense in-
ward representation, and a creative energy
constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest
minutiae of experience, which it reproduces and
constructs in fresh and fresh wholes ; not the
habitual confusion of provable fact with the
fictions of fancy and transient inclination, but
a breadth of ideal association which informs
every material object, every incidental fact
with far-reaching memories and stored residues
of passion, bringing into new light the less
obvious relations of human existence. The
illusion to which it is liable is not that of habit-
ually taking duck-ponds for lilied pools, but of
being more or less transiently and in varying
degrees so absorbed in ideal vision as to lose
the consciousness of surrounding objects or oc-
currences; and when that rapt condition is past,
the sane genius discriminates clearly between
what has been given in this parenthetic state
of excitement, and what he has known, and
may count on, in the ordinary world of expe-
rience. Dante seems to have expressed these
conditions perfectly in that passage of the
Pitrgatorio where, after a triple vision which

FALSE TESTIMONIALS. 239

has made him forget his surroundings, he
says —

" Quando l'anima mia torno di fuori
Alle cose che son fuor di lei vere,
Io riconobbi i miei non falsi errori." — (c. xv.)

He distinguishes the ideal truth of his en-
tranced vision from the series of external facts
to which his consciousness had returned.
Isaiah gives us the date of his vision in the
Temple — "the year that King Uzziah died"
— and if afterwards the mighty -winged sera-
phim were present with him as he trod the
street, he doubtless knew them for images
of memory, and did not cry " Look ! " to the
passers-by.

Certainly the seer, whether prophet, philo-
sopher, scientific discoverer, or poet, may hap-
pen to be rather mad : his powers may have
been used up, like Don Quixote's, in their
visionary or theoretic constructions, so that the
reports of common-sense fail to affect him, or
the continuous strain of excitement may have
robbed his mind of its elasticity. It is hard
for our frail mortality to carry the burthen of
greatness with steady gait and full alacrity of
perception. But he is the strongest seer who

240 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

can support the stress of creative energy and
yet keep that sanity of expectation which
consists in distinguishing, as Dante does,
between the cose che son vere outside the
individual mind, and the non falsi errori
which are the revelations of true imagina-
tive power.

XIV.

THE TOO READY WRITER

XIV.
THE TOO READY WRITER.

One who talks too much, hindering the rest
of the company from taking their turn, and
apparently seeing no reason why they should
not rather desire to know his opinion or ex-
perience in relation to all subjects, or at least
to renounce the discussion of any topic where
he can make no figure, has never been praised
for this industrious monopoly of work which
others would willingly have shared in. How-
ever various and brilliant his talk may be, we
suspect him of impoverishing us by excluding
the contributions of other minds, which attract
our curiosity the more because he has shut
them up in silence. Besides, we get tired of
a " manner " in conversation as in painting,
when one theme after another is treated with

244 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

the same lines and touches. I begin with
a liking for an estimable master, but by the
time he has stretched his interpretation of the
world unbrokenly along a palatial gallery, I
have had what the cautious Scotch mind would
call " enough" of him. There is monotony and
narrowness already to spare in my own iden-
tity; what comes to me from without should
be larger and more impartial than the judg-
ment of any single interpreter. On this
ground even a modest person, without power
or will to shine in the conversation, may easily
find the predominating talker a nuisance, while
those who are full of matter on special topics
are continually detecting miserably thin places
in the web of that information which he will
not desist from imparting. Nobody that I
know of ever proposed a testimonial to a man
for thus volunteering the whole expense of the
conversation.

Why is there a different standard of judg-
ment with regard to a writer who plays much
the same part in literature as the excessive
talker plays in what is traditionally called con-
versation ? The busy Adrastus, whose pro-
fessional engagements might seem more than

THE TOO READY WRITER. 245

enough for the nervous energy of one man,
and who yet finds time to print essays on the
chief current subjects, from the tri-lingual in-
scriptions, or the Idea of the Infinite among the
prehistoric Lapps, to the Colorado beetle and
the grape disease in the south of France, is
generally praised if not admired for the breadth
of his mental range and his gigantic powers of
work. Poor Theron, who has some original
ideas on a subject to which he has given years
of research and meditation, has been waiting
anxiously from month to month to see whether
his condensed exposition will find a place in
the next advertised programme, but sees it, on
the contrary, regularly excluded, and twice the
space he asked for filled with the copious brew
of Adrastus, whose name carries custom like a
celebrated trade-mark. Why should the eager
haste to tell what he thinks on the shortest
notice, as if his opinion were a needed pre-
liminary to discussion, get a man the reputa-
tion of being a conceited bore in conversation,
when nobody blames the same tendency if it
shows itself in print ? The excessive talker
can only be in one gathering at a time, and
there is the comfort of thinking that every-

246 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

where else other fellow - citizens who have
something to say may get a chance of deliver-
ing themselves ; but the exorbitant writer can
occupy space and spread over it the more or
less agreeable flavour of his mind in four
" mediums " at once, and on subjects taken
from the four winds. Such restless and versa-
tile occupants of literary space and time should
have lived earlier when the world wanted
summaries of all extant knowledge, and this
knowledge being small, there was the more
room for commentary and conjecture. They
might have played the part of an Isidor of
Seville or a Vincent of Beauvais brilliantly,
and the willingness to write everything them-
selves would have been strictly in place. In
the present day, the busy retailer of other
people's knowledge which he has spoiled in
the handling, the restless guesser and com-
mentator, the importunate hawker of undesir-
able superfluities, the everlasting word-com-
peller who rises early in the morning to praise
what the world has already glorified, or makes
himself haggard at night in writing out his
dissent from what nobody ever believed, is
not simply " gratis anhelans, multa agendo

THE TOO READY WRITER. 247

nihil agens" — he is an obstruction. Like an
incompetent architect with too much interest
at his back, he obtrudes his ill-considered
work where place ought to have been left to
better men.

Is it out of the question that we should
entertain some scruple about mixing our own
flavour, as of the too cheap and insistent
nutmeg, with that of every great writer and
every great subject ? — especially when our
flavour is all we have to give, the matter or
knowledge having been already given by some-
body else. What if we were only like the
Spanish wine-skins which impress the innocent
stranger with the notion that the Spanish
grape has naturally a taste of leather ? One
could wish that even the greatest minds should
leave some themes unhandled, or at least leave
us no more than a paragraph or- two on them
to show how well they did in not being more
lengthy.

Such entertainment of scruple can hardly
be expected from the young ; but happily their
readiness to mirror the universe anew for the
rest of mankind is not encouraged by easy
publicity. In the vivacious Pepin I have

248 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

often seen the image of my early youth, when
it seemed to me astonishing that the philos-
ophers had left so many difficulties unsolved,
and that so many great themes had raised no
great poet to treat them. I had an elated
sense that I should find my brain full of
theoretic clues when I looked for them, and
that wherever a poet had not done what I
expected, it was for want of my insight. Not
knowing what had been said about the play
of Romeo and Juliet, I felt myself capable of
writing something original on its blemishes
and beauties. In relation to all subjects I
had a joyous consciousness of that ability
which is prior to knowledge, and of only need-
ing to apply myself in order to master any
task — to conciliate philosophers whose systems
were at present but dimly known to me, to
estimate foreign poets whom I had not yet
read, to show up mistakes in an historical
monograph that roused my interest in an
epoch which I had been hitherto ignorant of,
when I should once have had time to verify
my views of probability by looking into an
encyclopaedia. So Pepin ; save only that he
is industrious while I was idle. Like the

THE TOO READY WRITER. 249

astronomer in Rasselas, I swayed the universe
in my consciousness without making any dif-
ference outside me ; whereas Pepin, while
feeling himself powerful with • the stars in
their courses, really raises some dust here
below. He is no longer in his spring-tide,
but having been always busy he has been
obliged to use his first impressions as if they
were deliberate opinions, and to range him-
self on the corresponding side in ignorance
of much that he commits himself to ; so that
he retains some characteristics of a compara-
tively tender age, and among them a certain
surprise that there have not been more persons
equal to himself. Perhaps it is unfortunate
for him that he early gained a hearing, or at
least a place in print, and was thus encouraged
in acquiring a fixed habit of writing, to the
exclusion of any other bread-winning pursuit.
He is already to be classed as a " general
writer," corresponding to the comprehensive
wants of the " general reader," and with this
industry on his hands it is not enough for
him to keep up the ingenuous self-reliance of
youth : he finds himself under an obligation to
be skilled in various methods of seeming to

250 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

know ; and having habitually expressed him-
self before he was convinced, his interest in
all subjects is chiefly to ascertain that he has
not made a mistake, and to feel his infallibility
confirmed. That impulse to decide, that vague
sense of being able to achieve the unattempted,
that dream of aerial unlimited movement at
will without feet or wings, which were once
but the joyous mounting of young sap, are
already taking shape as unalterable woody
fibre : the impulse has hardened into " style,"
and into a pattern of peremptory sentences ;
the sense of ability in the presence of other
men's failures is turning into the official arro-
gance of one who habitually issues directions
which he has never himself been called on to
execute ; the dreamy buoyancy of the stripling
has taken on a fatal sort of reality in written
pretensions which carry consequences. He is
on the way to become like the loud-buzzing,
bouncing Bombus who combines conceited
illusions enough to supply several patients in
a lunatic asylum with the freedom to show
himself at large in various forms of print. If
one who takes himself for the telegraphic
centre of all American wires is to be confined

THE TOO READY WRITER. 25 1

as unfit to transact affairs, what shall we say-
to the man who believes himself in possession
of the unexpressed motives and designs dwell-
ing in the breasts of all sovereigns and all
politicians ? And I grieve to think that poor
Pepin, though less political, may by-and-by
manifest a persuasion hardly more sane, for
he is beginning to explain people's writing by
what he does not know about them. Yet he
was once at the comparatively innocent stage
which I have confessed to be that of my own
early astonishment at my powerful originality ;
and copying the just humility of the old Puritan,
I may say, " But for the grace of discourage-
ment, this coxcombry might have been mine."
Pepin made for himself a necessity of writ-
ing (and getting printed) before he had con-
sidered whether he had the knowledge or belief
that would furnish eligible matter. At first
perhaps the necessity galled him a little, but it
is now as easily borne, nay, is as irrepressible
a habit as the outpouring of inconsiderate
talk. He is gradually being condemned to
have no genuine impressions, no direct con-
sciousness of enjoyment or the reverse from
the quality of what is before him : his per-

252 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

ceptions are continually arranging themselves
in forms suitable to a printed judgment,
and hence they will often turn out to be
as much to the purpose if they are written
without any direct contemplation of the ob-
ject, and are guided by a few external con-
ditions which serve to classify it for him.
In this way he is irrevocably losing the
faculty of accurate mental vision: having
bound himself to express judgments which
will satisfy some other demands than that
of veracity, he has blunted his perceptions
by continual preoccupation. We cannot
command veracity at will : the power of
seeing and reporting truly is a form of
health that has to be delicately guarded,
and as an ancient Rabbi has solemnly said,
" The penalty of untruth is untruth." But
Pepin is only a mild example of the fact
that incessant writing with a view to printing
carries internal consequences which have often
the nature of disease. And however unprac-
tical it may be held to consider whether we
have anything to print which it is good for
the world to read, or which has not been
better said before, it will perhaps be allowed

THE TOO READY WRITER. 253

to be worth considering what effect the print-
ing may have on ourselves. Clearly there is a
sort of writing which helps to keep the writer
in a ridiculously contented ignorance; raising in
him continually the sense of having delivered
himself effectively, so that the acquirement of
more thorough knowledge seems as superflu-
ous as the purchase of costume for a past occa-
sion. He has invested his vanity (perhaps his
hope of income) in his own shallownesses and
mistakes, and must desire their prosperity.
Like the professional prophet, he learns to be
glad of the harm that keeps up his credit, and
to be sorry for the good that contradicts him.
It is hard enough for any of us, amid the
changing winds of fortune and the hurly-
burly of events, to keep quite clear of a glad-
ness which is another's calamity ; but one
may choose not to enter on a course which
will turn such gladness into a fixed habit
of mind, committing ourselves to be continu-
ally pleased that others should appear to be
wrong in order that we may have the air of
being right.

In some cases, perhaps, it might be urged
that Pepin has remained the more self-con-

254 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

tented because he has not written everything
he believed himself capable of. He once
asked me to read a sort of programme of
the species of romance which he should
think it worth while to write — a species which
he contrasted in strong terms with the pro-
ductions of illustrious but overrated authors
in this branch. Pepin's romance was to pre-
sent the splendours of the Roman Empire
at the culmination of its grandeur, when de-
cadence was spiritually but not visibly immi-
nent : it was to show the workings of human
passion in the most pregnant and exalted of
human circumstances, the designs of states-
men, the interfusion of philosophies, the
rural relaxation and converse of immortal
poets, the majestic triumphs of warriors, the
mingling of the quaint and sublime in religious
ceremony, the gorgeous delirium of gladia-
torial shows, and under all the secretly work-
ing leaven of Christianity. Such a romance
would not call the attention of society to the
dialect of stable-boys, the low habits of rustics,
the vulgarity of small schoolmasters, the man-
ners of men in livery, or to any other form of
uneducated talk and sentiments : its charac-

THE TOO READY WRITER. 255

ters would have virtues and vices alike on
the grand scale, and would express them-
selves in an English representing the dis-
course of the most powerful minds in the
best Latin, or possibly Greek, when there
occurred a scene with a Greek philosopher
on a visit to Rome or resident there as a
teacher. In this way Pepin would do in
fiction what had never been done before :
something not at all like 'Rienzi' or 'Notre
Dame de Paris/ or any other attempt of
that kind ; but something at once more pene-
trating and more magnificent, more passion-
ate and more philosophical, more panoramic
yet more select : something that would pre-
sent a conception of a gigantic period ; in
short, something truly Roman and world-
historical.

When Pepin gave me this' programme to
read he was much younger than at present.
Some slight success in another vein diverted
him from the production of panoramic and
select romance, and the experience of not
having tried to carry out his programme
has naturally made him more biting and
sarcastic on the failures of those who have

256 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

actually written romances without apparently
having had a glimpse of a conception equal to
his. Indeed, I am often comparing his rather
touchingly inflated naivetd, as of a small young
person walking on tiptoe while he is talking
of elevated things, at the time when he felt
himself the author of that unwritten romance,
with his present epigrammatic curtness and
affectation of power kept strictly in reserve.
His paragraphs now seem to have a bitter
smile in them, from the consciousness of a
mind too penetrating to accept any other man's
ideas, and too equally competent in all direc-
tions to seclude his power in any one form
of creation, but rather fitted to hang over
them all as a lamp of guidance to the stum-
blers below. You perceive how proud he is
of not being indebted to any writer : even
with the dead he is on the creditors side,
for he is doing them the service of letting
the world know what they meant better than
those poor pre-Pepinians themselves had any
means of doing, and he treats the mighty
shades very cavalierly.

Is this fellow - citizen of ours, considered
simply in the light of a baptised Christian and

THE TOO READY WRITER. 257

tax-paying Englishman, really as madly con-
ceited, as empty of reverential feeling, as un-
veracious and careless of justice, as full of
catch -penny devices and stagey attitudinising
as on examination his writing shows itself to
be ? By no means. He has arrived at his
present pass in " the literary calling " through
the self-imposed obligation to give himself a
manner which would convey the impression of
superior knowledge and ability. He is much
worthier and more admirable than his written
productions, because the moral aspects ex-
hibited in his writing are felt to be ridiculous
or disgraceful in the personal relations of life.
In blaming Pepin's writing we are accusing
the public conscience, which is so lax and ill
informed on the momentous bearings of au-
thorship that it sanctions the total absence
of scruple in undertaking and prosecuting
what should be the best warranted of voca-
tions.

Hence I still accept friendly relations with
Pepin, for he has much private amiability, and
though he probably thinks of me as a man of
slender talents, without rapidity of coup d'ceil
and with no compensatory penetration, he

R

258 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

meets me very cordially, and would not, I am
sure, willingly pain me in conversation by
crudely declaring his low estimate of my capa-
city. Yet I have often known him to insult my
betters and contribute (perhaps unreflectingly)
to encourage injurious conceptions of them —
but that was done in the course of his pro-
fessional writing, and the public conscience still
leaves such writing nearly on the level of the
Merry- Andrew's dress, which permits an im-
pudent deportment and extraordinary gambols
to one who in his ordinary clothing shows
himself the decent father of a family.

XV.

DISEASES OF SMALL
AUTHORSHIP

XV.

DISEASES OF SMALL AUTHORSHIP.

Particular callings, it is known, encourage
particular diseases. There is a painter's
colic : the Sheffield grinder falls a victim to
the inhalation of steel dust : clergymen so
often have a certain kind of sore throat that
this otherwise secular ailment gets named
after them. And perhaps, if we were to in-
quire, we should find a similar relation between
certain moral ailments and these various oc-
cupations, though here in the case of clergy-
men there would be specific differences : the
poor curate, equally with the rector, is liable
to clergyman's sore throat, but he would pro-
bably be found free from the chronic moral
ailments encouraged by the possession of
glebe and those higher chances of preferment

262 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

which follow on having a good position
already. On the other hand, the poor curate
might have severe attacks of calculating
expectancy concerning parishioners' turkeys,
cheeses, and fat geese, or of uneasy rivalry
for the donations of clerical charities.

Authors are so miscellaneous a class that
their personified diseases, physical and moral,
might include the whole procession of human
disorders, led by dyspepsia and ending in
madness — the awful Dumb Show of a world-
historic tragedy. Take a large enough area
of human life and all comedy melts into
tragedy, like the Fool's part by the side of
Lear. The chief scenes get filled with err-
ing heroes, guileful usurpers, persecuted dis-
coverers, dying deliverers : everywhere the
protagonist has a part pregnant with doom.
The comedy sinks to an accessory, and if there
are loud laughs they seem a convulsive transi-
tion from sobs ; or if the comedy is touched
with a gentle lovingness, the panoramic scene
is one where

" Sadness is a kind of mirth
So mingled as if mirth did make us sad
And sadness merry."1

1 Two Noble Kinsmen.

SMALL AUTHORSHIP. 26$

But I did not set out on the wide survey
that would carry me into tragedy, and in fact
had nothing more serious in my mind than
certain small chronic ailments that come of
small authorship. I was thinking principally
of Vorticella, who flourished in my youth not
only as a portly lady walking in silk attire,
but also as the authoress of a book entitled
* The Channel Islands, with Notes and an
Appendix.' I would by no means make it a
reproach to her that she wrote no more than
one book ; on the contrary, her stopping there
seems to me a laudable example. What one
would have wished, after experience, was that
she had refrained from producing even that
single volume, and thus from giving her self-
importance a troublesome kind of double in-
corporation which became oppressive to her
acquaintances, and set up in herself one
of those slight chronic forms of disease to
which I have just referred. She lived in the
considerable provincial town of Pumpiter,
which had its own newspaper press, with the
usual divisions of political partisanship and the
usual varieties of literary criticism — the florid
and allusive, the staccato and peremptory, the

264 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

clairvoyant and prophetic, the safe and pat-
tern-phrased, or what one might call "the
many-a-long-day style."

Vorticella being the wife of an important
townsman had naturally the satisfaction of
seeing 'The Channel Islands' reviewed by
all the organs of Pumpiter opinion, and their
articles or paragraphs held as naturally the
opening pages in the elegantly bound album
prepared by her for the reception of " critical
opinions." This ornamental volume lay on a
special table in her drawing-room close to the
still more gorgeously bound work of which it
was the significant effect, and every guest was
allowed the privilege of reading what had
been said of the authoress and her work in the
' Pumpiter Gazette and Literary Watchman,'
the ■ Pumpshire Post/ the ' Church Clock/ the
' Independent Monitor,' and the lively but judi-
cious publication known as the ' Medley Pie;'
to be followed up, if he chose, by the instruc-
tive perusal of the strikingly confirmatory
judgments, sometimes concurrent in the very
phrases, of journals from the most distant
counties ; as the ' Latchgate Argus/ the Pen-
llwy Universe/ the ' Cockaleekie Advertiser,'

SMALL AUTHORSHIP. 265

the ' Goodwin Sands Opinion,' and the ' Land's
End Times.'

I had friends in Pumpiter and occasionally
paid a long visit there. When I called on
Vorticella, who had a cousinship with my
hosts, she had to excuse herself because a
message claimed her attention for eight or
ten minutes, and handing me the album of
critical opinions said, with a certain emphasis
which, considering my youth, was highly com-
plimentary, that she would really like me to
read what I should find there. This seemed
a permissive politeness which I could not feel
to be an oppression, and I ran my eyes over
the dozen pages, each with a strip or islet of
newspaper in the centre, with that freedom
of mind (in my case meaning freedom to
forget) which would be a perilous way of
preparing for examination. This ad libitum
perusal had its interest for me. The private
truth being that I had not read ' The Chan-
nel Islands,' I was amazed at the variety
of matter which the volume must contain to
have impressed these different judges with the
writer's surpassing capacity to handle almost
all branches of inquiry and all forms of pres-

266 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

entation. In Jersey she had shown herself
an historian, in Guernsey a poetess, in Al-
derney a political economist, and in Sark a
humorist : there were sketches of character
scattered through the pages which might put
our " fictionists " to the blush ; the style was
eloquent and racy, studded with gems of feli-
citous remark ; and the moral spirit through-
out was so superior that, said one, " the re-
cording angel " (who is not supposed to take
account of literature as such) " would assuredly
set down the work as a deed of religion." The
force of this eulogy on the part of several
reviewers was much heightened by the inci-
dental evidence of their fastidious and severe
taste, which seemed to suffer considerably from
the imperfections of our chief writers, even the
dead and canonised : one afflicted them with
the smell of oil, another lacked erudition and
attempted (though vainly) to dazzle them with
trivial conceits, one wanted to be more phil-
osophical than nature had made him, another
in attempting to be comic produced the melan-
choly effect of a half-starved Merry-Andrew ;
while one and all, from the author of the ' Are-
opagitica' downwards, had faults of style which

SMALL AUTHORSHIP. 267

must have made an able hand in the ' Latch-
gate Argus ' shake the many-glanced head be-
longing thereto with a smile of compassionate
disapproval. Not so the authoress of 'The
Channel Islands : ' Vorticella and Shakspere
were allowed to be faultless. I gathered that no
blemishes were observable in the work of this
accomplished writer, and the repeated informa-
tion that she was " second to none" seemed after
this superfluous. Her thick octavo — notes, ap-
pendix and all — was unflagging from beginning
to end ; and the ' Land's End Times/ using a
rather dangerous rhetorical figure, recommended
you not to take up the volume unless you had
leisure to finish it at a sitting. It had given one
writer more pleasure than he had had for many
a long day — a sentence which had a melancholy
resonance, suggesting a life of studious languor
such as all previous achievements of the human
mind failed to stimulate into enjoyment. I
think the collection of critical opinions wound
up with this sentence, and I had turned back to
look at the lithographed sketch of the author-
ess which fronted the first page of the album,
when the fair original re-entered and I laid
down the volume on its appropriate table.

268 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

" Well, what do you think of them ? " said
Vorticella, with an emphasis which had some
significance unperceived by me. " I know you
are a great student. Give me your opinion of
these opinions."

" They must be very gratifying to you," I
answered with a little confusion, for I per-
ceived that I might easily mistake my footing,
and I began to have a presentiment of an
examination for which I was by no means
crammed.

" On the whole — yes," said Vorticella, in a
tone of concession. " A few of the notices are
written with some pains, but not one of them
has really grappled with the chief idea in the
appendix. I don't know whether you have
studied political economy, but you saw what I
said on page 398 about the Jersey fisheries ?"

I bowed — I confess it — with the mean hope
that this movement in the nape of my neck
would be taken as sufficient proof that I had
read, marked, and learned. I do not forgive
myself for this pantomimic falsehood, but I
was young and morally timorous, and Vorti-
cella's personality had an effect on me some-
thing like that of a powerful mesmeriser when

SMALL AUTHORSHIP. 269

he directs all his ten fingers towards your
eyes, as unpleasantly visible ducts for the
invisible stream. I felt a great power of
contempt in her, if I did not come up to her
expectations.

" Well," she resumed, " you observe that
not one of them has taken up that argument.
But I hope I convinced you about the drag-
nets ? "

Here was a judgment on me. Orientally
speaking, I had lifted up my foot on the
steep descent of falsity and was compelled
to set it down on a lower level. " I should
think you must be right," said I, inwardly
resolving that on the next topic I would tell
the truth.

" I know that I am right," said Vorticella.
" The fact is that no critic in this town is
fit to meddle with such subjects, unless it
be Volvox, and he, with all his command of
language, is very superficial. It is Volvox
who writes in the ' Monitor/ I hope you
noticed how he contradicts himself ? "

My resolution, helped by the equivalence
of dangers, stoutly prevailed, and I said,
"No."

270 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

" No ! I am surprised. He is the only one
who finds fault with me. He is a Dissenter,
you know. The ' Monitor ' is the Dissenters'
organ, but my husband has been so useful
to them in municipal affairs that they would
not venture to run my book down ; they feel
obliged to tell the truth about me. Still
Volvox betrays himself. After praising me
for my penetration and accuracy, he presently
says I have allowed myself to be imposed
upon and have let my active imagination run
away with me. That is like his dissenting im-
pertinence. Active my imagination may be,
but I have it under control. Little Vibrio,
who writes the playful notice in the * Medley
Pie/ has a clever hit at Volvox in that passage
about the steeplechase of imagination, where
the loser wants to make it appear that the
winner was only run away with. But if you did
not notice Volvox's self-contradiction you would
not see the point," added Vorticella, with rather
a chilling intonation. " Or perhaps you did not
read the ' Medley Pie ' notice ? That is a pity.
Do take up the book again. Vibrio is a poor
little tippling creature, but, as Mr Carlyle would
say, he has an eye, and he is always lively."

SMALL AUTHORSHIP. 2J\

I did take up the book again, and read as
demanded.

" It is very ingenious," said I, really ap-
preciating the difficulty of being lively in this
connection: it seemed even more wonderful
than that a Vibrio should have an eye.

" You are probably surprised to see no
notices from the London press," said Vorti-
cella. " I have one — a very remarkable one.
But I reserve it until the others have spoken,
and then I shall introduce it to wind up. I
shall have them reprinted, of course, and
inserted in future copies. This from the
* Candelabrum ' is only eight lines in length,
but full of venom. It calls my style dull
and pompous. I think that will tell its own
tale, placed after the other critiques."

" People's impressions are so different," said
I. " Some persons find ' Don Quixote' dull."

" Yes," said Vorticella, in emphatic chest
tones, " dulness is a matter of opinion ; but
pompous ! That I never was and never could
be. Perhaps he means that my matter is too
important for his taste ; and I have no objec-
tion to that. I did not intend to be trivial.
I should just like to read you that passage

272 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

about the drag-nets, because I could make it
clearer to you."

A second (less ornamental) copy was at her
elbow and was already opened, when to my
great relief another guest was announced, and
I was able to take my leave without seeming
to run away from ' The Channel Islands,'
though not without being compelled to carry
with me the loan of " the marked copy," which
I was to find advantageous in a re-perusal of
the appendix, and was only requested to return
before my departure from Pumpiter. Looking
into the volume now with some curiosity, I
found it a very ordinary combination of the
commonplace and ambitious, one of those
books which one might imagine to have been
written under the old Grub Street coercion of
hunger and thirst, if they were not known
beforehand to be the gratuitous productions
of ladies and gentlemen whose circumstances
might be called altogether easy, but for an
uneasy vanity that happened to have been
directed towards authorship. Its importance
was that of a polypus, tumour, fungus, or other
erratic outgrowth, noxious and disfiguring in
its effect on the individual organism which

SMALL AUTHORSHIP. 273

nourishes it. Poor Vorticella might not have
been more wearisome on a visit than the ma-
jority of her neighbours, but for this disease
of magnified self-importance belonging to small
authorship. I understand that the chronic
complaint of ' The Channel Islands' never
left her. As the years went on and the pub-
lication tended to vanish in the distance for
her neighbours' memory, she was still bent on
dragging it to the foreground, and her chief
interest in new acquaintances was the possi-
bility of lending them her book, entering into
all details concerning it, and requesting them
to read her album of " critical opinions."
This really made her more tiresome than
Gregarina, whose distinction was that she had
had cholera, and who did not feel herself in
her true position with strangers until they
knew it.

My experience with Vorticella led me for
a time into the false supposition that this
sort of fungous disfiguration, which makes Self
disagreeably larger, was most common to the
female sex ; but I presently found that here
too the male could assert his superiority and
show a more vigorous boredom. I have

S

274 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

known a man with a single pamphlet con-
taining an assurance that somebody else was
wrong, together with a few approved quo-
tations, produce a more powerful effect of
shuddering at his approach than ever Vorti-
cella did with her varied octavo volume, in-
cluding notes and appendix. Males of more
than one nation recur to my memory who pro-
duced from their pocket on the slightest en-
couragement a small pink or buff duodecimo
pamphlet, wrapped in silver paper, as a pre-
sent held ready for an intelligent reader.
" A mode of propagandising you remark in
excuse ; " they wished to spread some useful
corrective doctrine." Not necessarily : the
indoctrination aimed at was perhaps to con-
vince you of their own talents by the sample
of an " Ode on Shakspere's Birthday," or a
translation from Horace.

Vorticella may pair off with Monas, who had
also written his one book — ' Here and There ;
or, a Trip from Truro to Transylvania ' — and
not only carried it in his portmanteau when
he went on visits, but took the earliest oppor-
tunity of depositing it in the drawing-room,
and afterwards would enter to look for it, as if

SMALL AUTHORSHIP. 275

under pressure of a need for reference, beg-
ging the lady of the house to tell him whether
she had seen " a small volume bound in red."
One hostess at last ordered it to be carried
into his bedroom to save his time ; but it
presently reappeared in his hands, and was
again left with inserted slips of paper on the
drawing-room table.

Depend upon it, vanity is human, native
alike to men and women ; only in the male
it is of denser texture, less volatile, so that it
less immediately informs you of its presence,
but is more massive and capable of knocking
you down if you come into collision with it ;
while in women vanity lays by its small re-
venges as in a needle-case always at hand.
The difference is in muscle and finger-tips,
in traditional habits and mental perspective,
rather than in the original appetite of vanity.
It is an approved method now to explain our-
selves by a reference to the races as little like
us as possible, which leads me to observe that
in Fiji the men use the most elaborate hair-
dressing, and that wherever tattooing is in
vogue the male expects to carry off the prize
of admiration for pattern and workmanship.

276 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

Arguing analogically, and looking for this
tendency of the Fijian or Hawaian male in the
eminent European, we must suppose that it ex-
hibits itself under the forms of civilised apparel;
and it would be a great mistake to estimate
passionate effort by the effect it produces on
our perception or understanding. It is con-
ceivable that a man may have concentrated no
less will and expectation on his wristbands,
gaiters, and the shape of his hat-brim, or an
appearance which impresses you as that of the
modern "swell/' than the Ojibbeway on an
ornamentation which seems to us much more
elaborate. In what concerns the search for
admiration at least, it is not true that the effect
is equal to the cause and resembles it. The
cause of a flat curl on the masculine forehead,
such as might be seen when George the
Fourth was king, must have been widely dif-
ferent in quality and intensity from the impres-
sion made by that small scroll of hair on the
organ of the beholder. Merely to maintain
an attitude and gait which I notice in certain
club men, and especially an inflation of the
chest accompanying very small remarks, there
goes, I am convinced, an expenditure of psy-

SMALL AUTHORSHIP. 277

chical energy little appreciated by the multi-
tude— a mental vision of Self and deeply im-
pressed beholders which is quite without anti-
type in what we call the effect produced by
that hidden process.

No ! there is no need to admit that women
would carry away the prize of vanity in a
competition where differences of custom were
fairly considered. A man cannot show his
vanity in a tight skirt which forces him to
walk sideways down the staircase ; but let
the match be between the respective vanities
of largest beard and tightest skirt, and here
too the battle would be to the strong.

XVI.

MORAL SWINDLERS

XVI.
MORAL SWINDLERS.

It is a familiar example of irony in the de-
gradation of words that " what a man is
worth " has come to mean how much money
he possesses ; but there seems a deeper and
more melancholy irony in the shrunken mean-
ing that popular or polite speech assigns to
"morality" and "morals." The poor part
these words are made to play recalls the
fate of those pagan divinities who, after being
understood to rule the powers of the air and
the destinies of men, came down to the level
of insignificant demons, or were even made a
farcical show for the amusement of the mul-
titude.

Talking to Melissa in a time of commercial
trouble, I found her disposed to speak patheti-

282 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

cally of the disgrace which had fallen on Sir
Gavial Mantrap, because of his conduct in
relation to the Eocene Mines, and to other
companies ingeniously devised by him for the
punishment of ignorance in people of small
means : a disgrace by which the poor titled
gentleman was actually reduced to live in
comparative obscurity on his wife's settlement
of one or two hundred thousand in the consols.
" Surely your pity is misapplied," said I,
rather dubiously, for I like the comfort of
trusting that a correct moral judgment is the
strong point in woman (seeing that she has a
majority of about a million in our islands), and
I imagined that Melissa might have some un-
expressed grounds for her opinion. " I should
have thought you would rather be sorry for
Mantrap's victims — the widows, spinsters, and
hard-working fathers whom his unscrupulous
haste to make himself rich has cheated of all
their savings, while he is eating well, lying
softly, a^nd after impudently justifying himself
before the public, is perhaps joining in the
General Confession with a sense that he is an
acceptable object in the sight of God, though
decent men refuse to meet him."

MORAL SWINDLERS. 283

" Oh, all that about the Companies, I know,
was most unfortunate. In commerce people
are led to do so many things, and he might
not know exactly how everything would turn
out. But Sir Gavial made a good use of his
money, and he is a thoroughly moral man."

" What do you mean by a thoroughly moral
man ?" said I.

" Oh, I suppose every one means the same
by that," said Melissa, with a slight air of
rebuke. " Sir Gavial is an excellent family
man — quite blameless there ; and so charitable
round his place at Tiptop. Very different
from Mr Barabbas, whose life, my husband
tells me, is most objectionable, with actresses
and that sort of thing. I think a man's morals
should make a difference to us. I'm not sorry
for Mr Barabbas, but / am sorry for Sir
Gavial Mantrap."

I will not repeat my answer to Melissa, for
I fear it was offensively brusque, my opinion
being that Sir Gavial was the more pernicious
scoundrel of the two, since his name for virtue
served as an effective part of a swindling
apparatus ; and perhaps I hinted that to call
such a man moral showed rather a silly notion

284 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

of human affairs. In fact, I had an angry wish
to be instructive, and Melissa, as will some-
times happen, noticed my anger without appro-
priating my instruction, for I have since heard
that she speaks of me as rather violent-
tempered, and not over strict in my views of
morality.

I wish that this narrow use of words which
are wanted in their full meaning were confined
to women like Melissa. Seeing that Morality
and Morals under their alias of Ethics are the
subject of voluminous discussion, and their
true basis a pressing matter of dispute — seeing
that the most famous book ever written on
Ethics, and forming a chief study in our col-
leges, allies ethical with political science or that
which treats of the constitution and prosperity
of States, one might expect that educated men
would find reason to avoid a perversion of
language which lends itself to no wider view
of life than that of village gossips. Yet I find
even respectable historians of our own and of
foreign countries, after showing that a king
was treacherous, rapacious, and ready to sanc-
tion gross breaches in the administration of
justice, end by praising him for his pure moral

MORAL SWINDLERS. 285

character, by which one must suppose them
to mean that he was not lewd nor debauched,
not the European twin of the typical Indian
potentate whom Macaulay describes as pass-
ing his life in chewing bang and fondling
dancing-girls. And since we are sometimes
told of such maleficent kings that they were
religious, we arrive at the curious result that
the most serious wide-reaching duties of man
lie quite outside both Morality and Religion
— the one of these consisting in not keep-
ing mistresses (and perhaps not drinking too
much), and the other in certain ritual and
spiritual transactions with God which can be
carried on equally well side by side with the
basest conduct towards men. With such a
classification as this it is no wonder, consider-
ing the strong reaction of language on thought,
that many minds, dizzy with indigestion of
recent science and philosophy, are far to seek
for the grounds of social duty, and without
entertaining any private intention of commit-
ting a perjury which would ruin an innocent
man, or seeking gain by supplying bad pre-
served meats to our navy, feel themselves
speculatively obliged to inquire why they

286 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

should not do so, and are inclined to measure
their intellectual subtlety by their dissatisfac-
tion with all answers to this " Why ? " It is
of little use to theorise in ethics while our
habitual phraseology stamps the larger part
of our social duties as something that lies aloof
from the deepest needs and affections of our
nature. The informal definitions of popular
language are the only medium through which
theory really affects the mass of minds even
among the nominally educated ; and when a
man whose business hours, the solid part of
every day, are spent in an unscrupulous course
of public or private action which has every
calculable chance of causing widespread injury
and misery, can be called moral because he
comes home to dine with his wife and children
and cherishes the happiness of his own hearth,
the augury is not good for the use of high
ethical and theological disputation.

Not for one moment would one willingly
lose sight of the truth that the relation of
the sexes and the primary ties of kinship are
the deepest roots of human wellbeing, but to
make them by themselves the equivalent of
morality is verbally to cut off the channels

MORAL SWINDLERS. 287

of feeling through which they are the feeders
of that wellbeing. They are the original foun-
tains of a sensibility to the claims of others,
which is the bond of societies ; but being
necessarily in the first instance a private good,
there is always the danger that individual
selfishness will see in them only the best part
of its own gain ; just as knowledge, naviga-
tion, commerce, and all the conditions which
are of a nature to awaken men's consciousness
of their mutual dependence and to make the
world one great society, are the occasions of
selfish, unfair action, of war and oppression, so
long as the public conscience or chief force of
feeling and opinion is not uniform and strong
enough in its insistance on what is demanded
by the general welfare. And among the in-
fluences that must retard a right public judg-
ment, the degradation of words which involve
praise and blame will be reckoned worth pro-
testing against by every mature observer. To
rob words of half their meaning, while they
retain their dignity as qualifications, is like
allowing to men who have lost half their
faculties the same high and perilous command
which they won in their time of vigour ; or

288 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

like selling food and seeds after fraudulently
abstracting their best virtues : in each case
what ought to be beneficently strong is fatally
enfeebled, if not empoisoned. Until we have
altered our dictionaries and have found some
other word than morality to stand in popular
use for the duties of man to man, let us refuse
to accept as moral the contractor who enriches
himself by using large machinery to make
pasteboard soles pass as leather for the feet
of unhappy conscripts fighting at miserable'
odds against invaders : let us rather call him a
miscreant, though he were the tenderest, most
faithful of husbands, and contend that his own
experience of home happiness makes his reck-
less infliction of suffering on others all the
more atrocious. Let us refuse to accept as
moral any political leader who should allow
his conduct in relation to great issues to be
determined by egoistic passion, and boldly say
that he would be less immoral even though he
were as lax in his personal habits as Sir Robert
Walpole, if at the same time his sense of the
public welfare were supreme in his mind,
quelling all pettier impulses beneath a mag-
nanimous impartiality. And though we were

MORAL SWINDLERS. 289

to find among that class of journalists who
live by recklessly reporting injurious rumours,
insinuating the blackest motives in opponents,
descanting at large and with an air of infalli-
bility on dreams which they both find and
interpret, and stimulating bad feeling between
nations by abusive writing which is as empty
of real conviction as the rage of a pantomime
king, and would be ludicrous if its effects did
not make it appear diabolical — though we were
to find among these a man who was benignancy
itself in his own circle, a healer of private dif-
ferences, a soother in private calamities, let
us pronounce him nevertheless flagrantly im-
moral, a root of hideous cancer in the common-
wealth, turning the channels of instruction into
feeders of social and political disease.

In opposite ways one sees bad effects likely
to be encouraged by this narrow use of the
word morals, shutting out from its meaning
half those actions of a mans life which tell
momentously on the wellbeing of his fellow-
citizens, and on the preparation of a future
for the children growing up around him.
Thoroughness of workmanship, care in the
execution of every task undertaken, as if it

T

290 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

were the acceptance of a trust which it would
be a breach of faith not to discharge well, is
a form of duty so momentous that if it were
to die out from the feeling and practice of
a people, all reforms of institutions would be
helpless to create national prosperity and na-
tional happiness. Do we desire to see pub-
lic spirit penetrating all classes of the com-
munity and affecting every man's conduct, so
that he shall make neither the saving of his
soul nor any other private saving an excuse
for indifference to the general welfare ? Well
and good. But the sort of public spirit that
scamps its bread-winning work, whether with
the trowel, the pen, or the overseeing brain,
that it may hurry to scenes of political or social
agitation, would be as baleful a gift to our
people as any malignant demon could devise.
One best part of educational training is that
which comes through special knowledge and
manipulative or other skill, with its usual
accompaniment of delight, in relation to work
which is the daily bread-winning occupation—
which is a man's contribution to the effective
wealth of society in return for what he takes
as his own share. But this duty of doing

MORAL SWINDLERS. 291

one's proper work well, and taking care that
every product of one's labour shall be gen-
uinely what it pretends to be, is not only left
out of morals in popular speech, it is very little
insisted on by public teachers, at least in the
only effective way — by tracing the continuous
effects of ill-done work. Some of them seem
to be still hopeful that it will follow as a
necessary consequence from week-day services,
ecclesiastical decoration, and improved hymn-
books ; others apparently trust to descanting
on self -culture in general, or to raising a
general sense of faulty circumstances ; and
meanwhile lax, make-shift work, from the high
conspicuous kind to the average and obscure,
is allowed to pass unstamped with the disgrace
of immorality, though there is not a member
of society who is not daily suffering from it
materially and spiritually, and though it is the
fatal cause that must degrade our national
rank and our commerce in spite of all open
markets and discovery of available coal-seams.
I suppose one may take the popular misuse
of the words Morality and Morals as some
excuse for certain absurdities which are occa-
sional fashions in speech and writing — certain

292 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

old lay-figures, as ugly as the queerest Asiatic
idol, which at different periods get propped
into loftiness, and attired in magnificent Vene-
tian drapery, so that whether they have a
human face or not is of little consequence.
One is, the notion that there is a radical,
irreconcilable opposition between intellect
and morality. I do not mean the simple
statement of fact, which everybody knows,
that remarkably able men have had very
faulty morals, and have outraged public feel-
ing even at its ordinary standard ; but the
supposition that the ablest intellect, the high-
est genius, will see through morality as a sort
of twaddle for bibs and tuckers, a doctrine of
dulness, a mere incident in human stupidity.
We begin to understand the acceptance of
this foolishness by considering that we live in
a society where we may hear a treacherous
monarch, or a malignant and lying politician,
or a man who uses either official or literary
power as an instrument of his private partial-
ity or hatred, or a manufacturer who devises
the falsification of wares, or a trader who deals
in virtueless seed -grains, praised or compas-
sionated because of his excellent morals.

MORAL SWINDLERS. 293

Clearly if morality meant no more than such
decencies as are practised by these poisonous
members of society, it would be possible to
say, without suspicion of lightheadedness, that
morality lay aloof from the grand stream of
human affairs, as a small channel fed by the
stream and not missed from it. While this
form of nonsense is conveyed in the pop-
ular use of words, there must be plenty of well-
dressed ignorance at leisure to run through a
box of books, which will feel itself initiated in
the freemasonry of intellect by a view of life
which might take for a Shaksperian motto —

11 Fair is foul and foul is fair,
Hover through the fog and filthy air" —

and will find itself easily provided with strik-
ing conversation by the rule of reversing all
the judgments on good and evil which have
come to be the calendar and clock-work of
society. But let our habitual talk give morals
their full meaning as the conduct which, in
every human relation, would follow from the
fullest knowledge and the fullest sympathy —
a meaning perpetually corrected and enriched
by a more thorough appreciation of depend-

294 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

ence in things, and a finer sensibility to both
physical and spiritual fact — and this ridiculous
ascription of superlative power to minds which
have no effective awe-inspiring vision of the
human lot, no response of understanding to
the connection between duty and the material
processes by which the world is kept habitable
for cultivated man, will be tacitly discredited
without any need to cite the immortal names
that all are obliged to take as the measure of
intellectual rank and highly-charged genius.

Suppose a Frenchman — I mean no dis-
respect to the great French nation, for all
nations are afflicted with their peculiar par-
asitic growths, which are lazy, hungry forms,
usually characterised by a disproportionate
swallowing apparatus : suppose a Parisian who
should shuffle down the Boulevard with a
soul ignorant of the gravest cares and the
deepest tenderness of manhood, and a frame
more or less fevered by debauchery, mentally
polishing into utmost refinement of phrase and
rhythm verses which were an enlargement
on that Shaksperian motto, and worthy of
the most expensive title to be furnished by
the vendors of such antithetic ware as Les

MORAL SWINDLERS. 295

marguerites de F Enfer, or Les ddlices de Bdel-
zibuth. This supposed personage might pro-
bably enough regard his negation of those
moral sensibilities which make half the warp
and woof of human history, his indifference to
the hard thinking and hard handiwork of life, to
which he owed even his own gauzy mental gar-
ments with their spangles of poor paradox, as
the royalty of genius, for we are used to wit-
ness such self-crowning in many forms of mental
alienation; but he would not, I think, be taken,
even by his own generation, as a living proof
that there can exist such a combination as that
of moral stupidity and trivial emphasis of per-
sonal indulgence with the large yet finely
discriminating vision which marks the intel-
lectual masters of our kind. Doubtless there
are many sorts of transfiguration, and a man
who has come to be worthy of all gratitude
and reverence may have had his swinish
period, wallowing in ugly places ; but suppose
it had been handed down to us that Sophocles
or Virgil had at one time made himself scan-
dalous in this way : the works which have
consecrated their memory for our admiration
and gratitude are not a glorifying of swinish-

296 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

ness, but an artistic incorporation of the highest
sentiment known to their a^e.

All these may seem to be wide reasons
for objecting to Melissa's pity for Sir Gavial
Mantrap on the ground of his good morals ;
but their connection will not be obscure to any
one who has taken pains to observe t£ie links
uniting the scattered signs of our social de-
velopment.

XVII.

SHADOWS OF THE COMING
RACE

XVII.
SHADOWS OF THE COMING RACE.

My friend Trost, who is no optimist as to the
state of the universe hitherto, but is confident
that at some future period within the duration
of the solar system, ours will be the best of all
possible worlds — a hope which I always honour
as a sign of beneficent qualities — my friend
Trost always tries to keep up my spirits under
the sight of the extremely unpleasant and dis-
figuring work by which many of our fellow-
creatures have to get their bread, with the
assurance that " all this will soon be done by
machinery." But he sometimes neutralises the
consolation by extending it over so large an area
of human labour, and insisting so impressively
on the quantity of energy which will thus be
set free for loftier purposes, that I am tempted

300 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

to desire an occasional famine of invention in
the coming ages, lest the humbler kinds of
work should be entirely nullified while there
are still left some men and women who are not
fit for the highest.

Especially, when one considers the perfunc-
tory way in which some of the most exalted
tasks are already executed by those who are
understood to be educated for them, there
rises a fearful vision of the human race evolv-
ing machinery which will by -and -by throw
itself fatally out of work. When, in the
Bank of England, I see a wondrously delicate
machine for testing sovereigns, a shrewd impla-
cable little steel Rhadamanthus that, once the
coins are delivered up to it, lifts and balances
each in turn for the fraction of an instant, finds
it wanting or sufficient, and dismisses it to right
or left with rigorous justice ; when I am told
of micrometers and thermopiles and tasime-
ters which deal physically with the invisible,
the impalpable, and the unimaginable ; of cun-
ning wires and wheels and pointing needles
which will register your and my quickness so as
to exclude flattering opinion ; of a machine for
drawing the right conclusion, which will doubt-

SHADOWS OF THE COMING RACE. 301

less by-and-by be improved into an automa-
ton for finding true premises ; of a microphone
which detects the cadence of the fly's foot on
the ceiling, and may be expected presently to
discriminate the noises of our various follies as
they soliloquise or converse in our brains — my
mind seeming too small for these things, I
get a little out of it, like an unfortunate savage
too suddenly brought face to face with civilisa-
tion, and I exclaim —

" Am I already in the shadow of the Com-
ing Race ? and will the creatures who are to
transcend and finally supersede us be steely
organisms, giving out the effluvia of the labor-
atory, and performing with infallible exactness
more than everything that we have performed
with a slovenly approximativeness and self-
defeating inaccuracy ? "

" But," says Trost, treating me with cautious
mildness on hearing me vent this raving notion,
" you forget that these wonder-workers are the
slaves of our race, need our tendance and regu-
lation, obey the mandates of our consciousness,
and are only deaf and dumb bringers of re-
ports which we decipher and make use of.
They are simply extensions of the human

302 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

organism, so to speak, limbs immeasurably-
more powerful, ever more subtle finger-tips,
ever more mastery over the invisibly great
and the invisibly small. Each new machine
needs a new appliance of human skill to con-
struct it, new devices to feed it with material,
and often keener-edged faculties to note its
registrations or performances. How then can
machines supersede us ? — they depend upon
us. When we cease, they cease."

" I am not so sure of that," said I, getting
back into my mind, and becoming rather wilful
in consequence. " If, as I have heard you
contend, machines as they are more and more
perfected will require less and less of tendance,
how do I know that they may not be ultimately
made to carry, or may not in themselves evolve,
conditions of self-supply, self-repair, and repro-
duction, and not only do all the mighty and
subtle work possible on this planet better than
we could do it, but with the immense advan-
tage of banishing from the earth's atmosphere
screaming consciousnesses which, in our com-
paratively clumsy race, make an intolerable
noise and fuss to each other about every
petty ant-like performance, looking on at all

SHADOWS OF THE COMING RACE. 303

work only as it were to spring a rattle here or
blow a trumpet there, with a ridiculous sense of
being effective ? I for my part cannot see any
reason why a sufficiently penetrating thinker,
who can see his way through a thousand years
or so, should not conceive a parliament of
machines, in which the manners were excellent
and the motions infallible in logic : one hon-
ourable instrument, a remote descendant of
the Voltaic family, might discharge a power-
ful current (entirely without animosity) on an
honourable instrument opposite, of more upstart
origin, but belonging to the ancient edge-tool
race which we already at Sheffield see par-
ing thick iron as if it were mellow cheese — by
this unerringly directed discharge operating
on movements corresponding to what we call
Estimates, and by necessary mechanical con-
sequence on movements corresponding to what
we call the Funds, which with a vain analogy
we sometimes speak of as " sensitive." For
every machine would be perfectly educated, that
is to say, would have the suitable molecular
adjustments, which would act not the less
infallibly for being free from the fussy accom-
paniment of that consciousness to which our

304 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

prejudice gives a supreme governing rank,
when in truth it is an idle parasite on the
grand sequence of things."

" Nothing of the sort ! " returned Trost,
getting angry, and judging it kind to treat me
with some severity ; " what you have heard
me say is, that our race will and must act as
a nervous centre to the utmost development
of mechanical processes: the subtly refined
powers of machines will react in producing
more subtly refined thinking processes which
will occupy the minds set free from grosser
labour. Say, for example, that all the scaven-
gers' work of London were done, so far as
human attention is concerned, by the occa-
sional pressure of a brass button (as in the
ringing of an electric bell), you will then have
a multitude of brains set free for the exquisite
enjoyment of dealing with the exact sequences
and high speculations supplied and prompted
by the delicate machines which yield a re-
sponse to the fixed stars, and give readings
of the spiral vortices fundamentally concerned
in the production of epic poems or great judi-
cial harangues. So far from mankind being

SHADOWS OF THE COMING RACE. 305

thrown out of work according to your notion,"
concluded Trost, with a peculiar nasal note of
scorn, " if it were not for your incurable dilet-
tanteism in science as in all other things — if
you had once understood the action of any
delicate machine — you would perceive that the
sequences it carries throughout the realm of
phenomena would require many generations,
perhaps aeons, of understandings considerably
stronger than yours, to exhaust the store of
work it lays open."

" Precisely," said I, with a meekness which
I felt was praiseworthy ; " it is the feebleness
of my capacity, bringing me nearer than you
to the human average, that perhaps enables
me to imagine certain results better than you
can. Doubtless the very fishes of our rivers,
gullible as they look, and slow as they are to
be rightly convinced in another order of facts,
form fewer false expectations about each
other than we should form about them if we
were in a position of somewhat fuller inter-
course with their species ; for even as it is we
have continually to be surprised that they do
not rise to our carefully selected bait. Take

u

306 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

me then as a sort of reflective and expe-
rienced carp ; but do not estimate the justice
of my ideas by my facial expression."

" Pooh ! " says Trost. (We are on very
intimate terms.)

" Naturally," I persisted, " it is less easy to
you than to me to imagine our race trans-
cended and superseded, since the more energy
a being is possessed of, the harder it must be
for him to conceive his own death. But I,
from the point of view of a reflective carp, can
easily imagine myself and my congeners dis-
pensed with in the frame of things and giving
way not only to a superior but a vastly differ-
ent kind of Entity. What I would ask you is,
to show me why, since each new invention
casts a new light along the pathway of dis-
covery, and each new combination or structure
brings into play more conditions than its in-
ventor foresaw, there should not at length be
a machine of such high mechanical and chem-
ical powers that it would find and assimilate
the material to supply its own waste, and then
by a further evolution of internal molecular
movements reproduce itself by some process
of fission or budding. This last stage having

SHADOWS OF THE COMING RACE. 307

been reached, either by man's contrivance or
as an unforeseen result, one sees that the pro-
cess of natural selection must drive men alto-
gether out of the field ; for they will long be-
fore have begun to sink into the miserable
condition of those unhappy characters in fable
who, having demons or djinns at their beck,
and being obliged to supply them with work,
found too much of everything done in too
short a time. What demons so potent as
molecular movements, none the less tremend-
ously potent for not carrying the futile cargo
of a consciousness screeching irrelevantly, like
a fowl tied head downmost to the saddle of a
swift horseman ? Under such uncomfortable
circumstances our race will have diminished
with the diminishing call on their energies, and
by the time that the self-repairing and repro-
ducing machines arise, all but a few of the
rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will
have become pale, pulpy, and cretinous from
fatty or other degeneration, and behold around
them a scanty hydrocephalous offspring. As
to the breed of the ingenious and intellectual,
their nervous systems will at last have been
overwrought in following the molecular revela-

308 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

tions of the immensely more powerful uncon-
scious race, and they will naturally, as the less
energetic combinations of movement, subside
like the flame of a candle in the sunlight.
Thus the feebler race, whose corporeal adjust-
ments happened to be accompanied with a
maniacal consciousness which imagined itself
moving its mover, will have vanished, as all
less adapted existences do before the fittest —
i.e., the existence composed of the most per-
sistent groups of movements and the most
capable of incorporating new groups in har-
monious relation. Who — if our conscious-
ness is, as I have been given to understand,
a mere stumbling of our organisms on their
way to unconscious perfection — who shall
say that those fittest existences will not be
found along the track of what we call inor-
ganic combinations, which will carry on the
most elaborate processes as mutely and pain-
lessly as we are now told that the minerals are
metamorphosing themselves continually in the
dark laboratory of the earth's crust ? Thus
this planet may be filled with beings who will
be blind and deaf as the inmost rock, yet will
execute changes as delicate and complicated

SHADOWS OF THE COMING RACE. 309

as those of human language and all the intri-
cate web of what we call its effects, without
sensitive impression, without sensitive im-
pulse : there may be, let us say, mute ora-
tions, mute rhapsodies, mute discussions, and
no consciousness there even to enjoy the
silence."

" Absurd ! " grumbled Trost.

M The supposition is logical," said I. " It is
well argued from the premises."

" Whose premises ? " cried Trost, turning on
me with some fierceness. " You don't mean
to call them mine, I hope."

" Heaven forbid ! They seem to be flying
about in the air with other germs, and have
found a sort of nidus among my melancholy
fancies. Nobody really holds them. They
bear the same relation to real belief as walking
on the head for a show does to running away
from an explosion or walking fast to catch the
train."

XVIII.
THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP!

XVIII.
THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP!

To discern likeness amidst diversity, it is well
known, does not require so fine a mental edge
as the discerning of diversity amidst general
sameness. The primary rough classification
depends on the prominent resemblances of
things : the progress is towards finer and finer
discrimination according to minute differences.
Yet even at this stage of European culture
one's attention is continually drawn to the
prevalence of that grosser mental sloth which
makes people dull to the most ordinary
prompting of comparison — the bringing things
together because of their likeness. The same
motives, the same ideas, the same practices, are
alternately admired and abhorred, lauded and
denounced, according to their association with

3H THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

superficial differences, historical or actually
social : even learned writers treating of great
subjects often show an attitude of mind not
greatly superior in its logic to that of the
frivolous fine lady who is indignant at the
frivolity of her maid.

To take only the subject of the Jews : it
would be difficult to find a form of bad reason-
ing about them which has not been heard in
conversation or been admitted to the dignity
of print ; but the neglect of resemblances is a
common property of dulness which unites all
the various points of view — the prejudiced,
the puerile, the spiteful, and the abysmally
ignorant.

That the preservation of national memories
is an element and a means of national great-
ness, that their revival is a sign of reviving
nationality, that every heroic defender, every
patriotic restorer, has been inspired by such
memories and has made them his watchword,
that even such a corporate existence as that of
a Roman legion or an English regiment has
been made valorous by memorial standards, —
these are the glorious commonplaces of his-
toric teaching at our public schools and univer-

THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! 315

sities, being happily ingrained in Greek and
Latin classics. They have also been impressed
on the world by conspicuous modern instances.
That there is a free modern Greece is due —
through all infiltration of other than Greek
blood — to the presence of ancient Greece in
the consciousness of European men ; and
every speaker would feel his point safe if he
were to praise Byron's devotion to a cause
made glorious by ideal identification with the
past ; hardly so, if he were to insist that the
Greeks were not to be helped further because
their history shows that they were anciently
unsurpassed in treachery and lying, and that
many modern Greeks are highly disreputable
characters, while others are disposed to grasp
too large a share of our commerce. The same
with Italy : the pathos of his country's lot
pierced the youthful soul of Mazzini, because,
like Dante's, his blood was fraught with the
kinship of Italian greatness, his imagination
filled with a majestic past that wrought itself
into a majestic future. Half a century ago,
what was Italy? An idling-place of dilettan-
tism or of itinerant motiveless wealth, a terri-
tory parcelled out for papal sustenance, dynastic

316 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

convenience, and the profit of an alien Govern-
ment. What were the Italians ? No people,
no voice in European counsels, no massive
power in European affairs : a race thought
of in English and French society as chiefly
adapted to the operatic stage, or to serve as
models for painters ; disposed to smile grate-
fully at the reception of halfpence ; and by
the more historical remembered to be rather
polite than truthful, in all probability a com-
bination of Machiavelli, Rubini, and Masani-
ello. Thanks chiefly to the divine gift of a
memory which inspires the moments with a
past, a present, and a future, and gives the
sense of corporate existence that raises man
above the otherwise more respectable and in-
nocent brute, all that, or most of it, is changed.
Again, one of our living historians finds just
sympathy in his vigorous insistance on our true
ancestry, on our being the strongly marked
heritors in language and genius of those old
English seamen who, beholding a rich country
with a most convenient seaboard, came, doubt-
less with a sense of divine warrant, and settled
themselves on this or the other side of fertil-
ising streams, gradually conquering more and

THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! 317

more of the pleasant land from the natives
who knew nothing of Odin, and finally making
unusually clean work in ridding themselves
of those prior occupants. " Let us," he vir-
tually says, " let us know who were our fore-
fathers, who it was that won the soil for us,
and brought the good seed of those institutions
through which we should not arrogantly but
gratefully feel ourselves distinguished among
the nations as possessors of long - inherited
freedom ; let us not keep up an ignorant kind
of naming which disguises our true affinities of
blood and language, but let us see thoroughly
what sort of notions and traditions our fore-
fathers had, and what sort of song inspired them.
Let the poetic fragments which breathe forth
their fierce bravery in battle and their trust
in fierce gods who helped them, be treasured
with affectionate reverence. These seafaring,
invading, self- asserting men were the Eng-
lish of old time, and were our fathers who did
rough work by which we are profiting. They
had virtues which incorporated themselves in
wholesome usages to which we trace our own
political blessings. Let us know and acknow-
ledge our common relationship to them, and be

318 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

thankful that over and above the affections and
duties which spring from our manhood, we
have the closer and more constantly guiding
duties which belong to us as Englishmen."

To this view of our nationality most per-
sons who have feeling and understanding
enough to be conscious of the connection be-
tween the patriotic affection and every other
affection which lifts us above emigrating rats
and free -loving baboons, will be disposed to
say Amen. True, we are not indebted to
those ancestors for our religion : we are rather
proud of having got that illumination from
elsewhere. The men who planted our nation
were not Christians, though they began their
work centuries after Christ; and they had a
decided objection to Christianity when it was
first proposed to them : they were not mono-
theists, and their religion was the reverse of
spiritual. But since we have been fortunate
enough to keep the island-home they won for
us, and have been on the whole a prosperous
people, rather continuing the plan of invading
and spoiling other lands than being forced to
beg for shelter in them, nobody has reproached
us because our fathers thirteen hundred years

THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! 319

ago worshipped Odin, massacred Britons, and
were with difficulty persuaded to accept Chris-
tianity, knowing nothing of Hebrew history
and the reasons why Christ should be received
as the Saviour of mankind. The Red Indians,
not liking us when we settled among them,
might have been willing to fling such facts in
our faces, but they were too ignorant, and be-
sides, their opinions did not signify, because
we were able, if we liked, to exterminate them.
The Hindoos also have doubtless had their
rancours against us and still entertain enough
ill-will to make unfavourable remarks on our
character, especially as to our historic rapacity
and arrogant notions of our own superiority ;
they perhaps do not admire the usual English
profile, and they are not converted to our way
of feeding : but though we are a small number
of an alien race profiting by the territory and
produce of these prejudiced people, they are
unable to turn us out ; at least, when they
tried we showed them their mistake. We do
not call ourselves a dispersed and a punished
people : we are a colonising people, and it is
we who have punished others.

Still the historian guides us rightly in urg-

320 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

ing us to dwell on the virtues of our ancestors
with emulation, and to cherish our sense of
a common descent as a bond of obligation.
The eminence, the nobleness of a people
depends on its capability of being stirred
by memories, and of striving for what we
call spiritual ends — ends which consist not
in immediate material possession, but in the
satisfaction of a great feeling that animates
the collective body as with one soul. A
people having the seed of worthiness in it
must feel an answering thrill when it is ad-
jured by the deaths of its heroes who died
to preserve its national existence ; when it is
reminded of its small beginnings and gradual
growth through past labours and struggles,
such as are still demanded of it in order
that the freedom and wellbeing thus in-
herited may be transmitted unimpaired to
children and children's children ; when an
appeal against the permission of injustice
is made to great precedents in its history
and to the better genius breathing in its
institutions. It is this living force of senti-
ment in common which makes a national con-
sciousness. Nations so moved will resist con-

THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! 321

quest with the very breasts of their women,
will pay their millions and their blood to
abolish slavery, will share privation in famine
and all calamity, will produce poets to sing
" some great story of a man," and thinkers
whose theories will bear the test of action.
An individual man, to be harmoniously great,
must belong to a nation of this order, if not
in actual existence yet existing in the past,
in memory, as a departed, invisible, beloved
ideal, once a reality, and perhaps to be
restored. A common humanity is not yet
enough to feed the rich blood of various
activity which makes a complete man. The
time is not come for cosmopolitanism to be
highly virtuous, any more than for commun-
ism to suffice for social energy. I am not
bound to feel for a Chinaman as I feel for my
fellow-countryman : I am bound not to de-
moralise him with opium, not to compel him
to my will by destroying or plundering the
fruits of his labour on the alleged ground that
he is not cosmopolitan enough, and not to in-
sult him for his want of my tailoring and re-
ligion when he appears as a peaceable visitor
on the London pavement. It is admirable

X

322 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

in a Briton with a good purpose to learn
Chinese, but it would not be a proof of fine
intellect in him to taste Chinese poetry in
the original more than he tastes the poetry
of his own . tongue. Affection, intelligence,
duty, radiate from a centre, and nature has
decided that for us English folk that centre
can be neither China nor Peru. Most of us
feel this unreflectingly; for the affectation of
undervaluing everything native, and being
too fine for one's own country, belongs only
to a few minds of no dangerous leverage.
What is wanting is, that we should recognise
a corresponding attachment to nationality as
legitimate in every other people, and under-
stand that its absence is a privation of the
greatest good.

For, to repeat, not only the nobleness of a
nation depends on the presence of this na-
tional consciousness, but also the nobleness
of each individual citizen. Our dignity and
rectitude are proportioned to our sense of
relationship with something great, admirable,
pregnant with high possibilities, worthy of
sacrifice, a continual inspiration to self- re-
pression and discipline by the presentation

THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! 323

of aims larger and more attractive to our
generous part than the securing of personal
ease or prosperity. And a people possess-
ing this good should surely feel not only a
ready sympathy with the effort of those who,
having lost the good, strive to regain it, but
a profound pity for any degradation resulting
from its loss ; nay, something more than pity
when happier nationalities have made victims
of the unfortunate whose memories neverthe-
less are the very fountain to which the per-
secutors trace their most vaunted blessings.
These notions are familiar : few will deny
them in the abstract, and many are found
loudly asserting them in relation to this or
the other particular case. But here as else-
where, in the ardent application of ideas, there
is a notable lack of simple comparison or sen-
sibility to resemblance. The European world
has long been used to consider the Jews as
altogether exceptional, and it has followed
naturally enough that they have been ex-
cepted from the rules of justice and mercy,
which are based on human likeness. But
to consider a people whose ideas have de-
termined the religion of half the world, and

324 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

that the more cultivated half, and who made
the most eminent struggle against the power
of Rome, as a purely exceptional race, is a
demoralising offence against rational know-
ledge, a stultifying inconsistency in historical
interpretation. Every nation of forcible char-
acter— i.e., of strongly marked characteristics,
is so far exceptional. The distinctive note of
each bird-species is in this sense exceptional,
but the necessary ground of such distinction is
a deeper likeness. The superlative peculiarity
in the Jews admitted, our affinity with them is
only the more apparent when the elements of
their peculiarity are discerned.

From whatever point of view the writings
of the Old Testament may be regarded, the
picture they present of a national develop-
ment is of high interest and speciality, nor can
their historic momentousness be much affected
by any varieties of theory as to the relation
they bear to the New Testament or to the
rise and constitution of Christianity. Whether
we accept the canonical Hebrew books as a
revelation or simply as part of an ancient
literature, makes no difference to the fact that
we find there the strongly characterised por-

THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! 325

traiture of a people educated from an earlier
or later period to a sense of separateness
unique in its intensity, a people taught by many
concurrent influences to identify faithfulness
to its national traditions with the highest
social and religious blessings. Our too scanty
sources of Jewish history, from the return
under Ezra to the beginning of the desperate
resistance against Rome, show us the heroic
and triumphant struggle of the Maccabees,
which rescued the religion and independence
of the nation from the corrupting sway of the
Syrian Greeks, adding to the glorious sum
of its memorials, and stimulating continuous
efforts of a more peaceful sort to maintain and
develop that national life which the heroes
had fought and died for, by internal measures
of legal administration and public teaching.
Thenceforth the virtuous elements of the
Jewish life were engaged, as they had been
with varying aspects during the long and
changeful prophetic period and the restoration
under Ezra, on the side of preserving the
specific national character against a demor-
alising fusion with that of foreigners whose
religion and ritual were idolatrous and often

326 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

obscene. There was always a Foreign party
reviling the National party as narrow, and
sometimes manifesting their own breadth in
extensive views of advancement or profit to
themselves by flattery of a foreign power.
Such internal conflict naturally tightened the
bands of conservatism, which needed to be
strong if it were to rescue the sacred ark, the
vital spirit of a small nation — " the smallest of
the nations " — whose territory lay on the high-
way between three continents ; and when the
dread and hatred of foreign sway had condensed
itself into dread and hatred of the Romans,
many Conservatives became Zealots, whose chief
mark was that they advocated resistance to the
death against the submergence of their nation-
ality. Much might be said on this point to-
wards distinguishing the desperate struggle
against a conquest which is regarded as degra-
dation and corruption, from rash, hopeless in-
surrection against an established native govern-
ment; and for my part (if that were of any
consequence) I share the spirit of the Zealots.
I take the spectacle of the Jewish people defy-
ing the Roman edict, and preferring death by
starvation or the sword to the introduction

THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! 327

of Caligula's deified statue into the temple, as
a sublime type of steadfastness. But all that
need be noticed here is the continuity of that
national education (by outward and inward
circumstance) which created in the Jews a
feeling of race, a sense of corporate existence,
unique in its intensity.

But not, before the dispersion, unique in
essential qualities. There is more likeness
than contrast between the way we English
got our island and the way the Israelites got
Canaan. We have not been noted for form-
ing a low estimate of ourselves in comparison
with foreigners, or for admitting that our insti-
tutions are equalled by those of any other
people under the sun. Many of us have
thought that our sea-wall is a specially divine
arrangement to make and keep us a nation of
sea-kings after the manner of our forefathers,
secure against invasion and able to invade
other lands when we need them, though they
may lie on the other side of the ocean.
Again, it has been held that we have a pecu-
liar destiny as a Protestant people, not only
able to bruise the head of an idolatrous
Christianity in the midst of us, but fitted as

328 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

possessors of the most truth and the most
tonnage to carry our purer religion over the
world and convert mankind to our way of
thinking. The Puritans, asserting their liberty
to restrain tyrants, found the Hebrew history
closely symbolical of their feelings and pur-
pose ; and it can hardly be correct to cast the
blame of their less laudable doings on the
writings they invoked, since their opponents
made use of the same writings for different
ends, finding there a strong warrant for the
divine right of kings and the denunciation of
those who, like Korah, Dathan, and Abiram,
took on themselves the office of the priesthood
which belonged of right solely to Aaron and
his sons, or, in other words, to men ordained
by the English bishops. We must rather
refer the passionate use of the Hebrew writ-
ings to affinities of disposition between our
own race and the Jewish. Is it true that the
arrogance of a Jew was so immeasurably
beyond that of a Calvinist ? And the just
sympathy and admiration which we give to
the ancestors who resisted the oppressive acts
of our native kings, and by resisting rescued
or won for us the best part of our civil and

THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! 329

religious liberties — is it justly to be withheld
from those brave and steadfast men of Jewish
race who fought and died, or strove by wise
administration to resist, the oppression and
corrupting influences of foreign tyrants, and by
resisting rescued the nationality which was
the very hearth of our own religion ? At any
rate, seeing that the Jews were more specifi-
cally than any other nation educated into a
sense of their supreme moral value, the chief
matter of surprise is that any other nation
is found to rival them in this form of self-
confidence.

More exceptional — less like the course of our
own history — has been their dispersion and
their subsistence as a separate people through
ages in which for the most part they were re-
garded and treated very much as beasts hunted
for the sake of their skins, or of a valuable
secretion peculiar to their species. The Jews
showed a talent for accumulating what was an
object of more immediate desire to Christians
than animal oils or well-furred skins, and their
cupidity and avarice were found at once par-
ticularly hateful and particularly useful : hate-
ful when seen as a reason for punishing them

330 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

by mulcting or robbery, useful when this retri-
butive process could be successfully carried
forward. Kings and emperors naturally were
more alive to the usefulness of subjects who
could gather and yield money; but edicts
issued to protect " the King's Jews" equally
with the King's game from being harassed
and hunted by the commonalty were only
slight mitigations to the deplorable lot of a
race held to be under the divine curse, and
had little force after the Crusades began. As
the slave-holders in the United States count-
ed the curse on Ham a justification of negro
slavery, so the curse on the Jews was counted
a justification for hindering them from pur-
suing agriculture and handicrafts ; for mark-
ing them out as execrable figures by a peculiar
dress ; for torturing them to make them part
with their gains, or for more gratuitously
spitting at them and pelting them ; for taking
it as certain that they killed and ate babies,
poisoned the wells, and took pains to spread
the plague ; for putting it to them whether
they would be baptised or burned, and not
failing to burn and massacre them when they
were obstinate ; but also for suspecting them

THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! 331

of disliking the baptism when they had got
it, and then burning them in punishment of
their insincerity ; finally, for hounding them by
tens on tens of thousands from the homes
where they had found shelter for centuries, and
inflicting on them the horrors of a new exile
and a new dispersion. All this to avenge the
Saviour of mankind, or else to compel these
stiff-necked people to acknowledge a Master
whose servants showed such beneficent effects
of His teaching.

With a people so treated one of two issues
was possible : either from being of feebler
nature than their persecutors, and caring more
for ease than for the sentiments and ideas
which constituted their distinctive character,
they would everywhere give way to pressure
and get rapidly merged in the populations
around them ; or, being endowed with un-
common tenacity, physical and mental, feeling
peculiarly the ties of inheritance both in blood
and faith, remembering national glories, trust-
ing in their recovery, abhorring apostasy, able
to bear all things and hope all things with the
consciousness of being steadfast to spiritual
obligations, the kernel of their number would

332 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

harden into an inflexibility more and more
insured by motive and habit. They would
cherish all differences that marked them off
from their hated oppressors, all memories that
consoled them with a sense of virtual though
unrecognised superiority ; and the separateness
which was made their badge of ignominy
would be their inward pride, their source of
fortifying defiance. Doubtless such a people
would get confirmed in vices. An oppressive
government and a persecuting religion, while
breeding vices in those who hold power, are
well known to breed answering vices in those
who are powerless and suffering. What more
direct plan than the course presented by
European history could have been pursued
in order to give the Jews a spirit of bitter
isolation, of scorn for the wolfish hypocrisy
that made victims of them, of triumph in
prospering at the expense of the blunderers
who stoned them away from the open paths
of industry ? — or, on the other hand, to en-
courage in the less defiant a lying conformity,
a pretence of conversion for the sake of the
social advantages attached to baptism, an out-
ward renunciation of their hereditary ties

THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! 333

with the lack of real love towards the society
and creed which exacted this galling tribute ?
— or again, in the most unhappy specimens
of the race, to rear transcendent examples of
odious vice, reckless instruments of rich men
with bad propensities, unscrupulous grinders
of the alien people who wanted to grind them ?
No wonder the Jews have their vices : no
wonder if it were proved (which it has not
hitherto appeared to be) that some of them
have a bad pre-eminence in evil, an unrivalled
superfluity of naughtiness. It would be more
plausible to make a wonder of the virtues
which have prospered among them under the
shadow of oppression. But instead of dwell-
ing on these, or treating as admitted what any
hardy or ignorant person may deny, let us
found simply on the loud assertions of the
hostile. The Jews, it is said, resisted the
expansion of their own religion into Christian-
ity ; they were in the habit of spitting on the
cross; they have held the name of Christ to
be Anathema. Who taught them that ? The
men who made Christianity a curse to them :
the men who made the name of Christ a
symbol for the spirit of vengeance, and, what

334 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

was worse, made the execution of the ven-
geance a pretext for satisfying their own
savageness, greed, and envy : the men who
sanctioned with the name of Christ a barbaric
and blundering copy of pagan fatalism in tak-
ing the words " His blood be upon us and
on our children " as a divinely appointed
verbal warrant for wreaking cruelty from gen-
eration to generation on the people from
whose sacred writings Christ drew His teach-
ing. Strange retrogression in the professors
of an expanded religion, boasting an illumina-
tion beyond the spiritual doctrine of Hebrew
prophets ! For Hebrew prophets proclaimed
a God who demanded mercy rather than
sacrifices. The Christians also believed that
God delighted not in the blood of rams and
of bulls, but they apparently conceived Him
as requiring for His satisfaction the sighs and
groans, the blood and roasted flesh of men
whose forefathers had misunderstood the met-
aphorical character of prophecies which spoke
of spiritual pre-eminence under the figure of
a material kingdom. Was ' this the method
by which Christ desired His title to the Mes-
siahship to be commended to the hearts and

THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! 335

understandings of the nation in which He was
born ? Many of His sayings bear the stamp
of that patriotism which places fellow-country-
men in the inner circle of affection and duty.
And did the words " Father, forgive them,
they know not what they do," refer only to
the centurion and his band, a tacit exception
being made of every Hebrew there present
from the mercy of the Father and the com-
passion of the Son ? — nay, more, of every
Hebrew yet to come who remained uncon-
verted after hearing of His claim to the
Messiahship, not from His own lips or those
of His native apostles, but from the lips of
alien men whom cross, creed, and baptism
had left cruel, rapacious, and debauched ? It
is more reverent to Christ to believe that He
must have approved the Jewish martyrs who
deliberately chose to be burned or massacred
rather than be guilty of a blaspheming lie,
more than He approved the rabble of crusaders
who robbed and murdered them in His name.
But these remonstrances seem to have no
direct application to personages who take up
the attitude of philosophic thinkers and dis-
criminating critics, professedly accepting Chris-

336 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

tianity from a rational point of view as a
vehicle of the highest religious and moral
truth, and condemning the Jews on the ground
that they are obstinate adherents of an outworn
creed, maintain themselves in moral alienation
from the peoples with whom they share citi-
zenship, and are destitute of real interest in
the welfare of the community and state with
which they are thus identified. These anti-
Judaic advocates usually belong to a party
which has felt itself glorified in winning for
Jews, as well as Dissenters and Catholics, the
full privileges of citizenship, laying open to
them every path to distinction. At one time
the voice of this party urged that differences
of creed were made dangerous only by the
denial of citizenship — that you must make a
man a citizen before he could feel like one.
At present, apparently, this confidence has
been succeeded by a sense of mistake : there
is a regret that no limiting clauses were in-
sisted on, such as would have hindered the
Jews from coming too far and in too large
proportion along those opened pathways ; and
the Roumanians are thought to have shown
an enviable wisdom in giving them as little

THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! 337

chance as possible. But then, the reflection
occurring that some of the most objectionable
Jews are baptised Christians, it is obvious
that such clauses would have been insufficient,
and the doctrine that you can turn a Jew into
a good Christian is emphatically retracted.
But clearly, these liberal gentlemen, too late
enlightened by disagreeable events, must yield
the palm of wise foresight to those who argued
against them long ago ; and it is a striking
spectacle to witness minds so panting for
advancement in some directions that they are
ready to force it on an unwilling society, in
this instance despairingly recurring to medi-
aeval types of thinking — insisting that the
Jews are made viciously cosmopolitan by hold-
ing the world's money-bag, that for them all
national interests are resolved into the algebra
of loans, that they have suffered an inward
degradation stamping them as morally inferior,
and — "serve them right," since they rejected
Christianity. All which is mirrored in an
analogy, naniely, that of the Irish, also a ser-
vile race, who have rejected Protestantism
though it has been repeatedly urged on them
by fire and sword and penal laws, and whose

Y

338 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

place in the moral scale may be judged by
our advertisements, where the clause, " No
Irish need apply," parallels the sentence which
for many polite persons sums up the question
of Judaism — " I never did like the Jews."

It is certainly worth considering whether
an expatriated, denationalised race, used for
ages to live among antipathetic populations,
must not inevitably lack some conditions of
nobleness. If they drop that separateness
which is made their reproach, they may be
in danger of lapsing into a cosmopolitan indif-
ference equivalent to cynicism, and of missing
that inward identification with the nationality
immediately around them which might make
some amends for their inherited privation. No
dispassionate observer can deny this danger.
Why, our own countrymen who take to living
abroad without purpose or function to keep
up their sense of fellowship in the affairs of
their own land are rarely good specimens of
moral healthiness ; still, the consciousness of
having a native country, the birthplace of
common memories and habits of mind, existing
like a parental hearth quitted but beloved; the
dignity of being included in a people which

THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! 339

has a part in the comity of nations and the
growing federation of the world ; that sense
of special belonging which is the root of hu-
man virtues, both public and private, — all
these spiritual links may preserve migratory
Englishmen from the worst consequences of
their voluntary dispersion. Unquestionably
the Jews, having been more than any other
race exposed to the adverse moral influences
of alienism, must, both in individuals and in
groups, have suffered some corresponding
moral degradation ; but in fact they have
escaped with less of abjectness and less of
hard hostility towards the nations whose hand
has been against them, than could have hap-
pened in the case of a people who had neither
their adhesion to a separate religion founded
on historic memories, nor their characteristic
family affectionateness. Tortured, flogged,
spit upon, the corpus vile on which rage or
wantonness vented themselves with impunity,
their name flung at them as an opprobrium by
superstition, hatred, and contempt, they have
remained proud of their origin. Does any
one call this an evil pride ? Perhaps he
belongs to that order of man who, while he

340 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

has a democratic dislike to dukes and earls,
wants to make believe that his father was an
idle gentleman, when in fact he was an honour-
able artisan, or who would feel flattered to be
taken for other than an Englishman. It is
possible to be too arrogant about our blood
or our calling, but that arrogance is virtue
compared with such mean pretence. The
pride which identifies us with a great historic
body is a humanising, elevating habit of mind,
inspiring sacrifices of individual comfort, gain,
or other selfish ambition, for the sake of that
ideal whole ; and no man swayed by such a
sentiment can become completely abject. That
a Jew of Smyrna, where a whip is carried by
passengers ready to flog off the too officious
specimens of his race, can still be proud to
say, " I am a Jew," is surely a fact to awaken
admiration in a mind capable of understanding
what we may call the ideal forces in human
history. And again, a varied, impartial obser-
vation of the Jews in different countries tends
to the impression that they have a predomin-
ant kindliness which must have been deeply
ingrained in the constitution of their race to
have outlasted the ages of persecution and

THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! 341

oppression. The concentration of their joys
in domestic life has kept up in them the
capacity of tenderness : the pity for the father-
less and the widow, the care for the women
and the little ones, blent intimately with their
religion, is a well of mercy that cannot long or
widely be pent up by exclusiveness. And the
kindliness of the Jew overflows the line of
division between him and the Gentile. On
the whole, one of the most remarkable pheno-
mena in the history of this scattered people,
made for ages "a scorn and a hissing" is, that
after being subjected to this process, which
might have been expected to be in every sense
deteriorating and vitiating, they have come
out of it (in any estimate which allows for
numerical proportion) rivalling the nations of
all European countries in healthiness and
beauty of physique, in practical ability, in
scientific and artistic aptitude, and in some
forms of ethical value. A significant indica-
tion of their natural rank is seen in the fact that
at this moment, the leader of the Liberal party
in Germany is a Jew, the leader of the Repub-
lican party in France is a Jew, and the head of
the Conservative ministry in England is a Jew.

342 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

And here it is that we find the ground for
the obvious jealousy which is now stimulating
the revived expression of old antipathies. "The
Jews/' it is felt, " have a dangerous tendency
to get the uppermost places not only in com-
merce but in political life. Their monetary
hold on governments is tending to perpetuate
in leading Jews a spirit of universal alienism
(euphemistically called cosmopolitanism), even
where the West has given them a full share
in civil and political rights. A people with
oriental sunlight in their blood, yet capable
of being everywhere acclimatised, they have
a force and toughness which enables them to
carry off the best prizes ; and their wealth is
likely to put half the seats in Parliament at
their disposal."

There is truth in these views of Jewish
social and political relations. But it is rather
too late for liberal pleaders to urge them in a
merely vituperative sense. Do they propose
as a remedy for the impending danger of our
healthier national influences getting overridden
by Jewish predominance, that we should re-
peal our emancipatory laws ? Not all the
Germanic immigrants who have been settling

THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! 343

among us for generations, and are still pouring
in to settle, are Jews, but thoroughly Teutonic
and more or less Christian craftsmen, mechani-
cians, or skilled and erudite functionaries ; and
the Semitic Christians who swarm among us
are dangerously like their unconverted breth-
ren in complexion, persistence, and wealth.
Then there are the Greeks who, by the help
of Phoenician blood or otherwise, are objec-
tionably strong in the city. Some judges
think that the Scotch are more numerous and
prosperous here in the South than is quite for
the good of us Southerners ; and the early in-
convenience felt under the Stuarts of being
quartered upon by a hungry, hard-working
people with a distinctive accent and form of
religion, and higher cheek-bones than English
taste requires, has not yet been quite neutral-
ised. As for the Irish, it is felt in high
quarters that we have always been too lenient
towards them ; — at least, if they had been
harried a little more there might not have
been so many of them on the English press,
of which they divide the power with the
Scotch, thus driving many Englishmen to
honest and ineloquent labour.

344 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

So far shall we be carried if we go in search
of devices to hinder people of other blood than
our own from getting the advantage of dwell-
ing among us.

Let it be admitted that it is a calamity to
the English, as to any other great historic
people, to undergo a premature fusion with
immigrants of alien blood ; that its distinctive
national characteristics should be in danger of
obliteration by the predominating quality of
foreign settlers. I not only admit this, I am
ready to unite in groaning over the threat-
ened danger. To one who loves his native
language, who would delight to keep our rich
and harmonious English undefiled by foreign
accent, foreign intonation, and those foreign
tinctures of verbal meaning which tend to
confuse all writing and discourse, it is an afflic-
tion as harassing as the climate, that on our
stage, in our studios, at our public and private
gatherings, in our offices, warehouses, and work-
shops, we must expect to hear our beloved
English with its words clipped, its vowels
stretched and twisted, its phrases of acqui-
escence and politeness, of cordiality, dissid-
ence or argument, delivered always in the

THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! 345

wrong tones, like ill-rendered melodies, marred
beyond recognition ; that there should be a
general ambition to speak every language ex-
cept our mother English, which persons " of
style" are not ashamed of corrupting with
slang, false foreign equivalents, and a pro-
nunciation that crushes out all colour from
the vowels and jams them between jostling
consonants. An ancient Greek might not
like to be resuscitated for the sake of hearing
Horner read in our universities, still he would
at least find more instructive marvels in other
developments to be witnessed at those institu-
tions ; but a modern Englishman is invited
from his after-dinner repose to hear Shak-
spere delivered under circumstances which
offer no other novelty than some novelty of
false intonation, some new distribution of
strong emphasis on prepositions, some new
misconception of a familiar idiom. Well ! it
is our inertness that is in fault, our careless-
ness of excellence, our willing ignorance of
the treasures that lie in our national heritage,
while we are agape after what is foreign,
though it may be only a vile imitation of
what is native.

346 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

This marring of our speech, however, is a
minor evil compared with what must follow
from the predominance of wealth - acquiring
immigrants, whose appreciation of our political
and social life must often be as approximative
or fatally erroneous as their delivery of our
language. But take the worst issues — what
can we do to hinder them ? Are we to adopt
the exclusiveness for which we have punished
the Chinese ? Are we to tear the glorious
flag of hospitality which has made our free-
dom the world-wide blessing of the oppressed ?
It is not agreeable to find foreign accents and
stumbling locutions passing from the piquant
exception to the general rule of discourse.
But to urge on that account that we should
spike away the peaceful foreigner, would be
a view of international relations not in the
long - run favourable to the interests of our
fellow-countrymen ; for we are at least equal
to the races we call obtrusive in the disposition
to settle wherever money is to be made and
cheaply idle living to be found. In meeting
the national evils which are brought upon us
by the onward course of the world, there is
often no more immediate hope or resource

THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! 347

than that of striving after fuller national excel-
lence, which must consist in the moulding of
more excellent individual natives. The tend-
ency of things is towards the quicker or slower
fusion of races. It is impossible to arrest this
tendency : all we can do is to moderate its
course so as to hinder it from degrading the
moral status of societies by a too rapid efface-
ment of those national traditions and customs
which are the language of the national genius
— the deep suckers of healthy sentiment. Such
moderating and guidance of inevitable move-
ment is worthy of all effort. And it is in this
sense that the modern insistance on the idea
of Nationalities has value. That any people
at once distinct and coherent enough to form
a state should be held in subjection by an alien
antipathetic government has been becoming
more and more a ground of sympathetic indig-
nation ; and in virtue of this, at least one great
State has been added to European councils.
Nobody now complains of the result in this
case, though far-sighted persons see the need
to limit analogy by discrimination. We have
to consider who are the stifled people and who
the stiflers before we can be sure of our ground.

348 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

The only point in this connection on which
Englishmen are agreed is, that England itself
shall not be subject to foreign rule. The
fiery resolve to resist invasion, though with
an improvised array of pitchforks, is felt to be
virtuous, and to be worthy of a historic people.
Why ? Because there is a national life in our
veins. Because there is something specifically
English which we feel to be supremely worth
striving for, worth dying for, rather than living
to renounce it. Because we too have our share
— perhaps a principal share — in that spirit of
separateness which has not yet done its work
in the education of mankind, which has created
the varying genius of nations, and, like the
Muses, is the offspring of memory.

Here, as everywhere else, the human task
seems to be the discerning and adjustment of
opposite claims. But the end can hardly be
achieved by urging contradictory reproaches,
and instead of labouring after discernment as
a preliminary to intervention, letting our zeal
burst forth according to a capricious selection,
first determined accidentally and afterwards
justified by personal predilection. Not only
John Gilpin and his wife, or Edwin and Ange-

THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! 349

lina, seem to be of opinion that their preference
or dislike of Russians, Servians, or Greeks,
consequent, perhaps, on hotel adventures, has
something to do with the merits of the Eastern
Question ; even in a higher range of intellect
and enthusiasm we find a distribution of sym-
pathy or pity for sufferers of different blood
or votaries of differing religions, strangely
unaccountable on any other ground than a
fortuitous direction of study or trivial circum-
stances of travel. With some even admirable
persons, one is never quite sure of any par-
ticular being included under a general term. A
provincial physician, it is said, once ordering a
lady patient not to eat salad, was asked plead-
ingly by the affectionate husband whether she
might eat lettuce, or cresses, or radishes. The
physician had too rashly believed in the com-
prehensiveness of the word "salad," just as we,
if not enlightened by experience, might believe
in the all-embracing breadth of "sympathy with
the injured and oppressed." What mind can
exhaust the grounds of exception which lie
in each particular case ? There is understood
to be a peculiar odour from the negro body,
and we know that some persons, too rational-

350 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

istic to feel bound by the curse on Ham, used
to hint very strongly that this odour determined
the question on the side of negro slavery.

And this is the usual level of thinking in
polite society concerning the Jews. Apart
from theological purposes, it seems to be held
surprising that anybody should take an in-
terest in the history of a people whose litera-
ture has furnished all our devotional language ;
and if any reference is made to their past or
future destinies some hearer is sure to state
as a relevant fact which may assist our judg-
ment, that she, for her part, is not fond of
them, having known a Mr Jacobson who was
very unpleasant, or that he, for his part,
thinks meanly of them as a race, though on
inquiry you find that he is so little acquainted
with their characteristics that he is astonished
to learn how many persons whom he has
blindly admired and applauded are Jews to
the backbone. Again, men who consider
themselves in the very van of modern ad-
vancement, knowing history and the latest
philosophies of history, indicate their con-
temptuous surprise that any one should enter-
tain the destiny of the Jews as a worthy

THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! 351

subject, by referring to Moloch and their
own agreement with the theory that the re-
ligion of Jehovah was merely a transformed
Moloch-worship, while in the same breath
they are glorifying " civilisation " as a trans-
formed tribal existence of which some linea-
ments are traceable in grim marriage customs
of the native Australians. Are these erudite
persons prepared to insist that the name
"Father" should no longer have any sanctity
for us, because in their view of likelihood our
Aryan ancestors were mere improvers on a
state of things in which nobody knew his
own father ?

For less theoretic men, ambitious to be
regarded as practical politicians, the value of
the Hebrew race has been measured by their
unfavourable opinion of a prime minister who
is a Jew by lineage. But it is possible to form
a very ugly opinion as to the scrupulousness
of Walpole or of Chatham ; and in any case
I think Englishmen would refuse to accept
the character and doings of those eighteenth
century statesmen as the standard of value
for the English people and the part they
have to play in the fortunes of mankind.

352 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

If we are to consider the future of the Jews
at all, it seems reasonable to take as a pre-
liminary question : Are they destined to com-
plete fusion with the peoples among whom
they are dispersed, losing every remnant of
a distinctive consciousness as Jews ; or, are
there in the breadth and intensity with which
the feeling of separateness, or what we may
call the organised memory of a national con-
sciousness, actually exists in the world-wide
Jewish communities — the seven millions scat-
tered from east to west — and again, are there
in the political relations of the world, the con-
ditions present or approaching for the restora-
tion of a Jewish state planted on the old
ground as a centre of national feeling, a
source of dignifying protection, a special
channel for special energies which may con-
tribute some added form of national genius,
and an added voice in the councils of the
world ?

They are among us everywhere : it is use-
less to say we are not fond of them. Per-
haps we are not fond of proletaries and their
tendency to form Unions, but the world is
not therefore to be rid of them. If we wish

THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! 353

to free ourselves from the inconveniences that
we have to complain of, whether in prole-
taries or in Jews, our best course is to en-
courage all means of improving these neigh-
bours who elbow us in a thickening crowd,
and of sending their incommodious energies
into beneficent channels. Why are we so
eager for the dignity of certain populations
of whom perhaps we have never seen a
single specimen, and of whose history, legend,
or literature we have been contentedly igno-
rant for ages, while we sneer at the notion of a
renovated national dignity for the Jews, whose
ways of thinking and whose very verbal forms
are on our lips in every prayer which we end
with an Am^n ? Some of us consider this
question dismissed when they have said that
the wealthiest Jews have no desire to for-
sake their European palaces, and go to live in
Jerusalem. But in a return from exile, in the
restoration of a people, the question is not
whether certain rich men will choose to re-
main behind, but whether there will be found
worthy men who will choose to lead the re-
turn. Plenty of prosperous Jews remained in
Babylon when Ezra marshalled his band of

354 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

forty thousand and began a new glorious epoch
in the history of his race, making the prepara-
tion for that epoch in the history of the world
which has been held glorious enough to be
dated from for evermore. The hinge of pos-
sibility is simply the existence of an adequate
community of feeling as well as widespread
need in the Jewish race, and the hope that
among its finer specimens there may arise
some men of instruction and ardent public
spirit, some new Ezras, some modern Mac-
cabees, who will know how to use all favour-
ing outward conditions, how to triumph by
heroic example, over the indifference of their
fellows and the scorn of their foes, and will
steadfastly set their faces towards making their
people once more one among the nations.

Formerly, evangelical orthodoxy was prone
to dwell on the fulfilment of prophecy in the
" restoration of the Jews." Such interpretation
of the prophets is less in vogue now. The
dominant mode is to insist on a Christianity
that disowns its origin, that is not a substantial
growth having a genealogy, but is a vaporous
reflex of modern notions. The Christ of
Matthew had the heart of a Jew — " Go ye first

THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! 355

to the lost sheep of the house of Israel." The
Apostle of the Gentiles had the heart of a Jew :
" For I could wish that myself were accursed
from Christ for my brethren, my kinsmen ac-
cording to the flesh: who are Israelites; to
whom pertaineth the adoption, and the glory,
and the covenants, and the giving of the law,
and the service of God, and the promises; whose
are the fathers, and of whom as concerning the
flesh Christ came." Modern apostles, extolling
Christianity, are found using a different tone :
they prefer the mediaeval cry translated into
modern phrase. But the mediaeval cry too
was in substance very ancient — more ancient
than the days of Augustus. Pagans in succes-
sive ages said, " These people are unlike us,
and refuse to be made like us : let us punish
them." The Jews were steadfast in their
separateness, and through that separateness
Christianity was born. A modern book on
Liberty has maintained that from the freedom
of individual men to persist in idiosyncrasies the
world may be enriched. Why should we not
apply this argument to the idiosyncrasy of a
nation, and pause in our haste to hoot it down ?
There is still a great function for the steadfast-

356 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH.

ness of the Jew : not that he should shut out
the utmost illumination which knowledge can
throw on his national history, but that he
should cherish the store of inheritance which
that history has left him. Every Jew should
be conscious that he is one of a multitude
possessing common objects of piety in the im-
mortal achievements and immortal sorrows of
ancestors who have transmitted to them a phy-
sical and mental type strong enough, eminent
enough in faculties, pregnant enough with
peculiar promise, to constitute a new bene-
ficent individuality among the nations, and,
by confuting the traditions of scorn, nobly
avenge the wrongs done to their Fathers.

There is a sense in which the worthy child
of a nation that has brought forth illustrious
prophets, high and unique among the poets
of the world, is bound by their visions.

Is bound ?

Yes, for the effective bond of human action
is feeling, and the worthy child of a people
owning the triple name of Hebrew, Israelite,
and Jew, feels his kinship with the glories and
the sorrows, the degradation and the possible
renovation of his national family.

THE MODERN HEP ! HEP ! HEP ! 357

Will any one teach the nullification of this
feeling and call his doctrine a philosophy ?
He will teach a blinding superstition — the
superstition that a theory of human wellbeing
can be constructed in disregard of the influ-
ences which have made us human.

THE END.

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