IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH

GEORGE ELIOT

Second Edition

William Blackwood and SonsEdinburgh and LondonMDCCCLXXIX

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

 --Phaedrus

CONTENTS

 I. LOOKING INWARD

 II. LOOKING BACKWARD

 III. HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH

 IV. A MAN SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY

 V. A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN

 VI. ONLY TEMPER

 VII. A POLITICAL MOLECULE

 VIII. THE WATCH-DOG OF KNOWLEDGE

 IX. A HALF-BREED

 X. DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY

 XI. THE WASP CREDITED WITH THE HONEYCOMB

 XII. "SO YOUNG!"

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

 XIV. THE TOO READY WRITER

 XV. DISEASES OF SMALL AUTHORSHIP

 XVI. MORAL SWINDLERS

 XVII. SHADOWS OF THE COMING RACE

XVIII. THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP!

I. 

LOOKING INWARD. 

It is my habit to give an account to myself of the characters I meetwith: can I give any true account of my own? I am a bachelor, withoutdomestic distractions of any sort, and have all my life been anattentive companion to myself, flattering my nature agreeably onplausible occasions, reviling it rather bitterly when it mortified me, and in general remembering its doings and sufferings with a tenacitywhich is too apt to raise surprise if not disgust at the carelessinaccuracy of my acquaintances, who impute to me opinions I never held, express their desire to convert me to my favourite ideas, forget whetherI have ever been to the East, and are capable of being three severaltimes astonished at my never having told them before of my accident inthe Alps, causing me the nervous shock which has ever since notablydiminished my digestive powers. Surely I ought to know myself betterthan these indifferent outsiders can know me; nay, better even than myintimate friends, to whom I have never breathed those items of my inwardexperience which have chiefly shaped my life. 

Yet I have often been forced into the reflection that even theacquaintances who are as forgetful of my biography and tenets as theywould be if I were a dead philosopher, are probably aware of certainpoints in me which may not be included in my most active suspicion. Wesing an exquisite passage out of tune and innocently repeat it for thegreater pleasure of our hearers. Who can be aware of what his foreignaccent is in the ears of a native? And how can a man be conscious ofthat dull perception which causes him to mistake altogether what willmake him agreeable to a particular woman, and to persevere eagerly in abehaviour which she is privately recording against him? I have had someconfidences from my female friends as to their opinion of other men whomI have observed trying to make themselves amiable, and it has occurredto me that though I can hardly be so blundering as Lippus and the restof those mistaken candidates for favour whom I have seen ruining theirchance by a too elaborate personal canvass, I must still come under thecommon fatality of mankind and share the liability to be absurd withoutknowing that I am absurd. It is in the nature of foolish reasoning toseem good to the foolish reasoner. Hence with all possible study ofmyself, with all possible effort to escape from the pitiable illusionwhich makes men laugh, shriek, or curl the lip at Folly's likeness, intotal unconsciousness that it resembles themselves, I am obliged torecognise that while there are secrets in me unguessed by others, theseothers have certain items of knowledge about the extent of my powers andthe 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, andwhile suffering pangs of pallid shyness was yet proud of my superiorityas a dancing pupil, imagining for myself a high place in the estimationof beholders; but I can now picture the amusement they had in theincongruity of my solemn face and ridiculous legs. What sort of hornpipeam I dancing now?

Thus if I laugh at you, O fellow-men! if I trace with curious interestyour labyrinthine self-delusions, note the inconsistencies in yourzealous adhesions, and smile at your helpless endeavours in a rashlychosen part, it is not that I feel myself aloof from you: the moreintimately I seem to discern your weaknesses, the stronger to me is theproof that I share them. How otherwise could I get the discernment?--foreven what we are averse to, what we vow not to entertain, must haveshaped or shadowed itself within us as a possibility before we can thinkof 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 notignorant of it, that I too am laughable on unsuspected occasions; nay, in the very tempest and whirlwind of my anger, I include myself under myown indignation. If the human race has a bad reputation, I perceive thatI cannot escape being compromised. And thus while I carry in myself thekey to other men's experience, it is only by observing others that I canso far correct my self-ignorance as to arrive at the certainty that I amliable to commit myself unawares and to manifest some incompetency whichI 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? Inall autobiography there is, nay, ought to be, an incompleteness whichmay have the effect of falsity. We are each of us bound to reticence bythe piety we owe to those who have been nearest to us and have had amingled influence over our lives; by the fellow-feeling which shouldrestrain us from turning our volunteered and picked confessions into anact of accusation against others, who have no chance of vindicatingthemselves; and most of all by that reverence for the higher efforts ofour common nature, which commands us to bury its lowest fatalities, itsinvincible remnants of the brute, its most agonising struggles withtemptation, in unbroken silence. But the incompleteness which comes ofself-ignorance may be compensated by self-betrayal. A man who isaffected to tears in dwelling on the generosity of his own sentimentsmakes me aware of several things not included under those terms. Who hassinned more against those three duteous reticences than Jean Jacques?Yet half our impressions of his character come not from what he means toconvey, but from what he unconsciously enables us to discern. 

This _naïve_ veracity of self-presentation is attainable by theslenderest talent on the most trivial occasions. The least lucid andimpressive of orators may be perfectly successful in showing us the weakpoints of his grammar. Hence I too may be so far like Jean Jacques as tocommunicate more than I am aware of. I am not indeed writing anautobiography, or pretending to give an unreserved description ofmyself, but only offering some slight confessions in an apologeticlight, to indicate that if in my absence you dealt as freely with myunconscious weaknesses as I have dealt with the unconscious weaknessesof others, I should not feel myself warranted by common-sense inregarding your freedom of observation as an exceptional case ofevil-speaking; or as malignant interpretation of a character whichreally offers no handle to just objection; or even as an unfair use foryour amusement of disadvantages which, since they are mine, should beregarded with more than ordinary tenderness. Let me at least try to feelmyself in the ranks with my fellow-men. It is true, that I would rathernot hear either your well-founded ridicule or your judicious strictures. Though not averse to finding fault with myself, and conscious ofdeserving lashes, I like to keep the scourge in my own discriminatinghand. I never felt myself sufficiently meritorious to like being hatedas a proof of my superiority, or so thirsty for improvement as to desirethat all my acquaintances should give me their candid opinion of me. Ireally do not want to learn from my enemies: I prefer having none tolearn from. Instead of being glad when men use me despitefully, I wishthey would behave better and find a more amiable occupation for theirintervals of business. In brief, after a close intimacy with myself fora longer period than I choose to mention, I find within me a permanentlonging for approbation, sympathy, and love. 

Yet I am a bachelor, and the person I love best has never loved me, orknown that I loved her. Though continually in society, and caring aboutthe joys and sorrows of my neighbours, I feel myself, so far as mypersonal lot is concerned, uncared for and alone. "Your own fault, mydear fellow!" said Minutius Felix, one day that I had incautiouslymentioned this uninteresting fact. And he was right--in senses otherthan he intended. Why should I expect to be admired, and have my companydoated on? I have done no services to my country beyond those of everypeaceable orderly citizen; and as to intellectual contribution, my onlypublished work was a failure, so that I am spoken of to inquiringbeholders as "the author of a book you have probably not seen. " (Thework was a humorous romance, unique in its kind, and I am told is muchtasted in a Cherokee translation, where the jokes are rendered with allthe serious eloquence characteristic of the Red races. ) This sort ofdistinction, as a writer nobody is likely to have read, can hardlycounteract an indistinctness in my articulation, which thebest-intentioned loudness will not remedy. Then, in some quarters myawkward feet are against me, the length of my upper lip, and aninveterate way I have of walking with my head foremost and my chinprojecting. One can become only too well aware of such things by lookingin the glass, or in that other mirror held up to nature in the frankopinions of street-boys, or of our Free People travelling by excursiontrain; and no doubt they account for the half-suppressed smile which Ihave observed on some fair faces when I have first been presented beforethem. This direct perceptive judgment is not to be argued against. But Iam tempted to remonstrate when the physical points I have mentioned areapparently taken to warrant unfavourable inferences concerning my mentalquickness. With all the increasing uncertainty which modern progress hasthrown over the relations of mind and body, it seems tolerably clearthat wit cannot be seated in the upper lip, and that the balance of thehaunches in walking has nothing to do with the subtle discrimination ofideas. Yet strangers evidently do not expect me to make a cleverobservation, and my good things are as unnoticed as if they wereanonymous pictures. I have indeed had the mixed satisfaction of findingthat when they were appropriated by some one else they were foundremarkable and even brilliant. It is to be borne in mind that I am notrich, have neither stud nor cellar, and no very high connections such asgive to a look of imbecility a certain prestige of inheritance through atitled line; just as "the Austrian lip" confers a grandeur of historicalassociations on a kind of feature which might make us reject anadvertising footman. I have now and then done harm to a good cause byspeaking for it in public, and have discovered too late that my attitudeon the occasion would more suitably have been that of negativebeneficence. Is it really to the advantage of an opinion that I shouldbe known to hold it? And as to the force of my arguments, that is asecondary consideration with audiences who have given a new scope to the_ex pede Herculem_ principle, and from awkward feet infer awkwardfallacies. Once, when zeal lifted me on my legs, I distinctly heard anenlightened artisan remark, "Here's a rum cut!"--and doubtless hereasoned in the same way as the elegant Glycera when she politely putson an air of listening to me, but elevates her eyebrows and chills herglance in sign of predetermined neutrality: both have their reasons forjudging the quality of my speech beforehand. 

This sort of reception to a man of affectionate disposition, who hasalso the innocent vanity of desiring to be agreeable, has naturally adepressing if not embittering tendency; and in early life I began toseek for some consoling point of view, some warrantable method ofsoftening the hard peas I had to walk on, some comfortable fanaticismwhich might supply the needed self-satisfaction. At one time I dweltmuch on the idea of compensation; trying to believe that I was all thewiser for my bruised vanity, that I had the higher place in the truespiritual scale, and even that a day might come when some visibletriumph would place me in the French heaven of having the laughers on myside. But I presently perceived that this was a very odious sort ofself-cajolery. Was it in the least true that I was wiser than several ofmy friends who made an excellent figure, and were perhaps praised alittle beyond their merit? Is the ugly unready man in the corner, outside the current of conversation, really likely to have a fairerview of things than the agreeable talker, whose success strikes theunsuccessful as a repulsive example of forwardness and conceit? And asto compensation in future years, would the fact that I myself got itreconcile me to an order of things in which I could see a multitude withas bad a share as mine, who, instead of getting their correspondingcompensation, were getting beyond the reach of it in old age? What couldbe more contemptible than the mood of mind which makes a man measure thejustice of divine or human law by the agreeableness of his own shadowand the ample satisfaction of his own desires?

I dropped a form of consolation which seemed to be encouraging me in thepersuasion that my discontent was the chief evil in the world, and mybenefit the soul of good in that evil. May there not be at least apartial release from the imprisoning verdict that a man's philosophy isthe formula of his personality? In certain branches of science we canascertain our personal equation, the measure of difference between ourown judgments and an average standard: may there not be somecorresponding correction of our personal partialities in moraltheorising? If a squint or other ocular defect disturbs my vision, I canget instructed in the fact, be made aware that my condition is abnormal, and either through spectacles or diligent imagination I can learn theaverage appearance of things: is there no remedy or corrective for thatinward squint which consists in a dissatisfied egoism or other want ofmental balance? In my conscience I saw that the bias of personaldiscontent was just as misleading and odious as the bias ofself-satisfaction. Whether we look through the rose-coloured glass orthe indigo, we are equally far from the hues which the healthy human eyebeholds in heaven above and earth below. I began to dread ways ofconsoling which were really a flattering of native illusions, afeeding-up into monstrosity of an inward growth alreadydisproportionate; to get an especial scorn for that scorn of mankindwhich is a transmuted disappointment of preposterous claims; to watchwith peculiar alarm lest what I called my philosophic estimate of thehuman lot in general, should be a mere prose lyric expressing my ownpain and consequent bad temper. The standing-ground worth striving afterseemed to be some Delectable Mountain, whence I could see things inproportions as little as possible determined by that self-partialitywhich certainly plays a necessary part in our bodily sustenance, but hasa starving effect on the mind. 

Thus I finally gave up any attempt to make out that I preferred cuttinga bad figure, and that I liked to be despised, because in this way I wasgetting more virtuous than my successful rivals; and I have long lookedwith suspicion on all views which are recommended as peculiarlyconsolatory to wounded vanity or other personal disappointment. Theconsolations of egoism are simply a change of attitude or a resort to anew kind of diet which soothes and fattens it. Fed in this way it is aptto become a monstrous spiritual pride, or a chuckling satisfaction thatthe final balance will not be against us but against those who noweclipse us. Examining the world in order to find consolation is verymuch like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order tofind our own name, if not in the text, at least in a laudatory note:whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered usfrom a true knowledge of the contents. But an attention fixed on themain theme or various matter of the book would deliver us from thatslavish subjection to our own self-importance. And I had the mightyvolume of the world before me. Nay, I had the struggling action of amyriad lives around me, each single life as dear to itself as mine tome. Was there no escape here from this stupidity of a murmuringself-occupation? Clearly enough, if anything hindered my thought fromrising to the force of passionately interested contemplation, or my poorpent-up pond of sensitiveness from widening into a beneficent river ofsympathy, it was my own dulness; and though I could not make myself thereverse of shallow all at once, I had at least learned where I hadbetter turn my attention. 

Something came of this alteration in my point of view, though I admitthat the result is of no striking kind. It is unnecessary for me toutter modest denials, since none have assured me that I have a vastintellectual scope, or--what is more surprising, considering I havedone so little--that I might, if I chose, surpass any distinguished manwhom they wish to depreciate. I have not attained any lofty peak ofmagnanimity, nor would I trust beforehand in my capability of meeting asevere demand for moral heroism. But that I have at least succeeded inestablishing a habit of mind which keeps watch against myself-partiality and promotes a fair consideration of what touches thefeelings or the fortunes of my neighbours, seems to be proved by theready confidence with which men and women appeal to my interest in theirexperience. It is gratifying to one who would above all things avoid theinsanity of fancying himself a more momentous or touching object than hereally is, to find that nobody expects from him the least sign of suchmental aberration, and that he is evidently held capable of listening toall kinds of personal outpouring without the least disposition to becomecommunicative in the same way. This confirmation of the hope that mybearing is not that of the self-flattering lunatic is given me in amplemeasure. My acquaintances tell me unreservedly of their triumphs andtheir piques; explain their purposes at length, and reassure me withcheerfulness as to their chances of success; insist on their theoriesand accept me as a dummy with whom they rehearse their side of futurediscussions; unwind their coiled-up griefs in relation to theirhusbands, or recite to me examples of feminine incomprehensibleness astypified in their wives; mention frequently the fair applause whichtheir merits have wrung from some persons, and the attacks to whichcertain oblique motives have stimulated others. At the time when I wasless free from superstition about my own power of charming, Ioccasionally, in the glow of sympathy which embraced me and my confidingfriend on the subject of his satisfaction or resentment, was urged tohint at a corresponding experience in my own case; but the signs of arapidly lowering pulse and spreading nervous depression in my previouslyvivacious interlocutor, warned me that I was acting on that dangerousmisreading, "Do as you are done by. " Recalling the true version of thegolden rule, I could not wish that others should lower my spirits as Iwas lowering my friend's. After several times obtaining the same resultfrom a like experiment in which all the circumstances were varied exceptmy own personality, I took it as an established inference that thesefitful signs of a lingering belief in my own importance were generallyfelt to be abnormal, and were something short of that sanity which Iaimed to secure. Clearness on this point is not without itsgratifications, as I have said. While my desire to explain myself inprivate ears has been quelled, the habit of getting interested in theexperience of others has been continually gathering strength, and I amreally at the point of finding that this world would be worth living inwithout any lot of one's own. Is it not possible for me to enjoy thescenery of the earth without saying to myself, I have a cabbage-gardenin it? But this sounds like the lunacy of fancying oneself everybodyelse and being unable to play one's own part decently--another form ofthe disloyal attempt to be independent of the common lot, and to livewithout a sharing of pain. 

Perhaps I have made self-betrayals enough already to show that I havenot arrived at that non-human independence. My conversationalreticences about myself turn into garrulousness on paper--as thesea-lion plunges and swims the more energetically because his limbs areof a sort to make him shambling on land. The act of writing, in spite ofpast experience, brings with it the vague, delightful illusion of anaudience nearer to my idiom than the Cherokees, and more numerous thanthe visionary One for whom many authors have declared themselves willingto go through the pleasing punishment of publication. My illusion is ofa more liberal kind, and I imagine a far-off, hazy, multitudinousassemblage, as in a picture of Paradise, making an approving chorus tothe sentences and paragraphs of which I myself particularly enjoy thewriting. The haze is a necessary condition. If any physiognomy becomesdistinct in the foreground, it is fatal. The countenance is sure to beone bent on discountenancing my innocent intentions: it is pale-eyed, incapable of being amused when I am amused or indignant at what makes meindignant; it stares at my presumption, pities my ignorance, or ismanifestly preparing to expose the various instances in which Iunconsciously disgrace myself. I shudder at this too corporeal auditor, and turn towards another point of the compass where the haze isunbroken. Why should I not indulge this remaining illusion, since I donot take my approving choral paradise as a warrant for setting the pressto work again and making some thousand sheets of superior paperunsaleable? I leave my manuscripts to a judgment outside my imagination, but I will not ask to hear it, or request my friend to pronounce, beforeI have been buried decently, what he really thinks of my parts, and tostate candidly whether my papers would be most usefully applied inlighting the cheerful domestic fire. It is too probable that he will beexasperated at the trouble I have given him of reading them; but theconsequent clearness and vivacity with which he could demonstrate to methat the fault of my manuscripts, as of my one published work, is simplyflatness, and not that surpassing subtilty which is the preferableground of popular neglect--this verdict, however instructivelyexpressed, is a portion of earthly discipline of which I will notbeseech my friend to be the instrument. Other persons, I am aware, havenot the same cowardly shrinking from a candid opinion of theirperformances, and are even importunately eager for it; but I haveconvinced myself in numerous cases that such exposers of their own backto the smiter were of too hopeful a disposition to believe in thescourge, and really trusted in a pleasant anointing, an outpouring ofbalm without any previous wounds. I am of a less trusting disposition, and will only ask my friend to use his judgment in insuring me againstposthumous mistake. 

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

II. 

LOOKING BACKWARD. 

Most of us who have had decent parents would shrink from wishing thatour father and mother had been somebody else whom we never knew; yet itis held no impiety, rather, a graceful mark of instruction, for a man towail that he was not the son of another age and another nation, of whichalso he knows nothing except through the easy process of an imperfectimagination and a flattering fancy. 

But the period thus looked back on with a purely admiring regret, asperfect enough to suit a superior mind, is always a long way off; thedesirable contemporaries are hardly nearer than Leonardo da Vinci, mostlikely they are the fellow-citizens of Pericles, or, best of all, of theAeolic lyrists whose sparse remains suggest a comfortable contrast withour redundance. No impassioned personage wishes he had been born in theage of Pitt, that his ardent youth might have eaten the dearest bread, dressed itself with the longest coat-tails and the shortest waist, orheard the loudest grumbling at the heaviest war-taxes; and it would bereally something original in polished verse if one of our young writersdeclared he would gladly be turned eighty-five that he might have knownthe joy and pride of being an Englishman when there were fewer reformsand plenty of highwaymen, fewer discoveries and more faces pitted withthe small-pox, when laws were made to keep up the price of corn, and thetroublesome Irish were more miserable. Three-quarters of a century agois not a distance that lends much enchantment to the view. We arefamiliar with the average men of that period, and are still consciouslyencumbered with its bad contrivances and mistaken acts. The lords andgentlemen painted by young Lawrence talked and wrote their nonsense in atongue we thoroughly understand; hence their times are not muchflattered, not much glorified by the yearnings of that modern sect ofFlagellants who make a ritual of lashing--not themselves but--all theirneighbours. To me, however, that paternal time, the time of my father'syouth, never seemed prosaic, for it came to my imagination first throughhis memories, which made a wondrous perspective to my little daily worldof discovery. And for my part I can call no age absolutely unpoetic: howshould it be so, since there are always children to whom the acorns andthe swallow's eggs are a wonder, always those human passions andfatalities through which Garrick as Hamlet in bob-wig and knee-breechesmoved his audience more than some have since done in velvet tunic andplume? But every age since the golden may be made more or less prosaicby minds that attend only to its vulgar and sordid elements, of whichthere was always an abundance even in Greece and Italy, the favouriterealms of the retrospective optimists. To be quite fair towards theages, a little ugliness as well as beauty must be allowed to each ofthem, a little implicit poetry even to those which echoed loudest withservile, pompous, and trivial prose. 

Such impartiality is not in vogue at present. If we acknowledge ourobligation to the ancients, it is hardly to be done without someflouting of our contemporaries, who with all their faults must beallowed the merit of keeping the world habitable for the refinedeulogists of the blameless past. One wonders whether the remarkableoriginators who first had the notion of digging wells, or of churningfor butter, and who were certainly very useful to their own time as wellas ours, were left quite free from invidious comparison withpredecessors who let the water and the milk alone, or whether somerhetorical nomad, as he stretched himself on the grass with a goodappetite for contemporary butter, became loud on the virtue of ancestorswho were uncorrupted by the produce of the cow; nay, whether in a highflight of imaginative self-sacrifice (after swallowing the butter) heeven wished himself earlier born and already eaten for the sustenance ofa generation more _naïve_ than his own. 

I have often had the fool's hectic of wishing about the unalterable, butwith me that useless exercise has turned chiefly on the conception of adifferent self, and not, as it usually does in literature, on theadvantage of having been born in a different age, and more especially inone where life is imagined to have been altogether majestic andgraceful. With my present abilities, external proportions, and generallysmall provision for ecstatic enjoyment, where is the ground forconfidence that I should have had a preferable career in such an epochof society? An age in which every department has its awkward-squad seemsin my mind's eye to suit me better. I might have wandered by the Strymonunder Philip and Alexander without throwing any new light on method ororganising the sum of human knowledge; on the other hand, I might haveobjected to Aristotle as too much of a systematiser, and have preferredthe freedom of a little self-contradiction as offering more chances oftruth. I gather, too, from the undeniable testimony of his discipleTheophrastus that there were bores, ill-bred persons, and detractorseven in Athens, of species remarkably corresponding to the English, andnot yet made endurable by being classic; and altogether, with my presentfastidious nostril, I feel that I am the better off for possessingAthenian life solely as an inodorous fragment of antiquity. As toSappho's Mitylene, while I am convinced that the Lesbian capital heldsome plain men of middle stature and slow conversational powers, theaddition of myself to their number, though clad in the majestic folds ofthe himation and without cravat, would hardly have made a sensationamong the accomplished fair ones who were so precise in adjusting theirown drapery about their delicate ankles. Whereas by being another sortof person in the present age I might have given it some needfultheoretic clue; or I might have poured forth poetic strains which wouldhave anticipated theory and seemed a voice from "the prophetic soul ofthe wide world dreaming of things to come;" or I might have been one ofthose benignant lovely souls who, without astonishing the public andposterity, make a happy difference in the lives close around them, andin this way lift the average of earthly joy: in some form or other Imight have been so filled from the store of universal existence that Ishould have been freed from that empty wishing which is like a child'scry to be inside a golden cloud, its imagination being too ignorant tofigure the lining of dimness and damp. 

On the whole, though there is some rash boasting about enlightenment, and an occasional insistance on an originality which is that of thepresent year's corn-crop, we seem too much disposed to indulge, and tocall by complimentary names, a greater charity for other portions of thehuman race than for our contemporaries. All reverence and gratitude forthe worthy Dead on whose labours we have entered, all care for thefuture generations whose lot we are preparing; but some affection andfairness for those who are doing the actual work of the world, someattempt to regard them with the same freedom from ill-temper, whether onprivate or public grounds, as we may hope will be felt by those who willcall us ancient! Otherwise, the looking before and after, which is ourgrand human privilege, is in danger of turning to a sort ofother-worldliness, breeding a more illogical indifference or bitternessthan was ever bred by the ascetic's contemplation of heaven. Except onthe ground of a primitive golden age and continuous degeneracy, I see norational footing for scorning the whole present population of the globe, unless I scorn every previous generation from whom they have inheritedtheir diseases of mind and body, and by consequence scorn my own scorn, which is equally an inheritance of mixed ideas and feelings concoctedfor me in the boiling caldron of this universally contemptible life, andso on--scorning to infinity. This may represent some actual states ofmind, for it is a narrow prejudice of mathematicians to suppose thatways of thinking are to be driven out of the field by being reduced toan absurdity. The Absurd is taken as an excellent juicy thistle by manyconstitutions. 

Reflections of this sort have gradually determined me not to grumble atthe age in which I happen to have been born--a natural tendencycertainly older than Hesiod. Many ancient beautiful things are lost, many ugly modern things have arisen; but invert the proposition and itis equally true. I at least am a modern with some interest in advocatingtolerance, and notwithstanding an inborn beguilement which carries myaffection and regret continually into an imagined past, I am aware thatI must lose all sense of moral proportion unless I keep alive a strongerattachment to what is near, and a power of admiring what I best know andunderstand. Hence this question of wishing to be rid of one'scontemporaries associates itself with my filial feeling, and calls upthe thought that I might as justifiably wish that I had had otherparents than those whose loving tones are my earliest memory, and whoselast parting first taught me the meaning of death. I feel bound to quellsuch a wish as blasphemy. 

Besides, there are other reasons why I am contented that my father was acountry parson, born much about the same time as Scott and Wordsworth;notwithstanding certain qualms I have felt at the fact that the propertyon which I am living was saved out of tithe before the period ofcommutation, and without the provisional transfiguration into a modus. It has sometimes occurred to me when I have been taking a slice ofexcellent ham that, from a too tenable point of view, I was breakfastingon a small squealing black pig which, more than half a century ago, wasthe unwilling representative of spiritual advantages not otherwiseacknowledged by the grudging farmer or dairyman who parted with him. Oneenters on a fearful labyrinth in tracing compound interest backward, andsuch complications of thought have reduced the flavour of the ham; butsince I have nevertheless eaten it, the chief effect has been tomoderate the severity of my radicalism (which was not part of mypaternal inheritance) and to raise the assuaging reflection, that if thepig and the parishioner had been intelligent enough to anticipate myhistorical point of view, they would have seen themselves and the rectorin a light that would have made tithe voluntary. Notwithstanding suchdrawbacks I am rather fond of the mental furniture I got by having afather who was well acquainted with all ranks of his neighbours, and amthankful that he was not one of those aristocratic clergymen who couldnot have sat down to a meal with any family in the parish except mylord's--still more that he was not an earl or a marquis. A chiefmisfortune of high birth is that it usually shuts a man out from thelarge sympathetic knowledge of human experience which comes from contactwith various classes on their own level, and in my father's time thatentail of social ignorance had not been disturbed as we see it now. Tolook always from overhead at the crowd of one's fellow-men must be inmany ways incapacitating, even with the best will and intelligence. Theserious blunders it must lead to in the effort to manage them for theirgood, one may see clearly by the mistaken ways people take of flatteringand enticing those whose associations are unlike their own. Hence I havealways thought that the most fortunate Britons are those whoseexperience has given them a practical share in many aspects of thenational lot, who have lived long among the mixed commonalty, roughingit with them under difficulties, knowing how their food tastes to them, and getting acquainted with their notions and motives not by inferencefrom traditional types in literature or from philosophical theories, butfrom daily fellowship and observation. Of course such experience is aptto get antiquated, and my father might find himself much at a lossamongst a mixed rural population of the present day; but he knew verywell what could be wisely expected from the miners, the weavers, thefield-labourers, and farmers of his own time--yes, and from thearistocracy, for he had been brought up in close contact with them andhad been companion to a young nobleman who was deaf and dumb. "Aclergyman, lad, " he used to say to me, "should feel in himself a bit ofevery class;" and this theory had a felicitous agreement with hisinclination and practice, which certainly answered in making him belovedby his parishioners. They grumbled at their obligations towards him; butwhat then? It was natural to grumble at any demand for payment, titheincluded, but also natural for a rector to desire his tithe and lookwell after the levying. A Christian pastor who did not mind about hismoney was not an ideal prevalent among the rural minds of fat centralEngland, and might have seemed to introduce a dangerous laxity ofsupposition about Christian laymen who happened to be creditors. Myfather was none the less beloved because he was understood to be of asaving disposition, and how could he save without getting his tithe? Thesight of him was not unwelcome at any door, and he was remarkable amongthe clergy of his district for having no lasting feud with rich or poorin his parish. I profited by his popularity, and for months after mymother's death, when I was a little fellow of nine, I was taken care offirst at one homestead and then at another; a variety which I enjoyedmuch more than my stay at the Hall, where there was a tutor. Afterwardsfor several years I was my father's constant companion in his outdoorbusiness, riding by his side on my little pony and listening to thelengthy dialogues he held with Darby or Joan, the one on the road or inthe fields, the other outside or inside her door. In my earliestremembrance of him his hair was already grey, for I was his youngest aswell as his only surviving child; and it seemed to me that advanced agewas appropriate to a father, as indeed in all respects I considered hima parent so much to my honour, that the mention of my relationship tohim was likely to secure me regard among those to whom I was otherwise astranger--my father's stories from his life including so many names ofdistant persons that my imagination placed no limit to hisacquaintanceship. He was a pithy talker, and his sermons bore marks ofhis own composition. It is true, they must have been already old when Ibegan to listen to them, and they were no more than a year's supply, sothat they recurred as regularly as the Collects. But though this systemhas been much ridiculed, I am prepared to defend it as equally soundwith that of a liturgy; and even if my researches had shown me that someof my father's yearly sermons had been copied out from the works ofelder divines, this would only have been another proof of his goodjudgment. One may prefer fresh eggs though laid by a fowl of the meanestunderstanding, but why fresh sermons?

Nor can I be sorry, though myself given to meditative if not activeinnovation, that my father was a Tory who had not exactly a dislike toinnovators and dissenters, but a slight opinion of them as persons ofill-founded self-confidence; whence my young ears gathered many detailsconcerning those who might perhaps have called themselves the moreadvanced thinkers in our nearest market-town, tending to convince methat their characters were quite as mixed as those of the thinkersbehind them. This circumstance of my rearing has at least delivered mefrom certain mistakes of classification which I observe in many of mysuperiors, who have apparently no affectionate memories of a goodnessmingled with what they now regard as outworn prejudices. Indeed, myphilosophical notions, such as they are, continually carry me back tothe time when the fitful gleams of a spring day used to show me my ownshadow as that of a small boy on a small pony, riding by the side of alarger cob-mounted shadow over the breezy uplands which we used todignify with the name of hills, or along by-roads with broad grassyborders and hedgerows reckless of utility, on our way to outlyinghamlets, whose groups of inhabitants were as distinctive to myimagination as if they had belonged to different regions of the globe. From these we sometimes rode onward to the adjoining parish, where alsomy father officiated, for he was a pluralist, but--I hasten to add--onthe smallest scale; for his one extra living was a poor vicarage, withhardly fifty parishioners, and its church would have made a very shabbybarn, the grey worm-eaten wood of its pews and pulpit, with their doorsonly half hanging on the hinges, being exactly the colour of a leanmouse which I once observed as an interesting member of the scantcongregation, and conjectured to be the identical church mouse I hadheard referred to as an example of extreme poverty; for I was aprecocious boy, and often reasoned after the fashion of my elders, arguing that "Jack and Jill" were real personages in our parish, andthat if I could identify "Jack" I should find on him the marks of abroken crown. 

Sometimes when I am in a crowded London drawing-room (for I am atown-bird now, acquainted with smoky eaves, and tasting Nature in theparks) quick flights of memory take me back among my father'sparishioners while I am still conscious of elbowing men who wear thesame evening uniform as myself; and I presently begin to wonder whatvarieties of history lie hidden under this monotony of aspect. Some ofthem, perhaps, belong to families with many quarterings; but how many"quarterings" of diverse contact with their fellow-countrymen enter intotheir qualifications to be parliamentary leaders, professors of socialscience, or journalistic guides of the popular mind? Not that I feelmyself a person made competent by experience; on the contrary, I arguethat since an observation of different ranks has still left mepractically a poor creature, what must be the condition of those whoobject even to read about the life of other British classes than theirown? But of my elbowing neighbours with their crush hats, I usuallyimagine that the most distinguished among them have probably had a farmore instructive journey into manhood than mine. Here, perhaps, is athought-worn physiognomy, seeming at the present moment to be classed asa mere species of white cravat and swallow-tail, which may once, likeFaraday's, have shown itself in curiously dubious embryonic form leaningagainst a cottage lintel in small corduroys, and hungrily eating a bitof brown bread and bacon; _there_ is a pair of eyes, now too muchwearied by the gas-light of public assemblies, that once perhaps learnedto read their native England through the same alphabet as mine--notwithin the boundaries of an ancestral park, never even being driventhrough the county town five miles off, but--among the midland villagesand markets, along by the tree-studded hedgerows, and where the heavybarges seem in the distance to float mysteriously among the rushes andthe feathered grass. Our vision, both real and ideal, has since thenbeen filled with far other scenes: among eternal snows and stupendoussun-scorched monuments of departed empires; within the scent of the longorange-groves; and where the temple of Neptune looks out over thesiren-haunted sea. But my eyes at least have kept their earlyaffectionate joy in our native landscape, which is one deep root of ournational life and language. 

And I often smile at my consciousness that certain conservativeprepossessions have mingled themselves for me with the influences of ourmidland scenery, from the tops of the elms down to the buttercups andthe little wayside vetches. Naturally enough. That part of my father'sprime to which he oftenest referred had fallen on the days when thegreat wave of political enthusiasm and belief in a speedy regenerationof all things had ebbed, and the supposed millennial initiative ofFrance was turning into a Napoleonic empire, the sway of an Attila witha mouth speaking proud things in a jargon half revolutionary, halfRoman. Men were beginning to shrink timidly from the memory of theirown words and from the recognition of the fellowships they had formedten years before; and even reforming Englishmen for the most part werewilling to wait for the perfection of society, if only they could keeptheir throats perfect and help to drive away the chief enemy of mankindfrom our coasts. To my father's mind the noisy teachers of revolutionarydoctrine were, to speak mildly, a variable mixture of the fool and thescoundrel; the welfare of the nation lay in a strong Government whichcould 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 myeffective religion, in contrast with the word "rebel, " which seemed tocarry the stamp of evil in its syllables, and, lit by the fact thatSatan was the first rebel, made an argument dispensing with moredetailed inquiry. I gathered that our national troubles in the first twodecades of this century were not at all due to the mistakes of ouradministrators; and that England, with its fine Church and Constitution, would have been exceedingly well off if every British subject had beenthankful for what was provided, and had minded his own business--if, for example, numerous Catholics of that period had been aware how verymodest they ought to be considering they were Irish. The times, I heard, had often been bad; but I was constantly hearing of "bad times" as aname for actual evenings and mornings when the godfathers who gave themthat name appeared to me remarkably comfortable. Altogether, my father'sEngland seemed to me lovable, laudable, full of good men, and havinggood rulers, from Mr Pitt on to the Duke of Wellington, until he was foremancipating the Catholics; and it was so far from prosaic to me that Ilooked into it for a more exciting romance than such as I could find inmy own adventures, which consisted mainly in fancied crises calling forthe resolute wielding of domestic swords and firearms against unapparentrobbers, rioters, and invaders who, it seemed, in my father's prime hadmore chance of being real. The morris-dancers had not then dwindled to aragged and almost vanished rout (owing the traditional name probably tothe historic fancy of our superannuated groom); also, the good old kingwas alive and well, which made all the more difference because I had nonotion what he was and did--only understanding in general that if he hadbeen still on the throne he would have hindered everything that wisepersons thought undesirable. 

Certainly that elder England with its frankly saleable boroughs, socheap compared with the seats obtained under the reformed method, andits boroughs kindly presented by noblemen desirous to encouragegratitude; its prisons with a miscellaneous company of felons andmaniacs 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 ofit, --has great differences from the England of to-day. Yet we discern astrong family likeness. Is there any country which shows at once as muchstability and as much susceptibility to change as ours? Our nationallife is like that scenery which I early learned to love, not subject togreat convulsions, but easily showing more or less delicate (sometimesmelancholy) effects from minor changes. Hence our midland plains havenever lost their familiar expression and conservative spirit for me;yet at every other mile, since I first looked on them, some sign ofworld-wide change, some new direction of human labour has wrought itselfinto what one may call the speech of the landscape--in contrast withthose grander and vaster regions of the earth which keep an indifferentaspect in the presence of men's toil and devices. What does it signifythat a lilliputian train passes over a viaduct amidst the abysses of theApennines, or that a caravan laden with a nation's offerings creepsacross the unresting sameness of the desert, or that a petty cloud ofsteam sweeps for an instant over the face of an Egyptian colossusimmovably submitting to its slow burial beneath the sand? But ourwoodlands and pastures, our hedge-parted corn-fields and meadows, ourbits of high common where we used to plant the windmills, our quietlittle rivers here and there fit to turn a mill-wheel, our villagesalong the old coach-roads, are all easily alterable lineaments that seemto make the face of our Motherland sympathetic with the laborious livesof her children. She does not take their ploughs and waggonscontemptuously, but rather makes every hovel and every sheepfold, everyrailed bridge or fallen tree-trunk an agreeably noticeable incident; nota mere speck in the midst of unmeasured vastness, but a piece of oursocial history in pictorial writing. 

Our rural tracts--where no Babel-chimney scales the heavens--are withoutmighty objects to fill the soul with the sense of an outer worldunconquerably aloof from our efforts. The wastes are playgrounds (andlet us try to keep them such for the children's children who willinherit no other sort of demesne); the grasses and reeds nod to eachother over the river, but we have cut a canal close by; the very heightslaugh with corn in August or lift the plough-team against the sky inSeptember. Then comes a crowd of burly navvies with pickaxes andbarrows, and while hardly a wrinkle is made in the fading mother's faceor a new curve of health in the blooming girl's, the hills are cutthrough or the breaches between them spanned, we choose our level andthe white steam-pennon flies along it. 

But because our land shows this readiness to be changed, all signs ofpermanence 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 abush is left of the old hedgerow. A crumbling bit of wall where thedelicate ivy-leaved toad-flax hangs its light branches, or a bit of greythatch with patches of dark moss on its shoulder and a troop ofgrass-stems on its ridge, is a thing to visit. And then the tiled roofof cottage and homestead, of the long cow-shed where generations of themilky mothers have stood patiently, of the broad-shouldered barns wherethe old-fashioned flail once made resonant music, while the watch-dogbarked at the timidly venturesome fowls making pecking raids on theoutflying grain--the roofs that have looked out from among the elms andwalnut-trees, or beside the yearly group of hay and corn stacks, orbelow the square stone steeple, gathering their grey or ochre-tintedlichens and their olive-green mosses under all ministries, --let uspraise the sober harmonies they give to our landscape, helping to uniteus pleasantly with the elder generations who tilled the soil for usbefore we were born, and paid heavier and heavier taxes, with muchgrumbling, but without that deepest root of corruption--theself-indulgent despair which cuts down and consumes and never plants. 

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

I cherish my childish loves--the memory of that warm little nest wheremy affections were fledged. Since then I have learned to care forforeign countries, for literatures foreign and ancient, for the life ofContinental towns dozing round old cathedrals, for the life of London, half sleepless with eager thought and strife, with indigestion or withhunger; and now my consciousness is chiefly of the busy, anxiousmetropolitan sort. My system responds sensitively to the Londonweather-signs, political, social, literary; and my bachelor's hearth isimbedded where by much craning of head and neck I can catch sight of asycamore in the Square garden: I belong to the "Nation of London. " Why?There have been many voluntary exiles in the world, and probably in thevery first exodus of the patriarchal Aryans--for I am determined not tofetch my examples from races whose talk is of uncles and nofathers--some of those who sallied forth went for the sake of a lovedcompanionship, when they would willingly have kept sight of the familiarplains, and of the hills to which they had first lifted up their eyes. 

III. 

HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 

The serene and beneficent goddess Truth, like other deities whosedisposition has been too hastily inferred from that of the men who haveinvoked them, can hardly be well pleased with much of the worship paidto her even in this milder age, when the stake and the rack have ceasedto form part of her ritual. Some cruelties still pass for service donein her honour: no thumb-screw is used, no iron boot, no scorching offlesh; but plenty of controversial bruising, laceration, and evenlifelong maiming. Less than formerly; but so long as this sort oftruth-worship has the sanction of a public that can often understandnothing in a controversy except personal sarcasm or slanderous ridicule, it is likely to continue. The sufferings of its victims are often aslittle 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 apractice which had certainly budded, but, like Aaron's rod, seemed notdestined to proceed further in that marvellous activity. Meanwhile heoccupied himself in miscellaneous periodical writing and in amultifarious study of moral and physical science. What chiefly attractedhim in all subjects were the vexed questions which have the advantage ofnot admitting the decisive proof or disproof that renders many ingeniousarguments superannuated. Not that Merman had a wrangling disposition: heput all his doubts, queries, and paradoxes deferentially, contendedwithout unpleasant heat and only with a sonorous eagerness against thepersonality of Homer, expressed himself civilly though firmly on theorigin of language, and had tact enough to drop at the right moment suchsubjects as the ultimate reduction of all the so-called elementarysubstances, his own total scepticism concerning Manetho's chronology, oreven the relation between the magnetic condition of the earth and theoutbreak of revolutionary tendencies. Such flexibility was naturallymuch helped by his amiable feeling towards woman, whose nervous system, he was convinced, would not bear the continuous strain of difficulttopics; and also by his willingness to contribute a song whenever thesame desultory charmer proposed music. Indeed his tastes were domesticenough to beguile him into marriage when his resources were still verymoderate and partly uncertain. His friends wished that so ingenious andagreeable a fellow might have more prosperity than they ventured to hopefor him, their chief regret on his account being that he did notconcentrate his talent and leave off forming opinions on at leasthalf-a-dozen of the subjects over which he scattered his attention, especially now that he had married a "nice little woman" (the genericname for acquaintances' wives when they are not markedly disagreeable). He could not, they observed, want all his various knowledge and Laputanideas for his periodical writing which brought him most of his bread, and he would do well to use his talents in getting a speciality thatwould fit him for a post. Perhaps these well-disposed persons were alittle rash in presuming that fitness for a post would be the surestground for getting it; and on the whole, in now looking back on theirwishes for Merman, their chief satisfaction must be that those wishesdid not contribute to the actual result. 

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

"What is the matter, Proteus?"

"A great matter, Julia. That fellow Grampus, whose book is cried up as arevelation, is all wrong about the Magicodumbras and the Zuzumotzis, andI 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 worldright; I shall regenerate history; I shall win the mind of Europe to anew view of social origins; I shall bruise the head of manysuperstitions. "

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

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

"What _do_ you mean, Proteus?"

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

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

Julia Merman was really a "nice little woman, " not one of the statelyDians sometimes spoken of in those terms. Her black _silhouette_ had avery infantine aspect, but she had discernment and wisdom enough to acton the strong hint of that memorable conversation, never again givingher husband the slightest ground for suspecting that she thoughttreasonably of his ideas in relation to the Magicodumbras andZuzumotzis, or in the least relaxed her faith in his infallibilitybecause Europe was not also convinced of it. It was well for her thatshe 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'stroubles. 

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

But the hour of publication came; and to half-a-dozen persons, describedas the learned world of two hemispheres, it became known that Grampuswas attacked. This might have been a small matter; for who or what onearth that is good for anything is not assailed by ignorance, stupidity, or malice--and sometimes even by just objection? But on examination itappeared that the attack might possibly be held damaging, unless theignorance of the author were well exposed and his pretended facts shownto be chimeras of that remarkably hideous kind begotten by imperfectlearning on the more feminine element of original incapacity. Grampushimself did not immediately cut open the volume which Merman had beencareful to send him, not without a very lively and shifting conceptionof the possible effects which the explosive gift might produce on thetoo eminent scholar--effects that must certainly have set in on thethird day from the despatch of the parcel. But in point of fact Grampusknew nothing of the book until his friend Lord Narwhal sent him anAmerican newspaper containing a spirited article by the well-knownProfessor Sperm N. Whale which was rather equivocal in its bearing, thepassages quoted from Merman being of rather a telling sort, and theparagraphs which seemed to blow defiance being unaccountably feeble, coming from so distinguished a Cetacean. Then, by another post, arrivedletters from Butzkopf and Dugong, both men whose signatures werefamiliar to the Teutonic world in the _Selten-erscheinendeMonat-schrift_ or Hayrick for the insertion of Split Hairs, asking theirMaster whether he meant to take up the combat, because, in the contrarycase, 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 heapand cut it open. For his own part he was perfectly at ease about hissystem; but this is a world in which the truth requires defence, andspecious falsehood must be met with exposure. Grampus having once lookedthrough the book, no longer wanted any urging to write the most crushingof replies. This, and nothing less than this, was due from him to thecause of sound inquiry; and the punishment would cost him little pains. In three weeks from that time the palpitating Merman saw his bookannounced in the programme of the leading Review. No need for Grampus toput his signature. Who else had his vast yet microscopic knowledge, whoelse his power of epithet? This article in which Merman was pilloriedand as good as mutilated--for he was shown to have neither ear nor nosefor the subtleties of philological and archaeological study--was muchread and more talked of, not because of any interest in the system ofGrampus, or any precise conception of the danger attending lax views ofthe Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis, but because the sharp epigrams withwhich the victim was lacerated, and the soaring fountains of acrid mudwhich were shot upward and poured over the fresh wounds, were foundamusing in recital. A favourite passage was one in which a certain kindof sciolist was described as a creature of the Walrus kind, having aphantasmal resemblance to higher animals when seen by ignorant minds inthe twilight, dabbling or hobbling in first one element and then theother, without parts or organs suited to either, in fact one of Nature'simpostors who could not be said to have any artful pretences, since acongenital incompetence to all precision of aim and movement made theirevery action a pretence--just as a being born in doeskin gloves wouldnecessarily pass a judgment on surfaces, but we all know what hisjudgment would be worth. In drawing-room circles, and for the immediatehour, this ingenious comparison was as damaging as the showing up ofMerman's mistakes and the mere smattering of linguistic and historicalknowledge which he had presumed to be a sufficient basis for theorising;but the more learned cited his blunders aside to each other and laughedthe laugh of the initiated. In fact, Merman's was a remarkable case ofsudden notoriety. In London drums and clubs he was spoken of abundantlyas one who had written ridiculously about the Magicodumbras andZuzumotzis: the leaders of conversation, whether Christians, Jews, infidels, or of any other confession except the confession of ignorance, pronouncing him shallow and indiscreet if not presumptuous and absurd. He was heard of at Warsaw, and even Paris took knowledge of him. M. Cachalot had not read either Grampus or Merman, but he heard of theirdispute in time to insert a paragraph upon it in his brilliant work, _L'orient au point de vue actuel_, in which he was dispassionate enoughto speak of Grampus as possessing a _coup d'oeil presque français_ inmatters of historical interpretation, and of Merman as nevertheless anobjector _qui mérite d'être connu_. M. Porpesse, also, availing himselfof M. Cachalot's knowledge, reproduced it in an article with certainadditions, which it is only fair to distinguish as his own, implyingthat the vigorous English of Grampus was not always as correct as aFrenchman could desire, while Merman's objections were more sophisticalthan solid. Presently, indeed, there appeared an able _extrait_ ofGrampus's article in the valuable _Rapporteur scientifique ethistorique_, and Merman's mistakes were thus brought under the notice ofcertain Frenchmen who are among the masters of those who know onoriental subjects. In a word, Merman, though not extensively read, wasextensively read about. 

Meanwhile, how did he like it? Perhaps nobody, except his wife, for amoment reflected on that. An amused society considered that he wasseverely punished, but did not take the trouble to imagine hissensations; indeed this would have been a difficulty for persons lesssensitive and excitable than Merman himself. Perhaps that popularcomparison of the Walrus had truth enough to bite and blister onthorough application, even if exultant ignorance had not applauded it. But it is well known that the walrus, though not in the least amalignant animal, if allowed to display its remarkably plain person andblundering performances at ease in any element it chooses, becomesdesperately savage and musters alarming auxiliaries when attacked orhurt. In this characteristic, at least, Merman resembled the walrus. Andnow he concentrated himself with a vengeance. That his counter-theorywas fundamentally the right one he had a genuine conviction, whatevercollateral mistakes he might have committed; and his bread would notcease to be bitter to him until he had convinced his contemporaries thatGrampus had used his minute learning as a dust-cloud to hidesophistical evasions--that, in fact, minute learning was an obstacle toclear-sighted judgment, more especially with regard to the Magicodumbrasand Zuzumotzis, and that the best preparation in this matter was a widesurvey of history and a diversified observation of men. Still, Mermanwas resolved to muster all the learning within his reach, and hewandered day and night through many wildernesses of German print, hetried compendious methods of learning oriental tongues, and, so tospeak, getting at the marrow of languages independently of the bones, for the chance of finding details to corroborate his own views, orpossibly even to detect Grampus in some oversight or textual tampering. All other work was neglected: rare clients were sent away and amazededitors found this maniac indifferent to his chance of gettingbook-parcels from them. It was many months before Merman had satisfiedhimself that he was strong enough to face round upon his adversary. Butat last he had prepared sixty condensed pages of eager argument whichseemed to him worthy to rank with the best models of controversialwriting. He had acknowledged his mistakes, but had restated his theoryso as to show that it was left intact in spite of them; and he had evenfound cases in which Ziphius, Microps, Scrag Whale the explorer, andother Cetaceans of unanswerable authority, were decidedly at issue withGrampus. Especially a passage cited by this last from that greatest offossils Megalosaurus was demonstrated by Merman to be capable of threedifferent interpretations, all preferable to that chosen by Grampus, whotook the words in their most literal sense; for, 1°, the incomparableSaurian, alike unequalled in close observation and far-glancingcomprehensiveness, might have meant those words ironically; 2°, _motzis_was probably a false reading for _potzis_, in which case its bearing wasreversed; and 3°, it is known that in the age of the Saurians therewere conceptions about the _motzis_ which entirely remove it from thecategory of things comprehensible in an age when Saurians runridiculously small: all which views were godfathered by names quite fitto be ranked with that of Grampus. In fine, Merman wound up hisrejoinder by sincerely thanking the eminent adversary without whosefierce assault he might not have undertaken a revision in the course ofwhich he had met with unexpected and striking confirmations of his ownfundamental views. Evidently Merman's anger was at white heat. 

The rejoinder being complete, all that remained was to find a suitablemedium for its publication. This was not so easy. Distinguished mediumswould not lend themselves to contradictions of Grampus, or if theywould, Merman's article was too long and too abstruse, while he wouldnot consent to leave anything out of an article which had nosuperfluities; for all this happened years ago when the world was at adifferent stage. At last, however, he got his rejoinder printed, and noton hard terms, since the medium, in every sense modest, did not ask himto 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 correctGrampus in matters of erudition, and an eminent man has something elseto do than to refute a petty objector twice over. What was essential hadbeen done: the public had been enabled to form a true judgment ofMerman's incapacity, the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis were butsubsidiary elements in Grampus's system, and Merman might now be dealtwith by younger members of the master's school. But he had at least thesatisfaction of finding that he had raised a discussion which would notbe let die. The followers of Grampus took it up with an ardour andindustry of research worthy of their exemplar. Butzkopf made it thesubject of an elaborate _Einleitung_ to his important work, _DieBedeutung des Aegyptischen Labyrinthes_; and Dugong, in a remarkableaddress which he delivered to a learned society in Central Europe, introduced Merman's theory with so much power of sarcasm that it becamea theme of more or less derisive allusion to men of many tongues. Mermanwith his Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis was on the way to become aproverb, being used illustratively by many able journalists who tookthose names of questionable things to be Merman's own invention, "thanwhich, " said one of the graver guides, "we can recall few moremelancholy examples of speculative aberration. " Naturally the subjectpassed into popular literature, and figured very commonly in advertisedprogrammes. The fluent Loligo, the formidable Shark, and a youngermember of his remarkable family known as S. Catulus, made a specialreputation by their numerous articles, eloquent, lively, or abusive, allon the same theme, under titles ingeniously varied, alliterative, sonorous, or boldly fanciful; such as, "Moments with Mr Merman, " "MrMerman and the Magicodumbras, " "Greenland Grampus and Proteus Merman, ""Grampian Heights and their Climbers, or the New Excelsior. " They tossedhim on short sentences; they swathed him in paragraphs of windingimagery; they found him at once a mere plagiarist and a theoriser ofunexampled perversity, ridiculously wrong about _potzis_ and ignorant ofPali; they hinted, indeed, at certain things which to their knowledge hehad silently brooded over in his boyhood, and seemed tolerably wellassured that this preposterous attempt to gainsay an incomparableCetacean of world-wide fame had its origin in a peculiar mixture ofbitterness and eccentricity which, rightly estimated and seen in itsdefinite proportions, would furnish the best key to his argumentation. All alike were sorry for Merman's lack of sound learning, but how couldtheir readers be sorry? Sound learning would not have been amusing; andas it was, Merman was made to furnish these readers with amusement at noexpense of trouble on their part. Even burlesque writers looked into hisbook to see where it could be made use of, and those who did not knowhim were desirous of meeting him at dinner as one likely to feed theircomic 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 eminencestoo high and arduous for human ability, and had given an example ofignominious failure edifying to the humble Christian. 

All this might be very advantageous for able persons whose superfluousfund of expression needed a paying investment, but the effect on Mermanhimself was unhappily not so transient as the busy writing and speakingof which he had become the occasion. His certainty that he was rightnaturally got stronger in proportion as the spirit of resistance wasstimulated. The scorn and unfairness with which he felt himself to havebeen treated by those really competent to appreciate his ideas hadgalled him and made a chronic sore; and the exultant chorus of theincompetent seemed a pouring of vinegar on his wound. His brain became aregistry of the foolish and ignorant objections made against him, and ofcontinually amplified answers to these objections. Unable to get hisanswers printed, he had recourse to that more primitive mode ofpublication, oral transmission or button-holding, now generally regardedas a troublesome survival, and the once pleasant, flexible Merman was onthe way to be shunned as a bore. His interest in new acquaintancesturned chiefly on the possibility that they would care about theMagicodumbras and Zuzumotzis; that they would listen to his complaintsand exposures of unfairness, and not only accept copies of what he hadwritten on the subject, but send him appreciative letters inacknowledgment. Repeated disappointment of such hopes tended to embitterhim, and not the less because after a while the fashion of mentioninghim died out, allusions to his theory were less understood, and peoplecould only pretend to remember it. And all the while Merman wasperfectly sure that his very opponents who had knowledge enough to becapable judges were aware that his book, whatever errors of statementthey might detect in it, had served as a sort of divining rod, pointingout hidden sources of historical interpretation; nay, his jealousexamination discerned in a new work by Grampus himself a certainshifting of ground which--so poor Merman declared--was the sign of anintention gradually to appropriate the views of the man he had attemptedto brand as an ignorant impostor. 

And Julia? And the housekeeping?--the rent, food, and clothing, whichcontroversy can hardly supply unless it be of the kind that serves as arecommendation to certain posts. Controversial pamphlets have been knownto earn large plums; but nothing of the sort could be expected fromunpractical heresies about the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis. Painfullythe contrary. Merman's reputation as a sober thinker, a safe writer, asound lawyer, was irretrievably injured: the distractions of controversyhad caused him to neglect useful editorial connections, and indeed hisdwindling care for miscellaneous subjects made his contributions toodull to be desirable. Even if he could now have given a new turn to hisconcentration, and applied his talents so as to be ready to show himselfan exceptionally qualified lawyer, he would only have been like anarchitect in competition, too late with his superior plans; he would nothave had an opportunity of showing his qualification. He was thrown outof the course. The small capital which had filled up deficiencies ofincome was almost exhausted, and Julia, in the effort to make suppliesequal to wants, had to use much ingenuity in diminishing the wants. Thebrave and affectionate woman whose small outline, so unimpressiveagainst an illuminated background, held within it a good share offeminine heroism, did her best to keep up the charm of home and sootheher husband's excitement; parting with the best jewel among her weddingpresents in order to pay rent, without ever hinting to her husband thatthis sad result had come of his undertaking to convince people who onlylaughed at him. She was a resigned little creature, and reflected thatsome husbands took to drinking and others to forgery: hers had onlytaken to the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis, and was not unkind--only alittle more indifferent to her and the two children than she had everexpected he would be, his mind being eaten up with "subjects, " andconstantly a little angry, not with her, but with everybody else, especially those who were celebrated. 

This was the sad truth. Merman felt himself ill-used by the world, andthought very much worse of the world in consequence. The gall of hisadversaries' 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 eagermonotonous construction which comes of feverish excitement on a singletopic and uses up the intellectual strength. 

Merman had never been a rich man, but he was now conspicuously poor, andin need of the friends who had power or interest which he believed theycould exert on his behalf. Their omitting or declining to give this helpcould not seem to him so clearly as to them an inevitable consequence ofhis having become impracticable, or at least of his passing for a manwhose views were not likely to be safe and sober. Each friend in turnoffended him, though unwillingly, and was suspected of wishing to shakehim off. It was not altogether so; but poor Merman's society hadundeniably ceased to be attractive, and it was difficult to help him. Atlast the pressure of want urged him to try for a post far beneath hisearlier prospects, and he gained it. He holds it still, for he has novices, and his domestic life has kept up a sweetening current of motivearound and within him. Nevertheless, the bitter flavour mingling itselfwith all topics, the premature weariness and withering, are irrevocablythere. It is as if he had gone through a disease which alters what wecall the constitution. He has long ceased to talk eagerly of the ideaswhich possess him, or to attempt making proselytes. The dial has movedonward, 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 ideawhich was at the root of his too rash theorising has been adopted byGrampus and received with general respect, no reference being heard tothe ridiculous figure this important conception made when ushered in bythe incompetent "Others. "

Now and then, on rare occasions, when a sympathetic _tête-à-tête_ hasrestored some of his old expansiveness, he will tell a companion in arailway carriage, or other place of meeting favourable toautobiographical confidences, what has been the course of things in hisparticular case, as an example of the justice to be expected of theworld. The companion usually allows for the bitterness of a disappointedman, and is secretly disinclined to believe that Grampus was to blame. 

IV. 

A MAN SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY. 

Among the many acute sayings of La Rochefoucauld, there is hardly onemore acute than this: "La plus grande ambition n'en a pas la moindreapparence lorsqu'elle se rencontre dans une impossibilité absolued'arriver où elle aspire. " Some of us might do well to use this hint inour treatment of acquaintances and friends from whom we are expectinggratitude because we are so very kind in thinking of them, invitingthem, and even listening to what they say--considering how insignificantthey must feel themselves to be. We are often fallaciously confident insupposing that our friend's state of mind is appropriate to our moderateestimate of his importance: almost as if we imagined the humble mollusc(so useful as an illustration) to have a sense of his own exceedingsoftness and low place in the scale of being. Your mollusc, on thecontrary, is inwardly objecting to every other grade of solid ratherthan to himself. Accustomed to observe what we think an unwarrantableconceit exhibiting itself in ridiculous pretensions and forwardness toplay the lion's part, in obvious self-complacency and loudperemptoriness, we are not on the alert to detect the egoistic claims ofa more exorbitant kind often hidden under an apparent neutrality or anacquiescence in being put out of the question. 

Thoughts of this kind occurred to me yesterday when I saw the name ofLentulus in the obituary. The majority of his acquaintances, I imagine, have always thought of him as a man justly unpretending and as nobody'srival; but some of them have perhaps been struck with surprise at hisreserve in praising the works of his contemporaries, and have now andthen felt themselves in need of a key to his remarks on men of celebrityin various departments. He was a man of fair position, deriving hisincome from a business in which he did nothing, at leisure to frequentclubs and at ease in giving dinners; well-looking, polite, and generallyacceptable in society as a part of what we may call its bread-crumb--theneutral basis needful for the plums and spice. Why, then, did he speakof the modern Maro or the modern Flaccus with a peculiarity in his toneof assent to other people's praise which might almost have led you tosuppose that the eminent poet had borrowed money of him and showed anindisposition to repay? He had no criticism to offer, no sign ofobjection more specific than a slight cough, a scarcely perceptiblepause before assenting, and an air of self-control in his utterance--asif certain considerations had determined him not to inform against theso-called poet, who to his knowledge was a mere versifier. If you hadquestioned him closely, he would perhaps have confessed that he didthink something better might be done in the way of Eclogues andGeorgics, or of Odes and Epodes, and that to his mind poetry wassomething very different from what had hitherto been known under thatname. 

For my own part, being of a superstitious nature, given readily toimagine alarming causes, I immediately, on first getting these mystichints from Lentulus, concluded that he held a number of entirelyoriginal poems, or at the very least a revolutionary treatise onpoetics, in that melancholy manuscript state to which works excellingall that is ever printed are necessarily condemned; and I was long timidin speaking of the poets when he was present. For what might notLentulus have done, or be profoundly aware of, that would make myignorant impressions ridiculous? One cannot well be sure of the negativein such a case, except through certain positives that bear witness toit; and those witnesses are not always to be got hold of. But timewearing on, I perceived that the attitude of Lentulus towards thephilosophers was essentially the same as his attitude towards the poets;nay, there was something so much more decided in his mode of closing hismouth after brief speech on the former, there was such an air of raptconsciousness in his private hints as to his conviction that allthinking hitherto had been an elaborate mistake, and as to his ownpower of conceiving a sound basis for a lasting superstructure, that Ibegan to believe less in the poetical stores, and to infer that the lineof Lentulus lay rather in the rational criticism of our beliefs and insystematic construction. In this case I did not figure to myself theexistence of formidable manuscripts ready for the press; for greatthinkers are known to carry their theories growing within their mindslong before committing them to paper, and the ideas which made a newpassion for them when their locks were jet or auburn, remain perilouslyunwritten, an inwardly developing condition of their successive selves, until the locks are grey or scanty. I only meditated improvingly on theway in which a man of exceptional faculties, and even carrying withinhim some of that fierce refiner's fire which is to purge away the drossof human error, may move about in society totally unrecognised, regardedas a person whose opinion is superfluous, and only rising into a powerin emergencies of threatened black-balling. Imagine a Descartes or aLocke being recognised for nothing more than a good fellow and aperfect gentleman--what a painful view does such a picture suggest ofimpenetrable dulness in the society around them!

I would at all times rather be reduced to a cheaper estimate of aparticular person, if by that means I can get a more cheerful view of myfellow-men generally; and I confess that in a certain curiosity whichled me to cultivate Lentulus's acquaintance, my hope leaned to thediscovery 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 revolutionarypoetical critic, nor an epoch-making philosopher, my admiration for thepoets and thinkers whom he rated so low would recover all its buoyancy, and I should not be left to trust to that very suspicious sort of meritwhich constitutes an exception in the history of mankind, and recommendsitself as the total abolitionist of all previous claims on ourconfidence. You are not greatly surprised at the infirm logic of thecoachman who would persuade you to engage him by insisting that anyother would be sure to rob you in the matter of hay and corn, thusdemanding a difficult belief in him as the sole exception from thefrailties of his calling; but it is rather astonishing that thewholesale decriers of mankind and its performances should be even moreunwary in their reasoning than the coachman, since each of them notmerely confides in your regarding himself as an exception, but overlooksthe almost certain fact that you are wondering whether he inwardlyexcepts _you_. Now, conscious of entertaining some common opinions whichseemed 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 whichhe seems to have found nowhere else. And for whatever purposes silencemay be equal to gold, it cannot be safely taken as an indication ofspecific ideas. I sought to know why Lentulus was more than indifferentto the poets, and what was that new poetry which he had either writtenor, as to its principles, distinctly conceived. But I presently foundthat he knew very little of any particular poet, and had a generalnotion of poetry as the use of artificial language to express unrealsentiments: he instanced "The Giaour, " "Lalla Rookh, " "The Pleasures ofHope, " and "Ruin seize thee, ruthless King;" adding, "and plenty more. "On my observing that he probably preferred a larger, simpler style, heemphatically assented. "Have you not, " said I, "written something ofthat order?" "No; but I often compose as I go along. I see how thingsmight be written as fine as Ossian, only with true ideas. The world hasno notion what poetry will be. "

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

Still, he had himself thrown the chief emphasis of his protest and hisconsciousness of corrective illumination on the philosophic thinking ofour race; and his tone in assuring me that everything which had beendone in that way was wrong--that Plato, Robert Owen, and Dr Tuffle whowrote in the 'Regulator, ' were all equally mistaken--gave mysuperstitious nature a thrill of anxiety. After what had passed aboutthe poets, it did not seem likely that Lentulus had all systems byheart; but who could say he had not seized that thread which maysomewhere hang out loosely from the web of things and be the clue ofunravelment? We need not go far to learn that a prophet is not made byerudition. Lentulus at least had not the bias of a school; and if itturned out that he was in agreement with any celebrated thinker, ancient or modern, the agreement would have the value of an undesignedcoincidence not due to forgotten reading. It was therefore with renewedcuriosity that I engaged him on this large subject--the universalerroneousness of thinking up to the period when Lentulus began thatprocess. And here I found him more copious than on the theme of poetry. He admitted that he did contemplate writing down his thoughts, but hisdifficulty was their abundance. Apparently he was like the woodcutterentering the thick forest and saying, "Where shall I begin?" The sameobstacle appeared in a minor degree to cling about his verbalexposition, and accounted perhaps for his rather helter-skelter choiceof remarks bearing on the number of unaddressed letters sent to thepost-office; on what logic really is, as tending to support the buoyancyof human mediums and mahogany tables; on the probability of all miraclesunder all religions when explained by hidden laws, and myunreasonableness in supposing that their profuse occurrence at half aguinea an hour in recent times was anything more than a coincidence; onthe haphazard way in which marriages are determined--showing thebaselessness of social and moral schemes; and on his expectation that heshould offend the scientific world when he told them what he thought ofelectricity as an agent. 

No man's appearance could be graver or more gentleman-like than that ofLentulus as we walked along the Mall while he delivered theseobservations, understood by himself to have a regenerative bearing onhuman society. His wristbands and black gloves, his hat and nicelyclipped hair, his laudable moderation in beard, and his evidentdiscrimination in choosing his tailor, all seemed to excuse theprevalent estimate of him as a man untainted with heterodoxy, and likelyto be so unencumbered with opinions that he would always be useful as anassenting and admiring listener. Men of science seeing him at theirlectures doubtless flattered themselves that he came to learn from them;the philosophic ornaments of our time, expounding some of their luminousideas in the social circle, took the meditative gaze of Lentulus for oneof surprise not unmixed with a just reverence at such close reasoningtowards so novel a conclusion; and those who are called men of theworld considered him a good fellow who might be asked to vote for afriend of their own and would have no troublesome notions to make himunaccommodating. 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 anindication of native benignity, because of his gaseous, illimitablyexpansive conceit. Yes, conceit; for that his enormous and contentedlyignorant confidence in his own rambling thoughts was usually clad in adecent silence, is no reason why it should be less strictly called bythe name directly implying a complacent self-estimate unwarranted byperformance. Nay, the total privacy in which he enjoyed hisconsciousness of inspiration was the very condition of its undisturbedplacid nourishment and gigantic growth. Your audibly arrogant manexposes himself to tests: in attempting to make an impression on othershe may possibly (not always) be made to feel his own lack ofdefiniteness; and the demand for definiteness is to all of us a needfulcheck on vague depreciation of what others do, and vague ecstatic trustin our own superior ability. But Lentulus was at once so unreceptive, and so little gifted with the power of displaying his miscellaneousdeficiency of information, that there was really nothing to hinder hisastonishment at the spontaneous crop of ideas which his mind secretlyyielded. If it occurred to him that there were more meanings than onefor the word "motive, " since it sometimes meant the end aimed at andsometimes the feeling that prompted the aiming, and that the word"cause" was also of changeable import, he was naturally struck with thetruth of his own perception, and was convinced that if this vein werewell followed out much might be made of it. Men were evidently in thewrong about cause and effect, else why was society in the confused statewe behold? And as to motive, Lentulus felt that when he came to writedown his views he should look deeply into this kind of subject and showup thereby the anomalies of our social institutions; meanwhile thevarious aspects of "motive" and "cause" flitted about among the motleycrowd of ideas which he regarded as original, and pregnant withreformative efficacy. For his unaffected goodwill made him regard allhis insight as only valuable because it tended towards reform. 

The respectable man had got into his illusory maze of discoveries byletting go that clue of conformity in his thinking which he had keptfast hold of in his tailoring and manners. He regarded heterodoxy as apower in itself, and took his inacquaintance with doctrines for acreative dissidence. But his epitaph needs not to be a melancholy one. His benevolent disposition was more effective for good than his silentpresumption for harm. He might have been mischievous but for the lack ofwords: instead of being astonished at his inspirations in private, hemight have clad his addled originalities, disjointed commonplaces, blinddenials, and balloon-like conclusions, in that mighty sort of languagewhich would have made a new Koran for a knot of followers. I mean nodisrespect to the ancient Koran, but one would not desire the roc to laymore eggs and give us a whole wing-flapping brood to soar and maketwilight. 

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

V. 

A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN. 

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

But there are studious, deliberate forms of insincerity which it is fairto be impatient with: Hinze's, for example. From his name you mightsuppose him to be German: in fact, his family is Alsatian, but has beensettled in England for more than one generation. He is the superlativelydeferential man, and walks about with murmured wonder at the wisdom anddiscernment of everybody who talks to him. He cultivates the low-toned_tête-à-tête, _ keeping his hat carefully in his hand and often strokingit, while he smiles with downcast eyes, as if to relieve his feelingsunder the pressure of the remarkable conversation which it is his honourto enjoy at the present moment. I confess to some rage on hearing himyesterday talking to Felicia, who is certainly a clever woman, and, without any unusual desire to show her cleverness, occasionally sayssomething 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 manysubjects on which the best things were said long ago, and inconversation with a person who has been newly introduced thosewell-worn themes naturally recur as a further development of salutationsand preliminary media of understanding, such as pipes, chocolate, ormastic-chewing, which serve to confirm the impression that our newacquaintance is on a civilised footing and has enough regard forformulas to save us from shocking outbursts of individualism, to whichwe are always exposed with the tamest bear or baboon. Considered purelyas a matter of information, it cannot any longer be important for us tolearn that a British subject included in the last census holds Shakspereto be supreme in the presentation of character; still, it is asadmissible for any one to make this statement about himself as to rubhis hands and tell you that the air is brisk, if only he will let itfall as a matter of course, with a parenthetic lightness, and notannounce his adhesion to a commonplace with an emphatic insistance, asif it were a proof of singular insight. We mortals should chiefly liketo talk to each other out of goodwill and fellowship, not for the sakeof hearing revelations or being stimulated by witticisms; and I haveusually found that it is the rather dull person who appears to bedisgusted with his contemporaries because they are not always strikinglyoriginal, and to satisfy whom the party at a country house should haveincluded the prophet Isaiah, Plato, Francis Bacon, and Voltaire. It isalways your heaviest bore who is astonished at the tameness of moderncelebrities: naturally; for a little of his company has reduced them toa state of flaccid fatigue. It is right and meet that there should be anabundant utterance of good sound commonplaces. Part of an agreeabletalker's charm is that he lets them fall continually with no more thantheir due emphasis. Giving a pleasant voice to what we are all wellassured of, makes a sort of wholesome air for more special and dubiousremark to move in. 

Hence it seemed to me far from unbecoming in Felicia that in her firstdialogue with Hinze, previously quite a stranger to her, herobservations were those of an ordinarily refined and well-educated womanon standard subjects, and might have been printed in a manual of politetopics and creditable opinions. She had no desire to astonish a man ofwhom she had heard nothing particular. It was all the more exasperatingto see and hear Hinze's reception of her well-bred conformities. Felicia's acquaintances know her as the suitable wife of a distinguishedman, a sensible, vivacious, kindly-disposed woman, helping her husbandwith graceful apologies written and spoken, and making her receptionsagreeable to all comers. But you would have imagined that Hinze had beenprepared by general report to regard this introduction to her as anopportunity comparable to an audience of the Delphic Sibyl. When she haddelivered herself on the changes in Italian travel, on the difficulty ofreading Ariosto in these busy times, on the want of equilibrium inFrench political affairs, and on the pre-eminence of German music, hewould know what to think. Felicia was evidently embarrassed by hisreverent wonder, and, in dread lest she should seem to be playing theoracle, became somewhat confused, stumbling on her answers rather thanchoosing them. But this made no difference to Hinze's rapt attention andsubdued eagerness of inquiry. He continued to put large questions, bending his head slightly that his eyes might be a little lifted inawaiting 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 suffersfrom two diseases--bad taste in the patrons and want of inspiration inthe 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 nothingcan please. "

"That would be too severe a misfortune for others, " says mycomplimentary ape. "You approve, perhaps, of Rosemary's 'Babes in theWood, ' as something fresh and _naïve_ in sculpture?"

"I think it enchanting. "

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

"Heaven forbid! It would be an impertinence in me to praise a work ofhis--to pronounce on its quality; and that I happen to like it can be ofno consequence to him. "

Here was an occasion for Hinze to smile down on his hat and strokeit--Felicia's ignorance that her praise was inestimable being peculiarlynoteworthy to an observer of mankind. Presently he was quite sure thather favourite author was Shakspere, and wished to know what she thoughtof Hamlet's madness. When she had quoted Wilhelm Meister on this point, and had afterwards testified that "Lear" was beyond adequatepresentation, that "Julius Caesar" was an effective acting play, andthat a poet may know a good deal about human nature while knowing littleof geography, Hinze appeared so impressed with the plenitude of theserevelations that he recapitulated them, weaving them together withthreads of compliment--"As you very justly observed;" and--"It is mosttrue, as you say;" and--"It were well if others noted what you haveremarked. "

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

But perhaps you would say that his adulatory manner was originallyadopted under strong promptings of self-interest, and that his absurdlyover-acted deference to persons from whom he expects no patronage is theunreflecting persistence of habit--just as those who live with the deafwill shout to everybody else. 

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

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

What is the reason of all this subdued ecstasy, moving about, hat inhand, with well-dressed hair and attitudes of unimpeachable correctness?Some persons conscious of sagacity decide at once that Hinze knows whathe is about in flattering Tulpian, and has a carefully appraised end toserve though they may not see it They are misled by the common mistakeof supposing that men's behaviour, whether habitual or occasional, ischiefly determined by a distinctly conceived motive, a definite objectto be gained or a definite evil to be avoided. The truth is, that, theprimitive wants of nature once tolerably satisfied, the majority ofmankind, even in a civilised life full of solicitations, are withdifficulty aroused to the distinct conception of an object towards whichthey will direct their actions with careful adaptation, and it is yetrarer to find one who can persist in the systematic pursuit of such anend. Few lives are shaped, few characters formed, by the contemplationof definite consequences seen from a distance and made the goal ofcontinuous effort or the beacon of a constantly avoided danger: suchcontrol by foresight, such vivid picturing and practical logic are thedistinction of exceptionally strong natures; but society is chiefly madeup of human beings whose daily acts are all performed either inunreflecting obedience to custom and routine or from immediatepromptings of thought or feeling to execute an immediate purpose. Theypay their poor-rates, give their vote in affairs political or parochial, wear a certain amount of starch, hinder boys from tormenting thehelpless, and spend money on tedious observances called pleasures, without mentally adjusting these practices to their own well-understoodinterest or to the general, ultimate welfare of the human race; and whenthey fall into ungraceful compliment, excessive smiling or otherluckless efforts of complaisant behaviour, these are but the tricks orhabits gradually formed under the successive promptings of a wish to beagreeable, stimulated day by day without any widening resources forgratifying the wish. It does not in the least follow that they areseeking by studied hypocrisy to get something for themselves. And sowith Hinze's deferential bearing, complimentary parentheses, andworshipful tones, which seem to some like the over-acting of a part in acomedy. He expects no appointment or other appreciable gain throughTulpian's favour; he has no doubleness towards Felicia; there is nosneering or backbiting obverse to his ecstatic admiration. He is verywell off in the world, and cherishes no unsatisfied ambition that couldfeed design and direct flattery. As you perceive, he has had theeducation and other advantages of a gentleman without being conscious ofmarked result, such as a decided preference for any particular ideas orfunctions: his mind is furnished as hotels are, with everything foroccasional and transient use. But one cannot be an Englishman andgentleman in general: it is in the nature of things that one must havean individuality, though it may be of an often-repeated type. As Hinzein growing to maturity had grown into a particular form and expressionof person, so he necessarily gathered a manner and frame of speech whichmade him additionally recognisable. His nature is not tuned to the pitchof a genuine direct admiration, only to an attitudinising deferencewhich does not fatigue itself with the formation of real judgments. Allhuman achievement must be wrought down to this spoon-meat--this mixtureof other persons' washy opinions and his own flux of reverence for whatis third-hand, before Hinze can find a relish for it. 

He has no more leading characteristic than the desire to stand well withthose who are justly distinguished; he has no base admirations, and youmay know by his entire presentation of himself, from the management ofhis hat to the angle at which he keeps his right foot, that he aspiresto correctness. Desiring to behave becomingly and also to make a figurein dialogue, he is only like the bad artist whose picture is a failure. We may pity these ill-gifted strivers, but not pretend that their worksare pleasant to behold. A man is bound to know something of his ownweight and muscular dexterity, and the puny athlete is called foolishbefore he is seen to be thrown. Hinze has not the stuff in him to be atonce agreeably conversational and sincere, and he has got himself up tobe at all events agreeably conversational. Notwithstanding thisdeliberateness of intention in his talk he is unconscious of falsity, for he has not enough of deep and lasting impression to find a contrastor diversity between his words and his thoughts. He is not fairly to becalled a hypocrite, but I have already confessed to the moreexasperation at his make-believe reverence, because it has no deephunger to excuse it. 

VI. 

ONLY TEMPER. 

What is temper? Its primary meaning, the proportion and mode in whichqualities are mingled, is much neglected in popular speech, yet evenhere the word often carries a reference to an habitual state or generaltendency of the organism in distinction from what are held to bespecific virtues and vices. As people confess to bad memory withoutexpecting to sink in mental reputation, so we hear a man declared tohave a bad temper and yet glorified as the possessor of every highquality. When he errs or in any way commits himself, his temper isaccused, not his character, and it is understood that but for a brutalbearish mood he is kindness itself. If he kicks small animals, swearsviolently at a servant who mistakes orders, or is grossly rude to hiswife, it is remarked apologetically that these things mean nothing--theyare all temper. 

Certainly there is a limit to this form of apology, and the forgery of abill, or the ordering of goods without any prospect of paying for them, has never been set down to an unfortunate habit of sulkiness or ofirascibility. But on the whole there is a peculiar exercise ofindulgence towards the manifestations of bad temper which tends toencourage them, so that we are in danger of having among us a number ofvirtuous persons who conduct themselves detestably, just as we havehysterical patients who, with sound organs, are apparently labouringunder many sorts of organic disease. Let it be admitted, however, that aman may be "a good fellow" and yet have a bad temper, so bad that werecognise his merits with reluctance, and are inclined to resent hisoccasionally 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 himwith respect, neglectful of his friends, angry in face of legitimatedemands, procrastinating in the fulfilment of such demands, prompted torude words and harsh looks by a moody disgust with his fellow-men ingeneral--and yet, as everybody will assure you, the soul of honour, asteadfast friend, a defender of the oppressed, an affectionate-heartedcreature. Pity that, after a certain experience of his moods, hisintimacy becomes insupportable! A man who uses his balmorals to tread onyour toes with much frequency and an unmistakeable emphasis may prove afast friend in adversity, but meanwhile your adversity has not arrivedand your toes are tender. The daily sneer or growl at your remarks isnot to be made amends for by a possible eulogy or defence of yourunderstanding against depredators who may not present themselves, and onan occasion which may never arise. I cannot submit to a chronic state ofblue and green bruise as a form of insurance against an accident. 

Touchwood's bad temper is of the contradicting pugnacious sort. He isthe honourable gentleman in opposition, whatever proposal or propositionmay be broached, and when others join him he secretly damns theirsuperfluous agreement, quickly discovering that his way of stating thecase is not exactly theirs. An invitation or any sign of expectationthrows him into an attitude of refusal. Ask his concurrence in abenevolent measure: he will not decline to give it, because he has areal sympathy with good aims; but he complies resentfully, though wherehe is let alone he will do much more than any one would have thought ofasking for. No man would shrink with greater sensitiveness from theimputation of not paying his debts, yet when a bill is sent in with anypromptitude he is inclined to make the tradesman wait for the money heis in such a hurry to get. One sees that this antagonistic temper mustbe much relieved by finding a particular object, and that its worstmoments must be those where the mood is that of vague resistance, therebeing nothing specific to oppose. Touchwood is never so little engagingas when he comes down to breakfast with a cloud on his brow, afterparting from you the night before with an affectionate effusiveness atthe end of a confidential conversation which has assured you of mutualunderstanding. Impossible that you can have committed any offence. Ifmice have disturbed him, that is not your fault; but, nevertheless, yourcheerful greeting had better not convey any reference to the weather, else it will be met by a sneer which, taking you unawares, may give youa crushing sense that you make a poor figure with your cheerfulness, which was not asked for. Some daring person perhaps introduces anothertopic, and uses the delicate flattery of appealing to Touchwood for hisopinion, the topic being included in his favourite studies. Anindistinct muttering, with a look at the carving-knife in reply, teachesthat daring person how ill he has chosen a market for his deference. IfTouchwood's behaviour affects you very closely you had better break yourleg 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 younight after night; he will do all the work of your department so as tosave you from any loss in consequence of your accident; he will be evenuniformly tender to you till you are well on your legs again, when hewill some fine morning insult you without provocation, and make you wishthat his generous goodness to you had not closed your lips againstretort. 

It is not always necessary that a friend should break his leg forTouchwood to feel compunction and endeavour to make amends for hisbearishness or insolence. He becomes spontaneously conscious that he hasmisbehaved, and he is not only ashamed of himself, but has the betterprompting to try and heal any wound he has inflicted. Unhappily thehabit of being offensive "without meaning it" leads usually to a way ofmaking amends which the injured person cannot but regard as a beingamiable without meaning it. The kindnesses, the complimentaryindications or assurances, are apt to appear in the light of a penanceadjusted to the foregoing lapses, and by the very contrast they offercall up a keener memory of the wrong they atone for. They are not aspontaneous 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 nowexpresses more than he quite feels. It is in vain. Having made youextremely uncomfortable last week he has absolutely diminished hispower of making you happy to-day: he struggles against this result byexcessive effort, but he has taught you to observe his fitfulness ratherthan to be warmed by his episodic show of regard. 

I suspect that many persons who have an uncertain, incalculable temperflatter themselves that it enhances their fascination; but perhaps theyare under the prior mistake of exaggerating the charm which they supposeto be thus strengthened; in any case they will do well not to trust inthe attractions of caprice and moodiness for a long continuance or forclose intercourse. A pretty woman may fan the flame of distant adorersby harassing them, but if she lets one of them make her his wife, thepoint of view from which he will look at her poutings and tossings andmysterious inability to be pleased will be seriously altered. And ifslavery to a pretty woman, which seems among the least conditional formsof abject service, will not bear too great a strain from her bad tempereven though her beauty remain the same, it is clear that a man whoseclaims lie in his high character or high performances had need impressus very constantly with his peculiar value and indispensableness, if heis to test our patience by an uncertainty of temper which leaves usabsolutely without grounds for guessing how he will receive our personsor humbly advanced opinions, or what line he will take on any but themost momentous occasions. 

For it is among the repulsive effects of this bad temper, which issupposed to be compatible with shining virtues, that it is apt todetermine a man's sudden adhesion to an opinion, whether on a personalor impersonal matter, without leaving him time to consider his grounds. The adhesion is sudden and momentary, but it either forms a precedentfor his line of thought and action, or it is presently seen to have beeninconsistent with his true mind. This determination of partisanship bytemper has its worst effects in the career of the public man, who isalways in danger of getting so enthralled by his own words that he looksinto facts and questions not to get rectifying knowledge, but to getevidence that will justify his actual attitude which was assumed underan impulse dependent on something else than knowledge. There has beenplenty 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 amuch worse woe to befall a man is to have every judgment controlled byan "I said it"--to make a divinity of his own short-sightedness orpassion-led aberration and explain the world in its honour. There ishardly a more pitiable degradation than this for a man of high gifts. Hence I cannot join with those who wish that Touchwood, being youngenough to enter on public life, should get elected for Parliament anduse his excellent abilities to serve his country in that conspicuousmanner. For hitherto, in the less momentous incidents of private life, his capricious temper has only produced the minor evil of inconsistency, and he is even greatly at ease in contradicting himself, provided he cancontradict you, and disappoint any smiling expectation you may haveshown that the impressions you are uttering are likely to meet with hissympathy, considering that the day before he himself gave you theexample which your mind is following. He is at least free from thosefetters of self-justification which are the curse of parliamentaryspeaking, and what I rather desire for him is that he should produce thegreat book which he is generally pronounced capable of writing, and puthis best self imperturbably on record for the advantage of society;because I should then have steady ground for bearing with his diurnalincalculableness, and could fix my gratitude as by a strong staple tothat unvarying monumental service. Unhappily, Touchwood's great powershave been only so far manifested as to be believed in, not demonstrated. Everybody rates them highly, and thinks that whatever he chose to dowould be done in a first-rate manner. Is it his love of disappointingcomplacent expectancy which has gone so far as to keep up thislamentable negation, and made him resolve not to write the comprehensivework 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 tofrequent speaking on platforms or from his seat in the House, it wouldhardly be possible for him to maintain much integrity of opinion, or toavoid courses of partisanship which a healthy public sentiment wouldstamp with discredit. Say that he were endowed with the purest honesty, it would inevitably be dragged captive by this mysterious, Protean badtemper. There would be the fatal public necessity of justifyingoratorical Temper which had got on its legs in its bitter mood and madeinsulting imputations, or of keeping up some decent show of consistencywith opinions vented out of Temper's contradictoriness. And words wouldhave to be followed up by acts of adhesion. 

Certainly if a bad-tempered man can be admirably virtuous, he must be sounder extreme difficulties. I doubt the possibility that a high order ofcharacter can coexist with a temper like Touchwood's. For it is of thenature of such temper to interrupt the formation of healthy mentalhabits, which depend on a growing harmony between perception, conviction, and impulse. There may be good feelings, good deeds--for ahuman nature may pack endless varieties and blessed inconsistencies inits windings--but it is essential to what is worthy to be called highcharacter, that it may be safely calculated on, and that its qualitiesshall have taken the form of principles or laws habitually, if notperfectly, obeyed. 

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

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

VII. 

A POLITICAL MOLECULE. 

The most arrant denier must admit that a man often furthers larger endsthan he is conscious of, and that while he is transacting his particularaffairs with the narrow pertinacity of a respectable ant, he subservesan economy larger than any purpose of his own. Society is happily notdependent for the growth of fellowship on the small minority alreadyendowed with comprehensive sympathy: any molecule of the body politicworking towards his own interest in an orderly way gets hisunderstanding more or less penetrated with the fact that his interest isincluded in that of a large number. I have watched several politicalmolecules being educated in this way by the nature of things into afaint feeling of fraternity. But at this moment I am thinking of Spike, an elector who voted on the side of Progress though he was not inwardlyattached to it under that name. For abstractions are deities having manyspecific names, local habitations, and forms of activity, and so get amultitude of devout servants who care no more for them under theirhighest titles than the celebrated person who, putting with forciblebrevity a view of human motives now much insisted on, asked whatPosterity had done for him that he should care for Posterity? To manyminds even among the ancients (thought by some to have been invariablypoetical) the goddess of wisdom was doubtless worshipped simply as thepatroness of spinning and weaving. Now spinning and weaving from amanufacturing, wholesale point of view, was the chief form under whichSpike from early years had unconsciously been a devotee of Progress. 

He was a political molecule of the most gentleman-like appearance, notless than six feet high, and showing the utmost nicety in the care ofhis person and equipment. His umbrella was especially remarkable for itsneatness, though perhaps he swung it unduly in walking. His complexionwas fresh, his eyes small, bright, and twinkling. He was seen to greatadvantage in a hat and greatcoat--garments frequently fatal to theimpressiveness of shorter figures; but when he was uncovered in thedrawing-room, it was impossible not to observe that his head shelved offtoo rapidly from the eyebrows towards the crown, and that his length oflimb seemed to have used up his mind so as to cause an air ofabstraction from conversational topics. He appeared, indeed, to bepreoccupied with a sense of his exquisite cleanliness, clapped his handstogether and rubbed them frequently, straightened his back, and evenopened his mouth and closed it again with a slight snap, apparently forno other purpose than the confirmation to himself of his own powers inthat line. These are innocent exercises, but they are not such as giveweight to a man's personality. Sometimes Spike's mind, emerging from itspreoccupation, burst forth in a remark delivered with smiling zest; as, that he did like to see gravel walks well rolled, or that a lady shouldalways wear the best jewellery, or that a bride was a most interestingobject; but finding these ideas received rather coldly, he would relapseinto abstraction, draw up his back, wrinkle his brows longitudinally, and seem to regard society, even including gravel walks, jewellery, andbrides, as essentially a poor affair. Indeed his habit of mind wasdesponding, and he took melancholy views as to the possible extent ofhuman pleasure and the value of existence. Especially after he had madehis fortune in the cotton manufacture, and had thus attained the chiefobject of his ambition--the object which had engaged his talent fororder and persevering application. For his easy leisure caused him much_ennui_. He was abstemious, and had none of those temptations to sensualexcess which fill up a man's time first with indulgence and then withthe process of getting well from its effects. He had not, indeed, exhausted the sources of knowledge, but here again his notions of humanpleasure were narrowed by his want of appetite; for though he seemedrather surprised at the consideration that Alfred the Great was aCatholic, or that apart from the Ten Commandments any conception ofmoral conduct had occurred to mankind, he was not stimulated to furtherinquiries on these remote matters. Yet he aspired to what he regarded asintellectual society, willingly entertained beneficed clergymen, andbought the books he heard spoken of, arranging them carefully on theshelves of what he called his library, and occasionally sitting alone inthe same room with them. But some minds seem well glazed by natureagainst the admission of knowledge, and Spike's was one of them. It wasnot, however, entirely so with regard to politics. He had had a strongopinion about the Reform Bill, and saw clearly that the large tradingtowns ought to send members. Portraits of the Reform heroes hung framedand glazed in his library: he prided himself on being a Liberal. In thislast particular, as well as in not giving benefactions and not makingloans without interest, he showed unquestionable firmness. On the Repealof the Corn Laws, again, he was thoroughly convinced. His mind wasexpansive towards foreign markets, and his imagination could see thatthe people from whom we took corn might be able to take the cotton goodswhich they had hitherto dispensed with. On his conduct in thesepolitical concerns, his wife, otherwise influential as a woman whobelonged to a family with a title in it, and who had condescended inmarrying him, could gain no hold: she had to blush a little at what wascalled her husband's "radicalism"--an epithet which was a very unfairimpeachment of Spike, who never went to the root of anything. But heunderstood his own trading affairs, and in this way became a genuine, constant political element. If he had been born a little later he couldhave been accepted as an eligible member of Parliament, and if he hadbelonged to a high family he might have done for a member of theGovernment. Perhaps his indifference to "views" would have passed foradministrative judiciousness, and he would have been so generally silentthat he must often have been silent in the right place. But this isempty speculation: there is no warrant for saying what Spike would havebeen and known so as to have made a calculable political element, if hehad not been educated by having to manage his trade. A small mindtrained to useful occupation for the satisfying of private need becomesa representative of genuine class-needs. Spike objected to certain itemsof legislation because they hampered his own trade, but his neighbours'trade was hampered by the same causes; and though he would have beensimply selfish in a question of light or water between himself and afellow-townsman, his need for a change in legislation, being shared byall his neighbours in trade, ceased to be simply selfish, and raised himto a sense of common injury and common benefit. True, if the law couldhave been changed for the benefit of his particular business, leavingthe cotton trade in general in a sorry condition while he prospered, Spike might not have thought that result intolerably unjust; but thenature of things did not allow of such a result being contemplated aspossible; it allowed of an enlarged market for Spike only through theenlargement of his neighbours' market, and the Possible is always theultimate master of our efforts and desires. Spike was obliged tocontemplate a general benefit, and thus became public-spirited in spiteof himself. Or rather, the nature of things transmuted his active egoisminto a demand for a public benefit. Certainly if Spike had been born amarquis he could not have had the same chance of being useful as apolitical element. But he might have had the same appearance, have beenequally null in conversation, sceptical as to the reality of pleasure, and destitute of historical knowledge; perhaps even dimly dislikingJesuitism as a quality in Catholic minds, or regarding Bacon as theinventor of physical science. The depths of middle-aged gentlemen'signorance will never be known, for want of public examinations in thisbranch. 

VIII. 

THE WATCH-DOG OF KNOWLEDGE

Mordax is an admirable man, ardent in intellectual work, public-spirited, affectionate, and able to find the right words inconveying ingenious ideas or elevated feeling. Pity that to all thesegraces he cannot add what would give them the utmost finish--theoccasional admission that he has been in the wrong, the occasional frankwelcome of a new idea as something not before present to his mind! Butno: Mordax's self-respect seems to be of that fiery quality whichdemands that none but the monarchs of thought shall have an advantageover him, and in the presence of contradiction or the threat of havinghis notions corrected, he becomes astonishingly unscrupulous and cruelfor so kindly and conscientious a man. 

"You are fond of attributing those fine qualities to Mordax, " saidAcer, the other day, "but I have not much belief in virtues that arealways requiring to be asserted in spite of appearances against them. True fairness and goodwill show themselves precisely where his areconspicuously absent. I mean, in recognising claims which the rest ofthe world are not likely to stand up for. It does not need much love oftruth and justice in me to say that Aldebaran is a bright star, or IsaacNewton the greatest of discoverers; nor much kindliness in me to want mynotes to be heard above the rest in a chorus of hallelujahs to onealready crowned. It is my way to apply tests. Does the man who has theear of the public use his advantage tenderly towards poor fellows whomay 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 aswhat ignorant people take to be tests of intellect and learning. If thescholar or _savant_ cannot answer their haphazard questions on theshortest notice, their belief in his capacity is shaken. But thebetter-informed have given up the Johnsonian theory of mind as a pair oflegs able to walk east or west according to choice. Intellect is nolonger taken to be a ready-made dose of ability to attain eminence (ormediocrity) in all departments; it is even admitted that application inone line of study or practice has often a laming effect in otherdirections, and that an intellectual quality or special facility whichis a furtherance in one medium of effort is a drag in another. We haveconvinced ourselves by this time that a man may be a sage in celestialphysics and a poor creature in the purchase of seed-corn, or even intheorising about the affections; that he may be a mere fumbler inphysiology and yet show a keen insight into human motives; that he mayseem the "poor Poll" of the company in conversation and yet write withsome humorous vigour. It is not true that a man's intellectual power islike the strength of a timber beam, to be measured by its weakest point. 

Why should we any more apply that fallacious standard of what is calledconsistency to a man's moral nature, and argue against the existence offine impulses or habits of feeling in relation to his actionsgenerally, because those better movements are absent in a class of caseswhich act peculiarly on an irritable form of his egoism? The mistakemight be corrected by our taking notice that the ungenerous words oracts which seem to us the most utterly incompatible with gooddispositions in the offender, are those which offend ourselves. Allother persons are able to draw a milder conclusion. Laniger, who has atemper but no talent for repartee, having been run down in a fierce wayby Mordax, is inwardly persuaded that the highly-lauded man is a wolf atheart: he is much tried by perceiving that his own friends seem to thinkno worse of the reckless assailant than they did before; and Corvus, whohas lately been flattered by some kindness from Mordax, is unmindfulenough of Laniger's feeling to dwell on this instance of good-naturewith admiring gratitude. There is a fable that when the badger had beenstung all over by bees, a bear consoled him by a rhapsodic account ofhow he himself had just breakfasted on their honey. The badger replied, peevishly, "The stings are in my flesh, and the sweetness is on yourmuzzle. " The bear, it is said, was surprised at the badger's want ofaltruism. 

But this difference of sensibility between Laniger and his friends onlymirrors in a faint way the difference between his own point of view andthat of the man who has injured him. If those neutral, perhaps evenaffectionate persons, form no lively conception of what Laniger suffers, how should Mordax have any such sympathetic imagination to check him inwhat he persuades himself is a scourging administered by the qualifiedman to the unqualified? Depend upon it, his conscience, though activeenough in some relations, has never given him a twinge because of hispolemical rudeness and even brutality. He would go from the room wherehe has been tiring himself through the watches of the night in liftingand turning a sick friend, and straightway write a reply or rejoinder inwhich he mercilessly pilloried a Laniger who had supposed that he couldtell the world something else or more than had been sanctioned by theeminent Mordax--and what was worse, had sometimes really done so. Doesthis nullify the genuineness of motive which made him tender to hissuffering friend? Not at all. It only proves that his arrogant egoism, set on fire, sends up smoke and flame where just before there had beenthe dews of fellowship and pity. He is angry and equips himselfaccordingly--with a penknife to give the offender a _comprachico_countenance, a mirror to show him the effect, and a pair of nailed bootsto give him his dismissal. All this to teach him who the Romans reallywere, and to purge Inquiry of incompetent intrusion, so rendering animportant service to mankind. 

When a man is in a rage and wants to hurt another in consequence, he canalways regard himself as the civil arm of a spiritual power, and all themore easily because there is real need to assert the righteous efficacyof indignation. I for my part feel with the Lanigers, and should objectall the more to their or my being lacerated and dressed with salt, ifthe administrator of such torture alleged as a motive his care for Truthand posterity, and got himself pictured with a halo in consequence. Intransactions between fellow-men it is well to consider a little, in thefirst place, what is fair and kind towards the person immediatelyconcerned, before we spit and roast him on behalf of the next centurybut one. Wide-reaching motives, blessed and glorious as they are, and ofthe highest sacramental virtue, have their dangers, like all else thattouches the mixed life of the earth. They are archangels with awful browand flaming sword, summoning and encouraging us to do the right and thedivinely heroic, and we feel a beneficent tremor in their presence; butto learn what it is they thus summon us to do, we have to consider themortals we are elbowing, who are of our own stature and our ownappetites. I cannot feel sure how my voting will affect the condition ofCentral Asia in the coming ages, but I have good reason to believe thatthe future populations there will be none the worse off because Iabstain from conjectural vilification of my opponents during the presentparliamentary session, and I am very sure that I shall be less injuriousto my contemporaries. On the whole, and in the vast majority ofinstances, the action by which we can do the best for future ages is ofthe sort which has a certain beneficence and grace for contemporaries. Asour father may reform prisons, but considered in his sourness he doesharm. The deed of Judas has been attributed to far-reaching views, andthe wish to hasten his Master's declaration of himself as the Messiah. Perhaps--I will not maintain the contrary--Judas represented his motivein this way, and felt justified in his traitorous kiss; but my beliefthat he deserved, metaphorically speaking, to be where Dante saw him, atthe bottom of the Malebolge, would not be the less strong because he wasnot convinced that his action was detestable. I refuse to accept a manwho has the stomach for such treachery, as a hero impatient for theredemption of mankind and for the beginning of a reign when the kissesshall be those of peace and righteousness. 

All this is by the way, to show that my apology for Mordax was notfounded on his persuasion of superiority in his own motives, but on thecompatibility of unfair, equivocal, and even cruel actions with a naturewhich, apart from special temptations, is kindly and generous; and alsoto enforce the need of checks from a fellow-feeling with those whom ouracts immediately (not distantly) concern. Will any one be so hardy as tomaintain that an otherwise worthy man cannot be vain and arrogant? Ithink most of us have some interest in arguing the contrary. And it isof the nature of vanity and arrogance, if unchecked, to become cruel andself-justifying. There are fierce beasts within: chain them, chain them, and let them learn to cower before the creature with wider reason. Thisis what one wishes for Mordax--that his heart and brain should restrainthe outleap of roar and talons. 

As to his unwillingness to admit that an idea which he has notdiscovered is novel to him, one is surprised that quick intellect andshrewd observation do not early gather reasons for being ashamed of amental trick which makes one among the comic parts of that various actorConceited Ignorance. 

I have a sort of valet and factotum, an excellent, respectable servant, whose spelling is so unvitiated by non-phonetic superfluities that hewrites _night_ as _nit_. One day, looking over his accounts, I said tohim jocosely, "You are in the latest fashion with your spelling, Pummel:most people spell "night" with a _gh_ between the _i_ and the _t_, butthe greatest scholars now spell it as you do. " "So I suppose, sir, "says Pummel; "I've see it with a _gh_, but I've noways give into thatmyself. " You would never catch Pummel in an interjection of surprise. Ihave sometimes laid traps for his astonishment, but he has escaped themall, either by a respectful neutrality, as of one who would not appearto notice that his master had been taking too much wine, or else by thatstrong persuasion of his all-knowingness which makes it simplyimpossible for him to feel himself newly informed. If I tell him thatthe world is spinning round and along like a top, and that he isspinning 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 puppies in China, that there are duckswith fur coats in Australia, or that in some parts of the world it isthe pink of politeness to put your tongue out on introduction to arespectable stranger, Pummel replies, "So I suppose, sir, " with an airof resignation to hearing my poor version of well-known things, such aselders use in listening to lively boys lately presented with ananecdote book. His utmost concession is, that what you state is what hewould have supplied if you had given him _carte blanche_ instead of yourneedless instruction, and in this sense his favourite answer is, "Ishould say. "

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

I have taken to asking him hard questions, and as I expected, he neveradmits his own inability to answer them without representing it ascommon to the human race. "What is the cause of the tides, Pummel?"

"Well, sir, nobody rightly knows. Many gives their opinion, but if Iwas to give mine, it 'ud be different. "

But while he is never surprised himself, he is constantly imaginingsituations of surprise for others. His own consciousness is that of oneso thoroughly soaked in knowledge that further absorption isimpossible, but his neighbours appear to him to be in the state ofthirsty sponges which it is a charity to besprinkle. His greatinterest in thinking of foreigners is that they must be surprised atwhat they see in England, and especially at the beef. He is oftenoccupied with the surprise Adam must have felt at the sight of theassembled animals--"for he was not like us, sir, used from a b'y toWombwell's shows. " He is fond of discoursing to the lad who acts asshoe-black and general subaltern, and I have overheard him saying tothat small upstart, with some severity, "Now don't you pretend to know, because the more you pretend the more I see your ignirance"--a lucidityon his part which has confirmed my impression that the thoroughlyself-satisfied person is the only one fully to appreciate the charm ofhumility in others. 

Your diffident self-suspecting mortal is not very angry that othersshould feel more comfortable about themselves, provided they are nototherwise offensive: he is rather like the chilly person, glad to sitnext a warmer neighbour; or the timid, glad to have a courageousfellow-traveller. It cheers him to observe the store of small comfortsthat his fellow-creatures may find in their self-complacency, just asone is pleased to see poor old souls soothed by the tobacco and snufffor which one has neither nose nor stomach oneself. 

But your arrogant man will not tolerate a presumption which he sees tobe ill-founded. The service he regards society as most in need of is toput down the conceit which is so particularly rife around him that he isinclined to believe it the growing characteristic of the present age. Inthe schools of Magna Graecia, or in the sixth century of our era, oreven under Kublai Khan, he finds a comparative freedom from thatpresumption by which his contemporaries are stirring his able gall. Theway people will now flaunt notions which are not his without appearingto mind that they are not his, strikes him as especially disgusting. Itmight seem surprising to us that one strongly convinced of his own valueshould prefer to exalt an age in which _he_ did not flourish, if it werenot for the reflection that the present age is the only one in whichanybody has appeared to undervalue him. 

IX. 

A HALF-BREED

An early deep-seated love to which we become faithless has its unfailingNemesis, if only in that division of soul which narrows all newer joysby the intrusion of regret and the established presentiment of change. Irefer not merely to the love of a person, but to the love of ideas, practical beliefs, and social habits. And faithlessness here means not agradual conversion dependent on enlarged knowledge, but a yielding toseductive circumstance; not a conviction that the original choice was amistake, but a subjection to incidents that flatter a growing desire. Inthis sort of love it is the forsaker who has the melancholy lot; for anabandoned belief may be more effectively vengeful than Dido. The childof a wandering tribe caught young and trained to polite life, if hefeels an hereditary yearning can run away to the old wilds and get hisnature into tune. But there is no such recovery possible to the man whoremembers what he once believed without being convinced that he was inerror, who feels within him unsatisfied stirrings towards old belovedhabits and intimacies from which he has far receded without consciousjustification or unwavering sense of superior attractiveness in the new. This involuntary renegade has his character hopelessly jangled and outof tune. He is like an organ with its stops in the lawless condition ofobtruding themselves without method, so that hearers are amazed by themost unexpected transitions--the trumpet breaking in on the flute, andthe oböe confounding both. 

Hence the lot of Mixtus affects me pathetically, notwithstanding that hespends his growing wealth with liberality and manifest enjoyment. Tomost observers he appears to be simply one of the fortunate and alsosharp commercial men who began with meaning to be rich and have becomewhat they meant to be: a man never taken to be well-born, butsurprisingly better informed than the well-born usually are, anddistinguished among ordinary commercial magnates by a personal kindnesswhich prompts him not only to help the suffering in a material waythrough his wealth, but also by direct ministration of his own; yet withall this, diffusing, as it were, the odour of a man delightedlyconscious of his wealth as an equivalent for the other socialdistinctions of rank and intellect which he can thus admire withoutenvying. Hardly one among those superficial observers can suspect thathe aims or has ever aimed at being a writer; still less can they imaginethat his mind is often moved by strong currents of regret and of themost unworldly sympathies from the memories of a youthful time when hischosen associates were men and women whose only distinction was areligious, a philanthropic, or an intellectual enthusiasm, when the ladyon whose words his attention most hung was a writer of minor religiousliterature, when he was a visitor and exhorter of the poor in the alleysof a great provincial town, and when he attended the lectures givenspecially to young men by Mr Apollos, the eloquent congregationalpreacher, who had studied in Germany and had liberal advanced views thenfar beyond the ordinary teaching of his sect. At that time Mixtusthought himself a young man of socially reforming ideas, of religiousprinciples and religious yearnings. It was within his prospects also tobe rich, but he looked forward to a use of his riches chiefly forreforming and religious purposes. His opinions were of a stronglydemocratic stamp, except that even then, belonging to the class ofemployers, he was opposed to all demands in the employed that wouldrestrict the expansiveness of trade. He was the most democratic inrelation to the unreasonable privileges of the aristocracy and landedinterest; and he had also a religious sense of brotherhood with thepoor. Altogether, he was a sincerely benevolent young man, interested inideas, and renouncing personal ease for the sake of study, religiouscommunion, and good works. If you had known him then you would haveexpected him to marry a highly serious and perhaps literary woman, sharing his benevolent and religious habits, and likely to encouragehis studies--a woman who along with himself would play a distinguishedpart in one of the most enlightened religious circles of a greatprovincial capital. 

How is it that Mixtus finds himself in a London mansion, and in societytotally 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 fascinatedothers, by her prettiness, her liveliness, and her music. It is a commonenough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearlythe opposite of his ideal; or if not wholly captivated, at leasteffectively captured by a combination of circumstances along with anunwarily manifested inclination which might otherwise have beentransient. Mixtus was captivated and then captured on the worldly sideof his disposition, which had been always growing and flourishing sideby side with his philanthropic and religious tastes. He had ability inbusiness, and he had early meant to be rich; also, he was getting rich, and the taste for such success was naturally growing with the pleasureof rewarded exertion. It was during a business sojourn in London that hemet Scintilla, who, though without fortune, associated with families ofGreek merchants living in a style of splendour, and with artistspatronised by such wealthy entertainers. Mixtus on this occasion becamefamiliar with a world in which wealth seemed the key to a more brilliantsort of dominance than that of a religious patron in the provincialcircles of X. Would it not be possible to unite the two kinds of sway? Aman bent on the most useful ends might, _with a fortune large enough_, make morality magnificent, and recommend religious principle by showingit in combination with the best kind of house and the most liberal oftables; also with a wife whose graces, wit, and accomplishments gave afinish sometimes lacking even to establishments got up with thatunhesitating worldliness to which high cost is a sufficient reason. Enough. 

Mixtus married Scintilla. Now this lively lady knew nothing ofNonconformists, except that they were unfashionable: she did notdistinguish one conventicle from another, and Mr Apollos with hisenlightened interpretations seemed to her as heavy a bore, if not quiteso ridiculous, as Mr Johns could have been with his solemn twang at theBaptist chapel in the lowest suburbs, or as a local preacher among theMethodists. In general, people who appeared seriously to believe in anysort of doctrine, whether religious, social, or philosophical, seemedrather absurd to Scintilla. Ten to one these theoretic people pronouncedoddly, had some reason or other for saying that the most agreeablethings were wrong, wore objectionable clothes, and wanted you tosubscribe to something. They were probably ignorant of art and music, did not understand _badinage_, and, in fact, could talk of nothingamusing. In Scintilla's eyes the majority of persons were ridiculous anddeplorably wanting in that keen perception of what was good taste, withwhich she herself was blest by nature and education; but the peopleunderstood to be religious or otherwise theoretic, were the mostridiculous of all, without being proportionately amusing and invitable. 

Did Mixtus not discover this view of Scintilla's before their marriage?Or did he allow her to remain in ignorance of habits and opinions whichhad made half the occupation of his youth?

When a man is inclined to marry a particular woman, and has made anycommittal of himself, this woman's opinions, however different from hisown, are readily regarded as part of her pretty ways, especially if theyare merely negative; as, for example, that she does not insist on theTrinity or on the rightfulness or expediency of church rates, but simplyregards her lover's troubling himself in disputation on these heads asstuff and nonsense. The man feels his own superior strength, and is surethat marriage will make no difference to him on the subjects about whichhe is in earnest. And to laugh at men's affairs is a woman's privilege, tending to enliven the domestic hearth. If Scintilla had no liking forthe best sort of nonconformity, she was without any troublesome biastowards Episcopacy, Anglicanism, and early sacraments, and was quitecontented not to go to church. 

As to Scintilla's acquaintance with her lover's tastes on thesesubjects, she was equally convinced on her side that a husband's queerways while he was a bachelor would be easily laughed out of him when hehad married an adroit woman. Mixtus, she felt, was an excellentcreature, quite likable, who was getting rich; and Scintilla meant tohave all the advantages of a rich man's wife. She was not in the least awicked woman; she was simply a pretty animal of the ape kind, with anaptitude for certain accomplishments which education had made the mostof. 

But we have seen what has been the result to poor Mixtus. He has becomericher even than he dreamed of being, has a little palace in London, andentertains with splendour the half-aristocratic, professional, andartistic society which he is proud to think select. This society regardshim as a clever fellow in his particular branch, seeing that he hasbecome a considerable capitalist, and as a man desirable to have on thelist of one's acquaintance. But from every other point of view Mixtusfinds himself personally submerged: what he happens to think is not feltby his esteemed guests to be of any consequence, and what he used tothink with the ardour of conviction he now hardly ever expresses. He istransplanted, and the sap within him has long been diverted into otherthan the old lines of vigorous growth. How could he speak to the artistCrespi or to Sir Hong Kong Bantam about the enlarged doctrine of MrApollos? How could he mention to them his former efforts towardsevangelising the inhabitants of the X. Alleys? And his references to hishistorical and geographical studies towards a survey of possible marketsfor English products are received with an air of ironical suspicion bymany of his political friends, who take his pretension to give adviceconcerning the Amazon, the Euphrates, and the Niger as equivalent to thecurrier's wide views on the applicability of leather. He can only make afigure through his genial hospitality. It is in vain that he buys thebest pictures and statues of the best artists. Nobody will call him ajudge in art. If his pictures and statues are well chosen it isgenerally thought that Scintilla told him what to buy; and yet Scintillain other connections is spoken of as having only a superficial andoften questionable taste. Mixtus, it is decided, is a good fellow, notignorant--no, really having a good deal of knowledge as well as sense, but not easy to classify otherwise than as a rich man. He hasconsequently become a little uncertain as to his own point of view, andin his most unreserved moments of friendly intercourse, even whenspeaking to listeners whom he thinks likely to sympathise with theearlier part of his career, he presents himself in all his variousaspects and feels himself in turn what he has been, what he is, and whatothers take him to be (for this last status is what we must all more orless accept). He will recover with some glow of enthusiasm the vision ofhis old associates, the particular limit he was once accustomed to traceof 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 meansby which you can get what is best worth having in the world, and willarrive at the exclamation "Give me money!" with the tone and gesture ofa man who both feels and knows. Then if one of his audience, not havingmoney, remarks that a man may have made up his mind to do without moneybecause he prefers something else, Mixtus is with him immediately, cordially concurring in the supreme value of mind and genius, whichindeed make his own chief delight, in that he is able to entertain theadmirable possessors of these attributes at his own table, though nothimself reckoned among them. Yet, he will proceed to observe, there wasa time when he sacrificed his sleep to study, and even now amid thepress of business he from time to time thinks of taking up themanuscripts which he hopes some day to complete, and is alwaysincreasing his collection of valuable works bearing on his favouritetopics. And it is true that he has read much in certain directions, andcan remember what he has read; he knows the history and theories ofcolonisation and the social condition of countries that do not atpresent consume a sufficiently large share of our products andmanufactures. He continues his early habit of regarding the spread ofChristianity as a great result of our commercial intercourse with black, brown, and yellow populations; but this is an idea not spoken of in thesort of fashionable society that Scintilla collects round her husband'stable, and Mixtus now philosophically reflects that the cause must comebefore the effect, and that the thing to be directly striven for is thecommercial intercourse, not excluding a little war if that also shouldprove needful as a pioneer of Christianity. He has long been wont tofeel bashful about his former religion; as if it were an old attachmenthaving consequences which he did not abandon but kept in decent privacy, his avowed objects and actual position being incompatible with theirpublic acknowledgment. 

There is the same kind of fluctuation in his aspect towards socialquestions and duties. He has not lost the kindness that used to make hima benefactor and succourer of the needy, and he is still liberal inhelping forward the clever and industrious; but in his activesuperintendence of commercial undertakings he has contracted more andmore of the bitterness which capitalists and employers often feel to bea reasonable mood towards obstructive proletaries. Hence many who thisis an idea not spoken of in the sort of fashionable society thatScintilla collects round her husband's table, and Mixtus nowphilosophically reflects that the cause must come before the effect, andthat the thing to be directly striven for is the commercial intercourse, not excluding a little war if that also should prove needful as apioneer of Christianity. He has long been wont to feel bashful about hisformer religion; as if it were an old attachment having consequenceswhich he did not abandon but kept in decent privacy, his avowed objectsand actual position being incompatible with their public acknowledgment. 

There is the same kind of fluctuation in his aspect towards socialquestions and duties. He has not lost the kindness that used to make hima benefactor and succourer of the needy, and he is still liberal inhelping forward the clever and industrious; but in his activesuperintendence of commercial undertakings he has contracted more andmore of the bitterness which capitalists and employers often feel to bea reasonable mood towards obstructive proletaries. Hence many who haveoccasionally met him when trade questions were being discussed, concludehim to be indistinguishable from the ordinary run of moneyed andmoney-getting men. Indeed, hardly any of his acquaintances know whatMixtus really is, considered as a whole--nor does Mixtus himself knowit. 

X. 

DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY. 

"Il ne faut pas mettre un ridicule où il n'y en a point: c'est se gâterle goût, c'est corrompre son jugement et celui des autres. Mais leridicule qui est quelque part, il faut l'y voir, l'en tirer avec grâceet d'une manière qui plaise et qui instruise. "

I am fond of quoting this passage from La Bruyère, because the subjectis one where I like to show a Frenchman on my side, to save mysentiments from being set down to my peculiar dulness and deficientsense of the ludicrous, and also that they may profit by thatenhancement of ideas when presented in a foreign tongue, that glamour ofunfamiliarity conferring a dignity on the foreign names of very commonthings, of which even a philosopher like Dugald Stewart confesses theinfluence. I remember hearing a fervid woman attempt to recite inEnglish the narrative of a begging Frenchman who described the violentdeath of his father in the July days. The narrative had impressed her, through the mists of her flushed anxiety to understand it, as somethingquite grandly pathetic; but finding the facts turn out meagre, and heraudience cold, she broke off, saying, "It sounded so much finer inFrench--_j'ai vu le sang de mon père_, and so on--I wish I could repeatit in French. " This was a pardonable illusion in an old-fashioned ladywho had not received the polyglot education of the present day; but Iobserve that even now much nonsense and bad taste win admiringacceptance solely by virtue of the French language, and one may fairlydesire that what seems a just discrimination should profit by thefashionable prejudice in favour of La Bruyère's idiom. But I wish he hadadded that the habit of dragging the ludicrous into topics where thechief interest is of a different or even opposite kind is a sign not ofendowment, but of deficiency. The art of spoiling is within reach of thedullest faculty: the coarsest clown with a hammer in his hand mightchip the nose off every statue and bust in the Vatican, and standgrinning at the effect of his work. Because wit is an exquisite productof high powers, we are not therefore forced to admit the sadly confusedinference of the monotonous jester that he is establishing hissuperiority over every less facetious person, and over every topic onwhich he is ignorant or insensible, by being uneasy until he hasdistorted it in the small cracked mirror which he carries about with himas a joking apparatus. Some high authority is needed to give many worthyand timid persons the freedom of muscular repose under the growingdemand on them to laugh when they have no other reason than the peril ofbeing taken for dullards; still more to inspire them with the courage tosay that they object to the theatrical spoiling for themselves and theirchildren of all affecting themes, all the grander deeds and aims of men, by burlesque associations adapted to the taste of rich fishmongers inthe stalls and their assistants in the gallery. The English people inthe present generation are falsely reputed to know Shakspere (as, bysome innocent persons, the Florentine mule-drivers are believed to haveknown the _Divina Commedia_, not, perhaps, excluding all the subtlediscourses in the _Purgatorio_ and _Paradiso_); but there seems a clearprospect that in the coming generation he will be known to them throughburlesques, and that his plays will find a new life as pantomimes. Abottle-nosed Lear will come on with a monstrous corpulence from which hewill frantically dance himself free during the midnight storm; Rosalindand Celia will join in a grotesque ballet with shepherds andshepherdesses; Ophelia in fleshings and a voluminous brevity ofgrenadine will dance through the mad scene, finishing with the famous"attitude of the scissors" in the arms of Laertes; and all the speechesin "Hamlet" will be so ingeniously parodied that the originals will bereduced to a mere _memoria technica_ of the improver's puns--premonitorysigns of a hideous millennium, in which the lion will have to lie downwith the lascivious monkeys whom (if we may trust Pliny) his soulnaturally abhors. 

I have been amazed to find that some artists whose own works have theideal stamp, are quite insensible to the damaging tendency of theburlesquing spirit which ranges to and fro and up and down on the earth, seeing no reason (except a precarious censorship) why it should notappropriate every sacred, heroic, and pathetic theme which serves tomake up the treasure of human admiration, hope, and love. One would havethought that their own half-despairing efforts to invest in worthyoutward shape the vague inward impressions of sublimity, and theconsciousness of an implicit ideal in the commonest scenes, might havemade them susceptible of some disgust or alarm at a species of burlesquewhich is likely to render their compositions no better than a dissolvingview, where every noble form is seen melting into its preposterouscaricature. It used to be imagined of the unhappy medieval Jews thatthey parodied Calvary by crucifying dogs; if they had been guilty theywould at least have had the excuse of the hatred and rage begotten bypersecution. Are we on the way to a parody which shall have no otherexcuse than the reckless search after fodder for degradedappetites--after the pay to be earned by pasturing Circe's herd wherethey may defile every monument of that growing life which should havekept them human?

The world seems to me well supplied with what is genuinely ridiculous:wit and humour may play as harmlessly or beneficently round the changingfacets of egoism, absurdity, and vice, as the sunshine over the ripplingsea or the dewy meadows. Why should we make our delicious sense of theludicrous, with its invigorating shocks of laughter and itsirrepressible smiles which are the outglow of an inward radiation asgentle and cheering as the warmth of morning, flourish like a brigand onthe robbery of our mental wealth?--or let it take its exercise as amadman might, if allowed a free nightly promenade, by drawing thepopulace with bonfires which leave some venerable structure a blackenedruin or send a scorching smoke across the portraits of the past, atwhich we once looked with a loving recognition of fellowship, anddisfigure them into butts of mockery?--nay, worse--use it to degrade thehealthy appetites and affections of our nature as they are seen to bedegraded in insane patients whose system, all out of joint, findsmatter for screaming laughter in mere topsy-turvy, makes every passionpreposterous or obscene, and turns the hard-won order of life into asecond chaos hideous enough to make one wail that the first was everthrilled with light?

This is what I call debasing the moral currency: lowering the value ofevery inspiring fact and tradition so that it will command less and lessof the spiritual products, the generous motives which sustain the charmand elevation of our social existence--the something besides bread bywhich man saves his soul alive. The bread-winner of the family maydemand more and more coppery shillings, or assignats, or greenbacks forhis day's work, and so get the needful quantum of food; but let thatmoral currency be emptied of its value--let a greedy buffoonery debaseall historic beauty, majesty, and pathos, and the more you heap up thedesecrated symbols the greater will be the lack of the ennoblingemotions which subdue the tyranny of suffering, and make ambition onewith social virtue. 

And yet, it seems, parents will put into the hands of their childrenridiculous parodies (perhaps with more ridiculous "illustrations") ofthe poems which stirred their own tenderness or filial piety, and carrythem to make their first acquaintance with great men, great works, orsolemn crises through the medium of some miscellaneous burlesque which, with its idiotic puns and farcical attitudes, will remain among theirprimary associations, and reduce them throughout their time of studiouspreparation for life to the moral imbecility of an inward giggle at whatmight have stimulated their high emulation or fed the fountains ofcompassion, trust, and constancy. One wonders where these parents havedeposited that stock of morally educating stimuli which is to beindependent of poetic tradition, and to subsist in spite of the finestimages being degraded and the finest words of genius being poisoned aswith some befooling drug. 

Will fine wit, will exquisite humour prosper the more through thisturning of all things indiscriminately into food for a gluttonouslaughter, an idle craving without sense of flavours? On the contrary. That delightful power which La Bruyère points to--"le ridicule qui estquelque part, il faut l'y voir, l'en tirer avec grâce et d'une manièrequi plaise et qui instruise"--depends on a discrimination onlycompatible with the varied sensibilities which give sympathetic insight, and with the justice of perception which is another name for graveknowledge. Such a result is no more to be expected from faculties on thestrain to find some small hook by which they may attach the lowestincongruity to the most momentous subject, than it is to be expected ofa sharper, watching for gulls in a great political assemblage, that hewill notice the blundering logic of partisan speakers, or season hisobservation with the salt of historical parallels. But after all ourpsychological teaching, and in the midst of our zeal for education, weare still, most of us, at the stage of believing that mental powers andhabits have somehow, not perhaps in the general statement, but in anyparticular case, a kind of spiritual glaze against conditions which weare continually applying to them. We soak our children in habits ofcontempt and exultant gibing, and yet are confident that--as Clarissaone day said to me--"We can always teach them to be reverent in theright place, you know. " And doubtless if she were to take her boys tosee a burlesque Socrates, with swollen legs, dying in the utterance ofcockney puns, and were to hang up a sketch of this comic scene amongtheir bedroom prints, she would think this preparation not at all to theprejudice of their emotions on hearing their tutor read that narrativeof the _Apology_ which has been consecrated by the reverent gratitude ofages. This is the impoverishment that threatens our posterity:--a newFamine, a meagre fiend with lewd grin and clumsy hoof, is breathing amoral mildew over the harvest of our human sentiments. These are themost delicate elements of our too easily perishable civilisation. Andhere again I like to quote a French testimony. Sainte Beuve, referringto a time of insurrectionary disturbance, says: "Rien de plus prompt àbaisser que la civilisation dans des crises comme celle-ci; on perd entrois semaines le résultat de plusieurs siècles. La civilisation, la_vie_ est une chose apprise et inventée, qu'on le sache bien: '_Inventasaut qui vitam excoluere per artes_. ' Les hommes après quelques années depaix oublient trop cette verité: ils arrivent à croire que la _culture_est chose innée, qu'elle est la même chose que la _nature_. Lasauvagerie est toujours là à deux pas, et, dès qu'on lâche pied, ellerecommence. " We have been severely enough taught (if we were willing tolearn) that our civilisation, considered as a splendid material fabric, is helplessly in peril without the spiritual police of sentiments orideal feelings. And it is this invisible police which we had need, as acommunity, strive to maintain in efficient force. How if a dangerous"Swing" were sometimes disguised in a versatile entertainer devoted tothe amusement of mixed audiences? And I confess that sometimes when Isee a certain style of young lady, who checks our tender admiration withrouge and henna and all the blazonry of an extravagant expenditure, withslang and bold _brusquerie_ intended to signify her emancipated view ofthings, and with cynical mockery which she mistakes for penetration, Iam sorely tempted to hiss out "_Pétroleuse!_" It is a small matter tohave our palaces set aflame compared with the misery of having our senseof a noble womanhood, which is the inspiration of a purifying shame, thepromise of life--penetrating affection, stained and blotted out byimages of repulsiveness. These things come--not of higher education, but--of dull ignorance fostered into pertness by the greedy vulgaritywhich reverses Peter's visionary lesson and learns to call all thingscommon and unclean. It comes of debasing the moral currency. 

The Tirynthians, according to an ancient story reported by Athenaeus, becoming conscious that their trick of laughter at everything andnothing was making them unfit for the conduct of serious affairs, appealed to the Delphic oracle for some means of cure. The godprescribed a peculiar form of sacrifice, which would be effective ifthey could carry it through without laughing. They did their best; butthe flimsy joke of a boy upset their unaccustomed gravity, and in thisway the oracle taught them that even the gods could not prescribe aquick cure for a long vitiation, or give power and dignity to a peoplewho in a crisis of the public wellbeing were at the mercy of a poorjest. 

XI. 

THE WASP CREDITED WITH THE HONEYCOMB

No man, I imagine, would object more strongly than Euphorion tocommunistic principles in relation to material property, but with regardto property in ideas he entertains such principles willingly, and isdisposed to treat the distinction between Mine and Thine in originalauthorship as egoistic, narrowing, and low. I have known him, indeed, insist at some expense of erudition on the prior right of an ancient, amedieval, or an eighteenth century writer to be credited with a view orstatement lately advanced with some show of originality; and thischampionship seems to imply a nicety of conscience towards the dead. Heis evidently unwilling that his neighbours should get more credit thanis due to them, and in this way he appears to recognise a certainproprietorship even in spiritual production. But perhaps it is no realinconsistency that, with regard to many instances of modern origination, it is his habit to talk with a Gallic largeness and refer to theuniverse: he expatiates on the diffusive nature of intellectualproducts, free and all-embracing as the liberal air; on theinfinitesimal smallness of individual origination compared with themassive inheritance of thought on which every new generation enters; onthat growing preparation for every epoch through which certain ideas ormodes of view are said to be in the air, and, still more metaphoricallyspeaking, to be inevitably absorbed, so that every one may be excusedfor not knowing how he got them. Above all, he insists on the propersubordination of the irritable self, the mere vehicle of an idea orcombination which, being produced by the sum total of the human race, must belong to that multiple entity, from the accomplished lecturer orpopulariser who transmits it, to the remotest generation of Fuegians orHottentots, however indifferent these may be to the superiority of theirright above that of the eminently perishable dyspeptic author. 

One may admit that such considerations carry a profound truth to beeven religiously contemplated, and yet object all the more to the modein which Euphorion seems to apply them. I protest against the use ofthese majestic conceptions to do the dirty work of unscrupulosity andjustify the non-payment of conscious debts which cannot be defined orenforced by the law. Especially since it is observable that the largeviews as to intellectual property which can apparently reconcile anable person to the use of lately borrowed ideas as if they were hisown, when this spoliation is favoured by the public darkness, neverhinder him from joining in the zealous tribute of recognition andapplause to those warriors of Truth whose triumphal arches are seen inthe public ways, those conquerors whose battles and "annexations" eventhe carpenters and bricklayers know by name. Surely the acknowledgmentof a mental debt which will not be immediately detected, and may neverbe asserted, is a case to which the traditional susceptibility to"debts of honour" would be suitably transferred. There is no massivepublic opinion that can be expected to tell on these relations ofthinkers and investigators—relations to be thoroughly understoodand felt only by those who are interested in the life of ideas andacquainted with their history. To lay false claim to an invention ordiscovery which has an immediate market value; to vamp up aprofessedly new book of reference by stealing from the pages of onealready produced at the cost of much labour and material; to copysomebody else's poem and send the manuscript to a magazine, or hand itabout among; friends as an original "effusion;" to deliver an elegantextract from a known writer as a piece of improvisedeloquence:—these are the limits within which the dishonestpretence of originality is likely to get hissed or hooted and bringmore or less shame on the culprit. It is not necessary to understandthe merit of a performance, or even to spell with any comfortableconfidence, in order to perceive at once that such pretences are notrespectable. But the difference between these vulgar frauds, thesedevices of ridiculous jays whose ill-secured plumes are seen fallingoff them as they run, and the quiet appropriation of other people'sphilosophic or scientific ideas, can hardly be held to lie in theirmoral quality unless we take impunity as our criterion. The pitiablejays had no presumption in their favour and foolishly fronted an alertincredulity; but Euphorion, the accomplished theorist, has an audiencewho expect much of him, and take it as the most natural thing in theworld that every unusual view which he presents anonymously should bedue solely to his ingenuity. His borrowings are no incongruousfeathers awkwardly stuck on; they have an appropriateness which makesthem seem an answer to anticipation, like the return phrases of amelody. Certainly one cannot help the ignorant conclusions of politesociety, and there are perhaps fashionable persons who, if a speakerhas occasion to explain what the occipat is, will consider that he haslately discovered that curiously named portion of the animal frame:one cannot give a genealogical introduction to every long-stored itemof fact or conjecture that may happen to be a revelation for the largeclass of persons who are understood to judge soundly on a small basisof knowledge. But Euphorion would be very sorry to have it supposedthat he is unacquainted with the history of ideas, and sometimescarries even into minutiae the evidence of his exact registration ofnames in connection with quotable phrases or suggestions: I cantherefore only explain the apparent infirmity of his memory in casesof larger "conveyance" by supposing that he is accustomed by the veryassociation of largeness to range them at once under those grand lawsof the universe in the light of which Mine and Thine disappear and areresolved into Everybody's or Nobody's, and one man's particularobligations to another melt untraceably into the obligations of theearth to the solar system in general. 

Euphorion himself, if a particular omission of acknowledgment werebrought home to him, would probably take a narrower ground ofexplanation. It was a lapse of memory; or it did not occur to him asnecessary in this case to mention a name, the source being wellknown--or (since this seems usually to act as a strong reason formention) he rather abstained from adducing the name because it mightinjure the excellent matter advanced, just as an obscure trade-markcasts discredit on a good commodity, and even on the retailer who hasfurnished himself from a quarter not likely to be esteemed first-rate. No doubt this last is a genuine and frequent reason for thenon-acknowledgment of indebtedness to what one may call impersonal aswell as personal sources: even an American editor of school classicswhose own English could not pass for more than a syntactical shoddy ofthe cheapest sort, felt it unfavourable to his reputation for soundlearning that he should be obliged to the Penny Cyclopaedia, anddisguised 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 richbut unfashionable relations who are visited and received in privacy, andwhose capital is used or inherited without any ostentatious insistanceon their names and places of abode. As to memory, it is known that thisfrail faculty naturally lets drop the facts which are less flattering toour self-love--when it does not retain them carefully as subjects not tobe approached, marshy spots with a warning flag over them. But it isalways interesting to bring forward eminent names, such as Patricius orScaliger, Euler or Lagrange, Bopp or Humboldt. To know exactly what hasbeen drawn from them is erudition and heightens our own influence, whichseems advantageous to mankind; whereas to cite an author whose ideas maypass as higher currency under our own signature can have no objectexcept the contradictory one of throwing the illumination over hisfigure when it is important to be seen oneself. All these reasons mustweigh considerably with those speculative persons who have to askthemselves whether or not Universal Utilitarianism requires that in theparticular instance before them they should injure a man who has been ofservice to them, and rob a fellow-workman of the credit which is due tohim. 

After all, however, it must be admitted that hardly any accusation ismore difficult to prove, and more liable to be false, than that of aplagiarism which is the conscious theft of ideas and deliberatereproduction of them as original. The arguments on the side of acquittalare obvious and strong:--the inevitable coincidences of contemporarythinking; and our continual experience of finding notions turning up inour minds without any label on them to tell us whence they came; so thatif we are in the habit of expecting much from our own capacity we acceptthem at once as a new inspiration. Then, in relation to the elderauthors, there is the difficulty first of learning and then ofremembering exactly what has been wrought into the backward tapestry ofthe world's history, together with the fact that ideas acquired long agoreappear as the sequence of an awakened interest or a line of inquirywhich is really new in us, whence it is conceivable that if we wereancients some of us might be offering grateful hecatombs by mistake, andproving our honesty in a ruinously 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 criticism, is apt to lead us injuriously astray in our daily judgments, especiallyof the resentful, condemnatory sort. How Pythagoras came by his ideas, whether St Paul was acquainted with all the Greek poets, what Tacitusmust have known by hearsay and systematically ignored, are points onwhich a false persuasion of knowledge is less damaging to justice andcharity than an erroneous confidence, supported by reasoningfundamentally similar, of my neighbour's blameworthy behaviour in a casewhere I am personally concerned. No premisses require closer scrutinythan those which lead to the constantly echoed conclusion, "He must haveknown, " or "He must have read. " I marvel that this facility of belief onthe side of knowledge can subsist under the daily demonstration that theeasiest of all things to the human mind is _not_ to know and _not_ toread. To praise, to blame, to shout, grin, or hiss, where others shout, grin, or hiss--these are native tendencies; but to know and to read areartificial, hard accomplishments, concerning which the only safesupposition is, that as little of them has been done as the case admits. An author, keenly conscious of having written, can hardly help imagininghis condition of lively interest to be shared by others, just as we areall apt to suppose that the chill or heat we are conscious of must begeneral, or even to think that our sons and daughters, our pet schemes, and our quarrelling correspondence, are themes to which intelligentpersons will listen long without weariness. But if the ardent authorhappen to be alive to practical teaching he will soon learn to dividethe larger part of the enlightened public into those who have not readhim and think it necessary to tell him so when they meet him in politesociety, and those who have equally abstained from reading him, but wishto conceal this negation and speak of his "incomparable works" with thattrust in testimony which always has its cheering side. 

Hence it is worse than foolish to entertain silent suspicions ofplagiarism, still more to give them voice, when they are founded on aconstruction of probabilities which a little more attention to everydayoccurrences as a guide in reasoning would show us to be reallyworthless, considered as proof. The length to which one man's memory cango in letting drop associations that are vital to another can hardlyfind a limit. It is not to be supposed that a person desirous to make anagreeable impression on you would deliberately choose to insist to you, with some rhetorical sharpness, on an argument which you were the firstto elaborate in public; yet any one who listens may overhear suchinstances of obliviousness. You naturally remember your peculiarconnection with your acquaintance's judicious views; but why should_he_? Your fatherhood, which is an intense feeling to you, is only anadditional fact of meagre interest for him to remember; and a sense ofobligation to the particular living fellow-struggler who has helped usin our thinking, is not yet a form of memory the want of which is feltto be disgraceful or derogatory, unless it is taken to be a want ofpolite instruction, or causes the missing of a cockade on a day ofcelebration. In our suspicions of plagiarism we must recognise as thefirst weighty probability, that what we who feel injured remember bestis precisely what is least likely to enter lastingly into the memory ofour neighbours. But it is fair to maintain that the neighbour whoborrows your property, loses it for a while, and when it turns up againforgets your connection with it and counts it his own, shows himself somuch the feebler in grasp and rectitude of mind. Some absent personscannot remember the state of wear in their own hats and umbrellas, andhave no mental check to tell them that they have carried home afellow-visitor's more recent purchase: they may be excellenthouseholders, far removed from the suspicion of low devices, but onewishes them a more correct perception, and a more wary sense that aneighbours umbrella may be newer than their own. 

True, some persons are so constituted that the very excellence of anidea seems to them a convincing reason that it must be, if not solely, yet especially theirs. It fits in so beautifully with their generalwisdom, it lies implicitly in so many of their manifested opinions, thatif they have not yet expressed it (because of preoccupation) it isclearly a part of their indigenous produce, and is proved by theirimmediate eloquent promulgation of it to belong more naturally andappropriately to them than to the person who seemed first to havealighted on it, and who sinks in their all-originating consciousness tothat low kind of entity, a second cause. This is not lunacy, norpretence, but a genuine state of mind very effective in practice, andoften carrying the public with it, so that the poor Columbus is found tobe a very faulty adventurer, and the continent is named after Amerigo. Lighter examples of this instinctive appropriation are constantly metwith among brilliant talkers. Aquila is too agreeable and amusing forany one who is not himself bent on display to be angry at hisconversational rapine--his habit of darting down on every morsel ofbooty that other birds may hold in their beaks, with an innocent air, asif it were all intended for his use, and honestly counted on by him as atribute in kind. Hardly any man, I imagine, can have had less trouble ingathering a showy stock of information than Aquila. On close inquiry youwould probably find that he had not read one epoch-making book of moderntimes, for he has a career which obliges him to much correspondence andother official work, and he is too fond of being in company to spend hisleisure moments in study; but to his quick eye, ear, and tongue, a fewpredatory excursions in conversation where there are instructed persons, gradually furnish surprisingly clever modes of statement and allusion onthe dominant topic. When he first adopts a subject he necessarily fallsinto mistakes, and it is interesting to watch his gradual progress intofuller information and better nourished irony, without his ever needingto admit that he has made a blunder or to appear conscious ofcorrection. Suppose, for example, he had incautiously founded someingenious remarks on a hasty reckoning that nine thirteens made ahundred and two, and the insignificant Bantam, hitherto silent, seemedto spoil the flow of ideas by stating that the product could not betaken as less than a hundred and seventeen, Aquila would glide on in themost graceful manner from a repetition of his previous remark to thecontinuation--"All this is on the supposition that a hundred and twowere all that could be got out of nine thirteens; but as all the worldknows that nine thirteens will yield, " &c. --proceeding straightway intoa new train of ingenious consequences, and causing Bantam to be regardedby all present as one of those slow persons who take irony forignorance, and who would warn the weasel to keep awake. How should asmall-eyed, feebly crowing mortal like him be quicker in arithmetic thanthe keen-faced forcible Aquila, in whom universal knowledge is easilycredible? Looked into closely, the conclusion from a man's profile, voice, and fluency to his certainty in multiplication beyond thetwelves, seems to show a confused notion of the way in which very commonthings are connected; but it is on such false correlations that menfound half their inferences about each other, and high places of trustmay sometimes be held on no better foundation. 

It is a commonplace that words, writings, measures, and performances ingeneral, have qualities assigned them not by a direct judgment on theperformances themselves, but by a presumption of what they are likely tobe, considering who is the performer. We all notice in our neighboursthis reference to names as guides in criticism, and all furnishillustrations of it in our own practice; for, check ourselves as wewill, the first impression from any sort of work must depend on aprevious attitude of mind, and this will constantly be determined by theinfluences of a name. But that our prior confidence or want ofconfidence in given names is made up of judgments just as hollow as theconsequent praise or blame they are taken to warrant, is less commonlyperceived, though there is a conspicuous indication of it in thesurprise or disappointment often manifested in the disclosure of anauthorship about which everybody has been making wrong guesses. No doubtif it had been discovered who wrote the 'Vestiges, ' many an ingeniousstructure of probabilities would have been spoiled, and some disgustmight have been felt for a real author who made comparatively so shabbyan appearance of likelihood. It is this foolish trust in prepossessions, founded on spurious evidence, which makes a medium of encouragement forthose who, happening to have the ear of the public, give other people'sideas the advantage of appearing under their own well-received name, while any remonstrance from the real producer becomes an each person whohas paid complimentary tributes in the wrong place. 

Hardly any kind of false reasoning is more ludicrous than this on theprobabilities of origination. It would be amusing to catechise theguessers as to their exact reasons for thinking their guess "likely:"why Hoopoe of John's has fixed on Toucan of Magdalen; why Shrikeattributes its peculiar style to Buzzard, who has not hitherto beenknown as a writer; why the fair Columba thinks it must belong to thereverend Merula; and why they are all alike disturbed in their previousjudgment of its value by finding that it really came from Skunk, whomthey had either not thought of at all, or thought of as belonging to aspecies excluded by the nature of the case. Clearly they were all wrongin their notion of the specific conditions, which lay unexpectedly inthe small Skunk, and in him alone--in spite of his education nobodyknows where, in spite of somebody's knowing his uncles and cousins, andin spite of nobody's knowing that he was cleverer than they thought him. 

Such guesses remind one of a fabulist's imaginary council of animalsassembled to consider what sort of creature had constructed a honeycombfound and much tasted by Bruin and other epicures. The speakers allstarted from the probability that the maker was a bird, because this wasthe quarter from which a wondrous nest might be expected; for theanimals at that time, knowing little of their own history, would haverejected as inconceivable the notion that a nest could be made by afish; and as to the insects, they were not willingly received in societyand their ways were little known. Several complimentary presumptionswere expressed that the honeycomb was due to one or the other admiredand popular bird, and there was much fluttering on the part of theNightingale and Swallow, neither of whom gave a positive denial, theirconfusion perhaps extending to their sense of identity; but the Owlhissed at this folly, arguing from his particular knowledge that theanimal which produced honey must be the Musk-rat, the wondrous nature ofwhose secretions required no proof; and, in the powerful logicalprocedure of the Owl, from musk to honey was but a step. Somedisturbance arose hereupon, for the Musk-rat began to make himselfobtrusive, believing in the Owl's opinion of his powers, and feelingthat he could have produced the honey if he had thought of it; until anexperimental Butcher-bird proposed to anatomise him as a help todecision. The hubbub increased, the opponents of the Musk-rat inquiringwho his ancestors were; until a diversion was created by an ablediscourse of the Macaw on structures generally, which he classified soas to include the honeycomb, entering into so much admirable expositionthat there was a prevalent sense of the honeycomb having probably beenproduced by one who understood it so well. But Bruin, who had probablyeaten too much to listen with edification, grumbled in his low kind oflanguage, that "Fine words butter no parsnips, " by which he meant to saythat there was no new honey forthcoming. 

Perhaps the audience generally was beginning to tire, when the Foxentered with his snout dreadfully swollen, and reported that thebeneficent originator in question was the Wasp, which he had found muchsmeared with undoubted honey, having applied his nose to it--whenceindeed the able insect, perhaps justifiably irritated at what might seema sign of scepticism, had stung him with some severity, an inflictionReynard could hardly regret, since the swelling of a snout normally sodelicate would corroborate his statement and satisfy the assembly thathe had really found the honey-creating genius. 

The Fox's admitted acuteness, combined with the visible swelling, weretaken as undeniable evidence, and the revelation undoubtedly met ageneral desire for information on a point of interest. Nevertheless, there was a murmur the reverse of delighted, and the feelings of someeminent animals were too strong for them: the Orang-outang's jaw droppedso as seriously to impair the vigour of his expression, the edifyingPelican screamed and flapped her wings, the Owl hissed again, the Macawbecame loudly incoherent, and the Gibbon gave his hysterical laugh;while the Hyaena, after indulging in a more splenetic guffaw, agitatedthe question whether it would not be better to hush up the whole affair, instead of giving public recognition to an insect whose produce, it wasnow plain, had been much overestimated. But this narrow-spirited motionwas negatived by the sweet-toothed majority. A complimentary deputationto the Wasp was resolved on, and there was a confident hope that thisdiplomatic measure would tell on the production of honey. 

XII. 

"SO YOUNG!"

Ganymede was once a girlishly handsome precocious youth. That one cannotfor any considerable number of years go on being youthful, girlishlyhandsome, and precocious, seems on consideration to be a statement asworthy of credit as the famous syllogistic conclusion, "Socrates wasmortal. " But many circumstances have conspired to keep up in Ganymedethe illusion that he is surprisingly young. He was the last born of hisfamily, and from his earliest memory was accustomed to be commended assuch to the care of his elder brothers and sisters: he heard his motherspeak of him as her youngest darling with a loving pathos in her tone, which naturally suffused his own view of himself, and gave him thehabitual consciousness of being at once very young and very interesting. Then, the disclosure of his tender years was a constant matter ofastonishment to strangers who had had proof of his precocious talents, and the astonishment extended to what is called the world at large whenhe produced 'A Comparative Estimate of European Nations' before he waswell out of his teens. All comers, on a first interview, told him thathe was marvellously young, and some repeated the statement each timethey saw him; all critics who wrote about him called attention to thesame ground for wonder: his deficiencies and excesses were alike to beaccounted for by the flattering fact of his youth, and his youth was thegolden background which set off his many-hued endowments. Here wasalready enough to establish a strong association between his sense ofidentity and his sense of being unusually young. But after this hedevised and founded an ingenious organisation for consolidating theliterary interests of all the four continents (subsequently includingAustralasia and Polynesia), he himself presiding in the central office, which thus became a new theatre for the constantly repeated situation ofan astonished stranger in the presence of a boldly schemingadministrator found to be remarkably young. If we imagine with duecharity the effect on Ganymede, we shall think it greatly to his creditthat he continued to feel the necessity of being something more thanyoung, and did not sink by rapid degrees into a parallel of thatmelancholy object, a superannuated youthful phenomenon. Happily he hadenough of valid, active faculty to save him from that tragic fate. Hehad not exhausted his fountain of eloquent opinion in his 'ComparativeEstimate, ' so as to feel himself, like some other juvenile celebrities, the sad survivor of his own manifest destiny, or like one who has risentoo early in the morning, and finds all the solid day turned into afatigued afternoon. He has continued to be productive both of schemesand writings, being perhaps helped by the fact that his 'ComparativeEstimate' did not greatly affect the currents of European thought, andleft him with the stimulating hope that he had not done his best, butmight yet produce what would make his youth more surprising than ever. 

I saw something of him through his Antinoüs period, the time of richchesnut locks, parted not by a visible white line, but by a shadowedfurrow from which they fell in massive ripples to right and left. Inthese slim days he looked the younger for being rather below the middlesize, and though at last one perceived him contracting an indefinableair of self-consciousness, a slight exaggeration of the facialmovements, the attitudes, the little tricks, and the romance inshirt-collars, which must be expected from one who, in spite of hisknowledge, was so exceedingly young, it was impossible to say that hewas making any great mistake about himself. He was only undergoing oneform of a common moral disease: being strongly mirrored for himself inthe remark of others, he was getting to see his real characteristics asa dramatic part, a type to which his doings were always incorrespondence. Owing to my absence on travel and to other causes I hadlost sight of him for several years, but such a separation between twowho have not missed each other seems in this busy century only apleasant reason, when they happen to meet again in some old accustomedhaunt, for the one who has stayed at home to be more communicative abouthimself than he can well be to those who have all along been in hisneighbourhood. He had married in the interval, and as if to keep up hissurprising youthfulness in all relations, he had taken a wifeconsiderably older than himself. It would probably have seemed to him adisturbing inversion of the natural order that any one very near to himshould have been younger than he, except his own children who, howeveryoung, would not necessarily hinder the normal surprise at theyouthfulness of their father. And if my glance had revealed myimpression on first seeing him again, he might have received a ratherdisagreeable shock, which was far from my intention. My mind, havingretained a very exact image of his former appearance, took note ofunmistakeable changes such as a painter would certainly not have made byway of flattering his subject. He had lost his slimness, and that curvedsolidity which might have adorned a taller man was a rather sarcasticthreat to his short figure. The English branch of the Teutonic race doesnot produce many fat youths, and I have even heard an American lady saythat she was much "disappointed" at the moderate number and size of ourfat men, considering their reputation in the United States; hence astranger would now have been apt to remark that Ganymede was unusuallyplump for a distinguished writer, rather than unusually young. But howwas he to know this? Many long-standing prepossessions are as hard to becorrected as a long-standing mispronunciation, against which the directexperience of eye and ear is often powerless. And I could perceive thatGanymede's inwrought sense of his surprising youthfulness had beenstronger than the superficial reckoning of his years and the merelyoptical phenomena of the looking-glass. He now held a post underGovernment, and not only saw, like most subordinate functionaries, howill everything was managed, but also what were the changes that a highconstructive ability would dictate; and in mentioning to me his ownspeeches and other efforts towards propagating reformatory views in hisdepartment, he concluded by changing his tone to a sentimental headvoice and saying--

"But I am so young; people object to any prominence on my part; I canonly get myself heard anonymously, and when some attention has beendrawn 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 timecasting an observant glance over me, as if he were marking the effect ofseven years on a person who had probably begun life with an old look, and even as an infant had given his countenance to that significantdoctrine, the transmigration of ancient souls into modern bodies. 

I left him on that occasion without any melancholy forecast that hisillusion would be suddenly or painfully broken up. I saw that he waswell victualled and defended against a ten years' siege from ruthlessfacts; and in the course of time observation convinced me that hisresistance received considerable aid from without. Each of his writtenproductions, as it came out, was still commented on as the work of avery young man. One critic, finding that he wanted solidity, charitablyreferred to his youth as an excuse. Another, dazzled by his brilliancy, seemed to regard his youth as so wondrous that all other authorsappeared decrepit by comparison, and their style such as might be lookedfor from gentlemen of the old school. Able pens (according to a familiarmetaphor) appeared to shake their heads good-humouredly, implying thatGanymede's crudities were pardonable in one so exceedingly young. Suchunanimity amid diversity, which a distant posterity might take forevidence that on the point of age at least there could have been nomistake, was not really more difficult to account for than theprevalence of cotton in our fabrics. Ganymede had been first introducedinto the writing world as remarkably young, and it was no exceptionalconsequence that the first deposit of information about him held itsground against facts which, however open to observation, were notnecessarily thought of. It is not so easy, with our rates and taxes andneed for economy in all directions, to cast away an epithet or remarkthat turns up cheaply, and to go in expensive search after more genuinesubstitutes. There is high Homeric precedent for keeping fast hold of anepithet under all changes of circumstance, and so the precocious authorof the 'Comparative Estimate' heard the echoes repeating "YoungGanymede" when an illiterate beholder at a railway station would havegiven him forty years at least. Besides, important elders, sachems ofthe clubs and public meetings, had a genuine opinion of him as youngenough to be checked for speech on subjects which they had spokenmistakenly about when he was in his cradle; and then, the midway partingof his crisp hair, not common among English committee-men, formed apresumption against the ripeness of his judgment which nothing but aspeedy baldness could have removed. 

It is but fair to mention all these outward confirmations of Ganymede'sillusion, which shows no signs of leaving him. It is true that he nolonger hears expressions of surprise at his youthfulness, on a firstintroduction to an admiring reader; but this sort of external evidencehas become an unnecessary crutch to his habitual inward persuasion. Hismanners, his costume, his suppositions of the impression he makes onothers, have all their former correspondence with the dramatic part ofthe young genius. As to the incongruity of his contour and other littleaccidents of physique, he is probably no more aware that they willaffect others as incongruities than Armida is conscious how much herrouge provokes our notice of her wrinkles, and causes us to mentionsarcastically that motherly age which we should otherwise regard withaffectionate reverence. 

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

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, anyabsurd illusion, straightway to look for something of the same type inmyself, feeling sure that amid all differences there will be a certaincorrespondence; just as there is more or less correspondence in thenatural history even of continents widely apart, and of islands inopposite zones. No doubt men's minds differ in what we may call theirclimate or share of solar energy, and a feeling or tendency which iscomparable to a panther in one may have no more imposing aspect thanthat of a weasel in another: some are like a tropical habitat in whichthe very ferns cast a mighty shadow, and the grasses are a dry ocean inwhich a hunter may be submerged; others like the chilly latitudes inwhich your forest-tree, fit elsewhere to prop a mine, is a prettyminiature suitable for fancy potting. The eccentric man might betypified by the Australian fauna, refuting half our judiciousassumptions of what nature allows. Still, whether fate commanded us tothatch our persons among the Eskimos or to choose the latest thing intattooing among the Polynesian isles, our precious guide Comparisonwould teach us in the first place by likeness, and our clue to furtherknowledge would be resemblance to what we already know. Hence, having akeen interest in the natural history of my inward self, I pursue thisplan I have mentioned of using my observation as a clue or lantern bywhich I detect small herbage or lurking life; or I take my neighbour inhis least becoming tricks or efforts as an opportunity for luminousdeduction concerning the figure the human genus makes in the specimenwhich I myself furnish. 

Introspection which starts with the purpose of finding out one's ownabsurdities is not likely to be very mischievous, yet of course it isnot free from dangers any more than breathing is, or the other functionsthat keep us alive and active. To judge of others by oneself is in itsmost innocent meaning the briefest expression for our only method ofknowing mankind; yet, we perceive, it has come to mean in many caseseither the vulgar mistake which reduces every man's value to the verylow figure at which the valuer himself happens to stand; or else, theamiable illusion of the higher nature misled by a too generousconstruction of the lower. One cannot give a recipe for wise judgment:it resembles appropriate muscular action, which is attained by themyriad lessons in nicety of balance and of aim that only practice cangive. The danger of the inverse procedure, judging of self by what oneobserves in others, if it is carried on with much impartiality andkeenness of discernment, is that it has a laming effect, enfeebling theenergies of indignation and scorn, which are the proper scourges ofwrong-doing and meanness, and which should continually feed thewholesome restraining power of public opinion. I respect the horsewhipwhen applied to the back of Cruelty, and think that he who applies it isa more perfect human being because his outleap of indignation is notchecked by a too curious reflection on the nature of guilt--a moreperfect human being because he more completely incorporates the bestsocial life of the race, which can never be constituted by ideas thatnullify action. This is the essence of Dante's sentiment (it is painfulto think that he applies it very cruelly)--

 "E cortesia fù, lui esser villano"[1]--

and it is undeniable that a too intense consciousness of one's kinshipwith all frailties and vices undermines the active heroism which battlesagainst wrong. 

But certainly nature has taken care that this danger should not atpresent be very threatening. One could not fairly describe thegenerality of one's neighbours as too lucidly aware of manifesting intheir own persons the weaknesses which they observe in the rest of herMajesty's subjects; on the contrary, a hasty conclusion as to schemes ofProvidence might lead to the supposition that one man was intended tocorrect another by being most intolerant of the ugly quality or trickwhich he himself possesses. Doubtless philosophers will be able toexplain how it must necessarily be so, but pending the full extension ofthe _à priori_ method, which will show that only blockheads could expectanything to be otherwise, it does seem surprising that Heloisa should bedisgusted at Laura's attempts to disguise her age, attempts which sherecognises so thoroughly because they enter into her own practice; thatSemper, who often responds at public dinners and proposes resolutions onplatforms, though he has a trying gestation of every speech and a badtime for himself and others at every delivery, should yet remarkpitilessly on the folly of precisely the same course of action inUbique; that Aliquis, who lets no attack on himself pass unnoticed, andfor every handful of gravel against his windows sends a stone in reply, should deplore the ill-advised retorts of Quispiam, who does notperceive that to show oneself angry with an adversary is to gratify him. To be unaware of our own little tricks of manner or our own mentalblemishes and excesses is a comprehensible unconsciousness; the puzzlingfact is that people should apparently take no account of theirdeliberate actions, and should expect them to be equally ignored byothers. It is an inversion of the accepted order: _there_ it is thephrases that are official and the conduct or privately manifestedsentiment that is taken to be real; _here_ it seems that the practice istaken to be official and entirely nullified by the verbal representationwhich contradicts it. The thief making a vow to heaven of fullrestitution and whispering some reservations, expecting to cheatOmniscience by an "aside, " is hardly more ludicrous than the many ladiesand gentlemen who have more belief, and expect others to have it, intheir own statement about their habitual doings than in thecontradictory fact which is patent in the daylight. One reason of theabsurdity is that we are led by a tradition about ourselves, so thatlong after a man has practically departed from a rule or principle, hecontinues innocently to state it as a true description of hispractice--just as he has a long tradition that he is not an oldgentleman, and is startled when he is seventy at overhearing himselfcalled by an epithet which he has only applied to others. 

[Footnote 1: Inferno, xxxii. 150. ]

"A person with your tendency of constitution should take as little sugaras possible, " said Pilulus to Bovis somewhere in the darker decades ofthis century. "It has made a great difference to Avis since he took myadvice 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 hiswife. 

"No such thing!" exclaims Bovis. 

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

"Nonsense!" laughs Bovis, turning to Pilulus, that they may exchange aglance of mutual amusement at a woman's inaccuracy. 

But she happened to be right. Bovis had never said inwardly that hewould take a large allowance of sugar, and he had the tradition abouthimself that he was a man of the most moderate habits; hence, with thisconviction, he was naturally disgusted at the saccharine excesses ofAvis. 

I have sometimes thought that this facility of men in believing thatthey are still what they once meant to be--this undisturbedappropriation of a traditional character which is often but a melancholyrelic of early resolutions, like the worn and soiled testimonial tosoberness and honesty carried in the pocket of a tippler whom the needof a dram has driven into peculation--may sometimes diminish theturpitude of what seems a flat, barefaced falsehood. It is notoriousthat a man may go on uttering false assertions about his own acts tillhe at last believes in them: is it not possible that sometimes in thevery first utterance there may be a shade of creed-reciting belief, areproduction of a traditional self which is clung to against allevidence? 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 sanebody, the final test of completeness seems to be a security ofdistinction between what we have professed and what we have done; whatwe have aimed at and what we have achieved; what we have invented andwhat we have witnessed or had evidenced to us; what we think and feel inthe present and what we thought and felt in the past. 

I know that there is a common prejudice which regards the habitualconfusion of _now_ and _then_, of _it was_ and _it is_, of _it seemedso_ and _I should like it to be so_, as a mark of high imaginativeendowment, while the power of precise statement and description is ratedlower, as the attitude of an everyday prosaic mind. High imagination isoften assigned or claimed as if it were a ready activity in fabricatingextravagances such as are presented by fevered dreams, or as if itspossessors were in that state of inability to give credible testimonywhich would warrant their exclusion from the class of acceptablewitnesses in a court of justice; so that a creative genius might fairlybe subjected to the disability which some laws have stamped on dicers, slaves, and other classes whose position was held perverting to theirsense of social responsibility. 

This endowment of mental confusion is often boasted of by persons whoseimaginativeness would not otherwise be known, unless it were by the slowprocess of detecting that their descriptions and narratives were not tobe trusted. Callista is always ready to testify of herself that she isan imaginative person, and sometimes adds in illustration, that if shehad taken a walk and seen an old heap of stones on her way, the accountshe would give on returning would include many pleasing particulars ofher own invention, transforming the simple heap into an interestingcastellated ruin. This creative freedom is all very well in the rightplace, but before I can grant it to be a sign of unusual mental power, Imust inquire whether, on being requested to give a precise descriptionof what she saw, she would be able to cast aside her arbitrarycombinations and recover the objects she really perceived so as to makethem recognisable by another person who passed the same way. Otherwiseher glorifying imagination is not an addition to the fundamental powerof strong, discerning perception, but a cheaper substitute. And, infact, I find on listening to Callista's conversation, that she has avery lax conception even of common objects, and an equally lax memory ofevents. It seems of no consequence to her whether she shall say that astone is overgrown with moss or with lichen, that a building is ofsandstone or of granite, that Meliboeus once forgot to put on his cravator that he always appears without it; that everybody says so, or thatone stock-broker's wife said so yesterday; that Philemon praisedEuphemia up to the skies, or that he denied knowing any particular evilof her. She is one of those respectable witnesses who would testify tothe exact moment of an apparition, because any desirable moment will beas exact as another to her remembrance; or who would be the most worthyto witness the action of spirits on slates and tables because the actionof limbs would not probably arrest her attention. She would describe thesurprising phenomena exhibited by the powerful Medium with the samefreedom that she vaunted in relation to the old heap of stones. Hersupposed imaginativeness is simply a very usual lack of discriminatingperception, accompanied with a less usual activity of misrepresentation, which, if it had been a little more intense, or had been stimulated bycircumstance, might have made her a profuse writer unchecked by thetroublesome need of veracity. 

These characteristics are the very opposite of such as yield a fineimagination, which is always based on a keen vision, a keenconsciousness of what _is_, and carries the store of definite knowledgeas material for the construction of its inward visions. Witness Dante, who is at once the most precise and homely in his reproduction of actualobjects, and the most soaringly at large in his imaginativecombinations. On a much lower level we distinguish the hyperbole andrapid development in descriptions of persons and events which are lit upby humorous intention in the speaker--we distinguish this charming playof intelligence which resembles musical improvisation on a given motive, where the farthest sweep of curve is looped into relevancy by aninstinctive method, from the florid inaccuracy or helpless exaggerationwhich is really something commoner than the correct simplicity oftendepreciated as prosaic. 

Even if high imagination were to be identified with illusion, therewould be the same sort of difference between the imperial wealth ofillusion which is informed by industrious submissive observation and thetrumpery stage-property illusion which depends on the ill-definedimpressions gathered by capricious inclination, as there is between agood and a bad picture of the Last Judgment. In both these the subjectis a combination never actually witnessed, and in the good picture thegeneral combination may be of surpassing boldness; but on examination itis seen that the separate elements have been closely studied from realobjects. And even where we find the charm of ideal elevation with wrongdrawing and fantastic colour, the charm is dependent on the selectivesensibility of the painter to certain real delicacies of form whichconfer the expression he longed to render; for apart from this basis ofan effect perceived in common, there could be no conveyance of aestheticmeaning by the painter to the beholder. In this sense it is as true tosay of Fra Angelico's Coronation of the Virgin, that it has a strain ofreality, as to say so of a portrait by Rembrandt, which also has itsstrain of ideal elevation due to Rembrandt's virile selectivesensibility. To correct such self-flatterers as Callista, it is worthrepeating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, butintense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed bysusceptibility to the veriest minutiae of experience, which itreproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes; not the habitualconfusion of provable fact with the fictions of fancy and transientinclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs everymaterial object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories andstored residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obviousrelations of human existence. The illusion to which it is liable is notthat of habitually taking duck-ponds for lilied pools, but of being moreor less transiently and in varying degrees so absorbed in ideal visionas to lose the consciousness of surrounding objects or occurrences; andwhen that rapt condition is past, the sane genius discriminates clearlybetween what has been given in this parenthetic state of excitement, andwhat he has known, and may count on, in the ordinary world ofexperience. Dante seems to have expressed these conditions perfectly inthat passage of the _Purgatorio_ where, after a triple vision which hasmade him forget his surroundings, he says--

 "Quando l'anima mia tornò 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 entranced vision from the seriesof external facts to which his consciousness had returned. Isaiah givesus the date of his vision in the Temple--"the year that King Uzziahdied"--and if afterwards the mighty-winged seraphim were present withhim 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, philosopher, scientific discoverer, or poet, may happen to be rather mad: his powers may have been used up, like Don Quixote's, in their visionary or theoretic constructions, sothat the reports of common-sense fail to affect him, or the continuousstrain of excitement may have robbed his mind of its elasticity. It ishard for our frail mortality to carry the burthen of greatness withsteady gait and full alacrity of perception. But he is the strongestseer who can support the stress of creative energy and yet keep thatsanity 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 imaginative power. 

XIV. 

THE TOO READY WRITER

One who talks too much, hindering the rest of the company from takingtheir turn, and apparently seeing no reason why they should not ratherdesire to know his opinion or experience in relation to all subjects, orat least to renounce the discussion of any topic where he can make nofigure, has never been praised for this industrious monopoly of workwhich others would willingly have shared in. However various andbrilliant his talk may be, we suspect him of impoverishing us byexcluding the contributions of other minds, which attract our curiositythe more because he has shut them up in silence. Besides, we get tiredof a "manner" in conversation as in painting, when one theme afteranother is treated with the same lines and touches. I begin with aliking for an estimable master, but by the time he has stretched hisinterpretation of the world unbrokenly along a palatial gallery, I havehad what the cautious Scotch mind would call "enough" of him. There ismonotony and narrowness already to spare in my own identity; what comesto me from without should be larger and more impartial than the judgmentof any single interpreter. On this ground even a modest person, withoutpower or will to shine in the conversation, may easily find thepredominating talker a nuisance, while those who are full of matter onspecial topics are continually detecting miserably thin places in theweb of that information which he will not desist from imparting. Nobodythat I know of ever proposed a testimonial to a man for thusvolunteering the whole expense of the conversation. 

Why is there a different standard of judgment with regard to a writerwho plays much the same part in literature as the excessive talker playsin what is traditionally called conversation? The busy Adrastus, whoseprofessional engagements might seem more than enough for the nervousenergy of one man, and who yet finds time to print essays on the chiefcurrent subjects, from the tri-lingual inscriptions, or the Idea of theInfinite among the prehistoric Lapps, to the Colorado beetle and thegrape disease in the south of France, is generally praised if notadmired for the breadth of his mental range and his gigantic powers ofwork. Poor Theron, who has some original ideas on a subject to which hehas given years of research and meditation, has been waiting anxiouslyfrom month to month to see whether his condensed exposition will find aplace in the next advertised programme, but sees it, on the contrary, regularly excluded, and twice the space he asked for filled with thecopious brew of Adrastus, whose name carries custom like a celebratedtrade-mark. Why should the eager haste to tell what he thinks on theshortest notice, as if his opinion were a needed preliminary todiscussion, get a man the reputation of being a conceited bore inconversation, when nobody blames the same tendency if it shows itself inprint? The excessive talker can only be in one gathering at a time, andthere is the comfort of thinking that everywhere else otherfellow-citizens who have something to say may get a chance of deliveringthemselves; but the exorbitant writer can occupy space and spread overit the more or less agreeable flavour of his mind in four "mediums" atonce, and on subjects taken from the four winds. Such restless andversatile occupants of literary space and time should have lived earlierwhen the world wanted summaries of all extant knowledge, and thisknowledge being small, there was the more room for commentary andconjecture. They might have played the part of an Isidor of Seville or aVincent of Beauvais brilliantly, and the willingness to write everythingthemselves would have been strictly in place. In the present day, thebusy retailer of other people's knowledge which he has spoiled in thehandling, the restless guesser and commentator, the importunate hawkerof undesirable superfluities, the everlasting word-compeller who risesearly in the morning to praise what the world has already glorified, ormakes himself haggard at night in writing out his dissent from whatnobody ever believed, is not simply "gratis anhelans, multa agendo nihilagens"--he is an obstruction. Like an incompetent architect with toomuch interest at his back, he obtrudes his ill-considered work whereplace ought to have been left to better men. 

Is it out of the question that we should entertain some scruple aboutmixing our own flavour, as of the too cheap and insistent nutmeg, withthat of every great writer and every great subject?--especially when ourflavour is all we have to give, the matter or knowledge having beenalready given by somebody else. What if we were only like the Spanishwine-skins which impress the innocent stranger with the notion that theSpanish grape has naturally a taste of leather? One could wish that eventhe greatest minds should leave some themes unhandled, or at least leaveus no more than a paragraph or two on them to show how well they did innot being more lengthy. 

Such entertainment of scruple can hardly be expected from the young; buthappily their readiness to mirror the universe anew for the rest ofmankind is not encouraged by easy publicity. In the vivacious Pepin Ihave often seen the image of my early youth, when it seemed to meastonishing that the philosophers had left so many difficultiesunsolved, and that so many great themes had raised no great poet totreat them. I had an elated sense that I should find my brain full oftheoretic clues when I looked for them, and that wherever a poet had notdone what I expected, it was for want of my insight. Not knowing whathad been said about the play of Romeo and Juliet, I felt myself capableof writing something original on its blemishes and beauties. In relationto all subjects I had a joyous consciousness of that ability which isprior to knowledge, and of only needing to apply myself in order tomaster any task--to conciliate philosophers whose systems were atpresent but dimly known to me, to estimate foreign poets whom I had notyet read, to show up mistakes in an historical monograph that roused myinterest in an epoch which I had been hitherto ignorant of, when Ishould once have had time to verify my views of probability by lookinginto an encyclopaedia. So Pepin; save only that he is industrious whileI was idle. Like the astronomer in Rasselas, I swayed the universe in myconsciousness without making any difference outside me; whereas Pepin, while feeling himself powerful with the stars in their courses, reallyraises some dust here below. He is no longer in his spring-tide, buthaving been always busy he has been obliged to use his first impressionsas if they were deliberate opinions, and to range himself on thecorresponding side in ignorance of much that he commits himself to; sothat he retains some characteristics of a comparatively tender age, andamong them a certain surprise that there have not been more personsequal to himself. Perhaps it is unfortunate for him that he early gaineda hearing, or at least a place in print, and was thus encouraged inacquiring a fixed habit of writing, to the exclusion of any otherbread-winning pursuit. He is already to be classed as a "generalwriter, " corresponding to the comprehensive wants of the "generalreader, " and with this industry on his hands it is not enough for him tokeep up the ingenuous self-reliance of youth: he finds himself under anobligation to be skilled in various methods of seeming to know; andhaving habitually expressed himself before he was convinced, hisinterest in all subjects is chiefly to ascertain that he has not made amistake, and to feel his infallibility confirmed. That impulse todecide, that vague sense of being able to achieve the unattempted, thatdream of aerial unlimited movement at will without feet or wings, whichwere once but the joyous mounting of young sap, are already taking shapeas unalterable woody fibre: the impulse has hardened into "style, " andinto a pattern of peremptory sentences; the sense of ability in thepresence of other men's failures is turning into the official arroganceof one who habitually issues directions which he has never himself beencalled on to execute; the dreamy buoyancy of the stripling has taken ona fatal sort of reality in written pretensions which carry consequences. He is on the way to become like the loud-buzzing, bouncing Bombus whocombines conceited illusions enough to supply several patients in alunatic asylum with the freedom to show himself at large in variousforms of print. If one who takes himself for the telegraphic centre ofall American wires is to be confined as unfit to transact affairs, whatshall we say to the man who believes himself in possession of theunexpressed motives and designs dwelling in the breasts of allsovereigns and all politicians? And I grieve to think that poor Pepin, though less political, may by-and-by manifest a persuasion hardly moresane, for he is beginning to explain people's writing by what he doesnot know about them. Yet he was once at the comparatively innocent stagewhich I have confessed to be that of my own early astonishment at mypowerful originality; and copying the just humility of the old Puritan, I may say, "But for the grace of discouragement, this coxcombry mighthave been mine. "

Pepin made for himself a necessity of writing (and getting printed)before he had considered whether he had the knowledge or belief thatwould furnish eligible matter. At first perhaps the necessity galled hima little, but it is now as easily borne, nay, is as irrepressible ahabit as the outpouring of inconsiderate talk. He is gradually beingcondemned to have no genuine impressions, no direct consciousness ofenjoyment or the reverse from the quality of what is before him: hisperceptions are continually arranging themselves in forms suitable to aprinted judgment, and hence they will often turn out to be as much tothe purpose if they are written without any direct contemplation of theobject, and are guided by a few external conditions which serve toclassify it for him. In this way he is irrevocably losing the faculty ofaccurate mental vision: having bound himself to express judgments whichwill satisfy some other demands than that of veracity, he has bluntedhis perceptions by continual preoccupation. We cannot command veracityat will: the power of seeing and reporting truly is a form of healththat has to be delicately guarded, and as an ancient Rabbi has solemnlysaid, "The penalty of untruth is untruth. " But Pepin is only a mildexample of the fact that incessant writing with a view to printingcarries internal consequences which have often the nature of disease. And however unpractical it may be held to consider whether we haveanything to print which it is good for the world to read, or which hasnot been better said before, it will perhaps be allowed to be worthconsidering what effect the printing may have on ourselves. Clearlythere is a sort of writing which helps to keep the writer in aridiculously contented ignorance; raising in him continually the senseof having delivered himself effectively, so that the acquirement of morethorough knowledge seems as superfluous as the purchase of costume for apast occasion. 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 thatkeeps 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 andthe hurly-burly of events, to keep quite clear of a gladness which isanother's calamity; but one may choose not to enter on a course whichwill turn such gladness into a fixed habit of mind, committing ourselvesto be continually pleased that others should appear to be wrong in orderthat we may have the air of being right. 

In some cases, perhaps, it might be urged that Pepin has remained themore self-contented because he has _not_ written everything he believedhimself capable of. He once asked me to read a sort of programme of thespecies of romance which he should think it worth while to write--aspecies which he contrasted in strong terms with the productions ofillustrious but overrated authors in this branch. Pepin's romance was topresent the splendours of the Roman Empire at the culmination of itsgrandeur, when decadence was spiritually but not visibly imminent: itwas to show the workings of human passion in the most pregnant andexalted of human circumstances, the designs of statesmen, theinterfusion of philosophies, the rural relaxation and converse ofimmortal poets, the majestic triumphs of warriors, the mingling of thequaint and sublime in religious ceremony, the gorgeous delirium ofgladiatorial shows, and under all the secretly working leaven ofChristianity. Such a romance would not call the attention of society tothe dialect of stable-boys, the low habits of rustics, the vulgarity ofsmall schoolmasters, the manners of men in livery, or to any other formof uneducated talk and sentiments: its characters would have virtues andvices alike on the grand scale, and would express themselves in anEnglish representing the discourse of the most powerful minds in thebest Latin, or possibly Greek, when there occurred a scene with a Greekphilosopher on a visit to Rome or resident there as a teacher. In thisway Pepin would do in fiction what had never been done before: somethingnot at all like 'Rienzi' or 'Notre Dame de Paris, ' or any other attemptof that kind; but something at once more penetrating and moremagnificent, more passionate and more philosophical, more panoramic yetmore select: something that would present a conception of a giganticperiod; in short something truly Roman and world-historical. 

When Pepin gave me this programme to read he was much younger than atpresent. Some slight success in another vein diverted him from theproduction of panoramic and select romance, and the experience of nothaving tried to carry out his programme has naturally made him morebiting and sarcastic on the failures of those who have actually writtenromances without apparently having had a glimpse of a conception equalto his. Indeed, I am often comparing his rather touchingly inflated_naïveté_ as of a small young person walking on tiptoe while he istalking of elevated things, at the time when he felt himself the authorof that unwritten romance, with his present epigrammatic curtness andaffectation of power kept strictly in reserve. His paragraphs now seemto have a bitter smile in them, from the consciousness of a mind toopenetrating to accept any other man's ideas, and too equally competentin all directions to seclude his power in any one form of creation, butrather fitted to hang over them all as a lamp of guidance to thestumblers below. You perceive how proud he is of not being indebted toany writer: even with the dead he is on the creditor's side, for he isdoing them the service of letting the world know what they meant betterthan those poor pre-Pepinians themselves had any means of doing, and hetreats the mighty shades very cavalierly. 

Is this fellow--citizen of ours, considered simply in the light of abaptised Christian and tax-paying Englishman, really as madlyconceited, as empty of reverential feeling, as unveracious and carelessof justice, as full of catch-penny devices and stagey attitudinising ason examination his writing shows itself to be? By no means. He hasarrived at his present pass in "the literary calling" through theself-imposed obligation to give himself a manner which would convey theimpression of superior knowledge and ability. He is much worthier andmore admirable than his written productions, because the moral aspectsexhibited in his writing are felt to be ridiculous or disgraceful in thepersonal relations of life. In blaming Pepin's writing we are accusingthe public conscience, which is so lax and ill informed on the momentousbearings of authorship that it sanctions the total absence of scruple inundertaking and prosecuting what should be the best warranted ofvocations. 

Hence I still accept friendly relations with Pepin, for he has muchprivate amiability, and though he probably thinks of me as a man ofslender talents, without rapidity of _coup d'oeil_ and with nocompensatory penetration, he meets me very cordially, and would not, Iam sure, willingly pain me in conversation by crudely declaring his lowestimate of my capacity. Yet I have often known him to insult my bettersand contribute (perhaps unreflectingly) to encourage injuriousconceptions of them--but that was done in the course of his professionalwriting, and the public conscience still leaves such writing nearly onthe level of the Merry-Andrew's dress, which permits an impudentdeportment and extraordinary gambols to one who in his ordinary clothingshows himself the decent father of a family. 

XV. 

DISEASES OF SMALL AUTHORSHIP

Particular callings, it is known, encourage particular diseases. Thereis a painter's colic: the Sheffield grinder falls a victim to theinhalation of steel dust: clergymen so often have a certain kind of sorethroat that this otherwise secular ailment gets named after them. Andperhaps, if we were to inquire, we should find a similar relationbetween certain moral ailments and these various occupations, thoughhere in the case of clergymen there would be specific differences: thepoor curate, equally with the rector, is liable to clergyman's sorethroat, but he would probably be found free from the chronic moralailments encouraged by the possession of glebe and those higher chancesof preferment which follow on having a good position already. On theother hand, the poor curate might have severe attacks of calculatingexpectancy concerning parishioners' turkeys, cheeses, and fat geese, orof uneasy rivalry for the donations of clerical charities. 

Authors are so miscellaneous a class thattheir personified diseases, physical and moral, might include the whole procession of humandisorders, led by dyspepsia and ending inmadness--the awful Dumb Show of a world-historictragedy. Take a large enough areaof human life and all comedy melts intotragedy, like the Fool's part by the side ofLear. The chief scenes get filled with erringheroes, guileful usurpers, persecuted discoverers, dying deliverers: everywhere theprotagonist has a part pregnant with doom. The comedy sinks to an accessory, and if thereare loud laughs they seem a convulsive transitionfrom sobs; or if the comedy is touchedwith a gentle lovingness, the panoramic sceneis one where

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

[Footnote 1: Two Noble Kinsmen. ]

But I did not set out on the wide survey that would carry me intotragedy, and in fact had nothing more serious in my mind than certainsmall chronic ailments that come of small authorship. I was thinkingprincipally of Vorticella, who flourished in my youth not only as aportly lady walking in silk attire, but also as the authoress of a bookentitled 'The Channel Islands, with Notes and an Appendix. ' I would byno 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. Whatone would have wished, after experience, was that she had refrained fromproducing even that single volume, and thus from giving herself-importance a troublesome kind of double incorporation which becameoppressive to her acquaintances, and set up in herself one of thoseslight chronic forms of disease to which I have just referred. She livedin the considerable provincial town of Pumpiter, which had its ownnewspaper press, with the usual divisions of political partisanship andthe usual varieties of literary criticism--the florid and allusive, the_staccato_ and peremptory, the clairvoyant and prophetic, the safe andpattern-phrased, or what one might call "the many-a-long-day style. "

Vorticella being the wife of an important townsman had naturally thesatisfaction of seeing 'The Channel Islands' reviewed by all the organsof Pumpiter opinion, and their articles or paragraphs held as naturallythe opening pages in the elegantly bound album prepared by her for thereception of "critical opinions. " This ornamental volume lay on aspecial table in her drawing-room close to the still more gorgeouslybound work of which it was the significant effect, and every guest wasallowed the privilege of reading what had been said of the authoress andher work in the 'Pumpiter Gazette and Literary Watchman, ' the 'PumpshirePost, ' the 'Church Clock, ' the 'Independent Monitor, ' and the lively butjudicious publication known as the 'Medley Pie;' to be followed up, ifhe chose, by the instructive perusal of the strikingly confirmatoryjudgments, sometimes concurrent in the very phrases, of journals fromthe most distant counties; as the 'Latchgate Argus, ' the PenllwyUniverse, ' the 'Cockaleekie Advertiser, ' the 'Goodwin Sands Opinion, 'and the 'Land's End Times. '

I had friends in Pumpiter and occasionally paid a long visit there. WhenI called on Vorticella, who had a cousinship with my hosts, she had toexcuse herself because a message claimed her attention for eight or tenminutes, and handing me the album of critical opinions said, with acertain emphasis which, considering my youth, was highly complimentary, that she would really like me to read what I should find there. Thisseemed a permissive politeness which I could not feel to be anoppression, and I ran my eyes over the dozen pages, each with a strip orislet of newspaper in the centre, with that freedom of mind (in my casemeaning freedom to forget) which would be a perilous way of preparingfor examination. This _ad libitum_ perusal had its interest for me. Theprivate truth being that I had not read 'The Channel Islands, ' I wasamazed at the variety of matter which the volume must contain to haveimpressed these different judges with the writer's surpassing capacityto handle almost all branches of inquiry and all forms of presentation. In Jersey she had shown herself an historian, in Guernsey a poetess, inAlderney a political economist, and in Sark a humorist: there weresketches of character scattered through the pages which might put our"fictionists" to the blush; the style was eloquent and racy, studdedwith gems of felicitous remark; and the moral spirit throughout was sosuperior that, said one, "the recording angel" (who is not supposed totake account of literature as such) "would assuredly set down the workas a deed of religion. " The force of this eulogy on the part of severalreviewers was much heightened by the incidental evidence of theirfastidious and severe taste, which seemed to suffer considerably fromthe imperfections of our chief writers, even the dead and canonised: oneafflicted them with the smell of oil, another lacked erudition andattempted (though vainly) to dazzle them with trivial conceits, onewanted to be more philosophical than nature had made him, another inattempting to be comic produced the melancholy effect of a half-starvedMerry-Andrew; while one and all, from the author of the 'Areopagitica'downwards, had faults of style which must have made an able hand in the'Latchgate Argus' shake the many-glanced head belonging thereto with asmile of compassionate disapproval. Not so the authoress of 'The ChannelIslands:' Vorticella and Shakspere were allowed to be faultless. Igathered that no blemishes were observable in the work of thisaccomplished writer, and the repeated information that she was "secondto none" seemed after this superfluous. Her thick octavo--notes, appendix and all--was unflagging from beginning to end; and the 'Land'sEnd Times, ' using a rather dangerous rhetorical figure, recommended younot to take up the volume unless you had leisure to finish it at asitting. It had given one writer more pleasure than he had had for manya long day--a sentence which had a melancholy resonance, suggesting alife of studious languor such as all previous achievements of the humanmind failed to stimulate into enjoyment. I think the collection ofcritical opinions wound up with this sentence, and I had turned back tolook at the lithographed sketch of the authoress which fronted the firstpage of the album, when the fair original re-entered and I laid down thevolume on its appropriate table. 

"Well, what do you think of them?" said Vorticella, with an emphasiswhich had some significance unperceived by me. "I know you are a greatstudent. Give me _your_ opinion of these opinions. "

"They must be very gratifying to you, " I answered with a littleconfusion, for I perceived that I might easily mistake my footing, and Ibegan to have a presentiment of an examination for which I was by nomeans crammed. 

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

I bowed--I confess it--with the mean hope that this movement in the napeof my neck would be taken as sufficient proof that I had read, marked, and learned. I do not forgive myself for this pantomimic falsehood, butI was young and morally timorous, and Vorticella's personality had aneffect on me something like that of a powerful mesmeriser when hedirects all his ten fingers towards your eyes, as unpleasantly visibleducts 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 thatargument. But I hope I convinced you about the drag-nets?"

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

"I _know_ that I am right, " said Vorticella. "The fact is that no criticin 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 isVolvox who writes in the 'Monitor, ' I hope you noticed how hecontradicts himself?"

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

"No! I am surprised. He is the only one who finds fault with me. He isa Dissenter, you know. The 'Monitor' is the Dissenters' organ, but myhusband has been so useful to them in municipal affairs that they wouldnot venture to run my book down; they feel obliged to tell the truthabout me. Still Volvox betrays himself. After praising me for mypenetration and accuracy, he presently says I have allowed myself to beimposed upon and have let my active imagination run away with me. Thatis like his dissenting impertinence. Active my imagination may be, but Ihave it under control. Little Vibrio, who writes the playful notice inthe 'Medley Pie, ' has a clever hit at Volvox in that passage about thesteeplechase of imagination, where the loser wants to make it appearthat the winner was only run away with. But if you did not noticeVolvox's self-contradiction you would not see the point, " addedVorticella, with rather a chilling intonation. "Or perhaps you did notread 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. "

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

"It is very ingenious, " said I, really appreciating the difficulty ofbeing lively in this connection: it seemed even more wonderful than thata Vibrio should have an eye. 

"You are probably surprised to see no notices from the London press, "said Vorticella. "I have one--a very remarkable one. But I reserve ituntil 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 ofvenom. It calls my style dull and pompous. I think that will tell itsown tale, placed after the other critiques. "

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

"Yes, " said Vorticella, in emphatic chest tones, "dulness is a matter ofopinion; but pompous! That I never was and never could be. Perhaps hemeans that my matter is too important for his taste; and I have noobjection to _that_. I did not intend to be trivial. I should just liketo read you that passage about the drag-nets, because I could make itclearer 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 totake my leave without seeming to run away from 'The Channel Islands, 'though not without being compelled to carry with me the loan of "themarked copy, " which I was to find advantageous in a re-perusal of theappendix, and was only requested to return before my departure fromPumpiter. Looking into the volume now with some curiosity, I found it avery ordinary combination of the commonplace and ambitious, one of thosebooks which one might imagine to have been written under the old GrubStreet coercion of hunger and thirst, if they were not known beforehandto be the gratuitous productions of ladies and gentlemen whosecircumstances might be called altogether easy, but for an uneasy vanitythat happened to have been directed towards authorship. Its importancewas that of a polypus, tumour, fungus, or other erratic outgrowth, noxious and disfiguring in its effect on the individual organism whichnourishes it. Poor Vorticella might not have been more wearisome on avisit than the majority of her neighbours, but for this disease ofmagnified self-importance belonging to small authorship. I understandthat the chronic complaint of 'The Channel Islands' never left her. Asthe years went on and the publication tended to vanish in the distancefor her neighbours' memory, she was still bent on dragging it to theforeground, and her chief interest in new acquaintances was thepossibility of lending them her book, entering into all detailsconcerning it, and requesting them to read her album of "criticalopinions. " This really made her more tiresome than Gregarina, whosedistinction was that she had had cholera, and who did not feel herselfin her true position with strangers until they knew it. 

My experience with Vorticella led me for a time into the falsesupposition that this sort of fungous disfiguration, which makes Selfdisagreeably larger, was most common to the female sex; but I presentlyfound that here too the male could assert his superiority and show amore vigorous boredom. I have known a man with a single pamphletcontaining an assurance that somebody else was wrong, together with afew approved quotations, produce a more powerful effect of shuddering athis approach than ever Vorticella did with her varied octavo volume, including notes and appendix. Males of more than one nation recur to mymemory who produced from their pocket on the slightest encouragement asmall pink or buff duodecimo pamphlet, wrapped in silver paper, as apresent held ready for an intelligent reader. "A mode of propagandism, "you remark in excuse; "they wished to spread some useful correctivedoctrine. " Not necessarily: the indoctrination aimed at was perhaps toconvince you of their own talents by the sample of an "Ode onShakspere's Birthday, " or a translation from Horace. 

Vorticella may pair off with Monas, who had also written his onebook--'Here and There; or, a Trip from Truro to Transylvania'--and notonly carried it in his portmanteau when he went on visits, but took theearliest opportunity of depositing it in the drawing-room, andafterwards would enter to look for it, as if under pressure of a needfor reference, begging the lady of the house to tell him whether she, had seen "a small volume bound in red. " One hostess at last ordered itto be carried into his bedroom to save his time; but it presentlyreappeared in his hands, and was again left with inserted slips of paperon the drawing-room table. 

Depend upon it, vanity is human, native alike to men and women; only inthe male it is of denser texture, less volatile, so that it lessimmediately informs you of its presence, but is more massive and capableof knocking you down if you come into collision with it; while in womenvanity lays by its small revenges as in a needle-case always at hand. The difference is in muscle and finger-tips, in traditional habits andmental perspective, rather than in the original appetite of vanity. Itis an approved method now to explain ourselves by a reference to theraces as little like us as possible, which leads me to observe that inFiji the men use the most elaborate hair-dressing, and that wherevertattooing is in vogue the male expects to carry off the prize ofadmiration for pattern and workmanship. Arguing analogically, andlooking for this tendency of the Fijian or Hawaian male in the eminentEuropean, we must suppose that it exhibits itself under the forms ofcivilised apparel; and it would be a great mistake to estimatepassionate effort by the effect it produces on our perception orunderstanding. It is conceivable that a man may have concentrated noless will and expectation on his wristbands, gaiters, and the shape ofhis hat-brim, or an appearance which impresses you as that of the modern"swell, " than the Ojibbeway on an ornamentation which seems to us muchmore elaborate. In what concerns the search for admiration at least, itis not true that the effect is equal to the cause and resembles it. Thecause of a flat curl on the masculine forehead, such as might be seenwhen George the Fourth was king, must have been widely different inquality and intensity from the impression made by that small scroll ofhair on the organ of the beholder. Merely to maintain an attitude andgait which I notice in certain club men, and especially an inflation ofthe chest accompanying very small remarks, there goes, I am convinced, an expenditure of psychical energy little appreciated by themultitude--a mental vision of Self and deeply impressed beholders whichis quite without antitype in what we call the effect produced by thathidden process. 

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

XVI. 

MORAL SWINDLERS. 

It is a familiar example of irony in the degradation of words that "whata man is worth" has come to mean how much money he possesses; but thereseems a deeper and more melancholy irony in the shrunken meaning thatpopular or polite speech assigns to "morality" and "morals. " The poorpart these words are made to play recalls the fate of those pagandivinities who, after being understood to rule the powers of the air andthe destinies of men, came down to the level of insignificant demons, orwere even made a farcical show for the amusement of the multitude. 

Talking to Melissa in a time of commercial trouble, I found her disposedto speak pathetically of the disgrace which had fallen on Sir GavialMantrap, because of his conduct in relation to the Eocene Mines, and toother companies ingeniously devised by him for the punishment ofignorance in people of small means: a disgrace by which the poor titledgentleman was actually reduced to live in comparative obscurity on hiswife's settlement of one or two hundred thousand in the consols. 

"Surely your pity is misapplied, " said I, rather dubiously, for I likethe comfort of trusting that a correct moral judgment is the strongpoint in woman (seeing that she has a majority of about a million in ourislands), and I imagined that Melissa might have some unexpressedgrounds for her opinion. "I should have thought you would rather besorry for Mantrap's victims--the widows, spinsters, and hard-workingfathers whom his unscrupulous haste to make himself rich has cheated ofall their savings, while he is eating well, lying softly, and afterimpudently justifying himself before the public, is perhaps joining inthe General Confession with a sense that he is an acceptable object inthe sight of God, though decent men refuse to meet him. "

"Oh, all that about the Companies, I know, was most unfortunate. Incommerce people are led to do so many things, and he might not knowexactly how everything would turn out. But Sir Gavial made a good use ofhis 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 aslight air of rebuke. "Sir Gavial is an excellent family man--quiteblameless there; and so charitable round his place at Tiptop. Verydifferent from Mr Barabbas, whose life, my husband tells me, is mostobjectionable, with actresses and that sort of thing. I think a man'smorals should make a difference to us. I'm not sorry for Mr Barabbas, but _I am_ sorry for Sir Gavial Mantrap. "

I will not repeat my answer to Melissa, for I fear it was offensivelybrusque, my opinion being that Sir Gavial was the more perniciousscoundrel of the two, since his name for virtue served as an effectivepart of a swindling apparatus; and perhaps I hinted that to call such aman moral showed rather a silly notion of human affairs. In fact, I hadan angry wish to be instructive, and Melissa, as will sometimes happen, noticed my anger without appropriating my instruction, for I have sinceheard that she speaks of me as rather violent-tempered, and not overstrict in my views of morality. 

I wish that this narrow use of words which are wanted in their fullmeaning were confined to women like Melissa. Seeing that Morality andMorals under their _alias_ of Ethics are the subject of voluminousdiscussion, and their true basis a pressing matter of dispute--seeingthat the most famous book ever written on Ethics, and forming a chiefstudy in our colleges, allies ethical with political science or thatwhich treats of the constitution and prosperity of States, one mightexpect that educated men would find reason to avoid a perversion oflanguage which lends itself to no wider view of life than that ofvillage gossips. Yet I find even respectable historians of our own andof foreign countries, after showing that a king was treacherous, rapacious, and ready to sanction gross breaches in the administration ofjustice, end by praising him for his pure moral character, by which onemust suppose them to mean that he was not lewd nor debauched, not theEuropean twin of the typical Indian potentate whom Macaulay describes aspassing his life in chewing bang and fondling dancing-girls. And sincewe are sometimes told of such maleficent kings that they were religious, we arrive at the curious result that the most serious wide-reachingduties of man lie quite outside both Morality and Religion--the one ofthese consisting in not keeping mistresses (and perhaps not drinking toomuch), and the other in certain ritual and spiritual transactions withGod which can be carried on equally well side by side with the basestconduct towards men. With such a classification as this it is no wonder, considering the strong reaction of language on thought, that many minds, dizzy with indigestion of recent science and philosophy, are far to seekfor the grounds of social duty, and without entertaining any privateintention of committing a perjury which would ruin an innocent man, orseeking gain by supplying bad preserved meats to our navy, feelthemselves speculatively obliged to inquire why they should not do so, and are inclined to measure their intellectual subtlety by theirdissatisfaction with all answers to this "Why?" It is of little use totheorise in ethics while our habitual phraseology stamps the larger partof our social duties as something that lies aloof from the deepest needsand affections of our nature. The informal definitions of popularlanguage are the only medium through which theory really affects themass of minds even among the nominally educated; and when a man whosebusiness hours, the solid part of every day, are spent in anunscrupulous course of public or private action which has everycalculable chance of causing widespread injury and misery, can be calledmoral because he comes home to dine with his wife and children andcherishes the happiness of his own hearth, the augury is not good forthe use of high ethical and theological disputation. 

Not for one moment would one willingly lose sight of the truth that therelation of the sexes and the primary ties of kinship are the deepestroots of human wellbeing, but to make them by themselves the equivalentof morality is verbally to cut off the channels of feeling throughwhich they are the feeders of that wellbeing. They are the originalfountains of a sensibility to the claims of others, which is the bond ofsocieties; but being necessarily in the first instance a private good, there is always the danger that individual selfishness will see in themonly the best part of its own gain; just as knowledge, navigation, commerce, and all the conditions which are of a nature to awaken men'sconsciousness of their mutual dependence and to make the world one greatsociety, are the occasions of selfish, unfair action, of war andoppression, so long as the public conscience or chief force of feelingand opinion is not uniform and strong enough in its insistance on whatis demanded by the general welfare. And among the influences that mustretard a right public judgment, the degradation of words which involvepraise and blame will be reckoned worth protesting against by everymature observer. To rob words of half their meaning, while they retaintheir dignity as qualifications, is like allowing to men who have losthalf their faculties the same high and perilous command which they wonin their time of vigour; or like selling food and seeds afterfraudulently abstracting their best virtues: in each case what ought tobe beneficently strong is fatally enfeebled, if not empoisoned. Until wehave altered our dictionaries and have found some other word than_morality_ to stand in popular use for the duties of man to man, let usrefuse to accept as moral the contractor who enriches himself by usinglarge machinery to make pasteboard soles pass as leather for the feet ofunhappy conscripts fighting at miserable odds against invaders: let usrather call him a miscreant, though he were the tenderest, most faithfulof husbands, and contend that his own experience of home happiness makeshis reckless infliction of suffering on others all the more atrocious. Let us refuse to accept as moral any political leader who should allowhis conduct in relation to great issues to be determined by egoisticpassion, and boldly say that he would be less immoral even though hewere as lax in his personal habits as Sir Robert Walpole, if at the sametime his sense of the public welfare were supreme in his mind, quellingall pettier impulses beneath a magnanimous impartiality. And though wewere to find among that class of journalists who live by recklesslyreporting injurious rumours, insinuating the blackest motives inopponents, descanting at large and with an air of infallibility ondreams which they both find and interpret, and stimulating bad feelingbetween nations by abusive writing which is as empty of real convictionas the rage of a pantomime king, and would be ludicrous if its effectsdid not make it appear diabolical--though we were to find among these aman who was benignancy itself in his own circle, a healer of privatedifferences, a soother in private calamities, let us pronounce himnevertheless flagrantly immoral, a root of hideous cancer in thecommonwealth, turning the channels of instruction into feeders of socialand political disease. 

In opposite ways one sees bad effects likely to be encouraged by thisnarrow use of the word _morals_, shutting out from its meaning halfthose actions of a man's life which tell momentously on the wellbeing ofhis fellow-citizens, and on the preparation of a future for the childrengrowing up around him. Thoroughness of workmanship, care in theexecution of every task undertaken, as if it were the acceptance of atrust which it would be a breach of faith not to discharge well, is aform of duty so momentous that if it were to die out from the feelingand practice of a people, all reforms of institutions would be helplessto create national prosperity and national happiness. Do we desire tosee public spirit penetrating all classes of the community and affectingevery man's conduct, so that he shall make neither the saving of hissoul nor any other private saving an excuse for indifference to thegeneral welfare? Well and good. But the sort of public spirit thatscamps its bread-winning work, whether with the trowel, the pen, or theoverseeing brain, that it may hurry to scenes of political or socialagitation, would be as baleful a gift to our people as any malignantdemon could devise. One best part of educational training is that whichcomes through special knowledge and manipulative or other skill, withits usual accompaniment of delight, in relation to work which is thedaily bread-winning occupation--which is a man's contribution to theeffective wealth of society in return for what he takes as his ownshare. But this duty of doing one's proper work well, and taking carethat every product of one's labour shall be genuinely what it pretendsto be, is not only left out of morals in popular speech, it is verylittle insisted on by public teachers, at least in the only effectiveway--by tracing the continuous effects of ill-done work. Some of themseem to be still hopeful that it will follow as a necessary consequencefrom week-day services, ecclesiastical decoration, and improvedhymn-books; others apparently trust to descanting on self-culture ingeneral, or to raising a general sense of faulty circumstances; andmeanwhile lax, make-shift work, from the high conspicuous kind to theaverage and obscure, is allowed to pass unstamped with the disgrace ofimmorality, though there is not a member of society who is not dailysuffering from it materially and spiritually, and though it is the fatalcause that must degrade our national rank and our commerce in spite ofall open markets and discovery of available coal-seams. 

I suppose one may take the popular misuse of the words Morality andMorals as some excuse for certain absurdities which are occasionalfashions in speech and writing--certain old lay-figures, as ugly as thequeerest Asiatic idol, which at different periods get propped intoloftiness, and attired in magnificent Venetian drapery, so that whetherthey have a human face or not is of little consequence. One is, thenotion that there is a radical, irreconcilable opposition betweenintellect and morality. I do not mean the simple statement of fact, which everybody knows, that remarkably able men have had very faultymorals, and have outraged public feeling even at its ordinary standard;but the supposition that the ablest intellect, the highest genius, willsee through morality as a sort of twaddle for bibs and tuckers, adoctrine of dulness, a mere incident in human stupidity. We begin tounderstand the acceptance of this foolishness by considering that welive in a society where we may hear a treacherous monarch, or amalignant and lying politician, or a man who uses either official orliterary power as an instrument of his private partiality or hatred, ora manufacturer who devises the falsification of wares, or a trader whodeals in virtueless seed-grains, praised or compassionated because ofhis excellent morals. 

Clearly if morality meant no more than such decencies as are practisedby these poisonous members of society, it would be possible to say, without suspicion of light-headedness, that morality lay aloof from thegrand stream of human affairs, as a small channel fed by the stream andnot missed from it. While this form of nonsense is conveyed in thepopular use of words, there must be plenty of well-dressed ignorance atleisure to run through a box of books, which will feel itself initiatedin the freemasonry of intellect by a view of life which might take for aShaksperian motto--

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

and will find itself easily provided with striking conversation by therule of reversing all the judgments on good and evil which have come tobe the calendar and clock-work of society. But let our habitual talkgive morals their full meaning as the conduct which, in every humanrelation, would follow from the fullest knowledge and the fullestsympathy--a meaning perpetually corrected and enriched by a morethorough appreciation of dependence in things, and a finer sensibilityto both physical and spiritual fact--and this ridiculous ascription ofsuperlative power to minds which have no effective awe-inspiring visionof the human lot, no response of understanding to the connection betweenduty and the material processes by which the world is kept habitable forcultivated man, will be tacitly discredited without any need to cite theimmortal names that all are obliged to take as the measure ofintellectual rank and highly-charged genius. 

Suppose a Frenchman--I mean no disrespect to the great French nation, for all nations are afflicted with their peculiar parasitic growths, which are lazy, hungry forms, usually characterised by adisproportionate swallowing apparatus: suppose a Parisian who shouldshuffle down the Boulevard with a soul ignorant of the gravest cares andthe deepest tenderness of manhood, and a frame more or less fevered bydebauchery, mentally polishing into utmost refinement of phrase andrhythm verses which were an enlargement on that Shaksperian motto, andworthy of the most expensive title to be furnished by the vendors ofsuch antithetic ware as _Les_ _marguerites de l'Enfer_, or _Les délicesde Béelzébuth_. This supposed personage might probably enough regard hisnegation of those moral sensibilities which make half the warp and woofof human history, his indifference to the hard thinking and hardhandiwork of life, to which he owed even his own gauzy mental garmentswith their spangles of poor paradox, as the royalty of genius, for weare used to witness such self-crowning in many forms of mentalalienation; but he would not, I think, be taken, even by his owngeneration, as a living proof that there can exist such a combination asthat of moral stupidity and trivial emphasis of personal indulgence withthe large yet finely discriminating vision which marks the intellectualmasters of our kind. Doubtless there are many sorts of transfiguration, and a man who has come to be worthy of all gratitude and reverence mayhave had his swinish period, wallowing in ugly places; but suppose ithad been handed down to us that Sophocles or Virgil had at one time madehimself scandalous in this way: the works which have consecrated theirmemory for our admiration and gratitude are not a glorifying ofswinishness, but an artistic incorporation of the highest sentimentknown to their age. 

All these may seem to be wide reasons for objecting to Melissa's pityfor Sir Gavial Mantrap on the ground of his good morals; but theirconnection will not be obscure to any one who has taken pains to observethe links uniting the scattered signs of our social development. 

XVII. 

SHADOWS OF THE COMING RACE. 

My friend Trost, who is no optimist as to the state of the universehitherto, but is confident that at some future period within theduration of the solar system, ours will be the best of all possibleworlds--a hope which I always honour as a sign of beneficentqualities--my friend Trost always tries to keep up my spirits under thesight of the extremely unpleasant and disfiguring work by which many ofour fellow-creatures have to get their bread, with the assurance that"all this will soon be done by machinery. " But he sometimes neutralisesthe consolation by extending it over so large an area of human labour, and insisting so impressively on the quantity of energy which will thusbe set free for loftier purposes, that I am tempted to desire anoccasional famine of invention in the coming ages, lest the humblerkinds of work should be entirely nullified while there are still leftsome men and women who are not fit for the highest. 

Especially, when one considers the perfunctory way in which some of themost exalted tasks are already executed by those who are understood tobe educated for them, there rises a fearful vision of the human raceevolving machinery which will by-and-by throw itself fatally out ofwork. When, in the Bank of England, I see a wondrously delicate machinefor testing sovereigns, a shrewd implacable little steel Rhadamanthusthat, once the coins are delivered up to it, lifts and balances each inturn for the fraction of an instant, finds it wanting or sufficient, anddismisses it to right or left with rigorous justice; when I am told ofmicrometers and thermopiles and tasimeters which deal physically withthe invisible, the impalpable, and the unimaginable; of cunning wiresand wheels and pointing needles which will register your and myquickness so as to exclude flattering opinion; of a machine for drawingthe right conclusion, which will doubtless by-and-by be improved intoan automaton for finding true premises; of a microphone which detectsthe cadence of the fly's foot on the ceiling, and may be expectedpresently to discriminate the noises of our various follies as theysoliloquise or converse in our brains--my mind seeming too small forthese things, I get a little out of it, like an unfortunate savage toosuddenly brought face to face with civilisation, and I exclaim--

"Am I already in the shadow of the Coming Race? and will the creatureswho are to transcend and finally supersede us be steely organisms, giving out the effluvia of the laboratory, and performing withinfallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with aslovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?"

"But, " says Trost, treating me with cautious mildness on hearing me ventthis raving notion, "you forget that these wonder-workers are the slavesof our race, need our tendance and regulation, obey the mandates of ourconsciousness, and are only deaf and dumb bringers of reports which wedecipher and make use of. They are simply extensions of the humanorganism, so to speak, limbs immeasurably more powerful, ever moresubtle finger-tips, ever more mastery over the invisibly great and theinvisibly small. Each new machine needs a new appliance of human skillto construct it, new devices to feed it with material, and oftenkeener-edged faculties to note its registrations or performances. Howthen 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, andbecoming rather wilful in consequence. "If, as I have heard you contend, machines as they are more and more perfected will require less and lessof tendance, how do I know that they may not be ultimately made tocarry, or may not in themselves evolve, conditions of self-supply, self-repair, and reproduction, and not only do all the mighty and subtlework possible on this planet better than we could do it, but with theimmense advantage of banishing from the earth's atmosphere screamingconsciousnesses which, in our comparatively clumsy race, make anintolerable noise and fuss to each other about every petty ant-likeperformance, looking on at all work only as it were to spring a rattlehere or blow a trumpet there, with a ridiculous sense of beingeffective? I for my part cannot see any reason why a sufficientlypenetrating thinker, who can see his way through a thousand years or so, should not conceive a parliament of machines, in which the manners wereexcellent and the motions infallible in logic: one honourableinstrument, a remote descendant of the Voltaic family, might discharge apowerful current (entirely without animosity) on an honourableinstrument opposite, of more upstart origin, but belonging to theancient edge-tool race which we already at Sheffield see paring thickiron as if it were mellow cheese--by this unerringly directed dischargeoperating on movements corresponding to what we call Estimates, and bynecessary mechanical consequence on movements corresponding to what wecall the Funds, which with a vain analogy we sometimes speak of as"sensitive. " For every machine would be perfectly educated, that is tosay, would have the suitable molecular adjustments, which would act notthe less infallibly for being free from the fussy accompaniment of thatconsciousness to which our 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 itkind 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 utmostdevelopment of mechanical processes: the subtly refined powers ofmachines will react in producing more subtly refined thinking processeswhich will occupy the minds set free from grosser labour. Say, forexample, that all the scavengers work of London were done, so far ashuman attention is concerned, by the occasional pressure of a brassbutton (as in the ringing of an electric bell), you will then have amultitude of brains set free for the exquisite enjoyment of dealing withthe exact sequences and high speculations supplied and prompted by thedelicate machines which yield a response to the fixed stars, and givereadings of the spiral vortices fundamentally concerned in theproduction of epic poems or great judicial harangues. So far frommankind being thrown out of work according to your notion, " concludedTrost, with a peculiar nasal note of scorn, "if it were not for yourincurable dilettanteism in science as in all other things--if you hadonce understood the action of any delicate machine--you would perceivethat the sequences it carries throughout the realm of phenomena wouldrequire many generations, perhaps aeons, of understandings considerablystronger than yours, to exhaust the store of work it lays open. "

"Precisely, " said I, with a meekness which I felt was praiseworthy; "itis the feebleness of my capacity, bringing me nearer than you to thehuman average, that perhaps enables me to imagine certain results betterthan you can. Doubtless the very fishes of our rivers, gullible as theylook, and slow as they are to be rightly convinced in another order offacts, form fewer false expectations about each other than we shouldform about them if we were in a position of somewhat fuller intercoursewith their species; for even as it is we have continually to besurprised that they do not rise to our carefully selected bait. Take methen as a sort of reflective and experienced carp; but do not estimatethe 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 imagineour race transcended and superseded, since the more energy a being ispossessed 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 imaginemyself and my congeners dispensed with in the frame of things and givingway not only to a superior but a vastly different kind of Entity. What Iwould ask you is, to show me why, since each new invention casts a newlight along the pathway of discovery, and each new combination orstructure brings into play more conditions than its inventor foresaw, there should not at length be a machine of such high mechanical andchemical powers that it would find and assimilate the material to supplyits own waste, and then by a further evolution of internal molecularmovements reproduce itself by some process of fission or budding. Thislast stage having been reached, either by man's contrivance or as anunforeseen result, one sees that the process of natural selection mustdrive men altogether out of the field; for they will long before havebegun to sink into the miserable condition of those unhappy charactersin fable who, having demons or djinns at their beck, and being obligedto supply them with work, found too much of everything done in too shorta time. What demons so potent as molecular movements, none the lesstremendously potent for not carrying the futile cargo of a consciousnessscreeching irrelevantly, like a fowl tied head downmost to the saddle ofa swift horseman? Under such uncomfortable circumstances our race willhave diminished with the diminishing call on their energies, and by thetime that the self-repairing and reproducing machines arise, all but afew of the rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will have becomepale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other degeneration, and beholdaround them a scanty hydrocephalous offspring. As to the breed of theingenious and intellectual, their nervous systems will at last have beenoverwrought in following the molecular revelations of the immenselymore powerful unconscious race, and they will naturally, as the lessenergetic combinations of movement, subside like the flame of a candlein the sunlight Thus the feebler race, whose corporeal adjustmentshappened to be accompanied with a maniacal consciousness which imagineditself moving its mover, will have vanished, as all less adaptedexistences do before the fittest--i. E. , the existence composed of themost persistent groups of movements and the most capable ofincorporating new groups in harmonious relation. Who--if ourconsciousness is, as I have been given to understand, a mere stumblingof our organisms on their way to unconscious perfection--who shall saythat those fittest existences will not be found along the track of whatwe call inorganic combinations, which will carry on the most elaborateprocesses as mutely and painlessly as we are now told that the mineralsare metamorphosing themselves continually in the dark laboratory of theearth's crust? Thus this planet may be filled with beings who will beblind and deaf as the inmost rock, yet will execute changes as delicateand complicated as those of human language and all the intricate web ofwhat we call its effects, without sensitive impression, withoutsensitive impulse: there may be, let us say, mute orations, muterhapsodies, mute discussions, and no consciousness there even to enjoythe silence. "

"Absurd!" grumbled Trost. 

"The supposition is logical, " said I. "It is well argued from thepremises. "

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

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

XVIII. 

THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP!

To discern likeness amidst diversity, it is well known, does not requireso fine a mental edge as the discerning of diversity amidst generalsameness. The primary rough classification depends on the prominentresemblances of things: the progress is towards finer and finerdiscrimination according to minute differences. Yet even at this stageof European culture one's attention is continually drawn to theprevalence of that grosser mental sloth which makes people dull to themost ordinary prompting of comparison--the bringing things togetherbecause of their likeness. The same motives, the same ideas, the samepractices, are alternately admired and abhorred, lauded and denounced, according to their association with superficial differences, historicalor actually social: even learned writers treating of great subjectsoften show an attitude of mind not greatly superior in its logic to thatof the frivolous fine lady who is indignant at the frivolity of hermaid. 

To take only the subject of the Jews: it would be difficult to find aform of bad reasoning about them which has not been heard inconversation or been admitted to the dignity of print; but the neglectof resemblances is a common property of dulness which unites all thevarious points of view--the prejudiced, the puerile, the spiteful, andthe abysmally ignorant. 

That the preservation of national memories is an element and a means ofnational greatness, that their revival is a sign of revivingnationality, that every heroic defender, every patriotic restorer, hasbeen inspired by such memories and has made them his watchword, thateven such a corporate existence as that of a Roman legion or an Englishregiment has been made valorous by memorial standards, --these are theglorious commonplaces of historic teaching at our public schools anduniversities, being happily ingrained in Greek and Latin classics. Theyhave also been impressed on the world by conspicuous modern instances. That there is a free modern Greece is due--through all infiltration ofother than Greek blood--to the presence of ancient Greece in theconsciousness of European men; and every speaker would feel his pointsafe if he were to praise Byron's devotion to a cause made glorious byideal identification with the past; hardly so, if he were to insist thatthe Greeks were not to be helped further because their history showsthat they were anciently unsurpassed in treachery and lying, and thatmany modern Greeks are highly disreputable characters, while others aredisposed to grasp too large a share of our commerce. The same withItaly: the pathos of his country's lot pierced the youthful soul ofMazzini, because, like Dante's, his blood was fraught with the kinshipof Italian greatness, his imagination filled with a majestic past thatwrought itself into a majestic future. Half a century ago, what wasItaly? An idling-place of dilettanteism or of itinerant motivelesswealth, a territory parcelled out for papal sustenance, dynasticconvenience, and the profit of an alien Government. What were theItalians? No people, no voice in European counsels, no massive power inEuropean affairs: a race thought of in English and French society aschiefly adapted to the operatic stage, or to serve as models forpainters; disposed to smile gratefully at the reception of halfpence;and by the more historical remembered to be rather polite than truthful, in all probability a combination of Machiavelli, Rubini, and Masaniello. Thanks chiefly to the divine gift of a memory which inspires the momentswith a past, a present, and a future, and gives the sense of corporateexistence that raises man above the otherwise more respectable andinnocent brute, all that, or most of it, is changed. 

Again, one of our living historians finds just sympathy in his vigorousinsistance on our true ancestry, on our being the strongly markedheritors in language and genius of those old English seamen who, beholding a rich country with a most convenient seaboard, came, doubtless with a sense of divine warrant, and settled themselves on thisor the other side of fertilising streams, gradually conquering more andmore of the pleasant land from the natives who knew nothing of Odin, and finally making unusually clean work in ridding themselves of thoseprior occupants. "Let us, " he virtually says, "let us know who were ourforefathers, who it was that won the soil for us, and brought the goodseed of those institutions through which we should not arrogantly butgratefully feel ourselves distinguished among the nations as possessorsof long-inherited freedom; let us not keep up an ignorant kind of namingwhich disguises our true affinities of blood and language, but let ussee thoroughly what sort of notions and traditions our forefathers had, and what sort of song inspired them. Let the poetic fragments whichbreathe forth their fierce bravery in battle and their trust in fiercegods who helped them, be treasured with affectionate reverence. Theseseafaring, invading, self-asserting men were the English of old time, and were our fathers who did rough work by which we are profiting. Theyhad virtues which incorporated themselves in wholesome usages to whichwe trace our own political blessings. Let us know and acknowledge ourcommon relationship to them, and be thankful that over and above theaffections and duties which spring from our manhood, we have the closerand more constantly guiding duties which belong to us as Englishmen. "

To this view of our nationality most persons who have feeling andunderstanding enough to be conscious of the connection between thepatriotic affection and every other affection which lifts us aboveemigrating rats and free-loving baboons, will be disposed to say Amen. True, we are not indebted to those ancestors for our religion: we arerather proud of having got that illumination from elsewhere. The men whoplanted our nation were not Christians, though they began their workcenturies after Christ; and they had a decided objection to Christianitywhen it was first proposed to them: they were not monotheists, and theirreligion was the reverse of spiritual. But since we have been fortunateenough to keep the island-home they won for us, and have been on thewhole a prosperous people, rather continuing the plan of invading andspoiling other lands than being forced to beg for shelter in them, nobody has reproached us because our fathers thirteen hundred years agoworshipped Odin, massacred Britons, and were with difficulty persuadedto accept Christianity, knowing nothing of Hebrew history and thereasons why Christ should be received as the Saviour of mankind. The RedIndians, not liking us when we settled among them, might have beenwilling to fling such facts in our faces, but they were too ignorant, and besides, their opinions did not signify, because we were able, if weliked, to exterminate them. The Hindoos also have doubtless had theirrancours against us and still entertain enough ill-will to makeunfavourable remarks on our character, especially as to our historicrapacity and arrogant notions of our own superiority; they perhaps donot admire the usual English profile, and they are not converted to ourway of feeding: but though we are a small number of an alien raceprofiting by the territory and produce of these prejudiced people, theyare unable to turn us out; at least, when they tried we showed themtheir mistake. We do not call ourselves a dispersed and a punishedpeople: we are a colonising people, and it is we who have punishedothers. 

Still the historian guides us rightly in urging us to dwell on thevirtues of our ancestors with emulation, and to cherish our sense of acommon descent as a bond of obligation. The eminence, the nobleness of apeople depends on its capability of being stirred by memories, and ofstriving for what we call spiritual ends--ends which consist not inimmediate material possession, but in the satisfaction of a greatfeeling that animates the collective body as with one soul. A peoplehaving the seed of worthiness in it must feel an answering thrill whenit is adjured by the deaths of its heroes who died to preserve itsnational existence; when it is reminded of its small beginnings andgradual growth through past labours and struggles, such as are stilldemanded of it in order that the freedom and wellbeing thus inheritedmay be transmitted unimpaired to children and children's children; whenan appeal against the permission of injustice is made to greatprecedents in its history and to the better genius breathing in itsinstitutions. It is this living force of sentiment in common which makesa national consciousness. Nations so moved will resist conquest withthe very breasts of their women, will pay their millions and their bloodto abolish slavery, will share privation in famine and all calamity, will produce poets to sing "some great story of a man, " and thinkerswhose theories will bear the test of action. An individual man, to beharmoniously great, must belong to a nation of this order, if not inactual existence yet existing in the past, in memory, as a departed, invisible, beloved ideal, once a reality, and perhaps to be restored. Acommon humanity is not yet enough to feed the rich blood of variousactivity which makes a complete man. The time is not come forcosmopolitanism to be highly virtuous, any more than for communism tosuffice for social energy. I am not bound to feel for a Chinaman as Ifeel for my fellow-countryman: I am bound not to demoralise him withopium, not to compel him to my will by destroying or plundering thefruits of his labour on the alleged ground that he is not cosmopolitanenough, and not to insult him for his want of my tailoring and religionwhen he appears as a peaceable visitor on the London pavement. It isadmirable in a Briton with a good purpose to learn Chinese, but itwould not be a proof of fine intellect in him to taste Chinese poetry inthe original more than he tastes the poetry of his own tongue. Affection, intelligence, duty, radiate from a centre, and nature hasdecided that for us English folk that centre can be neither China norPeru. Most of us feel this unreflectingly; for the affectation ofundervaluing everything native, and being too fine for one's owncountry, belongs only to a few minds of no dangerous leverage. What iswanting is, that we should recognise a corresponding attachment tonationality as legitimate in every other people, and understand that itsabsence is a privation of the greatest good. 

For, to repeat, not only the nobleness of a nation depends on thepresence of this national consciousness, but also the nobleness of eachindividual citizen. Our dignity and rectitude are proportioned to oursense of relationship with something great, admirable, pregnant withhigh possibilities, worthy of sacrifice, a continual inspiration toself-repression and discipline by the presentation of aims larger andmore attractive to our generous part than the securing of personal easeor prosperity. And a people possessing this good should surely feel notonly a ready sympathy with the effort of those who, having lost thegood, strive to regain it, but a profound pity for any degradationresulting from its loss; nay, something more than pity when happiernationalities have made victims of the unfortunate whose memoriesnevertheless are the very fountain to which the persecutors trace theirmost vaunted blessings. 

These notions are familiar: few will deny them in the abstract, and manyare found loudly asserting them in relation to this or the otherparticular case. But here as elsewhere, in the ardent application ofideas, there is a notable lack of simple comparison or sensibility toresemblance. The European world has long been used to consider the Jewsas altogether exceptional, and it has followed naturally enough thatthey have been excepted from the rules of justice and mercy, which arebased on human likeness. But to consider a people whose ideas havedetermined the religion of half the world, and that the more cultivatedhalf, and who made the most eminent struggle against the power of Rome, as a purely exceptional race, is a demoralising offence against rationalknowledge, a stultifying inconsistency in historical interpretation. Every nation of forcible character--i. E. , of strongly markedcharacteristics, is so far exceptional. The distinctive note of eachbird-species is in this sense exceptional, but the necessary ground ofsuch distinction is a deeper likeness. The superlative peculiarity inthe Jews admitted, our affinity with them is only the more apparent whenthe elements of their peculiarity are discerned. 

From whatever point of view the writings of the Old Testament may beregarded, the picture they present of a national development is of highinterest and speciality, nor can their historic momentousness be muchaffected by any varieties of theory as to the relation they bear to theNew Testament or to the rise and constitution of Christianity. Whetherwe accept the canonical Hebrew books as a revelation or simply as partof an ancient literature, makes no difference to the fact that we findthere the strongly characterised portraiture of a people educated froman earlier or later period to a sense of separateness unique in itsintensity, a people taught by many concurrent influences to identifyfaithfulness to its national traditions with the highest social andreligious blessings. Our too scanty sources of Jewish history, from thereturn under Ezra to the beginning of the desperate resistance againstRome, show us the heroic and triumphant struggle of the Maccabees, whichrescued the religion and independence of the nation from the corruptingsway of the Syrian Greeks, adding to the glorious sum of its memorials, and stimulating continuous efforts of a more peaceful sort to maintainand 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, asthey had been with varying aspects during the long and changefulprophetic period and the restoration under Ezra, on the side ofpreserving the specific national character against a demoralising fusionwith that of foreigners whose religion and ritual were idolatrous andoften obscene. There was always a Foreign party reviling the Nationalparty as narrow, and sometimes manifesting their own breadth inextensive views of advancement or profit to themselves by flattery of aforeign power. Such internal conflict naturally tightened the bands ofconservatism, which needed to be strong if it were to rescue the sacredark, the vital spirit of a small nation--"the smallest of thenations"--whose territory lay on the highway between three continents;and when the dread and hatred of foreign sway had condensed itself intodread and hatred of the Romans, many Conservatives became Zealots, whosechief mark was that they advocated resistance to the death against thesubmergence of their nationality. Much might be said on this pointtowards distinguishing the desperate struggle against a conquest whichis regarded as degradation and corruption, from rash, hopelessinsurrection against an established native government; and for my part(if that were of any consequence) I share the spirit of the Zealots. Itake the spectacle of the Jewish people defying the Roman edict, andpreferring death by starvation or the sword to the introduction ofCaligula's deified statue into the temple, as a sublime type ofsteadfastness. But all that need be noticed here is the continuity ofthat national education (by outward and inward circumstance) whichcreated 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 ismore likeness than contrast between the way we English got our islandand the way the Israelites got Canaan. We have not been noted forforming a low estimate of ourselves in comparison with foreigners, orfor admitting that our institutions are equalled by those of any otherpeople under the sun. Many of us have thought that our sea-wall is aspecially divine arrangement to make and keep us a nation of sea-kingsafter the manner of our forefathers, secure against invasion and able toinvade other lands when we need them, though they may lie on the otherside of the ocean. Again, it has been held that we have a peculiardestiny as a Protestant people, not only able to bruise the head of anidolatrous Christianity in the midst of us, but fitted as possessors ofthe most truth and the most tonnage to carry our purer religion over theworld and convert mankind to our way of thinking. The Puritans, asserting their liberty to restrain tyrants, found the Hebrew historyclosely symbolical of their feelings and purpose; and it can hardly becorrect to cast the blame of their less laudable doings on the writingsthey invoked, since their opponents made use of the same writings fordifferent ends, finding there a strong warrant for the divine right ofkings and the denunciation of those who, like Korah, Dathan, and Abiram, took on themselves the office of the priesthood which belonged of rightsolely to Aaron and his sons, or, in other words, to men ordained by theEnglish bishops. We must rather refer the passionate use of the Hebrewwritings to affinities of disposition between our own race and theJewish. Is it true that the arrogance of a Jew was so immeasurablybeyond that of a Calvinist? And the just sympathy and admiration whichwe give to the ancestors who resisted the oppressive acts of our nativekings, and by resisting rescued or won for us the best part of our civiland religious liberties--is it justly to be withheld from those braveand steadfast men of Jewish race who fought and died, or strove by wiseadministration to resist, the oppression and corrupting influences offoreign tyrants, and by resisting rescued the nationality which was thevery hearth of our own religion? At any rate, seeing that the Jews weremore specifically than any other nation educated into a sense of theirsupreme moral value, the chief matter of surprise is that any othernation is found to rival them in this form of self-confidence. 

More exceptional--less like the course of our own history--has beentheir dispersion and their subsistence as a separate people through agesin which for the most part they were regarded and treated very much asbeasts hunted for the sake of their skins, or of a valuable secretionpeculiar to their species. The Jews showed a talent for accumulatingwhat was an object of more immediate desire to Christians than animaloils or well-furred skins, and their cupidity and avarice were found atonce particularly hateful and particularly useful: hateful when seen asa reason for punishing them by mulcting or robbery, useful when thisretributive process could be successfully carried forward. Kings andemperors naturally were more alive to the usefulness of subjects whocould gather and yield money; but edicts issued to protect "the King'sJews" equally with the King's game from being harassed and hunted by thecommonalty were only slight mitigations to the deplorable lot of a raceheld to be under the divine curse, and had little force after theCrusades began. As the slave-holders in the United States counted thecurse on Ham a justification of negro slavery, so the curse on the Jewswas counted a justification for hindering them from pursuing agricultureand handicrafts; for marking them out as execrable figures by a peculiardress; for torturing them to make them part with their gains, or formore gratuitously spitting at them and pelting them; for taking it ascertain that they killed and ate babies, poisoned the wells, and tookpains to spread the plague; for putting it to them whether they would bebaptised or burned, and not failing to burn and massacre them when theywere obstinate; but also for suspecting them of disliking the baptismwhen they had got it, and then burning them in punishment of theirinsincerity; finally, for hounding them by tens on tens of thousandsfrom the homes where they had found shelter for centuries, andinflicting on them the horrors of a new exile and a new dispersion. Allthis to avenge the Saviour of mankind, or else to compel thesestiff-necked people to acknowledge a Master whose servants showed suchbeneficent effects of His teaching. 

With a people so treated one of two issues was possible: either frombeing of feebler nature than their persecutors, and caring more for easethan for the sentiments and ideas which constituted their distinctivecharacter, they would everywhere give way to pressure and get rapidlymerged in the populations around them; or, being endowed with uncommontenacity, physical and mental, feeling peculiarly the ties ofinheritance both in blood and faith, remembering national glories, trusting in their recovery, abhorring apostasy, able to bear all thingsand hope all things with the consciousness of being steadfast tospiritual obligations, the kernel of their number would harden into aninflexibility more and more insured by motive and habit. They wouldcherish all differences that marked them off from their hatedoppressors, all memories that consoled them with a sense of virtualthough unrecognised superiority; and the separateness which was madetheir badge of ignominy would be their inward pride, their source offortifying defiance. Doubtless such a people would get confirmed invices. An oppressive government and a persecuting religion, whilebreeding vices in those who hold power, are well known to breedanswering vices in those who are powerless and suffering. What moredirect plan than the course presented by European history could havebeen pursued in order to give the Jews a spirit of bitter isolation, ofscorn for the wolfish hypocrisy that made victims of them, of triumph inprospering at the expense of the blunderers who stoned them away fromthe open paths of industry?--or, on the other hand, to encourage in theless defiant a lying conformity, a pretence of conversion for the sakeof the social advantages attached to baptism, an outward renunciation oftheir hereditary ties with the lack of real love towards the societyand creed which exacted this galling tribute?--or again, in the mostunhappy specimens of the race, to rear transcendent examples of odiousvice, 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 (whichit has not hitherto appeared to be) that some of them have a badpre-eminence in evil, an unrivalled superfluity of naughtiness. It wouldbe more plausible to make a wonder of the virtues which have prosperedamong them under the shadow of oppression. But instead of dwelling onthese, or treating as admitted what any hardy or ignorant person maydeny, let us found simply on the loud assertions of the hostile. TheJews, it is said, resisted the expansion of their own religion intoChristianity; they were in the habit of spitting on the cross; they haveheld the name of Christ to be _Anathema_. Who taught them that? The menwho made Christianity a curse to them: the men who made the name ofChrist a symbol for the spirit of vengeance, and, what was worse, madethe execution of the vengeance a pretext for satisfying their ownsavageness, greed, and envy: the men who sanctioned with the name ofChrist a barbaric and blundering copy of pagan fatalism in taking thewords "His blood be upon us and on our children" as a divinely appointedverbal warrant for wreaking cruelty from generation to generation on thepeople from whose sacred writings Christ drew His teaching. Strangeretrogression in the professors of an expanded religion, boasting anillumination beyond the spiritual doctrine of Hebrew prophets! ForHebrew prophets proclaimed a God who demanded mercy rather thansacrifices. The Christians also believed that God delighted not in theblood of rams and of bulls, but they apparently conceived Him asrequiring for His satisfaction the sighs and groans, the blood androasted flesh of men whose forefathers had misunderstood themetaphorical character of prophecies which spoke of spiritualpre-eminence under the figure of a material kingdom. Was this the methodby which Christ desired His title to the Messiahship to be commended tothe hearts and understandings of the nation in which He was born? Manyof His sayings bear the stamp of that patriotism which placesfellow-countrymen in the inner circle of affection and duty. And did thewords "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do, " refer only tothe centurion and his band, a tacit exception being made of every Hebrewthere present from the mercy of the Father and the compassion of theSon?--nay, more, of every Hebrew yet to come who remained unconvertedafter hearing of His claim to the Messiahship, not from His own lips orthose of His native apostles, but from the lips of alien men whom cross, creed, and baptism had left cruel, rapacious, and debauched? It is morereverent to Christ to believe that He must have approved the Jewishmartyrs who deliberately chose to be burned or massacred rather than beguilty of a blaspheming lie, more than He approved the rabble ofcrusaders who robbed and murdered them in His name. But theseremonstrances seem to have no direct application to personages who takeup the attitude of philosophic thinkers and discriminating critics, professedly accepting Christianity from a rational point of view as avehicle of the highest religious and moral truth, and condemning theJews on the ground that they are obstinate adherents of an outworncreed, maintain themselves in moral alienation from the peoples withwhom they share citizenship, and are destitute of real interest in thewelfare of the community and state with which they are thus identified. These anti-Judaic advocates usually belong to a party which has feltitself glorified in winning for Jews, as well as Dissenters andCatholics, the full privileges of citizenship, laying open to them everypath to distinction. At one time the voice of this party urged thatdifferences of creed were made dangerous only by the denial ofcitizenship--that you must make a man a citizen before he could feellike one. At present, apparently, this confidence has been succeeded bya sense of mistake: there is a regret that no limiting clauses wereinsisted on, such as would have hindered the Jews from coming too farand in too large proportion along those opened pathways; and theRoumanians are thought to have shown an enviable wisdom in giving themas little chance as possible. But then, the reflection occurring thatsome of the most objectionable Jews are baptised Christians, it isobvious that such clauses would have been insufficient, and the doctrinethat you can turn a Jew into a good Christian is emphatically retracted. But clearly, these liberal gentlemen, too late enlightened bydisagreeable events, must yield the palm of wise foresight to those whoargued against them long ago; and it is a striking spectacle to witnessminds so panting for advancement in some directions that they are readyto force it on an unwilling society, in this instance despairinglyrecurring to mediaeval types of thinking--insisting that the Jews aremade viciously cosmopolitan by holding the world's money-bag, that forthem all national interests are resolved into the algebra of loans, thatthey have suffered an inward degradation stamping them as morallyinferior, and--"serve them right, " since they rejected Christianity. Allwhich is mirrored in an analogy, namely, that of the Irish, also aservile race, who have rejected Protestantism though it has beenrepeatedly urged on them by fire and sword and penal laws, and whoseplace in the moral scale may be judged by our advertisements, where theclause, "No Irish need apply, " parallels the sentence which for manypolite persons sums up the question of Judaism--"I never _did_ like theJews. "

It is certainly worth considering whether an expatriated, denationalisedrace, used for ages to live among antipathetic populations, must notinevitably lack some conditions of nobleness. If they drop thatseparateness which is made their reproach, they may be in danger oflapsing into a cosmopolitan indifference equivalent to cynicism, and ofmissing that inward identification with the nationality immediatelyaround them which might make some amends for their inherited privation. No dispassionate observer can deny this danger. Why, our own countrymenwho take to living abroad without purpose or function to keep up theirsense of fellowship in the affairs of their own land are rarely goodspecimens of moral healthiness; still, the consciousness of having anative country, the birthplace of common memories and habits of mind, existing like a parental hearth quitted but beloved; the dignity ofbeing included in a people which has a part in the comity of nationsand the growing federation of the world; that sense of special belongingwhich is the root of human virtues, both public and private, --all thesespiritual links may preserve migratory Englishmen from the worstconsequences of their voluntary dispersion. Unquestionably the Jews, having been more than any other race exposed to the adverse moralinfluences of alienism, must, both in individuals and in groups, havesuffered some corresponding moral degradation; but in fact they haveescaped with less of abjectness and less of hard hostility towards thenations whose hand has been against them, than could have happened inthe case of a people who had neither their adhesion to a separatereligion founded on historic memories, nor their characteristic familyaffectionateness. Tortured, flogged, spit upon, the _corpus vile_ onwhich rage or wantonness vented themselves with impunity, their nameflung at them as an opprobrium by superstition, hatred, and contempt, they have remained proud of their origin. Does any one call this an evilpride? Perhaps he belongs to that order of man who, while he has ademocratic dislike to dukes and earls, wants to make believe that hisfather was an idle gentleman, when in fact he was an honourable artisan, or who would feel flattered to be taken for other than an Englishman. Itis possible to be too arrogant about our blood or our calling, but thatarrogance is virtue compared with such mean pretence. The pride whichidentifies us with a great historic body is a humanising, elevatinghabit of mind, inspiring sacrifices of individual comfort, gain, orother selfish ambition, for the sake of that ideal whole; and no manswayed by such a sentiment can become completely abject. That a Jew ofSmyrna, where a whip is carried by passengers ready to flog off the tooofficious specimens of his race, can still be proud to say, "I am aJew, " is surely a fact to awaken admiration in a mind capable ofunderstanding what we may call the ideal forces in human history. Andagain, a varied, impartial observation of the Jews in differentcountries tends to the impression that they have a predominantkindliness which must have been deeply ingrained in the constitution oftheir race to have outlasted the ages of persecution and oppression. The concentration of their joys in domestic life has kept up in them thecapacity of tenderness: the pity for the fatherless and the widow, thecare for the women and the little ones, blent intimately with theirreligion, is a well of mercy that cannot long or widely be pent up byexclusiveness. And the kindliness of the Jew overflows the line ofdivision between him and the Gentile. On the whole, one of the mostremarkable phenomena in the history of this scattered people, made forages "a scorn and a hissing" is, that after being subjected to thisprocess, which might have been expected to be in every sensedeteriorating and vitiating, they have come out of it (in any estimatewhich allows for numerical proportion) rivalling the nations of allEuropean countries in healthiness and beauty of _physique_, in practicalability, in scientific and artistic aptitude, and in some forms ofethical value. A significant indication of their natural rank is seen inthe fact that at this moment, the leader of the Liberal party in Germanyis a Jew, the leader of the Republican party in France is a Jew, and thehead of the Conservative ministry in England is a Jew. And here it isthat we find the ground for the obvious jealousy which is nowstimulating the revived expression of old antipathies. "The Jews, " it isfelt, "have a dangerous tendency to get the uppermost places not only incommerce but in political life. Their monetary hold on governments istending to perpetuate in leading Jews a spirit of universal alienism(euphemistically called cosmopolitanism), even where the West has giventhem a full share in civil and political rights. A people with orientalsunlight in their blood, yet capable of being everywhere acclimatised, they have a force and toughness which enables them to carry off the bestprizes; and their wealth is likely to put half the seats in Parliamentat 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 merelyvituperative sense. Do they propose as a remedy for the impending dangerof our healthier national influences getting overridden by Jewishpredominance, that we should repeal our emancipatory laws? Not all theGermanic immigrants who have been settling among us for generations, and are still pouring in to settle, are Jews, but thoroughly Teutonicand more or less Christian craftsmen, mechanicians, or skilled anderudite functionaries; and the Semitic Christians who swarm among us aredangerously like their unconverted brethren in complexion, persistence, and wealth. Then there are the Greeks who, by the help of Phoenicianblood or otherwise, are objectionably strong in the city. Some judgesthink that the Scotch are more numerous and prosperous here in the Souththan is quite for the good of us Southerners; and the earlyinconvenience felt under the Stuarts of being quartered upon by ahungry, hard-working people with a distinctive accent and form ofreligion, and higher cheek-bones than English taste requires, has notyet been quite neutralised. As for the Irish, it is felt in highquarters 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 manyof them on the English press, of which they divide the power with theScotch, thus driving many Englishmen to honest and ineloquent labour. 

So far shall we be carried if we go in search of devices to hinderpeople of other blood than our own from getting the advantage ofdwelling among us. 

Let it be admitted that it is a calamity to the English, as to any othergreat historic people, to undergo a premature fusion with immigrants ofalien blood; that its distinctive national characteristics should be indanger of obliteration by the predominating quality of foreign settlers. I not only admit this, I am ready to unite in groaning over thethreatened danger. To one who loves his native language, who woulddelight to keep our rich and harmonious English undefiled by foreignaccent, foreign intonation, and those foreign tinctures of verbalmeaning which tend to confuse all writing and discourse, it is anaffliction as harassing as the climate, that on our stage, in ourstudios, at our public and private gatherings, in our offices, warehouses, and workshops, we must expect to hear our beloved Englishwith its words clipped, its vowels stretched and twisted, its phrases ofacquiescence and politeness, of cordiality, dissidence or argument, delivered always in the wrong tones, like ill-rendered melodies, marredbeyond recognition; that there should be a general ambition to speakevery language except our mother English, which persons "of style" arenot ashamed of corrupting with slang, false foreign equivalents, and apronunciation that crushes out all colour from the vowels and jams thembetween jostling consonants. An ancient Greek might not like to beresuscitated for the sake of hearing Homer read in our universities, still he would at least find more instructive marvels in otherdevelopments to be witnessed at those institutions; but a modernEnglishman is invited from his after-dinner repose to hear Shaksperedelivered under circumstances which offer no other novelty than somenovelty of false intonation, some new distribution of strong emphasis onprepositions, some new misconception of a familiar idiom. Well! it isour inertness that is in fault, our carelessness of excellence, ourwilling ignorance of the treasures that lie in our national heritage, while we are agape after what is foreign, though it may be only a vileimitation of what is native. 

This marring of our speech, however, is a minor evil compared with whatmust follow from the predominance of wealth--acquiring immigrants, whoseappreciation of our political and social life must often be asapproximative or fatally erroneous as their delivery of our language. But take the worst issues--what can we do to hinder them? Are we toadopt the exclusiveness for which we have punished the Chinese? Are weto tear the glorious flag of hospitality which has made our freedom theworld-wide blessing of the oppressed? It is not agreeable to findforeign accents and stumbling locutions passing from the piquantexception to the general rule of discourse. But to urge on that accountthat we should spike away the peaceful foreigner, would be a view ofinternational relations not in the long-run favourable to the interestsof our fellow-countrymen; for we are at least equal to the races we callobtrusive in the disposition to settle wherever money is to be made andcheaply idle living to be found. In meeting the national evils which arebrought upon us by the onward course of the world, there is often nomore immediate hope or resource than that of striving after fullernational excellence, which must consist in the moulding of moreexcellent individual natives. The tendency of things is towards thequicker or slower fusion of races. It is impossible to arrest thistendency: all we can do is to moderate its course so as to hinder itfrom degrading the moral status of societies by a too rapid effacementof those national traditions and customs which are the language of thenational genius--the deep suckers of healthy sentiment. Such moderatingand guidance of inevitable movement is worthy of all effort. And it isin this sense that the modern insistance on the idea of Nationalitieshas value. That any people at once distinct and coherent enough to forma state should be held in subjection by an alien antipathetic governmenthas been becoming more and more a ground of sympathetic indignation; andin virtue of this, at least one great State has been added to Europeancouncils. Nobody now complains of the result in this case, thoughfar-sighted persons see the need to limit analogy by discrimination. Wehave to consider who are the stifled people and who the stiflers beforewe can be sure of our ground. 

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

Here, as everywhere else, the human task seems to be the discerning andadjustment of opposite claims. But the end can hardly be achieved byurging contradictory reproaches, and instead of labouring afterdiscernment as a preliminary to intervention, letting our zeal burstforth according to a capricious selection, first determined accidentallyand afterwards justified by personal predilection. Not only John Gilpinand his wife, or Edwin and Angelina, seem to be of opinion that theirpreference or dislike of Russians, Servians, or Greeks, consequent, perhaps, on hotel adventures, has something to do with the merits of theEastern Question; even in a higher range of intellect and enthusiasm wefind a distribution of sympathy or pity for sufferers of different bloodor votaries of differing religions, strangely unaccountable on any otherground than a fortuitous direction of study or trivial circumstances oftravel. With some even admirable persons, one is never quite sure of anyparticular being included under a general term. A provincial physician, it is said, once ordering a lady patient not to eat salad, was askedpleadingly by the affectionate husband whether she might eat lettuce, orcresses, or radishes. The physician had too rashly believed in thecomprehensiveness of the word "salad, " just as we, if not enlightened byexperience, might believe in the all-embracing breadth of "sympathy withthe injured and oppressed. " What mind can exhaust the grounds ofexception which lie in each particular case? There is understood to be apeculiar odour from the negro body, and we know that some persons, toorationalistic to feel bound by the curse on Ham, used to hint verystrongly that this odour determined the question on the side of negroslavery. 

And this is the usual level of thinking in polite society concerning theJews. Apart from theological purposes, it seems to be held surprisingthat anybody should take an interest in the history of a people whoseliterature has furnished all our devotional language; and if anyreference is made to their past or future destinies some hearer is sureto state as a relevant fact which may assist our judgment, that she, forher part, is not fond of them, having known a Mr Jacobson who was veryunpleasant, 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 theircharacteristics that he is astonished to learn how many persons whom hehas blindly admired and applauded are Jews to the backbone. Again, menwho consider themselves in the very van of modern advancement, knowinghistory and the latest philosophies of history, indicate theircontemptuous surprise that any one should entertain the destiny of theJews as a worthy subject, by referring to Moloch and their ownagreement with the theory that the religion of Jehovah was merely atransformed Moloch-worship, while in the same breath they are glorifying"civilisation" as a transformed tribal existence of which somelineaments are traceable in grim marriage customs of the nativeAustralians. Are these erudite persons prepared to insist that the name"Father" should no longer have any sanctity for us, because in theirview of likelihood our Aryan ancestors were mere improvers on a state ofthings in which nobody knew his own father?

For less theoretic men, ambitious, to be regarded as practicalpoliticians, the value of the Hebrew race has been measured by theirunfavourable opinion of a prime minister who is a Jew by lineage. But itis possible to form a very ugly opinion as to the scrupulousness ofWalpole or of Chatham; and in any case I think Englishmen would refuseto accept the character and doings of those eighteenth century statesmenas the standard of value for the English people and the part they haveto play in the fortunes of mankind. 

If we are to consider the future of the Jews at all, it seemsreasonable to take as a preliminary question: Are they destined tocomplete fusion with the peoples among whom they are dispersed, losingevery remnant of a distinctive consciousness as Jews; or, are there inthe breadth and intensity with which the feeling of separateness, orwhat we may call the organised memory of a national consciousness, actually exists in the world-wide Jewish communities--the seven millionsscattered from east to west--and again, are there in the politicalrelations of the world, the conditions present or approaching for therestoration of a Jewish state planted on the old ground as a centre ofnational feeling, a source of dignifying protection, a special channelfor special energies which may contribute some added form of nationalgenius, and an added voice in the councils of the world?

They are among us everywhere: it is useless to say we are not fond ofthem. Perhaps we are not fond of proletaries and their tendency to formUnions, but the world is not therefore to be rid of them. If we wish tofree ourselves from the inconveniences that we have to complain of, whether in proletaries or in Jews, our best course is to encourage allmeans of improving these neighbours who elbow us in a thickening crowd, and of sending their incommodious energies into beneficent channels. Whyare we so eager for the dignity of certain populations of whom perhapswe have never seen a single specimen, and of whose history, legend, orliterature we have been contentedly ignorant for ages, while we sneer atthe notion of a renovated national dignity for the Jews, whose ways ofthinking and whose very verbal forms are on our lips in every prayerwhich we end with an Amen? Some of us consider this question dismissedwhen they have said that the wealthiest Jews have no desire to forsaketheir European palaces, and go to live in Jerusalem. But in a returnfrom exile, in the restoration of a people, the question is not whethercertain rich men will choose to remain behind, but whether there will befound worthy men who will choose to lead the return. Plenty ofprosperous Jews remained in Babylon when Ezra marshalled his band offorty thousand and began a new glorious epoch in the history of hisrace, making the preparation for that epoch in the history of the worldwhich has been held glorious enough to be dated from for evermore. Thehinge of possibility is simply the existence of an adequate community offeeling as well as widespread need in the Jewish race, and the hope thatamong its finer specimens there may arise some men of instruction andardent public spirit, some new Ezras, some modern Maccabees, who willknow how to use all favouring outward conditions, how to triumph byheroic example, over the indifference of their fellows and the scorn oftheir foes, and will steadfastly set their faces towards making theirpeople once more one among the nations. 

Formerly, evangelical orthodoxy was prone to dwell on the fulfilment ofprophecy in the "restoration of the Jews, " Such interpretation of theprophets is less in vogue now. The dominant mode is to insist on aChristianity that disowns its origin, that is not a substantial growthhaving a genealogy, but is a vaporous reflex of modern notions. TheChrist of Matthew had the heart of a Jew--"Go ye first to the lostsheep of the house of Israel. " The Apostle of the Gentiles had the heartof a Jew: "For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for mybrethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh: who are Israelites; to whompertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and thegiving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; whose arethe fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came. " Modernapostles, extolling Christianity, are found using a different tone: theyprefer the mediaeval cry translated into modern phrase. But themediaeval cry too was in substance very ancient--more ancient than thedays of Augustus. Pagans in successive ages said, "These people areunlike us, and refuse to be made like us: let us punish them. " The Jewswere steadfast in their separateness, and through that separatenessChristianity was born. A modern book on Liberty has maintained that fromthe freedom of individual men to persist in idiosyncrasies the world maybe enriched. Why should we not apply this argument to the idiosyncrasyof a nation, and pause in our haste to hoot it down? There is still agreat function for the steadfastness of the Jew: not that he shouldshut out the utmost illumination which knowledge can throw on hisnational history, but that he should cherish the store of inheritancewhich that history has left him. Every Jew should be conscious that heis one of a multitude possessing common objects of piety in the immortalachievements and immortal sorrows of ancestors who have transmitted tothem a physical and mental type strong enough, eminent enough infaculties, pregnant enough with peculiar promise, to constitute a newbeneficent individuality among the nations, and, by confuting thetraditions of scorn, nobly avenge the wrongs done to their Fathers. 

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

Is bound?

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

Will any one teach the nullification of this feeling and call hisdoctrine a philosophy? He will teach a blinding superstition--thesuperstition that a theory of human wellbeing can be constructed indisregard of the influences which have made us human. 

THE END.