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+Produced by Afra Ullah and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
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+
+IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH
+
+
+GEORGE ELIOT
+
+
+Second Edition
+
+William Blackwood and Sons
+Edinburgh and London
+MDCCCLXXIX
+
+
+
+  "Suspicione si quis errabit sua,
+  Et rapiet ad se, quod erit commune omnium,
+  Stulte nudabit animi conscientiam
+  Huic excusatum me velim nihilominus
+  Neque enim notare singulos mens est mihi,
+  Verum ipsam vitam et mores hominum ostendere"
+
+  --Phaedrus
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+    I. LOOKING INWARD
+
+   II. LOOKING BACKWARD
+
+  III. HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH
+
+   IV. A MAN SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY
+
+    V. A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN
+
+   VI. ONLY TEMPER
+
+  VII. A POLITICAL MOLECULE
+
+ VIII. THE WATCH-DOG OF KNOWLEDGE
+
+   IX. A HALF-BREED
+
+    X. DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY
+
+   XI. THE WASP CREDITED WITH THE HONEYCOMB
+
+  XII. "SO YOUNG!"
+
+ XIII. HOW WE COME TO GIVE OURSELVES FALSE
+       TESTIMONIALS, AND BELIEVE IN THEM
+
+  XIV. THE TOO READY WRITER
+
+   XV. DISEASES OF SMALL AUTHORSHIP
+
+  XVI. MORAL SWINDLERS
+
+ XVII. SHADOWS OF THE COMING RACE
+
+XVIII. THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP!
+
+
+
+I.
+
+
+LOOKING INWARD.
+
+It is my habit to give an account to myself of the characters I meet
+with: can I give any true account of my own? I am a bachelor, without
+domestic distractions of any sort, and have all my life been an
+attentive companion to myself, flattering my nature agreeably on
+plausible occasions, reviling it rather bitterly when it mortified me,
+and in general remembering its doings and sufferings with a tenacity
+which is too apt to raise surprise if not disgust at the careless
+inaccuracy of my acquaintances, who impute to me opinions I never held,
+express their desire to convert me to my favourite ideas, forget whether
+I have ever been to the East, and are capable of being three several
+times astonished at my never having told them before of my accident in
+the Alps, causing me the nervous shock which has ever since notably
+diminished my digestive powers. Surely I ought to know myself better
+than these indifferent outsiders can know me; nay, better even than my
+intimate friends, to whom I have never breathed those items of my inward
+experience which have chiefly shaped my life.
+
+Yet I have often been forced into the reflection that even the
+acquaintances who are as forgetful of my biography and tenets as they
+would be if I were a dead philosopher, are probably aware of certain
+points in me which may not be included in my most active suspicion. We
+sing an exquisite passage out of tune and innocently repeat it for the
+greater pleasure of our hearers. Who can be aware of what his foreign
+accent is in the ears of a native? And how can a man be conscious of
+that dull perception which causes him to mistake altogether what will
+make him agreeable to a particular woman, and to persevere eagerly in a
+behaviour which she is privately recording against him? I have had some
+confidences from my female friends as to their opinion of other men whom
+I have observed trying to make themselves amiable, and it has occurred
+to me that though I can hardly be so blundering as Lippus and the rest
+of those mistaken candidates for favour whom I have seen ruining their
+chance by a too elaborate personal canvass, I must still come under the
+common fatality of mankind and share the liability to be absurd without
+knowing that I am absurd. It is in the nature of foolish reasoning to
+seem good to the foolish reasoner. Hence with all possible study of
+myself, with all possible effort to escape from the pitiable illusion
+which makes men laugh, shriek, or curl the lip at Folly's likeness, in
+total unconsciousness that it resembles themselves, I am obliged to
+recognise that while there are secrets in me unguessed by others, these
+others have certain items of knowledge about the extent of my powers and
+the figure I make with them, which in turn are secrets unguessed by me.
+When I was a lad I danced a hornpipe with arduous scrupulosity, and
+while suffering pangs of pallid shyness was yet proud of my superiority
+as a dancing pupil, imagining for myself a high place in the estimation
+of beholders; but I can now picture the amusement they had in the
+incongruity of my solemn face and ridiculous legs. What sort of hornpipe
+am I dancing now?
+
+Thus if I laugh at you, O fellow-men! if I trace with curious interest
+your labyrinthine self-delusions, note the inconsistencies in your
+zealous adhesions, and smile at your helpless endeavours in a rashly
+chosen part, it is not that I feel myself aloof from you: the more
+intimately I seem to discern your weaknesses, the stronger to me is the
+proof that I share them. How otherwise could I get the discernment?--for
+even what we are averse to, what we vow not to entertain, must have
+shaped or shadowed itself within us as a possibility before we can think
+of exorcising it. No man can know his brother simply as a spectator.
+Dear blunderers, I am one of you. I wince at the fact, but I am not
+ignorant of it, that I too am laughable on unsuspected occasions; nay,
+in the very tempest and whirlwind of my anger, I include myself under my
+own indignation. If the human race has a bad reputation, I perceive that
+I cannot escape being compromised. And thus while I carry in myself the
+key to other men's experience, it is only by observing others that I can
+so far correct my self-ignorance as to arrive at the certainty that I am
+liable to commit myself unawares and to manifest some incompetency which
+I know no more of than the blind man knows of his image in the glass.
+
+Is it then possible to describe oneself at once faithfully and fully? In
+all autobiography there is, nay, ought to be, an incompleteness which
+may have the effect of falsity. We are each of us bound to reticence by
+the piety we owe to those who have been nearest to us and have had a
+mingled influence over our lives; by the fellow-feeling which should
+restrain us from turning our volunteered and picked confessions into an
+act of accusation against others, who have no chance of vindicating
+themselves; and most of all by that reverence for the higher efforts of
+our common nature, which commands us to bury its lowest fatalities, its
+invincible remnants of the brute, its most agonising struggles with
+temptation, in unbroken silence. But the incompleteness which comes of
+self-ignorance may be compensated by self-betrayal. A man who is
+affected to tears in dwelling on the generosity of his own sentiments
+makes me aware of several things not included under those terms. Who has
+sinned more against those three duteous reticences than Jean Jacques?
+Yet half our impressions of his character come not from what he means to
+convey, but from what he unconsciously enables us to discern.
+
+This _naive_ veracity of self-presentation is attainable by the
+slenderest talent on the most trivial occasions. The least lucid and
+impressive of orators may be perfectly successful in showing us the weak
+points of his grammar. Hence I too may be so far like Jean Jacques as to
+communicate more than I am aware of. I am not indeed writing an
+autobiography, or pretending to give an unreserved description of
+myself, but only offering some slight confessions in an apologetic
+light, to indicate that if in my absence you dealt as freely with my
+unconscious weaknesses as I have dealt with the unconscious weaknesses
+of others, I should not feel myself warranted by common-sense in
+regarding your freedom of observation as an exceptional case of
+evil-speaking; or as malignant interpretation of a character which
+really offers no handle to just objection; or even as an unfair use for
+your amusement of disadvantages which, since they are mine, should be
+regarded with more than ordinary tenderness. Let me at least try to feel
+myself in the ranks with my fellow-men. It is true, that I would rather
+not hear either your well-founded ridicule or your judicious strictures.
+Though not averse to finding fault with myself, and conscious of
+deserving lashes, I like to keep the scourge in my own discriminating
+hand. I never felt myself sufficiently meritorious to like being hated
+as a proof of my superiority, or so thirsty for improvement as to desire
+that all my acquaintances should give me their candid opinion of me. I
+really do not want to learn from my enemies: I prefer having none to
+learn from. Instead of being glad when men use me despitefully, I wish
+they would behave better and find a more amiable occupation for their
+intervals of business. In brief, after a close intimacy with myself for
+a longer period than I choose to mention, I find within me a permanent
+longing for approbation, sympathy, and love.
+
+Yet I am a bachelor, and the person I love best has never loved me, or
+known that I loved her. Though continually in society, and caring about
+the joys and sorrows of my neighbours, I feel myself, so far as my
+personal lot is concerned, uncared for and alone. "Your own fault, my
+dear fellow!" said Minutius Felix, one day that I had incautiously
+mentioned this uninteresting fact. And he was right--in senses other
+than he intended. Why should I expect to be admired, and have my company
+doated on? I have done no services to my country beyond those of every
+peaceable orderly citizen; and as to intellectual contribution, my only
+published work was a failure, so that I am spoken of to inquiring
+beholders as "the author of a book you have probably not seen." (The
+work was a humorous romance, unique in its kind, and I am told is much
+tasted in a Cherokee translation, where the jokes are rendered with all
+the serious eloquence characteristic of the Red races.) This sort of
+distinction, as a writer nobody is likely to have read, can hardly
+counteract an indistinctness in my articulation, which the
+best-intentioned loudness will not remedy. Then, in some quarters my
+awkward feet are against me, the length of my upper lip, and an
+inveterate way I have of walking with my head foremost and my chin
+projecting. One can become only too well aware of such things by looking
+in the glass, or in that other mirror held up to nature in the frank
+opinions of street-boys, or of our Free People travelling by excursion
+train; and no doubt they account for the half-suppressed smile which I
+have observed on some fair faces when I have first been presented before
+them. This direct perceptive judgment is not to be argued against. But I
+am tempted to remonstrate when the physical points I have mentioned are
+apparently taken to warrant unfavourable inferences concerning my mental
+quickness. With all the increasing uncertainty which modern progress has
+thrown over the relations of mind and body, it seems tolerably clear
+that wit cannot be seated in the upper lip, and that the balance of the
+haunches in walking has nothing to do with the subtle discrimination of
+ideas. Yet strangers evidently do not expect me to make a clever
+observation, and my good things are as unnoticed as if they were
+anonymous pictures. I have indeed had the mixed satisfaction of finding
+that when they were appropriated by some one else they were found
+remarkable and even brilliant. It is to be borne in mind that I am not
+rich, have neither stud nor cellar, and no very high connections such as
+give to a look of imbecility a certain prestige of inheritance through a
+titled line; just as "the Austrian lip" confers a grandeur of historical
+associations on a kind of feature which might make us reject an
+advertising footman. I have now and then done harm to a good cause by
+speaking for it in public, and have discovered too late that my attitude
+on the occasion would more suitably have been that of negative
+beneficence. Is it really to the advantage of an opinion that I should
+be known to hold it? And as to the force of my arguments, that is a
+secondary consideration with audiences who have given a new scope to the
+_ex pede Herculem_ principle, and from awkward feet infer awkward
+fallacies. Once, when zeal lifted me on my legs, I distinctly heard an
+enlightened artisan remark, "Here's a rum cut!"--and doubtless he
+reasoned in the same way as the elegant Glycera when she politely puts
+on an air of listening to me, but elevates her eyebrows and chills her
+glance in sign of predetermined neutrality: both have their reasons for
+judging the quality of my speech beforehand.
+
+This sort of reception to a man of affectionate disposition, who has
+also the innocent vanity of desiring to be agreeable, has naturally a
+depressing if not embittering tendency; and in early life I began to
+seek for some consoling point of view, some warrantable method of
+softening the hard peas I had to walk on, some comfortable fanaticism
+which might supply the needed self-satisfaction. At one time I dwelt
+much on the idea of compensation; trying to believe that I was all the
+wiser for my bruised vanity, that I had the higher place in the true
+spiritual scale, and even that a day might come when some visible
+triumph would place me in the French heaven of having the laughers on my
+side. But I presently perceived that this was a very odious sort of
+self-cajolery. Was it in the least true that I was wiser than several of
+my friends who made an excellent figure, and were perhaps praised a
+little beyond their merit? Is the ugly unready man in the corner,
+outside the current of conversation, really likely to have a fairer
+view of things than the agreeable talker, whose success strikes the
+unsuccessful as a repulsive example of forwardness and conceit? And as
+to compensation in future years, would the fact that I myself got it
+reconcile me to an order of things in which I could see a multitude with
+as bad a share as mine, who, instead of getting their corresponding
+compensation, were getting beyond the reach of it in old age? What could
+be more contemptible than the mood of mind which makes a man measure the
+justice of divine or human law by the agreeableness of his own shadow
+and the ample satisfaction of his own desires?
+
+I dropped a form of consolation which seemed to be encouraging me in the
+persuasion that my discontent was the chief evil in the world, and my
+benefit the soul of good in that evil. May there not be at least a
+partial release from the imprisoning verdict that a man's philosophy is
+the formula of his personality? In certain branches of science we can
+ascertain our personal equation, the measure of difference between our
+own judgments and an average standard: may there not be some
+corresponding correction of our personal partialities in moral
+theorising? If a squint or other ocular defect disturbs my vision, I can
+get instructed in the fact, be made aware that my condition is abnormal,
+and either through spectacles or diligent imagination I can learn the
+average appearance of things: is there no remedy or corrective for that
+inward squint which consists in a dissatisfied egoism or other want of
+mental balance? In my conscience I saw that the bias of personal
+discontent was just as misleading and odious as the bias of
+self-satisfaction. Whether we look through the rose- glass or
+the indigo, we are equally far from the hues which the healthy human eye
+beholds in heaven above and earth below. I began to dread ways of
+consoling which were really a flattering of native illusions, a
+feeding-up into monstrosity of an inward growth already
+disproportionate; to get an especial scorn for that scorn of mankind
+which is a transmuted disappointment of preposterous claims; to watch
+with peculiar alarm lest what I called my philosophic estimate of the
+human lot in general, should be a mere prose lyric expressing my own
+pain and consequent bad temper. The standing-ground worth striving after
+seemed to be some Delectable Mountain, whence I could see things in
+proportions as little as possible determined by that self-partiality
+which certainly plays a necessary part in our bodily sustenance, but has
+a starving effect on the mind.
+
+Thus I finally gave up any attempt to make out that I preferred cutting
+a bad figure, and that I liked to be despised, because in this way I was
+getting more virtuous than my successful rivals; and I have long looked
+with suspicion on all views which are recommended as peculiarly
+consolatory to wounded vanity or other personal disappointment. The
+consolations of egoism are simply a change of attitude or a resort to a
+new kind of diet which soothes and fattens it. Fed in this way it is apt
+to become a monstrous spiritual pride, or a chuckling satisfaction that
+the final balance will not be against us but against those who now
+eclipse us. Examining the world in order to find consolation is very
+much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to
+find our own name, if not in the text, at least in a laudatory note:
+whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us
+from a true knowledge of the contents. But an attention fixed on the
+main theme or various matter of the book would deliver us from that
+slavish subjection to our own self-importance. And I had the mighty
+volume of the world before me. Nay, I had the struggling action of a
+myriad lives around me, each single life as dear to itself as mine to
+me. Was there no escape here from this stupidity of a murmuring
+self-occupation? Clearly enough, if anything hindered my thought from
+rising to the force of passionately interested contemplation, or my poor
+pent-up pond of sensitiveness from widening into a beneficent river of
+sympathy, it was my own dulness; and though I could not make myself the
+reverse of shallow all at once, I had at least learned where I had
+better turn my attention.
+
+Something came of this alteration in my point of view, though I admit
+that the result is of no striking kind. It is unnecessary for me to
+utter modest denials, since none have assured me that I have a vast
+intellectual scope, or--what is more surprising, considering I have
+done so little--that I might, if I chose, surpass any distinguished man
+whom they wish to depreciate. I have not attained any lofty peak of
+magnanimity, nor would I trust beforehand in my capability of meeting a
+severe demand for moral heroism. But that I have at least succeeded in
+establishing a habit of mind which keeps watch against my
+self-partiality and promotes a fair consideration of what touches the
+feelings or the fortunes of my neighbours, seems to be proved by the
+ready confidence with which men and women appeal to my interest in their
+experience. It is gratifying to one who would above all things avoid the
+insanity of fancying himself a more momentous or touching object than he
+really is, to find that nobody expects from him the least sign of such
+mental aberration, and that he is evidently held capable of listening to
+all kinds of personal outpouring without the least disposition to become
+communicative in the same way. This confirmation of the hope that my
+bearing is not that of the self-flattering lunatic is given me in ample
+measure. My acquaintances tell me unreservedly of their triumphs and
+their piques; explain their purposes at length, and reassure me with
+cheerfulness as to their chances of success; insist on their theories
+and accept me as a dummy with whom they rehearse their side of future
+discussions; unwind their coiled-up griefs in relation to their
+husbands, or recite to me examples of feminine incomprehensibleness as
+typified in their wives; mention frequently the fair applause which
+their merits have wrung from some persons, and the attacks to which
+certain oblique motives have stimulated others. At the time when I was
+less free from superstition about my own power of charming, I
+occasionally, in the glow of sympathy which embraced me and my confiding
+friend on the subject of his satisfaction or resentment, was urged to
+hint at a corresponding experience in my own case; but the signs of a
+rapidly lowering pulse and spreading nervous depression in my previously
+vivacious interlocutor, warned me that I was acting on that dangerous
+misreading, "Do as you are done by." Recalling the true version of the
+golden rule, I could not wish that others should lower my spirits as I
+was lowering my friend's. After several times obtaining the same result
+from a like experiment in which all the circumstances were varied except
+my own personality, I took it as an established inference that these
+fitful signs of a lingering belief in my own importance were generally
+felt to be abnormal, and were something short of that sanity which I
+aimed to secure. Clearness on this point is not without its
+gratifications, as I have said. While my desire to explain myself in
+private ears has been quelled, the habit of getting interested in the
+experience of others has been continually gathering strength, and I am
+really at the point of finding that this world would be worth living in
+without any lot of one's own. Is it not possible for me to enjoy the
+scenery of the earth without saying to myself, I have a cabbage-garden
+in it? But this sounds like the lunacy of fancying oneself everybody
+else and being unable to play one's own part decently--another form of
+the disloyal attempt to be independent of the common lot, and to live
+without a sharing of pain.
+
+Perhaps I have made self-betrayals enough already to show that I have
+not arrived at that non-human independence. My conversational
+reticences about myself turn into garrulousness on paper--as the
+sea-lion plunges and swims the more energetically because his limbs are
+of a sort to make him shambling on land. The act of writing, in spite of
+past experience, brings with it the vague, delightful illusion of an
+audience nearer to my idiom than the Cherokees, and more numerous than
+the visionary One for whom many authors have declared themselves willing
+to go through the pleasing punishment of publication. My illusion is of
+a more liberal kind, and I imagine a far-off, hazy, multitudinous
+assemblage, as in a picture of Paradise, making an approving chorus to
+the sentences and paragraphs of which I myself particularly enjoy the
+writing. The haze is a necessary condition. If any physiognomy becomes
+distinct in the foreground, it is fatal. The countenance is sure to be
+one bent on discountenancing my innocent intentions: it is pale-eyed,
+incapable of being amused when I am amused or indignant at what makes me
+indignant; it stares at my presumption, pities my ignorance, or is
+manifestly preparing to expose the various instances in which I
+unconsciously disgrace myself. I shudder at this too corporeal auditor,
+and turn towards another point of the compass where the haze is
+unbroken. Why should I not indulge this remaining illusion, since I do
+not take my approving choral paradise as a warrant for setting the press
+to work again and making some thousand sheets of superior paper
+unsaleable? I leave my manuscripts to a judgment outside my imagination,
+but I will not ask to hear it, or request my friend to pronounce, before
+I have been buried decently, what he really thinks of my parts, and to
+state candidly whether my papers would be most usefully applied in
+lighting the cheerful domestic fire. It is too probable that he will be
+exasperated at the trouble I have given him of reading them; but the
+consequent clearness and vivacity with which he could demonstrate to me
+that the fault of my manuscripts, as of my one published work, is simply
+flatness, and not that surpassing subtilty which is the preferable
+ground of popular neglect--this verdict, however instructively
+expressed, is a portion of earthly discipline of which I will not
+beseech my friend to be the instrument. Other persons, I am aware, have
+not the same cowardly shrinking from a candid opinion of their
+performances, and are even importunately eager for it; but I have
+convinced myself in numerous cases that such exposers of their own back
+to the smiter were of too hopeful a disposition to believe in the
+scourge, and really trusted in a pleasant anointing, an outpouring of
+balm without any previous wounds. I am of a less trusting disposition,
+and will only ask my friend to use his judgment in insuring me against
+posthumous mistake.
+
+Thus I make myself a charter to write, and keep the pleasing, inspiring
+illusion of being listened to, though I may sometimes write about
+myself. What I have already said on this too familiar theme has been
+meant only as a preface, to show that in noting the weaknesses of my
+acquaintances I am conscious of my fellowship with them. That a
+gratified sense of superiority is at the root of barbarous laughter may
+be at least half the truth. But there is a loving laughter in which the
+only recognised superiority is that of the ideal self, the God within,
+holding the mirror and the scourge for our own pettiness as well as our
+neighbours'.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+
+LOOKING BACKWARD.
+
+Most of us who have had decent parents would shrink from wishing that
+our father and mother had been somebody else whom we never knew; yet it
+is held no impiety, rather, a graceful mark of instruction, for a man to
+wail that he was not the son of another age and another nation, of which
+also he knows nothing except through the easy process of an imperfect
+imagination and a flattering fancy.
+
+But the period thus looked back on with a purely admiring regret, as
+perfect enough to suit a superior mind, is always a long way off; the
+desirable contemporaries are hardly nearer than Leonardo da Vinci, most
+likely they are the fellow-citizens of Pericles, or, best of all, of the
+Aeolic lyrists whose sparse remains suggest a comfortable contrast with
+our redundance. No impassioned personage wishes he had been born in the
+age of Pitt, that his ardent youth might have eaten the dearest bread,
+dressed itself with the longest coat-tails and the shortest waist, or
+heard the loudest grumbling at the heaviest war-taxes; and it would be
+really something original in polished verse if one of our young writers
+declared he would gladly be turned eighty-five that he might have known
+the joy and pride of being an Englishman when there were fewer reforms
+and plenty of highwaymen, fewer discoveries and more faces pitted with
+the small-pox, when laws were made to keep up the price of corn, and the
+troublesome Irish were more miserable. Three-quarters of a century ago
+is not a distance that lends much enchantment to the view. We are
+familiar with the average men of that period, and are still consciously
+encumbered with its bad contrivances and mistaken acts. The lords and
+gentlemen painted by young Lawrence talked and wrote their nonsense in a
+tongue we thoroughly understand; hence their times are not much
+flattered, not much glorified by the yearnings of that modern sect of
+Flagellants who make a ritual of lashing--not themselves but--all their
+neighbours. To me, however, that paternal time, the time of my father's
+youth, never seemed prosaic, for it came to my imagination first through
+his memories, which made a wondrous perspective to my little daily world
+of discovery. And for my part I can call no age absolutely unpoetic: how
+should it be so, since there are always children to whom the acorns and
+the swallow's eggs are a wonder, always those human passions and
+fatalities through which Garrick as Hamlet in bob-wig and knee-breeches
+moved his audience more than some have since done in velvet tunic and
+plume? But every age since the golden may be made more or less prosaic
+by minds that attend only to its vulgar and sordid elements, of which
+there was always an abundance even in Greece and Italy, the favourite
+realms of the retrospective optimists. To be quite fair towards the
+ages, a little ugliness as well as beauty must be allowed to each of
+them, a little implicit poetry even to those which echoed loudest with
+servile, pompous, and trivial prose.
+
+Such impartiality is not in vogue at present. If we acknowledge our
+obligation to the ancients, it is hardly to be done without some
+flouting of our contemporaries, who with all their faults must be
+allowed the merit of keeping the world habitable for the refined
+eulogists of the blameless past. One wonders whether the remarkable
+originators who first had the notion of digging wells, or of churning
+for butter, and who were certainly very useful to their own time as well
+as ours, were left quite free from invidious comparison with
+predecessors who let the water and the milk alone, or whether some
+rhetorical nomad, as he stretched himself on the grass with a good
+appetite for contemporary butter, became loud on the virtue of ancestors
+who were uncorrupted by the produce of the cow; nay, whether in a high
+flight of imaginative self-sacrifice (after swallowing the butter) he
+even wished himself earlier born and already eaten for the sustenance of
+a generation more _naive_ than his own.
+
+I have often had the fool's hectic of wishing about the unalterable, but
+with me that useless exercise has turned chiefly on the conception of a
+different self, and not, as it usually does in literature, on the
+advantage of having been born in a different age, and more especially in
+one where life is imagined to have been altogether majestic and
+graceful. With my present abilities, external proportions, and generally
+small provision for ecstatic enjoyment, where is the ground for
+confidence that I should have had a preferable career in such an epoch
+of society? An age in which every department has its awkward-squad seems
+in my mind's eye to suit me better. I might have wandered by the Strymon
+under Philip and Alexander without throwing any new light on method or
+organising the sum of human knowledge; on the other hand, I might have
+objected to Aristotle as too much of a systematiser, and have preferred
+the freedom of a little self-contradiction as offering more chances of
+truth. I gather, too, from the undeniable testimony of his disciple
+Theophrastus that there were bores, ill-bred persons, and detractors
+even in Athens, of species remarkably corresponding to the English, and
+not yet made endurable by being classic; and altogether, with my present
+fastidious nostril, I feel that I am the better off for possessing
+Athenian life solely as an inodorous fragment of antiquity. As to
+Sappho's Mitylene, while I am convinced that the Lesbian capital held
+some plain men of middle stature and slow conversational powers, the
+addition of myself to their number, though clad in the majestic folds of
+the himation and without cravat, would hardly have made a sensation
+among the accomplished fair ones who were so precise in adjusting their
+own drapery about their delicate ankles. Whereas by being another sort
+of person in the present age I might have given it some needful
+theoretic clue; or I might have poured forth poetic strains which would
+have anticipated theory and seemed a voice from "the prophetic soul of
+the wide world dreaming of things to come;" or I might have been one of
+those benignant lovely souls who, without astonishing the public and
+posterity, make a happy difference in the lives close around them, and
+in this way lift the average of earthly joy: in some form or other I
+might have been so filled from the store of universal existence that I
+should have been freed from that empty wishing which is like a child's
+cry to be inside a golden cloud, its imagination being too ignorant to
+figure the lining of dimness and damp.
+
+On the whole, though there is some rash boasting about enlightenment,
+and an occasional insistance on an originality which is that of the
+present year's corn-crop, we seem too much disposed to indulge, and to
+call by complimentary names, a greater charity for other portions of the
+human race than for our contemporaries. All reverence and gratitude for
+the worthy Dead on whose labours we have entered, all care for the
+future generations whose lot we are preparing; but some affection and
+fairness for those who are doing the actual work of the world, some
+attempt to regard them with the same freedom from ill-temper, whether on
+private or public grounds, as we may hope will be felt by those who will
+call us ancient! Otherwise, the looking before and after, which is our
+grand human privilege, is in danger of turning to a sort of
+other-worldliness, breeding a more illogical indifference or bitterness
+than was ever bred by the ascetic's contemplation of heaven. Except on
+the ground of a primitive golden age and continuous degeneracy, I see no
+rational footing for scorning the whole present population of the globe,
+unless I scorn every previous generation from whom they have inherited
+their diseases of mind and body, and by consequence scorn my own scorn,
+which is equally an inheritance of mixed ideas and feelings concocted
+for me in the boiling caldron of this universally contemptible life, and
+so on--scorning to infinity. This may represent some actual states of
+mind, for it is a narrow prejudice of mathematicians to suppose that
+ways of thinking are to be driven out of the field by being reduced to
+an absurdity. The Absurd is taken as an excellent juicy thistle by many
+constitutions.
+
+Reflections of this sort have gradually determined me not to grumble at
+the age in which I happen to have been born--a natural tendency
+certainly older than Hesiod. Many ancient beautiful things are lost,
+many ugly modern things have arisen; but invert the proposition and it
+is equally true. I at least am a modern with some interest in advocating
+tolerance, and notwithstanding an inborn beguilement which carries my
+affection and regret continually into an imagined past, I am aware that
+I must lose all sense of moral proportion unless I keep alive a stronger
+attachment to what is near, and a power of admiring what I best know and
+understand. Hence this question of wishing to be rid of one's
+contemporaries associates itself with my filial feeling, and calls up
+the thought that I might as justifiably wish that I had had other
+parents than those whose loving tones are my earliest memory, and whose
+last parting first taught me the meaning of death. I feel bound to quell
+such a wish as blasphemy.
+
+Besides, there are other reasons why I am contented that my father was a
+country parson, born much about the same time as Scott and Wordsworth;
+notwithstanding certain qualms I have felt at the fact that the property
+on which I am living was saved out of tithe before the period of
+commutation, and without the provisional transfiguration into a modus.
+It has sometimes occurred to me when I have been taking a slice of
+excellent ham that, from a too tenable point of view, I was breakfasting
+on a small squealing black pig which, more than half a century ago, was
+the unwilling representative of spiritual advantages not otherwise
+acknowledged by the grudging farmer or dairyman who parted with him. One
+enters on a fearful labyrinth in tracing compound interest backward, and
+such complications of thought have reduced the flavour of the ham; but
+since I have nevertheless eaten it, the chief effect has been to
+moderate the severity of my radicalism (which was not part of my
+paternal inheritance) and to raise the assuaging reflection, that if the
+pig and the parishioner had been intelligent enough to anticipate my
+historical point of view, they would have seen themselves and the rector
+in a light that would have made tithe voluntary. Notwithstanding such
+drawbacks I am rather fond of the mental furniture I got by having a
+father who was well acquainted with all ranks of his neighbours, and am
+thankful that he was not one of those aristocratic clergymen who could
+not have sat down to a meal with any family in the parish except my
+lord's--still more that he was not an earl or a marquis. A chief
+misfortune of high birth is that it usually shuts a man out from the
+large sympathetic knowledge of human experience which comes from contact
+with various classes on their own level, and in my father's time that
+entail of social ignorance had not been disturbed as we see it now. To
+look always from overhead at the crowd of one's fellow-men must be in
+many ways incapacitating, even with the best will and intelligence. The
+serious blunders it must lead to in the effort to manage them for their
+good, one may see clearly by the mistaken ways people take of flattering
+and enticing those whose associations are unlike their own. Hence I have
+always thought that the most fortunate Britons are those whose
+experience has given them a practical share in many aspects of the
+national lot, who have lived long among the mixed commonalty, roughing
+it with them under difficulties, knowing how their food tastes to them,
+and getting acquainted with their notions and motives not by inference
+from traditional types in literature or from philosophical theories, but
+from daily fellowship and observation. Of course such experience is apt
+to get antiquated, and my father might find himself much at a loss
+amongst a mixed rural population of the present day; but he knew very
+well what could be wisely expected from the miners, the weavers, the
+field-labourers, and farmers of his own time--yes, and from the
+aristocracy, for he had been brought up in close contact with them and
+had been companion to a young nobleman who was deaf and dumb. "A
+clergyman, lad," he used to say to me, "should feel in himself a bit of
+every class;" and this theory had a felicitous agreement with his
+inclination and practice, which certainly answered in making him beloved
+by his parishioners. They grumbled at their obligations towards him; but
+what then? It was natural to grumble at any demand for payment, tithe
+included, but also natural for a rector to desire his tithe and look
+well after the levying. A Christian pastor who did not mind about his
+money was not an ideal prevalent among the rural minds of fat central
+England, and might have seemed to introduce a dangerous laxity of
+supposition about Christian laymen who happened to be creditors. My
+father was none the less beloved because he was understood to be of a
+saving disposition, and how could he save without getting his tithe? The
+sight of him was not unwelcome at any door, and he was remarkable among
+the clergy of his district for having no lasting feud with rich or poor
+in his parish. I profited by his popularity, and for months after my
+mother's death, when I was a little fellow of nine, I was taken care of
+first at one homestead and then at another; a variety which I enjoyed
+much more than my stay at the Hall, where there was a tutor. Afterwards
+for several years I was my father's constant companion in his outdoor
+business, riding by his side on my little pony and listening to the
+lengthy dialogues he held with Darby or Joan, the one on the road or in
+the fields, the other outside or inside her door. In my earliest
+remembrance of him his hair was already grey, for I was his youngest as
+well as his only surviving child; and it seemed to me that advanced age
+was appropriate to a father, as indeed in all respects I considered him
+a parent so much to my honour, that the mention of my relationship to
+him was likely to secure me regard among those to whom I was otherwise a
+stranger--my father's stories from his life including so many names of
+distant persons that my imagination placed no limit to his
+acquaintanceship. He was a pithy talker, and his sermons bore marks of
+his own composition. It is true, they must have been already old when I
+began to listen to them, and they were no more than a year's supply, so
+that they recurred as regularly as the Collects. But though this system
+has been much ridiculed, I am prepared to defend it as equally sound
+with that of a liturgy; and even if my researches had shown me that some
+of my father's yearly sermons had been copied out from the works of
+elder divines, this would only have been another proof of his good
+judgment. One may prefer fresh eggs though laid by a fowl of the meanest
+understanding, but why fresh sermons?
+
+Nor can I be sorry, though myself given to meditative if not active
+innovation, that my father was a Tory who had not exactly a dislike to
+innovators and dissenters, but a slight opinion of them as persons of
+ill-founded self-confidence; whence my young ears gathered many details
+concerning those who might perhaps have called themselves the more
+advanced thinkers in our nearest market-town, tending to convince me
+that their characters were quite as mixed as those of the thinkers
+behind them. This circumstance of my rearing has at least delivered me
+from certain mistakes of classification which I observe in many of my
+superiors, who have apparently no affectionate memories of a goodness
+mingled with what they now regard as outworn prejudices. Indeed, my
+philosophical notions, such as they are, continually carry me back to
+the time when the fitful gleams of a spring day used to show me my own
+shadow as that of a small boy on a small pony, riding by the side of a
+larger cob-mounted shadow over the breezy uplands which we used to
+dignify with the name of hills, or along by-roads with broad grassy
+borders and hedgerows reckless of utility, on our way to outlying
+hamlets, whose groups of inhabitants were as distinctive to my
+imagination as if they had belonged to different regions of the globe.
+From these we sometimes rode onward to the adjoining parish, where also
+my father officiated, for he was a pluralist, but--I hasten to add--on
+the smallest scale; for his one extra living was a poor vicarage, with
+hardly fifty parishioners, and its church would have made a very shabby
+barn, the grey worm-eaten wood of its pews and pulpit, with their doors
+only half hanging on the hinges, being exactly the colour of a lean
+mouse which I once observed as an interesting member of the scant
+congregation, and conjectured to be the identical church mouse I had
+heard referred to as an example of extreme poverty; for I was a
+precocious boy, and often reasoned after the fashion of my elders,
+arguing that "Jack and Jill" were real personages in our parish, and
+that if I could identify "Jack" I should find on him the marks of a
+broken crown.
+
+Sometimes when I am in a crowded London drawing-room (for I am a
+town-bird now, acquainted with smoky eaves, and tasting Nature in the
+parks) quick flights of memory take me back among my father's
+parishioners while I am still conscious of elbowing men who wear the
+same evening uniform as myself; and I presently begin to wonder what
+varieties of history lie hidden under this monotony of aspect. Some of
+them, perhaps, belong to families with many quarterings; but how many
+"quarterings" of diverse contact with their fellow-countrymen enter into
+their qualifications to be parliamentary leaders, professors of social
+science, or journalistic guides of the popular mind? Not that I feel
+myself a person made competent by experience; on the contrary, I argue
+that since an observation of different ranks has still left me
+practically a poor creature, what must be the condition of those who
+object even to read about the life of other British classes than their
+own? But of my elbowing neighbours with their crush hats, I usually
+imagine that the most distinguished among them have probably had a far
+more instructive journey into manhood than mine. Here, perhaps, is a
+thought-worn physiognomy, seeming at the present moment to be classed as
+a mere species of white cravat and swallow-tail, which may once, like
+Faraday's, have shown itself in curiously dubious embryonic form leaning
+against a cottage lintel in small corduroys, and hungrily eating a bit
+of brown bread and bacon; _there_ is a pair of eyes, now too much
+wearied by the gas-light of public assemblies, that once perhaps learned
+to read their native England through the same alphabet as mine--not
+within the boundaries of an ancestral park, never even being driven
+through the county town five miles off, but--among the midland villages
+and markets, along by the tree-studded hedgerows, and where the heavy
+barges seem in the distance to float mysteriously among the rushes and
+the feathered grass. Our vision, both real and ideal, has since then
+been filled with far other scenes: among eternal snows and stupendous
+sun-scorched monuments of departed empires; within the scent of the long
+orange-groves; and where the temple of Neptune looks out over the
+siren-haunted sea. But my eyes at least have kept their early
+affectionate joy in our native landscape, which is one deep root of our
+national life and language.
+
+And I often smile at my consciousness that certain conservative
+prepossessions have mingled themselves for me with the influences of our
+midland scenery, from the tops of the elms down to the buttercups and
+the little wayside vetches. Naturally enough. That part of my father's
+prime to which he oftenest referred had fallen on the days when the
+great wave of political enthusiasm and belief in a speedy regeneration
+of all things had ebbed, and the supposed millennial initiative of
+France was turning into a Napoleonic empire, the sway of an Attila with
+a mouth speaking proud things in a jargon half revolutionary, half
+Roman. Men were beginning to shrink timidly from the memory of their
+own words and from the recognition of the fellowships they had formed
+ten years before; and even reforming Englishmen for the most part were
+willing to wait for the perfection of society, if only they could keep
+their throats perfect and help to drive away the chief enemy of mankind
+from our coasts. To my father's mind the noisy teachers of revolutionary
+doctrine were, to speak mildly, a variable mixture of the fool and the
+scoundrel; the welfare of the nation lay in a strong Government which
+could maintain order; and I was accustomed to hear him utter the word
+"Government" in a tone that charged it with awe, and made it part of my
+effective religion, in contrast with the word "rebel," which seemed to
+carry the stamp of evil in its syllables, and, lit by the fact that
+Satan was the first rebel, made an argument dispensing with more
+detailed inquiry. I gathered that our national troubles in the first two
+decades of this century were not at all due to the mistakes of our
+administrators; and that England, with its fine Church and Constitution,
+would have been exceedingly well off if every British subject had been
+thankful for what was provided, and had minded his own business--if,
+for example, numerous Catholics of that period had been aware how very
+modest they ought to be considering they were Irish. The times, I heard,
+had often been bad; but I was constantly hearing of "bad times" as a
+name for actual evenings and mornings when the godfathers who gave them
+that name appeared to me remarkably comfortable. Altogether, my father's
+England seemed to me lovable, laudable, full of good men, and having
+good rulers, from Mr Pitt on to the Duke of Wellington, until he was for
+emancipating the Catholics; and it was so far from prosaic to me that I
+looked into it for a more exciting romance than such as I could find in
+my own adventures, which consisted mainly in fancied crises calling for
+the resolute wielding of domestic swords and firearms against unapparent
+robbers, rioters, and invaders who, it seemed, in my father's prime had
+more chance of being real. The morris-dancers had not then dwindled to a
+ragged and almost vanished rout (owing the traditional name probably to
+the historic fancy of our superannuated groom); also, the good old king
+was alive and well, which made all the more difference because I had no
+notion what he was and did--only understanding in general that if he had
+been still on the throne he would have hindered everything that wise
+persons thought undesirable.
+
+Certainly that elder England with its frankly saleable boroughs, so
+cheap compared with the seats obtained under the reformed method, and
+its boroughs kindly presented by noblemen desirous to encourage
+gratitude; its prisons with a miscellaneous company of felons and
+maniacs and without any supply of water; its bloated, idle charities;
+its non-resident, jovial clergy; its militia-balloting; and above all,
+its blank ignorance of what we, its posterity, should be thinking of
+it,--has great differences from the England of to-day. Yet we discern a
+strong family likeness. Is there any country which shows at once as much
+stability and as much susceptibility to change as ours? Our national
+life is like that scenery which I early learned to love, not subject to
+great convulsions, but easily showing more or less delicate (sometimes
+melancholy) effects from minor changes. Hence our midland plains have
+never lost their familiar expression and conservative spirit for me;
+yet at every other mile, since I first looked on them, some sign of
+world-wide change, some new direction of human labour has wrought itself
+into what one may call the speech of the landscape--in contrast with
+those grander and vaster regions of the earth which keep an indifferent
+aspect in the presence of men's toil and devices. What does it signify
+that a lilliputian train passes over a viaduct amidst the abysses of the
+Apennines, or that a caravan laden with a nation's offerings creeps
+across the unresting sameness of the desert, or that a petty cloud of
+steam sweeps for an instant over the face of an Egyptian colossus
+immovably submitting to its slow burial beneath the sand? But our
+woodlands and pastures, our hedge-parted corn-fields and meadows, our
+bits of high common where we used to plant the windmills, our quiet
+little rivers here and there fit to turn a mill-wheel, our villages
+along the old coach-roads, are all easily alterable lineaments that seem
+to make the face of our Motherland sympathetic with the laborious lives
+of her children. She does not take their ploughs and waggons
+contemptuously, but rather makes every hovel and every sheepfold, every
+railed bridge or fallen tree-trunk an agreeably noticeable incident; not
+a mere speck in the midst of unmeasured vastness, but a piece of our
+social history in pictorial writing.
+
+Our rural tracts--where no Babel-chimney scales the heavens--are without
+mighty objects to fill the soul with the sense of an outer world
+unconquerably aloof from our efforts. The wastes are playgrounds (and
+let us try to keep them such for the children's children who will
+inherit no other sort of demesne); the grasses and reeds nod to each
+other over the river, but we have cut a canal close by; the very heights
+laugh with corn in August or lift the plough-team against the sky in
+September. Then comes a crowd of burly navvies with pickaxes and
+barrows, and while hardly a wrinkle is made in the fading mother's face
+or a new curve of health in the blooming girl's, the hills are cut
+through or the breaches between them spanned, we choose our level and
+the white steam-pennon flies along it.
+
+But because our land shows this readiness to be changed, all signs of
+permanence upon it raise a tender attachment instead of awe: some of us,
+at least, love the scanty relics of our forests, and are thankful if a
+bush is left of the old hedgerow. A crumbling bit of wall where the
+delicate ivy-leaved toad-flax hangs its light branches, or a bit of grey
+thatch with patches of dark moss on its shoulder and a troop of
+grass-stems on its ridge, is a thing to visit. And then the tiled roof
+of cottage and homestead, of the long cow-shed where generations of the
+milky mothers have stood patiently, of the broad-shouldered barns where
+the old-fashioned flail once made resonant music, while the watch-dog
+barked at the timidly venturesome fowls making pecking raids on the
+outflying grain--the roofs that have looked out from among the elms and
+walnut-trees, or beside the yearly group of hay and corn stacks, or
+below the square stone steeple, gathering their grey or ochre-tinted
+lichens and their olive-green mosses under all ministries,--let us
+praise the sober harmonies they give to our landscape, helping to unite
+us pleasantly with the elder generations who tilled the soil for us
+before we were born, and paid heavier and heavier taxes, with much
+grumbling, but without that deepest root of corruption--the
+self-indulgent despair which cuts down and consumes and never plants.
+
+But I check myself. Perhaps this England of my affections is half
+visionary--a dream in which things are connected according to my
+well-fed, lazy mood, and not at all by the multitudinous links of
+graver, sadder fact, such as belong everywhere to the story of human
+labour. Well, well, the illusions that began for us when we were less
+acquainted with evil have not lost their value when we discern them to
+be illusions. They feed the ideal Better, and in loving them still, we
+strengthen the precious habit of loving something not visibly, tangibly
+existent, but a spiritual product of our visible tangible selves.
+
+I cherish my childish loves--the memory of that warm little nest where
+my affections were fledged. Since then I have learned to care for
+foreign countries, for literatures foreign and ancient, for the life of
+Continental towns dozing round old cathedrals, for the life of London,
+half sleepless with eager thought and strife, with indigestion or with
+hunger; and now my consciousness is chiefly of the busy, anxious
+metropolitan sort. My system responds sensitively to the London
+weather-signs, political, social, literary; and my bachelor's hearth is
+imbedded where by much craning of head and neck I can catch sight of a
+sycamore in the Square garden: I belong to the "Nation of London." Why?
+There have been many voluntary exiles in the world, and probably in the
+very first exodus of the patriarchal Aryans--for I am determined not to
+fetch my examples from races whose talk is of uncles and no
+fathers--some of those who sallied forth went for the sake of a loved
+companionship, when they would willingly have kept sight of the familiar
+plains, and of the hills to which they had first lifted up their eyes.
+
+
+
+
+III.
+
+
+HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH.
+
+The serene and beneficent goddess Truth, like other deities whose
+disposition has been too hastily inferred from that of the men who have
+invoked them, can hardly be well pleased with much of the worship paid
+to her even in this milder age, when the stake and the rack have ceased
+to form part of her ritual. Some cruelties still pass for service done
+in her honour: no thumb-screw is used, no iron boot, no scorching of
+flesh; but plenty of controversial bruising, laceration, and even
+lifelong maiming. Less than formerly; but so long as this sort of
+truth-worship has the sanction of a public that can often understand
+nothing in a controversy except personal sarcasm or slanderous ridicule,
+it is likely to continue. The sufferings of its victims are often as
+little regarded as those of the sacrificial pig offered in old time,
+with what we now regard as a sad miscalculation of effects.
+
+One such victim is my old acquaintance Merman.
+
+Twenty years ago Merman was a young man of promise, a conveyancer with a
+practice which had certainly budded, but, like Aaron's rod, seemed not
+destined to proceed further in that marvellous activity. Meanwhile he
+occupied himself in miscellaneous periodical writing and in a
+multifarious study of moral and physical science. What chiefly attracted
+him in all subjects were the vexed questions which have the advantage of
+not admitting the decisive proof or disproof that renders many ingenious
+arguments superannuated. Not that Merman had a wrangling disposition: he
+put all his doubts, queries, and paradoxes deferentially, contended
+without unpleasant heat and only with a sonorous eagerness against the
+personality of Homer, expressed himself civilly though firmly on the
+origin of language, and had tact enough to drop at the right moment such
+subjects as the ultimate reduction of all the so-called elementary
+substances, his own total scepticism concerning Manetho's chronology, or
+even the relation between the magnetic condition of the earth and the
+outbreak of revolutionary tendencies. Such flexibility was naturally
+much helped by his amiable feeling towards woman, whose nervous system,
+he was convinced, would not bear the continuous strain of difficult
+topics; and also by his willingness to contribute a song whenever the
+same desultory charmer proposed music. Indeed his tastes were domestic
+enough to beguile him into marriage when his resources were still very
+moderate and partly uncertain. His friends wished that so ingenious and
+agreeable a fellow might have more prosperity than they ventured to hope
+for him, their chief regret on his account being that he did not
+concentrate his talent and leave off forming opinions on at least
+half-a-dozen of the subjects over which he scattered his attention,
+especially now that he had married a "nice little woman" (the generic
+name for acquaintances' wives when they are not markedly disagreeable).
+He could not, they observed, want all his various knowledge and Laputan
+ideas for his periodical writing which brought him most of his bread,
+and he would do well to use his talents in getting a speciality that
+would fit him for a post. Perhaps these well-disposed persons were a
+little rash in presuming that fitness for a post would be the surest
+ground for getting it; and on the whole, in now looking back on their
+wishes for Merman, their chief satisfaction must be that those wishes
+did not contribute to the actual result.
+
+For in an evil hour Merman did concentrate himself. He had for many
+years taken into his interest the comparative history of the ancient
+civilisations, but it had not preoccupied him so as to narrow his
+generous attention to everything else. One sleepless night, however (his
+wife has more than once narrated to me the details of an event memorable
+to her as the beginning of sorrows), after spending some hours over the
+epoch-making work of Grampus, a new idea seized him with regard to the
+possible connection of certain symbolic monuments common to widely
+scattered races. Merman started up in bed. The night was cold, and the
+sudden withdrawal of warmth made his wife first dream of a snowball,
+and then cry--
+
+"What is the matter, Proteus?"
+
+"A great matter, Julia. That fellow Grampus, whose book is cried up as a
+revelation, is all wrong about the Magicodumbras and the Zuzumotzis, and
+I have got hold of the right clue."
+
+"Good gracious! does it matter so much? Don't drag the clothes, dear."
+
+"It signifies this, Julia, that if I am right I shall set the world
+right; I shall regenerate history; I shall win the mind of Europe to a
+new view of social origins; I shall bruise the head of many
+superstitions."
+
+"Oh no, dear, don't go too far into things. Lie down again. You have
+been dreaming. What are the Madicojumbras and Zuzitotzums? I never heard
+you talk of them before. What use can it be troubling yourself about
+such things?"
+
+"That is the way, Julia--that is the way wives alienate their husbands,
+and make any hearth pleasanter to him than his own!"
+
+"What _do_ you mean, Proteus?"
+
+"Why, if a woman will not try to understand her husband's ideas, or at
+least to believe that they are of more value than she can understand--if
+she is to join anybody who happens to be against him, and suppose he is
+a fool because others contradict him--there is an end of our happiness.
+That is all I have to say."
+
+"Oh no, Proteus, dear. I do believe what you say is right That is my
+only guide. I am sure I never have any opinions in any other way: I mean
+about subjects. Of course there are many little things that would tease
+you, that you like me to judge of for myself. I know I said once that I
+did not want you to sing 'Oh ruddier than the cherry,' because it was
+not in your voice. But I cannot remember ever differing from you about
+_subjects_. I never in my life thought any one cleverer than you."
+
+Julia Merman was really a "nice little woman," not one of the stately
+Dians sometimes spoken of in those terms. Her black _silhouette_ had a
+very infantine aspect, but she had discernment and wisdom enough to act
+on the strong hint of that memorable conversation, never again giving
+her husband the slightest ground for suspecting that she thought
+treasonably of his ideas in relation to the Magicodumbras and
+Zuzumotzis, or in the least relaxed her faith in his infallibility
+because Europe was not also convinced of it. It was well for her that
+she did not increase her troubles in this way; but to do her justice,
+what she was chiefly anxious about was to avoid increasing her husband's
+troubles.
+
+Not that these were great in the beginning. In the first development and
+writing out of his scheme, Merman had a more intense kind of
+intellectual pleasure than he had ever known before. His face became
+more radiant, his general view of human prospects more cheerful.
+Foreseeing that truth as presented by himself would win the recognition
+of his contemporaries, he excused with much liberality their rather
+rough treatment of other theorists whose basis was less perfect. His own
+periodical criticisms had never before been so amiable: he was sorry for
+that unlucky majority whom the spirit of the age, or some other
+prompting more definite and local, compelled to write without any
+particular ideas. The possession of an original theory which has not yet
+been assailed must certainly sweeten the temper of a man who is not
+beforehand ill-natured. And Merman was the reverse of ill-natured.
+
+But the hour of publication came; and to half-a-dozen persons, described
+as the learned world of two hemispheres, it became known that Grampus
+was attacked. This might have been a small matter; for who or what on
+earth that is good for anything is not assailed by ignorance, stupidity,
+or malice--and sometimes even by just objection? But on examination it
+appeared that the attack might possibly be held damaging, unless the
+ignorance of the author were well exposed and his pretended facts shown
+to be chimeras of that remarkably hideous kind begotten by imperfect
+learning on the more feminine element of original incapacity. Grampus
+himself did not immediately cut open the volume which Merman had been
+careful to send him, not without a very lively and shifting conception
+of the possible effects which the explosive gift might produce on the
+too eminent scholar--effects that must certainly have set in on the
+third day from the despatch of the parcel. But in point of fact Grampus
+knew nothing of the book until his friend Lord Narwhal sent him an
+American newspaper containing a spirited article by the well-known
+Professor Sperm N. Whale which was rather equivocal in its bearing, the
+passages quoted from Merman being of rather a telling sort, and the
+paragraphs which seemed to blow defiance being unaccountably feeble,
+coming from so distinguished a Cetacean. Then, by another post, arrived
+letters from Butzkopf and Dugong, both men whose signatures were
+familiar to the Teutonic world in the _Selten-erscheinende
+Monat-schrift_ or Hayrick for the insertion of Split Hairs, asking their
+Master whether he meant to take up the combat, because, in the contrary
+case, both were ready.
+
+Thus America and Germany were roused, though England was still drowsy,
+and it seemed time now for Grampus to find Merman's book under the heap
+and cut it open. For his own part he was perfectly at ease about his
+system; but this is a world in which the truth requires defence, and
+specious falsehood must be met with exposure. Grampus having once looked
+through the book, no longer wanted any urging to write the most crushing
+of replies. This, and nothing less than this, was due from him to the
+cause of sound inquiry; and the punishment would cost him little pains.
+In three weeks from that time the palpitating Merman saw his book
+announced in the programme of the leading Review. No need for Grampus to
+put his signature. Who else had his vast yet microscopic knowledge, who
+else his power of epithet? This article in which Merman was pilloried
+and as good as mutilated--for he was shown to have neither ear nor nose
+for the subtleties of philological and archaeological study--was much
+read and more talked of, not because of any interest in the system of
+Grampus, or any precise conception of the danger attending lax views of
+the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis, but because the sharp epigrams with
+which the victim was lacerated, and the soaring fountains of acrid mud
+which were shot upward and poured over the fresh wounds, were found
+amusing in recital. A favourite passage was one in which a certain kind
+of sciolist was described as a creature of the Walrus kind, having a
+phantasmal resemblance to higher animals when seen by ignorant minds in
+the twilight, dabbling or hobbling in first one element and then the
+other, without parts or organs suited to either, in fact one of Nature's
+impostors who could not be said to have any artful pretences, since a
+congenital incompetence to all precision of aim and movement made their
+every action a pretence--just as a being born in doeskin gloves would
+necessarily pass a judgment on surfaces, but we all know what his
+judgment would be worth. In drawing-room circles, and for the immediate
+hour, this ingenious comparison was as damaging as the showing up of
+Merman's mistakes and the mere smattering of linguistic and historical
+knowledge which he had presumed to be a sufficient basis for theorising;
+but the more learned cited his blunders aside to each other and laughed
+the laugh of the initiated. In fact, Merman's was a remarkable case of
+sudden notoriety. In London drums and clubs he was spoken of abundantly
+as one who had written ridiculously about the Magicodumbras and
+Zuzumotzis: the leaders of conversation, whether Christians, Jews,
+infidels, or of any other confession except the confession of ignorance,
+pronouncing him shallow and indiscreet if not presumptuous and absurd.
+He was heard of at Warsaw, and even Paris took knowledge of him. M.
+Cachalot had not read either Grampus or Merman, but he heard of their
+dispute in time to insert a paragraph upon it in his brilliant work,
+_L'orient au point de vue actuel_, in which he was dispassionate enough
+to speak of Grampus as possessing a _coup d'oeil presque francais_ in
+matters of historical interpretation, and of Merman as nevertheless an
+objector _qui merite d'etre connu_. M. Porpesse, also, availing himself
+of M. Cachalot's knowledge, reproduced it in an article with certain
+additions, which it is only fair to distinguish as his own, implying
+that the vigorous English of Grampus was not always as correct as a
+Frenchman could desire, while Merman's objections were more sophistical
+than solid. Presently, indeed, there appeared an able _extrait_ of
+Grampus's article in the valuable _Rapporteur scientifique et
+historique_, and Merman's mistakes were thus brought under the notice of
+certain Frenchmen who are among the masters of those who know on
+oriental subjects. In a word, Merman, though not extensively read, was
+extensively read about.
+
+Meanwhile, how did he like it? Perhaps nobody, except his wife, for a
+moment reflected on that. An amused society considered that he was
+severely punished, but did not take the trouble to imagine his
+sensations; indeed this would have been a difficulty for persons less
+sensitive and excitable than Merman himself. Perhaps that popular
+comparison of the Walrus had truth enough to bite and blister on
+thorough application, even if exultant ignorance had not applauded it.
+But it is well known that the walrus, though not in the least a
+malignant animal, if allowed to display its remarkably plain person and
+blundering performances at ease in any element it chooses, becomes
+desperately savage and musters alarming auxiliaries when attacked or
+hurt. In this characteristic, at least, Merman resembled the walrus. And
+now he concentrated himself with a vengeance. That his counter-theory
+was fundamentally the right one he had a genuine conviction, whatever
+collateral mistakes he might have committed; and his bread would not
+cease to be bitter to him until he had convinced his contemporaries that
+Grampus had used his minute learning as a dust-cloud to hide
+sophistical evasions--that, in fact, minute learning was an obstacle to
+clear-sighted judgment, more especially with regard to the Magicodumbras
+and Zuzumotzis, and that the best preparation in this matter was a wide
+survey of history and a diversified observation of men. Still, Merman
+was resolved to muster all the learning within his reach, and he
+wandered day and night through many wildernesses of German print, he
+tried compendious methods of learning oriental tongues, and, so to
+speak, getting at the marrow of languages independently of the bones,
+for the chance of finding details to corroborate his own views, or
+possibly even to detect Grampus in some oversight or textual tampering.
+All other work was neglected: rare clients were sent away and amazed
+editors found this maniac indifferent to his chance of getting
+book-parcels from them. It was many months before Merman had satisfied
+himself that he was strong enough to face round upon his adversary. But
+at last he had prepared sixty condensed pages of eager argument which
+seemed to him worthy to rank with the best models of controversial
+writing. He had acknowledged his mistakes, but had restated his theory
+so as to show that it was left intact in spite of them; and he had even
+found cases in which Ziphius, Microps, Scrag Whale the explorer, and
+other Cetaceans of unanswerable authority, were decidedly at issue with
+Grampus. Especially a passage cited by this last from that greatest of
+fossils Megalosaurus was demonstrated by Merman to be capable of three
+different interpretations, all preferable to that chosen by Grampus, who
+took the words in their most literal sense; for, 1 deg., the incomparable
+Saurian, alike unequalled in close observation and far-glancing
+comprehensiveness, might have meant those words ironically; 2 deg., _motzis_
+was probably a false reading for _potzis_, in which case its bearing was
+reversed; and 3 deg., it is known that in the age of the Saurians there
+were conceptions about the _motzis_ which entirely remove it from the
+category of things comprehensible in an age when Saurians run
+ridiculously small: all which views were godfathered by names quite fit
+to be ranked with that of Grampus. In fine, Merman wound up his
+rejoinder by sincerely thanking the eminent adversary without whose
+fierce assault he might not have undertaken a revision in the course of
+which he had met with unexpected and striking confirmations of his own
+fundamental views. Evidently Merman's anger was at white heat.
+
+The rejoinder being complete, all that remained was to find a suitable
+medium for its publication. This was not so easy. Distinguished mediums
+would not lend themselves to contradictions of Grampus, or if they
+would, Merman's article was too long and too abstruse, while he would
+not consent to leave anything out of an article which had no
+superfluities; for all this happened years ago when the world was at a
+different stage. At last, however, he got his rejoinder printed, and not
+on hard terms, since the medium, in every sense modest, did not ask him
+to pay for its insertion.
+
+But if Merman expected to call out Grampus again, he was mistaken.
+Everybody felt it too absurd that Merman should undertake to correct
+Grampus in matters of erudition, and an eminent man has something else
+to do than to refute a petty objector twice over. What was essential had
+been done: the public had been enabled to form a true judgment of
+Merman's incapacity, the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis were but
+subsidiary elements in Grampus's system, and Merman might now be dealt
+with by younger members of the master's school. But he had at least the
+satisfaction of finding that he had raised a discussion which would not
+be let die. The followers of Grampus took it up with an ardour and
+industry of research worthy of their exemplar. Butzkopf made it the
+subject of an elaborate _Einleitung_ to his important work, _Die
+Bedeutung des Aegyptischen Labyrinthes_; and Dugong, in a remarkable
+address which he delivered to a learned society in Central Europe,
+introduced Merman's theory with so much power of sarcasm that it became
+a theme of more or less derisive allusion to men of many tongues. Merman
+with his Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis was on the way to become a
+proverb, being used illustratively by many able journalists who took
+those names of questionable things to be Merman's own invention, "than
+which," said one of the graver guides, "we can recall few more
+melancholy examples of speculative aberration." Naturally the subject
+passed into popular literature, and figured very commonly in advertised
+programmes. The fluent Loligo, the formidable Shark, and a younger
+member of his remarkable family known as S. Catulus, made a special
+reputation by their numerous articles, eloquent, lively, or abusive, all
+on the same theme, under titles ingeniously varied, alliterative,
+sonorous, or boldly fanciful; such as, "Moments with Mr Merman," "Mr
+Merman and the Magicodumbras," "Greenland Grampus and Proteus Merman,"
+"Grampian Heights and their Climbers, or the New Excelsior." They tossed
+him on short sentences; they swathed him in paragraphs of winding
+imagery; they found him at once a mere plagiarist and a theoriser of
+unexampled perversity, ridiculously wrong about _potzis_ and ignorant of
+Pali; they hinted, indeed, at certain things which to their knowledge he
+had silently brooded over in his boyhood, and seemed tolerably well
+assured that this preposterous attempt to gainsay an incomparable
+Cetacean of world-wide fame had its origin in a peculiar mixture of
+bitterness and eccentricity which, rightly estimated and seen in its
+definite proportions, would furnish the best key to his argumentation.
+All alike were sorry for Merman's lack of sound learning, but how could
+their readers be sorry? Sound learning would not have been amusing; and
+as it was, Merman was made to furnish these readers with amusement at no
+expense of trouble on their part. Even burlesque writers looked into his
+book to see where it could be made use of, and those who did not know
+him were desirous of meeting him at dinner as one likely to feed their
+comic vein.
+
+On the other hand, he made a serious figure in sermons under the name of
+"Some" or "Others" who had attempted presumptuously to scale eminences
+too high and arduous for human ability, and had given an example of
+ignominious failure edifying to the humble Christian.
+
+All this might be very advantageous for able persons whose superfluous
+fund of expression needed a paying investment, but the effect on Merman
+himself was unhappily not so transient as the busy writing and speaking
+of which he had become the occasion. His certainty that he was right
+naturally got stronger in proportion as the spirit of resistance was
+stimulated. The scorn and unfairness with which he felt himself to have
+been treated by those really competent to appreciate his ideas had
+galled him and made a chronic sore; and the exultant chorus of the
+incompetent seemed a pouring of vinegar on his wound. His brain became a
+registry of the foolish and ignorant objections made against him, and of
+continually amplified answers to these objections. Unable to get his
+answers printed, he had recourse to that more primitive mode of
+publication, oral transmission or button-holding, now generally regarded
+as a troublesome survival, and the once pleasant, flexible Merman was on
+the way to be shunned as a bore. His interest in new acquaintances
+turned chiefly on the possibility that they would care about the
+Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis; that they would listen to his complaints
+and exposures of unfairness, and not only accept copies of what he had
+written on the subject, but send him appreciative letters in
+acknowledgment. Repeated disappointment of such hopes tended to embitter
+him, and not the less because after a while the fashion of mentioning
+him died out, allusions to his theory were less understood, and people
+could only pretend to remember it. And all the while Merman was
+perfectly sure that his very opponents who had knowledge enough to be
+capable judges were aware that his book, whatever errors of statement
+they might detect in it, had served as a sort of divining rod, pointing
+out hidden sources of historical interpretation; nay, his jealous
+examination discerned in a new work by Grampus himself a certain
+shifting of ground which--so poor Merman declared--was the sign of an
+intention gradually to appropriate the views of the man he had attempted
+to brand as an ignorant impostor.
+
+And Julia? And the housekeeping?--the rent, food, and clothing, which
+controversy can hardly supply unless it be of the kind that serves as a
+recommendation to certain posts. Controversial pamphlets have been known
+to earn large plums; but nothing of the sort could be expected from
+unpractical heresies about the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis. Painfully
+the contrary. Merman's reputation as a sober thinker, a safe writer, a
+sound lawyer, was irretrievably injured: the distractions of controversy
+had caused him to neglect useful editorial connections, and indeed his
+dwindling care for miscellaneous subjects made his contributions too
+dull to be desirable. Even if he could now have given a new turn to his
+concentration, and applied his talents so as to be ready to show himself
+an exceptionally qualified lawyer, he would only have been like an
+architect in competition, too late with his superior plans; he would not
+have had an opportunity of showing his qualification. He was thrown out
+of the course. The small capital which had filled up deficiencies of
+income was almost exhausted, and Julia, in the effort to make supplies
+equal to wants, had to use much ingenuity in diminishing the wants. The
+brave and affectionate woman whose small outline, so unimpressive
+against an illuminated background, held within it a good share of
+feminine heroism, did her best to keep up the charm of home and soothe
+her husband's excitement; parting with the best jewel among her wedding
+presents in order to pay rent, without ever hinting to her husband that
+this sad result had come of his undertaking to convince people who only
+laughed at him. She was a resigned little creature, and reflected that
+some husbands took to drinking and others to forgery: hers had only
+taken to the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis, and was not unkind--only a
+little more indifferent to her and the two children than she had ever
+expected he would be, his mind being eaten up with "subjects," and
+constantly a little angry, not with her, but with everybody else,
+especially those who were celebrated.
+
+This was the sad truth. Merman felt himself ill-used by the world, and
+thought very much worse of the world in consequence. The gall of his
+adversaries' ink had been sucked into his system and ran in his blood.
+He was still in the prime of life, but his mind was aged by that eager
+monotonous construction which comes of feverish excitement on a single
+topic and uses up the intellectual strength.
+
+Merman had never been a rich man, but he was now conspicuously poor, and
+in need of the friends who had power or interest which he believed they
+could exert on his behalf. Their omitting or declining to give this help
+could not seem to him so clearly as to them an inevitable consequence of
+his having become impracticable, or at least of his passing for a man
+whose views were not likely to be safe and sober. Each friend in turn
+offended him, though unwillingly, and was suspected of wishing to shake
+him off. It was not altogether so; but poor Merman's society had
+undeniably ceased to be attractive, and it was difficult to help him. At
+last the pressure of want urged him to try for a post far beneath his
+earlier prospects, and he gained it. He holds it still, for he has no
+vices, and his domestic life has kept up a sweetening current of motive
+around and within him. Nevertheless, the bitter flavour mingling itself
+with all topics, the premature weariness and withering, are irrevocably
+there. It is as if he had gone through a disease which alters what we
+call the constitution. He has long ceased to talk eagerly of the ideas
+which possess him, or to attempt making proselytes. The dial has moved
+onward, and he himself sees many of his former guesses in a new light.
+On the other hand, he has seen what he foreboded, that the main idea
+which was at the root of his too rash theorising has been adopted by
+Grampus and received with general respect, no reference being heard to
+the ridiculous figure this important conception made when ushered in by
+the incompetent "Others."
+
+Now and then, on rare occasions, when a sympathetic _tete-a-tete_ has
+restored some of his old expansiveness, he will tell a companion in a
+railway carriage, or other place of meeting favourable to
+autobiographical confidences, what has been the course of things in his
+particular case, as an example of the justice to be expected of the
+world. The companion usually allows for the bitterness of a disappointed
+man, and is secretly disinclined to believe that Grampus was to blame.
+
+
+
+
+IV.
+
+
+A MAN SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY.
+
+Among the many acute sayings of La Rochefoucauld, there is hardly one
+more acute than this: "La plus grande ambition n'en a pas la moindre
+apparence lorsqu'elle se rencontre dans une impossibilite absolue
+d'arriver ou elle aspire." Some of us might do well to use this hint in
+our treatment of acquaintances and friends from whom we are expecting
+gratitude because we are so very kind in thinking of them, inviting
+them, and even listening to what they say--considering how insignificant
+they must feel themselves to be. We are often fallaciously confident in
+supposing that our friend's state of mind is appropriate to our moderate
+estimate of his importance: almost as if we imagined the humble mollusc
+(so useful as an illustration) to have a sense of his own exceeding
+softness and low place in the scale of being. Your mollusc, on the
+contrary, is inwardly objecting to every other grade of solid rather
+than to himself. Accustomed to observe what we think an unwarrantable
+conceit exhibiting itself in ridiculous pretensions and forwardness to
+play the lion's part, in obvious self-complacency and loud
+peremptoriness, we are not on the alert to detect the egoistic claims of
+a more exorbitant kind often hidden under an apparent neutrality or an
+acquiescence in being put out of the question.
+
+Thoughts of this kind occurred to me yesterday when I saw the name of
+Lentulus in the obituary. The majority of his acquaintances, I imagine,
+have always thought of him as a man justly unpretending and as nobody's
+rival; but some of them have perhaps been struck with surprise at his
+reserve in praising the works of his contemporaries, and have now and
+then felt themselves in need of a key to his remarks on men of celebrity
+in various departments. He was a man of fair position, deriving his
+income from a business in which he did nothing, at leisure to frequent
+clubs and at ease in giving dinners; well-looking, polite, and generally
+acceptable in society as a part of what we may call its bread-crumb--the
+neutral basis needful for the plums and spice. Why, then, did he speak
+of the modern Maro or the modern Flaccus with a peculiarity in his tone
+of assent to other people's praise which might almost have led you to
+suppose that the eminent poet had borrowed money of him and showed an
+indisposition to repay? He had no criticism to offer, no sign of
+objection more specific than a slight cough, a scarcely perceptible
+pause before assenting, and an air of self-control in his utterance--as
+if certain considerations had determined him not to inform against the
+so-called poet, who to his knowledge was a mere versifier. If you had
+questioned him closely, he would perhaps have confessed that he did
+think something better might be done in the way of Eclogues and
+Georgics, or of Odes and Epodes, and that to his mind poetry was
+something very different from what had hitherto been known under that
+name.
+
+For my own part, being of a superstitious nature, given readily to
+imagine alarming causes, I immediately, on first getting these mystic
+hints from Lentulus, concluded that he held a number of entirely
+original poems, or at the very least a revolutionary treatise on
+poetics, in that melancholy manuscript state to which works excelling
+all that is ever printed are necessarily condemned; and I was long timid
+in speaking of the poets when he was present. For what might not
+Lentulus have done, or be profoundly aware of, that would make my
+ignorant impressions ridiculous? One cannot well be sure of the negative
+in such a case, except through certain positives that bear witness to
+it; and those witnesses are not always to be got hold of. But time
+wearing on, I perceived that the attitude of Lentulus towards the
+philosophers was essentially the same as his attitude towards the poets;
+nay, there was something so much more decided in his mode of closing his
+mouth after brief speech on the former, there was such an air of rapt
+consciousness in his private hints as to his conviction that all
+thinking hitherto had been an elaborate mistake, and as to his own
+power of conceiving a sound basis for a lasting superstructure, that I
+began to believe less in the poetical stores, and to infer that the line
+of Lentulus lay rather in the rational criticism of our beliefs and in
+systematic construction. In this case I did not figure to myself the
+existence of formidable manuscripts ready for the press; for great
+thinkers are known to carry their theories growing within their minds
+long before committing them to paper, and the ideas which made a new
+passion for them when their locks were jet or auburn, remain perilously
+unwritten, an inwardly developing condition of their successive selves,
+until the locks are grey or scanty. I only meditated improvingly on the
+way in which a man of exceptional faculties, and even carrying within
+him some of that fierce refiner's fire which is to purge away the dross
+of human error, may move about in society totally unrecognised, regarded
+as a person whose opinion is superfluous, and only rising into a power
+in emergencies of threatened black-balling. Imagine a Descartes or a
+Locke being recognised for nothing more than a good fellow and a
+perfect gentleman--what a painful view does such a picture suggest of
+impenetrable dulness in the society around them!
+
+I would at all times rather be reduced to a cheaper estimate of a
+particular person, if by that means I can get a more cheerful view of my
+fellow-men generally; and I confess that in a certain curiosity which
+led me to cultivate Lentulus's acquaintance, my hope leaned to the
+discovery that he was a less remarkable man than he had seemed to imply.
+It would have been a grief to discover that he was bitter or malicious,
+but by finding him to be neither a mighty poet, nor a revolutionary
+poetical critic, nor an epoch-making philosopher, my admiration for the
+poets and thinkers whom he rated so low would recover all its buoyancy,
+and I should not be left to trust to that very suspicious sort of merit
+which constitutes an exception in the history of mankind, and recommends
+itself as the total abolitionist of all previous claims on our
+confidence. You are not greatly surprised at the infirm logic of the
+coachman who would persuade you to engage him by insisting that any
+other would be sure to rob you in the matter of hay and corn, thus
+demanding a difficult belief in him as the sole exception from the
+frailties of his calling; but it is rather astonishing that the
+wholesale decriers of mankind and its performances should be even more
+unwary in their reasoning than the coachman, since each of them not
+merely confides in your regarding himself as an exception, but overlooks
+the almost certain fact that you are wondering whether he inwardly
+excepts _you_. Now, conscious of entertaining some common opinions which
+seemed to fall under the mildly intimated but sweeping ban of Lentulus,
+my self-complacency was a little concerned.
+
+Hence I deliberately attempted to draw out Lentulus in private dialogue,
+for it is the reverse of injury to a man to offer him that hearing which
+he seems to have found nowhere else. And for whatever purposes silence
+may be equal to gold, it cannot be safely taken as an indication of
+specific ideas. I sought to know why Lentulus was more than indifferent
+to the poets, and what was that new poetry which he had either written
+or, as to its principles, distinctly conceived. But I presently found
+that he knew very little of any particular poet, and had a general
+notion of poetry as the use of artificial language to express unreal
+sentiments: he instanced "The Giaour," "Lalla Rookh," "The Pleasures of
+Hope," and "Ruin seize thee, ruthless King;" adding, "and plenty more."
+On my observing that he probably preferred a larger, simpler style, he
+emphatically assented. "Have you not," said I, "written something of
+that order?" "No; but I often compose as I go along. I see how things
+might be written as fine as Ossian, only with true ideas. The world has
+no notion what poetry will be."
+
+It was impossible to disprove this, and I am always glad to believe that
+the poverty of our imagination is no measure of the world's resources.
+Our posterity will no doubt get fuel in ways that we are unable to
+devise for them. But what this conversation persuaded me of was, that
+the birth with which the mind of Lentulus was pregnant could not be
+poetry, though I did not question that he composed as he went along, and
+that the exercise was accompanied with a great sense of power. This is a
+frequent experience in dreams, and much of our waking experience is but
+a dream in the daylight. Nay, for what I saw, the compositions might be
+fairly classed as Ossianic. But I was satisfied that Lentulus could not
+disturb my grateful admiration for the poets of all ages by eclipsing
+them, or by putting them under a new electric light of criticism.
+
+Still, he had himself thrown the chief emphasis of his protest and his
+consciousness of corrective illumination on the philosophic thinking of
+our race; and his tone in assuring me that everything which had been
+done in that way was wrong--that Plato, Robert Owen, and Dr Tuffle who
+wrote in the 'Regulator,' were all equally mistaken--gave my
+superstitious nature a thrill of anxiety. After what had passed about
+the poets, it did not seem likely that Lentulus had all systems by
+heart; but who could say he had not seized that thread which may
+somewhere hang out loosely from the web of things and be the clue of
+unravelment? We need not go far to learn that a prophet is not made by
+erudition. Lentulus at least had not the bias of a school; and if it
+turned out that he was in agreement with any celebrated thinker,
+ancient or modern, the agreement would have the value of an undesigned
+coincidence not due to forgotten reading. It was therefore with renewed
+curiosity that I engaged him on this large subject--the universal
+erroneousness of thinking up to the period when Lentulus began that
+process. And here I found him more copious than on the theme of poetry.
+He admitted that he did contemplate writing down his thoughts, but his
+difficulty was their abundance. Apparently he was like the woodcutter
+entering the thick forest and saying, "Where shall I begin?" The same
+obstacle appeared in a minor degree to cling about his verbal
+exposition, and accounted perhaps for his rather helter-skelter choice
+of remarks bearing on the number of unaddressed letters sent to the
+post-office; on what logic really is, as tending to support the buoyancy
+of human mediums and mahogany tables; on the probability of all miracles
+under all religions when explained by hidden laws, and my
+unreasonableness in supposing that their profuse occurrence at half a
+guinea an hour in recent times was anything more than a coincidence; on
+the haphazard way in which marriages are determined--showing the
+baselessness of social and moral schemes; and on his expectation that he
+should offend the scientific world when he told them what he thought of
+electricity as an agent.
+
+No man's appearance could be graver or more gentleman-like than that of
+Lentulus as we walked along the Mall while he delivered these
+observations, understood by himself to have a regenerative bearing on
+human society. His wristbands and black gloves, his hat and nicely
+clipped hair, his laudable moderation in beard, and his evident
+discrimination in choosing his tailor, all seemed to excuse the
+prevalent estimate of him as a man untainted with heterodoxy, and likely
+to be so unencumbered with opinions that he would always be useful as an
+assenting and admiring listener. Men of science seeing him at their
+lectures doubtless flattered themselves that he came to learn from them;
+the philosophic ornaments of our time, expounding some of their luminous
+ideas in the social circle, took the meditative gaze of Lentulus for one
+of surprise not unmixed with a just reverence at such close reasoning
+towards so novel a conclusion; and those who are called men of the
+world considered him a good fellow who might be asked to vote for a
+friend of their own and would have no troublesome notions to make him
+unaccommodating. You perceive how very much they were all mistaken,
+except in qualifying him as a good fellow.
+
+This Lentulus certainly was, in the sense of being free from envy,
+hatred, and malice; and such freedom was all the more remarkable an
+indication of native benignity, because of his gaseous, illimitably
+expansive conceit. Yes, conceit; for that his enormous and contentedly
+ignorant confidence in his own rambling thoughts was usually clad in a
+decent silence, is no reason why it should be less strictly called by
+the name directly implying a complacent self-estimate unwarranted by
+performance. Nay, the total privacy in which he enjoyed his
+consciousness of inspiration was the very condition of its undisturbed
+placid nourishment and gigantic growth. Your audibly arrogant man
+exposes himself to tests: in attempting to make an impression on others
+he may possibly (not always) be made to feel his own lack of
+definiteness; and the demand for definiteness is to all of us a needful
+check on vague depreciation of what others do, and vague ecstatic trust
+in our own superior ability. But Lentulus was at once so unreceptive,
+and so little gifted with the power of displaying his miscellaneous
+deficiency of information, that there was really nothing to hinder his
+astonishment at the spontaneous crop of ideas which his mind secretly
+yielded. If it occurred to him that there were more meanings than one
+for the word "motive," since it sometimes meant the end aimed at and
+sometimes the feeling that prompted the aiming, and that the word
+"cause" was also of changeable import, he was naturally struck with the
+truth of his own perception, and was convinced that if this vein were
+well followed out much might be made of it. Men were evidently in the
+wrong about cause and effect, else why was society in the confused state
+we behold? And as to motive, Lentulus felt that when he came to write
+down his views he should look deeply into this kind of subject and show
+up thereby the anomalies of our social institutions; meanwhile the
+various aspects of "motive" and "cause" flitted about among the motley
+crowd of ideas which he regarded as original, and pregnant with
+reformative efficacy. For his unaffected goodwill made him regard all
+his insight as only valuable because it tended towards reform.
+
+The respectable man had got into his illusory maze of discoveries by
+letting go that clue of conformity in his thinking which he had kept
+fast hold of in his tailoring and manners. He regarded heterodoxy as a
+power in itself, and took his inacquaintance with doctrines for a
+creative dissidence. But his epitaph needs not to be a melancholy one.
+His benevolent disposition was more effective for good than his silent
+presumption for harm. He might have been mischievous but for the lack of
+words: instead of being astonished at his inspirations in private, he
+might have clad his addled originalities, disjointed commonplaces, blind
+denials, and balloon-like conclusions, in that mighty sort of language
+which would have made a new Koran for a knot of followers. I mean no
+disrespect to the ancient Koran, but one would not desire the roc to lay
+more eggs and give us a whole wing-flapping brood to soar and make
+twilight.
+
+Peace be with Lentulus, for he has left us in peace. Blessed is the man
+who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of
+the fact--from calling on us to look through a heap of millet-seed in
+order to be sure that there is no pearl in it.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+
+A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN.
+
+A little unpremeditated insincerity must be indulged under the stress of
+social intercourse. The talk even of an honest man must often represent
+merely his wish to be inoffensive or agreeable rather than his genuine
+opinion or feeling on the matter in hand. His thought, if uttered, might
+be wounding; or he has not the ability to utter it with exactness and
+snatches at a loose paraphrase; or he has really no genuine thought on
+the question and is driven to fill up the vacancy by borrowing the
+remarks in vogue. These are the winds and currents we have all to steer
+amongst, and they are often too strong for our truthfulness or our wit.
+Let us not bear too hardly on each other for this common incidental
+frailty, or think that we rise superior to it by dropping all
+considerateness and deference.
+
+But there are studious, deliberate forms of insincerity which it is fair
+to be impatient with: Hinze's, for example. From his name you might
+suppose him to be German: in fact, his family is Alsatian, but has been
+settled in England for more than one generation. He is the superlatively
+deferential man, and walks about with murmured wonder at the wisdom and
+discernment of everybody who talks to him. He cultivates the low-toned
+_tete-a-tete,_ keeping his hat carefully in his hand and often stroking
+it, while he smiles with downcast eyes, as if to relieve his feelings
+under the pressure of the remarkable conversation which it is his honour
+to enjoy at the present moment. I confess to some rage on hearing him
+yesterday talking to Felicia, who is certainly a clever woman, and,
+without any unusual desire to show her cleverness, occasionally says
+something of her own or makes an allusion which is not quite common.
+Still, it must happen to her as to every one else to speak of many
+subjects on which the best things were said long ago, and in
+conversation with a person who has been newly introduced those
+well-worn themes naturally recur as a further development of salutations
+and preliminary media of understanding, such as pipes, chocolate, or
+mastic-chewing, which serve to confirm the impression that our new
+acquaintance is on a civilised footing and has enough regard for
+formulas to save us from shocking outbursts of individualism, to which
+we are always exposed with the tamest bear or baboon. Considered purely
+as a matter of information, it cannot any longer be important for us to
+learn that a British subject included in the last census holds Shakspere
+to be supreme in the presentation of character; still, it is as
+admissible for any one to make this statement about himself as to rub
+his hands and tell you that the air is brisk, if only he will let it
+fall as a matter of course, with a parenthetic lightness, and not
+announce his adhesion to a commonplace with an emphatic insistance, as
+if it were a proof of singular insight. We mortals should chiefly like
+to talk to each other out of goodwill and fellowship, not for the sake
+of hearing revelations or being stimulated by witticisms; and I have
+usually found that it is the rather dull person who appears to be
+disgusted with his contemporaries because they are not always strikingly
+original, and to satisfy whom the party at a country house should have
+included the prophet Isaiah, Plato, Francis Bacon, and Voltaire. It is
+always your heaviest bore who is astonished at the tameness of modern
+celebrities: naturally; for a little of his company has reduced them to
+a state of flaccid fatigue. It is right and meet that there should be an
+abundant utterance of good sound commonplaces. Part of an agreeable
+talker's charm is that he lets them fall continually with no more than
+their due emphasis. Giving a pleasant voice to what we are all well
+assured of, makes a sort of wholesome air for more special and dubious
+remark to move in.
+
+Hence it seemed to me far from unbecoming in Felicia that in her first
+dialogue with Hinze, previously quite a stranger to her, her
+observations were those of an ordinarily refined and well-educated woman
+on standard subjects, and might have been printed in a manual of polite
+topics and creditable opinions. She had no desire to astonish a man of
+whom she had heard nothing particular. It was all the more exasperating
+to see and hear Hinze's reception of her well-bred conformities.
+Felicia's acquaintances know her as the suitable wife of a distinguished
+man, a sensible, vivacious, kindly-disposed woman, helping her husband
+with graceful apologies written and spoken, and making her receptions
+agreeable to all comers. But you would have imagined that Hinze had been
+prepared by general report to regard this introduction to her as an
+opportunity comparable to an audience of the Delphic Sibyl. When she had
+delivered herself on the changes in Italian travel, on the difficulty of
+reading Ariosto in these busy times, on the want of equilibrium in
+French political affairs, and on the pre-eminence of German music, he
+would know what to think. Felicia was evidently embarrassed by his
+reverent wonder, and, in dread lest she should seem to be playing the
+oracle, became somewhat confused, stumbling on her answers rather than
+choosing them. But this made no difference to Hinze's rapt attention and
+subdued eagerness of inquiry. He continued to put large questions,
+bending his head slightly that his eyes might be a little lifted in
+awaiting her reply.
+
+"What, may I ask, is your opinion as to the state of Art in England?"
+
+"Oh," said Felicia, with a light deprecatory laugh, "I think it suffers
+from two diseases--bad taste in the patrons and want of inspiration in
+the artists."
+
+"That is true indeed," said Hinze, in an undertone of deep conviction.
+"You have put your finger with strict accuracy on the causes of decline.
+To a cultivated taste like yours this must be particularly painful."
+
+"I did not say there was actual decline," said Felicia, with a touch of
+_brusquerie_. "I don't set myself up as the great personage whom nothing
+can please."
+
+"That would be too severe a misfortune for others," says my
+complimentary ape. "You approve, perhaps, of Rosemary's 'Babes in the
+Wood,' as something fresh and _naive_ in sculpture?"
+
+"I think it enchanting."
+
+"Does he know that? Or _will_ you permit me to tell him?"
+
+"Heaven forbid! It would be an impertinence in me to praise a work of
+his--to pronounce on its quality; and that I happen to like it can be of
+no consequence to him."
+
+Here was an occasion for Hinze to smile down on his hat and stroke
+it--Felicia's ignorance that her praise was inestimable being peculiarly
+noteworthy to an observer of mankind. Presently he was quite sure that
+her favourite author was Shakspere, and wished to know what she thought
+of Hamlet's madness. When she had quoted Wilhelm Meister on this point,
+and had afterwards testified that "Lear" was beyond adequate
+presentation, that "Julius Caesar" was an effective acting play, and
+that a poet may know a good deal about human nature while knowing little
+of geography, Hinze appeared so impressed with the plenitude of these
+revelations that he recapitulated them, weaving them together with
+threads of compliment--"As you very justly observed;" and--"It is most
+true, as you say;" and--"It were well if others noted what you have
+remarked."
+
+Some listeners incautious in their epithets would have called Hinze an
+"ass." For my part I would never insult that intelligent and
+unpretending animal who no doubt brays with perfect simplicity and
+substantial meaning to those acquainted with his idiom, and if he feigns
+more submission than he feels, has weighty reasons for doing so--I would
+never, I say, insult that historic and ill-appreciated animal, the ass,
+by giving his name to a man whose continuous pretence is so shallow in
+its motive, so unexcused by any sharp appetite as this of Hinze's.
+
+But perhaps you would say that his adulatory manner was originally
+adopted under strong promptings of self-interest, and that his absurdly
+over-acted deference to persons from whom he expects no patronage is the
+unreflecting persistence of habit--just as those who live with the deaf
+will shout to everybody else.
+
+And you might indeed imagine that in talking to Tulpian, who has
+considerable interest at his disposal, Hinze had a desired appointment
+in his mind. Tulpian is appealed to on innumerable subjects, and if he
+is unwilling to express himself on any one of them, says so with
+instructive copiousness: he is much listened to, and his utterances are
+registered and reported with more or less exactitude. But I think he
+has no other listener who comports himself as Hinze does--who,
+figuratively speaking, carries about a small spoon ready to pick up any
+dusty crumb of opinion that the eloquent man may have let drop. Tulpian,
+with reverence be it said, has some rather absurd notions, such as a
+mind of large discourse often finds room for: they slip about among his
+higher conceptions and multitudinous acquirements like disreputable
+characters at a national celebration in some vast cathedral, where to
+the ardent soul all is glorified by rainbow light and grand
+associations: any vulgar detective knows them for what they are. But
+Hinze is especially fervid in his desire to hear Tulpian dilate on his
+crotchets, and is rather troublesome to bystanders in asking them
+whether they have read the various fugitive writings in which these
+crotchets have been published. If an expert is explaining some matter on
+which you desire to know the evidence, Hinze teases you with Tulpian's
+guesses, and asks the expert what he thinks of them.
+
+In general, Hinze delights in the citation of opinions, and would
+hardly remark that the sun shone without an air of respectful appeal or
+fervid adhesion. The 'Iliad,' one sees, would impress him little if it
+were not for what Mr Fugleman has lately said about it; and if you
+mention an image or sentiment in Chaucer he seems not to heed the
+bearing of your reference, but immediately tells you that Mr Hautboy,
+too, regards Chaucer as a poet of the first order, and he is delighted
+to find that two such judges as you and Hautboy are at one.
+
+What is the reason of all this subdued ecstasy, moving about, hat in
+hand, with well-dressed hair and attitudes of unimpeachable correctness?
+Some persons conscious of sagacity decide at once that Hinze knows what
+he is about in flattering Tulpian, and has a carefully appraised end to
+serve though they may not see it They are misled by the common mistake
+of supposing that men's behaviour, whether habitual or occasional, is
+chiefly determined by a distinctly conceived motive, a definite object
+to be gained or a definite evil to be avoided. The truth is, that, the
+primitive wants of nature once tolerably satisfied, the majority of
+mankind, even in a civilised life full of solicitations, are with
+difficulty aroused to the distinct conception of an object towards which
+they will direct their actions with careful adaptation, and it is yet
+rarer to find one who can persist in the systematic pursuit of such an
+end. Few lives are shaped, few characters formed, by the contemplation
+of definite consequences seen from a distance and made the goal of
+continuous effort or the beacon of a constantly avoided danger: such
+control by foresight, such vivid picturing and practical logic are the
+distinction of exceptionally strong natures; but society is chiefly made
+up of human beings whose daily acts are all performed either in
+unreflecting obedience to custom and routine or from immediate
+promptings of thought or feeling to execute an immediate purpose. They
+pay their poor-rates, give their vote in affairs political or parochial,
+wear a certain amount of starch, hinder boys from tormenting the
+helpless, and spend money on tedious observances called pleasures,
+without mentally adjusting these practices to their own well-understood
+interest or to the general, ultimate welfare of the human race; and when
+they fall into ungraceful compliment, excessive smiling or other
+luckless efforts of complaisant behaviour, these are but the tricks or
+habits gradually formed under the successive promptings of a wish to be
+agreeable, stimulated day by day without any widening resources for
+gratifying the wish. It does not in the least follow that they are
+seeking by studied hypocrisy to get something for themselves. And so
+with Hinze's deferential bearing, complimentary parentheses, and
+worshipful tones, which seem to some like the over-acting of a part in a
+comedy. He expects no appointment or other appreciable gain through
+Tulpian's favour; he has no doubleness towards Felicia; there is no
+sneering or backbiting obverse to his ecstatic admiration. He is very
+well off in the world, and cherishes no unsatisfied ambition that could
+feed design and direct flattery. As you perceive, he has had the
+education and other advantages of a gentleman without being conscious of
+marked result, such as a decided preference for any particular ideas or
+functions: his mind is furnished as hotels are, with everything for
+occasional and transient use. But one cannot be an Englishman and
+gentleman in general: it is in the nature of things that one must have
+an individuality, though it may be of an often-repeated type. As Hinze
+in growing to maturity had grown into a particular form and expression
+of person, so he necessarily gathered a manner and frame of speech which
+made him additionally recognisable. His nature is not tuned to the pitch
+of a genuine direct admiration, only to an attitudinising deference
+which does not fatigue itself with the formation of real judgments. All
+human achievement must be wrought down to this spoon-meat--this mixture
+of other persons' washy opinions and his own flux of reverence for what
+is third-hand, before Hinze can find a relish for it.
+
+He has no more leading characteristic than the desire to stand well with
+those who are justly distinguished; he has no base admirations, and you
+may know by his entire presentation of himself, from the management of
+his hat to the angle at which he keeps his right foot, that he aspires
+to correctness. Desiring to behave becomingly and also to make a figure
+in dialogue, he is only like the bad artist whose picture is a failure.
+We may pity these ill-gifted strivers, but not pretend that their works
+are pleasant to behold. A man is bound to know something of his own
+weight and muscular dexterity, and the puny athlete is called foolish
+before he is seen to be thrown. Hinze has not the stuff in him to be at
+once agreeably conversational and sincere, and he has got himself up to
+be at all events agreeably conversational. Notwithstanding this
+deliberateness of intention in his talk he is unconscious of falsity,
+for he has not enough of deep and lasting impression to find a contrast
+or diversity between his words and his thoughts. He is not fairly to be
+called a hypocrite, but I have already confessed to the more
+exasperation at his make-believe reverence, because it has no deep
+hunger to excuse it.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+
+ONLY TEMPER.
+
+What is temper? Its primary meaning, the proportion and mode in which
+qualities are mingled, is much neglected in popular speech, yet even
+here the word often carries a reference to an habitual state or general
+tendency of the organism in distinction from what are held to be
+specific virtues and vices. As people confess to bad memory without
+expecting to sink in mental reputation, so we hear a man declared to
+have a bad temper and yet glorified as the possessor of every high
+quality. When he errs or in any way commits himself, his temper is
+accused, not his character, and it is understood that but for a brutal
+bearish mood he is kindness itself. If he kicks small animals, swears
+violently at a servant who mistakes orders, or is grossly rude to his
+wife, it is remarked apologetically that these things mean nothing--they
+are all temper.
+
+Certainly there is a limit to this form of apology, and the forgery of a
+bill, or the ordering of goods without any prospect of paying for them,
+has never been set down to an unfortunate habit of sulkiness or of
+irascibility. But on the whole there is a peculiar exercise of
+indulgence towards the manifestations of bad temper which tends to
+encourage them, so that we are in danger of having among us a number of
+virtuous persons who conduct themselves detestably, just as we have
+hysterical patients who, with sound organs, are apparently labouring
+under many sorts of organic disease. Let it be admitted, however, that a
+man may be "a good fellow" and yet have a bad temper, so bad that we
+recognise his merits with reluctance, and are inclined to resent his
+occasionally amiable behaviour as an unfair demand on our admiration.
+
+Touchwood is that kind of good fellow. He is by turns insolent,
+quarrelsome, repulsively haughty to innocent people who approach him
+with respect, neglectful of his friends, angry in face of legitimate
+demands, procrastinating in the fulfilment of such demands, prompted to
+rude words and harsh looks by a moody disgust with his fellow-men in
+general--and yet, as everybody will assure you, the soul of honour, a
+steadfast friend, a defender of the oppressed, an affectionate-hearted
+creature. Pity that, after a certain experience of his moods, his
+intimacy becomes insupportable! A man who uses his balmorals to tread on
+your toes with much frequency and an unmistakeable emphasis may prove a
+fast friend in adversity, but meanwhile your adversity has not arrived
+and your toes are tender. The daily sneer or growl at your remarks is
+not to be made amends for by a possible eulogy or defence of your
+understanding against depredators who may not present themselves, and on
+an occasion which may never arise. I cannot submit to a chronic state of
+blue and green bruise as a form of insurance against an accident.
+
+Touchwood's bad temper is of the contradicting pugnacious sort. He is
+the honourable gentleman in opposition, whatever proposal or proposition
+may be broached, and when others join him he secretly damns their
+superfluous agreement, quickly discovering that his way of stating the
+case is not exactly theirs. An invitation or any sign of expectation
+throws him into an attitude of refusal. Ask his concurrence in a
+benevolent measure: he will not decline to give it, because he has a
+real sympathy with good aims; but he complies resentfully, though where
+he is let alone he will do much more than any one would have thought of
+asking for. No man would shrink with greater sensitiveness from the
+imputation of not paying his debts, yet when a bill is sent in with any
+promptitude he is inclined to make the tradesman wait for the money he
+is in such a hurry to get. One sees that this antagonistic temper must
+be much relieved by finding a particular object, and that its worst
+moments must be those where the mood is that of vague resistance, there
+being nothing specific to oppose. Touchwood is never so little engaging
+as when he comes down to breakfast with a cloud on his brow, after
+parting from you the night before with an affectionate effusiveness at
+the end of a confidential conversation which has assured you of mutual
+understanding. Impossible that you can have committed any offence. If
+mice have disturbed him, that is not your fault; but, nevertheless, your
+cheerful greeting had better not convey any reference to the weather,
+else it will be met by a sneer which, taking you unawares, may give you
+a crushing sense that you make a poor figure with your cheerfulness,
+which was not asked for. Some daring person perhaps introduces another
+topic, and uses the delicate flattery of appealing to Touchwood for his
+opinion, the topic being included in his favourite studies. An
+indistinct muttering, with a look at the carving-knife in reply, teaches
+that daring person how ill he has chosen a market for his deference. If
+Touchwood's behaviour affects you very closely you had better break your
+leg in the course of the day: his bad temper will then vanish at once;
+he will take a painful journey on your behalf; he will sit up with you
+night after night; he will do all the work of your department so as to
+save you from any loss in consequence of your accident; he will be even
+uniformly tender to you till you are well on your legs again, when he
+will some fine morning insult you without provocation, and make you wish
+that his generous goodness to you had not closed your lips against
+retort.
+
+It is not always necessary that a friend should break his leg for
+Touchwood to feel compunction and endeavour to make amends for his
+bearishness or insolence. He becomes spontaneously conscious that he has
+misbehaved, and he is not only ashamed of himself, but has the better
+prompting to try and heal any wound he has inflicted. Unhappily the
+habit of being offensive "without meaning it" leads usually to a way of
+making amends which the injured person cannot but regard as a being
+amiable without meaning it. The kindnesses, the complimentary
+indications or assurances, are apt to appear in the light of a penance
+adjusted to the foregoing lapses, and by the very contrast they offer
+call up a keener memory of the wrong they atone for. They are not a
+spontaneous prompting of goodwill, but an elaborate compensation. And,
+in fact, Dion's atoning friendliness has a ring of artificiality.
+Because he formerly disguised his good feeling towards you he now
+expresses more than he quite feels. It is in vain. Having made you
+extremely uncomfortable last week he has absolutely diminished his
+power of making you happy to-day: he struggles against this result by
+excessive effort, but he has taught you to observe his fitfulness rather
+than to be warmed by his episodic show of regard.
+
+I suspect that many persons who have an uncertain, incalculable temper
+flatter themselves that it enhances their fascination; but perhaps they
+are under the prior mistake of exaggerating the charm which they suppose
+to be thus strengthened; in any case they will do well not to trust in
+the attractions of caprice and moodiness for a long continuance or for
+close intercourse. A pretty woman may fan the flame of distant adorers
+by harassing them, but if she lets one of them make her his wife, the
+point of view from which he will look at her poutings and tossings and
+mysterious inability to be pleased will be seriously altered. And if
+slavery to a pretty woman, which seems among the least conditional forms
+of abject service, will not bear too great a strain from her bad temper
+even though her beauty remain the same, it is clear that a man whose
+claims lie in his high character or high performances had need impress
+us very constantly with his peculiar value and indispensableness, if he
+is to test our patience by an uncertainty of temper which leaves us
+absolutely without grounds for guessing how he will receive our persons
+or humbly advanced opinions, or what line he will take on any but the
+most momentous occasions.
+
+For it is among the repulsive effects of this bad temper, which is
+supposed to be compatible with shining virtues, that it is apt to
+determine a man's sudden adhesion to an opinion, whether on a personal
+or impersonal matter, without leaving him time to consider his grounds.
+The adhesion is sudden and momentary, but it either forms a precedent
+for his line of thought and action, or it is presently seen to have been
+inconsistent with his true mind. This determination of partisanship by
+temper has its worst effects in the career of the public man, who is
+always in danger of getting so enthralled by his own words that he looks
+into facts and questions not to get rectifying knowledge, but to get
+evidence that will justify his actual attitude which was assumed under
+an impulse dependent on something else than knowledge. There has been
+plenty of insistance on the evil of swearing by the words of a master,
+and having the judgment uniformly controlled by a "He said it;" but a
+much worse woe to befall a man is to have every judgment controlled by
+an "I said it"--to make a divinity of his own short-sightedness or
+passion-led aberration and explain the world in its honour. There is
+hardly a more pitiable degradation than this for a man of high gifts.
+Hence I cannot join with those who wish that Touchwood, being young
+enough to enter on public life, should get elected for Parliament and
+use his excellent abilities to serve his country in that conspicuous
+manner. For hitherto, in the less momentous incidents of private life,
+his capricious temper has only produced the minor evil of inconsistency,
+and he is even greatly at ease in contradicting himself, provided he can
+contradict you, and disappoint any smiling expectation you may have
+shown that the impressions you are uttering are likely to meet with his
+sympathy, considering that the day before he himself gave you the
+example which your mind is following. He is at least free from those
+fetters of self-justification which are the curse of parliamentary
+speaking, and what I rather desire for him is that he should produce the
+great book which he is generally pronounced capable of writing, and put
+his best self imperturbably on record for the advantage of society;
+because I should then have steady ground for bearing with his diurnal
+incalculableness, and could fix my gratitude as by a strong staple to
+that unvarying monumental service. Unhappily, Touchwood's great powers
+have been only so far manifested as to be believed in, not demonstrated.
+Everybody rates them highly, and thinks that whatever he chose to do
+would be done in a first-rate manner. Is it his love of disappointing
+complacent expectancy which has gone so far as to keep up this
+lamentable negation, and made him resolve not to write the comprehensive
+work which he would have written if nobody had expected it of him?
+
+One can see that if Touchwood were to become a public man and take to
+frequent speaking on platforms or from his seat in the House, it would
+hardly be possible for him to maintain much integrity of opinion, or to
+avoid courses of partisanship which a healthy public sentiment would
+stamp with discredit. Say that he were endowed with the purest honesty,
+it would inevitably be dragged captive by this mysterious, Protean bad
+temper. There would be the fatal public necessity of justifying
+oratorical Temper which had got on its legs in its bitter mood and made
+insulting imputations, or of keeping up some decent show of consistency
+with opinions vented out of Temper's contradictoriness. And words would
+have to be followed up by acts of adhesion.
+
+Certainly if a bad-tempered man can be admirably virtuous, he must be so
+under extreme difficulties. I doubt the possibility that a high order of
+character can coexist with a temper like Touchwood's. For it is of the
+nature of such temper to interrupt the formation of healthy mental
+habits, which depend on a growing harmony between perception,
+conviction, and impulse. There may be good feelings, good deeds--for a
+human nature may pack endless varieties and blessed inconsistencies in
+its windings--but it is essential to what is worthy to be called high
+character, that it may be safely calculated on, and that its qualities
+shall have taken the form of principles or laws habitually, if not
+perfectly, obeyed.
+
+If a man frequently passes unjust judgments, takes up false attitudes,
+intermits his acts of kindness with rude behaviour or cruel words, and
+falls into the consequent vulgar error of supposing that he can make
+amends by laboured agreeableness, I cannot consider such courses any the
+less ugly because they are ascribed to "temper." Especially I object to
+the assumption that his having a fundamentally good disposition is
+either an apology or a compensation for his bad behaviour. If his temper
+yesterday made him lash the horses, upset the curricle and cause a
+breakage in my rib, I feel it no compensation that to-day he vows he
+will drive me anywhere in the gentlest manner any day as long as he
+lives. Yesterday was what it was, my rib is paining me, it is not a main
+object of my life to be driven by Touchwood--and I have no confidence in
+his lifelong gentleness. The utmost form of placability I am capable of
+is to try and remember his better deeds already performed, and, mindful
+of my own offences, to bear him no malice. But I cannot accept his
+amends.
+
+If the bad-tempered man wants to apologise he had need to do it on a
+large public scale, make some beneficent discovery, produce some
+stimulating work of genius, invent some powerful process--prove himself
+such a good to contemporary multitudes and future generations, as to
+make the discomfort he causes his friends and acquaintances a vanishing
+quality, a trifle even in their own estimate.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+
+A POLITICAL MOLECULE.
+
+The most arrant denier must admit that a man often furthers larger ends
+than he is conscious of, and that while he is transacting his particular
+affairs with the narrow pertinacity of a respectable ant, he subserves
+an economy larger than any purpose of his own. Society is happily not
+dependent for the growth of fellowship on the small minority already
+endowed with comprehensive sympathy: any molecule of the body politic
+working towards his own interest in an orderly way gets his
+understanding more or less penetrated with the fact that his interest is
+included in that of a large number. I have watched several political
+molecules being educated in this way by the nature of things into a
+faint feeling of fraternity. But at this moment I am thinking of Spike,
+an elector who voted on the side of Progress though he was not inwardly
+attached to it under that name. For abstractions are deities having many
+specific names, local habitations, and forms of activity, and so get a
+multitude of devout servants who care no more for them under their
+highest titles than the celebrated person who, putting with forcible
+brevity a view of human motives now much insisted on, asked what
+Posterity had done for him that he should care for Posterity? To many
+minds even among the ancients (thought by some to have been invariably
+poetical) the goddess of wisdom was doubtless worshipped simply as the
+patroness of spinning and weaving. Now spinning and weaving from a
+manufacturing, wholesale point of view, was the chief form under which
+Spike from early years had unconsciously been a devotee of Progress.
+
+He was a political molecule of the most gentleman-like appearance, not
+less than six feet high, and showing the utmost nicety in the care of
+his person and equipment. His umbrella was especially remarkable for its
+neatness, though perhaps he swung it unduly in walking. His complexion
+was fresh, his eyes small, bright, and twinkling. He was seen to great
+advantage in a hat and greatcoat--garments frequently fatal to the
+impressiveness of shorter figures; but when he was uncovered in the
+drawing-room, it was impossible not to observe that his head shelved off
+too rapidly from the eyebrows towards the crown, and that his length of
+limb seemed to have used up his mind so as to cause an air of
+abstraction from conversational topics. He appeared, indeed, to be
+preoccupied with a sense of his exquisite cleanliness, clapped his hands
+together and rubbed them frequently, straightened his back, and even
+opened his mouth and closed it again with a slight snap, apparently for
+no other purpose than the confirmation to himself of his own powers in
+that line. These are innocent exercises, but they are not such as give
+weight to a man's personality. Sometimes Spike's mind, emerging from its
+preoccupation, burst forth in a remark delivered with smiling zest; as,
+that he did like to see gravel walks well rolled, or that a lady should
+always wear the best jewellery, or that a bride was a most interesting
+object; but finding these ideas received rather coldly, he would relapse
+into abstraction, draw up his back, wrinkle his brows longitudinally,
+and seem to regard society, even including gravel walks, jewellery, and
+brides, as essentially a poor affair. Indeed his habit of mind was
+desponding, and he took melancholy views as to the possible extent of
+human pleasure and the value of existence. Especially after he had made
+his fortune in the cotton manufacture, and had thus attained the chief
+object of his ambition--the object which had engaged his talent for
+order and persevering application. For his easy leisure caused him much
+_ennui_. He was abstemious, and had none of those temptations to sensual
+excess which fill up a man's time first with indulgence and then with
+the process of getting well from its effects. He had not, indeed,
+exhausted the sources of knowledge, but here again his notions of human
+pleasure were narrowed by his want of appetite; for though he seemed
+rather surprised at the consideration that Alfred the Great was a
+Catholic, or that apart from the Ten Commandments any conception of
+moral conduct had occurred to mankind, he was not stimulated to further
+inquiries on these remote matters. Yet he aspired to what he regarded as
+intellectual society, willingly entertained beneficed clergymen, and
+bought the books he heard spoken of, arranging them carefully on the
+shelves of what he called his library, and occasionally sitting alone in
+the same room with them. But some minds seem well glazed by nature
+against the admission of knowledge, and Spike's was one of them. It was
+not, however, entirely so with regard to politics. He had had a strong
+opinion about the Reform Bill, and saw clearly that the large trading
+towns ought to send members. Portraits of the Reform heroes hung framed
+and glazed in his library: he prided himself on being a Liberal. In this
+last particular, as well as in not giving benefactions and not making
+loans without interest, he showed unquestionable firmness. On the Repeal
+of the Corn Laws, again, he was thoroughly convinced. His mind was
+expansive towards foreign markets, and his imagination could see that
+the people from whom we took corn might be able to take the cotton goods
+which they had hitherto dispensed with. On his conduct in these
+political concerns, his wife, otherwise influential as a woman who
+belonged to a family with a title in it, and who had condescended in
+marrying him, could gain no hold: she had to blush a little at what was
+called her husband's "radicalism"--an epithet which was a very unfair
+impeachment of Spike, who never went to the root of anything. But he
+understood his own trading affairs, and in this way became a genuine,
+constant political element. If he had been born a little later he could
+have been accepted as an eligible member of Parliament, and if he had
+belonged to a high family he might have done for a member of the
+Government. Perhaps his indifference to "views" would have passed for
+administrative judiciousness, and he would have been so generally silent
+that he must often have been silent in the right place. But this is
+empty speculation: there is no warrant for saying what Spike would have
+been and known so as to have made a calculable political element, if he
+had not been educated by having to manage his trade. A small mind
+trained to useful occupation for the satisfying of private need becomes
+a representative of genuine class-needs. Spike objected to certain items
+of legislation because they hampered his own trade, but his neighbours'
+trade was hampered by the same causes; and though he would have been
+simply selfish in a question of light or water between himself and a
+fellow-townsman, his need for a change in legislation, being shared by
+all his neighbours in trade, ceased to be simply selfish, and raised him
+to a sense of common injury and common benefit. True, if the law could
+have been changed for the benefit of his particular business, leaving
+the cotton trade in general in a sorry condition while he prospered,
+Spike might not have thought that result intolerably unjust; but the
+nature of things did not allow of such a result being contemplated as
+possible; it allowed of an enlarged market for Spike only through the
+enlargement of his neighbours' market, and the Possible is always the
+ultimate master of our efforts and desires. Spike was obliged to
+contemplate a general benefit, and thus became public-spirited in spite
+of himself. Or rather, the nature of things transmuted his active egoism
+into a demand for a public benefit. Certainly if Spike had been born a
+marquis he could not have had the same chance of being useful as a
+political element. But he might have had the same appearance, have been
+equally null in conversation, sceptical as to the reality of pleasure,
+and destitute of historical knowledge; perhaps even dimly disliking
+Jesuitism as a quality in Catholic minds, or regarding Bacon as the
+inventor of physical science. The depths of middle-aged gentlemen's
+ignorance will never be known, for want of public examinations in this
+branch.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+
+THE WATCH-DOG OF KNOWLEDGE
+
+Mordax is an admirable man, ardent in intellectual work,
+public-spirited, affectionate, and able to find the right words in
+conveying ingenious ideas or elevated feeling. Pity that to all these
+graces he cannot add what would give them the utmost finish--the
+occasional admission that he has been in the wrong, the occasional frank
+welcome of a new idea as something not before present to his mind! But
+no: Mordax's self-respect seems to be of that fiery quality which
+demands that none but the monarchs of thought shall have an advantage
+over him, and in the presence of contradiction or the threat of having
+his notions corrected, he becomes astonishingly unscrupulous and cruel
+for so kindly and conscientious a man.
+
+"You are fond of attributing those fine qualities to Mordax," said
+Acer, the other day, "but I have not much belief in virtues that are
+always requiring to be asserted in spite of appearances against them.
+True fairness and goodwill show themselves precisely where his are
+conspicuously absent. I mean, in recognising claims which the rest of
+the world are not likely to stand up for. It does not need much love of
+truth and justice in me to say that Aldebaran is a bright star, or Isaac
+Newton the greatest of discoverers; nor much kindliness in me to want my
+notes to be heard above the rest in a chorus of hallelujahs to one
+already crowned. It is my way to apply tests. Does the man who has the
+ear of the public use his advantage tenderly towards poor fellows who
+may be hindered of their due if he treats their pretensions with scorn?
+That is my test of his justice and benevolence."
+
+My answer was, that his system of moral tests might be as delusive as
+what ignorant people take to be tests of intellect and learning. If the
+scholar or _savant_ cannot answer their haphazard questions on the
+shortest notice, their belief in his capacity is shaken. But the
+better-informed have given up the Johnsonian theory of mind as a pair of
+legs able to walk east or west according to choice. Intellect is no
+longer taken to be a ready-made dose of ability to attain eminence (or
+mediocrity) in all departments; it is even admitted that application in
+one line of study or practice has often a laming effect in other
+directions, and that an intellectual quality or special facility which
+is a furtherance in one medium of effort is a drag in another. We have
+convinced ourselves by this time that a man may be a sage in celestial
+physics and a poor creature in the purchase of seed-corn, or even in
+theorising about the affections; that he may be a mere fumbler in
+physiology and yet show a keen insight into human motives; that he may
+seem the "poor Poll" of the company in conversation and yet write with
+some humorous vigour. It is not true that a man's intellectual power is
+like 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 called
+consistency to a man's moral nature, and argue against the existence of
+fine impulses or habits of feeling in relation to his actions
+generally, because those better movements are absent in a class of cases
+which act peculiarly on an irritable form of his egoism? The mistake
+might be corrected by our taking notice that the ungenerous words or
+acts which seem to us the most utterly incompatible with good
+dispositions in the offender, are those which offend ourselves. All
+other persons are able to draw a milder conclusion. Laniger, who has a
+temper but no talent for repartee, having been run down in a fierce way
+by Mordax, is inwardly persuaded that the highly-lauded man is a wolf at
+heart: he is much tried by perceiving that his own friends seem to think
+no worse of the reckless assailant than they did before; and Corvus, who
+has lately been flattered by some kindness from Mordax, is unmindful
+enough of Laniger's feeling to dwell on this instance of good-nature
+with admiring gratitude. There is a fable that when the badger had been
+stung all over by bees, a bear consoled him by a rhapsodic account of
+how he himself had just breakfasted on their honey. The badger replied,
+peevishly, "The stings are in my flesh, and the sweetness is on your
+muzzle." The bear, it is said, was surprised at the badger's want of
+altruism.
+
+But this difference of sensibility between Laniger and his friends only
+mirrors in a faint way the difference between his own point of view and
+that of the man who has injured him. If those neutral, perhaps even
+affectionate persons, form no lively conception of what Laniger suffers,
+how should Mordax have any such sympathetic imagination to check him in
+what he persuades himself is a scourging administered by the qualified
+man to the unqualified? Depend upon it, his conscience, though active
+enough in some relations, has never given him a twinge because of his
+polemical rudeness and even brutality. He would go from the room where
+he has been tiring himself through the watches of the night in lifting
+and turning a sick friend, and straightway write a reply or rejoinder in
+which he mercilessly pilloried a Laniger who had supposed that he could
+tell the world something else or more than had been sanctioned by the
+eminent Mordax--and what was worse, had sometimes really done so. Does
+this nullify the genuineness of motive which made him tender to his
+suffering friend? Not at all. It only proves that his arrogant egoism,
+set on fire, sends up smoke and flame where just before there had been
+the dews of fellowship and pity. He is angry and equips himself
+accordingly--with a penknife to give the offender a _comprachico_
+countenance, a mirror to show him the effect, and a pair of nailed boots
+to give him his dismissal. All this to teach him who the Romans really
+were, and to purge Inquiry of incompetent intrusion, so rendering an
+important service to mankind.
+
+When a man is in a rage and wants to hurt another in consequence, he can
+always regard himself as the civil arm of a spiritual power, and all the
+more easily because there is real need to assert the righteous efficacy
+of indignation. I for my part feel with the Lanigers, and should object
+all the more to their or my being lacerated and dressed with salt, if
+the administrator of such torture alleged as a motive his care for Truth
+and posterity, and got himself pictured with a halo in consequence. In
+transactions between fellow-men it is well to consider a little, in the
+first place, what is fair and kind towards the person immediately
+concerned, before we spit and roast him on behalf of the next century
+but one. Wide-reaching motives, blessed and glorious as they are, and of
+the highest sacramental virtue, have their dangers, like all else that
+touches the mixed life of the earth. They are archangels with awful brow
+and flaming sword, summoning and encouraging us to do the right and the
+divinely heroic, and we feel a beneficent tremor in their presence; but
+to learn what it is they thus summon us to do, we have to consider the
+mortals we are elbowing, who are of our own stature and our own
+appetites. I cannot feel sure how my voting will affect the condition of
+Central Asia in the coming ages, but I have good reason to believe that
+the future populations there will be none the worse off because I
+abstain from conjectural vilification of my opponents during the present
+parliamentary session, and I am very sure that I shall be less injurious
+to my contemporaries. On the whole, and in the vast majority of
+instances, the action by which we can do the best for future ages is of
+the sort which has a certain beneficence and grace for contemporaries. A
+sour father may reform prisons, but considered in his sourness he does
+harm. The deed of Judas has been attributed to far-reaching views, and
+the wish to hasten his Master's declaration of himself as the Messiah.
+Perhaps--I will not maintain the contrary--Judas represented his motive
+in this way, and felt justified in his traitorous kiss; but my belief
+that he deserved, metaphorically speaking, to be where Dante saw him, at
+the bottom of the Malebolge, would not be the less strong because he was
+not convinced that his action was detestable. I refuse to accept a man
+who has the stomach for such treachery, as a hero impatient for the
+redemption of mankind and for the beginning of a reign when the kisses
+shall be those of peace and righteousness.
+
+All this is by the way, to show that my apology for Mordax was not
+founded on his persuasion of superiority in his own motives, but on the
+compatibility of unfair, equivocal, and even cruel actions with a nature
+which, apart from special temptations, is kindly and generous; and also
+to enforce the need of checks from a fellow-feeling with those whom our
+acts immediately (not distantly) concern. Will any one be so hardy as to
+maintain that an otherwise worthy man cannot be vain and arrogant? I
+think most of us have some interest in arguing the contrary. And it is
+of the nature of vanity and arrogance, if unchecked, to become cruel and
+self-justifying. There are fierce beasts within: chain them, chain them,
+and let them learn to cower before the creature with wider reason. This
+is what one wishes for Mordax--that his heart and brain should restrain
+the outleap of roar and talons.
+
+As to his unwillingness to admit that an idea which he has not
+discovered is novel to him, one is surprised that quick intellect and
+shrewd observation do not early gather reasons for being ashamed of a
+mental trick which makes one among the comic parts of that various actor
+Conceited Ignorance.
+
+I have a sort of valet and factotum, an excellent, respectable servant,
+whose spelling is so unvitiated by non-phonetic superfluities that he
+writes _night_ as _nit_. One day, looking over his accounts, I said to
+him jocosely, "You are in the latest fashion with your spelling, Pummel:
+most people spell "night" with a _gh_ between the _i_ and the _t_, but
+the greatest 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 that
+myself." You would never catch Pummel in an interjection of surprise. I
+have sometimes laid traps for his astonishment, but he has escaped them
+all, either by a respectful neutrality, as of one who would not appear
+to notice that his master had been taking too much wine, or else by that
+strong persuasion of his all-knowingness which makes it simply
+impossible for him to feel himself newly informed. If I tell him that
+the world is spinning round and along like a top, and that he is
+spinning with it, he says, "Yes, I've heard a deal of that in my time,
+sir," and lifts the horizontal lines of his brow a little higher,
+balancing his head from side to side as if it were too painfully full.
+Whether I tell him that they cook puppies in China, that there are ducks
+with fur coats in Australia, or that in some parts of the world it is
+the pink of politeness to put your tongue out on introduction to a
+respectable stranger, Pummel replies, "So I suppose, sir," with an air
+of resignation to hearing my poor version of well-known things, such as
+elders use in listening to lively boys lately presented with an
+anecdote book. His utmost concession is, that what you state is what he
+would have supplied if you had given him _carte blanche_ instead of your
+needless instruction, and in this sense his favourite answer is, "I
+should say."
+
+"Pummel," I observed, a little irritated at not getting my coffee, "if
+you were to carry your kettle and spirits of wine up a mountain of a
+morning, your water would boil there sooner." "I should say, sir." "Or,
+there are boiling springs in Iceland. Better go to Iceland." "That's
+what I've been thinking, sir."
+
+I have taken to asking him hard questions, and as I expected, he never
+admits his own inability to answer them without representing it as
+common to the human race. "What is the cause of the tides, Pummel?"
+
+"Well, sir, nobody rightly knows. Many gives their opinion, but if I
+was to give mine, it 'ud be different."
+
+But while he is never surprised himself, he is constantly imagining
+situations of surprise for others. His own consciousness is that of one
+so thoroughly soaked in knowledge that further absorption is
+impossible, but his neighbours appear to him to be in the state of
+thirsty sponges which it is a charity to besprinkle. His great
+interest in thinking of foreigners is that they must be surprised at
+what they see in England, and especially at the beef. He is often
+occupied with the surprise Adam must have felt at the sight of the
+assembled animals--"for he was not like us, sir, used from a b'y to
+Wombwell's shows." He is fond of discoursing to the lad who acts as
+shoe-black and general subaltern, and I have overheard him saying to
+that small upstart, with some severity, "Now don't you pretend to know,
+because the more you pretend the more I see your ignirance"--a lucidity
+on his part which has confirmed my impression that the thoroughly
+self-satisfied person is the only one fully to appreciate the charm of
+humility in others.
+
+Your diffident self-suspecting mortal is not very angry that others
+should feel more comfortable about themselves, provided they are not
+otherwise offensive: he is rather like the chilly person, glad to sit
+next a warmer neighbour; or the timid, glad to have a courageous
+fellow-traveller. It cheers him to observe the store of small comforts
+that his fellow-creatures may find in their self-complacency, just as
+one is pleased to see poor old souls soothed by the tobacco and snuff
+for which one has neither nose nor stomach oneself.
+
+But your arrogant man will not tolerate a presumption which he sees to
+be ill-founded. The service he regards society as most in need of is to
+put down the conceit which is so particularly rife around him that he is
+inclined to believe it the growing characteristic of the present age. In
+the schools of Magna Graecia, or in the sixth century of our era, or
+even under Kublai Khan, he finds a comparative freedom from that
+presumption by which his contemporaries are stirring his able gall. The
+way people will now flaunt notions which are not his without appearing
+to mind that they are not his, strikes him as especially disgusting. It
+might seem surprising to us that one strongly convinced of his own value
+should prefer to exalt an age in which _he_ did not flourish, if it were
+not for the reflection that the present age is the only one in which
+anybody has appeared to undervalue him.
+
+
+
+
+IX.
+
+
+A HALF-BREED
+
+An early deep-seated love to which we become faithless has its unfailing
+Nemesis, if only in that division of soul which narrows all newer joys
+by the intrusion of regret and the established presentiment of change. I
+refer not merely to the love of a person, but to the love of ideas,
+practical beliefs, and social habits. And faithlessness here means not a
+gradual conversion dependent on enlarged knowledge, but a yielding to
+seductive circumstance; not a conviction that the original choice was a
+mistake, but a subjection to incidents that flatter a growing desire. In
+this sort of love it is the forsaker who has the melancholy lot; for an
+abandoned belief may be more effectively vengeful than Dido. The child
+of a wandering tribe caught young and trained to polite life, if he
+feels an hereditary yearning can run away to the old wilds and get his
+nature into tune. But there is no such recovery possible to the man who
+remembers what he once believed without being convinced that he was in
+error, who feels within him unsatisfied stirrings towards old beloved
+habits and intimacies from which he has far receded without conscious
+justification or unwavering sense of superior attractiveness in the new.
+This involuntary renegade has his character hopelessly jangled and out
+of tune. He is like an organ with its stops in the lawless condition of
+obtruding themselves without method, so that hearers are amazed by the
+most unexpected transitions--the trumpet breaking in on the flute, and
+the oboee confounding both.
+
+Hence the lot of Mixtus affects me pathetically, notwithstanding that he
+spends his growing wealth with liberality and manifest enjoyment. To
+most observers he appears to be simply one of the fortunate and also
+sharp commercial men who began with meaning to be rich and have become
+what they meant to be: a man never taken to be well-born, but
+surprisingly better informed than the well-born usually are, and
+distinguished among ordinary commercial magnates by a personal kindness
+which prompts him not only to help the suffering in a material way
+through his wealth, but also by direct ministration of his own; yet with
+all this, diffusing, as it were, the odour of a man delightedly
+conscious of his wealth as an equivalent for the other social
+distinctions of rank and intellect which he can thus admire without
+envying. Hardly one among those superficial observers can suspect that
+he aims or has ever aimed at being a writer; still less can they imagine
+that his mind is often moved by strong currents of regret and of the
+most unworldly sympathies from the memories of a youthful time when his
+chosen associates were men and women whose only distinction was a
+religious, a philanthropic, or an intellectual enthusiasm, when the lady
+on whose words his attention most hung was a writer of minor religious
+literature, when he was a visitor and exhorter of the poor in the alleys
+of a great provincial town, and when he attended the lectures given
+specially to young men by Mr Apollos, the eloquent congregational
+preacher, who had studied in Germany and had liberal advanced views then
+far beyond the ordinary teaching of his sect. At that time Mixtus
+thought himself a young man of socially reforming ideas, of religious
+principles and religious yearnings. It was within his prospects also to
+be rich, but he looked forward to a use of his riches chiefly for
+reforming and religious purposes. His opinions were of a strongly
+democratic stamp, except that even then, belonging to the class of
+employers, he was opposed to all demands in the employed that would
+restrict the expansiveness of trade. He was the most democratic in
+relation to the unreasonable privileges of the aristocracy and landed
+interest; and he had also a religious sense of brotherhood with the
+poor. Altogether, he was a sincerely benevolent young man, interested in
+ideas, and renouncing personal ease for the sake of study, religious
+communion, and good works. If you had known him then you would have
+expected him to marry a highly serious and perhaps literary woman,
+sharing his benevolent and religious habits, and likely to encourage
+his studies--a woman who along with himself would play a distinguished
+part in one of the most enlightened religious circles of a great
+provincial capital.
+
+How is it that Mixtus finds himself in a London mansion, and in society
+totally unlike that which made the ideal of his younger years? And whom
+_did_ he marry?
+
+Why, he married Scintilla, who fascinated him as she had fascinated
+others, by her prettiness, her liveliness, and her music. It is a common
+enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly
+the opposite of his ideal; or if not wholly captivated, at least
+effectively captured by a combination of circumstances along with an
+unwarily manifested inclination which might otherwise have been
+transient. Mixtus was captivated and then captured on the worldly side
+of his disposition, which had been always growing and flourishing side
+by side with his philanthropic and religious tastes. He had ability in
+business, and he had early meant to be rich; also, he was getting rich,
+and the taste for such success was naturally growing with the pleasure
+of rewarded exertion. It was during a business sojourn in London that he
+met Scintilla, who, though without fortune, associated with families of
+Greek merchants living in a style of splendour, and with artists
+patronised by such wealthy entertainers. Mixtus on this occasion became
+familiar with a world in which wealth seemed the key to a more brilliant
+sort of dominance than that of a religious patron in the provincial
+circles of X. Would it not be possible to unite the two kinds of sway? A
+man bent on the most useful ends might, _with a fortune large enough_,
+make morality magnificent, and recommend religious principle by showing
+it in combination with the best kind of house and the most liberal of
+tables; also with a wife whose graces, wit, and accomplishments gave a
+finish sometimes lacking even to establishments got up with that
+unhesitating worldliness to which high cost is a sufficient reason.
+Enough.
+
+Mixtus married Scintilla. Now this lively lady knew nothing of
+Nonconformists, except that they were unfashionable: she did not
+distinguish one conventicle from another, and Mr Apollos with his
+enlightened interpretations seemed to her as heavy a bore, if not quite
+so ridiculous, as Mr Johns could have been with his solemn twang at the
+Baptist chapel in the lowest suburbs, or as a local preacher among the
+Methodists. In general, people who appeared seriously to believe in any
+sort of doctrine, whether religious, social, or philosophical, seemed
+rather absurd to Scintilla. Ten to one these theoretic people pronounced
+oddly, had some reason or other for saying that the most agreeable
+things were wrong, wore objectionable clothes, and wanted you to
+subscribe to something. They were probably ignorant of art and music,
+did not understand _badinage_, and, in fact, could talk of nothing
+amusing. In Scintilla's eyes the majority of persons were ridiculous and
+deplorably wanting in that keen perception of what was good taste, with
+which she herself was blest by nature and education; but the people
+understood to be religious or otherwise theoretic, were the most
+ridiculous of all, without being 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 which
+had made half the occupation of his youth?
+
+When a man is inclined to marry a particular woman, and has made any
+committal of himself, this woman's opinions, however different from his
+own, are readily regarded as part of her pretty ways, especially if they
+are merely negative; as, for example, that she does not insist on the
+Trinity or on the rightfulness or expediency of church rates, but simply
+regards her lover's troubling himself in disputation on these heads as
+stuff and nonsense. The man feels his own superior strength, and is sure
+that marriage will make no difference to him on the subjects about which
+he is in earnest. And to laugh at men's affairs is a woman's privilege,
+tending to enliven the domestic hearth. If Scintilla had no liking for
+the best sort of nonconformity, she was without any troublesome bias
+towards Episcopacy, Anglicanism, and early sacraments, and was quite
+contented not to go to church.
+
+As to Scintilla's acquaintance with her lover's tastes on these
+subjects, she was equally convinced on her side that a husband's queer
+ways while he was a bachelor would be easily laughed out of him when he
+had married an adroit woman. Mixtus, she felt, was an excellent
+creature, quite likable, who was getting rich; and Scintilla meant to
+have all the advantages of a rich man's wife. She was not in the least a
+wicked woman; she was simply a pretty animal of the ape kind, with an
+aptitude for certain accomplishments which education had made the most
+of.
+
+But we have seen what has been the result to poor Mixtus. He has become
+richer even than he dreamed of being, has a little palace in London, and
+entertains with splendour the half-aristocratic, professional, and
+artistic society which he is proud to think select. This society regards
+him as a clever fellow in his particular branch, seeing that he has
+become a considerable capitalist, and as a man desirable to have on the
+list of one's acquaintance. But from every other point of view Mixtus
+finds himself personally submerged: what he happens to think is not felt
+by his esteemed guests to be of any consequence, and what he used to
+think with the ardour of conviction he now hardly ever expresses. He is
+transplanted, and the sap within him has long been diverted into other
+than the old lines of vigorous growth. How could he speak to the artist
+Crespi or to Sir Hong Kong Bantam about the enlarged doctrine of Mr
+Apollos? How could he mention to them his former efforts towards
+evangelising the inhabitants of the X. alleys? And his references to his
+historical and geographical studies towards a survey of possible markets
+for English products are received with an air of ironical suspicion by
+many of his political friends, who take his pretension to give advice
+concerning the Amazon, the Euphrates, and the Niger as equivalent to the
+currier's wide views on the applicability of leather. He can only make a
+figure through his genial hospitality. It is in vain that he buys the
+best pictures and statues of the best artists. Nobody will call him a
+judge in art. If his pictures and statues are well chosen it is
+generally thought that Scintilla told him what to buy; and yet Scintilla
+in other connections is spoken of as having only a superficial and
+often questionable taste. Mixtus, it is decided, is a good fellow, not
+ignorant--no, really having a good deal of knowledge as well as sense,
+but not easy to classify otherwise than as a rich man. He has
+consequently become a little uncertain as to his own point of view, and
+in his most unreserved moments of friendly intercourse, even when
+speaking to listeners whom he thinks likely to sympathise with the
+earlier part of his career, he presents himself in all his various
+aspects and feels himself in turn what he has been, what he is, and what
+others take him to be (for this last status is what we must all more or
+less accept). He will recover with some glow of enthusiasm the vision of
+his old associates, the particular limit he was once accustomed to trace
+of freedom in religious speculation, and his old ideal of a worthy life;
+but he will presently pass to the argument that money is the only means
+by which you can get what is best worth having in the world, and will
+arrive at the exclamation "Give me money!" with the tone and gesture of
+a man who both feels and knows. Then if one of his audience, not having
+money, remarks that a man may have made up his mind to do without money
+because he prefers something else, Mixtus is with him immediately,
+cordially concurring in the supreme value of mind and genius, which
+indeed make his own chief delight, in that he is able to entertain the
+admirable possessors of these attributes at his own table, though not
+himself reckoned among them. Yet, he will proceed to observe, there was
+a time when he sacrificed his sleep to study, and even now amid the
+press of business he from time to time thinks of taking up the
+manuscripts which he hopes some day to complete, and is always
+increasing his collection of valuable works bearing on his favourite
+topics. And it is true that he has read much in certain directions, and
+can remember what he has read; he knows the history and theories of
+colonisation and the social condition of countries that do not at
+present consume a sufficiently large share of our products and
+manufactures. He continues his early habit of regarding the spread of
+Christianity as a great result of our commercial intercourse with black,
+brown, and yellow populations; but this is an idea not spoken of in the
+sort of fashionable society that Scintilla collects round her husband's
+table, and Mixtus now philosophically reflects that the cause must come
+before the effect, and that the thing to be directly striven for is the
+commercial intercourse, not excluding a little war if that also should
+prove needful as a pioneer of Christianity. He has long been wont to
+feel bashful about his former religion; as if it were an old attachment
+having consequences which he did not abandon but kept in decent privacy,
+his avowed objects and actual position being incompatible with their
+public acknowledgment.
+
+There is the same kind of fluctuation in his aspect towards social
+questions and duties. He has not lost the kindness that used to make him
+a benefactor and succourer of the needy, and he is still liberal in
+helping forward the clever and industrious; but in his active
+superintendence of commercial undertakings he has contracted more and
+more of the bitterness which capitalists and employers often feel to be
+a reasonable mood towards obstructive proletaries. Hence many who this
+is an idea not spoken of in the sort of fashionable society that
+Scintilla collects round her husband's table, and Mixtus now
+philosophically reflects that the cause must come before the effect, and
+that the thing to be directly striven for is the commercial intercourse,
+not excluding a little war if that also should prove needful as a
+pioneer of Christianity. He has long been wont to feel bashful about his
+former religion; as if it were an old attachment having consequences
+which he did not abandon but kept in decent privacy, his avowed objects
+and actual position being incompatible with their public acknowledgment.
+
+There is the same kind of fluctuation in his aspect towards social
+questions and duties. He has not lost the kindness that used to make him
+a benefactor and succourer of the needy, and he is still liberal in
+helping forward the clever and industrious; but in his active
+superintendence of commercial undertakings he has contracted more and
+more of the bitterness which capitalists and employers often feel to be
+a reasonable mood towards obstructive proletaries. Hence many who have
+occasionally met him when trade questions were being discussed, conclude
+him to be indistinguishable from the ordinary run of moneyed and
+money-getting men. Indeed, hardly any of his acquaintances know what
+Mixtus really is, considered as a whole--nor does Mixtus himself know
+it.
+
+
+
+
+X.
+
+
+DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY.
+
+"Il ne faut pas mettre un ridicule ou il n'y en a point: c'est se gater
+le gout, c'est corrompre son jugement et celui des autres. Mais le
+ridicule qui est quelque part, il faut l'y voir, l'en tirer avec grace
+et d'une maniere qui plaise et qui instruise."
+
+I am fond of quoting this passage from La Bruyere, because the subject
+is one where I like to show a Frenchman on my side, to save my
+sentiments from being set down to my peculiar dulness and deficient
+sense of the ludicrous, and also that they may profit by that
+enhancement of ideas when presented in a foreign tongue, that glamour of
+unfamiliarity conferring a dignity on the foreign names of very common
+things, of which even a philosopher like Dugald Stewart confesses the
+influence. I remember hearing a fervid woman attempt to recite in
+English the narrative of a begging Frenchman who described the violent
+death of his father in the July days. The narrative had impressed her,
+through the mists of her flushed anxiety to understand it, as something
+quite grandly pathetic; but finding the facts turn out meagre, and her
+audience cold, she broke off, saying, "It sounded so much finer in
+French--_j'ai vu le sang de mon pere_, and so on--I wish I could repeat
+it in French." This was a pardonable illusion in an old-fashioned lady
+who had not received the polyglot education of the present day; but I
+observe that even now much nonsense and bad taste win admiring
+acceptance solely by virtue of the French language, and one may fairly
+desire that what seems a just discrimination should profit by the
+fashionable prejudice in favour of La Bruyere's idiom. But I wish he had
+added that the habit of dragging the ludicrous into topics where the
+chief interest is of a different or even opposite kind is a sign not of
+endowment, but of deficiency. The art of spoiling is within reach of the
+dullest faculty: the coarsest clown with a hammer in his hand might
+chip the nose off every statue and bust in the Vatican, and stand
+grinning at the effect of his work. Because wit is an exquisite product
+of high powers, we are not therefore forced to admit the sadly confused
+inference of the monotonous jester that he is establishing his
+superiority over every less facetious person, and over every topic on
+which he is ignorant or insensible, by being uneasy until he has
+distorted it in the small cracked mirror which he carries about with him
+as a joking apparatus. Some high authority is needed to give many worthy
+and timid persons the freedom of muscular repose under the growing
+demand on them to laugh when they have no other reason than the peril of
+being taken for dullards; still more to inspire them with the courage to
+say that they object to the theatrical spoiling for themselves and their
+children of all affecting themes, all the grander deeds and aims of men,
+by burlesque associations adapted to the taste of rich fishmongers in
+the stalls and their assistants in the gallery. The English people in
+the present generation are falsely reputed to know Shakspere (as, by
+some innocent persons, the Florentine mule-drivers are believed to have
+known the _Divina Commedia_, not, perhaps, excluding all the subtle
+discourses in the _Purgatorio_ and _Paradiso_); but there seems a clear
+prospect that in the coming generation he will be known to them through
+burlesques, and that his plays will find a new life as pantomimes. A
+bottle-nosed Lear will come on with a monstrous corpulence from which he
+will frantically dance himself free during the midnight storm; Rosalind
+and Celia will join in a grotesque ballet with shepherds and
+shepherdesses; Ophelia in fleshings and a voluminous brevity of
+grenadine will dance through the mad scene, finishing with the famous
+"attitude of the scissors" in the arms of Laertes; and all the speeches
+in "Hamlet" will be so ingeniously parodied that the originals will be
+reduced to a mere _memoria technica_ of the improver's puns--premonitory
+signs of a hideous millennium, in which the lion will have to lie down
+with the lascivious monkeys whom (if we may trust Pliny) his soul
+naturally abhors.
+
+I have been amazed to find that some artists whose own works have the
+ideal stamp, are quite insensible to the damaging tendency of the
+burlesquing spirit which ranges to and fro and up and down on the earth,
+seeing no reason (except a precarious censorship) why it should not
+appropriate every sacred, heroic, and pathetic theme which serves to
+make up the treasure of human admiration, hope, and love. One would have
+thought that their own half-despairing efforts to invest in worthy
+outward shape the vague inward impressions of sublimity, and the
+consciousness of an implicit ideal in the commonest scenes, might have
+made them susceptible of some disgust or alarm at a species of burlesque
+which is likely to render their compositions no better than a dissolving
+view, where every noble form is seen melting into its preposterous
+caricature. It used to be imagined of the unhappy medieval Jews that
+they parodied Calvary by crucifying dogs; if they had been guilty they
+would at least have had the excuse of the hatred and rage begotten by
+persecution. Are we on the way to a parody which shall have no other
+excuse than the reckless search after fodder for degraded
+appetites--after the pay to be earned by pasturing Circe's herd where
+they may defile every monument of that growing life which should have
+kept 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 changing
+facets of egoism, absurdity, and vice, as the sunshine over the rippling
+sea or the dewy meadows. Why should we make our delicious sense of the
+ludicrous, with its invigorating shocks of laughter and its
+irrepressible smiles which are the outglow of an inward radiation as
+gentle and cheering as the warmth of morning, flourish like a brigand on
+the robbery of our mental wealth?--or let it take its exercise as a
+madman might, if allowed a free nightly promenade, by drawing the
+populace with bonfires which leave some venerable structure a blackened
+ruin or send a scorching smoke across the portraits of the past, at
+which we once looked with a loving recognition of fellowship, and
+disfigure them into butts of mockery?--nay, worse--use it to degrade the
+healthy appetites and affections of our nature as they are seen to be
+degraded in insane patients whose system, all out of joint, finds
+matter for screaming laughter in mere topsy-turvy, makes every passion
+preposterous or obscene, and turns the hard-won order of life into a
+second chaos hideous enough to make one wail that the first was ever
+thrilled with light?
+
+This is what I call debasing the moral currency: lowering the value of
+every inspiring fact and tradition so that it will command less and less
+of the spiritual products, the generous motives which sustain the charm
+and elevation of our social existence--the something besides bread by
+which man saves his soul alive. The bread-winner of the family may
+demand more and more coppery shillings, or assignats, or greenbacks for
+his day's work, and so get the needful quantum of food; but let that
+moral currency be emptied of its value--let a greedy buffoonery debase
+all historic beauty, majesty, and pathos, and the more you heap up the
+desecrated symbols the greater will be the lack of the ennobling
+emotions which subdue the tyranny of suffering, and make ambition one
+with social virtue.
+
+And yet, it seems, parents will put into the hands of their children
+ridiculous parodies (perhaps with more ridiculous "illustrations") of
+the poems which stirred their own tenderness or filial piety, and carry
+them to make their first acquaintance with great men, great works, or
+solemn crises through the medium of some miscellaneous burlesque which,
+with its idiotic puns and farcical attitudes, will remain among their
+primary associations, and reduce them throughout their time of studious
+preparation for life to the moral imbecility of an inward giggle at what
+might have stimulated their high emulation or fed the fountains of
+compassion, trust, and constancy. One wonders where these parents have
+deposited that stock of morally educating stimuli which is to be
+independent of poetic tradition, and to subsist in spite of the finest
+images being degraded and the finest words of genius being poisoned as
+with some befooling drug.
+
+Will fine wit, will exquisite humour prosper the more through this
+turning of all things indiscriminately into food for a gluttonous
+laughter, an idle craving without sense of flavours? On the contrary.
+That delightful power which La Bruyere points to--"le ridicule qui est
+quelque part, il faut l'y voir, l'en tirer avec grace et d'une maniere
+qui plaise et qui instruise"--depends on a discrimination only
+compatible with the varied sensibilities which give sympathetic insight,
+and with the justice of perception which is another name for grave
+knowledge. Such a result is no more to be expected from faculties on the
+strain to find some small hook by which they may attach the lowest
+incongruity to the most momentous subject, than it is to be expected of
+a sharper, watching for gulls in a great political assemblage, that he
+will notice the blundering logic of partisan speakers, or season his
+observation with the salt of historical parallels. But after all our
+psychological teaching, and in the midst of our zeal for education, we
+are still, most of us, at the stage of believing that mental powers and
+habits have somehow, not perhaps in the general statement, but in any
+particular case, a kind of spiritual glaze against conditions which we
+are continually applying to them. We soak our children in habits of
+contempt and exultant gibing, and yet are confident that--as Clarissa
+one day said to me--"We can always teach them to be reverent in the
+right place, you know." And doubtless if she were to take her boys to
+see a burlesque Socrates, with swollen legs, dying in the utterance of
+cockney puns, and were to hang up a sketch of this comic scene among
+their bedroom prints, she would think this preparation not at all to the
+prejudice of their emotions on hearing their tutor read that narrative
+of the _Apology_ which has been consecrated by the reverent gratitude of
+ages. This is the impoverishment that threatens our posterity:--a new
+Famine, a meagre fiend with lewd grin and clumsy hoof, is breathing a
+moral mildew over the harvest of our human sentiments. These are the
+most delicate elements of our too easily perishable civilisation. And
+here again I like to quote a French testimony. Sainte Beuve, referring
+to a time of insurrectionary disturbance, says: "Rien de plus prompt a
+baisser que la civilisation dans des crises comme celle-ci; on perd en
+trois semaines le resultat de plusieurs siecles. La civilisation, la
+_vie_ est une chose apprise et inventee, qu'on le sache bien: '_Inventas
+aut qui vitam excoluere per artes_.' Les hommes apres quelques annees de
+paix oublient trop cette verite: ils arrivent a croire que la _culture_
+est chose innee, qu'elle est la meme chose que la _nature_. La
+sauvagerie est toujours la a deux pas, et, des qu'on lache pied, elle
+recommence." We have been severely enough taught (if we were willing to
+learn) that our civilisation, considered as a splendid material fabric,
+is helplessly in peril without the spiritual police of sentiments or
+ideal feelings. And it is this invisible police which we had need, as a
+community, strive to maintain in efficient force. How if a dangerous
+"Swing" were sometimes disguised in a versatile entertainer devoted to
+the amusement of mixed audiences? And I confess that sometimes when I
+see a certain style of young lady, who checks our tender admiration with
+rouge and henna and all the blazonry of an extravagant expenditure, with
+slang and bold _brusquerie_ intended to signify her emancipated view of
+things, and with cynical mockery which she mistakes for penetration, I
+am sorely tempted to hiss out "_Petroleuse!_" It is a small matter to
+have our palaces set aflame compared with the misery of having our sense
+of a noble womanhood, which is the inspiration of a purifying shame, the
+promise of life--penetrating affection, stained and blotted out by
+images of repulsiveness. These things come--not of higher education,
+but--of dull ignorance fostered into pertness by the greedy vulgarity
+which reverses Peter's visionary lesson and learns to call all things
+common and unclean. It comes of debasing the moral currency.
+
+The Tirynthians, according to an ancient story reported by Athenaeus,
+becoming conscious that their trick of laughter at everything and
+nothing was making them unfit for the conduct of serious affairs,
+appealed to the Delphic oracle for some means of cure. The god
+prescribed a peculiar form of sacrifice, which would be effective if
+they could carry it through without laughing. They did their best; but
+the flimsy joke of a boy upset their unaccustomed gravity, and in this
+way the oracle taught them that even the gods could not prescribe a
+quick cure for a long vitiation, or give power and dignity to a people
+who in a crisis of the public wellbeing were at the mercy of a poor
+jest.
+
+
+
+
+XI.
+
+
+THE WASP CREDITED WITH THE HONEYCOMB
+
+No man, I imagine, would object more strongly than Euphorion to
+communistic principles in relation to material property, but with regard
+to property in ideas he entertains such principles willingly, and is
+disposed to treat the distinction between Mine and Thine in original
+authorship as egoistic, narrowing, and low. I have known him, indeed,
+insist at some expense of erudition on the prior right of an ancient, a
+medieval, or an eighteenth century writer to be credited with a view or
+statement lately advanced with some show of originality; and this
+championship seems to imply a nicety of conscience towards the dead. He
+is evidently unwilling that his neighbours should get more credit than
+is due to them, and in this way he appears to recognise a certain
+proprietorship even in spiritual production. But perhaps it is no real
+inconsistency that, with regard to many instances of modern origination,
+it is his habit to talk with a Gallic largeness and refer to the
+universe: he expatiates on the diffusive nature of intellectual
+products, free and all-embracing as the liberal air; on the
+infinitesimal smallness of individual origination compared with the
+massive inheritance of thought on which every new generation enters; on
+that growing preparation for every epoch through which certain ideas or
+modes of view are said to be in the air, and, still more metaphorically
+speaking, to be inevitably absorbed, so that every one may be excused
+for not knowing how he got them. Above all, he insists on the proper
+subordination of the irritable self, the mere vehicle of an idea or
+combination which, being produced by the sum total of the human race,
+must belong to that multiple entity, from the accomplished lecturer or
+populariser who transmits it, to the remotest generation of Fuegians or
+Hottentots, however indifferent these may be to the superiority of their
+right above that of the eminently perishable dyspeptic author.
+
+One may admit that such considerations carry a profound truth to be
+even religiously contemplated, and yet object all the more to the mode
+in which Euphorion seems to apply them. I protest against the use of
+these majestic conceptions to do the dirty work of unscrupulosity and
+justify the non-payment of conscious debts which cannot be defined or
+enforced by the law. Especially since it is observable that the large
+views as to intellectual property which can apparently reconcile an
+able person to the use of lately borrowed ideas as if they were his
+own, when this spoliation is favoured by the public darkness, never
+hinder him from joining in the zealous tribute of recognition and
+applause to those warriors of Truth whose triumphal arches are seen in
+the public ways, those conquerors whose battles and "annexations" even
+the carpenters and bricklayers know by name. Surely the acknowledgment
+of a mental debt which will not be immediately detected, and may never
+be asserted, is a case to which the traditional susceptibility to
+"debts of honour" would be suitably transferred. There is no massive
+public opinion that can be expected to tell on these relations of
+thinkers and investigators—relations to be thoroughly understood
+and felt only by those who are interested in the life of ideas and
+acquainted with their history. To lay false claim to an invention or
+discovery which has an immediate market value; to vamp up a
+professedly new book of reference by stealing from the pages of one
+already produced at the cost of much labour and material; to copy
+somebody else's poem and send the manuscript to a magazine, or hand it
+about among; friends as an original "effusion;" to deliver an elegant
+extract from a known writer as a piece of improvised
+eloquence:—these are the limits within which the dishonest
+pretence of originality is likely to get hissed or hooted and bring
+more or less shame on the culprit. It is not necessary to understand
+the merit of a performance, or even to spell with any comfortable
+confidence, in order to perceive at once that such pretences are not
+respectable. But the difference between these vulgar frauds, these
+devices of ridiculous jays whose ill-secured plumes are seen falling
+off them as they run, and the quiet appropriation of other people's
+philosophic or scientific ideas, can hardly be held to lie in their
+moral quality unless we take impunity as our criterion. The pitiable
+jays had no presumption in their favour and foolishly fronted an alert
+incredulity; but Euphorion, the accomplished theorist, has an audience
+who expect much of him, and take it as the most natural thing in the
+world that every unusual view which he presents anonymously should be
+due solely to his ingenuity. His borrowings are no incongruous
+feathers awkwardly stuck on; they have an appropriateness which makes
+them seem an answer to anticipation, like the return phrases of a
+melody. Certainly one cannot help the ignorant conclusions of polite
+society, and there are perhaps fashionable persons who, if a speaker
+has occasion to explain what the occipat is, will consider that he has
+lately discovered that curiously named portion of the animal frame:
+one cannot give a genealogical introduction to every long-stored item
+of fact or conjecture that may happen to be a revelation for the large
+class of persons who are understood to judge soundly on a small basis
+of knowledge. But Euphorion would be very sorry to have it supposed
+that he is unacquainted with the history of ideas, and sometimes
+carries even into minutiae the evidence of his exact registration of
+names in connection with quotable phrases or suggestions: I can
+therefore only explain the apparent infirmity of his memory in cases
+of larger "conveyance" by supposing that he is accustomed by the very
+association of largeness to range them at once under those grand laws
+of the universe in the light of which Mine and Thine disappear and are
+resolved into Everybody's or Nobody's, and one man's particular
+obligations to another melt untraceably into the obligations of the
+earth to the solar system in general.
+
+Euphorion himself, if a particular omission of acknowledgment were
+brought home to him, would probably take a narrower ground of
+explanation. It was a lapse of memory; or it did not occur to him as
+necessary in this case to mention a name, the source being well
+known--or (since this seems usually to act as a strong reason for
+mention) he rather abstained from adducing the name because it might
+injure the excellent matter advanced, just as an obscure trade-mark
+casts discredit on a good commodity, and even on the retailer who has
+furnished himself from a quarter not likely to be esteemed first-rate.
+No doubt this last is a genuine and frequent reason for the
+non-acknowledgment of indebtedness to what one may call impersonal as
+well as personal sources: even an American editor of school classics
+whose own English could not pass for more than a syntactical shoddy of
+the cheapest sort, felt it unfavourable to his reputation for sound
+learning that he should be obliged to the Penny Cyclopaedia, and
+disguised his references to it under contractions in which _Us. Knowl._.
+took the place of the low word _Penny_. Works of this convenient stamp,
+easily obtained and well nourished with matter, are felt to be like rich
+but unfashionable relations who are visited and received in privacy, and
+whose capital is used or inherited without any ostentatious insistance
+on their names and places of abode. As to memory, it is known that this
+frail faculty naturally lets drop the facts which are less flattering to
+our self-love--when it does not retain them carefully as subjects not to
+be approached, marshy spots with a warning flag over them. But it is
+always interesting to bring forward eminent names, such as Patricius or
+Scaliger, Euler or Lagrange, Bopp or Humboldt. To know exactly what has
+been drawn from them is erudition and heightens our own influence, which
+seems advantageous to mankind; whereas to cite an author whose ideas may
+pass as higher currency under our own signature can have no object
+except the contradictory one of throwing the illumination over his
+figure when it is important to be seen oneself. All these reasons must
+weigh considerably with those speculative persons who have to ask
+themselves whether or not Universal Utilitarianism requires that in the
+particular instance before them they should injure a man who has been of
+service to them, and rob a fellow-workman of the credit which is due to
+him.
+
+After all, however, it must be admitted that hardly any accusation is
+more difficult to prove, and more liable to be false, than that of a
+plagiarism which is the conscious theft of ideas and deliberate
+reproduction of them as original. The arguments on the side of acquittal
+are obvious and strong:--the inevitable coincidences of contemporary
+thinking; and our continual experience of finding notions turning up in
+our minds without any label on them to tell us whence they came; so that
+if we are in the habit of expecting much from our own capacity we accept
+them at once as a new inspiration. Then, in relation to the elder
+authors, there is the difficulty first of learning and then of
+remembering exactly what has been wrought into the backward tapestry of
+the world's history, together with the fact that ideas acquired long ago
+reappear as the sequence of an awakened interest or a line of inquiry
+which is really new in us, whence it is conceivable that if we were
+ancients some of us might be offering grateful hecatombs by mistake, and
+proving 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, especially
+of the resentful, condemnatory sort. How Pythagoras came by his ideas,
+whether St Paul was acquainted with all the Greek poets, what Tacitus
+must have known by hearsay and systematically ignored, are points on
+which a false persuasion of knowledge is less damaging to justice and
+charity than an erroneous confidence, supported by reasoning
+fundamentally similar, of my neighbour's blameworthy behaviour in a case
+where I am personally concerned. No premisses require closer scrutiny
+than those which lead to the constantly echoed conclusion, "He must have
+known," or "He must have read." I marvel that this facility of belief on
+the side of knowledge can subsist under the daily demonstration that the
+easiest of all things to the human mind is _not_ to know and _not_ to
+read. To praise, to blame, to shout, grin, or hiss, where others shout,
+grin, or hiss--these are native tendencies; but to know and to read are
+artificial, hard accomplishments, concerning which the only safe
+supposition is, that as little of them has been done as the case admits.
+An author, keenly conscious of having written, can hardly help imagining
+his condition of lively interest to be shared by others, just as we are
+all apt to suppose that the chill or heat we are conscious of must be
+general, or even to think that our sons and daughters, our pet schemes,
+and our quarrelling correspondence, are themes to which intelligent
+persons will listen long without weariness. But if the ardent author
+happen to be alive to practical teaching he will soon learn to divide
+the larger part of the enlightened public into those who have not read
+him and think it necessary to tell him so when they meet him in polite
+society, and those who have equally abstained from reading him, but wish
+to conceal this negation and speak of his "incomparable works" with that
+trust in testimony which always has its cheering side.
+
+Hence it is worse than foolish to entertain silent suspicions of
+plagiarism, still more to give them voice, when they are founded on a
+construction of probabilities which a little more attention to everyday
+occurrences as a guide in reasoning would show us to be really
+worthless, considered as proof. The length to which one man's memory can
+go in letting drop associations that are vital to another can hardly
+find a limit. It is not to be supposed that a person desirous to make an
+agreeable impression on you would deliberately choose to insist to you,
+with some rhetorical sharpness, on an argument which you were the first
+to elaborate in public; yet any one who listens may overhear such
+instances of obliviousness. You naturally remember your peculiar
+connection with your acquaintance's judicious views; but why should
+_he_? Your fatherhood, which is an intense feeling to you, is only an
+additional fact of meagre interest for him to remember; and a sense of
+obligation to the particular living fellow-struggler who has helped us
+in our thinking, is not yet a form of memory the want of which is felt
+to be disgraceful or derogatory, unless it is taken to be a want of
+polite instruction, or causes the missing of a cockade on a day of
+celebration. In our suspicions of plagiarism we must recognise as the
+first weighty probability, that what we who feel injured remember best
+is precisely what is least likely to enter lastingly into the memory of
+our neighbours. But it is fair to maintain that the neighbour who
+borrows your property, loses it for a while, and when it turns up again
+forgets your connection with it and counts it his own, shows himself so
+much the feebler in grasp and rectitude of mind. Some absent persons
+cannot remember the state of wear in their own hats and umbrellas, and
+have no mental check to tell them that they have carried home a
+fellow-visitor's more recent purchase: they may be excellent
+householders, far removed from the suspicion of low devices, but one
+wishes them a more correct perception, and a more wary sense that a
+neighbours umbrella may be newer than their own.
+
+True, some persons are so constituted that the very excellence of an
+idea seems to them a convincing reason that it must be, if not solely,
+yet especially theirs. It fits in so beautifully with their general
+wisdom, it lies implicitly in so many of their manifested opinions, that
+if they have not yet expressed it (because of preoccupation) it is
+clearly a part of their indigenous produce, and is proved by their
+immediate eloquent promulgation of it to belong more naturally and
+appropriately to them than to the person who seemed first to have
+alighted on it, and who sinks in their all-originating consciousness to
+that low kind of entity, a second cause. This is not lunacy, nor
+pretence, but a genuine state of mind very effective in practice, and
+often carrying the public with it, so that the poor Columbus is found to
+be a very faulty adventurer, and the continent is named after Amerigo.
+Lighter examples of this instinctive appropriation are constantly met
+with among brilliant talkers. Aquila is too agreeable and amusing for
+any one who is not himself bent on display to be angry at his
+conversational rapine--his habit of darting down on every morsel of
+booty that other birds may hold in their beaks, with an innocent air, as
+if it were all intended for his use, and honestly counted on by him as a
+tribute in kind. Hardly any man, I imagine, can have had less trouble in
+gathering a showy stock of information than Aquila. On close inquiry you
+would probably find that he had not read one epoch-making book of modern
+times, for he has a career which obliges him to much correspondence and
+other official work, and he is too fond of being in company to spend his
+leisure moments in study; but to his quick eye, ear, and tongue, a few
+predatory excursions in conversation where there are instructed persons,
+gradually furnish surprisingly clever modes of statement and allusion on
+the dominant topic. When he first adopts a subject he necessarily falls
+into mistakes, and it is interesting to watch his gradual progress into
+fuller information and better nourished irony, without his ever needing
+to admit that he has made a blunder or to appear conscious of
+correction. Suppose, for example, he had incautiously founded some
+ingenious remarks on a hasty reckoning that nine thirteens made a
+hundred and two, and the insignificant Bantam, hitherto silent, seemed
+to spoil the flow of ideas by stating that the product could not be
+taken as less than a hundred and seventeen, Aquila would glide on in the
+most graceful manner from a repetition of his previous remark to the
+continuation--"All this is on the supposition that a hundred and two
+were all that could be got out of nine thirteens; but as all the world
+knows that nine thirteens will yield," &c.--proceeding straightway into
+a new train of ingenious consequences, and causing Bantam to be regarded
+by all present as one of those slow persons who take irony for
+ignorance, and who would warn the weasel to keep awake. How should a
+small-eyed, feebly crowing mortal like him be quicker in arithmetic than
+the keen-faced forcible Aquila, in whom universal knowledge is easily
+credible? Looked into closely, the conclusion from a man's profile,
+voice, and fluency to his certainty in multiplication beyond the
+twelves, seems to show a confused notion of the way in which very common
+things are connected; but it is on such false correlations that men
+found half their inferences about each other, and high places of trust
+may sometimes be held on no better foundation.
+
+It is a commonplace that words, writings, measures, and performances in
+general, have qualities assigned them not by a direct judgment on the
+performances themselves, but by a presumption of what they are likely to
+be, considering who is the performer. We all notice in our neighbours
+this reference to names as guides in criticism, and all furnish
+illustrations of it in our own practice; for, check ourselves as we
+will, the first impression from any sort of work must depend on a
+previous attitude of mind, and this will constantly be determined by the
+influences of a name. But that our prior confidence or want of
+confidence in given names is made up of judgments just as hollow as the
+consequent praise or blame they are taken to warrant, is less commonly
+perceived, though there is a conspicuous indication of it in the
+surprise or disappointment often manifested in the disclosure of an
+authorship about which everybody has been making wrong guesses. No doubt
+if it had been discovered who wrote the 'Vestiges,' many an ingenious
+structure of probabilities would have been spoiled, and some disgust
+might have been felt for a real author who made comparatively so shabby
+an appearance of likelihood. It is this foolish trust in prepossessions,
+founded on spurious evidence, which makes a medium of encouragement for
+those who, happening to have the ear of the public, give other people's
+ideas the advantage of appearing under their own well-received name,
+while any remonstrance from the real producer becomes an each person who
+has paid complimentary tributes in the wrong place.
+
+Hardly any kind of false reasoning is more ludicrous than this on the
+probabilities of origination. It would be amusing to catechise the
+guessers as to their exact reasons for thinking their guess "likely:"
+why Hoopoe of John's has fixed on Toucan of Magdalen; why Shrike
+attributes its peculiar style to Buzzard, who has not hitherto been
+known as a writer; why the fair Columba thinks it must belong to the
+reverend Merula; and why they are all alike disturbed in their previous
+judgment of its value by finding that it really came from Skunk, whom
+they had either not thought of at all, or thought of as belonging to a
+species excluded by the nature of the case. Clearly they were all wrong
+in their notion of the specific conditions, which lay unexpectedly in
+the small Skunk, and in him alone--in spite of his education nobody
+knows where, in spite of somebody's knowing his uncles and cousins, and
+in spite of nobody's knowing that he was cleverer than they thought him.
+
+Such guesses remind one of a fabulist's imaginary council of animals
+assembled to consider what sort of creature had constructed a honeycomb
+found and much tasted by Bruin and other epicures. The speakers all
+started from the probability that the maker was a bird, because this was
+the quarter from which a wondrous nest might be expected; for the
+animals at that time, knowing little of their own history, would have
+rejected as inconceivable the notion that a nest could be made by a
+fish; and as to the insects, they were not willingly received in society
+and their ways were little known. Several complimentary presumptions
+were expressed that the honeycomb was due to one or the other admired
+and popular bird, and there was much fluttering on the part of the
+Nightingale and Swallow, neither of whom gave a positive denial, their
+confusion perhaps extending to their sense of identity; but the Owl
+hissed at this folly, arguing from his particular knowledge that the
+animal which produced honey must be the Musk-rat, the wondrous nature of
+whose secretions required no proof; and, in the powerful logical
+procedure of the Owl, from musk to honey was but a step. Some
+disturbance arose hereupon, for the Musk-rat began to make himself
+obtrusive, believing in the Owl's opinion of his powers, and feeling
+that he could have produced the honey if he had thought of it; until an
+experimental Butcher-bird proposed to anatomise him as a help to
+decision. The hubbub increased, the opponents of the Musk-rat inquiring
+who his ancestors were; until a diversion was created by an able
+discourse of the Macaw on structures generally, which he classified so
+as to include the honeycomb, entering into so much admirable exposition
+that there was a prevalent sense of the honeycomb having probably been
+produced by one who understood it so well. But Bruin, who had probably
+eaten too much to listen with edification, grumbled in his low kind of
+language, that "Fine words butter no parsnips," by which he meant to say
+that there was no new honey forthcoming.
+
+Perhaps the audience generally was beginning to tire, when the Fox
+entered with his snout dreadfully swollen, and reported that the
+beneficent originator in question was the Wasp, which he had found much
+smeared with undoubted honey, having applied his nose to it--whence
+indeed the able insect, perhaps justifiably irritated at what might seem
+a sign of scepticism, had stung him with some severity, an infliction
+Reynard could hardly regret, since the swelling of a snout normally so
+delicate would corroborate his statement and satisfy the assembly that
+he had really found the honey-creating genius.
+
+The Fox's admitted acuteness, combined with the visible swelling, were
+taken as undeniable evidence, and the revelation undoubtedly met a
+general desire for information on a point of interest. Nevertheless,
+there was a murmur the reverse of delighted, and the feelings of some
+eminent animals were too strong for them: the Orang-outang's jaw dropped
+so as seriously to impair the vigour of his expression, the edifying
+Pelican screamed and flapped her wings, the Owl hissed again, the Macaw
+became loudly incoherent, and the Gibbon gave his hysterical laugh;
+while the Hyaena, after indulging in a more splenetic guffaw, agitated
+the question whether it would not be better to hush up the whole affair,
+instead of giving public recognition to an insect whose produce, it was
+now plain, had been much overestimated. But this narrow-spirited motion
+was negatived by the sweet-toothed majority. A complimentary deputation
+to the Wasp was resolved on, and there was a confident hope that this
+diplomatic measure would tell on the production of honey.
+
+
+
+
+XII.
+
+
+"SO YOUNG!"
+
+Ganymede was once a girlishly handsome precocious youth. That one cannot
+for any considerable number of years go on being youthful, girlishly
+handsome, and precocious, seems on consideration to be a statement as
+worthy of credit as the famous syllogistic conclusion, "Socrates was
+mortal." But many circumstances have conspired to keep up in Ganymede
+the illusion that he is surprisingly young. He was the last born of his
+family, and from his earliest memory was accustomed to be commended as
+such to the care of his elder brothers and sisters: he heard his mother
+speak of him as her youngest darling with a loving pathos in her tone,
+which naturally suffused his own view of himself, and gave him the
+habitual consciousness of being at once very young and very interesting.
+Then, the disclosure of his tender years was a constant matter of
+astonishment to strangers who had had proof of his precocious talents,
+and the astonishment extended to what is called the world at large when
+he produced 'A Comparative Estimate of European Nations' before he was
+well out of his teens. All comers, on a first interview, told him that
+he was marvellously young, and some repeated the statement each time
+they saw him; all critics who wrote about him called attention to the
+same ground for wonder: his deficiencies and excesses were alike to be
+accounted for by the flattering fact of his youth, and his youth was the
+golden background which set off his many-hued endowments. Here was
+already enough to establish a strong association between his sense of
+identity and his sense of being unusually young. But after this he
+devised and founded an ingenious organisation for consolidating the
+literary interests of all the four continents (subsequently including
+Australasia and Polynesia), he himself presiding in the central office,
+which thus became a new theatre for the constantly repeated situation of
+an astonished stranger in the presence of a boldly scheming
+administrator found to be remarkably young. If we imagine with due
+charity the effect on Ganymede, we shall think it greatly to his credit
+that he continued to feel the necessity of being something more than
+young, and did not sink by rapid degrees into a parallel of that
+melancholy object, a superannuated youthful phenomenon. Happily he had
+enough of valid, active faculty to save him from that tragic fate. He
+had not exhausted his fountain of eloquent opinion in his 'Comparative
+Estimate,' so as to feel himself, like some other juvenile celebrities,
+the sad survivor of his own manifest destiny, or like one who has risen
+too early in the morning, and finds all the solid day turned into a
+fatigued afternoon. He has continued to be productive both of schemes
+and writings, being perhaps helped by the fact that his 'Comparative
+Estimate' did not greatly affect the currents of European thought, and
+left him with the stimulating hope that he had not done his best, but
+might yet produce what would make his youth more surprising than ever.
+
+I saw something of him through his Antinoues period, the time of rich
+chesnut locks, parted not by a visible white line, but by a shadowed
+furrow from which they fell in massive ripples to right and left. In
+these slim days he looked the younger for being rather below the middle
+size, and though at last one perceived him contracting an indefinable
+air of self-consciousness, a slight exaggeration of the facial
+movements, the attitudes, the little tricks, and the romance in
+shirt-collars, which must be expected from one who, in spite of his
+knowledge, was so exceedingly young, it was impossible to say that he
+was making any great mistake about himself. He was only undergoing one
+form of a common moral disease: being strongly mirrored for himself in
+the remark of others, he was getting to see his real characteristics as
+a dramatic part, a type to which his doings were always in
+correspondence. Owing to my absence on travel and to other causes I had
+lost sight of him for several years, but such a separation between two
+who have not missed each other seems in this busy century only a
+pleasant reason, when they happen to meet again in some old accustomed
+haunt, for the one who has stayed at home to be more communicative about
+himself than he can well be to those who have all along been in his
+neighbourhood. He had married in the interval, and as if to keep up his
+surprising youthfulness in all relations, he had taken a wife
+considerably older than himself. It would probably have seemed to him a
+disturbing inversion of the natural order that any one very near to him
+should have been younger than he, except his own children who, however
+young, would not necessarily hinder the normal surprise at the
+youthfulness of their father. And if my glance had revealed my
+impression on first seeing him again, he might have received a rather
+disagreeable shock, which was far from my intention. My mind, having
+retained a very exact image of his former appearance, took note of
+unmistakeable changes such as a painter would certainly not have made by
+way of flattering his subject. He had lost his slimness, and that curved
+solidity which might have adorned a taller man was a rather sarcastic
+threat to his short figure. The English branch of the Teutonic race does
+not produce many fat youths, and I have even heard an American lady say
+that she was much "disappointed" at the moderate number and size of our
+fat men, considering their reputation in the United States; hence a
+stranger would now have been apt to remark that Ganymede was unusually
+plump for a distinguished writer, rather than unusually young. But how
+was he to know this? Many long-standing prepossessions are as hard to be
+corrected as a long-standing mispronunciation, against which the direct
+experience of eye and ear is often powerless. And I could perceive that
+Ganymede's inwrought sense of his surprising youthfulness had been
+stronger than the superficial reckoning of his years and the merely
+optical phenomena of the looking-glass. He now held a post under
+Government, and not only saw, like most subordinate functionaries, how
+ill everything was managed, but also what were the changes that a high
+constructive ability would dictate; and in mentioning to me his own
+speeches and other efforts towards propagating reformatory views in his
+department, he concluded by changing his tone to a sentimental head
+voice and saying--
+
+"But I am so young; people object to any prominence on my part; I can
+only get myself heard anonymously, and when some attention has been
+drawn the name is sure to creep out. The writer is known to be young,
+and things are none the forwarder."
+
+"Well," said I, "youth seems the only drawback that is sure to diminish.
+You and I have seven years less of it than when we last met."
+
+"Ah?" returned Ganymede, as lightly as possible, at the same time
+casting an observant glance over me, as if he were marking the effect of
+seven years on a person who had probably begun life with an old look,
+and even as an infant had given his countenance to that significant
+doctrine, the transmigration of ancient souls into modern bodies.
+
+I left him on that occasion without any melancholy forecast that his
+illusion would be suddenly or painfully broken up. I saw that he was
+well victualled and defended against a ten years' siege from ruthless
+facts; and in the course of time observation convinced me that his
+resistance received considerable aid from without. Each of his written
+productions, as it came out, was still commented on as the work of a
+very young man. One critic, finding that he wanted solidity, charitably
+referred to his youth as an excuse. Another, dazzled by his brilliancy,
+seemed to regard his youth as so wondrous that all other authors
+appeared decrepit by comparison, and their style such as might be looked
+for from gentlemen of the old school. Able pens (according to a familiar
+metaphor) appeared to shake their heads good-humouredly, implying that
+Ganymede's crudities were pardonable in one so exceedingly young. Such
+unanimity amid diversity, which a distant posterity might take for
+evidence that on the point of age at least there could have been no
+mistake, was not really more difficult to account for than the
+prevalence of cotton in our fabrics. Ganymede had been first introduced
+into the writing world as remarkably young, and it was no exceptional
+consequence that the first deposit of information about him held its
+ground against facts which, however open to observation, were not
+necessarily thought of. It is not so easy, with our rates and taxes and
+need for economy in all directions, to cast away an epithet or remark
+that turns up cheaply, and to go in expensive search after more genuine
+substitutes. There is high Homeric precedent for keeping fast hold of an
+epithet under all changes of circumstance, and so the precocious author
+of the 'Comparative Estimate' heard the echoes repeating "Young
+Ganymede" when an illiterate beholder at a railway station would have
+given him forty years at least. Besides, important elders, sachems of
+the clubs and public meetings, had a genuine opinion of him as young
+enough to be checked for speech on subjects which they had spoken
+mistakenly about when he was in his cradle; and then, the midway parting
+of his crisp hair, not common among English committee-men, formed a
+presumption against the ripeness of his judgment which nothing but a
+speedy baldness could have removed.
+
+It is but fair to mention all these outward confirmations of Ganymede's
+illusion, which shows no signs of leaving him. It is true that he no
+longer hears expressions of surprise at his youthfulness, on a first
+introduction to an admiring reader; but this sort of external evidence
+has become an unnecessary crutch to his habitual inward persuasion. His
+manners, his costume, his suppositions of the impression he makes on
+others, have all their former correspondence with the dramatic part of
+the young genius. As to the incongruity of his contour and other little
+accidents of physique, he is probably no more aware that they will
+affect others as incongruities than Armida is conscious how much her
+rouge provokes our notice of her wrinkles, and causes us to mention
+sarcastically that motherly age which we should otherwise regard with
+affectionate reverence.
+
+But let us be just enough to admit that there may be old-young coxcombs
+as well as old-young coquettes.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.
+
+
+HOW WE COME TO GIVE OURSELVES FALSE TESTIMONIALS, AND BELIEVE IN THEM.
+
+It is my way when I observe any instance of folly, any queer habit, any
+absurd illusion, straightway to look for something of the same type in
+myself, feeling sure that amid all differences there will be a certain
+correspondence; just as there is more or less correspondence in the
+natural history even of continents widely apart, and of islands in
+opposite zones. No doubt men's minds differ in what we may call their
+climate or share of solar energy, and a feeling or tendency which is
+comparable to a panther in one may have no more imposing aspect than
+that of a weasel in another: some are like a tropical habitat in which
+the very ferns cast a mighty shadow, and the grasses are a dry ocean in
+which a hunter may be submerged; others like the chilly latitudes in
+which your forest-tree, fit elsewhere to prop a mine, is a pretty
+miniature suitable for fancy potting. The eccentric man might be
+typified by the Australian fauna, refuting half our judicious
+assumptions of what nature allows. Still, whether fate commanded us to
+thatch our persons among the Eskimos or to choose the latest thing in
+tattooing among the Polynesian isles, our precious guide Comparison
+would teach us in the first place by likeness, and our clue to further
+knowledge would be resemblance to what we already know. Hence, having a
+keen interest in the natural history of my inward self, I pursue this
+plan I have mentioned of using my observation as a clue or lantern by
+which I detect small herbage or lurking life; or I take my neighbour in
+his least becoming tricks or efforts as an opportunity for luminous
+deduction concerning the figure the human genus makes in the specimen
+which I myself furnish.
+
+Introspection which starts with the purpose of finding out one's own
+absurdities is not likely to be very mischievous, yet of course it is
+not free from dangers any more than breathing is, or the other functions
+that keep us alive and active. To judge of others by oneself is in its
+most innocent meaning the briefest expression for our only method of
+knowing mankind; yet, we perceive, it has come to mean in many cases
+either the vulgar mistake which reduces every man's value to the very
+low figure at which the valuer himself happens to stand; or else, the
+amiable illusion of the higher nature misled by a too generous
+construction of the lower. One cannot give a recipe for wise judgment:
+it resembles appropriate muscular action, which is attained by the
+myriad lessons in nicety of balance and of aim that only practice can
+give. The danger of the inverse procedure, judging of self by what one
+observes in others, if it is carried on with much impartiality and
+keenness of discernment, is that it has a laming effect, enfeebling the
+energies of indignation and scorn, which are the proper scourges of
+wrong-doing and meanness, and which should continually feed the
+wholesome restraining power of public opinion. I respect the horsewhip
+when applied to the back of Cruelty, and think that he who applies it is
+a more perfect human being because his outleap of indignation is not
+checked by a too curious reflection on the nature of guilt--a more
+perfect human being because he more completely incorporates the best
+social life of the race, which can never be constituted by ideas that
+nullify action. This is the essence of Dante's sentiment (it is painful
+to think that he applies it very cruelly)--
+
+  "E cortesia fu, lui esser villano"[1]--
+
+and it is undeniable that a too intense consciousness of one's kinship
+with all frailties and vices undermines the active heroism which battles
+against wrong.
+
+But certainly nature has taken care that this danger should not at
+present be very threatening. One could not fairly describe the
+generality of one's neighbours as too lucidly aware of manifesting in
+their own persons the weaknesses which they observe in the rest of her
+Majesty's subjects; on the contrary, a hasty conclusion as to schemes of
+Providence might lead to the supposition that one man was intended to
+correct another by being most intolerant of the ugly quality or trick
+which he himself possesses. Doubtless philosophers will be able to
+explain how it must necessarily be so, but pending the full extension of
+the _a priori_ method, which will show that only blockheads could expect
+anything to be otherwise, it does seem surprising that Heloisa should be
+disgusted at Laura's attempts to disguise her age, attempts which she
+recognises so thoroughly because they enter into her own practice; that
+Semper, who often responds at public dinners and proposes resolutions on
+platforms, though he has a trying gestation of every speech and a bad
+time for himself and others at every delivery, should yet remark
+pitilessly on the folly of precisely the same course of action in
+Ubique; that Aliquis, who lets no attack on himself pass unnoticed, and
+for every handful of gravel against his windows sends a stone in reply,
+should deplore the ill-advised retorts of Quispiam, who does not
+perceive that to show oneself angry with an adversary is to gratify him.
+To be unaware of our own little tricks of manner or our own mental
+blemishes and excesses is a comprehensible unconsciousness; the puzzling
+fact is that people should apparently take no account of their
+deliberate actions, and should expect them to be equally ignored by
+others. It is an inversion of the accepted order: _there_ it is the
+phrases that are official and the conduct or privately manifested
+sentiment that is taken to be real; _here_ it seems that the practice is
+taken to be official and entirely nullified by the verbal representation
+which contradicts it. The thief making a vow to heaven of full
+restitution and whispering some reservations, expecting to cheat
+Omniscience by an "aside," is hardly more ludicrous than the many ladies
+and gentlemen who have more belief, and expect others to have it, in
+their own statement about their habitual doings than in the
+contradictory fact which is patent in the daylight. One reason of the
+absurdity is that we are led by a tradition about ourselves, so that
+long after a man has practically departed from a rule or principle, he
+continues innocently to state it as a true description of his
+practice--just as he has a long tradition that he is not an old
+gentleman, and is startled when he is seventy at overhearing himself
+called 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 sugar
+as possible," said Pilulus to Bovis somewhere in the darker decades of
+this century. "It has made a great difference to Avis since he took my
+advice in that matter: he used to consume half a pound a-day."
+
+"God bless me!" cries Bovis. "I take very little sugar myself."
+
+"Twenty-six large lumps every day of your life, Mr Bovis," says his
+wife.
+
+"No such thing!" exclaims Bovis.
+
+"You drop them into your tea, coffee, and whisky yourself, my dear, and
+I count them."
+
+"Nonsense!" laughs Bovis, turning to Pilulus, that they may exchange a
+glance of mutual amusement at a woman's inaccuracy.
+
+But she happened to be right. Bovis had never said inwardly that he
+would take a large allowance of sugar, and he had the tradition about
+himself that he was a man of the most moderate habits; hence, with this
+conviction, he was naturally disgusted at the saccharine excesses of
+Avis.
+
+I have sometimes thought that this facility of men in believing that
+they are still what they once meant to be--this undisturbed
+appropriation of a traditional character which is often but a melancholy
+relic of early resolutions, like the worn and soiled testimonial to
+soberness and honesty carried in the pocket of a tippler whom the need
+of a dram has driven into peculation--may sometimes diminish the
+turpitude of what seems a flat, barefaced falsehood. It is notorious
+that a man may go on uttering false assertions about his own acts till
+he at last believes in them: is it not possible that sometimes in the
+very first utterance there may be a shade of creed-reciting belief, a
+reproduction of a traditional self which is clung to against all
+evidence? There is no knowing all the disguises of the lying serpent.
+
+When we come to examine in detail what is the sane mind in the sane
+body, the final test of completeness seems to be a security of
+distinction between what we have professed and what we have done; what
+we have aimed at and what we have achieved; what we have invented and
+what we have witnessed or had evidenced to us; what we think and feel in
+the present and what we thought and felt in the past.
+
+I know that there is a common prejudice which regards the habitual
+confusion of _now_ and _then_, of _it was_ and _it is_, of _it seemed
+so_ and _I should like it to be so_, as a mark of high imaginative
+endowment, while the power of precise statement and description is rated
+lower, as the attitude of an everyday prosaic mind. High imagination is
+often assigned or claimed as if it were a ready activity in fabricating
+extravagances such as are presented by fevered dreams, or as if its
+possessors were in that state of inability to give credible testimony
+which would warrant their exclusion from the class of acceptable
+witnesses in a court of justice; so that a creative genius might fairly
+be subjected to the disability which some laws have stamped on dicers,
+slaves, and other classes whose position was held perverting to their
+sense of social responsibility.
+
+This endowment of mental confusion is often boasted of by persons whose
+imaginativeness would not otherwise be known, unless it were by the slow
+process of detecting that their descriptions and narratives were not to
+be trusted. Callista is always ready to testify of herself that she is
+an imaginative person, and sometimes adds in illustration, that if she
+had taken a walk and seen an old heap of stones on her way, the account
+she would give on returning would include many pleasing particulars of
+her own invention, transforming the simple heap into an interesting
+castellated ruin. This creative freedom is all very well in the right
+place, but before I can grant it to be a sign of unusual mental power, I
+must inquire whether, on being requested to give a precise description
+of what she saw, she would be able to cast aside her arbitrary
+combinations and recover the objects she really perceived so as to make
+them recognisable by another person who passed the same way. Otherwise
+her glorifying imagination is not an addition to the fundamental power
+of strong, discerning perception, but a cheaper substitute. And, in
+fact, I find on listening to Callista's conversation, that she has a
+very lax conception even of common objects, and an equally lax memory of
+events. It seems of no consequence to her whether she shall say that a
+stone is overgrown with moss or with lichen, that a building is of
+sandstone or of granite, that Meliboeus once forgot to put on his cravat
+or that he always appears without it; that everybody says so, or that
+one stock-broker's wife said so yesterday; that Philemon praised
+Euphemia up to the skies, or that he denied knowing any particular evil
+of her. She is one of those respectable witnesses who would testify to
+the exact moment of an apparition, because any desirable moment will be
+as exact as another to her remembrance; or who would be the most worthy
+to witness the action of spirits on slates and tables because the action
+of limbs would not probably arrest her attention. She would describe the
+surprising phenomena exhibited by the powerful Medium with the same
+freedom that she vaunted in relation to the old heap of stones. Her
+supposed imaginativeness is simply a very usual lack of discriminating
+perception, accompanied with a less usual activity of misrepresentation,
+which, if it had been a little more intense, or had been stimulated by
+circumstance, might have made her a profuse writer unchecked by the
+troublesome need of veracity.
+
+These characteristics are the very opposite of such as yield a fine
+imagination, which is always based on a keen vision, a keen
+consciousness of what _is_, and carries the store of definite knowledge
+as material for the construction of its inward visions. Witness Dante,
+who is at once the most precise and homely in his reproduction of actual
+objects, and the most soaringly at large in his imaginative
+combinations. On a much lower level we distinguish the hyperbole and
+rapid development in descriptions of persons and events which are lit up
+by humorous intention in the speaker--we distinguish this charming play
+of intelligence which resembles musical improvisation on a given motive,
+where the farthest sweep of curve is looped into relevancy by an
+instinctive method, from the florid inaccuracy or helpless exaggeration
+which is really something commoner than the correct simplicity often
+depreciated as prosaic.
+
+Even if high imagination were to be identified with illusion, there
+would be the same sort of difference between the imperial wealth of
+illusion which is informed by industrious submissive observation and the
+trumpery stage-property illusion which depends on the ill-defined
+impressions gathered by capricious inclination, as there is between a
+good and a bad picture of the Last Judgment. In both these the subject
+is a combination never actually witnessed, and in the good picture the
+general combination may be of surpassing boldness; but on examination it
+is seen that the separate elements have been closely studied from real
+objects. And even where we find the charm of ideal elevation with wrong
+drawing and fantastic colour, the charm is dependent on the selective
+sensibility of the painter to certain real delicacies of form which
+confer the expression he longed to render; for apart from this basis of
+an effect perceived in common, there could be no conveyance of aesthetic
+meaning by the painter to the beholder. In this sense it is as true to
+say of Fra Angelico's Coronation of the Virgin, that it has a strain of
+reality, as to say so of a portrait by Rembrandt, which also has its
+strain of ideal elevation due to Rembrandt's virile selective
+sensibility. To correct such self-flatterers as Callista, it is worth
+repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but
+intense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed by
+susceptibility to the veriest minutiae of experience, which it
+reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes; not the habitual
+confusion of provable fact with the fictions of fancy and transient
+inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs every
+material object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories and
+stored residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious
+relations of human existence. The illusion to which it is liable is not
+that of habitually taking duck-ponds for lilied pools, but of being more
+or less transiently and in varying degrees so absorbed in ideal vision
+as to lose the consciousness of surrounding objects or occurrences; and
+when that rapt condition is past, the sane genius discriminates clearly
+between what has been given in this parenthetic state of excitement, and
+what he has known, and may count on, in the ordinary world of
+experience. Dante seems to have expressed these conditions perfectly in
+that passage of the _Purgatorio_ where, after a triple vision which has
+made him forget his surroundings, he says--
+
+  "Quando l'anima mia torno di fuori
+    Alle cose che son fuor di lei vere,
+    Io riconobbi i miei non falsi errori."--(c xv)
+
+He distinguishes the ideal truth of his entranced vision from the series
+of external facts to which his consciousness had returned. Isaiah gives
+us the date of his vision in the Temple--"the year that King Uzziah
+died"--and if afterwards the mighty-winged seraphim were present with
+him as he trod the street, he doubtless knew them for images of memory,
+and did not cry "Look!" to the passers-by.
+
+Certainly the seer, whether prophet, 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, so
+that the reports of common-sense fail to affect him, or the continuous
+strain of excitement may have robbed his mind of its elasticity. It is
+hard for our frail mortality to carry the burthen of greatness with
+steady gait and full alacrity of perception. But he is the strongest
+seer who can support the stress of creative energy and yet keep that
+sanity of expectation which consists in distinguishing, as Dante does,
+between the _cose che son vere_ outside the individual mind, and the
+_non falsi errori_ which are the revelations of true imaginative power.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.
+
+
+THE TOO READY WRITER
+
+One who talks too much, hindering the rest of the company from taking
+their turn, and apparently seeing no reason why they should not rather
+desire to know his opinion or experience in relation to all subjects, or
+at least to renounce the discussion of any topic where he can make no
+figure, has never been praised for this industrious monopoly of work
+which others would willingly have shared in. However various and
+brilliant his talk may be, we suspect him of impoverishing us by
+excluding the contributions of other minds, which attract our curiosity
+the more because he has shut them up in silence. Besides, we get tired
+of a "manner" in conversation as in painting, when one theme after
+another is treated with the same lines and touches. I begin with a
+liking for an estimable master, but by the time he has stretched his
+interpretation of the world unbrokenly along a palatial gallery, I have
+had what the cautious Scotch mind would call "enough" of him. There is
+monotony and narrowness already to spare in my own identity; what comes
+to me from without should be larger and more impartial than the judgment
+of any single interpreter. On this ground even a modest person, without
+power or will to shine in the conversation, may easily find the
+predominating talker a nuisance, while those who are full of matter on
+special topics are continually detecting miserably thin places in the
+web of that information which he will not desist from imparting. Nobody
+that I know of ever proposed a testimonial to a man for thus
+volunteering the whole expense of the conversation.
+
+Why is there a different standard of judgment with regard to a writer
+who plays much the same part in literature as the excessive talker plays
+in what is traditionally called conversation? The busy Adrastus, whose
+professional engagements might seem more than enough for the nervous
+energy of one man, and who yet finds time to print essays on the chief
+current subjects, from the tri-lingual inscriptions, or the Idea of the
+Infinite among the prehistoric Lapps, to the Colorado beetle and the
+grape disease in the south of France, is generally praised if not
+admired for the breadth of his mental range and his gigantic powers of
+work. Poor Theron, who has some original ideas on a subject to which he
+has given years of research and meditation, has been waiting anxiously
+from month to month to see whether his condensed exposition will find a
+place in the next advertised programme, but sees it, on the contrary,
+regularly excluded, and twice the space he asked for filled with the
+copious brew of Adrastus, whose name carries custom like a celebrated
+trade-mark. Why should the eager haste to tell what he thinks on the
+shortest notice, as if his opinion were a needed preliminary to
+discussion, get a man the reputation of being a conceited bore in
+conversation, when nobody blames the same tendency if it shows itself in
+print? The excessive talker can only be in one gathering at a time, and
+there is the comfort of thinking that everywhere else other
+fellow-citizens who have something to say may get a chance of delivering
+themselves; but the exorbitant writer can occupy space and spread over
+it the more or less agreeable flavour of his mind in four "mediums" at
+once, and on subjects taken from the four winds. Such restless and
+versatile occupants of literary space and time should have lived earlier
+when the world wanted summaries of all extant knowledge, and this
+knowledge being small, there was the more room for commentary and
+conjecture. They might have played the part of an Isidor of Seville or a
+Vincent of Beauvais brilliantly, and the willingness to write everything
+themselves would have been strictly in place. In the present day, the
+busy retailer of other people's knowledge which he has spoiled in the
+handling, the restless guesser and commentator, the importunate hawker
+of undesirable superfluities, the everlasting word-compeller who rises
+early in the morning to praise what the world has already glorified, or
+makes himself haggard at night in writing out his dissent from what
+nobody ever believed, is not simply "gratis anhelans, multa agendo nihil
+agens"--he is an obstruction. Like an incompetent architect with too
+much interest at his back, he obtrudes his ill-considered work where
+place ought to have been left to better men.
+
+Is it out of the question that we should entertain some scruple about
+mixing our own flavour, as of the too cheap and insistent nutmeg, with
+that of every great writer and every great subject?--especially when our
+flavour is all we have to give, the matter or knowledge having been
+already given by somebody else. What if we were only like the Spanish
+wine-skins which impress the innocent stranger with the notion that the
+Spanish grape has naturally a taste of leather? One could wish that even
+the greatest minds should leave some themes unhandled, or at least leave
+us no more than a paragraph or two on them to show how well they did in
+not being more lengthy.
+
+Such entertainment of scruple can hardly be expected from the young; but
+happily their readiness to mirror the universe anew for the rest of
+mankind is not encouraged by easy publicity. In the vivacious Pepin I
+have often seen the image of my early youth, when it seemed to me
+astonishing that the philosophers had left so many difficulties
+unsolved, and that so many great themes had raised no great poet to
+treat them. I had an elated sense that I should find my brain full of
+theoretic clues when I looked for them, and that wherever a poet had not
+done what I expected, it was for want of my insight. Not knowing what
+had been said about the play of Romeo and Juliet, I felt myself capable
+of writing something original on its blemishes and beauties. In relation
+to all subjects I had a joyous consciousness of that ability which is
+prior to knowledge, and of only needing to apply myself in order to
+master any task--to conciliate philosophers whose systems were at
+present but dimly known to me, to estimate foreign poets whom I had not
+yet read, to show up mistakes in an historical monograph that roused my
+interest in an epoch which I had been hitherto ignorant of, when I
+should once have had time to verify my views of probability by looking
+into an encyclopaedia. So Pepin; save only that he is industrious while
+I was idle. Like the astronomer in Rasselas, I swayed the universe in my
+consciousness without making any difference outside me; whereas Pepin,
+while feeling himself powerful with the stars in their courses, really
+raises some dust here below. He is no longer in his spring-tide, but
+having been always busy he has been obliged to use his first impressions
+as if they were deliberate opinions, and to range himself on the
+corresponding side in ignorance of much that he commits himself to; so
+that he retains some characteristics of a comparatively tender age, and
+among them a certain surprise that there have not been more persons
+equal to himself. Perhaps it is unfortunate for him that he early gained
+a hearing, or at least a place in print, and was thus encouraged in
+acquiring a fixed habit of writing, to the exclusion of any other
+bread-winning pursuit. He is already to be classed as a "general
+writer," corresponding to the comprehensive wants of the "general
+reader," and with this industry on his hands it is not enough for him to
+keep up the ingenuous self-reliance of youth: he finds himself under an
+obligation to be skilled in various methods of seeming to know; and
+having habitually expressed himself before he was convinced, his
+interest in all subjects is chiefly to ascertain that he has not made a
+mistake, and to feel his infallibility confirmed. That impulse to
+decide, that vague sense of being able to achieve the unattempted, that
+dream of aerial unlimited movement at will without feet or wings, which
+were once but the joyous mounting of young sap, are already taking shape
+as unalterable woody fibre: the impulse has hardened into "style," and
+into a pattern of peremptory sentences; the sense of ability in the
+presence of other men's failures is turning into the official arrogance
+of one who habitually issues directions which he has never himself been
+called on to execute; the dreamy buoyancy of the stripling has taken on
+a fatal sort of reality in written pretensions which carry consequences.
+He is on the way to become like the loud-buzzing, bouncing Bombus who
+combines conceited illusions enough to supply several patients in a
+lunatic asylum with the freedom to show himself at large in various
+forms of print. If one who takes himself for the telegraphic centre of
+all American wires is to be confined as unfit to transact affairs, what
+shall we say to the man who believes himself in possession of the
+unexpressed motives and designs dwelling in the breasts of all
+sovereigns and all politicians? And I grieve to think that poor Pepin,
+though less political, may by-and-by manifest a persuasion hardly more
+sane, for he is beginning to explain people's writing by what he does
+not know about them. Yet he was once at the comparatively innocent stage
+which I have confessed to be that of my own early astonishment at my
+powerful originality; and copying the just humility of the old Puritan,
+I may say, "But for the grace of discouragement, this coxcombry might
+have been mine."
+
+Pepin made for himself a necessity of writing (and getting printed)
+before he had considered whether he had the knowledge or belief that
+would furnish eligible matter. At first perhaps the necessity galled him
+a little, but it is now as easily borne, nay, is as irrepressible a
+habit as the outpouring of inconsiderate talk. He is gradually being
+condemned to have no genuine impressions, no direct consciousness of
+enjoyment or the reverse from the quality of what is before him: his
+perceptions are continually arranging themselves in forms suitable to a
+printed judgment, and hence they will often turn out to be as much to
+the purpose if they are written without any direct contemplation of the
+object, and are guided by a few external conditions which serve to
+classify it for him. In this way he is irrevocably losing the faculty of
+accurate mental vision: having bound himself to express judgments which
+will satisfy some other demands than that of veracity, he has blunted
+his perceptions by continual preoccupation. We cannot command veracity
+at will: the power of seeing and reporting truly is a form of health
+that has to be delicately guarded, and as an ancient Rabbi has solemnly
+said, "The penalty of untruth is untruth." But Pepin is only a mild
+example of the fact that incessant writing with a view to printing
+carries internal consequences which have often the nature of disease.
+And however unpractical it may be held to consider whether we have
+anything to print which it is good for the world to read, or which has
+not been better said before, it will perhaps be allowed to be worth
+considering what effect the printing may have on ourselves. Clearly
+there is a sort of writing which helps to keep the writer in a
+ridiculously contented ignorance; raising in him continually the sense
+of having delivered himself effectively, so that the acquirement of more
+thorough knowledge seems as superfluous as the purchase of costume for a
+past 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 that
+keeps up his credit, and to be sorry for the good that contradicts him.
+It is hard enough for any of us, amid the changing winds of fortune and
+the hurly-burly of events, to keep quite clear of a gladness which is
+another's calamity; but one may choose not to enter on a course which
+will turn such gladness into a fixed habit of mind, committing ourselves
+to be continually pleased that others should appear to be wrong in order
+that we may have the air of being right.
+
+In some cases, perhaps, it might be urged that Pepin has remained the
+more self-contented because he has _not_ written everything he believed
+himself capable of. He once asked me to read a sort of programme of the
+species of romance which he should think it worth while to write--a
+species which he contrasted in strong terms with the productions of
+illustrious but overrated authors in this branch. Pepin's romance was to
+present the splendours of the Roman Empire at the culmination of its
+grandeur, when decadence was spiritually but not visibly imminent: it
+was to show the workings of human passion in the most pregnant and
+exalted of human circumstances, the designs of statesmen, the
+interfusion of philosophies, the rural relaxation and converse of
+immortal poets, the majestic triumphs of warriors, the mingling of the
+quaint and sublime in religious ceremony, the gorgeous delirium of
+gladiatorial shows, and under all the secretly working leaven of
+Christianity. Such a romance would not call the attention of society to
+the dialect of stable-boys, the low habits of rustics, the vulgarity of
+small schoolmasters, the manners of men in livery, or to any other form
+of uneducated talk and sentiments: its characters would have virtues and
+vices alike on the grand scale, and would express themselves in an
+English representing the discourse of the most powerful minds in the
+best Latin, or possibly Greek, when there occurred a scene with a Greek
+philosopher on a visit to Rome or resident there as a teacher. In this
+way Pepin would do in fiction what had never been done before: something
+not at all like 'Rienzi' or 'Notre Dame de Paris,' or any other attempt
+of that kind; but something at once more penetrating and more
+magnificent, more passionate and more philosophical, more panoramic yet
+more select: something that would present a conception of a gigantic
+period; in short something truly Roman and world-historical.
+
+When Pepin gave me this programme to read he was much younger than at
+present. Some slight success in another vein diverted him from the
+production of panoramic and select romance, and the experience of not
+having tried to carry out his programme has naturally made him more
+biting and sarcastic on the failures of those who have actually written
+romances without apparently having had a glimpse of a conception equal
+to his. Indeed, I am often comparing his rather touchingly inflated
+_naivete_ as of a small young person walking on tiptoe while he is
+talking of elevated things, at the time when he felt himself the author
+of that unwritten romance, with his present epigrammatic curtness and
+affectation of power kept strictly in reserve. His paragraphs now seem
+to have a bitter smile in them, from the consciousness of a mind too
+penetrating to accept any other man's ideas, and too equally competent
+in all directions to seclude his power in any one form of creation, but
+rather fitted to hang over them all as a lamp of guidance to the
+stumblers below. You perceive how proud he is of not being indebted to
+any writer: even with the dead he is on the creditor's side, for he is
+doing them the service of letting the world know what they meant better
+than those poor pre-Pepinians themselves had any means of doing, and he
+treats the mighty shades very cavalierly.
+
+Is this fellow--citizen of ours, considered simply in the light of a
+baptised Christian and tax-paying Englishman, really as madly
+conceited, as empty of reverential feeling, as unveracious and careless
+of justice, as full of catch-penny devices and stagey attitudinising as
+on examination his writing shows itself to be? By no means. He has
+arrived at his present pass in "the literary calling" through the
+self-imposed obligation to give himself a manner which would convey the
+impression of superior knowledge and ability. He is much worthier and
+more admirable than his written productions, because the moral aspects
+exhibited in his writing are felt to be ridiculous or disgraceful in the
+personal relations of life. In blaming Pepin's writing we are accusing
+the public conscience, which is so lax and ill informed on the momentous
+bearings of authorship that it sanctions the total absence of scruple in
+undertaking and prosecuting what should be the best warranted of
+vocations.
+
+Hence I still accept friendly relations with Pepin, for he has much
+private amiability, and though he probably thinks of me as a man of
+slender talents, without rapidity of _coup d'oeil_ and with no
+compensatory penetration, he meets me very cordially, and would not, I
+am sure, willingly pain me in conversation by crudely declaring his low
+estimate of my capacity. Yet I have often known him to insult my betters
+and contribute (perhaps unreflectingly) to encourage injurious
+conceptions of them--but that was done in the course of his professional
+writing, and the public conscience still leaves such writing nearly on
+the level of the Merry-Andrew's dress, which permits an impudent
+deportment and extraordinary gambols to one who in his ordinary clothing
+shows himself the decent father of a family.
+
+
+
+
+XV.
+
+
+DISEASES OF SMALL AUTHORSHIP
+
+Particular callings, it is known, encourage particular diseases. There
+is a painter's colic: the Sheffield grinder falls a victim to the
+inhalation of steel dust: clergymen so often have a certain kind of sore
+throat that this otherwise secular ailment gets named after them. And
+perhaps, if we were to inquire, we should find a similar relation
+between certain moral ailments and these various occupations, though
+here in the case of clergymen there would be specific differences: the
+poor curate, equally with the rector, is liable to clergyman's sore
+throat, but he would probably be found free from the chronic moral
+ailments encouraged by the possession of glebe and those higher chances
+of preferment which follow on having a good position already. On the
+other hand, the poor curate might have severe attacks of calculating
+expectancy concerning parishioners' turkeys, cheeses, and fat geese, or
+of uneasy rivalry for the donations of clerical charities.
+
+Authors are so miscellaneous a class that
+their personified diseases, physical and moral,
+might include the whole procession of human
+disorders, led by dyspepsia and ending in
+madness--the awful Dumb Show of a world-historic
+tragedy. Take a large enough area
+of human life and all comedy melts into
+tragedy, like the Fool's part by the side of
+Lear. The chief scenes get filled with erring
+heroes, guileful usurpers, persecuted discoverers,
+dying deliverers: everywhere the
+protagonist has a part pregnant with doom.
+The comedy sinks to an accessory, and if there
+are loud laughs they seem a convulsive transition
+from sobs; or if the comedy is touched
+with a gentle lovingness, the panoramic scene
+is one where
+
+        "Sadness is a kind of mirth
+  So mingled as if mirth did make us sad
+  And sadness merry."[1]
+
+[Footnote 1: Two Noble Kinsmen.]
+
+But I did not set out on the wide survey that would carry me into
+tragedy, and in fact had nothing more serious in my mind than certain
+small chronic ailments that come of small authorship. I was thinking
+principally of Vorticella, who flourished in my youth not only as a
+portly lady walking in silk attire, but also as the authoress of a book
+entitled 'The Channel Islands, with Notes and an Appendix.' I would by
+no means make it a reproach to her that she wrote no more than one book;
+on the contrary, her stopping there seems to me a laudable example. What
+one would have wished, after experience, was that she had refrained from
+producing even that single volume, and thus from giving her
+self-importance a troublesome kind of double incorporation which became
+oppressive to her acquaintances, and set up in herself one of those
+slight chronic forms of disease to which I have just referred. She lived
+in the considerable provincial town of Pumpiter, which had its own
+newspaper press, with the usual divisions of political partisanship and
+the usual varieties of literary criticism--the florid and allusive, the
+_staccato_ and peremptory, the clairvoyant and prophetic, the safe and
+pattern-phrased, or what one might call "the many-a-long-day style."
+
+Vorticella being the wife of an important townsman had naturally the
+satisfaction of seeing 'The Channel Islands' reviewed by all the organs
+of Pumpiter opinion, and their articles or paragraphs held as naturally
+the opening pages in the elegantly bound album prepared by her for the
+reception of "critical opinions." This ornamental volume lay on a
+special table in her drawing-room close to the still more gorgeously
+bound work of which it was the significant effect, and every guest was
+allowed the privilege of reading what had been said of the authoress and
+her work in the 'Pumpiter Gazette and Literary Watchman,' the 'Pumpshire
+Post,' the 'Church Clock,' the 'Independent Monitor,' and the lively but
+judicious publication known as the 'Medley Pie;' to be followed up, if
+he chose, by the instructive perusal of the strikingly confirmatory
+judgments, sometimes concurrent in the very phrases, of journals from
+the most distant counties; as the 'Latchgate Argus,' the Penllwy
+Universe,' 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. When
+I called on Vorticella, who had a cousinship with my hosts, she had to
+excuse herself because a message claimed her attention for eight or ten
+minutes, and handing me the album of critical opinions said, with a
+certain emphasis which, considering my youth, was highly complimentary,
+that she would really like me to read what I should find there. This
+seemed a permissive politeness which I could not feel to be an
+oppression, and I ran my eyes over the dozen pages, each with a strip or
+islet of newspaper in the centre, with that freedom of mind (in my case
+meaning freedom to forget) which would be a perilous way of preparing
+for examination. This _ad libitum_ perusal had its interest for me. The
+private truth being that I had not read 'The Channel Islands,' I was
+amazed at the variety of matter which the volume must contain to have
+impressed these different judges with the writer's surpassing capacity
+to handle almost all branches of inquiry and all forms of presentation.
+In Jersey she had shown herself an historian, in Guernsey a poetess, in
+Alderney a political economist, and in Sark a humorist: there were
+sketches of character scattered through the pages which might put our
+"fictionists" to the blush; the style was eloquent and racy, studded
+with gems of felicitous remark; and the moral spirit throughout was so
+superior that, said one, "the recording angel" (who is not supposed to
+take account of literature as such) "would assuredly set down the work
+as a deed of religion." The force of this eulogy on the part of several
+reviewers was much heightened by the incidental evidence of their
+fastidious and severe taste, which seemed to suffer considerably from
+the imperfections of our chief writers, even the dead and canonised: one
+afflicted them with the smell of oil, another lacked erudition and
+attempted (though vainly) to dazzle them with trivial conceits, one
+wanted to be more philosophical than nature had made him, another in
+attempting to be comic produced the melancholy effect of a half-starved
+Merry-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 a
+smile of compassionate disapproval. Not so the authoress of 'The Channel
+Islands:' Vorticella and Shakspere were allowed to be faultless. I
+gathered that no blemishes were observable in the work of this
+accomplished writer, and the repeated information that she was "second
+to none" seemed after this superfluous. Her thick octavo--notes,
+appendix and all--was unflagging from beginning to end; and the 'Land's
+End Times,' using a rather dangerous rhetorical figure, recommended you
+not to take up the volume unless you had leisure to finish it at a
+sitting. It had given one writer more pleasure than he had had for many
+a long day--a sentence which had a melancholy resonance, suggesting a
+life of studious languor such as all previous achievements of the human
+mind failed to stimulate into enjoyment. I think the collection of
+critical opinions wound up with this sentence, and I had turned back to
+look at the lithographed sketch of the authoress which fronted the first
+page of the album, when the fair original re-entered and I laid down the
+volume on its appropriate table.
+
+"Well, what do you think of them?" said Vorticella, with an emphasis
+which had some significance unperceived by me. "I know you are a great
+student. Give me _your_ opinion of these opinions."
+
+"They must be very gratifying to you," I answered with a little
+confusion, for I perceived that I might easily mistake my footing, and I
+began to have a presentiment of an examination for which I was by no
+means crammed.
+
+"On the whole--yes," said Vorticella, in a tone of concession. "A few of
+the notices are written with some pains, but not one of them has really
+grappled with the chief idea in the appendix. I don't know whether you
+have studied political economy, but you saw what I said on page 398
+about the Jersey fisheries?"
+
+I bowed--I confess it--with the mean hope that this movement in the nape
+of my neck would be taken as sufficient proof that I had read, marked,
+and learned. I do not forgive myself for this pantomimic falsehood, but
+I was young and morally timorous, and Vorticella's personality had an
+effect on me something like that of a powerful mesmeriser when he
+directs all his ten fingers towards your eyes, as unpleasantly visible
+ducts for the invisible stream. I felt a great power of contempt in her,
+if I did not come up to her expectations.
+
+"Well," she resumed, "you observe that not one of them has taken up that
+argument. But I hope I convinced you about the drag-nets?"
+
+Here was a judgment on me. Orientally speaking, I had lifted up my foot
+on the steep descent of falsity and was compelled to set it down on a
+lower level. "I should think you must be right," said I, inwardly
+resolving that on the next topic I would tell the truth.
+
+"I _know_ that I am right," said Vorticella. "The fact is that no critic
+in this town is fit to meddle with such subjects, unless it be Volvox,
+and he, with all his command of language, is very superficial. It is
+Volvox who writes in the 'Monitor,' I hope you noticed how he
+contradicts himself?"
+
+My resolution, helped by the equivalence of dangers, stoutly prevailed,
+and I said, "No."
+
+"No! I am surprised. He is the only one who finds fault with me. He is
+a Dissenter, you know. The 'Monitor' is the Dissenters' organ, but my
+husband has been so useful to them in municipal affairs that they would
+not venture to run my book down; they feel obliged to tell the truth
+about me. Still Volvox betrays himself. After praising me for my
+penetration and accuracy, he presently says I have allowed myself to be
+imposed upon and have let my active imagination run away with me. That
+is like his dissenting impertinence. Active my imagination may be, but I
+have it under control. Little Vibrio, who writes the playful notice in
+the 'Medley Pie,' has a clever hit at Volvox in that passage about the
+steeplechase of imagination, where the loser wants to make it appear
+that the winner was only run away with. But if you did not notice
+Volvox's self-contradiction you would not see the point," added
+Vorticella, with rather a chilling intonation. "Or perhaps you did not
+read the 'Medley Pie' notice? That is a pity. Do take up the book again.
+Vibrio is a poor little tippling creature, but, as Mr Carlyle would say,
+he has an eye, and he is always lively."
+
+I did take up the book again, and read as demanded.
+
+"It is very ingenious," said I, really appreciating the difficulty of
+being lively in this connection: it seemed even more wonderful than that
+a Vibrio should have an eye.
+
+"You are probably surprised to see no notices from the London press,"
+said Vorticella. "I have one--a very remarkable one. But I reserve it
+until the others have spoken, and then I shall introduce it to wind up.
+I shall have them reprinted, of course, and inserted in future copies.
+This from the 'Candelabrum' is only eight lines in length, but full of
+venom. It calls my style dull and pompous. I think that will tell its
+own tale, placed after the other critiques."
+
+"People's impressions are so different," said I. "Some persons find 'Don
+Quixote' dull."
+
+"Yes," said Vorticella, in emphatic chest tones, "dulness is a matter of
+opinion; but pompous! That I never was and never could be. Perhaps he
+means that my matter is too important for his taste; and I have no
+objection to _that_. I did not intend to be trivial. I should just like
+to read you that passage about the drag-nets, because I could make it
+clearer to you."
+
+A second (less ornamental) copy was at her elbow and was already opened,
+when to my great relief another guest was announced, and I was able to
+take my leave without seeming to run away from 'The Channel Islands,'
+though not without being compelled to carry with me the loan of "the
+marked copy," which I was to find advantageous in a re-perusal of the
+appendix, and was only requested to return before my departure from
+Pumpiter. Looking into the volume now with some curiosity, I found it a
+very ordinary combination of the commonplace and ambitious, one of those
+books which one might imagine to have been written under the old Grub
+Street coercion of hunger and thirst, if they were not known beforehand
+to be the gratuitous productions of ladies and gentlemen whose
+circumstances might be called altogether easy, but for an uneasy vanity
+that happened to have been directed towards authorship. Its importance
+was that of a polypus, tumour, fungus, or other erratic outgrowth,
+noxious and disfiguring in its effect on the individual organism which
+nourishes it. Poor Vorticella might not have been more wearisome on a
+visit than the majority of her neighbours, but for this disease of
+magnified self-importance belonging to small authorship. I understand
+that the chronic complaint of 'The Channel Islands' never left her. As
+the years went on and the publication tended to vanish in the distance
+for her neighbours' memory, she was still bent on dragging it to the
+foreground, and her chief interest in new acquaintances was the
+possibility of lending them her book, entering into all details
+concerning it, and requesting them to read her album of "critical
+opinions." This really made her more tiresome than Gregarina, whose
+distinction was that she had had cholera, and who did not feel herself
+in her true position with strangers until they knew it.
+
+My experience with Vorticella led me for a time into the false
+supposition that this sort of fungous disfiguration, which makes Self
+disagreeably larger, was most common to the female sex; but I presently
+found that here too the male could assert his superiority and show a
+more vigorous boredom. I have known a man with a single pamphlet
+containing an assurance that somebody else was wrong, together with a
+few approved quotations, produce a more powerful effect of shuddering at
+his approach than ever Vorticella did with her varied octavo volume,
+including notes and appendix. Males of more than one nation recur to my
+memory who produced from their pocket on the slightest encouragement a
+small pink or buff duodecimo pamphlet, wrapped in silver paper, as a
+present held ready for an intelligent reader. "A mode of propagandism,"
+you remark in excuse; "they wished to spread some useful corrective
+doctrine." Not necessarily: the indoctrination aimed at was perhaps to
+convince you of their own talents by the sample of an "Ode on
+Shakspere's Birthday," or a translation from Horace.
+
+Vorticella may pair off with Monas, who had also written his one
+book--'Here and There; or, a Trip from Truro to Transylvania'--and not
+only carried it in his portmanteau when he went on visits, but took the
+earliest opportunity of depositing it in the drawing-room, and
+afterwards would enter to look for it, as if under pressure of a need
+for 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 it
+to be carried into his bedroom to save his time; but it presently
+reappeared in his hands, and was again left with inserted slips of paper
+on the drawing-room table.
+
+Depend upon it, vanity is human, native alike to men and women; only in
+the male it is of denser texture, less volatile, so that it less
+immediately informs you of its presence, but is more massive and capable
+of knocking you down if you come into collision with it; while in women
+vanity lays by its small revenges as in a needle-case always at hand.
+The difference is in muscle and finger-tips, in traditional habits and
+mental perspective, rather than in the original appetite of vanity. It
+is an approved method now to explain ourselves by a reference to the
+races as little like us as possible, which leads me to observe that in
+Fiji the men use the most elaborate hair-dressing, and that wherever
+tattooing is in vogue the male expects to carry off the prize of
+admiration for pattern and workmanship. Arguing analogically, and
+looking for this tendency of the Fijian or Hawaian male in the eminent
+European, we must suppose that it exhibits itself under the forms of
+civilised apparel; and it would be a great mistake to estimate
+passionate effort by the effect it produces on our perception or
+understanding. It is conceivable that a man may have concentrated no
+less will and expectation on his wristbands, gaiters, and the shape of
+his hat-brim, or an appearance which impresses you as that of the modern
+"swell," than the Ojibbeway on an ornamentation which seems to us much
+more elaborate. In what concerns the search for admiration at least, it
+is not true that the effect is equal to the cause and resembles it. The
+cause of a flat curl on the masculine forehead, such as might be seen
+when George the Fourth was king, must have been widely different in
+quality and intensity from the impression made by that small scroll of
+hair on the organ of the beholder. Merely to maintain an attitude and
+gait which I notice in certain club men, and especially an inflation of
+the chest accompanying very small remarks, there goes, I am convinced,
+an expenditure of psychical energy little appreciated by the
+multitude--a mental vision of Self and deeply impressed beholders which
+is quite without antitype in what we call the effect produced by that
+hidden process.
+
+No! there is no need to admit that women would carry away the prize of
+vanity in a competition where differences of custom were fairly
+considered. A man cannot show his vanity in a tight skirt which forces
+him to walk sideways down the staircase; but let the match be between
+the respective vanities of largest beard and tightest skirt, and here
+too the battle would be to the strong.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.
+
+
+MORAL SWINDLERS.
+
+It is a familiar example of irony in the degradation of words that "what
+a man is worth" has come to mean how much money he possesses; but there
+seems a deeper and more melancholy irony in the shrunken meaning that
+popular or polite speech assigns to "morality" and "morals." The poor
+part these words are made to play recalls the fate of those pagan
+divinities who, after being understood to rule the powers of the air and
+the destinies of men, came down to the level of insignificant demons, or
+were even made a farcical show for the amusement of the multitude.
+
+Talking to Melissa in a time of commercial trouble, I found her disposed
+to speak pathetically of the disgrace which had fallen on Sir Gavial
+Mantrap, because of his conduct in relation to the Eocene Mines, and to
+other companies ingeniously devised by him for the punishment of
+ignorance in people of small means: a disgrace by which the poor titled
+gentleman was actually reduced to live in comparative obscurity on his
+wife's settlement of one or two hundred thousand in the consols.
+
+"Surely your pity is misapplied," said I, rather dubiously, for I like
+the comfort of trusting that a correct moral judgment is the strong
+point in woman (seeing that she has a majority of about a million in our
+islands), and I imagined that Melissa might have some unexpressed
+grounds for her opinion. "I should have thought you would rather be
+sorry for Mantrap's victims--the widows, spinsters, and hard-working
+fathers whom his unscrupulous haste to make himself rich has cheated of
+all their savings, while he is eating well, lying softly, and after
+impudently justifying himself before the public, is perhaps joining in
+the General Confession with a sense that he is an acceptable object in
+the sight of God, though decent men refuse to meet him."
+
+"Oh, all that about the Companies, I know, was most unfortunate. In
+commerce people are led to do so many things, and he might not know
+exactly how everything would turn out. But Sir Gavial made a good use of
+his money, and he is a thoroughly _moral_ man."
+
+"What do you mean by a thoroughly moral man?" said I.
+
+"Oh, I suppose every one means the same by that," said Melissa, with a
+slight air of rebuke. "Sir Gavial is an excellent family man--quite
+blameless there; and so charitable round his place at Tiptop. Very
+different from Mr Barabbas, whose life, my husband tells me, is most
+objectionable, with actresses and that sort of thing. I think a man's
+morals should make a difference to us. I'm not sorry for Mr Barabbas,
+but _I am_ sorry for Sir Gavial Mantrap."
+
+I will not repeat my answer to Melissa, for I fear it was offensively
+brusque, my opinion being that Sir Gavial was the more pernicious
+scoundrel of the two, since his name for virtue served as an effective
+part of a swindling apparatus; and perhaps I hinted that to call such a
+man moral showed rather a silly notion of human affairs. In fact, I had
+an angry wish to be instructive, and Melissa, as will sometimes happen,
+noticed my anger without appropriating my instruction, for I have since
+heard that she speaks of me as rather violent-tempered, and not over
+strict in my views of morality.
+
+I wish that this narrow use of words which are wanted in their full
+meaning were confined to women like Melissa. Seeing that Morality and
+Morals under their _alias_ of Ethics are the subject of voluminous
+discussion, and their true basis a pressing matter of dispute--seeing
+that the most famous book ever written on Ethics, and forming a chief
+study in our colleges, allies ethical with political science or that
+which treats of the constitution and prosperity of States, one might
+expect that educated men would find reason to avoid a perversion of
+language which lends itself to no wider view of life than that of
+village gossips. Yet I find even respectable historians of our own and
+of foreign countries, after showing that a king was treacherous,
+rapacious, and ready to sanction gross breaches in the administration of
+justice, end by praising him for his pure moral character, by which one
+must suppose them to mean that he was not lewd nor debauched, not the
+European twin of the typical Indian potentate whom Macaulay describes as
+passing his life in chewing bang and fondling dancing-girls. And since
+we are sometimes told of such maleficent kings that they were religious,
+we arrive at the curious result that the most serious wide-reaching
+duties of man lie quite outside both Morality and Religion--the one of
+these consisting in not keeping mistresses (and perhaps not drinking too
+much), and the other in certain ritual and spiritual transactions with
+God which can be carried on equally well side by side with the basest
+conduct towards men. With such a classification as this it is no wonder,
+considering the strong reaction of language on thought, that many minds,
+dizzy with indigestion of recent science and philosophy, are far to seek
+for the grounds of social duty, and without entertaining any private
+intention of committing a perjury which would ruin an innocent man, or
+seeking gain by supplying bad preserved meats to our navy, feel
+themselves speculatively obliged to inquire why they should not do so,
+and are inclined to measure their intellectual subtlety by their
+dissatisfaction with all answers to this "Why?" It is of little use to
+theorise in ethics while our habitual phraseology stamps the larger part
+of our social duties as something that lies aloof from the deepest needs
+and affections of our nature. The informal definitions of popular
+language are the only medium through which theory really affects the
+mass of minds even among the nominally educated; and when a man whose
+business hours, the solid part of every day, are spent in an
+unscrupulous course of public or private action which has every
+calculable chance of causing widespread injury and misery, can be called
+moral because he comes home to dine with his wife and children and
+cherishes the happiness of his own hearth, the augury is not good for
+the use of high ethical and theological disputation.
+
+Not for one moment would one willingly lose sight of the truth that the
+relation of the sexes and the primary ties of kinship are the deepest
+roots of human wellbeing, but to make them by themselves the equivalent
+of morality is verbally to cut off the channels of feeling through
+which they are the feeders of that wellbeing. They are the original
+fountains of a sensibility to the claims of others, which is the bond of
+societies; but being necessarily in the first instance a private good,
+there is always the danger that individual selfishness will see in them
+only the best part of its own gain; just as knowledge, navigation,
+commerce, and all the conditions which are of a nature to awaken men's
+consciousness of their mutual dependence and to make the world one great
+society, are the occasions of selfish, unfair action, of war and
+oppression, so long as the public conscience or chief force of feeling
+and opinion is not uniform and strong enough in its insistance on what
+is demanded by the general welfare. And among the influences that must
+<DW44> a right public judgment, the degradation of words which involve
+praise and blame will be reckoned worth protesting against by every
+mature observer. To rob words of half their meaning, while they retain
+their dignity as qualifications, is like allowing to men who have lost
+half their faculties the same high and perilous command which they won
+in their time of vigour; or like selling food and seeds after
+fraudulently abstracting their best virtues: in each case what ought to
+be beneficently strong is fatally enfeebled, if not empoisoned. Until we
+have altered our dictionaries and have found some other word than
+_morality_ to stand in popular use for the duties of man to man, let us
+refuse to accept as moral the contractor who enriches himself by using
+large machinery to make pasteboard soles pass as leather for the feet of
+unhappy conscripts fighting at miserable odds against invaders: let us
+rather call him a miscreant, though he were the tenderest, most faithful
+of husbands, and contend that his own experience of home happiness makes
+his reckless infliction of suffering on others all the more atrocious.
+Let us refuse to accept as moral any political leader who should allow
+his conduct in relation to great issues to be determined by egoistic
+passion, and boldly say that he would be less immoral even though he
+were as lax in his personal habits as Sir Robert Walpole, if at the same
+time his sense of the public welfare were supreme in his mind, quelling
+all pettier impulses beneath a magnanimous impartiality. And though we
+were to find among that class of journalists who live by recklessly
+reporting injurious rumours, insinuating the blackest motives in
+opponents, descanting at large and with an air of infallibility on
+dreams which they both find and interpret, and stimulating bad feeling
+between nations by abusive writing which is as empty of real conviction
+as the rage of a pantomime king, and would be ludicrous if its effects
+did not make it appear diabolical--though we were to find among these a
+man who was benignancy itself in his own circle, a healer of private
+differences, a soother in private calamities, let us pronounce him
+nevertheless flagrantly immoral, a root of hideous cancer in the
+commonwealth, turning the channels of instruction into feeders of social
+and political disease.
+
+In opposite ways one sees bad effects likely to be encouraged by this
+narrow use of the word _morals_, shutting out from its meaning half
+those actions of a man's life which tell momentously on the wellbeing of
+his fellow-citizens, and on the preparation of a future for the children
+growing up around him. Thoroughness of workmanship, care in the
+execution of every task undertaken, as if it were the acceptance of a
+trust which it would be a breach of faith not to discharge well, is a
+form of duty so momentous that if it were to die out from the feeling
+and practice of a people, all reforms of institutions would be helpless
+to create national prosperity and national happiness. Do we desire to
+see public spirit penetrating all classes of the community and affecting
+every man's conduct, so that he shall make neither the saving of his
+soul nor any other private saving an excuse for indifference to the
+general welfare? Well and good. But the sort of public spirit that
+scamps its bread-winning work, whether with the trowel, the pen, or the
+overseeing brain, that it may hurry to scenes of political or social
+agitation, would be as baleful a gift to our people as any malignant
+demon could devise. One best part of educational training is that which
+comes through special knowledge and manipulative or other skill, with
+its usual accompaniment of delight, in relation to work which is the
+daily bread-winning occupation--which is a man's contribution to the
+effective wealth of society in return for what he takes as his own
+share. But this duty of doing one's proper work well, and taking care
+that every product of one's labour shall be genuinely what it pretends
+to be, is not only left out of morals in popular speech, it is very
+little insisted on by public teachers, at least in the only effective
+way--by tracing the continuous effects of ill-done work. Some of them
+seem to be still hopeful that it will follow as a necessary consequence
+from week-day services, ecclesiastical decoration, and improved
+hymn-books; others apparently trust to descanting on self-culture in
+general, or to raising a general sense of faulty circumstances; and
+meanwhile lax, make-shift work, from the high conspicuous kind to the
+average and obscure, is allowed to pass unstamped with the disgrace of
+immorality, though there is not a member of society who is not daily
+suffering from it materially and spiritually, and though it is the fatal
+cause that must degrade our national rank and our commerce in spite of
+all open markets and discovery of available coal-seams.
+
+I suppose one may take the popular misuse of the words Morality and
+Morals as some excuse for certain absurdities which are occasional
+fashions in speech and writing--certain old lay-figures, as ugly as the
+queerest Asiatic idol, which at different periods get propped into
+loftiness, and attired in magnificent Venetian drapery, so that whether
+they have a human face or not is of little consequence. One is, the
+notion that there is a radical, irreconcilable opposition between
+intellect and morality. I do not mean the simple statement of fact,
+which everybody knows, that remarkably able men have had very faulty
+morals, and have outraged public feeling even at its ordinary standard;
+but the supposition that the ablest intellect, the highest genius, will
+see through morality as a sort of twaddle for bibs and tuckers, a
+doctrine of dulness, a mere incident in human stupidity. We begin to
+understand the acceptance of this foolishness by considering that we
+live in a society where we may hear a treacherous monarch, or a
+malignant and lying politician, or a man who uses either official or
+literary power as an instrument of his private partiality or hatred, or
+a manufacturer who devises the falsification of wares, or a trader who
+deals in virtueless seed-grains, praised or compassionated because of
+his excellent morals.
+
+Clearly if morality meant no more than such decencies as are practised
+by these poisonous members of society, it would be possible to say,
+without suspicion of light-headedness, that morality lay aloof from the
+grand stream of human affairs, as a small channel fed by the stream and
+not missed from it. While this form of nonsense is conveyed in the
+popular use of words, there must be plenty of well-dressed ignorance at
+leisure to run through a box of books, which will feel itself initiated
+in the freemasonry of intellect by a view of life which might take for a
+Shaksperian motto--
+
+  "Fair is foul and foul is fair,
+  Hover through the fog and filthy air"--
+
+and will find itself easily provided with striking conversation by the
+rule of reversing all the judgments on good and evil which have come to
+be the calendar and clock-work of society. But let our habitual talk
+give morals their full meaning as the conduct which, in every human
+relation, would follow from the fullest knowledge and the fullest
+sympathy--a meaning perpetually corrected and enriched by a more
+thorough appreciation of dependence in things, and a finer sensibility
+to both physical and spiritual fact--and this ridiculous ascription of
+superlative power to minds which have no effective awe-inspiring vision
+of the human lot, no response of understanding to the connection between
+duty and the material processes by which the world is kept habitable for
+cultivated man, will be tacitly discredited without any need to cite the
+immortal names that all are obliged to take as the measure of
+intellectual rank and highly-charged genius.
+
+Suppose a Frenchman--I mean no disrespect to the great French nation,
+for all nations are afflicted with their peculiar parasitic growths,
+which are lazy, hungry forms, usually characterised by a
+disproportionate swallowing apparatus: suppose a Parisian who should
+shuffle down the Boulevard with a soul ignorant of the gravest cares and
+the deepest tenderness of manhood, and a frame more or less fevered by
+debauchery, mentally polishing into utmost refinement of phrase and
+rhythm verses which were an enlargement on that Shaksperian motto, and
+worthy of the most expensive title to be furnished by the vendors of
+such antithetic ware as _Les_ _marguerites de l'Enfer_, or _Les delices
+de Beelzebuth_. This supposed personage might probably enough regard his
+negation of those moral sensibilities which make half the warp and woof
+of human history, his indifference to the hard thinking and hard
+handiwork of life, to which he owed even his own gauzy mental garments
+with their spangles of poor paradox, as the royalty of genius, for we
+are used to witness such self-crowning in many forms of mental
+alienation; but he would not, I think, be taken, even by his own
+generation, as a living proof that there can exist such a combination as
+that of moral stupidity and trivial emphasis of personal indulgence with
+the large yet finely discriminating vision which marks the intellectual
+masters of our kind. Doubtless there are many sorts of transfiguration,
+and a man who has come to be worthy of all gratitude and reverence may
+have had his swinish period, wallowing in ugly places; but suppose it
+had been handed down to us that Sophocles or Virgil had at one time made
+himself scandalous in this way: the works which have consecrated their
+memory for our admiration and gratitude are not a glorifying of
+swinishness, but an artistic incorporation of the highest sentiment
+known to their age.
+
+All these may seem to be wide reasons for objecting to Melissa's pity
+for Sir Gavial Mantrap on the ground of his good morals; but their
+connection will not be obscure to any one who has taken pains to observe
+the 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 universe
+hitherto, but is confident that at some future period within the
+duration of the solar system, ours will be the best of all possible
+worlds--a hope which I always honour as a sign of beneficent
+qualities--my friend Trost always tries to keep up my spirits under the
+sight of the extremely unpleasant and disfiguring work by which many of
+our fellow-creatures have to get their bread, with the assurance that
+"all this will soon be done by machinery." But he sometimes neutralises
+the consolation by extending it over so large an area of human labour,
+and insisting so impressively on the quantity of energy which will thus
+be set free for loftier purposes, that I am tempted to desire an
+occasional famine of invention in the coming ages, lest the humbler
+kinds of work should be entirely nullified while there are still left
+some men and women who are not fit for the highest.
+
+Especially, when one considers the perfunctory way in which some of the
+most exalted tasks are already executed by those who are understood to
+be educated for them, there rises a fearful vision of the human race
+evolving machinery which will by-and-by throw itself fatally out of
+work. When, in the Bank of England, I see a wondrously delicate machine
+for testing sovereigns, a shrewd implacable little steel Rhadamanthus
+that, once the coins are delivered up to it, lifts and balances each in
+turn for the fraction of an instant, finds it wanting or sufficient, and
+dismisses it to right or left with rigorous justice; when I am told of
+micrometers and thermopiles and tasimeters which deal physically with
+the invisible, the impalpable, and the unimaginable; of cunning wires
+and wheels and pointing needles which will register your and my
+quickness so as to exclude flattering opinion; of a machine for drawing
+the right conclusion, which will doubtless by-and-by be improved into
+an automaton for finding true premises; of a microphone which detects
+the cadence of the fly's foot on the ceiling, and may be expected
+presently to discriminate the noises of our various follies as they
+soliloquise or converse in our brains--my mind seeming too small for
+these things, I get a little out of it, like an unfortunate savage too
+suddenly brought face to face with civilisation, and I exclaim--
+
+"Am I already in the shadow of the Coming Race? and will the creatures
+who are to transcend and finally supersede us be steely organisms,
+giving out the effluvia of the laboratory, and performing with
+infallible exactness more than everything that we have performed with a
+slovenly approximativeness and self-defeating inaccuracy?"
+
+"But," says Trost, treating me with cautious mildness on hearing me vent
+this raving notion, "you forget that these wonder-workers are the slaves
+of our race, need our tendance and regulation, obey the mandates of our
+consciousness, and are only deaf and dumb bringers of reports which we
+decipher and make use of. They are simply extensions of the human
+organism, so to speak, limbs immeasurably more powerful, ever more
+subtle finger-tips, ever more mastery over the invisibly great and the
+invisibly small. Each new machine needs a new appliance of human skill
+to construct it, new devices to feed it with material, and often
+keener-edged faculties to note its registrations or performances. How
+then can machines supersede us?--they depend upon us. When we cease,
+they cease."
+
+"I am not so sure of that," said I, getting back into my mind, and
+becoming rather wilful in consequence. "If, as I have heard you contend,
+machines as they are more and more perfected will require less and less
+of tendance, how do I know that they may not be ultimately made to
+carry, or may not in themselves evolve, conditions of self-supply,
+self-repair, and reproduction, and not only do all the mighty and subtle
+work possible on this planet better than we could do it, but with the
+immense advantage of banishing from the earth's atmosphere screaming
+consciousnesses which, in our comparatively clumsy race, make an
+intolerable noise and fuss to each other about every petty ant-like
+performance, looking on at all work only as it were to spring a rattle
+here or blow a trumpet there, with a ridiculous sense of being
+effective? I for my part cannot see any reason why a sufficiently
+penetrating thinker, who can see his way through a thousand years or so,
+should not conceive a parliament of machines, in which the manners were
+excellent and the motions infallible in logic: one honourable
+instrument, a remote descendant of the Voltaic family, might discharge a
+powerful current (entirely without animosity) on an honourable
+instrument opposite, of more upstart origin, but belonging to the
+ancient edge-tool race which we already at Sheffield see paring thick
+iron as if it were mellow cheese--by this unerringly directed discharge
+operating on movements corresponding to what we call Estimates, and by
+necessary mechanical consequence on movements corresponding to what we
+call the Funds, which with a vain analogy we sometimes speak of as
+"sensitive." For every machine would be perfectly educated, that is to
+say, would have the suitable molecular adjustments, which would act not
+the less infallibly for being free from the fussy accompaniment of that
+consciousness 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 it
+kind to treat me with some severity; "what you have heard me say is,
+that our race will and must act as a nervous centre to the utmost
+development of mechanical processes: the subtly refined powers of
+machines will react in producing more subtly refined thinking processes
+which will occupy the minds set free from grosser labour. Say, for
+example, that all the scavengers work of London were done, so far as
+human attention is concerned, by the occasional pressure of a brass
+button (as in the ringing of an electric bell), you will then have a
+multitude of brains set free for the exquisite enjoyment of dealing with
+the exact sequences and high speculations supplied and prompted by the
+delicate machines which yield a response to the fixed stars, and give
+readings of the spiral vortices fundamentally concerned in the
+production of epic poems or great judicial harangues. So far from
+mankind being thrown out of work according to your notion," concluded
+Trost, with a peculiar nasal note of scorn, "if it were not for your
+incurable dilettanteism in science as in all other things--if you had
+once understood the action of any delicate machine--you would perceive
+that the sequences it carries throughout the realm of phenomena would
+require many generations, perhaps aeons, of understandings considerably
+stronger than yours, to exhaust the store of work it lays open."
+
+"Precisely," said I, with a meekness which I felt was praiseworthy; "it
+is the feebleness of my capacity, bringing me nearer than you to the
+human average, that perhaps enables me to imagine certain results better
+than you can. Doubtless the very fishes of our rivers, gullible as they
+look, and slow as they are to be rightly convinced in another order of
+facts, form fewer false expectations about each other than we should
+form about them if we were in a position of somewhat fuller intercourse
+with their species; for even as it is we have continually to be
+surprised that they do not rise to our carefully selected bait. Take me
+then as a sort of reflective and experienced carp; but do not estimate
+the justice of my ideas by my facial expression."
+
+"Pooh!" says Trost (We are on very intimate terms.)
+
+"Naturally," I persisted, "it is less easy to you than to me to imagine
+our race transcended and superseded, since the more energy a being is
+possessed of, the harder it must be for him to conceive his own death.
+But I, from the point of view of a reflective carp, can easily imagine
+myself and my congeners dispensed with in the frame of things and giving
+way not only to a superior but a vastly different kind of Entity. What I
+would ask you is, to show me why, since each new invention casts a new
+light along the pathway of discovery, and each new combination or
+structure brings into play more conditions than its inventor foresaw,
+there should not at length be a machine of such high mechanical and
+chemical powers that it would find and assimilate the material to supply
+its own waste, and then by a further evolution of internal molecular
+movements reproduce itself by some process of fission or budding. This
+last stage having been reached, either by man's contrivance or as an
+unforeseen result, one sees that the process of natural selection must
+drive men altogether out of the field; for they will long before have
+begun to sink into the miserable condition of those unhappy characters
+in fable who, having demons or djinns at their beck, and being obliged
+to supply them with work, found too much of everything done in too short
+a time. What demons so potent as molecular movements, none the less
+tremendously potent for not carrying the futile cargo of a consciousness
+screeching irrelevantly, like a fowl tied head downmost to the saddle of
+a swift horseman? Under such uncomfortable circumstances our race will
+have diminished with the diminishing call on their energies, and by the
+time that the self-repairing and reproducing machines arise, all but a
+few of the rare inventors, calculators, and speculators will have become
+pale, pulpy, and cretinous from fatty or other degeneration, and behold
+around them a scanty hydrocephalous offspring. As to the breed of the
+ingenious and intellectual, their nervous systems will at last have been
+overwrought in following the molecular revelations of the immensely
+more powerful unconscious race, and they will naturally, as the less
+energetic combinations of movement, subside like the flame of a candle
+in the sunlight Thus the feebler race, whose corporeal adjustments
+happened to be accompanied with a maniacal consciousness which imagined
+itself moving its mover, will have vanished, as all less adapted
+existences do before the fittest--i.e., the existence composed of the
+most persistent groups of movements and the most capable of
+incorporating new groups in harmonious relation. Who--if our
+consciousness is, as I have been given to understand, a mere stumbling
+of our organisms on their way to unconscious perfection--who shall say
+that those fittest existences will not be found along the track of what
+we call inorganic combinations, which will carry on the most elaborate
+processes as mutely and painlessly as we are now told that the minerals
+are metamorphosing themselves continually in the dark laboratory of the
+earth's crust? Thus this planet may be filled with beings who will be
+blind and deaf as the inmost rock, yet will execute changes as delicate
+and complicated as those of human language and all the intricate web of
+what we call its effects, without sensitive impression, without
+sensitive impulse: there may be, let us say, mute orations, mute
+rhapsodies, mute discussions, and no consciousness there even to enjoy
+the silence."
+
+"Absurd!" grumbled Trost.
+
+"The supposition is logical," said I. "It is well argued from the
+premises."
+
+"Whose premises?" cried Trost, turning on me with some fierceness. "You
+don't mean to call them mine, I hope."
+
+"Heaven forbid! They seem to be flying about in the air with other
+germs, and have found a sort of nidus among my melancholy fancies.
+Nobody really holds them. They bear the same relation to real belief as
+walking on the head for a show does to running away from an explosion or
+walking fast to catch the train."
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.
+
+
+THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP!
+
+To discern likeness amidst diversity, it is well known, does not require
+so fine a mental edge as the discerning of diversity amidst general
+sameness. The primary rough classification depends on the prominent
+resemblances of things: the progress is towards finer and finer
+discrimination according to minute differences. Yet even at this stage
+of European culture one's attention is continually drawn to the
+prevalence of that grosser mental sloth which makes people dull to the
+most ordinary prompting of comparison--the bringing things together
+because of their likeness. The same motives, the same ideas, the same
+practices, are alternately admired and abhorred, lauded and denounced,
+according to their association with superficial differences, historical
+or actually social: even learned writers treating of great subjects
+often show an attitude of mind not greatly superior in its logic to that
+of the frivolous fine lady who is indignant at the frivolity of her
+maid.
+
+To take only the subject of the Jews: it would be difficult to find a
+form of bad reasoning about them which has not been heard in
+conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print; but the neglect
+of resemblances is a common property of dulness which unites all the
+various points of view--the prejudiced, the puerile, the spiteful, and
+the abysmally ignorant.
+
+That the preservation of national memories is an element and a means of
+national greatness, that their revival is a sign of reviving
+nationality, that every heroic defender, every patriotic restorer, has
+been inspired by such memories and has made them his watchword, that
+even such a corporate existence as that of a Roman legion or an English
+regiment has been made valorous by memorial standards,--these are the
+glorious commonplaces of historic teaching at our public schools and
+universities, being happily ingrained in Greek and Latin classics. They
+have also been impressed on the world by conspicuous modern instances.
+That there is a free modern Greece is due--through all infiltration of
+other than Greek blood--to the presence of ancient Greece in the
+consciousness of European men; and every speaker would feel his point
+safe if he were to praise Byron's devotion to a cause made glorious by
+ideal identification with the past; hardly so, if he were to insist that
+the Greeks were not to be helped further because their history shows
+that they were anciently unsurpassed in treachery and lying, and that
+many modern Greeks are highly disreputable characters, while others are
+disposed to grasp too large a share of our commerce. The same with
+Italy: the pathos of his country's lot pierced the youthful soul of
+Mazzini, because, like Dante's, his blood was fraught with the kinship
+of Italian greatness, his imagination filled with a majestic past that
+wrought itself into a majestic future. Half a century ago, what was
+Italy? An idling-place of dilettanteism or of itinerant motiveless
+wealth, a territory parcelled out for papal sustenance, dynastic
+convenience, and the profit of an alien Government. What were the
+Italians? No people, no voice in European counsels, no massive power in
+European affairs: a race thought of in English and French society as
+chiefly adapted to the operatic stage, or to serve as models for
+painters; disposed to smile 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 moments
+with a past, a present, and a future, and gives the sense of corporate
+existence that raises man above the otherwise more respectable and
+innocent brute, all that, or most of it, is changed.
+
+Again, one of our living historians finds just sympathy in his vigorous
+insistance on our true ancestry, on our being the strongly marked
+heritors in language and genius of those old English seamen who,
+beholding a rich country with a most convenient seaboard, came,
+doubtless with a sense of divine warrant, and settled themselves on this
+or the other side of fertilising streams, gradually conquering more and
+more of the pleasant land from the natives who knew nothing of Odin,
+and finally making unusually clean work in ridding themselves of those
+prior occupants. "Let us," he virtually says, "let us know who were our
+forefathers, who it was that won the soil for us, and brought the good
+seed of those institutions through which we should not arrogantly but
+gratefully feel ourselves distinguished among the nations as possessors
+of long-inherited freedom; let us not keep up an ignorant kind of naming
+which disguises our true affinities of blood and language, but let us
+see thoroughly what sort of notions and traditions our forefathers had,
+and what sort of song inspired them. Let the poetic fragments which
+breathe forth their fierce bravery in battle and their trust in fierce
+gods who helped them, be treasured with affectionate reverence. These
+seafaring, invading, self-asserting men were the English of old time,
+and were our fathers who did rough work by which we are profiting. They
+had virtues which incorporated themselves in wholesome usages to which
+we trace our own political blessings. Let us know and acknowledge our
+common relationship to them, and be thankful that over and above the
+affections and duties which spring from our manhood, we have the closer
+and more constantly guiding duties which belong to us as Englishmen."
+
+To this view of our nationality most persons who have feeling and
+understanding enough to be conscious of the connection between the
+patriotic affection and every other affection which lifts us above
+emigrating rats and free-loving baboons, will be disposed to say Amen.
+True, we are not indebted to those ancestors for our religion: we are
+rather proud of having got that illumination from elsewhere. The men who
+planted our nation were not Christians, though they began their work
+centuries after Christ; and they had a decided objection to Christianity
+when it was first proposed to them: they were not monotheists, and their
+religion was the reverse of spiritual. But since we have been fortunate
+enough to keep the island-home they won for us, and have been on the
+whole a prosperous people, rather continuing the plan of invading and
+spoiling other lands than being forced to beg for shelter in them,
+nobody has reproached us because our fathers thirteen hundred years ago
+worshipped Odin, massacred Britons, and were with difficulty persuaded
+to accept Christianity, knowing nothing of Hebrew history and the
+reasons why Christ should be received as the Saviour of mankind. The Red
+Indians, not liking us when we settled among them, might have been
+willing to fling such facts in our faces, but they were too ignorant,
+and besides, their opinions did not signify, because we were able, if we
+liked, to exterminate them. The Hindoos also have doubtless had their
+rancours against us and still entertain enough ill-will to make
+unfavourable remarks on our character, especially as to our historic
+rapacity and arrogant notions of our own superiority; they perhaps do
+not admire the usual English profile, and they are not converted to our
+way of feeding: but though we are a small number of an alien race
+profiting by the territory and produce of these prejudiced people, they
+are unable to turn us out; at least, when they tried we showed them
+their mistake. We do not call ourselves a dispersed and a punished
+people: we are a colonising people, and it is we who have punished
+others.
+
+Still the historian guides us rightly in urging us to dwell on the
+virtues of our ancestors with emulation, and to cherish our sense of a
+common descent as a bond of obligation. The eminence, the nobleness of a
+people depends on its capability of being stirred by memories, and of
+striving for what we call spiritual ends--ends which consist not in
+immediate material possession, but in the satisfaction of a great
+feeling that animates the collective body as with one soul. A people
+having the seed of worthiness in it must feel an answering thrill when
+it is adjured by the deaths of its heroes who died to preserve its
+national existence; when it is reminded of its small beginnings and
+gradual growth through past labours and struggles, such as are still
+demanded of it in order that the freedom and wellbeing thus inherited
+may be transmitted unimpaired to children and children's children; when
+an appeal against the permission of injustice is made to great
+precedents in its history and to the better genius breathing in its
+institutions. It is this living force of sentiment in common which makes
+a national consciousness. Nations so moved will resist conquest with
+the very breasts of their women, will pay their millions and their blood
+to abolish slavery, will share privation in famine and all calamity,
+will produce poets to sing "some great story of a man," and thinkers
+whose theories will bear the test of action. An individual man, to be
+harmoniously great, must belong to a nation of this order, if not in
+actual existence yet existing in the past, in memory, as a departed,
+invisible, beloved ideal, once a reality, and perhaps to be restored. A
+common humanity is not yet enough to feed the rich blood of various
+activity which makes a complete man. The time is not come for
+cosmopolitanism to be highly virtuous, any more than for communism to
+suffice for social energy. I am not bound to feel for a Chinaman as I
+feel for my fellow-countryman: I am bound not to demoralise him with
+opium, not to compel him to my will by destroying or plundering the
+fruits of his labour on the alleged ground that he is not cosmopolitan
+enough, and not to insult him for his want of my tailoring and religion
+when he appears as a peaceable visitor on the London pavement. It is
+admirable in a Briton with a good purpose to learn Chinese, but it
+would not be a proof of fine intellect in him to taste Chinese poetry in
+the original more than he tastes the poetry of his own tongue.
+Affection, intelligence, duty, radiate from a centre, and nature has
+decided that for us English folk that centre can be neither China nor
+Peru. Most of us feel this unreflectingly; for the affectation of
+undervaluing everything native, and being too fine for one's own
+country, belongs only to a few minds of no dangerous leverage. What is
+wanting is, that we should recognise a corresponding attachment to
+nationality as legitimate in every other people, and understand that its
+absence is a privation of the greatest good.
+
+For, to repeat, not only the nobleness of a nation depends on the
+presence of this national consciousness, but also the nobleness of each
+individual citizen. Our dignity and rectitude are proportioned to our
+sense of relationship with something great, admirable, pregnant with
+high possibilities, worthy of sacrifice, a continual inspiration to
+self-repression and discipline by the presentation of aims larger and
+more attractive to our generous part than the securing of personal ease
+or prosperity. And a people possessing this good should surely feel not
+only a ready sympathy with the effort of those who, having lost the
+good, strive to regain it, but a profound pity for any degradation
+resulting from its loss; nay, something more than pity when happier
+nationalities have made victims of the unfortunate whose memories
+nevertheless are the very fountain to which the persecutors trace their
+most vaunted blessings.
+
+These notions are familiar: few will deny them in the abstract, and many
+are found loudly asserting them in relation to this or the other
+particular case. But here as elsewhere, in the ardent application of
+ideas, there is a notable lack of simple comparison or sensibility to
+resemblance. The European world has long been used to consider the Jews
+as altogether exceptional, and it has followed naturally enough that
+they have been excepted from the rules of justice and mercy, which are
+based on human likeness. But to consider a people whose ideas have
+determined the religion of half the world, and that the more cultivated
+half, and who made the most eminent struggle against the power of Rome,
+as a purely exceptional race, is a demoralising offence against rational
+knowledge, a stultifying inconsistency in historical interpretation.
+Every nation of forcible character--i.e., of strongly marked
+characteristics, is so far exceptional. The distinctive note of each
+bird-species is in this sense exceptional, but the necessary ground of
+such distinction is a deeper likeness. The superlative peculiarity in
+the Jews admitted, our affinity with them is only the more apparent when
+the elements of their peculiarity are discerned.
+
+From whatever point of view the writings of the Old Testament may be
+regarded, the picture they present of a national development is of high
+interest and speciality, nor can their historic momentousness be much
+affected by any varieties of theory as to the relation they bear to the
+New Testament or to the rise and constitution of Christianity. Whether
+we accept the canonical Hebrew books as a revelation or simply as part
+of an ancient literature, makes no difference to the fact that we find
+there the strongly characterised portraiture of a people educated from
+an earlier or later period to a sense of separateness unique in its
+intensity, a people taught by many concurrent influences to identify
+faithfulness to its national traditions with the highest social and
+religious blessings. Our too scanty sources of Jewish history, from the
+return under Ezra to the beginning of the desperate resistance against
+Rome, show us the heroic and triumphant struggle of the Maccabees, which
+rescued the religion and independence of the nation from the corrupting
+sway of the Syrian Greeks, adding to the glorious sum of its memorials,
+and stimulating continuous efforts of a more peaceful sort to maintain
+and develop that national life which the heroes had fought and died for,
+by internal measures of legal administration and public teaching.
+Thenceforth the virtuous elements of the Jewish life were engaged, as
+they had been with varying aspects during the long and changeful
+prophetic period and the restoration under Ezra, on the side of
+preserving the specific national character against a demoralising fusion
+with that of foreigners whose religion and ritual were idolatrous and
+often obscene. There was always a Foreign party reviling the National
+party as narrow, and sometimes manifesting their own breadth in
+extensive views of advancement or profit to themselves by flattery of a
+foreign power. Such internal conflict naturally tightened the bands of
+conservatism, which needed to be strong if it were to rescue the sacred
+ark, the vital spirit of a small nation--"the smallest of the
+nations"--whose territory lay on the highway between three continents;
+and when the dread and hatred of foreign sway had condensed itself into
+dread and hatred of the Romans, many Conservatives became Zealots, whose
+chief mark was that they advocated resistance to the death against the
+submergence of their nationality. Much might be said on this point
+towards distinguishing the desperate struggle against a conquest which
+is regarded as degradation and corruption, from rash, hopeless
+insurrection against an established native government; and for my part
+(if that were of any consequence) I share the spirit of the Zealots. I
+take the spectacle of the Jewish people defying the Roman edict, and
+preferring death by starvation or the sword to the introduction of
+Caligula's deified statue into the temple, as a sublime type of
+steadfastness. But all that need be noticed here is the continuity of
+that national education (by outward and inward circumstance) which
+created in the Jews a feeling of race, a sense of corporate existence,
+unique in its intensity.
+
+But not, before the dispersion, unique in essential qualities. There is
+more likeness than contrast between the way we English got our island
+and the way the Israelites got Canaan. We have not been noted for
+forming a low estimate of ourselves in comparison with foreigners, or
+for admitting that our institutions are equalled by those of any other
+people under the sun. Many of us have thought that our sea-wall is a
+specially divine arrangement to make and keep us a nation of sea-kings
+after the manner of our forefathers, secure against invasion and able to
+invade other lands when we need them, though they may lie on the other
+side of the ocean. Again, it has been held that we have a peculiar
+destiny as a Protestant people, not only able to bruise the head of an
+idolatrous Christianity in the midst of us, but fitted as possessors of
+the most truth and the most tonnage to carry our purer religion over the
+world and convert mankind to our way of thinking. The Puritans,
+asserting their liberty to restrain tyrants, found the Hebrew history
+closely symbolical of their feelings and purpose; and it can hardly be
+correct to cast the blame of their less laudable doings on the writings
+they invoked, since their opponents made use of the same writings for
+different ends, finding there a strong warrant for the divine right of
+kings and the denunciation of those who, like Korah, Dathan, and Abiram,
+took on themselves the office of the priesthood which belonged of right
+solely to Aaron and his sons, or, in other words, to men ordained by the
+English bishops. We must rather refer the passionate use of the Hebrew
+writings to affinities of disposition between our own race and the
+Jewish. Is it true that the arrogance of a Jew was so immeasurably
+beyond that of a Calvinist? And the just sympathy and admiration which
+we give to the ancestors who resisted the oppressive acts of our native
+kings, and by resisting rescued or won for us the best part of our civil
+and religious liberties--is it justly to be withheld from those brave
+and steadfast men of Jewish race who fought and died, or strove by wise
+administration to resist, the oppression and corrupting influences of
+foreign tyrants, and by resisting rescued the nationality which was the
+very hearth of our own religion? At any rate, seeing that the Jews were
+more specifically than any other nation educated into a sense of their
+supreme moral value, the chief matter of surprise is that any other
+nation is found to rival them in this form of self-confidence.
+
+More exceptional--less like the course of our own history--has been
+their dispersion and their subsistence as a separate people through ages
+in which for the most part they were regarded and treated very much as
+beasts hunted for the sake of their skins, or of a valuable secretion
+peculiar to their species. The Jews showed a talent for accumulating
+what was an object of more immediate desire to Christians than animal
+oils or well-furred skins, and their cupidity and avarice were found at
+once particularly hateful and particularly useful: hateful when seen as
+a reason for punishing them by mulcting or robbery, useful when this
+retributive process could be successfully carried forward. Kings and
+emperors naturally were more alive to the usefulness of subjects who
+could gather and yield money; but edicts issued to protect "the King's
+Jews" equally with the King's game from being harassed and hunted by the
+commonalty were only slight mitigations to the deplorable lot of a race
+held to be under the divine curse, and had little force after the
+Crusades began. As the slave-holders in the United States counted the
+curse on Ham a justification of <DW64> slavery, so the curse on the Jews
+was counted a justification for hindering them from pursuing agriculture
+and handicrafts; for marking them out as execrable figures by a peculiar
+dress; for torturing them to make them part with their gains, or for
+more gratuitously spitting at them and pelting them; for taking it as
+certain that they killed and ate babies, poisoned the wells, and took
+pains to spread the plague; for putting it to them whether they would be
+baptised or burned, and not failing to burn and massacre them when they
+were obstinate; but also for suspecting them of disliking the baptism
+when they had got it, and then burning them in punishment of their
+insincerity; finally, for hounding them by tens on tens of thousands
+from the homes where they had found shelter for centuries, and
+inflicting on them the horrors of a new exile and a new dispersion. All
+this to avenge the Saviour of mankind, or else to compel these
+stiff-necked people to acknowledge a Master whose servants showed such
+beneficent effects of His teaching.
+
+With a people so treated one of two issues was possible: either from
+being of feebler nature than their persecutors, and caring more for ease
+than for the sentiments and ideas which constituted their distinctive
+character, they would everywhere give way to pressure and get rapidly
+merged in the populations around them; or, being endowed with uncommon
+tenacity, physical and mental, feeling peculiarly the ties of
+inheritance both in blood and faith, remembering national glories,
+trusting in their recovery, abhorring apostasy, able to bear all things
+and hope all things with the consciousness of being steadfast to
+spiritual obligations, the kernel of their number would harden into an
+inflexibility more and more insured by motive and habit. They would
+cherish all differences that marked them off from their hated
+oppressors, all memories that consoled them with a sense of virtual
+though unrecognised superiority; and the separateness which was made
+their badge of ignominy would be their inward pride, their source of
+fortifying defiance. Doubtless such a people would get confirmed in
+vices. An oppressive government and a persecuting religion, while
+breeding vices in those who hold power, are well known to breed
+answering vices in those who are powerless and suffering. What more
+direct plan than the course presented by European history could have
+been pursued in order to give the Jews a spirit of bitter isolation, of
+scorn for the wolfish hypocrisy that made victims of them, of triumph in
+prospering at the expense of the blunderers who stoned them away from
+the open paths of industry?--or, on the other hand, to encourage in the
+less defiant a lying conformity, a pretence of conversion for the sake
+of the social advantages attached to baptism, an outward renunciation of
+their hereditary ties with the lack of real love towards the society
+and creed which exacted this galling tribute?--or again, in the most
+unhappy specimens of the race, to rear transcendent examples of odious
+vice, reckless instruments of rich men with bad propensities,
+unscrupulous grinders of the alien people who wanted to grind _them_?
+
+No wonder the Jews have their vices: no wonder if it were proved (which
+it has not hitherto appeared to be) that some of them have a bad
+pre-eminence in evil, an unrivalled superfluity of naughtiness. It would
+be more plausible to make a wonder of the virtues which have prospered
+among them under the shadow of oppression. But instead of dwelling on
+these, or treating as admitted what any hardy or ignorant person may
+deny, let us found simply on the loud assertions of the hostile. The
+Jews, it is said, resisted the expansion of their own religion into
+Christianity; they were in the habit of spitting on the cross; they have
+held the name of Christ to be _Anathema_. Who taught them that? The men
+who made Christianity a curse to them: the men who made the name of
+Christ a symbol for the spirit of vengeance, and, what was worse, made
+the execution of the vengeance a pretext for satisfying their own
+savageness, greed, and envy: the men who sanctioned with the name of
+Christ a barbaric and blundering copy of pagan fatalism in taking the
+words "His blood be upon us and on our children" as a divinely appointed
+verbal warrant for wreaking cruelty from generation to generation on the
+people from whose sacred writings Christ drew His teaching. Strange
+retrogression in the professors of an expanded religion, boasting an
+illumination beyond the spiritual doctrine of Hebrew prophets! For
+Hebrew prophets proclaimed a God who demanded mercy rather than
+sacrifices. The Christians also believed that God delighted not in the
+blood of rams and of bulls, but they apparently conceived Him as
+requiring for His satisfaction the sighs and groans, the blood and
+roasted flesh of men whose forefathers had misunderstood the
+metaphorical character of prophecies which spoke of spiritual
+pre-eminence under the figure of a material kingdom. Was this the method
+by which Christ desired His title to the Messiahship to be commended to
+the hearts and understandings of the nation in which He was born? Many
+of His sayings bear the stamp of that patriotism which places
+fellow-countrymen in the inner circle of affection and duty. And did the
+words "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do," refer only to
+the centurion and his band, a tacit exception being made of every Hebrew
+there present from the mercy of the Father and the compassion of the
+Son?--nay, more, of every Hebrew yet to come who remained unconverted
+after hearing of His claim to the Messiahship, not from His own lips or
+those of His native apostles, but from the lips of alien men whom cross,
+creed, and baptism had left cruel, rapacious, and debauched? It is more
+reverent to Christ to believe that He must have approved the Jewish
+martyrs who deliberately chose to be burned or massacred rather than be
+guilty of a blaspheming lie, more than He approved the rabble of
+crusaders who robbed and murdered them in His name. But these
+remonstrances seem to have no direct application to personages who take
+up the attitude of philosophic thinkers and discriminating critics,
+professedly accepting Christianity from a rational point of view as a
+vehicle of the highest religious and moral truth, and condemning the
+Jews on the ground that they are obstinate adherents of an outworn
+creed, maintain themselves in moral alienation from the peoples with
+whom they share citizenship, and are destitute of real interest in the
+welfare of the community and state with which they are thus identified.
+These anti-Judaic advocates usually belong to a party which has felt
+itself glorified in winning for Jews, as well as Dissenters and
+Catholics, the full privileges of citizenship, laying open to them every
+path to distinction. At one time the voice of this party urged that
+differences of creed were made dangerous only by the denial of
+citizenship--that you must make a man a citizen before he could feel
+like one. At present, apparently, this confidence has been succeeded by
+a sense of mistake: there is a regret that no limiting clauses were
+insisted on, such as would have hindered the Jews from coming too far
+and in too large proportion along those opened pathways; and the
+Roumanians are thought to have shown an enviable wisdom in giving them
+as little chance as possible. But then, the reflection occurring that
+some of the most objectionable Jews are baptised Christians, it is
+obvious that such clauses would have been insufficient, and the doctrine
+that you can turn a Jew into a good Christian is emphatically retracted.
+But clearly, these liberal gentlemen, too late enlightened by
+disagreeable events, must yield the palm of wise foresight to those who
+argued against them long ago; and it is a striking spectacle to witness
+minds so panting for advancement in some directions that they are ready
+to force it on an unwilling society, in this instance despairingly
+recurring to mediaeval types of thinking--insisting that the Jews are
+made viciously cosmopolitan by holding the world's money-bag, that for
+them all national interests are resolved into the algebra of loans, that
+they have suffered an inward degradation stamping them as morally
+inferior, and--"serve them right," since they rejected Christianity. All
+which is mirrored in an analogy, namely, that of the Irish, also a
+servile race, who have rejected Protestantism though it has been
+repeatedly urged on them by fire and sword and penal laws, and whose
+place in the moral scale may be judged by our advertisements, where the
+clause, "No Irish need apply," parallels the sentence which for many
+polite persons sums up the question of Judaism--"I never _did_ like the
+Jews."
+
+It is certainly worth considering whether an expatriated, denationalised
+race, used for ages to live among antipathetic populations, must not
+inevitably lack some conditions of nobleness. If they drop that
+separateness which is made their reproach, they may be in danger of
+lapsing into a cosmopolitan indifference equivalent to cynicism, and of
+missing that inward identification with the nationality immediately
+around them which might make some amends for their inherited privation.
+No dispassionate observer can deny this danger. Why, our own countrymen
+who take to living abroad without purpose or function to keep up their
+sense of fellowship in the affairs of their own land are rarely good
+specimens of moral healthiness; still, the consciousness of having a
+native country, the birthplace of common memories and habits of mind,
+existing like a parental hearth quitted but beloved; the dignity of
+being included in a people which has a part in the comity of nations
+and the growing federation of the world; that sense of special belonging
+which is the root of human virtues, both public and private,--all these
+spiritual links may preserve migratory Englishmen from the worst
+consequences of their voluntary dispersion. Unquestionably the Jews,
+having been more than any other race exposed to the adverse moral
+influences of alienism, must, both in individuals and in groups, have
+suffered some corresponding moral degradation; but in fact they have
+escaped with less of abjectness and less of hard hostility towards the
+nations whose hand has been against them, than could have happened in
+the case of a people who had neither their adhesion to a separate
+religion founded on historic memories, nor their characteristic family
+affectionateness. Tortured, flogged, spit upon, the _corpus vile_ on
+which rage or wantonness vented themselves with impunity, their name
+flung at them as an opprobrium by superstition, hatred, and contempt,
+they have remained proud of their origin. Does any one call this an evil
+pride? Perhaps he belongs to that order of man who, while he has a
+democratic dislike to dukes and earls, wants to make believe that his
+father was an idle gentleman, when in fact he was an honourable artisan,
+or who would feel flattered to be taken for other than an Englishman. It
+is possible to be too arrogant about our blood or our calling, but that
+arrogance is virtue compared with such mean pretence. The pride which
+identifies us with a great historic body is a humanising, elevating
+habit of mind, inspiring sacrifices of individual comfort, gain, or
+other selfish ambition, for the sake of that ideal whole; and no man
+swayed by such a sentiment can become completely abject. That a Jew of
+Smyrna, where a whip is carried by passengers ready to flog off the too
+officious specimens of his race, can still be proud to say, "I am a
+Jew," is surely a fact to awaken admiration in a mind capable of
+understanding what we may call the ideal forces in human history. And
+again, a varied, impartial observation of the Jews in different
+countries tends to the impression that they have a predominant
+kindliness which must have been deeply ingrained in the constitution of
+their race to have outlasted the ages of persecution and oppression.
+The concentration of their joys in domestic life has kept up in them the
+capacity of tenderness: the pity for the fatherless and the widow, the
+care for the women and the little ones, blent intimately with their
+religion, is a well of mercy that cannot long or widely be pent up by
+exclusiveness. And the kindliness of the Jew overflows the line of
+division between him and the Gentile. On the whole, one of the most
+remarkable phenomena in the history of this scattered people, made for
+ages "a scorn and a hissing" is, that after being subjected to this
+process, which might have been expected to be in every sense
+deteriorating and vitiating, they have come out of it (in any estimate
+which allows for numerical proportion) rivalling the nations of all
+European countries in healthiness and beauty of _physique_, in practical
+ability, in scientific and artistic aptitude, and in some forms of
+ethical value. A significant indication of their natural rank is seen in
+the fact that at this moment, the leader of the Liberal party in Germany
+is a Jew, the leader of the Republican party in France is a Jew, and the
+head of the Conservative ministry in England is a Jew. And here it is
+that we find the ground for the obvious jealousy which is now
+stimulating the revived expression of old antipathies. "The Jews," it is
+felt, "have a dangerous tendency to get the uppermost places not only in
+commerce but in political life. Their monetary hold on governments is
+tending to perpetuate in leading Jews a spirit of universal alienism
+(euphemistically called cosmopolitanism), even where the West has given
+them a full share in civil and political rights. A people with oriental
+sunlight in their blood, yet capable of being everywhere acclimatised,
+they have a force and toughness which enables them to carry off the best
+prizes; and their wealth is likely to put half the seats in Parliament
+at their disposal."
+
+There is truth in these views of Jewish social and political relations.
+But it is rather too late for liberal pleaders to urge them in a merely
+vituperative sense. Do they propose as a remedy for the impending danger
+of our healthier national influences getting overridden by Jewish
+predominance, that we should repeal our emancipatory laws? Not all the
+Germanic immigrants who have been settling among us for generations,
+and are still pouring in to settle, are Jews, but thoroughly Teutonic
+and more or less Christian craftsmen, mechanicians, or skilled and
+erudite functionaries; and the Semitic Christians who swarm among us are
+dangerously like their unconverted brethren in complexion, persistence,
+and wealth. Then there are the Greeks who, by the help of Phoenician
+blood or otherwise, are objectionably strong in the city. Some judges
+think that the Scotch are more numerous and prosperous here in the South
+than is quite for the good of us Southerners; and the early
+inconvenience felt under the Stuarts of being quartered upon by a
+hungry, hard-working people with a distinctive accent and form of
+religion, and higher cheek-bones than English taste requires, has not
+yet been quite neutralised. As for the Irish, it is felt in high
+quarters that we have always been too lenient towards them;--at least,
+if they had been harried a little more there might not have been so many
+of them on the English press, of which they divide the power with the
+Scotch, thus driving many Englishmen to honest and ineloquent labour.
+
+So far shall we be carried if we go in search of devices to hinder
+people of other blood than our own from getting the advantage of
+dwelling among us.
+
+Let it be admitted that it is a calamity to the English, as to any other
+great historic people, to undergo a premature fusion with immigrants of
+alien blood; that its distinctive national characteristics should be in
+danger of obliteration by the predominating quality of foreign settlers.
+I not only admit this, I am ready to unite in groaning over the
+threatened danger. To one who loves his native language, who would
+delight to keep our rich and harmonious English undefiled by foreign
+accent, foreign intonation, and those foreign tinctures of verbal
+meaning which tend to confuse all writing and discourse, it is an
+affliction as harassing as the climate, that on our stage, in our
+studios, at our public and private gatherings, in our offices,
+warehouses, and workshops, we must expect to hear our beloved English
+with its words clipped, its vowels stretched and twisted, its phrases of
+acquiescence and politeness, of cordiality, dissidence or argument,
+delivered always in the wrong tones, like ill-rendered melodies, marred
+beyond recognition; that there should be a general ambition to speak
+every language except our mother English, which persons "of style" are
+not ashamed of corrupting with slang, false foreign equivalents, and a
+pronunciation that crushes out all colour from the vowels and jams them
+between jostling consonants. An ancient Greek might not like to be
+resuscitated for the sake of hearing Homer read in our universities,
+still he would at least find more instructive marvels in other
+developments to be witnessed at those institutions; but a modern
+Englishman is invited from his after-dinner repose to hear Shakspere
+delivered under circumstances which offer no other novelty than some
+novelty of false intonation, some new distribution of strong emphasis on
+prepositions, some new misconception of a familiar idiom. Well! it is
+our inertness that is in fault, our carelessness of excellence, our
+willing ignorance of the treasures that lie in our national heritage,
+while we are agape after what is foreign, though it may be only a vile
+imitation of what is native.
+
+This marring of our speech, however, is a minor evil compared with what
+must follow from the predominance of wealth--acquiring immigrants, whose
+appreciation of our political and social life must often be as
+approximative or fatally erroneous as their delivery of our language.
+But take the worst issues--what can we do to hinder them? Are we to
+adopt the exclusiveness for which we have punished the Chinese? Are we
+to tear the glorious flag of hospitality which has made our freedom the
+world-wide blessing of the oppressed? It is not agreeable to find
+foreign accents and stumbling locutions passing from the piquant
+exception to the general rule of discourse. But to urge on that account
+that we should spike away the peaceful foreigner, would be a view of
+international relations not in the long-run favourable to the interests
+of our fellow-countrymen; for we are at least equal to the races we call
+obtrusive in the disposition to settle wherever money is to be made and
+cheaply idle living to be found. In meeting the national evils which are
+brought upon us by the onward course of the world, there is often no
+more immediate hope or resource than that of striving after fuller
+national excellence, which must consist in the moulding of more
+excellent individual natives. The tendency of things is towards the
+quicker or slower fusion of races. It is impossible to arrest this
+tendency: all we can do is to moderate its course so as to hinder it
+from degrading the moral status of societies by a too rapid effacement
+of those national traditions and customs which are the language of the
+national genius--the deep suckers of healthy sentiment. Such moderating
+and guidance of inevitable movement is worthy of all effort. And it is
+in this sense that the modern insistance on the idea of Nationalities
+has value. That any people at once distinct and coherent enough to form
+a state should be held in subjection by an alien antipathetic government
+has been becoming more and more a ground of sympathetic indignation; and
+in virtue of this, at least one great State has been added to European
+councils. Nobody now complains of the result in this case, though
+far-sighted persons see the need to limit analogy by discrimination. We
+have to consider who are the stifled people and who the stiflers before
+we can be sure of our ground.
+
+The only point in this connection on which Englishmen are agreed is,
+that England itself shall not be subject to foreign rule. The fiery
+resolve to resist invasion, though with an improvised array of
+pitchforks, is felt to be virtuous, and to be worthy of a historic
+people. Why? Because there is a national life in our veins. Because
+there is something specifically English which we feel to be supremely
+worth striving for, worth dying for, rather than living to renounce it.
+Because we too have our share--perhaps a principal share--in that spirit
+of separateness which has not yet done its work in the education of
+mankind, which has created the varying genius of nations, and, like the
+Muses, is the offspring of memory.
+
+Here, as everywhere else, the human task seems to be the discerning and
+adjustment of opposite claims. But the end can hardly be achieved by
+urging contradictory reproaches, and instead of labouring after
+discernment as a preliminary to intervention, letting our zeal burst
+forth according to a capricious selection, first determined accidentally
+and afterwards justified by personal predilection. Not only John Gilpin
+and his wife, or Edwin and Angelina, seem to be of opinion that their
+preference or dislike of Russians, Servians, or Greeks, consequent,
+perhaps, on hotel adventures, has something to do with the merits of the
+Eastern Question; even in a higher range of intellect and enthusiasm we
+find a distribution of sympathy or pity for sufferers of different blood
+or votaries of differing religions, strangely unaccountable on any other
+ground than a fortuitous direction of study or trivial circumstances of
+travel. With some even admirable persons, one is never quite sure of any
+particular being included under a general term. A provincial physician,
+it is said, once ordering a lady patient not to eat salad, was asked
+pleadingly by the affectionate husband whether she might eat lettuce, or
+cresses, or radishes. The physician had too rashly believed in the
+comprehensiveness of the word "salad," just as we, if not enlightened by
+experience, might believe in the all-embracing breadth of "sympathy with
+the injured and oppressed." What mind can exhaust the grounds of
+exception which lie in each particular case? There is understood to be a
+peculiar odour from the <DW64> body, and we know that some persons, too
+rationalistic to feel bound by the curse on Ham, used to hint very
+strongly that this odour determined the question on the side of <DW64>
+slavery.
+
+And this is the usual level of thinking in polite society concerning the
+Jews. Apart from theological purposes, it seems to be held surprising
+that anybody should take an interest in the history of a people whose
+literature has furnished all our devotional language; and if any
+reference is made to their past or future destinies some hearer is sure
+to state as a relevant fact which may assist our judgment, that she, for
+her part, is not fond of them, having known a Mr Jacobson who was very
+unpleasant, or that he, for his part, thinks meanly of them as a race,
+though on inquiry you find that he is so little acquainted with their
+characteristics that he is astonished to learn how many persons whom he
+has blindly admired and applauded are Jews to the backbone. Again, men
+who consider themselves in the very van of modern advancement, knowing
+history and the latest philosophies of history, indicate their
+contemptuous surprise that any one should entertain the destiny of the
+Jews as a worthy subject, by referring to Moloch and their own
+agreement with the theory that the religion of Jehovah was merely a
+transformed Moloch-worship, while in the same breath they are glorifying
+"civilisation" as a transformed tribal existence of which some
+lineaments are traceable in grim marriage customs of the native
+Australians. Are these erudite persons prepared to insist that the name
+"Father" should no longer have any sanctity for us, because in their
+view of likelihood our Aryan ancestors were mere improvers on a state of
+things in which nobody knew his own father?
+
+For less theoretic men, ambitious, to be regarded as practical
+politicians, the value of the Hebrew race has been measured by their
+unfavourable opinion of a prime minister who is a Jew by lineage. But it
+is possible to form a very ugly opinion as to the scrupulousness of
+Walpole or of Chatham; and in any case I think Englishmen would refuse
+to accept the character and doings of those eighteenth century statesmen
+as the standard of value for the English people and the part they have
+to play in the fortunes of mankind.
+
+If we are to consider the future of the Jews at all, it seems
+reasonable to take as a preliminary question: Are they destined to
+complete fusion with the peoples among whom they are dispersed, losing
+every remnant of a distinctive consciousness as Jews; or, are there in
+the breadth and intensity with which the feeling of separateness, or
+what we may call the organised memory of a national consciousness,
+actually exists in the world-wide Jewish communities--the seven millions
+scattered from east to west--and again, are there in the political
+relations of the world, the conditions present or approaching for the
+restoration of a Jewish state planted on the old ground as a centre of
+national feeling, a source of dignifying protection, a special channel
+for special energies which may contribute some added form of national
+genius, and an added voice in the councils of the world?
+
+They are among us everywhere: it is useless to say we are not fond of
+them. Perhaps we are not fond of proletaries and their tendency to form
+Unions, but the world is not therefore to be rid of them. If we wish to
+free ourselves from the inconveniences that we have to complain of,
+whether in proletaries or in Jews, our best course is to encourage all
+means of improving these neighbours who elbow us in a thickening crowd,
+and of sending their incommodious energies into beneficent channels. Why
+are we so eager for the dignity of certain populations of whom perhaps
+we have never seen a single specimen, and of whose history, legend, or
+literature we have been contentedly ignorant for ages, while we sneer at
+the notion of a renovated national dignity for the Jews, whose ways of
+thinking and whose very verbal forms are on our lips in every prayer
+which we end with an Amen? Some of us consider this question dismissed
+when they have said that the wealthiest Jews have no desire to forsake
+their European palaces, and go to live in Jerusalem. But in a return
+from exile, in the restoration of a people, the question is not whether
+certain rich men will choose to remain behind, but whether there will be
+found worthy men who will choose to lead the return. Plenty of
+prosperous Jews remained in Babylon when Ezra marshalled his band of
+forty thousand and began a new glorious epoch in the history of his
+race, making the preparation for that epoch in the history of the world
+which has been held glorious enough to be dated from for evermore. The
+hinge of possibility is simply the existence of an adequate community of
+feeling as well as widespread need in the Jewish race, and the hope that
+among its finer specimens there may arise some men of instruction and
+ardent public spirit, some new Ezras, some modern Maccabees, who will
+know how to use all favouring outward conditions, how to triumph by
+heroic example, over the indifference of their fellows and the scorn of
+their foes, and will steadfastly set their faces towards making their
+people once more one among the nations.
+
+Formerly, evangelical orthodoxy was prone to dwell on the fulfilment of
+prophecy in the "restoration of the Jews," Such interpretation of the
+prophets is less in vogue now. The dominant mode is to insist on a
+Christianity that disowns its origin, that is not a substantial growth
+having a genealogy, but is a vaporous reflex of modern notions. The
+Christ of Matthew had the heart of a Jew--"Go ye first to the lost
+sheep of the house of Israel." The Apostle of the Gentiles had the heart
+of a Jew: "For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my
+brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh: who are Israelites; to whom
+pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the
+giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; whose are
+the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came." Modern
+apostles, extolling Christianity, are found using a different tone: they
+prefer the mediaeval cry translated into modern phrase. But the
+mediaeval cry too was in substance very ancient--more ancient than the
+days of Augustus. Pagans in successive ages said, "These people are
+unlike us, and refuse to be made like us: let us punish them." The Jews
+were steadfast in their separateness, and through that separateness
+Christianity was born. A modern book on Liberty has maintained that from
+the freedom of individual men to persist in idiosyncrasies the world may
+be enriched. Why should we not apply this argument to the idiosyncrasy
+of a nation, and pause in our haste to hoot it down? There is still a
+great function for the steadfastness of the Jew: not that he should
+shut out the utmost illumination which knowledge can throw on his
+national history, but that he should cherish the store of inheritance
+which that history has left him. Every Jew should be conscious that he
+is one of a multitude possessing common objects of piety in the immortal
+achievements and immortal sorrows of ancestors who have transmitted to
+them a physical and mental type strong enough, eminent enough in
+faculties, pregnant enough with peculiar promise, to constitute a new
+beneficent individuality among the nations, and, by confuting the
+traditions of scorn, nobly avenge the wrongs done to their Fathers.
+
+There is a sense in which the worthy child of a nation that has brought
+forth illustrious prophets, high and unique among the poets of the
+world, is bound by their visions.
+
+Is bound?
+
+Yes, for the effective bond of human action is feeling, and the worthy
+child of a people owning the triple name of Hebrew, Israelite, and Jew,
+feels his kinship with the glories and the sorrows, the degradation and
+the possible renovation of his national family.
+
+Will any one teach the nullification of this feeling and call his
+doctrine a philosophy? He will teach a blinding superstition--the
+superstition that a theory of human wellbeing can be constructed in
+disregard of the influences which have made us human.
+
+
+THE END.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Impressions of Theophrastus Such, by George Eliot
+
+*** 
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