>^'W THEOPHRASTUS SUCH, .TUBAL, AND OTHER POEMS, AND THE SPANISH GYPSY. 37 GEOKGE ELIOT, NEW EDITION COMPLETE IN ONE VOLUME, CHICAGO AND NEW YORK: BELFOKD, CLAKKE & CO. 1886. * OF GALIF. LIBRARY. LOS ANGELES " Susplcione si quis errablt sua, Et rapiet ad se, quod erit commune omnium, Stulte nudabit animi conscientiam. Huic excusatum me yeh;T. lihilominus: Neque -nim notare sinjrilos mens est mihi, Verum ipsam vitam et mores homiiium ostendere ' PRINTED AND BOUND BY DONOHTJE & HENNEBEBBY, CHICAGO. CONTENTS. IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. PAGE I. LOOKING INWARD, - - - - - . 7 II. LOOKING BACKWARD, ...... 17 III. How WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH, .... 39 IV. A MAN SURPRISED AT His ORIGINALITY, ... 41 V. A Too DEFERENTIAL MAN, 48 VI. ONLY TEMPER, 55 VIL A POLITICAL MOLECULE, ...... 61 VIII. THE WATCH-DOG OP KNOWLEDGE, ... 65 IX. A HALF-BREED, 71 X. DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY, - - - 77 XI. THE WASP CREDITED WITH THE HONEYCOMB, - 83 XII. "So YOUNG!"- 93 XIII. How WE COME TO GIVE OURSELVES FALSE TESTI- MONIALS, AND BELIEVE IN THEM, - 98 XIV. THE Too READY WRITER, 105 XV. DISEASES OF SMALL AUTHORSHIP, - - - - 112 XVI. MORAL SWINDLERS, --..... 120 XVII. SHADOWS OF THE COMING RACE, .... 128 XVIII. THE MODERN HEP! HEP!- HEP! .... 133 POEMS, OLD AND NEW. THE LEGEND OF JUBAL, ........ 157 (Reprinted from " Macmillan's Magazine.") AGATHA, 176 (Reprinted from the " Atlantic Monthly.") ARMGART, 187 (Reprinted from " Macmillan's Magazine.") How LISA LOVED THE KING, -----.. 222 (Reprinted from " Blackwood's Magazine.") A MINOR PROPHET, 288 BROTHER AND SISTER, 246 STUAOIVARIUB, -251 212*9270 6 CONTENTS. A COLLEGE BREAKFAST PARTY, - - - - - 255 (Reprinted from "Macmillan's Magazine.") Two LOVERS, 275 SELF AND LIFE, 276 " SWEET EVENINGS COME AND Go, LOVE," .... 279 THE DEATH OF MOSES, 280 ARION, ... 284 "O MAY I JOIN THE CHOIR INVISIBLE," - - 287 THE SPANISH GYPSY, 289 IMPKESSICOTS OF THEOPHBASTUS SUCH. IMPRESSIONS OF THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. i. LOOKING INWAED. 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 con- vert me to my favorite 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 biogra- phy and tenets as they would be if I were a dead philoso- pher, 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 i-agerly in a behavior which sho is privately recording 1 8 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 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 favor whom 1 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 recognize 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, imag- ining for myself a high place in the estimation of behold- ers; 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, fellow-men! if I trace with curious interest your labyrinthine self-delusions, note the inconsistencies in your zealous adhesions, and smile at your helpless endeavors 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 rny 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 observ- ing others that I can so far correct my self-ignorance LOOKIXK IXWARD. 9 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 com- mon nature, which commands us to bury its lowest fatalities, its invincible remnants of the brute, its most agonizing 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 senti- ments 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 suc- cessful in showing us the weak points of his grammar. Hence I too may be so far like Jean Jacques as to com- municate more than I am aware of. I am not indeed writing an autobiography, or pretending to give an unre- served 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 weak- nesses 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 inter- pretation of a character which really offers no handle to just objection; or even as an unfair use for your amuse- ment 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- 10 THEOPHKASTUS SUCH. *nen. 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 dis- criminating hand. I never felt myself sufficiently merito- "ious to like being hated as a proof of my superiority, or so thirsty for improvement as to desire that all my acquaint- ances should give me their candid opinion of me. I really do not want to learn from my enemies: L prefer having none to learn from. Instead of being glad when men use /ne 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 per- manent 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 con- tinually in society, and caring about the joys and sorrows of my neighbors, 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 be 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 con- tribution, 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 traveling 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 per- LOOKING i; \\VARD. 11 ceptive 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 unfavorable 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 satis- faction of finding that when they were appropriated by some one else they were found remarkable and even brill- iant. 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 inher- itance 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 foot- man. 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 second- ary consideration with audiences who have given a new scope to the ex pede Herculem principle, and from awk- ward 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 disposi- tion, 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 con- soling point of view, some warrantable method of softening the hard peas I had to walk on, some comfortable fanati- cism 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 12 THEOPHKASTTTS' SUCH. 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 oiv personal partialities in moral theorizing? 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 imagi- nation I can learn the average appearance of things: is there no remedy or corrective for that inward squint vliiel, consists in a dissatisfied egoism or other want of L. ^ntal balance? In my conscience I saw that th j biap of personal discontent was just as misleading and odioub as the bias of self-satisfaction. Whether we look through the rose-colored 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 nattering of native illusions, a feeding-up into monstrosity of an inward growth already LOOKING INWARD. 13 disproportionate; to get an especial scorn for that scorn of mankind which is a transmuted disappointment of prepos- terous claims; to watch with peculiar alarm lest what 1 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 possi- ble 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 disap- pointment. 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 ^fe 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 dullness; 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 14 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. 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 establish- ing 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 neighbors, 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 con- firmation 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 occasion- ally, 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 experi- ence 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 estab- lished inference that these fitful signs of a lingering belief LOOKING INWARD. 15 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 gratifi- cations, as I have said. While my desire to explain my- self 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 one self 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 1 have made self-betrayals enough already to show that I have not arrived at that non-human independ- ence. 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, de- lightful 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 physiog- nomy 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 igno- rance, or is manifestly preparing to expose the various instances in which I unconsciously disgrace myself. I Rhudder at this too corporeal auditor, and turn toward another point of the compass where the haze is unbroken. AVhy 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 manu- scripts to a judgment outside my imagination, but I will 16 THEOPHRASTUS SITCH. 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 pub- lished work, is simply flatness and not that surpassing snbtilty which is the preferable ground of popular neg- lect 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 thejne 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 bar- barous laughter may be at least half the truth. But there is a loving laughter in which the only recognized superiority is that of the ideal self, the God within, holding the mirror and the scourge for our own pettiness as well as our neighbors'. LOOKING BACKWABD. 17 n. LOOKING BACKWAKD. MOST of us who have had decent parents would shrink from wishing that our father and mother had been some- body else whom we never knew; yet it is held no impiety, rather, ti 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 ad- miring 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 ^Eolic 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 enchant- ment 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 glori- fied by the yearnings of that modern sect of Flaggellants who make a ritual of lashing not themselves but all their neighbors. To me, however, that paternal time, the time of my father's youth, never seemed prosaic, for it 2 18 TFEOPHRASTUS SUCH. came to my imagination first through his memories, which made a wondrous perspective to my little daily world of discovery. And, for my part, . can call no age absolutely unpoetic: how should it be so, since there are always chil- dren to whom the acorns and the swallow's eggs are a wonder, always those human passions and fatalities ( ii rough 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 favorite realms of the retrospective optimists. To be quite fair toward 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 blame- less past. One wonders whether the remarkable origina- tors 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 ances- tors 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 il 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 grace- ful. With my present abilities, extern il proportions, and generally small provision for ecstatic enjoyment, where is the ground for confidence that I should have had a prefer- able career in such an epoch of society? An age in which LOOKING BACKWAfiD. 19 every department has its awkward-squad seems in my mind's eye to suit me better. I might have wandered by the Stryinon under Philip and Alexander without throw- ing any new light on method or organizing the sum of human knowledge; on the other hand, I might have objected to Aristotle as too much of a system at izer, 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, '11-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 conversa- tional powers, the addition of myself to their number, though clad in the majestic folds of the himation and wit hunt cravat, would hardly have made a sensation among the accomplished fair ones who were so precise in adjusting their own drapery about their delicate ankles. Whereas by being another sort of person in the present age I might have given it some needful theoretic clue. Or I might have poured forth poetic strains which would have antici- pated theory and seemed a voice from " the prophetic soul Of the 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 rasli boasting about enlightenment, and an-occasional insistence on an origi- nality which is that of the present year's corn crop, we seem too much disposed to indulge, and to call by compliment- ary 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 labors we 20 THEOPHRASTTJS SUCH. 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 privi- lege, 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 con- tinuous degeneracy, 1 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 ui. ersally 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 continu- ally 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 othei parent .a 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 LOOKING BACKWARD. 21 which I am living was saved out of tithe before the period of commutation, and without the provisional transfigura- tion 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 bought have reduced the flavor 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 volun- tary. 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 neighbors, and am thankful that he was not one of those aristocratic clergy- men 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 \.hich 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 others 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 commonality, 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 22 THEOPHEASTUS SUCH. 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-laborers, and the 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 toward liim; 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. Afterward 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 gray, 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 consider him a parent so much to my honor, that the men- tion 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 ser- mons bore marks of his own composition. It is true, they LOOKING BACK \V.\K I>. 23 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 sys- tem 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? Xor 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 them- selves 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 hedge- rows 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 lie 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 gray worm-eaten wood of its pews and pulpit, with their doors only half hanging on the hinges, being exactly the color of a lean mouse which I once observed a.s an interesting member of the scant con gregation. and conjectured to be the identical church mouse I hud heard referred to as an example of extreme poverty; 24 THEOPHKASTUS SUCH. 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 abroken 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 nights 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, b"'ong to families with many quarterings; but how many " quarter- ings " of diverse contact with their fellow-countrymen enter into their qualifications to be parliamentary leaders, pro- fessors of social science, or journalistic guides of the popu- lar 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 neighbors 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 L arned 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 vil- lages 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 filu .1 with far other scenes: among eternal snows and stupen- dous 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 LOOKING ' AC K WARD. 25 native landscape, which is one deep root of our national life and language. And I often smile at my consciousness that certain con- servative 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 koep 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 'ontrast 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 mime 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 Well- ington, until he was for emancipating the Catholics; and 26 THEOPHEASTUS iSUCH. 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 every- thing 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 chari- ties; its non-resident, jovial clergy; its militia-ballot- ing; and above all, its blank ignorance of what we, its posterity, should be thinking of it, has great dif- ferences from the England of to-day. Yet we discern a strong family likeness. Is there any country which shows at once as much stability and as much susceptibility to change as ours? Our national life is like that scenery which I early learned to love, not subject to great convul- sions, but easily showing more or less delicate (sometimes melancholy) effects from minor changes. Hence our mid- land 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 labor has wrought itself into what one may call the speech of the landscape in contract 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 LOOKING BACKWARD. 27 common where we used to plant the windmills, our quiet little rivers here and there fit to turn a mill-wheel, our vil luges 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 plows and wagons contemptuously, but rather makes every hovel and every sheepfold, every railed bridge or fallen tree-trunk an agreeably noticeable inci- dent; not a mere speck in the midst of unmeasured vast- ness, 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 ly; 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 gray 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 gray or ochre-tinted lichens and their olive-green mosses under all ministries, let us praise the sober harmonies they give to our land- scape, helping to unite us pleasantly with the elder genera- 28 THEOPilK.VSTUS SUCH. tions 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 affec- tions is half visionary a dream in which things are con- nected 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 labor. Well, well, the illusions that began for us when we were less acquainted witli evil have not lost their value when we dis- cern 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 doz- ing round old cathedrals, for the life of London, half sleep- less 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 sensi- tively to the London weather-signs, political, social, liter^ ary; and my bachelor's hearth is imbedded where by much craning of head and neck I can catch sight of a syca- more 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. HOW WE ENCOURAGE KESEAKCH. 29 III. HOW WE ENCOUKAGE EESEAECH. THE serene and beneficent goddess Truth, like other deities whose disposition lias 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 honor: no thumb-screw is used, no iron boot, no scorching of flesh; but plenty of controversial bruising, laceration, and even life-long 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 suffer- ings 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 ot 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, unlike Aaron's rod, seemed not destined to proceed further in that marvelous activity. Meanwhile, he occu- pied 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 ques- tions 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 Earadoxes deferentially, contended without unpleasant eat and only with a sonorous eagerness against the per- sonality 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 skepticism concerning Manetho's chronology, or even the relation between the magnetic condition of the earth and the outbreak of revolutionary tendencies. Such flexibility 30 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. was naturally much helped by his amiable feeling toward women, 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 fel- low 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 mar- ried a " nice little woman " (the generic name for acquaint- ances' wives when they are not markedly disagreeable). He could not, they observed, want all his various knowl- edge 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 compar- ative history of the ancient civilizations, 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 possi- ble 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." HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 31 "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 Madico- j urn bras 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 hus- band'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 hap- piness. 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 can- not 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 hei husband the slightest ground for suspecting that she thought treasonably of his ideas in relation to the Magico- dumbras 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. Nut 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 32 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. general view of human prospects more cheerful. Fore- seeing that truth as presented hy himself would win the recognition of nis contemporaries, he excused with much liberality their rather rough treatment of other theorists whose basis was less perfect. His own periodical criti- cisms 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 cer- tainly 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, stupid- ity, 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 pro- duce on the too eminent scholar effects that must cer- tainly have set in on the third day from the dispatch 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, com- ing 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-ersclieinende 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 Eng land was still drowsy, and it seemed time now for Grampus HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 33 to find Merman's book under the heap and cut it open. For his own part, he was perfectly at ease about his sys- tem; but this is a world in which the truth requires defense, and specious falsehood must be met with expos- ure. 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 Ihe 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 Keview. 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 AMIS much read and more talked of, not because of any interest in the system of Grampus, or any precise concep- tion of the danger attending lax views of the Magicodum- bras 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 favorite passage was one in which a certain kind of sciolist was described as a creature of the Walrus kind, having a phan- tasmal resemblance to higher animals when seen by igno- rant 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 pretenses, since a con- genital incompetence to all precision of aim and movement made their every action a pretense 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 smatter- ing of linguistic and historical knowledge which he had presumed to be a sufficient basis for theorizing; 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, wh of her Chris- 3 34 THEOPHRASTUS SUCH. tians, 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 knawledge 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, V orient an point de vue actuel, in which he was dispassionate enough to speak of Grampus as possessing a coup d'ceil presque frangais in matters of historical interpretation, and of Merman as nevertheless an objector qui merit e 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 Eng- lish of Grampus was not always as correct as a Frenchman could desire, while Merman's objections were more sophis- tical than solid. Presently, indeed, there appeared an able extrait of Grampus's article in the valuable Rapporteur scientifique et historigue, and Merman's mistakes were thus brought under the notice of certain Frenchmen who are among the masters of those who know on oriental sub- jects. 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 wal- rus, 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 funda- mentally the right one he had a genuine conviction, what- ever 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 HOW WE ENCOURAGE RESEARCH. 35 clear-sighted judgment, more especially with regard to the Magicoaumbrae and Zuzumotzis, and that the best prepara- tion in this matter was a wide survey of history, and a diversified observation of men. Still, Merman was resolved to muster :ill the learning within his reach, and he wandered day and night through many wildernesses of German print, lie t ried c.oinperidious methods of learning oriental tongues, j'nd, so to speak, getting at the marrow of languages inde- pendently of the bones, for the chance of finding details i.o corroborate his own views, or possibly even to detect