Impressions of Theophrastus Such

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 _na***_ 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 p*****t, 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.