Impressions of Theophrastus Such

"So Young!"

Ganymede was once a girlishly handsome precocious youth. That one cannot

for any considerable number of years go on being youthful, girlishly

handsome, and precocious, seems on consideration to be a statement as

worthy of credit as the famous syllogistic conclusion, "Socrates was

mortal." But many circumstances have conspired to keep up in Ganymede

the illusion that he is surprisingly young. He was the last born of his

family, and from his earliest memory was accustomed to be commended as

such to the care of his elder brothers and sisters: he heard his mother

speak of him as her youngest darling with a loving pathos in her tone,

which naturally suffused his own view of himself, and gave him the

habitual consciousness of being at once very young and very interesting.

Then, the disclosure of his tender years was a constant matter of

astonishment to strangers who had had proof of his precocious talents,

and the astonishment extended to what is called the world at large when

he produced 'A Comparative Estimate of European Nations' before he was

well out of his teens. All comers, on a first interview, told him that

he was marvellously young, and some repeated the statement each time

they saw him; all critics who wrote about him called attention to the

same ground for wonder: his deficiencies and excesses were alike to be

accounted for by the flattering fact of his youth, and his youth was the

golden background which set off his many-hued endowments. Here was

already enough to establish a strong association between his sense of

identity and his sense of being unusually young. But after this he

devised and founded an ingenious organisation for consolidating the

literary interests of all the four continents (subsequently including

Australasia and Polynesia), he himself presiding in the central office,

which thus became a new theatre for the constantly repeated situation of

an astonished stranger in the presence of a boldly scheming

administrator found to be remarkably young. If we imagine with due

charity the effect on Ganymede, we shall think it greatly to his credit

that he continued to feel the necessity of being something more than

young, and did not sink by rapid degrees into a parallel of that

melancholy object, a superannuated youthful phenomenon. Happily he had

enough of valid, active faculty to save him from that tragic fate. He

had not exhausted his fountain of eloquent opinion in his 'Comparative

Estimate,' so as to feel himself, like some other juvenile celebrities,

the sad survivor of his own manifest destiny, or like one who has risen

too early in the morning, and finds all the solid day turned into a

fatigued afternoon. He has continued to be productive both of schemes

and writings, being perhaps helped by the fact that his 'Comparative

Estimate' did not greatly affect the currents of European thought, and

left him with the stimulating hope that he had not done his best, but

might yet produce what would make his youth more surprising than ever.

I saw something of him through his Antino** period, the time of rich

chesnut locks, parted not by a visible white line, but by a shadowed

furrow from which they fell in massive ripples to right and left. In

these slim days he looked the younger for being rather below the middle

size, and though at last one perceived him contracting an indefinable

air of self-consciousness, a slight exaggeration of the facial

movements, the attitudes, the little tricks, and the romance in

shirt-collars, which must be expected from one who, in spite of his

knowledge, was so exceedingly young, it was impossible to say that he

was making any great mistake about himself. He was only undergoing one

form of a common moral disease: being strongly mirrored for himself in

the remark of others, he was getting to see his real characteristics as

a dramatic part, a type to which his doings were always in

correspondence. Owing to my absence on travel and to other causes I had

lost sight of him for several years, but such a separation between two

who have not missed each other seems in this busy century only a

pleasant reason, when they happen to meet again in some old accustomed

haunt, for the one who has stayed at home to be more communicative about

himself than he can well be to those who have all along been in his

neighbourhood. He had married in the interval, and as if to keep up his

surprising youthfulness in all relations, he had taken a wife

considerably older than himself. It would probably have seemed to him a

disturbing inversion of the natural order that any one very near to him

should have been younger than he, except his own children who, however

young, would not necessarily hinder the normal surprise at the

youthfulness of their father. And if my glance had revealed my

impression on first seeing him again, he might have received a rather

disagreeable shock, which was far from my intention. My mind, having

retained a very exact image of his former appearance, took note of

unmistakeable changes such as a painter would certainly not have made by

way of flattering his subject. He had lost his slimness, and that curved

solidity which might have adorned a taller man was a rather sarcastic

threat to his short figure. The English branch of the Teutonic race does

not produce many fat youths, and I have even heard an American lady say

that she was much "disappointed" at the moderate number and size of our

fat men, considering their reputation in the United States; hence a

stranger would now have been apt to remark that Ganymede was unusually

plump for a distinguished writer, rather than unusually young. But how

was he to know this? Many long-standing prepossessions are as hard to be

corrected as a long-standing mispronunciation, against which the direct

experience of eye and ear is often powerless. And I could perceive that

Ganymede's inwrought sense of his surprising youthfulness had been

stronger than the superficial reckoning of his years and the merely

optical phenomena of the looking-glass. He now held a post under

Government, and not only saw, like most subordinate functionaries, how

ill everything was managed, but also what were the changes that a high

constructive ability would dictate; and in mentioning to me his own

speeches and other efforts towards propagating reformatory views in his

department, he concluded by changing his tone to a sentimental head

voice and saying--

"But I am so young; people object to any prominence on my part; I can

only get myself heard anonymously, and when some attention has been

drawn the name is sure to creep out. The writer is known to be young,

and things are none the forwarder."

"Well," said I, "youth seems the only drawback that is sure to diminish.

You and I have seven years less of it than when we last met."

"Ah?" returned Ganymede, as lightly as possible, at the same time

casting an observant glance over me, as if he were marking the effect of

seven years on a person who had probably begun life with an old look,

and even as an infant had given his countenance to that significant

doctrine, the transmigration of ancient souls into modern bodies.

I left him on that occasion without any melancholy forecast that his

illusion would be suddenly or painfully broken up. I saw that he was

well victualled and defended against a ten years' siege from ruthless

facts; and in the course of time observation convinced me that his

resistance received considerable aid from without. Each of his written

productions, as it came out, was still commented on as the work of a

very young man. One critic, finding that he wanted solidity, charitably

referred to his youth as an excuse. Another, dazzled by his brilliancy,

seemed to regard his youth as so wondrous that all other authors

appeared decrepit by comparison, and their style such as might be looked

for from gentlemen of the old school. Able pens (according to a familiar

metaphor) appeared to shake their heads good-humouredly, implying that

Ganymede's crudities were pardonable in one so exceedingly young. Such

unanimity amid diversity, which a distant posterity might take for

evidence that on the point of age at least there could have been no

mistake, was not really more difficult to account for than the

prevalence of cotton in our fabrics. Ganymede had been first introduced

into the writing world as remarkably young, and it was no exceptional

consequence that the first deposit of information about him held its

ground against facts which, however open to observation, were not

necessarily thought of. It is not so easy, with our rates and taxes and

need for economy in all directions, to cast away an epithet or remark

that turns up cheaply, and to go in expensive search after more genuine

substitutes. There is high Homeric precedent for keeping fast hold of an

epithet under all changes of circumstance, and so the precocious author

of the 'Comparative Estimate' heard the echoes repeating "Young

Ganymede" when an illiterate beholder at a railway station would have

given him forty years at least. Besides, important elders, sachems of

the clubs and public meetings, had a genuine opinion of him as young

enough to be checked for speech on subjects which they had spoken

mistakenly about when he was in his cradle; and then, the midway parting

of his crisp hair, not common among English committee-men, formed a

presumption against the ripeness of his judgment which nothing but a

speedy baldness could have removed.

It is but fair to mention all these outward confirmations of Ganymede's

illusion, which shows no signs of leaving him. It is true that he no

longer hears expressions of surprise at his youthfulness, on a first

introduction to an admiring reader; but this sort of external evidence

has become an unnecessary crutch to his habitual inward persuasion. His

manners, his costume, his suppositions of the impression he makes on

others, have all their former correspondence with the dramatic part of

the young genius. As to the incongruity of his contour and other little

accidents of physique, he is probably no more aware that they will

affect others as incongruities than Armida is conscious how much her

rouge provokes our notice of her wrinkles, and causes us to mention

sarcastically that motherly age which we should otherwise regard with

affectionate reverence.

But let us be just enough to admit that there may be old-young coxcombs

as well as old-young coquettes.