Impressions of Theophrastus Such

A Political Molecule

The most arrant denier must admit that a man often furthers larger ends

than he is conscious of, and that while he is transacting his particular

affairs with the narrow pertinacity of a respectable ant, he subserves

an economy larger than any purpose of his own. Society is happily not

dependent for the growth of fellowship on the small minority already

endowed with comprehensive sympathy: any molecule of the body politic

working towards his own interest in an orderly way gets his

understanding more or less penetrated with the fact that his interest is

included in that of a large number. I have watched several political

molecules being educated in this way by the nature of things into a

faint feeling of fraternity. But at this moment I am thinking of Spike,

an elector who voted on the side of Progress though he was not inwardly

attached to it under that name. For abstractions are deities having many

specific names, local habitations, and forms of activity, and so get a

multitude of devout servants who care no more for them under their

highest titles than the celebrated person who, putting with forcible

brevity a view of human motives now much insisted on, asked what

Posterity had done for him that he should care for Posterity? To many

minds even among the ancients (thought by some to have been invariably

poetical) the goddess of wisdom was doubtless worshipped simply as the

patroness of spinning and weaving. Now spinning and weaving from a

manufacturing, wholesale point of view, was the chief form under which

Spike from early years had unconsciously been a devotee of Progress.

He was a political molecule of the most gentleman-like appearance, not

less than six feet high, and showing the utmost nicety in the care of

his person and equipment. His umbrella was especially remarkable for its

neatness, though perhaps he swung it unduly in walking. His complexion

was fresh, his eyes small, bright, and twinkling. He was seen to great

advantage in a hat and greatcoat--garments frequently fatal to the

impressiveness of shorter figures; but when he was uncovered in the

drawing-room, it was impossible not to observe that his head shelved off

too rapidly from the eyebrows towards the crown, and that his length of

limb seemed to have used up his mind so as to cause an air of

abstraction from conversational topics. He appeared, indeed, to be

preoccupied with a sense of his exquisite cleanliness, clapped his hands

together and rubbed them frequently, straightened his back, and even

opened his mouth and closed it again with a slight snap, apparently for

no other purpose than the confirmation to himself of his own powers in

that line. These are innocent exercises, but they are not such as give

weight to a man's personality. Sometimes Spike's mind, emerging from its

preoccupation, burst forth in a remark delivered with smiling zest; as,

that he did like to see gravel walks well rolled, or that a lady should

always wear the best jewellery, or that a bride was a most interesting

object; but finding these ideas received rather coldly, he would relapse

into abstraction, draw up his back, wrinkle his brows longitudinally,

and seem to regard society, even including gravel walks, jewellery, and

brides, as essentially a poor affair. Indeed his habit of mind was

desponding, and he took melancholy views as to the possible extent of

human pleasure and the value of existence. Especially after he had made

his fortune in the cotton manufacture, and had thus attained the chief

object of his ambition--the object which had engaged his talent for

order and persevering application. For his easy leisure caused him much

_ennui_. He was abstemious, and had none of those temptations to sensual

excess which fill up a man's time first with indulgence and then with

the process of getting well from its effects. He had not, indeed,

exhausted the sources of knowledge, but here again his notions of human

pleasure were narrowed by his want of appetite; for though he seemed

rather surprised at the consideration that Alfred the Great was a

Catholic, or that apart from the Ten Commandments any conception of

moral conduct had occurred to mankind, he was not stimulated to further

inquiries on these remote matters. Yet he aspired to what he regarded as

intellectual society, willingly entertained beneficed clergymen, and

bought the books he heard spoken of, arranging them carefully on the

shelves of what he called his library, and occasionally sitting alone in

the same room with them. But some minds seem well glazed by nature

against the admission of knowledge, and Spike's was one of them. It was

not, however, entirely so with regard to politics. He had had a strong

opinion about the Reform Bill, and saw clearly that the large trading

towns ought to send members. Portraits of the Reform heroes hung framed

and glazed in his library: he prided himself on being a Liberal. In this

last particular, as well as in not giving benefactions and not making

loans without interest, he showed unquestionable firmness. On the Repeal

of the Corn Laws, again, he was thoroughly convinced. His mind was

expansive towards foreign markets, and his imagination could see that

the people from whom we took corn might be able to take the cotton goods

which they had hitherto dispensed with. On his conduct in these

political concerns, his wife, otherwise influential as a woman who

belonged to a family with a title in it, and who had condescended in

marrying him, could gain no hold: she had to blush a little at what was

called her husband's "radicalism"--an epithet which was a very unfair

impeachment of Spike, who never went to the root of anything. But he

understood his own trading affairs, and in this way became a genuine,

constant political element. If he had been born a little later he could

have been accepted as an eligible member of Parliament, and if he had

belonged to a high family he might have done for a member of the

Government. Perhaps his indifference to "views" would have passed for

administrative judiciousness, and he would have been so generally silent

that he must often have been silent in the right place. But this is

empty speculation: there is no warrant for saying what Spike would have

been and known so as to have made a calculable political element, if he

had not been educated by having to manage his trade. A small mind

trained to useful occupation for the satisfying of private need becomes

a representative of genuine class-needs. Spike objected to certain items

of legislation because they hampered his own trade, but his neighbours'

trade was hampered by the same causes; and though he would have been

simply selfish in a question of light or water between himself and a

fellow-townsman, his need for a change in legislation, being shared by

all his neighbours in trade, ceased to be simply selfish, and raised him

to a sense of common injury and common benefit. True, if the law could

have been changed for the benefit of his particular business, leaving

the cotton trade in general in a sorry condition while he prospered,

Spike might not have thought that result intolerably unjust; but the

nature of things did not allow of such a result being contemplated as

possible; it allowed of an enlarged market for Spike only through the

enlargement of his neighbours' market, and the Possible is always the

ultimate master of our efforts and desires. Spike was obliged to

contemplate a general benefit, and thus became public-spirited in spite

of himself. Or rather, the nature of things transmuted his active egoism

into a demand for a public benefit. Certainly if Spike had been born a

marquis he could not have had the same chance of being useful as a

political element. But he might have had the same appearance, have been

equally null in conversation, sceptical as to the reality of pleasure,

and destitute of historical knowledge; perhaps even dimly disliking

Jesuitism as a quality in Catholic minds, or regarding Bacon as the

inventor of physical science. The depths of middle-aged gentlemen's

ignorance will never be known, for want of public examinations in this

branch.