Impressions of Theophrastus Such

A Man Surprised at His Originality

Among the many acute sayings of La Rochefoucauld, there is hardly one

more acute than this: "La plus grande ambition n'en a pas la moindre

apparence lorsqu'elle se rencontre dans une impossibilit* absolue

d'arriver o* elle aspire." Some of us might do well to use this hint in

our treatment of acquaintances and friends from whom we are expecting

gratitude because we are so very kind in thinking of them, inviting

them, and even listening to what they say--considering how insignificant

they must feel themselves to be. We are often fallaciously confident in

supposing that our friend's state of mind is appropriate to our moderate

estimate of his importance: almost as if we imagined the humble mollusc

(so useful as an illustration) to have a sense of his own exceeding

softness and low place in the scale of being. Your mollusc, on the

contrary, is inwardly objecting to every other grade of solid rather

than to himself. Accustomed to observe what we think an unwarrantable

conceit exhibiting itself in ridiculous pretensions and forwardness to

play the lion's part, in obvious self-complacency and loud

peremptoriness, we are not on the alert to detect the egoistic claims of

a more exorbitant kind often hidden under an apparent neutrality or an

acquiescence in being put out of the question.

Thoughts of this kind occurred to me yesterday when I saw the name of

Lentulus in the obituary. The majority of his acquaintances, I imagine,

have always thought of him as a man justly unpretending and as nobody's

rival; but some of them have perhaps been struck with surprise at his

reserve in praising the works of his contemporaries, and have now and

then felt themselves in need of a key to his remarks on men of celebrity

in various departments. He was a man of fair position, deriving his

income from a business in which he did nothing, at leisure to frequent

clubs and at ease in giving dinners; well-looking, polite, and generally

acceptable in society as a part of what we may call its bread-crumb--the

neutral basis needful for the plums and spice. Why, then, did he speak

of the modern Maro or the modern Flaccus with a peculiarity in his tone

of assent to other people's praise which might almost have led you to

suppose that the eminent poet had borrowed money of him and showed an

indisposition to repay? He had no criticism to offer, no sign of

objection more specific than a slight cough, a scarcely perceptible

pause before assenting, and an air of self-control in his utterance--as

if certain considerations had determined him not to inform against the

so-called poet, who to his knowledge was a mere versifier. If you had

questioned him closely, he would perhaps have confessed that he did

think something better might be done in the way of Eclogues and

Georgics, or of Odes and Epodes, and that to his mind poetry was

something very different from what had hitherto been known under that

name.

For my own part, being of a superstitious nature, given readily to

imagine alarming causes, I immediately, on first getting these mystic

hints from Lentulus, concluded that he held a number of entirely

original poems, or at the very least a revolutionary treatise on

poetics, in that melancholy manuscript state to which works excelling

all that is ever printed are necessarily condemned; and I was long timid

in speaking of the poets when he was present. For what might not

Lentulus have done, or be profoundly aware of, that would make my

ignorant impressions ridiculous? One cannot well be sure of the negative

in such a case, except through certain positives that bear witness to

it; and those witnesses are not always to be got hold of. But time

wearing on, I perceived that the attitude of Lentulus towards the

philosophers was essentially the same as his attitude towards the poets;

nay, there was something so much more decided in his mode of closing his

mouth after brief speech on the former, there was such an air of rapt

consciousness in his private hints as to his conviction that all

thinking hitherto had been an elaborate mistake, and as to his own

power of conceiving a sound basis for a lasting superstructure, that I

began to believe less in the poetical stores, and to infer that the line

of Lentulus lay rather in the rational criticism of our beliefs and in

systematic construction. In this case I did not figure to myself the

existence of formidable manuscripts ready for the press; for great

thinkers are known to carry their theories growing within their minds

long before committing them to paper, and the ideas which made a new

passion for them when their locks were jet or auburn, remain perilously

unwritten, an inwardly developing condition of their successive selves,

until the locks are grey or scanty. I only meditated improvingly on the

way in which a man of exceptional faculties, and even carrying within

him some of that fierce refiner's fire which is to purge away the dross

of human error, may move about in society totally unrecognised, regarded

as a person whose opinion is superfluous, and only rising into a power

in emergencies of threatened black-balling. Imagine a Descartes or a

Locke being recognised for nothing more than a good fellow and a

perfect gentleman--what a painful view does such a picture suggest of

impenetrable dulness in the society around them!

I would at all times rather be reduced to a cheaper estimate of a

particular person, if by that means I can get a more cheerful view of my

fellow-men generally; and I confess that in a certain curiosity which

led me to cultivate Lentulus's acquaintance, my hope leaned to the

discovery that he was a less remarkable man than he had seemed to imply.

It would have been a grief to discover that he was bitter or malicious,

but by finding him to be neither a mighty poet, nor a revolutionary

poetical critic, nor an epoch-making philosopher, my admiration for the

poets and thinkers whom he rated so low would recover all its buoyancy,

and I should not be left to trust to that very suspicious sort of merit

which constitutes an exception in the history of mankind, and recommends

itself as the total abolitionist of all previous claims on our

confidence. You are not greatly surprised at the infirm logic of the

coachman who would persuade you to engage him by insisting that any

other would be sure to rob you in the matter of hay and corn, thus

demanding a difficult belief in him as the sole exception from the

frailties of his calling; but it is rather astonishing that the

wholesale decriers of mankind and its performances should be even more

unwary in their reasoning than the coachman, since each of them not

merely confides in your regarding himself as an exception, but overlooks

the almost certain fact that you are wondering whether he inwardly

excepts _you_. Now, conscious of entertaining some common opinions which

seemed to fall under the mildly intimated but sweeping ban of Lentulus,

my self-complacency was a little concerned.

Hence I deliberately attempted to draw out Lentulus in private dialogue,

for it is the reverse of injury to a man to offer him that hearing which

he seems to have found nowhere else. And for whatever purposes silence

may be equal to gold, it cannot be safely taken as an indication of

specific ideas. I sought to know why Lentulus was more than indifferent

to the poets, and what was that new poetry which he had either written

or, as to its principles, distinctly conceived. But I presently found

that he knew very little of any particular poet, and had a general

notion of poetry as the use of artificial language to express unreal

sentiments: he instanced "The Giaour," "Lalla Rookh," "The Pleasures of

Hope," and "Ruin seize thee, ruthless King;" adding, "and plenty more."

On my observing that he probably preferred a larger, simpler style, he

emphatically assented. "Have you not," said I, "written something of

that order?" "No; but I often compose as I go along. I see how things

might be written as fine as Ossian, only with true ideas. The world has

no notion what poetry will be."

It was impossible to disprove this, and I am always glad to believe that

the poverty of our imagination is no measure of the world's resources.

Our posterity will no doubt get fuel in ways that we are unable to

devise for them. But what this conversation persuaded me of was, that

the birth with which the mind of Lentulus was pregnant could not be

poetry, though I did not question that he composed as he went along, and

that the exercise was accompanied with a great sense of power. This is a

frequent experience in dreams, and much of our waking experience is but

a dream in the daylight. Nay, for what I saw, the compositions might be

fairly classed as Ossianic. But I was satisfied that Lentulus could not

disturb my grateful admiration for the poets of all ages by eclipsing

them, or by putting them under a new electric light of criticism.

Still, he had himself thrown the chief emphasis of his protest and his

consciousness of corrective illumination on the philosophic thinking of

our race; and his tone in assuring me that everything which had been

done in that way was wrong--that Plato, Robert Owen, and Dr Tuffle who

wrote in the 'Regulator,' were all equally mistaken--gave my

superstitious nature a thrill of anxiety. After what had passed about

the poets, it did not seem likely that Lentulus had all systems by

heart; but who could say he had not seized that thread which may

somewhere hang out loosely from the web of things and be the clue of

unravelment? We need not go far to learn that a prophet is not made by

erudition. Lentulus at least had not the bias of a school; and if it

turned out that he was in agreement with any celebrated thinker,

ancient or modern, the agreement would have the value of an undesigned

coincidence not due to forgotten reading. It was therefore with renewed

curiosity that I engaged him on this large subject--the universal

erroneousness of thinking up to the period when Lentulus began that

process. And here I found him more copious than on the theme of poetry.

He admitted that he did contemplate writing down his thoughts, but his

difficulty was their abundance. Apparently he was like the woodcutter

entering the thick forest and saying, "Where shall I begin?" The same

obstacle appeared in a minor degree to cling about his verbal

exposition, and accounted perhaps for his rather helter-skelter choice

of remarks bearing on the number of unaddressed letters sent to the

post-office; on what logic really is, as tending to support the buoyancy

of human mediums and mahogany tables; on the probability of all miracles

under all religions when explained by hidden laws, and my

unreasonableness in supposing that their profuse occurrence at half a

guinea an hour in recent times was anything more than a coincidence; on

the haphazard way in which marriages are determined--showing the

baselessness of social and moral schemes; and on his expectation that he

should offend the scientific world when he told them what he thought of

electricity as an agent.

No man's appearance could be graver or more gentleman-like than that of

Lentulus as we walked along the Mall while he delivered these

observations, understood by himself to have a regenerative bearing on

human society. His wristbands and black gloves, his hat and nicely

clipped hair, his laudable moderation in beard, and his evident

discrimination in choosing his tailor, all seemed to excuse the

prevalent estimate of him as a man untainted with heterodoxy, and likely

to be so unencumbered with opinions that he would always be useful as an

assenting and admiring listener. Men of science seeing him at their

lectures doubtless flattered themselves that he came to learn from them;

the philosophic ornaments of our time, expounding some of their luminous

ideas in the social circle, took the meditative gaze of Lentulus for one

of surprise not unmixed with a just reverence at such close reasoning

towards so novel a conclusion; and those who are called men of the

world considered him a good fellow who might be asked to vote for a

friend of their own and would have no troublesome notions to make him

unaccommodating. You perceive how very much they were all mistaken,

except in qualifying him as a good fellow.

This Lentulus certainly was, in the sense of being free from envy,

hatred, and malice; and such freedom was all the more remarkable an

indication of native benignity, because of his gaseous, illimitably

expansive conceit. Yes, conceit; for that his enormous and contentedly

ignorant confidence in his own rambling thoughts was usually clad in a

decent silence, is no reason why it should be less strictly called by

the name directly implying a complacent self-estimate unwarranted by

performance. Nay, the total privacy in which he enjoyed his

consciousness of inspiration was the very condition of its undisturbed

placid nourishment and gigantic growth. Your audibly arrogant man

exposes himself to tests: in attempting to make an impression on others

he may possibly (not always) be made to feel his own lack of

definiteness; and the demand for definiteness is to all of us a needful

check on vague depreciation of what others do, and vague ecstatic trust

in our own superior ability. But Lentulus was at once so unreceptive,

and so little gifted with the power of displaying his miscellaneous

deficiency of information, that there was really nothing to hinder his

astonishment at the spontaneous crop of ideas which his mind secretly

yielded. If it occurred to him that there were more meanings than one

for the word "motive," since it sometimes meant the end aimed at and

sometimes the feeling that prompted the aiming, and that the word

"cause" was also of changeable import, he was naturally struck with the

truth of his own perception, and was convinced that if this vein were

well followed out much might be made of it. Men were evidently in the

wrong about cause and effect, else why was society in the confused state

we behold? And as to motive, Lentulus felt that when he came to write

down his views he should look deeply into this kind of subject and show

up thereby the anomalies of our social institutions; meanwhile the

various aspects of "motive" and "cause" flitted about among the motley

crowd of ideas which he regarded as original, and pregnant with

reformative efficacy. For his unaffected goodwill made him regard all

his insight as only valuable because it tended towards reform.

The respectable man had got into his illusory maze of discoveries by

letting go that clue of conformity in his thinking which he had kept

fast hold of in his tailoring and manners. He regarded heterodoxy as a

power in itself, and took his inacquaintance with doctrines for a

creative dissidence. But his epitaph needs not to be a melancholy one.

His benevolent disposition was more effective for good than his silent

presumption for harm. He might have been mischievous but for the lack of

words: instead of being astonished at his inspirations in private, he

might have clad his addled originalities, disjointed commonplaces, blind

denials, and balloon-like conclusions, in that mighty sort of language

which would have made a new Koran for a knot of followers. I mean no

disrespect to the ancient Koran, but one would not desire the roc to lay

more eggs and give us a whole wing-flapping brood to soar and make

twilight.

Peace be with Lentulus, for he has left us in peace. Blessed is the man

who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of

the fact--from calling on us to look through a heap of millet-seed in

order to be sure that there is no pearl in it.