Impressions of Theophrastus Such | Page 3

never loved me, or
known that I loved her. Though continually in society, and caring about
the joys and sorrows of my neighbours, 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 he 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
contribution, 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 travelling 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 perceptive 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 unfavourable
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 satisfaction of finding that when they were appropriated by some
one else they were found remarkable and even brilliant. 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 inheritance 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 footman. 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 secondary consideration with audiences who have given a new
scope to the ex pede Herculem principle, and from awkward 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 disposition, 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 consoling point of view, some warrantable method of
softening the hard peas I had to walk on, some comfortable fanaticism
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 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