Impressions of Theophrastus Such | Page 6

the compass where the haze is unbroken. Why should I not indulge this
remaining illusion, since I do not take my approving choral paradise as
a warrant for setting the press to work again and making some thousand
sheets of superior paper unsaleable? I leave my manuscripts to a
judgment outside my imagination, but I will not ask to hear it, or
request my friend to pronounce, before I have been buried decently,
what he really thinks of my parts, and to state candidly whether my
papers would be most usefully applied in lighting the cheerful domestic
fire. It is too probable that he will be exasperated at the trouble I have
given him of reading them; but the consequent clearness and vivacity
with which he could demonstrate to me that the fault of my manuscripts,
as of my one published work, is simply flatness, and not that surpassing
subtilty which is the preferable ground of popular neglect--this verdict,
however instructively expressed, is a portion of earthly discipline of
which I will not beseech my friend to be the instrument. Other persons,
I am aware, have not the same cowardly shrinking from a candid
opinion of their performances, and are even importunately eager for it;
but I have convinced myself in numerous cases that such exposers of
their own back to the smiter were of too hopeful a disposition to
believe in the scourge, and really trusted in a pleasant anointing, an
outpouring of balm without any previous wounds. I am of a less
trusting disposition, and will only ask my friend to use his judgment in
insuring me against posthumous mistake.
Thus I make myself a charter to write, and keep the pleasing, inspiring
illusion of being listened to, though I may sometimes write about
myself. What I have already said on this too familiar theme has been

meant only as a preface, to show that in noting the weaknesses of my
acquaintances I am conscious of my fellowship with them. That a
gratified sense of superiority is at the root of barbarous laughter may be
at least half the truth. But there is a loving laughter in which the only
recognised superiority is that of the ideal self, the God within, holding
the mirror and the scourge for our own pettiness as well as our
neighbours'.

II.
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