Impressions of Theophrastus Such | Page 7

through which Garrick as Hamlet in bob-wig and
knee-breeches moved his audience more than some have since done in
velvet tunic and plume? But every age since the golden may be made
more or less prosaic by minds that attend only to its vulgar and sordid
elements, of which there was always an abundance even in Greece and
Italy, the favourite realms of the retrospective optimists. To be quite
fair towards the ages, a little ugliness as well as beauty must be allowed
to each of them, a little implicit poetry even to those which echoed
loudest with servile, pompous, and trivial prose.
Such impartiality is not in vogue at present. If we acknowledge our
obligation to the ancients, it is hardly to be done without some flouting
of our contemporaries, who with all their faults must be allowed the
merit of keeping the world habitable for the refined eulogists of the
blameless past. One wonders whether the remarkable originators who
first had the notion of digging wells, or of churning for butter, and who
were certainly very useful to their own time as well as ours, were left
quite free from invidious comparison with predecessors who let the
water and the milk alone, or whether some rhetorical nomad, as he
stretched himself on the grass with a good appetite for contemporary
butter, became loud on the virtue of ancestors who were uncorrupted by
the produce of the cow; nay, whether in a high flight of imaginative
self-sacrifice (after swallowing the butter) he even wished himself
earlier born and already eaten for the sustenance of a generation more
naïve than his own.

I have often had the fool's hectic of wishing about the unalterable, but
with me that useless exercise has turned chiefly on the conception of a
different self, and not, as it usually does in literature, on the advantage
of having been born in a different age, and more especially in one
where life is imagined to have been altogether majestic and graceful.
With my present abilities, external proportions, and generally small
provision for ecstatic enjoyment, where is the ground for confidence
that I should have had a preferable career in such an epoch of society?
An age in which every department has its awkward-squad seems in my
mind's eye to suit me better. I might have wandered by the Strymon
under Philip and Alexander without throwing any new light on method
or organising the sum of human knowledge; on the other hand, I might
have objected to Aristotle as too much of a systematiser, and have
preferred the freedom of a little self-contradiction as offering more
chances of truth. I gather, too, from the undeniable testimony of his
disciple Theophrastus that there were bores, ill-bred persons, and
detractors even in Athens, of species remarkably corresponding to the
English, and not yet made endurable by being classic; and altogether,
with my present fastidious nostril, I feel that I am the better off for
possessing Athenian life solely as an inodorous fragment of antiquity.
As to Sappho's Mitylene, while I am convinced that the Lesbian capital
held some plain men of middle stature and slow conversational powers,
the addition of myself to their number, though clad in the majestic folds
of the himation and without cravat, would hardly have made a
sensation among the accomplished fair ones who were so precise in
adjusting their own drapery about their delicate ankles. Whereas by
being another sort of person in the present age I might have given it
some needful theoretic clue; or I might have poured forth poetic strains
which would have anticipated theory and seemed a voice from "the
prophetic soul of the wide world dreaming of things to come;" or I
might have been one of those benignant lovely souls who, without
astonishing the public and posterity, make a happy difference in the
lives close around them, and in this way lift the average of earthly joy:
in some form or other I might have been so filled from the store of
universal existence that I should have been freed from that empty
wishing which is like a child's cry to be inside a golden cloud, its
imagination being too ignorant to figure the lining of dimness and

damp.
On the whole, though there is some rash boasting about enlightenment,
and an occasional insistance on an originality which is that of the
present year's corn-crop, we seem too much disposed to indulge, and to
call by complimentary names, a greater charity for other portions of the
human race than for our contemporaries. All reverence and gratitude
for the worthy Dead on whose labours we have entered, all care for the
future generations whose lot we are preparing; but some affection and
fairness for those who are doing the actual work