Impressions of Theophrastus Such | Page 8

of the world, some
attempt to regard them with the same freedom from ill-temper, whether
on private or public grounds, as we may hope will be felt by those who
will call us ancient! Otherwise, the looking before and after, which is
our grand human privilege, is in danger of turning to a sort of
other-worldliness, breeding a more illogical indifference or bitterness
than was ever bred by the ascetic's contemplation of heaven. Except on
the ground of a primitive golden age and continuous degeneracy, I see
no rational footing for scorning the whole present population of the
globe, unless I scorn every previous generation from whom they have
inherited their diseases of mind and body, and by consequence scorn
my own scorn, which is equally an inheritance of mixed ideas and
feelings concocted for me in the boiling caldron of this universally
contemptible life, and so on--scorning to infinity. This may represent
some actual states of mind, for it is a narrow prejudice of
mathematicians to suppose that ways of thinking are to be driven out of
the field by being reduced to an absurdity. The Absurd is taken as an
excellent juicy thistle by many constitutions.
Reflections of this sort have gradually determined me not to grumble at
the age in which I happen to have been born--a natural tendency
certainly older than Hesiod. Many ancient beautiful things are lost,
many ugly modern things have arisen; but invert the proposition and it
is equally true. I at least am a modern with some interest in advocating
tolerance, and notwithstanding an inborn beguilement which carries my
affection and regret continually into an imagined past, I am aware that I
must lose all sense of moral proportion unless I keep alive a stronger
attachment to what is near, and a power of admiring what I best know

and understand. Hence this question of wishing to be rid of one's
contemporaries associates itself with my filial feeling, and calls up the
thought that I might as justifiably wish that I had had other parents than
those whose loving tones are my earliest memory, and whose last
parting first taught me the meaning of death. I feel bound to quell such
a wish as blasphemy.
Besides, there are other reasons why I am contented that my father was
a country parson, born much about the same time as Scott and
Wordsworth; notwithstanding certain qualms I have felt at the fact that
the property on which I am living was saved out of tithe before the
period of commutation, and without the provisional transfiguration into
a modus. It has sometimes occurred to me when I have been taking a
slice of excellent ham that, from a too tenable point of view, I was
breakfasting on a small squealing black pig which, more than half a
century ago, was the unwilling representative of spiritual advantages
not otherwise acknowledged by the grudging farmer or dairyman who
parted with him. One enters on a fearful labyrinth in tracing compound
interest backward, and such complications of thought have reduced the
flavour of the ham; but since I have nevertheless eaten it, the chief
effect has been to moderate the severity of my radicalism (which was
not part of my paternal inheritance) and to raise the assuaging reflection,
that if the pig and the parishioner had been intelligent enough to
anticipate my historical point of view, they would have seen
themselves and the rector in a light that would have made tithe
voluntary. Notwithstanding such drawbacks I am rather fond of the
mental furniture I got by having a father who was well acquainted with
all ranks of his neighbours, and am thankful that he was not one of
those aristocratic clergymen who could not have sat down to a meal
with any family in the parish except my lord's--still more that he was
not an earl or a marquis. A chief misfortune of high birth is that it
usually shuts a man out from the large sympathetic knowledge of
human experience which comes from contact with various classes on
their own level, and in my father's time that entail of social ignorance
had not been disturbed as we see it now. To look always from overhead
at the crowd of one's fellow-men must be in many ways incapacitating,
even with the best will and intelligence. The serious blunders it must

lead to in the effort to manage them for their good, one may see clearly
by the mistaken ways people take of flattering and enticing those
whose associations are unlike their own. Hence I have always thought
that the most fortunate Britons are those whose experience has given
them a practical share in many aspects of the national lot, who have
lived long among the mixed commonalty, roughing it