Yeast: a Problem | Page 5

as a problem. It would be the
height of arrogance in me to do more than indicate the direction in
which I think a solution may be found. I fear that my elder readers may
complain that I have no right to start doubts without answering them. I
can only answer,-- Would that I had started them! would that I was not
seeing them daily around me, under some form or other, in just the very
hearts for whom one would most wish the peace and strength of a fixed
and healthy faith. To the young, this book can do no harm; for it will
put into their minds little but what is there already. To the elder, it may
do good; for it may teach some of them, as I earnestly hope, something
of the real, but too often utterly unsuspected, state of their own

children's minds; something of the reasons of that calamitous
estrangement between themselves and those who will succeed them,
which is often too painful and oppressive to be confessed to their own
hearts! Whatever amount of obloquy this book may bring upon me, I
shall think that a light price to pay, if by it I shall have helped, even in a
single case, to 'turn the hearts of the parents to the children, and the
hearts of the children to the parents, before the great and terrible day of
the Lord come,'--as come it surely will, if we persist much longer in
substituting denunciation for sympathy, instruction for education, and
Pharisaism for the Good News of the Kingdom of God.
1851.
CHAPTER I
: THE PHILOSOPHY OF FOX-HUNTING

As this my story will probably run counter to more than one fashion of
the day, literary and other, it is prudent to bow to those fashions
wherever I honestly can; and therefore to begin with a scrap of
description.
The edge of a great fox-cover; a flat wilderness of low leafless oaks
fortified by a long, dreary, thorn capped clay ditch, with sour red water
oozing out at every yard; a broken gate leading into a straight wood
ride, ragged with dead grasses and black with fallen leaves, the centre
mashed into a quagmire by innumerable horsehoofs; some forty red
coats and some four black; a sprinkling of young- farmers, resplendent
in gold buttons and green; a pair of sleek drab stable-keepers, showing
off horses for sale; the surgeon of the union, in Mackintosh and
antigropelos; two holiday schoolboys with trousers strapped down to
bursting point, like a penny steamer's safety-valve; a midshipman, the
only merry one in the field, bumping about on a fretting, sweating hack,
with its nose a foot above its ears; and Lancelot Smith, who then kept
two good horses, and 'rode forward' as a fine young fellow of
three-and-twenty who can afford it, and 'has nothing else to do,' has a

very good right to ride.
But what is a description, without a sketch of the weather?--In these
Pantheist days especially, when a hero or heroine's moral state must
entirely depend on the barometer, and authors talk as if Christians were
cabbages, and a man's soul as well as his lungs might be saved by
sea-breezes and sunshine; or his character developed by wearing guano
in his shoes, and training himself against a south wall--we must have a
weather description, though, as I shall presently show, one in flat
contradiction of the popular theory. Luckily for our information,
Lancelot was very much given to watch both the weather and himself,
and had indeed, while in his teens, combined the two in a sort of a
soul-almanack on the principles just mentioned--somewhat in this
style:--
'Monday, 21st.--Wind S.W., bright sun, mercury at 30.5 inches. Felt my
heart expanded towards the universe. Organs of veneration and
benevolence pleasingly excited; and gave a shilling to a tramp. An
inexpressible joy bounded through every vein, and the soft air breathed
purity and self-sacrifice through my soul. As I watched the beetles,
those children of the sun, who, as divine Shelley says, "laden with light
and odour, pass over the gleam of the living grass," I gained an
Eden-glimpse of the pleasures of virtue.
'N.B. Found the tramp drunk in a ditch. I could not have degraded
myself on such a day--ah! how could he?
'Tuesday, 22d.--Barometer rapidly falling. Heavy clouds in the
south-east. My heart sank into gloomy forebodings. Read Manfred, and
doubted whether I should live long. The laden weight of destiny
seemed to crush down my aching forehead, till the thunderstorm burst,
and peace was restored to my troubled soul.'
This was very bad; but to do justice to Lancelot, he had grown out of it
at the time when my story begins. He was now in the fifth act of his
'Werterean'