Yeast: a Problem | Page 6

stage; that sentimental measles, which all clever men must
catch once in their lives, and which, generally, like the physical
measles, if taken early, settles their constitution for good or evil; if

taken late, goes far towards killing them. Lancelot had found Byron
and Shelley pall on his taste and commenced devouring Bulwer and
worshipping Ernest Maltravers. He had left Bulwer for old ballads and
romances, and Mr. Carlyle's reviews; was next alternately chivalry-mad;
and Germany-mad; was now reading hard at physical science; and on
the whole, trying to become a great man, without any very clear notion
of what a great man ought to be. Real education he never had had. Bred
up at home under his father, a rich merchant, he had gone to college
with a large stock of general information, and a particular mania for
dried plants, fossils, butterflies, and sketching, and some such creed as
this:--
That he was very clever.
That he ought to make his fortune.
That a great many things were very pleasant--beautiful things among
the rest.
That it was a fine thing to be 'superior,' gentleman-like, generous, and
courageous.
That a man ought to be religious.
And left college with a good smattering of classics and mathematics,
picked up in the intervals of boat-racing and hunting, and much the
same creed as he brought with him, except in regard to the last article.
The scenery-and-natural-history mania was now somewhat at a
discount. He had discovered a new natural object, including in itself
all--more than all--yet found beauties and wonders--woman!
Draw, draw the veil and weep, guardian angel! if such there be. What
was to be expected? Pleasant things were pleasant--there was no doubt
of that, whatever else might be doubtful. He had read Byron by stealth;
he had been flogged into reading Ovid and Tibullus; and commanded
by his private tutor to read Martial and Juvenal 'for the improvement of
his style.' All conversation on the subject of love had been prudishly
avoided, as usual, by his parents and teacher. The parts of the Bible

which spoke of it had been always kept out of his sight. Love had been
to him, practically, ground tabooed and 'carnal.' What was to be
expected? Just what happened--if woman's beauty had nothing holy in
it, why should his fondness for it? Just what happens every day--that he
had to sow his wild oats for himself, and eat the fruit thereof, and the
dirt thereof also.
O fathers! fathers! and you, clergymen, who monopolise education!
either tell boys the truth about love, or do not put into their hands,
without note or comment, the foul devil's lies about it, which make up
the mass of the Latin poets--and then go, fresh from teaching Juvenal
and Ovid, to declaim at Exeter Hall against poor Peter Dens's
well-meaning prurience! Had we not better take the beam out of our
own eye before we meddle with the mote in the Jesuit's?
But where is my description of the weather all this time?
I cannot, I am sorry to say, give any very cheerful account of the
weather that day. But what matter? Are Englishmen hedge-gnats, who
only take their sport when the sun shines? Is it not, on the contrary,
symbolical of our national character, that almost all our field
amusements are wintry ones? Our fowling, our hunting, our
punt-shooting (pastime for Hymir himself and the frost giants)--our
golf and skating,--our very cricket, and boat-racing, and jack and
grayling fishing, carried on till we are fairly frozen out. We are a stern
people, and winter suits us. Nature then retires modestly into the
background, and spares us the obtrusive glitter of summer, leaving us
to think and work; and therefore it happens that in England, it may be
taken as a general rule, that whenever all the rest of the world is
in-doors, we are out and busy, and on the whole, the worse the day, the
better the deed.
The weather that day, the first day Lancelot ever saw his beloved, was
truly national. A silent, dim, distanceless, steaming, rotting day in
March. The last brown oak-leaf which had stood out the winter's frost,
spun and quivered plump down, and then lay; as if ashamed to have
broken for a moment the ghastly stillness, like an awkward guest at a
great dumb dinner-party. A cold suck of wind just proved its existence,

by toothaches on the north side of all faces. The spiders having been
weather-bewitched the night before, had unanimously agreed to cover
every brake and brier with gossamer- cradles, and never a fly to be
caught in them; like Manchester cotton-spinners madly glutting the
markets in the teeth of 'no demand.' The steam crawled out of the dank
turf, and reeked off the flanks and nostrils of the