how he himself had just breakfasted on their honey. The badger replied,
peevishly, "The stings are in my flesh, and the sweetness is on your
muzzle." The bear, it is said, was surprised at the badger's want of
altruism.

But this difference of sensibility between Laniger and his friends only
mirrors in a faint way the difference between his own point of view and
that of the man who has injured him. If those neutral, perhaps even
affectionate persons, form no lively conception of what Laniger suffers,
how should Mordax have any such sympathetic imagination to check him in
what he persuades himself is a scourging administered by the qualified
man to the unqualified? Depend upon it, his conscience, though active
enough in some relations, has never given him a twinge because of his
polemical rudeness and even brutality. He would go from the room where
he has been tiring himself through the watches of the night in lifting
and turning a sick friend, and straightway write a reply or rejoinder in
which he mercilessly pilloried a Laniger who had supposed that he could
tell the world something else or more than had been sanctioned by the
eminent Mordax--and what was worse, had sometimes really done so. Does
this nullify the genuineness of motive which made him tender to his
suffering friend? Not at all. It only proves that his arrogant egoism,
set on fire, sends up smoke and flame where just before there had been
the dews of fellowship and pity. He is angry and equips himself
accordingly--with a penknife to give the offender a _comprachico_
countenance, a mirror to show him the effect, and a pair of nailed boots
to give him his dismissal. All this to teach him who the Romans really
were, and to purge Inquiry of incompetent intrusion, so rendering an
important service to mankind.

When a man is in a rage and wants to hurt another in consequence, he can
always regard himself as the civil arm of a spiritual power, and all the
more easily because there is real need to assert the righteous efficacy
of indignation. I for my part feel with the Lanigers, and should object
all the more to their or my being lacerated and dressed with salt, if
the administrator of such torture alleged as a motive his care for Truth
and posterity, and got himself pictured with a halo in consequence. In
transactions between fellow-men it is well to consider a little, in the
first place, what is fair and kind towards the person immediately
concerned, before we spit and roast him on behalf of the next century
but one. Wide-reaching motives, blessed and glorious as they are, and of
the highest sacramental virtue, have their dangers, like all else that
touches the mixed life of the earth. They are archangels with awful brow
and flaming sword, summoning and encouraging us to do the right and the
divinely heroic, and we feel a beneficent tremor in their presence; but
to learn what it is they thus summon us to do, we have to consider the
mortals we are elbowing, who are of our own stature and our own
appetites. I cannot feel sure how my voting will affect the condition of
Central Asia in the coming ages, but I have good reason to believe that
the future populations there will be none the worse off because I
abstain from conjectural vilification of my opponents during the present
parliamentary session, and I am very sure that I shall be less injurious
to my contemporaries. On the whole, and in the vast majority of
instances, the action by which we can do the best for future ages is of
the sort which has a certain beneficence and grace for contemporaries. A
sour father may reform prisons, but considered in his sourness he does
harm. The deed of Judas has been attributed to far-reaching views, and
the wish to hasten his Master's declaration of himself as the Messiah.
Perhaps--I will not maintain the contrary--Judas represented his motive
in this way, and felt justified in his traitorous kiss; but my belief
that he deserved, metaphorically speaking, to be where Dante saw him, at
the bottom of the Malebolge, would not be the less strong because he was
not convinced that his action was detestable. I refuse to accept a man
who has the stomach for such treachery, as a hero impatient for the
redemption of mankind and for the beginning of a reign when the kisses
shall be those of peace and righteousness.

All this is by the way, to show that my apology for Mordax was not
founded on his persuasion of superiority in his own motives, but on the
compatibility of unfair, equivocal, and even cruel actions with a nature
which, apart from special temptations, is kindly and generous; and also
to enforce the need of checks from a fellow-feeling with those whom our
acts immediately (not distantly) concern. Will any one be so hardy as to
maintain that an otherwise worthy man cannot be vain and arrogant? I
think most of us have some interest in arguing the contrary. And it is
of the nature of vanity and arrogance, if unchecked, to become cruel and
self-justifying. There are fierce beasts within: chain them, chain them,
and let them learn to cower before the creature with wider reason. This
is what one wishes for Mordax--that his heart and brain should restrain
the outleap of roar and talons.

As to his unwillingness to admit that an idea which he has not
discovered is novel to him, one is surprised that quick intellect and
shrewd observation do not early gather reasons for being ashamed of a
mental trick which makes one among the comic parts of that various actor
Conceited Ignorance.

I have a sort of valet and factotum, an excellent, respectable servant,
whose spelling is so unvitiated by non-phonetic superfluities that he
writes _night_ as _nit_. One day, looking over his accounts, I said to
him jocosely, "You are in the latest fashion with your spelling, Pummel:
most people spell "night" with a _gh_ between the _i_ and the _t_, but
the greatest scholars now spell it as you do." "So I suppose, sir,"
says Pummel; "I've see it with a _gh_, but I've noways give into that
myself." You would never catch Pummel in an interjection of surprise. I
have sometimes laid traps for his astonishment, but he has escaped them
all, either by a respectful neutrality, as of one who would not appear
to notice that his master had been taking too much wine, or else by that
strong persuasion of his all-knowingness which makes it simply
impossible for him to feel himself newly informed. If I tell him that
the world is spinning round and along like a top, and that he is
spinning with it, he says, "Yes, I've heard a deal of that in my time,
sir," and lifts the horizontal lines of his brow a little higher,
balancing his head from side to side as if it were too painfully full.
Whether I tell him that they cook puppies in China, that there are ducks
with fur coats in Australia, or that in some parts of the world it is
the pink of politeness to put your tongue out on introduction to a
respectable stranger, Pummel replies, "So I suppose, sir," with an air
of resignation to hearing my poor version of well-known things, such as
elders use in listening to lively boys lately presented with an
anecdote book. His utmost concession is, that what you state is what he
would have supplied if you had given him _carte blanche_ instead of your
needless instruction, and in this sense his favourite answer is, "I
should say."

"Pummel," I observed, a little irritated at not getting my coffee, "if
you were to carry your kettle and spirits of wine up a mountain of a
morning, your water would boil there sooner." "I should say, sir." "Or,
there are boiling springs in Iceland. Better go to Iceland." "That's
what I've been thinking, sir."

I have taken to asking him hard questions, and as I expected, he never
admits his own inability to answer them without representing it as
common to the human race. "What is the cause of the tides, Pummel?"

"Well, sir, nobody rightly knows. Many gives their opinion, but if I
was to give mine, it 'ud be different."

But while he is never surprised himself, he is constantly imagining
situations of surprise for others. His own consciousness is that of one
so thoroughly soaked in knowledge that further absorption is
impossible, but his neighbours appear to him to be in the state of
thirsty sponges which it is a charity to besprinkle. His great
interest in thinking of foreigners is that they must be surprised at
what they see in England, and especially at the beef. He is often
occupied with the surprise Adam must have felt at the sight of the
assembled animals--"for he was not like us, sir, used from a b'y to
Wombwell's shows." He is fond of discoursing to the lad who acts as
shoe-black and general subaltern, and I have overheard him saying to
that small upstart, with some severity, "Now don't you pretend to know,
because the more you pretend the more I see your ignirance"--a lucidity
on his part which has confirmed my impression that the thoroughly
self-satisfied person is the only one fully to appreciate the charm of
humility in others.

Your diffident self-suspecting mortal is not very angry that others
should feel more comfortable about themselves, provided they are not
otherwise offensive: he is rather like the chilly person, glad to sit
next a warmer neighbour; or the timid, glad to have a courageous
fellow-traveller. It cheers him to observe the store of small comforts
that his fellow-creatures may find in their self-complacency, just as
one is pleased to see poor old souls soothed by the tobacco and snuff
for which one has neither nose nor stomach oneself.

But your arrogant man will not tolerate a presumption which he sees to
be ill-founded. The service he regards society as most in need of is to
put down the conceit which is so particularly rife around him that he is
inclined to believe it the growing characteristic of the present age. In
the schools of Magna Graecia, or in the sixth century of our era, or
even under Kublai Khan, he finds a comparative freedom from that
presumption by which his contemporaries are stirring his able gall. The
way people will now flaunt notions which are not his without appearing
to mind that they are not his, strikes him as especially disgusting. It
might seem surprising to us that one strongly convinced of his own value
should prefer to exalt an age in which _he_ did not flourish, if it were
not for the reflection that the present age is the only one in which
anybody has appeared to undervalue him.




IX.


A HALF-BREED

An early deep-seated love to which we become faithless has its unfailing
Nemesis, if only in that division of soul which narrows all newer joys
by the intrusion of regret and the established presentiment of change. I
refer not merely to the love of a person, but to the love of ideas,
practical beliefs, and social habits. And faithlessness here means not a
gradual conversion dependent on enlarged knowledge, but a yielding to
seductive circumstance; not a conviction that the original choice was a
mistake, but a subjection to incidents that flatter a growing desire. In
this sort of love it is the forsaker who has the melancholy lot; for an
abandoned belief may be more effectively vengeful than Dido. The child
of a wandering tribe caught young and trained to polite life, if he
feels an hereditary yearning can run away to the old wilds and get his
nature into tune. But there is no such recovery possible to the man who
remembers what he once believed without being convinced that he was in
error, who feels within him unsatisfied stirrings towards old beloved
habits and intimacies from which he has far receded without conscious
justification or unwavering sense of superior attractiveness in the new.
This involuntary renegade has his character hopelessly jangled and out
of tune. He is like an organ with its stops in the lawless condition of
obtruding themselves without method, so that hearers are amazed by the
most unexpected transitions--the trumpet breaking in on the flute, and
the oböe confounding both.

Hence the lot of Mixtus affects me pathetically, notwithstanding that he
spends his growing wealth with liberality and manifest enjoyment. To
most observers he appears to be simply one of the fortunate and also
sharp commercial men who began with meaning to be rich and have become
what they meant to be: a man never taken to be well-born, but
surprisingly better informed than the well-born usually are, and
distinguished among ordinary commercial magnates by a personal kindness
which prompts him not only to help the suffering in a material way
through his wealth, but also by direct ministration of his own; yet with
all this, diffusing, as it were, the odour of a man delightedly
conscious of his wealth as an equivalent for the other social
distinctions of rank and intellect which he can thus admire without
envying. Hardly one among those superficial observers can suspect that
he aims or has ever aimed at being a writer; still less can they imagine
that his mind is often moved by strong currents of regret and of the
most unworldly sympathies from the memories of a youthful time when his
chosen associates were men and women whose only distinction was a
religious, a philanthropic, or an intellectual enthusiasm, when the lady
on whose words his attention most hung was a writer of minor religious
literature, when he was a visitor and exhorter of the poor in the alleys
of a great provincial town, and when he attended the lectures given
specially to young men by Mr Apollos, the eloquent congregational
preacher, who had studied in Germany and had liberal advanced views then
far beyond the ordinary teaching of his sect. At that time Mixtus
thought himself a young man of socially reforming ideas, of religious
principles and religious yearnings. It was within his prospects also to
be rich, but he looked forward to a use of his riches chiefly for
reforming and religious purposes. His opinions were of a strongly
democratic stamp, except that even then, belonging to the class of
employers, he was opposed to all demands in the employed that would
restrict the expansiveness of trade. He was the most democratic in
relation to the unreasonable privileges of the aristocracy and landed
interest; and he had also a religious sense of brotherhood with the
poor. Altogether, he was a sincerely benevolent young man, interested in
ideas, and renouncing personal ease for the sake of study, religious
communion, and good works. If you had known him then you would have
expected him to marry a highly serious and perhaps literary woman,
sharing his benevolent and religious habits, and likely to encourage
his studies--a woman who along with himself would play a distinguished
part in one of the most enlightened religious circles of a great
provincial capital.

How is it that Mixtus finds himself in a London mansion, and in society
totally unlike that which made the ideal of his younger years? And whom
_did_ he marry?

Why, he married Scintilla, who fascinated him as she had fascinated
others, by her prettiness, her liveliness, and her music. It is a common
enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly
the opposite of his ideal; or if not wholly captivated, at least
effectively captured by a combination of circumstances along with an
unwarily manifested inclination which might otherwise have been
transient. Mixtus was captivated and then captured on the worldly side
of his disposition, which had been always growing and flourishing side
by side with his philanthropic and religious tastes. He had ability in
business, and he had early meant to be rich; also, he was getting rich,
and the taste for such success was naturally growing with the pleasure
of rewarded exertion. It was during a business sojourn in London that he
met Scintilla, who, though without fortune, associated with families of
Greek merchants living in a style of splendour, and with artists
patronised by such wealthy entertainers. Mixtus on this occasion became
familiar with a world in which wealth seemed the key to a more brilliant
sort of dominance than that of a religious patron in the provincial
circles of X. Would it not be possible to unite the two kinds of sway? A
man bent on the most useful ends might, _with a fortune large enough_,
make morality magnificent, and recommend religious principle by showing
it in combination with the best kind of house and the most liberal of
tables; also with a wife whose graces, wit, and accomplishments gave a
finish sometimes lacking even to establishments got up with that
unhesitating worldliness to which high cost is a sufficient reason.
Enough.

Mixtus married Scintilla. Now this lively lady knew nothing of
Nonconformists, except that they were unfashionable: she did not
distinguish one conventicle from another, and Mr Apollos with his
enlightened interpretations seemed to her as heavy a bore, if not quite
so ridiculous, as Mr Johns could have been with his solemn twang at the
Baptist chapel in the lowest suburbs, or as a local preacher among the
Methodists. In general, people who appeared seriously to believe in any
sort of doctrine, whether religious, social, or philosophical, seemed
rather absurd to Scintilla. Ten to one these theoretic people pronounced
oddly, had some reason or other for saying that the most agreeable
things were wrong, wore objectionable clothes, and wanted you to
subscribe to something. They were probably ignorant of art and music,
did not understand _badinage_, and, in fact, could talk of nothing
amusing. In Scintilla's eyes the majority of persons were ridiculous and
deplorably wanting in that keen perception of what was good taste, with
which she herself was blest by nature and education; but the people
understood to be religious or otherwise theoretic, were the most
ridiculous of all, without being proportionately amusing and invitable.

Did Mixtus not discover this view of Scintilla's before their marriage?
Or did he allow her to remain in ignorance of habits and opinions which
had made half the occupation of his youth?

When a man is inclined to marry a particular woman, and has made any
committal of himself, this woman's opinions, however different from his
own, are readily regarded as part of her pretty ways, especially if they
are merely negative; as, for example, that she does not insist on the
Trinity or on the rightfulness or expediency of church rates, but simply
regards her lover's troubling himself in disputation on these heads as
stuff and nonsense. The man feels his own superior strength, and is sure
that marriage will make no difference to him on the subjects about which
he is in earnest. And to laugh at men's affairs is a woman's privilege,
tending to enliven the domestic hearth. If Scintilla had no liking for
the best sort of nonconformity, she was without any troublesome bias
towards Episcopacy, Anglicanism, and early sacraments, and was quite
contented not to go to church.

As to Scintilla's acquaintance with her lover's tastes on these
subjects, she was equally convinced on her side that a husband's queer
ways while he was a bachelor would be easily laughed out of him when he
had married an adroit woman. Mixtus, she felt, was an excellent
creature, quite likable, who was getting rich; and Scintilla meant to
have all the advantages of a rich man's wife. She was not in the least a
wicked woman; she was simply a pretty animal of the ape kind, with an
aptitude for certain accomplishments which education had made the most
of.

But we have seen what has been the result to poor Mixtus. He has become
richer even than he dreamed of being, has a little palace in London, and
entertains with splendour the half-aristocratic, professional, and
artistic society which he is proud to think select. This society regards
him as a clever fellow in his particular branch, seeing that he has
become a considerable capitalist, and as a man desirable to have on the
list of one's acquaintance. But from every other point of view Mixtus
finds himself personally submerged: what he happens to think is not felt
by his esteemed guests to be of any consequence, and what he used to
think with the ardour of conviction he now hardly ever expresses. He is
transplanted, and the sap within him has long been diverted into other
than the old lines of vigorous growth. How could he speak to the artist
Crespi or to Sir Hong Kong Bantam about the enlarged doctrine of Mr
Apollos? How could he mention to them his former efforts towards
evangelising the inhabitants of the X. alleys? And his references to his
historical and geographical studies towards a survey of possible markets
for English products are received with an air of ironical suspicion by
many of his political friends, who take his pretension to give advice
concerning the Amazon, the Euphrates, and the Niger as equivalent to the
currier's wide views on the applicability of leather. He can only make a
figure through his genial hospitality. It is in vain that he buys the
best pictures and statues of the best artists. Nobody will call him a
judge in art. If his pictures and statues are well chosen it is
generally thought that Scintilla told him what to buy; and yet Scintilla
in other connections is spoken of as having only a superficial and
often questionable taste. Mixtus, it is decided, is a good fellow, not
ignorant--no, really having a good deal of knowledge as well as sense,
but not easy to classify otherwise than as a rich man. He has
consequently become a little uncertain as to his own point of view, and
in his most unreserved moments of friendly intercourse, even when
speaking to listeners whom he thinks likely to sympathise with the
earlier part of his career, he presents himself in all his various
aspects and feels himself in turn what he has been, what he is, and what
others take him to be (for this last status is what we must all more or
less accept). He will recover with some glow of enthusiasm the vision of
his old associates, the particular limit he was once accustomed to trace
of freedom in religious speculation, and his old ideal of a worthy life;
but he will presently pass to the argument that money is the only means
by which you can get what is best worth having in the world, and will
arrive at the exclamation "Give me money!" with the tone and gesture of
a man who both feels and knows. Then if one of his audience, not having
money, remarks that a man may have made up his mind to do without money
because he prefers something else, Mixtus is with him immediately,
cordially concurring in the supreme value of mind and genius, which
indeed make his own chief delight, in that he is able to entertain the
admirable possessors of these attributes at his own table, though not
himself reckoned among them. Yet, he will proceed to observe, there was
a time when he sacrificed his sleep to study, and even now amid the
press of business he from time to time thinks of taking up the
manuscripts which he hopes some day to complete, and is always
increasing his collection of valuable works bearing on his favourite
topics. And it is true that he has read much in certain directions, and
can remember what he has read; he knows the history and theories of
colonisation and the social condition of countries that do not at
present consume a sufficiently large share of our products and
manufactures. He continues his early habit of regarding the spread of
Christianity as a great result of our commercial intercourse with black,
brown, and yellow populations; but this is an idea not spoken of in the
sort of fashionable society that Scintilla collects round her husband's
table, and Mixtus now philosophically reflects that the cause must come
before the effect, and that the thing to be directly striven for is the
commercial intercourse, not excluding a little war if that also should
prove needful as a pioneer of Christianity. He has long been wont to
feel bashful about his former religion; as if it were an old attachment
having consequences which he did not abandon but kept in decent privacy,
his avowed objects and actual position being incompatible with their
public acknowledgment.

There is the same kind of fluctuation in his aspect towards social
questions and duties. He has not lost the kindness that used to make him
a benefactor and succourer of the needy, and he is still liberal in
helping forward the clever and industrious; but in his active
superintendence of commercial undertakings he has contracted more and
more of the bitterness which capitalists and employers often feel to be
a reasonable mood towards obstructive proletaries. Hence many who this
is an idea not spoken of in the sort of fashionable society that
Scintilla collects round her husband's table, and Mixtus now
philosophically reflects that the cause must come before the effect, and
that the thing to be directly striven for is the commercial intercourse,
not excluding a little war if that also should prove needful as a
pioneer of Christianity. He has long been wont to feel bashful about his
former religion; as if it were an old attachment having consequences
which he did not abandon but kept in decent privacy, his avowed objects
and actual position being incompatible with their public acknowledgment.

There is the same kind of fluctuation in his aspect towards social
questions and duties. He has not lost the kindness that used to make him
a benefactor and succourer of the needy, and he is still liberal in
helping forward the clever and industrious; but in his active
superintendence of commercial undertakings he has contracted more and
more of the bitterness which capitalists and employers often feel to be
a reasonable mood towards obstructive proletaries. Hence many who have
occasionally met him when trade questions were being discussed, conclude
him to be indistinguishable from the ordinary run of moneyed and
money-getting men. Indeed, hardly any of his acquaintances know what
Mixtus really is, considered as a whole--nor does Mixtus himself know
it.




X.


DEBASING THE MORAL CURRENCY.

"Il ne faut pas mettre un ridicule où il n'y en a point: c'est se gâter
le goût, c'est corrompre son jugement et celui des autres. Mais le
ridicule qui est quelque part, il faut l'y voir, l'en tirer avec grâce
et d'une manière qui plaise et qui instruise."

I am fond of quoting this passage from La Bruyère, because the subject
is one where I like to show a Frenchman on my side, to save my
sentiments from being set down to my peculiar dulness and deficient
sense of the ludicrous, and also that they may profit by that
enhancement of ideas when presented in a foreign tongue, that glamour of
unfamiliarity conferring a dignity on the foreign names of very common
things, of which even a philosopher like Dugald Stewart confesses the
influence. I remember hearing a fervid woman attempt to recite in
English the narrative of a begging Frenchman who described the violent
death of his father in the July days. The narrative had impressed her,
through the mists of her flushed anxiety to understand it, as something
quite grandly pathetic; but finding the facts turn out meagre, and her
audience cold, she broke off, saying, "It sounded so much finer in
French--_j'ai vu le sang de mon père_, and so on--I wish I could repeat
it in French." This was a pardonable illusion in an old-fashioned lady
who had not received the polyglot education of the present day; but I
observe that even now much nonsense and bad taste win admiring
acceptance solely by virtue of the French language, and one may fairly
desire that what seems a just discrimination should profit by the
fashionable prejudice in favour of La Bruyère's idiom. But I wish he had
added that the habit of dragging the ludicrous into topics where the
chief interest is of a different or even opposite kind is a sign not of
endowment, but of deficiency. The art of spoiling is within reach of the
dullest faculty: the coarsest clown with a hammer in his hand might
chip the nose off every statue and bust in the Vatican, and stand
grinning at the effect of his work. Because wit is an exquisite product
of high powers, we are not therefore forced to admit the sadly confused
inference of the monotonous jester that he is establishing his
superiority over every less facetious person, and over every topic on
which he is ignorant or insensible, by being uneasy until he has
distorted it in the small cracked mirror which he carries about with him
as a joking apparatus. Some high authority is needed to give many worthy
and timid persons the freedom of muscular repose under the growing
demand on them to laugh when they have no other reason than the peril of
being taken for dullards; still more to inspire them with the courage to
say that they object to the theatrical spoiling for themselves and their
children of all affecting themes, all the grander deeds and aims of men,
by burlesque associations adapted to the taste of rich fishmongers in
the stalls and their assistants in the gallery. The English people in
the present generation are falsely reputed to know Shakspere (as, by
some innocent persons, the Florentine mule-drivers are believed to have
known the _Divina Commedia_, not, perhaps, excluding all the subtle
discourses in the _Purgatorio_ and _Paradiso_); but there seems a clear
prospect that in the coming generation he will be known to them through
burlesques, and that his plays will find a new life as pantomimes. A
bottle-nosed Lear will come on with a monstrous corpulence from which he
will frantically dance himself free during the midnight storm; Rosalind
and Celia will join in a grotesque ballet with shepherds and
shepherdesses; Ophelia in fleshings and a voluminous brevity of
grenadine will dance through the mad scene, finishing with the famous
"attitude of the scissors" in the arms of Laertes; and all the speeches
in "Hamlet" will be so ingeniously parodied that the originals will be
reduced to a mere _memoria technica_ of the improver's puns--premonitory
signs of a hideous millennium, in which the lion will have to lie down
with the lascivious monkeys whom (if we may trust Pliny) his soul
naturally abhors.

I have been amazed to find that some artists whose own works have the
ideal stamp, are quite insensible to the damaging tendency of the
burlesquing spirit which ranges to and fro and up and down on the earth,
seeing no reason (except a precarious censorship) why it should not
appropriate every sacred, heroic, and pathetic theme which serves to
make up the treasure of human admiration, hope, and love. One would have
thought that their own half-despairing efforts to invest in worthy
outward shape the vague inward impressions of sublimity, and the
consciousness of an implicit ideal in the commonest scenes, might have
made them susceptible of some disgust or alarm at a species of burlesque
which is likely to render their compositions no better than a dissolving
view, where every noble form is seen melting into its preposterous
caricature. It used to be imagined of the unhappy medieval Jews that
they parodied Calvary by crucifying dogs; if they had been guilty they
would at least have had the excuse of the hatred and rage begotten by
persecution. Are we on the way to a parody which shall have no other
excuse than the reckless search after fodder for degraded
appetites--after the pay to be earned by pasturing Circe's herd where
they may defile every monument of that growing life which should have
kept them human?

The world seems to me well supplied with what is genuinely ridiculous:
wit and humour may play as harmlessly or beneficently round the changing
facets of egoism, absurdity, and vice, as the sunshine over the rippling
sea or the dewy meadows. Why should we make our delicious sense of the
ludicrous, with its invigorating shocks of laughter and its
irrepressible smiles which are the outglow of an inward radiation as
gentle and cheering as the warmth of morning, flourish like a brigand on
the robbery of our mental wealth?--or let it take its exercise as a
madman might, if allowed a free nightly promenade, by drawing the
populace with bonfires which leave some venerable structure a blackened
ruin or send a scorching smoke across the portraits of the past, at
which we once looked with a loving recognition of fellowship, and
disfigure them into butts of mockery?--nay, worse--use it to degrade the
healthy appetites and affections of our nature as they are seen to be
degraded in insane patients whose system, all out of joint, finds
matter for screaming laughter in mere topsy-turvy, makes every passion
preposterous or obscene, and turns the hard-won order of life into a
second chaos hideous enough to make one wail that the first was ever
thrilled with light?

This is what I call debasing the moral currency: lowering the value of
every inspiring fact and tradition so that it will command less and less
of the spiritual products, the generous motives which sustain the charm
and elevation of our social existence--the something besides bread by
which man saves his soul alive. The bread-winner of the family may
demand more and more coppery shillings, or assignats, or greenbacks for
his day's work, and so get the needful quantum of food; but let that
moral currency be emptied of its value--let a greedy buffoonery debase
all historic beauty, majesty, and pathos, and the more you heap up the
desecrated symbols the greater will be the lack of the ennobling
emotions which subdue the tyranny of suffering, and make ambition one
with social virtue.

And yet, it seems, parents will put into the hands of their children
ridiculous parodies (perhaps with more ridiculous "illustrations") of
the poems which stirred their own tenderness or filial piety, and carry
them to make their first acquaintance with great men, great works, or
solemn crises through the medium of some miscellaneous burlesque which,
with its idiotic puns and farcical attitudes, will remain among their
primary associations, and reduce them throughout their time of studious
preparation for life to the moral imbecility of an inward giggle at what
might have stimulated their high emulation or fed the fountains of
compassion, trust, and constancy. One wonders where these parents have
deposited that stock of morally educating stimuli which is to be
independent of poetic tradition, and to subsist in spite of the finest
images being degraded and the finest words of genius being poisoned as
with some befooling drug.

Will fine wit, will exquisite humour prosper the more through this
turning of all things indiscriminately into food for a gluttonous
laughter, an idle craving without sense of flavours? On the contrary.
That delightful power which La Bruyère points to--"le ridicule qui est
quelque part, il faut l'y voir, l'en tirer avec grâce et d'une manière
qui plaise et qui instruise"--depends on a discrimination only
compatible with the varied sensibilities which give sympathetic insight,
and with the justice of perception which is another name for grave
knowledge. Such a result is no more to be expected from faculties on the
strain to find some small hook by which they may attach the lowest
incongruity to the most momentous subject, than it is to be expected of
a sharper, watching for gulls in a great political assemblage, that he
will notice the blundering logic of partisan speakers, or season his
observation with the salt of historical parallels. But after all our
psychological teaching, and in the midst of our zeal for education, we
are still, most of us, at the stage of believing that mental powers and
habits have somehow, not perhaps in the general statement, but in any
particular case, a kind of spiritual glaze against conditions which we
are continually applying to them. We soak our children in habits of
contempt and exultant gibing, and yet are confident that--as Clarissa
one day said to me--"We can always teach them to be reverent in the
right place, you know." And doubtless if she were to take her boys to
see a burlesque Socrates, with swollen legs, dying in the utterance of
cockney puns, and were to hang up a sketch of this comic scene among
their bedroom prints, she would think this preparation not at all to the
prejudice of their emotions on hearing their tutor read that narrative
of the _Apology_ which has been consecrated by the reverent gratitude of
ages. This is the impoverishment that threatens our posterity:--a new
Famine, a meagre fiend with lewd grin and clumsy hoof, is breathing a
moral mildew over the harvest of our human sentiments. These are the
most delicate elements of our too easily perishable civilisation. And
here again I like to quote a French testimony. Sainte Beuve, referring
to a time of insurrectionary disturbance, says: "Rien de plus prompt à
baisser que la civilisation dans des crises comme celle-ci; on perd en
trois semaines le résultat de plusieurs siècles. La civilisation, la
_vie_ est une chose apprise et inventée, qu'on le sache bien: '_Inventas
aut qui vitam excoluere per artes_.' Les hommes après quelques années de
paix oublient trop cette verité: ils arrivent à croire que la _culture_
est chose innée, qu'elle est la même chose que la _nature_. La
sauvagerie est toujours là à deux pas, et, dès qu'on lâche pied, elle
recommence." We have been severely enough taught (if we were willing to
learn) that our civilisation, considered as a splendid material fabric,
is helplessly in peril without the spiritual police of sentiments or
ideal feelings. And it is this invisible police which we had need, as a
community, strive to maintain in efficient force. How if a dangerous
"Swing" were sometimes disguised in a versatile entertainer devoted to
the amusement of mixed audiences? And I confess that sometimes when I
see a certain style of young lady, who checks our tender admiration with
rouge and henna and all the blazonry of an extravagant expenditure, with
slang and bold _brusquerie_ intended to signify her emancipated view of
things, and with cynical mockery which she mistakes for penetration, I
am sorely tempted to hiss out "_Pétroleuse!_" It is a small matter to
have our palaces set aflame compared with the misery of having our sense
of a noble womanhood, which is the inspiration of a purifying shame, the
promise of life--penetrating affection, stained and blotted out by
images of repulsiveness. These things come--not of higher education,
but--of dull ignorance fostered into pertness by the greedy vulgarity
which reverses Peter's visionary lesson and learns to call all things
common and unclean. It comes of debasing the moral currency.

The Tirynthians, according to an ancient story reported by Athenaeus,
becoming conscious that their trick of laughter at everything and
nothing was making them unfit for the conduct of serious affairs,
appealed to the Delphic oracle for some means of cure. The god
prescribed a peculiar form of sacrifice, which would be effective if
they could carry it through without laughing. They did their best; but
the flimsy joke of a boy upset their unaccustomed gravity, and in this
way the oracle taught them that even the gods could not prescribe a
quick cure for a long vitiation, or give power and dignity to a people
who in a crisis of the public wellbeing were at the mercy of a poor
jest.




XI.


THE WASP CREDITED WITH THE HONEYCOMB

No man, I imagine, would object more strongly than Euphorion to
communistic principles in relation to material property, but with regard
to property in ideas he entertains such principles willingly, and is
disposed to treat the distinction between Mine and Thine in original
authorship as egoistic, narrowing, and low. I have known him, indeed,
insist at some expense of erudition on the prior right of an ancient, a
medieval, or an eighteenth century writer to be credited with a view or
statement lately advanced with some show of originality; and this
championship seems to imply a nicety of conscience towards the dead. He
is evidently unwilling that his neighbours should get more credit than
is due to them, and in this way he appears to recognise a certain
proprietorship even in spiritual production. But perhaps it is no real
inconsistency that, with regard to many instances of modern origination,
it is his habit to talk with a Gallic largeness and refer to the
universe: he expatiates on the diffusive nature of intellectual
products, free and all-embracing as the liberal air; on the
infinitesimal smallness of individual origination compared with the
massive inheritance of thought on which every new generation enters; on
that growing preparation for every epoch through which certain ideas or
modes of view are said to be in the air, and, still more metaphorically
speaking, to be inevitably absorbed, so that every one may be excused
for not knowing how he got them. Above all, he insists on the proper
subordination of the irritable self, the mere vehicle of an idea or
combination which, being produced by the sum total of the human race,
must belong to that multiple entity, from the accomplished lecturer or
populariser who transmits it, to the remotest generation of Fuegians or
Hottentots, however indifferent these may be to the superiority of their
right above that of the eminently perishable dyspeptic author.

Euphorion himself, if a particular omission of acknowledgment were
brought home to him, would probably take a narrower ground of
explanation. It was a lapse of memory; or it did not occur to him as
necessary in this case to mention a name, the source being well
known--or (since this seems usually to act as a strong reason for
mention) he rather abstained from adducing the name because it might
injure the excellent matter advanced, just as an obscure trade-mark
casts discredit on a good commodity, and even on the retailer who has
furnished himself from a quarter not likely to be esteemed first-rate.
No doubt this last is a genuine and frequent reason for the
non-acknowledgment of indebtedness to what one may call impersonal as
well as personal sources: even an American editor of school classics
whose own English could not pass for more than a syntactical shoddy of
the cheapest sort, felt it unfavourable to his reputation for sound
learning that he should be obliged to the Penny Cyclopaedia, and
disguised his references to it under contractions in which _Us. Knowl._.
took the place of the low word _Penny_. Works of this convenient stamp,
easily obtained and well nourished with matter, are felt to be like rich
but unfashionable relations who are visited and received in privacy, and
whose capital is used or inherited without any ostentatious insistance
on their names and places of abode. As to memory, it is known that this
frail faculty naturally lets drop the facts which are less flattering to
our self-love--when it does not retain them carefully as subjects not to
be approached, marshy spots with a warning flag over them. But it is
always interesting to bring forward eminent names, such as Patricius or
Scaliger, Euler or Lagrange, Bopp or Humboldt. To know exactly what has
been drawn from them is erudition and heightens our own influence, which
seems advantageous to mankind; whereas to cite an author whose ideas may
pass as higher currency under our own signature can have no object
except the contradictory one of throwing the illumination over his
figure when it is important to be seen oneself. All these reasons must
weigh considerably with those speculative persons who have to ask
themselves whether or not Universal Utilitarianism requires that in the
particular instance before them they should injure a man who has been of
service to them, and rob a fellow-workman of the credit which is due to
him.

After all, however, it must be admitted that hardly any accusation is
more difficult to prove, and more liable to be false, than that of a
plagiarism which is the conscious theft of ideas and deliberate
reproduction of them as original. The arguments on the side of acquittal
are obvious and strong:--the inevitable coincidences of contemporary
thinking; and our continual experience of finding notions turning up in
our minds without any label on them to tell us whence they came; so that
if we are in the habit of expecting much from our own capacity we accept
them at once as a new inspiration. Then, in relation to the elder
authors, there is the difficulty first of learning and then of
remembering exactly what has been wrought into the backward tapestry of
the world's history, together with the fact that ideas acquired long ago
reappear as the sequence of an awakened interest or a line of inquiry
which is really new in us, whence it is conceivable that if we were
ancients some of us might be offering grateful hecatombs by mistake, and
proving our honesty in a ruinously expensive manner. On the other hand,
the evidence on which plagiarism is concluded is often of a kind which,
though much trusted in questions of erudition and historical criticism,
is apt to lead us injuriously astray in our daily judgments, especially
of the resentful, condemnatory sort. How Pythagoras came by his ideas,
whether St Paul was acquainted with all the Greek poets, what Tacitus
must have known by hearsay and systematically ignored, are points on
which a false persuasion of knowledge is less damaging to justice and
charity than an erroneous confidence, supported by reasoning
fundamentally similar, of my neighbour's blameworthy behaviour in a case
where I am personally concerned. No premisses require closer scrutiny
than those which lead to the constantly echoed conclusion, "He must have
known," or "He must have read." I marvel that this facility of belief on
the side of knowledge can subsist under the daily demonstration that the
easiest of all things to the human mind is _not_ to know and _not_ to
read. To praise, to blame, to shout, grin, or hiss, where others shout,
grin, or hiss--these are native tendencies; but to know and to read are
artificial, hard accomplishments, concerning which the only safe
supposition is, that as little of them has been done as the case admits.
An author, keenly conscious of having written, can hardly help imagining
his condition of lively interest to be shared by others, just as we are
all apt to suppose that the chill or heat we are conscious of must be
general, or even to think that our sons and daughters, our pet schemes,
and our quarrelling correspondence, are themes to which intelligent
persons will listen long without weariness. But if the ardent author
happen to be alive to practical teaching he will soon learn to divide
the larger part of the enlightened public into those who have not read
him and think it necessary to tell him so when they meet him in polite
society, and those who have equally abstained from reading him, but wish
to conceal this negation and speak of his "incomparable works" with that
trust in testimony which always has its cheering side.

Hence it is worse than foolish to entertain silent suspicions of