“Of a truth,” rejoined the other, “I rejoice that I am no politician. I believe my spirit is as free as any cooped in the narrow dungeon of earth’s clay can well be; yet I confess that it has drawn none of its liberty from book, pamphlet, speech, or newspaper, of modern times.”
“So much the worse for you, sir,” said Wolfe, sourly: “the man who has health and education can find no excuse for supineness or indifference to that form of legislation by which his country decays or prospers.”
“Why,” said the other, gayly, “I willingly confess myself less of a patriot than a philosopher; and as long as I am harmless, I strive very little to be useful, in a public capacity; in a private one, as a father, a husband, and a neighbour, I trust I am not utterly without my value.”
“Pish!” cried Wolfe; “let no man who forgets his public duties prate of his private merits. I tell you, man, that he who can advance by a single hair’s-breadth the happiness or the freedom of mankind has done more to save his own soul than if he had paced every step of the narrow circle of his domestic life with the regularity of clockwork.”
“You may be right,” quoth the stranger, carelessly; “but I look on things in the mass, and perhaps see only the superficies, while you, I perceive already, are a lover of the abstract. For my part, Harry Fielding’s two definitions seem to me excellent. ‘Patriot,—a candidate for a place!’ ‘Politics,—the art of getting such a place!’ Perhaps, sir, as you seem a man of education, you remember the words of our great novelist.”
“No!” answered Wolfe, a little contemptuously; “I cannot say that I burden my memory with the deleterious witticisms and shallow remarks of writers of fancy. It has been a mighty and spreading evil to the world that the vain fictions of the poets or the exaggerations of novelists have been hitherto so welcomed and extolled. Better had it been for us if the destruction of the lettered wealth at Alexandria had included all the lighter works which have floated, from their very levity, down the stream of time, an example and a corruption to the degraded geniuses of later days.”
The eyes of the stranger sparkled. “Why, you outgoth the Goth!” exclaimed he, sharply. “But you surely preach against what you have not studied. Confess that you are but slightly acquainted with Shakspeare, and Spenser, and noble Dan Chaucer. Ay, if you knew them as well as I do, you would, like me, give—
‘To hem faith and full credence,
And in your heart have hem in reverence.’”
“Pish!” again muttered Wolfe; and then rejoined aloud, “It grieves me to see time so wasted, and judgment so perverted, as yours appears to have been; but it fills me with pity and surprise, as well as grief, to find that, so far from shame at the effeminacy of your studies, you appear to glory and exult in them.”
“May the Lord help me, and lighten thee,” said Cole; for it was he. “You are at least not a novelty in human wisdom, whatever you may be in character; for you are far from the only one proud of being ignorant, and pitying those who are not so.”