Again, a man to whom intellectual companionship means more than it does to many is thrown into a neighbourhood where he cannot hope to meet with comprehension, still less with sympathy. He is a Freethinker, and the neighbourhood goes in for the strictest Methodism or the highest ultra-Ritualism; he is a Radical, and he is in the very focus of county Toryism, where the doctrine of equality and the rights of man is just so much seditious blasphemy, while the British Constitution is held as a direct emanation from divine wisdom second only to the Bible; or he is a Tory to the backbone—and his backbone is a pretty stiff one—and he is in the midst of that blatant kind of Radicalism which thinks gentlehood a remnant of the dark ages, and confounds good breeding with servility, and loyalty to the Crown with oppression of the people. Surrounded by his kind, he is as much alone as if in the middle of a desert. An Englishman among Englishmen, he has no more mental companionship than if he were in a foreign country where he and his neighbour spoke different tongues, and each had a set of signs with not two agreeing. And this kind of solitude makes a pinching shoe to many minds; though to some of the more self-centred or defying kind it is bearable enough—perhaps even giving a sense of roominess which closer communion would destroy.
Of course one of the worst of our pinching shoes is matrimony, when marriage means bondage and not union. The mismated wife or husband never leaves off, willingly or unwillingly, squeezing the tender places; and the more the pressure is objected to the worse the pain becomes. And nothing can relieve it. A country gentleman, hating the dust and noise of London, with all his interest in his county position and all his pleasure in his place, and a wife whose love lies in Queen's balls and opera-boxes, and to whom the country is simply a slice out of Siberia wherever it may be; a hearty hospitable man, liking to see his table well filled, and a wife with a weak digestion, irritable nerves and a morbid horror of society; a pushing and ambitious man, with a loud voice and an imposing presence, and a shrinking fireside woman, who asks only to glide unnoticed through the crowd and to creep noiselessly from her home to her grave—are not all these shod with pinching shoes, which, do what they will, go on pinching to the end, and which nothing short of death or the Sir James Hannen of the time can remove? The pinching shoe of matrimony pinches both sides equally—excepting indeed, one of the two is specially phlegmatic or pachydermatous, and then the grip is harmless; but, as a rule, the ring-fence of marriage doubles all conditions, and when A. walks hobbled, B. falls lame, and both suffer from the same misfit. However, the only thing to do is to bear and wear till the upper-leather yields or till the foot takes the required shape; but there is an eternity of pain to be gone through before either of these desirable ends comes about; and the instinct which dreads pain, and questions its necessity, is by no means a false one. For all that, we must wear our pinching shoes of matrimony till death or the Divorce Court pulls them from our feet; which points to the need of being more careful than we usually are about the fit beforehand.
Poverty has a whole rack full of pinching shoes very hard to get accustomed to, and as bad to dance in lightly as were the fiery slippers of the naughty little girl in the German fairy-tale. Given a large heart, generous instincts and an empty purse, and we have the conditions of a real tragedy, both individual and social. For poverty does not mean only that elemental want of food and clothing which we generally associate with its name. Poverty may have two thousand a year as well as only a mouldy crust and three shillings a week from the parish; and poverty cursing its sore feet in a brougham is quite as common as poverty, full of corns and callosities, blaspheming behind a costermonger's barrow. The shoe may pinch horribly, though there is no question of hunger or the 'twopenny rope;' for it is all a matter of relative degree, and the means wherewith to meet wants. But as poverty is not one of those fixed conditions of human life which no human power can remove, we have not perhaps quite so much sympathy with its grips and pinches as in other things less remediable. For while there is work still undone in the world, there is gain still to be had. The man whose energies stagnate now in a dry channel can, if he will, turn them into one more fertile; and if he is making but a poor business out of meal, it is his own fault if he does not try to make a better out of malt. Where the shoe pinches hardest is in places which we cannot protect and with a grip which we cannot prevent; but we cannot say this of poverty as a necessary and inalienable condition, and sympathy is so much waste when circumstances can be changed by energy or will.
SUPERIOR BEINGS.
Every now and then one comes across the path of a Superior Being—a being who seems to imagine itself made out of a different kind of clay from that which forms the coarser ruck of humanity, and whose presence crushes us with a sense of our own inferiority, exasperating or humiliating, according to the amount of natural pride bestowed upon us. The superior being is of either sex and of all denominations; and its superiority comes from many causes—being sometimes due to a wider grasp of intellect, sometimes to a loftier standard of morals, sometimes to better birth or a longer purse, and very often to the simple conceit of itself which simulates superiority and believes in its own apery. The chief characteristic of the superior being is that exalted pity for inferiority which springs from the consciousness of excellence. In fact, one of the main elements of superiority consists in this sublime consciousness of private exaltation, and the immense interval that separates it from the grosser condition it surveys. Rivalry is essentially angry and contentious, but confessed superiority can afford to be serene and compassionate. The little people who live in that meagre sphere of theirs, mental and social, with which not one point of its own extended circle comes in contact, are deserving of all pity and are below anything like active displeasure. That they should be content with such a meagre sphere seems inconceivable to the superior being, as it contemplates its own enlarged horizon with the complacency proper to a dweller in vastness. Or it may be that its own world is narrow; and its superiority will then be that it is high, safe, exclusive, while its pity will flow down for those poor wayfarers who wander afield in broad latitudes, and know nothing of the pleasure found in reserved places. In any case the region in which a superior being dwells is better than the region in which any other person dwells.
Take a superior being who has made up a private account with truth, and who has, in his own mind at least, unlocked the gate of the great mysteries of life, and got to the back of that eternal Why? for ever confronting us. It does not in the least degree signify how the key is labelled. It may be High Church or Low Church, Swedenborgianism or Positivism. The name has nothing to do with the thing. It is the contented certainty of having unlocked that great gate at which others are hammering in vain which confers the superiority, and how the thing has been done does not affect the result. Neither does it disturb the equanimity of the superior being when he meets with opposing superior beings who have also made up their private accounts with truth, but in quite another handwriting and with a different sum-total at the bottom of the page; who have also unlocked the gate of the great mysteries, but with a key of contradictory wards, while the gate itself is of another order of architecture altogether. But then nothing ever does disturb the equanimity of the superior being; for, as he is above all rivalry, so is he beyond all teaching. The meeting of two superior beings of hostile creed is like the meeting of the two blind kings in the story, each claiming the crown for his own and both ignorant of the very existence of a rival. It may be that the superior being has soared away into the cold region of spiritual negation, whence he regards the praying and praising multitudes who go to church and believe in Providence as grown people regard children who still believe in ghosts and fairies. Or it may be that he has plunged into the phosphorescent atmosphere of mysticism and an all-pervading superstition; and then all who hold by scientific law, and who think the test of common sense not absolutely valueless, are Sadducees who know nothing of the glorious liberty of the light, but who prefer to live in darkness and to make themselves the agents of the great Lord of Lies.
Sometimes the superior being goes in for the doctrine of love and impulse, as against reason or experience, holding the physiologist and political economist as creatures absolutely devoid of feeling; and sometimes his superiority is shown in the application of the hardest material laws to the most subtle and delicate manifestations of the mind. But on which side soever he ranks himself—as a spiritualist to whom reason and matter are stumbling-blocks and accursed, or as a materialist denying the existence of spiritual influences at all—he is equally secure of his own superiority and serene in his own conceit. That there should be two sides to any question never seems to strike him; and that a man of another creed should have as much right as himself to a hearing and consideration is the one hard saying impossible for him to receive. With a light and airy manner of playful contempt—sometimes with a heavy and Johnsonian scorn that keeps no terms with an opponent—the superior being meets all your arguments or batters down all your objections; sometimes, indeed, he will not condescend even so far as this, but when you express your adverse opinion just lifts up his eyebrows with a good-humoured kind of surprise at your mental state, but lets you see that he thinks you too hopeless, and himself too superior, to waste powder and shot upon you. It is of the nature of things that there should be moles and that there should be eagles; so much the worse for the moles, who must be content to remain blind, not seeing things patent to the nobler vision.
The superior being is sometimes a person who is above all the passions and weaknesses of ordinary men; a philosopher, or an etherealized woman dwelling on serene Olympian heights which no clouds obscure and where no earth-fogs rise. The passions which shake the human soul, as tempests shake the forest trees, and warp men's lives according to the run of their own lines, are unknown to these Olympian personages who cannot understand their power. They look on these tempestuous souls with a curious analytical gaze, speculating on the geography of their Gethsemane, and wondering why they cannot keep as calm and quiet as they themselves are. They sit in scornful judgment on the mysterious impulses regulating human nature—regulating and disturbing—and think how perfect all things would be if only passions and instincts were cut out of the great plan, and men and women were left to the dominion of pure reason. But they do not take into account the law of constitutional necessity, and they are utterly unable to strike a balance between the good and evil wrought both by the tempests of souls and by those of nature. They only know that storms are inconvenient, and that for themselves they have no need of such convulsions to clear off stagnant humours; nor are they made of elements which kindle and explode at the contact of such or such materials. And if they know nothing of all this, why then should others? If they can sit on Olympian heights serene above all passion, why should not the whole world sit with them, and fogs and fires, earthquakes and deluges, be conditions unknown?