Prue and I

by George William Curtis

But even Prue grants that Minim has some reason for his pride. Sir Solomon was a respectable man, and Sir Shark a brave one; and the Right Honorable Haddock a learned one; the Lady Sheba was grave and gracious in her way; and the smile of the fair Dorothea lights with soft sunlight those long-gone summers. The filial blood rushes more gladly from Minim’s heart as he gazes; and admiration for the virtues of his kindred inspires and sweetly mingles with good resolutions of his own.

Time has its share, too, in the ministry, and the influence. The hills beyond the river lay yesterday, at sunset, lost in purple gloom; they receded into airy distances of dreams and faery; they sank softly into night, the peaks of the delectable mountains. But I knew, as I gazed enchanted, that the hills, so purple-soft of seeming, were hard, and gray, and barren in the wintry twilight; and that in the distance was the magic that made them fair.

So, beyond the river of time that flows between, walk the brave men and the beautiful women of our ancestry, grouped in twilight upon the shore. Distance smooths away defects, and, with gentle darkness, rounds every form into grace. It steals the harshness from their speech, and every word becomes a song. Far across the gulf that ever widens, they look upon us with eyes whose glance is tender, and which light us to success. We acknowledge our inheritance; we accept our birthright; we own that their careers have pledged us to noble action. Every great life is an incentive to all other lives; but when the brave heart, that beats for the world, loves us with the warmth of private affection, then the example of heroism is more persuasive, because more personal.

This is the true pride of ancestry. It is founded in the tenderness with which the child regards the father, and in the romance that time sheds upon history.

“Where be all the bad people buried?” asks every man, with Charles Lamb, as he strolls among the rank grave-yard grass, and brushes it aside to read of the faithful husband, and the loving wife, and the dutiful child.

He finds only praise in the epitaphs, because the human heart is kind; because it yearns with wistful tenderness after all its brethren who have passed into the cloud, and will only speak well of the departed. No offence is longer an offence when the grass is green over the offender. Even faults then seem characteristic and individual. Even Justice is appeased when the drop falls. How the old stories and plays teem with the incident of the duel in which one gentleman falls, and, in dying, forgives and is forgiven. We turn the page with a tear. How much better had there been no offence, but how well that death wipes it out.

It is not observed in history that families improve with time. It is rather discovered that the whole matter is like a comet, of which the brightest part, is the head; and the tail, although long and luminous, is gradually shaded into obscurity.

Yet, by a singular compensation, the pride of ancestry increases in the ratio of distance. Adam was valiant, and did so well at Poictiers that he was knighted—a hearty, homely country gentleman, who lived humbly to the end. But young Lucifer, his representative in the twentieth remove, has a tinder-like conceit because old Sir Adam was so brave and humble. Sir Adam’s sword is hung up at home, and Lucifer has a box at the opera. On a thin finger he has a ring, cut with a match fizzling, the crest of the Lucifers. But if he should be at a Poictiers, he would run away. Then history would be sorry—not only for his cowardice, but for the shame it brings upon old Adam’s name.

So, if Minim Sculpin is a bad young man, he not only shames himself, but he disgraces that illustrious line of ancestors, whose characters are known. His neighbor, Mudge, has no pedigree of this kind, and when he reels homeward, we do not suffer the sorrow of any fair Lady Dorothy in such a descendant—we pity him for himself alone. But genius and power are so imperial and universal, that when Minim Sculpin falls, we are grieved not only for him, but for that eternal truth and beauty which appeared in the valor of Sir Shark, and the loveliness of Lady Dorothy. His neighbor Mudge’s grandfather may have been quite as valorous and virtuous as Sculpin’s; but we know of the one, and we do not know of the other.

Therefore, Prue, I say to my wife, who has, by this time, fallen as soundly asleep as if I had been preaching a real sermon, do not let Mrs. Mudge feel hurt, because I gaze so long and earnestly upon the portrait of the fair Lady Sculpin, and, lost in dreams, mingle in a society which distance and poetry immortalize.