"Your grandpapa," retorted Mrs. Wilfer, with an awful look, and in an awful tone, "was what I describe him to have been, and would have struck any of his grandchildren to the earth who presumed to question it."
If our ancestors could return to the earth, it is little likely that their first inclination would be to goody themselves over the excellence of their own period, or pull faces at the degeneracy of ours. Sleepers in ill-ventilated, or rather entirely non-ventilated apartments, eaters of inordinate late suppers, five-bottle men, and for the most part wearers of sadly unphilosophical raiment, those sturdy old fox-hunters would acknowledge it just cause for astonishment that their children have any constitutions at all. Little motive for self-laudation would they find in the fact, that, after drawing out their account with Nature to the last dime, they had taken a respectable first-cabin passage to the Infinite Boulogne just before the great Teller said "No funds," and shoved back their checks through the window, leaving to their children the heritage of a spotless name and the declaration of physiological bankruptcy.
Nor would they content themselves, I fancy, with the negative ground of mere humility. They would have something very decided to say to the wiseacres, who taunt our wives in the agony of tic-doloureux with the statement that their grandmothers knew nothing of neuralgia. "No!" these generous ancients would retort, "that is the residuary legacy of a generation to whom we left a nervous system of worn-out fiddle strings." To such as talk of that woful novelty diphtheria as a crime of the present age, they would point out the impossibility of a race's throat descending to it without tenderness, a race's blood flowing to it without taint, from ancestors who swaddled their necks in fathoms of cravat, and despised the question of sewage. When I had the gout, and could not stand up for myself, those brave vieilles moustaches would stand up for me. "Many a fine old bin of our port," would they exclaim, "has been emptied down through the æons into those innocent toes of thine. I mind me how I smacked my lips over that very bottle whose broken glass now grinds around, red-hot, in the articulation of thy metatarsal phalanges. Dancing at thy fair great-grandmother's wedding, I slaked the thirst of many vigorous sarabands in that identical ruby nectar, which, turned by the alchemy of generations into acid blood, now through thy great toe distils in gouts of fiery torture. I danced;—thou, poor Serò-natus, dancest not, but dost pay the piper."
Suppose that our returning ancestors regarded us in the intellectual and spiritual, as well as the physical aspect, they must find still less reason to put on airs of superiority. If, in the sphere where they have been lately moving, improvement goes on as fast as we believe, they may be expected to wonder that the theological and scholastic training of their own earthly day has not resulted in a present race of imbeciles and fetish-worshippers, or Torquemadas and madmen. With thankful astonishment will they revere that nature whose boundless elasticity and self-repair has brought bright and self-reliant, even though sometimes a trifle too pert and iconoclastic, Young America from loins burdened, through all their period of cartilage, with five days and a half per week of grammar-grinding, a Saturday afternoon of "keeping in for marks," and a seventh day which should have been the Lord's, but was conspicuously liker the devil's.
Woman, religion, and the forefathers are all the victims of a false quality of reverence. The world has immemorially paid them in the coin of lip-service for the privilege of using their sacredness as a yoke. They are defrauded of their true power by the hands that waft them hypocritical incense; bought off the ground where their influence might be precious and permanent, by the compliment of a moment, or the ceremony of a day. We pick up the fan of the first, and shoulder her out of her partnership in our serious business of living. We build temples for the second, that she may not gad about among our shops, or trouble the doors of our houses. In the third, we do superstitious homage to a mere accident of time, and feel free to neglect the genial lesson of humanity which is eternal.
It is impossible not to reverence our forefathers—those grand old fellows who, long before we rose, got up to build the fires, and shovel the sidewalks of this world. The amount of work which they did was immense; great was their poking and their pushing; their thrashing of arms, and their blowing of fingers. If they sometimes made a compromise with their job; if here and there they left the gutters uncleared, or a heavy drift to thaw over under the sun of modern conscience, and flood our streets with revolution; if they built some of their fires with wet wood, which unto this day smokes the parlors, or even the inmost bed-chambers of mankind,—let us remember how frosty the dawn was, how poorly made were the tools and mittens of the period. All honor to their work, and the will with which they went at it! But when we are asked to regret the rising of the sun; to despise a time of day when there are no more fires to build, no more walks to shovel; or, if such anywhere remain, when there are snow-ploughs and patent-kindling to use in their behoof—distinctly No!—a No as everlasting as Mr. Carlyle's, and spelt with as big a capital.
The mistake of that great writer and minor disciple of the Belated-Owl school to which he belongs, naturally arises, not from the over-development of reverence, to which it is generally ascribed, but from a constitutional divorce between the poetic imagination and the power of analysis. The former faculty, by itself, results in impatience with the meaner actualities of life,—a divine impatience in great poets, a petulant in small ones. Lacking the latter faculty, such persons are in the condition of a near-sighted man placed without chart or compass at the helm of a free-going clipper. Making no allowance for the fact that the blemished and the trivial disappear with distance, and, ignorant of the direction in which humanity must steer, they put out with disgust from a shore where every old clam-shell and rotten wreck is as conspicuous to those, at least, who look for it as the orange-groved cliffs, and the fair retiring stretches of greensward, to voyage for some scarce descried Atlantis gemming the horizon ring with an empurpled roundness born of vapor, time, and space. To such, the future might be a noble course to lay; but that lies beyond the horizon, and impatience is not consistent with faith. On, then, on to the farthest visible,—but westward, while the grand fleet of humanity sails last. Into shadow which drowns the petty details of existence,—not toward a shore which shall be reached only by long buffeting and weary watching, whose noble scenery, glorious with all the temples and trophies of the latest age, shall bear unshamed the scrutiny of the full-risen sun.
The application of scientific processes to the study of history has revealed the steady amelioration of the race. The mail of chivalric giants is brought out of romance's armory to the profane test of a vulgar trying on, and, behold, it is too small for the foot-soldier of to-day. Population everywhere increases, while the rates of mortality diminish. The average longevity of the people of London is greater, by something like twenty-five per cent., than it was a century ago. The improvement of machinery is more and more lifting the yoke of physical labor from the neck of man, leaving his mind freer to cope with the higher problems of his own nature and the universe without. Not as a matter of platform enthusiasm and optimist poetry, but of office statistics, do we know that the world is an easier and better place to live in, and that a man is luckier to be born into it, than in the day of the fathers. So much has changed, and changed for the better. That analysis, which the Carlylists lack, reveals still other changes worked by the course of time in the phenomena of the race,—such changes as concern the habits of society, the styles of literature, the systems of political economy and commercial order, the tenets of philosophy, the schools of art, the forms of government and religion. This analysis further reveals that, while all these functions of life are in their nature endlessly mutable, the organic man, from whom, under all variations, they get their vis viva, remains from age to age eternally the same. While each successive generation has its fresh, particular business on the earth,—something to do for the race, which succeeding generations will not have the time, even as prior generations had not the light, to do,—something which is wanted right away,—something for which it was sent and for which the whole machine-shop of time had been shaping the material to be worked by its special hand,—analysis discloses that the capital upon which every business is to be carried on undergoes neither increase nor diminution. There is just as much faith, just as much courage, just as much power in the world as there ever was. They do not show themselves in Runnymedes, because Runnymede has been attended to; nor in wondrous Abbot Sampsons, because monkery is mainly cured. They are not manifest in martyred Edwardses, because at this day Edwards could call a policeman; nor in burning Cranmers, because society has made a phenomenal change in her method with martyrs and shuts them in a refrigerator, where once she chained them to a stake. They do not appear in French Revolutions, because the world has grown through a second American Revolution, grander than the first, and a great representative native has plucked Liberty out of the fire without one scorch of license on her garments. They seek no outlet in crusade, for Jerusalem has been made of as little consequence as Barnegat, by the fulfilment of the promise,—
"The hour cometh when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet in Jerusalem, worship the Father, ... when the true worshippers shall worship him in spirit and in truth."