Looking Backward - Page 2

optimists. To be quite fair towards the
ages, a little ugliness as well as beauty must be allowed to each of
them, a little implicit poetry even to those which echoed loudest with
servile, pompous, and trivial prose.

Such impartiality is not in vogue at present. If we acknowledge our
obligation to the ancients, it is hardly to be done without some
flouting of our contemporaries, who with all their faults must be
allowed the merit of keeping the world habitable for the refined
eulogists of the blameless past. One wonders whether the remarkable
originators who first had the notion of digging wells, or of churning
for butter, and who were certainly very useful to their own time as well
as ours, were left quite free from invidious comparison with
predecessors who let the water and the milk alone, or whether some
rhetorical nomad, as he stretched himself on the grass with a good
appetite for contemporary butter, became loud on the virtue of ancestors
who were uncorrupted by the produce of the cow; nay, whether in a high
flight of imaginative self-sacrifice (after swallowing the butter) he
even wished himself earlier born and already eaten for the sustenance of
a generation more _naïve_ than his own.

I have often had the fool's hectic of wishing about the unalterable, but
with me that useless exercise has turned chiefly on the conception of a
different self, and not, as it usually does in literature, on the
advantage of having been born in a different age, and more especially in
one where life is imagined to have been altogether majestic and
graceful. With my present abilities, external proportions, and generally
small provision for ecstatic enjoyment, where is the ground for
confidence that I should have had a preferable career in such an epoch
of society? An age in which every department has its awkward-squad seems
in my mind's eye to suit me better. I might have wandered by the Strymon
under Philip and Alexander without throwing any new light on method or
organising the sum of human knowledge; on the other hand, I might have
objected to Aristotle as too much of a systematiser, and have preferred
the freedom of a little self-contradiction as offering more chances of
truth. I gather, too, from the undeniable testimony of his disciple
Theophrastus that there were bores, ill-bred persons, and detractors
even in Athens, of species remarkably corresponding to the English, and
not yet made endurable by being classic; and altogether, with my present
fastidious nostril, I feel that I am the better off for possessing
Athenian life solely as an inodorous fragment of antiquity. As to
Sappho's Mitylene, while I am convinced that the Lesbian capital held
some plain men of middle stature and slow