Another aphorism of his was, “If you want to keep young, live in a metropolis; never stay above a few weeks at a time in the country. Take two men of similar constitution at the age of twenty-five; let one live in London and enjoy a regular sort of club life; send the other to some rural district, preposterously called ‘salubrious.’ Look at these men when they have both reached the age of forty-five. The London man has preserved his figure: the rural man has a paunch. The London man has an interesting delicacy of complexion: the face of the rural man is coarse-grained and perhaps jowly.”
A third axiom was, “Don’t be a family man; nothing ages one like matrimonial felicity and paternal ties. Never multiply cares, and pack up your life in the briefest compass you can. Why add to your carpet-bag of troubles the contents of a lady’s imperials and bonnet-boxes, and the travelling fourgon required by the nursery? Shun ambition: it is so gouty. It takes a great deal out of a man’s life, and gives him nothing worth having till he has ceased to enjoy it.” Another of his aphorisms was this, “A fresh mind keeps the body fresh. Take in the ideas of the day, drain off those of yesterday. As to the morrow, time enough to consider it when it becomes to-day.”
Preserving himself by attention to these rules, Mr. Mivers appeared at Exmundham totus, teres, but not rotundus,—a man of middle height, slender, upright, with well-cut, small, slight features, thin lips, enclosing an excellent set of teeth, even, white, and not indebted to the dentist. For the sake of those teeth he shunned acid wines, especially hock in all its varieties, culinary sweets, and hot drinks. He drank even his tea cold.
“There are,” he said, “two things in life that a sage must preserve at every sacrifice, the coats of his stomach and the enamel of his teeth. Some evils admit of consolations: there are no comforters for dyspepsia and toothache.” A man of letters, but a man of the world, he had so cultivated his mind as both that he was feared as the one and liked as the other. As a man of letters he despised the world; as a man of the world he despised letters. As the representative of both he revered himself.
CHAPTER IX
ON the evening of the third day from the arrival of Mr. Mivers, he, the Parson, and Sir Peter were seated in the host’s parlour, the Parson in an armchair by the ingle, smoking a short cutty-pipe; Mivers at length on the couch, slowly inhaling the perfumes of one of his own choice trabucos. Sir Peter never smoked. There were spirits and hot water and lemons on the table. The Parson was famed for skill in the composition of toddy. From time to time the Parson sipped his glass, and Sir Peter less frequently did the same. It is needless to say that Mr. Mivers eschewed toddy; but beside him, on a chair, was a tumbler and a large carafe of iced water.
SIR PETER.—“Cousin Mivers, you have now had time to study Kenelm, and to compare his character with that assigned to him in the Doctor’s letter.”
MIVERS (languidly).—“Ay.”
SIR PETER.—“I ask you, as a man of the world, what you think I had best do with the boy. Shall I send him to such a tutor as the Doctor suggests? Cousin John is not of the same mind as the Doctor, and thinks that Kenelm’s oddities are fine things in their way, and should not be prematurely ground out of him by contact with worldly tutors and London pavements.”
“Ay,” repeated Mr. Mivers more languidly than before. After a pause he added, “Parson John, let us hear you.”
The Parson laid aside his cutty-pipe and emptied his fourth tumbler of toddy; then, throwing back his head in the dreamy fashion of the great Coleridge when he indulged in a monologue, he thus began, speaking somewhat through his nose,—
“At the morning of life—”
Here Mivers shrugged his shoulders, turned round on his couch, and closed his eyes with the sigh of a man resigning himself to a homily.
“At the morning of life, when the dews—”
“I knew the dews were coming,” said Mivers. “Dry them, if you please; nothing so unwholesome. We anticipate what you mean to say, which is plainly this, When a fellow is sixteen he is very fresh: so he is; pass on; what then?”
“If you mean to interrupt me with your habitual cynicism,” said the Parson, “why did you ask to hear me?”
“That was a mistake I grant; but who on earth could conceive that you were going to commence in that florid style? Morning of life indeed! bosh!”
“Cousin Mivers,” said Sir Peter, “you are not reviewing John’s style in ‘The Londoner;’ and I will beg you to remember that my son’s morning of life is a serious thing to his father, and not to be nipped in its bud by a cousin. Proceed, John!”
Quoth the Parson, good-humouredly, “I will adapt my style to the taste of my critic. When a fellow is at the age of sixteen, and very fresh to life, the question is whether he should begin thus prematurely to exchange the ideas that belong to youth for the ideas that properly belong to middle age,—whether he should begin to acquire that knowledge of the world which middle-aged men have acquired and can teach. I think not. I would rather have him yet a while in the company of the poets; in the indulgence of glorious hopes and beautiful dreams, forming to himself some type of the Heroic, which he will keep before his eyes as a standard when he goes into the world as man. There are two schools of thought for the formation of character,—the Real and the Ideal. I would form the character in the Ideal school, in order to make it bolder and grander and lovelier when it takes its place in that every-day life which is called Real. And therefore I am not for placing the descendant of Sir Kenelm Digby, in the interval between school and college, with a man of the world, probably as cynical as Cousin Mivers and living in the stony thoroughfares of London.”
MR. MIVERS (rousing himself).—“Before we plunge into that Serbonian bog—the controversy between the Realistic and the Idealistic academicians—I think the first thing to decide is what you want Kenelm to be hereafter. When I order a pair of shoes, I decide beforehand what kind of shoes they are to be,—court pumps or strong walking shoes; and I don’t ask the shoemaker to give me a preliminary lecture upon the different purposes of locomotion to which leather can be applied. If, Sir Peter, you want Kenelm to scribble lackadaisical poems, listen to Parson John; if you want to fill his head with pastoral rubbish about innocent love, which may end in marrying the miller’s daughter, listen to Parson John; if you want him to enter life a soft-headed greenhorn, who will sign any bill carrying 50 per cent to which a young scamp asks him to be security, listen to Parson John; in fine, if you wish a clever lad to become either a pigeon or a ring-dove, a credulous booby or a sentimental milksop, Parson John is the best adviser you can have.”
“But I don’t want my son to ripen into either of those imbecile developments of species.”
“Then don’t listen to Parson John; and there’s an end of the discussion.”
“No, there is not. I have not heard your advice what to do if John’s advice is not to be taken.”
Mr. Mivers hesitated. He seemed puzzled.
“The fact is,” said the Parson, “that Mivers got up ‘The Londoner’ upon a principle that regulates his own mind,—find fault with the way everything is done, but never commit yourself by saying how anything can be done better.”
“That is true,” said Mivers, candidly. “The destructive order of mind is seldom allied to the constructive. I and ‘The Londoner’ are destructive by nature and by policy. We can reduce a building into rubbish, but we don’t profess to turn rubbish into a building. We are critics, and, as you say, not such fools as to commit ourselves to the proposition of amendments that can be criticised