 of these stages is
almost sure to be worldly advance. We can hardly imagine bucolic placidity
quickening to intellectual aims without imagining social aims as the
transitional phase. Yeobright's local peculiarity was that in striving at high
thinking he still cleaved to plain living - nay, wild and meagre living in many
respects, and brotherliness with clowns.
    He was a John the Baptist who took ennoblement rather than repentance for
his text. Mentally he was in a provincial future, that is, he was in many points
abreast with the central town thinkers of his date. Much of this development he
may have owed to his studious life in Paris, where he had become acquainted with
ethical systems popular at the time.
    In consequence of this relatively advanced position, Yeobright might have
been called unfortunate. The rural world was not ripe for him. A man should be
only partially before his time: to be completely to the vanward in aspirations
is fatal to fame. Had Philip's warlike son been intellectually so far ahead as
to have attempted civilization without bloodshed, he would have been twice the
godlike hero that he seemed, but nobody would have heard of an Alexander.
    In the interests of renown the forwardness should lie chiefly in the
capacity to handle things. Successful propagandists have succeeded because the
doctrine they bring into form is that which their listeners have for some time
felt without being able to shape. A man who advocates æsthetic effort and
deprecates social effort is only likely to be understood by a class to which
social effort has become a stale matter. To argue upon the possibility of
culture before luxury to the bucolic world may be to argue truly, but it is an
attempt to disturb a sequence to which humanity has been long accustomed.
Yeobright preaching to the Egdon eremites that they might rise to a serene
comprehensiveness without going through the process of enriching themselves, was
not unlike arguing to ancient Chaldeans that in ascending from earth to the pure
empyrean it was not necessary to pass first into the intervening heaven of
ether.
    Was Yeobright's mind well-proportioned? No. A well-proportioned mind is one
which shows no particular bias; one of which we may safely say that it will
never cause its owner to be confined as a madman, tortured as a heretic, or
crucified as a blasphemer. Also, on the other hand, that it will never cause him
to be applauded as a prophet, revered as a priest, or exalted as a king. Its
usual blessings are happiness and mediocrity. It produces the poetry of Rogers,
the paintings of West, the statecraft of North, the spiritual guidance of
Tomline
