of men, and forfeit nothing save the roughness of his original
nature. He is not only his own father, he is ours; and he is also our son. We
have produced him, he us. Such were we, to such are we returning: not other,
sings the poet, than one who toil-fully works his shallop against the tide, »si
brachia forte remisit«: - let him haply relax the labour of his arms, however
high up the stream, and back he goes, »in pejus,« to the early principle of our
being, with seeds and plants, that are as carelessly weighed in the hand and as
indiscriminately husbanded as our humanity.
    Poets on the other side may be cited for an assurance that the primitive is
not the degenerate: rather is he a sign of the indestructibility of the race, of
the ancient energy in removing obstacles to individual growth; a sample of what
we would be, had we his concentrated power. He is the original innocent, the
pure simple. It is we who have fallen; we have melted into Society, diluted our
essence, dissolved. He stands in the midst monumentally, a landmark of the tough
and honest old Ages, with the symbolic alphabet of striking arms and running
legs, our early language, scrawled over his person, and the glorious first flint
and arrow-head for his crest: at once the spectre of the Kitchen-midden and our
ripest issue.
    But Society is about him. The occasional spectacle of the primitive dangling
on a rope, has impressed his mind with the strength of his natural enemy: from
which uncongenial sight he has turned shuddering hardly less to behold the blast
that is blown upon a reputation where one has been disrespectful of the many. By
these means, through meditation on the contrast of circumstances in life, a
pulse of imagination has begun to stir, and he has entered the upper sphere, or
circle of spiritual Egoism: he has become the civilized Egoist; primitive still,
as sure as man has teeth, but developed in his manner of using them.
    Degenerate or not (and there is no just reason to suppose it), Sir
Willoughby was a social Egoist, fiercely imaginative in whatsoever concerned
him. He had discovered a greater realm than that of the sensual appetites, and
he rushed across and around it in his conquering period with an Alexander's
pride. On these wind-like journeys he had carried Constantia, subsequently
Clara; and however it may have been in the case of Miss Durham, in that of Miss
Middleton it is almost certain