BLOCKS.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4577, 20 November 1875, Page 1 (Supplement)

BLOCKS.

(From the Queen.) You might as -well try to get the proverbial blood out of the proverbial stone as to extract sentiment from or kindle intelligence in some people ; to change the course of their ideas ; to give them new thoughts ; or to lift them out of their well-worn grooves. They are blocks not to be moulded or impressed by any after manipulation; things out into their enduring shape from the first, and remaining unchanged for all time ; save when they are “whittled” by the sharp knife of experience into rougher, thinner, more fagged transcripts of the original form, or dried up by time inta gnarled and withered old stocks, like, and yet unlike, puckered exaggerations of the first sketch. Blocks are what they are, independent of the more visible material conditions of life, and are not confined to a class ; though naturally they are found more abundant among the poor, where there has been scant education and no versatility of circumstance, and where the whole life is passed in growing, increasing, and decaying on the same spot, and in exactly the same state, from the cradle to the grave. We all know the dull, blue eyes, the heavy, half-opened mouth, the huge rows of white teeth emblamatic of the lower type ; the slow speech and slouching gait, the unconquerable ignorance and impenetrable brain, the obstinacy that would rather die than yield an inch of the old ground, the fear of knowledge which holds every ray of unusual light to be false or wrong of the ordinary country lout. This is the typical peasant, the son of toil and serf of the soil, born and bred in the dull, unpeopled country, with his best companions the horses, and his most passionate emotions mere animal, instincts, without poetry to purify or intellect to spiritualise them. He is a block, and the keenest razor applied to him has but little chance of shaping him into anything superior to himself as nature made him ; while all the polishing materials that can be brought to bear on his dense form and thick surface will be useless ; he can be as little trimmed as shaped, as little smoothed as ornamented. Go into a village school and see him painfully puzzling , over the elements of the three R’s. The hopeless look in his light blue eyes, the drooping of his heavy chin and clumsy mouth, the very slouch of his thick-set figure, all betoken the block on whom the nimblest-witted master of the new regime can work no wonder and as little improvement. He by his side is his brother, bom under the same conditions as himself, but of a different order from the beginning. He has energy and the capacity for improvement. He will never be content to spend his life on that remote, half-starved old farm, udth horses for his best, companions, and a drunken spree as his most delectable enjoyment; riot he. He is minded to be off into the world on his own account, to make himself a draper in Manchester, to take ship at Liverpool, or perhaps to accept the Queen’s shilling and see life as it is transacted in the barrack-yard and the camp. He is no block, but a mobile and receptive bit of clay, which will drink up for its own share a good store of interpenetrating moisture, by which it wilt become supple and susceptible, able to take new impressions, and to be moulded into fairer forms.

i And that it is not the only outward circumstances of life by which our block is formed, we have only to look to the upper ten, where, if comparatively rare, we still find specimens of the unalterable stock, the unbendable stick, the block which nothing can modify after the orignal impress has been given, and which rejects, as not only alien to itself but unfit for all mankind, any thoughts or opinions not accepted from the earliest days. Stolid, impassive, these blocks are unable to read the signs of the times, and gravely attempt, on all new issues, Mrs. Partington’s feat with the Atlantic. They look back a century or two ago, and give it as their fiat that the hands of Time should be arrested, and the march of events delayed in midcareer, until things are brought back to the condition in which they were at that period which they have taken in hand to idealise. They resent the growth of the stem, the bursting of the buds, and think the great tree of human life and history should be kept to the point of simple radicles and cotyledons, and that anything more profuse is evil. Tliis is their philosophy—the theory of blocks; and no power on earth can make them enlarge their borders or advance their standpoint. For them, too, the motto is “ Semper Eadem;” and with all nature ever changing about us, now building up and now falling into ruins, again reconstructing new forms from old materials, they hold that human history should bo the one thing unalterable, the crystal to which the final form has been given, and where change means fracture, mutilation, and destruction.

In private life our blocks are as ungenial as they are obstructive in public matters. Whether success has brightened, or sorrow has darkened the family horizon, it is all one to the block. So long as he has his meals served with tolerable punctuality, and Is not called on

to exert himself in ways unusual and in methods incommodious, he is satisfied. He would rather not see those tearful faces about him, were he asked his opinion and had he arbitrary power ; but, seeing that things are not all as he would make them, he contents himself to the best of his ability, and shuts his eyes to what he cannot abolish. When people are joyous instead of sorrowful, he is no more moved than before. He cannot understand how a great delight should interfere with the ordinary arrangements of times and food ; and think the excited folks who forget both in the bounding happiness of the hour are akin to fools, and decidedly unpleasant to have dealings with at home. For himself he boasts that nothing has ever cost him a night’s sleep, a day’s loss of appetite : sometimes he boasts that his pulses have never been raised, his heart has never swelled, his eyes have never grown dim for sorrow, joy, or passion. He sees others stirred to the depths with enthusiasm for a cause, while he looks calmly on and asks, “Will it pay?” He holds the hand of the poor creature beaten to the earth, like a flower iu the storm, under the weight of some violent affliction, and he tells her with unfaltering tones to he more sensible. Of what use to grieve for the inevitable ? Can tears bring back the loved lost to life? restore' the honor forfeited by the felon? break the bonds of shame laid for all time on the dear one’s name ? Of what good then to be so miserable? Far better brace up the nerves to the point of apathy calling itself resignation, of indifference pranked out as philosophy ; far better be a block as he is, and let the waves of sorrow run free, carrying no precious freight of peace or happiness with them. But indeed he is not often alive enough even to reason. He lets people go their own way uuhelped or unhindered by him ; and so long as he is not disturbed in his own personal arrangements, gives himself no more concern about breaking hearts than he does about joyous ones. He is a block, and the sweeping passions of a more fluid humanity are not within his sphere. To live with a block of this kind is to live with a millstone round your neck and chains and fetters on your hands. It is a perpetual drag on your spirits and energies, which, do your best, you can never pull up abreast with yourself.