第 十三 章 · Chapter XIII

. Chapter XIII

It was the knot of wordy socialists and working-class philosophers that

held forth in the City Hall Park on warm afternoons that was

responsible for the great discovery. Once or twice in the month, while

riding through the park on his way to the library, Martin dismounted

from his wheel and listened to the arguments, and each time he tore

himself away reluctantly. The tone of discussion was much lower than at

Mr. Morse’s table. The men were not grave and dignified. They lost

their tempers easily and called one another names, while oaths and

obscene allusions were frequent on their lips. Once or twice he had

seen them come to blows. And yet, he knew not why, there seemed

something vital about the stuff of these men’s thoughts. Their

logomachy was far more stimulating to his intellect than the reserved

and quiet dogmatism of Mr. Morse. These men, who slaughtered English,

gesticulated like lunatics, and fought one another’s ideas with

primitive anger, seemed somehow to be more alive than Mr. Morse and his

crony, Mr. Butler.

Martin had heard Herbert Spencer quoted several times in the park, but

one afternoon a disciple of Spencer’s appeared, a seedy tramp with a

dirty coat buttoned tightly at the throat to conceal the absence of a

shirt. Battle royal was waged, amid the smoking of many cigarettes and

the expectoration of much tobacco-juice, wherein the tramp successfully

held his own, even when a socialist workman sneered, “There is no god

but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is his prophet.” Martin was

puzzled as to what the discussion was about, but when he rode on to the

library he carried with him a new-born interest in Herbert Spencer, and

because of the frequency with which the tramp had mentioned “First

Principles,” Martin drew out that volume.

So the great discovery began. Once before he had tried Spencer, and

choosing the “Principles of Psychology” to begin with, he had failed as

abjectly as he had failed with Madam Blavatsky. There had been no

understanding the book, and he had returned it unread. But this night,

after algebra and physics, and an attempt at a sonnet, he got into bed

and opened “First Principles.” Morning found him still reading. It was

impossible for him to sleep. Nor did he write that day. He lay on the

bed till his body grew tired, when he tried the hard floor, reading on

his back, the book held in the air above him, or changing from side to

side. He slept that night, and did his writing next morning, and then

the book tempted him and he fell, reading all afternoon, oblivious to

everything and oblivious to the fact that that was the afternoon Ruth

gave to him. His first consciousness of the immediate world about him

was when Bernard Higginbotham jerked open the door and demanded to know

if he thought they were running a restaurant.

Martin Eden had been mastered by curiosity all his days. He wanted to

know, and it was this desire that had sent him adventuring over the

world. But he was now learning from Spencer that he never had known,

and that he never could have known had he continued his sailing and

wandering forever. He had merely skimmed over the surface of things,

observing detached phenomena, accumulating fragments of facts, making

superficial little generalizations—and all and everything quite

unrelated in a capricious and disorderly world of whim and chance. The

mechanism of the flight of birds he had watched and reasoned about with

understanding; but it had never entered his head to try to explain the

process whereby birds, as organic flying mechanisms, had been

developed. He had never dreamed there was such a process. That birds

should have come to be, was unguessed. They always had been. They just

happened.

And as it was with birds, so had it been with everything. His ignorant

and unprepared attempts at philosophy had been fruitless. The medieval

metaphysics of Kant had given him the key to nothing, and had served

the sole purpose of making him doubt his own intellectual powers. In

similar manner his attempt to study evolution had been confined to a

hopelessly technical volume by Romanes. He had understood nothing, and

the only idea he had gathered was that evolution was a dry-as-dust

theory, of a lot of little men possessed of huge and unintelligible

vocabularies. And now he learned that evolution was no mere theory but

an accepted process of development; that scientists no longer disagreed

about it, their only differences being over the method of evolution.

And here was the man Spencer, organizing all knowledge for him,

reducing everything to unity, elaborating ultimate realities, and

presenting to his startled gaze a universe so concrete of realization

that it was like the model of a ship such as sailors make and put into

glass bottles. There was no caprice, no chance. All was law. It was in

obedience to law that the bird flew, and it was in obedience to the

same law that fermenting slime had writhed and squirmed and put out

legs and wings and become a bird.

Martin had ascended from pitch to pitch of intellectual living, and

here he was at a higher pitch than ever. All the hidden things were

laying their secrets bare. He was drunken with comprehension. At night,

asleep, he lived with the gods in colossal nightmare; and awake, in the

day, he went around like a somnambulist, with absent stare, gazing upon

the world he had just discovered. At table he failed to hear the

conversation about petty and ignoble things, his eager mind seeking out

and following cause and effect in everything before him. In the meat on

the platter he saw the shining sun and traced its energy back through

all its transformations to its source a hundred million miles away, or

traced its energy ahead to the moving muscles in his arms that enabled

him to cut the meat, and to the brain wherewith he willed the muscles

to move to cut the meat, until, with inward gaze, he saw the same sun

shining in his brain. He was entranced by illumination, and did not

hear the “Bughouse,” whispered by Jim, nor see the anxiety on his

sister’s face, nor notice the rotary motion of Bernard Higginbotham’s

finger, whereby he imparted the suggestion of wheels revolving in his

brother-in-law’s head.

What, in a way, most profoundly impressed Martin, was the correlation

of knowledge—of all knowledge. He had been curious to know things, and

whatever he acquired he had filed away in separate memory compartments

in his brain. Thus, on the subject of sailing he had an immense store.

On the subject of woman he had a fairly large store. But these two

subjects had been unrelated. Between the two memory compartments there

had been no connection. That, in the fabric of knowledge, there should

be any connection whatever between a woman with hysterics and a

schooner carrying a weather-helm or heaving to in a gale, would have

struck him as ridiculous and impossible. But Herbert Spencer had shown

him not only that it was not ridiculous, but that it was impossible for

there to be no connection. All things were related to all other things

from the farthermost star in the wastes of space to the myriads of

atoms in the grain of sand under one’s foot. This new concept was a

perpetual amazement to Martin, and he found himself engaged continually

in tracing the relationship between all things under the sun and on the

other side of the sun. He drew up lists of the most incongruous things

and was unhappy until he succeeded in establishing kinship between them

all—kinship between love, poetry, earthquake, fire, rattlesnakes,

rainbows, precious gems, monstrosities, sunsets, the roaring of lions,

illuminating gas, cannibalism, beauty, murder, lovers, fulcrums, and

tobacco. Thus, he unified the universe and held it up and looked at it,

or wandered through its byways and alleys and jungles, not as a

terrified traveller in the thick of mysteries seeking an unknown goal,

but observing and charting and becoming familiar with all there was to

know. And the more he knew, the more passionately he admired the

universe, and life, and his own life in the midst of it all.

“You fool!” he cried at his image in the looking-glass. “You wanted to

write, and you tried to write, and you had nothing in you to write

about. What did you have in you?—some childish notions, a few

half-baked sentiments, a lot of undigested beauty, a great black mass

of ignorance, a heart filled to bursting with love, and an ambition as

big as your love and as futile as your ignorance. And you wanted to

write! Why, you’re just on the edge of beginning to get something in

you to write about. You wanted to create beauty, but how could you when

you knew nothing about the nature of beauty? You wanted to write about

life when you knew nothing of the essential characteristics of life.

You wanted to write about the world and the scheme of existence when

the world was a Chinese puzzle to you and all that you could have

written would have been about what you did not know of the scheme of

existence. But cheer up, Martin, my boy. You’ll write yet. You know a

little, a very little, and you’re on the right road now to know more.

Some day, if you’re lucky, you may come pretty close to knowing all

that may be known. Then you will write.”

He brought his great discovery to Ruth, sharing with her all his joy

and wonder in it. But she did not seem to be so enthusiastic over it.

She tacitly accepted it and, in a way, seemed aware of it from her own

studies. It did not stir her deeply, as it did him, and he would have

been surprised had he not reasoned it out that it was not new and fresh

to her as it was to him. Arthur and Norman, he found, believed in

evolution and had read Spencer, though it did not seem to have made any

vital impression upon them, while the young fellow with the glasses and

the mop of hair, Will Olney, sneered disagreeably at Spencer and

repeated the epigram, “There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert

Spencer is his prophet.”

But Martin forgave him the sneer, for he had begun to discover that

Olney was not in love with Ruth. Later, he was dumfounded to learn from

various little happenings not only that Olney did not care for Ruth,

but that he had a positive dislike for her. Martin could not understand

this. It was a bit of phenomena that he could not correlate with all

the rest of the phenomena in the universe. But nevertheless he felt

sorry for the young fellow because of the great lack in his nature that

prevented him from a proper appreciation of Ruth’s fineness and beauty.

They rode out into the hills several Sundays on their wheels, and

Martin had ample opportunity to observe the armed truce that existed

between Ruth and Olney. The latter chummed with Norman, throwing Arthur

and Martin into company with Ruth, for which Martin was duly grateful.

Those Sundays were great days for Martin, greatest because he was with

Ruth, and great, also, because they were putting him more on a par with

the young men of her class. In spite of their long years of disciplined

education, he was finding himself their intellectual equal, and the

hours spent with them in conversation was so much practice for him in

the use of the grammar he had studied so hard. He had abandoned the

etiquette books, falling back upon observation to show him the right

things to do. Except when carried away by his enthusiasm, he was always

on guard, keenly watchful of their actions and learning their little

courtesies and refinements of conduct.

The fact that Spencer was very little read was for some time a source

of surprise to Martin. “Herbert Spencer,” said the man at the desk in

the library, “oh, yes, a great mind.” But the man did not seem to know

anything of the content of that great mind. One evening, at dinner,

when Mr. Butler was there, Martin turned the conversation upon Spencer.

Mr. Morse bitterly arraigned the English philosopher’s agnosticism, but

confessed that he had not read “First Principles”; while Mr. Butler

stated that he had no patience with Spencer, had never read a line of

him, and had managed to get along quite well without him. Doubts arose

in Martin’s mind, and had he been less strongly individual he would

have accepted the general opinion and given Herbert Spencer up. As it

was, he found Spencer’s explanation of things convincing; and, as he

phrased it to himself, to give up Spencer would be equivalent to a

navigator throwing the compass and chronometer overboard. So Martin

went on into a thorough study of evolution, mastering more and more the

subject himself, and being convinced by the corroborative testimony of

a thousand independent writers. The more he studied, the more vistas he

caught of fields of knowledge yet unexplored, and the regret that days

were only twenty-four hours long became a chronic complaint with him.

One day, because the days were so short, he decided to give up algebra

and geometry. Trigonometry he had not even attempted. Then he cut

chemistry from his study-list, retaining only physics.

“I am not a specialist,” he said, in defence, to Ruth. “Nor am I going

to try to be a specialist. There are too many special fields for any

one man, in a whole lifetime, to master a tithe of them. I must pursue

general knowledge. When I need the work of specialists, I shall refer

to their books.”

“But that is not like having the knowledge yourself,” she protested.

“But it is unnecessary to have it. We profit from the work of the

specialists. That’s what they are for. When I came in, I noticed the

chimney-sweeps at work. They’re specialists, and when they get done,

you will enjoy clean chimneys without knowing anything about the

construction of chimneys.”

“That’s far-fetched, I am afraid.”

She looked at him curiously, and he felt a reproach in her gaze and

manner. But he was convinced of the rightness of his position.

“All thinkers on general subjects, the greatest minds in the world, in

fact, rely on the specialists. Herbert Spencer did that. He generalized

upon the findings of thousands of investigators. He would have had to

live a thousand lives in order to do it all himself. And so with

Darwin. He took advantage of all that had been learned by the florists

and cattle-breeders.”

“You’re right, Martin,” Olney said. “You know what you’re after, and

Ruth doesn’t. She doesn’t know what she is after for herself even.”

“—Oh, yes,” Olney rushed on, heading off her objection, “I know you

call it general culture. But it doesn’t matter what you study if you

want general culture. You can study French, or you can study German, or

cut them both out and study Esperanto, you’ll get the culture tone just

the same. You can study Greek or Latin, too, for the same purpose,

though it will never be any use to you. It will be culture, though.

Why, Ruth studied Saxon, became clever in it,—that was two years

ago,—and all that she remembers of it now is ‘Whan that sweet Aprile

with his schowers soote’—isn’t that the way it goes?”

“But it’s given you the culture tone just the same,” he laughed, again

heading her off. “I know. We were in the same classes.”

“But you speak of culture as if it should be a means to something,”

Ruth cried out. Her eyes were flashing, and in her cheeks were two

spots of color. “Culture is the end in itself.”

“But that is not what Martin wants.”

“How do you know?”

“What do you want, Martin?” Olney demanded, turning squarely upon him.

Martin felt very uncomfortable, and looked entreaty at Ruth.

“Yes, what do you want?” Ruth asked. “That will settle it.”

“Yes, of course, I want culture,” Martin faltered. “I love beauty, and

culture will give me a finer and keener appreciation of beauty.”

She nodded her head and looked triumph.

“Rot, and you know it,” was Olney’s comment. “Martin’s after career,

not culture. It just happens that culture, in his case, is incidental

to career. If he wanted to be a chemist, culture would be unnecessary.

Martin wants to write, but he’s afraid to say so because it will put

you in the wrong.”

“And why does Martin want to write?” he went on. “Because he isn’t

rolling in wealth. Why do you fill your head with Saxon and general

culture? Because you don’t have to make your way in the world. Your

father sees to that. He buys your clothes for you, and all the rest.

What rotten good is our education, yours and mine and Arthur’s and

Norman’s? We’re soaked in general culture, and if our daddies went

broke to-day, we’d be falling down to-morrow on teachers’ examinations.

The best job you could get, Ruth, would be a country school or music

teacher in a girls’ boarding-school.”

“And pray what would you do?” she asked.

“Not a blessed thing. I could earn a dollar and a half a day, common

labor, and I might get in as instructor in Hanley’s cramming joint—I

say might, mind you, and I might be chucked out at the end of the week

for sheer inability.”

Martin followed the discussion closely, and while he was convinced that

Olney was right, he resented the rather cavalier treatment he accorded

Ruth. A new conception of love formed in his mind as he listened.

Reason had nothing to do with love. It mattered not whether the woman

he loved reasoned correctly or incorrectly. Love was above reason. If

it just happened that she did not fully appreciate his necessity for a

career, that did not make her a bit less lovable. She was all lovable,

and what she thought had nothing to do with her lovableness.

“What’s that?” he replied to a question from Olney that broke in upon

his train of thought.

“I was saying that I hoped you wouldn’t be fool enough to tackle

Latin.”

“But Latin is more than culture,” Ruth broke in. “It is equipment.”

“Well, are you going to tackle it?” Olney persisted.

Martin was sore beset. He could see that Ruth was hanging eagerly upon

his answer.

“I am afraid I won’t have time,” he said finally. “I’d like to, but I

won’t have time.”

“You see, Martin’s not seeking culture,” Olney exulted. “He’s trying to

get somewhere, to do something.”

“Oh, but it’s mental training. It’s mind discipline. It’s what makes

disciplined minds.” Ruth looked expectantly at Martin, as if waiting

for him to change his judgment. “You know, the foot-ball players have

to train before the big game. And that is what Latin does for the

thinker. It trains.”

“Rot and bosh! That’s what they told us when we were kids. But there is

one thing they didn’t tell us then. They let us find it out for

ourselves afterwards.” Olney paused for effect, then added, “And what

they didn’t tell us was that every gentleman should have studied Latin,

but that no gentleman should know Latin.”

“Now that’s unfair,” Ruth cried. “I knew you were turning the

conversation just in order to get off something.”

“It’s clever all right,” was the retort, “but it’s fair, too. The only

men who know their Latin are the apothecaries, the lawyers, and the

Latin professors. And if Martin wants to be one of them, I miss my

guess. But what’s all that got to do with Herbert Spencer anyway?

Martin’s just discovered Spencer, and he’s wild over him. Why? Because

Spencer is taking him somewhere. Spencer couldn’t take me anywhere, nor

you. We haven’t got anywhere to go. You’ll get married some day, and

I’ll have nothing to do but keep track of the lawyers and business

agents who will take care of the money my father’s going to leave me.”

Onley got up to go, but turned at the door and delivered a parting

shot.

“You leave Martin alone, Ruth. He knows what’s best for himself. Look

at what he’s done already. He makes me sick sometimes, sick and ashamed

of myself. He knows more now about the world, and life, and man’s

place, and all the rest, than Arthur, or Norman, or I, or you, too, for

that matter, and in spite of all our Latin, and French, and Saxon, and

culture.”

“But Ruth is my teacher,” Martin answered chivalrously. “She is

responsible for what little I have learned.”

“Rats!” Olney looked at Ruth, and his expression was malicious. “I

suppose you’ll be telling me next that you read Spencer on her

recommendation—only you didn’t. And she doesn’t know anything more

about Darwin and evolution than I do about King Solomon’s mines. What’s

that jawbreaker definition about something or other, of Spencer’s, that

you sprang on us the other day—that indefinite, incoherent homogeneity

thing? Spring it on her, and see if she understands a word of it. That

isn’t culture, you see. Well, tra la, and if you tackle Latin, Martin,

I won’t have any respect for you.”

And all the while, interested in the discussion, Martin had been aware

of an irk in it as well. It was about studies and lessons, dealing with

the rudiments of knowledge, and the schoolboyish tone of it conflicted

with the big things that were stirring in him—with the grip upon life

that was even then crooking his fingers like eagle’s talons, with the

cosmic thrills that made him ache, and with the inchoate consciousness

of mastery of it all. He likened himself to a poet, wrecked on the

shores of a strange land, filled with power of beauty, stumbling and

stammering and vainly trying to sing in the rough, barbaric tongue of

his brethren in the new land. And so with him. He was alive, painfully

alive, to the great universal things, and yet he was compelled to

potter and grope among schoolboy topics and debate whether or not he

should study Latin.

“What in hell has Latin to do with it?” he demanded before his mirror

that night. “I wish dead people would stay dead. Why should I and the

beauty in me be ruled by the dead? Beauty is alive and everlasting.

Languages come and go. They are the dust of the dead.”

And his next thought was that he had been phrasing his ideas very well,

and he went to bed wondering why he could not talk in similar fashion

when he was with Ruth. He was only a schoolboy, with a schoolboy’s

tongue, when he was in her presence.

“Give me time,” he said aloud. “Only give me time.”

Time! Time! Time! was his unending plaint.