One-Passage Books

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

THERE is a great deal to be said about the fashionable school of biography. The pensive but ingenious Mr. Andrew Lang has already said some of it, and I myself hope, on one of our days, to say a little more ; but meanwhile I turn aside upon the thought suggested by a passage in the very able and interesting Life of Huxley by his son. All who have read this biography will remember the abrupt exclamation in one of Thomas Huxley’s letters, dated some time, I think, in the eighteen-eighties, and piercing as the involuntary cry of one who has received a stinging blow in the dark, where his revolt from the idea of annihilation finds a startling vent. “To think, ” he says, or words to that effect, for I have not the book by me, — “To think that I shall probably know no more about what is going on in this interesting world in 1900 than I did in 1800! ” Then he rallies his intrepid wit and protests that he would a great deal rather go to hell, — “especially if I might be in one of the upper circles, where the society is comparatively good, and the climate not too trying! ”

Every one who has read the book, I say, will remember this passage; many of its titular critics have already quoted it, — and I venture to predict, furthermore, that a considerable number of its readers will permanently and distinctly remember no other. For this is my thought, — that of the higher class of books extensively read in these democratic days, the larger part hold on to the memory of mankind at large by a single passage only. Let me give a few instances, just as they occur at random to memory.

There was the Life of Darwin, which thousands of the laity — I mean the unscientific — labored through, with deep respect for the great savant’s heroic industry and single-minded devotion to truth, and an ever growing affection for the transparently beautiful and blameless character of the man. But the thing that gripped the general reader, and recurs often, even now, to the popular mind, — as we see, again, by its frequent quotation, —was the passage near the end where he confesses to having wholly lost through his exclusive devotion to experimental science the power, which he once possessed in a rather high degree, of enjoying music, poetry, and the plastic arts. He says, with a simplicity and humility all his own, — though perhaps a little wistfulIy, — that his “æsthetic faculties have long been atrophied. ”

Here is another instance, curiously like the one from Huxley, out of a somewhat older and decidedly more recondite work,— John Stuart Mill’s Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy. The main argument of the Examination turned upon Sir William’s assumption that goodness in a Supreme Being must needs be something so different from goodness in a limited human being, that we have no right to bring it to the same tests, or attempt measuring it by the same rule. Up to a certain point, in attacking the nicely jointed ethical system of which this postulate formed a part, Mill had preserved a cold and academic decorum, and employed only the driest and most technical phraseology. But suddenly there is a shiver of the sentient being, and the personal reaction of all this frigid argumentation sweeps over him, like a spring flood over a broken dam. The critic rises, and, at the pitch of his voice, in words palpitant with human passion declares that he does not and never will believe a doctrine, which to his mind and conscience destroys every conceivable sanction of human morality. “And if an Almighty Being can sentence me to hell for not so believing, to hell I will go.”

The “psychological ” word had been spoken, the wireless message went home. Some of those who read were inexpressibly shocked, and some were mysteriously exhilarated; but the dauntless challenge thus delivered to Omnipotence became the book henceforth to by far the larger proportion of those who knew it at all, and it has remained so for the thirty odd years during which the very expensive logical scaffolding of either disputant has been tranquilly rotting away: —

Another instance of a similar character was furnished by FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, — in those early days, already so long gone by, when the book was in the hands of those only whom it really concerned. The fit but few read the Rubáiyát first in the late sixties or early seventies, either in a now priceless little blue-covered brochure, or in the late Bernard Quaritch’s thin red volume. I well remember what an epoch it made with me, and that I diffidently proposed to the then editor of a magazine which shall be nameless to say a few words about the new star that had arisen, in that fine critical print, which was so very fine in those remote days, and accommodated such an astonishing number of words to a page. I was tenderly but decisively told, in reply, that such a notice could have no general interest. But only a few years later the Rubáiyát got a long body article over a worthy name; and since then, — Heaven help us all! — there have been Omar societies and clubs; and almost as much vapid exploitation, and superfluous, not to say impertinent, commentary, as has been lavished on In Memoriam. Yet is it not true that both these poems mark their influence on their generation, and retain their vital hold, — the one by the thunderous passage, —

and the other by the three numbers LIV, LV, and LVI, beginning with the lines — almost as well known, now, as the opening of the Burial Service —

and ending with the “sad mechanic” refrain, —

Of the instances I have thus far enumerated, three — Huxley’s, Mill’s, and FitzGerald’s (for we all know, by this time, how much and how little Omar had to do with it) — strike almost the same Promethean chord. They are essentially seditious, — a ringing call — mad at the moment perhaps, as the majority of such calls must ever seem — to insurrection against an invisible and supernatural tyranny. But all of them, even Darwin’s, indirectly and obscurely, touch the individual man to the quick concerning his own final destiny ; as the Puritan divines would have said, they make him “anxiety about his soul.” More hopeful than either of the foregoing extracts, yet almost more awful than any of them in its convincing solemnity, is the most frequently cited, — is it not the only frequently cited page from the Confessions of St. Augustine ? — the one in which the Bishop that was to be describes the last talk he had with his mother, the sainted Monica, before that more than “magic casement, ” the open window at Ostia.

There can be, I think, but one reason why this particular passage out of a book all palpitant with personal feeling and interest— “the most human of all religious books, ” as the late Master of Balliol rightly called it — should have escaped from the keeping of the learned, to live in the heart of average humanity; and that is because it comes nearer than any other known collocation of merely human words, except perhaps one or two of St. Paul and of Dante, to penetrating the beyond, capturing the transcendent, expressing the inexpressible : —

“If life eternal were to be forever what that one moment of high insight was, would not this be, in very truth, to enter into the joy of our Lord ? ”

But a truce to translation! There is a very beautiful one of the whole scene, in the inconsequent Mr. Mallock’smost unaccountable book, Is Life Worth Living ? But I would most earnestly beg those whom it may really concern to turn to the tenth chapter of the ninth Book of the Confessions and read it all in the strange and soul-subduing agro-dolce of Augustine’s own “converted ” Latin.

Almost anything will seem like an anti-climax after it; still I am moved to inquire, as I pass, how many of the unprofessional and comparatively illiterate there are to whom the casual mention of Kant means anything more than the familiar remark of the astronomical prophet about the two things which fill him with equal wonder, the starry heaven above, and the moral law within; or to whom Plotinus is not comprised in that solitary, yet curiously uplifting expression, — “the flight of the one to the One.” Cœtera desiderantur.