When the intellectual history of this time comes to be written, nothing
I think will stand out more strikingly than the empty gulf in quality
between the superb and richly fruitful scientific investigations that
are going on and the general thought of other educated sections of the
community. I do not mean that the scientific men are as a whole a class
of supermen, dealing with and thinking about everything in a way
altogether better than the common run of humanity, but that in their own
field, they think and work with an intensity, an integrity, a breadth,
boldness, patience, thoroughness and faithfulness that (excepting only a
few artists) puts their work out of all comparison with any other human
activity. Often the field in which the work is done is very narrow, and
almost universally the underlying philosophy is felt rather than
apprehended. A scientific man may be large and deep-minded, deliberate
and personally detached in his work, and hasty, commonplace and
superficial in every other relation of life. Nevertheless it is true
that in these particular directions the human mind has achieved a new
and higher quality of attitude and gesture, a veracity, self-detachment
and self-abnegating vigour of criticism that tend to spread out and must
ultimately spread out to every other human affair. In these
uncontroversial issues at least mankind has learnt the rich rewards that
ensue from patience and infinite pains.
The peculiar circumstances of Trafford's birth and upbringing had
accentuated his natural disposition toward this new thoroughness of
intellectual treatment which has always distinguished the great artist,
and which to-day is also the essential quality of the scientific method.
He had lived apart from any urgency to produce and compete in the common
business of the world; his natural curiosities, fed and encouraged by
his natural gifts, had grown into a steady passion for clarity and
knowledge. But with him there was no specialization. He brought out from
his laboratory into the everyday affairs of the world the same sceptical
restraint of judgment which is the touchstone of scientific truth. This
made him a tepid and indeed rather a scornful spectator of political and
social life. Party formulae, international rivalries, social customs,
and very much of the ordinary law of our state impressed him as a kind
of fungoid growth out of a fundamental intellectual muddle. It all
maintained itself hazardously, changing and adapting itself
unintelligently to unseen conditions. He saw no ultimate truth in this
seething welter of human efforts, no tragedy as yet in its defeats, no
value in its victories. It had to go on, he believed, until the
spreading certitudes of the scientific method pierced its unsubstantial
thickets, burst its delusive films, drained away its folly. Aunt
Plessington's talk of order and progress and the influence of her
Movement impressed his mind very much as the cackle of some larger kind
of hen--which cackles because it must. Only Aunt Plessington being human
simply imagined the egg. She laid--on the plane of the ideal. When the
great nonsensical issues between liberal and conservative, between
socialist and individualist, between "Anglo-Saxon" and "Teuton," between
the "white race" and the "yellow race" arose in Trafford's company, he
would if he felt cheerful take one side or the other as chance or his
amusement with his interlocutors determined, and jest and gibe at the
opponent's inconsistencies, and if on the other hand he chanced to be
irritable he would lose his temper at this "chewing of mesembryanthemum"
and sulk into silence. "Chewing mesembryanthemum" was one of Trafford's
favourite images,--no doubt the reader knows that abundant fleshy
Mediterranean weed and the weakly unpleasant wateriness of its
substance. He went back to his laboratory and his proper work after such
discussions with a feeling of escape, as if he shut a door upon a dirty
and undisciplined market-place crowded with mental defectives. Yet even
before he met and married Marjorie, there was a queer little undertow of
thought in his mind which insisted that this business could not end with
door-slamming, that he didn't altogether leave the social confusion
outside his panels when he stood alone before his apparatus, and that
sooner or later that babble of voices would force his defences and
overcome his disdain.
His particular work upon the intimate constitution of matter had
broadened very rapidly in his hands. The drift of his work had been to
identify all colloids as liquid solutions of variable degrees of
viscosity, and to treat crystalline bodies as the only solids. He had
dealt with oscillating processes in colloid bodies with especial
reference to living matter. He had passed from a study of the melting
and toughening of glass to the molecular structure of a number of
elastic bodies, and so, by a characteristic leap into botanical
physiology, to the states of resinous and gummy substances at the moment
of secretion. He worked at first upon a false start, and then resumed to
discover a growing illumination. He found himself in the presence of
phenomena that seemed to him to lie near the still undiscovered
threshold to the secret processes of living protoplasm. He was, as it
were, breaking into biology by way of molecular physics. He spent many
long nights of deep excitement, calculating and arranging the
development of these seductive intimations. It was this work which his
marriage had interrupted, and to which he was now returning.
He was surprised to find how difficult it was to take it up again. He
had been only two months away from it, and yet already it had not a
little of the feeling of a relic taken from a drawer. Something had
faded. It was at first as if a film had come over his eyes, so that he
could no longer see these things clearly and subtly and closely. His
senses, his emotions, had been living in a stirring and vivid
illumination. Now in this cool quietude bright clouds of coloured
memory-stuff swam distractingly before his eyes. Phantom kisses on his
lips, the memory of touches and the echoing vibrations of an adorable
voice, the thought of a gay delightful fireside and the fresh
recollection of a companion intensely felt beside him, effaced the
delicate profundities of this dim place. Durgan hovered about him,
helpful and a mute reproach. Trafford had to force his attention daily
for the better part of two weeks before he had fully recovered the fine
enchanting interest of that suspended work.