Everybody felt it too absurd that Merman should undertake to correct
Grampus in matters of erudition, and an eminent man has something else
to do than to refute a petty objector twice over. What was essential had
been done: the public had been enabled to form a true judgment of
Merman's incapacity, the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis were but
subsidiary elements in Grampus's system, and Merman might now be dealt
with by younger members of the master's school. But he had at least the
satisfaction of finding that he had raised a discussion which would not
be let die. The followers of Grampus took it up with an ardour and
industry of research worthy of their exemplar. Butzkopf made it the
subject of an elaborate _Einleitung_ to his important work, _Die
Bedeutung des Aegyptischen Labyrinthes_; and Dugong, in a remarkable
address which he delivered to a learned society in Central Europe,
introduced Merman's theory with so much power of sarcasm that it became
a theme of more or less derisive allusion to men of many tongues. Merman
with his Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis was on the way to become a
proverb, being used illustratively by many able journalists who took
those names of questionable things to be Merman's own invention, "than
which," said one of the graver guides, "we can recall few more
melancholy examples of speculative aberration." Naturally the subject
passed into popular literature, and figured very commonly in advertised
programmes. The fluent Loligo, the formidable Shark, and a younger
member of his remarkable family known as S. Catulus, made a special
reputation by their numerous articles, eloquent, lively, or abusive, all
on the same theme, under titles ingeniously varied, alliterative,
sonorous, or boldly fanciful; such as, "Moments with Mr Merman," "Mr
Merman and the Magicodumbras," "Greenland Grampus and Proteus Merman,"
"Grampian Heights and their Climbers, or the New Excelsior." They tossed
him on short sentences; they swathed him in paragraphs of winding
imagery; they found him at once a mere plagiarist and a theoriser of
unexampled perversity, ridiculously wrong about _potzis_ and ignorant of
Pali; they hinted, indeed, at certain things which to their knowledge he
had silently brooded over in his boyhood, and seemed tolerably well
assured that this preposterous attempt to gainsay an incomparable
Cetacean of world-wide fame had its origin in a peculiar mixture of
bitterness and eccentricity which, rightly estimated and seen in its
definite proportions, would furnish the best key to his argumentation.
All alike were sorry for Merman's lack of sound learning, but how could
their readers be sorry? Sound learning would not have been amusing; and
as it was, Merman was made to furnish these readers with amusement at no
expense of trouble on their part. Even burlesque writers looked into his
book to see where it could be made use of, and those who did not know
him were desirous of meeting him at dinner as one likely to feed their
comic vein.
On the other hand, he made a serious figure in sermons under the name of
"Some" or "Others" who had attempted presumptuously to scale eminences
too high and arduous for human ability, and had given an example of
ignominious failure edifying to the humble Christian.
All this might be very advantageous for able persons whose superfluous
fund of expression needed a paying investment, but the effect on Merman
himself was unhappily not so transient as the busy writing and speaking
of which he had become the occasion. His certainty that he was right
naturally got stronger in proportion as the spirit of resistance was
stimulated. The scorn and unfairness with which he felt himself to have
been treated by those really competent to appreciate his ideas had
galled him and made a chronic sore; and the exultant chorus of the
incompetent seemed a pouring of vinegar on his wound. His brain became a
registry of the foolish and ignorant objections made against him, and of
continually amplified answers to these objections. Unable to get his
answers printed, he had recourse to that more primitive mode of
publication, oral transmission or button-holding, now generally regarded
as a troublesome survival, and the once pleasant, flexible Merman was on
the way to be shunned as a bore. His interest in new acquaintances
turned chiefly on the possibility that they would care about the
Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis; that they would listen to his complaints
and exposures of unfairness, and not only accept copies of what he had
written on the subject, but send him appreciative letters in
acknowledgment. Repeated disappointment of such hopes tended to embitter
him, and not the less because after a while the fashion of mentioning
him died out, allusions to his theory were less understood, and people
could only pretend to remember it. And all the while Merman was
perfectly sure that his very opponents who had knowledge enough to be
capable judges were aware that his book, whatever errors of statement
they might detect in it, had served as a sort of divining rod, pointing
out hidden sources of historical interpretation; nay, his jealous
examination discerned in a new work by Grampus himself a certain
shifting of ground which--so poor Merman declared--was the sign of an
intention gradually to appropriate the views of the man he had attempted
to brand as an ignorant impostor.
And Julia? And the housekeeping?--the rent, food, and clothing, which
controversy can hardly supply unless it be of the kind that serves as a
recommendation to certain posts. Controversial pamphlets have been known
to earn large plums; but nothing of the sort could be expected from
unpractical heresies about the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis. Painfully
the contrary. Merman's reputation as a sober thinker, a safe writer, a
sound lawyer, was irretrievably injured: the distractions of controversy
had caused him to neglect useful editorial connections, and indeed his
dwindling care for miscellaneous subjects made his contributions too
dull to be desirable. Even if he could now have given a new turn to his
concentration, and applied his talents so as to be ready to show himself
an exceptionally qualified lawyer, he would only have been like an
architect in competition, too late with his superior plans; he would not
have had an opportunity of showing his qualification. He was thrown out
of the course. The small capital which had filled up deficiencies of
income was almost exhausted, and Julia, in the effort to make supplies
equal to wants, had to use much ingenuity in diminishing the wants. The
brave and affectionate woman whose small outline, so unimpressive
against an illuminated background, held within it a good share of
feminine heroism, did her best to keep up the charm of home and soothe
her husband's excitement; parting with the best jewel among her wedding
presents in order to pay rent, without ever hinting to her husband that
this sad result had come of his undertaking to convince people who only
laughed at him. She was a resigned little creature, and reflected that
some husbands took to drinking and others to forgery: hers had only
taken to the Magicodumbras and Zuzumotzis, and was not unkind--only a
little more indifferent to her and the two children than she had ever
expected he would be, his mind being eaten up with "subjects," and
constantly a little angry, not with her, but with everybody else,
especially those who were celebrated.
This was the sad truth. Merman felt himself ill-used by the world, and
thought very much worse of the world in consequence. The gall of his
adversaries' ink had been sucked into his system and ran in his blood.
He was still in the prime of life, but his mind was aged by that eager
monotonous construction which comes of feverish excitement on a single
topic and uses up the intellectual strength.
Merman had never been a rich man, but he was now conspicuously poor, and
in need of the friends who had power or interest which he believed they
could exert on his behalf. Their omitting or declining to give this help
could not seem to him so clearly as to them an inevitable consequence of
his having become impracticable, or at least of his passing for a man
whose views were not likely to be safe and sober. Each friend in turn
offended him, though unwillingly, and was suspected of wishing to shake
him off. It was not altogether so; but poor Merman's society had
undeniably ceased to be attractive, and it was difficult to help him. At
last the pressure of want urged him to try for a post far beneath his
earlier prospects, and he gained it. He holds it still, for he has no
vices, and his domestic life has kept up a sweetening current of motive
around and within him. Nevertheless, the bitter flavour mingling itself
with all topics, the premature weariness and withering, are irrevocably
there. It is as if he had gone through a disease which alters what we
call the constitution. He has long ceased to talk eagerly of the ideas
which possess him, or to attempt making proselytes. The dial has moved
onward, and he himself sees many of his former guesses in a new light.
On the other hand, he has seen what he foreboded, that the main idea
which was at the root of his too rash theorising has been adopted by
Grampus and received with general respect, no reference being heard to
the ridiculous figure this important conception made when ushered in by
the incompetent "Others."
Now and then, on rare occasions, when a sympathetic _tête-à-tête_ has
restored some of his old expansiveness, he will tell a companion in a
railway carriage, or other place of meeting favourable to
autobiographical confidences, what has been the course of things in his
particular case, as an example of the justice to be expected of the
world. The companion usually allows for the bitterness of a disappointed
man, and is secretly disinclined to believe that Grampus was to blame.
IV.
A MAN SURPRISED AT HIS ORIGINALITY.
Among the many acute sayings of La Rochefoucauld, there is hardly one
more acute than this: "La plus grande ambition n'en a pas la moindre
apparence lorsqu'elle se rencontre dans une impossibilité absolue
d'arriver où elle aspire." Some of us might do well to use this hint in
our treatment of acquaintances and friends from whom we are expecting
gratitude because we are so very kind in thinking of them, inviting
them, and even listening to what they say--considering how insignificant
they must feel themselves to be. We are often fallaciously confident in
supposing that our friend's state of mind is appropriate to our moderate
estimate of his importance: almost as if we imagined the humble mollusc
(so useful as an illustration) to have a sense of his own exceeding
softness and low place in the scale of being. Your mollusc, on the
contrary, is inwardly objecting to every other grade of solid rather
than to himself. Accustomed to observe what we think an unwarrantable
conceit exhibiting itself in ridiculous pretensions and forwardness to
play the lion's part, in obvious self-complacency and loud
peremptoriness, we are not on the alert to detect the egoistic claims of
a more exorbitant kind often hidden under an apparent neutrality or an
acquiescence in being put out of the question.
Thoughts of this kind occurred to me yesterday when I saw the name of
Lentulus in the obituary. The majority of his acquaintances, I imagine,
have always thought of him as a man justly unpretending and as nobody's
rival; but some of them have perhaps been struck with surprise at his
reserve in praising the works of his contemporaries, and have now and
then felt themselves in need of a key to his remarks on men of celebrity
in various departments. He was a man of fair position, deriving his
income from a business in which he did nothing, at leisure to frequent
clubs and at ease in giving dinners; well-looking, polite, and generally
acceptable in society as a part of what we may call its bread-crumb--the
neutral basis needful for the plums and spice. Why, then, did he speak
of the modern Maro or the modern Flaccus with a peculiarity in his tone
of assent to other people's praise which might almost have led you to
suppose that the eminent poet had borrowed money of him and showed an
indisposition to repay? He had no criticism to offer, no sign of
objection more specific than a slight cough, a scarcely perceptible
pause before assenting, and an air of self-control in his utterance--as
if certain considerations had determined him not to inform against the
so-called poet, who to his knowledge was a mere versifier. If you had
questioned him closely, he would perhaps have confessed that he did
think something better might be done in the way of Eclogues and
Georgics, or of Odes and Epodes, and that to his mind poetry was
something very different from what had hitherto been known under that
name.
For my own part, being of a superstitious nature, given readily to
imagine alarming causes, I immediately, on first getting these mystic
hints from Lentulus, concluded that he held a number of entirely
original poems, or at the very least a revolutionary treatise on
poetics, in that melancholy manuscript state to which works excelling
all that is ever printed are necessarily condemned; and I was long timid
in speaking of the poets when he was present. For what might not
Lentulus have done, or be profoundly aware of, that would make my
ignorant impressions ridiculous? One cannot well be sure of the negative
in such a case, except through certain positives that bear witness to
it; and those witnesses are not always to be got hold of. But time
wearing on, I perceived that the attitude of Lentulus towards the
philosophers was essentially the same as his attitude towards the poets;
nay, there was something so much more decided in his mode of closing his
mouth after brief speech on the former, there was such an air of rapt
consciousness in his private hints as to his conviction that all
thinking hitherto had been an elaborate mistake, and as to his own
power of conceiving a sound basis for a lasting superstructure, that I
began to believe less in the poetical stores, and to infer that the line
of Lentulus lay rather in the rational criticism of our beliefs and in
systematic construction. In this case I did not figure to myself the
existence of formidable manuscripts ready for the press; for great
thinkers are known to carry their theories growing within their minds
long before committing them to paper, and the ideas which made a new
passion for them when their locks were jet or auburn, remain perilously
unwritten, an inwardly developing condition of their successive selves,
until the locks are grey or scanty. I only meditated improvingly on the
way in which a man of exceptional faculties, and even carrying within
him some of that fierce refiner's fire which is to purge away the dross
of human error, may move about in society totally unrecognised, regarded
as a person whose opinion is superfluous, and only rising into a power
in emergencies of threatened black-balling. Imagine a Descartes or a
Locke being recognised for nothing more than a good fellow and a
perfect gentleman--what a painful view does such a picture suggest of
impenetrable dulness in the society around them!
I would at all times rather be reduced to a cheaper estimate of a
particular person, if by that means I can get a more cheerful view of my
fellow-men generally; and I confess that in a certain curiosity which
led me to cultivate Lentulus's acquaintance, my hope leaned to the
discovery that he was a less remarkable man than he had seemed to imply.
It would have been a grief to discover that he was bitter or malicious,
but by finding him to be neither a mighty poet, nor a revolutionary
poetical critic, nor an epoch-making philosopher, my admiration for the
poets and thinkers whom he rated so low would recover all its buoyancy,
and I should not be left to trust to that very suspicious sort of merit
which constitutes an exception in the history of mankind, and recommends
itself as the total abolitionist of all previous claims on our
confidence. You are not greatly surprised at the infirm logic of the
coachman who would persuade you to engage him by insisting that any
other would be sure to rob you in the matter of hay and corn, thus
demanding a difficult belief in him as the sole exception from the
frailties of his calling; but it is rather astonishing that the
wholesale decriers of mankind and its performances should be even more
unwary in their reasoning than the coachman, since each of them not
merely confides in your regarding himself as an exception, but overlooks
the almost certain fact that you are wondering whether he inwardly
excepts _you_. Now, conscious of entertaining some common opinions which
seemed to fall under the mildly intimated but sweeping ban of Lentulus,
my self-complacency was a little concerned.
Hence I deliberately attempted to draw out Lentulus in private dialogue,
for it is the reverse of injury to a man to offer him that hearing which
he seems to have found nowhere else. And for whatever purposes silence
may be equal to gold, it cannot be safely taken as an indication of
specific ideas. I sought to know why Lentulus was more than indifferent
to the poets, and what was that new poetry which he had either written
or, as to its principles, distinctly conceived. But I presently found
that he knew very little of any particular poet, and had a general
notion of poetry as the use of artificial language to express unreal
sentiments: he instanced "The Giaour," "Lalla Rookh," "The Pleasures of
Hope," and "Ruin seize thee, ruthless King;" adding, "and plenty more."
On my observing that he probably preferred a larger, simpler style, he
emphatically assented. "Have you not," said I, "written something of
that order?" "No; but I often compose as I go along. I see how things
might be written as fine as Ossian, only with true ideas. The world has
no notion what poetry will be."
It was impossible to disprove this, and I am always glad to believe that
the poverty of our imagination is no measure of the world's resources.
Our posterity will no doubt get fuel in ways that we are unable to
devise for them. But what this conversation persuaded me of was, that
the birth with which the mind of Lentulus was pregnant could not be
poetry, though I did not question that he composed as he went along, and
that the exercise was accompanied with a great sense of power. This is a
frequent experience in dreams, and much of our waking experience is but
a dream in the daylight. Nay, for what I saw, the compositions might be
fairly classed as Ossianic. But I was satisfied that Lentulus could not
disturb my grateful admiration for the poets of all ages by eclipsing
them, or by putting them under a new electric light of criticism.
Still, he had himself thrown the chief emphasis of his protest and his
consciousness of corrective illumination on the philosophic thinking of
our race; and his tone in assuring me that everything which had been
done in that way was wrong--that Plato, Robert Owen, and Dr Tuffle who
wrote in the 'Regulator,' were all equally mistaken--gave my
superstitious nature a thrill of anxiety. After what had passed about
the poets, it did not seem likely that Lentulus had all systems by
heart; but who could say he had not seized that thread which may
somewhere hang out loosely from the web of things and be the clue of
unravelment? We need not go far to learn that a prophet is not made by
erudition. Lentulus at least had not the bias of a school; and if it
turned out that he was in agreement with any celebrated thinker,
ancient or modern, the agreement would have the value of an undesigned
coincidence not due to forgotten reading. It was therefore with renewed
curiosity that I engaged him on this large subject--the universal
erroneousness of thinking up to the period when Lentulus began that
process. And here I found him more copious than on the theme of poetry.
He admitted that he did contemplate writing down his thoughts, but his
difficulty was their abundance. Apparently he was like the woodcutter
entering the thick forest and saying, "Where shall I begin?" The same
obstacle appeared in a minor degree to cling about his verbal
exposition, and accounted perhaps for his rather helter-skelter choice
of remarks bearing on the number of unaddressed letters sent to the
post-office; on what logic really is, as tending to support the buoyancy
of human mediums and mahogany tables; on the probability of all miracles
under all religions when explained by hidden laws, and my
unreasonableness in supposing that their profuse occurrence at half a
guinea an hour in recent times was anything more than a coincidence; on
the haphazard way in which marriages are determined--showing the
baselessness of social and moral schemes; and on his expectation that he
should offend the scientific world when he told them what he thought of
electricity as an agent.
No man's appearance could be graver or more gentleman-like than that of
Lentulus as we walked along the Mall while he delivered these
observations, understood by himself to have a regenerative bearing on
human society. His wristbands and black gloves, his hat and nicely
clipped hair, his laudable moderation in beard, and his evident
discrimination in choosing his tailor, all seemed to excuse the
prevalent estimate of him as a man untainted with heterodoxy, and likely
to be so unencumbered with opinions that he would always be useful as an
assenting and admiring listener. Men of science seeing him at their
lectures doubtless flattered themselves that he came to learn from them;
the philosophic ornaments of our time, expounding some of their luminous
ideas in the social circle, took the meditative gaze of Lentulus for one
of surprise not unmixed with a just reverence at such close reasoning
towards so novel a conclusion; and those who are called men of the
world considered him a good fellow who might be asked to vote for a
friend of their own and would have no troublesome notions to make him
unaccommodating. You perceive how very much they were all mistaken,
except in qualifying him as a good fellow.
This Lentulus certainly was, in the sense of being free from envy,
hatred, and malice; and such freedom was all the more remarkable an
indication of native benignity, because of his gaseous, illimitably
expansive conceit. Yes, conceit; for that his enormous and contentedly
ignorant confidence in his own rambling thoughts was usually clad in a
decent silence, is no reason why it should be less strictly called by
the name directly implying a complacent self-estimate unwarranted by
performance. Nay, the total privacy in which he enjoyed his
consciousness of inspiration was the very condition of its undisturbed
placid nourishment and gigantic growth. Your audibly arrogant man
exposes himself to tests: in attempting to make an impression on others
he may possibly (not always) be made to feel his own lack of
definiteness; and the demand for definiteness is to all of us a needful
check on vague depreciation of what others do, and vague ecstatic trust
in our own superior ability. But Lentulus was at once so unreceptive,
and so little gifted with the power of displaying his miscellaneous
deficiency of information, that there was really nothing to hinder his
astonishment at the spontaneous crop of ideas which his mind secretly
yielded. If it occurred to him that there were more meanings than one
for the word "motive," since it sometimes meant the end aimed at and
sometimes the feeling that prompted the aiming, and that the word
"cause" was also of changeable import, he was naturally struck with the
truth of his own perception, and was convinced that if this vein were
well followed out much might be made of it. Men were evidently in the
wrong about cause and effect, else why was society in the confused state
we behold? And as to motive, Lentulus felt that when he came to write
down his views he should look deeply into this kind of subject and show
up thereby the anomalies of our social institutions; meanwhile the
various aspects of "motive" and "cause" flitted about among the motley
crowd of ideas which he regarded as original, and pregnant with
reformative efficacy. For his unaffected goodwill made him regard all
his insight as only valuable because it tended towards reform.
The respectable man had got into his illusory maze of discoveries by
letting go that clue of conformity in his thinking which he had kept
fast hold of in his tailoring and manners. He regarded heterodoxy as a
power in itself, and took his inacquaintance with doctrines for a
creative dissidence. But his epitaph needs not to be a melancholy one.
His benevolent disposition was more effective for good than his silent
presumption for harm. He might have been mischievous but for the lack of
words: instead of being astonished at his inspirations in private, he
might have clad his addled originalities, disjointed commonplaces, blind
denials, and balloon-like conclusions, in that mighty sort of language
which would have made a new Koran for a knot of followers. I mean no
disrespect to the ancient Koran, but one would not desire the roc to lay
more eggs and give us a whole wing-flapping brood to soar and make
twilight.