Christian Science Part 7

This is not English--I mean, grown-up English. But it is fifteen-year-old English, and has not grown a month since the same mind produced the Poems. The standard of the Poems and of the plague-spot-and-bacilli effort is exactly the same. It is most strange that the same intellect that worded the simple and self-contained and clean-cut paragraph beginning with "How unreasonable is the belief,"

should in the very same l.u.s.trum discharge upon the world such a verbal chaos as the utterance concerning that plague-spot or bacilli which were gnawing at the insides of the metropolis and bringing its heart on bended knee, thus exposing to the eye the rest of the skeleton breathing slowly through a barren breast.

The immense contrast between the legitimate English of Science and Health and the b.a.s.t.a.r.d English of Mrs. Eddy's miscellaneous work, and between the maturity of the one diction and the juvenility of the other, suggests--compels--the question, Are there two guns? It would seem so.

Is there a poor, foolish, old, scattering flint-lock for rabbit, and a long-range, centre-driving, up-to-date Mauser-magazine for elephant?

It looks like it. For it is observable that in Science and Health (the elephant-ground) the practice was good at the start and has remained so, and that the practice in the miscellaneous, outside, small-game field was very bad at the start and was never less bad at any later time.

I wish to say that of Mrs. Eddy I am not requiring perfect English, but only good English. No one can write perfect English and keep it up through a stretch of ten chapters. It has never been done. It was approached in the "well of English undefiled"; it has been approached in Mrs. Eddy's Annex to that Book; it has been approached in several English grammars; I have even approached it myself; but none of us has made port.

Now, the English of Science and Health is good. In pa.s.sages to be found in Mrs. Eddy's Autobiography (on pages 53, 57, 101, and 113), and on page 6 of her squalid preface to Science and Health, first revision, she seems to me to claim the whole and sole authors.h.i.+p of the book. That she wrote the Autobiography, and that preface, and the Poems, and the Plague-spot-Bacilli, we are not permitted to doubt. Indeed, we know she wrote them. But the very certainty that she wrote these things compels a doubt that she wrote Science and Health. She is guilty of little awkwardnesses of expression in the Autobiography which a practiced pen would hardly allow to go uncorrected in even a hasty private letter, and could not dream of pa.s.sing by uncorrected in pa.s.sages intended for print. But she pa.s.ses them placidly by; as placidly as if she did not suspect that they were offenses against third-cla.s.s English. I think that that placidity was born of that very unawareness, so to speak. I will cite a few instances from the Autobiography. The italics are mine:

"I remember reading in my childhood certain ma.n.u.scripts containing Scriptural Sonnets, besides other verses and enigmas," etc. Page 7.

[On page 27.] "Many pale cripples went into the Church leaning on crutches who came out carrying them on their shoulders."

It is awkward, because at the first glance it seems to say that the cripples went in leaning on crutches which went out carrying the cripples on their shoulders. It would have cost her no trouble to put her "who" after her "cripples." I blame her a little; I think her proof-reader should have been shot. We may let her capital C pa.s.s, but it is another awkwardness, for she is talking about a building, not about a religious society.

"Marriage and Parentage" [Chapter-heading. Page 30]. You imagine that she is going to begin a talk about her marriage and finish with some account of her father and mother. And so you will be deceived.

"Marriage" was right, but "Parentage" was not the best word for the rest of the record. It refers to the birth of her own child. After a certain period of time "my babe was born." Marriage and Motherhood--Marriage and Maternity--Marriage and Product--Marriage and Dividend--either of these would have fitted the facts and made the matter clear.

"Without my knowledge he was appointed a guardian." Page 32.

She is speaking of her child. She means that a guardian for her child was appointed, but that isn't what she says.

"If spiritual conclusions are separated from their premises, the nexus is lost, and the argument with its rightful conclusions, becomes correspondingly obscure." Page 34.

We shall never know why she put the word "correspondingly" in there. Any fine, large word would have answered just as well: psychosuperintangibly--electroincandescently--oligarcheologically-- sanchrosynchro-stereoptically--any of these would have answered, any of these would have filled the void.

"His spiritual noumenon and phenomenon silenced portraiture." Page 34.

Yet she says she forgot everything she knew, when she discovered Christian Science. I realize that noumenon is a daisy; and I will not deny that I shall use it whenever I am in a company which I think I can embarra.s.s with it; but, at the same time, I think it is out of place among friends in an autobiography. There, I think a person ought not to have anything up his sleeve. It undermines confidence. But my dissatisfaction with the quoted pa.s.sage is not on account of noumenon; it is on account of the misuse of the word "silenced." You cannot silence portraiture with a noumenon; if portraiture should make a noise, a way could be found to silence it, but even then it could not be done with a noumenon. Not even with a brick, some authorities think.

"It may be that the mortal life-battle still wages," etc. Page 35.

That is clumsy. Battles do not wage, battles are waged. Mrs. Eddy has one very curious and interesting peculiarity: whenever she notices that she is chortling along without saying anything, she pulls up with a sudden "G.o.d is over us all," or some other sounding irrelevancy, and for the moment it seems to light up the whole district; then, before you can recover from the shock, she goes flitting pleasantly and meaninglessly along again, and you hurry hopefully after her, thinking you are going to get something this time; but as soon as she has led you far enough away from her turkey lot she takes to a tree. Whenever she discovers that she is getting pretty disconnected, she couples-up with an ostentatious "But" which has nothing to do with anything that went before or is to come after, then she hitches some empties to the train-unrelated verses from the Bible, usually--and steams out of sight and leaves you wondering how she did that clever thing. For striking instances, see bottom paragraph on page 34 and the paragraph on page 35 of her Autobiography. She has a purpose--a deep and dark and artful purpose--in what she is saying in the first paragraph, and you guess what it is, but that is due to your own talent, not hers; she has made it as obscure as language could do it. The other paragraph has no meaning and no discoverable intention. It is merely one of her G.o.d-over-alls. I cannot spare room for it in this place.

"I beheld with ineffable awe our great Master's marvelous skill in demanding neither obedience to hygienic laws nor," etc. Page 41.

The word is loosely chosen-skill. She probably meant judgment, intuition, penetration, or wisdom.

"Naturally, my first jottings were but efforts to express in feeble diction Truth's ultimate." Page 42.

One understands what she means, but she should have been able to say what she meant--at any time before she discovered Christian Science and forgot everything she knew--and after it, too. If she had put "feeble"

in front of "efforts" and then left out "in" and "diction," she would have scored.

"... its written expression increases in perfection under the guidance of the great Master." Page 43.

It is an error. Not even in those advantageous circ.u.mstances can increase be added to perfection.

"Evil is not mastered by evil; it can only be overcome with Good.

This brings out the nothingness of evil, and the eternal Somethingness vindicates the Divine Principle and improves the race of Adam." Page 76.

This is too extraneous for me. That is the trouble with Mrs. Eddy when she sets out to explain an over-large exhibit: the minute you think the light is bursting upon you the candle goes out and your mind begins to wander.

"No one else can drain the cup which I have drunk to the dregs, as the discoverer and teacher of Christian Science" Page 47.

That is saying we cannot empty an empty cup. We knew it before; and we know she meant to tell us that that particular cup is going to remain empty. That is, we think that that was the idea, but we cannot be sure.

She has a perfectly astonis.h.i.+ng talent for putting words together in such a way as to make successful inquiry into their intention impossible.

She generally makes us uneasy when she begins to tune up on her fine-writing timbrel. It carries me back to her Plague-Spot and Poetry days, and I just dread those:

"Into mortal mind's material obliquity I gazed and stood abashed.

Blanched was the cheek of pride. My heart bent low before the omnipotence of Spirit, and a tint of humility soft as the heart of a moonbeam mantled the earth. Bethlehem and Bethany, Gethsemane and Calvary, spoke to my chastened sense as by the tearful lips of a babe."

Page 48.

The heart of a moonbeam is a pretty enough Friends.h.i.+p's-Alb.u.m expression--let it pa.s.s, though I do think the figure a little strained; but humility has no tint, humility has no complexion, and if it had it could not mantle the earth. A moonbeam might--I do not know--but she did not say it was the moonbeam. But let it go, I cannot decide it, she mixes me up so. A babe hasn't "tearful lips," it's its eyes. You find none of Mrs. Eddy's kind of English in Science and Health--not a line of it.

CHAPTER III

Setting aside t.i.tle-page, index, etc., the little Autobiography begins on page 7 and ends on page 130. My quotations are from the first forty pages. They seem to me to prove the presence of the 'prentice hand. The style of the forty pages is loose and feeble and 'prentice-like. The movement of the narrative is not orderly and sequential, but rambles around, and skips forward and back and here and there and yonder, 'prentice-fas.h.i.+on. Many a journeyman has broken up his narrative and skipped about and rambled around, but he did it for a purpose, for an advantage; there was art in it, and points to be scored by it; the observant reader perceived the game, and enjoyed it and respected it, if it was well played. But Mrs. Eddy's performance was without intention, and dest.i.tute of art. She could score no points by it on those terms, and almost any reader can see that her work was the uncalculated puttering of a novice.

In the above paragraph I have described the first third of the booklet.

That third being completed, Mrs. Eddy leaves the rabbit-range, crosses the frontier, and steps out upon her far-spreading big-game territory--Christian Science and there is an instant change! The style smartly improves; and the clumsy little technical offenses disappear. In these two-thirds of the booklet I find only one such offence, and it has the look of being a printer's error.

I leave the riddle with the reader. Perhaps he can explain how it is that a person-trained or untrained--who on the one day can write nothing better than Plague-Spot-Bacilli and feeble and stumbling and wandering personal history littered with false figures and obscurities and technical blunders, can on the next day sit down and write fluently, smoothly, compactly, capably, and confidently on a great big thundering subject, and do it as easily and comfortably as a whale paddles around the globe.

As for me, I have scribbled so much in fifty years that I have become saturated with convictions of one sort and another concerning a scribbler's limitations; and these are so strong that when I am familiar with a literary person's work I feel perfectly sure that I know enough about his limitations to know what he can not do. If Mr. Howells should pretend to me that he wrote the Plague-Spot Bacilli rhapsody, I should receive the statement courteously; but I should know it for a--well, for a perversion. If the late Josh Billings should rise up and tell me that he wrote Herbert Spencer's philosophies; I should answer and say that the spelling casts a doubt upon his claim. If the late Jonathan Edwards should rise up and tell me he wrote Mr. Dooley's books, I should answer and say that the marked difference between his style and Dooley's is argument against the soundness of his statement. You see how much I think of circ.u.mstantial evidence. In literary matters--in my belief--it is often better than any person's word, better than any shady character's oath. It is difficult for me to believe that the same hand that wrote the Plague-Spot-Bacilli and the first third of the little Eddy biography wrote also Science and Health. Indeed, it is more than difficult, it is impossible.

Largely speaking, I have read acres of what purported to be Mrs. Eddy's writings, in the past two months. I cannot know, but I am convinced, that the circ.u.mstantial evidence shows that her actual share in the work of composing and phrasing these things was so slight as to be inconsequential. Where she puts her literary foot down, her trail across her paid polisher's page is as plain as the elephant's in a Sunday-school procession. Her verbal output, when left undoctored by her clerks, is quite unmistakable It always exhibits the strongly distinctive features observable in the virgin pa.s.sages from her pen already quoted by me:

Desert vacancy, as regards thought. Self-complacency. Puerility.

Sentimentality. Affectations of scholarly learning. l.u.s.t after eloquent and flowery expression. Repet.i.tion of pet poetic picturesquenesses.

Confused and wandering statement. Metaphor gone insane. Meaningless words, used because they are pretty, or showy, or unusual. Sorrowful attempts at the epigrammatic. Dest.i.tution of originality.

The fat volume called Miscellaneous Writings of Mrs. Eddy contains several hundred pages. Of the five hundred and fifty-four pages of prose in it I find ten lines, on page 319, to be Mrs. Eddy's; also about a page of the preface or "Prospectus"; also about fifteen pages scattered along through the book. If she wrote any of the rest of the prose, it was rewritten after her by another hand. Here I will insert two-thirds of her page of the prospectus. It is evident that whenever, under the inspiration of the Deity, she turns out a book, she is always allowed to do some of the preface. I wonder why that is? It always mars the work.

I think it is done in humorous malice I think the clerks like to see her give herself away. They know she will, her stock of usable materials being limited and her procedure in employing them always the same, substantially. They know that when the initiated come upon her first erudite allusion, or upon any one of her other stage-properties, they can shut their eyes and tell what will follow. She usually throws off an easy remark all sodden with Greek or Hebrew or Latin learning; she usually has a person watching for a star--she can seldom get away from that poetic idea--sometimes it is a Chaldee, sometimes a Walking Delegate, sometimes an entire stranger, but be he what he may, he is generally there when the train is ready to move, and has his pa.s.s in his hat-band; she generally has a Being with a Dome on him, or some other cover that is unusual and out of the fas.h.i.+on; she likes to fire off a Scripture-verse where it will make the handsomest noise and come nearest to breaking the connection; she often throws out a Forefelt, or a Foresplendor, or a Foreslander where it will have a fine nautical foreto'gallant sound and make the sentence sing; after which she is nearly sure to throw discretion away and take to her deadly pa.s.sion, Intoxicated Metaphor. At such a time the Mrs. Eddy that does not hesitate is lost:

"The ancient Greek looked longingly for the Olympiad. The Chaldee watched the appearing of a star; to him no higher destiny dawned on the dome of being than that foreshadowed by signs in the heavens. The meek Nazarene, the scoffed of all scoffers, said, 'Ye can discern the face of the sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?'--for He forefelt and foresaw the ordeal of a perfect Christianity, hated by sinners.

"To kindle all minds with a gleam of grat.i.tude, the new idea that comes welling up from infinite Truth needs to be understood. The seer of this age should be a sage.

"Humility is the stepping-stone to a higher recognition of Deity. The mounting sense gathers fresh forms and strange fire from the ashes of dissolving self, and drops the world. Meekness heightens immortal attributes, only by removing the dust that dims them. Goodness reveals another scene and another self seemingly rolled up in shades, but brought to light by the evolutions of advancing thought, whereby we discern the power of Truth and Love to heal the sick.

"Pride is ignorance; those a.s.sume most who have the least wisdom or experience; and they steal from their neighbor, because they have so little of their own."--Miscellaneous Writings, page 1, and six lines at top of page 2.

It is not believable that the hand that wrote those clumsy and affected sentences wrote the smooth English of Science and Health.