J. D. Beresford

“ The imagination endows the man-made thing with consciousness and powers, whether of reservation or aloofness; the similitude of meditation and profundity is wrought into stone. Is there not source for mystery to the uninstructed in the great machine registering the progress of its own achievement with each solemn, recurrent beat of its metal pulse?
“Behind all these things is the wonder of the imagination that never approaches more nearly to the creation of a hitherto unknown image than when it thus hesitates on the verge of mystery. ”

“ When they came out of the woods on to the stretch of common from which you can see the great swelling undulations of the Hampden Hills, Challis stopped. A spear of April sunshine had pierced the load of cloud towards the west, and the bank of wood behind them gave shelter from the cold wind that had blown fiercely all the afternoon.
“It is a fine prospect,” said Challis, with a sweep of his hand. “I sometimes feel, Lewes, that we are over-intent on our own little narrow interests. ”

“ It is the solving of the problem that brings enjoyment—the solved problem has no further interest. So when all is known, the stimulus for action ceases; when all is known there is quiescence, nothingness. Perfect knowledge implies the peace of death, implies the state of being one—our pleasures are derived from action, from differences, from heterogeneity.
“Oh! pity the child,” said Challis, “for whom there could be no mystery. Is not mystery the first and greatest joy of life? Beyond the gate there is unexplored mystery for us in our childhood. ”

“ Challis shook his head. “He is too many thousands of years ahead of us,” he said. “We can only bridge the gap by many centuries of patient toil. If a revelation were made to us, we should not understand it.”
So, by degrees, Challis’s influence took possession of me and roused me to self-assertion.
One morning, half in dread, I stayed at home and read a novel—no other reading could hold my attention—philosophy had become nauseating.
I expected to see the strange little figure of the Wonder come across the Common, but he never came, nor did I receive any reproach from Ellen Mary. ”

“ Challis stopped and faced him. “Why not, Lewes; why not?” he asked, with a kindly smile. “Think of the gap which separates your intellectual powers from those of a Polynesian savage. Why, after all, should it be impossible that this child’s powers should equally transcend our own? A freak, if you will, an abnormality, a curious effect of nature’s, like the giant puff-ball—but still——”
“Oh! yes, sir, I grant you the thing is not impossible from a theoretical point of view,” argued Lewes, “but I think you are theorising on altogether insufficient evidence. ”

“ I admit that one cannot even begin to do this thing; within our present limitations our whole machinery of thought is built of these two original concepts. They are the only gauges wherewith we may measure every reality, every abstraction; wherewith we may give outline to any image or process of the mind. Only when we endeavour to grapple with that indeterminable mystery of consciousness can we conceive, however dimly, some idea of a pure abstraction uninfluenced by and independent of, those twin bases of our means of thought.
Here it is that Challis has paused. ”

“ As the afternoon wore on, however, Challis’s [172] attitude must have changed; he must have assumed an armour of mental resistance not unlike the resistance of Lewes. Challis perceived, however dimly, that life would hold no further pleasure for him if he accepted that theory of origin, evolution, and final adjustment; he found in this cosmogony no place for his own idealism; and he feared to be convinced even by that fraction of the whole argument which he could understand.
We see that Challis, with all his apparent devotion to science, was never more than a dilettante. ”

“ But Elmer was inclined to laugh at this assumption of modernity. “Steven,” he said, on one occasion, “marks time and thinks he is keeping step. And every now and then he runs a little to catch up.” The point of Elmer’s satire lay in the fact that Steven was usually to be seen either walking very slowly, head down, lost in abstraction; or—when aroused to a sense of present necessity—going with long strides as if intent on catching up with the times without further delay. Very often, too, he might be seen running across the school playground, his hand up to those elusive glasses of his. ”

“ These cottages lie all on one’s left hand; to the right a stretch of grass soon merges into bracken and bush, and then the beech woods enclose both, and surge down into the valley and rise up again beyond, a great wave of green; as I saw it then, not yet touched with the first flame of autumn.
I inquired at the first cottage and received my direction to Stott’s dwelling. It lay up a little lane, the further of two cottages joined together. ”

“ I know,” said Challis. “I daresay you’re right, Elmer; but it will be difficult to persuade this child to answer any questions his examiners may put to him.”
“Surely he must be open to reason,” roared Elmer. “You tell me he has an extraordinary intelligence, and in the next sentence you imply that the child’s a fool who can’t open his mouth to serve his own interests. What’s your paradox?”
“Sublimated material. Intellectual insight and absolute spiritual blindness,” replied Challis, getting to his feet. “The child has gone too far in one direction—in another he has made not one step. ”

“ When he looked one in the face with intention, and suddenly allowed one to realise, as it were, all the dominating power of his brain, one shrank into insignificance, one felt as an ignorant, intelligent man may feel when confronted with some elaborate theorem of the higher mathematics. “Is it possible that any one can really understand these things?” such a man might think with awe, and in the same way one apprehended some vast, inconceivable possibilities of mind-function when the Wonder looked at one with, as I have said, intention. ”

“ Lewes replied, a touch of defiance in his tone.
“Isn’t that what you want to believe?” asked Challis.
Lewes hit at a flag of dead bracken and missed. “You mean...?” he prevaricated.
“I mean that that is a much stronger influence than any preconception, my dear Lewes. I’m no pragmatist, as you know; but there can be no doubt that with the majority of us the wish to believe a thing is true constitutes the truth of that thing for us. And that is, in my opinion, the wrong attitude for either scientist or philosopher. ”

“ And then, feeling the urgent need to explain something of the motives that govern this little world of ours—the world into which this strangely logical exception had been born—Challis attempted an exposition.
“I know,” he said, “that these things must seem to you utterly absurd, but you must try to realise that you are an exception to the world about you; that Crashaw or I, or, indeed, the greatest minds of the present day, are not ruled by the fine logic which you are able to exercise. We are children compared to you. ”

“ Even Mrs. Reade tried to subdue her stertorous breathing, to move with less ponderous quakings. The neighbours told her she looked thinner.
Little wonder that during the long night vigil the nurse, moving silently between the two upstairs rooms, should pause on the landing and lean over the handrail; little wonder that she should give a long sigh of relief when she heard the music of Stott’s snore ascend from the sitting-room.
O’Connell called twice every day during the first week, not because it was necessary for him to visit his two patients, but because the infant fascinated him. ”

“ He was resigned to bear with my feeble mental development, because I was strong enough to keep at bay that half-animal creature who appeared to believe that Victor Stott was one of his own kind—the only one he had ever met. The idiot in some unimaginable way had inferred a likeness between himself and the Wonder—they both had enormous heads—and the idiot was the only human being over whom the Wonder was never able to exercise the least authority. ”

“ I judge no man any more for displaying an overweening vanity, rather do I envy him this representative mark of his humanity. The Wonder was completely and quite inimitably devoid of any conceit, and the word ambition had no meaning for him. ”

“ The supreme ambition of all great women—and have not all women the potentialities of greatness?—is to give birth to a god. That ambition it is which is marred by the disappointing birth of a female child—when the man-child is born, there is always hope, and slow is the realisation of failure. That realisation never came to Ellen Mary. ”

“ I felt at such times that all the knowledge I needed for so stupendous a task was present with me in some inexplicable way, was even pressing upon me, but that my brain was so clogged and heavy that not one idea of all that priceless wisdom could be expressed in clear thought. ”

“ Would you teach that to the child, and explain to him that the wonder of life and growth is no wonder, but a demonstrable result of impeded force, to be evaluated by the application of an adequate formula? [295]
“You and I,” said Challis, “are children in the infancy of the world. Let us to our play in the nursery of our own times. The day will come, perhaps, when humanity shall have grown and will have to take upon itself the heavy burden of knowledge. But you need not fear that that will be in our day, nor in a thousand years. ”

“ Crashaw might crush his clerical wideawake over his frowning eyebrows, arm himself with a slightly dilapidated umbrella, and seek with long, determined strides the members of the Local Education Authority, but far ahead of him had run an intelligence that represented the instructed common sense of modernity. ”

“ The strongest of all habits is that of acquiescence. It is this habit of submission which explains the admired patience and long-suffering of the abjectly poor. The lower the individual falls, the more unconquerable becomes the inertia of mind which interferes between him and revolt against his condition. All the miseries of the flesh, even starvation, seem preferable to the making of an effort great enough to break this habit of submission.
Ginger Stott was not poor. For a man in his station of life he was unusually well provided for, but in him the habit of acquiescence was strongly rooted. ”

“ For the first time in my life I was a free man. At forty one can still look forward, and I put the past behind me and made plans for the future. There was that book of mine still waiting to be written.
It was wonderful how the detail of it all came back to me—the plan of it, the thread of development, even the very phrases that I had toyed with. The thought of the book brought back a train of associations. There was a phrase I had coined as I had walked out from Ailesworth to Stoke-Underhill; a chapter I had roughed out the day I went to [220] see Ginger Stott at Pym. ”

“ Little Heinecken in his four years of life suffered the mental experience—with certain necessary limitations—of a developed brain. He gathered knowledge as an ordinary child gathers knowledge, the only difference being that his rate of assimilation was as ten to one.
But little Stott had gathered no knowledge from books. He had been born of ignorant parents, he was being brought up among uneducated people. Yet he had wonderful intellectual gifts: surely he must have one above all others—the gift of reason. His brain must be constructive, logical; he must have the power of deduction. ”

“ When that is explored, there are new and wonderful possibilities beyond the hills, then beyond the seas, beyond the known world, in the everyday chances and movements of the unknown life in which we are circumstanced. [292]
“Surely we should all perish through sheer inanity, or die desperately by suicide if no mystery remained in the world. Mystery takes a thousand beautiful shapes; it lurks even in the handiwork of man, in a stone god, or in some mighty, intricate machine, incomprehensibly deliberate and determined. ”

“ The child must, at least, ask then for another book. Even if he chose one for himself, his choice might furnish some sort of a test.
So Challis waited and said little; and Lewes was puzzled, because he was beginning to doubt whether it were possible that the child could sustain a pose so long. That, in itself, would be evidence of extraordinary abnormality. Lewes fumbled in his mind for another hypothesis.
This reading craze may be symptomatic of some form of idiocy, was his thought; “and I don’t believe he does read,” was the inevitable rider. ”

“ Lewes pursed his lips. “No, no, no,” he said. “But that is hardly ground for argument, is it?”
“I suppose not,” returned Challis thoughtfully; “but when you take up psychology, Lewes, I should much like you to specialise in a careful inquiry into association in connection with memory. I feel certain that if one can reproduce, as nearly as may be, any complex sensation one has experienced, no matter how long ago, one will stimulate what I may call an abnormal memory of all the associations connected with that experience. ”

“ Education Authority—a man of some note in the larger world—and it seems that you cannot be exempted unless you convince the Authority that your knowledge is such that to give you a Council school education would be the most absurd farce.”
“Cannot you stand in loco parentis?” asked the Wonder suddenly, in his still, thin voice.
“You mean,” said Challis, startled by this outburst, “that I am in a sense providing you with an education? Quite true; but there is Crashaw to deal with.”
“Inform him,” said the Wonder.
Challis sighed. “I have,” he said, “but he can’t understand.” ”