The heart of a moonbeam is a pretty enough Friendship’s-Album expression
–let it pass, 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 title-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-fashion. 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 destitute 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 circumstantial 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 circumstantial 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