diagnostician. I mean to tell you that I am not suffering from the
microbe of socialism. I mean to tell you that it is you who are
suffering from the emasculating ravages of that same microbe. As
for me, I am an inveterate opponent of socialism just as I am an
inveterate opponent of your own mongrel democracy that is nothing
else than pseudo-socialism masquerading under a garb of words that
will not stand the test of the dictionary.”
“I am a reactionary – so complete a reactionary that my position is
incomprehensible to you who live in a veiled lie of social
organization and whose sight is not keen enough to pierce the veil.
You make believe that you believe in the survival of the strong and
the rule of the strong. I believe. That is the difference. When
I was a trifle younger, – a few months younger, – I believed the
same thing. You see, the ideas of you and yours had impressed me.
But merchants and traders are cowardly rulers at best; they grunt
and grub all their days in the trough of money-getting, and I have
swung back to aristocracy, if you please. I am the only
individualist in this room. I look to the state for nothing. I
Martin Eden
213
look only to the strong man, the man on horseback, to save the
state from its own rotten futility.”
“Nietzsche was right. I won’t take the time to tell you who
Nietzsche was, but he was right. The world belongs to the strong –
to the strong who are noble as well and who do not wallow in the
swine-trough of trade and exchange. The world belongs to the true
nobleman, to the great blond beasts, to the noncompromisers, to the
‘yes-sayers.’ And they will eat you up, you socialists – who are
afraid of socialism and who think yourselves individualists. Your
slave-morality of the meek and lowly will never save you. – Oh,
it’s all Greek, I know, and I won’t bother you any more with it.
But remember one thing. There aren’t half a dozen individualists
in Oakland, but Martin Eden is one of them.”
He signified that he was done with the discussion, and turned to
Ruth.
“I’m wrought up to-day,” he said in an undertone. “All I want to
do is to love, not talk.”
He ignored Mr. Morse, who said:-
“I am unconvinced. All socialists are Jesuits. That is the way to
tell them.”
“We’ll make a good Republican out of you yet,” said Judge Blount.
“The man on horseback will arrive before that time,” Martin
retorted with good humor, and returned to Ruth.
But Mr. Morse was not content. He did not like the laziness and
the disinclination for sober, legitimate work of this prospective
son-in-law of his, for whose ideas he had no respect and of whose
nature he had no understanding. So he turned the conversation to
Herbert Spencer. Judge Blount ably seconded him, and Martin, whose
ears had pricked at the first mention of the philosopher’s name,
listened to the judge enunciate a grave and complacent diatribe
against Spencer. From time to time Mr. Morse glanced at Martin, as
much as to say, “There, my boy, you see.”
“Chattering daws,” Martin muttered under his breath, and went on
talking with Ruth and Arthur.
But the long day and the “real dirt” of the night before were
telling upon him; and, besides, still in his burnt mind was what
had made him angry when he read it on the car.
“What is the matter?” Ruth asked suddenly alarmed by the effort he
was making to contain himself.
“There is no god but the Unknowable, and Herbert Spencer is its
prophet,” Judge Blount was saying at that moment.
Martin turned upon him.
“A cheap judgment,” he remarked quietly. “I heard it first in the
Martin Eden
214
City Hall Park, on the lips of a workingman who ought to have known
better. I have heard it often since, and each time the clap-trap
of it nauseates me. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. To hear
that great and noble man’s name upon your lips is like finding a
dew-drop in a cesspool. You are disgusting.”
It was like a thunderbolt. Judge Blount glared at him with
apoplectic countenance, and silence reigned. Mr. Morse was
secretly pleased. He could see that his daughter was shocked. It
was what he wanted to do – to bring out the innate ruffianism of
this man he did not like.
Ruth’s hand sought Martin’s beseechingly under the table, but his
blood was up. He was inflamed by the intellectual pretence and
fraud of those who sat in the high places. A Superior Court Judge!
It was only several years before that he had looked up from the
mire at such glorious entities and deemed them gods.
Judge Blount recovered himself and attempted to go on, addressing
himself to Martin with an assumption of politeness that the latter
understood was for the benefit of the ladies. Even this added to
his anger. Was there no honesty in the world?
“You can’t discuss Spencer with me,” he cried. “You do not know
any more about Spencer than do his own countrymen. But it is no
fault of yours, I grant. It is just a phase of the contemptible
ignorance of the times. I ran across a sample of it on my way here
this evening. I was reading an essay by Saleeby on Spencer. You
should read it. It is accessible to all men. You can buy it in
any book-store or draw it from the public library. You would feel
ashamed of your paucity of abuse and ignorance of that noble man
compared with what Saleeby has collected on the subject. It is a
record of shame that would shame your shame.”
“‘The philosopher of the half-educated,’ he was called by an
academic Philosopher who was not worthy to pollute the atmosphere
he breathed. I don’t think you have read ten pages of Spencer, but
there have been critics, assumably more intelligent than you, who
have read no more than you of Spencer, who publicly challenged his
followers to adduce one single idea from all his writings – from
Herbert Spencer’s writings, the man who has impressed the stamp of
his genius over the whole field of scientific research and modern
thought; the father of psychology; the man who revolutionized
pedagogy, so that to-day the child of the French peasant is taught
the three R’s according to principles laid down by him. And the
little gnats of men sting his memory when they get their very bread
and butter from the technical application of his ideas. What
little of worth resides in their brains is largely due to him. It
is certain that had he never lived, most of what is correct in
their parrot-learned knowledge would be absent.”
“And yet a man like Principal Fairbanks of Oxford – a man who sits
in an even higher place than you, Judge Blount – has said that
Spencer will be dismissed by posterity as a poet and dreamer rather
than a thinker. Yappers and blatherskites, the whole brood of
them! ‘”First Principles” is not wholly destitute of a certain
literary power,’ said one of them. And others of them have said
Martin Eden
215
that he was an industrious plodder rather than an original thinker.
Yappers and blatherskites! Yappers and blatherskites!”
Martin ceased abruptly, in a dead silence. Everybody in Ruth’s
family looked up to Judge Blount as a man of power and achievement,
and they were horrified at Martin’s outbreak. The remainder of the
dinner passed like a funeral, the judge and Mr. Morse confining
their talk to each other, and the rest of the conversation being
extremely desultory. Then afterward, when Ruth and Martin were
alone, there was a scene.
“You are unbearable,” she wept.
But his anger still smouldered, and he kept muttering, “The beasts!
The beasts!”
When she averred he had insulted the judge, he retorted:-
“By telling the truth about him?”
“I don’t care whether it was true or not,” she insisted. “There
are certain bounds of decency, and you had no license to insult
anybody.”
“Then where did Judge Blount get the license to assault truth?”
Martin demanded. “Surely to assault truth is a more serious
misdemeanor than to insult a pygmy personality such as the judge’s.
He did worse than that. He blackened the name of a great, noble
man who is dead. Oh, the beasts! The beasts!”
His complex anger flamed afresh, and Ruth was in terror of him.
Never had she seen him so angry, and it was all mystified and
unreasonable to her comprehension. And yet, through her very
terror ran the fibres of fascination that had drawn and that still
drew her to him – that had compelled her to lean towards him, and,
in that mad, culminating moment, lay her hands upon his neck. She