(eBook PDF) Critical Thinking, Reading and

Writing 9th Edition download

https://ebookluna.com/product/ebook-pdf-critical-thinking-
reading-and-writing-9th-edition/

Download more ebook from https://ebookluna.com

Critical Thinking, Reading, and
Writing
this page left intentionally blank
Critical Thinking, Reading, and
Writing
A Brief Guide to Argument

NINTH EDITION

SYLVAN BARNET
Professor of English, Late of Tufts University

HUGO BEDAU
Professor of Philosophy, Late of Tufts University

JOHN O’HARA
Associate Professor of Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing, Stockton
University
For Bedford/St. Martin’s
Vice President, Editorial, Macmillan Learning Humanities: Edwin Hill
Editorial Director, English: Karen S. Henry
Senior Publisher for Composition, Business and Technical Writing,
Developmental Writing: Leasa Burton
Executive Editor: John E. Sullivan III
Developmental Editor: Alicia Young
Senior Production Editor: Jessica Gould
Media Producers: Allison Hart and Rand Thomas
Production Supervisor: Victoria Anzalone
Marketing Manager: Joy Fisher Williams
Copy Editor: Alice Vigliani
Photo Editor: Martha Friedman
Photo Researcher: Jen Simmons
Permissions Editor: Elaine Kosta
Senior Art Director: Anna Palchik
Text Design: Laura Shaw Feit
Cover Design: John Callahan
Cover Photo: Martin Hardman/Getty Images
Composition: Jouve
Printing and Binding: LSC Communications

Copyright © 2017, 2014, 2011, 2008 by Bedford/St. Martin’s.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, except as may be
expressly permitted by the applicable copyright statutes or in writing by
the Publisher.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

1 0 9 8 7 6
f e d c b a

For information, write: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 75 Arlington Street,

Boston, MA 02116
(617-399-4000)
ISBN 978-1-319-03545-7

Acknowledgments
Text acknowledgments and copyrights appear at the back of the book on
page 477, which constitutes an extension of the copyright page. Art
acknowledgments and copyrights appear on the same page as the art
selections they cover.
this page left intentionally blank
this page left intentionally blank
Preface
This book is a text — a book about reading other people’s arguments and
writing your own arguments — and it is also an anthology — a
collection of dozens of selections, ranging from Plato to the present, with
a strong emphasis on contemporary arguments and, in this edition, the
first in full color, new modes of argument. Before we describe these
selections further, we’d like to describe our chief assumptions about the
aims of a course that might use Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing:
A Brief Guide to Argument.
Probably most students and instructors would agree that, as critical
readers, students should be able to

summarize accurately an argument they have read;

locate the thesis (the claim) of an argument;
locate the assumptions, stated and unstated, of an argument;
analyze and evaluate the strength of the evidence and the
soundness of the reasoning offered in support of the thesis; and
analyze, evaluate, and account for discrepancies among various
readings on a topic (for example, explain why certain facts are
used, why probable consequences of a proposed action are
examined or are ignored, or why two sources might interpret the
same facts differently).

Probably, too, students and instructors would agree that, as thoughtful

writers, students should be able to

imagine an audience and write effectively for it (for instance, by

using the appropriate tone and providing the appropriate amount of
detail);
present information in an orderly and coherent way;
be aware of their own assumptions;
locate sources and incorporate them into their own writing, not
simply by quoting extensively or by paraphrasing but also by
having digested material so that they can present it in their own
words;
 properly document all borrowings — not merely quotations and
paraphrases but also borrowed ideas; and
do all these things in the course of developing a thoughtful
argument of their own.

In the first edition of this book we quoted Edmund Burke and John
Stuart Mill. Burke said,

He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our

skill.
Our antagonist is our helper.

Mill said,

He who knows only his own side of the cause knows little.

These two quotations continue to reflect the view of argument that

underlies this text: In writing an essay one is engaging in a serious effort
to know what one’s own ideas are and, having found them, to contribute
to a multisided conversation. One is not setting out to trounce an
opponent, and that is partly why such expressions as “marshaling
evidence,” “attacking an opponent,” and “defending a thesis” are
misleading. True, on television talk shows we see right-wingers and left-
wingers who have made up their minds and who are concerned only with
pushing their own views and brushing aside all others. But in an
academic community, and indeed in our daily lives, we learn by listening
to others and also by listening to ourselves.
We draft a response to something we have read, and in the very act of
drafting we may find — if we think critically about the words we are
putting down on paper — we are changing (perhaps slightly, perhaps
radically) our own position. In short, one reason that we write is so that
we can improve our ideas. And even if we do not drastically change our
views, we and our readers at least come to a better understanding of why
we hold the views we do.
Features

THE TEXT
Part One: Critical Thinking and Reading (Chapters 1–4) and Part Two:
Critical Writing (Chapters 5–7) together offer a short course in methods
of thinking about and writing arguments. By “thinking,” we mean
serious analytic thought, including analysis of one’s own assumptions
(Chapter 1); by “writing” we mean the use of effective, respectable
techniques, not gimmicks (such as the notorious note a politician
scribbled in the margin of the text of his speech: “Argument weak; shout
here”). For a delightfully wry account of the use of gimmicks, we
recommend that you consult “The Art of Controversy” in The Will to
Live by the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur
Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer reminds readers that a Greek or Latin
quotation (however irrelevant) can be impressive to the uninformed and
that one can knock down almost any proposition by loftily saying,
“That’s all very well in theory, but it won’t do in practice.”
We offer lots of advice about how to set forth an argument, but we do
not offer instruction in one-upmanship. Rather, we discuss responsible
ways of arguing persuasively. We know, however, that before one can
write a persuasive argument, one must clarify one’s own ideas — a
process that includes arguing with oneself — to find out what one really
thinks about a problem. Therefore, we devote Chapter 1 to critical
thinking; Chapters 2, 3, and 4 to critical reading (Chapter 4 is about
reading images); and Chapters 5, 6, and 7 to critical writing.
Parts One and Two together contain thirty readings (seven are student
papers) for analysis and discussion. Some of these essays originated as
op-ed newspaper pieces, and we reprint some of the letters to the editor
that they generated, so students can easily see several sides to a given
issue. In this way students can, in their own responses, join the
conversation, so to speak. (We have found, by the way, that using the
format of a letter helps students to frame their ideas, and therefore in
later chapters we occasionally suggest writing assignments in the form of
a letter to the editor.)
Discovering Diverse Content Through
Random Scribd Documents
Of sunset, or His simpler dream
Of moonlight, or that miracle
We name a rose.

Dear Earth, one thought alone doth grieve—

The tender dread
Of parting from thee; as a child,
Who painted while his father smiled,
Then watched him paint, is loth to leave
And go to bed.
A Reminiscence of
“The Transgressor”
By Francis Forster
A Letter to the Editor
From Max Beerbohm

D ear Sir,—When The Yellow Book appeared I was in Oxford. So

literary a little town is Oxford that its undergraduates see a
newspaper nearly as seldom as the Venetians see a horse, and until
yesterday, when coming to London, I found in the album of a friend
certain newspaper cuttings, I had not known how great was the
wrath of the pressmen.
What in the whole volume seems to have provoked the most
ungovernable fury is, I am sorry to say, an essay about Cosmetics
that I myself wrote. Of this it was impossible for anyone to speak
calmly. The mob lost its head, and, so far as anyone in literature can
be lynched, I was. In speaking of me, one paper dropped the usual
prefix of “Mr.” as though I were a well-known criminal, and referred
to me shortly as “Beerbohm”; a second allowed me the “Mr.” but
urged that “a short Act of Parliament should be passed to make this
kind of thing illegal”; a third suggested, rather tamely, that I should
read one of Mr. William Watson's sonnets. More than one comic
paper had a very serious poem about me, and a known adherent to
the humour which, forest-like, is called new, declared my essay to be
“the rankest and most nauseous thing in all literature.” It was a
bomb thrown by a cowardly decadent, another outrage by one of
that desperate and dangerous band of madmen who must be
mercilessly stamped out by a comity of editors. May I, Sir, in justice
to myself and to you, who were gravely censured for harbouring me,
step forward, and assure the affrighted mob that it is the victim of a
hoax? May I also assure it that I had no notion that it would be
taken in? Indeed, it seems incredible to me that any one on the face
of the earth could fail to see that my essay, so grotesque in subject,
in opinion so flippant, in style so wildly affected, was meant for a
burlesque upon the “precious” school of writers. If I had only signed
myself D. Cadent or Parrar Docks, or appended a note to say that
the MS. had been picked up not a hundred miles from Tite Street, all
the pressmen would have said that I had given them a very delicate
bit of satire. But I did not. And hinc, as they themselves love to say,
illæ lacrimæ.
After all, I think it is a sound rule that a writer should not kick his
critics. I simply wish to make them a friendly philosophical
suggestion. It seems to be thought that criticism holds in the artistic
world much the same place as, in the moral world, is held by
punishment—“the vengeance taken by the majority upon such as
exceed the limits of conduct imposed by that majority.” As in the
case of punishment, then, we must consider the effect produced by
criticism upon its object, how far is it reformatory? Personally, I
cannot conceive how any artist can be hurt by remarks dropped
from a garret into a gutter. Yet it is incontestable that many an
illustrious artist has so been hurt. And these very remarks, so far
from making him change or temper his method, have rather made
that method intenser, have driven him to retire further within his
own soul, by showing him how little he may hope for from the world
but insult and ingratitude.
In fact, the police-constable mode of criticism is a failure. True that,
here and there, much beautiful work of the kind has been done. In
the old, old Quarterlies is many a slashing review, that, however
absurd it be as criticism, we can hardly wish unwritten. In the
National Observer, before its reformation, were countless fine
examples of the cavilling method. The paper was rowdy, venomous
and insincere. There was libel in every line of it. It roared with the
lambs and bleated with the lions. It was a disgrace to journalism and
a glory to literature. I think of it often with tears and desiderium. But
the men who wrote these things stand upon a very different plane to
the men employed as critics by the press of Great Britain. These
must be judged, not by their workmanship, which is naught, but by
the spirit that animates them and the consequence of their efforts. If
only they could learn that it is for the critic to seek after beauty and
to try to interpret it to others, if only they would give over their
eternal fault-finding and not presume to interfere with the artist at
his work, then with an equally small amount of ability our pressmen
might do nearly as much good as they have hitherto done harm.
Why should they regard writers with such enmity? The average
pressman, reviewing a book of stories or of poems by an unknown
writer, seems not to think “where are the beauties of this work that I
may praise them, and by my praise quicken the sense of beauty in
others?” He steadily applies himself to the ignoble task of plucking
out and gloating over its defects. It is a pity that critics should show
so little sympathy with writers, and curious when we consider that
most of them tried to be writers themselves, once. Every new school
that has come into the world, every new writer who has brought
with him a new mode, they have rudely persecuted. The dulness of
Ibsen, the obscurity of Meredith, the horrors of Zola—all these are
household words. It is not until the pack has yelled itself hoarse that
the level voice of justice is heard in praise. To pretend that no
generation is capable of gauging the greatness of its own artists is
the merest bauble-tit. Were it not for the accursed abuse of their
function by the great body of critics, no poet need “live uncrown'd,
apart.” Many and irreparable are the wrongs that our critics have
done. At length let them repent with ashes upon their heads. Where
they see not beauty, let them be silent, reverently feeling that it may
yet be there, and train their dull senses in quest of it.
Now is a good time for such penance. There are signs that our
English literature has reached that point, when, like the literatures of
all the nations that have been, it must fall at length into the hands of
the decadents. The qualities that I tried in my essay to travesty—
paradox and marivaudage, lassitude, a love of horror and all unusual
things, a love of argot and archaism and the mysteries of style—are
not all these displayed, some by one, some by another of les jeunes
écrivains? Who knows but that Artifice is in truth at our gates and
that soon she may pass through our streets? Already the windows of
Grub Street are crowded with watchful, evil faces. They are ready,
the men of Grub Street, to pelt her, as they have pelted all that
came before her. Let them come down while there is still time, and
hang their houses with colours, and strew the road with flowers. Will
they not, for once, do homage to a new queen? By the time this
letter appears, it may be too late!
Meanwhile, Sir, I am, your obedient servant,
MAX BEERBOHM.
Oxford, May '94.
A Study
By Bernhard Sickert
 EPIGRAM
TO A LADY RECOVERED FROM A DANGEROUS
SICKNESS

Life plucks thee back as by the golden hair—

Life, who had feigned to let thee go but now.

Wealthy is Death already, and can spare

Ev'n such a prey as thou.

WILLIAM WATSON
The Coxon Fund
By Henry James

"
T hey've got him for life!" I said to myself that evening on my
way back to the station; but later, alone in the compartment
(from Wimbledon to Waterloo, before the glory of the District
Railway), I amended this declaration in the light of the sense that
my friends would probably after all not enjoy a monopoly of Mr.
Saltram. I won't pretend to have taken his vast measure on that first
occasion; but I think I had achieved a glimpse of what the privilege
of his acquaintance might mean for many persons in the way of
charges accepted. He had been a great experience, and it was this
perhaps that had put me into a frame for divining that we should all
have the honour, sooner or later, of dealing with him as a whole.
Whatever impression I then received of the amount of this total, I
had a full enough vision of the patience of the Mulvilles. He was
staying with them for the winter; Adelaide dropped it in a tone which
drew the sting from the temporary. These excellent people might
indeed have been content to give the circle of hospitality a diameter
of six months; but if they didn't say that he was staying for the
summer as well it was only because this was more than they
ventured to hope. I remember that at dinner that evening he wore
slippers, new and predominantly purple, of some queer carpet-stuff;
but the Mulvilles were still in the stage of supposing that he might
be snatched from them by higher bidders. At a later time they grew,
poor dears, to fear no snatching; but theirs was a fidelity which
needed no help from competition to make them proud. Wonderful
indeed as, when all was said, you inevitably pronounced Frank
Saltram, it was not to be overlooked that the Kent Mulvilles were in
their way still more extraordinary; as striking an instance as could
easily be encountered of the familiar truth that remarkable men find
remarkable conveniences.
They had sent for me from Wimbledon to come out and dine, and
there had been an implication in Adelaide's note (judged by her
notes alone she might have been thought silly), that it was a case in
which something momentous was to be determined or done. I had
never known them not to be in a state about somebody, and I
daresay I tried to be droll on this point in accepting their invitation.
On finding myself in the presence of their latest revelation I had not
at first felt irreverence droop—and, thank heaven, I have never been
absolutely deprived of that alternative in Mr. Saltram's company. I
saw, however (I hasten to declare it), that compared to this
specimen their other phœnixes had been birds of inconsiderable
feather, and I afterwards took credit to myself for not having even in
primal bewilderments made a mistake about the essence of the
man. He had an incomparable gift; I never was blind to it—it dazzles
me at present. It dazzles me perhaps even more in remembrance
than in fact, for I'm not unaware that for a subject so magnificent
the imagination goes to some expense, inserting a jewel here and
there or giving a twist to a plume. How the art of portraiture would
rejoice in this figure if the art of portraiture had only the canvas!
Nature, however, had really rounded it, and if memory, hovering
about it, sometimes holds her breath, this is because the voice that
comes back was really golden.
Though the great man was an inmate and didn't dress he kept
dinner on this occasion waiting long, and the first words he uttered
on coming into the room were a triumphant announcement to
Mulville that he had found out something. Not catching the allusion
and gaping doubtless a little at his face, I privately asked Adelaide
what he had found out. I shall never forget the look she gave me as
she replied: “Everything!” She really believed it. At that moment, at
any rate, he had found out that the mercy of the Mulvilles was
infinite. He had previously of course discovered, as I had myself for
that matter, that their dinners were soignés. Let me not indeed, in
saying this, neglect to declare that I shall falsify my counterfeit if I
seem to hint that there was in his nature any ounce of calculation.
He took whatever came, but he never plotted for it, and no man who
was so much of an absorbent can ever have been so little of a
parasite. He had a system of the universe, but he had no system of
sponging—that was quite hand to mouth. He had fine, gross, easy
senses, but it was not his good-natured appetite that wrought
confusion. If he had loved us for our dinners we could have paid
with our dinners, and it would have been a great economy of finer
matter. I make free in these connections with the plural possessive
because, if I was never able to do what the Mulvilles did, and people
with still bigger houses and simpler charities, I met, first and last,
every demand of reflection, of emotion—particularly perhaps those
of gratitude and of resentment. No one, I think, paid the tribute of
giving him up so often, and if it's rendering honour to borrow
wisdom I have a right to talk of my sacrifices. He yielded lessons as
the sea yields fish—I lived for a while on this diet. Sometimes it
almost appeared to me that his massive, monstrous failure—if failure
after all it was—had been intended for my private recreation. He
fairly pampered my curiosity; but the history of that experience
would take me too far. This is not the large canvas I just now spoke
of, and I would not have approached him with my present hand had
it been a question of all the features. Frank Saltram's features, for
artistic purposes, are verily the anecdotes that are to be gathered.
Their name is legion, and this is only one, of which the interest is
that it concerns even more closely several other persons. Such
episodes, as one looks back, are the little dramas that made up the
innumerable facets of the big drama—which is yet to be reported.

II

It is furthermore remarkable that though the two stories are distinct

—my own, as it were, and this other, they equally began, in a
manner, the first night of my acquaintance with Frank Saltram, the
night I came back from Wimbledon so agitated with a new sense of
life that, in London, for the very thrill of it, I could only walk home.
Walking and swinging my stick, I overtook, at Buckingham Gate,
George Gravener, and George Gravener's story may be said to have
begun with my making him, as our paths lay together, come home
with me for a talk. I duly remember, let me parenthesise, that it was
still more that or another person, and also that several years were to
elapse before it was to extend to a second chapter. I had much to
say to him, none the less, about my visit to the Mulvilles, whom he
more indifferently knew, and I was at any rate so amusing that for
long afterwards he never encountered me without asking for news
of the old man of the sea. I hadn't said Mr. Saltram was old, and it
was to be seen that he was of an age to outweather George
Gravener. I had at that time a lodging in Ebury Street, and Gravener
was staying at his brother's empty house in Eaton Square. At
Cambridge, five years before, even in our devastating set, his
intellectual power had seemed to me almost awful. Some one had
once asked me privately, with blanched cheeks, what it was then
that after all such a mind as that left standing. “It leaves itself!” I
could recollect devoutly replying. I could smile at present at this
reminiscence, for even before we got to Ebury Street I was struck
with the fact that, save in the sense of being well set up on his legs,
George Gravener had actually ceased to tower. The universe he laid
low had somehow bloomed again—the usual eminences were visible.
I wondered whether he had lost his humour, or only, dreadful
thought, had never had any—not even when I had fancied him most
Aristophanesque. What was the need of appealing to laughter,
however, I could enviously inquire, where you might appeal so
confidently to measurement? Mr. Saltram's queer figure, his thick
nose and hanging lip were fresh to me: in the light of my old friend's
fine cold symmetry they presented mere success in amusing as the
refuge of conscious ugliness. Already, at hungry twenty-six, Gravener
looked as blank and parliamentary as if he were fifty and popular. In
my scrap of a residence (he had a wordling's eye for its futile
conveniences, but never a comrade's joke), I sounded Frank Saltram
in his ears; a circumstance I mention in order to note that even then
I was surprised at his impatience of my enlivenment. As he had
never before heard of the personage, it took indeed the form of
impatience of the preposterous Mulvilles, his relation to whom, like
mine, had had its origin in an early, a childish intimacy with the
young Adelaide, the fruit of multiplied ties in the previous
generation. When she married Kent Mulville, who was older than
Gravener and I, and much more amiable, I gained a friend, but
Gravener practically lost one. We were affected in different ways by
the form taken by what he called their deplorable social action—the
form (the term was also his) of nasty second-rate gush. I may have
held in my for intérieur that the good people at Wimbledon were
beautiful fools, but when he sniffed at them I couldn't help taking
the opposite line, for I already felt that even should we happen to
agree it would always be for reasons that differed. It came home to
me that he was admirably British as, without so much as a sociable
sneer at my bookbinder, he turned away from the serried rows of my
little French library.
“Of course I've never seen the fellow, but it's clear enough he's a
humbug.”
“Clear enough is just what it isn't,” I replied: “if it only were!” That
ejaculation on my part must have been the beginning of what was to
be later a long ache for final frivolous rest. Gravener was profound
enough to remark after a moment that in the first place he couldn't
be anything but a Dissenter, and when I answered that the very note
of his fascination was his extraordinary speculative breadth he
retorted that there was no cad like your cultivated cad and that I
might depend upon discovering (since I had had the levity not
already to have inquired), that my shining light proceeded, a
generation back, from a Methodist cheesemonger. I confess I was
struck with his insistence, and I said, after reflection: “It may be—I
admit it may be; but why on earth are you so sure?”—asking the
question mainly to lay him the trap of saying that it was because the
poor man didn't dress for dinner. He took an instant to dodge my
trap and come blandly out the other side.
“Because the Kent Mulvilles have invented him. They've an infallible
hand for frauds. All their geese are swans. They were born to be
duped, they like it, they cry for it, they don't know anything from
anything, and they disgust one (luckily perhaps!) with Christian
charity.” His intensity was doubtless an accident, but it might have
been a strange foreknowledge. I forget what protest I dropped; it
was at any rate something which led him to go on after a moment:
“I only ask one thing—it's perfectly simple. Is a man, in a given case,
a real gentleman?”
“A real gentleman, my dear fellow—that's so soon said!”
“Not so soon when he isn't! If they've got hold of one this time he
must be a great rascal!”
“I might feel injured,” I answered, “if I didn't reflect that they don't
rave about me.”
“Don't be too sure! I'll grant that he's a gentleman,” Gravener
presently added, “if you'll admit that he's a scamp.”
“I don't know which to admire most, your logic or your
benevolence.”
My friend coloured at this, but he didn't change the subject. “Where
did they pick him up?”
“I think they were struck with something he had published.”
“I can fancy the dreary thing!”
“I believe they found out he had all sorts of worries and difficulties.”
“That, of course, was not to be endured, and they jumped at the
privilege of paying his debts!” I replied that I knew nothing about his
debts, and I reminded my visitor that though the dear Mulvilles were
angels they were neither idiots nor millionaires. What they mainly
aimed at was re-uniting Mr. Saltram to his wife. “I was expecting to
hear that he has basely abandoned her,” Gravener went on, at this,
“and I'm too glad you don't disappoint me.”
I tried to recall exactly what Mrs. Mulville had told me. “He didn't
leave her—no. It's she who has left him.”
“Left him to us?” Gravener asked. “The monster—many thanks! I
decline to take him.”
“You'll hear more about him in spite of yourself. I can't, no, I really
can't, resist the impression that he's a big man.” I was already
learning—to my shame perhaps be it said—just the tone that my old
friend least liked.
“It's doubtless only a trifle,” he returned, “but you haven't happened
to mention what his reputation's to rest on.”
“Why, on what I began by boring you with—his extraordinary mind.”
“As exhibited in his writings?”
“Possibly in his writings, but certainly in his talk, which is far and
away the richest I ever listened to.”
“And what is it all about?”
“My dear fellow, don't ask me! About everything!” I pursued,
reminding myself of poor Adelaide. “About his idea of things,” I then
more charitably added. “You must have heard him to know what I
mean—it's unlike anything that ever was heard.” I coloured, I admit,
I overcharged a little, for such a picture was an anticipation of
Saltram's later development and still more of my fuller acquaintance
with him. However, I really expressed, a little lyrically perhaps, my
actual imagination of him when I proceeded to declare that, in a
cloud of tradition, of legend, he might very well go down to posterity
as the greatest of all great talkers. Before we parted George
Gravener demanded why such a row should be made about a
chatterbox the more and why he should be pampered and
pensioned. The greater the windbag the greater the calamity. Out of
proportion to all other movements on earth had come to be this
wagging of the tongue. We were drenched with talk—our wretched
age was dying of it. I differed from him here sincerely, only going so
far as to concede, and gladly, that we were drenched with sound. It
was not, however, the mere speakers who were killing us—it was the
mere stammerers. Fine talk was as rare as it was refreshing—the gift
of the gods themselves, the one starry spangle on the ragged cloak
of humanity. How many men were there who rose to this privilege,
of how many masters of conversation could he boast the
acquaintance? Dying of talk?—why, we were dying of the lack of it!
Bad writing wasn't talk, as many people seemed to think, and even
good wasn't always to be compared to it. From the best talk, indeed,
the best writing had something to learn. I fancifully added that we
too should peradventure be gilded by the legend, should be pointed
at for having listened, for having actually heard. Gravener, who had
looked at his watch and discovered it was midnight, found to all this
a response beautifully characteristic of him.
“There is one little sovereign circumstance,” he remarked, “which is
common to the best talk and the worst.” He looked at this moment
as if he meant so much that I thought he could only mean once
more that neither of them mattered if a man wasn't a real
gentleman. Perhaps it was what he did mean; he deprived me,
however, of the exultation of being right by putting the truth in a
slightly different way. “The only thing that really counts for one's
estimate of a person is his conduct.” He had his watch still in his
hand, and I reproached him with unfair play in having ascertained
beforehand that it was now the hour at which I always gave in. My
pleasantry so far failed to mollify him as that he presently added that
to the rule he had just enunciated there was absolutely no
exception.
“None whatever?”
“None whatever.”
“Trust me then to try to be good at any price!” I laughed as I went
with him to the door. “I declare I will be, if I have to be horrible!”

III

If that first night was one of the liveliest, or at any rate was the
freshest, of my exaltation, there was another, four years later, that
was one of my great discomposures. Repetition, I well knew by this
time, was the secret of Saltram's power to alienate, and of course
one would never have seen him at his finest if one hadn't seen him
in his remorses. They set in mainly at this season and were
magnificent, orchestral. I was perfectly aware that one of these
great sweeps was now gathering; but none the less, in our arduous
attempt to set him on his feet as a lecturer, it was impossible not to
feel that two failures were a large order, as we said, for a short
course of five. This was the second time, and it was past nine
o'clock; the audience, a muster unprecedented and really
encouraging, had fortunately the attitude of blandness that might
have been looked for in persons whom the promise (if I am not
mistaken) of an Analysis of Primary Ideas had drawn to the
neighbourhood of Upper Baker Street. There was in those days in
that region a petty lecture-hall to be secured on terms as moderate
as the funds left at our disposal by the irrepressible question of the
maintenance of five small Saltrams (I include the mother) and one
large one. By the time the Saltrams, of different sizes, were all
maintained, we had pretty well poured out the oil that might have
lubricated the machinery for enabling the most original of men to
appear to maintain them.
It was I, the other time, who had been forced into the breach,
standing up there, for an odious lamplit moment to explain to half-a-
dozen thin benches, where the earnest brows were virtuously void of
guesses, that we couldn't put so much as a finger on Mr. Saltram.
There was nothing to plead but that our scouts had been out from
the early hours and that we were afraid that on one of his walks
abroad—he took one, for meditation, whenever he was to address
such a company—some accident had disabled or delayed him. The
meditative walks were a fiction, for he never, that anyone could
discover, prepared anything but a magnificent prospectus; so that
his circulars and programmes, of which I possess an almost
complete collection, are as the solemn ghosts of generations never
born. I put the case, as it seemed to me, at the best; but I admit I
had been angry, and Kent Mulville was shocked at my want of
attenuation. This time therefore I left the excuses to his more
practised patience, only relieving myself in response to a direct
appeal from a young lady next whom, in the hall, I found myself
sitting. My position was an accident, but if it had been calculated the
reason would scarcely have eluded an observer of the fact that no
one else in the room had an appearance so charming. I think indeed
she was the only person there who looked at her ease, who had
come a little in the spirit of adventure. She seemed to carry
amusement in her handsome young head, and her presence quite
gave me the sense of a sudden extension of Saltram's sphere of
influence. He was doing better than we hoped and he had chosen
this occasion, of all occasions, to succumb to heaven knew which of
his infirmities. The young lady produced an impression of auburn
hair and black velvet, and had on her other hand a companion of
obscurer type, presumably a waiting-maid. She herself might
perhaps have been a foreign countess, and before she spoke to me I
had beguiled our sorry interval by thinking that she brought vaguely
back the first page of some novel of Madame Sand. It didn't make
her more fathomable to perceive in a few minutes that she could
only be an American; it simply engendered depressing reflections as
to the possible check to contributions from Boston. She asked me if,
as a person apparently more initiated, I would recommend further
waiting, and I replied that if she considered I was on my honour I
would privately deprecate it. Perhaps she didn't; at any rate
something passed between us that led us to talk until she became
aware that we were almost the only people left. I presently
discovered that she knew Mrs. Saltram, and this explained in a
manner the miracle. The brotherhood of the friends of the husband
were as nothing to the brotherhood, or perhaps I should say the
sisterhood, of the friends of the wife. Like the Kent Mulvilles I
belonged to both fraternities, and even better than they I think I had
sounded the dark abyss of Mrs. Saltram's wrongs. She bored me to
extinction, and I knew but too well how she had bored her husband;
but she had her partisans, the most inveterate of whom were indeed
the handful of poor Saltram's backers. They did her liberal justice,
whereas her peculiar comforters had nothing but hatred for our
philosopher. I am bound to say it was we, however—we of both
camps, as it were—who had always done most for her.
I thought my young lady looked rich—I scarcely knew why; and I
hoped she had put her hand in her pocket. But I soon discovered
that she was not a partisan—she was only a generous, irresponsible
inquirer. She had come to England to see her aunt, and it was at her
aunt's she had met the dreary lady we had all so much on our
minds. I saw she would help to pass the time when she observed
that it was a pity this lady wasn't intrinsically more interesting. That
was refreshing, for it was an article of faith in Mrs. Saltram's circle—
at least among those who scorned to know her horrid husband—that
she was attractive on her merits. She was really a very common
person, as Saltram himself would have been if he hadn't been a
prodigy. The question of vulgarity had no application to him, but it
was a measure that his wife kept challenging you to apply to her. I
hasten to add that the consequences of your doing so were no
sufficient reason for his having left her to starve. “He doesn't seem
to have much force of character,” said my young lady; at which I
laughed out so loud that my departing friends looked back at me
over their shoulders as if I were making a joke of their discomfiture.
My joke probably cost Saltram a subscription or two, but it helped
me on with my interlocutress. “She says he drinks like a fish,” she
sociably continued, “and yet she admits that his mind is wonderfully
clear.” It was amusing to converse with a pretty girl who could talk of
the clearness of Saltram's mind. I tried to tell her—I had it almost on
my conscience—what was the proper way to regard him; an effort
attended perhaps more than ever on this occasion with the usual
effect of my feeling that I wasn't after all very sure of it. She had
come to-night out of high curiosity—she had wanted to find out this
proper way for herself. She had read some of his papers and hadn't
understood them; but it was at home, at her aunt's, that her
curiosity had been kindled—kindled mainly by his wife's remarkable
stories of his want of virtue. “I suppose they ought to have kept me
away,” my companion dropped, “and I suppose they would have
done so if I hadn't somehow got an idea that he's fascinating. In fact
Mrs. Saltram herself says he is.”
“So you came to see where the fascination resides? Well, you've
seen!”
My young lady raised her fine eyebrows. “Do you mean in his bad
faith?”
“In the extraordinary effects of it; his possession, that is, of some
quality or other that condemns us in advance to forgive him the
humiliation, as I may call it, to which he has subjected us.”
“The humiliation?”
“Why mine, for instance, as one of his guarantors, before you as the
purchaser of a ticket.”
“You don't look humiliated a bit, and if you did I should let you off,
disappointed as I am; for the mysterious quality you speak of is just
the quality I came to see.”
“Oh, you can't see it!” I exclaimed.
“How then do you get at it?”
“You don't! You mustn't suppose he's good-looking,” I added.
“Why, his wife says he is!”
My hilarity may have struck my interlocutress as excessive, but I
confess it broke out afresh. Had she acted only in obedience to this
singular plea, so characteristic, on Mrs. Saltram's part, of what was
irritating in the narrowness of that lady's point of view? “Mrs.
Saltram,” I explained, “undervalues him where he is strongest, so
that, to make up for it perhaps, she overpraises him where he's
weak. He's not, assuredly, superficially attractive; he's middle-aged,
fat, featureless save for his great eyes.”
“Yes, his great eyes,” said my young lady attentively. She had
evidently heard all about them.
“They're tragic and splendid—lights on a dangerous coast. But he
moves badly and dresses worse, and altogether he's strange to
behold.”
My companion appeared to reflect on this, and after a moment she
inquired: “Do you call him a real gentleman?”
I started slightly at the question, for I had a sense of recognising it:
George Gravener, years before that first flushed night, had put me
face to face with it. It had embarrassed me then, but it didn't
embarrass me now, for I had lived with it and overcome it and
disposed of it. “A real gentleman? Decidedly not!”
My promptitude surprised her a little, but I quickly felt that it was
not to Gravener I was now talking. “Do you say that because he's—
what do you call it in England?—of humble extraction?”
“Not a bit. His father was a country schoolmaster and his mother the
widow of a sexton, but that has nothing to do with it. I say it simply
because I know him well.”
“But isn't it an awful drawback?”
“Awful—quite awful.”
“I mean, isn't it positively fatal?”
“Fatal to what? Not to his magnificent vitality.”
Again there was a meditative moment. “And is his magnificent
vitality the cause of his vices?”
“Your questions are formidable, but I'm glad you put them. I was
thinking of his noble intellect. His vices, as you say, have been much
exaggerated: they consist mainly after all in one comprehensive
misfortune.”
“A want of will?”
“A want of dignity.”
“He doesn't recognise his obligations?”
“On the contrary, he recognises them with effusion, especially in
public: he smiles and bows and beckons across the street to them.
But when they pass over he turns away, and he speedily loses them
in the crowd. The recognition is purely spiritual—it isn't in the least
social. So he leaves all his belongings to other people to take care of.
He accepts favours, loans, sacrifices, with nothing more restrictive
than an agony of shame. Fortunately we're a little faithful band, and
we do what we can.” I held my tongue about the natural children,
engendered, to the number of three, in the wantonness of his youth.
I only remarked that he did make efforts—often tremendous ones.
“But the efforts,” I said, “never come to much; the only things that
come to much are the abandonments, the surrenders.”
“And how much do they come to?”
“I've told you before that your questions are terrible! They come,
these mere exercises of genius, to a great body of poetry, of
philosophy, a notable mass of speculation, of discovery. The genius
is there, you see, to meet the surrender; but there's no genius to
support the defence.”
“But what is there, after all, at his age, to show?”
“In the way of achievement recognised and reputation established?”
I interrupted. “To 'show' if you will, there isn't much, for his writing,
mostly, isn't as fine as his talk. Moreover, two-thirds of his work are
merely colossal projects and announcements. 'Showing' Frank
Saltram is often a poor business; we endeavoured, you will have
Welcome to our website – the ideal destination for book lovers and
knowledge seekers. With a mission to inspire endlessly, we offer a
vast collection of books, ranging from classic literary works to
specialized publications, self-development books, and children's
literature. Each book is a new journey of discovery, expanding
knowledge and enriching the soul of the reade

Our website is not just a platform for buying books, but a bridge
connecting readers to the timeless values of culture and wisdom. With
an elegant, user-friendly interface and an intelligent search system,
we are committed to providing a quick and convenient shopping
experience. Additionally, our special promotions and home delivery
services ensure that you save time and fully enjoy the joy of reading.

Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and

personal growth!

ebookluna.com