The verbal duel between Heliobas, the man of God, and El-Râmi, the man of Science, is exceedingly well-written. In the course of their conversation El-Râmi opines that Heliobas is more of a poet than either a devotee or a scientist. The monk’s rejoinder is worth quoting:
“Perhaps I am! Yet poets are often the best scientists, because they never know they are scientists. They arrive by a sudden intuition at the facts which it takes several Professors Dry-as-Dust years to discover. When once you feel you are a scientist, it is all over with you. You are a clever biped who has got hold of a crumb out of the universal loaf, and for all your days afterwards you are turning that crumb over and over under your analytical lens. But a poet takes up the whole loaf unconsciously, and hands portions of it about at haphazard and with the abstracted behavior of one in a dream.”
In spite, however, of Heliobas’ warning words, El-Râmi proceeds with his experiment, which ends as recorded. The scientist is taken by his brother Féraz—a poetically conceived character—to a monastery in Cyprus, where he lives in placid contentment. Here he is visited by some English friends, who sum up his condition and suggest a simple remedy for others inclined to pursue similar researches in a way that strikes one as singularly practical:
“He always went into things with such terrible closeness, did El-Râmi,”—said Sir Frederick after a pause; “no wonder his brain gave way at last. You know you can’t keep on asking the why, why, why of everything without getting shut up in the long run.”
“I think we were not meant to ask ‘why’ at all,” said Irene slowly; “we are made to accept and believe that everything is for the best.”
And surely the gentle rejoinder of Irene is one that should silence controversy, dissipate vain speculation, and bring peace and rest to many thousands of minds which are wearied with attempts “to prove the apparently Unprovable.”
CHAPTER VII
MR. BENTLEY’S ENCOURAGEMENT—SOME LETTERS OF AN OLD PUBLISHER
When Solomon was at the zenith of his glory the number of people who could read must have been extremely limited, and yet that monarch—whose methods of administering justice may compare, in point of brevity and common sense, with those of the late Mr. Commissioner Kerr—is known to have commented on the never-ceasing literary output of his generation.
We may take it, then, that from the earliest times the supply of books has always exceeded the demand—when Israel had kings there must have been publishers, and from that era to the days of Byron (and, possibly, in subsequent times) there must have been robbers among them.