An Hour With Pasteur

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

IN 1891, Pasteur passed an afternoon — unforgettable to at least one person present — at the house of a colleague, one of those co-workers who were also his friends, and attached to him with the most touching and reverent devotion. The occasion was the rehearsal, previous to a fete to he given by Dr. G——, of a drawing-room play (the play a French trifle, the actors amateurs), to witness which the master had been bidden, since his health forbade his being out at night, and his tastes inclined little to worldly pageantry.

The scene made a picture of the sort that becomes a permanent possession of memory : in the background, the sober elegance of the host’s consulting-room, its Beauvais tapestry, its fine head of Pasteur in bronze ; in the foreground, the family group that will be ever associated, in the thought of the Parisians, with the great chemist,— the old man seated in the centre, simple and benign, his daughter on the one hand, his son and son-in-law on the other, and a grandchild at his knee.

Very slight was the performance ; very powerless to give the finer shades were the uninitiated, if arduous efforts of the four amateurs. But the great savant brought to the moment the freshness of impression that belongs to children and to genius, and that can transmute the actual and imperfect into the starting-point of pleasure which draws all its nutriment from the imagination. Oh, the zest, the readiness, of that ingenuous laughter ! Other and smaller people might be carping critics ; Pasteur’s spontaneous abandonment to his enjoyment, to the none too original witticisms of the comedy, its none too original savor and situations, was complete, Homeric. He was already an ill man at the time, and his bent frame and the suggestion of physical infirmity in his movements gave him an aspect older than his years. But the inextinguishable youth of those whom the gods love was in his eyes, — he had laughed till, the tears came, —as in his hand-shake, when, the performance over, he thanked each amateur in turn. Whereupon the little group departed as it had come : the grandchild clinging to the old man’s hand ; the son (a secretary of embassy) calling him, with the absence of selfconsciousness of a French son, “ papa.” Pasteur went down the stairs leaning on the arm of his host, — a great man, too, in his way, Dr. G——, but filial in his respect and tender regard at this moment. Here, in short, was an epitome of the very best in French life, — that life in its worthiest expression, in its veneration for the things of the mind, for the things that go for the advancement of the race rather than for the well-being of the individual. And all this spoke in Dr. G——’s light shrug a moment later, also, when he said : “ Pasteur could have been a very rich man had he chosen to be. He never has been. He never chose. Why should he ? ”

Why, indeed ? Before the unity of such a life, the consistency of its pursuit of the highest ends, the calm contentment of its laborious days, weaker vessels, tossed by the changes and chances of fate, may well be filled with a noble, melancholy envy, and question the value of the vain possessions and desires chased by the world. In the midst of his peaceful, cheerful activity, in the seclusion of laboratories and libraries, the last thing that Pasteur had time to think of was the amassing of wealth. Also, the last thing he needed, to strengthen the consideration of those amongst whom he lived, was the material mark and proof of success.

The “ priesthood of science ” — that term of which we hear less now than we did awhile ago — has meant to one person, since that spring afternoon in Paris, something forever associated with the personality of the serene and kindly old man, who, amid his ardent work in the invisible world of the “ infinitely little,” where “ life has its beginning,” had kept a green heart, and who never left his retreat to address his countrymen or the young but he found generous accents that upheld the cause of the ideal with unchilled fervor. Continuity, an integral oneness in the plan of the personal existence, are become antique virtues. The abnegation they ask, and the singleness, and the patience in enduring one’s self, grow rare with us, who are greedy of many emotions and fritter ourselves away in fleeting interests. Hence it is an hour to remember when our path crosses one which teaches the higher lesson and holds the secret of a nobler repose. He surely is a priest who, while he labors for the physical welfare of his fellow-man, likewise fulfills this moral function, shaming with a simple dignity the blurred and broken plan of our average futile day.