I meet a melancholy old Savoyard playing on a hurdy-gurdy, grisly,
dejected, dirty, with a look upon him as though the iron had long since
entered into his soul. It is a frosty morning but he has very little
clothing, and there is a dumb despairing look about him which is surely
genuine. There passes him a young butcher boy with his tray of meat upon
his shoulder. He is ruddy, lusty, full of life and health and spirits,
and he vents these in a shrill whistle which eclipses the hurdy-gurdy of
the Savoyard.
The like holds good with the horses and cats and dogs which I meet daily,
with the flies in window panes and with plants, some are successful,
other have now passed their prime. Look at the failures _per se_ and
they make one very unhappy, but it helps matters to look at them in their
capacities as parts of a whole rather than as isolated.
I cannot see things round about me without feeling that they are all
parts of one whole which is trying to do something; it has not perhaps a
perfectly clear idea of what it is trying after, but it is doing its
best. I see old age, decay and failure as the relaxation, after effort,
of a muscle in the corporation of things, or as a tentative effort in a
wrong direction, or as the dropping off of particles of skin from a
healthy limb. This dropping off is the death of any given generation of
our cells as they work their way nearer and nearer to our skins and then
get rubbed off and go away. It is as though we sent people to live
nearer and nearer the churchyard the older they grew. As for the skin
that is shed, in the first place it has had its turn, in the second it
starts anew under fresh auspices, for it can at no time cease to be part
of the universe, it must always live in one way or another.