often lose, I think, their sharp savours. One is preoccupied with
one's own happy schemes and merry visions; the bird sings shrill within
its cage, and claps its golden wings. But on such soft and languorous
days as these days of early spring, when the body is unstrung, and the
bonds and ties that fasten the soul to its prison are loosened and
unbound, the spirit, striving to be glad, draws in through the passages
of sense these swift impressions of beauty, as a thirsty child drains a
cup of spring-water on a sun-scorched day, lingering over the limpid
freshness of the gliding element. The airy voices of the strings being
stilled, with a sort of pity for those penned in the crowded room,
interchanging the worn coinage of civility, we stood a while looking in
at a gate, through which we could see the cool front of a Georgian
manor-house, built of dusky bricks, with coigns and dressings of grey
stone. The dark windows with their thick white casements, the
round-topped dormers, the steps up to the door, and a prim circle of
grass which seemed to lie like a carpet on the pale gravel, gave the
feeling of a picture; the whole being framed in the sombre yews of
shrubberies which bordered the drive. It was hard to feel that the
quiet house was the scene of a real and active life; it seemed so full
of a slumberous peace, and to be tenanted only by soft shadows of the
past. And so we went slowly on by the huge white-boarded mill, its
cracks streaming with congealed dust of wheat, where the water
thundered through the sluices and the gear rattled within.
We crossed the bridge, and walked on by a field-track that skirted the
edge of the wold. How thin and clean were the tints of the dry
ploughlands and the long sweep of pasture! Presently we were at the
foot of a green drift-road, an old Roman highway that ran straight up
into the downs. On such a day as this, one follows a spirit in one's
feet, as Shelley said; and we struck up into the wold, on the green
road, with its thorn-thickets, until the chalk began to show white
among the ruts; and we were soon at the top. A little to the left of
us appeared, in the middle of the pasture, a tiny round-topped tumulus
that I had often seen from a lower road, but never visited. It was
fresher and cooler up here. On arriving at the place we found that it
was not a tumulus at all, but a little outcrop of the pure chalk. It
had steep, scarped sides with traces of caves scooped in them. The
grassy top commanded a wide view of wold and plain.
Our talk wandered over many things, but here, I do not know why, we
were speaking of the taking up of old friendships, and the comfort and
delight of those serene and undisturbed relations which one sometimes
establishes with a congenial person, which no lapse of time or lack of
communication seems to interrupt--the best kind of friendship. There
is here no blaming of conditions that may keep the two lives apart; no
feverish attempt to keep up the relation, no resentment if mutual
intercourse dies away. And then, perhaps, in the shifting of
conditions, one's life is again brought near to the life of one's
friend, and the old easy intercourse is quietly resumed. My companion
said that such a relation seemed to him to lie as near to the solution
of the question of the preservation of identity after death as any
other phenomenon of life. "Supposing," he said, "that such a
friendship as that of which we have spoken is resumed after a break of
twenty years. One is in no respect the same person; one looks
different, one's views of life have altered, and physiologists tell us
that one's body has changed perhaps three times over, in the time, so
that there is not a particle of our frame that is the same; and yet the
emotion, the feeling of the friendship remains, and remains unaltered.
If the stuff of our thoughts were to alter as the materials of our body
alter, the continuity of such an emotion would be impossible. Of
course it is difficult to see how, divested of the body, our
perceptions can continue; but almost the only thing we are really
conscious of is our own identity, our sharp separation from the mass of
phenomena that are not ourselves. And, if an emotion can survive the
transmutation of the entire frame, may it not also survive the
dissolution of that frame?"
"Could it be thus?" I said. "A ray of light falls through a chink in a
shutter; through the ray, as we watch it, floats an infinite array of
tiny motes, and it is through the striking of the light upon them that
we are aware of the light; but they are never the same. Yet the ray
has a seeming identity, though even the very ripples of light that
cause it are themselves ever changing, ever renewed. Could not the
soul be such a ray, illuminating the atoms that pass through it, and
itself a perpetual motion, a constant renewal?"
But the day warned us to descend. The shadows grew longer, and a great
pale light of sunset began to gather in the West. We came slowly down
through the pastures, till we joined the familiar road again. And at
last we parted, in that wistful silence that falls upon the mood when
two spirits have achieved a certain nearness of thought, have drawn as
close as the strange fence of identity allows. But as I went home, I
stood for a moment at the edge of a pleasant grove, an outlying
pleasaunce of a great house on the verge of the town. The trees grew
straight and tall within it, and all the underwood was full of spring
flowers and green ground-plants, expanding to light and warmth; the sky
was all full of light, dying away to a calm and liquid green, the
colour of peace. Here I encountered another friend, a retiring man of
letters, who lives apart from the world in dreams of his own. He is a
bright-eyed, eager creature, tall and shadowy, who has but a slight
hold upon the world. We talked for a few moments of trivial things,
till a chance question of mine drew from him a sad statement of his own
health. He had been lately, he said, to a physician, and had been
warned that he was in a somewhat precarious condition. I tried to
comfort him, but he shook his head; and though he tried to speak
lightly and cheerfully, I could see that there was a shadow of doom
upon him.
As I turned to go, he held up his hand, "Listen to the birds!" he said.
We were silent, and could hear the clear flute-like notes of thrushes
hidden in the tall trees, and the soft cooing of a dove. "That gives
one," he said, "some sense of the happiness which one cannot capture
for oneself!" He smiled mournfully, and in a moment I saw his light
figure receding among the trees. What a world it is for sorrow! My
friend was going, bearing the burden of a lonely grief, which I could
not lighten for him; and yet the whole scene was full of so sweet a
content, the birds full of hope and delight, the flowers and leaves
glad to feel themselves alive. What was one to make of it all? Where
to turn for light? What conceivable benefit could result from thus
perpetually desiring to know and perpetually being baffled?
Yet, after all, to-day has been one of those rare days, like the gold
sifted from the _debris_ of the mine, which has had for me, by some
subtle alchemy of the spirit, the permanent quality which is often
denied to more stirring incidents and livelier experiences. I had seen
the mysteries of life and death, of joy and sorrow, sharply and sadly
contrasted. I had been one with Nature, with all her ardent ecstasies,
her vital impulses; and then I had seen too the other side of the
picture, a soul confronted with the mystery of death, alone in the
shapeless gloom; the very cries and stirrings and joyful dreams of
Nature bringing no help, but only deepening the shadow.
And there came too the thought of how little such easy speculations as
we had indulged in on the grassy mound, thoughts which seemed so
radiant with beauty and mystery, how little they could sustain or
comfort the sad spirit which had entered into the cloud.
So that bright first day of spring shaped itself for me into a day when
not only the innocent and beautiful flowers of the world rose into life
and sunshine; but a day when sadder thoughts raised their head too, red
flowers of suffering, and pale blooms of sadness; and yet these too can
be woven into the spirit's coronal, I doubt not, if one can but find
heart to do it, and patience for the sorrowful task.
IX
The Hare
I have just read a story that has moved me strangely, with a helpless
bewilderment and a sad anger of mind. When the doors of a factory, in
the heart of a northern town, were opened one morning, a workman, going
to move a barrel that stood in a corner, saw something crouching behind
it that he believed to be a dog or cat. He pushed it with his foot,
and a large hare sprang out. I suppose that the poor creature had been
probably startled by some dog the evening before, in a field close to
the town, had fled in the twilight along the streets, frightened and
bewildered, and had slipped into the first place of refuge it had
found; had perhaps explored its prison in vain, when the doors were
shut, with many dreary perambulations, and had then sunk into an uneasy
sleep, with frequent timid awakenings, in the terrifying unfamiliar
place.
The man who had disturbed it shouted aloud to the other workmen who
were entering; the doors were shut, and the hare was chased by an eager
and excited throng from corner to corner; it fled behind some planks;
the planks were taken up; it made, in its agony of fear, a great leap
over the men who were bending down to catch it; it rushed into a corner
behind some tanks, from which it was dislodged with a stick. For half
an hour the chase continued, until at last it was headed into a
work-room, where it relinquished hope; it crouched panting, with its
long ears laid back, its pretty brown eyes wide open, as though
wondering desperately what it had done to deserve such usage; until it
was despatched with a shower of blows, and the limp, bleeding body
handed over to its original discoverer.
Not a soul there had a single thought of pity for the creature; they
went back to work pleased, excited, amused. It was a good story to
tell for a week, and the man who had struck the last blows became a
little hero for his deftness. The old savage instinct for prey had
swept fiercely up from the bottom of these rough hearts--hearts
capable, too, of tenderness and grief, of compassion for suffering,
gentle with women and children. It seems to be impossible to blame
them, and such blame would have been looked upon as silly and misplaced
sentiment. Probably not even an offer of money, far in excess of the
market value of the dead body, if the hare could be caught unharmed,
would have prevailed at the moment over the instinct for blood.
There are many hares in the world, no doubt, and _nous sommes tous
condamnes_. But that the power which could call into being so
harmless, pretty, and delicately organised a creature does not care or
is unable to protect it better, is a strange mystery. It cannot be
supposed that the hare's innocent life deserved such chastisement; and
it is difficult to believe that suffering, helplessly endured at one
point of the creation, can be remedial at another. Yet one cannot bear
to think that the extremity of terror and pain, thus borne by a
sensitive creature, either comes of neglect, or of cruel purpose, or is
merely wasted. And yet the chase and the slaughter of the unhappy
thing cannot be anything but debasing to those who took part in it.
And at the same time, to be angry and sorry over so wretched an episode
seems like trying to be wiser than the mind that made us. What single
gleam of brightness is it possible to extract from the pitiful little
story? Only this: that there must lie some tender secret, not only
behind what seems a deed of unnecessary cruelty, but in the implanting
in us of the instinct to grieve with a miserable indignation over a
thing we cannot cure, and even in the withholding from us any hope that
might hint at the solution of the mystery.
But the thought of the seemly fur stained and bedabbled, the bright
hazel eyes troubled with the fear of death, the silky ears, in which
rang the horrid din of pursuit, rises before me as I write, and casts
me back into the sad mood, that makes one feel that the closer that one
gazes into the sorrowful texture of the world, the more glad we may
well be to depart.
X
The Diplodocus
I have had my imagination deeply thrilled lately by reading about the
discovery in America of the bones of a fossil animal called the
_Diplodocus_. I hardly know what the word is derived from, but it
might possibly mean an animal which _takes twice as much_, of
nourishment, perhaps, or room; either twice as much as is good for it,
or twice as much as any other animal. In either case it seems a
felicitous description. The creature was a reptile, a gigantic toad or
lizard that lived, it is calculated, about three million years ago. It
was in Canada that this particular creature lived. The earth was then
a far hotter place than now; a terrible steaming swamp, full of rank
and luxuriant vegetation, gigantic palms, ferns as big as trees. The
diplodocus was upwards of a hundred feet long, a vast inert creature,
with a tough black hide. In spite of its enormous bulk its brain was
only the size of a pigeon's egg, so that its mental processes must have
been of the simplest. It had a big mouth full of rudimentary teeth, of
no use to masticate its food, but just sufficing to crop the luxuriant
juicy vegetable stalks on which it lived, and of which it ate in the
course of the day as much as a small hayrick would contain. The
poisonous swamps in which it crept can seldom have seen the light of
day; perpetual and appalling torrents of rain must have raged there,
steaming and dripping through the dim and monstrous forests, with their
fallen day, varied by long periods of fiery tropical sunshine. In this
hot gloom the diplodocus trailed itself about, eating, eating; living a
century or so; loving, as far as a brain the size of a pigeon's egg can
love, and no doubt with a maternal tenderness for its loathly
offspring. It had but few foes, though, in the course of endless
generations, there sprang up a carnivorous race of creatures which seem
to have found the diplodocus tender eating. The particular diplodocus
of which I speak probably died of old age in the act of drinking, and
was engulfed in a pool of the great curdling, reedy river that ran
lazily through the forest. The imagination sickens before the thought
of the speedy putrefaction of such a beast under such conditions; but
this process over, the creature's bones lay deep in the pool.
Another feature of the earth at that date must have been the vast
volcanic agencies at work; whole continents were at intervals submerged
or uplifted. In this case the whole of the forest country, where the
diplodocus lay, was submerged beneath the sea, and sank to a depth of
several leagues; for, in the course of countless ages, sea-ooze, to a
depth of at least three miles, was deposited over the forest,
preserving the trunks and even the very sprays of the tropical
vegetation. Who would suppose that the secret history of this great
beast would ever be revealed, as it lay century after century beneath
the sea-floor? But another convulsion took place, and a huge ridge of
country, forming the rocky backbone of North and South America, was
thrust up again by a volcanic convulsion, so that the diplodocus now
lay a mile above the sea, with a vast pile of downs over his head which
became a huge range of snow mountains. Then the rain and the sun began
their work; and the whole of the immense bed of uplifted ocean-silt,
now become chalk, was carried eastward by mighty rivers, forming the
whole continent of North America, between these mountains and the
eastern sea. At last the tropic forest was revealed again, a wide
tract of petrified tree-trunks and fossil wood. And then out of an
excavation, made where one of the last patches of the chalk still lay
in a rift of the hills, where the old river-pool had been into which
the great beast had sunk, was dug the neck-bone of the creature.
Curiosity was aroused by the sight of this fragment of an unknown
animal, and bit by bit the great bones came to light; some portions
were missing, but further search revealed the remains of three other
specimens of the great lizard, and a complete skeleton was put together.
The mind positively reels before the story that is here revealed; we,
who are feebly accustomed to regard the course of recorded history as
the crucial and critical period of the life of the world, must be
sobered by the reflection that the whole of the known history of the
human race is not the thousandth, not the ten-thousandth part of the
history of the planet. What does this vast and incredible panorama
mean to us? What is it all about? This ghastly force at work, dealing
with life and death on so incredible a scale, and yet guarding its
secret so close? The diplodocus, I imagine, seldom indulged in
reveries as to how it came to be there; it awoke to life; its business
was to crawl about in the hot gloom, to eat, and drink, and sleep, to
propagate its kind; and not the least amazing part of the history is
that at length should have arisen a race of creatures, human beings,
that should be able to reconstruct, however faintly, by investigation,
imagination, and deduction, a picture of the dead life of the world.
It is this capacity for arriving at what has been, for tracing out the
huge mystery of the work of God, that appears to me the most wonderful
thing of all. And yet we seem no nearer to the solution of the secret;
we come into the world with this incredible gift of placing ourselves,
so to speak, on the side of the Creator, of surveying his work; and yet
we cannot guess what is in his heart; the stern and majestic eyes of
Nature behold us stonily, permitting us to make question, to explore,
to investigate, but withholding the secret. And in the light of those
inscrutable eyes, how weak and arrogant appear our dogmatic systems of
religion, that would profess to define and read the very purposes of
God; our dearest conceptions of morality, our pathetic principles, pale
and fade before these gigantic indications of mysterious, indifferent
energy.
Yet even here, I think, the golden thread gleams out in the darkness;
for slight and frail as our so-called knowledge, our beliefs, appear,
before that awful, accumulated testimony of the past, yet the latest
development is none the less the instant guiding of God; it is all as
much a gift from him as the blind impulses of the great lizard in the
dark forest; and again there emerges the mighty thought, the only
thought that can give us the peace we seek, that we are all in his
hand, that nothing is forgotten, nothing is small or great in his
sight; and that each of our frail, trembling spirits has its place in
the prodigious scheme, as much as the vast and fiery globe of the sun
on the one hand, and, on the other, the smallest atom of dust that
welters deep beneath the sea. All that is, exists; indestructible,
august, divine, capable of endless rearrangement, infinite
modifications, but undeniably there.
This truth, however dimly apprehended, however fitfully followed, ought
to give us a certain confidence, a certain patience. In careless moods
we may neglect it; in days of grief and pain we may feel that it cannot
help us; but it is the truth; and the more we can make it our own, the
deeper that we can set it in our trivial spirits, the better are we
prepared to learn the lesson which the deepest instinct of our nature
bids us believe, that the Father is trying to teach us, or is at least
willing that we should learn if we can.
XI
The Beetle
How strange it is that sometimes the smallest and commonest incident,
that has befallen one a hundred times before, will suddenly open the
door into that shapeless land of fruitless speculation; the land on to
which, I think, the Star Wormwood fell, burning it up and making it
bitter; the land in which we most of us sometimes have to wander, and
always alone.
It was such a trifling thing after all. I was bicycling very
pleasantly down a country road to-day, when one of those small pungent
beetles, a tiny thing, in black plate-armour, for all the world like a
minute torpedo, sailed straight into my eye. The eyelid, quicker even
than my own thought, shut itself down, but too late. The little fellow
was engulphed in what Walt Whitman would call the liquid rims. These
small, hard creatures are tenacious of life, and they have, moreover,
the power of exuding a noxious secretion--an acrid oil, with a strong
scent, and even taste, of saffron. It was all over in a moment. I
rubbed my eye, and I suppose crushed him to death; but I could not get
him out, and I had no companion to extract him; the result was that my
eye was painful and inflamed for an hour or two, till the tiny, black,
flattened corpse worked its way out for itself.
Now, that is not a very marvellous incident; but it set me wondering.
In the first place, what a horrible experience for the creature; in a
moment, as he sailed joyfully along, saying, "Aha," perhaps, like the
war-horse among the trumpets, on the scented summer breeze, with the
sun warm on his mail, to find himself stuck fast in a hot and oozy
crevice, and presently to be crushed to death. His little taste of the
pleasant world so soon over, and for me an agreeable hour spoilt, so
far as I could see, to no particular purpose.
Now, one is inclined to believe that such an incident is what we call
fortuitous; but the only hope we have in the world is to believe that
things do not happen by chance. One believes, or tries to believe,
that the Father of all has room in his mind for the smallest of his
creatures; that not a sparrow, as Christ said, falls to the ground
without his tender care. Theologians tell us that death entered into
the world by sin; but it is not consistent to believe that, whereas
both men and animals suffer and die, the sufferings and death of men
are caused by their sins, or by the sins of their ancestors, while
animals suffer and die without sin being the cause. Surely the cause
must be the same for all the creation? and still less is it possible to
believe that the suffering and death of creatures is caused by the sin
of man, because they suffered and died for thousands of centuries
before man came upon the scene.
If God is omnipotent and all-loving, we are bound to believe that
suffering and death are sent by him deliberately, and not cruelly. One
single instance, however minute, that established the reverse, would
vitiate the whole theory; and if so, then we are the sport of a power
that is sometimes kind and sometimes malignant. An insupportable
thought!
Is it possible to conceive that the law of sin works in the lower
creation, and that they, too, are punished, or even wisely corrected,
for sinning against such light as they have? Had the little beetle
that sailed across my path acted in such a way that he had deserved his
fate? Or was his death meant to make him a better, a larger-minded
beetle? I cannot bring myself to believe that. Perhaps a
philosophical theologian would say that creation was all one, and that
suffering at one point was remedial at some other point. I am not in a
position to deny the possibility of that, but I am equally unable to
affirm that it is so. There is no evidence which would lead me to
think it. It only seems to me necessary to affirm it, in order to
confirm the axiom that God is omnipotent and all-loving. Much in
nature and in human life would seem to be at variance with that.
It may be said that one is making too much of a minute incident; but
such incidents are of hourly occurrence all the world over; and the
only possible method for arriving at truth is the scientific method of
cumulative evidence. The beetle was small, indeed, and infinitely
unimportant in the scheme of things. But he was all in all to himself.
The world only existed so far as he was concerned, through his tiny
consciousness.
The old-fashioned religious philosophers held that man was the crown
and centre of creation, and that God was mainly preoccupied with man's
destiny. They maintained that all creatures were given us for our use
and enjoyment. The enjoyment that I derived from the beetle, in this
case, was not conspicuous. But I suppose that such cheerful optimists
would say that the beetle was sent to give me a little lesson in
patience, to teach me not to think so much about myself. But, as a
matter of fact, the little pain I suffered made me think more of myself
than I had previously been doing; it turned me for the time from a
bland and hedonistic philosopher into a petulant pessimist, because it
seemed that no one was the better for the incident; certainly, if life
is worth having at all, the beetle was no better off, and in my own
case I could trace no moral improvement. I had been harmlessly enough
employed in getting air and exercise in the middle of hard work. It
was no vicious enjoyment that was temporarily suspended.
Again, there are people who would say that to indulge in such reveries
is morbid; that one must take the rough with the smooth, and not
trouble about beetles or inflamed eyes. But if one is haunted by the
hopeless desire to search out the causes of things, such arguments do
not assist one. Such people would say, "Oh, you must take a larger or
wider view of it all, and not strain at gnats!" But the essence of
God's omnipotence is, that while he can take the infinitely wide view
of all created things, he can also take, I would fain believe, the
infinitely just and minute point of view, and see the case from the
standpoint of the smallest of his creatures!