O abbondante grazia, ond' io presunsi
Ficcar lo viso per la luce eterna
Tanto, che la veduta vi consunsi!
Nel suo profondo vidi che s' interna,
Legato con amore in un volume,
Ci˛ che per l' universo si squaderna.
DANTE, _Paradiso_, xxxiii. 82.
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I
_The Summer Field, and what it tells us_
There are few sights in Nature more restful to the soul than a daisied
field in June. Whether it be at the dewy hour of sunrise, with blithe
matin songs still echoing among the treetops, or while the luxuriant
splendour of noontide fills the delicate tints of the early foliage with
a pure glory of light, or in that more pensive time when long shadows
are thrown eastward and the fresh breath of the sea is felt, or even
under the solemn mantle of darkness, when all forms have faded from
sight and the night air is musical with the murmurs of innumerable
insects, amid all the varying moods through which the daily cycle runs,
the abiding sense is of unalloyed happiness, the profound tranquillity
of mind and heart that nothing ever brings save the contemplation of
perfect beauty. One's thought is carried back for the moment to that
morning of the world when God looked upon his work and saw that it was
good. If in the infinite and eternal Creative Energy one might imagine
some inherent impulse perpetually urging toward fresh creation, what
could it be more likely to be than the divine contentment in giving
objective existence to the boundless and subtle harmonies whereof our
world is made? That it is a world of perfect harmony and unsullied
beauty, who can doubt as he strolls through this summer field? As our
thought plays lightly with its sights and sounds, there is nothing but
gladness in the laugh of the bobolink; the thrush's tender note tells
only of the sweet domestic companionship of the nest; creeping and
winged things emerging from their grubs fill us with the sense of
abounding life; and the myriad buttercups, hallowed with vague memories
of June days in childhood, lose none of their charm in reminding us of
the profound sympathy and mutual dependence in which the worlds of
flowers and insects have grown up. The blades of waving grass, the
fluttering leaves upon the lilac bush, appeal to us with rare
fascination; for the green stuff that fills their cellular tissues, and
the tissues of all green things that grow, is the world's great
inimitable worker of wonders; its marvellous alchemy takes dead matter
and breathes into it the breath of life. But for that magician
chlorophyll, conjuring with sunbeams, such things as animal life and
conscious intelligence would be impossible; there would be no problems
of creation, nor philosopher to speculate upon them. Thus the delight
that sense impression gives, as we wander among buttercups and daisies,
becomes deepened into gratitude and veneration, till we quite understand
how the rejuvenescence of Nature should in all ages have aroused men to
acts of worship, and should call forth from modern masters of music, the
most religious of the arts of expression, outbursts of sublimest song.
And yet we need but come a little closer to the facts to find them
apparently telling us a very different story. The moment we penetrate
below the superficial aspect of things the scene is changed. In the
folklore of Ireland there is a widespread belief in a fairyland of
eternal hope and brightness and youth situated a little way below the
roots of the grass. From that land of Tir nan Og, as the peasants call
it, the secret springs of life shoot forth their scions in this visible
world, and thither a few favoured mortals have now and then found their
way. It is into no blest country of Tir nan Og that our stern science
leads us, but into a scene of ugliness and hatred, strife and massacre.
Macaulay tells of the battlefield of Neerwinden, that the next summer
after that frightful slaughter the whole countryside was densely covered
with scarlet poppies, which people beheld with awe as a token of wrath
in heaven over the deeds wrought on earth by human passions. Any summer
field, though mantled in softest green, is the scene of butchery as
wholesale as that of Neerwinden and far more ruthless. The life of its
countless tiny denizens is one of unceasing toil, of crowding and
jostling, where the weaker fall unpitied by the way, of starvation from
hunger and cold, of robbery utterly shameless and murder utterly cruel.
That green sward in taking possession of its territory has exterminated
scores of flowering plants of the sort that human economics and
Šsthetics stigmatize as weeds; nor do the blades of the victorious army
dwell side by side in amity, but in their eagerness to dally with the
sunbeams thrust aside and supplant one another without the smallest
compunction. Of the crawling insects and those that hum through the air,
with the quaint snail, the burrowing worm, the bloated toad, scarce one
in a hundred but succumbs to the buffets of adverse fortune before it
has achieved maturity and left offspring to replace it. The early bird,
who went forth in quest of the worm, was lucky if at the close of a day
as full of strife and peril as ever knight-errant encountered, he did
not himself serve as a meal for some giant foe in the gloaming. When we
think of the hawk's talons buried in the breast of the wren, while the
relentless beak tears the little wings from the quivering, bleeding
body, our mood toward Nature is changed, and we feel like recoiling from
a world in which such black injustice, such savage disregard for others,
is part of the general scheme.
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