idea of its extinction seems incredible to it. "A world without _us_!"
it says, as a heady young Cephalaspis might have said it in the old
Silurian sea. But since the Cephalaspis and the Coccostëus many a fine
animal has increased and multiplied upon the earth, lorded it over land
or sea without a rival, and passed at last into the night. Surely it is
not so unreasonable to ask why man should be an exception to the rule.
From the scientific standpoint at least any reason for such exception is
hard to find.
No doubt man is undisputed master at the present time--at least of most
of the land surface; but so it has been before with other animals. Let
us consider what light geology has to throw upon this. The great land
and sea reptiles of the Mesozoic period, for instance, seem to have been
as secure as humanity is now in their pre-eminence. But they passed away
and left no descendants when the new orders of the mammals emerged from
their obscurity. So, too, the huge Titanotheria of the American
continent, and all the powerful mammals of Pleistocene South America,
the sabre-toothed lion, for instance, and the Machrauchenia suddenly
came to a finish when they were still almost at the zenith of their
rule. _And in no case does the record of the fossils show a really
dominant species succeeded by its own descendants._ What has usually
happened in the past appears to be the emergence of some type of animal
hitherto rare and unimportant, and the extinction, not simply of the
previously ruling species, but of most of the forms that are at all
closely related to it. Sometimes, indeed, as in the case of the extinct
giants of South America, they vanished without any considerable rivals,
victims of pestilence, famine, or, it may be, of that cumulative
inefficiency that comes of a too undisputed life. So that the analogy of
geology, at anyrate, is against this too acceptable view of man's
certain tenure of the earth for the next few million years or so.
And, after all, even now man is by no means such a master of the
kingdoms of life as he is apt to imagine. The sea, that mysterious
nursery of living things, is for all practical purposes beyond his
control. The low-water mark is his limit. Beyond that he may do a little
with seine and dredge, murder a few million herrings a year as they come
in to spawn, butcher his fellow air-breather, the whale, or haul now and
then an unlucky king-crab or strange sea-urchin out of the deep water,
in the name of science; but the life of the sea as a whole knows him
not, plays out its slow drama of change and development unheeding him,
and may in the end, in mere idle sport, throw up some new terrestrial
denizens, some new competitor for space to live in and food to live
upon, that will sweep him and all his little contrivances out of
existence, as certainly and inevitably as he has swept away auk, bison,
and dodo during the last two hundred years.
For instance, there are the Crustacea. As a group the crabs and lobsters
are confined below the high-water mark. But experiments in air-breathing
are no doubt in progress in this group--we already have tropical
land-crabs--and as far as we know there is no reason why in the future
these creatures should not increase in size and terrestrial capacity. In
the past we have the evidence of the fossil _Paradoxides_ that creatures
of this kind may at least attain a length of six feet, and, considering
their intense pugnacity, a crab of such dimensions would be as
formidable a creature as one could well imagine. And their amphibious
capacity would give them an advantage against us such as at present is
only to be found in the case of the alligator or crocodile. If we
imagine a shark that could raid out upon the land, or a tiger that could
take refuge in the sea, we should have a fair suggestion of what a
terrible monster a large predatory crab might prove. And so far as
zoological science goes we must, at least, admit that such a creature is
an evolutionary possibility.
Then, again, the order of the Cephalopods, to which belong the
cuttle-fish and the octopus (sacred to Victor Hugo), may be, for all we
can say to the contrary, an order with a future. Their kindred, the
Gastropods, have, in the case of the snail and slug, learnt the trick of
air-breathing. And not improbably there are even now genera of this
order that have escaped the naturalist, or even well-known genera whose
possibilities in growth and dietary are still unknown. Suppose some day
a specimen of a new species is caught off the coast of Kent. It excites
remark at a Royal Society soirée, engenders a Science Note or so, "A
Huge Octopus!" and in the next year or so three or four other specimens
come to hand, and the thing becomes familiar. "Probably a new and larger
variety of _Octopus_ so-and-so, hitherto supposed to be tropical," says
Professor Gargoyle, and thinks he has disposed of it. Then conceive some
mysterious boating accidents and deaths while bathing. A large animal of
this kind coming into a region of frequent wrecks might so easily
acquire a preferential taste for human nutriment, just as the Colorado
beetle acquired a new taste for the common potato and gave up its old
food-plants some years ago. Then perhaps a school or pack or flock of
_Octopus gigas_ would be found busy picking the sailors off a stranded
ship, and then in the course of a few score years it might begin to
stroll up the beaches and batten on excursionists. Soon it would be a
common feature of the watering-places--possibly at last commoner than
excursionists. Suppose such a creature were to appear--and it is, we
repeat, a possibility, if perhaps a remote one--how could it be fought
against? Something might be done by torpedoes; but, so far as our past
knowledge goes, man has no means of seriously diminishing the numbers of
any animal of the most rudimentary intelligence that made its fastness
in the sea.
Even on land it is possible to find creatures that with a little
modification might become excessively dangerous to the human ascendency.
Most people have read of the migratory ants of Central Africa, against
which no man can stand. On the march they simply clear out whole
villages, drive men and animals before them in headlong rout, and kill
and eat every living creature they can capture. One wonders why they
have not already spread the area of their devastations. But at present
no doubt they have their natural checks, of ant-eating birds, or what
not. In the near future it may be that the European immigrant, as he
sets the balance of life swinging in his vigorous manner, may kill off
these ant-eating animals, or otherwise unwittingly remove the checks
that now keep these terrible little pests within limits. And once they
begin to spread in real earnest, it is hard to see how their advance
could be stopped. A world devoured by ants seems incredible now, simply
because it is not within our experience; but a naturalist would have a
dull imagination who could not see in the numerous species of ants, and
in their already high intelligence, far more possibility of strange
developments than we have in the solitary human animal. And no doubt the
idea of the small and feeble organism of man, triumphant and
omnipresent, would have seemed equally incredible to an intelligent
mammoth or a palæolithic cave bear.
And, finally, there is always the prospect of a new disease. As yet
science has scarcely touched more than the fringe of the probabilities
associated with the minute fungi that constitute our zymotic diseases.
But the bacilli have no more settled down into their final quiescence
than have men; like ourselves, they are adapting themselves to new
conditions and acquiring new powers. The plagues of the Middle Ages, for
instance, seem to have been begotten of a strange bacillus engendered
under conditions that sanitary science, in spite of its panacea of
drainage, still admits are imperfectly understood, and for all we know
even now we may be quite unwittingly evolving some new and more terrible
plague--a plague that will not take ten or twenty or thirty per cent.,
as plagues have done in the past, but the entire hundred.
No; man's complacent assumption of the future is too confident. We
think, because things have been easy for mankind as a whole for a
generation or so, we are going on to perfect comfort and security in the
future. We think that we shall always go to work at ten and leave off at
four, and have dinner at seven for ever and ever. But these four
suggestions, out of a host of others, must surely do a little against
this complacency. Even now, for all we can tell, the coming terror may
be crouching for its spring and the fall of humanity be at hand. In the
case of every other predominant animal the world has ever seen, I
repeat, the hour of its complete ascendency has been the eve of its
entire overthrow. But if some poor story-writing man ventures to figure
this sober probability in a tale, not a reviewer in London but will tell
him his theme is the utterly impossible. And, when the thing happens,
one may doubt if even then one will get the recognition one deserves.
THE WRITING OF ESSAYS
The art of the essayist is so simple, so entirely free from canons of
criticism, and withal so delightful, that one must needs wonder why all
men are not essayists. Perhaps people do not know how easy it is. Or
perhaps beginners are misled. Rightly taught it may be learnt in a brief
ten minutes or so, what art there is in it. And all the rest is as easy
as wandering among woodlands on a bright morning in the spring.
Then sit you down if you would join us, taking paper, pens, and ink; and
mark this, your pen is a matter of vital moment. For every pen writes
its own sort of essay, and pencils also after their kind. The ink
perhaps may have its influence too, and the paper; but paramount is the
pen. This, indeed, is the fundamental secret of essay-writing. Wed any
man to his proper pen, and the delights of composition and the birth of
an essay are assured. Only many of us wander through the earth and never
meet with her--futile and lonely men.
And, of all pens, your quill for essays that are literature. There is a
subtle informality, a delightful easiness, perhaps even a faint
immorality essentially literary, about the quill. The quill is rich in
suggestion and quotation. There are quills that would quote you
Montaigne and Horace in the hands of a trades-union delegate. And those
quirky, idle noises this pen makes are delightful, and would break your
easy fluency with wit. All the classical essayists wrote with a quill,
and Addison used the most expensive kind the Government purchased. And
the beginning of the inferior essay was the dawn of the cheap steel
pen.
The quill nibs they sell to fit into ordinary pen-holders are no true
quills at all, lacking dignity, and may even lead you into the New
Humour if you trust overmuch to their use. After a proper quill commend
me to a stumpy BB pencil; you get less polish and broader effects, but
you are still doing good literature. Sometimes the work is close--Mr.
George Meredith, for instance, is suspected of a soft pencil--and always
it is blunter than quill work and more terse. With a hard pencil no man
can write anything but a graceless style--a kind of east wind air it
gives--and smile you cannot. So that it is often used for serious
articles in the half-crown reviews.
There follows the host of steel pens. That bald, clear, scientific
style, all set about with words like "evolution" and "environment,"
which aims at expressing its meaning with precision and an exemplary
economy of words, is done with fine steel nibs--twelve a penny at any
stationer's. The J pen to the lady novelist, and the stylograph to the
devil--your essayist must not touch the things. So much for the pen. If
you cannot write essays easily, that is where the hitch comes in. Get a
box of a different kind of pen and begin again, and so on again and
again until despair or joy arrests you.
As for a typewriter, you could no more get an essay out of a typewriter
than you could play a sonata upon its keys. No essay was ever written
with a typewriter yet, nor ever will be. Besides its impossibility, the
suggestion implies a brutal disregard of the division of labour by which
we live and move and have our being. If the essayist typewrite, the
unemployed typewriter, who is commonly a person of superior education
and capacity, might take to essays, and where is your living then? One
might as reasonably start at once with the Linotype and print one's wit
and humour straight away. And taking the invasion of other trades one
step further one might, after an attempt to sell one's own newspaper,
even get to the pitch of having to read it oneself. No; even essayists
must be reasonable. If its mechanical clitter-clatter did not render
composition impossible, the typewriter would still be beneath the honour
of a literary man.
Then for the paper. The luxurious, expensive, small-sized cream-laid
note is best, since it makes your essay choice and compact; and, failing
that, ripped envelopes and the backs of bills. Some men love ruled
paper, because they can write athwart the lines, and some take the
fly-leaves of their friends' books. But whosoever writes on cheap sermon
paper full of hairs should write far away from the woman he loves, lest
he offend her ears. It is good, however, for a terse, forcible style.
The ink should be glossy black as it leaves your pen, for polished
English. Violet inks lead to sham sentiment, and blue-black to
vulgarity. Red ink essays are often good, but usually unfit for
publication.
This is as much almost as anyone need know to begin essay writing. Given
your proper pen and ink, or pencil and paper, you simply sit down and
write the thing. The value of an essay is not its matter, but its mood.
You must be comfortable, of course; an easy-chair with arm-rests,
slippers, and a book to write upon are usually employed, and you must be
fed recently, and your body clothed with ease rather than grandeur. For
the rest, do not trouble to stick to your subject, or any subject; and
take no thought for the editor or the reader, for your essay should be
as spontaneous as the lilies of the field.
So long as you do not begin with a definition you may begin anyhow. An
abrupt beginning is much admired, after the fashion of the clown's entry
through the chemist's window. Then whack at your reader at once, hit him
over the head with the sausages, brisk him up with the poker, bundle him
into the wheelbarrow, and so carry him away with you before he knows
where you are. You can do what you like with a reader then, if you only
keep him nicely on the move. So long as you are happy your reader will
be so too. But one law must be observed: an essay, like a dog that
wishes to please, must have a lively tail, short but as waggish as
possible. Like a rocket, an essay goes only with fizzle and sparks at
the end of it. And, know, that to stop writing is the secret of writing
an essay; the essay that the public loves dies young.
THE PARKES MUSEUM
THE PLACE TO SPEND A HAPPY DAY
By way of jest, my morning daily paper constantly includes in its menu
of "To-day" the Parkes Museum, Margaret Street, adding, seductively,
"free"; and no doubt many a festive Jonas Chuzzlewit has preened himself
for a sight-seeing, and all unaware of the multitudes of Margaret
Streets--surely only Charlottes of that ilk are more abundant--has
started forth, he and his feminine, to find this Parkes Museum. One may
even conceive a rare Bank Holiday thoughtfully put aside for the quest,
and spent all vainly in the asking of policemen, and in traversing this
vast and tiresome metropolis, from Margaret Street to Margaret Street,
the freshness of the morning passing into the dry heat of the day,
fatigue spreading from the feet upwards, discussion, difference, denial,
"words," and a day of recreation dying at last into a sunset of lurid
sulks. Such possibility was too painful to think of, and a philanthropic
inquirer has at last by persistent investigation won the secret of the
Missing Museum and opened the way to it for all future investigators.
The Margaret Street in question is an apparently derelict thoroughfare,
opening into Great Portland Street. Immemorial dust is upon its
pavements, and a profound silence broods over its vacant roadway. The
blinds of its houses are mostly down, and, where the blackness of some
window suggests a dark interior, no face appears to reassure us in our
doubt of humanity within. It may be that somewhen in the past the entire
population of this street set out on a boating party up the river, and
was overset by steam launches, and so never returned, or perchance it
has all been locked up for a long term of imprisonment--though the
houses seem almost too respectable for that; or the glamour of the
Sleeping Beauty is upon it all. Certainly we saw the figure of a porter
in an attitude of repose in the little glass lodge in the museum
doorway. He _may_ have been asleep. But we feared to touch him--and
indeed slipped very stealthily by him--lest he should suddenly crumble
into dust.
And so to the Museum and its wonders. This Parkes Museum is a kind of
armoury of hygiene, a place full of apparatus for being healthy--in
brief, a museum of sanitary science. To that large and growing class of
people who take no thought of anything but what they eat and what they
drink, and wherewithal they should be clothed, it should prove intensely
interesting. Apart from the difficulty of approach we cannot understand
how it is so neglected by an intelligent public. You can see germicides
and a model convict prison, Pentonville cells in miniature, statistical
diagrams and drain pipes--if only there was a little more about
heredity, it would be exactly the kind of thing that is popular in
literature now, as literature goes. And yet excepting ourselves and the
sleeping porter--if he was sleeping--and the indistinct and motionless
outline, visible through a glass door, of a human body sitting over a
book, there was not a suggestion or memory of living humanity about the
place.
The exhibits of food are especially remarkable. We cleaned the glass
case with our sleeves and peered at the most appetising revelations.
There are dozens of little bottles hermetically sealed, containing such
curios as a sample of "Bacon Common (Gammon) Uncooked," and then the
same cooked--it looked no nicer cooked--Irish sausage, pork sausage,
black pudding, Welsh mutton, and all kinds of rare and exquisite
feeding. There are ever so many cases of this kind of thing. We saw, for
instance, further along, several good specimens of the common oyster
shell (_Ostrea edulis_), cockle shells, and whelks, both "almonds" and
"whites," and then came breadstuffs. The breadstuffs are particularly
impressive, of a grey, scientific aspect, a hard, hoary antiquity. We
always knew that stale bread was good for one, but yet the Parkes Museum
startled us with the antique pattern it recommended. There was a muffin,
too, identified and labelled, but without any Latin name, a captured
crumpet, a collection of buns, a dinner-roll, and a something novel to
us, called Pumpernickel, that we had rather be without, or rather--for
the expression is ambiguous--that we had rather not be without, but
altogether remote from. And all these things have been tested by an
analyst, with the most painful results. Nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and
the like nasty chemical things seem indeed to have occurred in
everything he touched. Those sturdy mendicants who go about complaining
that they cannot get food should visit this Parkes Museum and see what
food is really like, and learn contentment with their lot.
There were no real vegetables, but only the ideals of a firm of
seedsmen, made of wax and splendidly coloured, with something of the
boldness and vigour of Michael Angelo about the modelling of them. And
among other food stuffs were sweetmeats and yellow capers, liver flukes,
British wines, and snuff. At last we felt replete with food stuffs, and
went on to see the models to illustrate ventilation, and the exhibits of
hygienic glazed tiles arranged around a desert lecture-theatre. Hygienic
tiles stimulate the eye vigorously rather than relax it by any æsthetic
weakness; and the crematory appliances are so attractive as they are,
and must have such an added charm of neatness and brightness when
alight, that one longs to lose a relative or so forthwith, for the mere
pleasure of seeing them in operation.
A winding staircase designed upon hygienic principles, to bump your head
at intervals, takes one to a little iron gallery full of the most
charming and varied display of cooking-stoves and oil-lamps. Here, also,
there are flaunted the resources of civilisation for the Prevention of
Accidents, which resources are four, namely, a patent fire-escape, a
patent carriage pole, a coal plate, and a dog muzzle. But the labels,
though verbose, are scarcely full enough. They do not tell you, for
instance, if you wish to prevent cramp while bathing, whether the dog
muzzle or the coal plate should be employed, nor do they show how the
fire-escape will prevent the explosion of a paraffin lamp. However, this
is a detail. We feel assured that no intelligent person will regret a
visit to this most interesting and instructive exhibition. It offers you
valuable hints how to live, and suggests the best and tidiest way in
which you can, when dead, dispose of your body. We feel assured that the
public only needs this intimation of its whereabouts to startle the
death-like slumbers of Margaret Street with an unaccustomed tumult. And
the first to arrive will, no doubt, find legibly and elegantly written
in the dust that covers the collection the record of its discovery by
Euphemia and me.
BLEAK MARCH IN EPPING FOREST
All along the selvage of Epping Forest there was excitement. Before the
swallows, before the violets, long before the cuckoo, with only untimely
honeysuckle bushes showing a trace of green, two trippers had been seen
traversing the district, making their way towards High Beech, and
settling awhile near the Forest Hotel. Whether they were belated
survivals from last season or exceptionally early hatchings of the
coming year, was a question of considerable moment to the natives, and
has since engaged the attention of the local Natural History Society.
But we know that, as a matter of fact, they were of little omen, being
indeed but insignificant people from Hampstead and not true trippers at
all, who were curious to see this forest in raw winter.
For some have argued that there is no Epping Forest at all in the
winter-time; that it is, in fact, taken up and put away, and that
agriculture is pursued there. Others assert that the Forest is shrouded
with wrappers, even as a literary man's study is shrouded by dusty women
when they clean him out. Others, again, have supposed that it is a
delightful place in winter, far more delightful than in summer, but that
this is not published, because no writing man hath ever been there in
the cold season. And much more of unreal speculation, but nothing which
bore upon it the stamp of truth. So these two--and I am one of the
two--went down to Epping Forest to see that it was still there, and how
it fared in the dismal weather.
The sky was a greasy grey that guttered down to the horizon, and the
wind smote damp and chill. There was a white fringe of ice in the
cart-wheel ruts, but withal the frost was not so crisp as to prevent a
thin and slippery glaze of softened clay upon the road. The decaying
triumphal arch outside the station sadly lacked a coat of paint, and was
indistinctly regretful of remote royal visits and processions gone for
ever. Then we passed shuddering by many vacant booths that had once
resounded with the revelry of ninepenny teas and the gingerbeer cork's
staccato, and their forms were piled together and their trestles
overturned. And the wind ravened, and no human beings were to be seen.
So up the hill to the left, and along the road leading by devious
windings between the black hedges and through clay wallows to the hilly
part round High Beech.