sharp and vivid before my mind that there--there was the book I needed,
already written! A blank page, a dedication, a blank page, a dedication,
and so on. I saw no reason to change the title. It only remained to
select the things, and the book was done. I set to work at once, and in
a very little while my bibelot was selected. There were dedications
fulsome and fluid, dedications acrid and uncharitable, dedications in
verse and dedications in the dead languages: all sorts and conditions of
dedications, even the simple "To J.H. Gabbles"--so suggestive of the
modest white stones of the village churchyard. Altogether I picked out
one hundred and three dedications. At last only one thing remained to
complete the book. And that was--the Dedication. You will scarcely
credit it, but that worries me still....
I am almost inclined to think that Dedications are going out of
fashion.
THROUGH A MICROSCOPE
SOME MORAL REFLECTIONS
This dabbler person has recently disposed of his camera and obtained a
microscope--a short, complacent-looking implement it is, of brass--and
he goes about everywhere now with little glass bottles in his pocket,
ready to jump upon any stray polly-woggle he may find, and hale it home
and pry into its affairs. Within his study window are perhaps half a
dozen jars and basins full of green scum and choice specimens of black
mud in which his victims live. He persists in making me look through
this instrument, though I would rather I did not. It seems to me a kind
of impropriety even when I do it. He gets innumerable things in a drop
of green water, and puts it on a glass slip under the object glass, and,
of course, they know nothing of the change in their condition, and go on
living just as they did before they were observed. It makes me feel at
times like a public moralist, or Peeping Tom of Coventry, or some such
creature.
Certainly there are odd things enough in the water. Among others,
certain queer green things that are neither plants nor animals. Most of
the time they are plants, quiet green threads matted together, but every
now and then the inside comes out of one, so to speak, and starts off
with a fine red eye and a long flickering tail, to see the world. The
dabbler says it's quite a usual thing among the lower plants--_Algæ_ he
calls them, for some reason--to disgorge themselves in this way and go
swimming about; but it has quite upset my notions of things. If the
lower plants, why not the higher? It may be my abominable imagination,
but since he told me about these--swarm spores I think he called
them--I don't feel nearly so safe with my geraniums as I did.
A particularly objectionable thing in these water drops, the dabbler
insists upon my spying at is the furious activity of everything you see
in them. You look down his wretched tube, and there, bright and yellow
with the lamplight in the round field of the microscope, is a perfect
riot of living things. Perhaps it's the water he got from Hampstead, and
a dozen flat things the shape of shortbreads will be fussing about.
They are all quite transparent and colourless, and move about like
galleys by means of a lot of minute oars that stick out all over them.
Never a moment's rest. And, presently, one sees that even the green
plant threads are wriggling across the field. The dabbler tries to
moralise on this in the vein of Charles Kingsley, and infer we have much
to learn from these ridiculous creatures; but, so far as I can see, it's
a direct incentive to sloth to think how low in the scale of creation
these things are, in spite of all their fussing. If they had sat about
more and thought, they might be fishing the dabbler out of ponds and
examining him instead of his examining them. Your energetic people might
do worse things than have a meditative half-hour at the microscope. Then
there are green things with a red spot and a tail, that creep about like
slugs, and are equally transparent. _Euglena viridis_ the dabbler calls
them, which seems unnecessary information. In fact all the things he
shows me are transparent. Even the little one-eyed Crustacea, the size
of a needle-point, that discredit the name of Cyclops. You can see their
digestion and muscle and nerve, and, in fact, everything. It's at least
a blessing we are not the same. Fancy the audible comments of the
temperance advocate when you get in the bus! No use pulling yourself
together then. "Pretty full!" And "Look," people would say, "his wife
gives him cold mutton."
Speaking of the name of Cyclops reminds me that these scientific people
have been playing a scurvy trick upon the classics behind our backs. It
reminds one of Epistemon's visit to Hades, when he saw Alexander a
patcher of clouts and Xerxes a crier of mustard. Aphrodite, the dabbler
tells me, is a kind of dirty mud-worm, and much dissected by spectacled
pretenders to the London B.Sc.; every candidate, says the syllabus, must
be able to dissect, to the examiner's satisfaction, and demonstrate upon
Aphrodite, Nereis, Palæmon. Were the gods ever so insulted? Then the
snaky Medusa and Pandora, our mother, are jelly-fish; Astræa is still to
be found on coral reefs, a poor thing, and much browsed upon by parrot
fish; and Doris and Tethys and Cydippe are sea slugs. It's worse than
Heine's vision of the gods grown old. They can't be content with the
departed gods merely. Evadne is a water flea--they'll make something out
of Mrs. Sarah Grand next; and Autolycus, my Autolycus! is a polymorphic
worm, whatever subtlety of insult "polymorphic worm" may convey.
However, I wander from the microscope. These shortbread things are
fussing about hither and thither across the field, and now and then an
amoeba comes crawling into view. These are invertebrate jelly-like
things of no particular shape, and they keep on thrusting out a part
here, and withdrawing a part there, and changing and advancing just as
though they were popular democratic premiers. Then diatoms keep gliding
athwart the circle. These diatoms are, to me at least, the most
perplexing things in the universe. Imagine a highly ornamental thing in
white and brown, the shape of a spectacle case, without any limbs or
other visible means of progression, and without any wriggling of the
body, or indeed any apparent effort at all, gliding along at a smart
pace. That's your diatom. The dabbler really knows nothing of how they
do it. He mumbles something about Bütschli and Grenfell. Imagine the
thing on a larger scale, Cleopatra's Needle, for instance, travelling on
its side up the Thames Embankment, and all unchaperoned, at the rate of
four or five miles an hour.
There's another odd thing about these microscope things which redeems,
to some extent at least, their singular frankness. To use the decorous
phrase of the text-book, "They multiply by fission." Your amoeba or
vorticella, as the case may be, splits in two. Then there are two amoebæ
or vorticellæ. In this way the necessity of the family, that
middle-class institution so abhorrent to the artistic mind, is avoided.
In my friend's drop of ditch-water, as in heaven, there is neither
marrying nor giving in marriage. There are no waste parents, which
should appeal to the scholastic mind, and the simple protozoon has none
of that fitful fever of falling in love, that distressingly tender state
that so bothers your mortal man. They go about their business with an
enviable singleness of purpose, and when they have eaten and drunk, and
attained to the fulness of life, they divide and begin again with
renewed zest the pastime of living.
In a sense they are immortal. For we may look at this matter in another
light, and say our exuberant protozoon has shed a daughter, and remains.
In that case the amoeba I look at may have crawled among the slime of
the Silurian seas when the common ancestor of myself and the royal
family was an unassuming mud-fish like those in the reptile house in the
Zoo. His memoirs would be interesting. The thought gives a solemn tint
to one's meditations. If the dabbler wash him off this slide into his
tube of water again, this trivial creature may go on feeding and growing
and dividing, and presently be thrown away to wider waters, and so
escape to live ... after I am dead, after my masterpieces are forgotten,
after our Empire has passed away, after the human animal has passed
through I know not what vicissitudes. It may be he will still, with the
utmost nonchalance, be pushing out his pseudopodia, and ingesting
diatoms when the fretful transitory life of humanity has passed
altogether from the earth. One may catch him in specimen tubes by the
dozen; but still, when one thinks of this, it is impossible to deny him
a certain envious, if qualified, respect.
And all the time these creatures are living their vigorous, fussy little
lives; in this drop of water they are being watched by a creature of
whose presence they do not dream, who can wipe them all out of existence
with a stroke of his thumb, and who is withal as finite, and sometimes
as fussy and unreasonably energetic, as themselves. He sees them, and
they do not see him, because he has senses they do not possess, because
he is too incredibly vast and strange to come, save as an overwhelming
catastrophe, into their lives. Even so, it may be, the dabbler himself
is being curiously observed.... The dabbler is good enough to say that
the suggestion is inconceivable. I can imagine a decent amoeba saying
the same thing.
THE PLEASURE OF QUARRELLING
Your cultivated man is apt to pity the respectable poor, on the score of
their lack of small excitements, and even in the excess of his generous
sympathy to go a Toynbee-Halling in their cause. And Sir Walter Besant
once wrote a book about Hoxton, saying, among other things, how
monotonous life was there. That is your modern fallacy respecting the
lower middle class. One might multiply instances. The tenor of the pity
is always the same.
"No music," says the cultivated man, "no pictures, no books to read nor
leisure to read in. How can they pass their lives?"
The answer is simple enough, as Emily Brontë knew. They quarrel. And an
excellent way of passing the time it is; so excellent, indeed, that the
pity were better inverted. But we all lack the knowledge of our chiefest
needs. In the first place, and mainly, it is hygienic to quarrel, it
disengages floods of nervous energy, the pulse quickens, the breathing
is accelerated, the digestion improved. Then it sets one's stagnant
brains astir and quickens the imagination; it clears the mind of
vapours, as thunder clears the air. And, finally, it is a natural
function of the body. In his natural state man is always quarrelling--by
instinct. Not to quarrel is indeed one of the vices of our civilisation,
one of the reasons why we are neurotic and anæmic, and all these things.
And, at last, our enfeebled palates have even lost the capacity for
enjoying a "jolly good row."
There can be no more melancholy sight in the world than that of your
young man or young woman suffering from suppressed pugnacity. Up to the
end of the school years it was well with them; they had ample scope for
this wholesome commerce, the neat give and take of offence. In the
family circle, too, there are still plentiful chances of acquiring the
taste. Then, suddenly, they must be gentle and considerate, and all the
rest of it. A wholesome shindy, so soon as toga and long skirts arrive,
is looked upon as positively wrong; even the dear old institution of the
"cut" is falling into disrepute. The quarrelling is all forced back into
the system, as it were; it poisons the blood. This is why our literature
grows sinister and bitter, and our daughters yearn after this and that,
write odd books, and ride about on bicycles in remarkable clothes. They
have shut down the safety valve, they suffer from the present lamentable
increase of gentleness. They must find some outlet, or perish. If they
could only put their arms akimbo and tell each other a piece of their
minds for a little, in the ancient way, there can be not the slightest
doubt that much of this _fin-de-siècle_ unwholesomeness would disappear.
Possibly this fashion of gentleness will pass. Yet it has had increasing
sway now for some years. An unhealthy generation has arisen--among the
more educated class at least--that quarrels little, regards the function
as a vice or a nuisance, as the East-ender does a taste for fine art or
literature. We seem indeed to be getting altogether out of the way of
it. Rare quarrels, no doubt, occur to everyone, but rare quarrelling is
no quarrelling at all. Like beer, smoking, sea-bathing, cycling, and the
like delights, you cannot judge of quarrelling by the early essay. But
to show how good it is--did you ever know a quarrelsome person give up
the use? Alcohol you may wean a man from, and Barrie says he gave up the
Arcadia Mixture, and De Quincey conquered opium. But once you are set as
a quarreller you quarrel and quarrel till you die.
How to quarrel well and often has ever been something of an art, and it
becomes more of an art with the general decline of spirit. For it takes
two to make a quarrel. Time was when you turned to the handiest human
being, and with small care or labour had the comfortable warmth you
needed in a minute or so. There was theology, even in the fifties it was
ample cause with two out of three you met. Now people will express a
lamentable indifference. Then politics again, but a little while ago fat
for the fire of any male gathering, is now a topic of mere tepidity. So
you are forced to be more subtle, more patient in your quarrelling. You
play like a little boy playing cricket with his sisters, with those who
do not understand. A fellow-votary is a rare treat. As a rule you have
to lure and humour your antagonist like a child. The wooing is as
intricate and delicate as any wooing can well be. To quarrel now,
indeed, requires an infinity of patience. The good old days of
thumb-biting--"Do you bite your thumbs at us, sir?" and so to clash and
stab--are gone for ever.
There are certain principles in quarrelling, however, that the true
quarreller ever bears in mind, and which, duly observed, do much to
facilitate encounters. In the first place, cultivate Distrust. Have
always before you that this is a wicked world, full of insidious people,
and you never know what villainous encroachments upon you may be hidden
under fair-seeming appearances. That is the flavour of it. At the first
suspicion, "stick up for your rights," as the vulgar say. And see that
you do it suddenly. Smite promptly, and the surprise and sting of your
injustice should provoke an excellent reply. And where there is least
ground for suspicion, there, remember, is the most. The right hand of
fellowship extended towards you is one of the best openings you have.
"Not such a fool," is the kind of attitude to assume, and "You don't put
upon _me_ so easy." Your adversary resents this a little, and, rankling,
tries to explain. You find a personal inference in the expostulation.
Next to a wariness respecting your interests is a keen regard for your
honour. Have concealed in the privacy of your mind a code of what is due
to you. Expand or modify it as occasion offers. Be as it were a
collector of what are called "slights," and never let one pass you.
Watch your friend in doorways, passages; when he eats by you, when he
drinks with you, when he addresses you, when he writes you letters. It
will be hard if you cannot catch him smuggling some deadly insult into
your presence. Tax him with it. He did not think, forsooth! Tell him no
gentleman would do such a thing, thinkingly or not; that you certainly
will not stand it again. Say you will show him. He will presently argue
or contradict. So to your climax.
Then, again, there is the personal reference. "Meaning me, sir?" Your
victim with a blithe heart babbles of this or that. You let him meander
here and there, watching him as if you were in ambush. Presently he
comes into your spring. "Of course," you say, "I saw what you were
driving at just this minute, when you mentioned mustard in salad
dressing, but if I am peppery I am not mean. And if I have a thing to
say I say it straight out." A good gambit this, and well into him from
the start. The particular beauty of this is that you get him apologetic
at first, and can score heavily before he rises to the defensive.
Then, finally, there is your abstract cause, once very fruitful indeed,
but now sadly gone in decay, except perhaps in specialist society. As an
example, let there be one who is gibing genially at some topic or other,
at Japanese king-crabs, or the inductive process, or any other topic
which cannot possibly affect you one atom. Then is the time to drop all
these merely selfish interests, and to champion the cause of truth. Fall
upon him in a fine glow of indignation, and bring your contradiction
across his face--whack!--so that all the table may hear. Tell him, with
his pardon, that the king-crab is no more a crab than you are a
jelly-fish, or that Mill has been superseded these ten years. Ask: "How
can you say such things?" From thence to his general knowledge is a
short flight, and so to his veracity, his reasoning powers, his mere
common sense. "Let me tell you, sir," is the special incantation for the
storm.
These are the four chief ways of quarrelling, the four gates to this
delightful city. For it is delightful, once your 'prentice days are
past. In a way it is like a cold bath on a winter's morning, and you
glow all day. In a way it is like football, as the nimble aggravation
dances to and fro. In a way it is like chess. Indeed, all games of skill
are watered quarrels, quarrel and soda, come to see them in a proper
light. And without quarrelling you have not fully appreciated your
fellow-man. For in the ultimate it is the train and complement of Love,
the shadow that rounds off the delight we take in poor humanity. It is
the vinegar and pepper of existence, and long after our taste for sweets
has vanished it will be the solace of our declining years.
THE AMATEUR NATURE-LOVER
It is possible that an education entirely urban is not the best
conceivable preparation for descriptive articles upon the country. On
the other hand, your professional nature-lover is sometimes a little
over-familiar with his subject. He knows the names of all the things,
and he does not spare you. Besides, he is subtle. The prominent features
are too familiar to him, and he goes into details. What respectable
townsman, for instance, knows what "scabiosa" is? It sounds very
unpleasant. Then the professional nature-lover assumes that you know
trees. No Englishman can tell any tree from any other tree, except a
very palpable oak or poplar. So that we may at least, as an experiment,
allow a good Londoner to take his unsophisticated eyes out into the
sweet country for once, and try his skill at nature-loving, though his
botany has been learned over the counter of flower-shops, and his
zoology on Saturday afternoons when they have the band in the Gardens.
He makes his way, then, over by Epsom Downs towards Sutton, trying to
assimilate his mood to the proper flavour of appreciation as he goes,
and with a little notebook in the palm of his hand to assist an
ill-trained memory. And the burthen of his song is of course the autumn
tints.
The masses of trees towards Epsom and Ewell, with the red houses and
Elizabethan façades peeping through their interstices, contain, it would
seem, every conceivable colour, except perhaps sky-blue; there are
brilliant yellow trees, and a kind of tree of the most amazing gamboge
green, almost the green of spring come back, and tan-coloured trees,
deep brown, red, and deep crimson trees. Here and there the wind has
left its mark, and the grey-brown branches and their purple tracery of
twigs, with a suggestion of infinite depth behind, show through the
rents in the leafy covering. There are deep green trees--the amateur
nature-lover fancies they may be yews--with their dense warm foliage
arranged in horizontal masses, like the clouds low down in a sunset; and
certain other evergreens, one particularly, with a bluish-green covering
of upstanding needles, are intensely conspicuous among the flame tints
around. On a distant church tower, and nearer, disputing the possession
of a gabled red house with a glowing creeper, is some ivy; and never is
the perennial green of ivy so delightful as it is now, when all else is
alight with the sombre fire of the sunset of the year....
The amateur nature-lover proceeds over the down, appreciating all this
as hard as he can appreciate, and anon gazing up at the grey and white
cloud shapes melting slowly from this form to that, and showing lakes,
and wide expanses, and serene distances of blue between their gaps. And
then he looks round him for a zoological item. Underfoot the grass of
the down is recovering from the summer drought and growing soft and
green again, and plentiful little flattened snail shells lie about, and
here and there a late harebell still nods in the breeze. Yonder bolts a
rabbit, and then something whizzes by the amateur nature-lover's ear.
They shoot here somewhere, he remembers suddenly; and then looking
round, in a palpitating state, is reassured by the spectacle of a lone
golfer looming over the brow of the down, and gesticulating black and
weird against the sky. The Londoner, with an abrupt affectation of
nonchalance, flings himself flat upon his back, and so remains
comparatively safe until the golfer has passed. These golfers are
strange creatures, rabbit-coloured, except that many are bright red
about the middle, and they repel and yet are ever attracted by a devil
in the shape of a little white ball, which leads them on through toothed
briars, sharp furzes, pricking goss, and thorns; cursing the thing,
weeping even, and anon laughing at their own foolish rambling;
muttering, heeding no one to the right or left of their
career,--demented creatures, as though these balls were their souls,
that they ever sought to lose, and ever repented losing. And silent,
ever at the heel of each, is a familiar spirit, an eerie human hedgehog,
all set about with walking-sticks, a thing like a cylindrical
umbrella-stand with a hat and boots and a certain suggestion of leg. And
so they pass and are gone.
Rising, the amateur nature-lover finds he has been reclining on a
puff-ball. These puff-balls are certainly the most remarkable example of
adaptation to circumstances known to English botanists. They grow
abundantly on golf grounds, and are exactly like golf-balls in external
appearance. They are, however, Pharisees and whited sepulchres, and
within they are full of a soft mess of a most unpleasant appearance--the
amateur nature-lover has some on him now--which stuff contains the
spores. It is a case of what naturalists call "mimicry"--one of nature's
countless adaptations. The golf-player smites these things with force,
covering himself with ridicule--and spores, and so disseminating this
far-sighted and ingenious fungus far and wide about the links.
The amateur nature-lover passes off the down, and towards Banstead
village. He is on the watch for characteristic objects of the
countryside, and rustling through the leaves beneath a chestnut avenue
he comes upon an old boot. It is a very, very old boot, all its blacking
washed off by the rain, and two spreading chestnut leaves, yellow they
are with blotches of green, with their broad fingers extended, rest upon
it, as if they would protect and altogether cover the poor old boot in
its last resting-place. It is as if Mother Nature, who lost sight of her
product at the tanner's yard, meant to claim her own trampled child
again at last, after all its wanderings. So we go on, noting a sardine
tin gleaming brightly in the amber sunlight, through a hazel hedge, and
presently another old boot. Some hawthorn berries, some hoary clematis
we notice--and then another old boot. Altogether, it may be remarked, in
this walk the amateur nature-lover saw eleven old boots, most of them
dropped in the very sweetest bits of hedge tangle and grassy corner
about Banstead.