Tearing the high green branches down for food
Age after age, till from their ponderous heads
Out of their own elastic flesh they stretched
A trunk that, like a long grey muscular snake,
Could curl up through the bunches of green leaves,
And pluck their food at ease as cattle browse;
Life’s own dark effort aiding that strange Power
Without, and all controlled in one great plan,
Grotesquely free, and beautifully at one
With law, upsurging to the unknown end.
All Nature like a vast chameleon changed;
And all these forms of life through endless years,
Changing, developing, from one filament rose.
Man, on the heights, retravelled in nine moons
All that long journey in little, never to lose
What life had learned on its æonian way:
Man on the heights; but not divided now
From his own struggling kindred of the night.
Few dared to think it yet and set him free
Through knowledge of himself and his own power;
Few, yet, in France or England. Let him bask
Where in six days God set him at his ease
Among His wingless angels; there to hate
The truth, until he breaks his own vain heart
And finds the law at last and walks with God,
Who, not abhorring even the mire and clay
In the beginning, breathed His life through all.
This was his _vera causa_. Hate, contempt,
Ridicule, like a scurrilous wind swooped down
From every side. Great Cuvier, with the friends
Of orthodoxy, sneered—could species change
Their forms at will? Could the lean tiger’s need
To crouch in hiding stripe his tawny flesh
With shadows of the cane-break where he lay?
Could the giraffe, by wishing for the leaves
Beyond his reach, add to his height one inch?
Or could the reptile’s fond desire to fly
Create his wings?
Could Cuvier read one line
Of this blind man, he might have held his peace,
Found his own _versa causa_, and sunk his pride;
And even the wiser Darwin, when he came,
Might have withheld his judgment for an hour,
And learned from his forerunner. But, in their haste,
They flung away his fire; and, as he fell,
They set their heels upon it and stamped it out.
Not always does the distant age restore
The balance, or posterity renew
The laurel on the cold dishonoured brow
Unjustly robbed and blindly beaten down.
He laboured on in blindness. At his side
One faithful daughter, labouring with her pen,
As he dictated, wrote, month after month,
Year after year; and, when her father died,
She saw him tossed into the general grave,
The pauper’s fosse, where none can trace him now,
In Montparnasse, but wrapt in deeper peace
Among the unknown and long-forgotten dead.
VIII—IN GERMANY
GOETHE
I
THE DISCOVERER
The wreathing mist was quietly breathed away.
I stood upon a little hill at night;
The tang of pinewoods and the warbling joy
Of hidden brooks was round me.
The dark hill
Sloped to a darker garden. On the crest
A wooden cabin rose against the stars.
Its open door, a gap of golden light
In deep blue gloom, told me that he was there.
I saw his darkened house asleep below,
And Weimar clustering round it, a still cloud
Of shadowy slumbering houses.
Like a shadow,
Tracking the Sun-god to his midnight lair,
I climbed to the lighted cabin on the crest,
And I saw Goethe.
At his side a lamp
On a rude table, out of tumbled waves
Of manuscript, like an elfin lighthouse rose.
His bed, a forester’s couch for summer nights,
Was thrust into a corner. Rows of books
Lined the rough walls.
A letter was in his hand
From Craigenputtock; and while he looked at it,
The unuttered thoughts came flowing into the mind
Of his invisible listener—Shadow-of-a-Leaf.
All true, my friend; but there’s no halfway house.
Rid you of Houndsditch, and you’ll not maintain
This quite ungodlike severance of mankind
From Nature and its laws; though I should lose
My Scots apostle, if I called it so.
What’s an apostle? Is it one who sees
Just so much of his hero, as reflects
Himself and his own thoughts? I like him well,
And yet he makes me lonelier than before.
Houndsditch may go; but Cuvier will go first;
With all the rest who isolate mankind
From its true place in Nature.
Everywhere
I saw the one remodulated form.
The leaf ascended to mysterious bliss
And was assumed, with happy sister-leaves,
Into the heavenly glory of a flower.
Pistil and stamen, calyx and bright crown
Of coloured petals, all were leaves transformed,
Transfigured, from one type.
I saw in man
And his wild kinsfolk of the woods and seas,
In fish and serpent, eagle and orang,
One knotted spine that curled into a skull.
It ran through all their patterns everywhere,
Playing a thousand variants on one theme,
Branching through all the frame of fins and wings
And spreading through their jointed hands and feet.
Throughout this infinite universe I heard
The music of one law.
Is man alone
Belied by all the signs of his ascent?
Are men even now so far above the beasts?
What can the tiger teach them when they kill?
Are they so vain that they’d deny the bones
An inch beneath their skin—bones that when stripped
Of flesh and mixed with those of their dumb kin
Themselves could not distinguish? How they clung
To that distinction in the skull of man.
It lacked the inter-maxillary. They grew angry
When I foretold it would be found one day.
What’s truth to a poet? Back to your dainty lies!
And then—one day—I found it.
Did they say
Strange work for a poet? Is mankind asleep
That it can never feel what then I felt,
To find my faith so quietly confirmed?
I held it in my hand and stared at it,
An eyeless hollow skull that once could think
Its own strange thoughts and stare as well as we;
A skull that once was rocked upon a breast,
And looked its deathless love through dying eyes;
And, in that skull, above the incisor teeth,
The signs that men denied,—of its ascent
Through endless ages, in the savage night
Of jungle-worlds, before mankind was born.
No thought for poets, and no wonder there?
No gateway to the kingdoms of the mind?
No miracle in the miracle that I saw,
Touched, held.
My body tingled. All my veins
Froze with the inconceivable mystery,
The weirdness and the wonder of it all.
No vision? And no dream? Let poets play
At bowls with Yorick’s relic then, for ever;
Or blow dream-bubbles. I’ve a world to shape;
A law to guide me, and a God to find.
That night in sleep I saw—it was no dream!—
It was too wild, too strange, too darkly true,
And all too human in its monstrous pangs
To be a dream. I saw it, and I live.
I saw, I saw, and closed these eyes to see
That terrible birth in darkness, the black night
Of naked agony that first woke the soul.
Night and the jungle, burning with great stars,
Rolled all around me. There were steaming pools
Of darkness, and the smell of the wild beast
Musky and acrid on the blood-warm air.
The night was like a tiger’s hot sweet mouth;
I heard a muffled roar, and a wild cry,
A shriek, a fall.
I saw an uncouth form,
Matted with hair, stretched on the blood-stained earth;
And, in the darkness, darker than the night,
Another form uncouth, with matted hair,
Long-armed, like a gorilla, stooping low
Above his mate.
She did not move or breathe.
He felt her body with his long-clawed hands,
And called to her—a harsh, quick, startled cry.
She did not hear. One arm was tightly wound
About her little one. Both were strangely still,
Stiller than sleep.
He squatted down to wait.
They did not move all night. At dawn he stood
By that stiff mockery. He stretched up his arms
And clutched at the red sun that mocked him, too.
Then, out of his blind heart, with one fierce pang,
The man-child, Grief, was born.
His round dark eyes
Pricked with strange brine, and his broad twitching mouth
Quivered. He fell on the dark unanswering earth
Beside his dead, with inarticulate cries,
Great gasping sobs that seemed to rend his flesh
And shook him through and through.
The night returned and, with the night, a hope,
Because he could not see their staring eyes.
He rushed into the jungle and returned
With fruits and berries, ripe and soft and red.
He rubbed the dark wet plums against their lips.
He smeared the juices on their locked white teeth;
Pleading with little murmurs, while the stars
Wheeled overhead, and velvet-footed beasts
Approached and stared with eyes of gold and green;
And even the little leaves were all alive;
And tree-toads chirruped; but those dark forms lay still.
Day followed night. He did not know them now.
All that had been so swift to answer him
Was gone. But whither? Every day he saw
A ball of light arising in the East
And moving overhead the self-same way
Into the West....
The strange new hunger eating at his heart
Urged him to follow it, stumbling blindly on
Through endless forests; but it moved so swiftly
He could not overtake it, could not reach
The place where it went down, ere darkness came.
Then—in the dark—a shadow sometimes moved
Before him, like the shadow he had lost,
And with a cry, _Yoo! Yoo!_ he would awake
And, crashing through the forests to the West,
Would try to steal a march upon the sun,
And see it rise inexorably behind him,
And sail above, inexorably, at noon,
And sink beyond, inexorably, at night.
Then, after many suns had risen and set,
He saw at dusk a blaze of crimson light
Between the thinning tree-trunks and emerged
Out of the forest into a place of rocks,
Washed by a water greater than the world.
He stood, an uncouth image carved in stone,
Staring into the West. He saw the sun
Staining the clouds and sinking into the flood.
His lips were parched with thirst, a deeper thirst
Than any spring on earth could quench again;
And when he laid him down upon the shore
To drink of that deep water, he knew well
That he was nearer now to what he sought,
Because it tasted salt as his lost tears.
He drank. He waded out, and drank again.
Then a big wave of darkness rushed upon him,
And rolled him under. He rose, and with great arms
Swam out into that boundless flood of brine
Towards the last glimmer of light; a dark, blind brute,
Sobbing and panting, till the merciful waves,
Salt in his eyes and salt upon his lips,
Had drawn the agony out of his labouring limbs
And gently as the cradling boughs that once
Rocked him to sleep, embraced and drew him down
Into oblivion, the first life that caught
With eyes bewildered by the light they knew,
A glimpse of the unknown light beyond the world.
II
THE PROPHET
Before the first wild matins of the thrush
Had ended, or the sun sucked up the dew,
I saw him wrestling with his thoughts. He rose,
Laid down that eagle’s feather in his hand,
And looked at his own dawn.
He did not speak.
Only the secret music of his mind
In an enchanted silence flowed to meet
The listener, as his own great morning flowed
Through those Æolian pinewoods at his feet.
Colours and forms of earth and heaven you flow
Like clouds around a star—the streaming robe
Of an Eternal Glory. Let the law
Of Beauty, in your rhythmic folds, by night
And day, through all the universe, reveal
The way of the unseen Mover to these eyes.
Last night I groped into the dark abyss
Under the feet of man, and saw Thee there
Ascending, from that depth below all depth.
O, now, at dawn, as I look up to heaven
Descend to meet me, on my upward way.
How shall they grasp Thy glory who despise
The law that is Thy kingdom here on earth,
Our way of freedom and our path to Thee?
How shall they grasp that law, or rightly know
One truth in Nature, who deny Thy Power,
Unresting and unhasting, everywhere?
How shall the seekers, bound to their own tasks,
Each following his own quest, each spying out
His fragment of a truth, reintegrate
Their universe and behold all things in one?
Be this the task of Song, then, to renew
That universal vision in the soul.
Rise, poet, to thy universal height,
Then stoop, as eagles do from their wide heaven
On their particular prey. Between the clouds
They see more widely and truly than the mole
At work in his dark tunnel, though he cast
His earth upon the fields they watch afar.
Work on, inductive mole; but there’s a use
In that too lightly abandoned way of thought,
The way of Plato, and the way of Christ,
That man must find again, ere he can build
The temple of true knowledge. Those who trust
To Verulam’s _Novum Organum_ alone,
Never can build it. Quarriers of the truth,
They cut the stones, but cannot truly lay them;
For only he whose deep remembering mind
Holds the white archetype, can to music build
His towers, from the pure pattern imprinted there.
He, and he only, in one timeless flash
Through all this moving universe discerns
The inexorable sequences of law,
And, in the self-same flash, transfiguring all,
Uniting and transcending all, beholds
With my Spinoza’s own ecstatic eyes
God in the hidden law that fools call “chance,”
God in the star, the flower, the moondrawn wave,
God in the snake, the bird, and the wild beast,
God in that long ascension from the dark,
God in the body and in the soul of man,
God uttering life, and God receiving death.
IX—IN ENGLAND
DARWIN
I
CHANCE AND DESIGN
_“I am the whisper that he ceased to hear,”_
_The quiet voice of Shadow-of-a-Leaf began;_
_And, as he spoke, the flowing air before me_
_Shone like a crystal sphere, wherein I saw_
_All that he pictured, through his own deep eyes._
I waited in his garden there, at Down.
I peered between the crooklights of a hedge
Where ragged robins grew.
Far off, I heard
The clocklike rhythm of an ironshod staff
Clicking on gravel, clanking on a flint.
Then, round the sand-walk, under his trees he strode,
A tall lean man, wrapt in a loose dark cloak,
His big soft hat of battered sun-burnt straw
Pulled down to shade his face. But I could see,
For I looked upward, the dim brooding weight
Of silent thought that soon would shake the world.
He paused to watch an ant upon its way.
He bared his head. I saw the shaggy brows
That like a mountain-fortress overhung
The deep veracious eyes, the dogged face
Where kindliness and patience, knowledge, power,
And pain quiescent under the conquering will,
In that profound simplicity which marks
The stature of the mind, the truth of art,
The majesty of every natural law.
The child’s wise innocence, and the silent worth
Of human grief and love, had set their seal.
I stole behind him, and he did not hear
Or see me. I was only Shadow-of-a-Leaf;
And yet—I knew the word was on its way
That might annul his life-work in an hour.
I heard the whisper of every passing wing
Where, wrapt in peace, among the hills of Kent,
The patient watchful intellect had prepared
A mightier revolution for mankind
Even than the world-change of Copernicus
When the great central earth began to move
And dwine to a grain of dust among the stars.
I saw him pondering over a light-winged seed
That floated, like an elfin aeronaut,
Across the path. He caught it in his hand
And looked at it. He touched its delicate hooks
And set it afloat again. He watched it sailing,
Carrying its tiny freight of life away
Over the quick-set hedge, up, into the hills.
I heard him muttering, “beautiful! Surely this
Implies design!
Design?” Then, from his face
The wonder faded, and he shook his head;
But with such reverence and humility
That his denial almost seemed a prayer.
A prayer—for, not long after, in his house,
I saw him bowed, the first mind of his age,
Bowed, helpless, by the deathbed of his child;
Pondering, with all that knowledge, all that power,
Powerless, and ignorant of the means to save;
A dumb Prometheus, bending his great head
In silence, as he drank those broken words
Of thanks, the pitiful thanks of small parched lips,
For a sip of water, a smile, a cooling hand
On the hot brow; thanks for his goodness—God!
Thanks from a dying child, just ten years old!
And, while he stood in silence by her grave,
Hearing the ropes creak as they lowered her down
Into the cold dark hollow, while he breathed
The smell of the moist earth, those calm strange words—
_I am the Resurrection and the Life_,
Echoed and echoed through his lonely mind,
Only to deepen his agony of farewell
Into Eternity.
Dumbly there he strove
To understand how accents so divine,
In words so worthy of eternal power,
So postulant of it in their calm majesty,
Could breathe through mortal lips.
Madman or God,
Who else could say them?
God it could not be,
If in his mortal blindness he saw clear;
And yet, and yet, could madness wring the heart
Thus, thus, and thus, for nineteen hundred years?
_Would that she knew, would God that she knew now,_
_How much we loved her!_
The blind world, still ruled
By shams, and following in hypnotic flocks
The sheep-bell of an hour, still thought of him
“The Man of Science” as less or more than man,
Coldly aloof from love and grief and pain;
Held that he knew far more, and felt far less
Than other men, and, even while it praised
The babblers for their reticence and their strength,
The shallow for their depth, the blind for sight,
The rattling weathercocks for their love of truth,
Ere long would brand, as an irreverent fool,
This great dumb simple man, with his bowed head.
Could the throng see that drama, as I saw it—
I, Shadow-of-a-Leaf,—could the blind throng discern
The true gigantic drama of those hours
Among the quiet hills as, one by one,
His facts fell into place; their broken edges
Joined, like the fragments of a vast mosaic,
And, slowly, the new picture of the world,
Emerging in majestic pageantry
Out of the primal dark, before him grew;
Grew by its own inevitable law;
Grew, and earth’s ancient fantasies dwindled down;
The stately fabric of the old creation
Crumbled away; while man, proud demigod,
Stripped of all arrogance now, priest, beggar, king,
Captive and conqueror, all must own alike
Their ancient lineage. Kin to the dumb beasts
By the red life that flowed through all their veins
From hearts of the same shape, beating all as one
In man and brute; kin, by those kindred forms
Of flesh and bone, with eyes and ears and mouths
That saw and heard and hungered like his own,
His mother Earth reclaimed him.
Back and back,
He traced them, till the last faint clue died out
In lifeless earth and sea.
I watched him striving
To follow further, bending his great brows
Over the intense lens....
Far off, I heard
The murmur of human life, laughter and weeping;
Heard the choked sobbings by a million graves,
And saw a million faces, wrung with grief,
Lifted forlornly to the Inscrutable Power.
I saw him raise his head. I heard his thought
As others hear a whisper—_Surely this_
_Implies design!_
And worlds on aching worlds
Of dying hope were wrapped in those four words.
He stared before him, wellnigh overwhelmed
For one brief moment, with instinctive awe
Of Something that ... determined every force
Directed every atom....
Then, in a flash,
The indwelling vision vanished at the voice
Of his own blindfold reason. For what mind
Could so unravel the complicated threads,
The causes that are caused by the effects
Of other causes, intricately involved,
Woven and interwoven, in endless mazes,
Wandering through infinite time, infinite space,
And yet, an ordered and mysterious whole,
Before whose very being all mortal power
Must abdicate its sovereignty?
A dog
Might sooner hope to leap beyond the mind
Of Newton than a man might hope to grasp
Even in this little whirl of earth and sun
The Scheme of the All-determining Absolute.
And yet—if that—the All-moving, were the One
Reality, and sustained and made all forms,
Then, by the self-same power in man himself
Whatever was real in man might understand
That same Reality, being one substance with it,
One substance with the essential Soul of all,—
Might understand, as children understand,
Even in ignorance, those who love them best;
Might recognise, as through their innocent eyes,
The highest, which is Love, though all the worlds
Of lesser knowledge passed unheeded by.
What meant those moments else? Moments that came
And went on wings, wild as these wings of mine,
The wings of Shadow-of-a-Leaf,
Quick with a light that never could be reached
By toiling up the mountain-sides of thought;
Consummate meanings that were never found
By adding units; moments of strange awe
When that majestic sequence of events
We call the cosmos, from its wheeling atoms
Up to its wheeling suns, all spoke one Power,
One Presence, One Unknowable, and One Known?
_In the beginning God made heaven and earth_:
He, too, believed it, once....
II
THE VOYAGE
As if the wings
Of Shadow-of-a-Leaf had borne me through the West
So that the sunset changed into the dawn,
I saw him in his youth.
The large salt wind,
The creak of cordage, the wild swash of waves
Were round him as he paced the clear white deck,
An odd loose-tweeded sojourner, in a world
Of uniforms and guns.
The _Beagle_ plunged
Westward, upon the road that Drake had sailed;
But this new voyager, on a longer quest,
Sailed on a stranger sea; and, though I heard
His ringing laugh, he seemed to live apart
In his own mind, from all who moved around him.
I saw him while the _Beagle_ basked at anchor
Under West Indian palms. He lounged there, tanned
With sun; tall, lankier in his cool white drill;
The big slouched straw pulled down to shade his eyes.
The stirring wharf was one bright haze of colour;
Kaleidoscopic flakes, orange and green,
Blood-red and opal, glancing to and fro,
Through purple shadows. The warm air smelt of fruit.
He leaned his elbows on the butt of a gun
And listened, while a red-faced officer, breathing
Faint whiffs of rum, expounded lazily,
With loosely stumbling tongue, the cynic’s code
His easy rule of life, belying the creed
That both professed.
And, in one flash, I caught
A glimpse of something deeper, missed by both,—
The subtle touch of the Master-Ironist
Unfolding his world-drama, point by point,
In every sight and sound and word and thought,
Packed with significance.
Out of its myriad scenes
All moving swiftly on, unguessed by man,
To close in one great climax of clear light,
This vivid moment flashed.
The cynic ceased;
And Darwin, slowly knitting his puzzled brows,
Answered, “_But it is wrong!_”
“Wrong?” chuckled the other. “Why should it be wrong?”
And Darwin, Darwin,—he that was to grasp
The crumbling pillars of their infidel Temple
And bring them headlong down to the honest earth,
Answered again, naïvely as a child,
“_Does not the Bible say so?_”
A broad grin
Wreathed the red face that stared into his own;
And, later, when the wardroom heard the jest,
The same wide grin from Christian mouth to mouth
Spread like the ripples on a single pool
Quietly enough! They liked him. They’d not hurt him!
And Darwin, strange, observant, simple soul,
Saw clearly enough; had eyes behind his back
For every smile; though in his big slow mind
He now revolved a thought that greatly puzzled him,
A thought that, in their light sophistication,
These humorists had not guessed.
Once, in his cabin,
His red-faced cynic had picked up a book
By one whose life was like a constant light
On the high altar of Truth.
He had read a page,
Then flung it down, with a contemptuous oath,
Muttering, “These damned atheists! Why d’you read them?”
Could pagan minds be stirred, then, to such wrath
Because the man they called an “atheist” smiled
At dates assigned by bland ecclesiasts
To God for His creation?
_Man was made_
_On March the ninth, at ten o’clock in the morning_
_(A Tuesday), just six thousand years ago_:
A legend of a somewhat different cast
From that deep music of the first great phrase
In _Genesis_. The strange irony here struck home.
For Darwin, here, was with the soul-bowed throng
Of prophets, while the ecclesiasts blandly toyed
With little calendars, which his “atheist’s book,”
In its irreverence, whispered quite away;
Whispered (for all such atheists bend their heads
Doubtless in shame) that, in the Book of Earth,
Six thousand years were but as yesterday,
A flying cloud, a shadow, a breaking wave.
Million of years were written upon the rocks
That told its history. To upheave one range
Of mountains, out of the sea that had submerged
So many a continent, ere mankind was born,
The harnessed forces, governed all by law,
Had laboured, dragging down and building up,
Through distances of Time, unthinkable
As those of starry space.
It dared to say
(This book so empty of mystery and awe!)
That, searching the dark scripture of the rocks,
It found therein no sign of a beginning,
No prospect of an end.
Strange that the Truth,
Whether upheld by the pure law within
Or by the power of reason, thus dismayed
These worshippers of a little man-made code.
Alone there in his cabin, with the books
Of Humboldt, Lyell, Herschel, spread before him.
He made his great decision.
If the realm
Beyond the bounds of human knowledge gave
So large a sanctuary to mortal lies,
Henceforth his Bible should be one inscribed
Directly with the law—the Book of Earth.
III
THE TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS
I saw him climbing like a small dark speck
—Fraught with what vast significance to the world—
Among the snow-capt Andes, a dark point
Of travelling thought, alone upon the heights,
To watch the terrible craters as they breathed
Their smouldering wrath against the sky.
I saw him,
Pausing above Portillo’s pass to hear
The sea-like tumult, where brown torrents rolled
Innumerable thousands of rough stones,
Jarring together, and hurrying all one way.
He stood there, spellbound, listening to the voice
Of Time itself, the moments hurrying by
For ever irrecoverably. I heard
His very thought. The stones were on their way
To the ocean that had made them; every note
In their wild music was a prophecy
Of continents unborn.
When he had seen
Those continents in embryo, beds of sand
And shingle, cumulant on the coastwise plains,
Thousands of feet in thickness, he had doubted
Whether the river of time itself could grind
And pile such masses there. But when he heard
The mountain-torrents rattling, he recalled
How races had been born and passed away,
And night and day, through years unreckonable,
These grinding stones had never ceased to roll
On their steep course. Not even the Cordilleras,
Had they been ribbed with adamant, could withstand
That slow sure waste. Even those majestic heights
Would vanish. Nothing—not the wind that blows
Was more unstable than the crust of the earth.