_The Law of Balance_
How lustreless and same the passage of time appears when we review it
in our memory! but how uncertain and varied it is when we live it
moment by moment, leaning out of each second to encounter the next!
Likewise with the life of the great tree. Its sap on the daily round
of work may have had fresh pleasures and discomforts at each
revolution; but the tree's life seemed to have slipped past in a tame
monotony when taken in a period of thirty or forty centuries. Yet it
may be that the sequoia felt the seasons change about it, and that
the times and scenes (so constant to our eyes) in which it lived
affected it variously, just as its great outline may not have been
without influence on its own country. One can picture the huge
reddish spout leaping up into the air, with a hazy network of
hundreds of branches about it. Its head seemed to be lost in the
blue. Its bole was twenty-five paces about, but against its enormous
height such a thickness seemed slight, and the whole tree had an air
of slender grace, quite unlike other great trees, as, for instance,
the baobab, whose trunk might be thicker than a sequoia trunk, but
whose height would be incomparably less.
Like all conifers, the root-system of the sequoia was not elaborate.
Of course it had great roots, and many of them, and luxuriant
ones--but not to compare with the tree's size. Here also one may
trace the all-seeing Eye, having regard for universal harmony. If
trunk and roots were in due proportion, the tree's appetite would be
empowered to satisfy its hunger by ravaging an immense area of
ground. Its roots would exhaust the vital essences from a wide
circle, and reduce it to a desert. So the principle of balance
enters, and applies itself to the pine-giant: and we find if we
search diligently into nature that its greatest creatures have their
weak spots, and the feeblest things of the world have their
unexpected means of defence.
Examples of this law are well found in the fantastic prehistoric
time. Through its dense jungle rolled a nightmare shape, a reptile
(called the Diplodocus) unnaturally huge, perhaps a hundred feet long
and proportionally tall. On the end of its prolonged neck was a
grotesque little head, in which stared two glassy stupid eyes. The
beast would seem to have been doomed to a miserable life, for to
nourish its demensurate body would require nearly unlimited food, and
it had only a tiny mouth, able to pick up a spoonful at a time. So
poor Diplodocus passed his whole life chewing leaves, and had no time
off for sleep or holiday. He could do nothing all the while but eat,
and so by the law of compensation his greatness was brought low. If
his head had been as good as his body, and if instead of being only a
grass-eating lizard he had learned to eat meat, then nothing alive
could have resisted him, and he would have depopulated his radius of
action.
This harmony in life, this astonishing foresight watching over matter
makes one think. Every source of energy in the world has
irrefragible bounds marked out for it. The curse of Diplodocus seems
to have fallen on our modern whale, whose strength would make the sea
barren of other life if its gullet had not been made too small to
swallow them. What a danger for the rest of the world that other
mammal, the elephant, might have been with his union of strength and
intelligence, had his nature not been made so peaceable, and the
period of gestation so long!
Lions, tigers and panthers are fierce and powerful, but have found a
pitiless exterminator in man. The larger felines have ever been the
most tempting game for hunters, who pursue them with particular zest:
and things are always so, everywhere. Men give infinite reasons or
pretexts, on which they think (or say they think) they acted: but
behind all these we can trace the constant operation of an immutable
law, to which their obedience is implicit.
This terrible law of compensations cuts often across our brief
freedom--across those periods when we fancy ourselves all-powerful,
masters of the event. We might really be so, if the Eye was not
watching and regulating the smallest details of creation: but as it
is, this law which checks excessive strength comes into operation
against us, using ourselves as its own means. It may be for this
reason that we are tormented by drugs or drinks or other plagues; for
most non-human beings are comparatively free of them, and they cause
any number of weaknesses and harmful complications, fatal to the
health of society. As a crowning debilitant we have our
man-devouring wars.
For it really seems that they must be half-divine, these terrible
events which impose themselves upon us, as though at the dictates of
superhuman authority. If fate did not decree them how could these
wars yet pour out the life-blood of our peoples, since man has always
condemned them with the whole force of his reason?
No one, whether the greatest conqueror or the most commonplace
individual, has ever dared to speak of war without exposing its sorry
character: unless he curses it: and such is the plainest common
sense. There leap to our minds a thousand reasons against war,
whenever we need them. Only when the crisis comes and the clash of
peoples is prepared, then human beings savagely acclaim it. They
burn with the sense of battle, a madness which comes upon them from
without and masters them, so that they can speak only with its voice.
Just as the roots of plants have the pileorhiza to stay their first
feebleness and let them fight out their rivalries with the other
beings of the under-world, so when war begins this obscure law
injects us with patriotism, a draught which gives us strength and
courage to support the miseries of its train.
Daily it is said, "War would be easily prevented. All that is
needful is for every man alive to forswear it. If at the same moment
we all refused to make a move against our kind, these fires consuming
men would be at once put out." Yes, but exactly this apparently easy
agreement and common action never happen. When the moment comes for
armed slaughter men are unanimous only in fierce support of pretexts
for beginning it. When the storm has passed we are astounded and
rather horrified to look back on our bloodthirsty record, and like a
river sinking back into its bed after a flood, we return gradually to
our habitual peace and quietude:--too late, alas! for the will of the
gods has been done and humanity has paid its bloody tribute to their
law of death. At the next date of bleeding the whole round will
begin again, just as before.
So Diplodocus' little head, his point of weakness, may be made a
symbol of this malady of man. And the reason why we should be
subjected to this inflexible law? No doubt that our too-great
strength be brought down ... but it remains a question whether the
too-great strength is because our numbers are over-many for the earth
to bear, or because we are near discovering and exploiting the
working of the greater powers of nature. It may also be the law of
checks and balances pursuing its course against all excessive
strengths, which gives the riches and resources of this world to
ordinary people, rather than to those mighty spirits with character
enough to overturn their generations. One can imagine what might
have happened had the great scholars or thinkers whose writings
revolutionized life had in their hands the power of a despot or the
wealth of Croesus. "You can't have everything" is the hackneyed
phrase in which common sense has tried to express one of the most
disturbing truths of the universe. However much it may appear so,
nowhere is any excess of power allowed to disturb the balance of
things. Absolute equality is of course equally out of the question,
for harmony is based always on the union of unlike things.
One pine-tree could observe this law working in its sphere of life,
through the thousands of years for which it stood there. Generation
after generation of birds and insects followed one another on its
stem and branches. Some days were dismal, others glorious, just as
some hours were unprofitable and others rich. The light and warmth
were not always divided to it in equal part. Underground the
moisture did not always refresh its mazy roots in fair degree.
Clouds often veiled its blue sky: the seasons made that swelling hill
bare and sad as often as they made it smile with waving green. The
giant tree saw its needles grow from freshness into pallor, and then
fall, thousands of times. Some of its branches for no visible reason
grew splendidly, while others, also for no visible reason, remained
small and stunted. Yet still its life, as a whole, was lived in
tune, as ours are to our content, however discordant the individual
moments. A single ray of light is enough to scatter the darkness:
and when we think of the surroundings in which the giant lived, the
idea comes that perhaps we would fear death less if it were not for
that haunting picture of our corpses rotting slowly in the darkness
underground. We might live more in love with death if we knew that
our dust would remain under the sun, to change and re-model itself in
plant-fashion, like those yellow leaves which wither and fall before
winter comes. It would assuage our minds if we could think that
after our end we would live yet in the shimmering day, absorbed
particles of that great life-filled space this side the limitless
ether of the stars.