_What the Moon Saw_
Meanwhile there were showering down on earth the beams of that moon,
mirror and transmitter of the sun, which conveys to us its light
without its heat. From the distance came the splashing of water: and
on the river bank, where it was nearest to the tree and within sight,
lay a man and woman. They were naked, and the water was dripping
slowly from their bronzed bodies. They lay aside by side, and the
low murmur of their voices and their stifled kisses filled the near
air about. Beyond and around them eddied the confused noises of the
fields and woods, the scents of evening made lively by the cool damp
air, the brightness of the moon's shining on the silvan landscape, a
selection of all the sounds and shapes and tints and flavours in the
world. The contagion of universal love had caught the lovers, making
their eyes hard, their blood hot, their lips red. The everlasting
universal thrill which makes the flowers burst into bloom, which
makes the insects glitter and the birds sing, was upon these two,
flinging them into a mutual passionate embrace.
They were just another instance of the immortal lust of conjoined
sexes. Their sighs rustled between their lips like the wind in the
grass, they sobbed together like the breaking sea, their flesh
tingled with their blood as did the fibres of the forest giant with
sap. Their inchoate and always unfulfilled desires took wing in the
clear blue evening and became part of the immense and complex harmony
of a thousand strains which has reigned since the beginning of the
worlds, in the ether, to the stars, about the stars, beyond them,
even to the confines of illimitable space.
The great pine-tree in its six thousand years had many times seen
substances mating and beings marrying, and was able to record that
these two young naked humans were exactly like the thousands of other
couples whose loves it had witnessed since that distant time when as
a tender plant it had pushed its shy and timid way towards the blue.
For sixty centuries generation of man had succeeded generation
beneath the tree, but whatever differences there might have been in
their external circumstances or in the superficial accessories of
their state, always when in love their couples used to embrace naked
on such spring evenings as this, with the same ceremony and as
ecstatically as the pair to-day. The forest giant from its lofty
crest was thus able to establish that mankind had remained
essentially the same through the six thousand years.
Love is the strongest of our passions, but also that which we hide
the deepest: whereas we exhibit our ambitions, our pride, our greed,
our frenzies, openly. Yet when love does take possession of us it
sharpens and exalts our dullest, remotest faculties to the height:
but it is a moot point whether we are right to believe it exclusively
our work, a sentiment evoked by our own means. There is a disturbing
possibility that it may be imposed on us regardless of our will. We
are not able to extinguish it, nor to fan it: for its potent causes
lie deep beyond our sight, and are fleeting. We often see men
carried away by a passion for some one who is not in the least their
ideal, and see this passion grow greater or smaller without valid
cause. Insignificant trifles, and impressions of the apparent
slightest sometimes have enormous consequences in our lives. Love is
called up or frightened away by the faintest ghost of a memory, by
the waking impression of a forgotten dream, by some homely detail.
The faculty of love has been transmitted through our generations for
thousands of years, unchanged: for the tremor which excited our
forbears in their caves was, in its kind, of the intensity of the
embrace of the sexes to-day.
The truth would seem to be that in love we obey an eternal, general
and boundless law. In our conceit we think that no emotion is
comparable to the fever of passionate mankind. Yet what can we know
of the particular sensations possessing inhuman couples? such as the
fervour of a plant in seed, or that colossal attraction which drags
planets into the orbits of their suns. Our love-dramas and kisses
and excitements are mere examples of the universal spasm.
Let us return to the man and woman within sight of the upper branches
of the pine as they lay supine on the green bank of the river taking
their ease after happy exertions. The slight sound of their
voluptuous sighs had died away down the breeze. The vibrations of
their meeting flesh had gone abroad through the blue evening, with
the beaded moisture evaporating from their skins, and the heating
scents of awakened sex, to become part of the endless waves of ether
set up by the motions of the stars, by the odorous love-excitements
of birds and beasts and reptiles, by the pollen of seeding plants.
Of course the embracing couple did not know it: they knew nothing of
the movement of the Spheres and their Rivers of life, nor of their
component cells nor of the uncounted tribes of germs living within
their bodies. Yet at the very crisis of the amorous passion the
infinitely small no doubt bear their part in it to some degree, just
as the lovers in their act have contributed to the harmony of the
universe. We must try to think of ourselves existing as it were
detached, hanging between an external medley of forces beyond our
ken, and an internal current of life equally inappreciable by our
senses. We seem to become sensitive to exterior sensation only
locally, in the parts immediately affected. When lovers kiss the
delight of it attacks mouth and heart and spirit alone. We never
think that our arms or shoulders may also be concerned.
Yet on reflection it would seem incontestable that the mere
localization of the conscious emotion cannot prevent its being shared
generally by our whole being. The kiss, though expressed only by our
lips, is a product of the vitality of all our organs: and likewise in
each of our actions we, from our tiny sector of the world, share in
the universal harmony, though we cannot know the extent of our
contribution nor trace its course through the clash of external
forces.
It is a grave thought that in this indescribable whole the separate
items of activity undergo an identical evolutionary process. When
the sky was blue, in the piercing sunlight of a fragrant summer-time,
the forest giant attained its highest pitch, as its branches were
rich and supple with sap. Then came days of decline. Under a feeble
sun and a lack-lustre sky the air grew cold and faint: and the tree
entered on a phase of decline, slow at first but increasing in speed
till almost precipitate. Declines and falls have also (like all
else) their charts of intensity growing to a climax and falling away
inevitably thereafter. A stone flung into the air has a history like
the giant tree. It shoots up, up, to its highest point, dwells on
it, as it were, for a fraction of a second, and then turns to fall,
gently at first, but later coming down with an increasing rush. This
change up and change down seem to be one of the prime laws of life
and of matter and of energy, from the boundless existence of the
constellations to the atoms and the inexpressible complexities of
nature. Everything seems subject to such a process and our
imaginations cannot conceive anything exempt, or anything which will
ever be exempt. A stone flung up and falling, a branch budding and
growing bare, a fire flaring up and going out, a sentiment being
born, developing and dying, everything good or bad in events and in
things, in the animal creation, and in plants, in suns and in
particles, in everything that is or happens, exhibit obedience to
this universal law of change, growth and decay. Detached atoms
retain the character and share the fate of their former whole.
The lovers on the sloping river-bank near the giant tree were thus
reproducing the universal harmony, in their narrow and temporary
harmony, as they clipped and twined together in rhythmical
counterchange of their inmost emotions. They were so much larger
than the insects which shone red in the sunset or turned green in the
moonshine: they were so much smaller than the tree: yet in their
degree and kind they were in accord with the course of nature, as
expressed in the force which linked the fireflies and made the tree
bear seed. They partook of the ambitions which coming from the mists
of time and from the chaos of space make planets revolve in their
orbits and electrons whirl together: and if our insatiable curiosity
makes us seek to know, however dimly, what is going on up there or
down there, let us tell ourselves that we are part of all that is,
that we obey the very laws which govern alike the unimaginable whole
and its hugest components, and that therefore our infinitesimal
experience if we can expand or contract it indefinitely may guide us
as to the experiences both of the greatest and of the smallest.
Poor loving couple whom we have left sobbing with pleasure in the
harmonious and fragrant evening-light! It was written that their
transport should die, like all else in this world, and that a falling
cadence should close it, making its course one with those of the suns
and trees. The conviction that our joys are transient may make us
sad: but we can draw consolation from the idea that all the dwellers
in chaos are within the law. By taking thought we can make strong
our souls, and still them, with the certain knowledge of our utter
helplessness.
Yes, the moment was good for the man and woman by the tall and
splendid tree, as they throbbed together in the new sensitiveness of
their overcharged emotion: but remorselessly decline will follow on
the climax, not merely in the case of the love that grows faint, but
for the summer which must yield place to winter, for youth on which
old age is waiting, for the spray of water which rises to its height
only to fall, for the suns which to-day dazzle us, but for some few
ten thousand years are doomed to a slow expiry till they shall go
round and round their unyielding prisons of space in blind stiff
loneliness. The spiral of being leaps up rapidly to its brilliant
apogee, and then runs down again into obscurity while the ring-waves
of each action expand ever outward in the infinite.