THE HUNT FOR “COPY”
There never was a bigger, fatter, flabbier woodchuck than old
Tubby--among wild animals that I alone have known. Tubby is a fixture
of the farm. He was here when we came, or else it was his father or
his grandfather. He is fat and flabby and as broad as he is long, and
broader when full of beans. He is very much of a tub. When he sits in
the garden, he sits like a tub. When he runs, he runs like a tub. And
he holds beans like a tub.
It is worth a few beans to see him run--a medley in motions: up and
down and round and round, the spinning of a top and the hop of a
saucepan on a hot stove with amazing progress forward. He knows which
end of him is head and which tail; but from a distance I can see
neither head nor tail, only sides, bulging, tubby sides spilling down
the garden. One seldom does see the ends of a thing from a distance.
Tubby has a head-end; and he has wits in that end. He also has a
tail-end; and the disturbing conclusion one reaches with close study
is that Tubby has wits also in this end. He is a beautifully capable
thing in his way. A cutworm is not more capable--if there is anything
so capable as a cutworm! Both are poems; old Tubby an epic poem--were I
as capable as Tubby, and a Homer--
A full-sized woodchuck is twenty-two inches long; and I presume that
Tubby is not more than twenty-two inches wide, though I have seen him
wobbling out of the garden and carrying off as mere ballast a cabbage
or two, and a watermelon, and a peck or two of beans, and all of the
Swiss chard in the three rows. There are several bushels of chard in
three such rows.
The way he can run with his load! His little black heels twinkling
through the vines, his shapeless carcass flopping into his hole with me
on top of him! Then I will hear a chuckling deep down among the hickory
roots, a peculiar vegetarian chuckle quite unlike a carnivorous growl.
And then I will sit down on the hole and chuckle, having lost for the
moment my carnivorous growl. He is so bold, so impudent, so canny. The
old scamp rather likes me. And I am a fairly good gardener, if I do say
it myself.
When I place a trap in one entrance to his burrow, he uses the other
opening; if I put another trap here, he promptly digs a passage around
it; if I block this with chunks of rock, he undermines the stones and
patiently moves to a new house farther along the ridge; and, if I set
traps for him here, he changes house again. It is a wide wooded ridge
around the garden, and honeycombed with woodchuck holes. By and by he
is back in his favorite house under the hickory--when the spiders have
hung the doors with signs that the traps are gone.
But it happened once that I forgot the traps. Wood-earth and bits of
bark and dead leaves washed down till the wicked gins were covered,
and Tubby, coming back after weeks off on the ridge, tumbled into one
of the traps and got his thick fat fist fast. I heard him making a
dreadful racket, and rushed up with a club in my thick fat fist.
Old Tubby stopped kicking and grunting, and looked at me. I don’t
believe that I was ever looked at by a woodchuck before. Stolid,
sullen, defiant, there was much more of the puzzled, of the world-old
wonder in the eyes gazing steadily into mine, as to what this situation
and this moment meant. The snarled body was all fight and fear, but the
blinking eyes sought mine for an answer to the riddle that I have asked
of God. And all that I could answer was, “You fat-head!” And he said,
“Fat-head yourself!” if ever a woodchuck spoke, and spoke the truth.
“Fat-head, to set this rotten thing here and forget it!”
It was a rotten thing to do. Somehow he made me feel as if I had
trapped one of my neighbors. He saw how I was feeling, and took
advantage of me.
“Whose woods are these, anyway?” he asked. “Whose ancestors were here
first, yours or mine? You didn’t even come over in the Mayflower. But I
came here in Noah’s Ark.”
“I know it. But keep quiet,” I begged him, “and stop looking at me that
way.”
“What way?” he asked.
“Why, so much like my brother!” I exclaimed.
“But I am your brother,” he retorted, “though I am ashamed to say it.”
“Don’t say it, then,” I begged.
But he was wound up.
“Any man who is brute enough to set this sort of thing for his brother
has no soul. And any man who can’t share his beans with his brother
doesn’t deserve a soul. If I were as low-down and as lazy as you, I
would go over to the north side of this hill and dig a deep hole, and
crawl into it, and pull it in on top of me, I would.” And all the time
I was pressing down on the spring with my club, trying to free him.
Suddenly there was a flop in the hole, and away in the sub-cellar,
among the hickory roots, there was talk of me which I should have
heard, had I been able to understand.
But I have much to learn. And so has Pup, our Scotch-Irish terrier.
Time and time again Pup has sent the old woodchuck tumbling over
himself for his hole. Once or twice they have come to blows at the
mouth of the burrow, and Pup has come off with a limp or a hurt ear,
but with only a mouthful of coarse reddish hair to growl over. He came
off with a deep experience lately, and a greatly enhanced respect for
woodchucks. But he is of stubborn stock. So is Tubby of stubborn stock.
Pup knows that here is an enemy of the people, and that he must get
him. He knows that Tubby is all hair and hide and bowels. He now knows
that Tubby is deeper than he is broad, which makes him pretty deep.
The new light began to dawn on Pup when Tubby moved up from the
woods to a corner of the ice-house near the barn. The impudence, the
audacity of the thing stood Pup’s hair on end, and he took to the
blackberry-vines at the other corner of the ice-house to see what would
happen.
Tubby’s raiding hour was about five in the afternoon. At that hour
the shadows of the ice-house and the barn lay wide across the
mowing-field--the proper time and color for things to happen. And there
in the close-cut field, as if he had come up out of a burrow, sat old
Tubby, looking as big as a bear!
Pup stole softly out to meet him, moving over till he was between the
chuck and the ice-house hole. It was a deliberate act and one of
complete abandon. Things must this time be finished. And what a perfect
bit of strategy it was! Hugging the ground when the chuck rose high
on his haunches to reconnoiter, Pup would “freeze” till Tubby dropped
down and went to feeding, then, gliding like a snake forward, he would
flatten behind a stone or a tuft of grass, and work forward and wait.
The ground rose slightly to Pup’s disadvantage, and he was maneuvering
to avoid the uphill rush when Tubby heard something off in the woods
and turned with a dash for his hole. It was head-on and terrific! And
the utter shock of it, the moral shock, was more terrific! Neither knew
for an instant just what had happened; the suddenness, the precision,
the amazing boldness and quality of the attack putting Pup almost out
of action. But it was precisely the jar old Tubby needed. Every flabby
fiber of him was fight. The stub feet snapped into action; the chunk of
a body shot forward, ramming Pup amidships, sending him to the bottom
of the slope, Tubby slashing like a pirate with his terrible incisors.
But the touch of those long teeth brought Pup short about. He likes
the taste of pain. He is a son of battle. And in a moment like this he
is possessed of more than common powers of body and soul. The fur flew;
the grass flew; but there was scarcely a sound as the two fighters
tumbled and tossed a single black-brown body like a ball of pain. They
sprang apart and together again, whirled and dived and dodged as they
closed, each trying for a hold which neither dared allow. But Pup
got plenty of hair, choking, slippery hair, and leathery hide by the
mouthful, while the twisting, snapping woodchuck cut holes in Pup’s
thin skin with teeth which would punch holes in sheet steel.
And Tubby was fighting with his head as well as with teeth and toes. He
was cooler than Pup. He had a single-track mind, and it ran straight to
his burrow. The head-work was perfectly clear; the whole powerful play
going forward with the nicest calculation, mad as it appeared to be in
the wild rough-and-tumble. There was method in Tubby’s madness. He was
fighting true to plan. But Pup was fighting to kill, and he lost his
head. It was to win his hole, and life, and the pursuit of happiness
on these ancestral acres that the woodchuck was fighting; and, as the
two laid about them and rolled over and over, they kept rolling nearer
and nearer to the ice-house and a burrow under the corner.
Over and over, right and left, they lunged when the woodchuck, sent
spinning from Pup’s foreleg, came up with the dog chopping at his stub
nose, but, giving him all four of his mailed feet instead, he bounded
from the face of the dog, and, with a lightning somersault, landed plop
in his burrow, Pup raking the hair from the vanishing haunch.
And now Pup knows that there is no bottom to a woodchuck’s burrow. But
do I fully realize that there is no bottom to the woodchuck? I have
been almost fatally slow over this lesson. Yet this is the writer’s
first and most important lesson, no matter what his theme.
“I have been studying the woodchuck all my life,” said my old friend
Burroughs to me, “and there is no getting to the bottom of him!” He
made that great discovery early; eighty-four years of study confirmed
it; and from early to late Burroughs never lacked for things to write
about or failed of his urge to write. There was no bottom to his
woodchuck.
Others have made this discovery concerning other things: the
philosophers, of truth; the poets, of men and flowers; the prophets,
of God. But the writer must find it true of all things, of all his own
things, from woodchucks to God. There is nothing new in this discovery.
It simply makes all things new to the discoverer. The skeptical, the
shallow, the fool who says in his heart there is nothing but bowels
to a woodchuck--what would he at four-and-eighty find at Woodchuck
Lodge to write about? He might have all knowledge and a pen with which
he could remove mountains, but, lacking wonder, that power to invest
things with new and infinite significance, he would see no use in
removing the mountains and turning them into steppes and pampas and
peopled plains.
All creative work, whether by brush or pen or hoe, is somehow making
mountains into men, out of the dust an image, in our own likeness
created, in the likeness of God. It may be woodchuck dust, or dandelion
dust, or the shining dust of stars; touched with a creative,
interpreting pen the dust takes human shape and breathes a breath
divine. A woodchuck pelt makes an excellent fur for a winter coat; the
rest of him makes an excellent roast for a dinner; but it is what still
remains, the wonder of him, which makes for sermon and for song.
How hard a lesson that has been for me to learn! And so slow have I
been learning it that little time is left for me to preach or sing. If
only I had known early that Mullein Hill was as good as Helicon; that
the people of Hingham were as interesting as the people of Cranford;
that Hingham has a natural history as rich and as varied as Selborne!
My very friends have helped to mislead and hinder me: “I don’t see
what you find to write about up here!” they exclaim, looking out with
commiseration over the landscape, as if Wellfleet or Washington or
Wausau were better for books than Hingham! Hanover may be better for
ducks than Scituate; but Hingham is as good as Hanover or Heaven for
books.
One of my friends started for Hanover once for a day of hunting--but I
will let him tell the story:
“We were on our way to Hanover, duck hunting,” he said, “and at
Assinippi took the left fork of the road and kept going. But was this
left fork the right road? [An ancient doubt which had brought many a
traveler before them to confusion and a halt.] It was early morning,
raw and dark and damp. No one was stirring in the farmhouses straggling
along the road, and we were turning to go back to the forks when
the kitchen door of the near-by house opened and a gray-bearded man
appeared with a milk-pail on his elbow.
“‘Is this the road to Hanover?’ we called.
“The man backed into the kitchen door, put down his milk-pail, came out
again, carefully closing the door behind him, and started down the walk
toward the front gate. He opened the gate, turned and latched it behind
him as carefully as he had latched the kitchen door, and, stepping out
into the road, approached our carryall. Looking up, then down the road
intently, he hitched his right foot to the hub of our front wheel, spat
precisely into the dust, and, fixing his face steadfastly toward Cape
Cod, answered:
“‘No.’
“‘Say it with flowers!’ snapped our driver, wheeling about for the
other fork.
“At the turn I looked back. There stood our guide in the road, his
right foot still in the air, I think; and there--though it is several
years since, he may still be standing--one foot planted on the road to
Scituate, the other foot resting on the hub of the wheel that should
have been on the road to Hanover.”
The man in the road knew that this road ran to Scituate. He lived on
it. Had they asked him: “Master, which is the Great Commandment?” he
had answered: “Take this road for Scituate.” For were they not duck
hunting in Hanover? Then what profounder error could they have been in
than on the road to Scituate!
But most people go that way for Hanover. Every young writer I know
hankers to get his Hanover ducks out of Scituate, as if, failing to get
ducks, he might get Scituate; novelty, the mere novelty of gunning in
Scituate when the ducks are in Hanover, making the best sort of “copy.”
Is it some new thing that we should search out, or some deeper, truer
thing? Must we travel, or may we stay at home? Locomotion is certainly
a curse to literature. No one nowadays stays long enough in his own
place to know it and himself in it, which is about all that he can know
well enough to express. Let the writer stay at home. Drummers, actors,
circus-men, and Satan are free to go up and down the earth. And these
seem to be writing most of our books.
For some years, now, I, also, have been going to and fro and up and
down in the earth thinking that I might find some better place than
Hingham. I have just returned from Wausau, Wisconsin, where they have
a very hard red granite, and a deep green granite, both of them the
loveliest tombstone stuff that, I think, I ever saw. Certainly they are
superior to our seam-face Hingham granite for tombstones. Up to the
time of my Wausau visit, I had never given much thought to tombstones;
but it shows how one’s thought expands with travel, and how easily
Wausau may surpass Hingham, not alone in gravestones, but in other,
even in literary, materials.
But Hingham has one thing in the line of gravestones not found at all
in Wausau: I mean the boulders, great roundish glacial boulders, gray
granite boulders, old and gentle and mossy-grown, which lie strewn over
our hilly pastures among the roses and the hardhack and the sweetfern,
ready to be rolled to the tomb, and fit for any poet’s tomb. When that
shy spirit and bird-lover, Bradford Torrey, native of my neighbor town
of Weymouth, died in far-off California, he left but a single simple
request: that he be brought back to his birthplace for burial, and that
a Weymouth boulder be found and rolled up to mark his grave. Were mine
not Hingham boulders I would take one out of my wall, the one which
serves as a gatepost, and, with a yoke of Weymouth oxen, would draw it
to Bradford Torrey’s tomb, a tribute from Hingham to Weymouth, and a
gift out of the heart of one who knows and loves “The Foot-Path Way,”
“A Rambler’s Lease,” and “A World of Green Hills.”
Perhaps one must needs go to California in order to come by this deep
desire for Weymouth. Then let him go early. For if he is to write “The
Natural History of Weymouth,” or of Selborne, he must return early and
stay a long time. Thoreau has been criticized for writing of Nature as
if she were born and brought up in Concord. So she was. Can one not see
all of the world out of the “Window in Thrums”?--that is, all of the
world of Thrums, which is all of the world, and just the world, one
goes to Thrums to see? “I have traveled a great deal in Concord,” says
Thoreau.
This brings me back to Hingham. I wish that I could write “The Natural
History of Hingham”! A modest desire! There can never be another
Gilbert White--but not for lack of birds and beasts in Hingham. Were
I a novelist I would write a “Cranford”--and I could! I would call it
“Hingham,” not “Main Street,” though that is the name of perhaps the
longest street in Hingham. But there are many other streets in Hingham,
and all kinds of interesting people.
And here I am on Mullein Hill, Hingham, with all of these streets,
and all of these people, and woodchucks a plenty to write about--and
planning this day a trip to California! I might have been the author of
a recent book whose theme and sub-title read: “In the plains and the
rolling country there is room for the individual to skip and frolic,
but all the peaks are preëmpted.” Come down from Mullein Hill; get out
of Hingham; go West, young writer, as far as California; you shall find
room to skip and frolic on the plains out there!
It may be true in California, but the opposite of that is true in
Hingham. To be sure, I have tried to preëmpt Mullein Hill; I now own
the knoll outside my study window, and the seven-acre woodlot beyond;
but there are many other peaks here among the hills of Hingham, and
scarcely any of them occupied. The people of Hingham all crowd into the
plains. So did the people of Israel crowd into the plains--of Moab,
leaving Pisgah to Moses, who found it very lonesome. There is no one on
Pisgah now, I understand; no one on Ararat; no one on Popocatepetl; no
one on the top of Vesuvius, nor on the peak of Everest, peaks as well
known as White Plains or the Plains of Abraham, but not anything like
so crowded. Moses sleeps on Nebo, yet no man knows where he lies. Have
them lay you in Sleepy Hollow if you wish your friends and neighbors
to crowd in close and keep you company.
Why has there been no Iliad of Hingham? There are Helens in Hingham, as
there were Helens of Troy. Hingham is short of Homers. Mute, inglorious
Miltons have we in Hingham. If one of them, however, should take his
pen in hand, would he dream, and if he dreamed, would he dare to cry to
the Heavenly Muse,
“I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme”?
Which of our poets thinks any more of an adventurous song? Of
attempting any more the unattempted in either prose or rhyme? It is
as if everything had been attempted; everything dared; everything
accomplished--the peaks all preëmpted. Politics or religion or
literature, it matters not: the great days are gone, the great
things are done, the great men securely housed in the Hall of
Fame. Heaven offers us a League of Nations and we prefer the tried
and proved device of war; a famed evangelist comes to town, we
build him a vast tabernacle, and twenty thousand gather for the
quickening message--“Brighten the corner where you are!” And in the
corners, and over the walls of the nation, with poster and placard
the “Safety-First” sign warns us not to hold our little rushlight
over-high, or flare it over-far, for fear we set our brightened corner
of the world on fire. But the whole world is on fire! And wherever an
emperor has escaped the devouring flame, he is fiddling, as emperors
do; and his poet laureate is writing free verse; and all of his
faithful subjects are saying, over and over, “Day by day, in every way,
I am getting better and better.”
“We are taught by great actions that the universe is the property of
every individual in it,” says Emerson. “Every rational creature has all
nature for his dowry and estate. It is his, if he will. He may divest
himself of it; he may creep into a corner, and abdicate his kingdom, as
most men do, but he is entitled to the world by his constitution.” I
have not spoken lately with a man who seemed to think he was entitled
to the world. That grand old faith has passed away. But I talk with no
man lately who does not think he is entitled to an automobile. Great
is Tin Lizzie of the Americans! Greater than Diana of the Ephesians.
But except for our worship of the Ford we are not over-religious. The
Ford is a useful little deity; she meets our needs to the last mile.
The individual can skip and frolic with her, for she is distinctly the
goddess of the plains and rolling country. Admirable to her winking
tail-light, she is one hundred per cent American, the work of one of
the supreme inventive geniuses of our time. She is the greatest thing
in America, chugging everywhere but up Parnassus. Fool-proof, the
universal car, she is the very sign and symbol of our antlike industry,
the motor-minded expression of our internal-combustion age.
Even my quiet old friend Burroughs had his Ford. It was her creator
himself who gave her to him. The creature would climb around the slopes
and over the walls about Woodchuck Lodge like a side-hill gouger,
Burroughs in his long white beard driving her, as Father Time might
drive a merry-go-round. He nearly lost his life in her, too. But
everybody nearly loses his life so nowadays; and nearly everybody had
rather lose his life in a Ford than to drag out an endless existence
in a buggy or on foot or in a wooden swing at home, watching the Fords
go by. What is life, anyway? The Ford is cheap; the service station
is everywhere; so, pile into the little old “bug”--on the hood and
running-boards! “Let’s go!”
Perhaps our machines are taking us--we wish to believe so--to some new
Arden, some far-off Avalon, where we shall heal us of our motor-minds,
our movie-nerves, our corner-light religion; where “Safety First” shall
give place to “Derring-Do” as a national motto; where we shall ascend
the empty peaks, and out of the thunder and smoke of shaking Sinai
bring down some daring commandment, done by the finger of God on new
tables of stone.
We are not lacking courage. It is imagination that we lack. We dare.
But we do not think it worth while. We are shallow, skeptical,
conventional, out of tune with the Infinite, and out of touch with
spiritual things. If we do not try the unattempted, it is because we
believe it has already been tried. It is because Homer has preëmpted
Helicon that we tunnel it. Only Milton, among us moderns (and how
ancient Milton seems!), only Milton in his blindness has seen that
there is room and verge enough on Helicon, and deeps within the abyss
of Hades where Dante would be lost. No, Milton is not the only modern
to leave the plains, and, like a star, to dwell apart. Thoreau did it
at Walden; Lanier did it on the marshes of Glynn; Burroughs did it at
Woodchuck Lodge; and Hudson did it on the plains of Patagonia--proof
enough that ponds and plains and the low-lying marsh may be as high as
Helicon for poetry, if only the poet have the vision to see that
“Like to the greatness of God is the greatness within
The range of the marshes, the liberal marshes of Glynn.”
But here we fail. We no longer see the greatness of God in things. We
have covered God with an atom. We ask for bread, and Science gives
us a stone; for God, and Science gives us an electron. It was a
super-electron that created the heavens and the earth when it saw that
all of the other electrons were without form and void. Atomism has
taken the place of theism in our religion, if it is religion. Man is
only a bunch of willful atoms, or parts of atoms, not any longer the
crowning work of Creation, its center and circumference, its dominion
and destiny and glory, its divine expression, interpretation, and
immortal soul. Are we to be robbed of God? Inhibited forever from faith
by the lensed eyes of Science?
“What is man?” I ask, and Science laughs and answers, “Electrons.”
That is its latest guess. But does man look like them? Does he feel
like them? Does he behave like them? Does he believe like them? In the
laboratory he may. But out here in the hills of Hingham, where I am
returned to the earth and the sky and to my own soul, I know that I AM,
and that I still hold to all of those first things which Science would
shame me out of, offering me electrons instead!
I accept the electrons. Capering little deities, they are the sons
of God. But so are you and I the sons of God--and we are electrons,
trillions of electrons, if you like.
Gods and atoms, we can dwell and think and feel as either, the two
realms distinct and far apart, the roads between in a continual state
of construction, dangerous but passable. The anatomist, laying down his
scalpel, cries, “Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. I am fearfully
and wonderfully made!”--his science passing into poetry, and from
poetry to religion, but not easily in our present frame and mood.
Science clears the sight and widens its range; but Science can never
clear up the shadows at the bottom of a woodchuck. Only vision can
do that, and Science lacks vision, using a microtome instead, paring
its woodchuck till he is thinner than sliced sunlight before it can
see through so much as a single stained cell of him. Science turns
aside from shadows, walking by sight or else standing still. It deals
with the flesh, not the spirit; and is as impotent in literature and
art as in life and society. The potent thing among men and nations is
love. Love never faileth. Yet never were we so afraid of love as we
are to-day; and never did art and literature seem so fearful of the
imagination, of vision, of the eternal, the divine.
“Go get me a bird,” the old scientist said to me; “I will give you a
lesson in skinning and mounting.” I was a young boy. Hurrying out to
the woods, I was soon back with a cuckoo. The face of the old scientist
darkened. “You should not have killed this bird, it is the friend of
man. See when I open this gizzard.” And with a dexterous twist of his
fingers turned inside out the gizzard, and showed it, like a piece of
plush, its fleshy walls penetrated with millions of caterpillar hairs.
To this day I feel the wonder of that knowledge, and I thrill at the
meaning of that bird’s gizzard. Here was science and charity and
poetry and religion. What untold good to man! What greater possible
good to man? That was before I knew or understood the cuckoo’s song.
And neither the old scientist, nor yet his book, “Sixteen Weeks in
Zoölogy,” dealt with the song. Science is sure and beautiful with a
gizzard. Poetry is sure and beautiful with both gizzard and song. And I
wonder if the grinding gizzard or the singing throat is the better part
of the cuckoo, even in this world of worms?
“Though babbling only to the vale,
Of sunshine and of flowers,
Thou bringest unto me a tale
Of visionary hours.
“Thrice welcome, darling of the Spring!
Even yet thou art to me
No bird, but an invisible thing,
A voice, a mystery;
“And I can listen to thee yet;
Can lie upon the plain
And listen, till I do beget
That golden time again.
“O blessed Bird! the earth we pace
Again appears to be
An unsubstantial faëry place,
That is fit home for thee!”
I have a great book, published by the Government, devoted entirely to
birds’ gizzards, mills of the gods, and their grindings. It is not a
dull book, though the mills grind slowly and grind exceeding small.
It is a book of bones, of broken beetles, seeds, hairs, feathers, and
fragments. It is a great work of science. One might not like to lay it
down unfinished; but, having finished it, one could hardly say:
“And I can listen to thee yet;
Can lie upon the plain
And listen, till I do beget
That golden time again.
“O blessed Bird! the earth we Pace
Again appears to be
An unsubstantial faëry place,
That is fit home for thee!”
Nature will not do, nor all the truth of nature, for stuff of song and
story. As life is more than meat, so is literature more than life.
Nature conforms to art; and in fiction “the only real people are those
who never existed.”
At Good-Will Farm, Maine, there is a rock marked with a copper plate.
It had been marked for drill and dynamite, until, one day, my car
swung up and over a sharp turn in the road before the schoolhouse,
skidding rather horribly on the smooth outcropping ledge which had been
uncovered and left as part of the roadbed.
“You ought to blast that thing out,” I said, somewhat testily, to the
supervisor who came out to greet me, my nerves, strung a bit too tight
on the long day’s drive, snapping with the skid here at the very end of
the trip.
“I’ll do it,” he replied, apologetically. “I had intended to do it from
the first.”
The next day we were climbing this road on foot, and, standing on the
ledge to take in the wide landscape of the Kennebec below us, I chanced
to look down at my feet and saw, cut deep in the smooth surface of the
stone, several parallel lines.
“Don’t blast out this rock!” I exclaimed. “Tear down your schoolhouse
rather. Build a new road through the grounds, but leave this stone.
This is part of a great book.”
“I don’t understand,” said the supervisor.
“Here is written a page of the greatest story ever penned. These lines
were done by the hand of the glacier who came this way in the Ice Age.
Don’t blot it out. Put a fence about it, and a copper plate upon it,
translating the story so that your students can read it and understand.”
He did. There was no need of the fence; but he set the plate into the
rock, telling of the Ice Age, how the glacier came down, ploughing out
the valley of the Kennebec, rounding and smoothing this ledge, and
inditing this manuscript for Good-Will Farm School ages later.
So much does the mere scratch of science enhance the virtue of a stone!
Now add to your science history. Instead of the scratch of a glacier,
let it be a chisel and a human hand, and let the marks be--“1620.” Now
read--if you can read and understand.
I copy it verbatim from a Freshman college theme:
PLYMOUTH ROCK
Plymouth Rock is situated in Plymouth Mass. It is the rock upon which
the Mayflower landed in 1620. But it is not now where it was then. It
was moved many years ago up to the street. And when they moved it it
broke. But they cemented it together. It is four or five feet long;
and three or four feet wide; and it is inscribed with the famous
figures 1620, to celebrate the landing of the Puritans at that time.
It is enclosed within a canopy of stone and an iron fence; but the
gate is hardly ever closed. There are a great many famous stones in
the world but this is as famous as any.
My mother was visiting me. She is a self-contained old Quaker, and
this was the second time in all of her eighty years that she had
even seen New England! What should we do first? What did she most
desire to see? “Take me to see Plymouth Rock first,” she said; and we
were off, mother as excited and as lively as a girl. As we entered
Plymouth, however, I noticed that mother had grown silent, and that
her doctor-daughter, beside her on the back seat, always sensitive to
her moods, was also silent. We descended the hill to the harbor, came
on in sight of the canopy over the Rock, and slowed down to stop. But
the car had not stopped, when mother, the back door open, her foot on
the running-board, was stepping off and through the open gate, where,
falling on her knees, with tears running down her face, she kissed the
blessed stone, her daughter calling, “O Mother, the germs! the germs!”
When Science and Religion thus clash, Science must give way. Mother
knew as much about germs as her doctor-daughter. She had lived longer
than her daughter; she had lost more, and had loved more--some things
more than life itself.
Science has marked every rock; but only those that are wet with such
tears and kissed with such lips are ripe for sermon and song. These are
the eyes and these the lips of those, who, passing through Bacca, make
it a well. Knowledge alone, though it course the very heavens, will
come back to earth without so much as one shining fleck of stardust in
its hair.
The other day a great astronomer was delivering a lecture in Boston
on the stars. Wonder and awe held the audience as it traveled the
stellar spaces with the help of the astounding pictures on the screen.
The emotion was deep; the tension almost painful as the lecturer swept
on and on through the unthinkable vast, when, coming to his close, he
turned and asked lightly, “Now, what do you think of immortality? Is it
anything more than the neurotic hope of a very insignificant mote in
this immensity?”
The effect was terrific. The scientific smiled. The simple left the
hall dazed and stunned. They lost all sense of time and space, they
lost sight of the very stars in this swift, far fall. They had been
carried up through the seven spheres to the very gate of heaven,
then hurled to earth. The lecture failed--not of instruction, not of
emotion, but of will, leaving the listeners powerless and undone. The
lecturer may be right--for astronomy; and yet be quite wrong, for
poetry. He may have uttered the last word--for science; but this end is
only the beginning for religion.
How much greater an astronomer this college professor than that
shepherd psalmist on the far-off Syrian hills! Ranging the same astral
field as our scientist, sweeping the same stellar spaces, with only a
shepherd’s knowledge, the psalmist’s thought takes the same turn as the
scientist’s, down to man, but on different wings,--the wings of poetry:
“When I consider thy heavens,
The work of thy fingers,
The moon and the stars
Which thou hast ordained;
What is man, that thou art mindful of him?
And the son of man, that thou visitest him?”
Then, swinging upward on those mighty wings, past the reach of science,
out of the range of knowledge, up, up to the divinest height ever
touched by human thought, the psalmist-astronomer cries impiously,
exultantly,
“For thou hast made him but little lower than God,
And crownest him with glory and honor!”
This starts where the astronomer stopped. This is religion and
literature. And I have these very stars over my hilltop here in
Hingham!