The stars lie above all countries alike, but the atmosphere that
intervenes is denser in one place than in another; and even where
it is purest, if once its atoms catch the sunlight, it cuts off the
prospect beyond. In some climates the veil of earthly weather is so
thick and blotted that even the plodder with his eyes on the ground
finds its density inconvenient, and misses his way home. The advantage
of having eyes is neutralized at such moments, and it would be better
to have retained the power of going on all fours and being guided by
scent. In fact human beings everywhere are like marine animals and live
in a congenial watery medium, which like themselves is an emanation
of mother earth; and they are content for the most part to glide
through it horizontally at their native level. They ignore the third,
the vertical dimension; or if they ever get some inkling of empty
heights or rigid depths where they could not breathe, they dismiss
that speculative thought with a shudder, and continue to dart about in
their familiar aquarium, immersed in an opaque fluid that cools their
passions, protects their intellect from mental dispersion, keeps them
from idle gazing, and screens them from impertinent observation by
those who have no business in the premises.
The stellar universe that silently surrounds them, if while swimming
they ever think of it, seems to them something foreign and not quite
credibly reported. How should anything exist so unlike home, so out of
scale with their affairs, so little watery, and so little human? Their
philosophers confirm them in that incredulity; and the sea-caves hold
conclaves of profound thinkers congregated to prove that only fog can
be real. The dry, their council decrees, is but a vain abstraction, a
mere negative which human imagination opposes to the moist, of which
alone, since life is moist, there can be positive experience.
As for the stars, these inspired children of the mist have discovered
that they are nothing but postulates of astronomy, imagined for a
moment to exist, in order that a beautiful human science may be
constructed about them. Duller people, born in the same fog, may not
understand so transcendental a philosophy, but they spontaneously
frame others of their own, not unlike it in principle. In the middle
of the night, when the starlight best manages to pierce to the lowest
strata of the air, these good people are asleep; yet occasionally when
they are returning somewhat disappointed from a party, or when illness
or anxiety or love-hunger keeps them pacing their chamber or tossing
in their beds, by chance they may catch a glimpse of a star or two
twinkling between their curtains. Idle objects, they say to themselves,
like dots upon the wall-paper. Why should there be stars at all, and
why so many of them? Certainly they shed a little light and are pretty;
and they are a convenience sometimes in the country when there is no
moon and no lamp-posts; and they are said to be useful in navigation
and to enable the astronomers to calculate sidereal time in addition
to solar time, which is doubtless a great satisfaction to them. But
all this hardly seems to justify such an expense of matter and energy
as is involved in celestial mechanics. To have so much going on so far
away, and for such prodigious lengths of time, seems rather futile and
terrible. Who knows? Astrologers used to foretell people's character
and destiny by their horoscope; perhaps they may turn out to have been
more or less right after all, now that science is coming round to
support more and more what our fathers called superstitions. There may
be some meaning in the stars, a sort of code-language such as Bacon put
into Shakespeare's sonnets, which would prove to us, if we could only
read it, not how insignificant, but how very important we are in the
world, since the very stars are talking about us.
The safest thing, however, is to agree with the great idealists, who
say there are really no stars at all. Or, if their philosophy seems
insecure--and there are rumours that even the professors are hedging
on the subject--we can always take refuge in faith, and think of the
heavenly bodies as beautiful new homes in which we are to meet and work
together again when we die; and as in time we might grow weary even
there, with being every day busier and busier, there must always be
other stars at hand for us to move to, each happier and busier than the
last; and since we wish to live and to progress for ever, the number of
habitable planets provided for us has to be infinite. Certainly faith
is far better than science for explaining everything.
So the embryonic soul reasons in her shell of vapour; her huddled
philosophy is, as it were, pre-natal, and discredits the possibility
of ever peeping into a cold outer world. Yet in time this shell may
grow dangerously thin in places, and a little vague light may filter
through. Strange promptings and premonitions at the same time may visit
the imprisoned spirit, as if it might not be impossible nor inglorious
to venture into a world that was not oneself. At last, willy-nilly, the
soul may be actually hatched, and may suddenly find herself horribly
exposed, cast perhaps on the Arabian desert, or on some high, scorched,
open place that resembles it, like the uplands of Castile. There the
rarefied atmosphere lets the stars down upon her overwhelmingly, like a
veritable host of heaven. There the barren earth entwines few tentacles
about the heart; it stretches away dark and empty beneath our feet, a
mere footstool for meditation. It is a thing to look away from, too
indifferent and accidental even to spurn; for after all it supports
us, and though small and extinguished it is one of the stars. In these
regions the shepherds first thought of God.
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