Part 8

There dwelt that eager mind, whom fools deride For laced and periwigged verses on his flowers; Forgetting how he strode before his age, And how his grandson caught from his right hand A fire that lit the world. I saw him there, In his brown-skirted coat, among his plants, Pondering the thoughts, at which that dreamer sneered, Who, through a haze of opium, saw a star Twinkling within the tip of the crescent moon. Dispraise no song for tricks that fancy plays, Nor for blind gropings after an unknown light, But let no echo of Abora praise for this The drooping pinion and unseeing eye. Seek, poet, on thy sacred height, the strength And glory of that true vision which shall grasp, In clear imagination, earth and heaven, And from the truly seen ascend in power To those high realms whereof our heaven and earth Are images and shadows, and their law Our shining lanthorn and unfailing guide. There, if the periwigged numbers failed to fly, Let babbling dreamers who have also failed Wait for another age. The time will come When all he sought and lost shall mount and sing. He saw the life-stream branching out before him, Its forms and colours changing with their sky: Flocks in the south that lost their warm white fleece; And, in the north, the stubble-coloured hare Growing snow-white against the winter snows. The frog that had no jewel in his head, Except his eyes, was yet a fairy prince, For he could change the colours of his coat To match the mud of the stream wherein he reigned; And, if he dwelt in trees, his coat was green. He saw the green-winged birds of Paraguay Hardening their beaks upon the shells they cracked; The humming-bird, with beak made needle-fine For sucking honey from long-throated blooms; Finches with delicate beaks for buds of trees, And water-fowl that, in their age-long plashing At the lake’s edge, had stretched the films of skin Between their claws to webs. Out through the reeds They rowed at last, and swam to seek their prey. He saw how, in their war against the world, Myriads of lives mysteriously assumed The hues that hid them best; the butterfly dancing With its four petals among so many flowers, Itself a wingèd flower; the hedgerow birds With greenish backs like leaves, but their soft breasts Light as a downy sky, so that the hawk, Poised overhead, sees only a vanishing leaf; Or, if he swoops along the field below them, Loses their silvery flight against the cloud. He saw the goldfinch, vivid as the blooms Through which it flutters, as though their dews had splashed Red of the thistle upon its head and throat, And on its wings the dandelion’s gold. He saw the skylark coloured like its nest In the dry grass; the partridge, grey and brown In mottled fields, escaping every eye, Till the foot stumbles over it, and the clump Of quiet earth takes wing and whirrs away. I saw him there, a strange and lonely soul, An eagle in the Swan of Lichfield’s pen, Stretching clipped wings and staring at the sky. He saw the multitudinous hosts of life, All creatures of the sea and earth and air, Ascending from one living spiral thread, Through tracts of time, unreckonable in years. He saw them varying as the plastic clay Under the Sculptor’s hands. He saw them flowing From one Eternal Fount beyond our world, The inscrutable and indwelling Primal Power, His only _vera causa_; by whose will There was no gulf between the first and last. There was no break in that long line of law Between the first life drifting in the sea, And man, proud man, the crowning form of earth, Man whose own spine, the framework of his pride, The fern-stem of his life, trunk of his tree, Sleeps in the fish, the reptile, and the orang, As all those lives in his own embryo sleep.

What deeper revolution, then, must shake Those proud ancestral dynasties of earth? What little man-made temples must go down? And what august new temple must arise, One vast cathedral, gargoyled with strange life, Surging through darkness, up to the unknown end?

IV

LAMARCK AND CUVIER: THE _VERA CAUSA_

Fear nothing, Swan of Lichfield. Tuck thy head Beneath thy snowy wing and sleep at ease. Drift quietly on thy shadowy Minster Pool. No voice comes yet to shake thy placid world. Far off—in France—thy wingless angels make Strange havoc, but the bearer of this fire, The wise physician’s unknown comrade, toils Obscurely now, through his more perilous night, Seeking his _vera causa_, with blind eyes. Blind, blind as Galileo in his age, Lamarck embraced his doom and, as in youth, Held to the post assigned, till Life or Death Relieved him. All those changes of the world He had seen more clearly than his unknown friend; And traced their natural order. He saw the sea-gull like a flake of foam Tossed from the waves of that creative sea; The fish that like a speckled patch of sand Slides over sand upon its broad flat side, And twists its head until its nether eye Looks upward, too, and what swam upright once Is fixed in its new shape, and the wry mouth Grimaces like a gnome at its old foes. He saw the swarming mackerel shoals that swim Near the crisp surface, rippled with blue and green Round their dark backs to trick the pouncing gull, But silver-bellied to flash like streaks of light Over the ravenous mouths that from below Snap at the leaping gleams of the upper sea. And all these delicate artistries were wrought By that strange Something-Else which blind men call “Environment,” and the name is all their need; A Something-Else that, through the sum of things, Labours unseen; and, for its own strange ends, Desirous of more swiftness and more strength, Will teach the hunted deer to escape and fly, Even while it leads the tiger to pursue.

He saw that sexual war; the stags that fought In mating-time; the strong confirmed in power By victory. Lust and hunger, pleasure and pain, Like instruments in a dread Designer’s hand, Lured or dissuaded, tempted and transformed.

He saw dark monsters in primeval forests 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!