The book of earth

by Alfred Noyes

VII—LAMARCK AND THE REVOLUTION

I
Lamarck and Buffon

What wars are these? Far off, a bugle blew.

Out of oblivion rose the vanished world.

I stood in Amiens, in a narrow street

Outside a dark old college. I saw a boy,

A budding Abbé, pallid from his books,

Beaked like a Roman eagle. He stole out

Between grim gates; and stripping off his bands,

Hastened away, a distance in his eyes;

As though, through an earthly bugle, he had heard

A deeper bugle, summoning to a war

Beyond these wars, with enemies yet unknown.

I saw him bargaining for a starveling horse

In Picardy and riding to the North,

Over chalk downs, through fields of poppied wheat.

A tattered farm lad, sixteen years of age,

Followed like Sancho at his master’s heel:

Up to the flaming battle-front he rode;

Flinging a stubborn “no” at those who’d send him

Back to learn war among the raw recruits,

He took his place before the astonished ranks

Of grenadiers, and faced the enemy’s fire.

Death swooped upon them, tearing long red lanes

Through their massed squadrons. His commander fell

Beside him. One by one his officers died.

Death placed him in command. The shattered troops

Of Beaujolais were wavering everywhere.

“Retreat!” the cry began. In smoke and fire,

Lamarck, with fourteen grenadiers, held on.

“This is the post assigned. This post we hold

Till Life or Death relieve us.”

Who assigned it?

Who summoned him thither? And when peace returned

Was it blind chance that garrisoned Lamarck

Among the radiant gardens of the south,

Dazzled him with their beauty, and then slipt

That volume of Chomel into his hand,

Traité des Plantes?

Was it blind accident,

Environment—O, mighty word that masks

The innumerable potencies of God,—

When his own comrade, in wild horse-play, wrenched

And crippled him in body, and he returned

Discharged to Paris, free to take up arms

In an immortal army? Was it chance

That lodged him there, despite his own desire,

So high above the streets that all he saw

Out of his window was the drifting clouds

Flowing and changing, drawing his lonely mind

In subtle ways to Nature’s pageantry,

And the great golden laws that governed all?

Was it blind chance that drew him out to watch

The sunset clouds o’er Mont Valérien,

Where the same power, for the same purpose, drew

Jean Jacques Rousseau? Flowers and the dying clouds

Drew them together, and mind from mind caught fire?

What universal Power through all and each

Was labouring to create when first they met

And talked and wondered, whether the forms of life

Through earth’s innumerable ages changed?

Were species constant? Let the rose run wild,

How swiftly it returns into the briar!

Transplant the southern wilding to the north

And it will change, to suit the harsher sky.

Nourish it in a garden,—you shall see

The trailer of the hedgerow stand upright,

And every blossom with a threefold crown.

Buffon, upon his hill-top at Montbard

In his red turret, among his flowers and birds,

Gazing through all his epochs of the world,

Had guessed at a long ancestry for man,

Too long for the upstart kings.

He could not prove it;

And the Sorbonne, with Genesis in its hand,

Had frowned upon his æons. In six days

God made the heaven and earth.

He had withdrawn,

Smiling as wise men smile at children’s talk;

And when Lamarck had visited him alone,

He smiled again, a little ironically.

“Six epochs of the world may mean six days;

But then, my friend, six days must also mean

Six epochs. Call it compromise, or peace.

They cannot claim the victory.

There are some

Think me too—orthodox. O, I know the whine

That fools will raise hereafter. Buffon quailed;

Why did not Buffon like our noble selves

Wear a vicarious halo of martyrdom?

Strange—that desire of small sadistic eyes

At ease on the shore to watch a shipwrecked man

Drowning. Lucretius praised that barbarous pleasure.

Mine is a subtler savagery. I prefer

To watch, from a little hill above their world,

The foes of science, floundering in the waves

Of their new compromise. Every crooked flash

Of irony lightening their dark skies to-day

Shows them more wickedly buffeted, in a sea

Of wilder contradictions.

I had no proof.

Time was not ripe. The scripture of the rocks

Must first be read more deeply. But the law

Pointed to one conclusion everywhere,

That forms of flesh and bone, in the long lapse

Of time, were plastic as the sculptor’s clay,

And born of earlier forms.

Under man’s eyes,

Had not the forms of bird and beast been changed

Into new species? Children of the wolf,

Greyhound and mastiff, in their several kinds,

Fawned on his children, slept upon his hearth.

The spaniel and the bloodhound owned one sire.

Man’s own selective artistry had shaped

New flowers, confirmed the morning glory’s crown,

And out of the wild briar evoked the rose.

Like a magician, in a few brief years,

He had changed the forms and colours of his birds.

He had whistled the wild pigeons from the rocks;

And by his choice, and nature’s own deep law,

Evoked the rustling fan-tails that displayed

Their splendours on his cottage roof, or bowed

Like courtiers on his lawn. The pouter swelled

A rainbow breast to please him. Tumblers played

Their tricks as for a king. The carrier flew

From the spy’s window, or the soldiers’ camp,

The schoolboy’s cage, the lover’s latticed heart,

And bore his messages over turbulent seas

And snow-capt mountains, with a sinewy wing

That raced the falcon, beating stroke for stroke.”

II
Lamarck, Lavoisier, and Ninety-three

So, seizing the pure fire from Buffon’s hand,

Lamarck pressed on, flinging all else aside,

To follow all those clues to his own end.

Ten years he spent among the flowers of France,

Unravelling, and more truly than Linné,

The natural orders of their tangled clans;

Then, in “six months of unremitting toil,”

As Cuvier subtly sneered, he wrote his book,

The Flore Française; compact, as Cuvier knew,

And did not care to say, with ten years’ thought.

But Buffon did not sneer. The great old man,

A king of men, enthroned there at Montbard,

Aided Lamarck as Jove might aid his son.

He sent the book to the king’s own printing press.

Daubenton wrote his foreword; and Rousseau

Had long prepared the way.

“Linné of France,”

The stream of praise through every salon flowed.

Une science à la mode, great Cuvier sneered.

Was it blind chance that crushed Lamarck again

Back to his lean-ribbed poverty?

Buffon died.

Lamarck, who had married in his prosperous hour,

Had five young mouths to feed. With ten long years

Of toil he had made the great Jardin du Roi

Illustrious through the world. As his reward

The ministers of the king now granted him

A keepership at one thousand francs a year;

And, over him, in Buffon’s place, they set

The exquisite dilettante, Bernardin

Saint Pierre, a delicate twitcher of silken strings.

Lamarck held grimly to the post assigned.

Under that glittering rose-pink world he heard

Titanic powers upsurging from the abyss.

Then, in the blood-red dawn of ninety-three,

The bright crust cracked. The furious lava rolled

Through Paris, and a thundercloud of doom

Pealed over thrones and peoples. Flash on flash,

Blind lightnings of the guillotine replied.

Blind throats around the headsman’s basket roared.

The slippery cobbles were greased with human blood.

The torch was at the gates of the Bastille.

Old towers, old creeds, old wrongs, at a Mænad shout,

Went up in smoke and flame. Earth’s dynasties

Rocked to their dark foundations. Tyrants died;

But in that madness of the human soul

They did not die alone. Innocence died;

And pity died; and those whose hands upheld

The torch of knowledge died in the bestial storm.

Lavoisier had escaped. They lured him back

Into the Terror’s hot red tiger-mouth,

Promising, “Face your trial with these your friends,

And all will be set free. If not, they die.”

He faced it, and returned. The guillotine

Flashed down on one and all.

Let the wide earth,

Still echoing its old wrath against the kings

And priests who exiled, stoned and burned and starved

The bearers of the fire, remember well

How the Republic in its red right hand

Held up Lavoisier’s head, and told mankind

In mockery, colder than the cynical snarl

Of Nero, “The Republic has no need

Of savants. Let the people’s will be done

On earth, and let the headless trunk of Truth

Be trampled down by numbers. Tread in the mire

All excellence and all skill. Daub your raw wounds

With dirt of the street; elect the sick to health.

It is the people’s will, and they shall live.

Nay, crown the eternal Power who rules by law

With this red cap of your capricious will,

And ye shall hear His everlasting voice

More clearly than ye heard it when He spoke

In stillness, through the souls of lonely men,

On starry heights. Lift up your heads and hear

His voice in the whirling multitude’s wild-beast roar,

Not these men, but Barabbas.”

Must the mind

Turn back to tyranny, then, and trust anew

To harnessed might? The listening soul still heard

A more imperative call. Though Evil wore

A myriad masks and reigned as wickedly

In peoples as in kings, Truth, Truth alone,

Whether upheld by many or by few,

Wore the one absolute crown. Though Pilate flung

His murderous jest at Truth—the law remained

That answered his dark question; man’s one clue,

The law that all true seekers after Truth

Hold in their hands; the law, a golden thread

That, loyally followed, leads them to full light,

Each by his own dark way, till all the world

Is knit together in harmony that sets free.

Bridge-builders of the universe, they fling

Their firm and shining roads from star to star,

From earth to heaven. At his appointed task,

Lamarck held grimly on (as once he gripped

His wavering grenadiers) till Life or Death

Relieved him. But he knew his cause at last.

Jardin du Roi became Jardin des Plantes;

And the red tumult surging round his walls

Died to a whisper of leaves.

His mind groped back,

Back through the inconceivable ages now,

To terrible revolutions of the globe,

Huge catastrophic rendings of the hills,

Red floods of lava; cataracts of fire;

Monstrous upheavals of the nethermost deep;

Whereby as Cuvier painted them, in hues

Of blind disaster, all the hosts of life

In each æonian period, like a swarm

Of ants beneath the wheels of Juggernaut,

Were utterly abolished.

Did God create

After each earth-disaster, then, new hosts

Of life to range her mountains and her seas;

New forms, new patterns, fresh from His careless Hand,

Yet all so closely akin to those destroyed?

Or did this life-stream, from one fountain-head,

Through the long changes of unnumbered years

Flow on, unbroken, slowly branching out

Into new beauty, as a river winds

Into new channels? One, singing through the hills,

Mirrors the hanging precipice and the pine;

And one through level meadows curves away,

Turns a dark wheel, or foams along a weir,

Then, in a pool of shadow, drowns the moon.

III
An English Interlude: Erasmus Darwin

Already in England, bearing the same fire,

A far companion whom he never knew

Had long been moving on the same dark quest,

But through what quiet secluded walks of peace.

Out of the mist emerged the little City

Of Lichfield, clustering round its Minster Pool

That, like a fragment of the sky on earth,

Reflected its two bridges, gnarled old trees,

Half-timbered walls; a bare-legged child at play

Upon its brink; two clouds like floating swans,

Two swans like small white clouds; a boy that rode

A big brown cart-horse lazily jingling by;

And the cathedral, like a three-spired crown,

Set on its northern bank.

Then, from the west,

Above it, walled away from the steep street,

I saw Erasmus Darwin’s bluff square house.

Along its front, above the five stone steps

That climbed to its high door, strange vines and fronds

Made a green jungle in their dim prison of glass.

Behind, its windows overlooked a close

Of rambling mellow roofs, and coldly stared

At the cathedral’s three foreshortened spires,

Which seemed to draw together, as though in doubt

Of what lay hidden in those bleak staring eyes.

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!

And, while he stood in silence by her grave,

Hearing the ropes creak as they lowered her down

Into the cold dark hollow, while he breathed

The smell of the moist earth, those calm strange words—

I am the Resurrection and the Life,

Echoed and echoed through his lonely mind,

Only to deepen his agony of farewell

Into Eternity.

Dumbly there he strove

To understand how accents so divine,

In words so worthy of eternal power,

So postulant of it in their calm majesty,

Could breathe through mortal lips.

Madman or God,

Who else could say them?

God it could not be,

If in his mortal blindness he saw clear;

And yet, and yet, could madness wring the heart

Thus, thus, and thus, for nineteen hundred years?

Would that she knew, would God that she knew now,

How much we loved her!

The blind world, still ruled

By shams, and following in hypnotic flocks

The sheep-bell of an hour, still thought of him

“The Man of Science” as less or more than man,

Coldly aloof from love and grief and pain;

Held that he knew far more, and felt far less

Than other men, and, even while it praised

The babblers for their reticence and their strength,

The shallow for their depth, the blind for sight,

The rattling weathercocks for their love of truth,

Ere long would brand, as an irreverent fool,

This great dumb simple man, with his bowed head.

Could the throng see that drama, as I saw it—

I, Shadow-of-a-Leaf,—could the blind throng discern

The true gigantic drama of those hours

Among the quiet hills as, one by one,

His facts fell into place; their broken edges

Joined, like the fragments of a vast mosaic,

And, slowly, the new picture of the world,

Emerging in majestic pageantry

Out of the primal dark, before him grew;

Grew by its own inevitable law;

Grew, and earth’s ancient fantasies dwindled down;

The stately fabric of the old creation

Crumbled away; while man, proud demigod,

Stripped of all arrogance now, priest, beggar, king,

Captive and conqueror, all must own alike

Their ancient lineage. Kin to the dumb beasts

By the red life that flowed through all their veins

From hearts of the same shape, beating all as one

In man and brute; kin, by those kindred forms

Of flesh and bone, with eyes and ears and mouths

That saw and heard and hungered like his own,

His mother Earth reclaimed him.

Back and back,

He traced them, till the last faint clue died out

In lifeless earth and sea.

I watched him striving

To follow further, bending his great brows

Over the intense lens....

Far off, I heard

The murmur of human life, laughter and weeping;

Heard the choked sobbings by a million graves,

And saw a million faces, wrung with grief,

Lifted forlornly to the Inscrutable Power.

I saw him raise his head. I heard his thought

As others hear a whisper—Surely this

Implies design!

And worlds on aching worlds

Of dying hope were wrapped in those four words.

He stared before him, wellnigh overwhelmed

For one brief moment, with instinctive awe

Of Something that ... determined every force

Directed every atom....

Then, in a flash,

The indwelling vision vanished at the voice

Of his own blindfold reason. For what mind

Could so unravel the complicated threads,

The causes that are caused by the effects

Of other causes, intricately involved,

Woven and interwoven, in endless mazes,

Wandering through infinite time, infinite space,

And yet, an ordered and mysterious whole,

Before whose very being all mortal power

Must abdicate its sovereignty?

A dog

Might sooner hope to leap beyond the mind

Of Newton than a man might hope to grasp

Even in this little whirl of earth and sun

The Scheme of the All-determining Absolute.

And yet—if that—the All-moving, were the One

Reality, and sustained and made all forms,

Then, by the self-same power in man himself

Whatever was real in man might understand

That same Reality, being one substance with it,

One substance with the essential Soul of all,—

Might understand, as children understand,

Even in ignorance, those who love them best;

Might recognise, as through their innocent eyes,

The highest, which is Love, though all the worlds

Of lesser knowledge passed unheeded by.

What meant those moments else? Moments that came

And went on wings, wild as these wings of mine,

The wings of Shadow-of-a-Leaf,

Quick with a light that never could be reached

By toiling up the mountain-sides of thought;

Consummate meanings that were never found

By adding units; moments of strange awe

When that majestic sequence of events

We call the cosmos, from its wheeling atoms

Up to its wheeling suns, all spoke one Power,

One Presence, One Unknowable, and One Known?

In the beginning God made heaven and earth:

He, too, believed it, once....

II
THE VOYAGE

As if the wings

Of Shadow-of-a-Leaf had borne me through the West

So that the sunset changed into the dawn,

I saw him in his youth.

The large salt wind,

The creak of cordage, the wild swash of waves

Were round him as he paced the clear white deck,

An odd loose-tweeded sojourner, in a world

Of uniforms and guns.

The Beagle plunged

Westward, upon the road that Drake had sailed;

But this new voyager, on a longer quest,

Sailed on a stranger sea; and, though I heard

His ringing laugh, he seemed to live apart

In his own mind, from all who moved around him.

I saw him while the Beagle basked at anchor

Under West Indian palms. He lounged there, tanned

With sun; tall, lankier in his cool white drill;

The big slouched straw pulled down to shade his eyes.

The stirring wharf was one bright haze of colour;

Kaleidoscopic flakes, orange and green,

Blood-red and opal, glancing to and fro,

Through purple shadows. The warm air smelt of fruit.

He leaned his elbows on the butt of a gun

And listened, while a red-faced officer, breathing

Faint whiffs of rum, expounded lazily,

With loosely stumbling tongue, the cynic’s code

His easy rule of life, belying the creed

That both professed.

And, in one flash, I caught

A glimpse of something deeper, missed by both,—

The subtle touch of the Master-Ironist

Unfolding his world-drama, point by point,

In every sight and sound and word and thought,

Packed with significance.

Out of its myriad scenes

All moving swiftly on, unguessed by man,

To close in one great climax of clear light,

This vivid moment flashed.

The cynic ceased;

And Darwin, slowly knitting his puzzled brows,

Answered, “But it is wrong!”

“Wrong?” chuckled the other. “Why should it be wrong?”

And Darwin, Darwin,—he that was to grasp

The crumbling pillars of their infidel Temple

And bring them headlong down to the honest earth,

Answered again, naïvely as a child,

“Does not the Bible say so?”

A broad grin

Wreathed the red face that stared into his own;

And, later, when the wardroom heard the jest,

The same wide grin from Christian mouth to mouth

Spread like the ripples on a single pool

Quietly enough! They liked him. They’d not hurt him!

And Darwin, strange, observant, simple soul,

Saw clearly enough; had eyes behind his back

For every smile; though in his big slow mind

He now revolved a thought that greatly puzzled him,

A thought that, in their light sophistication,

These humorists had not guessed.

Once, in his cabin,

His red-faced cynic had picked up a book

By one whose life was like a constant light

On the high altar of Truth.

He had read a page,

Then flung it down, with a contemptuous oath,

Muttering, “These damned atheists! Why d’you read them?”

Could pagan minds be stirred, then, to such wrath

Because the man they called an “atheist” smiled

At dates assigned by bland ecclesiasts

To God for His creation?

Man was made

On March the ninth, at ten o’clock in the morning

(A Tuesday), just six thousand years ago:

A legend of a somewhat different cast

From that deep music of the first great phrase

In Genesis. The strange irony here struck home.

For Darwin, here, was with the soul-bowed throng

Of prophets, while the ecclesiasts blandly toyed

With little calendars, which his “atheist’s book,”

In its irreverence, whispered quite away;

Whispered (for all such atheists bend their heads

Doubtless in shame) that, in the Book of Earth,

Six thousand years were but as yesterday,

A flying cloud, a shadow, a breaking wave.

Million of years were written upon the rocks

That told its history. To upheave one range

Of mountains, out of the sea that had submerged

So many a continent, ere mankind was born,

The harnessed forces, governed all by law,

Had laboured, dragging down and building up,

Through distances of Time, unthinkable

As those of starry space.

It dared to say

(This book so empty of mystery and awe!)

That, searching the dark scripture of the rocks,

It found therein no sign of a beginning,

No prospect of an end.

Strange that the Truth,

Whether upheld by the pure law within

Or by the power of reason, thus dismayed

These worshippers of a little man-made code.

Alone there in his cabin, with the books

Of Humboldt, Lyell, Herschel, spread before him.

He made his great decision.

If the realm

Beyond the bounds of human knowledge gave

So large a sanctuary to mortal lies,

Henceforth his Bible should be one inscribed

Directly with the law—the Book of Earth.

III
THE TESTIMONY OF THE ROCKS

I saw him climbing like a small dark speck

—Fraught with what vast significance to the world—

Among the snow-capt Andes, a dark point

Of travelling thought, alone upon the heights,

To watch the terrible craters as they breathed

Their smouldering wrath against the sky.

I saw him,

Pausing above Portillo’s pass to hear

The sea-like tumult, where brown torrents rolled

Innumerable thousands of rough stones,

Jarring together, and hurrying all one way.

He stood there, spellbound, listening to the voice

Of Time itself, the moments hurrying by

For ever irrecoverably. I heard

His very thought. The stones were on their way

To the ocean that had made them; every note

In their wild music was a prophecy

Of continents unborn.

When he had seen

Those continents in embryo, beds of sand

And shingle, cumulant on the coastwise plains,

Thousands of feet in thickness, he had doubted

Whether the river of time itself could grind

And pile such masses there. But when he heard

The mountain-torrents rattling, he recalled

How races had been born and passed away,

And night and day, through years unreckonable,

These grinding stones had never ceased to roll

On their steep course. Not even the Cordilleras,

Had they been ribbed with adamant, could withstand

That slow sure waste. Even those majestic heights

Would vanish. Nothing—not the wind that blows

Was more unstable than the crust of the earth.

He landed at Valdivia, on the day

When the great earthquake shuddered through the hills

From Valparaiso, southward to Cape Horn.

I saw him wandering through a ruined city

Of Paraguay, and measuring on the coast

The upheaval of new land, discovering rocks

Ten feet above high-water, rocks with shells

For which the dark-eyed panic-stricken throngs

Had dived at ebb, a few short days ago.

I saw him—strange discoverer—as he sailed

Through isles, not only uncharted, but newborn,

Isles newly arisen and glistening in the sun,

And atolls where he thought an older height

Had sunk below the smooth Pacific sea.

He explored the Pampas; and before him passed

The centuries that had made them; the great streams

Gathering the red earth at their estuaries

In soft rich deltas, till new plains of loam

Over the Banda granite slowly spread,

And seeds took root and mightier forests towered,

Forests that human foot could never tread,

Forests that human eye could never see;

But by the all-conquering human mind at last

Trodden and seen, waving their leaves in air

As at an incantation,

And filled once more with monstrous forms of life.

He found their monstrous bones embedded there,

And, as he found them, all those dry bones lived.

I stole beside him in the dark, and heard,

In the unfathomable forest deeps, the crash

Of distant boughs, a wild and lonely sound,

Where Megatherium, the gigantic Sloth

Whose thigh was thrice an elephant’s in girth,

Rose, blindly groping, and with armoured hands

Tore down the trees to reach their tender crests

And strip them of their more delicious green.

I saw him pondering on the secret bond

Between the living creatures that he found

On the main coast, and those on lonely isles;

Forms that diverged, and yet were closely akin.

One key, one only, unlocked the mystery there.

Unless God made, for every separate isle

As it arose, new tribes of plants, birds, beasts,

In variant images of the tribes He set

Upon their nearest continent, grading all

By time, and place, and distance from the shore,

The bond between them was the bond of blood.

All, all had branched from one original tree.

I saw him off the Patagonian coast

Staring at something stranger than a dream.

There, on a rocky point above the ship

With its world-voyaging thoughts, he first beheld

Primeval man. There, clustering on the crags,

Backed by their echoing forests of dark beech,

The naked savages yelled at the white sails,

Like wolves that bay the moon. They tossed their arms

Wildly through their long manes of streaming hair,

Like troubled spirits from an alien world.

Whence had they risen? From what ancestral night?

What bond of blood was there? What dreadful Power

Begot them—fallen or risen—from heaven or hell?

I saw him hunting everywhere for light

On life’s dark mystery; gathering everywhere

Armies of fact, that pointed all one way,

And yet—what vera causa could he find

In blindfold Nature?

Even had he found it,

What æons would be needed! Earth was old;

But could the unresting loom of infinite time

Weave this wild miracle, or evolve one nerve

Of all this intricate network in the brain,

This exquisite machine that looked through heaven,

Revelled in colours of a sunset sky,

Or met love’s eyes on earth?

Everywhere, now,

He found new clues that led him all one way.

And, everywhere, in the record of the rocks,

Time and to spare for all that Time could do,

But not his vera causa.

Earth grew strange.

Even in the ghostly gleam that told the watch

One daybreak that the ship was nearing home

He saw those endless distances again....

He saw through mist, over the struggling waves

That run between the white-chalk cliffs of France

And England, sundered coasts that once were joined

And clothed with one wide forest.

The deep sea

Had made the strange white body of that broad land,

Beautifully establishing it on death,

Building it, inch by inch, through endless years

Out of innumerable little gleaming bones,

The midget skeletons of the twinkling tribes

That swarmed above in the more lucid green

Ten thousand fathoms nearer to the sun.

There they lived out their gleam of life and died,

Then slowly drifted down into the dark,

And spread in layers upon the cold sea-bed

The invisible grains and flakes that were their bones.

Layer on layer of flakes and grains of lime,

Where life could never build, they built it up

By their incessant death. Though but an inch

In every thousand years, they built it up,

Inch upon inch, age after endless age;

And the dark weight of the incumbent Deep

Compressed them (Power determined by what Will?)

Out of the night that dim creation rose

The seas withdrew. The bright new land appeared.

Then Gaul and Albion, nameless yet, were one;

And the wind brought a myriad wingèd seeds,

And the birds carried them, and the forests grew,

And through their tangled ways the tall elk roared.

But sun and frost and rain, the grinding streams

And rhythmic tides (the tools of what dread Hand?)

Still laboured on; till, after many a change,

The great moon-harnessed energies of the sea

Came swinging back, the way of the southwest wind,

And, æon after æon, hammering there,

Rechannelled through that land their shining way.

There all those little bones now greet the sun

In gleaming cliffs of chalk; and, in their chines

The chattering jackdaw builds, while overhead

On the soft mantle of turf the violet wakes

In March, and young-eyed lovers look for Spring.

What of the Cause? O, no more rounded creeds

Framed in a realm where no man could refute them!

Honesty, honesty, honesty, first of all.

And so he turned upon the world around him,

The same grave eyes of deep simplicity

With which he had faced his pagan-christian friends

And quoted them their Bible....

Slowly he marshalled his worldwide hosts of fact,

Legions new-found, or first assembled now,

In their due order. Lyell had not dared

To tell the truth he knew. He found in earth

The records of its vanished worlds of life,

Each with its own strange forms, in its own age,

Sealed in its own rock-system.

In the first,

The rocks congealed from fire, no sign of life;

And, through the rest, in order as they were made,

From oldest up to youngest, first the signs

Of life’s first gropings; then, in gathering power,

Strange fishes, lizards, birds, and uncouth beasts,

Worlds of strange life, but all in ordered grades,

World over world, each tombed in its own age

Or merging into the next with subtle changes,

Delicate modulations of one form,

(Urged by what force? Impelled by what dark power?)

Progressing upward, into subtler forms

Through all the buried strata, till there came

Forms that still live, still fight for life on earth,

Tiger and wolf and ape; and, last of all,

The form of man; the child of yesterday.

Of yesterday! For none had ever found

Among the myriad forms of older worlds,

Locked in those older rocks through tracts of time

Out-spanning thought, one vestige of mankind.

There was no human footprint on the shores

Whose old compacted sand, now turned to stone,

Still showed the ripples where a summer sea

Once whispered, ere the mastodon was born.

There were the pitted marks, all driven one way,

That showed how raindrops fell, and the west wind blew.

There on the naked stone remained the tracks

Where first the sea-beasts crawled out of the sea,

A few salt yards upon the long dark trail

That led through æons to the tidal roar

Of lighted cities and this world of tears.

The shell, the fern, the bird’s foot, the beast’s claw,

Had left their myriad signs. Their forms remained,

Their delicate whorls, their branching fronds, their bones,

Age after age, like jewels in the rocks;

But, till the dawning of an age so late,

It seemed like yesterday, no sign, no trace,

No relic of mankind!

Then, in that age

Among the skulls, made equal in the grave,

Of ape and wolf, last of them all, looked up

That naked shrine with its receding brows,

And its two sightless holes, the skull of man.

Round it, his tools and weapons, the chipped flints,

The first beginnings of his fight for power,

The first results of his first groping thought

Proclaimed his birth, the youngest child of time.

Born, and not made? Born—of what lesser life?

Was man so arrogant that he could disdain

The words he used so glibly of his God—

Born, and not made?

Could Lyell, who believed

That, in the world around us, we should find

The self-same causes and the self-same laws

To-day as yesterday; and throughout all time;

And that the Power behind all changes works

By law alone; law that includes all heights,

All depths, of reason, harmony, and love;

Could Lyell hold that all those realms of life,

Each sealed apart in its own separate age,

With its own separate species, had been called

Suddenly, by a special Act of God,

Out of the void and formless? Could he think

Even that mankind, this last emergent form,

After so many æons of ordered law,

Was by miraculous Hands in one wild hour,

Suddenly kneaded out of the formless clay?

And was the formless clay more noble, then,

Than this that breathed, this that had eyes to see,

This whose dark heart could beat, this that could die?

No! Lyell knew that this wild house of flesh

Was never made by hands, not even those Hands;

And that to think so were to discrown God,

And not to crown Him, as the blind believed.

The miracle was a vaster than they knew.

The law by which He worked was all unknown;

Subtler than music, quieter than light,

The mighty process that through countless

changes,

Delicate grades and tones and semi-tones,

Out of the formless slowly brought forth

forms,

Lifeless as crystals, or translucent globes

Drifting in water; till, through endless years,

Out of their myriad changes, one or two

More subtle in combination, at the touch

Of light began to move, began to attract

Substances that could feed them; blindly at

first;

But as an artist, with all heaven for prize,

Pores over every syllable, tests each thread

Of his most tenuous thought, the moving

Power

Spent endless æons of that which men call

Time,

To form one floating tendril that could close

On what it touched.

Who whispered in his ear

That fleeting thought?

We must suppose a Power

Intently watching—through all the universe—

Each slightest variant, seizing on the best,

Selecting them, as men by conscious choice

In their small realm selected and reshaped

Their birds and flowers.

We must suppose a Power

In that immense night-cleaving pageantry

Which men call Nature, a selective Power,

Choosing through æons as men choose through years.

Many are called, few chosen, quietly breathed

Shadow-of-a-Leaf, in exquisite undertone

One phrase of the secret music....

He did not hear.

Lamarck—all too impatiently he flung

Lamarck aside; forgetting how in days

When the dark Book of Earth was darker yet

Lamarck had spelled gigantic secrets out,

And left an easier task for the age to come;

Forgetting more than this; for Darwin’s mind,

Working at ease in Nature, lost its way

In history, and the thoughts of other men.

For him Lamarck had failed, and he misread

His own forerunner’s mind. Blindfold desires

Had never shaped a wing. The grapevine’s need

To cling and climb could thrust no tendrils out.

The environing snows of Greenland could not cloak

Its little foxes with their whiter fur.

Nor could the wing-shut butterfly’s inner will

Mimic the shrivelled leaf on the withered bough

So cunningly that the bird might perch beside it

And never see its prey.

Was it blind chance

That flashed his own great fragment of the truth

Into his mind? What vera causa, then,

What leap of Nature brought that truth to birth,

Illumining all the world?

It flashed upon him

As at a sudden contact of two wires

The current flashes through; or, when through space,

A meteorite for endless ages rolls

In darkness, and its world of night appears

Unchangeable for ever, till, all at once,

It plunges into a soft resisting sea

Of planet-girdling air, and burns with heat,

And bursts into a blaze, while far below,

Two lovers, in a world beyond its ken,

Look from a little window into the night

And see a falling star.

By such wild light,

An image of his own ambiguous “chance,”

Which was not “chance,” but governed by a law

Unknown, too vast for men to comprehend

(Too vast for any to comprehend but One,

Breathed Shadow-of-a-Leaf, who in each part discerns

Its harmony with the whole), at last the clue

Flashed on him....

In the strange ironical scheme

Wherein he moved, of the Master-Dramatist,

It was his own ambiguous “chance” that slipt

A book of Malthus into his drowsy hand

And drew his drowsy eyes down to that law

Of struggling men and nations.

Was it “chance”

That in this intricate torch-race tossed him there

Light from one struggling on an alien track

And yet not alien, since all roads to truth

Meet in one goal at last?

Was it blind chance

That even in this triumphant flash prepared

The downfall of his human pride, and slipt

The self-same volume into another hand;

And, in the lonely islands of Malay,

Drew Wallace to the self-same page, and said

—Though only Shadow-of-a-Leaf could hear that voice,—

Whose is the kingdom, whose the glory and power?

O, exquisite irony of the Master, there

Unseen by both, their generous rivalry

Evolved, perfected, the new thought for man;

And, over both, and all their thoughts, a Power

Intently watching, made of their struggle for truth

An image of the law that they illumed.

So all that wasting of a myriad seeds

In Nature’s wild profusion was not waste,

Not even such waste as drives the flying grains

Under the sculptor’s chisel, but was itself

A cause of that unending struggle of life

Through which all life ascends.

The conqueror there

Was chosen by laws inexorably precise,

As though to infinite Reason infinite Art

Were wedded, and had found in infinite “chance”

Full scope for their consummate certainties,—

Choice and caprice, freedom and law in one.

Each slightest variant, in a myriad ways,

That armed or shielded or could help its kind,

Would lead to a new triumph; would reveal,

In varying, subtler ways of varying still;

New strokes of that divinest “chance” of all

Which poet and sculptor count as unforeseen,

And unforeseeable; yet, when once achieved,

They recognise as crowning law with law,

And witnessing to infinitudes of Power

In that creative Will which shapes the world.

O, in that widening splendour of the mind,

Blinder than Buffon, blinder than Lamarck,

His eyes amazed with all that leapt to light,

Dazed with a myriad details, lost the whole.

He saw the law whereby the few were chosen

From forms already at variance. Back and back

He traced his law, and every step was true.

And yet his vera causa was no Cause,

For it determined nothing. It revealed,

In part, how subtler variants had arisen

From earliest simpler variants, but no more.

...

Subtler than music, quieter than light,

The Power that wrought those changes; and the last

Were all implied and folded in the first,

As the gnarled oak-tree with its thousand boughs

Writhing to heaven and striking its grim roots

Like monstrous talons into the mountain’s heart

Is pent in one smooth acorn. So each life,

In little, retold the tale; each separate man

Was, in himself, the world’s epitome,

A microcosm, wherein who runs may read

The history of the whole; from the first seed

Enclosed in the blind womb, until life wake

Through moons or æons of embryonic change

To human thought and love, and those desires

Which still grope upward, into the unknown realms

As far beyond us now as Europe lay

From the first life that crawled out of the sea.

There lies our hope; but O, the endless way!

And the lost road of knowledge, endless, too!

That infinite hope was not for him. One life

Hardly sufficed for his appointed task,

To find on earth his clues to the unknown law,

Out-miracling all miracles had he known,

Whereby this lifeless earth, so clearly seen

Across the abyss of time, this lifeless earth

Washed by a lifeless ocean, by no power

But that which moves within the things we see,

Swept the blind rocks into the cities of men,

With great cathedrals towering to the sky,

And little ant-like swarms in their dark aisles

Kneeling to that Unknowable.

His to trace

The way by inches, never to see the whole,

Never to grasp the miracle in the law,

And wrestling with it, to be written by light

As by an Angel’s finger in the dark.

Could he have stood on that first lifeless coast

With Shadow-of-a-Leaf, and seen that lifeless brine,

Rocks where no mollusc clung, nor seaweed grew;

Could he have heard a whisper,—Only wait.

Be patient. On one sure and certain day,

Out of the natural changes of these rocks

And seas, at last, a great ship will go by;

Cities will dusk that heaven; and you shall see

Two lovers pass, reading one printed book,

The Paradiso....

Would he have been so sure

That Nature had no miracles in her heart

More inconceivably shattering to the mind

Than madness ever dreamed? For this, this, this,

Had happened, though the part obscured the whole;

And his own labour, in a myriad ways,

Endlessly linking part to part, had lost

The vera causa that Lamarck had known,

The one determining Cause that moved through all.

IV
THE PROTAGONISTS

The mist cleared. As an airman flying, I saw,

Between the quiet wings of Shadow-of-a-Leaf,

Far down, a coiling glitter of willowy streams,

Then grey remembered battlements that enclosed

Gardens, like nests of nightingales; a bridge;

An airy tower; a shadowy dome; the High;

St Mary’s delicate spire.

A sound of bells

Rose like a spray of melody from the far

Diminished fountains of the City of Youth.

I heard and almost wept.

The walls grew large

And soared to meet me. As the patterned streets

Break into new dimensions, passing from sight

While the airman glides and circles down, they rose,

And the outer City, vanishing, revealed

The secret life within. At once I passed

Through walls of stone on those ethereal wings;

And, as an unseen spirit might survey

A crowded theatre from above, I saw

A packed assembly, gazing, hushed and still,

At certain famous leaders of that hour

On their raised daïs. Henslow in the midst,

Their president, gentle, tolerant, reverent, kind,

Darwin’s old tutor, scientist and half-saint;

Owen beside him, crabbèd as John Knox,

And dry as his dead bones; bland Wilberforce,

The great smooth Bishop of Oxford, pledged and primed

To make an end of Darwin, once for all.

Not far away, a little in shadow, sat

A strange young man, tall, slight, with keen dark eyes,

Who might, in the irresponsible way of youth,

Defend an absent thinker. Let him beware.

There was a balance of power in science, too,

Which would resent disturbance. He’d be crushed

By sheer weight of authority, then set,

Duly submissive, in his proper place.

His name was Huxley.

A square close-crowded room,

It held, in little, a concentrated world,

Imaging, on a microcosmic stage,

The doubts, the fears, the jealousies, and dull hates

That now beset one lonely soul at Down;

But imaging, also, dauntless love of truth

In two or three, the bearers of the fire.

Henslow, subdued, with twenty reticent words

That, in their mere formality, seemed aware

Of silent dark momentous currents flowing

Under the trivial ripple of use and wont,

Called on Daubeny, first, for his discourse

On Sex in Flowers, and their descent through time.

Daubeny, glancing over his glasses, bowed

And twinkled a wise physician’s rosy smile,

As one of his many parts; an all-round man,

Sound Latinist and an excellent judge of wine,

Humanist and geologist, who had tracked

Guettard through all his craters in Auvergne,

And, afterwards, with a map in his right hand,

And Ovid’s ‘Ars Amoris’ in his left,

Traced the volcanic chains through Hungary,

Italy, Transylvania, and returned

To Oxford, as her botanist at the last,

With silvery hair, but otherwise unchanged,

Oxford in bloom and Oxford to the core.

Swimming serene in academic air,

With open mind and non-committal phrase

He proved he knew how little all men know;

And whoso kept that little to himself

Could never be caught tripping.

Then he smiled,

And so remained the wisest of them all.

For half an hour the sexes of the flowers

Danced from his learned discourse, through the minds

Of half his feminine hearers, like a troop

Of Bacchanals, blowing kisses.

In the crowd

I saw, at the whimsical chuckle of Shadow-of-a-Leaf,

The large-eyed spinster with the small pursed mouth,

Eliza Pym of Woodstock, who desired

To know about the wild flowers that she drew

In delicate water-colours for her friends.

She sat bolt upright, innocently amazed

And vaguely trepidant in her hooped green gown.

What? Even the flowers? How startling was the sound

Of pistil! Awed, intent, she caught at clues;

Meticulously quivering at the thought

Of bees; and blushing deeply when he spoke

In baritone of male virtue in the rose.

Through all, the evasive academic phrase,

Putting out vaguely sensitive tentacles

That instantly withdrew from what they touched,

Implied that he could view, quite unperturbed,

All theories, and remain detached, aloft

Among the gods, in philosophic calm;

Nay, by his critical logic was endowed

With something loftier.

What were gods to him,

Who, being ephemeral, mortal, born to die,

Could, over the port of Corpus and All Souls

Mellowed in classic cellars, quiz the powers

That doomed him, as the aristocrat of thought

Looks through ironical lorgnettes at the might

Of Demos round his tumbril. They lived on,

Wasting their nectar, wrecking worlds on worlds.

He had risen, at least, superior to all that.

He held it somewhat barbarous, vulgar, crude

To wallow in such profusion as the gods.

All this implied, not spoken; for he found

His final causes in his dry pressed flowers;

Proved that he knew—none better—all the tribe

Who had dragged a net of Latin through the fields;

Proved that some flowers, at least, had never changed

Through many centuries. The black-seeded poppy

Was known to Homer. He rolled out the lines.

Almonds, the bitter-kernelled and the sweet,

Were tasted by the prophets; and he found

White-seeded sesamum, in the night of time,

Among the old Egyptians....

He showed that, while his library was vast,

Fragrant with leather, crested, tooled, and gilt,

He had closed the Book of Nature, and, on the whole,

Despite his open mind, dismissed the views

Of this—er—new philosopher, with a smile

That, don-wise, almost seemed to ask aloud,

“Who is he, after all?” Not one of us.

Why weigh his facts, then, further, since we hold

The official seals of truth in this our time.

Such men are always wrong. They come and go.

The breeze would soon blow over.

All this implied,

Not spoken, in that small dry steady smile,

Doctor Daubeny gathered up his tails

And made one definite and emphatic point

By sitting down, while some eight hundred hands

Acclaimed his perfect don-hood.

Henslow rose,

A little nervously. Had much pleasure, though....

And turned to Mr. Huxley. Would he speak?

A whisper passed, a queer new stillness gripped

The expectant crowd. The clock ticked audibly

Not yet, not yet! A sense of change at hand

Stole through the silence, like the first cool breath

That, over a great ship’s company at night,

Steals through the port-holes from the open sea.

Then, with sure foresight, seeing the clash to come,

The strange young man with the determined mouth

And quick dark eyes rose grimly, and flung down

A single sentence, like a gyve of steel

Wrenched from the wrists to set the strong hands free

For whatsoever need might rise, if clock

And Zeitgeist changed their quiet Not Yet to Now.

“A general audience, sir, where sentiment

May interfere, unduly interfere,

With intellect”—as a thin steel wire drawn tight

By an iron winch, the hush grew tense and rang

Low, hard, clear, cold—“is not a fitting place

For this discussion.”

Silence, and the clock,

Two great allies, the surest of them all,

Dead silence, and the voice Not Yet, Not Yet,

A cough, the creak of the chair as he sat down,

A shuffle of feet, the chairman’s baffled face,

Then little indignant mutterings round the hall,

Turning to gasps of mockery. Insolence?—no,—

Sheer weakness, full retreat!

The Bishop raised

His eye-brows, looked at the dense disflattered crowds,

And had no further fear. The battle was won.

Victory, of the only kind he knew,

Was in his hands. Retreat must now be turned

Into full rout. He glanced at Owen,—met

His little sardonic smile with a wise nod,

As if to say, “Ah, just as we foresaw.”

Excited clerics caught the flying hint

And whispered, eyes agog—“You noticed that?

He’s a great man, the Bishop? What a brow!

And Owen, too. Of course, they know; they know;

And understand each other, thick as thieves.”

Then Owen rose; waved Huxley’s empty excuse

Remorselessly aside; and plunged right on,

Declaring there were facts, whereby the crowd

Could very fitly judge.

The crowd’s own feet

Tapped a benign applause.

Then came the facts,

Facts from a realm that Huxley had made his own.

The brain of the gorilla—some one turned

A faint hysterical laugh into a sneeze—

Linked it more closely to the lowest groups

Of Quadrumana.

“Quadru—what-did-he-say?”

Whispered Miss Pym unconsciously to herself,

“Mana, four-handed,” clerical whiskers breathed,

With Evangelical titillance in her ear,

“Apes, monkeys, all the things that climb up trees.

Says the gorilla’s more like them than us.”

“Thank you.” Eliza Pym inclined her head

A little stiffly.

Had the world gone mad?

Was some one in the background trying to find

A pedigree for mankind among the brutes?

Absurd, of course, and yet—one must confess

How like they were in some things. Unto each

A mouth, a nose, two eyes, flesh, blood, and bones

Of the same pattern.

Comic enough, and weird;

But what became of Genesis, then, and God?

If all these whiskered men but one or two

So utterly disbelieved it, why discuss

Degrees of kinship? Surely the gulf was fixed

Wide as the severance between heaven and hell.

Then, in one dreadful gleam, she seemed to see

The rows of whiskered listeners, darkly perched,

Herself among them, on long swaying boughs,

Mesmerised, and all dumbly staring down

With horrible fascination at great eyes,

Green moons of cruelty, steadily smouldering,

In depths that—smelt of tigers; or the salts

Unstoppered by the vicar’s wife in front.

Smile at Eliza Pym with Shadow-of-a-Leaf;

But only if your inward sight can see

Her memories, too—a child’s uplifted face,

The clean white cot, the fluttering nursery fire;

Old days, old faces, teaching her those lines

From Blake, about a Lamb. Yet that—why that

Might be the clue they lacked in all this talk

Of our dumb kinsfolk. If she could but speak

And—hint it! Why don’t Bishops think of things

Like that, she wondered.

Owen resumed his chair

With loud applause.

That grim young man again,

Huxley, was on his feet, his dark eyes lit

With thrice the vital power of all the rest.

In one cool sentence, like a shining lance,

He touched the centre of his opponent’s shield,

And ended all the shuffling, all the doubts

Of where he stood, how far he dared to go,

If truth required it. He could not accept

Those facts from any authority; gave direct

Unqualified contradiction to those facts;

And pledged himself to justify this course,

Unusual as it seemed perhaps—elsewhere.

“Elsewhere,” and as he said it, came a gleam

Into his face, reflected from the heights

Where a tribunal sits whose judgment holds

Not for the fleeting moment, but all time.

“Elsewhere”—the Bishop smiled. He had not caught

That gleam. “Elsewhere” was only another sign

Of weakness, even timidity perhaps,

And certainly retreat, not from the truth

(He felt so sure of that) but from the might

And deep resources of the established powers

Whose influence ruled the world.

“Elsewhere” for him

Meant Saturday, and here. The lists were set,

The battle joined, and the great issue plain,—

Whether the human race came straight from God,

Or traced its dark descent back to the brute,

And left his creed a wreck of hollow towers,

The haunt of bats and owls. His time to strike

Would come on Saturday. Pleadings of “elsewhere”

Would not avail. He set his jaw. Please God,

He meant to drive this victory crashing home,

And make an end of Darwin once for all.

So closed the first strange scene.

The rumour spread

Everywhere, of the Bishop’s grim intent.

Saturday’s crowd, an hour before its time

Choked all the doors, and crammed the long west hall.

Black-coated members of all shades of thought,

Knowledge and doubt and bigotry, crushed their sides

In chair-packed rows together (Eliza Pym

Among them, with her startled innocent eyes).

A bevy of undergraduates at the back,

Quietly thoughtful, held their watching brief

For youth and for the future. Fame to come

Already touched the brows of a rare few

With faint leaf-shadows of her invisible wreath:

Green, the philosopher, gazing at the world

With youth’s aloofness, and that inward light

Which shines from Oxford still; not far away

The young historian of the coloured stream

Of outward life, the ancestral pageantry

Of England, and its tributary rills

Flowing in dawn-gleams out of the mists of time.

There, too, in front, with atavistic face

And Vandyke beard, so oddly like the king

Who loved Nell Gwynne, sat Admiral FitzRoy,

Late captain of the Beagle, quite prick-eared

With personal curiosity. Twice he told

His neighbour that, by George, he wouldn’t ha’ missed

This Donnybrook Fair for anything. He had sailed

With Darwin round the world. They used to call him

The old philosopher. Heard the bosun once,

Pointing the officers out—damned funny it was!—

“That’s Captain FitzRoy. That’s the second mate;

And that”—pointing a thumb at Darwin’s back—

“That’s our Fly-Catcher!”

Best of fellows, too,

But queer. He’d tell you, in the simplest way

—As if it meant no more than pass the salt,—

Something that knocked you endways; calmly shift

A mountain-range, in half a dozen words,

And sink it in the sea.

In fact, FitzRoy

Felt it his duty more than once, by George,

To expostulate; told him plainly he’d upset

Genesis and the Church; and then there’d be

The devil and all to pay. And now, by George,

He’d done it; and her Majesty’s Admiral

Had come on purpose, all the way from town,

To hear and see the end of it.

So he said,

Not wholly understanding why he came,—

The memory of a figure rapt and bowed

Over a shell, or finding in the rocks,

As though by wizardry, relics of lost worlds;

Moments that, by a hardly noticed phrase,

Had touched with orderly meaning and new light

The giant flaws and foldings in the hills;

Moments when, in the cabin, he had stared

Into the “old philosopher’s” microscope,

And seen the invisible speck in a water-drop

Grow to a great rose-window of radiant life

In an immense cathedral.

Vaguely enough,

Perhaps in the dimmest hinterland of his mind,

There lurked a quiet suspicion that, after all,

His queer old friend had hit on something queer.

Three places off, his face a twinkling mask

Of keen Scots humour, Robert Chambers glanced

Quietly at his watch, to hide a smile

When some one who had “written the Vestiges,”

And only half denied it, met his eye.

The vacant platform glared expectancy,

And held the gaze now of the impatient crowd.

Then Henslow led the conquering Bishop in.

Two rows of clerics, halfway down the hall,

Drummed for their doughty champion with their heels.

Above, in each recessed high window-seat,

Bishop-adoring ladies clapped their hands.

The rest filed in, mere adjuncts, modest foils.

Hooker and Lubbock and Huxley took their chairs

On Henslow’s left. The beautiful gaitered legs,

By their divine prerogative, on his right,

So carelessly crossed, more eloquently than words

Assured the world that everything was well,

And their translation into forms of speech

A mere formality. Next to the Bishop sat

A Transatlantic visitor with a twang,

One Doctor Draper, his hard wrinkled skin

Tinged by the infinite coffee he absorbed,

A gaunt bone-coloured desert, unassuaged.

He was a grim diplomatist, as befits

A pilgrim of the cosmos; ready at Rome

To tickle the Romans; and, if bishops ruled,

And found themselves at odds with freeborn souls

Outside the Land of Freedom, he’d befriend

Bishops, bring in the New World, stars and all,

To rectify that balance, and take home

For souvenir, with a chip of the pyramids,

The last odd homages of the obsequious Old.

The president called him for his opening speech.

He stood and beamed, enjoying to the full

The sense that, with his mighty manuscript,

He could delay the antagonists for an hour.

He cleared his throat. He took from a little box

A small black lozenge, popped it into his mouth,

Leisurely rolled it under a ruminant tongue,

Then placidly drawled his most momentous words:

“Proh-fessur Henslow, Bishop Wilbur-force,

Members, and friends, in this historic hall,

I assk first, air we a fortooitous

Con-course of atoms?” Half unconsciously,

He struck at once to the single central heart

Of all the questions asked by every age;

As though he saw what only Shadow-of-a-Leaf

Had watched last night, as in a crystal globe,

That scene preparing, the interweaving clues

Whose inconceivable intricacy at length,

By “chance,” as blind men call it, through the maze

Of life and time, at the one right juncture brought

Two shadows, face to face, in an Oxford Street,

Chambers and Huxley. “You’ll be there to-morrow.”—

“No, I leave Oxford now.”—

“The enemy means

To annihilate Darwin. You will not desert us?”—

“If you say that, I stay.”

Each to his place

Had moved in his own orbit, like a star,

Or like an atom, free-will at one with law,

In the unplanned plan of the Master-Dramatist,

Where Doctor Draper blindly played his part

And asked his pregnant question. He droned on,

For one enormous hour, starkly maintained

That Europe, in its intellectual life,

By mere “fortooity,” never could have flowered

To such results as blushed before him there

In that historic hall of halls to-night.

If Darwin thought so, he took leave to stand

Beside them, and to smile the vast calm smile

Of Arizona’s desert distances,

Till all such dragon thoughts had coiled away.

He took his chair. The great debate began.

For prelude came a menacing growl of storm.

A furious figure rose, like a sperm-whale,

Out of the seething audience. A huge man,

With small, hot, wicked eyes and cavernous mouth,

Bellowed his own ferocious claim to speak

On economic grounds. He had subscribed

His guineas, ringing guineas of red gold,

Ungrudgingly for years; but prophesied

Withdrawal of all such guineas, on all sides,

From this Association, if it failed

To brand these most abominable views

As blasphemous, bearing on their devilish brows,

Between their horns, the birth-mark of the Beast.

This last word hissed, he sank again. At once,

Ere Henslow found his feet or spoke a word,

Up leapt a raw-boned parson from the North,

To seize his moment’s fame. With sawing arm

The Reverend Dingle, like a windmill, vowed

He’d prove upon the blackboard, in white chalk,

By diagram—and the chalk was in his hand—

“That mawnkey and mahn had separate pedigrees.

Let A here be the mawnkey, and B the mahn.”

Loud laughter; shouts of “mawnkey!” and “sit down”

Extinguished him. He sat; and Henslow quelled

The hubbub with one clarion-clear demand,

Dictated, surely, by the ironic powers

Who had primed the Bishop and prepared his fall:

“Gentlemen, this discussion now must rest

On scientific grounds.”

At once there came

Calls for the Bishop, who, rising from his chair,

Urged by the same invisible ironies,

Remarked that his old friend, Professor Beale,

Had something to say first. That weighty first

Conveyed the weight of his own words to come.

Urged still by those invisible ones, his friend

Dug the pit deeper; modestly declared,

Despite his keen worn face and shoulders bowed

In histologic vigils, that he felt

His knowledge quite inadequate; and the way

Was made straight—for the Bishop.

The Bishop rose, mellifluous, bland, adroit.

A gesture, lacking only the lawn sleeves

To make it perfect, delicately conveyed

His comfortable thought—that what amazed

The sheepfold must be folly.

Half the throng,

His own experience told him, had not grasped

The world-inweaving argument, could not think

In æons. Æons, then, would be dismissed

As vague and airy fantasies. He might choose

His facts at will, unchallenged. He stood there

Secure that his traditions could not fail,

Basing his faith on schemes of thought designed

By authorised “thinkers” in pure artistry,

As free from Nature’s law as coloured blocks

That children play with on the nursery hearth,

And puzzle about and shift and twist and turn

Until the beautiful picture, as ordained,

Comes out, exact to the pattern, and reveals

The artificer’s plan, the pattern, as arranged,

By bishops, politic statesmen, teachers, guides,

Who hold it in reserve, their final test

Of truth, for times like this. He had been so sure

Of something deeper than all schemes of thought

That he had all too lightly primed himself

With “facts” to match their fables; hastily crammed

Into his mind’s convenient travelling bag

(Sound leather, British) all that he required,—

Not truth, but “a good argument.” He had asked

Owen, who hated Huxley, to provide it;

And he had brought it with him,—not the truth,

Not even facts, those unrelated crumbs

Of truth, the abiding consecrated whole.

He had brought his borrowed “facts,” misunderstood,

To meet, for the first time in all his life,

Stark earnest thought, wrestling for truth alone,

As men on earth discerned it. He had prayed,

With something deeper than blind make-believe,

Thy will be done on earth; and yet, and yet,

The law wherein that will might be discerned,

The law wherein that unity of heaven

And earth might yet be found (could he but trust

The truth, could he believe that his own God

Lived in the living truth), he waved aside.

These others had not found it, but they kept

One faith that he had lost. Though it should slay them,

They trusted in the truth. They could not see

Where it might lead them. Only at times they felt

As they deciphered the dark Book of Earth

That, following its majestic rhythm of law,

They followed the true path, the eternal way

Of That which reigns. Prophetic flashes came.

Words that the priest mechanically intoned

Burned upon Huxley’s keen ironical page

Like sudden sapphires, drawing their deeper light

From that celestial City which endures

Because it hath foundations: Shall I come

Before the Eternal with burnt offerings?

Hath not the Eternal showed thee what is good,

That thou do justly and mercifully, and walk

Humbly with the Eternal?

O, irony of the Master-dramatist,

Who set once more those lists; and sent His truth

Unrecognised, as of old, to fight for life

And prove itself in struggle and raise once more

A nobler world above the world out-worn,

Crushing all easy sophistry, though it stood

Garbed as the priest of God.

The Bishop seized

His diplomatic vantage. The blunt truth

Of Huxley’s warning offered itself to him

As a rash gambit in their game of—tact.

He seized it; gracefully smoothed the ruffled pride

Of that great audience, trained in a sound school

To judge by common-sense.

His mobile face

Revealed much that his politic words concealed.

His strength was in that sound old British way—

Derision of all things that transcend its codes

In life, thought, art; the moon-calf’s happy creed

That, if a moon-calf only sees the moon

In thoughts that range the cosmos, his broad grin

Sums the whole question; there’s no more to see.

In all these aids, an innocent infidel,

The Bishop put his trust; and, more than all,

In vanity, the vacant self-conceit

That, when it meets the masters of the mind

And finds them bowed before the Inscrutable Power,

Accepts their reverence and humility

As tribute, due acknowledgment of fool’s right

To give the final judgment, and annul

The labour of a life-time in an hour.

Dulcetly, first, he scoffed at Darwin’s facts.

“Rock-pigeons now were what they had always been.

Species had never changed. What were the proofs

Even of the variation they required

To make this theory possible? We had heard

Mysterious rumours of a long-legged sheep

Somewhere in Yorkshire (laughter). Let me ask

Professor Huxley, here upon the left

(All eyes on Huxley), who believes himself

Descended from an ape (chuckles of glee),

How recently this happened.”

The Bishop turned,

All smiling insolence, “May I beg to know

If this descent is on your father’s side,

Or on your mother’s?”

He paused, to let the crowd

Bellow its laughter. The unseen ironies

Had trapped him and his flock; and neither knew.

But Huxley knew. He turned, with a grim smile,

And while the opposing triumph rocked and pealed,

Struck one decisive palm upon his knee,

And muttered low—“The Lord hath delivered him

Into my hands.”

His neighbour stared and thought

His wits were wandering. Yet that undertone

Sounded more deadly, had more victory in it,

Than all the loud-mouthed minute’s dying roar.

It died to a tense hush. The Bishop closed

In solemn diapason. Darwin’s views

Degraded woman. They debased mankind,

And contradicted God’s most Holy Word.

Applause! Applause! The hall a quivering mist

Of clapping hands. From every windowseat

A flutter of ladies’ handkerchiefs and shrill cries

As of white swarming sea-gulls. The black rows

Of clerics all exchanging red-faced nods,

And drumming with their feet, as though to fill

A hundred-pedalled organ with fresh wind.

The Bishop, like a Gloire de Dijon rose

With many-petalled smiles, his plump right hand

Clasped in a firm congratulatory grip

Of hickory-bones by Draper of New York;

Who had small faith in what the Bishop said

But heard the cheers, and gripped him as a man

Who never means to let this good thing go.

Motionless, on the left, the observant few,

The silent delegates of a sterner power,

With grave set faces, quietly looking on.

At last the tumult, as all tumult must,

Sank back to that deep silence. Henslow turned

To Huxley without speaking. Once again

The clock ticked audibly, but its old “Not Yet”

Had somehow, in that uproar, in the face

Of that tumultuous mockery, changed to Now!

The lean tall figure of Huxley quietly rose.

He looked for a moment thoughtfully at the crowd;

Saw rows of hostile faces; caught the grin

Of ignorant curiosity; here and there,

A hopeful gleam of friendship; and, far back,

The young, swift-footed, waiting for the fire.

He fixed his eyes on these—then, in low tones,

Clear, cool, incisive, “I have come here,” he said,

“In the cause of Science only.”

He paused again.

Then, striking the mockery out of the mocker’s face,

His voice rang out like steel—

“I have heard nothing

To prejudice the case of my august

Client, who, as I told you, is not here.”

At once a threefold picture flashed upon me,

A glimpse, far off, through eyes of Shadow-of-a-Leaf,

First, of a human seeker, there at Down,

Gathering his endless cloud of witnesses

From rocks, from stones, from trees; and from the signs

In man’s own body of life’s æonian way;

But, far above him, clothed with purer light,

The stern, majestic Spirit of living Truth;

And, more august than even his prophets knew,

Through that eternal Spirit, the primal Power

Returning into a world of faiths out-worn.

Once more, as he spoke on, a thousand years

Were but as yesterday. If these truths were true,

This theory flooded the whole world with light.

Could we believe that the Creator set

In mockery all these birth-signs in the world,

Or once in a million years had wrecked His work

And shaped, in a flash, a myriad lives anew,

Bearing in their own bodies all the signs

Of their descent from those that He destroyed?

Who left that ancient leaf within the flower?

Who hid within the reptile those lost fins,

And under the skin of the sea-floundering whale

The bones of the lost thigh? Who dusked the foal

With shadowy stripes, and under its hoof concealed

Those ancient birdlike feet of its lost kin?

Who matched that hoof with a rosy fingernail,

Or furled that point within the human ear?

Who had imprinted in the body of man,

And in his embryo, all those intricate signs

Of his forgotten lineage, even those gills

Through which he drew his breath once in the sea?

The speaker glanced at his antagonist.

“You think all this too marvellous to be true;

Yet you believe in miracles. You think

The unfolding of this complicated life

Around us, out of a simple primal form,

Impossible; yet you know that every man

Before his birth, a few brief years ago,

Was once no more than a single living cell.

You think it ends your theory of creation.

You say that God made you; and yet you know

—And reconcile your creed with what you know—

That you yourself originally”—he held up

A gleaming pencil-case—“were a little piece

Of matter, not so large as the end of this.

But if you ask, in fine,

Whether I’d be ashamed to claim descent

From that poor animal with the stooping gait

And low intelligence, who can only grin

And chatter as we pass by, or from a man

Who could use high position and great gifts

To crush one humble seeker after truth—

I hesitate, but”—an outburst of applause

From all who understood him drowned the words.

He paused. The clock ticked audibly again.

Then, quietly measuring every word, he drove

The sentence home. “I asserted and repeat

A man would have no cause to feel ashamed

Of being descended through vast tracts of time

From that poor ape.

Were there an ancestor

Whom I could not recall without a sense

Of shame, it were a man, so placed, so gifted,

Who sought to sway his hearers from the truth

By aimless eloquence and by skilled appeals

To their religious prejudice.”

Was it the truth

That conquered, or the blind sense of the blow

Justly considered, delivered, and driven home,

That brought a crash of applause from half the house?

And more (for even the outright enemy

Joined in that hubbub), though indignant cries,

Protested vainly, “Abominable to treat

The Bishop so!”

The Bishop sat there dumb.

Eliza Pym, adding her own quaint touch

Of comedy, saw that pencil shine again

In Huxley’s hand; compared it, at a glance

Of fawn-like eyes, with the portentous form

In gaiters; felt the whole world growing strange;

Drew one hysterical breath, and swooned away.

V
The Vera Causa

And yet, and yet, the victor knew too well

His victory had a relish of the dust.

Even while the plaudits echoed in his ears,

It troubled him. When he pondered it that night,

A finer shame had touched him. He had used

The weapons of his enemy at the last;

And, if he had struck his enemy down for truth,

He had struck him down with weapons he despised.

He had used them with a swifter hand and eye,

A subtler cunning; and he had set his heel

On those who took too simply to their hearts

A tale, whose ancient imagery enshrined

A mystery that endured. He had proclaimed

A fragment of a truth which, he knew well,

Left the true Cause in darkness. Did he know

More of that Cause than Genesis? Could he see

Farther into that darkness than the child

Folding its hands in prayer?

More clearly far

Than Darwin, whom he had warned of it, he knew

The bounds of this new law; bade him beware

Of his repeated dogma—Nature makes

No leap. He pointed always to the Abyss

Of darkness round the flickering spark of light

Upheld by Science. Had Wilberforce been armed

With knowledge and the spiritual steel

Of Saint Augustine, who had also seen,

Even in his age, a ladder of life to heaven,

There had been a victory of another kind

To lighten through the world.

And Darwin knew it;

But, while he marshalled his unnumbered truths,

He lost the Truth; as one who takes command

Of multitudinous armies in the night,

And strives to envisage, in one sweep of the mind,

Each squadron and each regiment of the whole,

Ever the host that swept through his mind’s eye,

Though all in ordered ranks and files, obscured

Army on army the infinite truth beyond.

The gates of Beauty closed against his mind,

And barred him out from that eternal realm,

Whose lucid harmonies on our night bestow

Glimpses of absolute knowledge from above;

Unravelling and ennobling, making clear

Much that had baffled us, much that else was dark;

So that the laws of Nature shine like roads,

Firm roads that lead through a significant world

Not downward, from the greater to the less,

But up to the consummate soul of all.

He could not follow them now. Back, back and back,

He groped along the dark diminishing road.

The ecstasy of music died away.

The poet’s vision melted into a dream.

He knew his loss, and mourned it; but it marred

Not only his own happiness, as he thought.

It blurred his vision, even of his own truths.

He looked long at the butterfly’s radiant wings,

Pondered their blaze of colour, and believed

That butterfly wooers choosing their bright mates

Through centuries of attraction and desire

Evolved this loveliness. For he only saw

The blaze of colour, the flash that lured the eye.

He did not see the exquisite pattern there,

The diamonded fans of the under-wing,

Inlaid with intricate harmonies of design;

The delicate little octagons of pearl,

The moons like infinitesimal fairy flowers,

The lozenges of gold, and grey, and blue

All ordered in an intellectual scheme,

Where form to form responded and faint lights

Echoed faint lights, and shadowy fringes ran

Like Elfin curtains on a silvery thread,

Shadow replying to shadow through the whole.

Did eyes of the butterfly wooer mark all this,—

A subtlety too fine for half mankind?

He tossed a shred of paper on to his lawn;

He saw the white wings blindly fluttering round it.

He did not hear the whisper of Shadow-of-a-Leaf,

Was this their exquisite artistry of choice?

Had wooers like these evolved this loveliness?

He groped into the orchestral universe

As one who strives to trace a symphony

Back to its cause, and with laborious care

Feels with his hand the wood of the violins,

And bids you mark—O good, bleak, honest soul,

So fearful of false hopes!—that all is hollow.

He tells you on what tree the wood was grown.

He plucks the catgut, tells you whence it came,

Gives you the name and pedigree of the cat;

Nay, even affirms a mystery, and will talk

Of sundry dark vibrations that affect

The fleshly instrument of the human ear;

And so, with a world-excluding accuracy—

O, never doubt that every step was true!—

Melts the great music into less than air

And misses everything.

Everything! On one side

The music soaring endlessly through heavens

Within the human soul; on the other side,

The unseen Composed of whose transcendent life

The music speaks in souls made still to hear.

He clung to his vera causa. In that law

He saw the way of the Power, but not the Power

Determining the way. Did men reject

The laws of Newton, binding all the worlds,

Because they still knew nothing of the Power

That bound them? The stone fell. He knew not why.

The sun controlled the planets, and the law

Was constant; but the mystery of it was masked

Under a name; and no man knew the Power

That gripped the worlds in that unchanging bond,

Or whether, in the twinkling of an eye,

The Power might not release them from that bond,

As a hand opens, and the wide universe

Change in a flash, and vanish like a shadow,

As prophets had foretold.

He could not think

That chance decreed the boundless march of law

He saw in the starry heavens. Yet he could think

Of “chance” on earth; and, while he thought, declare

“Chance” was not “chance” but law unrecognised;

Then, even while he said it, he would use

The ambiguous word, base his own law on “chance”;

And, even while he used it, there would move

Before his eyes in every flake of colour,

Inlaid upon the butterfly’s patterned wing,

Legions of atoms wheeling each to its place

In ever constant law; and he knew well

That, even in the living eye that saw them,

The self-same Power that bound the starry worlds

Controlled a myriad atoms, every one

An ordered system; and in every cloud

Of wind-blown dust and every breaking wave

Upon the storm-tossed sea, an infinite host

Of infinitesimal systems moved by law

Each to its place; and, in each growing flower,

Myriads of atoms like concentred suns

And planets, these to the leaf and those to the crown,

Moved in unerring order, and by a law

That bound all heights and depths of the universe,

In an unbroken unity. By what Power?

There was one Power, one only known to man,

That could determine action. Herschel knew it;

The power whereby the mind uplifts the hand

And lets it fall, the living personal Will.

Ah, but his task, his endless task on earth,

Bent his head earthward. He must find the way

Before he claimed the heights. No Newton he;

Though men began to acclaim him and his law

As though they solved all mysteries and annulled

All former creeds, and changed the heart of heaven.

No Newton he; not even a Galileo;

But one who patiently, doggedly laboured on,

As Tycho Brahe laboured in old days,

Numbering the stars, recording fact on fact,

For those, who, after centuries, might discern

The meaning and the cause of what he saw.

Visions of God and Heaven were not for him,

Unless his “facts” revealed them, as the crown

Of his own fight for knowledge.

It might be

The final test of man, the narrow way

Proving him worthy of immortal life,

That he should face this darkness and this death

Worthily and renounce all easy hope,

All consolation, all but the wintry smile

Upon the face of Truth as he discerns it,

Here upon earth, his only glimmer of light,

Leading him onward to an end unknown.

Faith! Faith! O patient, inarticulate soul,

If this were faithlessness, there was a Power,

So whispered Shadow-of-a-Leaf, that shared it with him;

The Power that bowed His glory into darkness

To make a world in suffering and in death,

The passionate price that even the Omnipotent

Must pay for love, and love’s undying crown.

He hardly heard the whisper; could not hear it

And keep his own resolve. He bowed his head

In darkness; and, henceforth, those inward gates

Into the realms of the supernal light

Began to close.

He knew that they were closing;

And yet—was this the dark key to Creation?—

He shared the ecstasy also; shared that sense

Of triumph; broke the Bread and drank the Wine

In sacred drops and morsels of the truth;

Shared, in renouncement of all else but truth,

A sense that he could never breathe in words

To any one else, a sense that in this age

It was expedient that a man should lose

The glory, and die this darker new-found death,

To save the people from their rounded creeds,

Their faithless faith, and crowns too lightly won.

...

O, yet the memory of one midnight hour!

Would that she knew. Would God that she knew now....

Truer than all his knowledge was that cry;

The cry of the blind life struggling through the dark,

Upward ... the blind brow lifted to the unseen.

He groped along the dark unending way

And saw, although he knew not what he saw,

Out of the struggle of life, a mightier law

Emerging; and, when man could rise no higher

By the fierce law of Nature, he beheld

Nature herself at war against herself.

He heard, although he knew not what he heard,

A Voice that, triumphing over her clashing chords,

Resolved them into an infinite harmony.

Whose was that Voice? What Power within the flesh

Cast off the flesh for a glory in the mind,

And leapt to victory in self-conquering love?

What Voice, whose Power, cast Nature underfoot

In Bruno, when the flames gnawed at his flesh;

In Socrates; and, in those obscure Christs

Who daily die; and, though none other sees,

Lay hands upon the wheel of the universe

And master it; and the sun stands dark at noon?

These things he saw but dimly. All his life

He moved along the steep and difficult way

Of Truth in darkness; but the Voice of Truth

Whispered in darkness, out of the mire and day,

And through the blood-stained agony of the world,

“Fear nothing. Follow Me. I am the Way.”

So, when Death touched him also, and England bore

His dust into her deepening innermost shrine,

The Voice he heard long since, and could not hear,

Rose like the fuller knowledge, given by Death

To one that could best lead him upward now,

Rose like a child’s voice, opening up the heavens,

I am the Resurrection and the Life.