No one, whether the greatest conqueror or the most commonplace individual, has ever dared to speak of war without exposing its sorry character: unless he curses it: and such is the plainest common sense. There leap to our minds a thousand reasons against war, whenever we need them. Only when the crisis comes and the clash of peoples is prepared, then human beings savagely acclaim it. They burn with the sense of battle, a madness which comes upon them from without and masters them, so that they can speak only with its voice. Just as the roots of plants have the pileorhiza to stay their first feebleness and let them fight out their rivalries with the other beings of the under-world, so when war begins this obscure law injects us with patriotism, a draught which gives us strength and courage to support the miseries of its train.
Daily it is said, "War would be easily prevented. All that is needful is for every man alive to forswear it. If at the same moment we all refused to make a move against our kind, these fires consuming men would be at once put out." Yes, but exactly this apparently easy agreement and common action never happen. When the moment comes for armed slaughter men are unanimous only in fierce support of pretexts for beginning it. When the storm has passed we are astounded and rather horrified to look back on our bloodthirsty record, and like a river sinking back into its bed after a flood, we return gradually to our habitual peace and quietude:—too late, alas! for the will of the gods has been done and humanity has paid its bloody tribute to their law of death. At the next date of bleeding the whole round will begin again, just as before.
So Diplodocus' little head, his point of weakness, may be made a symbol of this malady of man. And the reason why we should be subjected to this inflexible law? No doubt that our too-great strength be brought down ... but it remains a question whether the too-great strength is because our numbers are over-many for the earth to bear, or because we are near discovering and exploiting the working of the greater powers of nature. It may also be the law of checks and balances pursuing its course against all excessive strengths, which gives the riches and resources of this world to ordinary people, rather than to those mighty spirits with character enough to overturn their generations. One can imagine what might have happened had the great scholars or thinkers whose writings revolutionized life had in their hands the power of a despot or the wealth of Croesus. "You can't have everything" is the hackneyed phrase in which common sense has tried to express one of the most disturbing truths of the universe. However much it may appear so, nowhere is any excess of power allowed to disturb the balance of things. Absolute equality is of course equally out of the question, for harmony is based always on the union of unlike things.
One pine-tree could observe this law working in its sphere of life, through the thousands of years for which it stood there. Generation after generation of birds and insects followed one another on its stem and branches. Some days were dismal, others glorious, just as some hours were unprofitable and others rich. The light and warmth were not always divided to it in equal part. Underground the moisture did not always refresh its mazy roots in fair degree. Clouds often veiled its blue sky: the seasons made that swelling hill bare and sad as often as they made it smile with waving green. The giant tree saw its needles grow from freshness into pallor, and then fall, thousands of times. Some of its branches for no visible reason grew splendidly, while others, also for no visible reason, remained small and stunted. Yet still its life, as a whole, was lived in tune, as ours are to our content, however discordant the individual moments. A single ray of light is enough to scatter the darkness: and when we think of the surroundings in which the giant lived, the idea comes that perhaps we would fear death less if it were not for that haunting picture of our corpses rotting slowly in the darkness underground. We might live more in love with death if we knew that our dust would remain under the sun, to change and re-model itself in plant-fashion, like those yellow leaves which wither and fall before winter comes. It would assuage our minds if we could think that after our end we would live yet in the shimmering day, absorbed particles of that great life-filled space this side the limitless ether of the stars.
CHAPTER 7
Metamorphoses
As space creates all things out of its own substance only to devour them again at last, so time which itself cannot move or change allots to everything its span of life. Our hours and days are within us, and it is the revolution of the globe, and not time, which makes the seasons. Yet beings and things succeed one another, and their courses give us an illusion that the age grows old. It is a convenient figure, for it is good to say that the days slip past and the seasons wheel round, each in turn.
Once more spring made green the mighty tree. The sun and the winds fretted its newly-budded branches. The giant began to transform itself. Like last year, and the thousands of years before, the sap made buds which pushed out into leaves, into flowers, and at last into fruits from which the future seeds would be born. Each spring inaugurated an ascending change, to be followed, this year as in the dead years, by a descending change.
So the sap in its evolution took the common way of all life's forces. It rose towards its highest forms, in turn becoming leaf and flower and fruit: and then it fell away in hard, dry, woodenish particles. Through this history of changing shape passes all we know, ideas as well as things. Even our feelings are not exempt. Everything within and without us alters and re-forms itself: so that there is no changeless situation, nothing which is for ever exactly the same. In the indestructible and turbulent race of matter one universal essence is working in a fixed direction: and if the tree-sap changed into wood, after having triumphally been green leaf and shining flower, so does implacable fate lead our component cells through exquisite childhood into splendid youth, only to change us at last into tottering and wasted creatures of old age.
The elements alter their shape through time and space. In the same light, in the same conditions and circumstances, flowers bloom and fade, our hair turns from its first dark or fair colour into silver, our eyes lose their early fire, our firm red flesh goes dry and shrivelled. These changes happen to the same drop of sap in the plant world, and to the same tissue in the animal world. In the unexplored world of instinct our senses follow a similar evolution. Our enthusiasm for something or other springs to life, lasts awhile, and then chills into complete detachment. "Love is akin to hate," says a proverb: but really the two states run together. Our indifference or our dislike is often born of an exhausted regard: otherwise would we so often come to hate what we once enjoyed? No, these rising and falling changes are not confined to plants, but are a general part of evolution, in material as in immaterial things.