Biologists have a theory—they would call it a law—which they call the law of “Multiplication in Geometrical Progression.” By that law the plants of any region would, under favouring conditions, increase from a hundred to a thousandfold every year. Happily for people who wish to walk about they never really do anything of the sort; on the contrary, the population of any given district, apart from man’s interference, remains for the most part all but stationary. Until a parent is considerate enough to die, and make way for it, every green child that is born is bound to die in its infancy. These little oaks of ours are an excellent example of that fact, as well as of the summary fashion with which Nature is in the habit of wielding her maternal sceptre. They are, as anyone can see, as hale and as vigorous as could be desired; hearts of oak, every one of them, and they know it. Not an oaklet amongst them but sees itself in nightly visions as an umbrageous giant, lifting high in air a mighty trunk, and spreading out branches that all the fowls of the air could lodge upon with comfort. Alas, for so much prospective dignity! Every one of these youthful monarchs is doomed to an early death, and it is merely a question of what stage of immaturity he will be called upon to perish at!
There is yet another biological dictum which these deluded young sovereigns may serve to illustrate. Before Darwin, or any other expositor, laid it down in prose, it had been already laid down in unforgettable verse—thus:—
“No being on this earthly ball
Is like another, all and all.”
Nothing certainly on this earthly ball can be truer. Never two living beings came into the world precisely alike, and these baby oaks differ each of them in some imperceptible fashion from its baby brother. Here is a handful plucked at random out of the flower-beds that will prove it. In this one that I hold in my fingers, it is easy to see that the future giant would have been a somewhat thick-set, and stunted colossus. This one again has already a tendency to self-division, and would probably have ended by becoming forked. Yet again this one would, if it had been spared—appropriate phrase—have grown up to be the very ideal of oaks; a glory of the woods; star-proof; sun-proof; magnificent in its life, and in its death destined to be converted into the very straightest and most wind-defying of masts. This last, by the way, is not a loss that we need delay to weep over, seeing that long before it could have reached maturity, masts will in all probability have gone to join the other relics of the past; even yachts being converted probably by that time into little electrical monsters, with ingenious arrangements for enabling them to become submarine ones, whenever the wars of that date threaten to interfere with the comfort of their owners.
Poor baby oaks! They gave me a great deal of trouble to pull up, and now, with that inopportune remorse, sometimes ascribed to murderers, I am disposed to grow quite pitiful over them. They have been so spoilt, moreover, in the process, that they are not even worth putting into a flower-vase. Imagine having been potentially capable of serving as the tutelary deity, the beloved shade, the rendezvous of all the lovers of a parish for possibly half a dozen generations, and being found actually unfit to fill a bow-pot for an hour! Could poet or pessimist hit upon instance of malicious destiny more dramatically or tragically complete?
April 2, 1900
AT last we are in April. The winter corner is turned, and a new era entered upon. But April this year is an incongruous sort of an April, though the incongruity is possibly only in one’s own fancy. We are apt to fashion our notions of the becoming, and to expect Nature to conform to them. A desperately dry April it certainly is. The days are hard, and cold, parched, and nipping; at night the wind howls, but with no accompaniment of desirable drops. The garden cries to the sky for rain, but no rain falls upon it, yet the only days I have spent in London were days of unceasing downpour. Such favouring of the Metropolis at the expense of the country is manifestly unjust.
April is such a lovely word, that it ought also to be always a lovely thing. If one imagines it—or rather her—as she might appear to us in dreams, or an allegory, we should deck her out of course in the tenderest green. Floating gossamers would hover around her; small pink buds would bend down to kiss her small pink feet. So encompassed she would come to meet us along the wood paths, a vision of grace and maidenly beauty; the traditional smile on her lips, the equally traditional tear in her eye. She would look up in our faces with an appealing glance, and then begin suddenly to weep, she herself knew not why. A maiden with the most maidenly of dreams, enclosing a whole enchanted world of visionary hopes, fears, delights, anticipations, which it would be the dull business of Experience to dissipate as the year rolled on.
But April, as she presents herself before us this year, is not that sort of maiden at all. She is a remarkably uncompromising sort of young woman, with hardly any visible green about her costume. She does not care for the colour apparently, but prefers drabs, and greys, and browns. As for tears she is not nearly as much given to them as we could desire. She thinks poorly of them evidently, and considers them out of date. Her smiles too are doled out in the same penurious fashion as her tears. She gives us what no doubt she considers our due of both, but nothing to spare. Her impulses are all dull, decorous, mechanical; as for her feet, far from being bare, they are clad in warm winter shoes and stockings, which indeed they have every reason to be.
Doubtless I am old-fashioned, but I cannot admire such sedate damsels. Give me a little more spontaneity; a little more youthful impetuosity and dash—