The question is the oldest of all questions, yet it is the question of to-day, as it will be the question of to-morrow, and of many more to-morrows. Job asked it about himself, as some of us ask it about those whom we know to be infinitely better than ourselves. Moreover it is not alone the apparent injustice of a life as a whole, but of the several parts of it, that we murmur at. There are acts of courage, of silent endurance, of unrecognised heroism, which only need to be performed in some more conspicuous fashion, or upon a larger field, to awaken the whole world to admiration. Yet they pass away unnoticed; oblivion enshrouds them, and they are never so much as heard of.
When such suppressions, such seeming injustices, occur at the beginning of things, while the sun is still high, and Time seems a friendly factor, one is able to reassure oneself. One says—“Wait a little longer!” “The time will come!” When such illusion, however, is no longer possible; when the sands have run out, or been scattered in mid-career; what is one to say then? What faith, what philosophy, what stoicism, or what mixture of all three, will enable one to accept it without complaint?
August 4, 1900
OF the vicissitudes of this year there seem to be no end! After we have mourned over these victims of Pekin as men mourn over those for whom there is absolutely no hope; after we have enumerated their names, like the names upon a death-roll, and all but held a national funeral service in their memory; and after we have followed their last moments; gloried in its heroism; wept over its tragedy; starved, sighed, bled, almost died with them; lo, it appeareth now that none of them are dead at all! Was ever an entire continent in the history of the world so mercilessly defrauded before of its tears?
I have no notion how they may feel about it themselves, but my impression is that were I the responsible head of a daily newspaper I should prefer to immure myself from society for the next few days! There is a pile of such papers at this moment in my sanctum, which I have just been turning over, and reading a few of the headlines with some little inward entertainment. Not that I pretend for a moment to have been one whit wiser, or less lugubrious myself! Far from it. We have all been a flight of ravens and screech-owls together, only that some of us have screeched and flapped our wings a little more energetically, and in rather a more public fashion than the rest!
August 6, 1900.
FEW of the minor experiences of life are, I think, more consoling than to come across some small link in the chain of natural law, over the right connections of which one has long groped blindly. Such a little bit of good luck befell me only yesterday. In itself it was what one calls the veriest trifle; simply a question as to the relationship of certain obscure organisms, profoundly uninteresting to the world at large. To myself it seemed, for a while at all events, to be of some little consequence. It imparted—for fully ten minutes—an entirely new impression of a vast, a peaceful, and a most orderly progress. It seemed to open up vistas into the perfection, into the breadth, no less than the complexity, of that great scheme of Life, of which we ourselves form a part. It came as a sudden vision, as a conception of possibilities—I hardly know what to call it—the vividness of which it would be difficult without exaggeration to put into words.
For those who, like myself, are the mere irresponsible camp-followers of science, the importance of any given solution seems often to be less in what it actually teaches us, than in what it allows us indirectly to guess at. The new fact may or may not be important, but the ideas that it starts in our minds can hardly fail to be so. In the imaginative realm there is literally no limit to the revelations to which the tiniest of natural phenomena may not serve as an introduction. The fact itself may be the minutest of facts; a mere pin-point, a scarce perceptible chink of light, but it is a chink in the walls as it were of a great cathedral of discovery, the doors of which may, for anything one knows to the contrary, be thrown widely open to oneself, and to everyone else to-morrow.
This, if I am not misleading myself, is the real attractiveness of every pursuit which has the elucidation of Nature for its end and aim; one perhaps most felt, or at all events most enjoyed, by the more ignorant of her votaries. Properly directed ignorance is in truth a most desirable haze, and when some stray beam does traverse its obscurity, how great is the illumination which follows! What may not be possible where there is no dead-weight of fact to keep our feet upon the solid earth; no panoply of unescapable knowledge to bid our pleasant fancies nay?
Even for those less comfortably unfettered by circumstances, it must be an alleviation surely of the prose of life that in this region of the ideas no man can ever positively say what may not be in store for him. However tame, however dull his foreground, there is always the chance of something ahead; something that when it comes, will sweep his thoughts away with it to the very verge of the horizon. There is never a day, there is hardly an hour, in which some new idea may not be upon its road. Now a really new idea for the time being remakes life. It is a solvent which dissolves all old impressions, and rebuilds them anew. Men live by ideas, as surely, almost as literally, as they live by bread, and a world into which no new idea ever entered would be a dead world, tenanted only by corpses.