While down at Greenwich for slaves and tin
The tall Phoenician ships stole in.
Men of the island caves mixed their blood with men of the great continental forests. It was an extraordinary agglomeration.
Norseman and Negro and Gaul and Greek
Drank with the Britons in Barking Creek,
And the Romans came with a heavy hand,
And bridged and roaded and ruled the land,
And the Roman left and the Danes blew in—
And that’s where your history books begin!
Is it any wonder that sometimes I feel, mingling with the emotions inspired by a recent communion service, [31] the savagery of some long-forgotten caveman ancestor? Civilization is so very young, and barbarism was so very old, that it is not surprising that I occasionally hark back involuntarily to the days to which my blood was most accustomed. I am an odd mixture considered from any point of view. ‘There are very few human actions,’ says Mark Rutherford, ‘of which it can be said that this or that, taken by itself, produced them. With our inborn tendency to abstract, to separate mentally the concrete into factors which do not exist separately, we are always disposed to assign causes which are too simple. Nothing in nature is propelled or impeded by one force acting alone. There is no such thing, save in the brain of the mathematician. I see no reason why even motives diametrically opposite should not unite in one resulting deed.’ Of course not! It is my duty, that is to say, to take myself to pieces as little as possible. It does not really matter how much of my present temperament I got from the communion service, and how much I got from the caveman with the club in his hand. Here I am, a present entity, with the caveman, the tribesman, the Roman, and the Dane all mixed up together in me; and it is my business, instead of taking the complex mechanism to pieces, to make it, as a united and harmonious whole, do the work for which I have been sent into the world. I am not [32] to talk one moment of the strawberries on my plate, and then, in the next breath, to speak of the cream. It is not so much a matter of strawberries and cream as of strawberriesandcream.