Take a pelican, for instance. What possible personal ideal was it that could make a pelican want to be a pelican or that could ever have made a pelican take being a pelican seriously for one minute?
And the camel with his lopsided hump. "Why, oh, why," cries the idealist, wringing his hands. "Oh, why——?"
I have come out here this afternoon, in the middle of my book, in the middle of a chapter against the syndicalists, but it ill beseems me, after spending half a day looking calmly at peacocks, at giraffes, at hippopotamuses, at all these tails, necks, legs and mouths, at this stretch or bird's eye view—this vast landscape of God's toleration—to criticise any man, woman or child of this world for blossoming out, for living up, or fleshing up, or paring down, to what he is really like inside.
Possibly what each man stands for is well enough for him to stand for. It is only when what a man says, comes to being repeated, to being made universal, to being jammed down on the rest of us, that the lie in it begins to work out.
Let us let everybody alone and be ready to find things out just for ourselves.
Here is this big, frivolous, gentle elephant, for instance, poking his huge, inquiring trunk into baby carriages. He is certainly too glorious, too profound, a personage to do such things! It does seem a little unworthy to me, as I have been sitting here and watching him from this park bench, for a noble, solemn being like the elephant—a kind of cathedral of a beast, to be as deeply interested as he is in peanuts.
He looms up before me once more. I look up a little closer—look into his little, shrewd eyes—and, after all, what do I know about him?
And I watch the camels with the happy, dazed children on their backs, go by with soft and drifting feet. Do I suppose I understand camels? Or I follow the crowd. I find myself at last with that huge, hushed, sympathetic congregation at the 4 P.M. service, watching the lions eat.
Everything does seem very much mixed up when one brings one's Sociological Society dogmas, and one's little neat, impeccable row of principles to the test of watching the lions eat!
Possibly people are as different from one another inside—in their souls at least—as different as these animals are.