And, indeed, there are dozens of lizards to the square yard in England, though I never before knew one of them to assail me of its own accord. I have caught them a hundred times by force or fraud among the heaths and sand-pits. The commonest sort hereabouts is the dingy brown viviparous lizard, which lays no eggs, but brings forth its young alive, and tends them like a mother. It is an agile, wee thing, that creeps from its hole or nest during the noontide hours, and basks lazily in the sun in search of insects. But let a fly come near it, and quick as lightning it turns its tiny head, darts upon him like fate, and crunches him up between those sharp small teeth with the ferocity of a crocodile. We have sand-lizards, too, a far timider and wilder species; they bite your hand when caught, and refuse to live in captivity at the bottom of a flowerpot like their viviparous cousins. These pretty wee reptiles are often delicately spotted or banded with green; they lay a dozen leathery eggs in a hole in the sand, where the sun hatches out the poor abandoned little orphans without the aid of their unnatural mother. Still, they are much daintier in their colouring than the more domestic brown kind; and, after all, in a lizard I demand beauty rather than advanced moral qualities. I may be wrong; but such is my opinion. It is all very well to be ethical at Exeter Hall; but too sensitive a conscience is surely out of place in the struggle for life on the open moorland.
XVI.
THE CHRYSALIS YEAR.
In warm spots under hedges, I see, the first spring insects now begin to appear, timidly and tentatively, from the shelter of their cocoons. Some few of them, indeed, like the lady-birds, the wasps, and the bumble-bees, have struggled through the winter in the winged or perfect form, having hibernated among warm moss or under the bark of trees in favoured situations. These adventurous kinds passed through their larval and pupal stages last year, and a tithe of them live on with difficulty through the winter frosts, to become the mothers and founders of fresh insect communities as April comes round again. But by far the greater number eat and grow as grubs or caterpillars through the summer months, and when autumn approaches turn into cocoons or chrysalides, to lie by for the winter in a snug retreat, well wrapped up in a warm silky or woollen coverlet, and protected underground from snow or hoarfrost. As soon as cold weather approaches, these prudent insects retire from public life, cease from active pursuits, melt themselves up into a sort of organic pulp, lose almost every distinguishable organ or feature, and remain dormant, in a state of indefinite protoplasm, which gradually takes shape again as moth, beetle, or butterfly. Mummies we sometimes call them, but they are not even mummies, for they lose almost entirely their form and limbs; they tide over the winter for the most part in an all but structureless mass, which yet encloses the potentiality of rebuilding in due course the shape and members of the ancestral insect. Slowly new limbs grow out within the protecting chrysalis case, wings bud from the side, and the grub or caterpillar changes by degrees into the totally unlike image of the beetle or butterfly. As soon as warmer weather sets in, the winged forms emerge with the first sunny day from their broken shell. I have seen nettle-butterflies abroad in a spell of genial warmth in the last week of January; a brimstone has been tempted forth to seek his lady-love on St. Valentine’s Day; and fritillaries are abundant in early March sunshine. Lesser insects, whose names are enshrined in scientific Latin alone, often emerge from their mummy-cases even earlier than these familiar and conspicuous lepidoptera.
The moment they peep forth, lo and behold! they find the plant world, for its part, ready decked to greet them. The very same morning that sees the first butterfly and the first bee on the wing, sees also the first crocus opening wide its shining cup in the full sun to woo them. The brimstone is no sooner out than the coltsfoot and the celandine and the bulbous buttercup spread their gold to allure him. And has it ever struck you that the plants, no less than the animals, pass through the winter period in the chrysalis condition? This is no mere figurative flower of speech; it is the scientific statement of a real and profound analogy. During the summer months the leaves of the crocus, the tulip, and the hyacinth have been eating and laying by, exactly as the caterpillar did, to provide material for next year’s flowering season. When winter blows cold, the leaves die down—the plant, as it were, retires underground into its bulb, like the caterpillar into the cocoon, and there remains, formless and organless, a mere pupa-like potentiality of future buds and blossoms. But when warm weather recurs, the bulb once more begins to germinate: it takes fresh form as a vigorous flower-head. Observe, too, that the flowering stem, like the winged stage of the insect, is the sexual epoch of the plant, an avatar told off, as the butterfly by the caterpillar, to produce the seeds which are the eggs of the species. In each case a certain definite period of time is passed in laying by material, in eating and storing only; then comes a quiescent epoch of rest and rebuilding; and this again is followed by a mature stage of marriage and reproduction. Notice, too, in either instance, that the reproductive stage is more beautifully formed and more attractively coloured than the mere accumulative and storing mechanism.
What is thus true of the crocus and of the butterfly is true, to a great extent, of all plants and animals in temperate or cold climates. They enter every winter into a chrysalis stage, from which in early spring they emerge once more, still more beautiful than before, freshly adorned for the mating and nesting period. Trees lose their leaves, and withdraw their protoplasmic and starchy material in a shapeless mass into the permanent tissues; but they hold it there, ready to manufacture it once more into bright green foliage and tasselled catkins, into blushing apple-blossoms, or tall spikes of horse-chestnut flower, or pink bloom of elms, with the first spring sunshine. Squirrels hibernate; moles sleep away the dead of winter; frogs retire to the depths of ponds; slugs bury themselves in the soil; dormice doze in well-lined crannies among the boles of hazels. Many species only tide over the cold weather, indeed, in the most potential form, as eggs or seeds; they are annuals, like the poppy or the aphides of roses. In such cases the whole race is represented for some months by its germs alone: one generation never sees or knows the existence of another. In other instances, somewhat higher, the species survives as pupa or as bulb, adult, no doubt, though in a relatively formless or indefinite shape, yet ready to come forth full-fledged and perfect at the first faint breath of returning summer. Still other kinds, again, struggle through as mature and fully formed insects, or birds, or mammals, and as evergreen trees or shrubs, though they live for the most part a life of low grade, and on accumulated materials. Nature is almost dormant in our zone through the winter months; life is then one vast and varied chrysalis.
XVII.
A SUMMER STROLL.
My friend the Poet and I walk the world together on somewhat different principles. It is a fixed belief of his that illusion is far more beautiful than reality. He likes to see the distant hills through some dim veil of mist; he likes to believe the skylark feeds on dew and sunshine, and he is revolted when I explain to him, in spite of Shelley, the actual staples of its unromantic diet. To him, it seems, everything loses just half its beauty when he knows all about it. Analysis, he says, is destructive of pleasure. Only in an imagined and unrealized world can he find the pure elements that delight his fancy.
But to me the actual world as it stands is beautiful. I love to descry the very contour of the hills; I love to watch from afar the saucer-shaped combes on the flanks of the South Downs, when the afternoon light floods and bathes them in its glory. Illusion to my mind is less lovely than reality. Nothing on earth seems more beautiful than Truth. I love to catch her face behind the clouds that conceal her.
And now it is the plain unvarnished Truth I am going to give you in this Moorland Idyll. I am going to tell you just what we saw to-day, without one episode or incident save what really occurred to us. I could not make that stroll more exquisite than I found it, if I tried till Doomsday. It was an idyll of real life. May many more so come to me!
We strayed together—the Poet, Elsie, Lucy, and myself—across the moor to Highfield, in search of strawberries. Highfield lies some two miles off, at the beginning of the valley; a lost old-world farm, in a dell of the moors, with a market-garden. You poor Londoners, when you go to buy strawberries, go to buy them prosaically at a commercial fruiterer’s in a noisy street; but we moorlanders go with our basket in our hands to some lonely grange across the heather-clad upland. The first part of our walk lay high over the ridge, where the heath was burnt in the Jubilee year by the great fire; you can still plainly mark the point up to which the flames made a clear sweep of the heather, and the point where they left off, held in check by the beaters. For heather is really a forest-tree of some fifty years’ growth; and the waste where the fire raged is still covered to this day with a shorter crop of young seedling gorse and ling and whortleberry, while the older vegetation unburnt beyond rises tall and bush-like. The blasted part, too, shows by far the finest and deepest purple of any; not because the flowers are really bigger or thicker, but because where the plants are still short the Tyrian purple of the Scotch heather is seen to greatest advantage; whereas, when they rise higher, the Scotch heather is overtopped by the bushier and coarser and taller-growing ling, with its somewhat insipid pale pink blossoms. The Poet thinks the fire makes the heath burn brighter. I think myself it keeps the ling lower.