And it is perhaps inadequate comfort to reflect that the one world known to us, wherein everything exists by virtue of destruction, can hardly be described as a realm of life rather than of death. As I write, I can observe, in the long field across the roadway, our family cow indefatigably grazing in the level light of sunset, a stolid Gothic monster whose placid conduct of existence I have sometimes envied.... More often, though, have I frowningly gazed out of the library window, in search of some elusive word, to find the creature tirelessly munching forward, and never for one instant having to use her brain; and then I have suspected that cow of being a really competent literary critic.... Well, the grass is, as we say, alive, and by its death she is being nourished. And it is rather vexatious to reflect that this cow will probably for some time be retained as the source of our milk supply. Otherwise I could go on to moralize how she will presently become steaks and roasts, to furnish me with nutriment through her cenatical interment; and how I in a little while shall be dead and nourishing new grasses for her descendants to feed on; and how the cycle of grass, cow and man will thus go on interminably and, some say, aimlessly. It could be worked up, I think, into a quite effective prose passage. Unluckily, I know I shall in every likelihood never eat that especial cow; and so my neat and edifying sermon is despoiled by the raid of common-sense, always inimical to art.
None the less do two minutes of reflection beget perturbing offspring, in shape of the knowledge that everywhere life brings about death, and death life, until the hardiest of philosophers may hardly dare assert which upon earth is prevalent. From wasp to tiger, from the eagle to the frog, all animate beings must kill ceaselessly, and eat and kill again, until they themselves be killed for another's nourishing. We may say, as we very glibly do, that the worm is the wren's food: yet it seems equally true that every wren is but a flying compost of dead worms, just as that cow yonder is, to the considerate, a heaving rick of dead hay.... And we human beings also are condemned to incessant killing, we are doomed to the diurnal massacre of innumerable fellow mammals, who very much excel us in some virtues, such as patience and taciturnity, even if they be upon the whole our inferiors in malevolence and folly. I do not imagine, for example, that many persons would declare an archbishop to be as near a thorough Christian as is a lamb, or could, with an unpricking conscience, affirm a congressman to be, in every district, as intelligent as a cow.
So we all live by grace of killing, as indubitably as did any mediæval bravo or headsman. Wheresoever, in the familiar Scriptural phrase, two or three are gathered together, there again is the customary alliance of the Bible and Shakespeare justified by the aptness of the naïve old stage direction, Enter three murderers.... Nor is it instantly apparent that an assassination is converted into righteousness by a subsequent eating of the corpse. It is an epilogue, indeed, which savors a little distastefully of the necrophile. Besides, a passionate or disinterested murder may well in many circumstances retain a certain childish grace, as befits the first invention of the first baby: a mere murder is often picturesque and, I am told, enjoyable: but that crime which is called a dinner party was never, to my knowledge, either of these things.... And therefore one laments this obscene crunching and devouring which, when reflected upon, abates man's proper pride in his race, and coolingly checks love and every other exalted sentiment. It is not possible to think with adoration, or even with actual pleasure, of the most dear of ladies as the sarcophagus of fish and chicken, as the moving monument of so many mangled sheep, as the animated ossuary of oxen, as in brief a mere morgue. And man that is born of woman does literally, we see, come out of a coffin into the tedium of life, whereunder he encounters on all sides the yawning of one or another grave, in the persons of his fellow omnivora.
So by the considerate our world may hardly be described as the realm of life rather than of death. And in all lands men have obscurely felt that death was perhaps the beginning as well as the end of all things. Thus, naturally enough, you find the Northmen talking of Ymir, the slain giant, whose flesh and blood and bones decayed into our earth and sea and mountains. In India men told of the giant Purusha, from whose dead body the world was just thus mortifyingly made: in Babylon, of rotting Tiamat; in China, of P'an Ku; and in Persia, of Gayomart. Everywhere you encounter the suspicion that this world and the busy life with which it swarms reveal the phenomena attendant upon the putrefying of any other sizable carcass: among all nations the older poets have, with queer unanimity, identified mankind with the worms which breed in a puffed and bubbling corpse; and have protested that, rightly speaking, in our terrestrial existence is nowhere apparent anything save the operation and products of death.
§ 59
Yet the chelonian-footed progress of science here, as usual, has in the outcome managed to catch up with the forerunning hare-brained fancies of the poets. Astronomers are now agreed that we inhabit a world already dying, a world made tenable for parasites through the abating of its vital heat; and that our race infests earth only during the last stages of the globe's demise. We men and women in our worldly relations rank, if you be an optimist, with lice: if pessimism be your creed, you will lean to the old poetic idea of our being maggots. For the science of the astronomer does, in essentials, but revert to the most ancient notions of cosmology; finds nowhere apparent anything save the operation and products of death; and rather cheerlessly unveils the cold and murderous tides of circumambient æther, about which drift so many other moribund planets among the corpses of their fellows.
None the less, it is with this omnipresent and omnicorporeal monarch that the artist makes sport, depriving death of terrors with the opiates of religion; and maiming death of potency likewise, so long as the artist eludes destruction and survives in his art. To that attenuated, grotesque and defamatory survival I shall by and by come back: meanwhile I must protest, even here, that in this third struggle is no least beckoning chance of victory.
For, before common-sense or piety man figures, as I have said, in the rôle of Frankenstein; he is as Dom Manuel before the vivified image of Sesphra; and he combats, without much hope, his own terrible creation: but here, the opponent seems far more likely to have created him, however accidentally. By the fanciful may mankind, thus, be viewed as an unpremeditated by-product, as some serious task's débris, which for the moment rather clutters this corner of death's workroom. Others will play with the notion—which, as I remember, Felix Kennaston once suggested,—of life's having somehow got into the material universe as a small, alien, unwelcome interloper; and will suspect this is the reason that death appears to come upon us and our labors frowningly, as the vexed housewife comes toward the unloved weavings of the spider, just seen.
But, in either case, the poets are sonorously agreed that never while time lasts can man's existence really matter; for time, they say, is death's broom.