Take it that the decree has gone forth from Heaven: There shall be no more generations, with this life the world shall die. Think you we should move another hand? The ships would rot in the harbours, the grain would rot in the ground. Should we paint pictures, write books, make music? hemmed in by that onward creeping sea of silence. Think you with what eyes husband and wife would look on one another. Think you of the wooing—the spring of Love dried up; love only a pool of stagnant water.
How little we seem to realize this foundation of our life. Herein, if nowhere else, lies our eternity. This Ego shall never die—unless the human race from beginning to end be but a passing jest of the Gods, to be swept aside when wearied of, leaving room for new experiments. These features of mine—we will not discuss their æsthetic value—shall never disappear; modified, varied, but in essential the same, they shall continue in ever increasing circles to the end of Time. This temperament of mine—this good and evil that is in me, it shall grow with every age, spreading ever wider, combining, amalgamating. I go into my children and my children’s children, I am eternal. I am they, they are I. The tree withers and you clear the ground, thankful if out of its dead limbs you can make good firewood; but its spirit, its life, is in fifty saplings. The tree dies not, it changes.
These men and women that pass me in the street, this one hurrying to his office, this one to his club, another to his love, they are the mothers of the world to come.
This greedy trickster in stocks and shares, he cheats, he lies, he wrongs all men—for what? Follow him to his luxurious home in the suburbs: what do you find? A man with children on his knee, telling them stories, promising them toys. His anxious, sordid life, for what object is it lived? That these children may possess the things that he thinks good for them. Our very vices, side by side with our virtues, spring from this one root, Motherhood. It is the one seed of the Universe. The planets are but children of the sun, the moon but an offspring of the earth, stone of her stone, iron of her iron. What is the Great Centre of us all, life animate and inanimate—if any life be inanimate? Is the eternal universe one dim figure, Motherhood, filling all space?
This scheming Mother of Mayfair, angling for a rich son-in-law! Not a pleasing portrait to look upon, from one point of view. Let us look at it, for a moment, from another. How weary she must be! This is her third “function” to-night; the paint is running off her poor face. She has been snubbed a dozen times by her social superiors, openly insulted by a Duchess; yet she bears it with a patient smile. It is a pitiful ambition, hers: it is that her child shall marry money, shall have carriages and many servants, live in Park Lane, wear diamonds, see her name in the Society Papers. At whatever cost to herself, her daughter shall, if possible, enjoy these things. She could so much more comfortably go to bed, and leave the child to marry some well-to-do commercial traveller. Justice, Reader, even for such. Her sordid scheming is but the deformed child of Motherhood.
Motherhood! it is the gamut of God’s orchestra, savageness and cruelty at the one end, tenderness and self-sacrifice at the other.
The sparrow-hawk fights the hen: he seeking food for his brood, she defending hers with her life. The spider sucks the fly to feed its myriad young; the cat tortures the mouse to give its still throbbing carcase to her kittens, and man wrongs man for children’s sake. Perhaps when the riot of the world reaches us whole, not broken, we shall learn it is a harmony, each jangling discord fallen into its place around the central theme, Motherhood.
ON THE INADVISABILITY OF FOLLOWING ADVICE
I was pacing the Euston platform late one winter’s night, waiting for the last train to Watford, when I noticed a man cursing an automatic machine. Twice he shook his fist at it. I expected every moment to see him strike it. Naturally curious, I drew near softly. I wanted to catch what he was saying. However, he heard my approaching footsteps, and turned on me. “Are you the man,” said he, “who was here just now?”
“Just where?” I replied. I had been pacing up and down the platform for about five minutes.