I see upon earth but one order of created beings which enjoy the power of ignoring or beguiling, by their freedom and swiftness of motion, this universal sadness of impotent aspiration; I mean those beings which belong to earth, so to speak, only by the tips of their wings; which the air itself cradles and supports, most frequently without being otherwise connected with them than by guiding them at their need and their caprice.
A life of ease, yet sublime! With what a glance of scorn may the weakest bird regard the strongest, the swiftest of quadrupeds—a tiger, a lion! How it may smile to see them in their utter powerlessness bound, fastened to the earth, which they terrify with vain and useless roaring—with the nocturnal wailings that bear witness to the bondage of the so-called king of animals, fettered, as we are all, in that inferior existence which hunger and gravitation equally prepare for us!
Oh, the fatality of the appetites! the fatality of motion which compels us to drag our unwilling limbs along the earth! Implacable heaviness which binds each of our feet to the dull, rude element wherein death will hereafter resolve us, and says, "Son of the earth, to the earth thou belongest! A moment released from its bosom, thou shalt lie there henceforth for ages."
Do not let us inveigh against nature; it is assuredly the sign that we inhabit a world still in its first youth, still in a state of barbarism—a world of essay and apprenticeship, in the grand series of stars, one of the elementary stages of the sublime initiation. This planet is the world of a child. And thou, a child thou art. From this lower school thou shalt be emancipated also; thy wings shall be majestic and powerful. Thou shalt win and deserve, while here, by the sweat of thy brow, a step forward in liberty.
Let us make an experiment. Ask of the bird while still in the egg what he would wish to be; give him the option. Wilt thou be a man, and share in that royalty of the globe which men have won by art and toil?
No, he will immediately reply. Without calculating the immense exertion, the labour, the sweat, the care, the life of slavery by which we purchase sovereignty, he will have but one word to say: "A king myself, by birth, of space and light, why should I abdicate when man, in his loftiest ambition, in his highest aspirations after happiness and freedom, dreams of becoming a bird, and taking unto himself wings?"
It is in his sunniest time, his first and richest existence, in his day-dreams of youth, that man has sometimes the good fortune to forget that he is a man, a slave to hard fate, and chained to earth. Behold, yonder, him who flies abroad, who hovers, who dominates over the world, who swims in the sunbeam; he enjoys the ineffable felicity of embracing at a glance an infinity of things which yesterday he could only see one by one. Obscure enigma of detail, suddenly made luminous to him who perceives its unity! To see the world beneath one's self, to embrace, to love it! How divine, how lofty a dream! Do not wake me, I pray you, never wake me! But what is this? Here again are day, uproar, and labour; the harsh iron hammer, the ear-piercing bell with its voice of steel, dethrone and dash me headlong; my wings are rent. Dull earth, I fall to earth; bruised and bent, I return to the plough.
When, at the close of the last century, man formed the daring idea of giving himself up to the winds, of mounting in the air without rudder, or oar, or means of guidance, he proclaimed aloud that at length he had secured his pinions, had eluded nature, and conquered gravitation. Cruel and tragical catastrophes gave the lie to this ambition. He studied the economy of the bird's wing, he undertook to imitate it; rudely enough he counterfeited its inimitable mechanism. We saw with terror, from a column of a hundred feet high, a poor human bird, armed with huge wings, dart into air, wrestle with it, and dash headlong into atoms.
The gloomy and fatal machine, in its laborious complexity, was a sorry imitation of that admirable arm (far superior to the human arm), that system of muscles, which co-operate among themselves in so vigorous and lively a movement. Disjointed and relaxed, the human wing lacked especially that all-powerful muscle which connects the shoulder to the chest (the humerus to the sternum), and communicates its impetus to the thunderous flight of the falcon. The instrument acts so directly on the mover, the oar on the rower, and unites with him so perfectly that the martinet, the frigate-bird, sweeps along at the rate of eighty leagues an hour, five or six times swifter than our most rapid railway trains, outstripping the hurricane, and with no rival but the lightning.