Shaped by himself with newly-learnèd art;
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;
And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song.
With these mental possessions he is opening his mind to the coming conquests of life: as much to be conquered by its beauty as to conquer it. But what he gains from his appreciation of earth’s loveliness brings loss to none; in this extension of his mental horizon there is no shutting of others from a like view; this aspect of the dominion upon which he is now entering is communal, something illimitable, which all may share. Of possession acquired upon those terms we need never be afraid. And it is a very real possession, far more real, as I shall hope presently to show, than any mere power to thwart, hinder, or control the freedom of others, which is the form of possession at which too often man aims.
Let us start, in order to realise this, with certain other experiments of childhood. Which child more truly “possesses” the life of linnet or hedge-sparrow, making it in some measure his own: the child who stays quiet and disciplines himself to watch the bird at the building of its nest, the hatching of its eggs and the feeding of its young; or the child who puts an end to all that beauty and complexity of motion by bringing down his bird with a stone? If he comes to tell others of his experience, what alternatively is there for him to tell? In the one case only his own act of destruction, a thing done and brought to a dead end; in the other he has a dozen new things to tell of—discoveries made in a process of life which he has watched with delight and knows still to be going on. From which of these two experiments does he draw the larger consciousness? Which of the two most peoples his world for him? Step by step as he advances he will find how much, by interfering with the lives of others, he can destroy, but how little he can build up; he can take hold of the daddy-legs leg by leg and find that they all come off, and wonder perhaps at the zest with which that eager little martyr fulfils the words of Scripture, “If thy foot offend thee cut it off and cast it from thee.” But constant repetition of the experiment, though it may give him an evil sense of power, will give him no variety, no real advance in knowledge concerning the life, or the use and beauty of flies’ legs. He will not treasure—to benefit by them—the legs that he has pulled off, nor will his brain have stored anything but an added sense of and liking for his own power to destroy. And so will it be with everything on which he experiments destructively. His knowledge and understanding of their nature will remain at a minimum. Progressing on these lines, he will for ever be making things cease to be themselves without making them really his own. But if he reverse that process of experiment by encouraging things to be themselves, how varied and multitudinous will grow his consciousness of life, his appreciation of its finer shades, its delicacy, its grace, its adaptability, its vigour and its freedom. If his interest is in birds, how much more he will know of them, and find in them how much more of alertness and beauty, if he hang food for them outside his window, rather than cages for them within; if he will recognise that the beauty of a bird lies too largely in its wings, for caging to be anything but a contradiction of its true existence. If his interest is in animals, how far more he will learn of their resources and character, if he aims not at cowing them and causing them to flee from him in fear, but at encouraging them in all genuine and characteristic development. That does not mean teaching them to “perform” in painful and artificial ways—exploits which are always built up on processes of cruelty, and do not in the least reveal animal nature as it really is but only impose upon it a mask of concealment—anthropomorphic, full of conceit and self-flattery—the same fond thing which he did when he began making God also in his own image to worship it.
There, indeed, in man’s shaping of God to be like himself, revengeful, deceitful, pompous, inconsiderate, unmerciful, one-sided and masculine; in making Him, too, a performer of tricks, so that in those attributes he might see himself reflected and stand enlarged in his own eyes—surely there more than in any other department of life has man by his foolish possessiveness brought to the human race poverty instead of wealth, a curse instead of a blessing.
That is but one example of how this narrow possessiveness with which man set out to conquer heaven and earth wears thin and poor under the test of time, and leaves him in the end no standing monuments but just a heap of rubble on which to gaze—only that, or perhaps less—perhaps only desert sand.