Title: The Forest Giant
Author: Corbeau, Adrien le
Language: English
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  _The Forest Giant_

  _by_

  ADRIEN LE CORBEAU


  _Translated from the French by_
  J. H. ROSS


  _Jonathan Cape_
  ELEVEN GOWER STREET LONDON



  FIRST PUBLISHED IN MCMXXIV

  MADE & PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
  BY BUTLER & TANNER LTD.
  FROME AND
  LONDON



_Contents_

CHAP.

1 THE ODYSSEY

2 THE GENUS TREMBLES INTO CONSCIOUSNESS

3 THE KINDLY DARKNESS

4 CONTRASTS WHICH ARE NOT CONTRASTS

5 CAUGHT UP INTO THE STREAM OF LIFE

6 THE LAW OF BALANCE

7 METAMORPHOSES

8 WHAT THE MOON SAW

9 WHEN THE CORSELET SNAPS

10 THE MIRROR OF CHANGELESS TIME

11 THE WHEEL OF LIFE LIVED

12 WHEN THE WOOD-DUST FLOATED IN THE AIR

13 WHAT IS CALLED DEATH

14 THE THEORY OF ETERNAL SLEEPLESSNESS

CONCLUSION: WITHIN A CELL



CHAPTER I

_The Odyssey_

For years on end it had been rolling, across the plains, through the
deep meadow grasses, under the dim echoing archways of the forest.
Always, in heat and cold, beneath blue skies, or skies clouded with
rain and hail and snow, it had been rolling ceaselessly.  One day it
would be gilded by the sunlight--but not softened; another day
grizzled streaks of rain soaked it--without refreshment.  It was
buried, to all appearances for ever, by drifts of snow--but was not
hurt.  It had crossed cataracts of light and floods of shadow; it had
been rocked by soft winds and hurled dizzily into the air by the
shrieking gusts of cyclones; and it had met all these things--the
sweetness of the day, the shade of night, the winters, the springs,
the summers--with the same submissive, invulnerable apathy.  It had
waited its hour, ready, if need be, to wait yet much longer.

Those who boast of their travels and adventures should think over
this journey and its conditions.  We have glimpses of other
countries, we climb mountains, we run through woods and fields; but
our varieties and difficulties are as nothing to the differences of
its varied blades of grass, to its dark holes in the ground, its
mounds of earth or snow, to all the obstacles which it met and
overcame or slipped past on its road.  Our gallops on shore or
voyages at sea do not compare with its mad career as the sport of
storms and mountain-torrents.  Time and space fought over the little
helpless rolling body.  The elements loosed out their terrors round
it like an evil dream, seeming to toss it about in prize.

Everything seemed to toss it about.  It was girt round by
immensities, which might be azure or glittering with gold in summer,
pallid dull or menacing in winter, silent as the abyss by night, and
terrible with a myriad of unknown noises in the day; but nothing
daunted it.  Within its tiny form it held other visions, greater yet,
visions and million-old memories of the childhood of the world, when
the waves moaned in another measure, and the agony of the vision of
earth was different.  So it waited the favourable event which would
give it life: or the sign of dissolution, to presage its death.

The light beating of a bird's wings, one dawn, had began its career
by flinging it out of the tiny shelter (a crevice in a low branch of
the mother-tree) from which the mightiest winds had been unable in
long years to tear it.  It was falling in slow gyrations through the
green air, across the red-barred dawn-fires of the sun, when a quick
breath of wind lifted its mossy form and carried it, from near the
ground, far out into space.  In its flight it grazed, time and again,
the rude bark of trees, sank to ground level, skimmed it, and rose
once more before it fell at last upon the polished surface of a
stone, where it lay till dark and through the night till the next
noon.  The air above it was heavy with the humming of insects, and
around stretched the very old forest, vibrant with life.

The merest trifle might have carried this tiny seed of Californian
pine a few inches farther, where lay fat moist soil, good for
tree-growth; but such was not its lot.  The vast and shining EYE
which oversees the dizzy spectacle of the universe, and comprehends
it in its dreadful whole as in its least bewildering detail, this EYE
had doubtless not lost sight of it.  Suddenly all light around was
blotted out: a great mass overwhelmed it and carried it away with
heavy abrupt movements.  It felt itself embedded in a soft warm
substance, among grains of sand, dead leaves and grass, which were
picked up now and then from the ground, carried awhile, and dropped
(only to be replaced by others), in a sequence of rudely rhythmical
movement.  The pine-seed had been caught up in the frog of an
animal's foot, fixed in it deeply, so that it was not till after many
days at last delivered, when the beast waded across a brook and left
the seed on a dry sand-bank, near sunset, in the deep glow of the
evening rays.

The seed had now quitted the forest for an immense, bare, open
desert, a new prospect of the world.  Here were no rustling grasses
nor fluttering leaves, no clashing together of dry branches, no birds
to sing nor beasts to howl: none of that rich, wide, strange stirring
of the mighty jungle, whose breathing and mysterious rumour was
choked (like the cries of its animals and the laboured thrumming of
the winds through its vaulted trees) by the rank smell of sap and the
exhalations of dead leaves and teeming soil.  A light wind blew the
seed across the sand, for hours driving it about, backwards,
forwards, to right or left, sometimes in great circles, and sometimes
stationary against a stone till a new gust should send it forth
again, past its obstacle, on yet another abandoned desultory course.
The world was overspread with an intense blue, from which light
seemed to fall in sheets.

Later this brilliant blue turned to a bleeding red, through which the
sun's golden arrows slid into violet bands and faded gently.  An
exquisite freshness fell from heaven as the purple mildness of
evening came down upon the world.  Yet the pine-seed could not rest.
The wind, as it became sweeter, became stronger, and sent it again
across the sand-spaces of its former road, while about it a new life
began to stir.  Insects which had been hiding all day danced over it,
or circled violently about it, or stopped to smell it, or tried in
vain to crack open its hard shell.  Their grotesque shadows ran
blackly over the silver sand.  At times green shining specks came
near, hovered a moment, and vanished in a soft shiver of wings.

All the while the pine-seed resigned itself with unconquerable
patience to its senseless course.  Dawn came.  The sun climbed high
in the heavens.  Yesterday's burning blue again hemmed in the world;
and after it came night and dawn, and day and night again once more.
In the same wide desert the pine-seed rolled about, the sport of the
same winds, pitting against their caprice the constant apathetic
endurance of its little, round, hard body.

So weeks and months flowed by, times which for other things or other
beings elsewhere may have been momentous; but which for the sequoia
seed were all alike.  Then one day the sky darkened, and rain began
to fall.  The first slow heavy drops seemed to nail the seed to the
sand, and whole days passed; but in the end, just at twilight, water
began to trickle over the ground and to collect in plashes here and
there over the huge sandy surface.

The strange power of water to absorb light enables it to preserve the
clearness of the daylight, even when the light has fled, and makes
the shadows which it reflects in the darkness appear even darker than
their truth.  The sea gives, better than any other thing, a feeling
of the mystery of never-ending distances.  It strikes not merely on
living beings, through their imagination, their blood, their nerves,
but seems almost to project itself into materials.  These
water-plashes at last ran together into little streams which carried
off in their current everything not strong enough to resist them.
Consequently the pine-seed found itself all at once flooded with
freshness.  The liquid got right into it, penetrated unreservedly
into its outer husk, till the little seed felt itself soaked.  None
the less it kept its vital force intact, and neither split nor
sprouted.  The life-force handed down to it through millions of
generations was too vigorous and too well-prepared for its special
future, whether near or distant, to break up in the tiny frame.  Only
this time inertia was not its sole defence against the assailing
elements: it found in itself a happy elasticity which helped to keep
out surplus liquid.

Thus for the whole rainy season the seed wandered about the
sand-desert, going with the waters down an imperceptible slope.  On
all sides the waves now compassed it, with the grey sky coving above
it and them in the daytime; but at night it was drowned by water and
by darkness.  The waters, as ever, darkened the shadows of these
shades circling in space.  A chill, blind, impenetrable horror
overcame the pine-seed.  It appeared, almost like an endowed being,
to hesitate in its career.  It struck against stones, seemed to cling
to the tufts of grass which the waters carried down with them, seemed
to betray a longing to stop, while the waves, so infinitely great,
withdrew it gently but irresistibly from every obstacle.  It yielded
patiently, strong perhaps in its sense of future greatness.  The
outside forces, despite their violence, could not prevail over the
insignificant seed whose giant bulk would some day laugh at the
roaring of the winds and the struggles of the waves; and as it was
tossed about during the night in the immensity of shadow and water,
may not the sense of past existence have come to life in it, and a
memory of that other chaos with the very different terrors, as
experienced by its forbears in the first stages of the world?  So it
journeyed, firmly and humbly, towards the unknown.



CHAPTER 2

_The Genus trembles into Consciousness_

One day the stream of water by which the seed was carried along sank
suddenly--whirling down a funnel in the ground.  Slowly the grey
light of day grew less as the seed dived deeper and deeper, till in
absolute darkness it was rushing madly down the water-spout.  Hoarse
bellowings resounded about its long subterranean voyage, asserting
themselves above the stifled noises of the passage of the buried
river through the bowels of the earth.  For weeks and months the
pine-kernel revolved in these invisible currents, at times slipping
slowly along the twisting flow, at other times hurled forward at a
dizzy speed in the dwelling coolness of the under-ground.

Suddenly the booming of the flood deepened.  A hesitating cautious
light came trembling down the waves, and with a huge guggling the
seed found itself thrown out into a greenish mass of translucent
water, the volume of a river which now took charge of its further
course, and in whose stream it long drifted, while the sun gilded the
changing surface or the moon turned it all to silver.  The tiny seed
seemed lost in time, swallowed up in space, as it floated on top of
the water or sank into its depth.  The contrasts were overwhelming,
when the insignificant grain was set beside the river which carried
it along, beside the wide champaigns of the two banks, beside the
unplumbed void above, in whose pale-blue transparency some far grey
and white clouds were fading or floating.  How small it looked so set
in infinite space!  and yet the pine-kernel had its own part to play,
and of the thousands of interacting forces in earth and heaven some
were specially appointed to fulfil its destiny.

Where did it go in this great smooth-running river?  How was it that
the immensities among which it wandered did not blot out its faint
existence?  Had the all-seeing Eye really appointed each one of the
many incidents which marked its start in life?  Can we, in view of
this case, believe that everything has been fore-ordained since the
beginning of time (which has never been), and is ordained to the end
of time (which also will never be)?  No doubt there are the same laws
for beings and for things, for constellations of dazzling size as for
atoms too small to see, laws which operate in a like spirit and
entail like inevitable consequences of related sense.  Worlds and
beings, objective things and abstractions of thought and instinct all
run a similar course of birth, climax, and decline.  They begin in
nameless processes, develop in phases according to their kinds, and
end one day to make room for other transformations equally
indescribable.

Accordingly the pine-seed was carried by the river in devious
courses, thrown up on the bank, snatched away by the wind, rolled
over the plains, cast up the mountain-side, tossed back into the
fields, led here and there for an incalculable time, the sport of
inapprehensible caprice.  A hundred times it nearly fell into a spot
favourable for taking root, and as often it was driven away from its
goal by forces apparently hostile.  If the little seed had been
gifted with an observing sense it would probably have seen the lot
and end of every event in its own destiny.  Once it hung for years a
few inches from a suitable hole in some fat land, and was left there
unmoved by the fresh winds of spring-time, by the ardent summers, by
the icy falls of snow.  Nothing helped it; till finally a pebble
slipped--for some unrecorded reason--picked it up on one of its muddy
faces and held it there for weeks, to set it free again on a path of
turf.

Such incidents often happened, to make the seed entertain the common
hope of its species, the chance of taking root; but always some
unknown force dashed the near fulfilment from it.  However, one
morning, at the edge of a forest and on rain-softened ground, the
sequoia seed at last got leave to germinate.  The leave was given
suddenly and precisely.  A gust of wind, blowing across a dead calm,
lifted it some hundreds of yards at a bound, and put it down on the
slope of a mound of soil by an open hole.  None the less the seed
might have lain short of its place for years, for it was fixed firmly
enough to nullify the impulse of the winds, and the many and various
undulations of the ground-surface; but now at length its natural
purpose was nearly achieved.  A few minutes later a dung-beetle
arrived, took it up between its claws, easily avoided the several
obstacles of the mound, and dropped it, as though intelligently, on
the very edge of the pit.  The insect then, as in obedience to some
non-apparent but exact will, began heedlessly to fill in the hole
with rich earth.

So from a little seed and a little soil there will be born here a
_sequoia gigantea_, the hugest plant of earth.  It seems a miracle
that the future bulk of the tree, its grain, its pith, the shape and
colour of its needles, the special nature of its sap, the many tens
of hundreds of years of its life should be found in a pin-head of
vegetable fibre; and another miracle that the microscopic seed should
already contain not merely its plant's organic nature, but also its
tastes and distastes, its pleasures and its pains, all the range of
yet unformed impressions which would colour its existence in the
world.

In such changeless fashion does the vital spark of species run
through a myriad centuries.  It was for the sequoia, as it is for the
innumerable forms of life upon earth, for the solar planets, and for
those unknown planets circulating in space, fragments perhaps of suns
beyond our ken.  From this aspect the law of perpetuity seems to be
an eternal re-beginning of the same careers, to be pursued through
similar stages to a like end.

How often we find in ourselves hopes, desires, griefs, apparently
unrelated to our own experiences and circumstances!  They come to us
from very far, these feelings, and in answering to them we follow a
mysterious and indiscoverable chain of forerunners.  Their fate is to
some extent our own.  Like memory (activity's retreating shadow),
their sensations mix and mirror themselves brokenly in us, quickening
in us hesitant, half-felt surmises about their final cause, or as to
why these reflections of a long-lost age are sent to us.

The play of external events upon our destiny seems to us as
inexplicable as the inherited influences which direct us from within.
The tiny seed, for example, in circumstances apparently hostile and
unfavourable to its development, yet by a few exact but unexpected
actions of others, found itself free to work out its fate; and to
work it out just after a moment when it had seemed indefinitely
delayed.

We men living under the sun can usefully apply the lessons of our own
existence to this case.  We are very far from grasping the whole
scheme of the forces which dispose our lives; indeed, we get only
faint occasional sidelights upon them.  They strike our attention
often because of the mysterious symmetry with which certain things
seem to happen.  We call them good and bad periods when an order of
events occurs to help or hinder our fortunes; and it is significant
that there should be a family likeness in such series of affairs.
The vision of the lean and fat cows in the Bible is only one instance
of this age-old observation; and we have also noted that cases
apparently hopeless sometimes contain, beyond our sight, their own
happy issue which bursts into view through a union of unexpected and
apparently unrelated circumstances.  This law sways not merely our
human affairs but universal fate.  Does the all-creating Eye really
see and set in motion His whole universe rhythmically, in tune with
one principle which is concealed from our sight by the terrifying
complexity of detail in daily life in the visible and invisible
worlds?

If so, the universe takes shape as a harmonious whole.  What we know
and what we do not know of the millions of existences everywhere at
any time all are driving towards a common end.  From the littlenesses
here and the greatnesses there would emerge, perhaps, for those who
could see it, a whole immeasurably, inconceivably huge.  The atoms
seem a mass to us, sometimes, though doubtless they differ among
themselves.  Men, despite their individual characters, appear, when
seen in bulk and from a distance, as a group-whole, comparable with
bees or ants.  From far enough our earth, despite its diversifying
hills and plains and valleys, would seem a smooth body; and if some
being could comprehend the entire universe at once, by means and from
a view-point beyond our understanding, what would it look like
all-together?

That no man will ever tell us.



CHAPTER 3

_The Kindly Darkness_

Buried between two layers of soil the little pine-kernel woke from
its inactivity.  Underground was warm and moist; and therefore the
seed swelled up with comfort, and relaxed itself with pleasure.  The
damp crept through it, right through it, with a gentle persistence in
marked contrast with the brutal attack of the flood which had swept
it away but had not broken down its stubborn defence.  The heat of
the subsoil made the seed ferment, and summoned it to live; but the
mysterious centre of life in it found a fellow-feeling in the equally
mysterious darkness which wrapped it about, full of the unaccountable
impalpable emanations of all life upon earth.

For this dark we have an unreasonable fear, and it is curious to
inquire into the causes of the horror of blackness which fixes itself
in our hearts at the moment of their first pulsations.  The black is
soothing, whence therefore our agony at thought of it?  Why do our
heads swim when we look at a graveyard and reckon the darkness of the
tomb; and the nothingness, in its grip, of things which have been but
will be no more?  Half-stifled we read a name inscribed on the marble
slab, and imagine the unknown dead man as he lived--what he did, whom
he loved, how he suffered--and we conjure up in our minds the poor
blank wraith, now for ever departed from the light of day.

We can go further, and from the one build up the army of those who
have lived, of those alive, of those who will live after us: and
these unknown shadows press about our familiar faces, flutter and
crowd in and out of the stage-properties of our own existence--like
dead leaves in the autumn winds.  Particular shapes haunt us with
disquieting persistency.  We find ourselves in streets, or at shows,
or in public parks in the midst of a mob of people whom we do not
know, but who live beside us; and we hear them speaking, and can
picture to ourselves what they care about.  They are of all ages, old
and young, men, women, children, black-eyed, blue-eyed, grey-eyed,
with fair or dark hair or hair withered white, full-lipped, or with
lips shrivelled by passing time; but all of them are living, are
there, glad or sorry, before our eyes.  An idea takes possession of
us and strengthens in us till we tremble with it.  We think--"All
these individuals about us, whom we could touch as they move, and
whom we know to have feelings and hopes and preoccupations, all these
beings are destined to disappear one day, whatever they do, wherever
they may be, no matter how strong, how well-founded, how firm.  In a
hundred years they will just have existed, will be nowhere
discoverable.  What will have become of them?"  And again we see the
cold, forbidding cemeteries, with the ranked and serried silent tombs
all shut fast among their flowers.  We shiver at the thought that
there, under the cover-stones, beneath the turf, below thick layers
of soil, are only blanched bones scattered through that dark which
makes us tremble with the notion that it is in some strange fashion
our enemy.

Such is the common mistake of reason when imagination has taken
charge of a mind; and in combating it we must first distinguish
between its cause and its effects.  These shadows which we fear only
have power upon us after we have irrevocably ceased to exist.  It is
not the darkness which destroys us; on the contrary, it is profoundly
creative, doing its work, with that odd prudishness of creation, by
choice out of sight.

It was in such a blank darkness underground that the sequoia seed
germinated and burst open under the life-impulse.  The cotyledons,
rich in vivifying substances, gave a beginning of nourishment to the
seedling until it was able itself to select the elements which would
assist its growth.  The darkness cradled the budding plant, and would
continue to prove its definite base after it had grown up to
strength.  In all these functions there was no destructiveness,
nothing to excuse our fear of it.  The shades stand attentive about
the seeds of plants, as they surround the young of birds in the
hatching egg, as they contain the foetus in its mother's womb.  In
the dark is the beginning of nearly all creative processes: even the
diamond forms itself so, in the very bowels of the earth, remote from
us--there, in a solid blackness, it takes to itself that faceted
shape which later will reflect the light from its every point.  These
unfortunate shadows for which we harbour so unjust a fear!--and so
illogical a fear, for when our cells are worn out by the strain and
stridency of life and day it is to darkness that we turn for the
renewal of our vital force; and when our hearts and spirits demand
either calm in which to rest after the blows of misfortune, or
mending after the shock of disillusion, again it is to the shadows
that we have recourse, and among them that we find hope--which is
either the salve of fresh illusions or the satisfaction of reviewing
our obtained petitions.

In this shadow-land our pine-microcosm accumulated the strength which
enabled it to make an essay at living.  First it absorbed the starchy
liquid which the cotyledons had prepared for it; then it began itself
to hunt in plant fashion for its own necessary sustenance.  Through
all its pores the tiny rootlet sucked up the particular juices and
essences it needed.  It grew, and divided itself into branches that
it might tap more sub-soil with these many extensions.  It is warm
down there underground, and the soil was wet, for it was spring-time
outside.  The earth was pulsating mightily with the sense of new
movement, was transmitting its excitement to the air.  The light of
day and the darkness of the pit communicate with one another by
exchanging invisible and indescribable rays.  The decaying bodies of
men, animals, and vegetable growths affect and influence their
corresponding numbers at the moment of conception and during
growth--reaching them as freely through the pellucid air as through
the solid layers of the soil.  Life and death everywhere run into one
another: every beginning is an end, and everything ends only to begin
again.  Innumerable unknown forces come down from heaven to earth,
and as many shoot up from earth into the blue sky, all crossing one
another, tangled together.  Some are destructive, some productive.
We cannot classify or estimate these millions of indiscoverable
elements.  Most of them never enter our orbit; for we must remind
ourselves that there are an infinity of creations, of every sort and
kind and lot and fate in our universe, ranging from suns to
microscopic cells, each subject to tens of thousands of varying
conditions, and tending towards an incalculable number of predestined
ends--and it is vain for our curious but purblind spirits to try to
estimate separately or to distinguish these appalling problems, for
our limitations in kind forbid us ever to know the infinity of
evolutions in earth and heaven, in the depths of the seas, in the
depths of the earth.  It is impossible that we should ever learn what
are the hidden powers which sway our courses, what are the unknown
and unsearchable emanations which breathe around us, or over us, and
give us in hardly perceptible fashion a sense of confused joy, a
vague sadness, or some heedless inexplicable fear.



CHAPTER 4

_Contrasts which are not Contrasts_

On the earth it was spring: and the excitement of it drove
underground.  Our sprouting seed was caught up in this frenzy of
living, expanded itself, and pushed downwards and upwards in a double
movement, under cover of that odd buckler, the pileorhiza.  The light
attracted it; but at the same time it plunged deeper into the night,
for there it found hidden sympathies, and encouragements which made
it fierce and greedy.  It grew enormously, draining to itself the
scattered nourishment about it.  If other existences were starved
thereby, so much the worse for them.

Not long ago our plant was a humble seed, ready to beg its tiny life
from each powerful menacing blade of grass.  To-day it was a
successful bully, drinking up all the ichor of its patch of soil: and
such conduct is the general rule, even with us men.  When we are weak
and know it, we are timid crawling things, hating all powers since
they seem directed against us: but let us gain a little strength, and
we grow proportionately rude, beating down the weaker.  So true is it
that evolution in nature is only a re-direction of energy.  The Eye
which controls the universe really seems to have foreseen and planned
everything; and things which appear unjust or horrible to us may
appear so only because we do not know the full logic of their
existence.

It is pleasant to imagine what happens deep down in that secret
mansion of the lower earth.  The press of life can be no less there
than on the face of the ground.  Yet we call it a mystery, and rank
it with all that is beyond our sense, with that class of event which
even our imaginations fail to visualize precisely.  If only we could
see the sequoia root with our eyes, or had some yet unexpressed means
with which to analyse or share its likes and dislikes, watch its
battles, follow its sorrows, its joys!  Why were we not endowed with
some special sense able to feel the satisfied tremor of the growing
root when it made contact with kindly elements in the blank night?

From some distance, somewhere deep under the ground, a trickle of
water sent it refreshing vibrations, like a call.  How did our plant
discover the presence of this distant and friendly liquid?  Did it
experience that familiar feeling of cool freshness which we men have
near water, which we would have felt in its place?  Yet the plant had
no skin like ours, nor nerves, nor sense of smell.  It is a mystery
how it should have known things, and how it guessed where lay the
foodstuffs it needed, and by what resources beyond our knowledge it
perceived their existence.  It never missed its aim, though it had to
reach out, twist, even ramify, to get at these food-elements, and
absorb them.  In nature there are hundreds of such instincts, and
senses, and faculties, besides the feelings, or nerves, or other
appurtenances of the flesh of which we are made.  In life there are
thousands of unknown energies, of secret perceptions, of
indescribable vibrations, which we never feel, and shall never know
while we are what we are....

Yes, outside it was spring-time.  Its light and heat bathed all the
surface of the ground, instilling into the under-soil a whole range
of influences to affect some of the thousands of embryos which there
come to life, by stages which we cannot follow, and of most of which
we never become aware.  Creation is so leisurely and so retiring that
it makes little impression on us.  It is destruction which is the
striking thing, because it is quick and clear and violent.  An
instant destroys a thing which we have long seen living and
developing.  A tree many hundreds of years old is crashed down in a
minute by lightning; in a few days a forest fire will destroy a
forest which has existed for thousands of years; and this wanton
annihilation instils in us a great terror, together with an
unintelligent belief in the goddess of destruction, that savage and
formidable power which seems to rule the world, and fills us with
devout awe: she seems so mighty and so bold and ruthless that we
think her the sole goddess of life.

Such an idea comes to us because of the limited range of our
knowledge and perceptions, our only criteria of judgment.  In such
conditions naturally it is the visible and tangible world which makes
most effect on us.  Yet we should remind ourselves that if a being
under our eyes passes in a second from life to death, yet in that
same instant millions of similar beings are being created by the
mysterious courses of organic nature: just as while lightning is
striking and consuming a giant of the forest in one burning moment,
simultaneously millions of such trees are germinating in the fruitful
heat of mother-earth, beyond our sphere of control.  We should note
that in all ways and at all times creation has the numerical
superiority over destruction, whether it concerns men or animals or
plants.  In truth we have no reason to complain that our senses have
been reduced to such bare limits.  How palpitant life would be for us
if new faculties superadded to our old gave us to see the invisible,
to understand the occult, to apprehend like plants, to feel in
vibrations like light, to flow abroad like seas and contemplate the
bounds of space.

Let it be enough if we record, without seeking to explain it by
finding a parallel in our equipment, how singularly efficient our
plant was in insinuating its roots where it would.  With the aid of
its pileorhiza it passed not merely through crumbling soil, but
through stony strata, plaster, and wood.  Another mystery, this, how
so soft a substance could penetrate hard bodies, which we burst
through only by means of a great effort of strength, using tools yet
harder.  The sequoia root, dipping downward in one direction,
thrusting upward in another, without external aid split obstacles
against which we have to employ iron and stone: and at last one fine
morning its first shoot pierced the top layer of soil to salute the
sun.

At this second the plant was, to our eyes, at last born.  We commonly
pass over its hardest battles, those conditioned by the circumstances
of its origin.  In reality it was while yet beneath the ground that
the little sequoia tree experienced the mother-care of those kindly
shades without which it could not have come to life: but few of us
take note of that.  We so commonly put the effect before the cause
and the success before the effort.  Yet our little plant went down as
much as it went up, with roots very like its crests, though the one
struck upward towards the sun, and the other struck downward through
the night.

I would say that this inexplicable symmetry is one of the laws which
govern the seen, and probably also the unseen, world.  Ideas, beings,
things, phenomena of all kinds exhibit to us much the same
beginnings, similar developments, and parallel endings.  This fact we
can grasp only piecemeal, not in its whole; but it is clear that
always there is an analogy between extremes.  We know that
plant-roots are like their heads.  Dawn and twilight (opposed limits
of a natural event) are like one another: the same pallid colours,
the same freshness, the same effect of unambitious calm.  Sunrise and
sunset, respectively the appearance and the disappearance of our
day-star, glare at us with a like extravagance of noisy red.  Old age
and childhood, the two poles of human life, resemble one another in
their feebleness and weak vitality.  Our great joys are silent as our
great sorrows; and the ecstasy of love is not far from the frenzy of
hate.  Nature is re-born in spring-tide, and falls sadly asleep when
autumn closes: and yet these two seasons are very like--showers of
rain and gusty winds, shot across with the same weak rays of yellow
light.

We find this odd likeness of contrasts not merely in visible nature
and in life, but also in the most subtle abstractions of the
spiritual world.  We expect a great happiness as anxiously as a great
misfortune, and when we do things our first conception, and the
memory which follows it, trace in our minds the same sort of hazy
contour in fleeting neutral tint.  The nescience of our birth is like
our death's.

Oh! we know very well _how_ some of these resemblances are
caused--thanks to the action of the simple laws of physical
nature--but our spirit fails when we ask _why_ these analogies should
appear with so strange and universal a regularity.



CHAPTER 5

_Caught up into the Stream of Life_

In the summer when the sky was blue and the air diaphanous, in autumn
with its melancholy mist, in winter when the wind blew cold and clean
and sharp, our tree lived on and prospered with the passing years.
For now it had become a tree, a giant sequoia pine.  It stood a
little clear of a forest in an open space, and so looked solitary.
Its head towered over the surrounding country from its place in the
blue and green opalescent gulf of heaven.  The forest whose leaves
danced tremblingly before its feet was made up of quite other trees:
delicate lively things, of middle but swift height, and
thin-branched, so that the wind and the sunlight wove patterns easily
through their frail screen.

Against this background the seasons passed leisurely, the complete
year seeming swifter than its parts: so that if an ever-living spirit
could have fixed itself deep within the fibres of the giant trunk
while the waves of time broke about it, and counted them as they
came, it would have found centuries fly past as lightly as single
years.  If our faculties and standards of perception had been
applicable to the pine, how beautiful we, in its place, would have
thought the world!  We would have noted the warmth, the sense of
space, its limpid clarity: also the colours and shapes and scents of
things; but did the tree know how splendid was the scene about it?
At times we think that it must have been sensitive to certain things.
Yet surely it could not see the distant hill rolling away to the
skyline, gay and clean and bright in summer, but pale and solemn in
winter.  It could not admire the endless plain or the river winding
near.  It paid no attention to the azure sky in which it bathed
itself, nor could it feel--at least not in any human sense--the
caressing wind, the rough embraces of the frost, the cool breath of
the water.  Likewise it could not taste the open air, or know the day
flashing round it, or be soothed by the calming shades of night.  It
was unable to feel, see, hear, or taste movement and light and noise
and flavours, as we can; yet it received impressions to which we are
blank, and united itself ardently or voluptuously or uneasily with
the other elements of its existence.  It would require a manufacture
of new words (to fit sensations foreign to our nature) before our
present understandings could appreciate plant-loves and hatreds, and
the things which please them or give them discomfort.

Our tree became part of its whole environment, of the hills, of the
plain, of the atmosphere and scents of things, by a constant
interchange of matter.  Its sap was drawn from the depths of the
earth, and rose unchecked through each breathing cell up to the crest
of the tree.  It flowed rapidly about even the very smallest pores,
and thence from the topmost twig fell again as fast (but this time
rich with new ingredients) to the lowest root.  We can easily gauge
the chemical content of these ingredients, but nevertheless the
absorption on their passage of the nutritive particles remains a
mystery.

They are drawn from all the elements of which the world is made up,
even in its most opposed forms: and the various species of active
things, whether men or animals or plants, select those actual ones
proper for their nourishment, after their kind, and attract them
through space and time, through all the multitude of encompassing
forces, from solid matter, from vapours or from liquids, whatever
their appearance and whatever their composition.  The sequoia, for
instance, drew to itself what was qualified to make rough its red
bark, to harden the fibres of its stem, to make smooth the green
composition of its needles; and drew them from the encircling air,
from the blue rays of light, from the mist of waters, from every
motion and scent about it.  From the same vast whole, made up of
thousands of dissimilar bodies, the birds draw their plumage, the
tortoises their shells, the worms their rings, the flowers their
petals, and humankind their complexions, their blood and flesh.

We are fully aware that these substances are all carbon in divers
forms; but that raises the fresh question, when we ponder it, whether
the whole universe is not of a single sameness--a vision of
mind-wracking infinity repeating itself in a perpetual changeless
series? and that might lead us to stand in astonished awe before a
nature which can make a bone, or pearl-shell, or a wing-case, or a
claw, or an eyelash from the same elements whether they are of the
air we breathe, of the light shining from our eyes, or of any other
transformation of appearance or taste.  However, even if the matter
be the same, the forces which cause it to take shape are infinite.
How many must be the sources of energy which together compose the
complete eternal mirror-disk of life, in which from time to time we
catch glimpses of vague forms, as it whirls on its mad course,
bearing away worlds too big for our failing minds to comprehend, or
too small for our blunted senses to distinguish?

Above all, this dazzling multiple disk teaches us motion and harmony:
that is to say, labour and love.  The largest planet like the
smallest atom exists by combination and by movement.  Look upon the
million needles of the sequoia pine, how they everlastingly breathed
in and out, drawing gases and water from the air and returning
others.  The stomata never stopped work for an instant.  Within the
seeds the sap worked as unceasingly.  Nothing ever dwells in absolute
inertia for a moment anywhere.  The atmosphere vibrates, light
pierces, hearts beat, water flows, the molecules of crystals build
themselves together, the stars revolve, the air stirs, the darkness
is propitious to growth: through everything is spun the cord of love
and labour.

Perhaps, when we contemplate the tireless labour of the bees and ants
as they run here and there, and reinforce one another in an endless
series of the same acts, with apparently their sole purpose in the
next generation--perhaps a dismal weariness steals over us at the
sight of such everlasting monotony of labour, and at a feeling that
their futile efforts much resemble our own; but we may legitimately
remind ourselves that our ignorance of the complete scheme of things
inhibits or at least vitiates our judgment; also that the chain of
succession, from father to son in an endless series stretching away
to infinity, is Nature's first law.

Just as nothing isolated happens in nature, so nothing exists which
is isolated or peculiar.  What we call our individuality is only a
congeries of cells: just as what we call an adventure is a complex of
events tending towards a single defined end.  It would be wrong for
us to pick out and treat of any single one of the tribulations of the
pine-seed on its described huge journey, except in relation to the
result of the history, the mighty tree towering like a red pillar
four hundred feet into the air.  Likewise with our storied lives.  We
will find nothing irregular in them if we realize that they existed
before they became patent, and that our minds became aware of them
only when they developed in some apparently fresh phase to which we
were peculiarly sensitive.  A good example is the ray of light which
left a star centuries ago, but which we notice only as it enters our
limited field of vision.

The least important event has a history going back far beyond our
mind's reach: we cannot fix the start of any thing, or of any
creature, or of any circumstance.  This enormous tree, whose shadow
falls across my book, and whose history we are tracing ... what began
it?  How did the class of giant pine arise?  The most evanescent
happening carries back through adventure upon adventure to infinity,
and if we could trace back everything to its first cause, probably we
would be astonished to find small consequences to things which we
think magnificent, and would find that our grandest created things
took their rise in ordinary and insignificant circumstances.

We may lawfully presume that the past has been universal, and that
the future will be the same; for probably everything happened in the
eternity which preceded us, and everything will certainly happen in
the limitless time which will succeed our paltry moments.

Where do we come from?  What was our first shape?  Academic questions
these, perhaps of no great urgency, but none the less difficult for
us to picture.  We feel distinctly enough what is good or bad in our
experiences of the moment; yet we cannot in the least evade our
destinies; and our impotence supplies us with a reason for casting
out despair, and accepting with dignity what fate offers.

Seconds build up into minutes, and minutes into hours, and these into
the days of our life; and so also far-fetched trifles accumulate into
occasions.  It depends on our circumstances whether they seek us out
or whether we go to them.  Every being possessing activity, that is,
which has a relation with space and a temporary faculty of volition,
moves towards change as change moves towards him.  The mobile beings,
such as men and beasts and birds, as often as they move, make
progress towards some small or large point in their history.  Their
change of position makes them encounter the unexpected, which is
itself perhaps coming towards them.  Our pine-tree, however, being of
the plant class, was rooted in one place, and had to attend its
changes there.  For of course its history was full of change.  In
seed-shape it had wandered across the world, its devious course lying
sometimes on the surface of the ground, sometimes in the water,
sometimes in the air.  Now, being a tree, its wanderings were over;
but its normal life yet varied nearly from day to day.  The scene (to
our eyes changeless) in which it stood no doubt changed without our
being able to see the differences.  We have no bark or needles or
sap, and cannot therefore enter into the feelings of the tree which
with them knew how clouds modulated its light, how the passing wind
varied its scent and texture according to the distance or direction
from which it came, how the rain-drops tasted so one time and so
another time, their very elements seeming different according as the
seasons varied the sensitiveness of the great lonely tree.

Anyhow, we should remember that with plants it will not be as with
us.  Lacking our faculties, they may yet be richer than us in other
directions, endowed with senses whose deficiency in ourselves we
cannot perceive: and perhaps even things have their senses.  There
may really be "tears in things."  It would be an attractive doctrine
that the energies which affect inanimate things may affect them in
sensible degrees, that the universe (which is a rounded whole) obeys
the same laws in forms which change according to circumstance, but
remain alike in force and means.



CHAPTER 6

_The Law of Balance_

How lustreless and same the passage of time appears when we review it
in our memory! but how uncertain and varied it is when we live it
moment by moment, leaning out of each second to encounter the next!
Likewise with the life of the great tree.  Its sap on the daily round
of work may have had fresh pleasures and discomforts at each
revolution; but the tree's life seemed to have slipped past in a tame
monotony when taken in a period of thirty or forty centuries.  Yet it
may be that the sequoia felt the seasons change about it, and that
the times and scenes (so constant to our eyes) in which it lived
affected it variously, just as its great outline may not have been
without influence on its own country.  One can picture the huge
reddish spout leaping up into the air, with a hazy network of
hundreds of branches about it.  Its head seemed to be lost in the
blue.  Its bole was twenty-five paces about, but against its enormous
height such a thickness seemed slight, and the whole tree had an air
of slender grace, quite unlike other great trees, as, for instance,
the baobab, whose trunk might be thicker than a sequoia trunk, but
whose height would be incomparably less.

Like all conifers, the root-system of the sequoia was not elaborate.
Of course it had great roots, and many of them, and luxuriant
ones--but not to compare with the tree's size.  Here also one may
trace the all-seeing Eye, having regard for universal harmony.  If
trunk and roots were in due proportion, the tree's appetite would be
empowered to satisfy its hunger by ravaging an immense area of
ground.  Its roots would exhaust the vital essences from a wide
circle, and reduce it to a desert.  So the principle of balance
enters, and applies itself to the pine-giant: and we find if we
search diligently into nature that its greatest creatures have their
weak spots, and the feeblest things of the world have their
unexpected means of defence.

Examples of this law are well found in the fantastic prehistoric
time.  Through its dense jungle rolled a nightmare shape, a reptile
(called the Diplodocus) unnaturally huge, perhaps a hundred feet long
and proportionally tall.  On the end of its prolonged neck was a
grotesque little head, in which stared two glassy stupid eyes.  The
beast would seem to have been doomed to a miserable life, for to
nourish its demensurate body would require nearly unlimited food, and
it had only a tiny mouth, able to pick up a spoonful at a time.  So
poor Diplodocus passed his whole life chewing leaves, and had no time
off for sleep or holiday.  He could do nothing all the while but eat,
and so by the law of compensation his greatness was brought low.  If
his head had been as good as his body, and if instead of being only a
grass-eating lizard he had learned to eat meat, then nothing alive
could have resisted him, and he would have depopulated his radius of
action.

This harmony in life, this astonishing foresight watching over matter
makes one think.  Every source of energy in the world has
irrefragible bounds marked out for it.  The curse of Diplodocus seems
to have fallen on our modern whale, whose strength would make the sea
barren of other life if its gullet had not been made too small to
swallow them.  What a danger for the rest of the world that other
mammal, the elephant, might have been with his union of strength and
intelligence, had his nature not been made so peaceable, and the
period of gestation so long!

Lions, tigers and panthers are fierce and powerful, but have found a
pitiless exterminator in man.  The larger felines have ever been the
most tempting game for hunters, who pursue them with particular zest:
and things are always so, everywhere.  Men give infinite reasons or
pretexts, on which they think (or say they think) they acted: but
behind all these we can trace the constant operation of an immutable
law, to which their obedience is implicit.

This terrible law of compensations cuts often across our brief
freedom--across those periods when we fancy ourselves all-powerful,
masters of the event.  We might really be so, if the Eye was not
watching and regulating the smallest details of creation: but as it
is, this law which checks excessive strength comes into operation
against us, using ourselves as its own means.  It may be for this
reason that we are tormented by drugs or drinks or other plagues; for
most non-human beings are comparatively free of them, and they cause
any number of weaknesses and harmful complications, fatal to the
health of society.  As a crowning debilitant we have our
man-devouring wars.

For it really seems that they must be half-divine, these terrible
events which impose themselves upon us, as though at the dictates of
superhuman authority.  If fate did not decree them how could these
wars yet pour out the life-blood of our peoples, since man has always
condemned them with the whole force of his reason?

No one, whether the greatest conqueror or the most commonplace
individual, has ever dared to speak of war without exposing its sorry
character: unless he curses it: and such is the plainest common
sense.  There leap to our minds a thousand reasons against war,
whenever we need them.  Only when the crisis comes and the clash of
peoples is prepared, then human beings savagely acclaim it.  They
burn with the sense of battle, a madness which comes upon them from
without and masters them, so that they can speak only with its voice.
Just as the roots of plants have the pileorhiza to stay their first
feebleness and let them fight out their rivalries with the other
beings of the under-world, so when war begins this obscure law
injects us with patriotism, a draught which gives us strength and
courage to support the miseries of its train.

Daily it is said, "War would be easily prevented.  All that is
needful is for every man alive to forswear it.  If at the same moment
we all refused to make a move against our kind, these fires consuming
men would be at once put out."  Yes, but exactly this apparently easy
agreement and common action never happen.  When the moment comes for
armed slaughter men are unanimous only in fierce support of pretexts
for beginning it.  When the storm has passed we are astounded and
rather horrified to look back on our bloodthirsty record, and like a
river sinking back into its bed after a flood, we return gradually to
our habitual peace and quietude:--too late, alas! for the will of the
gods has been done and humanity has paid its bloody tribute to their
law of death.  At the next date of bleeding the whole round will
begin again, just as before.

So Diplodocus' little head, his point of weakness, may be made a
symbol of this malady of man.  And the reason why we should be
subjected to this inflexible law?  No doubt that our too-great
strength be brought down ... but it remains a question whether the
too-great strength is because our numbers are over-many for the earth
to bear, or because we are near discovering and exploiting the
working of the greater powers of nature.  It may also be the law of
checks and balances pursuing its course against all excessive
strengths, which gives the riches and resources of this world to
ordinary people, rather than to those mighty spirits with character
enough to overturn their generations.  One can imagine what might
have happened had the great scholars or thinkers whose writings
revolutionized life had in their hands the power of a despot or the
wealth of Croesus.  "You can't have everything" is the hackneyed
phrase in which common sense has tried to express one of the most
disturbing truths of the universe.  However much it may appear so,
nowhere is any excess of power allowed to disturb the balance of
things.  Absolute equality is of course equally out of the question,
for harmony is based always on the union of unlike things.

One pine-tree could observe this law working in its sphere of life,
through the thousands of years for which it stood there.  Generation
after generation of birds and insects followed one another on its
stem and branches.  Some days were dismal, others glorious, just as
some hours were unprofitable and others rich.  The light and warmth
were not always divided to it in equal part.  Underground the
moisture did not always refresh its mazy roots in fair degree.
Clouds often veiled its blue sky: the seasons made that swelling hill
bare and sad as often as they made it smile with waving green.  The
giant tree saw its needles grow from freshness into pallor, and then
fall, thousands of times.  Some of its branches for no visible reason
grew splendidly, while others, also for no visible reason, remained
small and stunted.  Yet still its life, as a whole, was lived in
tune, as ours are to our content, however discordant the individual
moments.  A single ray of light is enough to scatter the darkness:
and when we think of the surroundings in which the giant lived, the
idea comes that perhaps we would fear death less if it were not for
that haunting picture of our corpses rotting slowly in the darkness
underground.  We might live more in love with death if we knew that
our dust would remain under the sun, to change and re-model itself in
plant-fashion, like those yellow leaves which wither and fall before
winter comes.  It would assuage our minds if we could think that
after our end we would live yet in the shimmering day, absorbed
particles of that great life-filled space this side the limitless
ether of the stars.



CHAPTER 7

_Metamorphoses_

As space creates all things out of its own substance only to devour
them again at last, so time which itself cannot move or change allots
to everything its span of life.  Our hours and days are within us,
and it is the revolution of the globe, and not time, which makes the
seasons.  Yet beings and things succeed one another, and their
courses give us an illusion that the age grows old.  It is a
convenient figure, for it is good to say that the days slip past and
the seasons wheel round, each in turn.

Once more spring made green the mighty tree.  The sun and the winds
fretted its newly-budded branches.  The giant began to transform
itself.  Like last year, and the thousands of years before, the sap
made buds which pushed out into leaves, into flowers, and at last
into fruits from which the future seeds would be born.  Each spring
inaugurated an ascending change, to be followed, this year as in the
dead years, by a descending change.

So the sap in its evolution took the common way of all life's forces.
It rose towards its highest forms, in turn becoming leaf and flower
and fruit: and then it fell away in hard, dry, woodenish particles.
Through this history of changing shape passes all we know, ideas as
well as things.  Even our feelings are not exempt.  Everything within
and without us alters and re-forms itself: so that there is no
changeless situation, nothing which is for ever exactly the same.  In
the indestructible and turbulent race of matter one universal essence
is working in a fixed direction: and if the tree-sap changed into
wood, after having triumphally been green leaf and shining flower, so
does implacable fate lead our component cells through exquisite
childhood into splendid youth, only to change us at last into
tottering and wasted creatures of old age.

The elements alter their shape through time and space.  In the same
light, in the same conditions and circumstances, flowers bloom and
fade, our hair turns from its first dark or fair colour into silver,
our eyes lose their early fire, our firm red flesh goes dry and
shrivelled.  These changes happen to the same drop of sap in the
plant world, and to the same tissue in the animal world.  In the
unexplored world of instinct our senses follow a similar evolution.
Our enthusiasm for something or other springs to life, lasts awhile,
and then chills into complete detachment.  "Love is akin to hate,"
says a proverb: but really the two states run together.  Our
indifference or our dislike is often born of an exhausted regard:
otherwise would we so often come to hate what we once enjoyed?  No,
these rising and falling changes are not confined to plants, but are
a general part of evolution, in material as in immaterial things.

Springtime, however, with its thrill towards active life prevailed
once again upon the earth.  The sap was boiling up in the inmost
pores of the giant tree.  It was shaken in mysterious travail,
sharing, in its tree-fashion, the corresponding sensations of living
beings: but expressing them of course very differently.  Its
passionate re-birth was shown in the perfumes which it released, in
the trembling of its branches, in its needles flashing silver in the
moonlight, or golden in the full light of the sun.  Yet these
enigmatical eddies were those of the new year, the same which make
our blood hot and our desires keen.

The universal mysterious analogy of all life again forces itself on
our reeling minds.  These millions of shoots and needles in the pine
were produced with such profusion only to grow old and die, like
lives passing away, while the great tree stood steady in the midst of
them, rooted and intact.  Our nerve cells and tissues in a like
fashion renew themselves day and night, without our giving them a
thought, so absorbed are we in "living our lives" to our full bent.
The pine-tree lived on the subsidiary lives of each of its utricles,
and exhausted something of its reserve force with each generation of
them passed by: and so do we grow old with each of their deaths as
the tiny cells in us die without our heeding.

Life seems to whirl like a top, getting apparently the momentum for a
new spin from each spin past, but actually failing steadily towards
its final rest.  Each slipping moment leaves us inevitably nearer to
our end, however it may seem to give us spring and key for fuller
existence.  Especially in spring-time does a new life seem to be
working in us.  A mute exhilaration flows through all our nerves,
making them tingle like the needles of the giant pine.  Beings and
things open in one great vibration, whose repercussion is felt even
in the dark places underground.  Subtle aspirations emanate from here
and there, and cross one another confusedly: yet in their varied and
varying shapes whirling aloft in the air, inspiring living creatures
or burgeoning in plants, they are only multiple aspects of one
central influence.  These very diverse expressions are all products
of one faculty, vivified by the same ichor.

A puff of wind stirred the twigs of the forest giant.  The sun was
setting in a western sky heaped with purple and violet and rosy
clouds.  There was a confused movement of many forms of life in the
darkling wood, whose smallness beside it made the sequoia tree seem a
disproportionate sentinel.  Twilight slid into darkness, dissipated
early by a silver moon.  A cloud of insects rose up the reddish trunk
of the pine.  They glittered or suggested red and blue and emerald
green, blended or particoloured.  Their tiny feet swarmed up the rude
bark silently.  On the ground other tiny insects gleamed greenly
through the grass, or darkened its sandy surface with queer black
shadows.  They paired, in obedience to the instinct which had made
the dainty butterflies all the afternoon flutter together intimately.
The echo of croaking frogs came keenly from the distance, through the
myriad smells of evening.

Everything seemed possessed, reeling with excitement, and with a
grave disturbance of spirit, before the might of this hetero-sexual
instinct, which drives male upon female, revives the splendour of
birds' plumage, sharpens the note of frogs, distils the scents of
flowers, causes the shallow stream to laugh aloud, makes the
meadow-grasses to dance, and the tigers to roar with excess of life:
which is able also to twine serpents in a slimy embrace, and to whirl
the deadly scorpions in a loathsome ecstasy.  It seems so universal,
this omnipotent force, able to run down the moonbeams, to flutter in
the wind, to wave with the grasses, to thrill through all the
atmosphere.  It makes human beings cling together in quivering
couples, jerking to the pull of its nameless demand: and truly seems
one spirit in these many shapes, an imperious will which in all these
varied pairings is shadowing out the frame of the master-law of
reproduction.  Even the elements appear subject to its sway: for this
passion which binds one to another of a kind that every sort may see
something of universality in its single mood, may it not be this
which puts the little more of glory in the sunlight, that extra
softness in the air of night, that repose in open space, that richer
music in the waves, that purer purity in heaven, and on earth that
sustained thrill?

From head to foot the giant tree responded to the new warmth of
sentiment in nature.  While the sun shone the birds had mated in its
boughs.  Now, in the moonshine, the insects had their turn, and clung
together silently in the vague shimmering mist of their brilliant
colours.  Deep in the soil the tap-roots of plants swelled up in
pleasure: in the air floated a sea of all imaginable scents,
impalpable unseen messengers through space of the universal fluid
which betrays itself to our sense of smell on the one side, and on
another side in the strange lights of lovers' eyes.  If we remember
how the loved one would tell us her feelings and her inmost thoughts
by a mere glance, then it will not seem to us far-fetched that plants
hold converse in the perfumes which they scatter in the air.  These
invisible and intangible but powerful scents, which spread abroad to
invite insects and to stupefy us with nebulous desires, seem to play
much the same role as the magnetism of our looks, that other strange
power which is able by shuffling the blues and blacks and greens of
our eyes to express love or indifference or hate; and without any
change of shape or colour can reassure with gentleness or paralyse
with terror, conveying the most subtle shades of desire and passion
and command.



CHAPTER 8

_What the Moon Saw_

Meanwhile there were showering down on earth the beams of that moon,
mirror and transmitter of the sun, which conveys to us its light
without its heat.  From the distance came the splashing of water: and
on the river bank, where it was nearest to the tree and within sight,
lay a man and woman.  They were naked, and the water was dripping
slowly from their bronzed bodies.  They lay aside by side, and the
low murmur of their voices and their stifled kisses filled the near
air about.  Beyond and around them eddied the confused noises of the
fields and woods, the scents of evening made lively by the cool damp
air, the brightness of the moon's shining on the silvan landscape, a
selection of all the sounds and shapes and tints and flavours in the
world.  The contagion of universal love had caught the lovers, making
their eyes hard, their blood hot, their lips red.  The everlasting
universal thrill which makes the flowers burst into bloom, which
makes the insects glitter and the birds sing, was upon these two,
flinging them into a mutual passionate embrace.

They were just another instance of the immortal lust of conjoined
sexes.  Their sighs rustled between their lips like the wind in the
grass, they sobbed together like the breaking sea, their flesh
tingled with their blood as did the fibres of the forest giant with
sap.  Their inchoate and always unfulfilled desires took wing in the
clear blue evening and became part of the immense and complex harmony
of a thousand strains which has reigned since the beginning of the
worlds, in the ether, to the stars, about the stars, beyond them,
even to the confines of illimitable space.

The great pine-tree in its six thousand years had many times seen
substances mating and beings marrying, and was able to record that
these two young naked humans were exactly like the thousands of other
couples whose loves it had witnessed since that distant time when as
a tender plant it had pushed its shy and timid way towards the blue.

For sixty centuries generation of man had succeeded generation
beneath the tree, but whatever differences there might have been in
their external circumstances or in the superficial accessories of
their state, always when in love their couples used to embrace naked
on such spring evenings as this, with the same ceremony and as
ecstatically as the pair to-day.  The forest giant from its lofty
crest was thus able to establish that mankind had remained
essentially the same through the six thousand years.

Love is the strongest of our passions, but also that which we hide
the deepest: whereas we exhibit our ambitions, our pride, our greed,
our frenzies, openly.  Yet when love does take possession of us it
sharpens and exalts our dullest, remotest faculties to the height:
but it is a moot point whether we are right to believe it exclusively
our work, a sentiment evoked by our own means.  There is a disturbing
possibility that it may be imposed on us regardless of our will.  We
are not able to extinguish it, nor to fan it: for its potent causes
lie deep beyond our sight, and are fleeting.  We often see men
carried away by a passion for some one who is not in the least their
ideal, and see this passion grow greater or smaller without valid
cause.  Insignificant trifles, and impressions of the apparent
slightest sometimes have enormous consequences in our lives.  Love is
called up or frightened away by the faintest ghost of a memory, by
the waking impression of a forgotten dream, by some homely detail.
The faculty of love has been transmitted through our generations for
thousands of years, unchanged: for the tremor which excited our
forbears in their caves was, in its kind, of the intensity of the
embrace of the sexes to-day.

The truth would seem to be that in love we obey an eternal, general
and boundless law.  In our conceit we think that no emotion is
comparable to the fever of passionate mankind.  Yet what can we know
of the particular sensations possessing inhuman couples? such as the
fervour of a plant in seed, or that colossal attraction which drags
planets into the orbits of their suns.  Our love-dramas and kisses
and excitements are mere examples of the universal spasm.

Let us return to the man and woman within sight of the upper branches
of the pine as they lay supine on the green bank of the river taking
their ease after happy exertions.  The slight sound of their
voluptuous sighs had died away down the breeze.  The vibrations of
their meeting flesh had gone abroad through the blue evening, with
the beaded moisture evaporating from their skins, and the heating
scents of awakened sex, to become part of the endless waves of ether
set up by the motions of the stars, by the odorous love-excitements
of birds and beasts and reptiles, by the pollen of seeding plants.
Of course the embracing couple did not know it: they knew nothing of
the movement of the Spheres and their Rivers of life, nor of their
component cells nor of the uncounted tribes of germs living within
their bodies.  Yet at the very crisis of the amorous passion the
infinitely small no doubt bear their part in it to some degree, just
as the lovers in their act have contributed to the harmony of the
universe.  We must try to think of ourselves existing as it were
detached, hanging between an external medley of forces beyond our
ken, and an internal current of life equally inappreciable by our
senses.  We seem to become sensitive to exterior sensation only
locally, in the parts immediately affected.  When lovers kiss the
delight of it attacks mouth and heart and spirit alone.  We never
think that our arms or shoulders may also be concerned.

Yet on reflection it would seem incontestable that the mere
localization of the conscious emotion cannot prevent its being shared
generally by our whole being.  The kiss, though expressed only by our
lips, is a product of the vitality of all our organs: and likewise in
each of our actions we, from our tiny sector of the world, share in
the universal harmony, though we cannot know the extent of our
contribution nor trace its course through the clash of external
forces.

It is a grave thought that in this indescribable whole the separate
items of activity undergo an identical evolutionary process.  When
the sky was blue, in the piercing sunlight of a fragrant summer-time,
the forest giant attained its highest pitch, as its branches were
rich and supple with sap.  Then came days of decline.  Under a feeble
sun and a lack-lustre sky the air grew cold and faint: and the tree
entered on a phase of decline, slow at first but increasing in speed
till almost precipitate.  Declines and falls have also (like all
else) their charts of intensity growing to a climax and falling away
inevitably thereafter.  A stone flung into the air has a history like
the giant tree.  It shoots up, up, to its highest point, dwells on
it, as it were, for a fraction of a second, and then turns to fall,
gently at first, but later coming down with an increasing rush.  This
change up and change down seem to be one of the prime laws of life
and of matter and of energy, from the boundless existence of the
constellations to the atoms and the inexpressible complexities of
nature.  Everything seems subject to such a process and our
imaginations cannot conceive anything exempt, or anything which will
ever be exempt.  A stone flung up and falling, a branch budding and
growing bare, a fire flaring up and going out, a sentiment being
born, developing and dying, everything good or bad in events and in
things, in the animal creation, and in plants, in suns and in
particles, in everything that is or happens, exhibit obedience to
this universal law of change, growth and decay.  Detached atoms
retain the character and share the fate of their former whole.

The lovers on the sloping river-bank near the giant tree were thus
reproducing the universal harmony, in their narrow and temporary
harmony, as they clipped and twined together in rhythmical
counterchange of their inmost emotions.  They were so much larger
than the insects which shone red in the sunset or turned green in the
moonshine: they were so much smaller than the tree: yet in their
degree and kind they were in accord with the course of nature, as
expressed in the force which linked the fireflies and made the tree
bear seed.  They partook of the ambitions which coming from the mists
of time and from the chaos of space make planets revolve in their
orbits and electrons whirl together: and if our insatiable curiosity
makes us seek to know, however dimly, what is going on up there or
down there, let us tell ourselves that we are part of all that is,
that we obey the very laws which govern alike the unimaginable whole
and its hugest components, and that therefore our infinitesimal
experience if we can expand or contract it indefinitely may guide us
as to the experiences both of the greatest and of the smallest.

Poor loving couple whom we have left sobbing with pleasure in the
harmonious and fragrant evening-light!  It was written that their
transport should die, like all else in this world, and that a falling
cadence should close it, making its course one with those of the suns
and trees.  The conviction that our joys are transient may make us
sad: but we can draw consolation from the idea that all the dwellers
in chaos are within the law.  By taking thought we can make strong
our souls, and still them, with the certain knowledge of our utter
helplessness.

Yes, the moment was good for the man and woman by the tall and
splendid tree, as they throbbed together in the new sensitiveness of
their overcharged emotion: but remorselessly decline will follow on
the climax, not merely in the case of the love that grows faint, but
for the summer which must yield place to winter, for youth on which
old age is waiting, for the spray of water which rises to its height
only to fall, for the suns which to-day dazzle us, but for some few
ten thousand years are doomed to a slow expiry till they shall go
round and round their unyielding prisons of space in blind stiff
loneliness.  The spiral of being leaps up rapidly to its brilliant
apogee, and then runs down again into obscurity while the ring-waves
of each action expand ever outward in the infinite.



CHAPTER 9

_When the Corselet Snaps_

More pine kernels had sprouted near by, and the great tree was now
kept company by other russet trunks, tens of centuries younger, but
undergoing the same development.  They grew and changed against the
same background as the older tree, extracting the nourishment which
formed their shape and colour, sap and scent, from the same area.
Again the law of perpetuity asserted itself in creation.

Near the giant a young tree was fainting and failing.  It had not the
strong straight shape of the other conifers, nor their sharp, shining
needles.  Its current of life was crossed, confused.  Its sap did not
fill its roots and branches, its wood was unhealthy: while on its
gnarled trunk grew and increased year by year a huge boss of dead
matter, whose weight seemed to crush the whole organism.  The stomata
laboured feebly in their task of collecting food from the environs,
and so reduced the tree's vitality that it felt no thrill from the
bounty of spring or summer, while hardly was there any flavour in the
weak sap which crept drop by drop through the sick veins of its
branches.  It seemed tired and faint-hearted in its travail, this
sap, like an aged workman: and the tree's whole attitude and effect
was that of old age, of a failing constitution such as marks the last
stages of life in trees long past their prime.

For this young sequoia was sick.  Its soggy utricles made no response
to the new winds of spring-tide, and were as insensible to sunlight
and to the rays of a cloudless sky.  The fine weather which made the
giant so brave and fresh in foliage had no effect on this.  Its slow,
sad invalid existence made it more and more like a tree whose cadence
was closing with its pale, fagged flagging tissue.

To an external observer its sickness was as though the coat of mail
which linked in and protected its life had parted, and let all its
fibres grow odd and wrong.  The course of development had been
broken, and the shattered rhythm had thrown out even the smallest
cells.  Their disordered whole was sad and sick with incurable
disease, a premature old age with its petulant inconsequence: and if
this sickness might be called premature age, age might be called a
slow sickness.

Plants and creatures have their illnesses, things their
malformations, planets no doubt their disasters: and since the fates
of puissant things are those of futile things may we presume that
there are mishaps also for the ordered whole?  The analogies between
stars and the microscopic dust of chemical particles impress
themselves more and more upon our notice.  Interstellar space seems
proportionately no richer in movement or in matter than atomic space,
and fancy, running beyond our physical powers of apprehension from
one to other, falls ever into the same nescience.  We can guess at a
common rhythm behind the march of events and the linked procession of
acts: so that our superstitions may be only distorted glimpses of
design half-understood, scattered observations which our unequal
spirits cannot join together.  Our superstitions take precise shape
more especially when we are in bodily pain and perturbed in spirit.
Our imagination then sublimates the shadows of our fate, flickering
over them like a marsh-light in the darkness of our half-knowledge;
and achieves only to make their obscurity more obscure.

The young sequoia tree because of its sickness could do no more than
just carry on its stunted life.  The breath entered faintly into its
labouring lungs: its whole life was limited by its deficient sap, and
by the futile ineffective busyness of its stomata.  Yet it accepted
the ill-health as a normal state.  The idea of a more fortunate life
could not come to it, as it might to men.  It had never known any
other condition than this painful breathing-in of the life-currents,
this poverty of exhalation, and so could not desire a better: whereas
human beings in pain feel it all the more since their spirits can
disengage themselves from the trammels of the flesh and conjure up
visions of a happier fate.

In such a way we make worse our torments each time we long to be
delivered from them.

A scented breath of evening floated beneath the starry sky.  Plants
and creatures came to life at its whisper, which combined with the
far-away murmur of the river and the resonance of space to give a new
vividness to the grove of young pines.  The tall and magnificent
giant with the full flush of its grown strength made this sweetness
of nature its own.  Only the sick tree remained without benefit from
the life-giving evening airs.  Its sluggish viscid sap stagnated in
the clogged stomata.  Slowly its faint exhalations were breathed out
through its pores: it seemed as though nothing could revive this
imperfect organism: and as a matter of fact the first effect of
illness is to disorganize the senses, to shatter the harmony of the
unit attacked, so that it receives insufficiently and returns to the
universal flow an insufficient rhythm.

We have all had experience for a shorter or a longer time of this
heart-breaking state of sickness, when a livid mist seems to settle
itself thickly over our faculties, and the objective world weighs
upon us with the whole weight of our material blemishes.  At such a
time our sensitiveness to influences outside ourselves is bad,
whether it is that our disease-crippled organs are no longer powerful
enough to communicate freely with the hidden forces through whose
paths we move, or whether it is that these very forces in a manner
avoid an unhealthy assemblage.  Anyhow, it is only when suffering has
disordered our state that we become fully aware of the gulf which
lies between the external world and that other world within us.

But what we learn more particularly at such moments is how our senses
limit external influences.  Our inner world is seething with a form
of life which feels special to itself, since all contact with the
vital currents of our environment has been cut off.  Also, apart from
a slight play given to the organs our physical sensibility detaches
itself entirely from external adventures and elements.  When our
being has once reached this absolute it fixes itself there, and no
piling up of circumstance, in however extravagant a degree, could
move it an inch farther.  Thus a loss of consciousness through
illness involves as vivid a sense of dizzy falling into space as a
literal plunge into some darkling abyss, and the perturbation of an
inward malady may strike us as suddenly and sharply as the flash of a
real lightning-stroke jazzing across our eyes.

In all the world there is no force able to extend or prolong our
sensibility beyond its fixed term; which may be a reflection upon the
poverty of our means of apprehension.  We would not hear the crash of
two colliding planets as loudly as the piercing of our ear-drums by a
pin-point, and to be burned alive in some conflagration is for the
individual as though the universe went up in flame, since for those
few seconds of his agony the intensity of the heat of his burning
house is as great upon him as the fires of an incandescent world.  A
heart struck by a fragment of bursting shell would feel no more if it
was caught up and crushed between clashing faces of rock.

So by means of our senses we can measure against our being the
greatest physical catastrophes: we can know the supreme degree of our
faculty for feeling pain without calling for a clash of worlds to
prove it.  The limitations of our senses are such that beyond a
quite-near point they can register no advance at all.  It is all the
same sensation whether we fall three hundred or thirty thousand feet.

Its illness made the young sequoia dull to its circumstances, while
the forest giant all the while responded to each vibration of its
environment.  On some days its sap seemed in easy relation with the
air and scents and light raining upon it, as if a mysterious fluid
somewhere in these many elements was making eager its stomata and
dissolving the material resistance of the fibres which cut off the
tree's vital fluid from the outer air.  At other times, for no clear
reason this sympathy between sap and outer world would grow difficult.

When ill-health overtakes us, it closes off from exterior contact the
private world in which we exist: but not completely: we are not
driven to subsist only on our internal vitality.  From there does
come the impulse or continuity which leads us up to action: but this
energy is reinforced by means existing independently of us, and yet
influencing us to our inmost soul.

Our passions come to birth within us, truly: but their growth and
final efflorescence may be due to a variety of vibrations sent from
without.  Our loves and braveries and hates are coloured by powers
beyond our will's control.  A single sentiment may express itself in
divers shapes according to the circumstances in which we move.  A
passionate outburst may be one in a closed room, another in a street,
quite different in open country.  The giant tree felt its feelings
change according to the state of the landscape over which it towered:
just as men are peculiarly liable to be strong or weak, safe or
fearful, forthcoming or callous according to their attitude, their
stage-setting, the occult influences which hem them in.  Otherwise
our likes and dislikes, our joys and sorrows would not move us to
different expressions of temper in different places and conditions.

The radiant discharges of the sky, the perfumes of space, and humane
shades of earth abounded: but the sick tree, in the balmy evening,
laboured painfully to breathe them in.  A link of its armour of
defence had slipped, and about it all the fibres of its being had
become displaced.



CHAPTER 10

_The Mirror of Changeless Time_

The giant tree seemed almost to slumber in the still hazy light of
that autumnal afternoon.  The sap appeared dispirited, weighed down
from tree-top to root by weariness.  For some hundreds of years it
had not been working at full pitch.  The time-worn trunk bristled
with dried lifeless branches in whose veins sap had ceased to flow
with life-giving effect: and in the covering of needles outside the
pine could be seen definite signs of age, even to the extent of sorry
bare patches.  Its life had now gone dull and very distant, indeed
had become little more than a reflection of the old boisterous self.
April and August no longer budded into splendid vigour in its
utricles.  For plants as for creatures perceptions become faint with
time, sensations get blurred, lights grow dim, till of the life of
yesterday nothing but a colourless print remains, a veiled
inconsequent activity.  So dull stood the giant on this set November
day, as if half-asleep.

Perhaps it was recalling some wordless memory of its six thousand
springs?  Did its tissues tingle with stored-up impressions?  Perhaps
a confused sense of important events was moving in those physical
parts which had most directly received their impact.  Up one side of
the time-worn trunk stretched an enormous scar, the relic of a gaping
wound where once lightning had struck and gashed the tree so that sap
ran out to waste.  It took the giant more than a hundred years to
close that wound, a period which, for the tree, compared well with
the month in which our human flesh heals up: since time has no
beginning nor ending, is neither long nor short, has no
halting-places and never changes: its duration is relative to the
life of the things which are its vehicle, and expresses itself only
in them.

Accordingly the giant's decay, in terms, was like our own.  It might
last for centuries, during which the weakness and partial inertia of
the tree would persist: whereas the decay of man is completed in
fifteen or twenty years.  Yet declines, like lives, in perspective
will be seen to have differed only in degree.  When man and tree have
ceased to exist their respective courses will be summed up in epochs,
short for the one and long for the other, but of the same category
and as easily tabulated:--for past events all fall into order since
they exist only as memories, without the qualities of action which
distinguished them in fact.  In retrospect fifty years are like six
centuries, a year of the past scarcely longer than a charged dragging
minute of the present.

Let us imagine that the sequoia, on this misty autumn afternoon was
recalling its memories.  It could a little titillate its cells by
remembering those uncounted days, sunny or overcast, those
storm-stricken or magical nights, those sharp or restful dawns.  Its
six thousand years of memory would be to the tree what his sixty
years are to an aged man, for in memory and dream we have two means
which smooth away the unlike things in time, and give to it, for one
looking backward, an equality which active nature hardly possesses.
A dream-second or a second in memory may be a century as easily as a
year: just as actions which have taken thousands of years to complete
may finally have the same contour as little events of an hour.  Our
eyes can enclose in their fixed impartial frame a huge landscape or a
tiny plot of space.  What is passed has no existence except in
memory: while as for time--we carry it within ourselves, and pay it
out slowly or fast (or unconsciously) according to whether we are
busy or interested or indifferent.  Hours are elastic periods, which
expand or contract according to the attention we pay them, and it is
our ideas and our passions which mark them off round the face of our
days.

Time may be imaged as a mirror, a confused mirror across whose
impassive face tens of thousands of scenes chase each other in a mazy
dance: for in it are reflected the innumerable and never-closing
consequences of all action, with all the lights, all the shadows, all
the extent and motions of the universe.  The mirror itself is
changeless, and the semblance of movement lies in the reflection, in
that endless rout of fleeting images whose transience is to their
glass as our little moment to eternity.  Our utmost capacity is to
project a thought-ray from our place and instant of existence back
into the night which hides our coming, or forward to the night which
waits our going--rays whose imagined courses towards the poles of the
infinite we cannot follow even in thought.  Yet they are our only
links with past and future, those two names which together spell
eternity: the future a past not yet achieved, and the past a future
left behind.

Such would have been the thoughts of the sequoia (had it been able to
think like us) on this chill November day, as it stood there by the
grove of its sons and grandsons, the derived pine-trees which had
sprung up about it, yet had not, even the greatest of them, reached
to half its height: and something of the same train of thought might
have been started by the sight of the neighbouring forest, now in its
twentieth generation.  These other trees had passed from youth to
maturity, and then grown old and died, changing their promise into
performance, and at last becoming a mere memory; and each stage of
their lives, each tree at every age was to be seen reflected in the
impassive glass of time, which kept of them no record nor trace, but
preserved itself intact against them, as against all phases of the
universe that had been, that was, that ever would be.

Years, hours, minutes and moments are not children of Time, but
circumstance made visible in some one or something.  Only dreams seem
able to assert themselves beyond the face of time's unchanging
mirror.  They shine and register, wheel and flit in the darkling mist
of eternity, with something of its power to embrace æons and seconds
alike.  Like eternity too they harmonize and arrange the great things
of the universe with the least, with things so small that they leave
no mark even in the cloud-confines of the immaterial: and again like
eternity they have no beginning and no end, and so convey something
of the incommunicable character of chaos.

Thus in that lifeless November the giant seemed lost in a white
trance.  If we are vivid in springtime, in autumn we wish for sleep
and dreams.  A vagueness is the nature of the falling year.  Up
above, in space, great deep clouds expanded gradually.  They dragged
themselves along in languor, while their slow shadows darkened the
moist earth and climbed the stripped branches of the giant pine.  In
this misty autumnal afternoon against its sad background all movement
seemed slack.  A formless but dreamy instinct seemed implicit in
animals and plants and things.  The minutes ticked off lazily in the
unearthly gleaming half-light, in this soft and yet magical
atmosphere above which the giant seemed to hang its head in reverie.
Its relaxed needles, weeping boughs and lined rugged trunk made up a
mournful-seeming disappointed whole.  There was not a breath nor a
whisper in the air.  Every shape, every colour, every scent, each
withering blade of grass supine on the earth, each pebble on the
plain, each ripple of light or trembling shadow seemed to give off a
similar emanation, a dull slow tonelessness which permeated the
toneless air, above, below, about.  In one huge fissure of the bole
slept a bear, made torpid by the close thick weather.  On the ground
near the foot of the tree in a tuft of dried grass a dog was
sleeping, the dim gaze of its half-open eyes veiled and turned
inward.  Beside it on a raised turf sat a great insect, the hardly
visible vibration of whose wings seemed pensive too.  Farther away,
but within sight from the tree-top, stood a hut whose people lay
silently watching the great clouds pass.  They also were dreaming or
thinking, allowing the whims of the spirit born of this declining
season to play over what had been or what yet might be.

It would seem as though rare influences of all that is
incomprehensible and infinite in space, of the chaotic and
inconceivable in time, were sometimes allowed to echo down upon
things alive and things lifeless, and to swing them in a general and
harmonious way.  Nature moves on for ever, sleeplessly and
untiringly, but from time to time the past seems to bode forward in
brief uncertain fashion, casting lights and shadows across the loom
of the present.  The adamant Now may keep no trace of the dead Then,
but the ripples of the past none the less persist in ever-failing
widening rings, which pass out into the abyss as ghost-memories: and
these, falling sometimes upon the bark of a tree, or upon the nature
of a man, or the mind of a dog, or into a sea or a perfume or the
half-light of a dewy evening, evoke dreams and clothe the formless
with apparent form that it may have relation with material men and
things.



CHAPTER 11

_The Wheel of Life Lived_

Time then is not to be divided into centuries and hours and minutes:
but just as each atom figures a world in itself, so each moment is an
eternity, one link in an endless chain which binds the remotest past
to the remotest future.  Time's mirror may look with changeless face
upon the tens of thousands of events which defile before it and pass
away leaving no mark;--but that is not to say that these events are
without issue, since their consequences ripple out into space for
ever and ever.  What has happened never wholly ceases to happen.  To
mankind a sentiment of it may return in many forms--in a snatch of
music, in a perfume, in some subtle vibration or illumination of the
atmosphere--and these returns are authentic parcels of the original
moment, for time is to be divorced neither from material nor
immaterial things.  This Present, which to us will so soon be Past,
keeps, as it flies, something of its true essence, and will revive
its influence a year, a century, thousands of centuries later, in
some scent or sound, or unforeseen collocation of circumstance.

This continuing process gives us our only approach to the conception
of eternity, for there could be no endless time if the hours lived
only once and for all, and then died irremediably.  Seconds which
have their passage grow enriched in its course and cease, only to
revive in a new form, after the same fashion as ourselves who, when
death has resolved us, will live again in other combinations of our
elements, no particle of which can be lost in space or time.  Each
second comprehends eternity, as each atom the infinite, and the
course of all that is in the universe is rotary, an orbit constant as
those of stars or of electrons.  Everything wheels about space in
circles; and probably movement in time is also circular: so that when
we find ourselves strangely imagining things which have been, or
things which may sometime be, we can explain ourselves to ourselves
with the reflection that our momentary path has doubtless that second
crossed the emanations of some instant fully lived by another, long
ago.

The sensation that we have already seen or lived or heard something
is similarly explained.  Each active moment is an amalgam of
sentiments and wills and multiple elements which split apart as soon
as the purpose is achieved.  The moments of its duration then scatter
through space and time, taking with them remains of their charged
sounds, colours, and scents, with atmospheres of joy or sadness not
fully perceptible by our limited senses, but certainly to be opined,
and almost to be felt.  We may pursue this train of thought a little
farther, and be prepared to accept that certain places derive a
special atmosphere from the events of which they have been the
setting, and may preserve it indefinitely.  We are often sensible of
particular associations which hang about such and such a feature: one
place may instil terror, and others peace, disquietude, mystery, or
love, without any apparent quality in their disposition to account
for the possession of such power.  The reason is that the events or
thoughts or actions of which they have been the scene have left
traces within the four walls of the room, in the branches of the
tree, or in the various features of the place.  In fact, the seconds
of old time are yet living there, loaded with old association, and as
they whirl and vibrate they sensitize us with their invisible rays.
If we were endowed with new faculties, sensitive to such influences
as now escape us, and with them were able to apprehend and analyse
these scattered fragments of the past, these waifs of dead
adventures, then we might be able to reconstruct the deeds and lives
and deaths, all the unplumbed combinations of circumstance in the
cities or countries of our passage.  This invisible swarm of "seconds
which have been" hems us about, wherever and whenever we go, with its
traces of suffering and of delight, of unrest, of clashing, of
colour: for the emanations of our souls (like those of the souls of
things) are heavy with various essences which may grow faint, but
never altogether perish.

In this dead November air a soft musical murmur seemed to hang round
the giant tree, as if it were mourning its old age and sadness.  In
this autumnal dreaminess the tree was living again some of its passed
life, hearing the times and moments thronging by, contrasting (even
in its least fibre) the brilliancy of yesterday with the sadness of
the failing present.  The numberless radiations of the air which for
centuries had made florid its stem seemed to-day to renew about it
their health-giving vibrations.  This dust of time, the elements of
old situations great and small, had come from near or far as the case
was: perhaps from the beginning of things in the depths of the abyss.
To-morrow, when the great tree would be no more, it might affect
other forms, and make fertile other existences.

We go abroad in a throng of atoms, the basic materials of distant and
diverse forms of life.  Sometimes they breathe upon us, sometimes we
hear them, sometimes we see them.  At other times they move us to
love or hope or fear, melt us to tenderness, brace us to deep
efforts, or daze us with weird portents.  To this vagabond star-dust
we can ascribe a sometime fit of passion or wrath, of madness or joy.
The world about us is all peopled with these spirit-mists.  We live
red moments and white moments, odorous or musical moments, moments of
pain or love, brief or slow, loud or peaceful.  Space, to repeat,
builds up nature out of its own substance: and likewise unchanging
time makes use of its own essence to assemble and arrange and fix the
order of events.

Evening came down wan and weeping over the uncertain scene.  The mist
thickened into clouds like smoke, whilst silence and a baseless
lethargy soaked through the sluggish air.  The giant tree loomed
straight and huge in the twilight, its form as ever, its colours
those which it had assumed on so many evenings.  Neither shape nor
appearance was different from those with which it had fronted the
autumns of many years, and their intricate pallors; but never before
had it looked so desolate in the desolate splendour of its setting.
Its sadness was as patent as the sadness of the landscape: and since
neither the content nor the surface of this November gloaming
appeared different from those of past autumns the source of this
changed feeling had to be searched for.  There was no motion in the
tree, nor stirring of a blade of grass, nor strange gleam through the
fog; nor did the chill air feel endued with a particular quality: yet
this depression over the world was true and heavy, weighing down all
spirits and things from some unknown direction, and by imperceptible
means.  It could only have been the product of secret universal
influences vibrating in space as a cloud of invisible particles able
to link time to matter, as dreams to reality.

The giant was weary, the giant was sick: and the mysterious sorrow of
its pain was diffused about it like an odour.  The low clouds
continued to collect together, darkening with their purple masses the
violet striations of the unwholesome sky.  The still country-side was
suddenly stirred by a faint shudder.  It was that the sun had set.
The first approach of evening yet held relics of the light of day:
and through it came another sudden tremor, which awoke the slumbering
air, and the inert earth, the pale grass, the scattered pebbles in
the plain, the roosting birds, the beasts in their dens men in their
houses, and insects in their inmost hiding-places.  The pine-tree in
turn felt this invisible convulsion penetrate strangely from its
crest to its roots.

The convulsion was invisible, indefinable, and immense, and yet its
cause seemed wholly hidden.  What was this swarm of vivified instants
(lived perhaps millions of years ago) which had drifted into the
district of the giant pine?  How far had they come, these fulfilled
seconds, whose course had once been run?  Were they the time- and
space-enfeebled echo of a cataclysm in some unknown world? (when? and
where?) or the travail of a blind sun lost in space, yet casting its
ominous enigmatic messages across the worlds?

These very real astral influences, active upon men and also upon all
that exists, are understood by us usually in an unworthy and
insufficient degree.  It is admitted that we are at times bound by
the forces of distant heavenly bodies, but this can hardly be as
individuals, nor can their waves, when they sway us, be sent forth
expressly on our petty account.  We must not be so simple as to think
that the existence of any one among us can interest or engross the
whole activity of a sphere or that its labouring is to make smooth
the way of a single man.  We feel its influence when our path crosses
the direction of its discharged waves; but all beings, all plants,
hills, peoples, countries in the same case are influenced at the same
time as ourselves, and in a like fashion.

This may explain why associations of things are sometimes swayed to a
common feeling or purpose by invisible means.  We often note that a
sense of gaiety or of suffering, of liveliness or of resignation, of
calm or disquietude imposes itself on us and on our neighbours, quite
independently of our own state of mind.  Both animate and inanimate
things are subject to such changes of state, which may last a long or
a short time, may be restricted or general, but which generally lead
their objects in an undesigned direction.  Such forms have probably
played a wide and yet undetected part in the history of mankind, and
also in the physical history of the globe: they may account for some
of our unexpected and abrupt departures from the usual manner, for
the irregular impulses which make us commit acts foreign to our
normal will and nature.  So that the unknown, into which pass our
dead acts and ideas, may itself conceal also the sources of our
resolutions and of our performances.

The evening closed in yet more, its clouds slowly veiling the
heavens, while the mists thickened, and covered up the ground: yet
the unnameable trouble, which so mysteriously gripped the region, had
faded as mysteriously as it had come.  Unchanged, in its surrounding
silence and circumstances stood the giant, serene once more.  True it
was still tired, and the sap in its veins felt enfeebled by advancing
age; but the sense of misery and desolation just now weighing upon it
had been lifted.  The dismal pomp of invisible minutes of grief had
wended its way past, invisibly.  These sad, dark, disaster-laden
minutes--from what black event, and whence had they been derived?
What incalculable journey had they made?  and whither would their
uncontrolled and endless course next tend?  And the great tree
itself, standing there so stiff under that autumn sky, so remote from
ours--what can have been these detached moments of its life and being
which come from its stem to interest us, to bring to our lamp-lighted
room the ghosts of its joy and the shades of its pain?  What were
these acts, these enjoyed moments of the giant's life, that they can
so float about us, murmur to us, hold our interest, that even to our
dreams come memories and broken incidents of what it was? that as the
tale of its death draws near to be told, we feel grief for that huge
ruddy trunk?

Perhaps it is because the thoughts which take wing from our souls, as
from the souls of things, are so many parcels of vital essence, which
pass over the face of the mirror of changeless time, and look into it
and are pictured there, and then break up and rearrange themselves,
but never die.



CHAPTER 12

_When the Wood-Dust floated in the Air_

Whilst the August sun was pouring its clear warm rays from the blue
heavens upon the world, a fine wood-powder continued to rain down
from all the internal cavities of the giant's trunk, in a reddish
dust which lay deep upon the roots.  The tree's substance had been so
falling away for centuries, with every now and then a larger
dilapidation when some great cavity formed itself within its
thickness: while on the outside the harsh bark as slowly decayed.

Beneath the soil in the still-kindly darkness of the earth's heart
the roots, regretting their failed vivacity, were now resigned to
grow more dry and twisted and inert day by day, powerless any more to
suck life-giving nourishment from their ground.  On the surface of
the earth the eternal counter-change of life and death proceeded.
Thousands of births, both plant and animal, occurred, to compensate
for the thousands of deaths, the wheel of life impartially grinding
out change or creation or destructiveness.

It was now summer.  The still air was elastic and alive, and
transmitted a shining lightness to the world.  All was green and gay
and content, serene as the unflecked sky and the splendid sun.  Girt
about with this joyous and pellucid atmosphere stood the giant, tall
as ever, but contrasting more sharply against its pure keenness.  The
huge embrace, vivid and blue and green, in which heaven held earth,
seemed almost violent in opposition to the spirit of the tree, whose
dead branches and scarred trunk and weary roots marked a heavy
despondency.

Sorrow in spring and summer is quite unlike sorrow in autumn or
winter.  When the year dies the current of life is dying too, whereas
in spring-time the new sharp vigour of life makes any sadness seem
doubly desolate.  The warm sun and renewal of activity in animals and
plants, the liveliness of those about us intensify our grief, which,
when autumn comes, is in keeping with the common tendency of nature,
and becomes moderate, soothed by the absence of joy in others.
Apposition is the greatest tonic of colours, as analogy clears the
vision: accordingly this day of fairest summer, with its luxuriant
flowers and plants about which the bees were humming in the sunshine
so that nature seemed to sing softly to itself in the jocund air and
the universal gladness made the far hills come together for joy, this
day made prominent the infinite desolation of the giant's aspect.

The gold of the sunlight was gilding the singing ripples of the
water, the birds were flinging their loudest notes upon the velvet
air, the wild beasts were supine with excess of well-being, the
plants were burgeoning and swelling with sap in the afflatus of their
perfumes: but the sequoia, alone, was bitten through and compassed
with the bitter smell of old age, and felt life draw back from its
insensitive branches, from its ruined trunk, from its hidden roots,
now lifeless and impassive among the former fertilizing benefits of
the juices underground.  The trees near-by were preening themselves
in the rain of sun-starts, shuddering with the force of the new waves
of life pumped into them from the teeming earth.  The wind thrilled
through their branches and all nature came together in that healthy
rush of new life, which had once been common also to the giant tree.
Once! for now the inside of its trunk was powdered thick with that
rain of fine red wood-dust, falling ever more fast towards the tree's
ruin.

Yet the outline of the tree against the clear, thin sky appeared
unchanged.  At its very head, the topmost twig still bore green and
lustrous pine-needles.  The remaining life of the sequoia had taken
refuge and concentrated itself there, in those few square inches of
supple wood and fluid sap.  From the first days of spring the tree
had seemed to live wholly for this last branch, which was linked
directly with a very fine tap root burrowing deep underground.  The
only pulse of life in the tree was here, in the circulation of these
few drops of sap between head and foot.  Breath had slowly abandoned
the rest of the tree, to hover hazardous and trembling for a weak
while between the labouring root and the little green twig lost away
up there in the blue.

The tree's entire intention seemed now to lie in this last twig, to
the exclusion of any thought of the huge dead mass between.  One
might say almost that it tried to ignore all the decay, after the
fashion of other failing lives.  This solitary green branch on the
inert bole was like the quivering wing-case of a crushed insect, or
the childish and petty busyness of an old man near the grave.
Everybody can recall the incomprehensible eagerness of some dying
soul to recollect a strayed trifle, as if repose of mind depended on
its being put straight: or that other unfortunate on his sick bed who
seemed to lose sense of the beating wings of death in listening to
the petty ticking of a newly mended watch.  Childhood, prime and age
have ambitions and goals to suit their strengths, so that the complex
and magnificent dreams of youth grow pale and few as life dims in us.
Old men have small hopes and mean activity, not because they are
weary and sick of life, but because life is abandoning them: and at
the final moment, when life leaves us altogether, its last feeblest
trace may be a trivial thought which we try to fix, a futile wish we
long to satisfy, a foolish interest.  This last living branch of the
giant tree may prefigure the moment when the last inhabitants of our
globe will cling to its last habitable portion while all the rest of
it is frozen in an eternal winter, or when the like fate overtakes
the last habitable planet of our sky.  Life which is made by inches
departs by inches: in those sudden cases of apparent and violent
destruction it is only that the falling curve dips downward more fast.

This we must consider not as a special act of nature, but as an
ultimate effect of life moving towards that new arrangement which is
called death.  Since everything which exists, small or great, is
compounded of various elements (an interaction of multiple energies),
so it is logical that life should take hold of its matter piece-meal,
and relinquish it, when the time comes, also piecemeal.

In this fashion the internal decomposition of the pine-tree
proceeded.  Slowly its substance crumbled away to dust, amidst the
close smell of age and decay.  Tremors of dissolution began to pass
through the giant.  Dull creakings ran up and down the trunk.  Its
sorry boughs quivered with a thin resonance, while deep-buried in the
soil its roots contracted in agony.  A narrow crack opened in the
wood just above ground level, and gradually spread round the trunk,
growing deeper as it went: while the red tree-dust trickled out
through every hollowed place and floated in the air as a fine cloud,
proof of dry rot and presage of coming death.

Still, at the very crest there shone out golden in the sunlight that
last living branch, fresh and shining in all its needles.  The
gracious summer had fortified all life upon earth.  From a hill far
away there came a waft of air, which loaded itself on its passage
with the emanations of plain and field and wood, till it reached the
district of the tree.  Its warm soft breath kissed the giant gently,
just waving the little green twig up aloft, and then passed on, as
though towards an endless series of new scenes and adventures.  Yet
it was early checked.  A line of trees, making a wall with their
interwoven branches, repulsed it, flung it back with a new impulse.
It became a gust, sweeping along the ground-level, raising a cloud of
leaves and dust and the dried powder of decomposed wood about the
base of the sequoia, into whose fissured trunk it blew strongly.  The
tree shuddered, spiral tremors running up its length and down again,
rather as the invigorating sap had once run up and down.  At the foot
of the tree, where the circular crack was, these tremors were stayed.
They ran together, reinforced each other, swelled into lateral
shocks.  A deep low warning sounded in the body of the wood, and
echoed outside.  For a little the huge shape shivered in the liquid
air, oscillating to right and left, while the tiny plume of green at
its summit described vivid curves against the blueness of the sky.
Then simply, powerfully, inevitably, as in all natural decisions,
came a loud rending like the last cry of an agonizing spirit, and the
immense pillar bowed down and fell upon the earth, which shook under
the weight, while the sky, suddenly made vacant of such bulk, seemed
to leap up as the giant fell.  Thick clouds of ruddy dust rose widely
into the air, filling it with the damp odour of decay, while the
bottom of the trunk feathered out in splinters, as the dried roots,
so long hidden from the day, were torn out from both ground and wood.

More than seven thousand years ago a heedless puff of wind had cast a
sequoia seed upon the fertile earth: and now another puff had broken
down its tree.  For more than seventy centuries the forest giant had
had its part in this life which we share, and its course (like ours,
while they endure) had run curving through time and space till its
circle was completed, a perfect round, as all life's movements are,
and will be everywhere and evermore.  Its very age was inscribed in
concentric circles in the thickness of its trunk.  The seasons, in
their repeated going and coming, had given the impression of a slowly
turning wheel, like the terrene revolution or the sun's.  The
sequoia, a cylinder in core, a cone in shape, had lived amongst
fellow-curves.  The rounded stars journey in their elliptical orbits,
and the electrons likewise in their infinite degree.  This unchanging
changeless time rounds all things in their span.  The hours encompass
us, described upon their dial; and even contrasts at the last run
together, made to coincide by the slow bending of every line of form.
Infinity, if that be the nature of the universe, causes to meet all
movement when its arc of direction is completed, and the course of
time too seems circular, the rolling of a wheel.  Can chaos, the
abyss itself, be concentric, after the likeness of everything with
which its halls are peopled?

Suppose that an eagle, piercing high beyond our sight in the blue
vault of heaven, had seen the giant fall.  It would have thought the
event and the object petty, across the vast distance.  One near-by
would have been moved by the greatness of the victim.  The greatness
and the littleness of things thus seem to depend upon the point of
view--a trite, daily, observation, no doubt, but so is life itself to
us.  Big and little--is it not possible that proportions get their
value only subjectively, and that in space they rank less important
than to our minds?  This concept of relativity, producing itself in
everlasting stages across the horizon of our intelligence--may it not
be linked with that other law of comparison, the relation of one
dimension to another, which ensures something bigger than any object,
however big, and something smaller than the almost infinitely small?

Anyhow, measured by human standards, the trunk of the dying giant as
it lay there on the ground was huge.  The wind was still rustling in
its branches, though the air about them was made dense with wood-dust
now.  It used to be, to our mind, an immense tree ... and soon it
will be nothing.  Soon?  Before the sequoia has given back to space
the elements of which it was made, its carcass will have to rot for
hundreds or thousands of years.  It takes so long for all the
constituents of such a tree to be resolved, for the oxygen to go back
to oxygen, for the carbon to re-become carbon, the liquid to turn
again into liquid.  Yet this lapse of time, when the last trace of
the tree has ceased to be, will have been as a second.  To our
fallibility it has seemed long, but eternity, which will bring the
ultimate and certain destruction of all matter, recks not of a few
thousand centuries.

When it was alive the forest giant harboured in its branches
thousands of bodies of insects.  Some were crushed violently to dust
by accidents.  Some perished merely by lapse of time, but all in the
end came to nothing: for eternity reduces everything to the same
value, sooner or later--reduces them all to nothing.  Our thousands
of lives, magnificent or sordid, long or short, great or small, as
they happen to be on earth, leave no mark in space and time.  The
glory or the shame of what has been bears value and meaning only in
our fitful solitary dreams.  Should we consider them as having never
existed--all these things which have had life and have, under the
law, returned to the chaos which called them forth--now only as the
dust of forces and of time?  The elements remain eternally unchanged,
however protean their assumed shapes: perhaps what we term life and
death are only their incidental phases.



CHAPTER 13

_What is called Death_

The forest giant now lay low in the sunlight waiting the return of
its substances to their kindred elements of time or space.  For the
moment the tree was dead, since it kept yet its living shape; but
when nothing of it remained recognizable, it would be as if it had
never been.  Long and short lives, rich and poor lives, are all made
equal at the moment when they have ended.

Like the mass of beings and plants and things, our tree found rest in
death.  After so many and with so many we ask anxiously, "What is
this Death?" a sempiternal, unanswered, fresh and vital question.  No
one has yet solved it, and probably no one will, for we cannot
experience death and retain our power to register its effects.
Sometimes we can feel it coming near, or imagine we do, and at that
time may try to describe its onset; but such an experience has
nothing in common with veritable death.  To know it, and to impart
our knowledge of it to others, would entail our having control of our
faculties, whereas death's first act is to deprive us of just that
control.

How much has been said and thought and written about death!  And
without effect.  We should make up our minds that nothing is to be
added to what we already know about it.  We continually strain to
realize the flavour of death by heaping up a confused mass of ideas,
by strange and inordinate imaginings, by deliberately forcing our
thought and dealing to a point beyond control.  Yet these are not
means and ways by which to learn; for in our wildest dreams, in our
most fearful phantasies, or strangest visions, in all that is
unfamiliar, runs the thread of life.  We can have no dreams or
hallucinations or inventions, born of true imagination or of a fit of
madness, unless life give them us--and so how can they hold an idea
or sense of death?  And this is why we will never, in anticipation,
taste death.

We cannot even distinguish and analyse for ourselves the fashion in
which death will some day bear us away from life.  Death is the
non-existent, made not out of silence (which noise explains), nor out
of darkness (which light would explain), but out of something
inconceivably absolute.  Sleep implies an awakening, dreams imply the
powers of seeing, thinking, hearing, inertness implies the power of
movement; so that nothing in our range of experience, from complete
peace to utter terror, can plant in us a true sense of death, and
probably no man, to the end of the world, will ever be able to
explain it in terms of others' deaths or of his own.

When our spirit has departed (that is, when the bond between the
secret and innumerable forces whose continued contact makes our life
is at last unloosed), we are only vague shapes in deliquescence.  The
dead keep nothing of their ancient character.  What had been their
life is submerged in the infinite whole, as myriads of particles of
varying elements.  In nature alone is the power to dispose of these
dispersed and impalpable essences; so it is finally impossible that
an entity such as our present should ever again come together and act
after our death.  We are, and we will cease to be: that much is
certain; but what we will be can never be told.

In some purple and grey evening of the closing year, one of those
pale hours which seem to dissolve away our flesh that our spirit may
grow more reinforced in itself, we can sit and dream of those who
were dear to us, whom life has left so that they are no more found.
With far-away eyes and hearts heavy with memories we remember our
dead, how brilliant their faces, how dear their voices, how moving
their presences once were to us: and from memories so harrowing we
have not wracking despair and agony, but only pitying tears, which
seem inadequate as issue of the certainty that we will never see
again those looks nor hear those voices nor feel those presences.
These dead were all in all to us, and yet they have gone without
trace left either for us or for the world.  And why does our reason
not swoon in a nerve-shattering flood of horror when it sees the
deaths of people whom we loved, or whom we have merely seen doing and
moving, people who have pleased us or hurt us, whose warm hands (full
and trembling with life) have touched ours, whose glances have met
our own; why are we not terrified as we stand by at their supreme
moment when life and death meet, and a world in the winking of an eye
is reduced to nothing?  And when we have lost our familiar friends,
how can we go on living, and talking? how can we take pleasure in
things or be sorry, in our usual fashion?  And how think of them
after they have gone, with such calm regret and resignation, whereas
it was a frenzied grief, touching madness, which the anticipation of
their future deaths evoked in us?

The answer to these questions is that the knowledge how we must
ourselves some day die is always stirring in us, forms part of our
flesh and blood, moves in our nerves, and finds our own inevitable
destined end prefigured in each death of those about us.  We say, or
rather we feel obscurely, that what is happening to them will some
day happen to us, when the fatal time comes for us to pay this dread
tribute which they are paying.

Perhaps it is the same current of ideas, which makes collective
disaster, such as war or pestilence, less frightful to us than the
tragedies of individuals.  The consciousness that we are ourselves
exposed to such perils reduces our commiseration, not out of egotism
(as is commonly thought), but from a sense that we too will bear our
part in the eventual expiation.  The idea that in our turn we will
suffer this softens in some odd way our dread of the inevitable and
the distress we might feel at another's pitiable situation.

The younger sequoia trees which had survived the greatest of their
family would flourish for a long while yet, and enjoy the vigour of
their cool fragrant sap; but the fall of the giant would be theirs in
the end.  They would go brittle and inert before the fatal hour.
Neither the light of day, nor warmth, nor the kindly earth would any
more be profitable to them.  Their substance would dissolve
infallibly into a fine red dust, smelling mournfully of age.  Only
time and space, of all the universe, remain for ever changeless.

There was a bustle of ants in the heavy dust of the decaying wood, up
and down the fallen trunk of the giant tree, now flecked with
alternate bars of light and shade.  Here as elsewhere life and death
succeeded one another.  Flowers bloom as flowers fade, creatures are
born as others die, fresh springs rise up here as rivers grow dry
elsewhere, crystals are formed as others split: and all the while
earth goes forward towards its frozen fate.  In high heaven the
wheeling stars prepare themselves to receive life, or to grow
desolate; all is in flux, transforms itself, repeats itself, dies:
even what seems to us most assured and everlasting.  While we
ourselves, atoms of the universe, endure our sentence of imprisonment
in life according to inexorable law, until the term of death.

In such a chaos, where, amidst millions of clashing forces, millions
of destinies are being worked out, what can be the purpose of the
all-seeing Eye? what inconceivable end has He designed for the living
and for the dead, for the stars, for all creation?  Our souls and
bodies, our births and goings-out, the details and the wholes, what
is the final inexpressible combination which will resolve them all?
whither does the huge inexplicable movement tend?

In face of such a problem let us remember how we mitigate our terror
by being able to take ourselves and our puny acts seriously.  They
are so small compared with the constellations of the stars, and yet
they absorb us.  We are able to laugh and cry, to love and hate, in
our narrow bounds, forgetting for the while the agony of the unknown
which encompasses us, and forgetting to ask the how and why, the
purpose of each act of life, its relation to the universe.  We are
able to exist by and according to the impulses of our own flesh and
spirit, as each species exists according to the particular measure
and direction of its means.

The forest giant also had its time.  A pine-seed after manifold
adventures transformed itself, in a course of admirable permutations,
into a mighty tree for more than seventy centuries.  Yet its hour
struck: and in its fate can be read the fates of all created things,
after due allowance has been made for variety in age and kind and
size.  The giant at last lay in peace upon the fertile ground, having
had its life, like us, and like us having nothing thereafter in
eternity or in the infinite: though while it lived it obeyed the
nature of its kind, and all powers in earth and heaven seemed leagued
in its support.

So we do all, while we exist.  In the small circle which it is
happiness for us to fill, we repeat the experience of those who have
gone before; and in the breathing air, in the shining light, the
dancing heat, the darkening shadow, in the rhythm of the friendly
world we carry through to the end the courses laid down for us.  And
vainly do we seek to learn not merely whence we come and whither we
go, but what and why we are, while we exist.



CHAPTER 14

_The Theory of Eternal Sleeplessness_

What can chaos be but the mass of elements not yet conjoined with
those other atoms which have been embodied and which have returned to
the mass?

The fallen tree was now sunken in an endless sleep.  The rays of the
sun playing over its ruined trunk gradually absorbed its colours.
The discoloured redness of its substance, the yellow of its rotted
dust, the fresh green of its last shoots slowly faded, while the
winds took away its antique smell and the blue atmosphere
re-incorporated the oxygen, the carbon, and the last elements of
moisture in its wood.  Finally the whole shape of the former tree
disappeared, so that there remained on earth no visible or tangible
trace of its former inhabitant; though its substance still existed.
Its component parts could be found in the light and air, in the
clouds, in a vibration, a breath, on a stone, either in material
substances or in invisible radiations.  They were the old elements of
the sequoia, exactly as they had been in essence, though now their
forms were so different that they conjured up no memories of the
vanished tree.  On the analogy it may well be that the solid
particles, the liquids, the essences which together make up our
apparent forms, have had equally varied incarnations, have been
beautiful or vile, have been drab or splendid, have been
delicious-smelling, have encountered a thousand unexpected changes
and adventures before they were re-born as us.  The energy which
moves us, the matter which gives us substance, the impulses which
excite us, the dreams which trouble us, and the occasional mysteries
which vibrate in our souls and bodies may come from sources thousands
of years old, and through a myriad phases of existence.

In face of these unexplored ramifications of our personality it seems
impossible that we should ever be able to tie effect to cause, or
learn the reason of these secret longings of ours, or of those
strange instincts and reactions, those preferences, those fears.
They come to us from so far, the forces which order our doings: and
though each element remains intact and unadulterated, yet signs of
the many moments they have passed embodied in various shapes cling to
them always, like fine dust.

One wonders whence came the particles which composed the giant tree,
from what previous embodiments, and into what shapes they reassembled
after the pine was dead.  What had been green in the tree might be
black or transparent when next its elements took visible form.  What
had made the tree seem solid might be liquid or vapour in the new
assemblage.  The fragrant pine-fumes might be solid and common next
time.  Common?  Well, hardly perhaps, for there is neither beautiful
nor ugly, noble nor ignoble in the universe.  Such qualities are
conferred upon things by their impact upon our senses.  This or that
vortex of atoms which to-day gives us exquisite dreams may in a later
evolution be some combination utterly hateful to our taste.  A
process which wounds us to-day may to-morrow bring forth a marvellous
constellation of molecules.  The indestructible elements whirl
unceasing in the universe, moving from an out-worn structure to a new
one, dissolving and amalgamating without rest till they rejoin the
ever-lasting silence--whence they will leap out again to like
adventures, or towards yet unknown variations, in turn to scatter in
a dust of atoms.  An embodiment may last for a day or for hundreds of
thousands of years; but its inevitable end is in the chaos of
infinity.

On the sun-bathed earth an irrefragable peace had at last drowned the
ruins of the tree.  With its death one particular adventure in
creation was run.  The forces which had made it tangible would
continue to function, but their specific combination as a pine-tree
was ended for ever.  The forest giant henceforward would be as before
its birth--a part of the body of eternal nature.  Around it the
rhythm of the world would flow, neither faster nor slower than of
old, with light and shadow, ice and fire, birth and death, all things
just as before, but not _it_: these similar conditions cannot be of
_this_ tree's atoms, nor partakers of _its_ life, nor a union of
_its_ elements.  Its race was run: as in this world all things must
some while end.  The tree with the ruddy trunk and green needles was
dead: and they are dead, or will die, those insects with the gaudy
wing-cases, the bright-scaled fish, the downy birds, the sharp-fanged
animals, proud mankind, diamonds of the purest water, black carbon,
seas, mountains, world and suns.  The eternal universal is built up
of perishable parts, and our blind career is only a succession of
incidents like or unlike, a drawn-out flicker of beginnings and
endings, a steady stream of sensations, of bubbles swelling up and
bursting, one single life made up of a myriad lives.  They beat and
flow and scatter, to be re-born after each change.

We are all ephemeral in terms of our allotted situation, and eternal
in terms of the universe.  Everything which is still, as everything
which moves about us, is no more than a whirl of situations
constantly made and unmade: and so our substances, those which now
make up ourselves, will infallibly scatter us some day.  Elements
seem to grow tired at last of being confined in one special shape, to
be weary of being so long a man, a stone, a river, a fire.  Their
weariness is ours, in sum.  We feel vigorous or weak, joyful or sad,
perturbed or resigned according to the prosperity of our cells: and
we all, whatever our age and health, encounter hours in which,
without reason given, our whole being longs for annihilation.  At
other times--in common experience it happens often at that hour when
lamps should be lit--there swells up in us an indeterminate wish to
be other than we are: and our flesh goes dead, our hearts cold, our
heads empty of desire.

May this not be our dissatisfied elements, desirous of change,
speaking within us?  And the often-just premonitions of death which
come to men, how explain them other than as the stirring of our
elements quickened by radiations from the unknown?  The trouble of
those stricken by a sudden and mortal fate, their inexplicable
distress, the panic-stricken flock of teeming thoughts vainly seeking
escape in their shadowy subconsciousness--all this morbid poignant
possessed state must be due to our cells' foreknowledge that shortly
their architecture will be changed.  Our independent life puts no
obstacle in the way of that universal ebb and flow, which sets
through us and subjects us to the same law of eternal change which
rules the rest of chaos.

For these reasons the close of a career should not be to us a
melancholy sight.  To be born, to exist, to die should seem simple,
natural, unchangeable things, only shades of difference even when
considered to the farthest obscurity of their never-ending course.
But to be eternal, there is a vision which exceeds!  To be eternal!

The universe withstands, unmoved, the passing of trees and beings and
things.  In its season everything must defile before the mirror of
changeless time.  Plants in their fading go the way of suns as they
grow cold, of dreams as they pass on waking, of an insect as it
perishes.  In the imperishable universe things are born only to die.
We, as atoms of the stream of life, can stiffen ourselves with the
knowledge that we suffer only the common fate of all created things;
that the same fate rules both material and spiritual things, men and
stars following one curve in their careers; and that in nature no
situation can endure unaltered.

As we dwell on it, the idea of being eternal becomes impossible to
our spirits.  To be infinitely active for ever, what a prospect of
overwhelming sameness!  Perpetual life would be for us no less than a
never-ending sleeplessness.  We would have to endure with a constant
endurance of constant circumstances, while others about us were born
and died, while plants grew green and withered, whilst the rivers
ran, and the suns burned themselves out; we would have to watch the
ebb and flow of things, and the measured flight of hours, the
evolution of form, the levelling of fine distinction.  The same
dreams, the same senses would function, without ever a stop, without
ever a relieving variation--what a vision of weariness and monotonous
despair!  Like a great wide eye in which were mirrored chaos and its
thousand ghostly shapes, an eye limpid but glassy, strained and
aching with its long stare, over which it was ordered that no easeful
lid might ever close.

Everlasting life for men an everlasting insomnia?  Let us call to
mind some of those nights when sleep would not visit us, when
open-eyed we gazed into the dark as though it were luminous, our
temples all one ring of ice, and in our stagnant veins a biding
weariness which nothing could relieve.  Life throbbed in our ears
with an unchanging beat.  The air about us might be loud with rumour,
or be silent; there might be a clock ticking, or a storm raging in
the night outside, but anyhow, and however our mood, the
sleeplessness always in the end prevailed over all circumstances, and
knotted up the customary arabesques of our sensation into one
pattern, mechanical and terrifying in its regularity.  A cold terror
would take hold of us--the lucid ordered distraction of severe
insomnia--and we would be lost in a passionless despair, in that
desert of opaque oppression which is ultimate fatigue.

Each cell in us called aloud on sleep, while our whole being thrummed
with the rhythm of life.  The entire existence of the aged and the
very sick is an unended longing for repose, and no small part of the
agony and horror of a death-bed is this cruel wakefulness which holds
the eyes ever on the watch.  Eternal peace has no terrors for the
dying: but if that necessary nescience was not to follow after, if
their wakefulness was to endure world without end--what then?

Despite our pains life is sweet, while it runs within its proper
bounds; but it would be intolerable if it were endless.  On this
mortal earth the giant tree had passed into its last rest, leaving
the general current of life behind it to continue unchecked.  The
sequoia, even if it had had the power, would not have been sorry no
longer to breathe in the odours of the world, nor feel the sunlight,
nor pump the sap up and down its weather-beaten trunk.  At its hour
of death it was desiring death, the great sleep in which lay repose,
with all its strength, even with its finest stomata, its inmost
grain, its remotest root; and if this was the issue of its seven
thousand years, such should be the issue of a dog's corresponding
fifteen years, of a man's seventy years, of a planet's millions.

In the midst of eternity an age is not so long.



CONCLUSION

_Within a Cell_

Through all the changing pomp of seasons, while the sun showered down
its yellow rays, while the rain striped it with grey markings, and
the snow lay heavy and white upon it, the vision of the tree was
present to me, first as a colossal column, standing up in heaven,
then as a broken ruin, prostrate on the ground.  As through a light
haze I have tried to distinguish the splendour of its life, and the
tragedy of its death: and all this while the blue and green and grey
country in which the sequoia lived and died has become in some degree
my own country, a part of me.  I grew to love those distant hills,
modulating away to invisibility on some shining day of spring; I
learned to feel the sadness of the autumn twilights which made the
background of the pine-tree go so pale and lifeless and desolate.  I
traced at length the slow circulation of the giant's sap, and became
sensitive like the tree to light and shadow, to all the influences,
exciting or soporific, of the type of country in which I had placed
it.  Nevertheless, all this creation of a vast landscape, and the
huge form of the tree, took shape, endured, and ended in a tiny
space, one of those imperceptible and secret compartments called
cells, parts of our bodies immeasurable by human wit.

Outside my window the world was growing feeble in the failing autumn,
but from the white page which I slowly darkened with my writing
bloomed for my sight a summer scene of green and gold, where once the
giant tree had stood, but which now was again become clear ground and
azure sky: and I told myself how shortly my memory-cell would produce
for me a new mind-landscape, new images, new sentiments.  Such
dreams, born within ourselves, have the vividness of real incidents,
while they last: to such a degree that it seems questionable whether
the physical shocks we undergo and the palpable matter we encounter
are really the intensest experiences of our lives.  May it not be
rather that our sharpest colouring comes from the volatile and
obscure matter of our ideas and dreams, with its rich palette of
innumerable shades?  Only by means of the abstract part of our nature
do we commune with the universe.  Our likes and dislikes, our
delights and despairs are not the issue of our carnal parts,
offspring of our blood and nerves, except in so far as these are
submissive conductors of the hidden reactions of our imagination.  A
single dream will change the current of our life, and our actions are
the product of the powerful but hidden inner world of our minds.

So that it is our imagination which rules our conduct.  Our physical
performance is the reflex of our conception of the deed.  Our will is
the developed image of the dark, fertile, capricious, imperceptible
force which we call fancy.  We can mingle this fancy in almost
material fashion with all the things and beings on our path through
life, so strange in composition is this substance or fluid.
Everything which is ours, even our passions, obey its commands.  It
can make us chaste or ardent, will purify our flesh in the presence
of our sisters, and inflame the same matter when our thoughts turn
concupiscently towards a woman with whom we can feasibly have
dealings.  Fanatics owe their superhuman endurance during horrible
mutilations of the flesh to this same power, which also gives to
martyrs the perfect calm of soul in which they tread the threshold of
an awful death.

May not this flexible mistress of our understanding be made of the
same essence as the motive force of the universe?  Not our reason but
our imagination enables us to grasp the conception of illimitable
chaos, to comprehend the music of the farthest spheres, to overleap
all distance and cast the sum of the faintest stars.  By it we can
distinguish between world and world, in their far-fetched and
fleeting changes from the incandescent minute of the nucleus to that
last frozen silence in which the dead planets circulate: and also by
its means we can see the smallness of things, even when they are
atoms inexpressibly small.

Not that our imagination is universal.  There are causes we will
never fathom, effects we can never know, forces too occult for us.
Yet we have monitions of them; their flickering image hovers
sometimes just beyond our grasp, their last repeated echo dies away
in a murmur just too weak for us to understand.

Therefore in the depths of our subconsciousness the immane with its
thousand heads mirrors itself vaguely, like a wide field agreeing to
compress its forms and rarefy its details within the tiny sphere of a
prismatic drop of water.

Our dreams take shape, and endure and fade, having seemed reality
while they endured.  Images and sounds and scents of strange
marvellous richness dance restlessly through our inner world.

This other life which palpitates in us is often more engrossing to us
than our public life, and always more fickle.  It has no bounds, so
far as supply of incident and vision is concerned: but is absolutely
limited (as much as is our physical life) in its extent of influence.
Its scope is for ourselves alone.  Our designs are made and our
actions prepared in this domain of our dark fancy, and the adventures
we there conceive only lose in richness and range when they are
translated into physical terms.  Of that realm we are absolute
master, and we rule our universe thence.  In it time and space both
bow at our behest.  By a simple whim we transpose seasons in a
moment, that we may inhabit tropics and the frozen north at once.
Elements and creatures and things are at our mercy.  In this world,
and only in this world, are we given to know freedom and omnipotence.

How do things go in this secret and magical realm of ours, where we
have power to work the miracles denied us in daily life?  There we
can love and hate, as we would wish to do, physically, can taste the
fill of love's joys, and all of ambition or of crime.  We can change
our shape, attend the marvellous revels of fairy-land, witness
horrible massacres, contemplate the incredible clash of suns.  In
this our private world neither days nor hours exist to limit us.  We
can live a thousand centuries in a moment, or spin out a moment
across unending years.  This dream-control of matter empowers us
somewhat to understand the terrible play of events across eternity
and the infinite, for it must proceed rather in the same manner: and
since the thousand flying shades of chaos can be reflected in our
subconsciousness, it follows that our fancy and our dreams must be
made of the same stuff as the nameless force which rules the universe.

The forest giant also had its life in a dream--a life which seemed to
last for more than seventy centuries, in the precise surroundings
wherein stood this substantial ghost.  The dream which made it did
not fade wholly with its death, for to my fancy clouds of wood-dust,
with their sad musty taste, seemed yet to float after its fall over
the vacant place where the tree had stood.

My memories of the landscape in which the dream had passed endured
after the ending of the dream.  Birds seemed to fly over the
prostrate giant, and thousands of busy insects flitted about its
hollow trunk.  The sound of the water came yet to me from far off,
while the sunlight was golden where the tree had breathed, and night
drew its dark curtain round the spot.  A mighty rumour filled the
space about--for in the subtle world of dream lively truth is given
by our imagination to shapes and sounds and smells, which become ours
to create, to destroy, or to revive at will.

And from my middle place, hanging between the external world which is
ours and the inner world which belongs to me alone, I ask myself,
hesitating and afraid, if our dreams are not perhaps more than
dreams, if we ourselves are not perhaps creations of some fancy
greater than our own, greater even than our understanding?  In which
case the external universe might be to the all-seeing Eye what the
world of our imagination is to us--another way of saying that one
substance makes substantial the mighty whole, but that the means, the
forces, the expression of it are innumerable.

It is a strange speculation that we may be ourselves products of the
creative thought of some being beyond our thought: yet very
far-reaching is the power of our imagination which can pass from star
to star, can people space, and conjure up new worlds, can shadow out
to itself the incomprehensible.  It is afraid of no height and of no
depth: but one idea escapes it, gives it dizzy pause--speculation
upon the beginning and the end of creation.  Yet in time our spirit
calms itself, grows resigned to the idea that there was no beginning,
and will be no end, only an interminable progression.  Such is the
only sober escape from the unbearable notions of a precise beginning
and a pre-destined final end, ideas which if driven home would wreck
our peace.  A beginning--but how could this be?  Whence could it
come? and when and how? and an end--but what could come after that?
Would it be the starting-point of a new evolution, of a fresh
departure in time?  Besides, the very ideas are absurd,
self-contradictory.  Nature has no exceptions, no isolated events.

In such a haze of strange ideas and confused visions my dream draws
to its close.  However, we do not make them of hazardous and fugitive
web.  Into them are woven real figments of our life and immanent
seconds from the stock of unchanging time.  Their elements will float
forth across the universe after the dissolution of the adventures
whose apparent, if mental, form they have for the moment composed.
These scattered moments of my faded dream will distribute an
impression of the life of the great pine-tree, which was born and
lived and died in its place, till the sense of it pierces to a tiny
immeasurable point, one of those secret places which we call our
cells ... and then it seems to me that there rises a thin mist of
russet wood-powder, amid a heartrending savour of old age....





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Forest Giant" ***

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