Chapter V: Part 5

To the best of my recollection my own investigations were chiefly carried on standing stork fashion upon a tussock, surrounded by an inky opacity, which threatened to draw the investigator downwards with a clutch, more tenacious and formidable than that of any sundew. To the faithful Irish botanist the poverty of the Flora of Ireland as compared with that of Great Britain has always been a serious humiliation. In this respect these Droseraceæ form an exception. Of the few British species all, I think, are to be found upon the bogs of the West of Ireland, the largest of them--appropriately called anglica--being much commoner in Ireland than elsewhere in these islands.

A very slight acquaintance with their habits could hardly fail, I think, to convince even the most sceptical that their roots are mainly employed as anchors, and water-pipes, while for a supply of that nitrogen which every plant requires they are chiefly, if not exclusively, dependent upon insects. Of these the two lesser species would appear to content themselves with the smallest of Diptera and Lepidoptera, whereas anglica will occasionally tackle larger prey, and I have myself seen it with a good-sized moth (a noctua) attached to and nearly covering the entire disk, the long tentacle-like hairs being closely inflected over the victim, whose struggles are soon put an end to, once the sticky secretion exuding from the hairs closes above the trachea. When the leaf re-opens nearly the whole of the insect (be it fly, moth or beetle) will be found to have disappeared, even the wings being reduced to a few glittering fragments. No animal substance in fact comes amiss; fragments of bone, hide, meat-fibrine, and even, according to one authority, tooth enamel, softening, and in time dissolving under the powerful solvent secreted by the glands. Whether the Droseraceæ have the power of attracting their prey, or must wait until chance sends it within their clutches, seems undecided. In the case of a little Portuguese relative, one Drosophylum lusitanicum (growing, unlike other members of the family, upon _dry_ hills in the neighbourhood of Oporto) such a power appears undoubtedly to exist, the people of the neighbourhood using it as a flycatcher, and hanging it upon their walls for that express purpose.

This meat-eating habit or instinct (whichever we may agree to call it) is shared to a greater or less extent by all the Droseraceæ, such as the Venus’s fly-trap, the Byblis gigantea of Australia, and a small but curious aquatic cousin, known to botanists by the formidable name of Aldrovanda vesiculosa, whose tiny leaves have the power of shutting vice-like over every unfortunate insect which approaches them, and which thus finds itself enclosed in a floating prison. If eminently characteristic of them, this carnivorousness is by no means confined however to the sundews, and their allies. If anything the Pinguiculas, for instance, rather exceed them in voracity. Few plants are at once so beautiful, and so interesting from the problems to which their distribution gives rise, as is the great Irish butterwort--Pinguicula grandiflora. Unknown to England and Scotland; unknown to the whole north of Europe; unknown even to the rest of Ireland; its viscid green rosettes may be seen on most of the lowlands of Kerry, and upon many of the bogs of south Cork. For nine months of the year that is all that there is to see. In June a flower-stalk rises out of the centre of the rosette, crowned with a pendulous bell of the most pellucid, the most ethereal shade of violet. Happily for the susceptibilities of the investigator this is not the flesh-eating portion of the plant, that office being strictly confined to the leaves. Stooping down and examining these leaves we find that, whereas some are flat, others are slightly dog-eared along the edges. If further we unroll a few of the dog-ears we discover the remains, not of one alone, but often of a dozen unfortunate flies and midges, in all stages of assimilation; some already half-digested, others still alive, and struggling to escape from their glutinous prison. If further we place a fragment of bone, of meat, or indeed of any nitrogenous substance, upon the edge of one of the fully expanded leaves, we shall find that little by little the leaf begins curling upwards, until the two edges approach, and then join. Finally the morsel is lost to sight, becoming entirely immersed in its bath of secretion, where it remains until all its nutritive parts are absorbed.

Viscous as the whole surface of the leaf is, it does not seem as if this process of digestion was carried on with the same rapidity in the centre as at the sides, and, as there are in this case no long hairs to act as locomotive organs, it often happens that one may see flies and other small insects lying partially dried up and useless in the centre of the leaf. In one respect this viscidity appears at first sight to be inconvenient, the entire surface of the leaf being often covered with twigs, leaves, particles of boggy fibre, and such-like matters, which the plant has apparently no power of getting rid of. In the end this may prove however to be an advantage rather than otherwise, since it has been ascertained that the Pinguiculas feed, not alone on animal, but also on vegetable substances; the extreme stickiness of the leaves causes them moreover to act as a chevaux-de-frise, thus hindering small but industrious ants from making their way up the flower-stalks to the corolla.

Yet another little group of bog-plants, namely, the Utricularias, or bladderworts, are meat eaters. In their case the fly-catching apparatus is situated, not in the leaves, but in certain small attached air-bladders, which are constructed almost exactly upon the principle of an eel-trap, and which, if opened, may generally be found to contain flies. Thus we see how discovery may be anticipated, and how one of man’s most boasted attributes--that of the Destroyer--may be wrested from him by a miserable little green bog-weed! Before the first Celtic hunter flung spear at wolf or stag; before the Firbolgs, or the Tuatha-da-Daanans--cunning workers and craftsmen--had set up any gins or traps in the wilderness; before the first monk or abbot had arranged ingeniously devised weirs, wherein the salmon--seemingly by miracle--rang a bell to announce its own arrival; before any of these things had been done, or thought of, little Utricularia minor and little Utricularia intermedia had set up their own primitive green eel-traps in the yet unvisited wastes of Iar-Connaught.

MAY 5, 1900

Few events are more gratifying than to find oneself taken more seriously by other people than by oneself, and I am pleased therefore to discover that our palpably artificial little pond has been taken possession of by a colony of frogs, which must have travelled some distance to make its acquaintance, frog-haunted ponds or even ditches being by no means abundant on these dry hillsides of ours.

I have never myself met more than one species of frog in these islands. Professor Bell, however, speaks of another, Rana Scotica, which he held to be distinct, but the difference seems to be mainly one of size. It is extremely difficult to persuade anyone who has noticed the multitudes of frogs which swarm in Ireland that they were only introduced there artificially, and as lately as the beginning of last century. Such, nevertheless, is the fact, and the date of the event is, moreover, a tolerably fixed one. It was a Dr. Gunthers, or Guithers, who, in the year 1705, turned out a handful of spawn into a ditch near Trinity College. For some years the frogs appear to have contented themselves with the neighbourhood of that University, but sixteen years later, in 1721, they were found forty miles away, from which point they seem to have rapidly extended themselves over the whole island. Incidentally the fact is confirmed by a great, if hardly a zoological authority, namely, Dean Swift. In his _Considerations about Maintaining the Poor_, which appeared in the year 1726, in the course of thundering against certain fire offices, which had the impertinence to be English, he declares that “their marks upon our houses spread faster and further than a colony of frogs.” The portent, therefore, it is plain, had reached his ears.

Coincidences are attractive things, and it is satisfactory to discover that as regards earlier times we are again able to fortify our mere lay zoology upon the authority of an eminent ecclesiastic. This time it was St. Donatus, bishop of Etruria, who, writing in the ninth century, assured the world, upon his episcopal authority, that no frogs or toads existed, or, moreover, could exist in Ireland. Three centuries later Giraldus Cambrensis tells us, however, that in his time a frog was taken alive near Waterford, and brought into court, Robert de la Poer being then warden. “Whereat,” he says, “Duvenold, King of Ossory, a man of sense amongst his people, beat upon his head, and spake thus: ‘That reptile is the bearer of doleful news to Ireland.’” Giraldus is careful, however, to assure us that “no man will venture to suppose that this reptile was ever born in Ireland, for the mud there does not, as in other countries, contain the germs from which frogs are bred”; indeed, in another part of the _Topographia Hibernica_ we learn that frogs, toads, and snakes, if accidentally brought to Ireland, on being cast ashore, immediately “turning on their backs, do burst and die.” This statement is corroborated by a still more illustrious authority, that of the Venerable Bede, whom Giraldus quotes as follows: “No reptile is found there” (in Ireland), “neither can any serpent live in it, for, though oft carried there out of Britain, so soon as the ship draws near the land, and _the scent of the air from off the shore reaches them_, immediately they die.” So efficacious was the very dust of Ireland that on “gardens or other places in foreign lands being sprinkled with it, immediately all venomous reptiles are driven away.” So, too, with fragments of the skins and bones of animals born and bred in Ireland; indeed, parings from Irish manuscripts, and scraps of the leather with which Irish books were bound, were amongst the accredited cures for snakebite until well on in the Middle Ages. Of his own personal experience Giraldus relates to us how, upon a certain occasion, a thong of Irish leather was, in his presence, drawn round a toad, and that, “coming to the thong, the animal fell backward as if stunned. It then tried the opposite side of the circle, but, meeting the thong all round, it shrank from it as if it were pestiferous. At last, digging a hole with its feet in the centre of the circle, it disappeared in the presence of much people.”

Our frogs and toads are not likely at present to become an affliction to us. Should they ever do so I must certainly send for some Irish leather, or, failing that, for a pinch of Irish dust, and try its effect upon them. An influence that has been vouched for by such a variety of authorities ought to retain something of its ancient potency. Scientific experiments in any case are always interesting!

MAY 8, 1900

Returning to our pond this morning to see whether the water-lilies propose flowering this season, I find that the frogs have been depositing spawn along its edges, so that the thongs of Irish leather may become necessary sooner than I expected!

All the same I am delighted to see the frog-spawn, for I have an affection for tadpoles. Youthful associations cluster pretty thickly around them, but apart from such a merely sentimental attachment, there is a satisfaction, I may say a zoologic thrill, about this transition of a water-living and water-breathing animal into an air-breathing one; a transition going on, moreover, not at some remote, and more or less dubious geologic age, but under one’s very eyes, even, as in this case, in the middle of one’s own decorous, shaven lawn.

It is difficult to remember that frogs breathe air as much as we do ourselves. Unlike ourselves, and their other zoologic betters, they do so, however, not by alternate contractions and dilations of the chest, Nature not having provided them with ribs, but by the doubtless more archaic process of swallowing air. Not only would a frog die if kept too long under water, but--seeing that it can only swallow air by shutting its mouth--were that mouth kept forcibly open it would equally die, and from the same cause, namely, want of breath. Tadpoles, on the other hand, are strictly water-breathers, and until they have shed their gills, have no more need to go to the surface to breathe than a fish has. That, by the way is not an absolutely accurate illustration, seeing that certain fishes _do_ need to go to the surface for air. The famous Anabas, or “climbing perch” of India, is such an air-breathing fish, the air reaching it by means of cavities on either side of its gills, and if prevented from reaching the surface, and renewing the supply, it would “drown like a dog,” or so the scientists assert. Such cases, however, can hardly be called normal. Fishes that can live comfortably for days out of the water, that can nest in a bush, and travel across a particularly dry country, are not likely to be met with in zoologic rambles about this parish.

Returning to our Irish frogs, it is an odd fact, especially considering their recent introduction, that in addition to swarming over the lowlands, and in every place dear to frogs, they have learnt to climb long distances up hill, and to establish themselves in ponds separated widely from any others, often not even fed by streams, and moreover destitute of nearly all other animal inhabitants, with the exception of certain minute molluscs, which are believed by zoologists to have reached them upon the feet of wading birds, and that at such a remote period of time that they have become what are practically new species.

Many years ago, on reaching the top of Mweelrea, the leading mountain of Connemara, I remember my surprise at finding swarms of young tadpoles wriggling along the margin of a small pond, nearly upon the actual summit. They were still in the engaging comma-like stage, before legs had begun to dawn upon their consciousness, and seemed to have remarkably little to eat, for the water was crystal clear. The pond was one of that attractive kind known as _corries_, held by the geologists, doubtless truly, to be of glacial origin; a delicious clean-cut oval; pure rock, from marge to marge; gouged, as if by the chisel of Michael Angelo, from the matrix in which it lay. But for the unmistakable evidence of the tadpoles it would, to any reasonable imagination, have suggested the bath of some mountain nymph very much sooner than frog-spawn.

We are all of us to-day evolutionists, if some of us still with a certain amount of reservation, and to the evolutionist tadpoles must always prove interesting acquaintances. They provide us with at least an inkling as to the fashion in which your unadulterated water-breather may have been converted into an air-breather, and by means of no process more recondite than that of losing its gills. That such conversions do take place, and under certain circumstances remain permanent, has been proved in the well-known case of the axolotl, or Mexican gilled salamander. As long ago as the year 1867, while conducting some experiments at the Jardin des Plantes, M. Duméril startled the zoologic world of Paris by communicating the fact that, out of a number of axolotls kept in the collection there, about thirty had left the water, and had assumed the form of what had hitherto been regarded as an absolutely distinct genus of land salamander, known as amplystoma. This discovery made at the time a prodigious stir, not so much on account of a water-breathing creature losing its gills, and becoming an air-breather, for that was a phenomenon which might be seen every spring, and in most of the ditches round Paris, but because the axolotl was known to breed, and that it therefore appeared to indicate the exceedingly anomalous case of a larval form proving to be fertile.

How the feat of transformation was to be actually witnessed was the next problem, and it is pleasant to remember that it was through the energy and perseverance of a woman naturalist, Fraulein Marie von Chauvin, that the matter was finally cleared up. By continually damping the specimens of axolotl kept by her on land, and assiduously feeding them, she was able to preserve two out of five through the gradual process of decreasing their gill-tufts, and tail-fins, changing their skins, and so forth. Finally to her own and everyone’s triumph, the complete amplystoma form was assumed, and the transformation was thereby accomplished. The world has seen a fair number of miracles since it began to run its course, and perhaps not the least difficult of those miracles to receive with absolute credulity have been some of its natural ones!

MAFEKING-DAY, 1900

It is the nineteenth of May. S. S. has returned, and the east wind which has long been vexing our souls has departed for the moment, and a soft caressing zephyr blows seductively. The garden, comforted by recent showers, is smiling one broad smile from the red steps at the top of it to the new pergola at the bottom. And now this morning comes the news of the Relief of Mafeking. Joy for the victors; joy for the nation; joy for everything and everybody. Flags flutter from all the posts; the dogs strut about in new tricolor rosettes; “the air breaks into a mist with bells.” All this is well, very well. Only; only. A few lines coming by the same post, a single short note, and for one person that May sunshine is blotted out as effectually as though the very orb itself had perished. The garden with all its flowers; the copse surrounding it, new clad in gala attire; the whole cheerful little picture has become darkened; its atmosphere changed; its pleasant anticipations turned into a simple mockery. Even to-day’s news sounds thin and unreal, and the tale of Mafeking is as it were the tale of some defence read of long since in an ancient, a seldom-opened history, the actors and heroes of which have long vanished and been forgotten. We are but poor, bedimmed mirrors all of us, and what we reflect is rarely the real thing, more often only some blurred and distorted image projected by our own sad selves.

MAY 26, 1900

That Nature is cruel is not to be denied; the evidences of that cruelty are written out large and red in every woodland, under every hedgerow. That she can be also unaccountably pitiful, or at all events take pains to appear so, is fortunately equally true, and it is a truth that at times comes very near to the heart. This morning at a very early hour there was a tenderness, a kind of hovering serenity over everything, that appealed to one like a benediction. The air itself seemed changed; sanctified. The familiar little paths one walked along were like the approaches to some as yet invisible Temple.

There are certain pictures of Jean Francois Millet’s in which this quality of sanctity is the first thing that strikes one, the more so that the obviously religious element is conspicuously absent from them. His “Angelus” has always seemed to me a poorer composition in this respect than some others. When one sees a man standing with his hat off in the middle of a field, in the company of a woman, who clasps her hands, and looks down, one knows what one is expected to feel. When on the other hand one sees only a childish-looking farm-drudge knitting, a number of greedy sheep feeding, and a rough dog watching them, where, one asks oneself in perplexity, does the religious element come in? That it is to be found in the “Bergère” is however, unmistakable, and equally unmistakably was it to be found in the copse this morning, though how it got there, or who implanted it, I were rash were I to attempt to explain.

Assuredly man is by nature a devotional creature, however little of the dogmatic may mingle with his devotions. He may avert his ear from the church-going bell, he may refuse to label himself with the label of any particular denomination, but it is only to be overtaken with awe in the heart of a forest, and to fall on his knees, as it were, in some green secluded spot of the wilderness. The sense of something benignant close at hand, of some pitying eye surveying one, is so vivid at certain moments of one’s life that it actually needs a rough conscious effort if one would shake it off. Even the sense of the vastness of that arena upon which our poor little drama is being played out, even this habitual impression becomes less grimly crushing at such moments than usual. What if it is colossal, one says to oneself, and what if, as compared to it, ourselves and our troubles are infinitesimal? what if they count no more in the scheme of things than do the afflictions of a broken-legged mouse, or of a crushed beetle? Very well; be it so. The mouse and the beetle have, after all, each their allotted place in that scheme. Nay for aught we know to the contrary, each may have its own incalculable hour; each may be susceptible of the same profound, if intangible, consolation.

JUNE 2, 1900

The revolving year has brought us back at last to June. Here is June, and here are all the June flowers. If June were only always really June, and if our hearts could always keep time to its weather, then were earth paradise, and any remoter one might be relegated to the remotest of Greek kalends. June however is by no means invariably June, while as for our hearts they are like our eyes, which have a fashion of blinking sometimes at the light, as those of owls are reported to do, preferring their own shadowy places, and the night, which at least brings kindly dreams. Yet are kindly dreams, it may be asked, really the kindliest, seeing that we wake from them, and know that they are false? Are not ugly dreams, are not even terrible ones, better, seeing that we wake from them, and say to ourselves that matters, after all, are not quite so bad as _that_? It is a question, and, like many questions, a good deal easier asked than answered.

“If there were dreams to sell,
Pleasant, and sad as well,
And the crier rang his bell,
Which would you buy?”

It is not the time, however, now for dreams, or for dream thoughts. It is nine o’clock in the morning, and everybody ought therefore to be wide awake and smiling. The garden at all events is performing its duty in both these respects, and seems, moreover, to be making encouraging little signals, like some humble but rather impatient suitor, who wishes to observe that he has really been waiting a long time, and deserves a little attention. Perhaps it does. Perhaps, seeing that it is there, and that we are here, it ought not to fare worse at our hands than our own dull bodies, which have to be clothed and fed, put to bed, and taken up again, whatever the less material portion may be feeling at the time. Here on my table I see is a list of some of our latest seedlings. They are not alpines this time, only common border plants, with a sprinkling of candidates for naturalisation, of which this copse can absorb almost any amount, so long as they are of the right sort. It is not a long list, and will not therefore take very long to transcribe.

Here it is:-

Adonis vernalis.
” pyrenaica.
Alströmeria aurantiaca.
Anchusa italica.
Anthemis tinctoria.
Aponogeton (self-sown).
Armeria cephalotes.
” ”” alba.
Aster amellus.
” ericoides.
Campanula pyramidalis.
Catananche cærulea.
Commelina cælestis.
Chionodoxa sardensis.
Cimicifuga fœtida.
Chelone (Penstemon) barbata.
Clematis graveolens.
Cobæa scandens.
Convolvulus sylvatica.
Coreopsis lanceolata.
” tenuifolia.
Cistus laurifolius.
” formosus.
Cyclamen Coum.
” europæum.
” hederæfolium.
Cytisus scoparius.
” ” albus.
” Andreanus.
Cytisus præcox.
Delphinium (various).
Dictamnus fraxinella.
Dipsacus laciniatus.
Doronicum austriacum.
” plantaginum
” excelsum.
Eccremocarpus scaber.
Echinops Ritro.
” ruthenicus.
Erigeron speciosus.
Eryngium amethystinum.
” Olivierianum.
Onopordon arabicum.
” illyricum.
Ferula tingitana.
Francoa appendiculata.
Gaillardia grandiflora.
Gypsophila paniculata.
Heuchera sanguinea.
Hypericum calycinum.
” olympicum.
Iberis corifolia.
” sempervirens.
Lathyrus latifolius grandiflorus.
Lilium tigrinum (from bulblets in axils).
Lupinus arboreus.
” polyphyllus.
Lupinus polyphyllus alba.
Lythrum salicaria superbum.
Libertia formosa.
Lobelia cardinalis.
Muscari armeniacum, } slow.
” conicum, }
Meconopsis cambrica
” nepalensis
Meconopsis Wallichi.
Mimulus cardinalis.
Myosotis dissitiflora.
” sylvatica.
” palustris semperflorens.

My list appears to be a longer one than I thought. I have as yet only reached the N’s, yet my energies have quite come to an end for the present. I will put off the remainder of it therefore for a day or two.

JUNE 8, 1900

I had intended going doggedly on this morning with the list of our seed-sowings, but another impulse has come, and the sowings must stand over for the moment. Something in the look of to-day’s sky and earth--a brand new earth after last night’s rain--has brought a new, and a most unlooked-for wave of exhilaration to my mental shores, and the visitation is just now too rare and comforting not to be met half way with the keenest of hospitality.

“Life is a flux of moods,” and to the fluctuations of those moods there is assuredly no limit. If we are eternally surprised by our own limitations, our own torpidity and dullness, there are also--and for this heaven be thanked--some possibilities of surprise upon the other side, and that for the oldest, the saddest, the least alert amongst us. A hundred hours of intolerable dullness and stagnation pass over our heads. Then comes the hundred and first, and lo! the dull brain wakes, and the deaf ear hears. A new perception of the unperceived relationship of things; a new perception of the invisible splendours lying unnoticed around us, becomes for the moment almost startlingly visible. Such hours are the only really countable ones, the chief solace of existence, the one clear reason, one is tempted to say, of our poor encumbered, stunted little lives. For their sakes, if for no other reason, it were well worth the trouble of being born, and of all the aches and ills that belong to that very singular estate; worth our meeting gallantly, if possible merrily, the thousand petty pinpricks, the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, the occasional alienation of those one loves best, nay--if it must be so--even the fell assaults of Giant Despair and all his abominable brood.

For the suggestiveness of what lies about us is no mere fancy, but is absolutely real; real as the light upon yonder tree-tops; real as the sorrow in our hearts; real as the love that makes all things endurable; real as the death which puts an end to pain. At this very moment, now passing over my head, there is lying about me--close to my eyes, could I but discern it--the materials alike of the loftiest poetry, and of the most riddle-solving science. Disregarded and unheeded there they lie, ready alike for the greatest singer in his happiest mood, for the most era-making of discoverers, nay, for aught I can tell to the contrary, for the seer, the saint, and the prophet in their hours of highest, and most God-inspired contemplation.

For the raw materials of inspiration are eternally at hand, only invisibly. They are as present here this morning as they ever were; present in the earth and its green things; in the common face of day; in the comings and goings of the clouds, and of men; in the changes of the sky, and of our own poor lives. The light that is gilding yonder cumulus is as capable of inspiring great thoughts here to-day in a Surrey copse, as ever it was in Delphi, or in Argos, or in Jerusalem. It may awaken just as resounding emotions, it may inspire just as great deeds to the hearts of yonder passers-by in a dogcart, as it did to the Assailants of Troy, or to the Seekers of the Golden Fleece. The constituents of all greatness, of all poetry, heroism, and sanctity are for ever amongst us. It is only the right recipients of them that are alas! so scanty.

And yet, even though we are not quite the right recipients, it is well for us that such gleams come. Who shall say that an existence which is capable of being even thus temporarily lifted above itself is not for that very reason a goodly and a desirable one? What proportion of discomfort, what proportion even of sheer pain, of numbing weakness, of crushing sorrow were not worth enduring so long as one knew--knew as a matter of absolute certainty--that they would be now and again pierced by gleams of such celestial potency? The hard thing, and the thing that for all mortals will always be hardest to bear patiently, is--not the uncertainty even--so much as the desperate transitoriness of such visitations. Almost before we have time to see and to confer with them, our enchanting visitors have spread out their gauzy wings, and have vanished beyond recall. They are gone, but where they are gone to, or when they will next revisit us we have not the faintest notion. Ariel and Titania have disappeared into the abyss, but Caliban and Bottom on the contrary remain permanently behind, and are continually at our elbows. At this very moment, and while I am still thinking about it, the light is shifting rapidly. The day has grown older; more crowded. A thousand bloated nothings have sprung up like so many fungi in the path. Shadows, slight, but impenetrable, have gathered over the foreground. My own mood too has shifted, and what a while ago seemed so clear has grown fainter and fainter, and seems to be upon the point of disappearing altogether. The good little hour has passed!

JULY 7, 1900

Once more the great outside tide of life has beaten down the little barricades that one erects against it, and has come thundering in over them in an avalanche, tossing them to right and left, as though they were so many straws in its path! This week that has just ended has been for millions--for all Europe, for the whole world in fact--stamped with the impress of what one would fain still hope to be an incredible horror. Personally this Pekin nightmare has centred itself for me in the fact that E. B. was reported to be still there. Recently she was known to have been there, and whether she had, or had not left seemed at first impossible to ascertain. At last, though not until after days of suspense, of uncertainty, of growing hopelessness, came the telegram--“Safe at Hong Kong,” and the relief is greater than it is easy, without exaggeration, to put into words.

So great has been that relief that for me it has perceptibly altered the whole situation, as I suppose it was inevitable that it should do. Nevertheless, the tragedy as a tragedy remains, and if anything seems to be deepening daily. The newspapers certainly do nothing to minimise it; perhaps they would say that it was hardly their province to do so! Such headings, however, as “The Chinese Cawnpore!” “Last shots reserved for the women!” “White children carried on spears!” seem to be rather more than it is their absolute duty to offer to their readers! As regards hope, no one appears to have any left, so that it seems mere optimism to cherish any. A ray reached us two days ago from our neighbour S. B., who had heard of a reassuring telegram from someone in Sir R. Hart’s employment in Pekin. No such gleam, however, seems to have travelled down to the murky depths of our newspapers, so that one can only fear that there must be some mistake.

It is with a sort of angry helplessness, mixed with an instinctive feeling of self-defence, that one turns from such accumulated, such carefully elaborated horrors, and tries to forget them in whatever little pursuit happens to lie nearest to one’s hand. It is not particularly creditable to one’s humanity that one should succeed in doing so, and there is no denying that one’s attitude is essentially that of a kitten, or other small Unreasonable, which runs after its ball, though disaster may be hovering, or conflagration about to involve, it and everyone else. Happily, we are made so, just as surely as the kitten is so made. We catch at straws, and in nine cases out of ten the straw saves us. Were it not for this same blessed prerogative of being interested in trifles, what, one sometimes asks oneself, would become of all our poor wits? or where on a journey so full of loss and sorrow, shock and trouble, would they have got to before the final goal is reached?

JULY 14, 1900

With a mind full of China, and its abominations, I happened this afternoon to take up _The Opium Eater_, and opened full upon the passages describing the results of the Malay’s visit. What imagery to be sure! What an amazing rhetorician! Certainly if all life were the feverish dream, the half nightmare, one is tempted sometimes to call it, no greater exponent of its terrors has ever existed than Thomas de Quincey. Take this as a prelude.

“The Malay has been a frightful enemy for months. I have been every night, through his means, transported into Asiatic scenes. I know not whether others share my feelings on this point, but I have often thought that if I were compelled to forego England, and to live in China, and among Chinese manners, and modes of life and scenery I should go mad. The causes of my horror lie deep, and some of them must be common to others. Southern Asia in general is the seat of awful images and associations. As the cradle of the human race it would alone have a dim and reverential feeling connected with it. But there are other reasons.... The mere antiquity of Asiatic things, of their institutions, histories, modes of faith, etc., is so impressive, that to me the vast age of the race and name overpowers the sense of youth in the individual. A young Chinese seems to me an antediluvian man renewed.... It contributes much to these feelings that Southern Asia is and has been for thousands of years, the part of the earth most swarming with human life. The great _officina gentium_. Man is a weed in these regions. The vast empires into which the enormous population of Asia has always been cast, give a further sublimity to the feelings associated with all Oriental names and images. In China, over and above what it has in common with the rest of Southern Asia, I am terrified by the modes of life, by the manners, and the barrier of utter abhorrence and want of sympathy, placed between us by feelings deeper than I can analyse. I could sooner live with lunatics, or brute animals.”

Now for the dream proper.

“Under the connecting feeling of tropical heat and vertical sunlights, I brought together all creatures, birds, beasts, reptiles, all trees and plants, usages and appearances, that are found in all tropical regions, and assembled them together in China, or Indostan. From kindred feelings I soon brought Egypt and all her gods under the same law. I was stared at, grinned at, hooted at, chattered at, by monkeys, by paraquets, by cockatoos. I ran into pagodas; and was fixed for centuries at the summit, or in secret rooms; I was the idol; I was the priest; I was worshipped; I was sacrificed; I fled from the wrath of Brahma through all the forests of Asia: Vishnu hated me; Seeva laid wait for me. I came suddenly upon Isis and Osiris; I had done a deed, they said, which the ibis and the crocodile trembled at. I was buried for a thousand years in stone coffins, with mummies and sphinxes, in narrow chambers, at the heart of eternal pyramids. I was kissed with cancerous kisses by crocodiles, and laid, confounded with all unutterable slimy things, amongst reeds and Nilotic mud.”

JULY 28, 1900

The last ten or twelve days have been different from any that I ever remember before. Circumstances have made them so, yet it has seemed as though there were something about themselves that has, as it were, affected those circumstances. For one thing it has been extraordinarily hot, so that we have been thankful for every breath of air that has travelled to us across the downs. The new little water-lily pond has been most kindly, and has contrived to produce an amazing illusion of coolness, while the oaks in whose shadow it lies have provided us with the reality of shade. We two have sat day after day for hours beside it, and the minutes have slipped along, like bubbles upon some very slow stream. There is a strange sense of unreality over everything; a sense that everything is very near its end. The hours of a summer’s day, and the years of a man’s life seem to be much the same thing, and the one hardly longer than the other. The chimes from the clock across the valley are almost the only sounds that break in upon our stillness, for the birds sing very little just now. It has been a most strange fortnight; curiously unreal; extraordinarily dreamy and spectral-like. One by one its days have slipped by, very, very slowly, yet now that they are almost gone I say to myself--“How terribly swiftly!”

AUGUST 1, 1900

There are times--surely we all know them--when the injustices of life, of the individual destiny, seem more than can be silently endured. “Why should this? and this? and this be?” we ask. “To what end such superfluous happiness heaped upon one head, such equally uncalled-for refusals of it consigned to another? What does it mean? or who is the better for such unendurable partiality?”

The question is the oldest of all questions, yet it is the question of to-day, as it will be the question of to-morrow, and of many more to-morrows. Job asked it about himself, as some of us ask it about those whom we know to be infinitely better than ourselves. Moreover it is not alone the apparent injustice of a life as a whole, but of the several parts of it, that we murmur at. There are acts of courage, of silent endurance, of unrecognised heroism, which only need to be performed in some more conspicuous fashion, or upon a larger field, to awaken the whole world to admiration. Yet they pass away unnoticed; oblivion enshrouds them, and they are never so much as heard of.

When such suppressions, such seeming injustices, occur at the beginning of things, while the sun is still high, and Time seems a friendly factor, one is able to reassure oneself. One says--“Wait a little longer!” “The time will come!” When such illusion, however, is no longer possible; when the sands have run out, or been scattered in mid-career; what is one to say _then_? What faith, what philosophy, what stoicism, or what mixture of all three, will enable one to accept it without complaint?

AUGUST 4, 1900

Of the vicissitudes of this year there seem to be no end! After we have mourned over these victims of Pekin as men mourn over those for whom there is absolutely no hope; after we have enumerated their names, like the names upon a death-roll, and all but held a national funeral service in their memory; and after we have followed their last moments; gloried in its heroism; wept over its tragedy; starved, sighed, bled, almost died with them; lo, it appeareth now that none of them are dead at all! Was ever an entire continent in the history of the world so mercilessly defrauded before of its tears?

I have no notion how they may feel about it themselves, but my impression is that were I the responsible head of a daily newspaper I should prefer to immure myself from society for the next few days! There is a pile of such papers at this moment in my sanctum, which I have just been turning over, and reading a few of the headlines with some little inward entertainment. Not that I pretend for a moment to have been one whit wiser, or less lugubrious myself! Far from it. We have all been a flight of ravens and screech-owls together, only that some of us have screeched and flapped our wings a little more energetically, and in rather a more public fashion than the rest!

AUGUST 6, 1900.

Few of the minor experiences of life are, I think, more consoling than to come across some small link in the chain of natural law, over the right connections of which one has long groped blindly. Such a little bit of good luck befell me only yesterday. In itself it was what one calls the veriest trifle; simply a question as to the relationship of certain obscure organisms, profoundly uninteresting to the world at large. To myself it seemed, for a while at all events, to be of some little consequence. It imparted--for fully ten minutes--an entirely new impression of a vast, a peaceful, and a most orderly progress. It seemed to open up vistas into the perfection, into the breadth, no less than the complexity, of that great scheme of Life, of which we ourselves form a part. It came as a sudden vision, as a conception of possibilities--I hardly know what to call it--the vividness of which it would be difficult without exaggeration to put into words.

For those who, like myself, are the mere irresponsible camp-followers of science, the importance of any given solution seems often to be less in what it actually teaches us, than in what it allows us indirectly to guess at. The new fact may or may not be important, but the ideas that it starts in our minds can hardly fail to be so. In the imaginative realm there is literally no limit to the revelations to which the tiniest of natural phenomena may not serve as an introduction. The fact itself may be the minutest of facts; a mere pin-point, a scarce perceptible chink of light, but it is a chink in the walls as it were of a great cathedral of discovery, the doors of which may, for anything one knows to the contrary, be thrown widely open to oneself, and to everyone else to-morrow.

This, if I am not misleading myself, is the real attractiveness of every pursuit which has the elucidation of Nature for its end and aim; one perhaps most felt, or at all events most enjoyed, by the more ignorant of her votaries. Properly directed ignorance is in truth a most desirable haze, and when some stray beam does traverse its obscurity, how great is the illumination which follows! What may not be possible where there is no dead-weight of fact to keep our feet upon the solid earth; no panoply of unescapable knowledge to bid our pleasant fancies nay?

Even for those less comfortably unfettered by circumstances, it must be an alleviation surely of the prose of life that in this region of the ideas no man can ever positively say what may not be in store for him. However tame, however dull his foreground, there is always the chance of something ahead; something that when it comes, will sweep his thoughts away with it to the very verge of the horizon. There is never a day, there is hardly an hour, in which some new idea may not be upon its road. Now a really new idea for the time being remakes life. It is a solvent which dissolves all old impressions, and rebuilds them anew. Men live by ideas, as surely, almost as literally, as they live by bread, and a world into which no new idea ever entered would be a dead world, tenanted only by corpses.

The strange thing is that we should any of us doubt this, or that in those innermost citadels which we call our brains, we should really very greatly care about anything else. Surely for people so oddly circumstanced as ourselves the quest for ideas, ever larger, ever more comprehensive ideas, is the only perfectly rational occupation? Stranded upon the shores of the Unknown; rocked to and fro by all the winds of mystery; ignorant of whence precisely we came, whither precisely we are going; for people in so strange a position as this to be continually on the quest for some new intimation, for some further hint, or indication, seems as natural as for shipwrecked sailors to be for ever on the watch for sails.

I remember--it is years since, yet the impression is as clear as though it were yesterday--one who, during the vigils of a sleepless night, slipped suddenly into a dream. And in that dream it seemed to the dreamer as though he stood upon a narrow-topped hill, encompassed by all the stars, and lifted high in air above the slumbering earth. And, looking upwards, he was aware of a sky, immeasurably vaster and higher, or so he thought, than he had ever observed any sky to be before. And, still gazing into that vast sky, the dreamer perceived that it was filled with what at first he took to be snowflakes. Looking more closely he saw that, if snowflakes, then they were snowflakes lit up by all the colours of the prism. And one of these snowflakes, just then slowly descending, touched the dreamer’s head with a soft, but quite a sensible impact. And as it touched him, lo, a new thought sprang up, alive, full-fledged, wonderful, within his brain; a thought absolutely unsuspected by him before; vast, formative, irresistible, like some new law of Evolution, or of Gravitation. And, with it, light seemed to break in upon him from every side at once, and a great joy, and a sense of elasticity such as he had never known before. And a voice said--“These are the thoughts with which this earth of yours has been built up, and all yonder other earths, of which this is one of the very least.” And another voice said--“They are as the sands of the sea for multitude, and of the secrets hidden in them, and of the wonder, and satisfaction, and delight of those secrets there is no end.”

Then that sleeper awoke, and, though the night was still long and dark, the thought of his dream remained with him, and was like the song of a thrush in his heart until the morning.

AUGUST 10, 1900

Life; Life the indomitable, the multifarious; Life, as it rises in the scale, becoming conscious of itself--the thought of this recurs again and again to one’s mind, and each time with a greater sense of power, and of a sort of consolation. What limit need be assigned, one asks oneself, to its capabilities, to the endless transformations, to the possibilities, as yet unguessed at, which may have been destined for it by its Inventor from the beginning of things? If the mere personal consciousness, the precarious personal life, is rarely without an element of discomfort, in this larger sense that personal life all but disappears, and with the loss of it comes--not perhaps actual joy, that could hardly be looked for--but at least a great exhilaration, an extraordinary sense of width, of serenity, and of detachment.

As the mind descends deeper and deeper into that serene abyss it seems to shake itself free for the time being from all that confused, battling, disturbing sea in which its daily lot is cast. As that downward course continues, all that appertains to the surface becomes more and more dreamlike, as it might to a diver, and the mind widens and strengthens insensibly with each descending fathom. “Life” is indeed a marvellous shibboleth; a spell that unlocks innumerable doors; a word of varied and manifold meanings. Merely to write it down, merely to utter it, seems to clear the atmosphere. Mental fogs of all kinds at that touch roll up their dingy tents, and depart. An impression of morning--fresh, imperishable morning--hovers around it; youth, health, fecundity, vigour belong to it. All the winds of Spring--“driving sweet buds, like flocks to feed in air"--rush after it, and fan it on its course. The sense of the good green earth, and of all those good green things that belong to it, pours in a stream of joy through even the dreariest veins. “And if one little planet is able to show it in this inexhaustible profusion, what of all the other planets?” one thinks. “What of those countless other worlds, all belonging to the same great plan; all built and upheld by the same architectonic hand; all strung, as it were, upon one great string, and vibrating eternally to a single immortal touch?”

AUGUST 18, 1900

Standing, shortly after dusk yesterday evening, upon the edge of the slope which drops suddenly into the valley enclosing our village and its church, my ear was filled with a variety of sounds, all of them familiar, yet none somehow quite recognisable; all with a certain strangeness about them, born no doubt of the mist and of the oncoming obscurity.

Sounds which reach our ears after nightfall never seem to be quite the same sounds as in the daytime, even though they may be produced by exactly the same means. Commonplace in reality, they are never perfectly commonplace in their effect. They awaken curious echoes. They bring back odd, and half-vanished thoughts. They play the same rather uncanny tricks with the brain as they doubtless did in the days of the Patriarchs, or of the Shepherd Kings. The bark of a dog half a mile away will conjure up visions of hunting scenes, swift and phantasmagoric as the pageant of a dream. The sharp “click-clack” of a horse’s hoof; the crunching of a waggon-wheel; most of all, perhaps, the thin, lamentable, bleating of sheep floating up from the valley; all these set vibrating fibres within us which have their roots as far back in the history of the race as anything well can be. Our life of to-day, with all its crowded impedimenta, tends at such moments to sink suddenly, and to disappear. We realise--if only during the duration of a lightning flash--that we are standing, not in the least upon any apex, merely upon some small peak on one of the sides of the great organic mountain. That we are looking at a scene which has witnessed the arrival of our race, as of other races, upon it, and which will assuredly one day witness its departure again. That all that we can discern is but, as it were, a few front streaks upon the surface of an ocean, rolling on without bourne or limit. And at that realisation the mind is apt to start, and to shiver instinctively, as before some yawning gulf, opening unexpectedly below the feet.

Such little mental peaks afford, in truth, but a dizzy standing ground, and are best, perhaps for that reason, not ascended too often. Just as the trade of the astronomer is said to need a sound leaven of stolidity before it can be safely embarked upon, so only a very strong head can with safety peer long into a void, hardly less perturbing and intoxicating than that into which it is his business to pry. Those capricious little particles, upon which all our comfort depends, dislike it, and they are probably right in doing so. It is true that what we call the Past, that which is entirely put away, and done with, might seem to be a harmless enough subject of contemplation. So conceivably it might be, were it not for the fact that in following it one is apt to find oneself brought suddenly face to face with the other, and the far more formidable brother; the one whose kingdom lies, not behind us, but ahead. At those dim barriers all real advance is inexorably stayed; into the recesses beyond them no secular lantern has ever peered; while even our most authoritative, our most convinced guides, can at best assure us as to its geography with hesitating, and often curiously conflicting voices.

To abstain from all attempts at peering into that obscurity is more perhaps than can be asked of mortals. The less of such peerings we indulge in, however, surely the better, because the saner, because, also, the more trustful. Of all the cataracts of words, poured in verbal Niagaras over this momentous topic, have there been many, I wonder, wiser or truer than these of old Hooker? I write them down as they have lodged in my memory; probably therefore quite incorrectly.