Chapter II: The Exile (2)

This Rock has played its part in many a life.
We know it, for we see it every day.
No angelus ever rang, but some one’s eyes
Were lifted to it; and, returning home,
The wanderer strains to see it from the road.
What is it, then? It plays no greater part
Than any grain of dust beneath our feet,
Could we discern it. A dumb block of stone,
A shadow in the mind, a thought of God,
A little fragment of the eternal order,
That postulates the whole.
If we could see
The universal Temple in which it stands
We, too, should bow our heads; for if this Form
Were shaped by Chance, it was the selfsame Chance
That gave us love and death. In this the fool
Descries a reason for denying all
To which our peasants kneel. The years to come
(And you will speed them, Jean) will rather make
This dust the floor of heaven.”
The old man laid
His bunch of herbs and flowers below the Rock,
Smiled, nodded, and went his way.
“Was it by chance,”
Thought Jean Guettard, “that grandad laid them so;
Or by design; or by some vaster art
Transcending, yet including, all our thoughts,
And memories, with those flowers and that dumb stone,
As chords in its world-music? Why should flowers
Laid thus”—he laid his own at the feet of the Rock—
“Transfigure it with such beauty that it stood
Blessing him, from its arch of soft blue sky
Above him, like a Figure in a shrine?”

He touched its glistening grains. “I think that Ray
Was right,” he murmured. “This was surely made
Under the sea; sifted and drifted down
From vanished hills and spread in level beds,
Under deep waters; compressed by the sea’s weight;
Upheaved again by fire; and now, once more,
Wears down by way of the rain and brook and river,
Back to the sea; but all by roads of law.”
Then, looking round him furtively, to make sure
No one was near, he dropped upon his knees.
The mist closed over him. Rock and hill were lost
In greyness once again.

II

MALESHERBES AND THE BLACK MILESTONES

Moments were years,
Till, at the quiet whisper of Shadow-of-a-Leaf,
Those veils withdrew, and showed another scene.
I saw two dusty travellers, blithely walking
With staffs and knapsacks, on a straight white road
Lined with tall sentinel poplars as to await
A king’s return; but scarce a bird took heed
Of those two travel-stained wanderers—Jean Guettard
And Malesherbes, his old school-friend.
Larks might see
Two wingless dots that crept along the road.
The Duke rode by and saw two vagabonds
With keenly searching eyes, as they jogged on
To Moulins. Birds and Duke and horse could see,
Against the sky, that old square prison-tower,
The tall cathedral, the dark gabled roofs,
Thronging together behind its moated wall;
But not one eye in all that wide green land
Saw what those two could see; and not one soul
Espied the pilgrim thought upon its way
To change the world for man.
The pilgrim thought!
Say rather the swift hunter, tracking down
More subtly than an Indian the dark spoor
Of his gigantic prey.
I saw them halt
Where, at the white road’s edge, a milestone rose
Out of the long grass, like a strange black gnome,
A gnome that had been dragged from his dark cave
Under the mountains, and now stood there dumb,
Striving to speak. But what?
“There! There! Again!”
Cried Jean Guettard. They stood and stared at it,
But not to read as other travellers use
How far themselves must journey.
They knelt down
And looked at it, and felt it with their hands.
A farmer passed, and wondered were they mad.
For, when they hailed him, and his tongue prepared
To talk of that short cut across the fields
Beside the mill-stream, they desired to know
Whence the black milestone came. It was the fourth
That they had passed since noon.
He grinned at them.
“Black stones?” he said, “you’ll find them all the way
To Volvic now!”
“To Volvic,” cried Guettard,
“Volcani vicus!”
They seized their staffs again;
Halted at Moulins, only to break a crust
Of bread and cheese, and drink one bottle of wine,
Then hastened on, following the giant trail,
Milestone by milestone, till the scent grew hot;
For now they saw, in the wayside cottages,
The black stone under the jasmine’s clustering stars;
And children, at the half-doors, wondered why
Those two strange travellers pushed the leaves away
And tapped upon their walls.
At last they saw,
Black as a thundercloud anchored to its hill,
Above the golden orchards of Limagne,
The town of Riom. All its walls were black.
Its turreted heights with leering gargoyles crawled
Above them, like that fortress of old Night
To which Childe Roland came.
No slughorn’s note
Challenged it, and they set no lance in rest,
But dusty and lame, with strangely burning eyes,
Those footpads, quietly as the ancient Word,
Stole into that dark lair and sought their prey.
Surely, they thought, the secret must be known
To some that live, eat, sleep, in this grim den.
Have they not guessed what monster lurks behind
This blackness?
In the chattering streets they saw
The throng around the fruit-stalls, and the priest
Entering the Sainte Chapelle. With eyes of stone
The statue of that lover of liberty
The chancellor, L’Hôpital, from his great dark throne
Gazed, and saw less than the indifferent sparrow
That perched upon his hand. Barefooted boys
Ran shouting round the fountain in the square.
It was no dream. Along the cobbled street,
Clattering like ponies in their wooden shoes,
Three girls went by with baskets full of apples.
The princely butcher, standing at his door,
Rosily breathing sawdust and fresh blood,
Sleeked his moustache and rolled an amorous eye.
It was no dream. They lived their light-winged lives
In this prodigious fabric of black stone,
Slept between walls of lava, drank their wine
In taverns whose black walls had risen in fire;
Prayed on the slag of the furnace; roofed their tombs
With slabs of that slaked wrath; and saw no more
Than any flock of birds that nightly roost
On the still quivering Etna.
It was late,
Ere the two travellers found a wise old host
Who knew the quarries where that stone was hewn;
Too far for them that night. His inn could lodge them.
A young roast fowl? Also he had a wine,
The Duc de Berry, once.... Enough! they supped
And talked. Gods, how they talked and questioned him,—
The strangest guests his inn had ever seen.
They wished to know the shape of all the hills
Around those quarries. “There were many,” he said,
“Shaped at the top like this.” He lifted up
An old round-bellied wine-cup.
At the word
He wellnigh lost his guests. They leapt to their feet.
They wished to pay their quittance and press on
To see those hills. But, while they raved, the fowl
Was laid before them, luscious, fragrant, brown.
He pointed, speechless, to the gathering dusk,
And poured their wine, and conquered.
“The Bon Dieu
Who made the sensual part of man be praised,”
He said to his wife; “for if He had made a world
Of pure philosophers, every tavern in France
Might close its shutters, and take down its sign.”

So Jean Guettard and Malesherbes stayed and supped;
And, ere they slept, being restless, they went out
And rambled through the sombre streets again.
They passed that haunted palace of Auvergne,
Brooding on its wild memories and grim birth;
And from the Sainte Chapelle, uplifting all
That monstrous darkness in one lean black spire
To heaven, they heard an organ muttering low
As though the stones once more were stirred to life
By the deep soul within. Then, arched and tall,
In the sheer blackness of that lava, shone
One rich stained window, where the Mother stood,
In gold and blue and crimson, with the Child.
They looked at it as men who see the life
And light of heaven through the Plutonian walls
Of this material universe. They heard
The young-voiced choir, in silver-throated peals,
Filling the night with ecstasy. They stood
Bareheaded in the dark deserted street,
Outcasts from all that innocence within,
And silent; till the last celestial cry,
Like one great flight of angels, ebbed away.

III

THE SHADOW OF PASCAL

At daybreak they pressed on. Strange hills arose
Clustering before them, hills whose fragrant turf,
Softer than velvet, hid what savage hearts!
At noon they saw, beside the road, a gash
Rending the sunlit skin of that green peace;
An old abandoned quarry, half overgrown
With ferns, and masked by boughs.
They left the road
And looked at it. Volcanic rock! A flood
Of frozen lava!
They marked its glossy blackness, the rough cords
And wrinkles where, as the fiery waves congealed,
It had crept on a little; and strangely there
New beauty, like the smile on truth’s hard face,
Gleamed on them. Never did bracken and hart’s tongue ferns
Whisper a tale like those whose dauntless roots
Were creviced in that grim rock. They tracked it up
Through heather and thyme. They saw what human eyes
Had seen for ages, yet had never seen,—
The tall green hill, a great truncated cone,
Robed in wild summer and haunted by the bee,
But shaped like grey engravings that they knew
Of Etna and Vesuvius.
Near its crest
They saw the sunlight on a shepherd’s crook,
Bright as a star. A flock of nibbling sheep
Flowed round it like a cloud, a rambling cloud
With drifting edges that broke and formed again
Before one small black barking speck that flew
Swift as a bird about a cloud in heaven.
Thyme underfoot, wild honey in the thyme;
But, under the thyme and honey, if eyes could see,
In every runnel and crevice and slip and patch,
A powdery rubble of pumice, black and red,
Flakes of cooled lava and stones congealed from fire.
It was no dream. A butterfly spread its fans
White, veined with green, on a rock of sunlit slag,
Slag of the seething furnaces below.
They reached the summit; and, under them, beheld
The hollow cup, the crater, whence that flood
Out of the dreadful molten heart of the earth
Poured in red fury to create Auvergne.
But now, instead of smoke and fire, they saw
Red of the heather in that deep grassy hollow,
And heard, instead of the hissing of the abyss,
The small grey locust, stridulent in the sun.
They came to Clermont. All its dark old streets
Were built of lava. By the _Place de Jaude_,
O, strangely in their own swift race for truth,
They met the phantom of an earlier fire!
They found the house where Pascal first beheld
The sunlight, through a window in lava-stone;
And many a time had passed, a brooding child,
With all his deep celestial thoughts to come,
Through that volcanic porch, but never saw
The wonder of the walls wherein he slept.
They saw, through mists, as I through mists discerned
Their own strange drama, that scene within the scene.
They climbed the very hill that Pascal made
A beacon-height of truth—the Puy de Dôme,
Where Florin Périer, at his bidding, took
His tubes of soft quicksilver; and, at the base,
And, at the summit, tested, proved, and weighed
The pressure of that lovely body of light,
Our globe-engirdling air. On one swift hint,
One flash of truth that Torricelli caught
From Galileo, and Pascal caught in turn,
He weighed that glory.
Ever the drama grew.
The vital fire, in yet more intricate ways
(As life itself, enkindling point by point
In the dark formless embryo, grows to power),
Coursed on, from mind to mind, each working out
Its separate purpose, yet all linked in one.
For those two pilgrims, on the cone-shaped hill
That Pascal knew, and yet had never known,
Met his great spirit among the scoriac flakes,
And found themselves, in vision, on that pure height
Where all the paths to truth shall one day meet.
They met his brooding spirit as they climbed.
They passed the dead man’s words from mouth to mouth,
With new significance, deeper and more strange
Even than they knew. _“We are on fire to explore_
_The universe, and build our tower of truth_
_Into the Infinite. Then the firm earth laughs,_
_Opens, under its cracked walls, an abyss.”—_
_Lavoisier! Malesherbes! Friends of Jean Guettard._
_Was it only the whisper of Shadow-of-a-Leaf that showed me_
_Gleams of the Terror approaching, a wild storm_
_Of fiercer, hell-hot lava, and that far sound_
_Of tumbrils.... The Republic has no need_
_Of savants!_
_This dream went by, with the dead man’s words._
They reached the highest crest. Before their eyes
The hill-scape opened like a mighty vision
That, quietly, has come true.
They stood there, dumb,
To see what they foresaw, the invisible thought
Grown firm as granite; for, as a man might die
In faith, yet wake amazed in his new world,
They saw those chains of dead volcanoes rise,
Cone behind cone, with green truncated crowns,
And smokeless craters, on the dazzling blue.
There, in the very sunlit heart of France,
They saw what human eyes had daily seen
Yet never seen till now. They stood and gazed,
More lonely in that loneliness of thought
Than wingèd men, alighting on the moon.

Old as the moon’s own craters were those hills;
And all their wrath had cooled so long ago
That as the explorers on their downward path
Passed by a cup-shaped crater, smooth and green,
Three hundred feet in depth and breadth, they saw,
Within it, an old shepherd and his flock
Quietly wandering over its gentle slopes
Of short sweet grass, through clumps of saffron broom.
They asked him by what name that hill was known.
He answered, _The Hen’s Nest_!
“Hen’s Nest,” cried Jean Guettard, “the good God grant
This fowl be not a phœnix and renew
Its feathers in Auvergne.”
They chuckled aloud,
And left the shepherd wondering, many a day,
What secret knowledge in the stranger’s eye
Cast that uncanny light upon the hill,
A moment, and no more; and yet enough
To make him feel, even when the north wind blew,
Less at his ease in that green windless cup;
And, once or twice, although he knew not why,
He turned, and drove his flock another way.

IV

AT PARIS

“Few know the name of Jean Guettard to-day,”
Said Shadow-of-a-Leaf; for now the mists concealed
All that clear vision. “I often visited him,
Between the lights, in after years. He lived
Alone at Paris then, in two lean rooms,
A sad old prisoner, at the Palais Royal;
And many a time, beside a dying fire,
We talked together. I was only a shadow,
A creature flickering on the fire-lit wall;
But, while he bowed his head upon his hands
And gazed into the flame with misted eyes,
I could steal nearer and whisper time away.
And sometimes he would breathe his thoughts aloud;
And when at night his faithful servant, Claire,
Stole into the room to lay his frugal meal,
She’d glance at him with big brown troubled eyes
To find him talking to himself alone.

And sometimes when the masters of the hour
Won easy victories in the light world’s fashion,
With fables, easily spun in light quick minds,
He’d leave the Academy thundering its applause,
And there, in his bare room, with none to see
But Shadow-of-a-Leaf, he would unfold again
—Smiling a little grimly to himself—
Those curious beautiful tinted maps he drew,
The very first that any man had made
To show, beneath the kingdoms made by man,
The truth, that hidden structure, ribbed with rock,
And track the vanished ages by the lives
And deaths imprinted there.
They had made him rich
In nothing but the truth.
He had mapped the rocks.
“The time is not yet come,” he used to say,
“When we can clothe them with a radiant Spring
Of happy meanings. I have never made
A theory. That’s for happier men to come;
It will be time to answer the great riddle
When we have read the question.
Here and there
Already, I note, they use this work of mine
And shuffle the old forerunner out of sight.
No matter. Let the truth live. I shall watch
Its progress, proudly, from the outer dark;
More happily, I believe, thus free from self,
Than if my soul went whoring after fame.
One thing alone I’ll claim. It is not good
To let all lies go dancing by on flowers.
This—what’s his name?—who claims to be the first
To find a dead volcano in Auvergne,
And sees, in that, only an easy road
To glory for himself, shall find, ere long,
One live volcano in old Jean Guettard.
The fool has forced me to it; for he thinks
That I’ll claim nothing. I prefer my peace;
But truth compels me here. I’ll set my heel
On him, at least. Malesherbes will bear me out.
As for the rest—no theory of the earth
Can live without these rock-ribbed facts of mine,
The facts that I first mapped, I claim no more.
These rocks, these bones, these fossil ferns and shells,
Of which the grinning moon-calf makes a jest,
A byword for all dotage and decay,
Shall yet be touched with beauty, and reveal
The secrets of the book of earth to man.”

“He made no theory,” whispered Shadow-of-a-Leaf,
“And yet, I think, he looked on all these things
Devoutly; on a sea-shell turned to stone
As on a sacred relic, at whose touch
Time opened like a gate, and let him pass
Out of this mocking and ephemeral world
Through the eternal ages, home to God.
And so I watched him, growing old and grey,
In seeking truth; a man with enemies,
Ten enemies for every truth he told;
And friends that still, despite his caustic tongue,
Loved him for his true heart.
Yet even these
Never quite reached it; never quite discerned
That even his gruffest words were but the pledge
Of his own passionate truth; the harsh pained cry
For truth, for truth, of one who saw the throng
Bewildered and astray, the ways of love
Grown tortuous, and the path to heaven grown dim
Through man’s unheed for truth.
I saw him greet
Condorcet, at the Academy. “We have lost
Two members. I condole with you, my friend.
It is their last _éloges_ you’ll speak to-day!
How will you bury their false theories?
In irony, or in academic robes?
No matter. There’ll be only one or two
Who really know; and I shall not be there
To vex you, from my corner, with one smile.
Lord, what a pack of lies you’ll have to tell!
It is the custom. When my turn arrives—
’Twill not be long,—remember, please, I want
Truth, the whole truth, or nothing.”
I saw one night
A member walking home with him—to thank him
For his support that morning. Jean Guettard
Turned on his threshold, growling like a bear.
“You owe me nothing. I believed my vote
Was right, or else you never should have had it.
Pray do not think I liked you.”
A grim door
Opened and closed like iron in the face
Of his late friend and now indignant foe;
To whom no less, if he had needed it,
Guettard would still have given his own last sou.
He came into his lonely room that night,
And sat and stared into the fluttering fire.
I, Shadow-of-a-Leaf, was there; and I could see
More in his eyes than even Condorcet saw,
Condorcet, who of all his friends remained
Most faithful to the end.
But, at the hour
When Claire would lay his supper, a light hand tapped
Timidly on his door. He sat upright
And turned with startled eyes.
“Enter,” he called.
A wide-eyed, pale-faced child came creeping in.
“What! Little Claire!” he cried.
“Your mother is not better!”
She stood before him,
The fire-light faintly colouring her thin face,—
“M’sieur, she is very ill. You are a doctor.
Come, quickly.”
Through the narrow, ill-lighted streets
Old Jean Guettard went hobbling, a small hand
Clutching his own, and two small wooden shoes
Clattering beside him, till the child began
To droop. He lifted her gently in his arms
And hobbled on. The thin, white, tear-stained face,
Pressing against his old grey-bristled cheek,
Directed him, now to left and now to right.
“O, quick, M’sieur!” Then, into an alley, dark
As pitch, they plunged. The third door on the right!
Into the small sad house they went, and saw
By the faint guttering candle-light—the mother,
Shivering and burning on her tattered bed.
Two smaller children knelt on either side
Worn out with fear and weeping.
All that night
Guettard, of all true kings of science then,
Obscure, yet first in France and all the world,
Watched, laboured, bathed the brow and raised the head,
Moistened the thirsting lips, and knew it vain;
Knew, as I knew, that in a hundred years
Knowledge might conquer this; but he must fight
A losing battle, and fight it in the dark
No better armed than Galen.
He closed her eyes
At dawn. He took the children to his house;
Prayed with them; dried their tears; and, while they slept,
Shed tears himself, remembering—a green hill,
A Rock against the sky.

He cared for them, as though they were his own.
Guettard, the founder of two worlds of thought,
Taught them their letters. “None can tell,” he said,
“What harvests are enfolded for the world
In one small grain of this immortal wheat.
But I, who owe so much to little things
In childhood; and have seen, among the rocks,
What vast results may wait upon the path
Of one blind life, under a vanished sea,
Bow down in awe before this human life.”

V

THE RETURN

Ever, as he grew older, life became
More sacred to him.
“In a thousand years
Man will look back with horror on this world
Where men could babble about the Lamb of God,
Then turn and kill for food one living thing
That looks through two great eyes, so like their own.
I have had living creatures killed for me;
But I will have no more.”
“Though Nature laughed
His mood to scorn,” said Shadow-of-a-Leaf, “the day
Will come (I have seen it come a myriad times)
When, through one mood like this, Nature will climb
Out of its nature, and make all things new.
Who prophesied cities, when the first blind life
Crawled from the sea, to breathe that strange bright air,
And conquer its own past?”—
“I have no theory of this wild strange world,”
Said Jean Guettard,
“But, if the God that made it dies with us
Into immortal life....”
“There, there’s the meaning,” whispered Shadow-of-a-Leaf,
“Could we but grasp it. There’s the harmony
Of life, and death, and all our mortal pain.”
I heard that old man whispering in the dark,
“O, little human life, so lost to sight
Among the eternal ages, I, at least,
Find in this very darkness the one Fact
That bows my soul before you.”
Once again
The mists began to roll away like smoke.
I saw a patch of vines upon the hill
Above Étampes; and through the mists I saw
Old Jean Guettard, with snowy wind-blown hair,
Nearing the shrouded summit. As he climbed,
Slowly the last thin veils dissolved away.
He lifted up his eyes to see the Rock.
The hill was bare. His facts were well confirmed.
Sun, wind, and rain, and the sharp chisels of frost
Had broken it down. The Rock was on its way
In brook and river, with all the drifting hills,
And all his life, to the remembering sea.
He looked around him, furtively. None was near.
Down, on his knees,
Among the weather-worn shards of his lost youth,
Dropt Jean Guettard.
The mist closed over him.
The world dissolved away. The vision died,
Leaving me only a voice within the heart,
Far off, yet near, the whisper of Shadow-of-a-Leaf.

_The rain had beaten. The wind had blown._
_The hill was bare as the sky that day._
_Mother and Child from the height had gone._
_The wind and rain, said Jean Guettard,_
_Had crumbled even the Rock away._

VI—IN SWEDEN

LINNÆUS

It was his garden that began it all,
A magical garden for a changeling child.

“The garden has bewitched him!
Carl! Carl! O, Carl! Now where is that elfkin hiding?”

It was the voice of Christina, wife of the Pastor,
Nils Linnæus, the Man of the Linden-tree.
Youthful and comely, she stood at her door in the twilight,
Calling her truant son.
Her flaxen hair
Kerchiefed with crisp white wings; her rose-coloured apron
And blue-grey gown, like a harebell, yielding a glimpse
Of the shapeliest ankle and snowiest stocking in Sweden;
She stood at her door, a picture breathed upon air.

She called yet again, and tilted her head to listen
As a faint, flushed, wild anemone turning aside
From a breeze out of elf-land, teasing her delicate petals,
The breeze of the warm, white, green-veined wings of her wooer;
And again, a little more troubled at heart, she called,
“Supper-time, Carl!”
But out of the fragrant pinewoods
Darkening round her, only the wood-pigeon cooed.
Down by the lake, from the alders, only the red-cap
Whistled three notes. Then all grew quiet again.
Yet, he was there, she knew, though he did not answer.
The lad was at hand, she knew, though she could not see him.
Her elf-child, nine years old, was about and around her,
A queer little presence, invisible, everywhere, nowhere,
Hiding, intensely still....
She listened; the leaves
All whispered, “Hush!”
It was just as though Carl had whispered,
“Hush! I am watching.
“Hush! I am thinking.
“Hush! I am listening, too.”

She tiptoed through the garden, her fair head
Turning to left and right, with birdlike glances,
Peeping round lichened boulders and clumps of fern.
She passed by the little garden his father gave him,
Elfdom within an elfdom, where he had sown
Not only flowers that rightly grow in gardens,
The delicate aristocracies of bloom,
But hedgerow waifs and ragamuffin strays
That sprawled across his borders everywhere
And troubled even the queendom of the rose
With swarming insurrections.
At last she saw him,
His tousled head a little golden cloud
Among the dark green reeds at the edge of the lake,
Bending over the breathless water to watch—
What?
She tiptoed nearer, until she saw
The spell that bound him. Floating upon the lake,
A yard away, a water-lily closed
Its petals, as an elfin cygnet smooths
Its ruffled plumes, composing them for sleep.

He watched it, rapt, intent.
She watched her son,
Intent and rapt, with a stirring at her heart,
And beautiful shining wonder in her eyes,
Feeling a mystery near her.
Shadow-of-a-Leaf
Whispered. The garden died into the dark.
Mother and child had gone—I knew not whither.
It seemed as though the dark stream of the years
Flowed round me.
Then, as one that walks all night
Lifts up his head in the early light of dawn,
I found myself in a long deserted street
Of little wooden houses, with thatched roofs.
It was Uppsala.
Over the silent town
I heard a skylark quivering, up and up,
As though the very dew from its wild wings
Were shaken to silvery trills of elfin song.
_Tirile, tirile, tirile_, it arose,
Praising the Giver of one more shining day.

Then, with a clatter of doors and a yodelling call
Of young men’s voices, the Svartbäcken woke;
And down the ringing street the students came
In loose blue linen suits, knapsack on back
And sturdy stick in hand, to rouse old Carl
For their long ramble through the blossoming fields.
I saw them clustering round the Master’s door.
I heard their jolly song—_Papa Linnæus_:

Linnæus, Papa Linnæus,
He gave his pipe a rap.
He donned his gown of crimson.
He donned his green fur-cap.
He walked in a meadow at daybreak
To see what he might see;
And the linnet cried, “Linnæus!
O hide! Here comes Linnæus.
Beware of old Linnæus,
The Man of the Linden-tree.”

So beautiful, bright and early
He brushed away the dews,
He found the wicked wild-flowers
All courting there in twos;
And buzzing loud for pardon,
Sir Pandarus, the bee:
“Vincit Amor, Linnæus,
Linnæus, Papa Linnæus!”
O, ho, quoth old Linnæus,
The Man of the Linden-tree.

Quoth he, ’Tis my conviction
These innocents must be wed!
So he murmured a benediction,
And blessed their fragrant bed;
And the butterflies fanned their blushes
And the red-cap whistled in glee,
_They are married by old Linnæus,_
_Linnæus, Papa Linnæus!_
_Vivat, vivat Linnæus,_
_The Man of the Linden-tree_.

_Vivat Linnæus!_ And out the old Master came,
Jauntily as a throstle-cock in Spring,
His big bright eyes aglow; the fine curved beak,
The kindly lips, the broad well-sculptured brow,
All looked as though the wisdom that had shaped them
Desired that they should always wear a smile
To teach the world that kindness makes men happy.
He shook his head at his uproarious troop,
And chose his officers for the day’s campaign:
One, for a marksman, with a fowling-piece,
To bring down bird or beast, if need arose;
One for a bugler, to recall their lines
From echoing valley and hill, when something rare
Lay in the Master’s hand; one to make notes
Of new discoveries; one for discipline; all
For seeking out the truth, in youth and joy.
To-day they made for Jumkil, miles away
Along the singing river, where that prize
The _Sceptrum Carolinum_ used to grow.
And, ever as they went, Linnæus touched
All that they saw with gleams of new delight.
As when the sun first rises over the sea
Myriads of ripples wear a crest of fire;
And over all the hills a myriad flowers
Lift each a cup of dew that burns like wine;
And all these gleams reflect one heavenly light;
He changed the world around him; filled the woods
With rapture; made each footpath wind away
Into new depths of elfin-land. The ferns
Became its whispering fringe; and every stile
A faerie bridge into a lovelier world.
His magic sunlight touched the adventurous plants
That grew on the thatch of wayside cottages,
_Crepis_ and _Bromus_, with the straggling brood
Of flowers he called _tectorum_, dancing there
Above the heads of mortals, like swart gnomes
In rusty red and gold.
“My Svartbäck Latin,”
Linnæus laughed, “may make the pedants writhe;
But I would sooner take three slaps from Priscian
Than one from Mother Nature.”
Ancient books
Had made their pretty pattern of the world.
They had named and labelled all their flowers by rote,
Grouping them in a little man-made scheme
Empty of true significance as the wheel
Of stars that Egypt turned for her dead kings.
His was the very life-stream of the flowers;
And everywhere in Nature he revealed
Their subtle kinships; wedded bloom and bloom;
Traced the proud beauty, flaunting in her garden,
To gipsy grandsires, camping in a ditch;
Linked the forgotten wanderers to their clan;
Grouped many-coloured clans in one great tribe;
And gathered scores of scattered tribes again
Into one radiant nation.
He revealed
Mysterious clues to changes wild as those
That Ovid sang—the dust that rose to a stem,
The stem that changed to a leaf, the crowning leaf
That changed to a fruitful flower; and, under all,
Sustaining, moving, binding all in one,
One Power that like a Master-Dramatist,
Through every act and atom of the world
Advanced the triumph that must crown the
whole. Unseen by man—that drama—here on earth
It must be; but could man survey the whole,
As even now, in flashes, he discerns
Its gleaming moments, vanishing sharp-etched scenes
Loaded with strange significance, he would know,
Like Shadow-of-a-Leaf, that not a cloud can sail
Across a summer sky, but plays its part.
There’s not a shadow drifting on the hills,
Or stain of colour where the sun goes down,
Or least bright flake upon the hawk-moth’s wing
But that great drama needs them.
The wild thrush,
The falling petal, the bubble upon the brook,
Each has its cue, to sing, to fall, to shine,
And exquisitely responds. The drunken bee
Blundering and stumbling through a world of flowers
Has his own tingling entrances, unknown
To man or to himself; and, though he lives
In his own bee-world, following his own law,
He is yet the unweeting shuttle in a loom
That marries rose to rose in other worlds,
And shapes the wonder of Springs he cannot see.
O, little bee-like man, thou shalt not raise
Thy hand, or close thine eyes, or sigh in sleep;
But, over all thy freedom, there abides
The law of this world-drama.
Under the stars,
Between sweet-breathing gardens in the dusk,
I heard the song of the students marching home.
I saw their eyes, mad nightingales of joy,
Shining with youth’s eternal ecstasy.
I saw them tossing vines entwined with flowers
Over girls’ necks, and drawing them all along;
Flags flying, French horns blowing, kettle-drums throbbing,
And Carl Linnæus marching at their head.
Up to the great old barn they marched for supper,—
Four rounds of beef and a cask of ripened ale;
And, afterwards, each with his own flower-fettered girl,
They’d dance the rest of the summer night away.

Greybeards had frowned upon this frolic feast;
But Carl Linnæus told them “Youth’s a flower,
And we’re botanic students.”
Many a time,
In green fur-cap and crimson dressing-gown,
He sat and smoked his pipe and watched them there
On winter nights; and when the fiddles played
His Polish dance, Linné would shuffle it too.
But now, to-night—they had tramped too many miles.
The old man was tired. He left them at the door,
And turned to his own house, as one who leaves
Much that he loved behind him.
As he went
They cheered their chief—“Vivat, vivat, Linnæus!”
And broke into their frolic song again.

I saw him in the shadowy house alone
Entering the room, above whose happy door
The watchword of his youth and his old age
Was written in gold—_Innocue vivito._
_Numen adest._
I saw him writing there
His last great joyous testament, to be read
Only by his own children, as he thought,
After he’d gone; an ecstasy of praise,
As though a bird were singing in his mind,
Praise, praise, to the Giver of life and love and death!

_God led him with His own Almighty Hand,_
_And made him grow up like a goodly tree._
_God filled his heart with such a loving fire_
_For truth, that truth returned him love for love._
_God aided him, with all that his own age_
_Had yet brought forth, to speed him on his way._
_God set him in a garden, as of old,_
_And gave him, for his duty and delight,_
_The task that he loved best in all the world._
_God gave him for his help-mate, from his youth_
_Into old age, the wife he most desired._
_And blessed him with her goodness._
_God revealed_
_His secrets to him; touched his eyes with light_
_And let him gaze into His Council Hall._
_God so determined even his defeats_
_That they became his greatest victories._
_God made his enemies as a wind to fill_
_His homeward-rushing sails. Wherever he went_
_The Lord was with him, and the Lord upheld him._
And yet, O yet, one glory was to come;
One strangest gate into infinitude
Was yet to be swung back and take him home.
_I know not how the fields that gave us birth_
_Draw us with sweetness, never to be forgotten_
_Back through the dark._
I saw him groping out,
As through a mist, into a shadowy garden;
And this was not Uppsala any more,
But the lost garden where his boyhood reigned.
The little dwindling path at Journey’s End
Ran through the dark, into a path he knew.

_Carl! Carl! Carl! Now where is that elfkin hiding!_
Down by the lake, from the alders, only the red-cap
Whistled three notes. Then all grew quiet again.

_Carl! O Carl!_ Her voice, though he could not answer,
Called him. He knew she was there, though he could not see her.
He stood and listened. The leaves were listening, too.

He tiptoed through the garden. His grey head
Turning to left and right with birdlike glances.
He passed by the little garden his father gave him.
He knew its breath in the night.
His heart stood still.
She was there. He saw her at last. Her back was towards him.
He saw her fair young head, through the deepening shadows,
Bending, breathlessly, forward to watch a child
At the edge of the lake, who watched a floating flower.
He watched her, rapt, intent. She watched her son,
Intent and rapt.
Tears in his heart, he waited, dark and still,
Feeling a mystery near him.

VII—LAMARCK AND THE REVOLUTION

I

LAMARCK AND BUFFON

What wars are these? Far off, a bugle blew.
Out of oblivion rose the vanished world.
I stood in Amiens, in a narrow street
Outside a dark old college. I saw a boy,
A budding Abbé, pallid from his books,
Beaked like a Roman eagle. He stole out
Between grim gates; and stripping off his bands,
Hastened away, a distance in his eyes;
As though, through an earthly bugle, he had heard
A deeper bugle, summoning to a war
Beyond these wars, with enemies yet unknown.
I saw him bargaining for a starveling horse
In Picardy and riding to the North,
Over chalk downs, through fields of poppied wheat.
A tattered farm lad, sixteen years of age,
Followed like Sancho at his master’s heel:
Up to the flaming battle-front he rode;
Flinging a stubborn “no” at those who’d send him
Back to learn war among the raw recruits,
He took his place before the astonished ranks
Of grenadiers, and faced the enemy’s fire.
Death swooped upon them, tearing long red lanes
Through their massed squadrons. His commander fell
Beside him. One by one his officers died.
Death placed him in command. The shattered troops
Of Beaujolais were wavering everywhere.
“Retreat!” the cry began. In smoke and fire,
Lamarck, with fourteen grenadiers, held on.
“This is the post assigned. This post we hold
Till Life or Death relieve us.”
Who assigned it?
Who summoned him thither? And when peace returned
Was it blind chance that garrisoned Lamarck
Among the radiant gardens of the south,
Dazzled him with their beauty, and then slipt
That volume of Chomel into his hand,
_Traité des Plantes_?
Was it blind accident,
Environment—O, mighty word that masks
The innumerable potencies of God,—
When his own comrade, in wild horse-play, wrenched
And crippled him in body, and he returned
Discharged to Paris, free to take up arms
In an immortal army? Was it chance
That lodged him there, despite his own desire,
So high above the streets that all he saw
Out of his window was the drifting clouds
Flowing and changing, drawing his lonely mind
In subtle ways to Nature’s pageantry,
And the great golden laws that governed all?

Was it blind chance that drew him out to watch
The sunset clouds o’er Mont Valérien,
Where the same power, for the same purpose, drew
Jean Jacques Rousseau? Flowers and the dying clouds
Drew them together, and mind from mind caught fire?

What universal Power through all and each
Was labouring to create when first they met
And talked and wondered, whether the forms of life
Through earth’s innumerable ages changed?
Were species constant? Let the rose run wild,
How swiftly it returns into the briar!
Transplant the southern wilding to the north
And it will change, to suit the harsher sky.
Nourish it in a garden,—you shall see
The trailer of the hedgerow stand upright,
And every blossom with a threefold crown.
Buffon, upon his hill-top at Montbard
In his red turret, among his flowers and birds,
Gazing through all his epochs of the world,
Had guessed at a long ancestry for man,
Too long for the upstart kings.
He could not prove it;
And the Sorbonne, with _Genesis_ in its hand,
Had frowned upon his æons. _In six days_
_God made the heaven and earth._
He had withdrawn,
Smiling as wise men smile at children’s talk;
And when Lamarck had visited him alone,
He smiled again, a little ironically.
“Six epochs of the world may mean six days;
But then, my friend, six days must also mean
Six epochs. Call it compromise, or peace.
They cannot claim the victory.
There are some
Think me too—orthodox. O, I know the whine
That fools will raise hereafter. Buffon quailed;
Why did not Buffon like our noble selves
Wear a vicarious halo of martyrdom?
Strange—that desire of small sadistic eyes
At ease on the shore to watch a shipwrecked man
Drowning. Lucretius praised that barbarous pleasure.
Mine is a subtler savagery. I prefer
To watch, from a little hill above their world,
The foes of science, floundering in the waves
Of their new compromise. Every crooked flash
Of irony lightening their dark skies to-day
Shows them more wickedly buffeted, in a sea
Of wilder contradictions.
I had no proof.
Time was not ripe. The scripture of the rocks
Must first be read more deeply. But the law
Pointed to one conclusion everywhere,
That forms of flesh and bone, in the long lapse
Of time, were plastic as the sculptor’s clay,
And born of earlier forms.
Under man’s eyes,
Had not the forms of bird and beast been changed
Into new species? Children of the wolf,
Greyhound and mastiff, in their several kinds,
Fawned on his children, slept upon his hearth.
The spaniel and the bloodhound owned one sire.
Man’s own selective artistry had shaped
New flowers, confirmed the morning glory’s crown,
And out of the wild briar evoked the rose.
Like a magician, in a few brief years,
He had changed the forms and colours of his birds.
He had whistled the wild pigeons from the rocks;
And by his choice, and nature’s own deep law,
Evoked the rustling fan-tails that displayed
Their splendours on his cottage roof, or bowed
Like courtiers on his lawn. The pouter swelled
A rainbow breast to please him. Tumblers played
Their tricks as for a king. The carrier flew
From the spy’s window, or the soldiers’ camp,
The schoolboy’s cage, the lover’s latticed heart,
And bore his messages over turbulent seas
And snow-capt mountains, with a sinewy wing
That raced the falcon, beating stroke for stroke.”

II

LAMARCK, LAVOISIER, AND NINETY-THREE

So, seizing the pure fire from Buffon’s hand,
Lamarck pressed on, flinging all else aside,
To follow all those clues to his own end.
Ten years he spent among the flowers of France,
Unravelling, and more truly than Linné,
The natural orders of their tangled clans;
Then, in “six months of unremitting toil,”
As Cuvier subtly sneered, he wrote his book,
The _Flore Française_; compact, as Cuvier knew,
And did not care to say, with ten years’ thought.
But Buffon did not sneer. The great old man,
A king of men, enthroned there at Montbard,
Aided Lamarck as Jove might aid his son.
He sent the book to the king’s own printing press.
Daubenton wrote his foreword; and Rousseau
Had long prepared the way.
“Linné of France,”
The stream of praise through every salon flowed.
_Une science à la mode_, great Cuvier sneered.

Was it blind chance that crushed Lamarck again
Back to his lean-ribbed poverty?
Buffon died.
Lamarck, who had married in his prosperous hour,
Had five young mouths to feed. With ten long years
Of toil he had made the great _Jardin du Roi_
Illustrious through the world. As his reward
The ministers of the king now granted him
A keepership at one thousand francs a year;
And, over him, in Buffon’s place, they set
The exquisite dilettante, Bernardin
Saint Pierre, a delicate twitcher of silken strings.
Lamarck held grimly to the post assigned.
Under that glittering rose-pink world he heard
Titanic powers upsurging from the abyss.
Then, in the blood-red dawn of ninety-three,
The bright crust cracked. The furious lava rolled
Through Paris, and a thundercloud of doom
Pealed over thrones and peoples. Flash on flash,
Blind lightnings of the guillotine replied.
Blind throats around the headsman’s basket roared.
The slippery cobbles were greased with human blood.
The torch was at the gates of the Bastille.
Old towers, old creeds, old wrongs, at a Mænad shout,
Went up in smoke and flame. Earth’s dynasties
Rocked to their dark foundations. Tyrants died;
But in that madness of the human soul
They did not die alone. Innocence died;
And pity died; and those whose hands upheld
The torch of knowledge died in the bestial storm.
Lavoisier had escaped. They lured him back
Into the Terror’s hot red tiger-mouth,
Promising, “Face your trial with these your friends,
And all will be set free. If not, they die.”
He faced it, and returned. The guillotine
Flashed down on one and all.
Let the wide earth,
Still echoing its old wrath against the kings
And priests who exiled, stoned and burned and starved
The bearers of the fire, remember well
How the Republic in its red right hand
Held up Lavoisier’s head, and told mankind
In mockery, colder than the cynical snarl
Of Nero, “The Republic has no need
Of savants. Let the people’s will be done
On earth, and let the headless trunk of Truth
Be trampled down by numbers. Tread in the mire
All excellence and all skill. Daub your raw wounds
With dirt of the street; elect the sick to health.
It is the people’s will, and they shall live.
Nay, crown the eternal Power who rules by law
With this red cap of your capricious will,
And ye shall hear His everlasting voice
More clearly than ye heard it when He spoke
In stillness, through the souls of lonely men,
On starry heights. Lift up your heads and hear
His voice in the whirling multitude’s wild-beast roar,
_Not these men, but Barabbas_.”
Must the mind
Turn back to tyranny, then, and trust anew
To harnessed might? The listening soul still heard
A more imperative call. Though Evil wore
A myriad masks and reigned as wickedly
In peoples as in kings, Truth, Truth alone,
Whether upheld by many or by few,
Wore the one absolute crown. Though Pilate flung
His murderous jest at Truth—the law remained
That answered his dark question; man’s one clue,
The law that all true seekers after Truth
Hold in their hands; the law, a golden thread
That, loyally followed, leads them to full light,
Each by his own dark way, till all the world
Is knit together in harmony that sets free.
Bridge-builders of the universe, they fling
Their firm and shining roads from star to star,
From earth to heaven. At his appointed task,
Lamarck held grimly on (as once he gripped
His wavering grenadiers) till Life or Death
Relieved him. But he knew his cause at last.
_Jardin du Roi_ became _Jardin des Plantes_;
And the red tumult surging round his walls
Died to a whisper of leaves.
His mind groped back,
Back through the inconceivable ages now,
To terrible revolutions of the globe,
Huge catastrophic rendings of the hills,
Red floods of lava; cataracts of fire;
Monstrous upheavals of the nethermost deep;
Whereby as Cuvier painted them, in hues
Of blind disaster, all the hosts of life
In each æonian period, like a swarm
Of ants beneath the wheels of Juggernaut,
Were utterly abolished.
Did God create
After each earth-disaster, then, new hosts
Of life to range her mountains and her seas;
New forms, new patterns, fresh from His careless Hand,
Yet all so closely akin to those destroyed?
Or did this life-stream, from one fountain-head,
Through the long changes of unnumbered years
Flow on, unbroken, slowly branching out
Into new beauty, as a river winds
Into new channels? One, singing through the hills,
Mirrors the hanging precipice and the pine;
And one through level meadows curves away,
Turns a dark wheel, or foams along a weir,
Then, in a pool of shadow, drowns the moon.

III

AN ENGLISH INTERLUDE: ERASMUS DARWIN

Already in England, bearing the same fire,
A far companion whom he never knew
Had long been moving on the same dark quest,
But through what quiet secluded walks of peace.

Out of the mist emerged the little City
Of Lichfield, clustering round its Minster Pool
That, like a fragment of the sky on earth,
Reflected its two bridges, gnarled old trees,
Half-timbered walls; a bare-legged child at play
Upon its brink; two clouds like floating swans,
Two swans like small white clouds; a boy that rode
A big brown cart-horse lazily jingling by;
And the cathedral, like a three-spired crown,
Set on its northern bank.
Then, from the west,
Above it, walled away from the steep street,
I saw Erasmus Darwin’s bluff square house.
Along its front, above the five stone steps
That climbed to its high door, strange vines and fronds
Made a green jungle in their dim prison of glass.
Behind, its windows overlooked a close
Of rambling mellow roofs, and coldly stared
At the cathedral’s three foreshortened spires,
Which seemed to draw together, as though in doubt
Of what lay hidden in those bleak staring eyes.

There dwelt that eager mind, whom fools deride
For laced and periwigged verses on his flowers;
Forgetting how he strode before his age,
And how his grandson caught from his right hand
A fire that lit the world.
I saw him there,
In his brown-skirted coat, among his plants,
Pondering the thoughts, at which that dreamer sneered,
Who, through a haze of opium, saw a star
Twinkling within the tip of the crescent moon.
Dispraise no song for tricks that fancy plays,
Nor for blind gropings after an unknown light,
But let no echo of Abora praise for this
The drooping pinion and unseeing eye.
Seek, poet, on thy sacred height, the strength
And glory of that true vision which shall grasp,
In clear imagination, earth and heaven,
And from the truly seen ascend in power
To those high realms whereof our heaven and earth
Are images and shadows, and their law
Our shining lanthorn and unfailing guide.
There, if the periwigged numbers failed to fly,
Let babbling dreamers who have also failed
Wait for another age. The time will come
When all he sought and lost shall mount and sing.
He saw the life-stream branching out before him,
Its forms and colours changing with their sky:
Flocks in the south that lost their warm white fleece;
And, in the north, the stubble-coloured hare
Growing snow-white against the winter snows.
The frog that had no jewel in his head,
Except his eyes, was yet a fairy prince,
For he could change the colours of his coat
To match the mud of the stream wherein he reigned;
And, if he dwelt in trees, his coat was green.
He saw the green-winged birds of Paraguay
Hardening their beaks upon the shells they cracked;
The humming-bird, with beak made needle-fine
For sucking honey from long-throated blooms;
Finches with delicate beaks for buds of trees,
And water-fowl that, in their age-long plashing
At the lake’s edge, had stretched the films of skin
Between their claws to webs. Out through the reeds
They rowed at last, and swam to seek their prey.
He saw how, in their war against the world,
Myriads of lives mysteriously assumed
The hues that hid them best; the butterfly dancing
With its four petals among so many flowers,
Itself a wingèd flower; the hedgerow birds
With greenish backs like leaves, but their soft breasts
Light as a downy sky, so that the hawk,
Poised overhead, sees only a vanishing leaf;
Or, if he swoops along the field below them,
Loses their silvery flight against the cloud.
He saw the goldfinch, vivid as the blooms
Through which it flutters, as though their dews had splashed
Red of the thistle upon its head and throat,
And on its wings the dandelion’s gold.
He saw the skylark coloured like its nest
In the dry grass; the partridge, grey and brown
In mottled fields, escaping every eye,
Till the foot stumbles over it, and the clump
Of quiet earth takes wing and whirrs away.
I saw him there, a strange and lonely soul,
An eagle in the Swan of Lichfield’s pen,
Stretching clipped wings and staring at the sky.
He saw the multitudinous hosts of life,
All creatures of the sea and earth and air,
Ascending from one living spiral thread,
Through tracts of time, unreckonable in years.
He saw them varying as the plastic clay
Under the Sculptor’s hands.
He saw them flowing
From one Eternal Fount beyond our world,
The inscrutable and indwelling Primal Power,
His only _vera causa_; by whose will
There was no gulf between the first and last.
There was no break in that long line of law
Between the first life drifting in the sea,
And man, proud man, the crowning form of earth,
Man whose own spine, the framework of his pride,
The fern-stem of his life, trunk of his tree,
Sleeps in the fish, the reptile, and the orang,
As all those lives in his own embryo sleep.

What deeper revolution, then, must shake
Those proud ancestral dynasties of earth?
What little man-made temples must go down?
And what august new temple must arise,
One vast cathedral, gargoyled with strange life,
Surging through darkness, up to the unknown end?

IV

LAMARCK AND CUVIER: THE _VERA CAUSA_