IX—IN ENGLAND Darwin

“I am the whisper that he ceased to hear,” The quiet voice of Shadow-of-a-Leaf began; And, as he spoke, the flowing air before me Shone like a crystal sphere, wherein I saw All that he pictured, through his own deep eyes. I waited in his garden there, at Down. I peered between the crooklights of a hedge Where ragged robins grew. Far off, I heard The clocklike rhythm of an ironshod staff Clicking on gravel, clanking on a flint. Then, round the sand-walk, under his trees he strode, A tall lean man, wrapt in a loose dark cloak, His big soft hat of battered sun-burnt straw Pulled down to shade his face. But I could see, For I looked upward, the dim brooding weight Of silent thought that soon would shake the world. He paused to watch an ant upon its way. He bared his head. I saw the shaggy brows That like a mountain-fortress overhung The deep veracious eyes, the dogged face Where kindliness and patience, knowledge, power, And pain quiescent under the conquering will, In that profound simplicity which marks The stature of the mind, the truth of art, The majesty of every natural law. The child’s wise innocence, and the silent worth Of human grief and love, had set their seal. I stole behind him, and he did not hear Or see me. I was only Shadow-of-a-Leaf; And yet—I knew the word was on its way That might annul his life-work in an hour. I heard the whisper of every passing wing Where, wrapt in peace, among the hills of Kent, The patient watchful intellect had prepared A mightier revolution for mankind Even than the world-change of Copernicus When the great central earth began to move And dwine to a grain of dust among the stars. I saw him pondering over a light-winged seed That floated, like an elfin aeronaut, Across the path. He caught it in his hand And looked at it. He touched its delicate hooks And set it afloat again. He watched it sailing, Carrying its tiny freight of life away Over the quick-set hedge, up, into the hills. I heard him muttering, “beautiful! Surely this Implies design! Design?” Then, from his face The wonder faded, and he shook his head; But with such reverence and humility That his denial almost seemed a prayer. A prayer—for, not long after, in his house, I saw him bowed, the first mind of his age, Bowed, helpless, by the deathbed of his child; Pondering, with all that knowledge, all that power, Powerless, and ignorant of the means to save; A dumb Prometheus, bending his great head In silence, as he drank those broken words Of thanks, the pitiful thanks of small parched lips, For a sip of water, a smile, a cooling hand On the hot brow; thanks for his goodness—God! Thanks from a dying child, just ten years old! And, while he stood in silence by her grave, Hearing the ropes creak as they lowered her down Into the cold dark hollow, while he breathed The smell of the moist earth, those calm strange words— I am the Resurrection and the Life, Echoed and echoed through his lonely mind, Only to deepen his agony of farewell Into Eternity. Dumbly there he strove To understand how accents so divine, In words so worthy of eternal power, So postulant of it in their calm majesty, Could breathe through mortal lips. Madman or God, Who else could say them? God it could not be, If in his mortal blindness he saw clear; And yet, and yet, could madness wring the heart Thus, thus, and thus, for nineteen hundred years? Would that she knew, would God that she knew now, How much we loved her! The blind world, still ruled By shams, and following in hypnotic flocks The sheep-bell of an hour, still thought of him “The Man of Science” as less or more than man, Coldly aloof from love and grief and pain; Held that he knew far more, and felt far less Than other men, and, even while it praised The babblers for their reticence and their strength, The shallow for their depth, the blind for sight, The rattling weathercocks for their love of truth, Ere long would brand, as an irreverent fool, This great dumb simple man, with his bowed head. Could the throng see that drama, as I saw it— I, Shadow-of-a-Leaf,—could the blind throng discern The true gigantic drama of those hours Among the quiet hills as, one by one, His facts fell into place; their broken edges Joined, like the fragments of a vast mosaic, And, slowly, the new picture of the world, Emerging in majestic pageantry Out of the primal dark, before him grew; Grew by its own inevitable law; Grew, and earth’s ancient fantasies dwindled down; The stately fabric of the old creation Crumbled away; while man, proud demigod, Stripped of all arrogance now, priest, beggar, king, Captive and conqueror, all must own alike Their ancient lineage. Kin to the dumb beasts By the red life that flowed through all their veins From hearts of the same shape, beating all as one In man and brute; kin, by those kindred forms Of flesh and bone, with eyes and ears and mouths That saw and heard and hungered like his own, His mother Earth reclaimed him. Back and back, He traced them, till the last faint clue died out In lifeless earth and sea. I watched him striving To follow further, bending his great brows Over the intense lens.... Far off, I heard The murmur of human life, laughter and weeping; Heard the choked sobbings by a million graves, And saw a million faces, wrung with grief, Lifted forlornly to the Inscrutable Power. I saw him raise his head. I heard his thought As others hear a whisper—Surely this Implies design! And worlds on aching worlds Of dying hope were wrapped in those four words. He stared before him, wellnigh overwhelmed For one brief moment, with instinctive awe Of Something that ... determined every force Directed every atom.... Then, in a flash, The indwelling vision vanished at the voice Of his own blindfold reason. For what mind Could so unravel the complicated threads, The causes that are caused by the effects Of other causes, intricately involved, Woven and interwoven, in endless mazes, Wandering through infinite time, infinite space, And yet, an ordered and mysterious whole, Before whose very being all mortal power Must abdicate its sovereignty? A dog Might sooner hope to leap beyond the mind Of Newton than a man might hope to grasp Even in this little whirl of earth and sun The Scheme of the All-determining Absolute. And yet—if that—the All-moving, were the One Reality, and sustained and made all forms, Then, by the self-same power in man himself Whatever was real in man might understand That same Reality, being one substance with it, One substance with the essential Soul of all,— Might understand, as children understand, Even in ignorance, those who love them best; Might recognise, as through their innocent eyes, The highest, which is Love, though all the worlds Of lesser knowledge passed unheeded by. What meant those moments else? Moments that came And went on wings, wild as these wings of mine, The wings of Shadow-of-a-Leaf, Quick with a light that never could be reached By toiling up the mountain-sides of thought; Consummate meanings that were never found By adding units; moments of strange awe When that majestic sequence of events We call the cosmos, from its wheeling atoms Up to its wheeling suns, all spoke one Power, One Presence, One Unknowable, and One Known? In the beginning God made heaven and earth: He, too, believed it, once....

As if the wings Of Shadow-of-a-Leaf had borne me through the West So that the sunset changed into the dawn, I saw him in his youth. The large salt wind, The creak of cordage, the wild swash of waves Were round him as he paced the clear white deck, An odd loose-tweeded sojourner, in a world Of uniforms and guns. The Beagle plunged Westward, upon the road that Drake had sailed; But this new voyager, on a longer quest, Sailed on a stranger sea; and, though I heard His ringing laugh, he seemed to live apart In his own mind, from all who moved around him. I saw him while the Beagle basked at anchor Under West Indian palms. He lounged there, tanned With sun; tall, lankier in his cool white drill; The big slouched straw pulled down to shade his eyes. The stirring wharf was one bright haze of colour; Kaleidoscopic flakes, orange and green, Blood-red and opal, glancing to and fro, Through purple shadows. The warm air smelt of fruit. He leaned his elbows on the butt of a gun And listened, while a red-faced officer, breathing Faint whiffs of rum, expounded lazily, With loosely stumbling tongue, the cynic’s code His easy rule of life, belying the creed That both professed. And, in one flash, I caught A glimpse of something deeper, missed by both,— The subtle touch of the Master-Ironist Unfolding his world-drama, point by point, In every sight and sound and word and thought, Packed with significance. Out of its myriad scenes All moving swiftly on, unguessed by man, To close in one great climax of clear light, This vivid moment flashed. The cynic ceased; And Darwin, slowly knitting his puzzled brows, Answered, “But it is wrong!” “Wrong?” chuckled the other. “Why should it be wrong?” And Darwin, Darwin,—he that was to grasp The crumbling pillars of their infidel Temple And bring them headlong down to the honest earth, Answered again, naïvely as a child, “Does not the Bible say so?” A broad grin Wreathed the red face that stared into his own; And, later, when the wardroom heard the jest, The same wide grin from Christian mouth to mouth Spread like the ripples on a single pool Quietly enough! They liked him. They’d not hurt him! And Darwin, strange, observant, simple soul, Saw clearly enough; had eyes behind his back For every smile; though in his big slow mind He now revolved a thought that greatly puzzled him, A thought that, in their light sophistication, These humorists had not guessed. Once, in his cabin, His red-faced cynic had picked up a book By one whose life was like a constant light On the high altar of Truth. He had read a page, Then flung it down, with a contemptuous oath, Muttering, “These damned atheists! Why d’you read them?” Could pagan minds be stirred, then, to such wrath Because the man they called an “atheist” smiled At dates assigned by bland ecclesiasts To God for His creation? Man was made On March the ninth, at ten o’clock in the morning (A Tuesday), just six thousand years ago: A legend of a somewhat different cast From that deep music of the first great phrase In Genesis. The strange irony here struck home. For Darwin, here, was with the soul-bowed throng Of prophets, while the ecclesiasts blandly toyed With little calendars, which his “atheist’s book,” In its irreverence, whispered quite away; Whispered (for all such atheists bend their heads Doubtless in shame) that, in the Book of Earth, Six thousand years were but as yesterday, A flying cloud, a shadow, a breaking wave. Million of years were written upon the rocks That told its history. To upheave one range Of mountains, out of the sea that had submerged So many a continent, ere mankind was born, The harnessed forces, governed all by law, Had laboured, dragging down and building up, Through distances of Time, unthinkable As those of starry space. It dared to say (This book so empty of mystery and awe!) That, searching the dark scripture of the rocks, It found therein no sign of a beginning, No prospect of an end. Strange that the Truth, Whether upheld by the pure law within Or by the power of reason, thus dismayed These worshippers of a little man-made code. Alone there in his cabin, with the books Of Humboldt, Lyell, Herschel, spread before him. He made his great decision. If the realm Beyond the bounds of human knowledge gave So large a sanctuary to mortal lies, Henceforth his Bible should be one inscribed Directly with the law—the Book of Earth.

I saw him climbing like a small dark speck —Fraught with what vast significance to the world— Among the snow-capt Andes, a dark point Of travelling thought, alone upon the heights, To watch the terrible craters as they breathed Their smouldering wrath against the sky. I saw him, Pausing above Portillo’s pass to hear The sea-like tumult, where brown torrents rolled Innumerable thousands of rough stones, Jarring together, and hurrying all one way. He stood there, spellbound, listening to the voice Of Time itself, the moments hurrying by For ever irrecoverably. I heard His very thought. The stones were on their way To the ocean that had made them; every note In their wild music was a prophecy Of continents unborn. When he had seen Those continents in embryo, beds of sand And shingle, cumulant on the coastwise plains, Thousands of feet in thickness, he had doubted Whether the river of time itself could grind And pile such masses there. But when he heard The mountain-torrents rattling, he recalled How races had been born and passed away, And night and day, through years unreckonable, These grinding stones had never ceased to roll On their steep course. Not even the Cordilleras, Had they been ribbed with adamant, could withstand That slow sure waste. Even those majestic heights Would vanish. Nothing—not the wind that blows Was more unstable than the crust of the earth. He landed at Valdivia, on the day When the great earthquake shuddered through the hills From Valparaiso, southward to Cape Horn. I saw him wandering through a ruined city Of Paraguay, and measuring on the coast The upheaval of new land, discovering rocks Ten feet above high-water, rocks with shells For which the dark-eyed panic-stricken throngs Had dived at ebb, a few short days ago. I saw him—strange discoverer—as he sailed Through isles, not only uncharted, but newborn, Isles newly arisen and glistening in the sun, And atolls where he thought an older height Had sunk below the smooth Pacific sea. He explored the Pampas; and before him passed The centuries that had made them; the great streams Gathering the red earth at their estuaries In soft rich deltas, till new plains of loam Over the Banda granite slowly spread, And seeds took root and mightier forests towered, Forests that human foot could never tread, Forests that human eye could never see; But by the all-conquering human mind at last Trodden and seen, waving their leaves in air As at an incantation, And filled once more with monstrous forms of life. He found their monstrous bones embedded there, And, as he found them, all those dry bones lived. I stole beside him in the dark, and heard, In the unfathomable forest deeps, the crash Of distant boughs, a wild and lonely sound, Where Megatherium, the gigantic Sloth Whose thigh was thrice an elephant’s in girth, Rose, blindly groping, and with armoured hands Tore down the trees to reach their tender crests And strip them of their more delicious green. I saw him pondering on the secret bond Between the living creatures that he found On the main coast, and those on lonely isles; Forms that diverged, and yet were closely akin. One key, one only, unlocked the mystery there. Unless God made, for every separate isle As it arose, new tribes of plants, birds, beasts, In variant images of the tribes He set Upon their nearest continent, grading all By time, and place, and distance from the shore, The bond between them was the bond of blood. All, all had branched from one original tree. I saw him off the Patagonian coast Staring at something stranger than a dream. There, on a rocky point above the ship With its world-voyaging thoughts, he first beheld Primeval man. There, clustering on the crags, Backed by their echoing forests of dark beech, The naked savages yelled at the white sails, Like wolves that bay the moon. They tossed their arms Wildly through their long manes of streaming hair, Like troubled spirits from an alien world. Whence had they risen? From what ancestral night? What bond of blood was there? What dreadful Power Begot them—fallen or risen—from heaven or hell? I saw him hunting everywhere for light On life’s dark mystery; gathering everywhere Armies of fact, that pointed all one way, And yet—what vera causa could he find In blindfold Nature? Even had he found it, What æons would be needed! Earth was old; But could the unresting loom of infinite time Weave this wild miracle, or evolve one nerve Of all this intricate network in the brain, This exquisite machine that looked through heaven, Revelled in colours of a sunset sky, Or met love’s eyes on earth? Everywhere, now, He found new clues that led him all one way. And, everywhere, in the record of the rocks, Time and to spare for all that Time could do, But not his vera causa. Earth grew strange. Even in the ghostly gleam that told the watch One daybreak that the ship was nearing home He saw those endless distances again.... He saw through mist, over the struggling waves That run between the white-chalk cliffs of France And England, sundered coasts that once were joined And clothed with one wide forest. The deep sea Had made the strange white body of that broad land, Beautifully establishing it on death, Building it, inch by inch, through endless years Out of innumerable little gleaming bones, The midget skeletons of the twinkling tribes That swarmed above in the more lucid green Ten thousand fathoms nearer to the sun. There they lived out their gleam of life and died, Then slowly drifted down into the dark, And spread in layers upon the cold sea-bed The invisible grains and flakes that were their bones. Layer on layer of flakes and grains of lime, Where life could never build, they built it up By their incessant death. Though but an inch In every thousand years, they built it up, Inch upon inch, age after endless age; And the dark weight of the incumbent Deep Compressed them (Power determined by what Will?) Out of the night that dim creation rose The seas withdrew. The bright new land appeared. Then Gaul and Albion, nameless yet, were one; And the wind brought a myriad wingèd seeds, And the birds carried them, and the forests grew, And through their tangled ways the tall elk roared. But sun and frost and rain, the grinding streams And rhythmic tides (the tools of what dread Hand?) Still laboured on; till, after many a change, The great moon-harnessed energies of the sea Came swinging back, the way of the southwest wind, And, æon after æon, hammering there, Rechannelled through that land their shining way. There all those little bones now greet the sun In gleaming cliffs of chalk; and, in their chines The chattering jackdaw builds, while overhead On the soft mantle of turf the violet wakes In March, and young-eyed lovers look for Spring. What of the Cause? O, no more rounded creeds Framed in a realm where no man could refute them! Honesty, honesty, honesty, first of all. And so he turned upon the world around him, The same grave eyes of deep simplicity With which he had faced his pagan-christian friends And quoted them their Bible.... Slowly he marshalled his worldwide hosts of fact, Legions new-found, or first assembled now, In their due order. Lyell had not dared To tell the truth he knew. He found in earth The records of its vanished worlds of life, Each with its own strange forms, in its own age, Sealed in its own rock-system. In the first, The rocks congealed from fire, no sign of life; And, through the rest, in order as they were made, From oldest up to youngest, first the signs Of life’s first gropings; then, in gathering power, Strange fishes, lizards, birds, and uncouth beasts, Worlds of strange life, but all in ordered grades, World over world, each tombed in its own age Or merging into the next with subtle changes, Delicate modulations of one form, (Urged by what force? Impelled by what dark power?) Progressing upward, into subtler forms Through all the buried strata, till there came Forms that still live, still fight for life on earth, Tiger and wolf and ape; and, last of all, The form of man; the child of yesterday. Of yesterday! For none had ever found Among the myriad forms of older worlds, Locked in those older rocks through tracts of time Out-spanning thought, one vestige of mankind. There was no human footprint on the shores Whose old compacted sand, now turned to stone, Still showed the ripples where a summer sea Once whispered, ere the mastodon was born. There were the pitted marks, all driven one way, That showed how raindrops fell, and the west wind blew. There on the naked stone remained the tracks Where first the sea-beasts crawled out of the sea, A few salt yards upon the long dark trail That led through æons to the tidal roar Of lighted cities and this world of tears. The shell, the fern, the bird’s foot, the beast’s claw, Had left their myriad signs. Their forms remained, Their delicate whorls, their branching fronds, their bones, Age after age, like jewels in the rocks; But, till the dawning of an age so late, It seemed like yesterday, no sign, no trace, No relic of mankind! Then, in that age Among the skulls, made equal in the grave, Of ape and wolf, last of them all, looked up That naked shrine with its receding brows, And its two sightless holes, the skull of man. Round it, his tools and weapons, the chipped flints, The first beginnings of his fight for power, The first results of his first groping thought Proclaimed his birth, the youngest child of time. Born, and not made? Born—of what lesser life? Was man so arrogant that he could disdain The words he used so glibly of his God— Born, and not made? Could Lyell, who believed That, in the world around us, we should find The self-same causes and the self-same laws To-day as yesterday; and throughout all time; And that the Power behind all changes works By law alone; law that includes all heights, All depths, of reason, harmony, and love; Could Lyell hold that all those realms of life, Each sealed apart in its own separate age, With its own separate species, had been called Suddenly, by a special Act of God, Out of the void and formless? Could he think Even that mankind, this last emergent form, After so many æons of ordered law, Was by miraculous Hands in one wild hour, Suddenly kneaded out of the formless clay? And was the formless clay more noble, then, Than this that breathed, this that had eyes to see, This whose dark heart could beat, this that could die? No! Lyell knew that this wild house of flesh Was never made by hands, not even those Hands; And that to think so were to discrown God, And not to crown Him, as the blind believed. The miracle was a vaster than they knew. The law by which He worked was all unknown; Subtler than music, quieter than light, The mighty process that through countless changes, Delicate grades and tones and semi-tones, Out of the formless slowly brought forth forms, Lifeless as crystals, or translucent globes Drifting in water; till, through endless years, Out of their myriad changes, one or two More subtle in combination, at the touch Of light began to move, began to attract Substances that could feed them; blindly at first; But as an artist, with all heaven for prize, Pores over every syllable, tests each thread Of his most tenuous thought, the moving Power Spent endless æons of that which men call Time, To form one floating tendril that could close On what it touched. Who whispered in his ear That fleeting thought? We must suppose a Power Intently watching—through all the universe— Each slightest variant, seizing on the best, Selecting them, as men by conscious choice In their small realm selected and reshaped Their birds and flowers. We must suppose a Power In that immense night-cleaving pageantry Which men call Nature, a selective Power, Choosing through æons as men choose through years. Many are called, few chosen, quietly breathed Shadow-of-a-Leaf, in exquisite undertone One phrase of the secret music.... He did not hear. Lamarck—all too impatiently he flung Lamarck aside; forgetting how in days When the dark Book of Earth was darker yet Lamarck had spelled gigantic secrets out, And left an easier task for the age to come; Forgetting more than this; for Darwin’s mind, Working at ease in Nature, lost its way In history, and the thoughts of other men. For him Lamarck had failed, and he misread His own forerunner’s mind. Blindfold desires Had never shaped a wing. The grapevine’s need To cling and climb could thrust no tendrils out. The environing snows of Greenland could not cloak Its little foxes with their whiter fur. Nor could the wing-shut butterfly’s inner will Mimic the shrivelled leaf on the withered bough So cunningly that the bird might perch beside it And never see its prey. Was it blind chance That flashed his own great fragment of the truth Into his mind? What vera causa, then, What leap of Nature brought that truth to birth, Illumining all the world? It flashed upon him As at a sudden contact of two wires The current flashes through; or, when through space, A meteorite for endless ages rolls In darkness, and its world of night appears Unchangeable for ever, till, all at once, It plunges into a soft resisting sea Of planet-girdling air, and burns with heat, And bursts into a blaze, while far below, Two lovers, in a world beyond its ken, Look from a little window into the night And see a falling star. By such wild light, An image of his own ambiguous “chance,” Which was not “chance,” but governed by a law Unknown, too vast for men to comprehend (Too vast for any to comprehend but One, Breathed Shadow-of-a-Leaf, who in each part discerns Its harmony with the whole), at last the clue Flashed on him.... In the strange ironical scheme Wherein he moved, of the Master-Dramatist, It was his own ambiguous “chance” that slipt A book of Malthus into his drowsy hand And drew his drowsy eyes down to that law Of struggling men and nations. Was it “chance” That in this intricate torch-race tossed him there Light from one struggling on an alien track And yet not alien, since all roads to truth Meet in one goal at last? Was it blind chance That even in this triumphant flash prepared The downfall of his human pride, and slipt The self-same volume into another hand; And, in the lonely islands of Malay, Drew Wallace to the self-same page, and said —Though only Shadow-of-a-Leaf could hear that voice,— Whose is the kingdom, whose the glory and power? O, exquisite irony of the Master, there Unseen by both, their generous rivalry Evolved, perfected, the new thought for man; And, over both, and all their thoughts, a Power Intently watching, made of their struggle for truth An image of the law that they illumed. So all that wasting of a myriad seeds In Nature’s wild profusion was not waste, Not even such waste as drives the flying grains Under the sculptor’s chisel, but was itself A cause of that unending struggle of life Through which all life ascends. The conqueror there Was chosen by laws inexorably precise, As though to infinite Reason infinite Art Were wedded, and had found in infinite “chance” Full scope for their consummate certainties,— Choice and caprice, freedom and law in one. Each slightest variant, in a myriad ways, That armed or shielded or could help its kind, Would lead to a new triumph; would reveal, In varying, subtler ways of varying still; New strokes of that divinest “chance” of all Which poet and sculptor count as unforeseen, And unforeseeable; yet, when once achieved, They recognise as crowning law with law, And witnessing to infinitudes of Power In that creative Will which shapes the world. O, in that widening splendour of the mind, Blinder than Buffon, blinder than Lamarck, His eyes amazed with all that leapt to light, Dazed with a myriad details, lost the whole. He saw the law whereby the few were chosen From forms already at variance. Back and back He traced his law, and every step was true. And yet his vera causa was no Cause, For it determined nothing. It revealed, In part, how subtler variants had arisen From earliest simpler variants, but no more. ... Subtler than music, quieter than light, The Power that wrought those changes; and the last Were all implied and folded in the first, As the gnarled oak-tree with its thousand boughs Writhing to heaven and striking its grim roots Like monstrous talons into the mountain’s heart Is pent in one smooth acorn. So each life, In little, retold the tale; each separate man Was, in himself, the world’s epitome, A microcosm, wherein who runs may read The history of the whole; from the first seed Enclosed in the blind womb, until life wake Through moons or æons of embryonic change To human thought and love, and those desires Which still grope upward, into the unknown realms As far beyond us now as Europe lay From the first life that crawled out of the sea. There lies our hope; but O, the endless way! And the lost road of knowledge, endless, too! That infinite hope was not for him. One life Hardly sufficed for his appointed task, To find on earth his clues to the unknown law, Out-miracling all miracles had he known, Whereby this lifeless earth, so clearly seen Across the abyss of time, this lifeless earth Washed by a lifeless ocean, by no power But that which moves within the things we see, Swept the blind rocks into the cities of men, With great cathedrals towering to the sky, And little ant-like swarms in their dark aisles Kneeling to that Unknowable. His to trace The way by inches, never to see the whole, Never to grasp the miracle in the law, And wrestling with it, to be written by light As by an Angel’s finger in the dark. Could he have stood on that first lifeless coast With Shadow-of-a-Leaf, and seen that lifeless brine, Rocks where no mollusc clung, nor seaweed grew; Could he have heard a whisper,—Only wait. Be patient. On one sure and certain day, Out of the natural changes of these rocks And seas, at last, a great ship will go by; Cities will dusk that heaven; and you shall see Two lovers pass, reading one printed book, The Paradiso.... Would he have been so sure That Nature had no miracles in her heart More inconceivably shattering to the mind Than madness ever dreamed? For this, this, this, Had happened, though the part obscured the whole; And his own labour, in a myriad ways, Endlessly linking part to part, had lost The vera causa that Lamarck had known, The one determining Cause that moved through all.

The mist cleared. As an airman flying, I saw, Between the quiet wings of Shadow-of-a-Leaf, Far down, a coiling glitter of willowy streams, Then grey remembered battlements that enclosed Gardens, like nests of nightingales; a bridge; An airy tower; a shadowy dome; the High; St Mary’s delicate spire. A sound of bells Rose like a spray of melody from the far Diminished fountains of the City of Youth. I heard and almost wept. The walls grew large And soared to meet me. As the patterned streets Break into new dimensions, passing from sight While the airman glides and circles down, they rose, And the outer City, vanishing, revealed The secret life within. At once I passed Through walls of stone on those ethereal wings; And, as an unseen spirit might survey A crowded theatre from above, I saw A packed assembly, gazing, hushed and still, At certain famous leaders of that hour On their raised daïs. Henslow in the midst, Their president, gentle, tolerant, reverent, kind, Darwin’s old tutor, scientist and half-saint; Owen beside him, crabbèd as John Knox, And dry as his dead bones; bland Wilberforce, The great smooth Bishop of Oxford, pledged and primed To make an end of Darwin, once for all. Not far away, a little in shadow, sat A strange young man, tall, slight, with keen dark eyes, Who might, in the irresponsible way of youth, Defend an absent thinker. Let him beware. There was a balance of power in science, too, Which would resent disturbance. He’d be crushed By sheer weight of authority, then set, Duly submissive, in his proper place. His name was Huxley. A square close-crowded room, It held, in little, a concentrated world, Imaging, on a microcosmic stage, The doubts, the fears, the jealousies, and dull hates That now beset one lonely soul at Down; But imaging, also, dauntless love of truth In two or three, the bearers of the fire. Henslow, subdued, with twenty reticent words That, in their mere formality, seemed aware Of silent dark momentous currents flowing Under the trivial ripple of use and wont, Called on Daubeny, first, for his discourse On Sex in Flowers, and their descent through time. Daubeny, glancing over his glasses, bowed And twinkled a wise physician’s rosy smile, As one of his many parts; an all-round man, Sound Latinist and an excellent judge of wine, Humanist and geologist, who had tracked Guettard through all his craters in Auvergne, And, afterwards, with a map in his right hand, And Ovid’s ‘Ars Amoris’ in his left, Traced the volcanic chains through Hungary, Italy, Transylvania, and returned To Oxford, as her botanist at the last, With silvery hair, but otherwise unchanged, Oxford in bloom and Oxford to the core. Swimming serene in academic air, With open mind and non-committal phrase He proved he knew how little all men know; And whoso kept that little to himself Could never be caught tripping. Then he smiled, And so remained the wisest of them all. For half an hour the sexes of the flowers Danced from his learned discourse, through the minds Of half his feminine hearers, like a troop Of Bacchanals, blowing kisses. In the crowd I saw, at the whimsical chuckle of Shadow-of-a-Leaf, The large-eyed spinster with the small pursed mouth, Eliza Pym of Woodstock, who desired To know about the wild flowers that she drew In delicate water-colours for her friends. She sat bolt upright, innocently amazed And vaguely trepidant in her hooped green gown. What? Even the flowers? How startling was the sound Of pistil! Awed, intent, she caught at clues; Meticulously quivering at the thought Of bees; and blushing deeply when he spoke In baritone of male virtue in the rose. Through all, the evasive academic phrase, Putting out vaguely sensitive tentacles That instantly withdrew from what they touched, Implied that he could view, quite unperturbed, All theories, and remain detached, aloft Among the gods, in philosophic calm; Nay, by his critical logic was endowed With something loftier. What were gods to him, Who, being ephemeral, mortal, born to die, Could, over the port of Corpus and All Souls Mellowed in classic cellars, quiz the powers That doomed him, as the aristocrat of thought Looks through ironical lorgnettes at the might Of Demos round his tumbril. They lived on, Wasting their nectar, wrecking worlds on worlds. He had risen, at least, superior to all that. He held it somewhat barbarous, vulgar, crude To wallow in such profusion as the gods. All this implied, not spoken; for he found His final causes in his dry pressed flowers; Proved that he knew—none better—all the tribe Who had dragged a net of Latin through the fields; Proved that some flowers, at least, had never changed Through many centuries. The black-seeded poppy Was known to Homer. He rolled out the lines. Almonds, the bitter-kernelled and the sweet, Were tasted by the prophets; and he found White-seeded sesamum, in the night of time, Among the old Egyptians.... He showed that, while his library was vast, Fragrant with leather, crested, tooled, and gilt, He had closed the Book of Nature, and, on the whole, Despite his open mind, dismissed the views Of this—er—new philosopher, with a smile That, don-wise, almost seemed to ask aloud, “Who is he, after all?” Not one of us. Why weigh his facts, then, further, since we hold The official seals of truth in this our time. Such men are always wrong. They come and go. The breeze would soon blow over. All this implied, Not spoken, in that small dry steady smile, Doctor Daubeny gathered up his tails And made one definite and emphatic point By sitting down, while some eight hundred hands Acclaimed his perfect don-hood. Henslow rose, A little nervously. Had much pleasure, though.... And turned to Mr. Huxley. Would he speak? A whisper passed, a queer new stillness gripped The expectant crowd. The clock ticked audibly Not yet, not yet! A sense of change at hand Stole through the silence, like the first cool breath That, over a great ship’s company at night, Steals through the port-holes from the open sea. Then, with sure foresight, seeing the clash to come, The strange young man with the determined mouth And quick dark eyes rose grimly, and flung down A single sentence, like a gyve of steel Wrenched from the wrists to set the strong hands free For whatsoever need might rise, if clock And Zeitgeist changed their quiet Not Yet to Now. “A general audience, sir, where sentiment May interfere, unduly interfere, With intellect”—as a thin steel wire drawn tight By an iron winch, the hush grew tense and rang Low, hard, clear, cold—“is not a fitting place For this discussion.” Silence, and the clock, Two great allies, the surest of them all, Dead silence, and the voice Not Yet, Not Yet, A cough, the creak of the chair as he sat down, A shuffle of feet, the chairman’s baffled face, Then little indignant mutterings round the hall, Turning to gasps of mockery. Insolence?—no,— Sheer weakness, full retreat! The Bishop raised His eye-brows, looked at the dense disflattered crowds, And had no further fear. The battle was won. Victory, of the only kind he knew, Was in his hands. Retreat must now be turned Into full rout. He glanced at Owen,—met His little sardonic smile with a wise nod, As if to say, “Ah, just as we foresaw.” Excited clerics caught the flying hint And whispered, eyes agog—“You noticed that? He’s a great man, the Bishop? What a brow! And Owen, too. Of course, they know; they know; And understand each other, thick as thieves.” Then Owen rose; waved Huxley’s empty excuse Remorselessly aside; and plunged right on, Declaring there were facts, whereby the crowd Could very fitly judge. The crowd’s own feet Tapped a benign applause. Then came the facts, Facts from a realm that Huxley had made his own. The brain of the gorilla—some one turned A faint hysterical laugh into a sneeze— Linked it more closely to the lowest groups Of Quadrumana. “Quadru—what-did-he-say?” Whispered Miss Pym unconsciously to herself, “Mana, four-handed,” clerical whiskers breathed, With Evangelical titillance in her ear, “Apes, monkeys, all the things that climb up trees. Says the gorilla’s more like them than us.” “Thank you.” Eliza Pym inclined her head A little stiffly. Had the world gone mad? Was some one in the background trying to find A pedigree for mankind among the brutes? Absurd, of course, and yet—one must confess How like they were in some things. Unto each A mouth, a nose, two eyes, flesh, blood, and bones Of the same pattern. Comic enough, and weird; But what became of Genesis, then, and God? If all these whiskered men but one or two So utterly disbelieved it, why discuss Degrees of kinship? Surely the gulf was fixed Wide as the severance between heaven and hell. Then, in one dreadful gleam, she seemed to see The rows of whiskered listeners, darkly perched, Herself among them, on long swaying boughs, Mesmerised, and all dumbly staring down With horrible fascination at great eyes, Green moons of cruelty, steadily smouldering, In depths that—smelt of tigers; or the salts Unstoppered by the vicar’s wife in front. Smile at Eliza Pym with Shadow-of-a-Leaf; But only if your inward sight can see Her memories, too—a child’s uplifted face, The clean white cot, the fluttering nursery fire; Old days, old faces, teaching her those lines From Blake, about a Lamb. Yet that—why that Might be the clue they lacked in all this talk Of our dumb kinsfolk. If she could but speak And—hint it! Why don’t Bishops think of things Like that, she wondered. Owen resumed his chair With loud applause. That grim young man again, Huxley, was on his feet, his dark eyes lit With thrice the vital power of all the rest. In one cool sentence, like a shining lance, He touched the centre of his opponent’s shield, And ended all the shuffling, all the doubts Of where he stood, how far he dared to go, If truth required it. He could not accept Those facts from any authority; gave direct Unqualified contradiction to those facts; And pledged himself to justify this course, Unusual as it seemed perhaps—elsewhere. “Elsewhere,” and as he said it, came a gleam Into his face, reflected from the heights Where a tribunal sits whose judgment holds Not for the fleeting moment, but all time. “Elsewhere”—the Bishop smiled. He had not caught That gleam. “Elsewhere” was only another sign Of weakness, even timidity perhaps, And certainly retreat, not from the truth (He felt so sure of that) but from the might And deep resources of the established powers Whose influence ruled the world. “Elsewhere” for him Meant Saturday, and here. The lists were set, The battle joined, and the great issue plain,— Whether the human race came straight from God, Or traced its dark descent back to the brute, And left his creed a wreck of hollow towers, The haunt of bats and owls. His time to strike Would come on Saturday. Pleadings of “elsewhere” Would not avail. He set his jaw. Please God, He meant to drive this victory crashing home, And make an end of Darwin once for all. So closed the first strange scene. The rumour spread Everywhere, of the Bishop’s grim intent. Saturday’s crowd, an hour before its time Choked all the doors, and crammed the long west hall. Black-coated members of all shades of thought, Knowledge and doubt and bigotry, crushed their sides In chair-packed rows together (Eliza Pym Among them, with her startled innocent eyes). A bevy of undergraduates at the back, Quietly thoughtful, held their watching brief For youth and for the future. Fame to come Already touched the brows of a rare few With faint leaf-shadows of her invisible wreath: Green, the philosopher, gazing at the world With youth’s aloofness, and that inward light Which shines from Oxford still; not far away The young historian of the coloured stream Of outward life, the ancestral pageantry Of England, and its tributary rills Flowing in dawn-gleams out of the mists of time. There, too, in front, with atavistic face And Vandyke beard, so oddly like the king Who loved Nell Gwynne, sat Admiral FitzRoy, Late captain of the Beagle, quite prick-eared With personal curiosity. Twice he told His neighbour that, by George, he wouldn’t ha’ missed This Donnybrook Fair for anything. He had sailed With Darwin round the world. They used to call him The old philosopher. Heard the bosun once, Pointing the officers out—damned funny it was!— “That’s Captain FitzRoy. That’s the second mate; And that”—pointing a thumb at Darwin’s back— “That’s our Fly-Catcher!” Best of fellows, too, But queer. He’d tell you, in the simplest way —As if it meant no more than pass the salt,— Something that knocked you endways; calmly shift A mountain-range, in half a dozen words, And sink it in the sea. In fact, FitzRoy Felt it his duty more than once, by George, To expostulate; told him plainly he’d upset Genesis and the Church; and then there’d be The devil and all to pay. And now, by George, He’d done it; and her Majesty’s Admiral Had come on purpose, all the way from town, To hear and see the end of it. So he said, Not wholly understanding why he came,— The memory of a figure rapt and bowed Over a shell, or finding in the rocks, As though by wizardry, relics of lost worlds; Moments that, by a hardly noticed phrase, Had touched with orderly meaning and new light The giant flaws and foldings in the hills; Moments when, in the cabin, he had stared Into the “old philosopher’s” microscope, And seen the invisible speck in a water-drop Grow to a great rose-window of radiant life In an immense cathedral. Vaguely enough, Perhaps in the dimmest hinterland of his mind, There lurked a quiet suspicion that, after all, His queer old friend had hit on something queer. Three places off, his face a twinkling mask Of keen Scots humour, Robert Chambers glanced Quietly at his watch, to hide a smile When some one who had “written the Vestiges,” And only half denied it, met his eye. The vacant platform glared expectancy, And held the gaze now of the impatient crowd. Then Henslow led the conquering Bishop in. Two rows of clerics, halfway down the hall, Drummed for their doughty champion with their heels. Above, in each recessed high window-seat, Bishop-adoring ladies clapped their hands. The rest filed in, mere adjuncts, modest foils. Hooker and Lubbock and Huxley took their chairs On Henslow’s left. The beautiful gaitered legs, By their divine prerogative, on his right, So carelessly crossed, more eloquently than words Assured the world that everything was well, And their translation into forms of speech A mere formality. Next to the Bishop sat A Transatlantic visitor with a twang, One Doctor Draper, his hard wrinkled skin Tinged by the infinite coffee he absorbed, A gaunt bone-coloured desert, unassuaged. He was a grim diplomatist, as befits A pilgrim of the cosmos; ready at Rome To tickle the Romans; and, if bishops ruled, And found themselves at odds with freeborn souls Outside the Land of Freedom, he’d befriend Bishops, bring in the New World, stars and all, To rectify that balance, and take home For souvenir, with a chip of the pyramids, The last odd homages of the obsequious Old. The president called him for his opening speech. He stood and beamed, enjoying to the full The sense that, with his mighty manuscript, He could delay the antagonists for an hour. He cleared his throat. He took from a little box A small black lozenge, popped it into his mouth, Leisurely rolled it under a ruminant tongue, Then placidly drawled his most momentous words: “Proh-fessur Henslow, Bishop Wilbur-force, Members, and friends, in this historic hall, I assk first, air we a fortooitous Con-course of atoms?” Half unconsciously, He struck at once to the single central heart Of all the questions asked by every age; As though he saw what only Shadow-of-a-Leaf Had watched last night, as in a crystal globe, That scene preparing, the interweaving clues Whose inconceivable intricacy at length, By “chance,” as blind men call it, through the maze Of life and time, at the one right juncture brought Two shadows, face to face, in an Oxford Street, Chambers and Huxley. “You’ll be there to-morrow.”— “No, I leave Oxford now.”— “The enemy means To annihilate Darwin. You will not desert us?”— “If you say that, I stay.” Each to his place Had moved in his own orbit, like a star, Or like an atom, free-will at one with law, In the unplanned plan of the Master-Dramatist, Where Doctor Draper blindly played his part And asked his pregnant question. He droned on, For one enormous hour, starkly maintained That Europe, in its intellectual life, By mere “fortooity,” never could have flowered To such results as blushed before him there In that historic hall of halls to-night. If Darwin thought so, he took leave to stand Beside them, and to smile the vast calm smile Of Arizona’s desert distances, Till all such dragon thoughts had coiled away. He took his chair. The great debate began. For prelude came a menacing growl of storm. A furious figure rose, like a sperm-whale, Out of the seething audience. A huge man, With small, hot, wicked eyes and cavernous mouth, Bellowed his own ferocious claim to speak On economic grounds. He had subscribed His guineas, ringing guineas of red gold, Ungrudgingly for years; but prophesied Withdrawal of all such guineas, on all sides, From this Association, if it failed To brand these most abominable views As blasphemous, bearing on their devilish brows, Between their horns, the birth-mark of the Beast. This last word hissed, he sank again. At once, Ere Henslow found his feet or spoke a word, Up leapt a raw-boned parson from the North, To seize his moment’s fame. With sawing arm The Reverend Dingle, like a windmill, vowed He’d prove upon the blackboard, in white chalk, By diagram—and the chalk was in his hand— “That mawnkey and mahn had separate pedigrees. Let A here be the mawnkey, and B the mahn.” Loud laughter; shouts of “mawnkey!” and “sit down” Extinguished him. He sat; and Henslow quelled The hubbub with one clarion-clear demand, Dictated, surely, by the ironic powers Who had primed the Bishop and prepared his fall: “Gentlemen, this discussion now must rest On scientific grounds.” At once there came Calls for the Bishop, who, rising from his chair, Urged by the same invisible ironies, Remarked that his old friend, Professor Beale, Had something to say first. That weighty first Conveyed the weight of his own words to come. Urged still by those invisible ones, his friend Dug the pit deeper; modestly declared, Despite his keen worn face and shoulders bowed In histologic vigils, that he felt His knowledge quite inadequate; and the way Was made straight—for the Bishop. The Bishop rose, mellifluous, bland, adroit. A gesture, lacking only the lawn sleeves To make it perfect, delicately conveyed His comfortable thought—that what amazed The sheepfold must be folly. Half the throng, His own experience told him, had not grasped The world-inweaving argument, could not think In æons. Æons, then, would be dismissed As vague and airy fantasies. He might choose His facts at will, unchallenged. He stood there Secure that his traditions could not fail, Basing his faith on schemes of thought designed By authorised “thinkers” in pure artistry, As free from Nature’s law as coloured blocks That children play with on the nursery hearth, And puzzle about and shift and twist and turn Until the beautiful picture, as ordained, Comes out, exact to the pattern, and reveals The artificer’s plan, the pattern, as arranged, By bishops, politic statesmen, teachers, guides, Who hold it in reserve, their final test Of truth, for times like this. He had been so sure Of something deeper than all schemes of thought That he had all too lightly primed himself With “facts” to match their fables; hastily crammed Into his mind’s convenient travelling bag (Sound leather, British) all that he required,— Not truth, but “a good argument.” He had asked Owen, who hated Huxley, to provide it; And he had brought it with him,—not the truth, Not even facts, those unrelated crumbs Of truth, the abiding consecrated whole. He had brought his borrowed “facts,” misunderstood, To meet, for the first time in all his life, Stark earnest thought, wrestling for truth alone, As men on earth discerned it. He had prayed, With something deeper than blind make-believe, Thy will be done on earth; and yet, and yet, The law wherein that will might be discerned, The law wherein that unity of heaven And earth might yet be found (could he but trust The truth, could he believe that his own God Lived in the living truth), he waved aside. These others had not found it, but they kept One faith that he had lost. Though it should slay them, They trusted in the truth. They could not see Where it might lead them. Only at times they felt As they deciphered the dark Book of Earth That, following its majestic rhythm of law, They followed the true path, the eternal way Of That which reigns. Prophetic flashes came. Words that the priest mechanically intoned Burned upon Huxley’s keen ironical page Like sudden sapphires, drawing their deeper light From that celestial City which endures Because it hath foundations: Shall I come Before the Eternal with burnt offerings? Hath not the Eternal showed thee what is good, That thou do justly and mercifully, and walk Humbly with the Eternal? O, irony of the Master-dramatist, Who set once more those lists; and sent His truth Unrecognised, as of old, to fight for life And prove itself in struggle and raise once more A nobler world above the world out-worn, Crushing all easy sophistry, though it stood Garbed as the priest of God. The Bishop seized His diplomatic vantage. The blunt truth Of Huxley’s warning offered itself to him As a rash gambit in their game of—tact. He seized it; gracefully smoothed the ruffled pride Of that great audience, trained in a sound school To judge by common-sense. His mobile face Revealed much that his politic words concealed. His strength was in that sound old British way— Derision of all things that transcend its codes In life, thought, art; the moon-calf’s happy creed That, if a moon-calf only sees the moon In thoughts that range the cosmos, his broad grin Sums the whole question; there’s no more to see. In all these aids, an innocent infidel, The Bishop put his trust; and, more than all, In vanity, the vacant self-conceit That, when it meets the masters of the mind And finds them bowed before the Inscrutable Power, Accepts their reverence and humility As tribute, due acknowledgment of fool’s right To give the final judgment, and annul The labour of a life-time in an hour. Dulcetly, first, he scoffed at Darwin’s facts. “Rock-pigeons now were what they had always been. Species had never changed. What were the proofs Even of the variation they required To make this theory possible? We had heard Mysterious rumours of a long-legged sheep Somewhere in Yorkshire (laughter). Let me ask Professor Huxley, here upon the left (All eyes on Huxley), who believes himself Descended from an ape (chuckles of glee), How recently this happened.” The Bishop turned, All smiling insolence, “May I beg to know If this descent is on your father’s side, Or on your mother’s?” He paused, to let the crowd Bellow its laughter. The unseen ironies Had trapped him and his flock; and neither knew. But Huxley knew. He turned, with a grim smile, And while the opposing triumph rocked and pealed, Struck one decisive palm upon his knee, And muttered low—“The Lord hath delivered him Into my hands.” His neighbour stared and thought His wits were wandering. Yet that undertone Sounded more deadly, had more victory in it, Than all the loud-mouthed minute’s dying roar. It died to a tense hush. The Bishop closed In solemn diapason. Darwin’s views Degraded woman. They debased mankind, And contradicted God’s most Holy Word. Applause! Applause! The hall a quivering mist Of clapping hands. From every windowseat A flutter of ladies’ handkerchiefs and shrill cries As of white swarming sea-gulls. The black rows Of clerics all exchanging red-faced nods, And drumming with their feet, as though to fill A hundred-pedalled organ with fresh wind. The Bishop, like a Gloire de Dijon rose With many-petalled smiles, his plump right hand Clasped in a firm congratulatory grip Of hickory-bones by Draper of New York; Who had small faith in what the Bishop said But heard the cheers, and gripped him as a man Who never means to let this good thing go. Motionless, on the left, the observant few, The silent delegates of a sterner power, With grave set faces, quietly looking on. At last the tumult, as all tumult must, Sank back to that deep silence. Henslow turned To Huxley without speaking. Once again The clock ticked audibly, but its old “Not Yet” Had somehow, in that uproar, in the face Of that tumultuous mockery, changed to Now! The lean tall figure of Huxley quietly rose. He looked for a moment thoughtfully at the crowd; Saw rows of hostile faces; caught the grin Of ignorant curiosity; here and there, A hopeful gleam of friendship; and, far back, The young, swift-footed, waiting for the fire. He fixed his eyes on these—then, in low tones, Clear, cool, incisive, “I have come here,” he said, “In the cause of Science only.” He paused again. Then, striking the mockery out of the mocker’s face, His voice rang out like steel— “I have heard nothing To prejudice the case of my august Client, who, as I told you, is not here.” At once a threefold picture flashed upon me, A glimpse, far off, through eyes of Shadow-of-a-Leaf, First, of a human seeker, there at Down, Gathering his endless cloud of witnesses From rocks, from stones, from trees; and from the signs In man’s own body of life’s æonian way; But, far above him, clothed with purer light, The stern, majestic Spirit of living Truth; And, more august than even his prophets knew, Through that eternal Spirit, the primal Power Returning into a world of faiths out-worn. Once more, as he spoke on, a thousand years Were but as yesterday. If these truths were true, This theory flooded the whole world with light. Could we believe that the Creator set In mockery all these birth-signs in the world, Or once in a million years had wrecked His work And shaped, in a flash, a myriad lives anew, Bearing in their own bodies all the signs Of their descent from those that He destroyed? Who left that ancient leaf within the flower? Who hid within the reptile those lost fins, And under the skin of the sea-floundering whale The bones of the lost thigh? Who dusked the foal With shadowy stripes, and under its hoof concealed Those ancient birdlike feet of its lost kin? Who matched that hoof with a rosy fingernail, Or furled that point within the human ear? Who had imprinted in the body of man, And in his embryo, all those intricate signs Of his forgotten lineage, even those gills Through which he drew his breath once in the sea? The speaker glanced at his antagonist. “You think all this too marvellous to be true; Yet you believe in miracles. You think The unfolding of this complicated life Around us, out of a simple primal form, Impossible; yet you know that every man Before his birth, a few brief years ago, Was once no more than a single living cell. You think it ends your theory of creation. You say that God made you; and yet you know —And reconcile your creed with what you know— That you yourself originally”—he held up A gleaming pencil-case—“were a little piece Of matter, not so large as the end of this. But if you ask, in fine, Whether I’d be ashamed to claim descent From that poor animal with the stooping gait And low intelligence, who can only grin And chatter as we pass by, or from a man Who could use high position and great gifts To crush one humble seeker after truth— I hesitate, but”—an outburst of applause From all who understood him drowned the words. He paused. The clock ticked audibly again. Then, quietly measuring every word, he drove The sentence home. “I asserted and repeat A man would have no cause to feel ashamed Of being descended through vast tracts of time From that poor ape. Were there an ancestor Whom I could not recall without a sense Of shame, it were a man, so placed, so gifted, Who sought to sway his hearers from the truth By aimless eloquence and by skilled appeals To their religious prejudice.” Was it the truth That conquered, or the blind sense of the blow Justly considered, delivered, and driven home, That brought a crash of applause from half the house? And more (for even the outright enemy Joined in that hubbub), though indignant cries, Protested vainly, “Abominable to treat The Bishop so!” The Bishop sat there dumb. Eliza Pym, adding her own quaint touch Of comedy, saw that pencil shine again In Huxley’s hand; compared it, at a glance Of fawn-like eyes, with the portentous form In gaiters; felt the whole world growing strange; Drew one hysterical breath, and swooned away.

And yet, and yet, the victor knew too well His victory had a relish of the dust. Even while the plaudits echoed in his ears, It troubled him. When he pondered it that night, A finer shame had touched him. He had used The weapons of his enemy at the last; And, if he had struck his enemy down for truth, He had struck him down with weapons he despised. He had used them with a swifter hand and eye, A subtler cunning; and he had set his heel On those who took too simply to their hearts A tale, whose ancient imagery enshrined A mystery that endured. He had proclaimed A fragment of a truth which, he knew well, Left the true Cause in darkness. Did he know More of that Cause than Genesis? Could he see Farther into that darkness than the child Folding its hands in prayer? More clearly far Than Darwin, whom he had warned of it, he knew The bounds of this new law; bade him beware Of his repeated dogma—Nature makes No leap. He pointed always to the Abyss Of darkness round the flickering spark of light Upheld by Science. Had Wilberforce been armed With knowledge and the spiritual steel Of Saint Augustine, who had also seen, Even in his age, a ladder of life to heaven, There had been a victory of another kind To lighten through the world. And Darwin knew it; But, while he marshalled his unnumbered truths, He lost the Truth; as one who takes command Of multitudinous armies in the night, And strives to envisage, in one sweep of the mind, Each squadron and each regiment of the whole, Ever the host that swept through his mind’s eye, Though all in ordered ranks and files, obscured Army on army the infinite truth beyond. The gates of Beauty closed against his mind, And barred him out from that eternal realm, Whose lucid harmonies on our night bestow Glimpses of absolute knowledge from above; Unravelling and ennobling, making clear Much that had baffled us, much that else was dark; So that the laws of Nature shine like roads, Firm roads that lead through a significant world Not downward, from the greater to the less, But up to the consummate soul of all. He could not follow them now. Back, back and back, He groped along the dark diminishing road. The ecstasy of music died away. The poet’s vision melted into a dream. He knew his loss, and mourned it; but it marred Not only his own happiness, as he thought. It blurred his vision, even of his own truths. He looked long at the butterfly’s radiant wings, Pondered their blaze of colour, and believed That butterfly wooers choosing their bright mates Through centuries of attraction and desire Evolved this loveliness. For he only saw The blaze of colour, the flash that lured the eye. He did not see the exquisite pattern there, The diamonded fans of the under-wing, Inlaid with intricate harmonies of design; The delicate little octagons of pearl, The moons like infinitesimal fairy flowers, The lozenges of gold, and grey, and blue All ordered in an intellectual scheme, Where form to form responded and faint lights Echoed faint lights, and shadowy fringes ran Like Elfin curtains on a silvery thread, Shadow replying to shadow through the whole. Did eyes of the butterfly wooer mark all this,— A subtlety too fine for half mankind? He tossed a shred of paper on to his lawn; He saw the white wings blindly fluttering round it. He did not hear the whisper of Shadow-of-a-Leaf, Was this their exquisite artistry of choice? Had wooers like these evolved this loveliness? He groped into the orchestral universe As one who strives to trace a symphony Back to its cause, and with laborious care Feels with his hand the wood of the violins, And bids you mark—O good, bleak, honest soul, So fearful of false hopes!—that all is hollow. He tells you on what tree the wood was grown. He plucks the catgut, tells you whence it came, Gives you the name and pedigree of the cat; Nay, even affirms a mystery, and will talk Of sundry dark vibrations that affect The fleshly instrument of the human ear; And so, with a world-excluding accuracy— O, never doubt that every step was true!— Melts the great music into less than air And misses everything. Everything! On one side The music soaring endlessly through heavens Within the human soul; on the other side, The unseen Composed of whose transcendent life The music speaks in souls made still to hear. He clung to his vera causa. In that law He saw the way of the Power, but not the Power Determining the way. Did men reject The laws of Newton, binding all the worlds, Because they still knew nothing of the Power That bound them? The stone fell. He knew not why. The sun controlled the planets, and the law Was constant; but the mystery of it was masked Under a name; and no man knew the Power That gripped the worlds in that unchanging bond, Or whether, in the twinkling of an eye, The Power might not release them from that bond, As a hand opens, and the wide universe Change in a flash, and vanish like a shadow, As prophets had foretold. He could not think That chance decreed the boundless march of law He saw in the starry heavens. Yet he could think Of “chance” on earth; and, while he thought, declare “Chance” was not “chance” but law unrecognised; Then, even while he said it, he would use The ambiguous word, base his own law on “chance”; And, even while he used it, there would move Before his eyes in every flake of colour, Inlaid upon the butterfly’s patterned wing, Legions of atoms wheeling each to its place In ever constant law; and he knew well That, even in the living eye that saw them, The self-same Power that bound the starry worlds Controlled a myriad atoms, every one An ordered system; and in every cloud Of wind-blown dust and every breaking wave Upon the storm-tossed sea, an infinite host Of infinitesimal systems moved by law Each to its place; and, in each growing flower, Myriads of atoms like concentred suns And planets, these to the leaf and those to the crown, Moved in unerring order, and by a law That bound all heights and depths of the universe, In an unbroken unity. By what Power? There was one Power, one only known to man, That could determine action. Herschel knew it; The power whereby the mind uplifts the hand And lets it fall, the living personal Will. Ah, but his task, his endless task on earth, Bent his head earthward. He must find the way Before he claimed the heights. No Newton he; Though men began to acclaim him and his law As though they solved all mysteries and annulled All former creeds, and changed the heart of heaven. No Newton he; not even a Galileo; But one who patiently, doggedly laboured on, As Tycho Brahe laboured in old days, Numbering the stars, recording fact on fact, For those, who, after centuries, might discern The meaning and the cause of what he saw. Visions of God and Heaven were not for him, Unless his “facts” revealed them, as the crown Of his own fight for knowledge. It might be The final test of man, the narrow way Proving him worthy of immortal life, That he should face this darkness and this death Worthily and renounce all easy hope, All consolation, all but the wintry smile Upon the face of Truth as he discerns it, Here upon earth, his only glimmer of light, Leading him onward to an end unknown. Faith! Faith! O patient, inarticulate soul, If this were faithlessness, there was a Power, So whispered Shadow-of-a-Leaf, that shared it with him; The Power that bowed His glory into darkness To make a world in suffering and in death, The passionate price that even the Omnipotent Must pay for love, and love’s undying crown. He hardly heard the whisper; could not hear it And keep his own resolve. He bowed his head In darkness; and, henceforth, those inward gates Into the realms of the supernal light Began to close. He knew that they were closing; And yet—was this the dark key to Creation?— He shared the ecstasy also; shared that sense Of triumph; broke the Bread and drank the Wine In sacred drops and morsels of the truth; Shared, in renouncement of all else but truth, A sense that he could never breathe in words To any one else, a sense that in this age It was expedient that a man should lose The glory, and die this darker new-found death, To save the people from their rounded creeds, Their faithless faith, and crowns too lightly won. ... O, yet the memory of one midnight hour! Would that she knew. Would God that she knew now.... Truer than all his knowledge was that cry; The cry of the blind life struggling through the dark, Upward ... the blind brow lifted to the unseen. He groped along the dark unending way And saw, although he knew not what he saw, Out of the struggle of life, a mightier law Emerging; and, when man could rise no higher By the fierce law of Nature, he beheld Nature herself at war against herself. He heard, although he knew not what he heard, A Voice that, triumphing over her clashing chords, Resolved them into an infinite harmony. Whose was that Voice? What Power within the flesh Cast off the flesh for a glory in the mind, And leapt to victory in self-conquering love? What Voice, whose Power, cast Nature underfoot In Bruno, when the flames gnawed at his flesh; In Socrates; and, in those obscure Christs Who daily die; and, though none other sees, Lay hands upon the wheel of the universe And master it; and the sun stands dark at noon? These things he saw but dimly. All his life He moved along the steep and difficult way Of Truth in darkness; but the Voice of Truth Whispered in darkness, out of the mire and day, And through the blood-stained agony of the world, “Fear nothing. Follow Me. I am the Way.” So, when Death touched him also, and England bore His dust into her deepening innermost shrine, The Voice he heard long since, and could not hear, Rose like the fuller knowledge, given by Death To one that could best lead him upward now, Rose like a child’s voice, opening up the heavens, I am the Resurrection and the Life.