Kitabı oku: «Madam How and Lady Why; Or, First Lessons in Earth Lore for Children», sayfa 11
And the competition of species means, that each thing, and kind of things, has to compete against the things round it; and to see which is the stronger; and the stronger live, and breed, and spread, and the weaker die out.
But that is very hard.
I know it, my child, I know it. But so it is. And Madam How, no doubt, would be often very clumsy and very cruel, without meaning it, because she never sees beyond her own nose, or thinks at all about the consequences of what she is doing. But Lady Why, who does think about consequences, is her mistress, and orders her about for ever. And Lady Why is, I believe, as loving as she is wise; and therefore we must trust that she guides this great war between living things, and takes care that Madam How kills nothing which ought not to die, and takes nothing away without putting something more beautiful and something more useful in its place; and that even if England were, which God forbid, overrun once more with forests and bramble-brakes, that too would be of use somehow, somewhere, somewhen, in the long ages which are to come hereafter.
And you must remember, too, that since men came into the world with rational heads on their shoulders, Lady Why has been handing over more and more of Madam How’s work to them, and some of her own work too: and bids them to put beautiful and useful things in the place of ugly and useless ones; so that now it is men’s own fault if they do not use their wits, and do by all the world what they have done by these pastures—change it from a barren moor into a rich hay-field, by copying the laws of Madam How, and making grass compete against heath. But you look thoughtful: what is it you want to know?
Why, you say all living things must fight and scramble for what they can get from each other: and must not I too? For I am a living thing.
Ah, that is the old question, which our Lord answered long ago, and said, “Be not anxious what ye shall eat or what ye shall drink, or wherewithal you shall be clothed. For after all these things do the heathen seek, and your Heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of these things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you.” A few, very few, people have taken that advice. But they have been just the salt of the earth, which has kept mankind from decaying.
But what has that to do with it?
See. You are a living thing, you say. Are you a plant?
No.
Are you an animal?
I do not know. Yes. I suppose I am. I eat, and drink, and sleep, just as dogs and cats do.
Yes. There is no denying that. No one knew that better than St. Paul when he told men that they had a flesh; that is, a body, and an animal’s nature in them. But St. Paul told them—of course he was not the first to say so, for all the wise heathens have known that—that there was something more in us, which he called a spirit. Some call it now the moral sentiment, some one thing, some another, but we will keep to the old word: we shall not find a better.
Yes, I know that I have a spirit, a soul.
Better to say that you are a spirit. But what does St. Paul say? That our spirit is to conquer our flesh, and keep it down. That the man in us, in short, which is made in the likeness of God, is to conquer the animal in us, which is made in the likeness of the dog and the cat, and sometimes (I fear) in the likeness of the ape or the pig. You would not wish to be like a cat, much less like an ape or a pig?
Of course not.
Then do not copy them, by competing and struggling for existence against other people.
What do you mean?
Did you never watch the pigs feeding?
Yes, and how they grudge and quarrel, and shove each other’s noses out of the trough, and even bite each other because they are so jealous which shall get most.
That is it. And how the biggest pig drives the others away, and would starve them while he got fat, if the man did not drive him off in his turn.
Oh, yes; I know.
Then no wiser than those pigs are worldly men who compete, and grudge, and struggle with each other, which shall get most money, most fame, most power over their fellow-men. They will tell you, my child, that that is the true philosophy, and the true wisdom; that competition is the natural law of society, and the source of wealth and prosperity. Do not you listen to them. That is the wisdom of this world, which the flesh teaches the animals; and those who follow it, like the animals, will perish. Such men are not even as wise as Sweep the retriever.
Not as wise as Sweep?
Not they. Sweep will not take away Victor’s bone, though he is ten times as big as Victor, and could kill him in a moment; and when he catches a rabbit, does he eat it himself?
Of course not; he brings it and lays it down at our feet.
Because he likes better to do his duty, and be praised for it, than to eat the rabbit, dearly as he longs to eat it.
But he is only an animal. Who taught him to be generous, and dutiful, and faithful?
Who, indeed! Not we, you know that, for he has grown up with us since a puppy. How he learnt it, and his parents before him, is a mystery, of which we can only say, God has taught them, we know not how. But see what has happened—that just because dogs have learnt not to be selfish and to compete—that is, have become civilised and tame—therefore we let them live with us, and love them. Because they try to be good in their simple way, therefore they too have all things added to them, and live far happier, and more comfortable lives than the selfish wolf and fox.
But why have not all animals found out that?
I cannot tell: there may be wise animals and foolish animals, as there are wise and foolish men. Indeed there are. I see a very wise animal there, who never competes; for she has learned something of the golden lesson—that it is more blessed to give than to receive; and she acts on what she has learnt, all day long.
Which do you mean? Why, that is a bee.
Yes, it is a bee: and I wish I were as worthy in my place as that bee is in hers. I wish I could act up as well as she does to the true wisdom, which is self-sacrifice. For whom is that bee working? For herself? If that was all, she only needs to suck the honey as she goes. But she is storing up the wax under her stomach, and bee-bread in her thighs—for whom? Not for herself only, or even for her own children: but for the children of another bee, her queen. For them she labours all day long, builds for them, feeds them, nurses them, spends her love and cunning on them. So does that ant on the path. She is carrying home that stick to build for other ants’ children. So do the white ants in the tropics. They have learnt not to compete, but to help each other; not to be selfish, but to sacrifice themselves; and therefore they are strong.
But you told me once that ants would fight and plunder each other’s nests. And once we saw two hives of bees fighting in the air, and falling dead by dozens.
My child, do not men fight, and kill each other by thousands with sharp shot and cold steel, because, though they have learnt the virtue of patriotism, they have not yet learnt that of humanity? We must not blame the bees and ants if they are no wiser than men. At least they are wise enough to stand up for their country, that is, their hive, and work for it, and die for it, if need be; and that makes them strong.
But how does that make them strong?
How, is a deep question, and one I can hardly answer yet. But that it has made them so there is no doubt. Look at the solitary bees—the governors as we call them, who live in pairs, in little holes in the banks. How few of them there are; and they never seem to increase in numbers. Then look at the hive bees, how, just because they are civilised,—that is, because they help each other, and feed each other, instead of being solitary and selfish,—they breed so fast, and get so much food, that if they were not killed for their honey, they would soon become a nuisance, and drive us out of the parish.
But then we give them their hives ready made.
True. But in old forest countries, where trees decay and grow hollow, the bees breed in them.
Yes. I remember the bee tree in the fir avenue.
Well then, in many forests in hot countries the bees swarm in hollow trees; and they, and the ants, and the white ants, have it all their own way, and are lords and masters, driving the very wild beasts before them, while the ants and white ants eat up all gardens, and plantations, and clothes, and furniture; till it is a serious question whether in some hot countries man will ever be able to settle, so strong have the ants grown, by ages of civilisation, and not competing against their brothers and sisters.
But may I not compete for prizes against the other boys?
Well, there is no harm in that; for you do not harm the others, even if you win. They will have learnt all the more, while trying for the prize; and so will you, even if you don’t get it. But I tell you fairly, trying for prizes is only fit for a child; and when you become a man, you must put away childish things—competition among the rest.
But surely I may try to be better and wiser and more learned than everybody else?
My dearest child, why try for that? Try to be as good, and wise, and learned as you can, and if you find any man, or ten thousand men, superior to you, thank God for it. Do you think that there can be too much wisdom in the world?
Of course not: but I should like to be the wisest man in it.
Then you would only have the heaviest burden of all men on your shoulders.
Why?
Because you would be responsible for more foolish people than any one else. Remember what wise old Moses said, when some one came and told him that certain men in the camp were prophesying—“Would God all the Lord’s people did prophesy!” Yes; it would have saved Moses many a heartache, and many a sleepless night, if all the Jews had been wise as he was, and wiser still. So do not you compete with good and wise men, but simply copy them: and whatever you do, do not compete with the wolves, and the apes, and the swine of this world; for that is a game at which you are sure to be beaten.
Why?
Because Lady Why, if she loves you (as I trust she does), will take care that you are beaten, lest you should fancy it was really profitable to live like a cunning sort of animal, and not like a true man. And how she will do that I can tell you. She will take care that you always come across a worse man than you are trying to be,—a more apish man, who can tumble and play monkey-tricks for people’s amusement better than you can; or a more swinish man, who can get at more of the pig’s-wash than you can; or a more wolfish man, who will eat you up if you do not get out of his way; and so she will disappoint and disgust you, my child, with that greedy, selfish, vain animal life, till you turn round and see your mistake, and try to live the true human life, which also is divine;—to be just and honourable, gentle and forgiving, generous and useful—in one word, to fear God, and keep His commandments: and as you live that life, you will find that, by the eternal laws of Lady Why, all other things will be added to you; that people will be glad to know you, glad to help you, glad to employ you, because they see that you will be of use to them, and will do them no harm. And if you meet (as you will meet) with people better and wiser than yourself, then so much the better for you; for they will love you, and be glad to teach you when they see that you are living the unselfish and harmless life; and that you come to them, not as foolish Critias came to Socrates, to learn political cunning, and become a selfish and ambitious tyrant, but as wise Plato came, that he might learn the laws of Lady Why, and love them for her sake, and teach them to all mankind. And so you, like the plants and animals, will get your deserts exactly, without competing and struggling for existence as they do.
And all this has come out of looking at the hay-field and the wild moor.
Why not? There is an animal in you, and there is a man in you. If the animal gets the upper hand, all your character will fall back into wild useless moor; if the man gets the upper hand, all your character will be cultivated into rich and fertile field. Choose.
Now come down home. The haymakers are resting under the hedge. The horses are dawdling home to the farm. The sun is getting low, and the shadows long. Come home, and go to bed while the house is fragrant with the smell of hay, and dream that you are still playing among the haycocks. When you grow old, you will have other and sadder dreams.
CHAPTER XI—THE WORLD’S END
Hullo! hi! wake up. Jump out of bed, and come to the window, and see where you are.
What a wonderful place!
So it is: though it is only poor old Ireland. Don’t you recollect that when we started I told you we were going to Ireland, and through it to the World’s End; and here we are now safe at the end of the old world, and beyond us the great Atlantic, and beyond that again, thousands of miles away, the new world, which will be rich and prosperous, civilised and noble, thousands of years hence, when this old world, it may be, will be dead, and little children there will be reading in their history books of Ancient England and of Ancient France, as you now read of Greece and Rome.
But what a wonderful place it is! What are those great green things standing up in the sky, all over purple ribs and bars, with their tops hid in the clouds?
Those are mountains; the bones of some old world, whose poor bare sides Madam How is trying to cover with rich green grass.
And how far off are they?
How I should like to walk up to the top of that one which looks quite close.
You will find it a long walk up there; three miles, I dare say, over black bogs and banks of rock, and up corries and cliffs which you could not climb. There are plenty of cows on that mountain: and yet they look so small, you could not see them, nor I either, without a glass. That long white streak, zigzagging down the mountain side, is a roaring cataract of foam five hundred feet high, full now with last night’s rain; but by this afternoon it will have dwindled to a little thread; and to-morrow, when you get up, if no more rain has come down, it will be gone. Madam How works here among the mountains swiftly and hugely, and sometimes terribly enough; as you shall see when you have had your breakfast, and come down to the bridge with me.
But what a beautiful place it is! Flowers and woods and a lawn; and what is that great smooth patch in the lawn just under the window?
Is it an empty flower-bed?
Ah, thereby hangs a strange tale. We will go and look at it after breakfast, and then you shall see with your own eyes one of the wonders which I have been telling you of.
And what is that shining between the trees?
Water.
Is it a lake?
Not a lake, though there are plenty round here; that is salt water, not fresh. Look away to the right, and you see it through the opening of the woods again and again: and now look above the woods. You see a faint blue line, and gray and purple lumps like clouds, which rest upon it far away. That, child, is the great Atlantic Ocean, and those are islands in the far west. The water which washes the bottom of the lawn was but a few months ago pouring out of the Gulf of Mexico, between the Bahamas and Florida, and swept away here as the great ocean river of warm water which we call the Gulf Stream, bringing with it out of the open ocean the shoals of mackerel, and the porpoises and whales which feed upon them. Some fine afternoon we will run down the bay and catch strange fishes, such as you never saw before, and very likely see a living whale.
What? such a whale as they get whalebone from, and which eats sea-moths?
No, they live far north, in the Arctic circle; these are grampuses, and bottle-noses, which feed on fish; not so big as the right whales, but quite big enough to astonish you, if one comes up and blows close to the boat. Get yourself dressed and come down, and then we will go out; we shall have plenty to see and talk of at every step.
Now, you have finished your breakfast at last, so come along, and we shall see what we shall see. First run out across the gravel, and scramble up that bank of lawn, and you will see what you fancied was an empty flower-bed.
Why, it is all hard rock.
Ah, you are come into the land of rocks now: out of the land of sand and gravel; out of a soft young corner of the world into a very hard, old, weather-beaten corner; and you will see rocks enough, and too many for the poor farmers, before you go home again.
But how beautifully smooth and flat the rock is: and yet it is all rounded.
What is it like?
Like—like the half of a shell.
Not badly said, but think again.
Like—like—I know what it is like. Like the back of some great monster peeping up through the turf.
You have got it. Such rocks as these are called in Switzerland “roches moutonnées,” because they are, people fancy, like sheep’s backs. Now look at the cracks and layers in it. They run across the stone; they have nothing to do with the shape of it. You see that?
Yes: but here are cracks running across them, all along the stone, till the turf hides them.
Look at them again; they are no cracks; they do not go into the stone.
I see. They are scratched; something like those on the elder-stem at home, where the cats sharpen their claws. But it would take a big cat to make them.
Do you recollect what I told you of Madam How’s hand, more flexible than any hand of man, and yet strong enough to grind the mountains into paste?
I know. Ice! ice! ice! But are these really ice-marks?
Child, on the place where we now stand, over rich lawns, and warm woods, and shining lochs, lay once on a time hundreds, it may be thousands, of feet of solid ice, crawling off yonder mountain-tops into the ocean there outside; and this is one of its tracks. See how the scratches all point straight down the valley, and straight out to sea. Those mountains are 2000 feet high: but they were much higher once; for the ice has planed the tops off them. Then, it seems to me, the ice sank, and left the mountains standing out of it about half their height, and at that level it stayed, till it had planed down all those lower moors of smooth bare rock between us and the Western ocean; and then it sank again, and dwindled back, leaving moraines (that is, heaps of dirt and stones) all up these valleys here and there, till at the last it melted all away, and poor old Ireland became fit to live in again. We will go down the bay some day and look at those moraines, some of them quite hills of earth, and then you will see for yourself how mighty a chisel the ice-chisel was, and what vast heaps of chips it has left behind. Now then, down over the lawn towards the bridge. Listen to the river, louder and louder every step we take.
What a roar! Is there a waterfall there?
No. It is only the flood. And underneath the roar of that flood, do you not hear a deeper note—a dull rumbling, as if from underground?
Yes. What is it?
The rolling of great stones under water, which are being polished against each other, as they hurry toward the sea. Now, up on the parapet of the bridge. I will hold you tight. Look and see Madam How’s rain-spade at work. Look at the terrible yellow torrent below us, almost filling up the arches of the bridge, and leaping high in waves and crests of foam.
Oh, the bridge is falling into the water!
Not a bit. You are not accustomed to see water running below you at ten miles an hour. Never mind that feeling. It will go off in a few seconds. Look; the water is full six feet up the trunks of the trees; over the grass and the king fern, and the tall purple loose-strife—
Oh! Here comes a tree dancing down!
And there are some turfs which have been cut on the mountain. And there is a really sad sight. Look what comes now.
One—two—three.
Why, they are sheep.
Yes. And a sad loss they will be to some poor fellow in the glen above.
And oh! Look at the pig turning round and round solemnly in the corner under the rock. Poor piggy! He ought to have been at home safe in his stye, and not wandering about the hills. And what are these coming now?
Butter firkins, I think. Yes. This is a great flood. It is well if there are no lives lost.
But is it not cruel of Madam How to make such floods?
Well—let us ask one of these men who are looking over the bridge.
Why, what does he say? I cannot understand one word. Is he talking Irish?
Irish-English at least: but what he said was, that it was a mighty fine flood entirely, praised be God; and would help on the potatoes and oats after the drought, and set the grass growing again on the mountains.
And what is he saying now?
That the river will be full of salmon and white trout after this.
What does he mean?
That under our feet now, if we could see through the muddy water, dozens of salmon and sea-trout are running up from the sea.
What! up this furious stream?
Yes. What would be death to you is pleasure and play to them. Up they are going, to spawn in the little brooks among the mountains; and all of them are the best of food, fattened on the herrings and sprats in the sea outside, Madam How’s free gift, which does not cost man a farthing, save the expense of nets and rods to catch them.
How can that be?
I will give you a bit of political economy. Suppose a pound of salmon is worth a shilling; and a pound of beef is worth a shilling likewise. Before we can eat the beef, it has cost perhaps tenpence to make that pound of beef out of turnips and grass and oil-cake; and so the country is only twopence a pound richer for it. But Mr. Salmon has made himself out of what he eats in the sea, and so has cost nothing; and the shilling a pound is all clear gain. There—you don’t quite understand that piece of political economy. Indeed, it is only in the last two or three years that older heads than yours have got to understand it, and have passed the wise new salmon laws, by which the rivers will be once more as rich with food as the land is, just as they were hundreds of years ago. But now, look again at the river. What do you think makes it so yellow and muddy?
Dirt, of course.
And where does that come from?
Off the mountains?
Yes. Tons on tons of white mud are being carried down past us now; and where will they go?
Into the sea?
Yes, and sink there in the still water, to make new strata at the bottom; and perhaps in them, ages hence, some one will find the bones of those sheep, and of poor Mr. Pig too, fossil—
And the butter firkins too. What fun to find a fossil butter firkin!
But now lift up your eyes to the jagged mountain crests, and their dark sides all laced with silver streams. Out of every crack and cranny there aloft, the rain is bringing down dirt, and stones too, which have been split off by the winter’s frosts, deepening every little hollow, and sharpening every peak, and making the hills more jagged and steep year by year.
When the ice went away, the hills were all scraped smooth and round by the glaciers, like the flat rock upon the lawn; and ugly enough they must have looked, most like great brown buns. But ever since then, Madam How has been scooping them out again by her water-chisel into deep glens, mighty cliffs, sharp peaks, such as you see aloft, and making the old hills beautiful once more. Why, even the Alps in Switzerland have been carved out by frost and rain, out of some great flat. The very peak of the Matterhorn, of which you have so often seen a picture, is but one single point left of some enormous bun of rock. All the rest has been carved away by rain and frost; and some day the Matterhorn itself will be carved away, and its last stone topple into the glacier at its foot. See, as we have been talking, we have got into the woods.
Oh, what beautiful woods, just like our own.
Not quite. There are some things growing here which do not grow at home, as you will soon see. And there are no rocks at home, either, as there are here.
How strange, to see trees growing out of rocks! How do their roots get into the stone?
There is plenty of rich mould in the cracks for them to feed on—
“Health to the oak of the mountains; he trusts to the might of the rock-clefts.
Deeply he mines, and in peace feeds on the wealth of the stone.”
How many sorts of trees there are—oak, and birch and nuts, and mountain-ash, and holly and furze, and heather.
And if you went to some of the islands in the lake up in the glen, you would find wild arbutus—strawberry-tree, as you call it. We will go and get some one day or other.
How long and green the grass is, even on the rocks, and the ferns, and the moss, too. Everything seems richer here than at home.
Of course it is. You are here in the land of perpetual spring, where frost and snow seldom, or never comes.
Oh, look at the ferns under this rock! I must pick some.
Pick away. I will warrant you do not pick all the sorts.
Yes. I have got them all now.
Not so hasty, child; there is plenty of a beautiful fern growing among that moss, which you have passed over. Look here.
What! that little thing a fern!
Hold it up to the light, and see.
What a lovely little thing, like a transparent sea-weed, hung on black wire. What is it?
Film fern, Hymenophyllum. But what are you staring at now, with all your eyes?
Oh! that rock covered with green stars and a cloud of little white and pink flowers growing out of them.
Aha! my good little dog! I thought you would stand to that game when you found it.
What is it, though?
You must answer that yourself. You have seen it a hundred times before.
Why, it is London Pride, that grows in the garden at home.
Of course it is: but the Irish call it St. Patrick’s cabbage; though it got here a long time before St. Patrick; and St. Patrick must have been very short of garden-stuff if he ever ate it.
But how did it get here from London?
No, no. How did it get to London from hence? For from this country it came. I suppose the English brought it home in Queen Bess’s or James the First’s time.
But if it is wild here, and will grow so well in England, why do we not find it wild in England too?
For the same reason that there are no toads or snakes in Ireland. They had not got as far as Ireland before Ireland was parted off from England. And St. Patrick’s cabbage, and a good many other plants, had not got as far as England.
But why?
Why, I don’t know. But this I know: that when Madam How makes a new sort of plant or animal, she starts it in one single place, and leaves it to take care of itself and earn its own living—as she does you and me and every one—and spread from that place all round as far as it can go. So St. Patrick’s cabbage got into this south-west of Ireland, long, long ago; and was such a brave sturdy little plant, that it clambered up to the top of the highest mountains, and over all the rocks. But when it got to the rich lowlands to the eastward, in county Cork, it found all the ground taken up already with other plants; and as they had enough to do to live themselves, they would not let St. Patrick’s cabbage settle among them; and it had to be content with living here in the far-west—and, what was very sad, had no means of sending word to its brothers and sisters in the Pyrenees how it was getting on.
What do you mean? Are you making fun of me?
Not the least. I am only telling you a very strange story, which is literally true. Come, and sit down on this bench. You can’t catch that great butterfly, he is too strong on the wing for you.
But oh, what a beautiful one!
Yes, orange and black, silver and green, a glorious creature. But you may see him at home sometimes: that plant close to you, you cannot see at home.
Why, it is only great spurge, such as grows in the woods at home.
No. It is Irish spurge which grows here, and sometimes in Devonshire, and then again in the west of Europe, down to the Pyrenees. Don’t touch it. Our wood spurge is poisonous enough, but this is worse still; if you get a drop of its milk on your lip or eye, you will be in agonies for half a day. That is the evil plant with which the poachers kill the salmon.
How do they do that?
When the salmon are spawning up in the little brooks, and the water is low, they take that spurge, and grind it between two stones under water, and let the milk run down into the pool; and at that all the poor salmon turn up dead. Then comes the water-bailiff, and catches the poachers. Then comes the policeman, with his sword at his side and his truncheon under his arm: and then comes a “cheap journey” to Tralee Gaol, in which those foolish poachers sit and reconsider themselves, and determine not to break the salmon laws—at least till next time.
But why is it that this spurge, and St. Patrick’s cabbage, grow only here in the west? If they got here of themselves, where did they come from? All outside there is sea; and they could not float over that.
Come, I say, and sit down on this bench, and I will tell you a tale,—the story of the Old Atlantis, the sunken land in the far West. Old Plato, the Greek, told legends of it, which you will read some day; and now it seems as if those old legends had some truth in them, after all. We are standing now on one of the last remaining scraps of the old Atlantic land. Look down the bay. Do you see far away, under, the mountains, little islands, long and low?
Oh, yes.
Some of these are old slate, like the mountains; others are limestone; bits of the old coral-reef to the west of Ireland which became dry land.
I know. You told me about it.
Then that land, which is all eaten up by the waves now, once joined Ireland to Cornwall, and to Spain, and to the Azores, and I suspect to the Cape of Good Hope, and what is stranger, to Labrador, on the coast of North America.
