FullReads

So the earth is growing green again, and love is come again unto the hearts of us old sober-coated fellows. Oh, Madam, your feathers gleam wondrous black, and your bonnie bright eye stabs deep. Come, sit by our side, and we’ll tell you a tale such as rook never told before. It’s the tale of a nest in a topmost bough, that sways in the good west wind. It’s strong without, but it’s soft within, where the little green eggs lie safe. And there sits in that nest a lady sweet, and she caws with joy, for, afar, she sees the rook she loves the best. Oh, he has been east, and he has been west, and his crop it is full of worms and slugs, and they are all for her.

We are old, old rooks, so many of us. The white is mingling with the purple black upon our breasts. We have seen these tall elms grow from saplings; we have seen the old trees fall and die. Yet each season come to us again the young thoughts. So we mate and build and gather that again our old, old hearts may quiver to the thin cry of our newborn.

Mother Nature has but one care, the children. We talk of Love as the Lord of Life: it is but the Minister. Our novels end where Nature’s tale begins. The drama that our curtain falls upon, is but the prologue to her play. How the ancient Dame must laugh as she listens to the prattle of her children. “Is Marriage a Failure?” “Is Life worth Living?” “The New Woman versus the Old.” So, perhaps, the waves of the Atlantic discuss vehemently whether they shall flow east or west.

Motherhood is the law of the Universe. The whole duty of man is to be a mother. We labour: to what end? the children–the woman in the home, the man in the community. The nation takes thought for its future: why? In a few years its statesmen, its soldiers, its merchants, its toilers, will be gathered unto their fathers. Why trouble we ourselves about the future? The country pours its blood and treasure into the earth that the children may reap. Foolish Jacques Bonhomie, his addled brain full of dreams, rushes with bloody hands to give his blood for Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. He will not live to see, except in vision, the new world he gives his bones to build–even his spinning word-whipped head knows that. But the children! they shall live sweeter lives. The peasant leaves his fireside to die upon the battle-field. What is it to him, a grain in the human sand, that Russia should conquer the East, that Germany should be united, that the English flag should wave above new lands? the heritage his fathers left him shall be greater for his sons. Patriotism! what is it but the mother instinct of a people?

Take it that the decree has gone forth from Heaven: There shall be no more generations, with this life the world shall die. Think you we should move another hand? The ships would rot in the harbours, the grain would rot in the ground. Should we paint pictures, write books, make music? hemmed in by that onward creeping sea of silence. Think you with what eyes husband and wife would look on one another. Think you of the wooing–the spring of Love dried up; love only a pool of stagnant water.

How little we seem to realize this foundation of our life. Herein, if nowhere else, lies our eternity. This Ego shall never die–unless the human race from beginning to end be but a passing jest of the Gods, to be swept aside when wearied of, leaving room for new experiments. These features of mine–we will not discuss their aesthetic value–shall never disappear; modified, varied, but in essential the same, they shall continue in ever increasing circles to the end of Time. This temperament of mine–this good and evil that is in me, it shall grow with every age, spreading ever wider, combining, amalgamating. I go into my children and my children’s children, I am eternal. I am they, they are I. The tree withers and you clear the ground, thankful if out of its dead limbs you can make good firewood; but its spirit, its life, is in fifty saplings. The tree dies not, it changes.