I make no apology for this digression, especially
as this is an introduction which all young people
and those who never like to think (and it is a bad
habit) will naturally skip. It seems to me very
desirable that we should sometimes try to understand
the limitations of our nature, so that we may not be
carried away by the pride of knowledge. Man’s
cleverness is almost indefinite, and stretches like
an elastic band, but human nature is like an iron
ring. You can go round and round it, you can
polish it highly, you can even flatten it a little
on one side, whereby you will make it bulge out the
other, but you will never, while the world
endures and man is man, increase its total circumference.
It is the one fixed unchangeable thing —
fixed as the stars, more enduring than the mountains,
as unalterable as the way of the Eternal. Human
nature is God’s kaleidoscope, and the little
bits of coloured glass which represent our passions,
hopes, fears, joys, aspirations towards good and evil
and what not, are turned in His mighty hand as surely
and as certainly as it turns the stars, and continually
fall into new patterns and combinations. But
the composing elements remain the same, nor will there
be one more bit of coloured glass nor one less for
ever and ever.
This being so, supposing for the sake of argument
we divide ourselves into twenty parts, nineteen savage
and one civilized, we must look to the nineteen savage
portions of our nature, if we would really understand
ourselves, and not to the twentieth, which, though
so insignificant in reality, is spread all over the
other nineteen, making them appear quite different
from what they really are, as the blacking does a
boot, or the veneer a table. It is on the nineteen
rough serviceable savage portions that we fall back
on emergencies, not on the polished but unsubstantial
twentieth. Civilization should wipe away our
tears, and yet we weep and cannot be comforted.
Warfare is abhorrent to her, and yet we strike out
for hearth and home, for honour and fair fame, and
can glory in the blow. And so on, through everything.
So, when the heart is stricken, and the head is humbled
in the dust, civilization fails us utterly.
Back, back, we creep, and lay us like little children
on the great breast of Nature, she that perchance
may soothe us and make us forget, or at least rid
remembrance of its sting. Who has not in his
great grief felt a longing to look upon the outward
features of the universal Mother; to lie on the mountains
and watch the clouds drive across the sky and hear
the rollers break in thunder on the shore, to let
his poor struggling life mingle for a while in her
life; to feel the slow beat of her eternal heart,
and to forget his woes, and let his identity be swallowed
in the vast imperceptibly moving energy of her of
whom we are, from whom we came, and with whom we shall
again be mingled, who gave us birth, and will in a
day to come give us our burial also.
