I
Lamarck and Buffon
What wars are these? Far off, a bugle blew.
Out of oblivion rose the vanished world.
I stood in Amiens, in a narrow street
Outside a dark old college. I saw a boy,
A budding Abbé, pallid from his books,
Beaked like a Roman eagle. He stole out
Between grim gates; and stripping off his bands,
Hastened away, a distance in his eyes;
As though, through an earthly bugle, he had heard
A deeper bugle, summoning to a war
Beyond these wars, with enemies yet unknown.
I saw him bargaining for a starveling horse
In Picardy and riding to the North,
Over chalk downs, through fields of poppied wheat.
A tattered farm lad, sixteen years of age,
Followed like Sancho at his master’s heel:
Up to the flaming battle-front he rode;
Flinging a stubborn “no” at those who’d send him
Back to learn war among the raw recruits,
He took his place before the astonished ranks
Of grenadiers, and faced the enemy’s fire.
Death swooped upon them, tearing long red lanes
Through their massed squadrons. His commander fell
Beside him. One by one his officers died.
Death placed him in command. The shattered troops
Of Beaujolais were wavering everywhere.
“Retreat!” the cry began. In smoke and fire,
Lamarck, with fourteen grenadiers, held on.
“This is the post assigned. This post we hold
Till Life or Death relieve us.”
Who assigned it?
Who summoned him thither? And when peace returned
Was it blind chance that garrisoned Lamarck
Among the radiant gardens of the south,
Dazzled him with their beauty, and then slipt
That volume of Chomel into his hand,
Traité des Plantes?
Was it blind accident,
Environment—O, mighty word that masks
The innumerable potencies of God,—
When his own comrade, in wild horse-play, wrenched
And crippled him in body, and he returned
Discharged to Paris, free to take up arms
In an immortal army? Was it chance
That lodged him there, despite his own desire,
So high above the streets that all he saw
Out of his window was the drifting clouds
Flowing and changing, drawing his lonely mind
In subtle ways to Nature’s pageantry,
And the great golden laws that governed all?
Was it blind chance that drew him out to watch
The sunset clouds o’er Mont Valérien,
Where the same power, for the same purpose, drew
Jean Jacques Rousseau? Flowers and the dying clouds
Drew them together, and mind from mind caught fire?
What universal Power through all and each
Was labouring to create when first they met
And talked and wondered, whether the forms of life
Through earth’s innumerable ages changed?
Were species constant? Let the rose run wild,
How swiftly it returns into the briar!
Transplant the southern wilding to the north
And it will change, to suit the harsher sky.
Nourish it in a garden,—you shall see
The trailer of the hedgerow stand upright,
And every blossom with a threefold crown.
Buffon, upon his hill-top at Montbard
In his red turret, among his flowers and birds,
Gazing through all his epochs of the world,
Had guessed at a long ancestry for man,
Too long for the upstart kings.
He could not prove it;
And the Sorbonne, with Genesis in its hand,
Had frowned upon his æons. In six days
God made the heaven and earth.
He had withdrawn,
Smiling as wise men smile at children’s talk;
And when Lamarck had visited him alone,
He smiled again, a little ironically.
“Six epochs of the world may mean six days;
But then, my friend, six days must also mean
Six epochs. Call it compromise, or peace.
They cannot claim the victory.
There are some
Think me too—orthodox. O, I know the whine
That fools will raise hereafter. Buffon quailed;
Why did not Buffon like our noble selves
Wear a vicarious halo of martyrdom?
Strange—that desire of small sadistic eyes
At ease on the shore to watch a shipwrecked man
Drowning. Lucretius praised that barbarous pleasure.
Mine is a subtler savagery. I prefer
To watch, from a little hill above their world,
The foes of science, floundering in the waves
Of their new compromise. Every crooked flash
Of irony lightening their dark skies to-day
Shows them more wickedly buffeted, in a sea
Of wilder contradictions.
I had no proof.
Time was not ripe. The scripture of the rocks
Must first be read more deeply. But the law
Pointed to one conclusion everywhere,
That forms of flesh and bone, in the long lapse
Of time, were plastic as the sculptor’s clay,
And born of earlier forms.
Under man’s eyes,
Had not the forms of bird and beast been changed
Into new species? Children of the wolf,
Greyhound and mastiff, in their several kinds,
Fawned on his children, slept upon his hearth.
The spaniel and the bloodhound owned one sire.
Man’s own selective artistry had shaped
New flowers, confirmed the morning glory’s crown,
And out of the wild briar evoked the rose.
Like a magician, in a few brief years,
He had changed the forms and colours of his birds.
He had whistled the wild pigeons from the rocks;
And by his choice, and nature’s own deep law,
Evoked the rustling fan-tails that displayed
Their splendours on his cottage roof, or bowed
Like courtiers on his lawn. The pouter swelled
A rainbow breast to please him. Tumblers played
Their tricks as for a king. The carrier flew
From the spy’s window, or the soldiers’ camp,
The schoolboy’s cage, the lover’s latticed heart,
And bore his messages over turbulent seas
And snow-capt mountains, with a sinewy wing
That raced the falcon, beating stroke for stroke.”
II
Lamarck, Lavoisier, and Ninety-three
So, seizing the pure fire from Buffon’s hand,
Lamarck pressed on, flinging all else aside,
To follow all those clues to his own end.
Ten years he spent among the flowers of France,
Unravelling, and more truly than Linné,
The natural orders of their tangled clans;
Then, in “six months of unremitting toil,”
As Cuvier subtly sneered, he wrote his book,
The Flore Française; compact, as Cuvier knew,
And did not care to say, with ten years’ thought.
But Buffon did not sneer. The great old man,
A king of men, enthroned there at Montbard,
Aided Lamarck as Jove might aid his son.
He sent the book to the king’s own printing press.
Daubenton wrote his foreword; and Rousseau
Had long prepared the way.
“Linné of France,”
The stream of praise through every salon flowed.
Une science à la mode, great Cuvier sneered.
Was it blind chance that crushed Lamarck again
Back to his lean-ribbed poverty?
Buffon died.
Lamarck, who had married in his prosperous hour,
Had five young mouths to feed. With ten long years
Of toil he had made the great Jardin du Roi
Illustrious through the world. As his reward
The ministers of the king now granted him
A keepership at one thousand francs a year;
And, over him, in Buffon’s place, they set
The exquisite dilettante, Bernardin
Saint Pierre, a delicate twitcher of silken strings.
Lamarck held grimly to the post assigned.
Under that glittering rose-pink world he heard
Titanic powers upsurging from the abyss.
Then, in the blood-red dawn of ninety-three,
The bright crust cracked. The furious lava rolled
Through Paris, and a thundercloud of doom
Pealed over thrones and peoples. Flash on flash,
Blind lightnings of the guillotine replied.
Blind throats around the headsman’s basket roared.
The slippery cobbles were greased with human blood.
The torch was at the gates of the Bastille.
Old towers, old creeds, old wrongs, at a Mænad shout,
Went up in smoke and flame. Earth’s dynasties
Rocked to their dark foundations. Tyrants died;
But in that madness of the human soul
They did not die alone. Innocence died;
And pity died; and those whose hands upheld
The torch of knowledge died in the bestial storm.
Lavoisier had escaped. They lured him back
Into the Terror’s hot red tiger-mouth,
Promising, “Face your trial with these your friends,
And all will be set free. If not, they die.”
He faced it, and returned. The guillotine
Flashed down on one and all.
Let the wide earth,
Still echoing its old wrath against the kings
And priests who exiled, stoned and burned and starved
The bearers of the fire, remember well
How the Republic in its red right hand
Held up Lavoisier’s head, and told mankind
In mockery, colder than the cynical snarl
Of Nero, “The Republic has no need
Of savants. Let the people’s will be done
On earth, and let the headless trunk of Truth
Be trampled down by numbers. Tread in the mire
All excellence and all skill. Daub your raw wounds
With dirt of the street; elect the sick to health.
It is the people’s will, and they shall live.
Nay, crown the eternal Power who rules by law
With this red cap of your capricious will,
And ye shall hear His everlasting voice
More clearly than ye heard it when He spoke
In stillness, through the souls of lonely men,
On starry heights. Lift up your heads and hear
His voice in the whirling multitude’s wild-beast roar,
Not these men, but Barabbas.”
Must the mind
Turn back to tyranny, then, and trust anew
To harnessed might? The listening soul still heard
A more imperative call. Though Evil wore
A myriad masks and reigned as wickedly
In peoples as in kings, Truth, Truth alone,
Whether upheld by many or by few,
Wore the one absolute crown. Though Pilate flung
His murderous jest at Truth—the law remained
That answered his dark question; man’s one clue,
The law that all true seekers after Truth
Hold in their hands; the law, a golden thread
That, loyally followed, leads them to full light,
Each by his own dark way, till all the world
Is knit together in harmony that sets free.
Bridge-builders of the universe, they fling
Their firm and shining roads from star to star,
From earth to heaven. At his appointed task,
Lamarck held grimly on (as once he gripped
His wavering grenadiers) till Life or Death
Relieved him. But he knew his cause at last.
Jardin du Roi became Jardin des Plantes;
And the red tumult surging round his walls
Died to a whisper of leaves.
His mind groped back,
Back through the inconceivable ages now,
To terrible revolutions of the globe,
Huge catastrophic rendings of the hills,
Red floods of lava; cataracts of fire;
Monstrous upheavals of the nethermost deep;
Whereby as Cuvier painted them, in hues
Of blind disaster, all the hosts of life
In each æonian period, like a swarm
Of ants beneath the wheels of Juggernaut,
Were utterly abolished.
Did God create
After each earth-disaster, then, new hosts
Of life to range her mountains and her seas;
New forms, new patterns, fresh from His careless Hand,
Yet all so closely akin to those destroyed?
Or did this life-stream, from one fountain-head,
Through the long changes of unnumbered years
Flow on, unbroken, slowly branching out
Into new beauty, as a river winds
Into new channels? One, singing through the hills,
Mirrors the hanging precipice and the pine;
And one through level meadows curves away,
Turns a dark wheel, or foams along a weir,
Then, in a pool of shadow, drowns the moon.
III
An English Interlude: Erasmus Darwin
Already in England, bearing the same fire,
A far companion whom he never knew
Had long been moving on the same dark quest,
But through what quiet secluded walks of peace.
Out of the mist emerged the little City
Of Lichfield, clustering round its Minster Pool
That, like a fragment of the sky on earth,
Reflected its two bridges, gnarled old trees,
Half-timbered walls; a bare-legged child at play
Upon its brink; two clouds like floating swans,
Two swans like small white clouds; a boy that rode
A big brown cart-horse lazily jingling by;
And the cathedral, like a three-spired crown,
Set on its northern bank.
Then, from the west,
Above it, walled away from the steep street,
I saw Erasmus Darwin’s bluff square house.
Along its front, above the five stone steps
That climbed to its high door, strange vines and fronds
Made a green jungle in their dim prison of glass.
Behind, its windows overlooked a close
Of rambling mellow roofs, and coldly stared
At the cathedral’s three foreshortened spires,
Which seemed to draw together, as though in doubt
Of what lay hidden in those bleak staring eyes.
There dwelt that eager mind, whom fools deride
For laced and periwigged verses on his flowers;
Forgetting how he strode before his age,
And how his grandson caught from his right hand
A fire that lit the world.
I saw him there,
In his brown-skirted coat, among his plants,
Pondering the thoughts, at which that dreamer sneered,
Who, through a haze of opium, saw a star
Twinkling within the tip of the crescent moon.
Dispraise no song for tricks that fancy plays,
Nor for blind gropings after an unknown light,
But let no echo of Abora praise for this
The drooping pinion and unseeing eye.
Seek, poet, on thy sacred height, the strength
And glory of that true vision which shall grasp,
In clear imagination, earth and heaven,
And from the truly seen ascend in power
To those high realms whereof our heaven and earth
Are images and shadows, and their law
Our shining lanthorn and unfailing guide.
There, if the periwigged numbers failed to fly,
Let babbling dreamers who have also failed
Wait for another age. The time will come
When all he sought and lost shall mount and sing.
He saw the life-stream branching out before him,
Its forms and colours changing with their sky:
Flocks in the south that lost their warm white fleece;
And, in the north, the stubble-coloured hare
Growing snow-white against the winter snows.
The frog that had no jewel in his head,
Except his eyes, was yet a fairy prince,
For he could change the colours of his coat
To match the mud of the stream wherein he reigned;
And, if he dwelt in trees, his coat was green.
He saw the green-winged birds of Paraguay
Hardening their beaks upon the shells they cracked;
The humming-bird, with beak made needle-fine
For sucking honey from long-throated blooms;
Finches with delicate beaks for buds of trees,
And water-fowl that, in their age-long plashing
At the lake’s edge, had stretched the films of skin
Between their claws to webs. Out through the reeds
They rowed at last, and swam to seek their prey.
He saw how, in their war against the world,
Myriads of lives mysteriously assumed
The hues that hid them best; the butterfly dancing
With its four petals among so many flowers,
Itself a wingèd flower; the hedgerow birds
With greenish backs like leaves, but their soft breasts
Light as a downy sky, so that the hawk,
Poised overhead, sees only a vanishing leaf;
Or, if he swoops along the field below them,
Loses their silvery flight against the cloud.
He saw the goldfinch, vivid as the blooms
Through which it flutters, as though their dews had splashed
Red of the thistle upon its head and throat,
And on its wings the dandelion’s gold.
He saw the skylark coloured like its nest
In the dry grass; the partridge, grey and brown
In mottled fields, escaping every eye,
Till the foot stumbles over it, and the clump
Of quiet earth takes wing and whirrs away.
I saw him there, a strange and lonely soul,
An eagle in the Swan of Lichfield’s pen,
Stretching clipped wings and staring at the sky.
He saw the multitudinous hosts of life,
All creatures of the sea and earth and air,
Ascending from one living spiral thread,
Through tracts of time, unreckonable in years.
He saw them varying as the plastic clay
Under the Sculptor’s hands.
He saw them flowing
From one Eternal Fount beyond our world,
The inscrutable and indwelling Primal Power,
His only vera causa; by whose will
There was no gulf between the first and last.
There was no break in that long line of law
Between the first life drifting in the sea,
And man, proud man, the crowning form of earth,
Man whose own spine, the framework of his pride,
The fern-stem of his life, trunk of his tree,
Sleeps in the fish, the reptile, and the orang,
As all those lives in his own embryo sleep.
What deeper revolution, then, must shake
Those proud ancestral dynasties of earth?
What little man-made temples must go down?
And what august new temple must arise,
One vast cathedral, gargoyled with strange life,
Surging through darkness, up to the unknown end?
IV
Lamarck and Cuvier: The Vera Causa
Fear nothing, Swan of Lichfield. Tuck thy head
Beneath thy snowy wing and sleep at ease.
Drift quietly on thy shadowy Minster Pool.
No voice comes yet to shake thy placid world.
Far off—in France—thy wingless angels make
Strange havoc, but the bearer of this fire,
The wise physician’s unknown comrade, toils
Obscurely now, through his more perilous night,
Seeking his vera causa, with blind eyes.
Blind, blind as Galileo in his age,
Lamarck embraced his doom and, as in youth,
Held to the post assigned, till Life or Death
Relieved him. All those changes of the world
He had seen more clearly than his unknown friend;
And traced their natural order.
He saw the sea-gull like a flake of foam
Tossed from the waves of that creative sea;
The fish that like a speckled patch of sand
Slides over sand upon its broad flat side,
And twists its head until its nether eye
Looks upward, too, and what swam upright once
Is fixed in its new shape, and the wry mouth
Grimaces like a gnome at its old foes.
He saw the swarming mackerel shoals that swim
Near the crisp surface, rippled with blue and green
Round their dark backs to trick the pouncing gull,
But silver-bellied to flash like streaks of light
Over the ravenous mouths that from below
Snap at the leaping gleams of the upper sea.
And all these delicate artistries were wrought
By that strange Something-Else which blind men call
“Environment,” and the name is all their need;
A Something-Else that, through the sum of things,
Labours unseen; and, for its own strange ends,
Desirous of more swiftness and more strength,
Will teach the hunted deer to escape and fly,
Even while it leads the tiger to pursue.
He saw that sexual war; the stags that fought
In mating-time; the strong confirmed in power
By victory. Lust and hunger, pleasure and pain,
Like instruments in a dread Designer’s hand,
Lured or dissuaded, tempted and transformed.
He saw dark monsters in primeval forests
Tearing the high green branches down for food
Age after age, till from their ponderous heads
Out of their own elastic flesh they stretched
A trunk that, like a long grey muscular snake,
Could curl up through the bunches of green leaves,
And pluck their food at ease as cattle browse;
Life’s own dark effort aiding that strange Power
Without, and all controlled in one great plan,
Grotesquely free, and beautifully at one
With law, upsurging to the unknown end.
All Nature like a vast chameleon changed;
And all these forms of life through endless years,
Changing, developing, from one filament rose.
Man, on the heights, retravelled in nine moons
All that long journey in little, never to lose
What life had learned on its æonian way:
Man on the heights; but not divided now
From his own struggling kindred of the night.
Few dared to think it yet and set him free
Through knowledge of himself and his own power;
Few, yet, in France or England. Let him bask
Where in six days God set him at his ease
Among His wingless angels; there to hate
The truth, until he breaks his own vain heart
And finds the law at last and walks with God,
Who, not abhorring even the mire and clay
In the beginning, breathed His life through all.
This was his vera causa. Hate, contempt,
Ridicule, like a scurrilous wind swooped down
From every side. Great Cuvier, with the friends
Of orthodoxy, sneered—could species change
Their forms at will? Could the lean tiger’s need
To crouch in hiding stripe his tawny flesh
With shadows of the cane-break where he lay?
Could the giraffe, by wishing for the leaves
Beyond his reach, add to his height one inch?
Or could the reptile’s fond desire to fly
Create his wings?
Could Cuvier read one line
Of this blind man, he might have held his peace,
Found his own versa causa, and sunk his pride;
And even the wiser Darwin, when he came,
Might have withheld his judgment for an hour,
And learned from his forerunner. But, in their haste,
They flung away his fire; and, as he fell,
They set their heels upon it and stamped it out.
Not always does the distant age restore
The balance, or posterity renew
The laurel on the cold dishonoured brow
Unjustly robbed and blindly beaten down.
He laboured on in blindness. At his side
One faithful daughter, labouring with her pen,
As he dictated, wrote, month after month,
Year after year; and, when her father died,
She saw him tossed into the general grave,
The pauper’s fosse, where none can trace him now,
In Montparnasse, but wrapt in deeper peace
Among the unknown and long-forgotten dead.