Grant Allen

“ Has man, I asked myself at such moments, mere human man, any right to set himself up in the place of earthly providence, as so much better and more moral than insentient nature? If the spider cruelly devours living flies and intelligent or highly sensitive bees, we must at least remember that she has no choice in the matter, and that, as the poet justly remarks, ''tis her nature to.' But then, on the other hand, it might be plausibly argued that 'tis our nature equally to kill the creature that we see so hatefully fulfilling the law of its own cruel being. ”

“ I want to carry you back to a time when Ramsgate was still but a green gap in the long line of chalk cliff, and Margate but the chine of a little trickling streamlet that tumbled seaward over the undesecrated sands; when a broad arm of the sea still cut off Westgate from the Reculver cliffs, and when the tide swept unopposed four times a day over the submerged sands of Minster Level. You must think of Thanet as then greatly resembling Wight in geographical features, and the Wantsum as the equivalent of the Solent Sea. ”

“ Spread far below you, and basking in the sunshine, a comparatively flat and wide, open valley; olive and stone pine and mulberry on its slopes; pasture land and flowery vale in its midst. North and south, in two long ridges, the Apennines stretch their hard, blue outlines from Carrara to Siena against the afternoon sky—outlines of a sort that one never gets in northern lands, but which remind one so exactly of the painted background to a fifteenth-century Italian picture that nature seems here, to our topsy-turvy fancy, to be whimsically imitating an effect from art. ”

“ Exactly the same struggle is always taking place in the fields and woods and moors around us, and especially in the spots made over to pure nature. There, the greenwood tree raises its huge umbrella of foliage to the skies, and allows hardly a ray of sunlight to struggle through to the low woodland vegetation of orchid or wintergreen underneath. Where the soil is not deep enough for trees to root securely, bushes and heathers overgrow the ground, and compete with their bell-shaped blossoms for the coveted favour of bees and butterflies. ”

“ Nowhere on earth do I know a more peopled plain than that plain of Arno in our own time, seen on a sunny autumn day, when the light glints clearly on each white villa and church and hamlet, from this specular mount of antique Fiesole. But to understand why Fiesole itself stands there at all you must neglect all this, neglect all the wealth of art that makes each inch of that valley classic ground, and look only, if you can for a brief moment, at the bare facts of primitive nature. ”

“ For the town is always dead and lifeless. There are who admire it, they say—poor purblind creatures—because, forsooth, 'there is so much life there.' So much life, indeed! No grass in the streets; no flowers in the lanes; no beetles or butterflies on the dull stone pavements! Brick and mortar have killed out all life over square miles of Middlesex. For myself, I love better the densely-peopled fields than this human desert, this beflagged and macadamised man-made solitude. The country teems with life on every hand; a thousand different plants and flowers in the spangled meadows ”

“ Once they in turn were the Euganean islands, and even now to the trained eye of the historical observer they stand up island-like from the vast green plain that spreads flat around them.
Perhaps it seems to you a rather large order to be asked to believe that Lombardy and Venetia are nothing more than an outspread sheet of deep Alpine mud. Well, there is nothing so good for incredulity, don't you know, as capping the climax. If a man will not swallow an inch of fact, the best remedy is to make him gulp down an ell of it. ”

“ Here and there islands of sandstone stand out above the green sea of doura or cotton; here and there a bay of fertility runs away up some lateral valley, following the course of the mud; but one inch above the inundation-mark vegetation and life stop short all at once with absolute abruptness. In Egypt, then, more than anywhere else, one sees with one's own eyes that mud and moisture are the very conditions of mundane fertility.
Beyond Cairo, as one descends seaward, the mud begins to open out fan-wise and form a delta. ”

“ The sand-box tree of the West Indies has large round fruits, containing seeds about as big as an English horsebean; and the capsule explodes, when ripe, with a detonation like a pistol, scattering its contents with as much violence as a shot from an air-gun. It is dangerous to go too near these natural batteries during the shooting season. A blow in the eye from one would blind a man instantly. I well remember the very first night I spent in my own house in Jamaica, where I went to live shortly after the repression of 'Governor Eyre's rebellion,' as everybody calls it locally. ”

“ Now, the struggle for life is fiercest, and the wealth of nature is greatest, one need hardly say, in tropical climates. There alone do we find every inch of soil 'encumbered by its waste fertility,' as Comus puts it; weighed down by luxuriant growth of tree, shrub, herb, creeper. There alone do lizards lurk in every hole; beetles dwell manifold in every cranny; butterflies flock thick in every grove; bees, ants, and flies swarm by myriads on every sun-smitten hillside. Accordingly, in the tropics, adaptation reaches its highest point ”

“ For the water rises up to a certain level, and to that level accordingly it distributes both mud and moisture: above it comes the arid rock, as destitute of life, as dead and bare and lonely as the centre of Sahara. In and out, in waving line, up to the base of the hills, cultivation and greenery follow, with absolute accuracy, the line of highest flood-level; beyond it the hot rock stretches dreary and desolate. ”

“ But in between those two tossed and tumbled guardian ridges, the valley of the Arno, as it flows towards Pisa, with the minor basins of its tributary streams, expands for a while about Florence itself into a broad and comparatively level plain. In a mountain country so broken and heaved about as Peninsular Italy, every spare inch of cultivable plain like that has incalculable value. True, on the terraced slopes of the hillsides generation after generation of ingenious men have managed to build up, tier by tier, a wonderful expanse of artificial tilth. ”

“ All nature is dressed in its brightest robes. Great belts of blue gentian hang like a zone on the mountain slopes; masses of yellow globe-flower star the upland pastures; nodding heads of soldanella lurk low among the rugged boulders by the glacier's side. No lowland blossoms have such vividness of colouring, or grow in such conspicuous patches. To strike the eye from afar, to attract and allure at a distance, is the great aim and end in life of the Alpine flora.
Now, why are Alpine plants so anxious to be seen of men and angels? ”

“ Yet this little herb-like willow, one of the most northerly and hardy of European plants, is a true tree at heart none the less for all that. Soft and succulent as it looks in branch and leaf, you may yet count on it sometimes as many rings of annual growth as on a lordly Scotch fir-tree. But where? Why, underground. For see how cunning it is, this little stunted descendant of proud forest lords: hard-pressed by nature, it has learnt to make the best of its difficult and precarious position. ”

“ Even the very back streets of Florence recall at every step its mediæval magnificence. But when from Florence itself one turns to Fiesole, the city by the Arno sinks at once by a sudden revulsion into a mere thing of yesterday by the side of the city on the Etruscan hill-top. Fiesole was a town of immemorial antiquity while Florence was still, what perhaps its poetical name imports, a field of flowers. ”

“ Plants, in fact, compete with one another all round for everything they stand in need of. They compete for their food—carbonic acid. They compete for their energy—their fair share of sunlight. They compete for water, and their foothold in the soil. They compete for the favours of the insects that fertilize their flowers. They compete for the good services of the birds or mammals that disseminate their seeds in proper spots for germination. And how real this competition is we can see in a moment, if we think of the difficulties of human cultivation. ”

“ It is so very important, for those who wish to see things "as clear as mud," to understand this prime principle of the formation of mud-lands, that I shall make no apology for insisting on it further in some little detail; for when one comes to look the matter plainly in the face, one can see in a minute that almost all the big things in human history have been entirely dependent upon the mud of the great rivers. ”

“ Lucy, indeed, who was a decided coward, would stand and look anxiously at the doubtful intruder for several seconds, feeling the web with her claws, and running up and down in the most undecided manner, as if in doubt whether or not to tackle the uncertain customer. But Eliza, whose spirits always rose like Nelson's before the face of danger, and whose motto seemed to be 'De l'audace, de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace,' would rush at the huge foe in a perfect transport of wild fury, and go to work at once to enclose him in her toils of triple silken cables. ”

“ You have no rainfall to bother you, no local streams, no complex denudation: the Nile does all, and the Nile does everything. On either hand stretches away the bare desert, rising up in grey rocky hills. Down the midst runs the one long line of alluvial soil—in other words, Nile mud—which alone allows cultivation and life in that rainless district. The country bases itself absolutely on mud. The crops are raised on it; the houses and villages are built of it; the land is manured with it; the very air is full of it. The crude brick buildings that dissolve in dust are Nile mud solidified ”

“ Yet it is from this starved and dwarfed and impoverished northern area that most of us have formed our views of life, to the total exclusion of the wider, richer, more varied world that calls for our admiration in tropical latitudes.
Insensibly this richness and vividness of nature all around one, on a first visit to the Tropics, sinks into one's mind, and produces profound, though at first unconscious, modifications in one's whole mode of regarding man and his universe. ”

“ And so too with the unconscious warfare of plants. The daisy or the plantain that spreads its rosette of leaves flat against the ground is just as truly monopolizing a definite space of land as the noble owner of a Highland deer forest. No blade of grass can spring beneath the shadow of those tightly pressed little mats of foliage; no fragment of carbon, no ray of sunshine can ever penetrate below that close fence of living greenstuff. ”

“ Now everybody knows the marsupials as a class are nothing short of preternaturally stupid. They are just about the very dullest and silliest of all existing quadrupeds. And this is reasonable enough, when one comes to think of it, for they represent a very antique and early type, the first rough sketch of the mammalian idea, if I may so describe them, with wits unsharpened as yet by contact with the world in the fierce competition of the struggle for life as it displays itself on the crowded stage of the great continents. ”

“ What did the bronze axe ever do for humanity?' Well, nearly everything. I believe I have really not said too much. We are apt to talk big nowadays about the steam-engine, and that marvellous electricity which is always going to do wonders for us all—to-morrow; but I don't know whether either ever produced so great a revolution in human life, or so completely metamorphosed human existence, as that simple and commonplace bronze hatchet.
For, consider that before the days of bronze man knew no weapon or implement of any sort save the stone axe, or tomahawk, and the flint-tipped arrow. ”

“ The true mouths and stomachs of plants are not to be found in the roots, but in the green leaves; their true food is not sucked up from the soil, but is inhaled through tiny channels from the air; the mass of their material is carbon, as we can all see visibly to the naked eye when a log of wood is reduced to charcoal: and that carbon the leaves themselves drink in, by a thousand small green mouths, from the atmosphere around them.
But how about the juice, the sap, the qualities of the soil, the manure required? is the incredulous cry of Other People. ”

“ He lives in a dark cold world of scrubby vegetation and scant animal life: a world where human existence is necessarily preserved only by ceaseless labour and at severe odds; a world out of which all the noblest and most beautiful living creatures have been ruthlessly pressed; a world where nothing great has been or can be; a world doomed by its mere physical conditions to eternal poverty, discomfort, and squalor. ”

“ I don't know whether I'm wrong, but it often seems to me the very best way to gain an idea of the real history of England is thus to take a single district piecemeal, and trace out for one's self the main features of its gradual evolution. By so doing we get away from mere dynastic or political considerations, leave behind the bang of drums or the blare of trumpets, and reach down to the living facts of common human activity themselves—the realities of the workaday world of toilers and spinners. ”