The Worm Forgives the Plough

by John Stewart Collis

  I opened the flesh a bit more so that I might observe the main work of reconstruction. I gazed down at the living tubes as they squirmed and twisted and turned and turned them at their task, building up new life in the abominable ferment of corruption. The bluebottle is necessary. The bluebottle is good. All things in Nature have a meaning and a purpose. All are necessary. All are right. If it were not so, if any one thing were wrong, then nothing could be right; if a single error marred the scheme then we could count on nothing, all would be lost, we could hope for nothing, there would be nothing for it, as Edward Carpenter said, ‘but to fold our hands and be damned everlastingly’. But since it is not so we can afford to face the facts. It is expedient, on occasion, to gaze down into the pit as well as up towards heaven, to look at the roots of Nature as well as at her flags, regarding the burden of the beginning and the dereliction of the end alike without flinching, so that from time to time the seeing eye, the accepting mind, may receive the vision of what some men call beauty and others truth.

  17 The Growth of Trees

  I carried out my work of thinning on the basis of ‘cuts’ measuring twenty feet. Each of these slices went from one end of the wood to the other – a question of several hundred yards. The portion done presented a great transformation: from the side you could easily see through it till the eye hit the dark wall of trees and undergrowth not yet touched. When I had finished one cut and then went back and started again at a new one, so much time had often elapsed that shoots had already begun to grow from the stumps of the trees I had cut down earlier. The rapidity of their growth almost reminded me of bracken.

  Looking at such shoots one might think that a tree is only a kind of big flower. But the most striking thing about a tree is that it remains standing. It does not collapse after a season. The flowers fall down every year: their trunks (or stalks) give way, and a whole new plant must take the place of the old. The tree-trunk does not fall down and start again; it bequeaths one year’s work in the form of a monument, and next year builds another storey on top of it. It lays foundation-stones called buds that grow into branches. And as it builds its head out of the air of heaven, as it opens its leaves, as it spreads its branches, the prop upon which it rests, its trunk, increases in strength and girth. It increases thus because every leaf connects itself with the soil by sending down a cable. Trees have been called collective beings: and truly we may think of each leaf as an individual plant with a separate stem joining it with the earth. This connecting link is at the same time a tax which each leaf pays to the whole, it is a tribute levied for its upkeep. Every new leaf on the great tree in the forest lowers down this cable, this silken thread, this fibre, this cord, until reaching beneath the surface of the earth it becomes a root – and the sum of these connecting wires increases the girth of the tree every year. A tree-trunk is really a mass of wood-covered waterways linking leaf with root, ever widening as the building grows from above. We see here a wonderful natural example of two offices being performed by a single operation. The leaves require extra sustenance from the earth, and having received it they reach out ever higher and bulkier into the air; but this increase does not break down the spray, the branch, or the stem, because of the tribute, the wood-tax that has been paid, in virtue of which the spray, the branch, and the stem become proportionally larger and stronger. That is how every tree makes its trunk. Every leaf of every tree has sent down a tiny string, covering and clinging to the shoot beneath, and increasing its thickness. Singly it may seem a slender offering, but not in its hardened multiplicity. By itself it might not appear to be equal to its great task or certain of reaching its goal; but softness is often the sign of strength and determination. Just as granite rocks will be worn away under the washing of the softer substance of waves, and water itself fail to impress the greater softness of the flowering polyps that build up the coral reefs, so this law of humble power can be seen in the flowing downwards of the wooden threads. ‘Each according to his size and strength, wove his little strand of cable, as a spider his thread,’ wrote Ruskin in this connection, ‘and cast it down the side of the springing tower by a marvellous magic – irresistible! The fall of a granite pyramid from an Alp may perhaps be stayed: the descending force of that silver thread shall not be stayed. It will split the rocks themselves at its roots, if need be, rather than fail in its work.’

  Two interesting things follow from this. The first is that though a tree may be said to reach maturity in the eye of the timber-merchant, there can never come a time when it ceases to grow. A tree is not like an animal which grows to a certain size, then stops growing and eats only to live instead of to live and to grow. An animal does not build itself by eating through its limbs any more than a man through the tips of his fingers; it does not continually create a head any more than a man grows his head with his hair – it starts with a head. A tree starts without a head. Since it advances upwards by means of a self-building crown, and since every leaf thereof drops an anchor down beneath the surface of the soil, then so long as new leaves appear a greater bulk of crown and width of trunk must follow. But in proportion to the size of the tree will be the rate of growth. I have just mentioned how here in my wood I see several feet of new stems spring up in a few months. The process must inevitably get slower and slower as the ground to be covered by the communicating wires of wood increases. Were I to sit beneath the melancholy boughs of a six-thousand-years-old tree and attempt to note a season’s difference, I fear I should not succeed in convincing myself that it had changed at all.

  Six thousand years old? Yes, for this brings me to the second thing that follows upon the construction of a tree. Theoretically it need never die. Consider what a tree is – or any plant for that matter. It is not a single being, not one person, as it were (though it may have great personality). It is a group of beings. Looking at a hive, we should be tempted to say – Here are many units, yet it may really be a multiplicity of units. If we examine the little creature called the hydra, found in stagnant ponds, we find that its manner of giving birth to new hydras is by growing them upon its person like buds on a tree. All of them feed from the communal stomach; but after a certain period they break off from their parent to live a life of independence. When we examine a coral reef we find that it consists of polyps. A polyp has the same organization as a hydra, the same method of budding its offspring – with one difference. The hydra breaks off from the parent body, the polyp continues to remain attached. But it proceeds in the same way as the hydra, each polyp budding its children rather than lying or delivering them, and they all feed from the communal sac, the continual growth of which means the spreading out and up of their domicile, their polypary. This polyp, or ‘coral insect’, is a little hollow globule of gelatinous matter, a tiny sac whose mouth is bordered by eight leaf-shaped appendages, fringed at the edges: eight tentacles opening like the petals of a flower. No wonder a coral looks like a rock covered with brilliant flowers. What is that rock made of? How did these flower-like animals called polyps come to have this pedestal? Because it is made of their own exudations. They exude stone. With their own excrement they build up and rest upon a monument as hard as marble. The whole reef is made of polyp. The softest of all creatures has turned into the hardest of all rocks. These reefs continue to grow by means of the collective effort of millions upon milliards of polyps, so that an archipelago such as the Maldive in the Indian Ocean can comprise no less than twelve thousand reefs, and a reef can spread over an area of thirty-three thousand miles. No term needs to be set to the life of a polypary since it is a collection of beings continuously giving birth to others by process of budding, and continuously bequeathing their excrement to the magnificent ocean-dunghill upon which they stand.

  All life is related by the work of the twin sisters Time and Motion – often called Evolution – and it is not hard to see how similar is the growth of a plant to the growth of a coral reef. We can see that a tree is a community of beings rather than an individual. You cannot cut lim
bs off an individual and expect it to live, or the limb itself to live. That is exactly what we can do with a tree. If we want a fresh tree it is sufficient to cut off a living branch and plant it. It will spread roots and grow, while the parent will not suffer. We can even plant the young branches of one tree on to another tree, which we call grafting, an operation which explains the justice of Dupont de Nemours’ definition – ‘A plant is a family, a republic, a sort of living hive, whose inhabitants are fed in the common refectory upon the common stock of food.’ This communal stock of food, this sort of omnibus sac, called the trunk, is even ready to feed a species of tree not absolutely fraternal. Figs will not grow on thistles – (though under this ruling one would not be surprised if they did). But Fabre mentions a certain pear tree ‘on which, by means of grafting, the whole gamut of cultivated pears was represented. Sweet or sour, dry or juicy, large or small, green or brilliantly coloured, all these pears ripened on the same tree, year after year, always unchanged, faithful to the racial characteristics, not of the tree, their foster-mother, but of the various buds transferred to the common support’. Such an experiment might well have served as proof of the individuality of a bud as opposed to the free association of a tree.

  Thus granted, the age of a tree could be very great. In fact if it lives in a spot unexposed to the violence of storm or earthquake and out of the reach of man’s commercial activity, it may continue to live for an extraordinary period. A good place to find tree-veterans is in the sanctified area of graveyards where, companions of the dead, they are unmolested by the living. Thus in the cemetery of Allouville in Normandy there stands an oak tree some nine hundred years old, whose trunk at ground level shows a circumference of thirty-three feet, while within the aerial forest of its upper branches the cell of an anchorite has been built, and the lower portion of its partly hollow trunk has been used since 1696 as a chapel dedicated to Our Lady of Peace. Many a yew tree in an old churchyard vies in age with the most ancient church, while others look back to times long before any temple was built in the name of Christ. There was a yew tree at Fortingal in Scotland whose concentric rings amounted to two thousand five hundred, and another at Brabourne in Kent whose age was thirty centuries. Oak trees often stand sturdily against the blasts of time. In 1824, a wood-cutter in the Ardennes, on felling a giant of this species, found fragments of sacrificial urns and ancient medals within its trunk, thus connecting it with the barbarian invasions of Europe. It showed no more signs of failing health than the walnut tree noticed by the soldiers of Balaclava in the Crimea, which, though two thousand years old, yielded an annual crop of 100,00 walnuts, the harvesting of which was shared by five families.

  The size of such trees can best be imagined when we learn that on the occasion of a giant conifer which once stood on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada in California, falling before the axe, the woodmen had to use a long ladder even to mount its prostrate trunk, as if scaling the roof of a house. The bark of this tree was removed in a single piece from the length of twenty-two feet, which served to enclose a room in which one hundred and forty children could play hunt-the-slipper. This giant displayed three thousand concentric layers of wood, showing that it reached back to the time when, according to tradition, ‘Samson released in the cornfields of the Philistines, foxes, to whose tails incendiary torches were attached.’ These conifers of the Sierra Nevada had grown to three hundred feet or more. Other veterans have expressed themselves more in their crowns, like that yew tree in the cemetery of Haie-de-Routot which in 1832 spread its foliage over the entire churchyard and part of the church itself. I have already mentioned the Chestnut Tree of the Hundred Horses at Etna, under the cover of which the Queen of Aragon found room for her whole retinue; but in Mexico there is a cypress contemporary with Noah, standing in the cemetery of Santa Maria de Fesla near Oaxaca, beneath whose boughs Cortez, the conqueror of Mexico, found room to shelter his army. The crown of the baobab tree at Senegambia near Cape Verde, is even more remarkable. The diameter of the trunk is greater than the height of the tree, the latter being but fifteen feet and the former thirty! – a column fit to support the mighty dome which is two hundred feet in diameter. This baobab tree is a worthy companion in distinction with the dragon tree of Orotova in the Canary islands whose trunk cannot be encircled by ten men holding hands. Both trees, older the Pyramids, hold the memory of six thousand years, and show every promise of ignoring the terms of Time.

  18 The Feeling Intellect

  On sultry summer days it was interesting to observe the insectitude activity. Before the temperature rose the air would be moderately clear, but when the sun came out into the heavy, windless, sultry atmosphere then swarms of insects, especially a certain kind of fly, rising from nowhere particular, began to buzz round and round madly as if at that moment created, released, unloosened from a melting solid.

  A massive, solid unity – that’s the impression one often gets of the earth; almost motionless and asleep at the freezing Poles, partially melted into bits at these climes, and in the Tropics, under the equatorial rays, melted out into a seething flow and flood of fast-moving particles in every shape and size.

  Why does life hang together so well, seeing that everything is at everything else’s throat? Presumably because it is not really in parts. It is not a question of parts that make a whole but of a whole presenting itself in parts. If this were not so, the parts would certainly not hang together, they would hang separately as it were. The unity is so obvious that it would hardly seem worth mentioning; yet I cannot feel any confidence that the reader will regard it as a platitude. Certainly our working-habit of thought is not unity, not synthesis; it is almost always in terms of disunity, which, so far from being regretted has been conceived as excellent, as a triumph meriting the title of ‘victorious analysis’. The results are not wholly good. We can do wonders with the inorganic – there we are victorious, able to create a thing like the gramophone no less than other mechanical constructions, not all of which are beautiful or of good report. But in the field of medicine (not surgery), of religion, of philosophy, of economics and politics, we are nearly lost – because we cannot yet think in terms of the unity. (We do better in the field of agriculture, because we have to act in terms of unity or perish.)

  I enter thoughts of this kind in this account because they arise when I am confronted with Nature. If thoughts are simple experience arising from common sensation, they are sometimes worth putting down. I hope I have Reason on my page. But not ratiocination, not thinking before I experience. It is Wordsworth’s ‘feeling intellect’ that holds interest for me. The old adage ‘I think, therefore I am’ is less helpful than the other way round, ‘I am’, that is ‘I experience, therefore I think.’ Wordsworth held that ecstasy is the highest form of thought, since it is the nearest we get to communication with truth. And after a visitation of ecstasy caused in him by the earthly spectacle, he said – ‘Thought was not, in enjoyment it expired.’

  If it be complained that on this showing our systems simply follow our feelings I see no harm in it. Sensation is not so very eccentric. We back each other up. Anyway, to think without the thought springing from felt experience cannot but be as void as merely second-hand thinking – with which anyone could fill a book, and which is as valueless as second-hand observation. During the daily intercourse of life we need second-hand thinking all the time, but if we do not experience our own philosophy and religion we have none. And if we write it down we do not expect to be able to hand it to anyone else. This kind of knowledge ‘cannot be handed from one person having it to another person not having it’, as Whitman said. But we can support the findings of others, and stimulate experience-knowledge.

  The love of Nature is deep in England. And I think that what is behind this love is the instinct that Nature has a secret for us, and answers our questions. Take that foxglove over there – for we have now reached August in this chronicle. It stands singly where there had been such a wonderful display of bluebells that it then
looked as if a section of the sky had been established upon earth (though not really the same colour at all!). That foxglove with its series of petal-made thimbles held up for sale to the bees, puts me at ease upon the subject of – progress. It is quite obvious that the foxglove cannot be improved. There is no progressing beyond that point for that particular Appearance. There is no room for improvement in the bluebell nor in any of the other exhibits. The fact is we get perfection in this form and in that form. Hence Shakespeare’s ‘ripeness is all’, and Tennyson’s ‘God fulfils Himself in many ways’, and Whitman’s ‘there can never be any more perfection than there is now’, and Heraclitus’ ‘Life is a Fountain of Fire, an ever-living Flame, kindled in due measure, and in like measure extinguished’. Evolution is not something going up and up and up – but a series of perfect Forms. The goal of each Form is the fulfilment of its own unique perfection. There is no point in our gazing raptly into the future for paradise if it is at our feet.

  But this is not true of Man, you say. That is the paradox. In a perfect world he is imperfect. But then he has attained a new thing of his own – consciousness. Complete consciousness will be his ripeness, his perfection. That will probably take time, say several million years. But why worry? There might be five million years after that of perfect humanity. Meanwhile our foxglove can keep us sane at least about subjects such as beauty and art. There is no steady evolutionary ‘progress’ in these things, only different expressions. Just as there will never be a better foxglove so there will never be a better Shakespeare.