A man of fourscore was planting trees. ‘To build might pass; but to plant at such an age!’ exclaimed THREE YOUNG MEN of the neighbourhood. ‘Surely,’ said they, ‘you are doting; for in God’s name, what reward can you receive for this, unless you are to live as long as one of the Patriarchs? What good can there be in loading your life with cares about a time you are never destined to see? Pray devote the rest of your life to thoughts on your past errors; give up distant and grand expectations: these become only us YOUNG MEN.’ ‘They become not even you,’ answered the OLD MAN. ‘All we do comes late and is quickly gone. The pale hand of fate sports equally with your days and with mine. The shortness of our lives puts us all on a level. Who can say which of us shall last behold the light of heaven? Can any moment of your lives even secure you a second moment? My great-grandchildren will owe shady groves to me: And do you blame me for providing delight for others! Why, the thought of this is, itself, a reward which I already enjoy; I may enjoy it tomorrow and for some days after that; nay, I may more than once even see the sun rise on your graves.’ The OLD MAN was right: one of the three, ambitious to see the New World, was drowned in the port; another pursuing fame in the service of Mars, was suddenly stopped by an unexpected shot; the third fell from a tree, on which he himself was putting a graff: and the OLD MAN, lamenting their sad end, engraved on their tomb the story here related.
21 Experiments and Questions
‘Leaf by leaf crumbles the gorgeous year’, wrote the poet. But sometimes the year really falls, comes crashing down. Thus here, in November when the leaves were ready to fall but had not done so owing to lack of wind, there suddenly came a tempest lasting a day and a night. Next morning I looked round in vain for leaves still at their stations and saw only one, the terminal leaf on the highest branch of a young hazel bush: just that one, a battered flag that had not fallen. Immediately I stepped into winter.
There are not many beautiful autumn trees, when you come to think of it: not many, I mean, that amaze us like the terrific screens of beech leaves, the bright yellow of chestnut trees, the workmanship put into the evening drapery of the larch and silver birch. These do amaze us however often we see the show; we never look on them with indifference: that the decay of the leaf should be the glory of the leaf, that its day of withering and downfall should rival the beauty of its first unfolding, is a perennial encouragement to all mankind. I do not make any great claim for the ash as a particularly good autumn tree, I think it takes the winter best; but no tree at this time of year displays a more fascinating scheme of seeds – the famous ‘bunch of keys’, inaptly called.
At this point I must quote Cobbett again (it is always a job to refrain from quoting him if he has touched upon a matter in hand, but I do my best to refrain, recognizing that it is my business unfortunately to give you Collis and not Cobbett). ‘If you be curious and have a mind to see a tree in embryo,’ he writes, ‘take an ash seed, put it into a little water lukewarm, and there let it remain for three or four days. Take it out: take a sharp knife, split the seed longways down the middle, and there you will see, standing as upright as a dart, an ash tree, with leaves, trunk, and stem, that is to say the head of the root: and all this you will see with the naked eye, as clearly as you ever saw an ash tree growing in a field or meadow.’
Being extremely eager to see this I tried the experiment carefully. But I did not see it. I often tried but I never saw the little tree. Using a razor blade I slit the casket that holds the kernel, according to instructions, and I did find something. I found a very neat miniature spade. It was exceedingly attractive and surprising to look at, but it was not a tree.
William Cobbett is one of the most convincing writers who ever lived; even when wholly wrong, even when making a prophecy such as that the locust tree will, in fifty years, be the most common in England (owing to his advocacy), even then he is so unqualified in the certitude of his tone that we feel that we ought to see locust trees everywhere. And it may be that he was not right in this claim about the embryo ash tree. But I am inclined to think that the fault lies with me. This sort of thing, curiously enough, is often a matter of psychology. Experiments don’t work for me. For other men, or rather for a scientist (who is a special kind of person), the right thing happens at the right time. The great scientist – and of course we are not thinking of anyone like Cobbett – is a man to whom things occur. He is not only a man of great research and organization of particulars, he is a man for whom things occur. An example of how they do not occur for me might amuse a reader willing to wander for just a moment away from trees. When wishing to acquaint myself with the life and habits of earth-worms, I studied as my chief source of information Charles Darwin’s book The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of Worms, published in 1881 by John Murray. Amongst other things, he established by careful experimental proof how the worms manage slowly to bury objects, from stones to cities, if left alone. One day, when strolling in a great Cathedral Cloister, I observed that the grass in the middle contained many flat-slabbed tombstones, some modern, some quite ancient. How interesting, I thought, here I shall be able to see the result of worm-burial before my eyes. I saw a modern stone, 1921, how it was level with the grass, and near it another stone, 1804, which had sunk a considerable distance below the surface. This was excellent. I walked round so that I might see the old tombstones well sunk while the newer ones were still on the surface. I came to Martha Hunt, of Beloved Memory, dated 1870, and then to Nathaniel Groves, Resting in the Lord, dated 1791. But Martha Hunt’s tombstone had sunk lower than that of Nathaniel Groves! Trying not to notice this, I passed on and continued to conduct my researches. Some of the other stones conformed to the requirements of the theory, but not all. Coming upon Arthur Mackensie of Beloved Memory, dated 1801, and then upon Elizabeth Wakefield, in Loving Memory of, dated 1910, I was grieved to see that the latter was lower than the former.
I need not say that I do not at all dispute Darwin’s findings. Apart from the fact that a hundred reasons could doubtless be given as to why these particular stones were as they were, I feel confident that no fault lay with the worms. It is merely psychologically impossible for things of this kind to turn out well for me. Had Darwin experimented here, we can be sure that the tombstones would have arranged themselves in the proper order. The poet is the man who sees. The philosopher is the man who thinks. The man-of-action is the man who knows what to do. The scientist is the man who discovers. These are special kinds of men, as is soon found by any Tom, Dick, or Harry who assuming the role of one, attempts to see or to think or to lead or to experiment. I fear that I have nothing of the scientist in me, nothing of the naturalist or botanist; I shall never propose a theory supported by experimental proof, I shall never discover anything, never make new things known. I am content to make known things new.
Sometimes I am willing to ask a question. But not often, owing to the difficulty of getting a reply. For instance, I cannot understand why all woods are not found on the highest part of the land. Should not all woods be on hills? It is remarkable what colossal results follow upon minute and slow processes. We see this everywhere, not least in the famous case of the earthworm; and we might well be pardoned if we failed to believe that the mighty rocks of the early world could ever, by any process however slow, have been changed into soil. Now trees are things which in winter are one size and in summer another size, for they put on clothes called leaves. In the winter a given tree may look quite small – and in the summer enormous. Just outside my window there is a particular example of this, a silver birch. In the winter its marvellous network of twigs gives it a frail look, but when it becomes enleafed the change is remarkable; by midsummer it is a towering substance, a mighty mammoth of a tree standing there in the dusk huge and monumental. In the autumn it does not retain this extra substance, it lets it all fall to the ground. And those leaves do not all evaporate, many of them become vegetable mould. How is it then that after a few years, let alone a few centuries, a forest
will not have added enormously to the ground on which it stands? They say that the fungi feed on this decay; but surely not enough. And the amount in evaporation doesn’t seem likely to be equivalent to the deposit, and we cannot say that as much has been taken from the earth in order to make the leaves as is given by their fall, since they take huge supplies also from the air. They weave the atmosphere into visible shape. On a single oak tree seven million leaves have been counted. These leaves hang there throughout the country in perpetual slight motion in the ever-moving air, and by the conjured labours of millions of pores the substance of whole forests of solid wood is slowly extracted from the fleeting winds. Every year it rains heavily, it rains leaves, these leaves woven from the winds. Why is there not a moutainous result quite soon where there are woods? This question may be stupid, but I do not find that the answers I have ever received are very good.
Another thing. Why do we not notice a great change of air in the summer from what it was in the winter? There are those leaves extracting that vast amount of gas from the air, a process not active in winter, and yet we do not seem to suffer from it, do not notice any difference. Again, this question may seem too obviously the mark of an uninstructed mind; but I am relieved to find that Mr H E Bates says that this very thing does affect him personally. ‘It is as though – perhaps actually because – the air has been sucked up by a million leaves.’ And he goes on to say (in Through The Wood), ‘W H Hudson himself noticed this and had some comments on it in relation to the New Forest, where he felt that the great expanse of trees seemed to suck up all life and leave the mind and body and spirit as flabby as a sponge. He pointed out how pale the Hampshire people of that district looked, as though they were literally robbed of air,’
But one does not raise such questions with much hope of replies from specialists. They are far better at naming things than in answering questions of interest. If they can name a problem they often think they have solved it. ‘Perhaps nothing is more curious in the history of the human mind,’ said Ruskin, ‘than the way in which the science of botany has become oppressed with nomenclature.’ Thus do they overcome the problems of reality by simply labelling reality, just as in other departments the significance of a man’s point of view, his truth in which he passionately believes, is sidestepped by a label – his truth becoming merely an -ism. Still, I do not worry myself about getting answers to my question. I rather like not getting them. And I can truthfully say that the phenomenon itself is good enough for me. Gazing upon phenomena, I find that my problems are not solved; but they are dissolved.
And of all phenomena concerning trees, that which appeals to me most is – the trunk. For me the most beautiful sight in the woods is not the foliage, not the flowers, not the squirrel, not the deer – it is the trunks of trees of about thirty years old upwards. Especially the ash: the smooth grey bark; then a patch of dark moss; above it a patch of pale-green lichen in beautiful filigree pressed against the bark; then a number of white spots; then bark again; then moss again – no pattern, yet all pattern, no design yet all design, making a rounded tapestry beyond all the powers of art to render. No bright colours yet many colours – and in winter-time how often we see from the train window, tree-trunks almost as green as grass set in the gloom of the leafless boughs, taking the rain and the dusk in silent alertness. Once having been given four freshly cut logs of silver birch, I did not burn them (in any case they wouldn’t have been good as fire), but put them on a shelf as pictures. And I assure you they held my attention for many a day. Often I have been glad that I am not a painter; never more so than when confronted by some magnificent tree-trunk. Here is something that cannot be told, cannot be rendered. Here is the object, the thing itself, so staggering in its presence that we fall back from it, the intricacy of the totality cannot be copied, and it is the intricacy that is the picture; before it the art of suggestion is powerless, only the lower art of photography can give the total sum of the minutiae. Look at that old silver-birch trunk: knuckled, notched, and dented with its ditches, ruts, and causeways, all subservient to the majesty of design; look at the splashes of smooth white irregularly placed, the bark itself, not lichen: if a house-painter did a post with dabs of white here and there like that we would think it a poor, strange piece of work: but here it is magnificent, the impression of the Whole is terrific – we must leave our pen, our brush in face of it, abandon art as a hopeless substitute. Look at that old Scotch pine tree. It has no lichen, all the beauty is in the bark alone: rubbed, fluted, seamed, deeply chiselled, it is a personality, it is a Being. Perhaps that’s what I’m after here in these fumbling words: the power and the glory here is in the substance of the thing, and art is without substance.
Truly trees are Beings. We feel that to be so. Hence their silence, their indifference to us is almost exasperating. We would speak to them, we would ask their message; for they seem to hold some weighty truth, some special secret – and though sometimes we receive their blessing, they do not answer, they make no sign. When we look upon a man we find that he is not satisfied, he wishes he were something else, or had done something else. When we look upon a monkey we see that clearly it is a lost soul. When we look upon a sheep we see that it is unhappy in itself. When we look upon a cow we cannot be certain that underneath its apparent calm it is not concealing a great unease. Whitman said that he could turn and live with the animals. I would not join him. But many men have turned and lived with trees. They are much more companionable than cows. Thoreau would sometimes refuse to make an engagement with a friend on the ground that he had ‘an appointment with a tree’. What then is their final appeal, their message to mankind? Isaac Rosenberg alone has told it.
Then spake I to the tree,
Were ye your own desire
What is it ye would be?
Answered the tree to me,
I am my own desire;
I am what I would be.
22 Firewood
While carrying out my business of thinning the wood I piled up the thick poles which I had cut down, in batches of a hundred – for, working by the piece, I made so much per lug and so much per hundred poles. These piles of poles made a very satisfactory sight for me, since they were carried away at intervals to be used as firewood in the neighbouring village, superb firewood at that. It gave me considerable pleasure to know that one result of my work up here was that I supplied wood for a whole village throughout the winter. At irregular periods it was carted away by Reggie and the boys. I would hear his high voice from a long way off, shouting at the horse, and about half an hour later they would arrive with the trailer which they used for loading up.
One of the reasons why I am especially attracted by ash is because it has so much fire in it. That may not be the proper way to put it; but it certainly seems as if flame resides inside the wood. When we have put fire to wood, what do we see? We do not see the fire devouring the wood as it goes along: we see the wood becoming fire, ‘bursting into flames’ as we say. Everything has fire in it, we are told, even stones – though it takes much extra heat to set a stone on fire. Of all the receptacles of fire in the world, wood is the most famous and our debt to it without measure. It is easy to understand how the ancient Aryans regarded trees as the storerooms of heat and that the sun itself was periodically recruited from the fire which resided in the sacred oak.
And of all trees, Ash becomes fire best. It need not be seasoned first, it burns almost equally well whether dry or cut down yesterday. If you cut down a bundle of fresh, green ash-twigs they do perfectly for lighting your fire, they are ready-made crackers, they are children’s fireworks. Try the same thing with hazel and you’ll never get your fire lit at all. Whenever I go to any new place in the country I look round at once to see if there are any ash woods nearby, for if so I know that I need not depend upon dry twigs for lighting fires. To my amazement I found many woodmen ignorant of this, while one or two who were not ignorant of it gave me surprising examples of wasteful folly caused by such ignorance. Ob
serving the old man who worked with Reggie and the boys, taking home some hazel-faggots for his fire when there were heaps of ash around, I asked him why. He simply said that he had always done so. The fact that he had always done so was advanced in terms of a scientific statement that hazel made as good faggots as ash.
I used to take home a pole every day from the wood, and thus I was always in command of a magnificent fire – costing nothing save the labour of carriage. Then the bitter cold of a winter’s evening was transformed by the white-hot wood and I was nearly as happy in front of this earthly flame as in the summer under the sun.
I need not say that this job stimulated my interest in the financial aspect of fire-logs. All of us here were paid as woodmen, so much a week, or so much the piece; but occasionally I became familiar with the other sort of woodmen who, working on their own, made a good deal more by simply extracting wood and selling it – without any interest in the plantations. They made more, but of course they had to work hard for it, and to take risks. The man who really makes big profits is the man at the far end who distributes it – the man who neither plants, thins, tends, or extracts the wood. When I learnt the surprising prices charged for a sack of logs in the neighbouring towns, I realized that if you want to get rich in modern society you should not aim at securing the Means of Production, but rather the Means of Distribution. For today it is written – Blessed is he who distributes.
The Worm Forgives the Plough Page 38
