22nd April 1854:
Today, after falling ill of scarlet fever on Sunday night, our darling Felix died, beyond the doctor’s saving, at half-past six in the morning, aged one year and ten months.
I don’t understand him. I never sought him out, I could do without him. But there he is, washed up before me: I have to revive him.
I don’t understand him. The Notebooks don’t begin until 1854, with the death of his son. And they end in 1860, with the departure of Matthew from Burlford and from his wife and children for ever. And throughout that six-year period Matthew must have lived, to the world at least, the life he had always lived; must have ridden off every day over the hill to his work, and slipped into bed beside Elizabeth and sat with her in their pew on Sundays, as if nothing had changed.
The Notebooks must have been secret, even from the Rector, to whom his “thoughts” were not. The entries are sporadic—whole months go by with not a word written. And at any time during those six years (but how many times did he
do
this?) Matthew might have looked around him at all that he had and said, indeed, What is the difference? What difference does it make? And even on that very last day—it was a fine June day: he even found time to note the fleecy clouds and the roses in the Rectory garden—he might have walked up on to Jacob’s Hill, looked down at his house, at the village, at all that sweet,
unaltering make-belief, and, with a simple turning of a switch inside him and a sealing of his lips, returned to embrace it.
22nd April 1855:
Is there not in our minds, no less than in physical nature, a power of regeneration and renewal? Are we not lopped and smitten only so we will grow again? I thought it so once. “Heaviness may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”
9th August 1856:
Such a lovely day, blessed day. Unbroken sunshine and the breeze not bringing in clouds but seeming to sweep and cleanse the air. In the evening, at the imprecations of Lucy, who seemed to decide that today she must be my constant consort, took the gig and made a brief excursion with her round and about the village. Such a sweet evening, such a rare light over the valley, and the tops of the trees in Rectory Copse stirring as if with a consciousness of delight. On such a day why should we resist what we credulously call the “evidence of our senses”? “And the firmament sheweth his handywork”! Coming back, Lucy fell at once fast asleep, even in the jolting gig. Had to be lifted, still sleeping, from it. Observed how in her sleep she passes the back of her hand deliberately across her eyes, just as her mother does. Thought how a future husband will treasure that gesture just as I treasure it in Liz. No thing, perhaps, is truly separate from another. What right have I to make hostages to my conscience my children, my wife and all that is dear to me? When I know, truly, I would lay down my life, on the instant, for my daughter and her brothers and their mother, why can I not do the lesser thing and make a sacrifice of my doubts?
24th October 1856:
Raise again with the good Rector the question of Extinction. N.B., not Death—Extinction. The Rector would
have it that I confuse—because he himself, perhaps, confuses—the two, and that my discoursing on the latter is merely the old cavilling at the former. I am not so foolish as to take issue with mortality. I will bow to Divine Will—however volatile that Volition—in the individual (have I not done so?). But in the species?
These fossils of mine, quips he, are fast becoming the “insuperable bone of our contention.” But I will not be jested into submission. Question: Is the Creator to be viewed as a mere Experimenter? Why should the Maker who fashioned Noah, and gave him such provident instructions, make what he unmakes? He answers: Being the Creator, he would have every right. I answer: Yes, but what reason? He answers: Did not God repent of his Creation? Was not the Flood sent to punish all flesh with destruction, saving only the seedstock in the Ark? And might not these creatures (viz. “my fossils”) be the remains of those living things destroyed in the Flood, their shapes “monstrously altered” by that great Catastrophe? Answer: Anatomy not so flexible, nor distortion so uniform. And, in any case, “these creatures” were extinct (by any reckoning)
before
the Flood.
But he does not care to be launched again on the question of Time. He looks at me, indeed, with the scowl of a man who begins to feel I take up too much of his. Yet he once, not long ago, gave it freely enough. He was once not a little glad that, after some ten years his son-in-law, I opened up my thoughts to him and put him, in his words, “on his theological mettle.” We should not, he says, from the small vantage of our private grievances, call to task the universe and its governance. No, no, perhaps. But we regularly, it seems, do the opposite thing and suppose, from our private contentments and the smooth running of our local affairs, the compliant disposition of all things. Example: I am a surveyor; I go out with my yardstick to measure the field. I am told by Lyell here, whose
Principles of Geology
rests at my elbow and whom I do the credit of re-reading, this time
with my eyes open
, that the universe is a thing beyond all known
calculation. No matter: in order to measure the field it is not necessary to measure the universe, and I will swear, for all Lyell can tell me, that the field I tread today, after diligently perusing his work, is the same field I trod yesterday and that three feet still make one yard.
25th October 1856:
If Lyell is right, and I cannot—without shutting my eyes—pronounce him wrong, then the Book of Genesis is not a history but an allegory—and an imperfect one—and my father’s frail chronometers are of little avail in estimating the immense periods of Geological Time. Suppose that aeons elapsed before the Creator made Man, before the world became such as we see it to be, and that the six days of Genesis are properly to be counted in
millions
of years; then the entire record of human history is as a wink in the world’s duration. And if the world existed so long without Man upon it, why should we suppose that futurity holds for us any guaranteed estate and that we occupy any special and permanent place in Creation?
29th October 1856:
Walked with the Rector before dinner over Jacob’s Hill. Fine autumn weather, the bracken turning. Ventured—with caution—to raise again above questions. Answers: Bah! Who but the Almighty could have raised mountains and levelled plains? I answer: Lyell could tell him. Offer to lend copy.
Question rather is: Why should the
Almighty
have been so
slow
? If He ordained for us a privileged position between the brutes and the angels, why did He place us there so
late
? Anticipate the Rector’s answer: God not to be reckoned by temporal gauges; all is one
sub specie aeternitatis;
“a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday,” etc., etc.
6th November 1856:
Dined in Tavistock with Neale, who will be chief venturer in Wheal Talbot, and Mr Benson, a visiting acquaintance
of his, a Manchester man and something in cotton. Neale a sound enough fellow. Mean to invite him some day to Burlford. Benson harder to fathom. Proposes: (1) to acquire of Neale, and similarly of others, the exclusive right to refine the arsenopyrite waste from Wheal Talbot, which can hardly be objected to by Neale, who would otherwise have the task of its disposal; (2) to export said arsenic to the American plantations to curb the American boll weevil, thus benefiting—“a pretty chain of consequences”—not only the planters but the economies of Devonshire and Lancashire.
Asks (Neale having told him, doubtless, of my “bug-hunting”) whether I am acquainted with the boll weevil—“a prodigious devourer of cotton.” Answer: “No, I am not familiar with that species, but is there not a blight upon the cotton trade more detrimental than the boll weevil? I mean the blight of slavery.” Answers: “Indeed, sir, there is much sentiment aired nowadays on the subject of slavery, much of it, I observe, by those who do not object to wear cotton on their backs or who fondly suppose that slavery is an evil unmet with in our own happy land. You do not know our Lancashire factory hands. You would find them also an interesting species. I assure you that were you to view the conditions under which the mass of them exist, you would consider the miners here in Devon to be blessed in comparison. It would be an interesting experiment, would it not, to remove one of your negroes from his shackles in the Carolinas and set him down, a free man, in the din of one of our Manchester mills? Would he thank us, I wonder, for our Christian mercy?”
9th November 1856:
Estimation: from one mature oak tree, in a seed-bearing year, some 20,000, or, say, two bushels, of acorns. (This from calculations upon my own observation of the oaks in Loxley Wood.) Of which but some hundreds will root as seedlings (failure in germination; eaten by birds and animals). Of which again barely some ten per cent (nibbling by animals; want of light—your bracken is your
enemy of your oakwood) will remain after the first three years.
Estimation: A hen salmon of ten pounds from our Tamar will deposit, say, 10,000 eggs, of which perhaps only a quarter are made fertile and of these the vast bulk will be destroyed as eggs, in the larval stage or as parr. For this (being itself one of the lucky survivors) it performs, unstintingly, its gruelling and eventually fatal yearly journeys from the sea.
Estimation: The pheasant (this from Wilson, the gamekeeper) will lay, say, twelve eggs in a year. Of which (assuming no vigilant and protective Wilson) some three or four will be lost as eggs to weasels and other nest-robbers—not counting the frequent destruction of whole clutches—and of the surviving nestlings some three or four again will fall to predators or, as young birds, to the trial of their first winter.
The same pattern, if the margin of waste narrows, among the higher animals. If we suppose the human species to be above the harsh husbandry of nature, then we need but look to our own systems of economy (N.B., Benson’s factory hands). Two minutes in the company of our copper miners will prove that they are Toms, Dicks and Harrys; but are they not perceived as so many man-units, quantifiable (and expendable) at cheap rate?
Conclusions
. (
a
) Bad: That nature is a pitiless arithmetician and gross cozener, hiding behind her bountiful appearance the truth that the greater portion of Creation exists only as a tribute to Destruction.
(
b
) Good (but conditionally): That nature is indomitable in her promulgation of life.
What expense will she not spare
to maintain her own? But this the tenacity of the blind. If disposed by the Almighty and All-seeing, why not with more
thrift?
10th November 1856:
“And herb for the service of man”? If the cotton plant were created so we might not lack for clothing, why the boll weevil? And all the nations of
pests
.
15th November 1856:
The Rector has returned my Lyell. Confesses he has progressed so far but found it bewildering ground. It is the ground
under our feet
! Concedes he will not judge what he cannot pretend to have studied. A humble way of wishing the subject closed. But I perceive a kind of challenge in this embargo on further parley. I have spoken; he has heard me. This is the gist of it. He has allowed me, for so long, to be the
advocatus diaboli
in his study; he has answered me with patience, with sympathy, even with pleasure in the envigoration of the exercise—but now, if I truly mean to persist in all this, would I consider very carefully the consequences?
Meanwhile, under this enforced truce, he does not shrink from outfacing me indirectly. He pre-empts me from the vantage of his pulpit and counters me in his choice of text—I am sure these things are intended especially for me. This Sunday’s sermon: “Therefore will we not fear, though the earth be removed; and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea.”
And still I go and sit in our pew and listen while he thus dares me before the unwitting congregation. And still I kneel and pray, and my heart is uplifted by the words of the Bible, which I cannot believe, no, no, are mere fancy, mere poetry, like the Rector’s Virgil. Dear God, I do not want to hurt the dear old man. And only when I put on again my Sunday hat, do my “thoughts” return. Only at the church gate does my conscience meet me once more and charge me with desertion.
I trust—I know—he will not speak to Elizabeth. Is not that the true measure of my hypocrisy? That I keep from my own wife what I impart to her father, wishing to spare her, being her father’s daughter, the full pain of disclosure, when I daily injure and perplex her with my furtive preoccupation; and she, dear Liz, patiently supposes that periodically I must wrap myself in weighty but necessary “studies.” Surely she suspects. But surely if I were to tell her all, she would only commend me to her father’s counsel. Surely, one day, taking the matter into her own
hands, she will speak to her father. And there will be the poor Rector in a fine state of contortion.
6th July 1857:
My dear little Lucy! Such a sweet mixture of trustingness and forwardness. I confess she has become my favourite. I endeavour to instill in her what, increasingly, is absent in me and to teach her to see what I discern less and less: an immanent Divinity in all things. As this morning, when we passed a memorable hour in the sunshine, observing the butterflies on our buddleia bush. I had thought she had no mind for her lost little brother, but today, when I explain how short is the life of the butterfly, she pierces my heart by remarking: “Poor things, like Felix.”
“This is the Large White,” I say, “and this is the Tortoiseshell—you see, each wears its own apparel—and this the Red Admiral, who is called admiral not because he is a naval gentleman but because he is to be admired: do you not agree?” She asks: “But why should each kind be dressed the same?” A big question. I answer. “Why, so we can recognise them and tell one kind from the other and know their names.” Answers: “But that is silly, Papa, they cannot all have the same name. I would rather they had names of their own, like you and me.”
20th August 1857:
To the Rectory for dinner. The first such occasion for some time. I observe the Rector cannot altogether restrain the animosity formerly confined to his study, though his good wife and Elizabeth mark nothing more than an unwonted testiness, for which they chide him, and he, good soul, is duly contrite. I introduce the subject of Brunel’s bridge, the first great truss for which is to be positioned next month; whereupon he adopts the popular stance of fearful and scornful incredulity. “But surely,” he exclaims, “the thing is
impossible
!” I see his drift: he will not attack me, not before Emily and Liz, but he will attack the bridge, which I defend, for its unholy presumption.
“You tell me,” he says, in the manner of an
ipso facto
denunciation, “that the distance to be spanned is nigh on a thousand feet, and each truss will weigh over a thousand tons!”
How we human beings are so easily dismayed by effects of
scale
. The Saltash bridge is indeed a thing of vast proportions, but it is no less practicable, no less conformable to the laws of physics, than one of my father’s quietly ticking clocks. With a sketch or two and some mathematics, I could show—I offer to do so, but the Rector forbids such dinner-table science—how such a mighty thing is achieved. To be sure, there are many who take the immensity of I.K.B.’s schemes as a measure of his vainglory and as an omen of his ruin. But it is their calumny which inhibits his success, not the man’s own scrupulous calculations.