The mist cleared. As an airman flying, I saw,
Between the quiet wings of Shadow-of-a-Leaf,
Far down, a coiling glitter of willowy streams,
Then grey remembered battlements that enclosed
Gardens, like nests of nightingales; a bridge;
An airy tower; a shadowy dome; the High;
St Mary’s delicate spire.
A sound of bells
Rose like a spray of melody from the far
Diminished fountains of the City of Youth.
I heard and almost wept.
The walls grew large
And soared to meet me. As the patterned streets
[274]
Break into new dimensions, passing from sight
While the airman glides and circles down, they rose,
And the outer City, vanishing, revealed
The secret life within. At once I passed
Through walls of stone on those ethereal wings;
And, as an unseen spirit might survey
A crowded theatre from above, I saw
A packed assembly, gazing, hushed and still,
At certain famous leaders of that hour
On their raised daïs. Henslow in the midst,
Their president, gentle, tolerant, reverent, kind,
Darwin’s old tutor, scientist and half-saint;
Owen beside him, crabbèd as John Knox,
And dry as his dead bones; bland Wilberforce,
The great smooth Bishop of Oxford, pledged and primed
To make an end of Darwin, once for all.
Not far away, a little in shadow, sat
A strange young man, tall, slight, with keen dark eyes,
[275]
Who might, in the irresponsible way of youth,
Defend an absent thinker. Let him beware.
There was a balance of power in science, too,
Which would resent disturbance. He’d be crushed
By sheer weight of authority, then set,
Duly submissive, in his proper place.
His name was Huxley.
A square close-crowded room,
It held, in little, a concentrated world,
Imaging, on a microcosmic stage,
The doubts, the fears, the jealousies, and dull hates
That now beset one lonely soul at Down;
But imaging, also, dauntless love of truth
In two or three, the bearers of the fire.
Henslow, subdued, with twenty reticent words
That, in their mere formality, seemed aware
Of silent dark momentous currents flowing
Under the trivial ripple of use and wont,
Called on Daubeny, first, for his discourse
On Sex in Flowers, and their descent through time.
[276]
Daubeny, glancing over his glasses, bowed
And twinkled a wise physician’s rosy smile,
As one of his many parts; an all-round man,
Sound Latinist and an excellent judge of wine,
Humanist and geologist, who had tracked
Guettard through all his craters in Auvergne,
And, afterwards, with a map in his right hand,
And Ovid’s ‘Ars Amoris’ in his left,
Traced the volcanic chains through Hungary,
Italy, Transylvania, and returned
To Oxford, as her botanist at the last,
With silvery hair, but otherwise unchanged,
Oxford in bloom and Oxford to the core.
Swimming serene in academic air,
With open mind and non-committal phrase
He proved he knew how little all men know;
And whoso kept that little to himself
Could never be caught tripping.
Then he smiled,
And so remained the wisest of them all.
For half an hour the sexes of the flowers
Danced from his learned discourse, through the minds
[277]
Of half his feminine hearers, like a troop
Of Bacchanals, blowing kisses.
In the crowd
I saw, at the whimsical chuckle of Shadow-of-a-Leaf,
The large-eyed spinster with the small pursed mouth,
Eliza Pym of Woodstock, who desired
To know about the wild flowers that she drew
In delicate water-colours for her friends.
She sat bolt upright, innocently amazed
And vaguely trepidant in her hooped green gown.
What? Even the flowers? How startling was the sound
Of pistil! Awed, intent, she caught at clues;
Meticulously quivering at the thought
Of bees; and blushing deeply when he spoke
In baritone of male virtue in the rose.
Through all, the evasive academic phrase,
Putting out vaguely sensitive tentacles
That instantly withdrew from what they touched,
[278]
Implied that he could view, quite unperturbed,
All theories, and remain detached, aloft
Among the gods, in philosophic calm;
Nay, by his critical logic was endowed
With something loftier.
What were gods to him,
Who, being ephemeral, mortal, born to die,
Could, over the port of Corpus and All Souls
Mellowed in classic cellars, quiz the powers
That doomed him, as the aristocrat of thought
Looks through ironical lorgnettes at the might
Of Demos round his tumbril. They lived on,
Wasting their nectar, wrecking worlds on worlds.
He had risen, at least, superior to all that.
He held it somewhat barbarous, vulgar, crude
To wallow in such profusion as the gods.
All this implied, not spoken; for he found
His final causes in his dry pressed flowers;
Proved that he knew—none better—all the tribe
Who had dragged a net of Latin through the fields;
[279]
Proved that some flowers, at least, had never changed
Through many centuries. The black-seeded poppy
Was known to Homer. He rolled out the lines.
Almonds, the bitter-kernelled and the sweet,
Were tasted by the prophets; and he found
White-seeded sesamum, in the night of time,
Among the old Egyptians....
He showed that, while his library was vast,
Fragrant with leather, crested, tooled, and gilt,
He had closed the Book of Nature, and, on the whole,
Despite his open mind, dismissed the views
Of this—er—new philosopher, with a smile
That, don-wise, almost seemed to ask aloud,
“Who is he, after all?” Not one of us.
Why weigh his facts, then, further, since we hold
The official seals of truth in this our time.
Such men are always wrong. They come and go.
[280]
The breeze would soon blow over.
All this implied,
Not spoken, in that small dry steady smile,
Doctor Daubeny gathered up his tails
And made one definite and emphatic point
By sitting down, while some eight hundred hands
Acclaimed his perfect don-hood.
Henslow rose,
A little nervously. Had much pleasure, though....
And turned to Mr. Huxley. Would he speak?
A whisper passed, a queer new stillness gripped
The expectant crowd. The clock ticked audibly
Not yet, not yet! A sense of change at hand
Stole through the silence, like the first cool breath
That, over a great ship’s company at night,
Steals through the port-holes from the open sea.
[281]
Then, with sure foresight, seeing the clash to come,
The strange young man with the determined mouth
And quick dark eyes rose grimly, and flung down
A single sentence, like a gyve of steel
Wrenched from the wrists to set the strong hands free
For whatsoever need might rise, if clock
And Zeitgeist changed their quiet Not Yet to Now.
“A general audience, sir, where sentiment
May interfere, unduly interfere,
With intellect”—as a thin steel wire drawn tight
By an iron winch, the hush grew tense and rang
Low, hard, clear, cold—“is not a fitting place
For this discussion.”
Silence, and the clock,
Two great allies, the surest of them all,
Dead silence, and the voice Not Yet, Not Yet,
A cough, the creak of the chair as he sat down,
[282]
A shuffle of feet, the chairman’s baffled face,
Then little indignant mutterings round the hall,
Turning to gasps of mockery. Insolence?—no,—
Sheer weakness, full retreat!
The Bishop raised
His eye-brows, looked at the dense disflattered crowds,
And had no further fear. The battle was won.
Victory, of the only kind he knew,
Was in his hands. Retreat must now be turned
Into full rout. He glanced at Owen,—met
His little sardonic smile with a wise nod,
As if to say, “Ah, just as we foresaw.”
Excited clerics caught the flying hint
And whispered, eyes agog—“You noticed that?
He’s a great man, the Bishop? What a brow!
And Owen, too. Of course, they know; they know;
And understand each other, thick as thieves.”
[283]
Then Owen rose; waved Huxley’s empty excuse
Remorselessly aside; and plunged right on,
Declaring there were facts, whereby the crowd
Could very fitly judge.
The crowd’s own feet
Tapped a benign applause.
Then came the facts,
Facts from a realm that Huxley had made his own.
The brain of the gorilla—some one turned
A faint hysterical laugh into a sneeze—
Linked it more closely to the lowest groups
Of Quadrumana.
“Quadru—what-did-he-say?”
Whispered Miss Pym unconsciously to herself,
“Mana, four-handed,” clerical whiskers breathed,
With Evangelical titillance in her ear,
“Apes, monkeys, all the things that climb up trees.
Says the gorilla’s more like them than us.”
[284]
“Thank you.” Eliza Pym inclined her head
A little stiffly.
Had the world gone mad?
Was some one in the background trying to find
A pedigree for mankind among the brutes?
Absurd, of course, and yet—one must confess
How like they were in some things. Unto each
A mouth, a nose, two eyes, flesh, blood, and bones
Of the same pattern.
Comic enough, and weird;
But what became of Genesis, then, and God?
If all these whiskered men but one or two
So utterly disbelieved it, why discuss
Degrees of kinship? Surely the gulf was fixed
Wide as the severance between heaven and hell.
Then, in one dreadful gleam, she seemed to see
The rows of whiskered listeners, darkly perched,
Herself among them, on long swaying boughs,
Mesmerised, and all dumbly staring down
[285]
With horrible fascination at great eyes,
Green moons of cruelty, steadily smouldering,
In depths that—smelt of tigers; or the salts
Unstoppered by the vicar’s wife in front.
Smile at Eliza Pym with Shadow-of-a-Leaf;
But only if your inward sight can see
Her memories, too—a child’s uplifted face,
The clean white cot, the fluttering nursery fire;
Old days, old faces, teaching her those lines
From Blake, about a Lamb. Yet that—why that
Might be the clue they lacked in all this talk
Of our dumb kinsfolk. If she could but speak
And—hint it! Why don’t Bishops think of things
Like that, she wondered.
Owen resumed his chair
With loud applause.
That grim young man again,
Huxley, was on his feet, his dark eyes lit
With thrice the vital power of all the rest.
In one cool sentence, like a shining lance,
[286]
He touched the centre of his opponent’s shield,
And ended all the shuffling, all the doubts
Of where he stood, how far he dared to go,
If truth required it. He could not accept
Those facts from any authority; gave direct
Unqualified contradiction to those facts;
And pledged himself to justify this course,
Unusual as it seemed perhaps—elsewhere.
“Elsewhere,” and as he said it, came a gleam
Into his face, reflected from the heights
Where a tribunal sits whose judgment holds
Not for the fleeting moment, but all time.
“Elsewhere”—the Bishop smiled. He had not caught
That gleam. “Elsewhere” was only another sign
Of weakness, even timidity perhaps,
And certainly retreat, not from the truth
(He felt so sure of that) but from the might
And deep resources of the established powers
Whose influence ruled the world.
“Elsewhere” for him
[287]
Meant Saturday, and here. The lists were set,
The battle joined, and the great issue plain,—
Whether the human race came straight from God,
Or traced its dark descent back to the brute,
And left his creed a wreck of hollow towers,
The haunt of bats and owls. His time to strike
Would come on Saturday. Pleadings of “elsewhere”
Would not avail. He set his jaw. Please God,
He meant to drive this victory crashing home,
And make an end of Darwin once for all.
So closed the first strange scene.
The rumour spread
Everywhere, of the Bishop’s grim intent.
Saturday’s crowd, an hour before its time
Choked all the doors, and crammed the long west hall.
Black-coated members of all shades of thought,
Knowledge and doubt and bigotry, crushed their sides
[288]
In chair-packed rows together (Eliza Pym
Among them, with her startled innocent eyes).
A bevy of undergraduates at the back,
Quietly thoughtful, held their watching brief
For youth and for the future. Fame to come
Already touched the brows of a rare few
With faint leaf-shadows of her invisible wreath:
Green, the philosopher, gazing at the world
With youth’s aloofness, and that inward light
Which shines from Oxford still; not far away
The young historian of the coloured stream
Of outward life, the ancestral pageantry
Of England, and its tributary rills
Flowing in dawn-gleams out of the mists of time.
There, too, in front, with atavistic face
And Vandyke beard, so oddly like the king
Who loved Nell Gwynne, sat Admiral FitzRoy,
Late captain of the Beagle, quite prick-eared
With personal curiosity. Twice he told
His neighbour that, by George, he wouldn’t ha’ missed
[289]
This Donnybrook Fair for anything. He had sailed
With Darwin round the world. They used to call him
The old philosopher. Heard the bosun once,
Pointing the officers out—damned funny it was!—
“That’s Captain FitzRoy. That’s the second mate;
And that”—pointing a thumb at Darwin’s back—
“That’s our Fly-Catcher!”
Best of fellows, too,
But queer. He’d tell you, in the simplest way
—As if it meant no more than pass the salt,—
Something that knocked you endways; calmly shift
A mountain-range, in half a dozen words,
And sink it in the sea.
In fact, FitzRoy
Felt it his duty more than once, by George,
To expostulate; told him plainly he’d upset
Genesis and the Church; and then there’d be
[290]
The devil and all to pay. And now, by George,
He’d done it; and her Majesty’s Admiral
Had come on purpose, all the way from town,
To hear and see the end of it.
So he said,
Not wholly understanding why he came,—
The memory of a figure rapt and bowed
Over a shell, or finding in the rocks,
As though by wizardry, relics of lost worlds;
Moments that, by a hardly noticed phrase,
Had touched with orderly meaning and new light
The giant flaws and foldings in the hills;
Moments when, in the cabin, he had stared
Into the “old philosopher’s” microscope,
And seen the invisible speck in a water-drop
Grow to a great rose-window of radiant life
In an immense cathedral.
Vaguely enough,
Perhaps in the dimmest hinterland of his mind,
There lurked a quiet suspicion that, after all,
[291]
His queer old friend had hit on something queer.
Three places off, his face a twinkling mask
Of keen Scots humour, Robert Chambers glanced
Quietly at his watch, to hide a smile
When some one who had “written the Vestiges,”
And only half denied it, met his eye.
The vacant platform glared expectancy,
And held the gaze now of the impatient crowd.
Then Henslow led the conquering Bishop in.
Two rows of clerics, halfway down the hall,
Drummed for their doughty champion with their heels.
Above, in each recessed high window-seat,
Bishop-adoring ladies clapped their hands.
The rest filed in, mere adjuncts, modest foils.
Hooker and Lubbock and Huxley took their chairs
[292]
On Henslow’s left. The beautiful gaitered legs,
By their divine prerogative, on his right,
So carelessly crossed, more eloquently than words
Assured the world that everything was well,
And their translation into forms of speech
A mere formality. Next to the Bishop sat
A Transatlantic visitor with a twang,
One Doctor Draper, his hard wrinkled skin
Tinged by the infinite coffee he absorbed,
A gaunt bone-coloured desert, unassuaged.
He was a grim diplomatist, as befits
A pilgrim of the cosmos; ready at Rome
To tickle the Romans; and, if bishops ruled,
And found themselves at odds with freeborn souls
Outside the Land of Freedom, he’d befriend
Bishops, bring in the New World, stars and all,
To rectify that balance, and take home
For souvenir, with a chip of the pyramids,
The last odd homages of the obsequious Old.
[293]
The president called him for his opening speech.
He stood and beamed, enjoying to the full
The sense that, with his mighty manuscript,
He could delay the antagonists for an hour.
He cleared his throat. He took from a little box
A small black lozenge, popped it into his mouth,
Leisurely rolled it under a ruminant tongue,
Then placidly drawled his most momentous words:
“Proh-fessur Henslow, Bishop Wilbur-force,
Members, and friends, in this historic hall,
I assk first, air we a fortooitous
Con-course of atoms?” Half unconsciously,
He struck at once to the single central heart
Of all the questions asked by every age;
As though he saw what only Shadow-of-a-Leaf
Had watched last night, as in a crystal globe,
That scene preparing, the interweaving clues
Whose inconceivable intricacy at length,
[294]
By “chance,” as blind men call it, through the maze
Of life and time, at the one right juncture brought
Two shadows, face to face, in an Oxford Street,
Chambers and Huxley. “You’ll be there to-morrow.”—
“No, I leave Oxford now.”—
“The enemy means
To annihilate Darwin. You will not desert us?”—
“If you say that, I stay.”
Each to his place
Had moved in his own orbit, like a star,
Or like an atom, free-will at one with law,
In the unplanned plan of the Master-Dramatist,
Where Doctor Draper blindly played his part
And asked his pregnant question. He droned on,
For one enormous hour, starkly maintained
That Europe, in its intellectual life,
[295]
By mere “fortooity,” never could have flowered
To such results as blushed before him there
In that historic hall of halls to-night.
If Darwin thought so, he took leave to stand
Beside them, and to smile the vast calm smile
Of Arizona’s desert distances,
Till all such dragon thoughts had coiled away.
He took his chair. The great debate began.
For prelude came a menacing growl of storm.
A furious figure rose, like a sperm-whale,
Out of the seething audience. A huge man,
With small, hot, wicked eyes and cavernous mouth,
Bellowed his own ferocious claim to speak
On economic grounds. He had subscribed
His guineas, ringing guineas of red gold,
Ungrudgingly for years; but prophesied
Withdrawal of all such guineas, on all sides,
From this Association, if it failed
To brand these most abominable views
As blasphemous, bearing on their devilish brows,
[296]
Between their horns, the birth-mark of the Beast.
This last word hissed, he sank again. At once,
Ere Henslow found his feet or spoke a word,
Up leapt a raw-boned parson from the North,
To seize his moment’s fame. With sawing arm
The Reverend Dingle, like a windmill, vowed
He’d prove upon the blackboard, in white chalk,
By diagram—and the chalk was in his hand—
“That mawnkey and mahn had separate pedigrees.
Let A here be the mawnkey, and B the mahn.”
Loud laughter; shouts of “mawnkey!” and “sit down”
Extinguished him. He sat; and Henslow quelled
The hubbub with one clarion-clear demand,
Dictated, surely, by the ironic powers
Who had primed the Bishop and prepared his fall:
“Gentlemen, this discussion now must rest
On scientific grounds.”
[297]
At once there came
Calls for the Bishop, who, rising from his chair,
Urged by the same invisible ironies,
Remarked that his old friend, Professor Beale,
Had something to say first. That weighty first
Conveyed the weight of his own words to come.
Urged still by those invisible ones, his friend
Dug the pit deeper; modestly declared,
Despite his keen worn face and shoulders bowed
In histologic vigils, that he felt
His knowledge quite inadequate; and the way
Was made straight—for the Bishop.
The Bishop rose, mellifluous, bland, adroit.
A gesture, lacking only the lawn sleeves
To make it perfect, delicately conveyed
His comfortable thought—that what amazed
The sheepfold must be folly.
Half the throng,
[298]
His own experience told him, had not grasped
The world-inweaving argument, could not think
In æons. Æons, then, would be dismissed
As vague and airy fantasies. He might choose
His facts at will, unchallenged. He stood there
Secure that his traditions could not fail,
Basing his faith on schemes of thought designed
By authorised “thinkers” in pure artistry,
As free from Nature’s law as coloured blocks
That children play with on the nursery hearth,
And puzzle about and shift and twist and turn
Until the beautiful picture, as ordained,
Comes out, exact to the pattern, and reveals
The artificer’s plan, the pattern, as arranged,
By bishops, politic statesmen, teachers, guides,
Who hold it in reserve, their final test
Of truth, for times like this. He had been so sure
Of something deeper than all schemes of thought
[299]
That he had all too lightly primed himself
With “facts” to match their fables; hastily crammed
Into his mind’s convenient travelling bag
(Sound leather, British) all that he required,—
Not truth, but “a good argument.” He had asked
Owen, who hated Huxley, to provide it;
And he had brought it with him,—not the truth,
Not even facts, those unrelated crumbs
Of truth, the abiding consecrated whole.
He had brought his borrowed “facts,” misunderstood,
To meet, for the first time in all his life,
Stark earnest thought, wrestling for truth alone,
As men on earth discerned it. He had prayed,
With something deeper than blind make-believe,
Thy will be done on earth; and yet, and yet,
The law wherein that will might be discerned,
The law wherein that unity of heaven
[300]
And earth might yet be found (could he but trust
The truth, could he believe that his own God
Lived in the living truth), he waved aside.
These others had not found it, but they kept
One faith that he had lost. Though it should slay them,
They trusted in the truth. They could not see
Where it might lead them. Only at times they felt
As they deciphered the dark Book of Earth
That, following its majestic rhythm of law,
They followed the true path, the eternal way
Of That which reigns. Prophetic flashes came.
Words that the priest mechanically intoned
Burned upon Huxley’s keen ironical page
Like sudden sapphires, drawing their deeper light
From that celestial City which endures
Because it hath foundations: Shall I come
Before the Eternal with burnt offerings?
Hath not the Eternal showed thee what is good,
[301]
That thou do justly and mercifully, and walk
Humbly with the Eternal?
O, irony of the Master-dramatist,
Who set once more those lists; and sent His truth
Unrecognised, as of old, to fight for life
And prove itself in struggle and raise once more
A nobler world above the world out-worn,
Crushing all easy sophistry, though it stood
Garbed as the priest of God.
The Bishop seized
His diplomatic vantage. The blunt truth
Of Huxley’s warning offered itself to him
As a rash gambit in their game of—tact.
He seized it; gracefully smoothed the ruffled pride
Of that great audience, trained in a sound school
To judge by common-sense.
His mobile face
Revealed much that his politic words concealed.
[302]
His strength was in that sound old British way—
Derision of all things that transcend its codes
In life, thought, art; the moon-calf’s happy creed
That, if a moon-calf only sees the moon
In thoughts that range the cosmos, his broad grin
Sums the whole question; there’s no more to see.
In all these aids, an innocent infidel,
The Bishop put his trust; and, more than all,
In vanity, the vacant self-conceit
That, when it meets the masters of the mind
And finds them bowed before the Inscrutable Power,
Accepts their reverence and humility
As tribute, due acknowledgment of fool’s right
To give the final judgment, and annul
The labour of a life-time in an hour.
Dulcetly, first, he scoffed at Darwin’s facts.
“Rock-pigeons now were what they had always been.
[303]
Species had never changed. What were the proofs
Even of the variation they required
To make this theory possible? We had heard
Mysterious rumours of a long-legged sheep
Somewhere in Yorkshire (laughter). Let me ask
Professor Huxley, here upon the left
(All eyes on Huxley), who believes himself
Descended from an ape (chuckles of glee),
How recently this happened.”
The Bishop turned,
All smiling insolence, “May I beg to know
If this descent is on your father’s side,
Or on your mother’s?”
He paused, to let the crowd
Bellow its laughter. The unseen ironies
Had trapped him and his flock; and neither knew.
But Huxley knew. He turned, with a grim smile,
And while the opposing triumph rocked and pealed,
Struck one decisive palm upon his knee,
[304]
And muttered low—“The Lord hath delivered him
Into my hands.”
His neighbour stared and thought
His wits were wandering. Yet that undertone
Sounded more deadly, had more victory in it,
Than all the loud-mouthed minute’s dying roar.
It died to a tense hush. The Bishop closed
In solemn diapason. Darwin’s views
Degraded woman. They debased mankind,
And contradicted God’s most Holy Word.
Applause! Applause! The hall a quivering mist
Of clapping hands. From every windowseat
A flutter of ladies’ handkerchiefs and shrill cries
As of white swarming sea-gulls. The black rows
Of clerics all exchanging red-faced nods,
And drumming with their feet, as though to fill
A hundred-pedalled organ with fresh wind.
[305]
The Bishop, like a Gloire de Dijon rose
With many-petalled smiles, his plump right hand
Clasped in a firm congratulatory grip
Of hickory-bones by Draper of New York;
Who had small faith in what the Bishop said
But heard the cheers, and gripped him as a man
Who never means to let this good thing go.
Motionless, on the left, the observant few,
The silent delegates of a sterner power,
With grave set faces, quietly looking on.
At last the tumult, as all tumult must,
Sank back to that deep silence. Henslow turned
To Huxley without speaking. Once again
The clock ticked audibly, but its old “Not Yet”
Had somehow, in that uproar, in the face
Of that tumultuous mockery, changed to Now!
The lean tall figure of Huxley quietly rose.
He looked for a moment thoughtfully at the crowd;
[306]
Saw rows of hostile faces; caught the grin
Of ignorant curiosity; here and there,
A hopeful gleam of friendship; and, far back,
The young, swift-footed, waiting for the fire.
He fixed his eyes on these—then, in low tones,
Clear, cool, incisive, “I have come here,” he said,
“In the cause of Science only.”
He paused again.
Then, striking the mockery out of the mocker’s face,
His voice rang out like steel—
“I have heard nothing
To prejudice the case of my august
Client, who, as I told you, is not here.”
At once a threefold picture flashed upon me,
A glimpse, far off, through eyes of Shadow-of-a-Leaf,
First, of a human seeker, there at Down,
Gathering his endless cloud of witnesses
From rocks, from stones, from trees; and from the signs
In man’s own body of life’s æonian way;
But, far above him, clothed with purer light,
[307]
The stern, majestic Spirit of living Truth;
And, more august than even his prophets knew,
Through that eternal Spirit, the primal Power
Returning into a world of faiths out-worn.
Once more, as he spoke on, a thousand years
Were but as yesterday. If these truths were true,
This theory flooded the whole world with light.
Could we believe that the Creator set
In mockery all these birth-signs in the world,
Or once in a million years had wrecked His work
And shaped, in a flash, a myriad lives anew,
Bearing in their own bodies all the signs
Of their descent from those that He destroyed?
Who left that ancient leaf within the flower?
Who hid within the reptile those lost fins,
And under the skin of the sea-floundering whale
[308]
The bones of the lost thigh? Who dusked the foal
With shadowy stripes, and under its hoof concealed
Those ancient birdlike feet of its lost kin?
Who matched that hoof with a rosy fingernail,
Or furled that point within the human ear?
Who had imprinted in the body of man,
And in his embryo, all those intricate signs
Of his forgotten lineage, even those gills
Through which he drew his breath once in the sea?
The speaker glanced at his antagonist.
“You think all this too marvellous to be true;
Yet you believe in miracles. You think
The unfolding of this complicated life
Around us, out of a simple primal form,
Impossible; yet you know that every man
Before his birth, a few brief years ago,
Was once no more than a single living cell.
You think it ends your theory of creation.
You say that God made you; and yet you know
[309]
—And reconcile your creed with what you know—
That you yourself originally”—he held up
A gleaming pencil-case—“were a little piece
Of matter, not so large as the end of this.
But if you ask, in fine,
Whether I’d be ashamed to claim descent
From that poor animal with the stooping gait
And low intelligence, who can only grin
And chatter as we pass by, or from a man
Who could use high position and great gifts
To crush one humble seeker after truth—
I hesitate, but”—an outburst of applause
From all who understood him drowned the words.
He paused. The clock ticked audibly again.
Then, quietly measuring every word, he drove
The sentence home. “I asserted and repeat
A man would have no cause to feel ashamed
Of being descended through vast tracts of time
From that poor ape.
Were there an ancestor
Whom I could not recall without a sense
[310]
Of shame, it were a man, so placed, so gifted,
Who sought to sway his hearers from the truth
By aimless eloquence and by skilled appeals
To their religious prejudice.”
Was it the truth
That conquered, or the blind sense of the blow
Justly considered, delivered, and driven home,
That brought a crash of applause from half the house?
And more (for even the outright enemy
Joined in that hubbub), though indignant cries,
Protested vainly, “Abominable to treat
The Bishop so!”
The Bishop sat there dumb.
Eliza Pym, adding her own quaint touch
Of comedy, saw that pencil shine again
In Huxley’s hand; compared it, at a glance
Of fawn-like eyes, with the portentous form
In gaiters; felt the whole world growing strange;
Drew one hysterical breath, and swooned away.
