The Colour of Life | Page 5

and of the
dead throughout this landscape of manifest life. Where are they - all the
dying, all the dead, of the populous woods? Where do they hide their
little last hours, where are they buried? Where is the violence concealed?
Under what gay custom and decent habit? You may see, it is true, an
earth-worm in a robin's beak, and may hear a thrush breaking a snail's
shell; but these little things are, as it were, passed by with a kind of
twinkle for apology, as by a well-bred man who does openly some little
solecism which is too slight for direct mention, and which a meaner
man might hide or avoid. Unless you are very modern indeed, you
twinkle back at the bird.
But otherwise there is nothing visible of the havoc and the prey and
plunder. It is certain that much of the visible life passes violently into
other forms, flashes without pause into another flame; but not all. Amid
all the killing there must be much dying. There are, for instance, few
birds of prey left in our more accessible counties now, and many
thousands of birds must die uncaught by a hawk and unpierced. But if
their killing is done so modestly, so then is their dying also. Short lives
have all these wild things, but there are innumerable flocks of them
always alive; they must die, then, in innumerable flocks. And yet they
keep the millions of the dead out of sight.

Now and then, indeed, they may be betrayed. It happened in a cold
winter. The late frosts were so sudden, and the famine was so complete,
that the birds were taken unawares. The sky and the earth conspired
that February to make known all the secrets; everything was published.
Death was manifest. Editors, when a great man dies, are not more
resolute than was the frost of `95.
The birds were obliged to die in public. They were surprised and forced
to do thus. They became like Shelley in the monument which the art
and imagination of England combined to raise to his memory at
Oxford.
Frost was surely at work in both cases, and in both it wrought wrong.
There is a similarity of unreason in betraying the death of a bird and in
exhibiting the death of Shelley. The death of a soldier - passe encore.
But the death of Shelley was not his goal. And the death of the birds is
so little characteristic of them that, as has just been said, no one in the
world is aware of their dying, except only in the case of birds in cages,
who, again, are compelled to die with observation. The woodland is
guarded and kept by a rule. There is no display of the battlefield in the
fields. There is no tale of the game-bag, no boast. The hunting goes on,
but with strange decorum. You may pass a fine season under the trees,
and see nothing dead except here and there where a boy has been by, or
a man with a trap, or a man with a gun. There is nothing like a butcher's
shop in the woods.
But the biographers have always had other ways than those of the wild
world. They will not have a man to die out of sight. I have turned over
scores of "Lives," not to read them, but to see whether now and again
there might be a "Life" which was not more emphatically a death. But
there never is a modern biography that has taken the hint of Nature.
One and all, these books have the disproportionate illness, the death out
of all scale.
Even more wanton than the disclosure of a death is that of a mortal
illness. If the man had recovered, his illness would have been rightly
his own secret. But because he did not recover, it is assumed to be news
for the first comer. Which of us would suffer the details of any physical

suffering, over and done in our own lives, to be displayed and
described? This is not a confidence we have a mind to make; and no
one is authorised to ask for attention or pity on our behalf. The story of
pain ought not to be told of us, seeing that by us it would assuredly not
be told.
There is only one other thing that concerns a man still more exclusively,
and that is his own mental illness, or the dreams and illusions of a long
delirium. When he is in common language not himself, amends should
be made for so bitter a paradox; he should be allowed such solitude as
is possible to the alienated spirit; he should be left to the "not himself,"
and spared the intrusion against which