The Complete Essays | Page 6

one or any thing, not even a skittle-alley, for
they are all threaded to you, and to despise them would be to
blaspheme against continuity, and to blaspheme against continuity
would be to deny Eternity. Love you cannot help, and hate you cannot
help; but contempt is--for you--the sovereign idiocy, the irreligious
fancy!"
There was a bee weighing down a blossom of thyme close by, and
underneath the stalk a very ugly little centipede. The wild bee, with his
little dark body and his busy bear's legs, was lovely to me, and the
creepy centipede gave me shudderings; but it was a pleasant thing to

feel so sure that he, no less than the bee, was a little mood expressing
himself out in harmony with Designs tiny thread on the miraculous
quilt. And I looked at him with a sudden zest and curiosity; it seemed
to me that in the mystery of his queer little creepings I was enjoying the
Supreme Mystery; and I thought: "If I knew all about that wriggling
beast, then, indeed, I might despise him; but, truly, if I knew all about
him I should know all about everything--Mystery would be gone, and I
could not bear to live!"
So I stirred him with my finger and he went away.
"But how"--I thought "about such as do not feel it ridiculous to despise;
how about those whose temperaments and religions show them all
things so plainly that they know they are right and others wrong? They
must be in a bad way!" And for some seconds I felt sorry for them, and
was discouraged. But then I thought: "Not at all-- obviously not! For if
they do not find it ridiculous to feel contempt, they are perfectly right
to feel contempt, it being natural to them; and you have no business to
be sorry for them, for that is, after all, only your euphemism for
contempt. They are all right, being the expressions of contemptuous
moods, having religions and so forth, suitable to these moods; and the
religion of your mood would be Greek to them, and probably a matter
for contempt. But this only makes it the more interesting. For though to
you, for instance, it may seem impossible to worship Mystery with one
lobe of the brain, and with the other to explain it, the thought that this
may not seem impossible to others should not discourage you; it is but
another little piece of that Mystery which makes life so wonderful and
sweet."
The sun, fallen now almost to the level of the cliff, was slanting upward
on to the burnt-red pine boughs, which had taken to themselves a
quaint resemblance to the great brown limbs of the wild men Titian
drew in his pagan pictures, and down below us the sea-nymphs, still
swimming to shore, seemed eager to embrace them in the enchanted
groves. All was fused in that golden glow of the sun going down-sea
and land gathered into one transcendent mood of light and colour, as if
Mystery desired to bless us by showing how perfect was that
worshipful adjustment, whose secret we could never know. And I said
to myself: "None of those thoughts of yours are new, and in a vague
way even you have thought them before; but all the same, they have

given you some little feeling of tranquillity."
And at that word of fear I rose and invited my companion to return
toward the town. But as we stealthy crept by the "Osteria di
Tranquillita," our friend in the bowler hat came out with a gun over his
shoulder and waved his hand toward the Inn.
"You come again in two week--I change all that! And now," he added,
"I go to shoot little bird or two," and he disappeared into the golden
haze under the olive-trees.
A minute later we heard his gun go off, and returned homeward with a
prayer.
1910.

MAGPIE OVER THE HILL
I lay often that summer on a slope of sand and coarse grass, close to the
Cornish sea, trying to catch thoughts; and I was trying very hard when I
saw them coming hand in hand.
She was dressed in blue linen, and a little cloud of honey-coloured hair;
her small face had serious eyes the colour of the chicory flowers she
was holding up to sniff at--a clean sober little maid, with a very
touching upward look of trust. Her companion was a strong, active boy
of perhaps fourteen, and he, too, was serious--his deep-set, blacklashed
eyes looked down at her with a queer protective wonder; the while he
explained in a soft voice broken up between two ages, that exact
process which bees adopt to draw honey out of flowers. Once or twice
this hoarse but charming