IV Our Studies at Fontainebleau. (Continued.)
Even in its hours of silence, the forest occasionally finds a voice, a sound, or a murmur, which recalls to you the remembrance of life.
Sometimes the laborious woodpecker, laboriously toiling at its task of excavating the oak, cheers itself with its singular cry.
Frequently the heavy hammer of the quarryman, falling and falling on the sandstone, resounds in the distance with a hoarse, dull echo.
And finally, if you listen attentively, you catch a significant hum, and see, at your feet, legions of ants,—countless populations, the true inhabitants of the place, speeding over the withered and falling leaves.
So many images are these of persistent toil, which blend with the fanciful a serious gravity. Each in his own way digs and digs. And do thou too pursue thy work, and exhume and stir up thy thought.
It is an admirable place to cure you of the great malady of the day—its shiftiness, its empty agitation. The time does not know its own disease; men say that they are clogged and cloyed, when they have scarcely skimmed the surface. They set out with the delusive notion that the best of everything is superficial and external, and that it is sufficient to put their lips to the cup. But the surface is frequently froth. Lower down, and within, lies the elixir of life. We must penetrate deeper, and mingle more intimately with things, willingly and by habit, so as to discover their harmony, in which lies true happiness and strength. The real misfortune, the moral misery, is our want of concentration.
I love those spots which confine and limit the field of thought. Here, in this narrow circle of hill and wood, every change is purely external and wholly optical. With so many points of shelter, the winds, necessarily, do not greatly vary. The fixity of the atmosphere furnishes us with a moral basis. I am not certain that our ideas would here be strongly stimulated; but he who comes with them fully aroused may long preserve and cherish them, without any interruption of his dream; may seize and relish all the outer accidents, as well as the inner mysteries. The soul may here put forth its roots, and find that the true, the exquisite sense of life, is not to skim the surface, but to study, and probe, and enjoy the depth.
This spot admonishes thought. The sandstone, fixed and motionless beneath the mobility of the leaves, is eloquent enough in its very silence. Since when has it been planted here? Ah, what ages ago, since, despite its hardness, the rain has succeeded in excavating it! No other force has prevailed against it. Such as it was, even so it is; and thus it seems to say to the heart, “Persevere!”
Apparently it should be strong enough to exclude all vegetable life. But the heroic oaks will not be denied, and, being condemned to live there, have succeeded in defiance of every obstacle. With their twisted roots, and with their strong talons that have seized upon the rock, they too, after their fashion, eloquently exclaim, “Persevere!” The invincible trees, struggling all the more bravely the greater the resistance they meet with, have, on the unimpeded side, plunged so much the more deeply into the bowels of the earth, and drawn from it incalculable forces. One of them, the poor old giant named Charlemagne, worn-out, undermined, thunder-stricken, after so many centuries and so many trials, is still so vigorous in its loins, that in a solitary branch it has all the appearance of carrying a great oak with outstretched arms.
Between this sandstone and these oaks one may profit largely. Nor is man, if you find him here at work, a less useful teacher. The valiant quarrymen whom I encountered battling against the rock with monstrous hammers which seem never made for the hand of man, I could willingly believe to possess the resistant force of the sandstone and the iron heart of the oak. And this is undoubtedly true, so far as concerns the soul and the will. But the body has less power of endurance. Few quarrymen live beyond forty years of age; and those first carried off are invariably the most skilful and ardent at their work.
All the life of the forest centres in the quarrymen and the ants. Formerly it had the bees also. They were very numerous, and may still be met with in the direction of Franchart. But they have greatly decreased in numbers since the planting of so many pines and Northern trees, which kill everything with their shade, and in many places have exterminated the heather and the flowers. On the other hand, the yellow ants, which prefer for their materials the prickles and catkins of the pines, appear to prosper. No forest, perhaps, is richer in every species of ants.
These, then, are the true inhabitants, the true soul of the desert; the ants toiling in the sand, the quarrymen working in the sandstone. Both are of the same race; the men are ants on the surface, and the ants are men below.
I admired the resemblance in their destiny, in their laborious patience, in their admirable perseverance. The sandstone is a very refractory and rebellious substance, and often splitting badly, subjects the poor workmen to severe disappointments. Those especially who are forced by a protracted winter to return to the quarry before the end of the bad weather, find the hard and yet porous blocks excessively damp and half frozen. As a result, they have numerous ill-wrought stones, and a mass of waste. However, they do not lose their courage; and without murmuring recommence their painful toil.
The ants teach us a similar lesson of patience. The breeders of birds and game incessantly damage, overthrow, and carry away the immense works which have occupied them for a whole season. Incessantly they begin them anew with heroic ardour.
We constantly paid them a visit, and learned to sympathize with them more and more. Their patient procedures, their active and concentrated life, is, in truth, more like that of the artisan than the winged existence of the bird which formerly occupied our attention. That free inheritor of the day, that favourite of Nature, soars so high above man! To what may I compare my long laborious career? I have, indeed, caught glimpses of the sky, and sometimes heard the songs of the birds above; but, on the whole, my existence, the indefatigable labour which chains me to my task, much more nearly resembles the modest communities of the ant and the bee.
At first sight, the labours of their comrades, the quarrymen, are not very agreeable to contemplate. So many spoiled and badly quarried stones, so many fragments, so much dust and sand, have in them nothing attractive. It is but a field of ruin which is displayed before you. But what does Nature think of it? To judge by the eagerness with which the plants take possession of the sand, mingle with it, and convert it into a soil for their use, Nature is happy enough to see all this substance, which, while for thousands of years retained in the sandstone, did not enter into circulation, returning into the mobility of the Universal Life. That fortunate battle between man and the rock draws, at length, the captive element from its long enchantment. The grass seizes upon it; the tree seizes upon it; the animals seize upon it. All this sand, in which the rock never fails to end eventually, becomes permeable to the activity of a vast subterranean world.
Nothing aroused in my mind a greater number of dreams, no spectacle threw me back more directly upon myself. For I, too, through some degree of poverty or sluggishness, I have long been rebellious like this sandstone, upon which, frequently, nothing can make an impression, or which, splitting cross-wise, yields but irregular, shapeless fragments and useless refuse. It needed History, with its weighty iron hammer, to disengage me from myself, to separate me from my own obstacles, to shatter and release me.
A severe enfranchisement! What have I not lost of myself, in return for the few stones I have contributed to the great monument of the future! Sometimes, doubly stricken by the past and the present, I have felt as if I were crumbling into pieces—what say I?—into powder, into dust; and at times I have seen myself, as I see the bottom of yonder quarry, a mass of sand and rubbish.
Nevertheless, it is through these elements, through an undefinable sap hidden in the bosom of the flint, that all-powerful Nature has worked out my renovation. With a little grass and heather binding up what History and the world had crushed, she has said, smilingly: “You creature, you are Time. I am Nature, the everlasting.”
Thus, then, observe the rough quarry, bristling with the débris of ages, which grows green, once more reproduces, and attires itself in a garb of such foliage as it never knew before man applied the iron to it. “A wild winter vegetation! Black firs! Melancholy birch-trees!” But with all the gloominess mingles the white hawthorn blossom.
What I have so eagerly craved, and yearned for, in my long years of silence, when I was as an arid block and a man of stone, was the fluid nature of the sap and its capacity of expansion. My tardy youth longed to dilate my lingering soul. Yesterday, I gave to the world “The Bird,” an impulse of the heart towards light. To-day, the same force compels me, on the other hand, to descend below the earth, and embark along with you on the great living sea of metamorphoses. A world of mysteries and gloom, it is true; but where, nevertheless, the most penetrating light is thrown on the two cherished treasures of the soul—Immortality and Love.