DISHARMONIES AND OTHER SHADOWS 587 



ship ; and there gradually steals over us, instead of the old 

 warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that of an awful power 

 that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all things together 

 meaninglessly to a common doom." But this seems to us 

 a terribly alarmist inference to base on a demonstrably in- 

 accurate study of Animate Nature. It is not really the case 

 that beauty and hideousness, love and cruelty, keep house 

 together in indissoluble partnership. 



We must confess, however, that even the naturalists are 

 often against us. Thus the veteran John Burroughs writes 

 in his charming Breath of Life: "What savagery, what 

 thwartings and delays, what carnage and suffering, what an 

 absence of all that we mean by intelligent planning and 

 oversight, of love, fatherhood ! Just a clash of forces, the 

 battle to the strong and the race to the fleet.'' Are we not 

 all like perplexed privates writing bitterly of a campaign, 

 knowing little of the actual operations, still less of the tac- 

 tics, and nothing of the strategy ? There are no doubt terri- 

 ble minutes when two lions get the better of an antelope, or 

 the wolves close in upon the deer, and huntsmen like Selous 

 have spoken of the " frenzy of fear and agony of a dying 

 brute ". But we must beware of anthropomorphic exagger- 

 ation. We recall Mr. Louis Gelding's good-humoured rebuke 



(1919): 



" But if a moth should singe his wings, 

 The world is black with dismal things. 

 And if a strangled sparrow fall, 

 There is not any God at all." 



Alfred Russel Wallace had wide experience of wild na- 

 ture, and wrote: "Animals are spared from the pain of 

 anticipating death; violent deaths, if not too prolonged, arc 

 painless and easy; neither do those which die of cold or 



