Beyond the Rocks

Man is a hunter--a hunter always. He may be a poor thing and hunt only a

few puny aims, or he may be a strong man and choose big game. But he is

hunting, hunting--something--always.

And primitive life seems like the spectrum of light--composed of three

primary colors, and white and black at the beginning and ending of it.

And the three colors of blue, red, and yellow have their counterparts in

the three great passions in man--to hunt his food, to continue his

species, and to kill his enemy.

And white and black seem like birth and death--and there is the sun,

which is the soul and makes the colors, and allows of all combinations

and graduations of beautiful other shades from them for parallels to all

other qualities and instincts, only the original are those great primary

forces--to hunt his food, to continue his species, and to kill his

enemy.

And if this is so to the end of time, man will be the same, I suppose,

until civilization has emasculated the whole of nature and so ends the

world! Or until this wonderful new scientist has perfected his

researches to the point of creating human life by chemical process, as

well as his present discovery of animating jellyfish!

Who knows? But by that time it will not matter to any of us!

Meanwhile, man is at the stage that when he loves a woman he wishes to

possess her, and, in a modified form, he wishes to steal her, if

necessary, from another, or kill the enemy who steals her from him.

But the Sun of the Soul is there, too, so the poor old world is not in

such a very bad case after all.

And how the bon Dieu must smile sadly to Himself when He looks down on

priests and nuns and hermits and fanatics, and sees how they have

distorted His beautiful scheme of things with their narrow ideas. Trying

to eliminate the red out of His spectrum, instead of ennobling and

glorifying it all with the Sun of the Soul.

And all of you who are great reasoners and arguers will laugh at this

ridiculous little simile of life drawn by a woman; but I do not care. I

have had my outburst, and said what I wanted to. So now we can get back

to the two--who were not yet lovers--under their green tree in the

Forest of Marly.

"But you must be able to guess the end," Theodora was saying; "and oh, I

want to know, if all the roads were barred by love--how did they get out

of the wood?"