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The Colour of Life-Part1_Alice Meynell(1847-1924)_English Literature(文学名著)-第2页

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But no one has paused in the course of these phrases to take notice

of the curious and conspicuous fact of the suppression of death 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 physicalsuffering, 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 mentalillness, 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






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