Complete Works of Talbot Mundy

by Talbot Mundy

  The latter subject of conversation was brought up by contemplation of the Greek prisoner, who boasted openly to his captors that he had sufficient influence of the right sort to procure his release, no matter what the evidence against him, and he more than hinted that the influence was international, to be brought to bear through more than one legation. However, for the time being, he was a helpless and a pitiable prisoner, with red sores where the handcuffs chafed his wrists.

  The whole company was at loggerheads. The German grand-duke and his friend were suspected of political intrigue and kept themselves as much aloof as possible. One of the Belgians was an atheist and took malicious satisfaction in offending the two priests. The East-Indian trader was regarded by all and sundry as an unfair competitor. The Belgians came in for pointed criticism as the uniformed representatives of misgovernment, and naturally replied in kind. Hardly any three were on speaking terms; and the Congo native, who had charge of the clearing, was thrashed by the Italian for giving the Germans’ orders precedence. There were all the makings of an international “incident,” when the Greek prisoner produced his flute.

  For hours after that, the stars looked down through the circle of tree-tops in the midst of those leagues of forest on a scene that illustrated almost perfectly the difference between the working of Universal, as opposed to international Law.

  The Greek was a musician — so excellent a musician that his captors, who were afraid of him, removed his handcuffs, and he played, after the first five minutes, with two rifles pointed at him over the knees of guards who leaned their backs against trees to listen in comfort. At the end of ten minutes not a man was sulking in his tent; everyone came out into the open and lay, or sat, or sprawled, in a semi-circle around the Greek. The night became full of eyes, as the natives who had fled from the clearing to avoid contact with the terrifying white men crept back to swell the audience. And the Greek played Chopin, Mozart, Handel — until the very night seemed full of exquisite music, and he ceased, after hours of it, from physical exhaustion.

  Followed proof of what he had accomplished; laughter in place of snarling ill-humor. He had changed an international tragedy into a chapter of the Universal comedy — he, who stood charged with atrocious crimes and who needed to brag lest his own unlawful hope should perish in him. Men had forgotten their evening meal, and mutual dislike along with it; now they made common contributions to a bivouac-feast, although none could have told who proposed that. Conversation, once begun on that new basis, lasted until the stars grew pale in the morning sky; and when day dawned, all went their separate ways with at least the feeling that they had lost nothing by the ebb and flow of good-will with their fellow men.

  So works the Universal Law; and nothing less than that can ever overcome the international inharmonies. Whatever presupposes separateness leads to separation and to selfishness and all the strife inevitably consequent on that. The universal, presupposing nothing, since it includes all truth, unites all life in the limitless scope of evolution, playing no favorites, excluding none. The Path lies straight ahead. The guides, the illustrations, the examples, are so near that they can not possibly escape us, if we look.

  Therefore we, members of this Theosophical Peace Congress, may in confidence pursue our efforts to establish universal permanent Peace

  “MOTHER NATURE” A REVIEW OF A BOOK BY WILLIAM J. LONG

  WIDELY known though Mr. Long already is, his books deserve to be much more widely read and to be translated into other languages. He writes well. The truth is in him. And he is as sweetly reasonable as the processes of natural law, which he has observed, and which he justifies as against the “ferocious, red-with-ravin conception of a Nature that shrieks against human and divine love.”

  He proves his case (and Emerson’s), that as men go forth into the field each sees his own mood dressed in fur or feathers, constructing for himself a philosophy of nature, tender or savage, out of his own reflexion. There are faults that can be found with Mr. Long’s book, from the standpoint of Theosophy, but they are faults of omission, in no sense due to his observation or to any lack of it, but solely to the absence of that underlying recognition of the law of cause and effect, which Theosophy alone supplies. Mr. Long, for many years past, has gone forth into the wilds at intervals as an observer, armed with neither gun nor stupid sentiment, but with appreciation, which is a key to apprehension; with curiosity restrained by that important quality, good manners; and with sportsmanship, which has nothing whatever to do with trophy-hunting, cruelty, or contempt. His book could, consequently, not be other than a notable achievement.

  Perhaps the most outstanding thought in the mind of this reviewer after turning the last page of Mother Nature is, that manners maketh animals, as well as man. If ever a man in clear and thoughtful printed page described -and it may be without intending exactly that — the generosity and courtesy of nature, Mr. Long has done it. And it follows that of course — and this he set himself to do — he has left the ‘red-with-ravin’ school, the supporters of the insane and pitiless ‘competition’ and ‘survival of the fittest’ theory, without a leg to stand on or an argument that is not proved ridiculous.

  Co-operation, not competition, is the secret of all nature, and the sooner man learns that the better. It is the answer to the very riddle of the Sphinx. Wherever and whenever man has co-operated with the trees, streams, rocks, and animals, he has lost nothing, but has gained immeasureably.

  It is man the destroyer, the upsetter, the unbalancer, the ravenous, hasty, inconsiderate, ill-mannered ‘profiteer,’ who sees cruelty wherever he looks; because cruelty is in his heart, and the cause and its effect are one.

  COOPERATION IS INSTINCTIVE

  The first of the unanswerable indictments that Mr. Long brings against the alleged observers of facts who uphold the orthodoxy of the competition-theory, is that they do not observe. They study beasts in cages; or, if they do go afield, it is in the firm conviction that all nature is “red in tooth and claw.” They are determined beforehand to prove the comparatively recent (as Nature would reckon it), mainly occidental, wholly illogical theory that only the swiftest and strongest can survive. The weakest and most defenseless animals and birds are much the more numerous everywhere — so are the weakest and most defenseless men! — and the beasts of prey are as rare, but far more reasonable, than the two-gun ruffians, who murder wayfarers, but this self-evident fact is one that the ‘observers’ of so-called scientific laws unaccountably, and yet almost unanimously, seem to have agreed to overlook.

  Co-operation is instinctive because instinct is the reflexion (on the lower plane) of intuition, which is the means of communication on the higher. Day and night, the planets in their courses, the myriad suns in the surge of the Milky Way, are not at war. Seasons follow seasons and relieve each other. Life and death are alternating phases in an endless evolution, whose first quality is mercy, whose first law is that all things shall co-operate, atom and earth and constellation, in one sublime, whole, interrelating Universe. Intuition knows this; instinct reflects the knowledge. It is easy to read reverence between the lines of Mr. Long’s book. This is a man who has felt himself a part of one inseparable vastness, and has felt the urge of Brotherhood toward everything that lives. So he naturally has no use for the Malthusian theory of struggle, which, as he says, Darwin borrowed, while (to use his words) all “nature stands ready to produce abundance so soon as men cease from strife and follow her universal law.” He speaks of human competition as “unholy doctrine,” practising which, man is put to shame by the very “beasts that perish.” For their ways are not our ways.

  It may be that Mr. Long had never heard of Katherine Tingley’s Râja-Yoga College when he wrote this book, and if so, one of his paragraphs is all the more worth quoting:

  “We send our little children to school, children who are natural comrades, and there set them to working for rewards, marks, honors, prizes — for every empty and worthless bubble that shall foster a spirit of ri
valry. Even our games feel the artificial curse, for we no longer play to enjoy but play to win. The instinct of children still leads them to play, as birds and animals all play, for conscious pleasure and unconscious bodily training; but ... there is hardly a game left in our schools or colleges which has not been divorced from its true function of giving pleasure to the player and wedded to the lake ideal of winning over rivals.”

  Which is one of the evils of modern education against which Katherine Tingley raised her standard and has kept it raised now for a quarter of a century. The more such men as Mr. Long go forth to observe, and the more fearlessly they write, the more clearly will appear the wisdom, genius, and inspiration with which Katherine Tingley laid the sane foundation of her system of education.

  Mr. Long (himself a Christian minister) points out how timidly the theologians “murmur something about the harshness of nature as a foil for the tenderness of divine grace, not perceiving that nature and grace are two words of the same revelation”; and he goes on to say that “it is as certain as anything can be that grace could have found no welcome or lodgment on earth had not nature prepared the way for the gentle guest.” He quotes even Calvin, the creed-bound, the believer in eternal hell, who in a moment of illumination wrote: “With reverence may this be said, that God and nature are one.” The remainder of the book is mainly an illuminating series of observations, set down with restraint and without tendency to dogmatize, in support of that statement of Calvin’s, which no more gibes with his “predestined to damnation” theory than does the practise of vivisection comply with the teaching of Jesus Christ.

  The natural peace and trustfulness of animals is amply proved by the records of all explorers who have observed what is generally described as ‘game’ in natural surroundings before man has had opportunity to terrorize. Left to themselves animals multiply and are almost fearless; and they will live alongside man, giving him all the room he needs, doing their necessary share in maintaining the ‘balance of nature,’ if man will only let them. Nor is it true that man needs the ‘product’ of wild animals, nor that he can use that product profitably, at all events in any such quantity as to justify the slaughter that continues yearly. Man-invented, unnatural demand for fur and feathers, kept up and increased by the unhealthy competition and feverish selfishness of cities, is not only causing whole species of animals and birds to become extinct but is breeding the spirit of war and annihilation. The theory that animals must disappear, mercilessly exterminated, as civilization advances is the same infernal doctrine that declares that weak nations must give waq7 before the stronger. And that is the whole theory of war.

  If man would observe the animals and learn from them, he would soon discover that practically all the accepted notions about them are totally wrong. Most of our books on natural history have been written by men who shot an animal before trying to become acquainted with it, and whose nearest approach to genuine study of a living beast was through the bars of a cage. It is true, there have been others, and today there is William Beebe, with his observation-post at the edge of the jungle in British Guiana, honestly observing and most delightfully writing what he knows; but for the most part, with the exception of the so-called scientific treatises turned out from laboratories in the name of biology, our information about wild life comes from men who have regarded animals as prey, and have hunted them either for profit or from a perverted sense of sport. It is from such sources that the economists have drawn their ‘facts,’ so that we find Mill deducing that nature is a chaos of struggling beasts, accepting the cruelty of the natural world as an axiom, and trying to teach us (too often, too successfully!) to pattern our own ‘struggle for existence’ on the same imagined lines.

  John Stuart Mill was not alone in that egregious error. Huxley and a host of others made the mistake of taking alleged facts on faith and picturing a universe at war against itself, rending and tearing in a fiendish struggle to survive. Nine-tenths of nineteenth-century philosophy is based on gross misstatements, due to the confusion of dead carcases with living nature in the minds of men who saw to what a pass the world was coming and sought to justify economic warfare by contending that nature sets the example. The only trouble with their teaching is, that nature does nothing of the kind.

  To quote Mr. Long again:

  “The incredible thing is that you may search the 11brary from top to bottom without finding anything to indicate that any preacher of this degrading superstition of a terror-governed natural world has ever taken a single summer or winter to live peaceably among wild birds and beasts, to see with his own eyes just how they live, and to judge for himself what spirit governs them as they work and play, win their mates, protect their offspring, and seek food for themselves and their little ones.”

  ASK NOW THE BEASTS AND THEY WILL TEACH THEE

  The book is full of paragraphs that are almost irresistible to quote, because Mr. Long has done exactly what the ‘naturalists’ have so seldom done. He has gone, looked, listened, used intelligence, and he is able to hear a morning hymn in the music of the birds at dawn, that shows how glad they are to be alive; whereas the man with a gun or bird-lime can think of them only as potential dead specimens. Death, that comes to animals and birds as inevitably as to men, is kindly and not cruel, except where men have interfered with nature, bringing perverted dogs, guns and traps into the wilderness.

  One of Mr. Long’s most illuminating experiences is that of taking a ‘bad boy’ into the wilds with him. By upsetting himself and the boy out of a canoe into the water he contrived to lose the boy’s gun, with the result that the boy had to live next to nature without unnatural machinery for doing harm. Mr. Long turned him loose in the woods without a word of advice, trusting nature to do all needful preaching to the boy’s own instincts. Several times that summer the boy (unarmed) met bears and other wild beasts face to face and it was not long, after his first fright or two were over, before he became silent and companionable, unconsciously copying the harmony around him.

  “Then we began to watch the wood-folk with desire to learn something of their ways the rabbit that tried to frighten us by thumping the ground at our heels, the bull moose that stared at our passing canoe, the tiny warbler that nested by our tent, and the big owl that we called from his cedar swamp to hoot around our camp-fire. There was no preaching, no moralizing, nothing but nature’s unobtrusive lesson; pet before the summer was over there was no more regret for the lost guns, and no further disposition to interfere with our wild neighbors.”

  And, as has been pointed out elsewhere on good authority, men do not gather figs from thistles. If nature were bloodthirsty, an incorrigible boy could hardly learn gentle manliness from living face to face with her. Who has not witnessed the improvement that takes place in boys who have a chance to learn from undomesticated animals?

  STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE IS UNNATURAL

  Nature is spontaneously joyous, and it is only man’s attempt to justify his own unnatural habits and excitements by reading into nature what is not there that has produced the crass fiction on which so-called scientific theories have been built, and which nowadays it appears to be heresy not to believe. Mr. Long’s remarks on animals at play could be enormously amplified by the present writer and hosts of others, from experience. All young creatures, from young elephants to young mice, are playful as soon as they have strength enough to carry their own weight; greed is the exception, not the rule in nature; few wild animals will gorge themselves, or eat one fragment more than is good for them, although in a state of captivity, having nothing else to do, some of them become gluttons. And even the big cats, lions, tigers, leopards and so on restrict their killing to what they actually need, often — very often — going several days in succession without hunting.

  All so-called big game is dangerous when attacked by man, but only very rarely meddlesome if left alone — curious, yes; interested in the human stranger, yes; but ‘treacherous’ or pugnacious, so seldom that if men would only take example
from them the world might then be reckoned safe and peaceable! Here is a personal experience in confirmation: on one occasion five lions investigated my tent at about ten o’clock at night, in a wild district of what was then called German East Africa. The tent was so small that it was impossible to move without touching some portion of it, so it was impossible to bring a loaded rifle into play without betraying movement. There was nothing to do but lie still and ‘sham dead.’ The lions sniffed all around the tent, and could not possibly have been ignorant that a man was in there, for their sense of smell is remarkably keen; at the end of a few minutes one of them roared, which — contrary to usual belief -is not an indication of ill temper, but the reverse; thereafter, for ten or fifteen minutes, they engaged in rough horseplay, rolling over and biting one another like puppies, and the only danger to me was that they might have upset the tent, when my own state of panic would undoubtedly have caused serious trouble. In the end they scampered off and I was able to catch sight of them; one was a full-grown lion, and the others, judging by a glimpse and by their foot-prints, were almost fully grown. Nor was that a fundamentally exceptional experience.

  Mr. Long, in his book, confines himself to his own experiences on the North-American continent, and rightly so; but he deserves to be supported by actual evidence from Africa and Asia because, if his contentions are in the main correct, as this writer believes, they must apply everywhere and not to one continent only. His remarks on wolves are especially enlightening, although those, too, might be greatly amplified, and it does not seem to have occurred to him that the howl of wolves, so often spoken of with dread by ‘tenderfeet’ and written about sensationally by authors who have never heard it, is nothing more or less than music. Lawrence Trimble, who probably knows wolves more intimately than any other man alive today, describes it as the wolves’ ‘evening hymn,’ and I have seen him persuade a pack of wolves to howl, by sitting down near to them and rendering a wolf solo so perfectly that they could not resist the inclination to sing the chorus. They throw up their heads, throw their very souls into the music, and usually engage in rough-and-tumble play directly afterwards. Lions behave in the same way; when they are roaring, and particularly when they roar in chorus, they are never ‘up to mischief’ but full of life, strength, and contentment.