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?"