divide men--diet, dress, decorum, rings in the nose as in Africa,
or in the ears as in Europe, blue paint among the ancients, or red
paint among the modern Britons. The man in the cabbage field has
seen nothing at all; but he is thinking of the things that unite men--
hunger and babies, and the beauty of women, and the promise or menace
of the sky. Mr. Kipling, with all his merits, is the globe-trotter;
he has not the patience to become part of anything.
So great and genuine a man is not to be accused of a merely
cynical cosmopolitanism; still, his cosmopolitanism is his weakness.
That weakness is splendidly expressed in one of his finest poems,
"The Sestina of the Tramp Royal," in which a man declares that he can
endure anything in the way of hunger or horror, but not permanent
presence in one place. In this there is certainly danger.
The more dead and dry and dusty a thing is the more it travels about;
dust is like this and the thistle-down and the High Commissioner
in South Africa. Fertile things are somewhat heavier, like the heavy
fruit trees on the pregnant mud of the Nile. In the heated idleness
of youth we were all rather inclined to quarrel with the implication
of that proverb which says that a rolling stone gathers no moss. We were
inclined to ask, "Who wants to gather moss, except silly old ladies?"
But for all that we begin to perceive that the proverb is right.
The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling
stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.

The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller.
The telegraph and the steamboat make the world smaller.
The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope
that makes it larger. Before long the world will be cloven
with a war between the telescopists and the microscopists.
The first study large things and live in a small world; the second