And all the time these creatures are living their vigorous, fussy little lives; in this drop of water they are being watched by a creature of whose presence they do not dream, who can wipe them all out of existence with a stroke of his thumb, and who is withal as finite, and sometimes as fussy and unreasonably energetic, as themselves.  He sees them, and they do not see him, because he has senses they do not possess, because he is too incredibly vast and strange to come, save as an overwhelming catastrophe, into their lives.  Even so, it may be, the dabbler himself is being curiously observed....  The dabbler is good enough to say that the suggestion is inconceivable.  I can imagine a decent amoeba saying the same thing.

THE PLEASURE OF QUARRELLING

Your cultivated man is apt to pity the respectable poor, on the score of their lack of small excitements, and even in the excess of his generous sympathy to go a Toynbee-Halling in their cause.  And Sir Walter Besant once wrote a book about Hoxton, saying, among other things, how monotonous life was there.  That is your modern fallacy respecting the lower middle class.  One might multiply instances.  The tenor of the pity is always the same.

“No music,” says the cultivated man, “no pictures, no books to read nor leisure to read in.  How can they pass their lives?”

The answer is simple enough, as Emily Bronte knew.  They quarrel.  And an excellent way of passing the time it is; so excellent, indeed, that the pity were better inverted.  But we all lack the knowledge of our chiefest needs.  In the first place, and mainly, it is hygienic to quarrel, it disengages floods of nervous energy, the pulse quickens, the breathing is accelerated, the digestion improved.  Then it sets one’s stagnant brains astir and quickens the imagination; it clears the mind of vapours, as thunder clears the air.  And, finally, it is a natural function of the body.  In his natural state man is always quarrelling—­by instinct.  Not to quarrel is indeed one of the vices of our civilisation, one of the reasons why we are neurotic and anaemic, and all these things.  And, at last, our enfeebled palates have even lost the capacity for enjoying a “jolly good row.”

There can be no more melancholy sight in the world than that of your young man or young woman suffering from suppressed pugnacity.  Up to the end of the school years it was well with them; they had ample scope for this wholesome commerce, the neat give and take of offence.  In the family circle, too, there are still plentiful chances of acquiring the taste.  Then, suddenly, they must be gentle and considerate, and all the rest of it.  A wholesome shindy, so soon as toga and long skirts arrive, is looked upon as positively wrong; even the dear old institution of the “cut” is falling into disrepute.  The quarrelling is all forced back into the system, as it were; it poisons the blood.  This is why