Nature Mysticism Part 16

Our hearing is not hearing, And our seeing is not sight."

Or Morris gives the mysticism a more personal turn:

"Oh, snows so pure! oh, peaks so high!

I lift to you a hopeless eye, I see your icy ramparts drawn Between the sleepers and the dawn; I see you when the sun has set Flush with the dying daylight yet.

Oh, snows so pure! oh, peaks so high!

I shall not reach you till I die."

And now that modern geology is revealing to us more and more of the origin and structure of the mountain ranges of the world, and telling us more and more of the wondrous materials which go to their building, the field for mysticism is being widely extended.

Different, but hardly less powerful, is the influence of hill scenery--whether they

"in the distance lie Blue and yielding as the sky,"

or whether their gentle slopes are climbed and their delicate beauties seen close at hand. As Ruskin has averred, even the simplest rise can suggest the mountain; but it also has a mystic charm of its own, complementary to that of the sheltered vale, which is exquisite alike in its natural simplicity, and in its response to the labours of man, where some

"kneeling hamlet drains The chalice of the grapes of G.o.d."

But though the influence of mountains, hills, ravines, and vales, is obvious even to the superficial enquirer, it should not obscure for us the very real, if less potent influence of lowlands, plains, and deserts. More especially subtle in its effect upon the spirit of man, is the loneliness of wildernesses, the prairies, the pampas, the tundras, the Saharas. The Greek Pan was essentially a G.o.d of the wild, unploughed surfaces of the earth. Hence, also, the frequent conjunction of the wilderness and silent meditation and ascetic discipline. Schopenhauer suggests that one secret of the spell of mountain scenery is the permanence of the sky-line. Shall we say that one secret of the solitary place is the turning in of the human spirit upon itself because of the sameness of the permanent sky-line?

The effect of scenery upon religion was treated of in ill.u.s.tration of the general principle of Nature Mysticism--the kins.h.i.+p of man and his physical environment. No less marked has been the effect of scenery upon art. The theme is now somewhat well worn, but its true significance is seldom apprehended. For if art is concerned with the realm of the ideal, or rather, perhaps, with the real in its more ideal aspects, then it follows that whatever has an influence on art has an influence on the spiritual development of the people among whom any particular mode or school of art may-establish itself. An interesting phase of such influence is found in Geikie's suggestion as to the presence of the humorous element in the myths and legends of northern Europe. "The grotesque contours" (he says) "of many craggy slopes where, in the upstanding pinnacles of naked rock, an active imagination sees forms of men and of animals in endless whimsical repet.i.tions, may sometimes have suggested the particular form of the ludicrous which appears in the popular legend. But the natural instinct of humour which saw physical features in a comic light, and threw a playful human interest over the whole face of nature, was a distinctively. Teutonic characteristic." There opens out here an unexplored region for original research. Taking the nature-mystic's mode of experience as a basis for enquiry, how far is the comic a purely subjective affair, concerned only, as Bergson contends, with man, and only found in external phenomena by virtue of their reflecting his affairs; or how far has it a place of its own in the universe at large?

To conclude this slight sketch of the Nature Mysticism of the solid earth, let us bring together an ancient and a recent expression of the emotion these purely terrestrial phenomena can arouse. There is one of the Homeric hymns which is addressed to "the Earth, Mother of All." Its beginning and its ending are as follows (in Sh.e.l.ley's translation):

"O universal mother, who dost keep From everlasting thy foundations deep, Eldest of things, Great Earth, I sing of thee.

Mother of G.o.ds, thou wife of starry Heaven, Farewell! be thou propitious."

Is there not a living continuity between the emotional element in that grand old hymn and the strong full modern sentiment in this concluding stanza of Brown's "Alma Mater"?

"O mother Earth, by the bright sky above thee, I love thee, O, I love thee!

So let me leave thee never, But cling to thee for ever, And hover round thy mountains, And flutter round thy fountains, And pry into thy roses fresh and red; And blush in all thy blushes, And flush in all thy flushes, And watch when thou art sleeping, And weep when thou art weeping, And be carried with thy motion, As the rivers and the ocean, As the great rocks and the trees are-- O mother, this were glorious life, This were not to be dead.

O mother Earth, by the bright sky above thee, I love thee, O, I love thee! "

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

SEASONS, VEGETATION, ANIMALS

The seasons and the months, especially those of the temperate zones--how saturated with mysticism! The wealth of ill.u.s.tration is so abounding that choice is wellnigh paralysed. Poets and nature lovers are never weary of drawing on its inexhaustible supplies. Take these verses from Tennyson's "Early Spring":

"Opens a door in Heaven; From skies of gla.s.s A Jacob's ladder falls On greening gra.s.s, And o'er the mountain-walls Young angels pa.s.s.

For now the Heavenly Power Makes all things new And thaws the cold and fills The flower with dew; The blackbirds have their wills, The poets too."

Or take these exultant lines from Coventry Patmore's "Revulsion" Canto:

"'Twas when the spousal time of May Hangs all the hedge with bridal wreaths, And air's so sweet the bosom gay Gives thanks for every breath it breathes; When like to like is gladly moved, And each thing joins in Spring's refrain, 'Let those love now who never loved; Let those who have loved, love again.'"

Recall the poems that celebrate in endless chorus the emotions stirred by the pomp and glory of the summer; by the fruitfulness or sadness of the mellow autumn; by the keen exhilaration or the frozen grip of winter. Some poets, like Blake, have written special odes or sonnets on all the four; some like Keats, in his "Ode to Autumn," have lavished their most consummate art on the season which most appealed to them. Each month, too, has its bards; its special group of qualities and the sentiments they stimulate. Truly the heart of the nature-mystic rejoices as he reflects on the inexhaustibility of material and of significance here presented!

And what of the flowers? Once again the theme is inexhaustible.

The poets vie with one another in their efforts to give to even the humblest flowers their emotional and mystic setting. Some of the loveliest of the old-world myths are busied with accounting for the form or colour of the flowers.

Wordsworth's Daffodils, Burns's Daisy, Tennyson's "Flower in the Crannied Wall," these are but fair blooms in a full and dazzling cl.u.s.ter. Flowers (said a certain divine) are the sweetest things G.o.d ever made and forgot to put a soul into. The nature-mystic thankfully acknowledges the sweetness, but he questions the absence of the soul! The degree of individuality is matter for grave debate; but to a.s.sume its absence is to place oneself out of focus for gaining true and living insight into nature's being.

How much more deep-founded is Wordsworth's faith "that every flower enjoys the air it breathes."

Let us bring this matter to the test in regard to the big brothers of the flowers--the trees. Pa.s.sing by the ample range of striking and beautiful myths and legends (packed as many of them are with mystic meaning), let us turn to the expressions of personal feeling which the literature of various ages provides in abundance--limiting the view to certain typical examples. The Teutonic myth of the World-tree was dealt with fully in the chapter on Subterranean Waters. But it is well to mention it now in connection with the far-extended group of myths which centre in the idea of a tree of life, which preserved their vitality in changing forms, and which even appear in Dante in his account of the mystical marriage under the withered tree. Virgil was a lover of trees; the glade and the forest appealed to him by the same magic of suggested life as that which works on the modern poet or nature-lover.

It is generally supposed that, in England, the loving insight of the nature-mystic was practically unknown until Collins, Thomson, and Crabbe led the way for the triumph of the Lake poets.

This may be true for many natural objects--but it is not true for all. How fresh these lines from an address to his muse by Wither:

"By the murmur of a spring, Or the least bough's rustelling; By a daisy whose leaves spread, Shut when t.i.tan goes to bed; Or a shady bush or tree,-- She could more infuse in me Than all Nature's beauties can In some other wiser man."

Surely this is the voice of Wordsworth in Tudor phraseology.

Still more startling is this pa.s.sage from Marvell, out of the midst of the Commonwealth days: so remarkable is its Nature Mysticism and its Wordsworthian feeling and insight, that it must be given without curtailment. It occurs in the poem on the "Garden."

"Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less, Withdraws into its happiness; The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find; Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds, and other seas, Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade, Here at the fountain's sliding foot, Or at some fruit-tree's mossy root, Casting the body's vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide: There, like a bird, it sits and sings, Then whets and combs its silver wings, And, till prepared for longer flight, Waves in its plumes the various light."

Every line of this extract is worthy of close study--not only for its intrinsic beauty, but for its evidence of the working of the immanent ideas, and the vivid sense of kins.h.i.+p with tree life.

The two lines

"Annihilating all that's made To a green thought in a green shade,"

are justly famous. But more significant are the three less known ones:

"Casting the body's vest aside My soul into the boughs does glide: There like a bird it sits and sings."

Did Wordsworth, or Tennyson, or Sh.e.l.ley, ever give token of a more vivid sense of kins.h.i.+p with the life of the tree? Is it not palpable that the same essential form of intuitive experience is struggling in each and all of these poets to find some fitting expression? For Marvell, as for Wordsworth,

"The soft eye-music of slow-waving boughs"

seemed to fluctuate with an interior life and to call for joyous sympathy.

Or, finally, study these pa.s.sages from Walt Whitman, the st.u.r.dy Westerner; his feeling for the mystic impulses from tree life is exceptional, if not in its intensity, at any rate in his determination to give it utterance. If trees do not talk, he says, they certainly manage it "as well as most speaking, writing, poetry, sermons--or rather they do a great deal better. I should say indeed that those old dryad reminiscences are quite as true as any, and profounder than most, reminiscences we get."

Farther on, speaking of evening lights and shades on foliage gra.s.s, he says, "In the revealings of such light, such exceptional hour, such mood, one does not wonder at the old story fables (indeed, why fables?) of people falling into love-sickness with trees, seiz'd ecstatic with the mystic realism of the resistless silent strength in them--strength which, after all, is perhaps the last, completest, highest beauty." In another place, he says, "I hold on boughs or slender trees caressingly there in the sun and shade, wrestle with their inmost stalwartness--and _know_ the virtue thereof pa.s.ses from them into me. (Or maybe we interchange--maybe the trees are more aware of it all than I ever thought.)" And once again, speaking of a yellow poplar tree, "How strong, vital, enduring! How dumbly eloquent! What suggestions of imperturbability and _being_, as against the human trait of _seeming_. Then the qualities, almost emotional, palpably artistic, heroic, of a tree; so innocent and harmless, yet so savage. It _is_, yet says nothing. How it rebukes by its tough and equable serenity all weathers." All this is unconventional!

So much the better! The ident.i.ty of underlying sentiment comes out the more clearly. Trees are not only alive (and yet how much that fact alone contains!) but they have a character, an individuality of their own; they can speak directly to the heart and soul of man, and man can sympathise with them.

As for the animal world in the widest sense, it is plain that its study, from the mystical point of view, forms a department to itself. Granted that the transition from the mineral to the organism is gradual, and that from the vegetable to the animal still more gradual, the broad fact remains that, when we reach the higher forms of the realm of living matter, we definitely recognise many of the characteristics which are found in the human soul--will, emotion, impulse, even intellectual activities.

Not only primitive man, but those also who are often far advanced in mental development, attribute souls to animals, and find it difficult to believe otherwise--as witness the totemistic systems followed by theories of metempsychosis. And Darwinism, far from destroying these old ideas, has simply furnished a scientific basis for a new totemism.

As was remarked at the outset, this subject of what we may call Animal Mysticism, lies outside our present province.

Nevertheless, a word or two showing how the physical, the vegetable, and the animal are linked together in living mystical union may fittingly bring this chapter to a close. Many of our deepest and most original thinkers are feeling their way to this larger Mysticism. Here are two examples taken almost at random. Anatole France, in one of the many charming episodes which render his story of the old savant, Sylvestre Bonnard, at once so touching and so philosophic, takes his old hero under the shade of some young oaks to meditate on the nature of the soul and the destiny of man. The narrative proceeds thus: "Une abeille, dont le corsage brun brillait au soleil comme une armure de vieil or, vint se poser sur une fleur de mauve d'une sombre richesse et bien ouverte sur sa tige touffue. Ce n'etait certainement pas la premiere fois que je voyais un spectacle si commun, mais c'etait la premiere que je le voyais avec une curiosite si affectueuse et si intelligente. Je reconnus qu'il y avait entre l'insecte et la fleur toutes sortes de sympathies et mille rapports ingenieux que je n'avais pas soupconnes jusque la. L'insecte, ra.s.sasie de nectar, s'elanca en ligne hardie. Je me relevai du mieux que je pus, et me rajustai sur mes jambes-- Adieu, dis-je a la fleur et a l'abeille. Adieu. Puisse-je vivre encore le temps de deviner le secret de vos harmonies. . . .

Combien le vieux mythe d'Antee est plein de sens! J'ai touche la terre et je suis un nouvel homme, et voici qu'a soixante-dix ans de nouvelles curiosites naissent dans mon ame comme on voit des rejetons s'elancer du tronc creux d'un vieux saule."

"May I live long enough to solve the secret of your harmonies!"

There is the spirit of the true nature-mystic! But how will it be solved? By intuition first--if ever the intellect does seize the secret, it will be on the basis of intuition. It is with this conviction in his mind that Maeterlinck meditates on the same theme as that which arrested Anatole France. "Who shall tell us, oh, little people (the bees), that are so profoundly in earnest, that have fed on the warmth and the light and on nature's purest, the soul of the flowers--wherein matter for once seems to smile and put forth its most wistful effort towards beauty and happiness--who shall tell us what problems you have resolved, but we not yet; what cert.i.tudes you have acquired, that we have still to conquer? And if you have truly resolved these problems, acquired these cert.i.tudes, by the aid of some blind and primitive impulse and not through the intellect, then to what enigma, more insoluble still, are you not urging us on?"