Nature Mysticism Part 9

What is this but an antic.i.p.ation of Wordsworth's "Daffodils," or even of his "Ode on Immortality"?

The concepts and phraseology of the transmigration theory are merely temporary forms in which a deep thought clothes itself: at any rate, they are not necessary adjuncts of the thought; nor do they preclude sympathy with the following condensed statement of this same mystic's world-philosophy:

"I died from the mineral and became a plant; I died from the plant and reappeared as an animal; I died from the animal and became a man.

Wherefore then should I fear? When did I grow less by dying?

Next time I shall die from the man That I may grow the wings of angels.

From the angel, too, I must advance.

All things shall perish save His face."

With an insight like unto this, a mystic need not fear because the river flows into the sea! In spite of appearances, the idea of life can still reign supreme. The river of death embodies a true insight--but of a transition only, not of an abiding state. We die to live more fully.

This sense of continuity in the flow of the stream of life, and of the abidingness of its existence through all vicissitudes has been strikingly expressed by Jefferies. He is sitting on the gra.s.s-grown tumulus where some old warrior was buried two thousand years ago, and his thought slips back over the interval.

"Two thousand years being a second to the soul could not cause its extinction. . . . Resting by the tumulus, the spirit of the man who had been interred there was to me really alive, and very close. This was quite natural and simple as the gra.s.s waving in the wind, the bees humming, and the lark's songs. Only by the strongest effort of the mind could I understand the idea of extinction; that was supernatural, requiring a miracle; the immortality of the soul natural, like the earth. Listening to the sighing of the gra.s.s I felt immortality as I felt the beauty of the summer morning, and I thought beyond immortality, of other conditions, more beautiful than existence, higher than immortality."

Let Morris sum up the thoughts and emotions aroused by the mystical influences of water flowing onward to join the ocean.

"Flow on, O mystical river, flow on through desert and city; Broken or smooth flow onward into the Infinite sea.

Who knows what urges thee on?

Surely we know not at all, but the cycle of Being is eternal, Life is eternal as death, tears are eternal as joy.

As the stream flowed it will flow; though 'tis sweet, yet the sea will be bitter; Foul it with filth, yet the Deltas grow green and the ocean is clear.

Always the sun and the winds will strike its broad surface and gather Some purer drops from its depths to float in the clouds of the sky;-- Soon these shall fall once again, and replenish the full-flowing river.

Roll round then, O mystical circle! flow onward, ineffable stream!"

CHAPTER XXII

THE OCEAN

The Ocean! What is its mystic significance? A question as fraught with living issues as its physical object is s.p.a.cious and profound. Infinitely varied and yet unchanging; gentle and yet terrible; radiant and yet awful;

"Calm or convulsed, in breeze, or gale, or storm, Icing the pole, or in the torrid clime Dark heaving"--

there is not a mood with which the ocean cannot link itself, nor a problem to which it cannot hint, albeit darkly, a solution. To attempt a description of its external phenomena were a hardy task--much more to grapple with its protean influences on the souls of men.

Let the approach be by way of mythology. It was shown how that Thales was partly guided to his choice of Water as the _Welt-stoff_ by its place and function in the ancient cosmologies. Numerous and widely diffused were the myths of a primeval ocean out of which the structured universe arose.

The Babylonian tablet tells of the time before the times "when above were not raised the heavens, and below on the earth a plant had not grown up; the abyss also had not broken up its boundary. The chaos, the sea, was the producing mother of them all." A pa.s.sage from the Rig Veda speaks likewise of the time, or rather the no-time, which preceded all things. "Death was not then, nor immortality; there was no distinction of day or night. Only _Something_ breathed without breath, inwardly turned towards itself. Other than it there was nothing." And how did these ancient mystics best picture to themselves the primeval, or timeless, _Something_?--"What was the veiling cover of everything?"--they themselves ask. And they answer with another question--"Was it the water's deep abyss?" They think of it as "an ocean without light." "Then (say they) from the nothingness enveloped in empty gloom, Desire (Love) arose, which was the first germ of mind. This loving impulse the Sages, seeking in their heart, recognised as the bond between Being and Non-Being." How deep the plunge here into the sphere of abstract thought! Yet so subtle and forceful had been the mystic influence of the ocean on the primitive mind that it declares itself as a working element in their abstrusest speculations.

Nor has this mystic influence as suggesting the mysteries of origin ceased to be operative. Here is Tennyson, addressing his new-born son:

"Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep."

And again, when nearing the end of his own life, he strikes the same old mystic chord:

"When that which drew from out the boundless deep Turns again home."

Wordsworth, of course, felt the power of this ocean-born intuition, and a.s.sures us that here and now:

"Tho' inland far we be, Our souls have sight of that immortal sea Which brought us. .h.i.ther."

And of intense interest as modernising the ancient concept of "_Something_ which breathed without breath," is his appeal:

"Listen, the mighty Being is awake, And doth with his eternal motion make A sound like thunder--everlastingly."

It will not be possible to do more than draw attention to those chief characteristics of the ocean which have given it so large a place in the minds of men. And first would come the vastness of the sea, which prompts vague intuitions of mystery and infinity.

The sight of its limitless expanse still has this power. "The sea (says Holmes) belongs to eternity, and not to time, and of that it sings for ever and ever." How natural, then, the trend of the mythology just mentioned, and the belief in a primeval ocean--a formless abyss--Tiamat--which, as Milton puts it in a splendid line, is:

"The womb of nature and perhaps her grave."

But added to the mystic influence of sheer limitlessness are the manifestations of power and majesty, which compel the awe and wonder of those who "go down to the sea in s.h.i.+ps and do their business in great waters." In the minds of early navigators, the experience of the terrors of the sea begot a sense of relations.h.i.+p to hostile powers. One of the oldest Aryan words for sea, the German _Meer_, Old English _Mere_, means death or destruction; and the destructive action of the ocean's untutored elementary force found personifications in the Teutonic Oegir (Terror), with his dreaded daughter, and the sea-G.o.ddess, Ran, his wife, who raged in storms and overwhelmed the s.h.i.+ps. The eastern peoples, including the Hebrews, regarded the sea as the abode of evil powers, as certain of the visions in the Book of Daniel strikingly testify. Nor is this feeling of the action of hostile powers yet extinct. Victor Hugo makes fine use of it in his description of the storm in "The Toilers of the Sea."

Jefferies was always deeply affected by the vast-ness and strength of the sea. "Let me launch forth" (he writes) "and sail over the rim of the sea yonder, and when another rim rises over that, and again onwards into an ever-widening ocean of idea and life. For with all the strength of the wave, and its succeeding wave, the depth and race of the tide, the clear definition of the sky; with all the subtle power of the great sea, there rises the equal desire. Give me life strong and full as the br.i.m.m.i.n.g ocean; give me thoughts wide as its plain. . . . My soul rising to the immensity utters its desire-prayer with all the strength of the sea."

In many of its aspects, the ocean can stimulate and soften moods of sadness. The peculiar potency of the play of the waves is reserved for the next chapter. But the more general influences of this character are many and of undoubted significance. The vast loneliness of its watery, restless plains; its unchangeableness; its seeming disregard for human destinies; the secrets buried under its heaving waters--these and a mult.i.tude of like phenomena link themselves on to man's sadder reveries. Morris asks:

"Peace, moaning sea; what tale have you to tell, What mystic tidings, all unknown before?"

His answer is in terms of longing for the unrealised:

"The voice of yearning, deep but scarce expressed, For something which is not, but may be yet; Too full of sad continuance to forget, Too troubled with desires to be at rest, Too self-conflicting ever to be blest."

In strong contrast with this is the exhilarating, tonic power of the sea. Coleridge, revisiting the seash.o.r.e, cries:

"G.o.d be with thee, gladsome Ocean!

How gladly greet I thee once more."

Myers emphasises the fact that Swinburne, in his princ.i.p.al autobiographical poem, "Thala.s.sius, or Child of the Sea,"

reveals a nature for which the elemental play of the ocean is the intensest stimulus. The author of that poem tells how once he wandered off into indulgence of personal feelings, and how his mother, the sea, recalled him from such wanderings to

"charm him from his own soul's separate sense With infinite and invasive influence, That made strength sweet in him and sweetness strong, Being now no more a singer, but a song."

And akin to this exhilarating effect on a poet's sensibility is that which it has exercised on the large scale in moulding the characters and fortunes of seafaring nations. Longfellow had a firm grip of this historical fact:

"Wouldst thou (so the helmsman answered) Learn the secret of the sea?

Only those who brave its dangers Comprehend its mystery."

Allan Cunningham's sea songs furnish the cla.s.sical expression of the spirit in its modern guise as embodied in the British sailor--the defender of the isle that is "compa.s.sed by the inviolate sea":

"The sea! the sea! the open sea!

The ever fresh, the ever free."

Byron may be criticised as too consciously "posing" in his well-known apostrophe to the ocean; nevertheless it contains a tang of the Viking spirit:

"And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joy Of youthful sports was on thy breast to be Borne like thy bubbles onward: from a boy I wantoned with thy breakers."

What is the core of this Viking buoyancy and exhilaration?

Surely a sense of freedom, inspired by a life on the ocean, and fostered by the very hards.h.i.+ps and dangers which that life entails.