Perhaps at no season of the year is the beauty of still waters at
once so obvious and so ethereal as in Autumn. All the great painters
of Nature have realised this crowning secret of their delicate
loveliness. Corot exclaimed to a friend who was in raptures about one
of his midsummer river scenes ... ‘Yes, yes, but to paint the soul of
October, _voilà mon idéal_!’ Daubigny himself, that master of slow
winding waters and still lagoons, declared that if he had to be only
one month out of his studio it would have to be October, ‘for then you
can surprise Nature when she is dreaming, then you may learn her most
evanescent and most exquisite secrets.’ And our own Millais, when he
was painting ‘Chill October’ near Murthly, in Perthshire, wrote that
nothing had ever caused him so much labour, if nothing had ever given
him so much pleasure, in the painting, ‘for Nature now can be found in
a trance, and you can see her as she is.’ A friend of the late Keeley
Halswelle told me that this able artist (who was originally a ‘figure’
and ‘subject’ painter) remarked to him that he had never realised the
supreme charm of autumnal Nature among still waters till he found
himself one day trying to translate to his canvas the placid loveliness
of the wide, shallow reaches of the Avon around Christchurch. Doubtless
many other painters, French and Dutch and English, have felt thus,
and been glad to give their best to the interpretation of the supreme
charm of still waters in autumn. What would Venice be without them ...
Amsterdam ... Holland ... Finland ... Sweden? Imagine Scotland without
this water-beauty, from Loch Ken to Loch Maree, from the Loch of the
Yowes to the ‘thousand-waters’ of Benbecula: or Ireland, where the
white clouds climbing out of the south may mirror themselves in still
waters all day till they sink beyond the Lough of Shadows in the silent
north.
The phrase is as liberal as ‘running water.’ That covers all inland
waters in motion, from the greatest rivers to the brown burn of the
hillside, from the melting of the snows in fierce spate to the swift
invasion and troubled floods of the hurrying and confined tides. So
‘still waters’ covers lakes and mountain-lochs, shallow meres, lagoons,
the reaches of slow rivers, lochans, tarns, the dark brown pools in
peat-moors, or the green-blue pools in open woods and shadowy forests,
the duckweed-margined ponds at the skirts of villages, the lilied ponds
of old manor-garths and of quiet gardens, asleep beneath green canopies
or given over to the golden carp and the dragon-fly beneath mossed
fountains or beyond time-worn terraces. Often, too, and in February and
October above all, the low-lying lands are flooded, and the bewildered
little lives of the pastures crowd the hedgerows and copses. Sometimes
for days, motionless, these mysterious lake-arrivals abide under the
grey sky, sometimes a week or weeks pass before they recede. The crow
flying home at dusk sees the pale cloud and the orange afterglow
reflected in an inexplicable mirror where of late the grey-green grass
and brown furrow stretched for leagues: the white owl, hawking the
pastures after dusk, swoops so low on his silent wings that he veers
upward from a ghostly flying image underneath, as a bat at sundown
veers from the phantom of its purblind flight.
Delicate haze, cloud-dappled serenity, and moonlight are the three
chief qualities of beauty in the charm of still waters. It is a matter
of temperament, of the hour and occasion also no doubt, whether one
prefer those where another dream-world, that of human life, companions
them in the ineffable suspense of the ideal moment, the moment where
the superfluous recedes and silence and stillness consummate the
miraculous vision. Those moonlit lagoons of Venice, which become
scintillating floods of silver or lakes of delicate gold, where
the pole-moored _sandolò_ thrusts a black wedge of shadow into the
motionless drift, while an obscure figure at the prow idly thrums a
mandolin or hums drowsily a _canzonnetto d’amore_; those twilit canals
where old palaces lean and look upon their ancient beauty stilled and
perfected in sleep; how unforgettable they are, how they thrill even in
remembrance. In the cities of Holland, how at one are the old houses
with the mirroring canals, in still afternoons when quiet light warms
the red wall, and dwells on the brown and scarlet clematis in the cool
violet and amber hollows of the motionless water wherein the red wall
soundlessly slips and indefinitely recedes, hiding an undiscovered
house of shadow with silent unseen folk dreaming out across invisible
gardens. There are ancient towns like this in England also, as between
Upsala and Elsinore to where old châteaux in Picardy guard the
pollarded marais, or deserted Breton manoirs stand ghostly at the
forest-end of untraversed meres.
These have their charm. But have they for us the intimate and
unchanging spell of the lakes and meres and other still waters of our
own land? Nothing, one might think, could be more beautiful than to
see in the Lake of Como the cypresses of Bellaggio and the sloping
gardens of Cadenabbia meeting in a new underwater wonderland: or to
see Mont Blanc, forty miles away, sleeping in snow-held silence in the
blue depths of Lac Léman: or to see Pilatus and a new city of Lucerne
mysteriously changed and yet familiarly upbuilded among the moving
green lawns and azure avenues of the Lake of the Four Cantons. And yet
leaning boulders of granite, yellow with lichen and grey with moss and
deep-based among swards of heather and the green nomad bracken, will
create a subtler magic in the brown depths of any Highland loch. There
is a subtler spell in the solitary tarn, where the birch leans out of
the fern and throws an intricate tracery of bough and branch into the
unmoving wave, where the speckled trout and the speckled mavis meet as
in the strange companionships of dreams. Enchantment lies amid the
emerald glooms of pine and melancholy spruce, when a dream-world forest
underneath mirrors the last sunset-gold on bronze cones, and enfolds
the one white wandering cloud miraculously stayed at last between two
columnar green spires, flawless as sculptured jade.
Is this because, in the wilderness, we recover something of what we
have lost? ... because we newly find ourselves, as though surprised
into an intimate relationship of which we have been unaware or have
indifferently ignored? What a long way the ancestral memory has to go,
seeking, like a pale sleuth-hound among obscure dusks and forgotten
nocturnal silences, for the lost trails of the soul. It is not we
only, you and I, who look into the still waters of the wilderness and
lonely places, and are often dimly perplext, are often troubled we know
not how or why: some forgotten reminiscence in us is aroused, some
memory not our own but yet our heritage is perturbed, footsteps that
have immemorially sunk in ancient dust move furtively along obscure
corridors in our brain, the ancestral hunter or fisher awakes, the
primitive hillman or woodlander communicates again with old forgotten
intimacies and the secret oracular things of lost wisdoms. This is no
fanciful challenge of speculation. In the order of psychology it is
as logical as in the order of biology is the tracing of our upright
posture or the deft and illimitable use of our hands, from unrealisably
remote periods wherein the pioneers of man reached slowly forward to
inconceivable arrivals.
But whatever primitive wildness, whatever ancestral nearness we recover
in communion with remote Nature, there is no question as to the
fascination of beauty exercised by the still waters of which we speak,
of their enduring spell. What lovelier thing in Nature than, on a
serene and cloudless October day, to come upon a small lake surrounded
by tall elms of amber and burnished bronze, by beech and maple and
sycamore cloudy with superb fusion of orange and scarlet and every
shade of red and brown, by limes and aspens tremulous with shaken pale
gold? Beautiful in itself, in rare and dreamlike beauty, the woods
become more beautiful in this silent marriage with placid waters, take
on a beauty more rare, a loveliness more dreamlike. There is a haze
which holds the fluent gold of the air. Silence is no longer quietude
as in June; or a hushed stillness, as in the thunder-laden noons of
July or August; but a soundless suspense wherein the spirit of the
world, suddenly at rest, sleeps and dreams.
The same ineffable peace broods over all still waters: on the
meres of Hereford, on the fens of East Anglia, on lochs heavy with
mountain-shadow, on the long grey Hebridean sheets where the call of
the sea-wind or the sea-wave is ever near.
Truly there must be a hidden magic in them, as old tales tell. I
recall one where the poets and dreamers of the world are called ‘the
children of pools.’ The poet and dreamer who so called them must have
meant by his metaphor those who look into the hearts of men and into
the dim eyes of Life, troubled by the beauty and mystery of the world,
insatiable in longing for the ineffable and the unattainable. So, long
ago, even ‘ornamental waters’ may have been symbols of the soul’s
hunger and thirst, emblems of the perpetual silence and mystery of his
fugitive destiny!
Somewhere, I think it is in the _Kalevala_, occurs the beautiful
metaphor of still waters, ‘the mirrors of the world.’ Whoever the
ancient singer was who made the phrase, he had in his heart love for
still waters as well as the poet’s mind. The secret of their beauty
is in that image. It may be a secret within a secret, for the mirror
may disclose a world invisible to us, may reflect what our own or an
ancestral memory dimly recalls, may reveal what the soul perceives and
translates from its secret silences into symbol and the mysterious
speech of the imagination.
_Still waters_; it has the inward music that lies in certain words ...
amber, ivory, foam, silence, dreams; that lies often in some marriage
of words ... moonlight at sea, wind in dark woods, dewy pastures, old
sorrowful things: that dwells in some names of things, as chrysoprase;
or in some combination of natural terms and associations, as wind and
wave; or in some names of women and dreams, Ruth, Alaciel, Imogen,
Helen, Cleopatra; or in the words that serve in the courts of music
... cadence, song, threnody, epithalamion, viol, flute, prelude,
fugue. One can often evade the heavy airs of the hours of weariness by
the spell of one of these wooers of dreams. _Foam_--and the hour is
gathered up like mist, and we are amid “perilous seas in faëry lands
forlorn”: _Wind_--and the noises of the town are like the humming of
wild bees in old woods, and one is under ancient boughs, listening, or
standing solitary in the dusk by a forlorn shore with a tempestuous
sea filling the darkness with whispers and confused rumours and
incommunicable things: _Ruth_--and sorrow and exile are become
loveliness: _Helen_--and that immemorial desire is become _our_ desire,
and that phantom beauty is become _our_ dream and _our_ passion. _Still
Waters_--surely through that gate the mind may slip away from the
tedious and unwelcome, and be alone among forests where the birch leans
and dreams into an amber-brown pool, or by a mountain-lake where small
white clouds lie like sleeping birds, or on moonlit lagoons where the
reed and the reed’s image are as one, and the long mirrors are unshaken
by any wandering air, unvisited but by the passing soundless shadows of
travelling wings.