Though actually the work of man's hands--or, more properly speaking, the
work of his travelling feet,--roads have long since come to seem so much
a part of Nature that we have grown to think of them as a feature of the
landscape no less natural than rocks and trees. Nature has adopted them
among her own works, and the road that mounts the hill to meet the
sky-line, or winds away into mystery through the woodland, seems to be
veritably her own highway leading us to the stars, luring us to her
secret places. And just as her rocks and trees, we know not how or why,
have come to have for us a strange spiritual suggestiveness, so the
vanishing road has gained a meaning for us beyond its use as the avenue
of mortal wayfaring, the link of communication between village and
village and city and city; and some roads indeed seem so lonely, and so
beautiful in their loneliness, that one feels they were meant to be
travelled only by the soul. All roads indeed lead to Rome, but theirs
also is a more mystical destination, some bourne of which no traveller
knows the name, some city, they all seem to hint, even more eternal.
Never more than when we tread some far-spreading solitude and mark the
road stretching on and on into infinite space, or the eye loses it in
some wistful curve behind the fateful foliage of lofty storm-stirred
trees, or as it merely loiters in sunny indolence through leafy copses
and ferny hollows, whatever its mood or its whim, by moonlight or at
morning; never more than thus, eagerly afoot or idly contemplative, are
we impressed by that something that Nature seems to have to tell us,
that something of solemn, lovely import behind her visible face. If we
could follow that vanishing road to its far mysterious end! Should we
find that meaning there? Should we know why it stops at no mere
market-town, nor comes to an end at any seaport? Should we come at last
to the radiant door, and know at last the purpose of all our travel?
Meanwhile the road beckons us on and on, and we walk we know not why or
whither.
Vanishing roads do actually stir such thoughts, not merely by way of
similitude, but just in the same way that everything in Nature similarly
stirs thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls; as moonlit waters stir
them, or the rising of the sun. As I have said, they have come to seem
a part of natural phenomena, and, as such, may prove as suggestive a
starting-point as any other for those speculations which Nature is all
the time provoking in us as to why she affects us thus and thus. These
mighty hills of multitudinous rock, piled confusedly against the sky--so
much granite and iron and copper and crystal, says one. But to the soul,
strangely something besides, so much more. These rolling shapes of
cloud, so fantastically massed and moulded, moving in rhythmic change
like painted music in the heaven, radiant with ineffable glories or
monstrous with inconceivable doom. This sea of silver, "hushed and
halcyon," or this sea of wrath and ravin, wild as Judgment Day. So much
vapour and sunshine and wind and water, says one.
Yet to the soul how much more!
And why? Answer me that if you can. There, truly, we set our feet on the
vanishing road.
Whatever reality, much or little, the personifications of Greek
Nature-worship had for the ancient world, there is no doubt that for a
certain modern temperament, more frequently met with every day, those
personifications are becoming increasingly significant, and one might
almost say veritably alive. Forgotten poets may, in the first instance,
have been responsible for the particular forms they took, their names
and stories, yet even so they but clothed with legend presences of wood
and water, of earth and sea and sky, which man dimly felt to have a
real existence; and these presences, forgotten or banished for a while
in prosaic periods, or under Puritanic repression, are once more being
felt as spiritual realities by a world coming more and more to evoke its
divinities by individual meditation on, and responsiveness to, the
mysterious so-called natural influences by which it feels itself
surrounded. Thus the first religion of the world seems likely to be its
last. In other words, the modern tendency, with spiritually sensitive
folk, is for us to go direct to the fountain-head of all theologies,
Nature herself, and, prostrating ourselves before her mystery, strive to
interpret it according to our individual "intimations," listening,
attent, for ourselves to her oracles, and making, to use the phrase of
one of the profoundest of modern Nature-seers, our own "reading of
earth." Such was Wordsworth's initiative, and, as some one has said, "we
are all Wordsworthians today." That pagan creed, in which Wordsworth
passionately wished himself suckled, is not "outworn." He himself, in
his own austere way, has, more than any one man, verified it for us, so
that indeed we do once more nowadays
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.
Nor have the dryads and the fauns been frighted away for good. All over
the world they are trooping back to the woods, and whoso has eyes may
catch sight, any summer day, of "the breast of the nymph in the brake."
Imagery, of course; but imagery that is coming to have a profounder
meaning, and a still greater expressive value, than it ever had for
Greece and Rome. All myths that are something more than fancies gain
rather than lose in value with time, by reason of the accretions of
human experience. The mysteries of Eleusis would mean more for a modern
man than for an ancient Greek, and in our modern groves of Dodona the
voice of the god has meanings for us stranger than ever reached his
ears. Maybe the meanings have a purport less definite, but they have at
least the suggestiveness of a nobler mystery. But surely the Greeks were
right, and we do but follow them as we listen to the murmur of the wind
in the lofty oaks, convinced as they of the near presence of the divine.
The word by seers or sibyls told
In groves of oak or fanes of gold,
Still floats upon the morning wind,
Still whispers to the willing mind.
Nor was it a vain thing to watch the flight of birds across the sky, and
augur this or that of their strange ways. We too still watch them in a
like mood, and, though we do not interpret them with a like exactitude,
we are very sure that they mean something important to our souls, as
they speed along their vanishing roads.
This modern feeling of ours is quite different from the outworn
"pathetic fallacy," which was a purely sentimental attitude. We have, of
course, long since ceased to think of Nature as the sympathetic mirror
of our moods, or to imagine that she has any concern with the temporal
affairs of man. We no longer seek to appease her in her terrible moods
with prayer and sacrifice. We know that she is not thinking of us, but
we do know that for all her moods there is in us an answering thrill of
correspondence, which is not merely fanciful or imaginative, but of the
very essence of our beings. It is not that we are reading our thoughts
into her. Rather we feel that we are receiving her thoughts into
ourselves, and that, in certain receptive hours, we are, by some avenue
simpler and profounder than reason, made aware of certitudes we cannot
formulate, but which nevertheless siderealize into a faith beyond the
reach of common doubt--a faith, indeed, unelaborate, a faith, one might
say, of one tenet: belief in the spiritual sublimity of all Nature, and,
therefore, of our own being as a part thereof.
In such hours we feel too, with a singular lucidity of conviction, that
those forces which thus give us that mystical assurance are all the time
moulding us accordingly as we give up ourselves to their influence, and
that we are literally and not fancifully what winds and waters make us;
that the poetry, for instance, of Wordsworth was literally first
somewhere in the universe, and thence transmitted to him by processes no
less natural than those which produced his bodily frame, gave him form
and feature, and coloured his eyes and hair.
It is not man that has "poetized" the world, it is the world that has
made a poet out of man, by infinite processes of evolution, precisely in
the same way that it has shaped a rose and filled it with perfume, or
shaped a nightingale and filled it with song. One has often heard it
said that man has endowed Nature with his own feelings, that the pathos
or grandeur of the evening sky, for instance, are the illusions of his
humanizing fancy, and have no real existence. The exact contrary is
probably the truth--that man has no feelings of his own that were not
Nature's first, and that all that stirs in him at such spectacles is but
a translation into his own being of cosmic emotions which he shares in
varying degrees with all created things. Into man's strange heart Nature
has distilled her essences, as elsewhere she has distilled them in
colour and perfume. He is, so to say, one of the nerve-centres of cosmic
experience. In the process of the suns he has become a veritable
microcosm of the universe. It was not man that placed that tenderness in
the evening sky. It has been the evening skies of millions of years that
have at length placed tenderness in the heart of man. It has passed into
him as that "beauty born of murmuring sound" passed into the face of
Wordsworth's maiden.
Perhaps we too seldom reflect how much the life of Nature is one with
the life of man, how unimportant or indeed merely seeming, the
difference between them. Who can set a seed in the ground, and watch it
put up a green shoot, and blossom and fructify and wither and pass,
without reflecting, not as imagery but as fact, that he has come into
existence, run his course, and is going out of existence again, by
precisely the same process? With so serious a correspondence between
their vital experience, the fact of one being a tree and the other a man
seems of comparatively small importance. The life process has but used
different material for its expression. And as man and Nature are so like
in such primal conditions, is it not to be supposed that they are alike
too in other and subtler ways, and that, at all events, as it thus
clearly appears that man is as much a natural growth as an apple-tree,
alike dependent on sun and rain, may not, or rather must not, the
thoughts that come to him strangely out of earth and sky, the sap-like
stirrings of his spirit, the sudden inner music that streams through him
before the beauty of the world, be no less authentically the working of
Nature within him than his more obviously physical processes, and, say,
a belief in God be as inevitable a blossom of the human tree as
apple-blossom of the apple?
If this oracular office of Nature be indeed a truth, our contemplation
of her beauty and marvel is seen to be a method of illumination, and her
varied spectacle actually a sacred book in picture-writing, a revelation
through the eye of the soul of the stupendous purport of the universe.
The sun and the moon are the torches by which we study its splendid
pages, turning diurnally for our perusal, and in star and flower alike
dwells the lore which we cannot formulate into thought, but can only
come indescribably to know by loving the pictures. "The meaning of all
things that are" is there, if we can only find it. It flames in the
sunset, or flits by us in the twilight moth, thunders or moans or
whispers in the sea, unveils its bosom in the moonrise, affirms itself
in mountain-range and rooted oak, sings to itself in solitary places,
dreams in still waters, nods and beckons amid sunny foliage, and laughs
its great green laugh in the wide sincerity of the grass.
As the pictures in this strange and lovely book are infinite, so
endlessly varied are the ways in which they impress us. In our highest
moments they seem to be definitely, almost consciously, sacerdotal, as
though the symbolic acts of a solemn cosmic ritual, in which the
universe is revealed visibly at worship. Were man to make a practice of
rising at dawn and contemplating in silence and alone the rising of the
sun, he would need no other religion. The rest of the day would be
hallowed for him by that morning memory and his actions would partake of
the largeness and chastity of that lustral hour. Moonlight, again, seems
to be the very holiness of Nature, welling out ecstatically from
fountains of ineffable purity and blessedness. Of some moonlight nights
we feel that if we did what our spirits prompt us, we should pass them
on our knees, as in some chapel of the Grail. To attempt to realize in
thought the rapture and purification of such a vigil is to wonder that
we so seldom pay heed to such inner promptings. So much we lose of the
best kind of joy by spiritual inertia, or plain physical sloth; and some
day it will be too late to get up and see the sunrise, or to follow the
white feet of the moon as she treads her vanishing road of silver across
the sea. This involuntary conscience that reproaches us with such laxity
in our Nature-worship witnesses how instinctive that worship is, and how
much we unconsciously depend on Nature for our impulses and our moods.
Another definitely religious operation of Nature within us is expressed
in that immense gratitude which throws open the gates of the spirit as
we contemplate some example of her loveliness or grandeur. Who that
has stood by some still lake and watched a stretch of water-lilies
opening in the dawn but has sent out somewhere into space a profound
thankfulness to "whatever gods there be" that he has been allowed to
gaze on so fair a sight. Whatever the struggle or sorrow of our lives,
we feel in such moments our great good fortune at having been born into
a world that contains such marvels. It is sufficient success in life,
whatever our minor failures, to have beheld such beauty; and mankind at
large witnesses to this feeling by the value it everywhere attaches to
scenes in Nature exceptionally noble or exquisite. Though the American
traveller does not so express it, his sentiment toward such natural
spectacles as the Grand Cañon or Niagara Falls is that of an intense
reverence. Such places are veritable holy places, and man's heart
instinctively acknowledges them as sacred. His repugnance to any
violation of them by materialistic interests is precisely the same
feeling as the horror with which Christendom regarded the Turkish
violation of the Holy Sepulchre. And this feeling will increase rather
than decrease in proportion as religion is recognized as having its
shrines and oracles not only in Jerusalem, or in St. Peter's, but
wherever Nature has erected her altars on the hills or wafted her
incense through the woodlands.
After all, are not all religions but the theological symbolization of
natural phenomena; and the sacraments, the festivals, and fasts of all
the churches have their counterparts in the mysterious processes and
manifestations of Nature? and is the contemplation of the resurrection
of Adonis or Thammuz more edifying to the soul than to meditate the
strange return of the spring which their legends but ecclesiastically
celebrate? He who has watched and waited at the white grave of winter,
and hears at last the first faint singing among the boughs, or the first
strange "peeping" of frogs in the marshes; or watches the ghost-like
return of insects, stealing, still half asleep, from one knows not
where--the first butterfly suddenly fluttering helplessly on the
window-pane, or the first mud-wasp crawling out into the sun in a dazed,
bewildered way; or comes upon the violet in the woods, shining at the
door of its wintry sepulchre: he who meditates these marvels, and all
the magic processional of the months, as they march with pomp and pathos
along their vanishing roads, will come to the end of the year with a
lofty, illuminated sense of having assisted at a solemn religious
service, and a realization that, in no mere fancy of the poets, but in
very deed, "day unto day uttereth speech and night unto night sheweth
knowledge."
Apart from this generally religious influence of Nature, she seems at
times in certain of her aspects and moods specifically to illustrate or
externalize states of the human soul. Sometimes in still, moonlit
nights, standing, as it were, on the brink of the universe, we seem to
be like one standing on the edge of a pool, who, gazing in, sees his own
soul gazing back at him. Tiny creatures though we be, the whole solemn
and majestic spectacle seems to be an extension of our own reverie, and
we to enfold it all in some strange way within our own infinitesimal
consciousness. So a self-conscious dewdrop might feel that it enfolded
the morning sky, and such probably is the meaning of the Buddhist seer
when he declares that "the universe grows I."
Such are some of the more august impressions made upon us by the
pictures in the cosmic picture-book; but there are also times and
places when Nature seems to wear a look less mystic than dramatic in its
suggestiveness, as though she were a stage-setting for some portentous
human happening past or to come--the fall of kings or the tragic clash
of empires. As Whitman says, "Here a great personal deed has room." Some
landscapes seem to prophesy, some to commemorate. In some places not
marked by monuments, or otherwise definitely connected with history, we
have a curious haunted sense of prodigious far-off events once enacted
in this quiet grassy solitude--prehistoric battles or terrible
sacrifices. About others hangs a fateful atmosphere of impending
disaster, as though weighted with a gathering doom. Sometimes we seem
conscious of sinister presences, as though veritably in the abode of
evil spirits. The place seems somehow not quite friendly to humanity,
not quite good to linger in, lest its genius should cast its perilous
shadow over the heart. On the other hand, some places breathe an
ineffable sense of blessedness, of unearthly promise. We feel as though
some hushed and happy secret were about to be whispered to us out of the
air, some wonderful piece of good fortune on the edge of happening. Some
hand seems to beckon us, some voice to call, to mysterious paradises of
inconceivable green freshness and supernaturally beautiful flowers,
fairy fastnesses of fragrance and hidden castles of the dew. In such
hours the Well at the World's End seems no mere poet's dream. It awaits
us yonder in the forest glade, amid the brooding solitudes of silent
fern, and the gate of the Earthly Paradise is surely there in yonder
vale hidden among the violet hills.
Various as are these impressions, it is strange and worth thinking on
that the dominant suggestion of Nature through all her changes, whether
her mood be stormy or sunny, melancholy or jubilant, is one of presage
and promise. She seems to be ever holding out to us an immortal
invitation to follow and endure, to endure and to enjoy. She seems to
say that what she brings us is but an earnest of what she holds for us
out there along the vanishing road. There is nothing, indeed, she will
not promise us, and no promise, we feel, she cannot keep. Even in her
tragic and bodeful seasons, in her elegiac autumns and stern winters,
there is an energy of sorrow and sacrifice that elevates and inspires,
and in the darkest hours hints at immortal mornings. She may terrify,
but she never deadens, the soul. In earthquake and eclipse she seems to
be less busy with destruction than with renewed creation. She is but
wrecking the old, that
... there shall be
Beautiful things made new, for the surprise
Of the sky-children.
As I have thus mused along with the reader, a reader I hope not too
imaginary, the manner in which the phrase with which I began has
recurred to my pen has been no mere accident, nor yet has it been a
mere literary device. It seemed to wait for one at every turn of one's
theme, inevitably presenting itself. For wherever in Nature we set our
foot, she seems to be endlessly the centre of vanishing roads, radiating
in every direction into space and time. Nature is forever arriving and
forever departing, forever approaching, forever vanishing; but in her
vanishings there seems to be ever the waving of a hand, in all her
partings a promise of meetings farther along the road. She would seem to
say not so much _Ave atque vale_, as _Vale atque ave_. In all this
rhythmic drift of things, this perpetual flux of atoms flowing on and on
into Infinity, we feel less the sense of loss than of a musical
progression of which we too are notes.
We are all treading the vanishing road of a song in the air, the
vanishing road of the spring flowers and the winter snows, the vanishing
roads of the winds and the streams, the vanishing road of beloved faces.
But in this great company of vanishing things there is a reassuring
comradeship. We feel that we are units in a vast ever-moving army, the
vanguard of which is in Eternity. The road still stretches ahead of us.
For a little while yet we shall experience all the zest and bustle of
marching feet. The swift-running seasons, like couriers bound for the
front, shall still find us on the road, and shower on us in passing
their blossoms and their snows. For a while the murmur of the running
stream of Time shall be our fellow-wayfarer--till, at last, up there
against the sky-line, we too turn and wave our hands, and know for
ourselves where the road wends as it goes to meet the stars. And others
will stand as we today and watch us reach the top of the ridge and
disappear, and wonder how it seemed to us to turn that radiant corner
and vanish with the rest along the vanishing road.