LVIII

One of the most impressive passages in Wordsworth's poems describes how

he rowed by night, as a boy, upon Esthwaite Lake, and experienced a

sense of awestruck horror at the sight of a dark peak, travelling, as

the boat moved, beyond and across the lower and nearer slopes, seeming

to watch and observe the boy. Of course it may be said that such a

feeling is essentially subjective, and that the peak was but obeying

natural and optical laws, and had no concern whatever with the boy.

That there should be any connection between the child and the bleak

mountains is, of course, inconsistent with scientific laws. But to

arrive at a scientific knowledge of nature is not at all the same thing

as arriving at the truth about her; one may analyse everything, peak

and lake and moonlight alike, into its component elements, and show

that it is all matter animated and sustained by certain forces. But one

has got no nearer to knowing what matter or force is, or how they came

into being.

And then, too, even from the scientific point of view, the subjective

effect of the contemplation of nature by the mind is just as much a

phenomenon; it is there--it demands recognition. The emotions of man

are a scientific fact, too, and an even more complicated scientific

fact than matter and force. When Wordsworth says that he was

"Contented if he might enjoy

The things that others understand,"

he is but stating the fact that there is a mystical poetical perception

of nature as well as a scientific one. Perhaps when science has done

her work on elemental atoms and forces, she will turn to the analysis

of psychological problems. And meanwhile it must suffice to recognise

that the work of the scientist is as essentially poetical, if done in a

certain spirit, as the work of the poet. It is essentially poetical,

because the deeper that the man of science dives into the mystery, the

darker and more bewildering it becomes. Science, instead of solving the

mystery, has added enormously to its complexity by disposing of the old

comfortable theory that man is the darling of Nature and that all

things were created for his use. We know now that man is only a local

and temporary phenomenon in the evolution of some dim and gigantic law;

that he perhaps represents the highest development which that law has

at present evolved, but that probably we are rather at the threshold

than at the climax of evolution, and that there will be developments in

the future that we cannot even dimly apprehend. If the contemplation of

nature and the scientific analysis of nature are meant to have any

effect upon humanity at all, it seems as though both were intended to

stimulate our wonder and to torture us with the desire for solving the

enigma.

Perhaps the difference between the poetical view and the scientific

view of nature is this--that while scientific investigation stimulates

a man to penetrate the secret as far as he can, with the noble desire

to contribute what minute discoveries he may to the solution of the

problem, the poetical contemplation of nature tends to produce in the

mind a greater tranquillity of emotion. The scientist must feel that,

even when he has devoted his whole life to investigation, he has but

helped on the possibilities of solution a little. There can be no sense

of personal fruition as long as the abyss remains unplumbed; and

therefore nature is to him like a blind and blank mystery that reveals

its secrets slowly and almost reluctantly, and defies investigation.

Whereas the poet may rather feel that he at this precise point of time

may master and possess the emotion that nature can provide for his

soul, and that he is fully blessed if the sight of the mountain-head

above the sunset cloud-banks, the green gloom of the summer woodland,

the lake lashed with slanting storm, gives him a sense of profound

emotion, and fills him to the brim with the pure potion of beauty. He

may rest in that, for the time; he may feel that this is the message of

nature to him, thus and now; and that the more perfectly and

passionately that the beauty of nature comes home to him, the nearer he

comes to the thought of God.

This does not, either in the case of the man of science or the poet,

solve the further mystery--the mystery of complex human relationships.

But the investigation of science ardently pursued is more likely to

tend to isolate the explorer from his kind than the poetical

contemplation of nature, for the simple reason that the scientist's

business is not primarily with emotion but with concrete fact; while to

the poet the emotions of love and friendship, of patriotism and duty,

will all tend to be the object of impassioned speculation too. Both

alike will be apt to be somewhat isolated from the ordinary life of the

world, because both to the poet and the man of science the present

condition of things, the problems of the day, will be dwarfed by the

thought of the vast accumulation of past experience; both alike will

tend to minimise the value of human effort, because they will both be

aware that the phenomenon of human activity and human volition is but

the froth and scum working on the lip of some gigantic forward-moving

tide, and that men probably do not so much choose what they shall do,

as do what they are compelled to do by some unfathomable power behind

and above them. This thought may seem, to men of practical activity, to

weaken the force of effective energy in both poet and scientist. But

they will be content to be misunderstood on this point, because they

will be aware that such activity as they manifest is the direct effect

of something larger and greater than human volition, and that the

busiest lives are as much the inevitable outcome of this insuperable

force as their own more secluded, more contemplative lives.

The Mareway is an old track or drift-road, dating from primitive times,

which diverges from the Old North Road and runs for some miles along

the top of the low chalk downs which bound my southern horizon. Its

name is a corruption of the word Mary--Mary's way--for there was an

ancient shrine of pilgrimage dedicated to the Virgin Mary that stood on

the broad low bluff still known as Chapel Hill, where the downs sink

into the well-watered plain. No trace of the shrine exists, and it is

not known where it stood. Perhaps its walls have been built into the

little irregular pile of farm-buildings which stands close to where the

way ends. In a field hard by that spot, the leaden seal of a Pope, the

_bulla_ that gives its name to a Pope's bull, was once ploughed up; but

the chapel itself, which was probably a very humble place, was unroofed

and wrecked in an outburst of Puritanical zeal, with a practical piety

which could not bear that a place should gather about itself so many

hopes and prayers and holy associations. Well, it is all history, both

the trust that raised the shrine and the zeal that destroyed it; and we

are the richer, not the poorer, for our losses as well as for our

gains.

The Mareway passes through no villages, and only gives access to a few

lonely, wind-swept farms. The villages tend to nestle along the roots

of the down, in sheltered valleys where the streams break out, the

orchard closes and cottage gardens creeping a little way up the gentle

slopes; and thus when the time came for the roads to be metalled there

was little use for the high ridgeway; for its only advantage had been

that it gave in more unsettled times a securer and more secluded route

for the pack-horse of the pilgrim--a chance of seeing if danger

threatened or risk awaited him.

And so the old road keeps its solitary course, unfrequented and

untrimmed, along the broad back of the down. Here for a space it is

absorbed into a plough-land, there it melts with a soft dimple into the

pasture; but for the most part it runs between high thorn hedges, here

with deep ruts worn by heavy farm-carts, there trodden into miry pools

by sheep. In places it passes for a space through patches of old

woodland, showing by the deep dingles, the pleasant lack of ordered

planting, that it is a tract of ancient forest-land never disparked.

Here you may see, shouldering above the irregular copse, the bulk of

some primeval oak, gnarled and hollow-trunked, spared partly because it

would afford no timber worth cutting, and partly, we may hope, from

some tender sense of beauty and veneration which even now, by a hint of

instinctive tradition haunting the rustic mind, attends the ancient

tree and surrounds it with a sense of respect too dim to be called a

memory even of forgotten things. To right and left green roads dip down

to the unseen villages, and here and there the way itself becomes a

metalled road leading to some larger highway; but even so, you can soon

regain the grassy tract, following the slow curve of the placid down.

There is no sweeter place to be found on a hot summer day than the old

drift-road. The hedges are in full leaf, and the undergrowth, sprinkled

with flowers, weaves its tapestry over the barer stems of the

quicksets. The thrushes sing clear in the tiny thickets, and the

blackbird flirts with a sudden outcry in and out of his leafy

harbourage. Here the hedge is all hung with briony or traveller's joy;

there is a burst of wild-roses, pale discs of faintest rose-jacinth,

each with a full-seeded heart. The elder spreads its wide cakes of

bloom, and the rich scent hangs heavy on the air. One seems in a moment

to penetrate the very heart of the deep country-side, and even the

shepherd or the labourer whom one passes shares the silence of the open

field, and the same immemorial quality of quiet simplicity and

primitive work. It is then that there flashes upon one a sense of the

inexplicable mystery of these inexpressive lives, toiling to live and

living to toil, half pathetic, half dignified, wholly mysterious in the

lie that they give, by their meek persistence, to restless ambitions

and dreams of social amelioration. For, whatever happens, such work

must still be done until the end of time; and the more that mind and

soul awake, the less willing will men be to acquiesce in such uncheered

drudgery. If one could but educate the simpler hearts into a joyful and

tranquil consent to conditions which, after all, are simple and

wholesome enough; if one could implant the contented love of field and

wood, wide airs and flying clouds life, love, ease, labour, sorrow--all

that is best in our experience--could be tasted here and thus; while

the troubles bred by the covetous brain and the scheming mind would

find no place here. It is a better lot, after all, to live and feel

than to express life and feeling, however subtly and ingeniously, and I

for one would throw down in an instant all my vague dreams and

impossible hopes, my artificial cares and fretful ambitions, for a life

unconscious of itself and an unimpaired serenity of mood. The dwellers

in these quiet places neither brood over what might have been nor

exercise themselves over what will be. They live in the moment, and the

moment suffices them.

In the winter weather the Mareway, in its dreary and sodden bareness,

is to my mind an even more impressive place. The wind comes sharply up

over the shoulder of the down. The trees are all bare; the pasture is

yellow-pale. The water lies in the ruts and ditches. The silence in the

pauses of the wind is intense. You can hear the soft sound of grass

pulled by the lips of unnumbered browsing sheep behind the hedgerow, or

the cry of farmyard fowls from the byre below, the puffing of the

steam-plough on the sloping fallow, the far-off railway whistle across

the wide valley. The rooks stream home from distant fields, and discuss

the affairs of the race with cheerful clamour in the depth of the wood.

The day darkens, and a smouldering sunset, hung with gilded clouds

streaked with purple bars, begins to burn behind the bare-stemmed

copse.

But what is, after all, the deepest charm that invests the old road is

the thought of all the sad and tender associations clothing it in the

minds of so many vanished generations. Even an old house has a haunting

grace enough, as a place where men have been born and died, have loved

and enjoyed and suffered; but a road like this, ceaselessly trodden by

the feet of pilgrims, all of them with some pathetic urgency of desire

in their hearts, some hope unfulfilled, some shadow of sickness or sin

to banish, some sorrow making havoc of home, is touched by that

infinite pathos that binds all human hearts together in the face of the

mystery of life. What passionate meetings with despair, what eager

upliftings of desirous hearts, must have thrilled the minds of the

feeble and travel-worn companies that made their slow journeys along

the grassy road! And one is glad to think, too, that there must

doubtless have been many that returned gladder than they came, with the

burden shifted a little, the shadow lessened, or at least with new

strength to carry the familiar load. For of this we may be sure, that

however harshly we may despise what we call superstition, or however

firmly we may wave away what we hold to have been all a beautiful

mistake, there is some fruitful power that dwells and lingers in places

upon which the hearts of men have so concentred their swift and

poignant emotions--for all, at least, to whom the soul is more than the

body, and whose thoughts are not bounded and confined by the mere

material shapes among which, in the days of our earthly limitations, we

move uneasily to and fro.