There are few critics, however, who are not now prepared to put

themselves into sympathetic touch with the primitive thinker;

but there are still many who hesitate, or refuse, to allow any

value to the products of his thinking. These products are too

frequently dismissed as the fancies and babblings of ages in

which real knowledge was not as yet a practicable achievement.

Such an estimate is as unfair as it is unphilosophical. It

disregards the part played by intuition, and it is blind to the

germs of truth which were destined to ripen into noble fruit.

Mother Earth, with air and sunshine, and starry heaven above,

nurtured men's thoughts and souls as well as their bodies.

There is more than an analogy between the childhood of the

race and the childhood of the individual. And just as the child

plunges us at times, by questions, into problems of the deepest

import, so is it with unexpected flashes of insight preserved for

us in the records, written or unwritten, of the earliest workings

of the human mind. "The soul of man" (says Caird), "even at its

worst, is a wonderful instrument for the world to play on; and in

the vicissitudes of life, it cannot avoid having its highest chords

at times touched, and an occasional note of perfect music drawn

from it, as by a wandering hand on the strings."

It is remarkable how, in spite of the enormous advances made

by civilised thought, our concepts and hypotheses, not

excepting those deemed most fundamental, are being constantly

modified. How much more would change prevail in ages when

structured knowledge had hardly come into existence. But

whether the pace of change be slow or rapid, the same impelling

cause is at work--man's determination to find fuller expression

for his intuitional experience. Animism developed into

mythology, mythology into gnomic philosophy, and this again

became differentiated into science, art, philosophy, and

theology. In the earlier stages, the instability of men's

imaginings and conceptions was kaleidoscopic; but it was no

more governed by wanton fickleness and caprice than is the

course of modern thought. The human spirit was striving then,

as now, to realise worlds vaguely experienced and dimly

surmised. The more imperfect expression was continuously

yielding place to the less imperfect--the lower concept

continuously yielding place to the higher. And at the base of the

whole great movement upwards was sensation, as the simplest

mode of intuition--sensation being, in its various forms and

developments, the outcome of man's intercourse with an

external world that, in its essence, is spiritual like himself.

The main error of animism was its failure to draw distinctions.

It tended to look upon nature as equally and fully human in all

its parts. It translated its intuitions of kinship into terms of

undifferentiated similarity, and thereby entangled itself in

hopeless confusions. But by degrees the stubborn facts of

existence made their impression, and compelled men to realise

that life on the human plane is one thing, and quite another on

the plane of external nature. The attempt to absorb the larger

truth thus sighted was only partially successful, and gave birth

to the wondrous world of mythology. Its chief characteristic

was that the will which was at first conceived to be within, or

identical with, the object, was separated from the object and

accorded a personal, or quasi-personal existence. In other

words, the non-human character of external nature was

acknowledged, while at the same time the human type of will

was preserved. The river, for example, was at first regarded as

itself an animated being; then the will it manifests was

separated from the material phenomena, and by personification

became a river-god who rules the phenomena. So the sun gave

rise to the conception of Apollo; and, by a double remove, the

lightning became a weapon in the hand of Zeus. There was thus

added to man's world of things a second world of spiritual

beings who animated and swayed the things. The change was

momentous; but it held fast to the original root idea of nature as

a manifestation of spiritual powers.

It was inevitable that the mythological system should collapse

when once the spontaneous play of imaginative thought gave

place to self-conscious, systematising reflection. The mass of

incoherent, and often contradictory myths, in which the true was

so strangely blended with the false, the beautiful with the ugly

or revolting, fell almost by its own weight. The more solid

materials it contained were first transmuted into allegories, and

then expressed in the language of science and philosophy. The

original intuitions, which had been encumbered with degrading

superstitions and deadening ceremonies, again declared their

power and their persistence, though sometimes under disguises

which rendered them hard to recognise.

And very instructive and arresting it is to note how haltingly

conscious reflection assimilated the rich store of ideas which

spontaneous intuition had seized upon whole ages previously.

For instance, Anaxagoras taught that since the world presents

itself as an ordered and purposeful whole, the forming force or

agency must also be purposeful. Following up this line of

thought, and guided by the analogy of human activities, he

declared this agency to be Nous, or reason--or, better still,

"reason-stuff." This conclusion was rightly deemed to be of

profound importance. And yet, when we analyse it, it seems at

first sight difficult to see wherein consists its originality. For

what else but this had been taught by the age-old animism that

had preceded it? And yet all who were fitted to judge hailed the

teaching as something radically new. It stirred far-reaching

currents in the deep ocean of Greek philosophic thought! How

can we explain the apparent anomaly? The fact is we have here

a typical instance of the transition from intuition to reflective

thought. There is a conscious grasp of promptings dimly felt--a

grasp that rendered possible the advance from mythology to

science and philosophy. The gain was enormous, and bore

abundant fruit; but it should not be allowed to obscure the merit,

nor the value, of the primitive intuition on which it was based.

It must be evident that similar examples might be multiplied

indefinitely, and certain of them will be adduced when typical

nature-myths are under more detailed consideration. It is

because of these germ truths enshrined in the ancient myths that

so many bygone modes of thought and expression last on into

the new order. Ruskin, in genuine mythological style, often

used the term "gods," and explains his meaning thus: "By gods,

in the plural, I mean the totality of spiritual powers delegated by

the Lord of the universe to do in their several heights, or offices,

parts of His will respecting man, or the world that man is

imprisoned in; not as myself knowing, or in security believing,

that there are such, but in meekness accepting the testimony and

belief of all ages . . . myself knowing for indisputable fact, that

no true happiness exists, nor is any good work ever done by

human creatures, but in the sense or imagination of such

presences."

The nature-mystic need not be ashamed of mythology. Sympathetically

studied, it affords abundant proof of the working of intuition

and mystic insight. It enabled multitudes of men, long

before science and philosophy became conscious aims, to

enter into some of the deepest truths of existence, and

to live as members of a vast spiritual hierarchy embracing earth

and heaven.

CHAPTER XIII

POETRY AND NATURE MYSTICISM

What a charm the nature deities of Greece and Rome can still

exercise! How large the place they still occupy in poetry, art,

and general culture! At times some of our moderns are tempted

to look back with a very real measure of regret to the golden age

of mythology, feeling that in comparison the present is often

sadly dull and sordid. Wordsworth's great sonnet gives classical

expression to this mood, and rises to a white heat of

indignation:

"Great God! I'd rather be

A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,--

So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;

Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."

It may be said that the poet is carried away by the feeling of the

moment. It finds expression, however, more calmly, though no

less decidedly, in a less well-known passage:

"O fancy, what an age was that for song!

That age, when not by laws inanimate,

As men believed, the waters were impelled,

The air controlled, the stars their courses held;

But element and orb on _acts_ did wait

Of Powers endued with visible form instinct,

With will, and to their work by passion linked."

Clearly mythology and nature-poetry are closely allied though

centuries come between: they breathe the same air though

"creeds outworn" have yielded place to deeper faiths. And we are

driven to ask--Is poetry in its turn to go?--poetry, at any rate,

of the old, simple, direct sort? Reflective reason is asserting

itself: critical methods play havoc with the spontaneous

creations of imagination. Coleridge, in one of his moods, would

almost persuade us so. In his "Piccolomini" Max is conversing

with the Countess:

"The intelligible forms of ancient poets,

The fair humanities of old religion,

The power, the beauty and the majesty,

That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain,

Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring,

Or chasms and wat'ry depths; all these have vanished;

They live no longer in the faith of reason."

And yet Coleridge did not allow that the outlook was wholly

sad. His young soldier continues:

"But still the heart doth need a language, still

Doth the old instinct bring back the old names."

. . . and even at this day

'Tis Jupiter who brings whate'er is great,

And Venus who brings everything that's fair."

No, poetry is not dead, and never will die. Certain stages in

human progress may favour its spontaneity more than others--

critical reflection may cloud over the naive and fresh directness

of experience--but behind each natural phenomenon is the

immanent idea, the phase of cosmic will and consciousness,

which science, and logic and critical analysis can never exhaust.

The intuition has its rights as well as the syllogism, and will

always ultimately assert them. Whereas science reduces the

world to mechanism, poetry intuits and struggles to express its

inner life; and since this inner life is inexhaustible, poetry is

immortal. Emerson seized upon this truth with characteristic

keenness of perception allied with feeling.

"For Nature beats in perfect time

And rounds with rhyme her every rune,

Whether she work in land or sea,

Or hide underground her alchemy.

Thou canst not wave thy staff in air,

Or dip thy paddle in the lake,

But it carves the bow of beauty there,

And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake.

The wood is wiser far than thou;

The wood and the wave each other know

Not unrelated, unaffected,

But to each thought and thing allied

Is perfect Nature's every part,

Rooted in the mighty heart."

And again in his "Ode to Beauty," he rejoices in the

"Olympian bards who sung

Divine Ideas below,

Which always find us young

And always keep us so."

Thank Heaven, we have not yet come to think that the highest

form of wisdom is enshrined in the _sesquipedalia monstra_ of

chemical formulae, still less in the extreme abstractions of

mathematics. Not that such formulae have not a beauty, and

even a Mysticism of their own; their harmfulness comes from

the exclusiveness of their claims when they are advanced as an

adequate description (sometimes explanation!) of existence at

large and of life in particular. The biological formulas, based on

mathematics, at which Le Dantec, for instance, has arrived, if

taken at their author's valuation, and if consistently applied,

would make the sublimest poetry to be greater folly than the

babble of a child. The nature-mystic may, or may not, allow

them a relative value according as he considers them to be valid

or invalid abstractions from observed facts; but he knows that

the most valid of them are exceedingly limited in their scope

and superficial in their bearing: and it remains a standing

wonder to him that any trained intellect can fail to realise their

miserable inadequacy, in view of the full rich current of living

experience.

One of the chief merits of genuine nature-poetry is that it keeps

us in close and constant touch with sense experience, and at the

same time brings home nature's inner life and meaning. It is not

a mere string of metaphors and symbols based on accidental

associations of ideas, but an expression and interpretation of

definite sensations and intuitions which result from the action of

man's physical environment upon his deepest and most delicate

faculties. "High art" (says Myers) "is based upon unprovable

intuitions; and of all arts it is poetry whose intuitions take the

brightest glow, and best illumine the mystery without us from

the mystery within."

But more especially, poetry is essentially animistic. It produces

its characteristic effect by creating in the mind the sensuous

images which best stimulate the mind to grasp the immanent

idea, and it presents those images as instinct with life and

movement--sometimes it goes so far as to personify them. This

is what Matthew Arnold meant when he declared poetry to be

"simple, sensuous, passionate." Coleridge has a good illustration

(quoted by Nisbet). He observes that the lines:

"Behold yon row of pines that shorn and bowed

Bend from the sea-blast, seen at twilight eve"--

contain little or no poetry if rearranged as a sentence in a book

of topography or description of a tour. But the same image, he

says, rises into the semblance of poetry if thus conveyed:

"Yon row of black and visionary pines

By twilight glimpse discerned! Mark how they flee

From the fierce sea-blast, all their tresses wild

Streaming before them."

The difference in the two presentations consists in this, that in

the second of them there is a suggestion of life and movement

which is lacking in the first. But why the different effect upon

the mind? Nisbet answers--"the visual and motor centres

contribute to the creation of the image"--an answer admirably

typical of the fashionable psychology of the day, not necessarily

wrong in itself, but so curiously incomplete! Nisbet holds that

man himself is a machine, and thus could not easily go farther--

especially as his own machinery evidently would not work any

farther. The nature-mystic begins at the other end. He holds that

even the inorganic world is more than machinery--that it is

instinct with life and meaning. When, therefore, life and

movement are attributed to seemingly inert or motionless

objects, there is a responsive thrill caused by the subconscious

play of primitive intuitions that are based on the facts of

existence. Spirit realises more vividly than in normal experience

that it is in touch with spirit.

Contrast with the psychological dictum the proud claim

advanced by Emerson.

"The gods talk in the breath of the woods,

They talk in the shaken pine,

And fill the reach of the old sea-shore

With melody divine.

And the poet who overhears

Some random word they say

Is the fated man of men,

Whom the ages must obey."

There are two claims presented here--one directly, the other

indirectly. The direct claim is that there are seers and

interpreters who can catch the mystic words that nature utters.

The indirect is that the general mass of humanity have the

capacity for sharing the experiences of their poet leaders. The

one class are endowed to an exceptional degree with receptivity;

the other are also receptive, but are dependent on those who can

give expression to the intuitions which are, though in varying

degrees, a possession common to humanity at large. As Sir

Lewis Morris puts it:

"All men are poets if they might but tell

The dim ineffable changes which the sight

Of natural beauty works on them."

He, too, recognises the mediating function of the poet.

"We are dumb,

Save that from finer souls at times may rise

Once in an age, faint inarticulate sounds,

Low halting tones of wonder, such as come

From children looking on the stars, but still

With power to open to the listening ear

The Fair Divine Unknown, and to unseal

Heaven's inner gates before us evermore."

And what is this but to claim for the mass of men, in varying

but definite degrees, a capacity for the experiences of the

nature-mystic? Poetry and Nature Mysticism are linked together

in an imperishable life so long as man is man and the world is

the world.

It will have been apparent that in what has been said about the

relation of poetry to science, there has been no shadow of

hostility to science as such, but only to the exclusive claims so

often preferred on its behalf. Let a French philosopher of the

day conclude this chapter by a striking statement of the

relationship that should exist between these seemingly

incompatible modes of mental activity. In a recent number of

the "Revue Philosophique," Joussain writes as follows:

"On peut ainsi se demander si le savant, à mesure qu'il tend vers

une connaissance plus complète du réel, n'adopte pas, en un

certain sens, le point de vue propre au poète. Boileau disait de la

physique de Descartes qu'elle avait coupé la gorge à la poésie.

La raison en est qu'elle s'en tenait au pur mécanisme et ne

definissait la matière que par l'étendue et le mouvement. Mais la

physique de Descartes n'a pu subsister. Et, avec la gravitation

universelle que Leibniz considérait à juste titre, du point de vue

cartésien, comme une _qualité occulte_, avec les attractions, les

répulsions, les affinités chimiques, avec la théorie de

l'évolution, la science tend de plus en plus à pénétrer la vie réele

des choses. Elle se rapproche, bon gré, mal gré, de la

metaphysique et de la poésie, en prenant une conscience plus

profonde de la force et du devenir. C'est qu'au fond la pensée

humaine est une, quelle que soit la diversité des objets auxquels

elle s'applique, art, science, poésie, métaphysique, répondant,

chacun à sa façon au même désir, chacun reflétant dans la

conscience humaine les multiples aspects de la vie

innombrable."

CHAPTER XIV

THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE UGLY

A charge frequently brought against the nature-mystic is that he

ignores the dark side of nature, and shuts his eyes to the ugly

and repulsive features of the world of external phenomena. If

nature can influence man's spiritual development, what (it is

asked) can be the effect of its forbidding and revolting aspects?

Is the champion of cosmic emotion and of Nature Mysticism

prepared to find a place for the ugly in his general scheme? The

issue is grave and should not be shirked. It is, moreover, of long

standing, having been gripped in its essentials by many thinkers

of the old world, more especially by Plato, Aristotle, and

Plotinus.

Let us begin by examining one or two characteristic statements

of the indictment that there are ugly, and even revolting, objects

in a world we would fain think fair. Jefferies says of certain

creatures captured in the sea: "They have no shape, form, grace,

or purpose; they call up a vague sense of chaos which the mind

revolts from. . . . They are not inimical of intent towards man,

not even the shark; but there the shark is, and that is enough.

These miserably hideous things of the sea are not anti-human in

the sense of persecution, they are outside, they are ultra and

beyond. It is like looking into chaos, and it is vivid because

these creatures, interred alive a hundred fathoms deep, are

seldom seen; so that the mind sees them as if only that moment

they had come into existence. Use has not habituated it to them,

so that their anti-human character is at once apparent, and stares

at us with glassy eye."

Kingsley, in his "At Last," asks, "Who will call the Puff Adder

of the Cape, or the Fer-de-lance, anything but horrible and ugly;

not only for the hostility signified, to us at least, by a flat

triangular head and heavy jaw, but by the look of malevolence

and craft signified, to us at least, by the eye and lip?"

Frederic Harrison puts the case from the more general point of

view: "The world is not all radiant and harmonious; it is often

savage and chaotic. In thought we can see only the bright, but in

hard fact we are brought face to face with the dark side. Waste,

ruin, conflict, rot, are about us everywhere. . . . We need as little

think this earth all beauty as think it all horror. It is made up of

loveliness and ghastliness; of harmony and chaos; of agony,

joy, life, death. The nature-worshippers are blind and deaf to the

waste and the shrieks which meet the seeker after truth. . . . The

poets indeed are the true authors of the beauty and order of

nature; for they see it by the eye of genius. And they alone see

it. Coldly, literally examined, beauty and horror, order and

disorder seem to wage an equal and eternal war."

In considering the substance of these strong statements,

characteristic of very different types of mind, we note in the

first place that two different problems are to some extent fused--

that of the ugly, and that of the morally evil. Of course, it is

frequently impossible to separate them; still, for purposes of

analysis, the attempt should be made; especially as our present

quest is aesthetic rather than ethical.

In the second place it must be remembered that the nature-mystic

is by no means a nature-worshipper. His claim of kinship

with nature surely implies the contrary! He knows that

evil and ugliness (however interpreted) are in man, and he

expects therefore to find them permeating the whole.

Confining our attention as far as may be to the aesthetic aspect

of the objections raised, let us at once define and face the

real issue now before us, namely, the significance for the

nature-mystic of what is called "ugliness."

There are certain judgments known as aesthetic--so called

because they determine the aesthetic qualities of objects. And it

is agreed, with practical unanimity, that they rest much more

upon feeling and intuition than upon discursive reason. To this

extent they rank as genuine "mystical" modes of experience,

and from this point of view have bulked largely in the systems

of mystics like Plato and Plotinus. But while claiming them as

mystical, it is necessary to note that they possess a characteristic

which constitutes them a special class. They imply reference to

a standard, or an ideal. The reference need not be made, indeed

seldom is made, with any conscious apprehension of the

standard; but the reference is none the less there, and a

judgment results. The place of reflective reasoning process

which characterises the logical judgment is filled by a peculiar

thrill which accompanies a feeling of congruence or incongruence,

according as the ideal is satisfied or otherwise.

It is in accord with this view of the aesthetic judgment that

while, for reason, the outward form and semblance of the object

is of subsidiary import, save from the point of view of abstract

form and physical quality, for the aesthetic feeling or intuition it

is paramount. For example, a botanist, _quâ_ botanist, will reck

little of beauty of colour, or curve, or scent--indeed at times his

interest in a plant may be in inverse ratio to its beauty. But the

lover of flowers, or the poet, or the artist, will fix upon such

aesthetic qualities as determining his mood and judgment. Not

that the reflective and the aesthetic judgments are antagonistic--

they are supplementary, and, when rightly appreciated, they are

interdependent; nevertheless, they must not be confused.

The doctrine of Plotinus, the prince of mystics, is very helpful

when the problem of the ugly is in debate, and fits in admirably

with the considerations just advanced. His theory was that

material objects are beautiful in proportion as they share in

reason and form. The converse of this proposition is, that

objects are ugly in proportion as they lack the capacity for

sharing in reason and form. Passing over certain other phases of

his doctrine, let us see how far this theory will carry us in

answering the question--Is there in nature such a thing as

ugliness, in any absolute sense of the term?

Matter, as known to the modern scientist, is universally

possessed of form of some kind, and is, moreover, found to

share in reason, when tested by its responsiveness, so to speak,

to the processes of human ratiocination--or, in other words, by

its obedience to natural law. It would seem to follow that there

is no object in nature which is absolutely ugly. And the

conclusion surely commends itself to common sense. If, in spite

of this, certain objects are called "ugly," what is intended?

Following up the lead of Plotinus, we seem to be driven to the

conception of "degrees of beauty"--of "higher" and "lower"

forms of beauty. And the moment the existence of such

"degrees" is accepted, the aesthetic horizon is indefinitely

extended. The whole problem assumes larger and more generous

proportions, especially when viewed in the light of the

evolution hypothesis. For where there are degrees, or stages, it

is an easy step to conceive of transition from stage to stage. An

ugly object is only relatively ugly; and by entering into new

relations with its environment may be raised to even higher rank

in the aesthetic scale of values. In brief, true progress becomes

possible for the whole universe. Herbert Spencer stopped short

at progress from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous. It is

more interesting, not to say, inspiring, to postulate increase of

capacity for sharing in reason and form. The vast process of

evolution may then be viewed as an upward sweep into fuller

beauty and into correspondingly fuller life.

Of the fact that there is such an upward process, there is

abundant and accumulating evidence. The struggle upwards of

organic life, culminating so far, in man as we know him--the

increasingly complex beauty of natural forms--the haste of

nature to conceal her scars--all alike speak of a striving upward.

Nay, we are being told that the atoms themselves, so long

regarded as ultimates, have been subjected to the evolutionary

stress and strain, and have advanced from the simplest forms to

higher and more complex symmetries. And in another field, the

arts, more particularly painting and the drama, almost demand

the recognition of some such principle of progress; for they are

constantly and necessarily using elements which in themselves

are accounted ugly, for the production of their supremest

beauties.

The use of discords in music is singularly suggestive in this

regard. There are combinations of musical sounds which, when

produced as isolated combinations, are harsh, and even painful.

But let them be heralded by other chords, and let them be parted

from by suitable resolutions, and they can charm, or thrill, or

kindle deep emotion. What does this fact imply? That discords

in music, when used with knowledge and mastery, do not take

their places as aliens in musical progressions--as insertions of

ugliness in a texture of surrounding beauty--_but as themselves

beautiful_. Their aesthetic value is gained by their being linked

up in a network of relations which makes them part and parcel

of that which is an ordered and rational whole. In short, discords

are potential beauties; they have capacity for form and reason.

The ugly, then, is not to be opposed to the beautiful as its

contrary, but as standing in the relation to it of the less to the

more perfect. There will thus be grades of beauty as there are

grades of reality. And mystic intuition will have corresponding

grades of dignity and insight. The grand process of evolution is

thus revealed as a many-sided whole--the amount of real

existence increases in proportion to the increase of capacity for

sharing in form and reason; and along with this goes a growth in

power to appreciate the ever higher forms of beauty which

emerge in the upward-striving universe.

A further thought calls for emphasis. For beings like ourselves,

living under conditions which involve so many limitations, a

_purely_ aesthetic judgment is practically out of our reach. And

on this score also we may venture to tone down the strong

expressions used by Jefferies in his estimate of the anti- or

ultra-human character of the strange creatures in the sea. Individual

likings and dislikings are the resultants of an enormously

complex system of impulses, instincts, prejudices, motives,

habits, associations, and the rest. Few of these factors appear

above the threshold of consciousness, though they are

continually and influentially operative. Hence it by no means

follows that because a particular object is displeasing or

disgusting to one individual, or group of individuals, it will be

so to all. So undoubted is the resulting relativity of our aesthetic

judgments that Hegel was inclined to hold that below the level

of man and art there is no real ugliness at all. "Creatures" (he

says) "seem ugly to us whose forms are typical of qualities

opposed to vitality in general, or to what we have learnt to

regard as their own special or typical form of animate existence.

Thus the sloth as wanting in vitality, and the platypus as

seeming to combine irreconcilable types, and crocodiles and

many kinds of insects, simply, it would appear, because we are

not accustomed to consider their forms as adequate expressions

of life, are all ugly."

Just as, in music, discords become beautiful by being brought

into fitting relations with other parts of an ordered whole, so is

it with objects which are usually considered ugly, but which are

capable of aesthetic beauty when treated in pictures by masters

of their craft. To set them in new and fitting relations of light

and shade, of colour and composition, is to transform them.

Schopenhauer lays great stress on the transforming power of art.

He instances many typical paintings of the Dutch school, simple

interiors, homely scenes, fruit, vegetables, the commonest tools

and utensils, even dead flesh--all are taken up into material for

pictures, and, in their special setting, compel our admiration.

We have in these facts concerning pictorial art, a strong

corroboration of the inference from the use of discords in

music--the relativity of ugliness, and the possibility of its

progressive transformation. But there is a further point to be

emphasised, one which music, by reason of its abstractness,

could not well enforce, and one which is of profound

significance for the nature-mystic. Pictorial art is concerned

with the representation of external objects. How explain its

transforming power? Schopenhauer has an excellent answer to

the question. He says that the artist is endowed with an

exceptional measure of intuitive insight. He enjoys a genuine

vision of the Idea immanent in the object he reproduces in his

particular medium--he fixes attention upon this Idea, isolates it,

and reveals much that would otherwise escape notice. The result

is that his skill enables others to slip into his mood and share his

insight.

It is on some such lines as those tentatively traced in the last

few paragraphs that the most hopeful solution of the problem of

the ugly must be sought. The heart of the matter is that there is

no object in external nature which is absolutely ugly--no object

which cannot, even as things are, be transformed to some

degree by being set in fitting relation to others--no object which

is not capable of progress in its capacity for sharing and

manifesting the form and reason towards which the universe is

striving. Should there be thinkers who, like Kingsley, cannot

quite rid themselves of the feeling that ugliness is an absolute

reality--a positive mode of existence over against beauty--they

can only take refuge in the wider problem of evil. But care must

be exercised, as before observed, to distinguish between moral

evil and physical ugliness. To what extent the one may be

reflected in the other is a question on which it would not be safe

to dogmatise. The main theory, however, stands out clearly, and

involves a belief that the material phenomena of the universe, as

a grand whole, enjoy a wholesome freedom from positive

ugliness. Tennyson's "Ancient Sage" expresses the nature-mystic's

hopes concerning the fundamental beauty of the world he loves.

"My son, the world is dark with griefs and graves,

So dark, that men cry out against the Heavens,

Who knows but that the darkness is in man?

The doors of Night may be the gates of Light;

For wert thou born or blind or deaf, and then

Suddenly healed, how wouldst thou glory in all

The splendours and the voices of the world!

And we, the poor earth's dying race, and yet

No phantoms, watching from a phantom shore,

Await the last and largest sense to make

The phantom walls of this illusion fade,

And show us that the world is wholly fair."

CHAPTER XV

NATURE MYSTICISM AND THE RACE

The fundamental postulates and principles of a consistent

Nature Mysticism have now been expounded with a fullness

sufficient to allow of a soberly enthusiastic study of the detail of

our subject. Let it be noted, however, that though a detailed

application of general conclusions is henceforth to be the main

business, there will be no forsaking of the broadly human

standpoint. For it has been shown, more especially in the

chapter on poetry, that the nature-mystic does not arrogate to

himself any unique place among his fellows, nor seek to enjoy,

in esoteric isolation, modes of experience denied to the mass of

humanity. Wordsworth, for instance, though a prince among

modern mystics, appealed with confidence to his countrymen at

large: his "we" was in constant evidence--and an ever-growing

multitude of nature-lovers responds to his appeal. That is to say,

the faculty of intuition he demands is to be found, in varying

degrees, latent at least, if not evolved, in the normal human

being. The gifted seer seizes and interprets what his less gifted

brother obscurely feels. Can we trace this mystic power of

nature on the scale of history at large? If the power is real, it

should be possible to recognise its grander workings. Moreover,

a wide outlook will help us to avoid exaggerations, preciosities,

and fanaticisms.

Here, then, is our starting-point for detailed study. If it be true

that all normal members of the race share in varying degrees the

faculty of mystic intuition, then nature must have had a

moulding effect not only on certain gifted individuals, but on

the character and destiny of whole communities, peoples, and

empires. As behind the language of the Greeks there were

age-long promptings of subconscious metaphysics, so behind the

aesthetic and spiritual development of this remarkable people

there must have been age-long promptings of subconscious

mystical intuitions stimulated by the influences of natural

phenomena. The moulding force of the immanent ideas, and of

the inner life of things, is, for the race at large, and for certain

peoples in particular, continuous, cumulative, massive. True, it

takes effect chiefly in the sphere of the subconscious. But he

will be a poor student of history who fails to reckon with those

subtler forces which, though obscure in their action, often

extend so widely and go so deep.

An eloquent evidence of nature's power to mould is to be found

in the contrasted characteristics of the great religions. The hardy

peoples of northwestern Europe were nurtured under stormy

skies, were girt in by stern, avalanche-swept mountains, and

struggled strenuously against the hardships of rigorous and

lengthy winters. What wonder that they filled their heaven with

_Sturm und Drang_--with titanic conflicts of the gods--and

heard it echoing with the whirl of hunting, the riot of feasting,

and the clang of battle? Their religion was strenuous as their

lives--free and fierce--yet tinged with a melancholy that

promised rich developments.

The favoured Greeks of classical times, "ever delicately

walking on most pellucid air," or rocked on the isle-strown

waters of the sapphire AEgaean, expanded their soul-life in an

environment teeming with light and colour, with harmony and

form. For them, therefore, Apollo bent his burnished bow and

launched his myriad shafts of gold; Aphrodite embodied visions

of foam-born beauty; Athene stood forth in panoply of reason

and restraint. Nature herself lured them to evolve ideals of law

and order, of disciplined thought and perfectly proportioned art.

What wonder that, prompted by mystic impulses and visions,

they purged their inherited religion of its grosser features, and

made it a vehicle for philosophic thought and spiritual

aspiration.

Pass to the wandering children of the desert, cradled amid the

great silences of space and time, swallowed up of vastness.

Above them by day the burning vault of blue, by night the

wheeling galaxies--around them the trackless levels of a thirsty

land. Such influences sank deep into their souls, and imparted

depth and intensity to their views of the source and meaning of

that vastness. Nor can we wonder that in such an environment,

the premonitions of the spiritual unity of existence, that were

stirring in many hearts, found special sustenance.

Let it be clearly understood that in the striking and

unmistakable illustrations just adduced, there is no mere

question of the influences of physical environment on social

organisation or economic development--though these also react

in a thousand ways upon ideas and ideals--but a question of

moulding spiritual concepts by the direct influence of the ideas

and impulses manifested in external nature. Man's soul was in

constant, if generally subconscious, communion with his

material environment, and his thinking was thereby largely

coloured and fashioned. And if the kind and quality of the

influence vary from age to age, and from people to people, it is

not the less continuously potent. The complexities of modern

life, the interminglings of civilisations, tend to obscure its

manifestations; science, wrongly pursued, seems hostile to

continued vigour. But underneath the play of the cross-currents

on the surface, is the resistless swing of the tide.

An illustration of another class is found in Max Müller's

brilliant lectures on "Physical Religion," the chief theme of

which is the development of Agni, the Vedic god of fire. The

starting-point was the sensuous perception of the physical

qualities of fire. The Idea and the will immanent in these

qualities gradually raised men's thoughts from the material to

the spiritual, until the Eastern world attained to what Max

Müller calls "a precious line from the Veda"--"He who above

the gods was the One God"--composed at least one thousand

years before the Christian era. It was not the result of a

supernatural revelation, but a natural outcome of man's thoughts

guided and moulded by impressions of outward phenomena.

That is to say, as Max Müller observes, there was nothing in it

artificial--simply that which man could not help saying, being

what he was and seeing what he saw.

In the instances just advanced, the broad principle is most

assuredly established that nature has a definite and continuous

effect upon the development of man's conduct and thought. And

as a consequence of this, we may affirm that Wordsworth's

experience is true, in its measure, of all normal members of the

race who are in touch with nature:

"Therefore am I still

A lover of the meadows and the woods

And mountains; and of all that we behold

Of this green earth; both what they half create

And what perceive; well pleased to recognise

In nature and the language of the sense,

The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

Of all my moral being."

Why, even old Dr. Johnson in his Dictionary days would write

to his friend Langton, in Lincolnshire: "I shall delight to hear

the ocean roar, or see the stars twinkle, in the company of men

to whom Nature does not spread her volumes or utter her voice

in vain." And let us observe, that the naturalness of his feeling

keeps him to the simplest, almost monosyllabic, English!

CHAPTER XVI

THALES

In an earlier chapter mention was made of that truly remarkable

group of thinkers who, in the sixth century before the Christian

era, made the momentous transition from mythology and

tradition to philosophy and science. It was also pointed out that

these pioneers, bold as they were, could not shake themselves

free from the social and intellectual conditions of their day. And

it is precisely this fact of what may be termed contemporary

limitations that makes a review of their speculations so valuable

to a student of Nature Mysticism. For they lived in times when

the old spontaneous nature beliefs were yielding to reflective

criticism. Their philosophising took its spring from the fittest

products of the mytho-poeic faculty, and thus remained in living

contact with the primitive past, while reaching forward, in the

spirit of the future, to an ordered knowledge of an ordered

whole. The chief object of their search was the _Welt-stoff_--

the substance of the universe--and they were guided in their

search by the dominating concepts which had emerged in the

long course of the animistic and mythological stages. Certain

forms of external existence have impressed themselves upon the

general mind, notably those of water, air, and fire; and to these

the reflecting mind naturally turned in its earliest efforts to

discover the Ground of things. The interest taken by the

nature-mystic in this group of thinkers is twofold. Firstly, he

finds that in their speculations there is a large element of

primitive intuition, embodied in concepts fashioned by the

spontaneous play of reflective thought and free imagination.

Closeness to nature is thus secured. And secondly, he rejoices

in the fact that these speculations, crude and premature as

they inevitably were, contained germs of thought and flashes

of insight which anticipate the most advanced speculative science

and philosophy of the present day. He maintains that here is

corroboration of his view of intuition. Nature was the teacher--

and it was to intuition that she chiefly addressed herself; and the

intellect--keen and fresh, but untrained--was able to seize upon

the material presented, and to fix it in concepts and theories

which share in nature's universal and unending life.

Water, air, and fire--what an enormous number and variety of

natural phenomena range themselves under these heads! If we

try to understand why they were singled out in turn, in the

search for the _Welt-stoff_, we shall have penetrated far into the

Nature Mysticism of these famous "elements."

Starting, then, with Thales, we ask why he fixed upon water in

his attempt (the earliest recorded) to determine the constitution

of the universe? What were the properties, qualities, and

functions of that "element" which arrested his attention, and

governed his crude, but acute and original, speculations? As

already remarked, existing cosmological conceptions played an

important rôle, more especially that of the great primeval ocean

on which the world was supposed to float. This cosmographical

ocean and its accompanying myths will be considered in a

subsequent chapter. But restricting our view at present to the

physical aspects of water, it is not wholly impossible to recover,

and sympathise with, his train of reasoning.

Water is wonderfully mobile, incessantly changing, impelled

apparently by some inherent principle of movement. Its

volatility, also, is very marked; it passes from solid to liquid,

and liquid to vapour, and easily reverses the series. More

especially would the old-world thinker be struck by the

phenomena of the circulation of water. He would see the vapour

drawn up by the sun from lake and ocean, seeming to feed the

heavenly fires, and returning to earth in the form of rain. He

concluded that this must represent the flow of the cosmic

process as a whole. Again, in the falling of dew, in the

gatherings of mists, and in the welling-up of fountains, the solid

materials of the world are apparently passing into a liquid state.

Thales was not the first to note these things. They had been

subtly modifying the thoughts of men for untold generations.

But he was the first whom we know to have gathered together

into a definite theory the vague intuitions which had been so

long unconsciously operative. He singled out this mobile

element and saw in it the substance of the flux of the world as a

whole.

His theory of movement took a wide range. He did not separate

the thing moved from the moving force; nor did he draw any

distinction between the organic and inorganic--the mechanical

and the vital. He regarded all modes of motion as essentially

spontaneous and self-determined. Moreover (as Aristotle tells

us) he identified this inherent principle of change with what is

divine in nature and in the soul. That is to say, the Real, for

Thales, is living impulse and continuous process. It is

experienced in man's conscious activities, and constitutes the

principle of unity in every mode and form of existence.

It is on the organic side of this speculation that Aristotle,

probably biased by his biological studies, chiefly dwells. Is it

possible to trace the grounds of which Thales based his wider

induction? Aristotle helps us. He supposes his predecessor to

have noted that water and life seem to be inseparable, and that

moisture is necessary to the germination and development of all

known organisms. It was natural to conclude that the principle

of life is in the water--the conclusion of the reason also

harmonising with the intuition stimulated by movement. Nor

was the inference altogether unwarranted. Put into historical

perspective, it still retains its force and value. The latest

biological authorities tell us that all branches of the zoological

family tree were formed on the moist shores of large water

basins, and that there is no form of life, not only terrestrial, but

even of the deep seas which has not passed through a littoral

phase. In other words, it is still allowable to hold that the

"moist," as Thales generally called his primal element, contains

one of the secrets of life. So close is the earliest to the latest

pronouncement on the origin of life on the globe!

Reviewing this brief exposition of the leading doctrine of an

ancient speculation, what bearing has it on the principles of

Nature Mysticism as laid down in preceding chapters? Certain

fairly obvious ones. Thales was guided by impressions received

from the qualities, behaviour, and functions of water; and they

led him to attribute a plastic life to matter. It would be

modernising him too severely to style him a hylozoist. But his

ascription of a soul to the magnet and to amber carries him far

on the way to that metaphysical world-view. Deeply suggestive

also is the saying which, if not rightly attributed to him, is at

least characteristic of his school--"All things are full of the

gods." We may therefore infer that the physical properties of

water are such as to suggest the ideas which have culminated in

modern animism. That is to say, water is capable of producing

intellectual and spiritual, as well as what are termed physical

effects. The deeper view of intuition is justified. And Thales, by

virtue of the whole trend and outcome of his speculations, may

claim an honoured place in the ranks of the nature-mystics.

CHAPTER XVII

THE WATERS UNDER THE EARTH

We have found that the constant movement and change

manifested in the circulation of the waters of the globe

impressed the mind of Thales and largely determined the course

of his speculation. When his great successor, Heracleitus,

passed from water to fire, in his search for the _Welt-stoff_, he

by no means became insensible to the mystic appeal of running

water. "All things are flowing." Such was the ancient expression

of the universal flux; and it is plainly based on the analogy of a

stream. If Heracleitus was not its author, at any rate it became

his favourite simile. "We cannot step" (he said) "into the same

river twice, for fresh and ever fresh waters are constantly

pouring into it." And yet, in a sense, though the waters change,

the river remains. Hence the statement assumed a form more

paradoxical and mystical--"We step into the same river, and we

do not step into it; we are, and we are not."

Moving water, then, has the power of stimulating emotion and

prompting intuition; and this power is manifested in exceptional

degree when the source from which the water issues, and the

goal to which it flows, are unknown. These conditions are best

satisfied in the case of streams that flow in volume through

subterranean caverns. The darkness contributes its element of

undefined dread, and the hollow rumblings make the darkness

to be felt. What more calculated to fill the mind of the child of

nature with a sense of life and will behind the phenomena? The

weird reverberations are interpreted by him as significant

utterances of mighty, unseen powers, and the caves and chasms

are invested with the awe due to entrances into the gloomy

regions where reign the monarchs of the dead.

True, it may be said, for the child of nature. But are such

experiences possible for the modern mind? Yes, if we can

pierce through the varied disguises which the intuitional

material assumes as times and manners change. Coleridge, for

instance, is thrown into a deep sleep by an anodyne. His

imagination takes wings to itself; images rise up before him,

and, without conscious effort, find verbal equivalents. The

enduring substance of the vision is embodied in the fragment,

"Kubla Khan," the glamour of which depends chiefly on the

mystical appeal of subterranean waters. We are transported to

where

"Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man,

Down to a sunless sea."

These three lines make a deeper impression than any others in

the poem, and form its main theme.

Nor is the feeling of the supernatural unrecognised. Spirits are

near with prophetic promptings. From a deep chasm the sacred

river throws up a mighty fountain, and for a short space

wanders through wood and dale, only to plunge again into its

measureless caverns, and sink in tumult to a lifeless ocean:

"And mid this tumult Kubla heard from far

Ancestral voices prophesying war."

Thus when Coleridge's imagination was set free, the mode of

feeling declared itself which had persisted down the ages to the

present. The primitive experience is there in its essentials,

enriched by the aesthetic and intellectual gains of the

intervening centuries. Doubtless there is a living idea, or rather

a group of living ideas, behind the phenomena of subterranean

waters.

Wordsworth has described a more personal experience which

chimes in with all that has been said.

"Through a rift

Not distant from the shore on which we stood,

A fixed, abysmal, gloomy, breathing place--

Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams

Innumerable, roaring with one voice!

Heard over earth and sea, and, in that hour,

For so it seemed, felt by the starry heavens."

If the modern poet could be thus affected, how much more the

primitive man who looked down on water falling into chasms,

or rushing through their depths. It was natural that such

experiences should find expression in his systems of

mythology. The general form they assume is that of springs and

rivers in the underworld, the best known of which appear in the

Graeco-Roman conceptions of Hades. Homer makes Circe

direct Odysseus thus. He is to beach his ship by deep-eddying

Oceanus, in the gloomy Cimmerian land. "But go thyself

to the dank house of Hades. Thereby into Acheron flow

Pyriphlegethon and Cocytus, a branch of the water of the Styx,

and there is a rock and the meeting of the two roaring waters."

Such were the materials which, with many additions and

modifications, developed into the Hades of Virgil's sixth

AEneid, with its lakes, and swamps and dismal streams. The

subterranean waters figured also in the Greek mysteries, and are

elaborated with much detail in Plato's great Phaedo Myth--in all

these cases with increasing fullness of mystical meaning. In the

popular mind they were incrusted with layers of incongruous

notions and crude superstitions. But, as Plato, for one, so clearly

saw, there is always at their core a group of intuitions which

have their bearing on the deepest problems of human life, and

are capable of moulding spiritual concepts.

Still more obviously suffused with mystic meaning and

influence are the Teutonic myths concerning the waters of the

underworld. The central notion is that of Yggdrasil, the tree of

the universe--the tree of time and life. Its boughs stretched up

into heaven; its topmost branch overshadowed Walhalla, the

hall of the heroes. Its three roots reach down into the

dark regions beneath the earth; they pierce through three

subterranean fountains, and hold together the universal structure

in their mighty clasp. These three roots stretch in a line from

north to south. The northernmost overarches the Hvergelmer

fountain with its ice-cold waters. The middle one overarches

Mimur's well with its stores of creative force. The southernmost

overarches Urd's well with its warmer flow. They are gnawed

down below by the dragon Nidhögg and innumerable worms;

but water from the fountain of Urd keeps the world-ash ever

green.

Hvergelmer is the mother fountain of all the rivers of the world--

below, on the surface of the earth, and in the heaven above.

From this vast reservoir issue all the waters, and thither they

return. On their outward journey they are sucked up and lifted

aloft by the northern root of the world tree, and there blend into

the sap which supplies the tree with its imperishable strength

and life. Rising through the trunk, they spread out into the

branches and evaporate from its crown. In the upper region,

thus attained, is a huge reservoir, the thunder-cloud, which

receives the liquid and pours it forth again in two diverse

streams. The one is the stream of fire-mist, the lightning, which

with its "terror-gleam" flows as a barrier round Asgard, the

home of the gods; the other falls in fructifying shower upon the

earth, to return to its original source in the underworld. The

famous maelstrom is the storm-centre, so to speak, of the

down-tending flood. The fountain Hvergelmer may therefore be

regarded as embodying impressions made on the Teuton mind

by the physical forces of the universe in the grand activities of

their eternal circulation. But their source was hidden.

The southernmost well has the warmer water of the sunny

climes--the fountain of Urd. The Norns, the three sisters who

made known the decrees of fate, come out of the unknown

distance, enveloped in a dark veil, to the world tree, and

sprinkle it daily with water from this fountain, that its foliage

may be ever green and vigorous. Urd is the eldest of the three,

and gazes thoughtfully into the past; Werdandi gazes at the

present; and Skuld gazes into the future. For out of the past and

present is the future born. The fountain of Urd may be regarded

as the embodiment of impressions of a spiritual force which

upholds and renews the universe.

Mimur, the king of the lower world, is the warder of the central

fountain, and round its waters are ranged his golden halls. The

fountain itself is seven times overlaid with gold, and above it

the holy tree spreads its sheltering branches. It is the source of

the precious liquid, the mead, which belongs to Mimur alone,

and rises from an unknown depth to water the central root. In its

purity, it gives the gods their wisdom and power. But the mead

which rises in the sap is not entirely pure; it is mixed with the

liquids from the other fountains. Thus earth is not like heaven.

Nevertheless, though thus diluted, it is a fructifying blessing to

whomsoever may obtain it. Around it grow delightful beds of

reeds and bulrushes; and bordering it are the Glittering Fields,

in which grow flowers that never fade and harvests that are

never reaped; in which grow also the seeds of poetry. In short,

Mimur's well is the source of inspiration and creative power.

These Teutonic notions of the waters under the earth have been

dwelt upon somewhat fully, partly because they are not so well

known as the classical myths--partly because they present such

a decided contrast to the classical myths--but mainly because of

their wealth of mystic suggestiveness. Let it not be thought that

they form a group of elaborate symbols--were that the case their

interest for the natural mystic would be vastly decreased. They

are almost wholly the spontaneous product of the mythopoeic

faculty; they were genuinely believed as presentations of

realities. They are primitive intuitions embodied to form a

primitive philosophy of life. They glow with mystic insight.

Under the forms of subterranean fountains that well forth life,

physical, aesthetic, spiritual, is mirrored the life of the universe,

which wells from unknown depths, and returns to the deeps

from which it emanated. And inasmuch as these ideas were

largely suggested by the circulation of the waters of the globe, the

Teutonic child of nature joins hands with the nature-philosopher

Thales. The Reality is ultimately the same for both; the

substance of the universe is living movement.

Yet another type of the mystic influence of subterranean

watercourses will serve to illustrate the deepening processes to

which all concrete forms, derived from intuitions, must be

subjected. Near to Banias in Northern Palestine, at the base of

an extensive cup-shaped mound, afar from human habitations,

is one of the two chief sources of the Jordan. The rushing waters

pour out of the ground in sufficient volume to form at once a

river. The roar and tumult are strikingly impressive. Peters, on

whose description of the place I have largely drawn, presumes

that this was the site of an ancient temple of Dan. The worship

at this temple was of the primitive sort, "such as was befitting

the worship of the God who exhibited himself in such nature

forces." We are therefore carried back to the mythological

stage, for which the gushing forth, in volume, of subterranean

waters was a manifestation of the life in, or behind, the natural

phenomenon, and roused a peculiar kind of emotion.

We are carried on to a much more advanced stage when we

come to the feelings represented in the 42nd Psalm. Peters

argues that this Psalm, which so vividly describes the roaring of

the waters was, "in its original form, a liturgical hymn sung at

the great autumnal festival by worshippers at this shrine, where

served, according to tradition, the descendants of Moses." On

this supposition how pregnant with historical import become the

well-known words: "One deep calleth another because of the

noise of the water-pipes; all thy waves and billows are gone

over me." It is no mere analogy or symbol that is here employed

(though such elements may be mingled in the complex whole)

but an intuition yearning to express itself that life's burden

would be lightened if the secret of the gushing waters could be

read.

And it is thus that we arrive at the fundamental intuition

common to the various modes of experience just reviewed. The

subterranean waters spring from an unknown source, or fall into

an unknown abyss. In both cases there is a sense of having

reached the limits of the knowable, combined with a sense of

inexhaustible power. The beyond is vague and insubstantial, but

it is instinct with life and purpose. Man's spirit may shrink

before the unknown--but he fills the empty regions with forms

and objects which rob them of much of their strangeness and

aloofness, and bring them within the range of his hopes and

fears. There, as here (he feels), there must be interpenetration

of spirit by spirit.

CHAPTER XVIII

SPRINGS AND WELLS

Milton, in his noble "Ode on the Nativity," sings that, with the

advent of the Saviour,

"From haunted spring and dale,

Edged with poplars pale,

The parting genius is with sighing sent."

Is this a statement of fact? Largely so, if the reference is to the

river gods, the Naiads, and water sprites, of classical

mythology. But not true if the vaguer belief in spirits who

preside over mossy wells and bubbling springs be taken into

account, or if the faith in the healing or other virtues of the

waters that issue from them be included in the underlying idea.

No, not even in the most Christian countries of to-day is such

faith extinct. One has but to remember the famous well at

Auray, or the sacred fountain in the crypt of the church at St.

Melars, to which whole crowds of pilgrims still resort, to realise

how far this is from being the case. Scotland herself, for all her

centuries of Puritanism, has not wiped her slate quite clean; still

less the countries like Ireland and Brittany, which are so

retentive of the past. Nay, the present age is not content with its

liberal supply of sacred springs, it must be adding new ones of

its own! Let Lourdes be witness. And who shall say how many

more are yet to come?

Very remarkable, both as illustrating Milton's Ode, and also the

persistency of this particular form of superstition, is the story of

the only real spring close to Jerusalem--Enrogel. It is identified

by high authorities with the Dragon's Well, mentioned in a

romantic passage of the book of the patriot, Nehemiah.

Assuming the validity of this identification, we have a glimpse

of times far earlier than the Hebrew occupation of the land.

Primitive peoples often associated serpents with springs and

wells, as incarnations of the spirit of the waters. A link is thus

supplied which carries back the history to the animistic and

mythological periods, in this case, prehistoric.

Retracing our course, we arrive at the time of the Hebrew

occupation of the country. A purer form of religion has rejected

most of the mythological material. But the old name of the

spring remains, and, what is still more pertinent, the old belief

in its healing power. We have evidence of this belief in St.

John's Gospel, which contains the peculiar story of the healing

at the pool of Bethesda, most probably connected with this same

spring. The popular view that at times an angel came to trouble

the water is perhaps an attempted explanation of its intermittent

action.

Now should have come the time, according to Milton, for the

departure of the sighing genius--the dying out of the

superstition. But those who anticipate such a _dénouement_

will be grievously disappointed. For the Jews still bathe in its

waters, at the times of overflow, for cure of various maladies.

And on the Christian side of the history, it has gained the name

of the Virgin's Pool!

Similar stories might be found in any part of the globe where

tradition is sufficiently continuous to preserve them, testifying

to the almost astounding persistency of belief in the power of

springing water. No doubt simple faith healing has played its

part--but that part is very subsidiary; the strongest influence has

been that exercised by the movement of the water itself,

suggesting as it does the idea of spontaneous life. Not less

surprising is the hold such springs retain upon the imagination

and affections. Pathetic proof of this meets the traveller at every

turn on the west coast of Ireland. As he tramps the byways and

unfrequented paths of County Clare, his eye is caught from time

to time by an artless array of shelves on the sloping banks of

some meadow spring. On the shelves are scanty votive offerings,

piteous to see. Piteous, not on the score of the superstition

which prompts them--that is a matter to be dealt with

in a spirit of broad sympathy, on its historic and social

merits--but because of the dire poverty they reveal. Even its of

broken crockery are held worthy of a place at these little

shrines; so bereft are the peasantry of the simplest

accompaniments of civilised life.

How thoroughly natural is the growth of such sentiments and

beliefs! Jefferies felt the charm. "There was a secluded spring"

(he writes) "to which I sometimes went to drink the pure water,

lifting it in the hollow of my hand. Drinking the lucid water,

clear as light itself in solution, I absorbed the beauty and the

purity of it. I drank the thought of the element; I desired

soul-nature pure and limpid."

Nor has the charm ceased to be potent for the new man in the

new world. Walt Whitman knew it. Here is a delightful

paragraph from his notes of "Specimen Days": "So, still

sauntering on, to the spring under the willows--musical and soft

as clinking glasses--pouring a sizeable stream, thick as my neck,

pure and clear, out from its vent where the bank arches over like

a great brown shaggy eyebrow or mouth roof--gurgling,

gurgling ceaselessly--meaning, saying something of course (if

one could only translate it)--always gurgling there, the whole

year through--never going out--oceans of mint, blackberries in

summer--choice of light and shade--just the place for my July

sun-baths and water-baths too--but mainly the inimitable soft

sound-gurgles of it, as I sit there hot afternoons. How they and

all grow into me, day after day--everything in keeping--the

wild, just palpable, perfume, and the dapple of leaf-shadows,

and all the natural-medicinal, elemental-moral influences of the

spot."

If these two passages be taken together, there will be few

elements of mystic influence left unnoted. And how deeply

significant the fact that each author instinctively and

spontaneously associates with the limpid flow of the water the

ideas of life and health! Were the old mythologists so very far

from the truth? Is it so very hard to understand why wells and

springs have had their thousands of years of trust and affection?

Was it mere caprice that led our Teutonic fathers to place under

the roots of the world-tree the three wells of force and life and

inspiration?

A fine example of a more definitely mystic use of the ideas

prompted by the sight of springing water, is found in Dante's

"Earthly Paradise"--an example the more interesting because of

its retention of what may be called the "nature-elements" in the

experience.

"The water, thou behold'st, springs not from vein,

Restored by vapour, that the cold converts;

As stream that intermittently repairs

And spends his pulse of life; but issues forth

From fountain, solid, undecaying, sure:

And, by the will omnific, full supply

Feeds whatsoe'er on either side it pours;

On this, devolved with power to take away

Remembrance of offence; on that, to bring

Remembrance back of every good deed done.

From whence its name of Lethe on this part;

On the other, Eunoe: both of which must first

Be tasted, ere it work; the last exceeding

All flavours else."

This passage, say the authorities, is linked on to the old

Proserpine mystery, and is parallel to the Teutonic conceptions

described in the last chapter. Of quite exceptional character, yet

best treated in the present connection, are the "wells" of eastern

lands. Where the sources of springing water are rare and far

distant from one another, the supply of water has to be

supplemented by that from artificial pits, sunk with hard toil,

often into the solid rock, and valued accordingly. Such "wells,"

in the stricter sense, are too directly associated with human

labour in historic times, to allow much mythical material to

accumulate around them. Still, from the simple fact of their

dispensing water in arid and thirsty lands, they possess not

unfrequently a rich store of family and tribal legends. And

further, by reason of their very freedom from the cruder

superstitions, the intuitions they prompted were from the first

transparent and spiritual. Under such conditions the water is

literally "life." And as the conception of life deepened, so did

intuition become more delicate.

We have the early freshness of the feeling stimulated in an

ancient strain, delightful in its naive spontaneity.

"Then sang Israel this song:

Spring up, O well, sing ye unto it:

The well which the princes digged,

Which the nobles of the people delved,

With the sceptre and with their staves."

The deepening of the feeling came rapidly, and took exquisite

form in the prophet's assurance that his people should "draw

water out of the wells of salvation." But here mysticism was

beginning to blend with symbolism, and the later developments

of the idea pass over almost wholly into the sphere of reflective

analogy.

So far as the nature-mystic is concerned, he emphasises the

continuity of the feeling, from the earliest ages to the present,

that in the phenomena of water gushing from a source we have

a manifestation of self-activity, as immanent Idea and concrete

will. And convinced of the validity of his contention, he is not

surprised, as some may be, at the influence which wells and

springs have wielded, and still do wield, over the human soul.

CHAPTER XIX

BROOKS AND STREAMS

There is a striking passage in Tylor's "Primitive Culture" which

will admirably serve as an introduction to this chapter and the

one which is to follow, on "Rivers and Waterfalls." "In those

moments of the civilised man's life when he casts off hard dull

science, and returns to childhood's fancy, the world-old book of

nature is open to him anew. Then the well-worn thoughts come

back fresh to him, of the stream's life that is so like his own;

once more he can see the rill leap down the hill-side like a child,

to wander playing among the flowers; or can follow it as, grown

to a river, it rushes through a mountain gorge, henceforth in

sluggish strength to carry heavy burdens across the plain. In all

that the water does, the poet's fancy can discern its personality

of life. It gives fish to the fisher, and crops to the husbandman;

it swells in fury and lays waste the land; it grips the bather with

chill and cramp, and holds with inexorable grasp its drowning

victim. . . . What ethnography has to teach of that great element

of the religion of mankind, the worship of well and lake, brook

and river, is simply this--that what is poetry to us was

philosophy to early man; that to his mind water acted not by

laws of force, but by life and will; that the water-spirits of

primeval mythology are as souls which cause the water's rush

and rest, its kindness and its cruelty; that lastly man finds, in the

beings with such power to work him weal or woe, deities with a

wider influence over his life, deities to be feared and loved, to

be prayed to and praised and propitiated with sacrificial gifts."

Tylor has here given a masterly résumé of a large group of

facts, and has viewed them from a particular angle--not quite

that of the nature-mystic, though not so far removed as might

appear. He does not make it appear that there was any organic

connection between the phenomena and the mythology, nor

even between the phenomena and the feelings which the

modern man, in certain moods, feels stirring within him at their

prompting. These myths are simply "fancies"; the "feelings" are

simply those of "the poet." The wider view adopted by so many

philosophers and scientists (as was shown in the chapter on

animism) does not seem to have won his adherence--perchance

was not known to him. And yet in sentence after sentence he

hovers on the brink of genuine Nature Mysticism. His sympathy

with the leaping rill and the rushing river is deep and

spontaneous; he is evidently well pleased to open afresh "the

world-old book of nature," and to read it in the light of

"childhood's fancy." The nature-mystic avers that what he

deemed a recurrence of meaningless, if pleasant, "well-worn

thoughts" was really an approach to the heart of nature from

which an imperfect understanding of the place and function of

science had carried him away. Not that the old forms should be

perpetuated, but that the childlike insight should be cherished.

Water in movement in brooks and streams! Have we discovered

the secret of it when we tell of liquids in unstable equilibrium

which follow lines of least resistance? It is a valuable advance

to have gained such abstract terms and laws, so long as we

remember they _are_ abstractions. But it is a deadly thing to

rest in them. How infinitely wiser is Walt Whitman, in his

address to a brook he loved, than the man who coldly analyses,

with learned formulae to help him, and sees and feels nothing

beyond. "Babble on, O brook" (Walt Whitman cries), "with that

utterance of thine! . . . Spin and wind thy way--I with thee a

little while at any rate. As I haunt thee so often, season by

season, thou knowest, reckest not me (yet why be so certain--

who can tell?)--but I will learn from thee, and dwell on thee--

receive, copy, print, from thee."

Is this to indulge in vague anthropomorphic fancies--though not

of the cruder sort, still of subjective value only? The

persistence, the vividness, and the frequency of such

"imaginings" prove that the subjective explanation does not tell

the whole tale. How natural, in the simplest sense of the word,

is Coleridge:

"A noise like of a hidden brook

In the leafy month of June,

That to the sleeping woods all night

Singeth a quiet tune."

How earnest is Wordsworth as he opens out glimpses of

unknown modes of being in his address to the Brook:

"If wish were mine some type of thee to view

Thee, and not thee thyself, I would not do

Like Grecian artists, give the human cheeks

Channels for tears; no Naiad shouldst thou be,--

Have neither limbs, feet, feathers, joints, nor hairs;

It seems the Eternal Soul is clothed in thee

With purer robes than those of flesh and blood,

And hath bestowed on thee a safer good;

Unwearied joy, and life without its care."

Again, what natural feeling declares itself in the delightful

Spanish poem translated by Longfellow:

"Laugh of the mountain! lyre of bird and tree!

Pomp of the meadow! mirror of the morn!

The soul of April, unto whom are born

The rose and jessamine, leaps wild in thee!"

How deep, once more, the note sounded by Brown in his lines

on "The Well":

"I am a spring--

Why square me with a kerb?

. . .

O cruel force,

That gives me not a chance

To fill my natural course;

With mathematic rod

Economising God;

Calling me to pre-ordered circumstance

Nor suffering me to dance

Over the pleasant gravel,

With music solacing my travel--

With music, and the baby buds that toss

In light, with roots and sippets of the moss!"

The longing for freedom to expand the dimly realised and

mystic elements in his soul-life was stirred within him by the

joyous bubbling of a spring. To kerb the artless, natural flow is

to "economise God"--so the limitations and restrictions of the

life that now is artificialise and deaden the divine within us.

There is more than metaphor in such a comparison; there is the

linkage of the immanent idea. His emotion culminates in the

concluding lines:

"One faith remains--

That through what ducts soe'er,

What metamorphic strains,

What chymic filt'rings, I shall pass

To where, O God,

Thou lov'st to mass

Thy rains upon the crags, and dim the sphere.

So, when night's heart with keenest silence thrills,

Take me, and weep me on the desolate hills."

There are indeed but few with any feeling for nature who have

not been moved to special trains of thought, the outcome of

characteristic moods, by the babblings and wayward wanderings

of brooks and rivulets. The appeal, therefore, is to a

wide experience. Can we be satisfied to join with Tylor in his

sense of disillusionment? Or shall we strive to get yet nearer to

the heart of things? If we cling to the deeper view, to us, as to

the men of old, the running stream will sing of the soul in

nature.

CHAPTER XX

RIVERS AND LIFE

A river is but a larger brook. And yet by virtue of its volume, it

manifests features which are peculiarly its own, and exerts

influences which have not alone affected individual moods and

imaginings, but often profoundly modified and moulded the

destinies of peoples and civilisations. The two outstanding

instances are the Nile and the Ganges.

The Nile has attracted to itself, from the dawn of history to the

present day, a peculiar share of wonder and renown. It is the

longest river of its continent--possibly of the world; and the

exploration of its sources is only just completed. It flows

through a limestone country over which, save for its beneficent

action, would drive the parched sands of the Libyan desert. Its

periodic inundations, with their rich deposits of alluvial soil,

repel the encroaching wastes, and solve the problem of the food

supply. Egypt has with good reason been called "the gift of the

Nile."

This river therefore possesses in a marked degree all the mystic

influences of moving water, and emphasises them by physical

and historical features of exceptional import. What wonder that

it has had so direct a bearing on the spiritual development of the

people on its banks, and that it entered into the very texture of

their lives! It was, for the Egyptian, pre-eminently the sacred

river--deemed to be one of the primitive essences--ranked with

those highest deities who were not visible objects of adoration.

As a form of God "he cannot (says an ancient hymnist) be

figured in stone; he is not to be seen in the sculptured images

upon which men place the united crowns of the North and the

South, furnished with uraei." The honour thus conferred was but

commensurate with the blessings he brought. For in what would

have been a valley of death he was the sole source and sustainer

of life. A further quotation from the beautiful hymn just

mentioned will indicate the affection and mystic emotion he

inspired. "Homage to thee, O Hapi! (i.e. the Nile). Thou comest

forth in this land, and dost come in peace to make Egypt to live,

O thou hidden one, thou guide of the darkness whensoever it is

thy pleasure to be its guide. Thou waterest the fields which Ra

hath created, thou makest all animals to live, thou makest the

land to drink without ceasing; thou descendest the path of

heaven, thou art the friend of meat and drink, thou art the giver

of the grain, and thou makest every place of work to flourish, O

Ptah! . . . If thou wert to be overcome in heaven the gods would

fall down headlong, and mankind would perish."

In this passage the mystic observes how the natural power of

running water to suggest spontaneous movement, and therefore

life, is accentuated and denned by the actual results of the river's

beneficent overflow. And a further step is taken when Hapi is

addressed by the names of Ptah (as above) and Khnemu; for he

is not thus confused with the gods so named, but being the great

life-supplier for the land, he is, like them, regarded as a creative

power. The development of the ideas suggested is thus

essentially parallel to that described in the chapter on the

Teutonic myths of the three subterranean wells and the

World-tree.

But can any distinctive features of the Egyptian religion be

traced to the influences exerted by the phenomena of the Nile?

Most decidedly so--in two directions more especially. That

religion is one of contrasts; it represents the world as a scene of

titanic conflict. The realm of Osiris is opposed to that of

Typhon--creation to destruction. And the master influence in

shaping the form in which these contrasts were conceived was

undoubtedly the Nile. On one side barren rocks and parched

sands, and on the other the fertilising powers of the sacred

stream. All around, vast solitudes, and along the river the hum

of teeming communities and the rich fullness of prosperous

civilisations. The world was visibly, for the Egyptian, a fierce

recurring battle between life and death.

And springing out of this appears the second great influence to

be attributed to the famous river. The Egyptian grasped firmly

and developed fully the doctrine of immortality. Doubtless

many factors contributed to the peculiar form which his belief

assumed, but none would be of more importance than the ever

renewed gift of life which the Nile brought from an unknown

and an unseen world. Hence also the connection between the

Nile-god and Osiris, the god of the resurrection. So deeply were

the world-views and spiritual experiences of the Egyptians

influenced by the mystic's powers of the Nile--by the immanent

ideas therein made concrete. The Egyptians, in their turn,

influenced the Hebrews, the Greeks, and the Romans; and these,

again, have influenced the race. Who shall estimate the effect

on the human mind of the physical phenomena of this single

river!

When we turn to the story of the Ganges, a further mystical

concept comes into view--that of purification. It is manifestly

suggested by the cleansing qualities of water, and has exercised

an important function in the development of certain moral ideas

and ideals. Bathing in running water to cleanse the stains of the

body led on to, and combined with, the concept of cleansing the

stains of the soul. But even thus the dominant suggestion of life

declares itself, as is specially obvious in the case of Christian

baptism, where the washing with water symbolises not only the

cleansing of the soul, but the new birth, the higher life of the

spirit. It is by keeping in mind these blended concepts that we

shall best understand the story of the Ganges.

All the larger rivers of India are looked upon as abodes and

vehicles of the divine essence, and therefore as possessed of

power to cleanse from moral guilt. Their banks, from source to

sea, are holy ground, and pilgrims plod their way along them to

win merit--a merit that is measured by the years of travel and

the sanctity of the stream. Of all the great rivers in this ancient

land, the Ganges is the noblest. Mother Ganga, stands supreme.

No water such as hers for washing away the stains of the most

heinous crimes. She has bands of priests who call themselves

her "Sons," and who conduct pilgrims down the flights of steps

that line her banks, aid them in their ablutions, and declare them

clean. To die and to be buried near the stream is in itself

sufficient to win an entrance to the realms of bliss. "Those who,

even at a distance of a hundred leagues, cry Ganga, Ganga,

atone for the sins committed during three previous lives." In

short, the hold the river has obtained upon the affections and

imaginations of the Hindus is marvellously firm and lasting.

Of course a river so renowned has its wreath of myths and

legends, characterised, in this instance, by the prodigality of the

Eastern mind. It is not necessary to linger over these, save in so

far as to note that they ascribe a divine origin to the sacred

stream; the sense of power and movement issuing from the

world of the unseen is no less strong than that aroused by the

Nile; though it finds strangely different modes of expression, its

essential character is the same. Interesting and typical is the

Hindu belief that the spot where flow together the waters of the

Ganges, the Jumna and the Sarasvati is one of the most

hallowed in a land of holy places. "These three sacred rivers

form a kind of Tri-murti, or triad, often personified as

goddesses, and called 'Mothers.'" With such facts in view, it

would be hard to exaggerate the influence of rivers on the

development of the Hindu's speculation and practice, and more

especially of his mysticism.

Such intuitions and beliefs find their full flower in the

conception of the river of life--the stream, pure as crystal, that,

with exulting movement onward, brings to men the thrill of

hope and the inspiration of progress to a world beyond. It pulses

and swings in the glorious sunshine--it reflects the blue of

heaven--it sweeps superbly with unsullied current past every

obstacle, and bursts through every barrier:

at ille

Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum.

Yes, the Nile, the Ganges, the Rhine, the Thames, and a

thousand other rivers of renown have had, and still have, their

part to play in the cosmic drama and in the development of

man's spiritual nature. Generation after generation has found

them to be capable of stirring peculiar emotions, and of

stimulating profound thoughts on the mystery of life. And all

these powers are concentrated and sublimated in this glorious

vision of "the river of water of life that flows from the throne

of God."

CHAPTER XXI

RIVERS AND DEATH

The world of fact, no less than the world of abstract thought, is

full of contradictions and unsolved antinomies. Here is one such

contradiction or antinomy. Moving water, it has been shown, is

suggestive of life. But over against it we find a suggestion of

death. Indeed there has been a widely diffused belief in a river

of death--a striking foil to the inspiring mysticism of the river of

life. The old-world mythology taught, in varying forms, but

with underlying unity of concept, that there is a river, or gulf,

which must be crossed by the departing soul on its way to the

land of the departed. Evidently the extension of the original

thought to cover its seeming opposite has a basis in the nature

of things. Its most elaborate presentment is in the ancient myths

of the nether regions and of the seven streams that watered

them--from Styx that with nine-fold weary wanderings bounded

Tartarus, to where

"Far off from these, a slow and silent stream,

Lethe the river of oblivion runs."

Nor has Christianity disdained to adapt the idea. Bunyan, for

example, brings his two pilgrims within sight of the heavenly

City. "Now I saw further that between them and the gate was a

river; but there was no bridge, and the river was very deep. At

the sight therefore of this river, the pilgrims were much stunned;

but the men that went with them said, you must go through or

you cannot come at the gate."

What suggestive power has the river to induce this more sombre

train of reflection? Surely that embodied in the old proverb--

Follow the river and you will come to the sea. Clough, in his

little poem, "The Stream of Life," concludes with a note of

sadness, almost of despair:

"O end to which all currents tend,

Inevitable sea,

To which we flow, what do we know,

What shall we guess of thee?

A roar we hear upon thy shore,

As we our course fulfil;

Scarce we divine a sun will shine

And be above us still."

The rushing rapid and the plunging waterfall have an influence

all their own in rousing intuitions of more than human life and

power. The dazzling and dashing rainbows of spray appeal to

the sense of sight--the internal rhythmic sound from the lighter

tones which are flung around like notes from a Ström Karl's

magic harp, or the alluring song of a Lorelei, to the thunder of a

Niagara, nature's diapason sounding the lowest note that mortal

ears can catch, appeal to the sense of hearing--and underlying

all is a vague sense of irresistible power. How touching, how

profoundly true, the story in "Eckehard" of the little lad and his

sister who wandered off until they came to the Rheinfal. There,

gazing at the full sweep of that magnificent fall the little fellow

throws into the swirling emerald of the waters at his feet a

golden goblet, as an offering to the God whom he felt to be so

near. Unconsciously he was a natural mystic. Movement, sound,

and colour combined to produce in him, what it should produce

in all, a sense of immanent Reality, self-moving, self-sustained.

And yet even a waterfall may suggest far other thoughts--a

downward course from the freshness of the uplands of youth to

the broadening stream of manhood declining towards old age

and the final plunge. The fall itself would thus convey vague

feelings of loss of power and vigour--a loss that gathers speed

as it approaches the end. So in Campbell's well-known "River

of Life":

"When joys have lost their bloom and breath

And life itself is vapid,

Why, as we reach the Falls of Death,

Feel we its course more rapid? "

If so sad a train of reflections can be stimulated by the rapids

and the falls of rivers, how much more so by their ending in the

ocean! Old age and death can hardly fail to assert themselves in

the minds of those who sail down some noble river and

meditate:

"As the banks fade dimmer away,

As the stars come out, and the night wind

Brings up the stream

Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea."

Granting that the river's merging in the sea suggests the close

of life as we know it here, must we also grant that the

natural-mystic must give way to a partial, if not an absolute,

tendency to pessimism? That a natural-mystic should be a pessimist

would seem to be an anomaly. For he holds that he can hold

living communion with the Real; and such communion would

carry with it, surely, a strong hope, if not a conviction, that

change in material form cannot affect the inner being, call it the

spiritual essence, of which that form is a particular

manifestation. Deny that nature has a soul and optimism

becomes a ghastly mockery. Believe that nature and man are

linked together as kindred forms of spiritual existence, and then,

though there will not indeed be formal proof of immortality,

there will be intuitive trust in the future. What the implications

of such a trust may be is for the various philosophies and

theologies to determine; but taken at its lowest value, it would

secure a man from pessimism.

In the light of these general observations, let us consider the

particular case now presented. The river is merged in the sea--it

is absorbed--its existence as a river is terminated. But the

"substance" of its being remains; diffused in a vaster whole, but

not lost. What is this vaster whole? If we regard it as an

Absolute, there may perchance be ground for pessimism. If,

with certain scientists, we stop short at the conservation of

energy, there is nothing ahead but a blank. But if we hold to the

conservation of values, as at least a parallel to this conservation

of energy, we are impelled to hold also to the conservation of all

that is ultimate in individualities. For values imply modes of

being which can allow of the experience of values as such. And

the Nature-Mystic's direct communion with his environment is

seen to be one mode by which the individual centre of life

learns to live increasingly in the life of the Whole--the total

Reality. There is, then, no absorption where values are

conserved, but an ever richer content of experience, an ever

deepening insight into its significance, and an ever keener

enjoyment of the material it affords.

As a specific case of an optimistic creed based on an intuition of

the essential kinship of all things, it is profitable to study the

poetry of a Sufi mystic of the thirteenth century. How delicate

the thought enshrined in the following lines:

"When man passed from the plant to the animal state,

He had no remembrance of his state as a plant,

Except the inclination he felt for the world of plants,

Especially at the time of spring and sweet flowers."

What is this but an anticipation 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

grass-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 grass 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 grass 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 spacious 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 passage 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 assures us that here and now:

"Tho' inland far we be,

Our souls have sight of that immortal sea

Which brought us hither."

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--Tiâmat--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 ships 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

relationship 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-goddess, Ran, his wife, who raged in storms and overwhelmed

the ships. 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 brimming

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

multitude 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 seashore, cries:

"God be with thee, gladsome Ocean!

How gladly greet I thee once more."

Myers emphasises the fact that Swinburne, in his principal

autobiographical poem, "Thalassius, 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 classical expression

of the spirit in its modern guise as embodied in the British

sailor--the defender of the isle that is "compassed 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 hardships and dangers which that life

entails.

Thus cumulative is the evidence that the present, for all its

materialism, inherits the essence of the ancient mysticism; or

rather, it is open to the same impulses and intuitions, however

changed and changing the forms they may assume. On the one

hand, the infinite complexity of man's developing soul-life; on

the other, the limitless range of the moods and aspects of the

ocean: the two are spiritually linked by ultimate community of

nature: deep calls to deep: the response is living and eternal.

CHAPTER XXIII

WAVES

The most familiar appeal of the Ocean is that of the wave which

speeds over its surface or breaks upon its shores. Poets have

found here an inexhaustible theme. Painters have here expended

their utmost skill. Whether it is the tiny ripple that dies along

the curving sands, or the merry, rustling, crested surf that

hurries on to wanton in the rocky pools, or the storm billow that

rushes wildly against an iron-bound coast to spurt aloft its

sheets of spray or to hurl its threatening mass on the trembling

strand--in each and every form the wave is a moving miracle.

Through every change of contour and interplay of curves, its

lines are ever of inimitable grace. Its gradations of colour, its

translucent opalescence framed in gleaming greens and tender

greys, wreathed with the radiance of the foam, are of inimitable

charm. Its gamuts of sounds, the faint lisp of the wavelet on the

pebbly beach, the rhythmic rise and fall of the plashing or

plunging surf, the roar and scream of the breaker, and the boom

of the billow, are of inimitable range. What marvel is it that

even the commonplace of the sons of men yield themselves

gladly to a spell they cannot analyse, content to linger, to gaze,

and to ponder!

If the spell of the waves enthralls the ordinary mortal, how

much more those whose aesthetic and spiritual senses are keen

and disciplined? Coleridge, while listening to the tide, with eyes

closed, but with mind alert, finds his thoughts wandering back

to

"that blind bard who on the Chian strand

By those deep sounds possessed with inward light,

Beheld the Iliad and the Odyssee

Rise to the swelling of the voiceful sea."

Swinburne, listening to the same music, exclaims:

"Yea, surely the sea like a harper

Laid his hand on the shore like a lyre."

Sometimes the emphasis is on the sympathy with the striving

forces manifested in the ceaseless activity of the ocean as it

"beats against the stern dumb shore

The stormy passion of its mighty heart."

Sometimes the emphasis is on the subjective mood which that

activity arouses:

"Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O sea.

And I would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me,"

Sometimes the two are indissolubly blended as in the song,

"Am Meer," so exquisitely set to music by Schubert--where the

rhythmic echoes of the heaving tide accompany the surging

emotions of a troubled heart.

The direct impression made by the objective phenomena of the

play of waves finds abundant expression in the whole range of

literature--not the least forcefully in Tennyson. How fine his

painting of the wave on the open sea.

"As a wild wave in the wide North-Sea

Green glimmering towards the summit, bears, with all

Its stormy crests that smoke against the skies,

Down on a bark, and overbears the bark,

And him that helms it."

How perfect also the description of a wave breaking on a level,

sandy beach:

"The crest of some slow-arching wave,

Heard in dead night along that table-shore,

Drops flat, and after the great waters break

Whitening for half a league, and thin themselves,

Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud,

From less and less to nothing."

As to the moods thus stimulated, the one most frequently

provoked would seem to be that of sadness. Or would it be truer

to say that those whose thoughts are tinged with melancholy, or

weighted with sorrow, find in the restless, endless tossing and

breaking of the waves their fittest companions?

How sad this passage from the French poet-philosopher, Guyot.

"I remember that once, sitting on the beach, I watched

the serried waves rolling towards me. They came without

interruption from the expanse of the sea, roaring and white.

Beyond the one dying at my feet I noticed another; and farther

behind that one, another; and farther still another and another--a

multitude. At last, as far as I could see, the whole horizon

seemed to rise and roll on towards me. There was a reservoir of

infinite, inexhaustible forces there. How deeply I felt the

impotency of man to arrest the effort of that whole ocean in

movement! A dike might break one of the waves; it could break

hundreds and thousands of them; but would not the immense

and indefatigable ocean gain the victory? And this rising tide

seemed to me the image of the whole of nature assailing

humanity, which vainly wishes to direct its course, to dam it in,

to master it. Man struggles bravely; he multiplies his efforts.

Sometimes he believes himself to be the conqueror. That is

because he does not look far enough ahead, and because he does

not notice far out on the horizon the great waves which, sooner

or later, must destroy his work and carry himself away."

Similar is the train of thought which finds poetical expression in

Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach."

"Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

. . .

Sophocles heard it long ago,

Heard it on the AEgaean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought;

Hearing it by this distant northern sea."

And the thought! "The melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of

the Sea of Faith, retreating down the "naked shingles of the

world!"

But if the pessimistic mood may thus find support in watching

the waves of the sea, so no less surely can the hopeful and

joyous mood be evolved and stimulated by the same influence.

Before Sophocles came AEschylus. The greatest hero of this

earlier poet was Prometheus, the friend of man, who, tortured

but unshaken, looked out from his Caucasian rock on the

presentments of primeval nature. How sublime his appeal!

"Ether of heaven, and Winds untired of wing,

Rivers whose fountains fail not, and thou Sea

Laughing in waves innumerable!"

To him the winds and waves brought a message of untiring,

indomitable energy--the movement, the gleam, inspired fresh

life and hope. The ideas immanent in the ocean wave are as

varied as the human experiences to which they are akin.

Or take another group of these ideas immanent in the

phenomena of the wave--the group which rouse and nurture the

aesthetic side of man's nature. Very significant in this regard is

the fact that not for the Greeks alone, but also for the Hindus

and the Teutons, the goddesses of beauty were wave-born.

When Aphrodite walked the earth, flowers sprang up beneath

her feet; but her birthplace was the crest of a laughing wave. So

Kama, the Hindu Cupid, and the Apsaras, lovely nymphs, rose

from the wind-stirred surface of the sea, drawn upward in

streaming mists by the ardent sun. So, too, the Teutonic Freyja

took shape in the sea-born cloudlets of the upper air.

The loveliness of the wave, dancing, tossing, or breaking must

have entered, from earliest days, deeply into the heart and

imagination of man, and have profoundly influenced his

mythology, his art, and his poetry. We trace this influence in

olden days by the myths of Poseidon with his seahorses and the

bands of Tritons, Nereids, and Oceanides--each and all giving

substance to vague intuitions and subconscious perceptions of

the physical beauty of the ocean.

And as for our own more immediate forefathers, the mystic

spell of the ocean wave sank deep into their rugged souls.

"When you so dance" (says Shakespeare to a maiden) "I wish

you a wave o' the sea, that you might ever do nothing but that."

The experiences of countless watchers of the wave went to the

framing of that wish!

And, as has been richly proved by quotations from our modern

poets, the mystic spell gains in potency as man's aesthetic

powers are keener and more disciplined. The present-day

nature-mystic needs no imaginary personifications to bring him

into communion with the beauty, the mystery, of the ocean

wave. He conceives of it as a manifestation of certain modes of

being which are akin to himself and which speak to him in

language too plain to be ignored or misinterpreted. Human

knowledge has not yet advanced far enough to define more

closely such modes of experience; but the fact of the experience

remains.

CHAPTER XXIX

STILL WATERS

Tiefer Stille herrscht im Wasser,

Ohno Regung ruht das Meer,

Und bekümmert sieht der Schiffer

Glatte Flache rings umher.

Keine Luft von keiner Seite!

Todesstille fürchterlich!

In der ungeheuern Weite

Reget keine Welle sich.

Thus does Goethe, in this little poem of two verses, with a

masterly ease that carries conviction, suggest to us the subtle

power of a calm at sea. The mountain tarn, alone with the sky,

has a charm that is all its own. The shining levels of the lake, in

the lower hollows of the hills; the quiet reaches of a river where

the stream seems to pause and gather strength for its onward

course; even the still pool that hides in the meadows among the

alders and willows: each of these has its own peculiar charm--a

charm which is hard to analyse but almost universal in its range

of appeal. But potent above them all is this Meeresstille, this

calm at sea--when, as Bowring finely translates Goethe's second

verse:

"Not a zephyr is in motion!

Silence fearful as the grave!

In the mighty waste of ocean

Sunk to rest is every wave."