JUNE--HAMPSHIRE--THE GOLDEN AGE--TRAHERNE
HAMPSHIRE.
Now day by day, indoors and out of doors, the conquest of spring
proceeds to the music of the conquerors. One evening the first chafer
comes to the lamp, and his booming makes the ears tremble with
dim apprehension. He climbs, six-legged and slow, up the curtain,
supporting himself now and then by unfurling his wings, or if not he
falls with a drunken moan, then begins to climb again, and at last
blunders about the room like a ball that must strike something, the
white ceiling, the white paper, the lamp, and when he falls he rests.
In his painful climbing he looks human, as perhaps a man looks angelic
to an angel; but there is nothing lovelier and more surprising than the
unfurling of his pinions like a magic wind-blown cloak out of that hard
mail.
Another day the far-off woods in a hot, moist air first attain their
rich velvet mossiness, and even near at hand the gorse-bushes all
smouldering with bloom are like clouds settled on the earth, having no
solidity, but just colour and warmth and pleasantness.
The broad-backed chestnuts bloom. On the old cart-lodge tiles the vast
carapace of the house-leek is green and rosy, and out of the midst of
it grow dandelions and grass, and the mass of black mould which it has
accumulated in a century bends down the roof.
The hawthorn-bloom is past before we are sure that it has reached its
fulness. Day after day its warm and fragrant snow clouded the earth
with light, and yet we waited, thinking surely to-morrow it will be
fairer still, and it was, and the next day we thought the same and we
were careless as in first love, and then one day it lay upon the grass,
an empty shell, the vest of departed loveliness, and another year was
over. The broad grass is full of buttercups’ gold or it is sullen
silvery under a burning afternoon sun, without wind, the horizon smoky,
the blue sky and its white, still clouds almost veiled by heat; the
red cattle are under the elms; the unrippled water slides under sullen
silvery willows.
The night-haze peels off the hills and lets the sun in upon small
tracts of wood--upon a group of walnuts in the bronze of their fine,
small leaf--upon downland grass, and exposes blue sky and white cloud,
but then returns and hides the land, except that the dewy ground-ash
and the ivy and holly gleam; and two cuckoos go over crying and crying
continually in the hollow vale.
Already the ash-keys hang in cool, thick bunches under the darker
leaves. The chestnut-bloom is falling. The oak-apples are large and
rosy. The wind is high, and the thunder is away somewhere behind the
pink mountains in the southern sky or in the dark drifts overhead. And
yet the blue of the massy hangers almost envelops the beechen green;
the coombes and the beeches above and around their grassy slopes of
juniper are soft and dim, and far withdrawn, and the nightjar’s voice
is heard as if the wind there were quiet. The rain will not come;
the plunging wind in the trees has a sound of waterfalls all night,
yet cannot trouble the sleep of the orange-tip butterfly on the
leopard’s-bane’s dead flower.
Now the pine blooms in the sandy lands, above the dark-fronded brake
and glaucous-fruited whortleberry, the foxgloves break into bell after
bell under the oaks and birches. The yellow broom is flowering and
scented, and the white lady’s bedstraw sweetens the earth’s breath.
The careless variety of abundance and freshness makes every lane a
bride. Suddenly, in the midst of the sand, deep meadows gleam, and the
kingfisher paints the air with azure and emerald and rose above the
massy water tumbling between aspens at the edge of a neat, shaven lawn,
and, behind that, a white mill and miller’s house with dark, alluring
windows where no one stirs.
June puts bronze and crimson on many of her leaves. The maple-leaves
and many of the leaves of thorn and bramble and dogwood are rosy; the
hazel-leaves are rosy-brown; the herb-robert and parsley are rose-red;
the leaves of ash and holly are dark lacquered. The copper beeches,
opulently sombre under a faintly yellowed sky, seem to be the sacred
trees of the thunder that broods above. Presently the colour of the
threat is changed to blue, which soiled white clouds pervade until
the whole sky is woolly white and grey and moving north. There is no
wind, but there is a roar as of a hurricane in the trees far off; soon
it is louder, in the trees not so remote; and in a minute the rain
has traversed half-a-mile of woods, and the distant combined roar is
swallowed up by the nearer pattering on roof and pane and leaf, the
dance of leaves, the sway of branches, the trembling of whole trees
under the flood. The rain falls straight upon the hard road, and each
drop seems to leap upward from it barbed. Great drops dive among the
motionless, dusty nettles. The thunder unloads its ponderous burden
upon the resonant floor of the sky; but the sounds of the myriad
leaves and grass-blades drinking all but drowns the boom, the splitting
roar, and the echo in the hills. When it is over it has put a final
sweetness into the blackbird’s voice and into the calm of the evening
garden when the voice of a singer does but lay another tribute at the
feet of the enormous silence. Frail is that voice as the ghost-moth
dancing above the grass so faithfully that it seems a flower attached
to a swaying stem, or as the one nettle-leaf that flutters in a
draught of the hedge like a signalling hand while all the rest of the
leaves are as if they could not move again, or as the full moon that
is foundering on a white surf in the infinite violet sky. More large
and more calm and emptier of familiar things grows the land as I pass
through it, under the hoverings of the low-flying but swiftly-turning
nightjar, until at midnight only a low white mist moves over the gentle
desolation and warm silence. The mist wavers, and discloses a sky all
strewn with white stars like the flowers of an immense jessamine. It
closes up again, and day is born unawares in its pale arms, and earth
is for the moment nothing but the tide of downs flowing west and the
branch of red roses that hangs heavily laden and drowsed with its
weight and beauty over my path, dipping its last spray in the dew of
the grass.
The day is a Sunday, and no one is on foot or on wheel in the broad
arable country that ripples in squares of green, or brown, or yellow,
or grey, to the green Downs and their dark, high-perched woods. As if
for some invisible beholder, the green elders and their yellow-green
flower-buds make their harmony with the yellow-lichened barns against
which they lean; the grass and the noble trees, the groups of wayside
aspen, the line of horse-chestnuts, the wych-elms on both sides of
the road, the one delicate sycamore before the inn and the company
of sycamores above the cross--the spacious thatch and tiles of the
farmyard quadrangle--the day newly painted in white and blue--the
green so green in the hedges, and the white and purple so pure in the
flowers--all seem to be meant for eyes that know nothing of Time and
of what “brought death into the world and all our woe.” And in this
solitude the young birds are very happy. They have taken possession
of the thick hedges, of the roadside grass, of the roads themselves.
They flutter and run and stumble there; they splash in the pools and in
the dust, which not a wheel nor a foot has marked. These at least are
admitted into the kingdom along with that strange wildfowl that lives
“to maintain the trade and mystery of typographers.”
Such a day, in the unblemished summer land, invariably calls up
thoughts of the Golden Age. As mankind has looked back to a golden age,
so the individual, repeating the history of the race, looks back and
finds one in his own past. Historians and archæologists have indeed
made it difficult for men of our time to look far back for a golden
age. We are shown a skull with supraciliary prominences and are told
that its owner, though able to survive the mammoth by means of tools of
flint, lived like the Tasmanian of modern times; and his was no Golden
Age. Then we look back to heroic ages which poetry and other arts
have magnified--to the Greece of Homer or Pheidias, to the Ireland of
Cuchulain, to the Wales of Arthur, to the England which built the great
cathedrals or produced Chaucer, Sir Philip Sidney, Izaak Walton.
In the same way, few men can now look back to their childhood like
Traherne and say that
“All appeared new and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and
delightful and beautiful. I was a little stranger which at my entrance
into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys.
My knowledge was Divine. I knew by intuition those things which
since my Apostasy I collected again by the highest reason. My very
ignorance was advantageous. I seemed as one brought into the Estate
of Innocence. All things were spotless and pure and glorious; yea,
and infinitely mine, and joyful and precious. I knew not that there
were any sins or complaints or laws. I dreamed not of poverties,
contentions or vices. All tears and quarrels were hidden from mine
eyes. Everything was at rest, free and immortal. I knew nothing
of sickness or death or rents or exaction, either for tribute or
bread.... All Time was Eternity, and a perpetual Sabbath. Is it not
strange, that an infant should be heir of the whole world and see
those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold?”[3]
[3] _Centuries of Meditation_, by Thomas Traherne (Dobell).
We blink, deliberately or not, unpleasant facts in our own lives, as
in the social life of Greece or the Middle Ages. Some have no need to
do so; robustly or sensitively made, their childish surroundings have
been such as to meet their utmost needs or to draw out their finest
powers or to leave them free. Ambition, introspection, remorse had not
begun. The vastness and splendour and gloom of a world not understood,
but seen in its effects and hardly at all in its processes, made a
theatre for their happiness which--especially when seen through a mist
of years--glorify it exceedingly, and it becomes like a ridge of the
far-off downs transfigured in golden light, so that we in the valley
sigh at the thought that where we have often trod is heaven now. Such
beauties of the earth, seen at a distance and inaccessibly serene,
always recall the equally inaccessible happiness of childhood. Why have
we such a melting mood for what we cannot reach? Why, as we are whirled
past them in a train, does the sight of a man and child walking quietly
beside a reedy pond, the child stooping for a flower and its gossip
unheard--why should we tremble to reflect that we have never tasted
just that cloistered balm?
Perhaps the happiest childhoods are those which pass completely away
and leave whole tracts of years without a memory; those which are
remembered are fullest of keen joy as of keen pain, and it is such that
we desire for ourselves if we are capable of conceiving such fantastic
desires. I confess to remembering little joy, but to much drowsy
pleasure in the mere act of memory. I watch the past as I have seen
workless, homeless men leaning over a bridge to watch the labours of a
titanic crane and strange workers below in the ship running to and fro
and feeding the crane. I recall green fields, one or two whom I loved
in them, and though no trace of such happiness as I had remains, the
incorruptible tranquillity of it all breeds fancies of great happiness.
I recall many scenes: a church and churchyard and black pigs running
down from them towards me in a rocky lane--ladslove and tall, crimson,
bitter dahlias in a garden--the sweetness of large, moist yellow apples
eaten out of doors--children: I do not recall happiness in them, yet
the moment that I return to them in fancy I am happy. Something like
this is true also of much later self-conscious years. I cannot--I am
not tempted to--allow what then spoiled the mingling of the elements
of joy to reappear when I look back. The reason, perhaps, is that only
an inmost true self that desires and is in harmony with joy can perform
these long journeys, and when it has set out upon them it sheds those
gross incrustations which were our curse before.
Many are the scenes thus to be recalled without spot or stain. It is
a May morning, warm and slightly breezy after midnight rain. In the
beech-woods the trees are unloading the dew, which drops from leaf to
leaf and down on to the lemon-tinged leaves of dark dog’s-mercury. At
the edge of the wood the privet branches are bent down by the weight of
raindrops of the size of peas. The dewy white stitchwort stars and the
feathered grasses are curved over on the banks. The sainfoin is hoary
and sparkling as I move. Already the sun is hot and the sky blue, with
faint white clouds in whirls. And in the orchard-trees and drenched
luxuriant hedges the garden-warbler sings a subdued note of rushing,
bubbling liquidity as of some tiny brook that runs in quick pulsations
among the fleshy-leaved water-plants. The bird’s head is uplifted; its
throat is throbbing; it moves restlessly from branch to branch, but
always renews its song on the new perch; being leaf-like, it is not
easily seen. And sometimes through this continuous jargon the small,
wild song of the blackcap is heard, which is the utmost expression of
moist warm dawns in May thickets of hawthorn-bloom and earliest roses.
On such a dawn the very spirit bathes in the dew and nuzzles into the
fragrance with delight; but it is no sooner left behind with May than
it has developed within me into an hour and a scene of utmost grace and
bliss, save that I am in it myself.
It is curious, too, how many different kinds of Eden or Golden Age
Nature has in her gift, as if she silently recorded the backward dreams
of each generation and reproduced them for us unexpectedly. It is,
for instance, an early morning in July. The cows pour out from the
milking-stalls and blot out the smell of dust with their breath in the
white road between banks of hazel and thorn. The boy who is driving
them to the morning’s pasture calls to them monotonously, persuasively,
in turn, as each is tempted to crop the roadside sward: “Wo, Cherry!
Now, Dolly! Wo, Fancy! Strawberry!... Blanche!... Blossom!...
Cowslip!... Rosy! Smut!... Come along, Handsome!... Wo, Snowdrop!...
Lily!... Darky!... Roany!... Come along, Annie!” Here the road is
pillowed with white aspen-down, there more fragrant than pines with the
brown sheddings of yew, and here thick with the dry scent of nettle and
cow-parsnip, or glorious in perfect mingling of harebell and foxglove
among the bracken and popping gorse on the roadside. The cows turn into
the aftermath of the sainfoin, and the long valley echoes to their
lowing. After them, up the road, comes a gypsy-cart, and the boy hangs
on the gate to see the men and women walking, black-haired, upright,
bright-eyed, and on the name-board of the cart the words: “Naomi
Sherwood, Burley, Hampshire.” These things also propose to the roving,
unhistoric mind an Eden, one still with us, one that is passing, not,
let us hope, the very last.
Some of these scenes, whether often repeated or not, come to have a
rich symbolical significance; they return persistently and, as it
were, ceremoniously--on festal days--but meaning I know not what.
For example, I never see the flowers and scarlet-stained foliage of
herb-robert growing out of old stone-heaps by the wayside without a
feeling of satisfaction not explained by a long memory of the contrast
between the plant and the raw flint; so also with the drenched
lilac-bloom leaning out over high walls of unknown gardens; and inland
cliffs, covered with beech, jutting out westward into a bottomless
valley in the mist of winter twilights, in silence and frost. Something
in me belongs to these things, but I hardly think that the mere naming
of them will mean anything except to those--many, perhaps--who have
experienced the same. A great writer so uses the words of every day
that they become a code of his own which the world is bound to learn
and in the end take unto itself. But words are no longer symbols,
and to say “hill” or “beech” is not to call up images of a hill or a
beech-tree, since we have so long been in the habit of using the words
for beautiful and mighty and noble things very much as a book-keeper
uses figures without seeing gold and power. I can, therefore, only
try to suggest what I mean by the significance of the plant in the
stone-heap, the wet lilac, the misty cliff, by comparing it with that
of scenes in books where we recognize some power beyond the particular
and personal. All of Don Quixote’s acts have this significance; so
have the end of Mr. Conrad’s story of _Youth_ and the opening of Mr.
Hudson’s _El Ombu_--the old man sitting on a summer’s day under the
solitary tree to tell the history “of a house that had been.” Malory’s
_Morte d’Arthur_ is full of scenes like this. For ten centuries, from
the battle of Badon to the writing of _Morte d’Arthur_, these stories
were alive on the lips of many kinds of men and women in many lands,
from Connemara to Calabria. Many of these men and women survive only
in the turns which their passionate hearts gave to these ghostly,
everlastingly wandering tales. Artists have worked upon them. Bards
have sung them, and the sound of their harping is entangled in the
words that have reached us to-day. This blending of many bloods is
suggested by the Saracen in the _Morte d’Arthur_ who was descended
from Hector and Alexander and Joshua and Maccabæus; by Taliesin, whose
“original country is the region of the summer stars,” who was with
Noah and Alexander and at the birth of Christ. And thus has the tale
become so full in the ear of humanity, so rich in scenes designed to
serve only an immediate purpose, yet destined by this grace to move
all kinds of men in manifold ways. Such is the chess-playing in _The
Dream of Rhonabwy_; the madness of Tristram when he ran naked in the
wood many days, but was lured by the music of a damsel playing on his
own harp; the speech of Arthur at the scattering of his knights in the
Sangraal quest; Launcelot’s fighting with the black knights against
the white; Launcelot’s adventures ending at the castle of Carbonek,
where he put on all his arms and armour and went--“and the moon shone
clear”--between the lions at the gate and forced open the door, and saw
the “Holy Vessel, covered with red samite, and many angels about it”;
and Arthur and Guenevere watching the dead Elaine in the barge; and in
the wars of Arthur and Launcelot, the scene opening with the words:
“Then it befell upon a day in harvest-time, Sir Launcelot looked over
the walls, and spake on high unto King Arthur and Sir Gawaine....”
No English writer has expressed as well as Traherne the spiritual
glory of childhood, in which Wordsworth saw intimations of immortality.
He speaks of “that divine light wherewith I was born” and of his “pure
and virgin apprehensions,” and recommends his friend to pray earnestly
for these gifts: “They will make you angelical, and wholly celestial.”
It was by the “divine knowledge” that he saw all things in the peace of
Eden--
“The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be
reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting
to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious
as gold; the gates were at first the end of the world. The green
trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and
ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap
and almost mad with ecstasy; they were such strange and wonderful
things. The Men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged
seem! Immortal Cherubims! And young men glittering and sparkling
angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and
girls tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving jewels. I knew
not that they were born or should die; but all things abided eternally
as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the
light of the day, and something infinite behind everything appeared,
which tallied with my expectation and moved my desire....”
Yet was this light eclipsed. He was “with much ado” perverted by the
world, by the temptation of men and worldly things and by “opinion and
custom,” not any “inward corruption or depravation of Nature.”
For he tells us how he once entered a noble dining-room and was there
alone “to see the gold and state and carved imagery,” but wearied of
it because it was dead, and had no motion. A little afterwards he saw
it “full of lords and ladies and music and dancing,” and now pleasure
took the place of tediousness, and he perceived, long after, that “men
and women are, when well understood, a principal part of our true
felicity.” Once again, “in a lowering and sad evening, being alone in
the field, when all things were dead quiet,” he had the same weariness,
nay, even horror. “I was a weak and little child, and had forgotten
there was a man alive in the earth.” Nevertheless, hope and expectation
came to him and comforted him, and taught him “that he was concerned in
all the world.” That he was “concerned in all the world” was the great
source of comfort and joy which he found in life, and of that joy which
his book pours out for us. Not only did he see that he was concerned
in all the world, but that river and corn and herb and sand were so
concerned. God, he says, “knoweth infinite excellencies” in each of
these things; “He seeth how it relateth to angels and men.” In this
he anticipated Blake’s _Auguries of Innocence_. He seems to see the
patterns which all living things are for ever weaving. He would have
men strive after this divine knowledge of things and of their place in
the universe.
He came to believe that “all other creatures were such that God was
Himself in their creation, that is, Almighty Power wholly exerted; and
that every creature is indeed as it seemed in my infancy, not as it is
commonly apprehended.”
Yet he feels the superiority of man’s soul to the things which it
apprehends: “One soul in the immensity of its intelligence is greater
and more excellent than the whole world.” Even so Richard Jefferies
prayed that his soul “might be more than the cosmos of life.” The soul
is greater than the whole world because it is capable of apprehending
the whole world, because it is spiritual, and the spiritual nature is
infinite. Thus Traherne was led to the splendid error of making the sun
“a poor little dead thing.” Or perhaps it was a figure of speech used
to convince the multitude of his estimation of man’s soul as above all
visible things. In the same spirit he speaks of “this little Cottage
of Heaven and Earth as too small a gift, though fair,” for beings of
whom he says: “Infinity we know and feel by our souls; and feel it so
naturally as if it were the very essence and being of the soul”; and
again, with childlike simplicity and majesty--
“Man is a creature of such noble principles and severe expectations,
that could he perceive the least defect to be in the Deity, it would
infinitely displease him.”
He could not well have thought of man except loftily, since he was
himself one whom imagination never deserted--imagination the greatest
power of the mind by which not poets only live and have their being--
“For God,” says he, “hath made you able to create worlds in your own
mind which are more precious unto Him than those which He created; and
to give and offer up the world unto Him, which is very delightful in
flowing from Him, but made more in returning to Him.”
That power to create worlds in the mind is the imagination, and is
the proof that the creature liveth and is divine. “Things unknown,”
he says, “have a secret influence on the soul,” and “we love we know
not what.” The spirit can fill the whole world and the stars be your
jewels: “You never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth
in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with
the stars, and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole
world.” And our inheritance is more than the world, “because men are
in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.” It is a social
mysticism. “The world,” he says in another place, “does serve you,
not only as it is the place and receptacle of all your joys, but as
it is a great obligation laid upon all mankind, and upon every person
in all ages, to love you as himself; as it also magnifieth all your
companions.” His is the true “public mind,” as he calls it. “There is
not,” he says in another place--“there is not a man in the whole world
that knows God, or himself, but he must honour you. Not only as an
Angel or as a Cherubim, but as one redeemed by the blood of Christ,
beloved by all Angels, Cherubims, and Men, the heir of the world, and
as much greater than the Universe, as he that possesseth the house
is greater than the house. O what a holy and blessed life would men
lead, what joys and treasures would they be to each other, in what a
sphere of excellency would every man move, how sublime and glorious
would their estate be, how full of peace and quiet would the world be,
yea, of joy and honour, order and beauty, did men perceive this of
themselves, and had they this esteem for one another!”
Here, as in other passages, he seems to advance to the position of
Whitman, whom some have blamed for making the word “divine” of no value
because he would apply it to all, whereas to do so is no more than to
lay down that rule of veneration for men--and the other animals--which
has produced and will produce the greatest revolutions.
This conception of universal divinity sprang from his doctrine of Love.
By love we can be at one with the divine power which he calls God.
“Love,” he says, “is the true means by which the world is enjoyed: our
love to others, and others’ love to us.” Why, even the love of riches
he excuses, since “we love to be rich ... that we thereby might be more
greatly delightful.” And just as Richard Jefferies says that Felise
loved before ever she loved a man, so Traherne says: “That violence
wherewith a man sometimes doteth upon one creature is but a little
spark of that love, even towards all, which lurketh in his nature....
When we dote upon the perfections and beauties of some one creature,
we do not love that too much, but other things too little.” It is
this love by which alone the commonwealth of all forms of life can be
truly known, and men are like God when they are “all life and mettle
and vigour and love to everything,” and “concerned and happy” in all
things. His feeling of the interdependence of all the world is thus
inseparable from his doctrine of love; love inspires it; by love alone
can it be real and endure. “He that is in all and with all can never
be desolate.” And, nevertheless, he cannot always be thinking of the
universe--he thought that the sun went round the earth--and just as he
regards man as superior to other forms of life, so, perhaps, he has a
filial love of “this cottage of Heaven and Earth,” the brown land and
blue sky, and one of the most beautiful of his meditations is where he
says--
“When I came into the country, and being seated among silent trees,
and meads, and hills, had all my time in mine own hands, I resolved
to spend it all, whatever it cost me, in the search of happiness, and
to satiate that burning thirst which Nature had enkindled in me from
my youth. In which I was so resolute, that I chose rather to live upon
ten pounds a year, and go in leather clothes, and feed upon bread
and water, so that I might have all my time clearly to myself, than
to keep many thousands per annum in an estate of life where my time
would be devoured in care and labour. And God was so pleased to accept
of that desire, that from that time to this, I have had all things
plentifully provided for me, without any care at all, my very study
of Felicity making me more to prosper, than all the care in the whole
world. So that through His blessing I live a free and a kingly life as
if the world were turned again into Eden, or much more, as it is at
this day.”
Traherne is remarkable in many ways, but for nothing more than for
his mingling of man and nature in the celestial light of infancy. He
begins, indeed, with the corn--the “orient and immortal wheat”--but he
goes on to the dust and stones and gates of the town, and then to the
old men and the young men and the children. But it was only on “some
gilded cloud or flower” that Vaughan saw “some shadows of eternity”;
he longs to travel back to his childish time and to a city of the
soul, but a shady city of palm-trees. Wordsworth, though he says that
“every common spirit” was “apparell’d in celestial light” in his early
childhood, only mentions “meadow, grove and stream”; it is a tree,
a single field, a flower, that reminds him of his loss; it is the
fountains, meadows, hills and groves which he is anxious to assure of
his lasting love. Perhaps many people’s memories in this kind are of
Nature more than of men. Even the social Lamb is at his deepest in
recalling the child who was solitary in the great house and garden of
Blakesmoor. With some the reason for this priority of Nature is that
her solitudes are the most rich. The presence of other children and
of adults is comparatively commonplace, and in becoming, permanently
or temporarily, part of a community, the spirit makes some sacrifice.
Provided, then, that a child is happy and at ease in the solitude of
Nature, it is more open than in company to what is afterwards regarded
as spiritual intercourse. But above all, our memories of Nature are
seldom or never flawed by the seeming triviality, the dislikes, the
disgusts, the misunderstandings which give to memories of human society
something of dulness and the commonplace. Thinking of ourselves and
other children, we may also think of things which make idealization
impossible. Thinking of ourselves in a great wood or field of flowers
ever so long ago, it is hard not to exaggerate whatever give-and-take
there was between the spirit of the child and the vast pure forces of
the sun and the wind. In those days we did not see a tree as a column
of a dark stony substance supporting a number of green wafers that
live scarcely half a year, and grown for the manufacture of furniture,
gates, and many other things; but we saw something quite unlike
ourselves, large, gentle, of foreign tongue, without locomotion, yet
full of the life and movement and sound of the leaves themselves, and
also of the light, of the birds, and of the insects; and they were
givers of a clear, deep joy that cannot be expressed. The brooding
mind easily exalts this joy with the help of the disillusions and the
knowledge and the folly and the thought of later years. A little time
ago I heard of the death of one whom I had once seemed to know well,
had roamed and talked and been silent with him, and I should have gone
on doing so had he not gone far away and died. And when I heard of his
death I kept on recalling his face and figure to my mind under familiar
conditions, in the old rooms, by the same river, under the same elms.
As before, I saw him in the clothes which he used to wear, smiling or
laughing or perhaps grim. But wherever he was and whatever his look,
there was always something--the shadow of a shadow, but awful--in his
face which made me feel that had I only seen it (and I felt that I
ought to have seen it), in those days, I should have known he was to
die early, with ambitions unfulfilled, far away.
And in this same way will the brain work in musing of earlier times.
All that has come after deepens that candid brow of the child as a
legend will darken a bright brook.
I once saw a girl of seven or eight years walking alone down a long
grassy path in an old garden. On one hand rose a peaceful long slope
of down; on the other, beyond the filberts, a high hedge shut out all
but the pale blue sky, with white clouds resting on its lower mist like
water-lilies on a still pool. Turning her back to the gabled house
and its attendant beeches, she walked upon the narrow level path of
perfect grass. The late afternoon sun fell full upon her, upon her
brown head and her blue tunic, and upon the flowers of the borders at
either side, the lowly white arabis foaming wild, the pansy, the white
narcissus, the yellow jonquil and daffodil, the darker smouldering
wallflowers, the tall yellow leopard’s-bane, the tufts of honesty among
the still dewy leaves of larkspur and columbine. But here and there,
as she walked, the light was dimmed by the clusters of cool white
humming cherry-blossom hanging out of the hot sky. In front of her the
cherry-trees seemed to meet and make a corridor of dark stems on either
hand, paved green and white and gold, and roofed by milky white clouds
that embowered the clear, wild warble of black-caps. Farther on, the
flowers ceased and the grass was shadowed by new-leaved beeches, and at
length involved in an uncertain mist of trees and shadows of trees, and
there the cuckoo cried. For the child there was no end to the path.
She walked slowly, at first picking a narcissus or two, or stooping
to smell a flower and letting her hair fall over it to the ground;
but soon she was content only to brush the tips of the flowers with
her outstretched hands, or, rising on tiptoe, to force her head up
amongst the lowest branches of cherry-bloom. Then she did nothing
at all but gravely walk on into the shadow and into Eternity, dimly
foreknowing her life’s days. She looked forward as one day she would
look back over a broad sea of years, and in a drowsy, haunted gloom,
full of the cuckoo’s note, saw herself going always on and on among the
interlacing shadows of tree trunks and branches and joys and pleasures
and pains and sorrows that must have an end, she knew not how. She
stopped, not venturing into that strange future under the beeches. She
stared into the mist, where hovered the phantoms of the big girl, the
young woman, the lover ... which in turn she was to become. Under the
last cherry-tree something went out of her into the shadow, and those
phantoms fed upon her blood as she stood still. But presently in the
long beech corridors the gloom began to lighten and move and change to
a glinting blue that approached her. “Pee-oi,” shouted the peacock, now
close at hand; “pee-oi ... pee-oi,” as he passed her by, and turning,
she also shouted “pee-oi,” frightening the cuckoo from the beeches, as
she ran back among the flowers to the house.
What is to come of our Nature-teaching in schools? What does it aim at?
Whence does it arise? In part, no doubt, it is due to our desire to
implant information. It is all very well for the poet to laugh--
When Science has discovered something more
We shall be happier than we were before;
but that is the road we are on at a high rate of speed. If we are
fortunate we shall complete our inventory of the contents of heaven and
earth by the time when the last man or woman wearing the last pair of
spectacles has decided that, after all, it is a very good world and one
which it is quite possible to live in. That, however, is an end which
would not in itself be a sufficient inducement to push on towards it;
still less can such a vision have set us upon the road.
Three things, perhaps, have more particularly persuaded us to pay
our fare and mount for somewhere-- three things which are really not
to be sharply distinguished, though it is convenient to consider
them separately. First, the literary and philosophical movement
imperfectly described as the romantic revival and return to Nature
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Poets and philosophers
need private incomes, State porridge and what not, but literature and
philosophy is a force, and for a century it has followed a course which
was entered in the period of the French Revolution. This literature
shows man in something like his true position in an infinite universe,
and shows him particularly in his physical environment of sea, sky,
mountain, rivers, woods, and other animals. Second, the enormous,
astonishing, perhaps excessive, growth of towns, from which the only
immediate relief is the pure air and sun of the country, a relief which
is sought by the urban multitudes in large but insufficient numbers and
for too short a time. Third, the triumph of science, of systematized
observation. Helped, no doubt, by the force of industrialism--to which
it gave help in return--science has had a great triumph. At one time
it was supposed to have fatally undermined poetry, romance, religion,
because it had confused the minds of some poets and critics.
These three things considered, Nature-study is inevitable. Literature
sends us to Nature principally for joy, joy of the senses, of the
whole frame, of the contemplative mind, and of the soul, joy which if
it is found complete in these several ways might be called religious.
Science sends us to Nature for knowledge. Industrialism and the great
town sends us to Nature for health, that we may go on manufacturing
efficiently, or, if we think right and have the power, that we may
escape from it. But it would be absurd to separate joy, knowledge and
health, except as we separate for convenience those things which have
sent us out to seek for them; and Nature-teaching, if it is good,
will never overlook one of these three. Joy, through knowledge, on a
foundation of health, is what we appear to seek.
There is no longer any need to hesitate in speaking of joy in
connection with schools, yet might we not still complain, as Thomas
Traherne did two hundred and fifty years ago--
“There was never a tutor that did professly teach Felicity, though
that be the mistress of all other sciences. Nor did any of us study
these things but as aliena, which we ought to have studied as our
enjoyments. We studied to inform our Knowledge, but knew not for what
end we so studied. And for lack of aiming at a certain end we erred in
the manner.”
If we cannot somehow have a professor of Felicity we are undone.
Perhaps Nature herself will aid. Her presence will certainly make for
felicity by enlarging her pupil for a time from the cloistered life
which modern towns and their infinite conveniences and servitudes
encourage. Tolstoy has said that in the open air “new relations are
formed between pupil and teacher: freer, simpler and more trustful”;
and certainly his walk on a winter night with his pupils, chatting and
telling tales (see _The School at Yasnaya Polyana_, by Leo Tolstoy),
leaves an impression of electrical activity and felicity in the young
and old minds of that party which is hardly to be surpassed. And how
more than by Nature’s noble and uncontaminated forms can a sense of
beauty be nourished? Then, too, the reading of great poetry might well
be associated with the study of Nature, since there is no great poetry
which can be dissevered from Nature, while modern poets have all dipped
their pens in the sunlight and wind and great waters, and appeal most
to those who most resemble them in their loves. The great religious
books, handed down to us by people who lived in closer intercourse with
Nature than many of us, cannot be understood by indoor children and
adults. Whether connected with this or that form of religion or not,
whether taken as “intimations of immortality” or not, the most profound
and longest remembered feelings are often those derived from the
contact of Nature with the child’s mind.
Of health, though there are exactly as many physicians as patients,
it is unnecessary to say anything, except that one of the pieces of
knowledge--I do not speak of information--which science has left to us
is that movement and the working of the brain in pure air and sunlight
is good for body and soul, especially if joy is aiding.
Knowledge aids joy by discipline, by increasing the sphere of
enjoyment, by showing us in animals, in plants, for example, what
life is, how our own is related to theirs, showing us, in fact, our
position, responsibilities and debts among the other inhabitants of the
earth. Pursued out of doors where those creatures, moving and still,
have their life and their beauty, knowledge is real. The senses are
invited there to the subtlest and most delightful training, and have
before them an immeasurable fresh field, not a field like that of
books, full of old opinions, but one with which every eye and brain can
have new vital intercourse. It is open to all to make discoveries as to
the forms and habits of things, and care should be taken to preserve
the child from the most verbose part of modern literature, that which
repeats in multiplied ill-chosen words stale descriptions of birds and
flowers, etc., coupled with trivial fancies and insincere inventions.
Let us not take the study, the lamp and the ink out of doors, as we
used to take wild life--having killed it and placed it in spirits of
wine--indoors. Let us also be careful to have knowledge as well as
enthusiasm in our masters. Enthusiasm alone is not enthusiasm. There
must, at some stage, be some anatomy, classification, pure brain-work;
the teacher must be the equal in training of the mathematician, and he
must be alive, which I never heard was a necessity for mathematicians.
But not anatomy for all, perhaps; for some it might be impossible, and
a study of colours, curves, perfumes, voices--a thousand things--might
be substituted for it.
Yet Nature-study is not designed to produce naturalists, any more than
music is taught in order to make musicians. If you produce nothing but
naturalists you fail, and you will produce very few. The aim of study
is to widen the culture of child and man, to do systematically what
Mark Pattison tells us in his dry way he did for himself, by walking
and outdoor sports, then--at the late age of seventeen--by collecting
and reading such books as _The Natural History of Selborne_, and
finally by a slow process of transition from natural history into “the
more abstract poetic emotion ... a conscious and declared poetical
sentiment and a devoted reading of the poets.” Geology did not come for
another ten years, “to complete the cycle of thought, and to give that
intellectual foundation which is required to make the testimony of the
eye, roaming over an undulating surface, fruitful and satisfying. When
I came in after years to read _The Prelude_ I recognized, as if it were
my own history which was being told, the steps by which the love of the
country boy for his hills and moors grew into poetical susceptibility
for all imaginative presentations of beauty in every direction.” The
botany, etc., would naturally be related to the neighbourhood of school
or home; for there is no parish or district of which it might not be
said, as Jefferies and Thoreau each said of his own, that it is a
microcosm. By this means the natural history may easily be linked to
a preliminary study of hill and valley and stream, the positions of
houses, mills and villages, and the reasons for them, and the food
supply, and so on, and this in turn leads on to--nay, involves--all
that is most real in geography and history. The landscape retains the
most permanent marks of the past, and a wise examination of it should
evoke the beginnings of the majestic sentiment of our oneness with
the future and the past, just as natural history should help to give
the child a sense of oneness with all forms of life. To put it at its
lowest, some such cycle of knowledge is needed if a generation that
insists more and more on living in the country, or spending many weeks
there, is not to be bored or to be compelled to entrench itself behind
the imported amusements of the town.