The Earliest Insights
The heaven which lies about us in our infancy, like every other heaven
of which men have dreamed, lies mainly within us; it is the heaven of
fresh instincts, of unworn receptivity, of expanding intelligence. It
is a heaven of faith and wonder, as every heaven must be; it is a
heaven of recurring miracle, of renewing freshness, of deepening
interest. Into such a heaven every child is born who brings into life
that leaven of the imagination which later on is to penetrate the
universe and make it one in the sublime order of truth and of beauty.
As I write, the merry shouts of children come through the open window,
and seem part of that universal sound in which the stir of leaves, the
faint, far song of birds, and the note of insect life are blended.
When I came across the field a few moments ago, a voice called me from
under the apple trees, and a little figure, with a flush of joy on her
face and the fadeless light of love in her eyes, came running with
uneven pace to meet me. How slight and frail was that vision of
childhood to the thought which saw the awful forces of nature at work,
or rather at play, about her! And yet how serene was her look upon the
great world dropping its fruit at her feet; how familiar and at ease
her attitude in the presence of these sublime mysteries! She is at one
with the hour and the scene; she has not begun to think of herself as
apart from the things which surround her; that strange and sudden sense
of unreality which makes me at times an alien and a stranger in the
presence of Nature, "moving about in world not realised," is still far
off. For her the sun shines and the winds blow, the flowers bloom and
the stars glisten, the trees hold out their protecting arms and the
grass waves its soft garment, and she accepts them without a thought of
what is behind them or shall follow them; the painful process of
thought, which is first to separate her from Nature and then to reunite
her to it in a higher and more spiritual fellowship, has hardly begun.
She still walks in the soft light of faith, and drinks in the immortal
beauty, as the flower at her side drinks in the dew and the light. It
is she, after all, who is right as she plays, joyously and at home, on
the ground which the earthquake may rock, and under the sky which
storms will darken and rend. The far-brought instinct of childhood
accepts without a question that great truth of unity and fellowship to
which knowledge comes only after long and agonising quest. Between the
innocent sleep of childhood in the arms of Nature and the calm repose
of the old man in the same enfolding strength there stretches the long,
sleepless day of question, search, and suffering; at the end the wisest
returns to the goal from which he set out.
To the little child, Nature is a succession of new and wonderful
impressions. Coming he knows not whence, he opens his eyes upon a
world which is as new to him as is the virgin continent to the first
discoverer. It matters not that countless eyes have already opened and
closed on the same magical appearances, that numberless feet have
trodden the same paths; for him the morning star still shines on the
first day, and the dew of the primeval night is still on the flowers.
Day by day light and shadow fall in unbroken succession on the
sensitive surface of his mind, and gradually an elementary order
discovers itself in the regularity of these recurring impressions.
Form, colour, distance, size, relativity of position are felt rather
than seen, and the dim and confused mass of sensations discovers
something trustworthy and stable behind. Nature is now simple
appearance; thought has not begun to inquire where the lantern is
hidden which throws this wonderful picture on the clouds, nor who it is
that shifts the scenes. Day and night alternately spread out a
changeful succession of wonders simply that the young eyes may look
upon them; and grass is green and sky blue that young feet may find
soft resting-places and the young head a beautiful roof over it. Every
day is a new discovery, and every night receives into its dreams some
new object from the world of sights and sounds.
Nature surrounds her child with invisible teachers, and makes even its
play a training for the highest duties. Gradually, imperceptibly, she
expands the vision and suffers here and there a hint of something
deeper and more wonderful to stir and direct the young discoverer. He
sees the apple tree let fall its blossoms, and, lo! the fruit grows day
by day to a mellow and enticing ripeness under his eyes. Suddenly he
detects a hidden sequence between flower and fruit! The rose bush is
covered with buds, small, green, unsightly; a night passes, and,
behold! great clusters of blossoming flowers that call him by their
fragrance, and when he has come reward him with a miracle of colour.
Here is another mystery; and day by day they multiply and grow yet more
wonderful. These varied and marvellous appearances are no longer
detached and changeless to him; they are alive, and they change moment
by moment. Ah, the young feet have come now to the very threshold of
the temple, and fortunate are they if there be one to guide them whose
heart still speaks the language of childhood while her thought rests in
the great truths which come with deep and earnest living. Childhood is
defrauded of half its inheritance when no one swings wide before it the
door into the fairyland of Nature; a land in which the most beautiful
dreams are like visions of the distant Alps, cloud-like, apparently
evanescent, yet eternally true; in which the commonest realities are
more wonderful than visions. How many children live all their
childhood in the very heart of this realm, and are never so much as
told to look about them. The sublime miracle play is yearly performed
in their sight, and they only hear it said that it is hot or cold, that
the day is fair or dark!
And now there come sudden insights into still larger and more awful
truths; a sense of wonder and awe makes the night solemn with mystery.
Who does not recall some starlit night which suddenly, alone on a
country road, perhaps, seemed to flash its splendour into his very soul
and lift all life for a moment to a sublime height? The trees stood
silent down the long road, no other footstep echoed far or near, one
was alone with Nature and at one with her; suspecting no strange
nearness of her presence, no sudden revelation of her inner self, and
yet in the very mood in which these were both possible and natural.
The boy of Wordsworth's imagination would stand beneath the trees "when
the earliest stars began to move along the edges of the hills," and,
with fingers interwoven, blow mimic hootings to the owls:
And they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call--with quivering peals,
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud,
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Of mirth and jocund din. And when it chanced
That pauses of deep silence mock'd his skill,
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven, received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.
It is in such moods as this, when all things are forgotten, and heart
and mind are open to every sight and sound, that Nature comes to the
soul with some deep, sweet message of her inner being, and with
invisible hand lifts the curtain of mystery for one hushed and fleeting
moment.
As I write, the memory of a summer afternoon long ago comes back to me.
The old orchard sleeps in the dreamy air, the birds are silent, a
tranquil spirit broods over the whole earth. Under the wide-spreading
branches a boy is intently reading. He has fallen upon a bit of
transcendental writing in a magazine, and for the first time has
learned that to some men the great silent world about him, that seems
so real and changeless, is immaterial and unsubstantial--a vision
projected by the soul upon illimitable space. On the instant all
things are smitten with unreality; the solid earth sinks beneath him,
and leaves him solitary and awestruck in a universe that is a dream.
He cannot understand, but he feels what Emerson meant when he said,
"The Supreme Being does not build up Nature around us, but puts it
forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and
leaves." That which was fixed, stable, cast in permanent forms
forever, was suddenly annihilated by a revelation which spoke to the
heart rather than the intellect, and laid bare at a glance the unseen
spiritual foundations upon which all things rest at last. From that
moment the boy saw with other eyes, and lived henceforth in things not
made with hands.
If we could but revive the consciousness of childhood, if we could but
look out once more through its unclouded eyes, what divinity would sow
the universe with light and make it radiant with fadeless visions of
beauty and of truth!