"The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we
really live, so that the longer we can stay among these things, so much
the more is snatched from inevitable time."
--RICHARD JEFFERIES
In the relationship that his everyday mind bore to his present state
there lay, moreover, a wealth of pregnant suggestion. The bridge
connecting his former "civilized" condition with this cosmic experience
was a curious one. That outer, lesser state, it seemed, had known a
foretaste sometimes of the greater. And it was hence had come those
dreams of a Golden Age that used to haunt him. For he began now to
recall the existence of that outer world of men and women, though by
means of certain indefinite channels only. And the things he remembered
were not what the world calls important. They were moments when he had
known--beauty; beauty, however, not of the grandiose sort that holds the
crowd, but of so simple and unadvertised a kind that most men overlook it
altogether.
He understood now why the thrill had been so wonderful. He saw
clearly why those moments of ecstasy he had often felt in Nature used
to torture him with an inexpressible yearning that was rather pain than
joy. For they were precisely what he now experienced when the viewless
figure of a god passed by him. Down there, out there, below--in that
cabined lesser state--they had been partial, but were now complete.
Those moments of worship he had known in woods, among mountains,
by the shores of desolate seas, even in a London street, perhaps at the
sight of a tree in spring or of a pathway of blue sky between the summer
clouds,--these had been, one and all, tentative, partial revelations of
the Consciousness of the Soul of Earth he now knew face to face.
These were his only memories of that outer world. Of people, cities,
or of civilization apart from these, he had no single remembrance.
* * * * *
Certain of these little partial foretastes now came back to him, like
fragments of dream that trouble the waking day.
He remembered, for instance, one definite picture: a hot autumn sun
upon a field of stubble where the folded corn-sheaves stood; thistles
waving by the hedges; a yellow field of mustard rising up the slope
against the sky-line, and beyond a row of peering elms that rustled in
the wind. The beauty of the little scene was somehow poignant. He
recalled it vividly. It had flamed about him, transfiguring the world; he
had trembled, yearning to see more, for just behind it he divined with
an exulting passionate worship this gorgeous, splendid Earth-Being with
whom at last he now actually moved. In that instant of a simple
loveliness her consciousness had fringed his own--had bruised it. He
had known it only by the partial channels of sight and smell and
hearing, but had felt the greater thing beyond, without being able to
explain it. And a portion of what he felt had burst in speech from his
lips.
He was there, he remembered, with two persons, a man and woman
whose name and face, however, he could not summon, and he recalled
that the woman smiled incredulously when he spoke of the exquisite
perfume of those folded corn-sheaves in the air. She told him he
imagined it. He saw again the pretty woman's smile of incomprehension; he
saw the puzzled expression in the eyes of the man; he heard
him murmur something prosaic about the soul, about birds, too, and
the prospects of killing hundreds later--sport! He even saw the woman
picking her way with caution as though the touch of earth could stain
or injure her. He especially recalled the silence that had followed on
his words that sought to show them--Beauty.... He remembered, too,
above all, the sense of loneliness among men that it induced in himself.
But the memory brought him a curious, sharp pain; and turning to
that couple who were now his playmates in this Garden of the Earth,
he called them with a singing cry and cantered over leagues of flowers,
wind, and sunshine before he stopped again. They leaped and danced
together, exulting in their spacious _Urwelt_ freedom ... want of
comprehension no longer possible.
* * * * *
The memory fled away. He shook himself free of it. Then others came in
its place, another and another, not all with people, blind, deaf, and
unreceptive, yet all of "common," simple scenes of beauty when something
vast had surged upon him and broken through the barriers that stand
between the heart and Nature. Such curious little scenes they were. In
most of them he had evidently been alone. But one and all had touched his
soul with a foretaste of this same nameless ecstasy that now he knew
complete. In every one the Consciousness of the Earth had "bruised" his
own.
Utterly simple they had been, one and all, these partial moments of
blinding beauty in that lesser, outer world:--A big, brown, clumsy bee
he saw, blundering into the petals of a wild flower on which the dew
lay sparkling.... A wisp of colored cloud driving loosely across the
hills, dropping a purple shadow.... Deep, waving grass, plunging and
shaking in the wind that drew out its underworld of blue and silver over
the whole spread surface of a field.... A daisy closed for the night upon
the lawn, eyes tightly shut, hands folded.... A south wind whispering
through larches.... The pattering of summer rain upon young oak
leaves in the dawn.... Fingers of long blue distance upon dreamy
woods.... Anemones shaking their pale and starry little faces in the
wind.... The columned stillness of a pine-wood in the dusk.... Young
birch trees mid the velvet gloom of firs.... The new moon setting in a
cloud of stars.... The hush of stars in many a summer night.... Sheep
grazing idly down a sun-baked hill.... A path of moonlight on a
lake.... A little wind through bare and wintry woods.... Oh! he
recalled the wonder, loveliness, and passion of a thousand more!
They thronged and passed, and thronged again, crowding one another:--all
golden moments of revelation when he had caught glimpses of the Earth,
and her greater Moods had swept him up into herself. Moments in which a
god had passed....
These were his only memories of that outer world he had left behind:
flashes of simple beauty.
Was thus the thrill of beauty then explained? Was loveliness, as men
know it, a revelation of the Earth-Soul behind? And were the blinding
flash, the dazzling wonder, and the dream men seek to render permanent
in music, color, line and language, a vision of her nakedness? Down
there, the poets and those simple enough of heart to stand close to
Nature, could catch these whispered fragments of the enormous message,
told as in secret; but now, against her very heart he heard the
thunder of the thing complete. Now, in the glory of all naked bodily
forms,--of women, men and children, of swift animals, of flowers, trees,
and running water, of mountains and of seas,--he understood these
partial revelations of the great Earth-Soul that bore them, gave them
life. For one and all were channels for her loveliness. He saw the
beauty of the "natural" instincts, the passion of motherhood and
fatherhood--Earth's seeking to project herself in endless forms and
variety. He understood why love increased the heart and made it feel at
one with all the world.
* * * * *
Moreover in some amazing fashion he was aware that others from
that outer world beside himself had access here, and that from this
Garden of the Earth's deep central personality came all the inspiration
known to men. He divined that others were even now drawing upon it
like himself. The thoughts of the poets went past him like thin flames;
the dreams of millions--mute, inexpressible yearnings like those he
had himself once known--streamed by in pale white light, to shoot
forward with a little nesting rush into some great Figure ... and then
return in double volume to the dreaming heart whence first they issued.
Shadows, too, he saw, by myriads--faint, feeble gropings of men and
women seeking it eagerly, yet hardly knowing what they sought; but,
above all, long, singing, beautiful tongues of colored flame that were
the instincts of divining children and of the pure in heart. These came
in rippling floods unerringly to their goal, lingered for long periods
before returning. And all, he knew, were currents of the great Earth
Life, moods, thoughts, dreams--expressions of her various Consciousness
with which she mothered, fed, and blessed all whom it was possible to
reach. Their passionate yearning, their worship, made access possible.
Along the tenderest portions of her personality these latter came, as by
a spread network of infinitely delicate filaments that extended from
herself, deliciously inviting....
* * * * *
The thing, however, that remained with him long after his return
to the normal state of lesser consciousness was the memory of those
blinding moments when a god went past him, or, as he phrased it in
another way, when he caught glimpses of the Earth--naked. For these
were instantaneous flashes of a gleaming whiteness, a dazzling and
supreme loveliness that staggered thought and arrested feeling, while yet
of a radiant simplicity that brought--for a second at least--a measure
of comprehension.
He then knew not mere partial projections. He saw beyond--deep
down into the flaming center that gave them birth. The blending of his
being with the Cosmic Consciousness was complete enough for this.
He describes it as a spectacle of sheer glory, stupendous, even
terrifying. The refulgent majesty of it utterly possessed him. The shock
of its magnificence came, moreover, upon his entire being, and was not
really of course a "sight" at all. The message came not through any small
division of a single sense. With a massed yet soaring power it shook him
free of all known categories. He then fringed a region of yet greater
being wherein he tasted for a moment some secret comprehension of a true
"divinity." The deliverance into ecstasy was complete.
In these flashing moments, when a second seemed a thousand years,
he further _understood_ the splendor of the stage beyond. Earth in her
turn was but a Mood in the Consciousness of the Universe, that Universe
again was mothered by another vaster one ... and the total that included
them all was not the gods--but God.