A BOY'S ANIMISM
The animistic faculty and its survival in us--A boy's animism and its
persistence--Impossibility of seeing our past exactly as it was--Serge
Aksakoff's history of his childhood--The child's delight in nature
purely physical--First intimations of animism in the child--How it
affected me--Feeling with regard to flowers--A flower and my mother--
History of a flower--Animism with regard to trees--Locust-trees by
moonlight--Animism and nature-worship--Animistic emotion not
uncommon--Cowper and the Yardley oak--The religionist's fear of
nature--Pantheistic Christianity--Survival of nature-worship in
England--The feeling for nature--Wordsworth's pantheism and animistic
emotion in poetry.
These serpent memories, particularly the enduring image of that black
serpent which when recalled restores most vividly the emotion
experienced at the time, serve to remind me of a subject not yet
mentioned in my narrative: this is animism, or that sense of something
in nature which to the enlightened or civilized man is not there, and
in the civilized man's child, if it be admitted that he has it at all,
is but a faint survival of a phase of the primitive mind. And by
animism I do not mean the theory of a soul in nature, but the tendency
or impulse or instinct, in which all myth originates, to animate all
things; the projection of ourselves into nature; the sense and
apprehension of an intelligence like our own but more powerful in all
visible things. It persists and lives in many of us, I imagine, more
than we like to think, or more than we know, especially in those born
and bred amidst rural surroundings, where there are hills and woods
and rocks and streams and waterfalls, these being the conditions which
are most favourable to it--the scenes which have "inherited
associations" for us, as Herbert Spencer has said. In large towns and
all populous places, where nature has been tamed until it appears like
a part of man's work, almost as artificial as the buildings he
inhabits, it withers and dies so early in life that its faint
intimations are soon forgotten and we come to believe that we have
never experienced them. That such a feeling can survive in any man, or
that there was ever a time since his infancy when he could have
regarded this visible world as anything but what it actually is--the
stage to which he has been summoned to play his brief but important
part, with painted blue and green scenery for background--becomes
incredible. Nevertheless, I know that in me, old as I am, this same
primitive faculty which manifested itself in my early boyhood, still
persists, and in those early years was so powerful that I am almost
afraid to say how deeply I was moved by it.
It is difficult, impossible I am told, for any one to recall his
boyhood exactly as it was. It could not have been what it seems to the
adult mind, since we cannot escape from what we are, however great our
detachment may be; and in going back we must take our present selves
with us: the mind has taken a different colour, and this is thrown
back upon our past. The poet has reversed the order of things when he
tells us that we come trailing clouds of glory, which melt away and
are lost as we proceed on our journey. The truth is that unless we
belong to the order of those who crystallize or lose their souls on
their passage, the clouds gather about us as we proceed, and as cloud-
compellers we travel on to the very end.
Another difficulty in the way of those who write of their childhood is
that unconscious artistry will steal or sneak in to erase unseemly
lines and blots, to retouch, and colour, and shade and falsify the
picture. The poor, miserable autobiographer naturally desires to make
his personality as interesting to the reader as it appears to himself.
I feel this strongly in reading other men's recollections of their
early years. There are, however, a few notable exceptions, the best
one I know being Serge Aksakoff's _History of His Childhood;_ and
in his case the picture was not falsified, simply because the temper,
and tastes, and passions of his early boyhood--his intense love of his
mother, of nature, of all wildness, and of sport--endured unchanged in
him to the end and kept him a boy in heart, able after long years to
revive the past mentally, and picture it in its true, fresh, original
colours.
And I can say of myself with regard to this primitive faculty and
emotion--this sense of the supernatural in natural things, as I have
called it--that I am on safe ground for the same reason; the feeling
has never been wholly outlived. And I will add, probably to the
disgust of some rigidly orthodox reader, that these are childish
things which I have no desire to put away.
The first intimations of the feeling are beyond recall; I only know
that my memory takes me back to a time when I was unconscious of any
such element in nature, when the delight I experienced in all natural
things was purely physical. I rejoiced in colours, scents, sounds, in
taste and touch: the blue of the sky, the verdure of earth, the
sparkle of sunlight on water, the taste of milk, of fruit, of honey,
the smell of dry or moist soil, of wind and rain, of herbs and
flowers; the mere feel of a blade of grass made me happy; and there
were certain sounds and perfumes, and above all certain colours in
flowers, and in the plumage and eggs of birds, such as the purple
polished shell of the tinamou's egg, which intoxicated me with
delight. When, riding on the plain, I discovered a patch of scarlet
verbenas in full bloom, the creeping plants covering an area of
several yards, with a moist, green sward sprinkled abundantly with the
shining flower-bosses, I would throw myself from my pony with a cry of
joy to lie on the turf among them and feast my sight on their
brilliant colour.
It was not, I think, till my eighth year that I began to be distinctly
conscious of something more than this mere childish delight in nature.
It may have been there all the time from infancy--I don't know; but
when I began to know it consciously it was as if some hand had
surreptitiously dropped something into the honeyed cup which gave it
at certain times a new flavour. It gave me little thrills, often
purely pleasurable, at other times startling, and there were occasions
when it became so poignant as to frighten me. The sight of a
magnificent sunset was sometimes almost more than I could endure and
made me wish to hide myself away. But when the feeling was roused by
the sight of a small and beautiful or singular object, such as a
flower, its sole effect was to intensify the object's loveliness.
There were many flowers which produced this effect in but a slight
degree, and as I grew up and the animistic sense lost its intensity,
these too lost their magic and were almost like other flowers which
had never had it. There were others which never lost what for want of
a better word I have just called their magic, and of these I will give
an account of one.
I was about nine years old, perhaps a month or two more, when during
one of my rambles on horseback I found at a distance of two or three
miles from home, a flower that was new to me. The plant, a little over
a foot in height, was growing in the shelter of some large cardoon
thistle, or wild artichoke, bushes. It had three stalks clothed with
long, narrow, sharply-pointed leaves, which were downy, soft to the
feel like the leaves of our great mullein, and pale green in colour.
All three stems were crowned with clusters of flowers, the single
flower a little larger than that of the red valerian, of a pale red
hue and a peculiar shape, as each small pointed petal had a fold or
twist at the end. Altogether it was slightly singular in appearance
and pretty, though not to be compared with scores of other flowers of
the plains for beauty. Nevertheless it had an extraordinary
fascination for me, and from the moment of its discovery it became one
of my sacred flowers. From that time onwards, when riding on the
plain, I was always on the look-out for it, and as a rule I found
three or four plants in a season, but never more than one at any spot.
They were usually miles apart.
On first discovering it I took a spray to show to my mother, and was
strangely disappointed that she admired it merely because it was a
pretty flower, seen for the first time. I had actually hoped to hear
from her some word which would have revealed to me why I thought so
much of it: now it appeared as if it was no more to her than any other
pretty flower and even less than some she was peculiarly fond of, such
as the fragrant little lily called Virgin's Tears, the scented pure
white and the rose-coloured verbenas, and several others. Strange that
she who alone seemed always to know what was in my mind and who loved
all beautiful things, especially flowers, should have failed to see
what I had found in it!
Years later, when she had left us and when I had grown almost to
manhood and we were living in another place, I found that we had as
neighbour a Belgian gentleman who was a botanist. I could not find a
specimen of my plant to show him, but gave him a minute description of
it as an annual, with very large, tough, permanent roots, also that it
exuded a thick milky juice when the stem was broken, and produced its
yellow seeds in a long, cylindrical, sharply-pointed pod full of
bright silvery down, and I gave him sketches of flower and leaf. He
succeeded in finding it in his books: the species had been known
upwards of thirty years, and the discoverer, who happened to be an
Englishman, had sent seed and roots to the Botanical Societies abroad
he corresponded with; the species had been named after him, and it was
to be found now growing in some of the Botanical Gardens of Europe.
All this information was not enough to satisfy me; there was nothing
about the man in his books. So I went to my father to ask him if he
had ever known or heard of an Englishman of that name in the country.
Yes, he said, he had known him well; he was a merchant in Buenos
Ayres, a nice gentle-mannered man, a bachelor and something of a
recluse in his private house, where he lived alone and spent all his
week-ends and holidays roaming about the plains with his vasculum in
search of rare plants. He had been long dead--oh, quite twenty or
twenty-five years.
I was sorry that he was dead, and was haunted with a desire to find
out his resting-place so as to plant the flower that bore his name on
his grave. He, surely, when he discovered it, must have had that
feeling which I had experienced when I first beheld it and could never
describe. And perhaps the presence of those deep ever-living roots
near his bones, and of the flower in the sunshine above him, would
bring him a beautiful memory in a dream, if ever a dream visited him,
in his long unawakening sleep.
No doubt in cases of this kind, when a first impression and the
emotion accompanying it endures through life, the feeling changes
somewhat with time; imagination has worked on it and has had its
effect; nevertheless the endurance of the image and emotion serves to
show how powerful the mind was moved in the first instance.
I have related this case because there were interesting circumstances
connected with it; but there were other flowers which produced a
similar feeling, which, when recalled, bring back the original
emotion; and I would gladly travel many miles any day to look again at
any one of them. The feeling, however, was evoked more powerfully by
trees than by even the most supernatural of my flowers; it varied in
power according to time and place and the appearance of the tree or
trees, and always affected me most on moonlight nights. Frequently,
after I had first begun to experience it consciously, I would go out
of my way to meet it, and I used to steal out of the house alone when
the moon was at its full to stand, silent and motionless, near some
group of large trees, gazing at the dusky green foliage silvered by
the beams; and at such times the sense of mystery would grow until a
sensation of delight would change to fear, and the fear increase until
it was no longer to be borne, and I would hastily escape to recover
the sense of reality and safety indoors, where there was light and
company. Yet on the very next night I would steal out again and go to
the spot where the effect was strongest, which was usually among the
large locust or white acacia trees, which gave the name of Las Acacias
to our place. The loose feathery foliage on moonlight nights had a
peculiar hoary aspect that made this tree seem more intensely alive
than others, more conscious of my presence and watchful of me.
I never spoke of these feelings to others, not even to my mother,
notwithstanding that she was always in perfect sympathy with me with
regard to my love of nature. The reason of my silence was, I think, my
powerlessness to convey in words what I felt; but I imagine it would
be correct to describe the sensation experienced on those moonlight
night among the trees as similar to the feeling a person would have
if visited by a supernatural being, if he was perfectly convinced that
it was there in his presence, albeit silent and unseen, intently
regarding him, and divining every thought in his mind. He would be
thrilled to the marrow, but not terrified if he knew that it would
take no visible shape nor speak to him out of the silence.
This faculty or instinct of the dawning mind is or has always seemed
to me essentially religious in character; undoubtedly it is the root
of all nature-worship, from fetishism to the highest pantheistic
development. It was more to me in those early days than all the
religious teaching I received from my mother. Whatever she told me
about our relations with the Supreme Being I believed implicitly, just
as I believed everything else she told me, and as I believed that two
and two make four and that the world is round in spite of its flat
appearance; also that it is travelling through space and revolving
round the sun instead of standing still, with the sun going round it,
as one would imagine. But apart from the fact that the powers above
would save me in the end from extinction, which was a great
consolation, these teachings did not touch my heart as it was touched
and thrilled by something nearer, more intimate, in nature, not only
in moonlit trees or in a flower or serpent, but, in certain exquisite
moments and moods and in certain aspects of nature, in "every grass"
and in all things, animate and inanimate.
It is not my wish to create the impression that I am a peculiar person
in this matter; on the contrary, it is my belief that the animistic
instinct, if a mental faculty can be so called, exists and persists in
many persons, and that I differ from others only in looking steadily
at it and taking it for what it is, also in exhibiting it to the
reader naked and without a fig-leaf expressed, to use a Baconian
phrase. When the religious Cowper confesses in the opening lines of
his address to the famous Yardley oak, that the sense of awe and
reverence it inspired in him would have made him bow himself down and
worship it but for the happy fact that his mind was illumined with the
knowledge of the truth, he is but saying what many feel without in
most cases recognizing the emotion for what it is--the sense of the
supernatural in nature. And if they have grown up, as was the case
with Cowper, with the image of an implacable anthropomorphic deity in
their minds, a being who is ever jealously watching them to note which
way their wandering thoughts are tending, they rigorously repress the
instinctive feeling as a temptation of the evil one, or as a lawless
thought born of their own inherent sinfulness. Nevertheless it is not
uncommon to meet with instances of persons who appear able to
reconcile their faith in revealed religion with their animistic
emotion. I will give an instance. One of the most treasured memories
of an old lady friend of mine, recently deceased, was of her visits,
some sixty years or more ago, to a great country-house where she met
many of the distinguished people of that time, and of her host, who
was then old, the head of an ancient and distinguished family, and of
his reverential feeling for his trees. His greatest pleasure was to
sit out of doors of an evening in sight of the grand old trees in his
park, and before going in he would walk round to visit them, one by
one, and resting his hand on the bark he would whisper a goodnight. He
was convinced, he confided to his young guest, who often accompanied
him in these evening walks, that they had intelligent souls and knew
and encouraged his devotion.
There is nothing surprising to me in this; it is told here only
because the one who cherished this feeling and belief was an orthodox
Christian, a profoundly religious person; also because my informant
herself, who was also deeply religious, loved the memory of this old
friend of her early life mainly because of his feeling for trees,
which she too cherished, believing, as she often told me, that trees
and all living and growing things have souls. What has surprised me is
that a form of tree-worship is still found existing among a few of the
inhabitants in some of the small rustic villages in out-of-the-world
districts in England. Not such survivals as the apple tree folk-songs
and ceremonies of the west, which have long become meaningless, but
something living, which has a meaning for the mind, a survival such as
our anthropologists go to the end of the earth to seek among barbarous
and savage tribes.
The animism which persists in the adult in these scientific times has
been so much acted on and changed by dry light that it is scarcely
recognizable in what is somewhat loosely or vaguely called a "feeling
for nature": it has become intertwined with the aesthetic feeling and
may be traced in a good deal of our poetic literature, particularly
from the time of the first appearance of _Lyrical Ballads_, which
put an end to the eighteenth-century poetic convention and made the
poet free to express what he really felt. But the feeling, whether
expressed or not, was always there. Before the classic period we find
in Traherne a poetry which was distinctly animistic, with Christianity
grafted on it. Wordsworth's pantheism is a subtilized animism, but
there are moments when his feeling is like that of the child or savage
when he is convinced that the flower enjoys the air it breathes.
I must apologize to the reader for having gone beyond my last, since I
am not a student of literature, nor catholic in my literary tastes,
and on such subjects can only say just what I feel. And this is, that
the survival of the sense of mystery, or of the supernatural, in
nature, is to me in our poetic literature like that ingredient of a
salad which "animates the whole"; that the absence of that emotion has
made a great portion of the eighteenth century poetic literature
almost intolerable to me, so that I wish the little big man who
dominated his age (and till a few months ago still had in Mr.
Courthope one follower among us) had emigrated west when still young,
leaving _Windsor Forest_ as his only monument and sole and sufficient
title to immortality.