was the skyey reflection of the electric lamps of the city; and only
this for many miles enabled me to distinguish the grooves in which I had
to walk from the high ridge of snow between them which I had to avoid.
When I skirted the lee side of a high hill, or passed the distal edge of
a thick wood, I floundered from one to other in the dark. The landscape,
such of it as could be seen under a leaden-grey sky, was a vast
monochrome, an expanse of dull white picked out with blotches and points
and lines of black. Not a living thing was to be seen. Not a sound was
to be heard. And, what particularly struck a lover of country walks,
not the faintest suspicion of any kind of a scent was to be detected.
Everything seemed to be dumb and dead; and the tiny flakes which fell in
myriads, fell so silently, so pitilessly, had seemingly for their object
the making of all things, if possible, still more dumb and dead.--There
is always something poetic about snow in England. There is something
playful and jocular in the way in which lusty standard rose-trees, stout
shrubs, and sturdy hedges don aged Winter's garb, as a laughing maid
will half demurely wear her grand-dam's cap. In the Western Hemisphere,
away from the genial influences of the Gulf Stream, even in the same
latitudes, winter is a more serious matter. The snow comes "to stay."
There is little jocosity about it. It lies several feet thick. If it
disappears during a temporary thaw, it comes again very soon. Here the
trees do not sport with it. They put up with it. They stand knee-deep in
it, leafless, motionless, scentless, soundless. If there is a wind, it
sweeps through them with a long thin swish, like the wail of a host
of lost spirits seeking shelter. Not a branch falls--the autumn blasts
brought down all that was frangible. Only frozen tears fall, fall from
the ice-encrusted twigs. For miles on either side of me stood these
patient trees; thick, black, heavy-boughed cedars, their stout trunks
buried in snow, squatting, like Mr Kipling's Djinn of All Deserts, on
their haunches and vainly "thinking a Magic" to make idling Winter "hump
himself"; beech-trees, naked but for a few scattered sere and yellow
leaves fluttering about their waists; the drooping-branched elm, not
half so graceful as when full-leafed; elegant maples with a tracery of
twigs far too fine to be compared to lace. These trees formed often the
outermost fringe of thick woods. Into these I penetrated. A profound
silence pervaded them, a silence so intense, so all-embracing, it seemed
to overflow the forest, to go out into space, to enwrap the world in
its grasp. Not a thing stirs. To be alive in that shrine of death-like
soundlessness seems desecration. It is supreme, infinite, absolute; you,
the living, moving onlooker, are finite and relative, a thing of time
and space. To think is to disturb the serenity of its repose, for to
think is to attempt to limit it, to reduce it to the level of yourself,
and no thought is large enough to compass it. Only some shaggy elk,
hoofed and horned, diabolically crashing through crust upon crust of
superimposed layers of frozen snow; and only demoniacal little troops of
wolves, pattering fiendishly, are fit to defy or to disturb this deity
of Quiet. It is large, expansive, in its influence. Summer sights
and sounds bind you to a spot, limit your attention to a locality,
accentuate the petty, the individual, the trivial. The wintry woods, the
white unfurrowed fields, stimulate no sense. The soul of man seems bared
to the soul of Nature, and human thought and the universal mind seem
contiguous and conterminous.--Silence affects the mind as darkness
affects the senses: both in their impressiveness quicken the faculties
to the utmost; and yet, as no sense can perceive the impalpability of
darkness, so no thought can pierce the impenetrability of silence.--One
must visit a wintry clime to experience emotions such as these.
As I walked, the wind rose, and its noise in the convolutions of
the ear, so still was everything else, became almost annoying in its
resounding roar. I had followed devious and untravelled ways in the
semi-darkness, and this wind it was that told me when again I reached
a high-road--namely, by the whistling of the telegraph wires. I
never heard such obstreperous wires. They made an Æolian harp truly
hyperborean in timbre and volume. Every note in the scale of audible
human sound seemed struck; and were there such a thing as an acoustical
spectroscope, it would have shown, not only every tone and semitone in
the gamut, but ultra-treble and infra-bass notes also. And it was played
_fortissimo_. Those wires shrieked, bellowed. Whether at that early hour
they were carrying messages, I do not know; but all the intensity of
human anguish, human happiness, and human woe seemed to be flowing
through their scrannel lengths; and the thin hapless things plained of
their freight to the unheeding winds. It was a weird sound far out there
in the desolate wild, with not a soul to hear or sympathise--for I, what
was I in all that huge expanse? They wotted not of me.
Then the great sky by degrees broke up into masses of cloud, and here
and there between them shone out the steady stars--imperturbable,
piercing, shaken not by the slightest twinkle. One rich and brilliant
planet in the west glowed argent in the blue--a blue into which the
eye penetrated far, far into infinity. The Canadian sky is ever lofty,
pellucid, profound; very different from the close canopy so common in
cloudy England.
But it was high time to turn homewards. A faint light overspread the
east; things began to take shape; houses, instead of appearing as dark
blotches against the white, now looked like habitable dwellings; the
separate boughs were distinguishable on the trees. As one neared the
town signs of life were seen--and smelled; the pungent odour of the
"coal-oil" with which the impatient and unthrifty housewife coaxed
her wood fire more rapidly to catch, smote almost smartingly upon
the nostril. Sleepy-eyed mechanics, buttoned to the throat, heavily
"overshoed," and with hands bepocketed, strode sullenly workwards. Later
on "cutters"--so are called the comfortable little one-horsed sleighs
just seating a couple--sped hither and thither. Then a milk-cart or two
glided past, the cans wrapped in furs, the hairs on the horses' muzzles
showing white with cleaving ice. Later still, and when within the
precincts of the town proper, children were met espying sleighs on which
to get "rides" to school. It was a different world now. A dazzling
sun transformed the dull dead landscape of the night into a blinding
spangled sheet of purest white. Involuntarily the eyes half closed
against that glare. No wonder the sub-Arctic eye lacks the large frank
openness of those of softer realms; against even the summer sunshine the
protection of approximated eyelids is needed, as the crow's-feet of the
farmers' features prove. If Canada has earned the title of Our Lady of
the Snows, she certainly equally deserves the title of Our Lady of the
Sunshine; nowhere is sunshine so bright or so abundant; so bright and
abundant that it is not unreasonable to suppose that it has not a little
to do with the elimination of that "phlegm" from the descendants of the
immigrant of that land to the folk of which the French attribute that
characteristic. "There are few, if any, places in England," says the
Director of the Meteorological Service of Canada, "that have a larger
normal annual percentage [of bright sunshine] than thirty-six, and there
are many as low as twenty-five; whereas in Canada most stations exceed
forty, and some few have as high a percentage as forty-six."[12]
"Weather permitting" is a phrase but rarely heard in Canada.
But my early morning walk was over. It was one I would not have
exchanged for many another taken under more genial skies.
XIV
The Mood for Walking
§ 19
A morning walk is worth the effort of getting up. Much would I give
to have been of that party which, in sixteen hundred and something,
"stretched their legs up Tottenham Hill towards the Thatched House in
Hoddesdon on that fine fresh May morning"--I mean Messrs _Piscator_,
_Venator_, and _Auceps_. I should have been _Peregrinator_; and whereas
_Piscator_ praised the water, and _Venator_ the land, and _Auceps_ the
air, as the element in which each respectively traded, I should have
praised all three, for the pedestrian's pleasures derive from no single
one. And to walking I should have applied dear old Izaak Walton's own
phrase, that it, like angling, was "most honest, ingenious, quiet, and
harmless."[13] Upon quiet, Walton sets extraordinary stress. Quoting
with approbation the learned Peter du Moulin, he tells us that "when God
intended to reveal any future events or high notions to his prophets, he
then carried them either to the deserts or the sea-shore, that having
so separated them from amidst the press of people and business, and the
cares of the world, he might settle their mind in a quiet repose, and
there make them fit for revelation."[14]
It is strange that Izaak Walton, himself apparently a most quiet and
contented old man (he lived to be ninety-one), should, writing at sixty
years of age, and two hundred and fifty years ago--when I suppose
there was no faster or noisier thing than a galloping horse--should so
insistently preach and teach quiet. Yet, perhaps we must remember that
he lived through the Great Rebellion. The last words of his book--and he
puts them into his own, _Piscator's_, mouth--are:
"And [let the blessing of St Peter's Master be] upon all that are
lovers of virtue, and dare trust in his providence, and be quiet,
and go a-angling. Study to be Quiet.--1 Thess. iv. 11."
Why, I do not exactly know, but there is to me something
straightforward, honest, and simple-minded in the idea of ending a book
with the words "and go a-angling." This and the quotation from 1 Thess.
iv. 11 sum up for me the character of the man and the book.
§ 20
Walking rivals angling in demanding and engendering quiet. "To make a
walk successful," says another dear old gentleman, writing at the same
time of life but in modern times, "mind and body should be free of
burthen."[15] The true and abiding joy of walking is in calm. "The
mood," says John Burroughs, "in which you set out on a spring or autumn
ramble or a sturdy winter walk ... is the mood in which your best
thoughts and impulses come to you.... Life is sweet in such moods,
the Universe is complete, and there is no failure or imperfection
anywhere."[16] Only Nature can induce such moods--
"Dear Nature is the kindest mother still,"
says the soul-tossed, self-torturing Byron. Books, music, art, the
drama, philosophy, science--at bottom there seems to be something
disquieting in these. They come in such questionable shape. They are the
works of man; and we never altogether trust the works of man. We never
feel, even with the first of those who know, that our fellow-man, who
is, after all, like unto ourselves, has answered every question, allayed
every doubt, stilled every fear. Was something of this in Matthew
Arnold's mind when he cried:
"One lesson, _Nature_, let me learn of thee,"
and prayed her to calm, to compose him to the end?--But enough in praise
of calm. Calm is compatible with the highest and most exuberant spirits.
Indeed, high and exuberant spirits are the first and natural outcome of
a mind at peace with itself. Good old Walton is continually breaking out
into pious or pastoral song--and making milkmaids and milkmaids' mothers
break out into song, too.
XV
Evening Meditations
§ 21
If, as Messieurs _Piscator_, _Venator_, and _Auceps_, and their tuneful
milkmaids, show, early morning walks tend to blithesomeness of heart,
evening walks tend perhaps to meditation of mind. As day wears on--I
do not know, I may be wrong, but to me it seems that as day wears on
it takes a more sombre aspect. It was at dusk that Gray's Elegy was
written. In the very sound of Milton's simple words,
"Then came still evening on,"
there is to me an echo of quietness, perhaps of melancholy.--Many a
lesson I have learned by quiet meditation in quiet scenes, prolonged far
into the night.--Indeed, he is a wise walker who chooses for himself one
or more secluded spots, sequestered deep, whither he may go, there to
commune with himself; or to hold high converse with the mighty dead;
or to lend an expectant ear for the dryads of the woods; or, if nothing
more, to rid him of the petty perturbations incident to a life lived
between four walls, a floor, and a ceiling, and broken into fragments by
clocks which strike the hours and watches which point to the minute.
§ 22
One such spot I have, and from it many a lesson I have learned.--It is
a great amphitheatre, Nature-made, vast and open. It slopes to the north
and west, and all about it and about are green trees--green trees and
shrubs and lowly plants. In the whole space I am the one spectator--save
for little grasses that stand on tiptoe to look and listen; save for
little weeds that nod their heads; and a beetle crawling heedless over
dry and shining grains of sand. In the orchestral centre, where, in
ancient Greece, should stand the lighted altar, there chances to be a
little crimson maple; and behind and beyond rise verdant hills. Before
me, as where should be the stage, stand, in green habiliments, beech
and elm and fir; oak and cedar; lithe and virginal saplings;
broad-shouldered pines, staid and stalwart--a goodly company, goodly
and green, wondrous green; and for me they act and pose and sing.... The
drama opens.
* * * * *
There is no fanfaronade. On the left, against a dove-grey cloud, the
topmost twigs of a silver poplar rustle, the signal to commence. Gently,
and with grace supreme, the boughs begin a cosmic song, and sway the
while they chant. They dip and fall, and lightly rise; take hands and
touch, and smile, and sing again. Troop after troop takes up the measure
as the wind sweeps through the trees, and there is revealed to the eye
and to the ear sound and motion obedient to an unseen power.... The
movement deepens. Great masses join the dance, swell the vespertinal
hymn. Huge and cumbrous boughs sweep back and forth, melodious,
eloquent; and from tremulous leaf to swaying limb rises a choric song,
beautiful, wonderful.... Of what is it that they speak?
* * * * *
Presently, beneath the dove-grey cloud, the red sun momentarily shows.
Gleams strike the amphitheatre, the stage. My neighbour grasses glint in
the sheen, the beetle's wing-sheaths glow; the sand grains glisten,
and, overhead, the veined leaves of the larch, which before were black
against the sky, become translucent to the light. The massed greens grow
radiant; solitary boughs shake sunshine from their locks; the shrubs
stand out overt; a divine gleesomeness fills all the wood.... Whence
comes the mystic impulse?
* * * * *
Then slowly evening falls. The wind dies down. A fitful breeze, now
warm with Summer's breath, now chill, strays aimless; and the major song
sinks to a key in flats.--The sun sinks. The green shadows grow black;
and where before was great leafage, is now a great gloom, in which even
the white-stemmed birches lose their tapering limbs. Gone are the leaves
of the larch; the shrubs hide; the beetle creeps out of sight. A far-off
rill mingles a bass _maestoso_ sob with its treble trill; and slowly, very
slowly, a thin thin mist creates itself in every cranny of the dell.
Only I am left, dull of hearing, miscomprehending, obtuse.
Only a little scene in an unending play; for all through the night, and
for endless days and nights, before man was, and long after man will be,
these leafy persons uplift that solemn chant, enact that choric
dance: now frolicsome and free; now plaintive: now expectant, patient,
still.... What is it that they hymn?
§ 23
It is but little that I, I and the heedless beetle, comprehend of this
mighty but mystical drama. Some supernal power impels them, so it seems,
and they hymn and praise this power; some hidden force, emanating in
regions far beyond the sun, yet immanent in the grass blade, in
the leaflet, in the sand grains at my feet. Often a darksome power,
ruthless, blind; slaying horde on horde; spilling blood like water;
scattering real pain and poignant agony like hail; yet often thrilling,
joyous, tremulous with bliss--inscrutable, recondite, dark. It is formed
and transformed into myriad shapes, out-running time, out-living life;
muted and re-muted, here into gross and ponderable matter, there into
filmiest air; anon revealing itself as exuberant life; again vanishing
in so-called death; a breath; a spirit; the soul of eternal things....
Some hidden power they hymn.
* * * * *
The darkness deepens. The mist grows thick apace, heavy and sombre. The
keen jagged edge that cut the horizon is blunted. The mystic play is
withdrawn; the persons of the drama vanish; and spectators and
stage, proscenium and scene, the ampitheatre, the open earth, and the
illimitable sky, are blent into one dark and invisible whole.
* * * * *
Then in the silence of night I heard the soundless voice of that Spirit
of Eternal Things: that Mystery, impenetrable as the dark, impalpable:
revealing itself as one with the shapes it took and one with the impulse
they obeyed; in the grass blade and the leaf, and in the wind to which
they swayed; in the ponderous earth that, darkling, rolls through space,
and in the subtle mind that holds this earth in fee. The vast and the
far-off were embraced in the vision, for from the remotest star came
rays that united me with it. The minute and the trivial were summoned
from their hiding to prove themselves near and akin. Magnitude
and proportion were swallowed up in unity; number and computation
disappeared in a stupendous integer. Not a leaf shook, not a bud burst,
but was moved to motion and to life by forces infinite and remote,
ante-dating sun or star, one with sun and star, older than the Milky
Way, vaster than the limits of vision. For in each leaflet of the
boscage ran a sap ancient as ocean; and but yesterday, in the history of
Time, that whole assemblage was something far other than it is. Bud and
leaf were but manifestations of a something supreme--a Force, a Spirit,
a God; a mysterious Thing that took hold of dew and sunshine and soil
and transformed them into shape and perfume. And sunshine and dew and
soil were in turn themselves but mutations of things, chemical elements
or movements of molecules; and these again but mutations of things
more subtle still--atoms or electrons, infinitesimal and innominate
particles; till ultimately, surely, we arrive at something immense,
immutable.--Something there must be behind all change; behind all
appearances Something that Appears. And the last appearance, and the
sum-total of appearances, must be potential in the first, as in the
acorn is contained a potential forest. Given one acorn, and enough of
space and time, and there is actually possible a cosmos of oaks; and
every oak different, and no two twigs alike. So, could we explain the
electron, we should comprehend the inane; in the moment lies concealed
the æon. Indeed, it is only to time-fettered space-bound man that these
are not one and identical. And, if in leaf and bud, then in perceiving
mind. For somehow mind, this wondering mind of man, arose upon this
planet; uprose, appeared, became. No trailing comet, surely, in wanton
sport, showered mind upon this world. Whencesoever it arose, being
here, and fed and nurtured by all things here, emergent from matter, a
fragment of earth and sea and sky, surely in this mind of man must also
be that self-same hidden power....
* * * * *
I, too, then, was one of a mystic band, was in the hands of the
self-same power, was indeed but a mutation amid its mutations, and had
a part to play on my little stage, a part without which the mighty drama
would be incomplete, however lowly it were. For, as by inexorable law
the youngest leaflet in that dell was potentially existent from before
all time, could not help but be and sway and flutter in the breeze, so
I in my little world. But what the mighty drama portended or portrayed
I knew as little as did the heedless beetle that had crept out of sight;
and surely, he, poor little soul, had as much right to know as I--not
many mutations, on this paltry planet, separated me from him. Only
I saw, behind all, some ineffable power enacting an ineffable drama:
playwright and protagonist in one; conceiving and enacting an endless
plot; manifesting itself to itself, yet ever remaining the thing
unmanifest; sundering itself into innumerable myriads, yet remaining one
and a whole--incomprehensible--divine.[17]
By degrees the great sky broke up into clouds. A half moon, cut into
fantastic shapes by the twigs, peered through the trees; and as I
thridded the boles--I miscomprehending, obtuse, merely a larger atom in
a small inane, finding my devious way by a doubly reflected light--the
scene was shifted, fresh actors called, and the great drama went on,
unfolding for ever a tale without end.
XVI
The Unity of Nature
§ 24
The lesson I learned was this: Nature is vast. Nature knows nothing
of Time. Nor does Nature know anything of Space. It is we who import
spatial and temporal limitations into Nature. Because we look up with
two eyes, and feel forth with two arms, and walk about with two legs,
we think, not only that _our_, but that _the_, universe is an infinite
sphere!--an actual objective sphere of which each stupidly assumes that
_he_ is the centre! Which means that there are, supposedly, millions
of centres, and each centre changing its place by millions of miles a
day!--positive proof of the preposterousness of the assumption.--To
an animalcule born and bred inside an old garden hose, the universe, I
suppose, is an endless tunnel. To a baby cockroach hatched between floor
and carpet, the universe is a limitless plane. Well, we are animalcules
on a little rolling clod; and this clod may bear the same relation to
some supernal, _n_-dimensional mansion and garden--and gardeners and
Owner, as does my supposititious caoutchouc hose or patterned carpet to
some terrestrial demesne.
* * * * *
And so with Time. Time is a matter of individual memory, of remembering
past events and of anticipating (which is memory reversed, as it were;
memory projected) events to come. And memory, as we know it, is purely
a matter of this or that sort of nerve-substance in the brain. Had we no
memory, we should know nothing whatsoever of time; an event would be
a point, and no past point could be recalled, nor any future one
conjectured. So, could an infinite number of memories coalesce, there
would be no time either, for in that case all events would occur here
and now.
* * * * *
Nature--the Cosmos--the All--the Deity ... _He_ is not limited by
cubical contents nor by clocks striking the hours.
§ 25
How convey a notion of this mysterious Unity? Shall we essay a gross and
inadequate analogy?
There are in the blood of man little things called white corpuscles.
They are alive; they are, in fact, little living personages. Indeed,
it would be hard to deny that they possess a certain sort of
"intelligence"; for, according to the phagocytic theory, they attack
their foes and help their friends. Now, if these white corpuscles ever
reason about the world which they inhabit, they must think that it
consists of an immense red ocean in a perpetual flux, limitless and
restless, and peopled with myriads of beings like unto themselves. Yet
they are an integral part of the human frame; indeed without them the
human frame could not be what it is. Well, man's place in _his_ universe
may be very similar to that of the white corpuscle in its; and the
intelligence and nature of the Being of which man forms an integral
part may be as inconceivable to man--to bewildered man, buried 'neath an
ocean of air, and blown about space without even a "by your leave"--as
are man's to the leucocytes of the blood.
If there is no such thing as Space objectively existing outside our
groping human selves; and if there is no such thing as Time, also
objectively existing independent of our remembering and anticipating
human selves; if also Death is but Life undergoing Change (for Life is
not a thing extraneous to the cosmos, and there is nothing in the cosmos
that can ever go out of it); if even Change itself is but a process so
named because of the necessities of our temporal and spatial conditions;
and what we call "multiplicity" or "manifoldness" merely a word coined
by our incompetence to perceive the interdependence of all that is
... why, then, surely, one with and interpenetrating our own little
space-bound, time-fettered lives, there must be an Absolute Life,
indiscerptible because coherent; immutable, because unspatial;
inexorable, because timeless; not to be gainsaid, because all-embracing;
whose behests the human spirit, because identical with and contained in
it, must and cannot but obey.
§ 26
However, that there is a flaw in my Philosophy and a flaw in my Creed, I
do not conceal from myself.--If, underlying and upholding all phenomenal
multiplicity, there is a noumenal unity, how it comes about that there
is evil and suffering and injustice and pain I do not know. Nor do I
know how, if that Unity (including man) is governed by infrangible law,
it comes about that we obtain notions of Responsibility and Will; how we
feel that we ought to act thus and not otherwise, and have the power to
choose the good from the evil.
Yet I comfort myself thus:--Human reason, after all, is inadequate
for the explanation of anything superhuman. But there may be in man a
faculty of imagination or feeling or emotion or faith--call it what you
like--that _insists_ upon our trying to act thus and not otherwise; upon
our helping on the good and eradicating the bad; and that leaves the
problem of the Origin of Evil and the problem of the Freedom of the Will
to another sphere and another stage in the upward emergence of mind.
§ 27
Of the Origin of Evil I have no solution whatsoever. Why it is that not
a single human being can go through his short threescore years and ten
without pain, anguish, disappointment, the heartache, and the thousand
natural shocks that flesh is heir to; why
"But to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs";
why this solid earth is drenched with blood, and on every square inch of
its surface are creatures slaughtering and stuffing creatures into their
maws; why torture and agony--mental and physical--should be rampant;
why innocent little babies should suffer lingering deaths--racked with
pain--weak--gasping ... upon this heart-rending enigma I dare not dwell.
But I cannot accept the incredible solution that an Almighty Being
created this cosmos out of nothing thus, and, having created it thus,
looks on at this his appalling creation unmoved.
§ 28
On the Freedom of the Will may I quote myself? Matthew Arnold has given
me precedent.[18]