of the appeal of Nature to the heart of man? Is the beauty of any
particular scene due to the generic fact that "those ever-springing
flowers and ever-flowing streams had been dyed by the deep colours of
human endurance, valour, and virtue"? If my theory is right that beauty
is subjective, not objective; that the connecting link between the
natural object and the emotion which it evokes is that of memory or
association, surely we must seek for a more particular, a more personal
explanation than this of Ruskin his "human endurance, valour, and
virtue." Well, I too have lounged a whole morning on a mountain top not
far from the spot of which Ruskin wrote. Before me was the valley of
the Arve; behind me, the valley of the Rhône: both, from that height of
vision, and on that perfect day, breathing prosperity and peace. Square
mile after square mile of fertile land lay under my eyes: farms and
vineyards, fields and meadows, all watered by winding streams. Dotted
about, here in groups, there discrete, were the tiled roofs of cottages;
and all through the verdure, in long white curves with an occasional
tangent, here hidden by boscage, there emerging in the sunlight, ran the
good white roads of France. The sweet grass on which I lay was thickly
strewn with flowers, and the air brought scents sweet as softest
music heard afar. To right and left in the middle distance rose Alpine
peaks--light green at their bases, dark green in the zone of the pines,
lifting grey or green or purple masses towards the clouds; and
straight in front, some seven leagues away, stretched the rugged jagged
snow-capped chain of Mont Blanc.
It was early morning, and it was one of those perfect summer days when,
as one lay supine, one could actually perceive the filmy clouds vanish
into invisibility; while, as an addition to the blessings of the scene,
there came to my ear the tinkling bells of the cattle.
And the region was thick with the memories of human endurance, valour,
and virtue. Cæsar's legions strode that soil. Long before Cæsar came,
marauding bands had met and fought. And, since Cæsar's time, owing
to the fortunes of war, war in which man fought hand-to-hand with
man--opposed shield to javelin, discharged the feathered arrow, or
pointed arquebus and carronade--the very ground on which I walked had
changed owners innumerable.
It would be difficult to choose a more appealing scene.--And yet, if
I probe my own heart to the core, if I tell my inmost thought, to me
a sunny--or even, for that matter, a misty--scene in pastoral
England--Surrey or Bucks or Berks, Kent or Devon, Sussex or Herts, where
you will--rouses more poignant emotions than all the plain of Haute
Savoie backed by the Chaine du Mont Blanc.
* * * * *
Mr Kipling, in his simple language, has come nearer to the truth than
has Ruskin with all his felicity of phrase. It is not the associations
connected with human endeavour _in the mass_ that make any particular
scene to appeal, it is the associations connected with our own little
selves; it is because "our hearts are small" that God has
"Ordained for each one spot should prove
Beloved over all."[39]
But, indeed, I think that the great Darwin long ago, quite
incidentally--and quite unwittingly--put his finger upon the crux of the
problem. Speaking of the beauties of the landscape of the East Indian
Archipelago he says: "These scenes of the tropics are in themselves so
delicious, that they almost equal those dearer ones at home, to which
we are bound by each best feeling of the mind."[40] The sublime and
beautiful in Nature call forth our admiration, reverence, awe; it is the
simple scenes, to which associations cling, that call forth our love.
Nature--the sun, the sky, the earth, the sea--is always beautiful,
because Nature, as Man's primæval habitat, has embedded in the memory
of Man primæval associations; but for any one particular scene to arouse
emotions deeper than those evoked by mere form and colour, that scene
must arouse associations embedded in one's own memory or in those of
one's forbears. It may be that this is a generalisation shallow and
jejune. Yet I make it, remembering torrid India; wide Canadian snows;
the Alps and the Jura; the Rhône; the Rhine; the Irawadi; lovely,
lovable England; and those perfumed slopes of le Grand Salève, inhabited
on that early morning only by myself and those grazing cows.
§ 57
Those mild-eyed cattle interested me. They were very gentle, very sleek,
very quiet and patient; large of bone, lactiferous; and, beneath all
their passivity, I should imagine they possessed potentialities of
heroism and endurance unknown to their bovine fellows of the plains. And
if I may judge from the features, figures, and expressions of the women
of this same region, too, I should be inclined to conjecture that they
were not dissimilar in character to their kine. They too are quiet-eyed,
deep-bosomed, large-framed, heavy-buttocked; and in the expression of
their faces there is something patient and heroic. And the youthful
tender of those cattle--he too was interesting. He lay prone on the
grass, his back to Mont Blanc. If he exercised his own limbs but little,
he faithfully performed all the duties appertaining to that state of
life into which it had pleased God to call him by springing every twenty
minutes to his feet and shouting orders to his dog--the faithful sub
or deputy herdsman, who kept the cattle from straying too far. I envied
that youthful herdsman his pleasant occupation. Life in that mountain
air must be sweet to the senses, as companionship with those gentle kine
must be quieting to the mind.
§ 58
It was a wonderful morning, that. How quiet it was, how peaceful! Those
mighty mountains were so still, so soundless. When I was out of sight of
the cattle, the only noise that reached my ear was the hum of the bee at
my elbow, the song of the lark overhead. Nature seemed at peace. Nature
seemed to fraternise with Man. A great comradeship was abroad. With my
own eyes I saw three cows come to their keeper's side, close up to him,
and he, kind soul, stroked their soft and wrinkled cheeks. With my own
eyes I saw a young and curious heifer walk up to the recumbent dog--her
deputy-herdsman--and sniff his hide; and he, good creature, never
twitched an ear!--though presently he did move off, moving somewhat
stiffly, as if his dignity had been ruffled.
* * * * *
And the flowers at my feet, on every side! It was not grass I lay on; it
was blossoms--lovely scented blossoms; and as I looked along the slopes
it was flowers I saw, not blades of grass: it was on a purfled plain I
lay, a plain of blue and green and yellow and purple.--At first I could
hardly bring myself to crush these buds. I kept to cart tracks, to
cattle-paths. But in time these ceased, and I could not choose but
crush. And then ... came a curious thought; one I hardly like to put
on paper. Yet of itself it came, and some perhaps will interpret it
as reverently as did I.--Nature was in repentant mood, and, like
the Magdalen, was once again bedewing Man's feet with her tears, and
bescenting them with her spikenard. She made amends, as it were, for her
treatment of Man.--Fickle, feminine Nature, from whose loins we come,
from whose breast we suck our livelihood; from whom we wrest our
pleasure--with much cost--much cost and strife....
§ 59
Strife! The very word was like a bell to toll me back. Those very
flowers were fighting for their lives. Their very scents and colours
were but enticements for the bee--for the bee which, in turn, with toil,
garnered honey against chimenal famine. And those still, stupendous
mountains--silent, superb--immobile, massive; their very crags bespoke
tremendous struggle, immense upheaval, and the grinding of ice and
glacier. Indeed the solid earth and all about me was unrestful,
rushing.--I lay on my back on the grass and thrust my finger towards
the sky. It seemed steady enough in all conscience. Yet I knew that as
a matter of fact that fingertip of mine was performing most astounding
feats. It was rushing through space. And in its rush it was pursuing a
path would take an expert astronomer to determine. With the rotation of
the earth, it was flying eastwards at more than a dozen miles a minute.
With the revolution of the earth, it was rushing round the sun some two
or three miles in that minute. And with the whole solar system, it was
leaping towards the constellation of Hercules with leaps of more
than seven hundred miles in each minute![41]--Seven hundred miles a
minute![42] It is inconceivable. That enormous mass, the sun, into a
spot on which, hundreds of our earths could be dropped like a handful
of pebbles into a puddle, it and the farthermost of its planets, three
thousand million miles away--all rushing through space ... twenty
miles while I sneeze; thirty thousand miles while I sit at dinner;
half-a-million miles between going to bed and getting up.... What a
stupendous journey! What a mighty company! Where to? What for? Why this
terrific expenditure of energy?--Think of the _ergs_ necessary to propel
that mass! What is being _done_? Who does it? And for whom?
Nothing is immobile in Nature. Nothing is stationary in Life. To exist,
to be, to live, is to become, to change, to strive, to achieve. The
seeming peace about me was outcome of infinite struggle. Only by
struggle does life evolve, does man aspire.
* * * * *
Return we to my theme.
XXIV
Warnings to the Over-Zealous
§ 60
Now, I know precisely what will happen. Some epimethean enthusiast,
carried away by the anticipated delights of a walk, will suddenly make
up his mind to take one; will hastily stuff some things into a bag,
and will start off at four o'clock in the morning with some vague and
distant goal in view. He will think to roll John Burroughs and Richard
Jefferies into one in his minute observation of Nature, and to outdo
Wordsworth and Amiel combined in his philosophico-poetical disquisitions
on the same; he will rid his mind of the world and the worldly, and
float in themes transcendental and abstruse. But I think I know what
will happen. By the afternoon of that selfsame day he will be hungry,
thirsty, footsore, and tired. His boots will be tight; his bag as heavy
as his spirits; his head as empty as his craw. Instead of observing
Nature he will find Nature--in the shape of the rustics (and the
rustics' dogs)--very narrowly observing him, not always with sympathetic
or benignant gaze. Instead of deep and transcendental meditations rising
spontaneously to his mind, he will find curt and practical questions
assailing his ear as to who he is and what he is doing there.--My
dear but epimethean enthusiast, you must know that Nature is a jealous
mistress. If so be you are sedulously engaged for fifty weeks in the
year in the pursuit of pelf, think not to woo her by a half day's
worship at her shrine. Even if your courtship be sincere, it must be
slow. Not in forty-eight hours will you brush away the cobwebs of the
workaday world and prepare for the reception of sweet Nature's
influence a mind free from all uncharitableness: their skies, not their
characters, they change who sail over-seas. From all blindness of heart,
from pride, vainglory, and hypocrisy, you must seek to be delivered,
else you will walk in vain. For most men walk in a vain show, and
the perpetual perambulation of the streets of Vanity Fair is a poor
preparation for the Delectable Mountains.--But take heart. If you will
keep but a corner of your mind free from the carking cares of barter and
commerce--if only by half-holiday jaunts and Sabbath-day journeys, great
will be your reward. By the end of the third or fourth day's tramp, what
with the exhilarating exercise, the fresh air, the peace and loneliness,
the long hours of mental quietude, the freedom from the petty
distractions of social and official life, if you are humble and
childlike, the world forgetting by the world forgot--the scales will
fall from your eyes; then indeed you will see--and feel--and think. The
trivial little objects at your feet, equally with the immense expanses
of earth and sky, will lift you high above themselves; the wet and
drooping high-road weed, the tender green of a curled frond, the soft
ooziness of a summer marsh--the sense of beauty--of the fitness of
things--of their immense incomprehensibility--the wonder of it all ...
words seem useless to say how such things sink into the soul, plough up
its foundations, sow there seeds which, like the Indian juggler's plant,
spring up at once and blossom into worship, reverence, awe.--Believe me,
I am not extravagant or hyperbolic, nor do I beguile with empty words.
If you will not hear me, hear the simple-minded Richard Jefferies:
"I linger in the midst of the long grass, the luxury of the leaves,
and the song in the very air. I seem as if I could feel all the
glowing life the sunshine gives and the south wind calls to being.
The endless grass, the endless leaves, the immense strength of the
oak expanding, the unalloyed joy of finch and blackbird; from all
of them I receive a little.... In the blackbird's melody one note
is mine; in the dance of the leaf shadows the formed maze is for me,
though the motion is theirs; the flowers with a thousand faces have
collected the kisses of the morning. Feeling with them, I receive
some, at least, of their fulness of life. Never could I have enough;
never stay long enough.... 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.... These are the only hours that are not
wasted--these hours that absorb the soul and fill it with beauty.
This is real life, and all else is illusion, or mere endurance. To
be beautiful and to be calm, without mental fear, is the ideal of
Nature. If I cannot achieve it, at least I can think it."[43]
Which passage has received the _imprimatur_ of quotation by no less
an authority than Lord Avebury (better known, perhaps, as Sir John
Lubbock), himself not only a man of science, but a statesman and a man
of affairs as well. Listen:
"The exquisite beauty and delight of a fine summer day in the country
has never perhaps been more truly, and therefore more beautifully,
described."[44]
* * * * *
But surely, with all deference to the learned quoter, there is something
deeper in Richard Jefferies, these his dithyrambs, than a description of
a fine summer day. Surely Jefferies finds himself here, in Amiel's fine
phrase, _tête-à-tête_ with the Infinite, and tries, poor soul, in vain
to find vent for his thoughts. It is not a picture, it is a poem.
Nor needed it the Pageant of Summer to transport this poet thither.
Jefferies was here viewing Nature through a seventh sense--a sense more
delicate than that of sight or sound, the sense that Maurice de Guérin
has defined as,--
"Un sens que nous avons tous, mais voilé, vague, et privé presque de
toute activité, le sens qui recueille les beautés physiques et les
livre à l'âme, qui les spiritualise, les harmonie, les combine
avec les beautés idéales, et agrandit ainsi sa sphère d'amour et
d'adoration"[45]
It is not Richard Jefferies his catalogue of the things he saw which
moves us to admiration and delight, it is his sense sublime which
enabled him to rise from the things which are seen to the things which
are unseen, to rise above the _hic et nunc_ of the parochial and to
peer into the _illuc et tunc_ of the eternal. He saw "into the life of
things," and in him the finite stirred emotions which savoured of the
infinite.
XXV
How that all points to the Infinite
§ 61
Of a sober truth, could we only realise it, all things point to the
infinite. Not a cobweb, not a wisp of morning mist, not a toadstool, not
a gnat, but has a life-history dating back to the dark womb of Time,
or ere even meteoritic dust or incandescent nebulæ were born; dating
forward too, could we trace it, to the dark doom of Time, if for Time
there be a doom. Who can understand it? Who shall explain it?--any part
of it? Take Burns his simple line,--
"Green grow the rashes, O."
To explain "green" is not within the power of profoundest oculist
and physicist combined: on the question of the colour-sense alone the
scientific world is divided and has for years been divided; and of the
precise action of chlorophyll--the green colouring-matter of plants--it
is almost equally ignorant; while of the train of connected phænomena,
from the chemic and catalytic action in the leaf, through the
stimulation of the retina, the transmission along the optic nerve, the
sensation in the corpora quadrigemina of the brain, to the concept in
the mind, we know absolutely nothing. To define and classify the rushes,
also; to know exactly their place in the vegetable kingdom and how they
came there--their evolution from lower forms, the modifications wrought
in their structure by environment and internecine strife--that is beyond
the wit of botanist and palæophytologist in one. And as to that simple
verb, "to grow," dealing, as it does, with life itself in its inmost
penetralia, that has baffled, and probably will for ever baffle, the
whole host of physical and metaphysical experimenters and speculators
world without end. When we can explain Life, we shall be within
measurable distance of explaining the Life-Giver.--Tennyson saw this:
"Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of your crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower, but _if_ I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is."
§ 62
But my song has grown too advent'rous. Let us descend th'Aonian
mount.--This, however, let me say: If to somewhat abstruse ontological
speculations such as these you like to add scientific or other knowledge
of the region of your walk--something of the geology, palæontology,
mineralogy, zoology, botany, archæology, history, well and good. No sort
of knowledge but is profitable for doctrine. The interest and pleasure
of walking are greatly enhanced by noting and being able to account for
the thousand and one natural phænomena which greet the eye even in the
shortest stroll; and few things sooner oust petty worries from the mind
than such occupation. Happy is the man who can do this. I, alas, cannot
help you here. I have but a bowing acquaintance with Science, though it
is always with a deep reverence that I doff my hat to her. Nevertheless,
with this I console myself; it seems to matter but little with what sort
of eyes you look on Nature, provided you really look. Give her but
the seeing eye and the understanding heart, and she is lavish of
her gifts.--And (let me roun this in thine ear) perhaps she prefers
(woman-like) the understanding heart to the seeing eye; though
(woman-like again) she likes to be admired as well as understood--though
never (and here most woman-like) does she like to be too curiously
regarded.--Sometimes, I confess, I have envied him gifted with the
scientific eye: him in whom a granite boulder in a grassy mead rouses
long geological trains of thought; to whom the dwarfed horse-tails by
lacustrine shores paint pictures of dense equisetaceous forests; for
whom a fossil trilobite calls up visions of Silurian seas; him too have
I envied who can classify common plants or recognise and name the stones
at his feet: can tell us why the lowly daisy is superior to the lordly
oak; can expatiate on crystallographic angles; and learnedly descant on
amphibole or pyroxene. For myself, I am not versed in the mechanism of
Nature. I have never asked to see the wheels go round. I like to see her
smile, and am not careful as to what oral or buccal muscles are brought
into play for that smile. That she has an anatomy I suppose. But I
bethink me of Actæon's fate, he who saw Dian's naked loveliness
too near. So thou, beware lest thine eye see so much that thy heart
understand too little. Keep thy mind "in a just equipoise of love."
Accomplish that, and no knowledge is too high for thee.
§ 63
Here, however, it is but right to enter a _caveat_. It must be admitted
that it is not given to everyone to hold high converse with Nature.
Nature speaks a cryptic tongue, and unless one has paid some heed to
her language her accents are apt to fall upon deaf ears. Nor can anyone
translate Nature's language to those unversed in her speech. If you
think to hear her voice while the din and clatter of business or
mercature are ringing in your ears, you will hear nothing. Nor, for that
matter, will you see anything. Trees and fields and clouds you may
see, or may think you see; but they will say nothing to you, will mean
nothing to you. To their mere beauty you will be blind; for beauty is a
thing to be felt, not seen.
Goethe declared that Beauty was a primæval phænomenon which had never
yet made its appearance.[46] To Euripides--~kluôn men audên,
omma douch horôn to son~.[47]
And Shelley declares--
"Fair are others; none beholds thee,
. . . . . .
And all feel, yet see thee never."[48]
Beauty is _felt_. That is the clue to the secret. The appeal of natural
beauty is to the heart, to the emotions, not to the intellect. The eyes
of the wisest savant may miss what Nature will reveal to the veriest
babe. This is what Mr Edward Carpenter means when he says, albeit in
somewhat extravagant language--
"As to you, O Moon--
I know very well that when the astronomers look at you through their
telescopes they see only an aged and wrinkled body;
But though they measure your wrinkles never so carefully they do not
see you personal and close--
As you disclosed yourself among the chimney-tops last night to the
eyes of a child--
When you thought no one else was looking.
* * * * *
Anyhow I see plainly that like all created things you do not yield
yourself up as to what you are at the first or the thousandth onset,
And that the scientific people for all their telescopes know as
little about you as any one--
Perhaps less than most.
How curious the mystery of creation."[49]
The poet, bereft of words whereby to give vent to his emotion, falls
back on "the mystery of creation."--Not dissimilarly says Carlyle,
"The rudest mind has still some intimation of the greatness there is
in Mystery."[50] And again, "The _mystical_ enjoyment of an object goes
infinitely farther than the _intellectual_."[51]--It is not alone the
indescribable colour of the delicate corolla, nor is it the minute
knowledge of its astonishing structure, that causes to blaze up in the
beholder a sense of something profound; it is not alone the majestic
heap of the cloud, nor the piercing radiance of the quiet stars, known
to be incomputably distant, that lifts one to the contemplation of
the lofty; it is the immanent, the permanent Mystery that pervades and
unifies all that ever was or is or shall be.
* * * * *
XXVI
The Pleasures of Walking
§ 64