Nature Mysticism Part 11

In each of these seascapes, the same essential features find a place--the calm expanse without any defined boundary--the silence--the play of delicate colour--the suggestions of rest after toil, of peace after storm--and chiefest of all, the strangely moving contrast of power and gentleness, the suggestion of hidden strength. Doubtless we have in these the secret of much of the mystic influence of the mighty ocean in its serenest moods; doubtless we have in these the manifestations of immanent ideas which have subtle power to subdue the human soul to pensive thought and unwonted restfulness.

Not unlike them in general character and function, save for the element of vastness, are the influences immanent in the calm of evening or night landscapes. Goethe has an exquisite fragment which is a fitting pendent to his Meeresstille:

Ueber alien Gipfeln Ist Ruh, In allen Wipfeln Spurest du Kaum einen Hauch; Die Vogelein schweigen im Walde.

Warte nur, balde Ruhest du auch.

Thus translated by Bowring:

"Hush'd on the hill Is the breeze; Scarce by the zephyr The trees Softly are pressed; The woodbird's asleep on the bough.

Wait, then, and thou Soon wilt find rest."

Who does not sympathise, in the measure possible to him, with Wordsworth's interpretations and premonitions?

"It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free, The holy time is quiet as a Nun Breathless with adoration; the broad sun Is sinking down in its tranquillity; The gentleness of heaven is on the sea."

And a less well-known pa.s.sage:

"Thine is the tranquil hour, purpureal eve, But long as G.o.dlike wish, or hope divine, Informs my spirit, ne'er can I believe That this magnificence is wholly thine!

--From worlds not quickened by the sun A portion of the gift is won."

Yes, the nature-mystic might well be content to rest his case on the influences of a calm at sea or a peaceful sunset. These will maintain their power as long as there are human eyes to see and human emotions to be stirred.

Not the least of the charms of still water is one which was mentioned in the description of Turner's picture--the charm of reflections. And here we discover a fresh vein of Nature Mysticism. As Hawthorne says, there is "no fountain so small but that heaven may be reflected in its bosom." Nay, as painters well know, the very puddles in a country lane, or in a London street, may be transfigured by thus reflecting lights and colours, and become indispensable factors in a composition.

The phenomena of perfect reflection are often of exceptional beauty. How perfect the effect of Wordsworth's lines:

"The swan on sweet St. Mary's Lake Floats double, swan and shadow."

And, more generally, of another lake:

"The mere Seems firm as solid crystal, breathless, clear, And motionless; and, to the gazer's eye, Deeper than ocean, in the immensity Of its vague mountains and unreal sky."

So on the broad, slowly moving waters of peaty rivers, the reflections of sky and landscape seem almost to exceed the originals in l.u.s.tre and delicate detail. Some of the Tasmanian rivers possess this reflecting quality in an exceptional degree.

Nor are the phenomena of broken reflections inferior in beauty and suggestion. Instead of motionless repet.i.tion of given detail, there are flickering, sinuous, mazy windings and twistings of colour, light, and shadow--a capricious hurrying from surface to surface. Knowledge of optics cannot rob them of their marvel and their glamour. And if such be their effect on the modern mind, what must it have been on that of primitive man! No laws of reflection came within his ken. He looked down on the still surface of tarn, or pool, or fountain, and saw, sinking downwards, another world, another sky, losing themselves in mystery. Mere wonder would yield place to meditation. Ah!

what secrets must lurk in those crystal depths, if only one could surprise them--wrest them from the beings who inhabit that nether realm! Possibly even the world-riddle might so be solved! And thus it came to pa.s.s that most water spirits were deemed to be dowered with prophetic gifts.

The Teutonic water-G.o.ds were "wise"--they could foretell the future. In cla.s.sical mythology, Proteus, the old man of the sea, presents himself as a well-developed embodiment of this belief.

Old Homer knew how to use the material thus provided, and Virgil, in his choicest manner, follows the lead so given. In the fourth book of the Georgics, Aristaeus, who had lost his bees, in despair appealed to his mother, the river-nymph, Cyrene. She bids him consult Proteus, the old prophet of the sea. He follows her counsel, captures Proteus, and compels him to tell the cause of his trouble. "The seer at last constrained by force, rolled on him eyes fierce-sparkling with grey light, and gnashing his teeth in wrath, opened his lips to speak the oracles of fate."

Once more the transient must be allowed to fall away, and the central intuition be recognised and grasped. The sense of a secret to be gained, of a mystery to be revealed--of a broken reflection of some fuller world--has been nurtured by the reflections of form and light and colour in nature's mirror. The older, simpler impressions made by such phenomena persist with deeper meanings. The "natural" emotion they stimulate affords the kind of sustenance on which Nature Mysticism can thrive. Longfellow, in his poem, "The Bridge," strikes the deeper note. The rushing water draws the poet's reflections away from a world of imperfection to the sphere of the ideal.

"And for ever and for ever, As long as the river flows, As long as the heart has pa.s.sions, As long as life has woes;

The moon and its broken reflection And its shadows shall appear, As the symbol of love in heaven And its wavering image here."

And thus the mountain tarn, the placid lake, the quiet river reaches, the hidden pool, and the ocean at rest, have each and all their soul language, and can speak to man as a sharer of soul-nature. Well might the Hebrew psalmist give us one of the marks of the Divine Shepherd--"He leadeth me beside the still waters."

CHAPTER XXV

ANAXIMENES AND THE AIR

Hitherto our attention has been almost exclusively fixed upon the mystical influences of water in motion or at rest. And even though we went no farther afield, a fair presentment has been gained of what a modern nature-mystic might advance in explanation and defence of his characteristic views and modes of experience. We now turn to consider other ranges of physical phenomena, which, though of equal dignity and significance, will not meet with equal fullness of treatment--otherwise the limits proposed for this study would be seriously exceeded.

We have seen how and why Thales deemed water to be the _Welt-stoff_. His immediate successors, while adhering to his principles and aims, were not content with his choice. They successively sought for something less material. One of them, Anaximenes, was attracted by the qualities and functions of the atmosphere, and his speculations will serve as an introduction to the mysticism of winds and storms and clouds. Only a single statement of his is preserved in its original form; but fortunately it is full of significance. "As our soul" (said the sage), "which is air, holds us together, so wind and air encompa.s.s the whole world." This, interpreted in the light of ancient comments, shows that Anaximenes compared the breath of life to the air, and regarded the two as essentially related--indeed as identical.

For the breath, he thought, holds together both animal and human life; and so the air holds together the whole world in a complex unity. He reached the wider doctrine by observing that the air is, to all appearance, infinitely extended, and that earth, water, and fire seem to be but islands in an ocean which spreads around them on all sides, penetrating their inmost pores, and bathing their smallest atoms. It was on such facts and appearances that he based his main doctrine. If we think of the modern theory of the luminiferous ether, we shall not be far from his view-point. But the simpler and more obvious qualities of the air would of course not be without their influence--its mobility and incessant motion; its immateriality; its inexhaustibility; its seeming eternity. It is, therefore, not astonishing that with his attention thus focussed on a group of truly wonderful phenomena, the old nature-philosopher should have selected air as his primary substance--as the universal vehicle of vital and psychic force.

It is of especial interest to the nature-mystic to find that Anaximenes was faithful to the doctrine that the primary substance must contain in itself the cause of its own motion.

And the interest is intensified in view of the fact that his insistence on the life-giving properties of air rests on a widely spread group of animistic notions which have exercised an extraordinary influence on the world at large. Let Tylor furnish a summary. "Hebrew shows _nephesh_, 'breath,' pa.s.sing into all the meanings of life, soul, mind, animal, while _ruach_ and _neshamah_ make the like transition from 'breath' to 'spirit'; and to these the Arabic _nefs_ and _ruh_ correspond. The same is the history of the Sanskrit atman and prana, of Greek _psyche_ and _pneuma_, of Latin _anima, animus, spiritus_. So Slavonic _duch_ has developed the meaning of 'breath' into that of 'soul'

or 'spirit'; and the dialects of the gypsies have this word _duk_ with the meanings of 'breath, spirit, ghost,' whether these pariahs brought the word from India as part of their inheritance of Aryan speech, or whether they adopted it in their migration across Slavonic lands. German _geist_ and English _ghost_, too, may possibly have the same original sense of breath." How marvellously significant this ascent from the perceptions of wind and breath to what we now understand by soul and spirit!

The most attenuated concepts have their basis in the physical world. Even to this present day, as Max Muller remarks, "the soul or the spirit remains a breath, an airy breath, for this is the least material image of the soul which they can conceive."

Another doctrine of Anaximenes is most worthy of note by nature mystics, as well as by scientists. It is well stated by Theophrastus. "The air differs in rarity and in density as the nature of things is different; when very attenuated it becomes fire, when more condensed, wind, and then cloud; and when still more condensed, water and earth and stone; and all other things are composed of these; and he regards motion as eternal, and by this changes are produced." We have here a distinct adumbration of the atomic theory in its most defensible form-- that is to say, a conception which makes the differences in various substances consist in differences in condensation or rarefaction of the particles of the primary substance. The simple normal condition of this substance he deemed to be air. In its rarefied condition, it becomes fire, and in its condensed condition it progresses by stages from liquid to solid. And just as the modern chemist is beginning to have good ground for believing that all substances, or so-called elements, may be the result of a series of differentiations and compositions of an originally h.o.m.ogeneous substance, in spite of the fact that he is not yet able to effect the transformations in his laboratory, so, all those centuries ago, the Milesian sage seized on the same root idea and made it the basis of a world philosophy. It is a long cry from the old idea, familiar to Homer, that mist or vapour is condensed air to the cosmology of a Herbert Spencer, and yet nature is so rich in material for prompting intuitions of her deepest truths that one ultimate cause of material evolution was revealed in days when science was hardly brought to the birth.

An examination, albeit cursory and partial, of this ancient speculation, has thus revealed at any rate two results of prime importance in the study of Nature Mysticism. The one is that the air has furnished the primary type of the soul as the principle of life--man's fleeting breath has suggested and fostered the idea of immortality; the wind that bloweth where it listeth, the idea of a realm of changeless spirit! The other result is that certain of nature's most obvious phenomena, when seized by intuition, can supply a key to some of her profoundest secrets. Shall not these results be as true for the world of to-day as for the flourishing times of old-world Miletus?

CHAPTER XXVI

WINDS AND CLOUDS

The recognition of the mystic element in external nature has had its fluctuations in most ages and climes, and not least so in England. Marvel, in his day, felt the numbness creeping on that comes of divorce from nature, and uttered his plaint of "The Mower against Gardens."

"Tis all enforced, the fountain and the grot, While the sweet fields do lie forgot, Where willing nature does to all dispense A wild and fragrant innocence."

And declared of the polished statues made to adorn the gardens, that

"howsoe'er the figures do excel, The G.o.ds themselves with us do dwell."

His protests, however, did not avail to ward off the artificiality of the reign of Pope. Here are two lines from the "Essay on Man."

"Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind Sees G.o.d in clouds, or hears Him in the wind."

"Untutored!" The poor Indian could have taught Pope many things, and perhaps made a n.o.bler man of him! For the poetry and mystic influence of the winds were experienced and expressed with a fullness of experience and feeling to which the town-bred poet was all too great a stranger. The range, the beauty and vigour of the myth of the four winds as developed among the native races of America (says Tylor) had scarcely a rival elsewhere in the mythology of the world. They evolved "the mystic quaternion"--the wild and cruel North Wind--the lazy South, the lover--the East Wind, the morning bringer--and the West, Mudjekeewis, the father of them all. Outside the quaternion were the dancing Pauppukkeewis, the Whirlwind, and the fierce and shifty hero, Mon.o.bozho, the North-West Wind. The spirit of these legends, if not their accurate detail, can be appreciated in Longfellow's "Hiawatha."

The magnificent imagery of the Hebrew psalmists should have given to Pope at least a touch of sympathy with "the untutored mind"; for they love to represent G.o.d making "the winds His messengers," or as Himself "flying on the wings of the wind."

Or the prophet Ezekiel could have brought home to him some of the deeper thoughts that the winds have stirred in the soul of man. "Then said he unto me, Prophesy unto the wind, prophesy, son of man, and say to the wind: . . . Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live." The Indian undoubtedly lacked tuition, but not exactly of the kind his would-be tutor could bestow. Man, says Browning,

"imprints for ever His presence on all lifeless things: the winds Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout, A querulous mutter, or a quick gay laugh."

That is better. But why "lifeless"? Why "imprints"? Best is the Hebrew apostrophe--"come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe--that we may live. Give us of the life that is in you."

And that is the mystic's prayer.

The winds of heaven were bound to make indelible impressions on the primitive mind. But few will be prepared for Max Muller's statement that the wind, next to fire, is the most important phenomenon in nature which has led to the conception of a divine being. But our surprise ceases when we realise how manifest and universal are the parts played by the wind in relation to man's weal or woe--they bring the rain, they drive the storm, they clear the air. The landsman knows much-- the sailor more. Guy de Maupa.s.sant makes the sailor say, "Vous ne le (vent) connaissez point, gens de la terre! Nous autres, nous le connaissons plus que notre pere ou que notre mere, cet invisible, ce terrible, ce capricieux, ce sournois, ce feroce. Nous l'aimons et nous le redoutons, nous savons ses malices et ses coleres . . . car la lutte entre nous et lui ne s'interrompt jamais."