Nature Mysticism Part 14

Coming down to the present, we ask if these mystic influences of light and of darkness still retain their power. Can we doubt it? We have Milton's Melancholy, "of Cerberus and blackest Midnight born"--"where brooding darkness spreads his jealous wings." All this no mere refurbishing of cla.s.sical lore, but the outcome of deep sympathy with the poets of the prime. And the same is true of his buoyant lines that describe the breaking of the day, when morn

"Waked by the circling hours, with rosy hand Unbarr'd the gates of light."

In sympathy, too, with the old belief in Ahura's final victory is Emerson's declaration that "the night is for the day, but the day is not for the night."

Browning finely discriminates the grades of darkness in Sordello, where he addresses Dante as

"pacer of the sh.o.r.e Where glutted h.e.l.l disgorgeth filthiest gloom, Unbitten by its whirring sulphur-spume; Or whence the grieved and obscure waters slope Into a darkness quieted by hope; Plucker of amaranths grown beneath G.o.d's eye In gracious twilights where His chosen lie."

Homer and Job are at one in a.s.sociating darkness with the grave, and all that the grave implies. "Before I go whence I shall not return, even to the land of darkness and the shadow of death." Homer and Ecclesiastes are one in love of the sunlit sky: "Truly the light is sweet, and a pleasant thing it is for the eyes to behold the sun." And Shakespeare in fullest sympathy cries:

"See how the sun Walks o'er the top of yonder eastern hill."

And sunrises and sunsets wake in Wordsworth's soul the thought of

"The light that never was on sea or land."

And it is the world-old feeling of life and joy that breathes in Blake's lines "To Morning":

"O holy virgin! clad in purest white, Unlock heaven's golden gates and issue forth; Awake the dawn that sleeps in heaven; let light Rise from the chambers of the east, and bring The honey'd dew that cometh on waking day.

O radiant morning, salute the sun, Roused like a huntsman to the chase, and with Thy buskin'd feet appear upon our hills."

But what of modern science? Does not that eliminate the mystic element? Far from that, it increases it. The dominant theory is that light is a sensation caused by waves in ether which travel at a speed of 186,000 miles a second. Of this theory Whewell wrote in 1857 that Optics had "reached her grand generalisation in a few years by sagacious and happy speculations." But it was not thus that a halting-place was gained. For there succeeded the discoveries of Faraday, Clerk Maxwell, Hertz, and other great physicists who used the old theory merely as a foundation for a superstructure of unsuspected and wondrous proportions. The theory of electrons came to the front, and the phenomena of light are being linked on to those of electricity. The phenomena of electricity, again, are being linked on to those of life. And thus, as ever where our deepest intuitions are concerned, the nature-mystic finds himself in harmony with and abreast of the latest developments of modern knowledge.

At the dawn of human thought light and life were dimly but persistently felt to be akin, if not identical. And now we know it was a deep prompting of mother nature which caused men to give to their divine beings the simple name--"the Bright Ones."

CHAPTER x.x.x

THE EXPANSE OF HEAVEN--COLOUR

"The broad open eye of the solitary sky."

Charles Lamb, with his native sensitiveness, considered this line to be too terrible for art. Its suggestion of "the irresponsive blankness of the universe" was for him too naked and poignant.

And yet, in certain of his aspects, nature is undoubtedly irresponsive to man--aloof from his affairs--more especially in her pageantry of the heavens, the sun, the moon and the stars.

But this feeling of aloofness is not constant, nor even normal, as witness the exquisite lines in Peter Bell:

"At noon, when by the forest's edge He lay beneath the branches high, The soft blue sky did never melt Into his heart--he never felt The witchery of the soft blue sky!"

Whether in its friendly or its alien aspects, the widespread, all-embracing arch of the heavens has, in all times and climes, profoundly influenced human thought, more particularly so in lands where the sky is clear and bright and the horizons extended. Its effect, in flat and desert regions, on the development of monotheistic beliefs was noted in an early chapter. In India it has played the chiefest part in fostering abstract universalism and the conception of a pantheistic Absolute, and has tempted men to views which leave no room for human initiative nor for belief in objective reality. And when we recognise the wide and deep influence exerted by Buddhism upon ethics and metaphysics ancient and modern, we realise that the dome of heaven has proved itself a mystic force of the first rank.

We must be on our guard, however, lest we exaggerate this pantheistic or universalistic influence. We have a sufficient corrective in the development of Dyaus, an ancient G.o.d of the sky, who became, in one of his later forms, the Greek Zeus--that is to say, a king of G.o.ds as well as of men--the ruler of Olympus--the supreme member of a polytheistic community.

And this development is but representative of a large cla.s.s which have proceeded on similar lines--the cla.s.s which come to their own in the concept of a Heaven-Father. For example, Tylor shows that, in the religion of the North American Indians, "the Heaven-G.o.d displays perfectly the gradual blending of the material sky itself with its personal deity"; and that the Chinese Tien, Heaven, the highest deity of the state religion, underwent a like theologic development. The mystic influence remains in Christianity, as witness Keble:

"The glorious sky embracing all Is like the Maker's love."

It may be affirmed, then, without fear of contradiction, that the elemental phenomena of the sky, overarching all with its unlimited span, has provided men with the idea of an all-embracing deity--this idea, among others, is immanent there and awaits still further development.

Awaits further development--for the mystic influences persist and suggest deeper interpretations. Browning, though not an avowed nature-mystic, felt the thrill and the emotion of the sky.

"The morn has enterprise, deep quiet droops With evening, triumph takes the sunset hour."

As for the emotional value of the universal span of the sky, its power to tranquillise by a sense of vast harmony and unity, Christina Rossetti knew it:

"Heaven o'erarches you and me, And all earth's gardens and her graves.

Look up with me, until we see The day break and the shadows flee.

What though to-night wrecks you and me If so to-morrow saves?"

Here, as is almost inevitable, the thought of the expanse is a.s.sociated with the alternate coming on of darkness and the breaking of the dawn; but the change and alternation gains its unity and ultimate significance from the all-inclusiveness of the sky as the abiding element.

Walt Whitman brings out another aspect of this subtle but powerful influence. He addresses the sky: "Hast Thou, pellucid, in Thy azure depths, medicine for case like mine? (Ah, the physical shatter and troubled spirit of me the last three years.) And dost Thou subtly, mystically now drip it through the air invisibly upon me?"

In similar mood Jefferies writes: "I turned to the blue heaven over, gazing into its depth, inhaling its exquisite colour and sweetness. The rich blue of the unattainable flower of the sky drew my soul towards it, and there it rested, for pure colour is rest of heart."

And thus "the witchery of the soft blue sky" launches us naturally into the subject of the sky as colour; and not of blue only, but of that vast range of hues and gradations which display their beauty and their glory in the four quarters of heaven during each move onwards of the earth from sunrise to sunrise. Tennyson's description is vivid and splendid. The shipwrecked Enoch Arden is waiting for a sail, and sees

"Every day The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts Among the palms and ferns and precipices; The blaze upon the waters to the east; The blaze upon his island overhead; The blaze upon the waters to the west; Then the great stars that globed themselves in Heaven, The hollower-bellowing ocean, and again The scarlet shafts of sunrise."

But of special interest here is the fact that the blue of the vault is never mentioned--only the scarlet shafts of sunrise and the blaze. Whether this omission was intentional or not, may be uncertain.

But it brings to mind the strange fact that the perception and naming of this blue are comparatively recent acquirements. In the old hymns of the Rigveda the chariot of the sun is described as glowing with varied colour, and its horses as gold-like or beaming with sevenfold hues; but although there was a word for the blue of the sea and for indigo dye, this word is never applied to the brightness of the sunlit vault. So, still more strangely, we find that notwithstanding the laughing blue of the Greek sky, old Homer never calls it blue! He has his rosy-fingered dawn, the parallel of Tennyson's scarlet shafts; but the daylight sky seems to have been for him as for Enoch Arden, a "blaze." Nor is the omission supplied in the later cla.s.sical literature; and the older Greek writers on science use such epithets as "air-coloured,"

as subst.i.tutes for more specific terms. A German scholar who has examined the ancient writings of the Chinese claims for them priority in the recognition of the blue of the sky, and points out that in the Schi-king, a collection of songs from about 1709 to 618 B.C., the sky is called the vaulted blue, as in the more modern language it is called the reigning blue.

Delitzsch, from whom much of what is just stated has been derived (as also from Gladstone's paper on Homer's colour-sense) does not find the blue of the sky recognised in Europe earlier than the oldest Latin poets of the third century B.C., who use _caerulus_ of the sky, and henceforth this epithet takes its place in literature, Pagan and Christian. And the appreciation of the heaven-colour develops apace until we have Wordsworth's "Witchery of the soft blue sky."

The explanation of this late development is a problem of much interest from the point of view of the physiologist and the psychologist, in its bearing on the history of the special senses.

It would not be safe to say that the colour was not perceived, in a somewhat loose sense of that term, but rather that it was not consciously distinguished. As with the child, so with primitive man, the strong sensations are the first to be definitely apprehended--the glow of flame, the scarlet and crimson of dawn and sunset, the gold of the sun and moon and stars. Red and yellow were the first to a.s.sert themselves; and the two are significantly combined in Homer's descriptions of the dawn--the yellow of the crocus as a garment, and the flush of the rose for the fingered rays.

We must not imagine, however, that the failure to distinguish the hues and grades of blue argued any lack of appreciation of the quality of pure, translucent depth which characterises the clear sunlit sky. A striking proof to the contrary is found in a description in the book of Exodus, where a vision of G.o.d is described, and where we read that under His feet was as it were a work of transparent sapphire, and as it were the body of heaven in its clearness." We recall also the exquisite expression, "the clear shining after rain."

The nature-mystic, therefore, need not eliminate the blue of the vault, the brightness of the sky, as an influence in moulding man's spiritual nature in the early days. It remains true, however, that the delicate discrimination of colour is a comparatively recent acquirement, and that thus the modern world has gained a new wealth of phenomena in the sphere of direct sensation. And this recently acquired subtlety of colour-sense is bound to bring with it a corresponding wealth of mystical intuition. The older attempts at colour symbolism point the way--the red of blood, the crimson of flame, the white of the lily, the blush of the rose, the gleam of steel or silver, the glow of gold, the green of the mantle worn by mother-earth, all these, and numberless others have played their part as subtle mystic influences. But there is more and better yet to come. Milton could write:

"O welcome pure-eyed Faith, white-handed Hope, Thou hovering angel, girt with golden wings!"

As tints, so significances, more delicate shall be won by man's soul in contact with nature. For colour is as varied as love.

"Colour" (says Ruskin) "is the type of love. Hence it is especially connected with the blossoming of the earth, and with its fruits; also with the spring and fall of the leaf, and with the morning and evening of the day, in order to show the waiting of love about the birth and death of man."

CHAPTER x.x.xI

THE MOON--A SPECIAL PROBLEM

The contention of the nature-mystic is that man can enter into direct communion with the objects in his physical environment, inasmuch as they are akin to himself in their essential nature.

Now Goethe says:

"The stars excite no craving, One is happy simply in their glory."