Nature Mysticism Part 8

Tylor has here given a masterly resume of a large group of facts, and has viewed them from a particular angle--not quite that of the nature-mystic, though not so far removed as might appear. He does not make it appear that there was any organic connection between the phenomena and the mythology, nor even between the phenomena and the feelings which the modern man, in certain moods, feels stirring within him at their prompting. These myths are simply "fancies"; the "feelings" are simply those of "the poet." The wider view adopted by so many philosophers and scientists (as was shown in the chapter on animism) does not seem to have won his adherence--perchance was not known to him. And yet in sentence after sentence he hovers on the brink of genuine Nature Mysticism. His sympathy with the leaping rill and the rushing river is deep and spontaneous; he is evidently well pleased to open afresh "the world-old book of nature," and to read it in the light of "childhood's fancy." The nature-mystic avers that what he deemed a recurrence of meaningless, if pleasant, "well-worn thoughts" was really an approach to the heart of nature from which an imperfect understanding of the place and function of science had carried him away. Not that the old forms should be perpetuated, but that the childlike insight should be cherished.

Water in movement in brooks and streams! Have we discovered the secret of it when we tell of liquids in unstable equilibrium which follow lines of least resistance? It is a valuable advance to have gained such abstract terms and laws, so long as we remember they _are_ abstractions. But it is a deadly thing to rest in them. How infinitely wiser is Walt Whitman, in his address to a brook he loved, than the man who coldly a.n.a.lyses, with learned formulae to help him, and sees and feels nothing beyond. "Babble on, O brook" (Walt Whitman cries), "with that utterance of thine! . . . Spin and wind thy way--I with thee a little while at any rate. As I haunt thee so often, season by season, thou knowest, reckest not me (yet why be so certain-- who can tell?)--but I will learn from thee, and dwell on thee-- receive, copy, print, from thee."

Is this to indulge in vague anthropomorphic fancies--though not of the cruder sort, still of subjective value only? The persistence, the vividness, and the frequency of such "imaginings" prove that the subjective explanation does not tell the whole tale. How natural, in the simplest sense of the word, is Coleridge:

"A noise like of a hidden brook In the leafy month of June, That to the sleeping woods all night Singeth a quiet tune."

How earnest is Wordsworth as he opens out glimpses of unknown modes of being in his address to the Brook:

"If wish were mine some type of thee to view Thee, and not thee thyself, I would not do Like Grecian artists, give the human cheeks Channels for tears; no Naiad shouldst thou be,-- Have neither limbs, feet, feathers, joints, nor hairs; It seems the Eternal Soul is clothed in thee With purer robes than those of flesh and blood, And hath bestowed on thee a safer good; Unwearied joy, and life without its care."

Again, what natural feeling declares itself in the delightful Spanish poem translated by Longfellow:

"Laugh of the mountain! lyre of bird and tree!

Pomp of the meadow! mirror of the morn!

The soul of April, unto whom are born The rose and jessamine, leaps wild in thee!"

How deep, once more, the note sounded by Brown in his lines on "The Well":

"I am a spring-- Why square me with a kerb?

O cruel force, That gives me not a chance To fill my natural course; With mathematic rod Economising G.o.d; Calling me to pre-ordered circ.u.mstance Nor suffering me to dance Over the pleasant gravel, With music solacing my travel-- With music, and the baby buds that toss In light, with roots and sippets of the moss!"

The longing for freedom to expand the dimly realised and mystic elements in his soul-life was stirred within him by the joyous bubbling of a spring. To kerb the artless, natural flow is to "economise G.o.d"--so the limitations and restrictions of the life that now is artificialise and deaden the divine within us.

There is more than metaphor in such a comparison; there is the linkage of the immanent idea. His emotion culminates in the concluding lines:

"One faith remains-- That through what ducts soe'er, What metamorphic strains, What chymic filt'rings, I shall pa.s.s To where, O G.o.d, Thou lov'st to ma.s.s Thy rains upon the crags, and dim the sphere.

So, when night's heart with keenest silence thrills, Take me, and weep me on the desolate hills."

There are indeed but few with any feeling for nature who have not been moved to special trains of thought, the outcome of characteristic moods, by the babblings and wayward wanderings of brooks and rivulets. The appeal, therefore, is to a wide experience. Can we be satisfied to join with Tylor in his sense of disillusionment? Or shall we strive to get yet nearer to the heart of things? If we cling to the deeper view, to us, as to the men of old, the running stream will sing of the soul in nature.

CHAPTER XX

RIVERS AND LIFE

A river is but a larger brook. And yet by virtue of its volume, it manifests features which are peculiarly its own, and exerts influences which have not alone affected individual moods and imaginings, but often profoundly modified and moulded the destinies of peoples and civilisations. The two outstanding instances are the Nile and the Ganges.

The Nile has attracted to itself, from the dawn of history to the present day, a peculiar share of wonder and renown. It is the longest river of its continent--possibly of the world; and the exploration of its sources is only just completed. It flows through a limestone country over which, save for its beneficent action, would drive the parched sands of the Libyan desert. Its periodic inundations, with their rich deposits of alluvial soil, repel the encroaching wastes, and solve the problem of the food supply. Egypt has with good reason been called "the gift of the Nile."

This river therefore possesses in a marked degree all the mystic influences of moving water, and emphasises them by physical and historical features of exceptional import. What wonder that it has had so direct a bearing on the spiritual development of the people on its banks, and that it entered into the very texture of their lives! It was, for the Egyptian, pre-eminently the sacred river--deemed to be one of the primitive essences--ranked with those highest deities who were not visible objects of adoration.

As a form of G.o.d "he cannot (says an ancient hymnist) be figured in stone; he is not to be seen in the sculptured images upon which men place the united crowns of the North and the South, furnished with uraei." The honour thus conferred was but commensurate with the blessings he brought. For in what would have been a valley of death he was the sole source and sustainer of life. A further quotation from the beautiful hymn just mentioned will indicate the affection and mystic emotion he inspired. "Homage to thee, O Hapi! (i.e. the Nile). Thou comest forth in this land, and dost come in peace to make Egypt to live, O thou hidden one, thou guide of the darkness whensoever it is thy pleasure to be its guide. Thou waterest the fields which Ra hath created, thou makest all animals to live, thou makest the land to drink without ceasing; thou descendest the path of heaven, thou art the friend of meat and drink, thou art the giver of the grain, and thou makest every place of work to flourish, O Ptah! . . . If thou wert to be overcome in heaven the G.o.ds would fall down headlong, and mankind would perish."

In this pa.s.sage the mystic observes how the natural power of running water to suggest spontaneous movement, and therefore life, is accentuated and denned by the actual results of the river's beneficent overflow. And a further step is taken when Hapi is addressed by the names of Ptah (as above) and Khnemu; for he is not thus confused with the G.o.ds so named, but being the great life-supplier for the land, he is, like them, regarded as a creative power. The development of the ideas suggested is thus essentially parallel to that described in the chapter on the Teutonic myths of the three subterranean wells and the World-tree.

But can any distinctive features of the Egyptian religion be traced to the influences exerted by the phenomena of the Nile?

Most decidedly so--in two directions more especially. That religion is one of contrasts; it represents the world as a scene of t.i.tanic conflict. The realm of Osiris is opposed to that of Typhon--creation to destruction. And the master influence in shaping the form in which these contrasts were conceived was undoubtedly the Nile. On one side barren rocks and parched sands, and on the other the fertilising powers of the sacred stream. All around, vast solitudes, and along the river the hum of teeming communities and the rich fullness of prosperous civilisations. The world was visibly, for the Egyptian, a fierce recurring battle between life and death.

And springing out of this appears the second great influence to be attributed to the famous river. The Egyptian grasped firmly and developed fully the doctrine of immortality. Doubtless many factors contributed to the peculiar form which his belief a.s.sumed, but none would be of more importance than the ever renewed gift of life which the Nile brought from an unknown and an unseen world. Hence also the connection between the Nile-G.o.d and Osiris, the G.o.d of the resurrection. So deeply were the world-views and spiritual experiences of the Egyptians influenced by the mystic's powers of the Nile--by the immanent ideas therein made concrete. The Egyptians, in their turn, influenced the Hebrews, the Greeks, and the Romans; and these, again, have influenced the race. Who shall estimate the effect on the human mind of the physical phenomena of this single river!

When we turn to the story of the Ganges, a further mystical concept comes into view--that of purification. It is manifestly suggested by the cleansing qualities of water, and has exercised an important function in the development of certain moral ideas and ideals. Bathing in running water to cleanse the stains of the body led on to, and combined with, the concept of cleansing the stains of the soul. But even thus the dominant suggestion of life declares itself, as is specially obvious in the case of Christian baptism, where the washing with water symbolises not only the cleansing of the soul, but the new birth, the higher life of the spirit. It is by keeping in mind these blended concepts that we shall best understand the story of the Ganges.

All the larger rivers of India are looked upon as abodes and vehicles of the divine essence, and therefore as possessed of power to cleanse from moral guilt. Their banks, from source to sea, are holy ground, and pilgrims plod their way along them to win merit--a merit that is measured by the years of travel and the sanct.i.ty of the stream. Of all the great rivers in this ancient land, the Ganges is the n.o.blest. Mother Ganga, stands supreme.

No water such as hers for washing away the stains of the most heinous crimes. She has bands of priests who call themselves her "Sons," and who conduct pilgrims down the flights of steps that line her banks, aid them in their ablutions, and declare them clean. To die and to be buried near the stream is in itself sufficient to win an entrance to the realms of bliss. "Those who, even at a distance of a hundred leagues, cry Ganga, Ganga, atone for the sins committed during three previous lives." In short, the hold the river has obtained upon the affections and imaginations of the Hindus is marvellously firm and lasting.

Of course a river so renowned has its wreath of myths and legends, characterised, in this instance, by the prodigality of the Eastern mind. It is not necessary to linger over these, save in so far as to note that they ascribe a divine origin to the sacred stream; the sense of power and movement issuing from the world of the unseen is no less strong than that aroused by the Nile; though it finds strangely different modes of expression, its essential character is the same. Interesting and typical is the Hindu belief that the spot where flow together the waters of the Ganges, the Jumna and the Sarasvati is one of the most hallowed in a land of holy places. "These three sacred rivers form a kind of Tri-murti, or triad, often personified as G.o.ddesses, and called 'Mothers.'" With such facts in view, it would be hard to exaggerate the influence of rivers on the development of the Hindu's speculation and practice, and more especially of his mysticism.

Such intuitions and beliefs find their full flower in the conception of the river of life--the stream, pure as crystal, that, with exulting movement onward, brings to men the thrill of hope and the inspiration of progress to a world beyond. It pulses and swings in the glorious sunshine--it reflects the blue of heaven--it sweeps superbly with unsullied current past every obstacle, and bursts through every barrier:

at ille Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum.

Yes, the Nile, the Ganges, the Rhine, the Thames, and a thousand other rivers of renown have had, and still have, their part to play in the cosmic drama and in the development of man's spiritual nature. Generation after generation has found them to be capable of stirring peculiar emotions, and of stimulating profound thoughts on the mystery of life. And all these powers are concentrated and sublimated in this glorious vision of "the river of water of life that flows from the throne of G.o.d."

CHAPTER XXI

RIVERS AND DEATH

The world of fact, no less than the world of abstract thought, is full of contradictions and unsolved antinomies. Here is one such contradiction or antinomy. Moving water, it has been shown, is suggestive of life. But over against it we find a suggestion of death. Indeed there has been a widely diffused belief in a river of death--a striking foil to the inspiring mysticism of the river of life. The old-world mythology taught, in varying forms, but with underlying unity of concept, that there is a river, or gulf, which must be crossed by the departing soul on its way to the land of the departed. Evidently the extension of the original thought to cover its seeming opposite has a basis in the nature of things. Its most elaborate presentment is in the ancient myths of the nether regions and of the seven streams that watered them--from Styx that with nine-fold weary wanderings bounded Tartarus, to where

"Far off from these, a slow and silent stream, Lethe the river of oblivion runs."

Nor has Christianity disdained to adapt the idea. Bunyan, for example, brings his two pilgrims within sight of the heavenly City. "Now I saw further that between them and the gate was a river; but there was no bridge, and the river was very deep. At the sight therefore of this river, the pilgrims were much stunned; but the men that went with them said, you must go through or you cannot come at the gate."

What suggestive power has the river to induce this more sombre train of reflection? Surely that embodied in the old proverb-- Follow the river and you will come to the sea. Clough, in his little poem, "The Stream of Life," concludes with a note of sadness, almost of despair:

"O end to which all currents tend, Inevitable sea, To which we flow, what do we know, What shall we guess of thee?

A roar we hear upon thy sh.o.r.e, As we our course fulfil; Scarce we divine a sun will shine And be above us still."

The rushing rapid and the plunging waterfall have an influence all their own in rousing intuitions of more than human life and power. The dazzling and dashing rainbows of spray appeal to the sense of sight--the internal rhythmic sound from the lighter tones which are flung around like notes from a Strom Karl's magic harp, or the alluring song of a Lorelei, to the thunder of a Niagara, nature's diapason sounding the lowest note that mortal ears can catch, appeal to the sense of hearing--and underlying all is a vague sense of irresistible power. How touching, how profoundly true, the story in "Eckehard" of the little lad and his sister who wandered off until they came to the Rheinfal. There, gazing at the full sweep of that magnificent fall the little fellow throws into the swirling emerald of the waters at his feet a golden goblet, as an offering to the G.o.d whom he felt to be so near. Unconsciously he was a natural mystic. Movement, sound, and colour combined to produce in him, what it should produce in all, a sense of immanent Reality, self-moving, self-sustained.

And yet even a waterfall may suggest far other thoughts--a downward course from the freshness of the uplands of youth to the broadening stream of manhood declining towards old age and the final plunge. The fall itself would thus convey vague feelings of loss of power and vigour--a loss that gathers speed as it approaches the end. So in Campbell's well-known "River of Life":

"When joys have lost their bloom and breath And life itself is vapid, Why, as we reach the Falls of Death, Feel we its course more rapid? "

If so sad a train of reflections can be stimulated by the rapids and the falls of rivers, how much more so by their ending in the ocean! Old age and death can hardly fail to a.s.sert themselves in the minds of those who sail down some n.o.ble river and meditate:

"As the banks fade dimmer away, As the stars come out, and the night wind Brings up the stream Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea."

Granting that the river's merging in the sea suggests the close of life as we know it here, must we also grant that the natural-mystic must give way to a partial, if not an absolute, tendency to pessimism? That a natural-mystic should be a pessimist would seem to be an anomaly. For he holds that he can hold living communion with the Real; and such communion would carry with it, surely, a strong hope, if not a conviction, that change in material form cannot affect the inner being, call it the spiritual essence, of which that form is a particular manifestation. Deny that nature has a soul and optimism becomes a ghastly mockery. Believe that nature and man are linked together as kindred forms of spiritual existence, and then, though there will not indeed be formal proof of immortality, there will be intuitive trust in the future. What the implications of such a trust may be is for the various philosophies and theologies to determine; but taken at its lowest value, it would secure a man from pessimism.

In the light of these general observations, let us consider the particular case now presented. The river is merged in the sea--it is absorbed--its existence as a river is terminated. But the "substance" of its being remains; diffused in a vaster whole, but not lost. What is this vaster whole? If we regard it as an Absolute, there may perchance be ground for pessimism. If, with certain scientists, we stop short at the conservation of energy, there is nothing ahead but a blank. But if we hold to the conservation of values, as at least a parallel to this conservation of energy, we are impelled to hold also to the conservation of all that is ultimate in individualities. For values imply modes of being which can allow of the experience of values as such. And the Nature-Mystic's direct communion with his environment is seen to be one mode by which the individual centre of life learns to live increasingly in the life of the Whole--the total Reality. There is, then, no absorption where values are conserved, but an ever richer content of experience, an ever deepening insight into its significance, and an ever keener enjoyment of the material it affords.

As a specific case of an optimistic creed based on an intuition of the essential kinship of all things, it is profitable to study the poetry of a Sufi mystic of the thirteenth century. How delicate the thought enshrined in the following lines:

"When man pa.s.sed from the plant to the animal state, He had no remembrance of his state as a plant, Except the inclination he felt for the world of plants, Especially at the time of spring and sweet flowers."