Part 12

Packed away in the brain and mind of man must be subtle and secret memories dating back through unknown ages of time.--A gaseous theory, perhaps, but one which Senancour has liquefied into the pellucid sentence:--"La nature sentie n'est que dans les rapports humains, et l'éloquence des choses n'est rien que l'éloquence de l'homme." The great fight for life, the stern joys of life--the ferocious combat, the thrilling love match, the myriad sensations and emotions evoked by man's physical environment, and his struggle for existence therein--surely these live somehow somewhere packed away in his brain to-day--just as some migratory and nidificatory memories must be packed away in the brain of a bird. It is these dormant cosmic memories that a landscape revives. On how many a plain to-day does there not flow veritable human blood remuted into sap!--Terrene Nature was man's ancestral home and no man can gaze upon it unmoved.

§ 54

The freedom of a great expanse seems to arouse primitive instincts. Idylls are not enacted in drawing-rooms. It is the odorous glades are Hymen's haunts. In the meads of Enna Proserpine was wooed. Zephir won Aurora a-maying. On Latmos top Endymion was nightly kissed. In the boscage Daphnis proposed--and was there and then accepted. If only Fashion would decree that honeymoons should be spent under Jove! Lovers ken the banks where amaranths blow, and poets build their altars in the fields. How actually physically exhilarating sometimes is

"The champaign with its endless fleece Of feathery grasses everywhere! Silence and passion, joy and peace, . . . . . . Such life there, through such lengths of hours, Such miracles performed in play, Such primal naked forms of flowers, Such letting Nature have her way."

There must survive in the cosmic consciousness of the race, deep-seated and ineradicable memories of primæval nuptials. What a pity it is that that supreme, that sacred drama called "Love" should be enacted by youths and damsels, not in secluded groves amidst perfumed and amorous blooms, but in ball-rooms and boudoirs.

§ 55

It is a complex, it is a profound enigma, this of the appeal of the beauty of nature to the senses and emotions of man. For Beauty, we must remember, is not an attribute of the external thing. Beauty is in the soul that feels, the mind that thinks, the memory that remembers. That is beautiful which brings to mind and memory and soul, ecstatic thrill, exalted feeling. That is beautiful which makes for the preservation and propagation and (which should make for the) elevation of the race.--And this is why Beauty is of various kinds. There is a Beauty of the senses, and there is a beauty of the soul--as there is a terrestrial Aphrodite, and an Aphrodite uranian. Though why the earthly and the heavenly Aphrodites should not join hands, I do not know. Perhaps it is only when they do join hands--when there is at one and the same time a spiritual obsession and a physical oblation--that Beauty becomes transfigured before us, reveals her divine nature radiant through fleshly vestments. Ah! this occurs only when we are on the Mount.

§ 56

After all, did John Ruskin really get to the bottom of this matter 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.

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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."

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." 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.

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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!--Seven hundred miles a minute! 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.

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Return we to my theme.