Part 15

The young Christ turned, for He heard Mary calling to the sheep and goats, and knew that dayset was come and that in the valleys the gloaming was already rising like smoke from the urns of the twilight. When He looked back He saw by the pool neither the Son of Joy nor the Son of Sorrow, but seven white doves were in the cedar beyond the pool, cooing in low ecstasy of peace and awaiting through sleep and dreams the rose-red pathways of the dawn. Down the long grey reaches of the ebbing day He saw seven birds rising and falling on the wind, black as black water in caves, black as the darkness of night in old pathless woods.

* * * * *

And that is how the first doves became white, and how the first crows became black and were called by a name that means the clan of darkness, the children of the wind.

STILL WATERS

Perhaps at no season of the year is the beauty of still waters at once so obvious and so ethereal as in Autumn. All the great painters of Nature have realised this crowning secret of their delicate loveliness. Corot exclaimed to a friend who was in raptures about one of his midsummer river scenes ... ‘Yes, yes, but to paint the soul of October, voilà mon idéal!’ Daubigny himself, that master of slow winding waters and still lagoons, declared that if he had to be only one month out of his studio it would have to be October, ‘for then you can surprise Nature when she is dreaming, then you may learn her most evanescent and most exquisite secrets.’ And our own Millais, when he was painting ‘Chill October’ near Murthly, in Perthshire, wrote that nothing had ever caused him so much labour, if nothing had ever given him so much pleasure, in the painting, ‘for Nature now can be found in a trance, and you can see her as she is.’ A friend of the late Keeley Halswelle told me that this able artist (who was originally a ‘figure’ and ‘subject’ painter) remarked to him that he had never realised the supreme charm of autumnal Nature among still waters till he found himself one day trying to translate to his canvas the placid loveliness of the wide, shallow reaches of the Avon around Christchurch. Doubtless many other painters, French and Dutch and English, have felt thus, and been glad to give their best to the interpretation of the supreme charm of still waters in autumn. What would Venice be without them ... Amsterdam ... Holland ... Finland ... Sweden? Imagine Scotland without this water-beauty, from Loch Ken to Loch Maree, from the Loch of the Yowes to the ‘thousand-waters’ of Benbecula: or Ireland, where the white clouds climbing out of the south may mirror themselves in still waters all day till they sink beyond the Lough of Shadows in the silent north.

The phrase is as liberal as ‘running water.’ That covers all inland waters in motion, from the greatest rivers to the brown burn of the hillside, from the melting of the snows in fierce spate to the swift invasion and troubled floods of the hurrying and confined tides. So ‘still waters’ covers lakes and mountain-lochs, shallow meres, lagoons, the reaches of slow rivers, lochans, tarns, the dark brown pools in peat-moors, or the green-blue pools in open woods and shadowy forests, the duckweed-margined ponds at the skirts of villages, the lilied ponds of old manor-garths and of quiet gardens, asleep beneath green canopies or given over to the golden carp and the dragon-fly beneath mossed fountains or beyond time-worn terraces. Often, too, and in February and October above all, the low-lying lands are flooded, and the bewildered little lives of the pastures crowd the hedgerows and copses. Sometimes for days, motionless, these mysterious lake-arrivals abide under the grey sky, sometimes a week or weeks pass before they recede. The crow flying home at dusk sees the pale cloud and the orange afterglow reflected in an inexplicable mirror where of late the grey-green grass and brown furrow stretched for leagues: the white owl, hawking the pastures after dusk, swoops so low on his silent wings that he veers upward from a ghostly flying image underneath, as a bat at sundown veers from the phantom of its purblind flight.

Delicate haze, cloud-dappled serenity, and moonlight are the three chief qualities of beauty in the charm of still waters. It is a matter of temperament, of the hour and occasion also no doubt, whether one prefer those where another dream-world, that of human life, companions them in the ineffable suspense of the ideal moment, the moment where the superfluous recedes and silence and stillness consummate the miraculous vision. Those moonlit lagoons of Venice, which become scintillating floods of silver or lakes of delicate gold, where the pole-moored sandolò thrusts a black wedge of shadow into the motionless drift, while an obscure figure at the prow idly thrums a mandolin or hums drowsily a canzonnetto d’amore; those twilit canals where old palaces lean and look upon their ancient beauty stilled and perfected in sleep; how unforgettable they are, how they thrill even in remembrance. In the cities of Holland, how at one are the old houses with the mirroring canals, in still afternoons when quiet light warms the red wall, and dwells on the brown and scarlet clematis in the cool violet and amber hollows of the motionless water wherein the red wall soundlessly slips and indefinitely recedes, hiding an undiscovered house of shadow with silent unseen folk dreaming out across invisible gardens. There are ancient towns like this in England also, as between Upsala and Elsinore to where old châteaux in Picardy guard the pollarded marais, or deserted Breton manoirs stand ghostly at the forest-end of untraversed meres.

These have their charm. But have they for us the intimate and unchanging spell of the lakes and meres and other still waters of our own land? Nothing, one might think, could be more beautiful than to see in the Lake of Como the cypresses of Bellaggio and the sloping gardens of Cadenabbia meeting in a new underwater wonderland: or to see Mont Blanc, forty miles away, sleeping in snow-held silence in the blue depths of Lac Léman: or to see Pilatus and a new city of Lucerne mysteriously changed and yet familiarly upbuilded among the moving green lawns and azure avenues of the Lake of the Four Cantons. And yet leaning boulders of granite, yellow with lichen and grey with moss and deep-based among swards of heather and the green nomad bracken, will create a subtler magic in the brown depths of any Highland loch. There is a subtler spell in the solitary tarn, where the birch leans out of the fern and throws an intricate tracery of bough and branch into the unmoving wave, where the speckled trout and the speckled mavis meet as in the strange companionships of dreams. Enchantment lies amid the emerald glooms of pine and melancholy spruce, when a dream-world forest underneath mirrors the last sunset-gold on bronze cones, and enfolds the one white wandering cloud miraculously stayed at last between two columnar green spires, flawless as sculptured jade.

Is this because, in the wilderness, we recover something of what we have lost? ... because we newly find ourselves, as though surprised into an intimate relationship of which we have been unaware or have indifferently ignored? What a long way the ancestral memory has to go, seeking, like a pale sleuth-hound among obscure dusks and forgotten nocturnal silences, for the lost trails of the soul. It is not we only, you and I, who look into the still waters of the wilderness and lonely places, and are often dimly perplext, are often troubled we know not how or why: some forgotten reminiscence in us is aroused, some memory not our own but yet our heritage is perturbed, footsteps that have immemorially sunk in ancient dust move furtively along obscure corridors in our brain, the ancestral hunter or fisher awakes, the primitive hillman or woodlander communicates again with old forgotten intimacies and the secret oracular things of lost wisdoms. This is no fanciful challenge of speculation. In the order of psychology it is as logical as in the order of biology is the tracing of our upright posture or the deft and illimitable use of our hands, from unrealisably remote periods wherein the pioneers of man reached slowly forward to inconceivable arrivals.

But whatever primitive wildness, whatever ancestral nearness we recover in communion with remote Nature, there is no question as to the fascination of beauty exercised by the still waters of which we speak, of their enduring spell. What lovelier thing in Nature than, on a serene and cloudless October day, to come upon a small lake surrounded by tall elms of amber and burnished bronze, by beech and maple and sycamore cloudy with superb fusion of orange and scarlet and every shade of red and brown, by limes and aspens tremulous with shaken pale gold? Beautiful in itself, in rare and dreamlike beauty, the woods become more beautiful in this silent marriage with placid waters, take on a beauty more rare, a loveliness more dreamlike. There is a haze which holds the fluent gold of the air. Silence is no longer quietude as in June; or a hushed stillness, as in the thunder-laden noons of July or August; but a soundless suspense wherein the spirit of the world, suddenly at rest, sleeps and dreams.

The same ineffable peace broods over all still waters: on the meres of Hereford, on the fens of East Anglia, on lochs heavy with mountain-shadow, on the long grey Hebridean sheets where the call of the sea-wind or the sea-wave is ever near.

Truly there must be a hidden magic in them, as old tales tell. I recall one where the poets and dreamers of the world are called ‘the children of pools.’ The poet and dreamer who so called them must have meant by his metaphor those who look into the hearts of men and into the dim eyes of Life, troubled by the beauty and mystery of the world, insatiable in longing for the ineffable and the unattainable. So, long ago, even ‘ornamental waters’ may have been symbols of the soul’s hunger and thirst, emblems of the perpetual silence and mystery of his fugitive destiny!

Somewhere, I think it is in the Kalevala, occurs the beautiful metaphor of still waters, ‘the mirrors of the world.’ Whoever the ancient singer was who made the phrase, he had in his heart love for still waters as well as the poet’s mind. The secret of their beauty is in that image. It may be a secret within a secret, for the mirror may disclose a world invisible to us, may reflect what our own or an ancestral memory dimly recalls, may reveal what the soul perceives and translates from its secret silences into symbol and the mysterious speech of the imagination.

Still waters; it has the inward music that lies in certain words ... amber, ivory, foam, silence, dreams; that lies often in some marriage of words ... moonlight at sea, wind in dark woods, dewy pastures, old sorrowful things: that dwells in some names of things, as chrysoprase; or in some combination of natural terms and associations, as wind and wave; or in some names of women and dreams, Ruth, Alaciel, Imogen, Helen, Cleopatra; or in the words that serve in the courts of music ... cadence, song, threnody, epithalamion, viol, flute, prelude, fugue. One can often evade the heavy airs of the hours of weariness by the spell of one of these wooers of dreams. Foam--and the hour is gathered up like mist, and we are amid “perilous seas in faëry lands forlorn”: Wind--and the noises of the town are like the humming of wild bees in old woods, and one is under ancient boughs, listening, or standing solitary in the dusk by a forlorn shore with a tempestuous sea filling the darkness with whispers and confused rumours and incommunicable things: Ruth--and sorrow and exile are become loveliness: Helen--and that immemorial desire is become our desire, and that phantom beauty is become our dream and our passion. Still Waters--surely through that gate the mind may slip away from the tedious and unwelcome, and be alone among forests where the birch leans and dreams into an amber-brown pool, or by a mountain-lake where small white clouds lie like sleeping birds, or on moonlit lagoons where the reed and the reed’s image are as one, and the long mirrors are unshaken by any wandering air, unvisited but by the passing soundless shadows of travelling wings.

THE PLEIAD-MONTH

From the Persian shepherd to the shepherd on the hills of Argyll--in a word, from the remote East to the remote West--November is known, in kindred phrase, as the Pleiad-Month.

What a world of legend, what a greater world of poetry and old romance, centres in this little group of stars. ‘The meeting-place in the skies of mythology and science,’ as they have been called by one of our chief astronomers. From time immemorial this remote starry cluster has been associated with festivals and solemnities, with auguries and destinies. On November 17, the day of the midnight culmination of the Pleiades, the great Festival of Isis was begun at Busiris: in ancient Persia, on that day, no petition was presented in vain to the King of Kings: and on the first of the month the midnight rites of our own ancestral Druids were connected with the rising of the Pleiades. To-day the South Sea Islanders of the Society and Tonga Isles divide the year by their seaward rising and setting. The Matarii i nia, or season of the ‘Pleiades Above,’ begins when in the evening this stellar group appears on the horizon, and while they remain above it: the Matarii i raro, or season of the ‘Pleiades Below,’ begins when after sunset they are no longer visible, and endures till once again they appear above the horizon. The most spiritual and the most barbaric races are at one in considering them centres of the divine energy. The Hindûs imaged them as Flame, typical of Agni, God of Fire, the Creative Energy: the several Persian words, from the ancient Perv or the Parur of Hafiz or the Parwin of Omar Khayyam--derive from Peru, a word signifying ‘The Begetters’: and we know that the Greeks oriented to them or to their lucida not only the first great temple of Athenê on the Acropolis, but its successor four hundred years later, the Hecatompedon of 1150 B.C., and seven hundred years later the Parthenon on the same side. [The great shrine of Dionysos at Athens, the still earlier Asclepieion at Epidaurus, and the temple of Poseidon at Sunium, looked towards the Pleiades at their setting.] But far removed from these are the Malays and Pacific islanders, who more vaguely and crudely revere ‘the central fires,’ and even so primitive and remote a people as the Abipones of the Paraguay River country worship them as their Great Spirit--Groaperikie, or Grandfather--and chant hymns of joy to this Pleiad-Allfather when, after the vernal Equinox, the mysterious cluster once more hangs visible in the northern sky.

It would be impossible, in a brief paper, to cover the ground of the nomenclature, of the literature, of scientific knowledge and speculation concerning the Pleiades. A long chapter in a book might be given to Alcyone alone--that bright particular star of which it has been calculated that, in comparison, our Sun would sink to a star below the tenth magnitude. Indeed, though the imagination strains after the astronomer’s calm march with dazzled vision, our solar brilliancy is supposed to be surpassed by some sixty to seventy of the Pleiadic group, for all that our human eyes have from time immemorial seen therein only a small cluster of tiny stars, the ‘seven’ of Biblical and poetic and legendary lore, from ‘the Seven Archangels’ to the popular ‘Hen and her six chicks.’ Alcyone, that terrible torch of the ultimate heavens, is eighty-three times more refulgent than that magnificent star Sirius, which has been called the ‘Glory of the South’: a thousand times larger than our Sun. I do not know how Merope and Taygeta, Celeno and Atlas are, but Maia, that shaking loveliness of purest light, has been calculated to be four hundred times larger than the Sun, and Electra about four hundred and eighty times larger. When one thinks of this mysterious majesty, so vast that only the winged imagination can discern the illimitable idea, all words fail: at most one can but recall the solemn adjuration of the shepherd-prophet Amos, ‘Seek Him that maketh Pleiades and Orion,’ or the rapt ecstasy of Isaiah, ‘O day star, son of the morning.’

A Gaelic poet has called them the Lords of Water, saying (though under different names, from the Gaelic mythology) that Alcyone controls the seas and the tides, that Electra is mistress of flood, that Taygeta and Merope and Atlas dispense rains and augment rivers and feed the well-springs, and that Maia’s breath falls in dew. The detail is fanciful; the central thought is in accord with legend and old wisdom. I do not know how far back the connection of the Pleiades with water, particularly rains and the rising of rivers, has been traced. It runs through many ancient records. True, in one place, Hesiod speaks of ‘retreating from the burning heat of the Pleiades,’ and mention has already been made of the Hindû association of them with ‘Flame.’ But Hesiod’s allusion is a seasonal trope, and natural to one living in a warm country where the coming of the autumnal rains coincides with days of sweltering closeness and heat. Moreover, Hesiod himself uses equally deftly other popular imagery as it occurs to him, speaking of the Pleiades, as Homer speaks, as Atlas-born; and again (with Pindar, Simonides and others) likening them to rock-pigeons flying from the Hunter Orion, doubtless from earliest mention of them in ancient legend as a flock of doves, or birds; and again as ‘the Seven Virgins’ and ‘the Virgin stars’--thus at one with his contemporary, the Hebrew Herdsman-prophet Amos, who called them by a word rendered in the Authorised Version of the Bible as ‘the seven stars.’ As for the Hindû symbol, it must be remembered that fire was the supreme sacred and primitive element, and that every begetter of life in any form would naturally be thus associate. The Hindûs called the Pleiad-Month (October-November) Kartik, and the reason of the great star-festival Dībalī, the Feast of Lamps, was to show gratitude and joy, after the close of the wet season, for the coming of the Pleiad-days of dry warmth and beauty. The ‘sweet influences’ of the Pleiades thus indicated will come more familiarly to many readers in Milton’s

“the grey Dawn and the Pleiades before him danc’d, Shedding sweet influence,...”

This ancient custom, the ‘Feast of Lamps,’ of the Western Hindûs survives to-day in the ‘Feast of Lanterns’ in Japan, though few Europeans seem to perceive any significance in that popular festival.

In general, however, we find the advent of the Pleiades concurrent, both in ancient and modern tradition, with springs and rains and floods: with the renewal of life. Thus the comment in the old Breeches Bible, opposite the mention of ‘the mystic seven’ in that supreme line in Job: ‘which starres arise when the sunne is in Taurus, which is the spring time, and bring flowres.’ A Latin poet, indeed, used Pliada as a synonym of showers. Again and again we find them as the Vergiliae, Companions of the Spring. They are intimately connected too with traditions of the Deluge: and in this association, perhaps also with that of submerged Atlantis, it is suggestive to note that early in the sixteenth century Cortez heard in that remote, mysterious Aztec otherworld to which he penetrated, a very ancient tradition of the destruction of the world in some past age at the time of their midnight culmination. A long way thence to Sappho, who marked the middle of the night by the setting of those wild-doves of the sky! Or, a century later, to Euripides, who calls them Aetos, our ‘Altair,’ the nocturnal timekeepers.

But to return to that mystery of seven. Although some scholars derive the word ‘Pleiades’ or ‘Pliades,’ and in the singular ‘Plias,’ from the Greek word plein, ‘to sail,’ because (to quote an eminent living authority) ‘the heliacal rising of the group in May marked the opening of navigation to the Greeks, as its setting in the late autumn did the close’--and though others consider that the derivation is from pleios, the epic form of the Greek word for ‘full,’ or, in the plural, ‘many’--and so to the equivalent ‘a cluster,’ corresponding to the Biblical Kimāh and the Arabic Al Thuruyya, the Cluster, the Many Little Ones--it is perhaps more likely that a less learned and ordinary classical reader may be nearer the mark in considering the most probable derivation to be from Pleione, the nymph of Greek mythology--‘Pleione, the mother of the seven sisters,’ as she was called of old. Such an one, too, may remember that certain Greek poets alluded to the Pleiades as the seven doves that carried ambrosia to the infant Zeus. To this day, indeed, a common English designation for the group is ‘the Seven Sisters’: and lovers of English poetry will hardly need to be reminded of kindred allusions, from Chaucer’s ‘Atlantes doughtres sevene’ to Milton’s ‘the seven Atlantic sisters’ (reminiscent here, of course, of Virgil’s ‘Eoae Atlantides’) or to Keats’ ‘The Starry Seven, old Atlas’ children.’ The mediæval Italians had ‘the seven doves’ again (sette palommiele), and to-day their compatriots speak of the ‘seven dovelets.’ It would be tiresome to go through the popular Pleiad-nomenclature of all the European races, and a few instances will equally indicate the prevalence, since the Anglo-Saxon sifunsterri. Miles Coverdale, in the first complete English Bible, comments on the passage in Job, ‘these vii. starres, the clocke henne with her chickens’; and to-day in Dorset, Devon, and other English counties ‘the Hen and her Chickens’ is a popular term, as it is, in effect, with the Wallachians, and indeed, with or without the number seven, throughout Europe. The long continuity and vast range of this association with seven may be traced from the ancient Celtic ‘The Seven Hounds’ to the still more ancient ‘seven beneficent sky-spirits of the Vedas and the Zend-Avesta’ or to the again more ancient ‘Seven Sisters of Industry’ of remote Chinese folklore. This feminine allusion in presumably the oldest mention of a popular designation for the Pleiades is the more singular from the kindred thought of the Roman writer Manilius--‘The narrow Cloudy Train of female stars’ ... i.e., no doubt, Pleione and her daughters.

On reading recently a work on mythological ornithology by Mr. D’Arcy Thompson I noticed that he traces the word Botrus, equivalent to a Bunch of Grapes (as the younger Theon likened the Pleiades) to οἰνάς, a dove, so called from its purple-red breast like wine, οἶνος, and naturally referred to a bunch of grapes; or perhaps because the bird appeared in migration at the time of the Vintage. [And see his further evidence of Cilician coins.]

Nor, again, is it possible to record the many picturesque or homely Pleiad-designations, ancient and modern, in literature and folklore. What range, indeed, to cover ... since we should have to go back to two thousand years B.C. to recover that fine name, General of the Celestial Armies! It would be tempting to range through the poets of all lands. Think of such lovely words as those from the Mu’allakāt, as translated by Sir William Jones: ‘It was the hour when the Pleiades appeared in the firmament like the folds of a silken sash variously decked with gems’: or that line in Graf’s translation of Sadi’s Gulistân ... ‘as though the tops of the trees were encircled by the necklace of the Pleiades’: or, or our own day, of a verse such as Roscoe Thayer’s:

“slowly the Pleiades Dropt like dew from bough to bough of the cinnamon trees,”

or lines such as that familiar but ever beautiful couplet in Locksley Hall:

“Many a night I saw the Pleiads, rising thro’ the mellow shade, Glitter like a swarm of fireflies tangled in a silver braid.”