now day by day, indoors and out of doors, the conquest of spring proceeds to the music of the conquerors. one evening the first chafer comes to the lamp, and his booming makes the ears tremble with dim apprehension. he climbs, six-legged and slow, up the curtain, supporting himself now and then by unfurling his wings, or if not he falls with a drunken moan, then begins to climb again, and at last blunders about the room like a ball that must strike something, the white ceiling, the white paper, the lamp, and when he falls he rests. in his painful climbing he looks human, as perhaps a man looks angelic to an angel; but there is nothing lovelier and more surprising than the unfurling of his pinions like a magic wind-blown cloak out of that hard mail.
another day the far-off woods in a hot, moist air first attain their rich velvet mossiness, and even near at hand the gorse-bushes all smouldering with bloom are like clouds settled on the earth, having no solidity, but just colour and warmth and pleasantness.
the broad-backed chestnuts bloom. on the old cart-lodge tiles the vast carapace of the house-leek is green and rosy, and out of the midst of it grow dandelions and grass, and the mass of black mould which it has accumulated in a century bends down the roof.
the hawthorn-bloom is past before we are sure that it[122] has reached its fulness. day after day its warm and fragrant snow clouded the earth with light, and yet we waited, thinking surely to-morrow it will be fairer still, and it was, and the next day we thought the same and we were careless as in first love, and then one day it lay upon the grass, an empty shell, the vest of departed loveliness, and another year was over. the broad grass is full of buttercups’ gold or it is sullen silvery under a burning afternoon sun, without wind, the horizon smoky, the blue sky and its white, still clouds almost veiled by heat; the red cattle are under the elms; the unrippled water slides under sullen silvery willows.
the night-haze peels off the hills and lets the sun in upon small tracts of wood—upon a group of walnuts in the bronze of their fine, small leaf—upon downland grass, and exposes blue sky and white cloud, but then returns and hides the land, except that the dewy ground-ash and the ivy and holly gleam; and two cuckoos go over crying and crying continually in the hollow vale.
already the ash-keys hang in cool, thick bunches under the darker leaves. the chestnut-bloom is falling. the oak-apples are large and rosy. the wind is high, and the thunder is away somewhere behind the pink mountains in the southern sky or in the dark drifts overhead. and yet the blue of the massy hangers almost envelops the beechen green; the coombes and the beeches above and around their grassy slopes of juniper are soft and dim, and far withdrawn, and the nightjar’s voice is heard as if the wind there were quiet. the rain will not come; the plunging wind in the trees has a sound of waterfalls all night, yet cannot trouble the sleep of the orange-tip butterfly on the leopard’s-bane’s dead flower.
[123]
now the pine blooms in the sandy lands, above the dark-fronded brake and glaucous-fruited whortleberry, the foxgloves break into bell after bell under the oaks and birches. the yellow broom is flowering and scented, and the white lady’s bedstraw sweetens the earth’s breath. the careless variety of abundance and freshness makes every lane a bride. suddenly, in the midst of the sand, deep meadows gleam, and the kingfisher paints the air with azure and emerald and rose above the massy water tumbling between aspens at the edge of a neat, shaven lawn, and, behind that, a white mill and miller’s house with dark, alluring windows where no one stirs.
june puts bronze and crimson on many of her leaves. the maple-leaves and many of the leaves of thorn and bramble and dogwood are rosy; the hazel-leaves are rosy-brown; the herb-robert and parsley are rose-red; the leaves of ash and holly are dark lacquered. the copper beeches, opulently sombre under a faintly yellowed sky, seem to be the sacred trees of the thunder that broods above. presently the colour of the threat is changed to blue, which soiled white clouds pervade until the whole sky is woolly white and grey and moving north. there is no wind, but there is a roar as of a hurricane in the trees far off; soon it is louder, in the trees not so remote; and in a minute the rain has traversed half-a-mile of woods, and the distant combined roar is swallowed up by the nearer pattering on roof and pane and leaf, the dance of leaves, the sway of branches, the trembling of whole trees under the flood. the rain falls straight upon the hard road, and each drop seems to leap upward from it barbed. great drops dive among the motionless, dusty nettles. the thunder unloads its ponderous burden upon[124] the resonant floor of the sky; but the sounds of the myriad leaves and grass-blades drinking all but drowns the boom, the splitting roar, and the echo in the hills. when it is over it has put a final sweetness into the blackbird’s voice and into the calm of the evening garden when the voice of a singer does but lay another tribute at the feet of the enormous silence. frail is that voice as the ghost-moth dancing above the grass so faithfully that it seems a flower attached to a swaying stem, or as the one nettle-leaf that flutters in a draught of the hedge like a signalling hand while all the rest of the leaves are as if they could not move again, or as the full moon that is foundering on a white surf in the infinite violet sky. more large and more calm and emptier of familiar things grows the land as i pass through it, under the hoverings of the low-flying but swiftly-turning nightjar, until at midnight only a low white mist moves over the gentle desolation and warm silence. the mist wavers, and discloses a sky all strewn with white stars like the flowers of an immense jessamine. it closes up again, and day is born unawares in its pale arms, and earth is for the moment nothing but the tide of downs flowing west and the branch of red roses that hangs heavily laden and drowsed with its weight and beauty over my path, dipping its last spray in the dew of the grass.
the day is a sunday, and no one is on foot or on wheel in the broad arable country that ripples in squares of green, or brown, or yellow, or grey, to the green downs and their dark, high-perched woods. as if for some invisible beholder, the green elders and their yellow-green flower-buds make their harmony with the yellow-lichened barns against which they lean; the grass and the noble[125] trees, the groups of wayside aspen, the line of horse-chestnuts, the wych-elms on both sides of the road, the one delicate sycamore before the inn and the company of sycamores above the cross—the spacious thatch and tiles of the farmyard quadrangle—the day newly painted in white and blue—the green so green in the hedges, and the white and purple so pure in the flowers—all seem to be meant for eyes that know nothing of time and of what “brought death into the world and all our woe.” and in this solitude the young birds are very happy. they have taken possession of the thick hedges, of the roadside grass, of the roads themselves. they flutter and run and stumble there; they splash in the pools and in the dust, which not a wheel nor a foot has marked. these at least are admitted into the kingdom along with that strange wildfowl that lives “to maintain the trade and mystery of typographers.”
such a day, in the unblemished summer land, invariably calls up thoughts of the golden age. as mankind has looked back to a golden age, so the individual, repeating the history of the race, looks back and finds one in his own past. historians and arch?ologists have indeed made it difficult for men of our time to look far back for a golden age. we are shown a skull with supraciliary prominences and are told that its owner, though able to survive the mammoth by means of tools of flint, lived like the tasmanian of modern times; and his was no golden age. then we look back to heroic ages which poetry and other arts have magnified—to the greece of homer or pheidias, to the ireland of cuchulain, to the wales of arthur, to the england which built the great cathedrals or produced chaucer, sir philip sidney, izaak walton.
[126]
in the same way, few men can now look back to their childhood like traherne and say that
“all appeared new and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful. i was a little stranger which at my entrance into the world was saluted and surrounded with innumerable joys. my knowledge was divine. i knew by intuition those things which since my apostasy i collected again by the highest reason. my very ignorance was advantageous. i seemed as one brought into the estate of innocence. all things were spotless and pure and glorious; yea, and infinitely mine, and joyful and precious. i knew not that there were any sins or complaints or laws. i dreamed not of poverties, contentions or vices. all tears and quarrels were hidden from mine eyes. everything was at rest, free and immortal. i knew nothing of sickness or death or rents or exaction, either for tribute or bread.... all time was eternity, and a perpetual sabbath. is it not strange, that an infant should be heir of the whole world and see those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold?”[3]
we blink, deliberately or not, unpleasant facts in our own lives, as in the social life of greece or the middle ages. some have no need to do so; robustly or sensitively made, their childish surroundings have been such as to meet their utmost needs or to draw out their finest powers or to leave them free. ambition, introspection, remorse had not begun. the vastness and splendour and gloom of a world not understood, but seen in its effects and hardly at all in its processes, made a theatre for their happiness which—especially when seen through a mist of years—glorify it exceedingly, and it becomes like a ridge of the far-off downs transfigured in golden light, so that[127] we in the valley sigh at the thought that where we have often trod is heaven now. such beauties of the earth, seen at a distance and inaccessibly serene, always recall the equally inaccessible happiness of childhood. why have we such a melting mood for what we cannot reach? why, as we are whirled past them in a train, does the sight of a man and child walking quietly beside a reedy pond, the child stooping for a flower and its gossip unheard—why should we tremble to reflect that we have never tasted just that cloistered balm?
perhaps the happiest childhoods are those which pass completely away and leave whole tracts of years without a memory; those which are remembered are fullest of keen joy as of keen pain, and it is such that we desire for ourselves if we are capable of conceiving such fantastic desires. i confess to remembering little joy, but to much drowsy pleasure in the mere act of memory. i watch the past as i have seen workless, homeless men leaning over a bridge to watch the labours of a titanic crane and strange workers below in the ship running to and fro and feeding the crane. i recall green fields, one or two whom i loved in them, and though no trace of such happiness as i had remains, the incorruptible tranquillity of it all breeds fancies of great happiness. i recall many scenes: a church and churchyard and black pigs running down from them towards me in a rocky lane—ladslove and tall, crimson, bitter dahlias in a garden—the sweetness of large, moist yellow apples eaten out of doors—children: i do not recall happiness in them, yet the moment that i return to them in fancy i am happy. something like this is true also of much later self-conscious years. i cannot—i am not tempted to—allow what then spoiled the[128] mingling of the elements of joy to reappear when i look back. the reason, perhaps, is that only an inmost true self that desires and is in harmony with joy can perform these long journeys, and when it has set out upon them it sheds those gross incrustations which were our curse before.
many are the scenes thus to be recalled without spot or stain. it is a may morning, warm and slightly breezy after midnight rain. in the beech-woods the trees are unloading the dew, which drops from leaf to leaf and down on to the lemon-tinged leaves of dark dog’s-mercury. at the edge of the wood the privet branches are bent down by the weight of raindrops of the size of peas. the dewy white stitchwort stars and the feathered grasses are curved over on the banks. the sainfoin is hoary and sparkling as i move. already the sun is hot and the sky blue, with faint white clouds in whirls. and in the orchard-trees and drenched luxuriant hedges the garden-warbler sings a subdued note of rushing, bubbling liquidity as of some tiny brook that runs in quick pulsations among the fleshy-leaved water-plants. the bird’s head is uplifted; its throat is throbbing; it moves restlessly from branch to branch, but always renews its song on the new perch; being leaf-like, it is not easily seen. and sometimes through this continuous jargon the small, wild song of the blackcap is heard, which is the utmost expression of moist warm dawns in may thickets of hawthorn-bloom and earliest roses. on such a dawn the very spirit bathes in the dew and nuzzles into the fragrance with delight; but it is no sooner left behind with may than it has developed within me into an hour and a scene of utmost grace and bliss, save that i am in it myself.
[129]
it is curious, too, how many different kinds of eden or golden age nature has in her gift, as if she silently recorded the backward dreams of each generation and reproduced them for us unexpectedly. it is, for instance, an early morning in july. the cows pour out from the milking-stalls and blot out the smell of dust with their breath in the white road between banks of hazel and thorn. the boy who is driving them to the morning’s pasture calls to them monotonously, persuasively, in turn, as each is tempted to crop the roadside sward: “wo, cherry! now, dolly! wo, fancy! strawberry!... blanche!... blossom!... cowslip!... rosy! smut!... come along, handsome!... wo, snowdrop!... lily!... darky!... roany!... come along, annie!” here the road is pillowed with white aspen-down, there more fragrant than pines with the brown sheddings of yew, and here thick with the dry scent of nettle and cow-parsnip, or glorious in perfect mingling of harebell and foxglove among the bracken and popping gorse on the roadside. the cows turn into the aftermath of the sainfoin, and the long valley echoes to their lowing. after them, up the road, comes a gypsy-cart, and the boy hangs on the gate to see the men and women walking, black-haired, upright, bright-eyed, and on the name-board of the cart the words: “naomi sherwood, burley, hampshire.” these things also propose to the roving, unhistoric mind an eden, one still with us, one that is passing, not, let us hope, the very last.
some of these scenes, whether often repeated or not, come to have a rich symbolical significance; they return persistently and, as it were, ceremoniously—on festal days—but meaning i know not what. for example, i[130] never see the flowers and scarlet-stained foliage of herb-robert growing out of old stone-heaps by the wayside without a feeling of satisfaction not explained by a long memory of the contrast between the plant and the raw flint; so also with the drenched lilac-bloom leaning out over high walls of unknown gardens; and inland cliffs, covered with beech, jutting out westward into a bottomless valley in the mist of winter twilights, in silence and frost. something in me belongs to these things, but i hardly think that the mere naming of them will mean anything except to those—many, perhaps—who have experienced the same. a great writer so uses the words of every day that they become a code of his own which the world is bound to learn and in the end take unto itself. but words are no longer symbols, and to say “hill” or “beech” is not to call up images of a hill or a beech-tree, since we have so long been in the habit of using the words for beautiful and mighty and noble things very much as a book-keeper uses figures without seeing gold and power. i can, therefore, only try to suggest what i mean by the significance of the plant in the stone-heap, the wet lilac, the misty cliff, by comparing it with that of scenes in books where we recognize some power beyond the particular and personal. all of don quixote’s acts have this significance; so have the end of mr. conrad’s story of youth and the opening of mr. hudson’s el ombu—the old man sitting on a summer’s day under the solitary tree to tell the history “of a house that had been.” malory’s morte d’arthur is full of scenes like this. for ten centuries, from the battle of badon to the writing of morte d’arthur, these stories were alive on the lips of many kinds of men and women in many lands, from[131] connemara to calabria. many of these men and women survive only in the turns which their passionate hearts gave to these ghostly, everlastingly wandering tales. artists have worked upon them. bards have sung them, and the sound of their harping is entangled in the words that have reached us to-day. this blending of many bloods is suggested by the saracen in the morte d’arthur who was descended from hector and alexander and joshua and maccab?us; by taliesin, whose “original country is the region of the summer stars,” who was with noah and alexander and at the birth of christ. and thus has the tale become so full in the ear of humanity, so rich in scenes designed to serve only an immediate purpose, yet destined by this grace to move all kinds of men in manifold ways. such is the chess-playing in the dream of rhonabwy; the madness of tristram when he ran naked in the wood many days, but was lured by the music of a damsel playing on his own harp; the speech of arthur at the scattering of his knights in the sangraal quest; launcelot’s fighting with the black knights against the white; launcelot’s adventures ending at the castle of carbonek, where he put on all his arms and armour and went—“and the moon shone clear”—between the lions at the gate and forced open the door, and saw the “holy vessel, covered with red samite, and many angels about it”; and arthur and guenevere watching the dead elaine in the barge; and in the wars of arthur and launcelot, the scene opening with the words: “then it befell upon a day in harvest-time, sir launcelot looked over the walls, and spake on high unto king arthur and sir gawaine....”
no english writer has expressed as well as traherne[132] the spiritual glory of childhood, in which wordsworth saw intimations of immortality. he speaks of “that divine light wherewith i was born” and of his “pure and virgin apprehensions,” and recommends his friend to pray earnestly for these gifts: “they will make you angelical, and wholly celestial.” it was by the “divine knowledge” that he saw all things in the peace of eden—
“the corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. i thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. the dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold; the gates were at first the end of the world. the green trees when i saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me; their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap and almost mad with ecstasy; they were such strange and wonderful things. the men! o what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! immortal cherubims! and young men glittering and sparkling angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! boys and girls tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving jewels. i knew not that they were born or should die; but all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. eternity was manifest in the light of the day, and something infinite behind everything appeared, which tallied with my expectation and moved my desire....”
yet was this light eclipsed. he was “with much ado” perverted by the world, by the temptation of men and worldly things and by “opinion and custom,” not any “inward corruption or depravation of nature.”
for he tells us how he once entered a noble dining-[133]room and was there alone “to see the gold and state and carved imagery,” but wearied of it because it was dead, and had no motion. a little afterwards he saw it “full of lords and ladies and music and dancing,” and now pleasure took the place of tediousness, and he perceived, long after, that “men and women are, when well understood, a principal part of our true felicity.” once again, “in a lowering and sad evening, being alone in the field, when all things were dead quiet,” he had the same weariness, nay, even horror. “i was a weak and little child, and had forgotten there was a man alive in the earth.” nevertheless, hope and expectation came to him and comforted him, and taught him “that he was concerned in all the world.” that he was “concerned in all the world” was the great source of comfort and joy which he found in life, and of that joy which his book pours out for us. not only did he see that he was concerned in all the world, but that river and corn and herb and sand were so concerned. god, he says, “knoweth infinite excellencies” in each of these things; “he seeth how it relateth to angels and men.” in this he anticipated blake’s auguries of innocence. he seems to see the patterns which all living things are for ever weaving. he would have men strive after this divine knowledge of things and of their place in the universe.
he came to believe that “all other creatures were such that god was himself in their creation, that is, almighty power wholly exerted; and that every creature is indeed as it seemed in my infancy, not as it is commonly apprehended.”
yet he feels the superiority of man’s soul to the things which it apprehends: “one soul in the immensity of its[134] intelligence is greater and more excellent than the whole world.” even so richard jefferies prayed that his soul “might be more than the cosmos of life.” the soul is greater than the whole world because it is capable of apprehending the whole world, because it is spiritual, and the spiritual nature is infinite. thus traherne was led to the splendid error of making the sun “a poor little dead thing.” or perhaps it was a figure of speech used to convince the multitude of his estimation of man’s soul as above all visible things. in the same spirit he speaks of “this little cottage of heaven and earth as too small a gift, though fair,” for beings of whom he says: “infinity we know and feel by our souls; and feel it so naturally as if it were the very essence and being of the soul”; and again, with childlike simplicity and majesty—
“man is a creature of such noble principles and severe expectations, that could he perceive the least defect to be in the deity, it would infinitely displease him.”
he could not well have thought of man except loftily, since he was himself one whom imagination never deserted—imagination the greatest power of the mind by which not poets only live and have their being—
“for god,” says he, “hath made you able to create worlds in your own mind which are more precious unto him than those which he created; and to give and offer up the world unto him, which is very delightful in flowing from him, but made more in returning to him.”
that power to create worlds in the mind is the imagination, and is the proof that the creature liveth and is divine. “things unknown,” he says, “have a secret influence on the soul,” and “we love we know not[135] what.” the spirit can fill the whole world and the stars be your jewels: “you never enjoy the world aright, till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens, and crowned with the stars, and perceive yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world.” and our inheritance is more than the world, “because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.” it is a social mysticism. “the world,” he says in another place, “does serve you, not only as it is the place and receptacle of all your joys, but as it is a great obligation laid upon all mankind, and upon every person in all ages, to love you as himself; as it also magnifieth all your companions.” his is the true “public mind,” as he calls it. “there is not,” he says in another place—“there is not a man in the whole world that knows god, or himself, but he must honour you. not only as an angel or as a cherubim, but as one redeemed by the blood of christ, beloved by all angels, cherubims, and men, the heir of the world, and as much greater than the universe, as he that possesseth the house is greater than the house. o what a holy and blessed life would men lead, what joys and treasures would they be to each other, in what a sphere of excellency would every man move, how sublime and glorious would their estate be, how full of peace and quiet would the world be, yea, of joy and honour, order and beauty, did men perceive this of themselves, and had they this esteem for one another!”
here, as in other passages, he seems to advance to the position of whitman, whom some have blamed for making the word “divine” of no value because he would apply it to all, whereas to do so is no more than to lay down that rule of veneration for men—and the other[136] animals—which has produced and will produce the greatest revolutions.
this conception of universal divinity sprang from his doctrine of love. by love we can be at one with the divine power which he calls god. “love,” he says, “is the true means by which the world is enjoyed: our love to others, and others’ love to us.” why, even the love of riches he excuses, since “we love to be rich ... that we thereby might be more greatly delightful.” and just as richard jefferies says that felise loved before ever she loved a man, so traherne says: “that violence wherewith a man sometimes doteth upon one creature is but a little spark of that love, even towards all, which lurketh in his nature.... when we dote upon the perfections and beauties of some one creature, we do not love that too much, but other things too little.” it is this love by which alone the commonwealth of all forms of life can be truly known, and men are like god when they are “all life and mettle and vigour and love to everything,” and “concerned and happy” in all things. his feeling of the interdependence of all the world is thus inseparable from his doctrine of love; love inspires it; by love alone can it be real and endure. “he that is in all and with all can never be desolate.” and, nevertheless, he cannot always be thinking of the universe—he thought that the sun went round the earth—and just as he regards man as superior to other forms of life, so, perhaps, he has a filial love of “this cottage of heaven and earth,” the brown land and blue sky, and one of the most beautiful of his meditations is where he says—
“when i came into the country, and being seated among silent trees, and meads, and hills, had all my time[137] in mine own hands, i resolved to spend it all, whatever it cost me, in the search of happiness, and to satiate that burning thirst which nature had enkindled in me from my youth. in which i was so resolute, that i chose rather to live upon ten pounds a year, and go in leather clothes, and feed upon bread and water, so that i might have all my time clearly to myself, than to keep many thousands per annum in an estate of life where my time would be devoured in care and labour. and god was so pleased to accept of that desire, that from that time to this, i have had all things plentifully provided for me, without any care at all, my very study of felicity making me more to prosper, than all the care in the whole world. so that through his blessing i live a free and a kingly life as if the world were turned again into eden, or much more, as it is at this day.”
traherne is remarkable in many ways, but for nothing more than for his mingling of man and nature in the celestial light of infancy. he begins, indeed, with the corn—the “orient and immortal wheat”—but he goes on to the dust and stones and gates of the town, and then to the old men and the young men and the children. but it was only on “some gilded cloud or flower” that vaughan saw “some shadows of eternity”; he longs to travel back to his childish time and to a city of the soul, but a shady city of palm-trees. wordsworth, though he says that “every common spirit” was “apparell’d in celestial light” in his early childhood, only mentions “meadow, grove and stream”; it is a tree, a single field, a flower, that reminds him of his loss; it is the fountains, meadows, hills and groves which he is anxious to assure of his lasting love. perhaps many people’s memories in this kind are of nature more than of men. even the[138] social lamb is at his deepest in recalling the child who was solitary in the great house and garden of blakesmoor. with some the reason for this priority of nature is that her solitudes are the most rich. the presence of other children and of adults is comparatively commonplace, and in becoming, permanently or temporarily, part of a community, the spirit makes some sacrifice. provided, then, that a child is happy and at ease in the solitude of nature, it is more open than in company to what is afterwards regarded as spiritual intercourse. but above all, our memories of nature are seldom or never flawed by the seeming triviality, the dislikes, the disgusts, the misunderstandings which give to memories of human society something of dulness and the commonplace. thinking of ourselves and other children, we may also think of things which make idealization impossible. thinking of ourselves in a great wood or field of flowers ever so long ago, it is hard not to exaggerate whatever give-and-take there was between the spirit of the child and the vast pure forces of the sun and the wind. in those days we did not see a tree as a column of a dark stony substance supporting a number of green wafers that live scarcely half a year, and grown for the manufacture of furniture, gates, and many other things; but we saw something quite unlike ourselves, large, gentle, of foreign tongue, without locomotion, yet full of the life and movement and sound of the leaves themselves, and also of the light, of the birds, and of the insects; and they were givers of a clear, deep joy that cannot be expressed. the brooding mind easily exalts this joy with the help of the disillusions and the knowledge and the folly and the thought of later years. a little time ago i heard of the death of one[139] whom i had once seemed to know well, had roamed and talked and been silent with him, and i should have gone on doing so had he not gone far away and died. and when i heard of his death i kept on recalling his face and figure to my mind under familiar conditions, in the old rooms, by the same river, under the same elms. as before, i saw him in the clothes which he used to wear, smiling or laughing or perhaps grim. but wherever he was and whatever his look, there was always something—the shadow of a shadow, but awful—in his face which made me feel that had i only seen it (and i felt that i ought to have seen it), in those days, i should have known he was to die early, with ambitions unfulfilled, far away.
and in this same way will the brain work in musing of earlier times. all that has come after deepens that candid brow of the child as a legend will darken a bright brook.
i once saw a girl of seven or eight years walking alone down a long grassy path in an old garden. on one hand rose a peaceful long slope of down; on the other, beyond the filberts, a high hedge shut out all but the pale blue sky, with white clouds resting on its lower mist like water-lilies on a still pool. turning her back to the gabled house and its attendant beeches, she walked upon the narrow level path of perfect grass. the late afternoon sun fell full upon her, upon her brown head and her blue tunic, and upon the flowers of the borders at either side, the lowly white arabis foaming wild, the pansy, the white narcissus, the yellow jonquil and daffodil, the darker smouldering wallflowers, the tall yellow leopard’s-bane, the tufts of honesty among the still dewy leaves of larkspur and columbine. but here and there,[140] as she walked, the light was dimmed by the clusters of cool white humming cherry-blossom hanging out of the hot sky. in front of her the cherry-trees seemed to meet and make a corridor of dark stems on either hand, paved green and white and gold, and roofed by milky white clouds that embowered the clear, wild warble of black-caps. farther on, the flowers ceased and the grass was shadowed by new-leaved beeches, and at length involved in an uncertain mist of trees and shadows of trees, and there the cuckoo cried. for the child there was no end to the path.
she walked slowly, at first picking a narcissus or two, or stooping to smell a flower and letting her hair fall over it to the ground; but soon she was content only to brush the tips of the flowers with her outstretched hands, or, rising on tiptoe, to force her head up amongst the lowest branches of cherry-bloom. then she did nothing at all but gravely walk on into the shadow and into eternity, dimly foreknowing her life’s days. she looked forward as one day she would look back over a broad sea of years, and in a drowsy, haunted gloom, full of the cuckoo’s note, saw herself going always on and on among the interlacing shadows of tree trunks and branches and joys and pleasures and pains and sorrows that must have an end, she knew not how. she stopped, not venturing into that strange future under the beeches. she stared into the mist, where hovered the phantoms of the big girl, the young woman, the lover ... which in turn she was to become. under the last cherry-tree something went out of her into the shadow, and those phantoms fed upon her blood as she stood still. but presently in the long beech corridors the gloom began to lighten and move and change[141] to a glinting blue that approached her. “pee-oi,” shouted the peacock, now close at hand; “pee-oi ... pee-oi,” as he passed her by, and turning, she also shouted “pee-oi,” frightening the cuckoo from the beeches, as she ran back among the flowers to the house.
what is to come of our nature-teaching in schools? what does it aim at? whence does it arise? in part, no doubt, it is due to our desire to implant information. it is all very well for the poet to laugh—
when science has discovered something more
we shall be happier than we were before;
but that is the road we are on at a high rate of speed. if we are fortunate we shall complete our inventory of the contents of heaven and earth by the time when the last man or woman wearing the last pair of spectacles has decided that, after all, it is a very good world and one which it is quite possible to live in. that, however, is an end which would not in itself be a sufficient inducement to push on towards it; still less can such a vision have set us upon the road.
three things, perhaps, have more particularly persuaded us to pay our fare and mount for somewhere— three things which are really not to be sharply distinguished, though it is convenient to consider them separately. first, the literary and philosophical movement imperfectly described as the romantic revival and return to nature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. poets and philosophers need private incomes, state porridge and what not, but literature and philosophy is a force, and for a century it has followed a course which was entered in the period of the french revolution. this literature shows man in something like his true[142] position in an infinite universe, and shows him particularly in his physical environment of sea, sky, mountain, rivers, woods, and other animals. second, the enormous, astonishing, perhaps excessive, growth of towns, from which the only immediate relief is the pure air and sun of the country, a relief which is sought by the urban multitudes in large but insufficient numbers and for too short a time. third, the triumph of science, of systematized observation. helped, no doubt, by the force of industrialism—to which it gave help in return—science has had a great triumph. at one time it was supposed to have fatally undermined poetry, romance, religion, because it had confused the minds of some poets and critics.
these three things considered, nature-study is inevitable. literature sends us to nature principally for joy, joy of the senses, of the whole frame, of the contemplative mind, and of the soul, joy which if it is found complete in these several ways might be called religious. science sends us to nature for knowledge. industrialism and the great town sends us to nature for health, that we may go on manufacturing efficiently, or, if we think right and have the power, that we may escape from it. but it would be absurd to separate joy, knowledge and health, except as we separate for convenience those things which have sent us out to seek for them; and nature-teaching, if it is good, will never overlook one of these three. joy, through knowledge, on a foundation of health, is what we appear to seek.
there is no longer any need to hesitate in speaking of joy in connection with schools, yet might we not still complain, as thomas traherne did two hundred and fifty years ago—
[143]
“there was never a tutor that did professly teach felicity, though that be the mistress of all other sciences. nor did any of us study these things but as aliena, which we ought to have studied as our enjoyments. we studied to inform our knowledge, but knew not for what end we so studied. and for lack of aiming at a certain end we erred in the manner.”
if we cannot somehow have a professor of felicity we are undone. perhaps nature herself will aid. her presence will certainly make for felicity by enlarging her pupil for a time from the cloistered life which modern towns and their infinite conveniences and servitudes encourage. tolstoy has said that in the open air “new relations are formed between pupil and teacher: freer, simpler and more trustful”; and certainly his walk on a winter night with his pupils, chatting and telling tales (see the school at yasnaya polyana, by leo tolstoy), leaves an impression of electrical activity and felicity in the young and old minds of that party which is hardly to be surpassed. and how more than by nature’s noble and uncontaminated forms can a sense of beauty be nourished? then, too, the reading of great poetry might well be associated with the study of nature, since there is no great poetry which can be dissevered from nature, while modern poets have all dipped their pens in the sunlight and wind and great waters, and appeal most to those who most resemble them in their loves. the great religious books, handed down to us by people who lived in closer intercourse with nature than many of us, cannot be understood by indoor children and adults. whether connected with this or that form of religion or not, whether taken as “intimations of immortality” or not, the most profound and longest remembered feelings are often those[144] derived from the contact of nature with the child’s mind.
of health, though there are exactly as many physicians as patients, it is unnecessary to say anything, except that one of the pieces of knowledge—i do not speak of information—which science has left to us is that movement and the working of the brain in pure air and sunlight is good for body and soul, especially if joy is aiding.
knowledge aids joy by discipline, by increasing the sphere of enjoyment, by showing us in animals, in plants, for example, what life is, how our own is related to theirs, showing us, in fact, our position, responsibilities and debts among the other inhabitants of the earth. pursued out of doors where those creatures, moving and still, have their life and their beauty, knowledge is real. the senses are invited there to the subtlest and most delightful training, and have before them an immeasurable fresh field, not a field like that of books, full of old opinions, but one with which every eye and brain can have new vital intercourse. it is open to all to make discoveries as to the forms and habits of things, and care should be taken to preserve the child from the most verbose part of modern literature, that which repeats in multiplied ill-chosen words stale descriptions of birds and flowers, etc., coupled with trivial fancies and insincere inventions. let us not take the study, the lamp and the ink out of doors, as we used to take wild life—having killed it and placed it in spirits of wine—indoors. let us also be careful to have knowledge as well as enthusiasm in our masters. enthusiasm alone is not enthusiasm. there must, at some stage, be some anatomy, classification, pure brain-work; the teacher must be the equal in[145] training of the mathematician, and he must be alive, which i never heard was a necessity for mathematicians. but not anatomy for all, perhaps; for some it might be impossible, and a study of colours, curves, perfumes, voices—a thousand things—might be substituted for it.
yet nature-study is not designed to produce naturalists, any more than music is taught in order to make musicians. if you produce nothing but naturalists you fail, and you will produce very few. the aim of study is to widen the culture of child and man, to do systematically what mark pattison tells us in his dry way he did for himself, by walking and outdoor sports, then—at the late age of seventeen—by collecting and reading such books as the natural history of selborne, and finally by a slow process of transition from natural history into “the more abstract poetic emotion ... a conscious and declared poetical sentiment and a devoted reading of the poets.” geology did not come for another ten years, “to complete the cycle of thought, and to give that intellectual foundation which is required to make the testimony of the eye, roaming over an undulating surface, fruitful and satisfying. when i came in after years to read the prelude i recognized, as if it were my own history which was being told, the steps by which the love of the country boy for his hills and moors grew into poetical susceptibility for all imaginative presentations of beauty in every direction.” the botany, etc., would naturally be related to the neighbourhood of school or home; for there is no parish or district of which it might not be said, as jefferies and thoreau each said of his own, that it is a microcosm. by this means the natural history may easily be linked to a preliminary study of hill and valley and stream, the posi[146]tions of houses, mills and villages, and the reasons for them, and the food supply, and so on, and this in turn leads on to—nay, involves—all that is most real in geography and history. the landscape retains the most permanent marks of the past, and a wise examination of it should evoke the beginnings of the majestic sentiment of our oneness with the future and the past, just as natural history should help to give the child a sense of oneness with all forms of life. to put it at its lowest, some such cycle of knowledge is needed if a generation that insists more and more on living in the country, or spending many weeks there, is not to be bored or to be compelled to entrench itself behind the imported amusements of the town.
