CHAPTER XIII

POETRY AND NATURE MYSTICISM What a charm the nature deities of Greece and Rome can still exercise! How large the place they still occupy in poetry, art, and general culture! At times some of our moderns are tempted to look back with a very real measure of regret to the golden age of mythology, feeling that in comparison the present is often sadly dull and sordid. Wordsworth's great sonnet gives classical expression to this mood, and rises to a white heat of indignation: "Great God! I'd rather be A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn,-- So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." It may be said that the poet is carried away by the feeling of the moment. It finds expression, however, more calmly, though no less decidedly, in a less well-known passage: "O fancy, what an age was that for song! That age, when not by laws inanimate, As men believed, the waters were impelled, The air controlled, the stars their courses held; But element and orb on _acts_ did wait Of Powers endued with visible form instinct, With will, and to their work by passion linked." Clearly mythology and nature-poetry are closely allied though centuries come between: they breathe the same air though "creeds outworn" have yielded place to deeper faiths. And we are driven to ask--Is poetry in its turn to go?--poetry, at any rate, of the old, simple, direct sort? Reflective reason is asserting itself: critical methods play havoc with the spontaneous creations of imagination. Coleridge, in one of his moods, would almost persuade us so. In his "Piccolomini" Max is conversing with the Countess: "The intelligible forms of ancient poets, The fair humanities of old religion, The power, the beauty and the majesty, That had their haunts in dale, or piny mountain, Or forest by slow stream, or pebbly spring, Or chasms and wat'ry depths; all these have vanished; They live no longer in the faith of reason." And yet Coleridge did not allow that the outlook was wholly sad. His young soldier continues: "But still the heart doth need a language, still Doth the old instinct bring back the old names." . . . and even at this day 'Tis Jupiter who brings whate'er is great, And Venus who brings everything that's fair." No, poetry is not dead, and never will die. Certain stages in human progress may favour its spontaneity more than others-- critical reflection may cloud over the naive and fresh directness of experience--but behind each natural phenomenon is the immanent idea, the phase of cosmic will and consciousness, which science, and logic and critical analysis can never exhaust. The intuition has its rights as well as the syllogism, and will always ultimately assert them. Whereas science reduces the world to mechanism, poetry intuits and struggles to express its inner life; and since this inner life is inexhaustible, poetry is immortal. Emerson seized upon this truth with characteristic keenness of perception allied with feeling. "For Nature beats in perfect time And rounds with rhyme her every rune, Whether she work in land or sea, Or hide underground her alchemy. Thou canst not wave thy staff in air, Or dip thy paddle in the lake, But it carves the bow of beauty there, And the ripples in rhymes the oar forsake. The wood is wiser far than thou; The wood and the wave each other know Not unrelated, unaffected, But to each thought and thing allied Is perfect Nature's every part, Rooted in the mighty heart." And again in his "Ode to Beauty," he rejoices in the "Olympian bards who sung Divine Ideas below, Which always find us young And always keep us so." Thank Heaven, we have not yet come to think that the highest form of wisdom is enshrined in the _sesquipedalia monstra_ of chemical formulae, still less in the extreme abstractions of mathematics. Not that such formulae have not a beauty, and even a Mysticism of their own; their harmfulness comes from the exclusiveness of their claims when they are advanced as an adequate description (sometimes explanation!) of existence at large and of life in particular. The biological formulas, based on mathematics, at which Le Dantec, for instance, has arrived, if taken at their author's valuation, and if consistently applied, would make the sublimest poetry to be greater folly than the babble of a child. The nature-mystic may, or may not, allow them a relative value according as he considers them to be valid or invalid abstractions from observed facts; but he knows that the most valid of them are exceedingly limited in their scope and superficial in their bearing: and it remains a standing wonder to him that any trained intellect can fail to realise their miserable inadequacy, in view of the full rich current of living experience. One of the chief merits of genuine nature-poetry is that it keeps us in close and constant touch with sense experience, and at the same time brings home nature's inner life and meaning. It is not a mere string of metaphors and symbols based on accidental associations of ideas, but an expression and interpretation of definite sensations and intuitions which result from the action of man's physical environment upon his deepest and most delicate faculties. "High art" (says Myers) "is based upon unprovable intuitions; and of all arts it is poetry whose intuitions take the brightest glow, and best illumine the mystery without us from the mystery within." But more especially, poetry is essentially animistic. It produces its characteristic effect by creating in the mind the sensuous images which best stimulate the mind to grasp the immanent idea, and it presents those images as instinct with life and movement--sometimes it goes so far as to personify them. This is what Matthew Arnold meant when he declared poetry to be "simple, sensuous, passionate." Coleridge has a good illustration (quoted by Nisbet). He observes that the lines: "Behold yon row of pines that shorn and bowed Bend from the sea-blast, seen at twilight eve"-- contain little or no poetry if rearranged as a sentence in a book of topography or description of a tour. But the same image, he says, rises into the semblance of poetry if thus conveyed: "Yon row of black and visionary pines By twilight glimpse discerned! Mark how they flee From the fierce sea-blast, all their tresses wild Streaming before them." The difference in the two presentations consists in this, that in the second of them there is a suggestion of life and movement which is lacking in the first. But why the different effect upon the mind? Nisbet answers--"the visual and motor centres contribute to the creation of the image"--an answer admirably typical of the fashionable psychology of the day, not necessarily wrong in itself, but so curiously incomplete! Nisbet holds that man himself is a machine, and thus could not easily go farther-- especially as his own machinery evidently would not work any farther. The nature-mystic begins at the other end. He holds that even the inorganic world is more than machinery--that it is instinct with life and meaning. When, therefore, life and movement are attributed to seemingly inert or motionless objects, there is a responsive thrill caused by the subconscious play of primitive intuitions that are based on the facts of existence. Spirit realises more vividly than in normal experience that it is in touch with spirit. Contrast with the psychological dictum the proud claim advanced by Emerson. "The gods talk in the breath of the woods, They talk in the shaken pine, And fill the reach of the old sea-shore With melody divine. And the poet who overhears Some random word they say Is the fated man of men, Whom the ages must obey." There are two claims presented here--one directly, the other indirectly. The direct claim is that there are seers and interpreters who can catch the mystic words that nature utters. The indirect is that the general mass of humanity have the capacity for sharing the experiences of their poet leaders. The one class are endowed to an exceptional degree with receptivity; the other are also receptive, but are dependent on those who can give expression to the intuitions which are, though in varying degrees, a possession common to humanity at large. As Sir Lewis Morris puts it: "All men are poets if they might but tell The dim ineffable changes which the sight Of natural beauty works on them." He, too, recognises the mediating function of the poet. "We are dumb, Save that from finer souls at times may rise Once in an age, faint inarticulate sounds, Low halting tones of wonder, such as come From children looking on the stars, but still With power to open to the listening ear The Fair Divine Unknown, and to unseal Heaven's inner gates before us evermore." And what is this but to claim for the mass of men, in varying but definite degrees, a capacity for the experiences of the nature-mystic? Poetry and Nature Mysticism are linked together in an imperishable life so long as man is man and the world is the world. It will have been apparent that in what has been said about the relation of poetry to science, there has been no shadow of hostility to science as such, but only to the exclusive claims so often preferred on its behalf. Let a French philosopher of the day conclude this chapter by a striking statement of the relationship that should exist between these seemingly incompatible modes of mental activity. In a recent number of the "Revue Philosophique," Joussain writes as follows: "On peut ainsi se demander si le savant, à mesure qu'il tend vers une connaissance plus complète du réel, n'adopte pas, en un certain sens, le point de vue propre au poète. Boileau disait de la physique de Descartes qu'elle avait coupé la gorge à la poésie. La raison en est qu'elle s'en tenait au pur mécanisme et ne definissait la matière que par l'étendue et le mouvement. Mais la physique de Descartes n'a pu subsister. Et, avec la gravitation universelle que Leibniz considérait à juste titre, du point de vue cartésien, comme une _qualité occulte_, avec les attractions, les répulsions, les affinités chimiques, avec la théorie de l'évolution, la science tend de plus en plus à pénétrer la vie réele des choses. Elle se rapproche, bon gré, mal gré, de la metaphysique et de la poésie, en prenant une conscience plus profonde de la force et du devenir. C'est qu'au fond la pensée humaine est une, quelle que soit la diversité des objets auxquels elle s'applique, art, science, poésie, métaphysique, répondant, chacun à sa façon au même désir, chacun reflétant dans la conscience humaine les multiples aspects de la vie innombrable."