CHAPTER XIX

BROOKS AND STREAMS There is a striking passage in Tylor's "Primitive Culture" which will admirably serve as an introduction to this chapter and the one which is to follow, on "Rivers and Waterfalls." "In those moments of the civilised man's life when he casts off hard dull science, and returns to childhood's fancy, the world-old book of nature is open to him anew. Then the well-worn thoughts come back fresh to him, of the stream's life that is so like his own; once more he can see the rill leap down the hill-side like a child, to wander playing among the flowers; or can follow it as, grown to a river, it rushes through a mountain gorge, henceforth in sluggish strength to carry heavy burdens across the plain. In all that the water does, the poet's fancy can discern its personality of life. It gives fish to the fisher, and crops to the husbandman; it swells in fury and lays waste the land; it grips the bather with chill and cramp, and holds with inexorable grasp its drowning victim. . . . What ethnography has to teach of that great element of the religion of mankind, the worship of well and lake, brook and river, is simply this--that what is poetry to us was philosophy to early man; that to his mind water acted not by laws of force, but by life and will; that the water-spirits of primeval mythology are as souls which cause the water's rush and rest, its kindness and its cruelty; that lastly man finds, in the beings with such power to work him weal or woe, deities with a wider influence over his life, deities to be feared and loved, to be prayed to and praised and propitiated with sacrificial gifts." Tylor has here given a masterly résumé 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 analyses, 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 God; Calling me to pre-ordered circumstance 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 God"--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 pass To where, O God, Thou lov'st to mass 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.