CHAPTER XXI

RIVERS AND DEATH The world of fact, no less than the world of abstract thought, is full of contradictions and unsolved antinomies. Here is one such contradiction or antinomy. Moving water, it has been shown, is suggestive of life. But over against it we find a suggestion of death. Indeed there has been a widely diffused belief in a river of death--a striking foil to the inspiring mysticism of the river of life. The old-world mythology taught, in varying forms, but with underlying unity of concept, that there is a river, or gulf, which must be crossed by the departing soul on its way to the land of the departed. Evidently the extension of the original thought to cover its seeming opposite has a basis in the nature of things. Its most elaborate presentment is in the ancient myths of the nether regions and of the seven streams that watered them--from Styx that with nine-fold weary wanderings bounded Tartarus, to where "Far off from these, a slow and silent stream, Lethe the river of oblivion runs." Nor has Christianity disdained to adapt the idea. Bunyan, for example, brings his two pilgrims within sight of the heavenly City. "Now I saw further that between them and the gate was a river; but there was no bridge, and the river was very deep. At the sight therefore of this river, the pilgrims were much stunned; but the men that went with them said, you must go through or you cannot come at the gate." What suggestive power has the river to induce this more sombre train of reflection? Surely that embodied in the old proverb-- Follow the river and you will come to the sea. Clough, in his little poem, "The Stream of Life," concludes with a note of sadness, almost of despair: "O end to which all currents tend, Inevitable sea, To which we flow, what do we know, What shall we guess of thee? A roar we hear upon thy shore, As we our course fulfil; Scarce we divine a sun will shine And be above us still." The rushing rapid and the plunging waterfall have an influence all their own in rousing intuitions of more than human life and power. The dazzling and dashing rainbows of spray appeal to the sense of sight--the internal rhythmic sound from the lighter tones which are flung around like notes from a Ström Karl's magic harp, or the alluring song of a Lorelei, to the thunder of a Niagara, nature's diapason sounding the lowest note that mortal ears can catch, appeal to the sense of hearing--and underlying all is a vague sense of irresistible power. How touching, how profoundly true, the story in "Eckehard" of the little lad and his sister who wandered off until they came to the Rheinfal. There, gazing at the full sweep of that magnificent fall the little fellow throws into the swirling emerald of the waters at his feet a golden goblet, as an offering to the God whom he felt to be so near. Unconsciously he was a natural mystic. Movement, sound, and colour combined to produce in him, what it should produce in all, a sense of immanent Reality, self-moving, self-sustained. And yet even a waterfall may suggest far other thoughts--a downward course from the freshness of the uplands of youth to the broadening stream of manhood declining towards old age and the final plunge. The fall itself would thus convey vague feelings of loss of power and vigour--a loss that gathers speed as it approaches the end. So in Campbell's well-known "River of Life": "When joys have lost their bloom and breath And life itself is vapid, Why, as we reach the Falls of Death, Feel we its course more rapid? " If so sad a train of reflections can be stimulated by the rapids and the falls of rivers, how much more so by their ending in the ocean! Old age and death can hardly fail to assert themselves in the minds of those who sail down some noble river and meditate: "As the banks fade dimmer away, As the stars come out, and the night wind Brings up the stream Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea." Granting that the river's merging in the sea suggests the close of life as we know it here, must we also grant that the natural-mystic must give way to a partial, if not an absolute, tendency to pessimism? That a natural-mystic should be a pessimist would seem to be an anomaly. For he holds that he can hold living communion with the Real; and such communion would carry with it, surely, a strong hope, if not a conviction, that change in material form cannot affect the inner being, call it the spiritual essence, of which that form is a particular manifestation. Deny that nature has a soul and optimism becomes a ghastly mockery. Believe that nature and man are linked together as kindred forms of spiritual existence, and then, though there will not indeed be formal proof of immortality, there will be intuitive trust in the future. What the implications of such a trust may be is for the various philosophies and theologies to determine; but taken at its lowest value, it would secure a man from pessimism. In the light of these general observations, let us consider the particular case now presented. The river is merged in the sea--it is absorbed--its existence as a river is terminated. But the "substance" of its being remains; diffused in a vaster whole, but not lost. What is this vaster whole? If we regard it as an Absolute, there may perchance be ground for pessimism. If, with certain scientists, we stop short at the conservation of energy, there is nothing ahead but a blank. But if we hold to the conservation of values, as at least a parallel to this conservation of energy, we are impelled to hold also to the conservation of all that is ultimate in individualities. For values imply modes of being which can allow of the experience of values as such. And the Nature-Mystic's direct communion with his environment is seen to be one mode by which the individual centre of life learns to live increasingly in the life of the Whole--the total Reality. There is, then, no absorption where values are conserved, but an ever richer content of experience, an ever deepening insight into its significance, and an ever keener enjoyment of the material it affords. As a specific case of an optimistic creed based on an intuition of the essential kinship of all things, it is profitable to study the poetry of a Sufi mystic of the thirteenth century. How delicate the thought enshrined in the following lines: "When man passed from the plant to the animal state, He had no remembrance of his state as a plant, Except the inclination he felt for the world of plants, Especially at the time of spring and sweet flowers." What is this but an anticipation of Wordsworth's "Daffodils," or even of his "Ode on Immortality"? The concepts and phraseology of the transmigration theory are merely temporary forms in which a deep thought clothes itself: at any rate, they are not necessary adjuncts of the thought; nor do they preclude sympathy with the following condensed statement of this same mystic's world-philosophy: "I died from the mineral and became a plant; I died from the plant and reappeared as an animal; I died from the animal and became a man. Wherefore then should I fear? When did I grow less by dying? Next time I shall die from the man That I may grow the wings of angels. From the angel, too, I must advance. All things shall perish save His face." With an insight like unto this, a mystic need not fear because the river flows into the sea! In spite of appearances, the idea of life can still reign supreme. The river of death embodies a true insight--but of a transition only, not of an abiding state. We die to live more fully. This sense of continuity in the flow of the stream of life, and of the abidingness of its existence through all vicissitudes has been strikingly expressed by Jefferies. He is sitting on the grass-grown tumulus where some old warrior was buried two thousand years ago, and his thought slips back over the interval. "Two thousand years being a second to the soul could not cause its extinction. . . . Resting by the tumulus, the spirit of the man who had been interred there was to me really alive, and very close. This was quite natural and simple as the grass waving in the wind, the bees humming, and the lark's songs. Only by the strongest effort of the mind could I understand the idea of extinction; that was supernatural, requiring a miracle; the immortality of the soul natural, like the earth. Listening to the sighing of the grass I felt immortality as I felt the beauty of the summer morning, and I thought beyond immortality, of other conditions, more beautiful than existence, higher than immortality." Let Morris sum up the thoughts and emotions aroused by the mystical influences of water flowing onward to join the ocean. "Flow on, O mystical river, flow on through desert and city; Broken or smooth flow onward into the Infinite sea. Who knows what urges thee on? . . . Surely we know not at all, but the cycle of Being is eternal, Life is eternal as death, tears are eternal as joy. As the stream flowed it will flow; though 'tis sweet, yet the sea will be bitter; Foul it with filth, yet the Deltas grow green and the ocean is clear. Always the sun and the winds will strike its broad surface and gather Some purer drops from its depths to float in the clouds of the sky;-- Soon these shall fall once again, and replenish the full-flowing river. Roll round then, O mystical circle! flow onward, ineffable stream!"