CHAPTER XXXII

EARTH, MOUNTAINS, AND PLAINS And thus the three great nature-philosophers of the old world, Thales, Anaximenes, and Heracleitus, have been our guides, so to speak, in surveying the most striking phenomena of water, air, and fire. The fourth member of the ancient group of "elements" has received but incidental treatment. Obviously it could hardly be otherwise, especially within the limits which such a study as this imposes. The varied and wondrous forms of vegetable and animal life have likewise made but brief and transient appearances; but this omission has been due to a definite intention expressed at the outset. It may nevertheless be well, before concluding, to cast a glance over the rich provinces which still lie open to the nature-mystic for further discovery and research. The more striking features of the landscape have always arrested attention and stimulated the mystic sense. The peculiar influence of heights has been noted at an earlier stage, though but cursorily. Much might be said of the enormous effect of mountain scenery. The most direct form of nature-feeling finds expression in Scott and Byron; and the description of crags, ravines, peaks and gorges, bulks largely in their writings. Typical are these lines from "Manfred": "Ye crags upon whose extreme edge I stand, and on the torrent's brink beneath Behold the tall pines dwindled as to shrubs In dizziness of distance." or Shelley with his "Eagle-baffling mountain Black, wintry, dead, unmeasured, without herb, Insect, or beast, or shape, or sound of life." Indeed there are few poets, even those who are chiefly concerned with man and his doings, who do not often turn to mountain scenery at least for similes. And it could not be otherwise; for the immanent ideas here manifested are self-assertive in character and specially rich in number and variety. As it has been well expressed, nature's pulse here seems to beat more quickly. In olden days the high places of the earth associated themselves with myths of gods and Titans. Fully representative of the world of to-day, Tennyson asks: "Hast thou no voice, O Peak, That standest high above all?" And his answer turns on the mystic bonds that bind the deep and the height into a cycle of interdependent activities. "The deep has power on the height, And the height has power on the deep. A deep below the deep And a height beyond the height! Our hearing is not hearing, And our seeing is not sight." Or Morris gives the mysticism a more personal turn: "Oh, snows so pure! oh, peaks so high! I lift to you a hopeless eye, I see your icy ramparts drawn Between the sleepers and the dawn; I see you when the sun has set Flush with the dying daylight yet. . . . Oh, snows so pure! oh, peaks so high! I shall not reach you till I die." And now that modern geology is revealing to us more and more of the origin and structure of the mountain ranges of the world, and telling us more and more of the wondrous materials which go to their building, the field for mysticism is being widely extended. Different, but hardly less powerful, is the influence of hill scenery--whether they "in the distance lie Blue and yielding as the sky," or whether their gentle slopes are climbed and their delicate beauties seen close at hand. As Ruskin has averred, even the simplest rise can suggest the mountain; but it also has a mystic charm of its own, complementary to that of the sheltered vale, which is exquisite alike in its natural simplicity, and in its response to the labours of man, where some "kneeling hamlet drains The chalice of the grapes of God." But though the influence of mountains, hills, ravines, and vales, is obvious even to the superficial enquirer, it should not obscure for us the very real, if less potent influence of lowlands, plains, and deserts. More especially subtle in its effect upon the spirit of man, is the loneliness of wildernesses, the prairies, the pampas, the tundras, the Saharas. The Greek Pan was essentially a god of the wild, unploughed surfaces of the earth. Hence, also, the frequent conjunction of the wilderness and silent meditation and ascetic discipline. Schopenhauer suggests that one secret of the spell of mountain scenery is the permanence of the sky-line. Shall we say that one secret of the solitary place is the turning in of the human spirit upon itself because of the sameness of the permanent sky-line? The effect of scenery upon religion was treated of in illustration of the general principle of Nature Mysticism--the kinship of man and his physical environment. No less marked has been the effect of scenery upon art. The theme is now somewhat well worn, but its true significance is seldom apprehended. For if art is concerned with the realm of the ideal, or rather, perhaps, with the real in its more ideal aspects, then it follows that whatever has an influence on art has an influence on the spiritual development of the people among whom any particular mode or school of art may-establish itself. An interesting phase of such influence is found in Geikie's suggestion as to the presence of the humorous element in the myths and legends of northern Europe. "The grotesque contours" (he says) "of many craggy slopes where, in the upstanding pinnacles of naked rock, an active imagination sees forms of men and of animals in endless whimsical repetitions, may sometimes have suggested the particular form of the ludicrous which appears in the popular legend. But the natural instinct of humour which saw physical features in a comic light, and threw a playful human interest over the whole face of nature, was a distinctively. Teutonic characteristic." There opens out here an unexplored region for original research. Taking the nature-mystic's mode of experience as a basis for enquiry, how far is the comic a purely subjective affair, concerned only, as Bergson contends, with man, and only found in external phenomena by virtue of their reflecting his affairs; or how far has it a place of its own in the universe at large? To conclude this slight sketch of the Nature Mysticism of the solid earth, let us bring together an ancient and a recent expression of the emotion these purely terrestrial phenomena can arouse. There is one of the Homeric hymns which is addressed to "the Earth, Mother of All." Its beginning and its ending are as follows (in Shelley's translation): "O universal mother, who dost keep From everlasting thy foundations deep, Eldest of things, Great Earth, I sing of thee. . . . Mother of gods, thou wife of starry Heaven, Farewell! be thou propitious." Is there not a living continuity between the emotional element in that grand old hymn and the strong full modern sentiment in this concluding stanza of Brown's "Alma Mater"? "O mother Earth, by the bright sky above thee, I love thee, O, I love thee! So let me leave thee never, But cling to thee for ever, And hover round thy mountains, And flutter round thy fountains, And pry into thy roses fresh and red; And blush in all thy blushes, And flush in all thy flushes, And watch when thou art sleeping, And weep when thou art weeping, And be carried with thy motion, As the rivers and the ocean, As the great rocks and the trees are-- O mother, this were glorious life, This were not to be dead. O mother Earth, by the bright sky above thee, I love thee, O, I love thee! "