NATURE'S IMMORTALITY
IN the days when days were fable, before the grim Tartar fled from Cathay,* or the hardy Goth from the shafted Tartar; before the hardy Goth rolled on the hot Kelt, or the hot Kelt on Italy; before the wolf-cubs lolled tongues of prey, or Rhodian galleys sheered the brine, an isle there was which has passed into the dreams of men, itself
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Ere the fierce Tartar fled Cathay,
The stark Goth shafted Tartary, The fiery Kelt the Gothic fray, —
And the Kelt rolled on Italy; Ere the wolf-cubs lolled tong:ue8 of prey,
Or Rhodian galleys sheered the sea, An isle there was — where is' t to-day? — *
The Muses caDed it Sicily. Was it, and is it not? — Aye me, Where's Eden, or Taprobane?
Where now does old Simztbus flow?
You take a map (great Poesy, Have they mapped Heaven 1) and thereon show —
What.' — the dust-heap of Italy 1 The Ausoaian mainland from its toe
Spurns it ^ide contemptuously. You point to it, you man that know,
And this, you say, is Sicily. I know not how the thing may be — It is not Sicily to me 1
-And when the Muses talked, they named it Sicily. Was it, and is it not? Alas, where's Eden, or Taprobane? Where flows Alpheus now? You take a map (great Poetry! have they mapped Heaven?) and show me — what? The dust-heap of Italy; a thing spurned contemptuously from the toe of the Ausonian mainland; you point to it, you man of knowledge, and this, you say, is Sicily. You may be right, I know not; but it is not Sicily to me. • Yet that olden Sicily could not, cannot pass. Dew but your eyes with the euphrasy of fancy, and purge your ears with the poet's singing; then, to the ear within the ear, and the eye within the eye, shall come the green of the ever-vernal forests, the babble of the imperishable streams. For within this life of ache and dread, like the greenness in the rain, like the solace in the tear, we may have each of us a dreamful Sicily. And since we can projeft it where we wull, for me, seeking those same ' sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing,' for me perchance, Sicily may ba Little Cloddington. What balm, then, for hurt minds has my Sicily? In the old Sicily, ' Shepherds piped on oaten straws,' and the inhabitants were entirely worthy of their surroundings. But that cultivating influence of beauty which our aesthetes preach has somehow broken down in the case of Little Cloddington, and one begins to have an uneasy suspicion that the constant imbibing of beauty, like the constant imbibing of wine, dulls the brain which it is supposed to stimulate. Yet, to commune with the heart of Nature — this has been the accredited mode since the days of Wordsworth. Nature, Coleridge assures us, has ministrations by which she heals her erring and distempered child; and it is notorious how effe£lual were her ministrations in the case of Coleridge.
Well, she is a very lovely Nature In this Sicily of mine; yet I confess a heinous doubt whether rustic stolidity may not be a secret effluence from her. You speak, and you think she answers you. It is the echo of your own voice. You think you hear the throbbing of her heart, and it is the throbbing of your own. I do not believe that Nature has a heart; and I susped that, Hke many another beauty, she has been credited with a heart because of her face. You go to her, this great, beautiful, tranquil, self-satisfied Nature, and you look for — sympathy? Yes; the sympathy of a cat, sitting by the fire and blinking at you. What, indeed, does she want with a heart or brain? She knows that she is beautiful, and she is placidly content with the knowledge; she was made to be gazed on, and she fulfils the end of her creation. After a careful anatomization of Nature, I pronounce that she has nothing more than a lymphatic vesicle. She cannot give what she does not need; and if we were but similarly organized, we should be independent of sympathy. A man cannot go straight to his objeds, because he has a heart; he cannot eat, drink, sleep, make money, and be satisfied, because he has a heart. It is a mischievous thing, and wise men accordingly take the earliest opportunity of giving it away.
Yet the thing is, after all, too deep for jest. What is this heart of Nature, if it exist at all? Is it, according to the conventional doftrine derived from Wordsworth and Shelley, a heart of love, according with the heart of man, and stealing out to him through a thousand avenues of mute sympathy? No; in this sense I repeat seriously what I said lightly: Nature has no heart.
I sit now, alone and melancholy, with that melancholv which comes to all of us when the waters of sad knowledge have left their ineffaceable delta in the soul. As I write, a calm, faint-tinted evening sky sinks like a nestward bird to its sleep. At a little distance is a dark wall of fir-wood; while close at hand a small group of larches rise like funeral plumes against that tranquil sky, and seem to say, * Night cometh.' They alone are in harmony with me. All else speaks to me of a beautiful, peaceful world in which I have no part. And did I go up to yonder hill, and behold at my feet the spacious amphitheatre of hill-girt wood and mead, overhead the mighty aerial velarium, I should feel that my hum-an sadness was a higher and deeper and wider thing than all. O Titan Nature! a petty race, which has dwarfed its spirit in dwellings, and bounded it in selfish shallows of art, may find you too vast, may shrink from you into its earths: but though you be a very large thing, and my heart a very little thing, yet Titan as you are, my heart is too great for you. Coleridge— speaking, not as Wordsworth had taught him to speak, but from his own bitter experience— said the truth:
0 Lady! we receive but what we give, And in our life alone does Nature live:
Ours is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!
1 may not hope from outward forms to win
The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
The truth, in relation to ourselves; though not the truth with regard to Nature absolutely. Absolute Nature lives not in our life, nor yet is lifeless, but lives in the life of God: and in so far, and so far merely, as man himself lives in that life, does he come into sympathy with Nature, and Nature with him. She is God's daughter, who stretches her hand only to her Father's friends. Not Shelley, not Wordsworth himself, ever drew so close to the heart of Nature as did the Seraph of Assisi, who was close to the Heart of God.
Yet higher, yet further let us go. Is this daughter of God mortal; can her foot not pass the grave? Is Nature, as men tell us, but a veil concealing the Eternal,
A fold Of Heaven and earth across His Face, '-.
which we must rend to behold that Face? Do our eyes indeed close for ever on the beauty of earth when they open on the beauty of Heaven? I think not so; I would fain beguile even death itself with a sweet fantasy, if it be no more than fantasy: I believe that in Heaven is earth. Plato's do6lrine of Ideals, as I conceive, laid its hand upon the very breast of truth, yet missed her breathing. For beauty — such is my faith — is beauty for eternity.
If the Trinity were not revealed, I should nevertheless be induced to suspect the existence of such a master-key by the trinities through which expounds itself the spirit of man. Such a trinity is the trinity of beauty — Poetry, Art, Music. Although its office is to create beauty, I call it the trinity of beauty, because it is the property of earthly as of the heavenly beauty to create everything to its own image and hkeness. Painting is the eye of passion. Poetry is the voice of passion. Music is the throbbing of her heart. For all beauty is passionate, though it may be a passionless passion. So absolutely are these three the distinft manifestations of a single essence that, in considering the general operation of any one of them we consider the general operation of all; and hence, as most easily understood because most definitely objective in its result, I take Art. Not the so-called Art which aims at the mere photographic representation of external objeds, for that can only reproduce; but the creative Art which alone is one essence with Poetry and Music.
In the artist's creation there are two distin6l stages or processes, the second of which is but a revelation of the first. There is the ideal and the image of the ideal, the painting. To be more exa6l I should distinguish an intermediate stage, only theoretically separable in order of process from the first stage, with which it is, or may be, praftically synchronous. There is first the ideal, secondly the mental image of the ideal (i.e., the pi6lure of it in form and colour formed on the mental eye*), thirdly the external or objeftive reproduftioh of the mental image in material form and colour, in pigments. Now of these three stages, which is the most perfeft creation, and therefore the most beautiful? They lessen in perfection as they become material; the ideal is the most perfeft; the mental image less perfe6l; the objective image, the painting, least perfeft.
' But,' you say, ' this ideal is an abstract thing, without real existence.' The commonest of errors, that the ideal is the unreal; and the more pernicious because founded on a truth. It is impossible to speak here with the distinctions and modifications necessary for accuracy; but generally I may say this: — The
• On the mental eye. — I use the popular expression. In reality this Image is as really, as physically (I do not say as vividly), seen as is a ray of Sunlight. It is therefore material, not spiritual. But this is not the place for a physiological discussion, and the popular phrase subserves my object, if it does not subserve accuracy.
reality of the artist's ideal is not the reality of, e.g., a star; for one is man's creation, the other diredly from God. Nor is the reality of the artist's ideal the same in kind as the reality of its objecffive image, of the painting. The one exists externally, and the senses are cognizant of it; the other within his spirit, and the senses can take no account of it. Yet both are real, aftual. If there be an advantage, it is not on the side of the painting; for in no true sense can the image be more real than tlie thing imaged. I admit that in man the ideal has not the continuous vividness of its obje6live image. The ideal may be dimmed or even forgotten; though I hold that in such a case it is merely put away from spiritual cognizance as the painting might be put out of physical sight, and that it still exists in the soul. But were the artist omniscient, so that he could hold all things in perpetual and simultaneous contemplation, the ideal would have an existence as unintermittent as that of the painting, and, unlike that of the painting, coeval with the artist's soul.
In Poetry and Music the same thing holds good. In both there is the conception (a term perhaps less suggesting unreality than the term ' ideal ') with its material expression; and between these two stages a mental expression which the material expression cannot realize. The mental expression in its turn cannot represent all the qualities of the conception; and the conception, whose essence is the same in all three arts, has a subtlety which the expressional union of all three could not adequately render, because expression never fully expresses. Yet (and it is on this that I insist) the conception is an a6hially existent thing, an existence within an existence, real as the spirit in which it exists, the reality of which the objective reahty is but the necessarily less perfect image, and transcending in beauty the image as body is transcended by soul. Can it be adequately revealed by one mortal to another? No. Could it be so revealed? Yes. If the spirit of man were untrammelled by his body, conception could be communicated by the interpenetration of soul and soul.
Let us apply this.* The Supreme Spirit, creating, reveals His conceptions to man in the material forms of Nature. There is no necessity here for any intermediate process, because nobody obstru61:s the free passage of conception into expression. An ideal wakes in the Omnipotent Painter; and straightway over the eternal dikes rush forth the flooding tides of night, the blue of Heaven ripples into stars; Nature, from Alp to Alpine flower, rises lovely with the betrayal of the Divine thought. An ideal wakes in the Omnipotent Poet; and there
• Be it observed that I am not trying to explain anything, metaphpically or otherwise, and consequently my language is not to be taken metaphysically. I am merely endeavouring analogically to suggest an idea. And the whole thing is put forward as a fantasy, which the writer likc3 to think may be a dim shadowing of truth.
chimes the rhythm of an ordered universe. An ideal wakes in the Omnipotent Musician; and Creation vibrates with the harmony, from the palpitating throat of the bird to the surges of His thunder as they burst in fire along the roaring strand of Heaven; nay, as Coleridge says,
The silent air Is Music slumbering on her instrument.
Earth]}' beauty is but heavenly beauty taking to itself flesh. Yet, though this objedlive presentment of the Divine Ideal be relatively more perfeft than any human presentment of a human ideal, though it be the most flawless of possible embodiments; yet is even the Divine embodiment transcendently inferior to the Divine Ideal.
Within the Spirit Who is Heaven lies Earth; for within Him rests the great conception of Creation. There are the woods, the streams, the meads, the hills, the seas that we have known in life, but breathing indeed ' an ampler ether, a diviner air,' themselves beautiful with a beauty which, for even the highest created spirit utterly to apprehend were ' swooning destruftion.'
Yet there the soul shall enter which hath earned That privilege by virtue.
As in the participation of human spirits some are naturally more qualified for interpenetration than others — in ordinary language, as one man is more able than his fellows to enter into another's mind, so in proportion as each of us by virtue has become kin to God, will he penetrate the Supreme Spirit, and identify himself with the Divine Ideals. There is the immortal Sicily, there the Elysian Fields, there all visions, all fairness engirdled with the Eternal Fair. This, my faith, is laid up in my bosom.