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 theyareabstractions. 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 brookIn the leafy month of June,That to the sleeping woods all nightSingeth 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 viewThee, and not thee thyself, I would not doLike Grecian artists, give the human cheeksChannels for tears; no Naiad shouldst thou be,—Have neither limbs, feet, feathers, joints, nor hairs;It seems the Eternal Soul is clothed in theeWith 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 bornThe 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 chanceTo fill my natural course;With mathematic rodEconomising God;Calling me to pre-ordered circumstanceNor suffering me to danceOver the pleasant gravel,With music solacing my travel—With music, and the baby buds that tossIn 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 passTo where, O God,Thou lov'st to massThy 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.
CHAPTER XX
RIVERS AND LIFE
A river is but a larger brook. And yet by virtue of its volume, it manifests features which are peculiarly its own, and exerts influences which have not alone affected individual moods and imaginings, but often profoundly modified and moulded the destinies of peoples and civilisations. The two outstanding instances are the Nile and the Ganges.
The Nile has attracted to itself, from the dawn of history to the present day, a peculiar share of wonder and renown. It is the longest river of its continent—possibly of the world; and the exploration of its sources is only just completed. It flows through a limestone country over which, save for its beneficent action, would drive the parched sands of the Libyan desert. Its periodic inundations, with their rich deposits of alluvial soil, repel the encroaching wastes, and solve the problem of the food supply. Egypt has with good reason been called "the gift of the Nile."
This river therefore possesses in a marked degree all the mystic influences of moving water, and emphasises them by physical and historical features of exceptional import. What wonder that it has had so direct a bearing on the spiritual development of the people on its banks, and that it entered into the very texture of their lives! It was, for the Egyptian, pre-eminently the sacred river—deemed to be one of the primitive essences—ranked with those highest deities who were not visible objects of adoration. As a form of God "he cannot (says an ancient hymnist) be figured in stone; he is not to be seen in the sculptured images upon which men place the united crowns of the North and the South, furnished with uraei." The honour thus conferred was but commensurate with the blessings he brought. For in what would have been a valley of death he was the sole source and sustainer of life. A further quotation from the beautiful hymn just mentioned will indicate the affection and mystic emotion he inspired. "Homage to thee, O Hapi! (i.e. the Nile). Thou comest forth in this land, and dost come in peace to make Egypt to live, O thou hidden one, thou guide of the darkness whensoever it is thy pleasure to be its guide. Thou waterest the fields which Ra hath created, thou makest all animals to live, thou makest the land to drink without ceasing; thou descendest the path of heaven, thou art the friend of meat and drink, thou art the giver of the grain, and thou makest every place of work to flourish, O Ptah! . . . If thou wert to be overcome in heaven the gods would fall down headlong, and mankind would perish."
In this passage the mystic observes how the natural power of running water to suggest spontaneous movement, and therefore life, is accentuated and denned by the actual results of the river's beneficent overflow. And a further step is taken when Hapi is addressed by the names of Ptah (as above) and Khnemu; for he is not thus confused with the gods so named, but being the great life-supplier for the land, he is, like them, regarded as a creative power. The development of the ideas suggested is thus essentially parallel to that described in the chapter on the Teutonic myths of the three subterranean wells and the World-tree.
But can any distinctive features of the Egyptian religion be traced to the influences exerted by the phenomena of the Nile? Most decidedly so—in two directions more especially. That religion is one of contrasts; it represents the world as a scene of titanic conflict. The realm of Osiris is opposed to that of Typhon—creation to destruction. And the master influence in shaping the form in which these contrasts were conceived was undoubtedly the Nile. On one side barren rocks and parched sands, and on the other the fertilising powers of the sacred stream. All around, vast solitudes, and along the river the hum of teeming communities and the rich fullness of prosperous civilisations. The world was visibly, for the Egyptian, a fierce recurring battle between life and death.
And springing out of this appears the second great influence to be attributed to the famous river. The Egyptian grasped firmly and developed fully the doctrine of immortality. Doubtless many factors contributed to the peculiar form which his belief assumed, but none would be of more importance than the ever renewed gift of life which the Nile brought from an unknown and an unseen world. Hence also the connection between the Nile-god and Osiris, the god of the resurrection. So deeply were the world-views and spiritual experiences of the Egyptians influenced by the mystic's powers of the Nile—by the immanent ideas therein made concrete. The Egyptians, in their turn, influenced the Hebrews, the Greeks, and the Romans; and these, again, have influenced the race. Who shall estimate the effect on the human mind of the physical phenomena of this single river!
When we turn to the story of the Ganges, a further mystical concept comes into view—that of purification. It is manifestly suggested by the cleansing qualities of water, and has exercised an important function in the development of certain moral ideas and ideals. Bathing in running water to cleanse the stains of the body led on to, and combined with, the concept of cleansing the stains of the soul. But even thus the dominant suggestion of life declares itself, as is specially obvious in the case of Christian baptism, where the washing with water symbolises not only the cleansing of the soul, but the new birth, the higher life of the spirit. It is by keeping in mind these blended concepts that we shall best understand the story of the Ganges.
All the larger rivers of India are looked upon as abodes and vehicles of the divine essence, and therefore as possessed of power to cleanse from moral guilt. Their banks, from source to sea, are holy ground, and pilgrims plod their way along them to win merit—a merit that is measured by the years of travel and the sanctity of the stream. Of all the great rivers in this ancient land, the Ganges is the noblest. Mother Ganga, stands supreme. No water such as hers for washing away the stains of the most heinous crimes. She has bands of priests who call themselves her "Sons," and who conduct pilgrims down the flights of steps that line her banks, aid them in their ablutions, and declare them clean. To die and to be buried near the stream is in itself sufficient to win an entrance to the realms of bliss. "Those who, even at a distance of a hundred leagues, cry Ganga, Ganga, atone for the sins committed during three previous lives." In short, the hold the river has obtained upon the affections and imaginations of the Hindus is marvellously firm and lasting.
Of course a river so renowned has its wreath of myths and legends, characterised, in this instance, by the prodigality of the Eastern mind. It is not necessary to linger over these, save in so far as to note that they ascribe a divine origin to the sacred stream; the sense of power and movement issuing from the world of the unseen is no less strong than that aroused by the Nile; though it finds strangely different modes of expression, its essential character is the same. Interesting and typical is the Hindu belief that the spot where flow together the waters of the Ganges, the Jumna and the Sarasvati is one of the most hallowed in a land of holy places. "These three sacred rivers form a kind of Tri-murti, or triad, often personified as goddesses, and called 'Mothers.'" With such facts in view, it would be hard to exaggerate the influence of rivers on the development of the Hindu's speculation and practice, and more especially of his mysticism.
Such intuitions and beliefs find their full flower in the conception of the river of life—the stream, pure as crystal, that, with exulting movement onward, brings to men the thrill of hope and the inspiration of progress to a world beyond. It pulses and swings in the glorious sunshine—it reflects the blue of heaven—it sweeps superbly with unsullied current past every obstacle, and bursts through every barrier:
at illeLabitur et labetur in omne volubilis aevum.
Yes, the Nile, the Ganges, the Rhine, the Thames, and a thousand other rivers of renown have had, and still have, their part to play in the cosmic drama and in the development of man's spiritual nature. Generation after generation has found them to be capable of stirring peculiar emotions, and of stimulating profound thoughts on the mystery of life. And all these powers are concentrated and sublimated in this glorious vision of "the river of water of life that flows from the throne of God."
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 shineAnd 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 breathAnd 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 windBrings up the streamMurmurs 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 manThat 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 gatherSome 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!"
CHAPTER XXII
THE OCEAN
The Ocean! What is its mystic significance? A question as fraught with living issues as its physical object is spacious and profound. Infinitely varied and yet unchanging; gentle and yet terrible; radiant and yet awful;
"Calm or convulsed, in breeze, or gale, or storm,Icing the pole, or in the torrid climeDark heaving"—
there is not a mood with which the ocean cannot link itself, nor a problem to which it cannot hint, albeit darkly, a solution. To attempt a description of its external phenomena were a hardy task—much more to grapple with its protean influences on the souls of men.
Let the approach be by way of mythology. It was shown how that Thales was partly guided to his choice of Water as theWelt-stoffby its place and function in the ancient cosmologies. Numerous and widely diffused were the myths of a primeval ocean out of which the structured universe arose. The Babylonian tablet tells of the time before the times "when above were not raised the heavens, and below on the earth a plant had not grown up; the abyss also had not broken up its boundary. The chaos, the sea, was the producing mother of them all." A passage from the Rig Veda speaks likewise of the time, or rather the no-time, which preceded all things. "Death was not then, nor immortality; there was no distinction of day or night. OnlySomethingbreathed without breath, inwardly turned towards itself. Other than it there was nothing." And how did these ancient mystics best picture to themselves the primeval, or timeless,Something?—"What was the veiling cover of everything?"—they themselves ask. And they answer with another question—"Was it the water's deep abyss?" They think of it as "an ocean without light." "Then (say they) from the nothingness enveloped in empty gloom, Desire (Love) arose, which was the first germ of mind. This loving impulse the Sages, seeking in their heart, recognised as the bond between Being and Non-Being." How deep the plunge here into the sphere of abstract thought! Yet so subtle and forceful had been the mystic influence of the ocean on the primitive mind that it declares itself as a working element in their abstrusest speculations.
Nor has this mystic influence as suggesting the mysteries of origin ceased to be operative. Here is Tennyson, addressing his new-born son:
"Out of the deep, my child, out of the deep."
And again, when nearing the end of his own life, he strikes the same old mystic chord:
"When that which drew from out the boundless deepTurns again home."
Wordsworth, of course, felt the power of this ocean-born intuition, and assures us that here and now:
"Tho' inland far we be,Our souls have sight of that immortal seaWhich brought us hither."
And of intense interest as modernising the ancient concept of "Somethingwhich breathed without breath," is his appeal:
"Listen, the mighty Being is awake,And doth with his eternal motion makeA sound like thunder—everlastingly."
It will not be possible to do more than draw attention to those chief characteristics of the ocean which have given it so large a place in the minds of men. And first would come the vastness of the sea, which prompts vague intuitions of mystery and infinity. The sight of its limitless expanse still has this power. "The sea (says Holmes) belongs to eternity, and not to time, and of that it sings for ever and ever." How natural, then, the trend of the mythology just mentioned, and the belief in a primeval ocean—a formless abyss—Tiâmat—which, as Milton puts it in a splendid line, is:
"The womb of nature and perhaps her grave."
But added to the mystic influence of sheer limitlessness are the manifestations of power and majesty, which compel the awe and wonder of those who "go down to the sea in ships and do their business in great waters." In the minds of early navigators, the experience of the terrors of the sea begot a sense of relationship to hostile powers. One of the oldest Aryan words for sea, the GermanMeer,Old EnglishMere,means death or destruction; and the destructive action of the ocean's untutored elementary force found personifications in the Teutonic Oegir (Terror), with his dreaded daughter, and the sea-goddess, Ran, his wife, who raged in storms and overwhelmed the ships. The eastern peoples, including the Hebrews, regarded the sea as the abode of evil powers, as certain of the visions in the Book of Daniel strikingly testify. Nor is this feeling of the action of hostile powers yet extinct. Victor Hugo makes fine use of it in his description of the storm in "The Toilers of the Sea."
Jefferies was always deeply affected by the vast-ness and strength of the sea. "Let me launch forth" (he writes) "and sail over the rim of the sea yonder, and when another rim rises over that, and again onwards into an ever-widening ocean of idea and life. For with all the strength of the wave, and its succeeding wave, the depth and race of the tide, the clear definition of the sky; with all the subtle power of the great sea, there rises the equal desire. Give me life strong and full as the brimming ocean; give me thoughts wide as its plain. . . . My soul rising to the immensity utters its desire-prayer with all the strength of the sea."
In many of its aspects, the ocean can stimulate and soften moods of sadness. The peculiar potency of the play of the waves is reserved for the next chapter. But the more general influences of this character are many and of undoubted significance. The vast loneliness of its watery, restless plains; its unchangeableness; its seeming disregard for human destinies; the secrets buried under its heaving waters—these and a multitude of like phenomena link themselves on to man's sadder reveries. Morris asks:
"Peace, moaning sea; what tale have you to tell,What mystic tidings, all unknown before?"
His answer is in terms of longing for the unrealised:
"The voice of yearning, deep but scarce expressed,For something which is not, but may be yet;Too full of sad continuance to forget,Too troubled with desires to be at rest,Too self-conflicting ever to be blest."
In strong contrast with this is the exhilarating, tonic power of the sea. Coleridge, revisiting the seashore, cries:
"God be with thee, gladsome Ocean!How gladly greet I thee once more."
Myers emphasises the fact that Swinburne, in his principal autobiographical poem, "Thalassius, or Child of the Sea," reveals a nature for which the elemental play of the ocean is the intensest stimulus. The author of that poem tells how once he wandered off into indulgence of personal feelings, and how his mother, the sea, recalled him from such wanderings to
"charm him from his own soul's separate senseWith infinite and invasive influence,That made strength sweet in him and sweetness strong,Being now no more a singer, but a song."
And akin to this exhilarating effect on a poet's sensibility is that which it has exercised on the large scale in moulding the characters and fortunes of seafaring nations. Longfellow had a firm grip of this historical fact:
"Wouldst thou (so the helmsman answered)Learn the secret of the sea?Only those who brave its dangersComprehend its mystery."
Allan Cunningham's sea songs furnish the classical expression of the spirit in its modern guise as embodied in the British sailor—the defender of the isle that is "compassed by the inviolate sea":
"The sea! the sea! the open sea!The ever fresh, the ever free."
Byron may be criticised as too consciously "posing" in his well-known apostrophe to the ocean; nevertheless it contains a tang of the Viking spirit:
"And I have loved thee, Ocean! and my joyOf youthful sports was on thy breast to beBorne like thy bubbles onward: from a boyI wantoned with thy breakers."
What is the core of this Viking buoyancy and exhilaration? Surely a sense of freedom, inspired by a life on the ocean, and fostered by the very hardships and dangers which that life entails.
Thus cumulative is the evidence that the present, for all its materialism, inherits the essence of the ancient mysticism; or rather, it is open to the same impulses and intuitions, however changed and changing the forms they may assume. On the one hand, the infinite complexity of man's developing soul-life; on the other, the limitless range of the moods and aspects of the ocean: the two are spiritually linked by ultimate community of nature: deep calls to deep: the response is living and eternal.
CHAPTER XXIII
WAVES
The most familiar appeal of the Ocean is that of the wave which speeds over its surface or breaks upon its shores. Poets have found here an inexhaustible theme. Painters have here expended their utmost skill. Whether it is the tiny ripple that dies along the curving sands, or the merry, rustling, crested surf that hurries on to wanton in the rocky pools, or the storm billow that rushes wildly against an iron-bound coast to spurt aloft its sheets of spray or to hurl its threatening mass on the trembling strand—in each and every form the wave is a moving miracle. Through every change of contour and interplay of curves, its lines are ever of inimitable grace. Its gradations of colour, its translucent opalescence framed in gleaming greens and tender greys, wreathed with the radiance of the foam, are of inimitable charm. Its gamuts of sounds, the faint lisp of the wavelet on the pebbly beach, the rhythmic rise and fall of the plashing or plunging surf, the roar and scream of the breaker, and the boom of the billow, are of inimitable range. What marvel is it that even the commonplace of the sons of men yield themselves gladly to a spell they cannot analyse, content to linger, to gaze, and to ponder!
If the spell of the waves enthralls the ordinary mortal, how much more those whose aesthetic and spiritual senses are keen and disciplined? Coleridge, while listening to the tide, with eyes closed, but with mind alert, finds his thoughts wandering back to
"that blind bard who on the Chian strandBy those deep sounds possessed with inward light,Beheld the Iliad and the OdysseeRise to the swelling of the voiceful sea."
Swinburne, listening to the same music, exclaims:
"Yea, surely the sea like a harperLaid his hand on the shore like a lyre."
Sometimes the emphasis is on the sympathy with the striving forces manifested in the ceaseless activity of the ocean as it
"beats against the stern dumb shoreThe stormy passion of its mighty heart."
Sometimes the emphasis is on the subjective mood which that activity arouses:
"Break, break, break,On thy cold gray stones, O sea.And I would that my tongue could utterThe thoughts that arise in me,"
Sometimes the two are indissolubly blended as in the song, "Am Meer," so exquisitely set to music by Schubert—where the rhythmic echoes of the heaving tide accompany the surging emotions of a troubled heart.
The direct impression made by the objective phenomena of the play of waves finds abundant expression in the whole range of literature—not the least forcefully in Tennyson. How fine his painting of the wave on the open sea.
"As a wild wave in the wide North-SeaGreen glimmering towards the summit, bears, with allIts stormy crests that smoke against the skies,Down on a bark, and overbears the bark,And him that helms it."
How perfect also the description of a wave breaking on a level, sandy beach:
"The crest of some slow-arching wave,Heard in dead night along that table-shore,Drops flat, and after the great waters breakWhitening for half a league, and thin themselves,Far over sands marbled with moon and cloud,From less and less to nothing."
As to the moods thus stimulated, the one most frequently provoked would seem to be that of sadness. Or would it be truer to say that those whose thoughts are tinged with melancholy, or weighted with sorrow, find in the restless, endless tossing and breaking of the waves their fittest companions?
How sad this passage from the French poet-philosopher, Guyot. "I remember that once, sitting on the beach, I watched the serried waves rolling towards me. They came without interruption from the expanse of the sea, roaring and white. Beyond the one dying at my feet I noticed another; and farther behind that one, another; and farther still another and another—a multitude. At last, as far as I could see, the whole horizon seemed to rise and roll on towards me. There was a reservoir of infinite, inexhaustible forces there. How deeply I felt the impotency of man to arrest the effort of that whole ocean in movement! A dike might break one of the waves; it could break hundreds and thousands of them; but would not the immense and indefatigable ocean gain the victory? And this rising tide seemed to me the image of the whole of nature assailing humanity, which vainly wishes to direct its course, to dam it in, to master it. Man struggles bravely; he multiplies his efforts. Sometimes he believes himself to be the conqueror. That is because he does not look far enough ahead, and because he does not notice far out on the horizon the great waves which, sooner or later, must destroy his work and carry himself away."
Similar is the train of thought which finds poetical expression in Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach."
"Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!Only, from the long line of sprayWhere the sea meets the moon-blanched landListen! you hear the grating roarOf pebbles which the waves draw back and fling,At their return, up the high strand,Begin, and cease, and then again begin,With tremulous cadence slow, and bringThe eternal note of sadness in.. . .Sophocles heard it long ago,Heard it on the AEgaean, and it broughtInto his mind the turbid ebb and flowOf human misery; weFind also in the sound a thought;Hearing it by this distant northern sea."
And the thought! "The melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of the Sea of Faith, retreating down the "naked shingles of the world!"
But if the pessimistic mood may thus find support in watching the waves of the sea, so no less surely can the hopeful and joyous mood be evolved and stimulated by the same influence. Before Sophocles came AEschylus. The greatest hero of this earlier poet was Prometheus, the friend of man, who, tortured but unshaken, looked out from his Caucasian rock on the presentments of primeval nature. How sublime his appeal!
"Ether of heaven, and Winds untired of wing,Rivers whose fountains fail not, and thou SeaLaughing in waves innumerable!"
To him the winds and waves brought a message of untiring, indomitable energy—the movement, the gleam, inspired fresh life and hope. The ideas immanent in the ocean wave are as varied as the human experiences to which they are akin.
Or take another group of these ideas immanent in the phenomena of the wave—the group which rouse and nurture the aesthetic side of man's nature. Very significant in this regard is the fact that not for the Greeks alone, but also for the Hindus and the Teutons, the goddesses of beauty were wave-born. When Aphrodite walked the earth, flowers sprang up beneath her feet; but her birthplace was the crest of a laughing wave. So Kama, the Hindu Cupid, and the Apsaras, lovely nymphs, rose from the wind-stirred surface of the sea, drawn upward in streaming mists by the ardent sun. So, too, the Teutonic Freyja took shape in the sea-born cloudlets of the upper air.
The loveliness of the wave, dancing, tossing, or breaking must have entered, from earliest days, deeply into the heart and imagination of man, and have profoundly influenced his mythology, his art, and his poetry. We trace this influence in olden days by the myths of Poseidon with his seahorses and the bands of Tritons, Nereids, and Oceanides—each and all giving substance to vague intuitions and subconscious perceptions of the physical beauty of the ocean.
And as for our own more immediate forefathers, the mystic spell of the ocean wave sank deep into their rugged souls. "When you so dance" (says Shakespeare to a maiden) "I wish you a wave o' the sea, that you might ever do nothing but that." The experiences of countless watchers of the wave went to the framing of that wish!
And, as has been richly proved by quotations from our modern poets, the mystic spell gains in potency as man's aesthetic powers are keener and more disciplined. The present-day nature-mystic needs no imaginary personifications to bring him into communion with the beauty, the mystery, of the ocean wave. He conceives of it as a manifestation of certain modes of being which are akin to himself and which speak to him in language too plain to be ignored or misinterpreted. Human knowledge has not yet advanced far enough to define more closely such modes of experience; but the fact of the experience remains.