The Silent Isle by Arthur Christopher Benson (books to read this summer txt) 📕

varnished green ground-weed, with a small white flower, and a dull crimson dead-nettle; both of them have covered the ground in places in huge patches. This is both strange and pleasant, I think.

I loitered about in my chalk-pit for a while; noted a new flower that sprinkled the high grassy ledges that I had never seen there before; and then sate down in a little dingle that commanded a wide view of the fen. The landscape to-day was dark with a sort of indigo-blue shadows; the clouds above big and threatening, as though they were nursing the thunder--the distance veiled in a blue-grey haze. Field after field, with here and there a clump of trees, ran out to the far horizon. A partridge chirred softly in the pastures up above me, and a wild screaming of sparrows came at intervals from a thorn-thicket, where they seemed to be holding a fierce and disorderly meeting.

I should like to be able to recover the thread of my thoughts in that quiet grassy place, because they ran on with an equable sparkle, quite without cause or reason. I had nothing particularly pleasing to think about; but the mood of retrospect and anticipation seemed to ramble about, picking sweet-smelling flowers from the past and future alike. I seemed to desire nothing and to regret nothing. My cup was full of a pleasant beverage, neither cloying nor intoxicating, and the glad spring-time tempered it nicely to my taste. There seemed to brood in the air a quiet benevolence as of a Father watching His myriad children at play; and yet as I saw a big blackbird, with a solemn eye, hop round a thorn-bush with a writhing worm festooned round his beak, I realised that the play was a deadly tragedy to some of the actors. I suppose that such thoughts ought to have ruffled the tranquil mood, but they did not, for the whole seemed so complete. I suppose that man walks in a vain shadow; but to-day it only seemed that he disquiets himself in vain. And it was not a merely selfish hedonism that thrilled me, for a large part of my joy was that we all seemed to rejoice together. As far as the eye could see, and for miles and miles, the flowers were turning their fragrant heads to the light, and the birds singing clear. And I rejoiced with them too, and shared my joy with all the brave world.


LVIII


One of the most impressive passages in Wordsworth's poems describes how he rowed by night, as a boy, upon Esthwaite Lake, and experienced a sense of awestruck horror at the sight of a dark peak, travelling, as the boat moved, beyond and across the lower and nearer slopes, seeming to watch and observe the boy. Of course it may be said that such a feeling is essentially subjective, and that the peak was but obeying natural and optical laws, and had no concern whatever with the boy. That there should be any connection between the child and the bleak mountains is, of course, inconsistent with scientific laws. But to arrive at a scientific knowledge of nature is not at all the same thing as arriving at the truth about her; one may analyse everything, peak and lake and moonlight alike, into its component elements, and show that it is all matter animated and sustained by certain forces. But one has got no nearer to knowing what matter or force is, or how they came into being.

And then, too, even from the scientific point of view, the subjective effect of the contemplation of nature by the mind is just as much a phenomenon; it is there--it demands recognition. The emotions of man are a scientific fact, too, and an even more complicated scientific fact than matter and force. When Wordsworth says that he was


"Contented if he might enjoy
The things that others understand,"


he is but stating the fact that there is a mystical poetical perception of nature as well as a scientific one. Perhaps when science has done her work on elemental atoms and forces, she will turn to the analysis of psychological problems. And meanwhile it must suffice to recognise that the work of the scientist is as essentially poetical, if done in a certain spirit, as the work of the poet. It is essentially poetical, because the deeper that the man of science dives into the mystery, the darker and more bewildering it becomes. Science, instead of solving the mystery, has added enormously to its complexity by disposing of the old comfortable theory that man is the darling of Nature and that all things were created for his use. We know now that man is only a local and temporary phenomenon in the evolution of some dim and gigantic law; that he perhaps represents the highest development which that law has at present evolved, but that probably we are rather at the threshold than at the climax of evolution, and that there will be developments in the future that we cannot even dimly apprehend. If the contemplation of nature and the scientific analysis of nature are meant to have any effect upon humanity at all, it seems as though both were intended to stimulate our wonder and to torture us with the desire for solving the enigma.

Perhaps the difference between the poetical view and the scientific view of nature is this--that while scientific investigation stimulates a man to penetrate the secret as far as he can, with the noble desire to contribute what minute discoveries he may to the solution of the problem, the poetical contemplation of nature tends to produce in the mind a greater tranquillity of emotion. The scientist must feel that, even when he has devoted his whole life to investigation, he has but helped on the possibilities of solution a little. There can be no sense of personal fruition as long as the abyss remains unplumbed; and therefore nature is to him like a blind and blank mystery that reveals its secrets slowly and almost reluctantly, and defies investigation. Whereas the poet may rather feel that he at this precise point of time may master and possess the emotion that nature can provide for his soul, and that he is fully blessed if the sight of the mountain-head above the sunset cloud-banks, the green gloom of the summer woodland, the lake lashed with slanting storm, gives him a sense of profound emotion, and fills him to the brim with the pure potion of beauty. He may rest in that, for the time; he may feel that this is the message of nature to him, thus and now; and that the more perfectly and passionately that the beauty of nature comes home to him, the nearer he comes to the thought of God.

This does not, either in the case of the man of science or the poet, solve the further mystery--the mystery of complex human relationships. But the investigation of science ardently pursued is more likely to tend to isolate the explorer from his kind than the poetical contemplation of nature, for the simple reason that the scientist's business is not primarily with emotion but with concrete fact; while to the poet the emotions of love and friendship, of patriotism and duty, will all tend to be the object of impassioned speculation too. Both alike will be apt to be somewhat isolated from the ordinary life of the world, because both to the poet and the man of science the present condition of things, the problems of the day, will be dwarfed by the thought of the vast accumulation of past experience; both alike will tend to minimise the value of human effort, because they will both be aware that the phenomenon of human activity and human volition is but the froth and scum working on the lip of some gigantic forward-moving tide, and that men probably do not so much choose what they shall do, as do what they are compelled to do by some unfathomable power behind and above them. This thought may seem, to men of practical activity, to weaken the force of effective energy in both poet and scientist. But they will be content to be misunderstood on this point, because they will be aware that such activity as they manifest is the direct effect of something larger and greater than human volition, and that the busiest lives are as much the inevitable outcome of this insuperable force as their own more secluded, more contemplative lives.

The Mareway is an old track or drift-road, dating from primitive times, which diverges from the Old North Road and runs for some miles along the top of the low chalk downs which bound my southern horizon. Its name is a corruption of the word Mary--Mary's way--for there was an ancient shrine of pilgrimage dedicated to the Virgin Mary that stood on the broad low bluff still known as Chapel Hill, where the downs sink into the well-watered plain. No trace of the shrine exists, and it is not known where it stood. Perhaps its walls have been built into the little irregular pile of farm-buildings which stands close to where the way ends. In a field hard by that spot, the leaden seal of a Pope, the bulla that gives its name to a Pope's bull, was once ploughed up; but the chapel itself, which was probably a very humble place, was unroofed and wrecked in an outburst of Puritanical zeal, with a practical piety which could not bear that a place should gather about itself so many hopes and prayers and holy associations. Well, it is all history, both the trust that raised the shrine and the zeal that destroyed it; and we are the richer, not the poorer, for our losses as well as for our gains.

The Mareway passes through no villages, and only gives access to a few lonely, wind-swept farms. The villages tend to nestle along the roots of the down, in sheltered valleys where the streams break out, the orchard closes and cottage gardens creeping a little way up the gentle slopes; and thus when the time came for the roads to be metalled there was little use for the high ridgeway; for its only advantage had been that it gave in more unsettled times a securer and more secluded route for the pack-horse of the pilgrim--a chance of seeing if danger threatened or risk awaited him.

And so the old road keeps its solitary course, unfrequented and untrimmed, along the broad back of the down. Here for a space it is absorbed into a plough-land, there it melts with a soft dimple into the pasture; but for the most part it runs between high thorn hedges, here with deep ruts worn by heavy farm-carts, there trodden into miry pools by sheep. In places it passes for a space through patches of old woodland, showing by the deep dingles, the pleasant lack of ordered planting, that it is a tract of ancient forest-land never disparked. Here you may see, shouldering above the irregular copse, the bulk of some primeval oak, gnarled and hollow-trunked, spared partly because it would afford no timber worth cutting, and partly, we may hope, from some tender sense of beauty and veneration which even now, by a hint of instinctive tradition haunting the rustic mind, attends the ancient tree and surrounds it with a sense of respect too dim to be called a memory even of forgotten things. To right and left green roads dip down to the unseen villages, and here and there the way itself becomes a metalled road leading to some larger highway; but even so, you can soon regain the grassy tract, following the slow curve of the placid down.

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