Nature in a City Yard/Chapter 9

THE Greeks had little to say about nature, but they lived closer to it than we do, in spite of our habit of painting, describing, and gushing over it. Carlyle, no doubt, would have said, from their very silence and unconsciousness, that nature was a part of their lives. They did feel and love it. We need no other proof than this: that they endowed it with godhood, They felt what science knows and the poet and preacher hope: that our relation to the universe is wide-spreading, though unfathomed. What is behind this mask of form we are not resolved, yet every primitive people realizes that it is a sign and an emblem, and the speech of this realization is poetry. The Indians of our Northwest are Greeks in their faith; they people the ​woods and waters, the mountains, the geysers and the glaciers, with supernatural beings, and the legendry of that region is fell of the action, baneful and heroic, that is worked by those forces, Later philosophies, in prose and verse, thrill with a hope that is faith, already, among these tribes.

“Manfred” is a wild dream, is it not? the summoning of spirits from other worlds—absurd? Yet they tell us that a responsive vibration goes through the world whenever a thing is done, as widening circles spread from where the stone falls into water; that, as thought is deed accompanied by motion in the brain, the working out of that thought affects, be it never so faintly, the gravities and substances of farthest suns. Is this a forecast of the energy that shall one day blaze from the mind of the race to lighten those chasms of cold that gulf our world in, and send messages of divine equality and brotherhood to the planets that roll about Sirius and Aldebaran? It tells, at all events, the oneness of creation, the refinement of mat​ter into mind, We are the spirits of the universe, emanations in fleshly guise. In our best moods we approach that larger soul of nature and try to read it or impress it. Some instinct to create or command seems to work in us whenever we meet it face to face.

The growth of science and the literary and artistic use of landscape prove a present interest in nature that hardly seems to have belonged to our grandfathers, to whom—honored pioneers!—it was a task-master rather than a friend. To them it was raw material to subjugate, to use, but not to study or to love. Yet man is but a piece of the world, and we must read his environment to know his relations and understanding. Our liking for brevities and essences we acquire from our preference for men in the presence of nature; for men are nature personated, crystallized. So we watch the light from the cabin shining on the mountain, rippling across the lake, or gleaming out at sea, and we forget the darkness and majesty that it illumines, and that more solemn shining of the god-lights in the sky. ​Certain of us huddle into cities to shut out the sight of woods and hills, saying: “A god is there. Eternity is symbolized yonder, Let us get together and deal with our affairs, of which gods and eternity are not yet part.”

Yet we are compelled back, every now and again; for it is food and breath and physical life that we have out of nature, even where there is no joy or brightness. Like wine, it can exhilarate and debauch; but, unlike wine, we cannot live without it. Every normal temperament pines for the earth at times, and art is only a form of this longing, so far as it concerns itself with landscape. The painter tells it on canvas; we hear it in the Waldweben of Wagner and the “Pastoral Symphony” of Beethoven; among modern writers Thackeray is almost alone in being without it—he preferred the streets; but it is voiced in clear and beautiful tones by Thoreau, Emerson, Wordsworth, Blackmore, Burroughs, Black, of Scotland; White, of Selborne; Miss Thomas, and Miss Murfree. Hawthorne exclaims: “Oh, that I could run ​wild! that I could put myself into a true relation with nature, and be on friendly terms with all congenial elements!” How many have echoed such a wish, for the mystery of the world is on the hills, and a subtle friendship broods in the wood. At times the mystery seems about to be revealed to us; yet, though we look and listen, the poke lips are closed, and we cry: “Let us know this secret.”

Still we must not peer too closely, nor lose the larger view of things. Men are great, generous, beautiful only in their obvious aspects; so let us heed our books, songs, pictures, cathedrals, and other works of our kind. Must we know the chemistry of soils and leaves to see heaven on earth?

We have come to that time when we begin to feel as well as to see in the presence of woods, hills, oceans, and stars; there are hints and portents in them that a new consciousness tries to read. There is an invitation to conquest that makes us delight in peril and seek it in the deeps and on the alps. If eased of our flesh, we would ride on the storm and bathe in ​lightning. And what analogies there are between nature and man’s work and experience: illusion, elusion, suffering—qualities that make art. Men overdo before they learn to do; nature teaches reserve, order, accomplishment, economy. Have you thought how nature fits herself to every human mood—that is, how the mind discovers answering moods in nature—as well as sustains us in every corporal need? All seems open for our view into the heart of the world; but, as we look, a spell is thrown over us, and the green brightens with Turner’s gold or pales into Corot’s mist of silvers or in the hills, and oftener in the desert, on a few lucky days of a life, rise towers of gold and crystal gemmed with sapphire and topaz and backed by peaks of opal. Our hard and searching glance is baffled by these splendors. The kindly sun, the free wind, balm-laden, the grateful color, the tinkle of brooks, the lilt and whistle of birds, the toss and sough of boughs, the spring of turf, the beat of waves, placate, yet encourage and rejoice, and create or fill our worthiest moods. We ​feel our avatar and almost see the hand that offers it. Pears of the ennui of eternity leave us, for we find that existence can be a joy. Nature will not press us back to savagery so long as we keep in touch with the striving spirit that animates all things, that has given wings to the reptile and let man evolve from the monkey.

There is deep truth in the allegory of Hercules’s opponent who regained his strength whenever he touched the earth, and was not vanquished until he had been held in air so long that his power had left him. Simple forms, like the jelly-fish, that keep near nature and are elementary, have powers of creation and recuperation that make us ridiculous; and the trees, also, draw life right out of the soil. Why might not we do so, too, instead of taking what the trees have taken—we parasites of parasites?

The life that was potent in cosmic dust and chaos flame inheres in silence, and those of subtler sight and hearing commune with it. We need to go back to the fields to renew mental and spiritual strength, to cool our brains after they have been ​heated by the excitements and intemperances of social life, to rest our nerves after the jarring of coarse utilities. The repose of the earth, the sky, and the waters is valuable, if only to show how much may be told and done without fretting and without speech; and little of our talk is needed. In politics alone, what words! what friction! what rivalry! what hatred! Suns, and clouds of suns, wheel through space, perhaps around some pivot of intelligence, and make no sound; but the choice of a man to do a little work for us fills the land with babbling and strife. Is not this much ado about nothing to speak of enough to drive a man to the woods, there to cast about for facts and affections that are worthy of him? There he is among objects that are idyllic, or that, at least, do not obtrude their functions. They are notes in a harmony, colors in a prism; they exist for an occult purpose which, in our present development, we only and vaguely recognize as beauty. Though we are apart from them, they follow us, and their charm is tender and alluring in their absence, be​cause memory is an artist, and paints a better picture than the retina. When we turn from the actual scene we seem to know it better, and to find a higher promise and beauty there. So does art soften detail, suppress, select, and try to give us the substance, perhaps the soul, of things.

A spiritualizing process is beginning in letters, art, music, color, life. “The world is too much with us,” but men are getting away from the base world of needs to the world of meanings. They progress as they realize beauty, and the constant inference of beauty is design. Can the fire of the diamond, the tenderness of the flower, the loveliness of the opal, the grandeur of the mountain, be accidental? Are they not part of some great scheme for the all-beautiful and all-good?

Nature piques, then eludes us; rejoices us, and will not tell how or why. We find her a mystery, and we are ever trying to get behind that mystery, even though what is fair in distance may be unlovely and unprofitable at close hand. It is not enough that we master inert physical na​ture, that we make her give us food and house, that she turns mills and propels ships for us; love and questioning of her mean more than that; they signify an effort spiritually to envelop her; they prove an aspiration in the soul of man toward universality—toward godhood. That is their drift, To what will it lead?