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 orms 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! "