§ 63
Here, however, it is but right to enter a caveat. It must be admitted that it is not given to everyone to hold high converse with Nature. Nature speaks a cryptic tongue, and unless one has paid some heed to her language her accents are apt to fall upon deaf ears. Nor can anyone translate Nature's language to those unversed in her speech. If you think to hear her voice while the din and clatter of business or mercature are ringing in your ears, you will hear nothing. Nor, for that matter, will you see anything. Trees and fields and clouds you may see, or may think you see; but they will say nothing to you, will mean nothing to you. To their mere beauty you will be blind; for beauty is a thing to be felt, not seen.
Goethe declared that Beauty was a primæval phænomenon which had never yet made its appearance.[46] To Euripides—κλυων μεν αυδην, ομμα δ'ουχ ορων το σον.[47]
"Fair are others; none beholds thee,
····
And all feel, yet see thee never." [48]
Beauty is felt. That is the clue to the secret. The appeal of natural beauty is to the heart, to the emotions, not to the intellect. The eyes of the wisest savant may miss what Nature will reveal to the veriest babe. This is what Mr Edward Carpenter means when he says, albeit in somewhat extravagant language—
"As to you, O Moon—
I know very well that when the astronomers look at you through their telescopes they see only an aged and wrinkled body;
But though they measure your wrinkles never so carefully they do not see you personal and close—
As you disclosed yourself among the chimney-tops last night to the eyes of a child—
When you thought no one else was looking.
Anyhow I see plainly that like all created things you do not yield yourself up as to what you are at the first or the thousandth onset,
And that the scientific people for all their telescopes know as little about you as any one—
Perhaps less than most.
How curious the mystery of creation."[49]
The poet, bereft of words whereby to give vent to his emotion, falls back on "the mystery of creation."—Not dissimilarly says Carlyle, "The rudest mind has still some intimation of the greatness there is in Mystery."[50] And again, "The mystical enjoyment of an object goes infinitely farther than the intellectual."[51]—It is not alone the indescribable colour of the delicate corolla, nor is it the minute knowledge of its astonishing structure, that causes to blaze up in the beholder a sense of something profound; it is not alone the majestic heap of the cloud, nor the piercing radiance of the quiet stars, known to be incomputably distant, that lifts one to the contemplation of the lofty; it is the immanent, the permanent Mystery that pervades and unifies all that ever was or is or shall be.