III
The most interesting point of all in connection with these æsthetic matters is that Darwin, for all his intimate contact with nature and all his scientific study, apparently did not feel much of the rapture and ecstasy that natural beauty affords to many who have often little or no scientific knowledge. Here, more than in any other field, there is of course a riot of convention and pretense, and thousands prate of clouds and sunsets and bird-song who have no more real feeling for these things than they have for any other form of æsthetic development. Nevertheless, the ecstasy has been recorded and rendered by too many persons whose gift of expression is as impressive as their sincerity is indisputable, to be neglected or overlooked. It is worth while to examine more closely into some of the elements of this imaginative enjoyment of the natural world.
To begin with, there is the delight of simple perception, the excitement, the inexplicable thrill that goes with color and form and sound and movement, with the nodding of a blossom and the quiver of a butterfly, the
‘Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.’
And no doubt this enjoyment is frequently too subtle, too delicate, too elusive, too evanescent to be put in words, and it comes to many who could never find the words to convey it. Something of its high intensity may be suggested by Cowper’s brief and poignant phrase: ‘O! I could spend whole days and moonlight nights in feeding upon a lovely prospect. My eyes drink the rivers as they flow.’[202]
The secret of the enjoyment must lie mainly in obscure processes of association, hints and suggestions of buried joy and sorrow, which go down deep into the roots of subconscious memory. But at any rate it is true that such enjoyment is bound up far more with simple scenes and home surroundings than with the remote or the picturesque or what Darwin so often refers to as the sublime. The hurrying tourist, who rushes about the world in search of some higher mountain or rougher glacier or wilder valley is not the one who feels the secret charm of nature, but rather he who strolls in lonely, quiet fields or woods that he has always known and loved. The return of violets in early spring, the song of thrushes in summer twilights, these are the things that bring tears, that come full charged with the weight of all that Cowper means when he writes of
‘Scenes that soothed
Or charmed me young, no longer young I find
Still soothing and of power to charm me still.’[203]
And it is in this matter of association that the poets most of all help us. It is they who can disentangle the subtle threads of emotion and thought that have twined themselves about the simple impressions of the natural world, and who in turn can interweave a tissue of still more splendid imaginative glory with all our sight and all our hearing. It is Shakespeare with his
‘Daffodils
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty.’
it is Keats, with his
‘Tall oaks, branch-charmed by the earnest stars,’
or his,
‘Fast-fading violets covered up in leaves,’
who store our souls with memories that vibrate at the sight of daffodils and violets and stars.
And the imagination goes further yet, interpenetrates the whole of nature, transforms it, makes it a living, sentient unity, wholly unlike the dead multiplicity on which the scientist exercises his ingenious research. Take Emerson’s ‘Nature’ and compare it with Darwin’s book on Earthworms. The Darwin has its fascination: it makes you long to spend your days watching and testing and measuring the tiny creatures who are forever making over the surface of the globe. But the Emerson transfuses all this natural world with thought, with creative human intelligence, dissolves it, moulds it, re-creates it, tosses and turns it till it seems a ball and a trifle for the overmastering soul of man to produce or abolish as it will. Or again, with Wordsworth, there is the sense of animating life in nature, the dim, impersonal personality, which is for ever passing and repassing through the endless manifestations that are all the scientist can count or measure,
‘A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts.’
And as there is the sense of this profounder life in nature, this deeper, mysterious unity, back of all the varied shift and change, so there is the passionate desire to be at one with that unity, to lose one’s miserable, insignificant, turbulent, tormenting I in that vast, illimitable, measureless All. There is the thirst of Shelley’s ‘Adonais’:
‘That sustaining love,
Which, through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst.’
There is Byron’s cry:
‘I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that about me, and to me
High mountains are a feeling.’[204]
And with the realization that the longing cannot be satisfied, that we are forever imprisoned within the insuperable barriers of this petty I, from which there is no escape, comes a bitter revolt of despair, or a profound melancholy of questioning. It is Obermann, with his, ‘There, in the peace of night, I questioned my uncertain destiny, and this inconceivable universe, which, containing everything yet does not contain my desires.’[205] Or, as an American contemporary has expressed the deep suggestion of the earnest stars: ‘O Lyra, I have gazed at you, until I could not tell your brightness from my own eyes. I have gazed at you till my soul left my body, and circled with you through the stars; but there is something which I am and you are not, something which will not let me rest....
‘Infinite Intelligence! Infinite Beauty! Either make me what thou art, take me to thyself, or free me from this passion which I cannot gratify and cannot destroy. Make me as other men are, toilers and forgetters, seeking yesterday in to-day, and to-day in to-morrow, and illusion always; or fulfill for me the hope which the waters whisper, which I can feel throbbing forever in the heart of thy world.’
Of all this in Darwin nothing whatever, nothing, nothing. It may indeed be said that with nature, as with other things, many people have feelings and experiences that they do not express or try to express. But persons who cherish such experiences with the natural world usually have a more constant regard and interest for the expression of them in others than Darwin had. Any such melancholy or passionate longing as is suggested above one would of course not expect in him. There was no natural melancholy in his temperament. He was depressed and discouraged when things went badly, yet in the main his disposition was even and serene. But his enjoyment of natural scenes and objects, which is indisputable and proved by his own testimony and that of others, would seem to have been generally of a rather superficial character, and certainly not to have partaken of the nature of passion. How far, far different is his touch from that of Lucretius, for example.
Darwin enjoyed picturesque surroundings and novel experiences. He enjoyed the beauty of flowers, their color and shape. His son’s account of this is very charming: ‘I used to like to hear him admire the beauty of a flower; it was a kind of gratitude to the flower itself, and a personal love for its delicate form and color. I seem to remember him gently touching a flower he delighted in; it was the same simple admiration that a child might have.’[206] Occasionally, also, there are scattered hints which seem to suggest a deeper feeling. There is the description of the hour in Moor Park: ‘At last I fell asleep on the grass, and awoke with a chorus of birds singing around me, and squirrels running up the trees, and some woodpeckers laughing, and it was as pleasant and rural a scene as ever I saw, and I did not care one penny how any of the beasts or birds had been formed.’[207] Yet even here, ‘as pleasant and rural a scene as ever I saw,’ is the eighteenth century, not the nineteenth. There is the still intenser bit in the ‘Beagle’: ‘Neither plant nor bird, excepting a few condors wheeling around the higher pinnacles, distracted my attention from the inanimate mass. I felt glad that I was alone: it was like watching a thunderstorm, or hearing in full orchestra a chorus of the Messiah.’[208] And there is the striking touch in the early letter to Henslow: ‘The delight of sitting on a decaying trunk amidst the quiet gloom of the forest is unspeakable, and never to be forgotten,’[209] which at least suggests Obermann in the Forest of Fontainebleau.
But these rare and scattered intimations serve only to bring out the different nature of the habitual attitude, and it is clear enough that such æsthetic element as there was gradually faded in the growing absorption of the scientific ardor. It cannot be denied that in the main Darwin’s interest in nature was intellectual, not emotional.