On poetic interpretation of nature

by John Campbell Shairp

CHAPTER II.
THE POETIC FEELING AWAKENED BY THE WORLD OF NATURE.

If the view taken in the former chapter of the genesis of Poetry be true, if any existence keenly realized may awaken it, must not that material framework which encompasses us from the cradle to the grave enter most intimately into our earliest and most permanent feelings, and color all the poetry which expresses them? For are not the visible earth and skies the storehouse from which imagination furnishes herself with her earliest forms, and draws her broadest as well as most delicate resemblances? Are these not the substance round which the affections twine many of their first and finest tendrils? Next to the household faces, is not the visible world the earliest existence that we know, the last we lose sight of in our earthly sojourn? All his life long man is encompassed with it, and never gets beyond its reach. He lies an infant in the lap of Nature before he has awakened to any consciousness. When consciousness does awaken within him, the external world is the occasion of the awakening, the first thing he learns to know at the same time that he learns his mother’s look and his own existence. For the growing boy she is the homely nurse that, long before schools and school-masters intermeddle with him, feeds his mind with materials, pouring into him alike the outward framework of his thought and the colors that flush over the chambers of his imagery. The expressive countenance of this earth and of these heavens, glad or pensive, stern or dreary, sublime or homely, is looking in on his heart at every hour and mingling with his dreams. Nature is wooing his spirit in manifold and mysterious ways, to elevate him with her vastness and sublimity, to gladden him with her beauty, to depress him with her bleakness, to restore him with her calm. This quick interchange of feeling between the world without and the world within, this vast range of sympathy, so subtle, so unceasing, so mysterious, is a fact as certain and as real as the flow of the tides or the motion of the earth. Yet, though truth it be, it is one which Science cannot recognize, and which she has left wholly to the poet. It is his to witness to the fact of this intimacy—kinship, I might say—between the movements of Nature and the heart of Man, to represent the relation and interpret it. And though he may never be able fully to compass or exhaust all the import of these relations, or to penetrate to the bottom of the secret, yet it is one chief office of the poet to express it, to get it recognized, to keep alive the sense of among his fellow-men, and to interpret to them, as best he may, those enduring yet tender intimacies that exist between their hearts and the wide world of eye and ear that surrounds him.

This mighty process of influencing man, not only through his corporeal needs, but in the more delicate recesses of the heart, the outward world, it is clear, must have been carrying on unremittingly since the earliest appearance of man on the earth. But what may have been the phases of it in primeval times, before history finds man, is a question I do not propose to enter on. No doubt, even in the most remote eras, when savage men dwelt naked in caves, or cowered in abject worship before the blind forces of Nature, and lived in terror of wild beasts, or of each other, even then there must have been moments when their hearts were imaginatively touched, as either the hurricane or the thunder awed them, or Nature looked on them more benignly through the sunset or the dawn. In that later stage, when the Aryan family had reached their mythologizing era, and owing to the weakness of their abstracting powers and the strength of untutored imagination, were weaving the appearances of earth and sky into their hierarchies of gods, Nature and Imagination were face to face, and were all in all.

The other intellectual powers of man were as yet comparatively dormant. He had not yet learned consciously to disengage the thoughts of himself and of God from the visible appearances in which they were still entangled. But to trace the movements of Imagination through that primeval time forms no part of my present task. Even without attempting this, there is more than enough to detain our thoughts, if we attempt to trace, even in outline, some of the ways in which the human and poetic imagination has worked on the outward world in that later stage when the three great entities, God, Man, and Nature, were in thought clearly distinguished. Though in studying our present subject it may be necessary for clearness’s sake, in some measure to isolate Nature in thought from the other two great objects of contemplation, with which in reality it is so closely interwoven, we must never conceive of it as if it were really a separate and independent existence. However we may for a moment regard Nature by herself, we must not forget that in reality we can never contemplate it apart from the other two entities on which it depends; that Nature as mere isolated appearance, without a mind to contemplate and a power to support it, is meaningless; that all the three objects of knowledge coexist at every moment, interpenetrate and modify each other at every turn of thought; and that it is to the light reflected on Nature from the other two that she owes large part of her meaning, her tenderness, her suggestiveness, her sublimity.

The tendency to isolate Nature and to regard it as a self-subsisting thing cut off from other existence, has been strong ever since man came to be clearly conscious of his own distinctness from the world. In this, as in every other realm of thought, progress is slow; it requires long ages to get to the right mental attitude. Among the ethnic races, at least, there were first the two periods already noticed—one in which man crouched in blind abject terror in presence of the elements; another marked by that brighter Nature-worship embodied in the Aryan mythology, which, though past its prime, was still surviving when the Homeric poems were composed. Then succeeded the time when, on the one hand, the mind of man separated itself from the world and asserted its distinct existence; and when, on the other, the thought of Deity, under the guidance of reflection and philosophy, gradually extracted itself from the visible appearances in which it had been so long imbedded.

When this great change had made itself felt, and when, at the same time, out-of-door life gave place to life in cities, Nature in a great measure lost its hold on man’s regards, and retired into the background as a lifeless mechanical thing, without interest or beauty or any intimacy with man. The material world, indeed, had still its utilitarian value. It ministered to man’s bodily wants in the thousand ways that immemorial usage handed down, and which science in recent times has so greatly multiplied. If the refreshing presence of Nature still blended unawares with the animal spirits of men, and cheered them when they were weary, yet the multitudes cast on it no imaginative regards, and cared nothing for the poetry which mediates between the eye and the heart. This seems a true account of the mental attitude of the great civilized communities, down even to recent times. And, notwithstanding the great movement toward Nature which is said to characterize this modern era, one may well doubt whether the sentiment has really penetrated the hearts of even the most cultivated men. Such things must always be difficult to gauge. Yet one cannot but sometimes wonder, if from the modern love of Nature, and the much talk about it, there could be deducted all that may be set down to love of change, imitation, fashion, and the desire to meet the expectations of refined society, how much would remain of feeling that was native, genuine, and spontaneous.

A few, we may believe, there have been in every age, and more perhaps in this than in former ages, to whom, in spite of the prosaic atmosphere that surrounded them, Nature was something more than a dead machine, something even worthy of affection. Poets, too, were born from age to age, favorite children of

“Gaudentes rure Camœnæ,”

who had their hearts opened in a preëminent degree to receive the love of Nature themselves, and to awaken it in other hearts by the music which they lent to it. Yet neither the poets, nor the few apprehensive spirits who sympathized with them, could do much to make head against the prosaic ways of thinking by which they were surrounded. It was only with furtive and occasional glances that even the poets of past ages were allowed to look at Nature as they would, only by a kind of sufferance that they were allowed to express the tender love they felt for her. The feelings which they had in her presence were put down to imagination, which was a faculty of falsehood, and the words which they used regarding her were supposed to be tropes and hyperboles that had no meaning. The science and the philosophy, as well as the common belief which surrounded them, had settled it, that Nature was as inanimate as any piece of man’s manufacture. And what were a few poets, with their weak singing, a few dreamers, with their flimsy fancies, that they could withstand the tyrant tradition, even though, half unconsciously, all their highest inspiration witnessed against it? The instinctive faith of the poet cannot be vindicated till, not in Poetry only, but by Science and Philosophy also, the unity and the life that is in Nature are fully recognized,—till the whole visible world, not in trope and figure, but in literal truth, is felt to be the embodied thought of a mind which is in Nature and above it, and which fills the Universe. Not till this conviction has come home to man as a sober truth of reason, can we feel that Nature is intended to minister no furtive, but a legitimate delight to the eye, to furnish an interest to the understanding, beauty and suggestiveness to the imagination, calm and restoration to the heart. Otherwise she becomes, none the less for all her beauty, to those who fain would love her, a cruel and all-devouring Sphinx.