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Title: A Hind in Richmond Park (1923)
Author: W. H. Hudson
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A Project Gutenberg of Australia eBook
Title: A Hind in Richmond Park (1923)
Author: W. H. Hudson
First published 1923
New York
By E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY
PREFATORY NOTE
The day before his death, Hudson told me that the last part of this
book's final chapter was practically finished. All that was needed by
the fragmentary script then lying scattered on his table was the
thorough revision his work invariably received. When I offered to have
it typed, he said that no one could understand it but himself. This I
took to refer to his handwriting, which at its best was at times
difficult, even to one who had known it for forty years. He often
scribbled so illegibly in pencil on odd pieces of paper that he was
occasionally hard pressed to read what he had written. As the book
remained incomplete, it was necessary for someone to put the last
words into order, and the task fell to me since I was familiar with
his themes and had discussed them in letters and in talk. He wrote to
me on the 2nd of August of this year, "I did not want to add anything
to the book, but it appears I must do it... and so I have had to go
into the infernal question of the meaning of art generally--its origin
and meaning.... And as soon as I get it done I want to send a copy for
you to read--not for you to tell me to modify anything, but to see
that I make myself understood." I quote this, as I could quote other
letters, to show why it lay upon me to undertake a laborious and very
painful task. But, when I came to examine the incomplete script, the
whole of it proved so difficult that many pages took days to
interpret, and perhaps one-third were wholly indecipherable. I have
therefore been obliged to divine, by the "suggestion of contiguity" to
which Hudson so often refers, the place of each paragraph and
sometimes that of separate significant sentences. My impression now is
that the main argument runs clearly enough, for many of the little
portions omitted had in them an intelligible line or two which showed
that they did but contain additional illustrative reasoning, not
necessary matter. I need scarcely say that I have added not a word and
have omitted nothing which could find a logical place.
MORLEY ROBERTS
October, 1922.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION. The Genius of W. H. Hudson. By Edward Garnett
CHAPTER I
Richmond Park--Red deer--An adventure with a hind eating
acorns--Watching a listening hind--Senses in dog and deer
compared--Senses and instinct in wild and domestic animals--Man and
beast compared--The hind divides her listening sense in two parts--The
trumpet ear and the ear trumpet--Strange case of a deaf lady listening
through an ear trumpet to a sermon
CHAPTER II
Ears in man and other animals--Ears in primitive man--Atavism in ears,
in the twitching-muscle and the teeth--Teeth-gnashing faculty--The
teeth as a musical instrument--Cave men's chamber music--A natural
ear-pad--Helping our ears--Wind-made noises in our ears a defect--A
wind symphony
CHAPTER III
Our senses--An atmospheric and wind sense--A difficult subject--Our
feeling about the wind--Women's unsuitable clothing--Eastern and
Western dress--A woman's fight with the wind--A ludicrous sight which
was beautiful--An historical question--Light from the dark
ages--Sheep-shearing--A saint's biography--Ellen in "News from
Nowhere"--Wind in poetical literature
CHAPTER IV
On seeking for a way back to Nature--The natural man and his
surroundings--When pain is pleasure--Man in unison with
Nature--"Intuition of snow," a notion fantastic and true--Influence of
the wind--The wind a promoter of thought--Flying thoughts--Help from
the physicists--Phantasms in the wind--Telepathic messages--A domestic
drama--Is the wind a mind-messenger?--A desire of the mind--The poet
expresses it--Is it a delusion?--Conjectures--Mental
embryology--Telepathy inherited from the animals
CHAPTER V
Wind and the sense of smell--Scent in deer and dog--Sense of smell in
man--In the Queensland savage--Sense of smell in different
races--Purely personal experience--The Smell of England: a mystery and
its solution--Aromatic and fragrant smells--Wordsworth's vision of
Paradise--Sweet gale--Bracken--Gorse and its powerful
effect--Spiritual quality in odours--Cowslip--Melancholy
flowers--Honeysuckle and sweet-briar--Shakespeare and Chaucer on its
scent--Chaucer, though old, still living--Scents and their degrading
associations--Frankincense
CHAPTER VI
The idea of unconscious smelling and the light it lends--Effect of
rest on nerves of smell: in caverns; at sea; on mountains--Character
of a dog's smell--A friend's surprising experience--Racial
smell--Smell a low subject--Physiology--Man-smelling by
savages--Atavism and a man whose nose never deceived
him--Cheek-smelling by Mosquito Indians--Case from Dugald
Stewart--Estimating character by scent--The dog's nose in judging
character--Effect of human odour on animals--Wolves in the Zoological
Gardens--Wolf-children--The jaguar's beneficent impulses--Bear and
puma--The mystery explained
CHAPTER VII
Little knowledge of savages available--Observations on the lower
animals--Nose-greeting in animals--Smell in savages--Our unconscious
sense of smell--Gypsies and savages on a level--Nerve of smell--The
dog in his world of smells--Small woodland beasts in their world--How
we are moved by hidden causes--Antipathies--Classical cases and modern
instances--Antipathies and second sight--A strange case; clairvoyance
or sense of smell?
CHAPTER VIII
An explanation and apology postponed--Smell in birds--An ancient
controversy--The vulture's two aspects--The way of the
vulture--Pigeons--Smell in crows--Daws and ravens--Carrion crow--The
rook's double nature--An uncanny took story--Panic fear in
mammals--Horses and cattle scenting grass and water--Great stampedes
preceding Indian invasions--Indian warfare in Argentina--A little
frontier tragedy
CHAPTER IX
The way this book is being written--The hind in Richmond Park
again--An imaginary colloquy--Sense of direction in animals and
man--Snakes--Insects--A foraging ant--Fishes, batrachians, birds and
mammals--Smell in self-preservation--Horses: the history of a homing
horse--Sense of direction in man--A gaucho's testimony--Sudden
recovery of the sense of direction--Comments
CHAPTER X
Migration unrelated to a sense of direction--Personal
observations--The old simple account of the phenomenon--Migration a
mystery still--Newton and Addison: the supernatural theory--Dr. Henry
More--Erasmus Darwin and his tradition theory--Wallace and
others--Canon Tristram's theory of the origin of life in the Arctic
regions--Glacial epochs and Seebohm in search of evidence--Benjamin
Kidd and the simple sun theory--Aspects of migration in England--We
are still left wondering--Recent futile methods of attacking the
problem--A new method suggested
CHAPTER XI
Aspects of migration in southern South America--Migrants from the
northern hemisphere--The abundance of bird life--Golden plover--Eskimo
curlew--Buff-breasted sandpiper--Glossy ibis--Cow-bird--Military
starling--Upland plover--The beautiful has vanished and returns not
CHAPTER XII
The migrants' cry--Unrest previous to departure--Upland plover,
swallows and others--Demonstrative and undemonstrative
species--Parental solicitude--Swifts and house-martins--Strange case
of a captive cuckoo--Night migration of diurnal species--Woodland
migrants on the pampas--Reluctant migrants--Thistledown as an
illustration--Migration of a troupial--Fear in birds and false
associations--Direction of migration--Unrest--Flying north--Migration
of rock-swallow--Pull of the north--Perturbations in migration--Upland
plover
CHAPTER XIII
No hard and fast line between migrants and non-migrants--Swallows and
partridges--Contrasted behaviour in two mocking-birds--Spur-wing
lapwing--An instinct in a state of flux--Migration in other
creatures--Fishes and insects--Kirby and Spence
speculate--Spiders--Mammals--Migration a danger--Sand-grouse and the
"Tartar invasions of Europe"--A "sense of polarity" the origin of
migration--A trace of this sense in man
CHAPTER XIV
The pampas Indian's battle-cry--Terrifying effects of sound
generally--Other aspects of sound--Effect of a powerful sneeze--The
human voice at its loudest--Account of a man with a big voice--Sound
in the ears of the drowning--Sound of big bells heard in a belfry--A
great thunder-clap--The phenomenon and the dream--The wilderness of
the mind
CHAPTER XV
The rhea's voice--Sounds that carry farthest--Man and animals compared
as to voice power--The swift's flight--Melody--Music as art and
instinctive--Mammalian music--Capybara--_Quis_--Tuco-tuco--Singing
mouse and small rodents--Monkeys--Braying of the ass as music--A purge
for the mind--The ass in fable and folk-story
CHAPTER XVI
Music of the lower animals--Of savage man and Hindoos--Music of the
stone age--The cannibal Pan--Singing of savages--Origin of
song--Diderot and Herbert Spencer--The cries of passion--Music founded
on passion and play--Music older than speech--Origin of
rhythm--Impassioned speech in savage and civilised man--Song in speech
and speech in song--Darwin's theory--Herbert Spencer's theory of the
function of music--What is Poetry?--Spiritual senses--Music and Poetry
sister arts--Furthest apart at their greatest, and nearest at their
lowest
CHAPTER XVII
Instrumental music, one with vocal music in its origin--Instrumental
music in the lower animals--Insects--Cicada--Locusts--_Oecanthus_;
silence, moonlight and tears made audible--_Locusta viridissima_ and
music in insects and man--A robber fly's musical performance--Of
insect wing-music generally--Hover-fly--Birds as
instrumentalists--Storks and woodpeckers--Wings as instruments of
music--Wing slap-pings and clappings--Bleating of snipe--Origin of
wing-music
CHAPTER XVIII
Instrumental music and its evolution--A book that is wanted--Fashion,
caprice and selection--The piano made perfect--The quality most
desired in musical sound--A bird and insect illustration--Naturalness
of instrumental music--A bird voice and the power of expression--Human
expression of instrumental music--The harp--Obsolete and reigning
instruments--A first experience of great music--Cause of different
effects produced by bird and human music--Conclusion
CONCLUSIONS
Difficulty of ending a story without end--Art as universal
instinct--Plastic art tracked by a footprint--Primitive expression of
the colour-sense--And of the actor's and storyteller's arts--Santayana
criticised--Insignificance of art in relation to life--An image of a
cloudy sky--The cry that calls attention to something seen--An
everlasting aspiration--The artist's creed--A way to something
better--The author's credentials--"Unemotional music" and the ordinary
man--A picture seen in boyhood--Sense of beauty a universal
possession--Definition of "field naturalist"--The perpetual flux of
artistic theory, a sign of progress beyond art--An unanswered question
INTRODUCTION
THE GENIUS OF W. H. HUDSON
When after Hudson's death I looked down upon his face as he lay on his
bed in the shadowed room, I saw before me the calm death mask of a
strong chieftain. All the chiselled, wavy lines of his wide brow, the
brooding mournfulness and glowing fire of his face had been smoothed
out. He was lying like some old chief of the Bronze Age, who, through
long years of good and ill, had led his tribe. And now for him only
remained the ancient rites, the purging fire, the cairn on the
hillside, and the eternity of the stars, the wind, the sun.
Yes, Hudson was a chief among his fellows, but the tribes over whom he
threw the mantle of his understanding, of his passionate love, for
whom he had spoken and fought all his life, were not human, but the
vast tribes of Nature's wild creatures, especially of the bird
kingdom, the tribes preyed on, destroyed and extirpated by man.
Yet though all wild Nature's life was Hudson's province and his
passion, though he often professed scant interest in the "petty
interests" of his fellows, his heart was the most deeply human of all
the men I have known.
The very source and centre of Hudson's genius was the inner fire of
lurking passion, of emotions of love and wrath and tender pity which
broke through the crust when he branded men's unfeeling brutality, and
were ever flashing to light up his eyes, in his response to beauty,
whether of nature or of woman, whether of birds or plants or trees or
skies or of the mother earth.
It was this unfailing well-spring of feeling that made Hudson the most
fascinating of all companions. I knew and loved him intimately as a
friend, and I never remember a moment of tiredness, of dullness, of
disappointment in his company. From the well-springs of his mind ever
gushed fresh limpid waters. I never heard him repeat himself in over
twenty years. It was because his spirit was so large, so vitally rich,
so fresh in its response to nature and life's drama; because his
spirit had renewed itself perennially in the river of nature's
fecundity; because, least of all men were his sympathies deflected by
the clamour and troubles of the self. Of all the writers I have known
Hudson was the least concerned with fame or reputation. He had
suffered bitterly in years gone by from poverty and isolation in
London, and deep in his mind lay the memory of his frustrations when
his essays and articles could scarcely earn him a chimney sweeper's
wage. How many Victorian mediocrities, now in the dust, were then
acclaimed to the skies! But when success came, though his books still
earned him little, he remained the least affected by applause. The
following passage from one of his letters to me, dated October n,
1910, is typical of his attitude: "You said so much in praise of 'A
Shepherd's Life' I had to wait and get cool before replying. But you
are always too generous to me. The reason of it is that you are to
some extent under an illusion. A man is so much better than his books!
Take the best thing you have done--don't you feel how little of all
the best in you it contains--and that little how poorly expressed? I
don't like even to look at a book of mine, after it is finished. I
suppose when you know a man intimately and have an affection for him,
you get into the way of expecting to find him--something worthy of
him--in his book. Hence the illusion. I think Sully explains it all
in his book 'Illusion.' But that's enough about the book."
How like Hudson to deprecate "A Shepherd's Life"! that rich intimate
web, so strongly woven, that truthful tapestry of the ways, facts,
manners and character of the life of the old-world people of the
Wiltshire Downs, a book which he had constructed out of many
sojournings and wanderings in Salisbury Plain. And yet what Hudson
says in his letters is true of himself. Hudson was much fuller and
deeper than his books; in each of which, successively, he mirrored
fresh features of "the earth life" he loved, fresh sides of himself as
naturalist-poet and artist. His fecundity one could not plumb. At our
meetings I must have heard from his lips hundreds of little human
dramas, moving, racy, arresting, characteristic stories of people he
had met or heard of, life stories of the kind of which he has set down
charming examples in "Afoot in England." All over the counties of
southern England he had traversed he made many friends, chiefly in
humble life, and in his letters to me he often regrets in revisiting
villages those old friends whose faces had vanished. He made friends
easily with anybody he wished. His tall, dark figure, the brusque
charm of his talk, his rich deep voice, magnetic eyes, the spice of
mystery in his coming and going, something abrupt and unforeseen in
his attitude, captivated his listeners. In his last years, when all
the relatives and friends of his youth, and even the wild character
and fauna and bird life of the pampas had passed away, his spirit
seemed to dwell much in sorrowful, tragic episodes and life's
frustrations: but even this "rebellious despondency" could not
attenuate his passionate zest in life. The one thing he dreaded was
death, and this shadowy dread is attested by scores of passages in his
latter books. And still in my ears rings the poignant thrill in his
voice, on the last day I saw him alive in August. "What! is she dead?"
he exclaimed, staring at me, when I spoke of the death of a woman
writer we both admired. And his eyes reflected all the "intolerable
regret" for "the beautiful multitudinous life that has vanished," all
that haunting mournfulness which inspires that exquisite paper, "The
Return of the Chiff-Chaff" in "A Traveller in Little Things." But,
even in his brooding melancholy, there was something indomitable in
Hudson's philosophy of life. One felt he was himself, as Conrad once
said, "a product of Nature," resembling in his essence some sketch of
forest or moor or mountain valley, rock-strewn, with impetuous streams
and blossoming thickets and luxuriance of delicate plants. And the
charm of his personality, as of his books, lay inherent in this
mysterious vitality and fecundity of spirit. The range of his
emotional powers and poetic vision may be appraised in contrasting
aspects in a dozen of his works: but the essence of his individuality
is best declared, I think, in his two romances, "The Purple Land"
(1885), and "Green Mansions" (1904). The first, the youthful Hudson,
contains all the flavour of his ironical humour, (tinged with the
Spanish courtesy which was his birthright, and set him apart from all
other English writers) and all the artistic caprice, passionate warmth
and tender sympathy of his temperament.
In certain chapters, such as XIX, XXI, XXVI, one can hear the rich
inflections of his voice. The graver emotional profundities of
Hudson's nature, in all their capacities for tragic passion and
brooding sorrow, are fully manifested in "Green Mansions." But while
"Green Mansions" is a magical fusion of Hudson's feeling for woman and
his passion for Nature and for bird life, "El Ombu" (I hold it to be
the finest short story in the English language) (1902) is to me the
most consummate of his imaginative creations. It was my enthusiasm for
this story, which as a publisher's reader I first read in MS., that
brought about our friendship. I shall speak of our personal relations
in another place, with reference to his letters to me, 1901-1922. The
story "Marta Reguelme" (1902) Hudson himself placed above "El Ombu,"
and one must own that for its piercing quality as well as for its
painting of a wild, savage atmosphere it is unique. I lay particular
stress on these imaginative creations, because they unlock the very
source and centre of Hudson's genius, his responsive wealth of feeling
which vivified the component layers of perception and reflection,
observation and analytic power which made him our greatest English
naturalist.
As an example of the manner in which his artistic feeling guided his
faculties, I give this little illustration from life. I was sitting
one evening with him in a meadow bordering on a wood, when we heard a
nightjar calling twice or thrice. Hudson immediately mimicked the cry,
and suddenly the nightjar came tumbling and twisting over our heads.
Hudson laughed sardonically at it, and repeated his cry, and the bird
kept circling round us, as if astonished at the sight of this strange
man-bird from whom the call came. Hudson watched the bird keenly with
affectionate mockery, and suddenly he waved his hand in a sweeping,
lordly dismissal! "There! go back to your moths!" he said, and turned
to rise, and the nightjar disappeared.
The early inception and development of Hudson's genius is shown quite
clearly in "Far Away and Long Ago." Born on the South American pampas
in 1846, as a child he had every favouring circumstance, an
environment romantically wild and beautiful--a Paradise of bird
life--richly stimulating his innate poetic and artistic faculties and
his sense of mystery, and feeding his human curiosity with the
spectacle of the primitive life of the gauchos and the atmosphere of
the gracious traditions of old-world Spanish manners. Hudson was happy
in his parents and home life. His father and mother and their children
were a fine, hardy stock. His mixed blood, Devonshire, New England and
Irish--his maternal grandmother was Irish--endowed him with the vigour
of a lucky cross.
In a letter to me of January 16, 1914, he dwells on the beauty of his
mother's character, adding: "Leigh Hunt's mother was an American, and
must have been strangely like my mother, who was also American, but
Hunt's mother's people were loyalists, while my mother's forbears were
furiously anti-English from the very beginning of the discontents
which ended in the Revolution." But at sixteen fell the blow. He
became an invalid and no hopes were held of his recovery. At first
sight this misfortune seemed paralyzing, but in fact it only diverted
his energies into a creative channel, and deepened his nature and his
spiritual vision immeasurably. Instead of leading a life of healthy
vigorous activities, he was forced for years to rest and contemplate,
to speculate and ponder; and so was mapped out for him the path of
student-naturalist, and later of nature-writer. While his mental
outlook, as he tells us, was changed and oriented by the new sun of
Evolution, his deep poetic sense, his sensibility to beauty, unlike
Darwin's, were in no sense lessened, but on the contrary they
continued to expand, face to face with Nature.
The second period of his development, which dates approximately
1860-74, completed the building-up of his powers of observation and
contemplation, and his artistic and poetic receptivity, which finally
yielded mature fruit in "A Naturalist in La Plata" and "Idle Days in
Patagonia," 1891-2, much of which he had composed in previous years.
Of the "dark period" in Hudson's life, approximately the years
1874-82, when he first came to London, and, as he says, "was compelled
to exist shut out from Nature, for long periods, sick, poor and
friendless," he himself hated to speak. Instinctively recognizing
this, I never questioned him, though I remember once he told me how,
when he was in great need, after executing a piece of work for a
well-known genealogist, and saying he could do no more without some
payment, his employer had drawn half-a-crown from his pocket, and
offered it him, saying, "This is all I can give you! I have no
money." "What!" I said to Hudson, "he had no money then to pay you for
your work!" "No," answered Hudson, "it was true. The man was widely
known by reputation, but he had no money himself!"
Hudson married in 1880 Miss Emily Wingrove, a minor concert singer,
and his tender tributes to her, the companion of his poverty, in
"Walking and Cycling" and "Seeking a Shelter" in "Afoot in England,"
and also in "The Return of the Chiff-Chaff" in "A Traveller in Little
Things," throw some gleams of light on those years, about which one
trusts Mr. Morley Roberts will have more to tell us, in his promised
book of Recollections.
Some of Hudson's early poetry may be found in the magazine "Merrie
England" 1884-5, and the most important piece, "The London Sparrow,"
has been reprinted by Mr. Bertram Lloyd in "The Great Kinship" (Alien
& Unwin, 1921). Of the pseudonymous novel, "Fan" by "Henry Harford,"
evidently composed in years anterior to its publication (1892), Hudson
remarked to me, twenty years ago, "Its great fault is that such a girl
as Fan could never have come out of the slums!" By it, as by his other
most faulty piece of story telling, "Ralph Herne," which was laid
aside for a lengthy period, a story the publication of which I assured
him years back "would ruin any man's reputation!" he laid no store
whatever. On the other hand, rather unexpectedly, he stood up in
defence of "A Crystal Age" in 1917 writing to me, June 10. "About 'A
Crystal Age' you haven't said more of depreciation of it than I have
said myself in the preface of the Third Edition. But the book in spite
of absurdities is not inferior to the others. They too are absurd in
some ways.... The sexual passion is the central thought in 'A Crystal
Age': the idea being that there is no millennium, no rest, no
perpetual peace till that fury has burnt itself out, and I give no
limited time for the change. It is, you say, the social model of the
Beehive, with the Queen-mother in its centre, and you say that I have
'adopted' the idea. Well, I didn't, and if you know of books in which
it appears before 'A Crystal Age' was published, let me know. I have
only seen it in a paper by Benjamin Kidd which appeared after my book
was written, though not before it was published.... Kidd believed that
the sexual passion would eventually decay--it would have to decay
simply because in no other way could man attain to that higher state,
mentally, morally, physically, to which he appears (or appears to
Kidd) to be destined."
The publication of "The Naturalist in La Plata" (1892), which was
immediately hailed as a classic and declared by Alfred Russel Wallace
to be "altogether unique among books on Natural History" permanently
established Hudson's reputation, and with it may be said to have
commenced his last, most creative period, 1892-1922. While he is the
great poet-interpreter of bird life, his wrathful pleading on behalf
of all the threatened species in "Last British Birds" has slowly
permeated the public conscience. In "Nature and Downland" (1900) and
"Hampshire Days" (1903) Hudson originated a new pattern of Nature
book, one that gets on to the printed page Nature's light and shading,
her variability, elusiveness and mutability: he catches, so to say,
the very breath of changing wind and weather, and cross hatches his
diverse picture with a network of human associations. Short-sighted
men of science have regretted that Hudson's poetic sense and feeling
for the illimitable mysterious beauty in Nature's wild life came more
and more to vivify and transfigure "the dull leaden mask of mere
intellectual curiosity" of which he speaks in "Green Mansions"; but,
as we have emphasized above, it was Hudson's force of passionate
feeling which lay at the root of all his varied powers and made him
pre-eminent. Through this force of emotional perception, he entered
more intimately and steeped himself more intensely in the protean
spectacle of Nature's life than have any of his rivals, Bates or
Wallace or Belt or Jefferies or Burroughs.
Beauty is an integral factor in Nature's scheme. Dullness of spirit
and an unfeeling heart, these mean lack of spiritual perception and
simply something barred out and lurking in the mind, just as cataract
in the eye means darkness, insensibility to light. Men do not boast of
myopia or failure to see the features of a face. Women do not boast
that they see no beauty in children or flowers. But millions of
civilized people complacently boast today of having little aesthetic
sense, no poetic sense, no artistic faculty! not comprehending that in
this respect they are lower than savages. Now Hudson in his Nature
books, like a surgeon who gives sight, restores spiritual vision to
the victims of civilization. As poet-naturalist he supplies a new lens
to our faculties.
In his chapter on "The Plains of Patagonia," Hudson gives us,
unconsciously, the key to his supremacy. "We ourselves," he says, "are
the living sepulchres of a dead past... what has truly entered our
soul and become psychical is our environment, that wild nature in
which and to which we were born at an inconceivably remote period, and
which made us what we are." He himself had stored up in his soul and
had access through his feeling to those immeasurable spiritual sources
of life which animate Nature. He himself was a strange fusion of the
highest intellectual faculties and "the hidden fiery core of primitive
nature ready to send flame through the civilized crust." His genius,
his supremacy over all his contemporaries, lay in his fuller
perception of the infinite ocean of Nature's fecundity, and in his
more delicate response to the mystery and beauty of her multitudinous
aspects. And his books flash upon us this gleaming spiritual
apprehension of the whole, while seizing upon and stamping the
character of the living past.
EDWARD GARNETT
October, 1922.
A HIND IN RICHMOND PARK
I
Richmond Park--Red deer--An adventure with a hind eating
acorns--Watching a listening hind--Senses in dog and deer
compared--Senses and instinct in wild and domestic animals--Man and
beast compared--The hind divides her listening sense in two parts--The
trumpet ear and the ear trumpet--Strange case of a deaf lady listening
through an ear trumpet to a sermon.
Occasionally when in London I visit Richmond Park to refresh myself
with its woods and waters abounding in wild life, and its wide
stretches of grass and bracken. It is the bird life that attracts me
most, for it is a varied one although so near to the metropolis, and
there are here, at least two of England's few remaining great
birds--the great crested grebe and the heron. The mammals are of less
account, but I have met here with at least two adventures with the red
deer which are worth recording. Stags are aloof and dignified, if not
hostile in their manner, which prevents one from becoming intimate
with them. When walking alone late on a misty October or November
evening I listen to their roaring and restrain my curiosity. A strange
and formidable sound! Is it a love-chant or a battle-cry? I give it
up, and thinking of something easier to understand quietly pursue my
way to the exit.
One afternoon in late summer I was walking with three ladies among the
scattered oak trees near the Pen Ponds when we saw a hind, a big
beautiful beast, rearing up in her efforts to reach the fully ripe
acorns, and on my plucking a few and holding them out to her, she came
readily to take them from my hand. She invariably took the acorn with
a sudden violent jerk; not that she was alarmed or suspicious, but
simply because it was the only way known to a hind to take an acorn
from the branch to which it is attached with a very tough stem. To her
mind the acorn had to be wrenched from me. My friends also gave her
acorns, and she greedily devoured them all and still asked for more.
And while we were amusing ourselves in this way, two ladies
accompanied by a little girl of about eight or nine came up and looked
on with delight at our doings. Presently the little girl cried out,
"Oh, mother, may I give it an acorn?" And the mother said "No." But I
said, "Oh, yes, come along and take this one and hold it out to the
deer." She took it from me gladly and held it out as directed. Then a
sudden change came over the temper of the animal; instead of taking it
readily she drew back, looking startled and angry; then slowly, as if
suspiciously, approached the child and took the acorn, and almost at
the same instant sprang clear over the child's head, and on coming
down on the other side, struck violently out with her hind feet. One
hoof grazed her cheek and dealt her a sharp blow on the shoulder. Then
it trotted away, leaving the child screaming and sobbing with pain and
fright.
For a few minutes I was amazed at this action of the hind, then I
noticed for the first time that the child was wearing a bright red
jacket. O unseeing fool that I am, exclaimed I to myself, not to have
noticed that red jacket in time! I think my hurt was as great as that
of the child, who recovered presently and was duly (and quite
unnecessarily) warned by her mother to feed no more deer.
I have seen the effect of scarlet on various other animals, but never
before on deer. It affects animals as a warning or a challenge,
according to their disposition, and if they are of a fiery or savage
temper, it is apt to put them in a rage.
In the other adventure with a hind there was no sensational or
surprising element, but it interested me even more than the first.
Seeing a hind lying under an oak tree, chewing her cud, I drew quietly
towards her and sat down at the roots of another tree about twenty
yards from her. She was not disturbed at my approach, and as soon as I
had settled quietly down the suspended vigorous cud-chewing was
resumed, and her ears, which had risen up and then were thrown
backwards, were directed forwards towards a wood about two hundred
yards away. I was directly behind her, so that with her head in a
horizontal position and the large ears above the eyes, she could not
see me at all. She was not concerned about me--she was wholly occupied
with the wood and the sounds that came to her from it, which my less
acute hearing failed to catch, although the wind blew from the wood to
us.
Undoubtedly the sounds she was listening to were important or
interesting to her. On putting my binocular on her so as to bring her
within a yard of my vision, I could see that there was a constant
succession of small movements which told their tale--a sudden
suspension of the cud-chewing, a stiffening of the forward-pointing
ears, or a slight change in their direction; little tremors that
passed over the whole body, alternately lifting and depressing the
hairs of the back--which all went to show that she was experiencing a
continual succession of little thrills. And the sounds that caused
them were no doubt just those which we may hear any summer day in any
thick wood with an undergrowth--the snapping of a twig, the rustle of
leaves, the pink-pink of a startled chaffinch, the chuckle of a
blackbird, or sharp little quivering alarm-notes of robin or wren, and
twenty besides.
It was evident that the deer could not see anything except just what I
saw--the close wood a couple of hundred yards away from us on the
other side of a grassy expanse; nor did she require to see anything;
she was living in and knew the exact meaning of each and every sound.
She was like the dog as we are accustomed to see it in repose, sitting
or lying down, with chin on paws, seemingly dozing, but awake in a
world of its own, as we may note by the perpetual twitching of the
nose. He is receiving a constant succession of messages, and albeit
some are cryptic, they mostly tell him something he understands and
takes a keen interest in. And they all come to him by one avenue--that
of smell; for when we look closely at him we see that his eyes, often
half-closed and blinking, have that appearance of blindness or of not
seeing consciously which is familiar to us in a man whose sight is
turned inwards, who is thinking and is so absorbed in his thoughts
that the visible world becomes invisible to him. The dimmed eye in the
reposing dog and the absent-minded philosopher is in both cases due to
the fact that vision is not wanted for the time, and has been put
aside. The resting, but wakeful, deer and dog differ only in this,
that the first is living in a bath of vibrations, the other of
emanations.
To return to our listening hind. The sounds that held her attention
were inaudible to me, but I dare say that a primitive man or pure
savage who had existed all his life in a state of nature in a woodland
district would have been able to hear them, although not so well as
the hind on account of the difference in the structure of the outer
ear in the two species. But what significance could these same little
woodland sounds have in the life of this creature in its present
guarded, semi-domestic condition--the condition in which the herd has
existed for generations? It is nothing but a survival--the perpetual
alertness and acute senses of the wild animal, which are no longer
necessary, but are still active and shining, not dimmed or rusted or
obsolete as in our domestic cattle, which have been guarded by man
since Neolithic times. But as I have seen on the Argentine pampas,
these qualities and instincts, dormant for thousands of years, revive
and recover their old power when cattle are allowed to run wild and
have to protect themselves from their enemies.
A life-long intimacy with animals has got me out of the common notion
that they are automata with a slight infusion of intelligence in their
composition. The mind in beast and bird, as in man, is the main thing.
Man has progressed mentally so far that, looking back at the other
creatures, they appear practically mindless to him. Their actions,
for example, are instinctive, whereas in the case of man reason has
taken the place of instinct. How funny it is to find these hard and
fast lines still set down by some modern biologists! Alfred Russel
Wallace maintained that there were no instincts in man. The simple
truth of the matter is that our instincts have been more modified and
obscured, as instincts, in us than in the lower animals. But though
the instincts of animals are less modified and obscured, they are also
interwoven and shot through or saturated with intelligence. In what do
the ordinary occupations of hunting, fishing, shelter-building,
rearing and protecting the young, and so on, differ in the animal and
the savage or primitive man? There is mind-stuff, or, let us say,
intelligence in both; neither beast nor man could exist without that
element, although no doubt the man in a state of nature has somewhat
more of it than his four-footed neighbours.
My only reason for touching on this question is that I want to say
that I recognize a mind-life in animals similar to, though much lower
in degree than, that of man. And the subject was suggested by the
behaviour of the hind during the whole time, which was not far short
of an hour, while I sat there intently watching her with interest and
with surprise as well. And the surprise was at the intense interest
she, on her part, was taking in the little sounds coming to her from
the wood. These sounds, as we have seen, were of no import in the
creature's life. It can even be said or supposed that she knew they
were without significance, since there was no fear of any danger from
that direction; and so wholly free from fear was she that even my
presence at the tree's root behind her was disregarded. Surely thus in
her listening she was experiencing a sort of mind-life, amusing
herself, we might say, in capturing and identifying the series of
slight sounds floating to her. Or one might compare the animal in that
state in which I watched her, resting after feeding, chewing the cud,
and at the same time agreeably occupied in listening to the little
woodland sounds, to the man who, after dining well, smokes his cigar
in his easy chair and amuses his mind at the same time with a book--a
fascinating story, let us say, of old unhappy things and battles long
ago.
The last paragraph is pure speculation, and if any sober-minded
naturalist (and they are practically all that) has already said in
reading it, "You are going too far," I agree with him. The poet Donne
has said that there are times when we, or some of us, think with our
bodies, and it is truer of the lower animals than of us, perhaps; but
the small outward manifestations are not enough to show us the mind,
and the gentleman in his easy-chair, smoking his post-prandial cigar
and enjoying his novel at the same time, may be on a very different
plane from the deer chewing its cud and catching little flying sounds
in its trumpet ears, or from the dog dozing in the sunshine and
capturing winged scents, even as the garden spider while peacefully
reposing captures small gilded flies in her geometric web.
But what follows is plain fact. This same hind gave me yet another
surprise before I had finished with her.
After sitting there for a space of fifteen or twenty minutes,
sufficiently entertained by watching all those minute motions I have
described, it came into my head to try a little experiment, and I
emitted a low whistle. Instantly the ears, which had been pointed
forward all the time, were thrown back, and remained in that position
about a minute; then, no further sound being given, they went forward
again. Then the whistle was repeated, and the ears came back and
remained a longer interval, but finally went forward again; and the
whistle and movement of the ears was repeated five or six times. Then
came the surprise. When I whistled next time one ear was laid back
while the other continued pointing forward at the wood. It was as if
the hind had said--for she no doubt knew the whistling came from
me--"I'm not going to be cheated out of my woodland sounds any more; I
shall keep on attending to them and at the same time keep one ear on
you to find out what this whistling means."
The surprise was that she was able to do such a thing. I had not
known that an animal with trumpet ears could use them in that way,
receiving impressions from two sources, taken in and judged separately
and simultaneously, as a bird receives sight-impressions through the
eyes placed (as in most birds) at the sides of the head, each with its
own distinct field of vision. Or as the chameleon, with eyes mounted
on rods, is able to keep one eye on the movements of an insect in its
neighbourhood, while the other looks at you or at some other object
which attracts its attention.
I soon found that if I refused to whistle as long as an ear pointed
back at me, it would at last go forward once more to assist the other,
and when this happened, and I then whistled again, the one ear--always
the left ear--was instantly thrown back again, the other always
keeping steadily on the wood.
This went on until the hind got up, shook the dust and dead leaves
off, and slowly sauntered away without even a parting look at the
person who had interfered with her pleasure by behaving in that
eccentric manner. But she had taught me a lot. Did the hind, I wonder,
with its beautiful trumpet ears, suggest the ear trumpet? Watching how
this deer moved her pair of live trumpets about to catch passing
sounds, it amused me to recall an old lady I used to see in a
Hampshire village church who sat in a pew before mine during the
Sunday morning services, and the deft way in which she manipulated her
trumpet to capture the preacher's precious winged words. His manner
in preaching was curious, if not quite unique. He would begin each
sentence in a quiet natural tone, then raise his voice, then higher
still, then let it drop back to the opening tone. Thus there were four
changes in tone fitted to the four clauses composing each sentence,
and there were also four bodily attitudes and movements to correspond.
Thus, the first clause was delivered standing in a stooping attitude,
the eyes fixed on the MS. In the second he rose to his full height
and fixed his eyes on his congregation. In the third the upward
movement culminated in the preacher standing up on his toes,
supporting himself by placing his finger-tips on the pulpit, and then
having launched the words of clause three in his most powerful tones,
he would sink back to the lower attitude, downward bent eyes and low
voice. The difference in the man's height when he delivered clauses
three and four must have been about nine inches, which would of course
make a very great difference in listening to the sermon by a person
hard of hearing. There the old lady's ear trumpet came in; there were
four changes in its direction for each sentence, from the first and
last when it was directed straight before her, to the second and third
when it rose, automatically as it seemed, and at the third it would
appear like a crest above her head.
I was told, if I remember rightly, that he had been vicar above a
quarter of a century, and had always preached just in that way, and
that the old lady had attended the church for many years with her ear
trumpet, till long practice had made her so perfect in its use in
following the sermon through all the preacher's bobbings up and down,
she could almost do it with her eyes shut and never miss a word.
II
Ears in man and other animals--Ears in primitive man--Atavism in ears,
in the twitching-muscle and the teeth--Teeth-gnashing faculty--The
teeth as a musical instrument--Cave men's chamber music--A natural
ear-pad--Helping our ears--Wind-made noises in our ears a defect--A
wind symphony.
The subject of the hind and her ears set me thinking about the outer
ears in man, and how they compare with those of other mammals,
especially with the trumpet ear.
The ears in primitive men were free-hinged, not nailed to the
head--but never so free as in the deer, horse, and many other animals,
which are able to point forwards, backwards, and sideways. They were
built on a different principle, though it may puzzle us to know why a
long narrow head as in the horse, or a broad head as in foxes and
others, should have ears placed like pinnacles on the top, while man's
are against the sides of the head. One can only say that it is so
because they grew so, or they happened by chance to come in that
position.
The ears in early man were also undoubtedly very much bigger than
ours; and by ours I mean the ears of the refined, cultivated races of
man--the higher classes, who with the little "shell-like" ears flat
against the head always exist side by side with those of a less
improved type who have big ears standing out, and their correlatives,
big hands and feet. I dare say the Palaeolithic man's auricle was
about the bigness of a tea-cup half-saucer, and being hinged, it could
lie back flat against his head when listening to sounds from the sides
or the rear, or--as in other mammals--to express anger. The other
movement was forward; it could stand out, as in the elephant, at right
angles to the head to catch sounds coming from the front. Judging from
the position of the ears in new-born babies, one might suppose that
the ears ordinarily stood out from the head like the two opposite
handles of a round pot.
No doubt there have been instances of atavism in the human ear
observed from time to time, just as in the case of the
twitching-muscle. There are those who have this twitching power all
over the head instead of in the forehead and muscles of the face only;
so vigorous is it in some instances that the man is able to throw or
shake off his hat by a sudden violent movement of the head-muscles,
like that of a dog shaking himself. I also suppose that primitive man
had the teeth-gnashing faculty, as I have known one man who had it as
powerfully as it exists in the dog, in peccaries and pigs of all
kinds, and other fierce mammals. This man was a Spanish Basque, a
workman, and as he was musically inclined he had utilised his
wonderfully strong teeth and teeth-gnashing faculty by turning his
mouth into a musical instrument. Planting an elbow on the table and
resting his chin on his hand, he would start the performance and go
through a number of marches and martial airs far in advance, as music,
of any performance on the bones I have ever listened to, and while the
teeth were grinding, rattling and crashing together, the lips were
rapidly moving to soften, deaden and louden the sounds. It was an
astonishing kind of music, but not agreeable to me on account of an
apprehension I felt that at any loud crash or finale the teeth would
fly into pieces all over the room like two china vases brought
violently into collision.
We know that the earliest man who has left traces of his life and mind
in the holes he inhabited was an artist, that with rock and bone to
work on he was able to express the sense of beauty and wonder in him,
and to leave pictures of the wild life of his day--deer and mastodon
and wild horse in flight--which move the admiration of the ameliorated
man of over a hundred centuries later. Doubtless he had his music
too, his composers, and "instruments of unremembered forms," and it is
highly probable that, like my friend the Basque, he used his large
powerful teeth and the teeth-gnashing faculty in his winter evening
concerts, when the family sat round the fire in Wookey Hole or Kent
Cave or King Arthur's Cave, and other rocky dens where they had their
homes and hearths.
I have never come across anyone with a free or movable ear, but I once
met a man who, when conversing with another person sitting by him or
walking in the street, would always draw down the upper part of the
ear on the other side of the head, and hitch the curve of the top lobe
over the lobe at the bottom, thus closing the passage to sound from
one side.
The question I am concerned with just now is: To what extent does the
outer ear in its present condition, glued to the head and diminishing
in size, help our hearing? Some physiologists have said that it helps
us not at all, that but for the look of the thing we should be just as
well off if our ears were all removed in infancy. The light of
nature, or experience, shows us that it is not so; that when we listen
intently to sounds difficult to catch we almost instinctively put up a
finger and push the ear a little forward; and it is possible the
movement is instinctive and dates back to the far time when the ear
began to lose its freedom of motion. Thus, in _Adventures of an Atom_,
we read: "Soon as Gotto-mio stood up every spectator raised his thumb
to his ear as if it were instinctively." A good observation worth
rescuing from the dullest as well as the obscenest "classic" in the
language. We have also the habit of holding an open hand behind the
ear when listening; the hand thus held open, and the fingers curved
forwards to make a hollow pan, is a substitute for the primitive ear
when it was swung forward to listen to sounds from the front. It would
not be difficult to ascertain by experiments just how far the outer
ear does help us in the hearing. Thus the ear could be done away with
by sinking it in and covering it smoothly over with wax, leaving the
passage free. And it would perhaps be an agreeable experience to face
the wind for the first time in this practically earless condition, to
find that it had lost its sound, though still possessed of its full
fury.
The noisiness of the wind when it blows in our face is a defect in us.
Has it not been made so or aggravated owing to the ear having become
fixed? Our ears, which we are incapable of moving at will, are like
the iron guttering, the loose tiles and slates and weathercock on the
roof of some high exposed house on a windy coast. The wind beats
unceasingly on the exposed roof with a succession of blasts or waves
which vary in length and violence, causing all the loose parts to
vibrate into sound. And the sounds are hissing, whispering,
whistling, muttering and murmuring, whining, wailing, howling,
shrieking--all the inarticulate sounds uttered by man and beast in
states of intense excitement, grief, terror, rage, and what not. And
as they sink and swell and are prolonged or shattered into convulsive
sobs and moans, and overlap and interwave, acute and shrill and
piercing, and deep and low, all together forming a sort of harmony, it
seems to express the whole ancient dreadful tragedy of man on
earth--man and the noble intelligent brutes he warred and preyed on--a
story told in a symphony by some unearthly Tchaikovsky or wandering
spirit of the air, so fascinating that one can lie awake long hours
listening to it, as I have on many nights in rough winter weather at
the Land's End.
But there is no fascination in the noises made by the wind in our ears
when it beats upon the loose cartilaginous slates and tiles and
gutters attached to our heads and sets them vibrating. It is a pure
annoyance, a flap-flapping as of flags; murmurings and rumblings mixed
with sibilant sounds, also a good deal of thunder. It hinders hearing,
and to get rid of it we are compelled to turn the head aside.
I take it that all animals with large ears are in some degree subject
to this annoyance; it could not be otherwise, since their ears must
vibrate in the wind like ours, and more than ours, and so create
sound; but I also think that they are able to minimise the annoyance
by slight voluntary, or perhaps automatic, movements of the ears to
change the angle at which the wind strikes them.
But the wind is a long subject, and now I'm at it, I must go on about
it in the next part.
III
Our senses--An atmospheric and wind sense--A difficult subject--Our
feeling about the wind--Women's unsuitable clothing--Eastern and
Western dress--A woman's fight with the wind--A ludicrous sight which
was beautiful--An historical question--Light from the dark
ages--Sheep-shearing--A saint's biography--Ellen in "News from
Nowhere"--Wind in poetical literature.
Undoubtedly we possess several senses in addition to the five with
which we are supposed to be endowed--the canonical five they may be
called, or the seven with which some of the authorities now credit us,
the two apocryphal or supplementary being the muscular sense and the
sense of equilibrium. Others are not recognized as senses on account
of having no _organs_; but into this question I do not wish to enter
now, as at present we are concerned only with the wind, and I have no
desire to shelter myself from it.
To begin with, I must say that we have an atmospheric sense, and that
the wind is included in it as well as cloud, mist, rain, snow,
sunshine, and so on; nevertheless, apart from all that, we may, or
some of us may, recognise in ourselves something which may be called a
_wind-sense_, seeing that it is, or so I believe, an effect on body
and mind widely different in character from all other atmospheric
effects. One has only one's own experiences to go by; this sense may
be common or rare--as rare, say, as the sense of direction in
civilised man; or, rarer still, the "sense of polarity." A difficult
subject! The attempt to deal with it is like trying to grasp the wind
in one's hand, and perhaps my best plan is to approach it in a
roundabout way, with little tentative crawlings, springs and dashes,
like a kitten trying to capture an elusive bit of thistledown on a
windy polished floor.
A man I am acquainted with, the author of many books, once said to me:
"All I know about the wind is that it is an infernal nuisance!"
Undoubtedly this is an extreme view for a man, but it is one almost
universal in women. The natural man who works out of doors is not put
out by the wind, although he knows when it is blowing, just as he
knows when the sun is shining or is behind a cloud, and when it is
raining. It is different with the man whose time is mostly spent
indoors, whose skin is thinner and softer, his nerves of touch more
sensitive. Yet even in such a one, despite the physical degeneracy
caused by a sheltered sedentary existence, there is ever coming out a
quick glad response to Nature's influence, a sense of something
restorative, even in its rudest assaults. The man by himself or with
other men feels this; but no sooner does a woman come on the scene
than a change, a different attitude, is produced in him out of sheer
sympathy. The wind distresses her, and he becomes infected with her
feeling; and that feeling, after he has experienced it a dozen or a
hundred times, becomes permanently associated with the wind and with
the very thought of the wind. But if you explained to a man, who is
your friend, the reason of the wind being an infernal nuisance to him,
he would take it as an insult and perhaps never speak to you again. It
would be a reflection on his manliness.
Woman's dislike of the wind, we know, is caused by her dress, or, let
us say, because she has not yet found out the way to clothe herself
suitably for outdoor work and exercise. Barbarians and savages know
the way, but as our civilisation progressed and our women were more
and more confined to the house, they clothed themselves for that
condition mainly, and after several thousand years of study and
experiment have succeeded in making their covering as beautiful as we
want it to be. That is for so long as we think clothing necessary at
all: the main fault with the clothing is that there is too much of it;
but it is a fault which there is now happily a tendency to remedy.
Undoubtedly there are Eastern costumes more beautiful; but to our
Western eyes the beauty is of a kind which we do not desire to see
adopted, since it is not in harmony with our Western feeling about
womankind, and appears to us designed to give artificial or fictitious
charm and allurement to the inane sex.
This indoor dress which pleases becomes unsuitable and even absurd
when worn out of doors in wind and rough and wet weather, a usual
condition in this "brumous island." The headgear, designed to
harmonize with the costume, makes it worse; what wonder then that if a
hundred women be asked their opinion of the wind, ninety-nine will
reply at once: "I hate it!" The ludicrous spectacle of a woman in a
high wind struggling with her skirts, her hat and her hair,
endeavouring to keep her furbelows from flying away, and not to lose
her sunshade and bag or reticule at the same time, is common enough.
Ludicrous, I have called it, but it is also repulsive and painful,
since it forces on us the painful fact of women's idiocy; we laugh or
smile and are sad.
Once only in my lifetime have I seen such a thing and admired the
spectacle of a woman's contest with her old hated enemy, the wind. It
was on a brilliant spring morning, and I had just left St. Ives behind
me to walk to Zennor on the Cornish coast. The blue sea on my left
hand sparkled with whitest foam, whilst clouds were flying across the
intensely blue sky, and the strong wind, which with the sunshine made
the day so glorious, blew the fresh, sharp, salt smell of the sea,
mingled with the spicy odours of the blossoming gorse, to my nostrils.
I came to a point where the road is cut across at right angles by a
narrow stony footpath running from a small farm-house on my right,
towards the sea, to another farm-house on the inland side; and just
when I arrived at this point I caught sight of a young lady coming
from the first little house to the second; and as it was a strange
figure in that rude incult wilderness of rock and furze, I stood still
at the cross-roads and waited for her to come by, so as to get a full
and satisfying look at her.
She was of medium height, but looked tall on account of her
slimness--an elegant figure of a young lady of about seventeen or
eighteen, all in blackest black, with a black feather boa and a wisp
of black crape on a transparent or translucent hat of large dimensions
which she was wearing--one of those wide yet almost invisible hats
made of some unsubstantial material like thistledown or gossamer. With
her left hand she anxiously held on to the rim or brim of the
wonderful hat fluttering on her loose pale golden or honey-coloured
hair. It was in an incessant flutter, trying to escape from her head
and hand to fly over the hills and frolic with the wind. In her right
hand, held out before her, she carried a tall slim vessel of some sort
which sparkled like silver-white fire in the sunshine. And as she came
down the rough rocky path towards me, stepping carefully, her eyes
fixed on the goblet, she walked between two hedge-like rows of furze
bushes covered with masses of shining yellow and orange-coloured
blossoms. An unforgettable picture! As she came nearer I perceived
that she was in great trouble owing to the wind, also that the
sparkling object in her hand was a tall crystal goblet, brimful of
Cornish cream, which she no doubt had purchased at the little farm
near the cliff, and was conveying to the place she was lodging in. The
rude, uncivilised wind was worrying her all it could, agitating her
volatile hat, whirling the fine wavy loose ends of her boa about her
head, and causing her skirts to wind themselves like black serpents
about her pretty legs. And whenever they got tightly wound about them,
she would stop and slowly and carefully turn round and round to get
them free again, still keeping a hold on her hat, and her eyes fixed
on the goblet for fear of spilling the Cornish cream. She was really a
beautiful girl, so I had my reward; small delicate features and a
complexion like the briar rose, and eyes of a blue that was like the
sky above her.
Just as she crossed the road where I stood, the wind again struck her
and compelled her to stand still and slowly make three turns round
before proceeding once more. "A rather difficult task," I remarked
sympathetically, with a glance at the goblet. "Yes, it _is_ rather
difficult," she returned, but the even tone in which she spoke was a
_distant_ one, and very dignified in so young a person. Nor did she
lift her eyes; they were still fixed fast on the goblet of cream. Then
slowly, slowly and carefully, she went on her way, leaving me
congratulating myself on having witnessed a really beautiful thing--a
better Delia in the country than any a Morland's coarse brush could
paint. It was a subject that Whistler might have attempted: the colour
scheme would have intoxicated him with delight; the slim, beautiful
figure in its dead black coming down that piece of rocky path between
walls of black-green furze, their darkness, which was nearly as dark
as her costume, almost covered with the flame yellow of the flowers,
and the blue sky with white flying clouds and the deeper blue sea,
flecked with white foam, for a background. He once did something I was
reminded of, a beautiful young lady in deep mourning, with black
sunshade in her hand, sheltering herself from a sudden storm under a
horse-chestnut tree in its golden yellow and red autumnal foliage. But
there he had a black storm for a background and silver-grey raindrops
over all the picture. This was an infinitely more difficult subject,
an impossible one, owing to the intense light, the brilliant blue sky.
This incident has little or no bearing on the subject under
discussion, and my only motive in introducing it is the common desire
we all have of imparting to others anything wonderful or beautiful we
have seen.
To go back: How long is it since this quarrel between woman and the
wind has existed? As long, I suppose, as a costume only suitable for
indoor life has been worn out of doors. A small ray of light on this
subject comes to me by chance from mediaeval times.
It happened, when my age was nineteen, that an old intimate friend of
mine asked me to take charge of the sheep-shearing at a bankrupt
estate on the pampas. He had undertaken to do it, but found he could
not spare the time, and I was doing nothing just then. Accordingly, I
went and established myself at the house of the mayor-domo, or manager
of the estancia, a barn-like building of unburnt bricks with a
thatched roof, without a tree or bush or flower about it, surrounded
with sheds and sheep folds and cattle enclosures--a dusty, desolate
place! Here I established myself and kept the books, weighed the wool
and paid the shearers every day, men and women, for we had them of
both sexes; only a woman never got beyond her fifty per day, while
some men would soar to a hundred, and even twenty more. And so we went
on for about three weeks, until some thirty-five to forty thousand
animals had been deprived of their fleeces. The siestas or lazy
intervals in the day, and the evenings, were tedious in that hot,
dusty, woolly place, and I asked my host one day if he had not such a
thing as a book in his house. Oh yes, he joyfully and proudly replied,
he had a book, one book, but a good one, a big one; and dashing off to
another room he soon appeared with the one book--a huge old folio
bound in thick leather, almost black with age. It was a life, in
Spanish, of the Italian saint, John Gualberto, a great and holy man,
as such things were accounted in the eleventh century, or as we might
describe him from a twentieth-century point of view, a dull-witted,
insanely superstitious, enraged bull in a religious china shop. A poem
or romance would have suited me better, or at all events a book one
could hold in one's hand when lying on a couch; but it was the one and
only book in the house, and I had to read sitting at a table; and in
this uncomfortable way, reading a few chapters at a sitting, I got
through the whole of it--the dullest book I ever waded through, about
the most detestable character one could stumble upon even in the
histories of the saints.
After the blessed Gualberto's death, I read, there was a statue or
monument of him erected in some public place, in the town of his
birth, I think, but I forget about that; and no sooner had it been set
up than miracles began to happen on the spot. Thus, if some starving
beggar came along, and, plucking off his hat, fell on his knees to
worship the saint, he would presently catch sight of a gleaming object
in the dust at his knees, which would turn out to be a silver coin,
which would serve to buy him food and wine. But there were also
miracles of a contrary kind--miraculous punishments for those who had
hard, unbelieving hearts and spoke scornfully of the saint and his
works. Such a person would perhaps bark his shins against some
obstruction he had failed to see, or would stumble and come down on
his face on the stony road. And one day two women came by, and one,
being of a frivolous and mocking disposition, made some derogatory
remark about St. John Gualberto, and had no sooner spoken than a
sudden violent gust of wind caught her and blew her gown over her
head, which was the cause of much laughter and jeering from the
onlookers, until she, overwhelmed with shame and confusion, fled from
the spot.
Many of the ponderous biographies of the saints, writ by the monks of
the Middle Ages, are like that, unpleasant to read, and if we desire
to keep up any devotional sentiment about them, we must confine our
reading of their lives to the modern bowdlerised versions.
But let us go back to the wind--let it blow from our brains the memory
of saints and their miracles, nice or nasty. No doubt there are
exceptions among women to this ancient hostility to the wind; one can
even believe that the Ellen of _News from Nowhere_ was not wholly
evolved from the author's inner consciousness, when he tells us how
she laid her brown hand and arm on the old lichened brick wall of
Kelmscott Manor as if to embrace it, and cried: "O me! O me! how I
love the earth, and the seasons and weather and all things that deal
with it and grow out of it." I know one myself who delights above all
things in long walks in a strong wind, who wears a cap and
close-fitting costume--a form of dress as suitable, without being
ugly, to all weathers as that of a man.
Such women are rare, and it is a sad thought that our system of life,
our devotion to comfort, which adds and adds and goes on everlastingly
adding to the attractions of an indoor existence, has the inevitable
effect of making Nature increasingly strange and hostile to us.
I think in this connection of our poetical literature: how have our
poets, for example, treated this subject of the wind? T. E. Brown
thought the sea "the great challenger and promoter of song." This
seems natural enough in an islander--and the Isle of Man is even
smaller than England. Swinburne was never happier than when splashing
about in the ocean, and he offers to exchange lots with the seamew, to
give him his--Swinburne's--songs' wild honey in exchange for the
seamew's sunny wide eyes that search the sea and wings that weary
never. Then, he said, it would be well for him for ever. But, I
venture to add, it would not be so well for the sea-mew.
The wind has not been so fortunate. One can't remember all the poetry
one has read in a lifetime; one remembers only that the poet's wind is
of two sorts, like two distinct entities. One is the warm and soft
caressing wind that breathes among the flowers, stealing and giving
odours, the spring wind ever associated with love's young dream; the
other is the loud, the boisterous or blustering wind, "the wind
Euroclydon, the storm-wind," the wind that howls like a hungry wolf
about the house, or moans "in its strange penance," as one has it; the
wind that is eerie and weird and uncanny, and is associated with the
poet's darkest moods, the desolation of his soul, and distinctly
encourages his suicidal impulses. It all seems like a convention which
after many centuries has ceased to he one. I dare say there are many
exceptions, but I can't recall them just now, excepting Shelley's
wonderful ode.
And one other, and this only because it was written yesterday--the
most soul-stirring hymn to the wind and the elemental forces of Nature
I am acquainted with, the forces against which man has striven from
the unremembered, the incalculable past even to the present day and
these last four years of bloody strife. It is entitled _Barbarry
Camp_, and was written in the year before the war by Captain C. H.
Sorley, one of our young poets who have given their lives for England
and France. I must quote more than a stanza or two. It is supposed to
be spoken by the men, dead long ages--thousands of years ago, who
burrowed night and day, and heaped the bank up and called it a ring:
And here we strove and here we felt each vein
Ice-bound, each limp foot frozen, all night long.
And here we held communion with the rain
That lashed us into manhood with its thong,
Cleansing through pain:
And the wind visited us and made us strong.
Up from around us, numbers without name,
Strong men and naked, vast, on either hand
Pressing us in, they came. And the wind came
And bitter rain, turning grey all the land.
That was our game,
To fight with men and storms, and it was grand.
For many days we fought them, and our sweat
Watered the grass, making it spring up green
Blooming for us. And if the wind was wet
Our blood wetted the wind, making it clean
With the hatred
And wrath and courage that our blood had been.
So fighting men and winds and tempests, hot
With joy and hate and battle lust, we fell....
Wind that has blown here always ceaselessly,
Bringing, if any man can understand,
Might to the mighty, freedom to the free;
Wind that has caught us, cleansed us, made us grand,
Wind that is we,
We that are men--make men in all this land.
It is like the call of a trumpet to one who has long been a listener
to the sweet and soulful, enervating sounds of citherns and citoles.
_If anyone can understand_? Does anyone really want to understand,
especially just now when we are lapped in a dream of peace--perpetual
peace and a federation of the world? It is a big place no doubt, and
not all West, and we may cast an apprehensive look at Asia and Africa
when causing the globe to revolve with a touch of the finger; we may
well have a fleeting vision of a million million bi-coloured souls,
gasping and straining towards a more open world, a wider space with
room to breathe and live and propagate. Numbers without name,
surrounding our Barbarry Camp, fencing us in! Let it pass--the ugly
vision; let us fall to dreaming again as in those beautiful days
before the last great devastating eruption of the Huns. Dreaming of
peace on earth, everlasting peace, since to understand is to despair;
does not the aspiration itself signify decay?
IV
On seeking for a way back to Nature--The natural man and his
surroundings--When pain is pleasure--Man in unison with
Nature--"Intuition of snow," a notion fantastic and true--Influence of
the wind--The wind a promoter of thought--Flying thoughts--Help from
the physicists--Phantasms in the wind--Telepathic messages--A domestic
drama--Is the wind a mind-messenger?--A desire of the mind--The poet
expresses it--Is it a delusion?--Conjectures--Mental
embryology--Telepathy inherited from the animals.
I once knew a man, an English sheep-farmer in South America, who would
mount his horse on a rainy day in summer to go out for a long ride
without a cloak, so as to get a thorough wetting. This was, he assured
me, his greatest pleasure.
It reminds me of a great financier and millionaire who, when his day's
business was done, would shut himself up in a room sacred from
intrusion, where, throwing off his clothes, he would lie naked on a
rug before a huge fire and soak himself in the heat for an hour or so.
This, he said, was his best time, his chief happiness in life.
And a very good sort of happiness, as many of us know from experience;
yet one pities that poor, unhappy, toiling plutocrat who had no other
way of coming back to Nature.
I have known others whose chief happiness was in walking--walking
steadily and fast their twenty or thirty miles a day, with no object
at all except that it gave them a sense of escape from an irksome
indoor existence; as so long as they were out, miles from home, they
felt free and happy.
Another who from time to time would suddenly abandon his office, and
going to the nearest terminus, take an express train and travel
hundreds of miles, north or south, then off in another direction, and
so for three or four days, borrowing his night-shirt and whatever he
needed at the hotels he stayed at, after which he would return to
London and business again. He explained to me that the irksomeness of
his conventional indoor life, with so many hours each day in his
office in the city, appeared to have a cumulative effect, and in the
end would become unbearable; and he would then rush or run away, and
travelling at express speed over long distances, he would get the
illusion that he had made his escape from such an existence, and was
flying for ever from it.
Others there are whose chief delight is in water--the sight and feel
of it, running water, pools and lakes and the sea, to bathe in or to
sit on the margin or by the shore, poring on it. Such a one was
Shelley.
Still others there are who are exhilarated by thunder and lightning,
who will go out in the most dreadful storms and stand gazing up
delightedly at the tremendous spectacle.
All these peculiar preferences, and one could add many others, have
one and the same origin--the sense of disharmony between the organism
and its environment. By a happy chance the poor wretch has discovered
a way of escape for a brief interval from his imprisonment--in violent
exercise, in getting drunk, in exposing himself to the weather, in
water, and even in lying naked basking like a cat in the heat of a big
fire in the grate. A particular condition has become associated in his
mind with the feeling of recovery, of relief, as if a burden had been
dropped.
The natural man, living an outdoor natural life, although apparently
indifferent, does yet experience a certain pleasure in all weathers
and aspects of Nature. And I may say that this is how it is, and
always has been, with me, and that there is a satisfaction to me not
only in the aspects and weather and other natural conditions which
please us or "flatter the senses," but also in those which produce
discomfort and even actual physical pain or fear. To the town-bred
person this may sound like nonsense, seeing that discomfort is not
comfort, and fear is fear, and pain, pain--and pain isn't pleasure, is
it? He must take my word for it that it is in some circumstances and
in some persons, although he may not be one of them. The degree in
which we are affected varies greatly, according to our bringing up and
character and tastes and occupation.
But apart from all this, apart from the aesthetic feelings which the
object or scene or atmospheric conditions may rouse, and from the
sense of novelty, the lively interest we experience at times in what
we see and smell and hear and feel, and from other causes operating in
us, there is a sense of the _thing itself_--of the tree or wood, the
rock, river, sea, mountain, the soil, clay or gravel, or sand or
chalk, the cloud, the rain, and what not--something let us say,
penetrative, special, individ-ual, as if the quality of the thing
itself had entered into us, changing us, affecting body and mind. It
is possible that something of this feeling was in the mind, or at the
back of it, of Willughby, the Elizabethan writer and "Father of
British Ornithology," when he suggested that the white colour in birds
and beasts in the Arctic regions was due to the constant intuition of
snow, and the force of imagination. A notion which, after having
seemed fantastic enough to cause many a man to smile during the last
three centuries, will probably be seized upon and made much of by the
biologists by-and-by. For who at this day can believe that the winter
snow-white fur and feathers of hare, weasel, grouse and other arctic
species, the sand-colouring of animals which is almost universal in
sandy deserts, and the green plumage of many hundreds of species of
birds in tropical forests, have been brought about by means ol the
Darwinian principle--the gradual accumulation and inheritance of a
long series of small individual variations favourable to the
individual itself and its descendants in the struggle for life? The
insurmountable objection is and always will be that such variations
are of the individual.
One drops into the language of metaphor in speaking of the
evolutionary processes. The "better way" of one human protagonist may
eventually triumph because he finds believers and helpers from the
very birth of the thought, and they face the hostile world together.
Nature also abounds in reformers, prophets, cranks, and improvers of
their kind generally; but here the individual reformer can find no
disciple; he is one against an incalculable multitude all wound up to
keep on the old bad way so that his better way inevitably comes to an
end with himself.
Imagination was not the right word, at all events in its restricted
sense, while the other phrase of the constant intuition of snow
suggests that these world-wide physical effects are due principally to
a purely psychical cause. Well, I don't find it impossible to believe
that. One always wants to find something to believe, some way out of
the maze, for we do know that in the lower animals, as in man, the
mind does react on the organism sometimes with tremendous power, to
the production of strange results, as we see, for example, in cases of
prenatal suggestion.
However, just now we are concerned mainly with the atmospheric sense,
and particularly with the influence of the wind.
While classing myself as an ordinary outdoor natural man, tolerant,
and more than tolerant, of all weathers and Nature's influence in all
her moods and manifestations, I yet fear when coming back to this
subject that I shall find no support in anything said by others in
what remains to be told. There is, then, nothing but my own personal
experience, and as every face of man and every mind differs from every
other face and every other mind, so it may be that the wind, when it
visits me, tells me a story somewhat different from the thousands and
millions of stories it has told and tells to others.
The effect of the wind on me, always greatest when it caught me on
horseback, when, during the first half of my life, I was constantly
riding and sometimes passed weeks at a stretch on a horse every day
from morning till night, is now my subject. When in my teens I first
began to think, I found that my best time was when on horseback, in a
high wind. It was not like the purely agreeable sensation of a soft
caressing wind, or of riding in a comparatively quiet air in a genial
sunshine; it was a pleasure of a distinctly different kind, if it can
be called pleasure. Certainly that word does not give the feeling its
characteristic expression, but I have no other. It was a sense of a
change, bodily and mental, a wonderful exhilaration and mental
activity. "Now I can think!" I would exclaim mentally, when starting
on a gallop over the great plain--that green floor of the world where
I was born--in the face of a strong wind. Nor could it be said that
this was only the effect of being mounted and of rapid motion. We know
that merely to be on the back of a good horse does give us a sense of
power and elation; or, as Lord Herbert of Cherbury says in his
autobiography, "It lifts a man above himself." Here I may remark in
passing that this feeling, as he describes it, is common to those who,
however familiar with the horse they may be, are only on his back
occasionally, or at all events not nearly so often as they are on
their own legs and on chairs and couches. To one reared in a semi-wild
riding country the feeling is somewhat different; in the saddle one is
there conscious of being simply in the right place, since owing to
one's long and close intimacy with the horse, one manages him
automatically without thinking anything about it, the mind being left
quite free, just as a man in walking manages his legs. The effect was
not then that which is produced by merely being on horseback and the
swift motion, but almost exclusively of the wind.
Undoubtedly, one gets more air into one's lungs in a gallop than on
foot, and the oxygenation of the blood is more rapid, but the greater
exhilaration thus produced is experienced whether there is wind or
not.
My experience in a high wind was as if, blowing through me, it had
blown away some obstruction, some bar to a perfect freedom of mind; or
as if the two minds in us, the conscious, slow, laborious mind, and
the mind that works easily and swiftly in the dark, and only from time
to time gives us a result, a glimpse, of its secret doings, had
become merged in one, the thoughts coming and going so rapidly that it
was like the flight of a bird, every wing-beat a thought,
spontaneously clothed in an appropriate expression, coming and
vanishing, to be instantly succeeded by others and still others. The
poet says:
For what are thoughts
But birds that fly?
And what are words
But traps to catch them by?
Many are dead
And lost in Lethe's river;
But some survive
As joys encaged forever.
They would perhaps have been a joy for ever to me if I could have
encaged them, but I couldn't; trap them I did, but they were too many,
too elusive, so that I no sooner gripped them in my hands than they
slipped through my fingers and were gone. I really think that if I
could have devised some means of recording them, if I had had any idea
of such a thing, they would have presented a strong contrast to the
stodgy stuff I am obliged to put in my books since I started
book-writing or book-making. The difference in the movement of my
mind on these rides in the wind and now, sitting in a chair with paper
and pens on a table in front of me, is, as I put it before, like the
flight of a bird through the air--a sparrow-hawk, let us say, that
flashes into sight over the trees on swift-beating wings and is
instantly gone--and walking in heavy boots over a newly ploughed field
of stiff clay, saturated with last night's heavy rains.
Why and how did the wind affect me in this way? It is one of the
innumerable puzzles, problems, mysteries, one is eternally stumbling
against. Like everybody else, I am like an infant in the night crying
for the light, and with no language but a cry. And answer there comes
none. For what do we _know_--and what _do_ we know--what do we
_really_ and _truly_ know about what a friend of mine will insist on
calling our "insides"? Meaning not our lights, livers and other
organs, but that part of us where the mysteries are. For we do know a
lot about our insides according to the physiologists and
psychologists, yet they can't tell me why the wind had the effect of
transforming me into a new and different being, one as unlike my
ordinary self as, say, a sparrow-hawk is unlike a barn-door fowl. Will
the physicist help me to understand it?
He, the physicist, tells us that we are only half matter--we are
matter and ether; and ether isn't matter, but' is the original
space-pervading stuff out of which matter is evolved; and albeit not
itself matter, since it is intangible, ungraspable, and has subtle
qualities which do not pertain to matter, its elasticity and tenacity
show its relationship to matter, and one of its functions here on this
earth, to which it brings the light of sun and moon and stars, is to
hold matter together, binding atom to atom, so that if its hold were
relaxed this sensible being and the globe itself would instantly
dissolve into thin air, leaving not a wrack behind. We are also told
that when the atoms are violently agitated and pulled and thrown to
this or that side, the corpuscles of which the ether is composed, or
supposed to be, retain their hold on them and pull them back to their
proper places.
This, too, we are told, is not hypothesis run mad, but sober matter of
fact, and I am not going to say that I disbelieve it or even doubt. We
are all, vitalists and anti-vitalists alike, always anxiously
Watching and hearkening for ethereal news,
and when it comes, when more of it comes, as doubtless come it will,
we shall know more than we do now, and by that time the physicists may
be able to assist the other researchers in helping us to understand
our insides.
The wind does not blow through me, although it assaults me violently:
it bombards me with millions of atoms, and presses hard against me,
not evenly, but in waves of varying strength, in blows, as it were,
that can shake me even as they shake and make tremble the mighty trees
and towers and bridges and great buildings of stones and wood and
metal. My whole body, lifted above the ground on a horse, is vibrating
violently, and although this body vibration does not translate itself
into sound, it reaches the brain, even as sound vibrations do, and
sets the mental machinery going.
There was more to say on this fascinating question, but as it must be
all purely conjecture, I will leave it here to discuss another mystery
which connects itself in my mind with the wind.
One autumn evening some years ago I was walking home in a London
street, walking briskly in the face of a strong south-west wind, the
one I love best of all winds in this hemisphere, thinking of nothing
except that I was thirsty for my tea and that the wind was very
delightful, when something extraordinary occurred, something never
hitherto experienced. This was the appearance of a face--the face of a
girl well known and very dear to me, who lived at that time at home
with her people at a distance of eighty miles from where I was. It was
the face only, the vivid image of the face, so vividly seen that it
could not have appeared a more real human face if the girl had
actually come before me. But, as I said, only the face, and it
appeared to be in and a part of the wind, since it did not rest still
for one instant, but had a flutter like the flutter we used to see in
a cinematograph picture, and continually moved to and fro and vanished
and reappeared almost every second, always keeping on a level with and
about three feet removed from my eyes. The flutter and motion
generally was like that of a flag or of some filmy substance agitated
by the wind. Then it vanished and I saw it no more.
It was to me an amazing experience, as I am about the last person in
the universe to suffer from delusions and illusions, being, as someone
has said, "too disgustingly sane for anything," or at all events to
experience such things; and I consequently soon came to the conclusion
that this phantom was of a nature of a telepathic communication.
Whether or not it was a right conclusion, the reader will judge when
he knows the sequel. But I must first relate a second similar
experience which came to me two years later.
I was out in a high wind, an exceptionally violent and very cold east
wind in early March, on this occasion blowing on my back, and I was
walking very fast over a heath towards a huge pile of rocks forming a
headland on the west Cornish coast. I had visited the headland on the
previous day, and had sat a long time on the summit of the rocky pile
watching the sea birds, and on coming home I discovered to my disgust
that I had left my nice thick leather gloves on the rock where I had
pulled them off. And this high rock was unfortunately the favourite
resort of a pair of ravens. My object now was to look for my gloves,
with little hope that the ravens had not succeeded in tearing them to
pieces in trying to devour them, or simply because of their innate
cussedness.
This, then, was the sole subject occupying my mind, when suddenly once
more I had the strange experience of a face fluttering before me--just
a face as on the former occasion, just as real in appearance, at the
same distance from my eyes, fluttering, moving as if blown to and fro,
appearing and disappearing as before.
It was the face of a lady, an intimate and dear friend who was at a
distance of something under four hundred miles from me at that moment.
As in the former case, I concluded that it was a telepathic message,
and in that belief I rest. Why this phantasm appeared to me at that
moment I am not at liberty to tell, but there is now unhappily no
reason for the same reticence with regard to the first case; death has
prematurely removed the dear souls who were the principal actors in
that little drama, and its relation can hurt no one.
It was the case of a girl of fourteen I loved as much as if she had
been my own daughter, because of her sweetness and charm and loving
disposition, the bright clear temper of her mind and other engaging
qualities; and I wished to adopt her--a desire or craving that
sometimes attacks a childless man. She too desired it, but there were
difficulties in the way which could not be overcome, and so the matter
was dropped, or rather left for the time in abeyance. The appearance
of that phantasmal face caused me to write at once to the mother to
inquire after them all, particularly my favourite girl, and her reply
was that they were all well and going on as usual, etc. Somehow this
did not quite satisfy me; something in the child's mind had caused
that vision, although the mother was perhaps ignorant of it. Before
long I was able to pay them a visit, and found them, as I had been
told, all well and going on as usual. The girl told me nothing, and I
asked no questions. Nevertheless a suspicion lurked in my mind, and
presently I became conscious of a slight change in the moral or mental
atmosphere of the place, a change so slight that it could not be
described as a restraint or a chill, but it was there all the same, a
something which had come to dim the old bright family happiness and
union.
Here it is necessary to tell what the atmosphere had been. They were
an intensely religious family, churchgoers, but not satisfied with the
Sunday services at the village church, they made it a custom to attend
religious meetings and week-day services in their own and the
neighbouring village. Which was only the right thing for them to do,
considering their evangelical doctrine with its Methodist colouring,
which was that their God was a jealous God Who watched their minds,
taking note of every thought in them, and Who desired them to live
with one object before them--to save their souls from everlasting
perdition by availing themselves of all the means of grace at their
command. They were all of that mind, all having undergone or suffered
conversion, excepting the girl I was fond of; and naturally--seeing
that all her merits, her beautiful disposition and crystal purity and
goodness of heart, her love of them all and of all living things, were
nothing but "filthy rags" in their God's sight--and until she was
regenerated and the original sin, derived by inheritance from our
first parents, was washed away in the blood of the Redeemer, they
could not regard her as "saved." Sudden death at any moment might
precipitate her into the burning pit out of which the smoke of the
torment would ascend everlastingly. A sad fate for that beautiful,
innocent soul!
There are still people in England who hold this form of Christianity.
I know it, because I have associated and discussed these subjects with
them. And when I live with people, although only a lodger, I like to
be one with them. When staying with this family I loved them, for they
were all lovable, and I elected to be religious too, as far as outward
observances went, and attended meetings, and insisted on getting up at
half-past six on winter mornings to attend family prayers before
breakfast at seven by candle-light. At the same time it was a pleasure
to know from her own lips that my loved girl was not going to be
converted, because, as she explained to me, there was nothing the
matter with her. She went to church and said her prayers, and thought
that was enough. But I did not know, for this she kept from me, that
the pressure which had been brought to bear on her had become
increasingly painful until the breaking-point was reached.
About that I now heard. On the second day of my visit the mother,
finding me alone, said there was something she thought it right to
tell me. I had written to her a little while back, inquiring, as she
thought, a little anxiously about their welfare, especially about my
young friend, and she had answered that they were all well. So they
were, but a day or two before receiving my letter there had been an
exceedingly painful scene with the girl. She had suddenly, to their
amazement, broken out in a passionate revolt against them on account
of the religious question which had been troubling their minds. She
told them that she had prayed to Heaven to send me to her
assistance--to protect and deliver her from them. She had also, she
said, made up her mind to leave them, and if she had no money to pay
the railway fare, she would walk and live on charity by the way until
she came to where I was or found me. It was, the mother said, a trying
situation, and gave them all the greatest pain; they began to think
they had worried her too much about her religious indifference. They
told her how sorry they were, and succeeded in pacifying her by
promising not to trouble her any more, but to leave her to follow her
own mind about such matters.
They must indeed have gone through a painful experience, I thought,
seeing the state of mind it had caused in the mother, which made her
open her heart to me about it, knowing, too, beforehand on which side
my sympathies would lie.
Believers in telepathy will say that I was justified in my belief that
there could be no explanation of my strange experience other than the
one given; while the unbeliever will say, as usual, that it was
nothing but coincidence.
My experience--the two appearances of phantasmal faces--has been
described here solely because it somehow appears to fit in with my
whole idea about the wind--its powerful effect on the mind, or shall
we say on the matter or substance of the mind; and I do not find it
impossible to believe that one of its effects is to make the mind more
sensitive to telepathic communications. In both instances the wind, a
strong south-west wind and an east wind blowing a gale, blew from the
direction of the persons whose minds were occupied with me at that
time.
Perhaps I should have seen the faces if the wind had been blowing in
other directions. I doubt it. As I have said, they appeared to be in
the wind, and of it, or as if the wind had blown them like gossamer or
thistledown to me. Doubtless, they were images on the brain, projected
into the air, as it seemed, and their incessant windy motions perhaps
corresponded with an agitation in the brain, or with that substance of
it in which the affections, memory, reason and imagination reside,
with perhaps other faculties we know not of or are only just beginning
to know. And if, as I imagine, the wind was the cause of the agitation
of the brain--the wind or the subtle immaterial substance which
pervades the brain and the wind alike, or perhaps moves with the
wind--then the direction in which it blows may be a fact to be taken
into account as wafting or blurring or making a vivid mental message
from a distance.
There was, and is, much more to say on this subject--this new and
strange problem in psychology, which is after all perhaps one of the
oldest in human thought. Only just now, when it comes to us under a
new name and increasing knowledge of its manifestation, it has
acquired a peculiar interest, in some instances a personal one, but in
all of us it sharply pricks curiosity. And the prick is all the
sharper in my case since I seem at times to catch a glimpse of a
connection between this and still other mysteries. At present want of
time and space compels me to abandon it, to be picked up when the
opportunity offers at another time, although (to take a hint from Sir
Thomas Browne) that time may be when I am no longer here. I am finding
it prudent on this voyage to relieve myself of a good deal of
material--many bales and crates of merchandise collected in many
outlandish places; otherwise this slow ancient barque, with only the
wind to keep her going, will never reach port. Nevertheless, before
dropping it I should like to put down a few thoughts and suggestions
to bring this chapter to a conclusion.
It will be remembered that the only instances I have given of
telepathy relate to but one aspect of the phenomenon of
thought-transference, and this the most arresting, the most startling
in its manifestations, being that of apparitions or phantasms of the
living, the message or shock invariably proceeding from a person in a
moment of supreme agitation and, frequently, in the agonies of death:
the percipient as a rule being one closely connected with the sufferer
by ties of relationship and affection. Furthermore, it is known or
assumed that the sufferer is passionately thinking of the absent and
loved one at the moment, and that the thought finds its objective over
long distance, and appears as a wraith or phantasm.
Now we know that this faculty, this power of the mind of projecting
itself in such moments of violent disturbances, is a useless one,
seeing there can be no response, no helpful action, nor even a return
message, and that its only effect is anxious doubt or keen distress in
the percipient. Is it not then curious to think that this useless
sense, or faculty, which is in some if not all of us, and of which we
are unconscious, is the very one which all men desire to possess, only
with this difference, that they want to be conscious of it and able to
control and direct it? There is a time in the life of a natural man
when his most ardent, most burning wish is for some undiscovered way,
some unknown faculty by means of which he can communicate with the
absent or lost loved one. Often enough this passion that feeds on the
heart, that makes life a torment and darkens the reason, actually
brings the sufferer to the belief, or the brink of it, that it is not
impossible that in a dream, or by an effort of the will or in some
other unknown way, the miracle can be brought to pass. And with this
feeling there is sometimes the thought that if it cannot be so long as
both are alive, death will yet make it possible to the craving soul.
The author of _The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich_, who never heard of
telepathy, since the word was not invented in his day, has, to my
mind, given this universal feeling, this burning desire to be with and
comfort the absent one, its most perfect expression in the following
lines:
Is it impossible, say you, these passionate, fervent impressions,
These projections of spirit to spirit, these inward embraces,
Should in strange ways, in her dreams, should visit her, strengthen
her, shield her?
Is it possible, rather, that these great floods of feeling
Setting in daily from me to her should, impotent wholly,
Bring neither sound nor motion to that sweet shore they heave to?
Efflux here, and there no stir nor pulse of influx!...
"Would I were dead," I keep saying, "that so I could go and uphold
her!"
Surely, surely, when sleepless I lie in the mountain lamenting,
Surely, surely, she hears in her dreams a voice, "I am with thee,"
Saying, "although not with thee, behold, for we mated in spirit,
There when we stood in the chamber and knew not the words we
were saying."
Yea, if she felt me within her, when not with a finger I touched her.
Surely, she knows it, and feels it while sorrowing here in the moorland.
"Would I were dead," I keep saying, "that so I could go and uplift
her."
There we have it all! Is it for nothing this intense, this intolerable
craving of the soul for the absent one, this cry of the heart and
throwing out of the arms, as it were, has been given him--this
plangent emotion which seems to lift and bear him out to that sweet
shore it heaves to? "Surely, surely!" he cries, hoping against hope,
"it cannot be impossible!" And if impossible, then let death come,
since then all barriers will be overpassed and he would be there to
whisper, "I am with thee," to uphold her and uplift her!
It has been said by certain writers of books which the reader is
invited to regard as prophetic that there is nothing he desires which
is unattainable by man, if only he desires it ardently and
persistently enough--if he hopes and believes that the desire itself
will eventually bring about its fulfilment. But of this desire of the
mind to be able to project itself, consciously, at will, to a distant
one, we can only say that it exists in millions of men, that it has so
existed for untold generations, and is still nothing but a vain dream
and desire. The delusion of a mind abnormally excited; and as that
form of excitement goes as far back as the existence of man on the
earth, we may say that the wish and the delusion it gives rise to
begins when and where thought begins.
We ourselves sometimes cherish the delusion, probably imparted to us
by anthropological and other masters, that the passion of love, in all
its forms of devotion to a loved one, is different both in character
and degree in savage and primitive people from the feeling in us.
Doubtless it is true in some cases, in some degraded tribes or races,
but it is not a general truth. Savage men are capable of every form of
love and self-sacrifice as well as ourselves (there are many
exceptions among ourselves), and not only so, but the love of another
goes further back to the lower animals, which are often known to pine
and perish of grief and misery at the loss of a mate or companion.
I dare say that many a reader will be ready to challenge every word I
am writing on this obscure subject. I can challenge much of it myself.
For example, when I say that this particular wish, with the delusion
it gives rise to, is as old as thought, human and semi-human, and is
still nothing but a wish and delusion, how do I know what has been in
the past--that dreadful past of man's history on earth? Absolutely
nothing, or no more than we can know from the study of a few fossil
thigh-bones and an occasional skull. And all that these tell us is
that distant races, our own and other species of men, have been in the
occupation of continental areas for long periods of time, probably
untold thousands of generations, and that some of these races were
larger-brained than the men of the present era. Of their nature, their
inner life, we know and can know nothing, and can only suppose that
they had developed a mentality wholly unlike ours. They did not build
cities of stone to live in, or, in other words, they did not create
new artificial conditions of life, to be themselves remade by the
conditions they had created, and were therefore not civilised in our
sense. Theirs was then the simple life, the life of animal and savage,
with, perhaps, the savage nature outlived. We are told, at all
events, of one of these large-brained races, that their dentition was
different from ours, that they had no canine teeth, and were not flesh
but grain-eaters. What, then, was the culture of these human beings
of thirty or forty--some say fifty--thousand years ago--these men that
did not feed on flesh, animal or human, and probably had no weapons of
offence and made no wars? I don't know, and it was therefore nothing
but presumption on my part to say that this universal desire of the
soul in man to have the power to project, or to impart, itself to
another one has never been anything but a wish and a delusion.
"But whither will conjecture stray?" as Wordsworth asks. In this case
only this far. We cannot imagine a mentality other than our own--that
of a wasp, let us say, or of a visitor from Mars; or even of a member
of the human race of a subspecies nearly allied to ours, whose mental
evolution has progressed so far and lasted so long as to have given
him a far bigger brain than we possess, since the evolution has not
been on our lines and is consequently to us unimaginable.
Nevertheless we are not wholly without hope, so let us go cheerfully
stumbling and fumbling on; or "rushing in," as the anthropologist,
physiologist, biologist and psychologist will each exclaim with a
giggle from his own particular water-and-air-tight compartment.
And what gives us hope is something still to be found in ourselves--in
some, if not in all, of us; vestiges of ancient outlived impulses,
senses, instincts, faculties, which stir in us and come to nothing,
and in some exceptional cases are rekindled and operate so that a man
we know may seem to us, in this particular, like a being of another
species. They are numerous enough, and when collected and classified
they may form a new subject or science with a specially invented new
name, signifying an embryology of the mind.
We know now that telepathy or thought-transference in the extreme and
violent form in which it has been so far discussed here is not an
exclusively human faculty, but is common to man and the lower
animals--to some of the higher vertebrates, so far as we know at
present. Up till now the authentic cases on record which concern the
animal relate to telepathy between the man and the animal, but I now
have a perfectly authentic case of telepathy of this kind between
animal and animal. In this one case I have before me I see that there
is this difference between the animal and man, in that the brain-wave
or vibration in the former does not appear to the percipient as a
phantasm, but translates itself into sound, to an agonising cry for
help which meets with an instant response.
>From this solitary instance we may form a guess as to what telepathy
may be, its function and importance, in wild animal life; and if we,
even in the artificial conditions we exist in (and have existed in for
thousands of years), the inevitable effect of which is to wither and
kill the faculties suitable to a purely natural life--if we still have
remains or vestiges or intimations of these lost faculties in us, is
it not probable that the large-brained men of the far past who lived
with nature had them too, in a larger measure and perhaps another way;
that they developed and flourished in forms and a lustre unimaginable
to us, apart from nature, in our warm clothing, in the close shelter
of our houses?
How was it possible, one may ask, that a race of men, physically
strong, no doubt, as the animals are, cultivators of the soil, since
they must have sown and harvested the grain they fed on, could exist
for long ages on the continent of Europe in a region abounding in
powerful beasts of rapine and surrounded and pressed upon by more
savage men, armed with spears and arrows and axes, hunters, fighters,
cannibals--how is it possible they could have maintained existence in
such conditions unless by a mental development--mental and physical,
let us say--which gave them power over their enemies, man and beast?
And that power could but have been the result of faculties, long
trained and highly developed, which with us are rare and startling
phenomena, and are described as occult or supernormal or even
supernatural.
Here then for the present I drop the subject, since it cannot be fully
treated in this book--this story without an end, in which so many
matters can only be touched on. Telepathy here, as stated before, is
but one aspect or form or manifestation of what is called
thought-transference; not quite rightly so called in this form, seeing
that thought, or any mental faculty beyond memory, can have little to
do with it. It is rather of the nature of a sudden or spasmodic and
unconscious discharge of a violent and painful emotion. How
discharged, or how it came to be bottled up so as to make it
dischargeable in that special way, is the mystery. Unconscious,
spasmodic, violent, yet resulting in something in appearance thought
out, definite, sane, intelligible--a message from a subject in pain or
trouble or agony which hits its distant mark and is visualised as an
apparition or phantasm by the human percipient, and is heard as an
acute cry of distress, a summons for help, by the animal. What can we
say of it except that it is inexplicable; or that it is a striking
example of that vaguely conscious something, force or principle, in
nature, which we sometimes roughly name "unconscious intelligence," a
diffused mind in or behind nature which gives a sort of supernatural
disguise to phenomena?
But that indefinable something in or behind nature, that formative
principle, ever blindly feeling and struggling on towards a definite
goal, which the mechanicians interpret in one way and the Doctor Henry
Mores of the past and the Flammarions of the present in another, is in
everything--in all organisms, animal and vegetable, in every cell. And
as to telepathy, the plain common-sense view of the matter is that the
Flam-marions had better drop it as an additional proof of the
existence of a soul, or else overcome all opposition to the idea of
sharing their heaven with the lower animals.
V
Wind and the sense of smell--Scent in deer and dog--Sense of smell in
man--In the Queensland savage--Sense of smell in different
races--Purely personal experience--The Smell of England: a mystery and
its solution--Aromatic and fragrant smells--Wordsworth's vision of
Paradise--Sweet gale--Bracken--Gorse and its powerful
effect--Spiritual quality in odours----Cowslip----Melancholy
flowers----Honeysuckle and sweet-briar--Shakespeare and Chaucer on its
scent--Chaucer, though old, still living--Scents and their degrading
associations--Frankincense.
The wind was the subject of the last chapter, then that of telepathy
cropped up and occupied the last half. But the gust had not blown its
fill: there was indeed very much more to say about it, only here I
seem to be standing alone in it, feeling it, thinking of it, and it
will probably be best for me to wait for others--physicists,
physiologists and psychologists--to come out and feel and listen to it
with me.
There is, however, just one matter, a simple fact familiar, I dare
say, to most persons, which I either forgot to mention, or did not
emphasise when writing in praise of the wind. It will now, I fancy,
come best in this place, since it will serve to link the last chapter
with the present one, which has for its subject the sense of smell.
When a smell--a flowery fragrance, let us say, to be on the agreeable
side of things--is blown to our nostrils, the nerve's sensibility is
not quickly exhausted, as it usually is in a quiet atmosphere. The
sense ordinarily becomes tired so soon that we are annoyed with our
olfactories for serving us so badly. In a wind the scent comes in
gusts, and however fragrant it may be, there is little or no
diminution in the effect produced.
I suppose the explanation would be that the nerves of smell and the
liquid covering them are agitated by the wind, and that in this
condition the scent particles are more rapidly and thoroughly
dissolved, and so have a greater stimulating power than at other
times.
When watching the hind in Richmond Park I thought with admiration of
the exquisite perfection of the three most important senses in a wild
animal's life--vision, hearing and smell. The dog, with a horizon
limited to about a third of a stag's, is a comparatively dim-eyed
creature; he lives, as we see, mainly in the sense of smell. This is
astonishingly acute, but that of the deer is just as perfect with
regard to its use or purpose, which is chiefly to inform it of distant
or hidden dangers to be escaped only by flight. The dog's smell is
concerned with numberless little matters that are of less ac-count;
these constitute his entertainment and give a perpetual zest to his
life, He quarters and examines the ground with his nose to find it
abundantly sprinkled over, so to speak, with the visiting cards of
other creatures--other dogs, some known personally to him, others
strangers; also rabbits, rats, voles, and what not. The deer is not
concerned in these minute matters; if a rabbit or mouse has crossed
his track he is not excited about it, and bits of carrion hidden in
the grass, and small local stenches, in which the dog revels, are
nothing to him.
No doubt there is a vast difference in power in the sense of smell in
both these animals and in man; nevertheless, I don't think so meanly
of man's olfactories as some physiologists appear to do. It is a
common idea, and is in the books, that man's sense of smell is
decayed; some writers have gone so far as to describe it as
obsolescent.
Who, we may ask, is _Man_ in this connection? It would be nearer the
truth to say that the more civilised man becomes, or the more he
secures himself against the forces of nature by improving his
conditions, the less important to his welfare does this sense become.
The dangers he is warned against by smell in a state of nature have
been removed artificially; in an environment in which the function of
the olfactories has been superseded, the inevitable result is their
decay. This is in accordance with Nature's economical principle; she
will not continue doing for us what we have undertaken to do for
ourselves, and will cheerfully scrap the exquisite apparatus she has
been building up for our safety in thousands and millions of years.
When I see a lover of flowers and their perfumes pressing a bunch of
violets to her nose as if to drag something out of them with her nose,
to stimulate by violence, as it were, by repeated sniffing
inhalations, a torpid sense--the sense which she knows is in her
although it may have given no evidence of its existence for some time
past--when I see this, knowing at the same time that the violets'
"nimble emanations" are filling the whole room, I recognise the fact
that the sense of smell is so enfeebled in her as to be of no account
at all; also that it may be the same in a majority of the inhabitants
of London and of all the great urban centres of human life in England.
All that doesn't come to much, seeing that England is but a dot on the
map and its people a mere roomful compared with the population of the
globe. What one asks to know is, does the Armenian, the Turk, the
Siberian, the Zulu, the Arab, the inhabitant of the Roof of the World,
press a flower to his nose in order to get the sensation of its
fragrance?
When the traveller and naturalist Lumholtz lived with the cannibal and
ophiophagous tribes of Queensland, he found that they hunted the
serpent, a large species of boa on which they fed, by its scent. This
serpent travels long distances in quest of prey, and once on its scent
the natives would follow it like a pack of beagles, through woods and
thicket, marshes, over rocky tracts and all kinds of country, until
they came up with it. The scent, they assured him, was quite strong
and easy to follow, but though he went down on all-fours and sniffed
with all his might, he could detect no scent at all. There is, then, a
considerable difference between man and man with regard to this sense
in different countries and conditions. The man of the physiologist is
the one he knows, who is of his own state in life, who lives in
comfortable circumstances in an equable temperature. Again, Humboldt
relates that the Peruvian Indians distinguished between the footprints
of their own people and those of whites and negroes.
There are, besides, the aborigines of America from Alaska to Tierra
del Fuego, the Africans, the Polynesians, the Malays, the inhabitants
of a thousand oceanic islands, the Asiatics. I suppose that at least a
hundred thousand Europeans have written books about China, Hindustan,
and all the other countries of that vast continent, but I doubt if
there is a chapter in the hundred thousand books dealing with the
sense of smell in any Asiatic people compared with ours.
Having, then, few or no facts to go upon, we are very much in the dark
about this sense; we can only suppose that, if it be accepted as a
principle that its decay proceeds _pari passu_ with the increase in
the value of vision and and the improvements in our artificial
condition of life, the decline has been greater in the town-dwelling
and comfortably-off classes in England during the last two centuries
than in the previous two thousand years.
To dogmatise on such a subject would be ridiculous; we are even more
in the dark than I have made it appear. By watching a man and subtly
drawing him out, we can penetrate through his mask and discover his
secret and real mind, but we can't get at the real state of his sense
of smell. Each one of us knows his own, and many of us only know it
"in a way." Wherefore I'm glad to get away from this wide and general
view of the subject, and to confine myself for the rest of this
section to the purely personal aspect of the matter--my own private
sense of smell.
So long as a smell is not a warning or disgustful one, even if acrid
or sour or pungent, it is agreeable to me. The heavy greasy smell of
sheep, for instance, and of sheep-folds, of cattle and cow-houses and
stables, of warehouses filled with goods, and drapers', grocers',
cheesemongers', and apothecaries' shops, of leather and iron and wood,
of sawpits and carpenters' workshops. Wood-smells are indeed almost
as grateful as aromatic and fragrant scents. And many other
smells--tanneries, breweries, and all kinds of works, including
gasworks. But it is always a pleasing change from the great
manufacturing centres to the country and the dusty smell of rain after
dry, hot weather; the smell of rain-wet pine-woods, of burning weeds
and peat, and above all the smell of the fresh-turned earth--the smell
which, as the agricultural labourer believes, gives him his long,
healthy, peaceful life.
One of my first sharp unforgettable experiences in England was a novel
smell, which I will not say assailed, but rushed hospitably on me to
receive me, so to speak, in its soft, flesh-like, welcoming arms--an
earth-born thick, warm smell, something like cookery and Russian
leather, a happy, pleasant smell the like of which I had never
encountered before.
I had just landed at Southampton on a bright morning in early May, and
the whole air seemed redolent of it, just as it seemed peopled with
the chirruping sounds of innumerable sparrows. What was it? I
consulted my fellow-passengers on the question as we strolled about
the town, glad at being on firm land after thirty-one days at sea; but
though there were Englishmen in our party, no one could give me any
information. They assured me that they did not perceive it, and didn't
believe there was any such smell. I set them down as poor noseless
creatures with wisdom at one entrance quite shut out. These voyaging
companions soon drifted away, leaving only one of their company, an
American, who said he had nothing to do except to see England, and so
would stay with me until I had exhausted Southampton. We took long
walks about the suburbs and over the neighbouring beautiful common, he
always sticking to me, and still the strange agreeable smell attended
me. Then we hired a trap and youth to drive, and went farther afield;
we were constantly shouting to our driver to tell us what _that_ was.
There were sights and sounds and smells in plenty all new to me. I was
intoxicated with delight at listening to the skylark mounting up in
the blue and pouring down his ecstatic music. My companion, whose mind
was practical, cared for none of these things, but was curious about
the state and system of agriculture. "What do you call _that_?" he
shouted, pointing to a field of red clover in flower as we flew, past
it. "Grass," said our Briton. "Yes, yes, but what kind of grass?"
"Grass--what the horses eat," he returned. "I only wish the horses
had eaten your head off," said my companion, and the poor driver
looked puzzled and hurt.
Even at a distance from the town I received whiffs of my mysterious
scent, but it diminished the further I went. Returning to the town it
would again seem universal and powerful, yet I could not find a native
of the place to tell me what it was. They did not perceive it, they
all told me, and I came to the conclusion that as they lived in it
they had ceased to smell it--that it was the smell of the place, of
the country, and I called it the Smell of England.
Afterwards in London, then in Gloucestershire, and later in Scotland,
I almost lost sight or scent of the Smell of England. Occasional
whiffs came to my nostrils, but I imagined I had, like the natives,
lived long enough in it to become unconscious of it. Then after many
months came the day when the mystery was revealed. I was in London,
walking thoughtfully up Oxford Street, when on approaching Tottenham
Court Road a powerful gust of the now old familiar smell came on me
and brought back a vivid memory of my first day in Southampton, when
the Smell of England was new to me. As I advanced the gusts became
frequent and increased in power, until I was at the side of a big
building from which issued clouds of steam and hot air from a dozen
conduits, and dull rumbling noises of machinery. The whole air had
become a bath of the thick, sweetish, warm, half-flowery and
half-savoury smell. And the building was a brewery, and the smell was
the smell of brewing!
Of natural odours, the most agreeable are the aromatic and fragrant
that emanate from plants. The odours of spices and fruits, all more or
less associated in the mind with tastes, are of a distinctly lower or
less intellectual or aesthetic order. It is related of Wordsworth that
he was without the sense of smell, and that on one occasion when he
was sitting on a spring day in his flowery garden the unknown sense
suddenly came to him to astonish and delight with the lovely novel
sensation. He described it as being like a vision of Paradise. A
similar vision has been mine at frequent intervals all my life; I
doubt if its loveliness has been less in my case than in that of the
poet, to whom it came once as by a miracle. When a gust of flowery
fragrance comes to me, as when I walk by a blossoming beanfield or a
field of lucerne, it is always like a new and wonderful experience, a
delightful surprise. The reason of this effect, I take it, is that
odours do not register impressions in our brains which may be
reproduced at will, as it is with sights and sounds. Thus odours never
wholly lose the effect of novelty. We remember that certain flowers
delighted us with their fragrance, but cannot recall or recover the
sensation; there is no record, no image. Nevertheless, the bare
remembrance of it--of what it was to us at the moment--is a joy for
ever. I think of certain flowering trees--catalpa, orange, lime,
mimosa, acacia, locust, with many others--and cherish a love of them
which is almost like the love that some woman has inspired in us with
her charm, the quality which has lifted her above other women and
endowed her with a beauty above all beauty.
Trees differ from trees in glory in this respect. I think less of
orange and lime than of the Pride of China or Tree of Paradise, as it
is variously called; I often stand, in memory, in the shade of its
light loose feathery foliage, drinking in the divine fragrance of its
dim purple flowers, until I grow sick with longing, and being so far
removed from it feel that I am indeed an exile and stranger in a
strange land.
It has always been a subject of wonder to me that so many persons find
the loveliest perfumes excessive or oppressive, as when they stand by
a flowering syringa bush, or are in a room with fragrant
flowers--lilies, stock, mignonette, and various others. I can never
get too much of it nor quite enough to satisfy my smelling hunger.
Thus I love to spend entire days roaming about on boggy or marshy
heaths, perhaps less for what I see and hear of wild life than for the
sake of the odour of golden withy or sweet gale, where there are acres
of it, and I can stand knee-deep among its thick-growing shrubs and
rub my hands and face with the crushed leaves and fill my pockets with
them so as to wrap myself up in the delicious aroma.
Almost all aromatic plants are agreeable to me--fennel, horehound,
tansy, pennyroyal, and all mints, even the water-mint, which most
persons find too powerful. Also bracken when it first unrolls its
broad fronds, and I crush it to get the unique smell, which suggests
castor-oil and the fish-and-cucumber odour of smelts--a strange and
fascinating combination.
The fragrance of gorse is not of the highest order, yet it holds and
enchants me above most flowers, and being itself a sun's child, like
the sunflower, or sun-gazer as we call it in Spanish, its habit is the
exact opposite of that of the "melancholy flowers," which shed their
soulful fragrance like tears in the darkness and silence of night.
The gorse is most fragrant at noon, when the sun shines brightest and
hottest. At such an hour when I approach a thicket of furze, the wind
blowing from it, I am always tempted to cast myself down on the grass
to lie for an hour drinking the odour in. The effect is to make me
languid; to wish to lie till I sleep and live again in dreams in
another world, in a vast open-air cathedral where a great festival and
ceremony is perpetually in progress, and acolytes, in scores and
hundreds, with beautiful bright faces, in flame-yellow and orange
surplices, are ever and ever coming towards me swinging their censers
until I am ready to swoon in that heavenly incense.
Yet, as I have said, this fragrance is not of the higher order, since
in its richness there lurks a suggestion of flavours. Its powerful
effect is probably partly due to association with the
sight-impressions the blossoming plant has imparted to the mind of its
splendour. Many of our other wild flowers come nearer to the spiritua