THROUGH GLADE AND MEAD. OUTDOOR LIFE IN LITERATURE. And this our life, exempt from public haunt, -As You Like It. IT is a familiar fact in the experience of nearly every student that the opening sentence or the first page of a new text-book is that which clings longest to the memory and rises most persistently into the realm of consciousness. The student remembers Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres when the rest of Cæsar has vanished; and it is so with other authors, classical or English, whose works have been the subjects of study in childhood and youth. In days when the study of the history of English literature was considered the proper introduction to the study of the literature itself,-Times are changed and we are changed with them,-Collier's "History of English Literature" was the text-book put into the hands of my class, and its first sentence, repeated until branded into the memory and haunting it ever afterwards, florid as it was in style, had an indefinable charm for our crude youthful taste, while it conveyed dimly to our minds the intimate connection between outdoor life and the beginnings of literature and art. It ran as follows: "When in the depths of some Asiatic forest, shadowy with the green fans and swordblades of the palm-tribe and the giant fronds of the purple-streaked banana, a sinewy savage stood, one day long ago, etching with a thorn on some thick-fleshed leaf, torn from the luxuriant shrub-wood around him, rude images of the beasts he hunted or the arrows he shot, the first step was taken toward the making of a book." Numerous as have been the changes since those far-off days our language has preserved the fact that the tree, the beech tree probably, is the parent of the book, the leaf of the tree is the ancestor of the leaf of the book, the papyrus of the Nile Valley has given us the name for paper, and the Latin word for feather, penna, has given us our word for pen. The literature of every people is redolent with the odor of outdoor life, as the forms and means by which it has been preserved speak of its outdoor origin. In the early development of our race we see the effect of the appeal of the outer world to the spiritual nature of man in the origin of the various forms of mythology. Every original expression of the devout feelings of mankind is a worship of Nature. On the plains of India, in the Nile Valley, in Syria, Greece, Italy, in Scandinavia, in that strange volcanic isle, Iceland, among the cañons of the Colorado River, and along the great plains of the West, under the Equator or the Arctic Circle, it has always been the same. The imagination, stimulated by close contact with those mighty and unknown forces of Nature, has endeavored to answer the "obstinate questionings of sense and outward things," and has peopled the earth and the air and the sea with myriad forms, beneficent or cruel. The worship of Isis and Osiris and the sacred animals has long since passed away from the Nile Valley, but the Parsee of the Iranian. plateau and of western India still reverences, as his ancestors did ages ago, the glorious sun and its mystic symbol, fire. And of all forms of worship not divine, this will seem the most rational. What fitter emblem of the Almighty than the sun, on whose beneficent supply of light and heat our life depends! The men of that elder day perceived this and fell down in adoration. So every race developed its own worship, colored by the influence of the differing aspects of Nature, here bright, there gloomy, borrowing ofttimes from its neighbors, sometimes imposing its own by relentless wars. This religion of Nature is seen at its best as developed by the highly spiritual Greeks under the clear skies of their sunny land, in the worship of the cloudcompelling Zeus, the lightning Hephæstus, the windruling Æolus, the wise Athena, and the myriad other impersonations which, by a blending of physics and poetry, evolved a mythology the richness and beauty of which will be an inexhaustible source of delight through all time. The outdoor life of those ancient Greeks has reacted and is still reacting upon our own literature with a power we scarcely realize. The old Norse myths concerning Thor and Balder and Freya and many another show us the forms under which our ancestors, dwellers by the North Sea twenty centuries ago and more, worshipped the powers of Nature. This very day was once Thor's day, dedicated to his worship; yesterday was Woden's day; to-morrow will be Freya's day; and these names, slightly modified by lapse of years, are historic landmarks of great significance in the religious development of the Germanic stock. On English soil druids once performed their religious rites in the depths of the oak groves; now Christian priests in noble cathedrals, the pillars of which are imitations of the oak boles, and the naves are imitations of the forest aisles, worship in spirit and in truth. But the condition in which the myth is developed can exist in only a certain stage, generally an early one, in the culture of mankind. "As the Isis veil is lifted by the thinker, the gods disappear from the earth and then from the sky, and law takes their place; and yet, somehow, the sense of beauty still animates the whole and the soul feels that the divine is still near." Contemplation of Nature becomes again the worship of God, but only after all the ungodly and human has been separated from it, and naught remains but an ineffable goodness and justice and beauty. The exigencies of an advancing civilization which tend to draw us away from the close contact with, and contemplation of, Nature rob us of a part, and that not a small one, of our lawful inheritance. It is Wordsworth, the Christian poet, who, observing this tendency, strongly expresses his feelings in a well-known sonnet: "The world is too much with us; late and soon, We've given our hearts away, a sordid boon! A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn, So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea, Or hear old Triton blow his wreathéd horn." |