II

Once every people in the world believed that trees were divine, and could take a human or grotesque shape and dance among the shadows; and that deer, and ravens and foxes, and wolves and bears, and clouds and pools, almost all things under the sun and moon, and the sun and moon, were not less divine and changeable. They saw in the rainbow the still bent bow of a god thrown down in his negligence; they heard in the thunder the sound of his beaten water-jar, or the tumult of his chariot wheels; and when a sudden flight of wild duck, or of crows, passed over their heads, they thought they were gazing at the dead hastening to their rest; while they dreamed of so great a mystery in little things that they believed the waving of a hand, or of a sacred bough, enough to trouble far-off hearts, or hood the moon with darkness. All old literatures are full of these or of like imaginations, and all the poets of races, who have not lost this way of looking at things, could have said of themselves, as the poet of the Kalevala said of himself, ‘I have learned my songs from the music of many birds, and from the music of many waters.’ When a mother in the Kalevala weeps for a daughter, who was drowned flying from an old suitor, she weeps so greatly that her tears become three rivers, and cast up three rocks, on which grow three birch-trees, where three cuckoos sit and sing, the one ‘love, love,’ the one ‘suitor, suitor,’ the one ‘consolation, consolation.’ And the makers of the Sagas made the squirrel run up and down the sacred ash-tree carrying words of hatred from the eagle to the worm, and from the worm to the eagle; although they had less of the old way than the makers of the Kalevala, for they lived in a more crowded and complicated world, and were learning the abstract meditation which lures men from visible beauty, and were unlearning, it may be, the impassioned meditation which brings men beyond the edge of trance and makes trees, and beasts, and dead things talk with human voices.

The old Irish and the old Welsh, though they had less of the old way than the makers of the Kalevala, had more of it than the makers of the Sagas, and it is this that distinguishes the examples Matthew Arnold quotes of their ‘natural magic,’ of their sense of ‘the mystery’ more than of ‘the beauty’ of nature. When Matthew Arnold wrote it was not easy to know as much as we know now of folk song and folk belief, and I do not think he understood that our ‘natural magic’ is but the ancient religion of the world, the ancient worship of nature and that troubled ecstasy before her, that certainty of all beautiful places being haunted, which it brought into men’s minds. The ancient religion is in that passage of the Mabinogion about the making of ‘Flower Aspect.’ Gwydion and Math made her ‘by charms and illusions’ ‘out of flowers.’ ‘They took the blossoms of the oak, and the blossoms of the broom, and the blossoms of the meadowsweet, and produced from them a maiden the fairest and most graceful that man ever saw; and they baptized her, and called her Flower Aspect’; and one finds it in the not less beautiful passage about the burning Tree, that has half its beauty from calling up a fancy of leaves so living and beautiful, they can be of no less living and beautiful a thing than flame: ‘They saw a tall tree by the side of the river, one half of which was in flames from the root to the top, and the other half was green and in full leaf.’ And one finds it very certainly in the quotations he makes from English poets to prove a Celtic influence in English poetry; in Keats’s ‘magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn’; in his ‘moving waters at their priest-like task of pure ablution round earth’s human shore’; in Shakespeare’s ‘floor of heaven,’ ‘inlaid with patens of bright gold’; and in his Dido standing ‘on the wild sea banks,’ ‘a willow in her hand,’ and waving it in the ritual of the old worship of nature and the spirits of nature, to wave ‘her love to come again to Carthage.’ And his other examples have the delight and wonder of devout worshippers among the haunts of their divinities. Is there not such delight and wonder in the description of Olwen in the Mabinogion: ‘More yellow was her hair than the flower of the broom, and her skin was whiter than the foam of the wave, and fairer were her hands and her fingers than the blossoms of the wood-anemone amidst the spray of the meadow fountains.’ And is there not such delight and wonder in—

‘Meet we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,

By paved fountain or by rushy brook,

Or on the beached margent of the sea’?

If men had never dreamed that fair women could be made out of flowers, or rise up out of meadow fountains and paved fountains, neither passage could have been written. Certainly the descriptions of nature made in what Matthew Arnold calls ‘the faithful way,’ or in what he calls ‘the Greek way,’ would have lost nothing if all the meadow fountains or paved fountains were meadow fountains and paved fountains and nothing more. When Keats wrote, in the Greek way, which adds lightness and brightness to nature—

‘What little town by river or sea-shore

Or mountain built with quiet citadel,

Is emptied of its folk, this pious morn’;

when Shakespeare wrote in the Greek way—

‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,

Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows’;

when Virgil wrote in the Greek way—

‘Muscosi fontes et somno mollior herba,’

and

‘Pallentes violas et summa papavera carpens

Narcissum et florem jungit bene olentis anethi’;

they looked at nature without ecstasy, but with the affection a man feels for the garden where he has walked daily and thought pleasant thoughts. They looked at nature in the modern way, the way of people who are poetical, but are more interested in one another than in a nature which has faded to be but friendly and pleasant, the way of people who have forgotten the ancient religion.