Part 5

These remarks lead me naturally to the concluding section of my subject, in which I propose to inquire how far the discoveries of science have affected the relation of scenery to the imagination. It has often been charged against scientific men that the progress of science is distinctly hostile to the cultivation alike of the fancy and of the imagination, and that some of the choicest domains of literature must necessarily grow more and more neglected as life and progress are brought more completely under the sway of continued discovery and invention. We hear these complaints, now in the form of a helpless and hopeless wail, now as an angry and impotent protest. That they are made in good faith, and are often the expression of deep regret and anxious solicitude for the future of some parts of our literature cannot be doubted, and in so far they deserve to be treated by scientific men with hearty respect and sympathy. But is there really anything in the progress of science that is inimical to the cultivation of the imaginative faculty and the fullest blossoming of poetry? The problems of life--truth and error, love and hope, joy and sorrow, toil and rest, peace and war, disease and death, here and hereafter--will be with us always. From the days of Homer they have inspired the sweet singers of each successive generation of men, and they will continue to be the main theme of the poets of the future. As for the outer world in which we live, the more we learn of it the more marvellous does it appear, and the more powerfully does it make its mute appeal to all that is highest and best within us. And, after all, how little have we yet learnt! How small is the sum of all our knowledge! It is still and ever must be true that, in the presence of the Infinite, 'the greater our circle of light, the wider the circumference of darkness that surrounds it.' When the man of letters complains that we have dethroned the old gods, discarded the giants and witches, and erected in their place a system of cold and formal laws that can evoke no enthusiasm, and must repress all poetry, has he never perceived how a true poet can pierce, as our late Laureate could, through mere superficial technicalities into the deeper meaning of things, and can realise and express, in language that appeals to the soul as well as to the ear, the divine harmony and progressive evolution which it is the aim of science to reveal? Let me ask such a critic to ponder well the sonnet of Lowell's:

'I grieve not that ripe knowledge takes away The charm that nature to my childhood wore; For, with that insight, cometh, day by day, A greater bliss than wonder was before: The real doth not clip the poet's wings; To win the secret of a weed's plain heart Reveals some clue to spiritual things, And stumbling guess becomes firm-footed art.'

It will not, I think, be hard to show that in dissipating the popular misconceptions which have grown up around the question of the origin of scenery, science has put in their place a series of views of nature which appeal infinitely more to the imagination than anything which they supplant. While in no way lessening the effect of human association with landscape, science lifts the veil that hides the past from us, and in every region calls up a succession of visions which, by their contrast with what now presents itself to the eye and by their own unlooked-for marvels, rivet our attention. Scenes long familiar are illumined by 'a light that never was on land or sea.' We view them as if an enchanter's wand were waving over us, and by some strange glamour were blending past and present into one.

Let me try to illustrate these remarks by three examples culled from the scenery of each of the three kingdoms. First, I would transport the reader in imagination to a lonely valley in the far west of the county of Donegal. The morning light is sparkling in diamonds from the dewdrops that cluster on the bent and heather, and is throwing a rainbow sheen across each web of gossamer that hangs across our path as we climb the long rough slope in front. Around are bare bleak moorlands, too high and infertile for cultivation, from the sides and hollows of which the peasants dig their fuel. The signs of human occupation grow fewer and fainter as we ascend. The barking of the village dogs and the shouts from the school playground no longer reach our ears. And while we thus retire from the living world of to-day, it almost seems as if we enter into progressively closer communion with the past. Yonder, only a few miles to the north, lies the deep hollow of Glen Columbkill--that western seclusion where tradition records that St. Columba, the great apostle of the Scots, in his earlier years, loved to bury himself for meditation and prayer. Mouldering cross and crumbling cairn, to which latter every pious pilgrim adds a stone, keep his memory green through the centuries. It is with him and his courageous friends and disciples, rather than with sights and sounds of the present time, that we feel ourselves in contact here. And when, high up on this bare mountain-side, we come upon the ruined cells which these devoted men built with their own hands out of the rough stones of the crest, and to which they betook themselves for quiet intercourse with Heaven, amid the wild winds and driving rains of these western hills, the halo of human courage and self-denial falls for us on this solitude to heighten its loneliness and desolation.

Musing on these memories of the past, we find ourselves at last at the top of the slope, nearly two thousand feet above the sea, and discover that from this lofty summit, which is known as Slieve League, the ground plunges down on the other side in a succession of precipices into the Atlantic Ocean, which stretches from the far western horizon up to the very base of the crags beneath our feet. We have in truth been climbing a mountain whereof one-half has been cut away by the sea. What a picture of decay here presents itself! We peer over the verge of the cliffs, still wrapped in their morning shadows, and mark how peak, ridge, and wall of flinty quartzite, glowing in tints of orange, yellow, and red, uprear themselves from the face of the declivity, like the muscles on the limb of some sculptured Hercules, as if the mountain had gathered up its whole strength and knit its frame together to defy the fiercest assaults of the elements. But look how every crag is splintered, how every jutting buttress is rent and creviced, how every ledge is strewn with blocks that have fallen from the naked wall above it! If we detach one of these loosened blocks and set it in downward motion, we may watch it plunge into the abyss, flash from crag to crag, career down the screes of rubbish and make no pause until, if it survive so far, it dashes into the surge below. What we can thus carelessly do in a few moments is done deliberately every winter by the hand of Nature. Slowly but ceaselessly this vast seawall, swept by Atlantic storm, sapped by frost, soaked with rain, dried and beaten by sun and wind, is being battered down under the fire of Nature's resistless artillery.

So far the scene is one that requires no special acquaintance with science for its appreciation. The man of literature, who may most disparage the man of science, may well affirm that here they meet on common ground and have equal powers of reception and enjoyment. Nor will he be gainsaid if he claims that for the enjoyment of the distant view he is likewise quite as well equipped as the other. His eye, too, can range over the whole glorious panorama of sea and land, across the wide bay to the hills of Mayo, among which the noble cone of Nephin rises like a distant Vesuvius; southward to the terraced heights of Sligo, with their green tablelands and gleaming cliffs, which look away to the western ocean; eastward and northward, over the billowy sea of hills that stretch through Donegal round again westward to the Atlantic. What is there of note in such a landscape, he may demand, which he, ignorant of science, misses? What added pleasure, what brighter light, can science cast over it?

By way of reply to these queries, let me ask the reader who has thus far accompanied me to turn from the distant view to what lies beneath his feet on the bare, stony, wind-swept summit of Slieve League. Never shall I forget my own astonishment and enthusiasm when, in company with some of my colleagues of the Geological Survey, I found the splintered slabs of stone lying there to be full of stems of fossil trees, belonging to kinds which occur abundantly in the sandstones below our Coal-measures. The geologist will at once appreciate the full meaning of this discovery. It showed that, perched on the summit of this mountain, some two thousand feet above the sea, lay a cake, only a few acres in extent, of that division of the Carboniferous rocks called the Millstone Grit--a formation which spreads over a large tract of country farther to the east. Here, in the north-west of Ireland, in the very heart of the region of the ancient crystalline schists, and occupying the highest ground of the district, lay a little remnant, which demonstrated that a sheet of Millstone Grit once stretched over that remote part of the island, and may have extended much farther westward over tracts where the Atlantic now rolls. And as the Millstone Grit is followed by the Coal-measures, the further inference could be legitimately drawn that the Irish coal-fields, now so restricted in extent, once spread far and wide over the hills of Donegal, from which they have since been gradually denuded. Truly the woes of Ireland may be traced back to a very early time, when not even the most ardent patriot can lay blame on the invading Saxon.

That little cake of grit on the top of Slieve League stands as a monument of waste so prolonged and so stupendous as to be hardly conceivable. It proves that the north-west of Ireland was buried under a sheet of strata many hundreds of feet thick, and that, inch by inch, this overlying mantle of solid stone has been worn away, until it has been reduced at last to merely a few scattered patches of which that of Slieve League is the most westerly. Not only so, but the present system of hill and valley is thus demonstrated not to be part of the primeval architecture of the earth, but to have come into being after that upper envelope of Carboniferous rock had begun to be removed. What a marvellous series of pictures is thus presented to our imagination! Standing on that bare mountain-top, we think of the ages represented by the quartzite of those craggy precipices below, then of the time when the region lay beneath the waters in which the coal jungles spread over a large part of Ireland. We try to realise how these jungles sank foot by foot beneath the sea, how sand and silt were heaped over them, and how, in course of ages, this submerged area was once more upraised into land. But we fail to form any adequate conception of the lapse of time required for the long succession of changes that followed. We only know that, slowly and insensibly, by the fall of rain, the beating of wind, the creeping of ice-fields, and the surging of the ocean, hollow and glen have been carved out, hill after hill has emerged, like forms from a block of marble under the hand of a sculptor, that ravines have been cut out here and crags have been left there, until, at last, the whole landscape has been wrought into its present forms.

We look once more down the face of the precipice, now lit up by the advancing sun, and, though everywhere upon its ruined surface we mark how--

'Nature softening and concealing, Is busy with a hand of healing'--

crusting the bare rock with golden lichen, or hiding its rawness under a cover of richly tinted weather-stains, we none the less perceive the sure signs of constant and inevitable decay; we recognise the working of the same forces that have sculptured the whole landscape, far as well as near; and we feel awed in presence of this revelation of the continuity of law and of the potency even of the unregarded operations of nature when they have had untold ages in which to accomplish their appointed work.

I should like now to transport the reader to a wholly different scene, that we may consider together some of the more obvious features in the landscapes of the south coast of England. At the western end of the Isle of Wight, a long ridge of chalk-down, which stretches completely across the island, runs out to sea, and terminates in the well-known white pinnacles of the Needles. From the highest part of the ridge, when the air is clear, the eye ranges southward over a vast expanse of open sea. To the west and north the breadth of water is bounded by the blue hills of Dorsetshire, the white cliffs of Swanage Bay, and then the long low brown heights which are crowned with the spires of Bournemouth and Christchurch. Eastward we note how the ridge on which we stand sinks down into the hollow of Freshwater Gap, but rises again on the farther side, and then striking inland for some miles, sweeps round to form the heights of St. Catharine's, nearly 800 feet high, whence it descends once more in white cliffs to the sea.

On a summer noon, when a fresh westerly breeze roughens the sea into deepest azure, and keeps a continual murmur of plashing waves at the foot of the cliffs, few pieces of English coast scenery offer more attractions than this. From the verge of the short green sward of the down, the chalk plunges in a sheer precipice of dazzling whiteness, that contrasts well with the mingled blue and emerald-green of the sea below. Projecting massive buttresses, that catch the full blaze of sunlight, throw into delicate violet shadow the recesses and alcoves into which the face of chalk has been worn. On the great ocean highway in front, vessels of every size and rig sail past on their outward or homeward voyage. Though our perch above the precipice is solitary, we yet feel within sight and touch of the living world. Across the bay we mark the smoke of distant villages and towns, and the fields and woodlands that separate the scattered hamlets. Just below, at the northern foot of the ridge, sheltered and concealed among its woods, lies that home so dear to lovers of English literature, where--

'Groves of pine on either hand, To break the blast of winter, stand, And further on, the hoary channel Tumbles a breaker on chalk and sand.'

Nor are memorials of the past wanting to throw over the scene the priceless charm of old memory and tradition. The down is roughened here and there with 'the grassy barrows of the happier dead.' The steeples and towers of the country churches dotted over the landscape, mark still, as they have done for centuries, the heart of each parish and its quiet graveyard. It is a typically English scene, full of that hallowed, historic interest, and of that subdued, unobtrusive beauty, where the lineaments of nature are everywhere more or less concealed by the labours of man, which constitute so chief a source of pleasure in the landscapes of England.

Here, surely, our literary censor may claim that no room can be found for the foot of science. What can we pretend to add to the charm of such scenery; or what can we do, if we touch it at all, but lessen that charm? Again, I accept the challenge, though with perhaps somewhat more diffidence; not that I think the contribution from science is here less available or less appropriate, but because I so fully share in the feeling that a scene, in itself and to the ordinary eye so full of everything that can give pleasure, needs no addition from any source.

Let me suppose that we are placed upon the extreme western verge of the down, with the Needles in front of us. The chalk that forms these white faces of rock is shown by science to be made up entirely of the mouldered remains of creatures that gathered on the sea-bottom, ages before the species of animals living at the present day came into existence. Sponges, crinoids, corals, shells, fishes, reptiles, mingled their remains with those of the minuter forms of life that accumulated on the floor of that ancient ocean. And now, hardened into stone, the ooze of that sea-bed has been upraised into land. The 'long backs of the bushless downs,' which for many successive centuries have remained as we see them, were originally parts of the sea-bed, and are entirely built up of the vestiges of dead organisms.

But this is not all. Look at one of those noble faces of rock which shoot up from the restless breakers, and take note of the parallel lines of dark flints which, as if traced with a pencil, sweep in such graceful curves from base to crest of the cliffs. Alike on buttress and recess, from headland to headland, no matter how irregularly the chalk has been sculptured, these parallel lines may be followed. A feature so conspicuous in the architecture of the precipices could not escape the attention of the most casual visitor, but he only vaguely marvels at it, until geology tells him that these dark lines mark successive floors of that ancient sea--floors that gathered one over another, as generation after generation of marine creatures left their crumbling remains upon the bottom. But now they are bent up and placed on end, like books on the shelves of a library. And thus we learn that not only has this ancient sea-bed been turned into dry land, but its layers of hardened ooze have been tilted up vertically, and that it is the worn ends of these upturned layers which form the long ridges of the downs.

But science further makes known to us that beyond the cliffy margin on which we stand, there once stretched an ampler land that has long disappeared. Far over the English Channel the chalk downs once extended with their undulating summits, their smooth grassy slopes, their deep cooms and quiet bournes. That vanished land ran southward, until it ended off in a range of white precipices. The rain that fell on its surface gathered into a river that flowed northward through Freshwater Gap into the Solent. Strange to tell, perched on the top of the present cliffs, to the east of Freshwater, lie fragments of the bed of that ancient stream, consisting of gravel and silt which, as the cliffs are undermined by the waves, tumble to the beach and mingle with the gravel of to-day. In these ancient deposits are found teeth of the long-extinct mammoths which browsed the herbage on slopes that rose southward, where for many a long age the Atlantic has rolled its restless tides and breakers.

Musing on these records of a dim forgotten past, we once more turn to the last spurs of chalk and the isolated Needles. There, with eye quickened to recognise what science has to reveal, we trace on every feature of the rocky foreground, inscribed in characters that cannot be mistaken, the story of that process of destruction which has reduced the Isle of Wight to its present diminished proportions. The rains, frosts, and tempests splinter the chalk above and the waves gnaw it away below. Year by year fresh slices are cut off and strewn in fragments over the sea-floor by the unwearying surge. The Needles, once part of the down, are perceptibly less than they were a generation ago. The opposite white cliffs and downs of Dorset were at one time continuous with those of the Isle of Wight. They too, by their shattered precipices, tunnelled caverns, and isolated stacks of rock, tell the same tale of disintegration. And, thus, impressive though the scenery was before, it now acquires a new interest and significance, when every cliff and pinnacle becomes eloquent to us of a past so strange, so remote, and yet so closely linked with our own day by a chain of slow and unbroken causation.

And now, as a last illustration, let me conduct the reader in imagination to the far north-west of Scotland and place him on the craggy slopes above the upper end of Loch Maree as the sun, after a day of autumnal storm, is descending towards the distant Hebrides in a glory of crimson, green, and gold. Hardly anywhere within the compass of our islands can a landscape be beheld so varied in form and colour, so abounding in all that is noblest and fairest in our mountain scenery. To the right rises the huge mass of Slioch, catching on his terraced shoulders the full glow of sunset, and wreathing his summit with folds of delicate rose-coloured cloud. To the left, above the purple shadows that are now gathering round their base, tower the white crags and crests of Ben Eay, rising clear and sharp against the western sky. Down the centre, between these two giant buttresses, lies Loch Maree--the noblest sheet of water in the Scottish Highlands--now ablaze with the light of the sinking sun. Headland behind headland, and islet after islet rise as bars of deep violet out of that sea of gold. Yonder a group of pines, relics of the old Caledonian forest, stand boldly above the rocky knolls. Around us the naked rock undulates in endless bosses, dotted with boulders or half-buried in the deep heather that flames out with yet richer crimson in the ruddy light filling all the valley. Overhead, the banded cliffs of Craig Roy, draped with waterfalls and wet with the rains of the earlier part of the day, glow in the varying tints of sunset. We hear the scream of the eagles that still nest in these inaccessible crags; the hoarse outcry of the heron comes up from the lake; the whirr of the black-cock re-echoes down the hill-side. It might seem as if we were here out of sight and hearing of man, save that now and then the low of cattle, driven home to their stalls, falls faintly on the ear from the distant hamlet, which is fading into the gathering twilight of the glen.

At such a time and in such a scene the past speaks vividly to us, if there be human associations of a bygone time linked with the place. Here, in this remote Highland valley, we are led backward in imagination through generations of strife and rapine, clan warfare and private revenge, bravery and treachery, superstition and ignorance, far away to that early time when, in the seventh century, Maelrubha, the red priest from Ireland, preached to the savage Picts, and first brought this region within the ken of civilised men. More than twelve hundred years have since passed away, but the memory of that early missionary still lives here among the solitudes which he chose as the scene of his labours. The lake yet bears his name, and his favourite island of retirement, embowered in holly, mountain ash, and honeysuckle, contains his holy well, which, even to this day, is visited for the cure of diseases, while offerings are there made to the saint.

It is just this little touch of 'the still, sad music of humanity' which is needed to crown the interest and dignity of our Highland landscape. 'What more, then, can we need or desire?' our literary critic may once more demand; 'you may go on to elaborate the details of the scene, for every part of the picture abounds in the most exquisite detail, beyond the power of pen or almost of pencil adequately to pourtray. But what can science do here, except to mar what already is perfect, or to confuse by contributing what is entirely irrelevant?'

Again I feel the force of the objection, and all the more because to combat it as I should wish to do, would involve me in geological details which would here be wholly out of place. Let me say, briefly and decidedly, that after many years of experience in every variety of landscape in this country, I know nowhere a scene which has its true inner meaning as a source of impressiveness more strikingly revealed, or which has its ordinary interest more vividly intensified by the light which geological history throws upon it.