Part 10
Perhaps in sheer beauty of pictorial isolation clouds are most lovely when viewed above sea horizons, from shores of islands, or promontories, or remote headlands. In the South this beauty is possibly more dream-like, more poignantly lovely, than in the North. Certainly, I have nowhere known cloud beauty excelling that in the Mediterranean and Ionian seas, viewed from the Spanish coast, from the Balearic Isles, over against the mountain-bastions of Sardinia and Corsica, from the headlands of Sicily, where Ithaka and Zante are as great galleys in a magic ocean, where for weeks at midsummer the wine-dark waters are untroubled between the cliffs of Hellas and the sands of Alexandria. Perhaps. It is difficult to say of any region that there beauty is more wonderfully revealed than elsewhere. It comes, and is present, and is upgathered; as the wind, that has no home, that the shaken reed knows, that crumbles the crests of ancient hills; as the rainbow, which is the same aerial flame upon Helicon, upon Ida, on the green glen of Aghadoe, on the steeps of Hecla in the Hebrides, that gives majesty and wonder to the village green, and delivers mystery on the horizons of the frequented common. It is like light, whose incalculable arrivals are myriad, but which when most steadfast is most dreamlike, a phantom: as moonlight on the mysterious upturned face of great woods; or as when, on illimitable moors, the dew glistens on the tangled bent and pale flood of orchis where the lapwings nest; or in golden fire, as when at the solstice the sorrel in the meadows and the tansy in the wastes and the multitude of the dandelion are transmuted into a mirage of red and yellow flame; or in rippling flood of azure and silver, when the daysprings loosen; or in scarlet and purple and chrysoprase, when the South is as a clouded opal and the West is the silent conflagration of the world. There is not a hidden glen among the lost hills, there is not an unvisited shore, there is not a city swathed in smoke and drowned in many clamours, where light is not a continual miracle, where from dayset to dawn, from the rising of the blue to the gathering of shadow, the wind is not habitual as are the reinless, fierce, unswerving tides of the sea. Beauty, and Light, and Wind: they who are so common in our companionship and so continual in mystery, are as one in this--that none knows whence the one or the other is come, or where any has the last excellence or differs save in the vibration of ecstasy, or whither the one or the other is gone, when the moment, on whose wings it came or on whose brows it stood revealed, is no longer Eternity speaking the language of Time, but the silence of what is already timeless and no more.
It has been said, less wisely than disdainfully, that the chief element of beauty is destroyed when one knows the secret of semblance. Clouds, then, are forfeit in loveliness when one knows the causes of their transformation, their superb illusion? Not so. Has the rose lost in beauty, has she relinquished fragrance, for all that we have learned of her blind roots, the red ichor in her petals, the green pigment in her stem, her hunger that must be fed in coarse earth, her thirst that must be quenched in rain and dew, her desire that must mate with light? Is the rainbow the less a lovely mystery because we know that it is compact of the round, colourless raindrops such as fall upon us in any shower? Is the blue of an unclouded sky the less poignant for us if we know that the sunlight which inhabits it is there, not the yellow or red or suffused white which we discern, but itself an ineffable azure; that, there, the sun itself is not golden or amber or bronze, but violet-blue?
I remember it was complained once of something I wrote ... in effect, that cloud was the visible breathing, the suspended breath of earth ... that the simile was as inept as it was untrue. None who knows how cloud is formed will dispute the truth in similitude: as to disillusion, can that be ‘unpoetic’ which is so strange and beautiful a thing? The breath of a little child born in the chill of dawn, the breath of old age fading into the soon untroubled surface of the mirror held against silent lips, the breath of the shepherd on the hills, of the seamen on dark nights under frost-blue stars, the breath of cows on the morning pastures, of the stag panting by the tarn, the breath of woods, of waters, of straths, of the plains, of the brows of hills, the breath of the grass, the breathing of the tremulous reed and the shaken leaf ... are not these the continual vapour of life; and what is cloud but the continual breath of our most deep and ancient friend, the brown earth, our cradle, our home, and our haven?
If any reader wish to _feel_ the invisible making of the cloud that shall afterward rise on white wings or stream like a banner from mountain-bastions, let him stand on the slopes of a furrowed hill in this midsummer season. He will then feel the steady, upflowing tide of the warm air from the low-lying glens and valleys, a constant tepid draught, the breath of the earth. It will not be long before the current which shook yonder rose-flusht briar, which swayed these harebells as foam is blown, which lifted yonder rowan-branch and softly trampled this bracken underfoot, is gathered by scaur and sudden corrie to the sheer scarps of the mountain-summit, to be impelled thence, as a geyser is thrown from an imperious fount, high into the cold and windy solitude. There it may suddenly be transmuted to an incalculable host of invisible ice-needles, and become cirrus; to float like thistledown, or to be innumerably scattered in wisps and estrays, or long ‘grey-mares’-tails,’ or dispersed like foam among vast, turbulent shallows. Or it may keep to the lee-side of the mountain-summit, and stretch far like a serrated sword, or undulatingly extend like a wind-narrowed banner, covering as a flag the climbing armies of pine and boulder and the inscrutable array of shadow.
_Cirrus_ ... what a beauty there is in the familiar name: what beauty of association for all who love the pageant of cloud, and, loving, know somewhat of the science of the meteorologist. It is not alone in this: memory and imagination are alike stirred by the names of the three other of the four main divisions of Cloud--the Cumulus, the Stratus, the Nimbus. From the grey and purple of earthward nimbus to the salmon-pink bastions of the towering cumuli, those unloosened mountains of the middle air, those shifting frontiers of the untravelled lands of heaven, and thence to the dazzling whiteness of the last frozen pinnacles of cirrus, all loveliness of colour may be found. Neither brush of painter nor word of poet can emulate those apparitions of gold and scarlet, of purple and emerald, of opal and saffron and rose. There every shade of dove-brown and willow-grey, every subterfuge of shadow and shine, can be seen.
The cloud-lover will know that these four great divisions are but terms of convenience. There are intervening children of beauty. Betwixt the earth-held, far-reaching nimbus and the climbing cumulus, whose forehead is so often bathed in the rarest fires of sunset, is the cumulo-nimbus. Between the cumulus and the stratus, whose habitual grey robe can be so swiftly made radiant in yellow and orange and burning reds, is the strato-cumulus: a sombre clan in the upper wilderness, heavy with brooding rains, moving in dark folds, less persuaded of the great winds which may drive the as silent seeming stratus, some ten thousand feet higher it may be, at the lightning speed of the eagle. Between the stratus and cirrus there are the cirro-cumulus and the cirro-stratus. The former is in one form as commonly welcome as beautiful, the familiar ‘mackerel-sky,’ harbinger of fair weather--in another, it is the soft dappled sky that moonlight will turn into the most poignant loveliness, a wilderness of fleecy hillocks and delicate traceries. The latter is that drift-ice or broken-up snow-field enmassing which is so familiar. Both march from horizon to horizon in ordered majesty, though when they seem like idle vapours motionlessly suspended along the blue walls of heaven they are rustling their sheaves of frost-fire armour, are soaring to more than twenty thousand feet above the earth, and are surging onward with impetuous rush at the rate of from seventy to eighty miles an hour.
I have called them the children of beauty. But these children of cloud are many. In each division, in each subdivision, there is again complex division. In a Gaelic story or poem-saga they are called ‘the Homeless Clan.’ It is a beautiful name. But they are not homeless whom the great winds of the upper world eternally shepherd, who have their mortal hour in beauty and strength and force, and, instead of the havens and graves and secret places of the creatures of earth, know a divine perpetual renewal.
THE CUCKOO’S SILENCE
There is silence now in the woods. That spirit of the south wind, that phantom voice of the green tides of May, has passed: that which was a wandering dream is become a haunting memory. Whence is the cuckoo come, whither does the cuckoo go? When our leaves grow russet and the fern clothes herself in bronze and pale gold, what land hears that thrilling call in ancient groves, or above old unvisited forests, or where arid declivities plunge into the gathering sands of the desert? Whither is gone Sinlinda, the summer bird, as the Esthonians call her: she who has been a voice in the far Orkneys (a daughter, it may be, of that cuckoo-queen who bore Modred to King Arthur, Modred the Pict who afterward wrought so great evil upon Arthur and his knights), or cried the sighing of vain love above the hills of the Gael, or in Sweden swung on the north wind as the _sorg-gök_, uttering ‘sorrow,’ or floated out of the east as the _tröste-gök_, calling ‘consolation’? When Finland loses her, and the Baltic peasant no more counts with dread the broken cries, and she has passed from the Irish valleys, so that men and women are safe for another year from the wildness of wild love, whither is she gone? Like a dream her voice fades from Broceliande, is heard no more by Fontarabia, has no echo in the wood of Vallombrosa. In the last reaches of the Danube she no longer mocks love; above the Siberian steppe the exile no more hears her ironic _Go! Go!_: from the dim Campagna she is lifted into silence, _sospir’ d’ amore_: she is not heard across the waters of Corinth from that fallen temple where Zeus took her form upon him, nor is the shadow of her wings in that wild mountain-valley of Mykenai, where Agamemnon and Clytaimnestra sleep, where once the marble statue of divine Hera stood bearing on a sceptre her perilous image. Where, then, is she gone, she who from the dim Asian valleys to the Aztec wilderness, from one world to another, is the mysterious voice of wandering love; she who is, in one place, to be hailed with hymns of gladness, in another to be hearkened to with bowed head or averted eyes? For thus it is, even to-day, among the ancient remnant in Mexico and the Californian wilds, who hear with terror that foreboding flute-like voice calling out of the unseen world: thus it was in the Himalayan solitudes of old when the Sanskrit villagers hailed the cuckoo as a divine messenger, _Kakila_, the bird who knows all things, not only what has happened, but what shall happen.
She has troubled many minds, this wanderer. It could not be otherwise. What mysterious music, this, when through the grey lands of the north the south wind went laughing on a vast illimitable surge of green and foam of blossom? One morning, when the missel-thrush was silent and even the skylarks sank through the hazy stillness, a far cry would be heard, a sound from the unknown, a bell out of heaven. It would float bodiless through the blue air, or call softly like an imprisoned echo in the coverts of grey cloud. Then those who heard would know that Summer had ceased from wearing her robe of white and green and yellow, and with sun-browned hands was gathering roses for her May garland, her June coronal. The bird of love is come. The sighing heart, the beating pulse, know it. She is come, voice out of the sea, voice across waters, Aphroditê of sound. Long, long ago this voice, this dim-remembered myth, was transmuted into Orpheus in the south, into Lemminkainen by the singers of the Kalevala, into Sigurd across the Scandinavian fjords, into Kukkolind along the Esthonian wastes into Cuchulaind among the Irish hills, into Coohoolin beside the foam of the Hebrides. My old nurse had a Gaelic song I have forgotten, all save its refrain, which was
“_Gù-Gù, Gù-Gù, A cuisilin a-ghràidh, Cuisilin mo-chrìdhe!_”
“_Cuckoo! Cuckoo! O pulse of love, Pulse of my heart!_”
In the first movement of the _oran_ the singer called to the cuckoo to come, ‘Blue-bird of love.’ Why ‘blue-bird’ I am unaware, though among the Finns and Esths ‘blue-bird’ is a poetic analogue for the cuckoo. In the second lift of the _oran_, the singer cried, ‘It is come, it is come, bird of love, bird of joy.’ In the third fall the singer crooned, ‘It is gone, bird of sorrow, bird of foam, bird of the grey wind.’ And after each the swift and passionate or long, melancholy, and sorrowful refrain
“_Gù-Gù! Gù-Gù! O cushleen a-ghrày Cushleen mo-chree!_”
‘The returning one’ the cuckoo is called in an old saga. It is the ancient mystery, Love, the son of Earth: the wildwood brother of him, that other Love, who puts aside the green branches of home to long for the shining stars, who sighs unappeased by white breasts and dreams of one beautiful and far-off, made of the wandering rainbow, of the dew, of the fragrance of flowers. The one comes with the green wind and goes with the grey wind: the other puts on blindness as divine vision, and deafness as a sacred veil, and wooes Psyche.
All old primitive tales know the advent of this mysterious bird. Was not, as I have said, the divine Hera herself wooed thus by Zeus? In that ancient Heraion, in the heart of the Peloponnesos which Pausanias saw, he tells us of a statue of the goddess whose sceptre bore the image of this spring-born voice of eternal love and eternal illusion. The people loved it not, for in their eyes the story covered an evil thing: but the priests bowed before an ancient mystery, and the poets smiled, and the musicians paused and wondered and struck a new vibrant note. In every country there are oldtime tales of the cuckoo with the attributes of a god, or demigod, or at least of magic and illusion. When, in the great Northern saga, Ilmarinen, the son of Wondersmith and the Air, goes north to woo the snow-bound princess ... what but another lovely metaphor of Spring calling to the North to cover herself with the snow-blossom of betrothal and the roses and honeysuckles of procreant love ... he orders thus the outbringing of his sleigh:
“Take the fleetest of my racers, Put the grey steed in the harness, Hitch him to my sledge of magic: Place six cuckoos on the break-board, Seven blue-birds on the crossbow, Thus to charm the northland maidens, Thus to make them look and listen As the cuckoos call and echo.”
The wind, that grey steed, fleetest of racers, the calling of cuckoos, the northland maidens charmed to silence among awakening fields or amid the first green stirring of grass-blades and pointed leaf: is not Ilmarinen, son of Wondersmith and the Air, the veritable cuckoo-god?
If ever the cuckoo-myth find its historian one will learn how widespread and basic it is. We follow it from Orpheus himself to the myth of Saturn and Rhea, to that of Faunus and Fauna, to Siegfried in the north, to Cuchulain in the west--for the famous hero of the Gaels is, for all the bardic legends as to Setanta being Cu-chulain, the hound of Culain, as unmistakably a cuckoo-god as his Finnish or Esthonian namesake, Kukkolind. The base of all is the divine inspiration, the mysterious wandering Breath, the incalculable Word, ‘the heroic cuckoo,’ who awakens the green world, the world of blossom and leaf and the songs of birds and the sap in the trees and the mounting warmth in the blood, who, as the chroniclers say, ‘rouses the enchanted maid of spring from her long sleep.’ Of all these, whether it be Faunus, or Kullervo, or Kalevipoeg, or the Son of Mananan, or Cuchulain, the same thing may be said: they are bringers of Spring, champions of the sun, rhapsodes of the immemorial ecstasy, bacchids of the ancient intoxication.
One of the loveliest of these mythopœic dreams I heard first, at the break of June, years ago, at Strachur of Loch Fyne, in a season of cloudless blue by day and mellow amber by night, and when in the long-delaying dusk the voices of many cuckoos floated across the narrow loch from the shadowy woods of Claondiri. It was of Manan, the son of that ancient Manan the Gaelic Poseidon; and how he went to the north to woo his beautiful sister, and strew her way with the petals of wild-rose, and fill her ears with the songs of birds, and the sighing of waters, and the longing of the wind of the west. But that I have told, and am more fully telling, elsewhere. Two summers ago, on the Sound of Morven, I was told a fragmentary legend of Conlay (Connleach), the son of Cuchulain, when a youth in Skye, and how he went to Ireland and, all unwitting, fought to the death with his father--as in the Greek tale of Oidipous, as in the Persian tale of Sohrab: and, unknowing relevancy or keeping to the ancestral word, the teller emphasised this old myth-tale of the cuckoo that knows not and is not known by its own offspring, by adding, ‘Aye, it was a meeting of cuckoos, that: father and son, the one not knowing the other any more than a cuckoo on the wind knows father or mother, brother or sister.’
Of all the cuckoo-tales there is none lovelier than that told of our Gaelic hero in ‘The Wooing of Blathmaid.’ This sleeping queen or lost princess, whose name signifies ‘Blossom,’ lives on a remote island. With the Gaelic teller this island will be the Isle of Man, home of Mananan, that ancient god whose cold hands grope blindly along the shores of the world: with the Swede or Finn or Esth it will be that other city set among cold forgotten waters, that other Mana. Cuchulain loves Blathmaid, and their wooing is so sweet that fragrance comes into flowers, and birds break into song. The voice of Cuchulain is the music of the world. Blathmaid hears it, awakes, moves to it in wondering joy. But a rival lord, Curoi the king, carries Blathmaid away. Cuchulain is left bound, and shorn of his long yellow hair. But he regains his strength and freedom, and follows Blathmaid. Her sign to him from the dun where she is kept a prisoner is milk poured into the water that makes a gulf between the fortress and the leaning banks. In the end, Curoi is slain or driven away; Blathmaid hears the call of Cuchulain, and wanders into the beautiful green world with her lover. Here, every touch is symbolical. Cuchulain is the breath of returning life, Spring, symbolised in the Cuckoo, that ‘child of air’ as the old northland poet calls his dream. Blathmaid is the awakening world: Blossom. Curoi is the wind of autumn, the fierce and silent magician Winter. The milk is but the emblem of melting streams, of the fluent sap.
But now, as I write, already midsummer is gone. The cuckoo is silent. The country-folk still think it is become a hawk. The old Cymric _Gwalchmei_ (the cuckoo-son of Arthur and twin brother of Modred) is, Professor Rhys tells us, but an analogue of the Hawk of May. So, once more, we see the incalculable survival of tradition. Some say that the wandering clan has dispersed on the four winds. The sweet mysterious voice will be heard no more in the world till the wind of the south crosses the sea next far-off Spring, and the sound of the wings of swallows is come again. But ‘the bird of the sevens’ is not yet gone. Seven weeks from the coming of the Voice to the hunger of the fledgeling; seventeen weeks, and the fledgeling has left foster-parents and gone out upon the wind; seven and twenty weeks, and the bird fades away from the woodlands like mist.
It is gone: Midsummer, the songs of birds, the ‘wandering Voice.’ Already, with that old insatiate passion of the soul, we long for Blathmaid, so soon taken from us: long for that divine call to youth and love: long for Spring that shall come again, though it shall be but a sweet wandering voice, the call of the unknown, the promise of the unfulfilled. For we thirst for that invisible mystery whose voice floats above the veils of the world, and we would drink again of the old wonder and the old illusion.
THE COMING OF DUSK
At all seasons the coming of dusk has its spell upon the imagination. Even in cities it puts something of silence into the turmoil, something of mystery into the commonplace aspect of the familiar and the day-worn. The shadow of the great change that accompanies the passage of day is as furtive and mysterious, as swift and inevitable, amid the traffic of streets as in aisles of the forest, or in glens and on hills, on shores, or on the sea. It is everywhere the hour of suspense. Day has not receded into the confused past, already a shadow in eternity, and night has not yet come out of the unknown. Instinctively one feels as though crossing an invisible bridge over a gulf, perchance with troubled glances at the already dimming shore behind, or with dreaming eyes or watchful or expectant gaze on the veiled shore upon which we are almost come. In winter one can see dusk advancing like a mountain-shadow. In lonely places there is something ominous, menacing in the swift approach of the early winter-dusk, further gloomed perhaps by the oncome of snow or rain or of a soughing wind moving out of low congregated cloud. In thronged streets it is not less swift, not less sombre, but the falling veils have hardly been secretly unloosened before they are punctuated by the white or yellow flare of the street-lamps. Hardly is breathing-space, there, between the stepping out of day and the stepping into night. The fear of darkness, which possesses towns like a great dread, has broken the spell with ten thousand lights: as the mind of man, which likewise dreads the naked darkness of thought and the white, remote, passionless stars of the spirit, hastens to hide its shadowy dusks and brooding nights with a myriad frail paper lanterns that a flying hand of rain will extinguish or a breath of wind carry in a moment to the outer darkness.