Part 14
Yes, it is nigh upon twenty hundred years that we must go back. It was in the last month of the last year of the seven years’ silence and peace. When would that be, you ask? Surely what other would it be than the seven holy years when Jesus the Christ was a little lad. Do you not remember the lore of the elders? ... that in the first seven years of the life of the young Christ there was peace in the world, and that the souls of men were like souls in a dream, and that the hearts of women were at rest. In the second seven years it is said that the world was like an adder that sloughs its skin: for there was everywhere a troubled sense of new things to come. So wide and far and deep was this, that men in remote lands began moving across swamps and hills and deserts; that the wild beasts shifted their lairs and moaned and cried in new forests and upon untrodden plains; that the storks and swallows in their migration wearied their wings in high, cold, untravelled ways; that the narwhals and great creatures of the deep foamed through unknown seas; that the grasses of the world wandered and inhabited hills; that many waters murmured in the wilderness and that many waters mysteriously sank from pools and wellsprings. In the third seven years, men even on the last ocean-girdled shores were filled with further longing, and it is said that new stars were flung into the skies and ancient stars were whirled away, like dust and small stones beneath the wheels of a chariot. It was at the end of the third seven years that a Face looked out of Heaven, and that from the edges of the world men heard a confused and dreadful sound rising from the Abyss. Though the great and the small are the same, it is the great that withdraws from remembrance and the small that remains, and that may be why men have grown old with time, and have forgotten, and remember only the little things of the common life: as that in these years the Herring became the king of all fishes, because his swift gleaming clan carried the rumour of great tidings to the uttermost places of ocean; as that in these years the little fly became king over lions and panthers and eagles and over all birds and beasts, because it alone of all created things had remained tameless and fearless; as that in these years the wild-bees were called the clan of wisdom, because they carried the Word to every flower that grows and spread the rumour on all the winds of the world; as that in these years the Cuckoo was called the Herald of God, because in his voice are heard the bells of Resurrection.
But, as I was saying, it was in the last month of the last year of the seven years’ silence and peace: the seventh year in the mortal life of Jesus the Christ. It was on the twenty-fifth day of that month, the day of His holy birth.
It was a still day. The little white flowers that were called Breaths of Hope and that we now call Stars of Bethlehem were so hushed in quiet that the shadows of moths lay on them like the dark motionless violet in the hearts of pansies. In the long swards of tender grass the multitude of the daisies were white as milk faintly stained with flusht dews fallen from roses. On the meadows of white poppies were long shadows blue as the blue lagoons of the sky among drifting snow-white moors of cloud. Three white aspens on the pastures were in a still sleep: their tremulous leaves made no rustle, though there was a soundless wavering fall of little dusky shadows, as in the dark water of a pool where birches lean in the yellow hour of the frostfire. Upon the pastures were ewes and lambs sleeping, and yearling kids opened and closed their onyx eyes among the garths of white clover.
It was the Sabbath, and Jesus walked alone. When He came to a little rise in the grass He turned and looked back at the house where His parents dwelled. Joseph sat on a bench, with bent shoulders, and was dreaming with fixt gaze into the west, as seamen stare across the interminable wave at the pale green horizons that are like the grassy shores of home. Mary was standing, dressed in long white raiment, white as a lily, with her right hand shading her eyes as she looked to the east, dreaming her dream.
The young Christ sighed, but with the love of all love in His heart. “So shall it be till the day of days,” He said aloud; “even so shall the hearts of men dwell among shadows and glories, in the West of passing things: even so shall that which is immortal turn to the East and watch for the coming of Joy through the Gates of Life.”
At the sound of His voice He heard a sudden noise as of many birds, and turned and looked beyond the low upland where He stood. A pool of pure water lay in the hollow, fed by a ceaseless wellspring, and round it and over it circled birds whose breasts were grey as pearl and whose necks shone purple and grass-green and rose. The noise was of their wings, for though the birds were beautiful they were voiceless and dumb as flowers.
At the edge of the pool stood two figures, whom He knew to be of the angelic world because of their beauty, but who had on them the illusion of mortality so that the child did not know them. But He saw that one was beautiful as Night, and one beautiful as Morning.
He drew near.
“I have lived seven years,” He said, “and I wish to send peace to the far ends of the world.”
“Tell your secret to the birds,” said one.
“Tell your secret to the birds,” said the other.
So Jesus called to the birds.
“Come,” He cried; and they came.
Seven came flying from the left, from the side of the angel beautiful as Night. Seven came flying from the right, from the side of the angel beautiful as Morning.
To the first He said: “Look into my heart.”
But they wheeled about Him, and with new-found voices mocked, crying, “How could we see into your heart that is hidden” ... and mocked and derided, crying, “What is Peace!... Leave us alone! Leave us alone!”
So Christ said to them:
“I know you for the birds of Ahriman, who is not beautiful but is Evil. Henceforth ye shall be black as night, and be children of the winds.”
To the seven other birds which circled about Him, voiceless, and brushing their wings against His arms, He cried:
“Look into my heart.”
And they swerved and hung before Him in a maze of wings, and looked into His pure heart: and, as they looked, a soft murmurous sound came from them, drowsy-sweet, full of peace: and as they hung there like a breath in frost they became white as snow.
“Ye are the Doves of the Spirit,” said Christ, “and to you I will commit that which ye have seen. Henceforth shall your plumage be white and your voices be the voices of peace.”
The young Christ turned, for He heard Mary calling to the sheep and goats, and knew that dayset was come and that in the valleys the gloaming was already rising like smoke from the urns of the twilight. When He looked back He saw by the pool neither the Son of Joy nor the Son of Sorrow, but seven white doves were in the cedar beyond the pool, cooing in low ecstasy of peace and awaiting through sleep and dreams the rose-red pathways of the dawn. Down the long grey reaches of the ebbing day He saw seven birds rising and falling on the wind, black as black water in caves, black as the darkness of night in old pathless woods.
* * * * *
And that is how the first doves became white, and how the first crows became black and were called by a name that means the clan of darkness, the children of the wind.
STILL WATERS
Perhaps at no season of the year is the beauty of still waters at once so obvious and so ethereal as in Autumn. All the great painters of Nature have realised this crowning secret of their delicate loveliness. Corot exclaimed to a friend who was in raptures about one of his midsummer river scenes ... ‘Yes, yes, but to paint the soul of October, _voilà mon idéal_!’ Daubigny himself, that master of slow winding waters and still lagoons, declared that if he had to be only one month out of his studio it would have to be October, ‘for then you can surprise Nature when she is dreaming, then you may learn her most evanescent and most exquisite secrets.’ And our own Millais, when he was painting ‘Chill October’ near Murthly, in Perthshire, wrote that nothing had ever caused him so much labour, if nothing had ever given him so much pleasure, in the painting, ‘for Nature now can be found in a trance, and you can see her as she is.’ A friend of the late Keeley Halswelle told me that this able artist (who was originally a ‘figure’ and ‘subject’ painter) remarked to him that he had never realised the supreme charm of autumnal Nature among still waters till he found himself one day trying to translate to his canvas the placid loveliness of the wide, shallow reaches of the Avon around Christchurch. Doubtless many other painters, French and Dutch and English, have felt thus, and been glad to give their best to the interpretation of the supreme charm of still waters in autumn. What would Venice be without them ... Amsterdam ... Holland ... Finland ... Sweden? Imagine Scotland without this water-beauty, from Loch Ken to Loch Maree, from the Loch of the Yowes to the ‘thousand-waters’ of Benbecula: or Ireland, where the white clouds climbing out of the south may mirror themselves in still waters all day till they sink beyond the Lough of Shadows in the silent north.
The phrase is as liberal as ‘running water.’ That covers all inland waters in motion, from the greatest rivers to the brown burn of the hillside, from the melting of the snows in fierce spate to the swift invasion and troubled floods of the hurrying and confined tides. So ‘still waters’ covers lakes and mountain-lochs, shallow meres, lagoons, the reaches of slow rivers, lochans, tarns, the dark brown pools in peat-moors, or the green-blue pools in open woods and shadowy forests, the duckweed-margined ponds at the skirts of villages, the lilied ponds of old manor-garths and of quiet gardens, asleep beneath green canopies or given over to the golden carp and the dragon-fly beneath mossed fountains or beyond time-worn terraces. Often, too, and in February and October above all, the low-lying lands are flooded, and the bewildered little lives of the pastures crowd the hedgerows and copses. Sometimes for days, motionless, these mysterious lake-arrivals abide under the grey sky, sometimes a week or weeks pass before they recede. The crow flying home at dusk sees the pale cloud and the orange afterglow reflected in an inexplicable mirror where of late the grey-green grass and brown furrow stretched for leagues: the white owl, hawking the pastures after dusk, swoops so low on his silent wings that he veers upward from a ghostly flying image underneath, as a bat at sundown veers from the phantom of its purblind flight.
Delicate haze, cloud-dappled serenity, and moonlight are the three chief qualities of beauty in the charm of still waters. It is a matter of temperament, of the hour and occasion also no doubt, whether one prefer those where another dream-world, that of human life, companions them in the ineffable suspense of the ideal moment, the moment where the superfluous recedes and silence and stillness consummate the miraculous vision. Those moonlit lagoons of Venice, which become scintillating floods of silver or lakes of delicate gold, where the pole-moored _sandolò_ thrusts a black wedge of shadow into the motionless drift, while an obscure figure at the prow idly thrums a mandolin or hums drowsily a _canzonnetto d’amore_; those twilit canals where old palaces lean and look upon their ancient beauty stilled and perfected in sleep; how unforgettable they are, how they thrill even in remembrance. In the cities of Holland, how at one are the old houses with the mirroring canals, in still afternoons when quiet light warms the red wall, and dwells on the brown and scarlet clematis in the cool violet and amber hollows of the motionless water wherein the red wall soundlessly slips and indefinitely recedes, hiding an undiscovered house of shadow with silent unseen folk dreaming out across invisible gardens. There are ancient towns like this in England also, as between Upsala and Elsinore to where old châteaux in Picardy guard the pollarded marais, or deserted Breton manoirs stand ghostly at the forest-end of untraversed meres.
These have their charm. But have they for us the intimate and unchanging spell of the lakes and meres and other still waters of our own land? Nothing, one might think, could be more beautiful than to see in the Lake of Como the cypresses of Bellaggio and the sloping gardens of Cadenabbia meeting in a new underwater wonderland: or to see Mont Blanc, forty miles away, sleeping in snow-held silence in the blue depths of Lac Léman: or to see Pilatus and a new city of Lucerne mysteriously changed and yet familiarly upbuilded among the moving green lawns and azure avenues of the Lake of the Four Cantons. And yet leaning boulders of granite, yellow with lichen and grey with moss and deep-based among swards of heather and the green nomad bracken, will create a subtler magic in the brown depths of any Highland loch. There is a subtler spell in the solitary tarn, where the birch leans out of the fern and throws an intricate tracery of bough and branch into the unmoving wave, where the speckled trout and the speckled mavis meet as in the strange companionships of dreams. Enchantment lies amid the emerald glooms of pine and melancholy spruce, when a dream-world forest underneath mirrors the last sunset-gold on bronze cones, and enfolds the one white wandering cloud miraculously stayed at last between two columnar green spires, flawless as sculptured jade.
Is this because, in the wilderness, we recover something of what we have lost? ... because we newly find ourselves, as though surprised into an intimate relationship of which we have been unaware or have indifferently ignored? What a long way the ancestral memory has to go, seeking, like a pale sleuth-hound among obscure dusks and forgotten nocturnal silences, for the lost trails of the soul. It is not we only, you and I, who look into the still waters of the wilderness and lonely places, and are often dimly perplext, are often troubled we know not how or why: some forgotten reminiscence in us is aroused, some memory not our own but yet our heritage is perturbed, footsteps that have immemorially sunk in ancient dust move furtively along obscure corridors in our brain, the ancestral hunter or fisher awakes, the primitive hillman or woodlander communicates again with old forgotten intimacies and the secret oracular things of lost wisdoms. This is no fanciful challenge of speculation. In the order of psychology it is as logical as in the order of biology is the tracing of our upright posture or the deft and illimitable use of our hands, from unrealisably remote periods wherein the pioneers of man reached slowly forward to inconceivable arrivals.
But whatever primitive wildness, whatever ancestral nearness we recover in communion with remote Nature, there is no question as to the fascination of beauty exercised by the still waters of which we speak, of their enduring spell. What lovelier thing in Nature than, on a serene and cloudless October day, to come upon a small lake surrounded by tall elms of amber and burnished bronze, by beech and maple and sycamore cloudy with superb fusion of orange and scarlet and every shade of red and brown, by limes and aspens tremulous with shaken pale gold? Beautiful in itself, in rare and dreamlike beauty, the woods become more beautiful in this silent marriage with placid waters, take on a beauty more rare, a loveliness more dreamlike. There is a haze which holds the fluent gold of the air. Silence is no longer quietude as in June; or a hushed stillness, as in the thunder-laden noons of July or August; but a soundless suspense wherein the spirit of the world, suddenly at rest, sleeps and dreams.
The same ineffable peace broods over all still waters: on the meres of Hereford, on the fens of East Anglia, on lochs heavy with mountain-shadow, on the long grey Hebridean sheets where the call of the sea-wind or the sea-wave is ever near.
Truly there must be a hidden magic in them, as old tales tell. I recall one where the poets and dreamers of the world are called ‘the children of pools.’ The poet and dreamer who so called them must have meant by his metaphor those who look into the hearts of men and into the dim eyes of Life, troubled by the beauty and mystery of the world, insatiable in longing for the ineffable and the unattainable. So, long ago, even ‘ornamental waters’ may have been symbols of the soul’s hunger and thirst, emblems of the perpetual silence and mystery of his fugitive destiny!
Somewhere, I think it is in the _Kalevala_, occurs the beautiful metaphor of still waters, ‘the mirrors of the world.’ Whoever the ancient singer was who made the phrase, he had in his heart love for still waters as well as the poet’s mind. The secret of their beauty is in that image. It may be a secret within a secret, for the mirror may disclose a world invisible to us, may reflect what our own or an ancestral memory dimly recalls, may reveal what the soul perceives and translates from its secret silences into symbol and the mysterious speech of the imagination.
_Still waters_; it has the inward music that lies in certain words ... amber, ivory, foam, silence, dreams; that lies often in some marriage of words ... moonlight at sea, wind in dark woods, dewy pastures, old sorrowful things: that dwells in some names of things, as chrysoprase; or in some combination of natural terms and associations, as wind and wave; or in some names of women and dreams, Ruth, Alaciel, Imogen, Helen, Cleopatra; or in the words that serve in the courts of music ... cadence, song, threnody, epithalamion, viol, flute, prelude, fugue. One can often evade the heavy airs of the hours of weariness by the spell of one of these wooers of dreams. _Foam_--and the hour is gathered up like mist, and we are amid “perilous seas in faëry lands forlorn”: _Wind_--and the noises of the town are like the humming of wild bees in old woods, and one is under ancient boughs, listening, or standing solitary in the dusk by a forlorn shore with a tempestuous sea filling the darkness with whispers and confused rumours and incommunicable things: _Ruth_--and sorrow and exile are become loveliness: _Helen_--and that immemorial desire is become _our_ desire, and that phantom beauty is become _our_ dream and _our_ passion. _Still Waters_--surely through that gate the mind may slip away from the tedious and unwelcome, and be alone among forests where the birch leans and dreams into an amber-brown pool, or by a mountain-lake where small white clouds lie like sleeping birds, or on moonlit lagoons where the reed and the reed’s image are as one, and the long mirrors are unshaken by any wandering air, unvisited but by the passing soundless shadows of travelling wings.
THE PLEIAD-MONTH
From the Persian shepherd to the shepherd on the hills of Argyll--in a word, from the remote East to the remote West--November is known, in kindred phrase, as the Pleiad-Month.
What a world of legend, what a greater world of poetry and old romance, centres in this little group of stars. ‘The meeting-place in the skies of mythology and science,’ as they have been called by one of our chief astronomers. From time immemorial this remote starry cluster has been associated with festivals and solemnities, with auguries and destinies. On November 17, the day of the midnight culmination of the Pleiades, the great Festival of Isis was begun at Busiris: in ancient Persia, on that day, no petition was presented in vain to the King of Kings: and on the first of the month the midnight rites of our own ancestral Druids were connected with the rising of the Pleiades. To-day the South Sea Islanders of the Society and Tonga Isles divide the year by their seaward rising and setting. The _Matarii i nia_, or season of the ‘Pleiades Above,’ begins when in the evening this stellar group appears on the horizon, and while they remain above it: the _Matarii i raro_, or season of the ‘Pleiades Below,’ begins when after sunset they are no longer visible, and endures till once again they appear above the horizon. The most spiritual and the most barbaric races are at one in considering them centres of the divine energy. The Hindûs imaged them as Flame, typical of Agni, God of Fire, the Creative Energy: the several Persian words, from the ancient _Perv_ or the _Parur_ of Hafiz or the _Parwin_ of Omar Khayyam--derive from _Peru_, a word signifying ‘The Begetters’: and we know that the Greeks oriented to them or to their _lucida_ not only the first great temple of Athenê on the Acropolis, but its successor four hundred years later, the Hecatompedon of 1150 B.C., and seven hundred years later the Parthenon on the same side. [The great shrine of Dionysos at Athens, the still earlier Asclepieion at Epidaurus, and the temple of Poseidon at Sunium, looked towards the Pleiades at their setting.] But far removed from these are the Malays and Pacific islanders, who more vaguely and crudely revere ‘the central fires,’ and even so primitive and remote a people as the Abipones of the Paraguay River country worship them as their Great Spirit--_Groaperikie_, or Grandfather--and chant hymns of joy to this Pleiad-Allfather when, after the vernal Equinox, the mysterious cluster once more hangs visible in the northern sky.
It would be impossible, in a brief paper, to cover the ground of the nomenclature, of the literature, of scientific knowledge and speculation concerning the Pleiades. A long chapter in a book might be given to Alcyone alone--that bright particular star of which it has been calculated that, in comparison, our Sun would sink to a star below the tenth magnitude. Indeed, though the imagination strains after the astronomer’s calm march with dazzled vision, our solar brilliancy is supposed to be surpassed by some sixty to seventy of the Pleiadic group, for all that our human eyes have from time immemorial seen therein only a small cluster of tiny stars, the ‘seven’ of Biblical and poetic and legendary lore, from ‘the Seven Archangels’ to the popular ‘Hen and her six chicks.’ Alcyone, that terrible torch of the ultimate heavens, is eighty-three times more refulgent than that magnificent star Sirius, which has been called the ‘Glory of the South’: a thousand times larger than our Sun. I do not know how Merope and Taygeta, Celeno and Atlas are, but Maia, that shaking loveliness of purest light, has been calculated to be four hundred times larger than the Sun, and Electra about four hundred and eighty times larger. When one thinks of this mysterious majesty, so vast that only the winged imagination can discern the illimitable idea, all words fail: at most one can but recall the solemn adjuration of the shepherd-prophet Amos, ‘_Seek Him that maketh Pleiades and Orion_,’ or the rapt ecstasy of Isaiah, ‘_O day star, son of the morning_.’