“All this she takes up into her great heart as part of herself!” I murmured.
“All this,” he replied softly, as the sound of the Band beyond the Serpentine floated over to us on our roof; “—the separate little consciousnesses of all the cities, all the tribes, all the nations of men, animals, flowers, insects—everything.” He again opened his arms to the sky. He drew in deep breaths of the night air. The dew glistened on the slates behind us. Far across the towers of Westminster a yellow moon rose slowly, dimming the stars. Big Ben, deeply booming, trembled on the air nine of her stupendous vibrations. Automatically, I counted them—subconsciously.
“And all our subconscious sensations are also hers,” he added, catching my thought again; “our dreams but half divined, our aspirations half confessed, our tears, our yearnings, and our—prayers.”
At the moment it almost seemed to me as if our two minds joined, each knowing the currents of the other’s thought, and both caught up, gathered ill, folded comfortably away into the stream of a Consciousness far bigger than either. It was like a momentary, specific proof of what he urged—a faint pulse-beat we heard of the soul of the earth; and it was amazingly uplifting.
“Every form of life, then, is of importance,” I heard myself thinking, or saying, for I hardly knew which. “The tiniest efforts of value—even the unrecognized ones, and those that seem futile.”
“Even the failures,” he whispered, “—the moments when we do not trust her.”
We stood for some moments in silence. Presently, with a hand upon my shoulder, he drew me down again among our rugs against the chimney-stack.
“And there are some of us,” he said gently, yet with a voice that held the trembling of an immense joy, “who know a more intimate relationship with their great Mother than the rest, perhaps. By the so-called Love of Nature, or by some artless simplicity of soul, wholly unmodern of course, perhaps felt by children or poets mostly, they lie caught close to her own deep life, knowing the immense sweet guidance of her mighty soul, divinely mothered, strangers to all the strife for material gain—to that ‘unrest which men miscall delight,’—primitive children of her potent youth … offspring of pure passion … each individual conscious of her weight and drive behind him—” His words faded away into a whisper that became unintelligible, then inaudible; but his thought somehow continued itself in my own mind.
“The simple life,” I said in a low tone; “the Call of the Wild, raised to its highest power?”
But he changed my sentence a little.
“The call,” he answered, without turning to look at me, speaking it into the night about us, “the call to childhood, the true, pure, vital childhood of the Earth—the Golden Age—before men tasted of the Tree and knew themselves separate; when the lion and the lamb lay down together and a little child could lead them. A time and state, that is, of which such phrases can be symbolical.”
“And of which there may be here and there some fearful exquisite survival?” I suggested, remembering Stahl’s words.
His eyes shone with the fire of his passion. “Of which on that little tourist steamer I found one!”
The wind that fanned our faces came perhaps across the arid wastes of Bayswater and the North-West. It also came from the mountains and gardens of this lost Arcadia, vanished for most beyond recovery….
“The Hebrew poets called it Before the Fall,” he went on, “and later poets the Golden Age; today it shines through phrases like the Land of Heart’s Desire, the Promised Land, Paradise, and what not; while the minds of saint and mystic have ever dreamed of it as union with their deity. For it is possible and open to all, to every heart, that is, not blinded by the cloaking horror of materialism which blocks the doorways of escape and prisons self behind the drab illusion that the outer form is the reality and riot the inner thought….”
The hoarse shouting of a couple of drunken men floated to us from the pavements, and crossing over, we peered down toward the opening of Sloane Street, watching a moment the stream of broughams, motors, and pedestrians. The two men with the rage of an artificial stimulant in their brains reeled out of sight. A big policeman followed slowly. The night-life of the great glaring city poured on unceasingly—the stream of souls all hurrying by divers routes and means toward a state where they sought to lose themselves—to forget the pressure of the bars that held them—to escape the fret and worry of their harassing personalities, and touch some fringe of happiness! All so sure they knew the way—yet hurrying really in the wrong direction—outwards instead of inwards; afraid to be—simple….
We moved back to our rugs. For a long time neither of us found anything to say. Soon I led the way down the creaking ladder indoors again, and we entered the stuffy little sitting-room of the tiny flat he temporarily occupied. I turned up an electric light, but O’Malley begged me to lower it. I only had time to see that his eyes were still aglow. We sat by the open window. He drew a worn notebook from his still more worn coat; but it was too dark for him to read. He knew it all by heart.
XVII
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SOME OF FECHNER’S REASONS FOR thinking the Earth a being superior in the scale to ourselves, he gave, but it was another passage that lingered chiefly in my heart, the description of the daring German’s joy in dwelling upon her perfections—later, too, of his first simple vision. Though myself wholly of the earth, earthy in the ordinary sense, the beauty of the thoughts live in my spirit to this day, transfiguring even that dingy Insurance Office, streaming through all my dullest, hardest daily tasks with the inspiration of a simple delight that helps me over many a difficult weary time of work and duty.
“‘To carry her precious freight through the hours and seasons what form could be more excellent than hers—being as it is horse, wheels, and wagon all in one. Think of her beauty—a shining ball, sky-blue and sunlit over one half, the other bathed in starry night, reflecting the heavens from all her waters, myriads of lights and shadows in the folds of her mountains and windings of her valleys she would be a spectacle of rainbow glory, could one only see her from afar as we see parts of her from her own mountain tops. Every quality of landscape that has a name would then be visible in her all at once—all that is delicate or graceful, all that is quiet, or wild, or romantic, or desolate, or cheerful, or luxuriant, or fresh. That landscape is her face—a peopled landscape, too, for men’s eyes would appear in it like diamonds among the dew-drops. Green would be the dominant color, but the blue atmosphere and the clouds would enfold her as a bride is shrouded in her veil—a veil the vapory, transparent folds of which the earth, through her ministers the winds, never tires of laying and folding about herself anew.’
“She needs, as a sentient organism,” he continued, pointing into the curtain of blue night beyond the window, “no heart or brain or lungs as we do, for she is—different. ‘Their functions she performs through us! She has no proper muscles or limbs of her own, and the only objects external to her are the other stars. To these her whole mass reacts by the most exquisite alterations in its total gait and by the still more exquisite vibratory responses in its substance. Her ocean reflects the lights of heaven as in a mighty mirror, her atmosphere refracts them like a monstrous lens, the clouds and snowfields combine them into white, the woods and flowers disperse them into colors…. Men have always made fables about angels, dwelling in the light, needing no earthly food or drink, messengers between ourselves and God. Here are actually existent beings, dwelling in the light and moving through the sky, needing neither food nor drink, intermediaries between God and us, obeying His commands. So, if the heavens really are the home of angels, the heavenly bodies must be those very angels, for other creatures there are none. Yes! the Earth is our great common guardian angel, who watches over all our interests combined.’
“And then,” whispered the Irishman, seeing that I still eagerly listened, “give your ear to one of his moments of direct vision. Note its simplicity, and the authority of its conviction:
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“‘On a certain spring morning I went out to walk. The fields were green, the birds sang, the dew glistened, the smoke was rising, here and there a man appeared; a light as of transfiguration lay on all things. It was only a little bit of the earth; it was only a moment of her existence; and yet as my look embraced her more and more it seemed to me not only so beautiful an idea, but so true and clear a fact, that she is an angel, an angel so rich and fresh and flower-like, and yet going her round in the skies so firmly and so at one with herself, turning her whole living face to Heaven, and carrying me along with her into that Heaven, that I asked myself how the opinions of men could ever have so spun themselves away from life as to deem the earth only a dry clod, and to seek for angels above it or about it in the emptiness of the sky,—only to find them nowhere.’”
Fire-engines, clanging as with a hurrying anger through the night, broke in upon his impassioned sentences; the shouts of the men drowned his last words….
Life became very wonderful inside those tight, confining walls, for the spell and grandeur of the whole conception lifted the heart. Even if belief failed, in the sense of believing—a shilling, it succeeded in the sense of believing—a symphony. The invading beauty swept about us both. Here was a glory that was also a driving power upon which any but a man half dead could draw for practical use. For the big conceptions fan the will. The little pains of life, they make one feel, need not kill true joy, nor deaden effort.
“Come,” said O’Malley softly, interrupting my dream of hope and splendor, “let us walk together through the Park to your place. It is late, and you, I know, have to be up early in the morning … earlier than I.”
And presently we passed the statue of Achilles and got our feet upon the turf beyond—a little bit of living planet in the middle of the heavy smothering London town. About us, over us, within us, stirred the awe of that immense idea. Upon that bit of living, growing turf we passed toward the Marble Arch, treading, as it were, the skin of a huge Body—the physical expression of a grand angelic Being, alive, sentient, conscious. Conscious, moreover, of our little separate individual selves who walked … a Being who cared; who felt us; who knew, understood, and—loved us as a mother her own offspring…. “To whom men could pray as they pray to their saints.”
The conception, even thus dimly and confusedly adumbrated, brought a new sense of life—terrific and eternal. All living things upon the earth’s surface were emanations of her mighty central soul; all—from the gods and fairies of olden time who knew it, to the men and women of Today who have forgotten it.
The gods—!
Were these then projections of her personality—aspects and facets of her divided self—emanations now withdrawn? Latent in her did they still exist as moods or Powers—true, alive, everlasting, but unmanifest? Still knowable to simple men and to Children of Nature?
Was this the giant truth that Stahl had built on Fechner?
Everything about us seemed to draw together into an immense and towering configuration that included trees and air and the sweep of open park—the looming and overwhelming beauty of one of these very gods survived—Pan, the eternal and the splendid … a mood of the Earth-life, a projection clothed with the light of stars, the cloudy air, the passion of the night, the thrill of an august, extended Mood.
And the others were not so very far behind—those other little parcels of Earth’s Consciousness the Greeks and early races, the simple, primitive, childlike peoples of the dawn, divined the existence of, and labeled “gods” … and worshipped … so as to draw their powers into themselves by ecstasy and vision …
Could, then, worship now still recall them? Was the attitude of even one true worshipper’s heart the force necessary to touch that particular aspect of the mighty total Consciousness of Earth, and call forth those ancient forms of beauty? Could it be that this idea—the idea of “the gods"—was thus forever true and vital…? And might they be known and felt in the heart if not actually in some suggested form?
I only know that as we walked home past the doors of that dingy Paddington house where Terence O’Malley kept his dusty books and papers and so to my own quarters, these things he talked about dropped into my mind with a bewildering splendor to stay forever. His words I have forgotten, or how he made such speculations worth listening to at all. Yet, I hear them singing in my blood as though of yesterday; and often when that conflict comes ‘twixt duty and desire that makes life sometimes so vain and bitter, the memory comes to lift with strength far greater than my own. The Earth can heal and bless.
XVIII
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SLOWLY, TAKING LIFE EASILY, THE little steamer puffed its way across the Ionian Sea. The pyramid of Etna, bluer even than the sky, dominated the western horizon long after the heel of Italy had faded, then melted in its turn into the haze of cloud and distance. No other sails were visible.
With the passing of Calabria spring had leaped into the softness of full summer, and the breezes were gentle as those that long ago fanned the cheeks and hair of Io, beloved of Zeus, as she flew southwards toward the Nile. The passengers, less lovely than that fair daughter of Argos, and with the unrest of thinner adventure in their blood, basked lazily in the sun; but the sea was not less haunted for those among them whose hearts could travel. The Irishman at any rate slipped beyond the confines of the body, viewing that ancient scene as she had done, from above. His widening consciousness expanded to include it.
Cachalots spouted; dolphins danced, as though still to those wild flutes of Dionysus; porpoises rolled beneath the surface of the transparent waves, diving below the vessel’s sides but just in time to save their shiny noses; and all day long, ignoring the chart upon the stairway walls, the tourists turned their glasses eastwards, searching for a first sight of Greece.
O’Malley, meanwhile, trod the decks of a new ship. For him now sea and sky were doubly peopled. The wind brought messages of some divine deliverance approaching slowly, the heat of that pearly, shining sun warmed centers of his being that hitherto the world kept chill. The land toward which the busy steamer moved he knew, of course, was but the shell from which the inner spirit of beauty once vivifying it had long since passed away. Yet it remained a clue. That ancient loveliness, as a mood of the earth’s early consciousness, was buried, not destroyed. Eternally it still flamed somewhere. And, long before the days of Greece, he knew, it had existed in yet fuller and more complete manifestation: that earliest, vastly splendid Mood of the earth’s soul, too mighty for any existence that the history of humanity can recall, and too remote for any but the most daringly imaginative minds even to conceive. The Urwelt Mood, as Stahl himself admitted, even while it called to him, was a reconstruction that to men today could only seem—dangerous.
And his own little Self, guided by the inarticulate stranger, was being led at last toward its complete recapture.
Yet, while he crawled slowly with the steamer over a tiny portion of the spinning globe, feeling that at the same time he crawled toward a spot upon it where access would be somehow possible to this huge expression of her first Life—what was it, phrased timidly as men phrase big thoughts today, that he really believed? Even in our London talks, intimate as they were, interpreted too by gesture, facial expression, and—silence, his full meaning evaded precise definition. “There are no words, there are no words,” he kept saying, shrugging his shoulders and stroking his untidy hair. “In me, deep down, it all lies clear and plain and strong; but language cannot seize a mode of life that throve before language existed. If you cannot catch the picture from my thoughts, I give up the whole dream in despair.” And in his written account, owing to its strange formlessness, the result was not a little bewildering.
Briefly stated, however—that remnant, at least, which I discover in my own mind when attempting to tell the story to others—what he felt, believed, lived, at any rate while the adventure lasted, was this:—
That the Earth, as a living, conscious Being, had known visibl
e projections of her consciousness similar to those projections of our own personality which the advanced psychologists of today now envisage as possible; that the simple savagery of his own nature, and the poignant yearnings derived from it, were in reality due to his intimate closeness to the life of the Earth; that, whereas in the body the fulfillment of these longings was impossible, in the spirit he might yet know contact with the soul of the planet, and thus experience their complete satisfaction. Further, that the portion of his personality which could thus enter this heaven of its own subjective construction, was that detachable portion Stahl had spoken of as being “malleable by desire and longing,” leaving the body partially and temporarily sometimes in sleep, and, at death, completely. More,—that the state thus entered would mean a quasi-merging back into the life of the Earth herself, of which he was a partial expression.
This closeness to Nature was today so rare as to be almost unrecognized as possible. Its possession constituted its owner what the doctor called a “Cosmic Being"—a being scarcely differentiated from the life of the Earth Spirit herself—a direct expression of her life, a survival of a time before such expressions had separated away from her and become individualized as human creatures. Moreover, certain of these earliest manifestations or projections of her consciousness, knowing in their huge shapes of fearful yet simple beauty a glory of her own being, still also survived. The generic term of “gods” might describe their status as interpreted to the little human power called Imagination.
The Algernon Blackwood Collection Page 11