He
Was Convinced, He Confided To His Young Guest, Who Often Accompanied
Him In These Evening Walks, That They Had Intelligent Souls And Knew
And Encouraged His Devotion.
There is nothing surprising to me in this; it is told here only
because the one who cherished this
Feeling and belief was an orthodox
Christian, a profoundly religious person; also because my informant
herself, who was also deeply religious, loved the memory of this old
friend of her early life mainly because of his feeling for trees,
which she too cherished, believing, as she often told me, that trees
and all living and growing things have souls. What has surprised me is
that a form of tree-worship is still found existing among a few of the
inhabitants in some of the small rustic villages in out-of-the-world
districts in England. Not such survivals as the apple tree folk-songs
and ceremonies of the west, which have long become meaningless, but
something living, which has a meaning for the mind, a survival such as
our anthropologists go to the end of the earth to seek among barbarous
and savage tribes.
The animism which persists in the adult in these scientific times has
been so much acted on and changed by dry light that it is scarcely
recognizable in what is somewhat loosely or vaguely called a "feeling
for nature": it has become intertwined with the aesthetic feeling and
may be traced in a good deal of our poetic literature, particularly
from the time of the first appearance of _Lyrical Ballads_, which
put an end to the eighteenth-century poetic convention and made the
poet free to express what he really felt. But the feeling, whether
expressed or not, was always there. Before the classic period we find
in Traherne a poetry which was distinctly animistic, with Christianity
grafted on it. Wordsworth's pantheism is a subtilized animism, but
there are moments when his feeling is like that of the child or savage
when he is convinced that the flower enjoys the air it breathes.
I must apologize to the reader for having gone beyond my last, since I
am not a student of literature, nor catholic in my literary tastes,
and on such subjects can only say just what I feel. And this is, that
the survival of the sense of mystery, or of the supernatural, in
nature, is to me in our poetic literature like that ingredient of a
salad which "animates the whole"; that the absence of that emotion has
made a great portion of the eighteenth century poetic literature
almost intolerable to me, so that I wish the little big man who
dominated his age (and till a few months ago still had in Mr.
Courthope one follower among us) had emigrated west when still young,
leaving _Windsor Forest_ as his only monument and sole and sufficient
title to immortality.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE NEW SCHOOLMASTER
Mr. Trigg recalled - His successor - Father O'Keefe - His mild rule and
love of angling - My brother is assisted in his studies by the priest -
Happy fishing afternoons - The priest leaves us - How he had been
working out his own salvation - We run wild once more - My brother's
plan for a journal to be called _The Tin Box_ - Our imperious editor's
exactions - My little brother revolts - _The Tin Box_ smashed up - The
loss it was to me.
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