One of the most treasured memories
of an old lady friend of mine, recently deceased, was of her visits,
Some sixty years or more ago, to a great country-house where she met
many of the distinguished people of that time, and of her host, who
was then old, the head of an ancient and distinguished family, and of
his reverential feeling for his trees. His greatest pleasure was to
sit out of doors of an evening in sight of the grand old trees in his
park, and before going in he would walk round to visit them, one by
one, and resting his hand on the bark he would whisper a goodnight. 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.
The account of our schooling days under Mr. Trigg was given so far
back in this history that the reader will have little recollection of
it. Mr. Trigg was in a small way a sort of Jekyll and Hyde, all
pleasantness in one of his states and all black looks and truculence
in the other; so that out of doors and at table we children would say
to ourselves in astonishment, "Is this our schoolmaster?" but when in
school we would ask, "Is this Mr. Trigg?" But, as I have related, he
had been forbidden to inflict corporal punishment on us, and was
finally got rid of because in one of his demoniacal moods he thrashed
us brutally with his horsewhip. When this occurred we, to our regret,
were not permitted to go back to our aboriginal condition of young
barbarians: some restraint, some teaching was still imposed upon us by
our mother, who took, or rather tried to take, this additional burden
on herself. Accordingly, we had to meet with our lesson-books and
spend three or four hours every morning with her, or in the schoolroom
without her, for she was constantly being called away, and when
present a portion of the time was spent in a little talk which was not
concerned with our lessons. For we moved and breathed and had our
being in a strange moral atmosphere, where lawless acts were common
and evil and good were scarcely distinguishable, and all this made her
more anxious about our spiritual than our mental needs.
My two elder brothers did not attend, as they had long discovered that
their only safe plan was to be their own schoolmasters, and it was
even more than she could manage very well to keep the four smaller
ones to their tasks. She sympathized too much with our impatience at
confinement when sun and wind and the cries of wild birds called
insistently to us to come out and be alive and enjoy ourselves in our
own way.
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