Prose Idylls, New and Old. Charles Kingsley

so proud, though they are doing all the wrong and folly they can from one week’s end to the other.  And now our self-conceit has brought its own Nemesis; the mechanical philosophy is turning on us, and saying, ‘The bird’s “nature” and your “human nature” differ only in degree, but not in kind.  If they are machines, so are you.  They have no souls, you confess.  You have none either.’

      But there are those who neither yield to the mechanical philosophy nor desire to stifle it.  While it is honest and industrious, as it is now, it can do nought but good, because it can do nought but discover facts.  It will only help to divide the light from the darkness, truth from dreams, health from disease.  Let it claim for itself all that it can prove to be of the flesh, fleshly.  That which is spiritual will stand out more clearly as of the Spirit.  Let it thrust scalpel and microscope into the most sacred penetralia of brain and nerve.  It will only find everywhere beneath brain and beneath nerve, that substance and form which is not matter nor phenomenon, but the Divine cause thereof; and while it helps, with ruthless but wholesome severity, to purge our minds from idols of the cave and idols of the fane, it will leave untouched, more clearly defined, and therefore more sacred and important than ever—

            ‘Those first affections,

         Those shadowy recollections,

         Which, be they what they may,

      Are yet the fountain light of all our day,

         Are yet the master light of all our seeing;

      Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make

         Our noisy years seem moments in the being

      Of the eternal silence; truths that wake

            To perish never;

      Which neither listlessness, nor mad endeavour,

            Nor man nor boy,

         Nor all that is at enmity with joy,

         Can utterly abolish or destroy.

****

      Then sing, ye birds, sing out with joyous sound,

      as the poet-philosopher bids you.  Victorious analysis will neither abolish you, nor the miraculous and unfathomable in you and in your song, which has stirred the hearts of poets since first man was man.  And if anyone shall hint to us that we and the birds may have sprung originally from the same type; that the difference between our intellect and theirs is one of degree, and not of kind, we may believe or doubt: but in either case we shall not be greatly moved.  ‘So much the better for the birds,’ we will say, ‘and none the worse for us.  You raise the birds towards us: but you do not lower us towards them.  What we are, we are by the grace of God.  Our own powers and the burden of them we know full well.  It does not lessen their dignity or their beauty in our eyes to hear that the birds of the air partake, even a little, of the same gifts of God as we.  Of old said St. Guthlac in Crowland, as the swallows sat upon his knee, “He who leads his life according to the will of God, to him the wild deer and the wild birds draw more near;” and this new theory of yours may prove St. Guthlac right.  St. Francis, too—he called the birds his brothers.  Whether he was correct, either theologically or zoologically, he was plainly free from that fear of being mistaken for an ape, which haunts so many in these modern times.  Perfectly sure that he himself was a spiritual being, he thought it at least possible that birds might be spiritual beings likewise, incarnate like himself in mortal flesh; and saw no degradation to the dignity of human nature in claiming kindred lovingly with creatures so beautiful, so wonderful, who (as he fancied in his old-fashioned way) praised God in the forest, even as angels did in heaven.  In a word, the saint, though he was an ascetic, and certainly no man of science, was yet a poet, and somewhat of a philosopher; and would have possibly—so do extremes meet—have hailed as orthodox, while we hail as truly scientific, Wordsworth’s great saying—

         ‘Therefore am I still

      A lover of the meadows and the woods

      And mountains; and of all that we behold

      From this green earth; of all the mighty world

      Of eye and ear—both what they half create,

      And what perceive; well pleased to recognize

      In Nature and the language of the sense,

      The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,

      The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul

      Of all my moral being.’

      II

       CHALK-STREAM STUDIES. 2

      Fishing is generally associated in men’s minds with wild mountain scenery; if not with the alps and cataracts of Norway, still with the moors and lochs of Scotland, or at least with the rocky rivers, the wooded crags, the crumbling abbeys of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Hereford, or the Lowlands.  And it cannot be denied that much of the charm which angling exercises over cultivated minds, is due to the beauty and novelty of the landscapes which surround him; to the sense of freedom, the exhilarating upland air.  Who would prefer the certainty of taking trout out of some sluggish preserve, to the chance of a brace out of Edno or Llyn Dulyn?  The pleasure lies not in the prize itself, but in the pains which it has cost; in the upward climbs through the dark plantations, beside the rock-walled stream; the tramp over the upland pastures, one gay flower-bed of blue and purple butter-wort; the steady breathless climb up the crags, which looked but one mile from you when you started, so clear against the sky stood out every knoll and slab; the first stars of the white saxifrage, golden-eyed, blood-bedropt, as if a fairy had pricked her finger in the cup, which shine upon some green cushion of wet moss, in a dripping crack of the cliff; the first grey tufts of the Alpine club-moss, the first shrub of crowberry, or sea-green rose-root, with its strange fleshy stems and leaves, which mark the two-thousand-feet-line, and the beginning of the Alpine world; the scramble over the arid waves of the porphyry sea aloft, as you beat round and round like a weary pointer dog in search of the hidden lake; the last despairing crawl to the summit of the Syenite pyramid on Moel Meirch; the hasty gaze around, far away into the green vale of Ffestiniog, and over wooded flats, and long silver river-reaches, and yellow sands, and blue sea flecked with flying clouds, and isles and capes, and wildernesses of mountain peaks, east, west, south, and north; one glance at the purple gulf out of which Snowdon rises, thence only seen in full majesty from base to peak: and then the joyful run, springing over bank and boulder, to the sad tarn beneath your feet: the loosening of the limbs, as you toss yourself, bathed in perspiration, on the turf; the almost awed pause as you recollect that you are alone on the mountain-tops, by the side of the desolate pool, out of all hope of speech or help of man; and, if you break your leg among those rocks, may lie there till the ravens pick your bones; the anxious glance round the lake to see if the fish are moving; the still more anxious glance through your book to guess what they will choose to take; what extravagant bundle of red, blue, and yellow feathers, like no insect save perhaps some jewelled monster from Amboyna or Brazil—may tempt those sulkiest and most capricious of trout to cease for once their life-long business of picking leeches from among those Syenite cubes which will twist your ankles and break your shins for the next three hours.  What matter (to a minute philosopher, at least) if, after two hours of such enjoyment as that, he goes down again into the world of man with empty creel, or with a dozen pounders and two-pounders, shorter, gamer, and redder-fleshed than ever came out of Thames or Kennet?  What matter?  If he has not caught them, he might have caught them; he has been catching them in imagination all the way up; and if he be a minute philosopher, he holds that there is no falser proverb than that devil’s beatitude—‘Blessed is he who expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed.’

      Say, rather, Blessed is he who expecteth everything, for he enjoys everything once at least: and if it falls out true, twice also.

      Yes.  Pleasant enough is mountain fishing.  But there is one objection against it, that it is hard work to get to it; and that the angler, often enough half-tired before he arrives at his stream or lake, has left for his day’s work only

2

Fraser’s Magazine, September 1858.