Lavengro | Page 7

OF THE OPEN AIR UNDER A GREEN UMBRELLA.
Perhaps, however, I had better define what Hake and I meant by this phrase, and to do this I cannot do better than quote the definition of Nature-worship, by H. A. the "Swimming Rye," which we had both been just discussing, and which I quoted not long after this memorable walk in a literary journal:--
"With all the recent cultivation of the picturesque by means of water- colour landscape, descriptive novels, 'Cook's excursions,' etc., the real passion for Nature is as rare as ever it was,--perhaps rarer. It is quite an affair of individual temperament: it cannot be learned; it cannot be lost. That no writer has ever tried to explain it shows how little it is known. Often it has but little to do with poetry, little with science. The poet, indeed, rarely has it at its very highest; the man of science as rarely. I wish I could define it:--in human souls--in one, perhaps, as much as in another--there is always that instinct for contact which is a great factor of progress; there is always an irresistible yearning to escape from isolation, to get as close as may be to some other conscious thing. In most individuals this yearning is simply for contact with other human souls; in some few it is not. There are some in every country of whom it is the blessing, not the bane, that, owing to some exceptional power, or to some exceptional infirmity, they can get closer to 'Natura Benigna' herself, closer to her whom we now call 'Inanimate Nature,' than to the human mother who bore them--far closer than to father, brother, sister, wife, or friend. Darwin among English savants, and Emily Bronte among English poets, and Sinfi Lovell among English gypsies, showed a good deal of the characteristics of the 'Children of the Open Air.' But in the case of the first of these, besides the strength of his family ties the pedantic inquisitiveness, the methodising pedantry of the man of science; in the second, the sensitivity to human contact; and in the third, subjection to the love passion--disturbed, and indeed partially stifled, the native instinct with which they were undoubtedly endowed.
"Between the true 'Children of the Open Air' and their fellows there are barriers of idiosyncrasy, barriers of convention, or other barriers quite indefinable, which they find most difficult to overpass, and, even when they succeed in overpassing them, the attempt is not found to be worth the making. For, what the Nature-worshipper finds in intercourse with his fellow-men is, not the unegoistic frankness of Nature, his first love, inviting him to touch her close, soul to soul--but another ego enisled like his own--sensitive, shrinking, like his own--a soul which, love him as it may, is, nevertheless, and for all its love, the central ego of the universe to itself, the very Alcyone round whom all other Nature-worshippers revolve like the rest of the human constellations. But between these and Nature there is no such barrier, and upon Nature they lavish their love--'a most equal love,' that varies no more with her change of mood than does the love of a man for a beautiful woman, whether she smiles, or weeps, or frowns. To them a Highland glen is most beautiful; so is a green meadow; so is a mountain gorge or a barren peak; so is a South American savannah. A balmy summer is beautiful, but not more beautiful than a winter's sleet beating about the face, and stinging every nerve into delicious life.
"To the 'Child of the Open Air' life has but few ills; poverty cannot touch him. Let the Stock Exchange rob him of his Turkish bonds, and he will go and tend sheep in Sacramento Valley, perfectly content to see a dozen faces in a year; so far from being lonely, he has got the sky, the wind, the brown grass, and the sheep. And as life goes on, love of Nature grows both as a cultus and a passion, and in time Nature seems 'to know him and love him' in her turn."
It was the umbrella, green, manifold and bulging, under Borrow's arm, that made me ask Dr. Hake, as Borrow walked along beneath the trees, "Is he a genuine Child of the Open Air"? And then, calling to mind "Lavengro" and "The Romany Rye," I said, "He went into the Dingle, and lived alone--went there not as an experiment in self-education, as Thoreau went and lived by Walden Pond. He could enjoy living alone, for the 'horrors' to which he was occasionally subject did not spring from solitary living. He was never disturbed by passion as was the nature- worshipper who once played such selfish tricks with Sinfi Lovell, and as Emily Bronte would certainly have been