Lavengro | Page 7

my side, with a vast umbrella under his arm, a true
"Child of the Open Air."
"Did a true Child of the Open Air ever carry a gigantic green umbrella
that would have satisfied Sarah Gamp herself?" I murmured to Hake,
while Borrow lingered under a tree and, looking round the Park, said,
in a dreamy way, "Old England! Old England!"

VIII. A CHILD 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