Trees in nature, myth and art

Front matter

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BOSTON PUB LIC LIBRARY

Preface

THE thought of writing this book came to me during the preparation of a short series of articles on the pictorial representation of trees for the National Home Reading Union Magazine, in connection with which I had to consider the literature of the subject in order to recommend books for reading and reference. It seemed to me that there was room for an unpretentious book that would bring together many things definitely related to each other, yet hitherto, for the most part, treated separately. The publishers of this book agreed with me, and so it appears. It purports to be nothing more than introductory ; but by quotation and reference it draws attention to some of the works that deal more thoroughly with the various matters discussed in it. For permission to make extensive quotation from one book, to which I owe much instruction and pleasure, Philip Gilbert Hamerton's Landscape, my vi TREES IN NATURE, MYTH & ART

thanks are due to Mrs. Hamerton and to its publishers, Messrs. Seeley & Co. My debt to this and other books I have quoted will be repaid, I hope, by my attracting readers to them. Besides books there are pictures ; and beyond both literature and art there is Nature ; and I hope it is not all too presumptuous for a happy, if somewhat desultory, scholar in her great school of life and beauty to chat for a brief while about some of the things that, with others' help, he has learned and learned to enjoy there.

J. E. P.

Holmes Chapel, Cheshire July, 1907

Contents

I. The Soul of a Tree - - - II. Tree- Worship

III. Trees in Nature

IV. Through the Changing Year V. The Architecture of Trees

Chapter I The Soul Of A Tree

LEST the reader should fear that, if he venture forth along the pages of this opening chapter, he may be asked to believe in some modernised form of animism, let it be said at once that no glimmering of consciousness is here attributed to plant-life. It will be maintained later that the absence of consciousness distinctly marks off the emotion awakened within us by the contemplation of such life from that awakened by the animal world. In what sense, then, can we speak of the soul of a tree ? We shall best arrive at an answer to this question by beginning in the inanimate world.

Even in these rigidly scientific days we cannot, and happily cannot, escape from thinking of many inanimate objects, and from feeling towards them, in a way for which a narrowly exact science gives no authority. We almost endow them with personality ; we feel strong affection for them ; when they suffer injury we grieve for them. The inroads of the railway promoter upon lovely scenery are opposed almost in a spirit of chivalrous defence of that which cannot defend itself. The hills of our native land we count almost among our personal friends. How Surrey would mourn the loss of Leith Hill ! Imagine the feelings of a Cornishman who should return from mining in a foreign land to learn that Brown Willy was no more ! What fabulous sum would Shropshire refuse for that most venerable of our hills, the Wrekin, were it possible for a combine of millionaires to move it ? Would Derbyshire part with Kinder Scout, Lancashire with Pendle, Yorkshire with Ingleborough, Whernside and Pen-y-ghent? It would be sacrilege even to suggest the possibility of betraying Snowdon and Cader Idris, Scawfell, Skiddaw and Helvellyn. And is not this feeling stronger, if anything, across the Border ? Yet all these hills are but masses of inanimate matter that.

through being tougher than what was around them, have for longer time resisted the destructive forces of frost and rain. Their structure is not organic, only mechanical. They have not raised themselves by some inward life. Still we love them ; and we are hurt if we are too insistently asked to think of them as what, in mere fact, they are, only little more than chance excrescences which would not roughen the surface of the globe to the feeling of one who could hold it in his hand. We are perhaps ready to speak even of the soul of the mountains, and almost to regret that not they, but only the trees they bear so lightly on their" flanks, are our immediate subject.

Let us take one more illustration, this time from the work of man. The towers and spires of our cathedrals, abbeys and churches are hardly less dear to us than our hills. Kent will seek as carefully to make good the Bell Harry tower at Canterbury against wind and rain, as Shakespeare's Cliff at Dover against the inroads of the sea. Lincolnshire has no mountains ; but it has the three towers on the edge of the wold, and Boston Stump, and many another landmark. Wiltshire has joy and pride in Salisbury's dizzy height of tower and spire. Staffordshire loves "the Three Sisters of the Vale ". Durham sees a type of North-country strength in the towers that look down upon the Wear, and far over the country through which the river has deeply cut its channel. Yet, again, these are but inanimate things. They come in one sense nearer to us than the hills, because man has made them. Almost legitimately we may speak of their soul ; for something of the soul of man has entered into them. They seem well-nigh organic, nervous, in their structure. We could almost ask life for them, as did Pygmalion for the image he had made. Yet though they have individuality, and beauty, and strength, they have not life. But the trees have all that hill and tower have; and they have life as well. Do we read something of our soul into the hills ; and think that we also read there something of the spirit of the Over- Soul? Do we find tower and spire that we have made to be in their measure akin to us? And is there no sense in which we can rightly speak of the soul of the tree ?

We have ruled out animism, the belief that an individual spirit informs each living thing.

But some portion of the power we call life, which culminates, within the limits of our experience, in human nature, moves in the tree, and determines, in ways we can observe but not explain, what, to use the simple, biblical word, its kind shall be. I turn my head away from the page before me to look at a tree, and to wonder at the mystery of its being, and, almost more, at the arrest of its being below such consciousness as we must think the higher forms of animal life, at least, to possess. "In the beginning God created " — more than this : always, God, using the word, if the reader will have it so, in the broadest, vaguest sense, creates, brings forth, the living things, and determines, by laws we dimly trace, the character and limits of their being. Mrs. Browning wrote : —

A tree's mere firewood, unless humanised, — Which well the Greeks knew when they stirred its bark With close-pressed bosoms of subsiding nymphs, And made the forest-rivers garrulous With babble of gods.

About the nymphs we shall have something to say hereafter. It has to be said now that a tree is not mere firewood unless humanised ;

any more than we human beings are mere food for worms if there be no after life for us. There are animal painters who humanise the animals they represent ; and we do not thank them for so doing, unless they do it by way of jest. The interest of the lower animals to us is that they are in so many ways like us and yet are not of us. And so it is with the trees. Their life is in many ways like ours ; and yet at how great a distance below us their evolution has been arrested ! The highest animals are so far below us that, when in some ways they come near to us, the distance in other ways becomes even acutely pathetic. Vegetable and animal life seem in certain cases almost to overlap ; yet, in the main, how wide is the gulf between them ! It is not by pretending the trees to be human that we can become and continue keenly interested in them ; but by seeing and feeling both their likeness to us and their difference from us.

In what ways are they like us? They are born, grow to maturity, fail and then die. They draw nourishment from earth and air ; and by its aid are formed the myriad cells of which they are built up ; the nutriment being changed, by a process we can trace but cannot understand, into root, stem, bark, leaf or other part of their economy. They have no heart to pump the fluid nourishment throughout their frame from root to highest branch and twig ; but other forces effect the needed circulation of food. They have a rough, thick skin to protect their sensitive, vital parts. Earth and air, rain and sunshine, are needful for their life ; and they vary in character with varying habitat. They come near to us in that they differ in sex ; and it is only by great restraint that we do not speak of their love-making. Ruskin, who in one place marks off the pathetic fallacy, by which we read ourselves into the lower forms of life and even inanimate nature, in another place says that "all plants are composed of essentially two parts — the leaf and root — one loving the light, the other darkness ; one liking to be clean, the other to be dirty ; one liking to grow for the most part up, the other for the most part down ; and each having faculties and purposes of its own. But the pure one which loves the light, has, above all things, the purpose of being married to another leaf, and having child-leaves, and children's children of leaves, to make the earth fair for ever. And when the leaves marry, they put on wedding-robes, and are more glorious than Solomon in all his glory, and they have feasts of honey, and we call them 'Flowers'."

We need not stay to distinguish fact from fancy in this passage. They distinguish themselves. That plants, including trees, do unconsciously— on our assumption — marry is fact ; and those whose marriage is aided by insects make themselves — no, we must only say become — conspicuously attractive, and to our eyes beautiful, when the marrying-time comes round.

Mr. Edward Step, in Wayside and Woodland Trees, quotes Huxley's saying that " The plant is an animal confined in a wooden case ; and Nature, like Sycorax, holds thousands of ' delicate Ariels ' imprisoned in every oak. She is jealous of letting us know this ; and among the higher and more conspicuous forms of plants reveals it only by such obscure manifestations as the shrinking of the Sensitive Plant, the sudden clasp of the Dionaea, or still more slightly, by the phenomena of the cyclosis." It really becomes difficult not to wonder if there be consciousness in a tree! But the reader has been given a guarantee that he shall not be asked to go so far. Perhaps we must say that there is soul in the tree, even if we cannot literally speak of the soul of a tree. Charles Darwin, in a letter to Romanes, said that, if a theologian contended that God must have given to force and matter the attributes that culminate in life, he could not answer him. Romanes put the question, respecting natural causation : "Is it the mode in which a Divine Being is everywhere simultaneously and eternally operating ? " Are Huxley's thousands of delicate Ariels the agents of such a Divine Being ? These are questions not to be answered here ; but, were we to answer them, it would not be with an emphatic negative. So once again, as I turn from writing to look at the trees, it is with wonder as to what they are in their inmost life.

All the early part of this book is meant to lead up to a study of the representation of trees in art. But we shall not know what to ask of the artist unless we set out with wonder. We must not refuse to nature a io TREES IN NATURE, MYTH & ART

capital N . Wordsworth thought that mortality must have been a meaningless word to the builders of our Gothic abbeys and cathedrals — of the towers and spires of which we have already taken account. Emerson said that, in the woods, " a man casts off his years as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods is perpetual youth. Within these plantations of God, a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years. In the woods we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity (leaving me my eyes), which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball ; I am nothing ; I see all ; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me ; I am part or particle of God."

Emerson here expresses his feeling of what Matthew Arnold called " Nature's healing power". I have just taken down from the

THE SOUL OF A TREE n

shelf Walt Whitman's Specimen Days in America, and have opened the book, byhappy chance, at the following passage in which he tells "The Lesson of a Tree". He says : "I should not take either the biggest or the most picturesque tree to illustrate it. Here is one of my favourites now before me, a fine yellow poplar, quite straight, perhaps ninety feet high, and four thick at the butt. How strong, vital, enduring ! how dumbly eloquent ! What suggestions of imperturbability and being, as against the human trait of mere seeming. Then the qualities, almost emotional, palpably artistic, heroic, of a tree ; so innocent and harmless, yet so savage. It is, yet says nothing. How it rebukes, by its tough and equable serenity all weathers, this gusty-tempered little whiffet, man, that runs indoors at a mite of rain or snow. Science (or rather half-way science) scoffs at reminiscence of dryad and hamadryad, and of trees speaking. But, if they don't, they do as well as most speaking, writing, poetry, sermons — or rather they do a great deal better. I should say indeed that those old dryad reminiscences are quite as true as any, and profounder than most reminiscences we get. ('Cut this out,' as the quack mediciners say, and keep by you.) Go and sit in a grove or woods, with one or more of those voiceless companions, and read the foregoing and think."

It is safe to assume that all who will read these pages have felt as these writers have felt, when in the woodland, though they may not have put their feeling into words. I am offering the reader nothing new, but only seeking to intensify his appreciation of something old. Perhaps our sense of fellowship with the trees is in part instinctive. It may have remained in the blood from the time that our ancestors lived and worshipped in the groves, nay, worshipped the trees themselves. Charles Kingsley could hardly bring himself to part with the idea that the pillars and branching vaulting-ribs of Gothic architecture were copied from the forest-aisles. We shall return to this subject hereafter, when we come to study the many ways in which trees have figured in architecture. At the moment I will only quote a passage from Kingsley's Grots and Groves, in which, speaking of the forms of trees when they grow socially, he says : " I never understood how possible, how common, they must have been in mediaeval Europe, till I saw in the forest of Fontainebleau a few oaks like the oak of Charlemagne, and the Bouquet du Roi, at whose age I dare not guess, but whose size and shape showed them to have once formed part of a continuous wood, the like whereof remains not in these isles, perhaps not east of the Carpathian Mountains. In them a clear shaft of at least sixty, it may be eighty feet, carries a flat head of boughs, each in itself a tree. In such a grove, I thought the heathen Gaul, even the heathen Frank, worshipped beneath ' trees of God '. Such trees, I thought, centuries after, inspired the genius of every builder of Gothic aisles and roofs." From this passage we take just now only the one suggestion that a sense of fellowship with the trees may be deep in our nature ; dormant only, it is but too likely, in those who are closely confined in our overgrown towns and cities ; ready to awake again if the companionship of trees should happily be granted them again.

Is the reader one of those for whom the companionship of trees is almost an impossibility? I do not mean merely that, while living away from them, he may often see them, even at all seasons of the year. This is not enough for companionship. It is, of course, quite possible to live always amongst trees and yet have no companionship with them, not to have even so much as a nodding acquaintance ; and one may live in a London street and have companionship with the trees in the parks. We shall see hereafter that this was true of the painter Millais. Perhaps there are not a few who have made friends among the trees and think of them from afar. In these restless days we hurry from place to place, changing frequently even our holiday-resorts. It will be well for us if we have, those of us who must spend most of our time in the town, some spot in the country to which we return again and again. Not a few of our landscape painters have done their life-work within a radius of not many miles of the place where once they found that at last they were at home. In England we have had our " Norwich School," in France they have had their " Barbizon School," to give only two examples. The reader is short of something if he have no bit of woodland which he visits again and again, not once nor twice only, as each year passes by. If he have this he will know what it is to enjoy the companionship of trees. He will learn to know them in their various moods, and he will find also how different they are to him according to his own mood.

There is closer companionship for those who have actively to watch and care for trees. I who write these pages am a townsman who happily, so many years ago that I cannot at once tell the number, escaped into the country ; and, if I am to be a good tenant, and a good patriot, in the large sense of the word, must take some care of oak and ash, of beech and elm, of sycamore and chestnut, and many other trees ; must see that the fruit-trees are pruned ; that those past bearing are taken away, and young ones planted in their stead. Alas that, not being to the manner born, and busied with other things, it may be also lacking enterprise, I let most of the work be done by another! But I have been enough among the trees, and have planned and worked enough among them, to have come to know them intimately, to grieve if one must go, almost to grieve if, for the good of a tree, a branch must come out, to give the new wood a chance ; or to let another tree, that is being injured by a more strongly growing neighbour, have more room ; and my heart sinks whenever I think that some day I may have to leave these humble friends of mine to the care or the neglect of others. Before I came among them others cared for them or lived indifferent to them. Here, though I have called them humble, they seem, in more than their height, to rise above me. By their silent endurance, by their mere length of years, by their naturalness, they soothe and strengthen. Though the tree have not a soul, it is to me as if it had.

In a later chapter we shall have much to say about the various kinds of trees. Botanists divide them into several orders, and there are varying species within the orders. Not only this, but individual trees have their own character. We may say simply that this is an oak, that a beech, and that an elm ; as we distinguish Englishman, Frenchman and German. But the tree lover goes further than this ; as we do also with our fellows when we know them intimately. Not every oak has just the same appearance of rugged strength. Not every silver birch is just as graceful as every other. And individuals of the same kind grow very differently under varying conditions of soil and climate. How different also are trees according to their age. They have individuality ; and, as with men, their individual character is more strongly marked at one time of life than at another. Like us, too, they are creatures of habit ; and their habits become fixed ; from which quality of theirs many a moral lesson has been drawn for the benefit of human saplings. Have we not also fruitful trees and unfruitful trees; the latter, however, being fruitful, at least, in homilies ? Also do not the trees aid each other and injure each other ? Are not some of them social in their habit and others markedly individualistic? And when the trees live together in companies, must not each part with something of its liberty as the price of social companionship ?

All this varied life of the trees went on for long ages before there were any human eyes to watch it, and human minds to wonder at it, and human brains and hands to modify it. In many ways men have varied the life of the trees to suit their own use and liking. They have brought into play what the men of science call artificial selection. But is that which we call natural selection any less artificial? Have we any right to call only that which we do, artifice? Is there skill and purpose only in the planting of larch-woods so that there shall be the maximum of long, straight timber ; and no skill and purpose in the evolution that has produced trees so widely differing as the oak and the larch? I, at least, am with Walt Whitman, when he calls the science that scoffs at reminiscence of dryad and hamadryad but half-way science, and declares such reminiscence to be quite as true as any, and profounder than most reminiscences we get.

So when I am among the trees, and much more when I work among them, it is always with the thought that the power that works in me works also in them ; and, according to its own purpose, determines their likeness and their difference. Matter and motion, as we conceive them, could not produce a tree. The laws of nature are but the ways in which is working, in the lowest as well as in the highest forms of life, a power which must be in every way superior to the highest outcome of its working. Darwin, in the instance already referred to, put into the mouth of the imaginary theologian the objection, "you have no right to say that all natural laws necessarily follow from gravity, the persistence of force, and existence of matter. If you say that nebulous matter existed aboriginally and from eternity with all its present complex powers in a potential state ; you seem to me to beg the whole question." And his significant comment on this objection was, "Please observe it is not I, but a theologian who has thus addressed you, but I could not answer him ".

This may seem heavy material to bring into a book about trees in nature, myth and art. But probably the reader will readily see the purpose of it, which is to aid him in realising the wonder of tree-life. Does any one say, impatiently, that the wonder is obvious? I am only too glad if this be so. Only let us be sure that, being obvious, it is not taken for granted, and not felt. Or it may be said that animal life is still more wonderful. Agreed. And what questions would come up for probing if it were animal life we were discussing ; such, for example, as Blake's question to the tiger : —

Did He who made the lamb make thee ?

To this question the tiger could give no answer. But who could give the answer, and say why the mild and the fierce must both have a place in creation? And the trees can give no answer to any question we may ask about the life that lives in their cells and along their fibre. But who can give the answer? We can guess at it, as we watch the trees, or work among them, modifying their life. The whole answer it is not ours to have.

Flower in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies,

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,

Little flower — but if I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all,

I should know what God and man is.

So said Tennyson.

To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.

So said Wordsworth. I make no apology for having headed this chapter "The Soul of a Tree".

Chapter II

THE promise not to ask the reader to believe in any form of animism has been kept. He will not, however, object to consider for a brief space the animistic beliefs that have been held in the past, and are still held by a larger part of the human race than is commonly realised. It would be wrong to suppose that, because the old significance of such observances as those still customary with us at Christmas and May-Day has ceased to exist for us, it has ceased to exist for even the majority of our fellow-beings. We may go into the woods with no thought of there being in them spirits, good or evil ; but it is not so with more than a considerable minority of the human race. It is interesting to wake up to such facts. Beliefs are still widely held that are earlier in origin, and lower as thought, than the mythology of ancient Greece. Tree-worship, which obviously has interest for us here, and which we find low down in, if not at the base of, the structure of the ancient faiths, is still in vogue to-day. In the course of its history it has found remarkable expression in art and literature. A most interesting chapter of human thought is closed to us if we be not acquainted with its history ; and the trees then say far less to us than otherwise they would. For many reasons we must study, if only briefly, that belief in " something human in a tree," something, indeed, more than human, which is only less general now than it was in earlier ages.

We begin lower than this, amid ideas that are hardly to be associated with religion, which, in fact, are the first, or, at least, the earliest known attempts at natural science. We might almost say that man starts out as his own god, believing in no other control of nature than his own. He looks to no higher power than himself for help in bringing rain or making his trees fruitful, or whatever else he needs or wishes, that nature at the time is withholding from him. It is a far cry from this belief to one in higher beings whose aid must be begged or bought.

The earliest ideas of cause and effect are extremely crude. It is believed that neighbourhood and superficial likeness establish causal relations. This belief is still widely prevalent. Mr. J. G. Frazer says in The Golden Bough, that "if the test of truth lay in a show of hands or a counting of heads, the system of magic might appeal, with far more reason than the Catholic Church, to the proud motto, Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, as the sure and certain credential of its own infallibility".

The reader will be familiar with many instances of imitative magic, such as pouring out water in imitation of rain, and beating drums in imitation of thunder, in order to bring a drought to an end. The people who do this are not invoking a higher power ; they believe that the resemblance will suffice to produce the reality. We must limit ourselves to a few examples relating to our particular subject. Mr. Frazer, in The Golden Bough, gives many modern instances; of which the following ones will suffice for our purpose.