Читать книгу The Observations of Professor Maturin - Clyde Bowman Furst - Страница 8

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I HAVE never seen my friend Professor Maturin in better health or spirits than he was when I met him the other evening at the Athenaeum. He had just finished dinner, and indicated that he was in the mood for talk by ordering two of the Cuban vegueras that he keeps in a private box at the club, for use on special occasions.

“I am just back from the best vacation I have ever had,” he began. “I have been spending a month with a friend up the river, at a most delightful place, built and planted about fifty years ago by his father, from memories of the villas about Florence, where he once lived. The house has window balconies, a tower, a loggia opening west and south, and a red-flagged terrace with a stone balustrade, all complete. Below this slopes a wide lawn, then many flowering shrubs, and finally splendid groupings of trees between and over which you may see the river, here at its widest. The hills beyond and the highlands to the north complete the picture.

“After breakfasting alone, at any time my fancy chose, according to the happy custom of the house, I spent whole mornings on the terrace, looking through the aisles of ancient oaks at the river, or at the heaped-up summer clouds as they drifted south. I have heard the Hudson called epic, because of its breadth and power. It is no less so in its incidental embellishments of sunlight and shadow. I often watched it from its morning silver, through all shades of reflected blue, until at night it looked like a texture of royal purple into which the moonlight and the stars were being woven. The clouds were better than any Alpine mountains. Their mass and light and dark were as definite, and they had other clouds about their peaks and oceans of vapor at their feet. In addition they changed constantly, and turned to gold and opal at evening.

“At luncheon, or shortly before, I met my host and hostess. If before, we often strolled through a catalpa avenue to a semi-circular stone seat overlooking the river, or along a pine walk to a lookout toward the highlands, or past an orchard back of the house to a certain sunset hill, for the widest view of all, where we could see the river for twenty miles. Sometimes the hostess led us to sections which she called ‘nature’s gardens,’ because of the wild flowers, of which she was particularly fond.

“About such flowers I knew so little that I would have been tempted to revive my ancient botany had I not a good while ago learned the necessity of limiting the number of one’s avocations and of resisting the temptation to rob them of time, to spend on this new thing and that. I felt the same way about the trees, which, I was told, represented every indigenous variety. I knew by name only oak and elm, beech and maple, and a few others; but I made the most of the compensations of my ignorance, by noting, with all the freshness of discovery, the characteristic angle or curve of the different boughs, the varied form, texture, and characteristic movement of branch and leaf, the innumerable greens of the foliage, and their infinite modulations under light and shade.

“I am sure that we often know too much to get the full value of our impressions. For a long time painters could not represent trees because they remembered what each leaf was like; Claude painted his landscapes from what he knew, rather than what he saw, Constable from what he loved, Turner from what he imagined. It was not until the Barbizon men lived in the forest that Rousseau caught the actual form and Corot the fragrance of nature, and Monet could paint true light and air. It is said that the most interesting writing is done by generally cultivated people concerning subjects that are new to them. The greatest enjoyment of nature often comes in the same way. It is quite possible to be ‘connoisseured out of one’s senses.’

“At our luncheons the talk was always delightful, for my friend’s ample fortune gives him both occupation enough to keep him contemporary, and leisure enough to allow him to be Coleridge’s ideal man of letters, reaping only the choicest and most spontaneous growths of a richly cultivated mind. After luncheon we usually sat awhile in the large, although simple, conservatory, which adjoined the dining-room—if the word ‘simple’ may properly be applied to a place where orange and lemon trees attained their natural size, roses bloomed by the hundred, and where we picked ripe pomegranates and figs for our dessert. This, too, was due to the genius of the founder of the house, whose works my friend delighted to honor and cherish.

“When we separated again I usually retired to my room for a book and a nap, which lasted I know not how long, one of the charms of the place being that artificial timepieces were absent, or, at least, invisible and inaudible, everything, apparently, being regulated by the sun. This source of light and heat usually led me in the late afternoon to the loggia to watch the earliest anticipations of the evening glow, and to listen to an orchestra of mocking-birds in an open-air cage, accompanied by their wild neighbors, of whom there seemed to be multitudes. English sparrows were ruthlessly banished, but every other sort of bird was protected, with the reward of the almost familiar companionship of orioles, cardinals, wrens, and humming-birds, and the constant song of warbler, thrush, and meadow-lark. In nothing, I think, is the country more delightfully different from the town than in its sounds. Even the winds and the rains sound different there.

“My friend has so long lived his life with nature that it has become the theme of his chief study. He outlined this to me one evening when the rain caused us to transfer our coffee from the terrace to the conservatory, where his ideas became permanently associated with the impressions of azalea bloom and jasmine fragrance which I acquired at the same time.

“‘I am slowly accumulating,’ he said, ‘facts and ideas for a history of the relations between nature and man in the United States. The conditions have been peculiar, and the results more than ordinarily interesting. Nowhere else, for example, have people possessing all the arts of civilization made their homes in the midst of absolutely primitive nature. With such a beginning, three thousand years of history have here been epitomized in three hundred. Nature as an enemy was soon conquered, and nowhere else has she afterward shown herself more friendly in surface fertility and underground resources. Our vast and relatively undiversified territory has brought men of the coast, the mountains, and the plains; of the rugged North and the languorous South, into closer and more constant contact than ever before. And to this unparalleled interplay we have welcomed myriads from every other climate and condition on the earth, and have set up for the whole theories of government which allow almost perfect freedom to all racial, local, and individual traits.

“‘I intend to deal but briefly with the physical results of such inhabitation. The wisdom of experience is beginning to check the perhaps natural tendency to spoil ruthlessly the conquered forest; and even the most materially minded are beginning to act toward the universal mother no more harshly than they would toward a captive or slave whose usefulness is increased by considerate treatment.

“‘The peculiar relations between nature and the human spirit in the United States, however, seem to me worthy of extended study. Thus, it is undoubtedly because of our unique environment, that so just an observer as Emerson found American perceptions keener than any he met with elsewhere. Our poets have certainly recorded other and more varied aspects of nature than their English brethren, who in comparison seem to deal chiefly with the “common or garden variety.” Nothing is more mistaken than to consider Bryant a kind of inferior Wordsworth. There is more truth in the remark that Wordsworth himself was not primarily a nature poet, since nature was to him chiefly the source of certain stimuli to the mental life, which was his fundamental interest. Bryant not only feels this stimulus, along with nature’s suggestive and representative qualities, and its physical benefits; but he also apprehends nature as an independent world of physical life and order, of which man is a citizen so far as he is a creature, and of which he may be a ruler so far as his mind works in harmony with natural law, and partakes of the power behind it.

“‘This aspect of nature was not, I believe, apprehended by Wordsworth at all. He at least gave no utterance to it. Similarly, in the treatment of the water-world, in which English poets have usually excelled, the English critic Henley has shown how Longfellow, through a simple self-forgetfulness in his impressions, found eternal beauties hitherto unnoticed. Emerson’s nature-teaching is fairly well known, but the depth and breadth of Whitman’s sympathy for land and sea has yet to be generally appreciated; and these poets are only a few of many examples.

“‘American painting, too, has found itself in landscape; our sculpture and music have drawn inspiration from aboriginal life; and our natural science is second to none in its careful, accurate, and tireless study.

“‘The special field in which we may learn from the older world is in the employment of nature as the material of art; and for this with our advance in wealth and leisure, we are now ready. Roman, Italian, and English examples have already been followed in making real for us some of Poe’s visions of cultivated landscape; and I am daily expecting those delightful intellectual and aesthetic results which have always come when men, wearied with the cultivation of cities, retire to the contrasting peace, simplicity, and beauty of nature.’

“There were, of course,” continued Professor Maturin, “many other general ideas in my friend’s system, and he has accumulated a vast hoard of particular facts to illustrate them. The last aspect of the subject, however, continued to interest me most; for I was experiencing hourly the truth of what he said concerning the thaumaturgic, healing power of nature. I never felt such gentle and cumulative refreshment in my life. The varied sensations of travel, which is perhaps the favorite form of recreation, merely whip the jaded spirit into new activity. But these peaceful, natural scenes and sounds allow the senses to relax, and the mind to renew its texture and recover its tone. As Browning puts it,

my soul

Smoothed itself out, a long-cramped scroll.

I have experienced a real re-creation.

“Therefore,” concluded Professor Maturin, as we finished our cigars, “you must not be surprised if, within the next few weeks, I compose a pastoral symphony, or become a new Theocritus, or—what is less unlikely—retire to a villa, as Horace did.”