Path of Vision; pocket essays of East and West/Part First, 7

by Ameen Rihani

VII

A FOOTNOTE OF NATURE

THROUGH her own medium, Nature's appeal is not always adequate. Her language is not understood alike by the woodman and the poet. Her secret is often hidden under her articulate charm; and she unveils only to the elect of the soul and mind. That is why we often get more of her through the medium of the interpreter, who pursues his task with the patience and faithfulness of a devotee. But even these translations, whether they be literal or poetic, have a varying degree of merit and interest. John Burroughs, for instance, is an excellent guide; but Thoreau, who knows as well the winding paths, the forest trails, the secret nooks and hidden mysteries, can also entertain us with a song. Even in the idealization of Nature, we have such a variety as ranges from the mirage-like glamor of Turner to the rhythmic delicacies of Corot to the apocalyptic grandeur of Van Gogh.

But the translator, whether a painter or a maker of manuels or of song, loses or gains in the appeal according to the individuality he infuses into his work. The human touch is unfailing no matter how slight or how strong. It can hold you spellbound before a fern or send you scampering through the fields, chasing a butterfly or a will-o'-the-wisp. For Nature, like man, will tyrannize when she can. And when the translator is conquered by her, he loses the quality that makes his art supreme. He becomes a dryasdust master of definitions and classifications. For to be impersonal as the elements, is unhuman, unnatural. One may be sublime, as Emerson; but it is an arid sublimity void of the one great element of genius—passion.

To copy Nature? A boy with a camera can do that. To get the spirit of Nature? A woodman or a shepherd can follow the trail of the whistling wind to hoarded sunshine in distant wolds. But to interpret Nature and inform it with a human personality that rises above it, invokes the divine in it, is the work of genius. And this can only be done through the magnifying and intensifying process. Even the eye of the soul can not always see the subtleties that conceal a world of beauty and charm. So the medium of genius, which stands between us and Nature, is necessarily complex, and is endowed moreover with an intense passion. Every note and echo, every line and shade, no matter how minute and distant, is transfigured through it, is intensified, magnified for our common perception.

Passing through a glade, I hear the flitting notes of a bird or smell the elusive aroma concealed in the brush. The poet sits there and, with infinite patience, waits and waits, till he catches the one and identifies the other. The result would be a lyric perhaps, in which both are so intensely reproduced that they are unmistakable. Inversely, and by the same token, there is good reason for magnifying certain situations in literature, on a canvas, or on the stage in spectacular productions.

Consider, for instance, a simoom in the desert. One feels the intensity and magnitude of even the slightest gust of the sand storm in the vast and trackless waste. There is no need there for magnification. The boundless sea of sands is a sufficient background. But on the stage or on a canvas, with a limited area and an artificial background, how can such a picture be produced with effect unless its elemental features are magnified, intensified? If a traveller, who happens to be in the audience, objects that the simoom seldom reaches such brobdingnagian proportions, the reply is, Bring to play in this circumscribed space in the open desert a compressed simoom, so to speak, and you will have an intensity of effect that can hardly be represented on the stage or on a canvas.

The same thing might be said of a poem in which all the reactions of Nature are translated through the complex medium of the senses as well as the soul. Her voice, her form, her lights and shades, the very spirit of her whole being breathes and sings in the lines of a Wordsworth or a Shelly. At this height, the painter and the poet are one; or the musician brings them together, is the link between them. For a poem may not only contain a picture, or a picture, a poem, but both are often vibrant with the rythmic harmony, even the melody of song.

This brings us to the tone-poem, of which so much has been written, and little understood. What is a tone-poem? I have heard many such, no doubt; and I have read somewhat of the musical critic's abstruseness on the subject. But not until I stood one day before a mountain stream, was the matter clear in my mind. The rolling waters, the silvery music, the foaming cascades—here is Nature's Footnote, her own simple interpretation of a tone-poem. It is more than that, indeed. It is her hornbook of the arts, a symbol of the holy trinity of genius—Music and Painting and Poetry.

In poetry, however, this treble phase is often inadequately expressed. Only a trained ear can make out its music, can catch the rhythmic beauty of its harmonies; and only a trained eye can appreciate the word-painting. For most people, especially in this age of free verse and realism, read in poetry only the idea it conveys, the sentiment it shrines or burlesques, or the bare facts it gathers and disseminates. But in music is the temple of the trinity of Art for those who can see as well as hear; in painting too, for those who can read as well as see.

Indeed, the three arts are as associated with each other, as related to each other as the tripple phenomenon of a mountain stream. For in its cascade-bedecked currents, breaking into silver spray, singing themselves into cerulean ecstasies, pausing in hollows under daffiodiled banks, flowing in transparent lucid stanzas over the moss-carpeted rocks, we have the sonata, the poem and the picture combined.

And never, as I said, could I fathom the musical critic's dogmatism and esoteric sidelights thereon, until I beheld this striking and telling symbol of a tone-poem. I shut my eyes and enjoy the music; I open them and enjoy the music and the picture. I behold the waters in their coruscating splendor; I hear them sing as they roll on, meandering to the sea; and with the soul's surgings of color and shade, intensified through my own interpreting medium, I have the poem, the picture, the song—all in one masterpiece.

A tone poem, therefore, is that which appeals to the ear and the eye as well as to the eye of the soul. It is the living, moving, singing incarnation of Poetry, Painting and Music. I offer this, a footnote by Nature, to the esteemed critic's learning. And it is devoid, it will be observed, of the ruffles and flounces of criticism.

The holy trinity of Art symbolized in a mountain stream. For if we can not see a picture in a fine piece of music or hear the strains of a distant song in a picture,—if we can not drink of the beauty of both with the eye as well as the ear,—we had better seek entertainment in a picture gallery, where hang many a visible palpable specimen of colors rioting in quadrangles of gilded mouldings, of colors clamoring for recognition in the little square horizons of the artist's soul.