CHAPTER IV.
THE CLAN AND NATURE.
§ 43. Although Alexander von Humboldt[1] and others after him have observed the influences of a great political union, such as that effected by the Roman empire or that of Great Britain and her colonies, on human views of the physical world, no one, so far as the present writer is aware, has undertaken to trace the different aspects which Nature assumes for man under the varying and expanding forms of social organisation he has experienced. The studies of Montesquieu, to whom we owe so much as one great founder of truly historical inquiry in Europe, tended to treat social life too exclusively as the resultant of physical forces—climate, the nature of the soil, extent and character of sea-board, and the like. But though the physical conformation of the country they inhabit powerfully affects the commercial and political, the philosophical and artistic life of men, we must not forget that the structure of their social system, however dependent upon physical causes, supplies the aspects of Nature with certain lines peculiarly its own. Humboldt with great felicity compares the poetic descriptions of Nature left us by Indians and Persians, Hebrews and Arabs, Greeks and Romans, and the literatures of modern Europe. But his point of view, though not quite so passive as that of Montesquieu, though not directly intimating the creation of human ideas by physical forces, is that of the physical, not of the human, world. It is one thing to watch the effects of Indian or Italian scenery as they disclose themselves in Sanskrit or Italian poetry; it is another to observe the different aspects under which the same physical environment presents itself to social groups differently organised. The latter is the study to which at present we propose to direct attention—the sentiment of Nature as dependent on social organisation, that of the clan in particular.
We must at the outset carefully distinguish the two faces which early social conditions present—that of the clan and that of the chief's hall, the communal poetry of the Hebrew or the Arab, and the heroic songs of Homeric aoidoi or of Saxon Scôps. Nature presents herself in different garb to the village community and the household of the chief. To the former she is the maker of the harvest, the bounteous giver or the offended with-holder of the corn and wine and oil; the whole community lives in constant companionship with her, and (as the Hebrew when he spoke of sunrise as the sun's "going forth," like man to his labour, and sunset as the sun's "coming in," like man to his rest) transfer to her the associations of their agricultural life. To the household and retainers of the chief she is less interesting than the ancestor from whom the chief derives his divine lineage, or the deeds of martial prowess in which he and his immediate following take pride. The epic rhapsodist may, indeed, clothe his heroes in the dress of Nature's godship, but the personality of his chief shines through. Hence, wherever the clan community falls under the domination of chiefs (as, in the absence of a strong priestly centralism, it has at least for a time almost always fallen), the powers of Nature are thrust into the background by divinities, or demi-gods, or heroes whose connection with the physical world is obscured by aristocratic associations; wherever communal life has for any length of time held its own against the chiefs, the poetry of Nature, comparatively unhumanised, has been kept alive.
In Homeric Greece and Saxon England the development of social unity found its main channel in the individual enterprise of military chiefs; and the Scôp of the mead-hall or Demodokus in the palace of Alkinous are the song-makers whom such a turn of social circumstances brings to the front. In early Israel or Arabia before the Prophet the progress of social unity moves along another channel—that fusion of leaguered clans which in the Amphiktionic League looks out upon us like a survival from unsuccessful prehistoric efforts after Hellenic unity. In the poetry of Israel and Arabia, accordingly, Nature plays a more prominent part than in that of Homeric Greece or Saxon England. The point of view from which Nature is conceived is also different in these cases—she is the grand unity of the Hebrew and Arab, before which all social differences "are as dust that rises up and is lightly laid again;" she is the grand diversity of the Greek and Saxon, looking out from every place with a new face and a changed name, and a sympathy for none but her local friends. The same principle meets us in the poetry of India. Here Nature, too, predominates, not merely because the splendour of Indian scenery is passively reflected in the Indian hymns, epics, dramas, but because human life in India has been such as to make the social predominate over the individual factors, the Indian village community having always been the most stable institution of Indian life. Indian, like Hebrew, literature is full of the social sentiment of Nature, but knows little of the individualised Nature of Theocritus or Wordsworth
"Now sleeps the deep, now sleep the wandering winds,
But in my heart the anguish sleepeth not,"[2]
sings the Greek idyllist; but the song of his own heart outsings through the stillness of Nature.
"Yon cloud with that long purple cleft
Brings fresh into my mind
A day like this which I have left
Full thirty years behind,"
sings the English poet of Nature; but the cloud bears no rainbow of social hope, it is a private sign of personal recollections.
§ 44. In order to reach the point of view from which the clan regards Nature we must remember the one grand characteristic of clan thought which has been previously explained at some length. This is the want of personality in any sense resembling the modern. Just as the responsibility of a child for the deeds of generations buried long before it was born does not appear irrational to men who have no clear notion of personal intention, of personal as distinct from communal life, so in dealing with the phenomena of Nature—wind and cloud, rain and thunder, sun, moon, stars—the names given by such primitive minds and expressing for the most part ideas of human action are not really individual names. The Hebrew and Teuton heard without surprise that the eponymous ancestor of the human race was "Man" (âdâm, mannus), because the difference between a general idea and an individual name was not yet conceived with any distinctness, because, in fact, the sense of personality was not sufficiently developed to admit of such distinctness. In the same way the phenomena of Nature are expressed in the terms of human existence, as it was then conceived, without either the desire or the ability to personify Nature in our modern sense. The early confusion of human and physical existence is, in fact, only an extension of that confusion of personal with social existence which so strikingly characterises the clan age. Both proceed from a condition of thought in which personal and collective, subjective and objective, abstract and concrete forms of being are confused; and the source of this confusion is to be largely discovered in the communal organisation of early social life.
Viewed in this light we may regard the work of myth-making as the peculiar function of the clan age; and the relations of the clan to myth are alike visible in the social and the physical aspects of myth-making. "Myth" (a word which had no fixed value among the Greeks, fables of invention, like the Choice of Hercules, and divine traditions of prehistoric origin being lumped together under the vague term mûthos) would seem to be now tacitly used by those who profess any accuracy of language to mean creations of imagination unconsciously working upon external nature; and philological scholars in England and Germany have sometimes displayed a tendency to narrow the term still farther, and make myths little more than a disease of language. But the makers of myth are really the narrow limits within which man's primitive action and thought are bound up; just as the destroyers of myth are man's widening or deepening experiences of space or time, of social and individual life. The myth, which may consist in a rude effort to explain some element of physical nature or some form of animal life,[3] or some social custom or some rude sense of personality, does not become visible as myth until wider circles of comparison and contrast have superannuated the beliefs and corrected the experiences upon which it once reposed. The social aspect of clan myth-making may thus be easily conceived. Such myth-making constantly accompanies the fusion of clan groups, traditions of eponymous ancestry being interwoven as larger groups—clan-federations or nations—are developed. It is indeed mainly this social fusion that makes the beginning of every national history fade into masses of myth, blending their social and physical origins in darkness which science has hitherto done little to lighten.
The clan age, then, is the great maker of social as well as physical myths; and, to return to the latter, it views physical Nature neither as a person in our modern sense of the word, nor as an impersonal entity; neither as invested with individuality as we conceive it, nor yet as divested of personality and conceived in the abstract. Ages later than those of the clan reach the individual view of Nature; and ages later still reach the abstract view of Nature.
But here our brief review of nature's aspects as modified by clan life must cease. The illustrations we had intended to offer must be reserved for another opportunity; and we shall willingly leave the corroboration or denial of our views to students who can spare the time and trouble to criticise them in the light of early poetry.
There are many other aspects of clan literature to which we should have gladly given even passing attention. We might have discussed, for example, the treatment of animals in early poetry, such as that of the camel, in the Moʾallaqah of Lebid, taking refuge "in the hollow trunk of a tree with lofty branches standing apart on the skirts of the sandhills," while overhead is a starless night of rain; or that of the wild asses, in the same poem, raising as they gallop along "a train of dust with shadows flitting like the smoke of a blazing fire." But these and many other aspects of early poetry we must leave untouched. We have merely thrown out a few hints which have cost no little study, however small their value; and we shall be content if the path of our inquiries is honestly pursued, and not at all offended if real study discovers a good deal to be corrected even in this little glimpse of a vast subject.
Footnotes edit
- ↑ Perhaps the best introduction for students beginning the interesting study of literature in its relations with Nature would be the section on Poetic Descriptions of Nature in Humboldt's Cosmos, and the works of M. Victor de Laprade Le Sentiment de la Nature avant le Christianisme and Le Sentiment de la Nature chez les Modernes.
- ↑ Idyll ii. 38—<
ἠνίδε σιγᾷ μὲν πόντος, σιγῶντι δ᾽ ὰῆται
ἁ δ᾽ ἐμὰ οὐ σιγᾷ στίρνων ἔντοσθεν ἀνία κ.τ.λ. - ↑ Cf. the "Beast-epic," as studied by Jacob Grimm or Dr. Bleek; or Zoological Mythology, by Professor Gubernatis.