The Child, Said Everybody, Had Had A Marvellous Escape, And As She Had
Never Previously Seen A Snake And Could
Not intuitively know it as
dangerous, or _ku-ku_, it was conjectured that she had made some
gesture or attempted
To push the snake away when it came on to the
rug, and that it had reared its head and struck viciously at her.
Recalling this incident I concluded that this unknown serpent, which
had been killed because it wanted to share my baby sister's rug, and
my black serpent were one and the same species - possibly they had been
mates - and that they had strayed a distance away from their native
place or else were the last survivors of a colony of their kind in our
plantation. It was not until twelve or fourteen years later that I
discovered that it was even as I had conjectured. At a distance of
about forty miles from my home, or rather from the home of my boyhood
where I no longer lived, I found a snake that was new to me, the
_Philodryas scotti_ of naturalists, a not uncommon Argentine snake,
and recognized it as the same species as the one found coiled up on my
little sister's rug and presumably as my mysterious black serpent.
Some of the specimens which I measured exceeded six feet in length.
CHAPTER XVII
A BOY'S ANIMISM
The animistic faculty and its survival in us - A boy's animism and its
persistence - Impossibility of seeing our past exactly as it was - Serge
Aksakoff's history of his childhood - The child's delight in nature
purely physical - First intimations of animism in the child - How it
affected me - Feeling with regard to flowers - A flower and my mother -
History of a flower - Animism with regard to trees - Locust-trees by
moonlight - Animism and nature-worship - Animistic emotion not
uncommon - Cowper and the Yardley oak - The religionist's fear of
nature - Pantheistic Christianity - Survival of nature-worship in
England - The feeling for nature - Wordsworth's pantheism and animistic
emotion in poetry.
These serpent memories, particularly the enduring image of that black
serpent which when recalled restores most vividly the emotion
experienced at the time, serve to remind me of a subject not yet
mentioned in my narrative: this is animism, or that sense of something
in nature which to the enlightened or civilized man is not there, and
in the civilized man's child, if it be admitted that he has it at all,
is but a faint survival of a phase of the primitive mind. And by
animism I do not mean the theory of a soul in nature, but the tendency
or impulse or instinct, in which all myth originates, to animate all
things; the projection of ourselves into nature; the sense and
apprehension of an intelligence like our own but more powerful in all
visible things. It persists and lives in many of us, I imagine, more
than we like to think, or more than we know, especially in those born
and bred amidst rural surroundings, where there are hills and woods
and rocks and streams and waterfalls, these being the conditions which
are most favourable to it - the scenes which have "inherited
associations" for us, as Herbert Spencer has said. In large towns and
all populous places, where nature has been tamed until it appears like
a part of man's work, almost as artificial as the buildings he
inhabits, it withers and dies so early in life that its faint
intimations are soon forgotten and we come to believe that we have
never experienced them. That such a feeling can survive in any man, or
that there was ever a time since his infancy when he could have
regarded this visible world as anything but what it actually is - the
stage to which he has been summoned to play his brief but important
part, with painted blue and green scenery for background - becomes
incredible. Nevertheless, I know that in me, old as I am, this same
primitive faculty which manifested itself in my early boyhood, still
persists, and in those early years was so powerful that I am almost
afraid to say how deeply I was moved by it.
It is difficult, impossible I am told, for any one to recall his
boyhood exactly as it was. It could not have been what it seems to the
adult mind, since we cannot escape from what we are, however great our
detachment may be; and in going back we must take our present selves
with us: the mind has taken a different colour, and this is thrown
back upon our past. The poet has reversed the order of things when he
tells us that we come trailing clouds of glory, which melt away and
are lost as we proceed on our journey. The truth is that unless we
belong to the order of those who crystallize or lose their souls on
their passage, the clouds gather about us as we proceed, and as cloud-
compellers we travel on to the very end.
Another difficulty in the way of those who write of their childhood is
that unconscious artistry will steal or sneak in to erase unseemly
lines and blots, to retouch, and colour, and shade and falsify the
picture. The poor, miserable autobiographer naturally desires to make
his personality as interesting to the reader as it appears to himself.
I feel this strongly in reading other men's recollections of their
early years. There are, however, a few notable exceptions, the best
one I know being Serge Aksakoff's _History of His Childhood;_ and
in his case the picture was not falsified, simply because the temper,
and tastes, and passions of his early boyhood - his intense love of his
mother, of nature, of all wildness, and of sport - endured unchanged in
him to the end and kept him a boy in heart, able after long years to
revive the past mentally, and picture it in its true, fresh, original
colours.
And I can say of myself with regard to this primitive faculty and
emotion - this sense of the supernatural in natural things, as I have
called it - that I am on safe ground for the same reason; the feeling
has never been wholly outlived.
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