Such a Jocund Company - Nature as a Companion and Helper in Literature and Life

"Colin...felt as if tight strings which had held him had loosened themselves and let him go. ...Instead of lying and staring at the wall and wishing he had not awakened, his mind was full of the plans he and Mary had made yesterday, of pictures of the garden and of Dickon and his wild creatures. It was so nice to have things to think about." - The Secret Garden

"[Archibald Craven] was a man who for 10 years had kept his mind filled with dark and heart-broken thinking. ...he had let his soul fill itself with blackness and had refused obstinately to allow any rift of light to pierce through. [But as] he sat and gazed at the sunlit water and his eyes began to see things growing at tits edge. There was one lovely mass of blue forget-me-nots growing so close to the stream that its leaves were wet and at these he found himself looking as he remembered he had looked at such things years ago. He was actually thinking tenderly how lovely it was and what wonders of blue its hundreds of little blossoms were. He did not know that just that simple thought was slowly filling his mind -- filling and filling it until other things were softly pushed aside. ... Something seemed to have been unbound and released in him, very quietly." - The Secret Garden

What we learn from experience depends on the kind of philosophy we bring to experience.
- C.S. Lewis, Miracles

Two weeks ago, I wrote on the experience of Nature through the Imagination and how it has the ability to pull us up out of ourselves. This week, I want to look at that again from a different angle and consider the picture of Nature as a delivering force in Literature and Life; not so much the Deliverer Himself, as “assistant to the --,” so to speak. 

Nature as a Companion and Helper in Literature; The Secret Garden and Pilgrim’s Progress

I teach a Junior High Literature class at our homeschool co-op and right now our book is Frances Burnett’s The Secret Garden. There are so many things I would love to share about this book. I might do a separate post about it. The images of the Briar Rose fairy tale are everywhere in the story, but in a way that is layered and playful. It is exquisite. But one thing that I keep noticing is the way the inner life of the two main characters, Colin and Mary, mirrors the inner life of the secret garden.

Colin, the sickly boy of the manor who is abandoned by his father to the care of indifferent nurses, is not only physically shut up in a room alone, but his mind is shut up, too, and overgrown with consuming thoughts. This is exactly the way the garden is when Mary first steps into it.

“There were other trees in the garden, and one of the things which made the place look strangest and loveliest was that the climbing roses had run all over them and swung down long tendrils which made light swaying curtains, and here and there they had caught at each other or at a far reaching branch and had crept from one tree to another and made lovely bridges of themselves. There were neither leaves nor roses on them now and Mary did not know whether they were dead or alive, but their thin gray or brown branches and sprays looked like a sort of hazy mantle spreading over everything, walls and trees, and even brown grass, where they had fallen from their fastenings and run along the ground. It was this hazy tangle from tree to tree which made it all look so mysterious.”

A few paragraphs later, she is described as walking “under one of these fairy-grey arches.” There is a distinct feeling of enchantment about the place. Repeatedly it is described as “a secret kingdom” and “a world” all in itself. You can begin to see what I mean about the Briar Rose imagery; it really is everywhere. The rose is continually connected to Colin’s mother, and when she died, her kingdom, so to speak, fell asleep. Both the secret garden and Colin are like the Princess Rosamund hidden away, surrounded by thorns (real in the garden and metaphorical in Colin’s case), and under a death-like enchantment –  both are effectively cursed.

There is an obvious connection between Colin’s physical well-being and the well-being of his dead mother’s rose garden, but the connection between Colin’s mental well-being and the garden was a new observation for me. When Mary meets Colin – at which point in the story Mary’s time in Nature has begun to cure her Loathly Lady (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loathly_lady) type enchantment – she has already found the secret garden and begun to care for it intuitively: 

“She did not know anything about gardening, but the grass seemed so thick in some of the places where the green points were pushing their way through that she thought they did not seem to have room enough to grow. She searched about until she found a rather sharp piece of wood and knelt down and dug and weeded out the weeds and grass until she made nice little clear place around them. ‘Now they look as if they could breathe,’ she said.” 

This picture of the little shoots growing without any room to breathe is an exact picture of Colin who is shut away without any fresh air or exercise; indeed he says several times that he hated and feared the outdoors, and because he is the lord of the manor when his father is away, he is never forced to go beyond his fears. The result is that he is doubly imprisoned, by the weakness of his body and the wildness of his mind. 

His body is fed, but in spite of regular meals, his limbs become like the thin tendrils of the roses that make the “hazy mantle” of the garden, and which Mary is not sure are dead or alive. Interestingly, Colin is most often described as having an “ivory” appearance, a sort of sickly, waxy paleness that brings to mind cold statues and not a living boy. 

His mind is cared for to a degree with expensive, beautiful books purchased by his absent father, but he is not educated or force out of his thoughts by play or personal interaction. Neither body nor mind are tended in any way that produces health. In fact, because his mind is left to become “a hazy tangle” of morbid self-absorption, his body languishes. Though he has a store of beautiful picture books to distract him, his Imagination, though enlarged, becomes wild and overgrown because there is nothing that draws his focus outward. The stories distract him for a while, and we are told by the author that they even give him a larger capacity for imagination than Mary has, but Mary’s imagination, though small, was nourished at least to the point of having a slight interest in the natural world. In the very first chapter we see her trying to “play garden.” This is an activity that engages her in something outside of herself and this becomes a small door of escape from her own soul’s desert and into a garden of beauty, friendship, and love, and eventual wholeness.

  The entire book is about the power of Nature to heal. Though ”Magic” is often mentioned, it is always the Magic of natural cycles at work. When Mary and Colin finally meet, Mary’s stories of the garden waking up in early spring rouse Colin to a vibrant, persistent interest beyond his thoughts of illness and his (assumed) impending death. Her stories of the garden make him forget his illness, he says, and when he forgets he feels better. This over everything else is shows that his illness is truly “all in his head.” 

Mary is the first person to care for Colin as a person. She recognizes herself in him and cares for him in a very motherly way, intuitively, just as she intuitively knew the new shoots needed room to grow and breathe. The forgotten garden is the focus of the story at first, but I think Colin’s mind is the true secret garden in the book. “Mistress Mary quite contrary” both prunes back Colin’s overgrown, tangled thoughts and gives them room to breathe by first bringing him stories of springtime gardens, and then bringing him to the garden itself where his healing begins in earnest. His experiences with Nature in the imagination and in the actual retrains his tangled thoughts to grow upward and outward. 

Colin’s experience reminded me of a scene from Pilgrim’s Progress which connects with what I wrote about Nature in my Murmuration post. In PP, Christian leads his friend Hopeful off the path into Byway Meadow. They become lost and can’t find their way back so they sleep in the field, hoping to find their in the morning. But before they have a chance to retrace their steps, they are found by Giant Despair and imprisoned in Doubting Castle.

In The Secret Garden, Colin’s father, Archibald Craven, has imprisoned his son. While the motive and intention might be different, the image is the same in both stories. But the interesting thing is that Mr. Craven imprisons Colin because Mr. Craven is himself imprisoned by his own despair at the death of his wife. For 10 years, he has wandered in a self-imposed exile, unable to stay for long in any place, unable to remain in the home he shared with her, unable to be in the garden where she suffered her mortal injury, unable to even look at the son who so reminds him of his dead wife. He is locked in himself as much as, if not more than, Colin. In the story, Craven is both Giant Despair and Christian despairing. 

If you have read PP, you know that eventually, Christian and Hopeful escape from Doubting Castle. Here is the scene:

‘Now, a little before it was day, good Christian, as one half amazed, brake out into this earnest speech: "What a fool," quoth he, "am I to lie in a foul-smelling dungeon, when I may as well walk at liberty! I have a key in my bosom called Promise, that will, I am sure, open any lock in Doubting Castle." Then said Hopeful, "That is good news, good brother: pluck it out of thy bosom, and try."

‘Then Christian pulled it out of his bosom, and began to try at the dungeon door, whose bolt, as he turned the key, gave back, and the door flew open with ease, and Christian and Hopeful both came out. Then he went to the outward door that leads into the castle-yard, and with his key opened that door also. After, he went to the iron gate, for that must be opened too; but that lock went exceedingly hard, yet the key did open it. Then they thrust open the gate to make their escape with speed; but that gate, as it opened, made such a creaking, that it waked Giant Despair who, hastily rising to pursue his prisoners, felt his limbs to fail; for his fits took him again, so that he could by no means go after them. Then they went on, and came to the King's highway again, and so were safe because they were out of Giant Despair's rule.’

What is this fit of Giant Despair that keeps him from going after them? Though the key provides the way of release, it seems it also the well-timed fit of the Giant that allowed them to get safely out of his reach. Earlier in the episode, we are told about these fits of Giant Despair: 

‘When morning was come, [Despair] goes to them in a surly manner, as before and, perceiving them to be very sore with the stripes that he had given them the day before, he told them that, since they were never like to come out of that place, their only way would be forthwith to make an end of themselves, either with knife, halter, or poison: "For why," said he, "should you choose life, seeing it is attended with so much bitterness?" But they desired him to let them go. With that, he looked ugly upon them, and rushing to them, had doubtless made an end of them himself, but that he fell into one of his fits (for he sometimes, in sunshiny weather, fell into fits), and lost for a time the use of his hands, wherefore he withdrew, and left them as before to consider what to do.’

Bunyan was a man familiar with Despair and his ways. He knew what it was like to be locked in Doubting Castle, to wrestle with self-destructive thoughts, to take the severe beatings of Despair over and over again to the point of wishing it would all just end. In Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, Bunyan says that for two years he was, as one biographer puts it*, “in the doom of damnation” – ‘I found it a hard work now to pray to God because despair was swallowing me up.’* Giant Despair isn’t the only picture of this consuming sadness; the Slough of Despond at the very beginning of the journey is also a sort of swallowing despair. And the way Christian was released from that was by calling to a man named Help. In both instances, the release is not complicated or mystical. The solutions are simple. Despond is gotten through by calling for Help; Despair is immobilized “in sunshiny weather.” It is only an aside, mentioned twice. Perhaps I am guilty of making more of a detail that I ought to, but I don’t think so. When someone like Bunyan points out that Despond and Despair have points of weakness, I think it’s worth paying attention to.

It is the key of Promise that releases Christian and Hopeful, but it is no accident, no throw away detail, that the Promise of Scripture and the sunshiny-weather-induced fit working together saves them. Nature, while not the Deliverer proper, is indeed a necessary assistant.

Nature as a Companion and Helper through Memory and Poetic Vision

There is the way Nature in memory, lifted out of Nature in Time and transplanted as Nature in Poetic Vision works on us to deliver us from our tendencies toward “pensive moods.” This is the Nature of literature and poetry. A perfect example is Wordsworth’s daffodil poem:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

As Northrop Frye says, “The flowers become poetic flowers as soon as they’re identified with a human mind. Here we have an image from the natural world, a field of daffodils; it’s enclosed inside the human mind, which puts it in the world of the imagination, and the sense of human vision and emotion radiating from the daffodils, so to speak is what gives them their poetic magic.”

I first read Wordsworth’s poem in the 6th grade and was immediately affected, even though I had never seen a field of daffodils in my life. When I lived in York, England 10 years later and finally saw an actual field of daffodils “stretched in never ending line” along the margin of the city walls, I was transfixed. The 

“real” field of daffodils had a poetic quality about them because of that poem. They seemed even more real because I had envisioned them so often. Every daffodil I had ever seen since first reading the poem had an imaginative radiance about it, and that is still true. They are, for me, one of the most beautiful flowers because when I see them, I see the Wordsworthian field.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/allan_harris/

Nature as as God's Messenger

For the Christian, a poetic image connects “the image from the natural world” with a transcendent, eternal reality – not with an Idea of Daffodil-ness, or an eternal Form of the Daffodil, but with the eternal Maker of the daffodils, the God who delights in buttery yellow flowers that have no use beyond their refreshing loveliness. This perspective allows the daffodil to become a living metaphorical stained-glass window, filled with light from beyond and but also itself made more beautiful by the light.

I have experienced the restorative power of Nature too often to deny that it is anything less than a powerful tonic in its own right. And you can’t take too much of it; there is no fear of overdosing or sickening. In fact, usually the more you take, the better it works. 

I think, from the examples of Pilgrim's Progress and The Secret Garden as well as real life experiences, we can draw the conclusion that Nature is a necessary and powerful emotional and mental, and even spiritual, restorative. We need to be in Nature. It is time spent outside, stimulating our senses and looking out of ourselves that restores us to a healthy frame of mind. This does not deify Nature or put too much emphasis on its power to affect us. I’m not sure we can overestimate it’s influence on us. However, because we live in a time of renewed and enthusiastic Paganism, and because before Christ saved me I leant that way myself, I want to end by directing our thought to Nature as not only an assistant to our Deliverer, but a our companion and fellow creature. 

In C.S. Lewis’s book Reflections on the Psalms, in the chapter titled Nature, Lewis talks in general about “the Psalmists’ approach to Nature and how they differ from the majority of ancient writers. He first points out that “what we should now, perhaps, call, ‘appreciation of Nature’ could not then exist – all that part which is really delight in ‘the country’ as a contrast to the town.” Lewis says that “a certain sort of ‘nature poetry’ never existed in the ancient world till really vast cities like Alexandria arose; and, after the fall of ancient civilization, it never existed again until the eighteenth century.” The modern separation of Man from Nature came after (and because of) the Machine Age, when we were able to move far away from farm areas and forget exactly how and where our food comes from. Indeed, the Machine Age now “manufactures” what we call “food” though I doubt people before the Machine Age would recognize it as such. 

Lewis says that in ancient texts, “appreciation of Nature can exist; a delight which is both utilitarian and poetic. Home can enjoy a landscape, but what he means by a beautiful landscape is one that is useful – good deep soil, plenty of fresh water, pasture that will make the cows really fat, and some nice timber.” Appreciation of the things Nature was made to produce, the things that make our lives better, is like appreciating a woman because she is a good mother and a loving wife. She was made to be this kind of woman; not only this – her womanhood is wider than these roles - but this is still part of what makes her appreciable.

The Psalmists, though, says Lewis, are “writing lyrics not romances,” and “naturally give us little landscape. What they do give us, far more sensuously and delightedly than anything I have seen in Greek, is the very feel of weather – weather seen with a real countryman’s eyes, enjoyed almost as a vegetable might be supposed to enjoy it.” As someone on “the inside,” like a member of a family enjoying his household. 

Lewis then points us to the “real significance” of the Jewish doctrine of Creation, of the distinction between Nature and God. He says that, in the ancient texts, “Creation, in an unambiguous sense, seems to be a surprisingly rare doctrine; and when stories about it occur in Paganism, they are often religiously unimportant, not in the least central to the religions in which we find them.” For us, Lewis says, the belief that Nature and God are distinct, “that the One made the other; the One ruled and the other obeyed…is…a platitude.” With the exception of Plato, ancient authors did not seem to think of a doctrine of Creation. Obviously, he says, this is important “from a strictly and obviously religious point of view. But its total consequences, the way in which it changes a man’s whole mind and imagination, might escape us.”

“To say that God created Nature, while it brings God and Nature into relation, also separates them. What makes and what is made must be two, not one. Thus the doctrine of Creation in one sense empties Nature of divinity. …But in another sense the same doctrine which empties Nature of her divinity also makes her an index, a symbol, a manifestation, of the Divine. … It is surely just because the natural objects are no long taken to be themselves Divine that they can now be magnificent symbols of Divinity. …Of course the doctrine of Creation leaves Nature full of manifestations which show the presence of God, and created energies which serve him. … The world is full of his emissaries and executors. 

“All this is of course in one way very close to Paganism. Thor and Zeus also spoke in the thunder; Hermes or Iris was the messenger of the gods. But the difference, though, subtle, is momentous, between hearing in the thunder the voice of God or the voice of a god. …By taking the god’s voice away…you go further. The thunder becomes not less divine but more. By emptying Nature of divinity – or, let us say, of divinities – you may fill her with Deity, for she is now the bearer of messages. There is a sense in which Nature-worship silences her – as if a child or a savage were so impressed with the postman’s uniform that he omitted to take in the letters.”

Perhaps “the most surprising result of all is still to be mentioned. I said that the Jews, like nearly all the ancients, were agricultural and approached Nature with a gardener’s and a farmer’s interest, concerned with rain, with grass ‘for the service of man,’ wine to cheer man up and olive-oil to make his face shine – to make it look, as Homer says somewhere, like a peeled onion (Psalm 104:14 & 15). But we find them led on beyond this. Their gusto, or even gratitude, embraces things that are no use to man. In the great Psalm especially devoted to Nature, from which I have just quoted, we have not only the useful cattle, the cheering vine, and the nourishing corn. We have springs where the wild asses quench their thirst, fir trees for the storks, hill country for the wild goats and ‘conies’ (perhaps marmots) finally even lions; and even with a glance far out sea, where no Jew willingly went, the great whales playing, enjoying themselves. … The Psalmist’s clear objective view…is unusual. And I think it is certainly reached through the idea of God as creator and sustainer of all. … The thought which gives these creatures a place in the Psalmist’s gusto for Nature is surely obvious. They are our fellow-dependents; we all, lions, storks, ravens, whales – live as our fathers said, ‘as God’s charges’ and the mention of all equally redounds to his praise.”

Nature, as our “fellow-creature” and “fellow-dependent” is that “jocund company” we can turn to for help in our Sloughs of Despond or our Doubting Castles. Though it is not itself the Key of Promise, it has the power to disarm Despair long enough to give us a chance of escape. It is Nature in experience, in memory, and in the poetic vison that has the power to do this. What Charlotte Mason said about a child’s education, that it “should furnish him with whole galleries of mental pictures…hanging permanently in the halls of his imagination,” is as true for us as it is for our children. She goes on to say, “Perhaps we might secure at least a hundred lovely landscapes too, -- sunsets, cloudscapes, star-light nights. At any rate he should go forth well furnished because imagination has the property of magical expansion, the more it holds the more it will hold.” To put it in Lewisian terms, the Mind is the Wardrobe, Imagination is the world within, and Nature – like the fur coats, or the springtime, or the ordinary robin – is happy and at home in both.