SOULS IN TREES.

Dominion, Volume 3, Issue 841, 13 June 1910, Page 8

SOULS IN TREES.

"THE BLUE BIRD." 'AND THE NEW ZEALAND BUSH. (Br J.Q.X.) Now that Maeterlinck's "Blue Bird" Is obtainable in a cheap edition, it is in order to ask how tho scene in the forest will read among the bush farms of New Zealand. If Tyityl and Mytyl, on tlic turning of tho diamond, could 6eo tho souls of tho trees, may not our| little Bill and Polly, by some inagical. chance, find themselves in similar strange company? And if the ■ Oak, the Beech, and tho Elm would s.vengo themselves on Tyityl for the harm his father, the wood-cutter, has done them, may not tho Totara, the Rinvu, the Matai, and tho Kihikatea try to throw back upon tho headß of bur own youngsters 'the havoc their fathers have wrought upon the bush? If, as the forest scene in "The Blue Bird" prompts us to think, our wide familiar landscapes of stumps and logs, charred black and weathered grey, arc .vast cemeteries of unburied corpses, must wo not fear that tho-' paddocks are haunted by uneasy ghosts, and that tho souls of the yot living trees are .waiting for thoir revenge?

Is this a mere fancy, for idle poets and dreaming children ?' It is that, at least, if not more. Miss Dora Wilcox declares, in serious verse, that the Dead Tree of our own bush "speech fcath and Spirit, though a shadow grey," and that its ghost is not released until tho storm winds have snapped its roots: In some of Miss .■Bright's Now Zealand fairy tales, the kauri, the pukatea, and the rata feel ■and speak very much liko .ourselves. Going back again to the' other side of the world, wo huvo in George Jlacdonald's beautiful "faorie romance," "Phantastes," what is perhaps •the nearest parallel to tho forest scene in "Tho Blue Bird." There the hero, pursued threateningly by tho Ash, '.whose stubby twigs are a hand outstretched to strike or tear, is saved iby .the fair and pitiful woman who is -the Beech. Sparing but a glance at Tennyson's "Talking Oak," and merely noting that the idea of souls in . trees was entertained by Spenser and by Dante when"they told:of errant human beings reincarnated for their sins* in woody growths, we go back to the classic stories of those transformations whereby Daphne, becoming a laurel tree, escaped the amorous Apollo, and the ancient couple, Baucis and Philemon, in reward for their hospitality to gods, were graoited renewal of their lease of life and an old age green Indeed.-; \

To the old Greeks the spirits of the were . not mere poetical fictions. •Buskin's protest against the notion that Homer was .-"merely an ingenious fabulist" probably represents tho.view bow generally accepted. The Greek, feeling instinctively that, there was life in Nature, reasoned' upon his. feeling (according to the author, of "Modern 'Painters"), and declared that humanlike gods were in the rivers and woods.

Chapter after chapter in Frazer's '"Golden Bough" is filled with instances .which prove that the belief in treo spirits was among our renlote ancestors, and still is among uncivilised peoples in every quarter of the globe, a leal belief.

"To the savage, the world in general is animate, and trees are ho exception to -tho rule. Ho thinks that' they have souls like his own and he treats them accordingly. Thus the Wanika in Eastern Africa fancy, that every tree, and especially every coconut tree, has its -spirit;' 'the destruction of a coconut tree is regarded as equivalent to' matricide, because that tree gives them lifeand nourishment as a mother does her. 6hild.' Siamese monks; beliering'that there are souls everywhere, and that to destroy anything whatever is forcibly to dispossess a soul, will not break a branch of a treo, 'as they will not break the arm of an innocent person.' . . . Again, the Dj-aks ascribe souls to trees and do not dare to cut down an old tree. "'ln. • some places, when an old tree has been blown down, they set it up, smear it with blood, and deck . it with,, flags 'to apease the soul of the tree.'"

Frazer insists also that tho popular festivals still celebrated by European .peasants are survivals of the primitive religion of the Aryans. "The great intellectual and moral forces which have revolutionised the educated world nave scarcely affected the peasant. In bis inmost beliefs.he is what his fore> fathers were in the days when forest trees still grew and squirrels played on the ground where Rome and London now stand." Thus, old peasants, in' some parts of Austria, when felling a tree, have been known to beg its pardon. "German woodmen make a cross upon the stump whilo the tree is falling, in the belief that this enables the spirit of the tree to live upon tho stump." It may be gathered from one of Thomas Hardy's novels, "The Woodlanders," that the Dorsetshire peasant. is not exempt 'from the old superstition. The old woodman South is com.plaining on his sick-bed of tho great elm, which he persists in believing will fall upon his cottage and kill him. "'How long has he complained, of the tree?' asked the doctor of Marty. " ' Weeks and weeks, sir. The shape of it seems to haunt him like .an evil spirit. He says that it ,is exactly his own age, that it has got human sense, and sprouted up when he was born on purpose' to rule him, and keep him as its slave. Others have been like it afore in Hintock.' " , .

■ Thus a backward glanco over travelled roads shows that what wemay have regarded, on a first reading, as a strikingly original scene in a most modern play is in reality built upon an idea which has come down to us through poetry, superstition, and religion from the dawn of human intelligence. If we •have any half-belief in such sorrow and anger of tree spirits as moved the Oak to lead the attack upon the woodcutter's children, is it ■ n6t' because tho thoughts of our far-hack ancestors live in us yet? They are with us in all our fancies of clouds that weep, sunbeams that dance, flowers that smile. Wo do not, with the savage and the old Greek, 6eo perfect human forms in the tree and the fountain, hut wo stilj read feelings like our own into matter which in cold reason we describe as inanimate.

Shall we welcome and entertain this reversion to the earlier thought—these tree-souls of the fairy play? Why not? Apart from their rage, which is futile, they are pleasant, queer, homely creatures, quite lacking tho terrors of the old tree gods of our ancestors. "Tho soul of the Elm, for instance, is a sort of pursy, pot-bellied, crabbed gnome: tho Lime-tree is placid, familiar, and jovial; tho Beech, elegant and agile." J3y all means let us have tlicm thus, and, also, each after his kind, tho more serious fellows of our own bush and plantations. And, perliaps, in some rare moment, a pine-treo may mean as much to us as it did to Emerson, and all the voices of forest altars and fairy glades may unite to say through the music of the branches tliat "conscious Law is King of kings," and

"This vault which glows immense with ' light Is tho inn where ho lodges for a night."