The Spirit of Place

I

MRS. MEYNELL, in her essay on this subject, did no more than skirt the fringe of it, halting of a sudden, entranced by the sound of bells; forgetting, in her delight in this one expression of the Spirit of Place, the vastness of the territory that lay before her. But it may not have been forgetfulness. Her decision to go no farther was due, more than likely, to her wise woman’s instinct which told her that a little journey may be more profitable than a great one, and that the Spirit of Place is not to be captured in a butterfly net of words.

And yet there is no subject for discussion more fascinating than this: of the subtle, elusive influences which make themselves felt on the smallest island, the greatest continent; on hills and in valleys; in provinces marked off by artificial as well as by natural boundaries where the man-made, imaginary lines seem, often, to delimit some particular province of a spirit of place. There are hierarchies of these spirits — of that I am sure; and, the older I grow, the more convinced I become that, while they rule men by coloring their moods and by quickening and directing their fancies, they are, in turn, ruled by them. Indeed, men have the power of life and death over vast numbers of them. This is a matter of great importance, but not many of us give it even a passing thought.

Mrs. Meynell says: ‘The untraveled spirit of place — not to be pursued, for it never flies, but always to be discovered; never absent, without variation — lurks in the byways and rules over the towers, indestructible, an indescribable unity. It awaits us always in its ancient and eager freshness. It is sweet and vivacious in its immemorial boundaries, but it never crosses them. . . . And if by good fortune it is a child who is the pilgrim, the spirit of place gives him a peculiar welcome, for antiquity and the conceiver of antiquity (who is only a child) know one another; nor is there a more delicate perceiver of locality than a child.’

I wish that I might share her faith in the immortality, the indestructibility, of the Spirit of Place! It would comfort me in many a forlorn experience when I return to old haunts — to some spot I have loved in past years, to find the spirit of it fled, as lost to me as though it had never been. Even a child’s sensitive awareness of the spirit of locality would be baffled in these places, for they have been left untenanted, desolate. If I could believe the small gracious presences still there, hidden only, waiting for the day when they might again reveal themselves in safety, I should be content even though I knew that I should not live to see that day. But I have no such faith. I believe that spirits of place — at least, those that rule tiny kingdoms: some bend of a river, a wooded hollow, a grassy hilltop — can be and are, often, not banished by men, but destroyed. I further believe that there never was a land where they have been swept away more ruthlessly, in hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, than in our own.

Fortunately, the mighty spirits of place — rulers of mountains, the deserts, the plains, the prairies — cannot be destroyed. Man may do his worst, but they abide, as Mrs. Meynell believed the lesser ones do, unchanging and unchangeable. Riding on the L, in Chicago, shut in on all sides by steel and stone and wood, I have been conscious of an influence immeasurably greater than that of the city itself, flowing over it from without, like water flowing over a pebble. The hoarse, myriad-throated voice of that great human ant heap, shouting ‘I will!’ in chorus, has been lost in the silence, the vastness of a presence that says T am!’ So I have found it elsewhere — in Kansas City, El Paso, Denver, Salt Lake City. The great continental spirits of place are not to be conquered. Roads are gashed across their territories, smoke and poisonous gases belched into their skies, filth poured into their lakes and rivers; but they remain — possessors, not the possessed, in their domains.

In New York City, it is true, one is conscious of no mighty influence superior to the works of man. The reason is, I believe, that none existed, even in ancient times. All the Atlantic seaboard seems to have been divided among various lesser spirits, and the territory that is now New York must have been ruled by local ones: one for Long Island, one for Manhattan, one for the lower reaches of the Hudson; and we know of the charming presence that haunted the Catskill Mountains in the days of Washington Irving. I recall no report of it since his day, and it is not to be expected that it could have survived into our own. As for those of Manhattan and Long Island, where could they have fled for refuge? What coign among the rocks has been left for them? They must have perished, both, long since.

II

Our indifference, in America, to the welfare of our spirits of place has cost us dear, and it is the lesser ones above all others that we should have protected, for their services to mankind are of inestimable value. Why is poetry — lyric poetry in particular — all but dead in our day? Why do the poets we have — all but a handful — fashion stuff so obscure that we cannot understand it, or so bleak that we shudder to read it? What other reason is there except one: that we have destroyed in tens of thousands the small spirits of place, who, since time began, have been the friends and inspirers of poets? For centuries the English have guarded theirs, and they still make great efforts to do so. That is why England has always been the fountainhead of lyric poetry; why there is not a corner of the land, unless it be in the vicinity of Manchester, that has not given birth to song.

In America there has been no such wise forethought. Here is a cry from the heart of one of our poets. He calls his lament, ironically, ‘Homo Sapiens and Free’: —

So it is. Mother Earth has all but cast us off, leaving us to our own foolish devices since it seems that we would have it so. We are free with a freedom that makes us long for the ancient gentle tyranny of her sway: for the tyranny of leaves, of grasses, of the worn stones of ancient footpaths; of country roads which she herself marked out for us and made gracious with the fragrance of wild roses and honeysuckle and bright with goldenrod. We are free indeed on our dreary concrete highways, in our Empire State buildings where, over the imposing entrance to each, there might well be inscribed: —

Grandeur in material things we might well have left to Nature. She has enough and to spare for all our needs. Why try to com pete wit h her when we have our own sublime end toward which to labor — grandeur in human character? In our Slow and painful progress toward it we have no need of one-hundred-story buildings to serve as milestones on the journey.

But, to resume, the following is another offering by the same poet, born, like all of his contemporaries, to live through a day when there are few friendly spirits of place to guide him and to enrich his fancy. I know of no more pathetic ‘Pastoral’ than this: —

Graze? They do worse than that: they devour. Not only are they the pitiless, mindless destroyers of the spirits of place, but of the very earth itself. Wherever they go they leave ruin behind them, like so many dinosaurs trampling over fields of flowers.

Is this an exaggeration of the harm they do, these monsters? I don’t believe so. On the contrary, owing to the rapid disappearance of forests and meadow lands, and to t he neglect, for those more profitable, of the crops that bind the soil, erosion is taking place at an alarming rate. The rich top soil is flowing into creeks and rivers, so rapidly in many places that the time when these lands will be waste and all but useless can be accurately foretold. And it is, in large part at least, thanks to the machines which Business thinks, or professes to think, so essential to human welfare that this erosion is taking place. No more here than elsewhere will they consent to work except upon their own terms. What they give with one of their ingenious hands they more than take back with half a dozen others.

III

But it is their destruction of the spirits of place that I am chiefly concerned with here. These small creatures would cling to us, to things human, if we would let them. They would keep our land sweet and wholesome, for them and for us. But when they see a huge gang plough ripping up the soil, or a tractor in a field of young corn, they lose heart and hope. They know, intuitively, that the thing is wrong, that it should not be there. Knowing, further, that men who can make and guide these monsters over the green earth are lost to their help, they either die or flee the land.

And when, along the once beautiful coast of Southern California, men, debased by greed, erect their filthy oil derricks in the sea — even in the sea! — the spirits of place vanish, leaving the land to bleakness and desolation. Small wonder that California has produced not one poet of significance. Where could he go in search of those friendly spirits of Earth — there must have been thousands at one time — who could speak to his heart, scatter about him the pollenating dust that alone is needed to make him articulate?

What of the Middle West? Does the golden dust float in the air over the prairies, the Great Lakes? A little, surely; but it seems not to reach those who deeply want and need it. There is Carl Sandburg to speak of a heavier, gritty dust that clouds the air in many regions; but this is scattered, not by the ancient spirits of place, but by those man has created in their stead.

Thus have these spirits inspired him. One would need to be something more or something less than human to burgeon in that poisonous air. At best the sap would be, in my opinion, oiltainted and scummy, and the flowers, flowers of soot.

It must have been somewhere in that region that a forlorn seeker for the spirit of place, baffled and discouraged, sat down to write the following lines. I can imagine the nature of the landscape that lay before him.

This strain of melancholy, of foreboding, runs through the verse of our day in innumerable threads, sobering the texture of it to a dull gray. One might think, after reading deeply in the modern poets of America, that there never was such a lugubrious band of singers since the birth of Song. And I doubt whether there has been. Not all of them, of course. There have been exceptions hidden away in some secluded valley, or, perhaps as effectively, in the light of thought, which has prevented them from seeing the desolation around them. But for the most part their songs are gray indeed.

It would, therefore, seem time to listen; to give them something more than a passing half-contemptuous hearing, if not for the songs themselves, then to learn their reasons for singing in this monotonous key. It can’t be that they enjoy it. They are forced into it: that is plain.

Here is the lament of yet another — his Song of the Open Road. In a happier age he would not, certainly, have mused in this vein. The filling station near which the lines must have been written is known to all of us, and the old kindly spirit of place that once dwelt in that region, to none, this past generation.

ON A STATE HIGHWAY

One can sympathize with him in this wry mood. It is, indeed, these plagues of beetles that have been, and are, above all others, the remorseless enemies of the spirits of place, hunting them out in the remotest corners of the land. There is not a lane, byway, wood lot, or pasture where they may dwell in safety. Oh, for some Piper — pied or not, so long as his magic was great — who might lead these vast swarms of vermin over the highest cliffs into the deepest sea that laps our coasts! Failing him, we must, somehow, reconcile ourselves to this: never again shall our land be made wholesome by the presence of spirits of place.

Never? That is a word not to be used lightly. And I have a deep-seated faith in humankind which tells me that men are unmindful of their true interests only during certain periods of madness that must run their course before health may be regained. Why should one think that the friends of the spirits of place are few? They must be counted by the tens if not the hundreds of thousands, and it is inconceivable that, having known and loved these spirits in past days, they should be content to live without them at whatever gain in purely material advantage. And Mother Earth is a mighty breeder. Why should she not give birth to others, to replace those we have thoughtlessly destroyed? She might — that is well within the range of possibility; but she would need to be convinced in advance of our friendliness toward them, and of our serious intent to safeguard the places where they might dwell.

IV

The small local spirits are not all dead, even now. They are tenacious of life, and not a few have withstood an incredible amount of ill treatment. They cling to their little provinces as long as these retain a recognizable feature of what they once were. An old gnarled tree, spared destruction, or a shelving grassy bank can shelter them. I know of one that has survived the desecration of a national highway driven straight through the heart of its territory. What saved it was a grassy knoll, left untouched, twenty yards distant. There it sits, on sunny afternoons, but it has not yet learned how to adapt itself to the changed conditions or to make its presence felt by travelers at fifty or sixty miles an hour.

I know of another truly remarkable instance of the survival of an ancient spirit of place in the heart of a city of one hundred thousand inhabitants. I had met there, by chance, an old man whose boyhood had been spent in that region, and I well remember my astonishment when he said, pointing to the site of a twelve-story hotel across the street from where we sat, ‘I used to plough corn there.’ Presently he took me to a small vacant lot in the very heart of the city. It was flanked on one side by a department store, on the other by a sumptuous bank building, and was shut off from the street by a double tier of billboards; but we could peer in from one side.

‘There,’said my companion, ‘is something you may never see again, young man: a piece of the old prairie that was.’

The ground was littered with brick fragments, old bottles, and papers torn from the billboards. Nevertheless, as I glanced in, I was conscious of an influence that did not, certainly, come from the city itself; nor was it a fancied presence. A local spirit of place, immemorially ancient, had survived, unmistakably, despite the city that had grown up around it, encroaching upon its former territory until nothing remained save this small plot of ground open to the sky alone. There it lived, wretchedly enough; but it lived.

Where, I wonder, — in what section of the country, — are its kindred spirits to be found in the greatest numbers? I can speak only of the remnant of those I have known best, in the upland prairie country of Iowa. There a surprising number have survived, and I should imagine that many more might be found among the mountains of Virginia and Tennessee and the lagoons of the Carolina coasts. We find authentic reports of them north of Boston, in Robert Frost’s poems. I can recall no more beautiful tribute paid to the influence of a spirit of place than that to be found in ‘My November Guest.’

How much ease and speed of travel should be considered compensation for all we have lost in destroying the places where such spirits have, in the past, made their presence felt to sensitive observers? And how should one measure the value of such a tribute as this? Perhaps I place too high a value upon mere beauty. The fact remains that I prize this small poem, and I am sure that I should prize the place that inspired it, above any transcontinental highway that might be mentioned, including all of its tributaries, — with its endless lines of beetles, — from coast to coast.

I look forward longingly and somewhat hopefully to the day when, matters of trade and finance having been satisfactorily adjusted, public attention may be turned to the welfare of our spirits of place. Should they be destroyed during the next generation as rapidly as they were in that just past, we shall have none left. A land without them, however rich it be in cities, towns, factories, power stations, filling stations, is no more than a waste and a desolation. Spirits of place, as Shelley knew, are spirits of delight. If, in the future, they come rarely, or never, we shall have only ourselves to blame.