Page:Psychology and preaching.djvu/368

 350 PSYCHOLOGY AND PREACHING

forest or the solemn grandeur of glens and crags or the wild freedom of the waste of waters; but the loneliness which soon falls like lead upon his aching heart discloses the fact that the predominantly human environment to which he is accustomed has become for him the very breath of life. The intolerable pain of being alone is an interest ing phase of the psychology of the modern city man. City life may afford the conditions for the greatest privacy of certain aspects of the individual and family life ; and a man may be more lonely in a great city than anywhere else, if he be a stranger, but it is, nevertheless, true that the normal city-bred man has become so accustomed to the presence of his fellowmen, his habitual processes of feeling and think ing have been so prevailingly determined by the human en vironment, that loneliness, and especially loneliness in the midst of the wild forms, the vast spaces and the deep silence of primeval nature, is peculiarly oppressive and pro foundly, though vaguely, disturbing.

(2) Out of this very estrangement of man from nature in its primitive, untamed forms arises the aesthetic delight in nature which is so marked a characteristic of the modern mind. As a rule it is not the men who live in daily contact with nature in whom its colours and forms awaken the re sponses which are called aesthetic. Usually it is the man who lives or has been bred in an artificial environment. Under the conditions of life in the early world when men lived in much closer familiarity with hills and streams and forests, with clouds and storms and the glorious panorama of the heavens, there was not the same thrill of joy in look ing upon them as modern men feel. It is most interesting to observe the different feeling for and treatment of nature in the early and later literatures of the world. Of course, in making such broad generalizations it must be remembered that they are relative and approximate only. But in a gen eral way it can be said that nature, simply as nature, is rarely if ever the inspiration of the writer in the early literature. His utterances are likely to be rich, almost riotously rich,

�� �