Mysticism in English Literature Part 10

The real evil is that we can suffer the need of the crust of bread to exist. This is a view which is gradually beginning to be realised to-day.

Blake is peculiarly daring and original in his use of the mystical method of crystallising a great truth in an apparently trivial fact. We have seen some of these truths in the Proverbs, and the _Auguries of Innocence_ is nothing else but a series of such facts, a storehouse of deepest wisdom. Some of these have the simplicity of nursery rhymes, they combine the direct freshness of the language of the child with the profound truth of the inspired seer.

If the Sun & Moon should Doubt They'd immediately Go Out.

It would scarcely be possible to sum up more completely than does this artless couplet the faith--not only of Blake--but of every mystic.

Simple, ardent, and living, their faith is in truth their life, and the veriest shadow of doubt would be to them a condition of death. They are the only people in the world who are the "possessors of certainty." They have seen, they have felt: what need they of further proof? Logic, philosophy, theology, all alike are but empty sounds and barren forms to those who know.

To Francis Thompson the presence of the Divine in all things is the one overwhelming fact. As a result of this sense, the consciousness that everything is closely related, closely linked together, is ever present in his poetry. It is the vision of this truth, he believes, which will be the revelation of a new heaven and a new earth.

When to the new eyes of thee All things by immortal power, Near or far, Hiddenly To each other linked are, That thou canst not stir a flower Without troubling of a star.

_The Mistress of Vision._

His "Divine intoxication," his certainty of the presence of G.o.d, is the more remarkable when it is realised through what depths of want and degradation and suffering Thompson pa.s.sed, and what his life was for many years. His father, a north-country doctor, wished him to follow the profession of medicine, but the son could not bear it, and so he ran away from home with--for sole wealth--a Blake in one pocket and an Aeschylus in the other. In his struggle for life in London, fragile in body and sensitive in soul, he sank lower and lower, from selling boots to errand-boy, and finally for five years living as a vagabond without home or shelter, picking up a few pence by day, selling matches or fetching cabs, and sleeping under the archways of Covent Garden Market at night. At last, in the very depth of his misery, he was sought out and rescued by the editor of the paper to whom he had sent _Health and Holiness_ and some of his poems. This saved him, his work brought him good friends, and he was enabled to write his wonderful poetry. These terrible experiences, which would have quenched the faith of the ordinary man and led him to despair, with the poet mystic sought expression in those six triumphant verses found among his papers when he died,[82] verses charged with mystic pa.s.sion, which a.s.sert the solid reality of spiritual things, and tell us that to the outcast and the wanderer every place was holy ground, Charing Cross was the gate of heaven, and that he beheld--

Christ walking on the water Not of Gennesareth, but Thames!

Through all that he writes there breathes the spirit of mystic devotion and aspiration, but the following characteristics and beliefs may be specially noted.

(1) His reverence of childhood. He sees in the child something of the divinity which Vaughan and Wordsworth saw, and his poems to children, such as _Daisy_ and _The Poppy_, have a special quality of pa.s.sionate wors.h.i.+p all their own.

(2) His att.i.tude towards the beauty of woman. This is entirely mystical, and is akin to the view of Plato and of Donne. He shares their belief that love is but the power to catch sight of the beauty of the soul, which s.h.i.+nes through and actually moulds the beauty of face and body.

How should I gauge what beauty is her dole, Who cannot see her countenance for her soul, As birds see not the cas.e.m.e.nt for the sky?

And, as 'tis check they prove its presence by, I know not of her body till I find My flight debarred the heaven of her mind.

_Her Portrait._

(3) His attraction towards the continual change and renewal of nature, not only of the movement of life to death, but of death to life. He broods over the changing cycles of the year, winter and spring, decay and re-birth, and he sees in them a profound and far-reaching symbolism.

This is magnificently expressed in the _Ode to the Setting Sun_, where he paints a picture, unmatched in English verse, of the sun sinking to rest amid the splendours gathered round him in his fall. The poem is charged with mystic symbolism, the main thought of which is that human life, ending apparently in death, is but the prelude of preparation for a more glorious day of spiritual re-birth.

For birth hath in itself the germ of death, But death hath in itself the germ of birth.

It is the falling acorn buds the tree, The falling rain that bears the greenery, The fern-plants moulder when the ferns arise.

For there is nothing lives but something dies, And there is nothing dies but something lives.

But Francis Thompson's most entirely mystical utterance is the famous Ode--_The Hound of Heaven_--where he pictures with a terrible vividness and in phrase of haunting music the old mystic idea of the Love chase.[83] It is the idea expressed by Plotinus when he says, "G.o.d ...

is present with all things, though they are ignorant that He is so. For they fly from Him, or rather from themselves. They are unable, therefore, to apprehend that from which they fly" (_Ennead_, vi. -- 7).

We see the spirit of man fleeing in terror "down the nights and down the days" before the persistent footsteps of his "tremendous Lover," until, beaten and exhausted, he finds himself at the end of the chase face to face with G.o.d, and he realises there is for him no escape and no hiding-place save in the arms of G.o.d Himself.

The voices of the English poets and writers form but one note in a mighty chorus of witnesses whose testimony it is impossible for any thoughtful person to ignore. Undoubtedly, in the case of some mystics, there has been great disturbance both of the psychic and physical nature, but on this account to disqualify the statements of Plotinus, St Augustine, Eckhart, Catherine of Siena, Catherine of Genoa, Blake, and Wordsworth, would seem a.n.a.logous to Macaulay's view that "perhaps no person can be a poet, or can even enjoy poetry without a certain unsoundness of mind." Our opinion about this must depend on what we mean by "soundness of mind." To some it may appear possible that the mystics and poets are as sound as their critics. In any case, the unprejudiced person to-day would seem driven to the conclusion that these people, who are, many of them, exceptionally great, intellectually and morally, are telling us of a genuine experience which has transformed life for them.

What, then, is the meaning of this experience? What explanation can we give of this puzzling and persistent factor in human life and history?

These are not easy questions to answer, and only a bare hint of lines of solution dare be offered.

It is of interest to note that the last word in science and philosophy tends to reinforce and even to explain the position of the mystic. The latest of European philosophers, M. Bergson, builds up on a mystical basis the whole of his method of thought, that is, on his perception of the simple fact that true duration, the real time-flow, is known to us by a state of feeling which he calls intuition, and not by an intellectual act.

He says something like this. We find as a matter of practice that certain problems when presented to the intellect are difficult and even impossible to solve, whereas when presented to our experience of life, their solution is so obvious that they cease to be problems. Thus, the unaided intellect might be puzzled to say how sounds can grow more alike by continuing to grow more different. Yet a child can answer the question by sounding an octave on the piano. But this solution is reached by having sensible knowledge of the reality and not by logical argument. Bergson's view, therefore, is that the intellect has been evolved for practical purposes, to deal in a certain way with material things by cutting up into little bits what is an undivided flow of movement, and by looking at these little bits side by side. This, though necessary for practical life, is utterly misleading when we a.s.sume that the "points" thus singled out by the intellect represent the "thickness"

of reality. Reality is fluidity, and we cannot dip up its substance with the intellect which deals with surfaces, even as we cannot dip up water with a net, however finely meshed. Reality is movement, and movement is the one thing we are unable intellectually to realise.

In order to grasp reality we must use the faculty of contact or immediate feeling, or, as Bergson calls it, intuition. Intuition is a different order of knowledge, it is moulded on the very form of life, and it enables us to enter into life, to be one with it, to live it. It is "a direction of movement: and, although capable of infinite development, is simplicity itself." This is the mystic art, which in its early stages is a direction of movement, an alteration of the quality and intensity of the self. So Bergson, making use of and applying the whole range of modern psychology and biology, tells us that we must develop intuition as a philosophical instrument if we are to gain any knowledge of things in themselves; and he is thus re-echoing in modern terms what was long ago stated by Plotinus when he said--

Knowledge has three degrees--opinion, science, illumination. The means or instrument of the first is sense, of the second dialectic, of the third intuition. To the last I subordinate reason. It is absolute knowledge founded on the ident.i.ty of the mind knowing with the object known. (_Letter to Flaccus._)

We have discovered that sense knowledge, however acute, has to be corrected by the intellect, which tells us that the sun does not go round the earth, although it appears to our observation to do this. So possibly, in turn, the intellect, however acute, may have to be corrected by intuition, and the impotence of brain knowledge in dealing with the problem of life is leading slowly to the perception that to _know_ in its true sense is not an intellectual process at all.

Further, in Bergson's theory of the nature of mind, and in his theory of rhythm, he seems to indicate the lines of a technical explanation of some part of the mystic experience.[84] The soul, or the total psychic and mental life of man, he says, is far greater than the little bit of consciousness of which we are normally aware, and the brain acts as a sheath or screen, which allows only a point of this mental life to touch reality. The brain or the cerebral life is therefore to the whole mental life as the point of a knife is to the knife itself. It limits the field of vision, it cuts in one direction only, it puts blinkers on the mind, forcing it to concentrate on a limited range of facts. It is conceivable that what happens with the mystics is that their mental blinkers become slightly s.h.i.+fted, and they are thus able to respond to another aspect or order of reality. So that they are swept by emotions and invaded by harmonies from which the average man is screened. Life having for them somewhat changed in direction, the brain is forced to learn new movements, to cut along fresh channels, and thus to receive sensations which do not directly minister to the needs of physical life. "Our knowledge of things," says Bergson, "derives its form from our bodily functions and lower needs. By unmaking that which these needs have made, we may restore to Intuition its original purity, and so recover contact with the Real." It is possibly this very unmaking and remaking, this readjustment which we see at work in the lives of the great mystics, and which naturally causes great psychic and even physical disturbances.

Bergson's theory of rhythm is peculiarly illuminating in this connection. The intellect, he says, is like a cinematograph. Moving at a certain pace, it takes certain views, snapshots of the continuous flux of reality, of which it is itself a moving part. The special views that it picks out and registers, depend entirely upon the relation between its movement and the rhythm or movement of other aspects of the flux. It is obvious that there are a variety of rhythms or tensions of duration.

For example, in what is the fraction of a second of our own duration, hundreds of millions of vibrations, which it would need thousands of our years to count, are taking place successively in matter, and giving us the sensation of light. It is therefore clear that there is a great difference between the rhythm of our own duration and the incredibly rapid rhythms of physical matter. If an alteration took place in our rhythm, these same physical movements would make us conscious--not of light--but of some other thing quite unknown.

"Would not the whole of history," asks Bergson, "be contained in a very short time for a consciousness at a higher degree of tension than our own?" A momentary quickening of rhythm might thus account for the sensation of timelessness, of the "partic.i.p.ation in Eternity" so often described by the mystic as a part of the Vision of G.o.d.

Again, Bergson points out that there is nothing but movement; that the idea of _rest_ is an illusion, produced when we and the thing we are looking at are moving at the same speed, as when two railway trains run side by side in the same direction. Here, once more, may not the mystic sensation of "stillness," of being at one with the central Life, be owing to some change having taken place in the spiritual rhythm of the seer, approximating it to that of the Reality which he is thus enabled to perceive, so that the fretful movement of the individual mind becomes merged in the wider flow of the whole, and both seem to be at rest?

Thus, the most recent philosophy throws light on the most ancient mystic teaching, and both point to the conclusion that our normal waking consciousness is but one special type of many other forms of consciousness, by which we are surrounded, but from which we are, most of us, physically and psychically screened. We know that the consciousness of the individual self was a late development in the race; it is at least possible that the attainment of the consciousness that this individual self forms part of a larger Whole, may prove to be yet another step forward in the evolution of the human spirit. If this be so, the mystics would appear to be those who, living with an intensity greater than their fellows, are thus enabled to catch the first gleams of the realisation of a greater self. In any case, it would seem certain, judging from their testimony, that it is possible, by applying a certain stimulus, to gain knowledge of another order of consciousness of a rare and vivifying quality. Those who have attained to this knowledge all record that it must be felt to be understood, but that, so far as words are of use, it is ever of the nature of a reconciliation; of discord blending into harmony, of difference merging into unity.

Bibliography

NOTE.--The literature on mysticism is growing very large, and the following is only a small selection from the general works on it. In the case of individual writers, references are given only where there might be difficulty about editions. Thus no references are given to the works of Burke, Carlyle, Wordsworth, Sh.e.l.ley, Tennyson, Browning, etc.

General

Underhill, Evelyn. _Mysticism_, Methuen, 1911. (See the valuable Bibliography of mystical works, pp. 563-585.) _The Mystic Way_, Dent, 1913.

Jones, Rufus M. _Studies in Mystical Religion_, Macmillan, 1909.

James, William. _The Varieties of Religious Experience_, Longmans Green, 1905.

Inge, W. R. _Christian Mysticism_, Methuen, 1899. _Studies of English Mystics_, Murray, 1905. _Light, Life and Love._ Selections from the German mystics. With Introduction. Methuen, 1904.

Hugel, Baron F. von. _The Mystical Element in Religion_, 2 vols.. Dent, 1909.

Delacroix, H. _etudes d'Histoire et de Psychologie du Mysticisme_, Paris, 1908.

Recejac, E. _Essai sur les fondements de la Connaissance Mystique_, Paris, 1897 (translated by S. C. Upton, London, 1899).

Gregory, Eleanor C. _A Little Book of Heavenly Wisdom._ Selections from some English prose mystics, with Introduction. Methuen, 1902.