Mysticism in English Literature Part 4

In the _Recluse_ he records how he deliberately fought, and bent to other uses, a certain wild pa.s.sionate delight he felt in danger, a struggle or victory over a foe, in short, some of the primitive instincts of a strong, healthy animal, feelings which few would regard as reprehensible. These natural instincts, this force and energy, good in themselves, Wordsworth did not crush, but deliberately turned into a higher channel.

At the end of the _Prelude_ he makes his confession of the sins he did not commit.

Never did I, in quest of right and wrong, Tamper with conscience from a private aim; Nor was in any public hope the dupe Of selfish pa.s.sions; nor did ever yield Wilfully to mean cares or low pursuits.

Such a confession, or rather boast, in the mouth of almost any other man would sound hypocritical or self-complacent; but with Wordsworth, we feel it is the bare truth told us for our help and guidance, as being the necessary and preliminary step. It is a high standard which is held up before us, even in this first stage, for it includes, not merely the avoidance of all obvious sins against man and society, but a tuning-up, a trans.m.u.ting of the whole nature to high and n.o.ble endeavour.

Wordsworth found his reward, in a settled state of calm serenity, "consummate happiness," "wide-spreading, steady, calm, contemplative,"

and, as he tells us in the fourth book of the _Prelude_, on one evening during that summer vacation,

Gently did my soul Put off her veil, and, self-trans.m.u.ted, stood Naked, as in the presence of her G.o.d.

When the mind and soul have been prepared, the next step is concentration, aspiration. Then it is borne in upon the poet that in the infinite and in the eternal alone can we find rest, can we find ourselves; and towards this infinitude we must strive with unflagging ardour;

Our destiny, our being's heart and home, Is with infinitude, and only there.

_Prelude_, Book vi. 604.

The result of this aspiration towards the infinite is a quickening of consciousness, upon which follows the attainment of the third or unitive stage, the moment when man can "breathe in worlds to which the heaven of heavens is but a veil," and perceive "the forms whose kingdom is where time and place are not." Such minds--

need not extraordinary calls To rouse them; in a world of life they live, By sensible impressions not enthralled, ... the highest bliss That flesh can know _is theirs_--the consciousness Of Whom they are.

_Prelude_, Book xiv. 105, 113,

Wordsworth possessed in a peculiar degree a mystic sense of infinity, of the boundless, of the opening-out of the world of our normal finite experience into the transcendental; and he had a rare power of putting this into words. It was a feeling which, as he tells us in the _Prelude_ (Book xiii.), he had from earliest childhood, when the disappearing line of the public highway--

Was like an invitation into s.p.a.ce Boundless, or guide into eternity,

a feeling which, applied to man, gives that inspiriting cert.i.tude of boundless growth, when the soul has--

... an obscure sense Of possible sublimity, whereto With growing faculties she doth aspire.

It is at this point, and on this subject, that Wordsworth's poetical and ethical imagination are most nearly fused. This fusion is far from constant with him; and the result is that there are tracts of his writings where the sentiments are excellent, the philosophy illuminating, but the poetry is not great: it does not awaken the "transcendental feeling."[22] The moments when this condition is most fully attained by Wordsworth occur when, by sheer force of poetic imagination combined with spiritual insight, in some mysterious and indescribable way, he flashes upon us a sensation of boundless infinity.

Herein consists the peculiar magic of such a poem as _Stepping Westward_; and there is a touch of the same feeling in the _Solitary Reaper_.

It is hardly necessary to dwell on other mystical elements in Wordsworth, such as his belief in the one law governing all things, "from creeping plant to sovereign man," and the hint of belief in pre-existence in the _Ode on Immortality_. His att.i.tude towards life as a whole is to be found in a few lines in the "after-thought" to the Duddon sonnets.

The Form remains, the Function never dies; While we, the brave, the mighty and the wise, We Men, who in our morn of youth defied The elements, must vanish:--be it so!

Enough, if something from our hands have power To live, and act, and serve the future hour; And if, as toward the silent tomb we go, Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower, We feel that we are greater than we know.

Richard Jefferies is closely akin to Wordsworth in his overpowering consciousness of the life in nature. This consciousness is the strongest force in him, so that at times he is almost submerged by it, and he loses the sense of outward things. In this condition of trance the sense of time vanishes, there is, he a.s.serts, no such thing, no past or future, only now, which is eternity. In _The Story of my Heart_, a rhapsody of mystic experience and aspiration he describes in detail several such moments of exaltation or trance. He seems to be peculiarly sensitive to suns.h.i.+ne. As the moon typifies to Keats the eternal essence in all things, so to Jefferies the sun seems to be the physical expression or symbol of the central Force of the world, and it is through gazing on sunlight that he most often enters into the trance state.

Standing, one summer's morning, in a recess on London Bridge, he looks out on the suns.h.i.+ne "burning on steadfast," "lighting the great heaven; gleaming on my finger-nail."

"I was intensely conscious of it," he writes, "I felt it; I felt the presence of the immense powers of the universe; I felt out into the depths of the ether. So intensely conscious of the sun, the sky, the limitless s.p.a.ce, I felt too in the midst of eternity then, in the midst of the supernatural, among the immortal, and the greatness of the material realised the spirit. By these I saw my soul; by these I knew the supernatural to be more intensely real than the sun. I touched the supernatural, the immortal, there that moment."[23]

When he reaches this state, outer things drop away,[24] and he seems to become lost, and absorbed into the being of the universe. He partakes, momentarily, of a larger, fuller life, he drinks in vitality through nature. The least blade of gra.s.s, he says, or the greatest oak, "seemed like exterior nerves and veins for the conveyance of feeling to me.

Sometimes a very ecstasy of exquisite enjoyment of the entire visible universe filled me."[25]

This great central Life Force, which Jefferies, like Wordsworth, seemed at moments to touch, he, in marked contrast to other mystics, refuses to call G.o.d. For, he says, what we understand by deity is the purest form of mind, and he sees no mind in nature. It is a force without a mind, "more subtle than electricity, but absolutely devoid of consciousness and with no more feeling than the force which lifts the tides."[26] Yet this cannot content him, for later he declares there must be an existence higher than deity, towards which he aspires and presses with the whole force of his being. "Give me," he cries, "to live the deepest soul-life now and always with this 'Highest Soul.'"[27]

This thrilling consciousness of spiritual life felt through nature, coupled with pa.s.sionate aspiration to be absorbed in that larger life, are the two main features of the mysticism of Richard Jefferies.

His books, and especially _The Story of my Heart_, contain, together with the most exquisite nature description, a rich and vivid record of sensation, feeling, and aspiration. But it is a feeling which, though vivifying, can only be expressed in general terms, and it carries with it no vision and no philosophy. It is almost entirely emotional, and it is as an emotional record that it is of value, for Jefferies'

intellectual reflections are, for the most part, curiously contradictory and unconvincing.

The certainty and rapture of this experience of spiritual emotion is all the more amazing when we remember that the record of it was written in agony, when he was wrecked with mortal illness and his nerves were shattered with pain. For with him, as later with Francis Thompson, physical pain and material trouble seemed to serve only to direct him towards and to enhance the glory of the spiritual vision.

Chapter IV

Philosophical Mystics

The mystical sense may be called philosophical in all those writers who present their convictions in a philosophic form calculated to appeal to the intellect as well as to the emotions. These writers, as a rule, though not always, are themselves markedly intellectual, and their primary concern therefore is with truth or wisdom. Thus Donne, William Law, Burke, Coleridge, and Carlyle are all predominantly intellectual, while Traherne, Emily Bronte, and Tennyson clothe their thoughts to some extent in the language of philosophy.

The dominating characteristic of Donne is intellectuality; and this may partly account for the lack in him of some essentialty mystical qualities, more especially reverence, and that ascension of thought so characteristic of Plato and Browning. These shortcomings are very well ill.u.s.trated in that extraordinary poem, _The, Progress of the Soul_. The idea is a mystical one, derived from Pythagorean philosophy, and has great possibilities, which Donne entirely fails to utilise; for, instead of following the soul upwards on its way, he depicts it as merely jumping about from body to body, and we are conscious of an entire lack of any lift or grandeur of thought. This poem helps us to understand how it was that Donne, though so richly endowed with intellectual gifts, yet failed to reach the highest rank as a poet. He was brilliant in particulars, but lacked the epic qualities of breadth, unity, and proportion, characteristics destined to be the distinctive marks of the school of which he is looked upon as the founder.

Apart from this somewhat important defect, Donne's att.i.tude of mind is essentially mystical. This is especially marked in his feeling about the body and natural law, in his treatment of love, and in his conception of woman. The mystic's postulate--if we could know ourselves, we should know all--is often on Donne's lips, as for instance in that curious poem written in memory of Elizabeth Drury, on the second anniversary of her death. It is perhaps best expressed in the following verse:

But we know our selves least; Mere outward shews Our mindes so store, That our soules, no more than our eyes disclose But forme and colour. Onely he who knowes Himselfe, knowes more.

_Ode: Of our Sense of Sinne._

One of the marked characteristics of Donne's poetry is his continual comparison of mental and spiritual with, physical processes. This sense of a.n.a.logy prevailing throughout nature is with him very strong. The mystery of continual flux and change particularly attracts him, as it did the Buddhists[28] and the early Greek thinkers, and Nettles.h.i.+p's remarks about the nature of bread and unselfishness are akin to the following comparison:--

Dost thou love Beauty? (And beauty worthy'st is to move) Poor cousened consener, _that_ she, and _that_ thou, Which did begin to love, are neither now; Next day repaires (but ill) last dayes decay.

Nor are, (although the river keepe the name) Yesterdaies waters, and to-daies the same.

_Of the Progresse of the Soule. The second Anniversarie_, 389-96.

Donne believes firmly in man's potential greatness, and the power within his own soul:

Seeke wee then our selves in our selves; for as Men force the Sunne with much more force to pa.s.se.

By gathering his beames with a chrystall gla.s.se;

So wee, If wee into our selves will turne, Blowing our sparkes of virtue, may out-burne The straw, which doth about our hearts sojourne.

_Letter to Mr Roland Woodward._

And although, in the _Progress of the Soul_, he failed to give expression to it, yet his belief in progress is unquenchable. He fully shares the mystic's view that "man, to get towards Him that's Infinite, must first be great" (_Letter to the Countess of Salisbury_).

In his treatment of love, Donne's mystical att.i.tude is most clearly seen. He holds the Platonic conception, that love concerns the soul only, and is independent of the body, or bodily presence; and he is the poet, who, at his best, expresses this idea in the most dignified and refined way. The reader feels not only that Donne believes it, but that he has in some measure experienced it; whereas with his imitators it degenerated into little more than a fas.h.i.+onable "conceit." The _Undertaking_ expresses the discovery he has made of this higher and deeper kind of love; and in the _Ecstasy_ he describes the union of the souls of two lovers in language which proves his familiarity with the description of ecstasy given by Plotinus (_Enn._ vi. 9, -- 11). The great value of this spiritual love is that it is unaffected by time and s.p.a.ce, a belief which is nowhere more exquisitely expressed than in the refrain of his little song, _Soul's Joy_.[29]

O give no way to griefe, But let beliefe Of mutuall love, This wonder to the vulgar prove Our Bodyes, not wee move.