interests were bounded by her family, the old servant Tabby, the dogs, and the moors. For the greater part of her thirty years of life she did the work of a servant in the little parsonage house on the edge of the graveyard. She can have read little of philosophy or metaphysics, and probably had never heard of the mystics; she was brought up in a narrow, crude, and harshly material creed; yet her own inner experience, her touch with the secret of life, enabled her to write the remarkable series of poems the peculiar and haunting quality of which has as yet scarcely been recognised. They are strong and free and certain, hampered by no dogma, weighted by no explanation, but containing–in the simplest language–the record of the experience and the vision of a soul. Emily Brontë lived remote, unapproachable, self-sufficing and entirely detached, yet consumed with a fierce, unquenchable love of life and of nature, of the life which withheld from her all the gifts most prized of men, love, friendship, experience, recognition, fame; and of the nature which she knew only on a circumscribed space of the wild Yorkshire moors.
In her poems her mysticism is seen principally in two ways: in her unerring apprehension of values, of the illusory quality of material things, even of the nature she so loved, together with the certain vision of the one Reality behind all forms. This, and her description of ecstasy, of the all-sufficing joy of the inner life of one who has tasted this experience, mark her out as being among those who have seen, and who know. In _The Prisoner_, the speaker, a woman, is “confined in triple walls,” yet in spite of bolts and bars and dungeon gloom she holds within herself an inextinguishable joy and unmeasured freedom brought to her every night by a “messenger.”
He comes with western winds, with evening’s wandering airs, With that clear dusk of heaven that brings the thickest stars. Winds take a pensive tone, and stars a tender fire, And visions rise, and change, that kill me with desire.
* * * * *
But, first, a hush of peace–a soundless calm descends; The struggle of distress, and fierce impatience ends; Mute music soothes my breast–unuttered harmony, That I could never dream, till Earth was lost to me.
Then dawns the Invisible; the Unseen its truth reveals; My outward sense is gone, my inward essence feels: Its wings are almost free–its home, its harbour found, Measuring the gulf, it stoops and dares the final bound.
Oh! dreadful is the check–intense the agony– When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see; When the pulse begins to throb, the brain to think again; The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.
This is the description–always unmistakable–of the supreme mystic experience, the joy of the outward flight, the pain of the return, and it could only have been written by one who in some measure had knowledge of it. This, together with the exquisite little poem _The Visionary_, which describes a similar experience, and _The Philosopher_, stand apart as expressions of spiritual vision, and are among the most perfect mystic poems in English.
Her realisation of the meaning of common things, her knowledge that they hold the secret of the universe, and her crystallisation of this in verse, place her with Blake and Wordsworth.
What have those lonely mountains worth revealing? More glory and more grief than I can tell: The earth that wakes one human heart to feeling Can centre both the worlds of Heaven and Hell.
And finally, the sense of continuous life–one central, all-sustaining Life–of the oneness of God and man, has never been more nobly expressed than in what is her best-known poem, the last lines she ever wrote:–
O God within my breast,
Almighty, ever-present Deity!
Life–that in me has rest,
As I–undying Life–have power in Thee!
* * * * *
With wide-embracing love
Thy spirit animates eternal years, Pervades and broods above,
Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates, and rears.
Though earth and man were gone,
And suns and universes ceased to be, And Thou wert left alone,
Every existence would exist in Thee.
Tennyson differs widely from the other poets whom we are considering in this connection. He was not born with the mystical temperament, but, on the contrary, he had a long and bitter struggle with his own doubts and questionings before he wrested from them peace. There is nothing of mystic calm or strength in the lines–
Oh, yet we trust that somehow good
Will be the final goal of ill.
He has no mystic rapture in Nature like Wordsworth,
I found Him not in world or sun
Or eagle’s wing, or insect’s eye;
no mystic interpretation of life as had Browning, no yearning for union with the spirit of love and beauty as had Shelley. Tennyson’s mysticism came, as it were, rather in spite of himself, and is based on one thing only–experience. He states his position quite clearly in _In Memoriam_, cxxiv. As is well known, he had from time to time a certain peculiar experience, which he describes fully both in prose and verse, a touch at intervals throughout his life of “ecstasy,” and it was on this he based his deepest belief. He has left several prose accounts of this mental state, which often came to him through repeating his own name silently,
till all at once, as it wore, out of the intensity of the consciousness of individuality, the individuality itself seemed to resolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the surest of the surest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality (if so it were) seeming no extinction, but the only true life[33]
It is a somewhat similar experience which is described in _In Memoriam_, xcv.
And all at once it seem’d at last
The living soul was flash’d on mine, And mine in this was wound, and whirl’d About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is, and caught The deep pulsations of the world.
And again in the conclusion of the _Holy Grail_–
Let visions of the night or of the day Come, as they will; and many a time they come, Until this earth he walks on seems not earth, This light that strikes his eyeball is not light, This air that strikes his forehead is not air But vision–yea, his very hand and foot– In moments when he feels he cannot die, And knows himself no vision to himself, Nor the high God a A vision, nor that One Who rose again.
“These three lines,” said Tennyson, speaking of the last three quoted, “are the (spiritually) central lines in the Idylls.” They are also the central lines in his own philosophy, for it was the experience of this “vision” that inspired all his deepest convictions with regard to the unity of all things, the reality of the unseen, and the persistence of life.
The belief in the impotence of intellectual knowledge is very closely connected, it is indeed based, upon these “gleams” of ecstasy. The prologue to _In Memoriam_ (written when the poem was completed) seems to sum up his faith after many years of struggle and doubt; but it is in the most philosophical as well as one of the latest, of his poems, _The Ancient Sage_, that we find this attitude most fully expressed. Tennyson wrote of it: “The whole poem is very personal. The passages about ‘Faith’ and ‘the Passion of the Past’ were more especially my own personal feelings.” Through the mouth of the Sage, the poet declares in impassioned words the position of the mystic, and points out the impotence of sense-knowledge in dealing with that which is beyond either the senses or the reason:
For Knowledge is the swallow on the lake That sees and stirs the surface-shadow there But never yet hath dipt into the abysm.
Tennyson, like Wordsworth, emphasises the truth that the only way in which man can gain real knowledge and hear the “Nameless” is by diving or sinking into the centre of his own being. There is a great deal of Eastern philosophy and mysticism in the _Ancient Sage_, as, for instance, the feeling of the unity of all existence to the point of merging the personality into the universal.
But that one ripple on the boundless deep Feels that the deep is boundless, and itself For ever changing form, but evermore
One with the boundless motion of the deep.
We know that Tennyson had been studying the philosophy of Lâo-Tsze about this time; yet, though this is, as it were, grafted on to the poet’s mind, still we may take it as being his genuine and deepest conviction. The nearest approach to a definite statement of it to be found in his poems is in the few stanzas called _The Higher Pantheism_, which he sent to be read at the first meeting of the Metaphysical Society in 1869.
Speak to Him thou for He hears, and Spirit with Spirit can meet– Closer is He than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet.
* * * * *
And the ear of man cannot hear, and the eye of man cannot see; But if we could see and hear, this Vision–were it not He?
In William Law, Burke, Coleridge, and Carlyle, we have a succession of great English prose-writers whose work and thought is permeated by a mystical philosophy. Of these four, Law is, during his later life, by far the most consistently and predominantly mystical.
As has been indicated, there were many strains of influence which in the seventeenth century tended to foster mystical thought in England. The group of Cambridge Platonists, to which Henry More belonged, gave new expression to the great Neo-platonic ideas, but in addition to this a strong vein of mysticism had been kept alive in Amsterdam, where the exiled Separatists had gone in 1593. They flourished there and waxed strong, and sent back to England during the next century a continual stream of opinion and literature. To this source can be traced the ideas which inspired alike the Quakers, the Seekers, the Behmenists, the Familists, and numberless other sects who all embodied a reaction against forms and ceremonies, which, in ceasing to be understood, had become lifeless. These sects were, up to a certain point, mystical in thought, for they all believed in the “inner light,” in the immediate revelation of God within the soul as the all-important experience.
The persecutions of the Quakers under Charles II. tended to withdraw them from active philanthropy, and to throw them more in the direction of a personal and contemplative religion. It was then that the writings of Madame Bourignon, Madame Guyon, and Fénelon became popular, and were much read among a certain section of thinkers, while the influence of the teachings of Jacob Boehme, whose works had been translated into English between the years 1644 and 1692, can be traced, in diverse ways. They impressed themselves on the thought of the founders of the Society of Friends, they produced a distinct “Behmenist” sect, and it would seem that the idea of the three laws of motion first reached Newton through his eager study of Boehme. But all this has nothing directly to do with literature, and would not concern us here were it not that in the eighteenth century William Law came into touch with many of these mystical thinkers, and that he has embodied in some of the finest prose in our language a portion of the “inspired cobbler’s” vision of the universe.
Law’s character is one of considerable interest. Typically English, and in intellect typically of the eighteenth century, logical, sane, practical, he is not, at first sight, the man one would expect to find in sympathy with the mystics. Sincerity is the keynote of his whole nature, sincerity of thought, of belief, of speech, and of life. Sincerity implies courage, and Law was a brave man, never shirking the logical outcome of his convictions, from the day when he ruined his prospects at Cambridge, to the later years when he suffered his really considerable reputation to be eclipsed by his espousal of an uncomprehended and unpopular mysticism. He had a keen rather than a profound intellect, and his thought is lightened by brilliant flashes of wit or of grim satire. We can tell, however, from his letters and his later writings, that underneath a severe and slightly stiff exterior, were hidden emotion, enthusiasm, and great tenderness of feeling.
By middle life Law was well known as a most able and brilliant writer on most of the burning theological questions of the day, as well as the author of one of the best loved and most widely read practical and ethical treatises in the language, _A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life_. These earlier writings are by far the best known of his works, and it is with the _Serious Call_ that his name will always be associated.
Until middle age he showed no marked mystical tendency, although we know that from the time he was an undergraduate he was a “diligent reader” of mystical books, and that he had studied, among others, Dionysius the Areopagite, Ruysbroek, Tauler, Suso, and the seventeenth century Quietists, Fénelon, Madame Guyon, and Antoinette Bourignon.
When, however, he was about forty-six (c. 1733), he came across the writings of the seer who set his whole nature aglow with spiritual fervour, so that when he first read his works they put him into “a perfect sweat.” Jacob Boehme–or Behmen, as he has usually been called in England–(1575-1624), the illiterate and untrained peasant shoemaker of Görlitz, is one of the most amazing phenomena in the history of mysticism, a history which does not lack wonders. His work has so much influenced later mystical thought and philosophy that a little space must be devoted to him here. He lived outwardly the quiet, hard-working life of a simple German peasant, but inwardly–like his fellow-seer Blake–he lived in a glory of illumination, which by flashes revealed to him the mysteries and splendours he tries in broken and faltering words to record. He saw with the eye of his mind into the heart of things, and he wrote down as much of it as he could express.
The older mystics–eastern and western alike–had laid stress on unity as seen in the nature of God and all things. No one more fully believed in ultimate unity than did Boehme, but he lays peculiar stress on the duality, or more accurately, the trinity in unity; and the central point of his philosophy is the fundamental postulate that all manifestation necessitates opposition. He asserted the uniformity of law throughout all existence, physical and spiritual, and this law, which applies all through nature, divine and human alike, is that nothing can reveal itself without resistance, good can only be known through evil, and weakness through strength, just as light is only visible when reflected by a dark body.
Thus when God, the Triune Principle, or _Will_ under three aspects, desires to become manifest, He divides the Will into two, the “yes” and the “no,” and so founds an eternal contrast to Himself out of His own hidden Nature, in order to enter into struggle with it, and finally to discipline and assimilate it. The object of all manifested nature is the transforming of the will which says “No” into the will which says “Yes,” and this is brought about by seven organising spirits or forms. The first three of these bring nature out of the dark element to the point where contact with the light is possible. Boehme calls them harshness, attraction, and anguish, which in modern terms are contraction, expansion, and rotation. The first two are in deadly antagonism, and being forced into collision, form an endless whirl of movement. These two forces with their resultant effect are to be found all through manifested nature, within man and without, and are called by different names: good, evil and life, God, the devil and the world, homogeneity, heterogeneity, strain, or the three laws of motion, centripetal and centrifugal force, resulting in rotation. They are the outcome of the “nature” or “no” will, and are the basis of all manifestation. They are the “power” of God, apart from the “love,” hence their conflict is terrible. When spirit and nature approach and meet, from the shock a new form is liberated, lightning or fire, which is the fourth moment or essence. With the lightning ends the development of the negative triad, and the evolution of the three higher forms then begins; Boehme calls them light or love, sound and substance; they are of the spirit, and in them contraction, expansion, and rotation are repeated in a new sense. The first three forms give the stuff or strength of being, the last three manifest the quality of being good or bad, and evolution can proceed in either direction.
The practical and ethical result of this living unity of nature is the side which most attracted Law, and it is one which is as simple to state as it is difficult to apply. Boehme’s philosophy is one which can only be apprehended by living it. Will, or desire, is the radical force in man as it is in nature and in the Godhead, and until that is turned towards the light, any purely historical or intellectual knowledge of these things is as useless as if hydrogen were to expect to become water by study of the qualities of oxygen, whereas what is needed is the actual union of the elements.
The two most important of Law’s mystical treatises are _An Appeal to all that Doubt_, 1740, and _The Way to Divine Knowledge_, 1752. The first of these should be read by any one desirous of knowing Law’s later thought, for it is a clear and fine exposition of his attitude with regard more especially to the nature of man, the unity of all nature, and the quality of fire or desire. The later book is really an account of the main principles of Boehme, with a warning as to the right way to apply them, and it was written as an introduction to the new edition of Boehme’s works which Law contemplated publishing.
The following is the aspect of Boehme’s teaching which Law most consistently emphasises.
Man was made out of the Breath of God; his soul is a spark of the Deity. It therefore cannot die, for it “has the Unbeginning, Unending Life of God in it.” Man has fallen from his high estate through ignorance and inexperience, through seeking separation, taking the part for the whole, desiring the knowledge of good and evil as separate things. The assertion of self is thus the root of all evil; for as soon as the will of man “turns to itself, and would, as it were, have a Sound of its own, it breaks off from the divine harmony, and falls into the misery of its own discord.” For it is the state of our will that makes the state of our life. Hence, by the “fall,” man’s standpoint has been dislocated from centre to circumference, and he lives in a false imagination. Every quality is equally good, for there is nothing evil in God from whom all comes; but evil appears to be through separation. Thus strength and desire in the divine nature are necessary and magnificent qualities, but when, as in the creature, they are separated from love, they appear as evil.[34] The analogy of the fruit is, in this connection a favourite one with both Law and Boehme. When a fruit is unripe (i.e. incomplete) it is sour, bitter, astringent, unwholesome; but when it has been longer exposed to the sun and air it becomes sweet, luscious, and good to eat. Yet it is the same fruit, and the astringent qualities are not lost or destroyed, but transmuted and enriched, and are thus the main cause of its goodness.[35] The only way to pass from this condition of “bitterness” to ripeness, from this false imagination to the true one, is the way of death. We must die to what we are before we can be born anew; we must die to the things of this world to which we cling, and for which we desire and hope, and we must turn towards God. This should be the daily, hourly exercise of the mind, until the whole turn and bent of our spirit “points as constantly to God as the needle touched with the loadstone does to the north.”[36] To be alive in God, before you are dead to your own nature, is “a thing as impossible in itself, as for a grain of wheat to be alive before it dies.”
The root of all, then, is the will or desire. This realisation of the momentous quality of the will is the secret of every religious mystic, the hunger of the soul, as Law calls it, is the first necessity, and all else will follow.[37] It is the seed of everything that can grow in us; “it is the only workman in nature, and everything is its work;” it is the true magic power. And this will or desire is always active; every man’s life is a continual state of prayer, and if we are not praying for the things of God, we are praying for _something else_.[38] For prayer is but the desire of the soul. Our imaginations and desires are, therefore, the greatest realities we have, and we should look closely to what they are.[39]
It is essential to the understanding of Law, as of Boehme, to remember his belief in the reality and actuality of the oneness of nature and of law.[40] Nature is God’s great Book of Revelation, for it is nothing else but God’s own outward manifestation of what He inwardly is, and can do…. The mysteries of religion, therefore, are no higher, nor deeper than the mysteries of nature.[41] God Himself is subject to this law. There is no question of God’s mercy or of His wrath,[42] for it is an eternal principle that we can only receive what we are capable of receiving; and to ask why one person gains no help from the mercy and goodness of God while another does gain help is “like asking why the refreshing dew of heaven does not do that to the flint which it does to the vegetable plant.”[43]
Self-denial, or mortification of the flesh is not a thing imposed upon us by the mere will of God: considered in themselves they have nothing of goodness or holiness, but they have their ground and reason in the nature of the thing, and are as “absolutely necessary to make way for the new birth, as the death of the husk and gross part of the grain is necessary to make way for its vegetable life.”[44]
These views are clear enough, but the more mystical ones, such as those which Law and Boehme held, for instance, about fire, can only be understood in the light of this living unity throughout nature, humanity, and divinity.
“Everything in temporal Nature,” says Law, “is descended out of that which is eternal, and stands as a palpable, visible Outbirth of it: … Fire and Light and Air in this World are not only a true Resemblance of the Holy Trinity in Unity, but are the Trinity itself in its most outward, lowest kind of Existence or Manifestation…. Fire compacted, created, separated from Light and Air, is the Elemental Fire of this World: Fire uncreated, uncompacted, unseparated from Light and Air, is the heavenly Fire of Eternity: Fire kindled in any material Thing is only Fire breaking out of its created, compacted state; it is nothing else but the awakening the Spiritual Properties of that Thing, which being thus stirred up, strive to get rid of that material Creation under which they are imprisoned … and were not these spiritual Properties imprisoned in Matter, no material Thing could be made to burn…. Fire is not, cannot be a material Thing, it only makes itself visible and sensible by the Destruction of Matter.”[45] “If you ask what Fire is in its first true and unbeginning State, not yet entered into any Creature, It is the Power and Strength, the Glory and Majesty of eternal Nature…. If you ask what Fire is in its own spiritual Nature, it is merely a _Desire_, and has no other Nature than that of a _working Desire_, which is continually its _own Kindler_.” [46]
All life is a kindled fire in a variety of states, and every dead, insensitive thing is only dead because its fire is quenched or compressed, as in the case of a flint, which is in a state of death “because its fire is bound, compacted, shut up and imprisoned,” but a steel struck against it, shows that every particle of the flint consists of this compacted fire.
But even as, throughout all nature, a state of death is an imprisoned fire, so throughout all nature is there only one way of kindling life. You might as well write the word “flame” on the outside of a flint and expect it to emit sparks as to imagine that any speculations of your reason will kindle divine life in your soul.
No; Would you have Fire from a Flint; its House of Death must be shaken, and its Chains of Darkness broken off by the Strokes of a Steel upon it. This must of all Necessity be done to your Soul, its imprisoned Fire must be awakened by the sharp Strokes of Steel, or no true Light of Life can arise in it.[2]
All life, whether physical or spiritual, means a death to some previous condition, and must be generated in pain. 6 1: _An Appeal, Works_, vol. vi. pp. 166. 2 _Ibid._, p, 82.
If this mystical view of Fire be clear, it will be easy enough to follow what Law says about Light and Darkness, or Air, Water, and Earth, interpreting them all in the same way as “eternal Things become gross, finite, measurable, divisible, and transitory.”[47]
_The Spirit of Prayer_ is of all Law’s works the one most steeped in mystic ardour, and it possesses a charm, a melody of rhythm, and an imaginative quality rarely to be found in his earlier work. It should be read by those who would see Law under a little known aspect, and who do not realise that we have an English mystic who expresses, with a strength and beauty which Plotinus himself has rarely surpassed, the longing of the soul for union with the Divine.
Burke, Coleridge, and Carlyle are three very different writers who are alike in the mystical foundations of their belief, and who, through their writings, for over a hundred years in England carry on the mystical attitude and diffuse much mystical thought.
Burke, the greatest and most philosophic of English statesmen, was so largely because of his mystic spirit and imagination. Much of the greatness of his political pamphlets and speeches and of their enduring value is owing to the fact that his arguments are based on a sense of oneness and continuity, of oneness in the social organism and of continuity in the spirit which animates it. He believes in a life in the Universe, in a divine order, mysterious and inscrutable in origins and in ends, of which man and society are a part.
This society is linked together in mutual service from the lowest to the highest. “Society is indeed a contract,” he says in a memorable passage,
It is a partnership in all science; a partnership in all art; a partnership in every virtue, and in all perfection. As the ends of such a partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primæval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world, according to a fixed compact sanctioned by the inviolable oath which holds all physical and all moral natures, each in their appointed place.
These are strange words for an English statesman to address to the English public in the year 1790; the thought they embody seems more in keeping with its surroundings when we hear it thundered out anew forty years later by the raw Scotch preacher-philosopher in the chapter he calls “Organic Filaments” in his odd but strangely stirring mystical rhapsody, _Sartor Resartus_.
It is on this belief of oneness, this interrelationship and interdependence that all Burke’s deepest practical wisdom is based. It is on this he makes his appeal for high principle and noble example to the great families with hereditary trusts and fortunes, who, he says, he looks on as the great oaks that shade a country and perpetuate their benefits from generation to generation.
This imaginative belief in the reality of a central spiritual life is always accompanied, whether definitely expressed or not, with a belief in the value of particulars, of the individual, as opposed to general statements and abstract philosophy. The mystic, who believes in an inward moulding spirit, necessarily believes that all reforms must come from within, and that, as Burke points out in the _Present Discontents_, good government depends not upon laws but upon individuals. Blake, in a characteristic phrase, says: “He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars; general good is the plea of the hypocrite, flatterer, and scoundrel.” This sums up the essence of the social philosophy of these three thinkers, as seen by Burke’s insistence on the value of concrete details in Coleridge’s use of them in his Lay Sermon, and in Carlyle’s belief in the importance of the single individual life in history.
It is easy to see that Coleridge’s attitude of mind and the main lines of his philosophy were mystical. From early years, as we know from Lamb, he was steeped in the writings of the Neo-platonists and these, together with Boehme, in whom he was much interested, and Schelling, strengthened a type of belief already natural to him.
In spite of his devotion to the doctrines of Hartley, it is clear from his poetry and letters, that Coleridge very early had doubts concerning the adequacy of the intellect as an instrument for arriving at truth, and that at the same time the conviction was slowly gaining ground with him that an act of the will is necessary in order to bring man into contact with reality. Coleridge believed in a Spirit of the universe with which man could come into contact, both directly by desire, and also mediately through the forms and images of nature, and in the _Religious Musings_ (1794) we get very early a statement of this mystical belief.
There is one Mind, one omnipresent Mind Omnific. His most holy name is Love.
From Him–
… we roam unconscious, or with hearts Unfeeling of our universal Sire,
and the greatest thing we can achieve, “our noon-tide majesty,” is–
to know ourselves
Parts and proportions of one wonderous whole!
The way to attain this knowledge is not by a process of reasoning, but by a definite act of will, when the “drowséd soul” begins to feel dim recollections of its nobler nature, and so gradually becomes attracted and absorbed to perfect love–
and centered there
God only to behold, and know, and feel, Till by exclusive consciousness of God All self-annihilated it shall make
God its Identity: God all in all!
This sense of “oneness,” with the desire to reach out to it, was very strong with Coleridge in these earlier years, and he writes to Thelwall in 1797, “The universe itself, what but an immense heap of little things?… My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something _great_, something _one_ and _indivisible_.” He is ever conscious of the symbolic quality of all things by which we are visibly surrounded,
all that meets the bodily sense I deem Symbolical, one mighty alphabet
For infant minds.[48]
To pierce through the outer covering, and realise the truth which they embody, it is necessary to feel as well as to see, and it is the loss of this power of feeling which Coleridge deplores in those bitterly sad lines in the _Dejection Ode_ when he gazes “with how blank an eye” at the starry heavens, and cries,
I see, not feel, how beautiful they are!
It is in this Ode that we find the most complete description in English verse of that particular state of depression and stagnation which often follows on great exaltation, and to which the religious mystics have given the name of the “dark night of the soul.” This is an experience, not common to all mystics, but very marked in some, who, like St John of the Cross and Madame Guyon, are intensely devotional and ecstatic. It seems to be a well-defined condition of listlessness, apathy, and _dryness_, as they call it, not a state of active pain, but of terrible inertia, weariness, and incapacity for feeling; “a wan and heartless mood,” says Coleridge,
A grief without a pang, void, dark, and drear, A stifled, drowsy, unimpassioned grief, Which finds no natural outlet, no relief, In word, or sigh, or tear.
Coleridge’s distrust of the intellect as sole guide, and his belief in some kind of intuitional act being necessary to the apprehension of reality, which he felt as early as 1794, was strengthened by his study of the German transcendental philosophers, and in March 1801 he writes, “My opinion is that deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling; and that all truth is a species of Revelation.”
Coleridge, following Kant, gave the somewhat misleading name of “reason” (as opposed to “understanding”) to the intuitive power by which man apprehends God directly, and, in his view, imagination is the faculty, which in the light of this intuitive reason interprets and unifies the symbols of the natural world. Hence its value, for it alone gives man the key
Of that eternal language, which thy God Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.[49]
Carlyle’s mysticism is the essence of his being, it flames through his amazing medley of writings, it guides his studies and his choice of subjects, it unifies and explains his visions, his thought, and his doctrines. His is a mystical attitude and belief of a perfectly simple and broad kind, including no abstruse subtleties of metaphysical speculation, as with Coleridge, but based on one or two deeply rooted convictions. This position seems to have been reached by him partly through intellectual conflict which found relief and satisfaction in the view of life taken by Goethe, Fichte, and other German “transcendental” thinkers; but partly also through a definite psychical experience which befell him in Edinburgh when he was twenty-six, and which from that day changed for him the whole of his outlook on life. He speaks of it himself as “a Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism.” It came to him after a period of great wretchedness, of torture with doubt and despair, and–what is significant–“during three weeks of total sleeplessness.” These are conditions which would be likely to reduce his body to the state of weakness and sensitiveness which seems often antecedent to psychic experience. He has given an account of the incident in _Sartor_ (Book ii. chap, vii.), when, he says, “there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me for ever. I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a god.” The revelation seems to have been of the nature of a certainty and assertion of his own inherent divinity, his “native God-created majesty,” freedom and potential greatness. This brought with it a characteristic defiance of untoward outer circumstances which gave him strength and resolution. “Perhaps,” he says, “I directly thereupon began to be a man.”
Carlyle believes that the world and everything in it is the expression of one great indivisible Force; that nothing is separate, nothing is dead or lost, but that all “is borne forward on the bottomless shoreless flood of Action, and lives through perpetual metamorphoses.” Everything in the world is an embodiment of this great Force, this “Divine Idea,” hence everything is important and charged with meaning. “Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows, through which the philosophic eye looks into Infinitude itself.”[50]
The universe is thus the “living visible garment of God,” and “matter exists only spiritually,” “to represent some Idea, and _body_ it forth.” We, each of us, are therefore one expression of this central spirit, the only abiding Reality; and so, in turn, everything we know and see is but an envelope or clothing encasing something more vital which is invisible within. Just as books are the most miraculous things men can make, because a book “is the _purest_ embodiment a Thought of man can have,” so great men are the highest embodiment of Divine Thought visible to us here. Great men are, as it were, separate phrases, “inspired texts” of the great book of revelation, perpetually interpreting and unfolding in various ways the Godlike to man (_Hero as Man of Letters_, and _Sartor_, Book ii. chap. viii.).
From this ground-belief spring all Carlyle’s views and aims. Hence his gospel of hero-worship, for the “hero” is the greatest embodied “Idea” a man can know, he is a “living light fountain,” he is “a man sent hither to make the divine mystery more impressively known to us.” Hence it is clear that the first condition of the great man is that he should be sincere, that he should _believe_. “The merit of originality is not novelty: it is sincerity. The believing man is the original man.” It is equally necessary that his admirers should be sincere, they too must believe, and not only, as Coleridge puts it, “believe that they believe.” No more immoral act can be done by a human creature, says Carlyle, than to pretend to believe and worship when he does not.
Hence also springs Carlyle’s doctrine of work. If man is but the material embodiment of a spiritual Idea or Force, then his clear duty is to express that Force within him to the utmost of his power. It is what he is here for, and only so can he bring help and light to his fellow-men.[51] And Carlyle, with Browning, believes that it is not the actual deeds accomplished that matter, no man may judge of these, for “man is the spirit he worked in; not what he did, but what he became.”
Chapter V
Devotional and Religious Mystics
All mystics are devotional and all are religious in the truest sense of the terms. Yet it seems legitimate to group under this special heading those writers whose views are expressed largely in the language of the Christian religion, as is the case with our earliest mystics, with Crashaw and Francis Thompson and it applies in some measure to Blake. But beyond this, it seems, in more general terms, to apply specially to those who are so conscious of God that they seem to live in His presence, and who are chiefly concerned with approaching Him, not by way of Love, Beauty, Wisdom, or Nature, but directly, through purgation and adoration.
This description, it is obvious, though it fits fairly well the other writers here included, by no means suffices for Blake. For he possessed in addition a philosophy, a system, and a profound scheme of the universe revealed to him in vision. But within what category could Blake be imprisoned? He outsoars them all and includes them all. We can only say that the dominant impression he leaves with us that is of his vivid, intimate consciousness of the Divine presence and his attitude of devotion.
We have seen that the earliest mystical thought came into this country by way of the writings of “Dionysius” and of the Victorines (Hugh and Richard of St Victor), and it is this type of thought and belief cast into the mould of the Catholic Church that we find mainly in the little group of early English mystics, whose writings date from the middle of the thirteenth to the beginning of the fifteenth century.[52]
These early Catholic mystics are interesting from a psychological point of view, and they are often subtle exponents of the deepest mystical truths and teachings, and in some cases this is combined with great literary power and beauty.
One of the earliest examples of this thought in English literature is the tender and charming lyric by Thomas de Hales, written probably before 1240. Here is perhaps the first expression in our poetry of passionate yearning of the soul towards Christ as her true lover, and of the joy of mystic union with Him. A maid of Christ, says the poet, has begged him to “wurche a luve ron” (make a love-song), which he does; and points out to her that this world’s love is false and fickle, and that worldly lovers shall pass away like a wind’s blast.
Hwer is Paris and Heleyne
That weren so bright and feyre on bleo: Amadas, Tristram and Dideyne
Yseudé and allé theo:
Ector with his scharpé meyne
And Cesar riche of wor[l]des feo? Heo beoth iglyden ut of the reyne,
So the schef is of the cleo.
As the corn from the hill-side, Paris and Helen and all bright lovers have passed away, and it is as if they had never lived.
But, maid, if you want a lover, he continues, I can direct you to one, the fairest, truest, and richest in the whole world. Henry, King of England, is his vassal, and to thee, maid, this lover sends a message and desires to know thee.
Mayde to the he send his sonde
And wilneth for to beo the cuth.
And so the poem goes on to express in simple terms of earthly love, the passionate delight and joy and peace of the soul in attaining to union with her God, in whose dwelling is perfect bliss and safety.
This poem is a delicate example of what is called “erotic mysticism,” that is the love and attraction of the soul for God, and of God for the soul, expressed in the terms of the love between man and woman. It is a type of expression characteristic of the great mystics of the Catholic Church, especially in the Middle Ages,[53] and we find a good deal of it in our earliest mystical writers. One of the most charming examples of it other than this lyric, is the chapter “Of Love” in the _Ancren Riwle_, or Rule for Anchoresses, written probably early in the thirteenth century. An account is there given, quite unsurpassed for delicate beauty, of the wooing of the soul by God.[54] On the whole, however, this type of mysticism is rare in England, and we scarcely meet it again after these early writers until we come to the poems of Crashaw. The finest expression of it is the Song of Solomon, and it is easy to see that such a form of symbolism is specially liable to degradation, and is open to grave dangers, which it has not always escaped. Yet, in no other terms known to man is it possible so fully to express the sense of insatiable craving and desire as well as the rapture of intimate communion felt by the mystic towards his God, as in the language of that great passion which, in its purest form, is the best thing known to man and his highest glory. “I saw Him, and sought Him, I had Him and I wanted Him.” Could any words more completely express the infinity of love’s desire, ever unsatisfied even in possession, than does this love-cry from the heart of Julian the anchoress of Norwich?
The intensity and freshness of religious feeling of a mystical type in England in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries are often not realised, partly owing to the fact that much of the religious writing of this time is still in manuscript. The country was full of devotees who had taken religious vows, which they fulfilled either in the many monasteries and convents, or often in single cells, as “hermit” or “anchoress.” Here they lived a life devoted to contemplation and prayer, and to the spiritual assistance of those who sought them out.
The hermits, of whom there were a large number, were apparently free to move from one neighbourhood to another, but the woman recluse, or “anchoress,” seldom or never left the walls of her cell, a little house of two or three rooms built generally against the church wall, so that one of her windows could open into the church, and another, veiled by a curtain, looked on to the outer world, where she held converse with and gave counsel to those who came to see her. Sometimes a little group of recluses lived together, like those three sisters of Dorsetshire for whom the _Ancren Riwle_ was written, a treatise which gives us so many homely details of this type of life.
Richard Rolle (_c._ 1300-1349), of Hampole, near Doncaster, and the Lady Julian, a Benedictine nun of Norwich (1342-_c._1413), are the two most interesting examples of the mediæval recluse in England. Both seem to have had a singular charm of character and a purity of mystical devotion which has impressed itself on their writings. Richard Rolle, who entered upon a hermit’s life at nineteen on leaving Oxford, had great influence both through his life and work on the whole group of fourteenth-century religious writers, and so on the thought of mediæval England. His contemporaries thought him mad, they jeered at him and abused him, but he went quietly on his way, preaching and writing. Love forced him to write; love, he said, gave him wisdom and subtlety, and he preached a religion of love. Indeed the whole of his work is a symphony of feeling, a song of Love, and forms a curious reaction against the exaltation of reason and logic in scholasticism. He wrote a large number of treatises and poems, both in Latin and English, lyrical songs and alliterative homilies, burning spiritual rhapsodies and sound practical sermons, all of which were widely known and read. Certain points about Rolle are of special interest and distinguish him from other mystics and seers. One is that for him the culminating mystical experience took the form of melody, rhythm, harmony. He is the most musical of mystics, and where others “see” or “feel” Reality, he “hears” it. Hence his description of his soul’s adventures is peculiarly beautiful, he thinks in images and symbols of music, and in his writings we find some of the most exquisite passages in the whole literature of mysticism, veritable songs of spiritual joy. In the _Fire of Love_, perhaps the finest of his more mystical works, he traces in detail his journey along the upward path. This is very individual, and it differs in some important respects from other similar records. He passed through the stage of “purgation,” of struggle between the flesh and spirit, of penitence and aspiration, through “illumination,” until he reached, after nearly three years, the third stage of contemplation of God through love.[55]
In this condition, after about a year, “the door of heaven yet biding open,” he experienced the three phases to which he gives the names of “calor, canor, dulcor,” heat, song, and sweetness. “Heat soothly I call when the mind truly is kindled in Love Everlasting, and the heart on the same manner to burn not hopingly, but verily is felt.”[56]
This “burning” seems to have been for him a real physical sensation, a bodily condition induced by the adventure of the spirit. This is not unusual in mystical states, and possibly the cryptic notes made by Pascal record a similar experience.[57] He continued in this warmth for nine months, when suddenly he felt and heard the “canor,” the “spiritual music,” the “invisible melody” of heaven. Here is his description of his change from “burning love” to the state of “songful love.”
Whilst … I sat in chapel, in the night, before supper, as I my psalms sung, as it were the sound of readers or rather singers about me I beheld. Whilst also, praying to heaven, with all desire I took heed, suddenly, in what manner I wot not, in me the sound of song I felt; and likeliest heavenly melody I took, with me dwelling in mind. Forsooth my thought continually to mirth of song was changed: and as it were the same that loving I had thought, and in prayers and psalms had said, the same in sound I showed, and so forth with [began] to sing that [which] before I had said, and from plenitude of inward sweetness I burst forth, privily indeed, alone before my Maker.[58]
The sweetness of this inward spiritual song is beyond any sound that may be heard with bodily ears, even lovers can only catch snatches of it. “Worldly lovers soothly words or ditties of our song may know, for the words they read: but the tone and sweetness of that song they may not learn.”[59] The final stage of “sweetness” seems really to include the other two, it is their completion and fruition. The first two, says Rolle, are gained by devotion, and out of them springs the third.[60] Rolle’s description of it, of the all-pervading holy joy, rhythm, and melody, when the soul, “now become as it were a living pipe,” is caught up into the music of the spheres, “and in the sight of God … joying sounds,”[61] deserves to be placed beside what is perhaps the most magnificent passage in all mystical literature, where Plotinus tells us of the choral dance of the soul about her God.[62]
Enough has been said to show that Rolle is a remarkable individual, and one of the most poetic of the English religious mystical writers, and it is regrettable that some of his other works are not more easily accessible. Unfortunately, the poem with which his name is generally associated, _The Pricke of Conscience_, is entirely unlike all his other work, both in form and matter. It is a long, prosaic and entirely unmystical homily in riming couplets, of a very ordinary mediæval type, stirring men’s minds to the horrors of sin by dwelling on the pains of purgatory and hell. It would seem almost certain, on internal evidence, that the same hand cannot have written it and the _Fire of Love_, and recent investigation appears to make it clear that Rolle’s part in it, if any, was merely of the nature of compilation or translation of some other work, possibly by Grosseteste.[63]
Of the life of the Lady Julian we know very little, except that she was almost certainly a Benedictine nun, and that she lived for many years in an anchoress’s cell close to the old church of St Julian at Conisford, near Norwich. But her character and charm are fully revealed in the little book she has left of _Revelations of Divine Love_, which contains a careful account of a definite psychological experience through which she passed on the 8th day of May 1373, when she was thirty years of age. She adds to this record of fact certain commentaries and explanations which, she says, have been taught her gradually in the course of the subsequent twenty years. This experience, which lasted altogether between five and six hours, was preceded by a seven days’ sickness most vividly described, ending in a semi-rigidity of the body as if it were already half dead, and it took the form of sixteen “Shewings” or “Visions.” These, she says, reached her in three ways, “by bodily sight, by word formed in mine understanding” (verbal messages which took form in her mind), “and by spiritual sight.” But of this last, she adds, “I may never fully tell it.”[64] It is impossible here to do justice to this little book, for it is one of the most important documents in the history of mysticism. There is no mention in it of any preliminary “purgative” stage, nor of any ultimate experience of ecstasy; it is simply–if one may so put it–a narrative of certain intimate talks with God, once granted, when, during a few hours of the writer’s life, He explained various difficulties and made clear to her certain truths. The impression left of the nearness of God to the soul was so vivid and sustaining, that it is not possible to read the record of it, even now, across six hundred years, without feeling strangely stirred by the writer’s certainty and joy.
Her vision is of Love: Love is its meaning, and it was shown her for Love; she sees that God is Love and that God and man are one. “God is nearer to us than our own soul, for man is God, and God is in all.” If we could only know ourselves, our trouble would be cleared away, but it is easier to come to the knowing of God than to know our own soul.[65] “Our passing life here that we have in our sense-soul knoweth not what our Self is,” and the cause of our disease is that we rest in little things which can never satisfy us, for “our Soul may never have rest in things that are beneath itself.” She actually saw God enfolding all things. “For as the body is clad in the cloth, and the flesh in the skin, and the bones in the flesh, and the heart in the whole, so are we, soul and body, clad in the Goodness of God, and enclosed.” She further had sight of all things that are made, and her description of this “Shewing” is so beautiful and characteristic that it must be given in her own words.
“In this same time our Lord shewed me a spiritual sight of His homely loving…. He shewed me a little thing, the quantity of an hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand; and it was as round as a ball. I looked thereupon with the eye of my understanding, and thought: _What may this be_? And it was answered generally thus: _It is all that is made_. I marvelled how it might last, for methought it might suddenly have fallen to naught for little[ness]. And I was answered in my understanding: _It lasteth, and ever shall [last] for that God loveth it_. And so All-thing hath the Being by the love of God.” Later, she adds, “Well I wot that heaven and earth, and all that is made is great and large, fair and good; but the cause why it shewed so little to my sight was for that I saw it in the presence of Him that is the Maker of all things: for to a soul that seeth the Maker of all, all that is made seemeth full little.” “In this Little Thing,” she continues, “I saw three properties. The first is that God made it, the second is that God loveth it, the third, that God keepeth it. But what is to me verily the Maker, the Keeper, and the Lover–I cannot tell; for till I am Substantially oned to Him, I may never have full rest nor very bliss: that is to say, till I be so fastened to Him, that there is right nought that is made betwixt my God and me” (_Revelations_, pp. 10, 18).
Julian’s vision with regard to sin is of special interest. The problem of evil has never been stated in terser or more dramatic form.
After this I saw God in a Point, that is to say, in mine understanding which sight I saw that He is in all things. I beheld and considered, seeing and knowing in sight, with a soft dread, and thought: _What is sin?_ (_Ibid_, p. 26).
Here is the age-old difficulty. God, so the mystic sees, is “in the Mid-point of all thing,” and yet, as Julian says, it is “dertain He doeth no sin.” The solution given to her is that “sin is no deed,” it “hath no part of being,” and it can only be known by the pain it is cause of. Sin is a negation, a failure, an emptiness of love, but pain _is_ something it is a purification. Sin brings with it pain, “to me was shewed no harder hell than sin”; but we must go through the pain in order to learn, without it we could never have the bliss. As a wave draws back from the shore, in order to return again with fuller force; so sin, the lack of love, is permitted for a time, in order that an opening be made for an inrush of the Divine Love, fuller and more complete than would otherwise be possible. It is in some such way as this, dimly shadowed, that it was shown to Julian that sin and pain are necessary parts of the scheme of God. Hence God does not blame us for sin, for it brings its own blame or punishment with it, nay more, “sin shall be no shame to man, but worship,” a bold saying, which none but a mystic would dare utter. When God seeth our sin, she says, and our despair in pain, “His love excuseth us, and of His great courtesy He doeth away all our blame, and beholdeth us with ruth and pity as children innocent and unloathful.”
It would be pleasant to say more of Julian, but perhaps her own words have sufficed to show that here we are dealing with one of the great mystics of the world. Childlike and yet rashly bold, deeply spiritual, yet intensely human, “a simple creature, unlettered,” yet presenting solutions of problems which have racked humanity, she inherits the true paradoxical nature of the mystic, to which is added a beauty and delicacy of thought and expression all her own.
There were many other mystical works written about this time in England. Of these the best known and the finest is _The Scale, or Ladder, of Perfection_, by Walter Hylton, the Augustinian, and head of a house of canons at Thurgarton, near Newark, who died in 1396. This is a practical and scientific treatise of great beauty on the spiritual life.[66] An interesting group of writings are the five little treatises, almost certainly by one author (_c._ 1350-1400), to be found in Harleian 674, and other MSS. Their names are _The Cloud of Unknowing, The Epistle of Prayer, The Epistle of Discretion, The Treatise of Discerning Spirits_, and _The Epistle of Privy Counsel_. We find here for the first time in English the influence and spirit of Dionysius, and it is probably to the same unknown writer we owe the first (very free) translation of the _Mystical Theology_ of Dionysius, _Deonise Hid Divinite_, which is bound up with these other manuscripts.
These little tracts are written by a practical mystic, one who was able to describe with peculiar accuracy and vividness the physical and psychological sensations accompanying mystical initiation. _The Cloud of Unknowing_ is an application in simple English of the Dionysian teaching of concentration joined to the practice of contemplation taught by Richard of St Victor, and it describes very clearly the preliminary struggles and bewilderment of the soul. The _Epistle of Privy Counsel_ (still in MS.) is the most advanced in mystical teaching: the writer in it tries to explain very intimately the nature of “onehede with God,” and to give instruction in simple and yet deeply subtle terms as to the means for attaining this.
There is a mystical strain in other writings of this time, the most notable from the point of view of literature being in the fourteenth-century alliterative poem of _Piers the Plowman_.[67] This is mystical throughout in tone, more especially in the idea of the journey of the soul in search of Truth, only to find, after many dangers and disciplines and adventures, that–
If grace graunte the to go in this wise, Thow shalt see in thi-selve Treuthe sitte in thine herte In a cheyne of charyte as thow a childe were.[68]
Moreover, the vision of Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest, bears a definite analogy to the three stages of the mystic’s path, as will be seen if the description of the qualities of these three are examined, as they are given in B., Passus viii. 11. 78-102.
* * * * *
Crashaw, George Herbert, and Christopher Harvey all alike sound the personal note in their religious poems. All three writers describe the love of the soul for God in the terms of passionate human love: Crashaw with an ardour which has never been surpassed, Herbert with a homely intimacy quite peculiar to him, and Christopher Harvey with a point and epigrammatic setting which serve only to enhance the deep feeling of the thought.
In many a lyric of flaming passion Crashaw expresses his love-longing for his God, and he describes in terms only matched by his spiritual descendant, Francis Thompson, the desire of God to win the human soul.
Let not my Lord, the mighty lover
Of soules, disdain that I discover The hidden art
Of his high stratagem to win your heart, It was his heavnly art
Kindly to crosse you
In your mistaken love,
That, at the next remove
Thence he might tosse you
And strike your troubled heart
Home to himself.[69]
The main feature of Herbert’s poetry is the religious love lyric, the cry of the individual soul to God. This is the mystical quality in his verse, which is quieter and far less musical than Crashaw’s, but which possesses at times a tender fragrance and freshness, as in the little poem _Love_.
Christopher Harvey, the friend of Izaak Walton and the admirer of Herbert, has in his poems some lines which breathe almost as rapturous a passion of spiritual love as anything in Crashaw. Such is his epigram on the _Insatiableness of the Heart_.
The whole round world is not enough to fill The heart’s three corners; but it craveth still. Onely the Trinity, that made it, can
Suffice the vast-triangled heart of man.[70]
Or again, in a later epigram in the same poem (_The School of the Heart_), he puts the main teaching of Plotinus and of all mystics into four pregnant lines–
My busie stirring heart, that seekes the best, Can find no place on earth wherein to rest; For God alone, the Author of its blisse, Its only rest, its onely center is.
But it is Crashaw who, of these three, shares in fullest measure the passion of the great Catholic mystics, and more especially of St Teresa, whom he seems almost to have worshipped. His hymn to her “name and honor” is one of the great English poems; it burns with spiritual flame, it soars with noble desire. Near the beginning of it, Crashaw has, in six simple lines, pictured the essential mystic attitude of action, not necessarily or consciously accompanied by either a philosophy or a theology. He is speaking of Teresa’s childish attempt to run away and become a martyr among the Moors.
She never undertook to know
What death with love should have to doe; Nor has she e’re yet understood
Why to shew love, she should shed blood Yet though she cannot tell you why,
She can LOVE, and she can DY.
Spiritual love has never been more rapturously sung than in this marvellous hymn. Little wonder that it haunted Coleridge’s memory, and that its deep emotion and rich melody stimulated his poet’s ear and imagination to write _Christabel_.[71] Crashaw’s influence also on Patmore, more especially on the _Sponsa Dei_, as well as later on Francis Thompson, is unmistakable.
William Blake is one of the great mystics of the world; and he is by far the greatest and most profound who has spoken in English. Like Henry More and Wordsworth, he lived in a world of glory, of spirit and of vision, which, for him, was the only real world. At the age of four he saw God looking in at the window, and from that time until he welcomed the approach of death by singing songs of joy which made the rafters ring, he lived in an atmosphere of divine illumination. The material facts of his career were simple and uneventful. He was an engraver by profession, poet and painter by choice, mystic and seer by nature. From the outer point of view his life was a failure. He was always crippled by poverty, almost wholly unappreciated in the world of art and letters of his day, consistently misunderstood even by his best friends, and pronounced mad by those who most admired his work. Yet, like all true mystics, he was radiantly happy and serene; rich in the midst of poverty. For he lived and worked in a world, and amongst a company, little known of ordinary men:–
With a blue sky spread over with wings, And a mild Sun that mounts & sings; With trees & fields full of Fairy elves, And little devils who fight for themselves–
* * * * *
With Angels planted in Hawthorn bowers, And God Himself in the passing hours.[72]
It is not surprising that he said, in speaking of Lawrence and other popular artists who sometimes patronisingly visited him, “They pity me, but ’tis they are the just objects of pity, I possess my visions and peace. They have bartered their birthright for a mess of pottage.” The strength of his illumination at times intoxicated him with joy, as he writes to Hayley (October 23, 1804) after a recurrence of vision which had lapsed for some years, “Dear Sir, excuse my enthusiasm or rather madness, for I am really drunk with intellectual vision whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand.” This is the “divine madness” of which Plato speaks, the “inebriation of Reality,” the ecstasy which makes the poet “drunk with life.”[73]
In common with other mystics, with Boehme, St Teresa, and Madame Guyon, Blake claimed that much of his work was written under direct inspiration, that it was an automatic composition, which, whatever its source, did not come from the writer’s normal consciousness. In speaking of the prophetic book _Milton_, he says–
I have written this poem from immediate dictation, twelve or sometimes twenty or thirty lines at a time, without pre-meditation and even against my will. The time it has taken in writing was thus rendered non-existent, and an immense poem exists which seems to be the labour of a long life, all produced without labour or study.
Whatever may be their source, all Blake’s writings are deeply mystical in thought, and symbolic in expression, and this is true of the (apparently) simple little _Songs of Innocence_, no less than of the great, and only partially intelligible, prophetic books. To deal at all adequately with these works, with the thought and teaching they contain, and the method of clothing it, would necessitate a volume, if not a small library, devoted to that purpose. It is possible, however, to indicate certain fundamental beliefs and assertions which lie at the base of Blake’s thought and of his very unusual attitude towards life, and which, once grasped, make clear a large part of his work. It must be remembered that these assertions were for him not matters of belief, but of passionate knowledge–he was as sure of them as of his own existence.
Blake founds his great myth on his perception of unity at the heart of things expressing itself in endless diversity. “God is in the lowest effects as [in] the highest causes. He is become a worm that he may nourish the weak…. Everything on earth is the word of God, and in its essence is God.”[74]
In the _Everlasting Gospel_, Blake emphasises, with more than his usual amount of paradox, the inherent divinity of man. God, speaking to Christ as the highest type of humanity, says–
If thou humblest thyself, thou humblest me. Thou also dwellst in Eternity.
Thou art a man: God is no more:
Thy own humanity learn to adore,
For that is my Spirit of Life.[75]
Similarly the union of man with God is the whole gist of that apparently most chaotic of the prophetic books, _Jerusalem_.
The proof of the divinity of man, it would seem, lies in the fact that he desires God, for he cannot desire what he has not seen. This view is summed up in the eight sentences which form the little book (about 2 inches long by 1½ inches broad) in the British Museum, _Of Natural Religion_. Here are four of them.
Man’s perceptions are not bounded by organs of perception, he perceives more than sense (tho’ ever so acute) can discover.
None could have other than natural or organic thoughts if he had none but organic perceptions.
Man’s desires are limited by his perceptions, none can desire what he has not perceiv’d.
The desires and perceptions of man untaught by anything but organs of sense, must be limited to objects of sense.
The solution of the difficulty is given in large script on the last of the tiny pages of the volume:
Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is.
According to Blake, the universe as we know it, is the result of the fall of the one life from unity into division. This fall has come about through man seeking separation, and taking the part for the whole. (See Jacob Boehme’s view, pp. 94, 95 above, which is identical with that of Blake.) “Nature,” therefore, or the present form of mental existence, is the result of a contraction of consciousness or “selfhood,” a tendency for everything to shrink and contract about its own centre. This condition or “state” Blake personifies as “Urizen” (=Reason) a great dramatic figure who stalks through the prophetic books, proclaiming himself “God from Eternity to Eternity,” taking up now one characteristic and now another, but ever of the nature of materialism, opaqueness, contraction. In the case of man, the result of this contraction is to close him up into separate “selfhoods,” so that the inlets of communication with the universal spirit have become gradually stopped up; until now, for most men, only the five senses (one of the least of the many possible channels of communication) are available for the uses of the natural world. Blake usually refers to this occurrence as the “flood “: that is, the rush of general belief in the five senses that overwhelmed or submerged the knowledge of all other channels of wisdom, except such arts as were saved, which are symbolised under the names of Noah (=Imagination) and his sons. He gives a fine account of this in _Europe_ (p. 8), beginning–
Plac’d in the order of the stars, when the five senses whelm’d In deluge o’er the earth-born man, then turn’d the fluxile eyes Into two stationary orbs, concentrating all things. The ever-varying spiral ascents to the heavens of heavens Were bended downward, and the nostrils’ golden gates shut, Turn’d outward, barr’d, and petrify’d against the infinite.
The only way out of this self-made prison is through the Human Imagination, which is thus the Saviour of the world. By “Imagination” Blake would seem to mean all that we include under sympathy, insight, idealism, and vision, as opposed to self-centredness, logical argument, materialism and concrete, scientific fact. For him, Imagination is the one great reality, in it alone he sees a human faculty that touches both nature and spirit, thus uniting them in one. The language of Imagination is Art, for it speaks through symbols so that men shut up in their selfhoods are thus ever reminded that nature herself is a symbol. When this is once fully realised, we are freed from the delusion imposed upon us from without by the seemingly fixed reality of external things. If we consider all material things as symbols, their suggestiveness, and consequently their reality, is continually expanding. “I rest not from my great task,” he cries–
To open the eternal worlds, to open the immortal eyes Of man inwards into the worlds of thought, into eternity, Ever expanding in the bosom of God, the human imagination.
In Blake’s view the qualities most sorely needed by men are not restraint and discipline, obedience or a sense of duty, but love and understanding. “Men are admitted into heaven, not because they have curbed and governed their passions, or have no passions, but because they have cultivated their understandings.” To understand is three parts of love, and it is only through Imagination that we _can_ understand. It is the lack of imagination that is at the root of all the cruelties and all the selfishness in the world. Until we can feel for all that lives, Blake says in effect, until we can respond to the joys and sorrows of others as quickly as to our own, our imagination is dull and incomplete:
Each outcry of the hunted Hare
A fibre from the Brain does tear
A Skylark wounded in the wing
A Cherubim does cease to sing.
_Auguries of Innocence._
When we feel like this, we will go forth to help, not because we are prompted by duty or religion or reason, but because the cry of the weak and ignorant so wrings our heart that we cannot leave it unanswered. Cultivate love and understanding then, and all else will follow. Energy, desire, intellect; dangerous and deadly forces in the selfish and impure, become in the pure in heart the greatest forces for good. What mattered to Blake, and the only thing that mattered, was the purity of his soul, the direction of his will or desire, as Law and Boehme would have put it. Once a man’s desire is in the right direction, the more he gratifies it the better;
Abstinence sows sand all over
The ruddy limbs & flaming hair, But Desire Gratified
Plants fruits of life & beauty there.[76]
Only an extraordinarily pure nature or a singularly abandoned one could confidently proclaim such a dangerous doctrine. But in Blake’s creed, as Swinburne has said, “the one thing unclean is the belief in uncleanness.”
It is easy to see that this faculty which Blake calls “Imagination” entails of itself naturally and inevitably the Christian doctrine of self-sacrifice. It is in _Milton_ that Blake most fully develops his great dogma of the eternity of sacrifice. “One must die for another through all eternity”; only thus can the bonds of “selfhood” be broken. Milton, just before his renunciation, cries–
I will go down to self-annihilation and eternal death Lest the Last Judgment come and find me unannihilate, And I be seiz’d and giv’n into the hands of my own Selfhood.
For, according to Blake, personal love or selfishness is the one sin which defies redemption. This whole passage in _Milton_ (Book i., pp. 12, 13) well repays study, for one feels it to be alive with meaning, holding symbol within symbol. Blake’s symbolism, and his fourfold view of nature and of man, is a fascinating if sometimes a despairing study. Blake has explained very carefully the way in which the visionary faculty worked in him:–
What to others a trifle appears
Fills me full of smiles or tears; For double the vision my Eyes do see,
And a double vision is always with me. With my inward Eye, ’tis an old Man grey, With my outward, a Thistle across my way.
* * * * *
Now I a fourfold vision see,
And a fourfold vision is given to me; ‘Tis fourfold in my supreme delight,
And threefold in soft Beulah’s night, And twofold Always. May God us keep
From Single vision & Newton’s sleep![77]
He says twofold always, for everything was of value to Blake as a symbol, as a medium for expressing a still greater thing behind it. It was in this way that he looked at the human body, physical beauty, splendour of colour, insects, animate, states, and emotions, male and female, contraction and expansion, division and reunion, heaven and hell.
When his imagination was at its strongest, his vision was fourfold, corresponding to the fourfold division of the Divine Nature, Father, Son, Spirit, and the fourth Principle, which may be described as the Imagination of God, without which manifestation would not be possible.[78] These principles, when condensed and limited so as to be seen by us, may take the form of Reason, Emotion, Energy and Sensation, or, to give them Boehme’s names, Contraction, Expansion, Rotation, and Vegetative life. These, in turn, are associated with the four states of humanity or “atmospheres,” the four elements, the four points of the compass, the four senses (taste and touch counting as one), and so on. Blake seemed, as it were, to hold his vision in his mind in solution, and to be able to condense it into gaseous, liquid, or solid elements at whatever point he willed. Thus we feel that the prophetic books contain meaning within meaning, bearing interpretation from many points of view; and to arrive at their full value, we should need to be able–as Blake was–to apprehend all simultaneously,[79] instead of being forced laboriously to trace them out one by one in succession. It is this very faculty of “fourfold vision” which gives to these books their ever-changing atmosphere of suggestion, elusive and magical as the clouds and colours in a sunset sky, which escape our grasp in the very effort to study them. Hence, for the majority even of imaginative people, who possess at the utmost “double vision,” they are difficult and often wearisome to read. They are so, because the inner, living, vibrating ray or thread of connection which evokes these forms and beings in Blake’s imagination, is to the ordinary man invisible and unfelt; so that the quick leap of the seer’s mind from figure to figure, and from picture to picture, seems irrational and obscure.
To this difficulty on the side of the reader, there must in fairness be added certain undeniable limitations on the part of the seer. These are principally owing to lack of training, and possibly to lack of patience, sometimes also it would seem to defective vision. So that his symbols are at times no longer true and living, but artificial and confused.
Blake has visions, though clouded and imperfect, of the clashing of systems, the birth and death of universes, the origin and meaning of good and evil, the function and secret correspondences of spirits, of states, of emotions, of passions, and of senses, as well as of all forms in earth and sky and sea. This, and much more, he attempts to clothe in concrete forms or symbols, and if he fails at times to be explicit, it is conceivable that the fault may lie as much with our density as with his obscurity. Indeed, when we speak of Blake’s obscurity, we are uncomfortably reminded of Crabb Robinson’s naive remark when recording Blake’s admiration for Wordsworth’s _Immortality Ode_: “The parts … which Blake most enjoyed were the most obscure–at all events, those which I least like and comprehend.”
Blake’s view of good and evil is the characteristically mystical one, in his case much emphasised. The really profound mystical thinker has no fear of evil, for he cannot exclude it from the one divine origin, else the world would be no longer a unity but a duality. This difficulty of “good” and “evil,” the crux of all philosophy, has been approached by mystical thinkers in various ways (such as that evil is illusion, which seems to be Browning’s view), but the boldest of them, and notably Blake and Boehme, have attacked the problem directly, and carrying mystical thought to its logical conclusion, have unhesitatingly asserted that God is the origin of Good and Evil alike, that God and the devil, in short, are but two sides of the same Force. We have seen how this is worked out by Boehme, and that the central point of his philosophy is that all manifestation necessitates opposition. In like manner, Blake’s statement, “Without Contraries is no progression,” is, in truth, the keynote to all his vision and mythology.
Attraction and Repulsion, Benson and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call Good and Evil.
Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy. Good is Heaven. Evil is Hell.
With these startling remarks Blake opens what is the most intelligible and concise of all the prophetic books, _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_. Swinburne calls it the greatest of Blake’s books, and ranks it as about the greatest work “produced by the eighteenth century in the line of high poetry and spiritual speculation.” We may think Swinburne’s praise excessive, but at any rate it is well worth reading (_Essay on Blake_, 1906 edn., pp. 226-252). Certainly, if one work had to be selected as representative of Blake, as containing his most characteristic doctrines clothed in striking form, this is the book to be chosen. Place a copy of _The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_ in the hands of any would-be Blake student (an original or facsimile copy, needless to say, containing Blake’s exquisite designs, else the book is shorn of half its force and beauty); let him ponder it closely, and he will either be repelled and shocked, in which case he had better read no more Blake, or he will be strangely stirred and thrilled, he will be touched with a spark of the fire from Blake’s spirit which quickens its words as the leaping tongues of flame illuminate its pages. The kernel of the book, and indeed of all Blake’s message, is contained in the following statements on p. 4, headed “The Voice of the Devil.”
All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following Errors:–
1. That man has two real existing principles, viz. a Body and a Soul.
2. That Energy, called Evil, is alone from the Body; and that reason, called Good, is alone from the Soul.
3. That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies.
But the following Contraries to these are True:–
1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul, for that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.
2. Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.
3. Energy is Eternal Delight.
Blake goes on to write down some of the Proverbs which he collected while walking among the fires of hell. These “Proverbs of Hell” fill four pages of the book, and they are among the most wonderful things Blake has written. Finished in expression, often little jewels of pure poetry, they are afire with thought and meaning, and inexhaustible in suggestion. Taken all together they express in epigrammatic form every important doctrine of Blake’s. Some of them, to be fully understood, must be read in the light of his other work. Thus, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” or, “If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise,” are expressions of the idea constantly recurrent with Blake that evil must be embodied or experienced before it can be rejected.[80] But the greater number of them are quite clear and present no difficulty, as for instance the following:–
A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.
He whose face gives no light shall never become a star.
No bird soars too high, if he soars with his own wings.
What is now proved was once only imagined.
As the air to a bird or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible.
Exuberance is Beauty.
Everything possible to be believed is an image of truth.
There are two tendencies of Blake’s mind, both mystical–that is, rooted in unity–the understanding of which helps, on the one hand, to clear much in his writing that seems strange and difficult; and, on the other, reveals a deep meaning in remarks apparently simple to the point of silliness. These are his view of the solidarity of mental and spiritual as compared with physical things, and his habit of concentrating a universal truth into some one small fact.
For Blake, mental and spiritual things are the only real things. Thought is more real than action, and spiritual attitude is more real than thought. It is the most real thing about us, and it is the only thing that is of any importance. The difference between Blake’s attitude and that of the ordinary practical man of the world is summed up in his characteristic pencil comment in his copy of Bacon’s _Essays_ on the remark, “Good thoughts are little better than good dreams,” in the Essay on Virtue. Blake writes beside this, “Thought _is_ act.” This view is well exemplified in the Job illustrations, where Blake makes quite clear his view of the worthlessness, spiritually, of Job’s gift to the beggar of part of his last meal, because of the consciously meritorious attitude of Job’s mind.[81]
If this attitude be remembered it explains a good many of the most startling and revolutionary views of Blake. For instance, in the poems called “Holy Thursday” in the _Songs of Innocence and Experience_, he paints first of all with infinite grace and tenderness the picture of the orphan charity children going to church, as it would appear to the ordinary onlooker.
The hum of multitudes was there but multitudes of lambs, Thousands of little boys & girls raising their innocent hands.
* * * * *
Beneath them sit the aged men, wise guardians of the poor; Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.
But in short, scathing words and significant change of metre he reverses the picture to show his view of it, when, in the companion song of “Experience,” he asks–
Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduc’d to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?
It is owing to a false idea that we can bear to see this so-called “charity” at all, for we–
reduce the man to want a gift, and then give with pomp.
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 linkèd 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 God, is the more remarkable when it is realised through what depths of want and degradation and suffering Thompson passed, 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 passion, which assert 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 passionate worship all their own.
(2) His attitude 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 shines 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 casement 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, “God … 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 God, and he realises there is for him no escape and no hiding-place save in the arms of God 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 analogous 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 assume 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 identity 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 shifted, 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 “participation in Eternity” so often described by the mystic as a part of the Vision of God.
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, Shelley, 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.
Hügel, Baron F. von. _The Mystical Element in Religion_, 2 vols.. Dent, 1909.
Delacroix, H. _Ãtudes d’Histoiré et de Psychologie du Mysticisme_, Paris, 1908.
Récéjac, 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.
Foreign Influences
Plato (_c._ 427-347 B.C.). _Opera_, ed. J. Burnet, 5 vols. (Bibliotheca Scriptorum Classicorum Oxoniensis), 1899-1907.
Plato (Eng. trans.) _The Dialogues_, translated by B. Jowett, 5 vols., Oxford, 3rd ed., 1892.
Plotinus (A.D. 204-270). _Plotini Ennéades, præsmisso Porphyrii de vita Plotini deque ordine librorum ejus libello_, edidit R. Volkmann, 2 vols., Leipzig, 1883-84. (Eng. trans.) There is no complete English translation of the _Enneads_, only _Select Works_, translated by T. Taylor, 1817; re-issued, George Bell, 1895. (French trans.) _Les Ennéades de Plotin_, translated by M.-N. Bouillet, 3 vols., Paris, 1857-61. (This is complete and very good, but out of print.) The best critical account of Plotinus is in _The Evolution of Theology in the Greek Philosophers_, by Edward Caird, 2 vols., Maclehose, 1904.
Dionysius the Areopagite. _Works_, translated Parker, 1897.
Jacob Boehme (1575-1624). _Works_ (incomplete), 4 vols., 1764-81. Reprint of complete works in progress, ed. C. J. Barker, published J. Watkins. (See Bibliography to chap. xii. of _Cambridge History of English Literature_, vol. ix.)
Emmanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). _Works_, published by the Swedenborg Society, London. Selections, _A Compendium of the Theological Writings_, ed. Warren, 1901.
English Writers
Thomas de Hales (fl. 1250). _A Luve Ron_, (printed in) Morris’s Old English Miscellany (E.E.T.S.), 1872.
Richard Rolle (1290?-1349). _Richard Rolle and his Followers_, ed. Horstmann, 2 vols., Sonnenschein, 1895-6. _The Fire of Love, and the Mending of Life_, ed. R. Harvey (E.E.T.S.), 1896.
Anonymous (_c._ 1350-1400). _The Cloud of Unknowing_, ed. Evelyn Underhill, J. Watkins, 1912.
All printed, with other early English mystical treatises, in _The Cell of Self-Knowledge_, ed. E. G. Gardner, Chatto & Windus, 1910. _The Epistle of Prayer_, _The Epistle of Discretion_, _The Treatise of Discerning Spirits_
Anonymous. _The Epistle of Privy Counsel_, in MS., British Museum, Harleian, 674 and 2473.
(William Langland, or other authors.? _c._ 1362-1399). _The Vision of William Concerning Piers the Plowman_, ed. Skeat, 2 vols., Oxford, 1886. Jusserand, J. J. _Piers Plowman: a Contribution to the History of English Mysticism._ Translated from the French by M. E. R., 1894.
Walter Hylton (d. 1396). _The Scale of Perfection_, ed. Guy, 1869; ed. Dalgairns, 1870. _The Song of Angels_, printed by Gardner, in _The Cell of Self-Knowledge_, 1910.
Julian of Norwich (1342-1413?). _Revelations of Divine Love_, ed. Warrack, Methuen, 1912.
Richard Crashaw (1613? 1649). _Poems_, ed. A. R. Waller, Cambridge 1904.
John Donne (1573-1631). _Poetical Works_, ed. Grierson, 2 vols., Oxford, 1912.
George Herbert (1593-1633). _Poems_, ed. Grosart, 1891; Oxford edition, 1907.
Christopher Harvey (1597-1663). _Poems_, ed. Grosart, 1874.
Henry More (1614-1687). _Complete Poems_, ed. Grosart, 1878. _Life_, by R. Ward, 1710, reprinted Theosophical Society, ed. Howard, 1911.
Henry Vaughan (1622-1695). _Poems_, ed. Chambers, 2 vols., 1896.
Thomas Traherne (_c._ 1636-1674). _Poetical Works_, ed. Dobell, 1903. _Centuries of Meditations_, ed. Dobell, 1908. _Poems of Felicity_, ed. Bell, Oxford, 1910.
William Law (1686-1761). _Works_, 9 vols., 1753-76, reprinted privately by G. Moreton, 1892-3. _The Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law_, ed. W Scott Palmer, 1908. (See Bibliography to chap xii. of _Cambridge History of English Literature_, vol. ix., 1912.)
William Blake (1757-1827). _Works_, ed. Ellis and Yeats, 3 vols., Quaritch, 1893.
William Blake. _Poetical Works_ (including Prophetic Books), ed, Ellis, 2 vols., Chatto and Windus, 1906. _Poetical Works_ (exclusive of Prophetic Books), ed. Sampson, Oxford, 1905. (The best text of the poems.) _Life_, Gilchrist, 2 vols., Macmillan, 1880. _William Blake_, by A. C. Swinburne, Chatto and Windus (new ed.), 1906. _William Blake, Mysticisme et Poésie_, par P. Berger, Paris, 1907.
S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834). _Complete Poetical Works_, ed. E. H. Coleridge, 2 vols., Oxford, 1912. _Biographia Literaria_, ed. J. Shawcross, 2 vols., Oxford, 1907.
Emily Brontë (1818-1848). _Complete Poems_, ed. Shorter, Hodder and Stoughton, 1910. _The Three Brontës_, by May Sinclair, Hutchinson, 1912.
Coventry Patmore (1823-1896). _Poems_, G. Bell, 1906. _The Rod, the Root, and the Flower_, 1895. _Memoirs and Correspondence of C. Patmore_, by B. Champneys, 1900.
Richard Jefferies (1848-1887). _The Story of my Heart_, 1883, (reprinted) Longmans, 1907.
Francis Thompson (1859-1907). _New Poems_, Burns and Oates, 1897. _Selected Poems_, 1908. _Sister Songs_, 1908.
Index
Aeschylus
Alchemists
Allen, H. E., _Authorship of the Prick of Conscience_ Ammonias Sakkas
_Ancren Riwle_
Bacon, Francis, _Essays_
Beauty; moon the symbol of;
Plato on;
truth and;
worship of
Behmenists. (_See_ also under Boehme) Bergson, mystical basis of his thought;
study of;
theory of rhythm
_Bhagavad-Gîtâ_
Blake, William;
_Auguries of Innocence_;