Mysticism in English Literature Part 2

He dwells on this again and again:--

G.o.d is seen In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod.

And through all these forms there is growth upwards. Indeed, it is only upon this supposition that the poet can account for

many a thrill Of kinship, I confess to, with the powers Called Nature: animate, inanimate In parts or in the whole, there's something there Man-like that somehow meets the man in me.

_Prince Hohenstiel-Schw.a.n.gau._

The poet sees that in each higher stage we benefit by the garnered experience of the past; and so man grows and expands and becomes capable of feeling for and with everything that lives. At the same time the higher is not degraded by having worked in and through the lower, for he distinguishes between the continuous persistent life, and the temporary coverings it makes use of on its upward way;

From first to last of lodging, I was I, And not at all the place that harboured me.

Humanity then, in Browning's view, is not a collection of individuals, separate and often antagonistic, but one whole.

When I say "you" 'tis the common soul, The collective I mean: the race of Man That receives life in parts to live in a whole And grow here according to G.o.d's clear plan.

_Old Pictures in Florence._

This sense of unity is shown in many ways: for instance, in Browning's protest against the one-sidedness of nineteenth-century scientific thought, the sharp distinction or gulf set up between science and religion. This sharp cleavage, to the mystic, is impossible. He knows, however irreconcilable the two may appear, that they are but different aspects of the same thing. This is one of the ways in which Browning antic.i.p.ates the most advanced thought of the present day.

In _Paracelsus_ he emphasises the fact that the exertion of power in the intelligence, or the acquisition of knowledge, is useless without the inspiration of love, just as love is waste without power. Paracelsus sums up the matter when he says to Aprile--

I too have sought to KNOW as thou to LOVE Excluding love as thou refusedst knowledge....

We must never part ...

Till thou the lover, know; and I, the knower, Love--until both are saved.

Arising logically out of this belief in unity, there follows, as with all mystics, the belief in the potential divinity of man, which permeates all Browning's thought, and is continually insisted on in such poems as _Rabbi ben Ezra, A Death in the Desert_, and _The Ring and the Book_. He takes for granted the fundamental position of the mystic, that the object of life is to know G.o.d; and according to the poet, in knowing love we learn to know G.o.d. Hence it follows that love is the meaning of life, and that he who finds it not

loses what he lived for And eternally must lose it.

_Christina._

For life with all it yields of joy and woe And hope and fear ...

Is just our chance o' the prize of learning love.

_A Death in the Desert._

This is Browning's central teaching, the key-note of his work and philosophy. The importance of love in life is to Browning supreme, because he holds it to be the meeting-point between G.o.d and man. Love is the sublimest conception possible to man; and a life inspired by it is the highest conceivable form of goodness.

In this exaltation of love, as in several other points, Browning much resembles the German mystic, Meister Eckhart. To compare the two writers in detail would be an interesting task; it is only possible here to suggest points of resemblance. The following pa.s.sage from Eckhart suggests several directions in which Browning's thought is peculiarly mystical:--

Intelligence is the youngest faculty in man.... The soul in itself is a simple work; what G.o.d works in the simple light of the soul is more beautiful and more delightful than all the other works which He works in all creatures. But foolish people take evil for good and good for evil. But to him who rightly understands, the one work which G.o.d works in the soul is better and n.o.bler and higher than all the world. Through that light comes grace. Grace never comes in the intelligence or in the will. If it could come in the intelligence or in the will, the intelligence and the will would have to transcend themselves. On this a master says: There is something secret about it; and thereby he means the spark of the soul, which alone can apprehend G.o.d. The true union between G.o.d and the soul takes place in the little spark, which is called the spirit of the soul.[9]

The essential unity of G.o.d and man is expressed more than once by Browning in Eckhart's image: as when he speaks of G.o.d as Him

Who never is dishonoured in the spark He gave us from his fire of fires.

He is at one with Eckhart, and with all mystics, in his appeal from the intellect to that which is beyond intellect; in his a.s.sertion of the supremacy of feeling, intuition, over knowledge. Browning never wearies of dwelling on the relativity of physical knowledge, and its inadequacy to satisfy man. This is perhaps best brought out in one of the last things he wrote, the "Reverie" in _Asolando_; but it is dwelt on in nearly all his later and more reflective poems. His maxim was--

Wholly distrust thy knowledge, then, and trust As wholly love allied to ignorance!

There lies thy truth and safety. ...

Consider well!

Were knowledge all thy faculty, then G.o.d Must be ignored: love gains him by first leap.

_A Pillar at Sebzevar._

Another point of resemblance with Eckhart is suggested by his words: "That foolish people take evil for good, and good for evil." Browning's theory of evil is part of the working-out of his principle of what may be called the coincidence of extreme opposites. This is, of course, part of his main belief in unity, but it is an interesting development of it.

This theory is marked all through his writings; and, although philosophers have dealt with it, he is perhaps the one poet who faces the problem, and expresses himself on the point with entire conviction.

His view is that good and evil are purely relative terms (see _The Bean-stripe_), and that one cannot exist without the other. It is evil which alone makes possible some of the divinest qualities in man--compa.s.sion, pity, forgiveness patience. We have seen that Sh.e.l.ley shares this view, "for none knew good from evil"; and Blake expresses himself very strongly about it, and complains that Plato "knew nothing but the virtues and vices, the good and evil.... There is nothing in all that.... Everything is good in G.o.d's eyes." Mysticism is always a reconcilement of opposites; and this, as we have seen in connection with science and religion, knowledge and love, is a dominant note of Browning's philosophy. He brings it out most startlingly perhaps in _The Statue and the Bust_, where he shows that in his very capacity for vice, a man proves his capacity for virtue, and that a failure of energy in the one implies a corresponding failure of energy in the other.

At the same time, clear knowledge that evil is illusion would defeat its own end and paralyse all moral effort, for evil only exists for the development of good in us.

Type needs ant.i.type: As night needs day, as shine needs shade, so good Needs evil: how were pity understood Unless by pain?

This is one reason why Browning never shrank from the evil in the world, why indeed he expended so much of his mind and art on the a.n.a.lysis and dissection of every kind of evil, laying bare for us the working of the mind of the criminal, the hypocrite, the weakling, and the cynic; because he held that--

Only by looking low, ere looking high Comes penetration of the mystery.

There are other ways in which Browning's thought is especially mystical, as, for instance, his belief in pre-existence, and his theory of knowledge, for he, like Plato, believes in the light within the soul, and holds that--

To know Rather consists in opening out a way Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape, Than in effecting entry for a light Supposed to be without.

_Paracelsus_, Act I.

But the one thought which is ever constant with him, and is peculiarly helpful to the practical man, is his recognition of the value of limitation in all our energies, and the stress he lays on the fact that only by virtue of this limitation can we grow. We should be paralysed else. It is Goethe's doctrine of _Entbehrung_, and it is vividly portrayed in the epistle of Karshish. Paracelsus learns it, and makes it clear to Festus at the end.

The natural result of Browning's theory of evil, and his sense of the value of limitation, is that he should welcome for man the experience of doubt, difficulty, temptation, pain; and this we find is the case.

Life is probation and the earth no goal But starting point of man ...

To try man's foot, if it will creep or climb 'Mid obstacles in seeming, points that prove Advantage for who vaults from low to high And makes the stumbling-block a stepping-stone.

_The Ring and the Book_: The Pope, 1436-7, 410-13.

It is this trust in unending progress, based on the consciousness of present failure, which is peculiarly inspiriting in Browning's thought, and it is essentially mystical. Instead of shrinking from pain, the mystic prays for it, for, properly met, it means growth.

Was the trial sore?

Temptation sharp? Thank G.o.d a second time!

Why comes temptation but for man to meet And master and make crouch beneath his foot, And so be pedestaled in triumph?

_The Ring and the Book_: The Pope, 1182-02.

Rossetti's mysticism is perhaps a more salient feature in his art than is the case with Browning, and the lines of it, and its place in his work, have been well described by Mr Theodore Watts-Dutton.[10] We can only here indicate wherein it lies, and how it differs from and falls short of the mysticism of Sh.e.l.ley and Browning. Rossetti, unlike Browning, is not the least metaphysical; he is not devoured by philosophical curiosity; he has no desire to solve the riddle of the universe. All his life he was dominated and fascinated by beauty, one form of which in especial so appealed to him as at times almost to overpower him--the beauty of the face of woman.[11] But this beauty is not an end in itself; it is not the desire of possession that so stirs him, but rather an absolute thirst for the knowledge of the mystery which he feels is hiding beneath and beyond it. Here lies his mysticism. It is this haunting pa.s.sion which is the greatest thing in Rossetti, which inspires all that is best in him as artist, the belief that beauty is but the expression or symbol of something far greater and higher, and that it has kinship with immortal things. For beauty, which, as Plato has told us, is of all the divine ideas at once most manifest and most lovable to man, is for Rossetti the actual and visible symbol of love, which is at once the mystery and solution of the secret of life.[12] Rossetti's mystical pa.s.sion is perhaps most perfectly expressed in his little early prose romance, _Hand and Soul_. It is purer and more austere than much of his poetry, and breathes an amazing force of spiritual vision. One wonders, after reading it, that the writer himself did not attain to a loftier and more spiritual development of life and art; and one cannot help feeling the reason was that he did not sufficiently heed the warning of Plotinus, not to let ourselves become entangled in sensuous beauty, which will engulf us as in a swamp.

Coventry Patmore was so entirely a mystic that it seems to be the first and the last and the only thing to say about him. His central conviction is the unity of all things, and hence their mutual interpretation and symbolic force. There is only one kind of knowledge which counts with him, and that is direct apprehension or perception, the knowledge a man has of Love, by being in love, not by reading about its symptoms. The "touch" of G.o.d is not a figure of speech.

"Touch," says Aquinas, "applies to spiritual things as well as to material things.... The fulness of intelligence is the obliteration of intelligence. G.o.d is then our honey, and we, as St Augustine says, are His; and who wants to understand honey or requires the _rationale_ of a kiss?" (_Rod, Root, and Flower_, xx.)

Once given the essential idea, to be grasped by the intuitive faculty alone, the world is full of a.n.a.logies, of natural revelations which help to support and ill.u.s.trate great truths. Patmore was, however, caught and enthralled by one aspect of unity, by one great a.n.a.logy, almost to the exclusion of all others. This is that in human love, but above all in wedded love, we have a symbol (that is an expression of a similar force in different material) of the love between G.o.d and the soul. What Patmore meant was that in the relationship and att.i.tude of wedded lovers we hold the key to the mystery at the heart of life, and that we have in it a "real apprehension" (which is quite different from real comprehension[13]) of the relationship and att.i.tude of humanity to G.o.d.