Mysticism in English Literature Part 3

His first wife's love revealed to him this, which is the basic fact of all his thought and work.

The relationship of the soul to Christ _as His betrothed wife_ is the key to the feeling with which prayer and love and honour should be offered to Him ... _She_ showed me what that relationship involves of heavenly submission and spotless pa.s.sionate loyalty.[14]

He believed that s.e.x is a relationship at the base of all things natural and divine;

Nature, with endless being rife, Parts each thing into "him" and "her"

And, in the arithmetic of life, The smallest unit is a pair.[15]

This division into two and reconciliation into one, this clash of forces resulting in life, is, as Patmore points out in words curiously reminiscent of those of Boehme, at the root of all existence. All real apprehension of G.o.d, he says, is dependent upon the realisation of his triple Personality in one Being.

Nature goes on giving echoes of the same living triplicity in animal, plant, and mineral, every stone and material atom owing its being to the synthesis or "embrace" of the two opposed forces of expansion and contraction. Nothing whatever exists in a single ent.i.ty but in virtue of its being thesis, ant.i.thesis, and synthesis and in humanity and natural life this takes the form of s.e.x, the masculine, the feminine, and the neuter, or third, forgotten s.e.x spoken of by Plato, which is not the absence of the life of s.e.x, but its fulfilment and power, as the electric fire is the fulfilment and power of positive and negative in their "embrace."

The essay from which this pa.s.sage is taken, _The Bow set in the Cloud_, together with _The Precursor_, give in full detail an exposition of this belief of Patmore's, which was for him "_the burning heart of the Universe_."

Female and male G.o.d made the man; His image is the whole, not half; And in our love we dimly scan The love which is between Himself.[16]

G.o.d he conceived of as the great masculine positive force, the soul as the feminine or receptive force, and the meeting of these two, the "mystic rapture" of the marriage of Divinity and Humanity, as the source of all life and joy.

This profound and very difficult theme is treated by Patmore in a manner at once austere and pa.s.sionate in the exquisite little preludes to the _Angel in the House_, and more especially in the odes, which stand alone in nineteenth-century poetry for poignancy of feeling and depth of spiritual pa.s.sion. They are the highest expression of "erotic mysticism"[17] in English; a marvellous combination of flaming ardour and sensuousness of description with purity and austerity of tone. This latter effect is gained largely by the bare and irregular metre, which has a curiously compelling beauty of rhythm and dignity of cadence.

The book into which Patmore put the fullness of his convictions, the _Sponsa Dei_, which he burnt because he feared it revealed too much to a world not ready for it, was says Mr Gosse, who had read it in ma.n.u.script, "a transcendental treatise on Divine desire seen through the veil of human desire." We can guess fairly accurately its tenor and spirit if we read the prose essay _Dieu et ma Dame_ and the wonderful ode _Sponsa Dei_, which, happily, the poet did not destroy.

It may be noted that the other human affections and relationships also have for Patmore a deep symbolic value, and two of his finest odes are written, the one in symbolism of mother love, the other in that of father and son.[18]

We learn by human love, so be points out, to realise the possibility of contact between the finite and Infinite, for divinity can only be revealed by voluntarily submitting to limitations. It is "the mystic craving of the great to become the love-captive of the small, while the small has a corresponding thirst for the enthralment of the great."[19]

And this process of intercourse between G.o.d and man is symbolised in the Incarnation, which is not a single event in time, but the culmination of an eternal process. It is the central fact of a man's experience, "for it is going on perceptibly in himself"; and in like manner "the Trinity becomes the only and self-evident explanation of mysteries which are daily wrought in his own complex nature."[20] In this way is it that to Patmore religion is not a question of blameless life or the holding of certain beliefs, but it is "an experimental science" to be lived and to be felt, and the clues to the experiments are to be found in natural human processes and experiences interpreted in the light of the great dogmas of the Christian faith.

For Keats, the avenue to truth and reality took the form of Beauty. The idea, underlying most deeply and consistently the whole of his poetry, is that of the unity of life; and closely allied with this is the belief in progress, through ever-changing, ever-ascending stages. _Sleep and Poetry, Endymion_, and _Hyperion_ represent very well three stages in the poet's thought and art. In _Sleep and Poetry_ Keats depicts the growth even in an individual life, and describes the three stages of thought, or att.i.tudes towards life, through which the poet must pa.s.s.

They are not quite parallel to the three stages of the mystical ladder marked out by Wordsworth in the main body of his poetry, because they do not go quite so far, but they are almost exactly a.n.a.logous to the three stages of mind he describes in _Tintern Abbey_. The first is mere animal pleasure and delight in living--

A pigeon tumbling in clear summer air; A laughing school-boy without grief or care Hiding the springy branches of an elm.

Then follows simple unreflective enjoyment of Nature. The next stage is sympathy with human life, with human grief and joy, which brings a sense of the mystery of the world, a longing to pierce it and arrive at its meaning, symbolised in the figure of the charioteer.

Towards the end of Keats's life this feeling was growing stronger; and it is much dwelt upon in the _Revision of Hyperion_. There he plainly states that the merely artistic life, the life of the dreamer, is selfish; and that the only way to gain real insight is through contact and sympathy with human suffering and sorrow; and in the lost Woodhouse transcript of the _Revision_, rediscovered in 1904, there are some lines in which this point is still further emphasised. The full realisation of this third stage was not granted to Keats during his short life; he had but gleams of it. The only pa.s.sage where he describes the ecstasy of vision is in _Endymion_ (bk. i., 1. 774 ff.), and this resembles in essentials all the other reports of this experience given by mystics.

When the mind is ready, anything may lead us to it--music, imagination, love, friendship.

Feel we these things?--that moment have we stept Into a sort of oneness, and our state Is like a floating spirit's.

Keats felt this pa.s.sage was inspired, and in a letter to Taylor in January 1818 he says, "When I wrote it, it was a regular stepping of the Imagination towards a truth."

In _Endymion_, the underlying idea is the unity of the various elements of the individual soul; the love of woman is shown to be the same as the love of beauty; and that in its turn is identical with the love of the principle of beauty in all things. Keats was always very sensitive to the mysterious effects of moonlight, and so for him the moon became a symbol for the great abstract principle of beauty, which, during the whole of his poetic life, he worshipped intellectually and spiritually.

"The mighty abstract Idea I have of Beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness," he writes to his brother George; and the last two well-known lines of the _Ode on a Grecian Urn_ fairly sum up his philosophy--

Beauty is truth, truth Beauty, that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

So that the moon represents to Keats the eternal idea, the one essence in all. This is how he writes of it, in what is an entirely mystical pa.s.sage in _Endymion_--

... As I grew in years, still didst thou blend With all my ardours: thou wast the deep glen; Thou wast the mountain-top, the sage's pen, The poet's harp, the voice of friends, the sun; Thou wast the river, thou wast glory won; Thou wast my clarion's blast, thou wast my steed, My goblet full of wine, my topmost deed: Thou wast the charm of women, lovely Moon!

In his fragment of _Hyperion_, Keats shadows forth the unity of all existence, and gives magnificent utterance to the belief that change is not decay, but the law of growth and progress. Ocea.n.u.s, in his speech to the overthrown t.i.tans, sums up the whole meaning as far as it has gone, in verse which is unsurpa.s.sed in English--

We fall by course of Nature's law, not force Of thunder, or of Jove ...

... on our heels a fresh perfection treads, A power more strong in beauty, born of us And fated to excel us, as we pa.s.s

In glory that old Darkness ...

... for 'tis the eternal law That first in beauty should be first in might.

This is true mysticism, the mysticism Keats shares with Burke and Carlyle, the pa.s.sionate belief in continuity of essence through ever-changing forms.

Chapter III

Nature Mystics

Vaughan and Wordsworth stand pre-eminent among our English poets in being almost exclusively occupied with one theme, the mystical interpretation of nature. Both poets are of a meditative, brooding cast of mind; but whereas Wordsworth arrives at his philosophy entirely through personal experience and sensation, Vaughan is more of a mystical philosopher, deeply read in Plato and the mediaeval alchemists. The constant comparison of natural with spiritual processes is, on the whole, the most marked feature of Vaughan's poetry. If man will but attend, he seems to say to us, everything will discourse to him of the spirit. He broods on the silk-worm's change into the b.u.t.terfly (_Resurrection and Immortality_); he ponders over the mystery of the continuity of life as seen in the plant, dying down and entirely disappearing in winter, and shooting up anew in the spring (_The Hidden Flower_); or, while wandering by his beloved river Usk, he meditates near the deep pool of a waterfall on its mystical significance as it seems to linger beneath the banks and then to shoot onward in swifter course, and he sees in it an image of life beyond the grave. The seed growing secretly in the earth suggests to him the growth of the soul in the darkness of physical matter; and in _Affliction_ he points out that all nature is governed by a law of periodicity and contrast, night and day, sunshine and shower; and as the beauty of colour can only exist by contrast, so are pain, sickness, and trouble needful for the development of man. These poems are sufficient to ill.u.s.trate the temper of Vaughan's mind, his keen, reverent observation of nature in all her moods, and his intense interest in the minutest happenings, because they are all manifestations of the one mighty law.

Vaughan appears to have had a more definite belief in pre-existence than Wordsworth, for he refers to it more than once; and _The Retreate_, which is probably the best known of all his poems and must have furnished some suggestion for the _Immortality Ode_, is based upon it.

Vaughan has occasionally an almost perfect felicity of mystical expression, a power he shares with Donne, Keats, Rossetti, and Wordsworth. His ideas then produce their effect through the medium of art, directly on the feelings. The poem called _Quickness_ is perhaps the best example of this peculiar quality, which cannot be a.n.a.lysed but must simply be felt; or _The World_, with its magnificent symbol in the opening lines:--

I saw Eternity the other night, Like a great _Ring_ of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright; And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years, Driv'n by the spheres, Like a vast shadow mov'd.[21]

Mysticism is the most salient feature of Wordsworth's poetry, for he was one who saw, whose inward eye was focussed to visions scarce dreamt of by men. It is because of the strangeness and unfamiliarity of his vision that he is a difficult poet to understand, and the key to the understanding of him is a mystic one. People talk of the difficulty of Browning, but he is easy reading compared with a great deal of Wordsworth. It is just the apparent simplicity of Wordsworth's thought which is so misleading. A statement about him of the following kind would be fairly generally accepted as the truth. Wordsworth was a simple-minded poet with a pa.s.sion for nature, he found great joy and consolation in the contemplation of the beauty of hills and dales and clouds and flowers, and urged others to find this too; he lived, and recommended others to live a quiet retired unexciting kind of life, and he preached a doctrine of simplicity and austerity. Now, except that Wordsworth had a pa.s.sion for Nature, there is not a single true statement here. Wordsworth was not only a poet, he was also a seer, a mystic and a practical psychologist with an amazingly subtle mind, and an unusual capacity for feeling; he lived a life of excitement and pa.s.sion, and he preached a doctrine of magnificence and glory. It was not the beauty of Nature which brought him joy and peace, but the _life_ in Nature. He himself had caught a vision of that life, he knew it and felt it, and it transformed the whole of existence for him. He believed that every man could attain this vision which he so fully possessed, and his whole life's work took the form of a minute and careful a.n.a.lysis of the processes of feeling in his own nature, which he left as a guide for those who would tread the same path. It would be correct to say that the whole of his poetry is a series of notes and investigations devoted to the practical and detailed explanation of how he considered this state of vision might be reached. He disdained no experience--however trivial, apparently--the working of the mind of a peasant child or an idiot boy, the effect produced on his own emotions by a flower, a glowworm, a bird's note, a girl's song; he pa.s.sed by nothing which might help to throw light on this problem. The experience which Wordsworth was so anxious others should share was the following. He found that when his mind was freed from pre-occupation with disturbing objects, petty cares, "little enmities and low desires," that he could then reach a condition of equilibrium, which he describes as a "wise pa.s.siveness," or a "happy stillness of the mind." He believed this condition could be deliberately induced by a kind of relaxation of the will, and by a stilling of the busy intellect and striving desires. It is a purifying process, an emptying out of all that is worrying, self-a.s.sertive, and self-seeking.

If we can habitually train ourselves and attune our minds to this condition, we may at any moment come across something which will arouse our emotions, and it is then, when our emotions--thus purified--are excited to the point of pa.s.sion, that our vision becomes sufficiently clear to enable us to gain actual experience of the "central peace subsisting for ever at the heart of endless agitation." Once seen, this vision changes for us the whole of life; it reveals unity in what to our every-day sight appears to be diversity, harmony where ordinarily we hear but discord, and joy, overmastering joy, instead of sorrow.

It is a kind of illumination, whereby in a lightning flash we see that the world is quite different from what it ordinarily appears to be, and when it is over--for the experience is but momentary--it is impossible to describe the vision in precise terms, but the effect of it is such as to inspire and guide the whole subsequent life of the seer. Wordsworth several times depicts this "bliss ineffable" when "all his thought were steeped in feeling." The well-known pa.s.sage in _Tintern Abbey_ already quoted (p. 7) is one of the finest a.n.a.lysis of it left us by any of the seers, and it closely resembles the accounts given by Plotinus and Boehme of similar experiences.

To Wordsworth this vision came through Nature, and for this reason. He believed that all we see round us is alive, beating with the same life which pulsates in us. It is, he says,--

my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes.

and that if we will but listen and look, we will hear and see and feel this central life. This is the pith of the message we find repeated again and again in various forms throughout Wordsworth's poetry, and perhaps best summed up at the end of the fourth book of the _Excursion_, a book which should be closely studied by any one who would explore the secret of the poet's outlook upon life. He tells us in the _Prelude_ (Book iii.) that even in boyhood it was by this feeling he "mounted to community with highest truth"--

To every natural form, rock, fruits, or flower, Even the loose stones that cover the highway, I gave a moral life: I saw them feel, Or linked them to some feeling: the great ma.s.s Lay bedded in a quickening soul, and all That I beheld respired with inward meaning.

Wordsworth, in short, was haunted by the belief that the secret of the universe is written clearly all round us, could we but train and purify our mind and emotions so as to behold it. He believed that we are in something the same att.i.tude towards Nature as an illiterate untrained person might be in the presence of a book containing the philosophy of Hegel. To the educated trained thinker, who by long and arduous discipline has developed his mental powers, that book contains the revelation of the thought of a great mind; whereas to the uneducated person it is merely a bundle of paper with words printed on it. He can handle it, touch it, see it, he can read the words, he can even understand many of them separately, but the essence of the book and its meaning remains closed to him until he can effect some alteration in himself which will enable him to understand it.

Wordsworth's claim is that he had discovered by his own experience a way to effect the necessary alteration in ourselves which will enable us to catch glimpses of the truths expressing themselves all round us. It is a great claim, but he would seem to have justified it.

It is interesting that the steps in the ladder of perfection, as described by Wordsworth, are precisely a.n.a.logous to the threefold path or "way" of the religious and philosophic mystic, an ethical system or rule of life, of which, very probably, Wordsworth had never heard.

The mystic vision was not attained by him, any more than by others, without deliberate renunciation. He lays great stress upon this; and yet it is a point in his teaching sometimes overlooked. He insists repeatedly upon the fact that before any one can taste of these joys of the spirit, he must be purified, disciplined, self-controlled. He leaves us a full account of his purgative stage. Although he started life with a naturally pure and austere temperament, yet he had deliberately to crush out certain strong pa.s.sions to which he was liable, as well as all personal ambition, all love of power, all desire for fame or money; and to confine himself to the contemplation of such objects as--

excite No morbid pa.s.sions, no disquietude, No vengeance and no hatred.