EXCHANGE MS XCHANGS AUG 11 ial SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY BY SISTER MARY Pius, M.A. ' .;. ' <*P ' THE STSTK: . JOSEPH OF CARONDELET SAINT Lorrs, Mis*ot m A DISSERTATION Submitted to the CatJiolic Sisters College of the Catholic University of America in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy WASHINGTON, D. C. JUNE, 1910 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY BY SISTER MARY Pius, M.A. OF THE SISTERS OF ST. JOSEPH OF CARONDELET SAINT Louis, MISSOURI A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Catholic Sisters College of the Catholic University of America in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy WASHINGTON, D. C. JUNE, 1916 QoS NATIONAL-CAPITAL PRESS, INC., WASHINOTON. 0. C. PREFATORY NOTE The purpose of this study has been to determine the part which that phase of philosophical thought known as mysticism has played as a creative factor in English poetry of the nineteenth century. An effort has been made, first, to reach a definite conclusion as to what the word mysticism connotes, and then to adduce specific instances of this characteristic from the writings of a group of poets selected as being the best exponents of the type of mysticism which they represent. The bibliographies contain only such works as have been of immediate value in preparing this dissertation. March 19, 1916. 337668 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY CONTENTS PAGE CHAPTER I. Mysticism: Its Definition and History 7 CHAPTER II. The Characteristics of Mysticism 17 CHAPTER III. The Relation between Philosophy and Poetry 4 CHAPTER IV. Wordsworth : God Sought through Nature ... 29 CHAPTER V. Rossetti : God Sought through Beauty 36 CHAPTER VI. Patmore : God Sought through Human Love . 44 CHAPTER VII. Francis Thompson: God Sought through Revelation 59 CONCLUSION 74 BIBLIOGRAPHY. . 77 CHAPTER I MYSTICISM: ITS DEFINITION AND HISTORY The word "mysticism" is borrowed from the Greek. The HvffTCLL, nfj.vr]fjLevoL, were those persons who were privileged to take part in certain ceremonies periodically performed in honor of some god. The word implies two characteristics in those so privileged : first, a special knowledge of divine things, obtained by instruction (juuko), and secondly, the ability and the obligation to maintain secrecy concerning these things (/oco). "The mystics are, in fact, the inner circle of devotees of any cult; they are pos- sessed of knowledge which partakes of the nature of revelation rather than of acquired science, and which is imparted in considera- tion of some special aptitude, natural or acquired." 1 So much for the history of the word: the experience itself has been variously defined. St. Bonaventure says, "Sapientia enim haec Mystica Theologica dicitur a Paulo Apostolo edocta, a Dionysio Areopagita suo discipulo, conscripta, quae idem est quod extensio amoris in Deum per amoris desiderium." 2 Gerson declares, "Theologica mystica est motio anagogica in Deum per amorem fervidum et purum." 3 Corderius in the definition "Mystica theologica> si vim nominis attendas designat quandam sacram et arcanam de Deo divinisque rebus notitiam" 4 points out two striking notes of mysticism, that the knowledge is sacred, and not for all, "arcanam." L'Abbe Migne gives the following definition. "La mystique est la science d'etat surnaturel de Tame humaine, manifeste dans le corps et dans 1'ordre des choses visible par des effets egalement surnaturels." 5 In Ribet we find, "La theologie mys- tique, au point de vue subjectif et experimental, nous semble pouvoir etre definie; une attraction surnaturelle et passive de Tame, vers Dieu, provenant d'une illumination et d'un ernbrase- , Mysticism: Its True Nature and Value, London, 1910, Ch. II, p. 1. 2 St. Bonaventurae Opera, Quaracchi, 1898, Mystica Theologica, Prologus Tomus Octavus, p. 2. 3 Gersonii Joannis, Opera, Parisiis, 1606, Mysticam Theologiam, Tertia pars operum, p. 276. 4 Corderius, in Opera S. Dionysii Areopagitae, Migne, P. G., Paris, 1844, seq., Ill, 1003. 6 Migne, Dictionnaire de Mystique Chrttienne, Paris, 1847. Tome Trente- Cinquieme, Introduction. 8 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH ment interieurs, qui, previennent la reflexion, surpassent 1'effort humain, et peuvent avoir sur le corps un retentissement merveil- leux et irresistible." 6 There is implied in all these definitions the idea that mysticism has its origin in "that dim consciousness of the beyond which is a part of our human nature, and which is the raw material of all religion, philosophy, and art." 7 Undoubtedly, there is a hunger and thirst of the soul, as well as of the body, and the same power which gave the body certain senses, together with a capacity and a tendency to satisfy them, has given the soul certain capacities and tendencies which can be satisfied only by knowledge and love. All philosophy of life, no matter what trend of thought it follows, attempts to satisfy this twofold longing, but mysticism is differ- entiated from other forms of philosophy in the manner in which it seeks that satisfaction. The mystic holds as a fundamental truth that back of all the diverse forms of reality is a Unity, and Ultimate Reality, which we call God, and that only through the soul can this truth be compre- hended. "Mysticism considers as the end of philosophy, the direct union of the human soul with the divinity through con- templation and love, and attempts to determine the processes and means of realizing this end. This contemplation is not based on a mere analytical knowledge of the Infinite, but on a direct and immediate intuition of the Infinite." 8 One of the greatest difficulties in the study of mysticism is the lack of anything like historic succession in the development of the movement. Mystics seem immune from the laws that ordi- narily govern human expression. "They are philosophers and hermits, unlettered women and profound scholars. They live in modern Paris or medieval England, or the story of their lives can be but faintly discerned through the rich web of Eastern tradition; they are legends of the past; they travel on our railroad carriages with us today. And yet, in spite of the dissimilarity of their origin, there is a wonderful unanimity in their teaching." 9 The term was first used in the sense in which we now apply it, by the pseudo-Dionysius, probably a Syrian monk of the sixth 6 Ribet, La Mystique Divine, Paris, 1879, Tome Premier, p. 14. 7 Inge, Christian Mysticism, London, 1899, Lecture I, p. 5. 8 Sauvage, Art, "Mysticism," Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. V, p. 663. 9 Thorold, Introduction to the Dialogue of St. Catherine of Sienna, London, 1903, p. 10. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 9 century, whose Mystical Theology has played so prominent a part in the development of Christian mysticism, but the roots of the thought itself lay in the Oriental religions. 10 Mysticism dominated in the philosophy of ancient Egypt, as is evident from the extrava- gant symbolism employed. It was a fundamental element in the Taoism of Laotze. The climate and habit of life in India tended to produce passivity, and the Upanishads teach that the soul or spiritual consciousness is the only source of true knowledge. The Hindu thinks of the soul as a great eye in the center of his being, by which he can look outward and penetrate through appearance to reality. Hence, despising matter, he bends all his faculties within his spiritual consciousness, and so becomes one with Brahman, the universal soul. There is not a great deal of this thought in Greece until Plato, to whom the desire of wisdom, or love of beauty, is nothing but the yearning of the soul to be joined to what is akin to it. Plato is regarded as the source of speculative mysticism in Europe, and in the later Platonic schools contemplation rather than reasoned knowledge became the object of philosophy. Plotinus (A. D. 204-270) was, perhaps, the most powerful exponent of Neo-Platonism. He was an Egyptian W T !IO studied in Alexandria at a time when that city was the greatest center of learning in the world. "The form of his thought is an advanced Platonic idealism combined with the conception of emanations from the Hermetic philosophy, with elements from the mysteries and from oriental cults, but the real inspiration came from his own deep mystical experience of ecstatic union with the One." 11 There can be little doubt about the genuineness of his mystical experience, "whether it was no more than a strong emotional realization of intellectual principles obtained by some remarkable philosophical acumen," 12 or "one of those manifestations of divine grace outside its regular channels, the occurrence of w r hich from time to time has been quite unmistakable." 13 With Plotinus the end of human life is the purification of the soul and its gradual assimilation with the divinity. His works were collected by his pupil, Porphyry, and arranged in six Enneads. 10 Cf. Spurgeon, Mysticism in English Literature, London, 1913, Introduction, p. 15. 11 Bailey, Milton and Jakob Boehme, Oxford University Press, 1914, p. 65. 12 Sharpe, Op. cit., p. 155. 13 Ibid., p. 156. 10 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH Here he teaches that "Three roads lead to God art, love, and philosophy. The artist seeks for the Idea in its sensible mani- festations; the lover seeks it in the human soul; the philosopher seeks for it in the sphere in which it dwells without alloy in the intelligible world and in God." 14 The teachings of Plotinus, transmitted through St. Augustine (354-430), and Dionysius, exercised an immense influence on Christian mysticism. While the Fathers recognized and gladly incorporated in their philosophy what they knew to be true in pagan thought, yet they maintained the essential inability of the mind to penetrate, of itself, and without divine illumination, the mysteries of divine love. St. Augustine expressly teaches that we can know the essence of things in "rationibus aeternis" yet the data for the knowledge must be supplied by the senses. 15 Mysticism, as implying a peculiar aptitude for certain states of mind not commonly enjoyed by the multitude, existed in the Church from the beginning. The Apostles were mystics in the truest sense. St. Paul, writing to the Philippians styles himself a "t&pvqjikris"* and certain prayers in the Liturgy of the Mass are still said ^UOTIKCOS. Harnack, in his Mission and Expansion of Christianity declares this to be one of its sources of power and appeal, that "It has mysteries of its own, which it sought to fathom, only to adore them again in silence; and secondly, that it preached to the perfect in another and a deeper sense than it did to simple folk." 17 The tradition was carried on by Clement of Alexandria, by the Shepherd of Hernias, by St. Ignatius, who styled himself d&xfropos, the God-bearer, thus laying claim to intimate mystical experience. About the middle of the ninth century the works of Dionysius were translated from Greek into Latin by the great Irish scholar and philosopher, John Scotus Eriugena, and in this form they were a mighty factor in determining the life and thought of the Middle Ages. Through the teachings of William of Champeaux (1070-1121), the movement gained strength in France during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It numbered among its defenders St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-1153), and the group of mystical philosophers known as the Victorines. In them mysticism took l *Enneads I, 3, translated by Taylor, London, 1817. 15 Cf. Quaestiones LXXXIII, C, XL VI. 16 Phil., IV, 12. 17 Harnack, Mission and Expansion of Christianity, Vol. II, p. 237. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 11 its place as a regularly organized science. 18 They had the medieval passion for allegory, and the scholastic love for classification, and so they divide the stages of contemplation, the states of the soul, and the degrees of divine love, and make them conform to the mystic numbers seven, four, and three. 19 Their writings do not appeal to modern readers, but they were vitally influential in conditioning the development of later mystics. Their works, and those of St. Bernard, were translated into English in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, probably by the unknown author of the "Cloud of Unknowing." In St. Bernard, and Richard of St. Victor we have two strong figures, the one a type of the political mystic, the other of the intellectual. In the same century there appeared in Germany a line qf women mystics not less remarkable for spiritual intuition than for literary ability. St. Hildegarde 20 (1098-1179) and St. Elizabeth of Schoenau (1138-1165), were able representatives of that mysticism which prompts to energetic public service in a good cause, and of which St. Catherine of Sienna is the most familiar example. St. Hildegarde sent her letters like firebrands over Europe, striving to enkindle in indifferent rulers and sluggish people something of her own enthusiastic idealism. In the next century we find three women of genius, whose home was in the Benedictine Convent of Helfta, 21 recording their mystical experience in no mean literary form. St. Gertrude, more absorbed in her subjective experience than St. Mechtild of Hack- born (d. 1310), is a characteristic Catholic mystic of the visionary type. Mechtild of Magdeburg (1212-1299), is the author of "The Flowing Light of the Godhead" remarkable for poetic beauty and for individuality of expression. 22 The mysticism of St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) descended to his spiritual son and biographer, St. Bona venture (1221-1274), who combined a contemplative nature with vast intellectual powers, and whose teaching, as a consequence, has dominated orthodox mysticism in all succeeding ages. In the period of transition from the medieval to the modern world all was unrest men yearned after they knew not what, and 18 Cf. Turner, History of Philosophy, New York, 1903, p. 303. 19 Cf. Migne, Patrologia Latina, Paris, 1844, seq., t. 175-177-196. 20 Cf. Ibid., t. 197. 21 Cf . Robinson, A. M. F., End of the Middle Ages, London, 1889, p. 45. 22 Cf. Welch, Of Six Medieval Women, London, 1913. y 12 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH sought for light, they knew not where. The old issues of Nomi- nalism and Realism were revived by William of Ockham (1280- 1349), Albert of Saxony (d. 1390), and Peter D'Ailly (1350-1425). An abundance of error crept into their teachings, actuated as they were by a spirit of intellectual pride. Some turned to the ancient classics for the consolation they sought and attempted to revive pagan ideals. 23 Many, ignorant and obstinate, without either the requisite knowledge or the necessary patience to discover the laws of nature, sought to wrest from her the secrets of which she is possessed, by the process of magic, astrology and simulated intercourse with spirits. 24 Others, again, weary of endless dis- putation, sought knowledge in a truer source, in union with the Godhead. Turner, in his History of Philosophy, writing of this period, says : "The revival of the principles of mysticism was a natural result of the decadent condition of philosophy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The heaping of subtlety on subtlety and the interminable controversies of the advocates of Thomism and Scotism bewildered and disgusted the serious seeker after spiritual light, and drove him eventually to abandon all intellectual phil- osophy in favor of a life of contemplation and prayer. Many with the author of the Imitation of Christ that it is better ^71$ to feel contrition than to know its definition, and that he is very learned indeed who does the will of God and renounces his own will." 25 Such was the case in Germany at this time. We see here a group of three mystics, 26 Eckhart (1260-1329), Tauler (1300-1360), and Suso (1300-1365), all three Dominicans, all living and working near the Rhine, yet affording a striking contrast. Eckhart was strong intellectually, and by some is looked upon as the founder of German philosophy. He taught that "'The light which is the Son of God, and the shining das Ausscheinen of that light in the creature world are inseparable. The birth of the Son, and the Creation of the W T orld were one act." 27 For this doctrine he was condemned. Tauler was a missionary, possessing 23 Cf. Weber, History of Philosophy, translated by Thilly, Xew York, 1896, p. 261. 24 Cf. Gorres, Die Christliche Mystik, Regensburg, 1842, Band IV. "Turner, History of Philosophy, New York, 1903, p. 411. 26 Cf . Preger, Geschichte der deutschen Mystik im Mittdalter, Leipsic, 1874. Erdmann, History of Philosophy, translation edited by Hough, London, 1890, p. 548, ff. 27 Stockl, Geschichte der Philosophic, Mainz, 1888, par. 3, 6, p. 494. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 13 a broad sympathy with humanity, and a deep spirituality. Suso, whose writings have a simple beauty, was a romantic mystic, deeply concerned with his own soul, and his personal relation with God. Associated with these are the names of Ruysbroek (1293-1381), and Thomas a Kempis (1380-1471), whose Imitation of Christ has been a guide and consolation for Christian mystics of widely varying types and ages. His works, together with those of Suso, appear in English manuscript early in the fifteenth century, taking their place by the side of those of Richard Rolle of Hampole (1300-1349). Rolle, who was educated at Oxford, became enamored of the mystic life, and turned hermit. His descriptions of his communion with Divine Love, are touched with a true poetic spirit, and give evidence of an ardent zeal for souls. 28 In the British Museum a number of mystical works of the four- teenth century are preserved in manuscript. Among these is The Cloud of Unknowing whose authorship has never been deter- mined, but which gives evidence of having been largely influenced by Dionysius and the Victor ines. Two other famous English mystics belong to this period, Walter Hylton 30 (d. 1396), and Julian of Norwich* (1343-1413) who in her Revelations of Divine Love* 1 exhibits at once the qualities of a poet, a prophet, and a divine lover. About the same time, another woman of great genius, St. Catherine of Sienna, was proving to the world that in one character, the traits of the visionary and of the practical philanthropist, the constructive thinker and the skilful administrator, may be finely balanced. She was at once politician, teacher, and con- templative, and was able, in her short career, to render a signal service to religion. 32 Denis, the Carthusian ( 1402-1471), 33 was a theologian, an ardent admirer of the pseudo-Dionysius. His works helped to carry over to the modern world the best traditions of Christian mysticism. 28 Cf . The Fire of Love and The Mending of Life, London, 1896, edited by R. Misyer. 29 Cf. Gardner, The Cell of Self Knowledge, London, 1910. 30 Cf. Inge, Studies of English Mystics, London, 1905. 31 Cf . Revelations of Divine Love, edited by Warrack, London, 1912. f. Gardner, St. Catherine of Sienna, London, 1907. The Divine Dialogue of St. Catherine of Sienna, translated by Thorold, London, 1896. 33 Cf . Gurdon, Art. Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. IV, pp. 734-736. Siegfried, "Dionysius, the Carthusian," Amer. Eccl. Review, XXI, 512-527. 29 C 30 C - ^^^^^^^^Ldl! 1 14 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH Spanish mysticism first found definite expression in the life and writings of St. Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556). His Spiritual Exercises are a concrete exposition of the several stages of psycho- logical growth in the life history of every true mystic, and were a formative influence in determining the inner life of that great spiritual teacher, St. Teresa (1515-1582), who with St. John of the Cross (1542-1591), seems destined to remain for all time the sanest type of pure Catholic mystic. The religious mysticism of the seventeenth century, while represented on the orthodox side by so great a master in the spiritual life as St. Francis of Sales (1567-1622), tended to one of those strange aberrations 34 which form a not infrequent phase of its development. Miguel de Molinos 35 (1640-1697) and Madam Guyon (16181717) taught a practical passivity and repudiation of the body which led to their condemnation by the Church. Among Protestant mystics we have Sebastian Franck (1500- 1543) and Jakob Bohme (1575-1624). In the philosophy of Descartes (1596-1649), in which all objective knowledge is made subservient to the study of our own consciousness, latent elements of mysticism are contained, which were developed by Pascal (1623-1662), by Geulincx (1625-1669), and Malebranche (1638-1715). In Spinoza (1632-1677) there is a pantheistic mysticism, wiiile from the philosophy of Kant (1724-1804) evolved the romantic mysticism of Fichte (1762- 1814), Novalis (1772-1801), and Schelling (1775-1854). It is this aspect of mysticism which through Coleridge, profoundly influenced much of the English literature of the nineteenth century. A tendency to mysticism as a mental trait is very pronounced in the philosophic thought of the last decade of the nineteenth century, and finds two powerful exponents in Euchen 36 and Bergson. 37 "Strange as the statement may sound in the midst of the rush and riot of our merely industrial pursuits and ambitions, it is nevertheless true that the spirit of mysticism is in the air. Spiritu- alism, in most, if not in all of its forms, Christian Science, Theos- ophy, Buddhism, even Hypnotism in its illegitimate uses, and the many other forms of occultism which prevail today, are simply 34 Cf. Pace, Art. "Quietism," Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. XII, p. 608-610. 35 Cf. Ott, Art. "Molinos," Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. X, p. 105-106. 36 Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens, translated by Gibson, London, 1909. 37 Underbill, "Bergson and the Mystics," English Review, February, 1912. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 15 diverse practices of a false and reprehensible mysticism. The country is covered with votaries, victims, priests and priestesses of the occult. It is, in fact, a sign of the times. On the other hand, the old heresies have been riddled to pieces by the persistent attacks of modern science, the license of private interpretation, higher criticism, journalistic ridicule, secular education, and the growing contempt in which all shams and pretences in the garb of religion are everywhere held in literature and in. the life of the people." 38 Tertullian says the soul is by nature Christian, 39 and with more truth may it be said that man is naturally curious about God, and everything touching the unseen world; about heaven and hell, the unseen forces of nature, the motor power of his own being, and those vast, undiscovered regions which must be for him, for- ever unexplored, if reason be his sole guide. Even when he fails to perceive it, or refuses to acknowledge it, in his moments of deep thought there is borne in upon man the conviction that his most substantial interests lie in the direction of the spirit, and that the solution of all the vexing problems of existence lies ultimately in the acceptance of the belief in another world, and in the knowledge and love of God. "Back of the Rationalism and Agnosticism of the day, may we read a strong religious feeling crying out for life and light and warmth. Could these geniuses ascend the heights traversed by the great intellects could they see them as Plato saw them, and as Clement and Augustine and Aquinas and a Kempis saw them they, too, would find that rest and that fulness of life that belong to those dwelling in the broad daylight of God's truth." 40 Charles Kingsley, 41 in an article contributed to Fraser more than fifty years ago, speaks of mysticism as "a mode of thought and feeling now all but extinct in England" yet mysticism was then, as is now, very far from being dead. Mysticism, like other modes of thought which constantly recur, has conquered for itself a place in the human mind, and "the very universality of the tendency argues some want which it fulfills, a capacity of the soul 38 Conway, S. J., "Nature of Catholic Mysticism," American Catholic Quarterly, XXX, 683. 39 Cf. Tertulliani Opera, Libri Apologetici, cur. E. F. Leopold, Lipsiae, 1839, Pars I, p. 81. 40 Azarias, Brother, Essays Miscellaneous, Chicago, 1896, p. 170. 41 Cf. Art. "The New Mysticism," Quart. Rev., CXC, 79. 16 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH for more perfection than we can obtain through knowledge of created things." 42 Ferdinand Brunetiere, in La Renaissance de I'ldealisme, tells us that modern mysticism is really a revolt against the hard and dry dicta of the high priests of modern science who attempted to pronounce the death sentence on spiritual philosophy. It takes hold of those who are unwilling to reject the findings of science, yet are eager to discover what is the unknown power w^hich binds together the patent facts and forces of nature; others, perplexed at the potency of evil in individuals, and in the world, are attracted by the refuge it offers; others again are fascinated by occult phenomena, which science has not yet been able to explain. The movement is the result of "the mystical instinct asserting itself against the usurpation of the official philosophy of Positivism; it amounts to an attempt to enter into the "arcana" of nature and human life, which scientific Agnostics definitely refuse to approach; it is an endeavor to indemnify us for the spiritual loss we have sustained or are in danger of sustaining by accepting a purely mechanical view of the universe." 43 It is to religion that man looks to cultivate this mystic instinct of his nature. Mysticism follows the lead of religion, and as there is but one true and many false religions, so there is but one true and many false cults of mysticism. All mysticism has in it a strong element of the supernatural, yet this has not always'been developed along lines harmonious with reason and revelation. Before discussing the place wiiich mysticism holds as a creative factor in the poetry of the day, it seems well to consider the characteristics of mysticism, the notes which differentiate the true from the false mysticism, and to call attention to the fact that in the Catholic Church alone can mysticism, in its purest form, exist. 42 Sauvage, Op. tit., p. 664. 43 "The New Mysticism," Op. cit., p. 88. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 17 CHAPTER II THE CHARACTERISTICS OF MYSTICISM Man is a compound of matter and spirit so substantially united that they act as a unit, and by their action put him in relation with a threefold world the world of matter, the world of men, and the world of spirits. Yet, notwithstanding their substantial union, mind and matter possess a degree of independence, and a certain power in determining the acts for which they, as a unit, are responsible. 44 When a balance is preserved, man is said to act normally; but it may so happen that all the life forces are exercised in the benefit of matter, and we have the mere animal life: on the other hand, the spiritual may be so cultivated that the activ- ities of the body are forced to occupy a secondary place, and we have a life analogous to that of pure spirits. Persons in this condition are possessed of a knowledge and experience foreign to, and beyond, the experience of most men, and inexplicable on natural grounds. Here we have the first note of true mysticism. It is something supernatural, but not unnat- ural, for "mysticism of every kind is wound up with the dual nature of man, and while it plays with objects and experiences lying above and beyond the sphere of normal human activity, it does not, in any instance, call forth the play of forces the poten- tiality of which is not rooted in man's faculties." 45 The sphere of man's activity is manifold, and the phenomena of mysticism appear whenever any element attempts to get into direct and immediate intercourse with an object. When the object sought is God, we have true or divine mysticism: but man may give himself wholly to the study, service, and worship of the forces, mysteries and phenomena of nature, and we have what is called nature-mysticism. This was the mysticism of pagan antiquity, and it is still designated as such by those who "look for mystical knowledge not beyond, but in the material, intellectual and emotional life in which our lot is cast. It regards this world as but a small fragment of a much larger whole, and as made up of many elements all of which are not discoverable, so at least as to be clearly distinguished, by either our bodily or our intellectual 44 Cf. Summa TheoL, Quaes., LXXVI, translation I, 3, p. 20, ff. 46 Conway, S. J., Op. cit. t XXX, 685. 18 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH faculties. But every part of it is, in this view, connected with and symbolic of something infinitely greater than itself. It embodies and illustrates the operation of vast cosmic laws, it gives evidence of a divine benevolence which reaches further than our utmost vision can follow : it is lit by a ray from the sun of perfect beauty that lies below the horizon of earthly existence." 46 Inge calls this "the attempt to realize the presence of the living God in the soul and in nature, or more generally, the attempt to realize in thought and feeling, the immanence of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in the temporal. 47 Those who teach that creatures are but so many mirrors wherein the goodness, and power, and wisdom of God are reflected, and that we have but to look therein to acquire a true knowledge of Him, belong to the cult of nature-mystics. Believing as they do, that every- thing outward and visible corresponds to some invisible entity which is its spiritual cause, they hold that every new insight into the nature of things is, of itself, a growth in the knowledge and love of the Creator. There is nothing essentially wrong in this doctrine, for since Nature in all its mysterious forces is the work of God, it can be evil neither in itself nor in its relation to man. There can be no objection to the theory that "something of the nature and' will of God can be discerned in all created things, that He is truly reflected in them, and that their reflection can be distinguished with in- creasing clearness as we draw near to the perfect human state." 4 The danger lies in mistaking the "vision of Nature" for the "vision of God," and in overlooking the fact that the effects of sin have been felt to the uttermost bounds of creation that through the fall a double principle has invaded the universe. "Two cities, the city of God and the city of Satan, exist everywhere and always, and man, placed in the midst of their battles finds as well in the evil seeds which sin has deposited in his being, as in the good which remained to him after the fall, attractions which may and do solicit him in one direction as well as in the other, making him party to the powers of evil as well as a votary to the spirits which do the work of God in the world." 49 God's presence in the world may be considered from two 46 Sharpe, Op, cit., p. 9. 47 Op. cit., p. 5. 48 Ibid., p. 26. 49 Conway, Op. cit., p. 691. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 19 aspects. In one point of view God is everywhere present in crea- tion: He is present as the efficient cause from which everything derives its being; He is present as the intelligent designer and supreme ruler of all that is. He is in the heart of all things, "per essentiam, presentiam et potentiam." 50 "In Him we live and move and have our being," 51 yet He is absolutely distinct from all creatures by the very nature of His being, which is absolute and independent. Creatures are necessarily dependent, and are like to God only by virtue of the being which is com- municated to them by Him. No intelligence, wisdom, beauty, or power in any degree of perfection whatsoever, can in a creature, give us an adequate idea of the manner in which these attributes are possessed by God. God can be known only by intellectual separation from all creatures, and hence must be apprehended or experienced in a wholly different manner from that in which we experience created existence. Thus God, while said to be im- manent in creation, is still transcendent. 52 There is another view in which God is said to be immanent in the universe : this holds that God is not only present in the universe, but that he is mingled with it, that God and nature are but two aspects of one substance. 63 God cannot be outside Nature, for there is no outside, and He cannot be distinct from it because He is the underlying Reality. Still another view regards Nature as a mode of God's being, 54 a moment in His self-realization. Nature is identical with God, but God is more than nature, since He is prior to nature in order of thought, though not necessarily in order of time. In this conception creation is a necessary part of God, and He transcends nature only in the sense of being more than, not different from, nature. In either of these views the knowledge of nature is the knowledge of God, the love of nature is the love of God, and the experience of nature is the experience of God. This type of myjtidSm_lej,d^tojp^nthejsm, and cannot be reconciled with the Catholic doctrine of the relation between Creator and creature. It is true, God made all things good, but "sin has marred the order of God's creation, has put man in a false relation to all these things; it has given them a hold upon him, Summa. Theol., I, VIII, 3. 61 Acts, XVII, 28. 62 Cf. Sharpe, Op. cit., p. 138. 63 Cf. Weber, History of Philosophy, translated by Thilly, New York, 1896, p. 328. 64 Cf. Turner, History of Philosophy, New York, 1903, pp. 470-471. 20 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH he has sunk under their influence, they have enslaved him ; instead of raising him to God, he has allowed them to drag him down, and to blind him, so that he cannot see God. 55 Man chose the creature before the Creator, and made created things an end in themselves. "They were meant to be channels of approach to God revelations of God but the channels have become clogged, the creatures have become opaque, and at last they form a barrier between the soul and God;" 56 hence the "via Remotionis" of the true mystics. Yet the Catholic mystic no more despises nature than he despises grace. He believes "It is the business of religion to inculcate that view of life which enables us to look out on nature as God's creation, distinct indeed from Him in substance, but filled with the beauty of His presence, and pulsating with the glad- ness of His beauty and the joy of His supremely perfect life/' 57 Neither does he deny that nature may be a medium between God and man, but he does insist that it is only a medium, and not a self -sufficing one; that to use it effectively the senses must be purified, and hence the doctrine of renunciation and purgation so strenuously insisted on by mystical writers. The object sought in this renunciation is union with God. "It was not in mere weariness of their fellow men, nor in bitterness of disappointment, nor in ambitious hope of mounting upward unhelped and being like God that they (the mystics), parted with most of the innocent joys of life. They were enamored of the "Divine Cloud," the bright darkness of the Divine mysteries hidden within them; they felt that His Divine Majesty, in the words of Blessed Julian of Norwich, had set up His "See" in their hearts. Their one aim was to blunt the world's after images which haunted their thought, so that, if His majesty thought fit, some passing image might be flashed upon their expectant souls." 58 For this they were willing and prepared to pass through those stages of development so graphically described by St. Teresa, 59 St. John of the Cross, 60 and other mystics. The first stages of this development are merely negative, 55 Maturin, Some Principles and Practices of the Spiritual Life, London, 1907, p. 40. 56 Ibid., p. 47. 67 Turner, "The Personality of God," Catholic University Bulletin, XIV, 184. 58 McNabb, Introduction to the "Anchoresses of the West," by Steele, London, 1903, p. XII. 69 Cf. The Interior Castle, London, 1906. 80 Cf. The Ascent of Mount Carmel, London, 190G. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 21 consisting as they do in the purification of the soul from actual sin, from worldly desires, and from certain entanglements of the will and senses which hold it bound to creatures. The work of sanctification is accomplished through extirpation and spiritual upbuilding. True mysticism is founded on abnegation, which results in a twofold purification, that of the senses and that of the soul. The divine necessity of pain is set forth in the writings of all the mystics: it breathes from every page of the Imitation. Tauler has put this beautifully when he makes Christ say, "Learn that My divine nature never worked so nobly in human nature as by suffering: and because suffering is so efficacious, it is sent out of great love. I understand the weakness of human nature at all times, and out of love and righteousness I lay no heavier burden on man than he can bear. The crown must be firmly pressed down that is to bud and blossom in the Eternal presence of My Heavenly Father. The deeper and more supernaturally a man crushes himself beneath all things, the more supernaturally will he be drawn above all things." 61 These sufferings are in a sense self-imposed. The sense of unworthiness which follows the "awakening of the soul," has been called, "the reflex action which follows the first touch of God" 62 the result of which is a series of strongly marked oscillations between pleasure and pain, well described by St. Augustine when he says, "I was swept up to Thee by Thy Beauty, and torn away from Thee by my own weight." 63 The normal course of mysticism proceeds first by w r ay of devout preparation in the discharge of ordinary Christian duties, and the use of the ordinary means of grace; next it leads the soul into the immediate presence of God, as an experienced reality, and not as a concept or imagination; the third stage consists of a progressive union with God. In true mysticism God, not man, is the active force: the soul must be called to this state by God alone, and though she may prepare herself by the ascetic practices of the Christian life, yet she must passively await the moment when God will deign to open to her the inner courts. 64 In St. Teresa's well known description of the different states, the first three "Mansions" are devoted to preparation: in the fourth there is a blending of 61 Tauler, The Inner Way, New York, 1908, p. 114. "Underbill, Mysticism, London, 1911, p. 243. 63 Con/., Bk. VII, Ch. XVII. 64 Cf. Saint Jean de la Croix, Vive Flamme, quoted in Saudreau, Lea Degres de la vie Spirituelle, Paris, 1903, Tome 2, p. 21. %% SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH natural and supernatural prayer, but the prayer of union and spiritual marriage described in the last are wholly supernatural. 65 Gerson 66 attempts to define the precise nature of mystical contemplation. He divides the powers of the soul into cognitive and affective: these two work together. Their first function is mere cogitation discursive consideration of the objects of sense; then comes meditation, or the concentrated application of reason to these objects, and the production by it of the abstract ideas; these, again, can be contemplated by the simple intelligence apart from sense perception. So far all is natural; the cognitive and affective faculties act mutually on one another, and on the objects presented to them. But above all natural objects is the divine presence which is known by special divine favor, not as an abstract idea resulting from meditation, but as the immediate object of love, natural or supernatural. In its most perfect expression this contemplative knowledge of God is ecstasy. In this state all life seems to go out into the exer- cise of the illuminated mind: all the elements of being converge toward this one absorbing activity, and the ordinary means through which communion with God was maintained are now, to all intents and purposes, suspended. This is the highest exercise of true mysticism, and from it emanate all the preternatural features of the mystical life. 67 In these favored hours, according to St. John of the Cross, "the substance of God touches the sub- stance of the soul." 68 This state is of necessity, of short duration, but from it, "The human soul, fixed at last in God, her true center, slowly feels her way to a perfect equilibrium. All her powers, the mysterious forces of physical instinct, no less than the flights of pure intellect come by degrees to express themselves in their true hierarchy, an order so inevitable in its gradual development, so convincing in its final achievement, that the poet's words are seen to be after all but sober fact : "By Grace Divine, not otherwise O Nature, are we thine." 69 65 Cf. St. Teresa, The Interior Castle. 66 Gerson, Myst. Theol. Cons., IX, XLIII. 67 Cf. Ribet, Op. cit., p. 501. 68 St. John of the Cross, The Living Flame of Love, translated by Lewis, London, 1911, Stanza II, 1, IV. 69 Thorold, Catholic Mysticism, p. 32. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 23 Mysticism of this sort is of necessity of one piece with Catholic doctrine. He only is a pure mystic whose knowledge is founded on the true idea of God, and upon the perfect expression of God's revelation. This revelation can be truly known only through the Catholic Church, and in consequence, however beautiful, however appealing, may be the hopes held out by nature mystics for a union between God and man through nature, they are doomed to failure. Before the Incarnation there could be no complete union between God and man. The God-man is the perfect expression of mysticism, and through His death the advent of true mysticism was inaugurated. 70 70 Cf. Saudreau, La Voie qui mtne a Dieu, Paris, 1904, Ch. XXXII. 24 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH CHAPTER III THE RELATION BETWEEN PHILOSOPHY AND POETRY \ "To make song wait on life, not life on song" 71 is the aim of every true poet. The greater the poet or artist is, the nearer will be his approach to a true expression of life. Arnold says, "The grand power of poetry is its interpretative power: by which I mean not a power in drawing out in black and white an explanation of the mystery of the universe, but the power of so dealing with things as to awaken in us a wonderfully full, new and intimate sense of them, and of our relations with them. When this sense is awakened within us as to objects without us, we feel ourselves to be in contact with the essential nature of these objects, to be no longer bewildered and oppressed by them, but to have their secret, and to be in harmony with them." 72 Poetry effects this inter- pretation in two ways: "It interprets by expressing with magical felicity the physiognomy and movement of the outward world, and it interprets by expressing with inspired convictions, the ideas and laws of the inward world of man's moral and spiritual nature. In other words, poetry is interpretative both by having natural magic in it, and by having moral profundity." 73 If poets are indeed seers and makers, "if what they make has matter, has weight, if what they see is more than shadow, the poets must reveal the meanings of the life that is about them. Poets cannot be freed from the conditions which attach to the intelligence of man everywhere." 74 In Life in Poetry, Law in Taste y Courthope declares, "I take all great poetry to be, not so much what Plato thought it, the utter- ance of individual genius, half-inspired, half -insane, as the enduring voice tof the soul and conscience of man living in society." 75 "The common original, then, from which all the arts draw is human life its mental processes, its spiritual movements, its outward acts issuing from deeper sources; in a word, all that constitutes the inward and essential activity of the soul." 76 The very nature of 71 Thompson, Francis, New Poems, Boston, 1897, "The Cloud's Swan Son,cj," p. 104. 72 Arnold, Essays in Criticism, London, 1886, p. 81. 73 Ibid., pp. 110-111. 74 Dewey, J., "Poetry and Philosophy," Andover Review, XVI, 107. 76 Courthope, Life in Poetry, Law in Taste, London, 1913, pp. 25-26. 76 Butcher, Aristotle's Theory of Poetry and the Fine Arts, London, 1902, p. 124. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 25 poetical conception makes it impossible to deduce a conclusive and fixed definition of poetry. Mackail says, "A thousand defini- tions have been offered, all varying from one another, sometimes to the extent of not having a single element in common.*' 77 For the influence exercised on men by words is greatest and most difficult to estimate or to disentangle when words themselves, the art of language, are the subject matter as well as the medium of the inquiry. 78 Since "all poetry begins and ends in feeling, to define poetry satisfactorily one must accordingly define the feeling out of which poetry springs, and to which it gives rise; but to do this is not possible; feeling is of such a nature that it cannot be defined; no exact logical definition of it can ever be made; poetry, itself, therefore, can never be satisfactorily or finally defined." 79 Yet the feeling that is aroused by poetry, or the thought that is con- veyed with an emotional setting, is aroused or conveyed through the use of a definite kind of material, and the working out of consistent processes, which are subject to laws*^ To present intellectual truths, freed from their emotional setting, is the task of science; science deals with laws and principles, with causes, or explanations; with general assertions, with classes and groups of objects. Poetry deals usually with individual persons, particular experiences, things or events. Emotion connects itself more readily with concrete things, with particular persons or events, than with abstract ideas. Yet the mind process of poetry is of necessity an abstraction, for the, mental image is the raw material out of which poetry is made. 80 "The working out of the author's conceptions is spontaneous and imaginative; they bring into play the conscious intellect, and from the germinal hint or motive build up the masterpiece of thought." 81 The poet, according to Aristotle, 82 is required to reproduce, not nature itself, but the idea of nature existing in the mind, "for nature in Aristotle is not the outward world of created things: it is the creative force, the productive principle of the universe." 83 Ideal life is subject to laws of its own, and Horace, in his Ars Poetica, says very justly, "Painters and poets have always been 77 Mackail, Lectures on Poetry, London, 1911, p. 6. 78 Fairchild, The Making of Poetry, New York, 1912, p. 11. 7 Ibid. 80 Cf. Fairchild, Op. cit., p. 21. 81 Stedman, Nature and Elements of Poetry, New York, 1892, p. 48. 82 Cf. Poetics, translated by Butcher, XXV, 2. 83 Butcher, Op. cit., p. 116. 26 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH allowed a just freedom of conception; this is an admitted fact, and the critic grants the indulgence that the poet asks." 84 All that the poet is required to do is to create a perfect illusion, the effect of probability, or in other words, that idea of unity which is the essential condition of organic life. In every genuinely inspired poetical conception, there are two elements of life, the one universal, the other particular. The universal is the idea of the subject, whatever it may be, as it exists in an undeveloped state in the human mind; the individual element is the particular form and character which is impressed upon the subject by the creative genius of the poet. The subject matter exists not only in the mind of the poet, but, in embryo, in the mind in general: the poet, then, must observe those laws and conditions of ideal life which prepare the imagination of the audi- ence for the reception of his thought. "He must vitalize the inorganic matter already existing in general conceptions, so that his audience will conspire with him in the act of creation." 86 The poet must have some authority for his attitude toward life. Only when we get at the ideas which the poet applies to life, only when we know the standard by which he criticises and interprets life, are we able to judge of his power. If the ideas which give substance to poetry are only illusive make-ups of the poet's fancy, they can have no claim on our serious attention, much less a power to stay by and to uphold. If the ideas expressed are only will-o'- the-wisps of the poet's fancy with no foundation in truth, they are of no more value than the idle fancies of a diseased brain. "Sometimes imagination invades the sphere of understanding, and seems to discredit its indispensable work. Common sense, we are allowed to infer, is a shallow affair, true insight changes all that. When so applied, poetic activity is not an unmixed good. It loosens our hold on fact, and confines our intelligence, so that we forget that intelligence has itself every prerogative of imagination, and has besides the sanction of practical validity." 8 But just because poetry "flashes home to us some of the gold which is at the core and heart of our everyday existence, amid the con- ventionalities and make-believes of our ordinary life" 87 it is of worth. "Each poet is really an explorer in the realm of thought 84 Horace, Satires and Epistles, edited by Morris, p. 191. 85 Courthope, Op. cit., p. 48. 86 Santayana, Poetry and Religion, New York, 1900, p. 255. 87 Dewey, Op. cit., p. 107. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 27 and feeling, not a creator. The truth is fixed by some power other than himself, other, indeed, than man." 88 The object of poetry is to bring to the mind of the reader, the realization of an ideal which has either never been in the plane of his activities, or has slipped down from the edge of action, and has ceased to play any part in his daily life. In all periods of social development, mental and spiritual needs occur which are more effectively satisfied through poetry, than in any other way. There is a common demand that the poet shall be accurate in his representations he is not to reproduce nature, but in his work he must take cognizance of the human appreciations of nature. Philosophy aims to correct the partiality of particular points of view by means of the standard of totality. The most synthetic and metaphysical minds are those which possess the widest vision. "That which the poet sees, the philosopher must define. That which the poet divines, the philosopher must calculate. The philosopher must dig for that which the poet sees shining through. As the poet transcends thought for the sake of experience, the philosopher must transcend experience for the sake of thought/' 89 The facts of life are not solely the things which we can grasp and handle nor are its utilitarian pursuits confined to mere money getting, scientific cultivation of knowledge, or other such things. Away beyond these in even practical value to the world are "the diligent conservation and cultivation of noble thought and senti- ment issuing to noble action, things which are of the very soul and substance of poetry, their natural and true expression, and efficient sustenance," 90 but that sustenance must be drawn from the intelligence of the time. The poet draws his material from life; and the life which is nearest the mind of the poet, is life translated into some prevailing theory of philosophy. Centuries of reflection have colored the material he finds at hand, and he must simply assimilate the results of the labor of scientific men and philosophers. "The poet, though influencing after times, is himself the product of influence; he molds the ideas he finds popular; he is the child of his age. . . . Men's philosophical opinions influence their actions long before they undertake to account to themselves for 88 Ibid. 89 Perry, Ralph Barton, "Poetry and Philosophy," Phil. Rev., XI, 591. 90 Waters, "Religious Element in Modern Poetry," Cath. World, 76, 110. 28 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH holding them. Religious and philosophical problems of deepest import are one." 91 "Literature is so closely related to the whole movement of life that every decided tendency which it discloses, every dominant impulse which it reveals, may be studied with the certainty that some fact of human experience, some energy of human purpose and desire, lies behind. . . . Great books are not born in the intellect, but in experience, in the contact of mind and heart with the great and terrible facts of life; the great conceptions of literature originate not in the individual mind, but in the soil of common human hopes, loves, fears, aspirations, and sufferings." 92 In our own time the objective manner of the earlier poets has given way to a subjectivism significant of a deepening self-con- sciousness. "No age has ever studied itself with so eager a curiosity as our own. This introspection has impressed itself very strongly upon all contemporary art; it has raised up the literature of locality: the analytical novel; it has turned the rivulet of our poetry almost entirely into the lyric channel, for the lyric is of all poetry the most subjective. It is well for the poet to look into his heart and write, well for him to examine the precise quality of his intent and the technical resources of his craft. The danger is that through looking too precisely, he be smitten with the paralysis of Hamlet. There is danger that he may lose the naked vision of that Beauty, whom we know by her earlier name of Truth." 93 To avoid this snare, poetry must be founded on a true philosophy of life, and "a noble religion, which will bear by its immaterial truths, our intellect, conscience, emotions, imagination, and spirit, beyond this world; and yet, by these very truths, set us into the keenest activity in the world for the bettering of the world." 94 91 Azarias, Brother, Philosophy of Literature, Philadelphia, 1879, p. 48. 92 Mabie, Essays in Literary Interpretation, New York, 1900, p. 4. 93 Hooker, Brian, "Introspection and Some Recent Poetry," Forum, XXXIX, 522. 94 Brooke, S. A., Religion in Literature, New York, 1901, p. 30. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 29 CHAPTER IV WORDSWORTH: GOD SOUGHT THROUGH NATURE Mysticism is essentially, a union with God: that it is much more need not concern us now. There are, however, many kinds of union with God. Firs, there is the substantial union of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, a union ineffable and incommunica- ble, into which the Three alone can enter. Secondly, there is the hypostatic or personal union of a created nature with a divine, a privilege which belongs to the adorable Humanity of Jesus Christ alone. Thirdly, there is the causal union which exists between the Creator and all creatures, by virtue of their origin, and their dependence on Him. Fourthly, there is an intellectual and affective union with God, which may be either natural or supernatural. It is possible that the existence of a Supreme Being, worthy of worship and love, may be discerned by the human mind through a purely natural knowledge of the universe, and from this purely natural knowledge may spring a purely natural love. If we believe that God has revealed Himself otherwise than through nature, another kind of knowledge and love is obtainable the knowledge of faith, and the love of charity: this supernatural intellectual and affective union with God every soul in a state of grace possesses. 95 When this union is cultivated, and maintained at its highest plane, when every element in it acts in accordance with reason, and a will founded on God, we have, not the mystical state, indeed, but its forerunner, contemplation. 96 If God is pleased to lead the soul thus prepared into His immediate pres- ence, and give her an "experimental" knowledge of Himself, we have true mysticism. Reserving until later all discussion as to what evidences of this type of mysticism modern English poetry affords, we shall here concern ourselves with that intellectual and affective union brought about by a contemplation of natural objects, and with the author who has given most pronounced expression to the belief that through Nature man may come into immediate contact with the Divine. 96 Cf. Sharpe, Op. ciL, pp. 63^64. 96 Cf. Lejeune, An Introduction to the Mystical- Life, translated by Lvett, London, 1915, p. 285, ff. 30 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH No one at all familiar with the poetry of Wordsworth will deny that he possessed a sort of moral sensitiveness, closely akin to the mystical consciousness, which very early affected his imaginative life, and impelled him to give an ethical interpretation to certain aspects of nature, and to claim for natural beauty an influence above and beyond the aesthetic. 97 His poetry is, in a very large measure, an account of his own inner experiences; experiences, which, originally sense perceptions, were synthesized through recollection, and given a moral interpretation. Physical environment has much to do with the mental and spiritual development of every individual. Wordsworth was born and reared in the Lake country, 98 a region noted for its natural beauty: much of his time, through childhood and youth, up to mature manhood, was spent in the presence of picturesque moun- tains and sheltered dales, of wild fells, and rapid waterfalls. The religious love and regard which he had for nature are traced by him to these early associations: "Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up, Fostered alike by beauty and by fear." 99 It w r as here, the Derwent, "fairest of all rivers" "loved to blend his murmurs" with his nurse's song, and "sent a voice That flowed" along his dreams. 100 In the biographical poem, "The Prelude," which Legouis declares less a narrative than a study of origins, less the history of a man than the philosophy of a mind, 101 he gives an account of youthful, solitary adventures, wherein he feels himself influenced by strange and obscure agencies which have a direct and decisive effect on his spiritual and imaginative life. One experience after another seems to bear out the sense of something back of reality at once awful and incomprehensible. When the boy, woodcock catching with his companions by moonlight, is tempted to take more than his share of the spoils, he hears among the solitary hills, "low breathings" coming after him, 97 Cf. Sneath, E. H., Wordsworth, Poet of Nature and Poet of Man, Boston, 1912, p. 3. 98 Cf. Myers, Life of Wordsworth, New York, 1887. 99 The Prelude, Bk. I, 11, 301-303. 100 Ibid., 11, 271-274. 101 Legouis, E. H., The Early Life of William Wordsworth, translated Uy J. W. Matthews, London, 1897, p. 14. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 31 "and sounds Of indistinguishable motion, steps Almost as silent as the turf they trod:" 102 the huge black peak seems to stride after him, with "measured motion like a living thing;" his mind "Worked with a dim and undetermined sense Of unknown modes of being." 103 Nature seemed full of huge and mighty forms, that did not live like men: dim, unseen presences which haunted his boyish sports, and "impressed upon all forms the character of danger and desire." 104 There can be no doubt as to the light in which Wordsworth himself views these experiences. He holds that for him, Nature was a moral teacher, the moulder of his conscience during those early years: that she enforced her lessons through pain and fear, and through the inspiration of high and enduring things. 105 However greatly he may have exaggerated in later years the impressions then made upon him, we see here the crude beginnings of that spiritual apprehension of Nature which was to form more and more an article of his poetic and philosophical creed. 106 He came to feel that he must "tread on shadowy ground, must sink Deep, and aloft ascending, breathe in worlds, To which the heaven of heavens is but a veil." 107 In all this it is evident that Wordsworth, in common with other mystics, had a dim consciousness of some vast power, over- shadowing this sense-world of ours, and making itself felt in the soul. 108 But he believed this power to be, not so much behind Nature, as in it. He held that through the contemplation of Nature man "may see into the Me of things" 109 as far, perhaps, as beatific vision or prophetic rapture can attain. He would make Nature a revealing agency of the transcendental world, like 102 The Prelude, Bk. I, 11, 323-325. 103 Ibid., 1. 392-393, 104 Ibid., 1, 471-472. 105 Ibid., 1, 409. 106 Cf. Clough, Arthur, Literary Remains, London, 1869, Vol. I, p. 310. 107 The Excursion, Preface. 108 Cf. Veitch, The Theism of Wordsworth. Transactions of Wordsworth Society, No. 8, p. 24. 109 Tintern Abbey, 1, 51. 32 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH love or prayer. 110 The question arises, can the world of life, and order, and beauty, by which we are surrounded, however studied, however enjoyed, lead us back to that knowledge and love of God which we have lost through sin? That Christianity is a supernatural system, propounding spirit- ual aids without which the human race can have no hope of regeneration, Wordsworth nowhere denies, but he nullifies this truth by asserting that man can be restored to a state of primitive purity by a process purely natural, and independent of any superior agency. "Paradise and groves Elysian, Fortunate Fields like those of old Sought in the Atlantic main: why should they be A history only of departed things, Or a mere fiction of what never was? For the discerning intellect of man When wedded to this goodly universe In love and holy passion, shall find these A simple produce of the common day." 111 In that portion of Wordsworth's poetry which represents his highest genius, the portion that is most apt to endure for all time, "the capacities of the soul, the exhaustless sympathies of nature, are held up for contemplation, positively declared, per- suasively reasoned, skilfully illustrated with the finest trophies of imaginative power. There is no shrinking from conclusions, no extenuation of meaning, but all that is implied in the "high argu- ment" of the perfect sufficiency of nature to the human mind, finds emphatic utterance." 112 He asserts the power of the soul to regenerate herself: "Within the soul a faculty abides That with interpositions which would hide And darken, so can deal, that they become Contingencies of pomp : and seem to exalt Her native brightness." 113 110 Cf. Myers, F. W. H., Wordsworth, New York, 1887, p. 130. 111 The Excursion, Preface, 11, 47-55. 112 Art. "Wordsworth as a Religious Teacher," Christian Review, 16, 434. 113 The Excursion, Bk. IV. 11, 1058-1062. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 33 These interpositions came from Nature "The whispering air Sends inspiration from the shadowy heights And blind recesses of the caverned rocks. The little rills, and waters numberless Inaudible to daylight, blend their notes With the loud streams." 114 Nature was to Wordsworth "The nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart;'* 115 he com- mends his sister to a like guardianship, as a sovereign remedy against "all solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief." 116 His highest aspiration for the Cumberland beggar is that he may live and die in the eyes of nature; the most telling incident he can summon to express the degradation of Peter Bell is that the tiny flower by the river's brim was nothing more to him than a yellow primrose. In all this Wordsworth was influenced, whether he was aware of it or not, by Rousseau and the Zeit-Geist. 117 "A return to Nature" was the gospel of the day. The very atmosphere was charged with it, and Wordsworth was all the more susceptible to its influence because it harmonized with his predispositions and likings. Emile Legouis, a keen and penetrating critic of the poet, says: "Wordsworth's surprise and resentment would surely have been provoked had he been told that, at half a century's distance, and from an European point of view, his work would seem, on the whole, though with several omissions and additions, to be a continuation of the movement initiated by Rousseau. It is, nevertheless, certain that it might be described as an English variety of Rousseau's well known tenets: he has the same semi- mystical faith in the goodness of nature as well as in the excellence of the child: his ideas on education are almost identical; there are apparent a similar diffidence in respect of the merely intellectual processes in the mind, and an equal trust in the good that may ac- crue to man from the cultivation of his senses and his feelings. . . . For this reason Wordsworth must be placed by the general historian among the numerous "sons of Rousseau" who form the main battalion of romanticism." 118 Ibid., 11, 1170-1176. 115 Tintern Abbey, 1, 110. 116 Ibid., 1, 144. 117 Cf. Caird, Edward, Essays on Literature and Philosophy, Glasgow, 1892, pp. 160-162. 118 Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. XI, p. 103. 34 SOME EVIDENCES OF MSYTICISM IN ENGLISH With Wordsworth this passion for Nature seemed to develop almost into a religion : he was a reverent worshipper at her shrine, and the overpowering vision which he there beheld was for him a tremendous reality, and he felt himself morally commissioned to speak that vision through his art. He was a "dedicated spirit." 119 "I, long before the blissful hour arrives, Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse Of this great consummation; and, by words Which speak of nothing more than what we are, Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep Of death, and win the vacant and the vain To noble raptures;" 120 Natural beauty has had a marked influence on nearly all true mystics. St. Bernard, masterful and rigid ascetic as he was, writing to a young friend, urging him to leave the world and enter a monastery, said: "Experto crede: aliquid amplius inveneris in silvis quam in libris; ligna et lapides docebunt te quod a magistro audire non possis." 121 "Thou wilt find something more in forests than in books: trees and rocks will teach thee what thou canst not learn from masters;" but here St. Bernard was simply making the point that the freer a life is from the complex toils of society, the more easily the soul rises to God He avows that he, himself, gained his understanding of the Scriptures by prayer and medita- tion "in silvis et in agris," 122 when he had no masters except the oaks and beeches, yet we note that the subject of his meditation was not the oaks and beeches, but the Scriptures. In the case of the true mystic it is the appreciation of unseen forces within and behind the material world that leads to a love of nature, and the transition is from the supernatural to the natural. Man cannot get a religion out of Nature, nor can she be to him a source of inspiration, unless he come to the spectacle of her with the thought of God already in his heart. The beauty we see in earth and sky is not shed over it by us, nor projected from our souls. "The ideal is not in the soul, it is in the soul's Maker," 123 with whom the soul is created to commune, and we 119 The Prelude, IV, 1, 337. 120 The Excursion, Preface, 11, 56-62. 121 Migne, Patrologia Lalina, Vol. CLXXXII, p. 242. 122 Ibid. 123 Brownson, Quarterly Review, 12, 537. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 35 are forced to ask ourselves if there is not a better way of reaching that communion than the one pointed out by the great poet. We do not question the fact that there is a profound connection between the world around us, and the world within us, but we believe a nature creed such as advanced by Wordsworth can lead but to vague and shadowy conclusions, and to a distant and bewildering view of God. He sought, in common with other writers of his time, to lead men from the old scholastic formulae to an intuition of an immanent God, and the result is a misty notion of an all-pervading Spirit, which neither strengthens to endure, nor rouses to action. In his poetry we miss the clear sense of the Personality of God. His theories may satisfy "a herdsman on a lonely mountain top," 124 but will they convince men living in the midst of great groaning cities? Deplore the fact as we may, men do so live, and they are the very ones whom spiritual starvation threatens most. Are they to be debarred from attaining moral and religious excellence because their surroundings afford no food for the imagination? Wordsworth held that through communion with Nature he regained his moral poise after the shock of the French Revolution, 126 a crisis in his life which has been compared to the "dark night of the soul" experienced by religious mystics. It may well be that the sight of nature in her calmness and beauty soothed the imag- ination of Wordsworth: the question is, had the "grisly drama" been enacted not in imagination, but in real life, had Wordsworth been an actor and not a spectator in that drama, would the power he ascribed to nature have been sufficient to support the strain. Had he been, not afar off, but in the midst of that carnival of fever and passion, would the considerations he advances have cooled that fever and held in check those passions? We doubt it. There are moral evils of too deep and obstinate a character to yield to the remedy he proposes. The perplexed, the darkened, the diseased mind craves something more than the beauteous aspects of nature, draw deeply as it may from her store. It needs the sight of the dying Savior, and the sense of His abiding Presence. 124 The Excursion, Bk. I, 1, 219. i Cf. The Prelude, XII. Raleigh, Life of Wordtworth, London, 1903, p. 4, 5. 36 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH CHAPTER V ROSSETTi: GOD SOUGHT THROUGH BEAUTY The supremacy of science, and the advance of democracy, are usually considered the two dominant forces in modern English We and thought. The ideas which had begun to shape them- selves early in the century, were clearly defined by 1830. The new political and social movements developed rapidly, but by the middle of the century, they were compelled to recede before the storm of historical criticism and scientific exposition which their wide-spread inception and propagation had aroused. 126 Prominent among the minds of more distinctly spiritual grain, whom this endless pursuit of scientific and political ideals had repelled, stands Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 127 As Keats in the earlier part of the century held aloof from the revolutionary struggles which so powerfully affected Byron and Shelley, so now Rossetti, and with him that small band of enthusiasts to be known later as the Pre-Raphaelites, cared not a whit for the endless discussion of the correlation of physical forces, natural selection, the infallibility of the Bible, and wholly unaffected by the expan- sion of these scientific and philosophical ideas, sought to "get away from this vain disquiet to quiet, from futile argument to fruitful meditation, from materialism to the spiritual, from this ugly world to a beautiful one, from theological squabbles to re- ligious symbols, from fighting sects to the invisible Church, from Science and its quarrels to the great creations of imagination, from convention to truth in Art, from imitation of dead forms of Art to Nature herself. . . . Let us seek the realm of pure faith, or if we do not care to believe, to that pure image of beauty which we see once more rising from the Sea of Time." 128 Mr. Arthur Benson, in his Life of Rossetti points out two pre- dominating strains in nineteenth century poetry: one, the strong impulse to find a poetical solution for the problem lying behind nature and life; the other, an attempt to treat of human relations 126 Cf. Saintsbury, George, The Later Nineteenth Century, London, 1907, pp. 352-396. 127 Cf. Rossetti, William, in Preface to Works of Dante Gabriel Rossitti, London, 1890, p. XXI. 128 Brooke, Stopford A., Four Victorian Poets: Clough, Arnold, Rossttti, Morris, London, 1908, p. 15. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 37 in their most direct form. With neither of these had Rossetti any close affinity. He belonged rather to the medieval school of Italian poetry, and sought inspiration in the romance and mysticism of that period. 129 "He was a Latin, and he made it his special task to interpret to modern Protestant England what- ever struck him as most spiritually intense and characteristic in the Latin Catholic Middle Age." 130 This was not strange. His mother was half-Italian: his father was a native of the kingdom of Naples, and a well known com- mentator and exponent of Dante. From his childhood he had been trained to love the great poet, and had been given his name at the baptismal font. 131 In the beautiful sonnet, "Dantis Tenebrae," written in memory of his father, he says, "And didst thou know, indeed, when at the font, Together with thy name thou gav'st me his, That also on thy son must Beatrice Decline her eyes according to her wont, Accepting me to be of those that haunt The vale of magical dark mysteries, Where to the hills her poet's foot-track lies, And wisdom's living fountain to his chaunt Trembles in music." 132 The poet believed that he had found in the Vita Nuova a sympa- thetic statement of his own moods, and he tells us, ' 'I, long bound within the threefold charm Of Dante's love sublimed to heavenly mood, Had marvelled; touching his Beatitude, How grew such presence from man's shameful scorn. At length within this book I found portrayed Newborn that Paradisal Love of his, And simple like a child; with whose clear aid I understood. To such a child as this, Christ, charging well his chosen ones, forbade Offence: "for lo! of such my kingdom is." 133 That for him Beatrice declined her eyes according to her wont, his poetry affords sufficient proof. His earlier productions show 129 Cf. Op. cit., p. 78-79. 130 Beers, A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century, New York. 1899, p. 298. 131 Cf . Rossetti, William M., in Preface to Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, London, 1905, pp. 7, 8. 132 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, Complete Poetical Work*, ]'<.st Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. I' 2 Ibid. " 3 Ibid., p. 340. " Ibid. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 51 "O too much joy; O touch of airy fire; O turmoil of content; O unperturbed desire," 196 and she, like St. Catherine of Sienna, who asked for "yet more sufferings, O Lord, yet more" 196 cries out, "Bitter be thy behests! Lie like a bunch of myrrh between my aching breasts. Some greatly pangful penance would I brave Sharpness me save From being slain by sweet!" 197 The divine Lover bids her not seek for sufferings save as they come : "Custom's joy-killing breath Shall bid you sigh full soon for custom killing death." 198 The soul is ready to obey, yet she must make her protestation of fidelity, "In all I thee obey! and thus I know That all is well." 199 In St. Teresa we read, "Do you know what it is to be truly spiritual? It is for men to be the slaves of God, branded with His mark, which is the cross," 200 and here the soul exclaims in a fever of impassioned zeal, "Thy love has conquered me: do with me as thou wilt, And use me as a chattel that is thine ! Kiss, tread me under foot, cherish or beat, Sheathe in my heart sharp pain up to the hilt, Invent what else were most perversely sweet; Nay, let the Fiend drag me through dens of guilt; Let Earth, Heav'n, Hell 'Gainst my content combine; What could make nought the touch that made thee mine!" 201 But when the vision would depart, her courage ebbs : "Ah, say not yet, farewell!" 202 and the answer is a playful taunt: "Behold, Beloved, the penance you would brave." 203 195 Ibid. 196 Cf . Dialogues of St. Catherine of Sienna, translated by Thorold, London, 1913. 197 Patmore, Poems, p. 340. 198 Ibid. 199 Ibid. . 200 The Interior Castle, Op. cit., p. 285. 201 Patmore, Poems, ed. cit., p. 342. 202 Ibid. 208 Ibid. 52 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH In touching humility, the soul acknowledges her weakness : "Cursed when it comes, the bitter thing we crave! Thou leav'st me now, like to the moon at dawn, A little vacuous world alone in air. I will not care. When dark comes back my dark shall be withdrawn ! Go as thou wilt and come ! Lover divine, Thou still art jealously and wholly mine. Rainbow, thou hast my heaven sudden spanned I am the apple of thy glorious gaze, Each else life cent 'ring to a different blaze." 204 and to prove that the vision is a true one, fructifying in action, she adds: "Whilst thou art gone, I'll search the weary meads, To deck my bed with lilies of fair deeds!" 205 Then follows a delicately, coyly candid invitation to the Bride- groom to visit her again : "And if thou choose to come this eventide, A touch, my Love, will set my casement wide." 206 In the second of the "Psyche" odes, "De Natura Deorum," we have the relation between God and the soul expressed in imagery that is essentially human, and daintily subtle. Psyche, troubled at the dread God who has won her heart, conscious that she is foolish, weak, and small, and fearful lest He visit her no more, seeks the "Wise Mother," who comforts her: "Know Sweet little daughter sad, He did but feign to go; And never more Shall cross thy window sill, Or pass beyond thy door, Save by thy will. He is present now in some dim place apart Of the ivory house wherewith thou mad'st him glad." 207 204 Ibid. 206 Ibid. 206 Ibid. Ibid., p. 344. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 53 This is in harmony with the teaching of the Catholic mystics that a soul once raised to the heights of contemplation, rarely loses that grace. 208 The soul laments her un worthiness : "Sadness and change and pain Shall me forever stain; For, though my blissful fate Be for a billion years, How shall I stop my tears That life was once so low and Love arrived so late." 209 St. John of the Cross tells us, that when "the interior favor of the king's scepter" 210 is extended to the soul, it becomes so bold in its intense and loving exaltation, that no prudence can withhold it, no counsel content it, no shame restrain it; for the favor which God hath shown it has made it vehemently bold. 211 In "Psyche's Discontent" we read, "Leave me awhile that I may shew thee clear How Goddess-like thy love has lifted me; How seeming lone upon the gaunt, lone shore, I'll trust thee near, When thou'rt to knowledge of my heart, no more Than a dream's heed Of lost joy track'd in scent of the sea- weed ! Leave me to pluck the incomparable flower Of frailty lion-like fighting in thy name and power; To make thee laugh in thy safe heaven, to see With what grip fell I'll cling to hope when life draws hard to hell. Yea, cleave to thee, when me thou seem'st to slay, Haply, at close of some most cruel day, To find myself in thy reveal'd arms clasped, Just when I say, My feet have slipp'd at last!" 212 The soul has grown so strong that delight is to her a "fond indig- nity" 213 and she merits the reproach of her Lord: "Little bold Femininity, That darest blame Heaven, what would'st thou have or be?" 214 208 Cf. St. Teresa, The Interior Castle, p. 259. St. John of the Cross, The Obscure Night of the Soul, ed. cit., p. 448. 2og Patmore, Poems, ed. cit., p. 344. 210 Op. tit., p. 438. 211 Cf. Patmore, Poems, pp. 438-439. 212 Ibid., pp. 349-350. 213 Ibid. 214 Ibid., p. 350. 54 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH Her response is a paeon of humility and ardor : "Shall I, the gnat which dances in the ray, Dare to be reverent? Therefore, dare I say I cannot guess the good that I desire; But this I know, I spurn the gifts which Hell Can mock till which is which 'tis hard to tell. I love Thee, God; yea, and 'twas such assault As this which made me thine; if that be fault; But I, thy Mistress, merit should thine ire, If aught so little, transitory and low As this which made me thine Should hold me so." The Master is satisfied: "Little to thee, my Psyche, is this, but much to me." "Accept the sweet, and say 'tis sacrifice! Sleep, Center to the tempest of my love, And dream thereof, And keep the smile which sleeps within thy face Like sunny eve in some forgotten place." 215 Mr. Edmund Gosse, in his Life of Coventry Pat more remarks: "The typical mystic has no pity for his wretched body. It is in a cloud of fatigue and anguish, in voluntary tribulation inflicted without mercy, that the saints of this type obtained their visions. . . . For this kind of penitential hysteria Patmore had the greatest possible disdain." 216 Passing over the fact that among the mystics whose teachings are held in greatest esteem by the Church, we find no authority for depreciation of the body, but only for repression of unlawful claims, there is in Patmore's work, sufficient proof that he was in full accord with the orthodox Cath- olic doctrine of asceticism. In "Eros and Psyche," the soul, urged by her great love is made to say : "Shouldst thou me tell Out of thy warm caress to go And roll my body in the biting snow, My very body's joy were but increased; More pleasant 'tis to please than to be pleased." 217 215 Ibid., pp. 350-351. 216 Gosse, Edmund, Op. cit., p. 165. 217 Patmore, Poems, ed. cit., p. 341. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 55 Psyche, in "De Natura Deorum," calls her self-inflicted wounds the effect of "Happiness at play, And speech of tenderness no speech can say." 218 and complains "He loves me dearly, but he shakes a whip Of deathless scorpions at my slightest slip." She asks, in "Psyche's Discontent," "To bear, apart from thy delight and thee, The fardel coarse of customary life's Exceeding injucundity." 219 In "Victory and Defeat" the poet says, "Ah, God, alas, How soon it came to pass The sweetness melted from thy barbed hook Which I so simply took; And I lay bleeding on the bitter land, Afraid to stir against thy least command. Thereafter didst thou smite So hard that, for a space, Uplifted seem'd Heav'n's everlasting door, And I the darling of thy grace." 220 Patmore was an aristocrat, and abhorred the crowd in religion as in politics. 221 He sought the high planes of the spiritual life, and this temper of mind explains, perhaps, his attraction for St. John of the Cross, of whom it has been said that he acted towards the Lord like a Spanish grandee in the presence of his king. 222 The only kind of well-being with which Patmore was much concerned was that which led to spiritual and moral growth, in the effecting of which pain has always been considered a necessai element. The full force and meaning of the ode in which he sings the praises of "Pain" are too obvious to permit of misinterpreta- tion : lbid., p. 346. 219 Ibid., p. 349. 220 Ibid., pp. 307-308. 121 Cf. Ibid., "1867" and "1880-85," pp. 291, ff, and 299, ff. 221 Cf. Joly. Henri, Psychologic des Saints, Paris, 1895, p. 78. 56 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH "O Pain, Love's mystery, Close next of kin To joy and heart's delight, Low Pleasure's opposite, Choice food of sanctity And medicine of sin, Angel, whom even they that will pursue Pleasure with hell's whole gust Find that they must Perversely woo, My lips, thy live coal touching, speak thee true." 223 When his poetic powers were in their maturity, Patmore conceived a desire to dedicate his gifts to the Mother of God; to bring back to her the golden coin she had given him. 224 In "Deliciae Sapien- tiae de Amore" he had sung "Love, light for me Thy ruddiest blazing torch, That I, albeit a beggar by the Porch Of the glad Palace of Virginity, May gaze within, and sing the pomp I see." 225 and in one of his letters we find, "Perfect humanity, verging upon, but never entering the breathless region of Divinity, is the real subject of all true love-poetry; but in all love-poetry hitherto an 'ideal' and not a reality has been the subject, more or less." 226 In the Blessed Virgin he thought to find such a reality. The poem planned was destined never to be completed, but "The Child's Purchase" which the poet meant to be the "Prologue" to his great work, abounds in delicacy of feeling, and sincerity of expression. Among the many lines of exceeding beauty it contains are these: "Mother, thou lead'st me still by unknown ways, Giving the gifts I know not how to ask, Bless thou the work Which, done, redeems my many wasted days, Makes white the murk, And crowns the few which thou wilt not dispraise." 227 It is interesting to note the attitude of Patmore toward the other poets whose works are here considered. For Wordsworth he 223 Patmore, Poems, ed. cit., p. 351. 224 Ibid., quoted in Champney, Op. cit.. Vol. II, p. 89. 226 Ibid., p. 330. 228 Ibid., quoted in Champney, Op. cil., Vol. II, p. 255. 227 Ibid., Poems, ed. cit., pp. 358-359. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 57 had a profound respect. 228 There is something very similar in the manner in which these two poets viewed, in the retrospect, the experiences of their childhood. In his Autobiography Patmore tells us: "Angels spoke to me from time to time, as they do to all, and I frequently saw, as others do in youth, the things of earth lighted up with the light which was not of earth ; and I was endowed with what, from my subsequent experience of men, I am obliged to conclude was an unusual faculty for implicitly believing my own eyes, without regard to the present defect of visible continuity between their reports and the facts of the material and external life. The things I saw, in those rare moments, when the properly human eye was open, remained with me, as abiding marks, and were the jewels of my life." 229 In "Auras of Delight" there are lines that recall "Intimations of Immortality." "And Him I thank, who can make live again, The dust, but not the joy we once profane, That I, of ye, Beautiful habitations, auras of delight, In childish years and since had sometimes sense and sight, But did for me they altogether die, Those trackless glories glimps'd in upper sky? Were they of chance, or vain, Nor good at all again For curb of heart or fret? Nay, though, by grace, Lest haply, I refuse God to his face, Their likeness wholly I forget, Ah, yet, Often in straits which else for me were ill, I mind me still I did respire the lonely auras sweet, I did the blest abodes behold." 230 His relations with Rossetti, in the early days of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, bordered on friendship, but he seems to have thought the latter not true to his high trust. He had failed to develop the idealism which his earlier work had foreshadowed, and Patmore came to regard him as one who, "more than any other man since the great old artist age, had been dowered with insight into spiritual mysteries, that the Ark of passion had been delivered into his 228 Ibid., quoted in Champney, Op. cit., Vol. II, pp. 100-101. 2M Ibid., Autobiography, Champney, Op. cit., Vol. II, p. 45. 280 Ibid., Poems, ed. cit., pp. 336-337. 58 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH hands, and that he had played with it, had used it to serve his curiosity and his vanity, had profaned the Holy of Holies." 231 Between Patmore and Francis Thompson, the poet whose works form the subject of the concluding chapter of this treatise, there was great sympathy. There is much similarity of thought, and even of form, in their poems. It was Patmore's wish that Thomp- son might be one of those singers whom "Views of the unveil'd heavens alone bring forth," and that he might utter to a generation better prepared than was the one to which Patmore sang, the immortal truths of David and of Dante. 232 231 Gosse, Edmund, Op. tit., p. 207. " z Cf. Patmore, Poems, p. 353. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 59 CHAPTER VII FRANCIS THOMPSON: GOD SOUGHT THROUGH REVELATION "To be the poet of the return to Nature is somewhat, but I would be the poet of the return to God." 233 In no other poet do we find so deep an insistence on the consciousness of God in crea- tion, as in Francis Thompson : nowhere do we find poetry so filled with that "sense of something far more deeply interfused'* 234 as is his. The eternal themes of Nature, Man, and God, had been trumpeted in Wordsworth, quired ethereally in Shelley, voiced wistfully in Keats, to receive new "intimations of immortality" in Thompson. 235 "I look to you to crush out all this false mysti- cism," 236 Coventry Patmore had written to him, and he endeavored to fulfill his friend's behest by substituting for the sentimental vaporings of would-be mystics, faith: for their cleverly concealed fatalism, hope: and for their Nirvana, the heaven of orthodox Christianity. Francis Thompson was Catholic through and through, and "his work is the concrete refutation of the idea that thought and imagination in order to be free must be unfettered. His freedom is kept within the bonds of faith and reason, simply because the passion of the poet was so completely informed by reason, and his reason so completely informed by faith. And it is precisely the bonds of faith and reason which have served to make the poet great." 237 To him the vast universe is but a reflection of God's mind, of which man's unaided vision sees but an infin- itesimal portion, and whose beauty is only a faint suggestion of the heavenly ideal, not a component part. Thompson loved nature with the worship of a Greek, yet his love of nature had nothing in common with the new paganism and the new pantheism of the day, except, perhaps, its intensity. In "Nature's Immor- tality" he says, "Absolute Nature lives not in our life, nor yet is lifeless, but lives in the life of God; and in so far, and so far merely, as man himself lives in that life, does he come into sympathy with nature, and nature with him. She is God's 133 Thompson, quoted in Meynell, Life of Francis Thompson, p. 205. 234 Wordsworth, Lines on Tintern Abbey. 235 Cf. Cock, "Francis Thompson," Church Quar. Rev.. 78. 26. 238 Meynell, Op. cit., p. 198. 837 Gerrard, S. J., Catholic World, 86. 613, "Thompson, The Poet." 60 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH daughter, who stretches her hand only to her Father's friends. Not Shelley, not Wordsworth himself, ever drew so close to the heart of nature as did the Seraph of Assisi, who was close to the heart of God." 238 This is the teaching of the true mystic. He had little sympathy with those who would deify Nature. "Lo, here stand I and Nature, gaze to gaze, And I the greater. Crouch thou at my feet, Barren of heart, and beautiful of ways, Strong to weak purpose, fair and brute-brained beast I am not of thy fools Who goddess thee with impious flatterings sweet, Stolen from the little Schools Which cheeped when that great mouth of Rydal ceased." 289 Earth, beautiful as it is, does not suffice for him; it is a symbol of eternal beauty, but the poet and mystic longs for the reality behind the symbol. But a century before Keats had sung, "Beauty is truth, truth Beauty, that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." 240 but a cycle of pain and passion had intervened, and men were ready to listen to the message of Thompson : "O Heart of Nature! did man ever hear Thy yearned for word, supposed dear? His pleading voice returns to him alone. He hears none other tone. No; No; Take back, O Poets, your praises little wise, Nor fool weak hearts to their unshunned distress, Who deem, that even after your device They shall lie down in Nature's holiness : For it was never so; She has no hands to bless : Her pontiff thou; she looks to thee, O man: she has no use, nor asks not, for thy knee." 241 With the Nature-mystics he revels in the beauty and wonder of life, but Catholicism was as a sanctuary to him from the pantheism which might otherwise have claimed him for its own. "He can draw exquisite genre pictures of the Seasons, and evoke the shy genius-loci who informs the wind, or cloud or stream. The changes 238 Prose Works, edited by Meynell, p. 82. 339 On Nature, Land and Plaint, Meynell Edition, Vol. II, p. 162. 240 Ode on a Grecian Urn. 241 Thompson, Op. cit. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 61 on the face of Nature he interprets in terms of the moods joyous or sad, willful or wistful of these unseen habitants. Yet it is because he realizes so intimately those gracious presences that he cannot rest in their finite, concrete expression of Nature." 242 He be- lieves "that the intellect of man seems unable to seize the divine beauty of Nature, until moving beyond that outward beauty it gazes on the spirit of Nature: even so the mind seems unable to appreciate the beautiful face of a woman until it has learned to appreciate the more beautiful beauty of her soul." 243 Nature affords no real solace in the sterner passes of life: love is personal, Nature is impersonal: "Hope not of Nature; she nor gives nor teaches; She suffers thee to take But what thine own hand reaches, And can itself make sovereign for their ache. Ah, hope not her to heal The ills she cannot feel Or dry with many businessed hand the tear Which never yet was weak In her unfettered eyes, on her uncarked cheek." 244 He asks, "What is the heart of Nature, if it exists at all? Is it, according to the conventional doctrine derived from Wordsworth and Shelley, a heart of love, according with the heart of man, and stealing out to him through a thousand avenues of mute sympathy? No, in this sense I repeat seriously what I said lightly: 'Nature has no heart.' " 245 If we seek, among the mystics, for further confirmation of the belief that in Nature there is no final content for man, we shall find it in Richard Jeffries. In The Story of My Heart he describes his peculiar mystical experiences: "Sometimes a very ecstasy of exquisite enjoyment of the entire visible universe filled me." Yet he refuses to see a mind in Nature, and later when shattered with pain of body, and agonized in mind, he gazed upon the southern downs that had received the worship of his life, he cried, \s "There is nothing human in Nature: give me soul life, give me love." 246 242 Moynihan, "The Symbolism of Francis Thompson," Cath. Univ. Bulletin, 19, 25. 243 A Renegade Poet and Other Essays, p. 57. 244 On Nature: Land and Plaint. 245 Nature's Immortality. 248 Jeffries, The Story of My Heart, London, 1907, p. 199. 62 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH While Thompson was very far from reading into Nature powers it does not possess, he had a true poet's susceptibility to beauty in child, and flower, and sky, but it was the appreciation"^ the mystic, who with a purified spirit comes "to enjoy all creatures in God, and God in all creatures." 247 St. John of the Cross says, "That thou mayest have pleasure in everything, seek pleasure in nothing," 248 and Thompson in the lines that follow sums up the mystical doctrine that only by leaving creatures can we find them fair: "This Nature fair This Gate is closed, this Gate beautiful, No man shall go in there Since the Lord God did pass through it; 'Tis sealed unto the King, The King Himself shall sit Therein, with them that are His following: Go: leave thy labor null; Ponder this thing Lady divine! Thou giv'st to men good wine And yet the best thou hast And nectarous, keepest to the last, And bring'st not forth before the Master's sign:" It is not Nature, but man that has gone wrong : "For, ah, this Lady I have much miscalled: No fault in her, but in thy wooing is : Then if thy wooing thou aright wouldst 'gin Lo here the door; straight and rough shapen 'tis And scant they be that even here make stays, But do the lintel miss, In dust of these blind days. For know, this Lady Nature thou hast left, Of whom thou fear'st thee reft This Lady is God's daughter, and she lends Her hand but to His friends, But to her Father's friends the hand Which thou wouldst win; Then enter in And here is that which shall for all make mends." 249 He had sought to find content in the beautiful Nature myths which form so large a part of the "Renascence of Wonder" in later 247 Meister Eckhart, quoted in Waskernagel, Altdeutsches Lesebuch, p. 891. 248 The Ascent of Mount Carmel, Bk. I, Ch. XIII. 249 Thompson, On Nature: Land and Plaint, p. 167. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 63 English poetry, but he found them vague and unsubstantial, with no power to stay in the deeper cares and sorrows of life her shrines were unavailing. "Nature, poor step-dame, cannot slake my drouth; Let her, if she would owe, Drop down yon blue bosom veil of sky, and show me The breasts o' her tenderness: Never did any milk of hers once bless My thirsting mouth." 260 Thompson can rejoice in beauty with all the sensuous loveliness of Keats : but ever through this glad earth-cry he catches dim pealings of a "higher and a solemn voice." Nature becomes sacramental and the visible a portent and prophecy of the invisible. Perhaps no one of his poems illustrates this attitude, as Christian as it is poetic, more characteristically than the lovely Paschal ode "From the Night of Forebeing" with its inspiring, "Look up, O mortals, and the portent heed: In very deed, Washed with new fire to their irradiant birth Reintegrated are the heavens and earth ! From sky to sod The world's unfolded blossom smells of God." 251 He weaves the name of Christ into the very texture of nature and gives phenomenal life a new meaning. 262 In the "Prelude" to (the "Ode to the Setting Sun" he sounds a warning, "O deceived, If thou hear in these thoughtful harmonies, A pious phantom of adorings reaved, An echo of fair ancient flatteries." He is prepared to sing, "A song thou hast not heard in Northern day; For Rome too daring, and for Greece too dark." for "Thou dost image, thou dost follow That King-Maker of Creation, Who ere Hellas hailed Apollo, Gave thee, angel God, thy station : Thou art of Him a type memorial, Like him thou hang'st in dreadful pomp of blood Upon thy Western rood;" 263 250 Thompson, The Hound of Heaven, ed. cit., Vol. I, p. 110. 261 Cf. Gerrard, Op. cit. 252 Cf . Walsh, Eccl. Rev., XLIX, 25. 263 Thompson, Ode to the Setting Sun, ed. cit., Vol. I, p. 125. 64 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH The rood is "too dark" for Hellas, and for her disciples of today, yet "Even so, O Cross! thine is the victory, Thy roots are fast within our fairest fields, Brightness they emanate in Heaven from thee, Here thy dread symbol only shadows yields.*' For consolation he appeals to the "Way's one mortal grace." 254 "Therefore, O tender Lady, Queen Mary, Thou gentleness that dost enmoss and drape The Cross's rigorous austerity, Wipe thou the blood from wounds that needs must gape," 285 and he hears the answer: "Lo, though suns rise and set, but crosses stay, *I leave thee ever,' saith she, * light of cheer' 'Tis so; yon sky still thinks upon the Day, And showers aerial blossoms on his bier." 256 When he "With winged feet had run, Through all the windy earth about, Quested its secret of the sun, And heard what things the stars together shout," 257 how could it be that he would fail to find a message within these : "By this, O singer; know we if thou see, WTien men shall say to thee: Lo, Christ is here, Believe them; yea, and this then art thou seer, When all thy crying clear Is but! Lo here! lo there! ah me, lo everywhere." 258 Thompson had learned that "to the Poet life is full of visions, to the Mystic it is one vision." 259 Thompson's view of human beauty is quite the antithesis of that held by Rossetti. Rossetti viewed spiritual beauty in the light of the body: Thompson viewed physical beauty in the light of the soul. The key to his conception of material loveliness in woman, is given in the following lines: 254 Thompson, Grace of the Way, ed. cit., Vol. II, p. 67. 265 Ibid., Ode to the Setting Sun, After-Strain, ed. cit., Vol. I, p. 126. 2 Ibid. 257 Ibid., Orient Ode, ed. cit., Vol. II, p. 28. 258 Ibid. 259 Cock, "Francis Thompson," Dublin Review, 149, 271. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 65 " 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." 260 His phantasy, free from the meshes of sense, can live only in heaven : "How praise the woman, who but knew the spirit? How praise the color of her eyes uncaught While they were coloured with her varying thought? How her mouth's shape, who only use to know What tender shape her speech had fit it to?" For mere bodily beauty he had no care: "But for what we call Beauty the loveliness corporeal, Its most just praise a thing improper were For singer or to listener, me or her. She wears that body but as one indues A robe, half careless, for it is the use; Although her soul and it so fair agree, We sure may unattaint of heresy, Concert it might the soul's begetter be : The immortal could we cease to contemplate, The mortal part suggests its every trait." 261 Thompson's affections, in their intensity, were centered on two forms of personality, God and little children. In "The Poppy," dedicated "To Monica" the poet says, "You have loved me, Fair, three lives or days: 'Twill pass with the passing of my face. But where I go, your face goes too, To watch lest I play false to you. I am but, my sweet, your foster-lover, Knowing well when certain years are over You vanish from me to another; Yet, I know, and love, like the foster-mother." 262 In "Sister Songs" he explains his tender regard for childhood: 260 Thompson, Poems, ed. cit, Love in Dian's Lap, Vol. I, p. 96. 261 Ibid., p. 95. 262 Ibid., Poems on Children, p. 8. 66 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH "Once, in that nightmare-time which still doth haunt My dreams, a grim, unbidden visitant Forlorn, and faint, and stark, I had endured through watches of the dark The abashless inquisition of each star, Suffered the trampling hoof of every hour In night's slow- wheeled car; Until the tardy dawn dragged me at length From under those dread wheels; and, bled of strength, I waited the inevitable last: Then there came past A child; like thee, a spring-flower; but a flower Fallen from the budded coronal of spring, And through the city-streets blown withering, She passed, O brave, sad, lovingest, tender thing ! And of her own scant pittance did she give, That I might eat and live : Then fled, a swift and trackless fugitive. Therefore I kissed in thee The heart of Childhood, so divine for me." 263 He calls to his aid in poesy, "Thou Who from Thy fair irradiant palms Scatterest all love and loveliness as alms; Yea, Holy One, Who coin'st Thyself to beauty for the world!" 264 and in that Beauty did he view all "love and loveliness." It was inevitable that one of Thompson's temperament, realizing as he did the omnipresence of God in a truly Catholic and mystical sense, should emphasize that phase of spiritual experience known as purgation, and assent to the doctrine that the excellence of the moral life can be obtained only by self-renunciation; that the highest excellences of the intellectual and spiritual life can be obtained only through control of the passions and the will. In Thompson the practice of asceticism is expounded in full harmony with the teaching of the saints. Thompson was a God-smitten poet, and he did not fear to cry out the needs of "our uncoura- geous day." In the "Mistress of Vision" he lays down the con- ditions for initiation to the goal of the spirit. 263 Ibid., Sister Songs, pp. 36-37. 284 Ibid., p. 26. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 67 XIV "On Golgotha there grew a thorn, Round the long-prefigured Brows, Mourn, O mourn! For the wine, have we the spine? Is This all the Heaven allows? XV On Calvary there shook a spear; Press the point into thy heart Joy and fear ! All the spines upon the thorn into curling tendrils start." If you seek the "Land of Luthany," then "Pierce thy heart to find the key; With thee take Only what none else would keep, Learn to dream when thou dost wake, Learn to wake when thou dost sleep, Learn to water joy with tears, Learn from fears to vanquish fears; To hope, for thou dar'st not despair, Exult, for that thou dar'st not grieve; Plough thou the rock until it bear; Die, for none other way canst live. When thy seeing blindest thee, To what thy fellow mortals see; Their living, death; their light, most lightless; Search no more Pass the gates of Luthany, tread the region Elenore." 265 Neither the pages of the Imitation, nor those of St. John of the Cross, furnish a more powerful exposition of "ascesis" than we find in this twentieth century poet, for he is of the twentieth rather than the nineteenth century. The doctrine of renunciation is writ large across his poetry. In "Any Saint" he says, "Compost of Heaven and mire, Slow foot and swift desire, Lo To have Yes, choose No; Gird, and thou shalt unbind; Seek not, and thou shalt find; To eat Deny thy meat; And thou shalt be fulfilled With all sweet things unwilled." 26 * 265 Ibid., Mistress of Vision, ed. cit., Vol. II, p. 7. 286 Ibid., Any Saint, ed. cit., Vol. II, p. 49. 68 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH Again he sings, "Bliss in extreme befits thee not, until Thou'rt not extreme in bliss; be equal still. Sweets to be granted think thyself unmeet Till thou have learned to hold sweet not too sweet." 267 He himself had learned the lesson : "I witness call the austere goddess Pain, If I have learned her sad and solemn scroll; Have I neglected her high sacrifice, Spared my heart's children to the sacred knife, Or turned her customed footing from my soul, Yea, thou pale Astorath who rul'st my life, Of all my offerings thou hast had the whole, One after one they passed at thy desire To sacrificial sword, or sacrificial fire." 268 The utter incapacity of a soul, destined to the heights of spiritual life, to resist, is expressed in, "Not my will shudders, but my flesh, In awful secrecy to hear The wind of thy great teaching sweep afresh Athwart my face, and agitate my hair. Thy ultimate unnerving dearness take The extreme right of abnegation make, And sum in one all renderings that were." 269 Coventry Patmore, writing of Thompson, says, "Of the glori- fication and supernatural invigoration of all the human passions by control and continence, the many know nothing. They go on burning the powder of human force in dishes, instead of in gun- barrels, and in their estimate of life, they mistake wasteful blaze for effectual energy. Mr. Thompson's poetry is spiritual almost to a fault but since it is a real ardour, and not the mere negation of life which passes with most people for spirituality, it seems some- what ungracious to complain of its predominance." 270 He knew better, however, than "to make his religion the direct subject of any of his poems, unless it presents itself to him as a human pas- sion, and the most human of passions, as it does in the splendid ode in which God's long pursuit and final conquest of the resisting soul is described in a torrent of as humanely impressive verse as was ever inspired by natural affection." 271 267 Ibid., Laus Amoris Doloris, ed. cit., Vol. II, p. 122. 268 Ibid., p. 121. 269 Ibid., p. 122. 270 Patmore, Fortnightly Review, January, 1904. 271 Ibid. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 69 Thompson has given us the only true solution of the life-problem, in the "Hound of Heaven" the veritable epos of the soul. He presents the Catholic view in verse that will live, as the Imitation presents it in immortal prose, and as David sang it round centuries ago. "There is no true liberty, no solid joy, but in the fear of God with a good conscience." The "Hound of Heaven" is sound theology informed and transformed by imagination. 272 It is the most entirely mystical of Thompson's poems. In bold and daring metaphor, with terrible vividness, and in phrase of haunting music, it pictures for us the everlasting quest of the soul for happiness, and the everlasting quest of the Creator for the creature. The idea of the love chase was not unknown to the mystics of the middle ages. 273 The Voice of Love said to Mechtilde of Magde- burg, "I have chased thee, for this was my pleasure; I captured thee for this was my desire; I bound thee, and I rejoice in thy bonds; I have wounded thee, that thou may'st be united to me. If I gave thee blows it was that I might be possessed of thee." 274 The poem tells of one who fled from preventing Love to seek for happiness in creatures, but found it not. "I pleaded, outlaw wise, By many a heated casement, curtained red, Trellised with intertwining charities: (For, though I know His love followed Yet was I sore adread Lest having Him, I must have naught beside.) But, if one casement parted wide The gust of his approach would clash it to. I tempted all his servitors, but to find Mine own betrayal in their constancy In faith to him, their fickleness to me. Fear wist not to evade, as Love wist to pursue" and still with "unperturbed pace" came on the following feet, and above their beat sounded a voice, "Naught shelters thee, who will not shelter Me." 278 272 Cf. O'Donnell, Francis Thompson: a critical essay, Notre Dame University Press, 1906. 273 Underbill, Op. cit., pp. 158-162. 274 Das Fliessende Licht der Gottheit, Pt. I, Cap. III. 378 Thompson. The Hound of Heaven, ed. cit., Vol. I, p. 108. 70 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH He turns to children "surely they at least are for me," but no! "just as their young eyes grow sudden fair, With dawning answers, then Their angel plucked them by the hair." Human love has failed, but Nature will be true; "Let me greet you lip to lip, Let me twine with your caresses, Wantoning ly With our Lady Mother's vagrant tresses Banqueting With her in the wind-walled palace, Underneath her azured dais, Quaffing as your taintless way is, From a chalice Luscent- weeping out of the day spring;" 27(J He became one in delicate fellowship with Nature he learned all her secrecies he made her moods the shapers of his own. "With them joyed or was bereaven, I was heavy with the even, When she lit her glimmering tapers Round the day's dead sanctities." 277 He laughed in the morning's eyes, and, most potent force to form a bond, "Heaven and I wept together" 278 Against the red throb of its sunset heart I laid my own to beat, And share commingling heat; But not by that, by that was eased my human smart ! For ah ! we know not what each other says, These things and I; in sound I speak, Their sound is but their stir, they speak by silences." 279 How different is this from "Nature never did betray the heart that loved her." 280 "Naked I wait Thy love's uplifted stroke"- all is sacrificed, all save self: ibid., p. 109. 177 Ibid. 178 ibid. * 79 Ibid., p. 110. 280 Wordsworth, Line* on Tintern Abbey. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 71 "In the rash lustihead of my young powers, I shook the pillaring hours And pulled my life upon me;'* man is a power unto himself, is not this the teaching of the modern world but he finds such has not been the lesson of the ages : "I stand amid the dust of the mounded years, My mangled youth lies dead beneath the heap/' 281 Eminently unreliable is the boasted apotheosis of human friendship, equally insufficient the aesthetic appreciation of nature, and foolish the claims of impersonal idealism : all three are "cords of all too weak account For earth, with heavy griefs nonplussed." 282 The "linked fantasies," the thoughts of poesy that seem to make the earth an enchanted toy are fading away; the innermost sanctuary of his own mind is despoiled: the soul might ask, "Why, after wounding This heart, hast Thou not healed it? And why, after stealing it, Hast Thou thus abandoned it?" 283 In the following lines, "Ah! is Thy love indeed A weed, albeit an amaranthine weed, Suffering no flowers except its own to mount?" 284 there is an echo of St. Teresa's naive complaint, " Lord, if you treat all of your friends thus, no wonder you have so few." And now the poet contemplates in pity his alienated self, "Ah! must Designer infinite ! Ah ! must Thou char the wood ere Thou canst limn with it?" 285 but the mood is vanishing : "And now my heart is as a broken fount, Wherein tear-drippings stagnate, spill down ever From the dark thoughts that shine Upon the sighful branches of my mind. Such is; what is to be?" 286 281 Thompson, Hound of Heaven, ed. cit.. 111. 282 Ibid. 88 St. John of the Cross. A Spiritual Canticle, Stan. IX, p. 7. 184 Thompson, Hound of Heaven, ed. cit., p. 111. 286 Ibid. * Ibid. 72 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH The shadows are to give place to reality, and he recognizes the One in whose everlasting arms he is to find peace. "I dimly guess what Time in mists confounds; Yet, ever and anon a trumpet sounds From the hid battlements of Eternity: Those shaken mists a space unsettle, then Round the half-glimpsed turrets slowly wash again, But not ere Him who summoneth I first have seen.'* 287 Critics have found in this poem a complete synthesis of the movements of English thought in the present day. In the first eight lines : "I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears I hid from Him, and under running laughter : Up vistaed hopes, I sped; And shot precipitated, Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears," 288 are suggested the reconstruction of history through the formative ideas of induction and development: the separation as a distinct study or science of psychology, whose work is generally agreed to be of the most vital importance to knowledge and religion together; and the alternative optimism and pessimism which, in turn and at times side by side, have dominated our literature, art, music, and philosophy. In the stanzas that follow the failure of impersonal idealism, the dark stagnation of that peculiarly modern tendency to self analysis, and the domination over all of the figure whom all science and all philosophy seek to explain the only efficacy of this Victim, this saving Victim, find fit and true expres- sion. The strength of the synthesis lies in its comprehension that love of Nature, home life, and idealism, if they are to actualize in right living, are not to be separated from, but included in, the Christ-life. 289 "All which I took from thee I did but take Not for thy harms, But just that thou might 'st seek it in My arms. All which thy child's mistake Fancies as lost, I have stored up for thee at home." 290 287 Ibid. 288 Ibid., p. 107. 289 Cf. Cock, Op. cit., p. 263. ^Thompson, Hound of Heaven, ed. cit., p. 112. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 73 The last stanza offers the solution of all, "Is my gloom after all Shade of His hand outstretched caressingly? Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest, I am He whom thou seekest! Thou drav'st love from thee, who drav'st Me." 291 The beauty sought was not the visible tangible beauty of Nature, neither was it the beauty of children, lovely as the flowers, but it was the invisible, intangible, inapprehensible Beauty whose quest his faith told him was not a vain one. The * 'Hound of Heaven*' pictures the "via purgativa." In that beautiful little poem, "In No Strange Land," found among Thompson's papers, and published after his death, we see that he had at least a glimpse of the "via illuminativa," "O world invisible, we view thee, O world intangible, we touch thee, O world unknowable, we know thee. Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter, Cry, clinging Heaven by the hems; And lo, Christ walking on the water Not of Genesareth, but of Thames!" 292 Thompson "came to feel .the futility of all writings save such as were explicitly a confession of faith ; and also of faithfulness to the institutional side of religion, the Church and the organized means of grace. . . . The sanity of his mysticism is the great value of it to the present generation. A high individual experiencing of purgation, illumination, and union, a quiet constancy in the corporate life, and discipleship as well as leadership : what combina- tion more needed than this for our day?" 293 191 Ibid., p. 113. 292 Thompson, In No Strange Land, quoted in Cock, Op. cit., p. 277. ' Meynell, Op. '/., p. 202. 74 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH CONCLUSION Mysticism is more a temper of mind than a doctrine : rather an atmosphere than a definite system of philosophy. The mystic bases his belief not on a demonstrated fact, but on feeling, and as feeling is the basis of poetry, the connection between this form of thought and poetry is necessarily close. There is a tinge of mystical thought in nearly all the greater poetry of the nineteenth century. This is not strange when we consider the spirit of the age. In the history of world-thought we have ever recurring periods of atheism and pantheism: of materialism and idealism: of intellectualism and pietism. The eighteenth century was essentially an age of atheism, of materialism, of intellectualism. It was a self-styled "Age of Enlightenment," and its light was the cold white light of reason. It refused to believe that half-tones are sometimes more productive of true vision than the blinding light of mid-day. "It insisted on abolishing mystery, and it regarded as mystery everything which was not finite, everything which could not be set by itself and clearly pictured by the sensuous imagination or defined by logical understanding. It favored a way of thinking which was clear and definite, but at the same time deficient in depth and suggestiveness." 294 Then came the reaction. It was Immanuel Kant who first turned the tide of thought in the opposite direction, and sought to substitute the vital and the spiritual for the mechanical; for division and isolation the essential unity of consciousness. The influence of this change of thought was evident in the German transcendental school of philosophy, and affected English literature through Coleridge, whose mysticism resulted from a study of Kant and of the writings of Jakob Boehme. De Quincey, in that wonderful inner life of thought and vision of which he has given us such vivid flashes; Shelley, in Prometheus Unbound, where Asia is the incarnation of that ideal sought by the poet, but never found, the "shadow of that beauty unbeheld" which tan- talized him in the transitory gleams vouchsafed him, and the baffled search for which Alastor and Epipsychidion reflect, both display the influence of a monistic idealism akin to Wordsworth, 294 Caird, Edward. The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Vol. I, p. 46, New York, 1889. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 75 but aesthetic rather than moral. Keats, though he lacked the spiritual tone, and the clear perception of abstract beauty which marks Shelley 's verse, shared with the latter a tendency toward pantheistic mysticism. In Matthew Arnold and Arthur Hugh Clough there is a mysti- cism devoid of actuality, a vague and vain appreciation of the older mystics, but an appreciation wanting in force and fiber. It is rather a melancholy yearning for some spiritual ideal, attain- able only by a stern negation, to which they are unwilling to submit. In Edwin Arnold's interpretation of oriental mysticism, and in Fitzgerald's translations of Persian poems, there is evident the same inclination to mystical contemplation. Tennyson, in his admission that sense knowledge is impotent in dealing with what is beyond both sense and reason, in his insistence on the reality of the unseen, in his belief in the persistence of life, has much in common with the mystic. In the outpourings of the Ancient Sage, in Vastness, in The Higher Pantheism, and in the Prologue to In Memoriam, are passages which suggest Plotinus <~ and Eckhart. Browning, who voiced at once the energy of the age, and its passion for self -analysis, in his assertion of the relativity of physical knowledge and its inadequacy to satisfy the mind of man, 295 in his refusal to acknowledge an irreconcilable break between the findings of science and of religion, in his belief that love of God is the fundamental law of life, 296 as well as in the emphasis he lays on the fact that intellectual knowledge and artistic insight do not work for the betterment of man when the cultivation of the emotional side of his nature is neglected, 297 and in his consideration of the problem of evil, 298 gives proof of a peculiarly mystical bent of mind. One of the grave dangers of mysticism has ever been the inclina- tion to become a passing fashion, a vague dream, an incentive to high aspirations, not invariably accompanied by good deeds. This type of mysticism, 299 emanating from the school represented 295 Cf. Asolando, 296 Cf . Rabbi ben Ezra, Paracelsus, f^ 297 Cf . My Last Duchess. 298 Cf . The Ring and the Book. 299 Cf. Charbonnel Victor, Lea Mystiques dans la litterature presente, Paris, 1897. 76 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH by Baudelaire, Huysmans, Maeterlinck, and Tolstoi, was not without its representatives in English literature. Among the poets more or less imbued with this spirit are William Morris, Arthur Symons, an exception must be made in favor of his transla- tion of the Obras Espirituales of St. John of the Cross, and Richard Le Gallienne. Fortunately this movement was counteracted by the more healthy tone of Coventry Patmore, of Lionel Johnson and of Gerard Hopkins, and above all, by Francis Thompson, who repre- sents a form of mysticism not wholly pleasing to the neo-pagan and the dreamer, but of infinite worth as an invigorator of life. In the study here presented, Wordsworth stands as a type of nature-mystic, with an undetermined leaning toward pantheism: Rossetti represents the trend of mind that seeks satisfaction for its highest needs in the contemplation of ideal beauty: Patmore would make human love a stepping-stone to the divine, and Thompson sought his inspiration in revealed religion. So through the changes from naturalism to romanticism, from materialism to idealism which marked the century "That rose 'midst dust of a down-tumbled world," 300 and died, "With rumor on the air Of preparation For a more ample devastation And death of ancient fairness no more fair," 301 the mind of man, through mists of error and faint gleams of light, turned ever eagerly toward God, and the Endless and the Unbegun. 300 Thompson, Francis, The Nineteenth Century. 301 Ibid. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 77 BIBLIOGRAPHY A Philosophical and Religious References. B Literary References. A PHILOSOPHICAL AND RELIGIOUS REFERENCES. 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MEYNELL, WILFRID. Life of Francis Thompson. New York, 1913. MYERS, F. W. H. Essays Modern. London, 1883. Life of Wordsworth. New York, 1887. 82 SOME EVIDENCES OF MYSTICISM IN ENGLISH NETTLESHIP, R. L. The Moral Influence of Literature. London, 1890. NICHOLSON, P. W. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Poet and Painter. Edin- burgh, 1886. O'CONNOR, J. F. X., S.J. A Study of Francis Thompson, New York, 1912. O'DoNNELL, CHARLES, C.S.C. Francis Thompson: a critical essay. Notre Dame University Press, 1906. OZANAM, FREDERICK. The Franciscan Poets in Italy of the Thirteenth Century, translated by A. E. Nellen and N. C. Craig. New York, 1915. PALLEN, COND. Epochs of Literature. St. Louis, 1897. Philosophy of Literature. St. Louis, 1898. PAYNE, WILLIAM MORTON. The Greater Poets of the Nineteenth Century. New York, 1907. PATER, WALTER. Appreciations. New York, 1889. PATMORE, COVENTRY. Principles in Art. London, 1889. Poems. London, 1906. Religio Poetae. London, 1905. The Rod, the Root, and the Flower. 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HOOKER, BRIAN. "Introspection and Some Recent Poetry," Forum, XXXIX, 522. April, 1908. MERRIMAN, HELEN B. "English Pre-Raphaelite and Poetical School of Painters," Andover Review, I, 594. June, 1884. MEYNELL, ALICE. "Thompson, the Poet of High Thinking," Living Age, CCXV, 804. December, 1907. MORE, P. E. "Poetry of Francis Thompson," Nation, LXXXV, 513. November, 1908. PEABODY, JOSEPHINE PRESTON. "Modern Life and Modern Poetry," Poet Lore, XIV, 56. January, 1903. SHAIRP, J. C. "Dante Gabriel Rossetti," British Quarterly Review, LXXVI, 109. July, 1882. TELFORD, A. J. "The Poet's Tragedy," London Quarterly, CXXI, 12. January, 1914. TRAILL, H. D. "The Poetry of Francis Thompson," Nineteenth Cen- tury and After, XXXV, 229. February, 1904. WATERS, F. "The Religious Element in Modern Poetry," Catholic World, LXXVI, 110. October,1905. WATTS-DUNTON, THEODORE. "The Truth About Rossetti," Nineteenth Century, XIII, 404. March 1883. WARREN, HERBERT. "The Poetry of the Twentieth Century," Living Age, 228, 660. March, 1901. "Swinburne, Rossetti, and Morris," Quarterly Review, 132, 59. January, 1872. "The Poetical Works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti," Westminster Review, XC, 55. January, 1871. "The Poetry of Francis Thompson," Academy, LI, 537. May, 1897. "An Appreciation of Francis Thompson," Harper's Weekly, 512, 1868. December, 1907. POETRY OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 85 VITA Sister Mary Pius Neenan was born in Keokuk, Iowa, October 15, 1878. She received her elementary education in St. Vincent's Academy, in that city, and followed the high school course at St. Joseph's Academy, Saint Louis, Mo., from which institution she was graduated in 1895. In 1897 she entered the novitiate of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, St. Louis. After having pursued various normal and collegiate courses under the direction of members of her own community, she began work at the Uni- versity of Missouri in 1908, and continued until the opening of the Catholic Sisters College, Catholic University of America, in 1911. She received the degree Bachelor of Arts in 1913, and that of Master of Arts in 1915. In her career as teacher she has been engaged as follows : Instructor in English, Academy of Our Lady, Peoria, 111.; Principal of the Redemptorist High School, Kansas City, Mo.; Principal of the Diocesan High School for Girls, St. Louis; Instructor in English, St. Joseph's Academy, St. Louis. The years 1912-1913, 1914-1915, 1915-1916, have been spent in residence at the Catholic Sisters College, Catholic University of America. In her graduate work the principal courses followed have been those under Mr. J. B. O'Connor, Ph.D., Reverend E. A. Pace, S.T.D., and Reverend William Turner, S.T.D. The writer is happy to have this opportunity to express her deep appreciation of the work done under these instructors and in particular to acknowledge gratefully the kindly assistance and encouragement given by Reverend William Turner, S.T.D., under whose direction this dissertation was written. Retum to desk from isDUE on the last date NOV 19 2 REC'D 12-63-3' iLD21 _100m-9,'47(A5702sl6)476 Gaylamount Pamphlet Binder Ciaylord Bros., Inc. Stockton, Calif. .M. Reg. U.S. Pat. Off. '962 LIBRARY USE RETURN TO DESK FROM WHICH BORROWED LOAN DEPT. THIS BOOK IS DUE BEFORE CLOSING TIME ON LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW LI2.1 ARV MSfc LD 62A-50m-2,'64 (E3494slO)9412A General Library University of California Berkeley