Mysticism in English Literature | Page 4

entering into something else, assimilating

and being assimilated, and that the more it loses itself (what it began by
being) the more it "finds itself" (what it is intended to be). If we follow
carefully the analysis Nettleship makes of the action of bread in the
physical world, we can see that to the man of mystic temper it throws
more light than do volumes of sermons on what seems sometimes a
hard saying, and what is at the same time the ultimate mystical counsel,
"He that loveth his life shall lose it."
It is worth while, in this connection, to ponder the constant use Christ
makes of nature symbolism, drawing the attention of His hearers to the
analogies in the law we see working around us to the same law working
in the spiritual world. The yearly harvest, the sower and his seed, the
leaven in the loaf, the grain of mustard-seed, the lilies of the field, the
action of fire, worms, moth, rust, bread, wine, and water, the mystery of
the wind, unseen and yet felt--each one of these is shown to contain and
exemplify a great and abiding truth.
This is the attitude, these are the things, which lie at the heart of
mysticism. In the light of this, nothing in the world is trivial, nothing is
unimportant nothing is common or unclean. It is the feeling that Blake
has crystallised in the lines:
To see a world in a grain of sand And a Heaven in a wild flower, Hold
Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.
The true mystic then, in the full sense of the term, is one who knows
there is unity under diversity at the centre of all existence, and he
knows it by the most perfect of all tests for the person concerned,
because he has felt it. True mysticism--and this cannot be
over-emphasised--is an experience and a life. It is an experimental
science, and, as Patmore has said, it is as incommunicable to those who
have not experienced it as is the odour of a violet to those who have
never smelt one. In its highest consummation it is the supreme
adventure of the soul: to use the matchless words of Plotinus, it is "the
flight of the Alone to the Alone."
As distinguished, therefore, from the mystical thinker or philosopher,
the practical mystic has direct knowledge of a truth which for him is

absolute. He consequently has invariably acted upon this knowledge, as
inevitably as the blind man to whom sight had been granted would
make use of his eyes.
Among English writers and poets the only two who fulfil this strict
definition of a mystic are Wordsworth and Blake. But we are not here
concerned primarily with a study of those great souls who are mystics
in the full and supreme sense of the word. For an examination of their
lives and vision Evelyn Underhill's valuable book should be consulted.
Our object is to examine very briefly the chief English writers--men of
letters and poets--whose inmost principle is rooted in mysticism, or
whose work is on the whole so permeated by mystical thought that their
attitude of mind is not fully to be understood apart from it.
Naturally it is with the poets we find the most complete and continuous
expression of mystical thought and inspiration. Naturally, because it
has ever been the habit of the English race to clothe their profoundest
thought and their highest aspiration in poetic form. We do not possess a
Plato, a Kant, or a Descartes, but we have Shakespeare and
Wordsworth and Browning. And further, as the essence of mysticism is
to believe that everything we see and know is symbolic of something
greater, mysticism is on one side the poetry of life. For poetry, also,
consists in finding resemblances, and universalises the particulars with
which it deals. Hence the utterances of the poets on mystical
philosophy are peculiarly valuable. The philosopher approaches
philosophy directly, the poet obliquely; but the indirect teaching of a
poet touches us more profoundly than the direct lesson of a moral
treatise, because the latter appeals principally to our reason, whereas
the poet touches our "transcendental feeling."
So it is that mysticism underlies the thought of most of our great poets,
of nearly all our greatest poets, if we except Chaucer, Dryden, Pope,
and Byron. Shakespeare must be left on one side, first, because the
dramatic form does not lend itself to the expression of mystical feeling,
and secondly, because even in the poems there is little real mysticism,
though there is much of the fashionable Platonism. Shakespeare is
metaphysical rather than mystical, the difference being, roughly, that

the metaphysician seeks to know the beginnings or causes of things,
whereas the mystic feels he knows