When the ear begins to hear, and the eye begins to see;
When the pulse begins to throb—the brain to think again—
The soul to feel the flesh, and the flesh to feel the chain.
EMILY BRONTË.
If, if, if . . . How many conditional clauses there are in the writings of the mystics!
How should I praise thee, Lord, . .
If what my soul doth feel sometimes,
My soul might ever feel;
might mortal breath
Express the passion then inspired,
Evil would die a natural death,
And nothing transient be desired;
Could we but live at will upon this perfect height,
Could we but always keep the passion of this peace . . .
Then we were all divine.
But the soul cannot always feel what it feels sometimes; mortal breath cannot express the passion then inspired; and the perfect height cannot be lived on, only visited. The clauses remain conditional—always. If they were fulfilled, man would lose all the qualities which we admire as distinctively human. Virtue is possible only in an unethical universe and in beings whose minds are so made that they cannot always remain at their highest pitch. Consistently rewarded, virtue would cease to be virtue; and if the soul did not have its long weary spells of feeling the flesh and the flesh of feeling the chain, there would be no such things as heroism and endurance. Man might be happier if the conditional clauses of the mystics were fulfilled—happier, but less interesting and, at bottom, ignobler.
Earth trembled from her entrails, as again
In pangs, and Nature gave a second groan;
Sky loured and, muttering thunder, some sad drops
Wept at completing of the mortal sin
Original; while Adam took no thought,
Eating his fill, nor Eve to iterate
Her former trespass feared, the more to soothe
Him with her loved society; that now,
As with new wine intoxicated both,
They swim in mirth, and fancy that they feel
Divinity within them breeding wings
Wherewith to scorn the Earth. But that false fruit
Far other operation first displayed,
Carnal desire inflaming.
JOHN MILTON.
Milton is almost always meticulously precise in his language. Which makes his present lapse the more surprising. For nobody can fancy that he feels something. We either do feel or don’t. Occasions arise when, by a process of inference after the fact, we decide that what we had supposed, at the time, to be the cause of the feeling was not the cause, or that its significance was not in fact what we had imagined. In these circumstances we can say that we felt what we fancied to be a feeling of such and such a nature. But to say that we fancied that we felt this feeling is quite unjustifiable. The feeling is a fact of immediate experience—given and unalterable. Fancy can affect only our subsequent attempts at explanation and interpretation.
By the Catholic Church ecstatic feelings are regarded as being intrinsically neither good nor bad. It is by their subsequent fruits—the moral fruits which they bear when the mystic has returned to common life—that they are judged. If the fruits are bad, then (such is the judgment of the Church) the ecstasy was sent by the Devil; if good, it came from God. There is nothing in the feeling itself to indicate its source. In practice, the ecclesiastical authorities are always extremely cautious and sceptical in their handling of ecstatics. They do not pronounce themselves until there has been plenty of time for the moral fruits of the experience to ripen.
As a practical policy this is excellent; indeed, it is the only policy that an organized Church could possibly pursue. Ecstatic states may be valuable in themselves; but they are very rare. Life must be lived in the main on another, unecstatic plane. The man who has one hour of ecstasy in every hundred and lives badly for the remaining ninety-nine hours cannot expect to receive a testimonial of sanctity for what he does, or is, or learns in the hour when, by definition he is “not himself.”
Practically, I repeat, this is excellent. But theoretically it is not quite so satisfactory. The theory of ecstasy is that it is a state of union with a higher being, that it provides knowledge not merely of something in the mind, but of something in the universe at large, something which cannot be known (except by remote and uncertain inference) in any other way. If this is so and if, as experience seems to show, there is no intrinsic difference between one ecstatic feeling and another, then all ecstasies should be regarded as valuable, irrespective of their causes and their subsequent results. The eating of “the false fruit” caused Adam and Eve to feel (really and actually) “divinity within them breeding wings wherewith to scorn the Earth.” The fact that it then “far other operation first displayed, carnal desire inflaming” is quite irrelevant. In itself, one ecstasy is as good as another. It does not matter how the ecstasy is produced—whether by oncoming epilepsy, as in the case of Dostoevsky’s Idiot, by voluntarily holding the breath and squinting at the tip of the nose, as with the Indians, by drinking wine, like the Persian dervishes, by fasting and self-hypnotism, the methods of the more refined ecstatics, or finally by mere accident, by a happy conjunction of physiological and mental circumstances. What it produces—whether good works or carnal desire, poetry or a crapula—is equally different. While it lasts it is felt to be a supernatural state; it provides us with otherwise inaccessible knowledge about ourselves and, according to the theory, about the world.
Country Ecstasies
(Whitman had two studies where he read: one was the top of an omnibus, and the other a small mass of sand, entirely uninhabited, far out in the ocean, called Coney Island.—M. D. Conway, 1866.)
The Revelation
An idle poet, here and there
Looks round him, but, for all the rest,
The world, unfathomably fair,
Is duller than a witling’s jest.
Love wakes men, once a lifetime each;
They lift their heavy lids and look;
And, lo, what one sweet page can teach
They read with joy, then shut the book.
And some give thanks, and some blaspheme,
And most forget; but either way,
That, and the child’s unheeded dream,
Is all the light of all their day.
COVENTRY PATMORE.
The outcry against the Impressionists proved that the great mass of human beings not only find the external world “duller than a witling’s jest,” but are normally incapable of seeing it. With unprecedented accuracy the Impressionists painted what they actually saw. They put their visual impressions straight on to the canvas and left them there—raw, so to speak, and mentally undigested. People were outraged. It was only natural. They were not used to seeing the shapes and colours revealed by their sensations. Their minds generalized the brute facts and interpreted them; what they were used to seeing was what almost all of us ordinarily see—visualized words, the Platonic ideas of Tree, Cloud and so forth. The actual, particular tree or cloud seemed impossibly queer, when the Impressionists revealed it to them; they were furious. Custom, for us, has staled the Impressionists. We look at their pictures and no longer feel that we are being made fools of and insulted. Sometimes, by luck or (trained by them) with a deliberate effort, we are able to see the external world with their innocent and unbiassed eyes . . . see it for a little sub specie momenti. But, strangely and mysteriously, sub specie momenti is somehow sub specie aeternitatis. Our immediate impressions of actuality, on the rare occasions when we contrive to see with the eyes of children or convalescents, of artists or lovers, seem to have a quality of supernaturalness. What we ordinarily call “nature” and find duller than a witling’s jest is in fact the system of generalizations and utilitarian symbols which we construct from our sensations. Sometimes, however, we are made directly and immediately aware of our sensations; it is an apocalypse; they seem supernatural. But it is through sensations that we come into contact with the external world, the world of Nature with a capital N. Hence a seeming paradox: external Nature is supernatural; and the supernatural, because mental, universe in which we do our daily living is all too natural—natural to the point of dullness.
Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!
O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!
The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!
Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves’-eyes!
The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!
Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flare!
Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!—
Ah well! It is all a purchase, all is a prize.
Buy then! bid then!—What?—Prayer, patience, alms, vows.
Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!
Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow sallows!
These are indeed the barn: withindoors house
The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse
Christ home, Christ and his mother and all the hallows.
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS.
The unthrift sun shot vital gold,
A thousand pieces,
And heaven its azure did unfold,
Chequered with snowy fleeces.
The air was all in spice.
And every bush
A garland wore: thus fed my eye,
But all the ear lay hush.
Only a little fountain lent
Some use for ears,
And on the dumb shades language spent,
The music of her tears.
HENRY VAUGHAN.
Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth, whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS.
This sycamore, oft musical with bees—
Such tents the Patriarchs loved. O long unharmed
May all its agèd boughs o’er-canopy
The small round basin, which this jutting stone
Keeps pure from
