Yet should there hover in their restless heads
One thought, one grace, one wonder at the least
Which into words no virtue can digest.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE.
I swear I will never henceforth have to do with the faith that tells the best!
I will have to do only with that faith that leaves the best untold.
WALT WHITMAN.
Whitman here succumbs to his besetting sin and protests too much. For why this swearing, unless for mere emphatic swearing’s sake? Oath or no oath, the best, as also the worst, cannot be told—can only be experienced. Dante did not find it necessary to swear not to tell the best about Paradise. “O ben creato spirito,” he wrote:—
“O ben creato spirito, che ai rai
di vita eterna la dolcezza senti,
che non gustata non s’intende mai. . . .”
He knew that there were certain “sweets which, untasted, may never be understood.” So did Marlowe and Drayton. And so, indeed, must all who have ever wrestled with the problem of artistic expression.
However miraculously endowed a poet may be, there is always, beyond the furthest reach of his powers of expression, a great region of the unexpressed and inexpressible. The rest is always silence.
God
The thought which the word, God, suggests to the human mind is susceptible of as many varieties as human minds themselves. The Stoic, the Platonist and the Epicurean, the Polytheist, the Dualist and the Trinitarian, differ infinitely in their conceptions of its meaning. They agree only in considering it the most awful and most venerable of names, as a common term to express all of mystery, or majesty, or power which the invisible world contains. And not only has every sect distinct conceptions of the application of this name, but scarcely two individuals of the same sect, who exercise in any degree the freedom of their judgment, or yield themselves with any candour of feeling to the influencings of the visible world, find perfect coincidence of opinion to exist between them.
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY.
The worship of God is: Honouring His gifts in other men, each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best; those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God.
The Angel, hearing this, almost became blue; but mastering himself he grew yellow and at last white, pink and smiling.
WILLIAM BLAKE.
I know of no other Christianity and no other Gospel than the liberty both of body and mind to exercise the Divine Arts of Imagination . . . The Apostles knew of no other Gospel. What were all their spiritual gifts? What is the Divine Spirit? Is the Holy Ghost any other than an Intellectual Fountain? What is the Harvest of the Gospel and its Labours? What is that Talent which it is a curse to hide? What are the treasures of Heaven which we are to lay up for ourselves, are they any other than Mental Studies and Performances? What are all the Gifts of the Gospel, are they not all Mental Gifts? What is the Joy of Heaven but improvement in the things of the Spirit? What are the Pains of Hell but Ignorance, Bodily Lust, Idleness and devastation of the things of the spirit?
Answer this to yourselves, and expel from among you those who pretend to despise the Labours of Art and Science, which alone are the Labours of the Gospel. Is not this plain and manifest to the thought? Can you think at all and not pronounce heartily: That to labour in Knowledge is to build up Jerusalem, and to Despise Knowledge is to Despise Jerusalem and her builders.
WILLIAM BLAKE.
Distractions
O knit me that am crumbled dust! the heap
Is all dispersed and cheap.
Give for a handful but a thought,
And it is bought.
Hadst thou
Made me a star, a pearl or a rainbow,
The beams I then had shot
My light had lessened not;
But now
I find myself the less the more I grow.
The world
Is full of voices; man is called and hurled
By each; he answers all,
Knows every note and call;
Hence still
Fresh dotage tempts or old usurps his will.
Yet hadst thou clipt my wings when coffined in
This quickened mass of sin,
And saved that light, which freely thou
Didst then bestow,
I fear,
I should have spurned and said thou didst forbear,
Or that thy store was less;
But now since thou didst bless
So much,
I grieve, my God, that thou hast made me such.
I grieve?
O, yes! thou know’st I do; come, and relieve
And tame and keep down with thy light
Dust that would rise and dim the sight,
Lest left alone too long
Amidst the noise and throng,
Oppressed I,
Striving to save the whole, by parcels die.
HENRY VAUGHAN.
Leave, leave thy gadding thoughts;
Who pores
And spies
Still out of door,
Descries
Within them nought.
The skin and shell of things,
Though fair,
Are not
Thy wish nor prayer,
But got
By mere despair
Of wings.
To rack old elements
Or dust
And say:
Sure here he must
Needs stay,
Is not the way,
Nor just.
HENRY VAUGHAN.
Fate which foresaw
How frivolous a baby man would be—
By what distractions he would be possessed,
How he would pour himself in every strife,
And well nigh change his own identity—
That it might keep from his capricious play
His genuine self, and force him to obey
Even in his own despite his being’s law,
Bade through the deep recesses of our breast
The unregarded river of our life
Pursue with indiscernible flow its way;
And that we should not see
The buried stream, and seem to be
Eddying at large in blind uncertainty,
Though driving on with it eternally.
But often, in the world’s most crowded streets,
But often in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to enquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us—to know
Whence our lives come, and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;
But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves—
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast;
But they course on for ever unexpressed.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well—but ’tis not true!
And then we will no more be racked
With inward striving, and demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour
Their stupefying power;
Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!
Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn,
From the soul’s subterranean depth upborne
As from an infinitely distant land,
Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey
A melancholy into all our day.
Only—but this is rare—
When a belovèd hand is laid in ours,
When, jaded with the rush and glare
Of the interminable hours,
Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear,
When our world-deafened ear
Is by the tones of a loved voice caressed—
A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast.
And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.
The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,
And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.
A man becomes aware of his life’s flow,
And hears its winding murmur; and he sees
The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
And there arrives a lull in the hot race
Wherein he doth for ever chase
That flying and elusive shadow, rest.
An air of coolness plays upon his face,
And an unwonted calm pervades his breast.
And then he thinks he knows
The hills where his life rose,
And the sea where it goes.
MATTHEW ARNOLD.
Cette source de mort, cette homicide peste,
Ce péché, dont l’enfer a le monde infecté,
M’a laissé pour tout être un bruit d’avoir été,
Et je suis de moi-même une image funeste.
L’Auteur de l’Univers, le Monarque céleste,
S’était rendu visible en ma seule beauté;
Ce vieux titre d’honneur qu’autrefois j’ai porté
Et que je porte encore est tout ce qui me reste.
Mais c’est fait de ma gloire et je ne suis plus rien
Qu’un fantôme qui court après l’ombre d’un bien
Ou qu’un corps animé du seul ver qui le ronge.
Non, je ne suis plus rien, quand je veux m’éprouver,
Qu’un esprit ténébreux qui voit tout comme en songe,
Et cherche incessamment ce qu’il ne peut trouver.
JEAN OGIER DE GOMBAULD.
The subject of distractions is one that has greatly preoccupied every moralist with a contemplative turn of mind. Of all the treatments of the theme with which I am acquainted, the best, the most reasonable and scientific is to be found in the Journal Intime of Maine de Biran (October 9th, 1817). He begins by quoting Pascal:—
“Man is more to be pitied for being able to distract himself with things so frivolous and low than for grieving over his real miseries; and his amusements are infinitely less reasonable than his melancholy (ennui).”
“But reason,” is Maine de Biran’s comment, “has nothing to do either with ennui or the propensity to amusements. These are purely organic dispositions, to which will and reason can oppose ideas, but which they can neither change nor directly combat. When I am organically sad and bored, no amusements, no ideas can change this fundamental state of my being—though it is possible for me to be, to a certain extent, distracted. When my organism is in good condition, everything becomes an amusement and a pleasure—everything from external sensations and far niente to ideas. Pascal is surely quite wrong in all that he says about the cause of human wretchedness and of that perpetual agitation in which men pass their lives. Preoccupied solely with his design, which is to show that humanity has fallen and that it was created for a better state, Pascal treats a man as a simple subject and takes no account whatever of the influence of his organic states on his immediately experienced feeling of existence. This feeling may be happy
