Down all that glory in the heavens to glean our Saviour;
And eyes, heart, what looks, what lips yet gave you a
Rapturous love’s greeting of realer, of rounder replies?
And the azurous hung hills are his world-wielding shoulder
Majestic—as a stallion stalwart, very-violet-sweet!—
These things, these things were here and but the beholder
Wanting; which two when they once meet,
The heart rears wings bold and bolder
And hurls for him, O half hurls earth for him off under his feet.
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS.
In a letter to Hawthorne, Herman Melville has written well of these country ecstasies. His remarks arise out of a discussion of Goethe’s philosophy.
“Here is a fellow with a raging toothache. ‘My dear boy,’ Goethe says to him, ‘you are sorely afflicted with that tooth; but you must live in the All, and then you will be happy!’ As with all great genius, there is an immense deal of flummery in Goethe . . . P.S.—This ‘all’ feeling, though, there is some truth in. You must often have felt it, lying on the grass on a warm summer’s day. Your legs seem to send out shoots into the earth. Your hair feels like leaves upon your head. This is the ‘all’ feeling. But what plays the mischief with the truth is that men will insist upon the universal application of a temporary feeling or opinion.”
The trouble is that we can never, in the nature of things, do anything else. All “feelings and opinions” are temporary; they last for a while and are then succeeded by other “feelings and opinions.” Thus, it is only very occasionally that we observe a phenomenon like the Brownian movement. Indeed, the vast majority of people have never observed it at all. But men of science feel justified in making universal applications of the “temporary feeling” they have during their occasional observations and in basing upon it a whole theory of molecular behaviour. And this despite of the fact that they, along with the rest of mankind, live their daily lives with the intimate conviction that molecules not only don’t move, but don’t exist. The all feeling is brief and occasional; but this is not to say that a metaphysical system based upon it must necessarily be untrue. Nor does the great predominance in our lives of not-all feelings necessarily invalidate an all-theory, any more than a theory of molecular movement is invalidated by our almost constant sense of the solidity and stability of matter. It is only in certain special circumstances that we can observe the Brownian movement; at other times we observe stillness. Similarly, it is only in special circumstances that we have the all-feeling; at other times we have an immediate sense of separateness. We cannot help it; we are made that way. Melville is quite right, of course, in insisting that this immediate sense of separateness cannot be denied; an all-philosophy will not cure toothache, just as the molecular theory will not modify our native incapacity to be aware of molecules. On the other hand, toothache (Melville’s expressive symbol of separateness) and the non-molecular life are, on their own plane, undeniable realities. Our experience is divided up into island universes. We jump from one to the other—there are no bridges. Because of their peculiar quality, we say that some of these experiences are more real, or at any rate more significant than others. But the others, nevertheless, continue to exist. We cannot “always keep the passion of this peace”; and “the best, alas, has neither memory nor tongue.” It is only of a god that Patmore could write (in that rather disquietingly emphatic style of his):—
The whole of life is womanhood to thee,
Momently wedded with enormous bliss.
For mortals, a great deal of their lives is manhood and wild beasts and mud.
To fly from, need not be to hate mankind:
All are not fit with them to stir and toil,
Nor is it discontent to keep the mind
Deep in its fountain, lest it overboil
In the hot throng, where we become the spoil
Of our infection, till too late and long
We may deplore and struggle with the coil,
In wretched interchange of wrong for wrong
Midst a contentious world, striving where none are strong.
Is it not better, then, to be alone,
And love Earth only for its earthly sake?
By the blue rushing of the arrowy Rhone,
Or the pure bosom of its nursing lake,
Which feeds it as a mother who doth make
A fair but froward infant her own care,
Kissing its cries away, as these awake;—
Is it not better thus our lives to wear
Than join the crushing crowd, doomed to inflict or bear?
I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me; and to me
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture: I can see
Nothing to loathe in nature, save to be
A link reluctant in a fleshly chain,
Classed among creatures, when the soul can flee,
And with the sky, the peak, the heaving plain
Of ocean, or the stars, mingle, and not in vain.
And thus I am absorbed, and this is life:
I look upon the peopled desert past,
As on a place of agony and strife,
Where, for some sin, to sorrow I was cast,
To act and suffer, but remount at last
With a fresh pinion, which I feel to spring,
Though young, yet waxing vigorous as the blast
Which it would cope with, on delighted wing,
Spurning the clay-cold bonds which round our being cling.
And when at length the mind shall be all free
From what it hates in this degraded form,
Reft of its carnal life, save what shall be
Existent happier in the fly and worm,
When elements to elements conform
And dust is as it should be, shall I not
Feel all I see, less dazzling, but more warm?
The bodiless thought? The Spirit of each spot?
Of which, even now, I share at times the immortal lot?
LORD BYRON.
Wherein lies happiness? In that which becks
Our ready minds to fellowship divine,
A fellowship with essence; till we shine,
Full alchemized and free of space. Behold
The clear religion of heaven! Fold
A rose leaf round thy finger’s taperness
And soothe thy lips; hist, when the airy stress
Of music’s kiss impregnates the free winds,
And with a sympathetic touch unbinds
Aeolian magic from their lucid wombs:
Then old songs waken from enclouded tombs;
Old ditties sigh above their father’s grave;
Ghosts of melodious prophesyings rave
Round every spot where trod Apollo’s foot;
Bronze clarions awake, and faintly bruit,
Where long ago a giant battle was;
And, from the turf, a lullaby doth pass
In every place where infant Orpheus slept.
Feel we these things?—that moment have we stepped
Into a sort of oneness, and our state
Is like a floating spirit’s. But there are
Richer entanglements, enthralments far
More self-destroying, leading by degrees
To the chief intensity; the crown of these
Is made of love and friendship and sits high
Upon the forehead of humanity.
All its more ponderous and bulky worth
Is friendship, whence there ever issues forth
A steady splendour; but at the tip-top
There hangs by unseen film an orbèd drop
Of light, and that is love: its influence
Thrown in our eyes genders a novel sense
At which we start and fret; till in the end,
Melting into its radiance, we blend,
Mingle, and so become a part of it,—
Nor with aught else can our souls interknit
So wingedly; when we combine therewith,
Life’s self is nourished by its proper pith,
And we are nurtured like a pelican brood.
Ay, so delicious is the unsating food,
That men, who might have towered in the van
Of all the congregated world, to fan
And winnow from the coming step of time
All chaff of custom, wipe away all slime
Left by men-slugs and human serpentry,
Have been content to let occasion die,
Whilst they did sleep in love’s Elysium.
And, truly, I would rather be struck dumb
Than speak against this ardent listlessness:
For I have ever thought that it might bless
The world with benefits unknowingly;
As does the nightingale, up-perchèd high,
And cloistered among cool and bunchèd leaves—
She sings but to her love, nor e’er conceives
How tip-toe Night holds back her dark grey hood.
Just so may love, although ’tis understood
The mere commingling of passionate breath,
Produce more than our searching witnesseth:
What I know not: but who, of men, can tell
That flowers would bloom, or that green fruit would swell
To melting pulp, that fish would have bright mail,
The earth its dower of river, wood, and vale,
The meadows runnels, runnels pebble-stones,
The seed its harvest, or the lute its tones,
Tones ravishment, or ravishment its sweet,
If human souls did never kiss and greet?
JOHN KEATS.
Perhaps separateness is really an illusion, perhaps there is, after all, some mysterious unity. Ontologically and absolutely, the “all-philosophy” may be true. Or it may be false. As with all ontological problems, there is really no knowing. One thing, however, is certain: in spite of the toothache, Goethe’s advice is sound; the best way to be happy is to try to live out of personal separateness, in the all—to try to share, in Byron’s words, “the immortal lot” of the spirit of things, to form, in Keats’s, “a fellowship with essence.”
Our ordinary day-to-day existence is that of a separate being having contact with his own abstractions from, and generalizations about, the world revealed to him by his sensations and intuitions. At certain moments, this separate being goes behind the abstractions and generalizations and becomes directly conscious of his sensations and intuitions—an apocalyptic process, which Keats describes (in terms which have as much or as little meaning as most philosophical language) as the forming of a fellowship with essence.
For all of us, the most intolerably dreary and deadening life is that which we live in ourselves. Happiness is to “become portion of that around me”—portion of the essence of that around me, Keats would qualify. We are happy only when the self achieves union with the not-self. Now both self and not-self are states of our consciousness. External
