There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
And then this gradually disappeared. As time went on, what Wordsworth calls ‘shades of the prison-house’ closed around him, and the world, far from being transfigured, came to seem as we ordinarily see it, rather dull and dreary.
I would also like to read an extremely beautiful passage from the Centuries of Meditations of Thomas Traherne, who lived one hundred and fifty years before Wordsworth, and who describes in prose his own experiences of childhood.
The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold … The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The Men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal Cherubims! And young men glittering and sparkling Angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the streets, and playing, were moving jewels … Eternity was manifest in the Light of the Day, and something infinite behind everything appeared … with much ado I was corrupted, and made to learn the dirty devices of this world. Which now I unlearn, and become, as it were, a little child again that I may enter into the Kingdom of God.
In another passage he speaks of the Kingdom of God as being the external world seen in this visionary way.
The world is a mirror of infinite beauty, yet no man sees it. It is a Temple of Majesty, yet no man regards it. It is a region of Light and Peace, did not men disquiet it. It is the Paradise of God … It is the place of Angels and the Gate of Heaven.
This is the world transfigured by the visionary experience, a world which many poets, and many people who are not poets, have seen. It is an experience which people have after convalescence, when they are, as it were, reborn into the world and suddenly, with this kind of visionary sight, they perceive its miraculous beauty.
There are certain aspects of ordinary sunlight which can produce this visionary view of the world. I would like to read another very beautiful poem by Wordsworth, where he describes the effect of sunset:
No sound is uttered, but a deep
And solemn harmony pervades
The hollow vale from steep to steep,
And penetrates the glades.
Far-distant images draw nigh,
Called forth by wondrous potency
Of beamy radiance, that imbues
Whate’er it strikes, with gem-like hues!
In vision exquisitely clear,
Herds range along the mountain-side;
And glistening antlers are descried;
And gilded flocks appear.
Thine is the tranquil hour, purpureal Eve!
But long as god-like wish, or hope divine,
Informs my spirit, ne’er can I believe
That this magnificence is wholly thine!
From worlds not quickened by the sun
A portion of the gift is won;
An intermingling of Heaven’s pomp is spread
On ground which British shepherds tread!
This is very beautiful and indicates the spontaneous way in which the poet interprets the natural phenomenon of sunset in supernatural terms. It seems to be profoundly inevitable.
Now, finally, we can begin to see why precious stones are precious. I think they are precious because they are the objects in the external world which most nearly resemble the things which people see in the visionary world. The ruby or the emerald is like the transparent fruit which the Mystic sees encrusting the rocks and the architecture of the visionary world. They have this gem-like quality which can be perceived in certain circumstances in the external world by an eye which has lost its natural dimness. Not only are gems valuable to us because they remind us of what goes on in the visionary world, they also, by themselves, induce a kind of vision.
Most of us rather seldom have visionary experiences, but we all potentially have them, and I think that objects such as gems somehow remind us of what is going on in the back of our head and take us a certain way towards this other world. There is a phrase which is constantly used in older literature: it is said that a vision is ‘transporting’—we are transported by visionary objects in the external world towards the visionary world which lies within us and of which a part of our mind is somehow always conscious. It is precisely this double function which makes the precious stone precious: it reminds us of what is going on in the visionary world and it transports us towards that world.
There are many aspects of art which are really understandable only when we take into account this strange aspect of our mind which is capable of visionary experience. There are various ways of producing visionary works of art, the most obvious of which is to make the work of art out of materials which are themselves intrinsically vision-inducing, such as gems and precious metals. We find that the furniture of the altar in virtually every religion concentrates on these vision-inducing materials. These chalices set with gems and these shining surfaces have a double influence upon us: they remind us of the extraordinary world we carry about with us and they transport us at least part of the way towards it.
There are numerous other ways of producing visionary works of art which I cannot go into in detail, but I will end up by pointing out the very curious and interesting fact that most of the popular arts of history have had a great deal to do with visionary experience. Take an art which was profoundly popular during the Middle Ages—the art of stained glass, which is one of the most magnificent of all the arts.
Because gems were not particularly common in Western Europe there are frequent references to glass in accounts of visionary experiences. In the Welsh tradition, the islands of the blessed were called Ynisvitrin, the Isles of Glass; similarly, there was a glass fair in the Teutonic tradition, a mountain of glass where the souls of the departed lived. In the Apocalypse the author speaks of the sea of glass and the gold of the streets of Jerusalem, which was transparent like glass. We find this in Hindu literature, in Japanese literature, in Chinese literature. It is always this same picture, almost word for word the kind of vision which Weir Mitchell had under the influence of peyote.
The popularity of stained glass as an art form is very clearly indicated by the fact that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the great stained glasses of Western Europe were being made, collection boxes were placed in all the churches for money contributions for setting up stained glass windows, and we are told by contemporaries that these boxes were always full. People evidently had a passion for these extraordinary works which could convert an entire cathedral into a single huge gem. Anyone who has visited Chartres or the Sainte Chapelle in Paris knows what it is like to enter a building which is one vast jewel. The experience is profoundly vision-inducing.
There are other popular arts which have lasted from time immemorial and which are specifically vision-inducing. Fireworks were immensely popular in the days of the Roman Empire—they were almost as popular as gladiatorial games—and they were of an extraordinary elaboration. With the advances in the technology of chemistry they reached a kind of apogee in the nineteenth century, when great fireworks displays on the Fourth of July here and on the Fourteenth of July in France, and at coronations and canonizations and so on, played a great part in popular entertainment and were highly valued by the masses of the people.
Another popular art is the art of pageantry, which has been used by kings and ecclesiastics to increase their own prestige. The immensely elaborate fancy dress of ecclesiastical and royal personages does greatly enhance the prestige of the person who wears it, but at the same time there is no question at all that it has given immense pleasure to great masses of people, who will travel for miles to see great state or religious pageantries. The most remarkable of these in recent times was one which, unlike the great pageants of the past, has actually been preserved for posterity. I refer to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, which, thanks to floodlights and movie cameras and colour films, has been preserved in its fantastically rich and beautiful elaboration and will go down as a remarkable example to posterity.
Closely associated with pageantry is theatrical spectacle. This has always gone hand in hand with the drama. The drama is human life in action, and spectacle is the visionary world shown upon the stage. The highest manifestations of this were seen in the Elizabethan and Jacobean masques of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Spectacle has become much more visionary in recent years as a result of advances in technology. Thanks to the invention in the late eighteenth century of the parabolic mirror, which permits
