A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
A STUDY IN 
 ILLUMINATION 
 
 BY 
 
 GERALDINE E. HODGSON 
 LITT.D. (TRIN. COLL. DUB.), 
 
 AUTHOR OF "IN THE WAY OF THE SAINTS," ETC. 
 
 HEATH, CRANTON & OUSELEY, LTD. 
 FLEET LANE, LONDON, E.G. 
 
" Loquere, Domine, quia audit servus tuus. Non loquatur 
 mihi Moyses aut aliquis ex prophetis : sed tu potius loquere, 
 Domine Deus, inspirator et illuminator omnium prophetarum ; 
 quia tu solus sine iis potes me perfecte imbuere; illi autem sine 
 te nihil proficient." DE IMITATIONE CHRISTI, III., II. 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 A GREAT part of Chapter IV appeared in The 
 Seeker for February, 1913, under the title 
 *' Robert Browning as a Mystic.'* Though the 
 fact will be apparent to careful readers, yet, in 
 order to forestall and save superficial criticism, 
 it may be as well to say that the many quotations 
 are illustrations of the theory of the book; that 
 their function is precisely that of diagrams, say 
 in a treatise on entomology. As it would be 
 tiresome to one reader to have to go to his collec- 
 tion every time he wished to see an insect, so it 
 would be to another to walk across the room to 
 his book-shelves. Moreover, it might conceiv- 
 ably happen in both cases that the particular 
 specimen was not there. 
 
 I owe and offer thanks to those who have 
 generously permitted me to make any excerpts 
 from their copyright works, whether to author or 
 
 publisher ; most specially to the Right Rev. Lady 
 
 5 
 
 523251 
 
6 FOREWORD 
 
 Abbess of Stanbrook Abbey, in the case of 
 S. Teresa, and to Mr Thomas Baker; and to 
 Wilfred Meynell, Esq., and Messrs Burns & 
 Gates, in the case of Francis Thompson. 
 
 G. E. H. 
 
 FEAST OF S. DUNSTAN, 1914. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 PROLOGUE 9 
 
 HENRY VAUGHAN 58 
 
 WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 76 
 
 ROBERT BROWNING 103 
 
 FRANCIS THOMPSON 144 
 
 EPILOGUE 165 
 
A STUDY IN 
 ILLUMINATION 
 
 PROLOGUE 
 
 IT is the fashion in a modern and powerful 
 section of that world which interests itself in 
 psychology, to urge that the senses are the only 
 channels of human knowledge. Knowledge is, 
 however, an equivocal word. It could bear a 
 meaning which would allow all of us to concede 
 this point. Unfortunately, some psychologists 
 seem to set no bounds to its connotation, or if 
 they do, do not make the limits obvious. To 
 maintain this predominant importance of the 
 senses is not only modern ; nihil est in intellects, 
 quod non prius fuerit in sensu is Scholasticism's 
 ancient formula; and the Abbot of Buckfast 
 endorses it with the sweeping judgment, " There 
 is not one single exception." 1 But then the 
 Schoolmen reckoned intellect as having a partial 
 
 Human Soul," page 31. By Anscar VonJer, 
 O.S.B. 
 
TO A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 value, and did not forget man's spirit, and its 
 exalted functions. " We know nothing but by 
 outward signification," 1 wrote Sir Thomas Elyot 
 in 1531 ; and that clinching sentence probably 
 bears the same absolute and materialistic mean- 
 ing as the dictum of a living philosopher, who 
 wrote, " All mental activity is based upon the 
 results of sense-perception, with which it starts." 2 
 The ordinary thinker might possibly suppose 
 that it is the business of the psychologist to con- 
 sider every possible type of mental life, and to 
 weigh every actual human capacity ; might fancy 
 that he of all men, to use Voltaire's phrase to 
 De Vauvenargues, is entitled to preferences 
 (perhaps) but to no exclusions; and if such an 
 ordinary mortal should so reflect, he might find 
 himself proceeding to inquire, " What has the 
 psychologist done with the saints? " For while 
 there are " practical " saints, i.e. those who heal 
 men's bodies, satisfy their hunger and other 
 physical needs, teach their ignorance, and suc- 
 cour them, in various more or less "sensible" 
 ways, there are also the Contemplatives, the 
 Ecstatics. What of their way of knowledge? 
 What of the methods of that comparatively large 
 body of men and women who are known as the 
 Mystics? The time has passed when they can 
 be quietly and effectively shovelled out of the 
 way as undiagnosed epileptics, or misty-minded, 
 irrational sentimentalists. To deal thus with 
 
 * " Boke of the Govern our," chapter ii. 
 
 " Essentials of Method," section i. By Professor C. 
 de Garmo. 
 
PROLOGUE it 
 
 obstinate facts contrary to one's own standpoint 
 and theory may sometimes seem a short and easy 
 way; but the method has one signal flaw, its 
 total lack of finality; supreme revenants are the 
 Saints and Mystics. Above the engrossing 
 materialism of the day, behind the crude and 
 vulgar triumphs of machine-made comfort they 
 stand challenging, provocative, evocative, un- 
 gainsayable. What of the Mystics' path to 
 reality ? 
 
 Before attempting to answer the question, it is 
 well to be explicit about the word. There is a 
 present-day mysticism which appears to wish to 
 obliterate the distinction between subject and 
 object}) It escapes in the two writers who pre- 
 faced remarks to a reprint of some of William 
 Law's mystical writings. There, Dr du Bose 
 writes: "Mysticism is supposed to involve a 
 direct or immediate communication to the recep- 
 tive soul of a reality outside of and above the 
 possibility of mere sensible experience. As the 
 heavens are reflected and repeated in the answer- 
 ing depths of a placid lake, so the Heaven of 
 God is mirrored in the responsive soul of man. 
 For one, that is not my mysticism ; that is not 
 the way reality comes to me. It comes to me all 
 out of the fathomless depths of myself." 1 In the 
 introduction to the same book, William Scott 
 Palmer says of Law : " He is for ever insisting 
 upon the fact from which men are for ever trying 
 to escape, the fact that in matters of religion only 
 
 1 " Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law," 
 preface, page viii. 
 
12 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 those things which happen in happen for him. 
 A Christ that is not in him cannot be for him." 1 
 Now, is not this use of " in " really a juggling 
 with words? An earthquake happens "for" 
 us, but not in us. A loaf of bread is " for " us; 
 thus, if it be outside of us, otherwise if jl be in ; 
 but " for " us in a sense in both cases. [^Surely 
 what Mr Scott Palmer means is that nothing 
 has significance for us which is not capable of 
 coming into relation with us, coming to be... 
 in us spiritually, intellectually, or physically ? 
 That is an intelligible, even the usual, doctrine; 
 but it is permissible to say that the phrase: " A 
 Christ that is not in him cannot be for him " is 
 either too vague to have value, or, if it be taken 
 at its face-meaning, is simply a heresy. [In this 
 present book, the ancient Catholic doctrine of 
 subjective and objective is accepted, the doctrine 
 of GOD as above, beyond, outside His creatures, 
 yet Who can become known to and be felt and 
 worshipped by them ; or, to use popular terms, 
 a transcendent GOD Who deigns also to become 
 immanent.^ " Objective truth is one thing, its 
 appreciatio'n in the subject is another. Truth is 
 in the mind," says S. Thomas. " Two worlds 
 exist fitted for each other." 2 And similarly, 
 here, mysticism is taken to mean that direct 
 knowledge of something not the " knower," as 
 contrasted with the indirect knowledge he gains 
 
 *" Liberal and Mystical Writing's of William Law," 
 introduction, page 5. 
 
 3 " The Summa Theologica," vol. i., page 14. Trans- 
 lated by the Fathers of the English Dominican Province. 
 
PROLOGUE 13 
 
 from his senses, and from his reason working 
 over and working up the data of sense. 
 
 To return to the question, what of the mystical 
 way? Most writers speak of stages in it, three 
 stages indeed-^purgation, illumination, and 
 union.) 
 
 Like all other efforts to draw in human affairs 
 definite, demarcating lines, to set rigid irrevoc- 
 able limits (the mystical life does not really admit 
 of these absolutely clear-cut severings.} In^Qne 
 sense it may be argued that illumination does 
 and must come first. A careful study of many 
 cases will probably show that here, as elsewhere, 
 there are several aspects of the matter. But 
 sometimes at least, possibly most frequently, 
 very vividly and with sudden onset, the convic- 
 tion of the supreme reality or supreme worth 
 of an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent life, 
 beyond, around, outside its own small fleeting 
 self, flashes in upon a human soul : 
 
 " Hast never oome to thee an hour, 
 A sudden gleam divine, precipitating, bursting all 
 
 these bubbles, fashions, wealth, 
 
 These eager business aims books, politics, art, 
 amours, 
 
 To utter nothingness? m 
 
 Or, the process may be more gradual a slow 
 breaking-in of light, like that pale gleaming 
 dawn which illumines the sky on some cloudy 
 morning, as the rising sun frets into bars and 
 fringes the dun-coloured east. Whether it be 
 slow like this, or a swift flash out of the dark, a 
 conviction, the equivalent in the mind or soul of 
 1 " Leaves of Grass," page 218. By Walt Whitman. 
 
I 4 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 sudden physical light in the material world, 
 
 when: 
 
 " Les chats-huants s'eveillent, et sans bruit, 
 Rament 1'air noir avec leurs ailes lourdes, 
 Et le zenith s'emplit de lueurs sourdes. 
 Blanche, Venus emerge " l 
 
 that conviction is the starting-point of mystic 
 life.;, For, after all, the soul needs some stimulus, 
 some light of a far-away hope ; it cannot embark 
 on a quest from mere vacuity ; it must be aware 
 or at least dream of something; it will never set 
 out on an empty search nor seek an absolutely 
 hidden goal. Just because, very often at least, 
 the instant of illumination is actually aflame with 
 the glow from the pure sight, the dark and sin- 
 stained soul is there and then aware of its 
 own sordid unworthiness. For the American 
 psychologist seems to be writing against the 
 evidence when he insists so hardily that, in 
 the moment of illumination : " It is not that the 
 person escapes from sin, but he no longer sees 
 that there is any sin in the world from which to 
 escape." 2 This statement is directly traversed 
 by an instance of illumination which this phil- 
 ospher himself reckons among the "great 
 cases " of the illuminated, that of the Apostle 
 of the Gentiles, S. Paul : 
 
 " As he journeyed, he came near to Damas- 
 cus : and suddenly there shined round about him 
 a light from heaven : And he fell to the earth, 
 and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, 
 
 1 " L'heure du berger." By Paul Verlaine. 
 
 8 " Cosmic Consciousness," page 62. By R. M. Bucke. 
 
PROLOGUE 15 
 
 why persecutes! thou Me? And he said, Who 
 art Thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am 
 JESUS, Whom thou persecutest: it is hard for 
 thee to kick against the pricks. And he, trem- 
 bling and astonished, said, Lord, what wilt Thou 
 have me to do? ' 51 
 
 Referring to this, S. Paul himself wrote: 
 " I thank Christ JESUS our Lord, who hath 
 enabled me, for that he counted me faithful, 
 putting me into the ministry, who was before a 
 blasphemer, and a persecutor and injurious: but 
 I obtained mercy because I did it ignorantly in 
 unbelief." 2 But S. Paul was by no means 
 delivered from the "sense of sin " in himself or 
 in the world. Who can forget his pathetic 
 regret : " The good that I would I do not : but 
 the evil which I would not that I do ... O 
 wretched man that I am " ; 3 or his plangent cry, 
 the terror of every genuine teacher " Lest that 
 by any means, when I have preached unto others, 
 I myself should be a castaway? " 4 
 
 A signal instance, to a similar effect, may 
 be found in Blaise Pascal. In that strange 
 " Amulet," casually felt within the doubtlet, 
 which clothed his corpse, by a servant who there- 
 upon ripped open the garment and found the 
 precious paper, lies the record of Pascal's illu- 
 mination. It testifies to the " light " which at 
 any rate often accompanies illumination ;N it 
 
 1 Acts of the Apostles ix. 3-6. 
 8 i Timothy i. 13. 
 
 * Romans vii. 19, 24. 
 
 * i Corinthians ix. 27. 
 
16 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 records joy and also undoubtedly a_ejise of sin. 
 The following lines, selected from the thirty-five 
 of which it is composed, show these points : 
 
 " L'an de grace 1654 
 
 Lundy 236 novbre jour de St Clement 
 
 Pape et m. et autres au martirologe Remain 
 
 Veille de St Crisogone m. et autres, etc. . . . 
 
 Depuis environ dix heures et demi du soir 
 
 Jusques environ minuit et demi 
 
 FEU 
 
 . . . mon Dieu me quitterez vous 
 Que je n'en sois pas s6par6 e"ternellement. 
 
 JESUS Christ 
 
 Je m'en suis se"pare" je 1'ay fuy, renonce", crucifie", 
 Que je n'en sois jamais separ6. m 
 
 A third instance may be found in that great 
 Spanish Saint and Mystic, S. John of the Cross. 
 Mr David Lewis, his biographer, writes of the 
 saint's imprisonment : " His cell became filled 
 with light seen by the bodily eye. One night 
 the friar who kept him went as usual to see that 
 his prisoner was safe, and witnessed the heavenly 
 light with which the cell was flooded. He did 
 not stop to consider it, but hurried to the prior, 
 thinking that someone in the house had keys to 
 open the doors of the prison. The prior with 
 two religious went at once to the prison, but 
 
 x The whole of this " Amulet " may be found in 
 Faugere's edition of Pascal's works. Paris, 1897. Dr 
 Bucke also reproduces it on pages 227 and 228 of his 
 " Cosmic Consciousness," 
 
PROLOGUE 17 
 
 on his entering the room through which the 
 prison was approached, the light vanished. The 
 prior, however, entered the cell, and finding it 
 dark, opened the lantern with which he had 
 provided himself, and asked the prisoner who 
 had given him light. S. John answered him and 
 said that no one in the house had done so, that 
 no one could do it, and that there was neither 
 candle nor lamp in the cell. The prior made no 
 reply and went away, thinking that the gaoler 
 had made a mistake. ..." 
 
 While making his escape from the prison of 
 the monastery, it is said that he had a repetition 
 of the experience as follows : 
 
 " He saw a wonderful light out of which came 
 a voice : Follow Me. He followed and the light 
 moved before him towards the wall which was 
 on the bank, and then, he knew not how, he 
 found himself on the summit of it without effort 
 or fatigue. He descended into the street, and 
 then the light vanished. So brilliant was it, that 
 for two or three days afterwards, so he confessed 
 at a later time, his eyes were weak as if he had 
 been looking at the sun in its strength." 
 
 It cannot be maintained surely that S. Paul, 
 Blaise Pascal, or S. John of the Cross were 
 "without the sense of sin.'* 
 
 In time, the first radiance of that unfor- 
 gettable moment of illumination passes into 
 memory; and all life turns slowly to the dire 
 task of purgation. ^'Relentlessly, wearily, with 
 countless slips and repeated failures, the work 
 of uprooting, changing, cleansing goes on. 
 
 B 
 
i8 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 When, at length, the soul has sloughed its 
 earthly cares, has torn off and thrown away its 
 material fetters, when it goes forth from its 
 own lower self, stripped, detached, emptied, then 
 comes the light for the second time, not now 
 as a transient awakening flash, but as a steady 
 effulgence) and it is this advent really a 
 return which is generally known as illumina- 
 tion. Not yet, however, for the real soldier in 
 the fighting line, for the genuine Mystic, is 
 the battle fought and the guerdon won. There 
 follows, sooner or later, that mysterious pain, 
 called by S. John of the Cross " the dark night 
 of the soul."- Not only need the seeker purify 
 his physical nature ; but the interior self must 
 undergo this strange trial. 
 
 " Et puis, et puis, quand tout des chases n^cessaires 
 L'homme, la patience et ce devoir dicte, 
 Aura fructifi de mon mieux dans vos serres, 
 
 Ah ! tuez mon esprit, et mon cceur et mes sens 1 
 
 Place a Tame qui croie, et qui sente et qua yoie 
 Que tout est vanite" fors elle-meme en Dieu; 
 Place a 1'ame, Seigneur, marchant dans votre vole 
 Et ne tenidant qu'au ciel, seul espoir et seul lieu ! m 
 
 The above passage is pertinent because it 
 suggests that true illumination is extra-sensible. 
 No doubt, the senses must be " killed," but that 
 is not all. The real crux of the matter lies 
 elsewhere. (The crucial -preliminary to real 
 enlightenment is the surrender of the will^) 
 
 In that ancient treatise, the " Book of 
 
 lu Priere du Matin." By Paul Verlaine. 
 
PROLOGUE 19 
 
 Wisdom," where, as must be evident to the most 
 casual reader, Wisdom is super-sensible enlight- 
 enment, we learn that the light only shines on 
 those who have surrendered their wills for 
 Love's sake. How is Wisdom described there ? 
 
 " She is the breath of the power of GOD, and a pure 
 influence flowing from the glory of the Al- 
 mighty. 
 
 11 She is the brightness of the everlasting light, the 
 unspotted mirror of the power of GOD. . . . 
 
 " She is more beautiful than the sun, and above all 
 the order of stars, being compared with the 
 light she is found before it." 1 
 
 Then follow the mysterious words of warning 
 combined with hope: "For after this cometh 
 the light; but vice shall not prevail against 
 wisdom." 
 
 The phrase, " being compared with the 
 light (i.e. the natural light) she is found before 
 it," is one which does not stand alone; we 
 may compare: "I loved her above health and 
 beauty, and chose to have her instead of light, 
 for the light that cometh from her never goeth 
 out," 2 where, quite evidently, the antithesis is 
 the same, natural as contrasted with supernatural 
 light. 
 
 Two points may be noticed in this passage : " I 
 
 1 '* Wisdom," vii. 25, 26, 29. It may be interesting to 
 compare the Vulgate : 
 
 " Vapor est enim virtutis Dei, et emanatio quaedam est 
 claritatis omnipoteotis Dei sincera. . . . 
 
 " Candor est enim lucis aeternae, et speculum sine 
 macula Dei majestatis. . . . Est enim haec speciiosior 
 sole, et super omnem dispositionem stellarum, luci com- 
 parata, invenitur prior." 
 
 a " Wisdom," vii. 10. 
 
20 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 . . . chose to have her," and "the light that 
 cometh from her." The choice is essential; a 
 choice is a matter of will. 
 
 In the first chapter of the " Book of Wisdom " 
 we find the sentence : " The holy spirit of discip- 
 line will flee deceit"; again "Wisdom is a 
 loving spirit"; and then the two ideas are, in 
 the sixth chapter, combined " For the very 
 true beginning of her " (i.e. Wisdom) " is the 
 desire of discipline, and the care of discipline 
 is love. And love is the keeping of the law." 1 
 It is not without interest, in the face of Dr 
 Bucke's statement that " Las Casas was presum- 
 ably possessed of cosmic consciousness, because 
 (a) of his unusual health and strength; for this 
 great faculty commonly occurs in exceptional 
 physical organisations," 2 to note that the writer 
 of the " Book of Wisdom," making his choice, 
 declared, " I loved her above health and beauty." 
 It would not be difficult to find cases of illu- 
 mination not combined with physical strength ; 
 perhaps Dr Bucke had forgotten his rather 
 favourite illumine, S. Paul. 
 
 'That the way to enlightenment is along the 
 path of self-surrender is the lesson of all the 
 Mystics,' " Who," says S. John of the Cross, 
 " shall tiinder God from doing His own will in 
 a soul that is resigned, detached and self- 
 annihilated? " 3 And again, "On this road, 
 
 x " Wisdom," vi. 17, 18. 
 8 " Cosmic Consciousness," page 118. 
 ''Ascent of Mount Carmel," Vol. II., chapter ir., 
 section a. 
 
PROLOGUE 21 
 
 therefore, to abandon one's own way is to enter on 
 the true way, or to speak more correctly, to pass 
 onwards to the goal; and to forsake one's own 
 way is to enter on that which has none, namely 
 God." 1 And yet A once more: " On this road, 
 therefore, to have our own faculties in darkness 
 is to see the light. . . . This relates to the 
 spiritual road : he who is in darkness, blind as 
 to his own proper and natural light, shall see 
 supernaturally, and he who shall rely on any 
 light of his own, the greater will be his blind- 
 ness, and the more he shall be hindered on the 
 way of the divine union." 2 
 
 Extraordinarily remote as this self-oblation, 
 self-merging in the Eternal is from the noisy 
 self-assertion of this material twentieth century, 
 yet perhaps even S. John of the Cross has 
 not more nearly succeeded than Ruysbroeck 
 had already done in conveying in human lan- 
 guage the consummation of self-surrender in 
 vision : 
 
 " Lorsqu'au-dessus de tout exercice d'amour 
 nous sommes embrasse's et saisis avec le Pere et 
 le Fils dans l'unit du Saint-Esprit, alors nous 
 sommes tous un, comme le Christ Dieu et 
 homme est un avec son Pere dans leur mutuel 
 amour sans limite. Et ce meme amour nous 
 consomme tous ensemble dans une fruition 
 e*ternelle, c'est-a-dire en une essence bien 
 heureuse et sans action, en dehors de compre*- 
 
 111 Ascent of Mount Carmel," Vol. II., chapter iv., 
 section 5. 
 * Ibid., Vol. II., chapter iv., section 7. 
 
22 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 hension pour toute creature. 1 . . . Mais quand 
 je dis que nous sommes un avec Dieu, il faut 
 1'entendre de 1'amour, et non pas de 1'essence 
 ni de la nature. Car 1'essence de Dieu est 
 incre'e'e, tandis que la notre est creee, entre Dieu 
 et la creature la distinction est immense. C'est 
 pourquoi, bien qu'ils soient unis, ils ne peuvent 
 devenir absolument un." 2 
 
 Jacob Boehme, the Lutheran, is as emphatic 
 on this point as the Catholic S. John of the 
 Cross and Ruysbroeck. In his " Discourse 
 between Two Souls" the distressed soul asks: 
 " What then shall I do to bud forth again and 
 recover the first life, wherein I was at rest before 
 I became an image? " 
 
 The enlightened soul answers: " Thou shalt 
 do nothing at all but forsake thy own will, viz. 
 that which thou callest I, or thyself." 
 
 In that other dialogue between a scholar, or 
 disciple, and his master (concerning the super- 
 sensual life) the scholar asks: 
 
 "Sir, how may I come to the supersensual 
 life, so that I may see God, and may hear God 
 speak?" 
 
 The master replies : 
 
 "Son, when thou canst throw thyself into 
 that, where no creature dwelleth, though it be 
 but for a moment, then thou hearest what God 
 speaketh." 
 
 *"Le Miroir du Salut fiternel," chapter xxiv. By 
 Johann Ruysbroeck. 
 'Ibid., chapter xxv. 
 
PROLOGUE 23 
 
 DISCIPLE. Is that where no creature dwelleth 
 near at hand, or is it afar off ? 
 
 MASTER. It is in thee. And if thou canst, my 
 son, for a while but cease from all thy thinking 
 and willing, then shalt thou hear the unspeakable 
 words of God. 
 
 DISCIPLE. How can I hear Him speak when 
 I stand still from thinking and willing? 
 
 MASTER. When thou standest still from the 
 thinking of self, and the willing of self; when 
 both thy intellect and will are quiet and passive 
 to the impressions of the Eternal Word and 
 spirit; . . . then the Eternal hearing, seeing 
 and speaking will be revealed in thee; . . . 
 blessed art thou therefore if that thou canst stop 
 the wheel of thy imagination and senses; foras- 
 much as hereby thou mayest arrive at length to 
 see the great salvation of God. . . . Since it is 
 naught indeed but thine own hearing and willing 
 that do hinder thee, so that thou dost not see 
 and hear God." 
 
 All through the dialogue, whose whole burden 
 is the attainment of the supersensual life, this 
 same lesson of the surrender of the will is insisted 
 upon. iThus the Master says, " Three things 
 are requisite. . . . The first is thou must resign 
 thy will up to God. . . . The second is thou 
 must hate thy own will. . . . The third is thou 
 must bow thy soul under the Cross." And 
 again : " Upon this entire surrender and yielding 
 up of thy will, the love of God in thee becometh 
 the life of thy nature; it killeth thee not, but 
 quickeneth thee, who art now dead to thyself in 
 
24 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 thine own will, according to its proper life, even 
 the life of God." 
 
 Boehme practised his own tenets; he said of 
 himself, " I have never desired to learn any 
 sciences, but from early youth I strove after the 
 salvation of my soul, and thought how I might 
 inherit or possess the Kingdom of Heaven. 
 Finding within myself a powerful contrariness, 
 viz. the desires that belong to flesh and blood, I 
 began to fight a hard battle against my cor- 
 rupted nature. . . . Now, while I was wrestling 
 and battling, being aided by God, a wonderful 
 light arose within my soul. It was a light 
 entirely foreign to my unruly nature, but in it I 
 recognised the true nature of God and man, and 
 the relation existing between them ; a thing which 
 heretofore I had never understood, and for which 
 I would never have sought." 1 
 
 William Law, who published an English 
 translation of Boehme's writings, teaches the 
 same lesson precisely in the preface he prefixed to 
 the " Signatura Rerum " : "If you ask, what is 
 the way to attain this wisdom ? Behold, Christ, 
 Who is the way, the truth and the life, tells you 
 plainly in these words : ' If any man will come 
 after Me, let him deny himself and take up his 
 cross daily and follow Me.' ' It would be easy 
 to multiply instances, but these four, Jewish 
 or Jewish-Hellenic, probably contemporary, or 
 nearly so, with the Christian era, from Catholic 
 Spain of the sixteenth century, from Catholic 
 
 1 " The Life and Doctrines of Jacob Boehme," page 50. 
 By Franz Hartmann. 
 
PROLOGUE 25 
 
 Flanders in the fourteenth, from Lutheran 
 Germany of the early seventeenth century, may 
 be taken perhaps as sufficiently typical. (But 
 after illumination comes the achievement of 
 union, when, the will being surrendered, union 
 has become possible between GOD and the 
 cleansed soul of His servant,) now at last, as 
 Ruysbroeck would say, His friend; a phrase 
 which is also used in the " Book of Wisdom,'* 
 many centuries previously: "Wisdom ... is 
 a treasure unto men that never faileth : which 
 they that use become the friends of GOD " j 1 and 
 again, " She maketh all things new; and in all 
 ages entering into holy souls, she maketh them 
 friends of GOD."* 
 
 In all this, one important truth should be 
 remembered, viz. that though words give a 
 certain definiteness to the comprehension of 
 stages, and seem to set fixed boundary lines, 
 yet, in reality, there is, in struggling human 
 life, an intermingling of states, as the passage 
 from Ruysbroeck already quoted shows, where 
 illumination and union seem to come together, 
 or, at any rate, are very difficult to disentangle. 
 
 As these states are incapable of strict deter- 
 mination from one another, so each particular 
 state fails to lend itself to one and the same all- 
 covering description. The question of degree 
 cannot be left out of account : 
 
 11 Thou spakest sometimes in visions unto Thy 
 
 saints." 3 
 
 1 " Wisdom," vii. 14. 
 
 3 Ibid., vii. 27. 
 
 * Psalm Ixxxix. 20. 
 
26 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 [No doubt these words enshrine the wonder of 
 perfect illumination. But there are other forms : 
 there is the sudden intuitive flash of apprehen- 
 sion, coming unexpectedly, yet ungainsayably ; 
 there is the unalterable conviction, gained un- 
 awares, for which no data are producible, but 
 which proves to be truth. It is perhaps this 
 latter kind of illuminated knowledge which 
 specially provokes the so-called modern person.] 
 The eighteenth century seems to have burned so 
 effectually into the European mind its doctrine 
 that " extra sense-arranged-by-understanding " 
 knowledge is no knowledge at all, that still 
 ordinary educated people are merely irritated by 
 the production of an unshakable conviction which 
 refuses to produce, or to consider the desirability 
 or possibility of producing, its intellectual 
 ground. 
 
 Concerning this kind of knowledge, Father 
 Tyrrell once advised us wisely: "They who 
 intuitively, or by inspiration, apprehend those 
 divine truths to which others climb laboriously 
 by slow reason and weary elimination of errors, 
 are rather likely to be wrong when they proceed 
 to give reasons for what they got without reason, 
 and to entangle themselves in fallacies." 1 
 
 Yet such considerations as these should not 
 lead to a belittling of understanding. Let us just 
 call to mind that passage in Dan Michel's trans- 
 lation of " Le Somme des Vices et des Vertus " 
 
 1 " Nova et Vetera," cxvi. By Father George Tyrrell, 
 SJ. 
 
PROLOGUE 27 
 
 of the Dominican Frere Lorens, which he gave 
 to his English brethren in 1340, with the title of 
 "The Again-biting of Inner Wit": "Holy 
 Writ teaches us two kinds of life, whereby we 
 come to the life without . The first is called 
 workaday (active) . . . the other is called restful 
 (contemplative) . . . the two last (gifts) whereof 
 we shall speak with the help of God and of the 
 Holy Ghost, that is to wit,, the gift of under- 
 standing and the gift of wisdom, belong to the 
 other life, which is called restful. . . . Now, we 
 will first talk of the gift of understanding, 
 according as the Holy Ghost will teach us. ^The 
 gift which is called the gift of understanding is 
 no other thing, according to the Hallows and 
 Doctors, but a light and a grace of brightness 
 which the Holy Ghost sends into the heart, 
 whereby the understanding of man is stirred up 
 to know his Creator, and the ghostly things that 
 cannot be seen bodily, in all the things which 
 belong to the soul's health, nor by the natural 
 reason and understanding of men, of itself, nor 
 for itself, can come to. This good is called 
 
 light.") 
 
 That " natural understanding " of which the 
 eighteenth century could give no very clear 
 genetic account, but to which it attributed con- 
 siderable powers, was supposed by the fourteenth 
 century to be supplemented by the " Light of the 
 Holy Spirit," i.e. by the gift of understanding. 
 Indeed, the sequence of Pentecost, the " Golden 
 Sequence," is only a little earlier than the 
 "Again-biting": to that illumined, mystical 
 
28 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 age we owe the great petition which the faithful 
 throughout the world still prefer : 
 
 " Veni, sancte Spiritus 
 Et emitte ccelitus 
 Lucis tuae radium. 
 Veni pater pauperum; 
 Veni dator munerum ; 
 Veni Lumen cordium." 
 
 ^When, however, we speak, as above, of un- 
 alterable convictions for which no data are 
 producible, we ought to be careful, and seldom 
 more so than now, not to encourage the misty 
 meanderings of undisciplined minds. There are 
 a number, perhaps an increasing number, of 
 people nowadays who mistake sentiment for 
 thought and dreams for intuition. In this 
 mood, they float luxuriously along the river of 
 idleness, and as they watch 
 
 " Les contours indecis des choses incertahies 
 Se f ondenit dans le soir calme que rien n 'emeut. ' n 
 
 they seem to imagine that they are adding vastly 
 to the stores of higher, spiritualised perception ; 
 whereas really they are only rambling emotion- 
 ally, to no lasting or definite purpose. Nor is 
 intuition a means whereby God will enable us 
 to " know " matters which we could discover by 
 our natural powers of reason and understanding, 
 if only we were not too idle to use these. If we 
 consider the dogmas of the Church, and, in 
 general, the teaching of the Gospels, we shall 
 
 '"Premieres Poemes." Frisson du Soir. Henri de 
 Regnier. 
 
PROLOGUE 29 
 
 see that we are never taught authoritatively those 
 things which we could perfectly well discover 
 for ourselves. By illumination men may come 
 to "see" (which is different from accepting 
 by faith) the inner meaning of admonitions so 
 contrary to the ordinary man's common sense as 
 11 Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and 
 persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil 
 against you falsely, for My sake " ; but they will 
 not, and they ought not to wish to, find by its 
 aid the matches which they have lost merely 
 through their own carelessness. Real intuition, 
 real illumination only flashes forth that truth 
 which is behind or above the phenomenal affairs 
 of this material world, with all its cargo of sound 
 experience sound that is so far as it goes, and 
 unless, as too often it is, it be spoiled by a 
 degrading, sterilising conventionality. It cannot 
 be too often said that the fact that all this is 
 spiritual does not mean that it is " unpractical " ; 
 exactly the reverse is the case. It has been well 
 said, "The lever which is to raise the world 
 must rest upon an eternal fulcrum. That false 
 and shallow view of the spiritual sphere as a 
 cloud-land, and of those who live in its contem- 
 plation as dreamers, must be allowed no place. 
 The best Mystics of the Middle Ages were 
 unselfish benefactors of their kind." 1 
 
 Huysmans* description of S. Teresa may be 
 apposite here: " Qu'elle soit une admirable 
 psychologue, cela est sur; mais quel singulier 
 
 x "The Inner Light," page 229. By the Rev. A. R. 
 Whately. 
 
30 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 melange elle montre aussi, d'une mystique 
 ardente et d'une femme d'affaires froide. Car 
 enfin elle est a double fond; elle est une con- 
 templative hors le monde et elle est e*galement un 
 homme d'6tat; elle est le Colbert f6minin des 
 cloitres. En somme, jamais femme ne fut et 
 une ouvriere de precision aussi parfaite et une 
 organisatrice aussi puissante. Quand on songe 
 que, malgre' d'invraisemblables difficulty's, elle a 
 fonde" trente-deux monasteres, qu'elle les a mis 
 sous I'obe'dience d'une regie qui est un modele 
 de sagesse, d'une regie qui preVoit, qui rectifie 
 les me'prises les mieux ignore*es du coeur, on 
 reste confondu de 1 'entendre traitee par les 
 esprits forts d'hyste'rique et de folle ! L'un des 
 signes distinctifs des mystiques, re*pondit, en 
 souriant, 1'Abbe*, c'est justement I'e'quilibre 
 absolu, Tender bon sens." 1 
 
 Possibly that balanced estimate, so accurate, so 
 sympathetic, of the great Spanish Mystic may 
 convince at least some doubters that " illumina- 
 tion " does not necessarily imply foolishness. 
 What pressing need there is for balance. The 
 human tendency towards non-mutual exclusions, 
 towards alternatives which are not only gratui- 
 tous and superfluous, but actually misleading, is 
 a grievous and disaster-working thing. Perhaps 
 it never shows itself more reprehensibly than in 
 this matter of exalting sense, reason and intui- 
 tion at each other's expense. It does not much 
 matter whether it be Locke and his modern 
 
 m 
 
 1 " En Route," page 113. By J. K. Huysmans. 
 
PROLOGUE 31 
 
 psychological disciples arguing that what 
 cannot be known by the senses, and afterwards 
 worked up by the understanding, is not knowl- 
 edge at all ; or whether it be an extremist like 
 William Law, insisting, over-insisting, on the 
 element of individual response in religion both 
 alike are guilty of " exclusions." Law writes 
 these fine passages: "It is the love of the 
 world instead of God that constitutes the whole 
 nature of the infidel " j 1 or again, of the Scrip- 
 tures that they have " no other end in view But 
 to teach him to renounce the tempers of his 
 fallen earthly nature, and live unto God in faith 
 and prayer; to be born again by the Divine 
 Nature"; 2 passages with which, after they 
 have been subjected to a little interpretation, 
 many of us can agree. But he is not content 
 to stop there ; he proceeds to these extravagant 
 statements about individual capacity : " Nothing 
 that is brought into the mind from without, or is 
 only an idea beheld by our reasoning faculty, 
 is any more our knowledge than the seeing our 
 natural face in a glass is seeing our own selves " ; 3 
 and, once more, " No honest, unlearned heart 
 stands in any need of any commentator, to 
 help him to all the benefit that can be had from 
 Scripture, or secure him from any hurtful 
 error." 4 
 
 He and those who think with him, when they 
 
 1 " Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law," 
 page 122. 
 
 3 Ibid., page 124. 
 'Ibid., page 136. 
 
 4 Ibid., page 125. 
 
32 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 write such dicta, designed as one cannot help 
 thinking to strike a shrewd blow at what Law 
 calls " opinions, sects, churches," seem to 
 forget that they are proving too much, are 
 showing indeed the entire superfluity of their 
 own treatises. While it is certainly true that 
 " religion is not a notion or opinion, but a real 
 life growing up in God," 1 that is no proof that 
 reason is valueless. It simply is not true that 
 "you can know nothing of God, of nature, of 
 heaven, or hell, or yourself, but so far as all 
 these things are self-evident in you"; 2 nor 
 is it true that the " Light of God cannot even 
 by God Himself, be communicated to you by 
 any creature." 3 (Our Lord Himself taught the 
 things of GOD, and poured light into the souls of 
 His hearers, by means of parables, often talking 
 as illustrations the homeliest physical facts^ 
 
 We learn " directly " it is the whole purpose 
 of this book to deal with intuitive apprehension 
 but we can also learn from others ; we can learn 
 by reasoning concerning direct or indirect ex- 
 perience, we can learn through the aid of the 
 senses.N Whence is that perverse quality in us 
 which, poor and limited as we are already, is for 
 ever impelling us towards useless, unnecessary 
 impoverishment, by the denial of this, that, or 
 the other power by the refusal, the wilful 
 refusal, to use all the gifts bestowed on us? 
 
 1 " Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law," 
 
 ige 144. 
 
 a Ibid., page 145. 
 
 Ibid., page 137. 
 
PROLOGUE 33 
 
 What is it which drives us to this species of 
 heretical picking and choosing among natural 
 capacities ? If we make the utmost possible use 
 of all we have and are, ,we shall still be far 
 enough from perfection. (We know that some- 
 times GOD reveals Himself directly, but He has 
 also granted us divers other means : the Sacra- 
 ments and discipline of His Church ; teachers, ex- 
 positors, prophets, and every personal power and 
 faculty any of us may possess, into the bargain."* 
 Because emphasis is rightly laid on the reality of 
 illumination, that is far from being a denial or 
 a minimising of the great gifts of the five senses, 
 of the human reason, and of all that can issue 
 from themj Surely Father Tyrrell perceived this 
 balance of powers when he wrote : ' ' God must 
 be sought, known and loved in His works, or 
 nowhere. Hence it is primary to teach men to 
 read those works aright, to * taste ' them and see 
 how gracious must be their Maker. As to the 
 works of physical nature, it is partly to science 
 and partly to art that the duty of teaching men 
 to observe and to admire belongs, while to ethics 
 belongs the office of forming the moral taste by 
 which we are drawn to love that word which God 
 speaks to us in the human souls of the great 
 and good; and above all in the Sacred Soul of 
 the Incarnate, that inexhaustible treasure of 
 moral beauty." 1 
 
 If we realised more acutely that there are 
 more ways of knowing than one, and if further 
 
 1 " Nova et Yetera," pages 175, 176. 
 
34 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 we realised that there is a connexion between 
 understanding and illumination, that, to use 
 human, even scientific language for the exposi- 
 tion of a mystery the Holy Spirit can raise the 
 natural understanding to a higher power, we 
 might be more careful of our understandings 
 than some of us are. The dreadful density 
 and unawareness of many good people is only 
 too familiar a spectacle. There is an astound- 
 ing instance of it in the Gospels, conveyed in 
 passages which many of us hear read often, and 
 is it too much to say? listen to unmoved by 
 the amazement which surely ought to greet such 
 incredible failure to comprehend and to care. 
 SS. Matthew and Mark record the whole story, 
 the former as follows : 
 
 " And JESUS, going up to Jerusalem, took the 
 twelve disciples apart, in the way, and said unto 
 
 them, 
 
 " Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, and the Son 
 
 of Man shall be betrayed unto the chief priests 
 
 and unto the scribes, and they shall condemn 
 
 Him to death. 
 
 " And shall deliver Him to the Gentiles, to 
 
 mock and to scourge and to crucify Him ; and 
 
 the third day He shall rise again. 
 
 " Then came to Him the mother of Zebedee's 
 
 children, with her sons, worshipping Him, and 
 
 desiring a certain thing of Him. 
 
 " And He said unto her, What wilt thou ? 
 
 She saith unto Him, Grant that these my two 
 
 sons may sit, the one on Thy right hand, and 
 
 the other on Thy left* 
 
'PROLOGUE 35 
 
 " But JESUS answered and said unto them, Ye 
 know not what ye ask. Are ye able to drink of 
 the cup that I shall drink of, and to be baptised 
 with the baptism that I am baptised with ? And 
 they said, We are able." 1 
 
 S. Mark's account differs in two particulars: 
 
 " And they were in the way going up to 
 Jerusalem ; and JESUS went before them ; and 
 they were amazed, and as they followed, they 
 were afraid. And He took again the twelve, and 
 began to tell them what things should happen 
 unto Him. 
 
 " Saying, Behold, we go up to Jerusalem, 
 and the Son of Man shall be delivered unto the 
 chief priests, and unto the scribes, and they shall 
 condemn Him to death, and shall deliver Him 
 to the Gentiles. 
 
 11 And they shall mock Him, and shall scourge 
 Him, and shall spit upon Him and shall kill 
 Him ; and the third day He shall rise again. 
 And James and John, the sons of Zebedee, come 
 unto Him, saying, Master, we would that Thou 
 shouldst do for us whatsoever we shall desire. 
 
 " And He said unto them, What would ye 
 that I should do for you ? 
 
 " They said unto Him, Grant unto us that we 
 may sit, one on Thy right hand, and the other 
 on Thy left hand, in Thy glory. 
 
 " But JESUS said unto them, Ye know not 
 what ye ask : can ye drink of the cup that I drink 
 of; and be baptised with the baptism that I am 
 baptised with? 
 
 1 S. Matthew xx. 17-22. 
 
36 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 "And they said unto Him, We can. 1 ' 1 
 The discrepancy in the two records as to who 
 asked the question, the mother or the sons, is 
 of small account; for in both cases Our Lord 
 addresses His answering question to the sons. 
 What is of overwhelming importance is the story 
 itself. Our Lord took the disciples aside, away 
 from the crowd, and then, without any wrapping 
 up of the bitter, dreadful details, told them 
 what was coming on Him. S. Mark's addition 
 of their previous mental perturbation and fear 
 only adds to the astonishing nature of the sequel. 
 We know how often the chosen twelve failed to 
 understand His words; but that two of them 
 should have met this so staggering statement of 
 His approaching overwhelming woe, and the 
 utter ruin of all their expectations, with a blunt 
 request for their own personal aggrandisement 
 is surely one of the most inexplicable of all the 
 mysteries to be faced even in the long, dark tale 
 of human weakness and failure. Their absolute 
 inability to sympathise seems incredible. S. 
 Peter's blunt refusal to believe in any such 
 possibility, which a short time before had called 
 forth the rebuke, " Get thee behind Me, Satan," 2 
 is so much easier to understand. If they did not 
 believe Him, they might at least have tried to 
 argue the point. If they had, in the foolish way 
 common to those who, for the moment at any 
 rate, have no insight into'that which is so clear 
 to another, attempted to persuade Him that He 
 
 1 S. Mark x. 32-39. 
 3 5. Matthew xvi. 23. 
 
PROLOGUE 37 
 
 was mistaken, that He was over-tired, that He 
 was in any one of the endless states suggested to 
 the dull by the inspired foresight of the enlight- 
 ened, then we might have understood. But their 
 entire refusal even to consider the details of what 
 He had said, even to contemplate the accumulated 
 outrages He was to suffer the capture, the 
 humiliation, the handing over to the hated 
 Roman Conqueror, the brutal mocking, the 
 criminal death it is this refusal which it is so 
 hard to comprehend, even though, in our own 
 small way, we may, in hours of illumined dread, 
 have sought for sympathy and found none ; and 
 even though, worse still by far, we cannot rid our 
 minds of the irremediable recollection when, in 
 their extremity, we have failed our own nearest 
 and dearest. The banale worldliness of the 
 request, from S. John too, the disciple whom 
 He loved " Grant unto us that we may sit 
 one on Thy right hand and the other on Thy 
 left, in Thy Glory " it is this which is so 
 crushing. 
 
 One would fain believe that the second inci- 
 dent did not, in fact, follow the first immediately. 
 But how can that be believed in the face of S. 
 Luke's record? He tells the same tale about the 
 going up to Jerusalem, and then in the place of 
 the sons of Zebedee episode, as if he could not 
 bear to tell it, he writes with that poignancy so 
 characteristic of him, and not for the only time, 
 these piercing words: "But they understood 
 none of these things : and this saying was hid 
 from them, neither knew they the things that 
 
38 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 were spoken." 1 Further, is not S. John's silence 
 about both incidents significant? 
 
 Surely, any of us who will meditate on this 
 signal instance of the failure of ordinary human 
 " understanding " will see what need there is 
 that we should never neglect it. If understanding 
 be thus important, let us recollect further that will 
 plays a part in illumination as it does in every 
 other human state. Some readers were provoked 
 by the mere title of Professor William James's 
 book, " The Will to Believe " ; still more by his 
 plea urged again and again (that will has a func- 
 tion to perform in belief j As a matter of fact, 
 surely will has that function in every human 
 state ; it is always positive or negative, very, very 
 seldom truly neutral : of the moods of the will the 
 other human states might well say, " He that is 
 not with us is against us." 
 
 Is the declaration, " Regnum ccelorum vim 
 patitur et violenti rapiunt illud," really a warning 
 concerning the function of the will ; a warning, 
 an urging to action on their part, to those who 
 would fain have light, who would really " see " ? 
 
 Ruysbroeck, who is one of the classic writers 
 on illumination, insists on the connexion be- 
 tween it and desire: " Les homines qui n'ont 
 que de faibles desirs, n'arrivent pas & adherer 
 fortement a 1'essence divine, et a y etre suspen- 
 dus. Us ne reoivent pas le rayon divin." 2 
 
 In " Les Noces Spirituelles " Ruysbroeck 
 
 1 S. Luke xviii. 34. 
 
 a "Livre des Amants de Dieu," chapter xxx. By 
 Johann Ruysbroeck. 
 
PROLOGUE 39 
 
 speaks of the third way of " seeing " as " une 
 conversion libre de la volonteY' and, he con- 
 tinues, "cette volonte 1 conflue dans I'unite' de 
 Dieu, et dans 1 'unite* des pensdes, afin que la 
 creature raisonnable, puisse obtenir et posse'der 
 surnaturellement la sublime unite* de Dieu. 
 C'est pour cela que Dieu a cre*e le ciel, et la terre 
 et toute chose." 1 
 
 This brings us to another and important aspect 
 of the matter. It is not only in the region of strictly 
 spiritual things that illumination, or the direct 
 apprehension of reality or intuition, obtains. 
 If it were so, human life would be incalculably 
 the poorer. Not only the saint, but the philoso- 
 pher and the poet " see directly." We will leave 
 the philosopher on one side for the present. ( The 
 poet may, often does, "see" spiritual things, 
 but then he sees them as a poet, not as a 
 theologian. Apart from all these, more dimly 
 perhaps, with less definite consciousness of the 
 fact, but still quite really, the great mass of 
 average men and women share, more or less, 
 with greater or rarer frequency, in this intui- 
 tive grasp of " le ciel et la terre et toute 
 chose." 
 
 The American psychologist, Dr Bucke, has 
 used the term "cosmic consciousness" for the 
 direct apprehension of truth in the phenomenal 
 world, that direct vision which, so far at any 
 rate as some mortals are concerned, cannot be 
 rejected or gainsaid, and which to more than just 
 
 1<4 Les Noces Spirituelles, " Book II., chapter i. 
 
40 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 a few comes, if dubiously, yet not in such wise 
 that they would dare to deny it outright : 
 
 " Immured in sense, with five- fold bonds confined, 
 
 Rest we content if whispers from the stars, 
 In waftings of the incalculable wind 
 Come blown at midnight through our prison bars." 1 
 
 Those who are accustomed to connect illumina- 
 tion with spiritual devotion only, need not resent 
 this "cosmic consciousness," this apprehension 
 of the Real Presence veiled in the phenomenal 
 world ; they do not even well to slight its value : 
 
 " Lo, God's two worlds immense, 
 Of spirit and of sense, 
 
 Wed 
 In this narrow bed; 
 
 . . . dear 
 To the ear within the ear, 
 
 But dense 
 To clay-sealed sense." 3 
 
 It was recognised early in the history of thought. 
 {For example, the writer, or writers, of the Psalms 
 had abundant consciousness of the sacramental 
 aspect of this beautiful physical world.J Dr 
 Bernard, writing of the various renderings the 
 world possesses, said that " no translation of the 
 Psalms has been so widely used in Europe as 
 the Gallican Psalter"; and again, he described 
 it as "one of the most venerable monuments 
 of Christian antiquity; its influence has been 
 
 *" Poems," page 24. By William Watson. 
 a " The Works of Francis Thompon," vol. ii., pages 
 47, 48- 
 
PROLOGUE 41 
 
 conspicuous both in theology and literature." 
 There can therefore be no need to apologise for 
 giving proofs from this stately rendering of the 
 Hebrew belief in the sacramental ism of nature: 
 
 " Quoniam videbo ccelos tuos, opera digi- 
 torum tuorum : lunam et Stellas quae tu fun- 
 dasti." 1 
 
 11 Cseli enarrant gloriam Dei, et opera manuum 
 ejus annunciat firmamentum." 2 
 
 11 In templo ejus omnes dicent gloriam," 3 
 where the " Temple " is obviously the universe of 
 created things. And then there is that declara- 
 tion : " Ccelum cceli Domino, terram autem dedit 
 filiis hominum." 4 All, no doubt, depends here 
 on the significance attached to dedit. But those 
 who, when the whole structure of dogmatic 
 religion has, under the blows of science or phil- 
 osophy apprehending theology awry, lain in 
 fragments around them, have still, in that hour 
 of rending and separation, buried themselves in 
 the quiet of some dearly loved beautiful place, 
 and have heard deep in their heart of hearts that 
 unquenchable, irresistible whisper, " In His 
 Temple everything saith glory ! " will not boggle 
 over the meaning of dedit. He gave it indeed not 
 more for their instruction than for their consola- 
 tion in that drear day of loss. Least of all will 
 men with that experience in their lives dream of 
 confining illumination to the great religious 
 Mystics: " Behold the Lord's hand is not short- 
 ened that it cannot save"; in the hour when 
 
 1 Psalms viii. 5. * Ibid., xxviii. 9. 
 
 * Ibid., xviii. i. * Ibid., cxiii., 16. 
 
42 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 human reason fails, when human doubt darkens, 
 and the mingling of human knowledge and 
 ignorance confounds, then He takes the scene at 
 hand, and moulds that to His will, then "the 
 Heavens declare the glory of GOD, and the 
 firmament showeth His handiwork," and that in 
 no merely " sensible " way, but by an unanalys- 
 able yet irresistible awareness of omnipotent, 
 omnipresent Being, veiling Itself in and breaking 
 through phenomenal things. 
 
 It is indeed a dreadful blunder to relegate 
 sacred things to a confined and shut-off region of 
 life : " It is the function of the best poetry and art 
 to re-sensitise our attention, and to teach us to 
 observe the beauties of those ordinary things and 
 persons, which are continually before our irre- 
 sponsive, use-worn gaze."v 
 
 Only a perverse puritanism will drive art, 
 poetry, and all the flaming aspirations of human 
 desire from the steps of the Temple of GOD. Yet 
 let no one be misled by the word desire: " Even 
 as our fleshly eyes (wrote Luis de Granada) 
 cannot behold the stars nor the beauty of Heaven 
 when it is cloudy and overcast, so neither can the 
 eyes of our souls contemplate the Eternal Light 
 when they are obscured by the clouds and 
 passions of this life." 2 For such clear vision we 
 must be, as Ruysbroeck says, " des hommes 
 recueillis qui, sous 1'influence de la grace de 
 Dieu, marchent en sa presence, avec le recueille- 
 ment d'un esprit libre et eleve", qui entraine apres 
 
 *" Nova et Vetera,," page 115. 
 
 f " Spanish Mystics," page 25. By M. Tollemache. 
 
PROLOGUE 43 
 
 lui le coeur et les sens, Tame, le corps et toutes les 
 puissances corporelles. Us sont maitres de leur 
 esprit et de leur nature, et ils possedent aussi la 
 paix veritable. Car bien qu'ils puissent ressentir 
 de temps en temps quelque Emotion dans la 
 nature, ils s'en rendent promptement victorieux, 
 aucun mouvement vicieux ne pouvant avoir 
 chez eux de dure"e.' 51 
 
 Of course many people are, and throughout 
 life remain, wholly unaware of Being behind 
 that which they would call an empty landscape. 
 Moreover, those conscious of it detect differences 
 between this place and that. There are people to 
 whom the Downs of Sussex are alive and tingling 
 with power, who may range for ever over 
 Surrey's wooded hills and find indeed nothing 
 but that beautiful landscape and the flower- 
 bespread ground. People may ask how is all 
 this? By what medium is the communication 
 made? 
 
 Who, aware of it, can tell him who is unaware ? 
 " There is neither speech nor language, but their 
 voices are heard among them," so said the 
 Psalmist. 
 
 " Le soir s'endort en du silence qui de"chire," 2 
 is another aspect of this mysterious communica- 
 tion ; nor can anyone who has ever read it forget 
 Pater's phrase, "the silence which is not nega- 
 tion." Since mysticism has been much written 
 
 1 " Le Miroir du Salut Eternd," chapter xii. By 
 Johann Ruysbroeck. 
 
 '"Premieres Poemes." By Henri de Regnier. 
 Sonnets ii. 
 
44 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 of lately, especially in the theological sphere, 
 though perhaps not always with theological 
 acumen and restraint, it may not be amiss to 
 attempt a study of the poets' share in this en- 
 lightened awareness. More and more we are 
 coming to see the futility of criticism which, by 
 treating too wide an area, dooms itself to utter 
 superficiality. I will therefore confine myself 
 mainly to four English poets. The gradual 
 neglect and oblivion into which Wordsworth 
 appears to be falling is by itself a sufficiently 
 weighty reason for trying to recall him to the 
 general memory. Moreover, by some writers on 
 illumination he has been treated with singular 
 and wholly undeserved contempt. Dr Bucke 
 writes of him: "That the mind of this writer 
 (nearly if not quite a poet) in his loftier moods 
 attained a very close neighbourhood to cosmic 
 consciousness, if he did not actually enter into 
 the magic territory of the Kingdom of Heaven, 
 no one will deny who knows what these words 
 mean, and who has read him with any sym- 
 pathy." 1 It is a little difficult to treat with 
 respect criticism which seems so gratuitously 
 perverse as that. De gustibus non est disputan- 
 dum that is true; but then philosophy, poetry 
 and theology are not wholly matters of taste. 
 Besides, there are principles of criticism, so we 
 have been trained to believe, which are some- 
 thing more than arbitrary expressions of indi- 
 vidual opinion and feelings " you must not 
 
 1 " Cosmic Consciousness," page 236. By Dr. R. M. 
 Bucke. 
 
PROLOGUE 45 
 
 say, ' I like Homer/ or ' I don't like Homer,' 
 unless you want to write yourself down a vul- 
 garian," 1 wrote a distinguished Oxford scholar 
 and certainly which are more, much more, 
 than individual dogmatism. 
 
 Perhaps it is not an exaggeration to call 
 by that severe name the temper of mind which 
 can gloss the words, " I will give unto thee 
 the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, and 
 whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be 
 bound in Heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt 
 loose on earth shall be loosed in Heaven," 
 with the following astonishing commentary: 
 " The cosmic sense is the final arbiter of good 
 and ill. Jesus seems to have looked forward to 
 the establishment of a school or sect, the members 
 of which should possess the cosmic sense." 2 
 Thus casually to dispose of a classic problem 
 seems the very midsummer madness of " private 
 judgment." Perhaps some more stringent criti- 
 cism still is deserved by these painful passages 
 concerning Walt Whitman, of whom Dr Bucke 
 writes: "He saw what neither Gautama nor 
 Paul saw, what Jesus saw, though not so clearly 
 as he " 3 the rest of the sentence is immaterial 
 to my point; and again, "What living man, 
 indeed, is able to say, time enough having surely 
 gone by, who was the greater, Gautama or Jesus ? 
 And if we cannot decide between these two, still 
 
 1 " Wayside Sketches in Ecclesiastical History," page 
 141. By Charles Bigg, D.D. 
 
 a " Cosmic Consciousness," page 87. 
 8 Ibid., page 192. 
 
46 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 less can we between either of them and, for 
 instance, Whitman." 1 
 
 The form and contents of these passages argue 
 the most extraordinary bluntness towards the 
 sentiments and beliefs of a large, widely and 
 variously experienced portion of the human race, 
 a bluntness which it would hardly be extreme to 
 call impudent egotism. Pardonable it might be 
 in the mouths of the unlettered and half- 
 educated, but surely inexcusable in the case of 
 one who affects to carry about the philosopher's 
 paraphernalia. 
 
 This has swept us far away from Wordsworth, 
 and these wild dicta on others might incline us 
 to attach no importance to Dr Bucke's criticism 
 of him. Therefore we may remember that 
 another popular writer on mysticism, Miss 
 Evelyn Underbill, treats Wordsworth with halt- 
 ing appreciation. In the matter of illumination 
 she classes him with Tennyson, and, oddly 
 enough, considering Dr Bucke's exaggerated 
 estimate, with Walt Whitman himself, as giving 
 " certain indications that they too were ac- 
 quainted beyond most poets and seers with 
 the phenomena of illuminated life." This may 
 sound quite flattering, but she began her sen- 
 tence with the words, " Amongst those who 
 cannot justly be reckoned as pure Mystics," 2 a 
 phrase whose meaning is hard to gauge, since the 
 most mystical of us must have our unillumined 
 hours. " Pure," if it mean uninterrupted 
 
 " Cosmic Consciousness," page 87. 
 '" Mysticism," page 286. By Evelyn Underbill. 
 
PROLOGUE 47 
 
 mysticism, is surely beyond the power of mortal 
 man on mortal earth. 
 
 The fact no doubt is that comparisons of poets 
 tend ever to mislead. Victor Hugo, writing 
 on geniuses, remarked, " Choisir entre ces 
 homines, pre"fe"rer 1'un 1'autre, indiquer du 
 doigt le premier parmi ces premiers, cela ne 
 se peut." 1 
 
 Mr John Morley, in his introduction to the 
 11 Complete Poetical Works of William Words- 
 worth," writes in a similar vein. After mention- 
 ing the views of Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, 
 Myers, on the one hand, and Swinburne on the 
 other, concerning the degree of eminence which 
 Wordsworth attained, he pleads with that quiet 
 humour which often lit his writings, to be ex- 
 cused from all such efforts of appraising : " Amid 
 these contentions of celestial minds it will be 
 safest to content ourselves with one or two plain 
 observations in the humble, positive degree with- 
 out hurrying into high and final comparatives 
 and superlatives." 
 
 That shall be the aim of the following pages : 
 to analyse facts in the positive degree; to com- 
 pare but not to depreciate ; to contrast not invidi- 
 ously but, if at all, illustratively, remembering 
 that other passage in the same introduction which 
 recalls the already quoted judgment of Victor 
 Hugo: " We are not called upon to place great 
 men of his stamp as if they were collegians in a 
 college list." 
 
 1 " William Shakespeare," page 73, By Victor Hugo, 
 
48 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 Once more, if Wordsworth be not entitled to 
 the name of illumine on precisely the same 
 grounds as Henry Vaughan and Francis 
 Thompson are, yet his gift is peculiarly germane 
 to the English genius and temperament. What 
 Wordsworth was and felt, other Englishmen 
 might be and feel without incurring any charge 
 of exotic, bizarre ways. While his countrymen 
 retain their ingrained insularity as they seem 
 likely to do for an incalculably long period it 
 may be worth while to show that a form, diluted 
 no doubt, " worn with a difference," but still a 
 form of mysticism, of illumination, is quite 
 compatible with the national characteristics. 
 
 Before passing on to consider illumination as 
 exhibited in these four English poets, it may be 
 just worth while to point out that this quality, 
 which appears more or less sporadically among 
 Englishmen, seems to be a racial characteristic 
 of the poetry of Ireland. It is not to be con- 
 founded with the irremediable pathos of Irish 
 poetry any more than with its ineradicable gaiety. 
 Both are indigenous ; but while gaiety might not 
 be confused with illumination since not every- 
 one can realise that joyfulness is a natural 
 element in sanctity it is not unlikely that Celtic 
 pathos might be ; that quality of infinite regret 
 which can bathe a memory in the dreaming pain 
 of a lost past, until the dead almost return to life 
 again, and that which is irrevocably absent seems 
 on the point of appearing ; the kind of yearning 
 which has inspired many poems of many lands, 
 the pain which thrills in " Innisfree " : 
 
PROLOGUE 49 
 
 11 I will arise and go now for always night and day, 
 I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the 
 
 shore; 
 
 While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavement grey, 
 I hear it in the deep heart's core 
 
 or in that last heart-breaking stanza of Henri de 
 Regnier : 
 
 " Car, j'evoque les soirs de funestes departs, 
 Ou dans la chambre obscure et veuve de 1'absente, 
 On rassemble, en pleurant, dans 1 'ombre grandissante, 
 Le tr^sor douloureux des souvenirs e"pars. m 
 
 ( Illumination is light on the living present, an 
 unanalysable flash, or steady shining as the case 
 may be, which almost changes human time into 
 the " instant of eternity," rather^ than a halo 
 round days which come no more :/' Au dessus 
 de la raison, et en dehors de la raison nous 
 recevons un clair savoir, ou il n'y a plus de 
 distance entre nous et Dieu," wrote Ruys- 
 broeck; 2 and what is that but A. E.'s : 
 
 " . . . mountain places 
 Where God from the stars dropt nearer 
 Our pale, dreaming faces."* 
 
 And we find the same idea in an early Irish 
 Christian poem : 
 
 " King of the seven heavens, grant me for dole 
 Thy love in my heart, Thy light in my soul."* 
 
 1 " Premieres Poemes." Frisson du Soir. By Henri 
 de Regnier. 
 
 3 " Le Miroir du Salut Eternel," chapter xxiv. 
 8 " The Divine Vision." By A. E. 
 
 4 "The Poem Book of the Gael," page 120. By E. 
 Hull. 
 
 D 
 
50 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 Somewhere between the mood of exalted 
 memory and that of actual illumination we might 
 perhaps put that unforgettable poem of Seumas 
 O'Sullivan " The Sheep " : 
 
 " Whitely they gleam 
 
 For a moment and vanish 
 Away in the dimness 
 Of sorrowful years : 
 Gleam for a moment 
 
 All white, and go fading 
 Away in the greyness 
 Of sundering years." 1 
 
 Not every flock of sheep, every evening, appears 
 just so to every passer-by. 
 
 ^The belief in illumination, in inspiration, as a 
 way of knowledge, quite distinct from the experi- 
 ence of the five senses, is as old as the written 
 literature of Ireland^; That the poet's inspiration 
 was believed to be a divine endowment appears 
 perfectly clearly in the " Book of Leinster." 
 The colloquy of the two sages is quoted from it 
 by Miss Hull in " The Poem Book of the Gael." 
 Herein are several references to the fact of the 
 belief in direct inspiration, e.g. the young poet 
 says : 
 
 " From the red sunrise of the dawn I come, 
 Where grow the nine hazels of poetic art." 
 
 And he adds : 
 
 " There is a land where righteousness is 
 instilled"; instilled not acquired or garnered 
 
 1 " Poems," page 5. By Seumas O'Sullivan. 
 
PROLOGUE 51 
 
 by experience, but given. In his turn, the old 
 poet announces: 
 
 " I move along- the columns of age, 
 Along the streams of inspiration, 
 Along the elf-mound of Neohtan's wife, 
 Along the fore-arm of the wife of Nuada, 
 Along the fair land of knowledge, 
 The bright country of the sun ; 
 
 Along the first beginnings of life." 
 
 When we read the passage from the " Book of 
 Leinster " which Miss Hull has prefixed to the 
 poem, the meaning of the second, third, and 
 fourth lines of the above quotation is clear : 
 " One day the young poet Nede fared forth till 
 he stood on the margin of the sea, for the poets 
 believed the brink of water to be the place for 
 poetic revelation." 
 
 The stream to which the old poet refers is 
 the Boyne, at whose source grew the " hazels " 
 which figure so constantly in Irish poetry whose 
 nuts of knowledge brought inspiration to the 
 poet, and wherein (i.e. in the Boyne's waters) 
 lived the " salmon of knowledge," again food 
 for the poets. 
 
 In " Amorgen's Song," which may, so some 
 think, be less ancient than it claims to be, we find 
 similar thoughts, e.g. : 
 
 " I am a salmon in a pool," 
 i.e. in the pools of knowledge. The whole 
 
52 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 burden of this song is the belief in the special 
 
 enlightenment of the Druid poet : 
 
 " Who, but I, will make clear every question? " 
 
 Who (but the poet) knows in what place the sun goes 
 down? " 
 
 and so forth. 
 
 Among the moderns, Mr Yeats has preserved 
 belief in water's power of inspiration, and in the 
 sacredness of the hazel the Irish tree of life 
 in " Aedh hears the cry of the sedge ": 
 
 " I wander by the edge 
 
 Of this desolate lake, 
 Where wind cries in the sedge 
 
 Until the axle break 
 That keeps the stars in their round." 
 
 Perhaps to the ordinary English reader this is 
 too elusive to convey meaning; it may be sup- 
 plemented by lines from " Mongan thinks of his 
 past greatness " : 
 
 " I have been a hazel tree and they hung 
 The Pilot Star and the Crooked Plough 
 Among my leaves in times out of mind." 
 
 Or, clearest still, perhaps, in A. E.'s " Nuts of 
 
 Knowledge " : 
 
 " And when the sun sets dimmed in eve, and purple 
 
 fills the air, 
 
 I think the hazel tree is dropping berries there, 
 From starry fruitage waved aloft where Connla's 
 
 well o'erflows; 
 
 For sure the enchanted waters run through every wind 
 that blows." 
 
 If the reader grasp the sacredness of the hazel 
 tree, the old Irish belief that the stars sometimes 
 
PROLOGUE 53 
 
 hang on it as fruit, and grasp also the fact that 
 the axle, of the previous poem, was of hazel- 
 wood, some drifting light may illumine him. 
 The hazel tree recurs again and again in Irish 
 poetry. In " The Wandering of Oisin " are the 
 lines: 
 
 " For he is strong and crafty as the seas 
 That sprang under the Seven Hazel Trees." 
 
 Wandering Aengus, too, when the fire was in 
 his head and what is that but illumination ? 
 cut him a hazel wand for a fishing-rod, and, with 
 a berry from it, caught the " little silver trout," 
 which became the " glimmering girl " who led 
 him through time and space, consumed with the 
 desire to find her again, and pluck 
 
 " The silver apples of the moon, 
 The golden apples of the sun." 
 
 The exact meaning, woven as it is of the 
 ancient folk-lore of the country, and of the racial 
 grip on things not of sense, which has not yet 
 deserted the Irish, and of that awareness of that 
 which is not palpably " there " (that quality 
 which in the eyes of more practical people makes 
 them so shamelessly careless of the tangible 
 things which " really matter "), the exact mean- 
 ing of so elusive a warp and woof may easily 
 escape the English reader. But he can scarcely 
 help knowing that the atmosphere is not his own 
 familiar, comfortable one, that the hazel yields 
 him no pleasant edible nuts, and that the salmon 
 of that knowledge will never grace his board. 
 
54 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 Equally separate is it from that grave, noble 
 intuition of supersensible things glowing with a 
 light more glorious than of setting suns, which 
 Wordsworth and a few other great Englishmen 
 have possessed. The English and Irish races 
 differ profoundly ; moreover, neither is homo- 
 geneous throughout, men of the same race can 
 be strangely unlike one another. It is a futile 
 occupation to compare them to each other's 
 disadvantage, while the task of bringing them to 
 understand one another seems beyond mortal 
 power. 
 
 In spite of its diaphanous texture and 
 ephemeral substance, or rather because of it, the 
 illumination of Irish poetry is an undeniable 
 fact; and it is anything but soberly based on or 
 in any way derived from our useful five senses. 
 Surely the unquenchable longing of Laegh's 
 exclamation to Cuchulain quivers with the 
 " light " of knowledge: 
 
 " If all evil were mine 
 And the Kingdom of Magh Bred of gold, 
 I would give it (no small test) 
 Could I frequent the place where I have been." 
 
 The " place," of course, is fairyland. But 
 what a radiance from elsewhere streams out upon 
 the everyday world from that wistful desire : 
 
 " Could I frequent the place where I have been." 
 
 ( Perhaps it is not too much to say that the 
 main charm of true Irish poetry is the sense 
 conveyed by it always that what is seen does 
 not really count, while what is beyond, behind, 
 
PROLOGUE 55 
 
 hidden is everything. What is that but illum- 
 ination ? of a highly elusive kind, perhaps, but 
 still illumination \ a direct, immediate "aware- 
 ness" of reality, of the one thing needful, of 
 the land of heart's desire, which beggars the 
 present tangible world of its derived values, and 
 empties it of its inferred meanings. 
 
 In the poem of County Kerry, "The White 
 Paternoster," immediately succeeding the lines: 
 
 " I put Mary with her Son between you and your fears, 
 Brigit with her mantle, 
 Michael with his shield." 1 
 
 there comes a line which gives the impression 
 of a sudden vision, a spontaneous intuition of 
 omnipotent power flashing in from behind on the 
 powers deliberately invoked : 
 
 " And the two long white hands of God from behind 
 folding- us all." 
 
 The only exact parallel to the vivid picture 
 here that I know is to be found in the exquisite 
 hymn from a Greek Orthodox Penitential 
 Service, where the same image appears : 
 
 " Lord, take me back into Thy Heart of Love, 
 
 And lead me back into Thy Light, and let 
 My lips find once again Thy Feet, and prove 
 Mine eyes are wet. 
 
 " And let Thy thin white hands extend above 
 
 My sinful head, and cleanse me as they spare : 
 O take me back into Thy Heart of Love 
 And keep me there." 2 
 
 1 " The Poem Book of the Gael," page 242. By E. 
 Hull. 
 
 2 " A Little Orthodox Manual," page 102. Done into 
 English by F. W. Groves Campbell, LL.D. 
 
56 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 Though much more might be written on the 
 subject, enough has been said for it to become 
 plain presently that Irish illumination differs in 
 quality from English. One difference perhaps 
 is fundamental. There is a vein of something 
 which might be called paganism in this occult 
 vision of Ireland, as if the former spirits still held 
 a kind of shivering tenancy even after Christi- 
 anity had won its way. It is hard to believe 
 quite that the Sidhe are gone utterly, wholly 
 banished from the still enchanted air; hard to 
 admit that no longer 
 
 " The host is rushing 'twixt night and day," 
 that they have lost all power over those not, in 
 the common sense, absent-minded, but other- 
 minded dwellers in the remote corners of that 
 haunted land. 
 
 Another difference, perhaps as marked, is the 
 wholly dissimilar standard of values. 
 
 " The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great 
 to be told." 
 
 There are many English people who love 
 beauty, who would grieve considerably over de- 
 formity and ugliness ; but that equably balanced 
 disposition is not the inspiration of Yeats' line. 
 It is in this region probably that the real reason 
 of the undoubted incompatibility of the two races 
 lies. Down in their hearts they are just that, 
 incompatible, as anyone may know who hears 
 one of either race deliver himself freely concern- 
 ing the other; they can never come together till 
 the " light " be changed for one or other or both 
 
PROLOGUE 57 
 
 of them. But what is the use of talking to 
 politicians about light ? 
 
 If the English poets' illumination be less skyey, 
 vaporous, less shot through with the wavering 
 light or shimmering mists of dawn or " moth- 
 time," it is somehow, in some of them notably 
 in Wordsworth and Browning, and to some 
 degree in them allT^even as a consequence nearer 
 to human conduct; one might say it is more 
 practical in the bearable sense of that misused 
 word; yet it hardly seems so ingrained and 
 elemental as the Irish sense of things unseen, 
 a sense so impossible to take from them that one 
 wonders why, for instance, A. E. should have 
 uttered that warning: 
 
 " Keep the secret sense celestial 
 
 Of the starry birth, 
 Though about you call the bestial 
 Voices of the earth." 1 
 
 1 " Songs by the Homeward Way." By A. E. 
 
HENRY VAUGHAN 
 
 IN his preface to the edition of his poems 
 published in 1655, Vaughan refers to certain 
 unnamed writers as poets who "aimed more at 
 verse than at perfection." Stated so, it is a 
 false antithesis, another instance of that human 
 tendency to make vain and futile alternatives of 
 qualities which should be concomitants. It is 
 indeed obvious that " perfection " in poetry 
 must include that of matter and form. At the 
 same time we have to admit that Vaughan has 
 not imitated the people he blames, but has turned 
 the matter about, caring more, as a rule, for what 
 he was trying to say than for the manner in 
 which he said it. 
 
 To this same edition of the " Silex Scintil- 
 lans," immediately after the dedication, and the 
 quotation from Hezekiah's prayer, Vaughan 
 prefixed a poem, twelves lines long, without any 
 title, wherein, by an apostrophe, he calls men 
 away from "experience" to "illumination." 
 Of course, in one sense, illumination is part of 
 experience, but the latter word is used here in 
 its right philosophical sense, for a posteriori 
 as distinguished from a priori knowledge. The 
 
 58 
 
HENRY VAUGHAN 59 
 
 opening lines, with their daring contrast, startle 
 the mere empirical observer : 
 
 " Vain wits and eyes 
 Leave, and be wise.'* 
 
 (What is this but the mystic, the direct, the 
 intuitive way to knowledge?) In the lines which 
 follow we are reminded irresistibly of Pascal, of 
 the marvellous, unexplained " Feu " : 
 
 " Abuse not, shun not holy fire, 
 
 And fire will purge your callous veil." 
 
 Remarkable words surely at any period; 
 doubly so in the midst of that seventeenth 
 century which seemed to be recovering the 
 mystical insight which had distinguished the 
 thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. We cannot 
 pretend that Vaughan knew anything about 
 Pascal's experience, which had actually occurred 
 in 1564, that is one year before this second 
 edition of " Silex Scintillans " appeared; for the 
 original of the " Amulet " was not discovered till 
 a few hours after Pascal's death in August, 
 1662. The paper, in his handwriting, passed 
 into the possession of his sister, Madame P^rier. 
 On her death, in 1687, her children handed it 
 to a friend, who wrote a commentary upon it. 
 This Friar's commentary is lost, but the original 
 precious paper is still preserved in the Biblio- 
 theque Nationale at Paris. 
 
 It must have been a coincidental flash of 
 light illuminating men so unlike, in many ways, 
 as Pascal and Vaughan. Coincidental for if 
 
60 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 Vaughan's poem be less charged with inex- 
 pressible emotion than Pascal's broken, exalted 
 phrases, yet the underlying conviction is of 
 identical texture : 
 
 " Depuis environ dix heures et demi du soir, 
 Jusques environ minuit et demi. 
 
 FEU 
 
 Dieu d'Abraham. Dieu d'Isaac. Dieu de Jacob, 
 
 Non des philosophes et des s a vans, 
 Certitude, joye, certitude, sentiment, veue joye paix. 
 
 Joye, joye, joye, et pleurs de joye." 
 Just a year later, Vaughan wrote: 
 
 " Abuse not shun not holy fire, 
 But with true tears wash off your mire. 
 Tears and these flames will soon grow kind, 
 And mix an eye-salve for the blind. 
 Tears cleanse and supple without fail, 
 And fire will purge your callous veil, 
 Then comes the light ! which when you spy, 
 And see your hakedness thereby, 
 Praise Him Who dealt His gifts so free, 
 In tears to you and fire to me." 
 
 A wider, profounder barrier than the Channel 
 separates the French genius from the English. 
 Yet, in these two outpourings, in spite of racial 
 and temperamental differences, there is an un- 
 deniable similarity of vision, and of the means of 
 vision. 
 
 \Pascal sees not the GOD of philosophers and 
 learned men ; ^Vaughan perceives GOD by grasp- 
 ing his own nakedness, valuelessness ; and both 
 come by the preparation of penitential tears, till, 
 
HENRY VAUGHAN 61 
 
 then and there, they are illumined by mystic 
 fire.) 
 
 It is interesting to note that Vaughan's poem 
 refers not only to illumination, but to that other 
 pre-essential stage, purgation. Research has 
 garnered so few details of his private life that 
 we perhaps shall have to continue to look in vain 
 for the events which between 1651, when the first 
 edition appeared, and 1655, tne ^ ate of the second, 
 led him to write this mystical poem, which 
 Mr Hutton in the popular edition of Vaughan's 
 poems 1 so unfortunately omits. He states that 
 he has followed Mr E. K. Chambers' text with 
 an alteration in the order, and the omission of 
 "the translations and a few fragments." The 
 deletion of this remarkable little poem is a grave 
 one, from the point of view of the student of that 
 most interesting element in Vaughan's poetry, 
 his mysticism. 
 
 In his quotations from Hezekiah's prayer, 
 which, in the edition of 1655, follow immediately 
 after the author's preface, Vaughan follows, in 
 some verses, the Authorised Version which had 
 appeared in 1604 and in others he seems to 
 translate from the Vulgate. In one verse, he 
 follows neither. The Authorised Version reads, 
 " O Lord, by these things men live, and in all 
 these things is the life of my spirit, so wilt Thou 
 recover me and make me to live " ; 2 while the 
 same passage in the Vulgate is, " Domine, si sic 
 vivitur et in talibus vita spiritus mei, corripies me 
 
 1 Published by Messrs Methuen. 
 " Isaiah xxxviii. 16. 
 
62 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 et vivificabis me." But Vaughan's rendering 
 is rather that of a man to whom the Mystic's 
 attitude has become a second nature, who knows 
 no " reality " save in and from Divinity " O 
 Lord, by Thee doth man live, and from Thee is 
 the life of my spirit ; therefore wilt Thou recover 
 me and make me to live." 
 
 (It is, of course, of the essence of the mystical 
 position that illumination is a divine gift. Yet 
 there may be, in some mortals, a predisposing 
 temperament to its reception. The student of 
 Vaughan will realise that his nature showed two 
 marked characteristics of this predisposing kind ; 
 his remarkable power of interpreting the beauty 
 of wild nature, and his unusual grasp of spiritual 
 things ; qualities which in his case interacted, but 
 which are not at all necessarily found in one and 
 the same person.^ 
 
 In " Resurrection and Immortality " he 
 describes clearly enough the natural unenlight- 
 ened powers of the normal human being, con- 
 trasting it, not with the condition of supernatural 
 illumination experienced here on earth, but with 
 the hoped-for light of immortality: 
 
 " Then I that here saw darkly in a glass 
 
 But mists and shadows pass, 
 And by their own weak shine did search the spring's 
 
 And course of things, 
 
 Shall with enlightened rays 
 
 Pierce all their ways ; 
 And as thou saw'st, I in thought could go 
 
 To Heaven or Earth below 
 
 To read some star, or min'ral, and in state 
 
 There often sate; 
 
HENRY V AUGEAN 63 
 
 So shalt thou then with me, 
 
 Both wing'd and free 
 
 Rove in that mighty and eternal light, 
 
 Where no rude shade, or night 
 Shall dare approach us; we shall there no more 
 
 Watch stars, or pore 
 
 Through melancholy clouds, and say, 
 
 Would it were Day! 
 One everlasting Sabbath there shall run 
 
 Without Succession and without a Sun." 
 
 The groping, slow methods of the discursive 
 understanding are here contrasted with the 
 instant intuition of the immortal soul. But 
 Vaughan knew the reality of intuition, of illum- 
 ination here and now. It is not perhaps very 
 clearly indicated, but it is suggested at any rate 
 in the first poem of " Silex Scintillans," where 
 the unlocated place of vision is clearly not any 
 " fair fresh field " which could have been found 
 in a morning's walk by any and every one of 
 Vaughan 's contemporaries: 
 
 " A virgin soil, which no 
 
 Rude feet e'er trod; 
 Where since He stept there only go 
 Prophets and friends of God," 
 
 so he describes it. 
 
 The fundamental distinction between imagina- 
 tion whether merely and accurately repetitive, or 
 " creative " and illumination is clearly brought 
 out in " The Search." Vaughan, in imagination, 
 reviews some of the chief events in Our 
 Lord's life, and then exclaims suddenly, in 
 
64 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 utter condemnation of these methods of under- 
 standing : 
 
 " Leave, leave thy gadding thoughts, 
 Who pores 
 And spies, 
 Still out of doors 
 Descries 
 Within them, naught. 
 
 Search well another world : who studies this 
 Travels in clouds, seeks manna where none is." 
 
 That "other world" is surely the region of 
 direct perception, an illuminated world. 
 
 The careful student cannot miss the fact that 
 Vaughan actually pierced the shows of this world 
 and had moments of " reality." Professor 
 Mackail, in his " Select Epigrams from the 
 Greek Anthology," thus translates Ptolemaeus: 
 
 " I know that I am mortal and ephemeral : but 
 when I scan the multitudinous circling spirals of 
 the stars, no longer do I touch earth with my 
 feet, but sit with Zeus himself, and take my fill 
 of the ambrosial food of gods." 1 Yet that was a 
 meagre, somewhat material vision compared with 
 Vaughan 's: 
 
 " I saw Eternity the other night 
 Like a great ring of pure and endless light, 
 All calm, as it was bright; 
 
 And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years, 
 Driven by the spheres 
 
 Like a vast shadow moved; in which the world 
 And all her train were hurl'd. " 
 
 ' Page 76. 
 
HENRY VAUGHAN 65 
 
 He goes on to comment on the various sons 
 of men absolutely engrossed and absorbed in 
 material interests, and then cries : 
 
 " O fools said I 'thus to prefer dark night 
 Before true light ! 
 
 To live in grots and caves, and hate the day 
 Because it shows the way ; 
 The way which from this dead and dark abode 
 Leads up to God ; 
 
 A way where you might tread the sun and be 
 More bright thiwi He ! 
 But as I did their madness so discuss, 
 One whisper 'd thus, 
 
 This ring the Bridegroom did for none provide 
 But for His Bride." 
 
 That the light of illumination was, for 
 Vaughan, no kind of physical light is perfectly 
 clear from the two closing stanzas of one of the 
 most beautiful poems he ever wrote, " The 
 Night": 
 
 " But living where the sun 
 
 Doth all things wake, and where all mix and tyre 
 Themselves and others, I consent and run 
 
 To ev'ry myre; 
 
 And by this world's ill-guiding light, 
 Err more than I can do by night. 
 " There is in God, some say 
 
 A deep, but dazzling darkness ; as men, here 
 Say it is late and dusky, because they 
 
 See not all clear. 
 
 O for that night ! where I in Him 
 Might live invisible and dim ! " 
 
 So far as I am aware, there is no evidence that 
 Henry Vaughan was acquainted with the writ- 
 
 E 
 
66 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 ings of S. John of the Cross, yet how aptly the 
 above stanzas recall the saint's words: "It is 
 true, speaking after the manner of men, that GOD 
 is as dark a light to the soul as faith." 1 As he 
 goes on to speak of the " three divisions . . . 
 of the night of the soul," he says: " The second 
 night of faith relates to the higher, to the rational 
 nature of man, and is therefore more interior and 
 obscure because it deprives us of the light of 
 reason, or rather, to speak more clearly, makes 
 it blind. Thus the comparison between it and 
 midnight is made good, for that is the most 
 obscure and most perfect portion of the night." 2 
 And this, of course, refers back to an earlier 
 passage, describing the " three nights of the 
 soul," as being really "one divided into three 
 parts. The first, which is that of sense, may be 
 likened to the commencement of night, when 
 material objects begin to be invisible. The 
 second, of faith, may be compared to midnight, 
 which is utter darkness. The third resembles 
 the close of night, which is GOD, when the dawn 
 of day is at hand." 3 
 
 Now, of course, S. John of the Cross was not 
 only one of the greatest Mystics the world has 
 known, but also a trained theologian. Vaughan 
 was a doctor of medicine. That his account of 
 the " dazzling darkness " should approach so 
 nearly to the Spanish Mystic's is a highly signi- 
 ficant fact. 
 
 1 " The Ascent of Mount Carmel," Book II., chapter ii. 
 
 8 Ibid., Book II., chapter ii. 
 
 'Ibid., Book I., chapter Hi., section 5. 
 
HENRY FAUGH AN 67 
 
 The illumination of night, such a seeming- 
 contradiction in terms, also struck Walt Whit- 
 man. Without admitting Dr Bucke's extrava- 
 gant plea " Walt Whitman is the best, most 
 perfect example the world has so far had of the 
 cosmic sense M1 we may still maintain that he 
 was a genuine illumine. It is not easy, by 
 quotations from his exquisite poem, " When 
 Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom 'd," to give 
 the mysterious sense of illumined darkness 
 which, in its entirety, it conveys: 
 
 " Passing the visions, passing the night, 
 
 I cease from my song for thee, 
 Yet each to keep and all, retrievemen/ts out of the night, 
 
 Comrades mine and I in the midst, and their memory 
 
 ever to keep for the dead I loved so well, 
 For the wisest, sweetest soul of all my days and lands 
 
 and this for his dear sake, 
 Lilac, and star, and bird twined with the chant of my 
 
 soul, 
 There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and 
 
 dim." 
 
 There is wanting in Whitman's lines the 
 Catholic feeling which inspires both S. John of 
 the Cross and Vaughan, but there is in them that 
 underlying mysterious knowledge, direct intui- 
 tion, profound, immediate conviction of reality 
 which no amount of the exercise of reason or 
 the operations of the understanding can give 
 " retrievements out of the night " of human 
 
 1 Cosmic Consciousness," page 186. 
 
68 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 limitations and losses; light penetrating the 
 sombre shadows of the world's " cedars dusk and 
 dim." 
 
 Very little is known for certain of Vaughan's 
 literary interests : his early education may fairly 
 be described as somewhat desultory. Though he 
 appears to have been a student of Jesus College, 
 no record remains even of his matriculation, 
 while his brother Thomas proceeded to a degree. 
 Leaving Oxford thus without a hall-mark, Henry 
 pursued some vague legal studies in London, 
 until the outbreak of the Civil War suggested his 
 prompt return to his father's house. No definite 
 information about his literary tastes has been 
 found ; we know nothing of his favourite authors, 
 as we can, e.g., make a list of Montaigne's. Even 
 his debt to George Herbert is disputed. Dr 
 Grosart's view is tersely expressed : " Summarily 
 I deny that Henry Vaughan was an imitator of 
 George Herbert." Before I ever read that, but 
 after a comparison of Vaughan and Herbert, I 
 wrote in a paper in the " Modern Languages 
 Quarterly": " Comfort and stimulus; there is 
 the sum of Vaughan's debt," i.e. to Herbert. 
 Some critics have shown parallel passages be- 
 tween the two poets, or passages which they have 
 deemed to be such. But what they do not seem 
 to perceive is the radical difference between the 
 two ; a difference which is surely best conveyed 
 if we say that Vaughan was essentially a Mystic 
 and Herbert was not. Essentially ! There is, 1 
 believe, no proof that he had studied the works 
 of the great Mystics who preceded him. We 
 
HENRY VAUGHAN 69 
 
 find no direct hints of his possessing or borrow- 
 ing, or reading, e.g. any of those of the thirteenth 
 and fourteenth centuries, Meister Eckhart, 
 Tauler, Ruysbroeck, S. Catharine of Siena, 
 S. John of the Cross, or Jacob Boehme. And yet 
 his mysticism is in the true direct line. It is 
 " interior ": 
 
 " Thus hast Thou plac'd in man's outside 
 
 Death to the common eye, 
 That heaven within him might abide 
 And close eternity." 1 
 
 Or again : 
 "I ... 
 
 . . . came at last 
 
 To search myself where I did find 
 Traces and sounds of a strange kind. 
 Here of this mighty spring I found some drills 
 With echoes beaten from the eternal hills. 
 Weak beams and fires flash 'd to my sight." 3 
 
 It is direct intuition, a power separate entirely 
 from sense, not empirical in any way : 
 " Besides I've lost 
 
 A train of lights, which in these sunshine days 
 Were my sure guides : and only with me stays 
 Unto my cost 
 One sullen beam." 3 
 
 And again (speaking not of the individual this 
 time, but rather of the race) he says : 
 
 " Sure it was so. Man in those early days 
 
 Was not all stone and earth; 
 He shin'd a little, and by those weak rays 
 Had some glimpse of his birth."* 
 
 1 " Thou that know'st for whom I mourn." 
 
 *' Vanity of Spirit." 
 
 " Man's Fall and Recovery." 
 
 4 " Corruption!." 
 
70 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 Further, there is the perhaps better known 
 passage : 
 
 " Happy those early days, when I 
 Shined in my angel infancy ! 
 
 While yet I had not walk'd above 
 A mile or two from my first Love, 
 And looking back at that short space 
 Could see a glimpse of His bright face ; 
 When on some gilded cloud or flow'r 
 My gazing soul would dwell an hour, 
 And in those weaker glories spy 
 Some shadows of Eternity." 1 
 
 Nor should we forget the lines : 
 
 " But I have one pearl by Whose light 
 
 All things I see; 
 
 And in the heart of earth and night 
 Find heaven and tihee." 9 
 
 Vaughan, though he phrases it differently, 
 believed, so far as one can see, in the " spark at 
 the apex of the soul " : 
 
 " Lord, since Thou diidst in this vile clay 
 That sacred ray, 
 
 The Spirit plant, quick 'ning the whole 
 With that one grain's infused wealth."* 
 
 It is idle for anyone to argue that Vaughan 
 was simply referring to the gift of faith. Of that 
 he speaks in quite a different vein in the poem 
 whose title is "Faith." Although he apostro- 
 phises it in the words 
 
 " Bright and blest beam ! " 
 he does not treat it as he treats illumination. 
 
 111 The Retreat." 
 
 '" Silence and Stealth of Days." 
 
 " Repentance." 
 
HENRY VAUGHAN 71 
 
 Without any doubt the latter is held by Vaughan 
 to be direct light from the Source of all light and 
 all reality as differentiated from phenomena : 
 
 " When first I saw True Beauty and Thy Joys 
 Active as light, and calm without all noise, 
 Shin'd on my soul, I felt through all my pow'rar 
 Such a rich air of sweets, as evening show'ra 
 Fanm'd by a gentle gale convey . . . 
 I am so warm'd now by this glance on me 
 That midst all storms I feel a ray of Thee." 1 
 
 Moreover, his is the mystic view that it is sin 
 which clouds and obscures the direct vision of 
 God; for the earlier poem quoted admits the 
 existence still of " one sullen beam." Vaughan 
 distinctly says that he enjoyed illumination 
 
 " Felt through all this fleshly dress 
 Bright shoots of everlastingness. " 
 
 and enjoyed it while he was in a condition of 
 innocence, while his sin was not deliberate and 
 embraced : 
 
 " Before I taught my tongue to wound 
 My conscience with a sinful sound, 
 Or had the black art to dispense 
 A sev'ral ray to every sense."* 
 
 His is the true mystical doctrine that only 
 those who are "pure in heart" see God; the 
 purity of innocence or the purity of penitence 
 constitute for him the vantage-ground 
 
 " Whence th' enlightened spirit sees 
 That shady city of palm trees." 
 
 ^Something has intervened between this light 
 
 111 Mount of Olives." 
 *" The Retreat," 
 
72 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 and man ; and that something every Mystic, and 
 with them Vaughan, knows is sin:/ 
 
 " Only this veil which Thou hast broke 
 
 And must be broken yet in me, 
 This veil I say is all the cloak 
 
 And cloud which shadows Thee from me, 
 This veil Thy full-ey'd love denies, 
 And only gleams and fractions spies. 
 
 " O take it off ! make no delay; 
 
 But brush me with Thy light that I 
 May shine unto a perfect day, 
 
 And warm me at Thy glorious Eye ! 
 O take it off ! or till it flee, 
 Though with no lily, stay with me ! m 
 
 If the technique of these lines be not perfect, 
 the Mystic's longing for full illumination is at 
 any rate unmistakable. 
 
 Moreover, as ever with the Mystics, so with 
 Vaughan, there is the one pre-essential, purified 
 love: 
 
 "... oft have I press'd 
 
 Heaven with a lazy breath ; but fruitless this, 
 Pierc'd not ; love only can with quick access 
 Unlock the way 
 When all else stray." 3 
 
 (In this generation, unfortunately prone to 
 superficial learning, it cannot be too often in- 
 sisted on that mysticism is not a vague exalta- 
 tion, a glorious intoxicated way of talking,} it 
 has a definite aim and a definite plan of com- 
 passing it. This aim Vaughan had, and he 
 perceived the means, perceived them apparently 
 
 '"Cock-crowing." 
 1 "The Shower." 
 
HENRY VAUGHAN 73 
 
 as S. Paul did " not of men, neither by men " 
 for, as I have said, there is no evidence that 
 Henry Vaughan studied the writings of the 
 Mystics. 
 
 It would be no small gain if people could 
 resolutely grasp the fact that fine poetic flights 
 need possess no element of mysticism at all. 
 Crashaw is often spoken of as a " mystical 
 poet " ; among his poems none are admired more 
 than those to S. Teresa. Now, the whole burden 
 of his hymn to that great Saint is a promise of 
 illumination in Heaven, which, by implication 
 at any rate, he seems to deny she possessed on 
 earth. Crashaw's view, in this latter respect, is 
 not borne out by S. Teresa's own writings ; but 
 that does not put into his poems the mystical 
 illumination which lights her books. 
 ! IToo often, again, the word mystical is treated 
 as if it were a mere synonym of religious. j The 
 mystic spirit is not merely religious. Vaughan, 
 like anybody else, could write religiously without 
 departing into mysticism. There is no trace of 
 the latter in " Peace," which, perhaps, from the 
 devotional and also from the technical point of 
 view, must be placed among his most perfect 
 poems : 
 
 " My soul there is a country 
 
 Afar beyond the stars 
 Where stands a winged sentry 
 
 All-skilful in the wars. 
 There above noise and danger, 
 
 Sweet Peace sits crowned with smiles, 
 And One born in a manger 
 Commands the beauteous files. 
 
74 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 He is thy gracious Friend, 
 
 And O my soul awake ! 
 Did in pure love descend, 
 
 To die here for thy sake. 
 If thou canst get but thither, 
 
 There grows the flower of Peace, 
 The Rose that cannot wither, 
 
 Thy fortress and thy ease. 
 Leave then thy foolish ranges; 
 
 For none can thee secure, 
 But One Who never changes, 
 
 Thy God, thy life, thy cure." 
 
 Among English poets Vaughan can, as a 
 matter of fact, lay claim to a larger share of 
 illumination, in the strict sense of the word, than 
 fell to the lot of most of them. Of his co- 
 temporaries it is Thomas Traherne who most 
 nearly approaches him, and that, as some of us 
 will think, by outstripping him. It is no small 
 proof that mysticism is entirely outside sense- 
 experience, that it is a mode of vision utterly 
 independent of physical means, that it is a way of 
 life wholly removed from all material considera- 
 tions and tangible environment, that Henry 
 Vaughan should have written his poems, and 
 Thomas Traherne his " Centuries of Medita- 
 tion " in the disturbed and intolerably painful 
 years of the Civil War. Away from the distress- 
 ing scenes wrought by human wilfulness, 
 Traherne raised his inward vision to the Cross, 
 which " is the abyss of wonders, the centre of 
 desires, the school of virtues, the house of 
 wisdom , the throne of love, the theatre of joys, 
 and the place of sorrows. It is the root of 
 
HENRY FAUGH AN 75 
 
 happiness, and the gate of Heaven " j 1 and then, 
 deliberately accepting the Mystic's medium of 
 attainment, " By love alone is God enjoyed, by 
 love alone delighted in, by love alone approached 
 or admired," 2 he proclaims adoringly the power 
 of Love's supreme sacrifice to raise men above 
 the dust and chaos and misery of their own 
 wretched misdeeds: "This Man bleeding here 
 was tutor to King Charles the Martyr, and Great 
 Master to S. Paul, the convert who learned of 
 Him activity and zeal unto all nations. Well 
 therefore may we take up with this prospect, and 
 from hence behold all the things in Heaven and 
 earth. Here we learn to imitate JESUS in His 
 love to all." 3 
 
 And so, on that high note, which recalls the 
 earlier English Mystic, Richard Rolle "Truth 
 may be without love : but it cannot help without 
 it" we may leave them both, and turn to 
 Wordsworth, whose peculiar gift of descrying 
 hidden reality through phenomena was faintly 
 foreshadowed by Vaughan : 
 
 "All things here show him heaven; waters that fall, 
 
 Chide and fly up : mists of corruptest foam 
 Quit their firs and beds and mount; trees, herbs, 
 
 flowers, all 
 Strive upwards still, and point him to his home," 
 
 though Vaughan far outstripped Wordsworth in 
 direct intuitive vision of divine things. 
 
 '"Centuries of Meditation, " page 58. 
 * Ibid., page 71. * Ibid., page 61. 
 
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 
 
 THE foregoing brief account of Vaughan has 
 passed far beyond illumination to other mystical 
 elements in his writing and thought, but Words- 
 worth recalls us to illumination, and yet to a 
 different form of it from that common to the 
 saints, as Vaughan 's also, though less so than 
 Wordsworth's, was different from theirs. Per- 
 haps two passages from Thomas a Kempis 
 may suggest this distinction best. The first, 
 " Amor vult esse liber et ab omni mundana affec- 
 tione alienus, ne internus eius impediatur aspec- 
 tus," 1 if we use "mundana" as meaning not 
 everything which belongs to this world, but as 
 worldly things so mishandled and loved as to 
 draw us from God might apply to both these 
 poets, and to many, at any rate, of the Saints. 
 But a Kempis goes further in another passage 
 where he is describing the Mystics' vision : 
 " Sunt alii, qui intellectu illuminati et affectu 
 
 '"De Imitatione Christi," Book III., chapter v. : 
 " Love wills to be free, and estranged from all worldly 
 affection, that so its inward sight may not be 
 hindered." 
 
 7 6 
 
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 77 
 
 purgati ad aeterna semper anhelant, de terrenis 
 graviter audiunt, necessitatibus naturce dolenter 
 inserviunt', et hi sentiunt, quid spiritus veritatis 
 loquitur in Us. Quia docet eos terrena despicere 
 et amare ccelestia, mundum negligere et cczlum 
 tola die ac node desiderare." 1 
 
 This is not approximately true of Words- 
 worth ; it is not entirely true of Vaughan. It 
 might be said that the light which came to 
 Wordsworth reached him, almost wholly, cer- 
 tainly overwhelmingly, through the beauty of 
 the natural world. He seemed to " see " quite 
 differently from the saints, and yet to see far 
 more than his unheeding generation ; escaping, 
 as they were, with so much difficulty from the 
 chill eighteenth century. Like these latter, he 
 looked out at the world of sensible things, and 
 while he was looking phenomena gave place to 
 noumena, the appearance to the shining reality 
 behind, underneath, above. 
 
 Perhaps the first thought which arises when 
 we look at Hay don's portrait of him is that 
 here is a man who " saw." Reflection and 
 feeling, no doubt, are there; but vision, and 
 that not merely physical, nor superficial, nor of 
 
 1 " De Imit," Book III., chapter iv. : " Others there 
 are who, being illuminated in their understandings, and 
 purged in their affection, do always pant after things 
 eternal, are unwilling to hear of earthly things, and do 
 serve the necessities of nature with grief; and these 
 perceive what the Spirit of Truth speaketh in them, for 
 He teacheth them to despise earthly, and to love heavenly 
 things; to neglect the world, and to desire Heaven all 
 the day and night." 
 
78 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 obviously palpable objects, is the salient charac- 
 teristic of the face. The bent head and unalter- 
 able gaze suggest the power to see what is 
 hidden, what is behind or beneath. 
 
 Vaughan stands between the purer Mystics 
 and Wordsworth. The latter is really a great 
 example of what Dr Bucke called "cosmic 
 consciousness," though he carefully warns us 
 against supposing that this is a homogeneous 
 state ; "all cases of cosmic consciousness are not 
 on the same plane." 1 
 
 Two claims Dr Bucke makes for this state, 
 which will, perhaps, not be universally allowed. 
 He urges that it is sudden in onset. If this be 
 so how are we to account for those to whom the 
 whole world has always seemed alive and vibrant 
 with half-veiled meaning; who can, by no means, 
 point like Pascal, for example, to a certain day 
 and say: "There and then I felt the sudden 
 advent of flame-lit conviction." Again Dr 
 Bucke is inclined to fix the illuminated age 
 between thirty and forty. He even goes so 
 far as to say : * Should we hear of a case of 
 cosmic consciousness occurring at twenty, for 
 instance, we should at first doubt the truth of 
 the account, and if forced to believe it, we should 
 expect the man (if he lived) to prove himself in 
 some way a spiritual giant." 2 This seems far 
 too rigid an attitude towards that which, after 
 all, is so fluid human experience. Did not 
 
 1 " Cosmic Consciousness," page 55. 
 
 2 Ibid., page 62. 
 
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 79 
 
 Wordsworth himself warn us against this very 
 thing, asking that most pertinent question : 
 
 "... But who shall parcel out 
 His intellect by geometric rules, 
 Split like a province into round and square? 
 Who knows the individual hour in whiich 
 His habits were first sown even as a seed? m 
 
 Who indeed ? This is in the vein of that other 
 poem wherein he once condemned the folly of 
 those who would fain measure and appraise 
 
 " Each little drop of wisdom as it falls 
 Into the dimpling cistern of the heart." 
 
 Moreover, something of the kind was clearly 
 observable in the early youth of Berkeley, of 
 Wordsworth himself, and of Newman. Some of 
 us may think these " spiritual giants," but two 
 of them, at any rate, Dr Bucke does not include, 
 and the third only half grudgingly. The pas- 
 sage in Newman's " Apologia " is well known: 
 " I thought life might be a dream or I an angel, 
 and all this world a deception, my fellow-angels 
 by a playful device concealing themselves from 
 me and deceiving me with a semblance of a 
 material world." 2 
 
 When he was an undergraduate at Trinity 
 College, Dublin, Berkeley kept a commonplace 
 book. This has been published. On one page 
 by themselves are a few sentences, of which the 
 following form part: " From my childhood I 
 
 l " The Prelude," book ii. 
 
 8 " The Apologia," chapter i. By J. H. Newman. 
 
80 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 had an unaccountable turn of thought that way. 
 Mem. That I was distrustful at eight years old, 
 and consequently by nature disposed for these 
 new doctrines." 
 
 The sentence in the commonplace book im- 
 mediately preceding the first of these is: " He 
 that would bring another over to his opinion 
 must seem to harmonise with him at first and 
 humour him in his own way of talking." 
 
 But in an earlier sentence on the same page 
 Berkeley refers to " my speculations." That 
 term, with the later " Mem. " seems to indicate 
 that Berkeley was really referring to his whole 
 view of philosophy (of which on page 455 of 
 the commonplace book he had written, " To be 
 eternally banishing metaphysics and recalling 
 men to common sense," glossed by his editor 
 as calling them "away from abstractions, and 
 through reflection to concrete reality in its con- 
 stant relation to living spirit) ; and it seems to 
 suggest that his youthful " distrustfulness " was 
 but the early germ of his later mature view of 
 the " sensible " world. 1 
 
 These apprehensions of Berkeley and Newman 
 cannot in strictness be called illumination, yet 
 of both it might he held that they perceived 
 '* reality " where others beheld only abstractions. 
 
 It would be difficult indeed to point to any 
 "sudden onset" of illumination in Words- 
 worth's case; at any rate in boyhood he shared 
 
 1 " Life, Letters, and Unpublished Writings of George 
 Berkeley." Vide pages 10, 455, 501, and 502. Edited 
 by Alexander Campbell Fraser, 1861. 
 
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 81 
 
 Newman's experience of the possible unreality 
 of the material world, for he says: " Many times 
 while going to school have I grasped at a wall 
 or a tree to recall myself from this abyss of 
 idealism to the reality." This is not illumina- 
 tion proper, but it seems to imply an unusual 
 sense of the reality of the unseen world ; though 
 possibly less uncommon than we think, even 
 among English people, whose real experiences, 
 owing to their temperamental reticences, are 
 very hard to diagnose. 
 
 There can, however, be no manner of doubt 
 that Wordsworth believed firmly in the inter- 
 connexion of the immaterial and material 
 worlds. This does not necessarily involve any 
 degree of illumination, though it may prepare 
 the way for it. This belief inspires the opening 
 pages of " The Prelude " : 
 
 11 I, meth ought, while the sweet breath of Heaven 
 Was blowing on my body, felt within 
 A correspondent breeze." 
 
 More confidently still he writes: 
 
 " Dust as we are, the immortal spirit grows 
 Like harmony in music; there is a dark, 
 Inscrutable workmanship that reconciles 
 Discordant elements, makes them cling together 
 In one society." 
 
 What is that but the same creed which finds 
 its further exposition in " The Recluse"? 
 
 11 Beauty a living Presence of the Earth, 
 Surpassing the most fair ideal forms 
 Which craft of delicate spirits hath composed 
 From Earth's materials waits upon my steps; 
 Pitches her tents before me as I move, 
 
 F 
 
82 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 An hourly neighbour. Paradise, and groves 
 Elysian, Fortunate Fields like those of old 
 Sought in the Atlantic Main why should they be 
 A history only of departed things 
 Or a mere fiction of what never was? 
 For the discerning intellect of Man, 
 When wedded to this goodly universe 
 In love and holy passion, shall find there 
 A simple produce of the common day. 
 
 I, long before the blissful hour arrives, 
 Would chant, in lonely peace, the spousal verse 
 Of this great consummation : and by words 
 Which speak of nothing more than what we are, 
 Would I arouse the sensual from their sleep 
 Of Death, and win the vacant and the vain 
 To noble raptures ; while my voice proclaims 
 How exquisitely the individual Mind 
 (And the progressive powers no less 
 Of the whole species), to the External World 
 Is fitted : and how exquisitely, too 
 Theme this but little heard of among men 
 The external World is fitted to the Mind." 
 
 This high kind of pre-arranged harmony has 
 not, properly speaking, any mystical element in 
 it. But the same poem, elsewhere, clearly testi- 
 fies to Wordsworth's consciousness of and belief 
 in illumination. Once he speaks of himself as: 
 
 " The transitory being that beheld 
 This vision," 
 
 and twice in fine apostrophes he craves sight : 
 
 " Descend, prophetic Spirit! that inspir'st 
 The human Soul of universal earth 
 Dreaming on things to come ; and dost possess 
 A metropolitan temple in the hearts 
 Of mighty poets : upon me bestow 
 A gift of genuine insight." 
 
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 83 
 
 More definitely still, a few lines on, he calls to 
 
 the 
 
 "... dread Power 
 
 Whose gracious favour is the primal source 
 Of all illumination." 
 
 The most casual student of Wordsworth is 
 probably aware of his view of essential 
 harmony between humanity and the world of 
 material things, a view perfectly plain in the 
 lines just quoted from "The Recluse." He 
 goes further, and penetrates to that more indi- 
 vidual, more intimate harmony between every 
 human being (as a unique personality) and his 
 environment in the lines lines which he cited 
 and thus emphasised in his preface to the 
 " Excursion," 
 
 "... That which each man loved 
 And prized in his peculiar nook of earth 
 Dies with him, or is changed." 1 
 
 Dr Bucke, who can bestow but one page of 
 his book on this man whom he describes as 
 " nearly, if not quite, a poet," only refers to 
 and quotes from one of Wordsworth's poems, 
 the well-known " Lines composed above Tintern 
 Abbey." He quotes two passages, viz. the twelve 
 lines following the one which speaks of "the 
 burden of the mystery," and the ten begin- 
 ning 
 
 " ... I have felt 
 A presence ..." 
 
 He ascribes the first to " the relief . . . 
 which belongs to the unrisen sun of the cosmic 
 l " Excursion," book i. 
 
84 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 sense," and the second to " the mental condition 
 which may be properly called the twilight of 
 cosmic consciousness." 1 Moreover, he commits 
 himself to the surprising statement : " There is no 
 evidence that upon him, at any time, the sun 
 actually rose that the veil was ever rent and 
 the splendour let through ; in fact it may be con- 
 sidered as quite clear that this did not happen." 2 
 
 Even if, supposing so amazing a thing as that 
 Wordsworth had written nothing but " Tintern 
 Abbey," we should hesitate to endorse this 
 judgment, certainly acquiescence in it becomes 
 impossible in the face of that great mass of poems 
 which he wrote between 1787 and 1805. Even 
 those who would not, as Mr Morley apparently 
 does, " accept the critical dictum that all his good 
 work was done in the decade between 1798 and 
 1808," will still allow that a great part of his 
 best work was done then ; though they will find 
 outside those ten years more work of a high 
 order than the one exception admitted by Mr 
 Morley, the " Ode composed on an evening of 
 extraordinary splendour and beauty," which 
 belongs to 1820. 
 
 What Dr Bucke means, the student of Words- 
 worth cannot conjecture ; for it is impossible to 
 suppose that this American psychologist con- 
 fined his attention to one single poem. As a 
 matter of fact, it would appear that even a super- 
 ficial acquaintance with those which one would 
 
 1 " Cosmic Consciousness," pages 236, 237. 
 a Ibid., page 236. 
 
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 85 
 
 expect to be familiar to all educated people would 
 stop such hasty judgments. 
 
 Mr Morley tells us that " in the handbooks of 
 familiar quotations Wordsworth fills more space 
 than anybody else, save Shakespeare and 
 Pope." 1 That being so, if there be a Words- 
 worth quotation which we all know, surely it is 
 that confession from " The Prelude " about his 
 
 boyhood : 
 
 "... Even then I felt 
 
 Gleams like the flashing of a shield the earth 
 And common face of Nature spake to me 
 Rememberable things," 3 
 
 a passage which not only declares that his youth 
 was not devoid of illumination, but implies a 
 fuller measure of it as the years passed on. 
 
 The claim to illumination in boyhood may be 
 further established by the well-known lines from 
 Michael : 
 
 "... while I was yet a boy 
 
 Careless of books, yet having- felt the power of 
 Nature." 
 
 If there be one of his poems which almost 
 invariably finds its way into the Anthologies, 
 is it not " Expostulation and Reply " with 
 Matthew's familiar exhortation ? 
 
 " The eye it cannot choose but see, 
 
 We cannot bid the ear be still; 
 Our bodies feel, where'er they be, 
 Against or with our will. 
 
 " Nor less I dream that there are Powers 
 Which of themselves our minds impress." 
 
 1 " The Complete Works of William Wordsworth with 
 an Introduction by John Morley," page 60. 
 '"The Prelude," book i., lines 585 et seq. 
 
86 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 The very next poem to it, one so universally 
 known that it is impossible to believe Dr Bucke 
 to be ignorant of it, declares even more plainly 
 the fact of the possibility of illumination. We 
 need not rely on the verse which Mr Morley once 
 dismissed with scathing, if undeserved, criticism, 
 but what about the lines, 
 
 " Come forth into the light of things 
 Let Nature be your teacher. 
 
 Come forth and bring with you a heart 
 That watches and receives." 
 
 Surely here we have, so clearly that the hastiest 
 could not miss it, the Mystic's illumination in the 
 Mystic's atmosphere of love. Perhaps, in these 
 pleasure-loving days, the very title of the " Ode 
 to Duty " debars people from reading it; but the 
 closing line can hardly have faded wholly from 
 memory : 
 
 " In the light of Truth thy bondman let me live." 
 
 Then there is that poem written in 1833 when 
 the happy decade declared by Mr Morley to have 
 seen his best work had passed away " On a 
 High Part of the Coast of Cumberland,'' and it 
 contains these suggestive lines : 
 
 " Teach me with quick-eared spirit to rejoice 
 In admonition of Thy softest voice." 
 
 That is aural illumination, if the mixed image 
 may be allowed; anyhow, it is no reference to 
 external ears. Nor can we forget the " After- 
 
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 87 
 
 thought," appended to the " Duddon Sonnets," 
 with its gallant creed : 
 
 " Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent 
 
 dower 
 We feel that we are greater than we know." 
 
 If that does not place us in any actual region 
 of illumination it surrounds us with the mystical 
 atmosphere, wherein anything may happen. 
 
 And then we recall those lines from 
 " Brougham Castle," which tell how Clifford's 
 " teachers " had been 
 
 41 The silence that is in the starry sky, 
 The sleep that is among the lonely hills." 
 
 If there be two lines filled to overflowing with the 
 Wordsworthian sense of occult, yet apprehended, 
 powers, streaming down, upon, and over and 
 into the responsive soul, surely these are they. 
 If people cannot spontaneously grasp their 
 meaning, talk is idle and explanation futile. 
 After all, a person is illuminated or he is not. 
 There surely cannot be a half-way house in this 
 matter? One who is will grasp the meaning of 
 " Nature's old felicities," 1 as Wordsworth did; 
 and he who is not must go without that compre- 
 hension. 
 
 Perhaps before we Consider the matter as it 
 appears in two of Wordsworth's greatest poems, 
 it is worth while to remember the lines which 
 Coleridge addressed to him : 
 
 "... thy soul received 
 The light reflected, as a light bestowed."* 
 
 ^'TheTrosachs." 
 "Sybilline Leaves." 
 
88 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 And again : 
 
 " Truth 
 Not learnt, but native, her own natural notes." 
 
 In estimating, in trying to appreciate the 
 innermost essence of Wordsworth's real attitude, 
 'The Prelude" must always come first. It is 
 not that the minor poems do not exemplify most 
 vividly, most beautifully, the texture of his 
 thought; enough has already been quoted to 
 remind us that they do. But " The Prelude " 
 was Wordsworth's deliberate effort to trace his 
 own inner growth. Even if one may believe that 
 a writer may sometimes let la vraie verite escape 
 concerning one subject when he is ostensibly 
 treating another, yet it is a gratuitous imperti- 
 nence to pay less than the closest attention to his 
 intentional, considered handling of the matter. 
 If there be one impression more indelibly graven 
 on the reader's mind than another by that 
 
 " Song- divine of high and passionate thoughts,*' 
 
 it surely is the poet's immense debt to Nature as a 
 formative, most truly educating force. No one 
 acquainted with Wordsworth's poems, and not 
 least among them, from this point of view, with 
 " The Prelude," and who also has shared in any 
 degree in the same kind of experience, can 
 possibly doubt that for him the 
 
 " World as God has made it," 
 
 i.e. the world of wild and practically unaltered 
 country, is actually, irrevocably filled with a 
 
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 89 
 
 Real Presence. Amidst the beauty, more or less 
 obvious and attractive to everyone, of the natural 
 world, the informing Loveliness behind calls to 
 Wordsworth ; nor is it only Loveliness : living 
 Being, Power are there too. The lines : 
 
 " Ye Presences of Nature in the sky, 
 And on the Earth ! Ye Visions of the hills ! 
 And Souls of lonely places ! " 
 
 are well enough known to be called, alas! 
 hackneyed. But just before them Wordsworth 
 has recorded an experience, and that a childish 
 experience his own boyhood's, of course 
 which is perhaps one of the most haunting 
 descriptions of that sense of life, power, being, 
 only just veiled by the physical world, of which 
 many, besides Wordsworth, are, or have been, 
 or will be aware, even if they lack the power of 
 expression to convey the reality to others: 
 
 " One summer evening (led by her *) I found 
 A little boat tied to a willow tree 
 Within a rocky cove, its usual home. 
 Straight I unloosed her chain, and stepping in 
 Pushed from the shore. It was an act of stealth 
 And troubled pleasure; not without the voice 
 Of mountain echoes did my boat move on ; 
 Leaving behind her still, on either side, 
 Small circles glittering idly in the moon, 
 Until they melted all into one track 
 Of sparkling light. But now, like one who rows, 
 Proud of his skill, to reach a chosen point 
 With an unswerving line, I fixed my view 
 Upon the summit of a craggy ridge, 
 The horizon's utmost boundary; far above 
 
 1 i.e. by Nature. 
 
po A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky. 
 
 She was an elfin pinnace; lustily 
 
 I dipped my oars into the silent lake, 
 
 And, as I rose upon the stroke, my boat 
 
 Went heaving through the water like a swan ; 
 
 When, from behind that craggy steep, till then 
 
 The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge, 
 
 As if with voluntary power instinct 
 
 Upreared its head. I struck and struck again, 
 
 And growing still in stature the grim shape 
 
 Towered up between me and the stars, and still, 
 
 For so it seemed, with purpose of its own 
 
 And measured motion like a living thing, 
 
 Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned 
 
 And through the silent water stole my way 
 
 Back to the covert of the willow tree. 
 
 There is her mooring-place I left my bark.*' 1 
 
 I spoke above of this sense of Being dawning 
 on a mortal who, like Wordsworth, moved 
 principally in the " world as God has made it." 
 Perhaps the capacity is carried to a still higher 
 power, at any rate to a rarer, more uncommon 
 power for those who can detect this hidden 
 Presence behind that sorrier world which is as 
 man has marred it. This is not an unknown 
 case. One might remember Mrs Meynell's 
 beautiful lines: 
 
 *' O heavenly colour, London town 
 Has blurred it from her skies; 
 And hooded in an earthly brown 
 Unheaven'd the city lies. 
 
 " But when the gold and silver lamps 
 
 Colour the London dew, 
 And misted by the winter damps 
 The shops shine bright anew 
 
 1 " The Prelude," book i., lines 357 et seq. 
 
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 91 
 
 Blue comes to earth, it walks the street, 
 
 It dyes the wide air through ; 
 A mimic sky about their feet, 
 
 The throng- go crowned with blue." 1 
 
 Even more triumphantly perhaps than in 
 these wonderful lines of delicate penetration did 
 Francis Thompson discover beneath the sordid 
 squalor of city life the abiding things of Eternity, 
 and imprisoned them in the poem found after 
 his death among his papers : 
 
 14 O world invisible, we view thee, 
 
 O world intangible, we touch thee, 
 O world unknowable, we know thee, 
 Inapprehensible, we clutch thee. 
 
 " The angels keep their ancient places ; 
 Turn but a stone and start a wing ! 
 'Tis ye, 'tis your estranged faces, 
 That miss the many-splenudoured thing. 
 
 " But when so sad, thou canst not sadder 
 
 Cry; and upon thy so sore loss 
 Shall shine the traffic of Jacob's ladder, 
 Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing- Cross. 
 
 " Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter, 
 
 Cry dinging Heaven by the hems, 
 And to Christ walking on the water 
 Not of Gennesareth but Thames." 
 
 Wordsworth was almost entirely, if not abso- 
 lutely, devoid of this form of insight ; for in spite 
 of the opening lines of his " Sonnet Composed 
 on Westminster Bridge, " the vision is due to 
 reflection and comparison, not to illumination. 
 But placed in the midst of his dearly loved 
 
 1 "Collected Poems," page 72. 
 
92 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 Cumbrian land, familiar to him from of old, and 
 sacred from numberless happenings, none could 
 easily outstrip him in that peculiar form of 
 illumination which conveys the reality behind the 
 apparent. The most hasty reader must notice 
 Wordsworth's sensitiveness to sound, and the 
 spiritual significance it had for him. " The 
 Prelude" is full of it; the three following 
 instances, though each differs from the other two, 
 occur in close proximity : 
 
 "... Was it for this 
 That one, the fairest of all rivers, loved 
 To blend his murmurs with my nurse's song, 
 And from his alder shades and rocky falls, 
 And from his fords and shallows, sent a voice 
 That flowed along my dreams? For this, didst thou, 
 O Derwent ! winding among grassy holms 
 Where I was looking on a babe in arms, 
 Make ceaseless music that composed my thoughts 
 To more than infant softness, giving me 
 Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind 
 A foretaste, a dim earnest of the calm 
 That Nature breathes among the hills and groves." 1 
 
 The second instance relates the fact that as a 
 boy, alone on the moor at night, he once stole a 
 woodcock out of another boy's trap : 
 
 "... the bird 
 
 Which was the captive of another's toil 
 Became my prey " 
 
 and tells how then at once he was himself the 
 I(< The Prelude," book i., limes 269 et seq. 
 
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 93 
 
 prey of Power, unseen, intangible, but very 
 definitely heard, if only with the inner ear : 
 
 "... when the deed was done 
 I heard among- the solitary hills 
 Low breathings coming after me, and sounds 
 Of undistinguishable motion, steps 
 Almost as silent as the turf 'they trod." 1 
 
 More suggestive still, because sight and hear- 
 ing are both involved, are the lines close by, 
 describing his hazardous quest, among rocky 
 places, after the raven's nest: 
 
 "... oh, at that time 
 While on the perilous ridge, I hung alone, 
 With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind 
 Blow through my ear ! the sky seemed not a sky 
 Of earth and with what motion moved the clouds 
 to escape." 3 
 
 It is possible that Wordsworth may have 
 possessed physical hearing acuter than normal 
 a possession which, in his circumstances of 
 country life, might be a blessing, but which is 
 not precisely that in this modern age of ceaseless 
 noise. That he was abnormally alert is sug- 
 gested by the beautiful lines : 
 
 " Catching from tufts of grass and harebell flowers 
 Their faintest whisper to the passing breeze." 3 
 
 No one but a solitary wanderer of heightened 
 apprehension would dream of such a possibility. 
 Yet it should be an actual fact for those who will 
 
 Prelude," book i., lines 321 et seq. 
 
 2 Ibid., book i., lines 330 et seq. 
 
 3 Ibid., book vi., lines 221, 222. 
 
94 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 listen for people, for example, who are not too 
 dense to catch the bat's tenuous cry in the gloom 
 of twilight. 
 
 While Wordsworth was a boy his delight, we 
 know, was to steal away alone, to escape from 
 the natural noise and racket of his fellows, which 
 one side of him enjoyed in the most wholesome 
 fashion, into peace and stillness. It is true that 
 there is one passage in " The Prelude" where 
 he admits the possibility that he may have been 
 over-addicted to loneliness: 
 
 44 I was taught to feel perhaps too much 
 The self-sufficing- power of solitude." 1 
 
 Yet this admission is balanced by the definite 
 statement in an earlier poem : 
 
 "... impulses of deeper birth 
 Have come to him in solitude." 3 
 
 And again : 
 
 14 When from our better selves we have too long 
 Been parted by the hurrying world, and droop 
 Sick of its business, of its pleasures tired. 
 How gracious, how benign is Solitude; 
 How potent a mere image of her sway; 
 
 ... as the soul of that great Power Is met 
 Sometimes embodied on a public road, 
 When,, for the night deserted it assumes 
 A character of quiet more profound 
 Than pathless wastes." 3 
 
 1 " The Prelude," book ii., lines 76, 77. 
 
 344 A Poet's Epitaph." 
 
 ' " The Prelude," book iv., lines 354 et seq. 
 
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 95 
 
 During his residence at Cambridge, amid the 
 multifarious interests of undergraduate life, not 
 over-harassed, one somehow imagines, by 
 
 "... important days, 
 Examinations, when the man was weighed 
 As in a balance," 
 
 amidst all that he can still cry, 
 
 "... all 
 
 That I beheld respired with inward meaning." 1 
 
 Cambridge, as Wordsworth knew it, can 
 scarcely be called a town; even still, it deserves 
 the apostrophe : 
 
 " O fairest of all fair places, 
 Sweetest of all sweet towns." 8 
 
 And that surely he must have found it, since he 
 could write: 
 
 " As, if awakened, summoned, roused, constrained, 
 I looked for universal things; perused 
 The common countenance of earth and sky ; 
 Earth nowhere unembellished by some trace 
 Of that first Paradise whence man was driven; 
 And sky whose beauty and bounty are expressed 
 By the proud name she bears the name of Heaven. 
 I called on both to teach me what they might; 
 Or, turning the mind in upon herself, 
 Pored, watched, expected, listened, spread my 
 
 thoughts 
 
 And spread them with a wider creeping; felt 
 Incumbencies more awful, visitings 
 
 1 " The Prelude," book iii., lines 131, 133. 
 " A Minor Poet," page 86. By Amy Levy. 
 
96 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 Of the Upholder of the tranquil soul 
 That tolerates the indignities of Time, 
 And from f he centre of Eternity 
 All finite motions overruling, lives 
 In glory immutable." 1 
 
 Yet, if we follow this intimate record of 
 Wordsworth's life, if we watch him taking up, 
 one by one, the old ways, dropping into the old 
 habits, in his first Long Vacation, when he went 
 home for the first time from Cambridge to the 
 
 "... bed of Windermere 
 Like a vast river stretching in the sun," 
 
 then the truth of the contention, already ad- 
 vanced, that the real source of Wordsworth's 
 illumination is the country, not the town, will 
 become apparent: 
 
 " The sun was set, or setting 
 
 . . . Gently did my soul 
 Put off her veil, and, self transmuted, stood 
 Naked as in the presence of her God." a 
 
 If that be not illumination, then what is it? 
 The lines which follow convey the deepening of 
 the experience in the mystical atmosphere, love : 
 
 11 While on I walked, a comfort seemed to touch 
 A heart that had not been disconsolate. 
 Strength came where weakness was not known 
 
 to be, 
 
 At least not felt ; and restoration came 
 Like an intruder knocking at the door 
 Of unacknowledged weariness." 
 
 1<4 The Prelude," book iii., lines 105 et seq. 
 3 /bid., book iv., lines 142 et sec(. 
 
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 97 
 
 I hardly think that the closing lines of the 
 seventh book of "The Prelude " " Residence 
 in London " really traverse this view, although 
 there he wrote: 
 
 " This did I feel in London's vast domain. 
 The spirit of Nature was upon me there; 
 The soul of Beauty and enduring Life, 
 Vouchsafed her inspiration, and diffused 
 Through meagre lines and colours, and the press 
 Of self-destroying, transitory things, 
 Composure and ennobling harmony," 
 
 But all which preceded those lines in the seventh 
 book gives a totally different impression. The 
 most convincing passage that Wordsworth was 
 not wholly unaware of the same Real Presence 
 even behind and beneath the disastrous bustle 
 and soul-killing vulgarism of great cities, occurs 
 in the eighth book : 
 
 " London, to thee I willingly return. 
 
 Ere while my verse played idly with the flowers 
 Enwrought upon thy mantle. 
 
 , . . on the roof 
 Of an itinerant vehicle I sate, 
 With vulgar men about me, trivial forms 
 Of houses, pavement, streets, of men and things- 
 Mean shapes on every side; but at the instant, 
 When to myself it fairly might be said 
 The threshold now is overpast (how strange 
 That aught external to the living mind 
 Should have such mighty sway 1 yet so it was), 
 A weight of ages did at once descend 
 Upon my heart; no thought embodied, no 
 Distinct remembrances, but weight and power 
 
 G 
 
98 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 Power growing under weight : alas 1 I feel 
 That I am trifling : 'twas a moment's pause 
 All that took place within me came and went 
 As in a moment; yet with Time it dwells 
 And grateful memory, as a thing divine." 1 
 
 Beneath the pompous verbosity and painful 
 self-consciousness of this passage, which is, 
 no doubt, Wordsworth in his most jejune and 
 tiresome mood, there is a flash of transient 
 illumination. 
 
 Truth compels us to allow, however, that there 
 was for him a source of illumination distinct from 
 the beauty of the country ; and this he found 
 in pure as distinguished from applied science. 
 Those who can in any way appreciate the 
 rare pleasure to be derived from the absolute 
 certainty here and now of the conclusions 
 of pure mathematics will find nothing ludi- 
 crous or even surprising in the following 
 passage : 
 
 41 More frequently from the same source I drew 
 A pleasure quiet and profound, a sense 
 Of permanent and universal sway 
 And paramount belief; there, recognised 
 A type, for finite natures, of the one 
 Supreme Existence, the surpassing life 
 Which to the boundaries of space and time, 
 Superior and incapable of change, 
 Nor touched by welterings of passion is 
 And hath the name of God. Transcendent peace 
 And silence did avail upon these thoughts 
 That were a frequent comfort to my youth." 3 
 
 1 " The Prelude," book viii., lines 32 el seq. 
 * Ibid., book vi., lines 129 et seq 
 
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 99 
 
 No doubt it would be easy to make merry 
 about a man's passage from Euclid to illumina- 
 tion, but in this case it would be quite unfair. 
 Wordsworth deliberately interposes the link of 
 " Nature's laws " : he travels from 
 
 " The pleasures gathered from the rudiments 
 Of geometric science," 
 
 to another region, where he moves 
 
 11 From star to star, from kindred sphere to sphere, 
 From system on to system without end." 
 
 What the great laws of the material heavens 
 conveyed to him we know from his lines on the 
 compelling statue of Newton, which, in the ante- 
 chapel of Trinity, draws all men to gaze into 
 those dreaming, far-away eyes: 
 
 11 Newton with his prism and silent face, 
 The marble index of a mind for ever 
 Voyaging through strange seas of thought alone." 1 
 
 Nor is he alone in this kind of attitude, though 
 the classical phrase of Immanuel Kant, " the 
 starry sky above me and the moral law within 
 me," is so familiar that one hardly dares to quote 
 it. Yet, in conclusion, it must be admitted that 
 Wordsworth himself seems to have no sustained 
 belief in the source of his illumination ; he 
 oscillates perpetually between one opinion and 
 
 l "The Prelude," book in., lines 61-63. 
 
ioo A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 another. After the extraordinarily beautiful 
 description of 
 
 " The dear presence of the full-orbed moon " 
 
 seen from the heights of Snowdon, he speaks of 
 Nature 
 
 44 ... putting forth 
 
 That mutual domination which she loves 
 To exert upon the face of outward things, 
 So moulded, joined, abstracted, so endowed 
 With interchangeable supremacy, 
 That men, least sensitive, see, hear, perceive 
 And cannot choose but feel." 1 
 
 A little further on he writes as if this capacity 
 of illumined vision, " spiritual love " he calls it, 
 were a kind of amalgam of capacities developed 
 in some men by use and deliberate cultivation ; 
 he speaks of it almost as an empirical psycholo- 
 gist might: 
 
 " This spiritual Love acts not nor can exist 
 Without Imagination, which in truth 
 Is but another name for absolute power 
 And clearest insight, amplitude of mind, 
 And Reason in her most exalted mood. 
 This faculty hath been the feeding source 
 Of our long labour; we have traced the stream 
 From the blind cavern whence is faintly heard 
 Its natal murmur; followed it to light 
 And open day : accompanied its course 
 Among the ways of Nature, for a time 
 Lost sight of it, bewildered and engulphed; 
 Then given it greeting as it rose once more 
 In strength, reflecting from its placid breast 
 
 1 " The Prelude," book xiv., lines 79 et seq. 
 
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 101 
 
 The works of man, and face of human life; 
 And lastly, from its progress have we drawn 
 Faith in life endless, the sustaining thought 
 Of human Being, Eternity and God." 1 
 
 And then there are the lines in " The 
 Recluse/' quoted earlier, where, having referred 
 to himself as 
 
 " The transitory being that beheld 
 This Vision," 
 
 he invokes the 
 
 " . . . dread Power 
 
 Whose gracious favour is the primal source 
 Of all illumination." 
 
 The whole tenor of his work inclines one 
 to the belief that this latter view was his real 
 conviction. Probably the oft-quoted lines, pos- 
 sibly more widely known than any others he ever 
 wrote, represent his most settled as also his most 
 comprehensive view : 
 
 " Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe ! 
 Thou Soul that art the Eternity of thought, 
 That givest to forms and images a breath 
 And everlasting motion, not in vain. 
 By day or star-light thus from my first dawn 
 Of childhood didst Thou intertwine for me 
 The passions that build up our human soul ; 
 Not with the mean and vulgar works of man, 
 But with high objects, with enduring things 
 With life and nature purifying thus 
 The elements of feeling and of thought, 
 And sanctifying, by such discipline, 
 Both pain and fear, until we recognise 
 
 "'The Prelude," book xiv., lines 188 et seq. 
 
102 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 A grandeur in the beating's of the heart. 
 Nor was this fellowship vouchsafed to me 
 With stinted kindness." 1 
 
 However that may be, there is confusion of 
 exposition in WordswortH, a confusion not ex- 
 hibited by the other poets here considered. 
 
 1 " The Prelude," book i., lines 401 et seq. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 
 
 BARON FRIEDRICH VON HUGEL, in his learned 
 and Supremely suggestive book, " The Mystical 
 Element of Religion," refers to the not un- 
 common opinion that metaphysics lend no 
 support to religion. He quotes the following 
 sufficiently startling passage from Professor 
 Wilhelm Hermann: "There exists no Theory 
 of Knowledge for such things as we hold to be 
 real in the strength of faith. In such religious 
 affirmation the believer demolishes every bridge 
 between his conviction and that which Science 
 can recognise as real." 1 
 
 He adds of Hermann and of his master, 
 Albert Ritschl, that " Metaphysics of any and 
 every kind appear everywhere to both writers 
 as essentially unnecessary, unreal, misleading, 
 so much inflation and delusion of soul." 2 Baron 
 von Hiigel notes that it is not only among phil- 
 osophers that these opinions obtain. He writes : 
 11 Many men of sense and goodness come to 
 speak as though religion, even at its fullest, 
 could and should get on without either, content- 
 
 lu The Mystical Element of Religion," voL ii., page 
 260. 
 * Ibid., vol. ii., page 269. 
 
 IOJ 
 
104 'A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 ing itself to be a somewhat sentimental Imman- 
 ental Ethics." 1 
 
 Such a sweeping statement as Professor Her- 
 mann's is robbed of much of its apparently 
 devastating force to the person who sees that the 
 Human Sciences are not overwhelmingly con- 
 cerned with " that which Science can recognise 
 as real." The pretensions of " Science " can 
 sometimes become a little over-swollen, the 
 delimitations of it imperfectly drawn. It is not 
 wholly fortunate that so many scientists have, 
 at any rate, seemed to fail to see that " reality " 
 may be of more than one kind, and reached by 
 more means than the ordinary methods of the 
 positive sciences. 
 
 It cannot be necessary to say, so ever more 
 widely known are his writings coming to be, 
 that Baron von Hiigel does not share Professor 
 Hermann's views; and his counter-claim against 
 such statements is of the most convincing nature 
 of all, as he simply recalls, as a matter of 
 historical fact, readily provable, " the procession 
 so largely made up of men and movements 
 not usually reckoned as exclusively or directly 
 religious, whose very greatness one which 
 humanity will not let die is closely interwoven 
 with mystical and metaphysical affirmations. 
 There are," so he reminds us, " among philoso- 
 phers, a Spinoza and a Leibniz, a Fichte, 
 Hegel, Schopenhauer, a Trendelenberg and a 
 Lotze, with the later stages of a John Mill, a 
 
 '"The Mystical Element of Religion," vol. ii., 
 page 271. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 105 
 
 Littre* and a Herbert Spencer; among poets, a 
 Pindar and ^Eschylus, a Lucretius and Virgil, 
 a Lessing and a Goethe, a Wordsworth and a 
 Browning; among historians, a Thucydides and 
 a Tacitus, a St. Simon and de Tocqueville, a 
 Carlyle, a Jakob Grimm, a Droysen and a Ranke ; 
 among scientists, a Copernicus and a Kepler, 
 a Newton, a Lyell, indeed, largely still, also a 
 Darwin ; and among men of action, a Moltke 
 and a Gordon, a Burke and a von Stein." 1 
 
 This interesting suggestion that mysticism and 
 philosophy contribute vital elements to so many 
 of the greatest movements, are essentially charac- 
 teristic of so many of the greatest men, is closed 
 and clinched by the striking challenge: "Shear 
 any of these men of their Mystical and Meta- 
 physical elements and you will have shorn 
 Samson of his locks." 
 
 That Browning was a Metaphysical poet is 
 a statement which has been repeated ad nauseam, 
 and not seldom by people who seemed to appre- 
 hend as little of the real nature of poetry as of 
 that of metaphysics. While Baron von Hugel's 
 statement that Wordsworth was a mystical poet 
 will be admitted, as I have tried to show, in 
 greater or less degree by most critics, his plea 
 that Browning's poetry contains a vein of 
 mysticism may be less readily conceded, even by 
 those who dwell with severest emphasis on his 
 obscurity, a quality which some people seem to 
 reckon as one and the same thing with mysticism. 
 
 1 " The Mystical Element of Religion," vol. ii., 
 page 271. 
 
io6 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 The real difficulty centres always round the exact 
 precise meaning of this elusive word. The view 
 advanced in the preceding pages is that it is a 
 way of knowledge not dependent on discursive 
 reasoning but on immediate experience, and that 
 the atmosphere in which it develops may and 
 actually does range from desire to ardent love. 
 
 M. Joly, quoting the Abbe" Huvelin, tells 
 us that " le mysticisme c'est 1 'amour de Dieu," 
 which he calls, " cette definition la plus simple et 
 la plus claire de toutes." 1 This is doubtless true, 
 but must not be confounded with the converse of 
 the proposition, since we can nowise admit that 
 all love of God is mystical. M. Joly urges this, 
 and without any shadow of hesitation writes: 
 " Non, tous les mystiques ne sont pas saints . . . 
 tous les saints ne sont pas mystiques." 
 
 Mysticism then is direct vision operating in 
 an atmosphere of love; the Mystic, kindling with 
 ardour, beholding things steadfastly, "sees" 
 immediately without any intervening medium 
 whatever ; is really illuminated. Upon his face, 
 as Festus said to Paracelsus, is 
 
 "... that look 
 As if where'er you gazed there stood a star ! " 
 
 We must not exaggerate in the case of Brown- 
 ing, but recollect that Baron von Hiigel goes no 
 further than to attribute a mystical element to 
 each one of the great men whose names he 
 cites; though he certainly implies the impor- 
 tance, the scope of this element, by his compari- 
 
 1 " Psychologic des Saints," page 40. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 107 
 
 son of Samson's locks. In studying Brown- 
 ing's poems then, the student need not expect 
 to find a mighty Mystic; we shall not think of 
 him as in the same great category as S. John of 
 the Cross or Ruysbroeck; and, to put it on a far 
 lower plane, we shall not find in him quite that 
 temperamental tendency to mysticism, that in- 
 born way of coming at occult truth through the 
 phenomenal world which distinguished Words- 
 worth. In Browning there was an ineradicable 
 vein of ratiocination, twined up with another, 
 hardly less marked, of speculation. Side by 
 side with these was that leaning towards the 
 solution of any human problem according to its 
 dramatic elements, which nothing could obli- 
 terate from his work, and which he very seldom 
 forced down into even a subordinate place. It 
 must be admitted that his plays have been 
 seldom staged, that ' * Straff ord ' ' with its great 
 tragic scene, not unworthy of Shakspere, was 
 reckoned a failure ; but for all that, so ingrained 
 was his dramatic feeling that he could not 
 exclude it from his lyrics. 
 
 All these qualities, sometimes singly, some- 
 times in union, attenuated his capacity for direct 
 vision. His indefatigable desire to pull things 
 into their component parts sometimes delayed, 
 sometimes impeded his power to see them as 
 a whole, intuitively. Then, and specially if 
 Browning be under consideration, it is never 
 permissible to overlook the vast distinction which 
 obtains between religious and philosophical 
 intuition. There are mysteries of philosophy as 
 
io8 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 well as of religion. The essence of this " way " 
 of knowledge lies, since it is "a way," in 
 its method. Dr Inge once wrote that " the 
 essence of mysticism is not speculation but in- 
 tuition." 1 The differentia is found in the fact 
 that the method of the Mystic is immediate, 
 experiential not discursive, i.e. not dependent 
 on a train of reasoning. The philosopher, no 
 less than the religious teacher, is, or may be, 
 conscious of intuited knowledge. Baron von 
 Hiigel, as is now well known, has drawn a 
 careful distinction between morality, mysticism, 
 philosophy and religion, and he explicitly says 
 that he thinks of mysticism " as with intellectu- 
 alism and moralism, one of the three psycho- 
 logical forms of religion, which are each legiti- 
 mate and necessary, and which each require the 
 check of the other two." 2 It is greatly to be 
 regretted that so many writers fail to see this 
 necessary balance ; and thus we find some over- 
 rating reason, others exalting intuition above all 
 the rest of our powers. 
 
 Intellectualism, as a form of religion, that is 
 religious truth pursued by means of discursive 
 reason, which is more properly called theology, 
 was singularly consonant with Browning's 
 genius. Of course it is true often that the same 
 conclusion may be reached by discursive reason- 
 ing or by intuition. For example, when in the 
 
 1 " Bampton Lectures " Christian Mysticism, page 
 338. By W. R. Inge. 
 
 a " The Mystical Element of Religion," vol. H., 
 page 268. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 109 
 
 " Gorgias " Plato observes: "to do is worse 
 than to suffer injustice," it is obvious to the 
 most casual reader that he has proceeded to this 
 judgment by a perfectly rational, strictly logical 
 argument, based on the fundamental principles 
 of ethics; his process is dialectical to the " nth," 
 if one may so express it. None the less, the 
 same conclusion is possible to the Mystic, to the 
 man who does not proceed slowly step by step, 
 from arduous reason to reason, but who " sees " 
 instantly, as he looks into this tangle which men 
 call life. For, undoubtedly, to the " just man " 
 even in the moment when the agony is keenest 
 of enduring the cruel consequences of other 
 men's ill-doing, since their way is made so easy 
 
 " . . . there's a real love of a lie 
 Liars find ready made for lies they make m 
 
 of their injustice, or rapacity, or baseless jeal- 
 ousy, their intrigue or moral cowardice, their 
 sheer stupid tattling, or whatever their crime be, 
 there is, or may be, an immediate consciousness, 
 a conviction based on insight proper, that it is, 
 in actual fact, whatever the bitterness of the 
 pain, better to suffer than to do injustice. Such 
 a conclusion can be reached by logical process, 
 yet to some, undoubtedly, it is an intuition, not 
 only needing no argument, but being to them 
 provable by no conceivable argument, or colloca- 
 tion of arguments, stronger than their own 
 conviction. 
 
 There are many cases where Browning evi- 
 l " Mr Sludge the Medium." 
 
no A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 dently preferred the method of intellectualism. 
 All through his life he seems to have been 
 immensely engrossed with religious problems, 
 and between 1850 and 1855 ne tackled them 
 mainly by reason, for it is to this period that 
 "Men and Women, 1 ' "Christmas Eve," and 
 " Easter Day " belong, though " Easter Day " 
 bears traces of mysticism irradiating its rational- 
 ism. Yet this latter poem must not stand quite 
 alone, for in the preface to " Men and Women," 
 i.e. in the poem called " Transcendentalism," we 
 come upon the reference to " German Boehme," 
 and his sudden awareness 
 
 "That plants could speak," 
 
 and again, further on to John of Halberstadt, 
 " Who made things Boehme wrote thoughts about," 
 the man who 
 
 11 Buries us with a glory, young once more, 
 Pouring heaven into this shut house of life," 
 
 and so we have conclusive proof that, as ever, 
 so at this early stage, Browning was well aware 
 of the possibility of intuition. The same atti- 
 tude is apparent in " Karshish " in the question : 
 
 " How can he give his neighbour the real ground 
 His own conviction? " 
 
 But while there are these flashings of direct 
 vision, yet it is among these " Men and 
 Women " that we find " Cleon," that crystallisa- 
 tion of hopelessness, however real for a time 
 
ROBERT BROWNING m 
 
 beauty may be, however keenly it may be appre- 
 ciated. And further, among them is " Blou- 
 gram," the typical instance surely of " rea- 
 soned " morality and religion. That it ap- 
 proaches, perhaps touches, casuistry, only proves 
 that it is absolutely antipodean to the mystical, 
 intuitive, immediate method of seizing upon 
 truth. It is undeniable that Blougram rises to 
 his own height : 
 
 " All's doubt in me; where 's break of faith in this? 
 It is the idea, the feeling- and the love, 
 God means mankind should strive for and show forth 
 Whatever be the process to the end 
 And not historic knowledge, logic sound 
 And metaphysical acumen, sure ! 
 ' What think ye of Christ,' friend? when all's done 
 
 and said, 
 
 Like you this Christianity or not ? 
 It may be false, but will you wish it true? 
 Has it your vote to be so if it can? 
 
 All the same his height is not that of mysti- 
 cism. The Mystic does not " think of,' J but 
 knows Christ. He does not ask if he " like M 
 Christianity, nor does he *' wish " it to be true, 
 since he is convinced that it is. This goodwill 
 is, no doubt, able to furnish an element in 
 that atmosphere of desire and finally of love 
 into which the vision shall some day flash ; but 
 Blougram, with all his strange attraction, is still 
 a reasoner, not a seer. 
 
 Between five-and-twenty and thirty years after, 
 Browning returns to this discursive method, as, 
 in " Iv&n Ivnovitch," he sets forth the ingeni- 
 
ii2 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 ous arguing of the tiresome Starosta. In that 
 same poem he gives us an excellent example of 
 reasoned ethics based on religion in the parish 
 priest's homily. Suddenly, in startling contrast 
 to both, to the rationalised morality of the 
 Starosta, and the priest's religious ethics, there 
 flashes in upon the dreadful scene that direct 
 intuition of righteousness, that mystical seizure 
 on truth of Ivan himself, whose swift blow with 
 the axe, whose almost scornful question as 
 
 " They told him he was free 
 As air to walk abroad. ' How otherwise? ' asked he " 
 
 comes like a justification of George Tyrrell's 
 daring assertion : "Religion . . . cares nothing 
 for the affairs of the mind, nor even for ethical 
 propriety of conduct save as an expression and 
 instrument of the life of the spirit, as furthering 
 union with the Divine Will." 1 And that is 
 precisely the Mystic's view. 
 
 Half-way between the laborious train of 
 reasoning offered by Blougram to Gigadibs, and 
 the flash of Ivan's immediate vision of truth, 
 there is an early poem, published among the 
 " Dramatic Romances " in 1849, which Brown- 
 ing's readers have sometimes misunderstood. 
 The solution of the misunderstanding surely is 
 that they have missed this element of intuitive, 
 immediate, mystical grasp. The poem is " The 
 Statue and the Bust." The story is so well 
 known that it seems almost superfluous to recall 
 
 l " Mother Julian of Norwich," preface, page xii. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 113 
 
 it. "The Riccardi," bringing home his bride, 
 is aware, in an instant, that she and his Duke 
 have fallen in love at first sight. Thereafter he 
 immures her in his palace, her largest liberty 
 henceforth being freedom to watch the street 
 below. Restricted thus, she resolves, as the 
 Duke rides by, to fly to him in the garb of a 
 page ; the Duke determining too that at all costs 
 they will fly together. 
 
 But Browning, who knew so intimately the 
 small windings and purposeless follies of the 
 human heart, read their futility like an open 
 book. Each, for an almost idle reason of 
 apparent convenience, defers the wrongful act, 
 once, twice, often. And so the moment for 
 action never comes : 
 
 " But next day passed, and next day yet, 
 With still fresh cause to wait one day more 
 Ere each leaped over the parapet. 
 
 So weeks grew months, years gleam by gleam 
 The glory dropped from their youth and love, 
 And both perceived they had dreamed a dream." 
 
 Finally he leaves us with the conviction that they 
 did not refuse the conclusion because it was 
 wrong, but from infirmity of purpose. " Well," 
 some will urge, " but at any rate they did not do 
 wrong." Quick as thought Browning bursts 
 forth, "They did do wrong: they achieved the 
 utter worthlessness of those who take no side; 
 they sinned the deadly sin of Laodicea : 
 
 " So while these wait the trump of doom, 
 How do their spirits pass, I wonder, 
 Nights and days in the narrow room? 
 
 H 
 
ii4 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 44 Still I suppose they sit and ponder 
 What a gift life was, ages ago, 
 Six steps out of the chapel yonder. 
 
 11 Only they see not God, I know, 
 Nor all that chivalry of His, 
 The soldier saints, who, row on row, 
 
 44 Burn upward each to his point of bliss 
 
 44 I hear you reproadh, 4 But delay was best, 
 For their end was a crime. ' Oh, a crime will do 
 As well, I reply, to serve for a test, 
 
 44 As a virtue golden through and through. 
 
 44 The counter our lovers staked was lost 
 As surely as if it were lawful coin ; 
 And the sin I impute to each frustrate ghost 
 
 44 Is, the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin, 
 Though the end in sight was a vice, I say ! 
 You of the virtue (we issue join) 
 How strive you? De te fabulal " 
 
 Browning is not saying, as some have seemed 
 to suppose, that good is no better than evil. 
 What he does declare is that lukewarmness, 
 halting between two opinions, backbonelessness, 
 looking so long before you leap that you never 
 leap at all all that is worse, if possible, than 
 deliberate wrong-doing. Perhaps some have 
 been shocked just because he does thus fling 
 it out, far more as an intuitively known, than 
 as a rationally argued proposition ; though it is 
 like some other mystically apprehended truths, 
 capable of reasoned support. For example, it 
 might be urged on empirical grounds that 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 115 
 
 invertebrateness is, from the standpoint of social 
 ethics that fashionable study nowadays more 
 objectionable even than deliberate wrong-doing 
 on account of its ingrained futility and incorrigi- 
 bility, and not least objectionable because it 
 defies all possibility of calculation. Browning 
 had weighty authority in support of his doctrine. 
 4 Woe," said the son of Sirach more than two 
 thousand years ago, " woe be to fearful hearts, 
 and faint hands, and the sinner that goeth two 
 ways." 
 
 Dante came nearer to the exact piercing point 
 when, with Virgil, he stood outside Hell's Gate, 
 on the dark, unlocated plain, and they perceived 
 the faint, glimmering shades of the "Trim- 
 mers," the ghostly forms of those who, in this 
 world, chose neither good nor evil, but were 
 " for themselves." In a terrible sentence, which 
 has rung down the ages, Dante described their 
 sin, the sin of Laodicea : 
 
 " Che fece per viltate il gran rifiuto." 
 
 Surely this scorn of " each frustrate ghost," with 
 " the unlit lamp and the ungirt loin," which rests 
 on no carefully linked chain of reasoning, but 
 burns up in the poetry of Dante and Browning 
 like some withering, blasting flame, surely this 
 scorn came to them from Primitive Christianity. 
 In the " Letters to the Seven Churches of Asia," 
 in the Apocalypse of S. John the Divine, one, 
 and one only, Laodicea, receives a warning and 
 a rebuke unrelieved by any recognition of worth, 
 any acknowledgment of redeeming virtue. And 
 
ii6 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 why? Just on account of the " unlit lamp and 
 the ungirt loin " : 
 
 " I know thy works, that thou art neither hot nor cold. 
 
 I would thou wert cold or hot. 
 
 So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold 
 nor hot, I will spue thee out of My mouth." 
 
 Browning treats this instance of moral insight 
 in a unique way. Generally, if he argues a 
 point out, he leaves it to be taken or left: as, on 
 quite another ground, he left the hammer-stroke 
 of Ivan's unanswerable question; as a rule he 
 will not didactically force his moral home. But 
 of such prime importance, apparently, does 
 he consider this immediate conviction of the 
 irremovable wretchedness of indecision that he 
 will, if possible, stimulate the consciousness so 
 that it may be ready to receive the truth's flash- 
 ing light ; for once he forces it on us, declines to 
 let us wriggle out : 
 
 11 You of the virtue (we issue join) 
 How strive you? De te fabula! " 
 
 It would be a mistake, as I have said already, 
 to assume that mysticism is a mode of religious 
 thought only ; any immediate intuition of truth is 
 of the same kind. It is as a philosophic rather 
 than as a religious Mystic that many might think 
 of Browning. His tendency to this particular 
 view of things appeared in that poem which, 
 though it was welcomed and praised on its 
 publication, and was transcribed whole by Dante 
 Gabriel Rossetti from the British Museum copy, 
 yet was forgotten soon by the public. Browning 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 117 
 
 himself shelved it rather in later years ; yet those 
 who have read these lines from " Pauline " can 
 hardly have lost all recollection of them : 
 
 " Up for the glowing day, leave the old woods ! 
 See, they part like a ruined arch : the sky ! 
 Nothing but sky appears, so close the roots 
 And grass of the hill-top level with the air 
 Blue sunny air, where a great cloud floats laden 
 With light, like a dead whale that white birds pick, 
 Floating away in the sun in some north sea. 
 Air, air, fresh life-blood, thin and searching air, 
 The clear dear breath of God that loveth us, 
 Where small birds reel and winds take their delight ! 
 Water is beautiful, but not like air : 
 See where the solid azure waters lie 
 Made as of thickened air, and down below, 
 The fern ranks, like a forest, spread themselves, 
 As though each pore could feel the element 
 Where the quick glancing serpent winds his way. 
 Float with me there, Pauline ! but not like air. 
 Down the hill ! Stop a clump of trees, see, set 
 On a heap of rocks, which look o'er the far plains, 
 And envious climbing shrubs would mount to rest 
 And peer from their spread boughs : there they 
 
 wave, looking 
 
 At the muleteers who whistle as they go 
 To the merry chime of their morning bells, and all 
 The little smoking cots and fields and banks 
 And copses bright in the sun." 
 
 I quote this vividly descriptive passage first, 
 though it occurs near the end, because it 
 proves incontrovertibly the intense alertness of 
 Browning's senses, the ordinary five senses, 
 claimed by some psychologists as the sole 
 avenues along which all knowledge must pass. 
 Here, in these twenty-five lines, we get impres- 
 
Ii8 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 sions of sight, sound, touch, and smell, and even 
 an ephemeral suggestion of taste; though it 
 seems a crime to analyse in this almost chemical 
 manner one of the most beautiful natural descrip- 
 tions in the whole range of English verse. It is 
 worth while to recall, just for an instant, two or 
 three of the vividest pictures : 
 
 "... where a great cloud floats laden 
 With light, like a dead whale that white birds pick, 
 Floating away in the sun in some north sea." 
 
 Or: 
 
 " . . . air, 
 
 The clear dear breath of God that loveth us, 
 When small birds reel and winds take their delight!" 
 
 And again, more mundane, but so replete with 
 the indigenous English love of plain, homely, 
 country life, even if it be not a typically English 
 landscape : 
 
 " . . . the muleteers, who whistle as they go 
 To the merry chime of their morning bells, and all 
 The little smoking cots and fields and banks 
 And copses bright in the sun." 
 
 The man who wrote those lines did not fall 
 back ever on the apprehensions of the " inner 
 sense," because his physical five senses were 
 deficient, because colour, and light, and swift 
 movement, and the audible echoes of human life 
 were just nothing at all to him. Rather because 
 they meant so much, because they were all that 
 to him, therefore his addiction to " the other way 
 
ROBERT BROWNING ng 
 
 of love " is additionally striking. It is interest- 
 ing in considering the contrast between the vision 
 of sense and that of the soul, to recall a 
 striking mystical aphorism from what Dr R. A. 
 Nicholson called the " new Sufism " of the ninth 
 century A.D. : " When the gnostic's spiritual eye 
 is opened, his bodily eye is shut : he sees nothing 
 but God." 1 The point of interest is not that a 
 man may possess both, but rather that they are 
 not simultaneously operative. 
 
 But despite all his manifest interest in the 
 phenomenal world, Browning, in this, his first 
 poem, is to be found groping for what the 
 philosopher calls the noumenal, for that which 
 lies behind the manifold of sense : 
 
 " I cannot chain my soul, it will not rest 
 In its clay prison, this most narrow sphere; 
 It has strange powers and feelings and desires, 
 Which I cannot account for nor explain, 
 But which I stifle not, being bound to trust 
 All feelings equally, to hear all sides ; 
 Yet I cannot indulge them, and they live 
 Referring to some state or life unknown."* 
 
 In a similar verse he writes : 
 
 11 ... I know this earth is not my sphere 
 For I cannot so narrow me, but that 
 I still exceed it."* 
 
 Still more definitely he admits the disparity 
 
 141 The Mystics of Islam," page 7. By Reynold A. 
 Nicholson, Litt.D. 
 
 a " The Works of Robert Browning " (edition of 1886), 
 vol. i., page 24. 
 
 td., vol. i., page 26. 
 
120 a STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 between sensible and extra-sensible apprehen- 
 sions : 
 
 " There's some vile juggle with my reason here; 
 I feel I but explain to my own loss. 
 These impulses; they live no less the same." 1 
 
 The strife thickens ; the puzzle grows : 
 
 "... I cannot be immortal, nor taste all. 
 
 God, where does this tend these struggling aims? 
 What would I have? What is this ' sleep ' which 
 
 seems 
 
 To bound all ? Can there be a ' waking ' point 
 Of crowning life ? The soul would never rule ; 
 It would be first in all things; it would have 
 Its utmost pleasure filled, but, that complete 
 Commanding, for commanding, sickens it." a 
 
 And then, at last, come the lines of climax : 
 
 " My God, my God, let me for once look on Thee, 
 As though naught else existed, we alone ! 
 And as creation crumbles, my soul's spark 
 Expands till I can say, even from myself, 
 
 1 need Thee, and I feel Thee, and I love Thee." 1 
 
 This last passage is interesting on account of 
 Browning's obvious reference to that which Dr 
 Inge has called " the curious doctrine which we 
 find in the Mystics of the Middle Ages, that there 
 is * at the apex of the mind ' a spark which is 
 consubstantial with the uncreated ground of the 
 Diety." 4 It is not the only time that Browning 
 uses this word which we find in Ruysbroeck, 
 
 1 " The Works of Robert Bro^wning," vol. i., page 27. 
 
 * Ibid., vol. i., page 32. 
 
 ' Ibid., vol. i., page 33. 
 
 4 " Bampton Lectures," page 7. By W. R. Inge, D.D. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 121 
 
 Eckhart, and other Mystics. As Dr Inge re- 
 minds us, the early poem " Any Wife to Any 
 Husband " contains these lines: 
 
 " And 'twould not be because my eye grew dim, 
 Thou couldst not find the love there, thanks to Him 
 Who never is dishonoured in the spark 
 He gave us from His fire of fires, and bade 
 Remember whence it sprang, nor be afraid 
 While that burns on, though all the rest grow dark." 
 
 One can hardly help saying that all that is 
 " curious " in the matter is that Dr Inge should 
 have interpreted the doctrine in so literal a sort 
 of fashion as he apparently does. As Eckhart 
 has been mentioned, it may not be without 
 interest, while we are considering this question of 
 vision, to recall his daring image in his sermon, 
 " True Hearing," where he says, " The eye with 
 which I see God is the same with which God sees 
 me. My eye and God's eye is one eye, and 
 one sight, and one knowledge, and one love "; 
 one may compare this with a saying of Dhu 
 '1 Nun, of Egypt, where the latter, speaking of 
 "gnostics," says: "They move as God causes 
 them to move, and their words are the words of 
 God which roll upon their tongues, and their 
 sight is the sight of God which has entered their 
 eyes." 1 
 
 Eckhart would seem to have wandered beyond 
 the limits of orthodoxy ; while of the similar 
 Oriental doctrine Dr Nicholson asks pertinently : 
 " Surely a God Who is all in all can have no 
 
 1 " The Mystics of Islam," page 79. By Dr R. A. 
 Nicholson. 
 
122 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 reason for thus revealing Himself : why should 
 the One pass over into the many? ni The snare 
 of pantheism has ever been its tendency to 
 forget the transcendence by over-emphasising 
 the immanence. The balance is kept truly by 
 Ruysbroeck in the following passage: "Nous 
 avons done tous au-dessus de notre etre ere* 6 une 
 vie e'ternelle en Dieu, comme en notre cause 
 vivante qui nous a fait et cre'e's de rien ; mais 
 nous ne sommes pas Dieu et nous ne sommes pas 
 faits nous-memes. Nous ne sommes pas non 
 plus e'mane's de Dieu, selon la nature; mais 
 parceque Dieu nous a connus et voulus eternelle- 
 ment en lui-meme, il nous a fait, non par nature, 
 ni par necessite, mais dans la liberte* de son 
 vouloir. II connait d'ailleurs toute chose, et 
 tout ce qu'il veut il peut I'accomplir au ciel et 
 sur la terre. II est en nous lumiere et ve'rite' ; il 
 se montre au sommet de notre etre cre*e*, e* levant 
 notre pense*e en purete", notre esprit jusqu'a la 
 liberte* divine et notre entendement jusqu'a une 
 nudite" sans images. II nous e*claire de la sagesse 
 e'ternelle et il nous apprend a regarder et a 
 contempler sa richesse insondable." 2 
 
 But, to return to " Pauline," we find the poem 
 closing on the note of mystical satisfaction : 
 
 " No less I make an end in perfect joy, 
 
 For this song shall remain to tell for ever 
 That when I lost all hope of such a change 
 Suddenly beauty rose on me again." 
 
 1 " The Mystics of Islam," page 80. By Dr R. A. 
 Nicholson. 
 1 " Le Miroir du Salut Eternel," chapter xvii. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 123 
 
 Possibly three lines from a later poem may 
 elaborate and explain the meaning here which 
 Browning, fumbling somewhat after a phil- 
 osophy, already held and intended dimly the 
 well-known lines from the " Guardian Angel ": 
 
 " O world, as God has made it ! all is beauty : 
 And knowing this is love, and love is duty, 
 What further may be sought for or declared? " 
 
 This is still but a halting exposition, far 
 enough away from the fuller development in his 
 later work; but the two passages together show 
 the dawn of a thought, which grew mightily 
 as the years passed on. No one pretends that 
 " Pauline " contains Browning's best work. It 
 is sometimes dull ; here and there the verse halts 
 lamely. But although it has been overlooked 
 and surprisingly neglected, it does hold the 
 promise of the future. Possibly he, in his 
 whimsical fashion, summed up its deserved 
 criticism in that quaint French " note," which he 
 represents Pauline as adding to the work of her 
 " pauvre ami," and hazarding this judgment, 
 " Le mieux serait de bruler ceci, mais que 
 faire? " After all, there are things not perfect 
 full, if anyone will insist on it, of imperfections 
 which, for all that, we cannot find the heart or 
 the way to burn. 
 
 There is a further point of interest in this early 
 poem, viz. that the process of thought in it is 
 identical with that which obtains all through his 
 work. Surely that process is through the things 
 of sense to the matters of direct philosophic 
 
124 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 intuition, whence he attains at last to religious 
 mysticism. 
 
 Naturally it is to Paracelsus that the student 
 will turn next, to the Paracelsus whom Browning 
 created out of the legends and traditions clinging 
 round a man of the sixteenth century, a man 
 who, according to those, was little better than a 
 quack, though, under the poet's handling, he 
 comes to be a creature of rare and winning 
 appeal. It is interesting to find, close to the 
 beginning of the poem, a speech of Paracelsus 
 which recalls the passage which I quoted, in 
 proof of the intense quickness of Browning's 
 senses, from " Pauline " : 
 
 "... when Festus learns 
 
 That every common pleasure of the world 
 
 Affects me as himself : that I have just 
 
 As varied appetite for joy, derived 
 
 From common thing's, a stake in life, in short, 
 
 Like his . . . 
 
 He may convince himself that, this in view, 
 
 I shall act well advised." 
 
 It is a mistake which often is, though it never 
 should be, made, that the Mystic is either a 
 mooning sentimentalist given over to the flimsi- 
 est feeling, or else a dullard, deaf, blind, and 
 dense to the attractions of this palpable world, 
 who therefore falls back upon a figment of his 
 imagination, which he chooses to call direct 
 knowledge of truth, immediate converse with 
 God. In one of Meister Eckhart's " Sermons 5J1 
 a passage occurs which contains his view of the 
 nature of renunciation and its results: "If the 
 Nearness of the Kingdom." 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 125 
 
 soul is to know God it must forget itself and lose 
 itself. . . . When it has lost itself and every- 
 thing in God, it finds itself again in God when 
 it attains to the knowledge of Him, and it finds 
 also everything which it had abandoned complete 
 in God." Another aspect of this doctrine is 
 conveyed in the same sermon in the terse phrase, 
 " He knows God rightly who knows Him 
 everywhere." 
 
 At the outset Paracelsus is far enough from 
 Eckhart's conditions; yet to bring him to these 
 he need forgo nothing which he already 
 possesses; he need, for instance, not dull his 
 acute sense of the outer world ; only the operation 
 of that sense need be changed : individuality is 
 after all an element in unity as the one falls 
 into his proper place among the many. 
 
 " The man who abides in God's love must be 
 dead to himself and all created things, and 
 regard himself as a mere unit among a thousand 
 millions. Such a man must renounce himself 
 and all the world. Supposing a man possessed 
 all the world, and gave it back to God intact just 
 as he received it, God would give him back all the 
 world and everlasting life to boot"; so spoke 
 Eckhart in his sermon on " True Hearing." 
 In a lower key certainly, but still quite evidently, 
 Browning preaches the same truth when he 
 speaks of 
 
 "... the race of Man 
 
 That receives life in parts to live in a whole 
 And grow here according- to God's plan." 1 
 
 14 'Old Pictures in Florence." 
 
126 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 It is somewhat anticipating the work of tracing 
 Browning's unfolding mysticism, yet this seems 
 the best place to point out that in the poem 
 called " Reverie," a poem which rendered 
 " Asolando," the last volume he ever wrote, 
 remarkable, he develops much more fully this 
 doctrine of the one and the many : 
 
 " Somewhere, below, above, 
 
 Shall a day dawn 'this I know 
 When Power, which vainly strove 
 
 My weakness to overthrow, 
 Shall triumph. I breathe, I move, 
 
 " I truly am, at last! 
 
 For a veil is real between 
 Me and the truth which passed 
 
 Fitful, half-guessed, half-seen, 
 Grasped at not gained, held fast. 
 
 " I for my race and me 
 
 Shall apprehend life's law : 
 In the legend of man shall see 
 
 Writ large what small I saw 
 In my life ; tale: both agree." 
 
 In the midst of the first act of " Paracelsus " 
 we only catch a glimpse of his aim : 
 
 " And I smiled as one never smiles but once, 
 Then first discovering my own aim's extent, 
 Which sought to comprehend the works of God, 
 And God Himself and all God's intercourse 
 With the human mind ; I understood, no less, 
 My fellows' studies, whose true worth I saw, 
 But smiled not, well aware Who stood by me. 
 And softer came the voice ' There is a way : 
 Tis hard for flesh to tread therein, imbued 
 With frailty hopeless, if indulgence first 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 127 
 
 Have ripened inborn germs of sin to strength : 
 Wilt thiou adventure for My sake and man's, 
 Apart from all reward ? ' And last it breathed, 
 ' Be happy, My good soldier : I am by thee, 
 Be sure, even to the end ! ' I answered not 
 Knowing Him. As He spoke, I was endued 
 With comprehension., and a steadfast will, 
 And when He ceased, my brow was sealed His own." 
 
 Then in response to this most searching appeal 
 comes Paracelsus 's resolve : 
 
 " . . . I go to prove my soul ! 
 I see my way as birds their trackless way. 
 I shall arrive ! What time, what circuit first, 
 I ask not : but unless God send His hail 
 Or blinding fire-balls, sleet or stifling snow, 
 In some time, His good time, I shall arrive; 
 He guides me and the bird. In His good time ! " 
 
 Here, surely, is the Mystic's immediate vision : 
 " I see my way as birds their trackless way." 
 
 How better could human words express the 
 pursuit of attainment by non-sensible means? 
 Then follows the speech, which shows clearly that 
 Paracelsus, at any rate in some moods, must be 
 reckoned among the Mystics, though here it is a 
 matter of method rather than of aim. Speaking 
 of the sages, of the seekers after truth who have 
 preceded him, he cries: 
 
 " No ! I reject and spurn them utterly 
 And all they teach. Shall I sit beside 
 Their dry wells, with a white lip and filmed eye, 
 While in the distance, heaven is blue above 
 Mountains where sleep the unsunned tarns." 
 
 The gap between true and false mysticism 
 
128 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 yawns, however, at once. Paracelsus utters the 
 haughty protest : 
 
 " . . . If I can serve mankind 
 'Tis well, but there our intercourse must end, 
 I never will be served by those I serve." 
 
 As quick as thought Festus, the profounder 
 Mystic of the two, at any rate for the moment, 
 answers in the true vein : 
 
 " Look well to this; here is a plague-spot, here, 
 Disguise it how you may ! 'Tis true, you utter 
 This scorn while by our side and loving us : 
 'Tis but a spot as yet ; but it will break 
 Into a hideous blotch if overlooked. 
 How can that course be safe which from the first 
 Produces carelessness to human love? " 
 
 And again : 
 
 " But do not cut yourself from human weal, 
 
 '. . . No, 
 There are strange punishments for such." 
 
 The aim of Paracelsus here, though the 
 method falls short, is the Mystic's : and his view 
 of the nature of truth is, in a sense, mystical. 
 The wonderful passage towards the close of the 
 first book quite clearly points to non-sensible 
 apprehension of truth, though in expression, 
 while it suggests, it still fails to reach such a 
 doctrine as Eckhart's: "Whoso will hear the 
 wisdom of the Father must dwell deep, and abide 
 at home, and be at unity with himself >u 
 
 11 Truth is within; ourselves : it takes no rise 
 From outward things, whate'er you may believe. 
 
 1 Meister Eckhart's " Sermons "True Hearing. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 129 
 
 There is an inmost centre in us all, 
 Where truth abides in fulness; and around, 
 Wall upon wall, the gross flesh hems it in, 
 This perfect clear perception which is truth, 
 A baffling- and perverting carnal mesh, 
 Blinds it, and makes all error : and to KNOW 
 Rather consists in opening 1 out a way 
 Whence the imprisoned splendour may escape, 
 Than in effecting entry for a light 
 Supposed to be without." 
 
 This inmost centre is surely of the same nature 
 as Eckhart's spark and Ruysbroeck's flame, at 
 the apex of the soul, both of which are consub- 
 stantial with the Deity. The meeting-place of 
 Divine and human has had many names in the 
 mouths of the Mystics, but it can have only one 
 nature. In Book II there are lines suggesting 
 that in special hours of illumination Paracelsus 
 really did attain, even though he fell back again 
 and again : 
 
 " Some one truth would dimly beacon me 
 From mountains rough with pines, and flit and wink 
 O'er dazzling wastes of frozen snow, and tremble 
 Into assured light in some branching mine 
 Where ripens, swathed in fire, the liquid gold 
 And all the beauty, all the wonder fell 
 On either side the truth, as its mere robe; 
 I see the robe now then I saw the form." 
 
 Further, like other Mystics, Paracelsus insists 
 that the method of acquisition is direct, intuitive ; 
 there must be no bar, no intermediary between 
 him who apprehends and that which is appre- 
 hended : 
 
 " I can abjure so well the idle arts 
 These pedants strive to learn and teach ; Black Arts, 
 
 I 
 
130 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 Great Works, the Secret and Sublime, forsooth 
 Let others prize; too intimate a tie 
 Connects me with our God ! " 
 
 His aim transcends, we here perceive, the 
 acquisition of mere philosophic, of mere natural, 
 truth ; it is these, but surrounded, completed, by 
 divine things, which he covets; he is seeking the 
 whole globe of truth: 
 
 " God helping", God directing" everywhere, 
 So that the earth shall yield her secrets up." 
 
 Indeed, only one thing is lacking, but it happens 
 to be the most important of all : that which Dr 
 Inge called " the Mystic's minor premise," viz. 
 the conviction that love is the atmosphere wherein 
 alone direct, mystical knowledge can develop. 
 This doctrine of the necessity, the all-essential- 
 ness, of love, Browning puts forcibly into the 
 mouth of Festus. But it fails to convince 
 Paracelsus, who has far to go, and failure, sore 
 and recurring, to encounter for, as Eckhart 
 says, " Sorrow is the root of all virtue JJ1 or ever 
 he perceives how far he is surpassed by the lover- 
 poet, Aprile. A portion of the very long passage 
 in the second book, wherein the slow breaking- 
 in of light on Paracelsus is portrayed, will recall 
 the situation to all who know the poem. Aprile 
 is speaking : 
 
 " I would love infinitely, and be loved. 
 
 . . . nay, listen ! 
 
 Knowing" ourselves, our world, our task so great, 
 Our time so brief, 'tis clear if we refuse 
 
 l " Sermons "Morality. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 131 
 
 The means so limited, the tools so rude 
 To execute our purpose, life will fleet, 
 And we shall fade and leave our task undone. 
 We will be wise in time. 
 
 Could I retain one strain of all the psalm 
 
 Of the angels, one word of the fiat of God, 
 
 To let my followers know what such things are ! 
 
 I would adventure nobly for their sakes : 
 
 When nights were still, and still the moaning sea, 
 
 And far away I could descry the land 
 
 Whence I departed, whither I return, 
 
 I would dispart the waves, and stand once more 
 
 At home, and load my bark, and hasten back, 
 
 And fling my gains to them, worthless or true. 
 
 1 Friends,' I would say, ' I went far, far for them.' 
 
 Thus for my higher loves, arid thus even weakness 
 
 Would win me honour. But not these alone 
 
 Should claim my care; for common life, its wants 
 
 And ways, would I set forth in beauteous hues; 
 
 The lowest hind should not possess a hope, 
 
 A fear, but I'd be by him, saying better 
 
 Than he his own heart's language. I would live 
 
 For ever in the thoughts I thus explored, 
 
 As a discoverer's memory is attached 
 
 To all he finds." 
 
 This excerpt from a long passage may serve 
 to convey the poet's pleading; and at last, as 
 he pleads, the truth of his own failure, and the 
 disastrous depth and extent of the tragedy of 
 that failure, burst on Paracelsus, and he cries: 
 
 " Love me, henceforth, Aprile, while I learn 
 To love ; and merciful God, forgive us both ! 
 We wake at length from weary dreams; but both 
 Have slept in fairyland : though dark and drear 
 Appears the world before us, we no less 
 
132 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 Wake with our wrists and ankles jewelled still. 
 I too have sought to KNOW as thou to LOVE 
 Excluding love as thou refusedst knowledge. 
 Still, thou hast beauty, and I, power. We wake. 
 
 Die not, Aprile ! we must never part. 
 
 Are we not halves of one dissevered world, 
 
 Whom this strange chance unites once more? Part? 
 
 Never! 
 
 Till thou the lover, know ; and I, the knower, 
 Love until both are saved." 
 
 The true mystical doctrine in its full develop- 
 ment is not here ; but Paracelsus is groping after 
 it as he stumbles up the steep ascent of attain- 
 ment. More clearly in " Easter Day," written 
 fifteen years later than " Paracelsus," Brown- 
 ing supplies " the Mystic's minor premise," 
 when he reminds us of the scheme according to 
 which God planned man's world: 
 
 " He Who in all His work below 
 Adapted to the needs of man, 
 Made love the basis of the plan," 
 
 and finally, when after the vision 
 
 " I knew Him through that dread disguise 
 As the whole God within His eyes 
 Embraced me," 
 
 the humbled learner of the meaning of " Easter 
 Day " confesses at last: 
 
 " And so I live, you see, 
 
 Go through the world, try, prove, reject, 
 
 Prefer, still struggling to effect 
 
 My warfare, happy that I can 
 
 Be crowned and thwarted like a man, 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 133 
 
 Not left, in God's contempt, apart, 
 With ghastly smooth life, dead at heart, 
 Tame in earth's paddock as her prize." 
 
 The wistful lines in " Ferishtah's Fancies," 
 written thirty-four years after " Easter Day," 
 shed light on the uphill path which lies before 
 humanity : 
 
 "... Man's part 
 
 Is plain to send love forth astray, perhaps; 
 No matter, he has done his part." 
 
 Even if we think Browning's content with the 
 faulty " doing" a little over-marked, we can- 
 not cavil at his view of the nature of the task. 
 No other English poet has surpassed, perhaps 
 no other has equalled, his conviction of the all- 
 essentialness of love. 
 
 The student of English mysticism will remem- 
 ber, again, that Richard Rolle, in " The 
 Form of Perfect Living," wrote " Truth may be 
 without love, but it cannot help without it." 
 
 In a dreamy age, over-given to posing, we 
 shall do well to recollect that Browning's idea of 
 love is not of any dream of ease : 
 
 11 There is a way, 'tis hard for flesh to tread therein," 
 
 said the minatory voice to Paracelsus long 
 before he came, with Aprile's help, to under- 
 stand the inner significance of the warning. And 
 elsewhere, Browning tells us that 
 
 " When pain ends, gain ends too," 1 
 a ringing echo of Blaise Pascal's sad phrase: 
 1 " A Death in the Desert." 
 
134 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 " Pour marquer tou jours qu'on ne pouvait trou- 
 ver la joie que par I'amertume " that doctrine 
 so unpalatable, so irrevocably true. 
 
 The love of our fellows, of those whom 
 Richard Rolle called " our even-Christians," 
 which Festus pressed on Paracelsus as the 
 necessary prelude to that love, which in the 
 mystical view is the avenue to knowledge of 
 the truth, of God: " If any man wills to do His 
 Will, he shall know of the doctrine " this 
 way of love is never described as a path of ease 
 
 11 Primrosed and hung with shade." 
 
 S. John's words, so strangely neglected by so 
 many, plainly set forth the fact that the plunge 
 must be made headlong, at all costs. We shall 
 not know first ; it is no bargain of which we know 
 the other side. We must surrender to know. 
 To most men, full whether their natural abili- 
 ties be great or small of intellectual self-suffici- 
 ency; possessed, obsessed by the "rights of 
 reason," it is just that child-like yielding which 
 seems so intolerable. 
 
 "The soul went forth," says S. John of the 
 Cross, " led of God, through love of Him only, 
 and with that love inflamed, in the dark night, 
 which is the privation of, and purgation from, 
 all sensual desires in all outward things of this 
 world, all the pleasures of the flesh, and all the 
 satisfactions of the will." 1 
 
 l " Ascent of Mount Carmel," Book I., chapter i., 
 section 3. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 135 
 
 As we hear of discourses, or read books and 
 articles assuring us that the Catholic Faith must 
 be restated " in terms of modern thought," that 
 the " modern man must have his reason satis- 
 fied," one wonders if that pregnant sentence of 
 the Apostle of Love has really no meaning for 
 these learned divines: "If any man wills to do 
 His Will, he shall know of the doctrine." For 
 surely there is no half-way house? It is either 
 supreme Wisdom or nonsense. We know, or if 
 we choose to take the trouble we can know, which 
 the Saints found. If sinners make the great 
 venture they do not find it otherwise, unless 
 they expect an immediate discovery, and grow- 
 ing impatient, give up. So once more we learn 
 that the Mystic's path is not one of easy wool- 
 gathering, but is that hardest of all emprises, 
 the total surrender of self, of self's will for Love's 
 high sake. Possibly those who object most to 
 the stern warnings of the symbol of St Athan- 
 asius might ponder on the fact that salvation 
 is there connected not with the province of 
 intellect first and foremost, but with that of 
 will. 
 
 Quicunque vult how well we know those 
 words. The same lesson lurks in the closing 
 warning: " Et qui bona egerunt, ibunt in vitam 
 asternum : qui vero mala in ignem seternum." 
 Perhaps a remark of George Tyrrell may throw 
 light on this particular function of love. First, 
 he reminds us that " love itself is a contemplative 
 act, complacentia boni a gazing with delight 
 upon the fair and the true; the mind's embrace 
 
136 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 of that which is its food and eternal life " j 1 and 
 secondly, that "all love is mystical in that it 
 refuses the exact analysis of reason, which, with- 
 out contradicting, it ineffably transcends." 2 
 
 Surely every human being who has ever really 
 loved anybody or anything (omitting, of course, 
 self-love), in which category probably we are 
 all included, will admit, if he think seriously 
 about the question, that this last proposition is 
 most certainly true : that love does, as a matter 
 of simple, everyday fact, as well as a matter of 
 heavenly feeling, " refuse the exact analysis of 
 reason which, without contradicting, it ineffably 
 transcends." If a person can be brought thus 
 far, and can then proceed to grasp the " Mystic's 
 minor premise," that love is the atmosphere 
 wherein real knowledge develops, then he will 
 see that he need not join the " many " to whom, 
 as Father Tyrrell remarked, " mysticism means 
 simply an abandonment of all attempt to recon- 
 cile the * religious sentiment ' with intelligent 
 thought; a deliberate yielding of oneself a 
 prey to any unchecked, unverifiable fancy or 
 speculation which seems to interpret the vague 
 yearning of the soul after God." 3 Were the 
 " many " justified in that so unflattering opinion, 
 it is quite evident that the long list of men 
 claimed by Baron von Hiigel as being of mysti- 
 cal tendency, could never have been drawn up. 
 Some time had to elapse still before Browning 
 would put forth the full strength of his mysti- 
 
 1 " Faith of the Millions," page 274. 
 
 8 Ibid., page 283. 3 Ibid., page 279. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 137 
 
 cism, for though the sweep of thought in 
 " Paracelsus " (which appeared in 1835) is wider 
 and deeper, yet it, too, shows that preponder- 
 ance of philosophic insight, tinged with reli- 
 gious, which was conspicuous in " Pauline " two 
 years before. As we have seen, " Easter Day " 
 (whose date is 1850) showed the tide to be run- 
 ning fuller; and then his more developed view 
 appears fourteen years later still in that most 
 characteristic and profound poem " A Death in 
 the Desert." There at last we find such pas- 
 sages as : 
 
 11 These (i.e. the * ashes ' of S. John's brains) 
 these make effort on the last o' the flesh, 
 Trying- to taste again the truth of things, 
 (He smiled) their very superficial truth ; 
 As that ye are my sons, that it is long- 
 Since James and Peter had release by death. 
 
 What if the truth broke on me from above 
 As once and oft-times? Such might hap again: 
 Doubtlessly He might stand in presence here, 
 With head wool-white, eyes, flame, and feet like 
 
 brass, 
 The sword and the seven stars, as I have seen " 
 
 or again, and far more " intuitive " than any- 
 thing which has been, so far, quoted: 
 
 "... how shall I assure them? Can they share 
 They, who have flesh, a veil of youth and strength 
 About each spirit, that needs must bide its time, 
 Living and learning still as years assist 
 Which wear the thickness thin, and let man see 
 With me, who hardly am withheld at all, 
 But shudderingly, scarce a shred between, 
 
138 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 Lie bare to the universal prick of light ? 
 Is it for nothing we grow old and weak, 
 We whom God loves? When pain ends, gain ends 
 too." 
 
 It is perhaps interesting to remember that 
 S. Augustine in his Homilies on the Gospel of 
 S. John, speaks of him as the apostle who 
 "symbolises the life of sight in Heaven. " Dr 
 Gore quotes the whole passage, which contains 
 an interesting comparison of the special func- 
 tions of S. Peter and S. John. The opening 
 sentence, which is as follows, is sufficient to 
 suggest S. Augustine's line of thought: " Two 
 states of life, the life of faith on earth, and the 
 life of sight in Heaven, were symbolised by 
 Peter and John, the one by the one, the other 
 by the other; but in this life they both of them 
 walked for a time by faith (which Peter repre- 
 sents), and the other sight (which John repre- 
 sents) they shall both of them enjoy eternally." 1 
 
 To much this same period of the poet's thought 
 belong those lines which in " The Ring and the 
 Book " he puts into the mouth of Pope Inno- 
 cent XII.: 
 
 " Yet my poor spark had for Its source the sun ; 
 Thither I sent the great looks which compel 
 Light from its fount, or seen or else surmised, 
 Remembered or divined, as mere man may : 
 I know just so, not otherwise." 
 
 Surely here at last Browning definitely names 
 
 l<< Roman Catholic Claims," quoted pages 81, 82. 
 By the Rt. Rev. C. Gore, D.D. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 139 
 
 the two methods of knowing: the discursive, the 
 intuitive; the rational, the mystical: 
 
 " Seen or else surmised, 
 Remembered or divined." 
 
 Yet once again he insists on the same distinc- 
 tion in the way of knowledge when the Pope 
 asks: 
 
 " . . . so my heart be struck 
 What care I by God's gloved hand or the bare? " 
 
 which is an expression of the antithesis con- 
 veyed by the words seen, divined, and surmised, 
 remembered. 
 
 It will be remembered that the claim which 
 Baron von Hugel made for Browning was the 
 possession of a " mystical element.*' In fact, he 
 was a Mystic only in some moods. When he sets 
 to work to consider definitely and analyse man's 
 method of acquiring knowledge, he is, at times, 
 capable of avoiding, perhaps of deliberately 
 setting aside, every trace of mysticism. There is 
 a passage in " The Ring and the Book " which 
 is a very clear example : 
 
 " Man's mind, what is it but a convex glass 
 Wherein are gathered all the scattered points 
 Picked out of the immensity of sky 
 To reunite there, be our heaven for earth, 
 Our known unknown, our God revealed to man." 
 
 Some lines from " A Death in the Desert'* 
 may well be compared with the above passages, 
 lines which, besides being remarkable in them- 
 selves, are certainly not less so in this poem 
 
140 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 where mysticism is bound up, one might have 
 thought inseparably, in the very heart of its 
 thought. Yet here Browning can describe the 
 growth of human knowledge without so much 
 as a hint of its possible mystical, intuitive 
 method : 
 
 " First, like the brute, obliged by facts to learn, 
 Next, as man may, obliged by his own mind, 
 Bent, habit, nature, knowledge turned to law, 
 God's gift was that man should conceive of truth, 
 And yearn to gain it, catching at mistake 
 As midway help till he reach fact indeed." 
 
 Here, quite plainly, are two of those religious 
 1 ' stages ' ' described by Baron von Hii gel : the 
 " child's " way by sense; the " youth's " way 
 by argument; 1 but the third, the mystical, the 
 intuitional, is omitted, unless anyone could in- 
 geniously twist it into the closing lines' vague 
 suggestion. 
 
 But while we realise these limitations, we must 
 remember that no student of Browning who 
 would understand his mysticism, partial though 
 it be, can afford to neglect altogether that jewel 
 of his later years, so far not considered here, 
 " Ferishtah's Fancies." At first sight " A Bean- 
 Stripe " may seem to be the completest possible 
 tribute to the material limits set to man's know- 
 ledge; the surest proof that he judges, and 
 must judge, by the illusions of sense, and 
 that " reality " ever escapes him. But its under- 
 current is the very opposite to all that. Rather, 
 
 l " The Mystical Element of Religion," Vol. I., chapter 
 ii., pages 50-53. 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 141 
 
 its burden is that man is misled by sense, still 
 more by reason, and only catches the glimmer 
 of truth by intuition. What but that can the 
 rare irony mean of? 
 
 " Palms furnish dates to eat, and leaves to shade 
 Maybe thatch huts with have another use 
 Than strikes the aphis," 
 
 that is, of course, in those moments when the 
 aphis trusts to his senses, and works up the 
 manifold of sense by reflection. In the " Pillar 
 at Sebsevar " Browning enunciates his mystical 
 view less equivocally. The opening lines 
 furnish its keynote: 
 
 " ' Knowledge deposed, then-! ' groaned whom that 
 
 most grieved' 
 As foolishest of all the company.*' 
 
 Then Ferishtah points to all-conquering power 
 behind " knowledge," to the Mystic's medium: 
 
 "... all I seem to know 
 Is I know nothing save that love I can 
 Boundlessly, endlessly." 
 
 And again, looking at it this time from another 
 angle, he cries: 
 
 "... knowledge means 
 Ever renewed assurance by defeat 
 That victory is somehow still to reach, 
 But love is victory, the prize itself : 
 Love trust to ! " 
 
 Once more: 
 
 " Wholly distrust thy knowledge, then; and trust 
 As wholly love allied to ignorance ! 
 There lies thy truth and safety. . . . 
 
142 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 So let us say not ' Since we know, we love,' 
 But rather, * Since we love, we know enough.' 
 
 . . . Once more then, Friend 
 (Whatever in those careless ears of thine 
 Withal I needs must round thee) knowledge doubt 
 Even wherein it seems demonstrable ! 
 Love in the claim for love, that's gratitude 
 For apprehended pleasure, nowise doubt ! 
 
 Finally comes the climax, convincing hammer- 
 stroke : 
 
 "... Consider well ! 
 Were knowledge all thy faculty, then God 
 Must be be ignored : love gains him by first leap." 
 
 Far removed as this high doctrine is from the 
 tentative gropings of the earlier poems, yet the 
 very fact of the gradual and traceable growth 
 of Browning's mystical apprehension avails to 
 prove Baron von Htigel's claim. Had he been 
 "a born Mystic," this development could not 
 have been so obvious. Browning is not one of 
 those great Mystics who " saw " from the first, 
 always, inerrantly. With all his marvellous 
 power of grasping points of view entirely alien 
 to his own a capacity for which, perhaps, he 
 has received too little credit he was fundamen- 
 tally of that rationalising, analysing spirit which 
 in itself is opposed to mysticism. He is a blend 
 of opposites; so it is quite true that he had a 
 mystical element that is all that need be claimed 
 here. 
 
 If Browning's mysticism were less ineradicably 
 ingrained than Wordsworth's, it was not so 
 
ROBERT BROWNING 143 
 
 entirely a power of seeing through external 
 phenomena to that which lies behind, and there- 
 fore possibly it was more really spiritual, 
 mystical. When he came to see, Browning 
 seemed to see "farther," if one might say so, 
 than even Wordsworth himself. 
 
 Possibly this obscure point may be cleared by 
 the suggestion that there is a difference, very 
 hard to render in words, and equally hard to 
 miss in feeling, between Wordsworth's apos- 
 trophe, not far removed, in spite of its beauty, 
 from pantheism : 
 
 " Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe ! 
 Thou soul that art the eternity of thought, 
 That givest to forms and images a breath 
 And everlasting motion "; 
 
 and that flame-lit, apocalyptic description of 
 S. John : 
 
 "... me, who hardly am withheld at all, 
 But shudderingly, scarce a shred between, 
 Lie bare to the universal prick of light." 
 
FRANCIS THOMPSON 
 
 WHEN we come to treat of Francis Thompson 
 we are in a region of greater certainty, of more 
 precise accuracy, and of more defined limitations. 
 His poetry, on non-secular matters, falls more 
 or less exactly into three divisions divisions 
 which, while they are not in themselves abso- 
 lutely mutually exclusive, rather become so in 
 his hands: poems religious, liturgical, and 
 mystical. The first two tend naturally to over- 
 lap ; but while a mystical poem must necessarily 
 contain a religious element, one which is reli- 
 gious or liturgical needs by no means be mysti- 
 cal. This point is surely worth making, for 
 there is a tendency nowadays to say every saint, 
 or holy person, is and must be a Mystic; nay, 
 more, we are dropping into the catch-phrase 
 attitude: " After all, we are all Mystics,'* 
 whereas the truth is that, after all we are not 
 all of us any one thing; and we ought never 
 to forget that mysticism, properly, denotes a 
 direct knowledge of spiritual matters. Now it is 
 possible it would be a miserable prospect for 
 some of us if it were not so for many of us to 
 attain holiness through following out the precepts 
 
 144 
 
FRANCIS THOMPSON 145 
 
 of GOD, given us through our Holy Church, 
 conforming our lives, slowly, painfully, toil- 
 somely to His Will, which Will is taught to us 
 preceptually, not by revelation directly to our 
 individual self. It is, in short, quite possible 
 to grow to be " good " without sharing in the 
 "visions" of mysticism proper. 
 
 Thompson, with true Catholic penetration, 
 perceived at once the vital importance and the 
 possible dangers of mysticism ; therefore, though 
 his first intention was to call one section of 
 his work " Mystical Poems," he deliberately 
 changed the title to " Poems of Sight and 
 Insight." So they were entitled in " New 
 Poems," which appeared during his life-time; 
 and so they remain in the definitive edition of his 
 works, issued by Mr Meynell in 1913. 
 
 Mysticism, the word if not the thing, has 
 become fashionable. The spread of a shallow 
 form of education, diffuse if neither deep nor 
 solidly based, has fostered this fashion. It is 
 idle to deplore the fact ; the more practical course 
 would be to make an attempt to persuade those 
 who trifle with it what it is they are really do- 
 ing. This Thompson clearly saw. Mr Everard 
 Meynell, in his " Life " of the poet, devotes the 
 opening pages of the tenth chapter to elucidating 
 Thompson's reasons for "wariness about the 
 word." There are indeed few pages in Mr 
 Meynell's book more suggestive and, if one may 
 say so, more convincing than those numbered 
 223 and 224, the pages which deal with the 
 delicate treading in holy places, characteristic of 
 
 K 
 
146 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 Thompson, as of all true Mystics a manner of 
 going so different from much that passes as 
 spiritual to-day. 
 
 It is not likely that the poet was acquainted, 
 nor perhaps his biographer, with an exposition 
 of the underlying principles of this matter, which 
 had been in the world some seventeen years when 
 he was born, which aroused a storm of indigna- 
 tion and misunderstanding on its publication, 1 
 and which, when and after that had subsided, has 
 fallen into an oblivion to be regretted ; an exposi- 
 tion which, had he known it, he surely would 
 have appreciated. I refer, of course, to Isaac 
 Williams' Tract, " On Reserve in Communicat- 
 ing Religious Knowledge." 
 
 If that pamphlet could be recovered and 
 disseminated among those who hold hazy and 
 facile views of Mysticism, it might do not a little 
 good. 
 
 There is, for instance, in the first paragraph of 
 Part II, the interesting statement, elaborated 
 with details concerning Aristotle, that " all 
 moralists" (both pagan and Christian) "con- 
 sider vice and virtue as states of darkness and 
 light." 1 
 
 The opening words of the Tract put the 
 circumstances of illumination so clearly that 
 modern minds inclined to meander emotionally 
 might do worse than ponder them : " The object 
 of the present inquiry is to ascertain whether 
 
 1 Vide "The Oxford Movement," pages 67, 229. By 
 R. W. Church. 
 a Tract, Ixxx. 34. 
 
FRANCIS THOMPSON 147 
 
 there is not in GOD'S dealings with mankind a 
 very remarkable holding back of sacred and 
 important truths, as if the knowledge of them 
 were injurious to persons unworthy of them." 
 
 The plain inference is that fitness, which surely 
 must include purity and love, must precede 
 illumination ; that it is no reward of all and 
 sundry who think to obtain it by mere pleasant 
 " feeling " ; but that: 
 
 " A battle's to fight ere the guerdon be gained, 
 The reward of it all." 
 
 This elementary fact is, in these days of increas- 
 ing ease, too often forgotten. That to attain the 
 state in which illumination can become possible 
 is not a business of sentimentalising sloppily, Mr 
 Williams urged by quotations from writers as 
 dissimilar as Bishop Butler and Aristotle. He 
 observes that the former taught " that going over 
 the theories of religion has the effect of harden- 
 ing the heart'': of the latter he writes " And 
 Aristotle had long before observed that the 
 reason why persons did not improve in virtue 
 was that they have recourse to theory and words 
 to persuade themselves that they are good, and 
 so do not labour after internal habits." 1 
 
 More acutely penetrating still is the paragraph 2 
 headed: " That God punishes with blindness 
 those who approach sacred truths with a specu- 
 lative mind," which recalls the phrase of Thomas 
 
 1 Tract, Ixxx. 80. 
 8 Ibid., Ixxx. 45-50. 
 
i 4 8 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 & Kempis in the last chapter of the " Imitation," 
 a chapter which opens with the tremendous 
 words: " Cavendum est tibi a curiosa et inutili 
 perscrutatione huius profundissime sacramenti, 
 si non vis in dubitationis profundum submergi. 
 . . . Plus valet Deus operari quam homo intel- 
 legere potest." 
 
 A view superficially somewhat unlike, but 
 fundamentally the same, is to be found in 
 Coventry Patmore's stanzas : 
 
 " Love blabb'd of is a great decline; 
 
 A careless word unsanctions sense ; 
 But he who casts Heaven's truth to swine 
 Consummates all incontinence. 
 
 " Not to unveil before the gaze 
 Of an imperfect sympathy 
 In aught we are, is the sweet praise 
 And main sum of modesty." 1 
 
 In " Religio Pcetae," a book prized by 
 Thompson, Mr Patmore wrote of reserve from yet 
 another angle of vision: "It is the nature of 
 man to believe the more because another believes, 
 and to derive additional knowledge from 
 another's mode of knowing. But how shall 
 such testimony be conveyed without betraying 
 knowledge which often cannot be attempted to 
 be spoken without profanation by and peril to 
 the ignorant, except in enigmas which are clear 
 to those who know, but hopelessly dark to those 
 
 1 " Collected Poems of Coventry Patmore," page 66. 
 
FRANCIS THOMPSON 149 
 
 who do not." 1 It is wise to recollect further 
 that Patmore insisted on a quite different point, 
 one which must have appealed to Thompson, 
 when he spoke of "a sort of interior sanctity 
 which dares to see and confess to itself that it 
 sees, though its vision should place it in a 
 minority of one." 2 Perhaps it will always 
 puzzle the upholders of thorough-going private 
 judgment that those who bow willingly to lawful 
 authority can yet be so positive as to visions. 
 But surely that is because they confuse the root 
 difference between discursive reasoning and in- 
 tuitive knowledge. 
 
 Finally, when we have realised the necessity 
 for reserve, the wicked folly of casting pearls 
 before swine, we must recollect that all these 
 matters are comparative : that they are changed 
 by era, place, circumstances, and perhaps most 
 of all by race. What seems reticence to one is 
 agonising exposure of inner mysteries to an- 
 other; what appears flamboyant exaggeration 
 to this man looks pale and thin to that. 
 
 Speaking of the fundamentals of the faith, 
 Isaac Williams wrote: " If we attempt to arrive 
 at any knowledge of them by speculation, or by 
 any other mode but that of practical obedience, 
 that knowledge is withheld, and we are punished 
 for the attempt." 3 Grave and solemn words 
 indeed; yet they are but an elaboration of 
 Our Lord's own promise which must ever 
 
 Pcetae," essay iii. 
 2 Ibid., Essay xiii. 
 8 Tract, Ixxx. 45. 
 
ISO A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 be the Mystic's Magna Carta: "If any man 
 wills to do His will, he shall know of the 
 doctrine." 1 
 
 Would that all those who take so lightly 
 on their lips the words mysticism and mystical 
 could bring themselves to ponder on this, the 
 price of knowledge, which is obedience. We 
 should hear no more of the shallow blasphemy 
 of being " above all churches and sacraments " 
 a mood which perhaps fancies it is using a 
 phrase of S. Augustine, for he once spoke 2 of 
 a love which " supersedes all the sacraments 
 nor of similar slightings of the authority of the 
 Mystical Body of Christ, the One Holy Catholic 
 and Apostolic Church. 
 
 It is perhaps justifiable to quote one passage 
 from Mr Meynell's exposition of Thompson's 
 standpoint with regard to mysticism : " That ' to 
 the poet life is full of visions, to the Mystic it is 
 one vision ' 3 was the double rule of Francis 
 Thompson's practice. Having regarded the 
 visions and set them down, he would, in another 
 capacity, call them in." (Surely this last sen- 
 tence contains a metaphor precisely showing the 
 nature of Thompson's mysticism as related to 
 his purely poetic view of things?) " The vision 
 enfolded them all. Thus, not long after it was 
 written, he cancels even the ' Orient Ode,' and 
 recants * his bright sciential idolatry,' even 
 though he had religiously adapted it to the 
 
 1 S. John, vii. 17. 
 
 a Quoted by Mr Patmore " Religio Poetas," essay vii. 
 
 * Mr Albert Cock in the " Dublin Review." 
 
FRANCIS THOMPSON 151 
 
 greater glory of God before it was half confessed. 
 The ' Anthem of Earth ' and the ' Ode to the 
 Setting Sun ' would also come under the censor- 
 ship of his anxious orthodoxy, to be in part 
 condemned. What profiteth it a man, he asks in 
 effect, if he gain the whole sun but lose the true 
 Orient Christ ? m 
 
 This is not the place to discuss the relations 
 which obtained between Patmore's poetry and 
 Thompson's, or, more properly speaking, be- 
 tween their two modes of thought. But perhaps 
 one or two points may be noted. The most 
 casual reader will notice their common use of 
 Latinisms ; e.g. if anyone acquainted with both 
 poets chanced in an anthology upon the follow- 
 ing lines : 
 
 " Intend thine eye 
 
 Into the dim and undisccver'd sky," 
 
 and had not met them before, or had forgotten 
 them, he might be puzzled to which of the two 
 to assign them. Even here there is a difference: 
 for in Patmore's verse we seem to see a predom- 
 inance of the scholar's taste and percipience, 
 while in Thompson's Latinised diction we meet 
 rather the artist's love of colour, the musician's 
 craving for sound. 
 
 Far more important than this, from the mere 
 point of view of words, the medium in which 
 they worked, is the fact that Patmore led the 
 way, and Thompson followed in it, for bringing 
 
 *" Life of Francis Thompson," page 201. By Everard 
 Meynell. 
 
152 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 new sound values into English verse. Surely no 
 other poet has surpassed either of them in their 
 delicate use of what one may call the vowel-power 
 of English. But not only that; they had, both 
 of them, a most unusual aptitude for making the 
 utmost of consonantal sounds. In Thompson's 
 characteristic lines : 
 
 " The rains thereon that drip 
 Perturb 
 With drip acerb 
 
 " My subtly answering soul," 1 
 
 there is an echo of the tense, bitter-sweet 
 acuity of Gregorio Allegri's " Miserere " music. 
 Much of Thompson's verse has the same relation 
 to what we may call ordinary poetic language 
 as the smell of chrysanthemums bears to the 
 fragrance of summer flowers. But to turn from 
 form to matter, and particularly to the matter 
 of the " Poems of Sight and Insight." Mr 
 Meynell claims a close kinship between the 
 two poets ; he goes so far as to write : ' * Their 
 thoughts chimed to the same stroke of metre and 
 rhyme ; for each of the mystical poems may 
 be found suggestions in Patmore." 2 Yet one 
 reader of both has wondered whether this last 
 sentence be really true, and that notwithstanding 
 the fact that Mr Meynell 's comparison of the 
 4 ' Dread of Height" to two passages in Pat- 
 
 lu Poems of Francis Thompson," vol. i., page 134. 
 8 " Life," page 220. 
 
FRANCIS THOMPSON 153 
 
 could have found. 1 Surely the parallelism be- 
 tween Patmore's 
 
 " For dreadful truth it is that men 
 Forget the heavens from whence they fall," 2 
 
 and Thompson's 
 
 " For low they fall whose fall is from the sky," 9 
 
 is most remarkable. 
 
 Perhaps the line which Patmore wrote to 
 Thompson in August, 1895, had slipped from 
 Mr Meynell's mind: "No one can really see 
 anything but his own vision." There was 
 close kinship between them, yet we know that 
 " Religio Pceta?," for example, made Thompson 
 hesitate until Father Anselm assured him of 
 Patmore's orthodoxy. Everyone who is ac- 
 quainted with the latter 's poetry and prose knows 
 how all through both he insisted again and again 
 on his theory that human love is a type of, and 
 an actual way to, the love of the creature for 
 the Creator, thus perhaps, as some may think, 
 turning round the teaching of S. John the 
 Divine. 4 
 
 Now of Thompson Mr Meynell writes the strik- 
 ing and surely accurate sentence: "It is within 
 forbidden degrees if it cannot be referred back 
 to Divine Love." 5 Thompson himself wrote 
 
 '"Life," page 220. 
 
 3 " Collected Poems " of Coventry Patmore, page 66. 
 
 " Collected Poems " of Francis Thompson, vol. ii., 
 19. 
 
 S. John iv. 19. 
 Life," page 229. 
 
154 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 of a critic of his own sequence, " A Narrow 
 Vessel": "He could not understand that all 
 human love was to me a symbol of divine love; 
 nay, that human love was in my eyes a piteous 
 failure unless as an image of the supreme Love 
 which gave meaning and reality to its seeming 
 insanity." 1 There is to both poets a close 
 relation between human and Divine Love. With 
 Patmore human love leads upwards. With 
 Thompson Divine Love is the standard to which 
 human must conform. While there is this 
 relation there is still a subtle difference between 
 the two men's outlook. Thompson, who wrote 
 " A Narrow Vessel," surely never would have 
 uttered Patmore's " Tristitia " ; while from 
 neither of them could have come Dowson's 
 " Impenitentia Ultima." Of Patmore it is 
 perhaps difficult to say whether he exalted the 
 ideal of human passion or lowered the conception 
 of Heavenly Love, though the present writer 
 would choose the first horn of the dilemma. 
 That one would never ask such a question in 
 Thompson's case indicates the delicate yet real 
 distinction between them. I suppose of that 
 section of Thompson's " Poems " which I have 
 called religious, "The Hound of Heaven " will 
 stand, while time endures, as his most wonderful, 
 most appealing work. It is not mystical, I 
 think. 
 
 On the other hand the most liturgical of all 
 his compositions, the " Orient Ode," not really 
 
 ltt Life," page 230. 
 
FRANCIS THOMPSON 155 
 
 "recalled," as Mr Meynell suggests, is placed 
 among the " Poems of Sight and Insight," i.e. 
 among those which he would have called mysti- 
 cal had he been able to bring himself to adven- 
 ture that word. We may find the same kind of 
 setting though with only one word of really 
 ecclesiastical import in those processional lines 
 in the " Ode to the Setting Sun " ; when speak- 
 ing of death and birth he writes : 
 
 11 And of these two the fairer thing is Death, 
 Mystical twins of Time inseparable, 
 The younger hath the holier array, 
 And hath the awfuller sway : 
 It is the falling- star that trails the light, 
 It is the breaking wave that hath the might, 
 The passing shower that rainbows maniple. 
 Is it not so, O thou down-stricken Day, 
 That draw'st thy splendours round thee in thy fall? 
 High was thine Eastern pomp inaugural; 
 But thou dost set in statelier pageantry, 
 Lauded with tumults of a firmament : 
 Thy visible music-blasts make deaf the sky, 
 Thy cymbals clang to fire the Occident, 
 Thou dost thy dying so triumphantly, 
 I see the crimson blaring of thy shawms." 
 
 In the final edition of Thompson's " Poems " 
 this Ode has a place to itself among the earlier 
 poems; while in the previous volume, -" New 
 Poems," it was printed among the " Miscellane- 
 ous Odes." 
 
 Is it merely fanciful to suggest a likeness 
 between these lines which I have quoted and those 
 which close Patmore's "Victory in Defeat, 11 
 
156 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 words which that daring writer puts into the 
 mouth of very GOD : 
 
 " The man who though his fights be all defeats, 
 
 Still fights, 
 
 Enters at last 
 
 The heavenly Jerusalem's rejoicing streets 
 With glory more, and more triumphant rites 
 Than always-conquering Joshua's, when his blast 
 The frighted walls of Jericho down cast; 
 
 And lo, the giad surprise 
 
 Of peace beyond surmise, 
 More than in common saints, for ever in his eyes." 
 
 It seems a pity that a comfort-loving, faint- 
 hearted generation cannot take some heart of 
 hope and set forth to do a little fighting, a little 
 struggling, even if instant victory be not always 
 the forgone conclusion. 1 
 
 From these liturgical poems we may turn to 
 the last section, the mystical. Those who will 
 read the fragment of a preface (designed for but 
 not prefixed to " New Poems ") which is printed 
 in Mr Meynell's " Life " 2 of the poet, may be 
 surprised to find that Thompson said of " The 
 Mistress of Vision" that it was "a fantasy 
 with no more than an illusive tinge of psychic 
 significance." And yet, besides the essentially 
 mystical perception in 
 
 " When earth and Heaven lay down the veil, 
 And that apocalypse turns thee pale; 
 
 1 This passage was written many months before the 
 outbreak of European War; and refers to none of those 
 who have borne a gallant part in it. It applies more 
 forcibly than ever to any who may have shirked whatever 
 share fell to them. 
 
 2 Page 237. 
 
FRANCIS THOMPSON 157 
 
 When thy seeing- blindeth thee 
 
 To what thy fellow-mortals see; 
 
 When their sight to thee is sightless, 
 
 Their living, death; their light, most lightless; " 
 
 it contains two lines which are the expression of 
 the very fundamental A B C of mystical method : 
 
 " Mine eyes saw not, and I saw," 
 and: 
 
 " The ravished soul her meanings knew. Mine ears 
 heard not, and I heard." 
 
 Possibly Thompson did not mean quite the 
 same thing when in "The Hollow Wood" he 
 wrote : 
 
 " . . . have but the ear the ear within, 
 And you may hear, if you hold you mute," 1 
 
 but anyone who is aware of the Presence behind 
 external nature would find it difficult not to take 
 these lines in a mystical sense. 
 
 It is almost profanity to attempt to estimate 
 the super-sensual apprehension, whether to use 
 the terms which belong to the five senses of 
 sight or sound, in that poem which is unique 
 in the great volume of English poetry, the 
 " Dread of Height." But perhaps those who 
 have allowed themselves to identify mysticism 
 with some comfortable doctrine of easy feeling, 
 if they can grasp the pain of strife in those 
 tenuous, elusive 
 
 " Tiding-s from the vast," 
 may pause in affright as Thompson cries : 
 " Ah, for a heart less native to high Heaven, 
 A hooded eye, for jesses and restraint." 
 
 1 " Collected Poems," vol. ii., page 190. 
 
158 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 We are brought back, not to any way of ease, 
 but to the drear, stripped condition of S. John 
 of the Cross, as he expounds, in awful, terror- 
 struck words, the " Dark Night of the Soul ": 
 " As eyes weakened and clouded by humours 
 suffer pain when the clear light beats upon them, 
 so the soul, by reason of its impurity, suffers 
 exceedingly when the divine light really shines 
 upon it." 1 
 
 If anyone will really ponder on such passages 
 as these, he will rid himself for ever of all 
 notions about mysticism being " pleasant dream- 
 ing." 
 
 The sense of awe seems to have died out of 
 ordinary English life. Our comfortable theories 
 to the effect that " somehow everything will be 
 all right in the end," however deplorable the 
 beginning and the middle may have been, have 
 deprived us of the capacity even to consider what 
 it must be to a human soul to come face to face, 
 actually in contact with Divine Mysteries. The 
 innate vulgarity of doctrines of equality seems 
 to have quenched in many minds any and every 
 appreciation of a Holy of Holies. How it has 
 come about one cannot say ; but the fact remains 
 that there are people who will say in so many 
 words that they have never offended GOD, and 
 that it is unreal and affected to use such words 
 as " provoking most justly Thy wrath and in- 
 dignation against us," or " Depart from me, 
 for I am a sinful man, O Lord." As one listens 
 
 *" The Dark Nigiht of the Soul," page 81. Edited by 
 Father Benedict Zimmermann, O.C.D. 
 
FRANCIS THOMPSON 159 
 
 to such blasphemies, which are not hypo- 
 thetical, the memory hies back to Thompson with 
 his materially beggared life, and his flame-lit, 
 spiritual vision, shrivelling his courage and 
 shaking his very soul : 
 
 " Ah, for a heart less native to high Heaven 
 A hooded eye for jesses and restraint." 
 
 Does not that contrast between the com- 
 placent, self-satisfied materialist and the mendi- 
 cant visionary convey something of the un- 
 bridgeable chasm between sense-knowledge and 
 intuition ? All that the English nation has 
 lost by allowing the doctrine of the Communion 
 of Saints to become obscured in this land can 
 only be gauged if we turn back to the earlier 
 chapters of our history, when this country shared 
 with Ireland the name of the Islands of the 
 Saints. 
 
 Among all the poets whom England has 
 borne, lovers of Nature as many of them are, 
 has anyone sung with more riotous joy than 
 Thompson of spring's return? He does not 
 admit the awful truth of life because he is a 
 dreary kill-joy; quite the reverse: 
 
 " Season enough has Nature to be wise; 
 
 But now discinct, with raiment glittering free, 
 
 Shake she the ringing rafters of the skies 
 
 With festal footing, and bold joyance sweet, 
 
 And let the earth be drunken and carouse I 
 
 For lo, into her house 
 
 Spring is come home with her world- wandering feet, 
 
 And all things are made young with young desires; 
 
 And all for her is light increased 
 
 In yellow stars and yellow daffodils." 
 
160 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 There, in its inexpressible, fresh joy, is the 
 springtime of this lower world, of this material 
 earth, at the moment of her most entrancing 
 charm. As the poem passes on to that strange 
 life with which the whole world is instinct in 
 the perfect days of spring, the tangible beauty 
 changes, for those who have the power of 
 mystic apprehension, and slips into the super- 
 sensual sphere : 
 
 " What little noises stir and pass 
 
 From blade to blade along the voluble grass ! 
 
 O Nature, never-done, 
 
 Ungaped-at Pentecostal miracle, 
 
 We hear thee, each man in his proper tongue." 
 
 Were ever borrowed words, like these last six, 
 used more daringly, or with apter high sugges- 
 tion ? 
 
 Those who are prone to over-emphasise the 
 kinship between Patmore and Thompson might 
 recall the former's feeling for the inherent 
 sadness of spring in " The Unknown Eros," in 
 the first book, in the lines on S. Valentine's 
 Day, those which begin " O baby spring." 
 Patmore 's is the rarer note in English poetry, 
 for the intrinsic, plangent tristesse hidden be- 
 neath, but not concealed by, the apparent joy 
 and abounding power of spring, seems to strike 
 but few. Those few can hardly break free 
 from it, can hardly close their inner eyes to 
 that poignant vision within a glorious pomp of 
 external paraphernalia. 
 
 But, from time to time, at any rate, Patmore 
 
FRANCIS THOMPSON 161 
 
 " saw " in this solitary fashion. As dissimilar 
 to the received view is his line on " Winter " : 
 
 "It is not death but plenitude of peace.*' 1 
 
 But then Ashdown Forest, the country round 
 Heron's Ghyll where Patmore had his Sussex 
 home, owns a unique peace in mid-winter, a 
 still, rich, vital content which is its own signal 
 possession. If anyone doubt this, let him go 
 and spend winters there before the money- 
 be-mused, jerry builder lastingly ruins one of 
 the fairest places on English ground. 
 
 Mr Meynell quotes a remark of Mr Wilfrid 
 Blunt, designed to challenge Thompson's close 
 acquaintance with Nature. 2 It is, no doubt, odd 
 that a lover of Nature did not know an oak 
 from an elm ; but, after all, he was brought 
 up in Manchester, and the remark of an edu- 
 cated Mancunian, translated to the Cambridge 
 " Backs": "I had no idea before that the 
 stems of trees differed," is not apocryphal, but 
 the maker of it still lives. Whether Thompson 
 really was ignorant of " the names of the 
 commonest flowers of the field," or whether that 
 part of him was absent, wandering, otherwise 
 employed when his host would fain have trapped 
 him into exactness, we shall never know now. 
 But anyone who has even once assisted at the 
 mysteries of spring in any fair country place 
 will have no doubt of Thompson's profound 
 
 Unknown Eros," book ii. 
 Life," page 13 
 
1 62 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 knowledge of the deeper side of Nature, if he 
 will read " From the Night of Forebeing." 
 After all, the names of plants and trees, even of 
 the commonest, are only a dodge of human con- 
 venience; they have no connexion with realities. 
 But it is far more than a great poem of natural 
 beauty; from underneath its exquisite imagery 
 flashes out the vision of the Mystic -who bids 
 men 
 
 " Hark to the jubilate of the bird 
 
 For them that found the dying way to life." 
 
 The young world swims in light; all the 
 visible, tangible scheme of things palpitates with 
 the heady joy, the surging vitality of spring: 
 
 " Earth's bosom pants, and heaves her scarfing sea." 
 
 Then again, in the midst of the physical, 
 palpable glory of material things, breaks in the 
 Mystic's refrain : 
 
 " . . . all the firsts are hauntings of some last, 
 And all the springs are flash-lights of one spring." 
 
 Through the glories of the resurgent life there 
 comes to him 
 
 " . . . the hid, hugged, swaddled bliss," 
 and 
 
 "... this aghast surprise of keenest panging." 
 
 Thompson, true to the spirit of the self- 
 imposed reserve with which he started out on his 
 
FRANCIS THOMPSON 163 
 
 high emprise, lets fall but the vaguest hint of 
 the substance of his vision : 
 
 " I, in this house so rifted, marred 
 
 I yet have sight beyond the smoke, 
 
 And kiss the gods' feet though they wreak 
 
 Upon me stroke and again stroke." 
 
 And so, at last, in English poetry we have 
 once more the mysticism of the devout Catholic, 
 even though it be shrouded in a devout reserve, 
 withheld in a spirit of delicatest reverence by him 
 who, having revealed what it was lawful for a 
 man to utter, shielded himself in the antinomian 
 phrase : 
 
 " This song is sung and sung not : and its words 
 are sealed." 
 
 No one will ever realise quite the insistent 
 purpose of Thompson in these " Poems of Sight 
 and Insight," who has not read, or who, having 
 read, does not endorse, his passionate entreaty 
 to the Church to recall, to bring home Poetry 
 the wanderer, Poetry the sinner; to restore her 
 to her old place as " lesser sister and helpmate 
 of the Church." 1 What a ringing, sob-pierced 
 appeal it is: " Fathers of the Church (we would 
 say) pastors of the Church, pious laics of the 
 Church, you are taking from its walls the panoply 
 of Aquinas ; take also from its walls the psaltery 
 of Alighieri." He bids the authoritative teachers 
 of the Church to bring to mind S. Francis : 
 " Sworn to poverty he forswore not beauty, but 
 1 Shelley, "Collected Works," vol. Hi., page i. 
 
i64 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 discerned through the lamp beaiity the Light 
 GOD." 
 
 Was ever the secret of genuine mysticism 
 revealed more clearly than in that last phrase? 
 What has not been lost to English poetry by 
 the long dominance of that harsh form of puri- 
 tanism which scouted all beauty, and stood 
 aghast at the spirits of light and joy ? 
 
 "Through the lamp beauty the Light GOD." 
 Vaughan, Crashaw and Traherne knew that; 
 Wordsworth held the lamp close to his heart 
 and lived in the reflection of the light ; Browning 
 strove and wrestled to reach the far-off radiance. 
 But if we add to these Blake and Patmore, of 
 what other English poets, save these illumined 
 seven, can we say as much before the coming of 
 Thompson? in whose awakened ears rang the 
 mystic direction 
 
 " Pierce thy heart to find the key." 
 
EPILOGUE 
 
 IF one Mystic have excelled all others in treating 
 the difficult subject of illumination, surely it is, 
 with perhaps the single exception of S. John 
 of the Cross, Johann Ruysbroeck. There are 
 two wonderful passage in " Le Miroir du Salut 
 Eternel " which, apprehending that that most 
 beautiful book, even in its accessible form, 1 is 
 not read by many, I will venture to transcribe : 
 
 " Tout d'abord la sainte Ecriture nous en- 
 seigne que Dieu le Pere celeste a cre'e' tous les 
 hommes a son image et a sa ressemblance, son 
 image, c'est son Fils, sa propre sagesse e*ter- 
 nelle. . . ." 
 
 " C'est d'apres cette image e*ternelle que nous 
 avons tous eHe* cre'e's. Car dans la partie la plus 
 haute de notre ame, au centre de nos puissances 
 supe*rieures, nous sommes constitue's a 1'^tat de 
 miroir vivant et ternel de Dieu ; nous y por- 
 tons graved son image e"ternelle et aucune autre 
 image n'y peut jamais entrer. Sans cesse, ce 
 miroir demeure sous les yeux de Dieu participant 
 
 1 "CEuvres de Ruysbroeck 1' Admirable. " Trading 
 du Flamand par les Be"ndictins de Saint Paul de 
 Wisques. (Vromant et Cie, 3 rue de la Chapelle, 
 Bruxelles, 3 fr. 50.) 
 
 165 
 
166 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 ainsi avec 1 'image qui y est grav6e a 1'e'ternite' 
 meme de Dieu." 
 
 It is difficult to conceive of an image which 
 could better suggest the nature of illumination 
 than Ruysbroeck's " nous sommes constitu6s a 
 l'e"tat de miroir vivant et e"ternel de Dieu," the 
 condition of a living, eternal mirror of GOD. 
 
 A little further on he elaborates his description 
 of the human soul: '* La premiere proprie"te de 
 Tame, c'est une nudite" essentielle, sans images; 
 par la nous ressemblons a et nous sommes unis 
 au Pere et a sa nature divine. 
 
 " La seconde propridte" peut etre appelde la 
 raison sup6rieure de Tame; c'est un miroir de 
 clarte*, ou nous recevons le Fils de Dieu, la ve*rit6 
 e*ternelle. Par cette darte", nous lui sommes 
 semblables; mais dans 1'acte de recevoir, nous 
 sommes un avec lui. 
 
 " La troisieme propriete", nous 1'appelons 
 l'e"tincelle de 1'ame: c'est une tendance intime 
 et naturelle de 1'ame, vers sa source et c'est la 
 que nous recevons le Saint-Esprit, la charit de 
 Dieu." 1 
 
 These closing words recall Ruysbroeck's 
 wonderful and daring description in another of 
 his writings : 
 
 " Car concevoir et comprendre Dieu au-dessus 
 de toutes les similitudes, tel qu'il est en lui-meme, 
 c'est etre Dieu avec Dieu, sans interme'diaire 
 et sans difference qui puisse devenir obstacle 
 ou interme'diaire. . . . Et c'est pourquoi, celui 
 
 1 " Le Miroir du Salut fiternel," chapter viii. 
 
EPILOGUE 167 
 
 qui veut comprendre ceci doit etre mort a lui- 
 me"me, et vivre en Dieu, et il tournera sa face vers 
 la lumiere e"ternelle au fond de son esprit, la ou 
 se manifeste, sans interme"diaire, 1'occulte veVite". 
 Car le Pere celeste veut que nous soyons voyants, 
 car il est pere de la lumiere et c'est pourquoi il 
 dit e"ternellement sans interme"diaire et sans inter- 
 ruption, au plus secret de notre esprit, un mot 
 unique et abyssal et nul autre. Et en ce mot, il 
 se profere lui-meme et toutes choses. Et ce mot 
 n'est autre que Voyez." 1 
 
 This effort to convey his own vision of 
 Ruysbroeck, the illuminated servant of GOD, is, 
 of course, only an elaboration of that wonderful 
 and terse promise which Our Lord made, and 
 which, it is hardly too much to say, falls often 
 on ears blunted by that inattention accorded to a 
 constantly repeated phrase: "Blessed are the 
 pure in heart, for they shall see GOD." 
 
 But, whether in the longer or the shorter form, 
 there it is, one everlasting condition of, one vital 
 pre-essential to vision purity of heart. What 
 we are taught by all the Mystics, after Our Lord 
 has taught them, we see carried out in real life. 
 As a matter of literal fact, as a verifiable truth 
 of history, the seers are those who in one way 
 or another have obeyed the injunction, " Wash 
 you, make you clean." 
 
 The other essential, it is hardly necessary to 
 say, is love; and this contributes to the essential 
 purity: " Sicut ignis consumit ligna, sic caritas 
 
 1 " L'Ornement des Noces Spirituelles," Book III., 
 chapter i. 
 
168 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 vitia extinguit" 1 wrote Thomas a Kempis. 
 Nor does he emphasise less that purity which 
 issues from self-abnegation: " Cito et liber e ad 
 Deum anima pur a per git et super omnia mundi 
 condita evolat, quce in terris nil commodi vel 
 honoris concupiscit." 2 
 
 It is nowise fitting for mere mortals to be 
 judging one another idly and to no purpose : " If 
 thou wilt ask how good is he or she, ask how 
 much he or she loves; and that no man can tell. 
 For I hold it folly to judge a man's heart; that 
 none knows save God." 3 
 
 Yet perhaps for the purpose of making clear a 
 spiritual truth it is even permissible to try to 
 estimate the real aspect of that side of a man's 
 life which he has made, at any rate, partly public. 
 If we do thus much, without trespassing be- 
 yond the limits of charity and respect, we shall 
 see that all these poets of whom we have thought 
 had no inconsiderable measure of purity of 
 heart. About Henry Vaughan there clings a 
 limpid simplicity, an ingenuous, child-like white- 
 ness of spirit. Wordsworth reminds one of 
 the wholesome cleanliness of unsullied, unspoilt 
 nature. Browning surely exhibited that kind of 
 strong cleanliness to which soils do not and will 
 
 111 As fire burns wood so love destroys vice." " Hor- 
 tulus Rosarum," chapter xiii., verse 4. 
 
 *" Quickly and freely the pure soul goes to GOD, and 
 flies up above all the world's treasures, desiring- on earth 
 neither reward nor honour." " Hortulus Rosarum," 
 chapter xiii, verse 5. 
 
 "The Form of Perfect Living," chapter x. By 
 Richard Rolle. 
 
EPILOGUE 169 
 
 not adhere, that which belonged to his own 
 Pompilia : 
 
 " . . . God's gift of a purity of soul 
 That will not take pollution." 
 
 And Thompson, though his outward circum- 
 stances were less calculated, as men calculate, 
 to favour the mystical life, yet scared to that 
 burning, glowing love of spiritual things which, 
 like a flame, devours all extrinsic, clogging 
 deficiency or failure. 
 
 One can go further afield than these four men, 
 startlingly dissimilar as they are, and it is well 
 to do so in an age of puritanical materialism 
 which on one hand denies the existence of sin, 
 and on the other, if the consequences of sin be 
 forced on it, is merciless to the sinner. 
 
 Huysmans draws a memorable picture of 
 illumination after Durtal had, with unutterable 
 agony, suffered "la nuit obscure"; a dark 
 night indeed, set out with all this writer's relent- 
 less skill in the analysis of sin and pain. 
 
 After Communion, as he walked in the 
 grounds of the monastery, he saw what he 
 certainly took to be a vision. All readers of 
 " En Route" will remember the overmastering 
 misery which held the great sinner in fetters 
 until he at last brought himself to the necessary 
 purgation : they cannot forget the Mass in 
 the chapel, and Durtal's Communion after his 
 penitence and absolution. Then, when he 
 returned to the garden which had witnessed so 
 much of his mortal struggle and silent anguish : 
 
170 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 " Alors, doucement, sans effets sensibles, le Sac- 
 rament agit ; le Christ ouvrit peu & peu ce logis 
 ferm6 et 1'aera : le jour entra k flots chez Durtal." 
 There it is, the mystical experience, " sans 
 effets sensibles." No one can possibly accuse 
 Huysmans of any incapacity in the matter of 
 analysis; we all, who have read "En Route,*' 
 have shared in that dreadful "dark night" of 
 shame and sin which obscured his spiritual 
 being, in the still darker night of numbing, 
 formless, inexplicable pain as he tore his soul 
 from the fetters with which he had bound it. 
 Yet, with equal power, Huysmans can describe 
 the inner vision, when purgation had opened the 
 way for illumination, overflowing, as it were, 
 the full soul, flooding into the external garden; 
 and this overflowing, of course, took " sensible " 
 shape, and is described in terms of the five 
 senses. All the while, however, we realise that 
 it is a spiritual, supernatural experience, which 
 illumines, transfigures, penetrates essentially into 
 every visible, tangible object, into every one of 
 those which had grown so familiar to him in its 
 everyday, natural aspect: " Sa vision de Nature 
 se modifia . . . 1'eclairage soudain de son ame 
 se re"percuta sur les alentours " there is the 
 precise actual fact. " Ces allies, ces bois qu'il 
 avait tant parcourus . . . lui apparurent sous un 
 autre aspect." Even the Calvary is changed, 
 vitalised to him by his inner illumination : " Les 
 arbres bruissaient, tremblant dans un souffle de 
 prieres, s'inclinaient devant le Christ qui ne 
 tordait plus ses bras douloureux dans le miroir 
 
EPILOGUE 171 
 
 de l'6tang, mais qui e"treignait ces eaux, les 
 6ployait contre lui en les be"nissant." 
 
 Then, a little later, comes a daring image, 
 which recalls " The Orient Ode " of Thompson : 
 " Le ciel s'entr'ouvrit, de son tabernacle de 
 nuages en sortit un clair soleil semblable a un 
 monstrance d'or en fusion, a un Saint Sacrament 
 de flammes. C'e"tait un Salut de la Nature." 
 Its supernatural nature Huysmans leaves in no 
 manner of doubt. These things do not happen 
 to all and sundry; not all men can know them, 
 and just when they will. They happen to the 
 " pure in heart/' whether their purity be that of 
 innocence or whether it be that restored purity 
 with which the travel-stained, sin-smirched soul 
 can be clothed if only it will tread the painful 
 path of purging: " Durtal regardait, transported 
 . . . Dieu seul avait le pouvoir de gorger ainsi 
 une ame, de la faire de"border et ruisseler en des 
 flots de joie; et, lui seul pouvait aussi combler 
 la vasque des douleurs, comme aucun e"ve"ne- 
 ment de ce monde ne le savait faire." 
 
 And we may note, by a final quotation, that 
 this vision was no mere sentimentality; Huys- 
 mans bids us recollect what had preceded it, the 
 direful shame, the tense misery, the " sensible M 
 fire of pain-wrung remorse which had made 
 such illumination possible: "Durtal venait de 
 1' experimenter : la souffrance et la liesse spiritu- 
 elles atteignaient, sous T^preinte divine, une 
 acuite" que les gens les plus humainement heureux 
 ou malheureux ne soupgonnent mme pas." 1 
 
 l " En Route," pages 377-379. By J. K. Huysmans. 
 
172 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 It is quite probable that some may urge that if 
 this be genuine illumination, and not a mere trick 
 of a literary artist, yet Huysmans or, if we prefer 
 so to call him, Durtal was, at any rate, not 
 " pure in heart.'* They will say that by his own 
 confession he had sinned grossly, deliberately. 
 
 I have perhaps somewhat forestalled the 
 answer to this, but it can be elaborated. The 
 present generation, devoid as it often appears to 
 be of any genuine consciousness of personal and 
 grave sin, is still more inclined to brush away 
 the reality and necessity of repentance in those 
 cases where wickedness is so patent that it is 
 sheer futility to deny it. Confession, so the 
 Church has ever proclaimed, is a step, a great 
 and important step along the path of penitence; 
 and penitence, as not a few of us know, like 
 Durtal " Durtal venait de I'exp^rimenter " 
 is still a reality, and not at all necessarily a self- 
 advantageous hypocrisy, whatever a sceptical 
 generation may choose to say it thinks on the 
 matter. Sometimes one wonders whether there 
 have slipped from the world's short, shallow 
 memory all remembrance of the man called 
 Augustine. More probably those who might 
 seem to have forgotten have conceived the queer, 
 stupid notion that things which may quite well 
 have happened in North Africa in the fourth 
 century most certainly would not occur in 
 Paris in the nineteenth. Yet the spiritual 
 world recks nothing of our temporal and spatial 
 sunderings. 
 
 There is nothing incredible in the fact that 
 
EPILOGUE 173 
 
 Huysmans should have experienced illumination. 
 Technically he was not a poet nor a saint ; but he 
 had more than a touch of the gifts of the first, 
 and no human creature has yet been without 
 potentiality for the state of the second. Coven- 
 try Patmore has reminded us that both the saint 
 and the poet can claim illumination in some 
 measure as an essential part of their being : " The 
 Poet is, par excellence, the perceiver, nothing 
 having any interest for him unless he can, as it 
 were, see and touch it with the spiritual sense 
 with which he is pre-eminently endowed. The 
 Saints indeed seem, for the most part, to have 
 had these senses greatly developed by their 
 holiness and their habitual suppression of the 
 corporal senses." 1 
 
 And so, a study in illumination, not in the 
 saints alone, but in the poets, and in those 
 sharing in poetic genius these others being, so 
 some may think, nearer to ordinary men and 
 women than the saints brings us back to the 
 fundamental truth that purgation, in one former 
 another, precedes and must precede vision ; that 
 cleansing paves the way for the entry of light. 
 
 Nowadays, when there is a dreamy, loose- 
 knit inclination towards amorphous, indefinite 
 emotion, which people choose to call mysticism, 
 it cannot be said too clearly, perhaps it can 
 hardly be repeated too often, that here again it 
 is, and most emphatically, true, in the somewhat 
 pagan phrase of Erasmus, that "the gods sell 
 us all things for labour. " Mysticism is no short 
 1 " Religio Poetse " (Uniform Edition), page 2. 
 
174 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 cut to unbought ease, nor is it, as some people 
 seem to fancy, the unearned increment of senti- 
 mentality. That should be understood; the 
 sooner the better. Nor is it any flabby feeling 
 or vaporous conclusion from shifting premises. 
 Nor can it, in its essendal reality, ever be a 
 matter of popular books or magazine articles; 
 psychology will never find it, and laboratory 
 experiments are out of the question. In spite of 
 many efforts, conscious or unaware, to make it 
 so, it can never really become a fashionable 
 appendage of luxurious life, nor fit into the 
 elaborately cushioned way of the emotional. It 
 is fundamentally, so far as all the beginnings 
 go, a matter of self-stripping ; and that, if we will 
 inquire into the Mystics' lives, so often not in any 
 great or manifest way which to some natures 
 would be in itself a rich satisfaction but rather 
 a ceaseless giving up of little things too small to 
 be worth thinking about a persistent, hidden 
 doing of those dull deeds, whose very drab- 
 ness deprives the performance of them of light, 
 though, of course, sometimes it is also the reward 
 of " those who have done their best by heroic 
 purity and self-humiliation to merit the vision >J1 
 a phrase apparently covering greater denials 
 than those of commonplace daily life. 
 
 Those " in the endless multitude of men " who 
 have seen God are those, and only those, who in 
 one way or another have forgone the ordinary 
 ways of easy-going men ; who, though they may 
 
 * " Religio Pcetae," page 52. By Coventry Patmore. 
 
EPILOGUE 175 
 
 have had and have carried out the usual duties 
 of workaday life laid on them, have not consumed 
 themselves thereabout, but have known, in longer 
 or shorter intervals, how to withdraw themselves 
 and walk the dire way of purgation, stripping 
 themselves as they went of loose thoughts, vague 
 desires, unhallowed imaginations, and last, 
 lingering reservations. 
 
 M. Henri Joly has expressed tersely the 
 difference between sham and genuine mysti- 
 cism: " Le faux mystique se complait dans les 
 raffinements de ses aspirations personelles, dans 
 les subtilite's et dans les mysteres : le vrai mys- 
 tique demande la clarte", celle-la meme ou celle-la 
 surtout qui met dans tout son jour la necessite" des 
 sacrifices." 1 So few of us seem really able to 
 realise the disabling power over our spiritual 
 life, of our conscious or unconscious reservations. 
 We will give much ; but that is of no avail 
 finally. God asks all. " Sicut non sufficeret tibi 
 omnibus habitis prceter me ; ita nee mihi placere 
 potent, quidquid dederis, te non oblato. Offer 
 te mihi, et da te totum pro Deo, et erit accepta 
 oblatio." 2 
 
 Da te totum. It is easy to write; it is in- 
 credibly hard to do, when it means "all "; e.g. 
 loss of livelihood, loss of friends, general, if 
 
 1 " Psychologic des Saints," page 147. By Henri Joly. 
 
 1 " As it would not suffice thee to have all things what- 
 soever besides Me : so neither can it please Me, what- 
 soever thou givest, if thou offerest not thyself. Offer up 
 thyself unto Me, and give thyself wholly for God, and 
 thy oblation shall be accepted." " Imitatio," IV. 
 viii. 2. 
 
176 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 undeserved, reprobation, the patient endurance 
 of a position easily riddled with ridicule, and 
 the twisting into shamefulness of one's sincerest 
 motives and endeavours : yet, for not a few it has 
 meant that in the past ; it may come to mean that 
 for some of us. It is difficult to believe that it 
 would not be a great deal better for the so-called 
 modern mind to embark on self-surrender, to 
 train its will to give up its own stubborn desires, 
 than to agitate itself about translating fundamen- 
 tal Catholic doctrines into " the terms of modern 
 thought." Self-surrender has, in the past, 
 proved a more hopeful path to holiness than 
 " self-expression " has shown itself able to 
 provide. Yet self-expression, the apotheosis of 
 the wavering opinions of its own passing day, is, 
 nowadays, many a man's and woman's wilfully 
 chosen path of seeking gain. 
 
 The lesson of entire surrender, which is so 
 familiar to us in the pages of Thomas a 
 Kempis, is emphasised by that other great saint, 
 S. Vincent de Paul. To his company of Sisters 
 of Charity he insisted: " I tell you that you will 
 never be true Sisters of Charity until you have 
 sifted all your motives, have rooted up every evil 
 habit, and stamped out every personal desire." 
 
 If anyone will shrug his shoulders and say, 
 " That may be all very well for a ' religious,' but 
 it is plainly ludicrous for people * in the world,' ' 
 then let him listen to S. Vincent de Paul's recent 
 biographer: " As for the great lady, it was a 
 matter of obligation that she should not cling to 
 her jewels while her neighbours died for lack of 
 
EPILOGUE 177 
 
 bread, so for the man or woman who had entered 
 on the special service of Christ there could be no 
 reservations." 1 
 
 No reservations ! it being true for all time into 
 Eternity that he who wills to save his life must 
 first of all lose it. 
 
 A recent book by Pere Lamballe (which is 
 a reprint of essays originally contributed to 
 " L'Ami du Clerge* ") has been translated lately 
 into English under the title " Mystical Contem- 
 plation." Pere Lamballe insists upon detachment 
 as the one vital pre-essential to mystical contem- 
 plation ; and he buttresses his plea by many 
 cogent quotations, the greater number, as anyone 
 might surmise, from S. John of the Cross. 
 Probably there is no single lesson which the 
 world to-day needs to learn more, and is more 
 unwilling to learn, than this simple fact of the 
 impossibility to any real follower of Christ of 
 making reservations. The desire to pick and 
 choose, the obsession of judging for themselves, 
 whether or no they have taken the smallest 
 pains to train and develop that judgment, seem 
 ingrained in English people: we will offer this, 
 that, or the other sacrifice, which perhaps is not 
 demanded at all ; we will go thus far, and some- 
 times it may be quite a considerable distance out 
 of our way; we will submit up to this limit, and 
 it may be one above the average practice of our 
 fellows; and so forth but there we stop dead. 
 That, whatever else it may be, is not the spirit of 
 
 1 Vincent de Paul," pages 17, 18. By E. K. 
 
 Sanders. 
 
178 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 Christianity. " If any man will come after Me, 
 
 let him deny " What? " Himself! " There 
 
 it stands for all time as the one condition. We 
 say the words so glibly. We listen to them a 
 hundred times so placidly. And then one day, 
 how or why we know not, the conviction bursts 
 on us, and will never more be gainsaid, that 
 denying oneself means at least willingness to 
 part with the very last reservation. We may 
 not always be called upon to do it ; but while we 
 say to ourselves, or whisper in the depths of our 
 hearts, " Anything but that," the whole battle is 
 still to fight. 
 
 Yet the Catholic religion is all-sided, and 
 covers all truth, all men, all things. Therefore 
 it is always to be remembered that Catholic 
 teaching is that pain is not, in and for itself, an 
 " end " for Christian men, only an essential and 
 salutary means, first for cleansing, and secondly 
 surely to bring our faltering, recalcitrant human 
 souls into close touch at last with the " Suffering 
 Servant," Who was also Lord of all things 
 visible and invisible. The modern world often 
 denies the reality of sin, and shrinks in horror 
 from pain, all the while, with curious in- 
 consistency, showing itself not quite courageous 
 enough to fling the word Christian to the winds. 
 Yet, as a plain matter of fact, sin is rampant ; as 
 a plain truth of historical record, Christianity is 
 built on sacrifice. If sacrifice be taken out of the 
 Gospels and Epistles, if it be cleared out of 
 the Apocalypse of S. John the Divine, if it be 
 strained out from the writings of the Doctors 
 
EPILOGUE 179 
 
 and Fathers of the Church, then there is no core 
 left in the Christian religion. It is, it always 
 has been, sacrifice, pain, which disciplines 
 saints and weans sinners from the clogging 
 bonds of shame. 
 
 But the world in which we live to-day holds 
 up before us a totally different ideal. That 
 world which affects to reverence Our Lord, 
 which indulges in high-flown rhapsodies over 
 S. Francis as he flung his rich clothes in 
 his astounded parent's face and fared forth to 
 poverty and to instant and incessant toil that 
 world, double-minded as perhaps it has never 
 been so extravagantly so before, begs us, tempts 
 us, one by one, to practise ease, to compromise 
 truth, to yield a point here and a position there, 
 to remember how wrong and impolitic it is to be 
 " violent " even though we were once told on 
 the highest authority that " the Kingdom of 
 Heaven suffereth violence and the violent take it 
 by force " (beata molentia, S. Ambrose called it) ; 
 the world of to-day pleads with us to forget an 
 ambiguous future in the joys of a certain secure 
 present. As we hear the subtle temptation, 
 pressed with a thousand ingenious and alluring 
 wiles, as fatigue of mind and body, as the ever- 
 present restlessness of doubt, and as the utter 
 weariness and futility of contending further with 
 a dense, complacent world, shutting its eyes to 
 pain and denying the reality of sin, add to the 
 tempters' strength, suddenly, scattering the mists 
 and darkness with its clarion courage, the ring- 
 ing appeal of Thomas k Kempis recalls us to 
 
180 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 ourselves: " Tola vita Christi crux fuit et mar- 
 tyrium : et tu tibi quceris requiem et gaudiiym ? " l 
 
 We cannot realise too soon that our ideals 
 in this age of soulless wealth and irresistible 
 machinery have all gone astray. The reckless 
 power inherent in wealth, where its use is 
 unrestrained by high principle, together with 
 the extension of mechanical invention and the 
 apparently boundless possibilities of scientific 
 discovery, have for the time upset our spiritual 
 balance. In their newly acquired relative power 
 many men and not a few women have seemed to 
 forget their absolute impotence. As they have 
 found themselves seemingly able to go any- 
 where, buy everything, and do what they will, 
 the fact that they have not one iota of power even 
 to prolong and continue their own personal lives 
 for one single second seems blotted from their 
 recollection ; they feel so strong that they appear 
 to overlook their essential and irremovable de- 
 pendence. In this riotous orgy of power and 
 comfort, the warnings of the great masters of the 
 spiritual life of Thomas a Kempis as he writes 
 the bitter-sweet phrase, " Sine dolor e non vivitur 
 in amore" or of Blaise Pascal, as he reminds us 
 of the institution of the Paschal ritual: " Pour 
 marquer toujours qu'on ne pouvait trouver la 
 joie que par ramertume " fall on heedless or 
 defiant ears. 
 
 So engrossed have many of us become in 
 
 1 " The whole life of Christ was a cross and martyr- 
 dom : and dost thou ask rest and joy for thyself?" 
 " Imitatio," II. xii. 7. 
 
EPILOGUE 181 
 
 materialism that if we care, and even suffer a 
 little for righteousness' sake, we still are over- 
 prone to think of the whole matter as one of loss 
 and gain ; the possibilities of reward and punish- 
 ment still loom too large in our spiritual life. 
 Perhaps, after all, no small measure of illumina- 
 tion may be needed to reach the selfless heights 
 of S. Francis Xavier : 
 
 " Cur igitur non amem te 
 
 O JESU amantissime ! 
 
 Non ut in ccelo salves me, 
 
 Aut ne aeternum damnes me, 
 " Nee prsemii ullius spe. 
 
 Sed sicut tu amasti me, 
 
 Sic amo et amabo te; 
 
 Solum quia Rex meus es, 
 
 Et solum quia Deus es." 1 
 
 Because of this modern hatred of prophylactic 
 pain, it has seemed worth while to try to bring 
 home to ordinary men and women, misled by a 
 shallow philosophy into over-confidence in their 
 five senses, or choked as to their spiritual capaci- 
 ties by the insistent luxury of a material age, the 
 plain facts of intuition and of illumination. And 
 it seemed worth while to try to show it mainly 
 
 translated " Hymns Ancient and Modern," 106. 
 S. Francis Xavier after his conversion by S. Ignatius 
 Loyola, was a missionary in the East Indies in the six- 
 teenth century. It would be interesting to know if he 
 ever met with the following aspiration of a saintly 
 mystical Moslem woman of the eighth century, 
 Rabi'a, whose words in his " Mystics of Islam," page 
 115, Dr Nicholson quotes as follows: "O God, if I 
 worship Thee in fear of Hell, burn me in Hell; and if 
 I worship Thee in hope of Paradise, exclude me from 
 Paradise; but if I worship Thee for Thine own sake, 
 withhold not Thine everlasting beauty ! " 
 
182 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 by the circumstances belonging to some of our 
 own English poets, partly because, in spite of 
 our constant touring and our Cook's tickets, we 
 are an oddly insular nation, and partly because 
 the plain person, while he only misdoubts a poet, 
 as a rule, actually rights shy of a saint. 
 
 And now, in conclusion, I should wish to urge 
 that what the Poet sees in part, the Saint sees in 
 a glorious whole ; and I should like to press home 
 the point which I made at the outset of this 
 chapter, that the condition of such "sight" is 
 purity. In other words I would plead the 
 dependence of illumination on purgation. If 
 that absolute dependence can be established and 
 demonstrated, then the fable that mysticism is a 
 primrose path of individual pleasant choice, of 
 picking and choosing always on the sunny side 
 of life, is exploded. 
 
 I suppose it would be generally believed 
 whether it be true or not I am not concerned here 
 to settle that women are as a rule more senti- 
 mental than men ; and that the Southern and 
 Latin races are more so than the Northern and 
 Teutonic. Setting aside so disquieting for any 
 such theory as they must be the lurking possi- 
 bilities of German manhood, let us accept the 
 hypothesis as passably true for the moment, and 
 look round for a woman saint of Latin extraction. 
 Possibly S. Teresa will serve our turn. She was 
 certainly a woman ; the only one, I believe, who 
 was ever called a Doctor of the Church, and 
 Spain is sufficiently Southern and Latin. 
 
 Besides her own " Autobiography," many 
 
EPILOGUE 183 
 
 " lives " of this saint have been published. My 
 present object is no such unnecessary feat as add- 
 ing to their number ; but rather I would use these 
 well-known facts of her life, personality, and 
 writings to establish the thesis which in these 
 days of undisciplined self-pleasing is more than 
 worth setting forth that a sane and extremely 
 human woman can be an illuminated saint; that 
 visions, though not of the essence of sanctity, and 
 though sometimes of diabolic origin, can be and 
 have been heavenly revelations ; that the genuine 
 Mystic is no headlong and contumacious upsetter 
 of order, but a humble servant of the Church 
 Catholic, obeying laws, and living by Sacra- 
 ments; and, lastly, that sanctity is not the wild 
 and unlikely goal of a few eccentric mortals, nor 
 the lonely lot of a spiritual aristocracy, but is the 
 proper end of passionate, pleasure-loving, sin- 
 bound humanity, if it only will tread the one path 
 which leads to GOD, the path of unreserved self- 
 surrender. 
 
 11 How sweet are Thy ways, O Lord! yet who 
 can travel by them without dread?" 1 If any 
 sort of justification be needed for this choice of 
 S. Teresa, as a guide, it can be found in the 
 following passage from the brief which Leo XIII. 
 addressed to Pere Marcel Bouix (the translator 
 into French of the Saint's " Autobiography ") : 
 " Les ouvrages de la grande Therese contien- 
 nent une certaine force plus voisine du ciel que 
 
 1 " Meditations of the Soul on its God," page 77. 
 Minor Works of S. Teresa : translated by the Benedic- 
 tines of Stanbrook. 
 
184 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 de la terre, une force merveilleusement efficace 
 pour la re* forme de la vie, en sorte qu'ils sont lus 
 avec fruit non seulement par ceux qui s'appli- 
 quent a la direction des ames ou qui aspirent a 
 une e'minente saintete*, mais encore par tout 
 homme qui s'occupe un peu se"rieusement du 
 salut de son ame." He was but elaborating the 
 words of the prayer proper to her Feast on the 
 I5th of October: " Exaudi nos, Deus salutaris 
 noster, ut sicut de beatce Teresice Virginis tuce 
 festivitate gaudemus ; ita ccelestis ejus doctrines 
 pabulo nutriamur, et pice devotionis erudiamur 
 affectu. Per Dominum," etc. 
 
 So, first of all, I will try to prove from her 
 own writings that S. Teresa was extraordinarily 
 " wholesome," natural, and, in the truest sense, 
 a woman ; and withal a woman of delightful 
 wit, practical common sense, and good business 
 capacity for it is a disastrous misapprehension 
 which has seized hold of the popular mind, that a 
 saint, even to be or become such, must of neces- 
 sity be made of quite different stuff from, and 
 particularly of much more excitable and unreli- 
 able stuff than, the rest of mankind. And then I 
 will try to show how, following slowly and pain- 
 fully the purgative way, she won by sure degrees 
 to the vision splendid. 
 
 If anyone will try to argue from the mere fact 
 of S. Teresa's having written her " Autobiog- 
 raphy," that she was and must have been an 
 egotist, he can only do it by overlooking entirely 
 the circumstances of its production. She simply 
 wrote it, as S. Francis would have all things 
 
EPILOGUE 185 
 
 done "in holy obedience." She would have 
 preferred not to write it; being commanded to 
 do so, she would have desired to record with 
 faithful minuteness all those sins, shortcomings, 
 and infidelities which, as she looked back, 
 seemed to her sometimes to obscure her whole 
 life and all its doings; but as she says, simply, 
 in her preface, " with regard to such admissions 
 extreme reserve is imposed on me." 
 
 Pope Urban VIII., fearing that even what she 
 had said might be misunderstood, declared, when 
 the first office in honour of S. Teresa was pre- 
 sented to him: " Sancta Teresia numquam com- 
 misit peccatum mortals " / and this judgment 
 was repeated by those whose business it was to 
 prepare the Report for her Canonisation. And 
 yet one moving sentence in her own Preface to 
 the "Autobiography," a sentence from the pen 
 of a woman whom the most searching examina- 
 tion left, at least, unconvicted of mortal sin, may 
 well give pause to those easygoing mortals who, 
 living without qualms or self-examination, seem, 
 at any rate, abundantly sure that GOD must be 
 as well pleased with them as they apparently are 
 with themselves : ' ' May He be for ever blessed 
 for waiting so long for me." 
 
 We know, from the story of her gallant effort 
 at the age of seven to seek martyrdom in com- 
 pany with her brother Rodrigo an enterprise 
 frustrated by an intervening uncle that she was 
 not a thoughtless nor irreligious child; a fact 
 
 1 " Vie de Sainte Th&ise," page 2. Traduite par le 
 Rev. Pere Marcel Bouix. 
 
186 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 which is further indicated by her action when, 
 being herself but twelve, her mother died. 
 S. Teresa tells us that in her grief she threw her- 
 self at the feet of a statue of Our Lady, uttering 
 a tearful entreaty that she should henceforth be 
 her mother. " This cry of a simple heart was 
 heard," she adds. But yet, despite such youth- 
 ful piety, she was as a young woman impatient of 
 restraint, eager for mundane pursuits in a word 
 anything but devote. She was, and it is for 
 some of us a most encouraging fact, never a saint 
 because worldly joys elicited no response from 
 her; they did, only too much, so she assures us. 
 She attributed this temporary lapse to her habit 
 of reading chivalrous romances, which, as we 
 know, were more than a fashion in sixteenth- 
 century Spain ; and this tendency was furthered 
 by the untoward influence of an elder sister. 
 
 It seems profitable to emphasise these facts, on 
 which she dwells in the second chapter of her 
 " Autobiography," because the world is, as has 
 been observed, over prone to imagine that the 
 "saints" are composed of some peculiar stuff 
 and are constitutionally immune from the tastes, 
 failings, and desires of ordinary humanity. If 
 S. Teresa's " Autobiography " shows one thing 
 quite plainly, it is that to her the struggle to 
 detach herself from the world, to surrender her 
 will wholly, was severe and bitter. Help came 
 to her, as she relates in the third chapter, in the 
 Augustinian Convent of Notre-Dame de Grace, 
 where she became a boarder for a year and a half. 
 But it did not come at once; as she naively 
 
EPILOGUE 187 
 
 remarks: " For the first eight days I was cruelly 
 bored." She was no " plaster saint." All the 
 same, her discomfort arose in part already from 
 remorse for the giddy ways into which, setting at 
 naught her father's wishes, she had fallen ; and 
 it so happened that the nun, whose happy fortune 
 it was to retrieve her, hit on that which is of 
 necessity, and not upon any mere irrelevant de- 
 tail, viz. upon the essentialness of self-surrender. 
 This nun, Maria Briceno, a member of the 
 nobility of Avila, had herself resolved on the 
 religious life in consequence of reading, presum- 
 ably in one of those moments when what we read 
 actually penetrates our inmost will, words which 
 surely she must have often enough heard before : 
 " Many are called, but few are chosen." 
 
 The subject of their conversations seems to 
 have been GOD'S rewards for those who give up 
 everything for His sake. These conversations 
 bore fruit; and she tells us that, at last, this nun 
 reawakened in her the thought of and wish for 
 spiritual things ; then follows the avowal, strange 
 as it may seem to some in the mouth of the great 
 reformer of the Carmelite Order : " Little by little 
 she undermined my repulsion from the religious 
 life, a repulsion I had felt so strongly." 
 
 When, after eighteen months, she left this 
 convent, she stayed for a while with an uncle 
 whose influence was all in the same direction, 
 whose example and words, so she records, 
 recalled her youthful tendency to piety, and 
 impressed her anew with the worthlessness of 
 merely worldly pleasure. But still the battle was 
 
188 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 far from won: " Terror seized me when I 
 reflected that had death come it would have found 
 me on the way to hell. In spite of that, my will 
 could not resolve on the religious life." Yet, 
 for all that, she could not divest herself of the 
 conviction that this life which repelled her, 
 from which her every natural inclination recoiled, 
 was " the most perfect, the safest." Therefore, 
 "" little by little," so she tells us, " I resolved to 
 force myself to embrace it." This struggle was 
 carried on for three months. 
 
 There is some doubt as to the precise date when 
 she took the habit. Some evidence suggests that 
 she was nineteen; but she herself, in 1575, wrote 
 in a letter that she had taken the habit forty years 
 before, which would make her age twenty-one. 
 
 It is possible that some people may argue that 
 since she had to "force" herself to resolve to 
 enter a convent she she must have lacked " voca- 
 tion," but it will only be those who imagine 
 that a " call " must necessarily be to ease. It is 
 difficult to believe that there could have been any 
 serious failure in her response when she could 
 say of herself, as she does so casually in the 
 fourth chapter, where she is referring to this 
 period of struggle: " As for comfort in life, I 
 took no heed of that." There are not so many 
 mortals who could say that much with any 
 appearance of truth. And lastly, it must be 
 obvious to everyone, that conventual, monastic 
 life would lose half, if not its whole value, were 
 it a course on which any serious person could 
 embark without a grave struggle. 
 
EPILOGUE 189 
 
 Perhaps this is a sufficient account of her way 
 of entering religion to help to prove the point I 
 wished to establish, viz. that she was constitu- 
 tionally wholesome, sane, natural, and very truly 
 womanly. There are no traces of false pose, of 
 sentimental posturing; indeed anyone who has 
 realised what she was cannot think of such things 
 in the same breath as of her : the good and the 
 bad are told together in the fashion of that 
 genuine humility so extolled by Madame de 
 Maintenon, that temper of heart which surely 
 brings us to admit just the truth, not hiding the 
 evil, and not denying those fragments of good 
 which may fortunately happen to belong to us. 
 S. Teresa passessed other gifts of a similar kind. 
 In a moment of irritation Erasmus once ex- 
 claimed a propos of an excellent but dense man : 
 " I would have him to know that dullness is not 
 sanctity.'* The converse notion that sanctity not 
 only is, but ought to be dull, is not yet slain 
 among us; and so S. Teresa's wit, flashing here 
 and there through the ordinary course of her holy 
 life, illumining her utter poverty, her weak health, 
 and frequent illnesses, her persecuted efforts, her 
 heavy sorrows, is most refreshing; most discon- 
 certing, too, for the advocates of dreary piety. 
 
 How funny she is ! and so spontaneously funny. 
 
 To Lorenzo de Cepeda, the beloved Brother 
 and recipient of some of her most delightful 
 letters, she wrote once l : "I send you this hair- 
 shirt. . . . But I send it on this condition, that 
 
 1577. 
 
igo A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 you do not wear it after you have dressed yourself, 
 nor when you go to bed. ... I cannot help smiling 
 to see how you send me sweetmeats, delicacies, 
 and money, and I send you a hair-shirt." 
 
 Then again there is a world of sly humour in 
 her remark in a letter addressed during 1578 to 
 the Prioress of Seville: "I believe the only 
 defect in the postulant recommended by Father 
 Nicolas is that she is a little too simple." 
 
 Sometimes she was quaintly frank to this 
 prioress, Mother Maria de San Joseph. For 
 example, having said how pleased Lorenzo de 
 Cepeda was with the Mother's letter to him, S. 
 Teresa adds: "The letters pleased me likewise, 
 but they were not well written, for the more you 
 try to write legibly the worse you seem to get on !" 
 
 The " Autobiography," too, shines through- 
 out its length with her bubbling love of a joke ; 
 it enters even into her gravest moments, when 
 she is occupied with the most serious subjects. 
 One of her minor writings, called " Conceptions 
 of the Love of God," is a series of meditations 
 on the selected passages from the " Canticle of 
 Canticles." She has quoted a difficult sentence, 
 and she writes: " I cannot understand this, and 
 I am very glad of it. For the soul ought not so 
 much to contemplate and honour God in those 
 things that our grovelling intellects can master 
 in this life, as in those problems that we cannot 
 solve. When you read a book, or hear a sermon, 
 or meditate on any of the mysteries of our holy 
 faith, if you find you cannot clearly comprehend 
 the matter, I strongly recommend you not to tire 
 
EPILOGUE 191 
 
 yourselves, nor to strain your minds by puzzling 
 over it, for many of these things are not suited 
 for women nor men either, very often! >51 
 
 The gist of this passage is every bit as grave 
 a warning, and on a matter of vital import, as 
 Thomas a Kempis's solemn last chapter in the 
 " Imitation. " All the same, S. Teresa ends her 
 exhortation quite naturally and unaffectedly, and 
 also quite convincingly, with a jest. She went a 
 little further in this particular vein of jesting in a 
 letter she wrote in 1576 to the General of the 
 Order of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. She sent 
 this particular letter in a time of heavy anxieties : 
 she was pleading for pardon for two Fathers who 
 had offended the General, and she ended up with 
 the earnest and witty plea : " For the love of God, 
 then, I beg of your Reverence to grant me this 
 favour . . . though we poor women are not fit 
 persons to give good advice, still sometimes we 
 hit the mark as well as a man." 
 
 Closely allied to her wit is that quality of gay 
 common sense which informs the whole of her 
 " Autobiography," and appears so constantly in 
 her letters. Perhaps those who imagine errone- 
 ously that religious live always at a strained 
 tension may correct their view when they find 
 S. Teresa quietly remarking to the Prioress of 
 Seville: "I was much pleased that you knit 
 stockings and gain something by your labour. 
 God will help those who help themselves." 
 
 It is superfluous to go on elaborating the point 
 
 1 " Minor Works" of S. Teresa, page 114. Trans- 
 lated by the Benedictines of Stanbrook. 
 
192 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 that S. Teresa was an eminently sane, whole- 
 some, and natural woman. A library of proof 
 would not satisfy those who are obsessed by the 
 belief that every saint is of necessity an hysterical 
 or epileptic person ; enough has been adduced to 
 convince ordinary people that this particular saint 
 was emphatically neither the one nor the other. 
 But now comes the important point. S. 
 Teresa was, as every unbiassed student of her 
 own writings must admit, healthy in mind, 
 endowed with more than common capacity, filled 
 with common sense, bubbling over with gay wit. 
 Yet the way she went was a very hard one. It 
 was along the path of purgation, deliberately 
 chosen and persistently trodden, that she won 
 illumination and union. It was not only that, 
 like every religious, she had to give up her 
 family and the everyday things dear to her the 
 story of all that I have already lightly sketched ; 
 but after she had taken the habit, her way 
 to holiness was obviously, from her own un- 
 varnished account, very hard, it was anything 
 but a uniform ascent in goodness. It was not 
 only very hard, but very long. We, who some- 
 times find it intolerable to bear discomfort for a 
 short space, must surely be staggered by such 
 quiet phrases as these : " For almost twenty years 
 I sailed this stormy sea"; 1 or again, "I fell, 
 I rose, feebly, no doubt, and then I fell again. 
 Dragging myself along the lowest paths of 
 perfection, I hardly troubled about venial sins, 
 and as for mortal ones, I did not dread them 
 ^'Autobiography," chapter viii. 
 
EPILOGUE 193 
 
 sufficiently, since I did not avoid dangers." 1 
 This is a great admission, for any sound theo- 
 logian will tell us, as, for instance, the Abbot of 
 Buckfast does, that " Nothing could be less 
 Catholic than to speak or think of venial sin 
 lightly. It is a great evil, but an evil that is 
 compatible with the privileges of the children of 
 God." 2 
 
 Surely no one can read this earlier part of 
 S. Teresa's " Autobiography " without realising 
 the clogged, difficult way along which she passed. 
 The recital is so simple, so straightforward, that 
 it is impossible to doubt the facts. And then, 
 more convincing still perhaps, is that kind 
 of invisible but hauntingly real atmosphere of 
 struggle and failure and difficulty, that environ- 
 ment which the reader feels to differ in toto from 
 that of the later chapters, which record events 
 after the struggle was " swallowed up in victory." 
 
 One more definitely worded passage, clear 
 beyond possibility of contradiction or mistake, 
 may be added as calculated to show the Saint's 
 careful accuracy about precise facts. She is not 
 telling us haphazardly that she suffered vaguely 
 for an indefinite period; she knows what was the 
 matter, and how long it lasted: " I ought, how- 
 ever to admit this: I can, during the course of 
 these years, reckon several months, and some- 
 times a whole year, of generous faithfulness. 
 Applying myself ardently to mental prayer, I 
 
 1 " Autobiography," chapter viii. 
 
 2 "The Human Soul," page 142. By Dom Anscar 
 Von-fcr. 
 
 N 
 
194 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 carefully avoided the smallest faults, and I took 
 serious precautions not to offend God. . . . But 
 only a feeble memory of these happy days 
 remains with me ; they must doubtless have been 
 much fewer than the bad ones. Still, few passed 
 in which I did not devote some considerable time 
 to mental prayer, except when I was very ill or 
 very busy. When my body was suffering, my 
 soul's union with God was closer. . . . Thus, 
 with the exception of the year I have just 
 mentioned, out of twenty-eight years since I 
 began to practise mental prayer, I spent more 
 than eighteen in this struggle and strife of a soul 
 divided between God and the world." 1 
 
 I have put this first among S. Teresa's suffer- 
 ings, for it will be obvious to anyone who reads 
 her life in the least sympathetically that to her, 
 herself, it was, as she looked back, far and away 
 the hardest of them. But, as the above passage 
 shows, she was also called upon to bear severe 
 and manifold corporal pains and sufferings. She 
 tells us of pain which seemed like a tearing with 
 sharp teeth, of a fever which could not be stayed, 
 of complete inability to take solid food, of 
 dreadful nausea, of contracting nerves, of a 
 heavy depression, and of temporary paralysis. 
 In mentioning this last she does so with that 
 accuracy which is such a marked trait of all her 
 writings: " For nearly three years I was struck 
 down by paralysis which, however, was getting 
 better every day." 1 How many people would 
 
 1 " Autobiography," chapter viii. 
 
 2 Ibid., chapter vi, 
 
EPILOGUE 195 
 
 have added this qualifying phrase when describ- 
 ing such an agglomeration of sufferings and 
 maladies ? 
 
 Then, again, from her intellectual tempera- 
 ment she suffered a still subtler trouble, not 
 perhaps very great in itself if it had been by 
 itself, but, added to everything else, we can easily 
 realise how it might have appeared to the saint 
 just one of those additional troubles about which 
 we ordinary mortals find oursel/es querulously 
 asking: " Why need I have this to bear as well 
 as everything else? " But S. Teresa quietly 
 relates the facts, never questioning the Tightness 
 of it all. As it is a rather delicate psychologi- 
 cal account, I will give it in Pere Bouix's well- 
 known French rendering rather than let it suffer 
 a second translation : " Voici qu'elle e"tait ma 
 maniere d'oraison. Je tachais, autant que je 
 pouvais, de conside"rer J^sus-Christ, notre bien et 
 notre maitre, comme present au fond de mon 
 ame. Chaque mystere de sa vie que je m^ditais, 
 je me la repre"sentais ainsi dans ce sanctuaire 
 inte"rieur. Toutefois, je passais la plus grande 
 partie du temps a lire de bons livres : ils e"taient 
 le charme et le refraichissement de mon ame. 
 Dieu ne m'a pas donn6 la talent de discourir avec 
 1'entendement, ni celui de me servir avec fruit de 
 Timagination. Cette derniere facult est chez 
 moi tellement inerte que lorsque je voulais me 
 peindre et me repre"senter en moi-meme 1'hu- 
 manit6 de Notre Seigneur, jamais, malgr tous 
 mes efforts, je ne pouvais en venir & bout. 
 
 " A la vrit, Tame qui ne peut discourir, si 
 
196 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 elle perseVere, arrive bien plus vite a la contem- 
 plation, mais sa voie est tres laborieuse et tres 
 pe"nible ; car, des que la volont ne se trouve pas 
 occupee, et que 1'amour ne se porte pas sur un 
 objet present, cette ame demeure comme sans 
 appui et sans exercice. La solitude et la se"cher- 
 esse la font beaucoup souffrir, et les pensees lui 
 livrent un terrible combat. A des ames de cette 
 trempe, il faut plus de puret de conscience qu'a 
 celles qui peuvent agir avec 1'entendement. . . 
 * Jamais, durant tout ce temps, excepte quand 
 je venais de communier, je n'osai d'aborder 
 1'oraison sans un livre. Sans lui, mon ame 
 e*prouvait le meme effroi que si elle avait eu 
 a lutter seule centre une multitude ennemie; 
 1'ayant a cot6 de moi, j'etais tranquille. C'e"tait 
 une compagnie, c'etait de plus un bouclier 
 sur lequel je recevais les coups des pense"es 
 importunes qui venaient troubler mon oraison. 
 D'ordinaire, je n'e"tais point dans la se*cheresse, 
 mais jamais je n'y e"chappais quand je me 
 trouvais sans livre ; soudain mon ame se troublait 
 et mes pensees s'e"garaient. Avec mon livre, je 
 les rappelais doucement, et par cette attrayante 
 amorce, j'attirais, je gouvernais facilement, mon 
 ame." 1 
 
 Anyone who desires really to understand St 
 Teresa's account of the mystical way must read 
 again and again the chapters eleven to twenty- 
 two in her " Autobiography." It will be well 
 worth their while, more particularly if they 
 themselves have any addiction to a dreamy, self- 
 1 " Autobiography," chapter iv. 
 
EPILOGUE 197 
 
 directed, amorphous mysticism, to compare care- 
 fully with this passage which I have just quoted, 
 the pages in Chapter XXII, where she de- 
 nounces in burning words the errors into which 
 she fell, through reading mystical authors, or 
 perhaps, one should say, writers upon mysticism, 
 who advised travellers by the way to detach them- 
 selves from every sort of corporeal image, and 
 to try to rise to a conception of the immaterial 
 Deity. In a wonderful apostrophe to Our Lord, 
 she cries to Him for pardon, because, through 
 the leading of others, she for a while put away 
 crucifix and pictures. "How could I, Lord, 
 have the idea, evtn for one single hour, that 
 Thou couldest be to me an obstacle in the path 
 of any greater good ? " 
 
 As at the outset she retained her book, so in 
 the height of mystical contemplation she learned 
 to shun the dreamy advice, resumed and thence* 
 forward kept on her own fit way, with crucifix 
 and picture. 
 
 The difference between the spiritual practical- 
 ness of this great saint and the diaphanous 
 raptures of some other seekers has a significance 
 which it would perhaps be difficult to over- 
 estimate. It is not very easy to convey the pre- 
 cise point ; possibly it is the intense vivid reality 
 of Teresa de Jesus which makes her so irresis- 
 tible, so ungainsayable. For I think it must be 
 admitted that in the case of S. Teresa we find 
 ourselves in the presence of a singularly impres- 
 sive power. It strikes us as crude when people 
 who do not seem to understand the obvious 
 
198 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 uses of a crucifix, of pictures, speak of them 
 as materialising the spiritual. S. Teresa not 
 merely reversed this process, and spiritualised 
 the material, but her rich nature rose to the feat 
 of synthesising seeming opposites : she broke 
 down the petty barriers raised by the inade- 
 quacy and faultiness of human language, and 
 pierced through the apparent to the hidden ; nay, 
 more, she perceived their imperishable relations ; 
 like Plato's philosopher she, if anyone has, " saw 
 things together," and therefore rejected none. 
 
 We ought to remember that here we have 
 to do with one who by her own confession 
 found it specially difficult to make real to her- 
 self the fact of Our Lord's humanity. I have 
 just quoted the passage where she says that she 
 was so deficient in imagination (she used the 
 word in its right sense of forming an image of 
 some person or thing) " that when I wanted to 
 depict or represent to myself Our Lord's human- 
 ity, I never could, with my utmost efforts, 
 succeed." 1 Therefore, this power of hers of 
 intertwining the material representation with the 
 spiritual apprehension is all the more remark- 
 able. No one could write more emphatically 
 than she does in her twenty-second chapter : she 
 declares that according to the mystical writers 
 whom she has cited, "what one ought to 
 endeavour to do is to consider oneself in an en- 
 closure, surrounded on all sides by God, and 
 lost in Him as in an abyss." Then she adds : 
 " That seems to me a good thing sometimes ; but 
 1 " Autobiography," chapter iv. 
 
EPILOGUE 199 
 
 to cut oneself off wholly from Jesus Christ, to 
 reckon His Divine Body among our difficulties, 
 to put it on a plane with other creatures, that I 
 could never tolerate." 1 
 
 To turn to another matter, from the extracts 
 which I have already given it is easy to see 
 that S. Teresa suffered from three quite differ- 
 ent painful conditions, conditions which were 
 dependent on her own personality. As to her 
 troubles which arose from or through other 
 people, they may be dealt with later. 
 
 Probably most people^ if they think about 
 the saints at all, and yet have not thought about 
 them carefully, entertain a strange notion that 
 they were (for so many people speak of saints 
 only in the past tense) in some unexplained 
 fashion quite different from ordinary people, 
 and that being holy somehow " came natural 
 to them," whatever that may mean. If such 
 thinkers can give their minds to the actual facts 
 of S. Teresa's earlier years, perhaps they will 
 find her corporeal sufferings the most under- 
 standable. It has become so common of late 
 years to dismiss the greatest and holiest men 
 and women of the past as epileptics, hysterical 
 subjects, semi-insane, over-strung mortals, that 
 it does not trouble the plain man to find that a 
 saint did not always enjoy robust healtTi ; rather, 
 that is what he would anticipate. But the 
 struggle to do rightly, to avoid actual sin, to 
 make solid progress in holiness, and that other 
 subtler inability if he can grasp it at all de- 
 1 " Autobiography," chapter xxii. 
 
200 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 pendent on a failure or lack of discursive under- 
 standing and imagination these surely will 
 stagger the ordinary person. They are so 
 entirely subversive of all cheerful theories about 
 goodness coming natural to the saints, and 
 about their immunity from the faults and fail- 
 ings and weaknesses of the rest of us. 
 
 Possibly, it is the very facts set forth by 
 herself, utterly simply, straightforwardly, and 
 convincingly, which make S. Teresa the most en- 
 couraging, because she is so thoroughly human, 
 of the saints to us, faulty, feeble, futile mortals 
 as most of us are. After all, a saint to whom 
 holiness were no trouble would not be of much 
 good to us. But S. Teresa has let us see the 
 actual fashioning of a saint, as it really occurred, 
 day by day and year by year. She may have 
 been a wonderful, an unusual woman ; but some- 
 how that is not the aspect she contrives to present 
 most frequently. The picture is rather of a 
 woman with many failings, great gifts and 
 some deficiencies, who, by the Grace of GOD 
 and her own persistent efforts to use it, did 
 at last, not by any means at first, reach her 
 goal. Undoubtedly she learned to excel in the 
 one supremely necessary quality, self-surrender. 
 But that did not come easily nor quickly : "a 
 struggle and strife of a soul divided between 
 GOD and the world," those are her own words 
 descriptive of the earlier years. It is an irre- 
 sistible temptation to put close by them the 
 beautiful stanzas of a poem which, so we are 
 told in the latest edition of her " Minor Works," 
 
EPILOGUE 201 
 
 " is undoubtedly by S. Teresa." The date is 
 not given, but it seems clear, from the " Auto- 
 biography," that her poems belong to her 
 later life, the seventies of the sixteenth century. 
 S. Vincent de Paul could demand no more utter 
 surrender than these stanzas convey : 
 
 " Bestow long life, or straightway bid me die; 
 Let health be mine, or pain and sickness send, 
 With honour or dishonour ; be my path 
 Beset by war or peaceful to the end. 
 My strength or weakness be as Thou shalt choose, 
 For naught Thou askest shall I e'er refuse 
 I only wish what Thou wilt have of me. 
 
 Give contemplation if Thou wilt, or let 
 My lonely soul in dryness ever pine; 
 Abundance and devotion be the gift 
 Thou choosest, or a sterile soul be mine ! 
 O Majesty Supreme, in naught apart 
 From Thy decree can I find peace of heart ! 
 Say what it is, Lord, Thou dost wish of me? 
 
 " Lord, give me wisdom, or, if love demand, 
 Leave me in ignorance; it matters naught 
 If mine be years of plenty, or beset 
 With famine direful and with parching drought ! 
 Be darkness over all, or daylight clear, 
 Dispatch me hither, keep me stationed here, 
 Say what it is, Lord, Thou wilt have of me? m 
 
 With these lines may be compared a portion 
 of that apostrophe to Our Lord which occurs in 
 her "Autobiography": "a nous seule est la 
 faute, si nous n'arrivons pas en peu de temps a 
 cette dignite" sublime, a ce veritable amour, 
 source de tous les biens. Nous mettons notre 
 
 1 " Minor Works" of S. Teresa, pages 4, 5. Trans- 
 lated by the Benedictines of Stanbrook. 
 
202 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 coeur a si haut prix! Nous sommes si lents a 
 faire a Dieu le don absolu de nous-memes ! nous 
 sommes si loin de la preparation qu'il exige! 
 Or, Dieu ne veut pas que nous jouissions 
 d'un bonheur si eleve, sans le payer d'un grand 
 prix. La terre, je le sais, n'a pas de quoi 
 1'acheter. Cependant, si nous faisions de ge"n- 
 e>eux efforts pour nous detacher de toutes les 
 creatures, pour tenir habituellement au ciel nos 
 de"sirs et nos pense"es; si, a 1'exemple de quelques 
 saints, nous nous disposions pleinement et sans 
 de"lai, j'en suis convaincue, Dieu en fort peu de 
 temps nous accorderait un tel tremor." 1 
 
 This translation of Pere Bouix seems so 
 happily to convey S. Teresa's precise meaning, 
 that I will not risk a fresh translation into 
 English. " Nous mettons notre cceur & si haut 
 prix ! " There is the whole point in a nutshell. 
 It would be hard indeed to express it more 
 poignantly. 
 
 Yet, so accustomed to comfort has the world 
 grown that many people now seem unable to 
 grasp the conception of pain accepted volun- 
 tarily. If they see anyone suffering it, their 
 inference seems to be either that the person 
 cannot help himself but certainly would if he 
 could, or that, for some strange reason, he likes 
 pain. S. Teresa neither "liked" it, speaking 
 naturally, nor would she have escaped it if she 
 could. Her famous motto, as we all know, was 
 aut pati aut rnori. But she did not choose that, 
 nor live up to it so gallantly, because her natural 
 1 " Autobiography," chapter xi. 
 
EPILOGUE 203 
 
 suffering. She knew well what 
 pain involved ; but she also knew that, for Chris- 
 tians, it is inevitable. In one of her letters she 
 writes : " If one day we are to reach the joy of 
 Our Divine Crucified Lord, we must, as you 
 know, carry the Cross after Him. However, it 
 is not necessary, as Father Gregory pretends to 
 ask God for sufferings : because He does not fail 
 to send them to those whom He loves, or to lead 
 them in the same path His Son trod." 
 
 This is by no means an isolated statement^ for 
 in the previous year she had written to her 
 brother, Lorenzo de Cepeda, as follows: "It is 
 a great stupidity, and little humility, to think of 
 arriving at this degree without prayer, even with 
 the virtues possessed by Francisco de Salcedo, or 
 with those which God gives to yourself. Believe 
 my words, and leave the matter to the Lord of 
 the vineyard, Who knows well what everyone 
 stands in need of. I never asked Him for 
 interior trials, though He has given me many 
 during my life, and these were very great. Our 
 natural disposition and constitution contribute 
 much to increase these afflictions." 1 
 
 In that very beautiful treatise she wrote, 
 " Conceptions of the Love of God," we find her 
 warning her daughters against too great a love 
 of peace, urging them to be watchful, to be on 
 the alert for attack, and willing to endure with 
 patience that which, necessarily in such a world 
 as this,, must come : " For the love of God, 
 
 1 Letters of S. Teresa " (translated by the Rev. John 
 Dalton) to her Brother, pages 175, 176. 
 
204 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 watch yourselves very carefully. There must 
 be war in this life, for we cannot sit with our 
 hands folded among so many enemies, but must 
 keep constant watch over both our inward and 
 outward conduct." 1 
 
 And yet once more, with just a flicker of that 
 wit which she never could wholly exclude from 
 solemn themes, she exclaims: " The Saints are 
 in Heaven, this is certain ; have we read of any 
 who got there by living luxuriously on earth ? 
 Then how can we feel so easy about doing so? 
 Who told us that it was right? How is it that 
 some men squander their time uselessly in eating 
 and sleeping well ? I am amazed at it. One 
 would suppose there was no future world, and 
 that this was the safest way to live." 2 
 
 Elsewhere in the same treatise she seems 
 almost to gauge and test spiritual progress by 
 the presence and persistence of pain and sorrow : 
 11 When I see anyone, like some people I have 
 met, always calm and never meeting with any 
 conflict, although I do not witness her offend 
 God, yet I always feel misgivings about her, 
 and, since the devil leaves her alone, I try to 
 prove her in every possible way, so that she 
 may discover what she really is. I have rarely 
 known such cases, yet it is possible for the soul 
 which God has raised to a high degree of con- 
 templation to be in such a state, and enjoy con- 
 stant interior happiness. ... I have weighed 
 
 lu Minor Works" of S. Teresa Conceptions of the 
 Love of God, section 4. 
 section 18. 
 
EPILOGUE 205 
 
 the matter carefully, and I do not envy such 
 persons, for I find others advance more who 
 sustain such combats that I have described, 
 although their prayer is not such, in point of 
 perfection, as we should expect it to be here. 
 
 I do not allude to those who have attained 
 great holiness and mortification by their long 
 years of warfare; they have died to the world, 
 and Our Lord usually gives peace, which, how- 
 ever, does not prevent their perceiving and griev- 
 ing deeply over their faults." 1 In one of the 
 later chapters of her "Autobiography," 2 these 
 words occur: " II me semble que souffrir est la 
 seule raison de 1'existence ; et c'est ce que je 
 demande a Dieu avec le plus d'ardeur. Je lui 
 dis quelquefois du fond le mon ame : Seigneur, 
 ou mourir ou souffrir ! je ne vous demande pas 
 autre chose. Lorsque j'entends sonner 1'horloge, 
 c'est pour moi un sujet de consolation, a la 
 pens6e que je touche d'un peu plus pres an 
 bonheur de voir Dieu, et que c'est une heure du 
 moins a passer dans cette vie." Surely in these 
 closing words there is a conviction of the 
 immense value of suffering, coupled with a half- 
 expressed avowal of wearied, strained, tense 
 endurance. The same sense of the inevitable- 
 ness, for those who would follow holiness, of 
 pain is conveyed, this time with a halo of 
 humour, in her letter to the Bishop of Osma : 
 " One cannot be a learned man, nor a courtier, 
 
 1 " Conceptions of the Love of God," sections 5, 6. 
 3 Chapter xl., page 530. Translation by Pere Marcel 
 Bouix. 
 
206 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 without great expense and labour. Now to 
 become a courtier of Heaven, and to possess 
 spiritual knowledge, cannot be effected without 
 spending some time, and enduring some afflic- 
 tion of spirit." 1 
 
 If we turn to her poems which, whether or 
 no she were right in disclaiming the true poet's 
 fire, were alight with her quick feeling, trans- 
 fused with her perfect self -surrender we find 
 the same teaching. Even if we omit those whose 
 authenticity, though not absolute, is almost 
 certain, viz. " The Nuns of Carmel," and " The 
 Processional for the Feast of the Holy Cross," 
 which last is sung still by Carmelite nuns on the 
 Feast, we can quote from the attested " Greeting 
 to the Cross " : 
 
 " Cross, thou delicious solace of my life, 
 I welcome thee I 
 
 O standard, 'neath whose sign the worst 
 Cf cowards must be brave." 
 
 Even in these days when unlimited individual 
 " interpretation " is claimed as a right, no one, 
 with the deliberate intention of avoiding suffer- 
 ing, could utter such words as these without 
 being guilty of really rank hypocrisy. What 
 S. Teresa meant by them is abundantly clear. 
 
 In one of the four poems which did or do bear 
 her own autograph, we find these lines : 
 
 " With sorrow rife, our earthly life 
 
 Could not more bitter be, 
 Nor can life dwell within the soul, 
 While kept apart from Thee. 
 
 1 " Letters of S. Teresa," page 67. Translated by 
 the Rev. John Dalton. 
 
EPILOGUE 207 
 
 " For he who dwells in this sad world 
 
 In sorrow ever sighs, 
 Since true life never can be found 
 Except in Paradise." 1 
 
 Under the title of the Gospel of Pain, Father 
 George Tyrrell preached on the Feast of 
 S. Teresa, in 1906, in the Carmelite Church in 
 London, a sermon which is perhaps one of the 
 most convincing discourses ever delivered on 
 this most difficult subject. 2 
 
 But not yet is the enumeration of her suffer- 
 ings complete. To all this pain of body and 
 mind was added for the Saint that other dolour 
 which comes surely so unnecessarily, so waste- 
 fully ? from the wanton hostility of some of 
 our fellow creatures. There may, of course, be 
 mortals who love fighting for its own sake it 
 seems an odd and unaccountable taste indeed 
 but if there be such they ought to be rather grate- 
 ful than not to that malignant portion of the 
 human race who devote what energies they have, 
 and a seeming abundance of leisure, to making 
 gratuitous troubles for their neighbours. Only 
 those who whole-heartedly desire to do their own 
 appointed congenial work in peace, and have, 
 through long years, been subjected to unpro- 
 voked attack, to the perpetual creation of arti- 
 ficial and wholly unnecessary obstacles and diffi- 
 culties by people who have little or no business 
 at all in the matter, can have any real idea of 
 the sharpness of the prolonged discomfort of 
 
 1 " Minor^ Works" of S. Teresa, page za. 
 
 8 Printed in " Hard Sayings," pages 131 et seq. 
 
208 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 such a state of things. It would not matter 
 so much to a capable person without Christian 
 principles; but the real irremovable sting to an 
 ordinary Christian, a fortiori to a saintly woman 
 like S. Teresa, lies in the almost irresistible 
 temptation which such troubles bring to injure 
 Christian charity. Let anyone try to do work 
 which needs to be done, which he personally 
 cares to do, try in the best way among a set of 
 people who do their ingenious utmost either 
 from stupidity, or malignity, or vanity, or more 
 likely from a combination of these, to spoil and 
 thwart his work perpetually, and he will need 
 no one to tell him what the acuteness of the 
 struggle is to feel really and truly charitable to 
 such persons. This is just how S. Teresa was 
 placed when she was toiling for the reform of 
 the Carmelite Order, and she was entirely aware 
 of the misery of the situation. She may not 
 have dwelt upon it often probably the needs of 
 charity are best served by thinking as little as 
 possible about such tangles but in one of her 
 letters a passage occurs which is singularly 
 significant to any reader who has had a real if, 
 compared to S. Teresa's, small experience of 
 this particular kind of suffering : 
 
 " Indeed the stratagems and diligence which 
 have been made use of to defame us, and 
 especially Father Gracian and myself (I am the 
 person against whom all their blows are directed) 
 are so numerous, and the accusations against 
 this good man have been so false, and the 
 memorials which were presented against him 
 
EPILOGUE 209 
 
 to the King, as well as against the reform of 
 the convents, were so scandalous, that to have 
 seen them your Lordship would have wondered 
 how anyone could have invented such malice. 
 But I am persuaded that we gained much by 
 them, because the nuns felt as much joy as if 
 these calumnies did relate to them. The virtue 
 of Father Gracian has shone with such bright- 
 ness under the trial that I am quite astonished. 
 What a great treasure must not God have 
 hidden in that soul, for he prays especially for 
 those who calumniate him, and he bears their 
 calumnies with as much joy as S. Jerome ! He 
 cannot, however, endure the false charges which 
 our enemies have brought against the nuns." 1 
 
 This letter was addressed to the Archbishop 
 of Evora in the year 1578. S. Teresa was there- 
 fore sixty-three, and was writing three years 
 later than the date when she herself said she had 
 worn the religious habit for forty years, sixteen 
 years after she had finished the " Autobiog- 
 raphy," and only four years before her death. 
 This frank admiration of Father Gracian 's 
 charity, tacitly admitting the extreme difficulty 
 of feeling truly charitable to deliberately mali- 
 cious enemies, does not belong to the long weary 
 years of struggle, but to the years of illumina- 
 tion, of saintliness. It may be compared with 
 that " Epistle on Charity " which Richard Rolle 
 wrote, perhaps one of the most wonderful expo- 
 sitions of this essential and difficult virtue ever 
 
 1 " Letters of S. Teresa," page 30. Translated by the 
 Rev. John Dalton. 
 
210 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 written, for, like the great chapter in the Corin- 
 thians, it makes no accommodations. Yet, for 
 us ordinary mortals who strive in vain to reach, 
 however utterly we admire, however entirely 
 we admit the necessity of these self-emptied 
 extremes of love, perhaps the admission of so 
 great a saint as Teresa de Jesus comes with a still 
 more encouraging comfort even than Rolle's, 
 a comfort which is of genuine assistance in our 
 struggles to get a little nearer to the ideal. If 
 anyone will imagine that because S. Teresa 
 recognised the difficulty of really loving, and 
 hence really praying for Our neighbours who 
 may behave unneighbourly, she therefore did not 
 do it herself, the following translated passage 
 from the Bull of Gregory XV., for her canon- 
 isation, may correct such a supposition : 
 
 " She also imitated the love of Our Lord 
 Jesus Christ for His enemies in a marvellous 
 manner. Although violently persecuted and 
 tried, she loved those who harmed her, and 
 prayed for those who hated her. Indeed the 
 slanders and injuries she endured nourished her 
 love and charity, so that men of authority used 
 to say that to win Teresa's love one must defraud 
 or injure her." 
 
 In this connexion we should remember the 
 contents of one of the eleven papers found 
 after her death in her Breviary. Different 
 people will feel the appeal of different members 
 of the Hierarchy of Holiness : the richness 
 of the Catholic heritage of Saints is one of 
 the great vitalising consolations of the Church, 
 
EPILOGUE 211 
 
 Among us mortals of so many races and of 
 infinite variety of temperament and environ- 
 ment, S. Teresa must always appeal to those 
 men and women who are essentially human, 
 who feel difficulties really and constantly, who 
 are quick-witted, who see all which is irre- 
 sistibly funny quite as acutely as they feel every- 
 thing which is intensely painful and trying. 
 Probably most people keep in some one devo- 
 tional book, all the papers which mean most to 
 them ; there is no reason to doubt that S. Teresa 
 followed this ordinary plan. How significant then 
 to those who love her and truly know her is the 
 following, the longest of these eleven bookmarks : 
 
 " (8) Advice as to how to profit by persecu- 
 cution. To ensure that persecutions and insults 
 should bear good fruit and profit the soul, it is 
 well to consider that they are done to God before 
 they are done to me, for the blow aimed at me 
 has already been aimed at His Majesty by sin. 
 Besides, the true lover ought to have made the 
 compact with the Bridegroom that she will be 
 wholly His, and care nothing for self. If then 
 our Spouse bears with this injury, why should 
 not we bear with it? Our sorrow ought to be 
 for the offence against His Majesty, as the wrong 
 does not affect our soul, but only our body of 
 clay, which so richly deserves to suffer." 1 
 
 What abiding comfort surely is to be found in 
 the closing words. The greatest malignity can, 
 it is true, hurt our " body of clay " almost in- 
 
 a " Minor Works " of S. Teresa, page 200. By the 
 Benedictines of Stanbrook. 
 
212 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 calculably ; but it lies with us, and with our faith- 
 ful or faithless use of grace, whether or no it 
 hurt our souls. That power has never been put 
 into the hands of our foes. Our real foes, here 
 as elsewhere, are those of our own household. 
 When once that fact is grasped, malignity is at 
 last shorn of its terrors. 
 
 Some of us, then, may find comfort in the 
 " Epistle on Charity, and some in this script in 
 a Breviary ; and all alike may thank GOD for His 
 holy hermit, Richard, and His winning woman 
 Saint, Teresa de Jesus. 
 
 It is absolutely unnecessary to elaborate further 
 the details of S. Teresa's sufferings; enough has 
 been said to describe to those who yet have to 
 make her acquaintance, to recall to those who have 
 made it, the various kinds of pain she endured. 
 
 My last point remains her attainment which 
 was won through pain, her vision, her illumina- 
 tion. 
 
 It is outside the purpose of this book to attempt 
 to undertake any minute description of the 
 " stages " in mystical union. Its aim is a 
 simpler, humbler, but in these days of hasty 
 snatching-up of fanciful ideas, not less necessary 
 one : it is just to argue that illumination is not 
 a strange decoration of a few intellectual or 
 spiritual cranks, but that while it is or can come 
 to be a constant state of the great saints, it can 
 also be the lot of poets, and that it can light 
 every man coming into the world, on the condi- 
 tion that saint, poet, or common man will attain 
 the state of purity, a state won by all alike, 
 
EPILOGUE 213 
 
 though in differing degrees, by some amount of 
 pain suffered, by some measure of deliberate 
 self-surrender. There may be but little bearing 
 of pain, but little self-denial ; then the purity is 
 stained and marred and partial, and the dimness 
 but seldom broken in upon by light. There 
 may be heroic acceptance of pain, a will given 
 up entirely, and then, into the transparence of 
 such a life, the light shines constantly. 
 
 Many of us need still to learn how in human 
 life the dividing lines are not absolute; that 
 unlike as we seem, not only in our natural 
 endowments, our external circumstances, but in 
 our own response, our own wilfulness or self- 
 surrender, yet we are not shut away, the saint 
 in one compartment, the sinner in another, with 
 the miscalled "average man" wandering about 
 loose somewhere between them ; but, in this life 
 at any rate, while our great opportunity still 
 remains, " we are members one of another." 
 
 That S. Teresa saw visions is definitely stated 
 in the Bull for her canonisation : " First among 
 Teresa's virtues ranked the love of God. . . . 
 Our Lord wonderfully increased it by a number 
 of visions and revelations." 1 
 
 In her "Autobiography," as early as the 
 fourth chapter, S. Teresa tells us that after nine 
 months Our Lord deigned to vouchsafe to her 
 illumination, and, though rarely, even union ; 
 she adds naively that she was ignorant of their 
 nature and value. 
 
 These graces were few, and at first fleeting. 
 1 " Minor Works "of S. Teresa, page 258. 
 
2i 4 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 As the years went by, and her struggles to detach 
 herself from every clogging fault, from every 
 worldly inclination, were more persistent and 
 more powerful, illumination grew stronger and 
 more frequent. 
 
 She was one of the most unfortunate of the 
 saints perhaps in her spiritual fathers, or rather, 
 it is truer to say, that for many years that was so. 
 She not seldom laments the loss she suffered 
 through the lack of a competent director who 
 would have had the experience to recognise the 
 divine origin of her visions, who would not have 
 troubled and distressed her by suggesting for 
 them a diabolical genesis. 
 
 This is not the place to recount the gradual 
 passage, as her whole nature became more and 
 more purified through struggle and suffering, of 
 the transient flickers of light into a steadier illu- 
 mination, of the stages of vision and quiet and 
 rapture into union. Indeed, since S. Teresa has 
 left behind her the " Autobiography," "The 
 Interior Castle," and " The Way of Perfection," 
 no one has the smallest excuse for meddling in 
 the matter, in the way of trying to tell it again. 
 But since there may be people who wish to have 
 some line of demarcation drawn between the 
 earlier and later stages, it is perhaps well just to 
 quote her account of union. It occurs in " The 
 Interior Gastle " i 1 "The devil cannot interfere 
 nor do any harm, for His Majesty is so joined 
 and united with the essence of the soul that the 
 evil one dare not approach, nor can he even 
 1 " Fifth Mansions," chapter i. 
 
EPILOGUE 215 
 
 understand this mystery. This is certain, for it 
 is said that the devil does not know our thoughts, 
 much less can he penetrate a secret so profound 
 that God does not reveal it even to us. Oh, 
 blessed state, in which this cursed one cannot 
 injure us." 
 
 Perhaps that passage makes clear the distinc- 
 tion between illumination which may shine on 
 those who are still very far from even that 
 degree of virtue which one day they will attain 
 on earth, which gleams at whiles in the troubled 
 scenes of our daily warfare and that full union 
 which a few of the greatest saints have experi- 
 enced, a union untroubled, unassailable by the 
 enemy of man. 
 
 Though it should not be necessary to say so, 
 one had perhaps better not omit to say that this 
 mystic union is, after all, an earthly state, a 
 condition of our present human life. It is not, 
 of course, beatific vision, the heavenly reward; 
 it is not even the humen glorice of Catholic theo- 
 logians. A reader who desires to pursue a little 
 further this theme might consult such a book as 
 the Abbot of Buckfast's "The Human Soul." 1 
 What it is of prime importance to realise is that 
 here, as elsewhere in the eternal scheme of things, 
 GOD, Who has done so much for us, still requires 
 us to do something for ourselves. As Abbot 
 Vonier says, that kind of sanctifying grace called 
 humen glorice i.e. the preparation of the human 
 soul for the Beatific Vision " is given to us and 
 given to us more abundantly through the acts 
 1 Chapters xli and xlii. 
 
216 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 of Christian life done in the body of our mor- 
 tality." Similarly the mystic wins to that union 
 which is possible " in the body of our mortality," 
 because he deliberately tries to purge himself of 
 sins, of faults, of all that is meretricious and 
 shameful and weak, that he may at last be ready 
 for the gift. None of us will ever make much 
 progress till we realise that preparation of our- 
 selves for the reception of the greatest gifts is 
 absolutely essential, and is our own bounden 
 business and responsibility. 
 
 There is perhaps another distinction which 
 should be made, that important one between 
 genuine illumination and self-delusion. It can 
 hardly be done better than in S. Teresa's own 
 words. The later chapters of the " Autobiog- 
 raphy " contain accounts of many of her visions 
 and revelations; but at the beginning of the 
 thirty-eighth chapter there occurs the following 
 passage, very familiar of course to all students 
 of her writings, wherein she draws clearly the 
 above distinction, and attempts further, so far 
 as the hampering limits of human speech will 
 extend, to convey the difference between physical 
 and supernatural light. She writes : " Dans la 
 suite il m'est arrive, et il m 'arrive encore quelque- 
 fois, que Notre Seigneur me de"couvre de plus 
 grands secrets, mais de telle maniere que je ne 
 vois que ce qu'il lui plait de me montrer, 
 sans qu'il soit au pouvoir de mon ame, quand 
 elle le voudrait, d'apercevoir rien de plus. Le 
 moindre de ces secrets suffit pour ravir 1'ame 
 d 'admiration, et la faire avancer beaucoup dans 
 
EPILOGUE 217 
 
 le mepris et la basse opinion des choses de la vie. 
 Je voudrais pouvoir donner une ide"e de ce qui 
 m'e"tait alors decouvert de moins e'leve'; mais en 
 cherchant a y parvenir, je trouve que c'est im- 
 possible ; car entre la seule lumiere de ce divin 
 sejour ou tout est lumiere, et la lumiere d'ici- 
 bas, il y a d6ja tant de difference, qu'on ne peut 
 les comparer, celle du soleil ne semblant plus 
 que laideur. L'imagination la plus subtile ne 
 peut arriver a se peindre et a se figurer cette 
 lumiere, ni a se re"presenter aucune des merveilles 
 que Notre Seigneur me faisait alors connaitre. 
 II est impossible de rendre le souverain plaisir 
 qui accompagnait cette connaissance, et le haut 
 degre' de suavit6 dont tous mes sens etaient alors 
 combl^s; ainsi je suis forcee de n'en dire davan- 
 tage." 1 
 
 It has been stated all through these pages that 
 the truth which it is eminently desirable to urge 
 to-day is that the Mystic's way is not, and never 
 has been, a way of wilful choice, of pleasant 
 selection, of self-directed emotion. We can see 
 and if at all how better than by the life of 
 S. Teresa? and yet we can by the life of every 
 saint who was also a Mystic that the necessary 
 path to union with GOD after illumination begins 
 while that illumination is waxing, with hardness 
 and pain. Now, in this passage just quoted, we 
 can perceive the same truth from another angle, 
 can realise how far the will is from being able 
 to pick and choose as it pleases. " I only saw 
 
 '"Autobiography," chapter xxxviii. 
 
218 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION' 
 
 what He was pleased to show me, without my 
 soul having any power, even when she wished 
 it, to perceive anything beyond." Surely that 
 definite experience of so great and so accurate a 
 Saint should for ever divide maudlin day-dreams 
 from real illumination. One more passage from 
 her writings may possibly clinch this particular 
 point : " Je reviens maintenant aux artifices du 
 d6mon et aux douceurs qu'il procure, et je dis 
 que le moyen sur de les 6viter^ c'est d 'avoir des 
 le de"but de la vie spirituelle, une e*nergique 
 resolution d'aller toujours par le chemin de la 
 croix, sans desirer les consolations inte'rieures." 1 
 
 If that be still insufficient, the reader may turn 
 back a page or two and find the passage where 
 she recommends those who aim at mystical 
 union " de commencer par se detacher de toute 
 espece de contentement, et d'entrer dans le 
 carriere avec une seule resolution, celle d'aider 
 Je"sus-Christ a porter sa croix.*' There is the 
 gateway to vision and union in that image so 
 dear to her " one only resolution, to help JESUS 
 Christ to carry His Cross." 
 
 It may be well to close with a rather different 
 example, a somewhat subtle one, of one actual 
 way whereby pain wrought the illumination. 
 After suffering considerably from not a few 
 maladroit directors, she tells us 2 that, at last, 
 the Rector of the Jesuit College gave her as 
 director a Confessor profoundly versed in spirit- 
 ual things. Yet even now all was not to be 
 
 1 " Autobiography, " chapter xv. 
 a Ibid., chapter xxxiii. 
 
EPILOGUE 219 
 
 plain sailing, for though Father Gaspard de 
 Salazar would fain have encouraged her to great 
 advances in illumination, he, like all his brethren 
 in the Company of Jesus, could not go beyond 
 the wishes of their Superior. Consequently, 
 some steps which otherwise he would have 
 recommended, he thought it wiser not to pro- 
 pose. S. Teresa, with the humility which had 
 become habitual, writes: " D'un autre cote*, 
 mon ame se sentait comme emporte' par rimpet- 
 uosite* de ses transports; je soufTrais beaucoup 
 de la voir ainsi Ii6e par mon confesseur ; cepen- 
 dant je ne m'e'cartais en rien de ce qu'il com- 
 mandait." 
 
 What an object lesson for those whose idea 
 of spiritual progress is bound up with the exer- 
 cise of their own independent judgment. Any 
 person of ordinary sensitiveness and perception 
 can realise the additional acuteness of this fresh 
 trouble. A Confessor who did not understand 
 was, some might think, a sufficient trial; but 
 how great the temptation must have been to 
 petulant impatience when another Confessor 
 did, at length, understand, but was hampered, 
 possibly not by the fact that his superior 
 would refuse, but simply because he could not 
 then and there obtain either permission or 
 refusal. 
 
 A whole flood of excellent arguments rushes 
 in; common sense, of which sometimes we hear 
 so much, flies to the rescue. That is to say, 
 with the ordinary many that is what would 
 occur. But S. Teresa was of the few who realise 
 
220 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 the grace and power and efficacy which are in 
 " holy obedience." Because she was willing to 
 bow to that which may have seemed like a very 
 earthly authority, an authority faulty to foolish- 
 ness the self-satisfied dogmatist might assure us, 
 therefore after many days the reward came, and 
 she could say with S. Paul, " I was not disobe- 
 dient unto the heavenly vision." 
 
 Some may wonder why this imperfect and 
 inadequate recital has, so far, taken no account 
 of that work of S. Teresa which would offer by 
 far the most easily collected and by far the most 
 cogent witness to the theory that suffering is the 
 pre-essential to that illumination which will one 
 day be exchanged for the Beatific Vision. I 
 mean, of course, " The Interior Castle." The 
 reason is not one nor simple. 
 
 First of all, there is the convincing force which 
 arises from the treatment of a subject when it is 
 not the writer's first and principal aim. When 
 a man or woman sits down deliberately to treat 
 a subject, it is almost certain that that treatment 
 will differ from the kind of handling it receives 
 when it comes in as a very important but still 
 subsidiary matter to the business directly in 
 hand. Both manners have their value; both 
 should be studied by all who would grasp the 
 whole meaning. Thus far, S. Teresa's other 
 works have been laid under careful contribution. 
 Nothing from them will, I believe, clash with 
 anything in "The Interior Castle," where the 
 theme is, as it were, raised to a higher plane, 
 reaching up and up into rare heights till it 
 
EPILOGUE 221 
 
 trembles on the confines of those things " which 
 it is not lawful for a man to utter." 
 
 Then some reader may ask why, even if that 
 be so, should we not supplement the collected 
 passages from so many other sources with some 
 from this supreme one ? Just because and this 
 is a second element in the complex reason it is 
 supreme, and because it deals with the matter 
 straight on ; just because S. Teresa has told us 
 S. Teresa, the woman who suffered, who saw, 
 who attained just because of all that, it were 
 worse than unnecessary for anyone to pick and 
 choose, to fall to the vulgarity of acting as show- 
 man among heavenly things, here where she 
 has done all. 
 
 And thirdly this is, in aim, a study not 
 of union but of illumination. Purgation and 
 union, the one the pre-essential, the other the 
 crown, cannot be left out; but illumination was 
 the chosen business of this book. 
 
 To create an interest where perhaps it did not 
 exist, to pave the way by extracts, to indicate the 
 exact place where the full conclusion may be 
 found, that much, I hope, a lover of S. Teresa 
 may lawfully attempt. To tell again what she 
 has told once for all, no ! 
 
 "The Interior Castle" has been translated 1 
 admirably into English. The volume is at any- 
 one's service ; nor can anyone really need a com- 
 mentary upon it. A perusal of it will drive 
 
 1 By the Benedictines of Stanbrook. Revised by the 
 Very Reverend Benedict Zimmermann, O.C.D. Pub- 
 lished by Thomas Baker, 6s. net. 
 
222 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 home the thesis which this book has attempted 
 to present, and the preliminary foundations of 
 which it has attempted to lay; in doing which 
 it prefers no claim to originality, and apologises 
 for no loans. Its single object, in a material- 
 istic age over prone to rely on the five senses 
 eked out with emotional speculation, w r as to call 
 some who might respond away from mysticism, 
 falsely so-called, to a contemplation of a few 
 poets, and then to that of this mighty soul, 
 whose holy and magnificent visions can never 
 be squared with the newest and most fashion- 
 able psychology, whose great heart out- 
 throbbed the puny bounds set by birth, worldly 
 position, wealth or fame^ and whose delightful 
 wit would have given short shrift to the pom- 
 pous pretensions of some modern science, which 
 will condemn dogma with tremendous dogma- 
 tism, sweep away what it calls superstition by 
 an arrogance which out-superstitions supersti- 
 tion, which will weigh Heaven and earth in a 
 human balance, and presume to bound Infinity 
 by the sorry limits of a finite understanding. 
 
 So, we may close with one single passage 
 from "The Interior Castle," one which sums 
 up all which has been quoted, and which must 
 remain a standing challenge to that modern 
 spirit which fancies that the essence of virtue lies 
 in "-holding up one's head like a man": if 
 only we had anything to do it about ! S. Teresa 
 asks : 
 
 " Do you know what it is to be truly spiritual ? 
 It is for men to make themselves the slaves of 
 
EPILOGUE 223 
 
 God branded with His mark which is the 
 Cross. . . . Unless you make up your minds to 
 this, never expect to make much progress, for 
 humility, as I said, is the foundation of the 
 whole building." 
 
 It seems to some of us, as we look on nowa- 
 days, that the one vital need is that the world 
 should get back to the elemental realities of life 
 and faith. Men's views seem now so often just 
 one mass of shallow borrowing, or emptiest 
 makeshift. Nothing much, so it seems some- 
 times, matters but being found out : everything 
 is all right if you can just scramble up to the 
 low dull standard of the world's external respec- 
 tability. Of some men's sins other than these, 
 sinned shamelessly and perhaps grossly, we 
 must of course say " it should not have been, it 
 is all wrong." And yet as we consider those 
 whom the world casts out as rank failures, the 
 wrecks of all kinds of intemperance, of wasting 
 poverty and idleness, we surely turn back more 
 at ease from these unashamed wastrels than 
 from the smooth mole-like sinners, to the lives 
 and doings of the Saints. Great as the space is, 
 it is not unbridgeable. As we turn and con- 
 template the Saints' transparent whiteness, their 
 infinite toilsome struggles, their humble self- 
 surrender, it is not only these which carry con- 
 viction, but it is also their lucid reality ; and that 
 is why, in the light of their lives, coarse sins 
 seem less hopeless than polished humbug. 
 
 Better still, we turn to the Gospels, and 
 we remember that none of the sinners, not 
 
224 A STUDY IN ILLUMINATION 
 
 Zacchaeus, not Lazarus the beggar, not S. Mary 
 Magdalene, and not even the rich young man, 
 drew from Our Lord those scorching words 
 which this accommodating age would have 
 shuddered to hear Him launch at the Pharisees. 
 His most burning denunciations were kept for 
 the smooth hypocrites. We all know it. And 
 it is a terrifying reflection, since hypocrisy is 
 superlatively easy and insidious. Here it is 
 where the Mystics bring us comfort, for surely 
 it is incompatible with the Mystic Way. Men 
 may counterfeit that life, but only for a time; 
 it is too exacting, they are soon exposed and 
 found out. Pain is a searching test, it divides 
 the joints and marrow ; no man has ever seen or 
 attained unless pain was first and long his close 
 companion. 
 
 So " the Way " is still there, that straight and 
 narrow path winding finely through this world's 
 wide spaces, hedged by thorns, paved with sharp 
 cutting stones, lit by a heavenly light, the only 
 possible way to the one supreme goal. 
 
 The conclusion of the matter, the theory, if 
 one can call it by so academic a term, of illumina- 
 tion is simple enough, as simple indeed as its 
 attainment is utterly hard. It is the " pure in 
 heart " (the will having more influence than 
 understanding has on the heart) who " see 
 GOD"; and pain is the great purifier. Along 
 the way of purgation, of entire self-surrender 
 at whatever cost, the sin-stained mortal passes, 
 first to purity, and then to vision. 
 
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