Part 2

The impulse that would throw over as equally worthless every product of human art, because it is not indistinguishable from some alleged external reality, does not perceive the serious self-contradictions under which it labours. In the first place the notion of an external reality is a human notion; our reason makes that hypothesis, and its verification in our experience is one of the ideals of science, as its validity is one of the assumptions of daily life. In throwing over all human ideas, because they are infected with humanity, all human ideas are being sacrificed to one of them--the idea of an absolute reality. If this idea, being human, deserved that such sacrifices should be made for it, have the other notions of the mind no rights? Furthermore, even if we granted for the sake of argument a reality which our thoughts were essentially helpless to represent, whence comes the duty of our thoughts to represent it? Whence comes the value of this unattainable truth? From an ideal of human reason. We covet truth. So that the attempt to surrender all human science as relative and all human ideals as trivial is founded on a blind belief in one human idea and an absolute surrender to one human passion.

In spite of these contradictions, which only a dispassionate logic could thoroughly unravel, the enthusiast is apt to rush on. The vision of absolute truth and absolute reality intoxicates him, and as he is too subtle a thinker, too inward a man, to accept the content of his senses or the conventions of his intelligence for unqualified verities, he fortifies himself against them with the consciousness of their relativity, and seeks to rise above them in his meditations. But to rise to what? To some more elaborate idea? To some object, like a scientific cosmos or a religious creed, put together by longer and more indirect processes than those of common perception? Surely not. If I renounce my senses and vulgar intellect because they are infected with finitude and smell of humanity, how shall I accept a work of art, a product of reasoning, or an idol made originally with hands and now encrusted all over, like the statue of Glaucus, with traditional accretions? Poetry, science, and religion, in their positive constructions, are more human, more conditioned, than are the senses and the common understanding themselves. The lover of inviolate reality must not look to them. If the data of human knowledge must be rejected as subjective, how much more should we reject the inferences made from those data by human thought. The way of true wisdom, therefore, if true wisdom is to deal with the Absolute, can only lie in abstention: neither the senses nor the common understanding, and much less the superstructure raised upon these by imagination, logic, or tradition, must delude us: we must keep our thoughts fixed upon the inanity of all this in comparison with the unthinkable truth, with the undivided and unimaginable reality. Everything, says the mystic, is nothing, in comparison with the One.

This confusion, the logical contradiction of which we have just seen, may, for lack of a more specific word, be called mysticism. It consists in the surrender of a category of thought on account of the discovery of its relativity. If I saw or reasoned or judged by such a category, I should be seeing, reasoning, or judging in a specific manner, in a manner conditioned by my finite nature. But the specific and the finite, I feel, are odious; let me therefore aspire to see, reason and judge in no specific or finite manner--that is, not to see, reason or judge at all. So I shall be like the Infinite, nay I shall become one with the Infinite and (marvellous thought!) one with the One.

The ideal of mysticism is accordingly exactly contrary to the ideal of reason; instead of perfecting human nature it seeks to abolish it; instead of building a better world, it would undermine the foundations even of the world we have built already; instead of developing our mind to greater scope and precision, it would return to the condition of protoplasm--to the blessed consciousness of an Unutterable Reality. In the primary stages, of course, mysticism does not venture to abolish all our ideas, or to renounce all our categories of thought. Thus many Christian mystics have still clung, out of respect for authority, to traditional theology, and many philosophical mystics have made some room for life and science in the post-scripts which they, like Parmenides, have appended to the blank monism of their systems. But such concessions or hesitations are inconsistent with the mystical spirit which will never be satisfied, if fully developed and fearless, with anything short of Absolute Nothing.

For the very reason, however, that mysticism is a tendency to obliterate distinctions, a partial mysticism often serves to bring out with wonderful intensity those underlying strata of experience which it has not yet decomposed. The razing of the edifice of reason may sometimes discover its foundations. Or the disappearance of one department of activity may throw the mind with greater energy into another. So Spinoza, who combined mysticism in morals with rationalism in science, can bring out the unqualified naturalism of his system with a purity and impressiveness impossible to men who still retain an ideal world, and seek to direct endeavour as well as to describe it. Having renounced all ideal categories, Spinoza has only the material categories left with which to cover the ground. He thus acquires all the concentrated intensity, all the splendid narrowness, which had belonged to Lucretius, while his mystical treatment of the spheres which Lucretius simply ignored, gives him the appearance of a greater profundity. So an ordinary Christian who is mystical, let us say, about time and space, may use his transcendentalism in that sphere to intensify his positivism in theology, and to emphasize his whole-souled surrender to a devout life.

What is impossible is to be a transcendentalist "all 'round." In that case there would be nothing left to transcend; the civil war of the mind would have ended in the extermination of all parties. The art of mysticism is to be mystical in spots and to aim the heavy guns of your transcendental philosophy against those realities or those ideas which you find particularly galling. Planted on your dearest dogma, on your most precious postulate, you may then transcend everything else to your heart's content. You may say with an air of enlightened profundity that nothing is "really" right or wrong, because in Nature all things are regular and necessary, and God cannot act for purposes as if his will were not already accomplished; your mysticism in religion and morals is kept standing, as it were, by the stiff backing which is furnished by your materialistic cosmology. Or you may say with a tone of devout rapture that all sights and sounds are direct messages from Divine Providence to the soul, without any objects "really" existing in space; your mysticism about the world of perception and scientific inference is sustained by the naive theological dogmas which you substitute for the conceptions of common sense. Yet among these partialities and blind denials a man's positive insight seems to thrive, and he fortifies and concentrates himself on his chosen ground by his arbitrary exclusions. The patient art of rationalizing the various sides of life, the observational as well as the moral, without confusing them, is an art apparently seldom given to the haste and pugnacity of philosophers.

Thus mysticism, although a principle of dissolution, carries with it the safeguard that it can never be consistently applied. We reach it only in exceptional moments of intuition, from which we descend to our pots and pans with habits and instincts virtually unimpaired. Life goes on; virtues and affections endure, none the worse, the mystic feels, for that slight film of unreality which envelops them in a mind not unacquainted with ecstasy. And although mysticism, left free to express itself, can have no other goal than Nirvana, yet moderately indulged in and duly inhibited by a residuum of conventional sanity, it serves to give a touch of strangeness and elevation to the character and to suggest superhuman gifts. It is not, however, in the least superhuman. It is hardly even abnormal, being only an exaggeration of a rational interest in the highest abstractions. The divine, the universal, the absolute, even the One, are legitimate conceptions. They are terms of human thought having as such a meaning in language and a place in speculation. Those who live in the mind, whose passions are only audible in the keen overtones of dialectic, are no doubt exalted and privileged natures, choosing a better part which should not be taken from them. So the poet and the mathematician have their spheres of abstract and delicate labour, in which a liberal legislator would not disturb them. Trouble only arises when the dialectician represents his rational dreams as knowledge of existences, and the mystic his excusable raptures as the only way of life. Poets and mathematicians do not imagine that their pursuits raise them above human limitations and are no part of human life, but rather its only goal and justification. Such a pretension would be regarded as madness in the mathematician or the poet; and is not the mystic as miserably a man? Is he not embodying, at his best, the analytic power of a logician, or the imagination of an enthusiast, and, at his worst, the lowest and most obscure passions of human nature?

Yes, in spite of himself, the mystic remains human. Nothing is more normal than abstraction. A contemplative mind drops easily its practical preoccupations, rises easily into an ideal sympathy with impersonal things. The wheels of the universe have a wonderful magnetism for the human will. Our consciousness likes to lose itself in the music of the spheres, a music that finer ears are sometimes privileged to catch. The better side of mysticism is an æsthetic interest in large unities and cosmic laws. The æsthetic attitude is not the moral, but it is not for that reason illegitimate. It gives us refreshment and a foretaste of that perfect adaptation of things to our faculties and of our faculties to things which, could it extend to every part of experience, would constitute the ideal life. Such happiness is denied us in the concrete; but a hint and example of it may be gathered by an abstracted element of our nature as it travels through an abstracted world. Such an indulgence adds to the value of reality only such value as it may itself have in momentary experience; it may have a doubtful moral effect on the happy dreamer himself. But it serves to keep alive the conviction, which a confused experience might obscure, that perfection is essentially possible; it reminds us, like music, that there are worlds far removed from the actual which are yet living and very near to the heart. Such is the fruit of abstraction when abstraction bears any fruit. If the imagination merely alienates us from reality, without giving us either a model for its correction or a glimpse into its structure, it becomes the refuge of poetical selfishness. Such selfishness is barren, and the fancy, feeding only on itself, grows leaner every day. Mysticism is usually an incurable disease. Facts cannot arouse it, since it never denied them. Reason cannot convince it, for reason is a human faculty, assuming a validity which it cannot prove. The only thing that can kill mysticism is its own uninterrupted progress, by which it gradually devours every function of the soul and at last, by destroying its own natural basis, immolates itself to its inexorable ideal.

Need we ask, after all these reflections, where we should look for that expansion and elevation of the mind which the mystic seeks so passionately and so unintelligently? We can find that expansion, in the first place, in the imagination itself. That is the true realm of man's infinity, where novelty may exist without falsity and perpetual diversity without contradiction. But such exercise of imagination leaves the world of knowledge untouched. Is there no escape from the prison, as the mystic thinks it, of science and history which shall yet not carry us beyond reality? Is there no truth beyond conventional truth, no life behind human existence?

Certainly. Behind the discovered there is the discoverable, beyond the actual, the possible. Science and history are not exhausted. In their determinate directions they are as infinite as fancy in its indetermination. The spectacle which science and history now spread before us is as far beyond the experience of an ephemeral insect as any Absolute can be beyond our own; yet we have put that spectacle together out of just such sensations as the insect may have--out of this sunlight and this buzz and these momentary throbs of existence. The understanding has indeed supervened, but it has supervened not to deny the validity of those sensations, but to combine their messages. We may still continue in the same path, by the indefinite extension of science over a world of experience and of intelligible truth. Is that prospect insufficient for our ambition? With a world so full of stuff before him, I can hardly conceive what morbid instinct can tempt a man to look elsewhere for wider vistas, unless it be unwillingness to endure the sadness and the discipline of the truth.

But can our situation be made better by refusing to understand it? If we renounced mysticism altogether and kept imagination in its place, should we not live in a clearer and safer world, as well as in a truer? Nay, are we sure that this gradually unfolding, intelligible, and real world would not turn out to be more congenial and beautiful than any wilful fiction, since it would be the product of a universal human labour and the scene of the accumulated sufferings and triumphs of mankind? When we compare the temple which we call Nature, built of sights and sounds by memory and understanding, with all the wonderful worlds evocable by the magician's wand, may we not prefer the humbler and more lasting edifice, not only as a dwelling, but even as a house of prayer? It is not always the loftiest architecture that expresses the deepest soul; the inmost religion of the Pagan haunted his hearth as that of the Christian his catacombs or his hermitage. So philosophy is more spiritual in her humility and abstinence than in her short-lived audacities, and she would do well to inscribe over her gates what, in an ancient Spanish church, may be seen written near the steep entrance to a little subterraneous crypt:--

"Wouldst thou pass this lowly door? Go, and angels greet thee there; For by this their sacred stair To descend is still to soar. Bid a measured silence keep What thy thoughts be telling o'er; Sink, to rise with wider sweep To the heaven of thy rest, For he climbs the heavens best Who would touch the deepest deep."

II

THE HOMERIC HYMNS

We of this generation look back upon a variety of religious conceptions and forms of worship, and a certain unsatisfied hunger in our own souls attaches our attention to the spectacle. We observe how literally fables and mysteries were once accepted which can have for us now only a thin and symbolical meaning. Judging other minds and other ages by our own, we are tempted to ask if there ever was any fundamental difference between religion and poetry. Both seem to consist in what the imagination adds to science, to history, and to morals. Men looked attentively on the face of Nature: their close struggle with her compelled them to do so: but before making statistics of her movements they made dramatizations of her life. The imagination enveloped the material world, as yet imperfectly studied, and produced the cosmos of mythology.

Thus the religion of the Greeks was, we might say, nothing but poetry: nothing but what imagination added to the rudiments of science, to the first impressions of a mind that pored upon natural phenomena and responded to them with a quick sense of kinship and comprehension. The religion of the Hebrews might be called poetry with as good reason. Their "sense for conduct" and their vivid interest in their national destiny carried them past any prosaic record of events or cautious theory of moral and social laws. They rose at once into a bold dramatic conception of their race's covenant with Heaven: just such a conception as the playwright would seek out in order to portray with awful acceleration the ways of passion and fate. Finally, we have apparently a third kind of poetry in what has been the natural religion of the detached philosophers of all ages. In them the imagination touches the precepts of morals and the ideals of reason, attributing to them a larger scope and more perfect fulfilment than experience can show them to have. Philosophers ever tend to clothe the harmonies of their personal thought with universal validity and to assign to their ideals a latent omnipotence and an ultimate victory over the forces of unreason. This which is obviously a kind of poetry is at the same time the spontaneous religion of conscience and thought.

Yet religion in all these cases differs from a mere play of the imagination in one important respect; it reacts directly upon life; it is a factor in conduct. Our religion is the poetry in which we believe. Mere poetry is an ineffectual shadow of life; religion is, if you will, a phantom also, but a phantom guide. While it tends to its own expansion, like any growth in the imagination, it tends also to its application in practice. Such an aim is foreign to poetry. The inspirations of religion demand fidelity and courageous response on our part. Faith brings us not only peace, not only the contemplation of ideal harmonies, but labour and the sword. These two tendencies--to imaginative growth and to practical embodiment--coexist in every living religion, but they are not always equally conspicuous. In the formative ages of Christianity, for instance, while its legends were being gathered and its dogma fixed, the imaginative expansion absorbed men's interest; later, when the luxuriant branches of the Church began to shake off their foliage, and there came a time of year

"When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,"

the energy of religious thought, released from the enlargement of doctrine, spent itself upon a more rigid and watchful application of the residuum of faith.

In the Pagan religion the element of applicability might seem at first sight to be lacking, so that nothing would subsist but a poetic fable. An unbiassed study of antiquity, however, will soon dispel that idea. Besides the gods whom we may plausibly regard as impersonations of natural forces, there existed others; the spirits of ancestors, the gods of the hearth, and the ideal patrons of war and the arts. Even the gods of Nature inspired reverence and secured a cultus only as they influenced the well-being of man. The worship of them had a practical import. The conception of their nature and presence became a sanction and an inspiration in the conduct of life. When the figments of the fancy are wholly divorced from reality they can have no clearness or consistency; they can have no permanence when they are wholly devoid of utility. The vividness and persistence of the figures of many of the gods came from the fact that they were associated with institutions and practices which controlled the conception of them and kept it young. The fictions of a poet, whatever his genius, do not produce illusion because they do not attach themselves to realities in the world of action. They have character without power and names without local habitations. The gods in the beginning had both. Their image, their haunts, the reports of their apparitions and miracles, gave a nucleus of empirical reality to the accretions of legend. The poet who came to sing their praise, to enlarge upon their exploits, and to explain their cultus, gave less to the gods in honour than he received from them in inspiration. All his invention was guided by the genius of the deity, as represented by the traditions of his shrine. This poetry, then, even in its most playful mood, is not mere poetry, but religion. It is a poetry in which men believe; it is a poetry that beautifies and justifies to their minds the positive facts of their ancestral worship, their social unity, and their personal conscience.

These general reflections may help us to approach the hymns of Homer in a becoming spirit. For in them we find the extreme of fancy, the approach to a divorce between the imagination and the faith of the worshipper. Consequently there is danger that we may allow ourselves to read these lives of the gods as the composition of a profane poet. If we did so we should fail to understand not only their spirit as a whole but many of their parts, in which notes are struck now of devotion and affectionate pride, now of gratitude and entreaty. These may be addressed, it is true, to a being that has just been described as guilty of some signal vice or treachery, and the contradiction may well stagger a Puritan critic. But the lusts of life were once for all in the blood of the Pagan gods, who were the articulate voices of Nature and of passion. The half-meant exaggeration of a well-known trait in the divinity would not render the poets that indulged in it unwelcome to the god; he could feel the sure faith and affection of his worshippers even in their good-humoured laughter at his imaginary plights and naughtiness. The clown was not excluded from these rites. His wit also counted as a service.

The Homeric Hymns, if we may trust the impression they produce on a modern, are not hymns and are not Homer's. They are fragments of narrative in Ionic hexameter recited during the feasts and fairs at various Greek shrines. They are not melodies to be chanted with a common voice by the assemblage during a sacrifice; they are tales delivered by the minstrel to the listening audience of citizens and strangers. They usually have a local reference. Thus we find under the title of a hymn to Apollo a song of Delos and one of Delphi. Delos is a barren rock; its wealth was due to the temple that attracted to the place pilgrimages and embassies, not without rich offerings, from many Greek cities. Accordingly we hear how Leto or Latona, when about to become the mother of Apollo, wandered about the cities and mountains of Greece and Asia, seeking a birthplace for her son. None would receive her, but all the islands trembled at the awful honour of such a nativity, profitable as the honour might eventually prove,--

"Until at length The lovely goddess came to Delos' side And, making question, spake these wingèd words: 'Delos, were it thy will to be the seat Of my young son Apollo, brightest god, And build him a rich fane, no other power Should ever touch thee or work ill upon thee. I tell thee not thou shalt be rich in kine Or in fair flocks, much fruit, or myriad flowers; But when Apollo of the far-felt dart Hath here his shrine, all men will gather here Bringing thee hecatombs.... And though thy soil be poor, The gods shall make thee strong against thy foes.'"

The spirit of the island is naturally not averse to so favourable a proposition but, like some too humble maiden wooed by a great prince, has some misgivings lest this promise of unexpected good fortune should veil the approach of some worse calamity. "When the god is born into the light of day," she says, "will he not despise me, seeing how barren I am, and sink me in the sea