"Moreover, something is or seems,
That touches me with mystic gleams,
Like glimpses of forgotten dreams--
"Of something felt, like something here;
Of something done, I know not where;
Such as no knowledge may declare." {149}
"Ah!" says the medical man, with a wise shake of the head, "this mental
condition is a common enough phenomenon, though only on rare occasions
does it express itself in literature. It is simple hysteria."
The transcendentalist who has regarded this state of mind as a spiritual
revelation, and looked upon its possessor as one endowed with special
powers of intuition, is indignant with this physiological explanation.
He is more indignant when the medical man proceeds to explain the
ecstatic trances of saints, those whom one may call professional mystics.
"Brutal materialism," says the transcendentalist.
Now although hysteria is commonly regarded as a foolish exhibition of
weakness on the part of some excitable men and women, there is absolutely
no scientific reason why any stigma should attach to this phenomenon.
Nor is there any reason why the explanation should be considered as
derogatory and necessarily connected with a materialistic view of the
Universe.
For what is hysteria? It is an abnormal condition of the nervous system
giving rise to certain physiological and psychical manifestations. With
the physiological ones we are not concerned, but the psychical
manifestation should be of the greatest interest to all students of
literature who are also presumably students of life. The artistic
temperament is always associated with a measure of nervous instability.
And where there is nervous instability there will always be a tendency to
hysteria. This tendency may be kept in check by other faculties. But it
is latent--ready to manifest itself in certain conditions of health or
under special stress of excitement. It does not follow that every
hysterical person has the artistic temperament; for nervous instability
may be the outcome of nervous disease, epilepsy, insanity, or even simple
neuroticism in the parents. But so powerful is the influence of the
imagination over the body, that the vivid imagination connoted by the
artistic temperament controls the nervous system, and when it reaches a
certain intensity expresses itself in some abnormal way. And it is the
abnormal psychical condition that is of so much significance in
literature and philosophy.
This psychical condition is far commoner in the East than in the West.
Indeed in India, training in mystical insight goes by the name of Yoga.
{151a} The passive, contemplative temperament of the Oriental favours
this ecstatic condition.
"The science of the Sufis," says a Persian philosopher of the
eleventh century, {151b} "aims at detaching the heart from all that
is not God, and at giving to it for sole occupation the meditation of
the divine being. . . . Just as the understanding is a stage of
human life in which an eye opens to discuss various intellectual
objects uncomprehended by sensation; just so in the prophetic the
sight is illumined by a light which uncovers hidden things and
objects which the intellect fails to reach. The chief properties of
prophetism are perceptible only during the transport by those who
embrace the Sufi life. The prophet is endowed with qualities to
which you possess nothing analogous, and which consequently you
cannot possibly understand. How should you know their true
nature?--what one can comprehend? But the transport which one
attains by the method of the Sufis is like an immediate perception,
as if one touched the objects with one's hand."
It is worthy of note how that every ecstatic condition is marked by the
same characteristics; and in the confession of Jefferies, the admissions
of Tennyson, and in the utterance of religious mystics of every kind, two
factors detach themselves. The vision or state of mind is one of
expectant wonder. Something that cannot be communicated in words thrills
the entire being. That is one characteristic. The other is that this
exaltation, this revelation to the senses, is one that appeals wholly to
sensation. It can be felt; it cannot be apprehended by any intellectual
formulae. It can never be reduced to logical shape. And the reference
to "touch" in the quotation just made will remind the reader of the
important part played by the tactile sense in Jefferies' aesthetic
appreciations.
We are not concerned here with any of the philosophical speculations
involved in these "trance conditions." All that concerns us is the
remarkable literature that has resulted from this well-ascertained
psychical condition. How far the condition is the outcome of forces
beyond our immediate ken which compel recognition from certain
imaginative minds, how far it is a question of physical disturbance; or,
in other words, how far these visions are objective realities, how far
subjective, are questions that he beyond the scope of the present paper.
One thing, however, is indisputable; they have exercised a great
fascination over men of sensitive, nervous temperaments, and are often
remarkable for the wider significance they have given to our ideals of
beauty.
The fact that mysticism may arise out of morbid conditions of health does
not justify us, I think, in looking upon it with Max Nordau as "the fruit
of a degenerate brain." Such a criticism is at one with the linking of
genius with insanity--an argument already broached in the paper dealing
with Hazlitt.
Professor William James--who certainly holds no brief for the
mystic--makes the interesting suggestion that "these mystical flights are
inroads from the subconscious life of the cerebral activity, correlative
to which we as yet know nothing." {153a}
"As a rule," he says elsewhere, "mystical states merely add a
super-sensuous meaning to the ordinary outward data of consciousness.
They are excitements like the emotions of love or ambition, gifts to
our spirit by means of which facts already objectively before us fall
into a new expressiveness, and make a new connection with our active
life. They do not contradict these facts as such, or deny anything
that our senses have immediately seized."
The connection between mysticism and hysteria, and the psychological
importance of hysteria, merits the fullest consideration in dealing with
the writings of these literary Vagabonds. Stevenson's mysticism is more
speculative than that of Jefferies; the intellectual life played a
greater share in his case, but it is none the less marked; and quite
apart from, perhaps even transcending, their literary interest is the
psychological significance of stories like _Markheim_ and _The Strange
Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_.
A medical friend of Jefferies, Dr. Samuel Jones, {153b} has said, when
speaking of his "ecstasies": "His is not the baneful, sensuous De Quincey
opium-deliriation; he felt a purer delight than that which inspired the
visions of Kubla Khan; he saw 'no damsel with a dulcimer,' but thrilled
with yearning unspeakable for the 'fuller soul,' and felt in every
trembling fibre of his frame the consciousness of incarnate immortality."
This attempt to exalt Jefferies at the expense of De Quincey and
Coleridge seems to me unfortunate. Enough has been said already in the
remarks on De Quincey to show that the dreams of De Quincey were no mere
opium dreams. De Quincey was a born dreamer, and from his earliest days
had visions and ecstatic moods. The opium which he took (primarily at
any rate to relieve pain, not, as Dr. Jones suggests, to excite sensuous
imagery) undoubtedly intensified the dream faculty, but it did not
produce it.
I confess that I do not know quite what the Doctor means by preferring
the "purer delight" of the Jefferies exaltation to the vision that
produced _Kubla Khan_. If he implies that opium provoked the one and
that "the pure breath of Nature" (to use his own phrase) inspired the
other, and that the latter consequently is the purer delight, then I
cannot follow his reasoning.
A vision is not the less "pure" because it has been occasioned by a drug.
One of the sublimest spiritual experiences that ever happened to a man
came to John Addington Symonds after a dose of chloroform. Nitrous
oxide, ether, Indian hemp, opium, these things have been the means of
arousing the most wonderful states of ecstatic feeling.
Then why should _Kubla Khan_ be rated as a less "pure" delight than one
of the experiences retailed in _The Story of my Heart_? Is our
imagination so restricted that it cannot enjoy both the subtleties of
Coleridge and the fuller muse of Jefferies?
The healing power of Nature has never found happier expression than in
_The Story of my Heart_. In words of simple eloquence he tells us how he
cured the weariness and bitterness of spirit by a journey to the
seashore.
"The inner nature was faint, all was dry and tasteless; I was weary
for the pure fresh springs of thought. Some instinctive feeling
uncontrollable drove me to the sea. . . . Then alone I went down to
the sea. I stood where the foam came to my feet, and looked out over
the sunlit waters. The great earth bearing the richness of the
harvest, and its hills golden with corn, was at my back; its strength
and firmness under me. The great sun shone above, the wide sea was
before me. The wind came sweet and strong from the waves. The life
of the earth and the sea, the glow of the sun filled me; I touched
the surge with my hand, I lifted my face to the sun, I opened my lips
to the wind. I prayed aloud in the roar of the waves--my soul was
strong as the sea, and prayed with the sea's might. Give me fulness
of life like to the sea and the sun, and to the earth and the air;
give me fulness of physical life, mind equal and beyond their
fulness; give me a greatness and perfection of soul higher than all
things; give me my inexpressible desire which swells in me like a
tide--give it to me with all the force of the sea."
Those who know Jefferies only by his quieter passages of leisurely
observation are surprised when they find such a swirl of passionate
longing in his autobiography.