ON MYSTIC REALISM: A NOTE FOR THE ADEPT.
“Poesie ist das absolut Reelle. Dies ist der Kern meiner Philosophie.
Je poetischer, je wahrer.”
—
Novalis (Schriften, vol. iii. p. 171).
In the present work, and in the works which have preceded
it from the same pen, an attempt is made to combine
two qualities which the modern mind is accustomed to
regard apart—reality and mystery, earthliness and spirituality;
and this combination, whether a merit or a fault,
is a consequence of natural temperament, and perfectly
incurable. The writer dropped into a world a few years
ago like a being fallen from another planet. His first
impression was one of surprise and awe;—he stood and
wondered—and here, on the same spot, he stands and
wonders still. What is nearest to him seems so sublime,
unaccountable, and inexhaustible, and occasionally, indeed,
so droll and odd, that he has never ceased to regard it
with all the eyes of his soul from that day to this.
Others may go to the mountain-tops and interrogate the
spheres. Wiser men may peruse the Past, and see there,
afar away, the dreamy poetry for which the spirit eternally
yearns. More acquiescent men may look heavenward,
slowly and strangely losing the habit of earthly perception
altogether. With all these, with all who love beauty near
or afar away, in any shape or form, abides the twofold
blessing of reverence and love. But the Mystic is
occupied hopelessly with what immediately surrounds
him. Minuter examination leads only to extremer joy
and wonder. To him this ever-present reality is the
only mystery, and in its mystery lies its sublime fascination
and beauty. Only what is most real and visible and
certain is marvellous, and only that which is marvellous
has the least fascination. What he sees may be seen by
every soul under the sun, for it is the soul's own reflection
in the river of life glassed to a mirror by its own
speed.
This close examination of human nature from the
mystic side is not so common that men will tolerate it
calmly. “What is the dullard looking at?” cries the
passer-by; “what are these wretched beings who surround
him?—costermongers, thieves, magdalen-women,
village schoolmasters, nomads,—what is the sentimentalist
trying to find among these? He floods them with the light
of his own vacant mind, and calls that light their souls!”
So the speaker passes on—to the heights of the Alps,
perhaps, where he finds communion; God communicating
with all men somewhere. A more elaborate person pauses
next before the Mystic. “The man is in error,” is his
criticism; “he would fain prove himself an artist, but
art deals only with things beautiful,—with remote forms
of nature, with the dreamy past, with antique turns of
thought, with what is essentially exquisite in itself—and
it has, moreover, a terminology quite at variance with
ordinary speech. Man yearns to the unknown and illimitable,
and demands distance in the subjects of his art.”
And this other goes his way, grateful to God for Greece
and Italy, and for Lessing and Winkelman. Meantime
the poor criticised barbarian has not budged. He
looks on into the eyes nearest to him, and ah! what
distance does he not find there? Approaching each
creature as ever from the mystic side, he becomes, in
spite of himself, an optimist. The moment he seizes
or examination is the divine moment, when the creature
under examination—be it Buonaparte or a street-walker,
Bismarck or “Barbara Gray”—is at its highest and best,
whether that “best” be intellectual beatification or the
simple vicarious instinct which merges in the identity
of another. He sees the nature spiritualised, in the dim
strange light of whatever soul the creature possesses.
This light is often very dim indeed, very doubtful—so
doubtful that its very existence is denied by non-mystic
men whose musings assume the purely spiritual and
unimaginative form. But be the teaching true or false,
be the light born in the subject examined or in the human
sentiment that broods over it, this mystic approach to the
creature at his highest point of spiritualisation, this mode
of approach which seems unnatural to many because it
involves the most minute enumeration of details and the
most careful display of the very facts of life which artists
try most to conceal, is the only procedure possible to the
present writer. The personal key-note to all his work—
poor enough, God knows, is all that work from his own
point of view—is to be found in the “Book of Orm,” and
most of all in the poem entitled “The Man Accurst.”
Imagination is not, as some seem to imply, the power
of conjuring up the remote and unknowable, but the gift
of realising correctly in correct images the truths of
things as they are and ever have been. He who can see
no poetry in his own time is a very unimaginative person.
The truly imaginative being is he who carries his own
artistic distance with him, and sees the mighty myths of
life vivid yet afar off, glorified by the truth which is
Eternal. How many people can walk out on a starry
night, or sit by the side of the sea, unmoved? But let a
comet appear, or a star shoot, and they exclaim, “How
beautiful!” Let a whale rise up in the water and roar, and
they think, “How wonderful are the works of God!”
These are the people, and their name is legion, who lack
as yet the consecrating gleam of the imagination. As for
the Mystic, he needs neither a comet nor a whale to fill
his soul with a sense of the wonderful; he needs still less
the dark vistas of tradition or the archaic scenery of
obscure periods. He comes into the world, as has been
said, like a man dropped from the moon, and he walks all
his life as among wonderful beings in a strange clime.
How far has he not wandered, how far has he not yet to
wander?—and every face he sees is turned in the same
direction. Faces! how they haunt them with their weird
beauty and divine significance! Go where he may, his
path swarms with poetic forms. All is glorified and
awful. What is nearest seems of all the most sublime
and unaccountable. It is with difficulty that he can bear
any book or contemplate any painted picture, seeing
what books and pictures present themselves in the
strangely-coloured lives of his fellow-beings. He turns
to history—not in disdain of what exists, but in search of
explanation and corroboration, and in order to discover
what part of the strange show there is perishable, what part
is durable and eternal. Having as he thinks discovered
that, he may become a poet, and put on record his own
idea or autobiography, written in reference to his own
time, but to be used in all after-times as explanatory and
corroborative. Homer, the Greek tragedians, Aristophanes,
Plato, David and the prophets, the authors of
the Sagas and Lieds, Dante, Boccaccio, Rabelais, William
Langdale, Chaucer, the ballad-singers of Scotland
and England, Ben Jonson, Shakspere, La Fontaine, Burns,
Wordsworth, Jean Paul, Balsac, Shelley, Tennyson, Whitman,—do
we find any of these men, poets all of them,
turning away from his own time because it is too uninteresting?
or, on the contrary, do we find them penetrating
to the very soul of it, stirring to every breath of it,
uttering every dream and aspiration of it? Does Dante
try to write like Virgil, though he sits at Virgil's feet?
Does Chaucer ape Boccaccio, though he wears the Decameron
next his heart? Does Ben Jonson reproduce Plautus
or La Fontaine Rabelais? Does Burns, having drunk
Scotch ballads into his soul, sing as the ballad-writers
sang? Do we find Wordsworth seeking for subjects far
back in the dark ages? Has Shelley so little imagination
as to reproduce Greek tragedy as it was, or so much
imagination as to make of his “Prometheus” a veritable
modern poem [in spite of the falsehood and shallowness
of the myth it preserves] with a distinctly modern purpose
and scope?
“But,” some one again interposes, “this is such an
unpoetic age, and the surroundings of modern life are so
vulgar.” The writer understands this objection, and
there is reason in it. The majority of people find their
ordinary associations vulgar and unpoetic, and like to be
lured away from them and interested. So much the
worse, alas! for the majority. But let it be at once
admitted that the poet fails altogether if he fails to lure
readers and interest them as they desire. He is no mere
moral teacher, but a singer of the beautiful, and his real
business in this world is not to join in a chorus raised by
any group of people, but to explain some point of beauty
which has rested altogether hidden until his advent. If
people are unimaginative, he comes to teach them imagination:
if people dislike modern subjects, he comes to
make them like modern subjects. If ordinary people
perceived the sublime mysteries of contemporary life, if
ordinary people understood the faces and souls they
behold daily, it would be a waste of time to sing to them.
If men in general understood the higher historical issues
and perceived the higher poetry of the siege of Paris,
what good would it be to celebrate it in song? And this
poem, for example, fails altogether—is veritably less than
nothing—is a futility, a mere wind-bag—if it does not
make the reader feel the events it describes as he never,
by any possibility, felt them before.
In the “Drama of Kings,” as in “London Poems,”
“Inverburn,” and “Meg Blane,” in the presentment of
the characters of Buonaparte, Louis Napoleon, and Prince
Bismarck,—as in the characters of “Nell,” “Liz,” “Meg
Blane,” and the rest,—one point of view is adopted; not
the point of view of the satirist, nor that of the politician,
nor that of the historian; but that of the realistic Mystic,
who, seeking to penetrate deepest of all into the soul, and
to represent the soul's best and finest mood, seizes that
moment when the spiritual or emotional nature is most
quickened by sorrow or by self-sacrifice, by victory or by
defeat. In good honest truth, the writer has had far
greater difficulty in detecting the spiritual point in these
great leaders than in the poor worms at their feet. The
utterly personal moods of arbitrary power, the impossibility
of self-abnegation for the sake of any other living creature,
the frightful indifference to all ties, the diabolic supremacy
of the intellect, make the first Emperor a figure more
despairing to the Mystic than the coster girl dying in
childbed in a garret, or the defiant woman declaiming
over the corpse of her deformed seducer. It is this sense
of the superlatively diabolic that has made the author, in
the Epilogue, attribute the performance of the three leading
characters to Lucifer himself;—only let it be understood
not to the irreclaimable and Mephistophelian type
of utter evil, but to the Mystic's Devil, a spirit difficult to
fathom individually, but clearly in the divine service
working for good. Perhaps, by the way, the supernatural
machinery of Prelude and Epilude is a defect, like all
allegory; and if the consensus of wise criticism inclines
to its condemnation as a defect, it will be obliterated, no
author having a right to resist the wish of his readers
where their dislike corresponds with a doubt of his
own. But if it serves to keep before the reader the
fact that the whole action of the drama is seen from the
spiritual or divine auditorium, he will not regret its introduction;
and in using it without perfect faith, he may
plead the example of the greatest poetic sceptic of modern
times. No one did fuller justice to mystic truths than
the great positivist who wrote the first and second
“Fausts.”
Concerning the mere form of the poem and its resemblances
to the Greek, little need be said. It is the first
serious attempt ever made to treat great contemporary
events in a dramatic form and very realistically, yet with
something of the massive grandeur of style characteristic of
the great dramatists of Greece. In minor points of detail
the author is sanguine that it is not at all Greek, nor in
any sense of the word archaic. The interest is epic rather
than tragic; but what the leading character is to a
tragedy France is to the “Drama of Kings,”—a wonderful
genius guilty of many sins, terribly overtaken by misfortune,
and attaining in the end perhaps to purification.
It is unnecessary to add any more by way of explanation,
save to say that most of the metrical combinations
used in the choruses are quite new to English poetry, and
that where a measure is employed which has been used
successfully by any previous poet, the fact is chronicled
in the notes.
One word in conclusion. For this new experiment in
poetic realism, the writer asks no favour but one—a quiet
hearing. He has a faint hope that if readers will do him
the honour to peruse the work as a whole, and then
patiently contemplate the impression left in their own
minds, the first feeling of repulsion at an innovation may
give place in the end to a pleasanter feeling. Perhaps,
however, this is too much to ask from any member of so
busy a generation, and he should be grateful to any one
who will condescend to read the “Drama” in fragments.
Die Masse könnt ihr nur durch Masse zwingen;
Ein Jeder sucht sich endlich selbst was aus.
Wer vieles bringt, wird manchem etwas bringen,
Und Jeder geht zufrieden aus dem Haus. . . .
Was hilft's, wenn ihr ein Ganzes dargebracht!
Das Publicum wird es euch doch zerpflücken.
Robert Buchanan.