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Contents of Part 2
4.
Selected 'Nature Mystics'
4.1.
Thomas Traherne
4.2.
Walt Whitman
4.3.
Richard Jefferies
References
for Part 2
4. Selected 'Nature
Mystics'
4.1.
Thomas Traherne
James and
Underhill were unaware of the work of Traherne, as his mystical writings
were not discovered until long after his death in 1674. The earliest
publication (of the 'Dobell' poems) was in 1903 and followed by a prose
collection in 1908 known as the Centuries. Further poems
(unfortunately heavily edited by Traherne's brother Philip) were
discovered at the British Museum shortly after, and more works found in
1964 and 1967. Zaehner rightly points out consonances in Traherne's work
with Jefferies, Whitman and the Zen Buddhists, but it is Happold who
devotes a whole chapter to him in his Mysticism. He comments:
Though Thomas Traherne cannot be numbered
among the great mystics, he demands a place in any anthology of
mysticism. Nowhere else does one find a similar fusion of
nature-mysticism and Christo-mysticism as exquisitely balanced, so that
both are essential parts of his consciousness, neither being complete
without the other [26].
At first glance Traherne's work makes one
think of James' 'healthy-minded' label; there is in his work a seemingly
endless recitation of the joyfulness of his soul's simplicity and
abundance, as reflected in and engendered by the abundance of creation.
One has to search quite hard for the 'sick-soul' correlates. Traherne
emphasises the innocence of childhood and speaks of his emergence from
'unbeing' to life and the delight in the treasures of the senses (in
particular sight) and the sense that all belongs to him (and at the
same time to all other men and women: in turn they are also his
treasures). We are presented with a conundrum: how is that a grown man can
speak so clearly of a childhood innocence and bliss, one that we all
recognise, however dimly, yet earnestly maintain it to be his present,
adult, reality? One possibility is that he was gifted with a quite
extraordinary memory for the childhood state, and furthermore that he was
quite precociously gifted with wisdom at that age. More likely, in the
context of mysticism, is that he travelled the same road as all of us: the
gradual loss of innocence into a worldly-wise adult, then followed by a
're-birth' of some kind into the mystical awareness. (Douglas Harding
provides an excellent analysis of this journey [27];
Ken Wilber also provides us with the concept of the pre-trans
fallacy lest we confuse the pre-adult with the post-enlightenment stages.)
This fits with James' 'twice-born' idea (and of course with the Indian
equivalent, dwiji), but is quite at odds with the
'healthy-mindedness' of his prose and poetry. Let us look first at typical
Traherne passages. Here are the first four verses of 'The Salutation', the
opening poem of the Dobell collection (all selections from the Penguin
edition [28]):
1
These little limbs,
These eyes and hands which here I
find,
These rosy cheeks wherewith my life begins,
Where have ye
been? Behind
What curtain were ye from me hid so long!
Where was, in
what abyss, my speaking tongue?
2
When silent I,
So many thousand years,
Beneath the dust did
in a chaos lie,
How could I smiles or tears,
Or lips or hands or
eyes or ears perceive?
Welcome, ye treasures which I now
receive.
3
I that so long
Was nothing from eternity,
Did little think
such joys as ear or tongue,
To celebrate or see:
Such sounds to
hear, such hands to feel, such feet,
Beneath the skies, on such a
ground to meet.
4
New burnish'd joys!
Which yellow gold and pearl excel!
Such
sacred treasures are the limbs in boys,
In which a soul doth
dwell;
Their organized joints, and azure veins
More wealth include,
than all the world contains.
These verses introduce many of Traherne's
themes: that it is blessed to be born (quite at odds with mainstream
Christianity's concept of original sin), that the sense organs themselves
are treasures (reminiscent of some Upanishadic and Tantric themes and
practices); and that the objects of those senses are also treasures. He
concludes the poem with this verse:
A stranger here
Strange things
doth meet, strange glories see;
Strange treasures lodg'd in this fair
world appear;
Strange all, and new to me.
But that they mine should
be, who nothing was,
That strangest is of all, yet brought to
pass.
This verse brings out another oft-repeated
theme: that all belongs to him. Leaving this point for a moment let us
compare this extract to verse 5 of Wordsworth's 'Intimations of
Immortality':
Our birth is but a sleep and a
forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's
Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar:
Not
in entire forgetfulness,
And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing
clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies
about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to
close
Upon the growing Boy
But He beholds the light, and whence it
flows
He sees it in his joy;
The Youth who daily travels farther
from the east
Must travel, still is Nature's Priest,
And by the
vision splendid
Is on his way attended;
At length the Man perceives
it die away,
And fade into the light of common day [29].
There are some similarities (though we can
be confident that Wordsworth would not have read Traherne): Wordsworth
recognises the 'heaven that lies about us in our infancy' and the 'vision
splendid'. But he is less optimistic: birth is a 'sleep and a forgetting';
the 'clouds of glory' that we trail have another origin than the wondrous
world of the senses; and of course the 'shades of the prison-house' close
in until the grown man sees his vision die away into 'the light of common
day.' A closer look at Traherne's work does reveal however his own 'prison
house.' In the Poems of Felicity collection the poems 'The
Apostasy', 'Solitude', 'Poverty', and 'Dissatisfaction' show Traherne's
'fall' from his childhood state of innocence, trapped by what he calls
'custom', that is the ways of the (adult) world that value tinsel, lace
and baubels above the stars, the light of the sun, and the air we breathe.
In 'The Bible' and 'Christendom' we learn of his recovery and restoration
to a state of grace.
As a nature mystic Traherne is not the purest
example for two reasons. Despite the emphasis on the body and the senses,
in particular sight, there is not that much description of Nature; stars
and clouds feature, but streets, cities, and above all people count
amongst his treasures. His love of creation rests on what is beyond
creation, which is what we would expect to find in a nature mystic, but it
is a Christian God and a Christian message that restores him to the
innocence-in-adulthood that is the mark of the mystic.
Traherne
shows us however a basic attribute that must be present in the nature
mystic: an acceptance of the body, its sense-organs, and the divine nature
of the world received through those senses when pure, that is freed from
selfish desires. We cannot know with Traherne if he meets the tentative
requirement postulated for a nature mystic at the beginning of this essay:
is his mysticism triggered by Nature? He speaks of no specific mystical
experiences, more of a continuum, and the attainment of this continuum
only briefly hinted at through receiving the Gospel. If there is a Nature
component in his mysticism, it is elemental in his case air and light, and
it may be thanks to Mercer that we spot this at all. Perhaps Traherne's
best prose on the subject is in the Meditations:
By the very right of your senses you enjoy
the world. Is it not the beauty of the hemisphere present to your sight?
Is not the vision of the world an amiable thing? Do not the stars shed
influences to perfect the air? Is not that a marvellous body to breathe
in? To visit the lungs: repair the spirits: revive the senses: cool the
blood: fill the empty spaces between the earth and heavens; and yet give
liberty to all objects? Prize these first: and you shall enjoy the
residue [30].
Prize these first: and you shall enjoy
the residue! This could be Lao Tsu talking, though Traherne goes on to
recommend a most un-Taoist insatiableness for life: 'It is the
nobility of man's soul that he is insatiable'.
4.2. Walt Whitman
In contrast to Traherne, Whitman's world is devoid
of Christianity or any religiosity as conventionally understood; in
similarity to Traherne, Whitman's world is a divine treasure-house of
which again he is the proprietor. I have made a long study of Whitman as
mystic [31]
and will summarise this before dealing with nature mysticism in his work.
We have seen that James complained of a cult growing up around Whitman,
and of comparisons to Christ; Zaehner found him preposterous; and to many
in his day he was an affront to Victorian values. Contemporary Western
criticism of Whitman has become solely a literary affair, yet Whitman
explicitly stated in Leaves of Grass that he intended to start a
new religion [32],
and this was taken seriously by many intelligent and sensitive
contemporaries: perhaps it is America's greatest tragedy that Whitman was
misunderstood and remembered merely as a poet.
There is not space
here to defend this view in detail other than to point out the religious
impact he had on people like R.M.Bucke, Anne Gilchrist, Edward Carpenter
(an English social reformer and mystic), John Burroughs (a naturalist and
one of Whitman's biographers) and Emerson. His personal magnetism and the
power of Leaves affected people far and wide, including the
unlikely figure of Bram Stoker. The confusion over Whitman lies in his
deliberate obfuscation in Leaves: he confided to Carpenter that he
had 'hidden his eggs in it like a furtive old hen' [33].
It also lies in a Western audience largely unfamiliar at that time with
Oriental mysticism, to which Whitman's work bears great resemblance,
though no derivation. One only need to look at the work of three Indian
scholars to recognise that Leaves easily takes its place alongside
the Upanishads, the Vedas, and the Gita: O.K.Nambiar
[34],
V.K.Chari [35],
and V.Sachitanandan [36]
demonstrate this, and we also find corroboration in the works of Dorothy
Mercer [37]
and Romain Rolland [38].
The objections of Zaehner to Whitman can be dismissed on two
ground I believe: firstly by lumping him with the Upanishads he does our
argument a service, and secondly I don't believe that he had studied
either Whitman's works or life closely enough. The second ground also
applies to James, though we need to look more closely at his assumption of
'healthy-mindedness' in Whitman. (Underhill's assertion that Whitman was
not a full-blown mystic is merely a matter of personal preference; no
scholars' lists will ever agree on a definitive group of full-blown
mystics.) It is fair to say the Leaves is optimistic on the whole,
as is the work of Traherne, but it contains a sharp-eyed realism about the
human condition as well (all the following extracts from Leaves are
Jerome Loving's edition [39]):
Whoever you are, come forth! or man or woman
come forth!
You must not stay sleeping and dallying there in the
house though you built it, or though it has been built for you.
Out
of the dark confinement! out from behind the screen!
It is useless
to protest, I know all and expose it.
Behold through you as bad as
the rest,
Through the laughter, dancing, dining, supping, of
people,
inside of dresses and ornaments, inside of those wash'd and
trimm'd faces,
Behold a secret silent loathing and despair.
No husband, no wife, no friend, trusted to hear the confession,
Another self, a duplicate of every one, skulking and hiding it goes,
Formless and wordless through the streets of the cities, polite and
bland in the parlors, In the cars of railroads, in steamboats, in the
public assembly, Home to the houses of men and women, at the table, in
the bedroom, everywhere,
Smartly attired, countenance smiling, form
upright, death under the breast-bones, hell under the skull-bones,
Under the broadcloth and gloves, under the ribbons and artificial
flowers,
Keeping fair with the customs, speaking not a syllable of
itself,
Speaking of any thing else but never of itself.
(Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, v. 13)
How can one write about 'death under the
breast-bones, hell under the skull-bones' unless one has known it? And
what a choice of words! Unlike with Traherne, we can draw on many
contemporary accounts of Whitman to fill out our picture of him: the
following passage is from Carpenter:
I have two portraits photographs which I am
fond of comparing with each other. One is of Whitman, taken in 1890; the
other, taken about the same time and at the same age (seventy years), is
of an Indian Gnani or seer. Both are faces of the highest interest and
import; but how different! That of Whitman deeply lined, bearing the marks
of life-long passion and emotion; aggressive and determined, yet wistful
and tender, full of suffering and full of love, indicating serenity, yet
markedly turbid and clouded, ample in brow and frame and flowing hair, as
of one touching and mingling with humanity at all points withal of a
wonderful majesty and grandeur, as of the great rock (to return always to
that simile) whose summit pierces at last the highest domain.
The
other portrait, of a man equally aged, shows scarcely a line on the face;
you might think for that and for the lithe, active form that he was not
more than forty years old; a brow absolutely calm and unruffled, gracious,
expressive lips, well-formed features, and eyes the dominant
characteristic of his countenance dark and intense, and illuminated by the
vision of the seer. In this face you discern command, control, gentleness,
and the most absolute inward unity, serenity, and peace; no wandering
emotions or passions flit across the crystal mirror of the soul; self-hood
in any but the highest sense has vanished the self has, as it were,
returned to its birthplace leaving behind the most childlike,
single-hearted, uncensorious, fearless character imaginable.
Yet
just here one seems to miss something in the last character the touch of
human and earthly entanglement. Here is not exactly the great loving heart
which goes a few steps on the way with every child of man; here is not the
ample-domed brow which tackles each new problem of life and science.
Notwithstanding evident signs of culture and experience in the past,
notwithstanding vast powers of concentration in any given matter or affair
when necessary, the face shows that the heart and intellect have become
quiescent, that interest in the actual has passed or is passing
away.[40]
The
impression of Whitman in this passage is born out by other contemporary
accounts, but is also interesting in Carpenter's juxtaposition of two
mystical types: the second being a fair account perhaps of an Indian sage
like Ramana Maharshi. The passage also tells us the unique spiritual gifts
that the West, and Whitman in particular, can bring to mysticism. The
passage is also relevant to nature mysticism: a nature mystic cannot be
one in which 'the interest in the actual has passed or is passing away.'
Leaves, despite its earthy nature, was carefully edited and
re-edited by Whitman over a lifetime to its present state, and James'
impression of it as optimistic is right. The assumption that this comes
from an epitome of naive healthy-mindedness is unfounded, as Whitman's
life shows, but even more so from what he left out of Leaves. I
believe that he was acutely aware of the power of the written word, and
that many things that we can allow ourselves to say to intimate persons
cannot be left in print. A recent compilation of Whitman's discarded
writings shows him capable of an extreme perversity, at least in
Respondez! of which this is an extract:
Let the theory of America still be
management, cast, comparisons!
(Say! what other theory would
you?)
Let them that distrust birth and death lead the rest!
(Say!
why shall they no lead you?)
Let the world never appear to him or her
for whom it was all made!
Let the heart of the young man still exile
itself from the heart of the old man! and let the heart of the old man
be exiled from that of the young man!
Let the sun and moon go! let
the scenery take the applause of the audience! let there be apathy under
the stars!
Let freedom prove no man's inalienable right! every one
who can tyrannize, let him tyrannize to his satisfaction!
...
Let
churches accommodate serpents, vermin, and the corpses of those who have
died of the most filthy of diseases!
Let marriage slip down among
fools, and be for none but fools!
Let men among themselves talk and
think forever obscenely of women! and let women themselves talk and
think obscenely of men! [41]
This poem goes on in this vein. However,
we may be in danger of focusing too much on this aspect of Whitman: this
poem was probably intended to provoke a response from the reader to an
inversion of all of Whitman's teachings, perhaps motivated in a
downhearted moment by the generally indifferent reception from the
American public of his time. In all events it was removed from
Leaves.
Turning now to some similarities with Traherne, we
notice the same delight in the mere fact of birth and the blessed gift of
life, expressed for example in this poem:
TO THE GARDEN OF THE WORLD
To the garden of the world anew
descending,
Potent mates, daughters, sons, preluding,
The love,
the life of their bodies, meaning and being,
Curious here behold my
resurrection after slumber,
The revolving cycles in their wide sweep
having brought me again,
amorous, mature, all beautiful to me, all
wondrous,
My limbs and the quivering fire that ever plays through
them, for reasons, most wondrous,
Existing I peer and penetrate
still,
Content with the present, content with the past,
By my side
or back of me Eve following,
Or in front, and I following her just
the same.
Unlike Traherne he does not say that he comes
from dust; unlike Wordsworth that he trails clouds of glory from his
Maker, but he simply descends to the garden of the world, curious for
life. Traherne's own phrase is 'insatiable': it is these expressions of
the love of life that must make the basis of the nature mystic, the via
positiva, and which make both Traherne and Whitman shocking to some
conventional religiosity. We know in fact of Whitman's great love of
Nature, not just from Leaves, but from contemporary accounts. What
makes Whitman unique is that people, ordinary common folk, are to
him an equal delight. Traherne shows this, but as with all his work, it is
at a relatively abstract level from which we find it hard to construct the
person: with Whitman his written expressions of the eagerness of his
loving curiosity for the million or so inhabitants of Manhattan is born
out by all contemporary accounts as a fact of his life. We build up a
picture of a real person, rugged like a George Fox, and bold to meet any
man or woman to gaze into their depths and contact them, essence to
essence; in addition we find the Christ-like yearning to find those that
can 'hear' him Whitman was a fisher of men. And of women: the reference to
Eve in the above poem is not a one-off literary flourish, rather it is
part of the fabric of all his writings and his life I know of no other man
in the history of literature who so consistently included the woman as
well as the man. As well as this determined symmetry between male and
female Whitman insists on the same for body and soul:
I believe in you my soul, the other I am
must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the
other.
('Song of Myself', v. 5)
Clear and sweet is my soul, and clear and
sweet is all that is not my soul.
Lack one lacks both, and the unseen
is proved by the seen,
Till that becomes unseen and receives proof in
its turn.
Showing the best and dividing it from the worst age vexes
age,
Knowing the perfect fitness and equanimity of things, while they
discuss I am silent, and go bathe and admire myself.
Welcome is
every organ and attribute of me, and of any man hearty and clean,
Not
an inch nor a particle of an inch is vile, and none shall be less
familiar than the rest.
(Song Of Myself, v. 3)
Traherne is less dogmatic about body and soul:
he may celebrate one at one time, but at another tells us that without the
other all is worthless. Wordsworth, as most other poets of a mystical
inclination, is also less inclined to be as determinedly even-handed as
Whitman.
What though does Whitman contribute to our delineation of
a nature mysticism? In Leaves, Whitman's celebration is so
comprehensive, and so inclusive of man's arts and industries, that Nature,
in the modern sense of it being in opposition to industrial and urban
life, does not stand out. It is a comment of his to R.M.Bucke (his other
chief contemporary biographer) that gives us an interesting insight into
his attitude to writing on Nature (Bucke had suggested writing about a
magnificent waterfall):
"All such things need to be at least the third or fourth remove; in
itself it would be too much for nine out of ten readers. Very few care
for natural objects themselves, rocks, rain, hail, wild animals, tangled
forests, weeds, mud, common Nature. They want her in a shape fit for
reading about in a rocking-chair, or as ornaments in china, marble or
bronze. The real things are, far more than they would own, disgusting,
revolting to them." Whitman adds: "This may be a reason of the dislike
of Leaves of Grass by the majority." [42]
In Leaves the descriptions of
nature are often in the form of lists, but effective in spite of that.
There is a prose description in Specimen Days that perhaps comes
closest to telling us how Whitman really sees nature:
1 September: I should not take either
the biggest or the most picturesque tree to illustrate it. Here is one
of my favorite now before me, a fine yellow poplar, quite straight,
perhaps ninety feet high, and four feet thick at the butt. How strong,
vital, enduring! how dumbly eloquent! What suggestions of
imperturbability and being, as against the human trait of mere
seeming. Then the qualities, almost emotional, palpably artistic,
heroic, of a tree; so innocent and harmless, yet so savage. It
is, yet says nothing. How it rebukes by its tough and equable
serenity in all weathers, this gusty-tempered little whiffet, man, that
runs indoors at a mite of rain or snow. Science (or rather half-way
science) scoffs at reminiscence of dryad and hamadryad, and of trees
speaking. But, if they don't, they do as well as most speaking, writing,
poetry, sermons or rather they do a great deal better. I should say
indeed that those old dryad-reminiscences are quite as true as any, and
profounder than most reminiscences we get. ('Cut this out,' as the quack
mediciners say, and keep by you.) Go and sit in a grove or woods, with
one or more of these voiceless companions and read the foregoing, and
think.
One lesson from affiliating a tree perhaps
the greatest moral lesson anyhow from earth, rocks, animals, is that
same lesson of inherencey, of what is, without the least regard
to what the looker on (the critic) supposes or says, or whether he likes
or dislikes. What worse what more general malady pervades each and all
of us, our literature, education, attitude towards each other, (even
towards ourselves,) than morbid trouble about seems, (generally
temporarily seems too,) and no trouble at all, or hardly any, about the
sane slow-growing, perennial, real parts of character, books,
friendship, marriage humanity's invisible foundations and hold-together?
(As the all-basis, the nerve, the great sympathetic, the plenum within
humanity, giving stamp to everything, is necessarily invisible.)
[43]
Part of this passage is quoted in Mercer's
Nature Mysticism. Whitman gives us another glimpse of how he
related to trees in the following passage:
10 - 13 October [1881]: I spend a
good deal of time on the Common, these delicious days and nights every
mid-day from 11.30 to about 1 and almost every sunset another hour. I
know all the big trees, especially the old elms along Tremont and Beacon
streets, and have come to a sociable-silent understanding with most of
them, in the sunlit air, (yet crispy-cool enough), as I saunter along
the wide unpaved walks. Up and down this breadth by Beacon street,
between these same old elms, I walk'd for two hours, of a bright sharp
February mid-day twenty-one years ago, with Emerson, then in his prime,
keen, physically and morally magnetic, arm'd at every point, and when he
chose, wielding the emotional just as well as the intellectual [44].
It was an endless pleasure for Whitman to
simply be in nature, spending time in the countryside, enjoying the
ordinary as much as any spectacular scenes like canyons or great
waterfalls or brilliant sunsets. Bucke saw that natural things gave
Whitman a pleasure that ordinary people never experience, and credited him
with above-average hearing and sense of smell (though this is probably
unlikely: Whitman may have just been more alert to his sensations).
Whitman's opinion of Thoreau (whom he knew) was interesting: he suspected
that the romantic view of nature expressed in Thoreau's Walden and
in his life was not so much from 'a love of woods, streams, and hills, ...
as from a morbid dislike of humanity. I remember Thoreau saying once, when
walking with him in my favorite Brooklyn "What is there in the people?
What do you (a man who sees as well as anybody) see in all this cheating
political corruption?"' This is echoed in a passage from Thoreau himself:
"I walk towards one of our ponds, but what
signifies the beauty of Nature when men are base? We walk to lakes to
see our serenity reflected in them; when we are not serene, we go not to
them." [45]
Whitman then is perhaps unusual in his
love of nature as an encompassing love, not a turning away from the human
and man-made. 'The Lesson of a Tree' is telling us how to let nature
instruct us in our human sphere, and in the foundations of our being; it
is teaching us a sobriety, a willingness to allow the important things to
mature at their own mysterious pace, and not to apply the modern haste to
our foundations. Beyond this lesson, and it is fundamental to Whitman's
teachings I think, there is also the sheer exuberant delight in nature,
and also an almost painful wonder at it:
As I have walk'd in Alabama my morning
walk,
I have seen where the she-bird the mocking-bird sat on her nest
in the briers hatching her brood.
I have seen the he-bird also,
I
have paus'd to hear him at hand inflating his throat and joyfully
singing.
And while I paus'd it came to me that what he really sang
for was not there only,
Not for his mate nor himself only, nor all
sent back by the echoes,
but subtle, clandestine, away beyond,
A
charge transmitted and gift occult for those being born.
('Starting from Paumanok' v. 11)
Whitman's mysticism is too broad, too
Vedantic, to be confined to nature mysticism, though our understanding of
it greatly increased by him. It is Jefferies however for whom the epithet
'nature mystic' may have been invented.
4.3. Richard
Jefferies
Richard Jefferies was
a contemporary of Whitman, though born in 1848 when Whitman was already
thirty-one; he died young, five years before Whitman, in 1887. He was born
in England, the son of a farmer struggling against the industrial age, and
was a journalist and writer by profession, much as Whitman. That he is
considered as a mystic is due to his book The Story of My Heart
[46],
which was published in 1883. The Story of My Heart is as unique and
different from the rest of the world's mystical literature as the Tao
Teh Ching, or Leaves of Grass at times there is an
extraordinary parallel with Whitman, and at other times he seems to say
the opposite. Jefferies' love of nature runs along the same stream as
Whitman's thoughts in 'The Lesson of a Tree', only he describes his
raptures at greater length, and in terms of the empowering of his 'soul
life'. Again and again he describes how he seeks solitary moments away
from his family and work, and climbs a local hill, or seeks the sea, and
strides across the human-remote countryside or beach in order to wrest the
nourishment for his soul-life from nature; or he lies under a tree or by a
brook and stares up at the sky and lets it fill him. His book is a careful
prose, and in great contrast to Whitman's free verse, but he sings of
nature, and, oddly for a Victorian Englishman, the body
too:
There came to me a delicate, but at the same
time a deep, strong and sensuous enjoyment of the beautiful green earth,
the beautiful sky and sun; I felt them, they gave me inexpressible
delight, as if they embraced and poured out their love upon me. It was I
who loved them, for my heart was broader than the earth; it is broader
now than even then, more thirsty and desirous. After the sensuous
enjoyment always come the thought, the desire: That I might be like
this; that I might have the inner meaning of the sun, the light, the
earth, the trees and grass, translated into some growth of excellence in
myself, both of the body and of mind; greater perfection of physique,
greater perfection of mind and soul; that I might be higher in myself
[47].
For Jefferies his mysticism is one of
longing, a desire that he calls his 'single thought' or prayer, and the
beauty of nature raises it to the highest degree. Unlike those that run
away from the human to nature, Jefferies finds the human body to be the
sum of all beauty in nature:
Not only in grass fields with green leaf and
running brook did this constant desire find renewal. More deeply still
with living human beauty; the perfection of form, the simple fact of
forms, ravished and always will ravish me away. In this lies the outcome
and end of all the loveliness of sunshine and green leaf, of flowers,
pure water and sweet air. This is embodiment and highest expression; the
scattered, uncertain, and designless loveliness of tree and sunshine
brought to shape. Through this beauty I prayed deepest and longest, and
down to this hour. The shape the divine idea of that shape the swelling
muscle or the dreamy limb, strong sinew or curve of bust, Aphrodite or
Hercules, it is the same. That I may have the soul-life, the
soul-nature, let the divine beauty bring to me divine soul. Swart
Nubian, white Greek, delicate Italian, massive Scandinavian, in all the
exquisite pleasure the form gave, and gives, to me immediately becomes
intense prayer [48].
If Whitman can bring one to walk down the
street looking at people that pass one in a new way a kind of curious
touch to each person then Jefferies can cause one to see in them the
distillation of sun, rain, and air on trees and their 'designless
loveliness'; a new gift to us.
Where Whitman is at pains to praise
the body and the soul equally, letting neither 'abase' itself before the
other, Jefferies is quite sure that the soul is higher, more important,
and that the soul or the spirit is entirely lacking in nature, in
the rocks, trees and sky, where Whitman sees 'God's handkerchief' dropped
at every corner. Jefferies goes further: he comments on the immense
inhospitability of nature, the very sun that sends him into raptures burns
and kills, the very sea is an undrinkable poison. It is a baffling
contrast to Whitman at first, and is not easily resolvable; however we can
leave it for now as a mark of the genuine expression of a mystic: that it
is unique, and will not agree with another's tale of the ultimate. We can
also find references in his book to having lived a hard life; one has the
impression that he was as poor as Whitman, and as unpractised in
economics, but his situation was worse, for he had a wife and children to
support. The sheer hardness of extracting a living in Victorian England
for a man so averse to the material spirit of that age may have found
expression in his views on the in-humanness of nature: he even mentions
all the hideous sea creatures, and finds dogs and horses alien to him. Yet
his soul is never so uplifted as under a tree! Or by the sky or sea;
rarely can you find such an extensive and sensitive relaying of a rapture
with nature.
He was at a loss to the human bustle and apparent
purposelessness of the great throng of people viewed from the steps of the
Royal Exchange in Victorian London, and railed against the work-ethic that
prevented people from having time to reflect and be with nature (he
shared this with both Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau).
Jefferies
presents us with contradictions so much the better! But in his attitude to
the eternal, he is quite classical in his discoveries, and unusually
honest in admitting that he doesn't know what happens after death. He
knows that this moment is eternal however; he is not worried that
death may dissolve him completely, body and soul, for all of that is not
now. In the following passage he is lying on the grass by a
tumulus, the burial-place of a warrior of some two thousand years
previous:
Realising that spirit, recognising my own
inner consciousness, the psyche, so clearly, I cannot understand time.
It is eternity now. I am in the midst of it. It is about me in the
sunshine; I am in it, as the butterfly floats in the light-laden air.
Nothing has to come; it is now. Now is eternity; now is the immortal
life. Here this moment, by this tumulus, on earth, now; I exist in it.
The years, the centuries, the cycles are absolutely nothing; it is only
a moment since this tumulus was raised; in a thousand years more it will
still be only a moment. To the soul there is no past and no future; all
is and will be ever, in now. For artificial purposes time is mutually
agreed on, but there is really no such thing. The shadow goes on upon
the dial, the index moves round upon the clock, and what is the
difference? None whatever. If the clock had never been set going, what
would have been the difference? There may be time for the clock, the
clock may make time for itself; there is none for me.
I dip my hand in the brook and feel the
stream; in an instant the particles of water which first touched me have
floated yards down the current, my hand remains there. I take my hand
away, and the flow the time of the brook does not exist for me. The
great clock of the firmament, the sun and the stars, the crescent moon,
the earth circling two thousand times, is no more to me than the flow of
the brook when my hand is withdrawn; my soul has never been, and never
can be, dipped in time [49].
(This last sentence alone puts him on an
equal footing with the Buddha!) Jefferies shares Whitman's easy dismissal
of all past religion; he does not make a big thing about it, but perhaps
goes even further than Whitman in finding no consonance whatsoever between
any previous writings and his experience. As a journalist, and one who
spent time in the British Library, he would had access to Eckhart or
The Cloud of Unknowing, or other mystical works; but perhaps the
Christian language of these hid the similarities with his experience. We
are probably better off that he had to struggle to find his own words;
perhaps the only one he uses that we might recognise is the word 'prayer',
and he only uses it for lack of something better. Jefferies' book is as
explicit as Whitman's is implicit, yet there is not the slightest hint
that Jefferies saw himself as a teacher, perhaps making the book an added
delight.
Zaehner makes a sensitive analysis of Jefferies, but
prefaces it with a reminder that nature mystics may be easily led to
describe their experiences in terms of God (Jefferies does not in fact)
though '"'God' here is clearly not the God of the Bible but the
pantheistic God against which Protestant Christians instinctively react"
[50].
To a non-Christian this is a baffling statement no matter how often it is
repeated or explained; equally baffling is Zaehner's attempt to
distinguish Jefferies' Nature from that of the scientists, the one
imaginary and the other somehow 'real'. For a Catholic to find that
science's view of Nature contradicts Jefferies, rather than complements
it, is absurd: does he seriously believe then that by the same token
science does not contradict Catholicism? Yet Zaehner needed to find a
resolution between Jefferies raptures and his pessimism and this was his
solution.
Happold includes a chapter on Jefferies in his
Mysticism and introduces it with the comment that Jefferies
combined nature-mysticism with soul-mysticism (the latter being the
equivalent of Zaehner's monistic mysticism, or jnani in Indian
thought) [51].
Happold also makes the comment that had Jefferies been acquainted 'with
the wide stream of mystical tradition, he would doubtless have written
differently'. As pointed out earlier he had the opportunity, and we simply
do not know whether he deliberately avoided reading and referring to them,
as in the case of Krishnamurti. However Happold also agrees that we are
the richer for it!
Jefferies' active and almost aggressive search
through Nature is paralleled in some way by that of Thoreau. The picture
we have of Traherne and Whitman is that of a passive almost indolent
enjoyment of Nature; Whitman, though always keen to be out of doors in a
field, wood, or mountain, is never searching. Thoreau in contrast
would stride for hours through the woods and fields of Concord: Reginald
Lansing Cook in his interesting analysis of Thoreau as nature mystics says
this of him:
He realised that it was wise to be outdoors
early and late, travelling far and earnestly in order to recreate the
whole body and to perceive the phenomena of the day. There was no way of
knowing when something might turn up. He had noticed that when he
thought his walk was profitless or a failure, it was then usually on the
point of success, "for then," he surmised, "you are that subdued and
knocking mood to which Nature never fails to open." One late August day,
in 1851, when it appeared to him that he had walked all day in vain and
the world, including field and wood as highway, had seemed trivial,
then, with the dropping of sun and wind, he caught the reflex of the day
the dews purifying the day and making it transparent, the lakes a rivers
acquiring "a glassy stillness, reflecting the skies." His attitude
changed, and he took what Keats called "the journey homeward to habitual
self." He exulted in the fact that he was at the top of his condition
for perceiving beauty [52].
References for Part
2
[26]
Happold, F.C. Mysticism - a Study and and
Anthology, Penguin Books, London, 1970, p. 367
[27]
see for example Harding, D.E. On Having No
Head - Zen and the Rediscovery of the Obvious, London: Arkana, 1986
[28]
Traherne, Thomas, Selected Poems and Prose,
London: Penguin, 1991
[29]
Wordsworth, William, 'The Prelude' in Poetical
Works, Oxford University Press, 1990, verses 356 - 380, p. 460
[30]
Traherne, Thomas, Selected Poems and Prose,
London: Penguin, 1991, p. 194
[31]
King, Mike, Krishna, Whitman, Nietzsche,
Sartre Essays in Applied Mysticism, unpublished.
[32]
Whitman, W. Leaves of Grass, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, New York, 1990, 'Starting From Paumanok', vs. 7
and 8.
[33]
Carpenter, Edward, Days with Walt Whitman,
London: George Allen, 1906, p. 43
[34]
Nambiar, O.K. Maha Yogi: Walt Whitman - New
Light on Yoga, Bangalore: Jeevan Publications, 1978
[35]
Chari, V.K. Whitman in the Light of Vedantic
Mysticism, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976
[36]
Sachitanandan, V. Whitman and Bharati: A
Comparative Study, Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi, Madras: The MacMillan
Company of India Ltd., 1978
[37]
for example Mercer Dorothy, 'Walt Whitman on
Reincarnation' in Vedanta and The West, IX Nov/Dec 1946
[38]
Rolland, Romain, Prophets of the New India,
London, Toronto, Melbource, Sidney: Cassell and Co., 1930, p.273
[39]
Whitman, W. Leaves of Grass, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, New York, 1990
[40]
Carpenter, Edward, Days with Walt Whitman,
London: George Allen, 1906, p. 49
[41]
Abrams, Sam, The Neglected Walt Whitman: Vital
Texts, New York, London: Four Walls Eight Windows 1993, p. 60
[42]
Bucke, R.M. Walt Whitman, Philadelphia,
1883, p. 61
[43]
Whitman, Walt, Specimen Days, London: The
Folio Society, 1979, p. 118
[44]
Whitman, Walt, Specimen Days, London: The
Folio Society, 1979, p. 240
[45]
Thoreau, Henry, Walden and Other Writings,
Bantam, 1962, p. 16
[46]
Jefferies, R. The Story of My Heart,
MacMillan St Martin's Press, London 1968
[47]
Jefferies, R. The Story of My Heart,
MacMillan St Martin's Press, London 1968, p. 56
[48]
Jefferies, R. The Story of My Heart,
MacMillan St Martin's Press, London 1968, p. 17
[49]
Jefferies, R. The Story of My Heart,
MacMillan St Martin's Press, London 1968, p. 30
[50]
Zaehner, R.C. Drugs, Mysticism and
Make-Believe, Collins, London 1972, p. 50
[51]
Happold, F.C. Mysticism - a Study and and
Anthology, Penguin Books, London, 1970, p. 384
[52]
Cook, Reginald Lansing, 'The Nature Mysticism of
Thoreau' in The Concord Saunterer, Middlebury, Vermont:
Middlebury College Press, 1940, p.9
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