THE MYSTICAL SIDE OF GOOD SENSE.
rERE is a very interesting paper in the new number of the National Eeview, by Mr. John Hogben, on "The Mystical Side of Wordsworth." We should like to show that where Wordsworth is most mystical, good sense itself, as Englishmen usually understand it, is almost identical in its assumptions, though instead of setting out in full the path by which these assumptions are reached, good sense is apt to leap to a conclusion without paying much attention to the somewhat mystical reasoning by which these assumptions are established. At the opening of his paper, Mr. Hogben shows how much Words- worth relied on the conclusions to which his own mind came in what may be called a kind of mental somnambulism, a mood in which the senses seemed to be laid asleep while some higher faculty was all the surer and more penetrating in its judgments on account of that partial sleep of the perceptive powers. In the great lines written near Tintern Abbey, for instance, Words- worth insists on "that blessed mood" in which,
" Even the motions of our human blood Almost suspended, we are laid asleep In body and become a living soul."
It is, he tells us, not by a restlessly inquisitive eye, but by "an eye made quiet by the power of harmony and the deep power of joy" that "we see into the life of things." So, too, he defends himself for sitting hour after hour on an old grey stone in apparent vacancy, on the ground that-
" 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 deem that there are powers Which of themselves our minds impress ; That we can feed this mind of ours By a wise passiveness."
Again, when he is most deeply stirred by anything he hears, as, for example, by the old leech-gatherer's account of his own patient endurance of hardship, Wordsworth finds the figure which has thus deeply impressed him becoming almost unreal, "like one that I had met with in a dream." In other words, Wordsworth's vision is, in his own belief, never thoroughly lucid till he is rapt by it far away from the ordinary alertness which is commonly called quickness of sense, and transported into a region in which he is alone with his thoughts, and all but unconscious of the momentary changes going on around him. Well, is not Wordsworth confirmed by the good sense, the better sense of the world, in this view of his, that we are apt to catch our truest and most really informing vision of the deeper aspects of things around us, in the least studied of- our glances, or even in the retrospect with which we revert to what we have previously seen without seeing it, as, for instance, when we are half falling asleep at night, or when we are just awakening and the events of the previous day flash back upon us a new light which they did not give out at the time P We may call it mysticism when we are speaking of it as a poet's explicit teaching ; but we do not call it mysticism, we call it good sense, when we attach more importance to the side-lights cast on any scene by a tranquil memory, than to the view of it which we took during the first eager gaze of a too anxious inquisition. Even the mere man of the world is conscious that when he is " laid asleep in body," he often becomes a much more "living soul" for those things which he is most desirous to discern truly ; that as his senses sink to rest, he recalls errors of which he was unconscious when he committed them, or expressions on the countenances of his friends or rivals which till then he had completely ignored. And if this be so in relation to things essentially of this world, it is certainly much more so as to those deeper springs of motive and character which it takes a still deeper peace of spirit to perceive. Every one who has any insight at all, knows that the false notes he has struck during his hours of work come back to him most clearly when he is no longer absorbed in the strain or passion of the moment, —when, indeed, he is not even consciously reviewing the events of the day, but when they revisit him involuntarily, with a new significance and in new relations of which he had no glimpse before. It is not till something has happened to quiet the whole nature, or, in Wordsworth's phrase, to subdue it with "the power of harmony," that the real drift of that which, with an agitated and excited nature, we had no power to discern at all, is grasped. It is not the eye which sees ill, for it does see that which the mind does not always note till the scene recurs in memory ; but it is the mind which interprets ill, because it is too much blinded by the heat and harry of the moment, to take all in. We need a wise " passiveness " to interpret truly what we see. But the good sense of the world is quite at one with Wordsworth on this point. It, too, says that what we remember when the rash of events is over, is apt to be much truer than what we see while the rush of events lasts.
Take another of Wordsworth's apparently mystical inspira- tions. There is nothing on which he dwells with more delight than the power of the imagination to transmute the greatest apparent obstacles which it has to face, into the very substance of its own visionary energy, so that instead of being arrested by difficulties, it is the difficulties which elicit and display its real vitality and power :-
"Within the soul, a faculty abides That, with interpositions that would hide And darken, so can deal that they become Contingencies of pomp, and serve to exalt Her native brightness. As the ample moon In the deep stillness of a summer even, Rising behind a thick and lofty grove, Burns like an noconsuming fire of light In the green trees • and, kindling on all sides Their leafy umbrage, turns the dusky veil Into a substance glorious as her own, Yea, with her own incorporated, by power Capacious and serene ;—like power abides In man's celestial spirit ; virtue thus Seta forth and magnifies herself ; thus feeds A calm, a beautiful, and silent fire From the incumbrances of mortal life, From error, disappointment, nay, from guilt, And sometimes, so relenting justice wills, From palpable oppressions of despair."
In like manner he dwells on- " Sorrow that ie not sorrow, but delight, And miserable love that is not pain To hear of, for the glory that redounds Therefrom to human kind and what we are."
It is a subject on which Wordsworth is never tired of insisting, that the imagination of man has in itself a spring of joy so deep that it can transform the most gloomy subjects with its own light, till the gloomier they are intrinsically, the better they serve to glorify the power of the mind by which they are grasped and transformed. That explains why Wordsworth seized so eagerly on subjects which all his contemporaries jeered at as unpoetical. He sought to show that the power of imaginative joy in him could make them all the more poetical from their unpromising appearance. In short, the more impervious to light the substance on which the imagination shed its rays, the more glorious the transformation it effected by touching it with the magic of its passion. Well, is not the good sense of the world completely at one with Wordsworth in the result, though it does not dwell on the process with the minute care with which he dwells on it P Does it not believe that it is difficulties which make a man,— whether imaginative or otherwise,—who is worth making at all ? Does it not hold that the most ennobling fate for a really great man is to have all sorts of obstacles cast in his way that he may surmount them, and by surmounting them, come to realise the deep-stored energy within, of which other- wise he might never know the depth P The better sense of the world takes little account of a man who has had no difficulties, it takes much of one who has had the greatest difficulties and conquered them, and more still of one who has sought out with- out the need for doing so, a difficult path that leads to a great goal, and conquered the obstacles in the way. No sound judge would trust a man whose life had been plain sailing. We all know that the nature which has not been early tested and often tested, is not to be trusted, that it is not tempered as we like to see all good steel tempered before we use it in a great conflict. Wordsworth's profound belief that this power was in the mind before it came out of it, and only waited to be brought out by conflict, does not concern the world, which does not busy itself with the source of the energy so long as the energy is there and is proved. But as profoundly as Wordsworth believed that con- flict and resistance were essential to bring to light the poet's inborn power, so profoundly does the better sense of the world believe that no man is really great who has not found out for himself the best difficulties to overcome, even if they did not challenge him to overcome them.
Or, again, what can be more apparently mystical than Words- worth's belief that he could feel,—intuitively feel,—the whole- ness of the universe, and the greatness of that whole?— "I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean, and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man; A motion and a spirit that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things."
And yet is it not this very sense of the wholeness of the universe, and especially of the essential harmony of the whole universe with the most sublime things in it, like "the light of setting suns, and the round ocean, and the living air, and the blue sky, and in the mind of man," which good sense half unconsciously insists upon as one of the first requisites of a large and sagacious nature P There is nothing good sense sooner takes offence at than either want of a large sympathy and in- sight into the world without, or on the other hand, pessimism,— want of the former implying want of feeling for the way in which one thing touches another, and gets itself into true relations with it, and the latter implying a disposition to interpret the facts of life from the ugly and dark side of it, instead of from the beau- tif al and bright side of it Either the one disposition or the other is offensive to the really good sense of the world, which is nevertheless all unconscious that in thus insisting on a feeling for the whole, as distinct from a feeling for insulated parts, and in insisting on interpreting the whole by that which is greatest and most beautiful, and not by that which is smallest and most ugly, it is really insisting on a mystical view of the universe, and especially on Wordsworth's mystical view of it,—the view which discerns a prevailing harmony in the whole, and which makes joy the key-note for explaining sorrow, and not sorrow the key-note for explaining joy.
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