CHAPTER I.
Amongst them all sate he that wonned there,
That hight Phantastes by his nature trew;
A man of years yet fresh, as mote appere,
Of swarth complexion and of crabbed hew,
That him full of melancholy did shew;
Bent hollow beetle brows, sharpe staring eyes
That mad or foolish seemed: one by his view
Mote deeme him born with ill disposed skyes,
When oblique Saturne sate in th’ house or agonyes.
Spenser.
The autumn is already advanced, and our friends who met at Summerford have returned to the neighbourhood of London. The days of damp and fog have arrived. All nature looks sullen and lustreless. As Gower gazes through the streaming pane on the narrowed dripping landscape, he sometimes tries, as sunny Persia and the Sufis recur to him, to transform the slope before his windows into an eastern valley. Fancy shall sow it thick with poppies, and daisies, and hyacinths of brilliant red;—a thymy smell breathes up the pass;—and there the ungainly stork, and gaily painted quails flutter away at the sound of his horse’s hoofs. Or those house-tops at the foot of the hill, among their trees, shall be a Persian town, on which he looks from an eminence. There are the flat-roofed white houses, enclosing in their courts those twinkling silver lights, the fountains; the green of trees among the shining walls relieves the eye; the domes and minarets look down into the narrow streets; there sleeps the burial-ground, under the shadow of its sentinel cypresses; and there blows the garland of gardens, surrounding the whole with its wavy line of many colours. But the weather is a water-monster, and swallows up too-venturous Fancy. For a few moments imagination can lay light behind the clouds; bright hues flush out on the surface of familiar forms, and the magic power prevails to change them into creatures of the Orient. But the rainy reality is too potent, and the wilderness of vapour will receive no form, retain no colour. So Gower turns away from the windows—pokes the fire—feels idle and fit for nothing—struggles with himself—conquers, and finally achieves a morning’s work.
Willoughby has laid aside his romance for a time and taken to the theosophists—to Jacob Behmen more especially. In fact, he had come to an exciting point in his story. He thought he had found a kind of seething turbulence in his thoughts, like that which certain rivers are said to manifest, when in parts of their course they pass over beds of subterranean fire. Afraid of becoming morbid and unnatural, he stopped work at once, and had recourse to Behmen as a refrigerant and sedative. The remedy succeeded to admiration. Within a day or two the patient could pronounce himself out of poetical danger; and Atherton found him, when he dropped in one morning, enjoying, with Behmen in his hand, that most promising token of convalescence—a profound sleep.
Gower resolved to make himself amends for that uncongenial morning, by spending the evening at Ashfield. Thither also Willoughby had found his way. A considerable part of the evening was passed in Atherton’s library, and conversation turned, before very long, upon the mystics, once more, and their position as regards the Reformation.
Willoughby. Those Teutonic worthies of the fourteenth century are noble specimens of the mystic.
Gower. Truly, with them, Mysticism puts on her beautiful garments. See her standing, gazing heavenward; ‘her rapt soul sitting in her eyes,’ and about her what a troop of shining ones! There is Charity, her cheek wet with tears for the dead Christ and pale with love for the living; carrying, too, the oil and the wine—for Mysticism was the good Samaritan of the time, and succoured bleeding Poverty, when priest passed by and Levite;—there is Truth, withdrawing worship from the form and superstitious substitute, transferring it from priest and pageantry to the heart alone with God, and pressing on, past every channel, toward the Fount Himself;—there Humility, pointing to the embers of consumed good works, while she declares that man is nothing and that God is all;—and there, too, Patriotism, and awakening Liberty—for Mysticism appealed to the people in their native tongue; fashioned the speech and nerved the arms of the German nation; gave heart to the Fatherland (bewildered in a tempest of fiery curses) to withstand, in the name of Christ, the vicar of Christ; led on the Teutonic lion of her popular fable to foil the plots of Italian Reynard; and dared herself to set at nought the infuriate Infallibility.
Atherton. Go on, Gower.
Gower. It seems to me that the doctrine of justification by faith, is practically involved in a theology like that of Tauler, so deep in its apprehension of sin as selfishness, so thorough in renouncing all merit on the part of man.
Atherton. Yes, practically. What was needful in addition was, that this doctrine should take its due central place in the system of Christian truth, as the principle, if I may so speak, of salvation for all men. It was not enough to arrive at it as the upshot of individual mystical experience.
Willoughby. There I think you indicate the weak point of this mysticism—it is so individual—so much a matter of the personal inward life.
Gower. That surely is the very secret of its strength.
Willoughby. Yes, of its strength up to a certain limit; beyond that limit, of its weakness. It lacked facility of impartation. Its sympathies were broad and humane; its doctrine too narrow and ascetic. Speaking from the depths of a soul that had known the nether darkness and the insufferable glory, its utterance was broken and obscure. It must be lived through to be understood. It might attract, but could only partially retain, the many. Its message, after all, was to the few.
Gower. But those few, master-minds, remember.
Atherton. True, yet what powers could compensate for the want of clear speech—of a ready vehicle for transference of thought? A deep saying that of Jeremy Taylor’s, where he remarks concerning mystical elevations and abstractions, that, while in other sciences the terms must first be known and then the rules and conclusions, the whole experience of mysticism must first be obtained before we can so much as know what it is, and the end acquired first—the conclusion before the premises.
Willoughby. When Luther appears, appealing to the Bible in the hands of the people, the defect is supplied, and we have the Reformation. That visible and venerable externalism, the Romish Church, could not be successfully assailed on merely internal grounds. The testimony of the individual heart against it was variable and uncertain, because more or less isolated. But where the Scriptures are set free, and they can be made the basis of assault, an externalism quite as visible, and more venerable, brings the outward to bear against the outward; while the power of an inward life, pure and deep and ardent as the best of the mystics ever knew, animates the irresistible onset.
Gower. The testimony of History, then, is decidedly against our modern spiritualism, which complains that we make too much of the book, and sacrifice the subjective religious development to an outward authority. Luther—a true man of the spirit—conquered because he could point to a letter. The fire of his own inward life could kindle so grand a flame, because he was sustained by an authority which no individual mystic could arrogate. The Scriptures were the common ground for the Reformer who had the truth, and the inquirer who sought it. The excessive subjectivity of the mystic deprived him of that advantage.
Willoughby. But are we not overlooking other causes which enabled Luther to accomplish so much, and precluded the mystics from carrying further their reforming tendency?
Atherton. By all means let the influence of the interval between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries be duly taken into account. To do so will only make good Gower’s remark. During the fifteenth century you find no fresh development of mysticism. The genuine religion of the period was still mystical in its complexion, but characterised by a much larger infusion of the scriptural element. This was the real advance of that interim. At the Universities the Bible began to displace the schoolmen. A better system of interpretation prevailed. Even with the mystics St. Paul was already taking the place of Dionysius, and mysticism began to lose its nature, merging in a true spirituality, sober-minded while fervent. In the theology of such men as John Wessel and Staupitz (who with Tauler and the German theology nourished the early religious life of Luther), we see a clearer apprehension of the nature of Christ’s work for us—a better balancing of the outward and the inward. In fact, the great step necessary to produce a reformation, after the mystics had made their preparation, was this very bringing into prominence of the word of God. Then, to the ardour and the power of mysticism in its noblest form, was added the authority, the guidance, and the divine adaptation of that message of salvation announced to all mankind.
Willoughby. Then, again, the doctrine of Luther directed men at once to the attainment of that clear hope concerning their spiritual safety which, say what we will, is the craving of our nature. We have seen how an Eckart would become pantheist to extort from philosophy that assurance which was denied him by the Church.
Gower. Yet does not the strength and attraction of Romanism lie in this very characteristic—its tempting facility of comfort? Most men prefer a sleeping conscience to a tender one; and for such the Romish Church offers a perpetual siesta.
Willoughby. Granted; for this very reason, however, she cannot satisfy the deeper wants of the class I speak of—those men out of whom may be made mystics, reformers, heretics,—but religious Helots never. I am not speaking of mere comfort, but of true peace,—of that entrance into a new relationship towards God which gives us the heart to aspire towards a new nature.
Gower. Agreed, then. Bunyan follows Paul when he makes Christian lose his burden early in the pilgrimage, so that he treads the onward path thenceforward with a lighter step.
Atherton. And can front Apollyon better. Look round at the Christendom of that age. You see only two classes who escape the condition of the hired servant—who are the sons of God and not his bondsmen. These are the mystics and the reformers. The mystic realizes adoption through appalling griefs and toils; the reformer is led thither straightway, as he exclaims with St. Paul, ‘Being therefore justified by faith, we have peace with God.’
Willoughby. How strongly does Luther urge men to believe on Christ as a Saviour for them—to receive in lowly simplicity the peace divinely offered. How triumphantly does he show that such a faith is victory—that all other is a mere historic belief about Christ, not a belief in an ever-present Deliverer, who lives within, and redeems us daily from ourselves. Thus did his followers helm them speedily with hope, and escape, in great measure, the fearful strain of those alternations between rapture and despair, for which mysticism did not even seek a remedy. The distinction between justification and sanctification is no mere theological refinement. Its practical recognition, at least, is essential to that solemn joyousness which is the strength and glory of the Christian life.
Atherton. That is, after all, the true escape from Self which delivers you from bondage to the shifting frames and feelings of the hour—the mere accidents of personal temperament, by making clear the external ground of hope. Mysticism had not light enough to find the way to its own ideal of rest. Luther, with his Bible, realized in soberness the longed-for repose of its intense passion.
Willoughby. We must confess too, I think, that the representatives of the better mysticism were not strong enough to cope with the fanatical or lawless leaders of the worse. How Tauler, Suso, Ruysbroek, and the author of the Theologia Germanica, lift up their voices against the ‘false lights’—against men who deified every impulse, who professed to have transcended all virtue, who renounced all moral obligation and outward authority, or who resigned themselves to a stupid apathy which they called poverty of spirit.
Gower. Those who constituted this last class must have been men who found in the false doctrine only an excuse for remaining as they were:—hard, indeed, to raise them to anything better. I imagine them poor ignorant hinds, the undermost victims of feudalism. One thinks of Tennyson’s portraiture of the serf,—
The staring eye glazed o’er with sapless days,
The long mechanic pacings to and fro,
The set gray life and apathetic end.
Willoughby. Be that as it may, this bastard mysticism, whether rapacious as King Stork, or passive as King Log, multiplies among men. Want and oppression seize on the sacred pretext of an inward light, and mysticism is fast growing fierce and revolutionary. Good men, speaking words of spiritual freedom, have unawares awakened licence. They themselves slew Self with vigil and with tears; and, lo! a Hydra-headed Self, rampant and ruthless, stalks abroad, and they have been unwittingly his creators.
Atherton. What could they do, as mystics, but mourn and rebuke? The inward testimony would not render an unvarying verdict in every case. Their appeal must be, either to an amount of right moral discernment already in the individual, or to the social judgment of a certain religious circle. Beyond these limits their very consistency is their weakness. For the thorough-going mystic, who is resolved to be in all things a light and law unto himself, replies that his inward light is quite as divinely authoritative for him as is that of the moderate man, reproving his excesses, for himself. He will answer, ‘Friend, walk thou by thy light, as I by mine. The external is nothing to the internal. “What is the chaff to the wheat?” saith the Lord. Thou art external to me, I listen therefore to the voice within me, not to thine.’
Willoughby. We have, too, the express testimony of Melanchthon to the fact, that had not Luther appeared when he did, to divert the under-current of popular indignation into the middle course of the Reformation, a fearful outbreak must have desolated Europe from the fury kindled by the intolerable oppressions of Church and State.
Gower. Certainly mysticism could never have spoken with power enough to turn aside such a long-gathered tempest.
Willoughby. Where the revolutionary spirit had once broken out, only the strong hand could avail.
Atherton. And how ruthlessly was that remedy applied! But—what in the world—Gower, I say, open your eyes. Are you going to sleep?
Gower. I was trying to recall a dream I had after reading about the Anabaptists of Munster.
Willoughby. A dream! Let us have it.
Gower. Wait a moment—ah, now I remember. First of all, I saw numbers of people toiling across the fields or along miry roads; weary mothers, delicately nurtured, carrying their babes, and followed by their crying little ones; the fathers laden, it would seem, with such property as they were allowed to take away. They look back mournfully towards the walls of a city, out of whose gates more of their friends are being thrust. These are the magistrates, the rich, the unbelievers, driven forth by the populace to find what shelter they may among the boors, or in the nearest towns. Then I am suddenly inside the city. I see, in one place, a crowd gathered about a shaggy, wild-eyed preacher, spluttering, screaming, foaming at the mouth; in another is a circle surrounding two men in rags, whirling round like spinning dervishes. One man, with face ghastly pale, and bandaged head, who seems to have escaped from a hospital, moans and wrings his hands, predicting universal ruin. Now, with a yell, he has fallen down in convulsions. There a burly brute has pushed down a weeping woman from the door-steps of a great house, that he may stand on the spot to roar out his prophecy and exhortation. All this was somehow mingled with hosannas to Mathieson, the baker; and at the end of the high street they were dancing about a bonfire made of all the books in the town, save the Bible only. Then the crowd made way for the favourite wife of John Bokelson, the tailor, riding in a great coach, resplendent in silks and costly stuffs torn from the churches. Methought I entered the Town Hall. There, on a throne, in a suit of silver tissue, slashed and lined with crimson, fastened with buckles of gold, sat John Bokelson himself.[[205]]
Willoughby. A Mormon elder, ‘all of the olden time!’
Atherton. Be quiet. He had only eight wives.
Gower. There he sat, with his triple crown, his globe, and cross of gold, his silver and golden swords, and above his head I could read, ‘King of Righteousness over the whole World.’ Then came a long succession of petitioners, thrice kneeling and prostrating themselves before him. A bell rang. The audience was over. Now he was sending out ambassadors, calling on the neighbouring towns to rise and establish the Kingdom of the Holy Ghost,—‘for the meek are to inherit the earth, and the time for spoiling the Egyptians is come.’ After this I saw long tables spread in the market-place, with fine linen cloths, whereat four thousand people partook of the sacrament, and afterwards riotously feasted; the grey towers of the cathedral looking down upon them. I passed in at the church doors. All was confusion there, drunken shouts, and running to and fro of boys from cook-shops. The great oriel window had been broken by stones, and on the pavement, with its time-worn epitaphs, lay the many-coloured fragments of glass, among broken flagons and pools of beer. A mad musician had seized upon the organ, and above the uproar rolled the mighty volumes of sound, shaking the old dusty banners. Now came a crash of unearthly music—quite unheeded,—and then the melody melted and trembled away, dying down with a far-off wail of unutterable pathos. In the midst of his ecstasy the crazed performer was hurled away by a swarm of ‘prentice lads who had found their way up the staircase. One among them struck up the well-known air of a wanton song. There was an outcry and sound of struggling, and I saw the madman leap from the clerestory down into the middle of the nave,——
Willoughby. And you woke?
Gower. No. There came over me a kind of blank bewilderment, and all was changed. The sides of the church had become mountains. I was in a winding rocky glen, and the moon was rising over the black fantastic peaks that shut in the valley. I saw what made me think of Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones. Along the hollow of the gorge, and in the great furrows of the heights on each side, where should have been mountain streams and pebbles, were the glistening bones; and on the rock-ledges where the moonlight fell I could see them strewn; and on every boulder, skeleton-heaps; and at the mouth of every cavern, like icicles hanging from the stony jaws. I heard a rising wind sweep up the pass,—another blast, and another; and then, coming nearer and nearer, a sound as though withered boughs of innumerable trees were snapping in a tempest. All was whirling, darting motion among the white rattling fragments, above, beneath, around; till every clanking bone had been locked to its fellow, and a skeleton sat on every crag and lay in every hollow. The sinews and the flesh then came up upon them; after that, the breath; and they arose, an exceeding great army. I heard a muttering near me, and turning, I saw one gazing on the multitude, having in his hand a torch. His wild, eager look startled me. Now I thought he was Carlstadt, and then he changed into Thomas Münzer. Then again I was sure I recognized Spenser’s Phantastes. He flung his torch into a cleft, whence it breathed out its last sparks into the windy night, and bowing his head, turned slowly away. I heard him say, ‘Dead Church! Dead Church! How shalt thou live? I have learnt it. Flesh and blood first—then breath. Truth for a body, then Love for a soul. The spirit must have a form—must quicken a letter. First a fact for motive; then let the young life work. The soul must have its sinews; the spirit its instrument, its means, its words. Lie there, fire that destroyest; come hither, fire that warmest,—that warmest to good, and that warnest from evil.’ Then I saw that he had a new book in his hand,—the last part then published of Luther’s German New Testament. He vanished. The hills rolled away in smoke, and I awoke with a start.
Atherton. I wish Phantastes and his kindred had really learnt the lesson of your dream. But such hot-brained enthusiasts cannot be taught, not even by sore stripes of adversity in the school of fools.