Hours with the Mystics: A Contribution to the History of Religious Opinion

by Robert Alfred Vaughan

These lines hovered in Gower’s memory that night, as he walked home after the conversation just recorded. He thought how applicable they were to asceticism,—especially to that intense asceticism of the mind which, not content with wasting the body and searing the sense, prides itself on starving Reason and blinding Imagination,—which eschews all form and figure, and affects naked truth, without a medium or an envelope. His was a nature which saw everything in figure. His mind moved everywhere among pictures. For him to dispense with metaphor and parable—with significant raiment and dramatic action for his ideas, would have been almost equivalent to dispensing with ideas altogether. So he quickened his steps; for the starless, unfeatured night seemed to him too much to resemble the blank and bleak Abstraction of the severer mystics,—that tyrannous curfew of warm natural life and of all bright thoughts.

He soon reached his abode, where a blithe fire awaited him, radiating its almost animated welcome over easel, busts, and books. Assuming light study vesture, he leaned back in his arm-chair, enjoying slippered ease. He would not light his lamp, but reclining in the very mood for reverie, watched the fire—now the undisputed magician of his studio,—as it called up or dismissed, with its waving flame, the distorted shadows of familiar things on wall and ceiling. He himself was soon occupied in like manner, waywardly calling forth, linking, severing, a company of shadows out of the past.

In a half-waking, half-dreaming twilight, Gower seemed to see the dusky form of the Indian, crouched on his mat beside a holy river, awaiting divine insensibility. There was the Yogi, gathered up in his patch of shade, like an insect rolled under a leaf; while, above, the beating sun-glare trampled over the plains, strewn with his reflected rays, as over an immeasurable threshing-floor.

Then he dreamed that he stood in a Persian garden, and before him were creeping plants, trained on wires slanting upward to a point, and in and out and up and down this flower-minster, hung with bells, darted those flying jewels, the humming-birds: the sun’s rays as they slanted on their glancing coats seemed to dash off in a spray of rainbow colours. Some pierced the nectaries of the flowers with their fine bills; others soared upward, and as they were lost in the dazzling air, the roses swung their censers, and the nightingales sang an assumption-hymn for them. Yet this scene changed incessantly. Every now and then the pinnacle of flowers assumed giant size,—was a needle of rock, shooting up out of a chasm of hanging vegetation; and innumerable spirits—winged souls of Sufis, were striving to reach the silent glistening peak. There was a flutter and a pulsing in the sky—as with summer lightning at night,—and the palpitation of some vast eyelid made light and darkness succeed each other with quick throbs. Now it was the pyramid of flowers, now the star-crowned point of rock. So time and space were surpassed—sported with. Instants were ages, he thought, and cycles ran their round in a moment. The vault of heaven was now a hanging flower-cup; and presently the feather of a humming-bird expanded to a sunset of far-streaming gold and purple.

A leaping flame caused these alternations in Dreamland, as it lit or left in shadow his closed eyes.

Then he stood on the desolate Campagna, where before him stretched the ruins of the Roman aqueducts. The broken arches, dotting at intervals the far waste of withered green, drew no more water from the hills for the million-mouthed City in the horizon. Their furrowed, beaten age held in its wrinkles only roots of maidenhair, and sometimes little rain-pools along the crevices,—the scornful charity of any passing shower. In a moment the wilderness grew populous with the sound of voices and the clangour of tools.—A swarm of workmen, clustered about the broken links of the chain, were striving to piece them together again—to bind up the mighty artery, and set it flowing as of old. But an insatiable morass sucked down the stones they brought. Waggons full of gods (such as moved in the old triumphs), of statues monstrous, bestial, many-limbed, from all the temples of the nations, were unladen, with sacrifice and augury, and the idols deposited on the treacherous quagmire, only to sink down, a drowning mass, with bowing heads and vainly-lifted arms. Then the whole undulating plain appeared to roll up in vapour, and a wind, carrying in it a sound of psalms, and driving before it a snowy foam of acacia blossoms, swept clear the field of vision. No; the old influence was to flow no more from the Olympian Houses above that blue line of hills. Great Pan was dead. The broken cisterns would hold no water.

He stood next before the mouth of a cavern, partly overhung with a drooping hair of tropical plants. At his side was a nun, who changed, as is the wont of dreams, into a variety of persons. At one time, she was St. Theresa, then Christina Mirabilis, and presently Gower thought he recognised Theresa once more. He followed his conductress into the cavern, in the gloom of which a hermit rivulet was pattering along, telling its pebble beads. As they passed on, the night-birds in the black recesses of the rock shrieked and hooted at them. As he touched the dank sides of the passage, from time to time his hand would rest on some loathly wet lump, shuffling into a cranny, or some nameless, gelid shape fell asunder at his touch, opening gashes in itself where lay, in rows, seeds of great tarantula eye-balls, that ran away dissolved in venomous rheum. Bat-like things flapped down from funnel-shaped holes: polypi felt after his face with slimy fingers: crabs, with puffed human faces, slid under his tread; and skinny creatures, as it were featherless birds, with faces like a horse’s skull, leaned over and whinnied at him. ‘These,’ said Theresa, ‘are the obscene hell-brood whose temptations make so terrible the entrance on the Higher Life.’

The long cavern had not yet made a single winding, and he turned, as the darkness increased, to have a last look at the entrance, whence the outer sunshine still twinkled after them. He could see a green hill that faced the mouth, lying off like a bright transparency. Or was it a spot brought into the disc of his great rock-telescope, from some planet of perpetual summer—one of those that play in the hair of the sun? Christina, impatient of this sinful looking back, urged him onward. A palm-branch she carried grew luminous, and its plume of flame dropping sparks, became their torch. She paused to point out to him some plants growing in a black mould. Birds had carried in thus far the seeds from which they sprang; but there had been no sun-light to give them colour, and their form was uncertain and defectively developed. ‘Behold,’ said she, ‘these saintly flowers. Mark that holy pallor! The sun never stained their pureness with those gaudy hues men admire. Yon garish world can show no such perfectness: see them, they are hueless, scentless, well-nigh formless!’ ‘Sickly, blanched abortions!’ exclaimed the dreamer, so loudly that he almost awoke. ‘We want more life, not less—fuller—sunnier!’ Christina crossed herself piously to hear abstraction thus blasphemed. And now the passage, widening, opened on the central hall of rock, that branched out into depths of darkness every way, and was fretted with gleaming stalactites. There were amber volutes and brittle clusters of tawny bubbles; lily-bells of stone, flowers with sparry thorns and twining stream-like stems; creamy falls from slabs of enamel, motionless, yet seeming ever to drop from ledge to ledge; membranous curtains, and net-work, and traceries; tissues and lawnlike folds of delicate marble; while in the centre, reaching to the misty summit of the dome, stood a huge sheaf of pillars, like alabaster organ-pipes. A solemn music trembled and swelled, and as its rising volume shook the air, voices sang—‘Weep for the sins of men!’ There was a wild burst of sound; then sudden silence; and, above and around, nothing was audible but a universal trickling and running, a dripping and dropping and plashing, while the palm-torch flashed on innumerable tear-drops, hanging on every pendant point and jutting ledge, or sliding down the glistening rock.

After a while, it seemed to be Theresa who spoke to him and said, ‘Here in these depths is warmth, when the world above is locked in ice; and when the surface is parched, here dwells chaste coolness, safe encelled. Our fire seems numbness to a blinded world; and we are frost to its dog-day rages.’ With that a spell seemed to come over her hearer. The spirit of the words became his spirit. The fate of an empire seemed as nothing in his eyes beside his next prospect of rapture, or his success in straining out another half-pint of tears. In a moment he was turned to stone. He had become a gargoyle high up on Strasburg Cathedral, and was spouting water from his lolling tongue at the circling birds.

Gower next found himself, on a cold grey morning in spring, in a vine country, where men and women were toiling up the steep hills on either side a river, carrying baskets of earth. Last winter’s rain had swept away the thin soil to the bone, and they must lay a new one about their vine-sticks. In the midst of their miserable labour, these poor people saw standing among them a majestic stranger, wrapped in a robe. Gower thought he recognised Swedenborg at once. ‘Stay,’ cried the seer, ‘God hath made a soil already for you. Build no other. Your own stony hearts have made the hill seem to you as iron.’ They heard: each seemed to take a stone out of his bosom, and hurl it down the steep; when straightway every foot sank deep into a rich and kindly earth, and a shout of joy broke forth, echoed far among the cloudy gorges.