Practical Mysticism | Page 8

wider and wider; till he unites with the whole of that
Reality which he feels all about him, and of which his own life is a part.
He is always tending, in fact, to pass over from the artistic to the
mystical state. In artistic experience, then, in the artist's perennial effort
to actualise the ideal which Keats expressed, we may find a point of
departure for our exploration of the contemplative life.
What would it mean for a soul that truly captured it; this life in which
the emphasis should lie on the immediate percepts, the messages the
world pours in on us, instead of on the sophisticated universe into
which our clever brains transmute them? Plainly, it would mean the
achievement of a new universe, a new order of reality: escape from the
terrible museum-like world of daily life, where everything is classified
and labelled, and all the graded fluid facts which have no label are
ignored. It would mean an innocence of eye and innocence of ear
impossible for us to conceive; the impassioned contemplation of pure
form, freed from all the meanings with which the mind has draped and
disguised it; the recapturing of the lost mysteries of touch and fragrance,
most wonderful amongst the avenues of sense. It would mean the
exchanging of the neat conceptual world our thoughts build up, fenced
in by the solid ramparts of the possible, for the inconceivable richness
of that unwalled world from which we have subtracted it. It would
mean that we should receive from every flower, not merely a beautiful
image to which the label "flower" has been affixed, but the full impact
of its unimaginable beauty and wonder, the direct sensation of life
having communion with life: that the scents of ceasing rain, the voice
of trees, the deep softness of the kitten's fur, the acrid touch of sorrel on
the tongue, should be in themselves profound, complete, and simple
experiences, calling forth simplicity of response in our souls.

Thus understood, the life of pure sensation is the meat and drink of
poetry, and one of the most accessible avenues to that union with
Reality which the mystic declares to us as the very object of life. But
the poet must take that living stuff direct from the field and river,
without sophistication, without criticism, as the life of the soul is taken
direct from the altar; with an awe that admits not of analysis. He must
not subject it to the cooking, filtering process of the brain. It is because
he knows how to elude this dreadful sophistication of Reality, because
his attitude to the universe is governed by the supreme artistic virtues
of humility and love, that poetry is what it is: and I include in the sweep
of poetic art the coloured poetry of the painter, and the wordless poetry
of the musician and the dancer too.
At this point the critical reader will certainly offer an objection. "You
have been inviting me," he will say, "to do nothing more or less than
trust my senses: and this too on the authority of those impracticable
dreamers the poets. Now it is notorious that our senses deceive us.
Every one knows that; and even your own remarks have already
suggested it. How, then, can a wholesale and uncritical acceptance of
my sensations help me to unite with Reality? Many of these sensations
we share with the animals: in some, the animals obviously surpass us.
Will you suggest that my terrier, smelling his way through an
uncoordinated universe, is a better mystic than I?"
To this I reply, that the terrier's contacts with the world are doubtless
crude and imperfect; yet he has indeed preserved a directness of
apprehension which you have lost. He gets, and responds to, the real
smell; not a notion or a name. Certainly the senses, when taken at
face-value, do deceive us: yet the deception resides not so much in
them, as in that conceptual world which we insist on building up from
their reports, and for which we make them responsible. They deceive us
less when we receive these reports uncooked and unclassified, as
simple and direct experiences. Then, behind the special and imperfect
stammerings which we call colour, sound, fragrance, and the rest, we
sometimes discern a whole fact--at once divinely simple and infinitely
various--from which these partial messages proceed; and which seeks
as it were to utter itself in them. And we feel, when this is so, that the

fact thus glimpsed is of an immense significance; imparting to that
aspect of the world which we are able to perceive all the significance,
all the character which it possesses. The more of the artist there is in us,
the more intense that significance, that character will seem: the more