Mysticism

Vaughan’s Half-hours with the Mystics led us to think and speak of the mystics as a class. But that is somewhat misleading. If the book had been called “ Half-hours of mysticism,” that would have pointed us more correctly to the truth. The Oxford Book of Mystical Verse shows how little the writers of such verse can be classed together on any other ground than that they have written verse which justifies the distinctive epithet. Here is Richard Rolle, but here also is Algernon Charles Swinburne. Here is William Blake, but here also is Walt Whitman. Here is Francis Thompson, but here also is Henley. It would not occur to us to call Swinburne a mystic—Swinburne, who was in wild revolt against Christianity and required that he should be buried without religious rites. Yet he had his mystical moments. Walt Whitman, too, would seem to be matter-offact, prosaic, democratic, non-religious, rather than mystical. To describe him as a mystic would seem quite beside the mark. And yet a great deal of his poetry may come under the designation “ mystical.” As for Henley, he seemed the most impetuous, violent, sceptical of men, in revolt against religion and life, and even his own best friend. But in him also was the mystical note. The fact is, Mysticism is a term, borrowed from the ancient Mystery religions, to describe certain experiences of the soul which occur in all religions and non-religions, and in men and women of all kinds. Sometimes it is an isolated experience in a whole life, like that of James Russell Lowell, described in William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience. ¹ Sometimes it is a succession of such experiences which colours a whole 288life, like Bœhmen’s, and then we call the subject of such experiences a mystic.