D. H. Lawrence as Mystic

The purpose of this article is to show that D. H. Lawrence is a mystic, as great as any recognised mystic of the past, though of a different kind. Because such a statement is bound to evoke a difference of opinion, I will begin by investigating ‘What is mysticism?’

The word ‘mysticism’ sounds ugly to most people because the modern man has a wholesome contempt for abstractions. In its derogatory sense, the word is often understood to mean a vague yearning of the soul after a transcendent experience. Mysticism begins, the philistine thinks, where all rational thinking ends. The idealists and visionaries indulge in such Quixotic exploits which are of little practical use to the men of the world. This may very well be the popular attitude towards mysticism, but let me admit at the outset that to the men who hold such an attitude I have nothing to say. Mysticism can have no significance for those who believe that spirit and things spiritual are figments of the poet’s imagination.

Since we have to choose a starting point for our enquiry, let us accept this as a working definition of the term: Mysticism is the endeavour of the human soul to enter into communion, as direct and immediate as possible, with the divine soul. The difficulty in understanding mysticism is due to the fact that for most of us the mystical experience, ‘the awakening of the fountain of the soul as Tagore put it, is a closed book, and those who were blessed with a mystical trance found the experience either too difficult to describe, or described it in terms the full implication of which we, the uninitiate, are unable to understand. The mystic rises above the world and above himself to enter into the world of pure spirit, which is a world apart, effulgent to him but mysterious to us.

Mysticism is commonly supposed to be of two kinds: theoretical or philosophical, achieved by rational enquiry; and practical or religious, achieved by emotional ecstasy. Theoretical mysticism is the endeavour of the human mind to grasp the divine essence, or, as we may choose to call it, the ultimate reality of things. A practical mystic on the other hand partakes in the divine nature. God ceases to be an object and becomes an experience.

This division gives rise to a pertinent enquiry. Is mysticism a phase of thought, or of feeling, or of both? The question has been answered by the thinkers in their own way. I for one do not believe in ‘rational mysticism’. The term appears to me to be self-contradictory. A rational enquiry is within the reach of most of us; but mysticism, as an experience, has been granted to very few. Mysticism has never been a demonstrable proposition. We cannot nail down a mystical experience by words in a language. The history of human thought moreover tells us that the mystics–like Thomas a Kempis, Blake, Keats–did notlay much store by knowledge. Moreover mysticism implies an identity between the human soul and the divine soul. Such an identity is possible only in a state of heightened feeling: knowledge involves subject-object relationship in cognition and therefore precludes identity.

So real mysticism is a heart-religion “felt in the blood, and felt along the heart”. A mystic believes that the Infinite Spirit is the perfective of the qualities of the Finite Spirit. God, in being the True, the Good and the Beautiful, contains in Him the consummation of the human soul. A mystic, implicitly or explicitly, recognises this and adjusts his life accordingly.

In the writings of the mystics we find that there are some features common to their experiences. Forexample, we know that most of the mystics become pantheistic. We also know that their unique experience lands them in a preternatural state of feeling. The three characteristics of any mystical experience are an acute consciousness of the other presence, a longing for communion with it, and a faith in the feasibility of this communion. The practical mystic becomes unsocial; the world of spirit so much envelops his existence that he is combed out of the world of human beings. The soul of the mystic does not live in a state of bliss. “It is impossible,” writes St. Teresa, “to describe the suffering of the Soul in this state. It goes about in quest of relief, and God suffers it to find none.” When the mystical trance has come to pass, all sense of duality or separate existence of the individual spirit is lost. The communion with God gives the feeling of oneness.

The communication of a mystical experience, as I have said above, has been a difficult task. There appear to my mind three reasons for this: the uninitiate reader cannot fully grasp the meaning of the terms which describe such an experience; human language itself is found inadequate as a medium of expression; and the mind of the mystic cannot keep pace with the soul in its adventure into the otherness. But a study of the writings of mystics living in different times and places discloses one very significant fact. A mystic is always required to see God through a medium. The face of God is so luminous that we can look at it only through a coloured glass. If we study and generalise we will discover that the media chosen through which we can look at God have been mainly three: Religion, Nature and Beauty. In English poetry, Blake, Wordsworth, and Keats represent these three kinds of mysticism. Let us take them one by one.

Blake is the purest of English mystic poets, and a representative example of religious mysticism. In his Bampton Lectures on Christian Mysticism delivered at Oxford in 1899, Dean Inge defined religious mysticism as “the attempt to realise, in thought and feeling, the importance of the temporal in the eternal, and of the eternal in the temporal”. Keeping this description in mind, when we turn to the works of Blake, the following lines come to us strikingly:

“To see a world in a grain of sand
A Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Divinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.”

These lines contain the essence of mysticism. The mystic realizes the presence of the living God every moment in his soul and in nature. The ‘insurgent naked throb of the instant moment’ is all that matters to him. But the inability to render a mystical experience in words of common parlance forces him to use symbols,–sometimes the symbols he uses are conventional, at other times he coins his own symbols.

“I give you the end of a golden string,
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.”

The attitude of a nature mystic is akin to the attitude of .the religious mystic. He discerns in every object of Nature the manifestation of the divine spirit. The dancing daffodils, the singing rivulets, the sea that bares her bosom to the moon, a violet by a mossy stone half hidden from the eye–all these objects are dear to the heart of Wordsworth, because in them he sees the life-breath of the celestial spirit, He sees ‘splendour’ in a blade of grass and ‘glory’ in a flower. This is why the meanest flower could give him thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears, The harmony and joy which he missed in the world of man and which he found in nature, enabled him to “see into the life of things”. There he discovered “a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused”.

Keats is our example of beauty mystic. The soul of such a mystic is filled with wonder at the sight of so much beauty all around him–the sight in a tender night of the Queen-Moon sitting on her throne clustered around by all her starry Fays; the sound when

“…full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing: and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.”

And then there is the taste of the true, the blushful Hippocrane, “With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, and purple-stained mouth”; the smell of the “white hawthorn, pastoral eglantine, fast fading violets” and “the coming musk-rose.” Keats loved all these things because in their beauty he saw the touch of the divine Painter’s brush. He declared his life-religion by saying, “I have loved the principle of beauty in all things…” In another letter to one of his correspondents he explained: “The roaring of the wind is my wife and the Stars through the window-pane are my Children. The mighty abstract idea I have of beauty in all things stifles the more divided and minute domestic happiness–an amiable wife and sweet Children, I contemplate as part of that Beauty, but I must have a thousand of those beautiful particles to fill up my heart. I feel more and more everyday, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds.” It is in the light of this statement, I feel, that we ought to understand the concluding lines of the Ode on a Grecian Urn:

“Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty;
That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

I have made this digression because my purpose now is to show that apart from these three commonly recognised and used media, viz.. religion, nature and beauty, Lawrence discovered a new medium–the flesh of the woman for man, of the man for woman. To give it in his own words, we take this passage from the unpublished Foreword to ‘Sons And Lovers.’ “And God the Father, the Inscrutable, the Unknowable, we know in the flesh in Woman. She is the door for our in-going and out-coming. In her we go to the Father; but like the witnesses of the transfiguration, blind and unconscious.” Before trying to understand this passage, let us try to find out how Lawrence came to such a realisation.

Lawrence begins by assuming that desires are no reprehensible part of our self, merely to be suppressed, or crushed, or denied. But he proclaims. “Desire itself is a pure thing, like sunshine, or fire, or rain”. And when a man gives way to his desire, everything spiritual in him is conveyed into his sexual function and flows through this channel. In order that this stream be pure and unsullied, there are certain precautions to be observed: a man should mate with the right woman who can take him and whose love he can take; body should mate with body and spirit with spirit; there should be no abstraction in love, no sex in the head: we should not make an ideal of love, thinking it to be eternal and boundless, for true love is intense and individual:

“The moment the mind interferes with love, or the will fixes on it,
or the personality assumes it as an attribute, or the ego takes possession of it,
it is not love anymore, it’s just a mess.
And we’ve made a great mess of love, mind-perverted, will-perverted, ego-perverted love.”

Equality between the sexes should not be a consideration with us, for all talk about it is merely an expression of sex-hate; and in the last place, man should not go in quest of love, love comes to the loving. Men simply ought to be desirous, and women desirable.

Lawrence lays so much stress on man woman relationship because it is the deepest and most intimate, the one of which we are so profoundly aware. And ‘awareness’ with Lawrence has got a religious significance. Just as our eyes have the property of vision, ears of sound, nose of smell and tongue of taste, so our body has the property of becoming aware of another’s presence, aware not of one’s physical existence but of one’s immediate being in relation to us. This dark presence of the otherness lies beyond the boundaries of man’s conscious mind. Our bodies are the first to discover this other presence and “the capacity for exaltation enshrined in it”. The body realises that the pleasure in another body is the greatest intoxication. The flesh of the male undertakes a search for a presence in the flesh of the female. “An impatient search,” as Jules Romains puts it, “which can never think it has done enough, and which is continued until it reaches a sort of delirium.” And this, for Lawrence,

“...is our ratification,
our heaven, as a matter of fact.
Immortality, the heaven, is only a projection of this strange but actual fulfillment,
here in the flesh.”

How does beauty communicate itself? What is the secret of sex-appeal? Lawrence’s answer to these questions gives us a clue to the understanding of his philosophy. Beauty for him is an experience. “It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness.” The beauty of the physical body is to be determined by the beauty of the spirit which permeates it and gives it life. The slightest twist in the mouth which makes the mouth so adorable is moulded in silence and slow time by a combination of feeling and thought. The lover adores not the body of his beloved but the signs he reads in the body. Just as a student of pure geometry discovers new delights when he reads algebra, so the lover, up till now admiring the curves and contours in the woman’s body, finds new delight in interpreting them as symbols of her soul. This for Lawrence is the religion of the sex. I cannot explain it better than by quoting a paragraph from a French novelist: “This religion rests on two main ideas: the idea that the fusion of bodies constitutes an immense mystery, which far surpasses the ordinary mechanisms of life, and borders on the supernatural; and the idea that the adoration of the flesh of the opposite sex, when that has the freshness and magnificence implied in the terms youth and beauty, is the medium by which men can adore an obscure but real godhead, hidden in that living flesh, and that the difference in the sexes is employed by such godhead to offer to each of us a close and material idol (provisory too, possibly).”

To accept this religion of the sex and to live according to it is as difficult and as much beyond, the reach of the ordinary man as any other mystical pursuit. What St. Teresa says about the travails of the soul in the path of religious mysticism is equally true of sex religion. In a letter to one of his correspondents, Lawrence wrote: “One must learn to love, and go through a good deal of suffering to get to it, like any knight of the grail, and the journey is always towardsthe other soul, not away from it. Do you think that love is an accomplished thing, the day it is recognised? It isn’t. To love, you have to learn to understand the other, more than she understands herself, and to submit to her understanding of you. It is damnably difficult and painful, but it is the only thing that endures.”

When the significance of the life in the flesh is apprehended, the oneness of man and woman in the first stage, and of man and God in the next, dawns upon the mystic. Man and woman cease to be two separate and. complete entities. They are not even two separate persons: not even two separate consciousnesses, or minds. Man is concerned with woman forever, in connexions visible and invisible, in a complicated life-flow that can never be analysed. The sex passion ceases to be a tempestuous, volcanic force, and becomes a calm, steady flame. Sex experience is immediate, therefore eternal. By eternal is meant not the ever- lasting, but something that is beyond the reckoning of time. The Poem ‘Manifesto’ ends with these prophetic lines:

“We shall not look before and after.
We shall be, now.
We shall know in full.
We, the mystic Now.”

This is Lawrence’s mysticism. People hesitate to call Lawrence a mystic, because mysticism is commonly supported to be an affair of the spirit while Lawrence is much concerned with sex, and sexual seems to be the contrary, the opposite, of spiritual. With Lawrence mystical experience is gained by the soul working in collaboration with the senses. That is why his mysticism seems so queer: but isn’t it exactly because ofthis that his approach ought to be recognised as more complete and more divinely right?