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feeble yellowish spikes, inch-high. She called her landlady, who said that if they weren't stars of Bethlehem she did not know what they were. Stars

of Bethlehem! a fanciful name suggestive of marvels. She felt that she was on the brink of a world of discoveries. The purley-man's wife with whom she took counsel fetched her from the wood-shed a rusty old stable fork wanting one of its four tines. With that unwieldy tool in her unpractised hands she entered on a toilsome campaign against the weeds, and that was the beginning of her gardening; wherein she soon took so much delight, that when the weather was fit she gave it almost all the daytime which was not claimed by her infant. Indeed she commonly combined the two occupations and had little Roland, who very early found his feet, out with her in the garden; where while she smoothed and planted he plucked and trampled.

But as the boy's sturdy limbs grew apace he became dissatisfied with the amusement of such easy destruction and the range of so narrow a plot. That part of the garden which now most interested him was the gate; upon which it would appear that his thoughts were fixed even when his eyes were turned away. For no sooner did his mother relax her oversight than he escaped into the adjacent wilderness; and if he had but half a minute's start there was much ado to find him among the heather, tall bracken and gorse. At last they took to securing the gate with a cord and blocking practicable gaps in the fence with old boxes; then for a while there was a sense of security within and without the cottage. The masterful child had perforce to be content with peeping through the bars of the gate at rabbits playing on the sward, at a goldfinch singing on a bush or a weasel passing on a stealthy errand of destruction. Often however his eyes would leave watching those

near and little things to rest upon the sombre irregular line marked by the oaks of Newstead. What were his imaginings thereupon who shall say? Sometimes he would stand gazing mutely thus by half-hours at once; but if ever a herd of red deer came between he would turn his face for a moment towards the house and shout in much excitement, "Big yabbits, big yabbits!"

At length it occurred to him to climb the gate and fall down on the other side. To his surprise he did so quite easily. He at once made for the wood, and when after long search and much tearful anxiety on the women's part he was found there at fall of day by Jacob Caley, the Kirkby keeper, he was fraternizing with a party of charcoalburners, whose sooty faces he contemplated with a horrified delight. After that nothing would have kept him at home but the rigor of shackles or locked doors. He almost lived in the forest, wandering there in all weathers, sometimes in the company of Jacob Caley, who took greatly to him and taught him woodcraft, but oftener alone and apparently unoccupied; though it may be surmised that all the while his brain was busily commenting on what his eyes saw and his ears heard. His mother had kept Astrology for him and he soon learnt to ride, but he early showed a preference for that form of progression which brought him nearest to the soil.

His book-learning meanwhile under his mother's direction made small progress, and indeed went little further than a slovenly reading and a scrawl which might just pass for writing. His religious instruction hardly went so far. He was brought up in a decent observance so far as was possible of the forms of his religion. Both mother and maid agreed that he could say his paternoster and Ave Maria with a little prompting at least a month earlier than the most preco

cious of her cousin Stanford's ten. But Fortuna, ill instructed herself and without the help of any book but a breviary, was hardly competent for the simplest exposition of her faith's histories and mysteries, its awful inexplicabilities, saintly lives, heroic deaths, wonderful deliverances, terrible chastisements, glorious successes and failures. In merely attempting it she was probably as much a gainer as her child. Certainly she somewhat reformed the lax practice and speech, possibly the lax thinking, which she had learnt of a dissolute and irreligious society.

Of what she could thus teach her son she found him not altogether an indocile scholar, if only he was allowed sometimes to give his ear instead of his attention; but of outdoor things, wind and weather, tree and flower, the sentient occupants of earth, air and water, he acquired a mastery with such intuitive ease that he never knew wher his ignorance passed into knowledge. The forest was an excellent book, a book in many volumes, offering much variety. By far the greater part of it was not woodland even then, perhaps never had been, and what timber there was was fast disappearing under the woodman's axe and the stealthier strokes of time; but there was still a middle strip pretty well wooded from Mansfield to within a few miles of Nottingham, comprising the great oak woods of Newstead and some smaller woods in the neighborhood, Thieves' Wood and the adjacent Harlow Wood, Sansom Wood, Hayward Oaks and Bestwood; while easily within the range of such an athlete as could run by the hour were the glories of the Birklands and Bilhagh, of Thoresby. Rufford and Welbeck. Yet perhaps the distinctive feature of that region was those open undulating breezy sandy tracts which surrounded and separated the woodlands, here yellow

with gorse and broom, there purple with heather, yonder a rolling sea of bracken varying from a lusty green to a rich red-brown, or again an expanse of fine grass close-cropped by the deer, or all these in one. The underlying sand too would ever be peeping forth, not seldom became for a space greater or less its most prominent characteristic, whether naked or thinly interspersed with herbage; and here and there a gash in the surface laid bare the fundamental red rock. But whether sand or herbage, ling or wood, it was laced by many a green-margined cleanbottomed gently flowing brook, through whose clear waters trout and dace and gudgeon could be followed by the eye, whether they darted or were at rest; a pleasant country, though the farmers grumbled sorely at the havoc wrought on their crops by the king's uncontrollable deer, and moralists shook their heads over the temptation which those roving herds offered to the mean man, sportsman by nature but by fortune landless.

In the women's eyes the occasional rabbit or trout which Roland snared and brought to the pot was the only solid outcome of his rambles. But touching the vagabondage, the waste of time, the wetting, soiling or rending of clothes, Press had much more to say than his mother, whose bent was towards the gay and easily happy. In spite of her misfortune Fortuna showed an unclouded face to the daylight. As she had turned unruffled from a life of ease and honor to that discredited solitude, so she put by the book which Roland had thrown down, and after she had watched him out of sight went unconcernedly to her gardening, or the weather not permitting that, sat at her harp, or took up the dropped thread of her knotting or of Mr. Pope's Dunciad or the Life and Actions of Jonathan Wild, or taught her parrot a new phrase.

(To be continued.)

BERGSON AND THE MYSTICS.

During the past twelve months the philosophy of Henri Bergson has been discussed from many points of view; the value of its contribution to our understanding of biology, ethics, art, and social life has been carefully investigated. Yet, strangely enough, one group of phenomena, one type of activity on which it throws remarkable and unexpected light, has so far been left out of consideration. I mean that group of phenomena, that kind of life which by friends and enemies alike is generally called "mystical."

From the point of view of that normal consciousness which is characteristic of the average man, this group of phenomena seems perhaps not very important. For it, the mystic is either a remote, half-sacred figure, or the proper object of amused contempt; and this for the most natural of reasons. The reality of his life, since it baffles alike the analytic brain and busy tongue, he finds himself unable to communicate to us.

Full though it be of

high romance and radiant with a strange enticing beauty, it is yet known only in the living of it, like the passion of love. The mystic's "path is in the pathless; his trace is in the traceless"; and human intelligence ever tends to discredit all those experiences which its clumsy device of speech refuses to express, regardless of the fact that all life's finest moments are thereby excluded from participation in reality.

Now Bergson, as it seems to some of us, comes as a mediator between these inarticulate explorers of the Infinite and the map-loving human mind; since he offers to us, not the sharp conventional diagram of some older philosophies, but a fluid and living "scheme of things" a teeming world of life, a complex realm of consciousness-and a way of looking at that world and that

consciousness which, if we choose to employ it, opens to us new aspects of reality, new possibilities of attainment. Within the enriched and extended field of vision of which he makes us free, the shallow-soiled but highly-cultivated country of common sense looks astonishingly small. Above, about and beneath it is the wild unknown-world within world enshrined, of hidden rock and spring, thick jungle, star-swept spaces-full of incalculable possibilities, ablaze with hidden splendors. All those countless worlds were once within our reach, potential homes for us, had life chosen to cut her way to freedom by another path than this; had consciousness been focussed on some other aspect of many-edged reality. In such a universe the experience of the mystic, which is as much a fact as the experience of artist philosopher or practical man, cannot easily be discredited. He may be as rare as any other type of genius: but history forces us to admit that he represents a permanently recurrent variation of human consciousness; a variation which sees, and reacts to, the world, in another way than that which is roughly characteristic of the majority of men.

The mystics' way of seeing the world, if we trust their reports, is a larger way than that of humanity in general. As civilized man congratulates himself on the possession of a wider universe than that of the aboriginal savage, for whom the "flaming ramparts" are set up close beyond the fences of his tribal home; so the mystic knows himself free of a greater country, heir to a universe of deeper and richer significance than that which is accessible to the consciousness of the practical man. He tells us this in many different tongues, describes it un

der symbols of various difficulty; but always with an accent of steady certitude and of exultant passion which is difficult to resist. He may say with Dionysius the Areopagite, that his exalted vision penetrates to "the Divine Dark which is an inaccessible light"; with Ruysbroeck that he has launched his spirit's ship upon "the vast and stormy sea of the divine"; with Richard Jefferies, that he has been "absorbed into the being or existence of the universe"; with Jacob Boehme, that "he has looked into the deepest foundations of things"; with Malaval, that "by one of love's secrets" he "penetrates the outer husk of creation to the divinity which is within"; or with Angela of Foligno, that he has "beheld a beauty so great that I can say nothing concerning it, save that I saw the Supreme Beauty which contains in itself all goodness."

Whether they use the language of religion, philosophy or art, these adventurers-and countless others who have shared their quest-would probably agree that this communion with Reality, this austere yet intimate experience which only paradox can express, was obtained by a change of attitude, a change of relation between the world and the self. The substance, and to some extent the method of their mystic vision was always that which St. Augustine has described to us in a celebrated passage of the "Confessions"—

"The mind withdrew its thoughts from experience, extracting itself from the contradictory throng of sensuous images, that it might find out what that Light was wherein it was bathed and thus, with the flash of one hurried glance, it attained to the Vision of That Which Is."

"If the mind turns from its ordinary preoccupation with material things," says, in effect, the greatest intellect of the 4th century, "it may, if only for an instant, catch a glimpse of undis

torted reality." A long line of contemplatives have proved for themselves the truth of these words: more, that the "hurried glance" may learn to sustain itself, become the forerunner of a deeper, more permanent state of comprehension. Now, with the twentieth century, Bergson brings their principles and their practice into immediate relation with philosophy: telling us, in almost Augustinian language, how great and valid may be the results of that new direction of mental movement, that alteration and intensification of consciousness, which is the secret of artistic perception, of contemplation and of ecstasy.

"Our psychic life," he says, "may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it; according to our attention to life

that which is usually held to be a greater complexity of the psychical life appears to us, from our point of view, to be a greater dilatation of the whole personality; which, normally screwed down by action, expands with the unscrewing of the vice in which it has allowed itself to be squeezed, and, always whole and undivided, spreads itself over a wider and wider surface." In this dilatation of consciousnessreleased from its usual servitude to the "throng of sensuous images"-Bergson finds our only chance of "knowing reality"; the living, moving actuality of the Light wherein we are bathed. It is an act, he says, in which "will and vision become one," and here every mystic, knowing how intense must be the act of withdrawal by which he attains the contemplative state, would agree with him.

Only in such mystics is the faculty of intuition, that strange, hardly describable power of knowing by contact or self-mergence, heightened, steadied and controlled; till the hurried glance of Augustine becomes "the deep gaze of love from which nothing escapes," giv

ing to its possessor a permanent consciousness of reality, raising the levels of his inner life. The great artist, whom Bergson holds the true knower of the Real, shares to some extent this mystic consciousness. He has "won the confidence of reality by long comradeship with its external manifestations," and, through and by those "sensuous images," has attained as it were a sacramental communion with Truth. The "thick veil" which hangs between our true selves and our consciousness is for him almost transparent. For the mystic it has been rent asunder, and he can enter his holy of holies whenever he will. Hence he is able, in a deeper sense than is possible to the artist, to unite himself with the very being of Reality; and so lives with a more intense existence than ordinary men are able to attain.

What then is the nature of the change which this immense development of intuition effects in the consciousness of the mystic? How can we actualize to ourselves the difference between his experience and that of ordinary men? Here again Bergson, in his general discussion of human consciousness, comes to help us with suggestions which place the situation in new light; and bring the strange adventures of the mystic into line with the rules which appear to govern the normal manifestations of man's psychic life.

"An intuition," he says first, "is nothing but a direction of movement: and although capable of infinite development, is simplicity itself." The mystic art, then, consists first in a direction of movement. That ceaseless change, that stream of consciousness which is our mental life, is turned a new way, orientated afresh. Thus its whole relations with the universe are changed: "the glory of the lighted mind" plays upon new, neglected levels of reality. Next, this alteration creates a "new" state of things, does

not merely add something to the old. The perception which it brings is not put into a water-tight compartment, but invades and tinctures the whole of life; altering the quality or intensity of the self. The degree of that self's intensity is the governing factor in determining the world that it knows; as the personality is heightened, deeper and deeper layers of existence are revealed. This has always been the experience of the mystic. "All things were new," says George Fox of his hour of illumination, "and all the creation gave another smell unto me than before, beyond what words can utter." "The same tree," says Blake, "may move one to tears of joy, and be to another only a green thing that stands in the way. The difference between the two is the difference between mystic and nonmystic vision: and this is simply a difference of intensity."

"The mystics," says Plotinus, anticipating the psychological conclusions of the newest philosophy, belong to "that race of divine men who through a more excellent power and with piercing eyes, acutely perceive the supernal light; to the vision of which they raise themselves up, above the clouds and darkness of the lower world, and there abidingly despise everything in these regions of sense. Having just such joy of that place, which is truly and properly their own, as he who after many wanderings is at length restored to his own country."

In his theory of rhythm, and his theory of the nature of mind, Bergson seems to offer us a hint as to the way in which this "more excellent power," this restoration to the country of the soul non tantum cernendam sed et inhabitandam, may be attained-is attained, in the case of those who possess mystical genius of a high type.

The soul, the total psychic life of man, he says, is something much greater than the little patch of con

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