THE ARTIST AND THE MYSTIC

DR. C. N. ZUTSHI, M.A., D.Litt. (Col. U.S.A.), M.R.A.S. (London)

The link between the true artist and the mystic is well known, yet it seems pre-eminently necessary to recognize the importance in both of the reality of a different order. Both exhibit the same disregard for the things of this world, but the artist uses for his own creative purposes much that the mystic instinctively rejects. It is because the great creative artist has fluidity, called by Keats ‘Negative Capability’, which enables him to enter imaginatively into whatever immediately takes possession of his imaginative power. Thus Keats wrote: “If a sparrow come before my window, I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel.” The mystic is not much concerned with goodness, with the good life, as life in its entirety, but for the great artist, there can scarcely be any aspect of life which cannot serve as a production of his creative genius. In this sense, his work is analogous to an alchemist’s transmutation of a specialised kind–he transforms the material of common experience into various forms of art. To perform this delicate office, it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness–even his life–and everything that makes life worth living for the common man. In this process, the artist is indeed eager to lose his ego just as the mystic is; his life is of self-forgetfulness or even self-effacements on one level and of self-finding on another. “Not I but God liveth in me” is the mystic’s joyful cry; “Not I but the wind of the spirit bloweth through me, “is the artist’s self-abandoning affirmation.

Evelga Underhill’s classic study, Mysticism, holds that “the mystic is a curious and definite type of personality with the passion for a spiritual and intangible quest.” This is also quite true of the artist though with him the end of the quest is tangible issuing in art forms the beauty and truth of which can be shared by all men; whereas the end of the mystic’s quest is union with God, and therefore cannot be shared and remains intangible. But if the personality of the mystic develops during his quest so much as to influence every one with whom he comes in contact, his quest can also be said to be tangible. The artist’s personality, curiously enough, is often an “offence” to the ordinary man, and his very appearance seems to be disruptive to society. So it is that he is more feared than disliked; and fear leads to abuse, persecution, and sometimes even crucifixion. And yet because his personality has strangeness of its own, it is powerfully attractive. Of Shelley, was it not said that he had a spirit’s volatile speed, a quality in his presence not easy to explain in other than spiritual terms? Similarly, was it not said of the beauty and strangeness of the German poet, Holdervor, in his youth that when he entered a room, “it was as if the God Apollo were striding in?” And George Sand’s daughter, Solange, was convinced that Chopin “was not a man, but an angel.” Denis Saurat says, “The poets rarely realise what they are. They are spirits who have lost much memory in contacting matter and have forgotten that they are angels.” Though such evidence of the strange supernatural quality of the great artist’s personality is very universal and convincing, the contemporary concentrated conspiracy of the materialists tends to reduce him to the status of a common man, because death-philosophy of the materialistic age has so much spread throughout the world like a fatal infection that there is little understanding of, or reverence for, greatness in any form.

The personality of the mystic also tends to waken such reactions as cannot be easily explained–and this is of course natural–since both the mystic and the artist live by certain inelastic rules and inexplicable values and in such dimensions of experience as are beyond the understanding of the average man. Take for instance Emilia Viviani, immortalised in Shelley’s poem, Epipsychidin, has a real existence for him in what is called by Blake “Spiritual form.” There is a sense in which everything deeply and vividly experienced has a quite real existence, as Plato also knew well. It is not the “human image” of Emilia but the inner self, her personality that inspires the poet. For him she wears the shadow of the soul by which he lives. The vision of the poet has seen a reality which indeed does exist, though not in the dimension we commonly know or understand.

On the creative artist such a heavy burden, or so deep an obligation, is laid that there is no wonder if he sometimes seems to stagger under its weight. Still this immense burden, this deep obligation, does not let him fight shy of the common burdens of everyday life. As person he has to live in the world and face the music of life like any other man. But as artist he carries an additional burden of his mission in life, for which he lives in the world–especial work assigned to him by Providence to achieve which he came into the world, and the knowledge of which gives him a peculiar, a strange, reaction to every aspect of life. And the nature of his mission is such that he cannot live or see life in the same perspective as any other man does in the world. He cannot but rebel and carry on unceasing war against conditions so diametrically opposed to his vision, and therefore he must court unpopularity. So it is that his proposals and remedies are invariably unacceptable to the average man. Since he is a seer gifted with a prophetic vision, he points the way to future development, but his ideas are not well received by the people at the time he suggests them, though they turn out to be true afterwards; and this makes his lot inevitably uncomfortable in his lifetime. Shelley and Kierkegaard are the two outstanding examples of victims to such a fate. How might not our present calamitous situation be ameliorated if even one of Blake’s dictums alone was accepted:

“Poetry fetter’d fitters the human race. Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting and music are destroyed or flourish.”

The arts being pitifully fettered during the last fifty years through neglect it is no wonder that the nations of the world hover perilously on the brink of destruction. None will listen to the voice of the poets calling the world to unity and peace. In one of his poems. Blake cried:

“And was the holy Lamb of God

On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

And did the countenance Divine

Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here

Among those dark Satanic mills?”

Today the dark Satanic mills grind ever more relentlessly throughout the world, and where is the countenance Divine? Can it ever shine again on hills clouded by ignorance and fear? And though these inspired words of Blake are spoken and sung so often, who is there to heed their meaning? The reason why the voice of the artist is not heard is very aptly put by Ouspensky in his A New Model of the Universe:

“People create nothing. They only destroy. The blind organisms of the masses struggle with the manifestations of the evolutionary spirit, annihilate and stifle it and destroy what has been created by it. But even so they cannot entirely annihilate ft. Something remains.”

So it is that the artist, despite these unflagging attempts to annihilate and stifle his productions, has no option but to carryon his predestined mission, disregarding the conflict between good and evil going on in the outer world which is but a reflection of the world of emotion, of thought–the invisible world–where moods are framed, actions determined, and where in fact all that eventually manifests in the visible world is conceived. The reason is that “Such men carry the fire. All things grow warm to them” as Browning says. And verily, all those who fight on God’s side in this world suffer the most intensive assaults from the powers of evil. Rightly, therefore, lung remarks in his Modern Man in Search of His Soul:

“There are hardly any exceptions to the rule that a person must pay dearly for the divine gift of the creative fire.”

And this creative fire is the artist’s unique power of imagination, his profoundest insight into reality.

In Eastern philosophy there is a far more comprehensive recognition and understanding of the two planes of being during earthly life than exists in Western philosophic thought. One is to live life merely for the sake of living without men experiencing the ordinary round of day-to-day events, without any radical change taking place in them–in other words, the facts and events of life that occur every day are not experienced by the majority of people without anything being created within as a result of what has happened; while in the other plane of being the same events, the same facts are experienced and recreated by the mysterious imaginative power of artist. For him the most trivial event is pregnant with tremendous experience and becomes charged with creative significance and therefore it is immediately transferred to the plane of creative imagination. So, it is that all the great confusion and general disastrous understanding of the personality and mission of the artist, or the mystic, stems from an inadequate recognition of the various types of Psychological and temperamental human being and of the different planes of being on which persons, elements, and qualities exist. Let it be understood that such true recognition draws from intimate knowledge and appreciation of the inexhorable, intricate and too often, enigmatic laws governing the invisible world–the mysterious realm of human personality–rather than those of the visible world which is absolutely governed by the laws of time and space.

The great artist, or the mystic, is alone capable of communicating what is otherwise incommunicable. He has the gift of giving voice to the multitudinous and multifarious experiences and complex reactions of the inner life, the life lived in the invisible world where art is always striving to find expression, and whence he sends forth ample material to enrich and enlighten the visible world, or our inadequate surface existence. This great artist is very akin to the “superman” spoken of by Ouspensky in his A New Model of the Universe:

“We must understand that he will live a certain peculiar life of his own which will be very unlike the lives of ordinary men and difficult for us to conceive. There will be very much suffering in the life….and there will be joys of which ordinary men have no idea.” \

As I have already pointed out, these different planes of being are better understood in the East than in the West. Modern psychology, with all its undoubted impulses and urges during the last forty years or so, has been able to touch only the fringe of the complex problem of human personality and failed to probe to the depths of the mind, the soul, the spirit, the heart, the “Invisible” past of man, which can range the whole world in a flash to find out how vast and complex that inner life is. And in the last analysis it is the only life that should matter because from it all bliss, all tragedy, derives and emanates. It is this life that conditions every external action and only the artist is gifted to project it in some form of his creative art through his imagination. This in itself distinguishes him from all other men. The artist or the mystic, lives in a dimension quite apart from the dimension of ordinary living. He lives in a country, native only to his class, whose ways, laws and problems are very different to those of the common world of action and day-to-day affairs, and therefore quite unacceptable in the external world. It is the business of the artist to interpret all those laws by which he inevitably lives.

The life-long difficulty lies in adjustment, in bringing the surface and the depths in perfect harmony, in dovetailing the two modes of experience, living with safety in the outer or visible world, conforming to the laws of the sublime inner or invisible world–the laws governing the human personality–where the vast cosmic drama of good and evil is conceived, and where the Divine, it is ever nearer than it can be in the midst of the tumult and the shouting and the ridiculous chaos of the world, man in his folly has himself created. The life of the artist, or the mystic, is really tragic, and, with all its irresistible attractiveness and mysterious aloof. ness, drawing and repelling simultaneously, brings from those whose lives he touches intimately, the cry voiced in May Webb’s lines:

“….Since a God has touched me and departed

I run through every temple broken-hearted.”

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