Essays

In going to Cambridge, a scholar who meant to use the place, did not go with any idea of enjoying life in ordinary ways, of finding society, of amusing himself: no, he went where there were honest, silent, like-minded men, too intent on study to do more than occasionally discuss the subjects with which they were grappling, or give the young student a word of encouragement —alere flammam; and besides this, a plain but adequate living, food and shelter, books and lectures – and all not without a certain severe grace and dignity – grace thrown over life by the stately courts of grey stone, retired gardens full of grassy butts and old standard trees, grave parlours and venerable halls, talks in galleries or cloisters; and for the young hearts that gathered there the unvarying march of the seasons: the orchards whitening and blushing over the stately stone walls of college gardens; the plunge of the water in the fountain, the snow on the ground throwing up mysterious light on to the ceilings of studious chambers, and choking the familiar street sounds; or there was some great preacher to hear; my lord of Ely travelling post-haste through the town with his long train of servants and gentlemen, and just stopping for compliments and refreshment at a Lodge, or the grave figures of the doctors, passing through the street, to be watched with bated breath and whispered names; some scholar, with worn spiritual aspect, stealing from his rooms, some nobleman with his flourishing following; or, best of all, the quiet services in the dark chapel, the droning bell ceasing high in the roof, the growing thunder of the organ, the flickering lights, and the master moving to his stall, accompanied by some scholar or writer of mighty name; and then the liturgy, the reviving in prayer and meditation of the old ideals, the thankful consciousness that God could so easily be sought and found.

Into this quiet society More was lovingly received, and it gave him deep content. He plunged into his studies with a kind of fury, like a man transported, digging for treasure; and one day it happened that his father came upon him unexpectedly as he sat with all his books about him, and, being rapturously delighted with the serious intentness of the young man, used a curious phrase about him, suggested no doubt by a certain glory, hardly human, transfiguring the boy's face, "That he spent his time in an angelical way," and then this old Puritan, to mark his sense of satisfaction by some practical testimony, went home and wrote the lad down for a handsome legacy in his will, in token of complete reconciliation: and this legacy was never revoked; but it moved Henry's heart when he discovered it, as the surest sign that he had been forgiven, knowing his father's concrete mode of thought as he did.

He tells us that his tutor, when he first arrived, received him kindly, and asked him, after some talk, observing the boy's melancholy and thoughtful disposition, whether he had a discernment of things good and evil, to which he replied in a low voice, "I hope I have." He says that as he uttered this he was all the time conscious of being the possessor of a singularly sensitive discrimination in these matters, and besides of an insatiable and burning curiosity after all kinds of knowledge. This, however, his diffidence did not allow him to confess. The tutor seems to have watched him carefully, for not long after, seeing his intense and unflagging zeal in study, he asked him rather brusquely why he was so intent on his work, hinting that mere ambition, if that were the motive, was too low an end. On this he confessed that his only aim was knowledge, an aim in itself. The mere consciousness of knowledge was exquisitely pleasurable to him.

Until he took his B.A. in 1635 he occupied himself chiefly in the works of the natural philosophers – Aristotle, Cardan, and Julius Scaliger; but they were a bitter disappointment to him. Their acute and solid observations pleased him, but they seemed to make hasty and obscure assertions on very trivial grounds; and he became a complete sceptic. Not, says Tulloch, as he carefully tells us, regarding the existence of God, or the duties of morality – "for of these he never had the least doubt" – but regarding the origin and end of life. This step he recorded, as his habit was, in a double quatrain of elegiacs, a metre to which he more than once resorted to summarise the turning-points of his career.

Being now able to please himself, he attacked the Platonists – not only Plato himself, but Plotinus and his followers – and gradually he was led to doubt the serious value of mere knowledge. Down into the valley of humiliation he stept; in the bitterness of the fruit of the intellect he could presume to believe, for he had tasted of it and strenuously bruised the savour from it, – and he came to see that it is not the origin and method of life, but life itself that it behoves the true man to know.

That was the point at which so many of his contemporaries were stopping all round him; they, too, had penetrated the secrets of the mind. A few of them, more enthusiastic, continued to pursue it: the others, mistaking the sensuous region for the higher way, fell back on life in its grosser forms; they ate and drank, they buried themselves in local politics and temporary interests. Such things had no charm for More; he pushed through and out into a purer air.

The mysterious and fascinating doctrine of the divine illumination opened before him – uncleanness of spirit, not distance of place, he said, divide men from God: to purge the mind from vice and impurity and the subtle temptations of sense, so as to leave the spiritual eye clear and undimmed – this holy art of life became his dream.

There fell into his hands Tauler's "Theologia Germanica," that precious treatise that, through similitudes, spoke so clearly of God; the work that had been so beloved of Luther. It spoke of the surrender of the will to God – the loosing it from selfish impulses to sail like a ship upon the free sea – the nameless but unerring instinct that falls upon the soul if such a course is faithfully pursued.

He awoke like a man out of sleep, and the conflict began. The old man, which, like Proteus, assumes so many and so bewildering shapes, stood revealed: but the struggle was a matter of time, though sharp at first, so clearly was the truth grasped; and this growing purity and simplicity of mind which he discovered, together with a superhuman assurance, which began to stir and rise within him, constitute what may be called his conversion. Another quatrain records this:

I come from Heaven, am an immortal ray
Of God; O joy! and back to God shall go.
And here sweet love on wings me up doth stay.
I live, I'm sure; and joy this life to know.
Night and vain dreams begone – Father of lights,
We live, as Thou, clad with eternal day.
Faith, wisdom, love, fixed joy, free winged might —
This is true life: all else death and decay.

He wrote also to record this a long mystical poem, called Psychozoia (Life of the Soul), in 1640, at the age of twenty-six. He was flooded with a perpetual content.

In the pursuit of mysticism there are often several painful facts to record. In the first place, it is common to find a mystical temperament in those whose physical nature is not very strong or passionate. It seems as if certain natures, by the very fact that the ties which hold them to the earth are more than half-loosened already, have a strong affinity to the world of abstractions – as if the very weakness of their corporeal organisation held open a door through which strange shapes are seen moving, and airy voices heard to call; and again the mystical life is, more than any other, subject to deep depressions of spirit, dumb insensibilities, and heavy overshadowings from the towers of death. In the history of More's life no trace of either of these failings can be even faintly discovered. In the first place, he was of a strong and sound constitution; he did not know what it was to be languid or out of health; he was gifted with an extraordinary spring and plenty of pure animal spirits – "a rich ethereal sort of body, for what was inward," to use his own Pythagorean phrase; he says of himself that his body seemed built for a hundred years; that he had a high warmth and activity of thought that never flagged – notably too, that, after a long day of incessant thought, when he came to sleep he had a strange sort of narcotic power; and he was no sooner in a manner laid on his bed, that the falling of a house would scarce wake him, and that he woke in the morning to an inexpressible life and vigour, so that his thoughts and notions "rayed" about him.

There would seem to be little of the visionary here; and yet he confesses to a consciousness of what he calls "Enthusiasm" – which we should almost call madness: he could summon up a material object with such distinctness – visualise it, as it is now called – that it produced on him all the sensations of being seen with the outward eye: that is, he could at any moment, with his eyes open, command a scene or a person, so that the vision passed before and effaced the furniture of his room or the page of his book: and he says that all his life he could, with an almost inconsiderable effort of the will, fix his mind so intently on any subject or line of thought that he could spend as much as three hours in an intent uninterrupted reverie.

Such a man would be sure to fling himself with rapture into ascetic and mortifying practices – and so he did: the result was a prolonged exaltation of soul, apparently unaccompanied by any symptoms of exhaustion and depression, which is almost miraculous. One reverie, which he records, lasted for fifteen days, during which he slept and rose, ate and drank, went about his ordinary business, without, he asserts, any one suspecting that he was all the time occupied in a serene and rapturous contemplation. In this "lazy activity," he said, "he passed from notion to notion without any perceptible images or words in the mind;" as he walked in the street he could have fallen, he said, and kissed the stones for joy; when playing the theorbo, for he had considerable musical talent, he says that he sometimes became almost mad with pleasure – so overcome that he was forced to desist.

"I am not out of my wits [as he writes in a touching passage in one of his mystical dialogues] in this divine freedom, for God does not ride me as a horse, and guide me I know not whither, but converseth with me as a friend: I sport with the beasts of the earth; the lion licks my hand like a spaniel; the serpent sleeps upon my lap and stings me not. I play with the fowls of heaven, and the birds of air sit singing upon my fist. Thou canst call down the moon so near thee by thy magic charm that thou mayst kiss her, as she is said to have kissed Endymion – or control and stop the course of the sun; or, with one stamp of thy foot, stay the motion of the earth.

"He that is come hither, God hath taken him to be His own familiar friend; and though He speaks to others aloof off, in outward religions and parables, yet He leads this man by the hand, teaching him intelligible documents upon all the objects of His providence: speaks to him plainly in His own language, sweetly insinuates Himself and possesseth all his faculties, understanding, reason, and memory. This is the darling of God, and a prince among men, far above the dispensation of either miracle or prophet."

There is no figure in literature that comes very close to this, except the solemn form of Prospero in the enchanted land:

The isle is full of noises.
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.

Henry More's life was a very simple one. His private means were large; we hear of his possessing the advowson of a living in Lincolnshire, Ingoldsby, to which he presented Mr. Ward, who wrote his life, and a large farm in the same county; he had also other sources of income. Thus he had no temptation to seek for wealth, or for preferment for the sake of wealth, since his tastes were extraordinarily simple. He did, as a matter of fact, give very largely in charity; his door, it was said, was like the door of an hospital; indeed, he was so liberal with his money, that in later life he made over to a nephew, Gabriel More, who had fallen into misfortunes through no fault of his own, not only his Lincolnshire estates, but a large legacy which he received from Lady Conway.

He was elected a Fellow of Christ's soon after taking his M.A. degree: his solitary and contemplative habits, his ascetic practices – for these, though not marked, were sure to be discussed in so small and intimate a society as a college – and the slight suspicion of fanaticism that he incurred, led some to doubt whether he would not be a melancholy addition to the Combination Room; but those who knew him better assured the authorities that, though he was studious and serious, yet he was a very pleasant companion, and in his way one of the merriest Greeks they were acquainted with.

He was offered several important posts. Great efforts were made to get him over to Ireland. On one occasion he was offered the Deanery of Christ Church, Dublin, and on another occasion the Provostship of Trinity College combined with the Deanery of St. Patrick's; as he never even considered these for a moment, he was offered two Irish Bishoprics in succession, the Lord-Lieutenant writing to him to press his acceptance of the latter. "Pray be not so morose or humoursome," he wrote, "as to refuse all things you have not known so long as Christ's College."

Once even he was offered an English Bishopric, and his friends got him as far as Whitehall to kiss hands, but they concealed the real object of their designs, and when he understood it, he was not on any account to be persuaded.

Late in life he accepted a prebend at Gloucester, urgently pressed on him by Heneage Finch, Earl of Nottingham, the Lord Chancellor, brother of an old pupil, but he resigned it almost immediately in favour of one of his friends; and once, too, the Fellows offered to elect him to the Mastership of Christ's, when it fell vacant, but this also he declined.

He was tutor of the College for a time, and was brought thus into close relations with Sir John Finch, afterwards Ambassador to Turkey, younger brother of Lord Nottingham, then an undergraduate. Finch's sister, Lady Conway, had been converted to the tenets of the Quakers, and Henry More, whose interest in his pupil extended itself to his pupil's sister, laboured to reclaim her for several years; he was thus brought into contact with Penn and the leaders of the Quietist party.

Lady Conway, the original of Lady Cardiff in "John Inglesant," was afflicted by mysterious and incurable pains in the head, and not only travelled to consult physicians, but was accustomed to assemble quacks and specialists in her house at Ragley; there More spent most of his time, and composed several books at her ladyship's special request. There, too, he met the faith-healer Greatrakes, a moody man who had lived for some time in seclusion at his own ruined castle of Capperquin in Ireland; as well as the famous Van Helmont, Baron of Austria, Quaker and physician, son of the famous chemist of the same name. This man was all that Greatrakes was not; he had considerable medical skill, and a quiet pious character. To us the union of the preacher and physician is somewhat repugnant. We take it to mean that a man supplies the gaps in his practical knowledge by the pretensions of spiritual insight; we believe him to be proficient in neither. Van Helmont, however, seems to have been a genuine man, and to suffer from an undeserved contempt. As a matter of fact the possession of keen moral insight and sympathy is one of the most powerful instruments that a physician can claim; the physical and mental constitution react so invariably, that without it a man must be at a loss; the healing art need not necessarily halt at the threshold of hypochondria.

As I have touched on Lady Conway and Van Helmont, I may as well follow out the part that Henry More plays in that fascinating romance —John Inglesant. The life and works, down even to the style and mode of expression, of Henry More have interested and influenced Mr. Shorthouse very strongly. I have heard the conversation between John Inglesant and Dr. More, which is said to have taken place at Oulton, instanced as an admirable tour de force of Mr. Shorthouse's style. The fact is that Henry More speaks there, not in character, but actually; nearly three-quarters of the conversation being sentences and aphorisms extracted straight from More's works. It is very ingeniously done, though a little too elaborate to be lifelike when regarded as conversation.

But the effects of Henry More's writings are traceable in several other parts of John Inglesant. In the conversation to which I have alluded, More is made to sketch what he considers to be Inglesant's character and physical constitution. He says:

"There would seem to be some that by a divine sort of fate are virtuous and good to a great and heroical degree, and fall into the drudgery of the world rather for the good of others, or by a divine force, than through their own fault or any necessity of Nature; as Plato says, they descend hither to declare the being and nature of God, and for the greater health, purity, and perfection of the lower world."

He goes on to describe the "luciform vehicle" in which such a soul as this is apt to display itself; and the great need of scrupulous temperance and purity to keep it undimmed.

Now these passages are, in the places where they occur in Henry More's works, undoubtedly and in reality autobiographical: they are extracted word for word from passages where he is obviously referring to himself.

The fact thus remains that, though Inglesant and More are represented as holding converse together, it is in reality More talking to himself – himself, that is, differently circumstanced and developed by other fortunes and influences. The figure of More was not quite romantic enough for Mr. Shorthouse, and his religious system lacked the vivid sense of the personal presence of Christ that is so marked a feature in Inglesant's career; but there is no reasonable doubt that Dr. More affords in the main outlines of his character and temperament the basis for that delicately drawn, laborious book which has made such a mark upon our late literature.

After Lady Conway's death, More was so far identified with her family and friends, as to write a preface, in the character of Van Helmont, for her Remains. At one time he thought of abandoning his collegiate life for his rectory of Ingoldsby in Lincolnshire; he intended to settle there with some friend as curate, and spend his time in quiet parochial work and study – but the scheme came to nothing. It may be doubted whether even he would have been proof against the trials of a country rectory; at Cambridge, indeed, he had quiet as much as he wished, but he had stimulus too: at Ingoldsby he would have had enforced quiet without the stimulus.

He was elected into the Royal Society, before its establishment by charter, in order to add lustre to it; for, though he never aimed at it, he had acquired long before his death a great reputation by his writings, which, as Mr. Chishull, the eminent bookseller of the day, said, ruled all the other booksellers in London.

He was a very laborious writer; his works fill folio volumes, and are full of curious learning, with a strange streak of humour, descending at times to a coarseness of expression which would not be tolerated now.

His voice, as was said, was somewhat inward, and not suited to the pulpit; and so he determined to give the world his thoughts in writing.

The Divine Dialogues are the Mystery of Godliness and the Mystery of Iniquity; the first of these being an exhaustive inquiry, in many books, into the nature and spirit of heathen religions. It may be said at once that his method of treating the subject is unjust; he is far too anxious, in his zeal for the Truth, to attribute to them a licentious or contemptible origin and obscene or meaningless ceremonies. The "Mysteries of Eleusis," which, according to Socrates, had much symbolism of a strangely exalted type, are treated by More as both superstitious and dissolute – even Apollonius of Tyana, who, whether he existed actually or not, at least exhibits a high type of the Stoic ideal, is a solemn puppet in his eyes. When he has, then, to his satisfaction demonstrated the worthless and debasing character of these rites – which is surely to shut the eyes to the inextinguishable hunger for the holy expression of life, in worship, that has never really deserted the human race – he proceeds to bring the Christian faith upon the stage, and to show how it satisfies the deepest and highest instincts of humanity.

But More cannot be said to have been a Christian in the sense that Thomas-à-Kempis or Francis of Assisi were Christians; he did not hunger for the personal relation with Christ which is so profoundly essential to the true conception of the Christian ideal. He was a devout, a passionate Deist; he realised the in-dwelling of God's spirit in the heart, and the divine excellence of the Son of Man. But it was as a pattern, and not as a friend, that he gazed upon Him; the light that he followed was the uncovenanted radiance. For it is necessary to bear in mind that More and the Cambridge Platonists taught that the Jewish knowledge of the mysteries of God had passed through some undiscovered channel into the hands of Pythagoras and Plato; and that the divinity of their teaching was directly traceable to their connection with Revelation. They looked upon Plato and Pythagoras as predestined vehicles of God's spirit, appointed to prepare the heathen world for the reception of the true mysteries, though not admitted themselves to full participation in the same.

Besides these books, which are profound and logical, and composed in a style which is admirable by comparison to the ordinary writing of the times. More drilled away into some rather grotesque speculations on the subject of Apocalyptical interpretation; of this, he says, humorously, himself, that while he was writing it "his nag was over free, and went even faster than he desired, but he thought it was the right way" – and there is something pathetic indeed in the mode in which the passionate seekers after truth of those times beat their heads against the various theories of the direct communication of God with man, such as warning dreams and visions, and the face of the heavens by night. The idea is beautifully presented in John Inglesant, where the hero says to his brother, who has produced a false horoscope of himself: "I would have you think no more of this, with which a wicked man has tried to make the heavens themselves speak falsely… Father St. Clare taught it me among other things, and I have seen many strange answers that he has known himself – but it is shameful that the science should be made a tool of by designing men."

This is said so naturally, with so simple and melancholy a faith, that it seems to me to reproduce the feeling of even the more refined and cultivated men of the time about such things in an infinitely affecting way.

Besides these there are published letters of Henry More's, prolix for the general reader, but interesting enough if the man's own personality appeals to you: some very disappointing hymns and didactic poems, stiff and unlovely to a strange degree for so deep and graceful a writer; and many other scattered works, such as the Enchiridion Ethicum, which it is impossible to analyse here.

More had a very facile style: he used to say that his friends had been always wanting him to go up upon a stall and speak to the people; but that was not his way: he should not have known what to have done in the world if he could not have preached at his fingers' ends. He said that when he sat down to write, though his thoughts were perfectly clear, yet they were too numerous; and that he had to cut his way through them as through a wood. However, he would never correct: the thing must go as he first wrote it; "if he saw any faults in the first draft, he could correct them, though it was not easy to him – that this correction went against the grain and seldom seemed to him so savoury as the rest." He was not inclined to overvalue his work. "Like the ostrich," he said, "I lay my eggs in the sand, and hope they will prove vital and prolific in time."

Though he produced very voluminous writings, yet he sometimes manifested a strong and healthy repugnance to the task of expressing himself: he had none of the gloomy laboriousness that is never satisfied with its performance, and yet never takes a lively pleasure in it. When he had finished one of his more lengthy works, he said pleasantly to a friend, as he threw down his pen: "Now for three months I will neither think a wise thought, nor speak a wise word, nor do a wise thing." Once in the middle of some troublesome work he said, with considerable irritation, to a friend who was sitting with him, "When I once get my hands out of the fire, I shall not very suddenly thrust them in afresh." In a letter to Dr. Worthington, Master of Jesus, he says: "I am infinitely pleased that I find my obligation of writing books not too fierce in me, and myself left free to my own more private meditations. I have lived the servant of the public hitherto: it is a great ease to me to be manumitted thus and left to the polishing of myself, and licking myself whole of the wounds I have received in these hot services;" adding, that as soon as he was free from his present business, his purpose was to recoil into that dispensation he was in before he wrote or published anything to the world – in which he says he very sparingly so much as read any books, but sought a more near union with a certain life and sense (the sixth sense), "which I infinitely prefer before the dryness of mere reason or the wantonness of the trimmest imagination."

He had no turn for dry and laborious criticism: he studied things more than words: of his own skill in dead languages, though it was in reality very considerable, he spoke jestingly, in that depreciating ironical way that he always used of himself – that he was like the man that passed by a garrison with a horseshoe hanging at his belt, when a bullet being shot at him struck right upon it, upon which he remarked, "that a little armour was sufficient, if well placed;" – and he often said, in writing his books, that when he came to criticism and quotation, it was "like going over ploughed lands."

I subjoin a few extracts from an ode by the "Ingenious and Learned" Mr. Norris, which is prefixed to Ward's Life of More. The composition has great merit; it is in Cowley's manner, but is the precursor of the art of Gray. It serves, I think, to emphasize both the opinion which his contemporaries deliberately held of him, as well as the points in his life and work which seem most worthy of our attention.

Norris writes:

Truth's outer courts were trod before,
Sacred was her recess: that was reserved for More.