The Thinking Corner

Poet and Mystic and Woman-Hunter

There are few figures in fiction with whom I feel more in sympathy than the one set alive by Charles Morgan at the centre of his novel, Sparkenbroke. Piers Tenniel, Lord Sparkenbroke, poet and mystic and woman-hunter - I seem to look into his heart and discover there with diamond concreteness something which is in the heart of every true idealist who is yet enmeshed in the crude flames that corrupt bodily desire. Bodily desire is not itself a sin: it can be a force of self-liberation like the urge of any other part of the being, if it goes burning with adoration and service at the feet of some visualised form of the Divine - but by getting caught in the snare of sex it becomes blind at the same time that it is hot, it dims in itself the light to discern what it is truly seeking. In Sparkenbroke the pull towards woman is one of three dominant motifs: poetry and the love of death are the other two. The connection between them all is simply a fiery aspiration to merge oneself in an infinite peace, a vast all-enveloping annihilation of the petty struggling ego and the commonplace world.

The fundamental experience of poetry is that the perfect word and the penetrating vision create a universe anew out of some great silence and some vast void. The sense of creation de novo is the real joy of poetry: there is suddenly a dissolution of the ordinary world - a gigantic blank is felt and against or within that blank the revelation of flawless form, the epiphany of impeccable rhythm. Perhaps it may be truer psychology to put it the other way round: the marvellous music and vision gradually unfold themselves by slowly destroying the common world and filling with their paradisal beauty the silence and the vacuity they create by that destruction. In any case, the limiting day-to-day world is blotted out and transcended: there is a liberation into freedom, into wholeness, denied by the harsh contacts and disappointing snipsnaps of routine existence, and as a result

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comes a fulfilling peace. This peace is of course caught for brief whiles and then too more as in a mirror of the consciousness than by actual identification with it, but its healing and liberating effect is intuited sufficiently to justify one's valuing very highly one's poetic experience.

Sparkenbroke puts it in the same category as what he calls death. For, death to him is no extinction: it is a final breaking out from the bondage of the restricted ego and the imperfect world. In a terse stanza which he is supposed to have written, the idea is crystallised:

Last night I flew into the tree of death:

Sudden an outer wind did me sustain:

And I, from feathered poppet on its swing,

Wrapt in my element, am bird again.

The poppet is the human soul forced to enjoy the gilded misery of a prison, but when the cage is flung open the spacious winds of eternity carry it into the world of trees which is part of its true home. The world of trees symbolises death, the lifting up of life into the freedom of the sweet firmament: a tree goes deep down under the clay like a dead body but it gets thus rooted only to rise above all clay, an inhabitant of air. Death, which is apparently a fall into the earth, is really a soar upward; it is part of the infinite where the prisoned poppet inhaling and breasting once more the clear unshackled ether remembers and resumes its true nature. But we must understand that Sparkenbroke's "death" is not the common failure of pulse and the dropping of lifeless limbs. The very fact that he considers the height of poetry to be analogous to death gives us a clue to his mysticism. Death is a condition of trance: it occurs even while one is living, though its completeness arrives only when physical dissolution leaves the soul entirely free to plunge into the Unknown. It has for Sparkenbroke a connotation similar to what it has for innumerable Indian Yogis awaiting through a life of spiritual ecstasy the hour of the

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supreme liberation, the Mahasamadhi of utter escape from the body.

As for the pursuit of woman, it seems at the first blush inconsistent with this high transcendentalism; and I am afraid Sparkenbroke does not make it anywhere quite clear how exactly the act of love shines in his imagination. In the girl Mary he discovers a beauty which appears to absolve and renew him, as he himself puts it; it is a beauty which strips him of bondage and sets him breathing a freer air; it is not merely his mind which is thus quickened, even his body feels elevated - and it feels so because the love he has is not mainly sensual. For the first time, the body is not the important thing: he has been a fool and tried to get the acme of self-extension in the mere physical desire-loosening orgasm of coitus. He had never found it and, thinking that some person at last would make all the difference in the world, he had drifted from trial to trial until his name had become a byword for libertinage. And surely a libertine he was, but not that alone: he was a libertine because he had failed to be what he was aspiring after: it was not shameless libertinage he was seeking, but, since he could not find the Ideal through the first woman he had lain with, he went from one to another and so through a whole series of fruitless affairs. The orgy of lust, the frenzied entwining of limbs - this was not sufficient to open the doors of self upon vistas of wonder, this could not be the fulfilment of a Sparkenbroke's hunger. Never did he feel with the woman by his side a consuming contact of the Ideal. He knew bitterly in his heart that he had merely cohabited with ordinary human beings and not fused his senses and his mind with a channel of some transcendental beauty. When, however, he awakens to the miracle that is Mary he realises that till now he had but read the verse of human form and now alone has he touched embodied poetry.

The act of love with her, he imagines, would dissolve his petty ego and give him the measureless peace that comes from the disappearance of the imperfect and fragmentary

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hours that make up normal life. She would be the tree of death into which his soul would fly and feel a bird again, a denizen of eternity's blue. But somehow the physical act is never consummated: they come to the verge of it without taking the plunge. The hand of circumstance is not the only factor to be considered in understanding why the plunge is never taken; a finer force stays them, as if the bodily union were not the centre of love's fulfilment. Perhaps there was some deep intuition at work behind the plot of the story, an intuition that sex could never bring the transcendental rapture that was drawing Sparkenbroke through the burning labyrinths of his life. Indian wisdom has from the beginning warned mystics against the delusions of sex, not just against its most external manifestation but even against the subtle weavings of inner desire. Sparkenbroke, of course, has no notion of this wisdom and so he follows the blind alley, with the one saving grace that while loving Mary he abstains instinctively from the extremity of actual coitus. We do not quite regret the blind alley; for that futile search is closely connected with all the other motifs in the book - and the result is unforgettable descriptions of the workings of a poet's mind, a story beautiful with a profound chiaroscuro of character and written in a style which, whether puissant or delicate, displays a creative felicity. A book that will live because it helps us die in the Sparkenbroke sense!

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