Note 81 — Chapter I

In the chapter which treats of French Neomystics, I shall give a cluster of such disconnected and mutually exclusive expressions, which are quite parallel with the instances cited by Legrain, of the manner of speech among those acknowledged to be of weak mind. In this place only one passage may be repeated from the Vte E. M. de Vogué, Le Roman Russe, Paris, 1888, in which this mystical author, unconsciously and involuntarily, characterizes admirably the shadowiness and emptiness of mystic diction, while praising it as something superior. ‘One trait,’ he says (p. 215), ‘they’ (certain Russian authors) ‘have in common, viz., the art of awakening series of feelings and thoughts by a line, a word, by endless re-echoings [résonnances].... The words you read on this paper appear to be written, not in length, but in depth. They leave behind them a train of faint reverberations, which are gradually lost, no one knows where.’ And p. 227: ‘They see men and things in the gray light of earliest dawn. The weakly indicated outlines end in a confused and clouded “perhaps.” ...’