We have no wish to add to these few notes a lengthy commentary upon the substance of a book which, probably for the first time, is accessible to those who[18] read only English. Scholars have debated over Lull’s probable debt to sufism, on the one hand, and, on the other, his influence upon the long line of mystics who have followed him. There is much still to be said upon these and other topics, much that will throw fresh light on Spain and Spanish mysticism both. But in this essay enough has been said of Lull’s life and works to form the indispensable prelude to his Book. For the present, therefore, we prefer to stand back, and allow Lull’s ardent spirit to work its miracles still. Work them it surely must. Writing in his native ‘catalan-provenzal,’ that he might appeal, not to learned men, but to the people, by the people he is read still. He needs none of the ‘Expositions,’ such as were written in his own age and as late as the seventeenth century. Here and there a passage confuses the modern mind by its medi?val subtleties; or the frequent references to the will, understanding, and memory (so common in most of the mystics) may puzzle the simple reader until he has learned to interpret them. But the vast majority of the three hundred and sixty-six ‘verses,’ put together to be read one on each day of the year, may still so be read. They speak to the twentieth century as clearly, picturesquely, and forcibly as they spoke to the thirteenth. Have we perhaps even more need of their message? [19]They speak of elementals. Like his great successors St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross, Lull knows no Master but his Beloved, Jesus Christ; he surpasses them perhaps in this, that he is never unmindful of the world his Beloved came to save. His is no cloistered love. He could never say, with St. John of the Cross, ‘Live in the world as though there were in it but God and thy soul.’ Ringing for ever in his ears is the Beloved’s last command.
Never was ‘Love’s regal dalmatic’ worn with more grace and fitness than by this ‘jester,’ this ‘fool of love.’ It is no compliment to Lull to call him, as the great scholar Menéndez Pelayo does, a ‘Spanish Jacopone da Todi.’ Jacopone, it is true, sang of love with unsurpassable fervour:
Amor, amore, tanto tu me fai,
Amore, amor, che nol posso patire;
Amor, amore, tanto me te dai,
Amor, amore, ben credo morire;
Amore, amore, tanto preso m’hai,
Amor, amore, famme ’n te transire;
Amor, dolce languire,
Amor mio desioso,
Amor mio delettoso,
Annegame en amore.
But Lull, who, like Jaco............