is confessedly propagandist. It aims deliberately at encouraging age
to discover eternal youth, and to lay hold of everlasting life. It is
to this end that “Æ” describes his own experiences, and offers to his
readers the means of their verification. He is quite explicit that no
“special gifts” or “genius” are necessary. “This do and ye shall find
even as I have found.” The special gift of genius does not, I agree, lie
in the nature of fact of the experience (though here, again, favour seems
sometimes to be shown), but it does, I think, lie in the bent towards
the effort involved. Anybody, it is true, may by the appropriate means
experience the same results, but not everybody has the “desire” to employ
them. Desire, moreover, is susceptible of many degrees of strength.
Like other psychological characteristics, it appears to peel off like
the skins of Peer Gynt’s onion. What is it that I really desire? Ask
me to-day, and I shall answer one thing. Ask me next year, and it may
be another. Years hence it may have changed again. But desire, in the
mystical sense, is the desire that is left when all the transient wishes
or fancies have either vanished or been satisfied. Only such a desire
leads the student to make the effort required by “Æ,” and the possession
of such a desire is something like a “special gift” or “genius.”
* * * * *
Page 20. “_Our religions make promises to be fulfilled beyond the grave,
because they have no knowledge now to be put to the test.... Mistrust
the religion that does not cry out: ‘Test me that we can become as
gods.’_” This is an excellent observation, and accounts, to my mind, for
all the so-called scepticism of modern times. It is usual to attribute
to our predecessors, the most remote as well as the more recent, a
quality of “faith” superior to our own. They are said to have been more
religious than we are. I do not believe it; or, rather, I believe that
they were religious because they had very good reason to be; in other
words, they were not only told the mysteries, but they were shown them.
Either they or their priests had the “open vision.” Is it conceivable
that the primitive peoples had the confidence-trick played on them?
Or, again, is it the fact that credulity is less to-day than before?
I feel sure that if our ancestors were brought to belief, it was by
means which would equally carry conviction to the present generation.
To repeat myself: They believed because they were shown. “Æ” suggests
that the after-life promises of modern religion are a substitute for
or an invasion of present demonstration. Religions, that is to say,
concentrate upon the invisible because their power over the visible is
gone. It is not the fact, however, that the earlier religions ignored the
after-death adventures of the soul; they were quite as much concerned
with the life beyond the grave as our own religions. What they did, and
what our religions fail to do, was to give present guarantees for their
future promises. Their priests could procure belief in the after-life on
the strength of their demonstrated power over this life. It is probable,
indeed, that many of the elect experienced “death” before it occurred
physically. The Egyptian mysteries were a kind of experimental death.
Page 21. Here and on the neighbouring pages “Æ” expounds his method of
meditation—the means by which any “ordinary” person may acquire spiritual
experience. “Æ’s” method follows the familiar line of the mystic schools,
namely, unwavering concentration on some mental object. “Five minutes of
this effort,” “Æ” says, “will at first leave us trembling as at the end
of a laborious day.” I can testify that this is no exaggeration, for,
like “Æ,” I have practised meditation after the methods prescribed.
It is no easy job, and after months of regular practice I was still an
amateur at the simplest exercises. There is no doubt, however, about the
benefit of it. Much is learned in meditation that cannot be realised by
any other mental exercise. The _mind_ becomes a real organ, as distinct
from the personality as a physical limb. And gradually one learns to
acquire sufficient control over it, if not to use it like a master, at
any rate, to realise that it _can_ be so used. I have not the smallest
doubt that one day men will be able to “use” their minds, and thus to
cease to be “used” by them; for it is obvious that at present we are
victims rather than masters of our mind. Meditation, as a means of
mind-control, is the appointed method, and “Æ’s” personal experience
should encourage his readers to take up the discipline.
* * * * *
Page 41. In regard to “visions,” they are usually dismissed by the
commonalty as products of imagination, “as if,” says “Æ,” “imagination
were as easily explained as a problem in Euclid.” This habit of referring
one mystery to another, as if this latter were no mystery, is very
common; and it arises, no doubt, from intellectual apathy. We cannot be
bothered to reduce mysteries to knowledge, and, moreover, the realisation
that literally everything is a mystery, that we simply live in mystery,
is a little disconcerting. Hence our preference for assuming some
things, at any rate, to be below the need of explanation. Imagination,
however, provides us with no escape from the mysteries of vision, any
more than matter provides us with an escape from the problems of spirit.
“Æ” raises some difficult, and, probably, insoluble problems concerning
imagination itself. _What_ is it in us that imagines? _How_ does it cast
thoughts into form? Even allowing (which we cannot) that imagination is
only “the re-fashioning of memory,” what re-fashions and transforms out
of their original resemblance the memories of things seen? “Æ” has had
many visions, some of which, no doubt, he could trace to recollected
impressions; but, leaving aside once more the difficulty involved in this
reconstruction, what of the visions that had, or appeared to have, no
earthly progenitors? “Æ’s” conclusion appears to be indisputable, that
“we swim in an æther of deity”—for “in Him we live and move and have our
being.”
Passim. Is it possible that telepathy occurs between people having the
same mental “wavelength”? Coincidences (another Mesopotamian word, by the
way) are too frequent to be accountable on any other supposition than
that of an established communication. Like many another, I could give
some remarkable instances of telepathy, but they would be tedious to
relate. Mental training, however, is certainly a means to this end; for
in proportion as the mind is brought under control, its susceptibility
to thoughts from outside palpably increases. The experience of the Old
Testament prophet who knew the plans of the enemy before they were
uttered is not unique, even in these days. It will be far less uncommon
in the days to come.
* * * * *
Page 54. “_Is there a centre within us through which all the threads of
the universe are drawn?_” An ingenious image for a recurrent doctrine
of mysticism, the doctrine, namely, that everything is everywhere. One
of the earliest discoveries made in meditation is the magnitude of the
infinitesimal. The tiniest point of space appears to have room enough
for a world of images; and the mediæval discussion concerning the number
of angels that could dance on the point of a needle was by no means
ridiculous. If I am not mistaken, “Æ’s” problem is identical with it.
* * * * *
Page 89. The Architecture of Dreams. In this chapter “Æ” sets himself to
casting some doubts (shall we say?) on the sufficiency of the Freudian
theory of dreams. Dreams, according to Freud, are the dramatisation of
suppressed desires; but what, asks “Æ,” is the means by which desires,
suppressed or otherwise, dramatise themselves? “A mood or desire may
_attract_ its affinities”; in other words, there may be a congruity
between the desire and the dream which serves the Freudian purpose
of interpretation; but desire can hardly be said “to _create_ what
it attracts.” Between anger, for instance, and a definite vision of
conflict, such as the dream may represent, there is a gulf which the
theory of Freud does not enable us to cross. What, in fact, _are_ dreams?
_Who_ or _what_ carries out the dramatisation? Assuming, with Freud,
that their impulse is a desire, what power shapes this desire into the
dream-cartoon? “Æ” throws no light on the mystery, but, at any rate, he
does not dismiss it as no mystery at all. Its philosophical discussion is
to be found in the Indian philosophy known as the Sankhya.
* * * * *
Page 89. “_The process must be conscious on some plane_”—the
dramatisation, that is to say, must be the conscious work of some
intelligent agent or quality. I am a little doubtful of this, for
reasons to be discovered in the Sankhya philosophy just referred to. Is
the pattern taken by sand on a shaken plate a “conscious” design? Are
frost-flowers the work of intelligence? Forms, according to the Sankhya,
are the reflection in matter (Prakriti) of the activities of the spirit
(Purusha); they are consciousness visible. But it would not follow that
they are themselves conscious or that their creation is a “conscious”
process.
* * * * *
Page 90. “Have imaginations body?” In other words, are the figures seen
in dream and vision three-dimensional? “Æ” describes several incidents
within his experience that certainly seem to suggest an objective reality
in dream-figures, and the occasional projection of dream-figures into
phantasms is a further evidence of it. But, once again, I would refer
“Æ” to the Sankhya aphorisms, and to Kapila’s commentary on them. The
question is really of the general order of the relation of form to
thought.
* * * * *
Page 114. Here, and in the succeeding essay, “Æ” develops his intuitional
thesis that sound and thought have definite affinities. For every
thought there is a sound, and every sound is at the same time a thought.
The idea is, of course, familiar, and, like many more in the _Candle
of Vision_, is found recurring like a decimal throughout mystical and
occult literature in all ages. The most ancient occult literature—dispute
whether that of India or Egypt—is most precise on the subject, the
general proposition being therein reduced to a series of equivalents in
which form, sound, colour, thought, emotion, and number, all seem to
be interchangeable. Each of these, in fact, is said to be a language—a
complete language; and to the initiate it is a matter of indifference
whether the text before him is “written” in form, in colour, in number,
or sound. Unfortunately, neither “Æ” nor anybody within our knowledge,
is able to procure even the skeleton key to the mystery. The records
are so perversely confused that I cannot believe that their authors
were not deliberately playing a game with us. It would be rather like
the old initiates to “dis” their type before leaving it to be examined
by the barbarian invaders; and certainly nobody of ordinary faculty
can begin to make head or tail of the “correspondences” recorded in
the Indian scriptures. It is the same, strangely enough, with Plato,
whose _Cratylus_ deals with the relation of verbal language to mental
conception. A master of simple exposition, he becomes in the _Cratylus_,
whether from design or feebleness of understanding, as cryptic as the
Indians themselves. I have read the _Cratylus_ all ways, with no better
result than to feel that I have wasted my time. “Æ” has approached the
problem, however, experimentally, with the aid of his intuition. If, he
said to himself, there is really a definite correspondence between sound
and idea, meditation on one or the other should be able to discover it.
In other words, he has attempted to re-discover the lost language, and
to find for himself the key whose fragments bestrew the ancient occult
works. This again, however, is no novelty, but another of the recurrent
ideas of mystics and would-be occultists. All of them have tried it,
but, unfortunately, most of them come to different conclusions. “Æ’s”
guesses must, therefore, be taken as guesses only, to be compared with
the guesses of other students.
* * * * *
Page 132. One of the features of the _Candle of Vision_ is the occasional
ray cast by “Æ” upon the obscure texts of the Bible. The Bible, of
course, is for the most part unmistakably “occult”; and not only its
stories are myths (“which things are an allegory”), but many of its texts
are echoes of a gnosis infinitely older than the Christian era. Greece,
it has now been established, was an infant when Egypt was old; and Egypt,
in its turn, was an infant when some civilisation anterior to it was in
its dotage. The Bible is a kind of ark, in which were stored (without
much order, I imagine) some of the traditions of the world that was
about to be submerged. They can be brought to life again, however, and
here and there, in the course of the _Candle of Vision_, “Æ” undoubtedly
rejuvenates a Biblical text, and restores to it its ancient meaning.
“He made every flower before it was in the field, and every herb before
it grew.” This points, says “Æ,” to the probability that the Garden of
Eden was the “Garden of the Divine Mind,” in which flowers and herbs and
all the rest of creation lived before they were made—visible! Such a
conception is very illuminating. Moreover, it brings the story of Genesis
into line with the genesis stories of both ancient India and the most
recent psychology. For modern psycho-analysis, in the researches of Jung
in particular, is undoubtedly trembling on the brink of the discovery
of the divine mind which precedes visible creation. The process is
indissolubly linked up with the psychology of imagination, phantasm, and
vision.
* * * * *
Page 137. On Power. “_If we have not power we are nothing, and must
remain outcasts of Heaven._” In this chapter “Æ” shakes the fringes of
the most dangerous subject in the world, that of the acquisition of
“spiritual” power. I put the word under suspicion, because while in the
comparative sense spiritual, the powers here spoken of may be anything
but beneficent. The instructions to be found in, let us say, Patanjali,
are full of warnings against the acquisition of occult powers before
the character of the student is “purified.” We are a long way, of
course, from the plane of conventional goodness in the use of this word
purity. The conventionally good may have all the characteristics of
the black magician (so-called) when he finds himself in the possession
of power. Purity, in the sense implied, connotes non-attachment, and
non-attachment, again, implies the non-existence of any personal
desire—even for the good. Nietzsche died before he began to understand
himself. His pre-occupation with the problem of power was undoubtedly
an occult exercise; and his discovery that spiritual power needs to be
exercised “beyond good and evil,” was a hint of the progress he had made.
Unfortunately for Nietzsche, his _Beyond Good and Evil_ was still not
clear of the element of egotism; he carried into the occult world the
attachment and the desire that emphatically belong to the world of both
Good and Evil. In short, he attempted to take Heaven by egoistic storm,
and his defeat was a foregone conclusion and a familiar tragedy in occult
history. “Æ,” like his authorities, is full of warning against the quest
of power. At the same time, like them, he realises that without power the
student can do nothing. Here is the paradox, the mightiest in psychology,
that the weakest is the strongest and the strongest the weakest. I
commend this chapter to Nietzscheans in particular. They have most to
learn from it.
* * * * *
Page 153 et seq. “Æ” makes an attempt to systematise “Celtic cosmogony.”
It appears to me to be altogether premature, and of as little value
as the “interpretation” of Blake’s cosmogony, which Messrs. Yeats and
Ellis formerly attempted. Celtic cosmogony, as found in Irish legend and
tradition, may be a cosmogony, and perhaps one of the oldest in the world
(for Ireland is always with us!). But the fragmentary character of the
records, the absence of any living tradition in them, coupled with the
difficulty of re-interpretation in rational terms, make even “Æ’s” effort
a little laborious. There is little illumination in the _Candle_ when it
becomes an Irish bog-light.
HOW TO READ.—The greatest books are only to be grasped by the total
understanding which is called intuition. As an aid to the realisation
of the truth, we may fall back upon the final proofs of idiom and
experience. Idiom is the fruit of wisdom on the tree of language; and
experience is both the end and the beginning of idiom. What more familiar
idiom is there than that which expresses the idea and the experience of
reading a book “between the lines”; reading, in fact, what is not there
in the perception of our merely logical understanding? And what, again,
is more familiar than the experience of “having been done good” by
reading a great, particularly a great mystical or poetical work, like the
Bible or Milton; still more, by reading such works as the _Mahabharata_?
Idiom and experience do not deceive us. The “subconscious” of every great
book is vastly greater than its conscious element, as the “subconscious”
of each of us is many times richer in content than our conscious minds.
Reading between the lines, resulting often and usually in a sense of
illuminated bewilderment difficult to put into words, is in reality
intuitional reading; the subconscious in the reader is put into relation
with the subconscious of the writer. Deep communicates with deep. No
“interpretation” of an allegorical kind need result from it. We may be
unable at once to put into words any of the ideas we have gathered.
Patience! The truths thus grasped will find their way to the conscious
mind, and one day, perhaps, to our lips.
THE OLD COUNTRY.—A country may grow aged in mind long before it is really
old in history, and it may be the case with England that long before
she is old in history her mind is becoming aged. The peculiarity of the
aged mind is not that it cannot think, but that it cannot think new
thoughts. All its energy runs in grooves, and there is none to spare
for the cutting of a new road into new ideas. There is little and less
“free mind” in England. Like the commons and the commonwealth, all the
mind-energy has been appropriated by one interest or another, with the
consequence that every fresh idea is compelled either to starve at home
or to emigrate abroad. America, as an intellectually youthful nation
(may it never grow aged!) reaps the advantage of the decline of its aged
parent. Ideas that cannot pick up a living in this country, owing to
the appropriations of energy already made, may emigrate to America and
flourish there.
LOOKING FOR THE DAWN.—The Spring issue of _Art and Letters_ has been
long enough out to have had its run for its money. Consequently I am
free to say that it is not only not so good as the first issue, but
that the descent has been steep as well as rapid. This decline from
the almost sublime to the more than ridiculous was inevitable from
the peculiar characteristics of our immediately contemporary epoch;
for it is the sober truth that our contemporary world does not supply
youthful stuff enough to make more than a single issue of a literary
magazine of high pretension. I have looked about me with the eye of an
eagle and the appetite of a raven to discover youthful talent possibly
budding into genius. A few sprigs and sprays have fallen within my
vision, and I have counted myself recompensed for hours and years of
trouble. But at this present moment such apparitions and premonitions
of the future are fewer than ever I have known them to be. Whether it
is that more than individual—_collective_ talent—has fallen in the war;
whether the increasing pre-occupation of men’s minds with economics
has proportionately impoverished the will to literature of our young
men; or whether a critical taste is losing generosity, the number of
fresh talents just being committed to us appears utterly unequal to the
unequalled opportunity for employing them. There never was a time when
it was easier for a young writer to find publication in one form or
another. The number of new magazines projected and issued recently has
been legion. I have examined most of them; for it is my hobby to collect
the earliest specimens, and it is my unpleasant opinion that most of them
would be better for never having been born.
They manage, or, at any rate, they are beginning to manage these things
better in America. That America is the country of the future is open
to less doubt as a prophecy when the critic has made acquaintance with
the new and renewed magazines now appearing in that country. A tone
of provinciality still dominates a considerable part of the American
literary Press, but it is obvious that tremendous efforts are being made
to recover or, let us say, to discover centrality. American literary
editors are more and more aiming to interest the world of readers rather
than a mere province of them. I need scarcely say that the world of
readers is not the same thing as a world of readers. A world of readers
connotes large numbers, consisting chiefly of readers in search of
amusement; but the world of readers consists of the few in every country
who really read for their living, or rather, for their lives. To appeal
to the latter class is to be “of the centre,” for the centre of every
movement of life is not only the most vital, it is the smallest element,
of the whole. The most recent American literary journals appear to me
to be endeavouring to become organs for this class of reader. It is not
indicated more plainly in the fact that they are enlisting European
writers than in the fact that their American contributors are writing to
be read in Europe as well as in America. America has begun to discover
Europe. America is on the way to absorb Europe. In the course of a
few generations, if the present American magazines may be taken as
indicating direction, European writers will be as intelligible in America
as in Europe; and, perhaps, more so.
FIELDING FOR AMERICA.—It is very doubtful whether anybody reads Fielding
nowadays. Nevertheless, like all the eighteenth century writers, he is
more than worth all the time we waste on certain contemporaries. There
is nothing of the “damned literary” about Fielding; but also there is
nothing of what usually goes with the absence of letters, sentimentality.
Fielding’s letters, one feels, were absorbed into his blood; they did not
remain like crumbs on the lips after a barbarian repast. Fielding could
carry his letters as his contemporaries boasted they could carry their
port—without showing it. And it was no less the case that he carried his
feelings with the same well-bred ease, without displaying them, and,
even more, without permitting them to rule his intelligence. Richardson
seems born to have provoked Fielding to write. He incarnated everything
that Fielding thought worth a negative. But for Richardson, Fielding
would possibly have never found his true _métier_; Richardson was his
twin opposite. Fielding, however, must always pay the penalty of being
a reactionary, of requiring a stimulant; he is no creator, for the stuff
of creation was not native to him. He is an amusing _causeur_ with his
eye always upon Richardson; a man of the world telling a story _à la_
Richardson, but with the explanations common to the class of English
gentlemen. He is put among the English _Men of Letters_ in the series
edited by Lord Morley, and now he is receiving attention in America.
America needs Fielding; for what is America in danger of becoming but
a kind of Richardson continent? Our eighteenth century writers are a
school to which American literature must go as a means of escape from
the Roundhead tradition which otherwise America will scarcely succeed in
overpassing. I cannot conceive, however, that _Tom Jones_ will be popular
in America yet awhile. He has more resistance to encounter there than in
any other civilised nation. But until _Tom Jones_ can be read in America
without a blush, American literature will remain several centuries behind
English and European literature.