rye and barley, and down past the island in the river where dwells the
Lady of Shalott. While she weaves her web, finding her whole delight
in the pictures, note that the sun or the moon is still shining;
afterwards, when she has turned and the curse has come upon her, the
low skies are raining ever so heavily. By the presence of the sun and
moon and wind and rain, by the earth-smell and the water-song, you
shall know that you are in the fairyland of the Right Hand, and that
everything about you is true. The story of the Lady of Shalott true?
Why, yes; a million and a million times. A tragedy again; fairyland is
full of tragedies. Yet she need not have left the web, need not have
seen the bloom on the water-lilies, need not ever have looked down to
Camelot.
And how nearly a tragedy is this scene too--of Titania, poor lady,
falling in love with the Ass! For, if you go far enough, you shall come
upon Oberon and his court; you shall find sweet Bully Bottom also,
strangely wandered from his own world, and with that queer, inevitable
headpiece clapped upon him. What else should he wear, in fairyland? As
was said, everything is so desperately true here; and sage and simple
are alike to come by their own. Should you stray here, no silk hat
has potent enough magic of the modern to protect your respectability:
a wandering wind will whisk it away, and you will appear in crown or
ass-head, according to your merits; or perchance in a dinted, war-worn
helmet, or wearing a garland of oak or laurel or bay. No one may wear
any colors but his own in fairyland.
There are innumerable provinces here, reigned over by innumerable
potentates; but you are to look for sun and moon and wind and rain in
all of them. Perseus and Theseus and Herakles; Roland and the good
knight Charlemain; Cuchullain and the Red Branch; the men of the
Emperor Arthur, and Oisin and Oscar and Finn--they are all here; here
are fought Moytura, Fontarabbia, Camlan. Ulysses flies the Island of
Calypso anew; and Odin comes anew into the Hall of the Dwarfs. There
is always a feast at Gwalas in Penfro; and the door that looks out
towards Aberhenfelen and Cornwall is flung wide by Heilyn again and
again--tragedy of tragedies; no one had opened that door until then,
from the time the sea and the sky and that old palace were made. But
hark! it is the scream of a real seagull that is blown down the hall.
Innumerable are the beauties and wonders and sorrows of this region;
and they are all true, true, true: you can hear the natural winds and
waves always, and taste the salt of natural wind-driven spray.
Yet in a sorrowless Italy here, Saturn still is reigning: and here
The wind in the reeds and the rushes,
The bees in the bells of thyme,
The birds in the myrtle bushes,
The cicale above in the lime,
And the lizards below in the grass
Are as silent as ever old Tmolus was,
listening to the sweet pipings of Pan: for the Golden Age has not faded
and you may come on Brugh-na-Boinne and the Hills of Arcady and the
Island of the Appletrees; you may come on all the haunts of Plenydd,
Alawn, Angus, Baldur, and Apollo.
II
So much, then, for the Fairyland of the Right-hand, as we may call it;
there is also a Left-hand fairyland, however; and its character and
denizens are altogether different.
You come to it by a road that never goes out of doors. I suspect that
you lock and bar your study door, and draw the curtains, and make
fearfully sure of your solitude. Then you sally forth by uncanny
gateways, and come where never hay was mown. There is light there,
especially at first; but the end is a dreadful darkness. The light
is of a kind, indeed, that never was on land or sea; but we may be
thankful for that. Our lands and seas are the wholesomer for the lack
of it.
At first it is not all so different, as to let us see at once we are
in no hallowed region. There is beauty, and color; but the beauty is
neither from the sun nor from the moon, and the color from no dawn
nor sunset, from no sky nor sea. Shifting mists may give place to a
dazzling Moorish palace, or to a peasant's cottage inhabited by the
dead. Mirth or sadness may lurk in such dwellings; but beware of any
intimacy with them: you cannot tell what fair seeming masks the ghoul.
There is no order nor established nature of things, nothing you can
depend on. The fig grows on the thistle; but any hunger is better than
to eat it; vines and figtrees are prolific of innumerable thorns.
Gorgeous blooms prophesy only of doom and impending horror. That is,
when you have journeyed some little while. At first, perhaps, they will
tell no tale but of sweetness and fragrance for the senses. Luxurious
poppies are on every roadside, haunted with night and dreams: but
beware of the whitest lily, the deepest rose; besides these the poppies
are but flower children innocent of guile.
Very early on the way to this fairyland, you shall come to Xanadu,
where Kublai Khan decreed his stately pleasure-dome. A beautiful place?
Yes, but mark; here Alph, the sacred river runs "through _caverns
measureless to man, down to a sunless sea_." There is much wonder
in that; but also darkness, and--incipient terror. Your true and
right-hand fairyland, "bards in fealty to Apollo hold." _It_ is all "in
the Face of the Sun and the Eye of Light."
For a lone reminder of better things, the forests of Xanadu do inclose
sunny spots of greenery; but the heart of the place! It is "as holy and
enchanted as e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted By woman _wailing
for her demon lover_." Heavens! is that your mark of holiness? They
do not so reckon it in the right fairyland, where the tragedies are
effects flowing from causes. And the beauty of the place? "The shadow
of the dome of pleasure Floated midway on the waves":--a scintillant
mirage, a sensuous unreal efflorescence of phantasmagoria; and midst it
all, "ancestral voices prophesying war."
_Christabel_, _Genevieve_, and _The Ancient Mariner_ all belong to
this fairyland; the first two near the hither frontier, and the last
much farther in. For one has to note how beauty wanes as the sun-known
horizons recede, and how its place is taken by a new kind of harmony,
a chiaroscuro of keen terror and gloom. This also holds one, as beauty
does; indeed, plays on the emotion with a more compelling, because
wilder and louder, touch. So we call the pictures and poems of the
left-hand fairyland also beautiful, also works of Art. Some day I
think we shall be wiser; our critics will use a deeper discrimination.
Beauty is not that which most stirs the emotion, but that which most
stirs it in a certain way. There is the evolutionary urge upward to be
considered; what works against that has no real right to the name of
beauty. You are to note here, that the further one travels in this dark
fairyland, the more Wonder transforms itself into horror. Wonder went
with us all through the bright realm, and grew from the mere wizardry
of flowers and mountains, into the atmosphere of majesty that surrounds
the soul and the judgments of Spiritual Law. The wizard-glow in the
woodlands waxes, and resolves itself into one of the elder gods. But
in the other case, the Daughter of Glamor that leads us is like the
_Gwrach y Rhibyn_ in the Celtic tales; subtly luring and exquisite at
first, she turns into a fearful terrifying hag, and he who accompanies
her does well if he escapes with his reason.
Glamor fills both regions; the one, a clean natural magic; the other,
not so decadent in the beginning, as to be wanting in some few waning
rays of the sun. In either case, it is partly the sense of a certain
depth in the things seen or heard; you know that the words of the
poem or story stand for something more than is actually spoken. Fairy
dwellings again; the grass-grown hillock that melts and reveals itself
a palace of the Immortals. In the poetry of the Right-hand Fairyland,
this is precisely what we find; beautiful is the seen, but infinitely
more beautiful and grander that which it symbolizes or indicates. In
that magical country, there is nothing not quickening with ancient
truth, and all the dramas enacted are leaves out of the diary of the
human soul. Hence the many tragedies, the many fallings of fate, dooms
that flow out of deeds done or undone. But in the other, we find none
of this. There, the esotericism is poorer than the outward form.
Fate is fate there, no longer Karma. At the best there may be some
moral taught; yet even then, it is doubtful if the lesson will be of
supreme value. It will not equal in weight the great superstructure
of art raised over it; as if one should sack the caves of the whole
sea, to find some not too-precious stone. It will be an after-thought,
a gem added, an excuse; not the seed and reason of the whole work.
More often, it will be some mere allegory of the passions, void of
truth in the deeper sense; or the deliberate esotericizing of a
Sandford-and-Mertonism. Yet these will be the very best the left-hand
fairyland has to offer; go a little further in, and you have simply
riot on the planes of delirium. Coleridge's _Genevieve_ and Keat's
_Belle Dame_ will point the difference. There is something of the same
color and mystery, even a parallelism in the subject-matter of the two
poems: but the first is mere sound and beauty, signifying nothing, and
the second a picture of the fate of one who has been lured away by
passion from the true paths of the Soul. They are surely wrong, who
ascribe to Coleridge the originality, and say that Keats followed him.
The truth is that the two are not comparable; Keat's voyagings were to
the right hand, Coleridge's, here, to the left.
And the last places in the witch-land? The House of Usher rears itself
gauntly beside its tarn there, and incontinently and dreadfully falls.
It is an "ultimate dim Thule," reached by a road haunted only of evil
angels. It is the home of decay, horror, and death; there is a godless
phosphorescence about it.
But, you say, did not Dante wander there, and Milton? No. Whither
they went, they went armed in the uprightness of spiritual strength.
They made their hells somber, terrible, _august_; not glamorous or
attractive. In Malebolge and Pandemonium alike, there is a certain
stability also, a procession of cause and effect; there are horrors,
but they are not inconsequential; they take their place in a definite
scheme of things. And here is a literary touchstone; both Milton and
Dante wielded that supreme quality of style which is called the _Grand
Manner_, so that the mere boom and march of their verses arouses the
feeling of heroism, of titan strength: a thing it was never given the
decadents and drug-fed to do. Dante had his safe guide and teacher
with him; as he walked through the wonders and terrors of hell, he
himself was the thing most aloof and wonderful. Unscathed he might
pass to his meeting with Beatrice, and walk with her in heaven as
majestically, as he had walked with Virgil through hell. Milton, too,
with all his limitations, remains a thing majestic for our vision;
poet or politician, he is still the armed and terrible warrior of
God. In his characteristic and later mood, he seeks never beauty, but
always righteousness; indeed, his chief fault is that he lost sight
of any unity in the two. _Comus_ and _Lycidas_ will show us from what
fairyland he had graduated, to take part in the stern earthly labors of
his prime.
But here is the mark of the later Coleridge, and of all true wanderers
in the fairyland of the left. When they see him, "All should cry
Beware, beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair." Yes--in one of
his moods. But what when the inspiration had passed; when the turbulent
dark glory that held them had waned from before his eyes; when the Dead
Sea Fruit of his fairyland had withered, and left him to be nourished
with filth and cinders? Then, too, wholesome men cry _Beware!_--but of
a victim of opium, a morphiomaniac, or one sodden with cocaine; a poor
wreck of a man, at sight of whom if you close your eyes, it will not be
in "holy dread," but in mere sorrow and pity.
Poor Coleridge! it was laudanum, and not honey-dew or the milk of
Paradise that inspired him. And perhaps we might trace all that part
of the literature of wonder which comes from the dark, left-hand
fairyland, to drugs; which would remove from the category of genius
many a name that figures there now.
LIGHT PHYSICAL AND METAPHYSICAL: by H. Coryn, M. D., M. R. C. S.
A metal is fixed and crystallized light, said H. P. Blavatsky--and was
laughed at. Light was not then, nor is it yet, substantive, but a mode
of motion--of the ether and of matter. The days when it was substantive
and corpuscular, the days of Newton, had gone by.
But there are several indications of their return--with additions, the
additions warranting H. P. Blavatsky's definition of a metal.
A crystal of metal consists of molecules, and they of the still smaller
atoms. Each atom, in its turn, is made of the still smaller electrons
or corpuscles. If these either _are_ light, or are made of even smaller
bodies which are, the definition is justified. This is the suggestion,
or contention, of Professor Bragg, developed at a recent lecture
delivered before the English Royal Institution.
Light is regarded as a spreading etheric pulsation, waves in ether. We
have it as the visible seven colors from red up to violet, and beyond
visibility as the ultra-violet. Still higher etheric pulses, according
to the usual theory, are the _x_-rays. Professor Bragg applies his new
corpuscular theory to the last alone, though he suggests that it also
includes the ultra-violet rays--in which case it must include all the
rest. He thinks the _x_-rays corpuscular because of a certain behavior;
but the ultra-violet rays have the same behavior--and no one doubts
_their_ continuity with the lower rays down to--and far below--the red.
What is the behavior on which the argument rests?
The term _x_-rays or kathode rays, as popularly used, covers three
kinds of emanation in the tube or from radium. The first and grossest
ingredient is ordinary matter, whirling atoms of the element helium.
The next and finer, the intermediate, is electrons, corpuscles. The
third and finest is _x_-rays proper, hitherto considered as merely
etheric pulses. Professor Bragg calls them _gamma_ rays, restricting
the other term, _x_-rays, for other rays of properties so nearly the
same that he includes them in the same argument.
When _gamma_ (or _x_-) rays fall on an atom of matter they cause it to
discharge one or more of its electrons or corpuscles, the intermediate
of the three emanations popularly included under the term _x_-rays. In
this connexion they are called _beta_ rays.
The professor points out that when _gamma_ (or _x_-) rays produce this
discharge from an atom
the _beta_ rays to a large degree continue the line of motion of the
_gamma_ rays, as if the latter pushed them out of the atoms; and,
lastly, that the number of the _beta_ rays depends on the intensity of
the _gamma_ rays.
The _gamma_ ray, entering an atom, pushes out a corpuscle, a _beta_
ray, and takes its place. It behaves, in fact, as if it were itself a
corpuscle, and the word ray is not well descriptive either of it or the
_beta_. Nor can it be a mere ether-pulse. The professor suggests that
it is a corpuscle, an electron, which has had the ordinary negative
charge of electricity proper to electrons neutralized by a positive.
Then he proceeds:
Many insist that my neutral corpuscle is too material, and that
something more ethereal is wanted, for it appears that ultra-violet
light possesses many of the properties of _x_- and _gamma_ rays....
They propose therefore a quasi-corpuscular theory of light, _gamma_
and _x_- rays being included.... The light corpuscle which is proposed
is a perfectly new postulate. It is to move with the velocity of light
... and to be capable of replacing and being replaced by an electron
which possesses the same energy but moves at a slower rate, and, of
course, it has to do all that the old light waves did. The whole
situation is most remarkable and puzzling.
So at this rate matter consists of molecules, as before; which consist
of atoms, as before; which consist of electrons, as before--but may
also in part or altogether consist of still more ethereal corpuscles
_which are light_.
It is but a step to the suggestion that the electrons consist of light
corpuscles, standing to them as they stand to the positive or negative
atom of matter. Then metals will be crystallized light.
But whence the light corpuscles? How did they manage to get born in
space? An answer to this question means a step-over from science into
metaphysics. If and when we have reached the last line of matter we
must begin to consider _consciousness_.
Intellectual light, spiritual light--we think we are using only
metaphors in those phrases. Possibly we are not. Physical light may
be the last stage of higher lights. If physical light is divine
thought-energy appealing to our sense, it may have passed down through
higher stages at which it appeals only to mind and heart and spirit.
If we think of Cosmic Spirit as pulsing its will and thought into that
passive and uniform essence which will afterwards become active and
differentiated matter, condensing and precipitating it into centers for
evolutionary work, we must surmise that it is these intensely conscious
centers that will subsequently be suns. Science would say that this
condensation would already involve the liberation of heat, that the new
center must at once be hot. But that is only true of condensing matter
as we know it, matter which already contains latent energy. But the
kind of matter we are considering now is what _will become matter_,
has no possessions nor qualities till these are conferred on it by
divine ideation and will. A sun at its first stage would be luminous
only to a _spiritual_ cognition--that is, it would be charged with, and
radiating, divine ideation. At the _very_ first it would not be even
that; it would be but a _receiving_ center--for divine thought and will.
But at last would come its first heart-beat, so to speak. Some of the
aggregated substance would be pulsed out to the surface charged with
accumulated energy, dissipated as corpuscular light. And now it would
fall within the range of human vision. It is illuminating not only to
sense but to mind; for it contains mind; and not only to mind but to
spirit; for that also it contains.
Theosophy teaches that the sun's envelopes do _not_ contain the
terrestrial elements _in their terrestrial condition_. It is their
antetypes that are alone there, transient, in perpetual aggregation
on the inner side of the envelope (towards the solar nucleus), in
disintegration as light on the outer. And this light, charged with
divine ideation--septenary--has the power on earth of building elements
like to, but lower down than, those found in the sun's envelopes--and
of destroying them. The planets owe the elements they have to the
formative power in the solar light; rather say the keynotes of the
elements they have, according to which keynotes the elementary matter
aggregates. Besides that every molecule is crystallized and fixed
light, it contains as its soul some of that light in its highest or
first state. And so has every cell, every compound of cells, every
living thing. If we had another kind of spectroscope we could find
their antetypes too on the sun. Every cell and molecule contains latent
what in man has begun to manifest--that _self_-consciousness which is a
direct reflection of the absolute Self-consciousness of that point or
center which is everywhere and whose circumference nowhere because the
universe has a limit nowhere. That self, latent or manifest, has in man
and molecule its first or highest embodiment in a layer or envelope of
light in its first or highest condition. As we say, Âtman is enshrined
in Buddhi.
[Illustration: Lomaland Photo. and Engraving Dept. A FAMILY
GROUP: JULIUS KRONBERG, THE FAMOUS ARTIST MADAME SCHOLANDER, HIS
MOTHER-IN-LAW, A WELL-KNOWN SWEDISH THEOSOPHIST AND MR. KRONBERG'S
CHILDREN. STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN]
[Illustration: Lomaland Photo. and Engraving Dept. "EROS": PAINTING BY
JULIUS KRONBERG]
EROS: by R. W. Machell
[Suggested on first seeing the painting by Julius Kronberg, entitled
_Eros_]
I looked into the depths and saw amid the writhing forms that filled
the abyss, a running stream of fire that flowed among them, and seared
and shriveled some and twisted others into strange shapes, but still
itself preserved its own undying energy insatiate. A monster that
devoured its devotees, for at times I seemed to see it as a being
having a form defined though monstrous. It fascinated me, and, as I
looked longer and more intensely it took form more definite, with a
strange beauty, wild and weird, yet strangely potent to attract and
hold the gazer in the spell of admiration that bewildered all the mind,
and fired the sense with strange thrills and throbbings of unsatisfied
desires, vague but intense, painful yet so seductive that the mind,
bathed in oblivion of former joys, craved only the consuming kiss
of that fierce flame. The form was superhuman, but as yet I saw no
face nor knew to what to liken the strange shape, so wild and yet so
strangely human that it seemed a part of me when first I looked. But in
a little while I knew that I was but a part of it--scarce even that, a
shadow looking towards a light that must consume it. I fought against
the fascination that seemed as if it would absorb my soul and scorch my
mind and sweep my body into its seething vortex of undying fire; and as
I fought to hold myself against the influence, it seemed as if it, that
living fire, took form and features and became the image of a God with
wondrous eyes that glowed as do the embers of the fire when burning
clear with caverns of throbbing radiance and unresting palpitations,
flushing and gleaming, or sinking into momentary dulness like a sulky
face swept by a passing cloud of temper. But strange and fascinating
as it was, that beauty seemed to be unable to define itself; there
was a _want_ that left in the beholder a wild yearning, in itself so
keen as to appear the most intense delight mingled and tinged with
woe unutterable. And then I knew that this on which I gazed was a
reflection of some higher thing, an _image only_ on the waves of that
deep ocean in which the world and all things corporeal float formless
and uncreate until the creative fire of Eros pierces its depths, and
awakening all its energies into activity, mirrors itself upon the
seething vortex of illusion.
Each one who looks into the depths shall see this image; they who have
no heart to search the depths of beings shall feel the fire within
their veins and hail the presence of a God and feed the flame with
their own substance, giving their lives in acts of impious sacrifice to
the consuming fires of the lower world, responsive to the passions that
so insistingly demand the tribute of self-immolation on the altar of
desire.
And from his place beside the throne on high the God of Love looks
down and sees the distorted image of himself torturing, deceiving,
and destroying all who fall beneath the spell of his pervading magic,
while tears of pity for the woes of men fall silently; and he waits,
divinely patient, for the hour when man shall rise from his long dream
of passion, and turning his eyes up towards the Sphere of Light,
shall know that he too is divine. Then shall man recognize the God of
Love who stands beside the throne and call to him to show the path by
which he can regain his place and once more sit upon the throne of
his divinity and rule within the kingdom of the soul, the soul of all
humanity.
TEMPTING COUNTERFEITS VS. REALITY: by Lydia Ross, M. D.