THE SIBYLLINE BOOKS
I hope it will be allowed to me that I treat the Reader with all
respectful courtesy, and that I am well bred enough to assume him
familiar with all manner of exquisite experience, though in my heart I
may be no less convinced that he has probably gone through life with
nothing worth calling experience whatsoever. It is our jaunty modern
fashion, and I follow it so far as I am able. I take for granted, for
instance, that every man has at one time or another--in his salad days,
you know, before he was embarked in his particular provision
business--had foolish yearnings towards poesy. I respect the mythical
dreams of his 'young days'; I assume that he has been really in love;
but, pray press me not too curiously as to whether I believe it all, as
to whether I really imagine that his youth knew other dreams than those
of the foolish young 'masherdom' one meets in the train every morning,
or that he has married a wife for other than purely 'masculine' reasons.
These matters I do not mind leaving in the form of a postulate--let them
be granted: but that every man has at one time or another had the craze
for saving the world I will not assume. Narcissus took it very early,
and though he has been silent concerning his mission for some time, and
when last we heard of it had considerably modified his propaganda, he
still cherishes it somewhere in secret, I have little doubt; and one may
not be surprised, one of these days, to find it again bursting out 'into
sudden flame.'
His spiritual experience has probably been the deepest and keenest of
his life. I do not propose to trace his evolution from Anabaptism to
Agnosticism. The steps of such development are comparatively familiar;
they have been traced by greater pens than mine. The 'means' may vary,
but the process is uniform.
Whether a man deserts the ancestral Brahminism that has so long been
'good enough for his parents,' and listens to the voice of the Buddhist
missionary, or joins Lucian in the seat of the scornful, shrugging at
augur and philosopher alike; whether it is Voltaire, or Tom Paine, or
Thomas Carlyle, or Walt Whitman, or a Socialist tract, that is the
emancipator, the emancipation is all one.
The seed that is to rend the rock comes in all manner of odd, and often
unremembered, ways; but somehow, it is there; rains and dews unnoticed
feed it; and surely, one day the rock is rent, the light is pouring in,
and we are free! It is often a matter of anguish that, strive as we may,
it is impossible to remember what helping hand it was that sowed for us.
Our fickle memory seems to convict us of ingratitude, and yet we know
how far that sin is from us; and how, if those sowers could but be
revealed to us, we would fall upon their necks, or at their feet.
I talked of this one day with Narcissus, and some time after he sent me
a few notes headed 'Spiritual Pastors,' in which he had striven to
follow the beautiful example set by Marcus Aurelius, in the anxiously
loving acknowledgment with which he opens his meditations. I know he
regarded it as miserably inefficient; but as it does actually indicate
some of the more individual side of his experience, and is, moreover,
characteristic in its style, I shall copy a few passages from it here:--
'To some person or persons unknown exceeding gratitude for the
suggestion, in some dim talk, antenatal it would almost seem, that Roman
Catholics might, after all, be "saved." Blessed fecundating suggestion,
that was the earliest loophole!
'To my father I owe a mind that, once set on a clue, must follow it, if
need be, to the nethermost darkness, though he has chosen to restrict
the operation of his own within certain limits; and to my mother a
natural leaning to the transcendental side of an alternative, which has
saved me so many a time when reason had thrown me into the abyss. But
one's greatest debt to a good mother must be simply--herself.
'To the Rev. Father Ignatius for his earnest preaching, which might
almost have made me a monk, had not Thomas Carlyle and his _Heroes_,
especially the lecture on Mahomet, given me to understand the true
significance of a Messiah.
'To Bulwer for his _Zanoni_, which first gave me a hint of the possible
natural "supernatural," and thus for ever saved me from dogmatising in
negatives against the transcendental.
'To Sir Edwin Arnold for his _Light of Asia,_ also to Mr. Sinnett for
his _Esoteric Buddhism,_ books which, coming to me about the same time,
together with some others like them, first gave some occupation to an
"unchartered freedom," gained in many forgotten steps, in the form of a
faith which transfigured my life for many months into the most beautiful
enthusiasm a man could know,--and which had almost sent me to the
Himalayas!
'That it did not quite achieve that, though much of the light it gave me
still remains, I owe to R.M., who, with no dialectic, but with one bald
question, and the reading of one poem, robbed me of my fairy palace of
Oriental speculation in the twinkling of an eye. Why it went I have
never really quite known; but surely, it was gone, and the wind and the
bare star-light were alone in its place.
'Dear Mac., I have not seen you for ever so long, and surely you have
forgotten how that night, long ago, you asked with such a strange,
almost childlike, simplicity: "_Is_ there a soul?" But I have not
forgotten, nor how I made no answer at all, but only staggered, and how,
with your strange, dreamy voice, you chanted for comfort:--
'"This hot, hard flame with which our bodies burn
Will make some meadow blaze with daffodil;
Ay! and those argent breasts of thine will turn
To water-lilies; the brown fields men till
Will be more fruitful for our love to-night:
Nothing is lost in Nature; all things live in Death's despite.
* * * * *
'"So when men bury us beneath the yew
Thy crimson-stained mouth a rose will be,
And thy soft eyes lush blue-bells dimmed with dew;
And when the white narcissus wantonly
Kisses the wind, its playmate, some faint joy
Will thrill our dust, and we will be again fond maid and boy.
'"... How my heart leaps up
To think of that grand living after death
In beast and bird and flower, when this cup,
Being filled too full of spirit, bursts for breath,
And with the pale leaves of some autumn day,
The soul, earth's earliest conqueror, becomes earth's last great prey.
'"O think of it! We shall inform ourselves
Into all sensuous life; the goat-foot faun,
The centaur, or the merry, bright-eyed elves
That leave they: dancing rings to spite the dawn
Upon the meadows, shall not be more near
Than you and I to Nature's mysteries, for we shall hear
'"The thrush's heart beat, and the daisies grow,
And the wan snowdrop sighing for the sun
On sunless days in winter; we shall know
By whom the silver gossamer is spun,
Who paints the diapered fritillaries,
On what wide wings from shivering pine to pine the eagle flies.
* * * * *
'"We shall be notes in that great symphony
Whose cadence circles through the rhythmic spheres,
And all the live world's throbbing heart shall be
One with our heart; the stealthy, creeping years
Have lost their terrors now; we shall not die--
The universe itself shall be our Immortality!"
Have you forgotten how you chanted these, and told me they were Oscar
Wilde's. You had set my feet firmly on earth for the first time, there
was great darkness with me for many weeks, but, as it lifted, the earth
seemed greener than ever of old, the sunshine a goodlier thing, and
verily a blessedness indeed to draw the breath of life. I had learnt
"the value and significance of flesh"; I no longer scorned a carnal
diet, and once again I turned my eyes on the damsels in the street.
'But an influence soon came to me that kept me from going all the way
with you, and taught me to say, "I know not," where you would say, "It
is not." Blessings on thee who didst throw a rainbow, that may mean a
promise, across the void, that awoke the old instinct of faith within
me, and has left me "an Agnostic with a faith," quite content with "the
brown earth," if that be all, but with the added significance a mystery
gives to living;--thou who first didst teach me Love's lore aright, to
thee do I owe this thing.
'To J.A.W. I owe the first great knowledge of that other love between
man and man, which Whitman has since taught us to call "the dear love of
comrades"; and to him I owe that I never burned those early rhymes, or
broke my little reed--an unequivocal service to me, whatever the
public, should it be consulted, may think.
'To a dear sister I owe that still more exquisite and subtle comradeship
which can only exist between man and woman, but from which the more
disturbing elements of sex must be absent. And here, let me also thank
God that I was brought up in quite a garden of good sisters.
'To Messrs. C. and W., Solicitors and Notaries, I owe, albeit I will say
no thanks to them, the opportunity of that hardly learned good which
dwells for those who can wrest it in a hateful taskwork, that faculty of
"detachment" which Marcus Aurelius learnt so long ago, by means of which
the soul may withdraw, into an inaccessible garden, and sing while the
head bends above a ledger; or, in other words, the faculty of dreaming
with one side of the brain, while calculating with the other. Mrs.
Browning's great _Aurora Leigh_ helped me more to the attainment of that
than any book I know.
'In their office, too, among many other great things, I learnt that a
man may be a good fellow and hate poetry--possibility undreamed of by
sentimental youth; also that Messrs. Bass and Cope are not unworthy of
their great reputation; and I had various nonsense knocked out of me,
though they never succeeded in persuading me in that little matter of
the "ambrosial curls."
'Through Samuel Dale I first came to understand how "whatever is" _can_
be "best," and also won a faith in God which I rather caught by
infection than gained by any process of his reasoning. Of all else I owe
to Samuel, how write? He knows.
'To a certain friend, mentioned last because he is not least, I owe: the
sum of ten pounds, and a loving companionship, up hill and down dale,
for which again I have no words and no--sovereigns.'
When I first read through these, I was somewhat surprised at the
omission of all reference to books which I know marked most striking
periods in Narcissus' spiritual life: _Sartor Resartus_, Thoreau's
_Walden_, for example, Mr. Pater's _Marius the Epicurean_, and
Browning's _Dramatis Personae_. As I reflected, however, I came to the
conclusion that such omission was but justice to his own individuality,
for none of these books had created an _initiative_ in Narcissus'
thought, but rather come, as, after all, I suppose they come to most of
us, as great confirming expressions of states of mind at which he had
already arrived, though, as it were, but by moonlight. In them was the
sunrise bringing all into clear sight and sure knowledge.
It would seem, indeed, that the growth of the soul in the higher spirits
of our race is analogous to the growth of a child in the womb, in this
respect: that in each case the whole gamut of earlier types is run
through, before the ultimate form is attained in which it is decreed
that the particular vital energy shall culminate. And, as in the
physical world the various 'halts,' so to say, of the progress are
illustrated by the co-existence and continual succession of those
earlier types; so in the world of mind, at every point of spiritual
evolution, a man may meet with an historical individuality who is a
concrete embodiment of the particular state to which he has just
attained. This, of course, was what Goethe meant when he referred to
mysticism as being a frame of mind which one could experience all round
and then leave behind. To quote Whitman, in another connection:--
'We but level that lift
To pass and continue beyond.'
But an individuality must 'crystallise out' somewhere, and its final
value will not so much depend on the number of states it has passed
through, as how it has lived each on the way, with what depth of
conviction and force of sincerity. For a modern young man to thus
experience all round, and pass, and continue beyond where such great
ones as St. Bernard, Pascal, and Swedenborg, have anchored their starry
souls to shine thence upon men for all time, is no uncommon thing. It is
more the rule than the exception: but one would hardly say that in going
further they have gone higher, or ended greater. The footpath of pioneer
individualism must inevitably become the highway of the race. Every
American is not a Columbus.
There are two ways in which we may live our spiritual progress: as
critics, or poets. Most men live theirs in that critical attitude which
refuses to commit itself, which tastes all, but enjoys none; but the
greatest in that earnest, final, rooted, creative, fashion which is the
way of the poets. The one is as a man who spends his days passing from
place to place in search of a dwelling to his mind, but dies at last in
an inn, having known nought of the settled peace of a home; but the
other, howsoever often he has to change his quarters, for howsoever
short a time he may remain in any one of his resting-places, makes of
each a home, with roots that shoot in a night to the foundations of the
world, and blossomed branches that mingle with the stars.
Criticism is a good thing, but poetry is a better. Indeed, criticism
properly _is_ not; it is but a process to an end. We could really do
without it much better than we imagine: for, after all, the question is
not so much _how_ we live, but _do_ we live? Who would not a hundred
times rather be a fruitful Parsee than a barren _philosophe_? Yes, all
lies, of course, in original greatness of soul; and there is really no
state of mind which is not like Hamlet's pipe--if we but know the 'touch
of it,' 'it will discourse most eloquent music.'
Now, it was that great sincerity in Narcissus that has always made us
take him so seriously. And here I would remark in parenthesis, that
trivial surface insincerities, such as we have had glimpses of in his
dealings, do not affect such a great organic sincerity as I am speaking
of. They are excrescences, which the great central health will sooner or
later clear away. It was because he never held an opinion to which he
was not, when called upon, practically faithful; never dreamed a dream
without at once setting about its translation into daylight; never
professed a creed for a week without some essay after the realisation of
its new ideal; it was because he had the power and the courage to glow
mightily, and to some purpose; because his life had a fiery centre,
which his eyes were not afraid of revealing--that I speak of his great
sincerity, a great capacity for intense life. Shallow patterers of
divine creeds were, therefore, most abhorrent to him. 'You must excuse
me, sir,' I remember his once saying to such a one, 'but what are you
doing with cigarette and salutaris? If I held such a belief as yours, I
would stand sandalled, with a rope round my waist, before to-morrow.'
One quaint instance of this earnest attitude in all things occurs to me
out of his schooldays. He was a Divine Right man, a fiery Jacobite, in
those days; and, probably not without some absurd unconfessed dream in
his heart that it might somehow help the dead old cause, he one
afternoon fluttered the Hanoverian hearts--all the men we meet in street
and mart are Hanoverians, of course--of our little literary club by
solemnly rising 'to give notice' that at the following meeting he would
read a paper to prove that 'the House of Hanover has no right to the
English throne.' Great was the excitement through the fortnight
intervening, extending even to the masters; and the meeting was a full
one, and no little stormy.
Narcissus rose with the air of a condemned Strafford, and with all his
boyish armoury of eloquence and scorn fought over again the long-lost
battle, hiss and groan falling unheeded into the stream of his young
voice. But vain, vain! hard is the Hanoverian heart in boy, as in man,
and all your glowing periods were in vain--vain as, your peroration told
us, 'was the blood of gallant hearts shed on Culloden's field.' Poor N.,
you had but one timorous supporter, even me, so early your _fidus
Achates_--but one against so many. Yet were you crestfallen? Galileo
with his 'E pur si muove,' Disraeli with his 'The time will come,' wore
such a mien as yours, as we turned from that well-foughten field. Yes!
and you loved to take in earnest vague Hanoverian threats of possible
arrest for your baby-treason, and, for some time, I know, you never
passed a policeman without a dignified tremor, as of one who might at
any moment find a lodging in the Tower.
But the most serious of all N.'s 'mad' enthusiasms was that of which the
Reader has already received some hint, in the few paragraphs of his own
confessions above, that which 'had almost sent him to the Himalayas.'
It belongs to natures like his always through life to cherish a half
belief in their old fairy tales, and a longing, however late in the day,
to prove them true at last. To many such the revelations with which
Madame Blavatsky, as with some mystic trumpet, startled the Western
world some years ago, must have come with most passionate appeal; and to
Narcissus they came like a love arisen from the dead. Long before, he
had 'supped full' of all the necromantic excitements that poet or
romancer could give. Guy Mannering had introduced him to Lilly; Lytton
and Hawthorne had sent him searching in many a musty folio for Elixir
Vitas and the Stone. Like Scythrop, in 'Nightmare Abbey,' he had for a
long period slept with horrid mysteries beneath his pillow. But suddenly
his interest had faded: these phantoms fled before a rationalistic
cock-crow, and Eugenius Philalethes and Robert Fludd went with Mejnour
and Zanoni into a twilight forgetfulness. There was no hand to show the
hidden way to the land that might be, and there were hands beckoning and
voices calling him along the highway to the land that is. So,
dream-light passing, he must, perforce, reconcile himself to daylight,
with its dusty beam and its narrow horizons.
Judge, then, with what a leaping heart he chanced on some newspaper
gossip concerning the sibyl, for it was so that he first stumbled across
her mission. Ironical, indeed, that the so impossible 'key' to the
mystery should come by the hand of 'our own correspondent'; but so it
was, and that paragraph sold no small quantity of 'occult' literature
for the next twelve months. Mr. Sinnett, doorkeeper in the house of
Blavatsky, who, as a precaution against the vision of Bluebeards that
the word Oriental is apt to conjure up in Western minds, is always
dressed in the latest mode, and, so to say, offers his cigar-case along
with some horrid mystery--it was to his prospectus of the new gospel,
his really delightful pages, that Narcissus first applied. Then he
entered within the gloomier Egyptian portals of the _Isis_ itself, and
from thence--well, in brief, he went in for a course of Redway, and
little that figured in that gentleman's thrilling announcements was long
in reaching his hands.
At last a day came when his eye fell upon a notice, couched in suitably
mysterious terms, to the effect that really earnest seekers after divine
truth might, after necessary probation, etc., join a brotherhood of
such--which, it was darkly hinted, could give more than it dared
promise. Up to this point Narcissus had been indecisive. He was,
remember, quite in earnest, and to actually accept this new evangel
meant to him--well, as he said, nothing less in the end than the
Himalayas. Pending his decision, however, he had gradually developed a
certain austerity, and experimented in vegetarianism; and though he was,
oddly enough, free of amorous bond that might have held him to earth,
yet he had grown to love it rather rootedly since the earlier days when
he was a 'seeker.' Moreover, though he read much of 'The Path,' no
actual Mejnour had yet been revealed to set his feet therein. But with
this paragraph all indecision soon came to an end. He felt there a clear
call, to neglect which would be to have seen the light and not to have
followed it, ever for him the most tragic error to be made in life. His
natural predisposition towards it was too great for him to do other than
trust this new revelation; and now he must gird himself for 'the
sacrifice which truth always demands.'
But, sacrifice! of what and for what? An undefined social warmth he was
beginning to feel in the world, some meretricious ambition, and a great
friendship--to which in the long run would he not be all the truer by
the great new power he was to win? If hand might no longer spring to
hand, and friendship vie in little daily acts of brotherhood, might he
not, afar on his mountain-top, keep loving watch with clearer eyes upon
the dear life he had left behind, and be its vigilant fate? Surely! and
there was nothing worth in life that would not gain by such a devotion.
All life's good was of the spirit, and to give that a clearer shining,
even in one soul, must help the rest. For if its light, shining, as now,
through the grimy horn-lantern of the body, in narrow lanes and along
the miasmatic flats of the world, even so helped men, how much more must
it, rising above that earthly fume, in a hidden corner no longer, but
in the open heaven, a star above the city. Sacrifice! yes, it was just
such a tug as a man in the dark warmth of morning sleep feels it to
leave the pillow. The mountain-tops of morning gleam cold and bare: but
O! when, staff in hand, he is out amid the dew, the larks rising like
fountains above him, the gorse bright as a golden fleece on the
hill-side, and all the world a shining singing vision, what thought of
the lost warmth then? What warmth were not well lost for this keen
exhilarated sense in every nerve, in limb, in eye, in brain? What potion
has sleep like this crystalline air it almost takes one's breath to
drink, of such a maddening chastity is its grot-cool sparkle? What
intoxication can she give us for this larger better rapture? So did
Narcissus, an old Son of the Morning, figure to himself the struggle,
and pronounce 'the world well lost.'
But I feel as I write how little I can give the Reader of all the
'splendid purpose in his eyes' as he made this resolve. Perhaps I am the
less able to do so as--let me confess--I also shared his dream. One
could hardly come near him without, in some measure, doing that at all
times; though with me it could only be a dream, for I was not free. I
had Scriptural example to plead 'Therefore I cannot come,' though in any
case I fear I should have held back, for I had no such creative instinct
for realisation as Narcissus, and have, I fear, dreamed many a dream I
had not the courage even to think of clothing in flesh and blood; like,
may I say, the many who are poets for all save song--poets in chrysalis,
all those who dream of what some do, and make the audience of those
great articulate ones. But there were one or two trifling doubts to set
at rest before final decision. The Reader has greatly misconceived
Narcissus if he has deemed him one of those simple souls whom any quack
can gull, and the good faith of this mysterious fraternity was a
difficult point to settle. A tentative application through the address
given, an appropriate _nom de mystère_, had introduced the ugly detail
of preliminary expenses. Divine truth has to pay its postage, its rent,
its taxes, and so on; and the 'guru' feeds not on air--although, of
course, being a 'guru,' he comes as near it as the flesh will allow:
therefore, and surely, Reader, a guinea per annum is, after all,
reasonable enough. Suspect as much as one will, but how gainsay? Also,
before the applicant could be admitted to noviciate even, his horoscope
must be cast, and--well, the poor astrologer also needed bread and--no!
not butter--five shillings for all his calculations, circles, and
significations--well, that again was only reasonable. H'm, ye-e-s, but
it was dubious; and, mad as we were, I don't think we ever got outside
that dubiety, but made up our minds, like other converts, to gulp the
primary postulate, and pay the twenty-six shillings. From the first,
however, Narcissus had never actually entrusted all his spiritual
venture in this particular craft: he saw the truth independent of them,
not they alone held her for him, though she might hold them, and they
might be that one of the many avenues for which he had waited to lead
him nearer to her heart. That was all. His belief in the new
illumination neither stood nor fell with them, though his ardour for it
culminated in the experience. One must take the most doubtful
experiment seriously if we are in earnest for results.
So next came the sacred name of 'the Order,' which, Reader, I cannot
tell thee, as I have never known it, Narcissus being bound by horrid
oaths to whisper it to no man, and to burn at midnight the paper which
gave it to his eyes. From this time, also, we could exchange no deep
confidences of the kind at all, for the various MSS. by means of which
he was to begin his excursions into Urania, and which his 'guru' sent
from time to time--at first, it must be admitted, with a diligent
frequency--were secret too. So several months went by, and my knowledge
of his 'chela-ship' was confined to what I could notice, and such
trifling harmless gossip as 'Heard from "guru" this morning,' 'Copying
an old MS. last night,' and so on. What I could notice was truly, as
Lamb would say, 'great mastery,' for lo! Narcissus, whose eyes had never
missed a maiden since he could walk, and lay in wait to wrest his
tribute of glance and blush from every one that passed, lo! he had
changed all that, and Saint Anthony in an old master looks not more
resolutely 'the other way' than he, his very thoughts crushing his flesh
with invisible pincers. No more softly-scented missives lie upon his
desk a-mornings; and, instead of blowing out the candle to dream of
Daffodilia, he opens his eyes in the dark to defy--the Dweller on the
Threshold, if haply he should indeed already confront him.
One thrilling piece of news in regard to the latter he was unable to
conceal. He read it out to me one flushed morning:--
'_I--have--seen--him--and--am--his--master_,'
wrote the 'guru,' in answer to his neophyte's half fearful question.
Fitly underlined and sufficiently spaced, it was a statement calculated
to awe, if only by its mendacity. I wonder if that chapter of Bulwer's
would impress one now as it used to do then. It were better, perhaps,
not to try.
The next news of these mysteries was the conclusion of them. When so
darkly esoteric a body begins to issue an extremely catchpenny 'organ,'
with advertisements of theosophic 'developers,' magic mirrors, and
mesmeric discs, and also advertises large copies of the dread symbol of
the Order, 'suitable for framing,' at five shillings plain and seven and
sixpence coloured, it is, of course, impossible to take it seriously,
except in view of a police-court process, and one is evidently in the
hands of very poor bunglers indeed. Such was the new departure in
propaganda instituted by a little magazine, mean in appearance, as the
mouthpieces of all despised 'isms' seem to be, with the first number of
which, need one say, ended Narcissus' ascent of 'The Path.' I don't
think he was deeply sad at being disillusionised. Unconsciously a
broader philosophy had slowly been undermining his position, and all was
ready for the fall. It cost no such struggle to return to the world as
it had taken to leave it, for the poet had overgrown the philosopher,
and the open mystery of the common day was already exercising an appeal
beyond that of any melodramatic 'arcana.' Of course the period left its
mark upon him, but it is most conspicuous upon his bookshelves.