Episodes Before Thirty/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
These notes aim at describing merely certain surface episodes, and would leave unmentioned of set purpose those inner activities which pertain to the intimate struggles of a growing soul. There is a veil of privacy which only in rarest cases of exceptional value should be lifted. That honesty, moreover, which is an essential of such value, seems almost unattainable. Only a diary, written at the actual time and intended for no one's eye, can hope to achieve the naked sincerity, which could make it useful to lift that veil.
Yet, even with these surface episodes, something of the background against which they danced and vanished must be sketched; to understand them, something of the individual who experienced them must be known. This apology for so much use of the personal pronoun is made once for all.
The failure of the evangelical Christian teaching either to attract deeply or to convince, has been indicated. An eager, impressionable mind lay empty and unstimulated. It fed upon insipid stuff, such as Longfellow, Mrs. Hemans, goody-goody stories, and thousands of religious tracts. It was the days of yellow-backs in three volumes, of Ouida especially, of Miss Braddon, and Wilkie Collins; but novels were strictly forbidden in the house. Lewis Carroll, which my father often read aloud, and Foxe's "Book of Martyrs," which made every Roman Catholic priest seem ominous, were our imaginative fiction. But my chief personal delight was Hebrew poetry, the Psalms, the Song of Solomon, above all the Book of Job (which I devoured alone)—these moved me in a different way and far more deeply.
The mind, meanwhile, without being consciously aware of it, was searching with eager if unrewarded zeal, until one day Fate threw a strange book in its way--Patanjali's "Yoga Aphorisms," a translation from the Sanskrit. I was about seventeen then, just home from a year and a half in the Moravian Brotherhood School in the Black Forest.
I shall never forget that golden September day when the slight volume, bound in blue, first caught my eye. It was lying beside a shiny black bag on the hall table, and the bag belonged, I knew, to a Mr. Scott, who had come to spend a week with us and to hold a series of meetings under my father's auspices in the village hall. Mr. Scott was an ardent revivalist. He was also--this I grasped even at the time--a cadaverous mass of religious affectations. He was writing a brochure, I learned later, to warn England that Satan was bringing dangerous Eastern teachings to the West, and this book was a first proof of the Fiend's diabolical purpose.
I opened it and read a few paragraphs in the hall. I did not understand them, though they somehow held my mind and produced a curious sense of familiarity, half of wonder, half of satisfaction. A deeper feeling than I had yet known woke in me. I was fascinated.... My father's voice calling me to tennis interrupted my reading, and I dropped the book, noticing that it fell behind the table. Hours later, though the bag was gone, the book lay where it had fallen. I stole it. I took it to bed with me and read it through from cover to cover. I read it twice, three times; bits of it I copied out; I did not understand a word of it, but a shutter rushed up in my mind, interest and joy were in me, a big troubling emotion, a conviction that I had found something I had been seeking hungrily for a long time, something I needed, something that, in an odd way, almost seemed familiar.
I repeat--I did not understand a word of it, while yet the meaningless phrases caught me with a revolutionary power. As I read and re-read till my candles guttered, there rose in me a dim consciousness, becoming more and more a growing certainty, that what I read was not entirely new. So strong was this that it demanded audible expression. In that silent bedroom, dawn not far away, I can hear myself saying aloud: "But I've known all this before--only I've forgotten it." Even the Sanskrit words, given phonetically in brackets, had a familiar look.
Shutter after shutter rose, "lifting a veil and a darkness," letting in glimpses of a radiant and exciting light. Though the mind was too untaught to grasp the full significance of these electric flashes, too unformed to be even intelligently articulate about them, there certainly rushed over my being a singular conviction of the unity of life everywhere and in everything--of its one-ness. That objects, the shifting appearance of phenomena, were but a veil concealing some intensely beautiful reality--the beauty shining and divine, the reality bitingly, terrifically actual--this poured over me with a sense of being not so much dis-covered as re-covered. Ignorant as I was, without facts or arguments or reason to support me, this I knew.
It is possible the awakening consciousness fringed some state of ecstasy during that long communing with ancient things.... The house, at any rate, was still dark, but sunrise not long to come, when at length I stole down into the deserted hall and replaced the little book upon the table.
Those Yoga aphorisms of a long-dead Hindu sage, set between a golden September evening and a guttering candle, marked probably the opening of my mind.... The entire paraphernalia of my evangelical teaching thenceforth began to withdraw. Though my father's beliefs had cut deep enough to influence me for many years to come, their dread, with the terror of a personal Satan and an actual Hell, grew less from that moment. The reality of the dogmas was impaired. Here was another outlook upon life, another explanation of the world; caprice was eliminated and justice entered; the present was the result of the past, the future determined by the present; I must reap what I had sown, but, also, I could sow what I wished to reap. Hope was born. Apart from this was that curious deep sense of familiarity with these Eastern teachings, as with something I understood and in which I felt at home....
Cautiously, I put indirect questions to my father, who at once--the clumsy questions betraying me--detected Satan's subtle handiwork. He was grave and troubled. With affectionate solicitude he told me, finally, a story of naïve horror, intended to point the warning. A young man, who suffered from repeated epileptic fits, had tried every doctor and specialist in vain, when, as a last resort, he followed some friend's counsel of despair, and consulted a medium. The medium, having conferred with his familiar, handed the patient a little locket which he was to wear day and night about his neck, but never on any account to open. The spell that would save him from a repetition of his fits lay inside, but he must resist to the death the curiosity to read it. To the subsequent delight and amazement of everybody, the fits abruptly ceased; the man was cured; until one day, after years of obedience, curiosity overcame him; he opened the brief inscription, and fell down in a fit--dead. The wording, minutely written in red ink, ran as follows: "Let him alone till he drop into Hell!"
The warning, above all the story, acted as a stimulus instead of the reverse. Yet another strange door was set ajar; my eyes, big with wonder and questions, peered through. "Earth's Earliest Ages," by G. H. Pember, an evangelical, but an imaginative evangelical, was placed in my hands, accompanied by further solemn warnings. Pember, a writer of the prophetic school, had style, imagination, a sense of the marvellous, a touch of genuine drama too; he used suggestion admirably, his English was good, he had proportion, he knew where to stop. As a novelist of fantastic kind--an evangelical Wells, a "converted" Dunsany--he might have become a best-*seller. He had, moreover, a theme of high imaginative possibilities, based upon a sentence in Genesis (vi. 2)--"The Sons of God saw the Daughters of men that they were fair ... and took to themselves wives from among them ... and there were giants in the earth in those days...." These Sons of God were some kind of higher beings, mighty spirits, angels of a sort; but rather fallen angels; their progeny formed a race apart from humans; for some reason, now slipped from my memory, Pember was convinced that this unlawful procreation was being resumed in modern days. The Nephilim, as he called them, were aiming at control of the world, Anti-Christ, a gorgeous but appalling figure, naturally, at their head.
It was a magnificent theme; he treated it, within the limits he set himself, with ingenious conviction. The danger was imminent; the human race, while shuddering, must be on its guard. In the night, in the twinkling of an eye, the catastrophe might come. Signs the Nephilim brought with them were spiritualism, theosophy, the development of secret powers latent in man, a new and awful type of consciousness, magic, and all the rest of the "occult" movement that was beginning to show its hydra head about this time.
In a moment Moody went to the bottom of the class, and Pember reigned in his stead. By hook or by crook I obtained the books that Pember signalled as so dangerously subversive of the truth: "Magic Black and White" by Dr. Franz Hartmann; "The Perfect Way," by Anna Kingsford and Edward Maitland; "Esoteric Buddhism," by A. P. Sinnett; "Voice of the Silence," by Mabel Collins; "The Bhagavad Gita," from the Upanishads; and Emma Hardinge Britten's "History of American Spiritualism." My first delicious alarm lest the sky might fall any moment, and Satan appear with the great and terrible Nephilim princes to rule the world, became less threatening.... Soon afterwards, too, I happened upon my first novel, Laurence Oliphant's "Massollam," followed, a good deal later, by his "Scientific Religion" and his "Sympneumata." This history of his amazing subservience to Thomas Luke Harris helped to peel another thin skin from my eyes; Oliphant seemed a hero, but Harris a vile humbug. By this time other books had brought grist to the mill as well: Amiel's "Journal Intime"; Drummond's "Natural Law in the Spiritual World"--I knew Professor Drummond later, when he came to stay with us, and also when he lectured to the students at Edinburgh on Sunday nights, coming from his Glasgow Chair for the purpose: I can still see his large, glowing, far-seeing eyes--Cahagnet's "Arcanes de la Vie Future"; and "Animal Magnetism," by Binet and Féré. The experiments of Braid, and Dr. Esdaille in India, had also come my way.
Such one-sided reading, of course, fed the growing sense of wonder, naturally strong in any case; Shelley coloured it; and nothing offered itself at the time to curb, shape or qualify it. Spiritualism, apart from the exciting phenomena it promised with such confident volubility, left me rather unstirred, but theosophy, of course, I swallowed whole, with its Mahatmas, development of latent powers, memory of past lives, astral consciousness, and description of other beings both superior and inferior to man. It was some years before scientific reading came to check and guide a too exuberant imagination; but, even so I have always taken ideas where I found them, regardless of their propounders; if Tibet and its shining Mahatmas faded, the theories of Karma and reincarnation were older than any modern movement, and the belief in extension of consciousness to some nth degree, with its correlative of greater powers and new faculties, have not only remained with me, but have justified themselves. The "Gita," too, remains the profoundest world-scripture I have ever read.
An immediate, happy result of this odd reading, at any rate, I recall with pleasure: my father's Christianity became splendid in my eyes. I realized, even then, that it satisfied his particular and individual vision of truth, while the fact that he lived up to his beliefs nobly and consistently woke a new respect and admiration in me....
By far the strongest influence in my life, however, was Nature; it betrayed itself early, growing in intensity with every year. Bringing comfort, companionship, inspiration, joy, the spell of Nature has remained dominant, a truly magical spell. Always immense and potent, the years have strengthened it. The early feeling that everything was alive, a dim sense that some kind of consciousness struggled through every form, even that a sort of inarticulate communication with this "other life" was possible, could I but discover the way--these moods coloured its opening wonder. Nature, at any rate, produced effects in me that only something living could produce; though not till I read Fechner's "Zend-Avesta," and, later still, James's "Pluralistic Universe," and Dr. R. M. Bucke's "Cosmic Consciousness" did a possible meaning come to shape my emotional disorder. Fairy tales, in the meanwhile bored me. Real facts were what I sought. That these existed, that I had once known them but had now forgotten them, was thus an early imaginative conviction.
This tendency showed itself even in childhood. We
had left the Manor House, Crayford, and now lived in
a delightful house at Shortlands, in those days semi-country.
It was the time of my horrible private schools--I
went to four or five--but the holidays afforded opportunities....
I was a dreamy boy, frequently in tears about nothing except a vague horror of the practical world, full of wild fancies and imagination and a great believer in ghosts, communings with spirits and dealings with charms and amulets, which latter I invented and consecrated myself by the dozen. This was long before I had read a single book.
I loved to climb out of the windows at night with a ladder, and creep among the shadows of the kitchen garden, past the rose trees and under the fruit-tree wall, and so on to the pond where I could launch the boat and practise my incantations in the very middle among the floating weeds that covered the surface in great yellow-green patches. Trees grew closely round the banks, and even on clear nights the stars could hardly pierce through, and all sorts of beings watched me silently from the shore, crowding among the tree stems, and whispering to themselves about what I was doing.
I cannot say I ever believed actually that my spells would produce any results, but it pleased and thrilled me to think that they might do so; that the scum of weeds might slowly part to show the face of a water-nixie, or that the forms hovering on the banks might flit across to me and let me see their outline against the stars.
Everything I did and felt in this way was evolved out of my inner consciousness, and even after I had passed into long trousers I loved the night, the shadows, empty rooms and haunted woods.
On returning from these nightly expeditions to the pond, the sight of the old country-house against the sky always excited me strangely. Three cedars of Lebanon flanked it on the side I climbed out, towering aloft with their great funereal branches, and I thought of all the people asleep in their silent rooms, and wondered how they could be so dull and unenterprising, when out here they could see these sweeping branches and hear the wind sighing so beautifully among the needles. These people, it seemed to me at such moments, belonged to a different race. I had nothing in common with them. Night and stars and trees and wind and rain were the things I had to do with and wanted. They were alive and personal, stirring my depths within, full of messages and meanings, whereas my parents and sisters and brother, all indoors and asleep, were mere accidents, and apart from my real life and self. My friend the under-gardener always took the ladder away early in the morning.
Sometimes an elder sister accompanied me on these excursions. She, too, loved mystery, and the peopled darkness, but she was also practical. On returning to her room in the early morning we always found eggs ready to boil, cake and cold plum-pudding perhaps, or some such satisfying morsels to fill the void. She was always wonderful to me in those days. Very handsome, dark, with glowing eyes and a keen interest in the undertaking, she came down the ladder and stepped along the garden paths more like a fairy being than a mortal, and I always enjoyed the event twice as much when she accompanied me. In the day-time she faded back into the dull elder sister and seemed a different person altogether. I never reconcile the two.
This childish manifestation of an overpowering passion changed later, in form, of course, but not essentially much in spirit. Forests, mountains, desolate places, especially perhaps open spaces like the prairies or the desert, but even, too, the simple fields, the lanes, and little hills, offered an actual sense of companionship no human intercourse could possibly provide. In times of trouble, as equally in times of joy, it was to Nature I ever turned instinctively. In those moments of deepest feeling when individuals must necessarily be alone, yet stand at the same time in most urgent need of understanding companionship, it was Nature and Nature only that could comfort me. When the cable came, suddenly announcing my father's death, I ran straight into the woods.... This call sounded above all other calls, music coming so far behind it as to seem an "also ran." Even in those few, rare times of later life, when I fancied myself in love, this spell would operate--a sound of rain, a certain touch of colour in the sky, the scent of a wood-fire smoke, the lovely cry of some singing wind against the walls or window--and the human appeal would fade in me, or, at least, its transitory character become pitifully revealed. The strange sense of a oneness with Nature was an imperious and royal spell that over-mastered all other spells, nor can the hint of comedy lessen its reality. Its religious origin appears, perhaps, in the fact that sometimes, during its fullest manifestation, a desire stirred in me to leave a practical, utilitarian world I loathed and become--a monk!
Another effect, in troubled later years especially, was noticeable; its dwarfing effect upon the events, whatever they might be, of daily life. So intense, so flooding, was the elation of joy Nature brought, that after such moments even the gravest worldly matters, as well as the people concerned in these, seemed trivial and insignificant. Nature introduced a vaster scale of perspective against which a truer proportion appeared. There lay in the experience some cosmic touch of glory that, by contrast, left all else commonplace and unimportant. The great gods of wind and fire and earth and water swept by on flaming stars, and the ordinary life of the little planet seemed very small, man with his tiny passions and few years of struggle and vain longings, almost futile. One's own troubles, seen in this new perspective, disappeared, while, at the same time, the heart filled with an immense understanding love and charity towards all the world--which, alas, also soon disappeared.
It is difficult to put into intelligible, convincing words the irresistible character of this Nature-spell that invades heart and brain like a drenching sea, and produces a sense of rapture, of ecstasy, compared to which the highest conceivable worldly joy becomes merely insipid.... Heat from this magical source was always more or less present in my mind from a very early age, though, of course, no attempt to analyse or explain it was then possible; but, in bitter years to come, the joy and comfort Nature gave became a real and only solace. When possession was at its full height, the ordinary world, and my particular little troubles with it, fell away like so much dust; the whole fabric of men and women, commerce and politics, even the destinies of nations, became a passing show of shadows, while the visible and tangible world showed itself as but a temporary and limited representation of a real world elsewhere whose threshold I had for a moment touched.
Others, of course, have known similar experiences, but, being better equipped, have understood how to correlate them to ordinary life. Richard Jefferies explained them. Whitman tasted expansion of consciousness in many ways; Fechner made a grandiose system of them; Edward Carpenter deliberately welcomed them; Jacob Boehme, Plotinus, and many others have tried to fix their nature and essence in terms, respectively, of religion and philosophy; and William James has reviewed them with an insight as though he had had experienced them himself. Whatever their value, they remain authentic, the sense of oneness of life their common denominator, a conviction of consciousness pervading all forms everywhere their inseparable characteristic.
If Kentish gardens saw the birth of this delight, the Black Forest offered further opportunities for its enjoyment, and a year in a village of the Swiss Jura Mountains to learn French--I often wandered all night in the big pine forests without my tutor, a bee-keeping pasteur, at Bôle, near Neuchâtel, discovering my absence--intensified it. Without it something starved in me. It was a persistent craving, often a wasting nostalgia, that cried for satisfaction as the whole body cries for covering when cold, and Nature provided a companionship, a joy, a bliss, that no human intercourse has ever approached, much less equalled. It remains the keenest, deepest sensation of its kind I have known....
Here, in Toronto, opportunities multiplied, and just when they were needed: in times of difficulty and trouble the call of Nature became paramount; during the vicissitudes of dairy and hotel the wild hinterland behind the town, with its lakes and forests, were a haven often sought. Among my friends were many, of course, who enjoyed a day "in the country," but one man only who understood a little the feelings I have tried to describe, even if he did not wholly share them. This was Arnold Haultain, a married man, tied to an office all day long, private secretary to Goldwin Smith (whose life, I think, he subsequently wrote), and editor of a weekly periodical called The Week. He was my senior by many years.... At three in the morning, sometimes, he would call for me at the dairy in College Street, and we would tramp out miles to enjoy the magic of sunrise in a wood north of the city. And such an effort was only possible to a soul to whom it was a necessity.... The intensity of early dreams and aspirations, what energy lies in them! In later life, though they may have solidified and become part of the character, that original fiery energy is gone. A dreadful doggerel I wrote at this time, Haultain used in his paper, and its revealing betrayal of inner tendencies is the excuse for its reproduction here. It appeared the same week its author bought the Hub Hotel and started business with Kay, as "The Hub Wine Company."
Change dreaming to action and work; there's a God in your will.
Self-mastery and courage and confidence make a man free,
And doing is stronger than dreaming for good or for ill.
Begin with the dearest and crush some delight-giving sin
Right out of your life, with a purpose of death before sleep;
A passion controlled is an index of power within.
With ruthless self-torture continue, nor half an inch yield,
Step fearless and bravely; hold on and believe--you won't fall;
Companions you've none but the best on this grim battle-*field.
Steel purpose maintain; let it be the first aim of your life;
Beware of those mushroom resolves as impulsive as fleet,
And remember, the nobler the end the more deadly the strife.
And the ladder, by which you must climb to yon far starry height,
Is of cast-iron rungs from the furnace of suffering and pain.
Then forward; and courage! from darkness to truth's golden light.