Part 6 (1/2)

Wherewithal then shall a young man cleanse his way; and how shall he keep his mind immune to Theosophical speculations, and novel schemes of Salvation?

Can he ever be sure that he won't be suddenly struck down by the fever of Funeral, or of Spelling Reform, or take to his bed with a new s.e.x Theory?

But is this struggle for a healthy mind in a maggoty universe really after all worth it? Are there not soporific dreams and sweet deliriums more soothing than Reason? If Transmigration can make clear the dark Problem of Evil; if Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy can free us from the dominion of Death; if the belief that Bacon wrote Shakespeare gives a peace that the world cannot give, why pedantically reject such kindly solace? Why not be led with the others by still waters, and be made to lie down in green pastures?

_The Quest_

”We walk alone in the world,” the Moralist, at the end of his essay on Ideal Friends.h.i.+p, writes somewhat sadly, ”Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables,” Yet we never quite give up the hope of finding them. But what awful things happen to us?

what snubs, what set-downs we experience, what shames and disillusions. We can never really tell what these new unknown persons may do to us. Sometimes they seem nice, and then begin to talk like gramophones. Sometimes they grab at us with moist hands, or breathe hotly on our necks, or make awful confidences, or drench us from sentimental slop-pails. And too often, among the thoughts in the loveliest heads, we come on nests of woolly caterpillars.

And yet we brush our hats, pull on our gloves, and go out and ring door-bells.

_The Kaleidoscope_

I find in my mind, in its miscellany of ideas and musings, a curious collection of little landscapes and pictures, s.h.i.+ning and fading for no reason. Sometimes they are views in no way remarkable-the corner of a road, a heap of stones, an old gate.

But there are many charming pictures, too: as I read, between my eyes and book, the Moon sheds down on harvest fields her chill of silver; I see autumnal avenues, with the leaves falling, or swept in heaps; and storms blow among my thoughts, with the rain beating forever on the fields. Then Winter's upward glare of snow appears; or the pink and delicate green of Spring in the windy suns.h.i.+ne; or cornfields and green waters, and youths bathing in Summer's golden heats.

And as I walk about, certain places haunt me: a cathedral rises above a dark blue foreign town, the colour of ivory in the sunset light; now I find myself in a French garden full of lilacs and bees, and shut-in suns.h.i.+ne, with the Mediterranean lounging and was.h.i.+ng outside its walls; now in a little college library, with busts, and the green reflected light of Oxford lawns--and again I hear the bells, reminding me of the familiar Oxford hours.

_Oxford Street_

One late winter afternoon in Oxford Street, amid the noise of vehicles and voices that filled that dusky thoroughfare, as I was borne onward with the crowd past the great electric-lighted shops, a holy Indifference filled my thoughts. Illusion had faded from me; I was not touched by any desire for the goods displayed in those golden windows, nor had I the smallest share in the appet.i.tes and fears of all those moving and anxious faces. And as I listened with Asiatic detachment to the London traffic, its sound changed into something ancient and dissonant and sad--into the turbid flow of that stream of Craving which sweeps men onward through the meaningless cycles of Existence, blind and enslaved forever. But I had reached the farther sh.o.r.e, the Harbour of Deliverance, the Holy City; the Great Peace beyond all this turmoil and fret compa.s.sed me around. _Om Mani padme hum_--I murmured the sacred syllables, smiling with the pitying smile of the Enlightened One on his heavenly lotus.

Then, in a shop-window, I saw a neatly fitted suit-case. I liked that suit-case; I desired to possess it. Immediately I was enveloped by the mists of Illusion, chained once more to the Wheel of Existence, whirled onward along Oxford Street in that turbid stream of wrong-belief, and l.u.s.t, and sorrow, and anger.

_Beauty_

Among all the ugly mugs of the world we see now and then a face made after the divine pattern. Then, a wonderful thing happens to us; the Blue Bird sings, the golden Splendour s.h.i.+nes, and for a queer moment everything seems meaningless save our impulse to follow those fair forms, to follow them to the clear Paradises they promise.

Plato a.s.sures us that these moments are not (as we are apt to think them) mere blurs and delusions of the senses, but divine revelations; that in a lovely face we see imaged, as in a mirror, the Absolute Beauty--; it is Reality, flas.h.i.+ng on us in the cave where we dwell amid shadows and darkness. Therefore we should follow these fair forms, and their s.h.i.+ning footsteps will lead us upward to the highest heaven of Wisdom. The Poets, too, keep chanting this great doctrine of Beauty in grave notes to their golden strings. Its music floats up through the skies so sweet, so strange, that the very Angels seem to lean from their stars to listen.

But, O Plato, O Sh.e.l.ley, O Angels of Heaven, what sc.r.a.pes you do get us into!