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Title: The Crest-Wave of Evolution

Author: Kenneth Morris

Release Date: January 4, 2005  [eBook #14587]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE CREST-WAVE OF EVOLUTION***


E-text prepared by M. R. Jaqua



THE CREST-WAVE OF EVOLUTION

A Course of Lectures in History, Given to the Graduates' Class in the
Raja-Yoga College, Point Loma, in the College-Year 1918-1919.*

by

KENNETH MORRIS







CONTENTS

    I.  INTRODUCTION
   II.  HOMER
  III.  GREEKS AND PERSIANS
   IV.  AESCHYLUS AND ATHENS
    V.  SOME PERICLEAN FIGURES
   VI.  SOCRATES AND PLATO
  VII.  THE MAURYAS OF INDIA
 VIII.  THE BLACK-HAIRED PEOPLE
   IX.  THE DRAGON AND THE BLUE PEARL
    X.  "SUCH A ONE"
   XI.  CONFUCIUS THE HERO
  XII.  TALES FROM A TAOIST TEACHER
 XIII.  MANG THE PHILOSOPHER, AND BUTTERFLY CHWANG
  XIV.  THE MANVANTARA OPENS
   XV.  SOME POSSIBLE EPOCHS IN SANSKRIT LITERATURE
  XVI.  THE BEGINNINGS OF ROME
 XVII.  ROME PARVENUE
XVIII.  AUGUSTUS
  XIX.  AN IMPERIAL SACRIFICE
   XX.  CHINA AND ROME:  THE SEE-SAW
  XXI.  CHINA AND ROME:  THE SEE-SAW (Continued)
 XXII.  EASTWARD HO!
XXIII.  "THE DRAGON, THE APOSTATE, THE GREAT MIND"
 XXIV.  FROM JULIAN TO BODHIDHARMA
  XXV.  TOWARDS THE ISLANDS OF THE SUNSET
 XXVI.  "SACRED IERNE OF THE HIBERNIANS"
XXVII.  THE IRISH ILLUMINATION

------------
*  Serialized in _Theosophical Path_ in 27 Chapters from
March, 1919 through July, 1921.
-----------



I.  INTRODUCTORY

These lectures will not be concerned with history as a record
of wars and political changes; they will have little to tell
of battles, murders, and sudden deaths.  Instead, we shall
try to discover and throw light on the cyclic movements of
the Human Spirit.  Back of all phenomena, or the outward show
of things, there is always a noumenon in the unseen.  Behind
the phenomena of human history, the noumenon is the Human
Spirit, moving in accordance with its own necessities and
cyclic laws.  We may, if we go to it intelligently, gain some
inkling of knowledge as to what those laws are; and I think
that would be, in its way, a real wisdom, and worth getting.
But for the most part historical study seeks knowledge only;
and how it attains its aim, is shown by the falseness of what
passes for history.  In most textbooks you shall find, probably,
a round dozen of lies on as many pages.  And these in themselves
are fruitful seeds of evil; they by no means end with the
telling, but go on producing harvests of wrong life; which
indeed is only the Lie incarnate on the plane of action.  The
Eternal _Right Thing_ is what is called in Sanskrit SAT, the
True; it opposite is the Lie, in one fashion or another, always;
and what we have to do, our mission and _raison d'etre_ as
students of Theosophy, is to put down the Lie at every turn,
and chase it, as far as we may, out of the field of life.

For example, there is the Superior-Race Lie:  I do not know
where it shall not be found.  Races A, B, C, and D go on
preaching it for centuries; each with an eye to its sublime
self.  In all countries, perhaps, history is taught with that
lie for mental background.  Then we wonder that there are wars.
But Theosophy is called onto provide a true mental background
for historical study; and it alone can do so.  It is the
mission of Point Loma, among many other things, to float a
true philosophy of history on to the currents of world-thought:
and for this end it is our business to be thinkers, using the
divine Manasic light within us to some purpose.  H.P. Blavatsky
supplied something much greater than a dogma:  she--like Plato
--gave the world a method and a spur to thought:  pointed for
it a direction, which following, it might solve all problems
and heal the wounds of the ages.

A false and foolish notion in the western world has been,
tacitly to accept the Greeks and Hebrews of old for the two
fountains of all culture since; the one in secular matter,
the other in religion and morality.  Of the Hebrews nothing
need be said here; but that true religion and morality have
their source in the ever-living Human Spirit, not in any sect,
creed, race, age, or bible.  I doubt there has been any new
discovery in ethics since man was man; or rather, all discoveries
have been made by individuals for themselves; and each, having
discovered anything, has found that that same principle was
discovered a thousand times before, and written a thousand times.
 There is no platitude so platitudinous, but it remains to burst
upon the perceptions of all who have not yet perceived it, as a
new and burning truth; and on the other hand, there is no
startling command to purity or compassion, that has not been
given out by Teachers since the world began.--As for Greece,
there was a brilliant flaming up of the Spirit there in the
Fourth and Fifth Centuries B.C.; and its intensity, like the
lights of an approaching automobile, rather obscures what lies
beyond.  It is the first of which we have much knowledge; so we
think it was the first of all.  But in fact civilization has been
traveling its cyclic path all the time, all these millions of
years; and there have been hundreds of ancient great empires and
cultural epochs even in Europe of which we know nothing.

I had intended to begin with Greece; but these unexplored eras
of old Europe are too attractive, and this first lecture must go
to them, or some of them.  Not to the antecedents of Greece, in
Crete and elsewhere; but to the undiscovered North; and in
particular to the Celtic peoples; who may serve us as an example
by means of which light may be thrown on the question of racial
growth, and on the racial cycles generally.

The Celtic Empire of old Europe affects us like some mysterious
undiscovered planet.  We know it was there by its effects on
other peoples.  Also, like many other forgotten histories, it has
left indications of its achievement in a certain spirit, an
uplift, the breath of an old traditional grandeur that has come
down.  But to give any historical account of it--to get a
telescope that will reach and reveal it--we have not to come to
that point yet.

Still, it may be allowed us to experiment with all sorts of
glasses.  To penetrate that gloom of ancient Europe may be quite
beyond us; but guessing is permitted.  Now the true art of
guessing lies in an intuition for guiding indications.  There is
something in us that knows things directly; and it may deign at
times to give hints, to direct the researches, to flash some
little light on that part of us which works and is conscious in
this world, and which we call our brain-minds.  So although
most or all of what I am going to say would be called by the
scientific strictly empirical, fantastic and foolish, yet I shall
venture; aware that their Aristotelio-Baconian method quite
breaks down when it comes to such a search into the unknown; and
that this guessing, guided by what seems to be a law, would not,
perhaps, have been sneered at by Plato.

Guided by what seems to be a law;--guided, at any rate, by the
knowledge that there are laws; that "God geometrizes," as Plato
says:  that which is within flows outward upon a design; that
life precipitates itself through human affairs as it does through
the forms of the crystals; that there is nothing more haphazard
about the sequence of empires and civilizations, than there is
about the unfolding of petals of a flower.  In both cases it is
the eternal rhythm, the Poetry of the Infinite, that manifests;
our business is to listen so carefully as to hear, and apprehend
the fact that what we hear is a poetry, a vast music, not a
chaotic cacophony:  catch the rhythms--perceive that there is a
design--even if it takes us long to discover what the design
may be.

You know Plato's idea that the world is a dodecahedron or
twelve-sided figure.  Now in Plato's day, much that every
schoolboy knows now, was esoteric--known only to the initiated.
So I think Plato would have known well enough that this physical
earth is round; and that what he meant when he spoke of the
dodecahedron, was something else.  This, for example: that on
the plane of causes--this outer plane being that of effects
--there are twelve (geographical) centers, aspects, foci,
facets, or what you like to call them:  twelve _laya centers,_
as I think the Secret Doctrine would say:  through which
the forces from within play on the world without.  You have
read, too, in _The Secret Doctrine,_ Professor Crooke's theory,
endorsed by H.P. Blavatsky, as to how the chemical elements
were deposited by a spiral evolutive force, a creative impulse
working outward in the form of a caduceus or lemniscate, or
figure '8.'  Now suppose we should discover that just as
that force deposited in space, in its spiral down-working,
what Crookes calls the seeds of potassium, beryllium, boron,
and the rest--so such another creative force, at work on the
planes of geographical space and time, rouses up or deposits
in these, according to a definite pattern, this nation and that
in its turn, this great age of culture after that one; and that
there is nothing hap-hazard about the configuration of continents
and islands, national boundaries, or racial migrations?

H.P. Blavatsky tells us that the whole past history of the race
is known to the Guardians of the Secret Wisdom; that it is all
recorded, nothing lost; down to the story of every tribe since
the Lords of Mind incarnated.  And that these records are in the
form of a few symbols; but symbols which, to those who can
interpret or disintegrate them, can yield the whole story.  What
if the amount of the burden of history, which seems so vast to us
who know so very little of it, were in reality, if we could know
it all, a thing that would put but slight tax on the memory; a
thing we might carry with us in a few slight formulae, a few
simple symbols?  I believe that it is so; and that we may make a
beginning, and go some little way towards guessing what these
formulae are.

As thus:  A given race flowered and passed; it had so many
centuries of history before its flowering; it died, and left
something behind.  Greece, for example.  We may know very little
--you and I may know very little--of the details of Greek history.
We cannot, perhaps, remember the date of Aegospotami, or what
happened at Plataea:  we may have the vaguest notion of the
import of Aeschylus, or Sophocles, or Plato.  But still there is
a certain color in our conscious perceptions which comes from
Greece:  the 'glory that was Greece' means something, is a
certain light within the consciousness, to everyone of us.  The
Greeks added something to the wealth of the human spirit, which
we all may share in, and do. An atmosphere is left, which
surrounds and adheres to the many tangible memorials; just as an
atmosphere is left by the glories of the Cinquecento in Italy,
with its many tangible memorials.

But indeed, we may go further, and say that an atmosphere is
left, and that we can feel it, by many ages and cultures
which have left no tangible memorials at all; or but few and
uninterpretable ones, like the Celtic.  And that each has
developed some mood, some indefinable inward color--which we
perceive and inherit.  Each different: you cannot mistake the
Chinese or the Celtic color for the Greek; thought it might be
hard to define your perception of either, or of their difference.
It would be hard to say, for instance, that this one was crimson,
the other blue; not quite so hard to say that this one affects
us as crimson does, that other as blue does.   And  yet we can
see, I think, that by chasing our impressions to their source,
there might be some way of presenting them in symbolic form.
There might be some way of reducing what we feel from the Greeks,
or Chinese, or Celts, into a word, a sentence; of writing it down
even in  a single hieroglyph, of which the elements would be such
as should convey to something in us behind the intellect just the
indefinable feeling either of these people give us.

In the Chinese writing, with all its difficulty, there is
something superior to our alphabets:  an element that appeals to
the soul directly, or to the imagination directly, I think.
Suppose you found a Chinese ideogram--of course there is no such
a one--to express the forgotten Celtic culture; and it proved in
analysis, to be composed of the signs for twilight, wind, and
pine trees; or wind, night, and wild waters; with certain other
elements which not the brain-mind, but the creative soul, would
have to supply.  In such a symbol there would be an appeal to the
imagination--that great Wizard within us--to rise up and supply
us with quantities of knowledge left unsaid.  Indeed, I am but
trying to illustrate an idea, possibilities.... I think there is
a power within the human soul to trace back all growths, the most
profuse and complex, to the simple seed from which they sprung;
or, just as a single rose or pansy bloom is the resultant, the
expression, of the interaction and interplay of innumerable
forces--so the innumerable forces whose interaction makes the
history of one race, one culture, could find their ultimate
expression in a symbol as simple as a pansy or rose bloom--color,
form and fragrance.  So each national great age would be a flower
evolved in the garden of the eternal; and once evolved, once
bloomed, it should never pass away; the actual blossom withers
and falls; but the color, the form, the fragrance,--these remain
in the world of causes.  And just as you might press a flower in
an album, or make a painting of it, and preserve its scent by
chemical distillation or what not--and thereby preserve the
whole story of all the forces that went to the production of
that bloom--and they are, I suppose, in number beyond human
computation--so you might express the history of a race in a
symbol as simple as a bloom... And that there is a power, an
unfolding faculty, in the soul, which, seeing such a symbol,
could unravel from it, by meditation, the whole achievement of
the race; its whole history, down to details; yes, even down to
the lives of every soul that incarnated in it:  their personal
lives, with all successes, failures, attempts, everything.
Because, for example, the light which comes down to us as that of
ancient Greece is the resultant, the remainder of all the forces
in all the lives of all individual Greeks, as these were played
on by the conditions of place and time.  Time:--at such and such
a period, the Mood of the Oversoul is such and such. Place:--the
temporal mood of the Oversoul, playing through that particular
facet of the dodecahedron, which is Greece.  The combinations and
interplay of these two, plus the energies for good or evil of the
souls there incarnate, give as their resultant the whole life of
the race.  There is perhaps a high Algebra of the Soul by which,
if we understood its laws, we could revive the history of
any past epoch, discover its thought and modes of living, as
we discover the value of the unknown factor in an equation.
Pythagoras must have his pupils understand music and geometry;
and by music he intended, all the arts, every department of life
that came under the sway of the Nine Muses.  Why?--Because, as he
taught, God is Poet and Geometer.  Chaos is only on the outer rim
of existence; as you get nearer the heart of thing, order and
rhythm, geometry and poetry, are more and more found.  Chaos is
only in our own chaotic minds and perceptions:  train these
aright, and you shall hear the music of the spheres, perceive the
reign of everlasting Law.  These impulses from the Oversoul, that
create the great epochs, raising one race after another, have
perfect rhythm and rhyme.  God sits harping in the Cycle of
Infinity, and human history is the far faint echo of the tune he
plays.  Why can we not listen, till we hear and apprehend the
tune?  Or History is the sound heard from far, of the marching
hosts of angels and archangels; the cyclic tread of their
battalions; the thrill and rumble and splendor of their drums and
fifes:--why should we not listen till the whole order of their
cohorts and squadrons is revealed?--I mean to suggest that there
are laws, undiscovered, but discoverable--discoverable from the
fragments of history we possess--by knowing which we might gain
knowledge, even without further material discoveries, of the lost
history of man.  Without moving from Point Loma, or digging up
anything more important that hard-pan, we may yet make the most
important finds, and throw floods of light on the whole dark
problem of the past.  H.P. Blavatsky gave us the clews; we owe it
to her to use them.

Now I want to suggest a few ideas along these lines that may
throw light on ancient Europe; of which orthodox history tells us
of nothing but the few centuries of Greece and Rome.  As if the
people of three thousand years hence should know, of the history
of Christendom, only that of Italy from Garibaldi onward, and
that of Greece beginning, say, at the Second Balkan War.  That is
the position we are in with regard to old Europe.  Very like
Spain, France, Britain, Germany and Scandinavia played as great
parts in the millennia B.C., as they have done in the times we
know about. All analogy from the other seats of civilization is
for it; all racial memories and traditions--tradition is racial
memory--are for it; and I venture to say, all reason and common
sense are for it too.

Now I have to remind you of certain conclusions worked out in an
article 'Cyclic Law in History,' which appeared some time back in
_The Theosophical Path:_--that there are, for example, three
great centers of historical activity in the Old World:  China and
her surroundings; West Asia and Egypt; Europe.  Perhaps these are
major facets of the dodecahedron.  Perhaps again, were the facts
in our knowledge not so desperately incomplete, we should find,
as in the notes and colors, a set of octaves: that each of these
centers was a complete octave, and each phase or nation a note.
Do you see where these leads?  Supposing the note _China_ is
struck in the Far Eastern Octave; would there not be a vibration
of some corresponding note in the octave Europe?  Supposing the
Octave _West Asia_ were under the fingers of the Great Player,
would not the corresponding note in Europe vibrate?

Now let us look at history.  Right on the eastern rim of the Old
World is the Chino-Japanese field of civilization.  It has been,
until lately, under pralaya, in a night or inactive period of its
existence, for something over six centuries:  a beautiful pralaya
in the case of Japan; a rather ugly one, recently, in the case
of China.  Right on the western rim of the Old World are the
remnants of the once great Celtic people.  Europe at large has
been very much in manvantara, a day or waking period, for a
little over six hundred years.  Yet of the four racial roots or
stocks of Europe, the Greco-Latin, Teutonic, Slavic, and Celtic,
the last-named alone has been under pralaya, sound asleep, during
the whole of this time.  Let me interject here the warning that
it is no complete scheme that is to be offered; only a few facts
that suggest that such a scheme may exist, could we find it.
Before Europe awoke to her present cycle of civilization and
progress, before the last quarter of the thirteenth century, the
Chinese had been in manvantara, very much awake, for about
fifteen hundred years.  When they went to sleep, the Celts
did also.

I pass by with a mere note of recognition the two dragons, the
one on the Chinese, the other on the Welsh flag; just saying
that national symbols are not chose haphazard, but are an
expression of inner things; and proceed to give you the dates of
all the important events in Chinese and Celtic, chiefly Welsh,
history during the last two thousand years.  In 1911 the Chinese
threw off the Manchu yoke and established a native republic.  In
1910 the British Government first recognized Wales as a separate
nationality, when the heir to the throne was invested as Prince
of Wales at Carnarvon.  Within a few years a bill was passed
giving Home Rule to Ireland; and national parliaments at Dublin
and at Cardiff are said to be among the likelihoods of the near
future.  The eighteenth century, for manvantara, was a singularly
dead time in Europe; but in China, for pralaya, it was a
singularly living time, being filled with the glorious reigns of
the Manchu emperors Kanghu and Kien Lung.  In Wales it saw the
religious revival which put a stop to the utter Anglicization of
the country, saved the language from rapid extinction, and
awakened for the first time for centuries a sort of national
consciousness.   Going back, the first great emperor we come to
in China before the Manchu conquest, was Ming Yunglo, conqueror
of half Asia.  His contemporary in Wales was Owen Glyndwr, who
succeeded in holding the country against the English for a number
of years; there had been no Welsh history between Glyndwr and
the religious revival.  In 1260 or thereabouts the Mongols
completed the conquest of China, and dealt her then flourishing
civilization a blow from which it never really recovered.  About
twenty years later the English completed the conquest of Wales,
and dealt her highly promising literary culture a blow from which
it is only now perhaps beginning to recover.  In the eleventh,
twelfth, and thirteenth centuries the great Sung artists of China
were painting infinity or their square feet of silk:  painting
Natural Magic as it has never been painted or revealed since.  In
those same centuries the Welsh bards were writing the Natural
Magic of the Mabinogion, one of the chief European repositories
of Natural Magic; and filling a remarkable poetical literature
with the same quality:--and that before the rest of Europe
had, for the most part, awakened to the spiritual impulses
that lead to civilization.  In the seventh and eighth centuries,
when continental Europe was in the dead vast and middle of
pralaya, Chinese poetry, under Tang Hsuan-tsong and his great
predecessors, was in its Golden Age--a Golden Age comparable to
that of Pericles in Athens.  In the seventh and eighth centuries,
Ireland was sending out scholars and thinkers as missionaries to
all parts of benighted Europe:  Ireland in her golden age, the
one highly cultured country in Christendom, was producing a
glorious prose and poetry in the many universities that starred
that then by no means distressful island.  In 420, China, after a
couple of centuries of anarchy, began to re-establish her
civilization on the banks of the Yangtse.  In 410, the Britons
finally threw off the Roman yoke, and the first age of Welsh
poetry, the epoch of Arthur and Taliesin, which has been the
light of romantic Europe ever since, began.

Does it not seem as if that great Far Eastern note could not
be struck without this little far western note vibrating in
sympathy?  Very faintly; not in a manner to be heard clearly by
the world; because in historical times the Celtic note has been
as it were far up on the keyboard, and never directly under the
Master-Musician's fingers.  And when you add to it all that this
Celtic note has come in the minds of literary critics rather to
stand as the synonym for Natural Magic--you all know what is
meant by that term;--and that now, as we are discovering the old
Chinese poetry and painting, we are finding that Natural Magic is
really far more Chinese than Celtic--that where we Celts have
vibrated to it minorly, the great Chinese gave it out fully and
grandly--does it not add to the piquancy of the 'coincidence?'

Now there is no particular reason for doubting the figures of
Chinese chronology as far back as 2350 B.C.  Our Western
authorities do doubt all before about 750; but it is hard to see
why, except that 'it is their nature to.'  The Chinese give the
year 2356 as the date of the accession of the Emperor Yao, first
of the three canonized rulers who have been the patriarchs,
saints, sages, and examples for all ages since.  In that decade a
manvantara of the race would seem to have begun, which lasted
through the dynasties of Hia and Shang, and halfway through the
Chow, ending about 850.  During this period, then, I think
presently we shall come to place the chief activities and
civilization of the Celts.  From 850 to 240--all these figures
are of course approximations:  there was pralaya in China;
on the other side of the world, it was the period of Celtic
eruptions--and probably, disruption.  While Tsin Shi Hwangti,
from 246 to 213, was establishing the modern Chinese Empire, the
Gauls made their last incursion into Italy.  The culmination of
the age Shi Hwangti inaugurated came in the reign of Han Wuti,
traditionally the most glorious in the Chines annals.  It
lasted from 140 to 86 B.C.; nor was there any decline under his
successor, who reigned until 63.  In the middle of that time--the
last decade of the second century--the Cimbri, allied with the
Teutones, made their incursion down into Spain.  Opinion is
divided as to whether this people was Celtic or Teutonic; but
probably the old view is the true one, that the word is akin to
Cimerii, Crimea, and Cymry, and that they were Welshmen in their
day.  When Caesar was in Gaul, the people he conquered had much
to say about their last great king.  Diviciacos, whose dominions
included Gaul and Britain; they looked back to his reign as a
period of great splendor and national strength.  He lived, they
said, about a hundred years before Caesar's coming--or was
contemporary with Han Wuti.

But the empire of the Celtic Kings was already far fallen, before
it was confined to Gaul, Britain, and perhaps Ireland.  When
first we see this people they were winning a name for fickleness
of purpose:  making conquests and throwing them away; which
things are the marks of a race declining from a high eminence it
had won of old through hard work and sound policy.  We shall come
to see that personal or outward characteristics can never be
posited as inherent in any race.  Such things belong to ages and
stages in the race's growth.  Whatever you can say of Englishmen,
Frenchmen, Germans, now, has been totally untrue of them at some
other period.  We think of the Italians as passionate, subtle of
intellect, above all things artistic and beauty-loving.  Now
look at them as they were three centuries B.C.:  plodding, self-
contained and self-mastered, square-dealing and unsubtle, above
all things contemning beauty, wholly inartistic.  But a race may
retain the same traits for a very long time, if it remains in a
back-water, and is unaffected by the currents of evolution.

So we may safely say of the Celts that the fickleness for which
they were famed in Roman times was not a racial, but a temporal
or epochal defect.  They were not fickle when they held out (in
Wales) for eight centuries against the barbarian onslaughts which
brought the rest of the Roman empire down in two or three; or
when they resisted for two hundred years those Normans who had
conquered the Anglo-Saxons in a decade.  This very quality, in
old Welsh literature, is more than once given as a characteristic
of extreme age; "I am old, bent double; I am fickly rash." says
Llywarch Hen.  I think that gives the clew to the whole position.
The race was at the end of its manvantaric period; the Race Soul
had lost control of the forces that bound its organism together;
centrifugalism had taken the place of the centripetal impulse
that marks the cycles of youth and growth.  It had eaten into
individual character; whence the tendency to fly off at
tangents.  We see the same thing in any decadent people; by
which I mean, any people at the end of one of its manvantaras,
and on the verge of a pralaya.  And remember that a pralaya, like
a night's rest or the Devachanic sleep between two lives, is
simply a means for restoring strength and youth.

How great the Celtic nations had been in their day, and what
settled and civilized centuries lay behind them, one may gather
from two not much noticed facts.  First: Caesar, conqueror of the
Roman world and of Pompey, the greatest Roman general of the day,
landed twice in Britain, and spent a few weeks there without
accomplishing anything in particular.  But it was the central
seat and last stronghold of the Celts; and his greatest triumph
was accorded him for this feat; and he was prouder of it than
anything else he ever did.  He set it above his victories over
Pompey. Second:  the Gauls, in the first century B.C., were able
to put in the field against him three million men:  not so far
short of the number France has been able to put in the field
in the recent war.  Napoleon could hardly, I suppose, have
raised such an army--in France.  Caesar is said to have killed
some five million Gauls before he conquered them.  By ordinary
computations, that would argue a population of some thirty
millions in the Gaulish half of the kingdom of Diviciacos a
century after the latter's death; and even if that computation
is too high, it leaves the fact irrefutable that there was a very
large population; and a large population means always a long and
settled civilization.

Diviciacos ruled only Gaul and Britain; possible Ireland as
well; he may have been a Gaul, a Briton, or an Irishman; very
likely there was not much difference in those days.  It will be
said I am leaving out of account much that recent scholarship has
divulged; I certainly am leaving out of account a great many of
the theories of recent scholarship, which for the most part make
confusion worse confounded.  But we know that the lands held by
the Celts--let us boldly say, with many of the most learned, the
Celtic empire--was vastly larger in its prime than the British
Isles and France.  Its eastern outpost was Galatia in Asia Minor.
You may have read in _The Outlook_ some months ago an article by
a learned Serbian, in which he claims that the Jugo-Slavs of the
Balkans, his countrymen, are about half Celtic; the product of
the fusion of Slavic in-comers, perhaps conquerors, with an
original Celtic population.  Bohemia was once the land of the
Celtic Boii; and we may take it as an axiom, that no conquest,
no racial incursion, ever succeeds in wiping out the conquered
people; unless there is such wide disparity, racial and
cultural, as existed, for example, between the white settlers in
America and the Indians.  There are forces in human nature itself
which make this absolute.  The conquerors may quite silence the
conquered; may treat them with infinite cruelty; may blot out
all their records and destroy the memory of their race; but the
blood of the conquered will go on flowing through all the
generation of the children of the conquerors, and even, it seems
probable, tend ever more and more to be the prevalent element.

The Celts, then, at one time or another, have held the following
lands:  Britain and Ireland, of course; Gaul and Spain;
Switzerland and Italy north of the Po; Germany, except perhaps
some parts of Prussia; Denmark probably, which as you know was
called the Cimbric Chersonese; the Austrian empire, with the
Balkan Peninsula north of Macedonia, Epirus and Thrace, and much
of southern Russia and the lands bordering the Black Sea.
Further back, it seems probable that they and the Italic people
were one race; whose name survives in that of the province of
Liguria, and in the Welsh name for England, which is Lloegr.  So
that in the reign of Diviciacos their empire had already shrunk
to the meerest fragment of its former self.   It had broken and
shrunk before we get the first historical glimpses of them;
before they sacked Delphi in 279 B.C.:  before their ambassadors
made a treaty with Alexander; and replied to his question as to
what they feared: "Nothing except that the skies should fall."
Before they sacked Rome in 390.  All these historic eruptions
were the mere sporadic outburst of a race long past its prime and
querulous with old age, I think  Two thousand years of severe
pralaya, almost complete extinction, utter insignificance and
terrible karma awaited them; and we only see them, pardon the
expression, kicking up their heels in a final plunge as a
preparation for that long silence.

Some time back I discussed these historical questions, particularly
the correspondence between Celtic and Chinese dates, with
Dr. Siren and Professor Fernholm; and they pointed out to
me a similar correspondence between the dates of Scandinavian
and West Asian history.  I can remember but one example now:
Gustavus Vasa, father of modern Sweden, founder of the present
monarchy, came to the throne in 1523 and died in 1560.  The last
great epoch of the West Asian Cycle coincides, in the west, and
reign of Suleyman the Magnificent in Turkey, from 1520 to 1566.
At its eastern extremity, Babar founded the Mogul Empire in India
in 1526; he reigned until 1556.  On the death of Aurangzeb in
1707, the Moguls ceased to be a great power; the Battle of
Pultowa, in 1709, put an end to Sweden's military greatness.

It is interesting to compare the earliest Celtic literature we
have, with the earliest literature of the race which was to be
the main instrument of Celtic bad karma in historical times--the
Teutons.  Here, as usual, common impressions are false.  It is
the latter, the Teutonic, that is in the minor key, and full
of wistful sadness.  There is an earnestness about it:  a
recognition of, and rather mournful acquiescence in, the
mightiness of Fate, which is imagined almost always adverse.  I
quote these lines from William Morris, who, a Celt himself by
mere blood and race, lived in and interpreted the old Teutonic
spirit as no other English writer has attempted to do, mush less
succeeded in doing:  he is the one Teuton of English literature.
He speaks of the "haunting melancholy" of the northern races--the
"Thought of the Otherwhere" that

     "Waileth weirdly along through all music and song
     From a Teuton's voice or string: ..."

Withal it was a brave melancholy that possessed them; they were
equal to great deeds, and not easily to be discouraged; they
could make merry, too; but in the midst of their merriment, they
could not forget grim and hostile Fate:--

     "There dwelt men merry-hearted and in hope exceeding great,
     Met the good days and the evil as they went the ways of fate."

It is literature that reveals the heart of a people who had
suffered long, and learnt from their suffering the lessons of
patience, humility, continuity of effort:  those qualities which
enable them, in their coming manvantaric period, to dominate
large portions of the world.

But when we turn to the Celtic remains, the picture we find is
altogether different.  Their literature tells of a people, in the
Biblical phrase, "with a proud look and a high stomach."  It is
full of flashing colors, gaiety, titanic pride.  There was no
grayness, no mournful twilight hue on the horizon of their mind;
their 'Other-World' was only more dawn-lit, more noon-illumined,
than this one; Ireland of the living was sun-bright and
sparkling and glorious; but the 'Great Plain' of the dead was
far more sun-bright and sparkling than Ireland.  It is the
literature of a people accustomed to victory and predominance.
When they began to meet defeat they by no means acquiesced in
it.  They regarded adverse fate, not with reverence, but with
contempt.  They saw in sorrow no friend and instructress of the
human soul; were at pains to learn no lesson from her; instead,
they pitted what was their pride, but what they would have called
the glory of their own souls, against her; they made no terms,
asked no truce; but went on believing the human--or perhaps I
should say the Celtic--soul more glorious than fate, stronger to
endure and defy than she to humiliate and torment.  In many sense
it was a fatal attitude, and they reaped the misery of it; but
they gained some wealth for the human spirit from it too.  The
aged Oisin has returned from Fairyland to find the old glorious
order in Ireland fallen and passed during the three centuries of
his absence.  High Paganism has gone, and a religion meek,
inglorious, and Unceltic has taken its mission thereto:  tells
him the gods are conquered and dead, and that the omnipotent God
of the Christians reigns alone now.--"I would thy God were set on
yonder hill to fight with my son Oscar!" replies Oisin.  Patrick
paints for him the hell to which he is destined unless he accepts
Christianity; and Oisin answers:

     "Put the staff in my hands! for I go to the Fenians, thou
         cleric, to chant
     The warsongs that roused them of old; they will rise,
         making clouds with their breath.
     Innumerable, singing, exultant; and hell underneath them
         shall pant,
     And demons be broken in pieces, and trampled beneath them
         in death."

"No," says Patrick; "none war on the masters of hell, who could
break up the world in their rage"; and bids him weep and kneel in
prayer for his lost soul.  But that will not do for the old
Celtic warrior bard; no tame heaven for him.  He will go to
hell; he will not surrender the pride and glory of his soul to
the mere meanness of fate.  He will

     "Go to Caolte and Conan, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair
     And dwell in the house of the Fenians, be they in flames or
at feast."

So with Llywarch Hen, Prince of Cumberland, in his old age and
desolation.  His kingdom has been conquered; he is in exile in
Wales; his four and twenty sons, "wearers of golden torques,
proud rulers of princes,"  have been slain; he is considerably
over a hundred years old, and homeless, and sick; but no whit of
his pride is gone.  He has learnt no lesson from life excepts
this One:  that fate and Karma and sorrow are not so proud, not
so skillful to persecute, as the human soul is capable of bitter
resentful endurance. He is titanically angry with destiny; but
never meek or acquiescent.

Then if you look at their laws of war, you come to know very well
how this people came to be almost blotted out. If they had a true
spiritual purpose, instead of mere personal pride, I should say
the world would be Celtic-speaking and Celtic-governed now. Yet
still their reliance was all on what we must call spiritual
qualities. The first notice we get in classical literature of
Celts and Teutons--I think from Strabo--is this: "The Celts
fight for glory, the Teutons for plunder." Instead of plunder,
let us say material advantage; they knew why they were fighting,
and went to get it. But the Celtic military laws--Don Quixote in
a fit of extravagance framed them! There must be no defensive
armor; the warrior must go bare-breasted into battle. There are a
thousand things he must fear more than defeat or death--all that
would make the glory of his soul seem less to him. He must make
fighting his business, because in his folly it seemed to him that
in it he could best nourish that glory; not for what material
ends he could gain. Pitted against a people--with a definite
policy, he was bound to lose in the long run. But still he
endowed the human spirit with a certain wealth; still his folly
had been a true spiritual wisdom at one time. The French at
Fontenoy, who cried to their English enemies, when both were
about to open fire: _"Apres vous, messieurs! "_ were simply
practicing the principles of their Gaulish forefathers; the
thrill of honor, of _'Pundonor'_ as the Spaniard says, was much
more in their eyes than the chance of victory.

Now, in what condition does a race gain such qualities? Not in
sorrow; not in defeat, political dependence or humiliation. The
virtues which these teach are of an opposite kind; they are what
we may call the plebeian virtues which lead to success. But the
others, the old Celtic qualities, are essentially patrician. You
find them in the Turks; accustomed to sway subject races, and
utterly ruthless in their dealings with them; but famed as clean
and chivalrous fighters in a war with foreign peoples. See
how the Samurai, the patricians of never yet defeated Japan,
developed them. They are the qualities the Law teaches us through
centuries of domination and aristocratic life. They are developed
in a race accustomed to rule other races; a race that does
not engage in commerce; in an aristocratic race, or in an
aristocratic caste within a race. Here is the point: the Law
designs periods of ascendency for each people in its turn, that
it may acquire these qualities; and it appoints for each people
in its turn Periods of subordination, poverty and sorrow, that it
may develop the opposite qualities of patience, humility, and
orderly effort.

Would it not appear then, that in those first centuries B. C.
when Celts and Teutons were emerging into historical notice, the
Teutons were coming out of a long period of subordination, in
which they had learnt strength--the Celts out of a long period of
ascendency, in which they had learnt other things? The Teuton,
fresh from his pralayic sleep, was unconquerable by Rome.
The Celt, old, and intoxicated with the triumphs of a long
manvantara, could not repel Roman persistence and order. Rome.
too, was rising, or in her prime; had patience, and followed her
material plans every inch of the way to success. Where she
conquered, she imposed her rule. But whatever material plan were
set before the Celt, some spiritual red-herring, some notion in
his mind, was sure to sidetrack him before he had come half way
to its accomplishment. He had enough of empire-building; and
thirsted only after dreams. Brennus turned from a burnt Rome, his
pride satisfied. Vercingetorix, decked in all his gold, rode
seven times--was it seven times?--round the camp of Caesar:
defeat had come to him; death was coming; but he would bathe his
soul in a little pomp and glory first. Whether you threw your
sword in the scales, or surrendered to infamous Caesar, the main
thing was that you should kindle the pride in your eye, and puff
up the highness of your stomach. . . . So the practical Roman
despised him, and presently conquered him.

Here is another curious fact: the greater number, if not all, of
the words in the Teutonic languages denoting social order and the
machinery of government, are of Celtic derivation. Words such as
_Reich_ and _Amt,_ to give two examples I happen to remember out
of a list quoted by Mr. T. W. Rollestone in one of his books.

And now I think we have material before us wherewith to reconstruct
a sketch or plan of ancient European history. Let me remind you
again that our object is simply the discovery of Laws.  That, in
the eyes of the Law, there are no most favored nations.  That
there are no such things as permanent racial characteristics;
but that each race adopts the characteristics appropriate to
its stage of growth.

It is a case of the pendulum swing, of ebb and flow. For two
thousand years the Teutons have been pressing on and, dominating
the Celts. They started at the beginning of that time with the
plebeian qualities--and have evolved, generally speaking, a large
measure of the patrician qualities. The Celts, meanwhile, have
been pushed to the extremities of the world; their history has
been a long record of disasters. But in the preceding period the
case was just the reverse. Then the Celts held the empire. They
ruled over large Teutonic populations. Holding all the machinery
of government in their hands, they imposed on the languages of
their Teuton subjects the words concerned with that machinery;
just as in Welsh now our words of that kind are mostly straight
from the English.  It does not follow that there was any sudden
rising of Teutons against dominant Celts; more probably the
former grew gradually stronger as the latter grew gradually
weaker, until the forces were equalized.  We find the Cimbri and
Teutones allied on equal terms against Rome.  According to an old
Welsh history, the _Brut Tyssilio,_  there were Anglo-Saxons in
Britain before Caesar's invasion; invited there by the Celts, and
living in peace under the Celtic kings.  To quote the _Brut
Tyssilio_ a short time ago would have been to ensure being
scoffed at on all sides; but recently professor Flinders Petrie
has vindicated it as against both the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and
Caesar himself.  English Teutonic was first spoken in Britain
probably, some two or three centuries B.C.; and it survived
there, probably, in remote places, through the whole of the Roman
occupation; then, under the influence of the rising star of the
Teutons, and reinforced by new incursions from the Continent,
finally extinguished the Latin of the roman province, and drove
Celtic into the west.

But go back from those first centuries B.C. and you come at last
to a time when the Celtic star was right at the zenith, the
Teutonic very low.  Free Teutons you should hardly have found
except in Scandinavia; probably only in southern Sweden:  for
further north, and in most of Norway, you soon came to ice and
the Lapps and _terra incognita._  And even Sweden may have been
under Celtic influence--for the Celtic words survive there
--but hardly so as to affect racial individuality; just as
Wales and Ireland are under English rule now, yet retain their
Celtic individuality.

And then go back a few more thousand years again, and you would
probably find the case again reversed; and Teutons lording it
over Celts, and our present conditions restored.  It is by
suffering these poles of experience, now pride and domination,
now humiliation and adversity, that the races of mankind learn.
Europe is not a new sort of continent.  Man, says one of the
Teachers, has been much what he is any time these million years.
History has been much what it is now, ebbing and flowing.
Knowledge, geographical and other, has receded, and again
expanded.  Europe has been the seat of empires and civilizations,
all Europe, probably, for not so far short of a million years;
there has been plenty of time for it to multiply terrible karma--
which takes the occasion to expend itself sometimes--as now.  I
mistrust the theory of recent Aryan in-pourings from Asia.  The
Huns came in when the Chinese drove them; and the Turks and
Mongols have come in since; but there is nothing to show that
the Slavs, for example, when they first appear in history, had
come in from beyond the Urals and the Caspian.  Slavs and Greco-
Latins, Teutons and Celts, I think they were probably in Europe
any time these many hundreds of thousands of years.

Or rather, I think there were Europeans--Indo-Europeans, Aryans,
call them what you will--where they are now at any time during
such a period.  Because race is a thing that will not bear
close investigation.  It is a phase; an illusion; a temporary
appearance taken on by sections of humanity.  There is nothing in
it to fight about or get the least hot over.  It is a camouflage;
there you have the very word for it.  What we call Celts
and Teutons are simply portions of the one race, humanity,
camouflaged up upon their different patterns.  So far as flood
and ultimate physical heredity are concerned, I doubt there is
sixpenny-worth of difference between any two of the lot.  "Oi
mesilf," said Mr. Dooley, speaking as a good American citizen,
"am the thruest and purest Anglo-Saxon that iver came out of
Anglo-Saxony."  We call ourselves Anglo-Saxons because we speak
English (a language more than half Latin); when in reality we
are probably Jews, Turks, infidels or heretics, if all were
known.  What is a Spaniard?  A Latin, you answer pat.  Yes; he
speaks a Latin-derived language; and has certain qualities of
temperament which seem to mark him as more akin to the French and
Italians, than to those whom we, just as wisely, dub 'Teutonic'
or 'Slavic.'  But in fact he may have in his veins not a drop of
blood that is not Celtic, or not a drop that is not Teutonic, or
Moorish, or Roman, or Phoenician, or Iberian, or God knows what.

Suppose you have four laya centers in Europe:  four Foci through
which psychic impulses from the Oversoul pour through into this
world.  A Mediterranean point, perhaps in Italy; a Teutonic
point in Sweden; a Celtic point in Wales-Ireland (formerly a
single island, before England rose out of the sea); and a Slavic
point, probably in Russia.  The moment comes for such and
such a 'race' to expand; the Mediterranean, for example.  The
Italian laya center, Rome, quickens into life.  Rome conquers
Italy, Gaul, Spain, Britain, the East; becomes _Caput Mundi._
Countries that shortly before were Celtic in blood, become,
through no material change in that blood, Latin; by language,
and, as we say, by race.  The moment comes for a Teutonic
expansion.  The laya center in Sweden quickens; there is a
Swedish or Gothic invasion of Celtic lands south of the Baltic;
the continental Teutons presently are freed.  It is the expansion
of a spirit, of a psychic something.  People that were before
Celts (just as Mr. Dooley is an Anglo-Saxon)  become somehow
Teutons.  The language expands, and carries a tradition with it.
Head measurements show that neither Southern Germany nor England
differs very much towards Teutonicism from the Mediterranean
type; yet the one is thoroughly Teutonic, the other Anglo-Saxon.
Sometimes the blood may be changed materially; often, I suppose,
it is changed to some extent; but the main change takes place in
the language and tradition; sometimes in tradition alone.  There
was a minor Celtic quickening in the twelfth century A. D.;
then Wales was in a fervor of national life.  She had not the
resources, or perhaps the will, for outside conquest.  But her
Authurian legend went forth, and drove Beowulf and Child Horn out
of the memory of the English, Charlemagne out of the memory of
the French; invaded Germany, Italy, even Spain:  absolutely
installed Welsh King Arthur as the national hero of the people
his people were fighting; and infused chivalry with a certain
uplift and mysticism through-out western Europe.  Or again, in
the Cinquecento and earlier, the Italian center quickened; and
learning and culture flowed up from Italy through France and
England; and these countries, with Spain, become the leaders in
power and civilization.

England since that Teutonic expansion which made her English was
spent, has grown less and less Teutonic, more and more Latin;
the Italian impulse of the Renaissance drove her far along that
path.  In the middle of the eleventh century, her language was
purely Teutonic; you could count on the fingers of your hand the
words derived from Latin or Celtic.  And now?  Sixty percent of
all English words are Latin.  At the beginning of the fifth
century, after nearly three hundred years of Roman occupation,
one can hardly doubt that Latin was the language of what is now
England.  Celtic, even then I imagine, was mainly to be heard
among the mountains.  See how that situation is slowly coming
back.  And the tendency is all in the same direction.  You have
taken, indeed, a good few words from Dutch; and some two dozen
from German, in all these centuries; but a Latin word has
only to knock, to be admitted and made welcome.  Teachers of
composition must sweat blood and tears for it, alas, to get their
pupils to write English and shun Latin.  In a thousand years'
time, will English be as much a Latin language as French is?
Quite likely.  The Saxon words grow obsolete; French ones come
pouring in.  And Americans are even more prone to Latinisms than
Englishmen are:  they 'locate' at such and such a place, where an
English man would just go and live there.

Before Latin, Celtic was the language of Britain.  Finally, says
W.Q. Judge, Sanskrit will become the universal language.  That
would mean simply that the Fifth Root Race will swing back slowly
through all the linguistic changes that it has known in the past,
till it reaches its primitive language condition.  Then the
descendants of Latins, Slavs, Celts, and Teutons will proudly
boast their unadulterated Aryan-Sanscrit heredity, and exult
over their racial superiority to those barbarous Teutons,
Celts, Slavs, and Latins of old, of whom their histories will
lie profusely.




II.  Homer


When the Law designs to get tremendous things out of a race of
men, it goes to work this way and that, making straight the road
for an inrush of important and awakened souls. Having in mind to
get from Greece a startling harvest presently, it called one
Homer, surnamed Maeonides, into incarnation, and endowed him with
high poetic genius. Or he had in many past lives so endowed
himself; and therefore the Law called him in. This evening I
shall work up to him, and try to tell you a few things about him,
some of which you may know already, but some of which may be new
to you.

What we may call a European manvantara or major cycle of
activity--the one that preceded this present one--should have
begun about 870 B. C. Its first age of splendor, _of which we
know anything,_ began in Greece about 390 years afterwards; we
may conveniently take 478, the year Athens attained the hegemony,
as the date of its inception. Our present European manvantara
began while Frederick II was forcing a road for civilization up
from the Moslem countries through Italy; we may take 1240 as a
central and convenient date. The first 390 years of it--from 1240
to 1632--saw Dante and all the glories of the Cinquecento in
Italy; Camoens and the era of the great navigators in Portugal;
Cervantes and his age in Spain; Elizabeth and Shakespeare in
England. That will suggest to us that the Periclean was not the
first age of splendor in Europe in that former manvantara; it
will suggest how much we may have lost through the loss of all
records of cultural effort in northern and western Europe during
the four centuries that preceded Pericles. Of course we cannot
certainly say that there were such ages of splendor. But we shall
see presently that during every century since Pericles--during
the whole historical period--there has been an age of splendor
somewhere; and that these have followed each other with such
regularity, upon such a definite geographical and chronological
plan, that unless we accept the outworn conclusion that at a
certain time--about 500 B. C.--the nature of man and the laws of
nature and history underwent radical change, we shall have to
believe that the same thing had been going on--the recurrence of
ages of splendor--back into the unknown night of time.  And that
geographical and chronological plan will show us that such ages
were going on in unknown Europe during the period we are speaking
of.  In the manvantara 2980 to 1480 B.C., did the Western Laya
Center play the part in Europe, that the Southern one did in the
manvantara 870 B.C. to 630 A.D.?  Was the Celtic Empire then,
what the roman Empire became in the later time?  If so, their
history after the pralaya 1480 to 870 may have been akin to that
of the Latin, in this present cycle; no longer a united empire,
they may have achieved something comparable to the achievements
of France, Spain, and Italy in the later Middle Ages. At least we
hear the rumblings of their marches and the far shoutings of
their aimless victories until within a century or two of the
Christian era. Then, what was Italy like in the heyday of the
Etruscans, or under the Roman kings? The fall of Tarquin--an
Etruscan--was much more epochal, much more disastrous, than Livy
guessed. There were more than seven kings of Rome; and their era
was longer than from 753 to 716; and Rome--or perhaps the
Etruscan state of which it formed a part--was a much greater
power then, than for several centuries after their fall. The
great works they left are an indication.  But only the vaguest
traditions of that time came down to Livy.  The Celts sacked
Rome in 390 B.C., and all the records of the past were lost;
years of confusion followed; and a century and a half and
more before Roman history began to be written by Ennius in his
epic _Annales._  It was a break in history and blotting out of
the past; such as happened in China in 214 B.C., when the ancient
literature was burnt.  Such things take place under the Law.
Race-memory may not go back beyond a certain time; there is a
law in Nature that keeps ancient history esoteric.  As we
go forward, the horizon behind follows us.  In the ages of
materialism and the low places of racial consciousness, that
horizon probably lies near to us; as you see least far on a
level plain.  But as we draw nearer to esotericism, and attain
elevations nearer the spirit, it may recede; as the higher you
stand, the farther you see.  Not so long ago, the world was but
six thousand years old in European estimation.  But ever since
Theosophy has been making its fight to spiritualize human
consciousness, _pari passu_ the horizon of the past has been
pushed back by new and new discoveries.

What comes down to us from old Europe between its waking and the
age of Pericles?  Some poetry, legends, and unimportant history
from Greece; some legends from Rome; the spirit or substance of
the Norse sagas; the spirit or substance of the Welsh Mabinogi
and the Arthurian atmosphere; and of the Irish tales of the Red
Branch and Fenian cycles.  The actual tales as we get them were
no doubt retold in much later times; and it is these late
recensions that we have. What will remain of England in the
memory of three or four thousand years hence? Unless this
Theosophical Movement shall have lifted human standards to the
point where that which has hitherto been esoteric may safely be
kept public, this much:--an echo only of what  England has
produced of eternal truth;--something from Shakespeare; something
from Milton; and as much else in prose and poetry from the rest.
But all the literature of this and all past ages is and will then
still be in being; in the hidden libraries of the Guardians of
Esoteric Science, from which they loose fragments and hints on
the outer world as the occasion cyclically recurs, and as their
wisdom directs.

How do they loose such fragments of old inspiration? It may be by
putting some manuscript in the way of discovery; it may be by
raising up some man of genius who can read the old records on
inner planes, and reproduce in epic or drama something of a long
past splendor to kindle the minds of men anew. In that way Greece
was kindled. Troy fell, says H. P. Blavatsky, nearly five
thousand years ago. Now you will note that a European manvantara
began in 2980 B. C.; which is very nearly five thousand years
ago. And that this present European manvantara or major cycle was
lit up from a West Asian Cycle; from the Moors in Spain; from
Egypt through Sicily and Italy; and, in its greatest splendor;
when Constantinople fell, and refugees therefrom came to light
the Cinquecento in Italy. Now Constantinople is no great way from
Troy; and, by tradition, refugees came to Italy from Troy, once.
Was it they in part, who lit up that ancient European cycle of
from 2980 to 1480 B. C.?

In the Homeric poems a somewhat vague tradition seems to come
down of the achievements of one of the European peoples in that
ancient cycle. Sometime then Greece had her last Pre-periclean
age of greatness. What form it took, the details of it, were
probably as much lost to the historic Greeks as the details of
the Celtic Age are to us. But Homer caught an echo and preserved
the atmosphere of it. As the Celtic Age bequeaths to us, in the
Irish and Welsh stories, a sense of style--which thing is the
impress of the human spirit triumphant over all hindrances to its
expression;--so that long past period bequeathed through Homer a
sense of style to the later Greeks. It rings majestically through
his lines. His history is perhaps not actual history in any
recognizable shape.

Legends of a long lost glory drifted down to a poet of mightiest
genius; and he embodied them, amplified them, told his message
through them; perhaps reinvented half of them. Even so Geoffrey
of Monmouth (without genius, however) did with the rumors that
came down to him anent the ancient story of his own people; and
Spenser followed him in the _Faery Queen,_ Malory in his book,
and Tennyson in the _Idylls of the King._  Even in that last,
from the one poem _Morte D'Arthur_ we should get a sense of the
old stylish magnificence of the Celtic epoch; for the sake of a
score of lines in it, we can forgive Tennyson the rest of the
Idylls.  But Tennyson was no Celt himself; only, like Spenser
and Malory, an anglicizer of things Celtic.  How much more
of the true spirit would have come down to Homer, a Greek
of genius, writing of traditional Greek glory, and thrilled
with racial uplift.

Where did he live?  Oh, Goodness knows!  When?  Goodness knows
again.  (Though we others may guess a little, I hope.)  We have
Herodotus for it, that Homer lived about four hundred years
before his own time; that is to say, to give a date, in 850;
and I like the figure well; for if Dante came in as soon as
possible after the opening of this present manvantara, why not
Homer as soon as possible after the opening of the last one?  At
such times great souls do come in; or a little before or a
little after; because they have a work of preparation to do;
and between Dante and Homer there is much parallelism in aims and
aspirations: what the one sought to do for Italy, the other
sought to do for Greece.  But this is to treat Homer as if he had
been one real man; whereas everybody knows 'it has been proved'
(a) that there was no such person; (b) that there were dozens of
him; (c) that black is white, man an ape, and the soul a
fiction.  Admitted.  A school of critics has cleaned poor old
blind Maeonides up very tidily, and left not a vestige of him on
God's earth--just as they have, or their like have, cleaned up
the Human Soul.  But there is another school, who have preserved
for him some shreds at least of identity.  Briefly put, you can
'prove up what may be classed as brain-mind evidence--grammar,
microscopic examination of text and forms and so on--that Homer
is a mere airy myth; but to do so you must be totally oblivious
of the spiritual facts of style and poetry.  Take these into
account, and he rises with wonderful individuality from the grave
and nothingness into which you have relegated him.  The Illiad
does not read like a single poem; there are incompatibilities
between its parts.  On the other hand, there is, generally
speaking, the impress of a single creative genius.  One master
made the Homeric style.  The Iliad, as we know it, may contain
passages not his; but--_he wrote the Iliad._

What does not follow is, that he ever sat down and said:  "Now
let us write an epic."  Conditions would be against it.  A
wandering minstrel makes ballads, not epics; for him Poe's law
applies:  that is a poem which can be read or recited at a single
sitting.  The unity of the Iliad is one not of structure, but of
spirit; and the chances are that the complete works of any great
poet will be a unity of spirit.

Why should we not suppose that in the course of a long life a
great poet--whose name may not have been Homer--that may have
been only _what he was called_--his real name may have been (if
the critics will have it so) the Greek for Smith, or Jones, or
Brown, or Robinson--but he was _called_ Homer anyhow--why should
we not suppose that he, filled and fascinated always with one
great traditionary subject, wrote now one incident as a complete
poem; ten years later another incident; and again, after an
interval, another?  Each time with the intention to make a
complete and separate poem; each time going to it influenced by
the natural changes of his mood; now preoccupied with one hero or
god, now with another.  The Tennyson in his twenties, who wrote
the fairylike _Lady of Shalott,_ was a very different man in mood
and outlook from the Mid-Victorian Tennyson who wrote the
execrable _Merlin and Vivien;_  but both were possessed with the
Arthurian legend.  At thirty and at fifty you may easily take
different views of the same men and incidents.  The Iliad, I
suggest, may be explained as the imperfect fusion of many poems
and many moods and periods of life of a single poet.  It was not
until the time of Pisistratus, remember, that it was edited into
a single epic.

Now these many poems, before Pisistratus took them in hand, had
been in the keeping for perhaps three centuries of wandering
minstrels--Rhapsodoi, Aoidoi, Citharaedi and Homeridae, as they
were called--who drifted about the Isles of Greece and Asiatic
mainland during the long period of Greek insignificance and
unculture.  The first three orders were doubtless in existence
long before Homer was born; they were the bards, trouveurs and
minnesingers of their time; their like are the instruments of
culture in any race during its pralayas.  So you find the
professional story-tellers in the East today.  But the Homeridae
may well have been--as De Quincey suggests--an order specially
trained in the chanting of Homeric poems; perhaps a single
school founded in some single island by or for the sake of Homer.
We hear that Lycurgus was the first who brought Homer--the works,
not the man--into continental Greece; importing them from Crete.
That means, probably, that he induced Homeridae to settle
in Sparta.  European continental Greece would in any case
have been much behind the rest of the Greek world in culture;
because furthest from and the least in touch with West Asian
civilization.  Crete was nearer to Egypt; the Greeks of Asia
Minor to Lydia; as for the islanders of the Cyclades and
Sporades, the necessity of gadding about would have brought them
into contact with their betters to the south and east, and so
awakened them, much sooner than their fellow Greeks of Attica,
Boeotia, and the Peloponnese.

Where did Homer live?  Naturally, as a wandering bard, all over
the place.  We know of the seven cities that claimed to be
his birthplace:

     _Smyrna, Chias, Colophon, Salamis, Rhodos, Argos, Athenae
          Orbis de patria certat, Homere, Tua._

Of these Smyrna probably has the best chance of it; for he was
Maeonides, the son of Maeon, and Maeon was the son of Meles; and
the Maeon and the Meles are rivers by Smyrna.  But De Quincey
makes out an excellent case for supposing he knew Crete better
than any other part of the world.  Many of the legends he
records; many of the superstitions--to call them that;--many of
the customs he describes: have been, and are still, peculiar to
Crete.  Neither the smaller islands, nor continental Greece, were
very suitable countries for horse-breeding; and the horse does
not figure greatly in their legends.  But in Crete the friendship
of horse and man was traditional; in Cretan folk-lore, horses
still foresee the doom of their masters, and weep. So they
do in Homer.

There is a certain wild goat found only in Crete, of which he
give a detailed description; down the measurement of its horns;
exact, as sportsmen have found in modern times.  He mentions the
_Kubizeteres,_ Cretan tumblers, who indulge in a 'stunt' unknown
elsewhere.  They perform in couples; and when he mentions them,
it is in the dual number.  Preternatural voices are an Homeric
tradition:  Stentor "spoke loud as fifty other men"; when
Achilles roared at the Trojans, their whole army was frightened.
In Crete such voices are said to be still common:  shepherds
carry on conversations at incredible distances--speak to, and are
answered by, men not yet in sight.--Dequincey gives several other
such coincidences; none of them, by itself, might be very
convincing; but taken all together, they rather incline one to
the belief that Smith, or Brown, or Jones, _alias_ Homer, must
have spent a good deal of his time in Crete;--say, was brought
up there.

Now Crete is much nearer Egypt than the rest of Greece is; and
may very likely have shared in a measure of Egyptian culture at
the very beginning of the European manvantara, and even before.
Of course, in past cycles it had been a great center of culture
itself; but that was long ago, and I am not speaking of it.  In
the tenth century A.D., three hundred years before civilization,
in our own cycle, had made its way from the West Asian Moslem
world into Christendom, Sicily belonged to Egypt and shared in
its refinement--was Moslem and highly civilized, while Europe
was Christian and barbarous; later it became a main channel
through which Europe received enlightenment.  May not Crete
have played a like part in ancient times?  I mean, is it
not highly probable?  May it not have been--as Sicily was
to be--a mainly European country under Egyptian influence,
and a seat of Egyptianized culture?

Let us, then, suppose Homer a Greek, born early in the ninth
century B.C., taken in childhood to Crete, and brought up there
in contact with cultural conditions higher than any that obtained
elsewhere among his own people.

But genius stirs in him, and he is Greek altogether in the deep
enthusiasms proper to genius: so presently he leaves Crete and
culture, to wander forth among the islands singing.--

     _En delo tote Proton ego Kai Homeros aoidoi
     Melpomen,_

says Hesiod: "Then first in Delos did I and Homer, two Aoidoi,
perform as musical reciters." Delos, of course, is a small island
in the Cyclades.

He would have had some training, it is likely, as an Aoidos: a
good founding in the old stories which were their stock in trade,
and which all pointed to the past glory of his race. In Crete he
had seen the culture of the Egyptians; in Asia Minor, the
strength and culture of the Lydians; now in his wanderings
through the isles he saw the disunion and rudeness of the Greeks.
But the old traditions told him of a time when Greeks acted
together and were glorious:  when they went against, and
overthrew, a great West Asian Power strong and cultured like the
Lydians and Egyptians.  Why should not he create again the glory
that once was Greece?

     _Menin aeide, Thea, Peleiadeo Achileos!_

--Goddess, aid me to sing the wrath (and grandeur) of a Greek
hero!--Let the Muses help him, and he will remind his people of
an ancient greatness of their own:  of a time when they were
united, and triumphed over these now so much stronger peoples!
So Dante, remembering ancient Rome, evoked out of the past and
future a vision of United Italy; so in the twelfth century a
hundred Welsh bards sand of Arthur.

I think he would have created out of his own imagination
the life he pictures for his brazen-coated Achaeans.  It
does not follow, with any great poet, that he is bothering
much with historical or other accuracies, or sticking very
closely even to tradition.  Enough that the latter should give
him a direction; as Poet-creator, he can make the details
for himself.  Homer's imagination would have been guided,
I take it, by two conditions:  what he saw of the life of
his semi-barbarous Greek country men; and what he knew of
civilization in Egyptianized Crete.  He was consciously picturing
the life of Greeks; but Greeks in an age traditionally more
cultured than his own.  Floating legends would tell him much
of their heroic deed, but little of their ways of living.
Such details he would naturally have to supply for himself.
How would he go to work?  In this way, I think.  The Greeks,
says he, were in those old ages, civilized and strong, not,
as now, weak, disunited and half barbarous.  Now what is strength
like, and civilization?  Why, I have them before me here to
observe, here in Crete.  But Crete is Egyptianized; I want a
Greek civilization; culture as it would appear if home-grown
among Greeks.--I do not mean that he consciously set this plan
before himself; but that naturally it would be the course that
he, or anyone, would follow.  Civilization would have meant for
him Cretan civilization:  the civilization he knew:  that part of
the proposition would inhere in his subconsciousness.  But in his
conscious mind, in his intent and purpose, would inhere a desire
to differentiate the Greek culture he wanted to paint, from the
Egyptianized culture he knew.  So I think that the conditions of
life he depicts were largely the creation of his own imagination,
working in the material of Greek character, as he knew it, and
Cretan-Egyptian culture as he knew that.  He made his people
essentially Greeks, but ascribed to them also non-Greek features
drawn from civilized life.

One sees the same thing in the old Welsh Romances:  tales from of
old retold by men fired with immense racial hopes, with a view to
fostering such hopes in the minds of their hearers.  The bards
saw about them the rude life and disunion of the Welsh, and the
far greater outward culture of the Normans; and their stock in
trade was a tradition of ancient and half-magical Welsh grandeur.
When they wrote of Cai--Sir Kay the Seneschal--that so subtle was
his nature that when it pleased him he could make himself as tall
as the tallest tree in the forest, they were dealing in a purely
celtic element:  the tradition of the greatness of, and the
magical powers inherent in, the human spirit; but when they set
him on horseback, to ride tilts in the tourney ring, they were
simply borrowing from, to out do, the Normans.  Material culture,
as they saw it, included those things; therefore they ascribed
them to the old culture they were trying to paint.

Lying was traditionally a Greek vice.  The Greek lied as
naturally as the Persian told the truth.  Homer wishes to set
forth Ulysses, one of his heroes, adorned with all heroic
perfections.  He was so far Greek as not to think of lying as a
quality to detract; he proudly makes Ulysses a "lord of lies."
Perhaps nothing in Crete itself would have taught him better; if
we may believe Epimenides and Saint Paul.  On the other hand, he
was a great-hearted and compassionate man; compassionate as
Shakespeare was.  Now the position of women in historical Greece
was very low indeed; the position of women in Egypt, as we know,
was very high indeed.  This was a question to touch such a man to
the quick; the position he gives women is very high:  very much
higher than it was in Periclean Athens, with all the advance that
had been made by that time in general culture.  Andromache, in
Homer, is the worthy companion and helpmeet of Hector; not a
Greek, but Egyptian idea.

Homer's contemporary, Hesiod, tells in his _Works and Days_ of
the plebeian and peasant life of his time.  Hesiod had not the
grace of mind or imagination to idealize anything; he sets down
the life of the lower orders with a realism comparable to that of
the English Crabbe.  It is an ugly and piteous picture he gives.
Homer, confining himself in the main to the patrician side of
things, does indeed give hints that the lot of the peasant and
slave was miserable; he does not quite escape some touches from
the background of his own day.  Nor did Shakespeare, trying to
paint the life of ancient Athens, escape an English Elizabethan
Background; Bully Bottom and his colleagues are straight from
the wilds of Warwickshire; the Roman mob is made up of London
prentices, cobblers and the like.  Learned Ben, on the other
hand, contrives in his _Sejanus_ and his _Catiline,_ by dint and
sheer intellect and erudition, to give us correct waxwork and
clockwork Romans; there are no anachronisms in Ben Johnson;
never a pterodactyl walks down _his_ Piccadilly.  But Shakespeare
rather liked to have them in his; with his small Latin and less
Greek, he had to create his human beings--draw them from the
life, and from the life he saw about him.  The deeper you see
into life, the less the costumes and academic exactitudes matter;
you keep your imagination for the great things, and let the
externals worry about themselves.  Now Homer was a deal more
like Shakespeare than Ben; but there was this difference:
he was trying to create Greeks of a nobler order than his
contemporaries.  Men in those days, he says, were of huger
stature than they are now.  And yet, when his imagination is not
actually at work to heighten and ennoble the portrait of a hero,
real Greek life of his own times does not fail sometimes--to
obtrude on him.  So he lets in bits now and again that belong to
the state of things Hesiod describes, and confirm the truth of
Hesiod's dismal picture.

Well, he wandered the islands, singing; "laying the nexus of his
songs," as Hesiod says in the passage from which I quoted just
now, "in the ancient sacred hymns."  As Shakespeare was first an
actor, then a tinkerer of other men's plays, then a playwright on
his own account; so perhaps Homer, from a singer of the old
hymns, became an improver and restorer of them, then a maker
of new ones.  He saw the wretched condition of his people,
contrasted it with the traditions he found in the old days, and
was spurred up to create a glory for them in his imagination.
His feelings were hugely wrought upon by compassion working as
yoke-fellow with race-pride.  You shall see presently how the
intensity of his pity made him bitter; how there must have been
something Dantesque of grim sadness in his expression:  he had
seen suffering, not I think all his own, till he could allow to
fate no quality but cruelty.  Impassioned by what we may call
patriotism, he attacked again and again the natural theme for
Greek epic:  the story of a Greek contest with and victory over
West Asians; but he was too great not to handle even his West
Asians with pity, and moves us to sympathy with Hector and
Andromache often, because against them too was stretched forth
the hand of the great enemy, fate.  In different moods and at
different times, never thinking to make an epic, he produced a
large number of different poems about the siege of Troy.

And the Odyssey?  Well, the tradition was that he wrote it in his
old age.  Its mood is very different from that of the Iliad; and
many words used in it are used with a different meaning; and
there are words that are not used in the Iliad at all.  Someone
says, it comes from the old age of the Greek epic, rather than
from that of Homer.  I do not know.  It is a better story than
the Iliad; as if more nearly cast at one throe of a mind.  Yet
it, too, must be said not to hang together; here also are
discrepant and incompatible parts.

There is all tradition for it that the Homeric poems were handed
down unwritten for several centuries.  Well; I can imagine the
Aoidoi and Citharaoidoi and the rest learning poems from the
verbal instruction of other Aoidoi and Citharaoidoi, and so
preserving them from generation to generation to generation. But
I cannot imagine, and I do think it is past the wit of man to
imagine, long poems being composed by memory; it seems to me
Homer must have written or dictated them at first.  Writing in
Greece may have been an esoteric science in those times.  It is
now, anywhere, to illiterates.  In Caesar's day, as he tells us,
it was an esoteric science among the Druids; they used it, but
the people did not.  It seems probable that writing was not in
general use among the Greeks until long after Homer; but, to me,
certain that Homer used it himself, or could command the services
to those who did.  But there was writing in Crete long before the
Greco-Phoenician alphabet was invented; from the time of the
first Egyptian Dynasties, for example.  And here is a point to
remember:  alphabets are invented; systems of writing are lost
and reintroduced; but it is idle to talk of the invention of
writing.  Humanity has been writing, in one way or another, since
Lemurian days.  When the Manasaputra incarnated, Man became a
poetizing animal; and before the Fourth Race began, his divine
Teachers had taught him to set his poems down on whatever he
chanced at the time to be using as we use paper.

Now, what more can we learn about the inner and real Homer?  What
can I tell you in the way of literary criticism, to fill out the
picture I have attempted to make?  Very little; yet perhaps
something.  I think his historical importance is greater, for us
now, than his literary importance.  I doubt you shall find in him
as great and true thinking, as much Theosophy or Light upon the
hidden things, as there is in Virgil for example.  I doubt he was
an initiate, to understand in that life and with his conscious
mind the truths that make men free.  Plato did not altogether
approve of him; and where Plato dared lead, we others need not
fear to follow.  I think the great Master-Poets of the world have
been such because, with supreme insight into the hidden, they
presented a great Master-Symbol of the Human Soul.  I believe
that in the Iliad Homer gives us nothing of that sort; and that
therefore, in a certain sense, he is constantly over-rated.  He
pays the penalty of his over-whelming reputation:  his fame is
chiefly in the mouths of those who know him not at all, and
use their hats for speaking-trumpets.  We have in English no
approximately decent translation of him.  Someone said that Pope
served him as Puck served Bully Bottom, what time Peter Quince
was moved to cry:  "Bless thee Bottom, how thou art translated!"
It is not so; to call Pope an ass would be to wrong a faithful
and patient quadruped; than which Pope was as much greater in
intellect as he was less in all qualities that call for true
respect.  Yet often we applaud Homer, only upon a knowledge of
Pope; and it is safe to say that if you love Pope you would
loathe Homer.  Pope held that water should manifest, so to say,
through Kew or Versailles fountains; but it was essentially to
be from the Kitchen-tap--or even from the sewer.  Homer was more
familiar with it thundering on the precipices, or lisping on the
yellow sands of time-forgotten Mediterranean islands.  Which
pronunciation do you prefer for his often-recurring and famous
sea-epithet:  the thunder-on-the-precipices of

     _poluphloisboio thalasses,_

or the lisping-on-the-sands of

    _ poluphleesbeeo thalassace?_

(pardon the attempted phonetics).--For truly there are advocates
of either; but neither I suppose would have appealed much to
Mr. Pope.

As to his style, his manner or movement:  to summarize what
Mathew Arnold says of it (the best I can do):  it is as direct
and rapid as Scott's; as lucid as Wordsworth's could be; but
noble like Shakespeare's or Milton's.  There is no Dantesque
periphrasis, nor Miltonian agnostic struggle and inversion; but
he calls spades, spades, and moves on to the next thing swiftly,
clearly, and yet with exultation.  (Yet there is retardation
often by long similes.)  And he either made a language for
himself, or found one ready to his hand, as resonant and sonorous
as the loll and slap of billows in the hollow caverns of the sea.
As his lines swing in and roll and crash, they swell the soul in
you, and you hear and grow great on the rhythm of the eternal.
This though we really, I suppose, are quite uncertain as to the
pronunciation.  But give the vowels merely a plain English value,
certain to be wrong, and you still have grand music.  Perhaps
some of you have read Mathew Arnold's great essay _On Translating
Homer,_ and know the arguments wherewith wise Matthew exalts him.
A Mr. Newman had translated him so as considerably to out-Bottom
Bottom; and Arnold took up the cudgels--to some effect.  Newman
had treated him as a barbarian, a primitive; Arnold argued that
it was Homer, on the contrary, who might have so looked on us.
There is, however, perhaps something to be said on Mr. Newman's
side.  Homer's huge and age-long fame, and his extraordinary
virtues, were quite capable of blinding even a great critic to
certain things about him which I shall, with great timidity,
designate imperfections:  therein following De Quincey, who read
Greek from early childhood as easily as English, and who, as a
critic, saw things sometimes.  _Bonus dormitat Homerus,_ says
Horace; like the elder Gobbo, he "something smacked."  He was
the product of a great creative force; which did not however
work in a great literary age:  and all I am going to say is
merely a bearing out of this.

First there is his poverty of epithets.  He repeats the same ones
over and over again.  He can hardly mention Hector without
calling him _megas koruthaiolos Hector,_--"great glittering-
helmeted Hector"; or (in the genitive) _Hectoros hippodamoio_--
"of Hector the tamer of war-steeds."  Over and over again we have
_anax andron Agamemnon;_ or "swift-footed Achilles."  Over and
over again is the sea _poluphloisbois-terous,_ as if he could say
nothing new about it.  Having discovered one resounding phrase
that fits nicely into the hexameter, he seems to have been just
content with the splendor of sound, and unwilling so to stir his
imagination as to flash some new revelation on it.  As if Hamlet
should never be mentioned in the play, without some such epithet
as "the hesitating Dane."......  But think how the Myriad-minded
One positively tumbles over himself in hurling and fountaining up
new revelatory figures and epithets about everything:  how he
could not afford to repeat himself, because there were not enough
hours in the day, days in the year, nor years in one human
lifetime, in which to ease his imagination of its tremendous
burden. He had Golconda at the root of his tongue: let him but
pass you the time of day, and it shall go hard but he will pour
you out the wealth of Ormus or of Ind. A plethora, some have
said: never mind; wealth was nothing to him, because he had it
all. Or note how severe Milton, almost every time he alludes to
Satan, throws some new light of majestic gloom, inner or outer,
with a new epithet or synonym, upon his figure or his mind.

Even of mere ancillaries and colorless lines, Homer will make you
a resounding glory. What means this most familiar one, think you:

     _Ten d'apameibomenos prosephe koruthaiolos Hector?_

--Surely here some weighty splendid thing is being revealed? But
no; it means: "Answering spake unto her great glittering-helmeted
Hector;" or _tout simplement,_ 'Hector answered.' And hardly can
anyone open his lips, but it must be brought in with some
variation of that sea-riding billow, or roll of drums:

     _Ton d'emeibet epeita anax andron Agamemnon.
     Hos phato.  Ten d'outi prosephe nephelegereta Zeus_

--whereafter at seven lines down we get again:

     _Ten de meg' ochthesas prosephe nephelegereta Zeus;_

--in all of which I think we do get something of primitivism and
unskill. It is a preoccupation with sound where there is no
adequate excuse for the sound; after the fashion of some orators,
whom, to speak plainly, it is a weariness to hear. But you will
remember how Shakespeare rises to his grandest music when he has
fatefullest words to utter; and how Milton rolls in his supreme
thunders each in its recurring cycle; leads you to wave-crest
over wave-trough, and then recedes; and how the crest is always
some tremendous thing in vision, or thought as well as sound. So
he has everlasting variation; manages his storms and billows; and
so I think his music is greater in effect than Homer's--would
still be greater, could we be sure of Homer's tones and vowel-
values; as I think his vision goes deeper into the realm of the
Soul and the Eternal.

Yet is Homer majestic and beautiful abundantly. If it is true
that his reputation gains on the principle of _Omne ignotum pro
magnifico_--because he is unknown to most that praise him--let
none imagine him less than a wonderful reservoir of poetry. His
faults--to call them that--are such as you would expect from his
age, race, and peculiar historic  position; his virtues are
drawn out of the grandeur of his own soul, and the current from
the Unfathomable that flowed through him.  He had the high
serious attitude towards the great things, and treated them
highly, deeply and seriously.  We may compare him to Dante:  who
also wrote, in an age and land not yet literary or cultured, with
a huge racial inspiration. But Dante had something more:  a
purpose to reveal in symbol the tremendous world of the Soul.
Matthew Arnold speaks of the Homeric poems as "the most important
poetical monument existing."  Well; cultured Tom, Dick and Harry
would say much the same thing; it is the orthodox thing to say.
But with great deference to Matthew, I believe they are really a
less important monument than the poems of Aeschylus, Dante,
Shakespeare, or Milton, or I suppose Goethe--to name only poets
of the Western World; because each of these created a Soul-
symbol; which I think the Iliad at any rate does not.

Here, to me, is another sign of primitivism.  If there is paucity
of imagination in his epithets, there is none whatever in his
surgery.  I do not know to what figure the casualty list in the
Iliad amounts; but believe no wound or death of them all was
dealt in the same bodily part or in the same way.  Now Poetry
essentially turns from these physical details; her preoccupations
are with the Soul.

"From Homer and Polygnotus,"  says Goethe, "I daily learn more
and more that in our life here above the ground we have, properly
speaking, to enact Hell."  A truth, so far as it goes:  this
Earth is hell; there is no hell, says H.P. Blavatsky, but a man-
bearing planet.  But we demand of the greatest, that they shall
see beyond hell into Heaven.  Homer achieves his grandeur
oftenest through swift glimpses of the pangs and tragedy of human
fate; and I do not think he saw through the gloom to the
bright Reality.  Watching the Greek host from the walls of Troy,
Helen says:

     "Clearly the rest I behold of the dark-eyed sons of Achaia;
     Known to me well are the faces of all; their names I remember;
     Two, two only remain whom I see not among the commanders,
     Castor, fleet in the car, Polydeukes, brave with the cestus--
     Own dear brethren of mine,--one parent loved us as infants.
     Are they not here in the host, from the shores of loved
         Lacedaimon?
     Or, though they came with the rest in the ships that bound
         through the waters,
     Dare they not enter the fight, or stand in the council of heroes,
     All for fear of the shame and the taunts my crime has awakened?"

And then:

     _Hos phato.  Tous d'ede kalechen phusizoos aia,
     En Lakedaimoni authi, phile en patridi gaie._

     "--So spake she; but they long since under Earth were
         reposing
     There in their own dear land, their fatherland, Lacedaimon."

                [From Dr. Hawtrey's translation, quoted by
Matthew Arnold in _On Translating Homer._]

There it is the sudden antithesis from her gentle womanly inquiry
about her brothers to the sad reality she knows nothing, that
strikes the magical blow, and makes the grand manner.  Then there
is that passage about Peleus and Cadmos:

  "Not even Peleus Aiacides, nor godlike Cadmos, might know
the happiness of a secure life; albeit the highest happiness
known to mortals was granted them:  the one on the mountain,
the other in seven-gated Thebes, they heard the gold-snooded
Muses sing."

You hear the high pride and pathos in that.  To be a poet, he
says:  to have heard the gold-snooded Muses sing:  is the highest
happiness a mortal can know; he is mindful of the soul, the
Poet-creator in every man, and pays it magnificent tribute; he
acknowledges what glory, what bliss, have been his own; but not
the poet, he says, not even he, may enjoy the commonplace
happiness of feeling secure against dark fate.  It is the same
feeling that I spoke of last week as so characteristic of the
early Teutonic literature; but there it appears without the
swift sense of tragedy, without the sudden pang, the grand
manner.  The pride is lacking quite:  the intuition for a
divinity within man.  But Homer sets the glory of soul-hood and
pet-hood against the sorrow of fate:  even though he finds the
sorrow weighs it down.  Caedmon or Cynewulf might have said:  "It
is given to none of us to be secure against fate; but we have
many recompenses."  How different the note of Milton:

     "Those other two, equal with me in fate,
     So were I equal with them in renown--"

or:

     "Unchanged, though fallen on evil days;
     On evil days though fallen, and evil tongues,
     In darkness, and by dangers compassed round."

And Llywarch, or Oisin, would never have anticipated the blows
of fate; when the blows fell, they would simply have been
astonished at fate's presumption.

We might quote many instances of this proud pessimism in Homer:

     _Kai se, geron, to prin men, akouomen, olbion einai_--

     "Thou to, we hear, old man, e'en thou was at once time happy;"

      _Hos gar epeklosanto theoi deiloisi brotoisin
     Zoein achnumenous.  Autoi de l'akedees eisin_--

     "The Gods have allotted to us to live thus mortal and mournful,
     Mournful; but they themselves live ever untouched by mourning."

Proud--no; it is not quite proud; not in an active sense;
there is a resignation in it; and yet it is a kind of haughty
resignation.  As if he said:  We are miserable; there is nothing
else to be but miserable; let us be silent, and make no fuss
about.--It is the restraint--a very Greek quality--the depth
hinted at, but never wailed over or paraded at all--that make in
these cases his grand manner.  His attitude is, I think, nearer
the Teutonic than the Celtic:--his countrymen, like the Teutons,
were accustomed to the pralaya, the long racial night.  But he
and the Celts achieved the grand manner, which the Teutons did
not.  His eyes, like Llywarch's or Oisin's, were fixed on a past
glory beyond the nightfall.

But where does this Homeric mood lead us?  To no height of truth,
I think.  Katherine Tingley gave us a keynote for the literature
of the future and the grandest things it should utter,--for the
life, the art, the poetry of a coming time that shall be
Theosophical, that is, lit with the splendor and beauty of the
Soul--when she spoke that high seeming paradox that "Life is
Joy."  Let us uncover the real Life; all this sorrow is only the
veil that hides it.  God knows we see enough of the veil; but
the poet's business is to tear it down, rend it asunder, and show
the brightness which it hides.  If the personality were all, and
a man's whole history were bounded by his cradle and his grave;
then you had done all, when you had presented personalities in
all their complexity, and made your page teem with the likenesses
of living men, and only shown the Beyond, the Governance, as
something unknowable, adverse and aloof.  But the Greater Part of
a man is eternal, and each of his lives and deaths but little
incidents in a vast and glorious pilgrimage; and when it is
understood that this is the revelation to be made, this grandeur
the thing to be shadowed forth, criticism will have entered upon
its true path and mission.

I find no such Soul-symbol in the Iliad:  the passion and
spiritual concentration of whose author, I think, was only enough
to let him see this outward world:  personalities, with their
motive-springs of action within themselves:  his greatness, his
sympathy, his compassion, revealed all that to him; but he
lacked vision for the Meanings.  I found him then less than
Shakespeare:  whose clear knowledge of human personalities--
ability to draw living men--was but incidental and an instrument;
who but took the tragedy of life by the way, as he went to set
forth the whole story of the soul; never losing sight of Karma,
and that man is his own adverse destiny; finishing all with the
triumph of the soul, the Magician, in _The Tempest._  And I count
him less than that Blind Titan in Bardism, who, setting out to
justify the ways of God to men, did verily justify the ways of
fate to the Soul; and showed the old, old truth, so dear to the
Celtic bards, that in the very depths of hell the Soul has not
yet lost all her original brightness; but is mightily superior
to hell, death, fate, sorrow and the whole pack of them;--I count
him less than the "Evening Dragon" of _Samson Agonistes,_ whose
last word to us is

     "Nothing is here for tears; nothing to wail
     Or knock the breast; no weakness or contempt."

And I found him less that One with the grand tragic visage, whose
words so often quiver with unshed tears, who went forth upon his
journey

       .... _pei dolci pomi
     Promessi a me per lo verace Duca;
     Ma fino al centro pria convien ch'io tomi:_--

"to obtain those sweet apples (of Paradise) promised me by my
true Leader; but first is"--convien--how shall you translate the
pride and resignation of that word?--"it behoves,"  we must say,
"it convenes"--"first it is convenient that I should fall as far
as to the center (of hell);"--who must end the gloom and terror
of that journey, that fall, with

     _E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle,_

"And then we came forth to behold again the Stars;"  and who came
from his ascent through purifying Purgatory with

     _Rifatto si, come piante novelle
     Rinnovellate di novella fronda,
     Puro e disposto a salire alle stelle_--

"So made anew, like young plants in spring with fresh foliage, I
was pure and disposed to come forth among the Stars;"--and who
must end his _Paradiso_ and his life-work announcing

     _L'amor che muove il sole e le altre stelle,_

"The Love that moves the sun and the other Stars."  Ah, glory
to this Dante!  Glory to the man who would end nothing but
with the stars!




III.  GREEKS AND PERSIANS


Now to consider what this Blind Maeonides did for Greece.
Sometime last Century a Black Potentate from Africa visited
England, and was duly amazed at all he saw.  Being a very
important person indeed, he was invited to pay his respects to
Queen Victoria.  he told her of the many wonders he had seen;
and took occasion to ask her, as the supreme authority, how such
things came to be.  What was the secret of England's greatness?
--She rose to it magnificently, and did precisely what a large
section of her subjects would have expected of her.  She solemnly
handed him a copy of the Bible, and told him he should find his
answer in that.

She was thinking, no doubt, of the influence of Christian
teaching; if called on for the exact passage that had worked the
wonder, very likely she would have turned to the Sermon on the
Mount.  Well; very few empires have founded their material
greatness on such texts, as _The meek shall inherit the earth._
They take a shorter road to it.  If a man ask of thee thy coat,
and thou give him thy cloak also, thou dost not (generally) build
thyself a world-wide commerce.  When he smiteth thee on they left
cheek, and thou turnest to him thy right for the complementary
buffet, thou dost not (as a rule) become shortly possessed of his
territories.  Queen Victoria lived in an age when people did not
notice these little discrepancies; so did Mr. Podsnap.  And yet
there was much more truth in her answer than you might think.

King James's Bible is a monument of mighty literary style; and
one that generations of Englishmen have regarded as divine, a
message from the Ruler of the Stars.  They have been reading it,
and hearing it read in the churches, for three hundred years.
Its language has been far more familiar to them than that of any
other book whatsoever; more common quotations come from it,
probably, than from all other sources combined.  The Puritans
of old, like the Nonconformists now, completely identified
themselves with the folk it tells about:  Cromwell's armies saw
in the hands of their great captain "the sword of the Lord and of
Gideon."  When the Roundhead went into battle, or when the
Revivalist goes to prayer meeting, he heard and hears the command
of Jehovah to "go up to Ramoth Gilead and prosper"; to "smite
Amalek hip and thigh."  Phrases from the Old Testament are in the
mouths of millions daily; and they are phrases couched in the
grand literary style.

Now the grand style is the breathing of a sense of greatness.
When it occurs you sense a mysterious importance lurking behind
the words.  It is the accent of the eternal thing in man, the
Soul; and one of the many proofs of the Soul's existence.  So
you cannot help being reminded by it of the greatness of the
soul.  There are periods when the soul draws near its racial
vehicle, and the veils grow thin between it and us:  through all
the utterances of such times one is apt to hear the thunder from
beyond.  Although the soul have no word to say, or although it
message suffer change in passing through the brain-mind, so that
not high truth, but even a lie may emerge--it still comes, often,
ringing with the grand accents.  Such a period was that which
gave us Shakespeare and Milton, and the Bible, and Brown, and
Taylor, and all the mighty masters of English prose.  Even when
their thought is trivial or worse, you are reminded, by the march
and mere order of their words, of the majesty of the Soul.

When Deborah sings of that treacherous murderess, Jael the wife
of Heber the Kenite, that before she slew her guest and ally
Sisera, "He asked water and she gave him milk; she brought
forth butter in a lordly dish,"--you are aware that, to the
singer, no question of ethics was implied.  Nothing common,
nothing of this human daily world, inheres in it; but sacrosanct
destinies were involved, and the martialed might of the Invisible.
It was part of a tremendous drama, in which Omnipotence itself
was protagonist.  Little Israel rose against the mighty of
this world; but the Unseen is mightier than the mighty; and
the Unseen was with little Israel.  The application is false,
unethical, abominable--as coming through brain-minds of that
kind.  But you must go back behind the application, behind
the brain-mind, to find the secret of the air of greatness that
pervades it.  It is a far-off reflection of this eternal truth:
that the Soul, thought it speak through but one human being, can
turn the destinies and overturn the arrogance of the world.  When
David sang, "Let God arise, and let his enemies be scattered;
yea, let all his enemies be scattered!"  he, poor brain-mind, was
thinking of his triumphs over Philistines and the like; with
whom he had better have been finding a way to peace;--but the
Soul behind him was thinking of its victories over him and his
passions and his treacheries.  So such psalms and stories,
though their substance be vile enough, do by their language
yet remind us somehow of the grandeur of the Spirit.  That
is what style achieves.

Undoubtedly this grand language of the Bible, as that of Milton
and Shakespeare in a lesser degree--lesser in proportion as they
have been less read--has fed in the English race an aptitude, an
instinct, for action on a large imperial scale.  It is not easy
to explain the effect of great literature; but without doubt it
molds the race.  Now the ethic of the Old Testament, its moral
import, is very mixed.  There is much that is true and beautiful;
much that is treacherous and savage.  So that its moral and
ethical effects have been very mixed too.  But its style, a
subtler thing than ethics, has nourished conceptions of a large
and seeping sort, to play through what ethical ideas they might
find.  The more spiritual is any influence--that is, the less
visible and easy to trace--the more potent it is; so style in
literature may be counted one of the most potent forces of all.
Through it, great creative minds mold the destinies of nations.
Let Theosophy have expression as noble as that of the Bible--as
it will--and of that very impulse it will bite deep into the
subconsciousness of the race, and be the nourishment of grand
public action, immense conceptions, greater than any that have
come of Bible reading, because pure and true.  Our work is to
purify the channels through which the Soul shall speak; the
Teachers have devoted themselves to establishing the beginnings
of this Movement in right thought and right life.  But the great
literary impulse will come, when we have learned and earned the
right to use it.

Now, what the Bible became to the English, Homer became to the
Greeks--and more also.  They heard his grand manner, and were
billed by it with echoes from the Supermundane.  _Anax andron
Agamemnon_--what Greek could hear a man so spoken of, and dream
he compounded of common clay?  Never mind what this king of men
did or failed to do; do but breathe his name and titles, and you
have affirmed immortality and the splendor of the Human Soul!
The _human_ Soul?

"Tush!" said they, "the Greek Soul! he was a Greek as we
are!".... And so Tomides, Dickaion and Harryotatos, Athenian
tinkers and cobblers, go swaggering back to their shops, and
dream grand racial dreams.  For this is a much more impressionable
people than the English; any wind from the Spirit blows
in upon their minds quickly and easily.  Homer in Greece
--once Solon, or Pisistratus, or Hopparchus, had edited and
canonized him, and arranged for his orderly periodical public
reading (as the Bible in the churches)--had an advantage even
over the Bible in England.  When Cromwell and his men grew mighty
upon the deeds of the mighty men of Israel, they had to thrill to
the grand rhythms until a sort of miracle had been accomplished,
and they had come to see in themselves the successors and living
representatives of Israel.  But the Greek, rising on the swell of
Homer's roll and boom, had need of no such transformation.  The
uplift was all for him; his by hereditary right; and no
pilfering necessary, from alien creed or race.  We have seen in
Homer an inspired Race-patriot, a mighty poet saddened and
embittered by the conditions he saw and his own impotence to
change them.--Yes, he had heard the golden-snooded sing; but
Greeks were pygmies, compared with the giants who fought at
Ilion!  There was that eternal contrast between the glory he had
within and the squalor he saw without.  Yes, he could sing; he
could launch great songs for love of the ancients and their
magnificence.  But what could a song do?  Had it feet to travel
Hellas; hands to flash a sword for her; a voice and kingly
authority to command her sons into redemption?--Ah, poor blind
old begging minstrel, it had vastly greater powers and organs
than these!

Lycurgus, it is said, brought singers or manuscripts of your
poems into Sparta; because, blind minstrel, he had a mind to
make Sparta great-souled; and he knew that you were the man to
do it, if done it could be.  Then for about two hundred and sixty
years, without much fuss to come into history, you were having
your way with your Greeks.  Your music was ringing in the ears of
mothers; their unborn children were being molded to the long
roll of your hexameters.  There came to be manuscripts of you in
every city:  corrupt enough, many of them, forgeries, many of
them; lays fudged up and fathered on you by venal Rhapsodoi,
to chant in princely houses whose ancestors it was a good
speculation to praise.  You were everywhere in Greece:  a great
and vague tradition, a formless mass of literature:  by the time
Solon was making laws for Athens, and Pisistratus was laying the
foundations of her stable government and greatness.

And then you were officially canonized.  Solon, Pisistratus, or
one of the Pisistratidae, determined that you should be, not a
vague tradition and wandering songs any longer, but the Bible of
the Hellenes.  From an obscure writer of the Alexandrian period
we get a tale of Pisistratus sending to all the cities of Greece
for copies of Homeric poems, paying for them well; collating
them, editing them out of a vast confusion; and producing at
last out of the matter thus obtained, a single more or less
articulate Iliad.  From Plato and others we get hints leading to
the supposition that an authorized state copy was prepared; that
it was ordained that the whole poem should be recited at the
Panathenaic Festivals by relays of Rhapsodoi; this state copy
being in the hands of a prompter whose business it was to see
there should be no transgression by the chanters.* The wandering
songs of the old blind minstrel have become the familiar Sacred
Book of the brightest-minded people in Greece.

------
* For a detailed account of all this see De Quincey's essay Homer
and the Homeridae.
------

Some sixty years pass, and now look what happens.  A mighty Power
in Asia arranges a punitive expedition against turbulent
islanders and coast-dwellers on its western border.  But an old
blind minstrel has been having his way with these:  and the
punitive expedition is to be of the kind not where you punish,
but where you are punished;--has been suggesting to them, from
the Olympus of his sacrosanct inspiration, the idea of great
racial achievement, till it has become a familiar thing, ideally,
in their hearts.--The huge armies and the fleets come on; Egypt
has gone down; Lydia has gone down; the whole world must go
down before them.  But there is an old blind minstrel, long since
grown Olympian in significance, and throned aloft beside
Nephelegereta Zeus, chanting in every Greek ear and heart.
Greeks rise in some sort to repel the Persian:  Athens and
Sparta, poles apart in every feeling and taste, find that under
the urge of archaic hexameters and in the face of this common
danger, they can co-operate after a fashion.  The world is in a
tumult and threatens to fall; but behind all the noise and
ominous thunder, by heaven, you can hear the roll of hexameters,
and an old blind sorrow-stricken bard chanting.  The soul of a
nation is rising, the beat of her wings keeping time to the music
of olden proud resounding lines.  Who led the Grecian fleet at
Salamis?--Not Spartan Eurygiades, but an old blind man dead these
centuries.  Who led the victors at Marathon?  Not sly Athenian
Miltiades, but an old dead man who had only words for his wealth:
blind Maeonides chanting; and with his chanting marshaling on
the roll of his hexameters mightier heroes than ever a Persian
eye could see:  the host that fought at Ilion; the creatures of
his brain; Polymechanos Odysseus, and Diomedes and Aias;
Podargos Achilles; Anas andron Agamemnon.

The story of the Persian Wars comes to us only from the Greek
side; so all succeeding ages have been enthusiastically
Prohellene.  We are to think that Europe since has been great and
free and glorious, because free and cultured Greeks then held
back a huge and barbarous Asian despotism.  All of which is great
nonsense.  Europe since has not been great and free and glorious;
very often she has been quite the reverse.  She has, at odd
times, been pottering around her ideal schemes of government;
which Asia in large part satisfied herself that she had found
long ago.  As for culture and glory, the trumps have now been
with the one, now with the other.  And the Persians were not
barbarians by any means.  And when you talk of Asia, remember
that it is as far a cry from Persia to China, as from Persian to
England.  Let us have not more of this preoccupation with
externals, and blind eyes to the Spirit of Man.  I suppose
ballot-boxes and referenda and recalls and the like were
specified, when it was said  _Of such is the kingdom of Heaven?_...

But Persia would not have flowed out over Europe, if  Marathon,
Salamis, and Plataea had gone the other way. Empires wax and wane
like the moon; they ebb and flow like the tides; and are governed
by natural law as these are; and as little depend, ultimately,
upon battle, murder, and sudden death; which are but effects that
wisdom would evitate; we are wrong in taking them for causes. Two
things you can posit about any empire: it will expand to its
maximum; then ebb and fall away. Though the daily sun sets not on
its  boundaries, the sun of time will set on its decay; because
all things born in time will die; and no elixer of life has been
found, nor ever will be. There is an  impulse from  the inner
planes; it strikes into the heart of a people; rises there, and
carries them forward upon an outward sweep; then recedes, and
leaves them to their fall. Its cycle may perhaps be longer or
shorter; but in the main its story is always the same, and bound
to be so; you cannot vote down the cycles of time. What hindered
Rome from  mastery of Europe; absolute mastery; and keeping it
forever?  Nothing--but the eternal Cyclic Law. So Persia.

She was the last phase of that West Asian manvantara which began
in 1890 and was due to end in 590 B. C. As such a phase, a
splendor-day of thirteen decades should have been hers; that, we
find, being  always the length of a national illumination. She
began under Cyrus in 558; flowed out under Cambyses and Darius to
her maximum growth--for half the thirteen decades expanding
steadily. Then she touched Greece, where a younger cycle was
rising, and recoiled. She should have been at high tide precisely
three years before-Marathon--a  half-cycle after the accession of
Cyrus, or in 493;--and was. Then the Law-pronounced its  _Thus
far and no further;_ and enforced it  with Homer's songs, and
Greek valor, and Darius' death, and Xerxes' fickle childishness
(he smacked the Hellespont because it was naughty). These things
together brought to naught the might and ambition and bravery of
Iran; but had they been lacking, the Law would have found other
means. Though Xerxes and Themistocles had both sat at home doing
nothing, Alexander would still have  marched east in  his time,
and  Rome conquered the world. So discount all talk of Greece's
having saved  Europe, which was never in danger. But you may say
Persia saved Greece: that her impact kindled the fires--was used
by the Law for that purpose--which so brilliantly have illumined
Europe since.

Persia rose in the evening of that  West Asian manvantara; the
empires of its morning and noon, as Assyria  chiefly, had been
slower of growth, longer of life, smaller of expanse; and for her
one, had several periods of glory.  A long habit of empire
-building had been formed there, which carried Persia rapidly and
easily to her far limits.  Assyria, the _piece de resistance_ of
the whole manvantara, with huge and long effort had created, so
to say, an astral mold; of which Persia availed herself, and
overflowed its boundaries, conquering regions east and west
Assyria never knew.  But if she found the mold and the habit
there to aid her, she came too late for the initial energies of
the morning, or the full forces of the manvantaric noon.  Those
had been wielded by the great Tiglath Pilesers and Assurbanipals
of earlier centuries; fierce conquerors, splendid builders,
ruthless patrons of the arts.  What was left for the evening and
Persia could not carry her outward her full thirteen decades, but
only half of them:  sixty-five years her tides were rising, and
then she touched Greece.  Thence-forward she remained stationary
within her borders, not much troubled internally, until the four
-twenties.  To a modern eye, she seems on the decline since
Marathon; to a Persian of the time, probably, that failure on
the Greek frontier looked a small matter enough.  A Pancho Villa
to chase; if you failed to catch him, pooh, it was nothing!
Xerxes is no Darius, true:  Artaxerxes I, no Cyrus, nor nothing
like.  But through both their reigns there is in the main good
government in most of the provinces; excellent law and order;
and a belief still in the high civilizing mission of the
Persians.  Peace, instead of the old wars of conquest; but you
would have seen no great falling off.  Hystaspes himself had
been less conqueror than consolidator; the Augustus of the
Achaemenids, greater at peace than at war;--though great at
that too, but not from land-frontiers; and indeed, had ample
provocation, as those things go, for his punitive expedition that
failed.  For the rest, he had strewn the coast with fine harbors,
and reclaimed vast deserts with reservoirs and dikes; had
explored the Indus and the ocean, and linked Egypt and Persia by
a canal from the Red Sea to the Nile.  Well; and Xerxes carried
it on; he too played the great Achaemenid game; did he not send
ships to sail round Africa?  If there was no more conquering, it
was because there was really nothing left to conquer; who would
bother about that Greece?--Darius Hystaspes was the last strong
kind, yes; but Datius Nothus was the first gloomy tyrant, or at
least his queen, bloodthirsty Parysatis, was; which was not til
434.  So that Persia too had her good thirteen decades of
comfortable, even glorious, years.

   Whereafter we see her wobbling under conflicting cyclic
impulses down to her final fall.  For lack of another to take her
place, she was still in many ways the foremost power; albeit
here and there obstreperous satraps were always making trouble.
When Lysander laid Athens low in 404, it was Persian financial
backing enabled him to do it; but Cyrus might march in to her
heart, and Xenophon out again, but two years later, and none to
say them effectually nay.  Had there been some other West Asian
power, risen in 520 or thereabouts, to outlast Persia and finish
its day with the end of the great cycle in 390, one supposes the
Achaemenids would have fallen in the four-twenties, and left that
other supreme during the remaining years.  But there was none.
The remains of Nineveh and Babylon slept securely in the Persian
central provinces; there was nothing there to rise; they had
their many days long since.  Egypt would have done something, if
she could; would have like to;--but her own cycles were against
her.  She had the last of her cyclic days under the XXVIth
Dynasty.  In 655 Psamtik I reunited and resurrected her while his
overlord Assurbanipal was wrecking his--Assurbanipal's--empire
elsewhere; thirteen decades afterwards, in 525, she fell before
Cambyses.  Thirteen decades, nearly, of Persian rule followed,
with interruptions of revolt, before she regained her independence
in 404;--stealing, you may say, the nine years short from
the weakness of Persia.  Then she was free for another half
-cycle, less one year; a weak precarious freedom at best, lost to
Artaxerxes Ochus in 340.  All but the first fourteen years of it
fell beyond the limits of the manvantara; the West Asian forces
were spent.  Egypt was merely waiting til the Greek cycle should
have sunk low enough and on to the military plane; and had not
long to wait.  She paid back most of her nine years to Persia;
then hailed Alexander as her savior; and was brought by him, to
some extent, under the influence of European cycles; to share
then in what uninteresting twilight remained to Greece, and
presently in the pomps and crimsons of Rome.

Persia, too, was waiting for that Greek military cycle; until it
should rise, however, something had to be going on in West Asia.
The Athenian first half-cycle--sixty-five years from the
inception of the hegemony--ended in 413, when the Peloponnesian
War entered its last, and for Athens, disastrous, phase.  Another
half-cycle brings us to the rise of Philip; who about that time
became dominant in Greece.  But not yet had a power consolidated,
which could contest with Persia the hegemony of the world.
Having enabled Sparta to put down Athens, the western satraps
turned their attention to finding those who should put down
Sparta.  Corinth, Thebes, Argos and Athens were willing; and
Pharnabazus financed them for war in 395.  A year after, he and
Conon destroyed the Spartan fleet.  In 387 came the Peace of
Antalicidas, by which Persia won what Xerxes had fought for of
old; the suzerainty of Greece.  But she was not strong; her
cycle was long past; she stood upon the wealth and prestige of
her better days, and the weakness of her contemporaries.
Internally she was falling to pieces until Artaxerxes Ochus,
between 362 and 338, wading through blood and cruelty, restored
her unity, wore out her resources, and left her apparently as
great as under Xerxes, but really ready to fall at a touch.  He
prepared the way for Alexander.

So ended an impulse that began, who knows when? on a high
spiritual plane in the pure religion of the Teacher we call
Zoroaster; a high system of ethics expressed in long generations
of clean and noble lives.  From that spirituality the impulse
descending reached the planes of intellect and culture; with
results we cannot measure now; nothing remains but the splendor
of a few ruins in the wilderness--the course the lion and the
lizard keep.  It reached the plane of military power, and flowed
over all the lands between the Indus and the Nile; covering them
with a well-ordered, highly civilized and wisely governed empire.
Then it began to ebb; meeting a counter-impulse arising in
Eastern Europe.

Which, too, had it source on spiritual planes; in the heart and
on the lyre of blind Maeonides; and worked downward and outward,
till it had wrought on this plane a stable firmness in Sparta, an
alertness in Athens.  It contacted then the crest of the Persian
wave, and received from the impact huge accession of vigor.  It
blossomed in the Age of Pericles on the plane  of mind and
creative imagination.  It came down presently on to the plane of
militarism, and swelled out under Alexander as far as to the
eastern limits of the Persian Empire he overthrew.  Where it met
a tide beginning to rise in India; and receded or remained
stationary before that.  And at last it was spent, and itself
overthrown by a new impulse arisen in Italy; which took on
impetus from contact with Greece, as Greece had done from contact
with Persia.

The Greeks of Homer's and Hesiod's time, before the European
manvantara, elsewhere begun, had reached or quickened them, were
uncouth and barbarous enough; they may have stood, to their
great West Asian neighbors, as the Moors of today to the nations
of Europe; they may have stood, in things cultural, to the
unknown nations of the north or west already at that time
awakened, as the Chinese now and recently to the Japanese.  Like
Moors, like Chinese, they had behind them traditions of an
ancient greatness; but pralaya, fall, adversity, squalor, had
done their work on them, developing the plebeian qualities.  Now
that they have emerged into modern history, as then when
they were emerging into ancient, we find them with many like
characteristics; a turn for democracy, for example; the which
they assuredly had not when they were passing into pralaya under
the Byzantine Empire.  A turn for democracy; plebeian qualities;
these are the things one would expect after pralaya, if that
pralaya had been at all disastrous.  With the ancient Greeks,
the plebeian qualities were not all virtues by any means;
they retained through their great age many of the vices of
plebeianism.  They won their successes for the most part on
sporadic impulses of heroism; shone by an extraordinary
intellectual and artistic acumen. But taking them by and large,
they were too apt to ineffectualize those successes, in the
fields of national and political life, by extraordinary venality
and instability of character. I shall draw here deeply on
Professor Mahaffy, who very wisely sets out to restore the
balance as between Greeks and Persians, and burst bubble-notions
commonly held. Greek culture was extremely varied, and therein
lay its strength; you can find all sorts of types there; and
there are outstanding figures of the noblest. But on the whole,
says Mahaffy--I think rightly--there was something sordid,
grasping, and calculating: _noblesse oblige_ made little appeal
to  them--was rather foreign to their nature. Patricianism did
exist; in Sparta; perhaps in Thebes. Of the two Thebans we know
best, Pindar was decidedly a patrician poet, and Epaminondas was
a very great gentleman; now Thebes, certainly, must have been
mighty in foregone manvantaras, as witness her five cycles of
myths, the richest in Greece. In her isolation she had doubtless
carried something of that old life down; and then, too, she had
Pindar. Nor was Sparta any upstart;--of her we have only heard
Athenians speak. But outside of these two, you hardly find a
Greek  _gentleman_ in public life; hardly that combination of
personal honor, contempt of commerce, class-pride, leisured
and cultured living;--with, very often, ultra-conservatism,
narrowness of outlook, political ineptitude and selfishness. The
Spartans had many of these instincts, good and bad. They reached
their cultural zenith in the seventh century or earlier;
probably Lycurgus had an eye to holding off that degeneration
which follows on super-refinement; and hence the severe life he
brought in. My authority makes much of the adoration the other
Greeks accorded them; who might hate and fight with Sparta, but
took infinite pride in her nonetheless. Thus they told those
tales of the Spartan mothers, and the Spartan boy the fox
nibbled; thus their philosophers, painting an Utopia, took
always most of its features from Lacedaemon.

All of which I quote for the light's sake it throws on the past
of Greece: the past of her past, and the ages before her history.
Or really, on the whole history of the human race; for I think it
is what you shall find always, or almost always. I spoke of the
Celtic qualities as having been of old patrician; they are
plebeian nowadays, after the long pralaya and renewal. As a
pebble is worn smooth by the sea, so the patrician type, with its
refinements and culture, is wrought out by the strong life
currents that play through a race during its manvantaric periods.
Pralaya comes, with conquest, the overturning of civilization,
mixture of blood; all the precious results obtained hurled back
into the vortex;--and then to be cast up anew with the new
manvantara, a new uncouth formless form, to be played on, shaped
and infused by the life-currents again.  In Greece an old
manvantara had evolved patricianism and culture; which the
pralaya following swept all away, except some relics perhaps in
Thebes the isolated and conservative, certainly in Sparta.
Lycurgus was wise in his generation when he sought by a rigid
system to impose the plebeian virtues on Spartan patricianism.

Wise in his generation, yes; but he could work no miracle.
Spartan greatness, too, was ineffectual:  there is that about
pouring new wine into old bottles.  Sparta was old and conservative;
covered her patrician virtues with a rude uncultural exterior;
was inept politically--as old aristocracies so commonly are;
she shunned that love of the beautiful and the things of
the mind which is the grace, as Bushido--to use the best
name there is for it--is the virtue, of the patrician.  You
may say she was selfish and short-sighted; true; and yet she
began the Peloponnesian War not without an eye to freeing the
cities and islands from the soulless tyranny an Athenian
democracy had imposed on them:  when there is a war, some men
will always be found, who go in with unselfish high motives.--
Being the patrician state, and the admired of all, it was she
naturally who assumed the hegemony when the Persian came.  But
she had foregone the graces of her position, and her wits,
through lack of culture, were something dull.  She lost that
leadership presently to a young democratic Athens endowed
with mental acumen and potential genius; who, too, gained
immeasurably from Sparta, because she knew how to turn everything
to the quickening of her wits--this having at her doors so
contrasting a neighbor, for example.--Young?  Well, yes; I
suspect if there had ever been an Athenian glory before, it was
ages before Troy fell.  She plays no great part in the legends of
the former manvantara; Homer has little to say about her.  She
had paid tribute at one time to Minos, king of Crete; her
greatness belonged not to the past, but to the future.

As all Greeks admired the Spartans--what we call a 'sneaking'
admiration--so too they admired the Persians; who were gentleman
in a great sense, and in most moral qualities their betters.  Who
was _Ho Basileus, The King_ par excellence?  Always 'the Great
King, the King of the Persians.'  Others were mere kings of
Sparta, or where it might be.  And this Great King was a far-way,
tremendous, golden figure, moving in a splendor as of fairy
tales; palaced marvelously, so travelers told, in cities
compared with which even Athens seemed mean.  Greek drama sought
its subjects naturally in the remote and grandiose; always in
the myths of prehistory, save once--when Aeschylus found a
kindred atmosphere, and the material he wanted, in the palace of
the Great King.  To whom, as a matter of history, not unrecorded
by Herodotus, his great chivalrous barons accorded a splendid
loyalty,--and loyalty is always a thing that lies very near the
heart of Bushido.  Most Greeks would cheerfully sell their native
city upon an impulse of chagrin, revenge, or the like.  Xerxes'
ships were overladen, and there was a storm; the Persian lords
gaily jumped into the sea to lighten them.  Such Samurai action
might not have been impossible to Greeks,--Spartans especially;
but in the main their eyes did not wander far from the main
chance.  You will think of many exceptions; but this comes as
near truth, probably, as a generalization may.  We should
understand their temperament; quick and sensitive, capable of
inspiration to high deeds; but, en masse, rarely founded on
enduring principles.  That jumping into the seas was nothing to
the Persians; they were not sung to it; it was not done in
defense of home, or upon a motive of sudden passion, as hate or
the like; but permanent elements in their character moved them
to it quietly, as to the natural thing to do.  But if Greeks
had done it, with what kudos, like Thermopylae, it would have
come down!

They were great magnificoes, very lordly gentlemen, those Persian
nobles; _hijosdalgo,_ as they say in Spain; men of large lives,
splendor and leisure, scorning trade; mighty huntsmen before the
Lord.  Of the Greeks, only the Spartans were sportsmen; but
where the Spartans hunted foxes and such-like small fry, The
Persians followed your true dangerous wild-fowl:  lions,
leopards, and tigers.  A great satrap could buy up Greece almost
at any time; could put the Greeks to war amongst themselves, and
finance his favorite side out of his own pocket.  On such a scale
they lived; and travelers and mercenaries brought home news of
it to Greece; and Greeks whose wealth might be fabulous strove
to emulate the splendor they heard of.  The Greeks made better
heavy armor--one cause of the victories; but for the most part
the Persian crafts and manufactures outshone the Greek by far.
All these things I take from Mahaffy, who speaks of their culture
as "an ancestral dignity for superior to, and different from, the
somewhat mercantile refinement of the Greeks."  The secret of the
difference is this:  the West Asian manvantara, to which the
Persians belonged, was more than a thousand years older than the
European manvantara, to which the Greeks belonged; so the
latter, beside the former, had an air of _parvenu._  The Greeks
dwelt on the Persian's borders; and fought him when they must;
intrigued with or against him when they might; called him
barbarian for self-respect's sake--and admired and envied him
always.  Had he been really a barbarian, in contact with their
superior civilization, he would have become degraded by the
contact; in such cases it always happens that the inferior sops
up the vices only of his betters.  But Alexander found the
Persians much the same courtly-mannered, lordly-living, mighty
huntsmen they had been when Herodotus described them; and was
ambitious that his Europeans should mix with them on equal terms
and learn their virtues.

Where and when did this high tradition grow up?  There was not
time enough, I think, in that half cycle between the rise of
Cyrus and Marathon.  In truth we are to see in these regions
vistas of empires receding back into the dimness, difficult to
sort out and fix their chronology.  Cyrus overthrew the Assyrian;
from whose yoke his people had freed themselves some fifteen
years or so before.  The Medes had been rising since the earlier
part of that seventh century; sometime then they brought the
kindred race of Persians under their sway.  Sometime then, too, I
am inclined to think, lived the Teacher Zoroaster: about whose
date there is more confusion than about that of any other World
Reformer; authorities differ within a margin of 6000 years.  But
Taoism, Confucianism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Pythagoreanism all
had their rise about this time; the age of religions began then;
it was not a thing of chance, but marked a definite change in the
spiritual climate of the world.  The _Bundahish,_ the Parsee
account of it, says that he lived 258 years before Alexander;
almost all scholars reject the figure--once more, "it is their
nature to."  But you will note that 258 is about as much as to
say 260, which is twice the cycle of thirteen decades; I think
the probabilities are strong that the _Bundahish_ is right.  The
chief grounds for putting him much earlier are these:  Greek
accounts say, six thousand years before the Greek time; and
there are known to have been kings in those parts, long before
Cyrus, by the name or title of Mazdaka,--which word is from
Mazda, the name of the God-Principle in Zoroastrianism.  The
explanation is this:  you shall find it in H.P. Blavatsky:  there
were many Zoroasters; this one we are speaking of was the last
(as Gautama was the last of the Buddhas); and of course he
invented nothing, taught no new truth; but simply organized as a
religion ideas that had before belonged to the Mysteries.  Where
then did his predecessors teach?--Where Zal and Rustem thundered
as they might; in the old Iran of the _Shah Nameh,_ the land of
Kaikobad the Great and Kaikhusru.  Too remote for all scholars
even to agree that it existed; set by those who do believe in it
at about 1100 B.C.--we hear of a "Powerful empire in Bactria"--
which is up towards Afghanistan; I take it that it was from this
the Persian tradition came--last down to, and through, the period
of the Achaemenidae.  What arts, what literature, these latter
may have had, are lost; nothing is known of their creative
and mental culture; but, to quote Mahaffy once more, it is
exceedingly unlikely they had none.  Dio Chrysostom, in the first
century B.C., says that "neither Homer nor Hesiod sang of the
chariots and horses of Zeus so worthily as Zoroaster"; which may
mean, perhaps, that a tradition still survived in his time of a
great Achaemenian poetry.  Why then is this culture lost, since
if it existed, it was practically contemporary with that
of the Greeks?  Because contemporaneity is a most deceiving
thing; there is nothing in it.  Persia now is not contemporary
with Japan; nor modern China with Europe or America.  The
Achaemenians are separated from us by two pralayas; while
between us and the Greeks there is but one.  When our present
Europe has gone down, and a new barbarism and Middle Ages have
passed over France, Britain and Italy, and given place in turn to
a new growth of civilization--what shall we know of this Paris,
and Florence, and London?  As much and as little as we know now
of Greece and Rome.  We shall dig them up and reconstruct them;
found our culture on theirs, and think them very wonderful for
mere centers of (Christian) paganism; we shall marvel at their
genius, as shown in the fragments that go under the names of
those totally mythological poets, Dante and Milton; and at their
foul cruelty, as shown by their capital punishment and their
wars.  And what shall we know of ancient Athens and Rome?  Our
scholars will sneer at the superstition that they ever existed;
our theologians will say the world was created somewhat later.

Or indeed, no; I think it will not be so.  I think we shall have
established an abiding perception of truth:  Theosophy will have
smashed the backbone of this foolish Kali-Yuga as a little,
before then.

So that Creasy is all out in his estimate of the importance
of Marathon and the other victories.  Wars are only straws
to show which way the current flows; and they do that only
indifferently.  They are not the current themselves, and they do
not direct it; and were men wise enough to avoid them, better
than the best that was ever won out of war would be won by other
means that the Law would provide.  And yet the Human Spirit will
win something out of all eventualities, even war, if Kama and the
Cycles permit.  In a non-political sense the Persian Wars bore
huge harvest for Greece; the Law used them to that end.  The
great effort brought out all the latent resources of the Athenian
mind:  the successes heightened Greek racial feeling to a pitch.
--What! we could stand against huge Persia?--then we are not
unworthy of the men that fought at Ilion, our fathers; the race
and spirit of _anax andron Agamemnon_ is not dead!  Ha, we can do
anything; there are no victories we may not win!  And here is the
dead weight and terror of the war lifted from us; and there is
no anxiety now to hold our minds.  We may go forth conquering and
to conquer; we may launch our triremes on immaterial seas, and
subdue unknown empires of the spirit!--And here is Athens the
quick-witted, hegemon of Greece; her ships everywhere on the
wine-dark seas; her citizens everywhere; her natural genius
swelled by an enormous sense of achievement; her soul, grown
great under a great stress, now freed from the stress and at
leisure to explore:--in contact with opposite-minded Sparta; in
contact with conservative and somewhat luxuriously-living slow
Thebes;--with a hundred other cities;--in contact with proud
Persia; with Egypt, fallen, but retaining a measure of her old
profound sense of the Mysteries and the reality of the Unseen;
--from all these contacts and sources a spirit is born in Athens
that is to astonish and illumine the world.  And Egypt is now in
revolt from the Persian; and intercourse with her is easier than
ever before in historical times; and the triremes, besides what
spiritual cargoes they may be bringing in from her, are bringing
in cargoes of honest material papyrus to tempt men to write down
their thoughts.--So the flowering of Greece became inevitable;
the Law intended it, and brought about all the conditions.





IV--AESCHYLUS AND HIS ATHENS


Greece holds such an eminence in history because the Crest-Wave
rolled in there when it did. She was tenant of an epochal time;
whoever was great then, was to be remembered forever. But the
truth is, Greece served the future badly enough.

The sixth and fifth centuries B. C. were an age of transition, in
which the world took a definite step downward. There had been
present among men a great force to keep the life of the nations
sweet: that which we call the Mysteries of Antiquity. Whether
they had been active continuously since this Fifth Root Race
began, who can say? Very possibly not; for in a million years
cycles would repeat themselves, and I dare say conditions
as desolate as our own have obtained. There may have been
withdrawals, and again expansions outward. But certainly they
were there at the dawn of history, and for a long time before.
What their full effect may have been, we can only guess; for when
the history that we know begins, they were already declining:--we
get no definite news, except of the Iron Age. The Mysteries were
not closed at Eleusis until late in the days of the Roman Empire;
and we know that such a great man as Julian did not disdain to be
initiated. But they were only a remnant then, an ever-indrawing
source of inspiration; already a good century before Pericles
they must have ceased to rule life. Pythagoras--born, probably,
in the five-eighties--had found it necessary, to obtain that with
which spirituality might be reawakened, to travel and learn what
he could in India, Egypt, Chaldaea, and, according to Porphyry
and tradition, among the Druids in Gaul--and very likely Britain,
their acredited headquarters. From these countries he brought
home Theosophy to Greek Italy; and all this suggests that he--and
the race--needed something that Eleusis could no longer give.
About the same time Buddha and the founder of Jainism in India,
Laotse and Confucius in China, and as we have seen, probably also
Zoroaster in Persia, all broke away from the Official Mysteries,
more or less, to found Theosophical Movements of their own;
--which would indicate that, at least from the Tyrrhenian to the
Yellow Sea, the Mysteries had, in that sixth century, ceased to
be the efficient instrument of the White Lodge. The substance of
the Ancient Wisdom might remain in them; the energy was largely
gone.

Pisistratus did marvels for Athens; lifting her out of obscurity
to a position which should invite great souls to seek birth in
her. He died in  527; two years later a son was born to the
Eupatrid Euphorion at Eleusis; and I have no doubt there was some
such stir over the event, on Olympus or on Parnassus, as happened
over a birth at Stratford-on-Avon in 1564, and one in Florence
in the May of 1265. In 510, Hippias, grown cruel since the
assassination of his brother, was driven out from an Athens
already fomenting with the yeast of new things. About that time
this young Eleusinian Eupatrid was set to watch grapes ripening
for the vintage, and fell asleep. In his dream Dionysos, God of
the Mysteries, appeared to him and bade him write tragedies for
the Dionysian Festival. On waking, he found himself endowed with
genius: beset inwardly with tremendous thoughts, and words to
clothe them in; so that the work became as easy to him as if he
had been trained to it for years.

He competed first in 499--against Choerilos and Pratinas, older
poets--and was defeated; and soon afterwards sailed for Sicily,
where he remained for seven years. The dates of Pythagoras are
surmised, not known; Plumptre, with a query, gives 497 for his
death. I wonder whether, in the last years of his life, that
great Teacher met this young Aeschylus from Athens; whether the
years the latter spent in Sicily on this his first visit there,
were the due seven years of his Pythagorean probation and
initiation? "Veniat Aeschylus," says Cicero, "non poeta solum,
sed etiam Pythagoreus: sic enim accepimus ";--and we may accept
it too; for that was the Theosophical Movement of the age;
and he above all others, Pythagoras having died, was the great
Theosophist. They had the Eleusinian Mysteries at Athens, and
Most of the prominent Athenians must have been initiated
into them--since that was the State Religion; but Aeschylus
alone in Athens went through life clothed in the living power
of Theosophy.

Go to the life of such a man, if you want big clues as to the
inner history of his age;--the life of Aeschylus, I think, can
interpret for us that of Athens. There are times when the
movement of the cycles is accelerated, and you can see the
great wheel turning; this was one.  Aeschylus had proudly
distinguished himself at Marathon; and Athens, as the highest
honor she could do him for that, must have his portrait appear in
the battle-picture painted for a  memorial of the victory.  He
fought, too, at Artemisium and Salamis; with equal distinction.
In 484 he won the first of thirteen annual successes in the
dramatic competitions.  These were the years during which Athens
was really playing the hero; the years of Aristides' ascendency.
 In 480 Xerxes burned the city; but the people fought on,
great in faith. In 479 came Plataea, Aeschylus again fighting.
Throughout this time, he, the Esotericist and Messenger of the
Gods, was wholly at one with his Athens--an Athens alive enough
then to the higher things to recognize the voice of the highest
when it spoke to her--to award Aeschylus, year after year, the
chief dramatic prize. Then in 478 or 477 she found herself in a
new position:  her heroism and intelligence had won their reward,
and she was set at the head of Greece. Six years later Aeschylus
produced _The Persians,_ the first of the seven extant out of the
seventy or eighty plays he wrote; in it he is still absolutely
the patriotic Athenian. In 471 came the  _Seven against Thebes;_
from which drama, I think, we get a main current of light on the
whole future history of Athens.

Two men, representing two forces, had guided the city during
those decades. On the one hand there was Aristides, called the
Just--inflexible, incorruptible, impersonal and generous; on the
other, Themistocles--precocious and wild as a boy; profligate as
a youth and young man; ambitious, unscrupulous and cruel; a
genius; a patriot; without moral sense. The policy of Aristides,
despite his so-called democratic reforms, was conservative; he
persuaded Greece, by sound arguments, to the side of Athens:  he
was for Athens doing her duty by Greece, and remaining content.
That of Themistocles was that she should aim at empire by any
means: should make herself a sea-power with a view to dominating
the Greek world. Oh, to begin with, doubtless with a view to
holding back the Persians; and so far his policy was sane enough;
but his was not the kind of mind in which an ambitious idea fails
to develop in ambitious and greedy directions; and that of
mastery of the seas was an idea that could not help developing
fatally. He had been banished for his corruption in 471; but he
had set Athens on blue water, and bequeathed to her his policy.
Henceforward she was to make for supremacy, never counting the
moral cost. She attacked the islands at her pleasure, conquered
them, and often treated the conquered with vile cruelty. The
_Seven against Thebes_ was directed by Aeschylus against the
Themistoclean, and in support of the Aristidean, policy.
Imperialistic ambitions, fast ripening in that third decade of
the fifth century, were opposed by the Messenger of the Gods.

His valor in four battles had set him among the national heroes;
he had been, in _The Persians,_ the laureate of Salamis; by the
sheer grandeur of his poetry he had won the prize thirteen times
in succession.--And by the bye, it is to the eternal credit of
Athenian intelligence that Athens, at one hearing of those
obscure, lofty and tremendous poems, should have appreciated
them, and with enthusiasm. Try to imagine _Samson Agonistes_ put
on the stage today; with no academical enthusiasts or eclat of
classicism to back it; but just put on before thirty thousand
sight-seers, learned and vulgar, statesman and cobbler, tinker
and poet; the mob all there; the groundlings far out-numbering
the elite:--and all not merely sitting out the play, but roused
to a frenzy of enthusiasm; and Milton himself, present and
acting, the hero of the day. That, despite Mr. Whistler and the
_Ten O'Clock_--seems really to have been the kind of thing that
happened in Athens.  Tomides was there, with his companions--
little Tomides, the mender of bad soles--and intoxicated by the
grand poetry; understanding it, and never finding it tedious;--
poetry they had had no opportunity to study in advance, they
understood  and appreciated wildly at first hearing. One cannot
imagine it among moderns.--And Milton is clear as daylight beside
remote and difficult Aeschylus. To catch the latter's thought, we
need the quiet of the study, close attention, reading and
re-reading; and though of course time has made him more difficult;
and we should have understood him better, with no more than our
present limited intelligence, had we been his countrymen and
contemporaries; yet it remains a standing marvel, and witness to
the far higher general intelligence of the men of Athens.  The
human spirit was immensely nearer this plane; they were far more
civilized, in respect to mental culture, than we are. Why?--The
cycles have traveled downward; our triumphs are on a more brutal
plane; we are much farther from the light of the Mysteries than
they were.

And yet they were going wrong:  the great cycle had begun
its down-trend; they were already preparing the way for our
fool-headed materialism.  In the _Seven against Thebes_ Aeschylus
protested against the current of the age. Three years later,
Athens, impatient of criticism, turned on him.

He is acting in one of his own plays--one that been lost. He
gives utterance, down there in the arena, to certain words--
tremendous words, as always, we must suppose: words hurled out of
the heights of an angry eternity--

     _"Aeschylus' bronze-throat eagle-bark for blood,"_

--and Athens, that used to thrill and go mad to such tones when
they proclaimed the godlike in her own soul and encouraged her to
grand aspirations--goes mad now in another sense. She has grown
used to hear warning in them, and something in alliance with her
own stifled conscience protesting against her wrong courses;
and such habituation rarely means acquiescence or soothed
complacency. Now she is smitten and stung to the quick. A yell
from the mob; uproar; from the tiers above tiers they butt,
lurch, lunge, pour forward and down: the tinkers and cobblers,
demagogs and demagoged:  intent--yes--to kill. But he, having yet
something to say, takes refuge at the altar; and there even a
maddened mob dare not molest him. But the prize goes to a rising
star, young Sophocles; and presently the Gods' Messenger is
formally accused and tried for "Profanation of the Mysteries."

Revealing secrets pertaining to them, in fact. And now note this:
his defense is that he did not know that his lines revealed any
secret--was unaware that what he had said pertained to the
Mysteries. Could he have urged such a plea, had it not been known
he was uninitiated? Could he have known the teachings, had he not
been instructed in a school where they were known? He, then, was
an initiate of the Pythagoreans, the new Theosophical Movement
upon the new method; not of Orthodox Eleusis, that had grown old
and comatose rather, and had ceased to count.--Well, the judges
were something saner than the mob; memory turned again to
what he had done at Marathon, what at Arternisium and Plataea;
to his thirteen solid years of victory (national heroism on
poetico-dramatic fields); and to that song of his that "saved
at Salamis":

     _"O Sons of Greeks, go set your country free!"_

--and he was acquitted: Athens had not yet fallen so low as to
prepare a hemlock cup for her teacher. But meanwhile he would do
much better among his old comrades in Sicily than at home; and
thither he went.

He returned in 458, to find the Age of Pericles in full swing;
with all made anew, or in the making; and the time definitely
set on its downward course. 'Reform' was busy at abolishing
institutions once held sacred; was the rage;--that funeral speech
of Pericles, with its tactless vaunting of Athenian superiority
to all other possible men and nations, should tell us something.
When folk get to feel like that, God pity and forgive them!--it
is hard enough for mere men to. Aeschylus smote at imperialism in
the _Agamemnon_--the first play of this last of  his trilogies;
and at the mania for reforming away sacred institutions in the
_Eumenides_--where he asserts the divine origin of the threatened
Areopagus.  Popular feeling rose once more against him, and he
returned to Sicily to die.

Like so many another of his royal line, apparently a failure.
And indeed, a failure he was, so far as his Athens was concerned.
True, Athenian artistic judgment triumphed presently over the
Athenian spite.  Though it was the rule that no successful play
should be performed more than once, they decreed that 'revivals'
of Aeschylus should always be in order.  And Aristophanes
testifies to his lasting popularity--when he shows little Tomides
with a bad grouch over seeing a play by Theognis, when he had
gone to the theater "expecting Aeschylus";--and when he shows
Aeschylus and Euripides winning, because his poetry had died with
him, and so he had it there for a weapon--whereas Aeschylus's was
still alive and on earth.  Yes; Athens took him again, and
permanently, into favor:  took the poet, but not the Messenger
and his message.  For she had gone on the wrong road in spite of
him:  she had let the divine force, the influx of the human
spirit which had come to her as her priceless cyclic opportunity,
flow down from the high planes proper to it, on to the plane of
imperialism and vulgar ambition; and his word had been spoken to
the Greeks in vain--as all Greek history and Karma since has been
proclaiming.  But in sooth he was not merely for an age, but for
all time; and his message, unlike Pindar's whom all Greece
worshiped, and far more than Homer's or that of Sophocles--is
vital today.  Aeschylus, and Plato, and Socrates who speaks
through Plato, and Pythagoras who speaks through all of them, are
the Greeks whose voices are lifted forever for the Soul.

Even the political aspect of his message--the only one I have
touched on--is vital.  It proclaims a truth that underlies all
history:  one, I suspect, that remains for our Theosophical
Movement to impress on the general world-consciousness so that
wars may end:  namely, that the impulse of Nationalism is a holy
thing, foundationed upon the human spirit:  a means designed by
the Law for humanity's salvation.  But like all spiritual forces,
it must be kept pure and spiritual, or instead of saving, it will
damn.  In its inception, it is vision of the Soul:  of the Racial
or National Soul--which is a divine light to lure us away from
the plane of personality, to obliterate our distressing and
private moods; to evoke the divine actor in us, and merge us in
a consciousness vastly greater than out own.  But add to that
saving truth this damning corolary:  _I am better than thou; my
race than thine; we have harvests to reap at your expense, and
our rights may be your wrongs:_--and you have, though it appear
not for awhile, fouled that stream from godhood:--you have
debased your nationalism and made it hellish. Upon your ambitions
and your strength, now in the time of your national flowering,
you may win to your desire, if you _will;_  because now the
spirit is quickening the whole fiber of your national self; and
the national will must become, under that pressure, almost
irresistibly victorious. The Peoples of the earth shall kneel
before your throne; you shall get your vulgar empire;--but you
shall get it presently, as they say, "where the chicken got the
axe": _Vengeance is mine, saith the Law; I will repay._ The
cycle, on the plane to which you have dragged it down, will run
its course; your high throne will go down with it, and yourself
shall kneel to races you now sniff at for 'inferior.' You have
brought it on to the material plane, and are now going upward on
its upward trend there gaily--

     "Ah, let no evil lust attack the host
     Conquered by greed, to plunder what they ought not;
     For yet they need return in safety home,
     Doubling the goal to run their backward race"
                            [_Agamemnon,_ Plumtre's translation]

The downtrend of the cycle awaits you--the other half--just as
the runner in the foot-races to win, must round the pillar at the
far end of the course, and return to the starting-place.--That is
among the warnings Aeschylus spoke in the  _Agamemnon_ to an
Athens that was barefacedly conquering and enslaving the Isles of
Greece to no end but her own wealth and power and glory. The
obvious reference is of course to the conquerors of Troy.

I have spoken of this Oresteian Trilogy as his _Hamlet;_ with the
_Prometheus Bound_--another tremendous Soul-Symbol--it is
what puts him in equal rank with the four supreme Masters of
later Western Literature. I suppose it is pretty certain that
Shakespeare knew nothing of him, and had never heard of the plot
of his _Agamemnon._ But look here:--

There was one Hamlet King of Denmark, absent from control of his
kingdom because sleeping within his orchard (his custom always of
an afternoon). And there was one Agamemnon King of Men, absent
from control of his kingdom because leading those same Men at the
siege of Troy. Hamlet had a wife Gertrude; Agamemnon had a wife
Clytemnestra. Hamlet had a brother Claudius; who became the lover
of Gertrude. Agamemnon had a cousin Aegisthos, who became the
paramour of Clytemnestra. Claudius murdered Hamlet, and thereby
came by his throne and queen. Clytemnestra and Aegisthos murdered
Agamemnon, and Aegisthos thereby became possessed of his throne
and queen. Hamlet and Gertrude had a son Hamlet, who avenged his
father's murder. Agamemnon and Clytemnestra had a son Orestes,
who avenged  his father's murder.

There, however, the parallel ends. Shakespeare had to paint the
human soul at a certain stage of its evolution: the 'moment of
choice,'  the entering on the path: and brought all his genius to
bear on revealing that. He had, here, to teach Karma only
incidentally; in _Macbeth,_ when the voice cried  'Sleep no
more!'  he is more Aeschylean in spirit. That dreadful voice
rings through Aeschylus; who was altogether obsessed with the
majesty and awfulness of Karma.  It is what he cried to Athens
then, and to all ages since, reiterating _Karma_ with terrible
sleep-forbidding insistency from dark heights.--I have quoted the
wonderful line in which Browning, using similes borrowed from
Aeschylus himself, sums up the effect of his style:

     'Aeschylus' bronze-throat eagle-bark for blood,'

which compensates for the more than Greek--unintelligibility of
Browning's version of the _Agamemnon:_  it gives you some color,
some adumbration of the being and import of the man. How shall we
compare him with those others, his great compeers on the Mountain
of Song?  Shakespeare--as I think--throned upon a peak where are
storms often, but where the sun shines mostly; surveying all
this life, and with an eye to the eternal behind:  Dante--a
prophet, stern, proud, glad and sorrowful; ever in a great pride
of pain or agony of bliss; surveying the life without,--only to
correlate it with and interpret it by the vaster life within
that he knew better;--this Universe for him but the crust and
excoriata of the Universe of the Soul.  Milton--a Titan Soul
hurled down from heaven, struggling with all chaos and the deep
to enunciate--just to proclaim and put on everlasting record--
those two profound significant words, _Titan_ and _Soul,_ for a
memorial to Man of the real nature of Man.  Aeschylus--the
barking of an eagle--of Zeus the Thunderer's own eagle out of
ominous skies above the mountains: a thing unseen as Karma,
mysterious and mighty as Fate, as Disaster, as the final Triumph
of the Soul; sublime as death; a throat of bronze, superhumanly
impersonal; a far metallic clangor of sound, hoarse or harsh,
perhaps, if your delicate ears must call him so; but grand;
immeasurably grand; majestically, ominously and terribly grand;--
ancestral voices prophesying war, and doom, and all dark
tremendous destinies;--and yet he too with serenity and the
Prophecy of Peace and bliss for his last word to us:  he will not
leave his avenging Erinyes until by Pallas' wand and will they
are transformed into Eumenides, bringers of good fortune.

Something like that, perhaps, is the impression Aeschylus leaves
on the minds of those who know him.  They bear testimony to the
fact that, however grand his style--like a Milton Carlylized in
poetry--thought still seems to overtop it and to be struggling
for expression through a vehicle less than itself.

Says Lytton, not unwisely perhaps:  "His genius is so near the
verge of bombast, that to approach his sublime is to rush into
the ridiculous"; and he goes on to say that you might find the
nearest echo of his diction in Shelley's _Prometheus;_ but of his
diction alone; for "his power is in concentration--that of
Shelley in diffuseness." "The intellectuality of Shelley," he
says, "destroyed; that of Aeschylus only increased his command
over the passions. The interest he excites is startling,
terrible, intense." Browning tried to bring over the style; but
left the thought, in an English _Double-Dutched,_ far remoter
than he found it from our understanding. The thought demands in
English a vehicle crystal-clear; but Aeschylus in the Greek is
not crystal-clear:  so close-packed and vast are the ideas that
there are lines on lines of which the best scholars can only
conjecture the meaning.--In all this criticism, let me say, one
is but saying what has been said before; echoing Professor
Mahaffy; echoing Professor Gilbert Murray; but there is a need
to give you the best picture possible of this man speaking from
the eternal.--Unless Milton and Carlyle had co-operated to make
it, I think, any translation of the _Agamemnon_--which so many
have tried to translate--would be fatiguing and a great bore to
read. It may not be amiss to quote three lines from George Peel's
_David and Bethsabe,_ which have been often called Aeschylean
in audacity:--

     "At him the thunder shall discharge his bolt,
     And his fair spouse, with bright and fiery wings,
     Sit ever burning on his hateful wings;"

His--the thunder's--fair spouse is the lightning. Imagine
images as swift, vivid and daring as that, hurled and flashed out
in language terse, sudden, lofty--and you may get an idea of what
this eagle's bark was like. And the word that came rasping and
resounding on it out of storm-skies high over Olympus, for Athens
then and the world since to hear, was KARMA.

He took that theme, and drove it home, and drove it home, and
drove it home. Athens disregarded the rights and sufferings of
others; was in fact abominably cruel. Well; she should hear about
Karma; and in such a way that she should--no, but she _should_--
give ear. Karma punished wrong-doing. It was wrong-doing that
Karma punished. You could not do wrong with impunity.--The common
thought was that any extreme of good fortune was apt to rouse the
jealousy of the Gods, and so bring on disaster. This was what
Pindar taught--all-worshiped prosperous Pindar, Aeschylus'
contemporary, the darling poet of the Greeks. The idea is
illustrated by Herodotus' story of the Ring of Polycrates.

You remember how the latter, being tyrant of Samos, applied to
Amasis of Egypt for an alliance.  But wary Amasis, noting his
invariable good luck, advised him to sacrifice something, lest
the Gods should grow jealous:  so Polycrates threw a ring into
the sea, with the thought thus to appease Nemesis cheaply; but
an obliging fish allowed itself to be caught and served up for
his supper with the ring in its internal economy; on hearing of
which, wary Amasis foresaw trouble, and declined the alliance
with thanks.  Such views or feelings had come to be Greek
orthodoxy; you may take it that whatever Pindar said was not far
from the orthodoxies--hence his extreme popularity:  we dearly
love a man who tells us grandly what we think ourselves, and
think it right to think.  But such a position would not do for
Aeschylus.  He noted his doctrine only to condemn it.

     "There live an old saw framed in ancient days
      In memories of men, that high estate,
      Full grown, brings forth its young, nor childless dies,
      But that from good success
      Springs to the race a woe insatiable.
      But I, apart from all,
      Hold this my creed alone:
      Ill deeds along bring forth offspring of ill
      Like to their parent stock."

Needless to say the translation--Dean Plumptre's in the main--
fails to bring out the force of the original.

We must remember that for his audiences the story he had to tell
was not the important thing.  They knew it in advance; it was
one of their familiar legends.  What they went to hear was
Aeschylus' treatment of it; his art, his poetry, his preaching.
That was what was new to them:  the thing for which their eyes
and ears were open.  We go to the theater, as we read novels, for
amusement; the Athenians went for aesthetic and religious ends.
So Aechylus had ready for him an efficient pulpit; and was not
suspect for using it.  We like Movies shows because they are
entertaining and exciting; the Athenian would have damned them
because they are inartistic.

I said, he had a pulpit ready for him; yet, as nearly as such a
statement can come to truth, it was he himself who invented the
drama.  It was, remember, an age of transition:  things were
passing out from the inner planes:  the Mysteries were losing
their virtue.  The Egyptian Mysteries had been dramatic in
character; the Eleusinian, which were very likely borrowed or
copied or introduced from Egypt, were no doubt dramatic too.
Then there had been festivals among the rustics, chiefly in
honor of Dionysos not altogether in his higher aspects, with
rudimentary plays of a coarse buffoonish character.  By 499, in
Athens, these had grown to something more important; in that
year the wooden scaffolding of the theater in which they were
given broke down under the spectators; and this led to the
building of a new theater in stone. It was in 499 Aeschylus first
competed; the show was still very rudimentary in character. Then
he went off to Sicily; and came back with the idea conceived of
Greek Tragedy as an artistic vehicle or expression--and something
more. He taught the men who had at first defeated him, how to do
their later and better work; and opened the way for all who came
after, from Sophocles to Racine. He took to sailing this new ship
of the drama as near as he might to the shore-line of the
Mysteries themselves;--indeed, he did much more than this; for he
infused into his plays that wine of divine life then to be found
in its purity and vigor only or chiefly in the Pythagorean
Brotherhood.--And now as to this new art-form of his.

De Quincey, accepting the common idea that the Dionysian Theater
was built to seat between thirty and forty thousand spectators
(every free Athenian citizen), argues that the formative elements
that made Greek Tragedy what it was were derived from these huge
dimensions. In such a vast building (he asks) how could you
produce such a play as _Hamlet?_--where the art of the actor
shows itself in momentary changes of expression, small byplay
that would be lost, and the like. The figures would be dwarfed by
the distances; stage whispers and the common inflexions of the
speaking voice would be lost. So none of these things belonged to
Greek Tragedy. The mere physical scale necessitated a different
theory of art. The stature of the actors had to be increased, or
they would have looked like pygmies; their figures had to be
draped and muffled, to hide the unnatural proportions thus
given them. A mask had to be worn, if only to make the head
proportionate to the body; and the mask had to contain an
arrangement for multiplying the voice, that it might carry to the
whole audience. That implied that the lines should be chanted,
not spoken;--though in any case, chanted they would be, for they
were verse, not prose; and the Greeks had not forgotten, as we
have, that verse is meant to be chanted.  So here, to begin with,
the whole scheme implied something as unlike actual life as it
well could be. And then, too, there was the solemnity of the
occasion--the religious nature of the whole festival.

Thus, in substance De Quincey; who makes too little, perhaps,
of the matter of that last sentence; and too much of what
goes before. We may say that it was rather the grand impersonal
theory of the art that created the outward condition; not the
conditions that created the theory. Mahaffy went to Athens and
measured the theater; and found it not so big by any means. They
could have worked out our theories and practice in it, had they
wanted to, so far as that goes. Coarse buffoonish country
festivals do not of themselves evolve into grand art or solemn
occasions; you must seek a cause for that evolution, and find it
in an impulse arisen in some human mind. Or minds indeed; for
such impulses are very mysterious. The Gods sow their seed in
season; we do not see the sowing, but presently mark the
greening of the brown earth. The method of the Mysteries--drama
serious and religious--had been drifting outwards:  things had
been growing to a point where a great creative Soul could take
hold of them and mold them to his wish. If Aeschylus was not an
Initiate of Eleusis, he had learnt, with the Pythagoreans, the
method of the Mysteries of all lands. He knew more, not less,
than the common pillars of the Athenian Church and State.  I
imagine it was he, in those thirteen consecutive years of his
victories, who in part created, in part drew from his Pythagorean
knowledge, those conventions and circumstances for Tragedy which
suited him--rather than that conventions already existing imposed
formative limits on him.  His genius was aloof, impersonal,
severe, and of the substance of the Eternal; such as would need
precisely those conventions, and must have created them had they
not been there.  Briefly, I believe that this is what happened.
Sent by Pythagoras to do what he could for Athens and Greece, he
forged this mighty bolt of tragedy to be his weapon.

The theory of modern drama is imitation of life.  It has
nothing else and higher to offer; so, when it fails to imitate,
we call it trash.  But the theory of Aeschylean Tragedy
is the illumination of life.  Illumination of life, through
a medium quite unlike life. Art begins on a spiritual plane,
and works down to realism in its decadence; then it ceases
to be art at all, and becomes merely copying what we imagine
to be nature,--nature, often, as seen through a diseased liver
and well-atrophied pineal gland.

True art imitates nature only in a very selective and limited
way. It chooses carefully what it shall imitate, and all to the
end of illumination. It paints a flower, or a sunset, not to
reproduce the thing seen with the eyes, but to declare and set
forth that mood of the Oversoul which the flower or the sunset
expressed.  Flower-colors or sunset-colors cannot be reproduced
in pigments; but you can do things with pigments and a brush that
can tell the same story. Or it can be done in words, in a poem;
or with the notes of music;--in both of which cases the medium
used is still more, and totally, unlike the medium through which
the Oversoul said its say in the sky or the blossom.

Nature is always expressing these moods of the Oversoul; but we
get no news of them, as a rule, from our own sight and hearing;
we must wait for the poets and artists to interpret them.  Life
is always at work to teach us life; but we miss the grand
lessons, usually, until some human Teacher enforces them. His
methods are the same as those of the artists:  between whose
office and his there was at first no difference;--_Bard_
means only, originally, an Adept Teacher.  Such a one selects
experiences out of life for his pupils, and illumines them
through the circumstances under which they are applied; just as
the true artist selects objects from nature, and by his manner of
treating them, interprets the greatness that lies beyond.

So the drama-theory of Aeschylus.  He took fragments of possible
experience, and let them be seen through a heightened and
interpretative medium; with a light at once intense and somber-
portentous thrown on them; and this not to reproduce the
externalia and appearance of life, but to illumine its inner
recesses; to enforce, in plays lasting an hour or so, the
lessons life may take many incarnations to teach.  This cannot be
done by realism, imitation or reproduction of the actual; than
which life itself is always better.

What keeps us from seeing the meanings of life?  Personality.
Not only our own, but in all those about us.  Personality dodges
and flickers always between our eyes and the solemn motions, the
adumbrations of the augustness beyond.  We demand lots of
personality in our drama; we call it character-drawing.  We want
to see fellows like ourselves lounging or bustling about, and
hear them chattering as we do;--fellows with motives (like our
own) all springing from the personality.  Human life is what
interests us:  we desire to drink deep of it, and drink again and
again.  The music that we wish to hear is the "still, sad music
of humanity";--that is, taking our theory at its best, and before
you come down to sheer 'jazz' and ragtime.  But what interested
Aeschylus was that which lies beyond and within life.  He said:
'You can get life in the Agora, on the Acropolis, any day of the
week; when you come to the theater you shall have something
else, and greater.'

So he set his scenes, either in a vast, remote, and mysterious
antiquity, or--in _The Persians_--at Susa before the palace of
the Great King:  a setting as remote, splendid, vast, and
mysterious, to the Greek mind of the day, as the other.  Things
should not be as like life, but as unlike life, as possible.  The
plays themselves, as acted, were a combination of poetry, dance,
statuesque poses and motions and groupings; there was no action.
All the action was done off the scenes.  They did not portray the
evolution of character; they hardly portrayed character--in the
personal sense--at all.  The _dramatis personae_ are types,
symbols, the expression of natural forces, or principles in man.
In our drama you have a line, an extension forward in time; a
progression from this to that point in time;--in Greek Tragedy
you have a cross-section of time--a cutting through the atom of
time that glimpses may be caught of eternity.  There was no
unfoldment of a story; but the presentation of a single mood.
In the chanted poetry and the solemn dance-movements a situation
was set forth; what led up to it being explained retrospectively.
The audience knew what was coming as well as the author did:
that Agamemnon, for instance, was to be murdered.  So all
was written to play on their expectations, not on their surprise.
There was a succession of perfect pictures; these and the
poetry were to hold the interest, to work it up: to seize
upon the people, and lead them by ever-heightening accessions
of feeling into forgetfulness of their personal lives, and
absorption in the impersonal harmony, the spiritual receptivity,
from which the grand truths are visible.  The actors' masks
allowed only the facial expression of a single mood; and
it was a single mood the dramatist aimed to produce:  a unity;
one great word.  There could be no grave-diggers; no quizzing
of Polonious; no clouds very like a whale.  The whole drama
is the unfoldment of a single moment:  that, say, in which
Hamlet turns on Caudius and kills him--rather, leads him out to
kill him.  To that you are led by a little sparse dialog, ominous
enough, and pregnant with dire significance, between two or three
actors; many long speeches in which the story is told in
retrospect; much chanting by the chorus--Horatio multiplied by a
dozen or so--to make you feel Hamlet's long indecision, and to
allow you no escape from the knowledge that Claudius' crime
would bring about its karmic punishment.  It is a unity:  one
thunderbolt from Zeus;--first the growl and rumbling of the
thunders; then the whirr of the dread missile,--and lo, the man
dead that was to die.  And through the bolt so hurled, so
effective, and with it--the eagle-bark--Aeschylus crying _Karma!_
to the Athenians.

So it has been said that Aeschylean Tragedy is more nearly allied
to sculpture; Shakespearean Tragedy to the Epic.

Think how that unchanging mask, that frozen moment of expression,
would develop the quality of tragic irony. In it Clytemnestra
comes out to greet the returning Agamemnon.  She has her
handmaids carpet the road for him with purple tapestries; she
makes her speeches of welcome; she alludes to the old sacrifice
of Iphigenia; she tells him how she has waited for his return;--
and all the while the audience knows she is about to kill him.
They listen to her doubtful words, in which she reveals to them,
who know both already, her faithlessness and dire purpose; but
to her husband, seems to reveal something different altogether.
With Agamemnon comes Cassandra from fallen Troy:  whose fate was
to foresee all woes and horror, and to forthtell what she saw--
and never to be believed; so now when she raises her dreadful
cry, foreseeing what is about to happen, and uttering warning--
none believe her but the audience, who know it all in advance.
And then there are the chantings of the chorus, a group of Argive
elders.   They know or guess how things stand between the queen
and her lover; they express their misgiving, gathering as the
play goes on; they recount the deeds of violence of which the
House of Atreus has been the scene, and are haunted by the
foreshadowings of Karma.  But they many not understand or
give credence to the warnings of Cassandra:  Karma disallows
fore-fending against the fall of its bolts.  Troy has fallen, they
say:  and that was Karma; because Paris, and Troy in supporting
him, had sinned against Zeus the patron of hospitality,--to whom
the offense rose like vultures with rifled nest, wheeling in
mid-heaven on strong oars of wings, screaming for retribution.
--You may not that Aeschylus' freedom from the bonds of outer
religion is like Shakespeare's own:  here Zeus figures as symbol
of the Lords of Karma; from him flow the severe readjustments
of the Law;--but in the _Prometheus Bound_ he stands for the
lower nature that crucifies the Higher.

Troy, then, had sinned, and has fallen; but (says the Chorus)
let the conquerors look to it that they do not overstep the mark;
let there be no dishonoring the native Gods of Troy; (the
Athenians had been very considerably overstepping the mark
in some of their own conquests recently;)--let there be no
plundering or useless cruelty; (the Athenians had been hideously
greedy and cruel;)--or Karma would overtake it own agents, the
Greeks, who were not yet out of the wood, as we say--who had not
yet returned home.  This was when the beacons had announced the
fall of Troy, and before the entry of Agamemnon.

Clytemnestra is not like Gertrude, but a much grander and more
tragical figure.  Shakespeare leaves you in no doubt as to his
queen's relation to Claudius; he enlarges on their guilty
passion _ad lib._  Aeschylus never mentions love at all in
any of his extant plays; only barely hints at it here.  It
may be supposed to exist; it is an accessory motive; it
lends irony to Clytemnestra's welcome to Agamemnon--in which
only the audience and the Chorus are aware that the lady
does protest too much.  But she stands forth in her own eyes
as an agent of Karma-Nemesis; there is something very terrible
and unhuman about her.  Early in the play she reminds the
Chorus how Agamemnon, is setting out for Troy, sacrificed
his and her daughter Iphigenia to get a fair wind:  a deed
of blood whose consequences must be feared--something to
add to the Chorus's misgivings, as they chant their doubtful
hope that the king may safely return.  In reality Artemis
had saved Igphigenia; and though Clytemnestra did not know
this, in assuming the position of her daughter's avenger
she put herself under the karmic ban.  And Agamemnon did
not know it:  he had intended the sacrifice:  and was therefore,
and for his supposed ruthlessness at Troy, under the same ban
himself. Hence the fate that awaited him on his return; and
hence because of  Clytemnestra's useless crime--when she and
Aegisthos come out from murdering him, and announce what they
have done, the Chorus's dark foretellings--to come true presently
--of the Karma that is to follow upon it.

And here we must guard ourselves against the error--as I think it
is that Aeschylus set himself to create the perfect and final
art-form as such. I think he was just intent on announcing Karma
to the Athenians in the most effective way possible:  bent all
his energies to making that--and that the natural result
of that high issue clear and unescapable; purpose was this
marvelous art-form--which Sophocles took up later, and in
some external ways perhaps perfected. Then came Aristotle after
a hundred years, and defining the results achieved, tried to make
Shakespeare impossible. The truth is that when you put yourself
to do the Soul's work, and have the great forces of the Soul to
back you therein, you create an art-form; and it only remains for
the Aristotelian critic to define it. Then back comes the Soul
after a thousand years, makes a new one, and laughs at the
Aristotles. The grand business is done by following the Soul--not
by conforming to rules or imitating models. But it must be the
Soul; rules and models are much better than personal whims;
they are a discipline good to be followed as long as one can.--
You will note how Aeschylus stood above the possibilities of
actualism with which we so much concern ourselves; in the course
of some sixteen hundred lines, and without interval or change of
act or scene, he introduces the watchman on the house-top who
first sees the beacons that announce the fall of Troy, on the
very night that Troy fell,--and the return of Agamemnon in his
chariot to Argos.

In the  _Choephori_ or _Libation-Pourers,_ the second play of the
trilogy, Orestes returns from his Wittenberg, sent by Apollo to
avenge his father. The scene again is in front of the house of
Atreus. Having killed Aegistlios within, Orestes comes out to
the Chorus; then Clytemnestra enters; he tells her what he has
done, and what he intends to do; and despite her pleadings,
leads her in to die beside her paramour. He comes out again,
bearing (for his justification) the blood-stained robe of
Agamemnon;--but he comes out distraught and with the guilt of
matricide weighing on his soul. The Chorus bids him be of good
cheer, reminding him upon what high suggestion he has acted; but
in the background he, and he alone, sees the Furies swarming to
haunt him, "like Gorgons, dark-robed, and all their tresses hang
entwined with many serpents; and from their eyes is dropping
loathsome blood."  He must wander the world seeking purification.
In the _Eumenides_ we find him in the temple of Loxias (the
Apollo) at Delphi, there seeking refuge with the god who had
prompted him to the deed. But even there the Furies haunt him--
though for weariness--or really because it is the shrine of
Loxias--they have fallen asleep.  From them even Loxias may not
free him; only perhaps Pallas at Athens may do that; Loxias
announces this to him and bids him go to Athens, and assures him
meanwhile of his protection.

To Athens then the scene changes, where Orestes' case is tried:
Apollo defends him; Pallas is the judge; the Furies the
accusers; the Court of the Areopagus the jury. The votes of
these are equally divided; but Athene gives her casting vote in
his favor; and to compensate the Erinyes, turns them into
Eumenides--from Furies to goddesses of good omen and fortune.
Orestes is free, and the end is  happy.

No doubt very pretty and feeble of the bronze-throated Eagle-
barker to make it so.  What! clap on an exit to these piled-up
miseries?--he  should have plunged us deeper in woe, and left us
to stew in our juices; he Should have shunned this detestable
effeminacy, worthy only of the Dantes and Shakespeares. But
unfortunately he was an Esotericist, with the business of
helping, not plaguing, mankind:  he must follow the grand
symbolism of the story of the Soul, recording and emphasizing and
showing the way to its victories, not its defeats. He had the eye
to see deep into realities, and was not to be led from the path
of truth eternal by the cheap effective expedients of realism.
He must tell the whole truth:  building up, not merely destroying;
and truth, at the end, is not bitter, but bright and glorious.
It is the triumph and purification of the soul; and to that
happy consummation all sorrow and darkness and the dread Furies
themselves, whom he paints with all the dark flame-pigments
of sheerest terror, are but incidental and a means.

And the meaning of it all? Well, the meaning is as vast as the
scheme of evolution itself, I suppose.  It is _Hamlet_ over
again, and treated differently; that which wrote _Hamlet_
through Shakespeare, wrote this Trilogy through Aeschylus. I
imagine  you are to find in the _Agamemnon_ the symbol of the
Spirit's fall into matter--of the incarnation (and obscuration)
of the  Lords of Mind--driven thereto by ancient Karma, and the
result--of the life of past universes. Shakespeare deals with
this retrospectively, in the Ghost's words to Hamlet on the
terrace. The 'death' of the Spirit is its fall into matter.

And just as the ghost urges Hamlet to revenge, so Apollo urges
Orestes; it is the influx, stir, or impingement of the Supreme
Self, that rouses a man, at a certain stage in his evolution,
to lift himself above his common manhood. This is the most
interesting and momentous event in the long career of the soul:
it takes the place, in that drama of incarnations, that the
marriage does in the modern novel.  Shakespeare, whose mental
tendencies were the precise opposite of Aeschylus's--they ran to
infinite multiplicity and complexity, where the other's ran to
stern unity and simplicity (of plot)--made two characters of
Polonius and Gertrude:  Polonius,--the objective lower world,
with its shallow wisdom and conventions; Gertrude,--Nature, the
lower world in it subjective or inner relation to the soul
incarnate in it.  Aeschylus made no separate symbol for the former.
Shakespeare makes the killing of Polonius a turning-point;
thenceforth Hamlet must, will he nill he, in some dawdling
sort sweep to his revenge.  Aeschylus makes that same turning-point
in the killing of Clytemnestra, whereafter the Furies are let
loose on Orestes.  If you think well what it means, it is
that "leap" spoken of in _Light on the Path,_ by which a
man raises himself "on to the path of individual accomplishment
instead of mere obedience to the genii which rule our earth."
He can no longer walk secure like a sheep in the flock; he
has come out, and is separate; he has chosen a captain within,
and must follow the Soul, and not outer convention.  That
step taken, and the face set towards the Spirit-Sun--the
life of the world forgone, that a way may be fought into
the Life of the Soul:--all his past lives and their errors
rise against him; his passions are roused to fight for their
lives, and easy living is no longer possible.  He must fly
then for refuge to Loxias the Sun-God, the Supreme Self, who can
protect him from these Erinyes--but it is Pallas, Goddess of the
Inner Wisdom, of the true method of life, that can alone set him
free.  And it is thus that Apollo pleads before her for Orestes
who killed his mother (Nature) to avenge his Father (Spirit):--a
man, says he, is in reality the child of his father, not of his
mother:--this lower world in which we are incarnate is not in
truth our parent or originator at all, but only the seed-plot in
which we, sons of the Eternal, are sown, the nursery in which we
grow to the point of birth;--but we ourselves are in our essence
flame of the Flame of God.  So Pallas--and you must think of all
she implied--Theosophy, right living, right thought and action,
true wisdom--judges Orestes guiltless, sets him free, and
transforms his passions into his powers.




V.  SOME PERICLEAN FIGURES


Yoshio Markino (that ever-delightful Japanese) makes an
illuminating comparison between the modern western and the
ancient eastern civilizations. What he says amounts to this: the
one is of Science, the other of the Human Spirit; the one of
intellect, the other of intuition; the one has learnt rules for
carrying all things through in some shape that will serve--the
other worked its wonders by what may be called a Transcendental
Rule of Thumb. But in fact it was a reliance on the Human Spirit,
which invited the presence thereof;--and hence results were
attained quite unachievable by modern scientific methods. What
Yoshio says of the Chinese and Japanese is also true of all the
great western ages of the past. We can do a number of things,--
that is, have invented machinery to do a number of things for
us,--but with all our resources we could not build a Parthenon:
could not even reproduce it, with the model there before our eyes
to imitate.*

------
* I quote Prof. Mahaffy in his _Problems of Greek History._  He
also points out that it is beyond the powers of modern science in
naval architecture to construct a workable model of a Greek trireme.
------

It stands as a monument of the Human Spirit: as an age-long
witness to the presence and keen activity of that during the Age
of Pericles in Athens. It was built at almost break-neck speed,
yet remains a thing of permanent inimitable beauty, defying time
and the deliberate efforts of men and gunpowder to destroy it.
The work in it which no eye could see was as delicate, as
exquisite, as that which was most in evidence publicly; every
detail bore the deliberate impress of the Spirit, a direct
spiritual creation. There is no straight line in it; no two
measurements are the same; but by a divine and direct intuition,
every  difference is inevitable, and an essential factor in the
perfection of the whole.  As if the same creative force had made
it, as makes of the sea and  mountains an inescapable perfection
of beauty.

It is one of the many mighty works wherewith Pericles and
his right-hand man Pheidias, and his architects Ictinus and
Callicrates, adorned Athens.  It would serve no purpose to make a
list of the great names of the age; which you know well enough
already. The simple fact to note is this:  that at a certain
period in the fifth and fourth centuries B. C. the Crest-Wave of
Evolution was, so far as we can see, flowing through a very
narrow channel.  The Far Eastern seats of civilization were under
pralaya; the life-forces in West Asia were running towards
exhaustion, or already exhausted; India, it is true, is hidden
from us; we cannot judge well what was going on there; and so
was most of Europe. Any scheme of cycles that we can put forward
as yet must necessarily be tentative and hypothetical; what we
do not know is, to what we do know, as a million to one; I may
be quite wrong in giving Europe as long a period for its
manvantaras as China; possibly there were no manvantaric
activities in Europe, in that period, before the rise of Greece.
But whether or no, this particular time belongs, of all European
countries, to Greece:  the genius of the world, the energy of the
human spirit, was  mainly concentrated there; and of Greece, in
the single not too large city of Athens.  It is true I am rather
enamored of the cycle of a hundred and thirty years; prejudiced,
if you like, in its favor; it is also true that genius was
speaking through at least one world-important Athenian voice--
that of Aeschylus--before the age of Pericles began.  Still,
these dates are significant:  477, in which year Athens attained
the hegemony of Greece, and 347, in which Plato died. It was
after 477 that Aeschylus eagle-barked the grandest part of his
message from the Soul, and that the great Periclean figures
appeared; and though Athenians of genius out-lived Plato, he was
the last world-figure and great Soul-Prophet; the last Athenian
equal in standing to Aeschylus. When those thirteen decades had
passed, the Soul had little more to say through Athens.--
Aristotle?--I said, _the Soul_ had little more to say. . . .

About midway through that cycle came Aegospotami, and the
destruction of the Long Walls and of the Empire; but these did
not put an end to Athenian significance.  Mahaffy very wisely
goes to work to dethrone the Peloponnesian War--as he does, too,
the Persian--from the eminence it has been given in the textbooks
ever since.  As usual, we get a lopsided view from the historians:
in this case from Thucydides, who slurred through a sort of
synopsis of the far more important and world-interesting
mid-fifth century, and then dealt microscopically with these
twenty-five years or so of trumpery raidings, petty excursions
and small alarms. That naval battle at Syracuse, which Creasy
puts with Marathon in his famous fifteen, was utterly unimportant:
tardy Nicias might have won all through, and still Athens
would have fallen.  Her political foundations were on the
sand. Under Persia you stood a much better chance of enjoying
good government and freedom:  Persian rule was far less
oppressive and cruel. The states and islands subject to Athens
had no self-government, no representation; they were at the
mercy of the Athenian mob, to be taxed, bullied, and pommeled
about as that fickle irresponsible tyranny might elect or be
swayed to pommel, tax, and bully them.  Thucydides was a great
master of prose style, and so could invest with an air of
importance all the matter of his tale.  Besides, he was the
only contemporary historian, or the only one that survives.
So the world ever since has been tricked into thinking this
Peloponnesian War momentous; whereas really it was a petty
family squabble among that most family-squabblesome of peoples,
the Greeks.--In most of which I am only quoting Mahaffy; who,
whether intentionally or not, deals with Greek history in such a
way as to show the utter unimportance, irrelevance, futility,
of war.

Greek history is merely a phase of human history. We have looked
for its significance exclusively in political and cultural
regions; but this is altogether a mistake. The Greeks did not
invent culture; there had been greater cultures before, only
they are forgotten. All that about the "evolution of Political
freedom," of the city state, republicanism, etc., is just
nonsense.  As far as I can see, the importance of Greece lies in
this:  human history, the main part of it, flowing in that age
through the narrow channel of Greece, came down from sacred to
secular; from the last remnants of a state of affairs in which
the Lodge, through the Mysteries, had controlled life and
events, to the beginnings of one in which things were to muddle
through under the sweet guidance of brain-minds and ordinary men.
The old order had become impossible; the world had drifted too
far from the Gods.  So the Gods tried a new method:  let loose a
new great force in the world; sent Teachers to preach openly
(sow broadcast, and let the seed take its chances) what had
before been concealed and revealed systematically within the
Established  Mysteries.  What Athens did with that new force has
affected the whole history of Europe since; apparently mostly
for weal; really, nearly altogether for woe.

Aristides, with convincing logic, had been able to persuade all
Greece to act against a common danger under an Athens then
morally great, and feeling this new force from the God-world
as a wine in the air, a mental ozone, an inspiration from the
subliminal to heroic endeavor.  But his policy perished when the
visible need for it subsided; it gave way to the Themistoclean,
which passed into the Periclean policy; and that, says Mahaffy,
"was so dangerous and difficult that no cautious and provident
thinker could have called it secure." Which also was Plato's view
of it; who went so far as to say that Pericles had made the
Athenians lazy, sensual, and frivolous. When we find Aeschylus at
the start at odds with it, and Plato at the end condemning it
wholesale,--for my part I think we hardly need bother to argue
about it further. Both were men who saw from a standpoint above
the enlightenment of the common brain-mind.

It is not the present purpose to treat history as a matter of
wars and politics; details of which you can get from any
textbook; our concern is with the motions of the human spirit,
and the laws that work from behind. As to these motions, and the
grand influxes, there is this much we can rely on:  they come by
law, in their regular cycles; and we can invite their coming,
and insure their stability when they do come. The more I study
history, the more the significance of my present surroundings
impresses me. We stand here upon a marvelous isthmus in time;
behind us lies a world of dreary commonplaces called the
civilization of Christendom; before us--who knows what possibilities?
Nothing is certain about the future--even the near future;--except
that it will be immensely unlike the past.  Whatever we have
learned or failed to learn, large opportunities are given us
daily for discovering those inward regions  whence all light
shines down into the world. Genius is one method of the Soul's
action; one aspect of its glory made manifest.  We are given
opportunities to learn what invites and what hinders its outflow.
To all common thinking, it is a thing absolutely beyond control
of the will; that cannot be called down, nor its coming
in anywise foretold.  But we know that the Divine Self would act,
were the obstructions to its action removed; and that the
obstructions are all in the lower nature of man.

Worship the Soul in all thoughts and deeds, and sooner or later
the Soul will pour down through the channel thus made for it;
and its inflow will not be fitful and treacherous, but sure,
stable, equable and redeeming.

This is where all past ages of brilliance have failed. Cyclically
they were bound to come:  the fields ripened in due season;
but the wealth of the harvest depended on the reapers. The
Elizabethan Age, with all its splendid quickening of the English
mind, was coarse and wicked to a degree. All through the
wonderful Cinquecento, when each of a dozen or more little
Italian city-states was  producing genius enough to furnish forth
a good average century in modern Europe or America, Italy was
also a hotbed of unnatural vices, lurid crimes, wickedness to
stock the nine circles of Malebolge.  So too Athens at the top of
her glory became selfish, grasping, conscienceless and cruel; and
those nameless vices grew up and grew common in her which
probably account for the long dark night that has spread itself
over Greece ever since. It is a strange situation, that looks
like an anomaly:  that wherever the Human Spirit presses in most,
and raises up most splendor of genius, there, and then the dark
forces that undermine life are most at work. But we should have
no difficulty in understanding it. At such times, by such
influxes, the whole inner kingdom of man is roused and illumined;
and not only the intellect and all noble qualities are quickened,
but the passions also. The race, and the individual, are stirred
to the deepest depths, and no part of you may have rest. What
then will happen, unless you have the surest moral training for
foundation? The force which rouses up the highest in you, rouses
up also the lowest; and there must be battle-royal and victory at
last, or surrender to hell. Through lack of training, and
ignorance of the laws of the inner life, the Higher will be
handicapped; the lower will have advantage through its own
natural impulse downward, increased by every success it is
allowed to gain. And so all these ages of creative achievement
exhaust themselves; every victory of the passions drawing down
the creative force from the higher planes, to waste  it on the
lower; till at last what had been an attempt of the Spirit to
lift humanity up on to nobler lines of evolution, and to open a
new order of ages, expires in debauchery, weakness, degeneracy,
physical and moral death. The worst fate you could wish a man is
genius without moral strength. It wrecks individuals, and it
wrecks nations. I said we stand now on an isthmus of time;
fifth-century Greece stood on  such another.  For reasons that we
have seen, there was to be a radical difference between the ages
that preceded, and the ages that followed it; its influence was
not to wear out, in the west, for twenty-five hundred years. It
was to give a keynote, in cultural effort, to a very long future.
So all western ages since have suffered because of its descent
from lofty ideals to vulgar greed and ambition; from Aristides
to Themistocles and Pericles.  We shall see this Athenian descent
in literature, in art, in philosophy.  If Athens had gone up, not
down, European history would have been a long record of the
triumphs of the spirit:--not, as it has been in the main, one of
sorrow and disaster.

At the beginning of the Greek age in literature, we find the
stupendous figure of Aeschylus.  For any such a force as he was,
there is--how shall I say?--a twofold lineage or ancestry to be
traced:  there are no sudden creations.  Take Shakespeare, for
example.  There was what he found read to his hand in English
literature; and what he brought into England out of the Unknown.
In his outwardness, the fabric of his art--we can trace this
broad river back to a thinnish stream by the name of Chaucer; or
he was growth, recognizably, of the national tree of which
Chaucer was the root, or lay at the root.  The unity called
English poetry had grown naturally from that root to this
glorious flower:  the sparkle, with, brightness, and above all
large hold upon the other life that one finds in Shakespeare--one
finds at least the rudiments of them in Chaucer also.  But there
is another, an exoteric element in him which one finds nowhere in
English literature before him:  the Grandeur from within, the
high Soul Symbol.  In him suddenly that portentous thing appears,
like a great broad river emerging from the earth.--Of which we do
not say, however, that they have had no antecedent rills and
fountain; we know that they have traveled long beneath the
mountains, unseen; they sank under the earth-surface somewhere,
and are not special new creations.  Looking back behind Shakespeare,
from this our eminence in time, we can see beyond the intervening
heights this broad water shine again over the plain in Dante;
and beyond him some glimmer of it in Virgil; until at last
we see the far-off sheen of it in Aeschylus, very near the
backward horizon of time.  We can catch no glimpse of it
farther, because that horizon is there.

We can trace Aeschylus' outward descent--as Shakespeare's from
Chaucer--from the nascent Greek drama and the rudimentary plays
at the rustic festivals; but the grand river of his esotericism
--there it shines, as large and majestic, at least, as in
Shakespeare; and it was, no more than his, a special creation or
new thing.  Our horizon lies there, to prevent our vision going
further; but from some higher time-eminence in the future,
we shall see it emerge again in the backward vastnesses of
pre-history; again and again. The grandeur of Aeschylus his no
parent in Greek, or in western extant literature; or if we say
that it has a parent in Homer (which I doubt, because not seeing
the Soul Symbols in Homer), it is only putting matters one step
further back.... But behind Greece, there were the lost literatures
of Babylonia, Assyria, Egypt, of which we know nothing; aye, and
for a guess, lost and mighty literatures from all parts of Europe
too. If I could imagine it otherwise, I would say so.

Almost suddenly, during Aeschylus' lifetime, another Greek Art
came into being. When he was a boy, sculpture was still a very
crude affair; or perhaps just beginning to emerge from that
condition. The images that come down to us, say from Pisistratus'
time and earlier, are not greatly different from the 'primitive'
carvings of many so-called savage peoples of our own day. That
statement is loose and general; but near enough the mark to
serve our purpose. You may characterize them as rude imitations
of the human form, without any troublesome realism, and with a
strong element of the grotesque. Says the _Encyclopeadia
Britannica_ (from which the illustration is taken):

"The statues of the gods began either with stiff and ungainly
figures roughly cut out of the trunk of a tree, or with the
monstrous and symbolical representations of Oriental art.... In
early decorations of vases and vessels one may find Greek deities
represented with wings, carrying in their hands lions or
griffins, bearing on their heads lofty crowns.  But as Greek art
progressed it grew out of this crude symbolism... What the
artists of Babylonia and Egypt express in the character of the
gods by added attribute or symbol, swiftness by wings, control of
storms by the thunderbolt, traits of character by animal
heads, the artists of Greece work more and more fully into the
scultptural type; modifying the human subject by the constant
addition of something which is above the ordinary levels of
humanity, until we reach the Zeus of Pheidias or the Dimeter of
Cnidus.  When the decay of the high ethical art of Greece sets
in, the Gods become more and more warped to the merely human
level.  They lose their dignity, but they never lose their charm."

In which, I think, much light is once more thrown on the inner
history of the race, and the curious and fatal position Greece
holds in it. For here we see Art emerging from its old Position
as a hand-maid to the Mysteries and recognized instrument of the
Gods or the Soul; from sacred becoming secular; from impersonal,
personal. There is, perhaps, little enough in pre-Pheidian Greek
sculpture that belongs to the history of Art at all (I do not
speak of old cycles and manvantaras, the ages of Troy and
Mycenae, but of historical times; I cast no glance now behind the
year 870 B. C.).  For the real art that came next before the
Pheidian Greek, we have to look to Egypt and Mesopotamia.

Take Egypt first.  There the sculptor thinks of himself far less
as artist than as priest and servant of the Mysteries:  that is,
of the great Divine heart of Existence behind this manifested
world, and the official channel which connected It with the
latter.   The Gods, for him, are frankly unhuman--superhuman--
unlike humanity.  We call them 'forces of Nature'; and think
ourselves mighty wise for having camouflaged our ignorance with
this perfectly meaningless term.  We have dealt so wisely with
our thinking organs, that do but give us a sop of words, and
things in themselves we shall never bother about:--like the
Grave-digger, who solved the whole problem of Ophelia's death and
burial with his three branches of an act.  But the Egyptian, with
mental faculties unrotted by creedal fatuities like our own,
would not so feed 'of the chameleon's dish,'--needed something
more than words, words, and words.  He knew also that there were
elements in their being quite unlike any we are conscious of in
ours.  So he gave them purely symbolic forms:  a human body, for
that which he could posit as common to themselves and humanity;
and an animal mask, to say that the face, the expression of their
consciousness, was hidden, and not to be expressed in terms of
human personality.  While affirming that they were conscious
entities, he stopped short of personalizing them.  What was
beneath the mask or symbol belonged to the Mysteries, and was not
to be publicly declared.

But when he came to portraying men, especially great kings, he
used a different method.  The king's statue was to remain through
long ages, when the king himself was dead and Osirified.  The
artist knew--it was the tradition of his school--what the
Osirified dead looked like.  Not an individual sculptor, but a
traditional wisdom, was to find expression.  What sculptor's name
is known?  Who wrought the Vocal Memnon?--Not any man; but the
Soul and wisdom and genius of Egypt.  The last things bothered
about were realism and personality.  There were a very few
conventional poses; the object was not to make a portrait, but
to declare the Universal Human Soul;--it was hardly artistic, in
any modern acceptation of the word; but rather religious.
Artistic it was, in the highest and truest sense:  to create, in
the medium of stone, the likeness or impression of the Human Soul
in its grandeur and majesty; to make hard granite or syenite
proclaim the eternal peace and aloofness of the Soul.--Plato
speaks of those glimpses of "the other side of the sky" which the
soul catches before it comes into the flesh;--the Egyptian artist
was preoccupied with the other side of the sky.  How wonderfully
he succeeded, you have only to drop into the British Museum to
see.  There is a colossal head there, hung high on the wall
facing the stairs at the end of the Egyptian Gallery; you may
view it from the ground, or from any point on the stairs; but
from whatever place you look at it, if you have any quality of
the Soul in you, you go away having caught large glimpses of the
other side of the sky. You are convinced, perhaps unconsciously,
of the grandeur and reality of the Soul.   Having watched
Eternity on that face many times, I rejoiced to find this
description of it in De Quincey;--if he was not speaking of this,
what he says fits it admirably:

"That other object which for four and twenty years in the British
Museum struck me as simply the sublimest sight which in this
sight-seeing world I had seen.  It was the memnon's head, then
recently brought from Egypt.  I looked at it, as the reader must
suppose in order to understand the depth which I have here
ascribed to the impression, not as a human but as a symbolic
head; and what it symbolized to me were:  (1) the peace which
passeth understanding. (2) The eternity which baffles and
confounds all faculty of computation--the eternity which had
been, the eternity which was to be.  (3) The diffusive love, not
such as rises and falls upon waves of life and mortality,
not such as sinks and swells by undulations of time, but a
procession, an emanation, from some mystery of endless dawn.  You
durst not call it a smile that radiated from those lips; the
radiation was too awful to clothe itself in adumbrations of
memorials of flesh."

Art can never reach higher than that,--if we think of it as a
factor in human evolution. What else you may say of Egyptian
sculpture is of minor importance:  as, that it was stiff,
conventional, or what not; that each figure is portrayed sitting
bolt upright, hands out straight, palms down, upon the knees, and
eyes gazing into eternity. Ultimately we must regard Art in this
Egyptian way: as a thing sacred, a servant of the Mysteries; the
revealer of the Soul and the other side of the sky.   You may
have enormous facility in playing with your medium; may be able
to make your marble quite fluidic, and flow into innumerable
graceful forms; you may be past master of every intricacy,
multiplying your skill to the power of n;--but you will still in
reality have made no progress beyond that unknown carver who
shaped his syenite, or his basalt, into  the "peace which passeth
understanding"--"the eternity which baffles and confounds all
faculty of computation."

If we turn to Assyria, we find much the same thing. This was a
people far less spiritual than the Egyptians:  a cruel, splendid,
luxurious civilization  deifying material power. But you cannot
look at the great Winged Bulls without knowing that there, too,
the motive was religious. There is an eternity and inexhaustible
power in those huge carvings; the sculptors were bent on one
end:--to make the stone speak out of superhuman heights, and
proclaim the majesty of the Everlasting.--In the Babylonian
sculptures we see the kings going into battle weaponless, but
calm and invincible; and behind and standing over, to protect and
fight for them, terrific monsters, armed and tiger-headed or
leopard-headed--the 'divinity that hedges a king' treated
symbolically. As always in those days, though many veils might
hide from the consciousness of Assyria and later Babylon the
beautiful reality of the Soul of Things, the endeavor, the
_raison d'etre,_ of Art was to declare the Might, Power, Majesty,
and dominion which abide beyond our common levels of thought.

Now then:  that great Memnon's head comes from behind the horizon
of time and the sunset of the Mysteries; and in it we sample the
kind of consciousness produced by the Teaching of the Mysteries.
Go back step by step, from Shakespeare's

     "Glamis hath murdered Sleep, and therefore Cawdor Shall sleep
         no more.";

to Dante's

     "The love that moves the Sun and the other Stars";

to Talesin's

     "My original country is the Region of the Summer Stars";

to Aeschylus's bronze-throat eagle-bark at blood;--and the next
step you come to beyond (in the West)--the next expression of the
Human Soul--marked with the same kind of feeling--the same
spiritual and divine hauteur--is, for lack of literary remains,
this Egyptian sculpture. The Grand Manner, the majestic note of
Esotericism, the highest in art and literature, is a stream
flowing down to us from the Sacred Mysteries of Antiquity.

It is curious that a crude primtivism in sculpture--and in
architecture too--should have gone on side by side, in Greece,
during the seventh and sixth centuries B. C., with the very
finished art of the Lyricists from Sappho to Pindar; but
apparently it did.  (They had wooden temples, painted in bright
reds and greens; I understand without pillared facades.)  I
imagine the explanation to be something like this:   You are to
think of an influx of the  Human Spirit, proceeding downward from
its own realms towards these, until it strikes some civilization
--the Greek, in this case. Now poetry, because its medium is less
material, lies much nearer than do the plastic arts to the Spirit
on its descending course; and therefore receives the impulse of
its descent much sooner. Perhaps music lies higher again; which
is why music was the first of the arts to blossom at all in this
nascent civilization of ours at Point Loma. Let me diverge a
little, and take a glance round.--At any such time, the seeds
of music may not be present in strength or in a form to be
quickenable into a separately manifesting art; and this may be
true of poetry too; yet where poetry is, you may say music has
been; for every real poem is born out of a pre-existing music of
its own, and is the _inverbation_ of it. The Greek Melic poets
(the lyricists) were all musicians first, with an intricate
musical science, on the forms of which they arranged their
language; I do not know whether they wrote their music apart
from the words. After the Greek, the Italian illumination was the
greatest in western history; there the influx, beginning in the
thirteenth century, produced first its chief poetic splendor in
Dante before that century had passed; not raising an equal
greatness in painting and sculpture until the fifteenth.  In
England, the Breath that kindled Shakespeare never blew down so
far as to light up a great moment in the plastic arts:  there
were some few figures of the second rank in painting presently;
in sculpture, nothing at all (to speak of).  Painting, you see,
works in a little less material medium than sculpture does.
Dante's Italy had not quite plunged into that orgy of vice,
characteristic of the great creative ages, which we find in the
Italy of the Cinquecento.  But England, even in Shakespeare's
day, was admiring and tending to imitate Italian wickedness.
James I's reign was as corrupt as may be; and though the Puritan
reaction followed, the creative force had already been largely
wasted:  notice had been served to the Spirit to keep off.
Puritanism raised itself as a barrier against the creative force
both in its higher and lower aspects:  against art, and against
vice;--probably the best thing that could happen under the
circumstances; and the reason why England recovered so much
sooner than did Italy.--On the other hand, when the influx came
to Holland, it would seem to have found, then, no opportunities
for action in the non-material arts:  to have skipped any grand
manifestation in music or poetry:  and at once to have hit the
Dutchman 'where he lived' (as they say),--in his paintbox.--But
to return:-

Sculpture, then, came later than poetry to Greece; and in some
ways it was a more sudden and astounding birth. Unluckily nothing
remains--I speak on tenterhooks--of its grandest moment. Progress
in architecture seems to have begun in the reign of Pisistratus;
some time in the next sixty years or so the Soul first impressed
its likeness on carved stone.  I once saw a picture--in a lantern
lecture in London--of a pre-Pheidian statue of Athene; dating,
I suppose, from the end of the sixth century B. C.  She is
advancing with upraised arm to protect--someone or something. The
figure is, perhaps, stiff and conventional; and you have no doubt
it is the likeness of a Goddess. She is not merely a very fine
and dignified woman; she is a Goddess, with something of
Egyptian sublimity.  The artist, if he had not attained perfect
mastery of the human form--if his medium was not quite plastic to
him--knew well what the Soul is like.--The Greek had no feeling,
as the Egyptian had, for the _mystery_ of the Gods; at his very
best (once he had begun to be artistic) he personalized them; he
tried to put into his representations of them, what the Egyptian
had tried to put into his representations  of men; and in that
sense this Athene is, after all, only a woman;--but one in whom
the Soul is quite manifest.  I have never been able to trace this
statue since; and my recollections are rather hazy.  But it
stands, for me, holding up a torch in the inner recesses of
history.  It was the time when Pythagoras was teaching; it was
that momentous time when (as hardly since) the doors of the
Spiritual were flung open, and the impulse of the six Great
Teachers was let loose on the world.  Hithertoo Greek carvers had
been making images of the Gods, symbolic indeed--with wings,
thunderbolts and other appurtenances;--but trivially symbolic;
mere imitation of the symbolism, without the dignity or religious
feeling, of the Egyptians and Babylonians; as if their gods and
worship had been mere conventions, about which they had felt
nothing deep;--now, upon this urge from the God-world, a sense of
the grandeur of the within comes on them; they seek a means of
expressing it:  throw off the old conventions; will carve the
Gods as men; do so, their aspiration leading them on to perfect
mastery:  for a moment achieve Egyptian sublimity; but--have
personalized the Gods; and dear knows what that may lead
to presently.

The came Pheidias, born about 496.  Nothing of his work remains
for us; the Elgin Marbles themselves, from the Parthenon, are
pretty certainly only the work of his pupils.  But there are two
things that tell us something about his standing:  (1) all
antiquity bears witness to the prevailing quality of his
conceptions; their sublimity.  (2) He was thrown into prison on a
charge of impiety, and died there, in 442.

Here you will note the progress downward.  Aeschylus had been so
charged, and tried--but acquitted.  Pheidias, so charged, was
imprisoned.  Forty-three years later Socrates, so charged, was
condemned to drink the hemlock.  Of Aeschylus and Socrates we can
speak with certainty:  they were the Soul's elect men.  Was
Pheidias too?  Athens certainly was turning away from the Soul;
and his fate is a kind of half-way point between the fates of the
others.  He appears in good company.  And that note of sublimity
in his work bears witness somewhat.

We have the work of his pupils, and know that in their hands the
marble--Pheidias himself worked mostly in gold and ivory--had
become docile and obedient, to flow into whatever forms they
designed for it.  We know what strength, what beauty, what
tremendous energy, are in those Elgin marbles.  All the figures
are real, but idealized:  beautiful men and horses, in fullest
most vigorous action, suddenly frozen into stone.  The men are
more beautiful than human; but they are human.  They are
splendid unspoiled human beings, reared for utmost bodily
perfection; athletes whose whole training had been, you may say,
to music:  they are music expressed in terms of the human body.
Yes; but already the beauty of the body outshone the majesty of
the Soul.  It was the beauty of the body the artists aimed at
expressing:  a perfect body--and a sound mind in it:  a perfectly
healthy mind in it, no doubt (be cause you cannot have a really
sound and beautiful body without a sound healthy mind)--was the
ideal they sought and saw. Very well, so far; but, you see,
Art has ceased to be sacred, and the handmaid of the Mysteries;
it bothers itself no longer with the other side of the sky.

In Pheidias' own work we might have seen the influx at that
moment when, shining through the soul plane, its rays fell full
on the physical, to impress and impregnate that with the splendor
of the Soul. We might have seen that it was still the Soul that
held his attention, although the body was known thoroughly and
mastered:  that it was the light he aimed to express, not the
thing it illumined.  In the work of his pupils, the preoccupation
is with the latter; we see the physical grown beautiful under
the illumination of the Soul; not the Soul that illumines it.
The men of the Egyptian sculptors had been Gods. The Gods of
these Greek sculptors were men. Perfect, glorious, beautiful men
--so far as externals were concerned. But men--to excite personal
feeling, not to quell it into nothingness and awe. The perfection,
even at that early stage and in the work of the disciples of
Pheidias, was a quality of the personality.

It was indeed marvelously near the point of equilibrium:  the
moment when Spirit enters conquered matter, and stands there
enthroned. In Pheidias himself I cannot but think we should have
found that moment as we find it in Aeschylus. But you see, it is
when that has occurred:  when Spirit has entered matter, and
made the form, the body, supremely beautiful; it is precisely
then that the moment of peril comes--if there is not the
wisdom present that knows how to avoid the peril. The next and
threatening step downward is preoccupation with, then worship of,
the body.

The Age of Pericles came to worship the body:  that was the
danger into which it fell; that was what brought about the ruin
of Greece. That huge revelation of material beauty; and that
absence of control from above; the lost adequacy of the
Mysteries, and the failure of the Pythagorean Movement;--the
impatience of spiritual criticism, heedlessness of spiritual
warning;--well, we can see what a turning-point the time was in
history.  On the side of politics, selfishness and ambition were
growing; on the side of personal life, vice. . . . It is a thing
to be pondered on, that what has kept Greece sterile these last
two thousand years or so is, I believe, the malaria; which is a
thing that depends for its efficacy on mosquitos.  Great men
simply will not incarnate in malarial territory; because
they would have no chance whatever of doing anything, with
that oppression and enervation sapping them. Greece has been
malarial; Rome, too, to some extent; the Roman Campagna
terribly; as if the disease were (as no doubt it is) a Karma
fallen on the sites of old-time tremendous cultural energies;
where the energies were presently wrecked, drowned and sodden in
vice.  Here then is a pretty little problem in the workings of
Karma:  on what plane, through what superphysical links or
channels, do the vices of an effete civilization transform
themselves into that poor familiar singer in the night-time, the
mosquito?  Greece and Rome, in their heyday, were not malarial;
if they had been, no genius and no power would have shone
in them.

In the Middle Ages, before people knew much about sanitary
science and antiseptics and the like, a great war quickly
translated itself into a great pestilence. Then we made advances
and discovered Listerian remedies and things, and said: Come now;
we shall fight this one; we shall have slaughtered millions
lying about as we please, and get no plague out of it; we are
wise and mighty, and Karma is a fool to us; we are the children
of MODERN CIVILIZATION; what have Nature and its laws to do with
us?  Our inventions and discoveries have certainly put them out
of commission.--And sure enough, the mere foulness of the
battlefield, the stench of decay, bred no pest; our Science had
circumvented the old methods through which Natural Law (which is
only another way of saying Karma) worked; we had cut the
physical links, and blocked the material channels through which
wrong-doing flowed into its own punishment.--Whereupon Nature,
wrathful, withdrew a little; took thought for her astral and
inner planes; found new links and channels there; passed through
these the causes we had provided, and emptied them out again
on the physical plane in the guise of a new thing, Spanish
Influenza;--and spread it over three continents, with greater
scope and reach than had ever her old-fashioned stench-bred
plagues that served her well enough when we were less scientific.
Whereof the moral is:  _He laughs loudest who laughs last;_  and
just now, and for some time to come, the laugh is with Karma.
Say until the end of the Maha-Manvantara; until the end of
manifested Time.  When shall we stop imagining that any possible
inventions or discoveries will enable us to circumvent the
fundamental laws of Nature?  Not the printing-press, nor steam,
nor electricity, nor aerial navigation, nor _vril_ itself when we
come to it, will serve to keep civilizations alive that have worn
themselves out by wrong-doing--or even that have come to old age
and the natural time when they must die.  But their passings need
not be ghastly and disastrous, or anything but honorable and
beneficial, if in the prime and vigor of their lifetimes they
would learn decently to live.

But to return to our muttons, which is Greece; and now to the
literature again:--

After Aeschylus, Sophocles.  The former, a Messenger of the Gods,
come to cry their message of _Karma_ to the world; and in doing
so, incidentally to create a supreme art-form;--the latter, a
"good easy soul who lives and lets live, founds no anti-school,
upsets no faith."--thus Browning sums him up.  A "faultless"
artist enamored of his art; in which, thinks he (and most
academic critics with him) he can improve something on old
Aeschylus; a man bothered with no message; a beautiful youth; a
genial companion, well-loved by his friends--and who is not his
friend?--all through his long life; twenty times first-prize
winner, and never once less than second.--Why, solely on the
strength of his _Antigone,_ the Athenians appointed him a
strategos in the expedition against Samos; with the thought that
one so splendidly victorious in the field of drama, could not
fail of victory in mere war.  But don't lose hope!--upon an
after-thought (perhaps) they appointed Pericles too; who
suggested to his poet-colleague that though master of them all in
his own line, he had better on the whole leave the sordid details
of command to himself, Pericles, who had more experience of that
sort.  What more shall we say of Sophocles?--A charming brilliant
fellow in his cups--of which, as of some other more questionable
pleasures, report is he was too fond; a man worshiped during his
life, and on his death made a hero with semi-divine honors;--does
that sound like the story of a Messenger of the Gods?

He was born at Colonos in Attica, in 496; of his hundred or so
of dramas, seven come down to us.  His age saw in him the very
ideal of a tragic poet; Aristotle thought so too; so did the
Alexandrian critics, and most moderns with them.  "Indeed," says
Mahaffy, "it is no unusual practice to exhibit the defects of
both Aeschylus and Euripides by comparison with their more
successful rival."  Without trying to give you conclusions of my
own, I shall read you a longish passage from Gilbert Murray, who
is not only a great Greek scholar, but a fine critic as well,
and a poet with the best translations we have of Greek tragedy to
his credit; he has made Euripides read like good English poetry.
Comparing the _Choephori_ of Aeschylus, the second play in the
Oreseian Trilogy, with the _Electra_ of Sophocles, which deals
with the same matter, he says:

"Aeschylus... had felt vividly the horror of his plot; he
carries his characters to the deed of blood on a storm of
confused, torturing, half-religious emotion; the climax is of
course, the mother-murder, and Orestes falls into madness after
it.  In the _Electra_ this element is practically ignored.
Electra has no qualms; Orestes shows no signs of madness; the
climax is formed not by the culminating horror, the matricide,
but by the hardest bit of work, the slaying of Aegisthos!
Aeschylus has kept Electra and Clytemnestra apart; here we see
them freely in the hard unloveliness of their daily wrangles.
Above all, in place of the cry of bewilderment that closes the
_Choephori_--'What is the end of all this spilling of blood for
blood?'--the _Electra_ closes with an expression of entire
satisfaction... Aeschylus takes the old bloody saga in an earnest
and troubled spirit, very different from Homer's, but quite as
grand.  His Orestes speaks and feels as Aechylus himself would...
Sophocles... takes the saga exactly as he finds it.  He knows
that those ancient chiefs did not trouble about their consciences;
they killed in the fine old ruthless way.  He does not try to
make them real to himself at the cost of making them false
to the spirit of the epos...

"The various bits of criticism ascribed to him--'I draw men as
they ought to be drawn; Euripides draws them as they are';
'Aeschylus did the right thing, but without knowing it'--all
imply the academic standpoint... Even his exquisite diction,
which is such a marked advance on the stiff magnificence of his
predecessor, betrays the lesser man in the greater artist.
Aeschylus's superhuman speech seems like natural superhuman
speech.  It is just the language that Prometheus would talk, that
an ideal Agamemnon or Atossa might talk in the great moments.
But neither Prometheus nor Oedipus nor Electra, nor anyone but an
Attic poet of the highest culture, would talk as Sophocles makes
them.  It is this which has established Sophocles as the perfect
model, not only for Aristotle, but in general for critics and
grammarians; while the poets have been left to admire Aeschylus,
who 'wrote in a state of intoxication,' and Euripedes, who broke
himself against the bars of life and poetry."

You must, of course, always allow for a personal equation in the
viewpoint of any critic:  you must here weight the "natural
superhuman diction" against the "stiff magnificence" Professor
Murray attributes to Aeschylus; and get a wise and general view
of your own.  What I want you to see clearly is, the descent of
the influx from plane to plane, as shown in these two tragedians.
The aim of the first is to express a spiritual message, grand
thought.  That of the second is to produce a work of flawless
beauty, without regard to its spiritual import.  What was to
Aeschylus a secondary object; the purely artistic--was to
Sophocles the whole thing.  Aeschylus was capable of wonderful
psychological insight.  Clytemnestra's speech to the Chorus, just
before Agamemnon's return, is a perfect marvel in that way.  But
the tremendous movement, the August impersonal atmosphere as

     ".... gorgeous Tragedy
     In sceptered pall comes sweeping by."

--divests it of the personal, and robes it in a universal symbolic
significance:  because he has built like a titan, you do not at
first glance note that he has labored like a goldsmith, as
someone has said.  But in Sophocles the goldsmithry is plain to
see.  His character-painting is exquisite:  pathetic often; just
and beautiful almost always.  I put in the almost in view of that
about the "hard unloveliness" of Electra's "daily wrangles"  with
her mother.  The mantle of the religious Egyptians had fallen on
Aeschylus:  but Sophocles' garb was the true fashionable Athenian
chiton of his day.  He was personal, where the other had been
impersonal; faultless, where the other had been sublime;
conventionally orthodox, where through Aeschylus had surged the
super-credal spirit of universal prophecy.

And then we come to third of the trio:  Euripides, born in 480.
"He was,"  says Professor Murray, "essentially representative of
his age, yet apparently in hostility to it; almost a failure of
the stage--he won only four prizes in fifty years of production--
yet far the most celebrated poet in Greece."  Athens hated,
jeered at, and flouted him just as much as she honored and
adored Sophocles; yet you know what happened to those Athenian
captives at Syracuse who could recite Euripides.  Where, in
later Greek writings, we come on quotations from the other
two once or twice, we come on quotations from Euripides dozens
of times.  The very fact that eighteen of his plays survive,
to seven each of Aeschylus' and Sophocles', is proof of his
larger and longer popularity.

He had no certain message from the Gods, as Aeschylus had; his
intensely human heart and his mighty intellect kept him from
being the 'flawless artist' that Sophocles was.  He questioned
all conventional ideas, and would not let the people rest in
comfortable fat acquiescence.  He came to make men 'sit up and
think.'   He did not solve problems, but raised them, and flung
them at the head of the world.  He must stir and probe things to
the bottom; and his recurrent unease, perhaps, mars the
perfection of his poetry.  Admetus is to die, unless someone will
die for him; recollect that for the Greekish mob, death was the
worst of all possible happenings.  Alcestis his wife will die for
him; and he accepts her sacrifice.  Now, that was the old saga;
and in Greek conventional eyes, it was all right.  Woman was an
inferior being, anyhow; there was nothing more fitting that
Alcestis should die for her lord.--Here let me make a point
plain:  you cannot look back through Greece to a Golden Age in
Greece; it is not like Egypt, where the farther you go into
the past, the greater things you come to;--although in Egypt,
too, there would have been rises and falls of civilization.  In
Homer's days, in Euripides', they had these barbarous ideas about
women; and these foolish exoteric ideas about death; historic
Greece, like modern Europe from the Middle Ages, rises from a
state of comparative barbarism, lightlessness; behind which,
indeed, there were rumors of a much higher Past.  These great
Greeks, Aeschylus, Euripides, Plato, brought in ideas which were
as old as the hills in Egypt, or in India; but which were new to
the Greece of their time--of historic times; they were, I think,
as far as their own country was concerned, innovators and
revealers; not voicers of a traditional wisdom; it may have
been traditional once, but that time was much too far back for
memory. I think we should have to travel over long, long ages, to
get to a time when Eleusis was a really effective link with the
Lodge--to a period long before Homer, long before Troy fell.--But
to return to the story of Alcestis:--

You might take it on some lofty impersonal plane, and find a
symbol in it; Aeschylus would have done so, somehow; though I
do not quite see how.  Sophocles would have been aware of nothing
wrong in it; he would have taken it quite as a matter of course.
Euripides saw clearly that Admetus was a selfish poltroon, and
rubbed it in for all he was worth. And he could not leave
it at that, either; but for pity's sake must bring in Hercules
at the end to win back Alcestis from death.  So the play is
great-hearted and tender, and a covert lash for conventional
callousness; and somehow does not quite hang together:--leaves
you just a little uncomfortable.  Browning calls him, in
_Balaustion's Adventure,_

     ".... Euripides
     The human, with his droppings of warms tears";

--it is a just verdict, perhaps.  Without Aeschylus' Divine Wisdom,
or Sophocles' worldly wisdom, he groped perpetually after some
means to stay the downward progress of things; he could not
thunder like the one, nor live easily and let live, like the
other.--I do not give you these scraps of criticism (which are
not my own, but borrowed always I think), for the sake of
criticism; but for the sake of history;--understand them, and
you have the story of the age illumined. You can read the inner
Athens here, in the aspirations and in the limitations of
Euripides, and in the contempt in which Athens held him; as you
can read it in the grandeur of Aeschylus, and the Athenian
acceptance of, and then reaction against, him; and in the
character of Sophocles and his easy relations with his age. When
Euripides came, the light of the Gods had gone. He was blindish;
he would not accept the Gods without question. Yet was he on the
side of the Gods whom he could not see or understand; we must
count him on their side, and loved by them. He was not panoplied,
like Aeschylus or Milton, in their grim and shining armor; yet
what armor he wore bore kindred proud dints from the hellions'
batterings.  Or perhaps mostly he wore such marks as wounds upon
his own flesh. . . . Not even a total lack of humor, which I
suppose must be attributed to him, can make him appear less than
a most sympathetic, an heroic figure. He was the child and
fruitage and outcast of his age, belonging as much to an Athens
declining and inwardly hopeless, as did Aeschylus (at first) to
Athens in her early glory. He was not so much bothered (like
Sophocles) with no message, as bothered with the fact that he had
no clear and saving message. His realism--for compared with the
other two, he was a sort of realist--was the child of his
despair; and his despair, of the atmosphere of his age.

He was, or had been, in close touch with Socrates (you might
expect it); lived a recluse somewhat, taking no part in affairs;
married twice, unfortunately both times; and his family troubles
were among the points on which gentlemanly Athens sneered at him.
A lovely lyricist, a restless thinker; tender-hearted; sublime
in pity of all things weak and helpless and defeated:--women
especially, and conquered nations. Prof. Murray says:

"In the last plays dying Athens is not mentioned, but her death-
struggle  and her sins are constantly haunting us; the Joy of
battle is mostly gone; the horror of war is left. Well might old
Aeschylus pray, 'God grant that I may sack no city!'  if the
reality of conquest is what it appears in the last plays of
Euripides. The conquerors there are as miserable as the
conquered; only more cunning, and perhaps more wicked."

He died the year before Aegospotami, at the court of Archelaus of
Macedon. One is glad to think he found peace and honor at last.
Athens heard with a laugh that some courtier there had insulted
him; and with astonishment that the good barbarous Archelaus had
handed said courtier over to Euripides to be scourged for his
freshness. I don't imagine that Euripides scourged him though-to
amount to anything.




VI.  SOCRATES AND PLATO


By this time you should have seen, rather than any picture of
Greece and Athens in their heyday, an indication of certain
universal historical laws. As thus  (to go back a little): an
influx of the Spirit is approaching, and a cycle of high
activities is about to begin. A great war has cleared off what
karmic weight has been hanging over Athens;--Xerxes, you will
remember, burnt the town. Hence there is a clearness in the inner
atmosphere; through which a great spiritual voice may, and does,
speak a great spiritual message. But human activities proceed,
ever increasing their momentum, until the atmosphere is no longer
clear, but heavy with the effluvia of by no means righteous
thought and action. The Spirit is no more visibly present, but
must manifest if at all through a thicker medium; and who speaks
now, speaks as artist only,--not as poet--or artist-prophet. Time
goes on, and the inner air grows still thicker; till men live in
a cloud, through which truths are hardly to be seen.  Then those
who search for the light are apt to cry out in despair; they
become realists struggling to break the terrible molds of
thought:--and if you can hear the Spiritual in them at all, it is
not in a positive message they have for men, but in the greatness
of their heart and compassion. They do not build; they seek only
to destroy. There seems nothing else for them to do.

So in England, Wordsworth opened this last cycle of poetry;
coming when there was a clear atmosphere, and speaking more or
less clearly through it his message from the Gods.  You hear a
like radiant note of hope in Shelley; and something of it in
Keats, who stood on the line that divides the Poet-Prophet from
the Poet-Artist. Then you come to the ascendency of Tennyson,
whose business in life was to be the latter. He tried the role of
prophet; he lived up to the highest he could: strove towards the
light much more gallantly than did Sophocles, his Athenian
paradigm. But the atmosphere of his age made him something of a
failure at it:  no clear light was there for him to find, such as
could manifest through poetry. Then you got men like Matthew
Arnold with his cry of despair, and William Morris with his
longing for escape; then the influence of Realism.  So many
poets recently have an element of Euripides in them; a will to
do well, but a despair of the light; a tendency to question
everything, but little power to find answers to their questions.
Then there were some few who, influenced (consciously or not) by
H.P. Blavatsky, that great dawn-herald, caught glimpses of the
splendor of a dawn--which yet we wait for.

Euripides, with the Soul stirring within and behind him, "broke
himself on the bars of life and poetry," as Professor Murray
says.  He was so hemmed in by the emanations of the time that he
could never clearly enunciate the Soul.  Not, at any rate, in an
unmixed way, and with his whole energies.  Perhaps his favorite
device of a _Deus ex Machina_--like Hercultes in the _Alcestis_
--is a symbolical enunciation of it, and intended so to be.
Perhaps the cause of the unrest he makes us feel is this:  he
knew that the highest artistic method was the old Aeschylean
symbolic one, and tried to use it; but at the same time was
compelled by the gross emanations of the age, which he was not
quite strong enough to rise above, to treat his matter not
symbolically, but realistically.  He could not help saying:
"Here is the epos you Athenians want me to treat,--that my artist
soul forces me to treat; here are the ideas that make up your
conventional religion;--now look at them!"  And forth-with he
showed them, in there exoteric side, sordid, ugly and bloody;--
and then, on the top of that showing, tried to twist them round
to the symbolic impersonal plane again; and so left a discord
not properly solved, an imperfect harmony; a sense of loss
rather than gain; of much torn down, and nothing built up to
take its place.  The truth was that the creative forces had
flowed downward until the organs of spiritual vision were no
longer open; and poetry and art, the proper vehicles of the
higher teaching in any age approximately golden, could no longer
act as efficient channels for the light.

To turn to England again:  Tennyson was, generally speaking, most
successful when most he was content to be merely the artist in
words, and least so when he assumed the office of Teacher;
because almost all he found to teach was brain-mind scientific
stuff; which was what the age called for, and the desired diet
of Mid-Victorian England.  Carlyle, who was a far greater poet
essentially, and a far greater teacher actually, fitted himself
to an age when materialism had made unpoetic; and eschewed
poetry and had no use for it; and would have had others eschew
it also. In our own time we have realists like Mr. Masefield.
They are called realists because they work on the plane which has
come, in the absence of anything spiritual, to seem that of the
realities; the region of outside happenings, of the passions in
all their ugly nakedness, of sorrow, misery, and despair.  Such
men may be essentially noble; we may read in them, under all the
ugliness and misery they write down, just one quality of the
Soul;--its unrest in and distaste for those conditions; but the
mischief of it is that they make the sordidness seem the reality;
and the truth about them is that their outlook and way of writing
are simply the result of the blindness of the Soul;--its
temporary blindness, not its essential glory.  But the true
business of Poetry never changes; it is to open paths into the
inner, the beautiful, the spiritual world.

Just when things were coming to this pass H. P. Blavatsky went to
England; and though she did not touch the field of creative
literature herself, brought back as you know a gleam of light and
beauty into poetry that may yet broaden out and redeem it. She
was born when the century was thirty-one years old; and,
curiously enough, there was a man born in Attica about 469, or
when _his_ century was thirty-one years old, who, though he did
not himself touch the field of literature, was the cause why that
light rose to shine in it which has shone most brilliantly since
all down the ages; that light which we could not afford to
exchange even for the light of Aeschylus. If one of the two were
about to be taken from us, and we had our choice which it should
be, we should have to cry, _Take Aeschylus, but leave us this!_
--Ay, and take all other Greek literature into the bargain!--But
to return to the man born in 469.

He was the son of humble people; his father was a stone-cutter
in a small way of business; his mother a midwife. He himself
began life as a sculptor,--a calling, in its lower reaches, not
so far above that of his father.  A group of the Graces carved by
him was still to be seen on the road to the Acropolis two hundred
years after; and they did not adorn Athens with mean work, one
may guess; the Athens of Pericles and Pheidias.  But, successful
or not, he seems soon to have given it up.  Of his youth we know
very little.  Spintharus, one of the few that knew him then and
also when he had become famous, said that he was a man of
terrible passions:  anger hardly to be governed, and vehement
desires; "though," he added, "he never did anything unfair." *
By 'unfair' you may understand 'not fitting'--a transgression of
right action.  He set out to master himself:  a tremendous and
difficult realm to master.

------
* Gilbert Murray: _Ancient Greek Literature_
------

We hardly begin to know him till he was growing old; and then he
was absolute monarch of that realm.  We do not know when he
abandoned his art; or how long it was before he had won some
fame as a public teacher.  We catch glimpse of him as a soldier:
from 432 to 429 he served at the siege of Potidaea; at Delium in
424; and at Amphipolis in 422.  Thus to do the hoplite, carrying
a great weight of arms, at forty-seven, he needed to have some
constitution; and indeed he had;--furthermore, he played the
part with distinguished bravery--though wont to fall at times
into inconvenient fits of abstraction.  Beyond all this, for the
outside of the man, we may say that he was of fascinating,
extreme and satyr-like ugliness and enormous sense of humor;
that he was a perpetual joke to the comic poets, and to himself;
an old fellow of many and lovable eccentricities; and that you
cannot pick one little hole in his character, or find any respect
in which he does not call for love.

And men did love him; and he them.  He saw in the youth of
Athens, whose lives so often were being wasted, Souls with all
the beautiful possibilities of Souls; and loved them as such,
and drew them towards their soulhood.  Such love and insight is
the first and strongest weapon of the Teacher:  who sees divinity
within the rough-hewn personalities of men as the sculptor sees
the God within the marble; and calls it forth.  He was wont to
joke over his calling; his mother, said he, had been a midwife,
assisting at the birth of men's bodies; he himself was a midwife
of souls.  How he drew men to him--of the power he had--let
Alcibiades bear witness.  "As for myself," says Alcibiades, "were
I not afraid you would think me more drunk than I am, I would
tell you on oath how his words have moved me--ay, and how they
move me still.  When I listen to him my heart beats with a more
than Corybantic excitement; he has only to speak and my tears
flow.  Orators, such as Pericles, never moved me in this way--
never roused my soul to the thought of my servile condition:  but
this man makes me think that life is not worth living so long as
I am what I am.  Even now, if I were to listen, I could not
resist.  So there is nothing for me but to stop my ears against
this siren's song and fly for my life, that I may not grow old
sitting at his feet.  No one would ever think that I had shame in
me; but I am ashamed in the presence of Socrates."

Poor Alciabes! whom Socrates loved so well, and tried so hard to
save; and who could only preserve his lower nature for its own
and for his city's destruction by stopping his ears against his
Teacher!  Alcibiades, whose genius might have saved Athens...
only Athens would not be saved... and he could not have saved
her, because he had stopped his ears against the man who made him
ashamed; and because his treacherous lower nature was always
there to thwart and overturn the efficacy of his genius;--what a
picture of duality it is!

Socrates gave up his art; because art was no longer useful as an
immediate lever for the age. He knew poetry well, but insisted,
as Professor Murray I think says, on always treating it as the
baldest of prose. There was poetry about, galore; and men did
not profit by it:  something else was needed. His mission was to
the Athens of his day; he was going to save Athens if he could.
So he went into the marketplace, the agora, and loafed about (so
to say), and drew groups of young men and old about him, and
talked to them. The Delphic Oracle had made pronouncement:
_Sophocles is wise; Euripides is wiser; but Socrates is the
wisest of mankind._  Sometimes, you see, the Delphic Oracle could
get off a distinctly good thing.  But Socrates, with his usual
sense of humor, had never considered himself in that light at
all; oldish, yes; and funny, and ugly, by all means;--but wise!
He thought at first, he used to say, that the Oracle must be
mistaken, or joking; for Athens was full of reputed wise men,
sophists and teachers of philosophy like Prodicus and Protagoras;
whereas he himself, heaven knew--. Well, he would go out and make
a trial of it. So he went, and talked, and probed the wisdom of
his fellow-citizens; and slowly came round to the belief that
after all the Delphic Oracle might not have been such a fool. For
he knew his ignorance; but the rest were ignorant without
knowing it.  This was his own way of telling the story; and you
can never be sure how much camouflage was in it;--and yet, too,
he was a giant humorist. Anyhow, he did show men their ignorance;
and you all know his solemn way of doing it.  He drew them on
with sly questionings to see what idiots they were; and then drew
them on with more sly questionings to perceive at least a few
sound ethical truths.

He took that humble patient means of saving Athens:  by breaking
down false opinions and instilling true ones.  It was beginning
quite at the bottom of things. Where we advertise a public
lecture, he button-holed a passer-by; and by the great power of
his soul won a following presently.  To rouse up a desire for
right living in the youth of Athens:  if he could do that,
thought he, he might save Athens for the world.  I wonder what
the cycles of national glory would come to, how long they might
last, if only the Teachers that invade to save them could have
their way. Always we see the same picture:  the tremendous effort
of the Gods to redeem these nations in the times of their
creative greatness; to lift them on to a spiritual plane, that
the greatness may not wane and become ineffective. There is the
figure that stands before the world, about whose perfection or
whose qualities you may wrangle if you will; he is great; he is
wonderful; he stirs up love and animosity;--but behind him are
the Depths, the Hierarchies, the Pantheons.  Socrates' warning
Voice, the Daimon that counseled him in every crisis, has always
been a hard nut for critics to crack. He was an impostor, was
he? Away with you for a double fool!  His life meets you so
squarely at every point; there was no atom in his being that
knew how to fear or lie.... Well, no; but he was deluded; he
mistook--.  Man, there is more value in the light word of
Socrates affirming, than in a whole world full of evidence
denying, of such maunderers as you!  See here; he was the most
sensible of men; balanced; keeping his head always;--a mind no
mood or circumstances could deflect from rational self-control,
either towards passion or ecstasy.  One explanation remains--as
in the case of Joan, or of H.P. Blavatsky;--he was neither
deceiving nor deceived, but what he claimed to hear, he did hear;
and it was the voice of One that stood behind him, and might not
appear in history at all, or in the outer world at all:  a
greater than he, and his Teacher; whose bodily presence might
have been in Greece the while, or anywhere else.  How dare we
pretend, because we can do a few things with a piston or a
crucible, that we know the limits of natural and spiritual law?

It is a strange figure to find in Greece; drawn thither, one
would say, by the attraction of opposites.  He must have owed
some of his power to his being such a contrast to all things
familiar.  Personal beauty was extremely common, and he was
comically ugly.  The Athenians were one of the best-educated
populations of ancient or modern times--far ahead of ourselves;
and he was ill-educated, and acted as a public teacher.  He was
hen-pecked at home, in an age when the place of woman was a very
subordinate and submissive one; and he was the butt of all
joke-lovers abroad, and himself enjoyed the joke most of all.
And he quietly stood alone, against the mob and his fellow-judges,
for the hapless victors of Arginusae in 406; and he quietly stood
alone against the Thirty Tyrants during their reign of terror in
404, disobeying them at peril of his life.  But Strip him of the
"thing of sinews and muscles," as he called his outer self;
forget the queer old personality that appears in the _Clouds_ of
Aristophanes, or for that matter in the _Memorabilia_ of
Xenophon--and what kind of picture of Socrates should we see?
The humor would not go, for it is a universal quality; it has
been said no Adept was ever without it; could you draw aside the
veil of Mother Isis herself, and draw it suddenly, I suspect you
should surprise a laugh vanishing from her face.  So the humor
would remain; and with it there would be ... something calm,
aloof, unshakable, yet vitally affectioned towards Athens, the
Athenians, humanity; something unsurprised at, far less hoping or
fearing anything from, life or death; in possession of "the
peace which passeth understanding"; native to "the eternity that
baffles all faculty of computation";--something that drew all
sorts and conditions of Athenians to him, good and bad, Plato and
Alcibiades, by "that diffusive love, not such as rises and falls
upon waves of life and mortality, not such as sinks and swells by
undulations of time, but a procession, an emanation, from some
mystery of endless dawn."--In point of fact, to get a true
portrait of Socrates you have to look at the Memnon's head.  The
Egyptian artists carved it to be the likeness of the Perfect Man,
the Soul, always in itself sublime, absolute master of its flesh
and personality.  That was what Socrates was.

Well; the century ended, with that last quarter of it in which
the Lodge makes always its outward effort. Socrates for the Lodge
had left no stone unturned; he had made his utmost effort dally.
The democracy had been reinstated, and he was understood to be a
moderate in politics. And the democracy was conventional-minded
in religion; and he was understood to be irreligious, a
disturber and innovator.  And the democracy was still smarting
from the wound; imposed on it by Critias and Charmides,
understood to have been his disciples; and could not forget the
treacheries of Alcibiades, another.  And there were vicious
youths besides, whom he had tried and failed to save; they had
ruined themselves, and their reputable parents blamed and hated
him for the ruin, not understanding the position.  And he himself
had seen so many of his efforts come to nothing:  Alcibiades play
the traitor; Critias and Charmides, the bloody tyrant;--he had
seen many he had labored for frustrate his labors; he had seen
Athens fallen.  He had done all he could, quietly, unfailingly
and without any fuss; now it was time for him to go. But going,
he might yet strike one more great blow for the Light.

So with quiet zest and humor he entered upon the plans of his
adversaries, accepting his trial and sentence like--_like
Socrates;_ for there is no simile for him, outside himself. He
turned it all masterfully to the advantage of the Light he loved.
You all know how he cracked his grand solemn joke when the death
sentence was passed on him. By Athenian law, he might suggest an
alternative sentence; as, to pay a fine, or banishment. Well,
said he; death was not certainly an evil; it might be a very
good thing; whereas banishment was certainly an evil, and so was
paying a fine.  And besides, he had no money to pay it. So the
only alternative he could suggest was that Athens should support
him for the rest of his life in the Prytaneum as a public
benefactor. Not a smile from him; not a tremor. He elected
deliberately; he chose death; knowing well that, as things
stood, he could serve humanity in no other way so well. So he put
aside Crito's very feasible plan for his escape, and at the last
gathered his friends around him, and discoursed to them.

On Reincarnation. It was an old tradition, said he; and what
could be more reasonable than that the soul, departing to Hades,
should return again in its season:--the living born from the
dead, as the dead are from the living?  Did not experience show
that opposites proceed from opposites?  Then life must proceed
from, and follow, death. If the dead came from the living, and
not the living from the dead, the universe would at last be
consumed in death. Then, too, there was the doctrine that
knowledge comes from recollection; what is recollected must have
been previously known.  Our souls must have existed then,
before birth. . . .

Why did he talk like that:  thus _reasoning_ about reincarnation,
and not stating it as a positive teaching?  Well; there would be
nothing new and startling about it, to the Greeks.  They knew of
it as a teaching both of Pythagoras and of the Orphic Mysteries:
that is, those did who were initiates or Pythagoreans.  But it
was not public teaching, known to the multitude; and except
among the Pythagoreans, sophistry and speculation had impaired
its vitality as a matter of faith or knowledge.  (So scientific
discovery and the spread of education have impaired the vitality
now of Christian presentations of ethics.)  So that to have
announced it positively, at that time, would have served his
purpose but little:  men would have said, "We have heard all that
before; had he nothing better to give us than stale ideas from
the Mysteries or Pythagoras?"  What he wanted to do was to take
it out of the region of religion, where familiarity with it had
bread an approach to contempt; and restate it robbed of that
familiarity, and clothed anew in a garb of sweet reasonableness.
So once more, and as ususal, he assumed ignorance, and approached
the whole subject in a quiet and rational way, thus:  I do not
say that this is positively so; I do not announce it as a dogma.
Dogmas long since have lost their efficacy, and you must stand or
fall now by the perceptions of your own souls, not by what I or
any authority may tell you.  But as reasoning human beings, does
it not appeal to you?

And the very spirit in which he approached it and approached his
death was precisely the one to engrave his last spoken ideas on
the souls of his hearers as nothing else could.  No excitement;
no uplift or ecstasy of the martyr; quiet reasoning only; full,
serene, and, for him, common-place command of the faculties of
his mind.  The shadow of death made no change in Socrates; how
then should they misunderstand or magnify the power of the shadow
of death?--"How shall we bury you?"  asks Crito.  Socrates turns
to the others present, and says:  "I cannot persuade Crito that I
here am Socrates--I who am now reasoning and ordering discourse.
He imagines Socrates to be that other, whom he will see by and
by, a corpse."--So the scene went on until the last moment, when
"Phaedo veiled his face, and Crito started to his feet, and
Apollodorus, who had never ceased weeping all the time, burst out
into a loud and angry cry which broke down everyone but Socrates."

Someone has said that there is nothing in tragedy or history so
moving as this death of Socrates, as Plato tells it.  And yet its
tragic interest, its beauty, is less important, to my thinking,
than the insight it gives us into the methods and mental workings
of an Adept.  Put ourselves into the mind of Socrates. He is
going to his death; which to him is about the same as, to us,
going to South Ranch or San Diego. You say I am taking the beauty
and nobility out of it; but no; I am only trying to see what
beauty and nobility look like from within. To him, then, his
death is in itself a matter of no personal moment. But the habit
of his lifetime has been to turn every moment into a blow struck
for the Soul, for the Light, for the Cause of Sublime Perfection.
And here now is the chance to strike the most memorable blow of
all. With infinite calmness he arranges every detail, and
proceeds to strike it. He continues to play the high part of
Socrates,--that is all. You might go to death like a poet, in
love with Death's solemn beauty, you might go to her like a
martyr, forgetting the awe of her in forevision of the splendor
that lies beyond.  But this man broadly and publicly goes to her
like Socrates. He will allow her no fascination, no mystery; not
even, nor by any means, equality with the Soul of Man. . . . And
Apollodorus might weep then, and burst into an angry cry; and
Crito and Phaedo and the rest might all break down--_then;_ but
what were they to think afterwards? When they remembered how they
had seen Death and Socrates, those two great ones, meet; and how
the meeting had been as simple, as unaffected, as any meeting
between themselves and Socrates, any morning in the past, in the
Athenian _agora?_ And when Death should come to them, what should
they say but this:  'There is nothing about you that can impress
me; formerly I conversed with one greater than you are, and I
saw you pay your respects to Socrates.'

Could he, could any man have proclaimed the Divinity in Man, its
real and eternal existence, in any drama, in any poem, in any
glorious splendor of rhetoric with what fervor soever of mystical
ecstasy endued--with such deadly effectiveness, such inevitable
success, as in this simple way he elected? There are men whose
actions seem to spring from a source super-ethical:  it is cheap
to speak of them as good, great, beautiful or sublime:  these are
but the appearances they assume as we look upwards at them. What
they are in themselves is: (1) Compassionate;--it is the law
of their being to draw men upwards towards the Spirit; (2)
Impersonal;--there is a non-being or vacuity in them where we
have our passions, likings, preferences, dislikes and desires.
They are, in the Chinese phrase, "the equals of Heaven and Earth";

     "Earth, heaven, and time, death, life and they
     Endure while they shall be to be."

So Socrates, having failed in his life-attempt to save Athens,
entered with some gusto on that great _coup de main_ of his
death: to make it a thing which first a small group of his
friends should see; then that Greece should see; then that
thirty coming centuries and more should see; presented it
royally to posterity, for what, as a manifestation of the Divine
in man, it might be worth.

And look! what is the result? Scarcely is the 'thing of muscles
and sinews' cold:  scarcely has high Socrates forgone his queer
satyr-like embodiment:  when a new luminary has risen into the
firmament,--one to shine through thirty centuries certainly,

     "Brighter than Jupiter--a blazing star
     Brighter than Hesper shining out to sea"

--one that is still to be splendid in the heavens wherever in
Europe, wherever in America, wherever in the whole vast realm of
the future men are to arise and make question and peer up into
the beautiful skies of the Soul. A Phoenix in time has arisen
from the ashes of Socrates:  from the glory and solemnity of his
death a Voice is mystically created that shall go on whispering
_The Soul_ wherever men think and strive towards spirituality.
--Ah indeed, you were no failure, Socrates--you who were
disappointed of your Critias, your Charmides, your Alcibiades,
your whole Athens; you were not anything in the very least like
a failure; for there was yet one among your disciples--

He says, that one, that he was absent through illness during that
last scene of his Teacher's life.  I do not know; it has been
thought that may have been merely a pretense, an artistic
convention, to give a heightened value of impersonality to his
marvelous prose:--for it was he who wrote down the account of the
death of Socrates for us:  that tragedy so transcendent in its
beauty and lofty calm. But this much is certain: that day he was
born again: became, from a gilded youth of Athens, an eternal
luminary in the heavens, and that which he has remained these
three-and-twenty hundred years:  the Poet-Philosopher of the
Soul, the Beacon of the Spirit for the western world....

He had been a brilliant young aristocrat among the crowd
that loved to talk with Socrates: the very best thing that
Athens could produce in the way of birth, charm, talent, and
attainments;--it is a marvel to see one so worshiped of Fortune
in this world, turn so easily to become her best adored in the
heaven of the Soul. On his father's side he was descended from
Codrus, last king of Athens; on his mother's, from Solon:  you
could get nothing higher in the way of family and descent. In
himself, he was an accomplished athlete; a brilliant writer of
light prose; a poet of high promise when the mood struck him--
and he had ideas of doing the great thing in tragedy presently;
trained unusually well in music, and in mathematics; deeply
read; with a taste for the philosophies; a man, in short, of
culture as deep and balanced as his social standing was high. But
it seemed as though the Law had brought all these excellencies
together mainly to give the fashionable Athenian world assurance
of a man; for here he was in his thirty-first year with nothing
much achieved beyond--his favorite pursuit--the writing of
_mimes_ for the delectation of his set: "close studies of little
social scenes and conversations, seen mostly in the humorous
aspect." *  He had consorted much with Socrates; at the trial,
when it was suggested that a fine might be paid, and the hemlock
evitated, it was he who had first subscribed and gone about to
raise a sum. But now the death of his friend and Teacher struck
him like a great gale amidships; and he was transformed, another
man; and the great Star Plato rose, that shines still; the
great Voice Plato was lifted to speak for the Soul and to be
unequaled in that speaking, in the west, until H.P. Blavatsky came.

------
* Murray:  _Ancient Greek Literature:_--whence all this as to
Plato's youth.
------

But note what a change had taken place with the ending of the
fifth century. Hitherto all the great Athenians had been great
Athenians. Aeschylus, witness of eternity, had cried his message
down to Athens and to his fellow-citizens; he had poured the
waters of eternity into the vial of his own age and place. I
speak not of Sophocles, who was well enough rewarded with the
prizes Athens had to give him. Euripides again was profoundly
concerned with his Athens; and though he was contemned by and
held aloof from her, it was the problems of Athens and the time
that ate into his soul. Socrates came to save Athens; he did not
seek political advancement, but would hold office when it came
his way; was enough concerned in politics to be considered a
moderate-one cause of his condemnation; but above all devoted
himself to raising the moral tone of the Athenian youth and
clearing their minds of falsity. Finally, he gave loyalty to his
city and its laws as one reason for rejecting Crito's plan for
his escape. What he hoped and lived for was, to save Athens; and
he was the more content to die, when he saw that this was no
longer possible.

But Plato had no part nor lot in Athens. He loathed her doctrine
of democracy, as knowing it could come to no good. He had
affiliations, like Aeschylus, in Sicily, whither he made
certain journeys; and might have stayed there among his fellow
Pythagoreans, but for the irascible temper of Dionysius. But much
more, and most of all, his affiliations were in the wide Cosmos
and all time:  as if he foresaw that on him mainly would devolve
the task of upholding spiritual ideas in Europe through the
millenniums to come. He dwelt apart, and taught in the Groves of
Academe outside the walls. Let Athens' foolish politics go
forward as they might, or backward--he would meddle with nothing.
It has been brought against him that he did nothing to help his
city 'in her old age and dotage'; well, he had the business of
thousands of coming years and peoples to attend to, and had no
time to be accused, condemned, and executed by a parcel of
obstreperous cobblers and tinkers hot-headed over the petty
politics of their day. The Gods had done with Athens, and were to
think now of the great age of darkness that was to come. He was
mindful of a light that should arise in Egypt, after some
five hundred years; and must prepare wick and oil for the
Neo-Platonists. He was mindful that there should be a thing called
the Renaissance in Italy; and must attend to what claims Pico di
Mirandola and others should make on him for spiritual food. He
must consider Holland of the seventeenth century, and England:
the Platonists of Cambridge and Amsterdam;--must think of Van
Helmont; and of a Vaughan who 'saw eternity the other night';
of a Traherne, who should never enjoy the world aright without
some illumination from his star; of a young Milton, _penseroso,_
out watching the Bear in some high lonely tower with thrice-great
Hermes, who should unsphere his spirit,

     "..... to unfold
     What worlds and what vast regions hold
     The immortal mind that hath forsook
     Her mansion in this fleshy nook";

--no, but he must think of all times coming; and how, whenever
there should be any restlessness against the tyranny of
materialism and dogma, a cry should go up for _Plato._--So let
Isocrates, the 'old man eloquent,'--let a many-worded not
unpeculant patriotic Demosthenes who knew nothing of the
God-world--attend to an Athens wherein the Gods were no longer
greatly interested;--the great Star Plato should rise up into
mid-heaven, and shine not in, but high over Athens and quite
apart from her; drawing from her indeed the external elements of
his culture, but the light and substance from that which was
potent in her no longer.

I said Greece served the future badly enough. Consider what might
have been. The pivot of the Mediterranean world, in the sixth
century, was not Athens, but in Magna Graecia: at Croton, where
Pythagoras had built his school. But the mob wrecked Croton, and
smashed the Pythagorean Movement as an organization; and that, I
take it, and one other which we shall come to in time, were the
most disastrous happenings in European history.  Yes; the causes
why Classical civilization went down; why the Dark Ages were
dark; why the God in Man his been dethroned, and suffered all
this crucifixion and ignominy the last two thousand years.
Aeschylus, truly, received some needed backing from the relics of
the Movement which he found still existent in Sicily; but what
might he not have written, and what of his writings might not
have come down to us, preserved there in the archives, had he had
the peace and elevation of a Croton, organized, to retire to?
Whither, too, Socrates might have gone, and not to death, when
Athens became impossible; where Plato might have dwelt and
taught; revealing, to disciples already well-trained, much more
than ever he did reveal; and engraving, oh so deeply! on the
stuff of time, the truths that make men free. And there he should
have had successors and successors and successors; a line to
last perhaps a thousand or two thousand years; who never should
have let European humanity forget such simple facts as Karma and
Reincarnation.  But only at certain times are such great
possibilities presented to mankind; and a seed-time once passed,
there can be no sowing again until the next season comes. It is
no good arguing with the Law of Cycles. Plato may not have been
less than Pythagoras; yet, under the Law, he might not attempt--
it would have been folly for him to have attempted--that which
Pythagoras had attempted.  So he had to take another line
altogether; to choose another method; not to try to prevent the
deluge, which was certain now to come; not even to build an ark,
in which something should be saved; but, so to say, to strew the
world with tokens which, when the great waters had subsided,
should still remain to remind men of those things it is of most
importance they should know.

This is the way he did it. He advanced no dogma, formulated no
system; but what he gave out, he gave rather as hypotheses.  His
aim was to set in motion a method of thinking which should lead
always back to the Spirit and Divine Truth. He started no world-
religion; founded no church--not even such a quite unchurchly
church as that which came to exist on the teachings of Confucius.
He never had the masses practicing their superstitions, nor a
priesthood venting its lust of power, in his name.  Instead, he
arranged things so, that wherever fine minds have aspired to the
light of the Spirit, Plato has been there to guide them on their
way. So you are to see Star-Plato shining, you are to hear that
voice from the Spheres at song, when Shelley, reaching his
topmost note, sang:

     "The One remains, the many change and pass;
          Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
     Life like a dome of many-coloured glass
          Stains the white radiance of Eternity";--

and when Swinburne sings of Time and change that:

     "Songs they can stop that earth found meet,
          But the Stars keep their ageless rhyme;
      Flowers they can slay that Spring thought sweet,
          But the Stars keep their Spring sublime,
     Actions and agonies control,
     And life and death, but not the Soul."

In a poetic age--in the time of Aeschylus, for example--Plato
would have been a poet; and then perhaps we should have had to
invent another class of poets, one above the present highest;
and reserve it solely for the splendor of Plato.  Because
Platonism is the very Theosophic Soul of Poetry.  But he came,
living when he did, to loathe the very name of poetry:  as who
should say: "God pity you! I give you the Way, the Truth, and the
Life, and you make answer, 'Charming Plato, how exquisitely
poetic is your prose!'"  So his bitterness against poetry is
very natural.  Poetry is the inevitable vehicle of the highest
truth; spiritual truth is poetry.  But the world in general does
not know this.  Like Bacon, it looks on poetry as a kind of
pleasurable lying.  Plato went through the skies Mercury to the
Sun of Truth, its nearest attendant planet; and therefore was,
and could not help being, Very-Poet of very-poets.  But Homer and
others had lied loudly about the Gods; and, thought Plato, the
Gods forbid that the truth he had to declare--a vital matter--
should be classed with their loud lying.

He masked the batteries of his Theosophy; camouflaged his great
Theosophical guns; but fired them off no less effectively,
landing his splendid shells at every ganglionic point in the
history of European thought since. Let a man soak his soul in
Plato; and it shall go hard but the fair flower Theosophy shall
spring up there presently and bloom.  He prepares the soil:
suggesting the way to, rather than precisely formulating, the
high teachings.  The advantage of the grand Platonic camouflage
has been twofold:  on the one hand you could hardly dwarf your
soul with dogmatic acceptation of Platonism, because he gave all
his teachings--even Reincarnation--as hypotheses,--and men do not
as a rule crucify their mental freedom on an hypothesis.  On the
other hand, how was any Church eager to burn out heresy and
heretics to deal with him?  He was not to be stamped out;
because his influence depended on no continuity of discipleship,
no organization; because he survived merely as a tendency of
thought.  No churchly fulminations might silence his batteries;
because he had camouflaged them, and they were not to be seen.
Of course he did not invent his ideas; they are as old as
Theosophy.  The Lodge sent him to proclaim them in the way he
did:  the best way possible, since the Pythagorean effort had
failed of its greatest success. What we owe to him--his genius
and inestimable gift to the world--is precisely that matchless
camouflage.  It has been effective, in spite of efforts--

That, for instance, of a forward youth who came to Athens and
studied under him for twenty years, and whom Plato called the
intellect of the school, saying that he spurned his Teacher as
colts do their mothers. A youth, it is said, who revered Plato
always; and only gradually grew away from thinking of himself as
a Platonist. But he never could have understood the inwardness
of Plato or Platonism, for his mind turned as naturally to
scientific or brain-mind methods, as Plato's did to mysticism and
the illumination of the Soul. He adopted much of the teaching,
but gave it a twist brain-mindwards; yet not such a twist,
either, but that the Neo-Platonists in their day, and certain of
the Arab and Turkish philosophers after them, could re-Platonize
it to a degree and admit him thus re-Platonized into their canon.
I am not going to trouble you much with Aristotle; let this from
the Encyclopedia suffice:  "Philosophic differences" it says "are
best felt by their practical effects: philosophically, Platonism
is a philosophy of universal forms, Aristotelianism is a
philosophy of individual substances:  practically, Plato makes us
think first of the supernatural and the kingdom of heaven,
Aristotle of the natural and the whole world."

Or briefly, Aristotle took what he could of Plato's inspiration,
and turned it from the direction of the Soul to that of the
Brain-mind. The most famous of Plato's disciples, he did what he
could, or what he could not help doing, to spoil Plato's message.
But Plato's method had guarded that, so that for mystics
it should always be there, Aristotle or no.  But for mere
philosophers, seeming to improve on it, he had something tainted
it.  It descended, as said, through the Neo-Platonists--who
turned it back Plato-ward--to the Moslems:  through Avicenna, who
Aristotelianized, to Averroes, who Platonized it again; and from
him to Europe; where Bacon presently gave it another twist to
out-Aristotle Aristotle (as someone said) to stagger the
Stagirite--and passed it on as the scientific method of today.
According to Coleridge, every man is by nature either a Platonist
or an Aristotelian; and there is some truth in it.

And meanwhile, though the huge Greek illumination could die but
slowly, Greece was growing uninteresting.  For Pheidias of the
earlier century, we have in Plato's time Praxiteles, whose carved
gods are lounging and pretty nincom--- well, mortals; "they
sink," says the Encyclopedia, "to the human level, or indeed,
sometimes almost below it. They have grace and charm in a supreme
degree, but the element of awe and reverence is wanting."--We
have an Aphrodite at the bath, a 'sweet young thing' enough, no
doubt; an Apollo Sauroctonos, "a youth leaning against a tree,
and idly striking with an arrow at a lizard."  A certain natural
magic has been claimed for Praxiteles and his school and
contemporaries; but if they had it, they mixed unholy elements
with it.--And then came Alexander, and carried the dying impetus
eastward with him, to touch India with it before it quite
expired; and after that Hellenism became Hellenisticism, and what
remained of the Crest-Wave in Greece was nothing to lose one
little wink of sleep over.




VII.  THE MAURYAS OF INDIA


"Some talk of Alexander" may be appropriate here; but not much.
He was Aristotle's pupil; and apart from or beyond his terrific
military genius, had ideas. Genius is sometimes, perhaps more
often than we suspect, an ability to concentrate the mind into a
kind of impersonality; almost non-existence, so that you have in
it a channel for the great forces of nature to play through. We
shall find that Mr. Judge's phrase 'the Crest-Wave of Evolution'
is no empty one: words were things, with him and in fact, as he
says; and it is so here. For this Crest-Wave is a force that
actually rolls over the world as a wave over the face of the sea,
raising up splendors in one nation after another in order
_geographically,_ and with no haphazard about it. Its first and
largest movement is from East to West; producing (as far as I
can see) the great manvantaric periods (fifteen hundred years
apiece) in East Asia, West Asia, and Europe; each of these being
governed by its own cycles. But it has a secondary movement as
well; a smaller motion within the larger one; and this produces
the brilliant days (thirteen decades long for the most part) that
recur in the manvantaras. Thus: China seems to have been in
manvantara from 2300 to 850 B. C.; West Asia, from 1890 to 390;
Europe, from 870 B. C. to 630 A. D.  So in the time of Alexander
West Asia was newly dead, and China waiting to be reborn. The
Crest-Wave, in so far as it concerned the European manvantara,
had to roll westward from Greece (in its time) to awaken Italy;
but in its universal aspect--in its strongest force--it had to
roll eastward, that its impulse might touch more important China
when her time for awaking should come. It is an impetus, of which
sometimes we can see the physical links and lines along which it
travels, and sometimes we cannot. The line from Greece to China
lies through Persia and India. But Persia was dead, in pralaya;
you could expect no splendor, no mark of the Crest-Wave's
passing, there. So Alexander, rising by his genius and towering
ideas to the plane where these great motions are felt, skips you
lightly across dead Persia, knocks upon the doors of India to say
that it is dawn and she must be up and doing; and subsides. I
doubt he carried her any cultural impulse, in the ordinary sense;
it is _our_ Euro-American conceit to imagine the Greek was the
highest thing in civilization in the world at that time.  We may
take it that Indian civilization was far higher and better in all
esentials; certainly the Greeks who went there presently, and
left a record, were impressed with that fact.  You shall see;
out of their own mouths we will convict them.  It is the very
burden of Megasthenes' song.

Alexander had certain larger than Greek conceptions, which one
must admire in him.  Though he overthrew the Persians, he never
made the mistake of thinking them an inferior race.  On the
contrary, he respected them highly; and proposed to make of them
and his Greeks and Mecedoinians one homogeneous people, in which
the Persian qualities of aristocracy should supply a need  he
felt in Europeans.  The Law made use of his intention, partially,
and to the furtherance of its own designs.--His method of
treating the conquered was (generally) far more Persian or
Asiatic than Greek; that is to say, far more humane and decent
than barbarous.  He took a short cut to his broad ends, and
married all his captains to Persian ladies, himself setting the
example; whereas most Greeks would have dealt with the captive
women very differently.  So that it was a kind of enlightenment
he set out with, and carried across Persia, through Afghanistan,
and into the Punjab,--which, we may note, was but the outskirts
of the real India, into which he never penetrated; and it may
yet be found that he went by no means so far as is supposed; but
let that be.  So now, at any rate, enough of him; he has brought
us where we are to spend this evening.

For a student of history, there is something mysterious and even
--to use a very vile drudge of a word--'unique' about India.  Go
else where you will, and so long as you can posit certainly a
high civilization, and know anything of its events, you can make
some shift to arrange the history.  None need boggle really at
any Chinese date after about 2350 B.C.; Babylon is fairly
settled back to about 4000; and if you cannot depend on assigned
Egyptian dates, at least there is a reasonably know sequence of
dynasties back through four or five millennia.  But come to
India, and alas, where are you?  All out of it, chronologically
speaking; enough; very likely, the flotsam and jetsam of
several hundred thousand years.  I have no doubt the Puranas are
crowded with history; but how much of what is related is to
be taken as plain fact; how much as 'blinds'; how much as
symbolism--only the Adepts know.  The three elements are mingled
beyond the wit of man to unravel them; so that you can hardly
tell whether any given thing happened in this or that millennium,
Root-Race period, or Round of Worlds, or Day of Brahma.  You are
in the wild jungles of fairyland; where there are gorgeous
blooms, and idylls, dreamlit, beautiful and fantastical, all
in the deep midwood lonliness; and time is not, and the
computations of chronology are an insult to the spirit of your
surroundings. History, in India, was kept an esoteric science,
and esoteric all the ancient records remain now; and I dare say
any twice-born  Brahmin not Oxfordized knows far more about it
than the best Max Mullers of the west, and laughs at them
quietly. Until someone will voluntarily lift that veil of
esotericism, the speculations of western scholars will go for
little.  Why it should be kept esoteric, one can only guess; I
think if it were known, the cycles and patterns of human history
would cease to be so abstruse and hidden from us:  we should know
too much for our present moral or spiritual status.  As usual,
our own _savants_ are avid to dwarf all dates, and bring
everything within the scope of a few thousand years; as for the
native authorities, they simply try confusions with us; if you
should trust them too literally, or some of them, events such as
the Moslem conquest will not take place for a few centuries yet.
They do not choose that their ancient history should be known;
so all things are in a hopeless muddle.

One thing to remember is this: it is a continent, like Europe;
not a country, like France. The population is even more
heterogeneous than that of Europe. Only one sovereign, Aurangzeb
--at least for many thousands of years--was ever even nominally
master of the whole of it. There are two main divisions, widely
different: Hindustan or Aryavarta, north of the Vindhya Mountains
and the River Nerbudda; and Dakshinapatha or the Deccan, the
peninsular part to the south. The former is the land of the
Aryans; the people of the latter are mainly non-Aryan--a race
called the Dravidians whom, apparently, the Aryans conquered in
Hindustan, and assimilated; but whom in the Deccan, though they
have influenced them largely, and in part molded their religion,
they never quite conquered or supplanted. Well; never is a long
day; dear knows what may have happened in the long ages
of pre-history.

The Aryans came down into India through its one open door--that
in the northwest. But when?--Oh, from about 1400 to 1200 B.C.,
says western scholarship; which has spent too much ingenuity
altogether over discovering the original seat of the Aryans, and
their primal civilization.  After Sir William Jones and others
had introduce Sanskrit to western notice, and its affinity had
been discovered to that whole chain of languages which is
sometimes called Indo-European, the theory long held that
Sanskrit was the parent of all these tongues, and that all their
speakers had emigrated at different times from somewhere in
Central Asia.  But in the scientific orthodoxies fashion reigns
and changes as  incontinently as in dress.  Scholars rose to
launch a new name for the race: _Indogermanic;_  and to prove
Middle-Europe the Eden in which it was created.  Then others, to
dodge that Eden about through every corner of Europe; which
at least must have the honor;--it could not be conceded to
_inferior_ Asia.  All the languages of the group were examined
and worried for evidence. Men said, 'By the names of trees we
shall run it to earth'; and this was the doxy that was ortho-for
some time.  Light on a tree-name common to all the languages, and
find in what territory that tree is indigenous:  that will
certainly be the place.  As thus; I will work out for you a
suggestion given in the encyclopaedia, that you may see what
strictly scientific methods of reasoning may lead to:--

Perhaps the two plant names most universally met with in all
Aryan languages, European or Asiatic, are _potato_ and _tobacco._
'From Greenland's icy mountains to Ceylon's sunny isle, Whereever
prospect pleases, And only man is vile.'--you shall nearly always
hear the vile ones calling the humble tuber of their mid-day
meal by some term akin to _potato,_ and the subtle weed that
companions their meditations, by some word like _tobacco._
_Argal,_ the Aryan race used these two words before their
separation; and if the two words, the two plants also.  You
follow the reasoning?--Now then, seek out the land where these
plants are indigenous; and if haply it shall be found they both
have one original habitat, why, there beyond doubt you shall find
the native seat of the primitive Aryans.  And, glory be to
Science! they do; both come from Virginia.  Virginia, then, is
the Aryan Garden of Eden.

Ah but, strangely enough, we do find one great branch of the
race--the Teutons--unacquainted with the word _potato._  You may
argue that the French are too:  but luckily, Science has the
seeing eye; Science is not to be cheated by appearances.  The
French say _pomme de terre;_ but this is evidently only a
corruption--_potater, pomdeter_--twisted at some late period by
false analogy into _pomme de terre,_ ('apple of the earth'.)  But
the Teuton has _kartoffel,_ utterly different; argal again, the
Teutons must have separated from the parent stem before the
Aryans had discovered that the thing was edible and worth naming.
They, therefore, were the first to leave Virginia:  paddle their
own canoes off to far-away Deutschland before ever the mild
Hindoo set out for Hindustan, the Greek for Greece, or the
Anglo-Saxon for Anglo-Saxony.  But even the Teutons have the word
_tobacco._  Come now, what a light we have here thrown on the
primitive civilization of our forefathers!  They knew, it seems,
the virtures of the weed or ever they had boiled or fried a single
murphy; they smoked first, and only ate long afterwards:  and
the Germans who led that first expedition out from the fatherland
of the race, must have gone with full tobacco-pouches and empty
lunch-bags.  What a life-like picture rises before our eyes!
These first Aryans were a dreamy contemplative people; tobacco
was the main item in their lives, the very basis of their
civilization.--Then presently, after the Teutons had gone,
someone must have let his pipe go out for a few minutes--long
enought to discover that he was hungry, and that a fair green
plant was growing at his door, with a succulent tuber at the root
of it which one could EAT.  Think of the joy, the wonder, of that
momentous discovery!  Did he hide it away, lest others should be
as happy as himself?  Were ditectives set to watch him, to spy
out the cause of a habit of sleek rotundity that was growing upon
him at last visibly?  We shall never know.  Or did he call in his
neighbors at once and annouce it?  Did someone ask:  'What shall
we name this God-given thing?'--and did another reply:  'It looks
to me like a _potato;_  let's call it that!'?  That at least must
have been how it came by it name.  They received the suggestion
with acclamations:  and all future out-going expeditions took
sacks of it with them; and their descendants have continued to
call it _potato_ to this day.  For you must not that being the
only food with a name common to all the languages--or almost all
--it must be supposed to have been the only food they knew of
before their separation.  Even the words for _father, mother,
fire, water,_ and the like, have a greater number of different
roots in the Aryan languages than have these blessed two.

To say the truth, a dawning perception of the possibilities
of this kind of reasoning chilled the enthusiasm of the
Aryan-hunters a good deal; it was the bare bodkin that did
quietus make for much philological pother and rout.  No; if
you are to prove racial superiority or exclusiveness, you had
much better avail yourself of the simplicity of a stout bludgeon,
than rely upon the subtleties of brain-mind argumentation; for
time past is long, and mostly hidden; and lots of things have
happened to account for your proofs in ways you would never
suspect.  The long and short of it is, that after pursuing
the primitive Aryans up hill and down dale through all parts
of Europe, Science is forced to pronouce her final judgement
thus:  _We really know nothing about it._

The ancestors of this Fifth Root-Race emigrated to Central Asia
to escape the fate of Atlantis; whither too went several
Atlantean peoples, such as the forefathers of the Chinese,--who
were not destined to be destroyed.  It is a vast region, and
there was room for them all.  That emigration may have been as
long a process as that of the Europeans in our own time to
America; probably it was; or longer.  But it happened, at any
rate, a million years ago; and in a million years a deal of
water will flow under the bridges.  You may call English
a universal language now; it might conceivably become so
absolutely, after a few centuries.  But history will go on and
time, and the cyclic changes inherent in natural law.  These are
not to be dodged by railways, turbines, aeroplanes; you cannot
evitate their action by inventing printing-presses;--which, I
suppose, have been invented and forgotten dozens of times 'since
created man.'  In a million years from now the world will have
contracted and expanded often. We have seen, in our little period
called historical, hardly anything but expansion; though there
have been contractions, too.  But contractions there will be,
major ones; it is quite safe to foretell that; because action
and reaction are equal and opposite:  it is a fundamental law.
Geography will re-become, what it was in the times we call
ancient, an esoteric science; the races will be isolated, and
there will be no liners on the seas, and Europe and Asia
will be fabulous realms of faerie for our more or less remote
descendants. Then what will have become of the once universal
English language?--It will have split into a thousand fragment
tongues, as unlike as Dutch and Sanskrit; and philology--the
great expansion having happened again--will have as much
confusion to unravel in the Brito-Yankish, as it has now in the
Indo-European.--In a million years?--Bless my soul, in a poor
little hundred thousand!

The Aryan languages, since they began to be, have been spreading
out and retreating, mixing and changing and interchanging; one
imposed on another, hidden under another, and recrudescing
through another; through ten or a hundred thousand years,--or
however long it may be; just as they have been doing in
historical times.  You find Persian half Arabicized; Armenian
come to be almost a dialect of Persian; Latin growing up through
English; Greek almost totally submerged under Latin, Slavonic,
and Turkish, and now with a tendency to grow back into Greek;
Celtic preserving in itself an older than Aryan syntax, and
conveying that in its turn to the English spoken by Celts.
Language is, to say the truth, a shifting kaleidoscopic thing:  a
momentary aspect of racial expression. In a thousand years it
becomes unintelligible; we are modifying ours every day, upon
laws whose nature can be guessed. Yet ultimately all is a
symphony and ordered progression, with regular rhythms recurring;
it only seems a chaos, and unmusical, because we hear no more
than the fragment of a bar.

You all know the teaching of _The Secret Doctrine_ about the
Root-Races of Humanity, of which this present one, generally
called the Aryan, is the fifth; and how each is divided into
seven sub-races; each sub-race into seven family-races; and
each family-race into innumerable nations and tribes. According
to that work, this Fifth Root-Race has existed a million years.
The period of a sub-race is said to be about 210,000 years; and
that of a family-race, about 30,000. So then, four sub-races
would have occupied the first 840,000 years of the Fifth Race's
history; and our present fifth sub-race would have been in being
during the last 160,000 years; in which time five family-races
would have flourished and passed; and this present sixth
family-race would be about ten millenniums old.  Now, no single
branch of the Aryans:  by which term I mean the sixth family-race;
I shall confine it to that, and not apply it to the Fifth Root-Race
as a whole,--no single race among the Aryans has been universal,
or dominant, or prominent even, during the whole of the last ten
thousand years. The Teutons (including Anglo-Saxons), who loom so
largely now, cut a very small figure in the days when Latin was,
in its world, something more universal than English is in ours;
and a few centuries before that, you should have heard Celtic,
and little else, almost anywhere in Europe.  This shows how
fleeting a thing is the sovereignty of any language; within the
three thousand years we know about, three at least of the Aryan
language-groups have been 'universal'; within the last ten
milleniums there has been time enough, and to spare, for a
'universality' each of Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Slavonic, Latin,
Teutonic, and Celtic. So evidently none of these is the language
of the family-race:  we may speak of the Aryan Family-Race; not
of the Celtic or Slavonic.

But it does not follow that the whole sub-race is not Aryan too.
Mr. Judge says somewhere that Sanskrit will be the universal
language again. Supposing that there were some such scheme of
evolution here, as in the world-chain? You know the diagram in
_The Secret Doctrine,_ with the teaching as to the seven rounds.
_As above, so below;_  when H. P. Blavatsky seems to be giving
you a sketch of cosmic evolution, often she is at the same time,
if you can read it, telling you about the laws that govern your
own and the race's history. I suspect some such arrangement as
this:  when the sub-race began, 160,000 years ago, Sanskrit was
its 'universal' language; spoken by all the Aryans that moved
out over Europe and into India.  An unaccountable Sanskrit
inscription has been found in Asia Minor;* and there is
Lithuania, a little  speech-island in northeastern Central
Europe, where a nearly Sanskrit language, I believe, survives.
Then Sanskrit changed imperceptibly (as American is changing from
English) into the parent language of the Persian group, which
became the general speech of the sub-race except in India, where
Sanskrit survived as a _seed-speech_ for future resurrection.
Then, perhaps _pari passu_  with further westward expansion,
Persian changed into the parent of the Slavonic group, itself
living on as a seed-speech in Iran; and so on through all the
groups; in each case the type-language of a group remaining, to
expand again after the passage of ages and when its cycle should
return, in or about its corresponding psychic center on the
geographical plane. Then this evolution, having  reached its
farthest limit, began to retrace its course; I would not attempt
to say in what order the language groups come:  which is
globe A in the chain, which Globe D, and so on; but merely
suggest that a 'family race' may represent one round from
Sanskrit to Sanskrit; and the whole Fifth Sub-race, seven
such complete rounds.

------
* _Ancient India,_ by E. J. Rapson
------

What came before? What was the Fourth Sub-race?  Well: I imagine
we may have the relic, the _sishta_ or seed of it, in the Hamitic
peoples and languages: the Libyans, Numidians, Egyptians,
Iberians, and Pelasgians of old; the Somalis, Gallas, Copts,
Berbers, and Abyssinians of today. We are almost able to discern
a time--but have not guessed when it was--when this Iberian race,
having perhaps its central seat in Egypt, held all or most lands
as far as Ireland to the west, and Japan and New Zealand
eastward; we find them surviving, mixed with, but by no means
submerged under, Aryan Celts in Spain--which is Iberia; we find
their name (I imagine) in that of Iverne, Ierine, Hibernia, or
Ireland; we know that they gave the syntax of their language to
that of the Celts of the British Isles; and that the Celtic races
of today are mainly Iberian in blood--I daresay all Europe is
about half Iberian in blood, as a matter of fact;--that the
Greeks found them in Greece:  I suspect that the main difference
between Sparta and Athens lay in the fact that Sparta was pure
Aryan, Athens mainly Iberian.--It seems to me then that we can
almost get a glimpse of the sub-race preceding our own. Some have
been puzzled by a seeming discrepancy between Katherine Tingley's
statement that Egypt is older than India, and H. P. Blavatsky's,
that Menes, founder of the Egyptian monarchy, went from India to
Egypt to found it. But now suppose that something like this
happened--would it not solve the problem?--In 158,000 B. C., or
at the time this present Aryan Sub-race began, Egypt, one state
in the huge Iberian series, was already a seat of civilization as
old as the Iberian race.  There may have been an Iberian Empire,
almost world-wide; which again may have split into many
kingdoms; and as the star of the whole race was declining, we
may suppose Egypt in some degree of pralaya; or again, that it
may have been an outlying and little-considered province _at that
time._  In Central Asia the Sanskrit-speaking tribe begins to
increase and multiply furiously. They pour down into Iberian
Hindustan. They are strong, and the Gods are leading them; the
Iberians have grown world-weary with the habit of long empire.
The Iberian power goes down before them; the Iberians become a
subject people. But there is one Menes among the latter, of the
royal house perhaps, who will not endure subjection. He stands
out as long as he may; then sails west with his followers for
Iberian lands that the Aryans have not disturbed, and are not
likely to.  In their contests with the invaders of India, they
have thrown off all world-weariness, and become strong; Prince
Menes is hailed in Egypt (as the last of the Ommevads, driven out
from the East by the Abbasids, was hailed in Spain); he wakens
Egypt, and founds a new monarchy there.--I am telling the tale of
very ancient and unknown conditions in terms of historic
conditions we know about and can understand; it is only the
skeleton of the story I would stand for.

And to put Menes back at 160,000 years ago--what an amusing idea
that will seem!--But the truth is we must wage war against this
mischievous foreshortening of history. I have no doubt there have
been empires going, from time to time, in Egypt, since before
Atlantis fell; people have the empire-building instinct, and it
is an eminently convenient place for empire-building.  I have no
doubt there have been dozens of different Meneses--that is,
founders of Egyptian monarchies,--with  thousands of years
between each two.  But I think probably the one that came from
India to do it, came about the time when the fifth sub-race rose
to supplant the fourth as that section of humanity in which
evolution was chiefly interested.

Which last phrase in itself is rank heresy, and smacks of the
'white man's burden,' and all such nonsense as that. We might
learn a lesson here. Think:  since that time, during how many
thousands of years, off and on, has not that old sub-race been
the darling of evolution, the seat of the Crest-Wave, and place
where all things were doing?  All the Setis, the grand Rameseses
and Thothmeses came since then; all the historic might and glory
of Egypt.  You never know rightly when to say that the life of a
sub-race is ended; the two-hundred-and-ten-century period
cannot, I imagine, include it from birth to death; but can only
mark the time between the rise of one, and the rise of another.--
But now to India.

We have no knowledge of the last time when Sanskrit was spoken:
it has always been, in historic or quasi-historic ages, what it
is now--literary language preserved by the high castes.  In the
days of the Buddha it had long given place to various vernaculars
grown out of it:  Pali, and what are called the Prakrits.--We
have lost memory of what I may call the archetypal languages of
Europe:  the common ancestor of the Celtic group, for instance;
or that Italian from which Latin and the lost Oscan and Savellian
and the rest sprang.  No matter; they remain in the ideal world,
and I doubt not in the course of our cyclic evolution we shall
return to them, take them up, and pass through them again.  But
it seems to me that in the land of Esoteric History, where Manu
provided in advance against the main destructiveness of war, the
archetypal language of the whole sub-race has been preserved.
The Aryans went down into India, and there, at the extreme end of
the Aryan world, enjoyed some of the advantages of isolation:
they were in a backwater, over which the tides of the languages
did not flow. By esotericizing their history, I imagine they have
really kept it intact, continuous, and within human memory; as
we have not done with ours. As if that which is to be preserved
forever, must be preserved in secret; and silence were the only
durable casket for truth.

The Greeks, they say, were very gifted liars; but I do not
see why we should suppose them lying, when they sang the
superiorities of Indian things and people;--_as they did._ The
Indians, says Megasthenes, were taller than other men, and of
greater distinction and prouder bearing. The air and water of
their land were the purest in the world; so you would expect in
the people, the finest culture and skill in the arts.  Almost
always they gathered two harvests in the years; and  _famine had
never visited India._--You see, railways, quick communications,
and all the appliances of modern science and invention cannot do
as much for India in pralaya, as her own native civilization
could do for her in manvantara.--Then he goes on to show how that
civilization guarded against famine and many other things; and
incidentally to prove it not only much higher than the Greek, but
much higher than our own.  I said Manu provided in advance
against the main destructiveness of war:  here was the custom,
which may have been dishonored in the breach sometimes, but still
_was the custom._--The whole continent was divided into any
number of kingdoms; mutually antagonistic often, but with
certain features of homogeneity that made the name Aryavarta more
than a geographical expression.  I am speaking of the India
Megasthenes saw, and as it had been then for dear knows how long.
It had made concessions to human weakness, yes; had fallen, as I
think, from an ancient unity; it had not succeeded in abolishing
war.  It was open to any king to make himself a Chakravartin, or
world-sovereign, if he disposed of the means for doing so:
which means were military.  As this was a well-recognised
principle, wars were by no means rare.  But with them all, what a
Utopia it was, compared to  Christendom!  There was never a draft
or conscription.  Of the four castes, the Kshatriya or warrior
alone did the fighting.  While the conches brayed, and the war-
cars thundered over Kurukshetra; while the pantheons held their
breath, watching Arjun and mightiest Karna at battle--the
peasants in the next field went on hoeing their rice; they knew
no one was making war on them.  They trusted Gandiva, the goodly
bow, to send no arrows their way; their caste was inviolable, and
sacred to the tilling of the soil.  Megasthenes notes it with
wonder.  War implied no ravaging of the land, no destruction
of crops, no battering down of buildings, no harm whatever
to non-combatants.

Kshatriya fought Kshatriya. If you were a Brahmin: which is to
say, a theological student, or a man of letters, a teacher or
what not of the kind--you were not even called up for physical
examination.  If you were a merchant, you went on quietly with
your 'business as usual.' A mere patch of garden, or a peddler's
tray, saved you from all the horrors of a questionnaire.
Kshatriya fought Kshatriya, and no one else; and on the
battlefield, and nowhere else. The victor  became possessed of
the territory of the vanquished; and there was no more fuss or
botheration about it.

And the vanquished king was not dispossessed, Saint Helenaed, or
beheaded. Simply, he acknowledged his conqueror as his overlord,
paid him tribute; perhaps put his own Kshatriya army at his
disposal; and went on reigning as before. So Porus met Alexander
without the least sense of fear, distrust, or humiliation at his
defeat. "How shall I treat you?" said the  Macedonian.  Porus
was surprised.--"I suppose," said he in effect, "as one king
would treat another"; or, "like a gentleman."  And Alexander rose
to it; in the atmosphere of a civilization higher than anything
he knew, he had the grace to conform to usage.  Manu imposed his
will on him. Porus acknowledged him for overlord, and received
accretions of territory.--This explains why all the changes of
dynasty, and the many conquests and invasions have made so little
difference as hardly to be worth recording. They effected no
change in the life of the people. Even the British Raj has been,
to a great degree, molded to the will of Manu.  Each strong
native state is ruled by its own Maharaja, who acknowledges the
Kaiser-i-Hind at London for his overlord, and lends him at need
his Moslem or Kshatriya army.--All of which proves, I think, the
extreme antiquity of the svstem:  which is so firmly engraved in
the prototypal world--the astral molds are so strong--that no
outside force coming in has been able materially to change it.
The Greek invasion goes wholy unnoticed in Indian literature.

Which brings us back to Alexander. If he got as far as to the
Indus;--he got no farther. There were kingdoms up there in
the northwest--perhaps no further east than Afghanistan and
Baluchistan--which had formed part of the empire of Darius
Hystaspes, and sent contingents to fight under Xerxes in Greece;
and these now Alexander claimed as Darius Codomannus's successor.
But even in these outlying regions, he found conditions very
different from those in Persia:  there was no "unquestionable
superiority of the European to the Asiatic," nor nothing like.
Had he gone further, and into the real India of the Ganges
valley, his name, it is likely, would not have come down
synonymous with victory; presentlv we will call Megasthenes to
witness again as to the "unquestionable superiority of the
Asiatic to the European."  But thither the Macedonians refused to
follow their king; and I suppose he wept rather over their
insubordination, than for any overwhelmment with a sense of
terrene limits. For he knew well that there was plenty more world
to conquer, could one conquer it:  rich and mighty kingdoms
beyond that Thar Desert his soldiers are said to have refused to
cross. He knew, because there were many to tell him: exiled
princes and malcontents from this realm and that, each with his
plan for self-advancement, and for using the Macedonia as a
catspaw. Among them one in particular:  as masterful a man as
Alexander, and a potential world-conqueror himself.  He was
(probably) a more or less illegitimate scion of the House of
Nanda, then reigning in Magadha; which country, now called
Behar, had been growing at the expense of its Gangetic neighbors
for some centuries. King Suddhodana, the Buddha's father, had
reigned over the Sakyas in Nepaul as a tributary under the king
of Magadha; which statement I let pass, well aware that the
latest western scholarship has revolutionized the Sakyas into a
republic--perhaps with soviets,--and King Suddhodana himself into
a mere ward politician.

This Sandrakottos, as the Greeks called him, had many tales to
tell of the wealth of his kinsman's kingdom, and of the extreme
unpopularity of its ruler:-and therefore of the ease with which
Alexander might conquer it and hand it over to him. But two of a
trade seldom agree; both he and his host were born to rule
empires; and presently he offended susceptibilities, and had to
flee the camp. Whereupon he shortly sharked up a list of landless
reprobates, Kshatriyas at a loose end, for food and diet; and
the enterprise with a stomach in't was, as soon as Alexander's
back was turned, to drive out the Macedonian garrisons. This
done, he marched eastward as king of the Indus region, conquered
Magadha, slew his old enemy the Nanda king with all male members
of the family, and reigned in his stead as Chandragupta I, of
the house of Maurya.  That was in 321. Master then of a highly
trained army of about 700,000, he spread his empire over all
Hindustan. In 305, Seleucus Nicator, Alexander's successor in
Asia, crossed the Indus with an army, and was defeated; and in
the treaty which followed, gave up to Chandragupta all claim to
the Indian provinces, together with the hand of his daughter in
marriage.--and received by way of compensation 500 elephants
that might come in useful in his wars elsewhere. Also he sent
Megisthenes to be his ambassador at Pataliputra, Chandragupta's
capital; and Megasthenes wrote; and in a few quotations from
his lost book that remain, chiefly in Arrian,--we get a kind of
window wherethrough to look into India:  the first, and perhaps
the only one until Chinese travelers went west discovering.

Here let me flash a green lantern. If at some future time it
should be shown that the Chandragupta Maurya of the Sanskrit
books was not the same person as the Sandacottos of  Megasthenes;
nor his son Bindusara Amitraghata, the Amitrochidas of the
Greeks; nor his son and successor, Asoka, the Devanampiya
Piadasi whose rock-cut inscriptions remain scattered over
India; nor the Amtiyako Yonaraja--the "Ionian King Antiochus"
apparently,--Atiochus Theos, Selecus Nicator's granson:  as is
supposed; nor yet the other four kings mentioned in the same
instricption in a Sanskrit disguise as contemporaries, Ptolemy
Philadelphos of Egypt (285-247); Magas of Cyrene (285-258);
Antigonus Gonatas of Macedon (277-239), and Alexander of Epirus,
who began to reign in 272;--if all these identifications should
fall to the ground, let no one be surprised.  There are passages
in the writings of H. P. Blavatsky that seem to suggest there is
nothing in them; and yet, after studying those passages, I do
not find that she says so positively:  her attitude seems rather
one of withholding information for the time being; she supplies
none of a contrary sort. The time may not have been ripe then for
unveiling so much of Indian history; nor indeed, in those days,
had the pictures of these kings, and particularly of Asoka, so
clearly emerged:  inscriptions have been deciphered since, which
have gone to fill out the outline; and the story, as it his been
pieced together now, has an air of verisimilitude, and hangs
together.  Without the Greek identifications, and the consequent
possibility of assigning dates to Chandragupta and his son, we
should know indeed that there was a great Maurya empire, which
lasted a matter of thirteen decades and a few odd years; but we
should hardly know when to place it.  Accepting the Greek
identifications, and placing the Mauryas where we do in time--you
shall see how beautifully the epoch fits into the universal
cycles, and confirms the teaching as to Cyclic Law.  So,
provisionally, I shall accept them, and tell the tale.

First a few more items from Megasthenes as to India under
Chandragupta.  There was no slavery, he notes; all Indians were
free, and not even were there aliens enslaved.  Crime of any kind
was rare; the people were thoroughly law-abiding.  Thievery was
so little known, that doors went unlocked at all times; there
was no usury, and a general absence of litigation.  They told the
truth:  as a Greek, he could not help noticing that.  The men
were exceptionally brave; the women, chaste and virturous.
But "in contrast to the general simplicity of their style,
they loved finery and ornaments.  Their robes were worked
in gold, adorned with precious stones, and they wore flowered
garments of the finest muslin.  Attendants walking behind
held umbrellas over them...."

The system of government was very highly and minutely evolved.
"Of the great officers of state, some have charge of the markets,
others of the city, others of the soldiers; others superintend
the canals, and measure the land, or collect the taxes; some
construct roads and set up pillars to show the by-roads and
distances from place to place. Those who have charge of the city
are divided into six boards of five members apiece:  The
first looks after industrial art. The second attends to the
entertainment of strangers, taking care of them, sound or sick,
and in the event of their death, burying them and sending their
property to their relatives." The third board registered births
and deaths; the fourth, fifth and sixth had supervision of things
commercial.  Military affairs were as closely organized:  there
were Boards of Infantry, Cavalry, War Chariots, Elephants, Navy,
and Bullock Transport.  And behind all these stood Chandragupta
himself, the superman, ruthless and terrifically efficient; and
Chanakya, his Macchiavellian minister:  a combination to hurry
the world into greatness. And so indeed they did.

Under Asoka, Chandragupta's grandson, the age culminated. H. P.
Blavatsky says positively that he was born into Buddhism; this
is not the general view; but one finds nothing in his edicts,
really, to contradict it. His father Bindusara, of whom we know
nothing, may have been a Buddhist. But it would appear that Asoka
in his youth was the most capable, and also the most violent and
passionate of Bindusara's sons. During his father's lifetime, he
held one of the great vice-royalties into which the empire was
divided; he succeeded to the throne in 271.  His domains at that
time included all Aryavarta, with Baluchistan, and as much of
Afghanistan as lies south of the Hindoo Koosh; and how much of
the Deccan it is difficult to determine. Nine years later he
extended this realm still further, by the conquest of the
Kalingas, whose country lay along the coast northward from
Madras. At the end of that war he was master of all India north
of a line drawn from Pondicherry to Cannanore in the south;
while the tip of the Deccan and Ceylon lay at least within his
sphere of influence.

He was easily the strongest monarch of his day. In China--between
which country and India there was no communication:  they had not
discovered each other, or they had lost sight of each other for
ages--an old order was breaking to pieces, and all was weakness
and decay. In the West, Greek civilization was in decadence, with
the successors of Alexander engaged in profitless squabbles.
Rome, a power only in Italy, was about to begin her long struggle
with Carthage; overseas nobody minded her. The Crest-Wave was in
India, the strongest power and most vigorous civilization, so far
as we can tell, in the world, and at the head of India stood this
Chakravartin, victorious Asoka, flushed with conquest, and a
whole world tempting him out to conquer.--

He never went to war again. For twenty-nine years after that
conquest of the Kalingas, until his death in 233, he reigned in
unbroken peace. He left his heart to posterity in many edicts and
inscriptions cut on rocks and pillars; thirty-five of these
remain, or have so far been discovered and read. In 257, or five
years after the Kalinga War, he published this:

     "Devanamipiya Piadasi"--

It means literally 'the Beloved of the Gods, the Beautiful of
Countenance'; but it is really a title equivalent to "His
Gracious Majesty,' and was borne by all the Maurya kings;--

"Devanampiya Piadasi feels remorse on account of the conquest of
the Kalingas; because, during the subjugation of a preciously
unconquered country slaughter, death, and taking away captives of
the people necessarily occur; whereat His Majesty feels profound
sorrow and regret..."

It would be in keeping with the Southern Buddhist tradition as to
the ungovernable violence of Asoka's youth, that he should have
introduced into war horrors quite contrary to Manu and Indian
custom; but here I must say that H. P. Blavatsky, though she
does not particularize, says that there were really two Asokas,
two 'Devanampiya Piadasis,' the first of whom was Chandragupta
himself, from whose life the tradition of the youthful violence
may have been drawn; and there remains the possibility that this
Kalinga War was waged by Chandragupta, not Asoka; and that it
was he who made this edict, felt the remorse, and became a
Buddhist. However, to continue (tentatively):--

"The loss of even the hundredth or the thousandth part of the
persons who were then slain, carried away captive, or done to
death in Kalinga would now be a matter of deep regret to His
Majesty.  Although a man should do him any injury, Devanampiya
Piadasi holds that it must patiently be borne, so far as it
possibly can be borne... for His Majesty desires for all animate
beings security, control over the passions, peace of mind, and
joyousness.  And this is the chief of conquests, in His Majesty's
opinion:  the Conquest of Duty."

Some time later he took the vows of a Buddhist monk, 'entered the
Path'; and, as he says, 'exerted himself strenuously.'

He has been called the 'Constantine of Buddhism'; there is much
talk among the western learned, about his support of that
movement having contributed to its decay.  They draw analogy from
Constantine; even hint that Asoka embraced Buddhism, as the
latter did Christianity, from political motives. But the analogy
is thoroughlv false.  Constantine was a bad man, a very far-gone
case; and there was little in the faith he adopted, or favored,
as it had come to be at that time, to make him better;--even if
he had really believed in it.  And it was a defined religio-
political body, highly antagonistic to the old state religion of
Rome, that he linked his fortunes with.  But no sovereign so
mighty in compassion is recorded in history as having reigned, as
this Asoka. He was the most unsectarian of men. Buddhism as it
came to him, and as he left it, was not a sect, but a living
spiritual movement. For what is a sect?--Something _cut off_--
from the rest of humanity, and the sources of inner life. But for
Asoka, as for the modern Theosophical Movement, there was no
religion higher than--_Dharma_--which word may be translated,
'the (higher) Law,' or 'truth.' or 'duty.' He never ceased to
protect the holy men of Brahminism. Edict after edict exhorts his
people to honor them. He preached the Good Law; he could not
insist too often that different men would have different
conceptions as to this _Dharma._ Each, then, must follow his own
conception, and utterly respect his neighbors'.  The Good Law,
the Doctrine of the Buddhas, was universal; because the
objective of all religions was the conquest of the passions and
of self.  All religions must manifest on this plane as right
action and life; and that was the evangel he proclaimed to the
world. There was no such sharp antagonism of sects and creeds.

There is speculation as to how he managed, being a world-sovereign
--and a highly efficient one--to carry out the vows of a
Buddhist monk.  As if the begging bowl would have been anything
of consequence to such an one!  It is a matter of the status of
the soul; not of outward paraphernalia. He was a practical man;
intensely so; and he showed that a Chakravartin could tread the
Path of the Buddhas as well as a wandering monk. One can imagine
no Tolstoyan playing at peasant in him. His business in life was
momentous. "I am never satisfied with my exertions and my
dispatch of business," he says.

"Work I must for the public benefit,--and the root of the matter
is in exertion and dispatch of business, than which nothing is
more efficacious for the public welfare. And for what end do I
toil? For no other end than that I may discharge my debt to
animate beings."

And again:

"Devanampiya Piadasi desires that in all places men of all
religions may abide, for they all desire purity of mind and
mastery over the senses."

Well; for nine and twenty years he held that vast empire warless;
even though it included within its boundaries many restless and
savage tribes. Certainly only the greatest, strongest, and wisest
of rulers could do that; it has not been done since (though
Akbar came near it). We know nothing as to how literature may
have been enriched; some think that the great epics may have
come from this time. If so, it would only have been recensions of
them, I imagine. But in art and architecture his reign was
everything. He built splendid cities, and strewed the land with
wonderful buildings and monoliths. Patna, the capital, in
Megasthenes' time nine miles long by one and a half wide, and
built of wood, he rebuilt in stone with walls intricately
sculptured. Education was very widespread or universal.  His
edicts are sermons preached to the masses: simple ethical
teachings touching on all points necessary to right living.
He had them carved on rock, and set them up by the roadsides
and in all much-frequented places, where the masses could
read them; and this proves that the masses could read. They
are all vibrant with his tender care, not alone for his human
subjects, but for all sentient beings. "Work I must.... that
I may discharge my debt to all things animate." And how he
did work without one private moment in the day or night, as his
decrees show, in which he should be undisturbed by the calls of
those who needed help. He specifies; he particularizes; there
was no moment to be considered private, or his personal own.

And even then he was not content. There were foreign lands; and
those, too, were entitled to his care.  I said that the southern
tip of India, with Ceylon, were within his sphere of influence:
his sphere of influence was much wider than that, however. Saying
that a king's sphere of influence is wherever he can get his will
done, Asoka's extended westward over the whole Greek world. Here
was a king whose will was benevolence; who sought no rights but
the right to do good; whose politics were the service of
mankind:--it is a sign of the Brotherhood of Man, that his writ
ran, as you may say--the writ of his great compassion,--to the
Mediterranean shore:--

"Everywhere in the dominions of Devanampiya Piadasi, and likewise
in the neighboring realms, such as those of the Chola, Pandya,
Satiyaputra and Keralaputra, in Ceylon, in the dominions of the
Greek king Antiochus, and in those of the other kings subordinate
to that Antiochus--everywhere, on behalf of His Majesty, have two
kinds of hospitals been founded:  hospitals for men, and
hospitals for beasts.  Healing herbs, medicinal for man and
medicinal for beasts, wherever they were lacking, have been
imported and planted.  On the roads, trees have been planted, and
wells have been dug for the use of men and beasts."

And everywhere, in all those foreign realms, he had his
missionaries preaching the Good Law. And some of these came to
Palestine, and founded there for him an order at Nazareth called
the Essenes; in which, some century or two later, a man rose to
teach the Good Law--by name, Jesus of Nazareth.--Now consider the
prestige, the moral influence, of a king who might keep his
agents, unmolested, carrying out his will, right across Asia, in
Syria, Greece, Macedonia, and Egypt; the king of a great, free,
and mighty people, who, if he had cared to, might have marched
out world-conquering; but who preferred that his conquests
should be the conquests of duty.  Devanampiya Piadasi:  the
Gracious of  Mien, the Beloved of the Gods:  an Adept King like
them of old time, strayed somehow into the scope and vision of
history.




VIII.  THE BLACK-HAIRED PEOPLE


Greece shone between 478 and 348,--to give the thirteen decades
of her greatest spiritual brightness. Then came India in 321; we
lose sight of her after the death of Asoka in the two-thirties,
but know the Maurya Empire lasted its thirteen decades (and six
years) until 185.  Then China flamed up brilliantly under the
Western House of Han from 194 to 64;--at which time, however, we
shall not arrive for a few weeks yet.

Between these three national epochs there is this difference:
the Greek Age came late in its manvantara; which opened (as I
guess), roughly speaking, some three hundred and ninety years
before:--three times thirteen decades, with room for three
national flowerings in Europe--among what peoples, who can say?--
We cannot tell where in its manvantara the Indian Age may have
come: whether near the beginning, or at the middle.  But in China
we are on firm ground, and the firmest of all. A manvantara, a
fifteen-century cycle, began in the two-forties B. C.; this Age
of Han was its first blossom and splendid epoch; and we need feel
no surprise that it was not followed by a night immediately, but
only by a twilight and slight dimming of the glories for about
thirteen decades again, and then the full brilliance of another
day. Such things are proper to peoples new-born after their long
pralaya; and can hardly happen, one would say, after the morning
of the manvantara has passed. Thus in our own European cycle,
Italy the first-born was in full creative energy from about 1240
to 1500: twenty-six decades;--whereas the nations that have held
hegemony since have had to be content each with its thirteen.

And now to take bird's-eye views of China as a whole; and to be
at pains to discover what relation she bears, historically, to
ourselves and the rest of the globe.

Do you remernber how Abraham haggled with the Lord over the
Cities of the Plain?  Yahveh was for destroying them off hand for
their manifold sins and iniquities; but Abraham argued and
bargained and brought him down till if peradventure there should
be found ten righteous in Sodom and Gomorrah, the Lord promised
he would spare them. But ten righteous there were not, nor
nothing near; so the Cities of the Plain went down.

I suppose the Crest-Wave rarely passes from a race without
leaving a wide trail of insanity in its wake. The life forces are
strong; the human organisms through which they play are but--as
we know them. Commonly these organisms are not directed by the
Divine Soul, which has all too little of the direction of life in
its hands; so the life-currents drift downward, instead of
fountaining up; and exhaust these their vehicles, and leave them
played out and mentally--because long since morally--deficient.
So come the cataclysmic wars and reigns of terror that mark the
end of racial manvantaras:  it is a humanity gone collectively
mad. On the other hand, none can tell what immense safeguarding
work may be done by the smallest sane co-ordinated effort
upwards.  If peradventure the ten righteous shall be found--but
they must be righteous, and know what they are doing--I will
spare, and not destroy, saith the Lord.

(He said nothing about respectabilities. I dare say there was
quite a percentage of respectable chapel-going Sabbath-observing
folk in the Cities of the Plain.)

And yet there must be always that dreadful possibility--which
perhaps has never become actual since the fall of Atlantis--that
a whole large section of mankind should go quite mad, and become
unfit to carry on the work of evolution.  It is a matter of
corrupting the streams of heredity; which is done by vice,
excess, wrong living; and these come of ignorance.  Heaven knows
how near it we may be today; I do not think Christendom stands,
or has stood, so very far, from the brink.  And yet it is from
the white race, we have supposed, that the coming races will be
born; this is the main channel through which human evolution is
intended to flow.--We are in kall-yuga; the Mysteries are dead,
and the religions have taken their place:  there has been no sure
and certain link, organized on this plane, between the world and
its Higher Self.  Each succeeding civilization, under these
circumstances, has run a greater risk.

Of what race are we?  I say, of no race at all, but can view the
matter as Human Souls, reincarnating egos, prepared to go where
the Law bids us.  Races are only temporary institutions set up
for the convenience of the Host of Souls.

We see, I suppose, the results of such a breakdown in Africa.
Atlanteans were segregated there; isolated; and for a million
years degenerated in that isolation to what they are.  But their
ancestors, before that segregation began, had better airships
than we have; were largely giants, in more respects than the
physical, were we are pygmies.  Now they are--whatever may be
their potentialities, whatever they may become--actually an
inferior reace.  And it is a racial stock that shows no signs of
dying out.  What then?--I suppose indeed there must be backward
races, to house backward egos;--though for that matter you would
think that our Londons and Chicagos and the rest, with their
slums, would provide a good deal of accommodation.

Or consider the Redskins, here and in South America:  whether
Atlanteans, or of some former subrace of the Fifth, at least not
Aryans.  Take the finest tribes among them, such as the Navajos.
Here is a very small hereditary stream, kept pure and apart:  of
fine physique; potentially of fine mentality; unsullied with
vices of any sort:  a people as much nearer than the white man to
natural spirituality, as to natural physical health.  It is no
use saying they are so few.  Two millenniums ago, how many were
the Anglo-Saxons?  Three millenniums ago, how many were the
Latins?  Supposing the white race in America failed.  The
statistics of lunacy--of that alone--are a fearful _Mene, Tekel
Upharsin_ written on our walls, for any Daniel with vision
to read.  I think Naure must also take into account these
possibilities.  Does she keep in reserve hereditary streams and
racial stocks other than her great and main ones, _in case of
accidents?_  Are the Redskins among these?

_The Secret Doctrine_ seems to hint sometimes that the founders
of our Fifth Root Race were of Lemurian rather than Atlantean
descent.  Nowhere is it actually said so; but there are a number
of passages that read, to me, as if they were written with that
idea, or theory, or fact, in mind.  Is it, possibly, that a small
pure stream of Lemurian heredity had been kept aloof through all
the years of Atlantis, in reserve;--some stream that may have
been, at one time, as narrow as the tribe of Navajos?--This may
be a very bold conclusion to draw from what is said in _The
Secret Doctrine;_  it may have no truth in it whatever:  other
passages are to be found, perhaps, that would at least appear to
contradict it.  But if it is true, it would account for what
seems like a racial anomaly--or more than one.  Science leans to
the conclusion that the Australian aborigines are Aryan:  they
are liker Aryans than anything else.  But we know from _The
Secret Doctrine_ that they are among the few last remnants of the
Lemurians.  Again, the Ainos of Japan are very like Europeans:
they have many physical features in common with the Caucasians,
and none in common with the peoples of East Asia.  Yet they are
very low down in the scale of evolution:--not so low as the
Australian Blackfellow, but without much occasion for giving
themselves airs.  A thousand years of contact with the much-
washing Japanese have never suggested to them why God made soap
and water.  Like many other people, they have the legend of the
flood:  remember, as you may say, the fall of Atlantis; but
unlike us upstarts of the Fourth and Fifth Races, they have also
a legend of a destruction of the world by fire and earthquake--a
cataclysm that lasted, they say, a hundred days. Is it a memory
of the fate of Lemuria?

Is a new Root-Race developed, not from the one immediately
preceding it, but from the one before?  Is Mercury's caduceus,
here too, a symbol of the way evolution is done?  Did the Law
keep in reserve a Sishta or Seed-Race from Lemuria, holding it
back from Atlantean development during the whole period of the
Atlanteans;--holding it, all that while, in seclusion and purity
--and therefore in a kind of pralaya;--at the right moment, to
push its development, almost suddenly, along a new line, not
parallel to the Atlantean, but _sui generis,_ and to be Aryan
Fifth presently?--Is the Law keeping in reserve a _Sishta_ or
Seed-Race of Atlantean stock, holding that in reserve and apart
all through our Aryan time, to develop from it at last the
beginnings of the Sixth, on the new continent that will appear?
Or to do so, at any rate, should the main Aryan stock fail at one
of the grand crises in its evolution, and become of too corrupt
heredity to produce fitting vehicles for the egos of the Sixth
to inhabit?

When we have evolved back to Sanskrit for the last time:  when
the forces of civilization have played through and exhausted for
the last time the possibilities of each of the groups of Aryan
languages, so that it would be impossible to do anything more
with them--for languages do become exhausted:  we cannot write
English now as they could in the days of Milton and Jeremy
Taylor; not necessarily because we are smaller men, but because
the fabric of our speech is worn much thinner, and will no longer
take the splendid dyes;--and when that final flowering of
Sanskrit is exhausted too--will the new Sixth Race language, as a
type, be a derivation from the Aryan?  Then how?--Or will it,
possibly, be as it were a new growth sprung out of the grave of
Fourth Race Chinese, or of one of that Atlantean group through
which, during all these millions of years, such great and main
brain-energies have not on the whole been playing as they have
been through the Aryans; and which might therefore, having
lain so long fallow, then be fit for new strange developments
and uses?

All of which may be, and very likely is, extremely wide of the
mark. Such ideas may be merest wild speculation, and have no
truth in them at all. And yet I think that if they were true,
they would explain a thing to me otherwise inexplicable: China.

We are in the Fifth Root-Race, and the fifth sub-race thereof:
that is, beyond the middle point. And yet one in every four of
the inhabitants of the globe is a Fourth Race Chinaman; and I
suppose that if you took all the races that are not Caucasian, or
Fifth Race, you would find that about half the population of the
world is Atlantean still.

Take the languages. A Sanskrit word, or a Greek, or Old Gothic,
or Latin, is a living organism, a little articulate being. There
is his spine, the root; his body, the stem; his limbs and head,
the formative elements, prefixes and suffixes, case-endings and
what not. Let him loose in the sentence, and see how he wriggles
gaily from state to state:  with a flick of the tail from
nominative to genitive, from singular to plural:  declaring his
meaning, not by means of what surroundings you put about him, but
by motions, changes, volitions so to say, of his own. 'Now,' says
he, 'I'm _pater,_ and the subject; set me where you will, and I
am still the subject, and you can make nothing else of me.'  Or,
'Now,' says he, 'I'm _patrem,_ and the object; go look for my
lord the verb, and you shall know what's done to me; be he next
door, or ten pages away, I am faithful to him.'  _Patrem filius
amat,_ or _filius amat patrem,_ or in whatever order it may be,
there is no doubt who does, and who (as they say) _suffers_ the
loving.--But now take a word in English. You can still recognise
him for the same creature that was once so gay and jumpy-jumpy:
_father_ is no such far cry from _pater:_--but oh what a change
in sprightliness of habits is here!  Time has worn away his head
and limbs to almost unrecognisable blunt excrescences. Bid him
move off into the oblique cases, and if he can help it, he will
not budge; you must shove him with a verb; you must goad him
with a little sharp preposition behind; and then he just _lumps_
backward or forward, and there is no change for the better in
him, as you may say. No longer will he declare his meaning of
himself; it must depend on where you choose to put him in the
sentence.--Among the mountains of Europe, the grand Alps are the
parvenus; the Pyrenees look down on them; and the Vosges on the
Pyrenees; and--pardon me!--the little old time-rounded tiny
Welsh mountains look down on them all from the heights of a much
greater antiquity. They are the smallest of all, the least jagged
and dramatic of all; time and the weather have done most to
them.  The storm, like the eagle of Gwern Abwy in the story, has
lighted on their proud peaks so often, that that from which once
she could peck at the stars in the evening, rises now but a few
thousand feet from the level of the sea. Time and springs and
summers have silenced and soothed away the startling crags and
chasms, the threatening gestures of the earth at infinity, and
clothed them over with a mantle of quietness and green fern and
heather and dreams. When the Fifth Race was younger, its language
was Alpine: in Gothic, in Sanskrit, in Latin, you can see the
crags and chasms.  French, Spanish and Italian are Pyrenean, much
worn down. English is the Vosges. Chinese is hardly even the
Welsh mountains. Every word is worn perfectly smooth and round.
There is no sign left at all of prefix or suffix, root or stem.
There are no parts of speech:  any word without change can do
duty for any part of speech. There is no sign of case or number:
all has been reduced to an absolute simplicity, beyond which
there is no going. Words can end with no consonant but the most
rounded of all, the nasal liquids _n_ and _ng._ There is about as
much likeness to the Aryan and Semitic languages--you can trace
about as much analogy between them--as you can between a
centipede and a billiard-ball.

There are definite laws governing the changes of language. You
know how the Latin _castrum_ became in English _ciaster_ and then
_chester;_  the change was governed by law. The same law makes
our present-day vulgar say _cyar_ for _car;_  that word, in the
American of the future, will be something like chair. The same
law makes the same kind of people say _donchyer_ for _don't you;_
some day, alas! even that will be classical and refined American.
Well; we know that that law has been at work in historic times
even on the Chinese billiard-ball:  where Confucius said _Ts'in_
like a gentleman, the late Yuan Shi Kai used to say _Ch'in._  So
did the Dowager Empress; it was eminently the refined thing to
do. So we ourselves have turned _Ts'in_ into _China._--And that
is the one little fact--or perhaps one of the two or three little
facts--that remain to convince us that Chinese and its group of
kindred languages grew up on the same planet, and among the same
humankind, that produced Sanskrit and Latin.

But does not that suggest also the possibility that Alpine Aryan
might some day--after millions of years--wear down or evolve back
even into billiard-ball Chinese?  That human language is _one
thing;_  and all the differences, the changes rung on that
according to the stages of evolution?

In the Aryan group of languages, the bond of  affinity is easily
recognisable:  the roots of the words are the same:  _Pitri,
pater, vater,_  are clearly but varying pronunciations of the
same word.  In the Turanic group, however--Finnish, Hungarian,
Turkish, Tatar, Mongol and Manchu--you must expect no such
well-advertised first-cousinship.  They are grouped together,
not because of any likeness of roots:  not because you could
find one single consonant the same in the Lappish or Hungarian,
say, and in the Mongol or Manchu words for _father_--you
probably could not;--but because there may be syntactical
likenesses, or the changes and assimilations of sounds may
be governed by the same laws.  Thus in Turkic--I draw upon
the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_--there is a suffix z, preceded
by a vowel, to mean your:  _pederin_ is 'father'; 'your father'
becomes _pederiniz;_  _dostun_ means 'friend'; 'your friend'
becomes not _dostuniz,_ but _dostunus;_  and this trick of
assimilating the vowel of the suffix is the last one in the
stem is an example of the kind of similarities which establish
the relationship of the group.  As for likeness of roots,
here is a specimen:  _gyordunus_ is the Turkish for the Finnish
_naikke._--So here you see a degree of kinship much more
remote than that you find in the Aryan.  Where, say, Dutch
and Gaelic are brothers--at least near relations and bosom
friends,--Turkish and Mongol are about fifteenth cousins by
marriage twice removed, and hardly even nod to each other in
passing.  And yet Turks and Mongols both claim descent from the
sons of a common father:  according to legends of both peoples,
the ancestor of the Turks was the brother of the ancestor of the
Mongols.  (Always remember that in speaking of Turks thus
scientifically, one does not mean the Ottomans, who inherit
their language, but are almost purely Caucasian or even Aryan,
in blood.)

Now take the Monosyllabic or South-Eastern Asiatic Group:
Chinese, Burmese, Siamese, Annamese, and Tibetan.  Here there
are only negatives, you might say, to prove a relationship.
They do not meet on the street; they pass by on the other side,
noses high in the air; each sublimely unaware of the other's
existence.  They suppose they are akin--through Adam; but whould
tell you that much has happened since then.  Their kinship
consists in this:  the words are each are billiard-balls--and
yet, if you will allow the paradox, of quite different shapes.
Thus I should call a Tibetan name like _nGamri-srong-btsan_ a
good jagged angular sort of billiard-ball; and a Chinese one
like _T'ang Tai-tsong_ a perfectly round smooth one of the kind
we know.--The languages are akin, because each say, where we
should say 'the horse kicked the man,'  _horse agent man kicking
completion,_ or words to that effect,--dapped out nearly in
spherical or angular disconnected monosyllables.  But the words
for _horse_ and _man,_ in Chinese and Tibetan, have respectively
as much phonetic likeness as _geegee_ and _equus,_ and _Smith_
and _Jones._  As to the value and possibilities of such
languages, I will quote you two pronouncements, both from writers
in the _Encyclopaedia Britannica._  One says:  "Chinese has the
greatest capacity of any language ever invented"; the other,
"The Chinese tongue is of unsurpass jejuneness."

In the whole language there are only about four or five hundred
sounds you could differentiate by spelling, as to say, _shih,_
pronounced like the first three letters in the word _shirt_ in
English.  That vocable may mean:  _history,_ or _to employ,_ or
_a corpse, a market, a lion, to wait on, to rely upon, time,
poetry, to bestow, to proclaim, a stone, a generation, to eat, a
house,_ and all such things as that;--I mention a few out of the
list by way of example.*  Now of course, were that all to be said
about it, Chinamen would no doubt sometimes get confused:  would
think you meant a corpse, when you were really talking about
poetry, and so on. But there is a way of throwing a little
breathing in, a kind of hiatus: thus _Ts'in_ meant one country,
and _Tsin_ another one altogether; and you ought not to mix them,
for they were generally at war, and did not mix at all well. That
would potentially extend the number of sounds, or words, or
billiard-balls, from the four hundred and twenty in modern polite
Pekinese, or the twelve hundred or so in the older and less
cultured Cantonese, to twice as many in each case. Still that
would be but a poor vocabulary for the language with the vastest
literature in the world, as I suppose the Chinese is. Then you
come to the four tones, as a further means of extending it. You
pronounce _shih_ one tone--you sing it on the right note, so to
say, and it means _poetry;_ you take that tone away, and give
it another, the dead tone, and very naturally it becomes _a
corpse:_--as, one way, and another I have often tried to impress
on you it really does.--Of course the hieroglyphs, the written
words, run into hundreds of thousands; for the literature, you
have a vocabulary indeed. But you see that the spoken language
depends, to express its meaning, upon a different kind of
elements from those all our languages depend on. We have solid
words that you can spell:  articles built up with the bricks of
sound-stuff we call letters: _c-a-t_ cat, _d-o-g_ dog, and so
on;--but their words, no; nothing so tangible:  all depends on
little silences, small hiatuses in the vocalizition,--and above
all, _musical tones._   Now then, which is the more primitive?
Which is nearer the material or intellectual, and which, the
spiritual, pole?

-------
* _Encyclopaedia Britannica:_ article, China: Language.
-------

More primitive--I do not know. Only I think when the Stars of
Morning sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy;
when primeval humanity first felt stirring within it the Divine
fire and essence of the Lords of Mind; when the Sons of the Fire
mist came down, and found habitation for themselves in the bodies
of our ancestors; when they saw the sky, how beautiful and
kindly it was; and the wonder of the earth, and that blue jewel
the sea; and felt the winds of heaven caress them, and were
aware of the Spirit, the Great Dragon, immanent in the sunlight,
quivering and scintillant in the dim blue diamond day;

     "They prayed, but their worship was only
          The wonder of nights and of days,"

--when they opened their lips to speak, and the first of all the
poems of the earth was made:--it was song, it was tone, it was
music they uttered, and not brute speech such as we use, it was
intoned vowels, as I imagine, that composed their language:
seven little vowels, and seven tones or notes to them perhaps:
and with these they could sing and tell forth the whole of the
Glory of God. And then--was it like this?--they grew material,
and intellectual, and away from the child-state of the Spirit;
and their tones grew into words; and consonants grew on to the
vowels, to make the vast and varied distinctions the evolving
intellect needed for its uses; and presently you had Atlantis
with its complex civilization--its infinitely more complex
civilization even than our own; and grammar came ever more into
being, ever more wonderful and complex, to correspond with the
growing curves and involutions of the ever more complex-growing
human brain; and a thousand languages were formed--many of them
to be found still among wild tribes in mid-Africa or America--as
much more complex than Sanskrit, as Sanskrit is than Chinese:
highly declensional, minutely syntactical, involved and worked up
and filigreed beyond telling;--and that was at the midmost point
and highest material civilization of Atlantis.  And then the
Fourth Race went on, and its languages evolved; back, in the
seventh sub-race, to the tonalism, the chanted simplicity of
the first sub-race;--till you had something in character not
intellectual, but spiritual:--Chinese.  And meanwhile--I am
throwing out the ideas as they come, careless if the second
appears to contradict the first:  presently a unity may come of
them;--meanwhile, for the purposes of the Fifth Root-Race, then
nascent, a language-type had grown up, intellectual as any in
Atlantis, because this Fifth Race was to be intellectual too,--
but also spiritual:  not without tonalistic elements:  a thing to
be chanted, and not dully spoken:--and there, when the time came
for, it to be born, you had the Sanskrit.

But now for the Sixth Root-Race: is that to figure mainly on the
plane of intellect? Or shall we then take intellectual things
somewhat for granted, as having learnt them and passed on to
something higher? Look at those diagrams of the planes and globes
in _The Secret Doctrine,_ and see how the last ones, the sixth
and seventh, come to be on the same level as the first and
second. Shall we be passing, then, to a time when, in the
seventh, our languages will have no need for complexity:  when
our ideas, no longer personal but universal and creative, will
flow easily from mind to mind, from heart to heart on a little
tone, a chanted breath of music; when mere billiard-balls of
syllables will serve us, so they be rightly sung:--until
presently with but seven pure vowel sounds, and seven tones to
sing them to, we shall be able to tell forth once more the whole
of the Glory of God?

Now then, is Chinese primitive, or is it an evolution far away
and ahead of us?  Were there first of all billiard-balls; and
did they acquire a trick of coalescing and running together;
this one and that one, in the combination, becoming subordinate
to another; until soon you had a little wriggling creature of a
word, with his head of prefix, and his tail of suffix, to look or
flicker this way or that according to the direction in which he
wished to steer himself, the meaning to be expressed;--from
monosyllabic becoming agglutinative, synthetic, declensional,
complex--Alpine and super-Sanskrit in complexity;--then Pyrenean
by the wearing down of the storms and seasons; then Vosges, with
crags forest-covered; then green soft round Welsh mountains;
and then, still more and more worn down by time and the phonetic
laws which decree that men shall (in certain stages of their
growth) be always molding their languages to an easier and easier
pronunciation,--stem assimilating prefix and suffix, and growing
intolerant of changes within itself;--fitting itself to the
weather, rounding off its angles, coquetting with euphony;--
dropping harsh consonants; tending to end words with a vowel, or
with only the nasal liquids n and ng, softest and roundest sounds
there are;--till what had evolved from a billiard-ball to an
Alpine crag, had evolved back to a billiard-ball again, and was
Chinese?  Is it primitive, or ultimate?  I am almost certain of
this, at any rate:  that as a language-type, it stands somewhere
midway between ours and spiritual speech.

How should that be; when we are told that this people is of the
Fourth, the most material of the Races; while we are on the
proud upward arc of the Fifth? And how is it that H. P. Blavatsky
speaks of the Chinese civilization as being younger than that of
the Aryans of India, the Sanskrit speakers,--Fifth certainly?  Is
this, possibly, the explanation:  that the ancestors of the
Chinese, a colony from Atlantis some time perhaps long before the
Atlantean degeneration and fall, were held under major pralaya
apart from the world-currents for hundreds of thousands of years,
until some time later than 160,000 years ago--the time of the
beginning our our sub-race?  A pralaya, like sleep, is a period
of refreshment, spiritual and physical; it depends upon your
mood as you enter it, to what degree you shall reap its benefits:
whether it shall regenerate you; whether you shall arise from it
spiritually cleansed and invigorated by contact with the bright
Immortal Self within.  Africa entered such a rest-period from an
orgy of black magic, and her night was filled with evil dreams
and sorceries, and her people became what they are.  But
if China entered it guided by white Atlantean Adepts, it
would have been for her Fairyland; it would have been the
Fortunate Islands; it would have been the Garden of Siwang Mu,
the paradise of the West; and when she came forth it would
have been--it might have been--with a bent not towards intellectual,
but towards spiritual achievements.

Compare her civilization, in historic times, with that of the
West.  Historic times are very little to go by, but they are all
we have at present.--She attained marvelous heights; but they
were not the same kind of heights the West has attained.  Through
her most troublous, stirring, and perilous times, she carried
whole provinces of Devachan with her.  It was while she was
falling to pieces, that Ssu-K'ung T'u wrote his divinely delicate
meditations.  When the iron most entered her soul, she would
weep, but not tear her hair or rage and grow passionate; she
would condescend to be heart-broken, but never vulgar.  In her
gayest moments, wine-flushed and Spring-flushed, she never forgot
herself to give utterance to the unseemly.  There is no line in
her poetry to be excused or regretted on that score.  She
worshipped Beauty, as perhaps only Greece and France in the West
have done; but unlike Greece or France, she sought her divinity
only in the impersonal and dispassionate:  never mistook for its
voice, the voices of the flesh.  She sinned much, no doubt; but
not in her pursuit of the Beautiful; not in her worship of Art
and Poetry.  She was faithful to the high Gods there.  She never
produced a figure comparable to, nor in the least like, our
Homers and Aeschyluses, Dantes and Miltons and Shakespeares.  But
then, the West has never, I imagine, produced a figure comparable
to her Li Pos, Tu Fus, Po Chu-is or Ssu-k'ung T'us:  giants in
lyricism--one might name a hundred of them--beside whom our Hugos
and Sapphos and Keatses were pygmies.  Nor have we had any to
compare with her masters of landscape-painting:  even the
_Encyclopaedia Britannica_ comes down flat-footed with the
statement that Chinese landscape-painting is the highest the
world has seen.--And why?--Because it is based on a knowledge of
the God-world; because her eyes were focused for the things 'on
the other side of the sky'; because this world, for her, was a
mere reflexion and thin concealment of the other, and the mists
between her and the Divine 'defecate' constantly, in Coleridge's
curious phrase, 'to a clear transparency.'  Things seen were an
open window into the Infinite; but with us, heaven knows, that
window is so thick filthy with selfhood, so cobwebbed and
begrimed with passion and egotism and individualism and all the
smoke and soot of the brain-mind, that given an artist with a
natural tendency to see through, he has to waste half his life
first in cleaning it with picks and mattocks and charges of
dynamite.  So it becomes almost inevitable that when once you
know Chinese painting, all western painting grows to look rather
coarse and brutal and materialistic to you.

But, you say, no Aeschylus or Shakespeare?  No Dante or Homer? No
epic--no great drama!   Pooh! you say, where is the great
creative energy?  Where is the sheer brain force?--

It is to us a matter of course that the type of our great ones is
the highest possible type. Well; it may be:  but the deeper you
go into thinking it over, the less certain you are likely to
become as to the absoluteness of standards. The time to award the
prizes is not yet; all we can do is to look into the nature of
the differences. Warily let us go to work here!

Where, you asked, are the great creative energies?  Well; in the
West, certainly, they have flowed most where they can most be
seen  as _energies._  I think, through channels nearer this
material plane:  nearer the plane of intellect, at any rate.--No:
there is no question where the sheer brain force has been:  it
has been in the West.  But then, where was it more manifest, in
Pope or in Keats?  In Pope most emphatically. But off with your
head if you say he gave the greater gift.--Or I will leave Pope,
and go to his betters; and say that Keats, when he caught in his
net of words the fleeting beauty of the world, was far nearer the
Spirit than was Bacon when with tremendous intellectual energy he
devised his philosophy:  there was a much longer evolution behind
the ease and effortless attainment of the one, than behind the
other's titanic brain-effort. Yet, so far as the putting forth of
brain energies is concerned, there is no question:  Bacon was
much the greater man.

So in all creative work, in all thought, we must call the West
incomparably greater in brain energy.  And I am not making such a
foolish comparison as between modern or recent conditions in the
two races. You see it if you set the greatest Eastern ages, the
Han, the T'ang, the Sung, or the Fujiwara, against the Periclean,
Augustan, Medicean, Elizabethan, or Louis Quatorze.  In the West,
the spiritual creative force came down and mingled itself more
forcefully with the human intellect:  had a much more vigorous
basis in that, I think, to work in and upon.  It has reached
lower into the material, and played on matter more powerfully--
and, be it said, on thought and intellection too.

We are so accustomed to thinking of spirituality as something
that, outside the plane of conduct, can only play through thought
and intellection, or perhaps religious emotion, that to speak of
the high spirituality of China will sound, to most, absurd. On
the whole, you must not go to China for thought or intellection.
Least of all you must go there for what we commonly understand by
religious emotion;--they don't readily gush over a personal god.
It will seem entirely far-fetched to say that in China the
creative forces have retained much more of their spirituality:
have manifested perhaps not less greatly than in the West, but on
planes less material, nearer their spiritual source. It will
seem so the more because until very recently China has been
constantly misrepresented to us.  And yet I think it is pretty
much the truth.

In all their creative art the Spirit has been busy suggesting
itself, not through ideas, or the forms of intellection, but
through the more subtle perceptions and emotions that lie behind.
It gives us, if we are at all gifted or educated to see, pure
vistas of Itself. Compare Michelangelo's Moses with the Dai Butsu
at Kamakura:--as I think Dr. Siren does in one of his lectures.
The former is a thing of titanic, even majestic energies; but
they are energies physical and mental:  a grand triumph on what
is called in Sanskrit philosophy the Rajasic plane.  The second
suggests, not energy and struggle, but repose and infinite calm.
In the Moses, we sense warfare, with victory, to attain and to
hold its attainment; in the Dai Butsu, something that has passed
through all that aeons ago.  In which is the greater sum of
energies included? In the Dai Butsu certainly; wherein we see no
sign of what we commonly call energies at all. The one is human
struggling up towards  Godhood; the other, Godhood looking down
with calm limitless compassion upon man.  Such need no engines
and dynamics to remove the mountains:  they bid them rise up, and
be cast into the sea; and are obeyed.

Or take a great Chinese landscape and a great Western one:  a Ma
Yuan, say, and a--whom you please.  To the uninstructed it seems
ridiculous to compare them.  This took a whole year to paint; it
is large; there is an enormous amount of hard work in it; huge
creative effort, force, exertion, went to make it.  That--it was
done perhaps in an hour.  That mountain is but a flick of the
brush; yonder lake but a wash and a ripple.  It is painted on a
little trumpery fan--a mere square foot of silk.  Yes; but on
that square foot, by the grace of the Everlasting Spirit, are 'a
thousand miles of space':  much more--there is Infinity itself.
Watch; and that faint gray or sepia shall become the boundless
blue; and you shall see dim dragons wandering:  you shall see
Eternal Mystery brooding within her own limitless home.  Far, far
more than in the western work, there is an open window into the
Infinite:  that which shall remind us that we are not the poor
clay and dying embers we seem, but a pat of the infinite
Mystery.  The Spirit is here; not involved in human flesh and
intellection, but impersonal and universal.  What do you
want:--to be a great towering personality; or to remember
that you are a flame of the Fire which is God?  Oh, out upon
these personal deities, and most ungodly personalities of
the West!  I thank China for reminding me that they are cheap
and nasty nothingnesses at the best!

We rather demand of our art, at its highest, that it shall be a
stimulant, and call to our minds the warfare in which we are
engaged:  the hopeless-heroic gay and ever mournful warfare of
the soul against the senses.  Well; that battle has to be
fought; there is nothing better than fighting it--until it is
won. Let us by all means hear the snarling of the trumpets; let
us heed the battle-cries of the Soul. But let us not forget that
somewhere also the Spirit is at peace:  let us remember that
there is Peace, beyond the victory. In Chinese art and poetry we
do not hear the war-shouts and the trumpets:  broken, there, are
the arrow and the bow; the shield, the sword, the sword and the
battle.--But--_the Day-Spring from on high hath visited us._

What element from the Divine is in it, does not concern itself
with this earth-life; tells you nothing in criticism of life.
There is naught in it of the Soul as Thinker, nor of the Soul as
Warrior.  But surely it is something for us, immersed here in
these turbid Rajasika regions, to be reminded sometimes that the
Sattvic planes exist; it is something for us to be given
glimpses of the pure quietudes of the Spirit in its own place.  I
am the better, if I have been shown for an instant the delicate
imperishable beauty of the Eternal.

     "We are tired who follow after
          Truth, a phantasy that flies;
      You with only look and laughter
          Stain our hearts with richest dyes."--

They do indeed; with look and laughter--or it may be tears.

Now, what does it all mean?  Simply this, I think:  that the West
brings down what it can of the Spirit into the world of thought
and passion; brings it down right here upon this bank and
shoal of time; but China rises with you into the world of
the Spirit.  We do not as a rule allow the validity of the
Chinese method. We sometimes dub Keats, at his best a thorough
Chinaman, 'merely beautiful.'

I have rather put the case for China; because all our hereditary
instincts will rise with a brief for the West.  But the truth is
that the Spirit elects its own methods and its own agents, and
does this through the one, that through the other. When I read
_Hamlet,_ I have no doubt Shakespeare was the greatest poet that
ever lived.  When I read Li Po, I forget Shakespeare, and think
that among those who sing none was ever so wonderful as this
Banished Angel of the Hills of Tang. I forget the Voice that
cried 'Sleep no more!' and Poetry seems to me to have spoken her
final word in what you would perhaps call trivialities about the
Cold Clear Spring or the White Foam Rapid:  she seems to me
to have accomplished all she can in such bits of childlike
detachment and wonder as this:

"The song-birds, the pleasure-seekers, have flown long since;
but this lonely cloud floats on, drifting round in a circle.  He
and Ching-ting Mountain gaze and gaze at each other, and never
grow weary of gazing";

--the 'lonely cloud' being, of course, Li Po himself. He has shown
me Man the brother of the Mountains, and I ask no more of him.
The mountains can speak for themselves.

He had no moral purpose, this Banished Angel for whose sake the
Hills of T'ang are a realm in the Spirit, inerasible, and a
beautiful dream while the world endures. Po Chu-i, says Mr.
Arthur  Waley, blamed him for being deficient in _feng_ and
_ya,_--by which we may understand, for present purposes, much
what Matthew Arnold meant by 'criticism of life.'  But does it
not serve a spiritual purpose that our consciousness should be
lifted on to those levels where personality is forgotten:  that
we should be made to regain, while reading, the child-state we
have lost?  Li Po died a child at sixty:  a magical child:
always more or less naughty, if we are to believe all accounts,
especially his own; but somehow never paying the penalty we pay
for our naughtiness,--exile from the wonder-world, and submersion
in these intolerable personalities. You read Milton, and are
cleaned of your personality by the fierce exaltation of the
Spirit beating through.  You read Li Po-type of hundreds of
others his compatriots--and you are also cleaned of your
personality; but by gentle dews, by wonderment, by being carried
up out of it into the diamond ether.  It seems to me that both
affirmed the Divine Spirit.  Milton waged grand warfare in his
affirmation.  Li Po merely said what he saw.

So I think that among the Aryans the Spirit has been fighting in
and into the great turbid current of evolution; and that among
the Chinese it has not been so much concerned with that stream,
but rather to sing its own untrammeled expression. A great drama
or epic comes of the presence and energy of the Spirit working
in a human mind.  A great lyric comes of the escape of the
consciousness from the mind, and into the Spirit.  The West has
produced all the great dramas and epics, and will persist in the
view that the Spirit can have no other expression so high as in
these forms.  Very likely the West is right; but I shall not
think so next time I am reading Li Po or Ssu-k'ung T'u--or Keats.

And I have seen small mild Japanese jujitsu men 'put it all
over,' as they say, big burly English wrestlers without seeming
to exert themselves in any way, or forgoing their gentle methods
and manner; and if you think of jujitsu rightly, it is, to our
wrestling and boxing, much what Wu Taotse and Ku Kai-chih are to
Rembrandt and Michelangelo, or the Chinese poets to ours.

If we go into the field of philosophy, we find much the same
thing. Take Confucianism. It is inappropriate, in some ways, to
call Confucius a great thinker (but we shall see that he was
something very much more than that). He taught no religion;
illuminated in nowise the world of mind; though he enabled
millions to illumine it for themselves. He made hardly a ripple
in his own day; and yet, so far as I can see, only the Buddha
and Mohammed, of the men whose names we know, have marshaled
future ages as greatly as he did.  _Flow his way!_ said he to
history; and, in the main, it did.  He created an astral mold
for about a quarter of humanity, which for twenty-four centuries
has endured.  He did it by formulating a series of rules for the
conduct of personal and national life; or rather, by showing
what kind of rules they should be, and leaving others to
formulate them;--and so infused his doctrine with his will and
example, that century after century flowed into the matrix he had
made for them. To create such a stable matrix, the Aryan mind, in
India, worked through long spiritual-intellectual exploration of
the world of metaphysics:  an intensive culture of all the
possibilities of thought. We in the West have boggled towards the
same end through centuries of crass political experiment.
Confucius, following his ancient models, ignored metaphysics
altogether:  jumped the life to come, and made his be-all and his
end-all here:--in what was necessary, in deeds and thought and
speech, to make individual, social, and political life staid,
sincere, orderly, quiet, decent, and happy.  He died a broken-
hearted failure; than whom perhaps no man except the Lord Buddha
ever succeeded more highly.

Laotse is his complement.  Laotse's aim is not the activity, but
the quiescence of mind, self, intellect:  "in the NO THING
seeking the lonely Way." You forgo everything--especially
selfhood;--you give up everything; you enter upon the heritage
of No Thing;--and you find yourself heir to the Universe, to
wonder, to magic.  You do with all your complicated egoity as the
camel did with his cameltiness before he could enter the needle's
eye; then--heigh presto!--it is the Elixir of Life you have
drunk; it is freedom you have attained of the roaming-place
of Dragons!--It amounts, truly, to the same thing as Aryan
Theosophy; but where the latter travels through and illuminates
immense realms of thought and metaphysic, Taoism slides gently
into the Absolute; as who should laugh and say, _You see how
easy it is!_ And you do not hear of the Path of Sorrow, as with
the Aryans; Tao is a path of sly laughter and delight.

Then from Japan we get Shinto; still less a system of metaphysics
or dogma.  The Shinto temple, empty but for air, is symbolic
of the creed whose keynotes are purity and simplicity.  Taoism,
Confucianism, and Shinto are the three great native creations,
in religion, of what I shall call the Altaic mind.  There
have been, indeed, profound thinkers and metaphysicians both
in Japan and China; but their mental activities have been
for the most part fruitage from the Aryan seed of Buddhism.

A word here as to that phrase 'Altaic mind.'  What business has
one to class the Chinese and Japanese together, and to speak of
them (as I shall) as 'Altaic'--the _Altaic Race?_ In the first
place this term, like 'Latin' or 'Anglo-Saxon,' has the virtue of
being quite meaningless.  It is utterly silly and inappropriate
from every standpoint; but as I need a term to include China and
all the peoples that have derived their historic culture from
her, I shall beg leave to use it.  Neither Japanese nor Corean
belong to the billiard-ball group of languages.  There is a
syntactical likeness between these two, but none in vocabulary;
where the Japanese vocabulary came from, Omniscience perhaps may
know.--A syntax outlasts a vocabulary by many ages:  you may hear
Celts now talk English with a syntax that comes from the sub-race
before our own: Iberian, and not Aryan.  So we may guess here a
race akin to the Coreans conquered at some time by a race whose
vocables were Japanese--whence they came, God knows.  Only one
hears that in South America the Japanese pick up the Indian
languages a deal more easily than white folk do, or than they do
Spanish or English.  But this is a divergence; we should be a
little more forward, perhaps, if we knew who were the Coreans,
or whence they came.  But we do not. They are not Turanic--of the
Finno-Turko-Mongol stock (by language); they are not speakers of
billiard-balls, allied to the Chinese, Burmese, and Tibetans.
But the fact is that neither blood-affinity nor speech-affinity
is much to the purpose here; we have to do with affinities of
culture.  During the period 240 B. C.--1260 A. D. a great
civilization rose, flowered, and waned in the Far East; it had
its origin in China, and spread out to include in its scope
Japan, Corea, and Tibet; probably also Annam and Tonquin, though
we hear less of them;--while Burma, Assam, and Siam, and those
southerly regions, though akin to China in language, seem
to have been always more satellite to India.  Mongols and
Manchus, though they look rather like Chinese, and have lived
rather near China, belong by language and traditionally by
race to another group altogether--to that, in fact, which
includes the very Caucasian-looking Turks and Hungarians;
as to what culture they have had, they got it from China
after the Chinese manvantara had passed.

The Chinese themselves are only homogeneous in race in the sense
that Europe might be if the Romans had conquered it all, and
imposed their culture and language on the whole continent. The
staid, grave, dignified, and rather stolid northern Chinaman
differs from the restless and imaginative Cantonese not much less
than the Japanese does from either. This much you can say:
Chinese, Japanese, and Coreans have been molded into a kind of
loose unity by a common culture; the peoples of China into a
closer homogeneity by a common culture-language, written and
spoken,--and by the fact that they have been, off and on during
the last two thousand years, but most of the time, under the same
government.  As to Corea, though in the days of Confucius it was
unknown to the Chinese, the legends of both countries ascribe the
founding of its civilization and monarchy to a Chinese minister
exiled there during the twelfth century B. C. Japanese legendary
history goes back to 600 B. C.;--that is, to the closing of the
Age of the Mysteries, and the opening of that of the Religions:--
I imagine that means that about that time a break with history
occurred, and the past was abolished:  a thing we shall see
happen in ancient China presently.  But I suppose we may call
Shotoku Daishi the Father of historical Japan;--he who, about the
end of the sixth century A. D., brought in the culture impetus
from the continent. About that time, too, Siam rose to power; and
soon afterwards T'ang Taitsong imposed civilization on Tibet.--So
there you have the 'Altaic' Race; Altaic, as Mr. Dooley is
Anglo-Saxon.  To speak of them as 'Mongolian' or 'Mongoloid,' as
is often done, is about as sensible as to speak of Europeans and
Americans as 'Hunnoid,'  because the Huns once conquered part of
Europe.  It conveys derogation--which Altaic does not.

I have compared their achievement with that of the West:  we have
one whole manvantara and a pralaya of theirs to judge by, as
against two fragments of western manvantaras with the pralaya
intervening.  It is not much; and we should remember that there
are cycles and epicycles; and that Japan, or old China herself,
within our own lifetime, may give the lie to everything.
But from the evidence at hand one is inclined to draw this
conclusion:  That in the Far East you have a great section of
humanity in reserve;--in a sense, in a backwater of evolution:
nearer the Spirit, farther from the hot press and conflict of the
material world;--even in its times of highest activity, not in
the van of the down-rush of Spirit into matter, as the western
races have been in theirs;--but held apart to perform a different
function. As if the Crest-Wave of Evolution needed what we might
call Devachanic cycles of incarnation, and found them there
during the Altaic manvantaras of manifestation.  Not that their
history has been empty of tragedies; it has been very full of
them; and wars--some eight or nine Napoleons in their day have
sat on the Dragon Throne.  But still, the worlds of poetry,
delight, wonder, have been nearer and more accessible to the
Chinaman, in his great ages, than to us in ours; as they have
been, and probably are now, nearer to the Japanese.  And I do
not know how that should be, unless the Law had taken those
Atlanteans away, kept them apart from the main stream--not
fighting the main battle, but in reserve--for purposes that the
long millenniums of the future are to declare.




IX.  THE DRAGON AND THE BLUE PEARL


The horizon of Chinese history lies near the middle of the third
millennium B. C. The first date sinologists dare swear to is 776;
in which year an eclipse of the sun is recorded, that actually
did happen:  it is set down, not as a thing interesting in
itself, but as ominous of the fall of wicked kings.  Here, then,
in the one place where there is any testing the annals, it
appears they are sound enough; which might be thought to speak
well for them. But our scholars are so damnebly logical, as Mr.
Mantalini would say, that to them it only proves this:  you are
to accept no date earlier. One general solar indorsement will not
do; you must have an eclipse for everything you believe, and
trust nothing unless the stars in their courses bear witness.

Well; we have fortunately Halley's Comet in the Bayeux Tapestry
for our familiar 1066; but beware! everything before that is to
be taken as pure fudge!

The fact is there is no special reason for doubting either
chronology or sequence of events up to about 2357 B. C., in which
year the Patriarch Yao came to the throne. He was the first of
those three, Yao, Shun, and Yu, who have been ever since
the patterns for all Chinese rulers who have aspired to be
Confucianly good. "Be like Yao, Shun, and Yu; do as they did";--
there you have the word of Confucius to all emperors and
governors of states.

Yao, it is true, is said to have reigned a full century, or but
one year short of it. This is perhaps the first improbability we
come to; and even of this we may say that some people do live a
long time. None of his successors repeated the indiscretion.
Before him came a line of six sovereigns with little historic
verisimilitude:  they must be called faint memories of epochs,
not actual men. The first of them, Fo-hi (2852-2738), was half
man, half dragon; which is being interpreted, of course, an
Adept King;--or say a line of Adept Kings. As for the dates given
him, I suppose there is nothing exact about them; that was all
too far back for memory; it belongs to reminiscence.  Before Fo-
hi came the periods of the Nest-Builders, of the Man-Kings, the
Earth-Kings, and the Heaven-Kings; then P'an K'u, who built the
worlds; then, at about two and a quarter million years before
Confucius, the emanation of Duality from the Primal One.  All
this, of course, is merely the exoteric account; but it shows at
least that--the Chinese never fell into such fatuity as we of the
West, with our creation six trumpery millenniums ago.

This much we may say:  about the time when Yao is said to have
come to the throne a manvantara began, which would have finished
its course of fifteen centuries in 850 or so B. C.  It is a
period we see only as through a glass darkly: what is told about
it is, to recent and defined history, as a ghost to a living man.
There is no reason why it should not have been an age of high
civilization and cultural activities; but all is too shadowy to
say what they were. To its first centuries are accredited works
of engineering that would make our greatest modern achievements
look small: common sense would say, probably the reminiscence of
something actual. Certainly the Chinese emerged from it, and into
daylight history, not primitive but effete:  senile, not
childlike. That may be only a racial peculiarity, a national
prejudice, of course.

And where should you look, back of 850 B. C., to find actual
history--human motives, speech and passions--or what to our eyes
should appear such? As things near the time-horizon, they lose
their keen outlines and grow blurred and dim. The Setis and
Thothmeses are names to us, with no personality attaching;
though we have discovered their mummies, and know the semblance
of their features, our imagination cannot clothe them with life.
We can hear a near Napoleon joking, but not a far-off Rameses. We
can call Justinian from his grave, and traverse the desert with
Mohammed; but can bold no converse with Manu or Hammurabi;--
because these two dwell well this side of the time-horizon, but
the epochs of those are far beyond it. The stars set:  the summer
evenings forget Orion, and the nights of winter the beauty of
Fomalhaut:  though there is a long slope between the zenith _Now_
and the sea-rim, what has once gone down beyond the west of time
we cannot recall or refashion. So that old Chinese manvantara is
gone after the Dragon Fo-hi and the Yellow Emperor, after the
Man-Kings and the Earth-Kings and the Heaven-Kings; and Yao,
Shun, and Yu the Great, and the kings of Hia, and Shang, and even
Chow, are but names and shadows,

     _Quo pater, Aeneas, quo dires Tullus et Ancus,_

--we cannot make them interestingly alive. But it does not follow
that they did not live when they are supposed to have lived, or
do the things attributed to them. Their architecture was
ephemeral, and bears no witness to them; they built no pyramids
to flout time; they raised no monument but a people, a culture,
an idea, that still endures.

Then, too, we shall see that at the beginning of the last Chinese
manvantara a conscious attempt was made to break wholly with the
past,--to wipe it from human memory, and begin all anew.  Such a
thing happened in Babylon once; there had been a Sargon in
remote antiquity with great deeds to his credit; thousands
of years after, another Sargon arose, who envied his fame;
and, being a kind, and absolute, decreed that all the years
intervening should never have existed--merged his own in the
personality of his remote predecessor, and so provided a good
deal of muddlement for archaeologists to come.  Indeed, such a
thing almost happened in France at the Revolution.  It is said
that in some French schools now you find children with a vague
idea that things more or less began with the taking of the
Bastille:  that there was a misty indefinable period between the
12th of October  (or on whatever day it was Eve's apple ripened)
and the glorious 14th of July:--an age of prehistory, wandered
through by unimportant legendary figures such as Jeanne Darc,
Henri Quatre, Louis Quatorze, which we may leave to the
superstitious--and come quickly to the real flesh and blood of M.
de Mirabeau and Citizen Danton.--Even so, in our own time, China
herself, wearied with the astral molds and inner burdens of two
millenniums, has been writhing in a fever of destruction:  has
burnt down the Hanlin College, symbol and center of a thousand
years of culture; destroyed old and famous cities; sent up
priceless encyclopaedias in smoke; replaced the Empire with a
republic, and the Dragon of wisdom with five meaningless
stripes;--breaking with all she was in her brilliant greatness,
and all she has been since in her weakness and squalid decline.--
We ask why history is not continuous; why there are these
strange hiatuses and droppings out?--the answer is simple enough.
It is because Karma, long piled up, must sometime break out upon
the world.  The inner realms become clogged with the detritus of
ages and activity, till all power to think and do is gone:  there
is no room nor scope left for it.  The weight of what has been
thought and done, of old habit, presses down on men, obstructs
and torments them, till they go mad and riot and destroy.  The
manvantara opens:  the Crest-Wave, the great tide of life, rushes
in.  It finds the world of mind cluttered up and encumbered;
there is an acute disparity between the future and the past,
which produces a kind of psychic maelstrom.  Blessed is that
nation then, which has a man at its head who can guide things, so
that the good may not go with the bad, the useful with the
useless!  The very facts that Ts'in Shi Hwangti, when the
manvantara opened at the beginning of the third century B.C., was
driven (you may say) to do what ruthless drastic things he did.--
and that his action was followed by such wonderful results--are
proof enough that a long manvantara crowded with cultureal and
national activities had run it course in the past, and clogged
the astral, and made progress impossible.  But what he did do,
throws the whole of that past manvantara, and to some extent the
pralaya that followed it, into the realm of shadows.--He burnt
the literature.

In a few paragraphs let me summarize the history of that past age
whose remnants Ts'in Shi Hwangti thus sought to sweep away.--Yao
adopted Shun for his successor; in whose reign for nine years
China's Sorrow, that mad bull of waters, the Hoangho, raged
incessantly, carrying the world down towards the sea.  Then Ta
Yu, who succeeded Shun on the throne presently, devised and
carried through those great engineering works referred to above:
--cut through mountains, yoked the mad bull, and saved the world
from drowning.  He was, says H. P. Blavatsky, an Adept; and had
learnt his wisdom from the Teachers in the snowy Range of SiDzang
or Tibet.  His dynasty, called the Hia, kept the throne until
1766; ending with the downfall of a cruel weakling.  Followed
then the House of Shang until 1122; set up by a wise and
merciful Tang the Completer, brought to ruin by a vicious tyrant
Chousin.  It was Ki-tse, a minister of this last, and a great
sage himself, who, fleeing from the persecutions of his royal
master, established monarchy, civilization, and social order
in Corea.

Another great man of the time was Won Wang, Duke of the
Palatinate of Chow, a state on the western frontier whose
business was to protect China from the Huns.  Really, those Huns
were a thing to marvel at:  we first hear of them in the reign of
the Yellow emperor, two or three centuries before Yao; they were
giving trouble then, a good three millenniums before Attila.  Won
Wang, fighting on the frontier, withstood these kindly souls;
and all China looked to him with a love he deserved.  Which of
course roused King Chousin's jealousy; and when a protest came
from the great soldier against the debaucheries and misgovernment
at the capital, the king roused himself and did what he could;
imprisoned the protestant, as he dared not kill him.  During the
three years of his imprisonment Won Wang compiled the mysterious
I-King, of Book of Changes; of which Confucius said, that were
another half century added to his life, he would spend them all
in studying it.  No western scholar, one may safely say, has ever
found a glimmer of meaning in it; but all the ages of China have
held it profounder than the profound.

His two sons avenged Won Wang; they roused the people, recruited
an army in their palatinate--perhaps enlisted Huns too--and swept
away Chousin and his dynasty.  They called their new royal house
after their native land, Chow; Wu Wang, the elder of the two,
becoming its first king, and his brother the Duke of Chow, his
prime minister.  I say _king;_  for the title was now _Wang_
merely; though there had been _Hwangtis_ or Emperors of old.
Won Wang and his two sons are the second Holy Trinity of China;
Yao, Shun, and Ta Yu being the first.  They figure enormously in
the literature:  are stars in the far past, to which all eyes,
following the august example of Confucius, are turned.  There is
a little  to be said about them:  they are either too near the
horizon, or too little of their history has been Englished, for
us to see them in their habit as they lived; yet some luster of
real greatness still seems to shine about them.  It was the Duke
of Chow, apparently, who devised or restored that whole Chinese
religio-political system which Confucius revivified and impressed
so strongly on the stuff of the ideal world--for he could get no
ruler of his day to establish it in the actualities--that it
lasted until the beginning of a new manvantara is shatter it now.
That it was based on deep knowledge of the hidden laws of life
there is this (among a host of other things) to prove:  Music was
an essential part of it.  When, a few years ago, the tiny last of
the Manchu emperors came to the throne, an edict was published
decreeing that, to fit him to govern the empire, the greatest
care should be taken with his education in music.  A wisdom,
truly, that the west has forgotten!

When William of Normandy conquered England, he rewarded his
followers with fiefs:  in England, while English land remained so
to be parceled out; afterwards (he and his successors) with
unconquered lands in Wales, and then in Ireland.  they were to
carve out baronies and earldoms for themselves; and the Celtic
lands thus stolen became known as the Marches:  their rulers,
more or less independent, but doing homage to the king, as Lords
Marchers.  The kings of Chow adopted the same plan.  Their old
duchy palatinate became the model for scores of others.  China
itself--a very small country then--southern Shansi, northern
Homan, western Shantung--was first divided up under the feudal
system; the king retaining a domain, known as Chow, in Homan,
for his own.  Then princes and nobles--some of the blood royal,
some of the old shang family, some risen from the ranks--were
given warrant to conquer lands for themselves from the barbarians
beyond the frontier:  so you go rid of the ambitious, and
provided Chow with comfortable buffers.  They went out, taking a
measure of Chinese civilization with them, and conquered or
cajoled Huns, Turks, Tatars, Laos, shans, Annamese, and all that
kind of people, into accepting them for their rulers.  It was a
work, as you may imagine, of centuries; with as much history
going forward as during any centuries you might name.  The states
thus formed were young, compared to China; and as China grew old
and weak, they grew into their vigorous prime.  The infinity of
human activities that has been!  These Chow ages seem like the
winking of an eye; but they were crowded with great men and
small, great deeds and trivialities, like our own.  The time will
come when our 'Anglo-Saxon' history will be written thus:
England sent out colonies, and presently the colonies grew
stronger and more populous than England;--and it will be enough,
without mention of the Pitts and Lincolns, the Washingtons and
Gladstones, that now make it seem so full and important.

By 850 the balance of power had left or was leaving the Chow king
at Honanfu.  His own subjects had grown unwarlike, and he could
hardly command even their allegiance; for each man's feudal duty
was first to his own duke, marquis, earl, viscount, or baron;--
strangely enough, there were those five degrees of nobility in
ancient China as in modern England.  Of these nobles, each with
his court and feudal dominion, there were in what we may call
China Proper some unascertainable number between thirteen and a
hundred and fifty:  mostly small and insignificant, but mostly,
too, full of schemes and ambitions.

But it was the Lords Marchers that counted.  One after another of
them had wrested from the Chow the title of _Wang_ or King; it
was not enough for them to be dukes and marquises.  Then came a
time when a sort of Bretwalda-ship was established; to be
wielded by whichever of them happened to be strongest--and
generally to be fought for between whiles:  a glorious and
perpetual bone of contention.  International law went by the
board.  The Chow domain, the duchies and marquisates, lay right
in the path of the contestants--midmost of all, and most to be
trampled.  Was Tsin to march all round the world, when a mere
scurry across neutral (and helpless) Chow would bring it at the
desired throat of Ts'u?--A question not to be asked!--there at
Honanfu sat the Chow king, head of the national religion, head of
the state with its feudatories, receiving (when it suited them
to pay it)  the annual homage of all those loud and greedy
potentates, who for the rest kicked him about as they pleased,
and ordered each other to obey him,--for was he not still the son
of Heaven, possessor of the Nine Tripods of sovereignty, the
tripods of Ta Yu?--So the centuries passed, growing worse and
worse ever, from the ninth to the sixth:  an age of anarchy, bad
government, disorder, crime and clash of ambitions:  when there
was a decline of virtue and an insurrection of vice and injustice
in the world;--and we know what manner of incarnation, at such
times, is likely to happen.

Conditions had outgrown the astral molds made for them in the
last manvantara:  the molds that had been made for a small
homogeneous China.  The world had expanded, and was no longer
homogeneous:  China herself was not homogeneous; and she found
on all sides of her very heterogeneous Ts'ins, Tsins, Ts'is,
Ts'us, Wus and Yuehs; each of whom, like so many Great Powers of
our own times, had the best of intentions to partake of her
sacramental body when God's will so should be.--Indeed, the
situation was very much as we have seen it.

Then, as now (or recently), China was old, inert, tired, and
unwarlike; must depend on her cunning, and chiefly on their
divisions, for what protection she might get against the
rapacious and strong.  She was dull, sleepy and unimaginative,
and wanted only to be left alone; yet teemed, too, with
ambitious politicians, each with his sly wires to pull.  Her
culture, ancient and decrepit, was removed by aeons from all
glamor of beginnings.--For a good European parallel, in this
respect, you might go to Constantinople in the Middle Ages, when
it hung ripe on the bough, so to say, and waiting to fall into
Latin, Turkish, Bulgar, or even Russian jaws, whichever at the
psychic moment should be gaping and ready beneath. There too was
the sense of old age and sterility; of disillusionment; of all
fountains and inspirations run dry.--In ancient Grecce, it was no
such far cry back from the essential modernity of Pericles' or of
Plato's time to the antiquity of Homer's.  In India, the faery
light of an immemorial dawn mingles so with the facts of history
that there is no disentangling myth from matter-of-fact; if you
should prove almost any king to have reigned quite recently, his
throne would still be somehow set in the mellow past and near the
fountains of time.  Augustan Rome, modern in all its phases,
stands not so far in front of a background peopled with nymphs
and Sibyls:  a past in which the Great Twin Brothers might fight
at Lake Regillus, and stern heroes make fantastic sacrifices for
Rome.  Even modern Europe is much less modern than  Medieval
Constantinople or Chow China.  We can breathe still the
mysterious atmosphere of the Middle Ages; you shall find
still, and that not in remote countries only, fairy-haunted
valleys; a few hours out from London, and you shall be in
the heart of druidry, and among peoples whose life is very
near to Poetry.  But China, in those first pre-Confucian centuries,
was desperately prosaic:  not so much modern, as pertaining to an
ugly not impossible future. Antiquity was far, far away. The dawn
with its glow and graciousness; noon and the prime with their
splendor, were as distant and unimaginable as from our Amercan
selves the day when Charlemain with all his peers went down.  If
you can imagine an American several hundred years from now--one
in which Point Loma had never been; several hundred years more
unromantic than this one; an America fallen and grown haggard
and toothless; with all impulse to progress and invention gone;
with centrifugal tendencies always loosening the bond of union;
advancing, and having steadily advanced, further from all
religious sanctions, from anything she may retain of the
atmosphere of mystery and folklore and the poetry of racial
childhood; you may get a picture of the mental state of that
China. A material civilization, with (except in war areas)
reasonable security of life and goods, remained to her. Her
people lived in good houses, wore good clothes, used chairs and
tables, chopsticks, plates and dishes of pottery; had for
transit boats, carts and chariots,* wheelbarrows I suppose, and
"cany wagons light." They had a system of writing, the origin of
which was lost in remote antiquity; a large literature, of which
fragments remain. They were home-loving, war-hating, quiet,
stagnant, cunning perhaps, quite un-enterprising; they lived in
the valley of the Hoangho, and had not discovered, or had
forgotten, the Yangtse to the south of them, and the sea to the
east. They might have their local loyalties and patriotism of the
pork-barrel, and a certain arrogance of race:  belief in
the essential superiority of the Black-haired People to the
barbarians on their borders; but no high feeling for Chu Hia--
All the Chinas;--no dream of a possible national union and
greatness. Some three hundred of their folk-ballads come down to
us, which are as unlike the folk-ballads of Europe as may be.
They do not touch on the supernatural; display no imagination;
there are no ghosts or fairies; there is no glory or delight in
war; there is no glory in anything;--but only an intense
desirability in _home,_--in staying at home with your family, and
doing your I work in the fields. And nothing of what we should
call romance, even in this home-love:  the chief tie is that
between parents and children, not that between husband and wife,
and still less that between lovers. There is much moralizing and
wistful sadness.--Such was the life of the peasants; at the
other pole was the life of the courts:  intrigue and cunning, and
what always goes with cunning--ineptitude; a good measure of
debauchery; some finicking unimportant refinement; each man for
self and party, and none for Gods and Men.  We have to do, not
with the bright colors of the childhood of a race, but with the
grayness of its extreme old age. Those who will may argue that
you can have old age with never a prime, youth, or childhood
behind it. Some say that Laotse was born at sixty-one, or
seventy, or eighty-two years old--a few decades more or less are
not worth bothering about--whence his name _lao tse,_ the _old
son_ (but _tse_ may also mean Teacher or Philosopher). But I
misdoubt the accuracy of such accounts, myself. I think it likely
he was a baby to begin with, like the majority of us. And I
imagine his country had been young, too, before she grew old;--as
young as America, and as vigorous.

------
* _Chinese Literature:_ Giles;--whence also much else in
these articles.
------

Among such a people, how much should you expect to find of the
Sacred Mysteries?--There were the Nine Tripods of Ta Yu with the
king at Honanfu, to say that his kinghood had behind it symbolic
sanctions; there was the Book of Changes; there was the system
of the Duke of Chow, more dishonored in the breach than honored
in the observance.... For the rest, you might as well look for
the Eleusinia in Chicago. Who could believe in religion, those
days?--Well; it was the pride of some of the little duchies and
marquisates to keep up a reputa-tion for orthodoxy:  there
was Lu in Shantung, for example,-very strict.*  (As strictness
went, we may say.) And if you wished to study ritual, you
went up to Honanfu to do so; where, too, was the National
or Royal Library, where profitable years might be spent. But
who, except enthusiasts, was to treat religion seriously?
--when one saw the doddering Head of Religion yearly flouted,
kicked about and hustled in his own capital by his Barbarian
Highness the 'King'--so he must now style himself and be
styled, where in better days 'Count Palatine' or 'Lord Marcher'
would have served his turn well enough--of Ts'in or Tsin
or Ts'i or Ts'u, who would come thundering down with his
chariots when he pleased, and without with-your-leave or
by-your-leave, march past the very gates of Honanfu;--and
lucky if he did march past, and not come in and stay awhile;
--on his way to attacking his Barbarian Highness the 'King'
of somewhere else. The God that is to be sincerely worshiped
must, as this world goes, be able now and then to do some
little thing for his vicegerent on earth; and Heaven did
precious little in those days for the weakling King-pontiff
puppets at Honanfu. A mad world, my masters!

------
* _Ancient China Simplified:_ E. Harper Parker;--also much
drawn on.
------

Wherein, too, we had our symbols:--the Dragon, the Sky-wanderer,
with something heavenly to say; but alas! the Dragon had been
little visible in our skies of Chu Hia these many years or
centuries;--the Tiger, brute muscularity, lithe terrible limbs,
fearful claws and teeth,--we knew him much better! This, heaven
knew, was the day of the Tiger of earthly strength and passions;
were there not those three great tigers up north, Ts'in, Tsin,
and Ts'i; and as many more southward; and all hungry and
strong?--And also, some little less thought of perhaps, the
Phoenix, Secular Bird, that bums itself at the end of each cycle,
and arises from its ashes young and dazzling again:  the Phoenix
--but little thought of, these days; for was not the world old
and outworn, and toppling down towards a final crash?  The days
of Chu Hia were gone, its future all in the long past; no one
dared dream of a time when there should be something better than
Yen diddling Lu, or Ts'u beating Ts'i at a good set-to with these
new sixty-warrior-holding chariots. Who should think of the
Phoenix--and of a new age to come when there should be no more
Yen and Lu and Chow and Tsin and Ts'in, but one broad and
mighty realm, a Middle, a Celestial Kingdom,--such a Chu
Hia as time had no memory of;--to whose throne the Hun himself
should bow, or whose hosts should drive him out of Asia;--a
Chu Hia to whom tribute should come from the uttermost ends
of the earth? Who should dream of the Secular Bird now,--
as improbable a creature, in these dark days of the Tiger,
as that old long-lost Sky-wanderer the Dragon himself?

Let be; let three little centuries pass; let the funeral pyre
but be kindled, and quite burn itself out; and let the ashes
grow cold--

And behold you now, this Phoenix of the World, bright and
dazzling, rising up from them! Behold you now this same
Black-haired People, young, strong, vigorous, gleaming with
all the rainbow hues of romance and imagination; conquering
and creative, and soon to strew the jewels of faerie over
all the Eastern World. . . .

But this is to anticipate:  to take you on to the second century
B. C.; whereas I want you now in the sixth.--I said that you
should find better chances for study in the Royal Library at
Honanfu, could you get together the means for journeying thither,
than anywhere else in Chu Hia. That was particularly true in the
latter part of that sixth century:  because there was a man by
the name of Li Urh, chief librarian there, from whom, if you
cared to, you might hear better things than were to be found in
the books in his charge. His fame, it appears, has gone abroad
through the world; although his chief aim seems to be to keep in
the shadows and not be talked about. Scholars resort to him from
far and near; one of them, the greatest of all, who came to him
in the year 517 and was (if we are to believe accounts) treated
without too much mercy, came out awestruck, and said: "Today I
have seen the Dragon."--What! that little old man with the bald
head and straggly lank Chirese beard?--Like enough, like enough!
--they are not all, as you look at them with these physical eyes,
to be seen winged and wandering the heavens. . . .

But wandering the heavens, this one, yes!  He has the blue ether
about him, even there in the Library among the books.--He has a
way of putting things in little old quiet paradoxes that seem to
solve all the problems,--to take you out of the dust and clatter
of this world, into the serenity of the Dragon-world where all
problems are solved, or non-existent. Chu Hia is all a fuss and
turmoil, and running the headlong Gadarene road; but the Old
Philosopher--as he has come to be called--has anchorage right
outside of and above it, and speaks from the calmness of the
peaks of heaven. A kind of school forms itself around him; his
wisdom keeps provincials from returning home, and the young men
of the capital from commonplace courses. Though he has been
accredited with much authorship, I think he wrote nothing;
living among books, he had rather a contempt for them,--as things
at the best for patching up and cosseting life, new windings and
wrappings for its cocoon;--whereas he would have had the whole
cocoon stripped away, and the butterfly beautifully airing its
wings.  Be that as it may, there are, shall we say, stenographers
among his disciples, and his sayings come down to us.  They have
to do with the Way, the Truth, and the Life; which things, and
much else, are included in Chinese in the one word _Tao._

"The main purpose of his studies" says Ssema Tsien (the 'Father
of Chinese History'), "was to keep himself concealed and
unknown."  In this he succeeded admirably, so far as all future
ages were to concerned; for Ssema himself, writing in the reign
of Han Wuti some four centuries later, could be by no means sure
of his identity.  He tells us all we know, or think we know,
about Laotse:--that he was born in a village in southern Honan;
kept the Royal Library at Honanfu; met Confucius there in 517;
and at last rode away on his ox into the west, leaving the _Tao
Teh King_ with the Keeper of the Pass on the frontier;--and then
goes on to say that there were two other men "whom many regarded
as having been the real Laotse"; one of the Lao Lai, a
contemporary of Confucius, who wrote fifteen treatises on
the practices of the school of Tao; the other, a "Grand
Historiographer of Chow," Tan by name, who lived some century and
a quarter later.  To me this is chiefly interesting as a
suggestion that the 'School of Tao' was a thing existent and
well-established at that time, and with more than one man writing
about it.

It may we'll have been. Taoists ascribe the foundation of their
religion to the Yellow Emperor, twenty-eight centuries B. C.;
but there never was time Tao was not; nor, I suppose, when there
was quite no knowledge of it, even in China.  In the old
manvantara, past now these three hundred years, the Black-haired
People had wandered far enough from such knowledge;--with the
accumulation of complexities, with the piling up of encumberments
of thought and deed during fifteen hundred busy years of
intensive civilization. As long as that piling up had not
entirely covered away Tao, the Supreme Simplicity, the Clear
Air;--as long as men could find scope to think and act and
accomplish things;--so long the manvantara lasted; when nothing
more that was useful could be accomplished, and action could no
longer bring about its expectable results (because all that old
dead weight was there to interpose itself between new causes set
in motion and their natural outcome)--then the pralaya set in.
You see, that is why pralayas do set in; why they must;--why no
nation can possibly go on at a pitch of greatness and high
activity beyond a certain length of time.--And all that activity
of the manvantara--all that fuss and bustle to achieve greatness
and fortune--it had all been an obscuration of and moving away
from Tao.

The Great Teachers come into this world out of the Unknown,
bringing the essence of their Truth with them. We know well what
they will teach:  in some form or another it will be Theosophy;
it will be the old self-evident truths about Karma and the two
natures of man.  But how they will teach it:  what kind of
sugar-coating or bitter aloes they will prescribe along with it:
--that, I think, depends on reactions from the age they come in
and the people whom they are to teach.  It is almost certain, as
I said, that Li Urh the Old Philosopher left no writings. "Who
knows, does not tell," said he; and Po Chu-i quotes this, and
pertinently adds:  "What then of his own five thousand words and
more.--the _Tao Teh King._" That book was proved centuries ago, in
China, not to have come, as it stands, even from Laotse's age;
because there are characters in it that were invented long
afterwards. The wisest thing to believe is that it is made up
mostly of his sayings, taken down by his disciples in the Pitman
of the time; and surviving, with accretions and losses perhaps,
through the disquiet of the next two centuries, and the burning
of the books, and everything. Because whatever vicissitudes may
have befallen it, one does hear in its maxims the tones of
a real voice:  one man's voice, with a timbre in it that
belongs to the Lords of Wisdom. And to me, despite Lao Lai
and Tan the Grand Historiographer, it is the voice of an
old man in the seclusion of the Royal Library:  a happy little
bald-headed straggly-bearded old man anxious to keep himself
unknown and unapplauded; it is a voice attuned to quietness,
and to mental reactions from the thunder of the armies, the
drums and tramplings and fuss and insolence of his day. I
thoroughly believe in the old man in the Royal Library, and
the riding away on oxback at last into the west,--where was
Si Wang Mu's Faery Garden, and the Gobi Desert, with sundry
oases therein whereof we have heard.  I can hear that voice,
with childlike wonder in it, and Adept-like seriousness, and
childlike and Adept-like laughter not far behind, in such sayings
as these:  "Tao is like the emptiness of a vessel; and the use
of it, we may say, must be free from all self-sufficiency. How
deep and mysterious it is, as if it were the author of all things!
We should make our sharpness blunt, and unravel the complications
of things. . . . How still and clear is Tao, a phantasm with
the semblance of permanence!  I do not know whose son it is.
It might appear to have been before God."

We see in Christendom the effects of belief in a personal God,
and also the inefficacy of mere ethics.  Believers make their God
in their own image, and nourish their personalities imitating an
imitation of themselves.  At the best of times they take their
New Testament ethics, distil from these every virtue and
excellent quality, and posit the result as the characteristics of
their Deity:--the result, plus a selfhood; and therefore the
great delusion and heresy, Separateness, is the link that binds
the whole together.  It is after all but a swollen personality;
and whether you swell your personalitv with virtues or vices, the
result is an offense. There is a bridge, razor-edged, between
earth and heaven; and you can never carry that load across it.
Laotse, supremely ethical in effect, had a cordial detestation--
take this gingerly!--of un-re-enforced ethics. "When the great
Tao is lost," says he, "men follow after charity and duty to
one's neighbor." Again: "When Tao is lost, virtue takes its
place. When virtue is lost, benevolence succeeds to it. When
benevolence is lost, justice ensues. When justice is lost, then
we have expediency."  He does not mean, of course, that these
things are bad; but simply that they are the successive stages
of best, things left when Tao is lost sight of; none of them in
itself a high enough aim. They are all included in Tao, as the
less in the greater. He describes to you the character of the man
of Tao; but your conduct is to be the effect of following Tao;
and you do not attain Tao by mere practice of virtue; though you
naturally practise virtue, without being aware of it, while
following Tao.  It all throws wonderful light on the nature of
the Adept; about whom you have said nothing at all when you have
accredited him with all the virtues.  Joan was blemishless; but
not thereby did she save France;--she could do that because, as
Laotse would have said, being one with Tao, she flowed out into
her surroundings, accomplishing absolutely her part in the
universal plan. No compilation of virtues would make a Teacher
(such as we know):  it is a case of the total absence of
everything that should prevent the natural Divine Part of man
from functioning in this world as freely and naturally as the sun
shines or the winds blow. The sun and the stars and the tides and
the wind and the rain--there is that perfect glowing simplicity
in them all:  the Original, the Root of all things, Tao.  _Be
like them,_ says Laotse, impersonal and simple.  "I hold fast to
and cherish Three Precious Things," he says:  "Gentleness,
Economy, Humility."  Why?  So, you would say, do the ethics of
the New Testament; such is the preaching of the Christian
Churches. But (in the latter case) for reasons quite unlike
Laotse's.  For we make of them too often virtues to be attained,
that shall render us meek and godly, acceptable in the eyes of
the Lord, and I know not what else:  riches laid up in heaven; a
pamperment of satisfaction; easily to become a cloak for self-
righteousness and, if worse can be, worse.  But _tut!_  Laotse
will not be bothered with riches here or elsewhere.  With him
these precious things are simply absences that come to be when
obstructive presences are thrown off.  No sanctimoniousness for
the little Old Man in the Royal Library!

He would draw minds away to the silence of the Great Mystery,
which is the fountain of laughter, of life, the unmarred; and he
would have them abide there in absolute harmony.  Understand him,
and you understand what he did for China.  It is from that Inner
Thing, that Tao, that all nourishment comes and all greatness.
You must go out with your eyes open to search for it:  watch for
Dragons in the sky; for the Laugher, the Golden Person, in the
Sun:  watch for Tao, ineffably sparkling and joyous--and quiet--
in the trees; listen for it in the winds and in the sea-roar;
and have nothing in your own heart but its presence and
omnipresence and wonder-working joy.  How can you flow out to the
moments, and capture the treasure in them; how can you flow out
to Tao, and inherit the stars, and have the sea itself flowing in
your veins;--if you are blocked with a desire, or a passion for
things mortal, or a grudge against someone, or a dislike?  Beauty
is Tao:  it is Tao that shines in the flowers:  the rose, the
bluebell, the daffodil--the wistaria, the chrysanthemum, the
peony--they are little avatars of Tao; they are little gateways
into the Kingdom of God.  How can you know them, how can you go
in through them, how can you participate in the laughter of the
planets and the angelic clans, through their ministration, if you
are preoccupied with the interests or the wants of contemptible
you, the personality?  Laotse went lighting little stars for the
Black-haired People:  went pricking the opacity of heaven, that
the Light of lights might filter through.  If you call him a
philosopher, you credit him with an intellectualism that really
he did not bother to possess.  Rather he stood by the Wells of
Poetry, and was spiritual progenitor of thousands of poets.
There is no way to Poetry but Laotse's Way. You think you must go
abroad and see the world; you must not; that is only a
hindrance:  a giving the eyes too many new externals, to hinder
them from looking for that which you may see, as he says,
'through your own window.'  If you traverse the whole world
seeking, you will never come nearer to the only thing that
counts, which is Here, and Now.  Seek to feed your imagination on
outward things, on doings and events, and you will perhaps
excite, but surely soon starve it.  But at the other pole, the
inner "How deep and mysterious is Tao, as if it were the author
of all things!"  And then I hear someone ask him whence it
originated--someone fishing for a little metaphysics, some dose
of philosophy. What! catch Laotse?  "I know," said Confucius,
"how birds fly, beasts run, fishes swim. But the runner may be
snared, the swimmer hooked, the flyer shot with an arrow. But
there is the Dragon; I cannot tell how he mounts on the wind
through the clouds and rises into heaven."  No; you cannot hook,
snare, or shoot the Dragon.  "I do not know whose son Tao is,"
says Laotse.  "It might appear to have been before God."

So I adhere to the tale of the old man in the Royal Library,
holding  wonderful quiet conversations there; that "it might
appear to have been before God" is enough to convince me.  There
was a man once*--I forget his name, but we may call him Cho Kung
for our purposes; he was of affable demeanor, and an excellent
flautist; and had an enormous disbelief in ghosts, bogies,
goblins, and 'supernatural' beings of every kind.  It seized
him with the force of a narrow creed; and he went forth to
missionarize, seeking disputants.  He found one in the chief
Librarian of some provincial library; who confessed to a
credulousness along that line, and seemed willing to talk.  Here
then were grand opportunities--for a day's real enjoyment, with
perchance a creditable convert to be won at the end of it.
Behold them sitting down to the fray, in the shadows among the
books:  the young Cho Kung, affable  (I like the word well),
voluble and earnest; the old Librarian, mild, with little to say
but _buts_ and _ifs,_ and courteous even beyond the wont in that
"last refuge of good manners," China.  All day long they sat; and
affable Cho, like Sir Macklin in the poem,

     "Argued high and argued low,
     And likewise argued round about him";

--until by fall of dusk the Librarian was fairly beaten.  So
cogent were Cho's arguments, so loud and warm his eloquence,
so entirely convincing his facts adduced--his modern instances,
as you may say--that there really was nothing for the old
man to answer.  Ghosts were not; genii were ridiculously
unthinkable; supernatural beings could not exist, and it
was absurd to think they could.  The Librarian had not a
leg to stand on; that was flat.  Accordingly he rose to
his feet--and bowed.--"Sir," said he, with all prescribed
honorifics, "undoubtedly you are victorious.  The contemptible
present speaker sees the error of his miserable ways.  He
is convinced.  It remains for him only to add"--and here
something occurred to make Cho rub his eyes--"that he is
himself a supernatural being."--And with that his form and
limbs distend, grow misty--and he vanishes in a cloud up through
the ceiling.--You see, those old librarians in China had a way of
doing things which was all their own.

------
* The story is told in Dr. H. H. Giles' _Dictionary of Chinese
Biography._
------

So Li Urh responded to the confusions of his day.  Arguments?--
You could hardly call them so; there is very little arguing,
where Tao is concerned.  The Tiger was abroad, straining all
those lithe tendons,--a tense fearful symmetry of destruction
burning bright through the night-forests of that pralaya:
grossest and wariest energies put forth to their utmost in a race
between the cunning for existence, a struggle of the strong for
power.--"It is the way of Tao to do difficult things when they
are easy; to benefit and not to injure; to do and not to
strive."  Come out, says Laotse, from all this moil and topsey-
turveydom; stop all this striving and botheration; give things
a chance to right themselves.  There is nothing flashy or to make
a show about in Tao; it vies with no one.  Let go; let be;
find rest of the mind and senses; let us have no more of these
fooleries, war, capital punishment, ambition; let us have self-
emptiness.  Just be quiet, and this great Chu Hia will come right
without aid of governing, without politics and voting and
canvassing and such.--_Here and Now_ and _What comes by_ were his
prescriptions. He was an advocate of the Small State.  Aristotle
would have had no government ruling more than ten thousand
people; Laotse would have had his State of such a size that the
inhabitants could all hear the cocks crowing in foreign lands;
and he would have had them quite uneager to travel abroad.  What
he taught was a total _bouleversement_ of the methods of his age.
"It is the way of Tao not to act from personal motives, to
conduct affairs--without feeling the trouble of them, to
taste without being aware of the flavor, to account the
great as the small and the small as the great, to recompense
injury with kindness."

The argument went all against him. Their majesties of Ts'in
and Tsin and Ts'i and Ts'u were there with their drums and
tramplings; the sixty warrior-carrying chariots were thundering
past;--who should hear the voice of an old quiet man in the Royal
Library?  Minister This and Secretary That of Lu and Chao and
Cheng were at it with their wire-pullings and lobbyings and petty
diddlings and political cheateries--(it is all beautifully
modern); what had the world to do with self-emptiness and Tao?
The argument was all against him; he hadn't a leg to stand on.
There was no Tao; no simplicity; no magic; no Garden of Si
Wang Mu in the West; no Azure Birds of Compassion to fly out
from it into the world of men.  Very well then; he, being one
with that non-existent Tao, would ride away to that imaginary
Garden; would go, and leave--

A strand torn out of the rainbow to be woven into the stuff of
Chinese life. You could not tell it at the time; you never would
have guessed it--but this old dull tired squalid China, cowering
in her rice-fields and stopping her ears against the drums and
tramplings, had had something--some seed of divinity, thrown down
into her mind, that should grow there and be brooded on for three
centuries or so, and then--

There is a Blue Pearl, Immortality; and the Dragon, wandering
the heavens, is forever in pursuit or quest of it. You will see
that on the old flag of China, that a foolish republicanism cast
away as savoring too much of the Manchu. (But it was Laotse and
Confucius, Han Wuti and Tang Taitsong, and Wu Taotse and the
Banished Angel that it savored of really.) Well, it was this Blue
Pearl that the Old Philosopher, riding up through the pass to the
Western Gate of the world, there to vanish from the knowledge of
men;--it was this Blue Pearl that, stopping and turning a moment
there so high up and near heaven, he tossed back and out into the
fields of China;--and the Dragon would come to seek it in his
time.--You perhaps know the picture of Laotse riding away on his
ox.  I do not wonder that the beast is smiling.

For it really was the Blue Pearl:  and the Lord knew what it was
to do in China in its day.  It fell down, you may say, from the
clear ether of heaven into the thick atmosphere of this world;
and amidst the mists of human personality took on all sorts of
iridescences; lit up strange rainbow tints and fires to glow and
glisten more and more wonderfully as the centuries should pass;
and kindle the Chinese imagination into all sorts of opal
glowings and divine bewilderments and wonderments;--and by and by
the wonder-dyed mist-ripples floated out to Japan, and brought to
pass there all sorts of nice Japanese cherry-blossomy and plum-
blossomy and peonyish things, and Urashima-stories and Bushido-
ish and Lafcadioish and badger-teakettle things:--reawakened, in
fact, the whole of the faery glow of the Eastern World.

It is not to be thought that here among the mists and personalities
the Pearl could quite retain all its pure blueness of the ether.
It is not to be thought that Taoism, spread broadcast among
the people, could remain, what it was at the beginning, an
undiluted Theosophy. The lower the stratum of thought into
which it fell, the less it could be Thought-Spiritual, the
stuff unalloyed of Manas-Taijasi.  Nevertheless, it was the
Pearl Immortality, with a vigor and virtue of its own, and
a competence for ages, on whatever plane it might be, to work
wonders.  Among thinking and spiritual minds it remained a true
Way of Salvation.  Among the masses it came to be thought of
presently as personal immortality and the elixir of life.
Regrettable, you may say; but this is the point: nothing was
ever intended to last forever.  You must judge Taoism by what it
was in its day, not by what it may be now.  Laotse had somehow
flashed down into human consciousness a vision of Infinity:  had
confronted the Chinese mind with a conviction of the Great
Mystery, the Divine Silence.  It is simply a fact that that is
the fountain whose waters feed the imagination and make it grow
and bloom.  Search for the Secret in chatter and outward sights
and deeds, and you soon run to waste and nothingness; but seek
here, and you shall find what seemed a void, teeming with lovely
forms.  He set the Chinese imagination, staggered and stupefied
by the so long ages of manvantara, and then of ruin, into a glow
of activity, of grace, of wonder; men became aware of the vast
world of the Within; as if a thousand Americas had been
discovered. It supplied the seed of creation for all the poets
and artists to come. It made a new folklore; revivified the
inner atmosphere of mountains and forests; set the fairies
dancing; raised Yellow Crane Pagodas to mark the spot where Wang
Tzu-chiao flew on the Crane to heaven in broad daylight.  It sent
out the ships of Ts'in Shi Hwangti presently to seek the Golden
Islands of Peng-lai, where the Immortals give cups of the elixir
to their votaries; in some degree it sent the armies of Han Wuti
in search of the Garden of Si Wang Mu.  The ships found (perhaps)
only the Golden Islands of Japan; the armies found certainly
Persia, India, and even the borders of Rome;--and withal, new
currents, awakening and inter-national, to flow into China and
make splendid the Golden Age of Han.




X.  "SUCH A ONE"


"I produce myself among creatures, O son of Bharata, whenever
there is a decline of Virtue and an insurrection of vice and
injustice in the world:  and thus I incarnate from age to age for
the preservation of the just, the destruction of the wicked, and
the establishment of righteousness."--_Bhagavad-Gita_

"The world had fallen into decay, and right principles had
perished.  Perverse discourses and oppressive deeds had grown
rife; ministers murdered their rulers and sons their fathers.
Confucius was frightened at what he saw, and undertook the work
of reformation."--Mencius


Men were expecting an avatar in old Judaea; and, sure enough,
one came.  But they were looking for a national leader, a
Messiah, to throw off for them the Roman yoke; or else for an
ascetic like their prophets of old time: something, in any case,
out of the way;--a personality wearing marks of avatarship easily
recognisable. The one who came, however, so far from leading them
against the Romans, seemed to have a good deal of sympathy with
the Romans. He consorted with centurions and tax-gatherers, and
advised the Jews to render unto Roman Caesar the things which
were his:  which meant, chiefly, the tribute. And he was not an
ascetic, noticeably; bore no resemblance to their prophets of
old time; but came, as he said, 'eating and drinking'; even
went to marriage-feasts, and that by no means to play killjoy;--
and they said, 'Behold, a gluttonous man and a winebibber!'
(which was a lie).--Instead of supporting the national religion,
as anyone with half an eye to his interests would have done, he
did surprising things in the temple with a whip of small cords.--
"Here," said they, "let us crucify this damned fellow!"  And
they did.

Aftertimes, however, recognised him as an avatar; and then so
perverse is man!--as the one and only possible avatar.  If ever
another should appear, said our western world, it could but be
this one come again; and, because the doctrine of avatars is a
fundamental instinct in human nature, they expected that he would
come again.  So when the pressure of the times and the intuition
of men warned them that a great incarnation was due, they began
to look for his coming.

That was in our own day, say in the last half-century; during
which time a mort of books have been written about a mysterious
figure turning up in some modern city, whom you could not fail
to recognise by certain infallible signs. Generally speaking,
the chief of these were:  long hair, and a tendency to make
lugubrious remarks beginning with _Verily, verily I say unto
you._  In actual life, too, lots of men did grow their hair long
and cultivate the _verily-verily_ habit; hoping that, despite
their innate modesty, their fellow-men might not fail to take the
hint and pierce the disguise afforded, often by a personal
morality you might call _oblique._

But if an avatar had come, it is fairly certain that he or she
would have followed modern fashions in hair and speech; first,
because real avatars have a sense of humor; and secondly,
because his or her business would have been to reform, not the
language or style of hair-dressing, but life.--'He or she' is a
very vile phrase; for the sake of novelty, let us make the
feminine include the masculine, and say 'she' simply.--Her
conversation, then, instead of being peppered with archaic
_verilies_ and _peradventures,_ would have been in form much like
that of the rest of us.  It is quite unlikely she would have
shone at Pleasant Sunday Afternoons, or Bazaars of the Young
Women's Christian Association; quite unlikely that she would
have been in any sense whatever a pillar of the orthodoxies.  As
she would have come to preach _Truth,_ you may suppose Truth
needed, and therefore lacking; and so, that her teachings
would have been at once dubbed vilest heterodoxy, and herself
a charlatan.

     "Below with eddy and flow the white tides creep
          On the sands."

Says Ssu-k'ung T'u,--

     "..... in no one form may Tao abide.
          But changes and shifts like the wide wing-shadows asweep
               On the mountainside";

--the sea is one, but the tides drift and eddy; the roc, or maybe
the dragon, is one, but the shadow of his wings on the mountain
sward shifts and changes and veers.  When you think you have set
up a standard for Tao:  when you imagine you have grasped it in
you hands:--how fleet it is to vanish!  "The man of Tao,"  said
the fisherman of the Mi-lo to Ch'u Yuan, "does not quarrel with
his surroundings, but adapts himself to them";--and perhaps there
you have the best possible explanation of the nature of those
Great souls who come from time to time to save the world.

I think we take the Buddha as the type of them; and expect not
only a life and character that _we can recognise_ as flawless,
but also a profundity of revelation in the philosophy and ethics.
But if no two blades of grass are alike, much less are two human
Souls; and in these Great Ones, it is the picture of Souls we
are given.  When we think that if all men were perfect, all would
be alike, we err with a wide mistake.  The nearer you get to the
Soul, and the more perfect is the expression of it, the less is
there monotony or similarity; and almost the one thing you may
posit about any avatar is, that he will be a surprise. Tom and
Dick and Harry are alike:  'pipe and stick young men'; 'pint and
steak young men'; they get born and marry and die, and the grass
grows over them with wondrous alikeness; but when the Masters of
Men come, all the elements are cast afresh.

Everyone has a place to fill in the universal scheme; he has a
function to perform, that none else can perform; a _just what he
can do,_--which commonly he falls far short of doing.  When he
does it, fully and perfectly, then he is on the road of progress;
that road opens up to him; and presently, still exercising the
fulness of his being, he becomes a completeness, like Heaven and
Earth; their 'equal,' in the Chinese phrase; or as we say, a
Perfect Man or Adept.  Does anyone know what place in history he
is to fill?  I cannot tell; I suppose an Adept, incarnated,
would be too busy filling it to have time or will to question.
But here perhaps we have the nearest thing possible to a standard
for measuring them; and here the virtue of Taoism, and one
greatest lesson we may learn from it.  Are we to judge by the
impressiveness of the personality?  No; the Man of Tao is not a
personality at all.  He makes one to use, but is not identified
with it; his personality will not be great or small, or
enchanting or repellent, but simply adapted to the needs.--Is it
the depth and fulness of the philosophv he gives out? No; it may
be wiser and also more difficult to keep silent on main points,
than to proclaim them broadcast; and for this end he may elect
even not to know (with conscious brain-mind) too much;--not to
have the deep things within his normal consciousness.  But he
comes into the world to meet a situation; to give the course of
history a twist in a desired direction; and the sign and measure
of his greatness is, it seems to me, his ability to meet the
situation at all points, and to do just what is necessary for the
giving of the twist,--no more and no less.  And then, of course,
it takes a thousand years or so before you can judge.  One
is not speaking of common statesmen, who effect quick changes
that are no changes at all, but of the Men who shepherd the
Host of Souls.

I like to imagine, before the birth of Such a One, a consultation
of the Gods upon the Mountain of Heaven.  A synod of the kind
(for China) would have taken place in the sixth century B. C.,
no doubt; because in those days certainly there was a "decline
of virtue and an insurrection of vice and injustice in the
world."  Transport yourselves then, say in the year 552, to the
peaks of Tien Shan of Kuen Lun, or high Tai-hsing, or the grand
South Mountain; and see the Pantheon assembled.

They look down over Chu Hia; they know that in three centuries
or so a manvantara will be beginning there, and grow anxious lest
anything has been left undone to insure its success. They note
Laotse (whom they sent some fifty years earlier) at his labors;
and consider, what those labors would achieve for the Black-
haired People.  He would bring light to the most excellent minds;
the God of Light said, "I have seen to that."  He would in time
waken the lute-strings of the Spirit, and set Chu Hia all a-song;
the God of Music said, "I have seen to that."  They foresaw Wu
Taotse and Ma Yuan; they foresaw Ssu-k'ung T'u and the Banished
Angel; and asked "Is it not enough?"  And the thought grew
on them that it was not enough, till they sighed with the
apprehensions that troubled them.  Only a few minds among the
millions, they foresaw, would have proper understanding of Tao.

Now, Gods of whatever land they may be, there are those three
Bardic Brothers amongst them:  He of Light, who awakens vision;
He of Song, who rouses up the harmonies and ennobling vibrations;
and He of Strength, whose gloves hold all things fast, and
neither force nor slipperiness will avail against them.  It was
this third of them, Gwron, who propounded the plan that satisfied
the Pantheon.  I will send one among them, with the "Gloves for
his treasure," said he.

They considered how it would be with Such a One:  going among
men as the Gods' Messenger, and with those two Gloves for his
treasure.--"This way will it be," they said.  "Not having the
treasure of the God of Light, he will seem as one without vision
of the God-world or remembrance whence he came. Not having the
treasure of the God of Music, he will awaken little song with the
Bards. But having the Gloves, he will hold the gates of hell
shut, so far as shut they may be, through all the cycle that
is coming."

With that the council ended. But Plenydd God of Light and Vision
thought:  "Though my treasure has gone with the Old Philosopher,
and I cannot endow this man with it, I will make him Such a One
as can be seen by all men; I will throw my light on him, that he
may be an example through the age of ages." And Alawn God of
Music thought:  "Though my lute has gone with Laotse, I will
confer boons on this one also. Such a One he shall be, as draws
no breath but to tunes of my playing; the motions of his mind,
to my music, shall be like the motions of the ordered stars."--
And they both thought:  "It will be easy for me to do as much as
this, with his having the Gloves of Gwron on his hands."

At that time K'ung Shuhliang Heih, Commander of the district
of Tsow, in the Marquisate of Lu in Shantung, determined
to marry again.

Now China is a vast democracy:  the most democratic country in
the world.  Perhaps I shall come to proving that presently; for
the moment I must ask you to let it pass on the mere statement,
satisfied that it is true.  Despite this radical democracy, then,
she has had two noble families.  One is descended from a famous
Patriot-Pirate of recent centuries, known to Westerners as
Koxinga; with it we have no concern.  The other is to be found
in the town of K'iuh-fow in Shantung, in the ancient Marquisate
of Lu.  There are about fifty thousand members of it, all bearing
the surname K'ung; its head has the title of 'Duke by Imperial
Appointment and hereditary right'; and, much prouder still,
'Continuator of the Sage.'

Dukes of England sometimes trace their descent from men who came
over with William the Conqueror:  a poor eight centuries is a
thing to be proud of.  There may be older families in France,
Italy, and elsewhere.  Duke K'ung traces his, through a line of
which every scion appears more of less in history, to the son of
this K'ung Shuhliang Heih in the sixth century B.C.; who in turn
traced his, through a line of which every scion appeared in
history, and all, with one possible exception, very honorably, to
a member of the Imperial House of Shang who, in 1122 B.C., on the
fall of that house, was created Duke of Sung in Honan by the
first of the Chows.  The House of Shang held the throne for some
five centuries, beginning with Tang the Comnpleter in 1766, who
traced his descent from the Yellow Emperor in mythological
times.  Duke K'ung, then, is descended in direct male line from
sovereigns who reigned beyond the horizon of history,--at the
latest, near the beginning of the third millennium B.C.  The
family has been distinguished for nearly five thousand years.

The matter is not unimportant; since we are to talk of a member
of this family.  We shall understand him better for remembering
the kind of heredity that lay behind him:  some seventy
generations of nobility, all historic.  Only one royal house in
the world now is as old as his was then:  that of Japan.

Some generations before, the K'ung family had lost their duchy of
Sung and emigrated to Lu; where, in the early part of the sixth
century, its head, this Shuhliang Heih, had made a great name for
himself as a soldier.  He was now a widower, and seventy years
old; and saw himself compelled to make a second marriage, or the
seventy illustrious generations of his ancestors would be
deprived of a posterity to offer them sacrifices.  So he
approached a gentlman of the Yen family, who had three eligible
daughters.  To these Yen put the case, leaving to them to decide
which should marry K'ung.--"Though old and austere,"  said he,
"he is of the high descent, and you need have no fear of him."
Chingtsai, the youngest, answered that it was for their father to
choose.--"Then you shall marry him," said Yen.  She did; and
when her son was to be born, she was warned in a dream to make
pilgrimage to a cave on Mount Ne.  There the spirits of the
mountain attended; there were signs and portents in the heavens
at the nativity.  The _k'e-lin,_ a beast out of the mythologies,
appeared to her; and she tied a white ribbon about its single
horn.  It is a creature that appears only when things of splendid
import are to happen.

Three years after, the father died, leaving his family on the
borders of poverty. At six, Ch'iu, the child, a boy of serious
earnest demeanor, was teaching his companions to play at
arranging, according to the rites, toy sacrificial vessels on a
toy altar.  Beyond this, and that they were poor, and that he
doted on his mother--who would have deserved it,--we know little
of his boyhood.  "At fifteen,"  he tells us himself, "his mind
was bent on learning."  Nothing in the way of studies, seems to
have come amiss to him; of history, and ritual, and poetry, he
came to know all that was to be known.  He loved music, theory
and practice; held it to be sacred:  "not merely one of the
refinements of life, but a part of life itself."  It is as well
to remember this; and that often, in after life, he turned
dangerous situations by breaking into song; and that his lute
was his constant companion.  He used to say that a proper study
of poetry--he was not himself a poet, though he compiled a great
anthology of folk-poems later--would leave the mind without a
single depraved thought.  Once he said to his son:  "If you do
not learn the Odes, you will not be fit to talk to."  "Poetry
rouses us," said he, "courtesy upholds us; music is our crown."
You are, then, to see in him no puritan abhorring beauty, but a
man with artistic perceptions developed. At what you might call
the other pole of knowledge, he was held to know more about the
science of war than any man living; and I have no doubt he did.
If he had consented to use or speak about or let others use that
knowledge, he might have been a great man in his day; but he
never would.

At nineteen, according to the custom, he married; and soon
afterwards accepted minor official appointments:  Keeper of the
Granaries, then Superintendent of the Public Parks in his native
district.  He made a name for himself by the scrupulous discharge
of his duties, that came even to the ears of the Marquis; who,
when his son was born, sent the young father a complimentary
present of a carp.--It would have been two or three years before
the beginning of the last quarter of the century when he felt the
time calling to him, and voices out of the Eternal; and threw up
his superintendentship to open a school.

Not an ordinary school by any means.  The Pupils were not
children, but  young men of promise and an inquiring mind; and
what he had to teach them was not the ordinary curriculum, but
right living, the right ordering of social life, and the right
government of states.  They were to pay; but to pay according to
their means and wishes; and he demanded intelligence from them;
--no swelling of the fees would serve instead.--"I do not open the
truth," said he, "to one not eager after knowledge; nor do I
teach those unanxious to explain themselves.  When I have
presented one corner of a subject, and the student cannot learn
from it the other three for himself, I do not repeat the lesson."
He lectured to them, we read, mainly on history and poetry,
deducing his lessons in life from these.

His school was a great success.  In five years he had acquired
some two thousand pupils:  seventy or eighty of them, as he said,
"men of extraordinary ability."  It was that the Doors of the
Lodge had opened, and its force was flowing through him in Lu, as
it was through the Old Philosopher in Honanfu.--By this time he
had added archery to his own studies, and (like William Q. Judge)
become proficient.  Also he had taken a special course in music
theory under a very famous teacher.  "At thirty he stood firm."

Two of his disciples were members of the royal family; and
Marquis Chao regarded him with favor, as the foremost educationist
in the state.  He had an ambition to visit the capital (of
China); where, as no where else, ritual might be studied;
where, too, was Laotse, with whom he longed to confer.  Marquis
Chao, hearing of this, provided him with the means; and he
went up with a band of his pupils.  There at Loyang, which is
Honanfu, we see him wandering rapt through palaces and temples,
examining the sacrificial vessels, marveling at the ancient art
of Shang and Chow.  But for a few vases, it is all lost.

He did interview Laotse; we cannot say whether only once or more
often.  Nor, I think, do we know what passed; the accounts we
get are from the pen of honest _Ben Trovato; Vero,_ the modest,
had but little hand in them.  We shall come to them later.

And now that he stands before the world a Teacher, we may drop
his personal name, K'ung Ch'iu, and call him by the title to
which paeans of praise have been swelling through all the ages
since:  K'ung Futse, K'ung the Master; latinized, Confucius.  It
is a name that conveys to you, perhaps, some associations of
priggishness and pedantry:  almost whereever you see him written
of you find suggestions of the sort.  Forgo them at once:  they
are false utterly.  Missionaries have interpreted him to the
West; who have worked hard to show him something less than the
Nazarene.  They have set him in a peculiar light; and others
have followed them.  Perhaps no writer except and until Dr.
Lionel Giles (whose interpretation, both of the man and his
doctrine, I shall try to give you), has shown him to us as he
was, so that we can understand why he has stood the Naional Hero,
the Savior and Ideal Man of all those millions through all
these centuries.

We have been told again and again that his teaching was wholly
unspiritual; that he knew nothing of the inner worlds; never
mentions the Soul, or 'God'; says no word to lighten for you the
"dusk within the Holy of holies."  He was all for outwardness,
they say:  a thorough externalist; a ritualist cold and
unmagnetic.--It is much what his enemies said in his own day;
who, and not himself, provide the false-interpreters with their
weapons.  But think of the times, and you may understand.  How
would the missionaries feel, were Jesus translated to the Chinese
as a fine man in some respects--considering--but, unfortunately!
too fond of the pleasures of the table; "a gluttonous man
and a winebibber "?

They were stirring times, indeed; when all boundaries were in
flux, and you needed a new atlas three times a year.  Robbers
would carve themselves new principalities overnight; kingdoms
would arise, and vanish with the waning of a moon.  What would
this, or any other country, become, were law, order, the police
and every restraining influence made absolutely inefficient?
Were California one state today; a dozen next week; in July six
or seven, and next December but a purlieu to Arizona?--Things,
heaven knows, are bad enough as they are; there is no dearth of
crime and cheatery.  Still, the police and the legal system do
stand between us and red riot and ruin.  In China they did not;
the restraints had been crumbling for two or three centuries.
Human nature, broadly speaking, is much of a muchness in all
lands and ages:  I warrant if you took the center of this world's
respectability, which I should on the whole put in some suburb of
London;--I warrant that if you relieved Clapham,--whose crimes,
says Kipling very wisely, are 'chaste in Martaban,'--of police
and the Pax Britannica for a hundred years or so, lurid Martaban
would have little pre-eminence left to brag about.  The class
that now goes up primly and plugly to business in the City day by
day would be cutting throats a little; they would be making life
quite interesting.  Their descendants, I mean.  It would take
time; Mother Grundy would not be disthroned in a day.  But it
would come; because men follow the times, and not the Soul; and
are good as sheep are, but not as heroes. So in Chow China.

But the young Confucius knew his history.  He looked back from
that confusion to a wise Wu Wang and Duke of Chow; to a Tang the
Completer, whose morning bath-tub was inscribed with this motto
from _The New Way:_  "If at any time in his life a man can make a
new man of himself, why not every morning?" Most of all he
looked back to the golden and sinless age of Yao and Shun and Yu,
as far removed from him, nearly, as pre-Roman Britain is from us:
he saw them ruling their kingdom as a strong benevolent father
rules his house.  In those days men had behaved themselves:
natural virtue had expressed itself in the natural way.  In good
manners; in observation of the proprieties, for example.--In
that wild Martaban of Chow China, would not a great gentleman of
the old school (who happened also to be a Great Teacher) have
seen a virtue in even quiet Claphamism, that we cannot?  It was
not the time for Such a One to slight the proprieties and
'reasonable conventions of life.'  The truth is, the devotion of
his disciples has left us minute pictures of the man, so that we
see him ... particular as to the clothes he wore; and from this
too the West gathers material for its charge of externalism.
Well; and if he accepted the glossy top-hats and black Prince
Albert coats;--only with him they were caps and robes of azure,
carnation, yellow, black, or white; this new fashion of wearing
red he would have none of:--I can see nothing in it but this:
the Great Soul had chosen the personality it should incarnate in,
with an eye to the completeness of the work it should do; and
seventy generations of noble ancestry would protest, even in the
matter of clothing, against red riot and ruin and Martaban.

He is made to cite the 'Superior Man' as the model of excellence;
and that phrase sounds to us detestably priggish.  In the
_Harvard Classics_ it is translated (as well as may be) 'true
gentleman,'  or  'princely man'; in which is no priggish ring
at all.  Again, he is made to address his disciples as "My
Children,"  at which, too, we naturally squirm a little:  what he
really called them was 'My boys,'  which sounds natural and
affectionate enough.  Supposing the Gospels were translated into
Chinese by someone with the gluttonous-man-and-winebibber bias;
--what, I wonder, would he put for _Amen, amen lego humin?_  Not
"Verily, verily I say unto you"!

But I must go on with his life.

Things had gone ill in in Lu during his absence:  threee great
clan chieftains had stopped fighting among themselves to fight
instead against their feudal superior, and Marquis Chao had been
exiled to Ts'i.  It touched Confucius directly; his teaching on
such matters had been peremptory:  he would 'rectify names':
have the prince prince, and the people his subjects:--he would
have law and order in the state, or the natural harmony of things
was broken.  As suggested above, he was very much a man of mark
in Lu; and a protest from him,--which should be forth-coming--
could hardly go unnoticed.  With a band of disciples he followed
his marquis into Ts'i:  it is in Chihli, north of Lu, and was
famous then for its national music.  On the journey he heard Ts'i
airs sung, and 'hurried forward.'   One of the first things he
did on arriving at the capital was to attend a concert (or
something equivalent); and for three months thereafter, as a
sign of thanksgiving, he ate no flesh.  "I never dreamed," said
he, "that music could be so wonderful."

The fame of his Raja-Yoga School (that was what it was) had gone
abroad, and Duke Ching of Ts'i received him well;--offered him a
city with its revenues; but the offer was declined.  The Duke
was impressed; half inclined to turn Confucianist; wished to
retain him with a pension, to have him on hand in case of need;--
but withal he was of doubtful hesitating mind about it, and
allowed his prime minister to dissuade him.  "These scholars,"
said the latter, "are impractical, and cannot be imitated.
They are haughty and self-opinionated, and will never rest
content with an inferior position. Confucius has a thousand
peculiarities";--this is the gluttonous-man-and-winebibber
saying, which the missionary interpreters have been echoing
since;--"it would take ages to exhaust all he knows about the
ceremonies of going up and down. This is not the time to examine
into his rules of propriety; your people would say you were
neglecting them."--When next Duke Ching was urged to follow
Confucius, he answered:  "I am too old to adopt his doctrines."
The Master returned to Lu; lectured to his pupils, compiled the
Books of Odes and of History; and waited for the disorders
to pass.

Which in time they did, more or less.  Marquis Ting came to the
throne, and made him chief magistrate of the town of Chungtu.

Now was the time to prove his theories, and show whether he was
the Man to the core, that he had been so assiduously showing
himself, you may say, on the rind.  Ah ha! now surely, with hard
work before him, this scholar, theorist, conventional formalist,
ritualist, and what else you may like to call him, will be put to
shame,--shown up empty and foolish before the hard-headed men of
action of his age.  Who, indeed,--the hard-headed men of action--
have succeeded in doing precisely nothing but to make confusion
worse confounded; how much less, then, will this Impractical One
do!  Let us watch him, and have our laugh...--On the wrong side
of your faces then; for lo now, miracles are happening!  He
takes control; and here at last is one city in great Chu Hia
where crime has ceased to be.  How does he manage it?  The
miracle looks but the more miraculous as you watch.  He frames
rules for everything; insists on the proprieties; morning,
noon, and night holds up an example, and, says he, relies on the
power of that.--Example?  Tush, he must be beheading right
and left!--Nothing of the sort; he is all against capital
punishment, and will have none of it.  But there is the fact:
you can leave your full purse in the streets of Chung-tu, and
pick it up unrifled when you pass next; you can pay your just
price, and get your just measure for it, fearing no cheateries;
High Cost of Living is gone; corners in this and that are no
more; graft is a thing you must go elsewhere to look for;--there
is none of it in Chung-tu.  And graft, let me say, was a thing as
proper to the towns of China then, as to the graftiest modern
city you might mention.  The thing is inexplicable--but perfectly
attested.  Not quite inexplicable, either:  he came from the
Gods, and had the Gloves of Gwron on his hands:  he had the
wisdom you cannot fathom, which meets all events and problems as
they come, and finds their solution in its superhuman self, where
the human brain-mind finds only dense impenetrability.--Marquis
Ting saw and wondered.--"Could you do this for the whole state?"
he asked.--"Surely; and for the whole empire," said Confucius.
The Marquis made him, first Assistant-Superintendent of Works,
then Minister of Crime.

And now you shall hear Chapter X of the _Analects,_ to show you
the outer man.  All these details were noted down by the love of
his disciples, for whom nothing was too petty to be recorded;
and if we cannot read them without smiling, there is this to
remember:  they have suffered sea-change on their way to us:
sea-change and time-change.  What you are to see really is:  (1)
a great Minister of State, utterly bent on reproving and
correcting the laxity of his day, performing the ritual duties of
his calling--as all other duties--with a high religious sense of
their antiquity and dignity; both for their own sake, and to set
an example.  what would be thought of an English Archbishop of
Canterbury who behaved familiarly or jocularly at a Coronation
Service?--(2) A gentleman of the old school, who insists on
dressing well and quietly, according to his station.  That is
what he would appear now, in any grade of society, and among men
the least capable of recognising his inner greatness:  'race' is
written in every feature of his being; set him in any modern
court, and with half an eye you would see that his family was a
thousand years or so older than that of anyone else present, and
had held the throne at various times.  Here is a touch of the
great gentleman:  he would never fish with a net, or shoot at a
bird on the bough; it was unsportsmanlike.  (3) A very natural
jovial man, not above "changing countenance" when fine meats were
set on his table:--a thing that directly contradicts the idea of
a cold, ever play-acting Confucius.  A parvenu must be very
careful; but a scion of the House of Shang, a descendant of the
Yellow Emperor, could unbend and be jolly without loss of
dignity;--and, were he a Confucius, would.  "A gentleman," said
he, "is calm and spacious"; he was himself, according to the
_Analects,_  friendly, yet dignified; inspired awe, but not
fear; was respectful, but easy. He divided mankind into three
classes:  Adepts or Sages; true Gentlemen; and the common run.
He never claimed to belong to the first, though all China knows
well that he did belong to it.  He even considered that he fell
short of the ideal of the second; but as to that, we need pay no
attention to his opinion.  Here, then, is Chapter X:

"Amongst his own countryfolk Confucius wore a homely look, like
one who has no word to say.  In the ancestral temple and at court
his speech was full, but cautious.  At court he talked frankly to
men of low rank, winningly to men of high rank.  In the Marquis's
presence he looked intent and solemn.

"When the Marquis bade him receive guests, his face seemed to
change, his knees to bend. He bowed left and right to those
behind him, straightened his robes in front and behind, and sped
forward, his elbows spread like wings. When the guest had left,
he always reported it, saying:  'The guest has ceased to
look back.'

"Entering the palace gate he stooped, as though it were too low
for him. He did not stand in the middle of the gate, nor step on
the threshold.  Passing the throne, his face seemed to change,
his knees to bend; and he spoke with bated breath.  Mounting the
royal dais, he lifted his robes, bowed his back and masked his
breathing till it seemed to stop.  Coming down, his face relaxed
below the first step, and bore a pleased look.  From the foot of
the steps he sped forward, his elbows spread like wings; and
when again in his seat, he looked intent as before.  He held his
hands not higher than in bowing, nor lower than in giving a
present.  He wore an awed look and dragged his feet, as though
they were fettered."

Which means that he felt the royal office to be sacred, as the
seat of authority and government, the symbol and representative
of heaven, the fountain of order:  in its origin, divine.  He
treated Marquis Ting as if he had been Yao, Shun, or Yu; or
rather, the Marquis's throne and office as if one of these had
held them.  There is the long history of China to prove he was
wise in the example he set.

"When presenting royal gifts his manner was formal; but he was
cheerful at the private audience.--This gentleman was never
arrayed in maroon or scarlet; even at home he would not wear red
or purple.  In hot weather he wore unlined linen clothes, but
always over other garments.  Over lambskin he wore black; over
fawn he wore white; over fox-skin he wore yellow.  At home he
wore a long fur robe with the right sleeve short.  He always had
his night-gown half as long again as his body.  In the house he
wore fox- or badger-skin for warmth.  When out of mourning there
was nothing wanting from his girdle.  Except for court-dress, he
was sparing of stuff.  He did not wear lamb's wool, or a black
cap, on a visit of condolence.  On the first day of the moon he
always went to court in court dress.  On fast days he always
donned clothes of pale hue, changed his food, and moved from his
wonted seat.  He did not dislike his rice cleaned with care, nor
his hash copped small.  He would not eat sour or mouldy rice,
putrid fish, or tainted meat.  Aught discolored or high, badly
cooked, or out of season, he would not eat.  He would not eat
what was badly cut, or a dish with the wrong sauce.  A choice of
meats could not tempt him to eat more than he had a relish for.
To wine alone he set no limit; but he never drunk more than
enough.  He did not drink brought wine, or eat ready-dried meat.
He did not eat much.  Ginger was never missing at his table.

"After sacrifice at the palace he would not keep the meat
over-night; at home, not more than three days.  If kept longer,
it was not eaten.  He did not talk at meals, nor in bed.  Though
there were but coarse rice and vegetables, he made his offering
with all reverence.  If his mat were not straight, he would not
sit down.  When drinking with the villagers, when those with
slaves left, he left too.  At the village exorcisms he donned
court dress, and stood on the eastern steps.

"When sending inquiries to another land, he bowed twice and saw
his messenger out.  On K'ang's making him a present of medicine,
he accepted it with a low bow, saying:  'I do not know; I dare
not taste it.'  His stables having been burnt, the Master, on his
return from court, said:  'Is anyone hurt?'  He did not ask after
the horses."

Set down in perfect good faith to imply that his concern was for
the sufferings of others, not for his personal loss:  and without
perception of the fact that it might imply callousness as to the
suffering of the horses.  We are to read the recorder's mind, and
not the Master's, in that omission.--

"When the marquis sent him baked meat, he set his mat straight,
and tasted it first.  When the Marquis sent him raw meat, he had
it cooked for sacrifice.  When the Marquis sent him a living
beast, he had it reared.  When dining in attendance on the
Marquis, the latter made the offering; Confucius ate of things
first.  On the Marquis coming to see him in sickness, he turned
his face to the east and had his court dress spread across him,
with the girdle over it.  When summoned by the Marquis, he
walked, without waiting for his carriage.  On entering the Great
Temple, he asked how each thing was done.  When a friend died who
had no home, he said:  'It is for me to bury him.'  When a friend
sent a gift, even of a carriage and horses, he did not bow.  He
only bowed for sacrificial meat.  He would not lie in a bed like
a corpse.  At home he unbent.

"On meeting a mourner, were he a friend, his face changed.  Even
in every-day clothes, when he met anyone in full dress, or a
blind man, his face grew staid.  When he met men in mourning, he
bowed over the cross-bar.  Before choice meats he rose with a
changed look.  At sharp thunder or fierce wind, his countenance
changed.  In mounting his chariot he stood straight and grasped
the cord.  When in his chariot, he did not look round, speak
fast, or point."

There you have one side of the outer man; and the most has
been made of it.  "Always figuring, always posturing," we
hear.  I merely point to the seventy noble generations, the
personality made up of that courtly heredity, whose smallest quite
spontaneous acts and habits seemed to men worth recording, as
showing how the perfect gentleman behaved:  a model.  Another
side is found in the lover of poetry, the devotee of music, the
man of keen and intense affections.  Surely, if a _poseur,_ he
might have posed when bereavement touched him; he might have
assumed a high philosophic calm.  But no; he never bothered to;
even though reproached for inconsistency.  His mother died when
he was twenty-four; and he broke through all rites and customs
by raising a mound over her grave; that, as he said, he might
have a place to turn to and think of as his home whereever he
might be on his wanderings.  He mourned for her the orthodox
twenty-seven months; then for five days longer would not touch
his lute.  On the sixth day he took it and began to play; but
when he tried to sing, broke down and wept.  One is surprised;
but there is no posing about it.  Yen Hui was his saint John, the
Beloved disciple.  "When Yen Hui died," we read, "the Master
cried, 'Woe is me!  I am undone of Heaven!  I am undone of
Heaven!'  When Yen Hui died the Master gave way to grief.  The
disciples said:  'Sir, you are giving way.'--'Am I giving way?'
said he.  'If for this man I do not give way, for whom shall I
give way?... Hui treated me as a son his father; I have failed
to treat him as a father his son.'"  Confucius was old then, and
near his own death...  But what I think you will recognise in his
speech, again and again, is the peculiarly spontaneous... indeed
impetuous ... ring of it.  He had that way of repeating a
sentence twice that marks a naturally impetuous man.--Of his
sense of humor I shall speak later.

He dearly loved his disciples, and was homesick when away from
them.--"My batch of boys, ambitious and hasty--I must go home to
them! I must go home to them!"  said he.  Once when he was very
ill, Tse Lu "moved the disciples to act as ministers":--to behave
to him as if he were a king and they his ministers.--"I know, I
know!" said Confucius; "Tse Lu has been making believe. This show
of ministers, when I have none,--whom will it deceive? Will it
deceive Heaven?  I had rather die in your arms, my boys, than be
a king and die in the arms of my ministers."--"Seeing the
disciple Min standing at his side in winning strength, Tse Lu
with warlike front, Jan Yu and Tse Kung fresh and strong, the
Master's heart was glad," we read.  He considered what he calls
'love' the highest state,--the condition of the Adept or Sage;
but that other thing that goes by the same name,--of that he
would not speak;--nor of crime,--nor of feats of strength,
--nor of doom,--nor of ghosts and spirits. Anything that
implied a forsaking of middle lines, a losing of the balance,
extravagance,--he abhorred.--And now back to that other side of
him again:  the Man of Action.

The task that lay before him was to reform the state of Lu.
Something was rotten in it; it needed some reforming.--The
rotten thing, to begin with, was Marquis Ting himself; who was
of such stuff as Confucius referred to when he said:  "You cannot
carve rotten wood."  But brittle and crumbling as it was, it
would serve his turn for the moment; it would give him the
chance to show twenty-five Chinese centuries the likeness of an
Adept at the head of a state.  So it should be proved to them
that Such a One--they call him _Such a One_ generally, I
believe, to avoid the light repetition of a name grown sacred--is
no impractical idealist merely, but a Master of Splendid
Successes here in this world:  that the Way of Heaven is the way
that succeeds on earth--if only it be honestly tried.

Ting was by no means master in his own marquisate.  As in England
under Stephen, bold bad robber barons had fortified their castles
everywhere, and from these strongholds defied the government.
The mightiest magnate of all was the Chief of Clan Chi, who
ordered things over his royal master's head, and was very much a
power for the new Minister of Crime to reckon with.  A clash came
before long.  Ex-marquis Chao--he that had been driven into
exile--died in Ts'i; and his body was sent home for burial with
his ancestors.  Chi, who had been chief among those responsible
for the dead man's exile, by way of insulting the corpse, gave
orders that it should be buried outside the royal cemetery; and
his orders were carried out.  Confucius heard of it, and was
indignant.  To have had the corpse exhumed and reburied would
have been a new indignity, I suppose; therefore he gave orders
that the cemetery should be enlarged so as to include the grave;
--and went down and saw it done.--"I have done this on your
behalf,"  he informed Chi, "to hide the shame of your disloyalty.
To insult the memory of a dead prince is against all decency."
The great man gnashed his teeth; but the Minister of Crime's
action stood.

He turned his attention to the robber-barons, and reduced them.
I do not know how; he was entirely against war; but it is
certain that in a very short time those castles were leveled with
the ground, and the writ of the Marquis ran through Lu.  He
hated capital punishment; but signed the death warrant for the
worst of the offenders;--and that despite the protest of some of
his disciples, who would have had him consistent above all
things.  But his back was up, and the man was executed.  One
makes no excuse for it; except perhaps, to say that such an
action, isolated, and ordained by Such a One, needs no excuse.
He was in the habit of fulfilling his duty; and duty may at times
present itself in strange shapes.  It was a startling thing to
do; and Lu straight-way, as they say, sat right up and began to
take concentrated notice of a situation the like of which had not
been seen for centuries.

He had the final decision in all legal cases. A father brought a
charge against his son; relying on the bias of the Minister
whose life had been so largely given to preaching filial piety.
"If you had brought up your son properly," said Confucius, "this
would not have happened"; and astounded plaintiff, defendant,
and the world at large by putting both in prison for three
months.  In a year or so he had done for Lu what he had done for
Chung-tu during his magistracy.

By this time Ts'i and Sung and Wei and the whole empire were
taking notice too.  There was actually a state where crime was
unknown; where law ruled and the government was strong, and yet,
the people more than contented; a state--and such a state!--
looming ahead as the probable seat of a Bretwalda.  Lu with the
hegemony!  This old orthodox strict Lu!--this home of lost
causes!--this back number, and quaint _chinoiserie_ to be laughed
at!--As if Morgan Shuster had carried on his work in Persia until
Persia had become of a strength to threaten the world.  Lu was
growing strong; and Ts'i--renowned military Ts'i--thought she
ought to be doing something.  Thus in our own time, whenever
somnolent obsolete Turkey tried to clean her house, Russia,
land-hungry and looking to a Thanksgiving Dinner presently, felt
a call to send down emissaries, and--see that the cleaning should
not be done.

Duke Ching of Ts'i, at the first attempt, bungled his plans
badly.  He would not strike at the root of things, Confucius;
perhaps retained too much respect for him; perhaps simply did
not understand; but at that harmless mutton Marquis Ting who
Confucius had successfully camouflaged up to look like a lion.
To that end he formally sought an alliance with Lu, and the Lu
Minister of Crime concurred.  He intended that there should be
more of these alliances.

An altar was raised on the frontier, where the two princes were
to meet and sign the treaty.  Duke Ching had laid his plans; but
they did not include the presence of Confucius at the altar as
Master or the Ceremonies on the side of Lu.  There he was,
however; and after all, it could hardly make much difference.
The preliminary rites went forward.  Suddenly, a roll of drums;
a rush of 'savages' out of ambush;--there were savage tribes in
those parts;--confusion; the Marquis's guard, as the Duke's, is
at some little distance; and clearly it is for the Marquis that
these 'savages' are making.  But Confucius is there.  He steps
between the kidnappers and his master, "with elbows spread like
wings" hustles the latter off into safety; takes hold of the
situation; issues sharp orders to the savages--who are of course
Ts'i troops in disquise:  _Attention!  About face!--Double
march!_--snaps out the words of command in right military style,
right in the presence of their own duke, who stands by amazed and
helpless;--and off they go.  Then spaciously clears the matter
up.  Finds, no doubt, that it is all a mistake; supplies, very
likely, an easy and acceptable explanation to save Ching's face;
shortly has all things peaceably _in status quo._  Then brings
back his marquis, and goes forward with the treaty; but now as
Master of the Ceremonies and something more.  There had been a
land question between Lu and Ts'i:  Lu territory seized some time
since by her strong neighbor, and the cause of much soreness on
the one hand and exultation on the other.  By the time that
treaty had been signed Duke Ching of Ts'i had ceded back the land
to Marquis Ting of Lu,--a thing assuredly he had never dreamed of
doing; and an alliance had been established between the two
states.  Since the Duke of Chow's time, Lu had never stood
so high.

Was our man a prig at all?  Was he a pedant?  have those who have
sedulously spread that report of him in the West told the truth
about him?  Or--hath a pleasant little lie or twain served
their turn?

Duke Ching went home and thought things over.  He had learned his
lesson:  that ting was but a camouflage lion, and by no means the
one to strike at, if business was to be done.  He devised a plan,
sweet in it simplicity, marvelous in its knowledge of what we are
pleased to call 'human' nature.  He ransacked his realm for
beautiful singing and dancing girls, and sent the best eighty he
could find to his dear friend and ally of Lu.  Not to make the
thing too pointed, he added a hundred and twenty fine horses--
with their trappings. What could be more appropriate than
such a gift?

It worked.  Ting retired to his harem, and day after day passed
over a Lu unlighted by his countenance.  Government was at a
standstill; the great Minister of Crime could get nothing done.
The Annual Sacrifice was at hand; a solemnity Confucius hoped
would remind Ting of realities and bring him to his  right mind.
According to the ritual, a portion of the offering should be sent
to each high official of the state:  none came to Confucius.  Day
after day he waited; but Ting's character was quite gone:  the
lion-skin had fallen off, and the native egregious muttonhood or
worse stood revealed.--"Master," said Tse Lu, "it is time you
went."  But he was very loath to go.  At last he gathered his
disciples, and slowly went out from the city.  He lingered much
on the way, looking back often, still hoping for sight of the
messenger who should recall him.  But none came.  That was
in 497.

The old century had ended about the time he took office; and
with it, of course, the last quarter in which, as always, the
Doors of the Lodge were open, and the spiritual influx pouring
into the world.  So the effort of that age had its consummation
and fine flower in the three years of his official life:  to be
considered a triumph.  Now, Laotse had long since ridden away
into the West; the Doors were shut; the tides were no longer
flowing; and the God's great Confucius remained in a world that
knew him not.  As for holding office and governing states, he had
done all that was necessary.




XI.  CONFUCIUS THE HERO


He had done enough in the way of holding office and governing
states.  Laotse had taught that of old time, before Tao was lost,
the Yellow Emperor sat on his throne and all the world was
governed without knowing it.  Confucius worked out the doctrine
thus:  True government is by example; given the true ruler, and
he will have the means of ruling at his disposal, and they will
be altogether different from physical force.  'Example' does not
covey it either:  his thought was much deeper.  There is a word
_li_--I get all this from Dr. Lionel Giles--which the egregious
have been egregiously translating 'the rules of propriety'; but
which Confucius used primarily for a state of harmony within the
soul, which should enable beneficent forces from the Infinite to
flow through into the outer world;--whereof a result would also
be, on the social plane, perfect courtesy and politeness, these
the most outward expression of it.  On these too Confucius
insisted which is the very worst you can say about him.--Now, the
ruler stands between Gods and men; let his _li_ be perfect--let
the forces of heaven flow through him unimpeded,--and the people
are regenerated day by day:  the government is by regeneration.
Here lies the secret of all his insistence on loyalty and
filial piety:  the regeneration of society is dependent on the
maintenance of the natural relation between the Ruler who rules--
that is, lets the _li_ of heaven flow through him--and his
people.  They are to maintain such an attitude towards him as
will enable them to receive the _li._  In the family, he is the
father; in the state, he is the king.  In very truth, this is
the Doctrine of the Golden Age, and proof of the profound occult
wisdom of Confucius:  even the (comparatively) little of it that
was ever made practical lifted China to the grand height she has
held.  It is hinted at in the _Bhagavad-Gita:_--"whatsoever is
practised by the most excellent men"; again, it is the Aryan
doctrine of the Guruparampara Chain.  The whole idea is so remote
from modern practice and theory that it must seem to the west
utopian, even absurd; but we have Asoka's reign in India, and
Confucius's Ministry in Lu, to prove its basic truth.  During
that Ministry he had flashed the picture of such a ruler
on to the screen of time:  and it was enough.  China could
never forget.

But if, knowing it to have been enough,--knowing that the hour of
the Open Door had passed, and that he should never see success
again,--he had then and there retired into private life, content
to teach his disciples and leave the stubborn world to save or
damn itself:--enough it would not have been.  He had flashed the
picture on to the screen of time, but it would have faded.
Twenty years of wandering, of indomitability, of disappointment
and of ignoring defeat and failure, lay before him:  in which to
make his creation, not a momentary picture, but a carving in jade
and granite and adamant.  It is not the ever-victorious and
successful that we take into the adyta of our hearts.  It is the
poignancy of heroism still heroism in defeat,--

     "unchanged, though fallen on evil years,"

--that wins admittance there.  Someone sneered at Confucius, in his
latter years, as the man who was always trying to do the
impossible.  He was; and the sneerer had no idea what high
tribute he was paying him.  It is because he was that:  the hero,
the flaming idealist:  that his figure shines out so clear and
splendidly.  His outer attempts--to make a Man of Marquis This
or Duke That, and a model state of Lu or Wei--these were
but carvings in rotten wood, foredoomed to quick failure.
All the material of the world was rotten wood:  he might have
learned that lesson;--only there are lessons that Such a One
never learns.  Well; we in turn may learn a lesson from him:
applicable now.  The rotten wood crumbled under his hands time
and again:  under his bodily hands;--but it made no difference to
him.  He went on and on, still hoping to begin his life's work,
and never recognising failure; and by reason and virtue of that,
the hands of his spirit were carving, not in rotten wood, but in
precious jade and adamant spiritual, to endure forever.  On those
inner planes he was building up his Raja-Yoga; which time saw to
it should materialize and redeem his race presently.  Confucius
in the brief moment of his victory illuminated the world indeed;
but Confucius in the long years of his defeat has bowed the
hearts of twenty-five centuries of the Black-haired People.  We
can see this now; I wonder did he see it then?  I mean, had that
certain knowledge and clear vision in his conscious mind, that
was possessed in the divinity of his Soul--as it is in every
Soul.  I imagine not; for in his last days he--the personality--
could give way and weep over the utter failure of his efforts.
One loves him the more for it:  one thinks his grandeur only the
more grand.  It is a very human and at last a very pathetic
figure--this Man that did save his people.

Due west from Lu, and on the road thence to Honanfu the Chow
capital, lay the Duchy of Wei; whither now he turned his steps.
He had no narrow patriotism:  if his own Lu rejected him, he
might still save this foreign state, and through it, perhaps, All
the Chinas.  He was at this time one of the most famous men
alive; and his first experience in Wei might have been thought
to augur well. On the frontier he was met by messengers from a
local Wei official, begging for their master an interview:--
"Every illustrious stranger has granted me one; let me not ask
it of you, Sir, in vain."  Confucius complied; was conducted to
the yamen, and went in, leaving his disciples outside.  To these
the magistrate came out, while the Master was still resting
within.--"Sirs," said he, "never grieve for your Teacher's fall
from office.  His work is but now to begin.  These many years the
empire has been in perilous case; but now Heaven has raised up
Confucius, its tocsin to call the people to awakenment."--A wise
man, that Wei official!

At the capital, Duke Ling received him with all honor, and at
once assigned him a pension equal to the salary he had been paid
as Minister of Crime in Lu.  He even consulted him now and again;
but reserved to himself liberty to neglect the advice asked for.
However, the courtiers intrigued; and before the year was out,
Confucius had taken to his wanderings again:  he would try the
state of Ch'in now, in the far south-east.  "If any prince would
employ me," said he, "within a twelvemonth I should have done
something considerable; in three years the government would
be perfect."

He was to pass through the town of Kwang, in Sung; it had lately
been raided by a robber named Yang Hu, in face and figure
resembling himself. Someone who saw him in the street put it
abroad that Yang Hu was in the town, and followed him to the
house he had taken for the night. Before long a mob had gathered,
intent on vengeance. The situation was dangerous; the mob in no
mood to hear reason;--and as to that, Yang Hu also would have
said that he was not the man they took him for,--very likely
would have claimed to be the renowned Confucius.  The disciples,
as well they might be, were alarmed:  the prospect was, short
shrift for the whole party.--"Boys," said the Master, "do you
think Heaven entrusted the Cause of Truth to me, to let me be
harmed by the towns-men of Kwang? "--The besiegers looked for
protests, and then for a fight.  What they did not look for was
to hear someone inside singing to a lute;--it was that great
musician Confucius.  When he sang and played you stopped to
listen; and so did the Kwang mob now.  They listened, and
wondered, and enjoyed their free concert; then made reasonable
inquiries, and apologies,--and went their ways in peace.

In those South-eastern states there was no prospect for him,
and after a while he returneci to Wei.  He liked Duke Ling
personally, and the liking was mutual; time and again he went
back there, hoping against hope that something might be done,--or
seeing no other horizon so hopeful.  Now Ling had a consort of
some irregular kind:  Nantse, famed for her beauty and brilliance
and wickedness.  Perhaps _ennuyee,_ and hoping for contact with a
mind equal to her own, she was much stirred by the news of
Confucius' return, and sent to him asking an interview.  Such a
request was a characteristic flouting of the conventions on her
part; for him to grant it would be much more so on his.  But he
did grant it; and they conversed, after the custom of the time,
with a screen between, neither seeing the other.  Tse Lu was much
disturbed; considering it all a  very dangerous innovation,
inconsistent in Confucius, and improper.  So in the eyes of the
world it would have seemed.  But Nantse held the Duke, and
Confucius might influence Nantse.  He never let conventions stand
in his way, when there was a chance of doing good work by
breaking them.

One suspects that the lady wished to make her vices respectable
by giving them a seeming backing by incarnate virtue; and that
to this end she brought about the sequel.  Duke Ling was to make
a Progress through the city; and requested Confucius to follow
his carriage in another.  He did so; not knowing that Nantse had
seen to it that she was to be sitting at the Duke's side.
Her position and reputation even in those days needed some
regularizing; and she had chosen this means to do it.  But to
the people, the spectacle was highly symbolic; and Confucius
heard their jeers as he passed:--Flaunting Vice in front,
Slighted Virtue in the rear.--"I have met none," said he, "who
loves virtue more than women."  It was time for him to go; and
now he would try the south again.  In reality, perhaps, it matter
little whither he went or where he stayed:  there was no place
for him anywhere. All that was important was, that he should keep
up the effort.

An official in Sung, one Hwan Tuy, held the roads against him,
accusing him of "a proud air and many desires; an insinuating
habit and a wild will."  From this time on he was subject to
persecution.  The "insinuating habit" reminds one of an old
parrot-cry one has heard:  "She hypnotizes them."  He turned
westward from this opposition, and visited one state, and then
another; in neither was there any disposition to use him.  He
had found no more likely material than Duke Ling of Wei, who at
least was always glad to see and talk with him:--might not be
jade to carve, but was the wood least rotten at hand.  But at
Wei, as usual, there was nothing but disappointment in store.

Pih Hsih, a rebel, was holding a town in Tsin, modern Shansi,
against the king of that state; and now sent messengers inviting
Confucius to visit him.  Tse Lu protested:  had he not always
preached obedience to the Powers that Were, and that the True
Gentleman did not associate with rebels?--"Am I a bitter gourd,"
said Confucius, "to be hung up out of the way of being eaten?"
He was always big enough to be inconsistent.  He had come to see
that the Powers that Were were hopeless, and was for catching at
any straw.  But something delayed his setting out; and when he
reached the Yellow River, news came of the execution of Tsin of
two men whom he admired.  "How beautiful they were!"  said he;
"how beautiful they were!  This river is not more majestic!  And
I was not there to save them!"

The truth seems to be that he would set out for any place where
the smallest opening presented itself; and while that opening
existed, would not be turned aside from his purpose; but if it
vanished, or if something better came in sight, he would turn and
follow that.  Thus he did not go on into Tsin when he heard of
these executions; but one, when he was on the road to Wei and a
band of roughs waylaid him and made him promise never to go there
again, he simply gave the promise and went straight on.

At Wei now Duke Ling was really inclined to use him;--but as his
military adviser.  It was the last straw; he left, and would not
return in Ling's lifetime.  He was in Ch'in for awhile; and then
for three years at Ts'ae, a new state built of the rebellion of
certain subjects or vassals of the great sourthern kingdom of
Ts'u.  On hearing of his arrival, the Duke of Ts'ae had the idea
to send for Tse Lu, who had a broad reputation of his own as a
brave and practical man, and to inquire of him what kind of man
the master really was.  But Tse Lu, as we have seen, was rigid as
to rebels, and vouchsafed no answer.--"You might have told him,"
said Confucius, "that I am simply one who forgets his food in the
pursuit of wisdom, and his sorrows in the joys of attaining it,
and who does not perceive old age coming on."

Missionary writers have cast it at him, that were of old he had
preached against rebellion, now he was willing enough to "have
rebels for his patrons";--"adversity had not stiffened his back,
but had made him pliable."  Which shows how blind such minds are
to real greatness.  "They have nothing to draw with, and this
well is deep."  He sought no "patrons,"  now or at another time;
but tools with which to work for the redemption of China; and he
was prepared to find them anywhere, and take what came to hand.
His keynote was _duty._  The world went on snubbing, ignoring,
insulting, traducing, and persecuting him; and he went on with
the performance of his duty;--rather, with the more difficult
task of searching for the duty he was to perform.  This resorting
to rebels, like that conversing with Nantse, shows him clearly
not the formalist and slave of conventions he has been called,
but a man of highest moral courage.  What he stood for was not
forms, conventions, reules, proprieties, or anything of the sort;
but the liens of least resistance in his high endeavor to lift
the world:  lines of least resistance; middle lines; common
sense.--As ususal, there was nothing to be done with the Duke
of Ts'ae.

Wandering from state to state, he came on recluses in a field by
the river, and sent Tse Lu forward to ask one of them the way to
the ford.  Said the hermit:--"You follow one who withdraws from
court to court; it would be better to withdraw from the world
altogether."--"What!"  said Confucius when it was told him;
"shall I not associate with mankind?  If I do not associate with
mankind, with whom shall I associate?"

In which answer lies a great key to Confucianism; turn it once
or twice, and you get to the import of his real teaching.  He
never would follow the individual soul into its secrecies; he
was concerned with man only as a fragment of humanity.  He was
concerned with man _as_ humanity.  All that the West calls
(personal) religion he disliked intensely.  Any desire or scheme
to save your own soul; any right-doing for the sake of a reward,
either here or hereafter, he would have bluntly called wrong-
doing, anti-social and selfish.  (I am quoting in substance from
Dr. Lionel Giles.)  He tempted no one with hopes of heaven;
frightened none with threats of hell.  It seemed to him that he
could make a higher and nobler appeal,--could strike much more
forcibly at the root of evil (which is selfishness), by saying
nothing about rewards and punishments at all.  The one inducement
to virtue that he offered was this:  By doing right, you lead the
world into right-doing.  He was justified in saying that Man is
divine; because this divine appeal of his was effective; not
like the West's favorite appeal to fear, selfish desire, and the
brutal side of our nature.  "Do right to escape a whipping, or a
hanging, or hell-fire,"  says Christendom; and the nations
reared on that doctrine have risen and fallen, risen and fallen;
a mad riot of people struggling into life, and toppling back into
death in a season; so that future ages and the far reaches of
history will hardly remember their names, too lightly graven upon
time.  But China, nourished on this divine appeal, however far
she may have fallen short of it, has stood, and stood, and stood.
In the last resort, it is the only inducement worth anything;
the only lever that lifts.--There is that _li,_--that inevitable
rightness and harmony that begins in the innermost _when there is
the balance_ and duty is being done, and flows outward healing
and preserving and making wholesome all the phases of being;--let
that harmony of heaven play through you, and you are bringing
mankind to virtue; you are pouting cleansing currents into the
world.  How little of the tortuosity of metaphysics is here;--but
what grand efficacity of super-ethics!  You remember what _Light
on the Path_ says about the man who is a link between the noise
of the market-place and the silence of the snow-capped Himalayas;
and what it says about the danger of seeking to sow good karma
for oneself,--how the man that does so will only be sowing the
giant weed of selfhood.  In those two passages you find the
essence of Confucianism and the wisdom and genius of Confucius.
It is as simple as A B C; and yet behind it lie all the truths
of metaphysics and philosophy.  He seized upon the pearl
of Theosophic thought, the cream of all metaphysics, where
metaphysics passes into action,--and threw his strength into
insisting on that:  Pursue virtue because it is virtue, and that
you may (as you will,--it is the only way you can)  bring the
world to virtue; or negatively, in the words of _Light on the
Path:_  "Abstain (from vice) because it is right to abstain--not
that yourself shall be kept clean."  And now to travel back
into the thought behind, that you may see if Confucius was a
materialist; whether or not he believed in the Soul;--and that
if he was not a great original thinker, at least he commanded the
ends of all great, true and original thinking.  Man, he says, is
naturally good.  That is, collectively.  _Man_ is divine and
immortal; only _men_ are mortal and erring.  Were there a true
brotherhood of mankind established, a proper relation of the
parts to the whole and to each other,--you would have no
difficulty with what is evil in yourself.  The lower nature with
its temptations would not appear; the world-old battle with the
flesh would be won.  But separate yourself in yourself,--consider
yourself as a selfhood, not as a unit in society;--and you find,
there where you have put yourself, evil to contend with a-plenty.
Virtue inheres in the Brotherhood of Man; vice in the separate
personal and individual units.  Virtue is in That which is no
man's possession, but common to all:  namely, the Soul--though he
does not enlarge upon it as that; perhaps never mentions it as
the Soul at all;--vice is in that which each has for himself
alone:  the personality.  Hence his hatred of religiosity, of
personal soul-saving.  You were to guard against evil in the
simplest way:  by living wholly in humanity, finding all you
motives and sources of action there.  If you were, in the highest
sense, simply a factor in human society, you were a good man.  If
you lived in yourself alone,--having all evil to meet there, you
were likely to succumb to it; and you were on the wrong road
anyway.  Come out, then; think not of your soul to be saved, nor
of what may befall you after death.  You, as you, are of no
account; all that matters is humanity as a whole, of which you
are but a tiny part.--Now, if you like, say that Confucius did
not teach Theosophy, because, _so far as we know,_ he said
nothing about Karma or Reincarnation.  I am inclined to think him
one of the two or three supreme historical Teachers of Theosophy;
and to say that his message, so infinitely simple, is one of the
most wonderful presentations of it ever given.

It is this entire purity from all taint of personal religion;
this distaste for prayer and unrelish for soul-salvation; this
sweet clean impersonality of God and man, that makes the
missionary writers find him so cold and lifeless.  But when you
look at him, it is a marvelously warm-hearted magnetic man you
see:  Such a One as wins hearts to endless devotion.  Many of the
disciples were men who commanded very much the respect of
the world.  The king of Ts'u proposed to give Confucius an
independent duchy:  to make a sovereign prince of him, with
territories absolutely his own.  But one of his ministers
dissuaded him thus:  "Has your majesty," said he, "any diplomatist
in your service like Tse Kung?  Or anyone so fitted to be prime
minister as Yen Huy?  Or a general to compare with Tse Lu? . . .
If K'ung Ch'iu were to acquire territory, with such men as these
to serve him, it would not be to the prosperity of Ts'u."--And
yet those three brilliant men were content--no, proud--to follow
him on his hopeless wanderings, sharing all his long sorrow;
they were utterly devoted to him. Indeed, we read of none of his
disciples turning against him;--which also speaks mighty well for
the stuff that was to be found in Chinese humanity in those days.

Tse Kung was told that some prince or minister had said that he,
Tse Kung, was a greater man than Confucius.  He answered:  "The
wall of my house rises only to the height of a man's shoulders;
anyone can look in and see whatever excellence is within.  But
the Master's wall is many fathoms in height; so that who fails to
find the gateway cannot see the beauties of the temple within nor
the rich apparel of the officiating priests.  It may be that only
a few will find the gate.    Need we be surprised, then, at His
Excellency's remark?"  Yen Huy said:--"The Master knows how to
draw us after him by regular steps.  He broadens our outlook
with polite learning, and restrains our impulses by teaching
us self-control."

Only once, I think, is he recorded to have spoken of prayer.  He
was very ill, and Tse Lu proposed to pray for his recovery.  Said
Confucius: "What precedent is there for that?"--There was great
stuff in that Tse Lu:  a bold warriorlike nature; not very
pliable; not too easy to teach, I imagine, but wonderfully
paying for any lesson taught and learned.  He figures often as
the one who clings to the letter, and misses vision of the spirit
of the teaching; so now the Master plays him a little with this
as to precedent,--which weighed always more strongly with Tse Lu
than with Confucius.--"In the _Eulogies,"_ said Tse Lu, (it is a
lost work), "it is written:  'We pray to you, O Spirits of
Heaven and Earth."--"Ah!" said Confucius, "my prayers began long,
long ago."  But he never did pray, in the Western sense.  His
_life_ was one great intercession and petition for his people.

As to his love of ritual:  remember that there are ceremonies and
ceremonies, some with deep power and meaning.  Those that
Confucius upheld came down to him from Adept Teachers of old;
and he had an eye to them only as outward signs of a spiritual
grace, and means to it.  "Ceremonies indeed!" said he once; "do
you think they are a mere matter of silken robes and jade
omaments?  Music forsooth!  Can music be a mere thing of drums
and bells?"--Or of harps, lutes, dulcimers, sackbuts, psalteries,
and all kinds of instruments, he might have added; all of which,
together with all rites, postures, pacings, and offerings, were
nothing to him unless channels through which the divine _li_
might be induced to flow.  Yet on his wanderings, by the
roadside, in lonely places, he would go through ceremonies with
his disciples.  Why?--Why is an army drilled?  If you go to the
root of the matter, it is to make _one_ the consciousness of the
individual soldiers.  So Confucius, as I take it, in his
ceremonies sought to unify the consciousness of his disciples,
that the _li_ might have passage through them.  I say boldly it
was a proof of that deep occult knowledge of his,--which he never
talked about.

They asked him once if any single ideogram conveyed the whole law
of life.--"Yes," he said; and gave them one compounded of two
others, which means 'As heart':--the missionaries prefer to
render it 'reciprocity.'  His teaching--out of his own mouth we
convict him--was the Doctrine of the Heart.  He was for the glow
in the heart always; not as against, but as the one true cause
of, external right action.  But the Heart doctrine cannot be
defined in a set of rules and formulae; so he was always urging
middle lines, common sense.  That is the explanation of his
famous answer when they asked him whether injuries should be
repaid with kindness.  What he said amounts to this:  "For
goodness sake, use common sense!  I have given you 'as heart' for
your rule."--We know Katherine Tingley's teaching:  not one of us
but has been helped and saved by it a thousand times.  I can only
say that, in the light of that, the more you study Confucius, the
greater he seems; the more extraordinary the parallelisms you
see between her method and his.  Perhaps it is because his method
has been so minutely recorded.  We do not find here merely
ethical precepts, or expositions of philosophic thought:  what we
see is a Teacher guiding and adjusting the lives of his disciples.

When he had been three years at Ts'ae, the King of Ts'u invited
him to his court.  Ts'u, you will remember, lay southward towards
the Yangtse, and was, most of the time, one of the six Great
Powers.*  Here at last was something hopeful; and Confucius set
out.  But Ts'ae and Ch'in, though they had neglected him, had not
done so through ignorance of his value; and were not disposed to
see his wisdom added to the strength of Ts'u.  They sent out a
force to waylay him; which surrounded him in the wilderness and
held him besieged but unmolested for seven days.  Food ran out,
and the Confucianists were so enfeebled at last that they could
hardly stand.  We do not hear that terms were offereed, as that
they should turn back or go elsewhere:  the intention seems
to have been to make an end of Confucius and Confucianism
altogether,--without bloodshed.  Even Tse Lu was shaken.--"Is it
for the Princely Man,"  said he, "to suffer the pinch of
privation?"--"Privation may come his way,"  Confucius answered;
"but only the vulgar grow reckless and demoralized under it."  So
saying he took his lute and sang to them, and hearing him they
forgot to fear.  Meanwhile one of the party had won through the
lines, and brought word to Ts'u of the Master's plight; whereat
the king sent a force to his relief, and came out from the
capital to receive him in state.  The king's intentions were
good; but we have seen how his ministers intrigued and diverted
them.  In the autumn of that year he died, having become somewhat
estranged from the Master.  His successor was one from whom no
good could be expected, and Confucius returned to Wei.

-------
* _Ancient China Simplified:_  by Prof. E. Harper Parker; from
which book the account of the political condition and divisions
of the empire given in these lectures is drawn.
------

Duke Ling was dead, and his grandson, Chuh, was on the throne.
There had been a complication of family crimes plottings:  Chuh
had driven out his father, who in turn had attempted the life of
his own mother, Nantse.  Chuh wished to employ Confucius, but not
to forgo his evil courses:  it was a situation that could not be
sanctioned.  For six years the Master lived in retirement in Wei,
watching events, and always sanguine that his chance would come.
He was not sixty-nine years old; but hoped to begin his life's
work presently.

Then suddenly he was in demand,--in two quarters.  There was a
sort of civil war in Wei, and the chief of one of the factions
came to him for advice as to the best means of attacking the
other.  Confucius was disgusted.  Meanwhile Lu had been at war
with Ts'i; and Yen Yu, a Confucianist, put in command of the Lu
troops, had been winning all the victories in sight.  Marquis
Ting now slept with his fathers, and Marquis Gae reigned in his
stead; also there was a new Chief of Clan Chi to run things:--
Gae to reign, Chi to rule.  They asked Yen Yu where he had
learned his so victorious generalship; and he answered, "from
Confucius."--If a mere disciple could do so much, they thought,
surely the Master himself could do much more:  as, perhaps, lead
the Lu armies to universal victory.  So they sent him a cordial
invitation, with no words as to the warlike views that prompted
it. High in hope, Confucius set out; these fourteen years his
native country had been pulling at his heart-strings, and
latterly, more insistently than ever.  But on his arrival he
saw how the land lay.  Chi consulted him about putting down
brigandage:  Chi being, as you might say, the arch-brigand of
Lu.--"If you, Sir, were not avaricious,"  said Confucius, "though
you offered men rewards for stealing, they would cleave to their
honesty."  There was nothing to be done with such men as these;
he went into retirement, having much literary work to finish.
That was in 483.

In 482 his son Li died; and a year later Yen Huy, dearest of his
disciples. We have seen how he gave way to grief.  There is that
strange mystery of the dual nature; even in Such a One.  There
is the human Personality that the Great Soul must work through.
He had performed his function; he had fulfilled his duty; all
that he owed to the coming ages he had paid in full.  But the
evidence goes to show that he was still looking forward for a
chance to begin, and that every disappointmtnt hurt the outward
man of him:  that it was telling on him:  that it was a sad, a
disappointed, even a heart-broken old man that wept over Yen
Huy.--In 481, we read, a servant of the Chief of Clan Chi caught
a strange one-horned aninial, with a white ribbon tied to its
horn.  None had seen the like of it; and Confucius, being the
most learned of men, was called in to make pronouncement.  He
recognised it at once from his mother's description:  it was the
_k'e-lin,_ the unicorn; that was the ribbon Chingtsai had decked
it with in the cave on Mount Ne the night of his birth.  He burst
into tears. "For whom have you come?"  he cried; "for whom have
you come?"  And then:  "The course of my doctrine is run, and
wisdom is still neglected, and success is still worshiped.  My
principles make no progress:  how will it be in the after ages?"
--Ah, could he have know!--I mean, that old weary mind and body;
the Soul which was Confucius knew.

Yen Huy, Tse Lu, and Tse Kung:  those were the three whom he had
loved and trusted most.  Yen Huy was dead; Tse Lu, with Tse Kao,
another disciple, he had left behind in Wei holding office under
the duke.  Now news came that a revolution had broken out there.
"Tse Kao will return,"  said he; "but Tse Lu will die."  So it
fell.  Tse Kao, finding the duke's cause hopeless, made his
escape; but Tse Lu fought the forlorn hope to the end, and died
like a hero.  Only Tse Kung, of the three, was left to him.  Who
one morning, when he went to the Master's house, found him
walking to and fro before the door crooning over this verse:

     "The great mountain must crumble,
     The strong beam must break.
     The wise man must wither like a flower."

Heavy-hearted, Tse Kung followed him in.--"What makes you so
late?"  said Confucius; and then:  "According to the rites of
Hia, the dead lay in state at the top of the eastern steps, as if
he were the host.  Under the Shangs, it was between the two
pillars he lay, as if he were both host and guest.  The rite of
the Chows is for him to lie at the top of the western steps,
as if he were the guest.  I am a man of Shang,"--it will be
remembered that he was descended from that royal house; "and
last night I dreamed that I was sitting between the pillars, with
offerings set out before me.  No intelligent monarch arises; no
prince will make me his teacher.  My time has come to die."--That
day he took to his bed; his passing was a week later.

On the banks of the Sze his disciples buried him; and for three
years mourned at his grave.  But Tse Kung built himself a cabin
at the graveside, and remained there three years longer.  "All my
life,"  said he, "I have had heaven above my head, but I do not
know its height.  I have had earth beneath my feet, but I have
not known its magnitude.  I served Confucius:  I was like a
thirsty man going with his pitcher to the river.  I drank my
fill, but I never knew the depth of the water."

And Tse Kung was right; and what he felt then, one feels now.
You read Boswell, and have your Johnson in the hollow of
your hand:  body, soul, and spirit:  higher triad and lower
quaternary.  Of Confucius we have a picture in some respects even
more detailed than Boswell's of Johnson; but when we have said
everything, we still feel that nothing has been said.  Boswell
lets you in through his master's church-door; shows you nave and
aisle, vault and vestry; climbs with you to the belfry; stands
with you at the altar and in the pulpit; till you have seen
everything there is to see.  But with Confucius as with every
Adept the case is quite different.  "The Master's wall is
fathomless,"  said Tse Kung; but he and the other disciples
took care that China at least should find the gate of entry;
and it is still possible for us to go in, and "see the beauty
of the temple, the richness of the robes of the officiating
priests."  You go through everything; see him under all sorts of
circumstances; and ask at last:  "Is this all?"--No, says your
guide; "see here!"  and flings one last door open.  And that,
like the door in Lord Dunsaney's play, opens on to the vastness
of the stars.  What is it that baffles us and remains undefined
and undefinable?  Just this:  TAO:  the Infinite Nature.  You can
survey the earth, and measure it with chains; but not Space, in
which a billion leagues is nowise different from an inch or two,
--it bears the same proportion to the whole.

There was his infinite trust;--and his unbroken silence as to the
Things he trusted in.  Time and the world went proving to him
year by year that his theories were all impracticable, all wrong;
that he was a failure; that there was not anything for him to
do, and never would be a chance for him to do it;--and all their
arguments, all the sheer dreadful tyranny of fact, had no weight
with him at all:  he went on and on.  What was his sword of
strength?  Where were the Allies in whom he trusted?  How dared
he pit K'ung Ch'iu of Lu against time and the world and me?--The
Unseen was with him, and the Silence; and he (perhaps) lifted no
veil from the Unseen, and kept silent as to the silence;--and yet
maintained his Movement, and held his disciples together, and
saved his people,--as if he himself had been the Unseen made
visible, and the Silence given a voice to speak.

And with it all there was the human man who suffered.  I think
you will love him the more for this, from the _Analects:_

"The Minister said to Tse Lu, Tseng Hsi, Jan Yu, and Kung-hsi Hua
as they sat beside him:  'I may be a day older than you are, but
forget that.  You are wont to say, "We are unknown."  Well; had
ye a name in the world, what would ye do?'"

"Tse Lu answered lightly:  'Give me charge of a land of a
thousand chariots, crushed between great neighbors, overrun by
soldiery and oppressed by famine; in three years' time I should
have put courage and high purpose into the people.'"

"The Master smiled,--'What wouldst thou do, Ch'iu?' he said."

"Jan Yu answered:  'Had I charge of sixty or seventy square
miles, or from fifty to sixty, in three years' time I would give
the people plenty.  As for courtesy, music and the like, they
could wait for these for the rise of a Princely Man.'"

"'And what wouldst thou do, Chih?' said the Master."

"Kung-hsi Hua answered:  'I would speak of the things I fain
would learn, not of what I can do.  At service in the Ancestral
Temple, or at the Grand Audience, clad in black robe and cap, I
fain would fill a small part.'"

"'And thou, Tien?' said the Master."

"Tseng Hsi stopped playing, pushed away his still sounding lute,
rose up, and made answer:  'My choice would be unlike those of
the other three.'"

"'What harm in that?' said the Master.  'Each but speaks his mind.'"

"Tseng Hsi said:  'In the last days of Spring, and clad for the
season, with five or six grown men and six or seven lads, I would
bathe in the waters of Yi, all fanned by the breeze in the Rain
God's Glade, and wander home with song.'"

"The Master sighed.--'I hold with Tien,' said he."

Very, very human, I say; very Chinese.  But here is that which
was not human but divine:  he never turned from his path to
satisfy these so human and Chinese longings; the breeze in the
Rain God's Glade never blew for him.  It is just as well to
remember, when you read of the ceremonies, the body bent under
the load of the scepter, the carefully chosen (as it may seem)
and habitually worn expression of face on pa