XVI

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    I have described what image??always opposite to the natural self or the natural world??Wilde, Henley, Morris copied or tried to copy, but I have not said if I found an image for myself. I know very little about myself and much less of that anti?self: probably the woman who y dinner or the woman who sweeps out my study knows more than I. It is perhaps because nature made me a gregarious man, going hither and thither looking for versation, and ready to deny from fear or favour his dearest vi, that I love proud and lonely images. When I was a child a daily to the sextons daughter for writing lessons, I found one poem in her School Reader that delighted me beyond all others: a fragment of some metrical translation from Aristophanes wherein the birds sing s upon mankind. In later years my mind gave itself tarious Shelleys dream of a young man, his hair blanched with sorrow studying philosophy in some loower, or of his old man, master of all human knowledge, hidden from human sight in some shell?strewn cavern on the Mediterranean shore. One passage above all raually in my ears??

    Some feign that he is Enoch: others dream He re?Adamite, and has survived Cycles of geion and of ruin. The sage, in truth, by dreadful abstinence, And quering penance of the mutinous flesh, Deep plation and unwearied study, In years outstretched beyond the date of man, May have attaio snty and sce Over those strong a things and thoughts Which others fear and know not.

    MAHMUD I would talk With this old Jew.

    HASSAN Thy will is even now Made known to him where he dwells in a sea?cavern Mid the Demonesi, less accessible Than thod! He who would question him Must sail alo su where the stream Of o sleeps around those foamless isles, When the young moon is westering as now, And evening airs wander upon the wave; And, when the pines of that bee?pasturing isle, Greehus, quench the fieryshadow Of his gilt prow within the sapphire water, Then must the lonely helmsman cry aloud Ahasuerus! and the caverns round Will answer Ahasuerus! If his prayer Be granted, a faieor will arise, Lighting him over Marmora; and a wind Will rush out of the sighing pine?forest, And with the wind a storm of harmony Unutterably sweet, and pilot him Through the soft twilight to the Bosphorus: The the hour and plad circumsta for the matter of their ferehe Jeears. Few dare, and few who dare Win the desired union.

    Already in Dublin, I had been attracted to the Theosophists because they had affirmed the real existence of the Jew, or of his like; and, apart from whatever might have been imagined by Huxley, Tyndall, Carolus Duran and Bastien?Lepage, I saw nothing against his reality. Presently having heard that Madame Blavatsky had arrived from France, or from India, I thought it time to look the matter up. Certainly if wisdom existed anywhere in the world it must be in some such lonely mind admitting no duty to us, uning with God only, g nothing from fear or favour. Have not all peoples, while bound together in a single mind and taste, believed that such meed and paid them that honour, or paid it to their mere shadow, which they have refused to philanthropists and to men of learning?

    I found Madame Blavatsky in a little house at Norwood, with but, as she said, three followers left??the Society of Psychical Research had just reported on her Indian phenomena??and as one of the three followers sat in an outer room to keep out undesirable visitors, I was kept a long time kig my heels. Presently I was admitted and found an old woman in a plain loose dark dress: a sort of old Irish peasant woman with an air of humour and audacious power. I was still kept waiting, for she was deep in versation with a woman visitor.

    I strayed through folding doors into the  room and stood, in sheer idleness of mind, looking at a cuckoo clock. It was certainly stopped, for the weights were off and lying upon the ground, a as I stood there the cue out and cuckooed at me. I interrupted Madame Blavatsky to say. Your clock has hooted me.

    It often hoots at a stranger, she replied. Is there a spirit in it? I said. I do not know, she said, I should have to be aloo know what is in it. I went back to the clod began examining it and heard her say Do not break my clock. I wondered if there was some hidden meism, and I s<bdi>.9９lib?</bdi>hould have been put out, I suppose, had I found any, though Henley had said to me, Of course she gets up fraudulent miracles, but a person of genius has to do something; Sarah Bernhardt sleeps in her coffin. Presently the visitor went away and Madame Blavatsky explaihat she ropagandist for womens rights who had called to find out why men were so bad. What explanation did you give her? I said. That men were born bad but women made themselves so, and then she explaihat I had bee waiting because she had mistaken me for some man whose name resembled mine and who wao persuade her of the flatness of the earth.

    When I  saw her she had moved into a house at Holland Park, and some time must have passed??probably I had been in Sligo where I returned stantly for long visits??for she was surrounded by followers. She sat nightly before a little table covered with green baize and on this green baize she scribbled stantly with a piece of white chalk. She would scribble symbols, sometimes humorously applied, and sometimes unintelligible figures, but the chalk was inteo mark down her score when she played patience. One saw in the  room a large table where every night her followers and guests, often a great number, sat down to their vegetarian meal, while she enced or mocked through the folding doors. A great passioure, a sort of female Dr. Johnson, impressive, I think, to every man or woman who had themselves any riess, she seemed impatient of the formalism, of the shrill abstract idealism of those about her, and this impatience broke out inrailing &amp; many niames: O you are a flapdoodle, but then you are a theosophist and a brother. The most devout and learned of all her followers said to me, H.P.B. has just told me that there is anlobe stu to this at the north pole, so that the earth has really a shape something like a dumb?bell. I said, for I khat her imagination tained all the folklore of the world, That must be some piece of Eastern mythology. O no it is not, he said, of that I am certain, and there must be something in it or she would not have said it. Her mockery was not kept for her followers alone, and her voice would bee harsh, and her mockery lose phantasy and humour, when she spoke of what seemed to her stific materialism. Once I saw this antagonism, guided by some kind of telepathic divination, take a form of brutal phantasy. I brought a very able Dublin woman to see her and this woman had a brother, a physiologist whosereputation, though known to specialists alone, was European; and, because of this brother, a family pride ihing stifid modern. The Dublin woman scarcely opened her mouth the whole evening and her name was certainly unknown to Madame Blavatsky, yet I saw at on that wrinkled old face bent over the cards, and the only time I ever saw it there, a personal hostility, the dislike obbr>..</abbr>f one woman for another.

    Madame Blavatsky seemed to bundle herself up, being all primeval peasant, and began plaining of her ailments, more especially of her bad leg. But of late her master??her old Jew, her Ahasuerus, cured it, or set it on the way to be cured. I was sitting here in my chair, she said, when the master came in and brought something with him which he put over my knee, something warm whiclosed my k was a live dog which he had cut open. I reised a cure used sometimes in mediaeval medie. She had two masters, and their portraits, ideal Indian heads, painted by some most inpetent artist, stood upoher side of the folding doors. One night, when talk was impersonal and general, I sat gazing through the folding doors into the dimly lighted dining?room beyond. I noticed a curious red light shining upon a picture and got up to see where the red light came from. It was the picture of an Indian and as I came near it slowly vanished. When I returo my seat, Madame Blavatsky said, What did you see? A picture, I said. Tell it to go away. It is already gone. So much the better, she said, I was afraid it was medium ship but it is only clairvoyance.

    What is the difference? If it had been medium ship, it would have stayed in spite of you. Beware of medium ship; it is a kind of madness; I know, for I have been through it.

    I found her almost always full of gaiety that, uhe occasional joking of those about her, was illogical and incalculable a always kindly and tolerant. I had called one evening to find her absent, but expected every moment. She had been somewhere at the seaside for her health and arrived with a little suite of followers. She sat down at on her big chair, and began unfolding a broer parcel, while all looked on full of curiosity. It tained a large family Bible. This is a present for my maid, she said. What! A Bible and not even anointed! said some shocked voice. Well my children, was the answer, what is the good of giving lemons to those who want es? When I first began to frequent her house, as I soon did very stantly, I noticed a handsome clever woman of the world there, who seemed certainly very much out of place, pehough she thought herself. Presently there was much sdal and gossip, for the pe laiangled with two young men, who were expected to grow into ascetic sages. The sdal was so great that Madame Blavatsky had to call the pe before her and to speak after this fashiohink that it is necessary to crush the animal nature; you should live in chastity in ad thought. Initiation is granted only to those who are entirely chaste, and so to run on for some time. However, after some minutes in that vehement style, the pe standing crushed and shamed before her, she had wound up, I ot permit you more than one. She was quite sincere, but thought that nothing mattered but what happened in the mind, and that if we could not master the mind, our as were of little importance. One young man filled her with exasperation; for she thought that his settled gloom came from his chastity. I had known him in Dublin, where he had been aced to interrupt long periods of asceticism, in which he would eat vegetables and drink water, with brief outbreaks of what he sidered the devil. After an outbreak he would for a few hours dazzle the imagination of the members of the local theosophical society with poetical rhapsodies about harlots and street lamps, and then sink into weeks of melancholy. A fellow theosophist once found him hanging from the window pole, but cut him down in the nick of time. I said to the man who cut him down, What did you say to one another? He said, We spent the night telling ic stories and laughing a great deal. This man, t?９9lｉb.orween sensuality and visionary ambition, was now the most devout of all, and told me that in the middle of the night he could oftehe ringing of the little astral bell whereby Madame Blavatskys master called her attention, and that, although it was a low silvery sound it made the whole house shake. Anht I found him waiting in the hall to show in those who had the right of entran some night when the discussion rivate, and as I passed he whispered into my ear, Madame Blavatsky is perhaps not a real woman at all. They say that her dead body was found many years ago upon some Russian battlefield. She had two dominant moods, both of extreme activity, but one calm and philosophid this was the mood always on that night in the week, when she answered questions upon her system; and as I look back after thirty years I often ask myself Was her speech automatic? Was she for one night, in every week, a trance medium, or in some similar state? Iher mood she was full of phantasy and insequent raillery. That is the Greek church, a triangle like all true religion, I recall her saying, as she chalked out a triangle on the green baize,and then, as she made it disappear in meaningless scribbles it spread out and became a bramble?bush like the Church of Rome. Then rubbing it all out except oraight line, Now they have lopped off the branches and tur into a broomstick arid that is Protestantism. And so it was, night after night, always varied and unforseen. I have observed a like suddereme ge in others, half whose thought was supernatural, and Laurence Oliphant records some where or other like observations. I  remember only once finding her in a mood of reverie; something had happeo damp her spirits, some attack upon her movement, or upon herself. She spoke of Balzac, whom she had seen but once, of Alfred de Musset, whom she had known well enough to dislike for his morbidity, and of Gee Sand whom she had known so well that they had dabbled in magic together of whieither knew anything at all in those days; and she ran on, as if there was nobody there to overhear her, I used to wo and pity the people who sell their souls to the devil, but now I only pity them. They do it to have somebody on their sides, and added to that, after some words I have fotten, I write, write, write as the Wandering Jew walks, walks, walks. Besides the devotees, who came to listen and to turn every doe into a ne<s>藏书网</s>w san for the puritanical vis of their Victorian childhood, ks came from half Europe and from all America, and they came that they might talk. One Ameri said to me, She has bee the most famous woman in the world by sitting in a big chair ating us to talk. They talked and she played patience, and totted up her score on the green baize, and generally seemed to listen, but sometimes she would listen no more. There was a woman who talked perpetually of the divine spark within her, until Madame Blavatsky stopped her with??Yes, my dear, you have a divine spark within you, and if you are not very careful you will hear it snore. A certain Salvation Army captain probably pleased her, for, if vociferous and loud of voice, he had muimation. He had known hardship and spoke of his visions while starving ireets and he was still perhaps a little light in the head. I wondered what he could preach to ignorant men, his head ablaze with wild mysticism, till I met a man who had heard him talking near t Garden to some crowd ireet. My friends, he was saying, you have the kingdom of heaven within you and it would take a pretty big pill to get that out.

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