Wherewithal then shall a young man cleanse his way; and how shall he keep his mind immune to Theosophical speculations, and novel schemes of Salvation?
Can he ever be sure that he won't be suddenly struck down by the fever of Funeral, or of Spelling Reform, or take to his bed with a new Sex Theory?
But is this struggle for a healthy mind in a maggoty universe really after all worth it? Are there not soporific dreams and sweet deliriums more soothing than Reason? If Transmigration can make clear the dark Problem of Evil; if Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy can free us from the dominion of Death; if the belief that Bacon wrote Shakespeare gives a peace that the world cannot give, why pedantically reject such kindly solace? Why not be led with the others by still waters, and be made to lie down in green pastures?
_The Quest_
"We walk alone in the world," the Moralist, at the end of his essay on Ideal Friendship, writes somewhat sadly, "Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables," Yet we never quite give up the hope of finding them. But what awful things happen to us?
what snubs, what set-downs we experience, what shames and disillusions. We can never really tell what these new unknown persons may do to us. Sometimes they seem nice, and then begin to talk like gramophones. Sometimes they grab at us with moist hands, or breathe hotly on our necks, or make awful confidences, or drench us from sentimental slop-pails. And too often, among the thoughts in the loveliest heads, we come on nests of woolly caterpillars.
And yet we brush our hats, pull on our gloves, and go out and ring door-bells.
_The Kaleidoscope_
I find in my mind, in its miscellany of ideas and musings, a curious collection of little landscapes and pictures, shining and fading for no reason. Sometimes they are views in no way remarkable-the corner of a road, a heap of stones, an old gate.
But there are many charming pictures, too: as I read, between my eyes and book, the Moon sheds down on harvest fields her chill of silver; I see autumnal avenues, with the leaves falling, or swept in heaps; and storms blow among my thoughts, with the rain beating forever on the fields. Then Winter's upward glare of snow appears; or the pink and delicate green of Spring in the windy sunshine; or cornfields and green waters, and youths bathing in Summer's golden heats.
And as I walk about, certain places haunt me: a cathedral rises above a dark blue foreign town, the colour of ivory in the sunset light; now I find myself in a French garden full of lilacs and bees, and shut-in sunshine, with the Mediterranean lounging and washing outside its walls; now in a little college library, with busts, and the green reflected light of Oxford lawns--and again I hear the bells, reminding me of the familiar Oxford hours.
_Oxford Street_
One late winter afternoon in Oxford Street, amid the noise of vehicles and voices that filled that dusky thoroughfare, as I was borne onward with the crowd past the great electric-lighted shops, a holy Indifference filled my thoughts. Illusion had faded from me; I was not touched by any desire for the goods displayed in those golden windows, nor had I the smallest share in the appetites and fears of all those moving and anxious faces. And as I listened with Asiatic detachment to the London traffic, its sound changed into something ancient and dissonant and sad--into the turbid flow of that stream of Craving which sweeps men onward through the meaningless cycles of Existence, blind and enslaved forever. But I had reached the farther shore, the Harbour of Deliverance, the Holy City; the Great Peace beyond all this turmoil and fret compassed me around. _Om Mani padme hum_--I murmured the sacred syllables, smiling with the pitying smile of the Enlightened One on his heavenly lotus.
Then, in a shop-window, I saw a neatly fitted suit-case. I liked that suit-case; I desired to possess it. Immediately I was enveloped by the mists of Illusion, chained once more to the Wheel of Existence, whirled onward along Oxford Street in that turbid stream of wrong-belief, and lust, and sorrow, and anger.
_Beauty_
Among all the ugly mugs of the world we see now and then a face made after the divine pattern. Then, a wonderful thing happens to us; the Blue Bird sings, the golden Splendour shines, and for a queer moment everything seems meaningless save our impulse to follow those fair forms, to follow them to the clear Paradises they promise.
Plato assures us that these moments are not (as we are apt to think them) mere blurs and delusions of the senses, but divine revelations; that in a lovely face we see imaged, as in a mirror, the Absolute Beauty--; it is Reality, flashing on us in the cave where we dwell amid shadows and darkness. Therefore we should follow these fair forms, and their shining footsteps will lead us upward to the highest heaven of Wisdom. The Poets, too, keep chanting this great doctrine of Beauty in grave notes to their golden strings. Its music floats up through the skies so sweet, so strange, that the very Angels seem to lean from their stars to listen.
But, O Plato, O Shelley, O Angels of Heaven, what scrapes you do get us into!
_The Power of Words_
I thanked the club porter who helped me into my coat, and stepped out lightly into the vastness and freshness of the Night. And as I walked along my eyes were dazzling with the glare I had left; I still seemed to hear the sound of my speech, and the applause and laughter.
And when I looked up at the Stars, the great Stars that bore me company, streaming over the dark houses as I moved, I felt that I was the Lord of Life; the mystery and disquieting meaninglessness of existence--the existence of other people, and of my own, were solved for me now. As for the Earth, hurrying beneath my feet, how bright was its journey; how shining the goal toward which it went swinging--you might really say leaping--through the sky.
"I must tell the Human Race of this!" I heard my voice; saw my prophetic gestures, as I expounded the ultimate meaning of existence to the white, rapt faces of Humanity. Only to find the words--that troubled me; were there then no words to describe this Vision--divine--intoxicating?
And then the Word struck me; the Word people would use. I stopped in the street; my Soul was silenced like a bell that snarls at a jarring touch. I stood there awhile and meditated on language, its perfidious meanness, the inadequacy, the ignominy of our vocabulary, and how Moralists have spoiled our words by distilling into them, as into little vials of poison, all their hatred of human joy. Away with that police-force of brutal words which bursts in on our best moments and arrests our finest feelings! This music within me, large, like the song of the stars--like a Glory of Angels singing--"No one has any right to say I am drunk!" I shouted.
_Self-Analysis_
"Yes, aren't they odd, the thoughts that float through one's mind for no reason? But why not be frank--I suppose the best of us are shocked at times by the things we find ourselves thinking. Don't you agree," I went on, not noticing (until it was too late) that all other conversation had ceased, and the whole dinner-party was listening, "don't you agree that the oddest of all are the improper thoughts that come into one's head--the unspeakable words I mean, and Obscenities?" When I remember that remark, I hasten to enlarge my mind with ampler considerations. I think of Space, and the unimportance in its unmeasured vastness, of our toy solar system; I lose myself in speculations on the lapse of Time, reflecting how at the best our human life on this minute and perishing planet is as brief as a dream.
_The Voice of the World_
"And what are you doing now?" The question of these school contemporaries of mine, and their greeting the other day in Piccadilly (I remember how shabby I felt as I stood talking to them)--for a day or two that question haunted me. And behind their well-bred voices I seemed to hear the voice of Schoolmasters and Tutors, of the Professional Classes, and indeed of all the world. What, as a plain matter of fact, was I doing, how did I spend my days? The life-days which I knew were numbered, and which were described in sermons and on tombstones as so irrevocable, so melancholy-brief.
I decided to change my life. I too would be somebody in my time and age; my contemporaries should treat me as an important person.
I began thinking of my endeavours, my studies by the midnight lamp, my risings at dawn for stolen hours of self-improvement.
But alas, the day, the little day, was enough just then. It somehow seemed enough, just to be alive in the Spring, with the young green of the trees, the smell of smoke in the sunshine; I loved the old shops and books, the uproar darkening and brightening in the shabby daylight. Just a run of good-looking faces--and I was always looking for faces--would keep me amused.
And London was but a dim-lit stage on which I could play in fancy any part I liked. I woke up in the morning like Byron to find myself famous; I was drawn like Chatham to St. Paul's, amid the cheers of the Nation, and sternly exclaimed with Cromwell, "Take away that bauble," as I sauntered past the Houses of Parliament.
_And Anyhow_
And anyhow, soon, so soon (in only seven million years or thereabouts the Encyclopaedia said) this Earth would grow cold, all human activities end, and the last wretched mortals freeze to death in the dim rays of the dying Sun.
_Drawbacks_