William Stewart Ross was
a Scottish writer and publisher. He was a noted secularist thinker, and used
the pseudonym "Saladin". Between 1888 and 1906 he was the editor of
the Agnostic Journal, successor to
the Secular Review; and when
Blavatsky died he wrote the folowing article about her.
HOW AN AGNOSTIC SAW HER
From stale, grey London we were
whirled out among the green fields and through masses of fruit trees white as
the vesture of Soracte's hill (Vide Hor., Ode ix), that day we followed to the furnace the mortal
remains of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Away we were whirled through plains
grazed by fat oxen that would have made a holocaust worthy to have celebrated
the victory of Plataea, and through a gloomy plantation of resinous pine that
would have made a funeral pyre for Patroclus. And, from among the bushes, the
birds sang as merrily as they did erst in Eden, and the primroses prinkt the
green slopes as fragrantly and daintily as in the old romantic days, when they
bore up the dancing feet of Titania and Oberon beneath the light of the moon.
And on we sped with our dead through
that blue-skied afternoon in the month of May. We bore no warrior to the pyre.
We needed no oxen and resinous pine. We hasted to a mortuary furnace more
intense than ever reddened the heavens round Ilium, or rendered Gehenna hideous
with unctuous smoke and the odor of smoldering bones.
We were accompanying to the flames
an oracle, a sphinx, or a sibyl, rather than anything that the world commonly
produces in its ordinary villages and towns. We accompanied the remains of what
erst was the madcap girl of Ekaterinoslow, who, with nuptial withes, had, as a
freak, tied her wild and impetuous young heart to that of tame and frosty age;
and had since, in every realm of this planet of ours, thought and toiled and
suffered, and had been misunderstood and calumniated. She felt her strength,
and knew the weakness of the chattering imbeciles that, in the census-return,
make up the millions of a country's population. Mabel Collins tells the truth
when she says that Madame Blavatsky had a contempt for mankind; but forgets to
say that it was an affectionate contempt.
She was neither pessimist nor
misanthropist. She was simply an upright and romantically honest giantess, who
measured herself with the men and women with whom she came in contact, and felt
the contrast, and was not hypocrite enough to pretend she did not feel it. But
she did not call even those who reviled and wronged her by a more bitter
epithet than "flapdoodles''. Such assailants as even the Coulombs and Dr.
Coues she referred to with expressions equivalent to "Father, forgive
them, for they know not what they do", even when these assailants were
doing their best to cut her, soul and body, with numerous and ghastly wounds,
and to fill them with salt and salve them with vitriol.
She had no more rancor against the
''flapdoodles" than I have against my butt, "Mr. John Smith,
nonconformist and cheese monger"; and my ill-will towards him is shown by
my working away for him year after year barring up my path to literary renown
and worldly success, and becoming prematurely blind and grey-haired, wrinkled
and old, for his sake. If Madame Blavatsky, like every other ambitious man and
woman, had flattered the "flapdoodles" and catered to their
prejudices, they would have paid her for her services and awarded her the kind
of excellently stale character that would obtain one a situation as a Methodist
preacher. But she was not one of the Methodist preacher type, and they give her
a character (vide Coues and others)
that would obtain for the very devil a more exalted position in hell. She declined
to place her feet in the very marks in which Mrs. Grundy trod, even as an eagle
could not be made to walk for leagues on the hoof- prints of an ass. She at one
time amused some gapers and gazers with specimens of home-made ''miracles";
and these "miracles", light as a game at Nap, they elected to
associate with Theosophy, which, compared with a frivolous game at Nap, is
serious as the cannonading at Trafalgar. They judged her on the testimony of a
snake she had warmed in her bosom, a Madame Coulomb, a renegade friend, the
most venomous viper the world knows of, especially if the viper be a female
one. And on the coilings and wrigglings and hissings of this adder they are
mean enough and mediocre enough to base devilish aspersions against the strong,
brave, and simple woman with the remains of whom we travel on to the furnace at
Woking. Such was the tenor of my contemplations by the way.
One in a wagon-load of uncraped
mourners, I reached the crematorium. It is a red-brick building, which, in
appearance, seems a mongrel between a chapel, a-tile-kiln and a factory
chimney. You enter by a mortuary chapel, passing through which you emerge
through heavy folding doors of oak, and find yourself in an apartment, in the
middle of the floor of which, and end to you, there is a great iron object like
the boiler of a locomotive, but supported by and embedded in masonry. The
Theosophists crowd round this boiler-looking object with anxious but decorous
curiosity, to gratify which one of the attendants turned, on the end of the
object, an iron snib which left a circular orifice about the size of a crown
piece. Those present looked in succession into this opening; most, I noticed,
gave one quick glance, and turned away with an involuntary shudder. When it
came to my turn to peep in I wondered not that my predecessors had shuddered.
If Virgil or Milton or Dante had ever seen such an Inferno, they would never
have written about the Inferno at all, relinquishing the theme as utterly
ineffable. Inside that furnace was filled with towels of fire whisked by the
arm of the very devil himself. I can look on a common furnace; but I shall
never again peep through that iron eye-let into the viscera of hell.
As I was so contemplating, the
hearse arrived and drew up on the gravel in front of the door of the mortuary
chapel. Into the chapel the coffin was borne and laid upon an oaken tressel,
and we all stood up and uncovered. The coffin was literally laden with and
hidden in flowers, and a heavy perfume pervaded the air. Under those flowers
lay the mortal remains of her who was dear to all of us, and had wielded a
personal influence such as mere mediocrity, however amiable, could never have
exercised. The glamour with which she evoked towards herself human respect and
affection was a greater "miracle" than any her traducers have drawn
our attention to. It was equaled only by the envenomed hate towards her with
which she could apparently inspire her enemies. And how she could have enemies
at all is a "miracle" to me; for, in spite of her tremendous
attainments and unrivalled talent, she had not a vestige of pedantic
assumption, and had the simple heart of a child. "Impostor" indeed!
She was almost the only mortal I
have ever met who was not an impostor. And the flagrant and apparent ignorance
of those who style her so is contemptible. They allege that she "founded a
new religion". Where and when did either she or hers make such claim?
On the authority of mendacious
popular gossip, they allege that the "new religion" like the baleful old
mockery of a religion that is in this country, by law established, was attested
by thaumaturgy and miracle. They are ignorant of the very elements of Theosophy
who make such a charge. Even if you were to take it for granted that, by a
clever juggle, Madame Blavatsky found a tea-cup under the ground and mystically
mended a trayful of broken china, the fact would have no more connection with
Theosophy than Tenterden Church has with the Goodwin Sands, or lawn tennis with
Christianity. Ye sneerers of cheap sneers, read Isis Unveiled, The Secret
Doctrine, and the Key to Theosophy,
and you will find that Theosophy is, most likely, something too high for your
comprehension, but something that is immeasurably removed from the possibility
of being assisted by the legerdemain of a charlatan or the jugglery of a
mountebank.
Mr. G.R.S. Mead, a young gentleman
of refined features and much spirituelle
of expression, stepped forward to the head of the coffin of her to whom he had
been private secretary and attached friend. There, in the most solemn hush, he
read an impressive address impressively. As his silvery voice rose and fell in
melancholy cadence, I was wafted away as
in a vision to the glen where —
"In accents soft and calm,
Kilmahoe gave out the psalm,"
among the heathery hills of my own
loved land, to sterner and less literate heretics who were persecuted with fire
and steel, even as the heretics among whom I now stood were persecuted with
sneering and calumny.
But, while thus musing, the door
from the crematorium into the chapel opened, and four employees, who did not
look exactly like either stokers or butchers, but had some resemblance to each,
entered, and, in a business-like manner, went two to each end of the tressel,
and, raising it by its four handles, moved off with it through the doorway.
Four Theosophists who had known and loved Madame Blavatsky, and had, like
myself, found the grandest and the worst-abused woman in the world identical,
followed her remains through that wide doorway down to the furnace. The mass of
flowers wafted us another wealth of fragrance as they disappeared, and the
great doorway was slammed and bolted with a decisive mastery suggestive of the
fall of the portcullis in Hades.
Tressel, coffin, and flowers had
gone. They were now behind that inexorable door, as also the mortal remains of
the strongest, bravest, and noblest woman that shall ever grasp this poor
trembling hand, all too mean and weak to write her obsequies.
"Give up thy life if thou
wouldst live….. Before he cast his shadow off his mortal coil, that pregnant
course of anguish and illimitable pain, in him will men a great and holy Buddha
honor….. When to the Permanent is sacrificed the mutable, the prize is thine:
the drop returneth whence it came. The Open Path leads to the changeless change
— Nirvana, the glorious state of Absoluteness, the Bliss past human thought."
(The Voice of Silence)
Since Madame Blavatsky's arrival in
England the Theosophic movement has made steady progress, principally among the
influential and educated; for, like Positivism, it offers no haven of mental
indolence and moral lethargy for the unlettered and unthinking. The most
notable English convert is Mrs. Annie Besant, whom we always predicted would,
in time, relinquish the cold this-worldism
of the Secularist.
Anyone with the capacity to recognize
human greatness and to discern the Shekinah
light of Genius —and this is written by one who has looked in the face of
Carlyle— could not fail to know that the world held only one Madame Blavatsky.
There was a charm in the sublime simplicity of her manner which drew her
followers to her as the horse-shoe magnet attracts the steel filings. She struck
you as a square-headed, rough-featured, stout, carelessly-draped, Oliver
Cromwell-looking personage, as you sat alone with her over coffee and smoking
with her cigarettes of her own making; but she had that overflow of soul which
falls to the lot of few, and such as might, but for superior mental fibre and
balance, have impelled her, like Wiertz and Blake, to ride on steeds of fire
while the multitude deemed their genius dashed with madness. Hers had been a
life of storm, toil, and unrest, which had left their autographs written
cruelly upon her face, and had originated or accentuated incurable illness. She
kept herself among us by taking doses of arsenic which would have killed the
strongest. And yet she was cheerful and sociable, incapable of an ungenerous
thought, and she had not a mean drop of blood in her veins.
Her manners and mode and matter of
speech were far too unconventional for the drawing-room. She could use
expressions of expletive force which are compatible with dashing dragoons
rather than with simpering dudes. She had that tremendous strength of
idiosyncrasy which can dispense with receiving lessons in deportment from the
dancing-master. The feeble yew looks best when clipped and pruned; but the
forest oak appears to most advantage in the possession of the full length and
strength of his great arms with which he has grappled with the roaring storm.
Theosophy or no Theosophy, the most
extraordinary woman of our century, or of any century, has passed away.
Yesterday the world had one Madame Blavatsky — to-day it has none. The matrix
of heredity environment in which she was molded has been broken. Through the
coming ages of time or eternity shall the shattered fragments of that matrix be
gathered up and refixed, and another Helena Petrovna Hahn be born upon the
earth, when the earth is sane enough not to misunderstand her, to persecute her,
and seek to bury her name in a cataclysm of falsehood, hatred, and slander?
Any discriminating person who came
in contact with her could easily understand why she was so dearly loved, and no
less easily conjecture why she was so bitterly hated. She wore her heart upon
her sleeve. Unfortunately for anyone who hopes to "get on" in this
world, she did not possess even a single rag of the cloak of hypocrisy. She
rattled away rather than conversed upon persons and principles in merry sarcasm
and happy cynicism, but, to those who could understand her, without even a
suspicion of bitterness or malevolence. She had none of that restrained
precision in utterance in regard to friends and contemporaries which ladies in
society adopt. She meant no ill, and so it did not occur to her that she could
speak any evil. She was, if you like, too simple and ingenuous and
straight-forward; she wanted in discretion; she was entirely lacking in
hypocrisy; and thus she became an easy butt for the envenomed arrows of her traducers.
Now, through dark death and the
crematorium fire, she has passed from among us, ye slanderers. Apart from the
nobility of her soul and the magnitude of her achievements, I cherish dearly
the memory of one I loved, of a misunderstood one whom I understood, and one of
the very few who ever understood me. The mystery to which we are passing may be
the richer for her presence; but this mediocre world of ours is all the poorer
for her loss. Her demise falls heavily upon me who was of her brotherhood, but
who do not share in the stoical consolations of her creed.
To her followers she is still alive.
The Madame Blavatsky I knew "can in the mind of no Theosophist be
confounded with the mere physical instrument which served it for but for one
brief incarnation''. But I lay not firm enough hold upon this doctrine for it
to give consolation to me. The Madame Blavatsky I knew is dead to me. Of
course, all that might be permanent or impermanent of her still whirls in the
vortex of the universe; but she lives to me only as do others on the roll of
the good and great, by the halo of her memory and the inspiration of her
example. Her followers are gnostic on grave issues of teleology on which I am
only agnostic. They have unbroken communion with their dead; but I am left to
mourn. It is not for me to altogether overleap the barriers of sense, and, by
the divine light of spiritual perception, behold help extended to me from that
awful borne from which no traveler returns. To me Madame Blavatsky is dead, and
another shadow has fallen athwart my life, which has never had much sunshine to
bless it.
Saladin.
(In Agnostic Journal.)
(This
article was published in Lucifer
magazine, June 1891, p.311-316; and later in the book HPB: in memory of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, 1891, p.47-52)
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