Mostof us who are writing books in Ireland to-day have some kind of a spiritual philosophy; and some among us when we look backward upon our lives see that the coming of a young Brahmin into Ireland helped to give our vague thoughts a shape. When we were schoolboys we used to discuss whatever we could find to read of mystical philosophy and to pass crystals over each others’ hands and eyes and to fancy that we could feel a breath flowing from them as people did in a certain German book; and one day somebody told us he had met a Brahmin in London who knew more of these things than any book. With a courage which I still admire, we wrote and asked him to come and teach us, and he came with a little bag in his hand andMarius the Epicureanin his pocket, and stayed with one of us, who gave him a plate of rice and an apple every day at two o’clock; and for a week and all day long he unfolded what seemed to be all wisdom. He sat there beautiful, as only an Eastern is beautiful, makinglittle gestures with his delicate hands, and to him alone among all the talkers I have heard, the delight of ordered words seemed nothing, and all thought a flight into the heart of truth.
We brought him, on the evening of his coming, to a certain club which still discusses everything with that leisure which is the compensation of unsuccessful countries; and there he overthrew or awed into silence whatever metaphysics the town had. And next day, when we would have complimented him, he was remorseful and melancholy, for was it not ‘intellectual lust’? And sometimes he would go back over something he had said and explain to us that his argument had been a fallacy, and apologise as though he had offended against good manners. And once, when we questioned him of some event, he told us what he seemed to remember, but asked us not to give much weight to his memory, for he had found that he observed carelessly. He said, ‘We Easterns are taught to state a principle carefully, but we are not taught to observe and to remember and to describe a fact. Our sense of what truthfulness is is quite different from yours.’ His principles were a part of his being, while our facts, though he was too polite to say it, were doubtless a part of that bodily life, which is, as he believed, an error. He certainly did hold that we livedtoo much to understand the truth or to live long, for he remembered that his father, who had been the first of his family for two thousand years to leave his native village, had repeated over and over upon his deathbed, ‘The West is dying because of its restlessness.’ Once when he had spoken of some Englishman who had gone down the crater of Vesuvius, some listener adventured: ‘We like men who do that kind of thing, because a man should not think too much of his life,’ but was answered solidly, ‘You do not think little of your lives, but you think so much of your lives that you would enjoy them everywhere, even in the crater of Vesuvius.’ Somebody asked him if we should pray, but even prayer was too full of hope, of desire, of life, to have any part in that acquiescence that was his beginning of wisdom, and he answered that one should say, before sleeping: ‘I have lived many lives. I have been a slave and a prince. Many a beloved has sat upon my knees, and I have sat upon the knees of many a beloved. Everything that has been shall be again.’ Beautiful words, that I spoilt once by turning them into clumsy verse.
Nearly all that we call education was to him but a means to bring us under the despotism of life; and I remember the bewilderment of a schoolmaster who asked about the educationof children and was told to ‘teach them fairy tales, and that they did not possess even their own bodies.’ I think he would not have taught anybody anything that had to be written in prose, for he said, very seriously, ‘I have thought much about it, and I have never been able to discover any reason why prose should exist.’ I think he would not have trained anybody in anything but in the arts and in philosophy, which sweeps the pathway before them, for he certainly thought, as William Blake did, that the ‘imagination is the man himself,’ and can, if it be strong enough, work every miracle. A man had come to him in London, and had said, ‘My wife believes that you have the wisdom of the East and can cure her neuralgia, from which she has suffered for years.’ He had answered: ‘Are you certain that she believes that? because, if you are, I can cure her.’ He had gone to her and made a circle round her and recited a poem in Sanscrit, and she had never had neuralgia since. He recited the poem to us, and was very disappointed because we did not know by the sound that it was a description of the spring. Not only did he think that the imaginative arts were the only things that were quite sinless, but he spent more than half a day proving, by many subtle and elaborate arguments, that ‘artfor art’s sake’ was the only sinless doctrine, for any other would hide the shadow of the world as it exists in the mind of God by shadows of the accidents and illusions of life, and was but Sadducean blasphemy. Religion existed also for its own sake; and every soul quivered between two emotions, the desire to possess things, to make them a portion of its egotism, and a delight in just and beautiful things for their own sake—and all religions were a doctrinal or symbolical crying aloud of this delight. He would not give his own belief a name for fear he might seem to admit that there could be religion that expressed another delight, and if one urged him too impetuously, he would look embarrassed and say, ‘This body is a Brahmin.’ All other parts of religion were unimportant, for even our desire of immortality was no better than our other desires. Before I understood him, I asked what he would answer to one who began the discussion by denying the immortality of the soul, for the accident of a discussion with religious people had set him grafting upon this stock, and he said, ‘I would say to him, What has that to do with you?’
I remember these phrases and these little fragments of argument quite clearly, for their charm and their unexpectedness has made them cling to the memory; but when I try toremember his philosophy as a whole, I cannot part it from what I myself have built about it, or have gathered in the great ruined house of ‘the prophetic books’ of William Blake; but I am certain that he taught us by what seemed an invincible logic that those who die, in so far as they have imagined beauty or justice, are made a part of beauty or justice, and move through the minds of living men, as Shelley believed; and that mind overshadows mind even among the living, and by pathways that lie beyond the senses; and that he measured labour by this measure, and put the hermit above all other labourers, because, being the most silent and the most hidden, he lived nearer to the Eternal Powers, and showed their mastery of the world. Alcibiades fled from Socrates lest he might do nothing but listen to him all life long, and I am certain that we, seeking as youth will for some unknown deed and thought, all dreamed that but to listen to this man who threw the enchantment of power about silent and gentle things, and at last to think as he did, was the one thing worth doing and thinking; and that all action and all words that lead to action were a little vulgar, a little trivial. Ah, how many years it has taken me to awake out of that dream!
1900-1908.