Part 2

‘Here it was that the Fairy, who is so obliging as to rule my destiny, as yonder star is said to rule the heart, bade me come at dated day and hour to meet with one, whose acquaintance, as she assured me, would prove to be remarkably interesting. Truly with all my utmost stretch of thought, be it in levelled prose or rolling poetry, I can conjure up nothing personal here, or make any spiritual bread out of these stones, but then, ’tis only purblind ignorance which vows that all is nothing which it cannot see. Now, as there is no form near me, and as I can with sorcerer’s sight see for fifty miles adown, and all around the land and sea, I opine that he, the beloved personage, to keep the tryst must come here on the wings of thought far sweeping. Light of my Soul, I give thee half an hour!’

But as Flaxius made this last remark, he observed a Cypress plant, about six feet high, with leafage reaching to the ground, a furlong distant on a cliff, was evidently moving from its place towards him, and, as it moved, was growing human in its form. The head became distinct, the shoulders next, then the lower foliage unfolded in a long dark robe.

Like all illuminati--such as you and I--Flaxius drew critical, philosophical deductions first, before examining vulgar details, in these words:

‘I wonder, now, whether the seeing saplings waving in the wind did not first suggest to man, ghosts? But this is really a Being. Fairy mine, I did not think that thou wouldst play a miracle on _me_! Thaumaturgy among us is really too bad. But perhaps,’ he added, ‘it is a fancy of the gentleman himself--habit becomes strict nature with us all.’

As the form drew near him, Flaxius recognised in the face and mien of the stranger, though it would not be apparent to the world, a Gymnosophist. So they were once termed, whom we should call Brahmins--that is, Indian sages. Evidently the stranger had come far astray into the Italian land.

Now, as Flaxius had passed a century or two of his youth in company with his friend Pythagoras in study at the leading Indian universities, he understood the stranger at a glance. Therefore he addressed him familiarly in Romany, which is a cousin to Hindi, which is a grand-daughter to Sanskrit, and therefore all in the family and generally spoken:

‘_Latcho divvus prala! Būt mishto hom dikàv tute!_’ (‘Good day, brother! Right glad I am to see thee!’)

But the stranger gravely replied in the mother of Sanskrit, or ancient Aryan of the Tertiary period:

‘I am of older race than thou hast deemed. I was among the fathers of those who first came into India from the far North, and I speak the tongue which is destined in its descendants to encircle the whole world. And thou, too, knowest it, Flaxius, as I know thee, for we have met ere now, long since, beyond the Ganges, though thou now speakest flippantly, like a mad college youth, in the language of the roads. But thou art only a boy as yet in years, and wilt learn wisdom in time. And the fairy who watches over thee has sent me here that thou mayst have a lesson which will profit thee so far as thou art wise, and redouble what there is in thee, be it small or great, and mend thy flippant speech.’

To which Flaxius humbly and gently replied, in good Sanskrit:

‘Few, indeed, O father, are the diamond dewdrops of immortality which have fallen into my vase from the infinite heaven of wisdom; barely the flavour of a taste of the Amrecta cup of true knowledge has come to me from the depth of the soundless sea of Truth, and if thou canst add to it ever so little, it will be most gratefully received. I am as one who murmurs feebly in a sleep, mid broken dreams. I pray thee, waken me to life and light!’

‘It is not from me, Flaxius,’ answered the Aryan sage, ‘that thy lesson is to come, but from one nearer allied to thee in that philosophy of life which thou art next to learn. My footsteps wander in the silent paths, far beyond humanity and the visible scope of sense; thine have not yet trodden all the ways of the world in which thou hast a part. As yet, for thee, there is perfume in the green valleys, amid violets and asphodel; for thee, birds still sing in leafy trees; for thee, the lovely nymph amid the reeds still smiles and beckons with a cautious air, and brave men welcome thee with the wine-cup in the weaponed hall; for thee is yet the ring and the crash of arms, and the joy of battle, and council among sages and kings. All of this I have left far behind me--for it was my fate. Whether to press on through the ages, or exhaust the age ere leaving it, is not a question for us. To every one let his road and ours be plain.

‘Now, as to him whom thou art here to meet. Here in this land, as indeed in many others, long ere thy Etruscan ancestors had brought Egyptian and Greek art or culture into their own rude strength and tremendous superstition and faith in ancient forms, there were men who after death became spirits, and were worshipped as gods. Yet even then, so inherent was earth in their natures, they remained of the world worldly, and existed in that nature which we of India ever aspire to transcend. Among them was one who vowed never to quit this world and human life till he had mastered its last secret.’

‘A most original and glorious god, that!’ observed Flaxius, ‘and one rather to my mind. Was he, think you, square right or round wrong?’

‘Being assumedly in his right mind, he did nothing wrong,’ answered the Aryan. ‘Nay, there is a point to come, in the dim and remote future, where our paths will meet. But, to the god himself! Look about thee, and tell me what thou seest?’

‘I behold,’ replied Flaxius, after a pause, ‘vast rocks, or remnants, as it seems on closer look, of some tremendous architecture of long lost ages, of rudest form, yet worked with giant will, so worn by time and so tossed in confusion that few would trace in them the hand of man. I myself did not at first observe that these were ruins of some massy building.’

‘What modern culture would not note,’ replied the Aryan, ‘has, however, been retained in popular tradition, for the wild shepherd who pastures his goats amid these rocks, or the old crones while spindling in their shade, record, in what has been called the “Gospel of the Distaff,” tales of a time when there was a mighty temple in this spot--a marvellous building of high walls and towers, from whose lofty summit men beheld the sun while it was still dark on earth, or, as legend grows in greatness, all night long. This tale their ancestors brought from the icy North, where, indeed, it is true enough in a way, and ever will be.

‘Therein dwelt the god, who had been a mighty man, uniting in himself all that was of the earth earthy, of human craft most crafty, of strength the strongest, of honeyed sweetness the most sweet, of mortal bitterness, the bitterest. He gave himself unto the very life of the life of what the Egyptian Hermes has called the downward-borne elements of God; but suffered not a fibre, a breath of that which transcends life--or what we call the spiritual or divine--to mingle with, or enter into his sphere. Hence, dealing only with material things, he found that all things material do somewhere clash or fail, and that, however high human thoughts may rise, there is always some higher point whence they appear as mockeries and failures, or foolish incompletions. He ended--supposing an end--by seeing in all things that which, beginning as almost senseless fun, and witless laughter in apes and boors, rises to humour and true wit in culture, flits as the paradox o’er many a problem of life, thrills or charms or terrifies as contrast or contradiction in the struggle of forces, appals and bewilders us in the agony and suffering, pain and tragedy of the elements and man, and ends all in death and new birth. To him in all is one stupendous humour, whether in laughter or in weeping, or in the deepest human wisdom--for in all lies _the paradox_ always visible from some point to the god.’

‘Verily,’ observed Flaxius, ‘_that_ is having a keen perception of a joke on a tremendous scale. And considering that all nature hath as yet appeared to me as consisting principally of conundrums, I should infer that our god will find no lack of work or of amusement for some time to come. Truly, I begin to surmise that there is more wisdom in the world than the wisest are aware of, and that the greater we become the greater are our jests and the more poetic our _quodlibets_; yea and that even a pun may be so sublime that a church may be founded on it. It has indeed occurred to me many a time that many a doctrine, creed or law divine, for which myriads of lives have been lost, is all _bosh_, as ye say in your ancient Indian tongue, ‘mere noise and nonsense.’ Like bricks set in a row on end by children, they only knock one another down in due succession at the last.

‘Therefore Humour in its highest and holiest, or most diabolical sense, is the one true _aurea catena_, or golden chain which runs through all things, so far as man can know them. Yes, it is like a tremendous rock which I once saw even in thy native land, O Sage. It overhung the road so terribly that the heart of him who passed under it quaked with fear, but when it was passed, men, looking backwards, beheld that in the sunshine it wore the form of a great grotesque face beaming with winky laughter.’

‘Thou dost indeed rise to the occasion, Flaxius,’ replied the Sage, with an expression which seemed almost like the reflected, far-away, dim phantom of a pre-historic smile. It was his first for seven hundred and fifty-three years, reckoning from the fifteenth of August, which is the Ascension Day of Buddha. ‘Almost thou persuadest me that the god has a convert ready-baked to his hand. But it is past the sunset, and I know that we are awaited. Follow me!’

He led the way along a winding path or easy footway, now beside vast, uplifted stones, now by the edges of tremendous cliffs, at whose base, far below, was heard the sound of a torrent, like human voices laughing together; overhead leaned, far out, graceful trees or shrubs, like daring girls seeking to look below for coming lovers--kneeling on tufts of waving mountain vines, softly lighted by the stars and rising moon.

The breeze came from the sea to woo the night, and its cool breath was pleasant to the giant-like young Etruscan, but the Indian sage drew his cloak about him, and as he seated himself on a stone said:

‘Yet a few minutes and we shall be before the ancient god. Know that long ago, even during the days of the earliest dwellers in Italy, there was a civilisation which far transcended that of savages, for wherever there is a race with genius there will be work, however rude, to prove it. At that time, the spirit of whom I spoke had here a temple. Then in a later age, when other races such as thine, O Flaxius, invaded Italy, these people, forewarned by divinity, left the marvellous image brought from some Asian clime in which their deity had dwelt, and, walling up the shrine with utmost care, laboured long to destroy all outward traces of man’s work, and fled.

‘Then the god, who had before ever been present in the statue, also left the cave. But once a year does he return to it, to revivify that which was once himself, unto mankind, even as in all countries feudal possessions are held by the tenure of annual presence and the performance of some deed. And the performance to which he is pledged, is to answer to such words as may be spoken to him, which indeed are few and far between, since among the spiritual and Theosophists, there are not many who care for such inveterate old heathenism, and hard-pressed, material, firm-baked worldliness as his.

‘Thou, O Flaxius, having by mortal virtue won the grace of an immortal _Fata_, or celestial fairy who is well nigh one of the gods, hast had the strange chance of a man who is to be perfected in worldly wisdom, and therefore art sent to confer with him who mastered it in the past. Long it is, I ween, since he ever saw before his shrine such a neophyte as thou art!’

‘And now let us enter!’

Saying this, he pressed aside the boughs and leaves of a dense thicket or copse, finding again a passage, till he came to what seemed to be a bare wall of rock. Here, he tapped thrice with his staff, whereupon a door opened, and they entered a wide-arched hall illuminated by a very soft and brilliant light, whose source was not visible, but seemed to be in the air itself. A single and silent form, that of a youth of beautiful, but strange type, as of another race, led them to the baths, where they found, after their ablutions in perfumed water, fresh linen garments ready for them. They were then taken to another apartment where a meal was spread. It gave no great promise, being simply a cake for each, with wine, which, however, in no wise astonished sages who knew the secrets of transcendental cookery, and of draughts distilled with Rosicrucian skill. And then, being greatly refreshed, the Aryan spoke once more:

‘Thou wilt now behold the god, and I bid and beg thee earnestly, that thou, ere speaking, wilt consider long and very seriously his countenance, following it to the very depths of its expression, and through all the shadows and tones of meaning which it awakens in thy memory or imagination. Now if thou art, as becomes a true student of wisdom, keenly perceptive of the soul in the face--that is, a genuine physiognomist--then wilt thou, with the aid of what I have told thee, know enough to learn more.’

And with this they went into a great hall. At the further end, in a wonderfully quaint shrine, which seemed like a dense swarm of blinking jewels and living gems swimming in gold, was a most marvellous image. It was apparently of some strange creamy-white or ivory-like material, browned or veined by great antiquity into rich dark tones and blending polished hues, as if time had completed on it with unusual care the daintiest part of the hand-work of the artist. One would think it had been made by Keats. In the form itself there was manifest a most archaic rudeness; there was in it nothing of the divine grace of the Greek, and yet it had not the ugliness of the old traditional forms of the Egyptian, for he who made it had gone straight to nature, copying what he saw there without convention. It was the converse of art.

Flaxius bowed low before the form; the Aryan prostrated himself flat on the ground, uttering a fervent prayer in many strophes, burning incense withal, and chanting an invocation. But the young Etruscan gazed boldly at the god, steadily and without fear, as a Norse champion might have gazed at Odin or Thor, had either faced him. And as the mystic light shone on the deeply inscrutable countenance of the Aryan sage and the splendid self-confidence and jovial air of Flaxius, like an Asiatic pre-figuring of the Roman or of the race predestined to conquer the world,--and finally on the marvellous mystery of the god, the wisest observer might well have thought that even in those days such a trio was without its equal on earth. There they were, even as they are to-day: the transcendental Oriental, the vigorous prototype of the coming Europe, and the obscuring image of the giant Past--a goodly picture for the artist who could do it justice!

And what Flaxius first beheld in the face was the coarse and laughing look, not even of the lowest faun or satyr, but of a boor or clown ‘grinning through a horse-collar,’ such as I have seen in a head of the fourteenth century in an old hall in Herefordshire: a look changing, an instant later, into the expression of a devil, with an unutterable depth of malice and despair, as of lunacy in man. But whether it was the play of the mystic light, or of something more marvellous within, he suddenly saw a new soul in it, as of a higher and more cultured fiend--a Mephistopheles who denied all things and smiled on all; and yet it was the same face, and anon there came insensibly the expression of the sage who, cold and calm, observes all human error and earthly change, like one studying insoluble problems.

‘Now we have come,’ thought Flaxius, ‘to the earliest Greek philosophers, Cynic and Stoic and Epicurean--sunshine on ice!’

And anon it was the poet, seeking his similes and correspondences in nature and man, caring not, so that he found the beautiful and vivid, how contradictory the elements might be.

‘Ha! art thou there, Hesiod--or is it Homer--or Sappho--or seest thou thy singers of the Mahabarata and Kalidasa?’ inquired Flaxius of the Indian. ‘Yes--’tis all the same--the simile and the antithesis--the contradiction and anomaly which point man’s highest poetry.’

But the face was ever the same nor had it changed.

‘And last of all I see the seeker into all,’ reflected Flaxius. ‘He who from the lowest sense of incongruity, as from the deepest agony of passion and faith, from the highest truth evolved by philosophy, as from the whirling million-folded threads of the garment of God, draws only the conclusion of strife and absurd change. The eternal Wheel of the Law, held by a laughing fiend--all is Humour--and thus endeth the first lesson!’

Then he spoke to the god.

‘I perceive that I can see in thee no more, since I have got back to my beginning. Doubtless there are in thee higher phases which I, the mere pupil, cannot perceive. All of us cannot fathom everything. But what I have learned during this past hour transcends all that I knew before, and I must live ages upon earth to master it. Humour is the perception of incongruity and imperfection, of contrasts and errors; the truest humorist is he who sees it with the most philosophy and truth.’

There was silence, and then there came a deep yet soft and solemn voice from the god:

‘Thou hast learned all which I expected from thee--now learn to live in life, and take it as it comes, since gods and men are all subject to the same laws. _Seek_ continually. Knowledge is the soil which when well cultivated yields the grain by which thou canst live. Children, go in peace, I have spoken!’

* * * * *

‘He spoke well,’ said the Aryan sage; ‘very well, but not beyond his past. Mine is another road. The true and far-advanced sage, my Flaxius, can by penance and contemplation rise through the ages far above all changes and contradictions of nature and of matter, and pass through the Gate of Nirvana--to eternal and unchangeable peace and happiness. Whether it be, as some suppose, into absorption with the highest happiness, or to pursue new fields of individual actions beyond all that intellect has ever dreamed, I know not, but that he can escape thereby the miseries of change, I _do_ believe.’

‘But that is only for one in millions,’ remarked Flaxius.

‘Eternity is long,’ replied the Sage.

‘I think,’ answered the Etruscan, ‘that as all truth is three-fold, there may be yet a third way. What it is I truly do not know, but I will think of it. Meanwhile I have enough to do for many a year, in following out what I this night have learned. Before I endeavour to excel in the higher heavenly mathematics and celestial algebra and transcendental curves and equations, I will first master this earthly arithmetic. Perhaps a few of your sages might find the gate of Nirvana sooner if they would do so. You Theosophists forget that you are here in this world as ants, and that the visions and thoughts of the eagle--however grand and fine they may be--are misplaced in the emmet. Speculations in billions of æons and millions of millenniums and blue eternities are folly for men whose manifest measure of black and white time is the change of day and night, the course of seasons and the path of years. You narrate minutely what occurred for thousands of Kalpacs to the gods, yet cannot trace your own human history accurately for more than a few centuries. To me it seems that knowledge--like charity--should begin at home. And like unto it, friend, but even worse, do I find your esoteric reincarnation. The gradual evolution of all men through revolving cycles, which requires for ‘complete unfoldment’ a solar system on the seven principles through each of which the soul makes seven rounds, in seven races, and so on through seventy times seven sevenings, with seven times seventy new senses, seasonings, and so on, ere you can get the human being into good form, reminds one very much of the machine depicted by Hogarth. There are in it steel wheels and springs, cogs, latchets, levers, eccentrics, valves, and God knows what all--to draw a cork!

‘You reply that Eternity is long, and by that saying you refute yourself. For life seems to be all to him who is in it. And you require man to master, study, understand, and in life live up to a system which he can only comprehend, or do anything with in a million of years. Wherein, O friend, thou art illogical.

‘And yet, O Aryan, I thank thy faith, for the time was not quite lost which I spent in studying it. For even as oysters lead to soup, and soup to fish and good _pièces de résistance_, or beef and game, so do I prophetically foresee that this thy Indian soup of speculation will lead to German metaphysics, which will conduce to the fish of a _Natur-philosophie_, which will bring man to the English roast beef of Darwin and Huxley, and solid pudding thereunto.

‘And I thank thee for introducing me to this god, in whom I find incarnate the moral aspect of the mere materialism in which I, for the time, live, move, and have my being. Truly, it is not quite enough for one who would fain think that ’tis not all of life to live, nor all of death to die, but it is all in all sufficient for the disciple of Epicurus and Lucretius, which it is well to be for once in life’s journey, wherein we must sometimes stop in queer inns of Hedonism.

‘Now may we in the ages often meet! Farewell until our paths again are one!’

And with this each went his way again into life.

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