NOTES
195
easily interpreted (as all Buddhists do interpret
the Precepts) can avail against them; do not
mop up the Ganges with a duster; nor stop the
revolution of the stars with a lever of lath.
Awake, awake only! let there be ever re-
membrance that Existence is sorrow, sorrow
by the inherent necessity of the way it is made;
sorrow not by volition, not by malice, not by
carelessness, but by nature, by ineradicable
tendency, by the incurable disease of Desire,
its Creator, is it so, and the way to destroy it
is by the uprooting of Desire; nor is a task so
formidable accomplished by any threepenny-bit-
in-the-plate-on-Sunday morality, the '‘ deceive
others and self-deception will take care of itself ”
uprightness, but by the severe roads of austere
self-mastery, of arduous scientific research,
which constitute the Noble Eightfold Path.
tor-105. There’s one. . . Six Six Six,3—
This opinion has been recently (and most oppor-
tunely) confirmed by the Rev. Father Simons,
Roman Catholic Missionary (and head of the
Corner in Kashmir Stamps), Baramulla, Kash-
mir.
106. Gallup.%*— For information apply to
Mr. Sidney Lee.
11. ‘'/t zs the number ofa Man."'3—Rev.
xill. 18,
117. Frves.AA—Dukes.,
122, (Elsewhere.)3> — See ‘‘ Songs
Spirit” and other works,
128. The Qabalistic Balm.3®— May be
studied in ‘‘The Kabbalah (szc) Unveiled”’
(Redway). It is much to be wished that some
one would undertake the preparation of an
English translation of Rabbi Jischak Ben
Loria’s ‘‘De Revolutionibus Animarum,” and
of the book ‘‘ Beth Elohim.”
139. Cain.?7—Gen. iv. 8.
152. Hunyadi,*8—Hunyadi Janos, a Hunga-
rian table water.
161. Nadi,3°—For this difficult subject refer to
the late Swami Vivekananda’s ‘‘ Raja Yoga.”
167. Tom Bond Bishop.*—Founder of the
‘*Children’sScripture Union” (an Association for
the Dissemination of Lies among Young People)
and otherwise knownasa philanthropist. His re-
lationship to the author (that of uncle) has pro-
cured him this rather disagreeable immortality.
He was, let us hope, no relation to George
Archibald Bishop, the remarkable preface to
whose dreadfully conventionally psychopathic
works is this.
of the
PREFACE.*
In the fevered days and nights under the
Empire that perished in the struggle of 1870,
* To a collection of MSS, illustrating the ‘‘ Psy-
chopathia Sexualis” of von Kraft-Ebing. ‘Ihe
names of the parties have been changed.
that whirling tumult of pleasure, scheming,
success, and despair, the minds of men hada
trying ordeal to pass through. In Zola’s ‘‘ La
Curée”” we see how such ordinary and natural
characters as those of Saccard, Maxime, and
the incestuous heroine, were twisted and dis-
torted from their normal sanity, and sent whirl-
ing into the jaws of a hell far more affrayant
than the mere cheap and nasty brimstone Sheol
which is a Shibboleth for the dissenter, and
with which all classes of religious humbug,
from the Pope to the Salvation ranter, from
the Mormon and the Jesuit to that mongrel
mixture of the worst features of both, the Ply-
mouth Brother, have scared their illiterate,
since hypocrisy was born, with Abel, and
spiritual tyranny, with Jehovah! Society, in
the long run, is eminently sane and practical ;
under the Second Empireit ran mad. If these
things are done in the green tree of Society,
what shall be done in the dry tree of Bo-
hemianism? Art always has a suspicion to
fight against; always some poor mad Max
Nordau is handy to call everything outside the
kitchen the asylum. Here, however, there is a
substratum of truth. Consider the intolerable
long roll of names, all tainted with glorious
madness. Baudelaire the diabolist, debauchee
of sadism, whose dreams are nightmares, and
whose waking hours delirium; Rollinat the
necrophile, the poet of phthisis, the anxio-
maniac; Péladan, the high priest—of non-
sense; Mendés, frivolous and scoffing sensualist ;
besides a host of others, most alike in this, that,
below the cloak of madness and depravity, the
true heart of genius burns. No more terrible
period than this is to be found in literature; so
many great minds, of which hardly one comes
to fruition ; such seeds of genius, such a harvest
of—whirlwind! Even a barren waste of sea is
less saddening than one strewn with wreckage.
In England such wild song found few fol-
lowers of any worth or melody. Swinburne
stands on his solitary pedestal above the vulgar
crowds of priapistic plagiarists; he alone
caught the fierce frenzy of Baudelaire’s brandied
shrieks, and his First Series of Poems and
Ballads was the legitimate echo of that not
fierier note. But English Art as a whole was
unmoved, at any rate not stirred to any depth,
by this wave of debauchery. The great thinkers
maintained the even keel, and the windy waters
lay not for their frailer barks to cross. ‘I here
is one exception of note, till this day unsus-
pected, in the person of George Archibald
Bishop. Ina corner of Paris this young poet
(for in his nature the flower of poesy did spring,
did even take root and give some promise of
a brighter bloom, till stricken and blasted in
latter years by the lightning of his own sins)
was steadily writing day after day, night after