The Sword of Song

NOTES 53 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 b y a ny t hreepenny- 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. 101-105. There’s one. . . Six Six Six.31— This opinion has most recently (and most oppor- tunely) been confirmed by the Rev. Father Simons, Roman Catholic Missionary (and head of the Corner in K ashmir Stamps), Baramulla, Kash- mir. 106. Gallup.32—For information apply to Mr. Sidney Lee. 111. “It is the number of a Man.”33—Rev. xiii. 18. 117. Fives.34—Dukes. 122. ( Elsewhere.)35—See “Songs of the Spirit” and other works. 128. The Qabalistic Balm.36—May be studied in “The Kabbalah ( sic) Unveiled” (Redway). It is much to be w ished 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.37—Gen. iv. 8. 152. Hunyadi.38—Hunyadi Janos, a Hunga- rian table water. 161. Nadi.39—For this difficult subject refer to the late Swami Vivekananda’s “Raja Yoga.” 167. Tom Bond Bishop.40—Founder of the “Children’s Scripture Union” (an Association for the Dissemination of Lies among Young People) and otherwise known as a 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. PREFACE* In the fevered days and nights under the Empire that perished in the struggle of 1870, * To a c ollection of MSS illustrating the “Psy- chopathia Sexualis” of von K raft-Ebing. T he names of the parties have been changed. that w hirling tumult of pleasure, scheming, success, and despair, the minds of men had a 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 j aws 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 mongrol mixture of the worst features of both, the Ply- mouth B rother, 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 Empire it 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 delerium; Rollinat the necrophile, the poet of phthisis, the anxio- maniac; Péledan, 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 seed 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 pedastal 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 w as 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. There is one exception of note, till this day unsus- pected, in the person of George Archibald Bishop. In a 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