The Sword of Song

THE SWORD OF SONG 60 and ignorant Hindus whose letters occasionally delight the readers of the Sporting Times, such letters being usually written by public scribes for a few pice in the native bazaar. As to “Babus” (Babu, I may mention, is the equivalent to our “Mister,” and not the name of a savage tribe), Mr. Chesterton, from his Brixton Brahmaloka, may look forth and see that the “Babu” cannot understand Western ideas; but a distinguished civil servant in the Madras Presidency, second wrangler in a very good year, assured me that he had met a native whose mathematical knowledge was superior to that of the average senior wrangler, and that he had met several others who approached that standard. His specific attack on Madame Blavatsky is equally unjust, as many natives, not theoso- phists, have spoken to me of her in the highest terms. “Honest Hindus” cannot be ex- pected to think as Mr. Chesterton deems likely, as he is unfortunately himself a Western, and in the same quagmire of mis- apprehension as Prof. Max Müller and the rest. Madame Blavatsky’s work was to remind the Hindus of the excellence of their own shastras,* to show that some Westerns held identical ideas, and thus to countermine the dishonest representations of the mission- aries. I am sufficiently well known as a bitter opponent of “Theosophy” to risk nothing in making these remarks. I trust that the sense of public duty which inspires these strictures w ill not be taken as incompatible w ith the gratitude I ow e to him for his exceedingly sympathetic and dispassionate review of my “Soul of Osiris.” I would counsel him, however, to leave alone the Brixton Chapel, and to “work up from his appreciation of the ‘Soul of Osiris’ to that loftier and wider work of the human imagina-tion, the appreciation of the Sporting Times !” ——— Mr Chesterton thinks it funny that I should call upon “Shu.” Has he forgotten that the Christian God may be most suitably invoked by the name “Yah” ? I should be sorry if God were to mistake his religious enthusiasms for the derisive ribaldry of the London “gamin.” Similar remarks apply to “El” and other Hebrai-christian deities. This note is hardly intelligible without the review referred to. I therefore reprint the * Sacred Books. portion thereof which is germane to my matter from the Daily News, June 18, 1901 :— To the side of a mind concerned with idle merri- ment (sic !) there is certainly something a little funny in M r. Cr owley’s passionate devotion to deities who bear such na mes as Mout and Nuit, and Ra and Shu, and Hor makhou. T hey do no seem to the English m ind to lend themselves to pious exhilara-tion. Mr Crowley says in the same poem : The burden is too hard to bear, I took too adamant a cross ; This sackcloth rends my soul to wear, My self-denial is as dross. O, Shu, that holdest up the sky, Holy up thy servant, lest he die ! We have all possible respect for Mr. Crowley’s re- ligious symbols, and we do not object to his calling upon Shu at any hour of the night. Only it would be unreasonable of him to complain if his r eligious exercises were generally mistaken for an effort to drive away cats. ——— Moreover, the poets of M r. Crowley’s school have, among all their merits, some genuine intellectual dangers from this tendency to im port religions, this free trade in gods. T hat all cr eeds are significant and all gods divine we willingly agree. But this is rather a r eason for being content with our own than for attempting to steal other people’s. T hat affecta-tion in many modern mystics of adopting an Oriental civilisation and mode of thought must cause much harmless merriment among the actual Orientals. The notion that a turban and a f ew vows will m ake an Englishm an a Hindu is quite on a par with the idea that a black hat and an Oxford degree will make a Hindu an Englishman. We wonder whether our Buddhistic philosopher s have ever read a flor id letter in Baboo E nglish. We suspect that the said type of docum ent is in reality exceedingly like the philosophic essay s written by Englishm en about the splendour of Eastern thought. Som etimes E uropean m ystics deserve something worse than mere laughter at the hands (sic !) of Orientals. If there was one person whom honest Hindus would ever have been justified in tearing to pieces it was Madame Blavatsky. ——— That our world-worn men of ar t should believe for a moment that moral salvation is possible and supremely important is an unm ixed benefit. But to believe for a moment that it is to be found by going to particular places or r eading particular books or joining particular socieites is to make for the thou- sandth time the mistake that is at once materialism and superstition. If Mr. Crowley and the new mystics think for one m oment that an Egyptian desert is m ore m ystic than an English meadow, that a palm tree is m ore poetic than a Sussex beech, that a broken temple of Osiris is more super- natural than a Baptist chapel in Brixton, then they