Magick Without Tears

OBSTACLES ON THE PATH 447 Dumas, Lytton, Huysmans, Mabel Collins, and Arthur Machen. You look at me with strange sad eyes: "But you, too, Master, have not you too led a life as strange, as glamourous, as weird and as romantic, as the best of them? Then why this cold detachment from that ambience?" Well, if you put it like that, I can only say that I feel at the same time more guilty and entirely innocent! For, while the charge is true, the defence is not to be shaken. The worst of all teachers are the Boloney Magnates, of whom I have already given some account. But the next worst are just exactly those who try to create an atmosphere of romance, and succeed only in a crude theatricalism. So, avoiding the swirling turmoil of Scylla, I have broken the ship on the barren rock Charybdis. Now let me hearten you, brave sister! All the old tales are true! You can have as many dragons, princesses, vampires, knights-errant, glendowers, enchanted apes, Jinn, sorcerers and incubi as you like to fancy, and-whoa Emma! did 1 tell you about Cardinal Newman? Well, I will. The one passage in his snivelling Apologia which impressed me was a tale of his childhood-before the real poet, lover, and mystic had been buried beneath the dung-heap of Theology. He tells us that he read The Arabian Nights-in a heavily Bowdlerized edition, bet you a tosser! -and was enchanted, like the rest of us, so that he sighed "I wish these tales were true!" The same thing happened to me; but I set my teeth, and muttered: "I will make these tales true!" Well, I have, haven't I? You said it yourself! Yes child, my deepest attitude is to be found in my life. I have been to most of the holy inaccessible places, and talked with the most holy inaccessible men; I have dared all the most dangerous adventures, both of the flesh and of the spirit; and 1 challenge the world's literature to match for sublimity and terror such experiences as those in the latter half of The Vision and the Voice.