Unicorns Part 9

JAMES JOYCE

Who is James Joyce? is a question that was answered by John Quinn, who told us that the new writer was from Dublin and at present residing in Switzerland; that he is not in good health--his eyes trouble him--and that he was once a student in theology, but soon gave up the idea of becoming a priest. He is evidently a member of the new group of young Irish writers who see their country and countrymen in anything but a flattering light. Ireland, surely the most beautiful and most melancholy island on the globe, is not the Isle of Saints for those iconoclasts. George Moore is a poet who happens to write English, though he often thinks in French; Bernard Shaw, notwithstanding his native wit, is of London and the Londoners; while Yeats and Synge are essentially Celtic, and both poets. Yes, and there is the delightful James Stephen, who mingles angels' pin-feathers with rainbow gold; a magic decoction of which we never weary. But James Joyce, potentially a poet, and a realist of the De Maupa.s.sant breed, envisages Dublin and the Dubliners with a cruel scrutinising gaze. He is as truthful as Tchekov, and as grey--that Tchekov compared with whose the "realism" of De Maupa.s.sant is romantic bric-a-brac, gilded with a fine style. Joyce is as implacably naturalistic as the Russian in his vision of the sombre, mean, petty, dusty commonplaces of middle-cla.s.s life, and he sometimes suggests the Frenchman in his clear, concise, technical methods. The man is indubitably a fresh talent.

Emerson, after his experiences in Europe, became an armchair traveller. He positively despised the idea of voyaging across the water to see what is just as good at home. He calls Europe a tapeworm in the brain of his countrymen. "The stuff of all countries is just the same." So Ralph Waldo sat in his chair and enjoyed thinking about Europe, thus evading the worries of going there too often. It has its merit, this Emersonian way, particularly for souls easily disillusioned. To antic.i.p.ate too much of a foreign city may result in disappointment. We have all had this experience. Paris resembles Chicago, or Vienna is a second Philadelphia at times; it depends on the colour of your mood. Few countries have been so persistently misrepresented as Ireland. It is lauded to the eleventh heaven of the Burmese or it is a place full of fighting devils in a h.e.l.l of crazy politics. Of course, it is neither, nor is it the land of Lover and Lever; Handy Andy and Harry Lorrequer are there, but you never encounter them in Dublin. John Synge got nearer to the heart of the peasantry, and Yeats and Lady Gregory brought back from the hidden s.p.a.ces fairies and heroes.

Is Father Ralph by Gerald O'Donovan a veracious picture of Irish priesthood and college life? Is the fiction of Mr. Joyce representative of the middle cla.s.s and of the Jesuits? A cloud of contradictory witnesses pa.s.ses across the sky. What is the Celtic character? Dion Boucicault's The Shaughraun? Or isn't the pessimistic dreamer with the soul of a "wild goose," depicted in George Moore's story, the real man? Celtic magic, cried Matthew Arnold. He should have said, Irish magic, for while the Irishman is a Celt, he is unlike his brethren across the Channel. Perhaps he is nearer to the Sarmatian than the continental Celt. Ireland and Poland! The Irish and the Polish! Dissatisfied no matter under which king! Not Playboys of the Western World, but martyrs to their unhappy temperaments.

The Dublin of Mr. Joyce shows another variation of this always interesting theme. It is a rather depressing picture, his, of the daily doings of his contemporaries. His novel is called A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a t.i.tle quite original and expressive of what follows; also a t.i.tle that seems to have emerged from the catalogue of an art-collector. It is a veritable portrait of the artist as a boy, a youth and a young man. From school to college, from the brothel to the confessional, from his mother's ap.r.o.n-strings to coa.r.s.e revelry, the hero is put to the torture by art and relates the story of his blotched yet striving soul. We do not recall a book like this since the autobiography En Route of J.-K. Huysmans. This Parisian of Dutch extraction is in the company of James Joyce. Neither writer stops at the half-way house of reticence. It's the House of Flesh in its most sordid aspects, and the human soul is occasionally illuminated by gleams from the grace of G.o.d. With both men the love of Rabelaisian speech is marked.

This, if you please, is a Celtic trait. Not even the Elizabethans so joyed in "green" words, as the French say, as do some Irish. Of richest hue are his curses, and the Prince of Obliquity himself must chuckle when he overhears one Irishman consign another to everlasting d.a.m.nation by the turn of his tongue.

Stephen, the hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, tells his student friend about his father. These were his attributes: "A medical student, an oarsman, a tenor, an amateur actor, a shouting politician, a small landlord, a small investor, a drinker, a good fellow, a story-teller, somebody's secretary, something in a distillery, a tax-gatherer, a bankrupt, at present a praiser of his own past." He could talk the devil out of the liver-wing of a turkey--as they say up Cork way. The portrait is well-nigh perfect.

The wild goose over again, and ever on the wing. Stephen became violently pious after a retreat at the Jesuits. From the extreme of riotous living he was transformed into a militant Catholic. The reverend fathers had hopes of him. He was an excellent Latinist, but his mind was too speculative; later it proved his spiritual undoing.

To a.n.a.lyse the sensibility of a soul mounting on flaming pinions to G.o.d is easier than to describe the modulations of a moral recidivist. Stephen fell away from his faith, though he did not again sink into the slough of Dublin low life. Cranly, the student, saw through the hole in his sceptical millstone. "It is a curious thing, do you know," Cranly said dispa.s.sionately, "how your mind is supersaturated with the religion in which you say you disbelieve." A profound remark. Once a Roman Catholic always a Roman Catholic, particularly if you are born in Ireland.

Mr. Joyce holds the scales evenly. He neither abuses nor praises. He is evidently out of key with religious life; yet he speaks of the Jesuits with affection and admiration. The sermons preached by them during the retreat are models. They are printed in full--strange material for a novel. And he can show us the black hatred caused by the clash of political and religious opinions. There is a scene of this sort in the house of Stephen's parents that simply blazes with verity. At a Christmas dinner the argument between Dante (a certain Mrs. Riordan) and Mr. Casey spoils the affair. Stephen's father carves the turkey and tries to stop the mouths of the angry man and woman with food. The mother implores. Stephen stolidly gobbles, watching the row, which culminates with Mr. Casey losing his temper--he has had several tumblers of mountain dew and is a little "how come you so?" He bursts forth: "No G.o.d in Ireland! We have had too much G.o.d in Ireland! Away with G.o.d!" "Blasphemer! Devil!"

screamed Dante, starting to her feet and almost spitting in his face. "Devil out of h.e.l.l! We won! We crushed him to death! Fiend!"

The door slammed behind her. Mr. Casey suddenly bowed his head on his hands with a sob of pain. "Poor Parnell!" he cried loudly. "My dead King." Naturally the dinner was not a success. Stephen noted that there were tears in his father's eyes at the mention of Parnell, but that he seemed debonair enough when the old woman unpacked her heart of vile words like a drab.

There is no denying that the novel is as a whole hardly cheerful.

Its grip on life, its intensity, its evident truth, and unflinching acceptance of facts will make A Portrait disagreeable to the average reader. There is relief in the Trinity College episodes; humour of a saturnine kind in the artistic armoury of Mr. Joyce. There is no ironist like an Irishman. The book is undoubtedly written from a full heart, but the author must have sighed with relief when he wrote the last line. No one may tell the truth with impunity, and the portrait of Stephen in its objective frigidity--as an artistic performance--and its pa.s.sionate personal note, is bound to give offence in every quarter. It is too Irish to be liked by the Irish; not an infrequent paradox. The volume of tales ent.i.tled Dubliners reveals a wider range, a practised technical hand, and a gift for etching character that may be compared with De Maupa.s.sant's. A big comparison, but read such masterpieces in pity and irony as The Dead, A Painful Case, The Boarding-House or Two Gallants, and be convinced that we do not exaggerate.

Dublin, we have said elsewhere, is a huge whispering gallery.

Scandal of the most insignificant order never lacks multiple echoes.

From Merrion Square, from the Shelbourne, to Dalkey or Drumcondra; from the Monument to Chapelizod, the repercussion of spoken gossip is unfailing. The book Dubliners is filled with Dublinesque anecdotes. It is charged with the sights and scents and gestures of the town. The slackers who pester servant-girls for their shillings to spend on whisky; the young man in the boarding-house who succ.u.mbs to the "planted" charms of the landlady's daughter to fall into the matrimonial trap--only De Maupa.s.sant could better the telling of this too commonplace story; the middle-aged man, parsimonious as to his emotions and the tragic ending of a love-affair that had hardly begun; and the wonderfully etched plate called The Dead with its hundred fine touches of comedy and satire--these but prove the claim of James Joyce's admirers that he is a writer signally gifted. A malevolent fairy seemingly made him a misanthrope. With Spinoza he could say--oh, terrifying irony!--that "mankind is not necessary" in the eternal scheme. We hope that with the years he may become mellower, but that he will never lose the appreciation of "life's more bitter flavours." Insipid novelists are legion. He is Huysmans's little brother in his flair for disintegrating character.

But yet an Irishman, who sees the shining vision in the sky, a vision that too often vanishes before he can pin its beauty on canvas. But yet an Irishman in his sense of the murderous humour of such a story as Ivy Day in the Committee-Room, which would bring to a Tammany heeler what Henry James called "the emotion of recognition." Ah! the wild goose. The flying dream.

CHAPTER XVII

CREATIVE INVOLUTION

Israel Zangwill, in the papers he contributed once upon a time to the _Strand Magazine_ and later reunited in a book bearing the happy t.i.tle Without Prejudice, spoke of women writers as being significant chiefly in their self-revelation. What they tell of themselves is of more value than what they write about. Whether Mr. Zangwill now believes this matters little in the discussion of an unusual book by a woman. Perhaps to-day he would open both eyes widely after reading Creative Involution, by Cora L. Williams, M. S., with an apposite introduction by Edwin Markham. Miss Williams deals with no less a bagatelle than the Fourth Dimension of s.p.a.ce (what we do not know we fear, and fear is always capitalised).

Speculative as is her work, she is not a New-Thoughter, a Christian Scientist, or a member of any of the other queer rag-tag and bobtail beliefs and superst.i.tions--fortune-telling, astrology, selling "futures" in the next life, table-rapping, and such like. Cora Lenore Williams is an authority in mathematics, as was the brilliant, unhappy Sonya Kovalevska. Her ideas, then, are not verbal wind-pudding, but have a basis of mathematics and the investigations of the laboratory, where "chemists and physicists are finding that the conduct of certain molecules and crystals is best explained as a fourth-dimensional activity."

We have always enjoyed the idea of the Fourth Spatial Dimension. The fact that it is an _x_ in the plotting of mathematicians in general does not hinder it from being a fascinating theme. J. K. F.

Zoellner, of Leipsic, proved to his own satisfaction the existence of a Fourth Dimension when he turned an india-rubber ball inside out without tearing it. Later he became a victim to incurable melancholy. No wonder. If you have read Cayley, or Abbot's Flatland, or the ingenious speculations of Simon Newcomb and W. K. Clifford, you will learn the attractions of the subject. Perpetual motion, squaring the circle, are only variants of the alchemical pursuit of the philosopher's stone, the trans.m.u.tation of the baser metals, the cabalistic Abracadabra, the quest of the absolute. Man can't live on machinery alone, and the underfed soul of the past period of positivism craves more spiritual nourishment to-day. Hasn't the remarkable mathematician Henri Poincare (author of Science and Hypothesis, The Value of Science, Science and Method) declared that between the construction of the spirit and the absolute of truth there is an abysm caused by free choice and the voluntary elimination which have necessitated such inferences? Note the word "free"; free-will is restored to its old and honourable estate in the hierarchy of thought. The cast-iron determinism of the seventies and eighties has gone to join the materialistic ideas of Buchner and Clifford. It is a pluralistic world now, and lordly Intuition--a dangerous vocable--rules over mere mental processes. (There is, as George Henry Lewes a.s.serted, profound truth in the Cullen paradox: _i. e._, there are more false facts than false theories current.) Science only attains the knowledge of the correspondence and relativity of things--no mean intellectual feat, by the way--but not of the things themselves; one must join, adds Poincare, to the faculty of reasoning the gift of direct sympathy. In a word, Intuition. Even mathematics as an exact science is not immutable, and the geometries of Lebatchevsky and Riemann are as legitimate as Euclid's. And at this point the earth beneath us begins to tremble and the stars to totter in their spheres. Is the age of miracles now?

Perhaps music is in the Fourth Dimension. Time may be in two dimensions. Herac.l.i.tus before Bergson compared Time to a river always flowing, yet a permanent river: if we emerged from this stream at a certain moment and entered it an hour later, would it not signify that Time has two dimensions. And where does music stand in the eternal scheme of things? Are not harmony with its vertical structure and melody with its horizontal flow proof that music is another dimension in Time? Miss Williams's notion of the Fourth Spatial Dimension is a spiritual one. Creative Involution is to supersede the Darwinian evolution. Again, the interior revolution described for our salvation in the epistles of the Apostle Paul. All roads lead to religion. Expel religion forcibly and it returns under strange disguises, usually as debasing superst.i.tions. Yet religion without dogma is like a body without a skeleton--it can't be made to stand upright.

Mathematicians are poets, and religion is the poetry of the poor, just as philosophy is the diversion of professors. Modern science, said Mallock, put out the footlights of life's stage when it denied religion. But matter, in the light of recent experiment, is become spirit, energy, anything but gross matter. Tyndall might have to revise the conclusions of his once famous Belfast address in the presence of radium. Remy de Gourmont said that the essential thing is to search the eternal in the diverse and fleeting movements of form. From a macrocosmic monster our G.o.ds are become microcosmic; G.o.d may be a molecule, a cell. A G.o.d to put in a phial; thus far has the zigzag caprice of theory attained. And religion is "a sum of scruples which impede the free exercise of our faculties," says Salomon Reinach in Orpheus. Bossuet did not write his Variations in vain. All is vanity, even doctrinal fluctuations. Goethe has warned us that "Man is not born to solve the mystery of Existence; but he must nevertheless attempt it, in order that he may learn how to keep within the limits of the Knowable." Goethe detested all "thinking about thought." Spinoza was his only philosophical recreation.

Man must no longer be egocentric. The collective soul is born. The psychology of the mob, according to Professor Le Bon, is different from the psychology of the individual. We know this from the mental workings of a jury. Twelve otherwise intelligent men put in a jury-box contaminate each other's will so that their united judgment is, as a rule, that of a full-fledged imbecile. Mark Twain noted this in his accustomed humorous (a mordant humour) fashion, adding that trial by jury was all very well in the time of Alfred the Great, candle-clocks, and small communities. Miss Williams, who sees salvation for the single soul in the collective soul--not necessarily socialistic--nevertheless warns parents against the dangers in our public-school system, where the individuality of the child is so often disturbed, if not destroyed, by cla.s.s teaching.

Mob psychology is always false psychology. The crowd obliterates the ego. Yet to collective consciousness may belong the future. It is all very well for Mallock to call war the glorification, the result, and the prop of limited cla.s.s interests. (This was years ago.) Stately, sedate, stable is the cla.s.s that won't tolerate war; a cla.s.s of moral lollipops. War we must have; it is one of the prime conditions of struggling existence. As belief in some totem, fetich, taboo is the basis of all superst.i.tions, so the superst.i.tion of yesterday builds the cathedrals of faith to-day. (Read Frazer's Golden Bough--James Frazer, who is the Darwin of Social Anthropology.) Happiness requires limitations, as a wine needs a gla.s.s to hold it; and if patriotism is a crime of lese-majesty against mankind, then be it so. But like the poor, war and patriotism are precious essences in the scheme of life, and we shall always have them with us. However, the warning of Miss Williams is a timely one. At school our children's souls are clogged with bricks and mortar, instead of being buoyant and individual.

She quotes--and her little volume contains a mosaic of apt quotations--with evident approbation from Some Neglected Factors in Evolution, by the late H. M. Bernard, an English thinker: "Organic life is thus seen advancing out of the dim past upon a series of waves, each of which can be scanned in detail until we come to that one on which we ourselves, the organisms of to-day, and the human societies to which we belong, are swept onward. Here we must necessarily pause, but can we doubt that the great organic rhythm which has brought life so far will carry it on to still greater heights in the unknown future?" Rhythm, measured flow, is the shibboleth. Zarathustra tells us that man is a discord and hybrid of plant and ghost. "I teach you Beyond-Man (superman); Man is something that will be surpa.s.sed ... once man was ape, and is ape in a higher degree than any ape.... Man is a rope connecting animal and Beyond-Man." "Believe that which thou seest not," cries Flaubert in his marvellous masque of mythologies ancient and modern, The Temptation of St. Anthony. Tertullian said the same centuries before the Frenchman: Believe what is impossible. We all do. Perhaps it is the price we pay for cognition.

Miss Williams is not a Bergsonian, though she appreciates his plastic theories. She has a receptive mind. Henri Bergson is a mystagogue, and all mystagogues are mythomaniacs. He has yet to answer Professor Hugh S. R. Elliott's three questions: "1. Bergson says, 'Time is a stuff both resistant and substantial.' Where is the specimen on which this allegation is founded? 2. Consciousness is to some extent independent of cerebral structure. Professor Bergson thinks he is disproving a crude theory of localisation of mental qualities. Will he furnish evidence of its existence apart from local structure? 3. Instinct leads us to a comprehension of life that intellect can never give. Will Professor Bergson furnish instances of the successes of instinct in biological inquiries where intellect has failed?" (From Modern Science and the Illusions of Professor Bergson, 1912.) These "metaphysical curiosities," as they are rather contemptuously called by Sir Ray Lankester in his preface to this solidly reasoned confutation, are the pabulum of numerous persons, dilettantes, with a craving for an embellished theory of the Grand Perhaps. Miss Williams is not the dupe of such silken sophistries, and while her divagations are sometimes in the air--which, like the earth, hath bubbles, as was observed by the greatest of poets--she plants her feet on tangible affirmations. And to have faith we must admit the Illative sense of John Henry Newman.

Thus "the wheel is come full circle." Creative Involution will please mystics and mathematicians alike. The author somersaults in the vasty blue, but safely volplanes to mother earth.

CHAPTER XVIII

FOUR DIMENSIONAL VISTAS

Hamlet, sometime Prince of Denmark, warned his friend that there were more things in heaven and earth than dreamed of in his philosophy. Now, both Hamlet and Horatio had absorbed the contemporary wisdom of Wittenberg. And let it be said in pa.s.sing that their knowledge did not lag behind ours, metaphysically speaking. Nevertheless, Hamlet, if he had lived longer, might have said that no philosophy would ever solve the riddle of the sphinx; that we never know, only name, things. Noah is the supreme symbol of science, he the first namer of the animals in the ark. The world of sensation is our ark and we are one branch of the animal family. We come whence we know not and go where we shall never guess. Standing on this tiny Isle of Error we call the present, we think backward and live forward. Hamlet the sceptical would now demand something more tangible than the Grand Perhaps. My kingdom for a fulcrum! he might cry to Horatio--on which I may rest my lever and pry this too too solid earth up to the starry skies! What the implement?

Religion? Remember Hamlet was a Catholic, too sensitive to send unshrived to h.e.l.l's fire the soul of his uncle. Philosophy? Read Jules Laforgue's Hamlet and realise that if he were alive to-day the melancholy Prince might be a delicate scoffer at all fables. A Hamlet who had read Schopenhauer. What then the escape? We all need more elbow-room in the infinite. The answer is--the Fourth Dimension in Higher s.p.a.ce. Eureka!

After studying Saint Teresa, John of the Cross, Saint Ignatius, or the selections in Vaughan's Hours with the Mystics, even the doubting Thomas is forced to admit that here is no trace of rambling discourse, fugitive ideation, half-stammered enigmas; on the contrary, the true mystic abhors the cloudy, and his vision pierces with crystalline clearness the veil of the visible world. As literary style we find sharp contours and affirmations. Mysticism is not all cobweb lace and opal fire. Remember that we are not stressing the validity of either the vision or its consequent judgments; we only wish to emphasise the absence of muddy thinking in these writings. This quality of precision, allied to an eloquent, persuasive style, we encounter in Claude Bragdon's Four Dimensional Vistas. The author is an architect and has written much of his art and of projective ornament. (He was a Scammon lecturer at the Chicago Art Inst.i.tute in 1915.) He is a mystic. He is also eminently practical. His contribution to aesthetics in The Beautiful Necessity is suggestive, and on the purely technical side valuable. But Mr.

Bragdon, being both a mathematician and a poet, does not stop at three-dimensional existence. Like the profound English mystic William Blake, he could ask: "How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five?"

What is the Fourth Dimension? A subtle transposition of precious essences from the earthly to the spiritual plane. We live in a world of three dimensions, the symbols of which are length, breadth, thickness. A species of triangular world, a prison for certain souls who see in the category of Time an escape from that other imperative, s.p.a.ce (however, not the Categorical Imperative of Kant and its acid moral convention). Helmholtz and many mathematicians employed the "n" dimension as a working hypothesis. It is useful in some a.n.a.lytical problems, but it is not apprehended by the grosser senses. Pascal, great thinker and mathematician, had his "Abyss"; it was his Fourth Dimension, and he never walked abroad without the consciousness of it at his side. This illusion or obsession was the result of a severe mental shock early in his life. Many of us are like the French philosopher. We have our "abyss," mystic or real.

Mr. Bragdon quotes from the mathematician Bolyai, who in 1823 "declared with regard to Euclid's so-called axiom of parallels, 'I will draw two lines through a given point both of which will be parallel to a given line.'" s.p.a.ce, then, may be curved in another dimension. Mr. Bragdon believes that it is, though he does not attempt to prove it, as that would be impossible; but he gives his readers the chief points in the hypothesis. The "n" dimension may be employed as a lever to the imagination. Even revealed religion demands our faith, and imagination is the prime agent in the interpretation of the universe, according to the gospel of mystic mathematics.

Nature geometrises, said Emerson, and it is interesting to note the imagery of transcendentalism through the ages. It is invariably geometrical. Spheres, planes, cones, circles, spirals, tetragrams, pentagrams, ellipses, and what-not. A cubistic universe. Xenophanes said that G.o.d is a sphere. And then there are the geometrical patterns made by birds on the wing. Heaven in any religion is another sphere. Swedenborg offers a series of planes, many mansions for the soul at its various stages of existence. The Bible, the mystical teachings of Mother Church--why evoke familiar witnesses?

We are hemmed in by riddles, and the magnificent and mysterious tumult of life asks for the eye of imagination, which is also the eye of faith. The cold fire and dark light of the mystics must not repel us by their strangeness. Not knowledge but perception is power, and the psychic is the sign-post of the future. What do all these words mean: matter, energy, spirit, cells, molecules, electrons, but the same old thing? I am a colony of cells, yet that fact does not get me closer to the core of the soul. What will? A fourth spatial dimension, answers Claude Bragdon. Truly a poetic concept.

He calls man a s.p.a.ce-eater. Human ambition is to annihilate s.p.a.ce.

Wars are fought for s.p.a.ce, and every step in knowledge is based upon its mastery. What miracles are wireless telegraphy, flying-machines, the Roentgen ray! Astronomy--what ghastly gulfs it shows us in s.p.a.ce! Time and s.p.a.ce were abolished as sense illusions by the worthy Bishop of Cloyne, George Berkeley; but as we are up to our eyes in quotidian life, which grows over and about us like gra.s.s, we cannot shake off the oppression. First thought, and then realised, these marvels are now accepted as matter of fact because mankind has been told the technique of them; as if any explanation can be more than nominal. We shall never know the real nature of the phenomena that crowd in on us from l.u.s.t to dust. Not even that synthesis of the five senses, the sixth, or s.e.x sense, with its evanescent ecstasy, cuts deeply into the darkness. There may be a seventh sense, a new dimension, intimations of which are setting advanced thinkers on fresh trails. But there is as yet no tangible proof.

Philosophers, who, like some singers, bray their brainless convictions to a gaping auditory, ask of us much more credence, and little or no imagination. As that "old mole," working in the ground, gravitation, is defied by aeroplanes, then we should not despair of any hypothesis which permits us a peep through the partly opened door. Plato's cavern and the shadows. Who knows but in this universe there may be a crevice through which filters the light of another life? Emerson, who shed systems yet never organised one, hints at aerial perspectives. A flight through the sky with the sun bathing in the blue jolts one's conception of a rigid finite world. In such perilous alt.i.tudes I have enjoyed this experience and felt a liberation of the spirit which has no parallel; not even when listening to Bach or Beethoven or Chopin. Music, indeed, is the nearest approach to psychic freedom.

Mr. Bragdon approvingly quotes Goethe's expression "frozen music,"

applied to Gothic architecture. (Stendhal appropriated this phrase.) For us the flying b.u.t.tress is aspiring, and the pointed arch is a fugue. Our author is rich in his a.n.a.logies, and like Sir Thomas Browne sees "quincunxes" in everything; his particular "quincunx"

being Higher s.p.a.ce. The precise patterns in our brain, like those of the ant, bee, and beaver, which enable us to perceive and build the universe (otherwise called innate ideas) are geometrical. s.p.a.ce is the first and final illusion. Time--which is not "a stuff both resistant and substantial," as Henri Bergson declares--is perhaps the Fourth Dimension in the guise of a sequence of states, and not grasped simultaneously, as is the idea of s.p.a.ce. That Time can shrink and expand, opium-eaters, who are not always totally drugged by their dreams, a.s.sure us. A second becomes an aeon. And s.p.a.ce curvature? Is it any wonder that "Lewis Carroll," who wrote those extraordinary parables for little folk, Through the Looking-Gla.s.s and Alice in Wonderland, was a mathematician? A topsy-turvy world; it is even upside down as an optical image. The other side of good and evil may be around the corner. Eternity can lurk in a molecule too tiny to harbour Queen Mab. And we may all live to see the back of our own heads without peering in mirrors. That "astral trunk"

once so fervently believed in may prove a reality; it is situated behind the ear and is a long tube that ascends to the planet Saturn, and by its aid we should be enabled to converse with spirits! The pineal gland is the seat of the soul, and miracles fence us in at every step. We fill our belly with the east wind of vain desires. We eat the air promise-crammed. This world is but a point in the universe, and our universe only one of an infinite series. There was no beginning, there is no end. Eternity is now; though death and the tax-gatherer never cease their importunings.

All this Mr. Bragdon does not say, though he leans heavily on the arcana of the ancient wisdom. The truth is that the majority of humans are mentally considered vegetables, living in two dimensions.

To keep us responsive to spiritual issues, as people were awaked in Swift's Laputa by flappers, is the service performed by such transcendentalists as C. Howard Hinton, author of The Fourth Dimension; Claude Bragdon and Cora Lenore Williams. Their thought is not new; it was h.o.a.ry with age when the Greeks went to old Egypt for fresh learning; Noah conversed with his wives in the same terminology. But its application is novel, as are the personal nuances. The idea of a fourth spatial dimension may be likened to a fresh lens in the telescope or microscope of speculation. For the present writer the hypothesis is just one more incursion into the fairyland of metaphysics. Without fairies the heart grows old and dusty.

The seven arts are fairy-tales in fascinating shapes. As for the paradise problem, it is horribly sublime for me, this idea of an eternity to be spent in a place which, with its silver, gold, plush, and diamonds, seems like the dream of a retired p.a.w.nbroker. The Eternal Recurrence is more consoling. The only excuse for life is its brevity. Why, then, do we yearn for that unending corridor through which in processional rhythms we move, our shoulders bowed by the burden of our chimera--our ego? I confess that I prefer to watch on the edge of some vast promontory the swift approach of a dark sun rushing out from the primordial depths of interstellar s.p.a.ces to the celestial a.s.signation made at the beginning of Time for our little solar system, whose provinciality, remote from the populous path of the Milky Way, has. .h.i.therto escaped colliding with a segment of the infinite. Perhaps in that apocalyptic flare-up--surely a more cosmical and heroic death than stewing in greasy bliss--Higher s.p.a.ce may be manifested and Time and Tri-Dimensional s.p.a.ce be no more. The rest is silence.

CHAPTER XIX

O. W.

It is an enormous advertis.e.m.e.nt nowadays to win a reputation as a martyr--whether to an idea, a vice, or a scolding wife. You have a label by which a careless public is able to identify you. Oscar Wilde was a born advertiser. From the sunflower days to Holloway Gaol, and from the gaol to the Virgins of Dieppe, he kept himself in the public eye. Since his death the number of volumes dealing with his glittering personality, negligible verse and more or less insincere prose, have been steadily acc.u.mulating; why, I'm at a loss to understand. If he was a victim to British "middle-cla.s.s morality," then have done with it, while regretting the affair. If he was not, all the more reason to maintain silence. But no, the clamour increases, with the result that there are many young people who believe that Oscar was a great man, a great writer, when in reality he was neither. Here is Alfred Douglas slamming the memory of his old chum in a not particularly edifying manner, though he tells some truths, wholesome and unwholesome. Henley paid an unpleasant tribute to his dead friend, Robert Louis Stevenson, but the note of hatred was absent; evidently literary depreciation was the object. However, there are many to whom the truth will be more welcome than the spectacle of broken friendship. Another, and far more welcome book, is that written by Martin Birnbaum, a slender volume of "fragments and memories." His Oscar Wilde is the Oscar of the first visit to New York, and there are lots of anecdotes and facts that are sure to please collectors of Wildiana--or Oscariana--which is it? Pictures, too. I confess that his early portraits flatter the Irish writer. "He looked like an old maid in a boarding-house" said a well-known Philadelphia portrait-painter. He was ugly, not a "beautiful Greek G.o.d," as his fervent admirers think. His mouth was loose, ill-shaped, his eyes dull and "draggy,"

his forehead narrow, the cheeks flabby, his teeth protruding and "horsy," his head and face was pear-shaped. He was a big fellow, as was his brother Willie Wilde, who once lived in New York, but he gave no impression of muscular strength or manliness; on the other hand, he was not a "Sissy," as so many have said. Indeed, to know him was to like him; he was the "real stuff," as the slang goes, and if he had only kept away from a pestilential group of flatterers and spongers, his end might have been different.