ious, discountenance every one among you who shall pretend to despise art and science. What is the life of man but art and science?" There may be a sense in which Blake is right. But his words recall the old Greek fable of the people who were so enamoured of the Muses that they vowed to spend days and nights in singing their praises. The Muses, however, grew very bored by those praises, and changed their foolish adorers into crickets, who could only chirp! Blake does not mention the will, at all, in his constructive spiritual scheme. The imagination is an important instrument. But one who wishes to become a great artist, cannot magnify the imagination and pass over the will, without becoming a "cricket." Such a one-sided course means blindness as to the value of discipline. Blake's complete lack of discipline, even his ardent admirers acknowledge. Gilchrist, his very partial biographer, summing up his long study of the man and his work, writes: "he was impatient of control, or of a law in anything,-in his Art, in his opinions on morals, religion, or what not." Gilchrist demurs at the opinion of Blake expressed by Wordsworth and Southey-"great, but undoubtedly insane genius." Gilchrist suggests that the milder word, undisciplined, or illbalanced, be substituted for insane. After all, the point at which habitual uncontrol passes into insanity is not easy to fix precisely. But to class a man as an unbalanced genius is to rank him with the minor and not with the great. If Blake be judged as a man of letters, there can be no doubt that his rank is far below the generation of poets who were partly his contemporaries. There was nothing unique in his literary aim. Wordsworth and Keats, two different types, each succeeded, in his own way, in vindicating a high place for the imagination, a supreme place; but it was a disciplined imagination they revered. Endeavouring to bring more of their natures under the mild yoke of discipline, they achieved the verse which is, each in its own manner, an ornament of our literature. In the fourteenth book of the Prelude, his spiritual autobiography, Wordsworth says of the disciplined imagination :— This alone is genuine liberty. And Keats, always sensitive to transcendent beauty, which he thought might at any moment meet him face to face, wrote of it: The thought thereof is awful, sweet, and holy, Blake aimed at the same goal as Keats and Wordsworth. He has left mere chips of beauty. He failed as artist because he would not submit to discipline. Where Blake has an aim different from his contemporaries, and where he might have won distinction, perhaps unique, is as occultistin his effort to work for true religion and true science. Here, too, he failed. He became lost in the psychic whirl and did not rise to clear vision. Some of his "prophetic" works read as if he had seen the Stanzas of Dzyan, reflected upside down and grotesquely foreshortened. Earth was not, nor globes of attraction; Death was not, but Eternal life sprung: A shriek ran through Eternity, And a paralytic stroke, At the birth of the human shadow. There are threads of Wisdom in his confused, incoherent writing. "I give you the end of a golden string," he wrote as the first line of a poem. He gave hints of the inner Wisdom, and one who is eager, might follow the golden string until the certain Path is reached. Blake himself does not give whole cloth. He was a madman who frayed out threads and shreds from the robe of Wisdom. He might have served the Lodge and their cause. He failed and disappointed. C. C. C. A doctor who has made a specialty of nervous diseases, so we read, has found a new remedy for the blues. His prescription amounts to this: "Keep the corners of your mouth turned up; then you can't feel blue.” The simple direction is: "Smile; keep on smiling; don't stop smiling.” It sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? Well, just try turning up the corners of your mouth, regardless of your mood, and see how it makes you feel; then draw the corners of your mouth down, and note the effect, and you will be willing to declare "there's something in it!"-FATHER Lasance.. T HE poor word did not always have a bad meaning; it has been dragged down from high spiritual estate. In its archaic form "godsyp", it meant literally "related in God", and was used to designate a sponsor in baptism. Then it slipped a little, as words will, and came to mean a friend with whom one has familiar talk, to whom one can say anything,-the understanding friend whom we all seek, and some of us find, in this world of lonely spaces. It is comfortable to believe that this was not so much a slip as a real widening of significance, hinting that we dare only to take our ease with those who are "related to us in God". By-and-by the poor thing took a big landslide and came to mean just tattle,-leaky, vulgar, silly tattle; and that is how we use the word to-day, prefixing "personal" to emphasize its ignominy, apparently quite forgetting that "personal gossip" can be the most loving and understanding thing in the world. Gossip in one form or another is inseparable from existence; it is one expression of the inevitable preoccupation of life with living, and it will continue until the mind of man shall cease to register reaction to the destinies of man. As with most inevitable things, it is potent for both good and ill. In its silent form, which we call meditation, its potency is highest,-here, to make us safe, it must positively be spelt "godsyp". It is probably not confined to humans. Birds, for instance, are inveterate gossips. They often sound like what country people call "a good tell", but this turns suddenly acrimonious if they get personal, and bird rushes at bird with indignant outcries when statements are repeated. Much misunderstanding and unhappiness among the nests results from this habit. You may sometimes see two horses in their lunch hour gossiping about a mean driver; and who can blame them? As to the poor unresting bandar-logs, they have no conversational alternative except scolding. When two talk in a corner of their cage, throwing uneasy glances behind them, it is easy to see that they are saying the nastiest things possible about the others, and who can blame them? No doubt even fishes gossip. As to human beings, if they ever stop long enough to give themselves a chance, it is considered the correct thing to condemn soundly, and utterly to repudiate, the pursuit; at least it is felt that though one's own gossip is harmless and excusable, everyone else should undoubtedly be muzzled. On the low plane where it usually prevails, gossip is a hideous thing-it all depends upon the plane. The bandar-logs themselves cannot sink far below the detestable "he said" and "she said" and "I was told not to repeat this, but", and so on, for ever and for ever. This can be done without brains, when it bores to tears; and without heart, and then the devils have entered in. The fruit of it is always poison, an irritant poison fatal to the germs of mutual understanding and good will, and almost impossible to eradicate from the system. Most people have the grace to be ashamed of this plane even while they function on it. If the matter were thus simple, it could be dismissed by the self-respecting with a final and all-including "thou shalt not", but the roots of gossip are buried deep in holy ground. The fine flower of brotherly love springs from the same soil, for the instinctive preoccupation of humanity with humanity shall not produce only weeds. Art also flowers splendidly here, and all Art gossips. We have been told that its province is to "purge us with pity and with terror" and for that it must tell us of ourselves, it must deal with people, with the desperate and hopeful little race of man. Every real poem, every true picture, every honest book, and even most dishonest ones, are efforts to bridge gulfs, to establish relationships, to break up the sense of separateness. The artist, be he never so coolly detached, is avid for ovμnådeia "a feeling together". He says in effect, "this is how life looks to mecan such fulfilment be mine that it also looks so to you?" He is empowered to express us to ourselves, and the great things of Art live on and on because they have gained the assent of humanity-"yea, thus, and thus, it is with us." And my song from beginning to end I found again in the heart of a friend no fame, no wealth can be named with this rapture. It is another way of finding what love finds directly, and it is gained largely by sublimated gossip. But, it may be objected, is Art to be held guiltless? By no means: in effect one is torn every day between reverent gratitude and a desire to box its ears. When the silly world, calling for stories like a child at dusk, is lured by psychic rubbish, or worse, down wasteful and forbidden ways, then Art stands arraigned and our souls must be the judge. The problem for disciples is how to deflect this incessant stream of comment on life, into some channel where it may serve the Master's purposes, instead of balking them; how to lift our interest in each other from the low material, the dangerous psychic, to a higher plane; how to make the Master accessory to the fact. Personal gossip on the psychic plane is a thing compared to which the "he said" and "she said" of the illiterate, is a harmless nursery game. It is often delicately elusive, entertaining, lenient, sporadically charitable. It is indulged in by people who have seen so much of life, lived through so many stories themselves, sat through so many plays and faced so many human problems, that they have grown expert; they honestly, as it is phrased, "take an interest in life for its own sake", but the step from this to making a playground of the sanctities of friendship, is sometimes a short one. Those people who pride themselves on psychological acumen are the enfants terribles of this game, and it is played by tongues that have not lost their power to wound. The theosophical student is largely recruited from this class, for Theosophy does not appeal to the stupid, but to people of aroused psychic force. The best thing that can happen to such a student is to be brought up with what is known as "a round turn". If so fortunate as to be attracted to a group where only the highest teaching prevails, he cannot fail to be impressed with the irresistible stress laid upon the matter of Love and all Love's discretions. He finds that any rules given for his guidance are based on the absolute determination that the individualities of others shall be reverently screened; that a spiritual noli me tangere is theosophical etiquette; he finds that to be spiritually well bred is to hear no evil, speak no evil, think no evil; he finds "the new commandment" which He gave unto us, printed in invisible ink on every page, and the Angel of Silence, finger on lip, awaiting him at every turn; in short, he finds that the Theosophical Movement is actually based on the brotherhood of man, just as it always said it was. If he also finds himself surprised, so much the more goose he. With all this he discovers, if he did not know it before, that the warp and woof of life is so heart-thrilling, so love-stirring, so watched by Great Ones who hardly venture to breathe upon it as they weave, that there is no place for the little personal judgments of little personal people. "Let your communication be yea, yea, and nay, nay", was the admonition given to his chêlas by the Prince of Gossips, and then and there he gave them practical demonstrations of his method. Well he knew that the poor things who hung about him would not listen unless they were gossipped to, and so he gossipped, but with what imperturbable discretion, with what sublime impersonality! The stories he told them were all about people, and are as full of human interest to-day as when the silent thousands drank them in. They are as minutely "noted" as the baldest realism of the most realism-drunk devotee; they are so entertaining that children listen and say, “tell it again", and so close to the heart of life that they have served as a running comment on life from that day to this. Only once through all the parables were names mentioned-those of Dives and Lazarus—and, as they were both dead, discretion was not marred. "A certain king made a marriage for his son", "There was a certain householder which planted a vineyard", "A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves". Observe that careful use of the word "certain", bestowing all the vraisemblance of a name. "Jump right in with your human appeal -give it to them hot", demands the slangy twentieth century editor. Two thousand years ago he "gave it to them hot"; he met the unappeasable craving with the undying genre. True stories he told them, as true as Love, as true as Life, for they were spoken by the spirit to the spiritthey were gossip raised to the spiritual plane. |