That was the Man: that is the record, outwardly, of a Soul fed upon the immensities of Vision. Vision is the keynote of him: the intense reality to him of the ever-beautiful compassionate Gods.... It is true there was a personality attached; and all his defenders since have found much in it that they wished had not been there. A lack of dignity, it is said; a certain self-consciousness... Well; he was very young; he died a very boy at thirty-two; he never attained to years of discretion:—in a sense we may allow that much. You say, he might very well have followd the reaonable conventions of life; and condescended, when emperor, not to dress as a philosopher of the schools. So he might. They laughed at his ways, at his garb, at his beard;— and he went the length of sitting up one night to write the Misopogon, a skit upon his personality. Only philosophers wore beards in those days; it was thought most unsuitable in an emperor. I do not know what the men of Antioch said about it; but he speaks of it as unkempt and,—in the Gibbonistic euphemism,—populous; indeed, names the loathsome cootie outright, which Gibbon was much too Gibbonish to do. In the nature of things, this was a libel.

I read lately an article, I think by an Irish writer, on the eccentricities of youthful genius. It often happens that a soul of really fine caliber, with a great work to do in the world, will waste a portion of his forces, at the outset, in fighting the harmless conventions. But as his real self grows into mastery, all this disappears, and he comes to see where his battle truly lies. Julian died before he had had time quite to outgow the eccentricities; but for all that, not before he had shown the world what the Soul in action is like.

Every great soul, incarnating, has still this labor to carry through as prolog to his life's work:—he must conquer the new personality, with all its hereditary tendencies; he must mold it difficultly to the perfect expression of the glory and dignity of himself. Julian had to take up a body in which on the one side ran the warrior blood of Claudius Gothicus and Constantius Chlorus, on the other, the refinement and culture of the senatorial house of the Anicii. Two such streams, coming together, might well need some harmonizing: might well produce, for example, an acute self-consciousness,—to be mastered. What he got from them, for world-service, was on the one hand his superb military leadership and mastery of affairs; on the other, his intense devotion to learning and culture. Thus the two streams of heredity appeared, dominated by his own quality of Vision. The paternal stream, by his generation, had grown much vitiated: it was pure warriorism in Claudius Gothicus, and even in Constantius Chlorus; it was warriorism refined with subtlety and cruelty in Constantine I; it was mere fussy treacherous cruelty in the Spider-Octopus,—and sensual brutality in Julian's brother Gallus. The vices of the latter may indicate how great a self-conqueror the unstained Julian was.

He was a Keats in imperial affairs, dying when he had given no more than a promise of what he should become. He laws, his valor, his victories, his writings, are no more than juvenilia: they are equal to the grand performance, not the promise, of many who are counted great. He came out from his overshadowment and long seclusion, from him books and dreams; was thrown into conditions that would have been difficult for an experienced statesman, and won through them all triumphantly; was set to conduct a war that would have taxed the genius of a Caesar, a Tiberius, or an Aurelius,—and swept through to as signal victories as any of theirs. He learnt the elements of drill, and was straight sent to conquer the conquering Germans; and did it brilliantly. He came to a Gaul as broken and hopeless as Joan of Arc's France; and found within himself every quality needed to heal it and make it whole.

Joan conquered with her Vision; Julian conquered with his. He set out with this before his eyes and in his soul:—The Gods are there; the beautiful Gods; uttermost splendor of divinity is at the heart of things. The glory of the Gods and of their world filled his eyes; and the determination filled his soul to make this outer world conform to the beauty of his vision. The thing he did not care about,—did not notice, except in a humourous way,—was that queer thing of a personality that had been allotted to himself. How could he have succeeded, in the world that then was?—And yet even a Christian poet was constrained to say,—and to rise, says Gibbon, above his customary mediocrity in saying it,—that though Julian was hateful to God, he was altogether beneficent to mankind.

I do not know how to explain the Persian expedition. He himself said, when dying, that he had loved and sought peace, and had but gone to war when driven to it. We cannot see now what were the driving factors. Did he go to reap glory that he might have used, or thought he might have used, in his grand design? Did he go to break a way into India, perhaps there to find a light beyond any that was in Rome? ... Or was it the supreme mistake of his life.... one would say the only mistake?

It failed, and he died, and his grand designs came to nothing; and Rome went out in utter darkness. And men sneered at him then, and have been sneering at him ever since, for his failure. Perhaps we must call it that; it was a forlorn hope at the best of times. But you cannot understand him, unless you think of him as a Lord of Vision lonely in a world wholly bereft of it: a man for whom all skies were transparent, and the solid earth without opacity, but with the luminous worlds shining through wherein Apollo walks, and all the Masters of Light and Beauty;—unless you think of him as a Lord of Vision moving in an outer world, a phase of civilization, old, tired, dying, dull as ditch-water, without imagination, with no little vestige of poetry, no gleam of aspiration,—with wit enough to sneer at him, and no more; by no means with wit enough to allow him to save it from itself and from ruin.



XXIV. FROM JULIAN TO BODHIDHARMA

When the news came drifting back over the Roman world that the Emperor had been killed in Persia, and that an unknown insignificant Jovian reigned in his stead;—and while three parts of the population were rejoicing that there was an end of the Apostate and his apostasy; and half the rest, that there was an end of this terrible strenuosity, this taking of the Gods (good harmless useful fictions—probably fictions) so fearfully in earnest: I wonder how many there were to guess how near the end of the world had come? The cataclysm was much more sudden and over-whelming than we commonly think; and to have prophesied, in Roman society, in the year 363, that in a century's time the empire and all its culture would be things of the past (in the West), would have sounded just as ridiculous, probably, as such a prophesy concerning Europe and its culture would have sounded in a London drawing-room fifteen years ago. There were signs and portents, of course, for the thoughtful; and no doubt some few Matthew Arnolds in their degree to be troubled by them. And of course (as in our own day, but perhaps rather more), an idea with cranks that at any moment Doomsday might come. But while the world endured, and the Last Trump had not sounded, of course the Roman empire would stand.—Christianity? Well, yes; it had grown very strong; and the extremists among the Christians were rabid enough against culture of any sort. But there were also Christians who, while they hated the olden culture of Paganism, were ambitious to supply a Christian literature in prose and verse to take the place of the Classical. There had been an awful devastation of Gaul; the barbarians of the north had been, now and again, uneasy and troublesome; but see how Julian—even he, with the Grace of God all against him—had chastised them! The head of the Roman State would always be the Master of the World.

And strangely enough, this was an idea that persisted for centuries; facts with all their mordant logic were impotent to kill it. Hardly in Dante's time did men guess that the Roman empire and its civilization were gone.

Life, when Julian died, was still capable of being a very graceful and dignified affair,—outwardly, at any rate. On their great estates in Gaul, in Britain, in Italy, great and polished gentlemen still enjoyed their otium cum dignitate. The culture of the great past still maintained itself amongst them; although thought and all mental vigor were buried deep under the detritus. In fourth century Gaul there was quite a little literary renaissance; centering, as you might expect, in the parts furthest from German invasion. Its leading light was born in Bordeaux in the three-thirties; and was thus (to link things up a little) a younger contemporary of the Indian Samudragupta. He was Ausonius: teacher of rhetoric, tutor to the prince Gratian, consul, country gentleman, large land-owner, and, in a studious uninspired reflective way, a goodish poet. Also a convert to Christianity, but unenthusiastic:—altogether, a dignified and polished figure; such as you might find in England now, in the country squire who has held important offices in India in his time, hunts and shoots in season, manages his estates with something between amateur and professional interest, reads Horace for his pleasure, and even has a turn for writing Latin verses. Ausonius leaves us a picture of the life of his class: a placid, cultured life, with quite a strong ethical side to it; sterile of any deep thought or speculation; far removed from unrest.— Another respresentative man was his friend Symmachus at Rome: also highly cultured and of dignified leisure; a very upright and capable gentleman widely respected for his sterling honesty; a pagan, not for any stirring of life within his heart or mind, but simply for love of the ancient Roman idea,—sheer conservatism;—for much the same reasons, in fact, as make the Englishman above-mentioned a staunch member of the English Church.

There were many such men about: admirable men; but unluckily without the great constructive energies that might, under Julian's guidance for example, have saved the empire. But the empire! In that crisis,—in that narrow pass in time! It is not excellent gentlemen that can do such near-thaumaturgic business; but only disciples; for the proposition is, as I understand it, to link this world with the God-world, and hold fast through thunders and cataclysm, so that what shall come through,—what shall be when the thunder is stilled and the cataclysm over,— shall flow on and up onto a new order of cycles, higher, nearer the Spirit. . . . . No; it is not to be done by amiable gentlemen, or excellent administrators, or clever politicians. . . . Julian had come flaming down into the world, to see if he could rouse up and call together those who should do it; but his bugles had sounded in the empty desert, and died away over the sands.

There were tremendous energies abroad; but they were all with the Destroyers, and were to be, ever increasingly: with such men as, at this time, Saint Martin of Tours, that great tearer-down of temples; or in the next century, Saint Cyril of Alexandria and Peter the Reader, the tearers-to-pieces of Hypatia. Perhaps the greatest energies of all you should have found, now and later, in the Christian mob of Alexandria,—wild beasts innocent of nothing but soap and water.

It was Symmachus who was chosen by the Roman Senate to remonstrate with the emperor Valentinian against the removal of the altar and statue of Victory,—the Pagan symbols,—from the senate house. I quote you Gibbon's summary of a part of his petition:

"The great and incomprehensible Secret of the Universe eludes the enquiry of man. Where reason cannot instruct, custom may be permitted to guide; and every nation seems to consult the dictates of prudence by a faithful attachment to those rites and opinions which have received the sanction of ages. If those ages have been crowned with glory and prosperity—if the devout people have frequently obtained the blessings which they have solicited at the altars of the Gods—it must appear still more advisable to persist in the same salutary practise and not to risk the unknown perils that may attend any rash inovations. The test of antiquity and success, (continues Gibbon), was applied with singular advantage to the Religion of NUMA, and Rome herself, the celestial genius that presided over the fates of the city, is introduced by the orator to plead her own cause before the tribunal of the emperors. 'Most excellent princes,' says the venerable matron, 'fathers of your country! pity and respect my age, which has hitherto flowed in an uninterrupted course of piety. Since I do not repent, enjoy my domestic institutions. This religion has reduced the world under my laws. These rites have repelled Hannibal from the city, and the Gauls from the Capitol. Were my grey hairs reserved for such intolerable disgrace? I am ignorant of the new system I am required to adopt; but I am well assured that the correction of old age is always an ungrateful and ignominious office.'"

Symmachus was addressing a Christian emperor; and it was an ill thing then, as in the days of Hadrian, to argue with the master of the legions. Still, the method he chooses is interesting: it holds a light up to the inwardness of the age, and shows it dead. This was at twenty-one years after the death of the Dragon-Apostate; whose appeal had all been to the realities and the divinity of man and the living splendor of the Gods he knew and loved. That splendor, said he, should burn away the detritus, and make Romans men and free again. But Symmachus, for all his admirable restraint, his rhetorical excellence, his good manners and gentlemanly bearing,—which I am sure we should admire,— appeals really only to the detritus; to nothing in the world that could possibly help or save Rome. The Christians wanted to be free of it, because they felt its weight; the Pagans wanted to keep it, because they found it warm and comfortable. Symmachus sees nothing higher or better than custom; the secret of the universe, says he, is unknowable; there is no inner life. —He was confuted by a much more alive and less estimable man: Ambrose, bishop of Milan,—with whom, also, both he and Ausonius were on friendly terms. Ambrose's argument, too, is illuminating: like the King of Hearts', it was in the main that "you were not to talk nonsense." How ridiculous, said he, to impute the victories of old Rome to the Religion of Numa and favor of the Gods,—when the strength and valor of the Roman soldier were quite enough to account for all. Thus he appears in the strange role of a rationalist. Christianity, he continued, was the one and only true religion; and all the rest—etc., etc., etc. Ambrose and his party were fighting towards a definite and positive end; knew what they wanted, and meant to get it. Of course they won. Symmachus and the senate were fighting only for a sentiment about the past, and had no chance at all. And it really did not matter: Rome was doomed anyway.

But in passing I must e'en linger on a note of sublimity in this petition of Symmachus: of sublime faith;—when he makes Dea Roma refer to her history as having "hitherto flowed in an uninterrupted course of piety." It makes one think that they taught Roman history in their schools then much in the same way that we teach our national histories in our schools today; here and in England, and no doubt elsewhere, "An uninterrupted course of piety!" quotha. Marry come up!

But all this is anticipating the years a little: looking into the eighties, whereas we have not finished with the sixties yet. Julian died in 363, on the 26th of June; and within a couple of years, you may say,—many said so then,—the Gods began to avenge him. Nature herself took a hand, to warn a degenerate world. In 365 came an earthquake; gollowed by a huge withdrawal of the sea, so that you could explore dry-shod the antres of the sea-gods. And then a tidal wave which threw large ships up onto the roofs of houses two miles inland, and killed in Alexandria alone fifty thousand people.—"Aha!" said the Pagans, "we told you so."—"Nothing of the kind!" said the Christians in reply; "did not we set a saint on the beach at Epidaurus, before whom the oncoming billow stopped, bowed its head, and retired?" Well; no doubt that was so; but Alexandria was a perfect hotbed of saints, one of whom, you might think, might have been lured down to the beach and the perilous proximity of water for the occasion. But let it pass!

Ten years later the Law began to marshal its armies seriously for the destruction of an obsolete world. The Huns crossed the Volga, and fell upon the Ostrogoths, who had had a Middle-European empire up through Austria and Germany. The Ostrogoths, somewhat flattened out, joined with the Huns to fall upon the Visigoths; who theeupon poured down through the Balkans to fall upon the Romans; and defeated and killed the emperor Valens at Adianople in 378. Theodosius, from 379 to 395, held precariously together a frontier cracking and bulging all along the line as it had never cracked and bulged before. When he died, the empire finally split: of his two sons, Arcadius taking the East, Honorius the West.

In Honorius' half, from now on it is a record of ruin hurrying on the footsteps of ruin. Ended the quiet otium cum dignitate of the great country gentlemen; the sterile culture, the somewhat puritan morality, the placid refined life we read of in Ausonius. You shall see now the well-ordered estate laid waste;—the peasants killed or hiding in the woods;—the mansion smashed, and its elegant furniture;—the squire, the kindly-severe religious matron his mother the young wife,—gracious lady of the house,— and the bonny children:—they are hacked corpses lying at random in the wrecked salons, or in the trampled garden where my lady's flowers now grow wild. The land went out of cultivation; the populace, what remained of it, crowded into the walled cities, there to frowse in mental and physical stuffiness until the Middle Ages were passed,—or else took to the wilds under any vigorous mind, and became bandits. The open country was all trodden down by wave after wave of marauding, murdering, beer-swilling, turbulent giants from the north,—or by the still more dreaded dwarfish horsemen whose forefathers Pan Chow had driven long since out of Asia. They poured down into Greece; they, poured down through Gaul and Spain into Africa; into Italy; host after host of them;—civilization was a pathetic sand-castle washed over and over by ruining seas. Rome, indeed, could still command generals at times: Stilicho, Aetius, and afterwards Belisarius and Narses; but they were all pitiful Partingtons swishing their mops round against a most ugly Atlantic. In 410 Rome itself was sacked by Alaric; in the same year Britain, and then Brittany, rose and threw off the Roman yoke. In the four-fifties came the keen point of the Hunnish terror, putting the fear of death on even the worst of the barbarians that had wrecked the Roman world. In 476, the pretense of a Western Empire was abandoned.—So now to follow the great march of the cycles eastward; with this warning: that next week we shall glance at a little backwash in the other direction, and see the disembodied soul of this now closed phase of human culture 'go west.'

The split with Rome was altogether of value to the Eastern empire of Constantinople. That empire lasted, from the time of Arcadius to that of Constantine IX and Mohammed the Conqueror, "one thousand and fifty-eight years," says Gibbon, "in a state of premature and perpetual decay."—A statement which, taken as an example of Gibbonese, is altogether delightful; but for the true purposes of history it may need a little modification. The position of this Byzantine Empire was a curious one: European in origin, mainly West-Asian in location. Its situation permitted it to last on so long into the West-Asian manvantara; its origin doomed that long survival to be, for the most part, devoid of the best characteristics of life. Yet during most of the European pralaya it was far and away the richest and most civilized power in Christendom; and, except during the reigns of extraordinary kings in the west, like Charlemagne, the strongest too. It specialized in military science; and the well-trained Byzantine soldiers and highly scientific generals had little to fear, as a rule, from the rude energies and huge stature of the northern and western hordes. But culture remained there in the sishta state, and could do nothing until it was transplanted. There were cycles: weaknesses and recoveries; on the whole its long life-period matters very little to history; it only became of great importance when it died.

The reason why it did not succumb when Rome did was that the tides of life in the whole empire had long been flowing eastward, and were now gathered there almost wholly: there was much more activity in the east; there were much bigger cities, and a much greater population. So that part was harder to penetrate and conquer: there was more resistance there. The barbarian deluge flowed down where it might flow down most easily: following, as deluges and everything else gifted with common sense always do, the lines of least resistance. The way through Gaul and Spain was quite open; the way into Italy nearly so;—but the way into Asia was blocked by Constantinople. That city is naturally one of the strongest in the world, in a military sense; and, you would say, inevitably the capital of an empire. If Dardanus had had a little more intuition, and had founded his Troy on the Golden Horn instead of on the Dardanelles, Anax andron Agamemnon and his chalcho-chitoned Achaeans, I dare say, would have gone home to Greece much sadder and wiser men;—or more probably, not at all. But Troy is near enough to that inevitable site to argue the strong probability of its having been, perhaps long before Priam's time, a great seat of empire, trade, and culture. If one dug in Constantinople itself, I dare say one should find the remains of cities that had been mighty. Events of the last seven years have shown how difficult it is to attack, how easy to defend. Since its foundation by Constantine it has been besieged nine times, and only twice taken by foreign enemies. When the Turks took it, they had already overflowed all the surrounding territories; and they were the strongest military power in the world, and the Byzantines were among the weakest.—So it stood there in the fifth century to hold back the hordes of northern Europe from the rich lands of Asia Minor and Syria: a strength much beyond the power of those barbarians to tackle; while all Europe west-ward was being trampled to death.

Further, the peace imposed on Jovian by Shah Sapor in 364 lasted, with one small intermission of war, and that successful for the Romans, for a hundred and thirty-eight years; during which time, also, the powers that were at Constantinople ruled mainly wisely and with economy. They were generally not the reigning emperor, but his wife or mother or aunt, or someone like that.

So then, in the year 400 we find the world in this condition:— western Europe going

"With hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition;"

—the Eastern Empire weakish, but fairly quiet and advancing towards prosperity: in pralaya certainly, and so to remain for thirteen decades (395 to 527) from the death of Theodosius to the accession of Justinian;—Persia, under an energetic and intelligent Yazdegird II (399 to 420), a strongish military power: Yazdegird held his barons well in hand, and even made a brave effort to broaden the religious outlook; he tried to stop the persecution of the Christians, and allowed them to organize a national church, the Nestorian;—India, still and until 456, at the height of her glory:—there is a continual rise as you go eastward, with the climax in India. The next step is China; to which now after all these centuries we return.

As we have seen, since the Hans fell there had been a confusion of ephemeral kingdoms jostling and hustling each other across the stage of time: there had been too much history altogether; too many wars, heroes, adventures and wild escapades. Life was too riotous and whirling an affair: China seemed to have sunk into a mere Europe, a kind of Kilkenny Christendom. Not that culture ever became extinct; indeed, through this whole period the super-refinement that had grown up under the Hans persisted side by side with the barbarian excursions and alarms. It was not, as in Rome, a case of major pralaya: men did not resort to savagery; literary production seems never to have run quite so sterile. But things were in the melting-pot, centripetalism had gone; little dynasties flared up quickly and expired; and amidst all those lightning changes there was no time for progress, or deep concerns, or for the Soul of the Black-haired People to be stirring to manifestation.

You will, I dare say, have learned to look for a rise in China at any falling-time in Europe; so would consider something should have happened there in 365, the year of the great earthquake and tidal wave, when the fifty thousand Alexandrians were drowned,— the second year after Julian's death. Well; in that 365 Tao Yuan-ming was born, who later became known as Tao Chien: in Japanese, Toemmei. There had been poets all along. During the last thirty years of the Hans, 190 to 220, there had been the Seven Scholars of the Chien An Period: among them that jolly K'ung Jung who, because he was a descendant of Confucius, claimed blood-relationship with the descendants of Laotse. Ts'ao Ts'ao himself wrote songs: he was that bold bad adventurer and highly successful general who turned out the last Han and set his own son on the throne as Wei Wenti; who also was a poet, as was his brother Ts'ao Chih. Of Ts'ao Chih a contemporary said: "If all the talent in the world were divided into ten parts, Ts'ao Chih would have eight of them."—"Who, then, would have the other two?" asked somebody.—"I should have one of them myself," was the answer, "and the rest of the world the other." Ts'ao Chih enriched the language with one of its most familiar and delicious quotations:

"The Superior Man takes precautions, And avoids giving rise to suspicion: He does not pull up his shoes in a melon patch, Nor adjust his cap while passing through an orchard of plums."

It is indicative of his own position at court.

Later in the third century came the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, a "club of rather bibulous singers"; and there are names of many scholars besides to say that the time was not too barren; yet on the whole it was, I suppose, a period of slump in literary production, as it was of confusion in politics. But when Julian had been dead two years in the west of the world, Tao Yuan-ming was born in the east: I do not say the creator of a new time; but certainly a sign of its coming.

A large amount of his poetry survives; and it is filled with a new spirit. Like Wordsworth, he went back to nature. Ambition, of course, had been a great mark of the age: men raced after office, and scrambled for the spoils. Tao Yuan-ming was called to fill an official post, and went up reluctantly to the capital; but very soon escaped back to the things he loved: the mountains, and his chrysanthemum garden, and the country, where he could hear the dogs barking in the far farms, and see the chickens scratching in the lanes. We do not find in him, perhaps, the flood of Natural Magic that came with the poets of the Great Age three or four centuries later; but we do find a heart-felt worship of the great unspoiled world under the sky: he is there to say that China was returning to her real strength, which is Nature-worship. While he pottered about in the front garden, he tells us, his wife pottered about in the back garden; they made an idol of their chrysanthemums, and started or nourished the cult which has flourished so strongly since in Japan. He was I suppose the greatest poet since Ch'u Yuan, who came some seven centuries earlier; it is from him we get the story some of you may know under the title Red Peach-Blossom Inlet.

For about half a cycle (sixty-five years) barbarian dynasties had been holding the north; with the result that the center of gravity of the real Black-haired People had been shifted from the puritan landscapes of North China to the pagan landscapes of the Yangtse Valley,—a region of mountains and forests and lakes and wild waters: Tsu the land of Laotse and Ch'u Yuan, and I think Chwangtse too. It is here are the Hills of T'ang, the metropolis of Natural Magic perhaps for all the world; and the mind and imagination of China, centered here, were receiving a new polarization; something richer and more luminous was being born. Contemporary with Tao Yuan-ming was Ku Kaichih, the first supreme name in painting. Fenollosa speaks of a "White Lotus Club," organized by Hui Yuan, A Buddhist priest, and consisteing of "mountain-climbers and thinkers,"—Tao Yuan-ming being a member.

One would like to get at the heart of what happened in that last quarter of the fourth century. This is what we see on our side: Canton and Yangtse ports were being visited more and more by Hindu, Arab, and Sassanian traders, bringing in new things and ideas: the Hindus, especially, an impetus towards culture from the splendor of the gupta period, then at its topmost height. Also ther were new inventions, such as that of paper, which was an incentive to literary output. The Chinese mind, in the south especially, was quickened on the one hand by the magical wind from the mountains, and on the other by a wind from the great world over-seas: the necessary nationalistic and international quickenings. But deeper quickenings also were taking place. India was fast becoming, under the Gupta reaction towards Brahmanism, no place for the Buddhists; and the Hindu ships that put in at Canton and the Yangtse were bringing much to China besides merchandise. A great propaganda of Buddhism was in process; by Indian monks, and now too for the first time by native Chinese. We read of a missionary who went about preaching to an indifferent world; then in sorrow took to the mountains, and proclaimed the Good Law to the mountain boulders; and they "nodded as it were their heads in assent." * But there is evidence that China was fast becoming the spiritual metropolis of the world: Buddhism was drifting in, and mingling among the mountains with mountain Taoism, that dear and hoary magic of the Eastern World; and the result was an atmosphere in which astounding events were to happen.

——— * Giles Dictionary of Chinese Biography; from which work, and from the same author's Chinese Literature, the facts, quotations, and enecdotes given in this lecture are taken. ———

In 401, Kumarajiva, the seventeenth Buddhist Patriarch, came from India and took up his residence at the court at Changan, where a Tibetan family was then reigning over the north; and this, when you think that these Patriarchs were (as I believe) no popes elected by a conclave of churchly dignities, but the Spiritual Successors of the Buddha, each appointed by his predecessor, an event momentous enough in itself. Still, Kumarajiva came (it would appear) but to prepare the way for the great change that was impending; left behind him a successor in India, or one to fill the office at his death; in India the headquarters of Buddhism remained. Two years before his arrival, Fa Hian, a Chinese Buddhist monk, had set out on foot from Central China, walked across the Gobi Desert, and down through Afghanistan into India, a pilgrim to the sacred places: a sane and saintly man, from whom we learn most of what we know about the Gupta regime. He returned by sea in 412, landing at Kiao-chao in Santung,—a place latterly so sadly famous,—bringing with him spiritual and quickening influences. In the south, meanwhile, another Indian teacher, Buddhabhadra, had been at work. Before very long, a Renaissance was in full flow.

The political events that led up to it were these: between 304 and 319 a Tatar family by the name of Liu, from Manchuria, succeeded in driving the House of Tsin out of northern China: these Tsins were that effete, ladylike, chess-playing, fan-waving, high-etiquettish dynasty I have spoken of before. In 319 they took up their abode in Nanking, and there ruled corruptly for a hundred years, leaving the north to the barbarians. In 420, a soldier in their employ, Liu-yu by name, deposed the last Tsin emperor, and set himself on the throne as the first sovereign of the Liu-song Dynasty. He was a capable man, and introduced some vigor and betterment into affairs; he found conditions ripe for a renaissance of civilization; and in his reign we may say that the renaissance took shape. 420 is, so far as a date can be given for what was really a long process, a convenient date to give. We have seen Persia rise in the two-twenties; India in the three-twenties; we shall not go far wrong in giving the four-twenties to China. That decade, too, marks a fresh step downward in the career of Rome: Honorius died in 423. Fenollosa is definite upon 420 for the inception of the great age of the Southern Renaissance of art. That age culminated in the first half of the next century, and ended with the passing of the Liang dynasty in the five-fifties: a matter of thirteen decades again; which, I take it, is further reason for considering our four-twenties epochal.

I fancy we shall grow used to finding the twenties in each century momentous, and marked by great political and spiritual re-shapings of the world. We shall find this in our historical studies; in the next few years we may find it in current events too; and what we shall see may remind us that in these decades the sun generally rises in some new part of the world,—the sun of culture and power. Naturally enough:—in the last quarter of each century you have the influx of spiritual forces; which influx, it is to be supposed, can hardly fail to produce changes inwardly,—a new temperature, new conditions in the world of mind. So there must be readjustments; there is a disharmony between outer and inner things, between the world of causes and the world of effects; and one commonly finds the first two decades of the new century filled with the noise and confusion of readjustment. New wine has been poured into the old skin-bottles of the world; and ferments, explodes, rends them. Then, in the twenties or so, things calm down, and it is seen that readjustments have been made. By 'readjustments,' one does not mean the treaties of statesmen and the like; brain-mind affairs for the most part, that amount to nothing. One means a new direction taken by the tide of incarnating souls. As if the readjusting cataclysms had blocked their old channels of these, and opened new ones...

A new arpeggio chord, but rather a faint and broken one, sounds in the five-twenties, or begins then. At Constantinople the thirteen pralayic and recuperative decades since the death of Theodosius and the split with the West have ended. Now an emperor dies; and it becomes a question which of several likely candidates can lay out his money to best advantage and secure the succession. There is an official of some sort at court there, one Justin, a Balkan peasant by birth; you will do well to bribe him heavily, for he, probably, can manage the affair for you,— One of the candidates does so: hands him a large sum, on the assurance from Justin that he shall be the man. But the old fellow has peasant shrewdness, shall we say; and the money is used most thriftily; but not as its donor intended. Justin duly ascends the throne.

Nothing very promising in that, to insure manvantaric times coming in. But the old man remembers a nephew of his back there in Bulgaria or Jugoslavia or where it may have been; and sends for him, and very wisely lets him do most of the running of things. In 527, this nephew succeeds to the purple on his uncle's death: as Justinian; and, for Europe and the Byzantine empire, and for the times,—that is to say, 'considering,' —manvantaric doings do begin. A man of hugely sanguine temperament, inquisitive and enterprising and impulsive, he had the fortune to be served by some great men: Tibonian, who drew up the Pandects; Belisarius and Narses, who thrashed the barbarians; the architect who built Saint Sophia. Against these assets to his reign of thirty-eight years you must set the factions of the circus, at Constantinople itself; and bloody battle over the merits of the Greens, the Blues, the Whites, etc. But certainly Justinian contrived to strike into history as no other Byzantine emperor did; with his law code, and with his church. So now enough of him.

Four years after the accession of this greatest of the Byzantines, the greatest of the Sassanids came to the throne in Persia: Chosroes Anushirwan: a wise and victorious reign until 579. There was an 'Endless Peace' sworn with Rome in 533; and not peace merely, but friendship and alliance; it was to last for all time, and did last for seven years. The Chosroes, jealous of the western victories of Justinian, listened to the pleadings of the Ostrogoths, and declared war; peace came again in 563, on the basis of a yearly tribute from Rome to Persia,— but with compensations, such as toleration for the Christians in Persia.—there were reforms in the army and in taxation; improvements in irrigation; encouragement of learning; revision of the laws; some little outburst in literature and culture generally: the culmination, in all but extent of territory, of the whole Sassanian period.—We may throw in one item from the future,—that is from 620: in that year Sassanian Persia had flowed out to the full limits of the empire of Darius Hystaspes: held Egypt, Syria, all West Asia to within a mile of the walls of Constantinople. Within three years the fall had begun; within twenty it was completed.

As to India, this (520) is among the hidden times: the Ephthalites had overturned the Guptas; they were Huns of the Hunniest; they had over-turned the Guptas and all else (in the north). Tales come down of the fiendishness of their kings: of a man that for his sport would have elephants hurled from the top of precipices; it may be that the Indian manvantara closed with the Gupta fall;—though we get the finical dandiacal 'great' reign of Harsha in 700. The light certainly was dying from India now: the Crest-Wave had been there, in all its splendor; they had made good use of it in all but the spiritual sense, and very bad use of it in that. The year in which you may say (as nearly as history will tell you) the light died there, was precisely this year of 520; and that effected a change in the spiritual center of gravity of the world of the most momentous kind: so much so that we may think of a new order of ages as beginning then; and looking at world-history as a whole, we may say, Here endeth the lesson that began where we took things up in the time of the Six Great Teachers; and here beginneth a new chapter,— with which these lectures will hardly concern themselves. But we may glance at the event that opens it.

It made very little stir at the time. It was merely the landing at Canton of an old man from India: a 'Blue-eyed Brahmin,'—but a Buddhist, and the head of all the Buddhists at that;—and his preaching there until Liang Wuti, the emperor at Nanking, had heard of his fame, and invited him to court; and his retirement thence to a cave-temple in the north. Beyond this there is very little to tell you. He was a king's son from southern India; his name Bodhidharma; and one would like to know what the records of the Great Lodge have to say about him. For he stands in history as the founder of the Dhyana or Zen School, another form of the name of which is Dzyan; when one reads The Voice of the Silence, or the Stanzas in The Secret Doctrine, one might remember this. Outwardly,—I think this is true,—he refused to cut into history at all: was a grand Esoteric figure, whose campaigns, (super-Napoleonic, more mirific than those of Genghiz Khan), were all fought on spiritual planes whence no noise of the cannonading could be heard in this outer world. He was the twenty-eighth Successor of the Buddha; of a line of Masters that included such great names as those of Vasubandhu, and of Nagarjuna, founder of the Mahayana,—"one of the four suns that illumine the world." We have seen that he had been preceded: Kumarajiva had come to China a century before; but experimentally, leaving the Center of the Movement in India; there must have been thousands of disciples in the Middle Kingdom in 520 when Bodhidharma came, bringing with him the Buddha's alms-bowl, the symbol of the Patriarchate, to make in China his headquarters and that of his successors. For a thousand years the Buddha's Movement had been in India a living link with the Lodge;—in that land of esoteric history which hides from us what it means to be so linked and connected. Now India had failed. The Guptas had reigned in great splendor; but they had flourished upon a reaction away from the Light. I suppose it means this: that the burden of fighting upward had been too much for this people, now wearied with old age; they had dropped the burden and the struggle, and found in the relief a phantom of renewed youth to last them a little day.

Whatever may be true of Buddhism now,—however the long cycles may have wasted its vitality, and to whatever depths it may have fallen,—we should remember this: that certainly for about fourteen centuries there was contained within it a living link with the Masters' Lodge. It was not like any other existing religion (so far as one knows): like none of the dominant religions of today, at any rate. At its head, apparently, through all those long centuries, was a line of Adepts, men of spiritual genius, members of the Lodge. So what Bodhidharma's coming meant, I take it, was that in China that was established actually which in the West first Pythagoras, and then Plotinus had tried to establish, and tried in vain. It was, as you may say, the transplanting of the Tree of Life from a soil that had grown outworn to one in which it could flourish; and the result was, it appears to me, a new impulse given to the ages, to all history.

Hitherto, in the main, we have seen (except in China) a downward trend of cycles; from this point an upward trend began. We have been dealing, latterly, with dullish centuries, and history in a febrile and flickering mood;—but give this wonderful change time to take effect, and the centuries begin to flame up, and history to become a roaring conflagration. We might here spy out into that time, which will lie beyond the scope of these lecture; and see the glory of the T'angs begin in China in 618; Corea's one historic age of splendor, in art and also in military prowess, at its highest point about 680; the era of Shotoku Daishi, saint, sage, prince and protagonist of civilization in Japan, from about 580 to 620; the rise of Siam, and of Tibet, into strength and culture and Buddhism, in the first half of the seventh century;— then, looking westward, the wonderful career of Mohammed in Arabia, who gave the impetus that rescued civilization first in West Asia and then, when in the thirteenth century a new European manvantara was ready to open, in Europe also: rescued civilization first in West Asia and then, when in the thirteenth century a new European manvantara was ready to open, in Europe also; an impetus which worked on the intellectual-cultural plane until it had brought things to the point where H. P. Blavatsky might come to give things a huge twist towards the spiritual,— and where Katherine Tingley might accomplish that which all the ages had been expecting, and the whole creation groaning and travailing to see. Oh, on brain-mind lines you can trace no connexion; but then the plane of causes lies deeper than the brain-mind. We may understand now, I think, what place the Buddha holds in human history: how it was not for nothing that he was the Buddha, the central Avatar, the topmost and Master Figure of humanity for these last twenty-five hundred years, with what other sublime men appeared as it were subordinate to him, and the guides of tributary streams: Laotse and Confucius preparing the way for him in China; Pythagoras carrying his doctrine into the West.... Well; here is scope for thought; and for much thought that may be true and deep, and illuminative of future ages; and yet not convenient to write down at this time.

But to Bodhidharma again.

H. P. Blavatsky affirmed that Buddhism had an esoteric as well as an exoteric side: an affirmation that was of course disputed. But here is this from a Chinese writer quoted by Edkins:

"Tathagata taught great truths and the causes of things. He became the instructor of men and devas; saved multitudes, and spoke the contents of more than five hundred books. Hence arose the Kiaumen or Exoteric branch of the system, and it was believed to hold the tradition of the words of the Buddha. Bodhidharma brought from the Western Heaven the seal of truth, and opened the Fountain of Dhyana in the east. He pointed directly to Buddha's heart and nature, swept away the parasitic growth of book instruction, and thus established the Esoteric branch of the system containing the doctrine of the heart, the tradition of the Heart of Buddha. Yet the two branches, while presenting of necessity a different aspect, form but one whole."

Now that Doctrine of the Heart had always been in existence; it does not mean that Bodhidharma invented anything. But in a line of Teachers, each will have its own methods, and, if there is progress, there will be new and deeper revelations. The Buddha gave out so much, as the time permitted him; Nagarjuna, founding the Mahayana, so much further; Bodhidharma, now that with the move to China a new lease of life had come, gave out, or rather taught to his disciples, so much more again of the doctrine that in its fulness is and always has been the doctrine of the Lodge.

Lian Wuti, the emperor at Nanking, had been at the end of the fifth century a general in the service of the last scion of a dying dynasty there, and a devout Taoist; in 502 he became the first of a new dynasty, the Liang; and presently, a devout Buddhist. Chinese historians love him not; Fenollosa describes him as too generous-minded and other-worldly for success. Yet he held the throne for nearly fifty years; a time in which art was culminating and affairs advancing through splendor and unwisdom to a downfall. Twice he took the yellow robe and alms-bowl, and went forth through his domains, emperor still, but mendicant missionary preaching the Good Law.—The Truth? the Inner doctrine?—I learn most about this poor Lian Wuti from the record of an interview held once between him and the 'Blue-eyed Brahmin' Master of Dzyan. Lian Wuti invited Bodhidharma to court, and Bodhidharma came. Said the emperor:

—"Since my accession I have been continually building temples, transcribing books, and admitting new monks to take the vows. How much merit may I be supposed to have accumulated?"

—"None," said Bodhidharma.

—"And why none?"

—"All this," said the Master, "is but the insignificant effect of an imperfect cause not complete in itself; it is but the shadow that follows the substance, and without real existence."

—"Then what," asked Wuti, "is real merit?"

—"It consists in purity and enlightenment, depth and completeness; in being wrapped in thought while surrounded by vacancy and stillness. Merit such as this cannot be won by worldly means."

Wuti, I suppose, found this kind of conversation difficult, and changed the subject,—with an exotericist's question. Said he:

—"Which is the most important of the holy doctrines?"

—"Where all is emptiness," said Bodhidharma, "nothing can be called holy."

A neat compliment, thinks good externalist Wuti, may improve things.—"If nothing can be called holy," says he, "who is it then that replies to me?"—holiness being a well-known characteristic of Bodhidharma himself. Who answered merely:

—"I do not know"; and went his ways. The final comment on the interview is given by a Japanese writer thus: "Can an elephant associate with rabbits?"

For the rest, he spent the remaining years of his life in a cave-temple near Honanfu; and died after appointing a Chinaman his successor. Besides this small stock of facts there is a sort of legend; as for example:

After leaving the court of Lian, he crossed the Yangtse on a reed,—a theme in sacred art for thousands ever since,—and because of this miraculous crossing, is worshiped still by Yangtse boatman as their patron saint,—on the 28th of February in each year.—Once, as he sat in meditation, sleep overcame him; and on waking, that it might never happen again, he cut off his eyelids. But they fell on the earth, took root and sprouted; and the plant that grew from them was the first of all tea plants,—the symbol (and cause!) of eternal wakefulness. He is represented in the pictures as being footless; in his missionary travels, it is said, he wore away his feet. Thus where there is no known life-story, but all hidden away beneath a veil of esotericism and a Master's seclusion, myths have grown, and a story has been made.—He sat there in his cave silent through the years, they say; his face to the wall. Chih Kuang came to him, asking to be taught the doctrine; and for seven days stood in the snow at the cave-mouth, pleading and unnoticed. Then, to show that he was in earnest, he drew his sword and sliced off his left arm; and the Master called him in, and taught him.—Legend again, no doubt.

I imagine we can only judge of the man and of his astounding greatness by the greatness of the ages he illumined. It was as if he gave, in East Asia, the signal for nation after nation to leap into brilliant being. As for China, she became something new. The Age of Han had been golden, strong, manly, splendid. But Han was like other empires here and there about the world. Henceforth during her cycle China was to be as a light-giving body, a luminary wondrous in the firmament with a shining array of satellite kingdoms circling about her. Her own Teachers of a thousand years before had prepared the way for it: Confucius when he gave her stability; Laotse when he dropped the Blue Pearl into her fields. That Pearl had shone, heaven knows. Now Ta-mo, this Bodhidharma, breathed on it; and it glowed, and flame shot up from it, and grew, and foamed up beautiful, till it was a steady fountain of wonder-fire spraying the far stars. Heretofore we have had a background of Taoist wizardry: in its highest aspects, Natural Magic,—the Keatsism of the waters and the wild, the wood, the field, and the mountain; henceforth there was to be a sacred something shining through and inmingled with this: the urge of the Divine Soul, the holy purposes of evolution. We may say this in Art, to take that one field alone, the most perfect, the fullest, the divinest, expression of Natural Magic

"whereof this world holds record"

was to come in the school of the Successors of Bodhidharma, directly the result of his 'Doctrine of the Heart.'

His school remained esoteric; but it was established, not among the secret mountains, nor in far unvisited regions; but there in the midst of imperial China: an extension of the Lodge, you may say, visible among men. Bodhidharma—are you to call him a Messenger at all? He hardly came out into the world. It was known he was there; near by was the northern capital;—he taught disciples, when they had the strength to insist on it. Yet he dwelt aloof too, and wrapped about in the seclusion Masters must have, to carry on their spiritual work. One must suppose that Messengers of the Lodge had been very busy in China between 375 and 400, in the days of Tao Yuang-ming and Ku Kai-chih; that they had been very busy again in the last quarter of the fifth century; for it seems as if somehow or other there was such an atmosphere in China in the first half of the sixth century,—when ordinarily speaking the Doors of the Spiritual World would be shut,—that the Lodge was enabled partly to throw off its seclusion, and it was possible for at least one of its Members to take up his abode there, and to be known to the world as doing so.

A Messenger was sent out into the Chinese world from the School of Bodhidarma in 575: Chih-i, the founder of the Tientai School which was the spiritual force underlying the glory of the T'ang age; but he was a Messenger from the Dzyan School of Bodhidharma, not its Head. As far as I have been able to gather the threads of it, the line of those Heads, the Eastern Patriarchs, Bodhidharma's successors, was as follows: He died in or about 536, having appointed Chi Kuang to succeed him. Chi Kuang appointed Hui Ssu, called the "Chief of the Chunglung School of the followers of Bodhidharma." Hui Ssu died in 576, having sent out Chih-i into the world the year before, and having appointed Seng T'san to succeed him as head of Dzyan. Seng T'san died in 606; Tao Hsin, his successor, in 651; Hung Jen, his, in 675. Hung Jen, it appears, left two successors: Lu Hui-neng in the south, and Shen Hsiu in the north. It was the last quarter of the century: I imagine Lu Hui-neng was the Messenger sent out into the world; he spent the rest of his life teaching in the neighborhood of Canton; I imagine Shen Hsiu remained the Head of the Esoteric School. After that the line disappears; but the school attained its greatest influence in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in China, and later still in Japan.—All these were men living not quite in the world: it was known that they were there, and where they might be found. After Shen Hsiu, the last Northern Chinese Patriarch, the line probably withdrew to Tibet, which had lately come into relations with China, and where civilization had been established through the efforts of T'ang Taitsong. And now I will close this lecture with a saying of Shen Hsiu's which, in this modified form, is very familiar to all of you:

"Mind is like a mirror: it gathers dust while it reflects. It needs the gentle breezes of soul wisdom to brush away the dust of our illusions."



XXV. TOWARDS THE ISLANDS OF THE SUNSET

I had not thought to speak to you further about Celtic things. But there is something in them here which concerns the spiritual history of the race; something to note, that may help us to understand the Great Plan. So, having beckoned you last week to the edge of the world and the fountain of dawn, and to see Bodhidharma standing there and evoking out of the deep a new order of ages, I find myself now lured by a westward trail, and must jump the width of two continents with you, and follow this track whither it leads: into the heart and flame of mysterious sunset. I hope, and the Gwerddonau Llion, the Green Spots of the Flood,—Makarn Nesoi, Tirnanogue, the Islands of the Blest.

We saw that while the great flow of the cycles from dying Rome ran in wave after wave eastward, there was a little backwash also, by reason of which almost the last glow we saw in the west was in fourth century Gaul, in the literary renaissance there which centers round the name of Ausonius. Now in later history we find every important French cycle tending to be followed by one in England: as Chaucer followed Jean de Meung; Shakespeare, Ronsard and the Pleyade; Dryden and Pope, Moliere and Racine; Wordsworth and Shelley, the Revolution. And we have seen China wake in 420; and we have noted, in the first of these lectures, the strange fact that whenever China 'gets busy,' we see a sort of reflexion of it among the Celts of the west. And we shall come presently to one of the most curious episodes in history,— the Irish Renaissance in the sixth century: when all Europe else was dead and buried under night and confusion, and Ireland only, standing like a white pillar to the west, a blazing beacon of culture and creative genius. Now if you see a wave rising in fourth-century Gaul, and a wave breaking into glorious foam in sixth- and seventh-century Ireland,—what would you suspect?— Why, naturally, that it was the same wave, and had flowed through the country that lies between: common sense would tell you to expect something of a Great Age in fifth- and early sixth-century Britain. And then comes tradition,—which is nine times out of ten the truest vehicle of history,—and shouts that your expectations are correct. For within this time came Arthur.

You know that in the twelfth century Geoffrey of Monmouth published what he claimed to be a History of the Kings of Britain from the time of the coming there of the Trojans; and that it was he mainly who was responsible for floating the Arthurian Legend on to the wide waters of European literature. What percentage of history there may be in his book; how much of it he did not "make out of whole cloth," but founded on genuine Welsh or Breton traditions, is at present unknowable;—the presumption being that it is not much. But here is a curious fact that I only came on this week. The Romans were expelled from Britain in 410, remember. Arthur passed from the world of mortals on the night after Camlan, that

"last weird battle in the west,"

when

"All day long the noise of battle rolled Among the mountains by the wintry sea, Till all King Arthur's Table, man by man, Had fallen in Lyonnesse about their lord King Arthur."

Now the reign of Arthur may be supposed to represent the culmination of a national revival among the British Celts; and, —this is the detail I was pleased to come upon,—according to Geoffrey, Camlan was fought in 542;—a matter of thirteen decades (and two years) after the expulsion of the Romans. So that, I say, it looks as if there were some cyclic reality behind it. Geoffrey of Monmouth did not know that such periods of national revival do last as a general rule for thirteen decades. He had some other guide to help him to that 542 for Camlan.

History knows practically nothing about fifth-century Britain. It has been looking at it, since scientific methods came in, through Teutonic (including Anglo-Saxon) or Latin eyes; and seen very little indeed but confusion. Britain like the rest of the western empire, suffered the incursions of northern barbarism; but unlike most of the rest, it fought, and not as a piece of Rome, but as Celtic Britain;—fought, and would not compromise nor understand that it was defeated. It took eight centuries of war, and the loss of all England, and the loss of all Wales, to teach, it that lesson; and even then it was by no means sure. In the twelve-eighties, when last Llewelyn went to war, he was still hoping, not to save Wales from the English, but to re-establish the Celtic Kingdom of Britain, Arthur's Empire, and to wear the high crown of London. The men that marched to Bosworth Field under Harri Tudor, two centuries later, went with the same curious hope and assurance. It was a racial mold of mind, and one of extraordinary strength and persistence,—and one totally unjustified by facts in what were then the present and future. But I do not believe such molds can ever be fudged up out of nothing: ex nihilo nihil is as true here as elsewhere. So we must look for the cause and formation of this mold in the past. Something, I think, within that first cycle of Welsh history must have impressed it on the Welsh mind: some national flowering; some great figure, one would say.—Arthur? He is like Vikramaditya of Ujjain; no one know whether he existed at all. There is no historic evidence; but rather the reverse. But then there are all those mountains and things named after him, "from the top of Pengwaed in Cornwall to the bottom of Dinsol in the North"; and, there is the Arthurian Legend, with such great vitality that it drove out the national Saxon legends from England, and quenched the Charlemagne legend in France, and made itself master of the mind of western Europe in the Middle Ages;— I imagine there would have been an Arthur. Some chieftain who won battles; held up the Saxon advance for a long time, probably; and reminded his people of some ancient hero, or perhaps of a God Artaios, thought to be reincarnate in him.

Not that I believe that the mold of mind of which we have been speaking could have been created in the fifth and sixth centuries. Whoever Arthur was—the Arthur of that time,—however great and successful, he could but have reigned over some part of Britain, precariously resisting and checking the barbarians; but tradition tells of a very Chakravartin, swaying the western world. No; that mold certainly was a relic of the lost Celtic empire. It had grown dim during the Roman domination; but it had survived, and the coming in of the Crest-Wave had put new life into it. Nothing could have put new life into it, it seems to me, but such a coming in of the Crest-Wave,—to make it endure and inspire men as it did. I think it is certain the Crest-Wave, —a backwash of it, a little portion of it, but enough to make life hum and the age important,—was among the Welsh between 410 and 542. The wave was receding towards the Western Laya-Center; and gathered force as it rolled from Ausonius' Gaul to Taliesin's Wales, and from Tallesin's Wales to Ireland.

Let us look at the probabilities in Britain in 410, seeing what we can. Three hundred years of Roman rule had left that province, I cannot doubt, rich and populous, with agriculture in a better condition than it has been since:—remember the corn Julian brought thence to feed Gaul. We must think of a large population, Roman and Romanized, mixed of every race in the Roman world, in the cities; and of another population, still Celtic, in the mountains of northern England, in the western Scottish Lowlands, and especially in Wales. It was the former element, the cities, that appealed to Aetius for help against the Picts and Scots; the latter, dwelling in less accessible places, fought as soon as they felt the invaders' pressure. Wales itself had never been all held by the Romans. The legions had covered the south from Caerleon in Monmouthshire to Saint Davids in Penfro, a region held by Silures and Gaelic Celts. They had marched along the northern coast to the island of Mona, establishing, just as Edward the Conqueror did in his day, strongholds from which to dominate the dangerous mountains: these regions also were held by Gaels. But just south of those mountains, in what are now the counties of Meirionydd and Montgomery, there was a great piece of Wales which they seem never to have penetrated; and it was held by the Cymric Ordovices, Welsh, not Irish, by language.

About this time there was a great upheaval of the Irish; who conquered western Scotland, and established there sooner or later the Scottish kingdom of history. They also invaded Wales and England, and sent their fleets far and wide: they were the 'Picts and Scots' of the history-books. There seems also to have been an invasion and conquest of Wales, from the north, by the Welsh; who, joining forces with the Welsh Ordovices whom they found already in the unconquered un-Roman part, established in the course of time the kingdom and House of Cunedda, which reigned till the Edwardian Conquest. It is pretty safe to say that the Romanized cities and the Romanized population generally offered no great resistance to the Saxons; mixed with them fairly readily, and went to form perhaps the basis of the English race; that they lost their language and culture is due to the fact that they were cut off from the sources of these on the continent, and, being of an effete civilization, were far less in vigor than the Saxon incomers. And as we saw in the first of these lectures, there was probably a large Teutonic or Saxon element in Britain since before the days of Julius Caesar.

But there seems to have been a time during those thirteen decades that followed the eviction of the Romans, when the Celtic element, wakened to life and receiving an impulse from the Crest-Wave, caught up the sovereignty that the Romans had dropped, remembered its Ancient greatness, and nourished vigorous hopes. To the Welsh mind, the age has appeared one of old unhappy far-off things,—unhappy, because of their tragic ending at Camlan;— but grandiose. Titanic vague figures loom up: Arthur, the type of all hero-kings; Taliesin, type of all prophet-bards; Merlin, type of magicians. Tennyson caught the spirit of it in the grand moments of the Morte D'Arthur; and missed it by a thousand miles elsewhere in the Idylls. The spirit, the atmosphere, is that of a glory receding into the unknown and the West of Wonder; into Lyonnesse, into Avallon, into the Sunset Isles. There is a sense of being on the brink of the world; with the 'arm clothed in white samite' reaching in from a world beyond,—that Otherworld to which the wounded Arthur, barge-borne over the nightly waters by the Queens of Faerie, went to heal him of his wounds, and to await the cyclic hour for his retum. He is the symbol of—what shall we say?—civilization, culture, or the spiritual sources of these, the light that alone can keep them sweet and wholesome; that light has died from the broken Roman world, and passes now west-ward through the Gates of the Sunset: through Wales, through Ireland, the Laya-Center; into the Hidden, the Place of the Spirit; into Avallon, which is Ynys Afallen, the 'Isle of Apple-trees';—whence to return in its time:—Rex quondam, rexque futurus.

There is a poem by Myrddin Gwyllt, traditionally of the sixth century, about that Garth of Apple-trees; which he will have a secret place in the Woods of Celyddon, the Occult Land, and not an island in the sea at all; and in this poem it has always seemed to me that one gets a clue to the real and interesting things of history. He claims in it to be the last of the white-robed Guardians of the Sacred Tree, the fruit of which none of the black-robed,—no 'son of a monk,'—shall ever enjoy. There has been a battle, in which the true order of the world has gone down; but there Myrddin stays to guard the 'Tree' against the 'Woodmen,'—whom also he seems to identify with the 'black-robed' and the priests Myrddin Gwyllt, by the by, is one of the two figures in Welsh tradition who have combined to become the Merlin of European tradition; the other was Myrddin Emrys the magician. I take great risks, gentlemen but wish to give you a taste, as I think the sound of some lines from the original may, and doubt any translation can, of the old and haughty sense of mystery and grandeur embodied in the poem; because it is this feeling, perhaps the last echo of the Western Mysteries, that is so characteristic of the literature that claims to come down to us from this age:

Afallen beren, bren ailwyddfa, Cwn coed cylch ei gwraidd dywasgodfa; A mi ddysgoganaf dyddiau etwa Medrawd ac Arthus modur tyrfa; Camlan darwerthin difiau yna; Namyn saith ni ddyraith o'r cymanfa.

Afallen bere, beraf ei haeron, A dyf yn argel yn argoed Celyddon; Cyt ceiser ofer fydd herwydd ei hafon, Yn y ddel Cadwaladr at gynadl Rhyd Theon, A Chynan yn erbyn cychwyn y Saeson. Cymru a orfydd; cain fydd ei Dragon; Caffant pawb ei deithi; llawen fi Brython! Caintor cyrn elwch cathl heddwch a hinon.

What it means appears to be something of this sort:

Sweet and beautiful Tree of the trees! The Wood-dogs guard the circle of its roots; But I will foretell, a day shall be When Modred and Authur shall rush to the conflict; Again shall they come to the Battle at Camlan, And but seven men shall escape from that meeting.

Sweet Apple-tree, sweetest its fruitage! It grows in secret in the Woods of Celyddon; In vain shall they seek it on the banks of its stream there, Till Cadwaladr shall come to Rhyd Theon, And Cynan, opposing the tumult of Saxons, Wales shall arise then; bright shall be her Dragon; All shall have their just reward; joy is me for the Brython! The horns of joy shall sound then the song of peace and calmness....

The sweet fruits of the Tree, he says, are the "prisoners of words," (carcharorion geirau)—which is just what one would say, under a stress of inspiration, about the truths of the Secret Wisdom;—and they shall not be found, he says,—they shall be sought in vain,—until the Maban Huan, the 'Child of the Sun,' shall come. The whole poem is exceedingly obscure; a hundred years ago, the wise men of Wales took it as meaning much what I think it means: the passing of the real wisdom of the Mysteries,—of Neo-druidism,—away from the world and the knowledge of men, to a secret place where the Woodmen, the Black-robed, could not find to destroy it;—until, after ages, a Leader of the Hosts of Light should come—you see it is here Cadwaladr, but Cadwaladr simply means 'Battle-Leader,' —and the age-old battle between light and darkness, Arthur and Modred, should be fought again, and this time won, and the Mysteries re-established.—If I have succeeded in conveying to you anything of the atmosphere of this poem, I have given you more or less that of most of the poetry attributed to this period; there is a large mass of it: some of the poems, like the long Gododin of Aneurin, merely telling of battles; others, like the splendid elegies of Llywarch Hen, being laments,—but with a marvelous haughty uplift to them; and others again, those attributed to Taliesin, strewn here and there with passages that . . . move me strangely . . . and remind me (to borrow a leaf from the Imagists) of a shower of diamonds struck from some great rock of it; and of a sunset over purple mountains; and of the Mysteries of Antiquity; and of the Divine Human Soul. Much of this poetry is unintelligible; much of it undoubtedly of far later origin; and the names of Taliesin and Myrddin, all through the centuries spells for Celts to conjure with, are now the laughing-stock of a brand-new scholarship that has tidied them up into limbo in the usual way. It is what happens when you treat poetry with the brain-mind, instead of with the creative imagination God gave you to treat it with: when you dissect it, instead of feeding your soul with it. But this much is true, I think: out of this poetry, the occasional intelligible flashes of it, rings out a much greater note than any I know of in our Welsh literature since: a sense of much profounder, much less provincial things: the Grand Manner,—of which we have had echoes since, in the long centuries of our provincialism; but only I think echoes; —but you shall find something more than echoes of it, say in Llywarch Hen, in a sense of heroic uplift, of the titanic unconquerableness that is in the Soul;—and in Taliesin, in a sense of the wizardly all-pervadingness of that Soul in space and time:

"I know the imagination of the oak-trees."

"Not of father and mother, When I became, My creator created me; But of nine-formed faculties, Of the Fruit of fruits, Of the fruit of primordial God; Of primroses and mountain flowers, Of the blooms of trees and shrubs, Of Earth, of an earthly course, When I became,— Of the blooms of the nettle, Of the foam of the Ninth Wave. I was enchanted by Math Before I became immortal. I was enchanted by Gwydion, The purifier of Brython, Of Eurwys, of Euron, Of Euron, of Modron,— Of Five Battalions of Initiates, High Teachers, the children of Math."

—Now Math—he was a famous wizard of old—means 'sort,' 'kind'; and so implies such ideas as 'differentiation,' 'heterogeneity.' To say that you were enchanted by Math before you became immortal, is as much as to say that before the great illumination, the initiation, one is under the sway of this illusionary world of separatenesses;—as for being 'enchanted by Gwydion,' that name is, I suppose, etymologically the same as the Sanskrit Vidya, or Budha; he is the 'Purifier' of those 'Five Battalions of—'Celfyddon,' the word is 'artists,' 'skillful ones'; but again I imagine, it is connected with the word Celi, 'occult' or 'secret'; so that being 'enchanted by' him would mean simply, being initiated into the Occult Wisdom. It is difficult for a student of symbolism not to believe that there were Theosophical activities in fifth- and sixth-century Britain.

Another glimpse of the feeling of the age you get in the two oldest Arthurian romances: The Dream of Rhonobwy, and Culhwch and Olwen. They were written, in the form in which we have them, not until the last centuries of Welsh independence,—when there was another national illumination; and indeed all the literature of this early time comes to us through the bards of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. They transmitted it; wrote it down; added to and took away from it; altered it: a purely brain-mind scholarship might satisfy itself that they invented it; but criticism, to be of any use at all, must be endowed with a certain delicacy and intuition; it must rely on better tools than the brain-mind. Matthew Arnold, who had such qualifications, compared the work of the later bards to peasants' huts built on and of the ruins of Ephesus; and it is still easier for us, with the light Theosophy throws on all such subjects, to see the greater and more ancient work through the less and later. I shall venture to quote from Culhwch and Olwen: a passage that some of you may know very well already. Culhwch the son of Cilydd the son of the Prince of Celyddon rides out to seek the help of Arthur:

"And the youth pricked forth upon a steed with head dappled gray, of four winters old, firm of limb, with shell-formed hoofs, having a bridle of linked gold on his head, and upon him a saddle of costly gold. In his hands were two spears of silver, sharp, well-tempered, headed with steel, three ells in length, of an edge to wound the wind and cause blood to flow, and that faster than the fall of the dewdrop from the blade of reed-grass upon the earth when the dew of June is at its heaviest. A gold-hilted sword was at his side, the blade of which was of gold, bearing a cross of inlaid gold of the hue of the lightning of heaven; his war-horn was of ivory. Before him were two brindled white-breasted greyhounds, having strong collars of rubies about their necks, reaching from the shoulder to the ear. And the one that was on the right side bounded across to the left side, and the one that was on the left to the right, and like two sea-swallows sported they around him. And his courser cast up four sods with his four hoofs like four swallows in the air, now above his head and now below. About him was a four-cornered cloth of purple, having an apple of gold at each corner; and every one of the apples was of the value of a hundred kine. And there was precious gold of the value of three hundred kine upon his shoes and upon his stirrups, from his knee to the tip of his toe. And the blade of reed-grass bent not beneath him, as he journeyed towards the gates of Arthur's palace."

So far we have the glittering imagination of the twelfth-century bard; you might think working in a medium not wholly Celtic, but Norman-influenced as well; imagining his Arthurian Culhwch in terms of the knights he had seen at the courts of the Lords Marchers,—were it not that just such descriptions are the commonplaces of Irish Celticism, where they come from a time and people that had never seen Norman knights at all. But now you begin to leave regions where Normans can be remembered or imagined at all:

"Spake the youth, 'Is there a porter?'—'There is; and unless thou holdest thy peace, small will be thy welcome. I am the porter of Arthur's hall on the first day of January in every year; and on every other day than this the post is filled by Huandaw, and Gogigwc, and Llaescenym, and Penpingion who goeth upon his head to save his feet, neither towards the heavens nor towards the earth, but like a rolling stone upon the floor of the court.'—'Open thou the portal.'—'I will not open it.'— 'Wherefore not?'—'The knife is in the meat and the drink is in the horn, and there is revelry in Arthur's court; and no man may enter but a craftsman bearing his craft, or the son of the king of a privileged country. But there will be refreshment for thy dogs and for thy horse, and for thee there will be collops cooked and peppered, and luscious wine and mirthful song,—and food for fifty men shall be set before thee in the guest chamber, where the stranger and the sons of other countries eat, who come not into the precincts of the palace of Arthur. Said the youth, 'That will I not do. If thou openest the portal, it is well. If thou dost not open it, I will bring disgrace upon thy lord and an evil report upon thee. And I will set up three shouts at this very gate, than which none were ever more deadly, from the top of Pengwaed in Cornwall to the bottom of Dinsol in the North, and to Esgair Oerfel in Ireland.'—'Whatsoever clamor thou mayest make,' said Glewlwyd Gafaelfawr, against the rules of Arthur's court thou shalt not enter until I first go and consult with Arthur.'

"Then Glewlwyd went into the hall. And Arthur said to him, 'Hast thou news from the gate?'—Half of my life is past, and half of thine. I was heretofore in Caer Se and As Se, in Sach and Salach, in Lotor and Ffotor, in India the Greater and India the Less. And I was with thee in the Battle of Dau Ynyr, when the twelve hostages were brought from Norway. And I have also been in Europe and in Africa and in the islands of Corsica, and in Caer Brythwch and Brythach and Ferthach; and I was present when thou didst conquer Greece in the East. And I have have been in Caer Oeth and Annoeth and Caer Nefenhir: nine supreme sovereigns, handsome men, saw we there; but never did I behold a man of equal dignity to him who is now at the door of the portal.' Then said Arthur:—'If walking thou didst enter here, return thou running. And everyone that beholds the light, and everyone that opens and shuts the eye, let him show him respect and serve him; some with gold-mounted drinking-horns, others with collops cooked and peppered, until such time as food and drink can be set before him."

Culhwch came in, and asked a boon of Arthur; and Arthur answered that he should receive whatsoever his tongue might name, "as far as the wind dries and the rain moistens and the sun revolves and the sea encircles and the earth extends; save only my ship and my mantle, and Caledfwlch my sword, and Rhongomiant my lance, and Wynebgwrthucher my shield, and Carnwenhau my dagger and Gwen Hwyfar my wife. By the truth of heaven thou shalt receive it cheerfully, name what thou wilt." So Culhwch made his request;— and it is really here that the ancient ages come trooping in:—

"I crave of thee that thou obtain for me Olwen the daughter of Yspaddaden Head of Giants; and this boon I seek likewise at the hands of thy warriors. I seek it from Cai, and Bedwyr, and Greidawl Galldonyd, and Greid the son of Eri, and Cynddelig Cyfarwvdd, and Tathal Cheat-the-Light, and Maelwys the son of Baeddan, and"—well, there are hundreds of them; but I must positively give you a few; they are all, it is likely, the denizens of ancient Celtic God-worlds and fairy-worlds and goblin-worlds,—"and Duach and Grathach and Nerthach the sons of Gwawrddur Cyrfach (these men came forth from the confines of hell); and Huell the son of Caw (he never yet made a request at the hands of any lord.) And Taliesin the Chief of Bards, and Manawyddan son of the Boundless, and Cormorant the son of Beauty (no one struck him in the Battle of Camlan by reason of his ugliness; all thought he was an auxiliary devil. Hair had he upon him like the hair of a stag). And Sandde Bryd Angel (no one touched him with a spear in the Battle of Camlan by reason of his beauty; all thought he was a ministering angel). And Cynwyl Sant (the third man who escaped from the Battle of Camlan; and he was the last that parted from Authur upon Henrtoen his horse). And Henwas the Winged the son of Erim; (unto these three men belonged these three peculiarities: with Henbedestyr there was not anyone that could keep pace, either on horseback or on foot; with Henwas Adeiniog no fourfooted beast could run the distance of an acre, much less could it go beyond it; and as to Sgilti Ysgawndroed, when he intended to go on a message for his lord, he never sought to find a path, but knowing whither he was to go, if his way led through a wood he went along the tops of the trees. During his whole life a blade of grass bent not beneath his feet, much less did it break, so light was his tread.) Teithi Hen the son of Gwynhan (his dominions were swallowed by the sea, and he himself barely escaped, and he came to Arthur; and his knife had this peculiarity: from the time he came there no haft would ever remain on it; and owing to this a sickness came on him, and he pined away during the remainder of his life, and of this he died.) Drem the son of Dremidyd (when the gnat arose in the morning with the sun, Drem could see it from Gelli Wis in Cornwall as far off as Pen Blathaon in North Britain.) And Eidol the son of Ner, and Glwyddyn Saer (who built Ehangwen, Arthur's hall.) Henwas and Henwyneb, (an old companion unto Arthur). Gwallgoyc another. (When he came to a town, though there were three hundred houses in it, if he wanted anything, he would let sleep come to the eyes of no man until he had it.) Osla Gyllellfawr (he bore a short broad dagger. When Arthur and his hosts came before a torrent, they would seek a narrow place where they might cross the water, and lay the sheathed dagger across the torrent, and it would be a bridge enough for the armies of the Three Islands of the Mighty and the three islands near thereby, with all their spoils.) The sons of Llwch Llawyniog from beyond the raging sea. Celi and Cueli and Gilla Coes Hydd, (who could clear three hundred acres at a bound: the chief leaper of Ireland was he). Sol and Gwadyn Ossol and Gwadyn Odyeith. (Sol could stand all day upon one foot. Gwadyn Ossol, if he stood upon the top of the highest mountain in the world, it would become a level plain under his feet. Gwadyn Odyeith,—the soles of his feet emitted sparks when they struck upon things hard, like the heated mass drawn out of the forge. He cleared the way for Arthur when they came to any stoppage.) Hireerwm and Hiratrwm (the day they went upon a visit three cantref provided for their entertainment, and they feasted until noon and drank until night and they they devoured the heads of vermin as if they had never eaten anything in their lives. When they made a visit they left neither the fat not the lean, the hot nor the cold, the sour nor the sweet, the fresh not the salt, the boiled nor the raw.) Huarwar the son of Aflawn (who asked Arthur such a boon as would satisfy him; it was the third great plague of Cornwall when he received it. None could get a smile from him but when he was satisfied.) Sugyn the sone of Sugnedydd (who could suck up the sea on which there were three hundred ships, so broad-chested he was). Uchtryd Faryf Draws (who spread his red untrimmed beard over the eight-and-forty rafters that were in Arthur's hall). Bwlch and Cyfwlch and Sefwlch the three sons of Cleddyf Cyfwlch, the three grandsons of Cleddyf Difwlch. (Their three shields were three gleaming glitterers. Their three spears were three pointed piercers. Their three swords were three griding gashers,—Gles, and Glessic, and Gleisad.) Clust the son of Clustfeinad; (though he were buried seven cubits beneath the earth, he would hear the ant fifty miles off rise from her nest in the norning). Medyr the son of Methredydd; (from Belli Wic he could in a twinkling")—