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CHAPTER I.
Spenser.
This poem consists of a dialogue between the god Crishna and the
hero Arjoun. Crishna, though wearing a human form, speaks
throughout as Deity. Arjoun is a young chieftain whom he befriends.
A great civil war is raging, and the piece opens on the eve of battle.
Crishna is driving the chariot of Arjoun, and they are between the
lines of the opposing armies. On either side the war-shells are heard
to sound—shells to which the Indian warriors gave names as did the
paladins of Christendom to their swords. The battle will presently
join, but Arjoun appears listless and sad. He looks on either army; in
the ranks of each he sees preceptors whom he has been taught to
revere, and relatives whom he loves. He knows not for which party to
desire a bloody victory: so he lays his bow aside and sits down in the
chariot. Crishna remonstrates, reminds him that his hesitation will be
attributed to cowardice, and that such scruples are, moreover, most
unreasonable. He should learn to act without any regard whatever to
the consequences of his actions. At this point commence the
instructions of the god concerning faith and practice.
So Arjoun must learn to disregard the consequences of his actions. I
find here not a ‘holy indifference,’ as with the French Quietists, but
an indifference which is unholy. The sainte indifférence of the west
essayed to rise above self, to welcome happiness or misery alike as
the will of Supreme Love. The odious indifference of these orientals
inculcates the supremacy of selfishness as the wisdom of a god. A
steep toil, that apathy towards ourselves; a facilis descensus, this
apathy toward others. One Quietist will scarcely hold out his hand to
receive heaven: another will not raise a finger to succour his fellow.
Mysticism, then, is born armed completely with its worst
extravagances. An innocent childhood it never had; for in its very
cradle this Hercules destroys, as deadly serpents, Reason and
Morality. Crishna, it appears, can invest the actions of his favourites
with such divineness that nothing they do is wrong. For the mystical
adept of Hindooism the distinction between good and evil is
obliterated as often as he pleases. Beyond this point mysticism the
most perverted cannot go; since such emancipation from moral law
is in practice the worst aim of the worst men. The mysticism of a
man who declares himself the Holy Ghost constitutes a stage more
startling but less guilty; for responsibility ends where insanity begins.
The orientals know little of a system of forces. They carry a single
idea to its consequences. The dark issue of the self-deifying
tendency is exhibited among them on a large scale,—the degrees of
the enormity are registered and made portentously apparent as by
the movement of a huge hand upon its dial. Western mysticism,
checked by many better influences, has rarely made so patent the
inherent evil even of its most mischievous forms. The European,
mystic though he be, will occasionally pause to qualify, and is often
willing to allow some scope to facts and principles alien or hostile to
a favourite idea.
It should not be forgotten that the doctrine of metempsychosis is
largely answerable for Crishna’s cold-blooded maxim. He tells Arjoun
that the soul puts on many bodies, as many garments, remaining
itself unharmed: the death of so many of his countrymen—a mere
transition, therefore—need not distress him.
CHAPTER II.
Molière.
Tennyson.
Philo to Hephæstion.