Things near & far
air.” I remember thinking at the time: “this is incredible”; and yet
it was a fact. The pavement of that horrible street had suddenly
become, not air, certainly, but resilient; the impact of my feet upon
it was buoyant; the sensation was delicious. I may mention that that
very morning I had made a certain interior resolution; but I do not
venture for one moment to connect this with that; I only tell what
happened to me. I make no deductions, nor do I venture to conclude
anything: remembering always that neither seeing nor smelling nor
feeling is necessarily believing. But so it was, exactly as I have
told it.
And then there was one afternoon in my sitting-room at 4 Verulam
Buildings, Gray’s Inn. I was sitting in my chair, and the wall
trembled and the pictures on the wall shook and shivered before my
eyes, as if a sudden wind had blown into the room. Let me hasten
to say that there was no wind, no actual wind, that is; and that I
knew at the time that there was no wind, and was, in consequence,
not a little alarmed, not knowing what would happen next. And I
must already correct my phrase: I have said that the pictures on
the wall opposite to the window that looked on the garden of the
Inn “shook and shivered.” It is not quite just: trembled, dilated,
became misty in their outlines; seemed on the point of disappearing
altogether, and then shuddered and contracted back again into their
proper form and solidity: that is the closest description of what I
witnessed: with a shaking heart, and with a sense that something, I
knew not what, was also being shaken to its foundations. This is all
wonderful? I suppose that it is; but let me here say firmly that I
consider an act of kindness to a wretched mangy kitten to be much
more important.
But now comes a puzzle. We are highly composite beings. We all know
that a stomach-ache may make a man very miserable, and I believe
that science is beginning to admit that misery may give a man a very
bad stomach-ache. There are old phrases about a “sinking heart,”
and a man’s heart being “in his boots.” Well, it seems that the
heart does not sink, but that the stomach does, when subjected to
certain emotional perturbations. Only this morning I was reading in
the paper of new radiographic experiments which showed that under
certain stimulations of horror or fear or grief the stomach sometimes
falls from one to three inches, and the doctor who was conducting
the experiments declared that there was the brighter side; that he
had mentioned possible “pints of bitter” to some of his subjects,
with the result that there was a perceptible and upward movement
of the organ in question. And so the play goes round in a ring,
with a constant action and reaction of the physical and mental--or
psychical, or spiritual--and it will often be difficult to say where
the prime cause resides: in the stomach, in the brain, or in the
immortal spirit. I have already professed my belief that the true
wonder, the true miracle are of the spirit, not of the body; I here
confess that in certain cases I find it difficult to disentangle
the two worlds of our apprehension, that is to say definitely that
the sensible thing, the phenomenal thing, is always and invariably
without any true significance.
And so with that afternoon’s work in Gray’s Inn. The shivering
pictures that seemed on the point to dissolve and return into
chaos, the sensible thrill of delight that accompanied this strange
manifestation--I had forgotten that part of the experience--such
phenomena as these may be producible, for all I know, by drugs. You
can, at all events, see far more wonderful things than anything that
I saw by taking a sufficient dose of Anhelonium Lewinii and then
shutting your eyes. But....
I had better begin at the beginning. That afternoon I was in a state
of very dreadful misery and desolation and dereliction of soul. It
is strange, but the most dreadful pangs of grief are generally, I
think, bearable in the moment of their impact. With the wounds of the
spirit, it is as with the wounds of the body; a certain anæsthesia
accompanies the actual fall of the blow. I once fell backwards from
some little height, and my skull lighting on the edge of a brick,
I remained unconscious for more than half an hour. And I remember
distinctly that the sensation at the very moment of the crash was
that of being lifted and gently laid on the softest of all downy
pillows; it was only when I raised myself slowly, not in the least
aware that I had been unconscious, that I felt the pain of the great
bleeding wound at the back of my head, and a dismal, heavy throbbing
of the brow. So with the wounds of the soul; I had borne what had to
be borne with some measure of solidity and stolidity; the torture
of six years of lamentable expectation had, as I supposed, seared
and burned my spirit into dull, insensitive acquiescence: but I was
mistaken. A horror of soul that cannot be uttered descended upon me,
on that dim, far-off afternoon in Gray’s Inn; I was beside myself
with dismay and torment; I could not endure my own being. And then a
process suggested itself to me, as having the possibility of relief,
and without crediting what I had heard of this process or indeed
having any precise knowledge of it or of its results, I did what had
to be done--I hasten to add without any more exalted motives than
those which urge a man with a raging toothache to get laudanum and
take it with all convenient speed. I suffered from a more raging pain
than that of any toothache, and I wanted that pain to be dulled; that
was all.
Well, I made my experiment, expecting, very doubtfully, almost
incredulously, certain results. The results that I obtained were
totally different from my expectations. I couldn’t have hypnotised,
or “magnetised,” or mesmerised, or suggested, or Couéd, or in any
way bedevilled myself into the obtained condition for the good
reason that I had never heard of it, had no faintest notion of it,
and was, in fact, as I have stated, not a little alarmed by it,
half-thinking, if the truth be told, that I was very near to death.
I may state, by the way, that in the course of a pretty extensive
acquaintance with “occult” company, I only once heard of anything at
all comparable with this strange adventure of mine. A man was running
on, foolishly and uncritically enough, about his various occult
experiences--they were of little interest as a whole--and talked at
last of some sojourn that he had made amongst the Moors of Northern
Africa. Here, he said, he had met a man who had known wonders, and he
proceeded to tell them. There was nothing very wonderful, so far as
I can remember; but the Moor or Arab of the story had an experience
like enough to mine--I need not say that I had not mentioned it nor
so much as hinted it to my occult acquaintance. The African also had
seen the walls shiver and prepare for dissolution, had felt that
the world was shaken, and that his heart was shaken within him.
Mr. Jones-Robinson told the tale without any sense, apparently,
that it had any special significance; it was part of his occult
pack, that was all; and he went on to some sick rubbish about the
“correspondence” of the Tarot Trumps with the letters of the Hebrew
Alphabet; and this nonsense he discussed with real relish and a
high sense of its infinite importance. I think that he alone knew
the real “attribution” of the aforesaid Tarot Trumps, but he “had
received it under pledge and was not at liberty to speak”--for which
inhibition I was deeply thankful, having little patience for solemn
hanky-panky or Abracadabras of any sort. But in ending his story of
the Enchanted Moor, he said that this man, who had seen the material
world quivering and fading before his eyes, had received, in some
manner not indicated, a command or an intimation that he must “leave
everything”; and this he could not do, having a wife and children.
And I must say at once that being pretty well acquainted with
Jones-Robinson and all his type, I should have paid no more attention
to his story of the Moor than I paid to his story of the Tarot
Trumps--if it had not been for something which I knew and kept to
myself. As it was, I heard the tale and the injunction, and wondered
deeply, and still wonder.
But now to our point: the connection between material or sensible
things and spiritual things, the question whether the former are
ever of any real consequence or significance. As I have said before,
the evidence that Home the medium rose “miraculously”--to adopt a
convenient shorthand--into the air seems to me good; but is such
a phenomenon of any more true consequence than the phenomenon of
Hydrogen gas rising into the air from the admixture of water, zinc
and sulphuric acid? And so, were the incense clouds that came to my
nostrils in places where, assuredly, no material incense smoked, of
consequence? Was the billowy and resilient pavement of detestable
Rosebery Avenue of consequence? Were the pictures that shivered and
wavered on the unstable wall of consequence? I do not know; but
I am sure that the state which followed this last experience was
of high consequence. For when I rose, afraid, and broke off the
process in which I had been engaged, I found to my utter amazement
that everything within had been changed. Amazement; for the utmost
that I had hoped from my experiment was a temporary dulling of the
consciousness, a brief opium oblivion of my troubles. And what I
received was not mere dull lack of painful sensation, but a peace
of the spirit that was quite ineffable, a knowledge that all hurts
and doles and wounds were healed, that that which was broken was
reunited. Everything, of body and of mind, was resolved into an
infinite and an exquisite delight; into a joy so great that--let
this be duly noted--it became almost intolerable in its ecstasy.
I remember thinking at the time: “There is wine so strong that no
earthly vessels can hold it”: joy threatened to become an agony, that
must shatter all. Emily Brontë, describing the state of Heathcliff
soon before his death, has described just such a condition; I have
often wondered how she knew of it.
But this was later. For that day and for many days afterwards I was
dissolved in bliss, into a sort of rapture of life which has no
parallel that I can think of, which has, therefore, no analogies by
which it may be made more plain. The vine and the exultation of the
vine are solemn and ancient and approved figures of the joys of the
interior life, but these are not quite to my purpose. I can only fall
back on little things, and quite material things. My chambers in
Verulam Buildings were towards the northern portion of the Inn, and
the traffic of Theobald’s Road was distinct enough, distinct enough,
often, to be an annoyance. But this night, the “ping, ping!” of the
omnibus bell, the grind of the many wheels upon the cobble-stones
sounded to me as marvellous and tremendous chords reverberating
from some mighty organ; filling the air, filling the soul and the
whole being with rapture immeasurable. And another trifle, as
insignificant, even more insignificant, perhaps. In the ordinary
state of existence the sense of touch is exercised constantly, but
almost unconsciously. Now and again it is used with intent; the
buyer of old furniture acquires a sort of thumb-and-finger craft;
he passes the tips of his fingers over the edges of the bureau or
cabinet, and they help him to decide whether the object is an antique
or a novelty. And so, I suppose, a woman choosing stuffs uses her
fingers in much the same manner, learning something about the silk
or velvet by the process. But in general, and very conveniently, you
take up pen or pencil, or place your hand on the back of the chair